Colum McCann - Dancer

It’s one hundred years old, he said. It belonged to your mother’s grandmother. Your mother rescued it from a cellar in Petersburg after the Revolution. Along with many other pieces. She wanted to keep them all.

What happened to them?

They broke on our journeys.

This is the only piece left?

He nodded and said: Poverty lust sickness envy hope.

Pardon me?

Poverty lust sickness envy and hope, he said again. It has survived them all.

I held the tiny piece of china in my hands and wept until my father told me, with a smile, that it was time for me to grow up. I wrapped the saucer again and placed it in the box, then swaddled it between clothes in my suitcase, hidden deep so it would not be found or harmed in any way.

Make sure it’s safe, he said.

We hugged, and he quoted a line about watching random fleets of night birds flying across the face of the moon.

I returned to Leningrad by train — the landscape speeding by — and on the journey I plucked up the courage finally to get divorced. It was a matter of saving enough money for the tax and waiting for the right time. Over the next eighteen months I cobbled together a number of translations and hid the money along with the china dish.

And then one evening, in the early summer of ’63, I woke up a little disoriented, wondering whether it was morning or evening. The news blackout on Rudi had been lifted that day. For two years he had not been mentioned anywhere, but that day both Izvestiya and Pravda carried articles about him. They said he had morally debased himself and his country, which was amusing, maybe even true. There was no photo of Rudi, of course, but he still shone somehow in the vitriol.

Iosif had grown angrier over the past months. Twice he had slapped me. Stupidly I caved into the desire to ridicule him and told him that he slapped like a member of the intelligentsia, so he had punched me, hard, knocked a tooth loose. Since then we had seldom talked.

He was at the table, hunched over a bowl of soup, reading both newspapers, slurping his food with relish. He looked old to me, the bald spot at the top of his head illuminated in the globe of lamplight from above his head.

From the bed I examined him, but after a while I became aware of a commotion outside the window, a distant and muffled shouting that seemed to intensify as I listened.

There was another shout and a thud.

I said to Iosif: What’s that?

Go to sleep, woman, it’s just the hooligans playing soccer, he said.

I put my face to the cool side of the pillow, but there was something about the texture of the shouting that disturbed me. I waited an hour, until Iosif had gone to bed on the couch, and then got up, went to the window, pulled aside the curtain, looked down. I was tired — I had been working on several translations — and had to blink many times before my eyes adjusted.

Beyond the courtyard, out towards the soccer field, a few hooligans were clustered around mounds of freshly dug soil. There was some new construction going on, and the dirt was piled up like a series of small hillocks. The hooligans had found a couple of short white sticks and had shoved them into the ground as goalposts.

A middle-aged man who looked like a war veteran — he wore an old military hat tilted at an angle — was trying to get at the sticks, but he was being pushed back by the teenagers. He was screaming at them, but, from my distance, I couldn’t make out his words. The hooligans were circling him and jabbing his chest, but he was holding his ground.

All of a sudden the man broke through their ranks and pulled both the short white goalposts out of the ground, brandishing them as weapons. He backed away, swinging the posts. The hooligans watched. Once he was about five meters away the man rushed off, clutching the white posts to his chest. The teenagers didn’t bother following. Instead they laughed and went back to one of the piles of soil from the construction site. They picked through the dirt until they found a white ball and began kicking it.

With a dreadful shiver, I realized that it was a skull.

The floor seemed to sway. I grasped at the window ledge.

The war veteran had, by then, turned around. He saw them passing the skull back and forth at their feet. I could not see his face. He dropped the sticks — they must have been armbones or legbones — and ran across the field once more, weighed down by his frame, his jacket, his hat, his sadness.

Behind him, the bones lay crossed on the ground.

The words of a song returned to me, the dead turning into a soaring flight of cranes. I trembled, wondering whether the bones were German or Russian and then I wondered if it even mattered, and then I thought of my small china dish hidden away and wrapped. Beneath the window frame I sat and curled up against the abandon of what we had become.

I pulled the curtains together, watched Iosif snore. I was exhausted yet exhilarated, as if something terrible was dragging me down and at the same time shoving me forward. I wanted to wake Iosif, to say that we would survive, that we would get through this, we could transform, we could learn. I wanted him to do something soothing and kind for me, but I didn’t wake him, nor did he stir, and I knew then that the opportunity was lost. I was thirty-eight years old and leaving.

I pulled the suitcase from under the bed and began packing: my clothes, my books, my dictionaries, the half-finished translations, the china saucer. I made enough noise for Iosif to waken but he didn’t. It seemed to me that the sleeping part of him knew what the waking half would feel.

I thought about kissing him on the cheek, but instead I wrote him a note, quoting my father’s line about the stars being deeper than their darkness.

By the time I had packed and was ready to leave, it was morning. Reefs of clouds had appeared in the sky. The hooligans had disappeared, but the military man was still in the field. He had a shovel in his hands now, and he was reinterring the bones and skull in an untouched part of the field. The sun was suspended between distant towers, and the apartment buildings on the horizon looked like children’s playing blocks. As if by design, a flock of birds rose and flapped small against the heavens. I walked down the stairs, not desiring the claustrophobia of the elevator. The day was already warm and humid. My suitcase was not heavy.

In the field I passed the military man, who looked at the ground and then turned his back on me as if to say: Our wars are never over.

JUNE 1964

Tamara,

You will doubt it, but the news of Father’s passing hit me with the force of an ax and brought me to my knees. I was in Italy. They stupidly waited until after the show, and then they handed me the telegram, which was routed on from Paris, where it was sent by mistake. Hence the time it took for me to get in touch. Nothing else.

I went out alone in the streets of Milan and could not help but recall him and, although you will not believe this, it was with fondness. It is true that I spent much of my life in difficulties with Father, yes, but I have also felt the opposite. To hold such conflicting emotions is indeed a possibility — even the cheapest choreographer will tell you that. So it wounds me deeply to hear the things you say.

It is true that I danced the following night — but dance to me, as you know, is every emotion, not just celebration but death, futility and loneliness, too. Even love must pass through loneliness. So I danced him alive. When I went onstage I took flight and was released. You may choose not to believe this, but it is the truth.

The stories you heard about me celebrating in nightclubs are absurd. The photograph of me spraying champagne inside the dressing room at La Scala was taken on another day, not on the night of Father’s death. Do not believe them when they lie. The notion is hideous. I am twenty-six years old. How could anyone possibly think I have become such an animal as to be dead to feeling? Am I frozen? Am I wood?