Colum McCann - Dancer

Finally my father had a quiet word in her ear and she put her face to his shoulder, stood, tottered a little, apologized, said she had to rest. She kissed Rudi on the cheek, and he stood there, silent.

You’ve done well, my father said to him. You’ve made her proud.

But at the door Rudi fingered his jacket and asked: What did I do wrong, Yulia?

Nothing. She’s tired. She’s been traveling for days.

I just wanted to talk.

Come back tomorrow, Rudi, I said.

I have classes tomorrow.

The next day then.

But he wasn’t back the next day, or the next week. I had set up a screen to block off a corner of the room, put down the mattress for my parents, while Iosif and I slept on the floor. They talked about trying to find a room for themselves, somewhere to live, perhaps in the suburbs, the sleeping quarters, but first they had to sort out their residence permit, their pension papers and State bonds. Their visas were valid for only three months. Mother grew more and more listless, and Father was unable to deal with the bureaucracy, so it was I who tried to handle the logistics. Each day when I came home my mother was on the couch, head slumped against a pillow, while my father limped restlessly from window to window.

Somehow he had acquired a map of Leningrad, a difficult thing to find; maybe he’d bargained for it in a market, or run into some old friends somewhere. It was best not to ask. At night he spread out the map on the kitchen table and occupied his time by identifying street names that had changed.

Look, he said to nobody in particular, Ship Street has become Red Street, how strange.

He marked all the changes, the post-Revolutionary places that had lost their history. English Embankment was now Red Fleet Embankment, Swimming Pool Street was renamed after the poet Nekrasov. Ascension Street naturally had been changed, along with Resurrection Street, where an Orthodox church had been converted into a department store. Small Czar’s Village had become Children’s Village. Policeman’s Avenue was now the People’s Avenue. Millionaire Street was gone. Christmas Street had been transformed into Soviet Street, which he found monstrous. Other lost names struck him as a great injury — Street of Little Mosses, Catherine’s Canal, Nicholas Street, Coachman Street, Miracle Avenue, Nightingale Street, Savior Street, Five Corners Street, Foundry Avenue, Meat Traders Alley, Big Craftsman Yard, Counterfeiters Lane. My father’s love of poetry made him find more than a political implication in the renaming.

One day they’ll name a street after the renamers, he said.

I whispered that he should be careful of what he said, to whom, and certainly when he said it.

I’m old enough now to say whatever I want.

It wasn’t that he had lost faith in his past, but it had become unrecognizable to him, as if he had expected to find the logic of his boyhood but found something else entirely. The old names seemed coded into his tongue and would never leave. His difficulty was that he was unable to move with the change, yet his good fortune was that he hadn’t been punished again for such stasis.

He gave up his obsession with the map when he saw that my mother was growing sicker. She refused to acknowledge that she was ill, but we took her to the hospital anyway, late at night in a taxi. The doctors examined her gently — my mother, by her nature, commanded that sort of respect — but they could find nothing wrong, even after a series of blood tests. She insisted there was something in the air that was making her feel drowsy.

Take me back, she said.

In the room everything felt tight, hampered, lifeless. Iosif disgusted me with his vague politeness. We hardly talked to each other at all anymore. For a number of years we had insulated ourselves from each other, and we had once even tried to think up a Russian word for privacy since it existed in the other languages I had studied. To some extent it existed for Iosif as a notion in physics, an unknowable place, but now it seemed that all the places we operated in were themselves unknowable. When I unpacked the few belongings from my mother’s hospital bag I felt, in a strange way, that I was unpacking my husband from my life also.

The only tangible link to an immediate past for my parents was Rudi— Our dear Rudik, my mother would say — but he had disappeared for quite a while, despite the fact that I had left notes for him at the Leningrad Choreographic, pleading that he come visit.

Eventually he did come around to announce that he was about to perform at a showcase in school. He stood stately in the center of the room, feet together, and it struck me that his body had now accepted dance as its only strategy.

I will be performing for just a few minutes, he said, but I’d like to show you what I’ve learned.

The idea of it brought the color back into my mother’s cheeks. She was astounded by his choice of dance, some terribly difficult male variation from a ballet based on Notre-Dame de Paris. He claimed that he had been practicing it with Pushkin and that he would be able to perform it quite easily.

But you’re too young, you can’t do a role like that, my mother said.

He grinned and said: Come watch me.

I had the Victor Hugo book on my shelf, and in the days leading up to the dance my father read it to my mother. His was a beautiful sonorous voice and he captured nuances in the text that surprised me. On the morning of the concert my mother plucked a special dress from the suitcase and spent hours adjusting it, then stood in front of the mirror with an elderly radiance.

My father put on a tie and a black suit. What remained of his hair had been combed back and I noticed that he had put the second cigar in the breast pocket of his jacket. He wanted to take a droisky for old time’s sake and could hardly believe that the horses and carriages were long gone. Instead we got on the tram, and my father gave my mother’s hand a secretive squeeze as we passed the all-weather KGB command post.

The showcase was in the Leningrad Choreographic, but we stopped for awhile outside the Kirov, its fierce elegance.

Anna, said my father. Aren’t we beautiful?

Yes, she said.

Two old fools.

Beautiful or fools?

Both, he said.

We were seated in an upper balcony that ringed the gymnasium. Most of the other spectators were teachers and students — they wore tights, sweaters, leg warmers. We were horrifically overdressed. My mother sat erect in a straight-backed chair. RosaMaria joined us and introduced herself to my mother in her broken Russian. They immediately conspired with each other, my mother and RosaMaria, whispering and smiling — it was as if they were parts of the same creature, living in different decades but linked through some odd emotional chain. My mother laid her hand on RosaMaria’s arm as the showcase progressed. The applause was polite for most of the students, who seemed to me accomplished and polished, if without spirit. Rudi was second last. When he came out he looked up to the balcony and my mother’s frame straightened even further.

There were mutterings around the room. He wore a belt cinched very tightly at the waist. His hair had been carefully snipped and combed, short at the back but long at the front, falling over his eyes.

Of course he danced perfectly, light and quick, pliant, his line controlled and composed, but more than that he was using something beyond his body — not just his face, his fingers, his long neck, his hips, but something intangible, beyond thought, some kinetic fury and spirit — and I felt a little hatred for him when the applause rang out.

It was RosaMaria who stood up first, followed by my mother and my father, who nudged me. Beneath us Rudi bowed and kept on bowing even through the appearance of the next dancer, who stood angrily to the side. At last Rudi swept his arm out and left the floor at a high trot. He was met by a small handsome bald man who clapped him on the back. My mother whispered to me: That’s Pushkin, he’s doing a wonderful job with Rudik.