Colum McCann - Dancer

Just when we all thought they were finished, a small blond boy stepped out of the line. He was about five or six years old. He extended his leg, placed his hands firmly on his hips and hitched his thumbs at his back. He bent his neck slightly forward, stretched his elbows out and began. The soldiers in their beds propped themselves up. Those by the windows shaded their eyes to watch. The boy went to the floor for a squatting dance. We all stood silently watching. The boy grinned. Some soldiers began clapping in rhythm but, just as the dance was about to end, the boy almost fell. His hand slapped the floor and broke the impact. For a moment he looked as if he was about to cry, but he didn’t, he was up once more, his blond hair flopping over his eyes.

When he finished the ward was full of applause. Someone offered the boy a cube of sugar. He blushed and slipped it into the top of his sock, and then he stood around with his hands in his pockets, rolling his shoulders from side to side. The stern woman snapped her fingers, and the troupe of children moved to the next ward. The soldiers began whistling and shouting and, when the troupe was nearly gone, the men lit up their cigarettes and dipped their cups once more into the vat of spirits. The blond boy peered over his shoulder to take another look at the ward.

Just then I heard the sound of a bed creak. I had forgotten about Nurmahammed. He was staring down at his one leg. He moved his lips as if he were eating something, then took a couple of deep breaths and reached down to his stump, ran his hands up and down along where the shinbone used to be. He caught my eye and tried a smile. I smiled back. There was nothing to say. What could I say? I turned away. A couple of soldiers nodded at me as I left.

From the end of the ward I could hear poor Nurmahammed sobbing.

I went back down to the baths. The sun was going down and it had gotten cold, but there were a couple of early stars. A wind whipped at the trees. Some balalaika music sounded from the hospital.

I closed the doors of the greenhouse and kept the lanterns turned off. There was a pile of uniforms and some kindling on the ground. I stuffed it all into the stove and fired it up, then filled a pail of water and waited. It took a long time for the water to boil and right there, in the greenhouse, I thought to myself that of all the good things in the world, the best is a hot bath all alone in the darkness.

He wakes beside his mother in the morning, head tucked by her arm. Already his sister has risen to get water from the well to prepare breakfast.

His mother recently traded two picture frames for a single bar of soap. The soap smelled strange to him at first but now, every morning, when he rises from the bed, Rudik takes the bar from the pocket of his mother’s bathrobe, hauls the scent of it down. There is, he has noticed, no soap in the hospital where he dances. The soldiers smell gruff and worn, and he wonders if his father will have a similar scent when he returns from the war.

His mother combs his hair and takes his clothes from the stove top, where they have been warming. She dresses him. Some of his clothes have been handed down from his sister. His mother has altered a shirt from a blouse — the cuffs lengthened, the collar stiffened with old cardboard — but still it seems ill-fitting to the boy and he squirms when she fastens the buttons.

For breakfast he is allowed the chair while his sister cleans the table around him. He hunches over his cup of milk and a potato left over from the night before. He can feel his stomach tighten as the milk hits the back of his throat, and he eats half the potato in three bites, tucks the rest away in his pocket. In school many of the other children have lunch boxes. With the war over, almost all the fathers have returned, but not his, and he has heard that most of his father’s salary goes to the war effort. Sacrifices must be made, says his mother. But there are times when Rudik wishes he could sit at his school desk, open a lunch box to reveal black bread, meat, vegetables. His mother has told him that hunger will make him strong, but to him, hunger is the high feeling of emptiness when the trains emerge from the forest and the sound bounces across the ice of the Belaya.

During school he imagines himself out on the river, skating. On the journey home he looks for the highest snowdrifts in the city, so he can step high and be close to the new telegraph wires, hear them crackle just above him.

In the evenings, after listening to the wireless, his mother reads him stories about carpenters and wolves and forests and hacksaws and stars hung on nails in the sky. In one of the stories a giant carpenter stretches upwards and removes the stars one by one, distributes them to the workers’ children.

How tall is the carpenter, Mama?

A million kilometers.

How many stars in each pocket?

One for everyone, she says.

Two for me?

One for everyone, she says again.

Farida watches as Rudik turns in the middle of the earthen shack floor, spinning on the heels of his boots. When he spins he raises dirt. So be it, let him spin, it is his joy. She will, one of these days, save enough money to buy a carpet from the old Turk in the local market. The carpets hang from twine and swing in the wind. She has often pondered what it would be like to have enough money to put carpets on the wall as well, to keep in the warmth, for decoration, to bring the shack to life. But before buying carpets she would purchase new dresses for her daughter, proper shoes for her son, a life away from this life.

Often Rudik’s mother shows him the letters that have come from the German border, where his father is still stationed as a politruk, a teacher. The messages are short and precise: All is well, Farida, do not worry. Stalin is powerful. The words accompany Rudik as he walks through the rain with his mother to the hospital, where at the gate she lets go of his hand, taps him on the bottom, says to him: Don’t be late, little sunshine.

She has rubbed goose fat on his chest to keep away the cold, now that the days are heading towards autumn.

The sick lift him in through the windows, already applauding. His appearance has become a weekly ritual. He grins as he is passed from one set of hands to another. Later he is guided from ward to ward, where he performs the new folk dances learned at school. Sometimes the nurses gather to watch. There are no pockets in Rudik’s dance costume, and by the time he finishes so many cubes of sugar are stuffed lumpily inside his socks that the patients laugh about his legs being diseased. He is given vegetable scraps and bread that the soldiers have set aside, and he crams them into a small paper bag to bring home.

At the farthest wing there is a ward for those soldiers who have gone mad. It is the only place in the hospital where he will not perform. He has heard they have machines with electricity to cure madness.

This ward is full — faces against windows, tongues lolling, rows of fixed eyes — and he stays away, though at times he sees a woman who lumbers up from the greenhouses. She stands at the window of the ward, talking to a soldier whose pajama top hangs loosely on his shoulders. One afternoon Rudik notices the same soldier hobbling through the grounds on crutches, the bottom of the pajama leg knotted just inches beneath his knee, the soldier moving determinedly from tree to tree. The soldier shouts to him — something about a dance — but Rudik is already gone, scared, looking over his shoulder, out the gate, along the rutted dirt streets. As he runs he imagines himself ripping stars from the sky like nails. He returns home, hopping one-legged through the darkness.

Where’ve you been? asks his mother, stirring in the bed beside Rudik’s sister.