Colum McCann - Dancer

Erik says that increasingly after performances he feels distanced from himself. He sits in his dressing room alone and exhausted, still in character. He changes clothes, faces the mirror, sees only a reflection. He must keep looking long enough until he finally recognizes an old friend — himself. Only then can he leave.

A series of rare Bashkirian woodcuts: 8,000 francs.

The thought of them sitting in Ufa, plain bread and borscht, a glass of vodka, Mother darning her blue smock, Tamara coming back from the market. My guilt is overwhelming but what is there to do?

When Elena (how beautiful she is) first arrived in France, she made a living sewing wedding dresses for the bourgeois families who had come before her. Then she told the story of her boat trip from Kiev to Constantinople — the boat was full of people fleeing with their most precious possessions, ridiculous things, lamps, letter openers, family crests. She stayed at the bow for most of the journey, which took many extra days in bad weather, and she said — quite wonderfully — that ever since, she has always felt there was water moving in everything, most especially history and violins.

He is fair, narrow, young, boyish. Such beauty sometimes makes me look at myself, though I fear nothing, he is shit, dances as if weighted with lead.

He broke down in fits when (as expected) he didn’t even make the corps. I thought of comforting him yet again, but I do not lead my entire life guided by my penis, whatever Claudette says. Well, not always! How to make him understand that he needs more ambition, that being in the corps is not enough, a molecule of air within a drum, condemned to make a small noise in a small space.

He sat with his hair over his eyes, in imitation no doubt. I promised to help him. In the rehearsal room he needed to be convinced of the importance of slow adagio to give enough control to land and still hold a clean position. And he still wouldn’t listen until I climbed to the windowsill and leaped, landed, frozen solid. (How I detest that linoleum floor.)

I watched him fail time and time again. What is there to do? He has no salt or pepper in his spirit. He finally said: I’m tired. I told him that if he left now he would be cutting the branch he was sitting on but he left anyway, his finger hooked under the shoe straps.

He wants to write a biography but what do I tell him, he is a shit, he reeks of garlic, he has too much bacon on his belt, his brain is stunted, and his entry into the Museum of Shitheads is undoubtedly assured. After explaining all this to him (!) he told me how much better I would be if I were shy and listened properly. I replied that yes indeed I look forward to being dead.

(Gillian says that my use of bad language, in English French Tatar Russian German etc. has become a virus.)

I carried Yulia’s letter to the Tuileries, sat on a bench. The letter had been folded and refolded many times and had taken many leaps, arriving first for Margot in London, forwarded to the Austrian embassy in Paris, and from there to Gillian.

Yulia’s writing is grand and looping. She had been meaning to write for a year but had postponed it for several reasons, none of which were important anymore. Her father had been found dead in the house in Ufa. Sergei must have known he was on his final journey, since he was wearing his hat, which he never did indoors. Pen in his hand, notebook on his chest. He had left a letter for her: Whatever loneliness we have felt in this world will surely become understandable when we are no longer lonely. He said he was not at all scared of death, that nothing frightened him, why should it, he was about to join Anna, he had always loved her even in the terrible moments of darkness.

I sat on the bench, the sun beating down. Immeasurable remorse.

Ended the day with Richter’s interpretation of Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata number 2, third movement — Andante, Prague. What mood could Richter have been in to offer this gift to humanity?

God, if he exists, is surely a visitor to the new farmhouse in Virginia. In the morning the air is cool and fresh enough to make everyone hungry. The horses gallop and neigh. The light is dense and yellow, the trees old and gnarled. (This is not the America I imagined when young.)

I went for a ride. The brown mare bucked me and stood, poising one hind leg behind the other, almost in arabesque, then she dipped her head down. Her mane touched the side of my face. For no particular reason I called her Yulia.

At the party, having drunk too much, I was struck by the idea that, as life goes on, there is a double for everyone, no matter whom. (Perhaps this is a result of the sudden spate of difficulty.) I looked across the room and saw that Sergei was standing by the buffet, minus his hat. He was talking to Tamara (only she never would’ve been so well dressed). Father sat in a corner. I searched for Mother and found someone vaguely similar — Lee’s old friend from Colorado, although Mother’s hair would be grayer by now. An older Polish woman reminded me of Anna. (An eerie trip back and forth across the Styx.)

When I saw Sergei’s double making his way towards Anna’s double it raised the hairs on my neck. He had his overcoat draped over his arm and even carried a hat.

On searching for myself I realized there was nobody.

In the dressing room: a full kilo of Black Sea caviar and twelve bouquets, including a dozen lilies. Sergei, old man, I thought of you.

Onassis had hired two young men to wash the white trousers, white shirts, white hats, white socks, white underwear, white vests, white everything. The Greek boy smiled at me from the deck, said he would like to give me something personal for my birthday, he could hardly believe it was my twenty-ninth.

After the celebrations I excused myself below deck. The boy was at the end of the corridor, waiting, wearing only a T-shirt, cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve.

Check with Saul: Why pay taxes when my country is a suitcase?

At the interval at Porte-Saint-Martin, for Hair, she leaned across and asked quite casually if I’d heard what had happened to Gilbert.

He had used a pair of my old socks to stuff the exhaust and left the car running. His wife found him in the garage, Mozart at full blast, an empty bottle of sleeping pills at his side.

Jacques suggested he would much prefer a communist hell to a capitalist one — the communists would inevitably have a fuel shortage!

Later in the evening he came up with the idea of a ballet about the Berlin Wall. The wall was, he claims, built in a day (is this true?). A Russian mason who fell into the mortar was not pulled out and so his bones still shore up the wall.

He said the Russian mason’s lover (call her Katerina) will move along the wall, feeling from brick to brick, trying to recapture the spirit of her dead sweetheart. Against her better instincts, she will fall in love with an American soldier on the other side of the wall. But to cross to the soldier she will have to break through the remains of her Russian lover’s body. (To dance a wall and the terror on both sides.) In the end the young American will cross to her and will be shot dead while straddling the brickwork.

(No dying fall.)

A monstrous idea, but we were drunk.

There are rumors that Sasha has discovered a young genius in Leningrad. Erik said my face went pale. (What bullshit.) Anyway, if this genius ever comes west he will just fire me to even greater things.

Before Margot dies, she says she will ask for one perfect performance to repeat itself in her imagination, one perfect performance, one so astounding and beautiful that she can relive every step of it in her head.

She did not say which one it would be, maybe she has not even danced it yet. So far, she said, she could possibly choose from eight to ten.