Dancer

1 SOVIET UNION 1941–1956

Four winters. They built roads through drifts with horses, pitching them forward into the snow until the horses died, and then they ate the horsemeat with great sadness. The medics went into the snowfields with vials of morphine taped beneath their armpits so the morphine wouldn’t freeze and, as the war went on, the medics found it harder to locate the veins of the soldiers — they were wasting away, dying long before they had really died. In the trenches they tied the earflaps of their ushinkis tight, stole extra coats, slept in huddles with the injured at the center, where they would get most warmth. They wore padded trousers, layers of underclothes, and sometimes they made jokes about wrapping whores around their necks for scarves. After a while they didn’t remove their boots too often. They had seen other soldiers — frostbitten toes dropping suddenly from their feet — and they began to feel that they could tell a man’s future by the way he walked.

For camouflage they fastened two white peasant shirts together to fit over their greatcoats, made drawstrings from bootlaces, pulled the cowl tight, and in that way they could lie in the snow unseen for hours. The recoil liquid in their artillery froze. The striker springs in their machine guns shattered like glass. When they touched bare metal the flesh tore away from their hands. They lit fires with charcoal, threw stones into the embers and later picked out the pebbles to warm their hands. They found that if they shat, which was not often, they had to shit in their pants. They let it lie there until frozen, pitched it out after they found shelter, and still nothing smelled, not even their gloves, until a thaw. To piss, they hitched oilskin sacks under their trousers so as not to expose themselves to the weather, and they learned to cradle the warmth of the pissbag between their legs and sometimes the warmth helped them think of women, until the bag froze and they were nowhere again, just a simple snowfield lit by an oil-refinery fire. They looked out over the steppe and saw the bodies of fellow soldiers, frozen to death, a hand in the air, a knee in a stretch, beards white with frost, and they learned to steal the dead man’s clothes before he became forever stiffened in them, and then they leaned down to whisper, Sorry comrade thanks for the tobacco.

They heard the enemy were using the dead to make roads, laying down the bodies since there were no trees left, and they tried not to listen as noises came across the ice, a tire catching on bone, moving on. There was never silence, the air carried all sounds: the reconnaissance crews on skis, the hiss of electric pylons, the whistle of mortars, a comrade calling out for his legs, his fingers, his rifle, his mother. In the mornings they warmed their guns with a low charge so that when the first volley of the day rang out the barrel did not explode in their faces. They wrapped cow skin around the handles of the antiaircraft batteries and covered the slits of the machine guns with old shirts to block the snow. The soldiers on skis learned to drop to a moving crouch to pitch their grenades sideways so they could still advance and maim at the same time. They found the remains of a T-34 or an ambulance or even an enemy Panzer, and they drained the antifreeze through the carbon filters of their gas masks and got drunk on it. Sometimes they drank so much that after a few days they went blind. They lubed their artillery with sunflower oil, not too much on the firing pins, just enough on the springs, and they wiped the excess oil on their boots so the leather would not crack and let the worst of the weather in. They peered at the ammunition boxes to see if a factory girl in Kiev or Ufa or Vladivostok had scrawled a loveheart for them, and even if she hadn’t she had, and then they rammed the ammunition into their Katyushas, their Maxims, their Degtyarevs.

When they retreated or advanced they blew a ditch with a 100-gram cartridge in order to save their lives if their lives were something they felt like saving. They shared cigarettes, and when their tobacco was finished they smoked sawdust, tea, lettuce, and if there was nothing else they smoked horse shit, but the horses were so hungry that they hardly shat anymore either. In the bunkers, they listened to Zhukov on the wireless, Yeremenko, Vasilevsky, Khrushchev, Stalin too, his voice full of black bread and sweetened tea. Loudspeakers were strung through the trenches, and amplifiers were put on the front line, facing west, so they could keep the Germans awake with tango, radio reels, socialism. They were told about traitors, deserters, cowards, and were instructed to shoot them down. They stripped red medals off the chests of these dead and pinned them to the undersides of their own tunics. To hide at night they put masking tape over the headlights of the cars, ambulances, tanks. They stole extra tape to put on their hands and feet, over their portyanka socks, and some of them even wrapped it around their ears, but the tape tore their flesh and they howled as the frostbite set in, and then they howled further against the pain and some just put their guns to their heads and said good-bye.

They wrote home to Galina, Yalena, Nadia, Vera, Tania, Natalia, Dasha, Pavlena, Olga, Sveta, and Valya too, careful letters folded in neat triangles. They didn’t expect much in return, perhaps just one sheet with the perfume left on the censor’s fingers. Incoming mail was given numbers and, if there were a series of numbers missing, the men knew that a mail carrier had been blown to bits. The soldiers sat in the trenches and stared straight ahead and composed letters to themselves in their imaginations, and then they went out into the war once more. Pieces of shrapnel caught them beneath their eyes. Bullets whipped clean through their calf muscles. Splinters of shells lodged in their necks. Mortars cracked their backbones. Phosphorus bombs set them aflame. The dead were heaped onto horse carts and laid in huge graves blown out of the ground with dynamite. Local women in shawls came to the pits to keen and secretly pray. The gravediggers — shipped in from the gulags — stood off to one side and allowed the women their rituals. Yet more dead were heaped upon the dead, and frozen bones were heard to crack, and the bodies lay there in their hideous contortions. The gravediggers shoveled the final dirt on the pits, and sometimes in their despair they pitched themselves forward, still alive. More dirt was thrown upon them so that afterwards it was said that the ground quivered. Often in the evenings the wolves came from the forests, trotting high-legged through the snow.

The injured were lifted into ambulances or onto horses or put on sleds. A whole new language appeared to them in the field hospitals: dysentery typhus frostbite trench foot ischemia pneumonia cyanosis thrombosis heartache, and if the soldiers recovered from any of these they were sent out to fight once more.

In the countryside they looked for newly burnt villages so the ground would be soft for digging. The snow unearthed a history, a layer of blood here, a horse bone there, the carcass of a PO-2 dive-bomber, the remains of a sapper they once knew from Spasskaya Street. They hid in the ruins and rubble of Kharkov and disguised themselves in piles of bricks in Smolensk. They saw ice floes on the Volga and they lit patches of oil on the ice so the river itself seemed aflame. In the fishing hamlets by the Sea of Azov they fished instead for pilots who had crashed and skidded three hundred meters along the ice. Gutted buildings lined the outskirts of towns and, in them, more dead in their havoc of blood. They found their comrades hung from lampposts, grotesque decorations, tongues black with ice. When they cut them down the lamps groaned and bent and changed the spread of their light. They tried to capture a Fritz alive to send him to the NKVD, who would drill holes in his teeth, or tie him to a stake in the snow, or just starve him in a camp like he was starving theirs. Sometimes they’d keep a prisoner for themselves, loan him an entrenching tool, watch him try to dig his grave in the frozen ground and, when he couldn’t, they shot him in the back of the head and left him there. They found enemy soldiers lying wounded in burnt-out buildings, and they pitched them out of windows to lie neck-deep in the snow, and they said to them, Auf Wiedersehen, Fritzie, but sometimes they pitied the enemy too — the sort of pity only a soldier can have — discovering in his wallet that the dead man had a father, a wife, a mother, maybe children too.

They sang songs to their own absent children, but moments later they put the stub of a rifle in an enemy boy’s mouth and, later again, they sang other songs, Raven oh black raven why do you circle me?

They recognized the movements of the planes, the half rolls, the chandelles, the sudden twists, the pancake falls, the flash of a swastika, the shine of a red star, and they cheered as their women pilots went up to hunt the Luftwaffe down, watched the women as they rose in the air and then fell in flames. They trained dogs to carry mines and they guided the dogs, with shrill whistles, to walk beneath enemy tanks. Crows patrolled the aftermath, fat on the dead, and then the crows themselves were shot and eaten. Nature was turned around — the mornings were dark with bomb dust and at night the fires cast light for miles. The days were no longer named, although on Sundays they could sometimes hear, across the ice, the Fritzes celebrating their god. For the first time in years they were allowed their own gods — they took their Crucifixes, their beads, their prayercloths out into the battlefields. All the symbols were needed, from God to Pavlik to Lenin. The soldiers were surprised by the sight of Orthodox priests, even rabbis, blessing the tanks, but not even blessings enabled them to hold their ground.

In retreat, to deny the enemy, the soldiers blew up the bridges their brothers had built, ripped apart their fathers’ tanneries, took acetylene torches to pylons, herded cattle over ravines, razed milk sheds, poured gasoline through the roofs of silos, hacked down telegraph poles, poisoned water wells, splintered fence posts and tore up their own barns for wood.

And when they advanced — in the third winter, as the war turned — the soldiers marched forward and wondered how anyone could have done such a thing to their land.

The living went west and the injured went east, packed into cattle cars, pulled by steam trains, which moved slowly across the frozen steppes. They huddled together, drawn to whatever light came through the wooden slats. In the center of each cattle car was an iron pail with a fire burning. The men reached into their armpits or groins to take out handfuls of lice, and then pitched the lice into the fire. They held bread to their wounds to stop the bleeding. A few of the soldiers were carried off, put onto carts, taken to hospitals, schoolhouses, clinics. Villagers came down to greet them, bearing gifts. The men who remained on the train heard their comrades leaving, all vodka and victory. And still there was no logic to their journeys — sometimes the trains passed right through their hometowns without stopping and the ones with legs tried to kick out the wooden slats; they were shot dead by the guards for insubordination and later in the night a family would trudge out through the snow, bearing candles, having heard that their son had died just a few kilometers from home, disgraced, left frozen by the tracks.

They lay awake in their blood-stiffened coats while the railroad cars rocked to and fro. They passed around the last of their cigarettes and waited for a woman or a child to shove a package between the slats or maybe even to whisper a sweet word. They were given food and water, but it tore through their intestines and made them sicker. There were rumors of new gulags being built to the west and south, and they told themselves that their gods had loved them this long but might not love them very much longer, so they furtively slipped their charms and icons through the floorboards to lie on the railroad tracks to be picked up by others in days to come. They pulled their blankets to their beards and threw more lice onto the fire. Still the trains poured steam into the air and carried the men through forests, over bridges, beyond mountains. The men had no idea where they would end up, and if the train broke down they waited for another to nudge up behind them, roll them forward, toward Perm, Bulgakovo, Chelyabinsk — where in the distance the Ural Mountains beckoned.

And so, in the late winter of nineteen hundred and forty-four, a train sped daily through the landscape of Bashkiria, emerging from the deep forest along the Belaya River to cross the wide stretch of ice into the city of Ufa. The trains made their way slowly across the trussed bridge, a quarter of a kilometer long, the steel giving out thuds and high pings under the stress of the wheels as if mourning in advance. The trains made their way to the far side of the frozen river, past the wooden houses, the tower blocks, the factories, the mosques, the unpaved roads, the warehouses, the concrete bunkers, until they reached the railway station, where the stationmaster sounded his whistle and the city’s brass band blew their battered trumpets. Muslim mothers waited on the upper platform clutching photographs. Old Tatar men went up on their toes to look for their sons. Babushkas huddled over buckets of sunflower seeds. Vendors solemnly rearranged the emptiness of their kiosks. Tough-faced nurses in brown uniforms prepared to transport the wounded. The local guards stood weary against pillars under red metal signs for rural electrification that swung in the breeze—Our Great Leader Is Bringing Electricity to You! — and a smell penetrated the air, foreshadowing the soldiers, sweat and rot, and each winter afternoon a six-year-old boy, hungry and narrow and keen, sat on a cliff above the river, looking down at the trains, wondering when his own father would be coming home and whether he would be broken just like the ones they were lifting from beneath the steam and the bugles.

We cleaned out the giant greenhouse first. Nuriya gave the tomato plants to the farm boy who hung around the hospital. Katya, Marfuga, Olga and I shoveled most of the soil onto the ground outside. I was the oldest and my shoveling duties were light. Soon the greenhouse was clear, as big as two houses. We dragged in eight woodstoves, stood them next to the glass and lit the fires. After a while the greenhouse didn’t smell so much of tomatoes anymore.

The next thing was the big metal sheets. Nuriya’s cousin, Milyausha, was a welder at the oil refinery. She had gotten permission to take away fifteen sheets. She borrowed a tractor, hitched the sheets to the back of it, dragged them through the hospital entrance, down the narrow road to the greenhouse. The sheets were too big to fit through the doors so we had to remove the back windows to slide the metal in. The farm boy helped us lift the heavy sheets. He kept his head down — maybe he was embarrassed by all us women working so hard, but it didn’t matter to us, it was our duty.

Milyausha was a splendid welder. She had learned just before the war. She wore special glasses and the blue flame lit up her lenses. After two days it was there: a giant metal bath.

But we hadn’t thought about how to heat the water properly.

We tried boiling the water on the woodstoves that we had set up, but, even though the greenhouse itself was warm from catching the sun, the water never held its temperature. The bath was just too big. We stood around, quiet and angry, until Nuriya had another idea. She asked her cousin Milyausha to see if she could get permission for maybe a dozen more metal sheets. The very next morning she came up from the refinery dragging five more sheets. Nuriya told us the plan. It was simple. Milyausha set to work straight away and welded the metal into the giant bath, crisscrossing the strips until eventually the whole thing looked like a metal chessboard. She drilled drains in the bottom of each bath, and Nuriya borrowed an old car engine from her husband’s brother. She attached a pump to the engine to take the water out. It worked perfectly. There were sixteen individual tubs and, because they were small, we knew the water would stay warm. We laid down planks for gangways so we could walk from bath to bath, and then we hung a portrait of Our Great Leader inside the door.

We lit the stoves, heated the water, filled the baths. Everyone smiled when the water stayed warm, and then we took off our clothes and sat in the baths, drinking tea. All around us the glass was steaming and we were warm as soup.

Sweetness, said Nuriya.

That evening we went up to the hospital and told the nurses we would be ready the next day. They looked exhausted, black bags under their eyes. We could hear the soldiers moaning from inside the hospital. There must have been hundreds of them.

Nuriya pulled me aside and said: We will start right now.

We did only eight the first evening, but on the second day we did sixty and by the end of the first week they were coming up directly from the railway station in their bloody rags and bandages. We had so many that they had to wait in lines outside the greenhouse on long canvas tarps. Sometimes the canvas got sticky with blood and it had to be hosed off, but they were patient, those men.

While they were outside Katya wrapped them in blankets. Some of them were happy, but others cried, of course, and many just sat and stared straight ahead. The parasites were on them and the rot was setting in. You could see the worst of it in their eyes.

Inside, Nuriya was the one to shave their heads. She was quick with the scissors, and most of the hair was gone in a few seconds. Without it they looked so different, some like boys, some like criminals. She shaved the rest of the hair with a straight-blade razor. She swept the hair up quickly because there were lice still crawling through the clumps. The hair was shoveled into buckets and placed at the door of the greenhouse, and the farm boy took them away.

The soldiers were so shy they didn’t want to take off their uniforms in front of us. We didn’t have any young girls working with us — most of us were thirty or more. I was forty-seven. And Nuriya told them not to worry, we all had husbands — which was true, except for me, I never had a husband, no reason really.

Still they wouldn’t take their clothes off until Nuriya roared: Come on, you don’t have anything we haven’t seen before!

Eventually they shed their uniforms, except for the men on the stretchers. We used Nuriya’s scissors for them. They didn’t like it when we had to take off their shirts and undershirts, maybe they thought we were accidentally going to cut their throats.

The soldiers stood in front of us, hands over their private parts. They were all so skinny, poor things, they made even Katya feel fat.

We used the rotten uniforms for fuel but we made sure we took the medals off first, put them in little bundles until the baths were finished. All the men had letters and photos in their pockets, of course, but there were some strange things too — the spout of a teapot, locks of hair, bits of gold teeth. One of them even had a little finger, curled up and shriveled. Sometimes there were explicit pictures we weren’t meant to see but, as Nuriya said, they’d been through a lot for our great nation, it wasn’t our place to scold.

As the soldiers waited their turn, Olga sprayed them with a chemical that came in boxes all the way from Kiev. We used fertilizer tanks and mixed the chemical with water — it smelled like bad eggs. We had to cover the soldiers’ mouths and eyes. But we didn’t always have enough dressing to put over their wounds, so when we sprayed them it sometimes hit their open sores. I felt so sorry for them the way they howled. Afterwards they leaned against us and cried and cried and cried. We sponged down the wounds as well as we could. They dug their fingers into our shoulders and clenched their fists. Their hands were so bony and black.

When their wounds were swabbed, it was time for the bath. If one of them had lost his legs, it took four of us to lower him in the water and we had to be careful of the level so he wouldn’t drown. If he had no arms, we propped him up at the edge of the metal sheet and kept ahold of him.

We didn’t want to shock them so we kept the water lukewarm at first, and when they were immersed we poured kettles full of boiling water around them, wary not to splash. They said ooh and aah, and the laughter was contagious; no matter how many times we laughed in a day another man would make us laugh all over again.

The thing about the greenhouse was that it made the sound much bigger. It wasn’t exactly an echo, it was just that the laughter seemed to bounce from pane to pane and back down to us, bent over the baths.

Olga and I were the ones to sponge. I didn’t use soap to start with. That was a treat for the very end. I gave their faces a good scrub — they had such eyes! — and I cleaned very carefully, the chin, the brows, the forehead and behind their ears. Then I went vigorously at their backs, which were always filthy. You could see their ribs and the curve of their spines. I went down towards their bottoms and cleaned a little around there, but not so much that they got uncomfortable. Sometimes they would call me Mama or Sister, and I’d lean forward and say: There there there.

But most of the time they just stared straight ahead without a word. I went to their necks again, but this time I went much more gently and I felt them relaxing.

It was harder to do the front of their bodies. Their chests were often bad, because a lot of the time they had been hit with shrapnel. Sometimes, when my hands were at their stomachs, they hunched over very quickly because they thought I was going to touch them down below, but most of the time I got them to do that themselves. I was no fool.

If a soldier was really sick or had no spirit, then I had to wash him down there. Mostly he would close his eyes because he was embarrassed, but once or twice he still got aroused and I had to leave him alone for five minutes.

Olga wouldn’t leave him alone. She carried a spoon in her apron and if a soldier got excited she bashed him there, and that was that. We all just laughed.

For some reason, I don’t know why, their legs were the worst — maybe it was from standing around in those boots all the time. Their feet were covered with sores and scabs. Most of the time they could hardly walk straight. They always talked a lot about their legs, said they used to play soccer and ice hockey and how good they had been at long-distance running. If the soldier was a very young boy, I let him put his head on my chest so he wouldn’t be ashamed of his tears. But if he was big and mean, I washed him much more quickly. He might say rude things to me about my arms, the way they wobbled, and for punishment I wouldn’t give him any soap.

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.

Where’ve you been? asks his mother, stirring in the bed beside Rudik’s sister.

In the palm of his hand he holds out the lumps of sugar.

They’ll dissolve, she says.

No they won’t.

Put them away and get to bed.

Rudik puts a lump between his gum and his cheek, drops the rest of the sugar into a dish on the kitchen table. He looks across the cabin at his mother, who has pulled the blankets high and turned her face towards the wall. He remains motionless until he is sure that she is asleep, then leans into the wireless radio and steadily adjusts the dial along the yellow paneling: Warsaw, Luxembourg, Moscow, Prague, Kiev, Vilnius, Dresden, Minsk, Kishinev, Novosibirsk, Brussels, Leningrad, Rome, Warsaw, Stockholm, Kiev, Tallinn, Tbilisi, Belgrade, Prague, Tashkent, Sofia, Riga, Helsinki, Budapest.

He already knows that if he stays awake long enough he will be able to turn the white knob to Moscow where, at the stroke of midnight, he will hear Tchaikovsky.

Well well well! His father stands in the doorway shaking snow from his shoulders. A black mustache. A strong chin. The voice raked with cigarettes. He wears a pilotka with the brims down fore and aft, so he looks as if he is both coming and going. Two red medals pinned to his chest. A Marx pin on the collar of his tunic. His mother hurries to the doorway while Rudik huddles in the corner beside the fire. Looking at his father is like looking at a painting for the very first time — he sees the painting exists, sees the colors and the textures, sees the frame within which it is hung, yet he knows nothing about it. Four years at war and another eighteen months in the territories. His older sister, Tamara, has long since made lace prints and jars of berry juice as homecoming gifts. She thrusts them into her father’s arms, clings to him, kisses him. Rudik has nothing to give. Still his father comes across, knocks away the high-backed chair in his joy, picks Rudik up and holds him in the air, spins him twice, all wide cheeks, yellow teeth. What a big boy! Look at you! Look! And how old are you now? Seven? Seven! Almost eight! My! Look at you!

Rudik notices the large puddles his father’s boots have left at the door, goes to the threshold and stands in the wet prints. My little boy! His father has a number of smells to him, not bad smells, a strange mixture, like trains and trams and the smell you get after wiping chalk from the blackboard with your elbow.

They walk in the street along the rows of cabins and wooden houses, into the late afternoon. Icicles hang from lampposts. Snow coats the rows of gates. The frost-hardened mud crunches beneath their feet. Rudik wears his sister’s old overcoat. His father stares at the coat, says the boy should not be dressed in his sister’s castoffs, tells Rudik’s mother to switch the buttons from one side to the other. His mother pales and nods, says of course she will. They watch the wind rip the cardboard and sackcloth from the window frames of the wooden houses. Men drink vodka in an abandoned car. His father looks at the men, shakes his head in disgust, links his arm with Rudik’s mother. Whispering, they seem as if they have years of secrets to tell each other. A cat wanders lean-shouldered along a crooked fence. Rudik flings a couple of stones at it. His father catches his arm on the second throw, but then he laughs, puts his pilotka on Rudik’s head, and they chase each other down the street, hot breath steaming. After dinner — cabbage, potatoes and a special piece of meat Rudik has never seen before — he is held so tight to his father’s chest that his head crumples the papirosy in the tunic pocket.

They spread the cigarettes out on the table and straighten them, stuff the stray tobacco back into the thin paper tubes. His father tells him that this is the dream of men, to straighten crumpled things.

Isn’t that right?

Yes, Father.

Call me Papa.

Yes, Papa.

He listens to the curious highs and lows of his father’s voice, the way it sometimes sounds torn, like radio waves when he turns the dial. The wireless, the only thing they haven’t sold for food, sits above the fireplace, dark and mahogany. His father tunes in to a report from Berlin, and says: Listen to that! Listen! Music, now that’s music!

His mother’s fingers are long and thin, and they tap out a rhythm on the chair. Rudik doesn’t want to go to bed, so he sits on her lap. He watches his father, a foreign thing. His cheeks are hollow and his eyes are larger than in the photographs. He coughs, a deep cough, a man’s cough, and spits in the fireplace. Embers jump out onto the dirt floor, so his father reaches down and extinguishes them with his bare fingers.

Rudik tries it, but his thumb blisters immediately and his father says: That’s my boy.

Rudik rocks against his mother’s shoulder while he holds back the tears.

That’s my boy, says his father again, disappearing out the door, coming back two minutes later, saying: If someone thinks there’s no evil in this world, they should visit that fucking outhouse in weather like this!

His mother looks up, says: Hamet.

What? says his father. He’s heard language before.

She swallows, smiles, says nothing.

My warrior’s heard language, haven’t you?

Rudik nods.

That night all four of them sleep in the bed together, Rudik’s head by his father’s armpit. Later he slips away and crosses to his mother, her smell, kefir and sweet potatoes. There is movement deep in the night, the bed slowly throbbing, his father whispering. Rudik turns very suddenly, jams his feet against the warmth of his mother. The rocking stops and he feels his mother’s fingers on his brow. Towards dawn he is woken again, but he doesn’t move and when his parents fall asleep, his father snoring, Rudik sees the light begin to finger the parting in the curtains. Quietly, he rises.

A handful of cabbage from the iron pot. The last of the milk, kept cold on the windowsill. His high-collared gray school tunic hangs on the wall. Dressing, he moves through the room on the balls of his feet.

His skates are hooked on the inside knob of the front door. He made them himself — filing down iron scraps from the refinery, embedding the metal into two pieces of thin wood, fashioning leather straps from scraps found behind the warehouses along the railway tracks.

He quietly unhooks the skates, closes the door, runs to the city lake, the straps joined around his neck, his gloves over the sharp steel so the blades don’t cut his face. Already the lake is dark with movement. Sunlight kindles the cold haze. Men in overcoats skate to work, hunched, smoking as they progress, solid figures against the skeletal trees. The women with shopping bags skate differently, taller somehow, erect. Rudik steps onto the ice and breaks against the traffic, going the wrong way in the flow, people laughing, dipping, cursing him. Hey, boy. You! Salmon!

He bends his knee, shortens the thrust of his arm, quickens his pace. The metal blades have become slightly loose in the wooden slats, but he has learned balance and counterbalance and, with a small flick of his ankle, he persuades the steel back into the wood. In the distance he can see the roof of the banya where he goes each Thursday with his mother and sister to bathe. There, his mother scrubs his back with birch twigs. He likes to lie on the wooden benches and receive the slap of the twigs. He finds patterns in the tiny pieces of birch leaf that dot the length of his body. His mother has told him that the baths will make him immune to sickness, and he has learned to endure the scalding steam longer than any other child his age.

He jumps, turns, lands, feels the skates catch once more.

On the ice many patterns are etched beneath him, and he can already tell by the marks who is a good skater and who isn’t. If he were to twirl for a long time in one place, he could get rid of everyone else, destroy their marks, be the only person ever to have skated there. A piece of litter catches beneath the blade, and he lifts his foot slightly, circles to crush it. Flecks of ice jump up from his boots. In the distance he hears his name called, the voice arriving from the edge of the lake, carried by the wind. Rudik! Rudik! Instead of turning, he leans on his right foot, and his whole body spins in the opposite direction to the shout. He knows not to swerve too hard, to lean just the right amount so he won’t fall. Then he is off against a head wind, small specks of litter still clinging to the blade. Rudik! Rudik! He leans over farther, his body concentrating itself in his shoulders. Beyond the lake, on the roads, he sees trucks, motorbikes, even men on bicycles — their tires fat to deal with the ice. He would love to hold on to the rear bumper of a car, to have it drag him along like the older boys, careful with their scarves so they don’t catch around the wheels, keeping an eye out for the brake lights so they can ready themselves to let go and travel faster than anything else on the road.

Ru-dik! Ru-dik!

He barrels in the direction of the road but is stopped by the sound of a whistle, a guard waving him away. He turns with one skate, the other foot high, makes a wide arc, and is forced around to the sight of his father, red-faced now, panting, on the bank, without skates. A wind rips along the lake, making the end of his father’s cigarette glow bright. How small he looks, the smoke trailing away from his mouth.

Rudik, you’re fast.

I didn’t hear you.

You didn’t hear me what?

I didn’t hear you say Rudik.

His father opens his mouth to say something, decides against it, says instead: I wanted to walk you to school. You should have waited for me.

Yes.

Next time, wait.

Yes.

Rudik puts his skates around his neck and they walk together, hands balled into their gloves. The road circles past a row of old houses to the schoolhouse. Above the school wall is an arched iron insignia where four crows sit. Father and son make a bet on which of the crows will leave first, but none do. They stand silent until the bell sounds, and then Rudik tugs away his hand.

Education, says his father suddenly, is the foundation of everything. Do you understand me?

Rudik nods.

The bell sounds once again, and the children in the yard run towards the building.

Well then, says his father.

Bye.

Bye.

Rudik steps away, but then returns and rises to his toes to plant a kiss on his father’s cheek. Hamet shifts his head slightly, and Rudik feels the edge of his mustache, wet with ice.

Rudik runs the gauntlet to the classroom. Blondie. Froggy. Girl face. Smaller than most, he is often beaten up. The boys push him into the wall, grip his testicles, squeeze them — pruning, they call it. They leave him alone only when a teacher turns the corner. Inside, flags on the wall, pennants, portraits. The wooden desks with their lifting lids. Goyanov the teacher on the platform, pasty-faced, calm. The early morning call. The Motherland is benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The Motherland will protect me. The rustling of boys and girls settling down, the scratch of chalk on the board, mathematics, his name called, five times fourteen, you, yes you, five times fourteen, yes you, sleepyhead! He gets the answer wrong, and Goyanov strikes his ruler hard on the desk. Three more wrong answers and he is slapped on the palm of his left hand. And then, before the right hand is hit, a puddle appears on the floor. The other children laugh when they realize that he has pissed himself, giggle behind their hands, trip him as he walks the aisle. Seventeen steps from the toilets to the top of the noisy stairs, where the mosque and the blue sky hang together in the window frame. He roots himself there, touches the front of his wet pants. Beyond the mosque stand the chimneys, bridges, low smokestacks of Ufa. The sky is broken by the horizon’s clean sharp shapes. Goyanov comes up behind him and takes him by the elbow back to the classroom, and he pisses himself a second time as he enters, all the children quiet now, hunched over their inkpots, dropping beads of black ink onto copybooks. He sits in his seat and waits, even through the lunch call, Our Leader is powerful, Our Leader is great, his stomach tight and knotted, until he is fully dry, and then he disappears to the bathroom once more, the mirror cracked, his face a thousand pieces, the rank piss around him, but it is quiet here, he leans into his reflection, the angle of the cracks distorting his face.

After school his father is waiting again, against the wall, coat collar turned up. Resting against his thigh is a muslin sack. In his other hand, a large bag with the bulge of a lantern. Hamet beckons him over, puts an arm around Rudik’s shoulder and they walk silently towards the tram.

By the time they reach the foothills of the city, the sky is already darkening. Birch trees stand in armies along the ice-covered road. The last of the red light filters between the branches. They cross a broad rockslide threaded with the footprints of wild animals and snow falls in clumps from the trees. A cold wind huddles them together. His father takes a jacket out of his bag and puts it around Rudik’s shoulders. They walk down a narrow gorge, and when they get to the small frozen mountain river at the bottom Rudik sees a line of fires along the ice where men are fishing in holes.

Trout, says his father. He slaps Rudik’s back. Now go get some firewood.

Rudik watches his father stake out an empty ice hole. He re-breaks the ice and uses two thin blocks of wood for makeshift chairs, covering each with a blanket. Hamet sets up the lantern between the chairs and pulls a fishing rod out from the muslin sack. He snaps it together, runs a line through the eyes of the rod, attaches some bait to the hook, anchors the apparatus, stands over the ice hole clapping his hands.

Rudik waits near the trees, two large branches tucked beneath one arm and a handful of twigs in the other.

His father looks up. We need more wood than that!

Nudging his way along the tree line, Rudik dips out of view, clears snow from a rock, sits down and waits. He has never fished before. How can there be trout in a river that is frozen solid? How can they swim through ice? He breathes warm air into the openings of his gloves. A single star claws its way into the sky. No moon. He thinks about the warmth of the bed at home, how his mother nestles the gray blankets to his chin, arcs her arm to snuggle him. He is sure animals await him in the trees beyond the river, badgers, bears, even wolves. He has heard stories of wolves carrying children away. Other stars rise in the sky as if on a series of pulleys. He hears a plane but can see no moving lights in the sky. Sniveling, he drops the wood at his feet, runs back across the frozen river.

I want to go home.

You what?

I don’t like it here.

His father chuckles into his collar, reaches out and takes Rudik’s gloved hand. They step together into the trees and collect enough wood to last through the night. His father places kindling on the ice and says it is a mistake to create a single big fire, that is for idiots. Instead they make two small tepees and he instructs Rudik to squat over the fire whenever he gets cold, that the heat will rise through his body and spread, a trick Hamet learned during the war.

All along the river the other fishermen chat in low tones.

I want to go home, Rudik says again.

His father doesn’t reply. He takes three of last night’s potatoes and heats them in the embers of the fire, turns them so the skin doesn’t scorch. They wait an hour for the first fish. When his father lifts it up through the ice, he takes off his gloves and the trout goes from living to gutted in seconds. He rips the fish belly open with his knife and, at the same time, follows with his forefinger, so that the innards come out in one motion. The guts steam in the air, and his father spears the body with a twig and holds it over the fire. They eat the fish and potatoes in the cold and his father asks him if he thinks it is delicious and he nods and then his father says: Do you like goose?

Of course.

Someday we’ll shoot geese, you and me. Do you like shooting?

I think so.

For oil, for food, for fat. Geese are good for that, says his father.

Mama puts the fat on my chest.

I taught her that trick. A long time ago.

Oh, says Rudik.

It’s a good one, isn’t it?

Yes.

When I was away, says his father, pausing for a moment, I missed you.

Yes, Papa.

We’ve a lot to talk of.

I’m cold.

Here, put this jacket on.

His father’s jacket is huge around his shoulders, and Rudik thinks that now he is wearing three jackets while his father wears only one, but still he puts his arms in the sleeves of the coat, sits there rocking.

Your mother told me you were a good boy.

Yes.

She said you’ve been doing lots of things.

I danced at the hospital.

I heard.

For the soldiers.

And what else?

School.

Yes?

And Mama took me to the big place, the Opera House.

She did, did she?

Yes.

I see.

Mama only had one ticket, but we got in and there was a big crush at the door and the door fell in and we almost fell but we didn’t! We went down near the front, where they didn’t come looking for us! We thought they were going to come looking!

Slow down, says his father.

We sat on the stairs and there were big lights and then it got dark and it started! They turned off the big lights and the curtain came up and the music was loud and everyone got quiet.

And did you like that?

It was a story about a shepherd and an evil man and a girl.

Did you like it?

I liked the way the boy saved the girl after the man got her.

And?

And the big red curtain.

Well that’s good, says his father, pulling his tunic tight, checking the line in the ice hole to see if any more fish have been caught, his face flushed and his mouth red as if he himself has just been hooked.

And when everyone was gone, says Rudik, Mama allowed me to sit in the seats. She told me they were velvet.

That’s good, his father replies again.

When the next fish comes his father takes out the knife, cleans the blade on an inside thigh of his trousers, leaves a streak of blood. He hands Rudik the small trout and says: You do it, son.

Rudik tightens his fingers inside the coat sleeves.

Try it.

No thanks, Papa.

Try it!

No thanks.

Right now, I said! Try it!

In a warehouse on Sverdlov Street — under the auspices of the Bashkirian Ministry of Culture — the new curtains of the Opera House are sewn by a crew of six women, the best seamstresses in Ufa. The special bolts of red velvet are forty-five metres long and eight metres wide and a single fold, when lifted and relifted, makes their arms ache. The women, in their hairnets, are not allowed to smoke or eat or drink tea anywhere near the cloth. They sit at the curtains for ten hours a day, shifting their chairs along the red sea of velvet. Each seam is supervised, and the lining where the curtains meet is restitched seventeen times before the supervisor feels that the proper nuances have been attended to. A running cloth, again of velvet, is made to order. The pelmets are carefully belled with white lace. The insignia of the State is embroidered on the curtains, at the center, so the two halves will meet at the beginning and end of every show.

When the curtains are finished, three representatives from the Ministry come to inspect them. They look the work over for an hour, running their fingers along the seams, gauging the height of the pelmets with their rulers, checking for consistency of color. They debate over the State insignia, holding a magnifying glass to the embroidered handle of a sickle. Finally they crack open a flask of vodka and each drinks a thimbleful. The seamstresses, watching through the blinds of an office window, touch each other’s elbows and sigh with relief. They are called from the office, and the men from the Ministry line them up and speak in gruff voices of collective harmony.

The curtains are carefully folded and transported to the Opera House in a truck. Two carpenters are on hand, having designed a series of poles and pulleys to support the weight. A reinforced rope is threaded through the greased pulleys. Scaffolding is put in place to hang the curtains, and the cloth never once touches the ground.

The first night, before the show starts, one of the stagehands, Albert Tikhonov — from a well-known family of stilt walkers — hitches himself high onto his stilts, winks at his fellow stagehands, crosses the boards like a giant insect, wooden ends clicking on the stage floor, checking for flaws in the curtain. He finds none.

The Motherland is benevolent. The Motherland is

strong. The Motherland will protect me. The

Motherland is benevolent. The Motherland is strong.

The Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

Motherland will protect me. The Motherland is

benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The

Motherland will protect me.

He hides the punishment lines from his father, but there is something about the crawl of the pen over the page that Rudik has grown to like. He connects the letters as if each word were a piece of string, never arranging the lines in columns, preferring their disorder, their bump up against each other. This is contrary to how the teacher wants it and sometimes the amount of punishment lines is doubled or tripled the following day.

When his homework is finished he runs to the lake to check the flags along the shore. If they are at half-mast it means someone eminent has died, and this delights him since later Tchaikovsky will be on the wireless again, uninterrupted, and his mother will lean into it also.

They have moved to a new communal house on Zentsov Street — one room, fourteen square meters, with an oak floor. A carpet from the market hangs on one wall. His mother has placed the wireless against the other wall so that the neighbors, newlyweds, can hear it if they desire. Rudik clicks the radio on, tunes the dial, raps four times on the wall so the couple knows to listen. The wireless takes a while to warm up and, in that time, Rudik imagines the notes floating through as if the air itself is in rehearsal. He positions himself at different points in the room to find the angle at which the music arrives best. The notes begin high and alien and scratchy and then settle down. During the broadcasts his mother moves across the floor, soundlessly in slippers, sits beside him, serious and appreciative. She tries to hold him back from dancing in case his father comes home, but often she relents, tells him not to make too much noise, turns her back as if she can’t see.

His mother smells to him of the yogurt from the bottling plant where she has found a new job. Just after his tenth birthday the paper carries a photograph of her after winning a commendation for helping to double the production, the caption reading: Labor as purpose: Muskina Yenikeeva, Farida Nureyeva and Lena Volkova at the kefir bottling plant. The clipping is placed on the window ledge beside his father’s medals. After two months the paper yellows, and his mother patches some foil from milk-bottle caps, backs it onto the newspaper cutting, makes a little hood over the picture to keep the direct sunlight from ruining it.

His older sister, Tamara, uses the same technique for pictures of male dancers she copies from books: Chaboukiani, Yermolayev, Tikhomirov, Sergeyev. Rudik studies the drawings, how the dancers hold their heads, the dip of their feet. Tamara stands in the courtyard and encourages him to imitate the pose. She laughs when he tries to stand stock-still on one foot. He doesn’t own a library card, but Tamara is a senior member of the Komsomol and so is allowed books from the library, which she brings home for him—Dance and Realism; Beyond the Bourgeoisie, The Form of Dance in the Soviet Union; Choreographic Structure for a New Society—all books that force Rudik into the use of a dictionary.

He writes lists of words in a notebook that he keeps in his school-bag. Many of them are French, so he feels sometimes like a boy of another country. In school he draws maps with pictures of trains moving across the landscape. His notebooks are covered with sketches of dancers’ legs, and when his teachers catch him with the book he simply shrugs and says: What’s wrong with that?

He has begun to acquire a reputation for himself, and sometimes he storms out of the classroom, shuts the door noisily behind him.

Later the teachers find him in empty corridors, attempting pirouettes, but he has no formal training, only folk dancing, and his moves are stunted. He is sent home with notes from the school’s director.

His father looks at the notes, crumples them, throws them away.

In Hamet’s new work there is the salvation of numbness. He is out early in the morning on the Djoma River with twelve other comrades, war veterans, on a barge. The smoke from Ufa’s factories drifts over the boat and the deep smell of metal is a reminder to him of blood. Hamet and the other men use giant boat hooks to bring in the logs that have floated down the river from the mill towns up north — Sterlitamak, Alkino, Tschishmi. The hooks are spun through the air like miniature sickles, catching and digging into the errant logs. They are hauled by hand to the rear of the barge, where the men step out and tie them with chains, jumping from one to the other as the logs roll beneath their feet, hats on, shirts open, water splashing around their boots.

Rudik has asked if he can step out into the water and roll on the logs, but Hamet has said that it is far too dangerous and, indeed, over the course of two years, as foreman, Hamet loses five men.

Hamet follows a city directive that says he must classify the dead man as drowned; sometimes he dreams of them at night, remembering soldiers whose bodies were used instead of trees to build roads. In the winters, when the lake is frozen and logs no longer drift downriver, he tours the factories, giving political lectures to the workers, just as he did for many years in the army, and he never questions what any of it means, to hook these logs and men.

One evening Hamet catches Rudik by the ear and says: There is nothing wrong with dance, son.

I know.

Even our great leaders like dance.

Yes I know.

But it’s what you do in the world that makes you. Do you understand?

I think so.

Your social existence determines consciousness, son. Remember?

Yes.

It’s very simple. You’re made for more than dance.

Yes.

You will be a great doctor, an engineer.

Yes.

Rudik looks at his mother in the ratty armchair across the room. She is thin, and there is a hollow in her neck that looks smoke-blue. Her eyes don’t move.

Correct, Farida? says his father.

Correct, replies his mother.

The following day, on the way home from the factory, Farida stops momentarily outside a house on a rutted dirt road. The small house is painted bright yellow, the paint is peeling off in large flakes, the roof is sloped by weather and the wooden doorway sags. The carved wooden shutters flap in the breeze. A single wind chime lets out a note.

She spies a pair of shoes on the porch step. Old, black, unpolished, familiar.

She works her tongue around in her mouth, moves it against a back tooth that has been loose for weeks, pushes at the tooth with force, places her hand on the gate in order to steady herself. She has heard about an old couple who live here with three or four other families. She feels dizzy, faint. The tooth rocks back and forth in her mouth. She ponders that she has lived her life through a constant driving storm, she thinks, she has walked on with her head down, her jaw locked, her mind always on the next step, and seldom before has she been forced to stop and examine it all:

Her tongue pushes against the loose molar. She puts her hand on the gate of the house to open it, but in the end she turns away, a pain shooting through her gums.

Later, when Rudik comes home — the flush of dance in his cheeks — she sits beside him on the bed and says: I know what you’re doing.

What? he asks.

Don’t fool with me.

What?

I’m too old to be fooled with.

What?

I saw your shoes outside that house.

What shoes?

I know who those people are, Rudik.

He looks up at her and says: Don’t tell Father.

She hesitates, bites her lip, then opens up her hand and says: Look.

A tooth rolls in her palm. She places it in the pocket of her housedress and then lays her hand on the back of Rudik’s neck, draws him close.

Be careful, Rudik, she says.

He nods and steps away from her, spins onto the floor to show her what he has learned, and he is confused when she doesn’t watch, her eyes fixed firmly on the wall.

After the boy left, Anna put on her nightgown, worn at the elbows, and perched at the very edge of the bed. I was at my desk, reading. She whispered good night, but then she coughed and said she felt blessed, that it was enough in this life just to feel blessed from time to time.

She said she knew, even after just one session, that the boy could be something unusual.

She rose and shuffled across the room, put her arms to my shoulders. With one hand she removed my reading glasses. She placed them in the center spine of the book and turned my face to hers. She said my name and it pierced my fatigue in the most extraordinary way. As she leaned across, her hair brushed against me and it smelled like the days when she had been with the Maryinsky. She turned me sideways in the chair, and the light from the candle flickered on her face.

She said: Read to me, husband.

I picked up the book, and she said: No, not here, let’s go to bed.

It was a book of Pasternak’s that had survived all our years, open to a poem about stars frozen in the sky. I have always adored Pasternak, not just for the obvious reasons but because it has seemed to me that by staying in the rearguard rather than moving with the vanguard, he had learned to love what is left behind without mourning what was gone.

The book was fattened from being thumbed through so much. My habit, which Anna hated, of turning down the edges of my favorite pages gave it a further thickness.

I picked up the candle, the book, my glasses, and I stepped to the bed, pulled back the covers, got in. Anna dropped her wooden dentures on a plate with a little sigh, combed her hair, climbed in beside me. Her feet were cold as always. With older dancers it is often this way — having tortured their feet for so many years, the blood just refuses to journey.

I read to her from a cycle of nature poems until she fell asleep, and it didn’t seem indulgent to let my arm fall across her waist while she slept, to take a little of her happiness — the old steal from each other as much as the young, but perhaps our thefts are more necessary. In years gone by Anna and I have stolen from each other ferociously and then lived inside the stolen moments until we began to share them. She once told me that when I was incarcerated she often turned down my covers, even rolled across and made a dent in the pillow as if I were still there.

I read more Pasternak as she slept and then quoted it from memory when the candle burned all the way down. Her breath grew foul, and I leaned in against her, pulled the covers high. Her hair had loosened and it fell across her face and, with the little breeze from the open window, the strands crossed and recrossed her eyes.

Sentiment is foolish, of course, and I do not know whether I slept that night, but I do remember thinking a very simple thought — that despite all the years I was still in love with her, and at that moment it didn’t seem foolish at all to have loved her, or to go on loving her, even in all our wreckage.

The factory alarm blew shrill at six in the morning. Anna turned the pillow to find the cool side, and I was left with her back to me. When the light broke through the crack in the curtains, I cobbled together some tea and kasha that still tasted all right from the day before, a small miracle.

We sat at the kitchen table beside the bed, and Anna played Mozart low on the gramophone, so as not to disturb the old washerwoman in the room next door. Anna and I chatted about the boy and then after breakfast she dressed and packed her dance skirt and slippers. When she raised her head from her shopping basket, she looked to me as though she was stepping back into days that once had been. With the corps de ballet in Saint Petersburg long ago she was given a special carrier bag for her slippers — Diaghilev himself had passed the bags around — but she had lost it somewhere in our shuffles.

In the corridor our neighbors were already about. Anna waved to me and closed the door as if the movement were part of a furtive dance.

That evening she brought the boy home a second time. He ate his potato carefully at first, as if unbuttoning an unfamiliar coat. He had no idea what to do with the butter, and he watched Anna for guidance.

The room and us, we were used to each other, but with the boy there it seemed like a foreign place, not seventeen years lived in.

Anna dared some Stravinsky low on the gramophone, and the boy loosened a little, as if he were eating the music with the potato. He asked for an extra cup of milk but ate in silence for the rest of the dinner. Looking over at Anna, I was put in mind of a crow calling out to another crow over the head of a sparrow.

He was pale and narrow-shouldered, with a face both cheeky and angelic at the same time. His eyes were a mixture of green and blue, and they darted around the room, never resting long enough, it seemed, to truly take stock. He ate ferociously, yet he sat straight-backed in the chair. Anna had already drummed into him the importance of posture. She said to me that he had almost immediately mastered the five positions, that he showed a natural turnout, but still he was a little uncouth and forced. Aren’t you? she said.

He held the fork at his mouth and smiled.

Anna told him he was to come to the school gymnasium every day except Sunday, and he was to tell his parents he needed at least two pairs of slippers and two sets of tights.

He paled and asked for another cup of milk.

We heard our washerwoman neighbor fumbling next door. Anna turned the gramophone a little lower, and we made the three short steps to the couch. The boy did not sit between us but wandered instead up and down the length of bookcases, touching the spines of the books, amazed that they were crammed four deep.

At seven o’clock he wiped his hand across his runny nose, said good-bye. When we opened the window to look out he was already running down the street, jumping over the ruts in the road.

Eleven years old, said Anna, imagine that.

We committed ourselves to the gray night with Pasternak once more. Anna fell asleep above the covers, breathing a sadness through her nostrils. I shaved — an old habit from the camps which used to allow me an extra moment in the mornings before the chill — and then carted my insomnia to the window, stars being infinitely more interesting than ceilings. It had begun to rain and the water funneled over the roof and sluiced down the gutter pipe, giving its acoustics to the city. Her breathing became so heavy it sang in my ears, and every now and then her body clenched itself as if dreaming of pain, but she woke cheerily, shifted herself into her housedress.

Sunday was our day to clean.

A few weeks before we had found silverfish in our photo album, moving through our tentative and uncertain smiles. All my military pictures had been destroyed long before, but we still had one or two others gnawed through at our feet — our wedding, Anna standing outside the Maryinsky, the two of us standing by a combine harvester in Georgia of all places.

Anna left the gray silverfish to me, and I squeezed them between my fingers. Over the years the silverfish had become fat with us, photos taken mostly in Saint Petersburg and mostly in sunlight for some strange reason. On the back of the photos we had scribbled little notes for ourselves, but we had written Leningrad, just in case.

There were some more recent photos from Ufa, but in their bitter little ironies the silverfish had spared them.

In the afternoon, after a merciful nap, I found Anna behind the changing screen at the foot of the bed, standing on the tips of her toes, wearing the outfit of her last dance, thirty-three years ago. It was a long, pale tutu, and she looked a bit like a footnote to her past. Embarrassed, she began to cry, then changed out of the costume. Her breasts swung, small, to her rib cage.

Once we had filled each other with desire, not remembrance.

She dressed and took my hat from the rack, her signal for us to go. I limped out, along the corridor, into the day, using my cane. The sun was strong and high, although the streets were still damp. The poplars swayed in a light breeze, and it felt quite fine to be alive even with the oil refinery dust still heavy in the air. At the bottom of the hill we stopped at the bakery, but for some reason the electricity had been turned off during the day and for the first time in weeks we weren’t greeted by the smell. We stood by the air vent to catch any remnant, but there was none so we walked on.

Even the mad war veteran at the bottom of Zentsov wasn’t around, so the day had acquired an unlived-in quality.

By the lake families sat with picnics. Drunks talked to their bottles. A kvass vendor busied herself at her stall. At the bandstand, a folk group struck up in 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 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 mouth closed. You are not a fly swallower.

I’m in the circus! he shouted, and he began leaping around the room with his mouth open.

Anna developed a system with him. Rudik’s parents were of Muslim stock and as the only boy he was not expected to do much. Buying bread was his only chore, but after a while Anna began to pick it up for him to give him time to practice. She lined up twice outside different bakeries, one on Krassina and one on October Prospect. I often went along to wait with her. We would try to keep our place by the bakery vents if we could — the great solace of queuing was the smell that hung in the air. I took the first batch of bread home while she waited with his family’s coupons at the second bakery. The process often took a whole morning, but that didn’t matter to Anna. At the end of his lesson he would kiss her on the cheek, put the bread in his shopping bag and run home.

One summer evening we took him on a picnic: pickles, some black bread and a small jar of berry juice.

In the park, by the Belaya, Anna spread a blanket on the ground. The sun was high, and it threw short shadows on the surrounding fields. Farther downstream a group of boys dove off a giant rock. One or two of them pointed in our direction and shouted Rudik’s name. Anna had a word in his ear. Reluctantly he got into his swimming gear and walked along the riverbank. He hung around near the rock for a while, a deep scowl on his face. It was easy to pick Rudik out in the crowd — he was thinner and whiter than the rest. The boys jumped from the rock into the water, grabbing their knees in midair. Great jets of water splashed up when they landed.

Rudik sat down and watched their antics, chin on his knees until one of the older boys came up to him and started pushing him around. Rudik shoved back and screamed an obscenity.

Anna got to her feet, but I pulled her down. I poured her a glass of berry juice and said: Let him fight his own battles.

She sipped the juice and let it be.

A couple of minutes passed. Then a look of terror crossed Anna’s face. Rudik and the other boy had climbed up to the very top of the rock. All the other children were watching. Some of them began to clap, slowly and rhythmically. I stood up and began to move my old cart horse of a body as quickly as I could along the riverbank. Rudik was poised, motionless, at the top of the rock. I shouted at him. It was a five-meter jump, next to impossible since the base of the rock was so wide. He spread his arms, took a deep breath. Anna screamed. I stumbled. Rudik spread his arms farther and flew outwards. He seemed to hang in the air, fierce and white, and then he dropped into the water with a huge splash. His head narrowly missed the rock edge. Anna screamed again. I waited for him to emerge. He stayed under a long time but eventually surfaced, a piece of river plant stuck to his neck. He flicked the plant away, shook his head, grinned enormously, then waved at the boy who was still standing at the top of the rock, frozen in fear.

Jump, shouted Rudik. Jump, asshole!

The boy climbed back down without jumping. Rudik swam away and came up to us, sat down nonchalantly on the blanket. He took a pickle from the jar, but he was trembling and I could see the fear in his eyes. Anna started to scold him, but he kept eating his pickle and finally she shrugged. Rudik looked up at her from under a stray lock of hair, finished his food, and came over to lean his head against her shoulder.

You’re a strange child, she said.

He came to our room every day, sometimes two or three times. Some of our phonograph collection was proscribed. We hid it in a wooden bookshelf that had a false back, one of the few pieces of my carpentry that had actually worked, having survived visits by the Ministry. He learned how to remove the records from their sleeves and catch them sideways so he didn’t leave fingerprints. He was always careful to take the dust off the stylus. It was like medicine to him when the gramophone gave out a couple of clicks and the sound moved into violins.

Walking around the room, he kept his eyes closed.

He came to adore Scriabin, listening while standing still, as if he wanted the music to repeat itself a thousand times until Scriabin himself stood beside him, feeding the fire with flutes.

He had this terrible habit of leaving his mouth open as he listened, but it seemed wrong to tap him on the shoulder and lift him out of the moment. Once Anna touched his chin, and he recoiled instantly. I knew it was his father. They weren’t bad bruises, but you could see that he had been knocked around. Rudik had told us that his father worked on the river, hauling logs. It seemed to me that he was slinging down the old curse of fathers — wanting his son to take advantage of the things he had fought for, to become a doctor or a military man or a commissar or an engineer. To him dancing meant the poorhouse. Rudik was failing in school, his teachers were saying he was fidgety, spending his time humming symphonies and occasionally looking at art books his sister had borrowed. He had developed an attachment to Michelangelo, and in his notebooks he made sketches — they were adolescent but well-realized.

The only good report he got was from the Pioneers, where he spent Tuesday afternoons practicing folk dances. And on the evenings when there was ballet at the Opera House—Esmeralda, Coppélia, Don Quixote, Swan Lake—he would be gone from his home, sneaking in the stage door, allowed a seat by my friend Albert Tikhonov, the stilt walker.

It was when he got home and his father discovered where he had been that Rudik was beaten.

Rudik didn’t whine about his bruises, and he didn’t have the empty gaze that I’d seen in other boys and men. He was being beaten for dance and still he went on dancing, so the whole thing balanced itself out. The beatings came on the spur of the moment, including a dreadful one the day after his thirteenth birthday. I didn’t doubt that Rudik deserved it — he could be terribly cantankerous — yet I could tell that by beating him, by refusing him the chance to dance, his father was giving Rudik the gift of need.

Anna talked about going to see his mother but decided against it. If you are wise you step through the darkness only one foot at a time.

I have always thought of memory as a foolish conceit, but as the gramophone crackled Anna began to tell him bits and pieces of her past. She glossed over her own youth and quickly settled into her years in the corps. How she yammered on! The costumes, the designers, the trains across borders! Saint Petersburg and the rain through the streetlights! The rake of the Kirov floor! The tenor aria from the last act of Tosca! After a while there was no arresting her — it was like the Dutch boy’s dam, except it wasn’t only the river that had burst but the ramparts, the bank, the weeds on the shore also.

I was grateful that she didn’t lie to him, that she didn’t pretend to have been one of the great dancers, denied by history. No. There was a lovely truth to it all. She told him about standing in the wings of the grand theaters, dreaming herself onstage. She remembered Pavlova in less striking colors than anyone else, perhaps because Pavlova herself was such an elemental part of the dance. I found myself adrift too, back at the Maryinsky, in the front row, waiting desperately for Anna to come on with the corps. In Swan Lake, when the curtain call came, the cry went up for Anna! Anna! Anna! I felt it was my Anna they were chanting for, so I chanted too. Afterwards I would meet her and we would walk down Rossi with her arm linked through mine and at her building her mother would be looking down from the fourth-floor window. I would guide her close to the wall and kiss her, whereupon she would touch my face and giggle and run upstairs.

How long ago it was and how strange, but all dead friends come to life again sometimes.

Rudik listened to the stories with a sort of rapt disbelief. It struck me later that the disbelief was born of a benign ignorance. After all, he was thirteen now, and he had been taught to think differently than us. Still, it was remarkable to me that he remembered the stories weeks later, sometimes quoting Anna exactly, word for word.

He inhaled everything, became taller and gangly, with an impish smirk that could silence a room, but he wasn’t aware of his body or its power. If anything, he was shy and afraid. Anna told him that his whole body must dance, all of it, not just his arms and legs. She tweaked him on the ear, saying even his lobe must believe in movement. Straighten your legs. Spot quicker on your turns. Work on your line. Absorb the dance like blotting paper. He stuck to it all diligently, never quitting until he had perfected a step, even if it meant another beating from his father. On Sundays, Anna took him first to the museum and then to watch rehearsals at the Opera House, so they were together every day of the week. As they walked home, Rudik would remember the exact movements he had seen — male or female, it didn’t matter — reconstructing the movements from memory.

He lay between us, like a long and charged evening.

Rudik began to develop a new language, not one that fit him, he was ill-shod for it. But it was charming to hear the rough provincial boy say port de bras as if he had stepped from a room full of chandeliers. At the same time, at our table, he would eat a piece of goat’s cheese like a savage. He had never in his life heard of washing his hands before a meal. Sometimes his finger went into his nose, and he had a terrible affinity for scratching his private parts.

You’ll scratch it away, I told him once, and he looked at me with the sort of horror reserved for death and pillage.

Late at night in bed, Anna and I talked until she fell asleep. It struck us that he was our new breath and that the breath would last us only a short while, that he would eventually have to move on. It gave us great sorrow, yet it also gave us a chance to live beyond any sorrows we had already accumulated.

I even went back to my garden patch to see if I could resurrect it.

Years ago we were given a plot, eight tram stops from our house. Someone in the Ministry had overlooked our history, and we were graced with a letter that said a plot, two meters square, could be ours. It was poor land, brittle and gray. We grew a few vegetables — cucumbers, radishes, cabbages, wild onions — but Anna also had a penchant for lilies, and each year she exchanged a couple of food coupons for a packet of bulbs. We put the bulbs deep in the soil, on the rim of the plot, sometimes used donkey manure for fertilizer, waited. We failed miserably with the flowers most years, but life deals us its strange little ecstasies, and that particular summer, for the first time ever, we had a patch of dark white.

In the afternoons, when she was at the gymnasium, I would catch the tram out there, limp up the hill and sit on a folding chair.

Often, on weekends, a short man with dark hair knelt over his plot, ten meters from my own. We caught each other’s eye every now and then, but we never exchanged a word. His face was tight and guarded, like that of a man who had lived his life with his traps constantly baited. He worked on his garden with a fierce industry, growing cabbages and potatoes mostly. When it came time to harvest, he brought a wheelbarrow with him and filled it high.

One Saturday morning he arrived up the path with Rudik at his heels. I was surprised — not just because this man was Rudik’s father, but because the boy was supposed to be at the gym with Anna and, over the course of a year, he had never once missed a session. I dropped my trowel into the soil and coughed loudly, but Rudik kept his eyes on the ground, as if there were terrible events lurking around each plant.

I rose to my feet to say something, but he turned away.

It struck me then that Rudik’s genius was in allowing his body to say things that he couldn’t otherwise express. It was simply the way his shoulders slumped from one side to the other and the angle of his head that gave him a look — even from the rear — that said any approach would not just impinge on him but wound him deeply. He was forever removed from his father, and yet he was forever removed from me also.

I could see that he was cut above the eye but that his father also had a large bruise on his right cheek. It was clear to me that his father was trying to reconcile all that had happened between them, but no reconciliation would be forthcoming.

His father troweled in the ground and spoke up at his son. Rudik occasionally gave a word back, but most of the time he said nothing.

I knew that there would never again be another beating.

I decided to leave well enough alone and put on my hat, went home, told Anna about what had happened.

Oh, she said, and then she went to sit at the table, curling and uncurling her fingers.

One of these days I’m going to have to pass him on to Elena Konstantinovna, she said. He’s learned all he can from me. It’s only fair.

I went to the cupboard to take out the small bottle of samogon that we had kept for many years. Anna wiped two glasses with a clean towel, and we sat down to drink.

I raised my glass and toasted.

She wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of her dress.

There was only enough in the bottle to get us to the stage where we wanted more. Still, we allowed our happiness to reach instead into the gramophone, Prokofiev, over and over. Anna said she didn’t mind letting Rudik move on to another teacher, especially Elena. Elena Konstantinovna Voitovich had been a coryphée in Saint Petersburg and was now the mistress at the Ufa Opera House. She and Anna kept in touch, and they had exchanged memories and favors — Anna said it might be possible after a few years for Rudik to get a walk-on role, maybe even a solo or two. Perhaps he can go all the way to the school at the Maryinsky, she said. She even talked about writing a letter to Yulia to see if she could negotiate any favors. I knew Anna was recalling herself when she was there, younger, more pliant, still full of promise, and so I nodded, let her talk. There is only so much we can do, she said, teaching is elastic, and if we stretch it out it will only snap back on us at some later date. She explained that she would bring him down to the advanced classes on Karl Marx Street some time during the week. First of all, however, she would cook up a great feast to surprise him.

My hand slipped across the table to hers. She told me to go and grab a book and that maybe with the samogon warming our bodies we would both be allowed a generous night’s sleep. It wasn’t true.

She danced with him all that week. I watched through the window of the gym door.

She had certainly knocked the roughest edges off his movement. His plié was still quite unaccomplished, and his legs contained more violence than grace, but he could pirouette well, and on jumps he had even learned to hang a moment in the air, which delighted Anna. She clapped. He responded to her gestures by jumping again, moving diagonally forward with slow grands jêtés and sweeping arcs, then crossing the rear of the room with a series of bad sissonnes where he bent the second knee. He retreated and stopped suddenly with his arms looped in a garland above his head, having scooped the air and made it his, which was certainly not something that Anna had taught him. His nostrils flared, and I thought for a moment that he might paw at the ground like a horse. Certainly there was more intuition in him than intellect, more spirit than knowledge, as if he had been here before in another guise, something wild and feral.

On Friday she pulled him aside and told him the news. I excused myself and watched from outside the door. I expected silence, maybe tears or a puzzled sorrow, but he just looked at her, hugged her close, stepped back, and took the prospect with a vigorous nod of his head.

Now, said Anna, for your last dance I want you to drop a tray of pearls at my feet.

He went across to the bench and picked up the watering can and did a series of chaînés up and down the room, sprinkling the floor for grip. For the next twenty minutes — before I went home — he strung together all she had taught him, moving from one end of the gym to the other, his tights worn and stretched. Anna glanced out the window at me, and we both knew, at that instant, that whatever attended us in the future we would at least have this.

In the hall on Karl Marx Street he is one of seventy young dancers. At fourteen he is given a whole new language: royales, tours jêtés, brisés, tours en l’air, fouettés. He stays late, practicing. On entrechatquatres he beats his legs together like a barber’s shears. Elena Voitovich watches him with her lips pursed and her hair pulled back in a severe bun. Once or twice her mouth curls into a smile, but mostly she remains uncertain. He tries to outrage her with a brisé volé but she simply scoffs and turns away, says that they would not tolerate form like his in the Kirov or the Bolshoi or even the Stanislavsky. She speaks of the ballet companies with a tinge of regret, and sometimes she tells him of Leningrad, of Moscow, of how the women dancers there work so hard their feet are bloodied at the end of their sessions, and that the sinks in the opera houses are tinged with the blood of great performers.

He carries the notion home, practices with the thought of red soaking through his slippers.

His sister Tamara has left the house to study teaching in Moscow and he now has room for a full-length bed. Taped to the wall near the bed he has scribbled notes to himself: Ask Anna to patch slippers. Work on spotting so as not to get dizzy. Find walk-ons. Get good piece of oak for barre. Have interest only in what you can’t do well. Beethoven was sixteen when he wrote the second movement concerto number 2! No direct sunlight hits the wall but still he has hooded the paper with foil like his mother used to do. His father paces the house but ignores the notes.

One March morning Rudik awakes to hear Yuri Levitan, the state radio’s chief announcer, interrupting a slew of solemn music with a bulletin: The heart of the Comrade Stalin, inspired Continuer of Lenin’s cause, Father and Teacher, Comrade in Arms, Coryphaeus of Science and Technology, Wise Leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, has ceased to beat.

Three minutes of silence is called for. Rudik’s father moves out into the street to stand beneath the trees, where the only sound is that of the grackles. His mother remains at the window and then turns to Rudik, takes her son’s face in her hands, not a word passing between them.

That evening, at the end of another broadcast, Rudik hears that Prokofiev has died on the very same day. He climbs through the window of the locked hall on Karl Marx Street and, in the bathroom sink, he scrapes the soles of his feet against the metal mouths of the taps so savagely that they bleed. He comes out, dancing for nobody, blood on his slippers, sweat spinning from his hair.

It was just before the May Day celebrations. We hadn’t seen each other in about four years. He knocked on the door of the electrician shop on Karl Marx Street where I was an apprentice. He looked different, more grown-up, hair long. We used to bully the little bastard at school, but he stood at the door now, as big as me. I had heard he was dancing, that he’d appeared at the Opera House a few times, mostly as a walk-on, but so what, I didn’t care. I asked what he wanted. He said he’d heard I owned a portable gramophone and he’d like to borrow it. I went to close the door, but he put his foot in it and it bounced back at me. I grabbed him by the shirt but he didn’t flinch. He got right to the point, said he’d like the gramophone for an exhibition he was giving in the basement canteen of the oil refinery. I told him to jump in the lake and fuck a few trout. But he began to plead like a little child and finally he said he’d give me some money. So I got him to promise me thirty rubles out of his one hundred. He said okay, as long as I got him some good phonographs to play. My cousin was high up in the Komsomol and he had some recordings, mostly army songs but some Bach, Dvorak, others. Besides, thirty rubles was thirty rubles. So I got the portable gramophone for him.

The refinery was a big area of pipes and steam and canals, with its own three ambulances that would pick up the dead or the injured when there was an accident. Sirens going off all the time, searchlights, dogs. You’d know a refinery worker just by the way he looked at you. The entertainment collective was run by a fat old babushka called Vera Bazhenova. Most of the time she showed films or bawdy puppet shows, and every now and then she stretched to a little folk dancing. But Rudi had talked her into letting him perform for one night. He was good that way, he could call an ass a racehorse and get away with it.

The canteen was dirty and it stank of sweat. It was six in the evening, just after the shifts had changed. The workers sat down to watch. There were about thirty men and twenty-five women — welders, toolmakers, furnace men, forklift drivers, a couple of office workers, some union representatives. I knew a few of them, and we shared a glass of koumiss. After a while Rudi came out from the kitchen, where he’d changed his clothes. He was wearing tights pulled up high on his stomach and a sleeveless top. A long fringe of hair was hanging down over his eyes. The workers started laughing. He pouted and told me to put a record on the gramophone. I told him I wasn’t his little Turkish slave, he should do it himself. He came across and whispered in my ear that I wouldn’t get any money. I thought, fuck him, but I put the record on anyway. The first thing he did was a piece from the Song of the Cranes, and just three or four minutes into it they were laughing at him. They’d seen plenty of dancing before, these workers, but this was the end of the day, flasks were being passed along the rows, everyone smoking and chattering, and they were saying, Get this shit off the stage! Get this piece of shit off the stage!

He danced some more, but they got louder, even the women. He glanced across at me, and I began to feel a little bad for him, so I lifted the needle from the gramophone. The canteen fell silent. There was a mean look in his eyes — as if he was all at once challenging the women to fuck him and the men to fight. His lips twitched. Someone threw a dirty rag up on the stage, which set off another great roar. Vera Bazhenova was red in the face, trying to get them to quieten down, it was her head on the block, she ran the collective.

Just then Rudi stretched out his arms wide and began a gopak followed by a yiablotshko, up on his toes, then slowly sinking to his knees, and then he moved into The Internationale. The laughter turned to some coughing and then the workers began to turn toward one another in their chairs, and then they began stamping out The Internationale on the floor. By the end of the performance Rudi was back to ballet, the Song of the Cranes, full circle, and the stupid bastards were applauding him. They passed around a tin cup, and he got another thirty rubles. He glanced at me and tucked it all in his pocket. The workers gathered around after the show and invited us for some more koumiss. Soon everyone in the canteen was shouting and drinking. A little red-haired man got up on the aluminum counter and gave a toast, then stood on one leg and extended his arms. Finally Rudi grabbed the man, steadied him and showed him how it was done properly.

When we took the tram home, both of us drunker than elephants, I asked him for some of the extra money. He told me I was a miserable Cossack, that he needed it to pay for his train ticket to Moscow or Leningrad, whichever would accept him, to go fuck myself, that it was him earned all the money anyway.

He has rouged his cheeks with a red stone and darkened his eyes with black liner stolen from the Opera House. His eyelashes have been thickened with a paste and his hair swept back with pomade. At home alone, he smiles and then grimaces in the mirror, creates a series of faces. Stepping frontways to the mirror, he adjusts his tights and his dance belt: the mirror is tilted downwards so he can see no more than his midtorso. He stretches his arm high beyond the reflection, takes a bow, and watches his hand reentering the mirror. He steps closer, exaggerates his turnout, tightens the upper muscles of his legs, brings his hips forward. He removes the tights to unhook the dance belt, stands still and closes his eyes.

A row of lights, a sea of faces, he is in the air to great applause. The footlights flicker and the curtains are opened again. He bows.

Later he removes the rouge and the eye makeup with an old handkerchief. He shifts the few pieces of furniture — sideboard, armchairs, cheap wall paintings — and begins to practice in the dark cramped space of the room.

In the afternoon his father returns earlier than usual and nods in the manner of men grown accustomed to silence. His eyes rest for a moment on the row of notes Rudi has taped to the mirror: Work on battements and accomplish proper order of jêtés coupés. Borrow Scriabin from Anna. Liniment for feet. At the end of one row of notes, the word Visa.

Hamet glances at the handkerchief on the floor near Rudi’s feet.

Silently he steps past his son, pulls the armchair back to its original position near the door. Beneath his mattress, Hamet has enough money for the fare. Two months’ wages, bundled in elastic. He has been saving for a shotgun. Geese and wild fowl. Pheasants. Woodcocks. Without ceremony, Hamet takes the money from under the mattress and tosses it to Rudik, then lies back on the bed and lights himself a cigarette to argue against the scent of the room.

On the way to Leningrad — or rather on the way to Moscow, which is the way to Leningrad — there is a stop in the little village of Izhevsk where I grew up. I told Rudi he would know the village by the red and green roof of the railway station. If he wanted to, he could drop in at my old uncle Majit’s house, sleep the night, and if he was lucky he might even get a lesson from him on stilt walking. He said he’d think about it.

I had helped Rudi try out the stilts once before in the Opera House, when he had a walk-on as a Roman spear-carrier. We had been cleaning up after the show. He was still in his costume. I thrust the stilts into his hands and told him to get on them. They were short, only three quarters of a meter. He laid them on the floor, put his feet on the blocks, tied the straps tight and then sat there, dumbfounded, finally realizing there was no way for him to get up from the floor. He said: Albert, you bastard, take this wool out of my eyes. He unstrapped the stilts and kicked them across the room but then retrieved them and stood center stage, trying to figure it out. Finally I got a stepladder and talked him through how it was done. He stepped up to the top of the ladder, and I gave him the most important pointers. Never fall backwards. Keep your weight on your feet. Don’t look down. Lift your knee high and the stilt will follow.

I strung a rope across the stage at about armpit level so he could hold on to it if he fell. He tried to balance on the stilts at first, the hardest thing of all, until I told him that he needed to move and to keep moving.

He progressed precariously up and down the length of the rope, holding on most of the time.

When I was young, my uncle Majit used to practice in an abandoned silo just outside our village. He did it there because there was no wind and every other ceiling was too low for him. He had maybe twenty or thirty different pairs of stilts, all made from ash wood, ranging from half a meter to three meters. His favorites were the meter-high ones because he could bend down and talk to us children or rub the tops of our heads or shake our hands as we ran beneath him. He was the finest stilt walker I ever saw. He would build a new set and step onto them and right away find the sweet spot for balance. Within a day or two he’d be running on them.

The only time Uncle tumbled was when he was teaching us how to fall properly. Never backwards! he shouted, you’ll crack your skull open! And then he would start falling backwards himself, shouting, Never like this! Never like this!

As he was toppling, Uncle would switch his weight and turn the stilts and just at the last instant he would fall forwards instead, landing with his knees bent and sitting back on his heels. He was the only stilt walker I ever met who never even tweaked his collar bone.

I tried working with Rudi’s stilt technique over the last couple of evenings before he left, but his thoughts were elsewhere. Just the notion of going away was a walk in the air for him anyway.

I told him that if he looked out from the train he would see children beyond the fields, my nieces and nephews, their heads bobbing above the corn. And if he looked behind the station he might even see a group of them playing stilt soccer. Sit on the left-hand side of the train, I told him.

I’m sure he never did.

2 LENINGRAD, UFA, MOSCOW 1956–1961

The railway platforms were wet from the passengers’ shoes and their shaken umbrellas. The whole day seemed weighted under a subdued gray damp. Railway workers moved around in their dark boredom. A new symphony was being piped through the loudspeakers, some factory drill of cello and violin. I took a bench under the platform eaves and watched as a woman my age bid good-bye to two teenage children. I smoothed my dress, neither too solemn nor celebratory, trying all the time to imagine what he would look like.

My mother had sent me a photograph taken years before, while she was still teaching him in Ufa. He had the thin cheeky face of a peasant boy — high Tatar cheekbones, sandy hair, a cocked stare — but he was seventeen now and would surely look different. She said he was extraordinary and I would recognize him immediately, he would stand out from the crowd, he had even turned walking into a sort of art.

When the train finally arrived, pouring steam into the air, I stood and held out a hat that had once belonged to my father, a prearranged signal — it was patently absurd but I felt a vague thrill, waiting for a boy half my age to emerge out of the day. I scanned the crowd, but nobody matched his description. Walking through, I brushed against summer overcoats and suitcases, even went so far as to hail two young boys who, in their fear, thought I was an official and hurriedly showed me their papers.

The next train was not for another four hours, so I went out into a light rain. In front of the station someone had altered the face of Stalin, chipping out tiny, almost imperceptible pocks in the stone cheeks. The flowers beneath the statue had gone untended. The statue’s defacement was foolish of course, if not outright dangerous, but it was shortly before the ’56 Congress and we could already feel the thaw in Leningrad. It was as if a tiny crack had opened and light was spilling through, a cumulative light that would continue to spread, its existence becoming an undeniable fact of our lives. Black canvas tents stood over the tram tracks where they were being repaired. The price of radios had fallen. Shipments of oranges from Morocco were getting through — we hadn’t seen oranges in years. Buyers pushed at one another down by the Neva’s docks. Just a few months before, in an attempt to resuscitate desire, I had been able to buy my husband eight bottles of his favorite Georgian wine. We even had hot water piped into the apartment, and very late one night I had slipped into the bath with him, surprising myself, him even more so. For a while Iosif had brightened considerably, but when he finished the wine he revisited his policy of gloom.

Instead of waiting outside the station, I walked along the Neva, past the prison, down to the bridge, where I took a tram to the university. I rapped on my husband’s door to inform him of the situation, but he wasn’t in his office — probably working somewhere or dallying with one of the other physics professors. It was my first visit back to the university in quite a while, and there was a hollowness to the corridors as if I were walking through the belly of a drum that once formed the musical centerpiece of my life. I even toyed with the idea of going into the Linguistics Department, but I felt that it might rekindle old wounds, not salve them. Instead I dug an old pass out of the depths of my bag and put my finger over the expiration date so I could get into the canteen.

The food was grimier and more insipid than I remembered. The ladies behind the counter regarded me with a sort of disdain, and a man with a giant broom pushed bits of food and rubbish around the floor, moving slowly as if contemplating the deep mysteries of his sloth.

Feeling like an intruder into my former life, I left. Outside the sun had broken through the clouds and reefs of arctic light lay on the sky.

Back at Finlandia Station there was a hum and a bustle that had not existed earlier and the working men passed cigarettes back and forth. Inside, a huge banner hung from the ceiling, swaying in the breeze, a picture of Khrushchev folding and refolding into himself: Life has become better, life is more joyful. The sign had not been there earlier but it somehow made sense, illuminated by the sunlight from the windows.

I sat back down on a platform bench and waited, wondering what exactly it was my mother expected me to do with a seventeen-year-old country boy. In their letters they said they had been graced by Rudi — whom she affectionately called Rudik — but I had the feeling they were graced not so much by him as by the memory of what dance had once meant to them.

I had not grown up alongside my parents, and in truth, my time with them had wound itself on a modest spool. They were exiled in Ufa, but the foothold of their lives was in what they still called Petersburg — the palaces, the houses, the fencing duels, the sideboards, the inkwells, the Bohemian cut glass, the orchestra seats at the Maryinsky — but that had receded from them forever after the Revolution. My father had miraculously survived the purges over the years, arrested and rearrested, kept in different Siberian camps, finally deported to Ufa, where he and my mother were more or less left alone by the authorities. My mother had always insisted on living in towns close to my father and, for the sake of good schooling and an ancient family dignity, I was brought up by my maternal grandparents in Leningrad, took on their last name and patronymic. I married young, got a job in the university, and had seen my parents only a few times. Ufa was a closed city — industry, forestry, weapons manufacturing. It didn’t appear on maps and was an extremely difficult place for which to get a visa. And so my parents, although they never receded from my imagination or my affection, occupied dusty corners of my days.

I heard the whistle of another engine approaching the station and I dipped into my bag to take a quick look at his photograph.

The crowd from the Moscow train surged past. I felt momentarily like a upstream fish, flapping from side to side, waving my father’s hat in the air. Rudi did not show.

Alone and worried, I began to think I had slipped across a tiny line in my life. I was thirty-one years old, the author of two miscarriages. I still spent much of my time imagining my children at the ages they could have been. And now, with this young Tatar boy, I was saddled with the responsibility of being a parent without any of its joys — I fretted about whether something unfortunate had happened to him en route, if he’d lost our address, if he would have the wherewithal to find the tram, if he’d even arrive at all.

I left the station, cursing him, and returned to the heart of the city. I adored our crumbling room in the communal apartments along the Fontanka River. The walls were peeling. The corridors smelled of paint and cabbage. The window frames were rotted. And yet the place gladdened me. The ceilings were high and cornices were molded in the corners. The wood was dark and secretive, the door was intricately carved, and in summer the light streamed through the windows. I could hear the canal water when boats went by, waves splashing against the embankments.

For hours I sat at the window, watching the street. Finally Iosif came home, tie askew. He looked at me wearily.

He’ll get here, he said.

Iosif ate his dinner, went off to sleep with a grunt, and I thought of myself then as a piece of china — a single saucer, perhaps, or a lid — decorative and useless.

I paced the room, twelve steps from window to back wall, six steps across. I had deadlines for poems to translate but had neither the energy nor the inclination to tackle them. I gazed at myself in the mirror obsessively, held my face at different angles. A hard feeling of dislocation came over me. We don’t ever, I thought, grow sharper, clearer, or more durable. I had a feeling that any youth I once owned had dramatically fled from me. How piteous! How mournful! How ridiculous! I pinched my cheeks for color, pulled on my coat, and descended the rank stairwell, wandered the courtyard, hearing noises from neighboring apartments, laughter, anger, a stray piano note.

It was white nights, the pale blue of midnight, no moon, no stars, just a few clouds still straggling along. My father had once written to me saying that the stars were deeper than their darkness, and I stayed out for an hour pondering that line when a figure finally broke the shadow of the archway.

Rudi had not turned walking into an art at all. Instead he was slumped and his shoulders looked rounded. In fact he might as well have stepped out of a cartoon, hauling a suitcase tied with string, his hair sticking out at angles beneath a corduroy hat. He was quite thin, which accentuated his cheekbones, but when I moved up close I noticed that his eyes were complicated and blue.

Where’ve you been? I asked.

I’m honored to meet you, he replied, his hand outstretched.

I waited for you all day.

Oh, he said.

He cocked his head, gazed at me with a sideways innocence, testing my resolve. I came in on the morning train, he said. You must have missed me in the station.

Didn’t you see me holding the hat?

No.

I knew it was a lie, not even a good one, but I let it go. He hopped nervously from foot to foot, and I quizzed him on what he had done the rest of the day.

I went to the Hermitage, he said.

Why?

To look at the paintings. Your mother told me that to dance you have to be a painter too.

She did, did she?

Yes.

And what else did she say?

She said it’s a good idea to be a musician also.

She didn’t say that to be a dancer you have to get your timing right?

He shrugged.

Do you have a piano? he asked.

There was a hint of impishness at the edges of his eyes and I had to hold back a smile.

No, I said.

Just then another piano note wafted out from the fourth floor, and someone began to play Beethoven, quite beautifully. Rudi brightened, said perhaps he could meet the owner of the piano, convince them to let him practice.

I don’t think so, I replied.

He took the stairs two at a time, even with his suitcase. In our room I sat him down at the table and made him eat his dinner cold.

Your cooking’s better than your mother’s, he said.

I joined him at the table, where he flicked another quick smile at me before he buried himself in the food once more.

So you want to be a dancer? I asked.

I want to dance better than I already do, he said.

He had a fleck of cabbage on his teeth, and he scratched it off with his thumbnail. He seemed so young and vital and naïve. His upturned smile made him look sad somehow, which he wasn’t, not at all. The more I studied him the more I noticed his extraordinary eyes, huge, untamed, as if they were independent entities that just so happened to sit in his head, searching the apartment, scanning my record collection. He asked for some Bach, which I played low, and the music seemed to move through him as he ate.

You’ll sleep on the couch, I said. You’ll meet my husband in the morning. He’ll be up early.

Rudi stood and yawned, stretched his arms, went to the couch, leaving the dirty dish on the table. My back was turned, but I caught sight of him in a mirror as he undressed to his undergarments. He slid onto the couch, pulled the blanket high.

I love it, he said.

What?

This city. I love it.

Why’s that?

Oh don’t trust that Nevsky Prospect, it’s all lies and dreams, it’s not what it all seems! he said, quoting Gogol, surprising me.

Then he lay back with his arms behind his head and exhaled, long and happily. I drank my wine quickly, then stupidly burst into tears for no reason at all, which embarrassed him, so he turned away.

I watched him sleep.

I thought then of my parents, the few times I had met them. They had been comical together, my father just a little taller than my mother and almost as narrow in the shoulders. He had a gray mustache, wore old-time shirts with cuff links, and his trousers always hovered above his ankles. His body had been ruined from all the years in the camps — in Siberia he had chopped off his toe with an ax to prevent gangrene, so he walked with a limp. Losing his toe had in fact saved my father — in the camp infirmary he met a doctor who was also a poet. They secretly shared lines from the old masters and, in return, the doctor made sure my father was kept alive. My father was well-known in the camps for his ability to hear a line of poetry and never forget it and, even after he was released, he could recall things that ordinarily would have whittled away. But his heart was weak from all the punishment, and his foot gave him tremendous trouble. Although a dreadful insomniac, he maintained a defiant cheerfulness, as if to say, You have not broken me. My mother, too, had retained her beauty through the years, her body still taut from years of ballet, her hair in a tight bun, eyes bright and lively. They had a remarkable regard for each other, my parents — even at their age they still held hands.

I looked at Rudi tossing on my couch, thinking that he was the secret now joining them together. And yet I didn’t feel jealous. I suppose one finally learns, after much searching, that we really only belong to ourselves.

I was still awake when the white night integrated itself into the morning. My deadlines for the Institute of Translation still gnawed at me, three Spanish sestinas so complicated that I doubted I could arbitrate their elegance. After breakfast I took a tram and carted my self-pity to the countryside, to a place I had gone since I was a child. There was a peculiar spot where the river seemed to bend itself against the land — it was a trick of the eye but the water seemed to go uphill. A grassy bank was filled with wildflowers and a trio of willow trees bent down to the river. I have always liked the tactile feel of standing, fully clothed, in running water. I went in up to my thighs, then lay on the riverbank and let the sun dry me off. I shaped one of the poems and set it in order, the six incanted words working haphazardly for me: faithful, dead, candle, silence, nighthawk, and radiance. When I had achieved a modicum of success, I closed my notebooks and swam in my underwear.

In truth I was still attractive then, having taken on my mother’s body, her dark hair, her fair skin, my father’s pale eyes.

I stayed by the river until late and when I arrived home my friends were already gathered around the table by the window, chatting seriously in the guarded language we shared. This was the normal routine — Monday nights were generally spent in the company of scientists and linguists I’d been friendly with since university. The evenings weren’t so much a salon—the word disturbs me, reeking as it does of the unmistakeably bourgeois — more a simple relief, all cigarettes and vodka, philosophy, invective and half words. Larissa was a professor of French. Sergei, a botanist. Nadia, a translator. Petr dabbled in the philosophy of science, ranting about Heisenberg and the inherent uncertainty of our lives — he was the sort of red-faced bore who could sometimes shore up an evening. I was vaguely in love with another Iosif, a tall blond-haired linguist who, when he got drunk, would switch to Greek. My husband didn’t participate at all, staying late most nights at his university office.

I entered the room quietly and watched a small drama unfolding at the table. Rudi was listening to the conversation, chin on his hand, somewhat taken aback, as if he’d just been presented with a great amount of words to swallow. The discussion centered on a new play reviewed in Pravda to great acclaim for its portrayal of striking workers in pre-Revolutionary Hungary. The talk spun on the phrase “linguistic dualism,” a term that had occurred quite often in recent reviews, though its meaning seemed nebulous to everyone but Petr. I pulled up a chair and joined the group. Rudi had opened a bottle of my husband’s vodka and had poured for everyone at the table, including a glass for himself. He looked close to being drunk. At one stage he leaned and touched my hand and said: Great!

When the evening finished he spilled out into the night with my friends and came home three hours later — Iosif had already returned and gone to sleep — saying, Leningrad Leningrad Leningrad!

He started dancing and looked as if he was checking the span of his wings. I let him be, moving around him to clean the dishes. Before I went to bed he shouted at the top of his voice: Thank you, Yulia Sergeevna!

It was the first time I ever remembered being called after my father, since I had always used the patronymic of my grandfather. I climbed beneath the covers and turned away from Iosif, my heart beating. My father’s visage swam in front of my eyes and, in my fitful sleep, an idea for the last line of the sestina resurfaced. The next morning the other two sestinas came to life so effortlessly that their underlying politics — the poet was a Marxist from Bilbao — seemed a significant accident. I put them in an envelope and brought them to the institute, where money was awaiting me. I bought some Turkish coffee and returned home, where Rudi was waiting, despondent. His first day of dancing had not gone well. He drank three coffees and went outside to the courtyard — from above, looking down, I watched him practice around the ironwork fencing.

All that week Rudi auditioned at the school and at night he wandered the city, sometimes coming back as late as three in the morning — it was white nights after all, nobody slept — talking about the beautiful palaces, or a vendor he had met outside the Kirov, or a guard who had swung a suspicious eye on him on Liteiny Prospect. I tried to warn him, but he shrugged me off.

I’m a country bumpkin, he said. They’re not interested in me.

There was something unusual in the clipped way he talked, a curious cocktail of rural arrogance and sophisticated doubt.

At the very end of the week I was hanging laundry in the communal kitchen when I heard my name being called from below. Yulia! I looked out the small window to see him in the rear courtyard, perched high on the ironwork fence, balanced precariously.

I got it! he shouted. I’m in! I’m in!

He jumped from the fence and landed in a puddle and ran towards the stairwell.

Clean your shoes! I shouted down.

He grinned and wiped his shoes with the cuff of his shirt, ran up the stairs to hug me.

I found out later that he had talked his way into the Leningrad Choreographic as much as he had danced. His level was still just high average, but they liked his fire and intuition. He was much older than most students, but the birth rate had dropped so significantly during the war that they were willing to audition dancers his age, even give them scholarships. He was to stay in a dorm with mostly eleven- and twelve-year-olds, which horrified him, and he pleaded with me to let him come along to my Monday evening gatherings. When I said yes, he took my hand and kissed it — he was, it seemed, already learning Leningrad.

After two weeks he had packed his case and was gone to the school dorms.

Iosif made love to me the evening Rudi left, and afterwards he padded across to the couch where he lit a cigarette and said, without turning in my direction: He’s a little shit, isn’t he?

All at once it felt as if my mother and father were surrounding me, and I turned to the pillow, said nothing.

It was almost three months before Rudi arrived back. He strolled in with RosaMaria, a girl from Chile. She was the sort of beauty who took the oxygen from the air. She wasn’t consumed by her own attractiveness but managed instead to carry it like an afterthought. Her father was the editor of a newspaper in Santiago, and she was at the Leningrad Choreographic to learn dance. Rudi, perhaps by virtue of being with her, looked different already. He was wearing a long army coat and boots to his knees, and his hair had grown longer.

RosaMaria laid a guitar case in the corner and took a seat in the background while Rudi sat at the table, listening, hunched over a small glass of vodka. Larissa, Petr, Sergei, Nadia and I were all quite drunk and deep into an interminable debate about Heidegger, who had suggested that life becomes authentic when lived in the presence of death. For me the debate seemed to relate ultimately to our lives under Stalin, but I also couldn’t help thinking of my father, who had lived his life in the shadow not only of his own death but of his former history too. I flicked a look at Rudi. He yawned and filled his glass again with a sort of theater, holding the bottle high in the air, so there was a deep splash against the side of the glass.

Petr turned and said: So then, you, young man, what do you think is authentic and inauthentic?

Rudi slurped his vodka. Petr pulled the bottle away and held it close to his chest. Around the table there was a quick blur of laughter. It was a delightful little showdown between a tired middle-aged man and a boy. I figured that Rudi would never be able to handle Petr, but he picked up two spoons, rose quickly, pushed his way past the rubber plants to the door, beckoned us all to follow. The simple strangeness of his action silenced us, although RosaMaria smiled as if she knew what was in store.

Rudi made his way down the corridor to the bathroom and sat down in the empty bathtub.

This, he said, is authentic.

He began to bash the spoons against the porcelain, reaching different notes where the bath curved, with longer, hollower notes at the base of the tub, higher notes where the spoons met the rim. The taps rang high metallic twangs, and then he reached to hit the spoons against the wall. He held his face perfectly serious, banging out a series of sounds that had no form or rhythm at all. It was pure circus.

Johann Sebastian Bach! he said.

He stopped and we launched into a drunken round of applause. Petr was momentarily shell-shocked but rescued himself admirably — instead of stalking away, he went to the bathtub, bottle in hand, poured a long measure of vodka down Rudi’s throat.

Together they finished the bottle, and then Petr held it above Rudi’s head and said: May you have as many troubles as there are drops left in this bottle.

I do not wish to get wet, laughed Rudi.

The evening grew wilder and drunker. We ate bread with horseradish sauce — it was all we could find — until a friend of Petr’s arrived with three hard-boiled eggs to share. RosaMaria took her guitar from its case and sang Spanish songs in a dialect I didn’t entirely recognize. Rudi went around the room with a metal saucepan, and he hammered on the woodwork, the tiles, the floor, the sink, until the neighbors began complaining.

Just at that moment Iosif came home. I met him at the door, shouted: Let’s dance! He shoved me away and I slammed into the wall. The room went silent.

Iosif yelled: Get the fuck out of here! Everyone! Get the fuck out!

My friends looked at me and began to stub out their cigarettes in the ashtrays in slow motion, not quite sure what to do. Out! shouted Iosif. He grabbed Rudi by the collar and dragged him into the corridor. Rudi was astounded, his eyes wide. But RosaMaria stood in front of my husband and — simply by keeping her eyes locked on his — she made him stare at the floor. Finally Iosif went downstairs to the courtyard, to smoke, chagrined.

The night began again. I was aware that something extraordinary had just happened, that RosaMaria had shifted a small axis in my life, if only temporarily, and I gave her a silent inner curtsy.

She returned the next evening, accompanied by Rudi. He made himself immediately at home, talking animatedly about a myth he had read in his world literature class that day. It had to do with the Indian god, Shiva, who had danced within a circle of fire. He and RosaMaria were arguing about whether the act of dance was one of construction or destruction, whether if by dancing you made a work of art or you broke it down. Rudi maintained that you built a dance from the bottom up, while RosaMaria believed that the dance was there to be torn apart, that each move was an entry into the dance until it lay all around in separate, splendid parts. I watched them, not so much with regret but as a mirror unto myself and Iosif ten years previously, remembering how we once had talked of physics and language in the same dark and concentrated manner. They held court together until Larissa came over and the talk veered off into science, the theory of uncertainty again, which clearly annoyed the young dancers.

When Iosif returned he actually sat at the table with everyone, and didn’t say a word, all polite resignation. He looked closely at RosaMaria, her dark hair, her wide smile, but then he pulled a chair next to me, even lit my cigarette. Iosif pronounced Chile to be his favorite country even though he had never been, and I sat pondering how rich I would be if every piece of horseshit that came from my husband’s mouth could be turned into a sliver of gold.

RosaMaria began visiting more and more, even without Rudi. I was aware that she was probably being watched, given that she was a foreigner. There was an intermittent clicking on my telephone. We turned the music loud in case the place was bugged, but really there was nothing extraordinary about our conversations anyway. She told me about Santiago, for which she was dreadfully homesick. I had, years before, translated some Chilean poetry and had imagined doorways, lean dogs, vendors of saints, but the country she talked of was all cafés, jazz clubs, long cigarettes. She spoke as if there were a tambourine in her throat. She loved dancing for the act of it rather than the art and so she was miserable at the school, where she felt that a rigidity was being forced into her. She had to wear skirts all the time and said that she had brought a pair of tight orange pants from Santiago — the notion of it made me laugh — and she was itching to wear them just once. The only person who kept her sane, she said, was Rudi, simply because he allowed himself to be Rudi. He was in constant trouble in school, especially with Shelkov, the school director. He refused to cut his hair, fought in rehearsals, put pepper in the dance belts of rivals. By all accounts he excelled in the classes he liked — literature, history of art, music — but he detested the sciences and anything else that didn’t suit his rhythm. He had stolen stage makeup, eyeshadow and a glaring rouge, and had worn it around his dorm. She said he had no respect for the other dancers but he adored his teacher, Aleksandr Pushkin, who had taken him under his tutelage. RosaMaria mentioned rumors that others had seen Rudi late at night, walking near Ekaterina Square, where perverted men were rumored to meet, a notion that didn’t seem to bother her, which surprised me, since it had seemed they were wearing each other like outfits.

We’re not in love, she told me one afternoon.

You’re not?

She raised her eyebrows, making me feel like I was twenty years old, not her.

Of course not, she said.

With RosaMaria I began to feel that I had once again opened myself to the world. We brewed coffee late into the night. She tutored me in Chilean dialects and wrote out old ballads, which I translated — she knew more love songs than anyone I’d ever met. Through her connections I managed to get my hands on a new gramophone. I read whatever I could find, Gorky, Pushkin, Lermentov, Mayakovsky, Mao, a Theodore Dreiser novel, Mitchel Wilson, Dante’s Inferno, Chekhov, even reread Marx, of whom I was very fond. I took on some more work with the institute and went on long walks with RosaMaria.

Every few months I sent my traditional package to my parents, including a letter to tell them that Rudi was doing just fine, progressing in his classes, that he had found a teacher who understood him.

My father replied, in the simple code we used, that the fruitcake hadn’t nearly as many raisins as usual, meaning of course that the letter was scant. He said that Ufa was gray under gray under yet more gray, and that he and my mother would desperately like to make a trip away from the city.

He wondered if I could pull any strings — Saint Petersburg, he wrote, had always been famous for its puppetry.

You see him on Rossi Street with his boots high on his calves and his long red scarf trailing the ground behind him; you see him with his collar turned up, his hands deep in his pockets, his shoes tipped with metal so that they raise a spark; you see how he stands in the canteen line with his head slightly angled as if he is dealing with a wound; you see him receive an extra ladle of soup from the canteen woman with the black hairnet; you see him lean over the counter and touch her hand, whispering, making her laugh; you see, when he lifts the flap of his shirt to clean his spoon, that his stomach has flattened and tightened; you see him eat quickly and wipe a rough hand across his mouth; you see the canteen woman watching him as if she has found her own long-lost son.

You see him in the attic studio, in the morning light, earlier than anyone else, intuiting a move that has taken you three days to learn; you see him jostling in the corridors wearing your brand-new leggings and when you confront him he says, Screw a horse; you see him without his modesty shorts; you see him preening; you see him elbowing forward to front and center, where he can properly look in the mirror; you see him counting impatiently as he watches others moving through their combinations; you see him drop a partner because she is a shade too slow and he doesn’t help her up, though she is crying and her wrist might be sprained, and he goes to the high window to yell Fuck! out over Theater Street; you see him through the winter and the summer and each time he appears larger to you and you are at a loss to explain what is happening.

You see him dye his white slippers black and sew on buttons so that they look different to everybody else’s; you see him take your dance belt, but you don’t say a word until he returns it filthy, and you ask him to wash it but he tells you to go take a shit and put your face in it; you see him the next day and tell him you want the belt washed and he says, You miserable Jewboy; you see him walk away chuckling; you see him when he passes you on the street without even moving his eyes in your direction and you think maybe he is a little mad or lonely or lost, and then suddenly he is dashing across the avenue towards the Chilean girl, who has opened her arms to him, and within seconds they are running along the street together; you see them go, you feel empty, foiled, until you decide you will open up to him, you will become his friend, and so you join him in the canteen but he says he is busy, he has something important to do, and immediately goes to the woman behind the counter; you see him chat and laugh with her and you sit there glaring, wanting to ask him if he ever met anyone he likes better than himself, but you already know the answer so you do not ask.

You see him taken under Aleksandr Pushkin’s wing; you see him reading constantly because Pushkin has told him that to be a great dancer he must know the great stories and so, in the courtyard, he bends over Gogol, Joyce, Dostoyevsky; you see him curl into the pages and you think that he has somehow become part of the book, and you think that whenever you read that book in the future you will be reading him.

You see him and ignore him but somehow begin to think of him even more; you see him tear a ligament and you delight in the news but then you watch him dance and you wonder if your hatred helped heal his ankle; you see him before class practice Kitri’s variation, his feet in half high-pointe, everyone staring in amazement, he is dancing a woman’s role and even the girls wait around to watch; you see him studying the original Petipas, getting to know them inside out so he can show you any combination with his hands, the hands themselves a complicated ballet, tough and fluid; you see him respond to Pushkin with silence and respect, you even hear him call Pushkin by the familiar name of Sasha; you see him haul the other students short when they miss a step and you see the way he accepts their stares, their shouts, their small hatreds; you see him stride into the office and call the director a fool and you see him step away from the outrage smiling; later you see him weeping uncontrollably for he is sure he will be sent home and later again you see him doing a handstand outside the director’s office, an upside-down grin on his face, until Pushkin emerges, having saved him once again from expulsion.

You see him refuse the Komsomol because it interferes with his training, something nobody has ever done before, and he is brought before the committee, where he leans across the table to say, Excuse me, comrades, but what exactly is political naïveté?; you see him nod and apologize, move away down the corridor, cackling to himself, never to attend the meetings anyway; you see him in the library copying the musical scores, the dance notations, his shirt splattered with ink; you see him rushing to the master’s rehearsal simply to watch and afterwards he moves his body to the memory of the dance; you see him doing what you used to do; you see him doing it better than yourself and then you see that he does not need to do it at all because it has become him; you see him lurking in the wings at the Kirov; you see the older dancers beckon to him; you see him feigning no emotion at the bulletin board when he is given the role you always wanted.

You see him everywhere, on the footbridge over the canal, on the benches in the Conservatory park, on the embankment down by the Winter Palace, in the sun outside the old Kazan Cathedral, on the grass of the Summer Gardens; you see his black beret, his dark suit, his white shirt, no tie, and he haunts you, you cannot shake him; you see him walking with Pushkin’s wife, Xenia; you see the way she looks at him, you are sure she is in love with him, you have heard rumors, but you’re convinced that it’s impossible; you see Pushkin himself say he might one day go straight to the Kirov as a soloist, even though you know — you know! — you are a better dancer, and you wonder where you went wrong, when it was that you slipped, because your technique is better, you are more accomplished, more sophisticated, you have a better line, your dance is cleaner, you know there’s something missing, you’re not sure what it is, you are scared and ashamed and you hate when people say his name; and then one day you see him — in class, in the hallway, in the canteen, in the fifth-floor rehearsal rooms, it doesn’t matter — and you believe you are seeing yourself, you want to move but you can’t, your feet are nailed to the floor, the heat of the day rises through you, it will not stop, and you think you have stepped into an acid bath, the liquid is above you, below you, around you, inside you, burning, until he moves away and the acid is gone, you stand alone and you look down and realize how much of yourself has disappeared.

Shortly after getting my father’s letter, I began to go down to the Big House on Liteiny Prospect to see about the feasibility of getting a reprieve for his exile. My mother could have visited Leningrad by herself, but she refused to do so — she would have felt one-footed without him. Yulia, she wrote, I will bide my time. In the past I had tentatively inquired about the process of getting them out of Ufa, but it had been fruitless, yet now with the thaw firmly in place the possibility seemed stronger. I pondered that they wanted to spend time with Rudi more than with me, but it hardly mattered — the notion of a visit from them set my spirit echoing.

At the Big House there were gray faces at the partitions. The wooden counters were scratched and scored where people had leaned too heavily with their pens. The eyes of the guards were glassy as they fingered their rifles. I found out exactly which forms my father should fill in, what he should say, how he should present his case, and sent letters to him with all the exact instructions. Months passed, nothing happened. I knew my actions were dangerous, perhaps more perilous than anything I’d ever done — it felt as if I were hanging my heart outside my body, hardly clever. I wondered if I’d compromised everyone around me, even Iosif who, despite all, had even more to lose than I.

RosaMaria said that her own father, influential in Communist circles in Santiago, might be able to do something, but I thought it would be far wiser for her to remain outside the fray. It was quite possible that the bureaucracy would catch up on my history, carbon copies revealing truths far different from the originals, as in some dark European novel.

But almost nine months later — while I was doing a translation of a Spanish poem for the State Publishing House — I received a telegram:

I cleaned the room from floor to ceiling and bought whatever provisions I could find. Iosif made space by saying nothing.

When I arrived at the station they were sitting on the bench underneath the giant clock, having come in on an earlier train. At their feet was a giant wooden trunk with a crude lacquer pattern. The trunk was covered with labels, though most of the lettering had been scratched out. My father wore his hat, of course. My mother was in an old coat with a fur-lined collar. She was sleeping with her head against his shoulder, her mouth slightly open. My father touched the inside of her wrist, just beneath the sleeve, to waken her. She opened her eyes suddenly, shook her head. I went to hold her, and she felt unusually brittle.

My father rose from the bench, spread his arms wide and said in a loud voice: Look, I have been rehabilitated! Then he lowered his tone as if in conspiracy and added: Well, for three months anyway.

I scanned the station for guards, but it was empty. Mother shushed him, but he leaned towards her and said enigmatically: Until morning comes, we are not yet free of journeys.

My mother said: You and your poetry.

He grinned and pointed to the suitcase. Yulia, my darling, he said, carry us.

On the trolley bus he didn’t want to sit. Instead he clung to the pole with one hand and to his cane with the other. He grimaced as the bus moved, but his eyes darted around. Most of the time he seemed wounded — his city was largely lost after the Blockade and the rebuilding after the war — but every now and then he shut his eyes as if he were closing his whole self to a memory, and once he quietly whispered: Petersburg. His smile flickered, moving like a wavelength to my mother and then to me, so that his memory had a sort of domino effect.

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.

He had left the water tap dripping, and there was a gurgling from the pipes as if the sadness was in the throat of the building. I went outside and left him alone. The air was hard and raw. By the time I came back he had dressed her and put traditional coins on her eyes.

It was noticeably sunny the day we buried her. At Piskarovskoye we were given a plot in a copse of trees not far from the mounds of those who had died during the Blockade. Light slanted through the trees, midges rose from the bushes, small birds darned the air with their wings. There was little or no ceremony. It cost us three hundred rubles to bribe for the plot and another hundred for the ground to be dug. Nearby a man on a tractor was cutting the grass on the mass graves, beautifully tended to, ringed with red roses. He respectfully turned his engine off and waited.

My father held his hat to his chest, and I noticed the little graph of sweat stains that appeared inside the rim. How many years had he worn that one hat and how many times had she put it on his head? He shifted, coughed and said he didn’t feel in the mood for words but that, even in her leaving, my mother had left many signs that she had been here.

May her influence enter the air, he said.

With this he coughed a second time and gave the ground a little grimace, turned his face away.

In a distant corner, through the trees, I caught a glimpse of a Black ZIL limousine pulling up in the graveyard, flanked by a fleet of black cars. We were startled a moment, thinking there might be some important visitor, but then the cars pulled away to the far end of the graveyard and we were glad to be left alone.

Rudi and RosaMaria stood next to each other. At first Rudi held his lower teeth against his upper lip. I wanted to berate him, to slap him, to jog a tear from him, but eventually, and for no particular reason, he broke down and began to weep.

My father, for his part, threw a handful of dirt on the coffin.

When we turned to leave the small forest, I noticed that the man on the tractor had fallen asleep, but he had taken his hat off and it sat lightly in his lap, and I thought that my mother would have enjoyed such a moment.

Later that day we took my father to the train station.

I am going home to Ufa, he said.

There was irony of course in the way he said home, but it was where he had survived most of his years with her and there was an eloquence, if not a practicality, to his return. Iosif came with us to Finlandia Station. I asked for a moment alone with my father. I carried his suitcase through the crowd. Light came in shafts through the windows, falling on the grayness below. We stopped by a train window. An old woman in a headscarf glared at us. My father held me tight and whispered in my ear that I should be proud of myself, that I should do what pleased me, within reason of course. He touched my cheek and I sniffled stupidly.

Great billows of steam were suspended above the station, hanging there as they have always hung, as if to say that most of us spend our lives breathing in our breathed-out breath.

Music sheets, Bach and Schumann. Piano lesson, Mali Opera. Talk with Shelkov re military conscription. Special salts for bathing feet. Postcard for Father’s birthday. Scrounge portable radio. Shorten lunchtime for barre work on extension. Take empty room. Sasha: Perfection is the duty. Work work work. In difficulty is ecstasy.

Every day I count wasted in which there has been no dancing. Nietzsche. Yes! Elocution lesson. Visa for Moscow. Tell Shelkov to eat shit or to eat more shit than he already does, bring him a bucket and a spoon. Better still, ignore him completely, the ultimate victory. Shoes. Permit. Clothes cleaned for conservatory concert. The boy on the bus. Vigilance.

Sleep less. Morning routine. Take twice as long with each grand battement to build control and strength. Stand long in relevé for strength. Nine or ten on pirouette. Chaboukiani, I kiss your feet! Do cabrioles face-on to the mirror rather than sideways. Sasha: Live inside the dance. Out-think. Out-maneuver. Out-learn. Even the wig should be alive! Triple assembles tours. Work on phrasing. The others like to take a bite to see if I am gold or brass. Let them. They will break their teeth either way. L’Après-midi d’un faune. Estrade Guerra says that Nijinsky’s ballon was like seeing a hare wounded by the huntsman’s shot, rising before the fall. Nijinsky said it is not difficult to stay in the air, you just have to pause a little while up there. Ha! Anna was correct after all.

Sasha says much of the ballon came from the strength in Nijinsky’s back. Exercise: walk on hands to strengthen back muscles. Richter tickets. Boy at the Hermitage said he had contacts in the conservatory. Rumors about Xenia, but if you don’t try everything your life is wasted. Find name of Ukrainian poet who said that nothing will ever be good until you learn to drink champagne from your boots!

Pas de trois from Guyane with torches, second act pas de deux from Swan Lake, Corsaire duet with Sizova. Read Byron for texture. Ask RosaMaria to patch tights. Cut fingernails to stop scratching Masha while lifting. Tell P. to stop counting out the phrases, her lips move when she dances. The pas de deux is a conversation not a fucking monologue. Forget all this talk of F. as a rival. Bullshit. Become a toilet bowl and you will see better movement. Demand five dozen pairs of shoes and maybe you will get a dozen, use the best maker, the Georgian woman with the lisp. Haircut: slant parting? Gorky says that life will never be quite so bad that the desire for something better will ever be extinguished in men. Yes.

Cloth hat left in the changing room. Letter from Bashkirian Ministry. Nineteenth birthday party. Eugene Onegin. Tchaikovsky score. In Corsaire achieve Byron’s romanticism and defiance. Sasha: The greatest artists are born to enrich their art, not themselves. Toothbrush. Honey for tea.

Perform as if things have to be said all over again. Sasha says the known way leads us to the unknown. Also, it is the unknown way that will finally lead us back to what is known. You are a dancer for only a part of your life. The rest of the time you are walking around, thinking about it! Those assigned to watch me — ignore them and you will lose an eye, but bow to them and they will strike you blind.

Extra practice in Room 17. Fix radio and put in order for telephone. Degas exhibition — RosaMaria said he wakens the sleep in her. Photographs. Destroy Xenia’s letters.

There is a story my husband used to tell Rudi. He recounted it over and over, after classes, when they were both exhausted and we would sit, all three of us, by the fireplace in our courtyard apartment. Once or twice Rudi played the piano softly while Sasha talked. The story shifted and changed, but Sasha enjoyed the telling and retelling of it and Rudi, for his part, listened intently. Even long afterwards, when Rudi left our place for his own apartment — when Sasha and I were alone again — the story left its mark.

Dmitri Yachmennikov, my husband said, was a minor figure in the world of Leningrad ballet in the late nineteenth century. A thin little man, a patch of black hair on the dome of his head, given to eating shoots of asparagus, he was a choreographer in a hall north of Obvodnyi Canal. He worked closely with his brother Igor, who played the piano.

Together the brothers were kept alive by the good graces of the young dancers they worked with — at their door someone always left some bread so they never starved.

One late winter evening Dmitri’s brother died, slumping face forward into the piano. Shortly after the funeral Dmitri went blind. People said the double calamity was caused by the strong bond between the brothers — Dmitri had been shocked into blindness and nothing would ever heal him. He walked up and down the street from his house to the hall, seldom straying farther than the market for his bundles of asparagus.

Dmitri decided to continue his career in choreography since it was the only thing he knew. He returned to the hall, locked the door behind him. But he could no longer plot a dance — instead he crawled about on the floor on his hands and knees, feeling its texture, rubbing his hands over the grain of wood, sometimes even chafing his cheek against the boards. He brought in a number of local carpenters and quizzed them about the composition of the wood, the length and direction of the grain. Everyone thought him thoroughly mad.

He was seen walking home at night, the sprig of asparagus crooked in his mouth, feeling his way forward into the faintly lit doorway of his home.

On the anniversary of his brother’s death, Dmitri opened up the doors of the hall and invited local dancers in for an audition, explained to them what he wanted. The dancers were curious at first — the thought of a blind man telling them how to move seemed preposterous — but some began auditioning anyway. Instead of using his brother’s old piano Dmitri brought in a cellist and a violinist, and as they played, he sat in the front row. Finally he picked a group of dancers he wanted to work with. They rehearsed for several weeks, during which Dmitri said little, but then suddenly on a whim he started to scold them.

Without seeing them, he was able to tell that the timing in their pirouette was off, that a hip was not aligned with a shoulder, that a jump was at the wrong angle. The dancers were stunned — not so much because the choreographer was blind but by the fact that he was correct.

The show soon became a local success.

The story spread in the autumn of 1909, when an article appeared in a local gazette. Dmitri was invited to larger halls within the community, but he refused. He fought off offers from factories, schools, and finally even a teacher from the Kirov who was perplexed by Dmitri’s method. He did however organize one guest appearance for an aging dancer, Nadia Kutepova, whom his late brother had once adored. She came to the hall and performed a solo especially for Dmitri, with no audience present. On his insistence there was also no music in the hall. Outside a crowd waited to hear the result.

The pair came out after two hours, Dmitri’s arm hooked through the crook of her elbow.

When asked by the crowd how the dance had gone, Kutepova pronounced that under Dmitri’s tuition she had danced perfectly. He had given her direction to make every move exquisite and it was, she said, one of her finer performances.

For his part, Dmitri told the crowd that as Kutepova danced he had heard one of his brother’s symphonies being played in the hall, that through her body the music had emerged, and that by the time she was finished he could almost hear every note his brother had ever created.

Dmitri Yachmennikov had been listening to the floorboards.

It was a hot summer in Ufa, the city enveloped in smoke from the factories and ash blown in from the forest fires off the Belaya River. A thin film of soot lay on the benches in Lenin Park. I was finding it difficult to sit and breathe, so I finally plucked up the courage to spend the last of my money on the extravagance of the cinema.

Having not been there since Anna passed on, I thought I might be able to revisit her, twine a lock of her gray hair around my finger.

The Motherland cinema was located down Lenin Street, gone slightly to ruin, the beginnings of cracks in the magnificent facade, posters yellowing in their glass cases. Inside, fans on the ceiling were at full force in the heat. I hobbled in on my cane and, having forgotten my eyeglasses, sat close to the front.

Word had gotten around that Rudi was featured in the newsreel, and there was a noise in the air, his name being whispered by what presumably were old classmates, young men and ladies, some former schoolteachers. Yulia had written to say that in Petersburg young women had begun to wait outside the stage door to get a glimpse of him. She mentioned that he was even due to dance for Khrushchev. The thought was chilling and wonderful — the barefoot Ufa boy performing in Moscow. I chuckled, remembering the names Rudi had been called at school: Pigeon, Girlie, Frogface. All of that had been forgotten now that he was a solo Kirov artist — the arrogance had been taken from the air and put in the victory soup.

After the anthem the newsreel came on. He was featured dancing the Spaniard in Laurencia. The sight of him was an acute but pleasing thorn. His hair was dyed black for the role, and his makeup was garish. I found myself holding Anna’s hand, and midway she leaned over to me. Rudi was being savage and exotic, she said. He was bringing a flagrant ruthlessness to his idea of dance. She whispered urgently that he was altogether too flamboyant, that his feet weren’t pointed well, his line was slightly wrong, that he needed to cut his hair.

I thought: How wonderful — even as a ghost Anna didn’t hold back.

I recalled the last time I had seen him, at Anna’s funeral, the look on his face that his gift was no longer a surprise. Now he seemed generations removed from the boy with the runny nose who had stood outside the Ufa Opera House, bruises above his eye, feet turned out.

The newsreel ended. I felt faintly nostalgic and dozed briefly in my seat before being awakened by some crude Western fare, Tarzan, the main feature of the day. I went out into the last of the sunlight. The sun had baked potholes in the dirt roads. Ravens were out pecking around the shriveled weeds. In the distance the forests flared orange. A cello was being played in a tower block along Aksakov. I turned onto my street, almost expecting to meet Rudi, his younger self, with Anna trailing behind.

I had forgotten provisions, but there were a few leftovers in the room, potatoes and cucumbers. The stylus on the gramophone was worn down, yet it still managed a little scratch of Mozart.

Remembering Anna’s old trick, I dented the pillow. My prolonged wakefulness had in recent times become almost unbearable and so I was surprised upon waking in the morning, not at the fact that I was awake but at the novelty of having slept at all.

After four days of traveling, his mother arrives at the hotel where he is staying before his first performance in Moscow. Gray coat and headscarf. Exhausted, she goes to tiptoe and kisses him on the cheek. He takes her by the elbow, leads her past the heavy, velvet-colored armchairs; through the gauntlet of antique furniture. Her shoulder brushes lightly against the red drapes, and she recoils slightly. A chandelier casts light on the giant portraits of the Heroes of the Soviet Union. They enter the banquet room where, earlier, Premier Khrushchev gave a speech announcing the opening of the national student showcase.

At one end of the room, the remnants of the banquet are spread out on the table.

I danced at the reception, he says.

Where?

On the wooden platform down there. Nikita Sergeyevich saw me. He applauded. Who could believe it?

Look, she says.

Farida shuffles alongside the table: a splotch of beluga caviar on a starched white cloth; a plate with a touch of duck pâté rimed to it; the smell of sturgeon, herring, beef, truffles, wild mushrooms, cheeses; krendeli biscuits in their broken figures of eight; a single Black Sea oyster on a glistening tray. She lifts a slice of salted meat to her mouth, decides against it, moves on, noticing empty silver ice-buckets for champagne, crumbs on the floor, cigar ashes on the windowsill, cigarette butts, lemon wedges in empty glasses, bent and broken toothpicks, a display of red chrysanthemums in the center of the room.

Rudik? she says.

Yes?

She goes to the window, looks down at her boots, worn and salt-stained: Your father says he’s sorry he couldn’t be here.

Yes.

He wanted to be.

Yes.

That is all, she says.

Yes, Mother.

At the hotel exit a guard makes way for them as they step into the cold. He begins to skip down the street, the lining of his coat flapping. Farida smiles, quickens her step, feels a momentary lightness. Things spinning: snowflakes, boots, the chime of a distant clock. Watching people nearby, watching him, being watched.

Rudik! she says. Wait!

They spend the afternoon in his sister Tamara’s room close to Kolomenskoye Park. Tamara shares a room with a family of six. Her corner of the room is small, damp, filled with rubber plants, knickknacks, a fading print of a Tsiolkovsky, intricate rugs hung from nails. In piles on the floor she has arranged her books. The kitchen is dark and cramped. Recently her salary from the kindergarten has been curtailed and the shelves are empty. A heavy iron sits on the stove, beside the teakettle. No samovar. Down the corridor the toilet has overflowed, and the waft of it comes strong through the building.

Tamara makes tea and a fuss with a plate of biscuits.

This is like old times, she says.

She takes Rudi’s shoes and polishes them. Later she fingers his coat and asks him where he gets his clothes made. He shrugs.

The afternoon grows lengthy as the light slants through the windows.

I have something, says Rudi.

He reaches in his suit jacket pocket, leans across, and hands them tickets for the following night’s performance.

They’re good seats, he says, the best.

Mother and daughter scan the tickets.

More tea, he says to Tamara, and she immediately climbs to her feet.

The next evening, in the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, Farida and Tamara sit nervously as the seats fill up around and behind them. They gaze at the tiered chandeliers, the ornate cornicework, the gold carvings on the stems of the lamps, the magnificent curtain with repeating designs, hammers and sickles. As the dance begins their hands are clenched tight in their laps, but soon the women are gripping each other, amazed to see Rudi, not just the dance, but what he has become, whole and full and fleshed, patrolling the stage, devouring space, graceful, angry.

His mother leans forward in her plush velvet seat, awed and slightly frightened. This is my flesh and blood, she thinks. This is what I have made.

Yes! Chistyakova review from Theater Moscow, volume 42, 1959. “A dancer with excellent natural gifts.” “Captivating us with the swiftness of his dance tempi.” Sasha: When at first you do succeed try not to look astonished. Ha! Yes! Advice on how to handle the crowd — stand tall, fill out all the space with one huge sweep of the arm. Like a farmer in the field, he says, with his very last swipe at the hay. Or, more to the point, an executioner at the neck! See film shot by Lenikowski(?) Labrakowski(?) Photographs for mother. New shoes. Wigs to get washed. Tailor the coat so it is short, up around the hips, give further length to me, oh shit I wish legs could grow! Access to special stores. Get leather bag with good strap if possible. Maybe sponge-soled shoes and narrow trousers, if possible. Tobacco for Father, heater that mother mentioned. Something for RosaMaria, jewelry box perhaps.

He is told to hold position as if position is a thing that can ever be held on a floor like this, a sheet at his feet. He is in fifth, arms above his head. Earlier in the morning he landed hard on his ankle and can feel the throb of it now. The studio is bright and airy, light drifting in confident packets through the small windows. The photographer has a cigarette which seems to cling to his lower lip. He smells of smoke and bromide. Also, the acrid whiff of the flashbulbs as they break with each emission of light. He has to change each bulb when it breaks, unscrewing it from beneath the white umbrella, using a padded glove. Rudi has already asked the photographer why he is bouncing flash light into the natural light — it seems to him to have no logic — but the photographer said: You do your trade, comrade, I do mine.

Rudi remains in position, his ankle pounding with pain, thinking that if he did his trade, if he really did his trade, the camera itself would not be able to catch him. There are other photographs on the back of the wall, ranged in careful order, dated and tagged. Dancers all, captured benignly and formlessly, even the great ones, Chaboukiani, Ulanova, Dudinskaya. The photographer has brought his ignorance to the job and there is nothing more Rudi would like than to break the air with movement in the second before the flash erupts, create a blur on the film. The photographer is using a Lomo which, because of its black weight, is propped on a tripod and what stupidity to smoke while taking a photograph, but Rudi needs the photo for the Kirov, so he breathes in the pain. He is surprised by the ache, that by remaining still his body is more violently active, so he concentrates his rage on the photographer, more precisely on the series of fat rolls at his neck. The flash causes Rudi to blink, leaving a single bright image on his retina.

And again! says the photographer as he unscrews the bulb, pauses a moment to put a lighter to the end of the cigarette which has extinguished itself.

No, says Rudi.

Pardon me?

No more, he says.

The photographer smiles nervously. One more, he says.

No. You’re an imbecile.

The photographer watches as Rudi descends the stairs, his black hat at an angle, shading one side of his face. At the bottom of the stairs Rudi bends, checks the swelling on his ankle and loosens the bandage minutely. Without looking back he waves at the photographer who is leaning over the banister, incredulous.

Send them to me, shouts Rudi. If they’re no good I’ll eat them and shit them and return them to you in an envelope.

He walks to the studios of the Kirov, where he rehearses through the pain with the master class. An older dancer tries to edge him out from the mirror. Rudi fakes a fall and slams his shoulder into the dancer’s knee, half-whispers an apology, climbs back into his dance. There is a muttering in the room, but Rudi aligns himself in the mirror, hair down to his eyebrows, his shoulders muscled. In the middle of the floor he pirouettes beautifully. His partner, Sizova, gives a calm nod of her head, comes across and says: You’re injured, don’t show off.

Rudi nods and does the move again. At the window he sees Xenia, elegant in a beautiful coat and headscarf. He whisks his hand in the air, waving at her to go away. When she doesn’t he turns to the front of the studio where she can no longer see him.

Later, with Sizova he works on the finishing touches for a duet from Les Sylphides. His ankle swells further but he dances through the pain, plunging it in a bucket of cold water at the end of the three hours. Then he rises again and puts in an extra half hour. Sizova watches the mating ritual in the mirror, not so much with himself as with the dance. Too exhausted to practice any more, she tells him she must leave to get a few hours’ sleep.

As she goes down the corridor she passes Xenia smoking on the steps, her long blond hair covering her face, her eyes red and swollen.

Far behind, in the rehearsal room, she can still hear Rudi cursing to himself: Your legs are still not long enough, asshole.

When I was a young girl in Santiago, there were games my brothers and I played when the day of the dead came around. My mother would fix up a basket of bread and corn fritters. We’d walk, with my father and brothers, to the cemetery, where other families had already lit up candles in the darkness. Hundreds of people crowded the graveyard. We had a humble family tomb under the oaks. The adults drank cheap rum and told stories. My parents talked of dead grandmothers who had baked wedding rings into bread, grandfathers who had held their breath in underwater caves, uncles who had received signs in their dreams. We, the children, played at the vaults. I put my favorite dolls on tombs and my brothers rode around on stick horses. Later we lay down on the cool stones and played at being dead. Even then, at the age of seven, I wanted to dance. On the tombs I sometimes thought I could feel the satin against my feet. It was the only night of the year we were allowed in the cemetery — our parents watched and made hot chocolate for us, and later we fell asleep in their arms.

It all returned to me like a dream on my last night in Leningrad.

A small farewell party had been held at a function room in the Kirov, hors d’oeuvres and Russian wine that tasted vaguely like hand lotion. My room was three kilometers from the Kirov but, instead of getting the tram, I walked, taking it all in, following the curve of the canals, a final gesture to the city. It was a warm white evening. Three years in skirts. I wore my orange pants. Girls giggled and waved. The wine had made my head a little woozy. The straight lines of the architecture were gone, the palaces were blurry, the wide streets narrowed, and the bronze statues of the Anichkov bridge seemed to sway. I hardly cared. My spirit was already home in Chile.

When I got to the apartment block I ran up the stairs. Inside, Rudi was sitting on my bed, cross-legged.

“You left the door open,” he said.

He had been at the party earlier and had already said a theatrical good-bye, but I wasn’t surprised to see him. My bags were packed but he had opened them, removed the copies of Dance magazine that had beaten the censors, and they were spread out on the bed, open to pictures of London, New York, Spoleto, Paris.

“Make yourself at home,” I said.

He grinned and asked me to take out my guitar. He sat, then, on the floor with his head against the bed, his eyes closed, listening. I thought of Mama, the way she, had sung to me at night beneath the murraya branches. She said to me once that a bad voice came from a good life, a good voice came from a bad life, but that a great voice came from a confusion of both.

After his favorite song Rudi stepped across to me. My head was still spinning from the wine and he put his finger to my lips, took the guitar from me, laid it against the wall.

I said, “Rudi, no.”

He touched the buttons on my cardigan, circled them with his finger, his fringe of hair against my forehead. He ran his hands across my waist, moved his fingers up my arms and on to my shoulders, his touch uneasy yet precise. I laughed and slapped his hands away.

“You’re leaving,” he whispered.

My buttons were open. His hands rested on my back and his legs trembled against mine. I had not slept with anyone since my arrival in Russia. I bit my tongue, pushed him away. Rudi gasped and lifted me, put his mouth to the ridge of my collarbone, thrust me against the wall. I slipped against his shoulder, caught the scent of him, said: “Rudi, no.”

I turned my face to his. “We’re friends.”

His mouth touched my earlobe. “I have no friends.”

“Xenia,” I whispered.

He drew back sharply from me. I hadn’t meant to invoke her, the name had slipped off my tongue. I immediately felt sober. He had been sleeping with Pushkin’s wife for a while but the affair had ended abruptly. Although Rudi had dismissed her, she still watched him rehearse, cooked for him, cleaned his clothes, attended to his whims.

He went to the window, his hands cupped low, embarrassed by his arousal.

I laughed nervously, not meaning to shame him, but he stepped backwards and slammed his fist into the wall.

“For this I missed rehearsal,” he said.

“For this?”

“For this.”

He was so close to the window his breath steamed the glass.

At the bathroom sink I poured cold water on my face. He was still at the window when I returned. I told him to leave and come back when he was Rudi once more, his ordinary self. He had his own apartment now, eight streets away. But he didn’t budge. The child in him seemed to reflect off the glass while he watched me in his own reflection. He had often told me that he loved me, that he’d marry me, that we’d dance together around the world — it had become our joke in the few moments when we found ourselves with little to say, but now the silence parted us.

He pouted in a charming way and I thought about the days we had spent together: massaging each other’s feet, skating, sunbathing by the canals, the evenings with Yulia. Perhaps the wine was still in me, I don’t know, but finally I said to him, “Rudi, come here.”

He turned on his toes, brushing his feet as if in ronde de jambe. “What?”

“Come, please.”

“Why?”

“Unbind my hair.”

He waited, fidgeted, then came across to remove the clips, fumbling and tentative. He held the weight of my hair and let it drop. I pressed against him, kissed him, my mouth filled suddenly with his breath. I whispered that he could stay with me until morning, or until 9.30 A.M. exactly, before I left for Pulkovo Airport, to which he smiled and said that his head had run rudderless thinking of me and we should sleep together, yes, make love, since we would never see each other again, spoken like hard fact or the first piano note of the morning.

His eyes were intense and narrow as if a phonograph needle had stopped just at the point of a trumpet blast.

His hands slipped down my spine, drew me against him, his fingers then at the small of my back, my hips, my thighs, moving slowly. I arched and closed my eyes. He yanked hard at the back of my hair, pulled me closer, but then all of a sudden he turned his face to the pillow and remained motionless.

“Sasha,” he said into the pillow.

He began to say Pushkin’s name over and over again. I knew then that we would not make love. I stroked his hair and the night thickened, we pulled a blanket over us, the sensation of our toes touching. He fell asleep with his eyelashes fluttering and I wondered, What dreams?

I awoke during the night, disoriented. Rudi was sitting on the floor, naked, his feet curled into his stomach, staring at photographs, finally noticing me, gazing up, pointing at a picture of Covent Garden, saying: “Look at this.”

He was studying a picture of Margot Fonteyn in her dressing room, her hair pinned back, her face serious, her eyes deliberate. “Look at her! Look at her!”

I propped myself up and asked if he had thought about the Pushkins during the night, if they’d appeared in his dreams, but he dismissed me with a wave, said he didn’t want to talk of trivialities. He immersed himself in the pictures once more. Feeling useless, I patted the bed. He climbed in beside me and began crying, kissing my hair, saying, “I’ll never see you again, RosaMaria, I’ll never see you, I’ll never see you, I’ll never see you.”

For the rest of the night we slept beside each other, arms entwined.

In the morning we left the room, carrying my suitcases. Outside a man in a dark suit was sitting on the low wall, smoking. When he saw us he stood up nervously. Rudi went over to him, whispered something in his ear. The man stuttered and swallowed, eyes wide.

Rudi started leaping down the street.

“I don’t give a shit!” he said. “Fuck them! All I want to do is dance! I don’t care!”

“Rudi,” I said. “Don’t be foolish.”

“Fuck caution,” he said.

He was going soon to Vienna to perform at the Stadthalle, and I said they would surely withdraw permission for the trip if he kept drawing attention to himself.

“I don’t care,” he said. “All I care about is you.”

I looked at him to see if this was just another of his mood swings, but it was hard to tell. I told him I loved him, that I’d never forget him. He took my hand, kissed it.

We put my bags into a taxi. The driver recognized Rudi from a performance of Les Sylphides the previous week and asked for an autograph. Fame fit Rudi like a curious coat, new but oddly snug. In the taxi he closed his eyes and rattled off the street names as we passed them, each note in the right place. I kissed his eyes. The driver coughed as if in warning. Behind us a car was trailing.

At the terminal in Pulkovo there was a group to see me off. I felt light-headed, blissful at the thought of returning home — already I was taking the white dustcloths off the mirrors and the furniture. I could taste the dust in the room.

Yulia was at the airport in all her loveliness. She smiled her subversive smile. Her long dark hair was draped around her shoulders. I had given her some clothes a few days before, and she was wearing a bright purple blouse of mine, which set off her dark skin, her eyes. Her father had written a letter from Ufa and in it had enclosed a small note for me. He said I’d made his wife, Anna, happy with my spirit when we met and that he appreciated my attendance at her funeral. At the very end of the letter there was a rather oblique reference to the deserts of Chile — he said he had always wanted to see the Atacama, where it had not rained in four hundred years, and if I ever got there I should throw some earth in the air in his honor.

I kissed Yulia good-bye, shook hands with the others.

My flight was to Moscow and then onward to Paris and then New York, where I was to make the final leg to Santiago. I wanted to say a final farewell to Rudi but he had disappeared. I pushed through the pockets of people, called his name, but he was nowhere to be seen among the passengers and guards. I called his name again and still he did not show. I turned towards the glass wall that led to passport control.

Just then I caught a glimpse of the top of his head, distant in the crowd. He was engaged in serious and animated conversation with someone — at first I was sure it was the man who had been spying on us, but then I saw it was another young man, dark-haired, handsome, with an athlete’s body and a pair of denim jeans, a rarity in Leningrad. The young man was touching Rudi gently on the inside of the elbow.

The call for my flight came through the loudspeakers. Rudi strode across and hugged me, whispered that he loved me, that he could hardly live without me, he would be lost, yes, rudderless, please come back soon, he would miss me terribly, we should have made love, he was sorry, he did not know what he would do without me.

He looked around over his shoulder. I turned his face back to mine and he smiled, a strange and chilling charm.

Incident Report, Aeroflot, Flight BL 286,

Vienna-Moscow-Leningrad, March 17, 1959.

Due to circumstances beyond the airline’s control, there were no meal or beverage carts provided for this flight. Passengers were so advised at the airport. Upon boarding, however, the Subject, a People’s artist, was noticed to be carrying a case of champagne. The Subject at first seemed to exhibit a severe fear of flying but then became rowdy, complaining about the lack of food and beverages. Midway through the flight, unbeknown to flight attendants, he took a bottle, shook it, and sprayed the contents around the cabin. The Subject then walked the aisles, offering champagne to passengers, pouring the alcohol into paper cups. The champagne soaked through the paper cups and leaked. Fellow passengers complained about wet seats and clothes. Others began singing and laughing. The Subject took out additional bottles from the same case. When confronted he used foul language. The Subject remarked that it was his twenty-first birthday and began gesticulating and shouting about being a Tatar. Late in the flight the plane hit turbulence and many of the passengers experienced bouts of violent sickness. The Subject seemed increasingly frightened but continued to shout and sing. When asked to calm down by representatives of the ballet company with whom he was traveling he used another epithet and sprayed the final bottle of champagne around the cabin just prior to landing. After the landing in Moscow a warning was issued and the Subject calmed. On disembarking in Leningrad he made a comment to the Captain of the flight, the nature of which remained undisclosed. Captain Solenorov reported in sick for the return flight.

He goes to the edge of the bed, pulls his shirt over his head, undoes the button at the top of his trousers, stands naked in the light. He says to the pilot: Close the curtains, keep the light on, make sure the door is locked.

Late at night in Ekaterina Square, in the antique dust of Leningrad, when the streetlamps were turned off to save power and the city was quiet, a scatter of us would come from different parts of the city to walk beneath the row of trees on the theater side of the park. Quietly. Furtively. If stopped by the militia we had our papers, the excuse of our jobs, insomnia, our wives, our children at home. Sometimes we were beckoned by those we didn’t recognize, but we knew better, we moved quickly away. Cars passed on Nevsky, catching us in their headlights, obliterating our shadows, and it seemed for a moment that our shadows had been taken for questioning. We imagined ourselves on the jump seat of a Black Maria, whisked away to the camps for being the goluboy, the blue boys, the perverts. The arrest, if it came, would be swift and brutal. At home we kept a small bag packed and hidden, just in case. The threat of it should have been enough: forests, mess cans, barracks, bunks, plank beds, five years, the crack of metal on frozen wood. But there were nights when the square was silent and we waited in the fog, stood against the fence, and smoked.

A tall thin boy picked at the springs of his watch with a penknife, carving time. The watch was on a chain, and he let it swing to his hips. Two brothers arrived each Thursday from the pedestrian underpass, fresh from the factory baths, their dark hair preceding their scuffed shoes. An old veteran stood under a tree. He was able to whistle many of the great Liszt rhapsodies. He was known to say aloud: Why earn your joy only when you are dead? He continued until morning, when the distant sound of the river steamers whistled him out. Sometimes the curtains of the rooms across the square opened and closed, figures appearing, disappearing. Black Volgas moved away from the curbside and went down the dark streets. Nervous laughter rang out. Cigarette papers were rolled and licked. Snuffboxes were unfurled. Nobody drank — drinking would loosen our tongues and give to the living the breath of the dead. Sweat stained the rims of our collars. We stamped our feet, blew warm air into our gloves, moved our bodies beyond ordinary wakefulness, and beyond that once again, until at times it felt as if we would never sleep.

The night went by, our desires hidden, as if sewn inside coat sleeves. It was not that we even took our coats off, it was the touch, the shiver of recognition when our sleeves met as we lit each other’s cigarettes. Hatred too. Hatred for such similarity.

The theater doors swung open late, allowing actors, dancers, stagehands out. Sometimes they walked all the way from the Kirov, twenty minutes. They leaned against the ironwork, wrapped in their scarves, gloves, leg warmers. A sandy-haired boy swung his foot into the air and propped it on a prong of the fence, stretched, his head to his knees, his breath steaming, his leather cap tipped backwards on his head. His body had an ease to it, his toes his feet his legs his chest his shoulders his neck his mouth his eyes. His lips were extraordinarily red, and his mouth was made more red again by the eyes. Even the leather hat seemed shaped to the way that he pulled it on and off. Most of the time he didn’t stay long in the square, he was privileged and there were other places for him to go — basements, cupolas, apartments — but once or twice he remained, kicking his foot to the top of the fence. We passed, inhaled the smell of him. He never said a word to us.

We waited for him to reappear in the square, but he became more recognizable, his face in the newspapers, on posters. The thought of him lay with us.

When the rumor of morning arrived, the streetlights flickered briefly and we would part. We unraveled into the streets, some looking for the boy with the pocket watch, or the factory brothers, or the dancer with the sandy hair, the print of his foot on the damp pavement, his overcoat parted by walking, his scarf flying out from the back of his neck. Sometimes, by the stone steps that descended to a canal’s black waters, the light of the moon was broken by a shadow’s stride and we turned to follow. Even then, so close to morning, there was always the thought that water might hide its flowing under ice.

3 LONDON 1961

Every Friday the drunks roll past, loud and foul with whiskey, reeking of piss and dustbins, and, as he has done for years now, he reaches out the window, handing each of them a shilling, so almost every tramp around Covent Garden knows that the place for a little money is the factory on the far side of the Royal, where the middle-aged man, the bald one with the spectacles, at the second to last window, open, but only on a Friday, leans out and listens to the stories — my mother’s caught up with consumption, my uncle lost his wooden leg, my aunt Josephine got her knickers in a twist—and, no matter what the story, he says to the drunks, Here you go, mate, shilling after shilling, much of his wages, so that instead of taking the Tube back to his room in Highbury he walks all the way, to save the money, a good five miles, stooped, his flat hat on, nodding to ladies and paperboys and more drunks, some of whom recognize him and try to charm another shilling from him, which he cannot give because he has calculated exactly enough for lodging and food, he says, Sorry, mate, tips his hat and walks on, a shopping bag banging against his calf, all the way through Covent Garden and Holborn and Grays Inn, along Rosebury Avenue, up the Essex Road onto Newington Green, the sky darkening as he goes, and he turns left on Poet’s Road, walks to the redbrick lodging house, number 47, where the landlady, a widow from Dorchester, greets him airily at the front door, by the mock-ebony clock with the two pawing horses, and he bows slightly to her, saying, Evening, Mrs. Bennett, and makes his way up the stairs, passing the pictures of ducks on the wall, straightening them if another lodger has bumped against them, sixteen steps, into his room, where at last he removes his shoes, thinking he must polish them, and then he unloosens his tie, pours himself a Scotch from the silver flask hidden behind the bedstead, just a nip, sighing deeply as it hits his throat, opens the shopping bag, sets the shoes out on his work desk, just finishing touches — a shank to be trimmed, a wing block to be extended, a drawstring that requires threading through, a heel to be cut down — neat, precise, and when he is finished he wraps them each in plastic, making sure there are no creases in the wrapping, since he has a reputation to maintain, the ballerinas, the choreographers, the opera houses, they all seek him out, sending their specifications,

a foot so wide at the toes and so narrow at the heel he must stretch the shoe to accommodate it,

the fourth toe abnormally longer than the third, something he solves with the simple loosening of a stitch,

the shoe that needs a harder shank, a higher back, a softer sole,

he is well-known for his tricks, they talk about him, the dancers with their difficulties or those just simply fussy, writing him letters, sending him telegrams, sometimes even visiting him at the factory — meet your maker! — especially those from the Royal Ballet, so delicate and fine and appreciative, most of all Margot Fonteyn, his favorite, who once got an amazing three performances out of one pair of toe shoes, her requirements being terribly intricate, a very short vamp, a low wing block, extra paste at the tips, wide pleats for grip, and he is the only maker she ever deals with, she adores him, she thinks him the perfect gentleman, and in return she is the only ballerina whose picture hangs above his worktable—To Tom, with love, Margot—and it makes him shiver to think how she handles his shoes once she gets them, shattering the shank to make it more pliable, banging the shoe against doors to soften the box, bending the shoe over and over so it feels perfect on her feet, as if she has worn it forever, a thought which prompts a little smile as he puts the shoes away neatly on his bedroom shelf, steps into his pajamas, kneels down for two quick prayers, goes to bed, never dreaming of feet or shoes, and when he wakes he shuffles down the corridor to the shared bathroom, where he soaps and shaves, the whiskers grown gray in recent years, fills a kettle with tap water, returns to his room, puts the kettle on his stove, waits for it to whistle, makes himself a cup of tea, having put the milk on the windowsill overnight to keep it cool, then takes the stack of shoes from the shelf and sets once again to work, and he works all morning long, although Saturdays aren’t considered overtime, he doesn’t care, he enjoys the repetitions and differing demands, the women’s toe shoes so much more intricate and difficult than the ballet boots for men, the French with more of an eye for flair than the English, the softer leather pads demanded by the Spanish, the Americans who call their shoes slippers, and how he detests that word, slipper, like something out of a fairy tale, he often thinks of the violence a shoe takes, the pounding, the destruction, not to mention the tiny incisions, the surgery, the gentleness, the tricks he learned from his late father, who worked the same job for forty years,

if you’re adjusting the vamp and it’s too stiff just use a little Brylcreem to soften it,

soap the satin clean of dust not only before but during and especially after the making of the shoe,

think of yourself as the foot,

and the only thing that disturbs the rhythm of his shoemaking is the soccer match each Saturday, he makes the trip half a mile down the road to watch Arsenal, and on alternating weeks he supports the reserves, a red-and-white scarf wrapped around his neck, standing in the terraces, for which he has built himself a special pair of shoes that give him another four inches, since he is a small man and he wants to watch the game over the other fans’ heads, Arsenal! Arsenal! the sway of the crowd as the ball is swept around the pitch, the spin, the dribble, the nutmeg, the volley, it is perhaps not entirely unlike ballet, everything in the feet is what matters, not that he would ever see a ballet, a notion inherited from his father

stay out of the theaters, son, don’t ever go watch,

no point in seeing your shoes ripped to pieces,

tune your shoes, that’s all,

and at halftime he finds his mind drifting back to the shoes in his room, how he can improve on them, if the shank was too tight, if the box could have been toughened, until he hears the crowd roaring and sees the teams trotting out onto the pitch, the referee’s shrill whistle, and the match begins again, the ball tipped on by Jackie Henderson, taken down the wing by George Eastham, and then swung across into the center for David Herd to head home, and the shoemaker jumps in the air on his false shoes and rips his hat from his head, revealing his baldness, and after the match he walks home with the singing crowd, swept along, sometimes he is pinned against a wall for a moment by the bigger men, though it is not far to the house, and he is embarrassed if he meets Mrs. Bennett at the door, she has not yet figured out how come he is taller on Saturdays, A cup of tea, Mr. Ashworth? No, ta, Mrs. Bennett, up to his room to look at his work, to trim the cardboard where there is a bump invisible to any normal eye, or to feather the shank down with a skiv, and then he lines the shoes up by his bedside table, so that on Sunday, after a sleep-in, they are the first thing he sees, pleasing him no end, even thinking of them while in church, walking heavy-footed back down the aisle after services, among the ladies in hats and veils, out into the sunlight, a deep breath and a sigh of relief, away from the church grounds, past the suburban gardens, taking the remainder of Sunday as a day of rest, a pint of bitter and a spot of lunch, reading the paper in the park, November 6, two days past his forty-fourth birthday—Hague Agreement to Be Altered, U.S. Charges Cuban Spy, Soviet Dancer to Arrive in London—a story he knows well, since the sketches of the feet came in last week, he is due to start work on the shoes first thing in the morning, a thought that occupies him as he prepares for bed, and ten hours later he emerges at Covent Garden in the sunlight, walks towards the shop, keen to get going, Mr. Reed the boss slapping him on the shoulder, Good morning, Tom oul’ son, and he leaves the toe shoes from the weekend in the front office, enters the shop, takes off his overcoat, puts on his large white apron, fires up the ovens, seventy degrees — hot enough to harden shoes but not melt the satin — and then he goes downstairs to the leather room, wanting to find a number of good sturdy hides before the other makers arrive, smells the leather, rubs his hands over the grain, then straight upstairs with the hides and a bucket of glue beneath his arm, to his work desk, the makers arriving, all cricket and wives and hangovers, nodding at him, he is the best of them, they have a deep respect for him, coming as he does from the line of Ashworths, the greatest makers of them all, craftsmen, the insignia on their shoes down over the years a simple

a

a little more intricate than those of any of the other makers, who all have their own flourishes — a squiggle, a circle, a triangle — placed on the sole, so the dancers know their makers, and some of the fans even go to the dustbins behind the theaters to rescue the ruined shoes, to see who made them, the Ashworths being coveted, but Tom isn’t troubled by the pressure, he gives himself to his work, spectacles on the bridge of his nose, studying the sketches of the Russian’s feet, the specifications in from Paris,

the size, the width, the length of the toes,

the angle of the nails, the ball of the foot, the way the ligaments come to the ankle,

the spread of the heel, the blisters, the bone spurs,

and just by the sketches alone he knows the life of this foot, raised in barefoot poverty and — from the unusual wideness of the bone structure — bare on concrete rather than grass, then squeezed into shoes that were too small, coming to dance later than usual given the smallness yet breadth of the foot, 7 EEE, then a great violence done by excessive training, many hard angles, but a remarkable strength, and stretching back from his worktable, Tom Ashworth smiles, shakes out his hands, and then is lost in the work, silent as if in a trance, making one pair of men’s boots in the first hour, three in the second, slow for him, the order is forty pairs, a full day’s work, maybe even two if he runs into difficulty, for the Russian desires his shoes made with a reverse channel construction, meaning two large hook needles must be used and — even though it’s a much easier proposition than making toe shoes for a ballerina — it requires time and intimacy, and he stops only when a shout goes up for lunch break, a moment he relishes, sandwiches and tea, the younger cobblers a bit cheeky, How’s the commie shoes then, eh? to which he nods and smiles — when the other makers saw the sketches they shouted, Defected my arse! Defective more likely! He’s a bleeding commie ain’t he? No he ain’t, he’s one of us. One of us? I seen him on telly and he looks a right bloody poofter! — and when lunch is finished he’s back with the sketches, afraid he has made a wrong move somewhere, the figures trilling through his head, keeping the inside-out shoes moist with wet cloths, his bald head shining, he stitches by hand, invoking the Ashworth spirit, then brings the shoes to the drying oven, which he checks again with the thermometer to make sure it is seventy degrees

after all, no matter who the shoes are for, or why, they always have to be perfect.

4 UFA, LENINGRAD 1961–1964

August 12

The wooden shutters on the windows blew open last night and banged until the morning.

August 13

Up before dawn with the radio, listening, but fell back to sleep. When I woke Father had already eaten breakfast. He said, You must rest, daughter. And yet he is the one feeling sickly. The past weeks have worn him out. I beseeched him to return to bed. Still he insisted on accompanying Mother and me to the market. Father does not talk to anyone when he goes out, for fear of what will be said, even though it has not been officially announced. He walks with his head down as if they have put something heavy on his neck, his forehead brought low with the weight of it. At the Krassina market we found three bundles of spinach. No meat. Father took both canvas bags at first. We switched when we got near the fountain on October Prospect. The stone wall has cracked in the heat. He was bent over with exhaustion. When he gave me the second bag he said, You must forgive, Tamara. And yet there is nothing for me to forgive. What is to forgive? I had a brother, he is gone, that is all.

August 16

In his leaving he has forced me home. Moscow seems years away already. What am I to become? My anger boils over. I almost smashed Mother’s teacup but held myself back.

August 17

Father came home from the factory long-faced. We dare not ask. We cooked chicken broth to soothe him. He ate without a, word.

August 18

A white car in the street, traveling up and down, up and down. It is marked Driving School, but the driver makes no mistakes.

August 19

At the Big House with Mother again. They believe she is the only one who can change Rudik’s mind. They gave us tea, unusual for them, considering. It was lukewarm. I thought for a moment it might be poisoned. A half-dozen phones were set up on the desk. Four men and two women. Three wore headphones, two worked into dictation machines, the other supervised. Most of them did not look us in the eye, but the supervisor stared. He gave Mother a set of headphones and told me to sit in the corner. They finally got through to Rudik on the third try. He was sleepy since there is a time difference. He was in an apartment in Paris. (They said later that it was a place famous for its men with unnatural perverted instincts. They insist on using that phrase in front of Mother, to watch her face. She tries not to have her face betray her. It is important not to display emotion, she says.) There was a time delay on what Rudik said. Sometimes they bleeped it out. They got angry when there were exchanges in Tatar. Mother swore later that she heard the end of the word happy but of course what she really wanted to hear was return. We are to tell nobody about the betrayal, yet they go ahead and question the dancers in the Opera House, his friends, even Rudik’s old teachers, how do they expect word not to get out?

August 20

I walked by the Belaya and ate an ice cream on the sandbar. Children were swimming. Old women sat in bathing suits and caps. The world goes on.

August 21

They have suggested a possible amnesty if he renounces what he has done, returns. What chance? It will be seven years hard labor at the absolute minimum, at the worst it is death. What would they do? Shoot him? Electrocute him? Would they hang him so that his feet would swing in the air, his last dance? These terrible thoughts.

August 22

The knowledge that he will never be here again makes him all the more present. I lie awake late at night and curse what he has done to us. They are always the same two people who sit in the Driving School car.

August 23

The bulb in the kitchen went out, there are no more. We are relieved only by the late hour of the setting sun and the beauty of the colors in the sky. Father said that the smoke from the factories makes the colors stronger.

August 24

We were coming home from the Big House when Mother’s legs went out from under her on an oil patch near the statue in Lenin Park. She caught herself on the base of the statue and then said to me, Look, I am almost hanging on his toe. She was immediately frightened by what she had said, but there was nobody around to hear. All the way home she was scratching her arms. Father found lime for the outhouse to stop the stench caused by the summer heat. I sat in peace and read the newspaper.

August 25

Mother has shingles. She took to bed, although the sheets irked her terribly. Father sat by the bed and pasted her stomach with a tomato poultice, an old army cure, he said. The juice made her look red and bloody, as if she had been skinned from the inside out. Father and I took a tram out of the city and went for a walk in the woods near the river. He told me that he and Rudik went ice fishing once. He said Rudik was great at gutting the fish with one sweep of the fingers. Returning home, Father wished for his rifle when a flock of geese rose.

August 26

I washed the sheets. They had an imprint of red tomato where she has been lying.

August 28

The fire in her skin has cooled, thank the heavens. Father thumped his chest and said, Tomatoes. Mother took a chair and sat in the sunlight.

August 29

Power failure in the oil refinery, and so the air was clean today. I went walking in the sunshine, found berries in the bushes behind the tool manufacturing yard. Came home and Mother made berry juice, her specialty, which made her sparkle. But in the late afternoon I caught sight of a wizened face reflected in a pane of glass. I was momentarily unsure who it was. It came as a shock to realize it was Mother, I suppose I haven’t truly looked at her in a long time. The irritation is almost gone, but her face is still puffy. Perhaps that is the way of age. I have to remind myself that she is only a few years from sixty. These days her mouth is set in a little pouch, which turns downward. To think that during the war she lived without a mirror! The only way to see herself was in a window, but even then many of the windows were shattered. There was the story she once told of a girl who lived underground. When she came out she didn’t recognize herself and wanted to go back underground again. We return to what we know. I spend my time wondering why I am here in this hellhole, how could I have given up my Moscow registration, am I mad, how much do they need me? Moscow. How I miss it, and yet how can I return? Father cut himself opening the window this morning. Bandaging his wrist, Mother said to him, Perhaps Rudik will find a nice girl and come home.

August 31

Have come down with a summer cold. Took gingerroot.

September 1

Father has been demoted, no longer politruk. It happened two weeks ago, but he refused to tell us. It is possible he will have to leave the Party. There has been no announcement of Rudik’s betrayal, though the word is almost certainly in the air. Mother’s friends have changed their time to go to the steambaths. I saw them walking down the street carrying their towels and birch twigs. Mother shrugged her shoulders and said no matter, she will go alone. She has great strength. If I have the time I shall accompany her. At the market on Krassina we found a delicious jar of sour pickles. Good fortune and joy. My favorite, Father said.

September 3

On the bus to the market the old woman said to her companion, You think it’s bad now, wait until tomorrow! Her friend laughed. For some reason I remembered that in Moscow, Nadia, from the third floor, once said everything happens so fast that living it never made any sense to her. She could never catch up with herself. She had a theory about being in the past, looking ahead at a stranger living out a life. Of course the stranger was herself. I never understood until the bus journey this afternoon. I saw myself sitting there, listening to two old babushkas. I watched myself, watching them. Before I knew it I had become them. How easy this shift from young girl to old woman.

September 4

This journal writes of too many small disappointments. I must be stronger.

September 6

It is a strange mill that does not churn the river! The kindergarten on Karl Marx Street has accepted me, and it is a good job. I am almost a week late but I will catch up. Joy!

September 9

We cannot open the classroom windows, they are soldered shut. But the wind blows through the front door and gives us some relief. The late summer drags its good days into bad. Muksina drew a picture for me. Majit brought me a drink from cowberries, how refreshing. The school takes me back to my youth. When Rudik was here they pulled his hair and bit him and teased him terribly, called him names. The children still have a number of cruel games, one is called the Little Macaroni. They make a child rock his head to the left and right and someone strikes him on each side of the neck as he turns. Another is the Dandelion, where they bash him on top of the head. I could not help the bad thoughts that came while walking home. Perhaps all those years ago the bullying of Rudik was punishment in advance.

September 11

A consignment of chalk and a new blackboard, the small mercies.

September 13

The days seem to grow longer as they grow shorter. Mother worries that Rudik did not take his boots with him. Imagine.

September 14

Another long day. Mother recalled that when Rudik danced in Moscow he bought her a long black coat and, at the Bolshoi, she was loathe to check it in. At the end of the dance, during his encores, she rushed down the stairs to retrieve the coat, afraid it would get lost, and she almost missed the cheers. Now she says she would be glad to check her coat in, she would check her very soul in if she could just see him home again. Yet in the end she must realize she would lose both soul and son. There was one relief. We went walking and there was a beautiful red sunset over the Belaya.

September 15

The first cold winds have blown in. Mother says she has pain in her knees. Her old body is a weathervane, she can tell when a storm is coming. The bathwater was as dark as tea.

September 17

Electricity problems in the kindergarten once again.

September 18

Life begins with bread. There is none. Still, there is the radio for distraction, at least for Father, who turns it on immediately when he comes from work. He says that a desire to make the world better is not worth much, the question is how. Before he left the house this morning Mother put goose fat on his chest, but still he came home coughing. The sicknesses switch between them. He didn’t even want the borscht that Elsa brought from upstairs. He is terribly thin, he keeps waiting to be expelled from the Party, which will surely break him completely. A conference is to be held some time soon. I heard him say something odd as we were waiting for the evening bus to the garden plot, We can put a satellite in the air, Tamara, but we cannot run our buses. It was almost as if Rudik was whispering in his ear, how dangerous. Only last year Father said we were living in a glorious time, another record harvest, Siberia open, nuclear power, Sputnik, the freedom of the African nations, and he had even almost reconciled himself to Rudik dancing — such a brightness in his cheeks then. Now the problem of being himself seems to exhaust him.

September 19

Mother talks sometimes of Rudik not having any food. When she speaks to him in the Big House he says he is fine. She is sure this is propaganda. She keeps asking if they still throw glass on the stage. He says no, but she is not so sure. She knows how they feel about us in the West. Rudik says they only did that at the beginning and, besides, it was Communists. We puzzled over that for a while. It makes no sense. When Mother left I sneaked an ice cream in the park.

September 20

Father’s wages went automatically to the State bonds. And mine have not yet come through. How I regretted yesterday’s ice cream. Mother scrounged together some kasha. Elsa shared her leaves, but drinking tea so late disturbs Mother’s sleep. Father screwed in the double windows for winter. The look on his face was as if the cold was already here.

October 2

Fierce whipping winds. We must ration the oil in the school tanks.

October 10

I have been unable to write, such misery, I must arrest these bad thoughts. The children are terribly cold. Games must be invented to keep them moving around the classroom. This is not my strength. Sasha dislikes running. Guldjamal likes to sit perfectly still, wrapped in two coats. Nicolas dislikes standing. Khalim likes to perch on one foot, he says this keeps his warm. And Majit is such a nuisance! What to do? The rest of the children gravitate toward whoever will give them extra food from their lunch boxes. Such fights! After school I tended to the garden plot. The first layer of snow had fallen so there was nothing to do. An old man came up to me and asked about Father. He said they had met many times at the plot. I cut the conversation short but told him to call around to the house since Father could do with the company. The man tipped his hat. He had a slightly bourgeois tone. I went back to work. Tending to the plot is for the sake of ritual. On the way home a bus splashed slush onto my coat. While I was cleaning it I found a new hole in the inside lining which needs to be darned. Mother, with her problems of incontinence, says if we could darn our bodies she would get a job as her very own seamstress! On my return I stood at the gate and saw something red on the door. My heart pounded with the thought that it might be sealing wax over the keyhole in order to move us. But it was just a notice saying to go down to the Big House again tomorrow The thought of talking to Rudik warms Mother. She misses the things he used to send her from Leningrad. She sometimes searches for the Voice of America on the radio, but of course it is impossible. Even in Moscow it was always scrambled and besides, it is pure Western propaganda. She is aware of that. How I detest their two faces, the joke they try to make of us.

October 11

A terrible mistake. The old man I talked to in the garden plot came over today to talk with Father. He is Sergei Vasilev, the husband of Rudik’s old dance teacher, Anna. Naturally Father was polite to him, in fact he even seemed to enjoy himself. I tried to apologize to Father, but he waved me away, said he had met the man before and he was happy to spend time with him, the man was rehabilitated years ago. Father said to me, If an undesirable wants the company of another undesirable, well then, so be it. He cannot afford to think in this manner, nor give up hopes of remaining with the Party. That would pierce him. I washed his shirts to make him happy.

October 12

A raven bashed against the school window and broke the glass, then died in the children’s hands, which made them cry. Mother said that Rudik is in Monte Carlo, where there is a palace and a beautiful beach. It is very odd. Why have I never seen the sea?

October 13

Sergei V. came over to visit. He brought a pot of jam, which I hate to admit was very tasty. He smoked half a cigar. Father coughed all evening.

October 15

A spoonful of raspberry jam to sweeten the tea.

October 16

Three tubes of toothpaste were bought at the market. One will be kept to give as a gift. It is Bulgarian. It tastes just as bad.

October 17

They still think Mother has the power to draw him back. The tapes they make are sent to Moscow, where they are examined and filed. Rudik said to her in Tatar that he is afraid the secret agents will break his legs. They were not quick enough to bleep it out. Mother said, I cannot sleep, beloved son. He says he is well-fed and has lots of money and that he is doing very well, yes, he even meets theater stars and singers and he is due to meet the Queen of England. Mother says perhaps they have brainwashed him, filled him full of delusions. He said some other famous names, and even the stenographer’s eyes opened wide. But in the end who cares, they are just names, they will die too. The supervisor slammed the desk when Mother slipped in a few more Tatar words and Rudik’s voice went high with worry. He is surely homesick. They told us Monte Carlo is full of gambling and perverted men, and also very violent, he could get stabbed or shot. That happens a lot.

October 19

Mother woke with terrible dreams about his legs. Later she said, I am sure he will find himself a nice girl.

October 20

The oven is broken. The school janitor says he will come to the house to fix it next week. Even these small things worry me. But he is as handy as a small pot and quite handsome too.

October 21

Father has been so tired, he has no strength for this. He’d prefer not to eat. There was a postcard from an acquaintance of Rudik’s, but it was impossible to read with the black marks. Sergei came over again. It seems that neither he nor Father has anything else to do with their lives. I dislike this old fool. I worry about him being in our house but it is true he has been rehabilitated. And I don’t suppose things could get much worse. He had more cigars, which made the room rank. They were cheap, he said, they came from Yugoslavia. He offered Father one, but Father said that smoking it would make him feel like a pig with a gold ring in its nose. They laughed and then had a long discussion about the weather on the radio. Father says he likes to listen to the weather in Chelyabinsk and then he knows what it will be, whereas Sergei listens to the weather from the east, something to do with the winds and a complicated idea to do with patterns from the mountains. And then he quoted poetry, as if poets were weather forecasters! Mother said why would we want to know the weather in advance anyway? All we have to do is to look out the window. Or, even better, step outside if your body allows it. Before Sergei left he saw the postcard and said there is a way to read the sentences underneath the black marks, that you must get a very thin sheet of paper and lightly rub the postcard with a pencil and that way the indentations will come out. Father was made nervous by this and asked Sergei not to say such things. Mother tried with the postcard but it was a complete and utter failure.

October 22

Mother says she is thankful for the small mercy of her body (even her varicose veins!) when she sees Father and Sergei together. She told me that they often finish their conversation chatting long and seriously about their bowel movements.

October 23

Father said, What is there to think about, except the past, if you have no future? I tried to remind him of things, but that was a mistake because it made him angry. I attempt to convince him that Rudik is an ambassador, one of goodwill, he can tell the world the truth about us, but Father just shakes his head, no. He continues to say, My son the traitor, how can I walk down Lenin Street? Nor does Father like his armchair anymore. The problem is that he used to be bigger and now, in these months, his smaller body has to lie in the big indent. And there is a coiled metal spring beginning to bulge that must be contained, perhaps tomorrow, tie it back with string so that it doesn’t stick out and hurt his back.

October 24

A new consignment of oil for the school! And Ilya the janitor did indeed fix the oven! There was nobody home. We talked. He charged no money. What a wonderful day! I forgot of course to ask him to fix the chair, which he certainly would have done.

October 25

Illogical rumors of Rudik with Margot Fonteyn in different places all over the world. How can that be? We are not machines or robots or satellites. It has no logic, but perhaps it is how the West treats its artists, if art is considered at all. Such a world we live in. How many lies are holding him up? How many treacheries? If only to know the truth. The West is using him as a pawn. They will suck the life out of him and spit him out into their dump yards.

October 27

A comic from the London Times was reprinted today in Izvestiya, a drunken bear at the feet of Stalin’s ghost. They attempt to make fools of us. If they could only admit the leaps we have made, but they cannot. They are scared since we will outlast them.

October 28

My birthday. I used to think that when I was older the world would be uncomplicated, but nothing seems to finish, nothing ever becomes simple. Father woke up sweating. Mother had knit a scarf for me using the wool from some of Rudik’s old sweaters. It is warm and yet I am loath to wear it.

October 29

Ilya came over again to fix the armchair. We had tea and bread. When he’s not at school he says that he adores skating. After a while he got to work. He cut the back of the seat open, reached in, and was able to get the spring and pull it back. He heard it had been my birthday and he asked me to meet him to walk by the lake some evening. He has thinning hair and very dark eyes. I am nervous but why live life at the bottom of an ocean floor?

October 31

We went past the Opera House, where washerwomen were busy scrubbing down the stairs with soap and water. By the bandstand men were singing bawdy songs and people were folk dancing. I laughed a lot. Later I boiled Father’s undershirts.

November 1

The children threw paint on the schoolhouse steps. What have they become? Ilya cleaned it up immediately — he said he did not want the young children to get into trouble. They flock around him and ride on his shoulders.

November 2

Preparation for celebrations of the Revolution. Ilya is very busy in school but he had time to take me to the park. The lake is his second home he says. He skated beautifully. Later he presented me with a small silver chain and a locket with the design of a fish. It is not my birth sign, but who cares. How handsome he looked as he waved good-bye. He says they play hockey late at night — they light fires on the ice and sometimes they carry burning bushels so they can see in the dark.

November 3

Father seems to fall further and further down into his overcoat. Rudik’s trial in Moscow, in absentia, will begin soon. Father has sent messages to Sergei through the young Turkish boy three houses down, asking him not to come over to the house, since he doesn’t want things to be jeopardized or influenced in any way. Father sits and stares. I fear for him.

November 4

Such beautiful drawings the children did for the Celebrations, we hung them along the corridor.

November 8

Revolution Day, yesterday. I dreamt I was at a kiosk selling summer apples with Ilya.

November 10

They have given Rudik seven years hard labor. We have no strength for this. Mother fell on the bed and put her face to the pillow and wept. A death sentence had been quite possible, so in truth she should have been relieved. But she wept. Father told me a story from Berlin about a soldier who got his foot caught in the tram tracks. A tram was approaching fast. Another soldier was walking down the street when suddenly he heard the screaming. The second soldier tried to pull the first soldier’s foot from the track. He couldn’t, so he tore off his overcoat and threw it over the soldier’s head so he would not have to watch the tram bearing down, to spare him the agony. I have heard this story before somewhere.

November 11

Am I the one who must throw the coat over Father’s eyes?

November 12

Mother worries about Father, and yet perhaps it is her we should worry about. Her neck is red and scratched raw, perhaps a recurrence of the shingles. Father says nothing, and I have no idea where I can get tomatoes, which seemed to work last time. Even if it was possible to get them, they would be far too expensive this time of year.

November 13

Father sits, still unmoving. He must now choose whether to denounce Rudik to the Committee, not really a choice, since they will surely denounce him anyway. Mother spent the night counting the money she has kept over the years in the porcelain elephant. Her outbreak of shingles seems to have calmed even without the tomato cure. She recalled for me her first ever meeting with Father. She seemed briefly happy, as if the memory propped her up. It was in the Central House of Culture of Railroad Workers, when he put a pinch of snuff up his nose. He had been talking of Mayakovski, quoting “Glory be to our beloved Motherland.” Then of course he sneezed in the middle, which embarrassed him terribly. She recalled how Father bought her the porcelain elephant the next day. I tried to ask him about it but he didn’t remember. He shooed me away like a fly. I cannot wait to tell Ilya these stories tomorrow. He says he doesn’t care about Rudik, that I am the only one who interests him. Happiness!

November 14

They have once again delayed the committee meeting. We went to the Big House again. Rudik, in London, was weeping, and I felt momentarily sorry for him. He is convinced he has made a mistake. They put pressure on him, and every day he appears in the newspapers. He says he cannot walk down the street without a photographer jumping from the bushes. He kept mentioning a dancer’s name — I believe he was trying to hint at something — but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. The stenographer gave me a rude look.

November 16

I have been working on a cardigan for the newborn next door. It is almost finished but not quite as good as I wanted it to be. It has four buttons but needs a fifth. A walk in the snow with Ilya. He mentioned how he would someday like to have children. I wondered what I would call a child. Not Rudolf certainly. Maybe after Father. And what if it was a girl? For school; prepare letters to be sent to Brezhnev for his birthday.

November 20

A knock on the door and it scared us so! Suffering birds! The woman was nervous. Blond hair. Finnish. She said she was a dancer. I believed it from her body. She did not give her name. She said she was a friend of a friend who had come in through Oslo, she didn’t explain how. She asked to be let in but Father refused. Then she got desperate. She had driven all the way from Moscow! Two full days! She said that Rudik had made friends with ambassadors in different countries and they had been able to bring things back. She had some items for us. We were convinced at first it was a ruse. Father told her it was against the law of the land. She flushed bright red. Then Mother asked her to leave. We kept looking up and down the street for the Driving School car, but it was not there. The woman pleaded but still Father said no. Finally the woman left the large package on the doorstep. She was crying with fear. It was terribly dangerous. We left the package there but before dawn Mother got up in her nightgown and brought it in, a light coating of snow upon it.

November 21

The package lay on the table. We could not bear to leave it unopened any longer.

November 22

Father drank a thimble measure from the bottle of brandy. Mother wore her new fur-lined coat, though only in the dark since she did not want the neighbors to see. When she put her hands in her pockets she found a note which said, How I miss you. Your loving son. I pondered what to do with the dress he sent me. It was far too tight at the hips. At first I thought I might burn it, but why? I decided instead to let the waistband out and wear it to the Motherland cinema next week with Ilya.

November 23

Father remembered that the dancer had said we are due another parcel, perhaps in the New Year. Next time I am sure we will open the door to her. Unless it is a ruse. We will find out soon enough. Father felt a certain measure of guilt, but he knows returning the parcel would mean even more trouble. Mother said, Yes, it is wondrous, but a new coat does not replace him. She was sitting in the armchair rubbing the fur collar.

November 26

Father was nostalgic and raised a glass to Rudik, and for the first time I heard him say, My dear son.

Six months before Rudi defected, Iosif came home to our room along the Fontanka, carrying a bottle of cheap champagne. At the doorway he kissed me.

Yulia, he said, I have wonderful news.

He removed his spectacles, rubbed the black semicircles beneath his eyes, and guided me to the table in the corner of the room. He opened the bottle, poured two cups, drank one immediately.

Tell me, I said.

His eyes drooped, and he quickly drank a second glass of champagne, pursed his lips and said: We have a new apartment.

For years I had cultivated our communal home along the river. The kitchen and toilet were down the hallway and our room tiny, old, ruined, but it felt majestic: an ornate fireplace, an intricate medallion in the center of the ceiling from which a yellow lampshade hung as a reminder of other days. Imagining the history of the chandelier that once hung there wasn’t so much bourgeois sentiment as a quiet nod to my father’s life. I had fixed all the window sashes and arranged the curtains so they didn’t obscure the view to the Fontanka. Most of all it was the sound of the water I adored. In summer it gently lapped against its walls as the canal boats passed with their wares and in winter the ice crackled.

Where? I asked.

In the sleeping quarters, he said.

The sleeping quarters were in the outskirts of Leningrad, where tower blocks met tower blocks, a place where I’d always felt that our country housed whatever was falling apart.

Calmly I took a sip of my drink.

Iosif said: It has an elevator, hot water, two rooms.

My silence made him shift in his seat.

I got the permits through the university, he said. We move next week.

I startled myself by saying nothing, rose slowly from the chair. Iosif grabbed my hair and yanked me across the table. I attempted to pull away, but he slapped my face: You’ll start packing tonight.

I thought about telling him that he slapped like an academic, but that would only have invited his fist. I watched as he poured himself another glass of champagne. As he tipped it back his double chin disappeared, and in a chilling way he looked briefly attractive.

Good night, I said.

I removed a scarf from the drawer and walked out into the corridor.

Patches of sunlight spun on the Fontanka. I thought for a moment that I might tumble over the low wall and get carried through the city, drawbridges rising as I floated on. Such elegant foolishness. I followed the river north and took a sidestreet towards the Conservatory, to the Kirov, palatial in the square. Outside there was a poster announcing Rudi’s performance in Giselle.

When I returned home Iosif was still at the table. He didn’t look up. I had hidden some rubles in an antique samovar next to our bed. I took out enough for a balcony seat, pulled on my cashmere sweater. Descending the stairs once again, I thought I could hear the echo of Iosif’s slap still reverberating around the building. By the time I returned to the Kirov, the lobby was teeming.

It was the rule of the theater that all coats and jackets must be hung in the cloakroom before the performance. I contemplated checking my cashmere sweater, but it felt good around me, its warmth, its delicacy. I wedged in my seat between two rather large women. I wanted to turn to them and say something ridiculous like, Ah ballet, the perfect antidote. I began thinking that perhaps Iosif was playing a crude trick on me, that really we wouldn’t have to move from our room at all, that things would stay the same, that I would still sleep at night to the sounds of the river.

The musicians entered the orchestra pit and began tuning up, a flute here, a cello there, and the notes, initially discordant, started moving in unison towards one another.

My neighbors in the seats were chattering excitedly. Rudi’s name fluttered in the air, and their pleasure at owning him began to disturb me. I wanted to stand and shout, But you don’t know Rudi, I know Rudi, my mother taught him how to dance! Yet I hadn’t seen him in a long time, almost a year. He was twenty-two, he had his own apartment, food privileges, a good salary and in the corridors of fate his portrait hung high.

The lights were dimmed. When Rudi entered, exploding from the wings to a round of applause, he tore the role open, not so much by how he danced, but by the manner in which he presented himself, a sort of hunger turned human. I wanted to let myself slip away into the performance, but after the first variation I began to realize how terribly hot I felt. Without drawing attention to myself, I tried to fan air to my body. I grew hotter and hotter, and yet I didn’t want to disturb my neighbors by wriggling around in my seat, or pulling the sweater over my head. The shrill alarm of Rudi’s dancing was saying, Look at me! Look at me! but I was obsessed by my sweater and how hot I was becoming. The air was packed with intensity. My face flushed and sweat collected at my brow.

When the intermission finally came, I stood up quickly, only for my knees to buckle and my legs to fold beneath me. I came to almost immediately, but already I’d created a fuss — people were pointing at me, whispering, and I had an immediate vision of the next day’s newspapers writing about the lone woman who had fainted during Rudi’s performance.

With the help of a gentleman behind me I got back into my seat and removed my sweater. I desperately wanted to explain what had happened, but I could tell he thought I was simply overcome.

He’s wonderful, isn’t he?

I was just hot, I said.

He has quite an effect, said the gentleman over my shoulder.

I thought I would faint a second time, but I managed a deep breath, rose, and stumbled out along the aisle, down the staircase under the light of the chandeliers. In the bathroom someone held my shoulders as I vomited. I was horrified when I heard her suggest that I might be pregnant, an impossibility. I cleaned up and splashed water on my face. The mirror was smudged with fingerprints, and I had the strange feeling that someone else’s ghostly hand was on my face. At thirty-six, I had acquired crow’s-feet, and there were the beginnings of dark bags beneath my eyes.

In the bathroom I could hear women exclaiming over the extraordinary performance. A couple of girls were smoking at a corner sink, rolling Rudi’s name around on their tongues.

On the second floor I bought an ice cream, and by the time the bell sounded for the second act I felt I had recovered sufficiently to take my seat.

I leaned forward and squinted at the distant stage, until the woman in front of me, annoyed that my hair was, touching her, handed me a pair of opera glasses.

Rudi’s body was a thing of the most captivating beauty — hard lines at his shoulders, his neck striated with muscle, enormous thighs, his calf muscles twitching. He took his partner in the air and spun her with remarkable lightness. I couldn’t help thinking about the day he had first arrived, at seventeen, when I had seen him undressing in my room, the pale promise of his body slipping beneath the blanket on my sofa. I returned the glasses and tried to quell whatever emotion was overcoming me. I was holding the edge of the chair far too tightly, nails gripping the wood.

When the ballet finished Rudi extended his arm in the air and slowly turned his head from one side of the theater to the other. The ovation rang in my ears.

I ran outside and hurried along the Fontanka, then ascended the stairwell. When I entered the room Iosif was still sitting at the table, drunk. I put my hands on his shoulders and kissed him. Shocked, Iosif pushed me aside, filled his glass, downed it quickly, then stumbled across the room and kissed me back. I tried to guide him into making love to me against the wall, but he was hardly able to hold me, drunk as he was. Instead he pulled me to the floor and yet I didn’t care, why should I care, the dancing still spun in me — Rudi had stood upon that stage like an exhausted explorer who had arrived in some unimagined country and, despite the joy of the discovery, was immediately looking for another unimagined place, and I felt perhaps that place was me.

I opened my eyes as Iosif was wiping the sweat from his neck. He went back to the table and said: Don’t forget, you have to pack.

If I could stack the foolishness of my life in cardboard boxes I could make a monument of it — I packed.

The following week I was out in the sleeping quarters of Leningrad, having left my beloved Fontanka behind. The new apartment was large and dark. It had hot water, a telephone, a stove, a small fridge. The elevator squeaked outside the door. I listened to the high whistle of the kettle. I promised myself that I would leave soon, get enough money together, pay the taxes, negotiate a divorce, take on the enormity of finding another place to live. But in truth I knew I had caved in to Iosif, that allowing him to make love to me had only cemented his dispassion.

Six months later I was sitting on the eighth floor of the new apartment building — trying in vain to translate a Cuban poem about mystery and shadow — when my friend Larissa knocked on the door. She had taken a tram all the way out to the tower block. Her face was ashen. She took me by the arm and escorted me out to the soccer field beyond the towers.

There’s a rumor, she whispered.

Pardon me?

Rudi has left, she said.

What?

People are saying that he defected to Paris.

We walked under the goalposts and looked at each other in silence. I began to remember moments that seemed like clues. How, during that first week, I had often caught a glimpse of him looking in the mirror, as if he was willing himself into someone else’s body. How he had talked about foreign dancers, listened to RosaMaria’s songs, rifled through my books. How, whenever he went to the Hermitage, he was drawn to the Italian Renaissance painters and the Dutch masters. How, when we sat around my table with my friends, he had always looked hungry, as if he were ready to pounce on a word or an idea. I felt a terrible guilt and a dread.

Paris? I asked.

We must keep this quiet, said Larissa.

That evening I sat with Iosif and heard the elevator’s pulleys screeching in the hallway. When it stopped on our floor I could hardly shuck the thought that they were coming to knock at the door. I packed a bag with what I imagined I would need. It included a Gorky novel with money pasted beneath the cloth cover. I put the bag under my bed, had nightmares of being chained to a table.

Iosif said: The little bastard, how did he dare?

He rose and paced the room, whispering: How did he dare?

He looked me in the eye: How did he fucking dare?

The next day Iosif surprised me by saying I had nothing to worry about, that I had done nothing wrong, that through his connections he could make sure I would be left alone. I ironed his shirt for a conference and as he prepared his briefcase he assured me that everything would be all right. He kissed me brusquely on the cheek and set out for the university.

They came anyway, the following Monday morning.

I was alone when I heard the rapping on the door. I stuffed money beneath the insoles of my shoes, even took a slice of bread and put it in the pocket of my housedress. Trembling, I went to answer. The man was the traditional sort, beady, in a gray overcoat, but the woman was young and beautiful, blond hair, green eyes.

They drifted in without introducing themselves and went to sit at the table. I had the sneaking feeling that Iosif had maybe gone to see them in order to protect himself, that he had finally betrayed me in a tangible way, after all our tiny intimate betrayals over the years.

Am I being arrested? I asked.

They said nothing. I felt sure they were going to march me out of the room. Each lit a cigarette — taken from my pack — and blew smoke at the ceiling. They had perfected their drama. They asked me how long I had known him, if he had ever mentioned the West, who he talked about, why had he betrayed his people.

You know he’s failing, don’t you, Citizen?

I haven’t heard anything.

Miserably.

Really?

They threw glass at him in Paris.

Glass? I said.

They wanted to rip his feet open.

Why?

Because he was terrible of course.

Of course.

I began to wonder how he had performed in Paris, since it was indeed possible that he had been booed or relegated to the corps. Perhaps Rudi’s style of dancing was anathema to the French, and it was conceivable that he really had failed. After all he was young, just twenty-three; he had been dancing only a few years.

They kept examining my features, but I held my face tight. Eventually the talk got around to the gatherings in my old room.

Your salon, said the woman.

There was no point in arguing.

She closed one eye: We need the name, address, occupation of everyone who came.

I wrote the names down. It was a pointless exercise since they knew them all anyway — when I was finished they looked the list over and told me, with wry smiles, whom I had forgotten. They had been watching me, it seemed, for quite a long time.

Write it again, they said.

Pardon me?

Your list.

My hands shook. They had me write down a second series of names and addresses — all those people who had ever spent time in my house, whether or not they had chatted with Rudi. I ferociously protected the corner of my mind in which my father sat. I had a vision of him at home in Ufa, in the shadow of the refinery, limping to the door to find yet more agents and yet more trouble arching through his life. But they didn’t ask about him. It began to dawn on me that they were trying to find out if I could exert any influence on Rudi — to perhaps phone him and convince him to return — but they already saw that it was doubtful.

Finally they asked if I was prepared to publicly denounce Rudi.

Yes, I said, without a moment’s hesitation.

They seemed vaguely disappointed and lit themselves another cigarette each. The man tucked a pencil behind his ear.

You will write a letter to him.

Yes.

You will tell him that he has betrayed his Motherland, his people, our history.

Yes.

Do not seal the letter.

I won’t.

Your behavior is very precarious, the woman told me.

I replied with a measure of dignity that I would certainly mend my ways.

Do not mention this to anybody, the man warned.

I nodded.

Do you understand me?

He was almost frightened — one foot wrong could have an effect on the rest of his life too, his wife, his children, his apartment.

Yes, I understand.

We’ll be back.

The woman turned and said: As for me, I would not have spat on him even if he had been on fire.

She glared, waiting for me to react.

I nodded and said: Certainly.

When they left I stood with my back against the door and waited for the elevator to begin its descent, and then for some reason, rather than cry, I laughed until I was exhausted, laughed as the pulleys clicked through the system of steel and rollers, laughed as I heard the pneumatic hiss, laughed as I heard the final stop, laughed, all the time remembering that night at the Kirov and the notion of sleeping with Rudi, or having slept with him, through Iosif. It struck me that I hated Rudi the way you can hate someone who makes love to you and leaves, in other words, with a certain grudging admiration or envy for the fact of having left.

My friends were terrified to be seen with me ever again. Their political diligence and reliability had been called into question, and they would always, now, have files. They too would listen for the elevators. I thought about how my life had been pared down over the years, peeled away layer by layer.

One night I found Iosif staring at a bottle. He curled his upper lip into a snarl, told me he had six shirts drying on the balcony and they needed ironing.

No, I said.

Iron the fucking shirts! he shouted.

He lifted his fist to my face, and held it centimeters from my eyes.

At the window — when I hauled the shirts in from the line — I could hear him behind me, pouring another glass of wine for himself.

I took the only option I felt might clear my head — the train, to visit my father in Ufa. It was late September by the time I got my visa. The journey took three days because of the connections. Exhausted, I couldn’t find a taxi, or even a horse and cart, so I walked through the city, asking people for directions. Tatar and Muslim women were out walking with their children. They glanced at me and looked away. I couldn’t help wondering how a city like this could have made a dancer like Rudi.

I finally found my father’s street. It was lined with old wooden houses where the bright shutters made an argument against the nearby tower blocks. I negotiated the muddy ruts, pondering how in the world my father managed such a difficult walk with his cane.

He came to the door and almost giggled when he saw me. He was looking remarkably well, although he had let his hair grow past his ears, which gave him a faintly mad look. He wore a suit and a tie with a few food stains. His shirt buttons were done up to the neck, but the tie was open as if it and the shirt had different intentions for the day. One of the earpieces of his spectacles was broken and he had looped a piece of string around his ear to keep them from, falling. Still, the only real evidence of serious aging were the few capillaries that had burst in his face. Yet I thought the burst vessels looked oddly handsome on him.

When we hugged I could smell the mustiness of his hair.

We sat down to Beethoven, and he made tea on the tiny stove. There was a portrait of my mother by the bedside. My father had met a young artist who had copied a photograph of her, using charcoal. How diligent the artist had been to her beauty, I thought, and now it seemed she would remain forever beautiful.

He caught me looking at the portrait and said: It’s our function in life to make moments durable.

I nodded, unsure of what he meant. He drank his tea. I hesitated to tell him about Rudi, knowing the news had not yet been made officially public, but finally I blurted it out.

Rudi’s in Paris.

Yes, he said, I know.

How do you know?

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:

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.

I pulled the suitcase from under the bed and began packing: my clothes, my books, my dictionaries, the half-finished translations, the china saucer. I made enough noise for Iosif to waken but he didn’t. It seemed to me that the sleeping part of him knew what the waking half would feel.

I thought about kissing him on the cheek, but instead I wrote him a note, quoting my father’s line about the stars being deeper than their darkness.

By the time I had packed and was ready to leave, it was morning. Reefs of clouds had appeared in the sky. The hooligans had disappeared, but the military man was still in the field. He had a shovel in his hands now, and he was reinterring the bones and skull in an untouched part of the field. The sun was suspended between distant towers, and the apartment buildings on the horizon looked like children’s playing blocks. As if by design, a flock of birds rose and flapped small against the heavens. I walked down the stairs, not desiring the claustrophobia of the elevator. The day was already warm and humid. My suitcase was not heavy.

In the field I passed the military man, who looked at the ground and then turned his back on me as if to say: Our wars are never over.