Sonechka

Angel

IN THE same years that Humbert Humbert was drooling over his prepubertal poppet and hatching his inhuman plan to marry the ill-starred Charlotte Haze, at the far end of the world Nikolai Romanovich, a lonely professor of philosophy (or at least of a science that laid claim to that name), also stricken by a deviant love bug, married a lady who in her wildest dreams could never have hoped for so dazzling a match. Actually, Antonina Ivanovna hardly qualified as a lady, and it would have been charitable even to class her as a citizen. She was unambiguously an old dear and working at that time as a nursing auxiliary—or, in earlier terminology, the linen keeper—of the cardiological department to which the professor was admitted as an inpatient suffering from stenocardia.

The amiable Antonina, who resembled less a hen than a rather gray turkey, expanded downward from her small head to her obese legs. She was divorced, a secret drinker, and she lived in a room one hundred feet square with her young son.

Her salary was derisory and she readily pilfered what she could, although she was ashamed of doing so. In short, she was a perfectly respectable woman. Early in January, as it was the school holidays, she began bringing the boy with her to work. The fair-haired lad, sitting in the linen room peeping out from behind his mother’s back, his brow white as milk and with blond brushes beneath his eyebrows, struck the professor right in his sick and disordered heart.

We shall leave a potential digression here on the connection between sickness and sin—their subtle points of contact and overlap—to the psychoanalysts and reverend fathers, both of whom have grazed to their hearts’ content on these treacherous terrains.

Nikolai Romanovich would wander down the hospital corridor for hours and peep in the half-open door of the linen room, catching with a targeted gaze a glimpse of a gawky elbow in a mended blue sweater moving lightly over the table (if drawing something) or just a cursory view of items of institutional laundry, yellowed from sterilization in the hospital’s autoclaves. Then again, he might suddenly behold, full height in the doorway, a radiant elegant being, a boy from the harem, perhaps not quite fully grown, just needing another two or three years. Twelve is the sweetest age.

Sometimes the boy was fed in the canteen for patients who could walk, and he would sit at the corner table where the doctors ate their rushed meals. His back was straight; he was grave and frightened. Nikolai Romanovich saw clearly his pale blue eyes, which squinted a little when he looked to the right, and his blond eyelashes, as downy as a ripe dandelion head.

“Tonya! Tonya!” the ward sister would call the linen keeper, looking into the canteen; and Antonina would respond in her kind flabby voice, “Over hee-er!”

It was upon hearing that voice one time that Nikolai Romanovich was riven by an insight: Should he not try to arrange a different life for himself? She was, of course, a domestic sort of person, just a linen keeper, a nanny, so why not draw up an honest matrimonial contract? You scratch my back, I scratch yours.

Nikolai Romanovich was approaching fifty-five, a fair age. The provisions would accordingly include no expectation or assurance of matrimonial delights but would include a room of her own, full board and lodging, and, needless to say, all proper respect. Your own contribution, dear Xantippe Ivanovna, will be to run the household, to maintain hearth and home: that is, to do the laundry, cooking, and cleaning. For my part, I shall adopt your young son and rear him in the best possible wa y. I shall give him an education, oh, yes, including music and gymnastics. A lightly running Ganymede, redolent of olive oil and young sweat. Calm down, calm down. Don’t frighten away a lovely melody. Gradually, miraculously, a tender child will grow up in his house, turn into a boy, a young friend, a pupil, his beloved. In these halcyon days he will weave the nest of his future happiness with his diligent beak.

Linen-keeping Antonina was at first thrown into confusion. How could this be? But happiness, like the wind, comes and goes unaccountably. Here she had landed a two-hundred-square-foot room with a balcony, on the fifth floor, with windows looking into the courtyard, in a smart building on Gorky Street, where your neighbors were actresses and generals and heaven knows who. Everything was good quality and solid. Her new husband was not greedy; he gave her a generous housekeeping allowance for food. And what food it was, from the Kremlin distribution center, no less, though he had said not to tell anyone that. And he never asked for the change. He was clean, changed his underwear every three days, and his socks nearly every day. He doused himself in the bathroom like a duck, and even so went to the bathhouse on Saturdays and spent half the day there. He was smartly dressed, brushed his own shoes, and ironed his own trousers. You wouldn’t do it right, said he.

To friends who really very much wanted to know, she would reply in all simplicity: As far as that goes, no, I can’t say there is. But how many years is it since I last saw a live . . . ? And anyway, who cares about that? I’m used to it by now. I really don’t know why I have been so lucky. He looks after little Slava as if he were the boy’s father. To tell the truth, he doesn’t have much to say to me at all. But what would we have to talk about anyway, when you think about it? He’s very educated, obviously, a professor. . . .

On this point, it has to be said, she was not deluding herself. He was both a professor and educated. Classical philosophers, like pedigreed dogs, did not thrive on the meager fruits of socialism, but Nikolai Romanovich himself had happened upon just the right border to cultivate in that garden, and dug it and watered and manured in it the scrawny tree of Marxist-Leninist aesthetics. On the very eve of the Revolution he managed to complete his university education and almost to defend his dissertation on the topic, “The essence of Plato’s dialectic as interpreted by Albinus and Anonym. Vales.” It was the magic word dialectic that opened before Nikolai Romanovich the royal doors to the new life: namely, the position of Lecturer in Classical Philosophy in the Socialist Academy. There he was the only member who actually knew Ancient Greek and Latin, so he was constantly in demand as a supplier of quotations to highly placed leaders, including Lunacharsky himself.

For decades thereafter he sifted through Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, looking for the correct scientific resolution of aesthetic questions before which all these pre-Marxian philosophers had been as helpless as blind kittens. He also became so adept in the theory of art and the criteria of artistic quality that not a single decree of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) was compiled without his complicity, whether the matter at issue was Vano Muradeli’s opera The Great Friendship or Shostakovich’s Katerina Izmailova. He was not schizophrenic in the least. The flexible dialectic, like a knowledgeable guide in the mountains, led him by tortuous paths through the most insalubrious places.

Alas, however, Nikolai Romanovich was indeed the servant of two masters. His second master, imperious and secretive, was his unhappy predilection for the male sex. From his earliest years it bore down on his head like a migraine, raising his blood pressure and causing tachycardia. The dread Article 120 of the Soviet Constitution hung over him. No enemy of the people, real or set up, no opportunist or oppositionist, experienced the same abyss of fear as those who lived under the threat of this seemingly unremarkable article. Theirs was a real, not fictive, secret society of men who, like freemasons with their secret signs and special handshakes, recognized each other in a crowd by the anguish in their eyes and the anxiety etched on their brows. The Leaden Age that replaced the Silver Age sent on their way the sophisticated youths, smutty schoolboys, and good-looking novices, leaving for Nikolai Romanovich and his ilk dangerous liaisons with heartless, greedy young men with whom you had constantly to be on your guard. They could betray, expose, or slander you. They could have you thrown into prison. Only once in Nikolai Romanovich’s adult life did he experience a deep and lasting relationship, with a young historian, a boy from a good family who died at the front in the Second World War and who, before doing so, brutally humiliated Nikolai Romanovich with the derisive letters, full of offensive allusions, of a complete psychopath.

The arrival of Slava opened a new era in the life of Nikolai Romanovich. The professor’s cherished dream looked as though it was about to come true. He would rear himself a beloved, and the boy would benefit from the love of a wise educator. Oh, yes, he would benefit rationally. Nikolai Romanovich would mold him in his own image, bringing him up lovingly and chastely. Nikolai Romanovich would be a true pedagogue, a slave not sparing even his own life to protect and educate his beloved.

“I swear by the dog!” Nikolai Romanovich vowed to himself. He leaned over the sleeping boy who now lived in his apartment, if admittedly in his mother’s room, on a couch upholstered in pale orange plush. “These things shall be!” he declared, by the flickering light of a bulbous standard lamp. “My little angel,” he murmured, as he tucked in the blanket at the sides.

In these evening hours, Antonina was allowed to take a glass or two of something strong to help her sleep, in moderation and under his supervision. He was truly a pedagogue who overlooked nothing.

In that first year of their family life, Nikolai Romanovich sent the boy to music school, to the wind department. Slava didn’t become a flute player, but he came to feel at home in music as if that was where he had always belonged. His great gift proved to be an ability to listen to music with godlike discrimination, so that even in this rarefied area Nikolai Romanovich received a partner. Stepfather and stepson now went to the Conservatory together to enjoy that art which least lent itself to analysis from a class standpoint.

The Conservatory’s habitués of those years grew accustomed to the sight of this couple, the slender elderly man with large spectacles on his small-boned face and the lissom youth with the neatly cut blond hair, in a black sweater with the collar of his white Pioneer’s shirt turned over the round neckline. The Moscow melohomophiles, a correlation as yet unexplained, writhed with envy when Nikolai Romanovich bought two lemonades and two cakes in the buffet. Nobody wrote any denunciations of him, however. They were all too scared for themselves.

In those years a circle of cognoscenti formed at the Conservatory. There was no formal membership, but their faces were recognizable and stood out. Apart from secret coreligionists of Nikolai Romanovich and ordinary music lovers, the circle naturally also included professional musicians and also some of Slava’s fellow pupils from the music school, like Zhenya, a young cellist, who usually came with her mother and father. Zhenya was forever whispering in Slava’s ear and pulling him by the sleeve over to one side with her.

“A sweet girl,” Nikolai Romanovich said to his protégé, “but not at all prepossessing in appearance.”

This was not true. She was entirely prepossessing, with dark little eyes and curls restrained by a checkered hairband. It was just that Nikolai Romanovich’s heart suffered a pang of dark jealousy for a moment. We can quite do without these girls.

He was granted all that Humbert Humbert ever dreamed of: a golden childhood that developed before his eyes into youth; the respectful friendship of a pupil; and a complete and trusting intimacy, carefully nurtured by one who proved to be a master of affectionate touching, breathing, and mellifluous movement.

In the sixty-third year of his life, Nikolai Romanovich died in his own bed from an aortic embolism. He died suffused with the youthful love of his angel and in perfect harmony with his daemon, never having read the novel charged with Nabokov’s high-voltage electricity and recognized his profound relatedness to its unhappy hero.

The orphaned Slava, by now a first-year student in the philosophical faculty of Moscow State University, was left in a state of complete bewilderment after the death of his mentor. While the course continued, analyzing the logic and propaedeutic of dialectical materialism in the old building of the philosophical faculty, whose windows looked out onto the anatomical theater of the First Medical Institute, he did not have too much of a problem. But then the summer vacation arrived. Slava was used to spending this with his stepfather in Estonia, at a guesthouse in Pjarnu, and at this point he became deeply depressed. He took to his bed in his stepfather’s study, listening to his favorite records, and had difficulty getting up to turn them over or to put on a new one.

Slava had been done no favors by the old aesthete, whose angel now had no idea how to go on living. Without his mentor, Slava was lost. He had no friends. The scrupulously kept secret of his relations with his stepfather had erected an impenetrable barrier between him and other people. He was remote from his mother and had long been treating her exactly as Nikolai Romanovich did: courteously and manipulatively. For the past four years he and his orange couch had migrated to Nikolai Romanovich’s study to escape from his mother’s snoring.

His stepfather left what by the standards of those times was a staggeringly large amount of money. There was a whole stack of savings books, some of which provided cash to the bearer on demand, while others were in Nikolai Romanovich’s name and had been bequeathed to Slava. One humble little gray booklet with three thousand rubles in it was left to Antonina. Slava passed it to his mother, who threw up her hands in delight. She had never expected to be so rich and went completely off the rails. Instead of the double vodka Nikolai Romanovich had permitted her, she now downed a third of a bottle, and not only in the evening either. By nine o’clock or so Antonina would, as always, be sleeping the sleep of the just, and Slava would go out for a walk, to fill his lungs with the heavy petrol-laden air and to sit on a dusty bench on Tverskoy Boulevard not far from the amateur chess club. As evening approached, it drew those addicted to the checkered board, old-age pensioners and failed chess prodigies. One muggy evening Zhenya from the music school also found her way there.

Zhenya came from a good, thoroughly musical family, whose talents passed from generation to generation in the same way that some families pass on a congenital disorder like hypertonia or diabetes. Among their forebears they numbered an Italian prima donna, a Czech organist, and a German conductor. The main Bach of the family was, however, Zhenya’s grandfather. To this day his name can be found in the company of Skryabin, inscribed in the roll of honor of gold medalists of the Moscow Conservatory.

Grandfather’s composing was no more than mediocre, in line with the spirit and culture of the times. He was captivated by modernism but had been granted neither the audacity of Debussy nor the originality of Mussorgsky. His fame was as a performer, a cellist, a teacher and public figure in the world of music. He chaired a variety of musical societies and committees and distributed stipends to poor but talented children and allowances to elderly orchestra musicians. He was, in short, a true Russian intellectual of mixed blood—none of it, as it happened, Russian. The family was large, and everything revolved around music. His elder brother was a concert violinist, while his younger brother, less successful, transcribed music.

Zhenya never knew her grandfather. They were separated by three decades, which had included two world wars. Her grandfather died at forty-two years of age on the same day as Archduke Franz Ferdinand, at the beginning of the First World War, while she was born on the last day of the Second.

As an act of rebellion or a sport, the family would suddenly throw up an apostate, like Uncle Lyova, who decamped to the accountants, and Aunt Vera, who was unfaithful to music in favor of agriculture. Zhenya’s father, Rudolf Petrovich, was another apostate, seduced by a career in the army. Under the tall Astrakhan papakha of a colonel, he pined for music all his life. He was infatuated with it but never touched a musical instrument. He decided, however, to be sure that his daughter returned to the family tradition and chose the cello for her. Their home, already full of signed photographs of all sorts of great people, with dusty sheet music, and with the scores of unburied operas, was filled with the living sound of scales and exercises. The little Zhenya showed promise of developing into a real performer. Daniil Shafran himself took an interest in her and supported her. Her grandfather’s renown in the music world put the wind in her sails, but her diligence and assiduousness were entirely her own, and as a girl she spent many hours with her legs spread and a diminutive cello, a learner’s toy, clenched between her knees. As she grew older something miraculous grew with her. Her cello proved highly responsive. She had barely to put the bow to it for it to respond with sounds more rich and velvety than anything she knew. And what comparison could there be between the broad sinuous voice of the cello and the scratchy unevenness of a violin, the simplemindedness of a viola, or the glum monotony of a double bass?

That summer she was alone in the city for the first time. Her parents were living out at the dacha, and she was preparing for her first concert program. In the evenings she would go out for a stroll.

They were both delighted by their chance meeting at the bench on Tverskoy Boulevard. Each was feeling lonely. For Zhenya it was an acute but temporary state, since she was alone at home for the first time in her life. It seemed to Slava that for him the condition was absolute and would be lifelong. They talked, however, only about music. They had in addition a shared source of memories in the music school on Pushkin Square, which both of them had attended for so long and of which no trace now remained. On its site there rose the hideous Izvestiya building. They recalled the lessons of solfeggio, the choirs, the student concerts, and talked till late in the evening.

He saw her home to Spiridonovka Street and told her on the way, to his own surprise, “My stepfather has died.”

It was the first time he had said this aloud, and he was struck by how the words sounded. Something in the air seemed to change. Because these words had been uttered, Nikolai Romanovich’s death became irrevocable.

Zhenya, detecting something, felt her heart beat faster.

“Did you love him very much?”

“He was more than a father to me.”

This sounded so elegiac it would surely have gladdened Nikolai Romanovich’s heart.

“Poor Slava. I would go crazy if my father—if something like that happened to him.” At the age of eighteen, she was so far removed from death she couldn’t even bring herself to say the word died. She shook her head to drive away the shadow of death and her lips pursed in sympathy, but she said something silly and childish. “Let’s go and eat some ice cream! A whole great lot of it.”

Slava smiled, touched by such total fellow feeling. “But where can we get it at this time of night?”

“I’ve got some in the fridge. My parents are at the dacha, and it’s the only thing I buy.”

The ice cream was excellent, with pieces of frozen strawberry or icy blackberries. The downstairs neighbor brought it in a saucepan with dry ice. She was a waitress at Café North. Everybody was stealing, provided only that there was something for them to get their hands on. After the ice cream, Zhenya produced from her father’s room an imposing record in a black-and-white sleeve.

“Karajan. They brought it back from Germany. You have never heard Wagner like this.”

She reverently lowered the gleaming record onto the turntable of the record player. It was the orchestral version of Tristan and Isolde. You would have thought the musicians in the orchestra were not human beings but demons. The two of them listened to it twice from beginning to end, and to the accompaniment of the towering music, Zhenya fell in love with Slava just at the point where Isolde dies. She had never, even with her father, listened so discriminatingly, so much in harmony with the perceptions of another person. And he was drawn to her with all his soul, such a sweet girl, so loving, with her dark clever eyes, her lively curls trembling above her forehead.

“What powerful, masculine music!” Zhenya commented, when Karajan had thundered his last.

“Wow, yes,” Slava agreed, wondering how she could know that. The tang of the wild strawberry ice cream lingered in his mouth, the blackberry seeds lodged in his gums, and a flavor of something remained in his heart from their shared experiencing of the dark colors of the tumultuous music.

He visited her throughout August. Late in the evening, when the heat had died down and the nocturnal chess players had gathered on Tverskoy Boulevard, he would go back home feeling cheered. His depression had lifted. The combined sensations of the boulevard at night, Wagner, and melting ice cream were firmly associated with Zhenya.

When autumn came and Zhenya’s parents returned to the city, it was time to study again and they began to meet less often, although every day they would talk at length on the telephone about a Richter concert or a marvelous album by Somov that Slava had bought at the secondhand shop on the Arbat, following his late stepfather’s habit of browsing in antique and secondhand shops with money in his pocket. Nikolai Romanovich had never been a genuine collector but had gradually learned a thing or two about objets d’art from the material world, the payoff, no doubt, for being such a convinced materialist.

By the end of the summer it had seemed to Zhenya that she finally had the beginnings of a real romance, but for some reason everything got stuck at the stage of a delightful friendship and just would not develop further. She very much wanted something more than little bits of frozen strawberry or icy blackberries.

Slava could feel the constant expectation emanating from her, and it made him nervous. He very much appreciated being with her, the admirable home he found himself in, and indeed Zhenya herself, who was so receptive toward literature and music and even toward him. He felt as much desire for her as he might have for a lamppost, and there seemed to be nothing he could do about that.

At the age of nineteen, he was well aware that he belonged to a rare and special breed of men condemned to furtiveness and secrecy because those soft protuberances enveloped in fabric disgusted him. He associated them with a large white sow, its nether side besieged by sucking piglets. The actual structure of women, the hairy nest with the unfortunately placed vertical slit, seemed dreadfully unattractive. Whether he had reached that conclusion himself or whether the professor of aesthetics, Nikolai Romanovich, had subtly suggested the idea, was immaterial. He liked Zhenya very much and she kept him from feeling lonely, but his physical longings had not only not gone away, they were growing stronger.

After bidding Zhenya good night, he would usually go to sit on the same bench on Tverskoy Boulevard not far from the chess players. He would look at the few passers-by, timidly wondering, Him? Not him? One time a well-built handsome blond man locked eyes with him and he became tense, because the gaze seemed very pointed, but the man walked on, leaving Slava in a delicious sweat with his heart pounding and seeming strangely to be echoing that other heart, which had suffered from angina. We share that too, Slava noted. Music lovers, dicky hearts, aesthetes.

He was wrong. The true picture was a good deal more complicated, but the error was perfectly understandable. The age of supermen clad in leather and wearing metal chains, homosexuals with bulging pumped-up muscles, contemptuously looking down on “straights,” had not yet arrived. Cowboys were sex symbols to excite the female half of the world, bullet-riddled, lustful creatures, not cow boys, cowherds with rear ends battered by coarse saddles, engaging in same-sex love because of a total dearth of women in their environment.

Slava belonged wholly to the Classical World, as romantically imagined by the superficial scholars of the nineteenth century. Even Marx jotted some nonsense about the “golden childhood of mankind.”

No doubt, from the immense distance of several thousand years, the picture had become distorted, and the reality was totally bloody and unbridled paganism. In its lurid polytheism, all that existed was deified, inspired, and set to guiltless lechery not only as nymphs, naiads, satyrs, and petty gods of puddles and roadside ditches but also as swans, cows, eagles, shepherds, and shepherdesses. All these engaged in an unending orgy of copulation that knew no bounds, and for some reason this heaving paganism came to be called Classical Materialism. This fallacy was what the beliefs of Nikolai Romanovich consisted of. He passed them on in full measure to his alumnus even as he inserted more personal predilections, cautiously and patiently, with the assistance of his experienced fingers, his sensitive tongue with its discerning tastebuds, and his old withered lance.

He was a brilliant teacher and he had found a brilliant pupil, whose hypersensitive body could no longer bear this indissoluble loneliness. His fair youthful hair, his mouth, his chest and bell y, his loins and buttocks were begging for love. The Garden of Eden and the Rose of Sodom, Nikolai Romanovich had called them. The trout was truly breaking through the ice.

In early October, on one of the dark but still warm evenings of a long Indian summer, Slava’s nights of sitting on Tverskoy Boulevard were rewarded with a new teacher. From a group of dark figures clustered beneath a lamppost that illuminated the chessboards, a man of around forty in a canvas cap came over to him. He had a handsome, possibly Jewish, face and was wearing an old-fashioned checked shirt. He took the cap off his bulbous skull and sat down carefully on the rickety bench. All of him seemed to be pressurized: his eyes were slightly protruding, and his beard was bursting forth with such force that onl y his nose provided a clearing free from undergrowth. (Nikolai Romanovich, in contrast, had always seemed a bit depressurized, like a slightly deflated balloon.)

The new arrival grasped the edge of the bench with his hairy fists and addressed himself very familiarly to Slava. “I know your face. You don’t by any chance play chess, do you?”

Slava’s heart pounded unevenly, dancing to sleazy music. Was this him? “I do a bit.”

The man laughed. “Even my grandmother did a bit. At least, she thought she did. We’ll soon find out.”

The man pulled a small leather case out of his pocket and opened it. The chessboard was already set up. Sharp little pins were inserted in holes punched in leather. “Your move.”

Slava’s hands were trembling so much he could barely take hold of the chesspiece. He made the first move, E2 to E4, and felt a sense of relief. There was no longer any doubt: this was him. The chess player lightly pulled out a black pawn with its sharp prong, held it between thumb and middle finger, and murmured, “It’s getting dark so early now,” before ramming it into a white square.

That evening the chess player supposed that Slava’s eyes were mirror-black, like the sunglasses that had just become fashionable, but it was a false impression. It was just that his pupils were so dilated that the blue iris was pressed out to the edge of his eyes.

“Let’s finish our game at my place. It really is far too dark.” The chess player folded up the chessboard and pulled his cap over his forehead, and they headed toward the trolley bus.

Slava did not ask how far they were going. His heart was thumping with anticipation, and the chess player periodically put a hand on his shoulder or on his knee. They reached Tsvetnoy Boulevard, alighted, and turned up a dark alley. They entered the neglected entrance of a three-story building, and as they were going up the stairs the chess player explained that he lived with his mother. She had been a great beauty in her youth, an actress, but was now almost blind and completely out of her mind.

The apartment was small and very dirty. From time to time the mother’s querulous voice was heard on the other side of the wall, and then she started singing a ballad. They did not finish their game of chess. They made love, strong masculine love, of which Slava had had only an inkling before. The place smelled of vaseline and blood. It was what Slava had been wanting and what Nikolai Romanovich had been unable to give him. It was a night of nuptials, of initiation, and of ecstasy beyond the reach of music. A new life began for Slava.

VALITA WAS buried at state expense, if indeed he was buried at all. It is possible that he was dissected for his organs, that they were doused with formaldehyde and given, to be torn apart, to the students whose windows looked out toward the philosophers, or perhaps to some other students, but it’s not very likely. The postmortem established that the body had been lying for fifteen to seventeen days before it was discovered in a secluded corner of Izmailovo Park by a citizen of sporting appearance who was taking his fox terrier for a walk.

It is difficult to explain what made Yevgenia Rudolfovna start a missing persons inquiry. In the forty years and more that she had known him, he had disappeared often and for different stretches of time. The first stretch was particularly long. He got five years, and then in the camps it was extended. That time he disappeared for almost ten years, but not from choice. Then he turned up again, but no longer as Slava. Now he was Valita. Such was the nickname he had acquired. He did tell Yevgenia a few things, but nothing to frighten or embarrass her. He did his best to spare her

It was not exactly that she loved Slava, of course not, but she loved the memories of her youth and recalled how much she had loved an inspired fair-haired boy, how wonderfully they had listened to music together, and how he had suffered from the imperfections of the recording technology of the time. Karajan had six bars piano and eight forte, but everything was evened out. She had felt sorry for this poor man, a pariah who had lost every last thing it is possible to lose: his property, his teeth, his fair hair, even his right to live in Moscow. He wrested that back from the clenched teeth of the world by marrying some irredeemable alcoholic and getting registered as living with her in a street poetically named Deerbank. Of his former riches, all that remained was his rare talent for listening to music and his aristocratic hands with their oval nails.

For many years he came to see Yevgenia at the theater, in her vast office with its MUSICAL DIRECTOR brass plate on the solid door. The other employees who worked there knew him, and the people in the cloakroom let him in. She would usually give him a little money, make coffee, and get some chocolates from a remote corner of the cupboard. He had a sweet tooth. Sometimes when there was time she would put on some music for him, although he admitted that he had long ago ceased to love it. Now he loved only sounds. She was not entirely sure what he meant by that, but in these matters he was better qualified than she was herself, the director of the musical department of a very famous Moscow theater. Unquestionably. She was fully aware of that.

He didn’t stay in her office for long. He embarrassed himself, as once his late mother, Antonina, had been embarrassed by herself.

For a couple of months he did not come to visit her, and Yevgenia thought nothing of it. Then one Saturday evening she went to the Conservatory. They were playing Brahms’s opus 115, the clarinet quintet, a piece unbelievably difficult to perform. In the last movement, when the soul has almost expired and you fly away into the empyrean, she suddenly remembered Slava. She remembered him sitting with his recorder in a little corner class being taught by Xenia Feofanovna, a fat, florid, coarse lady in a silk shift, and she, Zhenya, came barging into the classroom for some reason and stopped, shocked at her own impertinence. Forty years ago, in the music school, of which not a brick remained standing. The Brahms ended, and with the last sounds she sensed that Slava was no longer in this world.

She made an inquiry through the information bureau. Slava was neither to be found living at Deerbank nor in any other street, and she rang the police. She got a boorish reply, but a day later they called her in themselves, to identify his body. There was virtually nothing left to identify, just a heap of black rags, almost clay, a particularly dreadful kind of clay. Only the hand was human, with its aristocratic oval nails.

She spoke to the investigating officer. He was past his prime, rather flabby, and so knowing he might have been better off knowing less. Yevgenia told him nothing that interested him. The crime would have been fairly straightforward to clear up but the police did not take much interest in homosexual killings. They would snoop around for a while and then pin it on some maniac they already had under arrest. Anyway, who other than a maniac could have wanted to kill Valita, a man who had nothing other than a desperate longing to be loved by a man?

Back home, Yevgenia searched for a long time through the photographs of her childhood until she found the one she was looking for. All the others depicted a little girl called Zhenya with her cello, but this was a picture of the audience during a school concert. Her father had taken it. In the second row you could see both of them quite clearly: Nikolai Romanovich in his gray suit and striped tie with the twelve-year-old Slava in his white Pioneer’s shirt with the top button undone. Such a sweet face, as radiant as an angel. And how Nikolai Romanovich had loved him. How he had loved him.