Dancer Read online

  A row of lights, a sea of faces, he is in the air to great applause. The footlights flicker and the curtains are opened again. He bows.

  Later he removes the rouge and the eye makeup with an old handkerchief. He shifts the few pieces of furniture—sideboard, armchairs, cheap wall paintings—and begins to practice in the dark cramped space of the room.

  In the afternoon his father returns earlier than usual and nods in the manner of men grown accustomed to silence. His eyes rest for a moment on the row of notes Rudi has taped to the mirror: Work on battements and accomplish proper order of jêtés coupés. Borrow Scriabin from Anna. Liniment for feet. At the end of one row of notes, the word Visa.

  Hamet glances at the handkerchief on the floor near Rudi’s feet.

  Silently he steps past his son, pulls the armchair back to its original position near the door. Beneath his mattress, Hamet has enough money for the fare. Two months’ wages, bundled in elastic. He has been saving for a shotgun. Geese and wild fowl. Pheasants. Woodcocks. Without ceremony, Hamet takes the money from under the mattress and tosses it to Rudik, then lies back on the bed and lights himself a cigarette to argue against the scent of the room.

  * * *

  On the way to Leningrad—or rather on the way to Moscow, which is the way to Leningrad—there is a stop in the little village of Izhevsk where I grew up. I told Rudi he would know the village by the red and green roof of the railway station. If he wanted to, he could drop in at my old uncle Majit’s house, sleep the night, and if he was lucky he might even get a lesson from him on stilt walking. He said he’d think about it.

  I had helped Rudi try out the stilts once before in the Opera House, when he had a walk-on as a Roman spear-carrier. We had been cleaning up after the show. He was still in his costume. I thrust the stilts into his hands and told him to get on them. They were short, only three quarters of a meter. He laid them on the floor, put his feet on the blocks, tied the straps tight and then sat there, dumbfounded, finally realizing there was no way for him to get up from the floor. He said: Albert, you bastard, take this wool out of my eyes. He unstrapped the stilts and kicked them across the room but then retrieved them and stood center stage, trying to figure it out. Finally I got a stepladder and talked him through how it was done. He stepped up to the top of the ladder, and I gave him the most important pointers. Never fall backwards. Keep your weight on your feet. Don’t look down. Lift your knee high and the stilt will follow.

  I strung a rope across the stage at about armpit level so he could hold on to it if he fell. He tried to balance on the stilts at first, the hardest thing of all, until I told him that he needed to move and to keep moving.

  He progressed precariously up and down the length of the rope, holding on most of the time.

  When I was young, my uncle Majit used to practice in an abandoned silo just outside our village. He did it there because there was no wind and every other ceiling was too low for him. He had maybe twenty or thirty different pairs of stilts, all made from ash wood, ranging from half a meter to three meters. His favorites were the meter-high ones because he could bend down and talk to us children or rub the tops of our heads or shake our hands as we ran beneath him. He was the finest stilt walker I ever saw. He would build a new set and step onto them and right away find the sweet spot for balance. Within a day or two he’d be running on them.

  The only time Uncle tumbled was when he was teaching us how to fall properly. Never backwards! he shouted, you’ll crack your skull open! And then he would start falling backwards himself, shouting, Never like this! Never like this!

  As he was toppling, Uncle would switch his weight and turn the stilts and just at the last instant he would fall forwards instead, landing with his knees bent and sitting back on his heels. He was the only stilt walker I ever met who never even tweaked his collar bone.

  I tried working with Rudi’s stilt technique over the last couple of evenings before he left, but his thoughts were elsewhere. Just the notion of going away was a walk in the air for him anyway.

  I told him that if he looked out from the train he would see children beyond the fields, my nieces and nephews, their heads bobbing above the corn. And if he looked behind the station he might even see a group of them playing stilt soccer. Sit on the left-hand side of the train, I told him.

  I’m sure he never did.

  APRIL 15, ’59

  R—

  The magic of a dance, young man, is something purely accidental. The irony of this is that you have to work harder than anyone else for the accident to occur. Then, when it happens, it is the only thing in your life guaranteed never to happen again. This, to some, is an unhappy state of affairs, and yet to others, it is the only ecstasy. Perhaps, then, you should forget everything I have said to you and remember only this: The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur.

  —Sasha

  2

  LENINGRAD, UFA, MOSCOW • 1956–1961

  The railway platforms were wet from the passengers’ shoes and their shaken umbrellas. The whole day seemed weighted under a subdued gray damp. Railway workers moved around in their dark boredom. A new symphony was being piped through the loudspeakers, some factory drill of cello and violin. I took a bench under the platform eaves and watched as a woman my age bid good-bye to two teenage children. I smoothed my dress, neither too solemn nor celebratory, trying all the time to imagine what he would look like.

  My mother had sent me a photograph taken years before, while she was still teaching him in Ufa. He had the thin cheeky face of a peasant boy—high Tatar cheekbones, sandy hair, a cocked stare—but he was seventeen now and would surely look different. She said he was extraordinary and I would recognize him immediately, he would stand out from the crowd, he had even turned walking into a sort of art.

  When the train finally arrived, pouring steam into the air, I stood and held out a hat that had once belonged to my father, a prearranged signal—it was patently absurd but I felt a vague thrill, waiting for a boy half my age to emerge out of the day. I scanned the crowd, but nobody matched his description. Walking through, I brushed against summer overcoats and suitcases, even went so far as to hail two young boys who, in their fear, thought I was an official and hurriedly showed me their papers.

  The next train was not for another four hours, so I went out into a light rain. In front of the station someone had altered the face of Stalin, chipping out tiny, almost imperceptible pocks in the stone cheeks. The flowers beneath the statue had gone untended. The statue’s defacement was foolish of course, if not outright dangerous, but it was shortly before the ’56 Congress and we could already feel the thaw in Leningrad. It was as if a tiny crack had opened and light was spilling through, a cumulative light that would continue to spread, its existence becoming an undeniable fact of our lives. Black canvas tents stood over the tram tracks where they were being repaired. The price of radios had fallen. Shipments of oranges from Morocco were getting through—we hadn’t seen oranges in years. Buyers pushed at one another down by the Neva’s docks. Just a few months before, in an attempt to resuscitate desire, I had been able to buy my husband eight bottles of his favorite Georgian wine. We even had hot water piped into the apartment, and very late one night I had slipped into the bath with him, surprising myself, him even more so. For a while Iosif had brightened considerably, but when he finished the wine he revisited his policy of gloom.

  Instead of waiting outside the station, I walked along the Neva, past the prison, down to the bridge, where I took a tram to the university. I rapped on my husband’s door to inform him of the situation, but he wasn’t in his office—probably working somewhere or dallying with one of the other physics professors. It was my first visit back to the university in quite a while, and there was a hollowness to the corridors as if I were walking through the belly of a drum that once formed the musical centerpiece of my life. I even toyed with the idea of going into the Linguistics Department, but I felt that it might rekindle old wounds, not sa
lve them. Instead I dug an old pass out of the depths of my bag and put my finger over the expiration date so I could get into the canteen.

  The food was grimier and more insipid than I remembered. The ladies behind the counter regarded me with a sort of disdain, and a man with a giant broom pushed bits of food and rubbish around the floor, moving slowly as if contemplating the deep mysteries of his sloth.

  Feeling like an intruder into my former life, I left. Outside the sun had broken through the clouds and reefs of arctic light lay on the sky.

  Back at Finlandia Station there was a hum and a bustle that had not existed earlier and the working men passed cigarettes back and forth. Inside, a huge banner hung from the ceiling, swaying in the breeze, a picture of Khrushchev folding and refolding into himself: Life has become better, life is more joyful. The sign had not been there earlier but it somehow made sense, illuminated by the sunlight from the windows.

  I sat back down on a platform bench and waited, wondering what exactly it was my mother expected me to do with a seventeen-year-old country boy. In their letters they said they had been graced by Rudi—whom she affectionately called Rudik—but I had the feeling they were graced not so much by him as by the memory of what dance had once meant to them.

  I had not grown up alongside my parents, and in truth, my time with them had wound itself on a modest spool. They were exiled in Ufa, but the foothold of their lives was in what they still called Petersburg—the palaces, the houses, the fencing duels, the sideboards, the inkwells, the Bohemian cut glass, the orchestra seats at the Maryinsky—but that had receded from them forever after the Revolution. My father had miraculously survived the purges over the years, arrested and rearrested, kept in different Siberian camps, finally deported to Ufa, where he and my mother were more or less left alone by the authorities. My mother had always insisted on living in towns close to my father and, for the sake of good schooling and an ancient family dignity, I was brought up by my maternal grandparents in Leningrad, took on their last name and patronymic. I married young, got a job in the university, and had seen my parents only a few times. Ufa was a closed city—industry, forestry, weapons manufacturing. It didn’t appear on maps and was an extremely difficult place for which to get a visa. And so my parents, although they never receded from my imagination or my affection, occupied dusty corners of my days.

  I heard the whistle of another engine approaching the station and I dipped into my bag to take a quick look at his photograph.

  The crowd from the Moscow train surged past. I felt momentarily like a upstream fish, flapping from side to side, waving my father’s hat in the air. Rudi did not show.

  Alone and worried, I began to think I had slipped across a tiny line in my life. I was thirty-one years old, the author of two miscarriages. I still spent much of my time imagining my children at the ages they could have been. And now, with this young Tatar boy, I was saddled with the responsibility of being a parent without any of its joys—I fretted about whether something unfortunate had happened to him en route, if he’d lost our address, if he would have the wherewithal to find the tram, if he’d even arrive at all.

  I left the station, cursing him, and returned to the heart of the city. I adored our crumbling room in the communal apartments along the Fontanka River. The walls were peeling. The corridors smelled of paint and cabbage. The window frames were rotted. And yet the place gladdened me. The ceilings were high and cornices were molded in the corners. The wood was dark and secretive, the door was intricately carved, and in summer the light streamed through the windows. I could hear the canal water when boats went by, waves splashing against the embankments.

  For hours I sat at the window, watching the street. Finally Iosif came home, tie askew. He looked at me wearily.

  He’ll get here, he said.

  Iosif ate his dinner, went off to sleep with a grunt, and I thought of myself then as a piece of china—a single saucer, perhaps, or a lid—decorative and useless.

  I paced the room, twelve steps from window to back wall, six steps across. I had deadlines for poems to translate but had neither the energy nor the inclination to tackle them. I gazed at myself in the mirror obsessively, held my face at different angles. A hard feeling of dislocation came over me. We don’t ever, I thought, grow sharper, clearer, or more durable. I had a feeling that any youth I once owned had dramatically fled from me. How piteous! How mournful! How ridiculous! I pinched my cheeks for color, pulled on my coat, and descended the rank stairwell, wandered the courtyard, hearing noises from neighboring apartments, laughter, anger, a stray piano note.

  It was white nights, the pale blue of midnight, no moon, no stars, just a few clouds still straggling along. My father had once written to me saying that the stars were deeper than their darkness, and I stayed out for an hour pondering that line when a figure finally broke the shadow of the archway.

  Rudi had not turned walking into an art at all. Instead he was slumped and his shoulders looked rounded. In fact he might as well have stepped out of a cartoon, hauling a suitcase tied with string, his hair sticking out at angles beneath a corduroy hat. He was quite thin, which accentuated his cheekbones, but when I moved up close I noticed that his eyes were complicated and blue.

  Where’ve you been? I asked.

  I’m honored to meet you, he replied, his hand outstretched.

  I waited for you all day.

  Oh, he said.

  He cocked his head, gazed at me with a sideways innocence, testing my resolve. I came in on the morning train, he said. You must have missed me in the station.

  Didn’t you see me holding the hat?

  No.

  I knew it was a lie, not even a good one, but I let it go. He hopped nervously from foot to foot, and I quizzed him on what he had done the rest of the day.

  I went to the Hermitage, he said.

  Why?

  To look at the paintings. Your mother told me that to dance you have to be a painter too.

  She did, did she?

  Yes.

  And what else did she say?

  She said it’s a good idea to be a musician also.

  She didn’t say that to be a dancer you have to get your timing right?

  He shrugged.

  Do you have a piano? he asked.

  There was a hint of impishness at the edges of his eyes and I had to hold back a smile.

  No, I said.

  Just then another piano note wafted out from the fourth floor, and someone began to play Beethoven, quite beautifully. Rudi brightened, said perhaps he could meet the owner of the piano, convince them to let him practice.

  I don’t think so, I replied.

  He took the stairs two at a time, even with his suitcase. In our room I sat him down at the table and made him eat his dinner cold.

  Your cooking’s better than your mother’s, he said.

  I joined him at the table, where he flicked another quick smile at me before he buried himself in the food once more.

  So you want to be a dancer? I asked.

  I want to dance better than I already do, he said.

  He had a fleck of cabbage on his teeth, and he scratched it off with his thumbnail. He seemed so young and vital and naïve. His upturned smile made him look sad somehow, which he wasn’t, not at all. The more I studied him the more I noticed his extraordinary eyes, huge, untamed, as if they were independent entities that just so happened to sit in his head, searching the apartment, scanning my record collection. He asked for some Bach, which I played low, and the music seemed to move through him as he ate.

  You’ll sleep on the couch, I said. You’ll meet my husband in the morning. He’ll be up early.

  Rudi stood and yawned, stretched his arms, went to the couch, leaving the dirty dish on the table. My back was turned, but I caught sight of him in a mirror as he undressed to his undergarments. He slid onto the couch, pulled the blanket high.

  I love it, he said.

  What?

  This city. I love it. />
  Why’s that?

  Oh don’t trust that Nevsky Prospect, it’s all lies and dreams, it’s not what it all seems! he said, quoting Gogol, surprising me.

  Then he lay back with his arms behind his head and exhaled, long and happily. I drank my wine quickly, then stupidly burst into tears for no reason at all, which embarrassed him, so he turned away.

  I watched him sleep.

  I thought then of my parents, the few times I had met them. They had been comical together, my father just a little taller than my mother and almost as narrow in the shoulders. He had a gray mustache, wore old-time shirts with cuff links, and his trousers always hovered above his ankles. His body had been ruined from all the years in the camps—in Siberia he had chopped off his toe with an ax to prevent gangrene, so he walked with a limp. Losing his toe had in fact saved my father—in the camp infirmary he met a doctor who was also a poet. They secretly shared lines from the old masters and, in return, the doctor made sure my father was kept alive. My father was well-known in the camps for his ability to hear a line of poetry and never forget it and, even after he was released, he could recall things that ordinarily would have whittled away. But his heart was weak from all the punishment, and his foot gave him tremendous trouble. Although a dreadful insomniac, he maintained a defiant cheerfulness, as if to say, You have not broken me. My mother, too, had retained her beauty through the years, her body still taut from years of ballet, her hair in a tight bun, eyes bright and lively. They had a remarkable regard for each other, my parents—even at their age they still held hands.