Dancer by Colum McCann

institute, where money was awaiting me. I bought some Turkish coffee and returned home, where Rudi was waiting, despondent. His first day of dancing had not gone well. He drank three coffees and went outside to the courtyard—from above, looking down, I watched him practice around the ironwork fencing.
    All that week Rudi auditioned at the school and at night he wandered the city, sometimes coming back as late as three in the morning—it was white nights after all, nobody slept—talking about the beautiful palaces, or a vendor he had met outside the Kirov, or a guard who had swung a suspicious eye on him on Liteiny Prospect. I tried to warn him, but he shrugged me off.
    I’m a country bumpkin, he said. They’re not interested in me.
    There was something unusual in the clipped way he talked, a curious cocktail of rural arrogance and sophisticated doubt.
    At the very end of the week I was hanging laundry in the communal kitchen when I heard my name being called from below. Yulia! I looked out the small window to see him in the rear courtyard, perched high on the ironwork fence, balanced precariously.
    I got it! he shouted. I’m in! I’m in!
    He jumped from the fence and landed in a puddle and ran towards the stairwell.
    Clean your shoes! I shouted down.
    He grinned and wiped his shoes with the cuff of his shirt, ran up the stairs to hug me.
    I found out later that he had talked his way into the Leningrad Choreographic as much as he had danced. His level was still just high average, but they liked his fire and intuition. He was much older than most students, but the birth rate had dropped so significantly during the war that they were willing to audition dancers his age, even give them scholarships. He was to stay in a dorm with mostly eleven- and twelve-year-olds, which horrified him, and he pleaded with me to let him come along to my Monday evening gatherings. When I said yes, he took my hand and kissed it—he was, it seemed, already learning Leningrad.
    After two weeks he had packed his case and was gone to the school dorms.
    Iosif made love to me the evening Rudi left, and afterwards he padded across to the couch where he lit a cigarette and said, without turning in my direction: He’s a little shit, isn’t he?
    All at once it felt as if my mother and father were surrounding me, and I turned to the pillow, said nothing.
    It was almost three months before Rudi arrived back. He strolled in with RosaMaria, a girl from Chile. She was the sort of beauty who took the oxygen from the air. She wasn’t consumed by her own attractiveness but managed instead to carry it like an afterthought. Her father was the editor of a newspaper in Santiago, and she was at the Leningrad Choreographic to learn dance. Rudi, perhaps by virtue of being with her, looked different already. He was wearing a long army coat and boots to his knees, and his hair had grown longer.
    RosaMaria laid a guitar case in the corner and took a seat in the background while Rudi sat at the table, listening, hunched over a small glass of vodka. Larissa, Petr, Sergei, Nadia and I were all quite drunk and deep into an interminable debate about Heidegger, who had suggested that life becomes authentic when lived in the presence of death. For me the debate seemed to relate ultimately to our lives under Stalin, but I also couldn’t help thinking of my father, who had lived his life in the shadow not only of his own death but of his former history too. I flicked a look at Rudi. He yawned and filled his glass again with a sort of theater, holding the bottle high in the air, so there was a deep splash against the side of the glass.
    Petr turned and said: So then, you, young man, what do you think is authentic and inauthentic?
    Rudi slurped his vodka. Petr pulled the bottle away and held it close to his chest. Around the table there was a quick blur of laughter. It was a delightful little showdown between a tired middle-aged man and a