Dancer Read Online Free PDF

couple of stones at it. His father catches his arm on the second throw, but then he laughs, puts his pilotka on Rudik’s head, and they chase each other down the street, hot breath steaming. After dinner—cabbage, potatoes and a special piece of meat Rudik has never seen before—he is held so tight to his father’s chest that his head crumples the papirosy in the tunic pocket.
    They spread the cigarettes out on the table and straighten them, stuff the stray tobacco back into the thin paper tubes. His father tells him that this is the dream of men, to straighten crumpled things.
    Isn’t that right?
    Yes, Father.
    Call me Papa.
    Yes, Papa.
    He listens to the curious highs and lows of his father’s voice, the way it sometimes sounds torn, like radio waves when he turns the dial. The wireless, the only thing they haven’t sold for food, sits above the fireplace, dark and mahogany. His father tunes in to a report from Berlin, and says: Listen to that! Listen! Music, now that’s music!
    His mother’s fingers are long and thin, and they tap out a rhythm on the chair. Rudik doesn’t want to go to bed, so he sits on her lap. He watches his father, a foreign thing. His cheeks are hollow and his eyes are larger than in the photographs. He coughs, a deep cough, a man’s cough, and spits in the fireplace. Embers jump out onto the dirt floor, so his father reaches down and extinguishes them with his bare fingers.
    Rudik tries it, but his thumb blisters immediately and his father says: That’s my boy.
    Rudik rocks against his mother’s shoulder while he holds back the tears.
    That’s my boy, says his father again, disappearing out the door, coming back two minutes later, saying: If someone thinks there’s no evil in this world, they should visit that fucking outhouse in weather like this!
    His mother looks up, says: Hamet.
    What? says his father. He’s heard language before.
    She swallows, smiles, says nothing.
    My warrior’s heard language, haven’t you?
    Rudik nods.
    That night all four of them sleep in the bed together, Rudik’s head by his father’s armpit. Later he slips away and crosses to his mother, her smell, kefir and sweet potatoes. There is movement deep in the night, the bed slowly throbbing, his father whispering. Rudik turns very suddenly, jams his feet against the warmth of his mother. The rocking stops and he feels his mother’s fingers on his brow. Towards dawn he is woken again, but he doesn’t move and when his parents fall asleep, his father snoring, Rudik sees the light begin to finger the parting in the curtains. Quietly, he rises.
    A handful of cabbage from the iron pot. The last of the milk, kept cold on the windowsill. His high-collared gray school tunic hangs on the wall. Dressing, he moves through the room on the balls of his feet.
    His skates are hooked on the inside knob of the front door. He made them himself—filing down iron scraps from the refinery, embedding the metal into two pieces of thin wood, fashioning leather straps from scraps found behind the warehouses along the railway tracks.
    He quietly unhooks the skates, closes the door, runs to the city lake, the straps joined around his neck, his gloves over the sharp steel so the blades don’t cut his face. Already the lake is dark with movement. Sunlight kindles the cold haze. Men in overcoats skate to work, hunched, smoking as they progress, solid figures against the skeletal trees. The women with shopping bags skate differently, taller somehow, erect. Rudik steps onto the ice and breaks against the traffic, going the wrong way in the flow, people laughing, dipping, cursing him. Hey, boy. You! Salmon!
    He bends his knee, shortens the thrust of his arm, quickens his pace. The metal blades have become slightly loose in the wooden slats, but he has learned balance and counterbalance and, with a small flick of his ankle, he persuades the steel back into the wood.