Snow in May: Stories

Our Upstairs Neighbor, 1997

Sonya sat in the first row of the balcony and stared at the theater curtain, seeing nothing but a blur of red. The eye incident happened almost a week ago, but she was still thinking about what she should have said to Max, reevaluating the timing of her sighs and awkward giggles. Her friends had seen him so close to her face — they didn’t know she’d almost lost an eye — and concluded that they had been kissing. Max looked like he wanted to, maybe, and she had felt as though a giant envelope were opening up inside her chest. He had such kind eyes, for a boy. But.

She couldn’t wait for the concert to begin so that she would have something else to think about before her head burst.

This wasn’t a concert, exactly, but a celebration of the ninetieth birthday of the renowned Soviet tenor Vadim Makin. Several famous singers and TV personalities had flown into Magadan from St. Petersburg and Moscow for the occasion, which was all the teachers at the arts college had talked about for the last month. Sonya was a student in the gifted section there. Her mother was the accompanist in tonight’s program, and Sonya was excited to see her onstage, next to this Makin, though she’d only heard of him a month ago. Maybe her mother would also play for someone Sonya would recognized from TV.

Sonya watched the auditorium fill until only a small island in front of the stage was still empty. This was the VIP section for the guests from the capitals. Max was not someone who would voluntarily attend an event like this, probably, yet she still looked out for his tall figure. Couldn’t he be pulled into the theater if she thought about him hard enough?

Though they had been officially going together for almost two months, the ten minutes leading up to the eye incident was the longest time they’d spent one-on-one. The power had gone out at the school and second-shift grades were let out early. Instead of going home, several of them from ninth A and ninth C lingered at an abandoned construction site behind the soccer field. They played hide-and-seek among the concrete beams, tripping over metal rods and halfheartedly shouting the latest obscenities into the darkness. By accident or conspiracy, as the others were hiding, Sonya and Max found themselves sitting on two perpendicular slabs of cold concrete, all alone.

Here he was, so near. Sonya was barely breathing. He smiled, and she smiled. She was afraid. He was the captain of the basketball team and the tallest boy in all the ninth grade sections. His nose was large and his eyes slightly close-set, but he was very cute. He wore a neon yellow pom-pom hat, the hat she watched come out of the apartment building across from hers to take out the trash every evening. The hat she followed to school every morning, hanging back at a safe distance. In the evenings, she turned off the light in her room and stared at Max’s windows. If the lights in his room lit up before she counted to ten, he loved her. If his silhouette appeared in the kitchen, she loved him.

On those concrete slabs they were shy and tongue-tied. Sonya still couldn’t tell whether his eyes were brown or moss green. She had no siblings, she said when he asked. And yes, her father would be returning to America soon. His older brother was in the army, Max said; he himself wanted to be an engineer. His mother was already saving for the bribes to get him out of the mandatory two-year military service. Why? she asked. Terrible things happen to young men in the army. She didn’t ask for elaboration. He picked up some of last night’s snow and balled it up. What about his father? His father lived in another town with another family. She wondered what he thought of her family: he must have seen both her father and Oleg, her mother’s boyfriend, at the school.

Max threw the snowball and it hit Sonya smack in the left eye. The darkness around her became more solid, then flashed with yellow triangles. I will be blind, she thought. Tears ran down her face, out of surprise and pain and embarrassment. Max rushed over to her. “I didn’t mean to, it was a joke. I am so sorry. Does it hurt bad?” The pain began to recede and Sonya forced herself to smile. “I sure have excellent aim,” he said, dabbing her tears with his hat’s pom-pom. She laughed. She realized that he was holding her hand. And then everybody else appeared, stumbling and giggling, tired of waiting to be found.

* * *

Almost half an hour after the concert was supposed to start, the celebrity guests walked in — some men in suits and some in torn jeans and half-unbuttoned shirts with billowing sleeves. A group of beautiful young women in high heels tottered after them. Somebody started clapping and the rest of the audience joined in. The celebrities gave half bows from their chairs.

As the lights went down Sonya edged toward the balcony railing. The curtain rolled up to reveal a red throne in the corner of the stage; she remembered it from an operetta earlier in the season. It was empty. In the back, suspended by two wires, hung a huge black-and-white portrait of a handsome young man. Makin a long time ago, she assumed. Sergey Yakovlevich Frenkel, the theater director, strode out to the microphone in the middle of the stage. He was a massive man with red hair and an even redder beard. The applause petered out.

“Dear Magadanians and guests,” he thundered. “Thank you for coming to our historic celebration. I’ve just gotten word that Vadim Andreevich Makin is running a little late, so while we wait, and for the entertainment of our esteemed guests, please enjoy a performance by the youngest members of Magadan’s music community — the choir of the Children’s Music School Number One.”

A group of thirty children shuffled onto the stage. Sonya knew several of them as former students of her piano teacher, Faina Grigorievna. She had kicked them out for lack of talent. Sonya had studied with Faina Grigorievna since she was seven, half of her life. Her mother didn’t allow her to quit and her father always said: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Music School #1, on the other hand, accepted everyone, except the completely tone-deaf. According to some people at the arts college. The choir was dreadful. Sonya sank into her chair and watched the side curtains for any movement. She couldn’t believe this Makin would be late for his own concert.

After the choir finished its last song, two of the children brought out a large wreath of flowers and leaned it against Makin’s throne. Sonya would count to ten, she decided, and on ten Makin must appear. She counted to ten — no Makin. She counted again.

The theater director came out. He looked at the looming portrait.

“Dear comrades, unfortunately Vadim Andreevich is not here yet, but we cannot delay our show any longer. A special thank-you to our guests for making the journey all the way to our forgotten Arctic corner. Now we will celebrate the life of our dear Vadim Andreevich how he deserved to be celebrated a long time ago. Better late than never, yes, friends? Nu, of course, yes!”

The audience clapped. Sonya clapped, too — what else was there to do? Oleg had told her that Makin lived just across from the theater, on Port Street. So it couldn’t have been the distance. Or the weather: Magadan had known much fiercer winds.

The lights came up, then down again. Then Yakov Gutman came onstage with a cloth bag. Sonya had seen him many times on TV, but she hadn’t known that he was the most decorated singer in the history of both the USSR and the Russian Federation, as the theater director had remarked in his introduction. She’d always wondered whether his signature hairstyle — cut at sharp angles around his forehead — was a wig.

“I will now read passages from several telegrams and birthday cards received from Vadim Makin’s old stage friends and fans.” He pulled out a piece of cardboard paper from the bag. “‘My dearheart Vadimushka,’” Gutman addressed the throne in his distinct oily baritone, “writes Izabella Yurieva. You, of course, all know Yurieva, the legend of the Russian romance song. ‘So many years have passed,’ she writes, ‘so many lives we’ve lived, and we survived them all. Youth is in the soul, Vadimushka, keep singing.’”

The audience clapped, some whistled. Gutman put his finger to his lips and pulled out another piece of cardboard from the bag. “And this is a telegram from Yegor Tarasov, Junior Lieutenant, Veteran of the Great Patriotic War, residing in Rostov-on-Don. ‘When you sang,’ he writes, ‘hope was planted in our hearts and through all the noise and confetti, your angelic voice hewed a window to the essential, to the truth. You are not forgotten, Vadim Andreevich. Happy birthday.’” Gutman shook his head. “He is a poet, this comrade veteran, isn’t he? We should get our veterans to write our modern pop lyrics, eh?”

The audience laughed in approval. After the reading of postcards, a line formed at the base of the stage. People came up to Makin’s throne and piled on flowers, envelopes, and other gifts.

The theater director, Frenkel, lumbered on stage with a red folder. “We will now present a dramatic sketch about Makin’s life called ‘The World Spins Around the Song,’” he said. “Unfortunately, our respected Vadim Andreevich is still en route, but don’t despair, we have plenty of our own Makins waiting right here in the wings.”

Sonya was starting to feel cold and hungry. Her mother had insisted she wear her piano recital outfit — a brown corduroy dress with a three-tiered skirt that she couldn’t wait to grow out of. She wouldn’t want Max to see her like this. Despite herself, she searched for him in the audience again.

The theater director leaned on Makin’s throne and opened the red folder.

“Act One. It’s the dawn of the twentieth century…” He outlined some mountains in the air. “Revolutionary tremors are already quaking Russia, but certain families will be able to enjoy their privileged lifestyle a little longer.” Two boys from the Music School #1 Choir wheeled on an elaborately painted set piece of the St. Petersburg skyline. “Among such families is Makin’s: his father is a wealthy merchant, his mother — a beautiful gypsy, the great-niece of a famous gypsy singer, Varvara Vasilieva. Makin has seven sisters.”

An actress dressed in a gypsy costume and seven girls from the choir came out onstage to the sounds of “Gypsy Walks,” a song about the call of the gypsy star and following your true love over the edge of the earth. The girls knocked their feet against their ankles and squatted halfway in abysmal imitation of the gypsy dance. There were better dancers in Magadan and a much better children’s choir, the one at the arts college, Sonya thought with disappointment. Makin’s mother sat down at the piano, and the girls formed a circle around her. Then, a red-haired boy ran onto the stage and yelled into the ceiling, “Mama, I want to sing, too! I want to be a star!” Sonya almost fell off her chair. It was the director’s son, Zahar, Sonya’s classmate. A dedicated prankster. He looked nothing like Makin’s noble portrait, but the audience was rolling with laughter.

More people came out on stage, and the music-school boys brought out a fireplace with an electric fire and chairs.

“Makin’s father hosts cultural evenings in their opulent home on the Neva embankment and invites all kinds of historical personages, for example the young poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.” He pointed at an actor named Ruslan Belyaev, who played all the leads in the theater’s operettas. Belyaev was reciting: “… ‘Upon the scales of tinny fishes new lips summoned, though yet mute. But could you play right to the finish a nocturne on a drainpipe flute?’”

The audience clapped and laughed.

“Then came the revolutions.” Four girls in red leotards danced to Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. “Makin dreamed of the sea since childhood, but he is expelled from the navy academy because of his bourgeois father.” The gymnasts tore off Zahar/Makin’s sailor cap and banished him off the stage, lashing him with their red ribbons.

The theater director talked about how Makin worked as a cargo loader at the port, put up handbills, and at night played tangos and fox-trots for the silent movies. How he was discovered singing at the Port Workers’ Club. Zahar/Makin acted all of this out, exclaiming, “I want to sing for the people!” Then he was replaced by a short, bald actor, who usually played fumbling villains. Makin recorded hundreds of songs and performed in private concerts for Stalin (Belyaev with a mustache). When the war started, he volunteered to travel to the front lines to perform for the soldiers, who hoisted terrified Makin over their heads and disappeared into the side curtains.

“He inspired our country to defeat fascism — for words, if they are true, can be a weapon as formidable as tanks or rockets!”

The lights lowered and began to flash with red. “Act Two. In 1942, Vadim Makin falls out of favor with Stalin and, along with hundreds of thousands of others, is sent to the labor camps.” Makin appeared stage right, still dangling precariously over the soldiers’ shoulders, and then was carried off stage left. The last soldier was dragging behind him a length of barbed wire.

“Luckily for us, Makin ends up here, in Magadan. When he is released, he makes Magadan his home. And that is Act Three,” the director concluded triumphantly.

Actors dressed as reindeer pulled a big sled onto the stage.

“I want to sing for the people!” Makin shouted from his burrow inside the sled, and waved a toy cat at the audience. A cat? Maybe it was for the better that the real Makin wouldn’t see the play, Sonya thought.

The red curtain fell and the lights went up to the sound of mad applause. The director announced he’d gotten word that Makin would arrive by the start of the second part of the concert. The celebrities had already disappeared from the audience.

“He is all right, Sonechka, don’t worry. Yakov Gutman himself spent an hour trying to persuade him to come,” Sonya’s mother said when Sonya saw her during the intermission. Her long red hair was done up in an old-fashioned updo. She looked tired. “Makin said he had nothing appropriate to wear.”

“Nothing to wear?”

“Somebody from Moscow even offered him his tuxedo. Makin refused. He said he hadn’t taken off his felt boots in five years, and a tuxedo didn’t go with felt boots.”

“Was he joking?”

Sonya wanted to ask Oleg if he knew anything, but he was busy interviewing some elderly people for his TV segment on Makin.

A third of the audience didn’t return after the intermission. Makin didn’t appear either.

In the fourth hour of the concert, the pop stars from Moscow sang Makin’s songs with lots of bass, synthesizers, and guitar riffs. Then recordings of Makin were played from a record player that somebody had put on the red throne. Sonya was shocked to finally hear Makin’s real voice. Through the crackle of years it came out strong and silvery, and so fervent — like he was confessing to a person who already knew everything and agreed, not a whole world of strangers. She felt her face get red. The accompaniment was simple, just piano or guitar.

The director announced that Makin would be joining the celebration in half an hour. Sonya put her head on the wide balcony railing. It was draped in scarlet velvet and smelled like the last century. She must have dozed off because when she opened her eyes Belyaev was singing to Makin’s empty throne, one arm hugging its back: “Write to me, I beg of you. Write to me, if just a single line.” Sonya’s mother was on stage, hunched over the piano keys.

At the construction site Sonya had told Max that she wanted to be a doctor, her childhood ambition, largely because he said he wanted to be an engineer — a respectable, practical profession. In truth, these days she dreamed of doing something artistic: acting in films, or, better yet, making films. But she said “doctor” because she thought everyone considered her too serious, too good of a student. Max would laugh. And then she had cried when the snowball hit her in the eye. If she had been brave enough to say “actress,” she could’ve at least pretended the crying was on cue, a demonstration of her skill.

The lights went up. Sonya couldn’t believe it was finally over. She got her coat, put on woolen leggings over her tights, and leaned against a column in the foyer downstairs to wait for her mother and Oleg. She didn’t feel the usual post-theater headiness (like her first taste of rum mixed with milk at her grandmother’s), when just walking around under the influence of the performance felt exhilarating, romantic. Though the concert had lasted almost six hours, the evening still felt unfinished. Her stomach ached from hunger. She spotted some people from the arts college in the almost empty foyer. The rest were pensioners, bundling up in slow motion.

“All set, cabaret-beauty?” Sonya recognized Oleg by his nasal voice before she turned around. He was stuffed into all black: tight jeans and a short leather jacket stretched over slouched shoulders. Even though he was slim (except for his potato nose), his clothes always looked too small. She didn’t like it when he called her cabaret-beauty. She wasn’t supposed to like Oleg at all. When her father had returned from Alaska last year, her mother packed her things, packed Oleg’s things, too — he’d been living with them in their old apartment for almost a year — and moved to Oleg’s minuscule room in a kommunalka apartment on the edge of town. A long time before that, her father had promised that the three of them — Papa, Mama, and Sonya — would move to America. Now Sonya shuttled between her mother and father like a silent messenger, afraid to ask whether they would be exiled in Magadan forever.

Since she was now going with Max, she probably wasn’t supposed to still want to go to America.

“Why didn’t Makin come?” Sonya asked Oleg.

“Yes, he embarrassed us in front of the Moscow guests. You know I saw him last night?”

“Last night?”

“My cameraman and I were the only local media allowed to the opening party. They built a whole museum dedicated to Makin in the three-bedroom apartment next door to his place, which, by the way, the city bought him for his birthday. Organized a special ‘retro corner’ with an antique gramophone, his old concert posters and photographs. Very elegant. There’s even a one-of-a-kind cherry-red grand piano that they transported from St. Petersburg and installed through his fifth-floor window with a crane. In that crazy wind! I got it all on film.” Oleg scanned the foyer. “Your mother is taking her time, as usual.”

They sat down on a bench next to the coat check.

“Gutman banged on the piano so hard, Makin’s old rubber cat fell on the floor. The same cat who’d seen Stalin and Beria, and Churchill in Yalta. You know, when Makin performed, he used to put a rubber cat on the piano.”

“A cat? How do you know it was the same one?”

“Makin stood up and sang the last few lines. His voice was weak now, so he overcompensated with passion. Everyone was a little uncomfortable. I managed get a glimpse of his nails.”

“There’s Mama.” Sonya’s mother was coming from the back stairs. She had already put on her fur hat and was barely holding on to her frost-proof fur coat, a thing so big and bulky it was known in the family as Little House.

“Our cabaret-beauty,” Oleg said. “There was a rumor that Makin had abandoned personal hygiene, and his nails grew so deep into his skin that he had to have surgery. But his nails looked completely normal to me, and he didn’t stink. He wore what they said he always wears now: a ratty turtleneck sweater with safety pins on the chest and felt boots.”

“Why was he wearing safety pins?” Sonya said. The story was making her sad.

“Protection against evil eye. And Gutman, I guess.” Oleg chortled.

“What are you talking about?” Sonya’s mother said.

“I haven’t even gotten to the good part.” Oleg tore Little House out of her arms and opened it up, a little too high for her. She climbed in. “In the middle of yet another round of toasts, an old woman in a housedress and slippers bursts in and starts assaulting the Moscow guests, screaming and flailing — something about Yeltsin’s mafiosos. She tried to drag Gutman out the door. To see a grandma curse like that…” Oleg shook his head.

“Who was she?” Sonya said. Her mother was looking at Oleg with suspicion, an expression Sonya noticed more and more often lately.

“Maestro didn’t explain anything. We caught it all on film, I can let you watch later.”

“He is an old man and a giant, giant talent,” her mother said.

“So, for him it’s forgivable?” Oleg said.

“If he’s made mistakes, I’ll be the last in line to judge him.”

Sonya stared at the way her mother’s nostrils flared when she spoke with ardor. In frosty weather, her cheeks became picturesquely red, and her nose stayed small and pale. The opposite always happened to Sonya: her nose reddened and her cheeks’ color drained.

“Let’s go, philosophers.” Oleg ushered them toward the exit.

“I still don’t understand why Makin didn’t come,” Sonya said.

Her mother bent toward her and whispered, “Your grandfather knew Makin when he lived in Magadan, did you know? Ask him before he leaves.”

Sonya had almost forgotten about Deda Misha, who was visiting from Kiev. She knew, of course, that he’d lived in Magadan when he was young, but in her mind, she could only picture him as she knew him in the summers during her school breaks, tending his vegetable garden in a short-sleeved plaid shirt.

Oleg strained to push open the theater’s heavy doors. “What are you two conspiring about? I think—” he said, and was cut off by the wind.

Sonya turned for one last look at the four figures on the theater roof: a soldier with a machine gun, a kolkhoznitsa with a bundle of rye and a sickle, a miner with a hammer, and a huntress with a rifle, gazing into the snowy distance. Legend had it that if a person stared at the statues long enough, they would make a sign revealing the secret location of the Kolyma gold stolen by the escaped Gulag prisoners. She found the two windows Oleg had told her were Makin’s. They were dark, but Makin had an unobstructed view.

* * *

Oleg waited downstairs while her mother walked Sonya up to the fourth floor of their building. They still had a wooden door, tooled with cracked faux leather and tacks, while all their neighbors had installed heavy metal doors. If they had had a metal door, Sonya’s father liked to joke, would it have prevented her mother from leaving?

“How is Papa?” her mother whispered.

“He talks to Americans on the phone a lot.” Sonya realized she could’ve said anything; she could’ve even lied. But she didn’t know what she wanted to happen now.

“Good.” Her mother took off one of her gloves and pressed her red fingers to the keyhole. She stood like this for a moment, as if letting a few fingertip cells sneak into her old home. “Tell Deda Misha I send hello and wish him safe travels for me. And don’t forget to ask him about Makin.”

Sonya felt terribly sad that her mother would now have to take a long bus ride to Oleg’s kommunalka, with that cold-tiled communal bathroom and the cockroaches spying from the cracks in the wall. “Bye, Mama.” She buried her nose in the wet fur of Little House.

Once her mother disappeared down the first flight of stairs, Sonya rang the bell. After some time Deda Misha opened the door. He wore her father’s brown sweater and her mother’s pink apron.

“We thought they’d kidnapped you! Come in, come in. Hungry?”

“Hungry, of course.”

Sonya’s father lay on the couch, watching the news and reading a book called Business Advice from an American Lawyer. Sonya kissed him on the forehead. He smelled faintly of sweat, but — it was obvious now — he was so much better and more handsome than Oleg. Her favorite feature of her father’s were his pale green eyes, which, like her mother’s nostrils, she didn’t inherit.

“Shto, survived?” he said. A sly smile ruffled his mustache.

“Makin didn’t even come.”

Her father shook his head. “An understandable matter.”

“Sonya, come eat!” Deda Misha called from the kitchen.

“Go eat, Sonya,” her father said. It was a command veiled by a joking tone. He talked often this way since he got back from America.

“I was about to,” Sonya said. “Am I at least allowed to take this stupid dress off? Mama sent hello, by the way.”

“Just the hello? What about the money? They must be waiting till he wins the Palme d’Or and Hollywood calls. All right, I’ll wait, too. See you in L.A.”

Sonya didn’t reply; she never knew what to say to her father’s digs at Oleg or her mother. When she was with him, her father consumed all of her daughterly attention. She changed into track pants and an old turtleneck sweater, thinking of Makin’s safety pins. The New Year’s discotheque was just a week away, Sonya remembered with a jolt. She wanted it to be both sooner and later. Max would be there, of course, and he would ask her to dance. Everybody expected from them at least one slow medlyak—face-to-face, his arms around her waist, her arms around his neck. She would have to say yes.

In the kitchen, Deda Misha was pouring borsch into bowls. He’d made it Ukrainian style, with squares of lard floating on the scarlet surface. Sonya parted the curtains and rubbed the cold, frost-white window until a clear hole appeared on the glass. All three windows of Max’s apartment were dark. Where could he be? The basketball practice had finished hours ago, and he never went to bed early. Maybe at one of his teammates’ apartments. She’d heard of wild parties hosted by the girls in the B section; those girls were the most developed and grown-up in all of ninth grade. The booths by the theater would sell anything to anyone, even cheap vodka that made you go blind. And where was Max’s mother?

She closed the curtains and held on to the fabric for a second. She had recently decided, after much agonizing, that her first memory was of her mother hemming these curtains — Sonya distinctly remembered the pattern of blue and orange pears — and therefore, all the memories prior belonged to her previous lives.

She sat down at the table and began to fish the pieces of lard out of the borsch. Deda Misha put out a plate with black bread and sat down opposite her. He had thin knees and a formidable belly that was squared on top from the hernia he earned at fourteen, during the war. His white hair was thick and wavy — the best in the family.

“Tak, you say our maestro didn’t come?” he said and bit into a piece of garlic. He had excellent ivory teeth thanks to fearlessness of raw garlic and onion. “How old is he now, ninety?”

“Yes, ninety. The concert was for his birthday. Deda, tell me about him. Mama said you knew him.” Deda Misha’s eyes began to shine, so, in spite of herself, she added, “You know, Mama always adds beans to her borsch.”

“Your mama knows a lot about many things, just not the important ones. She is still young, we have hope.”

Sonya stared at the lard, itching to hit the table hard enough that the plate would flop over on the floor.

“Yes, Makin and I were friends.”

Deda Misha had arrived in Magadan full of stories, like a barrel full of pickled cabbage, and he was in a hurry to tell them. He had already gone through most of his childhood and adolescence, proving — Sonya had to concede — that his life at her age had been vastly more dramatic and historical. Deda’s mother had carried him out of Ukraine and into Chechnya to escape holodomor, the terror famine under Stalin. During the war, he had thrown twenty incendiary bombs off his apartment building with the help of giant metal pincers. He founded a club to grow silkworms and provide fabric for the military parachutes. Her own grandfather, contributing to the victory — it was incredible. She’d never heard of any of this before. He was drafted to help Russian soldiers catch horses, which the Chechens had released into the mountains before Stalin deported them to Kazakhstan and Siberia. He became a Young Pioneer, then a Komsomolets, and then joined the Party.

Sometimes, as Deda Misha talked, Sonya tried to imagine Max in Deda Misha’s stories, having his adventures. Max throwing bombs off the roof, Max rounding up the wild Chechen horses like a cowboy. Max was brave, there was no doubt about that. He’d once jumped off a five-story building into a giant snowbank on a dare. Then everybody else jumped after him. Then the police arrived and they ran away, except for Pet’ka, who had broken his leg.

“You could say I’d played a crucial role in Makin’s life,” Deda Misha said. “I’ll give you a garlic clove to gnaw on. It kills the microbes.”

“I don’t want a garlic clove. Do you know why he didn’t come?”

“Pride and stubbornness. He’s always been like that, stubborn as a crayfish. Now that he’s got the public’s attention, he wants to make a point. Eat up, Sonya.”

“What point?”

Deda Misha got up and put on a teakettle. Under his big square glasses, his eyes were slightly hooded. They said everyone in the world, and definitely everybody in Russia, had at least one gene from Genghis Khan. What if Deda Misha was Genghis Khan himself in his prior life? In the living room, her father had fallen asleep.

“To understand what happened with Makin, Sonya, I need to first tell you what happened with me, how I left Grozny after the Petroleum Institute and ended up in Magadan. ‘Magadan, Magadan, a windy city between two bays,’” he sang in a soothing baritone. “It’s already very late.”

“But I want to know about Makin, Deda, and you leave tomorrow. Was he really as famous as they say?”

“Yes, ‘okay,’ as you Americans say. I will begin from the beginning. First, you have to know I didn’t want to leave my mother all alone in Grozny. My father left the family eighteen years before, for another woman — she’d lied that she was pregnant. I went to him, we talked man to man, and I persuaded him to come back and live with Mother. You have to always take care of your parents, Sonya.”

“She just forgave him after eighteen years?” Sonya couldn’t imagine forcing her parents to be together.

“I don’t know if she forgave, but it was better this way, not to be alone. Your baba Mila and I arrived in Magadan in 1951. We took a train from Moscow to Vladivostok, and down to the port of Nahodka. Our ship was a German ocean liner named Russia, formerly Adolf Hitler. It was illegally seized by the USSR after the war and would have been arrested if it went into international waters. So it sailed to Magadan, Gulag country — the gateway to Hell, people called it then. The ship was very luxurious: plush carpets, mirrors, curved wooden staircases, German words everywhere. They’d managed to remove most of the swastikas.”

“You met Makin on the ship?”

The kettle began to whistle. Deda Misha took it off the burner and poured boiling water into the brew pot.

“I will get to Makin, Sonechka. He was already in Magadan. Listen. The closer we got to Magadan, the more horror stories our fellow travelers told us about our future hometown…”

Deda Misha talked about how the camps were everywhere, even in the center of Magadan. Sonya hadn’t known that. Barbed wire and dogs barking in the cold. If a prisoner lost a game of cards, upon release he had to kill on such and such date the tenth person he encounters on an evening walk. Or be killed. The Gulag’s criminal network reached everywhere. Released prisoners lived in flotsam shanties or manholes and stole food from first-floor kitchens. If a prisoner escaped, the whole town would be on lockdown while soldiers hunted him down.

“Tea’s ready,” Sonya said. She tried to imagine barbed wire in her neighborhood.

“Pour for us, Sonya, and ask if your father wants some.”

“He’s sleeping.” She poured the brew into two cups and added hot water. Her legs, from the knees down, were leaden. She parted the curtains again. Max’s windows were still dark.

“Tell me about Makin. Nothing scary, please.”

“Nothing scary, eh? When I arrived, the head of personnel talked to me, saw that I was Ukrainian — all the best petroleum engineers are Ukrainians — and decided not to send me to the mines … I will skip a few years. I became the director of the gas and petroleum depots in Magadan. I always preferred to be in the middle of the action, not in the office with the papers and the telephone. I traveled all over the region, and what situations I got into I can’t begin to describe. Some near-deaths even, in the beautiful and cruel far north. I worked hard, I love working. Back then there was real enthusiasm among the young people. They didn’t work just for the money. I’ve been lucky to meet many interesting people in my life, and I always stayed open-minded. People sense your interest and open up, Sonya. In Magadan, it wasn’t just Makin. The whole Kolyma was a living museum of Soviet history.”

Sonya yawned and sipped her tea while Deda Misha talked about all the people who were there in connection with the Kirov case. Whatever that was. Then he droned on about his coworkers — someone who used to be a senior engineer of some plant in Ukraine and was now a secretary, or someone with a German last name who used to be the director of the largest something in Leningrad and now shoveled coal. “I was twenty-six, but they never showed any bitterness or let me feel I didn’t deserve my authority. They always tried to help me.”

Sonya stared inside her teacup, where the tea leaves swirled like big, black snowflakes. “Deda, what about—”

“At the depot where I’d worked for twenty years, I had four hundred and forty people under me. New specialists who had just graduated from the universities on the continent, former camp guards and prisoners, and people who were still in the camps serving their sentences, and always I was proactive. Whenever I needed anything, a good-quality wall newspaper to celebrate the holidays or mark the progress of our headquarters, I went to the camps — a friend of mine was a behavioral counselor at one of them — and had my pick of the best artists and poets. I reconciled husbands and wives, rebuilt families, helped people quit smoking and vodka. I organized the construction of houses for my workers. I was a matchmaker to young people and arranged for them to move into studio apartments to have their privacy. And always I wanted to do more.”

“You found Makin a bride?” Sonya interrupted. She was getting impatient. Maybe Deda Misha didn’t know Makin that well after all? If they had been such great friends, wouldn’t he have come to his birthday concert, even though Oleg and her mother were there?

“Makin? He almost got himself a bride.” Deda Misha burst into such a fit of laughter that Sonya knocked over her cup of tea. She got up and found a rag to wipe the table.

“As I was saying, I built clubhouses, movie theaters, libraries, and gathered books to fill them. I required my workers to read, and then I held meetings to discuss the books. Who is the positive character? Who is the negative character? What is the author’s message? Useful, isn’t it? All the young people in town dreamed of working at my depot. It’s very pleasant to remember. If someone showed up drunk, I cut their salary. They understood and corrected their behavior. I had half of my depot staffed with West Ukrainians — very hardworking people, don’t drink, don’t smoke. East Ukrainians, Russians, Tatars, they all like to drink and curse. Nothing in this life I hate more than cursing. I still get phone calls and letters from all over the country from people whom I helped in Magadan. Da.

“I worked for thirty years as the director of large projects, in Magadan and then in Ukraine, building a pipeline under the Dnieper, and I wasn’t arrested once. I was very honest. I never used my connections to advance myself — I could’ve gotten in touch with Brezhnev if I wanted to, through relatives — but I didn’t want any promotions or medals I didn’t deserve. I never accepted bribes.”

“Maybe you should have.” Sonya’s father was standing in the kitchen doorway.

“And if the bribes had been slipped secretly, I returned them,” Deda Misha said. His face settled from surprise to babyish hurt. “Tolik, I’m sure you know that I would have gone to the camp for that, in our own backyard.”

“What’s three years? The curious thing is you usually get punished for small-time stuff. Steal billions and you’ll probably get away with it. Become best friends with the president, drink vodka together, and listen to Gutman live at your dacha.”

“That’s a good lesson to be teaching your daughter.”

“All right, Papa, tell us about Makin, like promised. Before your audience nosedives into the tea.”

“I was just laying the groundwork. Do you want some tea, Tolik?”

“I’ll make it. You get to your story.” Sonya’s tall father took up all the space in the tiny kitchen and cast shadows on the table as he moved.

“Tak.” Deda Misha cleared his throat. “Makin lived in a kommunalka room upstairs from us, on Park Street. As part of his sentence, he had loss of civil rights and was not allowed to travel beyond a certain region after he was released from the camp, and, of course, travel or move to the capital and major cities. Many people, after they had been officially acquitted, stayed in Magadan because their personal circumstances had changed. Say, they once had a wife, and now she’s dead or married to someone else. Or their family had rejected them. Many had found their second lives here.”

“Papa, we know you are an engineer to your core but less technical details, please.”

Sonya caught the spark in her father’s eyes and felt united with him against Deda Misha. Her father fixed the tea and brought it out to the living room. He returned and poured himself a glass of vodka.

“You drink too much, Tolik,” Deda Misha said.

“A little vodka keeps the spirit young and full of good ideas. A lot of vodka, on the other hand.” He drank from his glass. “She’s a grown-up, she made her own bed. She can sleep in his piss.”

Heat rushed to Sonya’s face when she realized he was talking about her mother and Oleg. She’d never actually seen Oleg drunk.

“My spirit is young, by natural method,” Deda Misha said.

“I wish we were all like you,” her father said.

“I am continuing. Tolik, please, no jokes.”

“I will leave in a minute,” Sonya’s father said. He remained by the window, his back pulling down on the pear-patterned curtains.

“Papa, you’ll snap the curtains,” Sonya said. “Just sit down, please.”

“I need to plan my great return, like the Count of Monte Cristo.”

“To America?” If that was true, she was ready to forgive him all his teasing, and everything he’d ever said about her mother.

“China,” her father said.

“China?”

“Sonya, what grade are you in?”

“Ninth.”

“Exactly. Don’t always believe the first thing you’re told.”

“Oh.” So, America! She could barely contain her thrill.

“Vot, continuing,” Deda Misha said loudly, like a teacher starting a lesson. “Makin was our upstairs neighbor, but once, he was the most famous tenor in the USSR.”

“Like Pavarotti and Domingo,” Sonya’s father said.

“Really?” Sonya said.

“His mother and grandmother were gypsies and singers. That’s where he got his singing genes. Gypsies have beautiful songs, almost as beautiful as Ukrainian songs. In the twenties and thirties, Makin sold out stadiums, and when a new record came out, the lines outside the record stores were so unruly that horse-mounted police were dispatched to maintain order.”

“Like Beatlemania,” Sonya said. Her father winked at her. They were fans of the Beatles together, and she was annoyed that Oleg also loved the Beatles. Sometimes, though, she wanted Oleg to like her; she couldn’t explain it. Even when Oleg had said that her father was like the fool from “The Fool on the Hill.” He’d intended it as a compliment, talking about the wise fool. Her mother had overheard and warned Oleg that for as long as he lived in their home and ate their food, he was forbidden to say a word about Sonya’s father. But Sonya had understood what Oleg meant, and, in a way, she even agreed.

“He wrote his own songs or collaborated with a lyricist. And he had his own piano accompanist, his friend Mikhail Bondarenko. Another Ukrainian.”

“I think Bondarenko was a Jew,” Sonya’s father said.

“Yes, Jews are good musicians. Like gypsies, but more educated in the classical tradition, not as soulful.”

“As Ukrainians?”

“You are yourself an almost full-blooded Ukrainian, Tolik, you should be proud. Tak, next. The war. Makin sang at the blockaded Leningrad, the besieged Sevastopol, and for the sailors in Arctic Murmansk. By the way, because there was an ingredient in the plastic records that was necessary for some very important military production, people were called to bring in their broken or even new records for recycling. But Makin’s records weren’t accepted. He told me himself. On the contrary, his records were given out as a reward to the most active recyclers. He could hypnotize people with his voice. That’s why he lasted as long as he did. The veterans say he made them want to not just survive, but to live. To return home and find love.” Deda Misha got teary-eyed for a second, which made Sonya uncomfortable. She wondered whether any veterans had come to Makin’s concert tonight.

“In ’42, shortly before Stalin’s birthday, Beria called Makin, the story goes, and asked why none of his songs were about Stalin. Have you studied Beria at school yet? He was the chief of secret police. At an earlier interview with the KGB Makin was asked — which means he was ordered — to write a song about Stalin. Makin replied that songs about Stalin did not suit a tenor voice. Can you imagine Beria getting such an answer? Beria! Who had personally signed thousands of execution orders. Who rode around Moscow in a black car, picking out women and girls on the street, then raped and murdered them. Stalin was like a jealous husband; he couldn’t stand when someone might be more popular than him. Makin was sentenced to eight years in one of Magadan’s camps. Not bad as Gulag sentences go, and he didn’t have to do the real hard labor, where people died in the mines and from cold and starvation. He was part of the agitprop brigade with other singers, actors, poets, and dancers and performed at different camps. It was a part of the so-called cultural and reeducation program. The camp leadership always loved art, and of course wanted to use the talents of so many accomplished people who came their way. These brigades even received bonuses and extra pay, and they felt welcomed and needed wherever they went. Makin’s talent saved him, but still it was devastating. He was cut down at the height of his career.”

“Just for not singing about Stalin?” Sonya said.

“People were arrested for less. Tell a political joke and you just signed your arrest warrant. There was a rumor of another reason — actually, many conflicting rumors — but rumors were a dangerous thing. People kept their mouths shut.”

“Love’s a bitch and life’s her lackey,” Sonya’s father said.

“Tolik, not for Sonya’s ears.”

“I’m sure she’s heard worse, in their kommunalka.” He poured himself more vodka. “The important question was not for what, Sonya, but for how long. With rights of correspondence, or without. If not, the family wouldn’t even know where you were, whether you were dead or alive.”

“Yes, it was like that. ‘If there is a person, an Article will be found for him.’” Deda Misha sighed. “So, Makin. After all the years of my friendship with him, I can confidently say that like so many artists, he was not practical. He didn’t know what was good for him. A tremendous shame, for someone of his stature.”

“Get to the point, comrade general,” Sonya’s father said.

Deda Misha waved him away. “Makin’s sentence was cut short, for good work and behavior. Afterward, he lived in Magadan with three cats. Everybody knew who he was, but many pretended not to. Even the walls have ears, that’s what we said. Housemates behind our thin walls could’ve been working surveillance for the KGB. I’d seen Makin on the staircase of our building many times. He always looked so fashionable — in a long checkered coat and a silk scarf. His cologne lingered on the stairs long after he’d passed. He still had foreign friends and admirers, who closed their eyes to certain of his proclivities. Just like I later would. They couldn’t help him move back to Moscow or restore his former glory, but they could procure for him an Italian scarf, a French beret.

“Every weekend, your baba Mila and I enjoyed music filtering down through the thin floor from his soirées. He played piano, his guests brought guitars, violins — and he sang, of course, he sang his long swan song. He was only in his mid-forties then and already starting to look old. His black gypsy eyes had sunk in and he was losing hair, but there was still an aura of nobility on his face, the way certain artists can look no matter how much they suffer. By the way, in ’43, when he was still in the camp, he was flown into Yalta for several hours.”

“Tehran,” Sonya’s father said.

“Yes, yes, Tehran. Yalta Conference was later. He was flown to Tehran under guard. It was Churchill’s birthday, and all the famous singers in the world gathered to perform for him. Churchill’s son had organized the concert and personally requested Makin. He, of course, had no idea that Makin was in the Gulag. As Makin was walking off the stage after his performance, he ran into Ida Shteynberg, a Yiddish singer he knew in his youth in St. Petersburg — she immigrated to Britain before the war. While everyone was applauding, she told him he must walk up to Roosevelt or Churchill, or even Churchill’s son, and ask to be taken for political asylum. It was his only chance for a free life. She even taught him how to say it in English. Makin didn’t do it.”

“But why?”

“At that point he still thought he would be rehabilitated and continue to be a star in his homeland. In America or England, who would he be? Artists need their audience. Without it, they wilt like unwatered flowers. When you are open-minded and listen, it’s not hard to figure people out.”

“He told you all of this?” Sonya said.

“He didn’t like talking about the past, Sonya. Understandable, with a past like his. Somebody else had told me.”

“Nu, honest folk, I am off to the land of dreams and fools.” Sonya’s father kissed her on the top of her head. “Don’t torture her for too long, Papa. Good night to all.”

“Good night,” Sonya said. She wanted to say something more — something comforting yet neutral — but couldn’t think of it fast enough. She had this feeling ever since her father had returned from America, like she was constantly chasing a loose thread.

“Good night, Tolik. Don’t worry, she’ll see what a mistake she’s made.”

Her father shrugged his shoulders and winked at Sonya.

She watched him disappear into the darkness of the living room. He wore an old woolen sweater he’d left in Magadan when he went to America. It was too small for him then, and Oleg had worn it when he lived with Sonya and her mother. Now it fit. For a whole year, Sonya had told her father on the phone what she wanted him to send with weekly flights: strawberry milk, sushi, cream-filled toaster strudels, yellow legal pads, highlighters. She had talked about school, complained about Faina Grigorievna and practicing piano, and described the ballroom dresses she wanted for the competitions. As if those were the most important things, the only things.

“I was never home in those years, that’s how hard I worked, Sonya,” Deda Misha continued. “Your father was just a baby, very fussy. Baba Mila noticed that in the evenings the singing from Makin’s room soothed Tolik to sleep, so during the day she began to play the one Makin record we had over and over. It had all of my favorite songs: ‘Friendship,’ ‘Autumn,’ ‘Good-bye, My Gypsy Camp.’ You know, after Makin’s first arrest, many of his records were pulled from stores, confiscated from people, and melted. He even burned his own records.”

“Why?”

“I think because he was depressed, broken. One weekend, as I passed him on the stairs, I told him about his youngest fan in the person of our baby, Tolik. You should’ve seen the way his gloomy face lit up — balsam on my heart. If you’d like, he said, I’d be happy to sing a song for your son; nothing would give me more pleasure. He had a very pleasant voice up close, very aristocratic. It was surreal to me, a lad from a Ukrainian hutor and now talking to someone who had personally known Stalin and Mayakovsky. I thought about another point quickly: Was he saying this to be polite? Who might see him going into my room and what conclusions would they draw? Who would they report to? I decided to take the risk. A person is a person. A bird flies, a singer sings, and that’s all there is to it. Never pass up an opportunity to do another person good, Sonya, even if it costs you a little extra. It will all be tallied up in the big book.

“‘Come in now, Comrade Makin, if you’re not in a hurry,’ I told him. ‘My wife just made a wonderful plov with beef.’

“Baba Mila almost fainted when she saw Makin in our room. She rushed up to him and kissed his hand as if he were a king. She later told me she knew this was inappropriate, but, she said, she did it instinctively. She didn’t know how else to express her heartbreak over Makin’s situation. Whatever anybody decreed, she said, Makin was lonely in a way that only few could truly understand. At that point many people still remembered him — their youth was colored by his beautiful melodies — but it was they who benefited from this, in safety, not he. Such a kind and wise woman your grandmother was. She comes to my dreams almost every night.” Deda Misha looked down at his lap, silent.

“I miss her, too,” Sonya said, although the time she remembered most clearly was the summer of Baba Mila’s death. Deda Misha had taken her out of the hospital and was administering natural therapy at home. Sonya remembered being scared of her grandmother’s legs, which had become as thin as her own. And she was scared to ask Deda Misha whether it was true that he forbade anyone to tell Baba Mila that she had cancer, for fear of upsetting her. That’s what Baba Olya had told her.

Was Baba Mila living a different life now, as a little girl? Maybe somewhere exotic and warm, like Brazil. And did she remember Sonya, her only granddaughter? Deda Misha now lived with another woman, whom he’d met in a village outside Kiev. She was nice, too.

“We sat with Makin, ate the plov and drank tea, and talked about the upcoming winter,” Deda Misha went on. “He told us he was writing new songs he’d like to record. Of course, he was forbidden access to a recording studio. He didn’t have to say it. Baba Mila got your father out of his crib. He’d just woken up and was preparing to start the siren. ‘Look at those long eyelashes,’ Makin said and shook Tolik’s chubby hand. He sang one of the famous old Russian songs, ‘Dance and sing, beautiful creature, and while you dance, I’ll laugh. And while you laugh, I’ll laugh with you, but inside I am burning.’ Makin’s voice reached into my chest and wrung out my soul. By the time he finished, your father was rolling with laughter, and Baba Mila was crying. Makin himself was almost in tears. It is a love song, like most songs.

“Since that first tea performance, I began thinking nonstop about Makin’s desire to record. We had a national treasure in our hutches, staring at the snow through his window, wasting away. We could help him resume work as a singer. That would be valuable both for him and for the people of Kolyma. You can’t fight destiny, but you should always try to befriend it — that is my motto. I knew everyone in Magadan, from the regional head of education to the chief veterinarian at the poultry plant, and my engineer’s mind began to work, calculate, draw connections, tak tak tak tak. At that point, Makin was employed at the library, typing up catalog cards and shelving books.

“Me, by the way, I understand music.” Deda Misha crossed his arms on top of his hernia and nodded. “When I was at the Petroleum Institute back in Grozny, I sang in a men’s a cappella group. I also played drums in a band. Musical accompaniments for banquets, weddings, funerals, groundbreaking for a new factory — for a small fee and a piece of kielbasa. You come from a very musical family, Sonya. Baba Mila sang, too, arias from Prince Igor, and played piano.”

“As good as Mama?” Sonya said, on purpose.

Deda Misha pretended not to hear. “I decided to take Makin under my wing and invited him to sing at our Petroleum Workers’ Club,” Deda Misha carried on. “He agreed with pleasure. When I announced that we would have a special guest as a closing number in our musical evening in the person of Comrade Vadim Andreevich Makin, the same famous Makin, my otherwise respectable workers began to holler like monkeys, demanding Makin immediately and Makin all night. Those ensembles scheduled to perform before Makin, including my a cappella group, gladly stepped down. Maestro was in the house.

“Makin marched toward the piano in an impeccably ironed black suit. By the way — a curious detail for you — instead of sheet music, he clutched a small rubber cat to his chest.”

“A cat!” Sonya exclaimed, about to tell Deda Misha that Oleg, too, had mentioned a toy cat at the party. She caught herself in time. She wanted to hear the end of the story, after all.

“Two hundred people held their breath as he began to sing. He sat at the piano half turned to the audience, emphasizing certain phrases with a pitch of his body or a movement of his hand. I remember the first song. ‘When youth leaves, the nights seem longer … What could’ve been said before, cannot now be said. When youth leaves, one loves differently. When youth leaves, one loves even stronger.’ His voice was spellbinding. One forgot certain details of his biography as long as this voice poured and poured. Even now I remember with goose bumps. I felt like my soul was getting undressed in front of everyone.” Deda Misha tugged at the skin of his Adam’s apple. “A part of me even wanted him to stop. Such is the power of art — yes, a sudden, gripping power. It was too late to try to contain him. He had gone out of orbit … in more than one way.

“He sang until he was about to collapse — old favorite songs and new songs in front of an audience for the first time. There was so much cheering, so much ‘Bravo!’ and ‘Bis!’ that the police showed up. They stared at Makin like at a tropical bird, but they enjoyed his singing, too. They didn’t even ask to see anyone’s papers, which was the bulk of their duties, you know.” Deda Misha chuckled.

“I felt tremendous satisfaction in bringing Makin to the people. I developed the petroleum supply infrastructure that powered the extraction of valuable natural resources in Kolyma: gold, uranium, tin, fish, crab. In the arts sphere, Makin was our gold. I was building my family. Your aunt Angela would be born soon. The next fifteen years were the happiest and most fruitful time of my life.”

Deda Misha took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, smiling into the past.

“I organized a few more concerts for Makin at our Workers’ Club and found him his own piano accompanist in the person of Galochka, one of our accountants. Remember this name, Sonya, for our story. Makin himself said that though she played too loudly, as if trying to outplay the racket of dishes in a restaurant, she had the soul of a real musician. Makin sang for free, of course, for the rehabilitation of his reputation.”

“What do you mean, ‘rehabilitation’? Like after an accident?”

“What are they teaching you in your English Lyceum? American slang? Rehabilitation is for those who were sent to the Gulag or executed without a good reason. Amnesty. The official restoration of civil rights and a good name.”

“Oh, right.” Sonya didn’t remember studying that at school.

“I talked to Gumenyuk (a Ukrainian, by the way) — he was the head artistic producer at the Magadan Musical and Dramatic Theater — about organizing Makin concerts there. By the way, he told me that the imprisoned artists had performed at the theater. All the local party bosses and MVD apparatchiks sat in the front row with their wives, while the guards with machine guns sat in the wings and in the balcony and took the performers back to the camps before the applause died down. Makin performed, too. He was the biggest celebrity in Kolyma.”

“This was at our theater?” Sonya said. “Are you sure?” She thought about all the portraits in the theater’s hall; the biggest one was of Frenkel, the director, staring into middle distance. And the black-and-white photographs of old productions along the grand staircase with the red carpet held down by metal rods. The actors forever frozen in the heat of the fight or a love confession — were some of them prisoners? Would she be able to tell if she looked very carefully next time?

“Same theater, probably before I got to Magadan. I’ve never seen any armed guards at a concert. But now Makin would be returning as a free man. The theater was in a hole: intrigue backstage, boredom onstage. The socialist realism plays from the capital weren’t popular with Magadan folk. We brought in Makin, and he sold out every performance, even the seats in the orchestra pit. He saved the theater. The following year he was hired full-time, though without any media fanfare or the northern coefficient. Makin didn’t mind, he was happy to perform again. He also had a fan in the person of Konstantin Kazakov, the director of the regional guild of radio broadcasting, and this Kazakov began recording him secretly in Magadan’s radio studio. I found this out only recently, through the grapevine of old acquaintances.

“It was brave of Kazakov. Makin was no longer a prisoner, and Stalin was dead, but there was still the unspoken ban on Makin. It was brave of me, too. If the KGB rang my doorbell at three at night and asked me why I was so interested in Makin’s career, I would have told them it was for the benefit of the Soviet people. It was the truth. If they’d asked me if I, how to say, was of a similar persuasion as Makin, I’d have told them: I have a beautiful wife and healthy children. There isn’t a single stain on my reputation.”

Deda Misha licked the white corners of his dry lips as he talked. “I had noticed that our accountant-accompanist Galochka had taken an interest in Makin right away. At the first rehearsal for his debut at the Workers’ Club, Galochka put her shawl around his shoulders — it might’ve been cold that evening. The next time, Makin brought her a casserole that, he said, he had cooked from a French recipe. We all had a taste after the rehearsal. Very exotic. After that, Makin and Galochka acted like they’d been best friends since diapers. About a year later, as Makin was gaining traction, Galochka was replaced by someone from the newly founded Magadan Philharmonic, but they remained inseparable.” Deda Misha took long pauses between sentences. “I ran into her several times on the stairs of our apartment building. She was always bringing him food. A woman from the depot had told me in confidence that she’d heard Galochka boasting about the Italian silk stockings Makin had procured for her. Not my business, I said. Everyone gives what they can, and that’s the only thing Makin could give a woman. Silk stockings. I almost asked him for a pair of tights for Baba Mila — after all, I was working hard on his behalf — but I didn’t want to risk any rumors of foreign schemes. Commercial speculation was illegal. I was the director, you remember.”

Sonya had fallen into the story’s dreamy trance. Inexplicably, it felt like her life had somehow become intertwined with Makin’s, years before her birth. Maybe she’d known him in her past life. She finally grasped what word Deda Misha didn’t want to say out loud, as if the walls and teacups still had ears. That word and its female counterpart were popular insults at school this quarter, even though all girls who were best friends held hands.

“In a few years, through tireless negotiation with heads of this and that at the municipal and regional levels, Gumenyuk and I managed to arrange for Makin to go on a solo concert tour around Kolyma. He gave his all, at every performance, not the lip-synching that goes on with the pop singers these days.

“In the next few years he toured not only Kolyma but all of Siberia, Yakutia, Kamchatka, Chukotka, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands. He sang for the deer farmers, fishermen, petroleum workers, submarine sailors, geologists, scientists. He sang in small towns, too, and was more popular than any other touring shows. If people heard that Makin was in town, they would run over to his performance instead of attending concerts or plays from the capitals, full of award-winning artists. Can you imagine such a blow, when they sent telegrams to the Ministry of Culture in Moscow? He began receiving letters from his old fans. Many were surprised he was still alive. He told me himself. He even looked younger and healthier. His gypsy eyes burned with the fire of life again. He told me he was writing a new cycle of songs about Magadan and Kolyma, about its unique natural beauty, the rare kindness of its people. But I wasn’t satisfied yet, silly me. I thought that the real comeback would be for him to return to Moscow with a solo concert. Gumenyuk and I continued to work on that. Our progress was slow: Makin was still blacklisted in central Russia. But we were able to convince some big artists we’d gotten in touch with in the process to add Magadan to their touring itineraries on the promise that they would get to meet the legendary Makin. And that was an unexpected benefit for everyone.

“Makin stayed involved with the music program at the Workers’ Club. Your baba Mila kept telling me to lighten his voluntary obligations, but a man, especially an artist, is only truly alive when he is working. Just as she herself had said before. You stop working, you start dying, and that’s all there is to it. He had Galochka, but I’m sure he missed his friends and admirers at the petroleum depot, too. He was such an inspiration to our amateur musical ensembles.

“Listen carefully now, Sonya. There is nothing out that window. One day in the early sixties, Galochka came to my office for advice on a matter of the heart. I was used to fixing people’s marital and personal problems, but this turned out to be a special case. She told me she’d been in love with Makin ever since that first rehearsal all those years ago, and she couldn’t bear loving in secret any longer. I almost fell off my chair. Makin was teaching her to sing, Galochka rattled on, and explained to her the secrets of the old songs. He personally knew many of the authors who had written them and was apparently very upset about the vulgar interpretations of modern singers. One example she gave was about the way they announce on TV that ‘Coachman, don’t race the horses’ is the national coachman’s song. It irritated Makin because, according to him, it was written in his childhood home in St. Petersburg by some Baronessa von Ritter as an answer to another song—‘Race, coachman, faster into the distance.’ Such answers to songs were popular at the turn of the century, Galochka said.”

Sonya liked this very much. Answer-songs. Baronessa von Ritter. Maybe that’s who she was in her past life, a beautiful and wealthy baronessa. She went on sleigh rides hitched to a troika of white horses, warm under a bear blanket. Sonya looked out the window again. She really should start worrying about Max, but all she could think of was how great it would be to ride in a sleigh with her best friend, Sabrinka. She wouldn’t have to wonder the whole time whether Max was waiting for a kiss.

“In Makin’s cramped room, stuffed with books and old recordings, Galochka went on, the world was bigger and more interesting even than going to the Black Sea for vacation, with a two-day stopover in Moscow. He told her about growing up in St. Petersburg, listening to Mayakovsky recite his poetry in the parlor of his parents’ house. His verses struck Makin’s soul like whips. On her part, Galochka told Makin about her childhood in the suburbs of Moscow. Her great-grandfather had been a royal beekeeper.

“She loved him, she said, and was certain that he loved her. She didn’t know why he hadn’t made a move all these years. Maybe the age difference. Makin was in his mid-fifties by then, but she, too, had been on the edge of spinsterhood for some time. Should she ask him to marry her or should she continue waiting?”

Sonya scooted to the edge of her taboret, listening now in horror.

“Poor Galochka. She was a pleasant woman, femininely plump, big blue eyes, wavy black hair. Half a head taller than Comrade Makin, by the way. To me, she looked like a kindergarten teacher, someone who should be surrounded by children, not numbers. Her personnel file said ‘never married’; I didn’t pry. She’d always struck me as a bit ‘not of this world,’ as they say, but she was a hardworking accountant. That’s what mattered to me most.

“So, Galochka and Makin. Da, I couldn’t dream of this in my sleep. How could she not have known of his disease? How could she not see it? Granted, sometimes I felt that if I didn’t know, I myself wouldn’t be able to tell from just looking at him. But it is what a person chooses to do behind closed doors, seen only by his conscience, that defines his true character. I even wondered if he had played some kind of trick on her.

“‘Galochka,’ I said to her, ‘I have to tell you something that, to be honest, I thought you knew.’ She was blinking at me with those big blue eyes. ‘Vadim Andreevich has been observed to, how to say, not fall in love with women. It is not your fault.’

“She smiled. ‘Maybe he hasn’t met the right one yet? For a special person like him it must be difficult.’

“‘With any woman,’ I said. How could I explain something I didn’t myself fully understand?

“Galochka looked at me askance. I felt scrambled inside. I just couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud. I was afraid, perhaps irrationally, that once I let the wild animal out of the cage, everything would fall into chaos. Our harmony at work. Our friendly, productive kollektiv. Of course, many knew, but it was all underwater. It wasn’t an issue. At the same time, I realized that no matter what I said, it wouldn’t change the truth.”

“‘His compass is broken,’ I blurted out. ‘Instead of women … it’s the other way around. He likes men. It’s a disease.’

“Galochka didn’t fall into hysterics like I’d expected. She didn’t even look very disappointed or betrayed. She asked me to please keep her confession in confidence. As you see, I’m only breaking my promise more than thirty years later.

“A few weeks after our conversation, Galochka came to my office again. She was pale and had even lost several kilos.

“‘Mikhail Pavlovich, I decided,’ she said dramatically, like the wife of a convicted Decembrist. Have you studied the Decembrist uprising at school yet, Sonya, when many wives had followed their husbands to exile in Siberia? ‘I’ve thought hard,’ Galochka said, ‘I understand that with Makin I wouldn’t get the kind of love women expect in a marriage. Besides, many husbands, normal husbands, beat their wives—’

“Here I lost my temper a bit. If my workers let their arms loose, I could call a disciplinary meeting and strip them of northern coefficient pay. She wasn’t talking about my workers, she said. Her heart was telling her that she had to be Makin’s companion, to love and serve him selflessly. Her life would be full, and they both would be happy. This was love between souls, bypassing the body, she said.

“I dismissed her. Told her that she’d been reading too much Turgenev.

“‘A person always knows when someone loves him,’ Galochka insisted. ‘I will take care of him, and if one day he is able to return my love like a husband, to my joy there will be no end. If not, it won’t change my feelings for him.’”

Sonya held her breath. The story was beginning to sound like one of Baba Olya’s favorite soap operas — full of amnesia, misunderstanding, and love for the wrong people.

“‘Enough with the decorative language,’ I said to her strictly.” Deda Misha shook his finger. “To be honest, I thought she must be a little abnormal. Unwed and childless at thirty-five, living in her dream world of books and piano. Lost in her head. Of course, such marriages weren’t unheard of. On the contrary, they were viewed positively, as a documented effort to change, to start a new life.

“I decided that Galochka needed to spend some time away from Makin, while I determined the feasibility of their union. My head began to work, tik tik tik. I surveyed my, so to speak, vast empire: there were gold mines all over Kolyma, and to each mine was attached a village, a camp, and an electrostation.

“‘I have a great idea, Galina Fyodorovna!’ I told her. ‘I can send you on a monthlong assignment to audit our accounting at the electrostations up north, and while you’re gone, I’ll talk to Makin. Don’t send him letters or call. Let me sort this out and let him think.’

“Galochka liked my plan very much. She left my office with her beatific smile. But I had a heavy heart.

“I didn’t know what I wanted to happen. On one hand, I hoped she would come to her senses and give up on Makin so he could live out his days in peace. I even considered keeping her up north indefinitely.” Deda Misha smiled sadly. “Time cures everything, except, I guess, Makin’s disease. On the other hand, this could be his only chance to rejoin Soviet society as a full member.

“The following month, Galochka began her work above the Arctic Circle, and I looked for the right time to talk to Makin. I turned over and over in my head how I would present to him such a marriage proposal. I still hoped that he might get himself fully rehabilitated as a man. For that, Galochka wouldn’t have been my first choice.… I lost hours of sleep thinking over this.

“Makin was not easy to catch in those days. Gumenyuk finally got the central arts committee to approve a solo tour outside his exile zone. Not Moscow or Leningrad, but Makin was moving inland, reconquering his former territories. He was rehearing all the time. He had ordered a new tuxedo at the local atelier, which, by the way, was stolen from his room the night before he left on tour.”

“How could someone do that?”

“Jealousy. Black-heartedness, small-heartedness. Makin returned home from the theater late, and I, let’s not forget, had my own family to take care of. Galochka wrote to me every week asking about the progress of our scheme. We petroleum engineers know that we’re always one mistake away from an explosion. I extended Galochka’s assignment for another month.

“I decided to talk to Makin after he returned. I meant to stop by and wish him good luck, but there was an accident at the port.”

“What happened?” Sonya said.

“An oil tanker was cleaning its pipes and flushed so much water—”

“No, Deda, with Makin. What happened with Makin?”

“What happened with Makin, what happened with Makin!” Deda Misha looked gratified. “It was equally shocking and predictable. His first stop was Sverdlovsk — now Yekaterinburg — a town east of the Urals. After a sold-out concert, he was caught red-handed at his old crime. In his hotel room, with a young man.” Deda Misha ran his hand through his white mane. “Makin, so naive. The KGB had been watching his every move. He was returned to his old camp, and my decision was made for me: there would be no wedding.”

“That is horrible. He should have been more careful. He should have known!”

“Yes. A tragedy for the country, to lose such a talented singer twice. He squandered the chance most other prisoners and former prisoners, millions and millions of them, never got — a second chance at life. To me, only one thing that could explain his behavior — madness. Perhaps he and Galochka weren’t so different in the end.

“After this, a wave of gossip and paranoia rolled through Magadan. Those who had advocated for the relaunch of Makin’s career got very nervous. People still remembered the years of repression, Stalin, Yezhov. Kazakov, the radio director, destroyed all the recordings of Makin’s new songs. My own fears subsided a bit when Baba Mila was appointed official witness while the KGB inventoried Makin’s property in his room, but you never knew whom they might play against whom.”

“And you never saw him again?”

“I did. Once. A year after his second arrest. I was looking for the supervisor at a construction site for one of my depot workers’ houses and instead found Makin. He sat at a desk in the corner of the room — well, you could hardly call it a room at that point, it was just a concrete box.”

“Dedushka! What was he doing there?”

“He was the timekeeper. His job was to record the hours of the other inmates who worked toward shortening their sentences. My first impulse was to pretend not to recognize him, to save our dignities. He looked up at me and smiled like at an old friend. I smiled in return. Genuine smiles are contagious, Sonya. I instantly forgot everything.

“‘Vadim Andreevich, I’ll try to do something to get you out sooner,’ I said. ‘Did you know how much Galochka loves you? She wants to marry you and take care of you as if you were her own child. We will restore you as the director of our musical ensemble at the Workers’ Club. You will be rehabilitated.’ I didn’t have the power to do what I was promising. In fact, my rambling probably sounded crazy and foolish, too. I tell you, Sonya, he had a witching influence over me, just as he did over millions of Soviet people. One nod from him, and his welfare would’ve taken over my life again.

“Makin spared me that responsibility. ‘Mikhail Pavlovich, please, don’t worry about me. This time, I’ll look out for myself,’ he said with his gypsy smile. It was pride and shame speaking. Gypsies are a proud people. There was nothing more I could do. We soon acquired new upstairs neighbors—”

“Wait. Do you think he knew that it was you who sent Galochka away?”

Deda Misha looked surprised. “I don’t know, I didn’t tell him. It was beside the point. Makin hadn’t changed at all, Galochka or no Galochka.

“I remember our new upstairs neighbors well because your father became best friends with the son, also named Tolya. That Tolya’s father was a police detective and his mother taught phys-culture at Baba Mila’s school. Details, details. I’m glad to have such a greedy memory, to remember every day with my family and Baba Mila.

“Baba Mila and I moved back to Ukraine in the midseventies, after your father graduated from college. Just before leaving, I saw Makin on our local TV. It was the studio where they filmed all the concerts in Magadan, the one with the black-and-white four-leaf clover floor. ‘All’s ever, the same old guitar,’ he sang with his usual earnestness and accompanied himself on the piano. His perennial rubber cat perched on top of the piano. He was in that same familiar pose, turned toward the audience, emphasizing the words with his torso and hands. That same unmistakable timbre, though his voice was weaker now. Vocal cords are just muscles, and they get old whether you are a star or not a star. He seemed to be really enjoying himself. He sang the songs he’d written about Magadan: ‘Snow Waltz’ something, ‘The Streets of Magadan.’ I didn’t like them as much as his old classic songs.

“Then, one of the listeners asked him about his early years as a singer, when he was worshipped by the whole USSR. Makin must’ve been almost seventy then, bald and chubby but still sprightly. He was finally free to leave Magadan. I don’t remember much of the interview except that he said — in a friendly tone and smiling, that I remember — that he didn’t regret anything. Vot tak … The end.”

“The end? But what happened to Galochka?”

“Galochka? She returned to Magadan a few months after Makin’s arrest and continued to work in our accounting department. Then she resigned and left for the continent. Some said she’d had a mental breakdown and went to a sanatorium on the Black Sea. I don’t know for sure. I’ve never liked to get involved with the gossip. So you stayed till the end of the concert, eh?”

Sonya nodded. She was reeling from the story.

“Did they announce that he would finally receive the title of People’s Artist of Russia?”

“I don’t think so.” She combed her mind. Could she have slept through it? The concert seemed like it had happened a century ago.

“I don’t think Makin was ever officially rehabilitated. A pity, a pity, but what can you do.”

“You don’t have any connections anymore, to help him?”

He smiled. “No, Sonechka.”

They sat in silence. Deda Misha stared into the empty teacup as if divining the tea leaves. Sonya rose and picked up the empty bowl and her cup.

“Leave it, Sonechka. I’ll clean up,” he said. “Go to bed.”

She stood in front of the frosted window. “Deda,” she whispered.

He grunted tiredly.

“Is it sometimes better to keep the animal locked up?”

“Kak? What animal?”

“The wild animal. Like with you, when you told Galochka about Makin. Sometimes, maybe it’s better to keep it in the cage?”

“What are you talking about? The wild animal was just me saying … it’s just a metaphor.”

“I know it’s a metaphor!” Sonya cried out. “I’m not totally dumb. I know it’s a metaphor. I didn’t open the stupid cage.”

“Shhh!”

A hot wave of shame rose up through her chest and pushed on the top of her throat. “I didn’t tell Papa about Oleg, not even when he moved in with us and ate the food Papa sent. I didn’t want Papa to come back from America. I didn’t stop them.”

Deda Misha was silent for a long time. “Don’t worry too much about that, Sonya. Your father knew. Magadan is a small town. He allowed it.” His glance had a harsh, unfamiliar edge.

She grieved for her mother and her father — and for Makin.

“We didn’t think that in the end she would be stupid enough to leave. Our side of the family doesn’t give up easily, though.”

She was suddenly disgusted with Deda Misha. For the last two years her mother had been both happier and more miserable. But what was she like before she met Oleg? Sonya could hardly remember.

“Too bad you’re leaving tomorrow, Deda. We could’ve visited Makin,” she said. He started at the mention of Makin. “I want to see that famous rubber cat. Maybe I’ll go to his museum with Mama later, then stop by his apartment and ask him if he remembers you.”

“The true tragedy is to have lived without a woman’s love, Sonya, to not be able to love a woman. I don’t regret sending Galochka away. Measure seven times, cut once, as they say.” Deda Misha stared at a space in front of him. “And he even denied it to the journalists, in the nineties. One of my old Magadan acquaintances had read in the newspaper and called me. I was shocked.”

“Denied what?”

“He said he was only interested in those circles for the sake of art … he wanted to know how they lived, how everyone lives, to write better songs. And the incident in Sverdlovsk was pure provocation. Again.”

“But if he wasn’t, how…”

“A setup, he claimed. Because people were jealous of him, and certain people wanted revenge, but he didn’t say who or for what. He had never been married but he had had an infant daughter, he said, and she died with her mother during the Leningrad blockade. For all the years I’d known him, he’d never mentioned any daughter. I don’t believe that he was honest in the interviews. Or maybe he finally changed.”

“Good night.” Sonya walked out into the living room without kissing him. She had an unpleasant feeling in her stomach, like she’d eaten spoiled food.

She got to her room and realized that she’d forgotten all about Max. She switched off the lights and looked out: even through the curtain of snow she could see that his windows were still black. It was almost one in the morning. Everything would be better as soon as Max’s windows lit up.

The old hysterical woman who had burst into Makin’s museum opening, was that Galochka? Her fate was painful to imagine. She could have married, had children, and even grandchildren by now. Or she could have died years ago. Of a broken heart.

Sonya had to know now whether she loved Max or not. The ultimate test of true love was to give your life for your beloved. She thought of her homeroom at the English Lyceum, her favorite teacher, Lyudmila Abramovna, the scratched blackboard, the ficus plant on the windowsill, the portraits of the great Russian writers looking down sternly at the three rows of desks with chewed gum stuck to their undersides. Except Pushkin. He looked inspired and a little sad. Maybe because he had foreseen that he would die for love.

It was absurd to imagine yourself dying in such ordinary circumstances, in your familiar-familiar hometown, yet it shouldn’t have to matter. Love was love. She imagined herself with a gunshot wound in her chest, bleeding into the sheets. She willed Max’s windows to light up.