Dancer (20 page)

He looked around as if there might be somebody else in the room. I have my ways, he said.

He shuffled to the cupboard: It calls for a small celebration, don't you think? I haven't yet celebrated.

I don't think so.

Why not?

They'll sentence him to death.

What? he said. They'll send a death squad to Paris?

Perhaps.

The thought of it sobered him up. He moved his mouth around as if he were tasting whatever idea it was that had come to him.

We're all sentenced to death, he finally said, with a certain amount of glee. At least he'll have a better one than us!

Oh, Father.

He always was a clever little cockroach, wasn't he?

Yes, I suppose he was.

From the cupboard he produced an old bottle of vodka, which he opened with a flourish, draping a white cloth over his arm for style.

To the clever little cockroach, Rudolf Hametovich Nureyev! he said, holding his glass in the air.

We cooked a small meal under the charcoal gaze of my mother. He recalled her days with the Maryinsky, saying she was robbed of her prime, that she could have been one of the greatest—he knew it was a lie but it was a good lie and it made us both feel warm.

I made a bed on the couch.

Just before I fell asleep he coughed and said: His father.

What?

I was just thinking of his poor father.

Go to sleep.

Ha! he said. Sleep!

Later I heard him sit down at the table with a book, leafing through the pages—a pen nib scratched across the paper—and I fell asleep to the sound.

He was gone early in the morning, worrying me, so I dusted the room and cleaned in the corners to occupy the time.

On the table, beneath a stack of poetry books, I found a journal. I flicked through. On the first page he had written the date of my mother's death. The paper was cheap and the ink had soaked through to other pages, making it difficult to read. His penmanship was ragged and spidery, and I thought to myself,
This is my father's life.
I willed myself not to read his words and began dusting what I had already dusted. He had allowed his plants to dry up, so I carried them to the communal bath and put them in an inch of water to see if they could be resurrected.

An old woman, a neighbor, came and watched me in the bathroom without saying a word. She was heavy but frail with age. She asked who I was, and when I replied, she returned to her room with a snort.

I sat at the edge of the bath. There was hair in the drain, and it did not belong to my father—it was a young man's hair, dark and vital. It seemed somehow offensive that my father should bathe in a place others used.

All the time the idea of the journal was burning a hole through me. I went back along the corridor, sat at the table, touched the journal's black cover, finally turned to a section about a third of the way through:

And yet it's true that—while I have never

believed in god, which on its own does not

make me a good Citizen—that perhaps, in the

end, it will endear god to me if he really does

exist. Most of my time in this life has not been spent living

in any real sense, more a day-to-day survival, going

to sleep wondering, What will happen to me tomorrow?

Then tomorrow arrives while I am still wondering.

And yet a landscape of sighs can come together in a

collective music. At this moment there are birds in the

trees, a dozen children outside my room window,

playing, even the sun is shining. And, I will tell you

this, since it is all I want to say: Anna, the sound of your

name still opens the windows of this room.

He returned home at noon, startling me. I was still looking at the same page when I heard the door creak. I fumbled to put the journal back under the pile of poetry books he had left on the table, but they went tumbling. I got to my knees and started picking them off the floor. He saw me tucking the journal beneath an old copy of Pasternak.

He held a bunch of lilies in his hand. He put them in a vase by the window, where they nodded in the wind. I wondered how many times he had said my mother's name as he was cutting the flowers.

His face betrayed nothing. I thought about asking him whether he would let me read the whole journal but, before I could, he said in a strange voice: Did you know that his father never saw him dance?

I stayed quiet for a long time and then asked: How do you know?

Oh I went to visit.

Where?

At his house.

You're friends?

We talk.

What's he like? I asked.

Oh he's a good solid man.

My father turned to the window and spoke as if to the world outside: I fear he will eventually be ruined.

He remained at the window, fingering the curtain.

And his mother? I asked.

She's stronger, he said. She will survive.

He made his way to the table, picked up his journal, rifled through the pages.

You can have this if you want, he said.

I shook my head and told him I had read a sentence or two, that it was beautiful.

It's balderdash, he said.

He touched my hand and said: Yulia, don't ever let them poison your life with narrowness.

I asked him what he meant and he replied that he wasn't quite sure, it was just something that he felt fated to say.

I clung to him those few days, clung to his spirit. Whenever he left the house I read his journal. What it amounted to was a song of love, and it bothered me that he didn't once mention me. The only people to appear were he and my mother. His recollections of their life were a jumble—the last days were nudged up against the first days and sometimes the later years seemed to have shaped the earlier ones—as if time had been gripped and squeezed formless. It struck me that, despite everything, my parents had lived their lives with a certain panache. They had been born into plenitude and lived with the knowledge that they would die in poverty, yet they appeared to have accepted everything that had happened to them—perhaps in some ways they were happier for the reversal, cementing them together.

I thought of my own small pleasures, having lived much of my own life avoiding difficulty. I went wandering around Ufa, the dirt streets, the factories, the few remaining bright houses. At a bird auction near the mosque I bought a goldfinch being sold as a songster. I declined the cage and took the bird in the cup of my hands towards the Belaya River. When I opened my hands it seemed startled a moment but then took off, surely to be captured again. I detested the fatuous self-pity I had sunk into, yet embraced it also, since in some ways it was healing. Foolishly I bought two more birds and set them free, only to realize that I had no money for the tram. I took it as an appropriate irony and walked back to my father's house.

I stayed for three more days. On the evening before my return to Leningrad I told my father that I was pondering a divorce. He didn't seem surprised, maybe happy even.

Go ahead, get a divorce.

I frowned, and he flung his arms out.

Or at least marry someone else!

What about the apartment?

Who cares? he said. We live with ourselves, not our rooms.

I sulked for a while until he said: Yulia, dear. Get a divorce. Stay in Petersburg. Live what you have left.

He sat back in his chair and smoked the butt end of a foul-smelling cigar he had kept hidden.

Later that evening he told me he had something special to do. He put his finger to his lips as if there were other people in the room and then fumbled at the gramophone. I thought he was simply putting on music, but he lifted the stylus and began dismantling the apparatus. In the belly of the gramophone he had hidden a small flat box. He handed the box to me and said it had been my mother's, she had always wanted me to have it.

I should have given it to you before, he said.

His voice trailed off as I tried to open the box. It had not been opened for a long time and the clasp was rusted. I took a knife and delicately began to pry it open. My father watched silently. I expected to find another journal, perhaps one she had kept before the Revolution. Or maybe some of their old love letters. Or some trinkets they had collected through the years. I went to rattle the box, but my father grabbed my wrist.

Don't do that, he said.

He took the knife and pried the clasp. Without opening the lid, he handed the box back to me.

Inside there was a tiny china saucer, no bigger than an ashtray. It was small and delicate and pale blue, with bucolic pictures of farmers and draft horses painted around the rim. It disappointed me at first, how light it was, how fragile, how it seemed to have nothing to do with either of them.

It's one hundred years old, he said. It belonged to your mother's grandmother. Your mother rescued it from a cellar in Petersburg after the Revolution. Along with many other pieces. She wanted to keep them all.

What happened to them?

They broke on our journeys.

This is the only piece left?

He nodded and said: Poverty lust sickness envy hope.

Pardon me?

Poverty lust sickness envy and hope, he said again. It has survived them all.

I held the tiny piece of china in my hands and wept until my father told me, with a smile, that it was time for me to grow up. I wrapped the saucer again and placed it in the box, then swaddled it between clothes in my suitcase, hidden deep so it would not be found or harmed in any way.

Make sure it's safe, he said.

We hugged, and he quoted a line about watching random fleets of night birds flying across the face of the moon.

I returned to Leningrad by train—the landscape speeding by—and on the journey I plucked up the courage finally to get divorced. It was a matter of saving enough money for the tax and waiting for the right time. Over the next eighteen months I cobbled together a number of translations and hid the money along with the china dish.

And then one evening, in the early summer of '63, I woke up a little disoriented, wondering whether it was morning or evening. The news blackout on Rudi had been lifted that day. For two years he had not been mentioned anywhere, but that day both
Izvestiya
and
Pravda
carried articles about him. They said he had morally debased himself and his country, which was amusing, maybe even true. There was no photo of Rudi, of course, but he still shone somehow in the vitriol.

Iosif had grown angrier over the past months. Twice he had slapped me. Stupidly I caved into the desire to ridicule him and told him that he slapped like a member of the intelligentsia, so he had punched me, hard, knocked a tooth loose. Since then we had seldom talked.

He was at the table, hunched over a bowl of soup, reading both newspapers, slurping his food with relish. He looked old to me, the bald spot at the top of his head illuminated in the globe of lamplight from above his head.

From the bed I examined him, but after a while I became aware of a commotion outside the window, a distant and muffled shouting that seemed to intensify as I listened.

There was another shout and a thud.

I said to Iosif: What's that?

Go to sleep, woman, it's just the hooligans playing soccer, he said.

I put my face to the cool side of the pillow, but there was something about the texture of the shouting that disturbed me. I waited an hour, until Iosif had gone to bed on the couch, and then got up, went to the window, pulled aside the curtain, looked down. I was tired—I had been working on several translations—and had to blink many times before my eyes adjusted.

Beyond the courtyard, out towards the soccer field, a few hooligans were clustered around mounds of freshly dug soil. There was some new construction going on, and the dirt was piled up like a series of small hillocks. The hooligans had found a couple of short white sticks and had shoved them into the ground as goalposts.

A middle-aged man who looked like a war veteran—he wore an old military hat tilted at an angle—was trying to get at the sticks, but he was being pushed back by the teenagers. He was screaming at them, but, from my distance, I couldn't make out his words. The hooligans were circling him and jabbing his chest, but he was holding his ground.

All of a sudden the man broke through their ranks and pulled both the short white goalposts out of the ground, brandishing them as weapons. He backed away, swinging the posts. The hooligans watched. Once he was about five meters away the man rushed off, clutching the white posts to his chest. The teenagers didn't bother following. Instead they laughed and went back to one of the piles of soil from the construction site. They picked through the dirt until they found a white ball and began kicking it.

With a dreadful shiver, I realized that it was a skull.

The floor seemed to sway. I grasped at the window ledge.

The war veteran had, by then, turned around. He saw them passing the skull back and forth at their feet. I could not see his face. He dropped the sticks—they must have been armbones or legbones—and ran across the field once more, weighed down by his frame, his jacket, his hat, his sadness.

Behind him, the bones lay crossed on the ground.

The words of a song returned to me, the dead turning into a soaring flight of cranes. I trembled, wondering whether the bones were German or Russian and then I wondered if it even mattered, and then I thought of my small china dish hidden away and wrapped. Beneath the window frame I sat and curled up against the abandon of what we had become.

I pulled the curtains together, watched Iosif snore. I was exhausted yet exhilarated, as if something terrible was dragging me down and at the same time shoving me forward. I wanted to wake Iosif, to say that we would survive, that we would get through this, we could transform, we could learn. I wanted him to do something soothing and kind for me, but I didn't wake him, nor did he stir, and I knew then that the opportunity was lost. I was thirty-eight years old and leaving.