Dancer Read online

  You what?

  I don’t like it here.

  His father chuckles into his collar, reaches out and takes Rudik’s gloved hand. They step together into the trees and collect enough wood to last through the night. His father places kindling on the ice and says it is a mistake to create a single big fire, that is for idiots. Instead they make two small tepees and he instructs Rudik to squat over the fire whenever he gets cold, that the heat will rise through his body and spread, a trick Hamet learned during the war.

  All along the river the other fishermen chat in low tones.

  I want to go home, Rudik says again.

  His father doesn’t reply. He takes three of last night’s potatoes and heats them in the embers of the fire, turns them so the skin doesn’t scorch. They wait an hour for the first fish. When his father lifts it up through the ice, he takes off his gloves and the trout goes from living to gutted in seconds. He rips the fish belly open with his knife and, at the same time, follows with his forefinger, so that the innards come out in one motion. The guts steam in the air, and his father spears the body with a twig and holds it over the fire. They eat the fish and potatoes in the cold and his father asks him if he thinks it is delicious and he nods and then his father says: Do you like goose?

  Of course.

  Someday we’ll shoot geese, you and me. Do you like shooting?

  I think so.

  For oil, for food, for fat. Geese are good for that, says his father.

  Mama puts the fat on my chest.

  I taught her that trick. A long time ago.

  Oh, says Rudik.

  It’s a good one, isn’t it?

  Yes.

  When I was away, says his father, pausing for a moment, I missed you.

  Yes, Papa.

  We’ve a lot to talk of.

  I’m cold.

  Here, put this jacket on.

  His father’s jacket is huge around his shoulders, and Rudik thinks that now he is wearing three jackets while his father wears only one, but still he puts his arms in the sleeves of the coat, sits there rocking.

  Your mother told me you were a good boy.

  Yes.

  She said you’ve been doing lots of things.

  I danced at the hospital.

  I heard.

  For the soldiers.

  And what else?

  School.

  Yes?

  And Mama took me to the big place, the Opera House.

  She did, did she?

  Yes.

  I see.

  Mama only had one ticket, but we got in and there was a big crush at the door and the door fell in and we almost fell but we didn’t! We went down near the front, where they didn’t come looking for us! We thought they were going to come looking!

  Slow down, says his father.

  We sat on the stairs and there were big lights and then it got dark and it started! They turned off the big lights and the curtain came up and the music was loud and everyone got quiet.

  And did you like that?

  It was a story about a shepherd and an evil man and a girl.

  Did you like it?

  I liked the way the boy saved the girl after the man got her.

  And?

  And the big red curtain.

  Well that’s good, says his father, pulling his tunic tight, checking the line in the ice hole to see if any more fish have been caught, his face flushed and his mouth red as if he himself has just been hooked.

  And when everyone was gone, says Rudik, Mama allowed me to sit in the seats. She told me they were velvet.

  That’s good, his father replies again.

  When the next fish comes his father takes out the knife, cleans the blade on an inside thigh of his trousers, leaves a streak of blood. He hands Rudik the small trout and says: You do it, son.

  Rudik tightens his fingers inside the coat sleeves.

  Try it.

  No thanks, Papa.

  Try it!

  No thanks.

  Right now, I said! Try it!

  * * *

  In a warehouse on Sverdlov Street—under the auspices of the Bashkirian Ministry of Culture—the new curtains of the Opera House are sewn by a crew of six women, the best seamstresses in Ufa. The special bolts of red velvet are forty-five metres long and eight metres wide and a single fold, when lifted and relifted, makes their arms ache. The women, in their hairnets, are not allowed to smoke or eat or drink tea anywhere near the cloth. They sit at the curtains for ten hours a day, shifting their chairs along the red sea of velvet. Each seam is supervised, and the lining where the curtains meet is restitched seventeen times before the supervisor feels that the proper nuances have been attended to. A running cloth, again of velvet, is made to order. The pelmets are carefully belled with white lace. The insignia of the State is embroidered on the curtains, at the center, so the two halves will meet at the beginning and end of every show.

  When the curtains are finished, three representatives from the Ministry come to inspect them. They look the work over for an hour, running their fingers along the seams, gauging the height of the pelmets with their rulers, checking for consistency of color. They debate over the State insignia, holding a magnifying glass to the embroidered handle of a sickle. Finally they crack open a flask of vodka and each drinks a thimbleful. The seamstresses, watching through the blinds of an office window, touch each other’s elbows and sigh with relief. They are called from the office, and the men from the Ministry line them up and speak in gruff voices of collective harmony.

  The curtains are carefully folded and transported to the Opera House in a truck. Two carpenters are on hand, having designed a series of poles and pulleys to support the weight. A reinforced rope is threaded through the greased pulleys. Scaffolding is put in place to hang the curtains, and the cloth never once touches the ground.

  The first night, before the show starts, one of the stagehands, Albert Tikhonov—from a well-known family of stilt walkers—hitches himself high onto his stilts, winks at his fellow stagehands, crosses the boards like a giant insect, wooden ends clicking on the stage floor, checking for flaws in the curtain. He finds none.

  * * *

  The Motherland is benevolent. The Motherland is

  strong. The Motherland will protect me. The

  Motherland is benevolent. The Motherland is strong.

  The Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

  benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

  Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

  benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

  Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

  benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

  Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

  benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

  Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

  benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

  Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

  benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

  Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

  benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

  Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

  benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

  Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

  benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

  Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

  benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

  Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

  benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

  Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

  benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

  Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

  benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

  Motherland will protect me.

  * * *

  He hides the punishment lines from his father, but there is something about the crawl of the pen over the page that
Rudik has grown to like. He connects the letters as if each word were a piece of string, never arranging the lines in columns, preferring their disorder, their bump up against each other. This is contrary to how the teacher wants it and sometimes the amount of punishment lines is doubled or tripled the following day.

  When his homework is finished he runs to the lake to check the flags along the shore. If they are at half-mast it means someone eminent has died, and this delights him since later Tchaikovsky will be on the wireless again, uninterrupted, and his mother will lean into it also.

  They have moved to a new communal house on Zentsov Street—one room, fourteen square meters, with an oak floor. A carpet from the market hangs on one wall. His mother has placed the wireless against the other wall so that the neighbors, newlyweds, can hear it if they desire. Rudik clicks the radio on, tunes the dial, raps four times on the wall so the couple knows to listen. The wireless takes a while to warm up and, in that time, Rudik imagines the notes floating through as if the air itself is in rehearsal. He positions himself at different points in the room to find the angle at which the music arrives best. The notes begin high and alien and scratchy and then settle down. During the broadcasts his mother moves across the floor, soundlessly in slippers, sits beside him, serious and appreciative. She tries to hold him back from dancing in case his father comes home, but often she relents, tells him not to make too much noise, turns her back as if she can’t see.

  His mother smells to him of the yogurt from the bottling plant where she has found a new job. Just after his tenth birthday the paper carries a photograph of her after winning a commendation for helping to double the production, the caption reading: Labor as purpose: Muskina Yenikeeva, Farida Nureyeva and Lena Volkova at the kefir bottling plant. The clipping is placed on the window ledge beside his father’s medals. After two months the paper yellows, and his mother patches some foil from milk-bottle caps, backs it onto the newspaper cutting, makes a little hood over the picture to keep the direct sunlight from ruining it.

  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.

  I read more Pasternak as she slept and then quoted it from memory when the candle burned all the way down. Her breath grew foul, and I leaned in against her, pulled the covers high. Her hair had loosened and it fell across her face and, with the little breeze from the open window, the strands crossed and recrossed her eyes.

  Sentiment is foolish, of course, and I do not know whether I slept that night, but I do remember thinking a very simple thought—that despite all the years I was still in love with her, and at that moment it didn’t seem foolish at all to have loved her, or to go on loving her, even in all our wreckage.