Dancer (15 page)

He turned on his toes, brushing his feet as if in ronde de jambe. “What?”

“Come, please.”

“Why?”

“Unbind my hair.”

He waited, fidgeted, then came across to remove the clips, fumbling and tentative. He held the weight of my hair and let it drop. I pressed against him, kissed him, my mouth filled suddenly with his breath. I whispered that he could stay with me until morning, or until 9.30
A.M.
exactly, before I left for Pulkovo Airport, to which he smiled and said that his head had run rudderless thinking of me and we should sleep together, yes, make love, since we would never see each other again, spoken like hard fact or the first piano note of the morning.

His eyes were intense and narrow as if a phonograph needle had stopped just at the point of a trumpet blast.

His hands slipped down my spine, drew me against him, his fingers then at the small of my back, my hips, my thighs, moving slowly. I arched and closed my eyes. He yanked hard at the back of my hair, pulled me closer, but then all of a sudden he turned his face to the pillow and remained motionless.

“Sasha,” he said into the pillow.

He began to say Pushkin's name over and over again. I knew then that we would not make love. I stroked his hair and the night thickened, we pulled a blanket over us, the sensation of our toes touching. He fell asleep with his eyelashes fluttering and I wondered, What dreams?

I awoke during the night, disoriented. Rudi was sitting on the floor, naked, his feet curled into his stomach, staring at photographs, finally noticing me, gazing up, pointing at a picture of Covent Garden, saying: “Look at this.”

He was studying a picture of Margot Fonteyn in her dressing room, her hair pinned back, her face serious, her eyes deliberate. “Look at her! Look at her!”

I propped myself up and asked if he had thought about the Pushkins during the night, if they'd appeared in his dreams, but he dismissed me with a wave, said he didn't want to talk of trivialities. He immersed himself in the pictures once more. Feeling useless, I patted the bed. He climbed in beside me and began crying, kissing my hair, saying, “I'll never see you again, RosaMaria, I'll never see you, I'll never see you, I'll never see you.”

For the rest of the night we slept beside each other, arms entwined.

In the morning we left the room, carrying my suitcases. Outside a man in a dark suit was sitting on the low wall, smoking. When he saw us he stood up nervously. Rudi went over to him, whispered something in his ear. The man stuttered and swallowed, eyes wide.

Rudi started leaping down the street.

“I don't give a shit!” he said. “Fuck them! All I want to do is dance! I don't care!”

“Rudi,” I said. “Don't be foolish.”

“Fuck caution,” he said.

He was going soon to Vienna to perform at the Stadthalle, and I said they would surely withdraw permission for the trip if he kept drawing attention to himself.

“I don't care,” he said. “All I care about is you.”

I looked at him to see if this was just another of his mood swings, but it was hard to tell. I told him I loved him, that I'd never forget him. He took my hand, kissed it.

We put my bags into a taxi. The driver recognized Rudi from a performance of
Les Sylphides
the previous week and asked for an autograph. Fame fit Rudi like a curious coat, new but oddly snug. In the taxi he closed his eyes and rattled off the street names as we passed them, each note in the right place. I kissed his eyes. The driver coughed as if in warning. Behind us a car was trailing.

At the terminal in Pulkovo there was a group to see me off. I felt light-headed, blissful at the thought of returning home—already I was taking the white dustcloths off the mirrors and the furniture. I could taste the dust in the room.

Yulia was at the airport in all her loveliness. She smiled her subversive smile. Her long dark hair was draped around her shoulders. I had given her some clothes a few days before, and she was wearing a bright purple blouse of mine, which set off her dark skin, her eyes. Her father had written a letter from Ufa and in it had enclosed a small note for me. He said I'd made his wife, Anna, happy with my spirit when we met and that he appreciated my attendance at her funeral. At the very end of the letter there was a rather oblique reference to the deserts of Chile—he said he had always wanted to see the Atacama, where it had not rained in four hundred years, and if I ever got there I should throw some earth in the air in his honor.

I kissed Yulia good-bye, shook hands with the others.

My flight was to Moscow and then onward to Paris and then New York, where I was to make the final leg to Santiago. I wanted to say a final farewell to Rudi but he had disappeared. I pushed through the pockets of people, called his name, but he was nowhere to be seen among the passengers and guards. I called his name again and still he did not show. I turned towards the glass wall that led to passport control.

Just then I caught a glimpse of the top of his head, distant in the crowd. He was engaged in serious and animated conversation with someone—at first I was sure it was the man who had been spying on us, but then I saw it was another young man, dark-haired, handsome, with an athlete's body and a pair of denim jeans, a rarity in Leningrad. The young man was touching Rudi gently on the inside of the elbow.

The call for my flight came through the loudspeakers. Rudi strode across and hugged me, whispered that he loved me, that he could hardly live without me, he would be lost, yes, rudderless, please come back soon, he would miss me terribly, we should have made love, he was sorry, he did not know what he would do without me.

He looked around over his shoulder. I turned his face back to mine and he smiled, a strange and chilling charm.

*   *   *

Incident Report, Aeroflot, Flight BL 286,

Vienna-Moscow-Leningrad, March 17, 1959.

Due to circumstances beyond the airline's control, there were no meal or beverage carts provided for this flight. Passengers were so advised at the airport. Upon boarding, however, the Subject, a People's artist, was noticed to be carrying a case of champagne. The Subject at first seemed to exhibit a severe fear of flying but then became rowdy, complaining about the lack of food and beverages. Midway through the flight, unbeknown to flight attendants, he took a bottle, shook it, and sprayed the contents around the cabin. The Subject then walked the aisles, offering champagne to passengers, pouring the alcohol into paper cups. The champagne soaked through the paper cups and leaked. Fellow passengers complained about wet seats and clothes. Others began singing and laughing. The Subject took out additional bottles from the same case. When confronted he used foul language. The Subject remarked that it was his twenty-first birthday and began gesticulating and shouting about being a Tatar. Late in the flight the plane hit turbulence and many of the passengers experienced bouts of violent sickness. The Subject seemed increasingly frightened but continued to shout and sing. When asked to calm down by representatives of the ballet company with whom he was traveling he used another epithet and sprayed the final bottle of champagne around the cabin just prior to landing. After the landing in Moscow a warning was issued and the Subject calmed. On disembarking in Leningrad he made a comment to the Captain of the flight, the nature of which remained undisclosed. Captain Solenorov reported in sick for the return flight.

*   *   *

He goes to the edge of the bed, pulls his shirt over his head, undoes the button at the top of his trousers, stands naked in the light. He says to the pilot: Close the curtains, keep the light on, make sure the door is locked.

*   *   *

Late at night in Ekaterina Square, in the antique dust of Leningrad, when the streetlamps were turned off to save power and the city was quiet, a scatter of us would come from different parts of the city to walk beneath the row of trees on the theater side of the park. Quietly. Furtively. If stopped by the militia we had our papers, the excuse of our jobs, insomnia, our wives, our children at home. Sometimes we were beckoned by those we didn't recognize, but we knew better, we moved quickly away. Cars passed on Nevsky, catching us in their headlights, obliterating our shadows, and it seemed for a moment that our shadows had been taken for questioning. We imagined ourselves on the jump seat of a Black Maria, whisked away to the camps for being the
goluboy,
the blue boys, the perverts. The arrest, if it came, would be swift and brutal. At home we kept a small bag packed and hidden, just in case. The threat of it should have been enough: forests, mess cans, barracks, bunks, plank beds, five years, the crack of metal on frozen wood. But there were nights when the square was silent and we waited in the fog, stood against the fence, and smoked.

A tall thin boy picked at the springs of his watch with a penknife, carving time. The watch was on a chain, and he let it swing to his hips. Two brothers arrived each Thursday from the pedestrian underpass, fresh from the factory baths, their dark hair preceding their scuffed shoes. An old veteran stood under a tree. He was able to whistle many of the great Liszt rhapsodies. He was known to say aloud:
Why earn your joy only when you are dead?
He continued until morning, when the distant sound of the river steamers whistled him out. Sometimes the curtains of the rooms across the square opened and closed, figures appearing, disappearing. Black Volgas moved away from the curbside and went down the dark streets. Nervous laughter rang out. Cigarette papers were rolled and licked. Snuffboxes were unfurled. Nobody drank—drinking would loosen our tongues and give to the living the breath of the dead. Sweat stained the rims of our collars. We stamped our feet, blew warm air into our gloves, moved our bodies beyond ordinary wakefulness, and beyond that once again, until at times it felt as if we would never sleep.

The night went by, our desires hidden, as if sewn inside coat sleeves. It was not that we even took our coats off, it was the touch, the shiver of recognition when our sleeves met as we lit each other's cigarettes. Hatred too. Hatred for such similarity.

The theater doors swung open late, allowing actors, dancers, stagehands out. Sometimes they walked all the way from the Kirov, twenty minutes. They leaned against the ironwork, wrapped in their scarves, gloves, leg warmers. A sandy-haired boy swung his foot into the air and propped it on a prong of the fence, stretched, his head to his knees, his breath steaming, his leather cap tipped backwards on his head. His body had an ease to it, his toes his feet his legs his chest his shoulders his neck his mouth his eyes. His lips were extraordinarily red, and his mouth was made more red again by the eyes. Even the leather hat seemed shaped to the way that he pulled it on and off. Most of the time he didn't stay long in the square, he was privileged and there were other places for him to go—basements, cupolas, apartments—but once or twice he remained, kicking his foot to the top of the fence. We passed, inhaled the smell of him. He never said a word to us.

We waited for him to reappear in the square, but he became more recognizable, his face in the newspapers, on posters. The thought of him lay with us.

When the rumor of morning arrived, the streetlights flickered briefly and we would part. We unraveled into the streets, some looking for the boy with the pocket watch, or the factory brothers, or the dancer with the sandy hair, the print of his foot on the damp pavement, his overcoat parted by walking, his scarf flying out from the back of his neck. Sometimes, by the stone steps that descended to a canal's black waters, the light of the moon was broken by a shadow's stride and we turned to follow. Even then, so close to morning, there was always the thought that water might hide its flowing under ice.

3

LONDON • 1961

Every Friday the drunks roll past, loud and foul with whiskey, reeking of piss and dustbins, and, as he has done for years now, he reaches out the window, handing each of them a shilling, so almost every tramp around Covent Garden knows that the place for a little money is the factory on the far side of the Royal, where the middle-aged man, the bald one with the spectacles, at the second to last window, open, but only on a Friday, leans out and listens to the stories—
my mother's caught up with consumption, my uncle lost his wooden leg, my aunt Josephine got her knickers in a twist
—and, no matter what the story, he says to the drunks,
Here you go, mate,
shilling after shilling, much of his wages, so that instead of taking the Tube back to his room in Highbury he walks all the way, to save the money, a good five miles, stooped, his flat hat on, nodding to ladies and paperboys and more drunks, some of whom recognize him and try to charm another shilling from him, which he cannot give because he has calculated exactly enough for lodging and food, he says,
Sorry, mate,
tips his hat and walks on, a shopping bag banging against his calf, all the way through Covent Garden and Holborn and Grays Inn, along Rosebury Avenue, up the Essex Road onto Newington Green, the sky darkening as he goes, and he turns left on Poet's Road, walks to the redbrick lodging house, number 47, where the landlady, a widow from Dorchester, greets him airily at the front door, by the mock-ebony clock with the two pawing horses, and he bows slightly to her, saying,
Evening, Mrs. Bennett,
and makes his way up the stairs, passing the pictures of ducks on the wall, straightening them if another lodger has bumped against them, sixteen steps, into his room, where at last he removes his shoes, thinking he must polish them, and then he unloosens his tie, pours himself a Scotch from the silver flask hidden behind the bedstead, just a nip, sighing deeply as it hits his throat, opens the shopping bag, sets the shoes out on his work desk, just finishing touches—a shank to be trimmed, a wing block to be extended, a drawstring that requires threading through, a heel to be cut down—neat, precise, and when he is finished he wraps them each in plastic, making sure there are no creases in the wrapping, since he has a reputation to maintain, the ballerinas, the choreographers, the opera houses, they all seek him out, sending their specifications,