Dancer (3 page)

We washed their heads last and sometimes, if they were nice, we gave them a final rub of the shoulders.

The whole bath took no more than five minutes. We had to drain the water each time and disinfect the metal. With the hoses attached to the old car engine we were able to pump the water out quickly. In summer the grass died where the water jetted out, and in winter the blood made the snow look brown.

Finally we wrapped the soldiers in blankets and put new foot cloths on, hospital shirts, pajamas, even hats. There were no mirrors, but sometimes I saw the men wiping the steam from the greenhouse windows, trying to have a look at themselves in the glass.

When we were finished and they were all fully dressed, they were ferried up the road towards the hospital by horse and cart.

The men who were waiting outside the greenhouse watched the clean ones go away. The looks on their faces! You'd think they were at a picture show the way their eyes lit up! Sometimes children came up and hid in the poplar trees and watched, it was like a carnival sometimes.

When I got home at night to Aksakov Street, I was always exhausted. I ate some bread, turned off the oil lamp beside my bed and went straight to sleep. My neighbors in the room next to mine were an old couple from Leningrad. She had been a dancer and he was from a wealthy family—they were exiles now, so I steered clear of them. But one afternoon the woman knocked on my door and said the volunteers were a credit to the country, no wonder we were winning the War. And then she asked if she could help. I thanked her but told her no, we had more than enough volunteers. It wasn't true, and she was embarrassed, but what was I to do? She was an undesirable, after all. She turned away. The next morning I found four loaves of bread at my door:
Please give this to the soldiers.
I fed it instead to the birds in Lenin Park. I did not wish to be tarnished with their brush.

By the time it came to celebrate the Revolution in early November, there were only a couple of dozen soldiers to bathe each day, stragglers coming in from the front.

In the afternoons I began to visit the hospital. The rooms were crammed full of men. The beds were stacked five high, nailed to the walls like shelves. The walls themselves were splattered with blood and grime. The only good thing was the children who came in to perform on occasion, and also the music that came through the loudspeaker—one of the nurses had set up a system where they could play the gramophone from the front office. The music could be heard all over the hospital, lots of wonderful victory songs. Even still, the men moaned and shouted for their sweethearts. Some of them were glad to see me, but a lot of them didn't recognize my face at first. When I reminded them, they smiled, and one or two of the cheeky ones even blew me a kiss.

Of all the soldiers there was one boy I remember best—Nurmahammed, from Chelyabinsk, who had lost his foot to a mine. He was just an ordinary Tatar boy with black hair and high cheekbones and wide eyes. He hobbled in on crutches made from tree branches. We sprayed him down, and I unwrapped the bandages from around the top of his stump. He was bad with the parasites, so I had Nuriya take good care of him. She swabbed the wound well while I got the bath ready. I checked the water temperature with my wrist, and then three of us supported him, walked him across to the bath. He was silent the whole time. I washed him down, and finally he said, Thank you.

When he was clean and dressed in hospital pajamas he gave me a strange look and began to tell me all about his mother's vegetable patch, how she spread chicken manure to make the carrots grow, how they were the most wonderful carrots a person could want in his life, how he missed those carrots more than anything else.

In my lunch box I had some leftover martsovka. Nurmahammed put his face to the food, smiled up at me, kept smiling while he ate, his head rising up from the plate as though making sure I was still there.

I decided to go up to the hospital with Nurmahammed. We got on the back of a horse wagon, the animals clopping their way forward.

All sorts of things were going on that day because of the celebrations—a special food truck had pulled up to the hospital kitchens, red flags were flying from the windows, two commissars had arrived to pin medals on the soldiers, a man sat on the steps playing a balalaika, and children were walking around in Bashkirian folk-dancing costumes.

“The Song of the Fatherland” came over the loudspeakers, and everyone stood still while we sang it together.

I squeezed Nurmahammed's hand, and I said: See, everything will be all right.

Yes, he said.

Usually the men were pushed around the hospital in wheelbarrows, but to our pleasant surprise there was a wheelchair for Nurmahammed that day. I helped him with the paperwork and wheeled him along the corridor to his ward. It was noisy in there, all the men shouting under a big cloud of cigarette smoke. Some of the soldiers had gotten hold of a huge vat of methylated spirits and they were dipping cups into it, passing them along the bunk beds.

Everyone wore bandages—some of them were wrapped from head to toe—and things had been written on the walls by their beds, names of girlfriends, favorite soccer teams, poems even.

I pushed Nurmahammed on through to D368, halfway down the ward. His was the second of five bunks. He used his one leg to prop himself on the edge of the first bed. I pushed from below, but still he couldn't heave himself up. Some men came and got their shoulders under Nurmahammed's weight. He flopped down on the bed without even lifting the sheets, lay there a moment, smiled down at me.

Just then the big troupe of children came into the room. There must have been about twenty of them, all in costumes, green and red, with caps. The youngest was maybe four or five years old. They looked so nice and clean and scrubbed.

A woman in charge made an announcement for silence. For a moment I thought it was my neighbor, but thankfully it wasn't, this woman was taller, sterner, no gray in her hair. She made a second announcement for quiet, but the soldiers were still roaring and laughing. The woman clapped her hands twice, and the children began dancing. After a few minutes a sort of hush came over the room—a slow wave, like a good thing being whispered through a crowd.

In the spaces between the beds the children performed. They twirled and reeled and went under bridges of arms for a Tatar folk dance. They sank to their knees, and then they rose and shouted and clapped their hands and sank to their knees once more. A tiny girl crossed her arms and kicked. Another child with red hair got embarrassed when his laces came undone. They wore big smiles and their eyes shone; it could have been their birthdays, they were so beautiful.

Just when we all thought they were finished, a small blond boy stepped out of the line. He was about five or six years old. He extended his leg, placed his hands firmly on his hips and hitched his thumbs at his back. He bent his neck slightly forward, stretched his elbows out and began. The soldiers in their beds propped themselves up. Those by the windows shaded their eyes to watch. The boy went to the floor for a squatting dance. We all stood silently watching. The boy grinned. Some soldiers began clapping in rhythm but, just as the dance was about to end, the boy almost fell. His hand slapped the floor and broke the impact. For a moment he looked as if he was about to cry, but he didn't, he was up once more, his blond hair flopping over his eyes.

When he finished the ward was full of applause. Someone offered the boy a cube of sugar. He blushed and slipped it into the top of his sock, and then he stood around with his hands in his pockets, rolling his shoulders from side to side. The stern woman snapped her fingers, and the troupe of children moved to the next ward. The soldiers began whistling and shouting and, when the troupe was nearly gone, the men lit up their cigarettes and dipped their cups once more into the vat of spirits. The blond boy peered over his shoulder to take another look at the ward.

Just then I heard the sound of a bed creak. I had forgotten about Nurmahammed. He was staring down at his one leg. He moved his lips as if he were eating something, then took a couple of deep breaths and reached down to his stump, ran his hands up and down along where the shinbone used to be. He caught my eye and tried a smile. I smiled back. There was nothing to say. What could I say? I turned away. A couple of soldiers nodded at me as I left.

From the end of the ward I could hear poor Nurmahammed sobbing.

I went back down to the baths. The sun was going down and it had gotten cold, but there were a couple of early stars. A wind whipped at the trees. Some balalaika music sounded from the hospital.

I closed the doors of the greenhouse and kept the lanterns turned off. There was a pile of uniforms and some kindling on the ground. I stuffed it all into the stove and fired it up, then filled a pail of water and waited. It took a long time for the water to boil and right there, in the greenhouse, I thought to myself that of all the good things in the world, the best is a hot bath all alone in the darkness.

*   *   *

He wakes beside his mother in the morning, head tucked by her arm. Already his sister has risen to get water from the well to prepare breakfast.

His mother recently traded two picture frames for a single bar of soap. The soap smelled strange to him at first but now, every morning, when he rises from the bed, Rudik takes the bar from the pocket of his mother's bathrobe, hauls the scent of it down. There is, he has noticed, no soap in the hospital where he dances. The soldiers smell gruff and worn, and he wonders if his father will have a similar scent when he returns from the war.

His mother combs his hair and takes his clothes from the stove top, where they have been warming. She dresses him. Some of his clothes have been handed down from his sister. His mother has altered a shirt from a blouse—the cuffs lengthened, the collar stiffened with old cardboard—but still it seems ill-fitting to the boy and he squirms when she fastens the buttons.

For breakfast he is allowed the chair while his sister cleans the table around him. He hunches over his cup of milk and a potato left over from the night before. He can feel his stomach tighten as the milk hits the back of his throat, and he eats half the potato in three bites, tucks the rest away in his pocket. In school many of the other children have lunch boxes. With the war over, almost all the fathers have returned, but not his, and he has heard that most of his father's salary goes to the war effort. Sacrifices must be made, says his mother. But there are times when Rudik wishes he could sit at his school desk, open a lunch box to reveal black bread, meat, vegetables. His mother has told him that hunger will make him strong, but to him, hunger is the high feeling of emptiness when the trains emerge from the forest and the sound bounces across the ice of the Belaya.

During school he imagines himself out on the river, skating. On the journey home he looks for the highest snowdrifts in the city, so he can step high and be close to the new telegraph wires, hear them crackle just above him.

In the evenings, after listening to the wireless, his mother reads him stories about carpenters and wolves and forests and hacksaws and stars hung on nails in the sky. In one of the stories a giant carpenter stretches upwards and removes the stars one by one, distributes them to the workers' children.

How tall is the carpenter, Mama?

A million kilometers.

How many stars in each pocket?

One for everyone, she says.

Two for me?

One for everyone, she says again.

Farida watches as Rudik turns in the middle of the earthen shack floor, spinning on the heels of his boots. When he spins he raises dirt. So be it, let him spin, it is his joy. She will, one of these days, save enough money to buy a carpet from the old Turk in the local market. The carpets hang from twine and swing in the wind. She has often pondered what it would be like to have enough money to put carpets on the wall as well, to keep in the warmth, for decoration, to bring the shack to life. But before buying carpets she would purchase new dresses for her daughter, proper shoes for her son, a life away from this life.

Often Rudik's mother shows him the letters that have come from the German border, where his father is still stationed as a politruk, a teacher. The messages are short and precise:
All is well, Farida, do not worry. Stalin is powerful.
The words accompany Rudik as he walks through the rain with his mother to the hospital, where at the gate she lets go of his hand, taps him on the bottom, says to him: Don't be late, little sunshine.

She has rubbed goose fat on his chest to keep away the cold, now that the days are heading towards autumn.

The sick lift him in through the windows, already applauding. His appearance has become a weekly ritual. He grins as he is passed from one set of hands to another. Later he is guided from ward to ward, where he performs the new folk dances learned at school. Sometimes the nurses gather to watch. There are no pockets in Rudik's dance costume, and by the time he finishes so many cubes of sugar are stuffed lumpily inside his socks that the patients laugh about his legs being diseased. He is given vegetable scraps and bread that the soldiers have set aside, and he crams them into a small paper bag to bring home.

At the farthest wing there is a ward for those soldiers who have gone mad. It is the only place in the hospital where he will not perform. He has heard they have machines with electricity to cure madness.

This ward is full—faces against windows, tongues lolling, rows of fixed eyes—and he stays away, though at times he sees a woman who lumbers up from the greenhouses. She stands at the window of the ward, talking to a soldier whose pajama top hangs loosely on his shoulders. One afternoon Rudik notices the same soldier hobbling through the grounds on crutches, the bottom of the pajama leg knotted just inches beneath his knee, the soldier moving determinedly from tree to tree. The soldier shouts to him—something about a dance—but Rudik is already gone, scared, looking over his shoulder, out the gate, along the rutted dirt streets. As he runs he imagines himself ripping stars from the sky like nails. He returns home, hopping one-legged through the darkness.