Free Dancer by Colum McCann Page A

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