Colum McCann - Dancer

Gilbert laughed and kicked me under the table.

Afterwards in the club on rue d’Assis the boys in red halter tops broke into a cancan. The English actor with the black sideburns looked in my direction. Outside, the sun stung my eyes. We walked straight to rehearsal. Gilbert slept on the bench in the dressing room.

The man in the corner seemed familiar but I couldn’t place him. His mustache and eyebrows were thick and gray. He was fidgeting and smoking. I racked my brains, nervous that he might be following me. He did seem Russian, yes, but it wasn’t until he turned to pay his bill that I noticed just how cunning and disenchanted his look was. Then it became clear — he was the émigré waiter from Dominique’s.

He ignored me, left the café, yet made a good deal of noise as he pushed back the tables. He stopped by a fire-eater performing at the corner and then made a show of flourishing a twenty-franc bill, dropped it in the fire-eater’s bucket.

I left the café and kissed the fire-eater’s cheeks (he did not flinch). The asshole waiter watched me from a distance and then finally scuttled away, probably to the rue Daru where he and the others could mourn their paltry existence.

Truth: I conceal my fear in loudness, including performances.

The ovations become more exhausting than the dance. Perhaps one day there will be a ballet of ovations. On mentioning this to Claire she said that any such effort would be very Artaud. I was lost — no idea. Sometimes it is impossible to conceal this blankness. She said it was all right, he’s a French experimentalist, she will get me his books, he might be interesting, something about the theater of cruelty.

She also promised the Richter recording. With a portable hi-fi I could listen to him on the road.

I thought at first it was a joke. I almost cursed her in four languages. I realized it was indeed Margot and almost choked. She said the whole thing was arranged.

Outside Covent Garden. Taking off my beret elicits a roar.

Rehearsal is pure and unpolluted. Margot’s fierce intelligence. She dances from the inside out. For the pas de deux she took tiny faltering steps, dropped them perfectly on stage like tears. She makes us see not only the dance but also what the dancer sees.

Afterwards she brought me to her home at the Panamanian embassy and made a lamb stew, laughed when I pulled my shirt over my head and inhaled the smell. (Over dinner she made a joke that she is the mutton and I am the lamb, but the two decades between us mean nothing to me.)

For the Savoy reception she dressed up fashionably, someone said it was very Saint Moritz, whatever that means. When we walked in all the heads swiveled.

The English claim to civilization is pure shit! They allow their reporters and photographers everywhere. The problem with them is that they see dance as an aperitif, not the actual bread of their lives.

The French critics say you are a god when you dance.

I doubt that.

You doubt the critics?

I doubt the French.

(laughter all round)

I also doubt the gods.

Pardon me?

I’d say the gods are far too busy to give a shit about me or anybody else for that matter.

Walked in the rain, past the National Gallery, the Tate. The bodyguard didn’t understand my terror, near Kensington Palace Gardens, on seeing the Soviet embassy.

Then it clicked and he bundled me away, his arm around my shoulder.

At Margot’s, she heated the leftover stew and made a bitter English tea. Tito was away at some Panamanian function. She wore a low-cut silk blouse. Her neck could have been painted by da Vinci at the very least. She asked about home, said she could imagine Mother in her mind’s eye, she must have been a beautiful woman. Unsure how to answer, I got up from the table and went into the back garden. She came out to say that she hoped she had not offended me.

Margot has a projector set up, dozens of cans of film, arranged by dates, beginning in 1938(!). Sat up all night unraveling the cans of film until I found some of Bruhn. His glorious formality. I went to my bedroom, couldn’t sleep, paced.

The vultures ask about Cuba. I will not let them rope me in. A particularly stupid headline in the Daily Express: Che será será.

Elephant and Castle: one expects a magical fairyland but simply finds another part of Kiev.

Manager, agent, accountant — Gillian claimed they are the holy trinity of any great performer’s life. At the end of the meeting Saul suggested he might be able to squeeze five thousand dollars from the German TV company. A twenty-minute performance, which means two hundred and fifty dollars per minute! I pretended to balk and could see him sweating at the other end of the table. (Margot says: Do not lose sight of the dance. )

Erik arrived in the lobby of the Savoy. Tall and lithe. He wore all white, even the stitching and zipper teeth of his jacket were white. We circled for a while, out-complimenting each other. He had just spent an awful lot of money on a Miró and the conversation swung between Miró and Picasso — we were surely talking about ourselves (Erik as Miró of course, me as Picasso.)

After champagne we asked the bellboy to find tea and cigarettes for Erik. He sat chain-smoking. At two Erik left for his room with an apology and a tortured smile. He avoided the elevator. The thought occurred to me that the greatest (second greatest?) dancer in the world was taking the steps four at a time.

Together we did an hour of barre, then went to class. The light streamed through the Covent Garden windows.

In the Tate, beside the Turner painting The Chain Pier 1828, he touched my shoulder. Later, on Saville Row, he wondered how we would look in the suits and bowler hats. The clerk pretended to be busy. I grabbed the measuring tape from around his neck and whispered to Erik that he should check the length of my inside leg. We wore the new bowler hats through the city, laughing.

Into the cinema on Shaftesbury Avenue. Darkness.

Erik’s tall silhouette by the window in the Savoy, rain outside.

The English shoemaker was so different from what I had expected. Bald head, dirty suit jacket, face like a Cossack. Above his desk he has a framed picture of Margot. I could hardly breathe in the factory, stink of cow hides and buckets of glue. But his work is glorious. He spent hours preparing the shoes, meticulously going over every detail. Simply slipping the shoes onto my feet seemed to give a new energy.

(The maker on Kaznacheiskaya could learn a thing or two.)

Afterwards in the dressing room, a light burned out in the row of bulbs above Margot’s mirror. She came to my door, knocked a couple of times and grew frantic when I didn’t answer. Rudi, dear, make a wish! (She is very superstitious. Sometimes she catches an eyelash that has fallen on her cheek or a petal from a vase, and she is convinced this will affect everything.)

In Edinburgh the snow came down, brought me back to Leningrad.

Clarinda and Oscar (under a pseudonym) are writing the account of my defection for a publishing house, which is altogether ridiculous but the only thing that interests people. They say it will sell books, that readers want to know what happened, how I defected, blah blah blah. (I can’t even remember the date, July 17 perhaps, who cares?) But I will cooperate and rattle on about freedom.

Their Kensington home is spacious and warm and they invited me to stay a month or two. She promised to wash my clothes, cook meals, look after me, why not? It costs nothing and she’s more cultured than a slave.

In the afternoons they like to listen to dramas on the radio, so very English. They make tea and scones, light a fire. I lie on the bearskin rug. At night they put more wood on the fire and make hot chocolate. Clarinda loves to listen to me play the piano. She says I am brilliant (which is quite a lie, even for her). Perhaps I am getting better, but how I wish I could stretch my fingers farther. To be my own orchestra.