Dancer by Colum McCann Page A

hideous disharmony. Nothing in this world ever approaches perfection—except perhaps a fine cigar, which I had not had in many years. The thought of it made me wince with longing.
    Anna was worried about my wheezing and tried to insist that we sit down on a park bench, but surely there could be no sadder or more ridiculous sight, old exiles on park benches, so we pressed on, down the streets by Lenin Park, through the archway, towards the Opera House.
    He was there, of course, as if in some divine comedy, standing on the steps of the Opera House. He was wearing a shirt that was obviously a castoff and the rear of his pants was streaked with mud like any boy’s. The back seams of his shoes were split, and the angle of his feet—in third position—accentuated the split. He held the position for as long as we held ours and, when we finally stepped forward to greet him, he acted as if the encounter was perfectly natural.
    He bowed to Anna and nodded to me.
    I am honored to see you again, he said.
    There were bruises above his left eye, but I didn’t ask, too accustomed to the miseries of beatings and the small silences we bear with them.
    Anna took him by the elbow and led him up the steps. She dug her pass out from her handbag, and the guard gave a gruff shake of the head. It was only then that Anna remembered me, and she came bounding down the steps to help.
    If I were eleven years old I’d be jealous, I said.
    Oh you.
    Inside the Opera House the carpenters were at work on a set for The Red Poppy, which had been renamed The Red Flower, and I thought to myself, Why not rename everything, donate to it all its proper inconsequence?
    The scaffold was up, and my old friend Albert Tikhonov—indeed a quiet one—was on his stilts as usual, painting the backdrop. He was covered foot to hair in many different paints. He hailed me from on high, and I waved back up. Below him a young woman in a blue uniform was welding a leg onto a broken metal chair. The stage seemed ablaze with the sparks from the welding gun. I sat four rows from the rear and watched the drama, significantly more interesting, I’m sure, than any Red Flower, rose or poppy or michaelma.
    Anna took the boy backstage, and when they reemerged after an hour he was carrying two sets of slippers, a dance belt and four sets of tights. He was ecstatic, begging Anna for the chance just to stand on the stage, but there was too much going on there, so she invited him to try out his positions in the aisles instead. He put on the new slippers, which were too big for him. Anna removed one elastic band from her hair and one from her bag, snapped them around the shoes to keep them intact. She worked with him in the aisle for half an hour. He kept grinning as he moved, as if picturing himself onstage. In truth I saw nothing extraordinary in him—he seemed ragged at the edges, overly excited and there was a dangerous charm to him, very Tatar.
    As far as I could see he had little control of his body, but Anna complimented him and even Albert Tikhonov stopped working a moment, leaned against the wall to steady his stilts and gave a quick round of applause. To console myself for my sloth I too joined in with the applause.
    I could tell from Anna’s face that she had already told him about dancing in Saint Petersburg and that the memory weighed on her heavily. What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely. She had told a secret and now had the sadness of wondering how much deeper she might dig in order to keep the first secret fed.
    Still, I could see that the boy was good for her—her cheeks were flushed and there was a high timbre in her voice that I had not heard for years. She saw something in him, a light intruding upon the shadows to make sense of all our previous gloom.
    They worked on a few more steps until finally Anna said: Enough! We left the Opera House and the boy walked home, the slippers slung over his