Dancer by Colum McCann Read Free Book Online Page B

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