Colum McCann - Dancer

Three-thirty

I left the room. The bodyguard was fiddling with a book, feeling its pages. He asked for another helping of cake.

Four o’clock

Rudik came out of Mother’s room. He looked stiff, but his face betrayed nothing. He nodded at Nuriya and Ilya and went to the window. He parted the curtain where, outside, the officials were sitting in their cars. Rudik turned. He signaled something to his bodyguard. He was feigning happiness, I’m sure. The bodyguard opened his suitcase and Rudik handed out the last of his presents, more jewelry and makeup and chocolates. Then he flapped his arms to get warm even though the house was toasty. Well, he said. He dug down into his pocket and threw a sheaf of rubles on the table. It was a lot of money. Nobody moved. Outside, one of the cars beeped. The flight to Leningrad was due to leave soon. The snow was still falling. At the door he pulled his beret down, hugged Nuriya and shook Ilya’s hand yet again. I stepped across to him at the threshold. She didn’t recognize me, he said. I whispered in his ear: Of course she did. We repeated ourselves. No, she didn’t. Yes she did. He looked at me and smiled a half-smile. My face still stings, he said and for a moment I thought he was going to slap me back, but he didn’t. He twirled his scarf and then turned his back and went out to the car. We stood there with all our new possessions.

Yulia, my dear, let me guess, you still don’t have a piano?

He was panting somewhat from the five flights of stairs. I gasped, unaware that at my age such deep surprise was still a possibility. He smiled at his own little joke, introduced his companion, Emilio, and apologized for calling so late at night. He said he felt awful for bringing no gifts, but that he had already given everything away. I embraced him as he studied the darkness of the apartment from the vantage of the threshold.

Same old Yulia, said Rudi. So many books that you can’t see the wallpaper.

How did you find me?

I have my means.

The electricity was off again in the building. I lit two candles and the light flared. Emilio stayed at the door and shook the snow off his shoulders. I invited him in and he was a little surprised at what he called my perfect Spanish. I explained that the language had been much of my life and he went to the bookshelf to look at my collection.

I pulled my dressing gown tight, then stepped behind the partition that divided the room. Kolya was sleeping. He grumbled at first when I woke him, but then he sat upright. Who? he said and he leaped out of bed, his hair tousled.

Put whatever food we have on the table, I whispered.

In the bathroom I rouged my cheeks with my knuckles, looked at myself in the mirror and laughed. The ghosts of my life had walked out to greet me at sixty-two years of age.

Hurry, called Rudi. I have only an hour or so.

Out on the table Kolya had spread a loaf of bread and some leftover cucumber salad. The bottle of vodka was already open but the glasses beside it were empty. The candles made nervous points against the darkness.

We’re honored, I said.

Rudi waved his hand: They wanted me to go to a dinner at the French embassy, he said, but they bore me.

So they let you come back?

They allowed me forty-eight hours to see Mother. My flight was delayed. It leaves from Pulkovo in a few hours.

A few hours?

I didn’t even get to see the Kirov. They managed the visit so that it would be closed.

Your mother? I asked. How is she?

Rudi smiled but didn’t reply. His teeth were still strikingly white as if making an argument against the rest of his face. There was a short silence as he looked around the room. He seemed to be searching for other figures to come out from the shadows. Then he clasped my hands suddenly and said: Yulia, you have lost none of your beauty.

Pardon me?

Not a day older.

And you, I replied, are still a liar.

No, no, no, he insisted. You’re still beautiful.

I am an old woman, Rudi. I have accepted my headscarves.

He reached for the vodka, poured out three small glasses, looked at Kolya, wondered aloud if he were old enough to drink. With his teenage gait Kolya went to the cupboard to get a fourth glass.

Your son? whispered Rudi.

In a manner of speaking, I said.

You are married again?

I hesitated, shook my head. They had been long years of poverty and struggle for Kolya and me. My translating skills were as good as useless: there was no longer such a call for foreign literature and many of the publishing houses had been closed down. I felt as if I were standing on the edge of a new life, already half-exhausted. I had begun to take on some menial cleaning jobs to put bread on the table. But my joy was in the fact that Kolya had grown into a good young man, tall, dark-haired, reclusive. Seventeen years old, he had given up the chess but he was working on becoming an artist — he had begun by drawing landscapes, solid and real, but he was branching out now, blurring the edges. He believed that change needed a reason, otherwise there would be no respect for the past: he wanted to paint through the traditions in order to find the new. He had done a series of portraits of Lenin, using milk. The paintings were history as parody — nothing showed up on them until held to a candle or a match. Kolya hadn’t sold any but kept them under his bed and his favorite was one that he’d accidentally left near a heating pipe and only the nose had emerged. Above his bed he had written a quote from Fontanelle from one of my old books: It is true that the philosopher’s stone cannot be found, but it is good to search for it.

What panicked me was that Kolya would soon be coming up to his military service. The thought of it was horrific — war closing off parts of him as they had closed off parts of my parents — and I often woke at night in a pool of sweat with visions of my son rounding a corner in a village in Afghanistan, a rifle strapped across his chest. Kolya, however, thought he had found a way to circumvent the system: when giving a urine sample, he said, he would prick his finger with a pin and allow a drop of blood to fall into the sample. If his urine showed an excess of protein he could skip the military. It often occurred to me that Kolya had somehow inherited my father’s spirit, although he looked nothing like him, of course. He had the tenacity, the intelligence, and the temperament. He had taken an interest in my family history and was amplified by the echoes he had found — inevitably, through his questions, he had discovered Rudi.

I scanned Kolya’s face for a reaction to the visit but he was, surprisingly, unruffled.

Emilio, I noticed, had taken a translation of Cervantes from my shelf. But instead of reading it he was feeling through the pages as if divining the words, his eyes closed. Rudi explained that he’d put a hair in the book earlier when they were alone in the room and now Emilio was searching for it, something Emilio liked to do to pass the time.

I surround myself with crazy people, said Rudi.

Rudi reached for the bottle of vodka and poured two more glasses. He smiled at me in our small and awkward silence. A quarter of a century had gone by and while the difference in age may have become less pronounced, a thin curtain of embarrassment had been drawn in the space between us. We began desperately talking around it. He sat forward, with his elbows on his knees, his chin in his palms, his eyes sparkling with the same old delight.

Tell me everything, he said.

He lifted the glass to his mouth, waited for me, and so I tried to unravel what I had thought had been firmly spooled — my apartment, my divorce, my street.