Dancer by Colum McCann Read Free Book Online

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