Dancer by Colum McCann Page B

shoulder, his legs deliberately turned out from his hips.
    It had grown dark, but Anna and I stopped at a park bench by the lake, weariness defeating us. She put her head to my shoulder and told me that she was not so foolish as to believe that Rudik would ever be anything more than a dancer to her. Anna had always wanted a son, even in our later years. Our daughter, Yulia, lived in Saint Petersburg, thousands of kilometers away. For most of our lives we had reluctantly lived away from her, and Anna had never had the chance to teach her to dance. It was, we knew, a history wasted, but there was nothing we could do about it.
    That night I didn’t read to Anna. It was enough that she stepped across the room and kissed me. I was surprised to find there was still a stir in my groin, then even more surprised to remember that there hadn’t been a stir in almost five years. Our bodies are foul things to live inside. I am convinced the gods patched us together this disastrously so that we might need them, or at least invoke them late at night.
    The small mercies of life struck a couple of weeks later, when a package from Saint Petersburg managed to find its way to us—Yulia cleverly sent it through the university. Inside was a pound of Turkish coffee and a fruitcake. The cake was wrapped in paper and taped behind the paper was a letter, kept largely innocuous, just in case. She cataloged the changes in the city and touched on whatever was new in her life. Her husband had been promoted in the physics department, and she hinted that she might be able to send us a little money in the coming months. We sat back in our armchairs, read the letter twelve times, cracking its codes, its nuances.
    Rudik came over and devoured a slice of the fruitcake, then asked if he could take a slice home for his sister. Later I saw him open the package halfway down the road and stuff the piece into his mouth.
    We used and reused Yulia’s coffee grains until they were so dry that Anna joked they might bleach—before the Revolution we often used a pound of coffee a week, but of course when there is no choice it is extraordinary what you adapt to.
    My own afternoon walks—slow and careful because of my foot—began to take me to the School Two gymnasium. I watched through the small glass window. Anna had forty students all together, but she kept only two of them behind after class, Rudik and another boy. The other was dark-haired, lithe and, to my eye, much more accomplished, no ruffian edges. Together, if they could have melded, they would have been magnificent. But Anna’s heart was for Rudik—she said to me that he was somehow born within dance, that he was unlettered in it, yet he knew it intimately, it was a grammar for him, deep and untutored. I saw the shine in her eyes when she berated him on a plié and he immediately turned and executed it perfectly, stood grinning, waiting for her to berate him again, which of course she did.
    Anna found herself a new dance dress, and although she kept herself covered with leg warmers and a long sweater, she was still slender and delicate. She stood beside him at the barre and corrected his tendus. She had him repeat the steps until he grew dizzy, shouted at him that he was not a monkey and that he should straighten his back. She even pounded a few notes on the piano for rhythm, although her skill on the keys left a lot to be desired. I was amazed to see her one winter afternoon developing runnels of sweat on her brow. Her eyes quite honestly sparkled, as if she had borrowed them from the boy.
    She began working with him on jumps—she told him that above all he must create what his feet wished for, and it was not so much that he must jump higher than anyone else but that he should remain in the air longer.
    Stay in the air longer!
    Yes, she said, hang on to God’s beard.
    His beard?
    And do not land like a cow.
    Cows jump? he asked.
    Don’t be cheeky. And keep your