Colum McCann - Dancer

Hello! one of them shouted. He looked about four years old. He ran over and made a gesture to rub his soft fuzzy head, where his hair had begun to grow. The skull seemed too large for his tiny body. His eyes were huge and strange, lopsided, his face terribly thin. I asked his name.

Kolya, he said.

Go back to the swing, Nikolai, Galina said.

We continued through the grounds. Over my shoulder I saw Kolya climb the makeshift slide once again. The sunlight caught the dark stubble on his head.

Where’s he from? I asked.

Galina touched my shoulder. Perhaps you shouldn’t draw so much attention to yourself, she said.

I’m just curious.

You really must be careful.

Galina had been assigned the work in the orphanage after failing at university. The seasons had passed through her face and it struck me that they had now conjured themselves into one which had become bland and nondescript, not unlike myself.

But at a copse of trees Galina stopped, coughed then half-smiled.

It turned out that Kolya’s parents were intellectuals from the far eastern stretches of Russia. They had been posted to a university in Leningrad where they’d been killed when their car smashed into a tram on Nevsky. There had never been any contact made with other relatives and Kolya, three months old at the time, had spent his first few years not saying a single word.

He’s a clever child but ruthlessly lonely, said Galina. And he has certain behaviors.

What kind of behaviors?

He hoards his food and then waits until it’s stale or moldy to digest it. And toilet things as well. He’s not yet trained himself for the toilet.

We rounded a corner where a group of boys and girls were chopping wood, their breath steaming in the cold. Their axes glinted momentarily in the light as they raised them above their shoulders.

But he shows some promise as a chess player, she said.

Temporarily stunned by a vision of my father pulling a bullet from a core of wood, I said: Who?

Kolya! she said. He’s already carved his own chess set from the slats of his bed. We discovered it one evening when he crashed to the floor. The pieces were tucked in his pillowcase.

I stopped on the path. An oil tanker had pulled up to the main building and Galina checked her watch. She sighed and said: I must go.

In the background I could hear the children laughing.

I suppose I can help arrange a job for you here if you desire, she said.

She shook her head and began to leave, jangling her keys.

Thank you, I replied.

She didn’t turn. I knew what I wanted, perhaps what I had always wanted since a young age. Before I left I stood watching Kolya swinging from a monkey bar. A shrill whistle blew, calling the children in, while a guard swept a dozen more kids out into the grounds.

I returned to my room, to my dictionaries, my clementines.

At the Ministry of Education the following week I was told that all adoptions had been curtailed, and I concurred with the official that custody by the People was a far better thing, but then I plied her gently on the question of wardship. She gave me a fierce look and said: Wait here please. She came back carting a file and was rifling through it when suddenly she asked: Do you like dance?

There was only one possible reason that she could have asked the question. Rudi had been gone for over a decade. Talk about him had softened somewhat in recent years and there had been other high-profile defections that had taken the spotlight away from him. There had even been a review in Izvestiya of a tour in Germany that quoted Western newspapers saying how Rudi’s touch had all but faded from the firmament. When Alexsandr Pushkin died in the early seventies the papers had mentioned Rudi briefly, but they had written that it was exclusively the teacher’s genius, not Rudi’s, which had made him an interesting dancer.

I tightened my fingers and waited for the official to clarify herself. She was looking closely at the particulars of my file. I felt that in my feverish haste I had dug myself a pit. Nothing had ever been stamped in my identity papers about the problem of having known Rudi, but obviously the files went deeper. I tried to mumble an apology, but the woman adjusted her glasses, peered over the half lenses.

She said sternly that she had seen a certain dance in the Kirov in the late fifties. The performer had danced beautifully, she said, but in later years he had disappointed her terribly. She was talking in half words, but it felt as if we had taken an irreversible journey together. She scanned my file further. I allowed myself a breath. She did not mention Rudi’s name, but he lay in the space between us.

The truth was that I didn’t really want Rudi in my life anymore, or at least not the sort of Rudi I had known years before. I wanted a Nikolai, a Kolya, someone I could help up from the slats of my own existence.

I may be able to help, Comrade, the official said.

I wondered what exactly I had allowed myself into. She said there was a provision under Article 123 of the Family Code for wardship, and there was a further provision under another law for Party members to have access to children of talent. I had been a member of the Party, but since leaving Iosif I had hidden low, afraid he might hunt me down. The thought even occurred that the woman at the Ministry was somehow connected to him, that she would betray me. And yet there was something about her that seemed honest, a display of simplicity that blended a sharp intelligence.

Does this boy show any particular talents? she asked.

He’s a chess player.

At the age of four?

She made a note on a piece of paper and said: Come back next week.

I had often believed, to that point in my life, that friendships among women were fickle things, dependent on circumstances other than the heart, but Olga Vecheslova, as I got to know her, was extraordinary. She was younger than I and insecure behind her gold-rimmed spectacles. Dark brown hair. Dark eyes, almost black. She herself had been a dancer although there was no whisper of it in her body anymore — her hips were wide and her carriage bent, unlike my mother, who, even when sick, had walked as if balancing china on her head. Olga was unnerved but pleased by the notion of me having known Rudi. She disliked him of course, for betraying our nation. She also disliked him for his betrayal of the very thing we ultimately wanted for our own lives, the realization of desire. And in that hatred there was a need. It was a disease of sorts; we couldn’t shake Rudi from our minds. Olga and I began to meet once a week, to walk along the canals together, aware that our actions could draw the wrong attention, but we forged on regardless.

Olga arranged that I be allowed to visit Kolya at the orphanage. Nearing the end of summer he seemed undernourished, his legs thin and spindly in his shorts. Terrible sores had erupted on his face. He had been punished for incontinence and there were welts on his back. At Galina’s office I learned that he was actually six years old, not four, that his growth was stunted. I began to doubt myself, started biting my nails for the first time since I was sixteen. I cannot handle a child like this, I thought.

Even the bureaucracy of having a child would be a strategic nightmare, waiting in lines for schools, name changes, apartment applications, vaccinations, identity cards.

Still, I bought paint, a brush, a secondhand set of lace curtains for the one window, decorated the corner of the room blue, copied out pictures of chess pieces from a book, sketched them around the sill. On the shelves I placed knickknacks. The shelves themselves were made from orange crates. The main problem was that I had no bed for Kolya. There was a four-month waiting list in the government department stores for a new one and though I was translating more and more, money was still an anguish. Finally Olga managed to find a mattress which, when cleaned and patched, was quite presentable.