Free Dancer by Colum McCann Page B

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