Colum McCann - Dancer

His older sister, Tamara, uses the same technique for pictures of male dancers she copies from books: Chaboukiani, Yermolayev, Tikhomirov, Sergeyev. Rudik studies the drawings, how the dancers hold their heads, the dip of their feet. Tamara stands in the courtyard and encourages him to imitate the pose. She laughs when he tries to stand stock-still on one foot. He doesn’t own a library card, but Tamara is a senior member of the Komsomol and so is allowed books from the library, which she brings home for him— Dance and Realism; Beyond the Bourgeoisie, The Form of Dance in the Soviet Union; Choreographic Structure for a New Society —all books that force Rudik into the use of a dictionary.

He writes lists of words in a notebook that he keeps in his school-bag. Many of them are French, so he feels sometimes like a boy of another country. In school he draws maps with pictures of trains moving across the landscape. His notebooks are covered with sketches of dancers’ legs, and when his teachers catch him with the book he simply shrugs and says: What’s wrong with that?

He has begun to acquire a reputation for himself, and sometimes he storms out of the classroom, shuts the door noisily behind him.

Later the teachers find him in empty corridors, attempting pirouettes, but he has no formal training, only folk dancing, and his moves are stunted. He is sent home with notes from the school’s director.

His father looks at the notes, crumples them, throws them away.

In Hamet’s new work there is the salvation of numbness. He is out early in the morning on the Djoma River with twelve other comrades, war veterans, on a barge. The smoke from Ufa’s factories drifts over the boat and the deep smell of metal is a reminder to him of blood. Hamet and the other men use giant boat hooks to bring in the logs that have floated down the river from the mill towns up north — Sterlitamak, Alkino, Tschishmi. The hooks are spun through the air like miniature sickles, catching and digging into the errant logs. They are hauled by hand to the rear of the barge, where the men step out and tie them with chains, jumping from one to the other as the logs roll beneath their feet, hats on, shirts open, water splashing around their boots.

Rudik has asked if he can step out into the water and roll on the logs, but Hamet has said that it is far too dangerous and, indeed, over the course of two years, as foreman, Hamet loses five men.

Hamet follows a city directive that says he must classify the dead man as drowned; sometimes he dreams of them at night, remembering soldiers whose bodies were used instead of trees to build roads. In the winters, when the lake is frozen and logs no longer drift downriver, he tours the factories, giving political lectures to the workers, just as he did for many years in the army, and he never questions what any of it means, to hook these logs and men.

One evening Hamet catches Rudik by the ear and says: There is nothing wrong with dance, son.

I know.

Even our great leaders like dance.

Yes I know.

But it’s what you do in the world that makes you. Do you understand?

I think so.

Your social existence determines consciousness, son. Remember?

Yes.

It’s very simple. You’re made for more than dance.

Yes.

You will be a great doctor, an engineer.

Yes.

Rudik looks at his mother in the ratty armchair across the room. She is thin, and there is a hollow in her neck that looks smoke-blue. Her eyes don’t move.

Correct, Farida? says his father.

Correct, replies his mother.

The following day, on the way home from the factory, Farida stops momentarily outside a house on a rutted dirt road. The small house is painted bright yellow, the paint is peeling off in large flakes, the roof is sloped by weather and the wooden doorway sags. The carved wooden shutters flap in the breeze. A single wind chime lets out a note.

She spies a pair of shoes on the porch step. Old, black, unpolished, familiar.

She works her tongue around in her mouth, moves it against a back tooth that has been loose for weeks, pushes at the tooth with force, places her hand on the gate in order to steady herself. She has heard about an old couple who live here with three or four other families. She feels dizzy, faint. The tooth rocks back and forth in her mouth. She ponders that she has lived her life through a constant driving storm, she thinks, she has walked on with her head down, her jaw locked, her mind always on the next step, and seldom before has she been forced to stop and examine it all:

Her tongue pushes against the loose molar. She puts her hand on the gate of the house to open it, but in the end she turns away, a pain shooting through her gums.

Later, when Rudik comes home — the flush of dance in his cheeks — she sits beside him on the bed and says: I know what you’re doing.

What? he asks.

Don’t fool with me.

What?

I’m too old to be fooled with.

What?

I saw your shoes outside that house.

What shoes?

I know who those people are, Rudik.

He looks up at her and says: Don’t tell Father.

She hesitates, bites her lip, then opens up her hand and says: Look.

A tooth rolls in her palm. She places it in the pocket of her housedress and then lays her hand on the back of Rudik’s neck, draws him close.

Be careful, Rudik, she says.

He nods and steps away from her, spins onto the floor to show her what he has learned, and he is confused when she doesn’t watch, her eyes fixed firmly on the wall.

After the boy left, Anna put on her nightgown, worn at the elbows, and perched at the very edge of the bed. I was at my desk, reading. She whispered good night, but then she coughed and said she felt blessed, that it was enough in this life just to feel blessed from time to time.

She said she knew, even after just one session, that the boy could be something unusual.

She rose and shuffled across the room, put her arms to my shoulders. With one hand she removed my reading glasses. She placed them in the center spine of the book and turned my face to hers. She said my name and it pierced my fatigue in the most extraordinary way. As she leaned across, her hair brushed against me and it smelled like the days when she had been with the Maryinsky. She turned me sideways in the chair, and the light from the candle flickered on her face.

She said: Read to me, husband.

I picked up the book, and she said: No, not here, let’s go to bed.

It was a book of Pasternak’s that had survived all our years, open to a poem about stars frozen in the sky. I have always adored Pasternak, not just for the obvious reasons but because it has seemed to me that by staying in the rearguard rather than moving with the vanguard, he had learned to love what is left behind without mourning what was gone.

The book was fattened from being thumbed through so much. My habit, which Anna hated, of turning down the edges of my favorite pages gave it a further thickness.

I picked up the candle, the book, my glasses, and I stepped to the bed, pulled back the covers, got in. Anna dropped her wooden dentures on a plate with a little sigh, combed her hair, climbed in beside me. Her feet were cold as always. With older dancers it is often this way — having tortured their feet for so many years, the blood just refuses to journey.

I read to her from a cycle of nature poems until she fell asleep, and it didn’t seem indulgent to let my arm fall across her waist while she slept, to take a little of her happiness — the old steal from each other as much as the young, but perhaps our thefts are more necessary. In years gone by Anna and I have stolen from each other ferociously and then lived inside the stolen moments until we began to share them. She once told me that when I was incarcerated she often turned down my covers, even rolled across and made a dent in the pillow as if I were still there.