Dancer by Colum McCann Page B

piece of horseshit that came from my husband’s mouth could be turned into a sliver of gold.
    RosaMaria began visiting more and more, even without Rudi. I was aware that she was probably being watched, given that she was a foreigner. There was an intermittent clicking on my telephone. We turned the music loud in case the place was bugged, but really there was nothing extraordinary about our conversations anyway. She told me about Santiago, for which she was dreadfully homesick. I had, years before, translated some Chilean poetry and had imagined doorways, lean dogs, vendors of saints, but the country she talked of was all cafés, jazz clubs, long cigarettes. She spoke as if there were a tambourine in her throat. She loved dancing for the act of it rather than the art and so she was miserable at the school, where she felt that a rigidity was being forced into her. She had to wear skirts all the time and said that she had brought a pair of tight orange pants from Santiago—the notion of it made me laugh—and she was itching to wear them just once. The only person who kept her sane, she said, was Rudi, simply because he allowed himself to be Rudi. He was in constant trouble in school, especially with Shelkov, the school director. He refused to cut his hair, fought in rehearsals, put pepper in the dance belts of rivals. By all accounts he excelled in the classes he liked—literature, history of art, music—but he detested the sciences and anything else that didn’t suit his rhythm. He had stolen stage makeup, eyeshadow and a glaring rouge, and had worn it around his dorm. She said he had no respect for the other dancers but he adored his teacher, Aleksandr Pushkin, who had taken him under his tutelage. RosaMaria mentioned rumors that others had seen Rudi late at night, walking near Ekaterina Square, where perverted men were rumored to meet, a notion that didn’t seem to bother her, which surprised me, since it had seemed they were wearing each other like outfits.
    We’re not in love, she told me one afternoon.
    You’re not?
    She raised her eyebrows, making me feel like I was twenty years old, not her.
    Of course not, she said.
    With RosaMaria I began to feel that I had once again opened myself to the world. We brewed coffee late into the night. She tutored me in Chilean dialects and wrote out old ballads, which I translated—she knew more love songs than anyone I’d ever met. Through her connections I managed to get my hands on a new gramophone. I read whatever I could find, Gorky, Pushkin, Lermentov, Mayakovsky, Mao, a Theodore Dreiser novel, Mitchel Wilson, Dante’s Inferno, Chekhov, even reread Marx, of whom I was very fond. I took on some more work with the institute and went on long walks with RosaMaria.
    Every few months I sent my traditional package to my parents, including a letter to tell them that Rudi was doing just fine, progressing in his classes, that he had found a teacher who understood him.
    My father replied, in the simple code we used, that the fruitcake hadn’t nearly as many raisins as usual, meaning of course that the letter was scant. He said that Ufa was gray under gray under yet more gray, and that he and my mother would desperately like to make a trip away from the city.
    He wondered if I could pull any strings—Saint Petersburg, he wrote, had always been famous for its puppetry.
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    You see him on Rossi Street with his boots high on his calves and his long red scarf trailing the ground behind him; you see him with his collar turned up, his hands deep in his pockets, his shoes tipped with metal so that they raise a spark; you see how he stands in the canteen line with his head slightly angled as if he is dealing with a wound; you see him receive an extra ladle of soup from the canteen woman with the black hairnet; you see him lean over the counter and touch her hand, whispering, making her laugh; you see, when he lifts the