The Concert Ticket

1

“WHO’S LAST IN LINE? Are you last in line? What are they selling?”

“No idea, but I’m hoping for something good. Maybe some gloves, my hands are cold.”

“Imported scarves, I’ve heard.”

“Oh, are they silk? And what color? Blue would be nice. Or green.”

“You don’t want much, do you, woman? Silk scarves, indeed! It’s toothpaste, someone told me.”

“Toothpaste? Toothpaste?! You idiot, would all these people wait here for toothpaste?”

“What’s wrong with toothpaste? I could use some.”

“By the looks of your teeth, it would be the first time.”

“Oh, shut up!”

“Shut up yourself!”

“Both of you shut up, it’s not toothpaste. A man up front was saying they just received a shipment of women’s boots, genuine leather.”

“Ooh, I’d love some of those! Where is that man, I’ll ask him myself.”

“He got tired of waiting and left half an hour ago.”

“Nah, a full hour at least.”

“Two hours, more like it. I could still feel my fingers back then.”

“Well, can’t be boots, or he wouldn’t have left.”

“But what if he wasn’t married, now? What would he need with a pair of women’s boots if he wasn’t married?”

“Maybe he has a lady friend.”

“A lady friend! Do you hear that, a lady friend, and him with a mug like that—worse than that fellow over there!”

“Hey, what—did he just call me ugly?… You there, yes, you, did you just call me ugly?”

“And what if I did, what are you going to do about it?”

“I’ll show you who’s ugly, let me just get a hold of you, move there, people, move—”

“Hey, watch your elbows, there’s an old man back here, don’t push!”

“And who are you to tell me what to do?”

“No, no, I wouldn’t… Wait, I wasn’t—you misunderstood—I—”

“Good, good, knock some of his teeth out, help him save on the toothpaste!”

“Oh God, there she goes again with the toothpaste! It’s not toothpaste, it’s not toothpaste, you stupid cow, how many times must you be told, it’s not toothpaste!”

“Oh, bother, looks like no one knows what they’re selling. Could be something really good, though… Well, I have some time on my hands, might as well join in for a while. Are you last in line?”

2

ONE DAY IN NOVEMBER, returning home from work, Anna walked a different way. Her usual street was flooded with a spontaneous citizens’ parade celebrating the thirty-seventh anniversary of the Change. Ordinarily she enjoyed such diversions, but today she felt too tired to shuffle for hours in a press of other passersby, even though she knew her husband was likely to be marching, his tuba propped up on his shoulder, in the midst of the volunteer neighborhood band whose dull brass snails were even now crawling up behind her, devouring the city in an explosion of triumphant sound.

It was only three o’clock in the afternoon, but the air hung heavy with the nearing of the night, the swelling of the snow. The world smelled of heated copper and wilting carnations. In a few blocks, the streets grew deserted; everyone had left for the demonstration, and the neighborhood, on the outskirts of the city, lay bare, damp, and gray, like the bottom of some northern sea with its dregs exposed by a receding tide. Anna’s flat-heeled shoes fell to the pavements with loud thumps. Striding quickly as if trying to escape the echoes of her passage, she turned into an alley, crossed a courtyard, its sky eliminated by gloomy, drooping buildings, rounded a corner—and slowed her steps.

A small crowd of fifteen or twenty people stood lining the sidewalk before her; autumn’s last brown leaves twirled above the dark curves of their backs. Another parade preparing to set off, Anna decided after a moment, and walked faster now, clutching her bag to her chest.

As she drew even with them, an old man turned toward her.

“Join us,” he said.

She wanted to move past, then stopped, afraid that her refusal to take part in the communal merriment might appear unpatriotic—but already she noticed that the people on the sidewalk did not resemble a joyful gathering of neighbors. Hushed and oddly solitary, they waved no homemade banners, chanted no slogans; she saw an aged woman leaning on a cane, a youth with the sharpened cheekbones of someone recently ill. Uncertain, she looked back at the man who had spoken. He was dressed in a threadbare, earth-colored coat; the stealthily creeping shadows had eaten away most of his face, becoming tangled in his untidy beard, gouging deep lines in the parchment of his skin, pooling his eyes with darkness. His unblinking, sorrowful gaze unsettled Anna, and she glanced away—and it was then that she saw the kiosk.

She had been wrong, she realized, relaxing her grip on the bag. This was not a parade—merely a line. The little kiosk before her was nondescript, with no sign above it. Its single window was boarded shut, a handwritten notice tacked onto it; she was too far away to read the words. She could not recall seeing any kiosk here before, but then, it had been so long since she had last found herself deviating from her daily route—months, maybe even a couple of years, possibly longer; time had all run together for quite a while, merging into a solid, hard, flat essence, a bit like concrete, she thought unexpectedly, yes, like a vat of frozen concrete, undistinguished save for a succession of doled-out State festivities, a smattering of red and yellow candy wrappers sucked here and there into the concrete’s monolithic mass.

Not that she was complaining, of course. She had a good life, such a good life.

They all did.

“So what are they selling here?” she asked.

The old man smiled, and as his wrinkles multiplied, a deeper darkness suffused them.

“What would you like?” he said softly.

“I’m sorry?”

“They are selling,” he said, “whatever you’d most like to have. What would you like?”

She stared at him. A leaf slowly sailed through the congealed air. The people around them were quiet, their faces hazy, averted. The old man is mad, she understood with a precipitate chill, and stepped away abruptly. The sign in the window, she saw as she hastened past, announced in a scrawl: Gone to the parade. There were more words scribbled below, but she did not stop to decipher them, keeping her eyes focused on some invisible, faraway destination instead, sensing all the while the weight of the old man’s gaze upon her, sliding the length of her, from her hair, along her back, to the scuffed-up soles of her shoes.

That night, she waited for her husband to return from his march before calling the family to supper. It was, perhaps, the uncustomary lateness of the hour that made the kitchen seem somehow smaller, darker than usual; the black-and-white clock up on the wall, big, round, and bare-faced just like a clock at a train station, had presided indifferently over the departure of the last fleeting light, the arrival of the slow, ponderous shadows. From her corner at the stove, pretending to spoon a second serving into her bowl, Anna watched her mother mince a morsel of meat, watched her son listlessly construct a potato fortification all along the rim of his plate, lumpy towers rising, then mash it into dust. When, having finished their silent meal, her mother and son departed, she poured two cups of tea, added a cube of sugar to hers, and for another minute watched her husband blow at the scalding liquid, his mouth set in sullen lines, his jaws moving in some internal rhythm she could not follow.

At last, suppressing a sigh, she turned away, looked out the window. Through the gap in the curtains, which rippled faintly with the insidious autumnal drafts, the night gazed back at her with a gentle face molded by light, obscured by shadow, reshaped by darkness into a hazy semblance of a once familiar, soft, youthful beauty.

“Something strange happened to me this afternoon,” she said quietly, as if to herself. “I was walking down this empty street, and—”

He glanced up sharply. “You didn’t go to the parade?”

Anna’s eyes met the eyes of the woman floating outside, and the night seemed to fill those eyes to the brim. She turned back to her husband.

“No, no,” she said. “I went. Of course I went, to hear you play. It was very good, I mean wonderful as always, of course.”

“Of course,” he said, but his voice had deflated, and he resumed sloshing the weak tea in his cup. She waited, then dropped another sugar cube into her water, listened to it fall with a small plop, took a sip. Her husband asked nothing else, and after a while she stood up, crossed to the sink, and carefully poured out her nearly full cup.

The next few weeks at school were very busy, and Anna soon forgot about the gathering of people at the kiosk, until one day in December, between classes, she came upon two teachers whispering in the corridor. As she paused at a bulletin board to pin the announcement of the annual composition contest (“The Revolutionary Hero I Would Most Like to Meet” was this year’s topic), she overheard Tatyana Alekseyevna say in an agitated undertone, “It appeared out of nowhere not long ago, and no one, no one at all, knows what they’re selling!”

“But doesn’t it have a sign?” Emilia Khristianovna asked.

Anna lingered with the thumbtack in the hollow of her hand, pretending to skim the other notices, her back suddenly tense.

“No, there’s no sign, nothing at all. But I heard this wild rumor—”

The bell thrashed shrilly above their heads. She looked back just in time to see the math teacher bend to shout the end of the sentence into the physics teacher’s ear and the physics teacher ripple like dough in inaudible astonishment. She was tempted to intrude, but Tatyana Alekseyevna had already tied her lips into a prim little bow and pranced off down the hall, trailing a mawkish vanilla scent in her wake, while Emilia Khristianovna had been rolled away in the opposite direction by a stampede of children late for class.

With a sigh, Anna pushed the thumbtack into the board.

That afternoon, on her way home, she found herself halting for a moment at a turn in the road, then, feeling vaguely embarrassed, continued straight; but in the soggy predawn hours of that night, with the wind rattling the windowpanes on their sixth floor and the world the shade of lead, she dreamed of turning left, and reaching the street with the kiosk. The dream street did not resemble the actual street, that graying afterthought of a shortcut with an abandoned old church at one end, a fence meandering like a sparsely toothed grin at the other, a row of dour six-story buildings in between. It was a slice of some outlandish town instead, like nothing she had ever seen, with a ruined clock tower rising like an accusing finger where the church should have been, eggshells and potato scum running down the gutters, and bald, faceless mannequins contorted in flooded shop windows—yet as she rushed past, her hair flying in a honey-smelling, sun-colored halo about her head, her arms heaped with flowers, she knew the street to be the same. The people were there still, waiting, but she had no desire to stop. She kept glancing at her hands—the delicate, smooth hands, with pearly pink petals of perfect fingernails and a lovely ring on one finger. And then that mad old man lifted his face to her, and his eyes were two round black mirrors, with clouds and branches and her own self reflected in them; but in his eyes she saw no honey mane of hair and no flowers, only an aging, badly combed woman in a shapeless brown skirt.

Anna disliked dreams. Dreams had an unpredictable, shimmering quality to them, seemed to her to be cut from the same illusory, wavering, precarious essence as life before the Change, the way she imagined it from history lessons, at least; she had been too young to remember much herself. Hers was a good life, a stable life. None of them ever went hungry, their apartment was warm in winter, they had their fair share of comforts and, too, more than a few accomplishments; last spring, for instance, she had been named District Teacher of the Year and received a roll of red silk—not real silk, but very smooth and gleaming all the same—from which she had made two pretty pillows for the bed. Not everything was perfect, of course, but if she could change one thing, any one thing, about her life, she was not sure what that thing would be, because her life was good, she said to herself once again as she sat behind her desk in class later that day. But as she thought it, her lips must have moved, or perhaps she even whispered it half audibly, for a few children stopped writing and were now staring at her with flat, incurious eyes resembling buttons and beetles. Looking down quickly, she found herself studying her hands, the weathered, naked hands of a woman no longer young, with blunt nails and fingers that were too short, their tips crumbling with pale chalk—and then she knew where she would go as soon as she was set free into the glittering white stretch of the afternoon.

When she turned into the street, she let out a gasp. More than fifty people stood before the kiosk, back after back, taking over the width of the sidewalk. The kiosk was closed as before, another sheet of paper pasted to its shuttered window.

She approached, squinted at the almost illegible scribble.

Gone to dinner, said the notice. Back after three.

She consulted her watch—it was two-thirty—then looked back at the line.

“So, what are they selling?” she asked.

A wide-faced woman in a fur hat, her mouth painted the color of ripe cherries, shrugged.

“I’m hoping for imported leather boots,” she said.

“Children’s coats, I heard,” a man behind her offered shyly.

“You imbecile, they don’t sell children’s coats in kiosks,” hissed a massive old woman next to him. “Cakes is my guess. Layered cakes with coconut shavings on top.” She smacked her lips. “The kiosk by the tram stop had them last week, but they ran out before my turn.”

“No one knows, then,” Anna said thoughtfully, and checked her watch again. She had half an hour to spare. Of course, on any other day, she would hardly consider wasting her time waiting for God knew what. Today, though—today was different; today, she realized suddenly, she wanted to be surprised; felt entitled to a surprise, in truth. Making up her mind, she hurried down the line, blinking at the snow; the descending sun made things bright and hazy, breaking the city into blinding triangles of chill and brilliance. She took her place at the end. A cake would be lucky, she mused—she loved the anticipation of a sweet mouthful traveling down her tongue, narrowing the whole universe to a pinpoint of one flaking, sugar-sprinkled moment—but of course, she would like any number of nice things: a pair of sheer stockings with their faintly chemical smell, for instance, or a ruby-red drop of nail polish in a square glass bottle, or a smooth pebble of jasmine soap. Once, on a winter afternoon just like this, she had chanced upon a kiosk selling oranges; true, the oranges had turned out to be sour and riddled with hard, bitter seeds, but their smell had been beautiful, beautiful, making her remember something she had not known she remembered, something from the dimmest reaches of childhood: the twilight deepening in a great, silk-lined, velvet-cushioned space, the majestic swaying of crimson and gold as the curtain rose, the rush of sound and motion and color, the stiffness of the lacy collar scratching her chin, the porous spiraling of the aromatic rind under her clumsy fingers as she leaned over the padded edge of the balcony, struggling to peel an orange, her eyes on the stage, now on the fruit, now on the stage again, and the disembodied voice, her father’s voice, breathing into her ear, “There—there she is, in white, do you see her—”

“What are you waiting for?” someone asked.

The question startled her out of her reverie into a world that was being swiftly drained of color. Gray hollows were already stretching by her feet like shadowy, somnolent beasts wearied by the passing of another day. Lazy snowflakes wandered through the air.

She frowned at the pale, skinny boy before her; she did not recognize him from school. He could not be more than ten; she was reminded of her own son when he had been that age, though the boy looked nothing like him.

“I don’t think anyone knows,” she said.

“But if you don’t know what it is,” said the boy, “how do you know you need it?”

He wore no mittens, was cradling one hand in the other.

“I’m sure it will be something good,” Anna replied patiently. “Otherwise all these people wouldn’t be here.”

The boy appeared puzzled. His eyes were two tiny pieces of a wintry sky; she could see herself in them, just like in her dream—two dark little figures drowning in a swirling of clouds, then gone in a blink, erased by a sweep of eyelashes wet with snow.

“And in any case,” she said impulsively, “it’s better this way, not knowing. It might be something you don’t need but really like. Like a present. Like flowers—”

She stopped, embarrassed. The boy breathed pensively on his fingers.

She watched the curling of his breath.

“I wonder if Mama would like it,” he said. “Whatever it is.”

“It might be perfume,” suggested a girl a few steps back.

The line had continued to grow all the while.

Anna glanced at her watch and was astonished to see that it was after four. “Would you like to take my place?” she asked. “I have to go, they’ll be worried about me at home.”

“Let him wait his turn like everyone else,” spat out someone behind her.

“That’s right, he isn’t with you, woman!” another voice shouted.

“He’s just a boy,” said Anna reproachfully, but the boy had already slunk away. “Shame,” she sighed, not certain what she meant precisely. Then, having cast one last glance at the boarded window, she ran through the disappearing city.

She burst into their apartment all out of breath, rehearsing some plausible explanation for being late—for some reason, she felt reluctant to confess to her futile two-hour wait in the waning light of the year—but no one asked her. She busied herself at the stove. At seven o’clock, they sat down to supper; her husband had been granted an evening off for the occasion. When she began to pour hot water over damp, odorless tea leaves saved from the previous teatime, her mother rose and, as always, wordlessly departed for her room. Anna set three cups on the table, looked from her husband to her son across the shadows of the dim, stuffy kitchen.

“I was hoping to buy a cake for tonight,” she announced brightly.

“A cake’s always good,” her son rejoined without enthusiasm.

In a small hush, she could hear the clock’s hand rustling toward the next minute, the gulp of liquid traveling down her husband’s throat. “Do you remember,” he said without raising his head, “in the old days, they put those skinny candles into birthday cakes, as many candles as you had years, and then you’d make a wish and blow them out?”

She laughed and protested in a flirtatious, insincere voice: “No, no, there wouldn’t have been space enough!”—yet already imagining the swoosh of the air escaping her lungs, the flickering dance of forty-three candles casting warm spells of golden-red light upon the convexity of the teacups, the concavity of the spoons, before rearing up and dying all at once—already wondering what she would have wished for, what special, unexpected, lovely thing…

Her husband did not contradict her but stared into his cup instead, and her son said, “Well, anyway, happy birthday!”

The boy’s face wore a startled expression, as if he’d only now remembered.

That night, tiptoeing along the unlit corridor, Anna collided with her mother, and her mother wound her thin arms about Anna and stood clinging to her for a moment, light as a bird, then, releasing her, flitted away, as before, in silence.

Anna gazed after her, not moving. In the darkness ahead, the door shut softly.

The next morning, she chanced to leave the house early, so she had time to walk the longer way; it was, after all, not that much of a detour, only a few extra blocks. The sun had not yet risen, and the kiosk was still closed—most places did not open until nine—but people were already starting to come by, drifting down sidewalks like pockets and patches of the departing night in the limpid green twilight of the last predawn hour. Noticing the bright-mouthed woman in the fur hat at the end of the line, Anna approached with hesitant steps.

“Good day. You may remember me—I was here yesterday, but I had to go—”

The woman regarded her blankly, her eyelids gleaming with lavender sleekness.

“Please, what did they end up selling?”

“A big fat nothing,” the woman said, flicking her flimsy scarf over her shoulder. “The cursed kiosk never reopened. Today’s the day, though, I can feel it. Whatever it is, it’ll go fast.”

“Oh.” Anna fiddled with her glove to keep from staring at the mesmerizing rotation of the woman’s earrings. “If you don’t mind… I have to go to work for a few hours—a school just around the corner—I’m a literature teacher… Would you be so kind as to hold the place for me, I’ll come as soon as I can—”

“The nerve,” said the woman indifferently. “The nerve of it. You think just because you’re educated, you don’t have to wait like everyone else?”

“Oh no, it’s not… I didn’t… I’ll be happy to replace you as soon as I… I mean, we could take turns—”

A few shadows around them tsked and shook their heads, and the woman turned away with a liquid toss of her earrings. Mortified, Anna pulled her gloves back on and stumbled off without looking up; but all day in school she felt stabs of acute shame at the memory of her audacity, mixed with a profound impatience that made her yearn to rush out in the middle of class, not waiting for the pupil to finish reciting “Ode to the Industrial Accomplishments of the Eastern Region,” and fly down the white streets, her unbuttoned coat flapping behind her. She felt like crying when the vice-principal, dropping by during her last hour, moved his pale fishlike lips and gleefully informed her that she must stay a while longer, to supervise a boy in detention. It was after five o’clock when she finally gathered her papers, struggled into the tight confinement of her sleeves. The night had already drawn its shutters over the city; windows were glowing with dull, steady lights, and the sky waved back and forth in a skeletal dance of black branches. She arrived just in time to see the line dispersing, to see the woman in the fur hat disappearing into the darkness with furious strides. The kiosk was boarded once again.

Slowly she came closer, and stopped. There was a new notice pasted to the window.

She strained to read it in the wavering light of the streetlamp, the branches’ shadows constantly tossed over the words, and at last made it out.

Closed for accounting. Back on Monday.

Footsteps shuffled behind her. A man was plodding away, his face blotted out by a raised collar, his shoulders hunched against the wind, muttering, “They think they can do anything, do they? Some joker comes by, puts up this garbage, then just saunters off—”

Her heart started to beat. “Excuse me,” she called out, “but—could you tell me—did they say what they would be selling? On Monday?”

She discovered that she was afraid of the answer—afraid that the night would throw back at her: “Laundry powder!” or “Socks!” She no longer wanted it to be a mundane, a trivial, thing. It was as if, unreasonable as she knew it to be, she had really begun to think of—of whatever it was—as some sort of a mystery birthday present meant for her.

The man was half a block away now, almost invisible, a denser darkness in the dark, but his words sliced sharp and angry through the empty street: “Nobody knows, woman! Why don’t you wait in line yourself if you’re so curious?”

Exhaling, Anna gathered up her bags and walked through the snow, raising small sparkling flurries with each step. At the corner, the mad old man from her dream sat on the curb, drawing some glowing symbol in the air with the burning tip of his cigarette; she smiled absently as she passed him, was smiling still as she unlocked her door.

She spent the next few days distracted, moving mindlessly through her chores and routines. On Sunday night, the night before the kiosk was set to open, she lay in bed unable to sleep, watching rare headlights stumble over the lump of her slumbering husband, thinking of the day, five, no, not five, seven years ago now (they had been celebrating Three Glorious Decades since the Change, and the city had shaken with garlands of festive flags mauled by the November wind)—the day when she had brought home the square tin box.

There had been a picture on the lid—an elephant under some exotic-looking, richly embroidered cloth in vibrant red and yellow patterns. She had hesitated to open it for the longest time, sitting alone at the kitchen table, cradling the box in her hands under the feeble glare of the lightbulb. At last she carefully slid the edge of a knife around the lid to loosen it, then prodded it free, releasing that dry, dense, delicious fragrance that did not smell of anything exactly and yet, she found, seemed to contain within it a wealth of other smells. They tumbled one after another into the cramped kitchen—the bright watermelon aroma of a chilly sunrise in the country in May, the intoxicating daffodil sweetness of a full-mooned June evening, the grassy ripeness of July on the veranda of a light-walled house tipping into the blue well of the night on a wave of laughter.

Funny, she thought, how her memory kept the smells, kept them perfectly, collected them like precious, rare specimens laid out on the black velvet lining of its few secret drawers, ready to spill its darkly glittering secrets whenever a long-forgotten smell sprang its lid open. Her mother had rented that house the last summer before the Change. There had been other children there, neighbors, friends. In an immediate, breathless rush, she recalled spoons clicking against cups, and the charmed, weightless leaps of the sad melody her mother had played so much on that funny rickety piano as their guests gathered for tea. Anna had never had an ear for music—indeed, she did not even like music all that much, she preferred the quiet—but this melody was special, it was sad and simple and special, and every time she had heard it, it had been as if someone’s cold, agile, silver-tipped fingers had slid swiftly up and down the clavichord of her spine.

She tried to hum it as she bent over the tin box with the elephant on its cover, but the tune proved elusive. Then the floor creaked, and her mother was looking at her, her eyes quiet, her long, painfully thin fingers pulling the purple velvet of her old robe tight at her throat. Anna struggled to empty her face of all traces of happiness—and then her mother spoke.

“Real eastern tea, how nice, shall we have a cup together?” she said in a casual, even voice, quite as if she spoke to Anna all the time, quite as if she had not maintained an aloof, maddening silence for so many years—and Anna felt that she had been granted permission to keep the happiness on her face just a while longer, and had to turn away and stare at the impossibly straight silhouette of her mother in their kitchen window, to hide the sudden welling in her eyes.

She had saved the box after the tea was gone, of course. Every so often, when sure that no one was watching, she would open it and press her nose against its cold metallic insides and breathe, and breathe, and try to remember; but no new memories came, the music did not distill into a clearer melody, and after some time, her mother reverted to her habitual thin-lipped silence. In another year or two Anna filled the box with an assortment of mismatched buttons. Her son had impatient fingers and was always pulling buttons off his clothes.

On Monday morning, she did the unthinkable: she rang her school and sneezed into the phone. “Oh yes, there’s a flu going around,” said the secretary sympathetically. “Emilia Khristianovna’s sick also. Squeeze a lemon into hot water.”

“I will,” Anna lied, and dressed quickly, then extracted the family’s savings from inside a sock in the bureau’s bottom drawer (just in case, one never knew, it might be something pricey), and walked out, pressing her handbag to her chest.

It was early, but some thirty or forty people already stood before the kiosk. One of them, a stocky woman in felt boots, rather resembled the physics teacher, but a garish knit scarf obscured her face, and Anna was not sure. She pulled her own scarf closer to her eyes all the same; then, opening the book she had brought along—the latest collection by the country’s most honored poet, whose work she frequently assigned to her pupils for memorization—she began to read, forming the words half volubly, a teacher’s habit:

“Ah,” said a voice behind her, “here already? Mind if I join?”

Today her lipstick was an unbecoming shade of orange, Anna noted with spite.

“You shouldn’t be cutting in front of anyone,” she said. “The end’s over there.”

The line was swelling rapidly.

“Fine, I wasn’t asking you for a favor anyway,” the woman announced airily, and walked off with a haughty click of her elegant earrings.

“I hope they run out of it just before your turn!” Anna cried, and, just as the squat woman who might or might not have been Emilia Khristianovna appeared to twitch in her direction, hastily hid behind her volume, embarrassed already by her unlikely outburst.

For an hour or two she tried to read, but found the poems difficult to like, whether because she could not concentrate or for some other reason. As the morning condensed into a dreary afternoon and the strengthening wind started to throw heavy hours back and forth like smudged, icy snowballs, she shut the book decisively and stood still, listening to conversations rise and collide and fade around her. People argued about the unknown merchandise at the end of their wait; every so often someone abandoned the line after much complaining; others joined. Anna soon gathered that over the past two months the kiosk had become a neighborhood obsession. It had appeared in the fall, but, unlike other local kiosks, which, regularly and with no secrecy, dispensed cheap cigarettes and vegetables or, on thrilling and brief occasions, chocolates and cosmetics, this kiosk had never sold anything at all, not even on those rare days when a fake blonde with a pasty face made surly appearances in the kiosk window. The woman would answer no questions, thereby deepening the general suspicion of some momentous mystery. As weeks went by, speculation and agitation only mounted. Rumors had spread; people whispered of imported crystal or ingenious toys or exclusive book subscriptions, or tickets for a new State lottery in which one could win an automobile or a vacation by the sea. An enterprising man had recently begun to take bets on the day of the week and the time of day when the nebulous something would finally go on sale. There were, of course, a few nonbelievers—“cynical, dried-out souls,” a man behind Anna grumbled—who predicted it would turn out to be something pathetic, say canned soup or matches, and who often came by the line to mock the trusting fools freezing off varied pieces of their anatomy; but many of those who lived nearby made it a habit to spend at least a couple of weekly hours at the kiosk, just in case. A handful even arrived by tram from farther out, and there were not a few, among housewives and pensioners, who waited daily. And the more Anna heard, the more filled she was with a sure presentiment of a change, whether small or boundless she did not know—but in any case, something, she thought, to make her and her family happier, or lend some simple beauty to her everyday life, or perhaps even infuse her entire existence, working into its minute cracks and voids, knitting it into a tighter, brighter, fuller fabric.

Shortly after four, the line surged forward. She felt someone’s chin prodding her back, and, looking up, saw a uniformed man unlocking the kiosk door. In the next moment her nose was driven into the back before her, her face flattened against a damp coat, her body trapped in a crush of other bodies.

“What’s happening, I can’t see,” she pleaded, her words muffled.

An exhalation brushed her ear: “The shutter’s been lifted!”

The world closed in on her, brown and hushed, warm with collectively held breath. The next minute stretched on, slowly, inexorably, spreading outward like a dense, viscous spill. A sharp heel grazed her foot; something hard and angular smashed painfully against her hip. She closed her eyes, let her whole being go still, settled into the faintly sour, furtive scents of wet wool and steaming whispers and anticipation.

The line sagged in a moan.

“Not another scribble!” a woman’s wail rose.

“A notice? What does it say?”

Someone read aloud: Out with flu. Will reopen in January.

The crowd slackened. Anna fought her way clear of coats, knees, and elbows just in time to see the shutter chomping down. The uniformed man emerged, manipulated the lock on the door. In the dejected silence, she could hear the muted screech of metal resisting metal, could smell the rust. As the man strolled away, she wanted terribly to follow, to ask, to demand, but she did not move.

No one did.

Then a polite voice called out: “Pardon me, but what might they be selling here, exactly?”

The uniformed man continued to walk away as if he had not heard.

“I don’t know about you,” said the bright-lipped woman, flying past in a blur of silk and fur, “but I’ve just about had enough of this!” People muttered, dispersing. Anna lingered for a while longer, even though it was clear to her that no one else was going to appear, nothing else was going to happen. At last she too turned toward home. She had, of course, resolved to be here on the first day of the new year. Surprisingly, she did not seem to mind all that much.

She felt purposeful and light, and strangely hopeful, as she moved along the darkening streets, chased by the dull rhythm of her flat heels slapping the frozen pavements.

3

A FEW DAYS LATER, Sergei woke up in a mood of suppressed anticipation. He tried to steel himself against disappointment, convinced that fate would do its best to cheat him yet again at the last possible moment: the director telephoning to inform him that his services for the evening were no longer required, or else his slipping in the street on the way and breaking an arm, or—or any number of scenarios on which he preferred not to dwell. He moved through his day with deliberation, pretending that nothing out of the ordinary awaited him. He ate an unhurried breakfast, perused the front page of a newspaper, then spent his customary two or three hours behind the closed bedroom door playing what his wife called his “songs.”

He knew, of course, that such rigorous practicing was excessive, since the music he was routinely called upon to perform was of a crude, simple nature—brass exclamations punctuating anthems and marches, not worth his time, not worth his breath, not worth the very air he sent vibrating. He despised it, in fact; despised, too, those of his fellow citizens who, uncoerced, attended his band’s performances or, year after year, meekly followed its hollow booming as the parades rolled through the streets. Despising it, he indulged in it daily all the same. The mere act of fleshing out a series of notes on his tuba always filled his chest with an expansive, cresting excitement, until, closing his eyes, he could imagine other instruments weaving into the phrase, swelling with a full orchestral glory, the melody in his mind moving farther and farther away from the threadbare score before him, sounding more and more like the brilliant, complex, unique symphony he had dreamed of hearing, and playing, for so long.

Tonight, he thought, he would get his chance at last.

He had not told his wife for fear of jinxing it.

At three o’clock, setting his tuba aside, he meticulously polished his special-occasion shoes, removed a few invisible dust motes from the lapels of his best suit, and started to get dressed; he chose not to notice that the jacket had grown somewhat tight in the armpits. At three-thirty, fully attired, he looked at his watch, picked up the tuba, and practiced some more. As the low, furry-clawed sounds resumed shuffling up and down invisible stairs like clumsy circus bears, the musically challenged downstairs neighbor again began to bang her broom against her ceiling; he did his best to ignore her. At four he laid the tuba down, looked at his watch, found a remnant of the morning newspaper, read an editorial. At three minutes past four, he sighed. At five minutes past, he looked at his watch. At seven minutes, he crumpled the newspaper, grabbed his tuba, threw the bedroom door open, and plunged into the corridor.

The corridor was hazy with smoke. He fought his way into the kitchen, coughing. Soft blue dusk was already rising in the solitary kitchen window like water poured slowly into a glass; beneath it, a splayed chicken corpse lay decomposing on the plastic tablecloth in a pool of oily lamplight. His wife stood at the stove, wagging a ladle in a pot.

“I’m afraid the onions will be a bit crisp,” she said with an apologetic smile, and glanced up, and paused in her stirring. “Oh, Serezha, you didn’t have to, it’s just the four of us, nothing fancy—but you do look really—”

He bent his head to adjust the knot of his tie.

“Yes, that,” he mumbled. “I meant to tell you, we have an important engagement in the city, sort of last-minute. Ivan Anatolievich asked me in person. I won’t be staying for supper.”

Emitting a little gasp, she splashed her hands. The ladle clunked onto the floor, and drops flew everywhere; a murky tear of some viscous substance trickled down the wall.

He stepped back hastily, brushing at his sleeve.

“But Serezha,” she said, “I’ve borrowed a piece of cheese and a tomato from downstairs. I was planning a soufflé for the second course. It is, after all—”

Her mother glided into the kitchen, straight and small and royal, without a word, without a noise. They watched her float gracefully between the disorder of pots and pans, pour tea into a porcelain cup with a thin gilded edge, reserved for her use alone, and glide away, her earlobes flashing with those precious earrings she always wore.

He heard a pointedly tactful click of the door closing, and breathed out.

“I must be off.” He would not meet her eyes. “I’m late already.”

She followed him into the hallway, stood there as he tightened his shoelaces.

“Don’t forget your tuba now,” she said, and added, a pitiful smile struggling on her lips, her voice flaking ever so slightly about the edges, “See you next year!”

He remembered the sound of her laughter, light and girlish, curling up at its ends into delighted little half-squeaks—in the beginning, so many years ago… His heart contracted. Giving his laces one final tug, he rose, opened the door with a jerk.

“Happy New Year,” he said from the threshold.

She might have said something in reply, but he had already descended a flight of stairs.

The streets stretched deserted, the haloes of recently lit streetlamps turning blue with the cold. He chanced upon a miraculous trolley, boarded it with all the haste his unwieldy instrument allowed him, and from inside the jaundiced, loosely jangling, drafty box watched the frozen apartment blocks slip on ice and tumble backward into the night. Monolithic and shabby at first, the city grew brighter, less geometrical, as he approached its heart, sprouting frivolous little balconies and plump caryatids along the façades of pastel-colored palaces from distant, sleepy centuries. At last he was disgorged onto a sidewalk before an imposing yellow mansion caged behind a stern row of columns; its gates, he saw, were already letting in a timid trickle of middle-aged men in baggy coats bent all out of shape beneath their bulky burdens.

He handed his documents to the guard in a booth, shifted from foot to foot, listened to the snow moaning under his shoes. The shoes, more than a decade old, pinched.

“Proceed,” the guard said.

“But my papers—”

“Proceed. You’ll receive them upon departing.”

The guard’s stare was a lengthy coda.

He hesitated for an instant, then walked in.

There was the briefest glowing, astonishing glimpse of marble and crystal set aflame and multiplied in a great mirrored chamber visible through a succession of doorways just ahead; but already he was being ushered into a small windowless room, no different from any of the rooms in which his life customarily took place. The security search was thorough and humiliating. When it was over, he was swept along a blind corridor and down a service staircase to another windowless room, where a few of them already waited, standing awkwardly along the walls, bleak brasses gleaming, strings lifeless in their black coffins; he noticed Sviatoslav in the corner, looking oddly deflated behind the bloated barrels of his drums.

There was only one chair in the room, next to a desk piled high with folders; in the chair sprawled a sleek-haired man in a much nicer suit than his own. The man was talking. Too anxious to follow the speech—something about the honor to have been selected as the State’s representatives in this bastion of foreign power, the trust that had been accorded them by the country—Sergei looked around the room, nodded to a couple of acquaintances, shifted his hold on the tuba. As his wedding ring grazed it, the metal emitted a loud, hollow clang, and he found the man’s lead-colored eyes boring into his. “And do not, I repeat, do not, address or make eye contact or communicate in any way with any of them,” the man said, holding Sergei with his flat, lusterless gaze. “Naturally, there is no need to remind you of the scrutiny to which each and every one of you will be subjected during and after this evening.”

He smiled a thin, ominous smile and, leaning forward slowly, tapped the stack of folders on the desk. The dry sound of his knuckles scratching cardboard made Sergei’s skin grow clammy, as if a nail had been deliberately dragged along a windowpane.

For a moment there was absolute stillness in the room.

“Dismissed,” the man said, and, looking thoroughly bored, reached for a drawer.

Already across the threshold, Sergei cast a glance back.

The man was clipping his fingernails.

A different corridor filled with the disconcerting echoes of invisible sentries’ footsteps, always seemingly marching toward them yet never arriving, led them farther down, to the basement, where the rest of the orchestra, some twenty of them altogether, had by now gathered. Another man, this one in a resplendent tuxedo, strode past them, briskly distributing sheets of music. Breathlessly, Sergei watched the tuxedo’s officious progress across the room. At last his fingers closed over his own set of pages, and a swift, chilled, delicious gust of anticipation blew through his chest, cleansing it of fear. Anyone chosen for these events signed an oath not to disclose anything witnessed or performed, but he had heard rumors, whispered half-confidences amidst deafening cacophonies of wearying parades, semi-voiced intimations of flight, of daring—enough to convince him that music from Over There was nothing like the turgid State-sanctioned drivel that drowned his lungs every day—enough to make him believe that tonight he would finally have something real, something special, to play, something to justify all the hours, the years, of practices, his neighbor stabbing the floor beneath his feet with her broom, his son slamming his door shut, his wife tiptoeing past him, massaging away her headache, careful not to lift toward him her dull, tortured gaze…

“We’ll be coming for you around nine. We trust that is sufficient,” the man in the tuxedo said from the doorway, and, stepping outside, closed the metal-bound door behind him.

Sergei barely registered the key forcing the lock. Impatiently, clumsily, he tore at the score, skimmed the first page, and the second, then brought the notes closer to his eyes; the lamps in the basement burned low. A stretch of time passed. As the hum of blood receded from his temples, he could suddenly hear pipes gurgling softly in the bowels of the place, a steady rhythm of water dripping somewhere from a forgotten faucet, the wheezing of an overweight trombone player behind him. He turned a page, frowning, scanned another song, felt his insides yawn with a premonition of emptiness, condensing already into bitter disbelief.

Someone issued a cough, someone else set his score down on a chair.

“Shall we try this, then?” inquired a hearty voice. “Has everyone familiarized themselves with the spirit of the thing?”

They cocked their instruments at the ready, began to play; and as one trite little ditty replaced another, their sounds floated about the basement, weightless as soap bubbles.

At seven o’clock, trays of food and drinks were brought in. There were tiny round flaky pastries and tiny elongated crispy pastries, delicacies stuffed with melted cheese and bits of olives, sprinkled with caviar, speckled with strange, strong-flavored meats and spices, tall glasses of emerald-green and azure-blue liquids stitched through with strings of bubbles yet not inebriating in the least. They took a break, and many started to laugh, grew flushed with excitement; Sergei alone remained seated, staring into space, the score still crucified on the note stand before him. Sviatoslav lumbered over, nudged him with a shiny elbow of his worn suit.

“What do you think this is? And have you tasted that?” he shouted, crumbs mingling with beads of sweat in his quivering mustache. “Smell it, smell it, isn’t it heavenly?”

Sergei nodded vaguely, though he could smell nothing; he had been born without a sense of smell—a minor nasal deviation, he had been told as a child. “I’m not hungry,” he said.

“Go on, go on, try this, you’ll thank me later. What’s with you, are you sick?”

He scraped something many-layered and brittle off the drummer’s palm, ate it without noticing its taste.

“Out of this world, isn’t it?” Sviatoslav sighed, spraying him with spittle.

“It sure is,” Sergei replied, and looked away.

At a quarter to nine the door opened again, and they were each handed a spotless white shirt with a tight collar, and a tuxedo jacket with a moist white bud in a buttonhole. “No one will be able to see your pants, the way the stage is set up,” they were told as they dressed. Afterward, they were led upstairs, into the chamber Sergei had glimpsed hours before, and there installed amidst the marble and the crystal in all their above-the-waist black-and-white splendor. The double doors swung outward, the ball began. Pausing between tunes, Sergei caught glimpses of glasses touching with expensively muted peals, pale green-and-silver sofas diminishing endlessly in the misty distance of the mirrors like waves of an elegant, silk-textured sea, the low notes of men’s placid chins pushing forward from beneath black masks, the high notes of women’s sharp chins peeking out from underneath rose-tinted masks, and lights, lights, lights, in candelabra, in chandeliers, flitting like a flock of dizzy moths under a ceiling so grand it hurt one’s neck to look up.

Sergei did not look up.

At midnight the clocks started to chime in the corners, the tall windows were thrown open, and the guests cheered and kissed and tossed their masks in the air. A sliver of a silvery streamer spiraled wildly onto Sergei’s sleeve. The orchestra banged and trilled. Then, gradually, the exuberant gestures wound themselves down. At a signal, the musicians ceased making noise, the chiming came to an end, the last masks descended, and all at once Sergei became aware of the silent northern night crashing through the windows in immense, hard, dark chunks of stillness and cold—and aware of everyone else in the room becoming aware of it at the same time.

There was a hush, complete, uncanny, as if an invisible hand had pressed itself against the guests’ mouths. “In our city,” a child’s voice sounded plaintively in the hush, speaking with an exaggerated foreign accent, “if you open the windows on New Year’s Eve, you hear bells ringing, crowds in the streets, singing everywhere—”

The invisible hand lifted just as suddenly, and laughter bubbled back up throughout the room. Sergei picked the streamer off his borrowed jacket, dropped it onto the floor, played another song. He had expected something else, but it was just another year—hardly worth the torment of a guard’s beefy hands running up his legs.

An hour or two later, he asked for permission to visit the facilities. The man from before, the one in the resplendent tuxedo, trained a double-barrel gaze on his face, then motioned to a guard whose head looked disturbingly small atop the massive expanse of his shoulders, like a lightbulb propped up on a shelf. They moved across the ballroom in a short grim procession, the tuxedo in front, the shoulders in the rearguard, another, upside-down procession at their feet, reflected in the shining floors. Sergei turned to face them by the door.

“Are you going to follow me in?” he asked without expression.

The lightbulb looked at the tuxedo. The tuxedo shook his head.

“Wait for him here,” he said. “And you, hurry up.”

Beyond, there were more mirrors, more flowers, more marble. A row of doors ran along the wall. Averting his eyes from the hordes of tall, middle-aged, morose tuba players in ill-fitting jackets who dogged his steps from mirror to mirror, he tried one of the inner doors, was blinded by porcelain, spent some time fighting the odd springing mechanism of the lock. After a while he heard a swelling of noise outside his stall, a snippet of jaunty music; then, with a soft percussive clap, the noise cut off, and two sets of steps walked across the marble, one crisp and assured, the other shuffling, old.

Water splashed. Sergei negotiated his zipper.

“—thirty-six years ago, as I recall,” said a low voice. “He left just after the closing of the borders. Escaped across the sea. Our loss, your gain. But are you sure?”

“Oh, quite,” replied the other. “It’s in all our newspapers.”

The second voice had a crack running down the middle, a crack of age—the shuffling steps, then—but what gave Sergei a start was the accent. The speaker was a foreigner.

He checked his hand on his belt, afraid now to give away his presence.

“Yes, imagine that, how time flies,” the accented voice said, “after all these years—” The words drowned as a cascade of water fell into the sink, and for two or three endless minutes, frozen in mid-movement, he heard nothing but splashing. Then the splashing slowed to a steady trickle, and the foreigner’s voice dove in and out: “… so they are finally allowing him… one concert in his hometown… a new symphony he’s written… the concert will take place a year from now, on New Year’s Eve… only three hundred seats, so the tickets will be rather—”

Sergei found himself straining to hear with such intensity that the insides of his ears were starting to ache. More water gurgled, then the native voice swam up, speaking urgently: “—his music is so unorthodox, so unusual—aren’t they afraid that people might—”

In the next instant, a thundering waterfall erupted under Sergei’s elbow: he had accidentally rested it on some handle that had given way. A shocked silence rang outside, followed by the hasty retreat of the shuffling steps, the tide of the party coming in, then rolling back. Cursing under his breath, he tore at the lock, clambered out of the stall—and nearly collided with a tall gray-haired man in a tuxedo, his face concealed by a mask.

Got the steps wrong, Sergei thought mechanically.

The foreigner’s hands were bleeding soap onto the marble floor, the foaming pink suds touching down with the faintest of sighs. Water dripped from a bright faucet, drip-drip, drip-drip-drip, a melody lost there somewhere. Giving a small shrug, the man turned toward the sink, and fleetingly Sergei saw the distorted, fattened reflections of his fingers slide across the faucet’s silver surface—the unmistakable, immaculate fingers of a musician…

He took an unthinking step forward.

“The man you were talking about just now,” he said in a voice that was nothing like his own, high and pinched, “the musician who’s coming here, who is he? I too am a musician. I heard you speak. I—”

The door yawned open, and the massive shoulders filled the frame. The guard leveled a low-voltage stare at Sergei’s face.

“Is this person bothering you, sir?” he asked, his voice sagging with menace.

Sergei’s heart thudded, then stopped, then fell somewhere, and he fell after it, through a trapdoor he had not known was there—into a blinding light of danger, of madness, of sheer unreality, the water dripping, the pompous lavatory, the foreign embassy, oh what have I done, what reckless, irretrievable, criminal thing have I done—

“I not understand,” the foreigner said dismissively.

Frozen with mute horror, Sergei watched him dry his hands on a towel. As the guard strode along the stalls, peeking under the doors, the foreigner raised his eyes to the mirror; they glittered through the slits of the mask, calm and unreadable, but it seemed to Sergei that somewhere in the uncertain, multiplying world of reflections, a gray eye closed in a nearly imperceptible, knowing wink. Then the man was gone.

“This incident will be recorded in your dossier,” the guard hissed.

Recovering his speech, Sergei began to stammer. He was one of the most reliable members of his orchestra, ask anyone, ask the drummer, he has known me all my life, he will vouch for me, ask the director, just don’t put this stain on my blameless record, a simple misunderstanding, two men obeying the call of nature, could happen to anyone, I would never, I’m forty-seven years old and in all this time I never—

The heavy stare was pawing, pawing at his face.

“We will be watching you closely,” the guard said at last. “Resume your duties.”

The dim lightbulb of the guard’s stare went out. He was free to return to the ballroom stage, to continue breathing a bouncy beat into his tuba.

It was close to four in the morning when they were finally divested of their tuxedos. The festivities had long since unraveled, the rooms lay empty and echoing; a solitary woman in a low-cut satin dress sat on a sofa in a corner, her mask askew, absently dropping green grapes into her gaping, drunken mouth. Sergei made his way to the exit, a trembling tightness in his stomach, praying that his documents would be returned to him without trouble. He was crossing the vestibule when, through the open front door, he saw two men smoking on the steps outside, conversing loudly in a foreign tongue. He halted. Their faces were bare now. One of them said something, and they both laughed, and tossed away their half-finished cigarettes.

“Wasteful bastards,” Sviatoslav grumbled, overtaking him. “Coming?”

Recollecting himself, Sergei hurried across the threshold after the drummer, nearly slipping on the sleek polished floors; but already the two foreigners had turned to go in, and he had to step aside to let them pass. In the doorway, the taller of the two, a grayhaired man with clear gray eyes and a thin aristocratic nose, glanced at Sergei with a small yet significant smile, and a footfall later Sergei heard the soft sound of something light hitting the stones.

A flat blue box lay on the steps where the men had just stood.

He cast a panicked look around him. No one was watching. The last members of the orchestra were receiving their papers at the booth ahead, the tuxedoed backs were retreating into the mansion behind him. He bent down, grabbed the tiny box, which threw a golden flash in his eyes, nearly dropped it at the unexpected dry rattle it emitted—there was something inside—stuffed it into his pocket, and, his upper lip glistening with sweat, his heart wobbling, caught up with the other musicians.

His documents bore no mark of the evening’s events.

In another two or three minutes, he was through the gates.

The embassy’s façade was still ablaze, and as the light welled through the bright silk draperies, the snow along the wrought-iron fence glimmered in pale squares of crimson and green and blue. A few steps beyond, they were cast into the darkness, the chill, the silence. Horns, trombones, and a timid, bug-eyed violin exchanged dispirited farewells and trudged off in different directions; snow crunched for some minutes, then all was quiet again.

“Well, that was some party,” Sviatoslav said, his massive jowls shuddering with a flattened yawn. “Sure, their music’s fluff, but they know how to have a good time, you have to give them that.” He brought his face close to Sergei’s. “Don’t tell anyone, this is risky, but I smuggled something out for my better half, look—”

Blindly Sergei nodded at the confusion of crumbs wrapped in a greasy napkin.

“Hey, want to drop by my place, have a drink? I tell you, the women we saw tonight, all trotting about like giraffes in those heels! Too skinny, though, if you ask me—”

“Listen, I’m worn out,” Sergei said. “See you at the theater, all right?”

The last of the trolleys had ceased running hours earlier, in the previous year; the first day of January pressed heavily onto the ground. As he strode through the deserted city, he thought of the New Years of his childhood, before he was ten, before the Change, when the city had still glowed with the soft, deep enchantment of sugared angels spreading their sparkling wings in bakery windows, and bells whose limpid sounds rose like the sea at a moonlit tide, and glass ornaments turning slowly this way and that on dark tree branches, gathering in their reflections the whole wondrous, promise-filled world.

His fingers were tightly curled around the mysterious object in his pocket—his own, private communication from a different life.

He was not far from his building when he stopped. The street did not look familiar. There was a dilapidated church at one end, a squat little kiosk with a boarded window at the other. The solitary streetlamp was lavender in tint, low and sickly. He withdrew his hand, unlocked his cramping fingers, looked at the small sky-blue box on his palm. It was made of cardboard; one side was blank, the other had two words engraved on it. He deciphered the foreign script, which he had learned as a boy. Café Apollo, the letters spelled out in curly gold. With a careful finger, he pushed at the inside of the box, ready to receive the final mystery.

The inner compartment slipped out.

There were matches in it. Sturdy white matches with generous red and yellow tips.

Sergei gazed at the matches for a long minute, until his fingers began to burn with cold, then gave a laugh so short and harsh it sounded like a bark, and threw the foreign matchbox into the night—and the night seemed to solidify, to lunge toward him in a flowing, shifting shape. He felt a stab of indistinct yet acute fear, then, blinking, saw it was only an old man in an odd baggy cape, of the kind gnarled hermits wore in the lavish illustrated books he had found as a child underneath the glittering tree.

The old man brushed the snow off his knees, stepped forward into the light.

“Matches falling from the sky into my lap, must be my lucky day,” he said, smiling. “Now, if only I could get some cigarettes. You don’t smoke, do you?”

Sergei shook his head, already moving off.

“Didn’t think so, or you wouldn’t be throwing good matches away,” the old man observed to himself. “Curious, what’s this, something written on it, let me see if I can make it out, my eyes aren’t what they used to be… ‘I-gor Se-lin-sky,’ yes, that’s it, Igor Selinsky—”

He was back in one leap, snatching the matchbox from the old man’s grasp, turning it in the streetlamp’s scanty light, forgetting to breathe, yes, indeed, he had missed it somehow—the golden engraving Café Apollo on one side, and on the other, scribbled in a hasty, almost indecipherable hand across the matchbox’s glossy underbelly: Igor Selinsky. He laughed and would have embraced the old man but did not, crying instead, “Keep it, keep it!”—pushing the matchbox into the man’s hands, hard and twisted like ancient tree bark, and running down the streets, and up the stairs, humming, no, singing, exuberantly singing the melody that had burst with such immediate triumph into his mind, that melody he had learned to play in his tenth year—the melody that, he had once believed, would change his whole life—a deceptively simple tune, simple and sad, one of Selinsky’s early pieces, yet already containing within it a promise, a dazzling promise of things that were to come but that never came, not for him, not for them, not here, not in this dark, cold place oppressed by winter—but somewhere else perhaps, yes, somewhere else for sure, somewhere luminous and bright and full of music, where life was like art and art like life, and soon to be his, theirs, here, because times were changing, because life was changing at last.

When he finally managed to control the shaking in his hands long enough to fit the key in the lock and push the door open and stumble inside, he was blinded by the light springing into life and his wife rising from the kitchen table.

“What’s that you’re singing?” she said, with a strange lapsing in her voice.

“Oh, Anya, you wouldn’t believe what just—” “But you’re traipsing snow everywhere!” she exclaimed, and, surging toward him, fussed about, shaking him out of his wet coat. “Did you have far to walk? Your shoes must be soaked through. Here, I’ll hang that… Do you think you’ve caught a cold? You’d better have a cup of tea, I’ll make it for you, sit down, sit down—”

He looked at the pots in the sink, their insides clotted with grayish lumps, and the pile of thick stockings in a basket on the windowsill, waiting their turn to be mended, and his wife’s broad back bending over the teakettle.

Silent now, he lowered himself onto a chair, began to pry his frozen shoelaces loose.

“Here,” she said, “nice and hot, with lemon… So what was that song, then?”

“Just something I heard on the radio the other day,” he said shortly.

He finished his cup, then walked off, leaving her at the table, and in the graying predawn bedroom fell into a humming, gleaming well, which overflowed with barely audible melodies he strove to hear through the rush of waters, and satin women playing cheerful little songs with silver spoons on ripened grapes, and, toward midmorning, when the light outside the window had grown broad and white, the old man with the scraggly beard and deep dark eyes standing under the streetlamp before the boarded-up kiosk, smiling a cunning smile.

4

THE FIRST TWO WEEKS of January there was no school. This fact made little difference to Alexander. As always, he left the apartment in the morning, and as always, he did not go to school. The second Friday of the new year found him sitting on a bench in a small park some blocks from home, watching pigeons root through the garbage that spilled out of trash cans. He was not all that curious about pigeons—indeed, he found them revolting, the way they appeared so puffy and glossy, so cozily substantial, but would, he knew, be skinny and tremulous to the touch, tiny, mousy bodies palpitating inside a ball of feathers. All the same, sitting here, in the cold, empty park, watching the birds, whiled away the time.

When the pigeons had stuffed their bellies with trash and waddled off, he rested his head against the bench’s back and did not move for many long minutes, staring upward at the flat gray sky that was sliding past him, unceasingly, quickly, spreading its wind-filled clouds like powerful sails and departing somewhere—perhaps toward another, brighter, deeper sky far, far away—leaving behind the pathetic park, the immobile city, the paralyzed day. At last he stirred as if awakening, sat up, groped for a splinter of a broken bottle under the bench, then proceeded to scratch his initials into its frozen wood; there was a bare patch amidst all the clumsy hearts, anatomical schematics, and equations that would never add up, all these adolescent confessions, O + N = LOVE.

“There,” he said aloud when he was done. “My contribution to humanity, my immortality.” He considered adding a short yet expressive word, but the glass felt brittle and icy in his gloveless fingers, and in any case, there was no room. He tossed the jagged piece into the snow and rose, and drifted through the city.

A few streets away, men were unloading large crates from a truck, slapping their padded gloves together with halfhearted grunts; he stopped and looked until one of them shooed him away. The movie theater was just around the corner, so he walked there next. The deserted foyer smelled of damp shoes and stale cigarettes growing in spittoons. He read the announcements on the wall, though without much interest: they had been running the same two features since November—a documentary called The Anvil of Righteousness and a historical epic, whose poster depicted three fierceeyed, bare-chested slaves trampling into marbled dust an effeminate degenerate in a jeweled toga. He had seen neither film; he never had the money. He was just tilting his head sideways, studying a potentially promising toppled statue in the poster’s lurid background, when the double doors groaned open, and there dribbled out a few people who had attended the matinee. He peered hopefully into their faces as they stumbled past him one by one; sometimes, if he caught them at the precise instant when they stepped squinting into the pale wintry light from the theater’s shadows, just before they adjusted their expressions, buttoned their coats, and trudged off toward the rest of their day, he was able to see their faces naked, split open like ripened fruit—and in their eyes, raw and urgent, unhappiness, or loneliness, or yearning. Catching such glimpses gave him brief comfort—he felt less alone. Today, though, the six or seven women who emerged into the foyer looked merely tired. One of them dragged a reluctant little boy by the hand; another yawned, and paused, and glared.

“What are you gawking at?” she snarled.

Alexander moved off.

The pet shop across the road, another one of his haunts, turned out to be locked, a sign on the door stating, tersely and indefinitely: Closed for accounting. He pressed his nose to the dim window, trying to discern, in the gloom beyond, the enormous, dusty aquarium in which, he knew, lethargic, bleary-eyed fish were pushing through the faintly illuminated water as through thick jelly; but it was rather like peering inside a bottle of dense brown glass. He gave the door a cursory kick, then cut through an alley, crossed a courtyard, swung into a street with a kiosk at one end. He had passed here before; the kiosk never seemed to be open, yet it always had a line before it. Lines depressed him, and he strode past with quick, determined steps, debating whether to make a trip to his favorite place of all before evening fell—a place that was breathing, throbbing, heaving on the other side of the city, a private place he had sworn never to share with anyone—when someone called his name. The name was common, so he took a few more resolute steps, and heard his name again. Looking up, he saw an aging woman in a lopsided coat, with a round face and unevenly drawn eyebrows, waving at him from the thick of the line.

It took him a second to recognize her as his mother.

He wondered whether he could just keep walking, but it was obvious that she had seen that he had seen her. “Ah, Sasha, how good that you happened by!” she exclaimed, even before he approached. Her tone was unnatural, too cheerful, too loud; as she spoke, she half turned to someone behind her, though not addressing anyone exactly. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw fur and glitter, but did not care to look closer.

“What are they selling?” he said sullenly. “Tablecloths? Curtains?”

“No, not—I don’t actually…” Her voice dipped lower. “Why? Do you think we need new curtains? In the bedroom, maybe? Have you noticed that hole? I mended it, but maybe it’s—”

“Our curtains are fine,” he said.

“Well, anyway, it’s lucky you came by, I just remembered I haven’t yet ironed your father’s shirt for his important performance tonight”—she pronounced the words in that same unnecessarily loud voice, her head turned to the side—“so I must run home, but you won’t have to wait long, no more than an hour, perhaps only forty—”

“I’m busy,” he said.

“Oh, I’ll be right back, half an hour, no longer. Here, take this, just in case. I don’t want to lose my place, I’ve been here two weeks, it’s supposed to reopen any day now, but of course not in the next twenty minutes. Just wait for me to get back, a quarter of an hour, all right?”

He looked at the wallet she had pressed into his hand.

“Fine,” he said. “Fine. Don’t rush.”

Not that he was going to take any of their money, of course, despite the fact that they never gave him anything and surely owed him by now—no, he wouldn’t even check how much there was, not until she rounded the corner—and not then either. He stuffed the wallet in his pocket and stood staring into space. After a while, the air abruptly grew a shade grayer, as if some giant fish in the cloudy waters over which the skies were sailing had flipped belly up, turning toward him its darker back. Snowflakes began to scratch his exposed face, hands, neck with tiny needles of wetness. “About time!” a voice shrieked ahead.

Emerging from his trance, Alexander peered into the drifting snow.

The kiosk shutter had been lifted, its insides lit. He saw the top of a woman’s head bent in the window. Oh great, he thought, and I don’t even know how many napkins Mother wants or whatever; but, since the circumstances seemed to call for it, he pulled the wallet out anyway, and glanced inside—and was startled to find a handful of large bills, more than he had ever seen at once, two months’ salary at least, he estimated, holding his breath now.

“Can anyone tell me what the devil they’re selling?” a man’s gruff voice asked in his ear.

His face hot, Alexander snapped the wallet shut. “No clue,” he muttered, turning.

The man was his father’s age, dressed in an oversized torn jacket, his chin unevenly sketched out with stubble, his right cheekbone slapped with the shadow of an old bruise.

“Hold my place, will you,” he said happily, sending an exhalation of mingled drink and sweat toward Alexander, and ambled off.

“Thinks he’s smarter than everyone else, that one,” someone threw after him with disapproval. “Better men have tried and failed.”

The line was already contracting, gathering itself, rearing up like a caterpillar about to creep forth. Alexander waited, clutching the wallet tightly. People shuffled forward one by one; he could now make out, in the glare of the lightbulb, the darkening roots of the kiosk woman’s bright hair. The afternoon was just beginning to vibrate with the aftershocks of some heated altercation at the kiosk window when the man in the torn jacket returned.

“Concert tickets,” he declared, and spat richly on the ground. “Can you believe it? All these fools have waited days for concert tickets!”

The announcement dropped into the crowd, and a heavy, openmouthed silence settled on it. Then a chorus of troubled voices rippled through, widening like circles on the water.

“Concert?”

“Did someone say ‘concert’?”

“What kind of concert, did you hear?”

The man choked on a curt laugh. “Folk dancing, boot-slapping, waltzing, violin-trilling, it’s all the same to me, I’m not hanging around for some symphony. It’s freezing, my throat’s dry, I’m off to get myself something to warm up and cheer the soul. How about it, my friend?”

“Me? Sure, whatever,” Alexander said with a nonchalant shrug, and abandoned his place in the line.

They moved through the frozen black-and-white city in silence.

“So, do your tastes run to simple or refined?” the man asked after a few blocks.

Alexander looked at him blankly.

“Vodka or cognac?” the man elaborated.

Alexander thought of the time when he and two classmates had met after school, emptied their pockets of ice cream money, bus money, absentminded neighbors’ money, sent in the tallest of the three, whose upper lip was already shaded with the premonition of a mustache, and afterward sat for some hours on a bench in the park, waiting for the darkness to dim their eager conspiratorial faces. Later they passed the bottle one to another until the world grew bright and angry before turning muddled, which was when the third classmate, the one without a mustache, claimed that this stuff wasn’t real vodka anyway but some horrible cheap concoction corroding their innards, even as he took another, unfairly generous swill, and that it probably wouldn’t burn if they set a match to it. Alexander left to accost frightened passersby for matches, and by the time he came back his two classmates had quarreled terribly and the shorter of the two had a cracked lip, though in the end he turned out to have been right, for a poisonous purplish, or maybe bluish, flame flickered briefly, then went out, and Alexander was spectacularly sick in the bushes.

“I’m a cognac man,” he said.

“Excellent, I know just the thing, then,” said the man merrily.

They strode through the streets, diving into alleys, cutting across passageways, walking in the shadow of a drunken fence for a spell. Alexander prided himself on knowing his neighborhood down to every boil of graffiti on its concrete expanses, but he was beginning to feel disoriented by the time the man stopped to pull open the door of an old apartment building. Pale spills of the January daylight dimly fleshed out an unclean staircase descending into nether regions, its top steps gleaming with the slush of many snow-coated footsteps.

Alexander hesitated on the threshold. He had no idea where he was.

“Care to join me, then?” the man’s voice boomed from the bottom of the stairs. “Don’t worry, you’ll be all right if you stick with me.” And when Alexander caught up, the slippery steps he had run down resounding like deep, rapid beats in his heart, he guessed at a quick brightening of the man’s teeth in the underground murk. “Of course, if you tell anyone about this little place, well—” Smiling still, the man drew a finger across his throat.

With a cold kind of thrill, Alexander realized he did not know whether the man was joking.

They traveled through low, faintly lit corridors at a brisk pace, pipes erupting moistly beside them, pockets of sudden hot air gushing into their faces with the concentrated smells of fried onions and detergent from the floors above. Then the man veered off, threw his shoulder against a wall. Invisible hinges moaned, and unexpectedly they were outside, stepping into a large courtyard closed off by low buildings.

Alexander halted. A derelict church slumped among the snowdrifts in the middle of the yard, gilt still streaking down its domes, shallow lakes of paint splashed on the peeling plaster. Of course, there were dozens like it in the city, tucked away in many forgotten, decaying corners, some with laundry drying between the twisted columns of their porches, others echoing shelters for colonies of crows or packs of homeless dogs; yet what surprised him about this one was the restless, purposeful activity he seemed to detect underneath its sagging arches.

He squinted to see better.

Strikingly stylish fellows were darting in and out of the gaping doorway.

“Hey there, you awake?” the man tossed over his shoulder as he too disappeared inside the ruin. Alexander ran.

When the church’s shadow fell over him, the brisk, frosty air of the midwinter day seemed to alter, growing somehow looser, damper; unsettling smells of urine, dust, and dissolution reached him through the slits of the empty windows above. Again he hesitated, then, with a small shudder, followed the echoes of the man’s assured steps inside. The sun had not yet set, but it was almost night within; the chill deepened here, and the cavernous dimness hung heavy on the crossing beams of many lanterns. Their flares of cold white light called into transient existence the hands, boots, faces of men loitering among a bewildering profusion of objects piled on invisible crates along the walls or revealed in brief flashes from under the sleek lining of the men’s leather jackets. As Alexander hurried across the ancient stones, trying not to wonder about the unpleasant sound of something bone-dry crunching underfoot, he glimpsed a bouquet of silver spoons with intricate handles; a pitcher with a pointy stopper that broke a flashlight’s ray into pieces and threw one jagged bright edge into his eyes; a fanned-out pack of curious-looking pictures, which appeared tantalizingly as so many pale curves in the shifting twilight and at which he wouldn’t have minded taking a closer peek; a magnificent, hefty knife, right next to the cracked icon of an old saint whose stark gaze condensed out of the darkness and pursued him uncomfortably for a few steps before melting back into the darkness; a small army of bottles glinting in a pool of light from a kerosene lamp hanging on a hook overhead—

“Just what we need,” said the man, braking so precipitately that Alexander nearly smashed into him. “You can always count on Stepan to deliver the goods. This one, I think.”

The fellow he addressed bent to pick up a plump bottle with a swelling of wax on its long throat; as his face passed in and out of a strip of light, Alexander saw a youth who looked to be only two or three years older than himself, with a short, angry scar under his left eye.

Straightening, the youth held up the bottle, named the price in a voice at once contemptuous and uneasy. Alexander swallowed.

“Could have just bought a fiver from a State store, sure,” said the man, “but I figured you’d appreciate the best there is. It’s from Over There, you know.” He paused; in the dimness, Alexander could hear him patting his jacket, rustling inside his pockets. “Bad luck, it appears I’ve left my funds at home. Well, next time, perhaps—”

“My treat,” said Alexander, stepping forward into the lamplight. “I’m flush today.”

Producing his wallet with a casual flourish, he leafed through the bills, then cast the smallest of glances at his companion.

“Good of you,” said the man. “Anything else your heart desires? Look around, go on.”

It might have been only the treacherous flickering of the shadows, but he did not appear overly impressed, or indeed all that surprised—and almost immediately Alexander felt his shaky surge of elation grow hollow, flutter into his stomach like the queasiness of indigestion.

“That knife over there,” he said tersely, as if arguing with someone.

The man nodded, already turning to go.

Back in the sickly light of the basement, the man beat the snow off his shoes, then expertly sliced through the bottle’s wax with the knife’s edge, pulled out the sweet-smelling cork, and took a slow swig. Alexander stared at his bobbing Adam’s apple, bristling with rough, graying hairs. Lowering the bottle, the man wiped his lips and looked back at him.

Alexander stretched out his hand.

The man went on looking at him in silence—and all at once, Alexander became aware of the echoing isolation of the stairwell and the man’s burly bulk and the tumorous growth of his mother’s wallet in his pocket. His hand wavered, but he did not withdraw it.

“My turn,” he said harshly.

The hush crept on, for one instant, and two, and three. Then, abruptly baring his large, bright teeth, the man slapped Alexander on the back and passed him the knife and the bottle. “I see you’re worried about your better half missing the money,” he said, “so here’s what you do—spin her a tale that you were mugged, gets you loads of sympathy. Me and the boys had a bit too much fun the other day, but it worked like a charm, always does.”

Alexander’s throat, clenched only moments before, was swept open in a vast gulp of relief, and he spluttered at the shock of the scalding yet somehow smooth taste sliding downward, slicing through his innards as through butter. “My better half, yeah!” Laughing now, he wiped his mouth with his sleeve, just as the man had done, and laughed again, flushed with pleasure.

“Don’t hoard it, you must share with your fellow citizens,” said the man. “By the way, name’s Nikolai, no need to stand on ceremony here… So, where to now, my friend?”

Alexander took another deep gulp before handing over the bottle. His expansive feeling had returned. “Well, Nikolai,” he said, “there is this one place I happen to know—”

Two hours later they were sitting shoulder to shoulder on the steps leading down to the platforms, watching the trains below laboriously peel themselves off the tracks and edge out of the station—rickety, drafty little trains with broken windows, shuttling back and forth between the city and nearby provincial towns, disgorging from their jerking, smoky interiors drab streams of people, baskets, bags, dogs, buckets, cages, dust; and the other, rarer kind, whose softly lit windows stayed blank with drawn curtains the shade of warm cream, whose doors slid open soundlessly to allow in small knots of orderly passengers with bulky suitcases, whose carriages displayed neat little plaques with the names of their long-distance destinations.

Alexander was talking. He might have been talking for quite some time, because his throat ached; he was not sure. He was telling a story. He had taken an overnight train once, on a class excursion. “Back when I was still in school,” he added for clarity. The teacher had brought a whole roasted chicken, and they ate it cold, in the dark compartment; the light had burned out, but they liked it better that way. There was a full moon, and he pushed down the window and the moon ran along the train for hours, for hours, and the wind came gusting into his face, and it smelled of all sorts of strange, wonderful, wild things, like the sea and wet grass and great, mossy woods. One time they were passing this black plain, and he saw three or four pale horses running. He hadn’t known there were still horses out there. He sang too, everyone sang. The conductor came by with a clinking tray, and the glasses were set in these beautiful filigree holders, and they drank tea, snug in a hollow of some small hour after midnight. No one slept. In the morning, when they arrived, the city was much like this one—ugly new buildings on the outskirts, neglected old buildings in the center, fences and kiosks and ruined churches everywhere—but the train, the train had been different.

He had never told this to anyone, and it felt liberating and frightening at once to tell it now. To be honest, he was not certain he was speaking all that clearly, because some of his words, quite a few of his words perhaps, while flowing with perfect ease, even eloquence, in his mind, tended to stumble and fall into pits that kept opening with an alarming regularity in the middle of his sentences. But Nikolai listened, and nodded, and drank, and he drank too, and the trains kept pulling in and out of the station, their windows burning brighter and brighter as the night moved in, until the trains themselves became barely visible and the clatter of wheels seemed to rush ribbons of fiery squares out into the darkness, toward strange, secret destinations, toward unknown cities far, far away.

They sat in companionable silence for a long while. The snow had stopped falling. Alexander felt very warm inside. The crowds thinned, then grew dense, then began to thin again.

“This is good,” he said at last. “Right now I don’t even mind about all that time stuff.”

“What time stuff?”

“You know how, when you’re growing up, your father tells you life is short and you need to set your goals and work hard and all that drivel, or you’ll wake up one day and realize your time has run out or something?… Hey, give me that, my turn… Anyway, I used to believe him when I was, you know, young. As if time were some real thing you can lose or save or spill or break or put on a shelf. You must hoard it grain by grain, I remember he told me once.”

“Like sand in an hourglass,” Nikolai said, nodding thoughtfully. “An hourglass compartment of your soul. So to speak.”

Alexander stared at him.

“Kind of like that, yeah,” he said then, and tipped the bottle into his mouth.

“Your father’s wise.”

“No, he isn’t. He works in this pathetic little place with a bunch of losers. He doesn’t know anything. See, the way I figure it, life isn’t short. It’s long. Too long. I don’t want to save time, see, I want to kill it. I mean, look at all this useless time we have—days and hours and months and years and… and whatever comes after that… but nothing ever changes, no matter what we do with it, do you understand? Not here, anyway… I guess, though, it could be different in other places… It probably is, don’t you think?”

“Well, some things change.” Nikolai wrested the bottle away from him, held it up to the light, shook it roughly. “See, almost gone now.”

He guffawed, or else hiccuped.

Alexander did not take his eyes off the tracks. “I come here a lot,” he said sternly. “Just to watch. But one day I’ll save enough money, and board one of these trains, and go—go far away.” He touched the wallet, still in his pocket, then frowned into the night, which dipped and shimmered in thrilling but disorienting ways before his eyes.

“East or West?” Nikolai asked.

“What?”

“You want to go East or West?”

Alexander giggled at the joke. No one ever went West anymore, except for diplomats and other important persons on special State missions; the borders had been closed for decades. Of course, not that many people went East, either: one needed work permits, residency registration, relocation documents, security clearance… Or at least he thought that one did; he had seen the conductors study passengers’ papers before letting them board.

“Yeah, I used to think about it myself,” Nikolai said. “Hey, watch where you’re stepping, people sitting here!… Goes down smooth, doesn’t it? Mind if I…? The gold mines in the East, the forests, the lakes—they say the water out there is bright blue, so blue you wouldn’t believe it, and the trees so green, I dreamed of seeing it all when I was your age.”

“I’m color-blind,” Alexander announced.

Nikolai opened his mouth, threw his head back, and there was his Adam’s apple again, wobbling up and down while he laughed. Watching it move, Alexander was unexpectedly seized with a vague worry. An enormous clock was hovering over the platform, but the numbers glowed with an unpleasant neon haze, melting into one another, making it impossible to see what time it was. He supposed he was feeling a bit… yes, just a little bit…

“Color-blind? Isn’t that like a family disease or something? Your parents have it too?”

“No, they see colors fine. Mother’s tone-deaf, though, and—” He was going to say something witty, something witty about his family, but instead blurted out, “She wouldn’t want tickets to any concert, so that was all right, leaving the line like that… I mean, she wouldn’t want to go, anyway.”

Nikolai stopped laughing, was quiet for a minute.

“My daughter loves music,” he said then. “Violins, symphonies, pretty melodies… She doesn’t get out much, though. And the symphonies, when they sell the tickets, they’re never for today or tomorrow. It’s stupid to throw money away on things like that. I mean, who knows if next November or December we’re even going to be—well, you know.”

“My parents believe I’ll enroll in the university in the fall,” said Alexander. “After I finish with school. But I won’t. There’s no point. I’ll just—”

A guttural voice, interrupting, rumbled a long, incoherent announcement from a speaker.

“Hey, listen, did you hear that?” Nikolai said, grabbing Alexander’s arm.

“What language was it in?” said Alexander, and chuckled. “Get it? What language—”

“No, listen, that’s the weekly eastern, crosses the whole country. Leaves in two hours. Go. You have the money. Go. You’ll be dipping your toes in the eastern sea come next week.”

“Very funny. You need all kinds of papers and stuff—”

“All you need is your passport and a ticket. You’re sixteen, right, old enough to have a passport? Two hours is plenty of time for you to go home, grab your things, get back here. Go.”

And suddenly Alexander feels a chill of coherence, a draft at the back of his head as if a window has opened there, and everything that has happened to him this day, that has ever happened to him, begins to make sense, the way he knew it would when he was given that wallet in that street, that remote street somewhere—the fence, the kiosk, the elderly men and women waiting, waiting for nothing—but not him, no, not him, because for him, he believes now, he has always believed, yes, for him there will be a splash of cold waves on a remote, desolate, beautiful shore, and strange birds dipping and rising overhead, and whispers of tall silver trees, and horses running, and the sea, the sea, rippling paths of invisible whales and fishing boats and sunrises so majestic he will see their flaming, golden colors at last…

He stumbles to his feet, and his legs buckle, but it’s all right, he can stand all right if he just leans against something, someone, if he just…

“Easy, easy there,” says his best friend, laughing. “I’ll wait for you right here, on the steps… And tell you what, why don’t I buy your ticket for you, just give me the—”

Perfect, perfect idea, he replies, or maybe he only thinks it, but in any case, here’s some, is this enough, well, just a couple more, then, yes, that should do it, I don’t have much left, anyway, just enough for a tram home and back, I’ll see you in just a bit… Some steps to navigate here, must be careful, very slippery, oh and look, a tram, there’s a tram, but they don’t want him to board for some reason, which is fine with him, he’ll just walk, it’s a wonderful frozen night full of snow, full of hush, the roofs sparkle, the trees are still, and maybe he’ll even miss all this a little, but only a little, when he is out there, with the sea, with the birds, with the horses. And as he walks, he imagines the train dissolving on the red sunburst horizon, and a wide, rolling freedom of space, the grasses waving, his chest filled to the point of bursting with bracing air, a rhythmic, pulsating alteration of dark and light, sunrises over new towns, sunsets in dazzling blue lakes, and the women, the women with red hair—a life, a real life!—and then his building runs into him before he expects it. He tiptoes up the stairs very quietly, and unlocks the door with no noise so he can steal into his room, pick up his bag, his documents, a sweater or two—but the whole place is flooded with lights, and his mother is pacing up and down the corridor, her hands at an unnatural angle.

Oh my God, she moans, oh my God—I thought you were—oh my God; and his father says, You have a lot of explaining to do, young man. Things do get a bit squashed together after that, one minute running into another running into another, all stuck together, and the floor keeps moving as if he were on a ship, or at least he thinks that’s what a ship would be like, because he has never been on a ship. And suddenly he knows that he will not see the sunrise over the eastern sea next week, or ever, and because his heart feels like it’s breaking, he grows angry and tells them he has been mugged, and that he left their stupid line because it was only for concert tickets, some stupid symphony, someone said, and not until next December, anyway.

And then there is another stretch of confusion, but they are all in the kitchen now, and the sink’s enamel is comforting, cool against his forehead, and his father is talking with much excitement, though not to him, saying something about some composer. Igor Selinsky, he keeps repeating, this must be the symphony, I’ve been trying for days to find out where they’ll sell the tickets, no one knows, but this must be it, it would be in December, so I heard, the genius forced to leave the country, Igor Selinsky, and his mother, who seems distracted and somehow concerned about the sink, keeps asking, Who is that, who is that? And then he knows that he must tell them the truth, so he straightens up and explains to them that being color-blind is really not as bad as it sounds, it’s not like you see everything in black-and-white, unless, of course, it’s very dark or it’s winter, which, now that he thinks about it, it always is in this goddamned place. His mother tries to stop him, something about the neighbors who might be listening, but he doesn’t care about any neighbors, in fact, it might enlighten them to know, it’s not like you can’t see any colors, you just get a few of them mixed up, the reds and the greens mostly, but on the plus side, and this is kind of funny, all the banners are green in his world, and all those idiotic garlands they put up on their idiotic holidays, and the portraits, and not even a nice green, but a dirty, brown, unappetizing sort of green, the color of vomit, though as he says that, he feels he should have used a different word, because his mother is looking distressed again.

Why don’t you go sleep it off now, she says in a tired voice. He wants to shout at her, but after thinking a minute, or not thinking, exactly, just kind of swaying a bit, he turns and stumbles to the door instead—which is when he realizes, when they all realize, that this horrible, horrible woman is standing there on the kitchen threshold, has been standing there for who knows how long, in that horrible decaying robe of hers, in those painfully bright earrings, bursting, bursting with explosions of unbearable light into his eyes. She opens her thin, white lips, but she can’t possibly be saying anything, he thinks, she has not spoken to anyone for years, she is his grandmother, she is insane, and then indeed she is speaking, and everyone gasps, and her words are drowned, so she opens her lips again, and repeats it.

And what she says is, “I would very much like to go to this concert, please.”

5

THE NEXT MORNING, Sergei rose well before sunrise and groped for his clothes without switching on the lamp. His socks proved elusive, but at last he cornered two—one under the bed, the other still balled up inside his shoe. His wife did not wake up. He dressed, tiptoed outside, and strode through the darkness torn here and there by the stab of misty streetlight. As he drew closer, he found himself walking faster and faster, until he was running, winter surging in and out of his lungs in chilly fits, the excitement billowing inside him like a sail full of wind. When his ears started to burn, he realized he had forgotten his hat, but he did not slow down.

The night was just beginning to be diluted by a thin blue haze when he arrived at the kiosk. He approached panting, feeling somehow years younger after his wild, bare-headed sprint through the empty predawn streets. A few lone figures were already shuffling about, hanging streamers of steamy breaths in the frozen air; a piece of cardboard was propped in the shuttered window. Will reopen upon restocking, read the handwritten notice, and underneath, in smaller, printed letters: REGULAR WINTER HOURS 10 TO 5.

“It will be today for sure, though, right?” he said, looking up with a smile. Shadows shifted between scarves and hats where faces should have been; no one replied. His smile faded.

“So, who’s last here?” he asked after a moment, raising his collar.

He waited until early afternoon, but the window remained blind. All the same, the elated certainty that had gripped him the night before—a certainty not unlike a sense of fate, reaffirmed by the immensity of the coincidence that placed the concert with such neatness within his reach, constructing the tickets kiosk so obligingly in his own corner of the city—the certainty, then, that this was the very place he had sought, did not waver in the slightest, though, oddly, no one in the growing line appeared to have heard about the symphony. Some concert tickets had, indeed, been sold the day before, “only it wasn’t any what-do-you-call-it,” he was told by an elderly man whose voice kept getting lost amidst layers of wool, “it was a visiting song-and-dance group. A good one, I’m hoping they haven’t run out. Who’s this Selyodsky, anyway?”

Shortly before three o’clock, Sergei left for work. For some blocks he kept glancing over his shoulder, tensing his legs for a dash back, until the kiosk vanished from sight behind the drifting snow. After the clear white stretches of a day so vast with possibility, the dim cavern of the People’s Theater, its walls the color of dried blood, its stage decorations a claustrophobic cardboard forest of smokestacks and assembly plants, struck him as unusually oppressive. He spat his thawing breaths into the tuba with increasing impatience, attempting to catch Sviatoslav’s eye through the monotonous seesawing of the trombones. During the intermission, when most of the orchestra crowded smoking and chatting around the spittoon in the stairwell, he pulled his friend aside.

“Listen,” he said in an urgent undertone, “I have some amazing news.”

“I’ve got some for you too,” the drummer whispered. “I overheard—”

“Later, later!… It’s about Selinsky, you know, the concert rumors I told you about, well, I think they’re actually selling the tickets just around—”

Sviatoslav pushed his walruslike mustache into Sergei’s face. “Forget Selinsky, you have troubles enough. I overheard our director on the phone, talking about you, making excuses. He sounded almost frightened. Something about the embassy. What the hell happened?”

A heartbeat of silence welled between them.

“No idea,” Sergei said in a flattened voice.

“Come on, you can tell me.”

He saw again the marble lavatory, the dripping water, the gray eye winking in the lustrous mirrors… Sharp little hammers beat at his temples. “It’s nothing.”

“Fine,” Sviatoslav said dryly, releasing him. “By the way, your socks don’t match.”

Through the rest of the performance, he kept searching other faces for secret signs of his disfavor, repeatedly missing his cues, recalling himself only upon discovering the monumental elbow of a fellow tuba player embedded painfully in his side. Well, let the bastards fire me, this concert changes everything, he thought as snowdrifts settled on his shoulders while he waited at the kiosk the next day. So I’ll become a tram conductor, a truck driver, I’ll even sweep the streets—but at least I won’t have to spend evening after evening playing their thumping songs, wasting my life away in that hellhole. And maybe, maybe, as I sweep the streets through the year, the melodies I once dreamed of composing will come to me at last—and notes will alight on my staffs like scores of migrant birds returned home. At the end of the year I will gather the pages, I will go to the concert, I will at last see the man I should have seen on that day thirty-seven years ago. In the stunned hush that will descend after he lowers his baton, just before the world explodes with applause, I will make my way to the stage, and our eyes will meet briefly, and—and—and here the vision blurred a little, for Sergei could not remember Selinsky’s features, which he must have glimpsed as a boy in those pre-revolutionary photographs where tuxedoed men in unnaturally exalted poses swam in the oily glow of hazy backgrounds; but he quickly filled the blank with a genius’s expansive forehead, an aristocratic thin nose, an attentive gray gaze—and I will toss him a bouquet wrapped in my secret score, my address concealed in a corner. That night, well after midnight, there will be a knock on my door. He will be alone. Grasping my hand in his own, he will say, “This dazzling masterpiece you showed me—this divine music—could it be that here, in this place, in this time, there still live such giants”—and he will ask me—and I will reply—and then—and afterward—

And afterward, that evening, in fact, standing mute and diminished amidst the expanses of the director’s office, he tried to hold his future conversation with Selinsky intact in his mind, brilliant and hard like a diamond, turning it to this or that facet, this or that phrase, to keep his dread at bay; but as the heavy silence continued, Selinsky’s noble features quivered, reverted to the sepia fog of a forgotten snapshot, then dissipated altogether. He shifted from foot to foot, bumped against his tuba, which lay curled up on the floor like a beaten dog, stared at the artificial plants on the windowsill, the monstrous ashtray shaped like a dying swan, the director’s fat neck piled in loose folds on the maroon silk of his collar.

The director would not look at him. The director was drumming his sausagelike fingers against a nondescript folder open on the desk before him.

“Please, Ivan Anatolievich,” he said hoarsely. “Please.”

He was conscious of steps thumping in the stairwell just outside the door; the last actors were leaving the theater, going home to their safe, uneventful lives.

The director said nothing.

“Please. I have a son, a wife, a mother-in-law to support. I won’t disappoint you again. I… Ivan Anatolievich, I’ll be most grateful. On Friday.”

Friday was the next payday. The unspoken knowledge hovered in the air for a tense minute. Then the director’s body heaved with an immense sigh.

“How long have you worked here, Sergei?”

“Twenty-four years.”

“Twenty-four years, is that right? Astonishing how time flies… I remember when you first came, such a dashing fellow, practically a boy, bushes of curly hair, milk on your lips… Well, tell you what. I’m willing to close my eyes to this unpleasant incident. Of course, some disciplinary action seems called for, especially given your, shall we say, questionable origins.” His fat finger slithered along the folder’s spine. “You’ll be transferred to matinees, with a corresponding decrease in pay. Morning rehearsals are at ten. You’ll be teaching an afternoon workshop as well, three to five. That’s on a strictly volunteer basis, you understand—one must do one’s best to give back to the community. In truth, though, I’m doing you a favor: you’ll be home in time for supper, restored, so to speak, to the bosom of your loving family, eh?”

His relief leaked away with an almost audible hiss.

“But,” he said in a wooden voice, “but that means I’ll have to be here from ten till five. That’s… I’m afraid it’s not very… I mean, there is somewhere else… that is, I would prefer…”

He wanted to shout at the odious man before him, to bang his fists against the desk, to grab his dossier and rip it in half. Instead, his words sputtered and fizzled out; he felt his limbs fill with lead, and his throat with dead, dusty insects. He stood without moving, without speaking, staring with pure, fierce hatred at the marble swan expiring on the obese man’s desk.

“I confess I expected a little more enthusiasm,” said Ivan Anatolievich frostily. “You start your new schedule on Thursday. And remember, I’ll be watching you.”

Sergei backed out of the office.

The kiosk’s hours were ten to five.

Unless the tickets went on sale in the next three days, it was unlikely he would go to the concert.

That night he barely slept, and at dawn the next morning he was the first to arrive in the quiet street; but the kiosk remained closed, as before. Neither did it open on Tuesday, though by then, at least, he had the satisfaction of being publicly confirmed in his belief: the line was swelling with an excited buzz of the Selinsky symphony. On Wednesday, the temperature dropped. People stomped their boots, puffed on their gloves; many left early, mumbling that no concert was worth freezing to death for. Sergei waited stubbornly, though he had lost all feeling in the toes of his left foot and though his breath, escaping in steaming bursts, had caused a whole beard of miniature icicles to grow on his scarf; but in mid-afternoon he too was forced to give up his place at the head of the line—as it was, he risked being late for work.

He was already at the next intersection when a small beat-up van labored past him. His heart quickening, he turned, followed it with his eyes. The van pulled up to the curb by the kiosk.

He swallowed an incoherent, thwarted gasp, and, just as the dented door of the van began to jerk open, dashed back, and instantly tripped over his shoelaces and started to fall, but somehow righted himself and, vaulting forward, slipped on the ice and fell again, and this time kept falling, skidding, sliding in a flurry of snow, closing his eyes against the dazzling, wet confusion, fully sprawled on his back now, coming at last to a blind, whirling stop.

For a moment he did not move. Then, deciding that nothing was broken, he opened his eyes, and was just attempting to scramble up when he saw the sky.

The sky was pale and empty and vast, and it appeared to float ever higher in transparent layers gradually bleached of all blue tints and shadows, until, at some vertiginous, unimaginable height, it seemed to him bled of all color, of all confusion, intense and pure like the essence of one sustained, crystal note.

He lay still and looked at it.

The van door slammed shut, and two pairs of legs crossed his upended horizon at odd angles. The first pair, ending with black shoes, possibly imported, stepped over him; the second, clumsy in felt boots, circled around, encumbered by a ladder. Sergei looked at the sky. From somewhere above drifted a scraping of wood against metal, a peremptory voice issuing commands, “Move to the left!” “Make sure it’s not crooked!” and, after a minute, the blows of a hammer. Winter muffled each harsh burst in cold, snowy pockets before the sounds could quite take their jagged, crowlike flight skyward; the sky did not reverberate, for it was immensely distant—and filled to the brim with its own clear, silent, infinite music. When the banging stopped, the two pairs of legs swerved back around him, the door moaned in opening and barked in closing, the motor sneezed and coughed and spat going past. Then all was quiet.

A couple of people from the line helped him up. There was now a large sign nailed above the kiosk. It announced, in bleached blue letters: CONCERT TICKETS.

“Too faded to have been freshly painted,” a man in a fedora noted with disapproval. “They must have taken it from some old kiosk no longer in operation.”

Sergei gazed at it blankly, then, recalling the time, hurried to the theater. He arrived nearly half an hour late, his coat caked with sleet and missing two buttons. Ivan Anatolievich, whom he encountered in a corridor on the way in, gave him a dirty look.

“Ten o’clock sharp tomorrow!” he boomed as Sergei was squeezing past. “And oh, I’ll be in on Friday if you feel the urge to drop by.”

The brittle January days, all sunshine and chunks of ice, soon darkened and shrank, passing into February in a sinking, gray procession. Every evening, the instant he was allowed to leave, Sergei flung his coat over his back and, too rushed to thread his arms through the sleeves, ran across the city, his coat leaping after him. The kiosk was always boarded up by the time he arrived, the purple streetlamp illuminating the deserted street. Wheezing, he would hobble up to the window, circle the kiosk once or twice, try to peer inside in an attempt to discern whether any tickets had been sold that day. He would gauge the length of the day’s line by looking at the sidewalk: at some distance, the pavement would be hard and white with ice, then, as he got closer, would turn black and naked, its snow having melted in the shuffling of dozens of feet. The ground bristled with a stubble of cigarette butts; over the next week or two, he watched them steadily encroach upon the surrounding snowdrifts.

By the time the butts were dotting the sidewalk all the way down the block and around the corner, he had given up hope of ever buying the ticket, and was taking a direct route home. One evening, as he was trudging along, giving cautious berth to dog feces, feeling an unaccustomed ache in his back, he glimpsed a portly woman moving with slow, laden steps in the snow-whirled darkness ahead, a bulging bag in each hand.

Briefly he hesitated, then caught up. “Here,” he said, “let me.”

“Oh.” A small laugh escaped her. “Thank you, Serezha. Lots of homework today.”

For some time they walked in silence. Damp snow slapped at his eyes, flew into his mouth. “It must be tedious for you,” he said at last. “Waiting in that line day after day.”

“It’s not too bad. I come in the afternoons, as soon as my classes are done. I’m worried, of course, that they’ll deliver the tickets in the morning, but starting in March, two of my mornings will open up. Of course, it will be before then for sure—who’s ever heard of a line lasting two months, you know—but just in case. Emilia Khristianovna is in line also, we’ve been talking about working something out between us, covering for each other—”

“Sure, that sounds reasonable,” he said, not listening. “Look, Anya, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something for a while, but I haven’t had a chance at home—”

She smiled uncertainly. “We eat supper together every night.”

“Yes, well,” he mumbled. “It just keeps slipping my mind, I guess. Anyway, you know I was hoping to get a ticket myself, to go to the concert, that is, but with my new schedule, I can never get to the kiosk on time, and, well”—she was descending a short flight of steps now; he followed—“I was thinking, since you’re in line anyway, you might be able to, you know—”

She reached the door at the bottom of the stairs, turned toward him. Shadows gathered here, the streetlamp above leaking in blotchy dribbles; he could see only her hands, pressed against her rough gray coat as if in prayer, and, in the twilight of her face, her eyebrows, glistening with tiny droplets of melting snow, lifting like the wings of a nervous bird.

“But Serezha,” she said quietly, “they’ll sell only one ticket per person, you know that. I promised mine to Mama.”

“Of course,” he said, “but it’s obvious that she—”

“I’m sorry, I must buy some bread… See you at home?”

“I’ll come with you,” he offered quickly. “Anyway, it’s obvious that she doesn’t—”

She pushed the door open. It was suffocating inside; in the bakery’s hot yellow light, a throng of middle-aged women milled about, prodding loaves with pairs of bright tongs, calling to one another. He hurried after her, sweeping away cobwebs of conversations, blinded by the lamps, disoriented by the heat, by the hubbub, still talking rapidly into her neck, “Look, we both know your mother doesn’t really need this ticket, she doesn’t—”

“Black or white?” she asked, glancing back at him.

“What?… Oh, I don’t care, whichever kind you like… She doesn’t intend to go, she never even leaves the house, she—”

She had already moved away, not having heard, repeating, “Ah, it smells so good in here.”

He tried to stay close but got tangled in a gaggle of noisy schoolgirls rushing toward the cashier; when he caught up at last, she was greeting an acquaintance. All at once he felt frantic, for it had to be now; the walls in their apartment were paper-thin, and with her mother always hovering a breath away, he would never dare to ask her again.

“Anya,” he said, placing his hand on her sleeve. “Do you think, maybe, this ticket—”

The acquaintance had meandered off.

His wife stood looking at him now, pressing the white loaf tightly to her chest, her fingers crushing its crust, her face oddly still—and he knew that she had heard him all along.

“Serezha,” she said. Her voice was pleading. “I can’t. Mama asked me.”

And for one moment, suspended in this warm, well-lit, close place, amidst the bustle of women, amidst the buns of bread, amidst all the hot, moist, rich smells of domesticity from which he felt eternally cut off, he wondered, in a kind of desperation, what he could possibly say to make her understand the immensity of his longing. He could tell her, perhaps, about that piece he had played as a child thirty-seven years ago—or else his trouble at work—or how, even though he had so wastefully squandered his best decades, he saw in Selinsky’s music his chance to start living at last, to become something more than he was, to try summoning into existence the notes he could almost imagine flowing from the tips of his fingers—

“Oh, don’t be upset,” she said gently. “There will be other nice concerts.”

He stared at her; then, without speaking, turned and walked out into the frozen darkness. Minutes later she came running behind him, gathering up the hems of her coat. She kept saying things, apologizing, promising something. He was silent on the way home, silent in the elevator, silent in the kitchen. “Please, don’t worry about it,” he said as he switched off the light on his nightstand. “Sleep well.”

He said little else in the coming days, practicing away his evenings, flooding the hush of their bedroom with his instrument’s hoarse respirations. One afternoon in mid-February, his two sole workshop students quarreled, and the older one smashed his tuba over the younger one’s head. The boys were sent home, and, finding himself with some daylight hours to spare, he came to the familiar street, took his place at the end of the line, and, his eyes closed, stood still for a while, listening to the voices that trudged, muffled and weary, through the day’s early shadows.

“Pardon me, if I may disturb you for a moment, what might they be selling here?”

“Concert tickets.”

“And would you be so obliging as to tell me what kind of concert, please?”

“The do-re-mi kind.”

“Indeed, but—”

“Listen, intelligentsia, do you want me to break your glasses for you? What are you bothering me for? Beat it.”

“For God’s sake, can’t you just answer the poor man, don’t you see how old he is?”

“Fine, then, it’s the Northern Nightingales. Happy now?”

“I’m sorry, I’m not quite familiar with—”

“See what I mean? He doesn’t know the Nightingales! There’s education for you.”

“Don’t mind him, grandpa, maybe his wife ran off with the plumber. It’s a group from the North. They wear beautiful costumes and sing about the friendship of the peoples and the happy tomorrow. It’s very soulful.”

“Oh, I see, thank you for your kindness, I suppose I’d better be—”

“Well, go on, woman, tell him about the symphony too, that will be more up his alley!”

“Pardon, did you say ‘symphony’?”

“Yeah, I forgot, there’s some symphony, but it won’t be until next New Year’s Eve, they haven’t sold any tickets for it yet. It’s some fancy composer, Vselensky, I think—”

“The name’s Solyonsky, you illiterate!”

“Not Solyonsky, Selyodsky!”

“Terribly sorry to interrupt, but… Not Selinsky, certainly? Not Igor Selinsky?”

“That’s just what I’m saying, or are you deaf? Selinsky, Selyodsky, whatever—”

“Wait a minute, Selinsky, Selinsky, I remember something… That’s right, wasn’t he the turncoat who traded his country for a life of ease Over There? I’ll tell you what I think, no decent person would want to watch some dusty aristocrat in a bow tie prance about with a baton!”

“And I’ll tell you what I think, such traitors to our Motherland should be shot. Just like that, with no trial. Bam, and that’s the end of it. What say you, Professor?”

“What, old man, swallowed your tongue? The fellow’s talking to you!”

“Oh, just leave him alone, all of you! Poor thing, his hands are shaking… Stop shouting now, he’s trying to say something. Don’t mind them, grandpa, speak up, speak up!”

“Thank you for your kindness. The tickets to the Selinsky symphony, would you happen to know when they might be on sale?”

“The kiosk woman says any day now. Oh, and it’s only three hundred seats, so they’ll go fast.”

“Oh dear, in that case… Excuse me, if I may trouble you, are you last in line?”

“Yes,” Sergei said, opening his eyes, “but you can take my place, I’m leaving now.”

The darkness under his eyelids had become, almost without his noticing, the darkness outside; evening had fallen. A street away, men in enormous gloves tottered on ladders affixing slogans to dim streetlamps in preparation for Army Day. Blindly he trudged in and out of the strips of ailing light, vowing to waste no more time on this hopeless, heart-wrenching wait, not noticing his wife, who trailed a block behind him all the way home.

6

MY PARENTS TOOK ME there when I was seven, to study ballet with the most celebrated teacher of the day. It was winter when we arrived in the city. Winter there was not like winter here—not dark but translucent. Maybe it’s still like that, maybe not. Probably not. This century has trodden heavy, and nothing is the same, not even the seasons. But back then, the sky was like milky glass, the roofs like wet bark, the trees like cobwebs in the air. My father rented an apartment in an old, stately building on one of the boulevards. I went to my classes in the morning, and in the early afternoon I returned to our place. For hours I sat on the windowsill, watching lamplighters light the gas lamps, watching chimney sweeps tiptoe on invisible ropes across the evening, listening to the bells as they floated over the river.

One February day my mother came home accompanied by two small liveried men carrying an enormous gray roll on their shoulders. They set the rug down on the living room floor and began to unroll it. The inside was soft and crimson, abundant with flowers, and I got down on my knees to see it better. And it was then that I noticed the first one.

This is how I always imagine telling the story. I imagine someone sitting before me, leaning forward, listening eagerly, and at this point he always asks: The first what? But there is no one to hear my stories. So now, I close my door, cover my lamp with an old green shawl—I like the soft light, the shifting sea-green shadows—and wait until everyone in the house is asleep. Then I talk to myself.

So it was then that I noticed the first bead. There was a bead, a vivid blue speck of light, wedged in one of the cracks in the hardwood floor. When I saw it, I felt the same kind of stillness I used to feel playing a game I had invented as a very young child. I would dig in the snow, searching for what I called a “secret,” which I myself would have buried under a shard of glass some days before—a candy wrapper, a shred of silk cloth, any other small treasure I had mined from my winters in the countryside. Sitting on the floor as the two men with fluttering hands unrolled the carpet, I was brushed by the same kind of happiness I had felt when my stiff fingers would scratch away a hard layer of snow to reveal the bright burst of miraculous color.

One bead was all it took before I saw another one, and another, and another—before I realized that all the cracks in the living room floor were filled with beads.

They put the carpet down, but every afternoon when I returned home, I would lie on the floor, still in my damp dancing clothes, peel a corner of the carpet away, and labor at the cracks with the tip of a pin. After a while, my eyes would grow tired, and I would begin to imagine the whole world as one dark, flat, unclean expanse through which flowed threadlike lines of melted glass, of molten gold. Whenever I caught one bead stream with the sharp prick of the pin and liberated it from its confinement, its droplets would turn into jeweled grains and leap all over the floors. There were hundreds of them—cones striped red and white like circus hats, glowing glass balls, tiny cubes with silver splotches on their sides. In the end, all of them fit into a small caviar jar. I kept it for a long time. It was lost in the revolution.

Now, if I had a listener, he would ask, of course, where the beads came from. He would not know me well enough to distrust my answers. I would be glad to tell him. The beads were the last, forgotten fragments of a special, enchanted world, like petrified coral and shells left embedded in rocks centuries after the sea has retreated from its black depths to a shoreline with beach umbrellas and plastic buckets. I used to imagine it, this world. It had once been filled with joyful, mischievous creatures who flew on the backs of dragonflies, sewed curly clouds onto the skies, pretended to be mossy weathervanes on the spires of ancient castles, tossed sunbeams at one another. When the sunbeams fell to the floor, they crystallized into tiny pieces of glass.

Pardon me? Oh, is it really that important? Fine, then, they were probably spilled by a couple of children whose parents had rented the apartment before us. They might have left the city in a hurry—perhaps there’d been a violent upheaval in their country. Or maybe a weak-eyed seamstress had spent years in a cozy armchair by the window, doing handiwork for sale. Or else—or else a girl working on an embroidered wallet for her beloved had received sudden news of his death, and let it all fall from her hands.

So now you wish you hadn’t asked.

The real explanations are usually the simplest, and often the saddest.

7

ON A DREARY DAY toward the end of February, when tempers had worn raw, a particularly ugly brawl broke out in the line, complete with the usual threats to polish someone’s glasses clean and dust off someone else’s hat with a brick. People were scrambling to get out of the way of the impending fracas when a short man with a jet-black beard was seen stepping forth and addressing the warring factions. Inevitably, voices rose in doubt—“Who the hell is he?” “One of those stuck-up university folks, I bet.” “Nah, he looks like a pirate.” “All the same, why should we listen to him?”—but eventually the line agreed to hear him out. The man, it transpired, had a radical reorganization to propose, beginning with the separation of those waiting for the Northern Nightingales tickets from those hoping to attend the symphony, and ending with numbers, from 1 to 300, being assigned to everyone in the symphony camp. This line, he said, was unprecedented in its nature; they needed to devise a few basic rules, make a list, check off the names; life would become immeasurably more civilized for all involved.

He talked rather at length. Some were able to understand him.

There followed the times of chaos, the times of confusion, the times of arguments. For days snow fell without cease, in big flakes, which flared up, theatrical, brilliant, as they passed under the streetlamp. The arguments died down slowly. On the fourth day, when the snow had dwindled away at long last, a middle-aged woman with a tired face, dressed in an ill-fitting coat and wet low-heeled shoes, stood clutching a square bit of paper in her chilled, reddened fingers. Her number was 137. In front of her was a woman in her thirties, with a bright mouth and a fur hat low on her forehead, and behind, a small boy with fragments of a cloudy sky for eyes.

The woman with the tired face turned from the one to the other.

“I’ve seen you both many times, but I don’t know your names,” she said. “I’m Anna.”