Colum McCann - Dancer

In the palm of his hand he holds out the lumps of sugar.

They’ll dissolve, she says.

No they won’t.

Put them away and get to bed.

Rudik puts a lump between his gum and his cheek, drops the rest of the sugar into a dish on the kitchen table. He looks across the cabin at his mother, who has pulled the blankets high and turned her face towards the wall. He remains motionless until he is sure that she is asleep, then leans into the wireless radio and steadily adjusts the dial along the yellow paneling: Warsaw, Luxembourg, Moscow, Prague, Kiev, Vilnius, Dresden, Minsk, Kishinev, Novosibirsk, Brussels, Leningrad, Rome, Warsaw, Stockholm, Kiev, Tallinn, Tbilisi, Belgrade, Prague, Tashkent, Sofia, Riga, Helsinki, Budapest.

He already knows that if he stays awake long enough he will be able to turn the white knob to Moscow where, at the stroke of midnight, he will hear Tchaikovsky.

Well well well! His father stands in the doorway shaking snow from his shoulders. A black mustache. A strong chin. The voice raked with cigarettes. He wears a pilotka with the brims down fore and aft, so he looks as if he is both coming and going. Two red medals pinned to his chest. A Marx pin on the collar of his tunic. His mother hurries to the doorway while Rudik huddles in the corner beside the fire. Looking at his father is like looking at a painting for the very first time — he sees the painting exists, sees the colors and the textures, sees the frame within which it is hung, yet he knows nothing about it. Four years at war and another eighteen months in the territories. His older sister, Tamara, has long since made lace prints and jars of berry juice as homecoming gifts. She thrusts them into her father’s arms, clings to him, kisses him. Rudik has nothing to give. Still his father comes across, knocks away the high-backed chair in his joy, picks Rudik up and holds him in the air, spins him twice, all wide cheeks, yellow teeth. What a big boy! Look at you! Look! And how old are you now? Seven? Seven! Almost eight! My! Look at you!

Rudik notices the large puddles his father’s boots have left at the door, goes to the threshold and stands in the wet prints. My little boy! His father has a number of smells to him, not bad smells, a strange mixture, like trains and trams and the smell you get after wiping chalk from the blackboard with your elbow.

They walk in the street along the rows of cabins and wooden houses, into the late afternoon. Icicles hang from lampposts. Snow coats the rows of gates. The frost-hardened mud crunches beneath their feet. Rudik wears his sister’s old overcoat. His father stares at the coat, says the boy should not be dressed in his sister’s castoffs, tells Rudik’s mother to switch the buttons from one side to the other. His mother pales and nods, says of course she will. They watch the wind rip the cardboard and sackcloth from the window frames of the wooden houses. Men drink vodka in an abandoned car. His father looks at the men, shakes his head in disgust, links his arm with Rudik’s mother. Whispering, they seem as if they have years of secrets to tell each other. A cat wanders lean-shouldered along a crooked fence. Rudik flings a couple of stones at it. His father catches his arm on the second throw, but then he laughs, puts his pilotka on Rudik’s head, and they chase each other down the street, hot breath steaming. After dinner — cabbage, potatoes and a special piece of meat Rudik has never seen before — he is held so tight to his father’s chest that his head crumples the papirosy in the tunic pocket.

They spread the cigarettes out on the table and straighten them, stuff the stray tobacco back into the thin paper tubes. His father tells him that this is the dream of men, to straighten crumpled things.

Isn’t that right?

Yes, Father.

Call me Papa.

Yes, Papa.

He listens to the curious highs and lows of his father’s voice, the way it sometimes sounds torn, like radio waves when he turns the dial. The wireless, the only thing they haven’t sold for food, sits above the fireplace, dark and mahogany. His father tunes in to a report from Berlin, and says: Listen to that! Listen! Music, now that’s music!

His mother’s fingers are long and thin, and they tap out a rhythm on the chair. Rudik doesn’t want to go to bed, so he sits on her lap. He watches his father, a foreign thing. His cheeks are hollow and his eyes are larger than in the photographs. He coughs, a deep cough, a man’s cough, and spits in the fireplace. Embers jump out onto the dirt floor, so his father reaches down and extinguishes them with his bare fingers.

Rudik tries it, but his thumb blisters immediately and his father says: That’s my boy.

Rudik rocks against his mother’s shoulder while he holds back the tears.

That’s my boy, says his father again, disappearing out the door, coming back two minutes later, saying: If someone thinks there’s no evil in this world, they should visit that fucking outhouse in weather like this!

His mother looks up, says: Hamet.

What? says his father. He’s heard language before.

She swallows, smiles, says nothing.

My warrior’s heard language, haven’t you?

Rudik nods.

That night all four of them sleep in the bed together, Rudik’s head by his father’s armpit. Later he slips away and crosses to his mother, her smell, kefir and sweet potatoes. There is movement deep in the night, the bed slowly throbbing, his father whispering. Rudik turns very suddenly, jams his feet against the warmth of his mother. The rocking stops and he feels his mother’s fingers on his brow. Towards dawn he is woken again, but he doesn’t move and when his parents fall asleep, his father snoring, Rudik sees the light begin to finger the parting in the curtains. Quietly, he rises.

A handful of cabbage from the iron pot. The last of the milk, kept cold on the windowsill. His high-collared gray school tunic hangs on the wall. Dressing, he moves through the room on the balls of his feet.

His skates are hooked on the inside knob of the front door. He made them himself — filing down iron scraps from the refinery, embedding the metal into two pieces of thin wood, fashioning leather straps from scraps found behind the warehouses along the railway tracks.

He quietly unhooks the skates, closes the door, runs to the city lake, the straps joined around his neck, his gloves over the sharp steel so the blades don’t cut his face. Already the lake is dark with movement. Sunlight kindles the cold haze. Men in overcoats skate to work, hunched, smoking as they progress, solid figures against the skeletal trees. The women with shopping bags skate differently, taller somehow, erect. Rudik steps onto the ice and breaks against the traffic, going the wrong way in the flow, people laughing, dipping, cursing him. Hey, boy. You! Salmon!

He bends his knee, shortens the thrust of his arm, quickens his pace. The metal blades have become slightly loose in the wooden slats, but he has learned balance and counterbalance and, with a small flick of his ankle, he persuades the steel back into the wood. In the distance he can see the roof of the banya where he goes each Thursday with his mother and sister to bathe. There, his mother scrubs his back with birch twigs. He likes to lie on the wooden benches and receive the slap of the twigs. He finds patterns in the tiny pieces of birch leaf that dot the length of his body. His mother has told him that the baths will make him immune to sickness, and he has learned to endure the scalding steam longer than any other child his age.

He jumps, turns, lands, feels the skates catch once more.

On the ice many patterns are etched beneath him, and he can already tell by the marks who is a good skater and who isn’t. If he were to twirl for a long time in one place, he could get rid of everyone else, destroy their marks, be the only person ever to have skated there. A piece of litter catches beneath the blade, and he lifts his foot slightly, circles to crush it. Flecks of ice jump up from his boots. In the distance he hears his name called, the voice arriving from the edge of the lake, carried by the wind. Rudik! Rudik! Instead of turning, he leans on his right foot, and his whole body spins in the opposite direction to the shout. He knows not to swerve too hard, to lean just the right amount so he won’t fall. Then he is off against a head wind, small specks of litter still clinging to the blade. Rudik! Rudik! He leans over farther, his body concentrating itself in his shoulders. Beyond the lake, on the roads, he sees trucks, motorbikes, even men on bicycles — their tires fat to deal with the ice. He would love to hold on to the rear bumper of a car, to have it drag him along like the older boys, careful with their scarves so they don’t catch around the wheels, keeping an eye out for the brake lights so they can ready themselves to let go and travel faster than anything else on the road.