Colum McCann - Dancer

a place that Rudi also likes, dark, anonymous, dangerous, a ditch of desire

and Victor debates it, whether to go down there or not, to the nightly row of vehicles in the meatpacking district, yes indeed, a lot of meat being packed, the last stage of the evening, and Victor — looking out over the dance floor — notices the drift has already begun, and he ponders that he does not want to become one of the hot-flush queens of New York, lamenting that he’s now fucking boys half his age, no, not that, not ever that— I have signed the charter of life! I will continue! I will roll on! Indeed I’ll roll over! — and with a wave of his hand and a few deft whispers, Bring only five thousand of my most intimate friends! he gathers up a flock, boys so far strung out that this may be the very end of their elastic, their eyes in the depths of their sockets, but a mania still there, traipsing behind the great Victor, a flotilla of yellow taxicabs waiting in the street, one of the few places in Manhattan at this hour where a cabby is guaranteed a fare, and Victor clicks his fingers while also kissing the bouncers good-night, and he and his cohorts hop into the taxis, some of them leaning from the windows, like cowboys on a urban drive, down the West Side, Out with the lassos, girls! telling the drivers they’ve just come in from Texas, that they’re looking for a place to lay their saddles, Cowboys make better lovers, my friend, just ask any bull! the smells from the Hudson wafting in the open windows, the cobblestones shining from a recent rain, fires burning in oil drums where bums share cigarettes, the night air still chill with possibility, the taxis negotiating corners, until the trucks appear like mirages, silver and huge and shiny, a mill of activity, men in various states of elation and annihilation, some laughing, some sobbing, a couple attempting a waltz on the sidewalk, everyone so close to being broke that they are finally generous with the very last of their drugs, pills and poppers and powders they’ve been hoarding away for the dregs of the evening, names being called from truck to truck, small cups of Crisco and jars of Vaseline being passed along, a man roaring about a pickpocket, a drag queen screaming at a lover, young boys jumping down from the back tailgates, older queens being shunted upwards, all of it like a magical war zone, a human hide-and-seek, but Victor stands outside the commotion for a moment, holds the end hairs of his mustache between his teeth, scans the crowd, all sorts of familiar faces, and — just before Victor climbs into the rear of a truck, Who knows, the world might very well end before sunrise! — he looks up the cobblestoned street and sees a lone man walking towards the trucks, disturbing the globes of lamplight, moving with certainty and grace, the volume of the walk turned up so that Victor’s attention is arrested, and instantly he knows, because he recognizes the leather hat, the bend of the brim, the lean of the body, and Victor feels a rush of emotion like wind over grass, causing the hairs on his arms to tingle, and Rudi shouts, You Venezuelan turd! You left me there! and he is laughing, his whole face worked into happiness, showing his fine white teeth, and a tremor runs through Victor’s spine as he watches Rudi approach, thinking here comes loneliness applauding itself all the way down the street.

In the winter of 1975 I walked around Leningrad, fretting over poems that were only half-translated. After divorcing Iosif I had moved to a communal apartment just off Kazanskaya. It was a bare, unadorned room with a linoleum floor, close enough to the Fontanka River to connect me to my old life. I rose early each morning to walk and work. The poets were socialist leftovers who still managed to rally and cry — in the beauty and space of the Spanish language — against the horrors of Franco. They had written to preserve what would have been forgotten, to give it a longer lease on life, and their words consumed me.

It used to be that I had gone to the countryside to think, to wade in rivers, but somehow Leningrad was a balm to me now. Barges moved slowly on the dark waters of the canals. Birds swooped above the boats. I still felt warmed by my father’s notebook from years before, which I kept inside my coat pocket and read while I sat on park benches. My display of seeming leisure was questionable to some — another pedestrian would look too long in my direction, or a car would slow and the driver gaze suspiciously. Leningrad was not a city in which to be seen idle.

I began to carry a shawl and held an imaginary bundle in the crook of my arm, reached in to touch the emptiness, pretending there was a child there.

I spent my fiftieth birthday working on a single verse, a highly antifascist tract about a thunderstorm where small countries of light and dark rushed headlong over fields and gullies. It had obvious political resonance, but I began to think the poem related directly to me, having imagined a child of sorts for myself. My interpretation wasn’t so much a wish fulfillment as a blatant mockery of how I had lived my early years with Iosif. Even after the two miscarriages it had been possible, when young, to be ambitious, for the Party, for the People, for science, for literature. But those ambitions had long been shut off, and the light that penetrated me now was the notion that I might become the sculptor of something human.

A child! I had to laugh at myself. Not only was I half a century in the world, but I had not met anyone since the divorce. I paced my room from wall to wall, mirror to mirror. I bought a box of clementines in the market as a birthday treat, but even peeling back the soft skin of the orange seemed to relate, however absurdly, to my desire. My father had once told me the story of how, when he was in the work camp, a truckload of giant logs was brought in to be chopped. He was on ax duty with a gang of twelve. It was a dreadfully hot summer and each swing of the blade was torture. He hacked at a log and there was the unmistakable sound of metal hitting metal. He bent down and found a mushroom-shaped chunk of lead embedded in the trunk. A bullet. He counted the rings from the perimeter to the bullet and found that they matched his age exactly.

We never escape ourselves, he said to me years later.

One spring morning I took a tram to the outskirts of Leningrad, where an acquaintance of mine, Galina, worked in a state orphanage. When I sat in her dark office she raised an eyebrow, frowned. I told her that I was beginning to look for other work in addition to my translations. She hardly seemed convinced. The desire to be around orphan children was considered strange. Mostly they were idiots or chronically disabled. To work with them was a social embarrassment. On the wall above Galina’s desk there was a print of an old saying she said came from Finland: The crack of a falling branch is its own apology to the tree for having broken. I had convinced myself that going there, even for an afternoon, was simply to get away from the poems. But I had also heard of certain women — women my age — who had opened foster homes, adjuncts to the dyetskii dom, the baby houses. The women were allowed to operate on a small scale, sometimes as many as six children, and they got a desultory pension from the state.

Are you no longer in the university? asked Galina.

I’m divorced now.

I see, she said.

In the background I could hear wailing voices. When we left the office a group of boys crowded around us, hair shaved, tunics gray, red sores around their mouths.

Galina showed me the grounds. The building was an old armory, brightly repainted, with a chimney stack that pierced the air. Prefabricated classrooms were propped on cinder blocks. Inside, the children sang paeans to a good life. A single set of swings stood in the garden where each child was allowed half an hour during the day. In their spare time the maintenance men were attempting to build a slide and the unfinished structure stood like a skeleton beside the swings. Still, three children had found a way to climb it anyway.