Colum McCann - Dancer

To which my father said: You’re Anna Vasileva and you did a wonderful job with Rudik too.

We left into the cool spring night. The city was quiet. Rudi was waiting outside, and we huddled together, congratulating him. His body odor was severe, but still I wanted to draw closer and inhale him, his energy. He leaned over my mother and asked her how he had done. She seemed to hesitate a moment but said: You were marvelous.

On the plié I think I was going too deep, he said.

Then he touched my father’s shoulder in a manly gesture and was gone down the street with RosaMaria, holding hands.

Who would have thought? said my father.

He had lit his last cigar and was puffing the smoke towards the sky. My mother watched Rudi disappear. You know, she whispered, his legs do look longer.

That’s easy, said my father.

He smiled and went, on his good foot, to his toes.

Just then Pushkin emerged from the studios. He wore a tan overcoat and tie. He was accompanied by his wife, Xenia, a woman I had seen before on the streets of Leningrad. It was impossible to ignore her, the depth of her beauty, her blond hair, the magnificence of her clothes, the way she seemed lit from the inside. They turned to us briefly and waved, and I thought what curious mirrors they were in the world: my parents, teachers of the boy, looking at the Pushkins, teachers of the man, and the man himself already gone down the street.

My mother said to the Pushkins with great formality: Good evening. May I extend my congratulations.

Pushkin turned: Rudi has often talked about you.

She smiled and said: My deepest thanks.

A month later my mother was dead. In my room she suffered a brain hemorrhage, which took her in her sleep. I woke up to see my father sitting quietly by her body, his hand at the back of her hair. I expected him to weep, but he calmly said that she was gone, would I please make arrangements to have her buried in Piskarovskoye Cemetery. Then he closed his eyes and tightened his grip on her hair and whispered her name over and over until it sounded like a prayer or a song, gently sung. Later that day, as was old custom, he spread her body out on the table and washed her. He used an old shirt of his, saying that it would be his final gesture to sentimentality. She looked terribly emaciated. He dipped the collar of his shirt in warm soapy water and bathed her neck and smoothed the cloth along her collarbone. With the sleeve he wiped her arm and with the body of the shirt he washed her small wizened breasts. It was as if he wanted her to wear the shirt in some way, to carry it with her on whatever journey she was on. He covered her with a sheet, and only then did I see my father cry, deeply, inconsolably.

He had left the water tap dripping, and there was a gurgling from the pipes as if the sadness was in the throat of the building. I went outside and left him alone. The air was hard and raw. By the time I came back he had dressed her and put traditional coins on her eyes.

It was noticeably sunny the day we buried her. At Piskarovskoye we were given a plot in a copse of trees not far from the mounds of those who had died during the Blockade. Light slanted through the trees, midges rose from the bushes, small birds darned the air with their wings. There was little or no ceremony. It cost us three hundred rubles to bribe for the plot and another hundred for the ground to be dug. Nearby a man on a tractor was cutting the grass on the mass graves, beautifully tended to, ringed with red roses. He respectfully turned his engine off and waited.

My father held his hat to his chest, and I noticed the little graph of sweat stains that appeared inside the rim. How many years had he worn that one hat and how many times had she put it on his head? He shifted, coughed and said he didn’t feel in the mood for words but that, even in her leaving, my mother had left many signs that she had been here.

May her influence enter the air, he said.

With this he coughed a second time and gave the ground a little grimace, turned his face away.

In a distant corner, through the trees, I caught a glimpse of a Black ZIL limousine pulling up in the graveyard, flanked by a fleet of black cars. We were startled a moment, thinking there might be some important visitor, but then the cars pulled away to the far end of the graveyard and we were glad to be left alone.

Rudi and RosaMaria stood next to each other. At first Rudi held his lower teeth against his upper lip. I wanted to berate him, to slap him, to jog a tear from him, but eventually, and for no particular reason, he broke down and began to weep.

My father, for his part, threw a handful of dirt on the coffin.

When we turned to leave the small forest, I noticed that the man on the tractor had fallen asleep, but he had taken his hat off and it sat lightly in his lap, and I thought that my mother would have enjoyed such a moment.

Later that day we took my father to the train station.

I am going home to Ufa, he said.

There was irony of course in the way he said home, but it was where he had survived most of his years with her and there was an eloquence, if not a practicality, to his return. Iosif came with us to Finlandia Station. I asked for a moment alone with my father. I carried his suitcase through the crowd. Light came in shafts through the windows, falling on the grayness below. We stopped by a train window. An old woman in a headscarf glared at us. My father held me tight and whispered in my ear that I should be proud of myself, that I should do what pleased me, within reason of course. He touched my cheek and I sniffled stupidly.

Great billows of steam were suspended above the station, hanging there as they have always hung, as if to say that most of us spend our lives breathing in our breathed-out breath.

Music sheets, Bach and Schumann. Piano lesson, Mali Opera. Talk with Shelkov re military conscription. Special salts for bathing feet. Postcard for Father’s birthday. Scrounge portable radio. Shorten lunchtime for barre work on extension. Take empty room. Sasha: Perfection is the duty. Work work work. In difficulty is ecstasy.

Every day I count wasted in which there has been no dancing. Nietzsche. Yes! Elocution lesson. Visa for Moscow. Tell Shelkov to eat shit or to eat more shit than he already does, bring him a bucket and a spoon. Better still, ignore him completely, the ultimate victory. Shoes. Permit. Clothes cleaned for conservatory concert. The boy on the bus. Vigilance.

Sleep less. Morning routine. Take twice as long with each grand battement to build control and strength. Stand long in relevé for strength. Nine or ten on pirouette. Chaboukiani, I kiss your feet! Do cabrioles face-on to the mirror rather than sideways. Sasha: Live inside the dance. Out-think. Out-maneuver. Out-learn. Even the wig should be alive! Triple assembles tours. Work on phrasing. The others like to take a bite to see if I am gold or brass. Let them. They will break their teeth either way. L’Après-midi d’un faune. Estrade Guerra says that Nijinsky’s ballon was like seeing a hare wounded by the huntsman’s shot, rising before the fall. Nijinsky said it is not difficult to stay in the air, you just have to pause a little while up there. Ha! Anna was correct after all.

Sasha says much of the ballon came from the strength in Nijinsky’s back. Exercise: walk on hands to strengthen back muscles. Richter tickets. Boy at the Hermitage said he had contacts in the conservatory. Rumors about Xenia, but if you don’t try everything your life is wasted. Find name of Ukrainian poet who said that nothing will ever be good until you learn to drink champagne from your boots!

Pas de trois from Guyane with torches, second act pas de deux from Swan Lake, Corsaire duet with Sizova. Read Byron for texture. Ask RosaMaria to patch tights. Cut fingernails to stop scratching Masha while lifting. Tell P. to stop counting out the phrases, her lips move when she dances. The pas de deux is a conversation not a fucking monologue. Forget all this talk of F. as a rival. Bullshit. Become a toilet bowl and you will see better movement. Demand five dozen pairs of shoes and maybe you will get a dozen, use the best maker, the Georgian woman with the lisp. Haircut: slant parting? Gorky says that life will never be quite so bad that the desire for something better will ever be extinguished in men. Yes.