Colum McCann - Dancer

We cooked a small meal under the charcoal gaze of my mother. He recalled her days with the Maryinsky, saying she was robbed of her prime, that she could have been one of the greatest — he knew it was a lie but it was a good lie and it made us both feel warm.

I made a bed on the couch.

Just before I fell asleep he coughed and said: His father.

What?

I was just thinking of his poor father.

Go to sleep.

Ha! he said. Sleep!

Later I heard him sit down at the table with a book, leafing through the pages — a pen nib scratched across the paper — and I fell asleep to the sound.

He was gone early in the morning, worrying me, so I dusted the room and cleaned in the corners to occupy the time.

On the table, beneath a stack of poetry books, I found a journal. I flicked through. On the first page he had written the date of my mother’s death. The paper was cheap and the ink had soaked through to other pages, making it difficult to read. His penmanship was ragged and spidery, and I thought to myself, This is my father’s life. I willed myself not to read his words and began dusting what I had already dusted. He had allowed his plants to dry up, so I carried them to the communal bath and put them in an inch of water to see if they could be resurrected.

An old woman, a neighbor, came and watched me in the bathroom without saying a word. She was heavy but frail with age. She asked who I was, and when I replied, she returned to her room with a snort.

I sat at the edge of the bath. There was hair in the drain, and it did not belong to my father — it was a young man’s hair, dark and vital. It seemed somehow offensive that my father should bathe in a place others used.

All the time the idea of the journal was burning a hole through me. I went back along the corridor, sat at the table, touched the journal’s black cover, finally turned to a section about a third of the way through:

He returned home at noon, startling me. I was still looking at the same page when I heard the door creak. I fumbled to put the journal back under the pile of poetry books he had left on the table, but they went tumbling. I got to my knees and started picking them off the floor. He saw me tucking the journal beneath an old copy of Pasternak.

He held a bunch of lilies in his hand. He put them in a vase by the window, where they nodded in the wind. I wondered how many times he had said my mother’s name as he was cutting the flowers.

His face betrayed nothing. I thought about asking him whether he would let me read the whole journal but, before I could, he said in a strange voice: Did you know that his father never saw him dance?

I stayed quiet for a long time and then asked: How do you know?

Oh I went to visit.

Where?

At his house.

You’re friends?

We talk.

What’s he like? I asked.

Oh he’s a good solid man.

My father turned to the window and spoke as if to the world outside: I fear he will eventually be ruined.

He remained at the window, fingering the curtain.

And his mother? I asked.

She’s stronger, he said. She will survive.

He made his way to the table, picked up his journal, rifled through the pages.

You can have this if you want, he said.

I shook my head and told him I had read a sentence or two, that it was beautiful.

It’s balderdash, he said.

He touched my hand and said: Yulia, don’t ever let them poison your life with narrowness.

I asked him what he meant and he replied that he wasn’t quite sure, it was just something that he felt fated to say.

I clung to him those few days, clung to his spirit. Whenever he left the house I read his journal. What it amounted to was a song of love, and it bothered me that he didn’t once mention me. The only people to appear were he and my mother. His recollections of their life were a jumble — the last days were nudged up against the first days and sometimes the later years seemed to have shaped the earlier ones — as if time had been gripped and squeezed formless. It struck me that, despite everything, my parents had lived their lives with a certain panache. They had been born into plenitude and lived with the knowledge that they would die in poverty, yet they appeared to have accepted everything that had happened to them — perhaps in some ways they were happier for the reversal, cementing them together.

I thought of my own small pleasures, having lived much of my own life avoiding difficulty. I went wandering around Ufa, the dirt streets, the factories, the few remaining bright houses. At a bird auction near the mosque I bought a goldfinch being sold as a songster. I declined the cage and took the bird in the cup of my hands towards the Belaya River. When I opened my hands it seemed startled a moment but then took off, surely to be captured again. I detested the fatuous self-pity I had sunk into, yet embraced it also, since in some ways it was healing. Foolishly I bought two more birds and set them free, only to realize that I had no money for the tram. I took it as an appropriate irony and walked back to my father’s house.

I stayed for three more days. On the evening before my return to Leningrad I told my father that I was pondering a divorce. He didn’t seem surprised, maybe happy even.

Go ahead, get a divorce.

I frowned, and he flung his arms out.

Or at least marry someone else!

What about the apartment?

Who cares? he said. We live with ourselves, not our rooms.

I sulked for a while until he said: Yulia, dear. Get a divorce. Stay in Petersburg. Live what you have left.

He sat back in his chair and smoked the butt end of a foul-smelling cigar he had kept hidden.

Later that evening he told me he had something special to do. He put his finger to his lips as if there were other people in the room and then fumbled at the gramophone. I thought he was simply putting on music, but he lifted the stylus and began dismantling the apparatus. In the belly of the gramophone he had hidden a small flat box. He handed the box to me and said it had been my mother’s, she had always wanted me to have it.

I should have given it to you before, he said.

His voice trailed off as I tried to open the box. It had not been opened for a long time and the clasp was rusted. I took a knife and delicately began to pry it open. My father watched silently. I expected to find another journal, perhaps one she had kept before the Revolution. Or maybe some of their old love letters. Or some trinkets they had collected through the years. I went to rattle the box, but my father grabbed my wrist.

Don’t do that, he said.

He took the knife and pried the clasp. Without opening the lid, he handed the box back to me.

Inside there was a tiny china saucer, no bigger than an ashtray. It was small and delicate and pale blue, with bucolic pictures of farmers and draft horses painted around the rim. It disappointed me at first, how light it was, how fragile, how it seemed to have nothing to do with either of them.