Colum McCann - Dancer

Cloth hat left in the changing room. Letter from Bashkirian Ministry. Nineteenth birthday party. Eugene Onegin. Tchaikovsky score. In Corsaire achieve Byron’s romanticism and defiance. Sasha: The greatest artists are born to enrich their art, not themselves. Toothbrush. Honey for tea.

Perform as if things have to be said all over again. Sasha says the known way leads us to the unknown. Also, it is the unknown way that will finally lead us back to what is known. You are a dancer for only a part of your life. The rest of the time you are walking around, thinking about it! Those assigned to watch me — ignore them and you will lose an eye, but bow to them and they will strike you blind.

Extra practice in Room 17. Fix radio and put in order for telephone. Degas exhibition — RosaMaria said he wakens the sleep in her. Photographs. Destroy Xenia’s letters.

There is a story my husband used to tell Rudi. He recounted it over and over, after classes, when they were both exhausted and we would sit, all three of us, by the fireplace in our courtyard apartment. Once or twice Rudi played the piano softly while Sasha talked. The story shifted and changed, but Sasha enjoyed the telling and retelling of it and Rudi, for his part, listened intently. Even long afterwards, when Rudi left our place for his own apartment — when Sasha and I were alone again — the story left its mark.

Dmitri Yachmennikov, my husband said, was a minor figure in the world of Leningrad ballet in the late nineteenth century. A thin little man, a patch of black hair on the dome of his head, given to eating shoots of asparagus, he was a choreographer in a hall north of Obvodnyi Canal. He worked closely with his brother Igor, who played the piano.

Together the brothers were kept alive by the good graces of the young dancers they worked with — at their door someone always left some bread so they never starved.

One late winter evening Dmitri’s brother died, slumping face forward into the piano. Shortly after the funeral Dmitri went blind. People said the double calamity was caused by the strong bond between the brothers — Dmitri had been shocked into blindness and nothing would ever heal him. He walked up and down the street from his house to the hall, seldom straying farther than the market for his bundles of asparagus.

Dmitri decided to continue his career in choreography since it was the only thing he knew. He returned to the hall, locked the door behind him. But he could no longer plot a dance — instead he crawled about on the floor on his hands and knees, feeling its texture, rubbing his hands over the grain of wood, sometimes even chafing his cheek against the boards. He brought in a number of local carpenters and quizzed them about the composition of the wood, the length and direction of the grain. Everyone thought him thoroughly mad.

He was seen walking home at night, the sprig of asparagus crooked in his mouth, feeling his way forward into the faintly lit doorway of his home.

On the anniversary of his brother’s death, Dmitri opened up the doors of the hall and invited local dancers in for an audition, explained to them what he wanted. The dancers were curious at first — the thought of a blind man telling them how to move seemed preposterous — but some began auditioning anyway. Instead of using his brother’s old piano Dmitri brought in a cellist and a violinist, and as they played, he sat in the front row. Finally he picked a group of dancers he wanted to work with. They rehearsed for several weeks, during which Dmitri said little, but then suddenly on a whim he started to scold them.

Without seeing them, he was able to tell that the timing in their pirouette was off, that a hip was not aligned with a shoulder, that a jump was at the wrong angle. The dancers were stunned — not so much because the choreographer was blind but by the fact that he was correct.

The show soon became a local success.

The story spread in the autumn of 1909, when an article appeared in a local gazette. Dmitri was invited to larger halls within the community, but he refused. He fought off offers from factories, schools, and finally even a teacher from the Kirov who was perplexed by Dmitri’s method. He did however organize one guest appearance for an aging dancer, Nadia Kutepova, whom his late brother had once adored. She came to the hall and performed a solo especially for Dmitri, with no audience present. On his insistence there was also no music in the hall. Outside a crowd waited to hear the result.

The pair came out after two hours, Dmitri’s arm hooked through the crook of her elbow.

When asked by the crowd how the dance had gone, Kutepova pronounced that under Dmitri’s tuition she had danced perfectly. He had given her direction to make every move exquisite and it was, she said, one of her finer performances.

For his part, Dmitri told the crowd that as Kutepova danced he had heard one of his brother’s symphonies being played in the hall, that through her body the music had emerged, and that by the time she was finished he could almost hear every note his brother had ever created.

Dmitri Yachmennikov had been listening to the floorboards.

It was a hot summer in Ufa, the city enveloped in smoke from the factories and ash blown in from the forest fires off the Belaya River. A thin film of soot lay on the benches in Lenin Park. I was finding it difficult to sit and breathe, so I finally plucked up the courage to spend the last of my money on the extravagance of the cinema.

Having not been there since Anna passed on, I thought I might be able to revisit her, twine a lock of her gray hair around my finger.

The Motherland cinema was located down Lenin Street, gone slightly to ruin, the beginnings of cracks in the magnificent facade, posters yellowing in their glass cases. Inside, fans on the ceiling were at full force in the heat. I hobbled in on my cane and, having forgotten my eyeglasses, sat close to the front.

Word had gotten around that Rudi was featured in the newsreel, and there was a noise in the air, his name being whispered by what presumably were old classmates, young men and ladies, some former schoolteachers. Yulia had written to say that in Petersburg young women had begun to wait outside the stage door to get a glimpse of him. She mentioned that he was even due to dance for Khrushchev. The thought was chilling and wonderful — the barefoot Ufa boy performing in Moscow. I chuckled, remembering the names Rudi had been called at school: Pigeon, Girlie, Frogface. All of that had been forgotten now that he was a solo Kirov artist — the arrogance had been taken from the air and put in the victory soup.

After the anthem the newsreel came on. He was featured dancing the Spaniard in Laurencia. The sight of him was an acute but pleasing thorn. His hair was dyed black for the role, and his makeup was garish. I found myself holding Anna’s hand, and midway she leaned over to me. Rudi was being savage and exotic, she said. He was bringing a flagrant ruthlessness to his idea of dance. She whispered urgently that he was altogether too flamboyant, that his feet weren’t pointed well, his line was slightly wrong, that he needed to cut his hair.

I thought: How wonderful — even as a ghost Anna didn’t hold back.

I recalled the last time I had seen him, at Anna’s funeral, the look on his face that his gift was no longer a surprise. Now he seemed generations removed from the boy with the runny nose who had stood outside the Ufa Opera House, bruises above his eye, feet turned out.

The newsreel ended. I felt faintly nostalgic and dozed briefly in my seat before being awakened by some crude Western fare, Tarzan, the main feature of the day. I went out into the last of the sunlight. The sun had baked potholes in the dirt roads. Ravens were out pecking around the shriveled weeds. In the distance the forests flared orange. A cello was being played in a tower block along Aksakov. I turned onto my street, almost expecting to meet Rudi, his younger self, with Anna trailing behind.