Dancer (12 page)

Just off Nevsky the wire jumped from the trolley pole, stopping the bus in the street. My father went to the door to rejiggle the wire back into place, but the buses had been redesigned and he was standing in the wrong place, utterly lost. The conductor glared at him. The other passengers turned around, and I saw my father's face flush with fear.

My mother beckoned him to sit down. He put his hand on hers and remained silent the rest of the journey.

Iosif greeted my parents expansively. My mother held his shoulders and examined him. She had only ever seen photographs. Iosif blushed and hurried to open a bottle of vodka. His toast was long and formal. In the room my mother touched things, the butter dish, my husband's Party bulletins, the books I had half-translated. We had a fine meal together and afterwards my mother went down the corridor to the bathroom, ran the hot water tap, took a bath, while Iosif excused himself to the university.

When she returned my mother said: He's not as tall as I had imagined.

My father stood at the window and said: Ah, the Fontanka.

By mid-afternoon my mother had fallen asleep at the table. I managed to move her to the couch. My father propped up her head with his overcoat. He stroked her hair while she slept, and even in his slight frame he seemed to surround her with his generosity. Soon he was sleeping also, but fitfully.

Early in the evening Mother woke to prepare for a visit from Rudi. She brushed her hair and put on a dress that smelled as if it had been hanging in a wardrobe too long. Father took a long walk down to Nevsky, desperately wanting a cigar, only to find that the stalls were closed, but a neighbor gave me two, and my father sniffed the length of them, quoted some line from a Lithuanian poet about the deep mercy of strangers.

Rudi arrived late, of course. He was without RosaMaria. He wore a double-breasted suit and a thin black tie, the first I'd ever seen on him. He had wrapped a single lilac in notebook paper, and he presented it to my mother as he kissed her. She beamed and told him that he'd already grown beyond what she could have dreamed.

For the next hour they were like two cogs clicking together. She listened and he talked rapid-fire, endlessly, in a perfect pitch and rhythm—the slope of the school's floor, the sweat stains on the gymnasium barre, the rumor of a certain move once done by Nijinsky, the books he was reading—Dostoyevsky, Byron, Shelley—and how he had switched dormitories to live with the Pushkins. He said: I am hanging in the air longer, you know!

My mother seemed lost. Rudi placed his hand on my her trembling fingers for a moment. The problem was that Rudi had learned too much and he wanted to tell her everything. The old teacher was being taught, and she was confused by it. She nodded and pursed her lips, tried to interrupt, but he was unstoppable: the routine for his classes, the Dutch masters at the Hermitage, a step that Pushkin wanted him to learn, a fight with the director, his fondness for Rachmaninov, rehearsals he had seen at the Kirov, nights at the Gorky theater. He seldom slept, he said, needing only four hours a night, and the rest of the day was packed with learning.

To control her trembling hand my mother twirled her wedding ring and it struck me how thin she had become, the ring slipping easily along her finger. She seemed extraordinarily tired but she kept repeating: That's right, dear boy, that's right.

Finally my father had a quiet word in her ear and she put her face to his shoulder, stood, tottered a little, apologized, said she had to rest. She kissed Rudi on the cheek, and he stood there, silent.

You've done well, my father said to him. You've made her proud.

But at the door Rudi fingered his jacket and asked: What did I do wrong, Yulia?

Nothing. She's tired. She's been traveling for days.

I just wanted to talk.

Come back tomorrow, Rudi, I said.

I have classes tomorrow.

The next day then.

But he wasn't back the next day, or the next week. I had set up a screen to block off a corner of the room, put down the mattress for my parents, while Iosif and I slept on the floor. They talked about trying to find a room for themselves, somewhere to live, perhaps in the suburbs, the sleeping quarters, but first they had to sort out their residence permit, their pension papers and State bonds. Their visas were valid for only three months. Mother grew more and more listless, and Father was unable to deal with the bureaucracy, so it was I who tried to handle the logistics. Each day when I came home my mother was on the couch, head slumped against a pillow, while my father limped restlessly from window to window.

Somehow he had acquired a map of Leningrad, a difficult thing to find; maybe he'd bargained for it in a market, or run into some old friends somewhere. It was best not to ask. At night he spread out the map on the kitchen table and occupied his time by identifying street names that had changed.

Look, he said to nobody in particular, Ship Street has become Red Street, how strange.

He marked all the changes, the post-Revolutionary places that had lost their history. English Embankment was now Red Fleet Embankment, Swimming Pool Street was renamed after the poet Nekrasov. Ascension Street naturally had been changed, along with Resurrection Street, where an Orthodox church had been converted into a department store. Small Czar's Village had become Children's Village. Policeman's Avenue was now the People's Avenue. Millionaire Street was gone. Christmas Street had been transformed into Soviet Street, which he found monstrous. Other lost names struck him as a great injury—Street of Little Mosses, Catherine's Canal, Nicholas Street, Coachman Street, Miracle Avenue, Nightingale Street, Savior Street, Five Corners Street, Foundry Avenue, Meat Traders Alley, Big Craftsman Yard, Counterfeiters Lane. My father's love of poetry made him find more than a political implication in the renaming.

One day they'll name a street after the renamers, he said.

I whispered that he should be careful of what he said, to whom, and certainly when he said it.

I'm old enough now to say whatever I want.

It wasn't that he had lost faith in his past, but it had become unrecognizable to him, as if he had expected to find the logic of his boyhood but found something else entirely. The old names seemed coded into his tongue and would never leave. His difficulty was that he was unable to move with the change, yet his good fortune was that he hadn't been punished again for such stasis.

He gave up his obsession with the map when he saw that my mother was growing sicker. She refused to acknowledge that she was ill, but we took her to the hospital anyway, late at night in a taxi. The doctors examined her gently—my mother, by her nature, commanded that sort of respect—but they could find nothing wrong, even after a series of blood tests. She insisted there was something in the air that was making her feel drowsy.

Take me back, she said.

In the room everything felt tight, hampered, lifeless. Iosif disgusted me with his vague politeness. We hardly talked to each other at all anymore. For a number of years we had insulated ourselves from each other, and we had once even tried to think up a Russian word for
privacy
since it existed in the other languages I had studied. To some extent it existed for Iosif as a notion in physics, an unknowable place, but now it seemed that all the places we operated in were themselves unknowable. When I unpacked the few belongings from my mother's hospital bag I felt, in a strange way, that I was unpacking my husband from my life also.

The only tangible link to an immediate past for my parents was Rudi—
Our dear Rudik,
my mother would say—but he had disappeared for quite a while, despite the fact that I had left notes for him at the Leningrad Choreographic, pleading that he come visit.

Eventually he did come around to announce that he was about to perform at a showcase in school. He stood stately in the center of the room, feet together, and it struck me that his body had now accepted dance as its only strategy.

I will be performing for just a few minutes, he said, but I'd like to show you what I've learned.

The idea of it brought the color back into my mother's cheeks. She was astounded by his choice of dance, some terribly difficult male variation from a ballet based on
Notre-Dame de Paris.
He claimed that he had been practicing it with Pushkin and that he would be able to perform it quite easily.

But you're too young, you can't do a role like that, my mother said.

He grinned and said: Come watch me.

I had the Victor Hugo book on my shelf, and in the days leading up to the dance my father read it to my mother. His was a beautiful sonorous voice and he captured nuances in the text that surprised me. On the morning of the concert my mother plucked a special dress from the suitcase and spent hours adjusting it, then stood in front of the mirror with an elderly radiance.

My father put on a tie and a black suit. What remained of his hair had been combed back and I noticed that he had put the second cigar in the breast pocket of his jacket. He wanted to take a droisky for old time's sake and could hardly believe that the horses and carriages were long gone. Instead we got on the tram, and my father gave my mother's hand a secretive squeeze as we passed the all-weather KGB command post.

The showcase was in the Leningrad Choreographic, but we stopped for awhile outside the Kirov, its fierce elegance.

Anna, said my father. Aren't we beautiful?

Yes, she said.

Two old fools.

Beautiful or fools?

Both, he said.

We were seated in an upper balcony that ringed the gymnasium. Most of the other spectators were teachers and students—they wore tights, sweaters, leg warmers. We were horrifically overdressed. My mother sat erect in a straight-backed chair. RosaMaria joined us and introduced herself to my mother in her broken Russian. They immediately conspired with each other, my mother and RosaMaria, whispering and smiling—it was as if they were parts of the same creature, living in different decades but linked through some odd emotional chain. My mother laid her hand on RosaMaria's arm as the showcase progressed. The applause was polite for most of the students, who seemed to me accomplished and polished, if without spirit. Rudi was second last. When he came out he looked up to the balcony and my mother's frame straightened even further.

There were mutterings around the room. He wore a belt cinched very tightly at the waist. His hair had been carefully snipped and combed, short at the back but long at the front, falling over his eyes.

Of course he danced perfectly, light and quick, pliant, his line controlled and composed, but more than that he was using something beyond his body—not just his face, his fingers, his long neck, his hips, but something intangible, beyond thought, some kinetic fury and spirit—and I felt a little hatred for him when the applause rang out.

It was RosaMaria who stood up first, followed by my mother and my father, who nudged me. Beneath us Rudi bowed and kept on bowing even through the appearance of the next dancer, who stood angrily to the side. At last Rudi swept his arm out and left the floor at a high trot. He was met by a small handsome bald man who clapped him on the back. My mother whispered to me: That's Pushkin, he's doing a wonderful job with Rudik.

To which my father said: You're Anna Vasileva and you did a wonderful job with Rudik too.

We left into the cool spring night. The city was quiet. Rudi was waiting outside, and we huddled together, congratulating him. His body odor was severe, but still I wanted to draw closer and inhale him, his energy. He leaned over my mother and asked her how he had done. She seemed to hesitate a moment but said: You were marvelous.

On the plié I think I was going too deep, he said.

Then he touched my father's shoulder in a manly gesture and was gone down the street with RosaMaria, holding hands.

Who would have thought? said my father.

He had lit his last cigar and was puffing the smoke towards the sky. My mother watched Rudi disappear. You know, she whispered, his legs do look longer.

That's easy, said my father.

He smiled and went, on his good foot, to his toes.

Just then Pushkin emerged from the studios. He wore a tan overcoat and tie. He was accompanied by his wife, Xenia, a woman I had seen before on the streets of Leningrad. It was impossible to ignore her, the depth of her beauty, her blond hair, the magnificence of her clothes, the way she seemed lit from the inside. They turned to us briefly and waved, and I thought what curious mirrors they were in the world: my parents, teachers of the boy, looking at the Pushkins, teachers of the man, and the man himself already gone down the street.

My mother said to the Pushkins with great formality: Good evening. May I extend my congratulations.

Pushkin turned: Rudi has often talked about you.

She smiled and said: My deepest thanks.

A month later my mother was dead. In my room she suffered a brain hemorrhage, which took her in her sleep. I woke up to see my father sitting quietly by her body, his hand at the back of her hair. I expected him to weep, but he calmly said that she was gone, would I please make arrangements to have her buried in Piskarovskoye Cemetery. Then he closed his eyes and tightened his grip on her hair and whispered her name over and over until it sounded like a prayer or a song, gently sung. Later that day, as was old custom, he spread her body out on the table and washed her. He used an old shirt of his, saying that it would be his final gesture to sentimentality. She looked terribly emaciated. He dipped the collar of his shirt in warm soapy water and bathed her neck and smoothed the cloth along her collarbone. With the sleeve he wiped her arm and with the body of the shirt he washed her small wizened breasts. It was as if he wanted her to wear the shirt in some way, to carry it with her on whatever journey she was on. He covered her with a sheet, and only then did I see my father cry, deeply, inconsolably.