Free Dancer by Colum McCann

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