The Big Green Tent

THE UPPER REGISTER

The house on Potapovsky Lane had known hundreds of residents. Its walls had been covered in silk, then in empire wallpaper, striped, or scattered with roses, later in crude oil paint, green and blue, then layers of newsprint, and cheap, porous wallpaper again, repeatedly torn. Having gone through its century and a half of wealth and poverty, birth and death, murder and marriage, densification and communalization, remodeling that only made things worse, trifling fires and petty floods, the house had begun to adorn itself in the 1960s with Czech furniture and three-cornered tables. The house existed in its own slow, incremental, virtually geological time; and only one room—the yardkeeper’s storeroom under the stairwell on the first floor—had preserved its primordial aspect and purpose: the walls were bare exposed brick, never even plastered, just as they had been right after the house was built; and, as of old, it was full of brooms, crowbars, and pails of sand. It also had a hose, lying in coils—its prize possession. The storeroom was locked with a padlock. The mammoth iron padlock could have defended much more valuable goods than these, but Ryzhkov, the yardkeeper, well known in the neighborhood for his fierce expression and his exceptional bowleggedness, loved sturdy, enduring things, and among them, he particularly loved his sixteen-pound padlock. His granddaughter Nadia had to struggle with the lock, poking and prodding it, every time she took a young man there. Nadia loved this—that is, she loved any kind of mild struggle, the poking and prodding. She had been ignited prematurely and was given to disgraceful behavior; she couldn’t even remember when she had first engaged in this fascinating activity. But by the ninth grade she was a master of the trade; and, like any master, she had her own signature and small predilections. She didn’t like the grown men, who stuck to her like flies. She preferred boys. Her classmates and the neighborhood kids, often a year or two younger, were aware of her worth, always stuck up for her, and never said an unkind word about her; she was a highly prized public asset.

Nadia’s grandfather rose early and went to bed with the chickens. There hadn’t been any chickens for a long time, of course—but his body clock still remembered when there had been a stable in the yard of the two-story house, with two lean-to sheds, and the chickens had lived in one of them. It was at that early evening hour, when her grandfather was snoring with the long-gone chickens, that Nadia would take the key from the nail and disappear into her boudoir under the stairs for an hour or two.

There, on the armchair of Karelian birch with the broken back, in the coils of the hose, and among the brooms, many interesting things transpired. Skinny boys, sometimes too young to have broken out in pimples, tested their powers and honed their weapons for the future. Half the boys in the nearby buildings had undergone their sexual initiation here, in the yardkeeper’s storeroom. It must be said that only once or twice had Nadia turned someone down, refusing them the pleasure of this simple, healthful activity.

Ilya came to her, too, taking advantage of her favors on a first-come, first-served basis.

Nadia had a weakness for virginal boys, and, with her characteristic directness, she asked Ilya now and then: “Why doesn’t Steklov ever come to me? Bring him here.”

Sanya was exactly to her taste—pale, slender, with clean hands, and excessively polite.

Ilya invited Sanya to visit Nadia. Blushing as deeply as the red-haired Mikha, he refused point-blank. Afterward, he began having second thoughts; it tormented him. Until then, he had never felt any interest in Nadia. She was a big, vulgar girl in the same grade, but in the parallel class. She had dark eyes that looked out from under her bangs. He had never exchanged more than two words with her. But after Ilya’s suggestion, he was agitated for a whole week and couldn’t get her off his mind. He decided that if Ilya approached him about it again, he would agree to go—it was obvious where, and why.

Ilya did, and this time Sanya was easily persuaded. They arrived at half past nine. Nadia was waiting for them, and reading a book—Virgin Soil Upturned, which was on their required reading list.

Ilya left immediately, and Nadia fastened the large iron latch across the door from the inside.

“Should I show you, or what?” the experienced Nadia asked. She could demonstrate if need be; but she could just jump right in, too.

Sanya didn’t say anything. He wanted very much to see in person what he had until then seen only in the Urban and Shwarzenberg Atlas of Human Anatomy on his mother’s bookshelf. But he kept silent.

“Don’t be afraid, it’s really nice.”

She unbuttoned her blue wool sweater, and he caught a whiff of warm sweat. Under her sweater he saw the top of her breasts rising up out of her tight bra, behind a pink slip with white lace.

Sanya shrank back. Nadia showed her white teeth and the pearly strip of her gums.

“Don’t be scared, give me your hand.”

Sanya extended his hand, like he expected her to shake it. She turned over his palm and placed it on her breast—it felt like fresh bread, warm and firm.

“You act like a complete stranger,” Nadia said with a slight note of disapproval, and turned out the light to encourage the stranger to get to know her.

She was an experienced seductress, but her animal innocence prevented her from being aware of this herself. There were no windows in the storeroom; it was as dark as a dungeon.

“Come on, Sanya! You’re stiff as a board, loosen up.”

He was stiff as a board. She took his cold hands in her own large warm ones, and started guiding them around her torso as if she were a tree. He wanted to run away and hide, but where? Where was it darker than this pitch-black darkness?

There was a rustling over in the corner, then squeaking. He gripped Nadia’s shoulder in alarm. It turned out that she was already completely undressed. Her whole body was like a loaf of fresh bread, not just her breasts.

“Don’t be scared, it’s just a rat with her babies, they have a nest. I’ll show it to you later.”

The rat calmed Sanya down, for some reason. He was afraid that Nadia would stop moving his hands around over her own body and would set her sights on him. And that’s what she did. Oh, how he wanted to run away, but now it was too late, far too late … She was already holding him in her soft palms and whispering: “My sweet boy, my sweet little one…”

Her words were, on the face of it, quite tactless, but they were in effect encouraging, and expressed an overwhelming sympathy. The seductress was full of compassion. She held his timid manhood with gentle firmness.

“See how good it is?” said the invisible Nadia with a deep sigh. She had won; that’s what she felt. Again she had won. She pressed Sanya’s head against her chest—what power she felt! This was how she conquered all of them.

No, I don’t want to, I don’t want to, Sanya told himself; to no avail. He was already inside, and there was no place else to go.

Then came a quiet, satisfied chuckle.

“See? The little animal finds its nest.”

What could have been the beginning was at the same time the end.

He seized up, then let go. Sticky and hot. And ashamed. So that was it?

Nadia sought out his lips with her mouth. He offered them politely. She licked his mouth with her large tongue, then put it under his top lip. She sucked in air, making a smacking sound.

“‘Die if you will, but never give a kiss without love,’” she whispered.

Never a truer word. Even dying would be better than this.

It was still drizzling outside, just as it had been when he went in. Ilya was waiting for him across the lane.

“Everything go okay?” he asked drily, without so much as a smile.

“I guess so. It was pretty disgusting,” Sanya said faintly, so faintly that Ilya couldn’t even guess just how disgusted he was.

They walked to Sanya’s house without speaking and parted at the entrance.

The next day, Sanya wasn’t in school. He had fallen ill. The usual thing—a high temperature, and no other symptoms. In his sleepy delirium he imagined he was dying, that he had syphilis or something even worse. But he had nothing of the sort. Three days later, his temperature fell. He lay around in bed for a few more days, while his grandmother boiled fruit compote for him, and made him cookies with cream filling and applesauce. He struggled with an unrelenting sense of self-loathing for himself, for his own body, which had betrayed him and responded to the summons of a complete stranger, against his own wishes … or not?

He lay in bed reading The Odyssey. He read to the part where Odysseus’s companions row past the island of the Sirens and pour wax into their ears, so they won’t hear the Sirens’ voices and jump into the water. And Odysseus, tethered to the mast, writhes and struggles to escape so he can throw himself into the sea and swim toward the irresistible song. He was the only one who heard their song and survived it. The stony shores were strewn with the dried-up corpses and bones of the hapless travelers who had reached the island—lured there by the bewitching, double-voiced song—and who were then sucked dry by the bloodthirsty Sirens.

“Nuta, what do you think—is the part about the Sirens about the power of sex over men?”

Anna Alexandrovna froze with a saucer in her hand.

“Sanya, I’ve never thought about it before; but I think you must be right. It doesn’t just have power over men, though—women are under its power, too. Let’s just say it has power over human beings. Love and hunger rule the world. It’s terribly banal, but that’s the way it is.”

“And there’s no way to escape it?”

Anna Alexandrovna laughed.

“Maybe there is, but I never discovered it. And I wouldn’t have wanted to. Everyone is sucked into that vortex sooner or later.”

She placed her cool, cruel hand on his forehead, and the touch was clinical and sterile.

“No temperature.”

Sanya took her bony hand, covered in rings, and kissed it.

He’s a grown-up boy. And he’s so good. But he’s too gentle, too sensitive … Anna Alexandrovna thought sadly. He’s going to have a hard time of it.

But Sanya’s difficulties had begun much earlier than Anna Alexandrovna guessed. From the earliest years, even before he started school, he had been tormented by the suspicion that he was different from the other children his age, and, indeed, from everyone else, too—and that this was due to some flaw or defect in him. Or, a less dire option, to some peculiarity. He did not doubt that it was, in some inchoate way, connected to music. Like archangels with swords, his mother and grandmother stood watch over him, protecting him from the ordinary world, which was alien to him.

In their enormous, enchanted room, all 350 square feet of it, they created a beautiful sanctuary for him, and were themselves filled with anxiety and fear: How would he cope without them, beyond the threshold of the room, and even farther afield, when they died? At first they had thought of educating him at home rather than sending him to school in the outside world; but they finally decided against such a radical measure.

Vasily Innokentievich, called in for advice, mostly so that they would have someone to argue with, rose to the occasion. He voiced crushing arguments, the most persuasive of which was that if the boy didn’t learn to adapt in childhood, if he weren’t run through the ringer at school, he would stand out like a sore thumb later in life, and was sure to end up in prison.

His mother and grandmother exchanged glances, then sent him off to be run through the ringer. The first five years of school were almost like being in solitary confinement. For some reason no one took any notice of him, as though he were invisible. And he cultivated his invisibility, insulating himself from boyish roughhousing and teasing with a polite smile. His relationship with his classmates was one of estrangement, nothing more.

A miracle occurred at the beginning of the sixth grade, however—a kitten, tormented by a dog and his classmates, laid down his life, thus laying the cornerstone of the friendship of Sanya and Ilya and Mikha. And this friendship was cemented when they revealed to one another the deepest secrets of their souls at the time.

But toward the end of their school years, new secrets grew up in them that they chose not to confess. The friends were almost grown, and reconciled to the notion that every person has the right to a private life. Sanya’s secret had no name, but he was afraid of being found out: What if Ilya and Mikha discovered in him what he himself could not even name? His future had still not managed to take root and ripen; it had not yet given way to anguished experiences, only a dull longing. They were aware of silences cropping up everywhere, yet these silences did not hamper their friendship.

They never quarreled. They managed to transform any differences of opinion into playful banter, ephemeral, spur-of-the-moment theater, the rules of which were known only to the three of them—the Trianon.

But even if Sanya had wanted to, he could not have revealed to his friends the secret he had discovered—the words were lacking. And telling them in approximate terms, using whatever words came to mind, would not have been possible, because of his inner need for accuracy and precision.

Only Liza was able to understand. Vasily Innokentievich’s granddaughter was a kindred spirit, as well as kin, to him. She was a pianist. Almost a professional one, although she had not yet entered the Conservatory. But she would. And Sanya would not.

Only with her was Sanya able to share his suspicion that the world in which people brushed their teeth with mint powder in the morning, cooked food, ate it, then unburdened themselves of this food in the WC, read newspapers, and went to bed at night, placing their heads on a pillow—that this world was unreal. Music was the incontrovertible proof of the existence of another world. Music was born in that world, then found its way into this one in some mysterious way. And it wasn’t just the music that filled the rooms of the Conservatory, or the disorganized cacophony that roamed the corridors of the music school, or the music that lurked in the dark grooves of a record. Even the music that poured out of a radio receiver, with its gaps, its rising and sinking notes, even that squeezed through the crack between worlds.

Sanya was paralyzed with fear at the horrible suspicion that this world, the one in which his grandmother, the tooth powder, and the WC at the end of the corridor seemed to exist was a fraud, an illusion, and if the crack were to open just a bit wider, everything in this world would burst like a soap bubble in a washtub.

“Do you know what I mean? It’s suffocating here, nauseating. It’s impossible. But we can’t get into that other world, they won’t let us in. Am I some sort of freak, do you think?”

Liza shrugged and said:

“Well, of course! As for being a freak—that’s nonsense! But of course there’s a boundary between these worlds … and when you play, that’s where you are, over there.”

She was certain that many people knew this. Most likely because she had studied at the music school, and her classmates all played eight hours a day on the piano, or the violin, or the cello, and were chained to a musical staff by invisible shackles.

In his final year of high school, Sanya hardly touched the instrument. For him, everything was over. He refused to take any more private lessons, and Anna Alexandrovna could only sigh.

They went to concerts.

Going to a concert with Liza was even better than going with his grandmother. They listened and compared, communicating with the subtlest signs of comprehension—a half nod, a half sigh, a suspended breath, and, the most expressive sign, a touch of the hand. They were perfectly in tune with each other. Then Sanya would walk Liza to the trolleybus stop, and sometimes accompany her home, all the way to Novoslobodskaya. They talked about Chopin and Schubert, and when they were a bit older about Prokofiev and Stravinsky, about Shostakovich. And it was impossible to imagine then that they would have these musical conversations their whole lives, until one of them died—about Bach, Beethoven, Alban Berg. And they would fly across the world to hear a one-off performance by some great musician in Paris, in Madrid, or in London, so together they could savor first the music, then the conversation that went on till morning, until they flew back home to the opposite ends of the earth.

And anyway, could he have admitted to Liza about the storeroom, about the darkness, about the coitus with this pitch-darkness, about the anguish that gripped him after this celebrated manly act? About Nadia and her glistening gums?

Shortly after the New Year, Nadia was expelled from school, which was unjust: she was quite a good student. Nature had endowed her not only with a healthy physique, but with a good head to go with it. And you couldn’t have faulted her for bad behavior in school—she sat drowsily through the lessons, never talking back to the teachers, and earning her Bs honestly. The school principal called her in, laid out all the facts that had been leaked to her about the storeroom, and ordered her to take her school records and leave. Nadia cried and took her records. She transferred to a trade school for working-class youth, which was only fitting.

Her former friends came by to see her, though she never had much time—from early morning she worked in a bakery on Pokrovka, and in the evening she attended classes.

Although Sanya and Nadia still lived in the same neighborhood for a few more years, they ran into each other only once, near the Uranus movie theater on Sretenka, completely by chance. Sanya was with Anna Alexandrovna, and Nadia was with her girlfriend Lilka. Sanya bowed to her in greeting from afar; she started giggling and whispered something into her girlfriend’s ear.

Sanya turned away: forget it ever happened … forget all about it … never breathe a word to anyone … never. And it went away, as though it had sunk to the bottom of his memory.

* * *

Oh, Liza, Liza! You are … beyond words!

She was crystalline, fragile; it was impossible to imagine that she was made of the same stuff as the fleshy Nadia, and that she wore the same elastic harnesses—a bra, an elastic belt holding up her stockings. It was sacrilege even to think about it. Sanya dismissed these unworthy suspicions: angels, naturally, don’t wear elastic.

But Sanya was cruelly mistaken. The angel wore all those accoutrements and was not at all unfamiliar with those elemental forces Sanya had discovered in the storeroom. Slowly, but very surely, Liza had begun a romance with a young violinist, a student from the Conservatory who hailed from a well-known musical family. A bearlike fellow with a florid, porous complexion and a shaggy dark head of hair, this corpulent Boris—it was unfathomable!—had captured Liza’s heart. Perhaps the name of his grandfather on a commemorative marble plaque in the lobby of the Minor Hall of the Conservatory added to his appeal. Sanya learned about their relations only four years later, not long before they got married, and was deeply shaken. All male-female corporeality was distasteful to him, tainted by the storeroom goings-on, and completely antithetical to the pure world of sound. How could Liza have succumbed to that? She played better and better. She had long ago left her apprenticeship behind and acquired her own sound, her own tone. Liza, with that fat Boris? No, it wasn’t jealousy he felt; more like bewilderment.

Two weeks before Liza and Boris’s wedding they played a duet—Mozart sonatas for piano and violin. Sanya sat in the half-empty hall and suffered: he knew these sonatas well and was agonized by the incompatibility of the two parts—there was no mutual support, no union of voices, but rather an alarming mutual inaudibility. There was no spiritual commingling between the piano and the violin, and he hated Boris for being so dull, egotistical, and so very conceited. Liza simply couldn’t marry him, she couldn’t!

He left without giving them the flowers he had brought. The three red carnations, wrapped in white paper and stuffed into the sleeve of his coat, he threw into a trash can next to the Tchaikovsky monument.

The wedding reception was held at home. It was simultaneously modest and sumptuous. There were not many guests, only parents and close friends and relatives. There were twenty-four people altogether, corresponding to the number of place settings of good china that had remained intact, given to Boris’s grandmother and grandfather at their own wedding.

A portrait of his grandfather Grigory Lvovich, a well-known violinist and teacher, looked out from a frame hanging next to a portrait of his young grandmother Eleonora, which was the work of Leonid Pasternak, father of the famous writer. His grandfather had died, a victim of the campaign against “rootless cosmopolitanism”; but his grandmother, who had once upon a time been a singer, had survived cosmopolitanism, and her husband, and her son. Now, with an iron fist, she ruled her highly organized home according to the highest social standards, as only she knew how.

The table gleamed like an iceberg under the sun. The silver had been polished to a bright sheen, the crystal goblets sparkled. On the oval and round serving dishes lay translucent slivers of fish and cheese. Like the illustrious Teacher, she, too, would have been able to feed a multitude with five loaves of bread, because she knew the art of fine slicing. In truth, there were never any leftovers. The food on offer was always meager, though the dishes were many. The newlyweds wore their concert garb—Boris was in a tuxedo, and Liza in a lacy, pale-yellow gown that was not at all flattering.

Among the guests were four of the most celebrated musicians in this part of the world, with their wives. The bald pate of a great pianist shone; the soft body of a great violinist seemed to be melting into the chair. A fifth performer, also considered a musical genius, was the only unaccompanied woman. She had never married. She placed her shabby handbag, a green bottle of kefir sticking out of it, on the table next to the gleaming silverware. A great cellist, a close friend of Boris’s late father, picked at his teeth with a sharpened matchstick. A famous, though not yet great, conductor masticated with his diminutive teeth, looking around to see what was on each plate and pretending not to notice his wife’s angry glances. Not counting the new relatives, nonmusical society was represented by a couple who were neighbors from the dacha—a professor of chemistry and his wife. Eleonora Zorakhovna, a consummate socialite with a genius for prestigious social gatherings, was disappointed, however. The wife of a great composer had just called to say that they wouldn’t be able to make it after all.

The gathering of the century, as she had conceived it, was falling apart.

“Déjà vu,” whispered Anna Alexandrovna to her grandson. “I was here for Eleonora’s wedding fifty years ago. In this very apartment. It was 1911…”

“With the same guests?” Sanya said, laughing.

“Just about. Alexander Nikolaevich Scriabin was here. He had just come from abroad.”

“Scriabin? Here?”

“Yes. He did show up, unlike Shostakovich, who wouldn’t condescend to it. Everyone loved Grigory Lvovich; and no one loved Eleonora.”

“Who else was there?”

“Leonid Osipovich Pasternak and Rosalia Isidorovna Pasternak. She was a marvelous pianist. Anton Rubinstein remarked on it when she was just a little girl. It was a select circle. Birth, affinity, profession … I was here in this house at your age—no, I was younger, of course. That wedding has stayed in my memory my whole life. As you will remember this one,” she added, and sighed.

“How did you come to be at that wedding?”

“My first husband was a musician. He was a friend of the groom’s. I’ll tell you about it another time.”

“Strange that you’ve never mentioned it before.”

Anna Alexandrovna grew angry with herself: she had long ago decided not to burden this gentle soul, her grandson, with her entire past. The friend of the groom was sitting opposite her at the moment, picking his teeth. That was enough—just like that she had been moved, and said too much.

“Liza won’t have an easy time of it here,” she said, changing the subject abruptly.

Liza was comporting herself beautifully. Vasily Innokentievich and his son Alexei, Liza’s father, were strangers in this company; but both of them were well-known doctors, and this put them on an equal footing with the musicians, in some sense. Liza’s mother, on the other hand, was completely out of place. She was overweight, with clearly bottle-blond hair, and very much aware of not fitting in among these guests.

At one time she had been a nurse in a field hospital during the war. It was a “frontline” marriage, unequal and accidental, but solid: their daughter held it together. On the face of the new mother-in-law one could read pride, boorishness, confusion, and awkwardness. Liza sat next to her mother and stroked her hand from time to time, making sure she didn’t drink too much.

Anna Alexandrovna sat on Sanya’s right. To the left of him was a bohemian-looking man with a mane of hair parted down the middle, wearing a black-and-yellow leopard-print ascot. Was he a singer? An actor? They called him Yury Andreevich.

When dinner was halfway over, and they had already cleared away the bouillon cups and the empty serving dish of tiny savory pies (exactly twenty-four of them, according to the precise number of guests), but before the main dish had been served, he stood up to make a toast.

“Dear Liza and Boba!”

Ah, so he’s a close friend, since he calls Boris “Boba,” Sanya noted.

His mouth was unusually mobile. The upper lip was etched with a deep furrow; the lower one protruded slightly.

“You have embarked on the dangerous path of matrimony! Perhaps it is not so much dangerous as it is unpredictable. I wish for you what I consider to be the most important thing in marriage: that it not prevent you from hearing music. This is the greatest possible happiness—to hear with four ears, to play with four hands, to take part in the birth of new sounds that were never heard in the world before you. Music, once it is released by your hands, lives only for a moment before dying away, dispersing into waves moving through space. But the ephemerality of music is just the other face of its immortality. Forgive me, Maria Veniaminovna, for saying such trivial things in your presence. Boba, Liza, my dear friends! From the bottom of my soul I hope that music never deserts you, that it grows ever deeper and fuller in you.”

“Nora!” a low, somewhat rasping voice called out. “Wonderful pies! Give me a few to take home with me, please!”

Eleonora answered with a spiteful glare.

“I’ll have them wrapped up for you, Maria Veniaminovna. They’ll be wrapped up.”

“This is for your memoirs, Sanya. Don’t forget it,” Anna Alexandrovna whispered.

Sanya was already spellbound, as though he had a front-row seat in the theater, in the midst of all these great ones. And the man next to him in the leopard-print ascot was not merely a chance person at table; he knew something important, you could see that at a glance. But who could he be? The old lady who had asked to take home the pies, Maria Veniaminovna, had been Sanya’s idol since the first concert at which he had heard her perform during his childhood.

After dinner, which passed without any ancient Russian exhortations of “It’s bitter!,” they all moved into the study. This was one of the last remaining aristocratic apartments on Marx and Engels Street, formerly Maly Znamensky Lane, behind the Pushkin Museum. In addition, this may have been the only family in the entire country that had lived in the building since its construction, in 1906. The great-grandfather, grandfather, father, and now Boris—none of them had been forcibly removed or had their property confiscated. None of them had been forced to communalize and partition the apartment into smaller units, admitting strangers into their midst. None of them had been arrested. Family legend had it that it was in this very apartment, and not Peshkov’s, that Lenin heard Issay Dobrowen, Eleonora Zorakhovna’s younger brother, perform Beethoven’s Sonata no. 23. Here, in the room next door, he spoke the words (unless Gorky had made them up, for some reason of his own): “Sublime, superhuman music … But I can’t listen to music too often. It works on my nerves and makes me want to say sweet nothings, to pat on the head those people who can create such beauty, despite living in a dirty hellhole…”

And the nothings turned out to be not so sweet after all, and the heads that he patted rolled by the thousands …

All these family legends, which had now become her own, Liza told Sanya when they went out on the balcony to talk. And something else: Dobrowen had not played the “Appassionata” that evening at all, but Sonata no. 14, the “Moonlight” sonata. The experts had mixed things up.

In the study, they had started smoking. A servant served coffee on a tray.

“Everything’s so British,” Sanya whispered to his grandmother.

“No, Jewish,” Anna Alexandrovna said.

“Nuta, that sounds quite anti-Semitic. I’m surprised at you.”

Anna Alexandrovna took a deep draw of her cigarette, flaring her delicate nostrils. She let out the smoke, shaking her head.

“Sanya, in our country, anti-Semitism has always been the exclusive privilege of shopkeepers and the nobility. By all accounts, our family is part of the intelligentsia, though rooted in the aristocracy. I love Jews, you know that yourself.”

“I know. You love Mikha. It’s a matter of indifference to me whether someone is a Jew, a non-Jew, or otherwise. But for some reason, of my two closest friends, one and a half are Jewish.”

“That’s what I’m talking about. Maybe there’s a heightened sensibility?”

Anna Alexandrovna truly did have an aversion to anti-Semitism; she had meant something else by her comment. In her youth, she had refused to marry Vasily Innokentievich, who continued to love her his whole life. Now fate was taking revenge: Liza, his granddaughter, had rejected her refined, sensitive Sanya in favor of this flabby young Jewish man.

Anna Alexandrovna’s version of things was somewhat off the mark, since Sanya had never proposed to Liza, and had wanted from her only amicable loyalty and heartfelt intimacy. Liza had had no grounds on which to reject him. But from their early childhood years, Anna Alexandrovna had been certain that these children were made for each other. In her heart she reproached Liza, believing her choice to be self-serving careerism. And, somehow, in her mind, his Jewishness figured as one of the unpleasant characteristics of Liza’s new husband.

Liza came up to Sanya, a goblet in hand. Her new wedding ring shone on her finger. She was leading the man in the leopard-print ascot with the other.

“Have you met Yury Andreevich? He’s a professor of music theory, Sanya. Here’s a person who might be able to resolve all your musical problems.”

“It’s rare that one meets someone with musical problems,” Yury Andreevich said, looking at Sanya with lively interest.

“Oh, what nonsense, Liza.” Sanya was both embarrassed and affronted. How could she have been so tactless?

Before Sanya could say anything else, he saw the cumbersome old lady, her handbag under her arm, trundling up to the piano.

Eleonora Zorakhovna had not foreseen this impromptu performance. According to her plan, dessert was the next point on the agenda: coffee, ice cream, and small pastries that the servant was already bringing out from the kitchen. But the performer, paying no attention to the tray with pastries, was drawn to the piano like a boxer to the ring, her massive head lowered, her hands still hanging loose at her sides. She dumped her heavily laden handbag on the floor to the right of the pedals, rummaged around in it, and extracted, from under the kefir bottle, her sheet music, which she placed on the music stand. Then she sat on the swiveling piano stool, her large body swaying slightly, and looked up, as though trying to decipher some message written on the ceiling. Covering her eyes, having apparently received her message, she struck a chord heavy as a watermelon. Then there was a second, and a third. They were strange chords in and of themselves, and augured something unprecedented.

“Sit down,” Yury Andreevich whispered. “This will last eighteen minutes, if she keeps up the tempo.”

Sanya had never heard music like this before. He knew that it existed, agitating music, hostile to the romantic tradition, which trampled on the old norms and canons. He had picked up on the waves of disapproval and mistrust it awakened, but he was hearing it now for the first time with his own ears.

He was listening to something absolutely new, and he didn’t understand how it was constructed. He was adept at listening to another kind of music, “normal” music—far more intelligible and predictable. He loved the internal movement of the music familiar to him, the almost importunate touch of the sounds; he anticipated its resolutions, foresaw the ends of the musical phrases.

He knew how absurd and empty the attempts to paraphrase the content of music through a specially evolved pseudo-poetic language were, how contrived and pompous they always sounded. The content of music was not amenable to translation into literary or visual imagery. He hated all those dreary concert-program notes—how one should perceive Chopin, or what Tchaikovsky had intended.

He viewed it the way a small child views the activities of adults, with perplexed indignation—how stupid they are!

What he was listening to now demanded intense concentration, all his attention. It’s like something written in a foreign language, Sanya thought.

The music summoned by the old lady’s hands rose in a stupefying crescendo of sound. Even in the past, Sanya had rarely experienced music so viscerally. He felt the music filling his skull and expanding it. It was as though some unknown biological process had been unleashed in his body, as though he could feel it producing hemoglobin or releasing powerful hormones in the blood. Something as profoundly inherent and natural as breathing, or photosynthesis …

“What is this?” he whispered, thrown off guard, to his neighbor.

The man smiled with his sculpted upper lip.

“Stockhausen. No one performs him here.”

“It’s like the end of the world…”

Sanya didn’t mean the end of the world in a religious or scientific sense. It was simply a notion current among the youth, the jargon of the decade. But Kolosov regarded the young man with interest. As a theoretician, he assumed that this new music signalled the end of one era and the beginning of an unknown new one, and he ascribed great significance to this transfiguration, which was invisible and hidden from most people. He valued very highly those like himself, who were aware of the shift—possibly a shift in the evolution of the world, in human consciousness. They were few and far between, the temporal forerunners of humanity, people who not only presaged the new world, but were also able to analyze and research it.

“I don’t understand how it works, how it’s constructed,” Sanya told Kolosov, falling at once into his mode of thought. “Perhaps it’s not even a new style, but another way of thinking altogether. It’s stunning, disorienting…”

Kolosov felt happy.

“You’re a musician, of course?”

“No, not at all. I would have been … but I was injured. A childhood accident. I only listen to music now.” He showed him his right hand, with its two bent fingers. “I’ll be graduating from the Institute of Foreign Languages next year.”

“Come to see me. I think we’ve got a lot to talk about.”

* * *

Everything that happened that evening after Stockhausen was a blur in Sanya’s memory. Even the image of Maria Veniaminovna herself faded a bit. He only remembered accompanying the young couple to the train station to see them off. They were going to the Baltics for their honeymoon.

What stayed with him was the sense of some portentous event. The next day Sanya went to see Yury Andreevich at the Conservatory, after the class he taught was over. They picked up the conversation where they had left off the evening before.

Later, they went together to a remote district on the outskirts of the city, first by subway and then by trolleybus. This was where Yury Andreevich lived, in an unsightly high-rise in the dreary middle ground between a village that was not quite extinct and the encroaching urban sprawl. They had agreed that Yury Andreevich would give him private lessons.

Within the demeaning confines of an almost Zamyatinesque cell, a one-room apartment with a metal number on the door (Sanya had just read the novel We), there was nothing but a piano and bookshelves, cabinets, and racks full of books and sheet music. There was no table to eat on, no bed to sleep on, no armoire where one could hang a coat. In his own home, Yury Andreevich looked as though he were just a guest—wearing a freshly pressed suit and a yellow ascot, in shoes polished to a high gleam and fit for the stage. For some time Sanya thought that this apartment was only the teacher’s study, and that he lived in another one, more fit for human habitation. Then he spied a terra-cotta teapot and a wooden box containing Chinese tea in the kitchen. And, sometime later, Sanya realized that Yury Andreevich, in his freshly pressed suit, his ascots tied with almost military precision, was in fact a recluse, and that this masquerade costume concealed a true ascetic.

How did he manage to observe the demands of his musical monkhood in this vulgar and dirty world, amid the crushing reality of Soviet existence, nauseating and dangerous? It was completely improbable.

On that very first evening, Sanya started preparing for the Conservatory entrance exam. He wished to enter the department of music theory. Yury Andreevich taught his student in the way a carpenter teaches an apprentice to drive in a nail with a single blow, a chef to slice onions and carrots with a precision measured in millimeters, or a surgeon to wield a scalpel lightly and with the utmost skill. He taught him the craft.

And it wasn’t just the explanations themselves—what tone must be doubled when resolving a dominant seventh chord into the tonic chord, how to harmonize a tritone modulation, the interplay of corresponding registers of the extreme voicings at the golden-section point, and so on. The fact was that Kolosov taught with the same enjoyment as Sanya learned.

“You don’t understand how lucky you were with your hand. A true musician is not a performer, but a composer, a theoretician. Above all a theoretician. Music is the quintessence, an infinitely compressed message; it’s what exists outside the range of our hearing, our perception, our consciousness. It is the highest form of Platonism, eidos descended from the heavens in its purest form. Can you grasp that?”

Sanya didn’t understand it; rather, he felt it. But he suspected that his teacher was getting a bit carried away. He remembered too well his childhood joy when music was born under his very fingers.

Nevertheless, this was the happiest year in Sanya’s life. The shell of the coarse and dirty world split open, and fresh new air gushed in through the gap. It was the only kind of air his soul needed to breathe. It was the same kind of upheaval that the sixth-graders had undergone ten years earlier, when Victor Yulievich arrived at their school and began showering the class with verse. The difference was that Sanya was now an adult, and, having overcome the devastating experience of parting with music forever, had discovered that his love had become even more profound. His gift, slumbering in the deepest part of him, had awakened and surfaced after a ten-year hibernation. The tedium of the solfeggio he had learned as a child was transformed into fascination with the science of musical structure. Several years later Sanya would become certain that solfeggio explained, in the simplest terms, as a rough approximation, the structure of the world itself.

Twice a week Sanya spent an hour and a half at Yury Andreevich’s. He did complex dictations and countless ear-training exercises. Yury Andreevich played the piano, and Sanya tried to identify the various intervals and chords, progressions, and modulations.

Sanya’s former piano teacher, Evgenia Danilovna, was summoned again. She was able to squeeze out two hours a week for Sanya from her tightly packed schedule (at that time she was training Wunderkinder, no fewer than ten of whom brought subsequent fame to the Central Music School). The well-known teacher, bent on producing superperformers, was only wasting her time with Sanya and his crippled hand; but she was a close friend of Anna Alexandrovna’s, and for someone of her generation it was unthinkable to refuse a friend such a request, although the child had no prospects whatsoever. Finally, with a new fingering that took into consideration his two crippled fingers, Sanya managed to master a very cleverly selected program, crowned by a performance of the Bach Chaconne in a transposition for the left hand only by Brahms. Anna Alexandrovna sold the remains of her jewelry that year—diamond earrings and a pendant—to pay for the lessons.

Sanya flew to his lessons with Yury Andreevich as though to a lovers’ rendezvous. Yury Andreevich was no less taken with his new student, who could grasp everything on the fly, sometimes posing questions that far outstripped the material they were covering. Yury Andreevich would then bloom, and break into a smile, before immediately recovering his usual composure and severity of expression. He didn’t believe in indulging his students. The lessons ended precisely when they were scheduled to end. Once, when Sanya was fifteen minutes late because a bus had broken down, his teacher refused to extend the lesson to make up for the time lost.

In addition to solfeggio, harmony, and the history of music, Sanya had to take exams in other subjects: writing, a foreign language, and the history of the USSR. He wasn’t in the least worried about these exams. The most challenging one for him was “general piano.” He would have to play a prepared program, as well as sight-read another piece. Naturally, students of music theory were not expected to master an instrument on a professional level, but Sanya was nervous nevertheless. From the time his tendon had been ruined by Murygin’s knife, he had lost the boldness of spirit necessary for performing.

Sanya passed the theoretical subjects easily. Even “general piano” was quite satisfactory; Evgenia Danilovna had not spent her precious time in vain. But the most remarkable thing was that no one on the admissions committee had even noticed that two fingers of his right hand were crippled. This was his chief victory.

In the autumn, when his fellow students at the Institute of Foreign Languages were beginning their fifth and final year of studies, Sanya began his first year in the theory department of the Conservatory. Anna Alexandrovna was happy, Evgenia Danilovna even more so. To mark the occasion, she gave Sanya some sheet music autographed by Scriabin himself. But by this time Sanya already had his doubts about Scriabin.

* * *

Victor Yulievich had been right a thousand times over—and Sanya agreed—when he said that finding the right teacher is like being reborn. Only now it was not Victor Yulievich, but another teacher, who introduced him to a new system of coordinates, who showed him new meanings and expanded his conceptions of the world. His brightest students discovered, with shivers that traveled up and down their spines, that they were dealing not only with music, but with the structure of the entire universe, with the laws of atomic physics, molecular biology, falling stars, and the rustling of leaves. It was a commingling of science, all of poetry, and every kind of art.

“Form is what transforms the content of a work into its essence. Do you understand? The character of music arises out of its form like steam from hot water,” Yury Andreevich said. “With a solid understanding of the general laws of form, which encompass all that is amenable to formulation, one can, by groping further, perceive the individual, the particular. Then, subtracting the general, one can sense a residue where wonder lurks in its purest, most undiluted form. Herein lies the goal of theory: the more fully one grasps what is available for comprehension, the more intensely the ineffable shines. Listen, and try to grasp it!” He put a black disk on the record player. The needle drew out sounds that were not perfect in themselves; but by looking at the notes while he listened, absorbing them with his eyes, and through his eyes with his ears and brain, Sanya discovered a new conception of the world, and his thoughts were drawn into unknown spaces and dimensions.

At the same time, his teacher scorned pathos, elevated words and expressions, and verbiage. He cut short any attempt to discuss music by resorting to literary devices and conceits.

“We’re not applying algebra to harmony. We’re studying harmony! It’s an exact science, just as algebra is. And for the time being, we’re putting poetry aside!” He spoke passionately, as though he were disputing with an invisible opponent.

His students adored him; the administration, always wary, regarded him with suspicion. There was something potentially anti-Soviet about him.

Yury Andreevich Kolosov was a structuralist at a time when the term had not yet been established. And the powers that be, in all eras, are particularly wary about what they don’t understand.

Kolosov expanded the horizons of the courses in harmony, the history of music and musical theory systems. He immersed the students in ancient history, and also exposed them to the newest, most innovative music, the second avant-garde, which had just begun to take hold in the USSR—spiritual heirs of Webern: Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono. And side by side with them, through the corridors of the Conservatory, walked their local avant-garde counterparts: Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina, Alfred Schnittke …

All of this was still in its infancy, tentative and tremulous. Even the music of Schoenberg was still novel.

Sanya’s head was awhirl with a powerful wave of myriad sounds: Baroque, early classical, the ubiquitous Bach, romantic music, overthrown, and then welcomed again with the passage of years, the later music of Beethoven, which approached the final threshold, it would seem, of classical music—and now all these new composers, with their new sounds and new ideas …

In the world outside the rains came down, snows fell, the poplar trees released their summer fluff, and the unbearable political blather about achievements and victories—that soon we would catch up with America—continued unabated. People drank tea and vodka in their kitchens, illegal pages of paper rustled, and tape recordings of Galich and the young Vysotsky, who gave birth to more new sounds and ideas, whirred. But Sanya hardly noticed any of this. This all happened in the world of Ilya and Mikha, his friends from his school days, who were drifting further and further away from him.

Khrushchev’s thaw was still under way, but Khrushchev himself had exited out the back door. At some Party powwow, he was heard to say: “The notion of some sort of thaw was just an invention of that shifty rascal Ehrenburg!”

Thus, a signal was given, and received. The cold had set in again.

At this historical juncture, the government music experts traded places with the government visual arts experts. Sanya only caught the tail end of rumors about a battle in the halls of the Manezh exhibition center, primarily through Ilya.

Mikha seemed to have disappeared for good after he went to live and work in a school for children with special needs, outside of town. Anna Alexandrovna saw him more often than anyone else did. She was the one he confided in about his experiences working with the deaf-mute children, who had won his incautiously open heart. But his heart did not belong in its entirety to this younger tribe; the other half beat for Alyona, who had a habit of returning his affections, then vanishing like the Snow Queen in the rain. She was the living embodiment of this fairy-tale creature: icy, fluid, and volatile, she seemed to crystallize, flare, and fade at will.

Mikha introduced Sanya to Alyona. Sanya, conscious of her charm, felt a sense of alarm: a dangerous girl. Mikha’s anxious, nervous loving was not something he had any desire to try on for size. But Ilya’s easy confidence and success with women, which smacked of the dreadful storeroom, failed to inspire envy in him either. He was afraid of the female sex. At the Conservatory he socialized more often with the male students, although he never grew really close to anyone. Sanya was no less wary of the boys who looked meaningfully at him than of the women who threw themselves at him and reeked of the yardkeeper’s storeroom on Potapovsky Lane. The musical milieu that seethed behind the bronze back of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was predisposed to the sin eschewed in the Bible. For that matter, it was even more inclined to the sins of envy and vanity. But they didn’t throw you in prison for those.

Sanya was not affected by Conservatory passions. He was even more oblivious to what was going on outside it, in the larger world. Neither the Thaw, nor the new cold snap, had anything to do with him.

Somewhere at the top, the powers-that-be had the jitters; but, luckily, Khrushchev had no interest in music, whether “sublime and superhuman” or “muddled and confused.” He was completely happy with the straightforward tune of “In the park, or in the garden.” Primitive, poorly educated, and drunk on power, he ruled the huge country as he saw fit. He raised his fist at Stalin, kicked his corpse out of the Mausoleum, released prisoners, cultivated virgin soil, sowed the Vologda region with corn, threw underground knitwear manufacturers, satirists, and parasites into prison, one after another, strangled Hungary, launched a satellite, and brought glory to the USSR through Gagarin. He destroyed churches and built Machine-Tractor Stations, merged some things, dismantled others, augmented this, downsized that. He inadvertently gave Crimea to Ukraine.

He set the creative intelligentsia straight with language of the gutter, and almost barely learned to pronounce that strange foreign word intelligentsia, which twisted the tongue without mercy. At the same time, radio announcers changed their pronunciation to reflect Khrushchev’s—“communism” and “Communists” becoming “commonism” and “Commonists,” for example. Sensing degeneration, deception, and bourgeois influences everywhere, Khrushchev promoted Lysenko, with his easily accessible theories, and shunted aside geneticists, cyberneticists, and all those who fell outside the scope of his limited intelligence. An enemy of culture and freedom, religion and talent, he suppressed all those his ignorant, myopic vision could discern. He couldn’t discern his primary enemies, however: neither great literature, nor philosophy, nor art. He couldn’t touch Beethoven, Bach was beyond his reach, even Mozart slipped out of his grasp—his simplicity of soul prevented him from understanding that they were the ones who should have been banned!

In 1964, Brezhnev came to power. The upper echelons of government were rearranged; one group of vampires changed places with another. Their mediocrity in matters of culture set a precedent for the entire country; it was dangerous to try to rise above the lowest common denominator. This diet of literary and artistic pablum was profoundly depressing. A handful of people, insignificant in all respects—surviving eggheads holed up in math and biology departments, some of them true scholars and respected academics, but far more of them marginals and eccentrics vegetating in low-level positions or languishing in third-rate research institutes, and one or two truly brilliant students of chemistry or physics or musical theory—these invisible, impractical people with spiritual needs existed illegally, outside the system.

And how numerous could they have been, these strangers who crossed paths in the cloakroom of the library, or the coat check at the Philharmonic, or in the quiet recesses of museums? They did not constitute a party, a social circle, a secret society; they were not even a cohort of like-minded people. Perhaps the only thing that united all of them was a mutual hatred of Stalinism. And, of course, reading. Hungry, unrestrained, obsessive reading. Reading was a passion, a neurosis, a narcotic. For many, books became surrogates for life rather than mere teachers of life.

In those years, the mania for reading—of a very particular kind—infected Sanya, too. He threw himself into reading musical scores, and spent all his free time in the music library. Unfortunately, borrowing privileges did not extend to many of the scores. His crippled hand limited him so drastically that now and then he was visited by compensatory dreams, one of which had recurred no fewer than five times in the past decade. In the dream, he was playing, and he experienced intense physiological gratification from this activity. His very body was transformed into a musical instrument, like some sort of multistemmed flute. From the tips of his fingers he filled up with music; it traveled through the marrow of his bones and collected in the resonator of his skull. His powers grew limitless. The instrument on which he played resembled a special, very complex kind of piano that produced unearthly sounds. He was aware of hearing music that was at the same time very familiar and completely unprecedented. The music was original, of the moment, freshly minted—but it was simultaneously also his, Sanya’s, own.

Sight-reading allowed him to grasp a musical text, and even came with some advantages. “Reading” with his eyes turned out to be a more ideally refined activity, and technical difficulties ceased to exist. The music poured directly from the page into his consciousness.

Sanya derived enormous pleasure from analyzing the scores. He delighted in the art of instrumentation, the vast opportunities for interpretation. The visual—and, through it, cognitive—perception of music offered him an added dimension of pleasure: sound and sign merged into one, and an exciting picture emerged, an amalgam that contained, possibly, its own indecipherable, illegible content. Even before he had read the notes he vaguely discerned some sort of textual-semantic formula, an interweaving of textual levels or planes, and it seemed to him that the key to the very secret of music was just within reach.

It seemed to him that music, too, was subject to the laws of evolution, the same ones that governed the self-organization of the world, arising from the simplest forms and becoming ever more complex. This evolution could be traced not only in sound, but even in musical notation, the semiotic reflection of the musical thought of an era. He discovered—though this was not a great discovery, since it had been made long before, by others—that musical notation, albeit belatedly, followed the changes that occurred in musical cognition through the ages. This insight led him logically to the attempt to find the laws of development of this cognition—in other words, the evolutionary law of systems of pitch.

When Sanya began, very cautiously, to set forth to Kolosov his ideas about the evolution of music, he stopped him in the middle of his halting explanation, and, with a brusque movement, pulled an American music journal out of a pile of sheet music lying under the table. He turned right to the page he was looking for. This was an article about the composer Earle Brown. The journal had reproduced the score of a piece called “December 1952.” It was a page of white paper covered with a multitude of black rectangles. While Sanya was examining this page in astonishment, Kolosov, chuckling, told him that this wasn’t the end of the story. Subsequently, Earle Brown had written a composition titled “Twenty-five Pages,” and this was, literally, twenty-five pages covered in drawings that could be performed in any order, by any number of musicians. In light of this article, the picture that Sanya was trying to develop acquired staggering potential, according to Kolosov.

If only Yury Andreevich hadn’t been emitting caustic little snorts and coughs under his breath. When Sanya realized that his teacher was mocking him and not taking him seriously, he grew upset and stopped talking altogether.

But the murky evolutionary ideas didn’t abandon him. He experienced a surge of unprecedented boldness and began pursuing in secret the creation of a single law, a kind of general theory of musical systems. The only thing comparable in scope and ambition would have been the Grand Unified Theory. Like a silkworm tirelessly drawing a precious thread from its own being, he fashioned a shining cocoon around himself, and was on the verge of withdrawing into it completely, passing over into a purely speculative, but more authentic, world. This was dangerous; if he had let himself go, it would have been easy to descend into a world of pure madness.

When Sanya graduated from the Conservatory, Kolosov, with whom he still spent a great deal of time, managed to land him a position as an assistant professor in the department of the history of foreign music. (There were no openings in the department of music theory.) In the fall, Sanya began teaching, but he was still preoccupied with his theoretical constructs. Relations between Kolosov and Sanya began to unravel. Sanya wanted Kolosov’s support and approval, but he was met with a skeptical grin. This hurt him.

From time to time, a sense of alarm stole over Anna Alexandrovna’s heart: had her boy, perhaps, chosen too high a register in life?