The Concert Ticket

1

THE DAYS WERE LENGTHENING, turning pale and deep. Under skies the shade of northern porcelain, the snow had begun to melt, and the glittering, leaking, rushing unrest of waters filled the city with a noise like that of a constant twittering of birds. Their home, though, lay quiet and still, as if under a snowdrift. His mother spent her afternoons waiting in line, and his father moved through the rooms in a sulking, taciturn mood, slamming doors and spitefully banging his tuba against corners. Alexander himself felt depressed and, to make matters worse, was having trouble sleeping: since the beginning of March, their building appeared to have sprung numerous leaks, through which the outside world seeped in unsettlingly—little drafts of a springtime hum and bright, breezy smells, which wafted through the lifeless air of their apartment, keeping him awake.

In the middle of the month, he had a particularly restless night. Some neighbors were talking, and snippets of strange conversations kept invading his dreams. “Pardon me?” someone was saying somewhere, quietly but distinctly. “No, I’m afraid that was not exactly true, the jar wasn’t lost in the revolution. Many things were, some tangible, some rather less so—but not the beads. It just makes the story more dramatic, don’t you find?” There was a pause, and he had just begun to fall asleep when the same old voice embarked on a long, pointless story about two men in workmen’s overalls carrying a gigantic crystal chandelier through crooked medieval streets. The chandelier was all trussed up like a felled beast on a stick, and the crystals clicked softly, and wisps of the light watercolor skies became entangled like silk petals amidst the pieces of radiant glass, and some little girl stopped openmouthed and stared, then followed after them as if charmed, and it went on and on, and he thought, half awake, The walls in this damn building are absurdly thin, is this coming from above or below, and who spouts such inane nonsense at three in the morning anyway; and he even considered banging on the floor or the ceiling, though he was not sure which—and though a part of him rather wanted to hear how the tale ended—when suddenly there was silence.

He was starting to drift off once more, or had perhaps drifted off already, when the voice—his grandmother’s voice, he knew all at once—said coyly, “Oh, so you’ve noticed at last. Yes, I did stop wearing them. Why? Because they are diamonds, and diamonds, my dear, are worn only in winter. Spring has come.”

Awaking with a start, he realized that his grandmother’s terrible earrings, which she never took off, had somehow slipped into his dream brewed from the neighbors’ idiotic conversation. He lay in bed for some time after that, populating the mounds and hollows of his ceiling with shadowy profiles and downy limbs, then, giving up, rose. His parents’ door was cracked open; the dark silence inside seemed denser than in the hallway. He slipped past. On the kitchen threshold, he shut his eyes against the unexpected glare.

“Mother?” he said, moving his head blindly from side to side.

“I can’t sleep,” her voice replied. “I keep hearing things—a radio somewhere, I guess—”

Unclenching his eyelids, he watched her emerge from the aching nothingness into a white haze, then, shedding the halo, slowly acquire untidy hair flattened by hours of insomniac tossing, a thick flannel gown the color of boiled milk, a piece of paper held in her fingers swollen from a recent wash. “What’s that you’re reading?” he asked, squinting.

They had barely spoken since the night he had lost the money; yet now, with his temples humming from the exhaustion of dammed dreams begging to be let out, he felt startled, or else released, into talking.

“It’s nothing, just a recipe,” she said. She sounded wistful. “For a date tart. It’s been making the rounds in the… that is, your physics teacher copied it for me.”

He bent over her shoulder, read aloud: “Cream the butter and sugar until light, next stir in the ground almonds and the orange flower water—”

“Better than poetry, no?” She folded the page carefully, smoothed its creases. “Some poetry, anyway. Of course, I’ll never be able to make it, dates are impossible to find. There is this woman who keeps saying she can get anything, she eats dates every week, so she says, but I don’t suppose it’s true. She’s always saying things.”

“A woman. What woman?”

“Oh, just someone I’ve met in the line. You might have seen her yourself the time you—”

She stopped.

He shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot, suddenly aware of the cold linoleum beneath his bare toes. The hour floated around them, weightless and unreal; the train-station clock on the wall had slid into a deep crevice of shadows, and the whole kitchen had ceased to exist beyond their circle of undiluted, naked lamplight, beyond the two of them blinking owlishly at each other. And as the silence swelled, then brimmed over with a quiet click of the invisible clock’s hand leaping from one notch to the next, Anna looked at her sixteen-year-old son standing before her in his touchingly childish pajamas, with a border of little sailboats along the cuffs too high on his wrists, and felt, for the first time since that night, that she had forgiven him, and was seized with an urge to tell him about the people in the line, about all the small, trivial encounters, conversations, nudges that made up her unrecorded, unshared days. That insufferable woman at 136, for instance, never tired of repeating that she was there only as a favor to her husband, who was a man of importance and intended to use the ticket to clench some deal with a highly cultured colleague. Anna did not like her. The boy at 138, now—him she liked very much. She had learned that he came from a family of musicians and was hoping to get the ticket for his grandfather, who would turn seventy-eight in December; she kept trying to talk to him, but he was always looking away, gnawing on his fingernails. Not that she had no one to talk to, of course: she often chatted with Emilia Khristianovna; they now worked around their schedules, spotting each other on alternate mornings. Emilia Khristianovna, it turned out, had a son only a couple of years older than Alexander, she wanted to tell him—did you know that, did you meet him in school perhaps? She’s knitting a scarf for her boy, fretting that the colors don’t go well together; orange and pink is all the wool she has left—

“My feet are frozen,” Alexander mumbled. “I better get back to bed.”

“Oh,” Anna said. “Of course. Have a good night.”

In the doorway he turned.

“Why do you do it?” he asked.

“Do what?”

“Stand in that line for hours.”

“Because your grandmother asked me to,” she replied wearily.

“But why does she want to go to some random concert? She never goes anywhere. Do you even know? Has she spoken to you at all since—I mean, has she even thanked you?”

She considered him in stony silence. He waited on the threshold for another minute, and still she said nothing. He nodded, and walked away, and, back in bed, fell into sleep as into still, dark water. In the morning, when he tried to disentangle sleep from wakefulness, the chandelier jolted by the two men striding through ancient streets hung vivid and bright in his mind, and the predawn conversation with his mother swayed like a shadowy, vaguely shameful, half-forgotten dream.

The following Monday, reopening after the midday break, the kiosk seller shook her dyed curls and announced that a batch of tickets was expected shortly.

“Finally!” said the wife of the important man, and tossed a bag at Anna. “Here, catch.”

Anna made a grab for it, missed, bent to retrieve it from the ground, from someone’s watery footprint. The smell reached her before she even saw what was inside: the dark, rich smell of southern earth, of unfamiliar trees with glossy leaves, of the measured roll of some distant sea. She exhaled in astonishment. “For me?” she whispered. “All this? Liubov Dmitriyevna, but that’s so… so unexpected. How can I—that is, how much do I—”

“Oh, I’m not taking any of your money.” The woman’s voice was muffled, her chin tucked under as she struggled to free an earring from the peacock swirls of a scarf. “Just think of it as a little charity. Teachers aren’t raking it in these days, I’m sure.”

Anna slowly set the bag on the ground and, straightening, looked at the woman.

“Now, me, I don’t have to worry, my husband gets me everything my little heart desires. See this hat? His Women’s Day present. The scarf too, pure silk, here, feel it… Fine, suit yourself… Wait, you’ve forgotten the dates!… Where are you—just where do you think you’re—”

No longer listening, Anna was walking away. She walked past middle-aged women copying the date tart recipe, past young women bending over the tired fashion magazine that had been traveling down the line these last few days, past boys scraping the remnants of the winter into sickly snowmen. She walked not noticing the little waterfalls erupting over her head, the wounding of shrunken snowdrifts by collapsed icicles, the world splashing about, wet and shining. Their building, when she reached at last its dim, concrete hollows, was filled with infants’ cries echoing in the stairwells and an assortment of midday smells, mostly shoe polish and soapsuds. When she stepped out of the elevator, her landing trembled with laboring sighs of the tuba; it was, she recalled, her husband’s afternoon off. She could feel the unpleasantly soft vibrations in the soles of her feet as she wrestled for a long minute with the lock before discovering she had the wrong key.

Once inside, she let her coat sink to the foyer floor, then moved down the hallway, entered her mother’s room without knocking. On the rare occasions when she came in here, to bring a cup of tea or quickly dust the shelves, empty save for a few thin, molting volumes, she was always visited by an uncomfortable feeling that she had accidentally stepped over the threshold into another house, another time, where everything, even the dust, had its precise place that she had no right to disturb. She stopped on the threshold now. In the solitary, narrow window, daylight floundered weakly, and died in the faded curtains the color of old tea roses; the small, casketlike space lay in the shadows of its own private, rose-tinted, faintly perfumed dusk. Her mother sat perched on the edge of her only chair, prim and straight-backed, an old tasseled lampshade billowing with soft brown light at the table before her, a fan of postcards spread in her lavender lap. When she looked up, her small, birdlike eyes, dark as velvet, held no reflections.

“Mama,” Anna said. “Mama, why do you need this ticket?”

The old woman made a tiny startled movement, and the postcards fell to the floor. She seemed about to speak, but did not. Anna waited; then, after a lapse of silence, turned and left, shutting the door behind her, careful to step over a sepia boulevard stained with horse-drawn carriages, which had fluttered out into the corridor.

The tuba sighs still ebbed and rose in the narrow veins of the apartment. She went into her son’s empty room, sat on his unmade bed, and stared unseeingly at the naked walls before her, indifferent to the sour effluvia of unwashed socks and furtive smoke and adolescence, her hands lifeless on her knees. She thought of the time, seemingly not that long ago, when she had expected something thrilling from her days in the line—a surprise, a present for herself, an escape from stifling routine—the time when she had felt richer, fuller, nestled deep within her vast anticipation as within a warm, secret cave. Now her life was laid bare once again, the anticipation gone, wrung dry by the tedium of the everyday bureaucracy of lists and shifts; and the waiting itself was for someone else now—not for her, never for her. She felt a sharp pang of loss, of impoverishment, which made her want to cry; but her eyes were dry when, some minutes later, her husband nudged the door open and peeked inside, muttering, “I thought I heard… What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, really,” she said, not lifting her eyes from her hands. “Only that I waste my life standing before that pointless kiosk, not to mention being insulted by some really tactless, uncivilized people, and no one will even tell me why—and you, you… you never… while other women’s husbands… you and I don’t even… you—”

Her voice, though not loud, had wound up and up, tight, tighter yet, until she stopped abruptly, as if the winding mechanism had sprained a spring.

“What?” he said stiffly. “You and I don’t even what?”

She studied her hands. Her nails were always breaking.

“Is this about Women’s Day again?” he said. “Look, I’ve told you already, I meant to get some flowers, but I just… The matinee schedule is really… All the kiosks were closed by the time… Just what do you want me to do?”

“We’ll lose our place,” she said distantly, “unless someone is there this afternoon. They do a check at the end of the day, just before five.”

“Our place?” he said. “You don’t mean—”

She met his eyes at last.

“I made her a promise,” she said, “but I’m very, very tired.”

“You can’t possibly expect me… Do you not realize how much—”

“Sergei,” she said, “I don’t need any flowers from you. But after all this time, I think I deserve something.”

He forced himself to continue looking at her—at her face widened by age, at the thickened folds of her eyelids, at the row of beetle-black buttons crawling down her sagging beige cardigan, at the stolid shape of her legs in the brown woolen hose she wore every winter, at her flat-heeled, square-nosed shoes, which she always took off upon entering their home, lining them meticulously alongside his own pair by the doormat, but which now rested, slightly apart, on their son’s bare floor in two darkening pools of melted mud…

He looked away.

“Fine,” he said. His voice scratched itself fighting to get out between his teeth.

“Our number is one hundred thirty-seven,” she called out after him. “There are some rules, I must explain, and you’ll need this, here—”

“Fine,” he said from the hallway, already punching his arms into his coat. “Fine, fine!”

He narrowly avoided crashing into his son, who had emerged, out of breath, from around the bend of the stairs, jerking his gaze away from his father’s face as if caught doing something illicit. While Sergei stood waiting for the elevator’s arrival, he heard the beginning of a quarrel inside the apartment, and, abandoning his wait, thumped down the steps instead, past a rasping of small angry dogs, past phalanxes of empty bottles behind the trash chute, past landing after landing freshly defaced by some savage—a few primitively expressed sentiments etched into the plaster with furious, knife-sharp slashes, which, by the time he threw his weight against the front door and was issued outside with a complaint of the hinges, reflected his own feelings with succinctness.

Seething, he strode down the street wet with puddles. He thought he might spend the hours walking, or catch a matinee, or buy a newspaper, find some dry place to read it. He paid no attention to where he was going; when he rounded a random corner and plowed into a crowd, he was momentarily disoriented, as if he had been transported to some unfamiliar, unlikely landscape in an alien city. He gazed at the orderly commas of bent backs marking the sidewalk in a depressingly long sentence—and an instant later, as understanding came, was assaulted by a vehement desire to register his protest, to say or do something offensive.

He approached the closed kiosk, read the handwritten sign in its window.

Pending delivery. Back after restocking.

“Restocking again, huh?” he said, breathing harshly. “In no rush, are they?”

The short, fierce-looking bearded man at the head of the line remained impassive.

“Are you on the list?” he asked, thrusting a sheet of paper at Sergei.

Sergei glared into the man’s face, noting the stray black hairs curling in the generous nostrils, the mole on the right cheek, the commanding intensity of the pinprick eyes. Oh, I can see right through you, he thought with something quickly approaching hatred, you self-appointed Saint Peter brandishing a list instead of a key, deciding whom to admit into paradise and whom to turn away, while these—these sheep—all meekly serve their time in purgatories of their own devising; yet when they are at last allowed through the heavenly gates, admission stubs in their sweaty hands, not one of them, no, not one among these bored housewives and batty old women, will understand a single note—not one of them will even hear the music—while I, I who have waited for Selinsky all my life, I who belong here by right, I must be excluded, kept away, thwarted by a conspiracy of faceless embassy spies and obese men and boys eager to carry their tubas in future parades, and oh-so-dutiful daughters—

“It will likely be today or tomorrow,” Saint Peter informed him matter-of-factly, holding out his pen. “Thursday at the latest. Possibly late in the evening, so be prepared to stay awhile this week, till ten maybe. The tickets will go fast once they’ve come in.”

Sergei’s hand froze in the mechanical act of accepting the pen.

“The tickets,” he said. “Today or tomorrow. The actual tickets.”

The man’s beard bristled with impatience.

“You’re here for Igor Selinsky, yes? Because if you want the Northern Nightingales, they were relocated to another kiosk two weeks ago. Do you have your number on you?”

“My… Yes, of course.” Sergei ravaged his pockets. His mouth had gone dry and porous, and as he peeled his lips open, he could hear a small, crackling pat of a noise. “Number one thirty-eight, got it… Or no, sorry, one thirty-seven, under ‘Anna,’ see here, that’s my wife.”

He hastened down the line in a heated, incredulous haze. Near the kiosk, a vaguely familiar old man was drawing on a cigarette, his eyes filling with distance; a few steps away, a student in a group of other students had just finished telling a joke and collapsed laughing amidst the applause. On the corner, a man of thirty-some years, with a long, agile, tanned face, was talking to a woman behind him, pressing a bag into her hands, exclaiming, “But you never know, you might, you might someday—”

“I believe this is my place,” Sergei mumbled, inserting himself between them.

He was panting as though he had just run an obstacle course; his blood throbbed in his ears. Today or tomorrow, today or tomorrow, today or tomorrow… The immensity of the chance that had been offered him so generously, so unexpectedly, seemingly by divine intercession, made some dark, still, deep place inside him well up with a trembling, long-suppressed, fluid feeling—

“Any use for them, then?”

“What?”

The tanned man had turned to face him.

“Any use for the dates?” the man repeated.

Sergei blinked, brushed at his eyes, forced himself to attend to the minute workings of the world around him. There would be time, he knew, there would be so much time later—the monotonous days in the burial pit of his orchestra, the sleepless nights next to his wife—oh yes, time enough for the joy, for the guilt, for the anticipation—

“Dates? What dates?”

“One can make a delightful tart with them, or so I hear. I’ve already offered them to Sofia Mikhailovna here, but she claims she doesn’t cook.”

Sergei glanced at the woman behind him—she was not old, no more than thirty—then turned back to the man. “This kind of thing should not be tolerated,” he said. “If you want to fleece someone, there are designated places for that, go to the—”

The man’s teeth split his face open. “I’m not selling anything,” he said. “I just have a bag full of dates I don’t need. Any cooks in your house?”

He cast another glance at the young woman. The streetlamp had just come on, with a long electric sigh, and in its tremulous, uneven light her skin appeared pale as the rice paper that had been used for printing books in the first years after the Change, and her eyelids so delicate, almost transparent, that he thought he could discern an intricate etching of tiny blue veins on their surface. She met his eyes with a quiet, reproachful gaze that reminded him of a medieval painting he had once seen in some folio of art reproductions—a tranquil green garden in cool, luminous colors, a floating petaledged cloud, an orchestra of rainbow-winged angels with sharp, childlike faces and great, transparent insect eyes, fondling shiny musical instruments with their impossibly tiny hands…

Afraid to be caught staring, he looked away, started to decline the offer of the dates, then changed his mind mid-word, muttered awkwardly, “All right, then, I’ll take them”—and, flustered, nearly made a little joke about his wife’s arson attempts in the kitchen, but at the last minute did not, saying instead as he accepted the sticky load, “So, then, are you a musician?”

“Me? No, no,” said the tanned man, and laughed again. “I sing a bit, though. Used to sing in a choir when I was young.”

The young woman behind Sergei leaned forward. “Oh, Pavel, did you really? What kind of choir?”

“Folk songs mainly, nothing too terribly—”

“But I think folk songs can be lovely. Not the ones they usually—I mean—” She pressed her lips together, fell silent.

“Selinsky has some very original interpretations of northern folk songs in his early music,” Sergei interjected quickly. “I’m a musician, myself. I played a few of his pieces before he—when I was a child.”

“Did you really? I’ve never heard anything by him. They say he’s amazing. I wonder what he’ll be performing here.”

“If I may be so bold as to intrude, I’m told it will be his latest symphony. His ninth. A kind of overview of civilization, from wild dances around a totem pole to the present day, told in an utterly groundbreaking musical language. Indeed, most of his instruments will have been designed specially for him, I hear.”

“How interesting, where did you hear that? I’ve actually heard it will be a kind of tribute to the traditional musical modes, a celebration of the past. I work at the Museum of Musical History, Instruments Division, and there has been this rumor that Selinsky’s orchestra will be borrowing some of our oldest pieces.”

“No, no, it’s a choral composition, they tell me. They’ll be doing most of it a cappella, and the costumes will be quite elaborate. Blue and silver silk. And their voices are heavenly.”

“Oh, I’d love to hear it.”

“Well, you’ll get your chance soon.”

“Do you think they’ll really have the tickets today? It’s growing dark already.”

“Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, I’ll be here.”

“Yes, me too… And by the way, thanks for the dates, most kind of you.”

“Don’t mention it, I hate dates myself, they get wedged in your teeth, my sister pressed these on me… Hey, since we’re stuck here anyway, want to hear me sing?”

2

BY EIGHT O’CLOCK, Anna had become somewhat unsettled by Sergei’s absence. She had grown angry by nine. By ten, she was worried. After finishing with the dishes, she opened the window and, leaning on the windowsill, looked out. The spring night smelled young and raw, of gasoline, damp, and anxiety; the street jangled with the passage of rare trolleys, clicked with the determined retreats of couples on their way home. For some time she stood collecting splinters of quarrels, sorting through squeals of tires. Occasional headlights flashed by in a whirl of song, an unrecognizable fragment of merriment, which made her imagine a close, perfumed dimness, the city breezing past in a black square of smudged illumination, a head thrown back in laughter, a hand lightly grazing a hand… After a while, she moved to the bedroom.

She opened the window there as well, but as the room faced the building’s inner courtyard, there were no cars, no steps, no voices, no music—no sounds at all. In the diffused, scant light from the hallway, Sergei’s tuba lay coiled on the floor like a slumbering dragon, its skin glistening; she felt briefly calmer in its presence, better able to reassure herself that nothing was amiss, that her husband would be arriving at any moment. She had asked him a favor she should not have asked, perhaps, but even so, he would be arriving shortly. She waited, and after a while knew that the night was just as filled with sounds and smells on this darker, private side. They were different here, the sounds and the smells, furtive, hidden, subterranean almost—a whisper instead of a laugh, the wet dip and rise of a tiptoe instead of the click-clack of a heel, a sharp waft of cigarette smoke on the wing of a nocturnal wind, a teakettle singing softly in someone’s flat across a span of sky, a bird stirring in precariously balanced sleep or else a girl sighing—a hushed, secret welling of invisible, joyous things within a tight bud of darkness. As she listened, trapped inside her own walled-in allotment of blind space, her breath stilled, her face grew hot, and her blood beat a solitary rhythm in her throat.

It was well past eleven—twenty-three minutes past—when she heard the key in the lock. She stayed where she was; she wanted him—willed him—to enter the shadows of the bedroom, to find her here, quiet and flushed, waiting at the heart of all the unspoken, barely remembered little moments of their nearly twenty years together. The apartment brimmed with the clutter of remote noises—shoes shed, keys tossed, coins dropped, an odd collection of unidentifiable rustles—but the noises failed to come closer, moving into the kitchen instead, expanding there into the clanging of dishes, the shutting of windows, the mechanics of a meal.

Unclenching her hands, she walked out of the bedroom.

Sergei was sitting at the table, a piece of bread on a plate before him.

“Where have you been?” she asked, her voice sharpened by disappointment.

“Standing in line,” he said flatly, picking up a slice of butter on his knife.

“Oh,” she said. His face was closed as before, but something in it, some thought, some emotion, seemed to have shifted, laying new perspectives open to internal illumination, giving rise to new shadows; it was lighter and darker at the same time. Suddenly uncertain, she tried to catch his eyes. He looked down at the knife; she imagined she glimpsed the reflection of his oblique gray gaze sliding down the stained blade like another sliver of butter.

“You forgot to shut the window,” he said as he smeared the bread.

“Sorry, I just thought… It’s almost April.”

“Well, it’s still cold at night… So they’re extending the line hours for the next week or so. Until ten or eleven, they told us.”

“Oh,” she said again. She felt her whole body sinking, spoke as if drowning. “I suppose I should go to bed, so I’m better rested tomorrow evening, if that’s—”

“I don’t mind waiting in the evenings for you,” he said. “Instead of you.”

She went quiet inside, sat down. He studied his buttered bread, then rose, took the knife to the sink, turned on the water. She watched his back mutely.

“I could come by after work, around five,” said his back. “To replace you, I mean.”

“Serezha.” She spoke slowly. “Serezha. I would never ask that of you.”

“I don’t mind,” he repeated, still without turning; through the water’s continuous splashing she strained to discern some meaning in his voice devoid of expression. It did not take this long to wash one knife, she thought. “Oh yes, I forgot—I brought you some dates, someone in line was selling them. They are in the bag on the windowsill. I hear you can make a nice cake with them or something… Well, my feet are sore, I better go lie down…” The water stopped running at last. He moved across the kitchen swiftly, a blur of gray. “Good night.”

“Serezha, wait! You haven’t yet eaten your bread. I’ll sit with you—”

“I’m very tired. Have it if you like. Well, good night.”

He left. She listened to his steps accompanied by the flipping of light switches. Then, compelled by a sudden desire to move, to make some gesture, to respond to some obscure feeling already rising inside her, threatening to overwhelm her, she stood abruptly, grabbed the bag with the dates off the windowsill, tied its handles together to prevent the smell from escaping, and walked to the front door, and onto the landing.

Her mouth set, she put the bag on the floor by the trash chute.

Back in the kitchen, she ate the piece of bread she did not want. A neighbor’s radio chimed midnight. She thought of a cuckoo clock they had when she was little—a lacquered gingerbread house from whose balcony a crimson-beaked, brightly painted bird took eager, lopsided bows. She used to watch it for hours, she remembered, happily anticipating the passage of time, in some shadowy room of a shadowy house she could no longer trust her memory to furnish; though now the clock, too, had an unreal, dusty quality to it, as if it had been merely an illustration to some fairy tale, glimpsed through a milky, semitransparent sheet used to cover pictures in old books, or a stanza from a poem that now alighted on her lips, a few stray lines she repeated, not knowing where she had heard them.

She fell asleep with the words still moving through her mind—I live like a cuckoo in a clock, I don’t envy birds in forests, They wind me, and I sing—and their deceptively lighthearted nursery-rhyme rhythm bounced in her barefoot steps when, at three or four in the morning, she rose and traversed the unlit treachery of cluttered hallways, gathering bruises on her naked shins. On the way back from the bathroom she paused, for a strange green light, wavering like seaweed, seemed to seep from under her mother’s door. She pressed her temple against the doorjamb and, barely awake, thought she heard a voice, quivering like sunlight under the water, weaving in and out of sleep, then falling silent. Lowering herself onto the floor, she leaned against the wall and drifted into an uneasy doze; and in her slumber, the voice was speaking again, and her dream was spinning, spinning it out like a thread of fine silk, and the thread gently wound round and round, and round, enclosing her in a warm cocoon, and the voice asked:

Have you ever seen a chestnut tree?

A pity. Close your eyes, my dear, and imagine.

In the Western city where I lived as a child grew hundreds of chestnut trees. Whole alleys of them, whole gardens, whole parks even. They were beautiful trees, tall and strong, some of them centuries old. For one week in the spring, the city would light up with thousands upon thousands of soft candles of chestnut blossoms, and in the fall, when pavements whispered with dead leaves, there would be thousands of chestnuts, hard and glossy, hidden among them. Their color was bright—not quite brown, not quite red, much like the lustrous, heaving sides of horses I would sometimes see prancing along the paths in the chestnut parks.

Our second autumn in the city, my mother told me that chestnuts contained new chestnut trees inside them. She was always teaching me the names of plants, the calls of birds, the wayward secrets of seeds. I was eight years old. The next day in the park, I stomped on a chestnut until it split open. It had a wrinkled kernel inside. I tried another, and another, and another—they were all the same. But I could not forget my mother’s words. I began to believe that some chestnuts were different, rare and precious like four-leaf clovers. The special chestnuts concealed inside them the gift of a real tree, half the size of my little finger, yet grown to miniature perfection, with hair-thin branches and droplets of pink and yellow blossoms. I started spending hours in parks and gardens, turning over damp, sweetly rotting leaves. Gathering handfuls of chestnuts, I broke them open, hoping that after two or three or four hundred attempts I would at last be rewarded with a tiny enchantment complete with gnarled roots and the smell of spring flowering.

The leaves yielded other secrets now and then; one day I uncovered a golden pendant shaped like a dainty slipper, and another time, a mildewed silk glove of a lovely turquoise tint. These small offerings only left me wistful. As twilight claimed the city, I would hurriedly cram more chestnuts into my pockets, into my dance bag, and bring them home, and, spilling them on the floor of my room, smash them open with a bronze paperweight in the form of a boot. Later I would secretly dispose of the dusty remains. They lost their velvety sheen when broken.

After a while I stopped prying the chestnuts apart. I let them accumulate instead, lined them along the walls, arranged them in curves and circles. I thought that perhaps, without my knowing, a hidden chestnut grove rustled and blossomed in my bedroom, and that was enough.

Eventually my mother noticed.

Our concierge knew a great number of chestnut recipes. Chestnut croquettes were her favorite. You mixed hot mashed chestnuts with egg yolks, thick cream, and sugar, then added essence of vanilla. My mother let me shape the paste into little balls. I became quite skilled at it.

Of course, you’ll ask whether I stopped believing, or whether I still thought that, perhaps—oh, pardon the—

On the other side of the wall, her mother coughed, and with a start, Anna opened her eyes. The place was absolutely still, but she suddenly had the same sense of marvelous, secret things ripening stealthily within the bud of the night—except that now she too was a part of it, she too was slowly growing, cresting within the darkness. Then, as she was, barefoot, in her nightgown, she rushed out to the landing, and down the steps, her feet burning on the icy concrete. Mercifully, the bag was still there, behind some empty bottles. She took it inside, and for a long, long time rinsed the fruit in warm water, trying not to notice the two or three small insects with whitish, bloated, segmented bellies that swam up and drowned and twirled away.

In the morning she almost cried as she remembered her dream—the translucent green glow under the closed door, the pocket-sized chestnut forest, the dates miraculously restored to the windowsill—but when she entered the kitchen, the dates were there, the dates were there!

She hummed under her breath while cooking her family breakfast.

She continued to hum for the next two weeks as she went about her stealthy errands, making inquiries of her acquaintances, standing in other lines, assembling little by little the impossible, precious ingredients. At last, just in time, all was ready; for surely, sugared water with a lemon squeezed into it would be just as good as orange flower water, whatever that might be, while strawberry jam (a gift from her downstairs neighbor) was much, much tastier than apricot—and almonds, well, never mind the almonds; all the saleswomen had laughed in her face at the mere question.

On a bright, windy afternoon in early April, just after five o’clock, she met Sergei at the corner to take his tuba from him and to hand over their number and a buterbrod wrapped in a napkin, as she did every day. “I’ll see you at the usual time, then,” she said, struggling to keep her excitement from breaking into her voice with an expectant, girlish giggle. Her fingers briefly lingered in his.

Withdrawing his hand, he slid the number into his pocket and his eyes past her face.

“Yes, yes,” he said. As he walked away, she stood gazing for a moment at his retreating gray jacket, smiling to herself. Then she ran home, the tuba impatiently nudging her in the back.

She was eager to begin their evening.

When he joined the line, Pavel, the tanned man at number 136, was there already, having just replaced a woman in a vulgar flowery hat; Sergei saw her motley scarf stream around the corner. The young woman with the pale eyelids appeared at the end of the street a half-hour later, as always, crossing the boundary between the clear dusk and the uncertain street illumination. In the last few days, a new sonorousness had spread through the air, as it did for a short time every April; her steps rang with a small crystal sound as if she were walking on a sheet of glass. He imagined the glass to be deep blue in color, vibrating lightly just beneath the veneer of the city.

“I’ve given your arguments some thought,” he was saying as he pretended not to watch her, “and I fear I can’t agree. Folk songs… Oh, hello, Sofia Mikhailovna, nice evening, isn’t it?… Folk songs do not come from the depths of the ‘national spirit,’ as you call it. On the contrary, they lie on the surface—simple music, wholly devoid of individuality or inspiration, field rhythms, chanted by peasant masses to avoid dozing off while planting potatoes and whatnot.”

“You do not, then, believe in the national spirit?” Pavel asked.

“There you go again,” Sofia Mikhailovna said without smiling.

“I do, I do wholeheartedly! But to my mind, it’s to be found elsewhere—namely, in the unique creations of our brightest composers, and the more original, the better. Like Selinsky. It’s precisely in these flashes of genius, born every generation or two—”

“Pardon me, I didn’t mean to eavesdrop,” interrupted a balding middle-aged man with a shoe brush for a mustache, two places behind, “but did I just hear you say that Selinsky embodies our national spirit? Because, and you must pardon me for the intrusion, that is nonsense.” Taking a step off the sidewalk, he bent down, scraped his fingers against the still-hardened ground; the bald spot on his head flushed red with the effort, and in the opening of his shirt Sergei glimpsed the swinging of a small pewter cross on a thread. “This,” the man said, holding up his hand smudged with dirt, “this is our national spirit. No more, no less. Selinsky chose to leave his country, and by doing so, betrayed his gift. He may well be a genius—and I for one will gladly sacrifice my time for the pleasure of listening to his music—but as he no longer stands on his native soil, his art can’t possibly have roots. An artist creates true art for his people only so long as he lives, and suffers, among them.”

“But surely you’re following the letter, not the spirit, of the matter!” Sergei objected. “Take our greatest writers of the past century—did most of them not spend years and years abroad, in the West? Yet no one questions their place in our culture… What do you think?”

“I believe one can carry one’s country within,” she said with her usual soft-spoken conviction. “It’s the depth of—of one’s affinity that matters, not one’s address… But I think you’re wrong about our folk songs. Maybe you’ve just never listened to them properly.”

“Perhaps,” he said, “but don’t you think—”

The evening was deepening, floating on a wave of cool, radiant dusk. He searched for, and failed to find, that initial disappointment that had gripped him some days earlier, when he had first realized he was in for a longer wait. With a clean, young, forgotten kind of pleasure, he filled his lungs with the small nighttime breezes as he drifted in and out of conversations, listened to Pavel sing in a reedy yet oddly stirring voice, watched the thin chill of darkness slowly transform Sofia Mikhailovna’s pallid features until, once again, they acquired that fragile, feathery purity of an old painting. Later, at ten o’clock, just as he was about to take his reluctant leave, the bearded organizer moved down the line, marking off names and informing everyone that the neighboring Nightingales kiosk had received an unexpected delivery of tickets at two in the morning and that it might make sense to stick around longer tonight. Sergei’s heart leapt with a surprising, fierce gladness; and he was suddenly grateful to the selfless man with the list, to the people in line around him, these strangers who held dear the very things that were dear to him.

“Two in the morning?” he said loudly. “That’s outrageous, what next!”

“An alphabet game?” inquired Pavel. “I give you a letter, you give me a composer. Vladimir Semyonovich, are you in?”

“You bet,” said the man with the shoe-brush mustache.

When he came home that night, pale squares of windows swam through the darkness; the sky was already holding its frosted breath in anticipation of a new day. Leaving the place unlit, he walked to the kitchen. On the threshold he halted. There was a chaos of indistinguishable shapes on the table, on the chairs, on the counter—small, discrete, mysterious gaps in the fabric of shadows. For an instant he felt a peculiar sensation in his nose, in the cavity of his mouth, as if something viscous and sweet were pushing its way through some invisible barrier; but before he quite made up his mind to investigate, the deepest accumulation of shadow resolved itself unmistakably into the curved spine of his wife collapsed asleep at the table, her cheek on her outstretched arms.

A heady rush of unease swept him off into the bedroom, and kept him in a state of sleepless, tense immobility all through the early-morning hours, even while she softly called his name as she readied herself for work. After her departure, he drifted off to some frozen terrain, the gliding ice field of a dream dipping unsteadily through cold black waters. Waking up with a start an hour later, he was so hurried to get to the theater on time that he cast only the most cursory glance into the kitchen, and saw, through the spiraling of his tuba, a pattern of plates he did not recognize, of candles melded into saucers with careful spillages of wax, of glasses neatly arranged, as though in readiness for something. But as he chased an errant trolley down the street, another windy day got tangled up in what was left of his hair and wiped his puzzlement out; and by the time he met her on their usual corner, he had forgotten all about it, overwhelmed as he always was by a weak-kneed surge of guilty relief—another afternoon passed, and the tickets hadn’t gone on sale yet, not on her watch, not on her watch—

She seemed about to speak, was peering at him with some timid yet urgent purpose.

“I’ll see you at the usual time,” he said quickly, already moving away to prevent her words from being born; but later that evening, the bearded organizer announced that he thought it prudent to extend their waiting for another night or two, just in case. When darkness crept in, the line began to twitch with unrest. People came and went; old characters, their faces worn thin by the weeks of vigil like profiles on coins long in circulation, slunk off in search of undamaged telephone booths, new characters stepped into the fray, and the organizer swore with passion as he struggled to keep up with the rapidly metamorphosing list. At ten, Pavel made his exit, announcing that his replacement would be by in a bit, and in another half-hour, Sofia Mikhailovna turned upon Sergei her bruised gaze of a medieval angel and, thanking him quietly for his kind offer, gave him her number, her fingers brushing his palm in passing—unintentionally, he was sure—and left in turn.

He spent the rest of his time in a trance of exhaustion, his eyes closed, his wife’s number folded in his right hand, Sofia Mikhailovna’s in his left, the enormity of the wait beginning to bear down on his spirit at last. At two o’clock he staggered away, feeling as if the tips of his curled fingers had dissolved in chilly numbness. A bearded old man sat smoking on the curb, flipping a matchbox up into the air, catching it, tossing it up again. As Sergei stumbled into a drifting cloud of smoke, the dark street beyond shimmered and vanished. The old man looked up.

“Patience,” he said thoughtfully. “It will be worth it.”

“What?” Sergei paused involuntarily.

When the old man smiled, his features became impossible to discern, obliterated by a cobweb of minute lines. “The music,” he said. “The most beautiful music you’ve ever heard.”

Sergei’s eyes followed the flips of the matchbox—up and down, up and down, up and down in the wide strip of lavender streetlight went the sky-blue box with the golden script on one side… In the end he said nothing, only nodded, and walked home, his head ringing with hollow lightness from lack of sleep; and in the morning, after waiting, with his eyelids pressed tightly shut, for the front door to close behind his wife, he threw the blanket aside and, leaping barefoot into the hallway, cornered his son on his way out.

“All right,” the boy said morosely. “It will cost you a fiver, though.”

Sergei considered him in disgusted silence, thought of launching into a speech about their lost savings, went to retrieve his pants instead (a glance cast into the kitchen revealed the two small armies of glasses and candlesticks still confronting each other across the table in a perplexing battle formation), turned his pockets inside out.

“Two now,” he conceded. “Three more later, if you actually show up.”

To his surprise, Alexander did, not precisely at ten, to be sure, but soon enough after. Sofia Mikhailovna had left a few minutes before; she too had arranged for a substitute, someone in the family, he gathered, to join the line shortly. He walked off, careless of the direction, thinking vaguely that he did not wish to go home just yet; it was, after all, a perfect night for a stroll. A street away, he chanced to glimpse her, and quickened his steps—then realized that she was talking to someone, a man; he could see the man’s back curving like a tall question mark inside a light coat. He slowed down, fell back, his mood abruptly, inexplicably, soured; but in another minute, the man turned and shuffled forth with a laborious, aged tread, looking through Sergei with the pale bespectacled eyes of another injured angel. Her father, a voice shouted in his mind, and, exhaling, he ran down the street, heedless of the muddy stains from the rain that had trudged through the city earlier that day.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s you. You gave me a bit of a start.”

“A pleasant evening,” he said, out of breath. “Strange to be awake, yet not in line.”

“Thank you again for last night. For keeping my place, I mean. I was very tired.”

“Of course. Anytime.”

They stood looking at each other in silence, then spoke at once.

He said, “If you like, I could walk you home, it’s getting quite—”

She said, “It’s late, but if you like, we could stop by my work, I’ll play you some—”

Their words, colliding, intercepted each other in mid-flight.

She said, “Oh, thank you, I’d like—”

He said, “Sure, that would be—”

They laughed then, a short, embarrassed laugh, but a laugh all the same, and somehow the moment filled with lightness, and as they walked to the Museum of Musical History, a half-hour away, he thought that if he tilted his head up, he could watch the moment turn airborne and float away, small and carefree, through streaks of smoking streetlamps, through pockets of night, up over the roofs and the churches of the old city, growing nebulous and pearly until it became just another wisp of an April cloud.

In the old mansion where the museum was housed, he followed her from room to room. The corners were full of theatrical, dusty moonlight and indifferent late-shift caretakers and old instruments with lovely curves and stretched, sinuous necks. Standing so close to her that their shoulders almost touched—almost, but not quite—he marveled at the light azure lacquer of harpsichords with garlands of ivory cupids cavorting along their sides, and brittle violins with delicate landscapes blossoming inside their cases; and as she pointed out her favorite pieces, which she had known and tended for years, for which she had made up little affectionate nicknames, he imagined these rooms not bleak and dusty but brilliant with lights, adorned with silk, pastel-colored trifles, and her in a long, narrow dress, seated at one of the azure harpsichords, playing melancholy, lingering music, or absently caressing a gold-throated harp with her pale hands—but as he glanced at her hands, he caught the glint of a ring on her finger, and his vision dimmed.

“Shall we go listen to your songs, then?” he asked brusquely.

“Of course,” she said after the slightest pause. “This way. Could you please turn off the light on the way out?”

She led him along a corridor with many closed doors, into a small place crowded with a herd of gramophones. She appeared to hesitate briefly among their yawning black-tongued maws, then walked over to one with an air of daring. “The earliest model we have. A bit cranky, but so nice. Special. Here, you’ll like this, I’m certain—”

She sat across from him, her eyes closed; he now discovered that the thin blue veins on her eyelids had not been a trick of the evening light after all. He forced himself to look away, to listen as the creaky gramophone whined about fates crossing and stars falling and grasses swaying, the whole world setting off on a treacherous, intoxicating ride toward distant horizons where horses galloped and winds whistled and lovers died young and doomed and maddeningly happy. Then his thoughts wandered. He remembered meeting Anna, two decades ago now, in the neighborhood doctor’s dingy vestibule; neither of them had been ill, but both needed the doctor’s signature on a document required by their place of employment; both had been bored and distracted, wedged next to each other in a restless crowd of coughing supplicants. He had incurred some crone’s wrath for allowing Anna to go in before him, out of turn, and later, leaving the office, had been touched to find her there still, waiting for him in the windowless trap of the room before the forbidding blind door. He thought too of all the many closed doors he had glimpsed in the secret reaches of this place, opening, he imagined, onto polished vistas of grand pianos and mysterious little gardens of imperceptibly vibrating violins and deep moonlit pools of symphonies and sonatas flitting about with the shimmer of chance reflections, with the grace of rare butterflies—

“So what did you think?” she asked.

The song had ended. She was looking at him.

“You were right,” he said, rising. “It was special.”

An hour later, having seen her to her building, he slowly walked home. His way took him past the kiosk. The line had dispersed, but a few characters still clustered in the moist darkness, their lit cigarettes circling about their heads like a flock of dull red moths. He saw his son talking to some man whose face was invisible, whose shadow made wild leaps across the pavement; the streetlamp blinked erratically, for the bulb needed replacing. He called out across the street, watched one burning moth dive to the ground, become hastily squashed.

He thought of speaking sharply to the boy, then said nothing.

Their steps kept falling out of rhythm as they crossed what was left of the night.

“Mother came by the line looking for you,” the boy said. “She had a pie with her.”

“A pie?”

“A pie or a cake. Something she baked. She wanted you to have it.”

“How silly,” Sergei said absently. “Why not wait till I get home.”

He wondered whether she wore perfume. He would never know, he supposed; it was not the kind of thing one could casually ask—though perhaps he would ask, on the evening of the concert. For the first time openly, without willing himself to suppress the indulgent thought, he dared to picture the unrolling staircase, Sofia’s small hand trembling lightly in the crook of his arm, a row of soft velvet chairs, the girlish angularity of her pale cheek inclining gently to his shoulder, a hush so perfect, so palpable, it would rise like a cloud to the immensity of the ceiling, and then the communal intake of breath, Selinsky, Selinsky, it’s really him, the flying steps, the flying tuxedo coattails, the flying white hair—and then the first, dizzying twirl of a baton flying through the awed air—and then… But here his fantasy grew vague, then stalled altogether. The draining necessity of daily evasions, the stress of worrying about the ticket falling into his wife’s oblivious possession, the harrowing prospect, in the event of his success, of having to concoct some explanation for his empty-handed return from the line, of then finding a safe place to hide his treasure, of erecting another precarious scaffolding of lies to obscure his absence on the night of the concert—the constant, unclean exertion of it all oppressed him again, and again he assured himself it was only right that he should be the one to hear Selinsky, he was not a dishonest man, he was entitled, yes, entitled—for had his whole life, with all its missed chances, its unrealized longings, its reversals of fortune, not guaranteed him this music, this gift, this—

“They told everyone to hang around till two again tomorrow,” his son said with a sideways glance, and, when Sergei did not respond, offered, “I can replace you at ten like today, if you want. For another fiver.”

“Math isn’t your strongest point, is it? Do you know what my salary is?”

“Three, then, I’ll do it for three,” Alexander said quickly.

They stopped before their building. Sergei looked at him for a moment. It would be madness, he knew, to try to explain; the boy could never understand what it meant to desire something with such ache, such fierceness…

“You can’t stay out till two on a regular basis,” he said at last. “You have school.”

“It’s not regular. It’s only two days, today and tomorrow. I just want to help.”

Sergei hesitated.

“Well, all right,” he said then. “Just one thing. If the tickets go on sale on your watch, bring the ticket to me. I want to give it to your grandmother myself. Agreed?”

“Sure, whatever,” Alexander said, though he wouldn’t quite meet his father’s eyes.

Struggling to disregard the bitter taste in his mouth, Sergei hunted for his wallet.

3

“YOU MUST BE NEW, I haven’t seen you here before.”

“Yeah, just helping out with the late shift.”

“Ah yes, the late shift! Some people are complaining, you know, what are the chances, they say, that the tickets will go on sale at one in the morning. But I say to them, you never know, these things can’t be predicted, and in any case, a little extra hope never hurt anyone… Have one to spare, perhaps? And a light?… Thank you, thank you kindly. And then, let’s face it, it’s not like we’d rather be somewhere else. I suffer from insomnia, you know—used to sit in the dark for hours, talking to myself. Now I come here, meet people, shoot the breeze, it’s something to do. Folks trade jokes, there’s a fellow who sings over there… Ah, I see another new face, a boy, must have come to help out his father. See the man walking away? A great expert on music, that one, he and that other fellow, the one with the mustache there—”

“Hey, I know that boy. Well, I better get to my place. See you around, then… Why, hello, looks like we’re neighbors, you’re number one thirty-seven? What, don’t you recognize me? Nikolai, remember?”

Alexander did not reply. He had spotted the bastard only a minute earlier, a hulking shadow in the misty blur of the streetlamp, sharing a smoke with some other crook, both of them turning to stare at him, and laughing, laughing… His breath still had not returned.

“So whatever happened to you?” the scoundrel asked cheerfully. “I waited at the station for three hours, but you never showed up.”

Alexander stood seething, directing his gaze above the man’s head.

“Ah, I get it. I get it. You think—you must think I cheated you out of your money or something. Well, I’m offended. I’m actually offended. I should make you eat that stupid ticket I bought you—had to wait in line for it, too—only I misplaced it somewhere.”

“Misplaced it. That’s rich,” Alexander said between his teeth.

“Believe me, don’t believe me, it’s all the same to me. It’s no good now, anyway. In any case, you shouldn’t care, you’re about to strike gold, why should you care?”

“Oh, yeah? And how am I about to do that, exactly?”

The thief seemed surprised. “You’re here for the Selinsky concert, yes?”

“So?” Alexander said, refusing to look at him.

“So just think.” He pushed his face so close that Alexander could smell his stale odor of drink and sweat. “A fancy composer returning home for one single concert! Hordes of folks will be dying to see him, but not everyone can spend their days hanging around this sidewalk. Get my meaning? Your time here is money, my friend. You buy at a low State price, pay a little visit to a certain little place you and I know, I introduce you to some good people, you walk away with your pockets stuffed.”

Against his will, Alexander’s thoughts flared out to let in the chilled church air that had seemed cut from a slab unlike the air outside, the rolling of flashlight beams over the half-glimpsed manifestations of his most secret, inarticulate desires, the expansive, generous feeling that for a few heartbeats had swelled his chest with an exhilarating foretaste of adulthood, the sense of something happening, happening at last, in his life…

“How much, do you think?” he blurted.

The man leaned in to whisper, his lips almost touching Alexander’s ear.

“Get lost,” Alexander gasped, staring.

The man nodded solemnly. “Maybe more. Enough to take your train three or four times over.”

And immediately Alexander’s thoughts shrank to a bright, glaring pinpoint of anger. The station, the slobbery confidences he had drunkenly drooled to the bastard, the humiliation of watching the trains together… His insides twisted hotly. He took a step back.

“This ticket isn’t mine,” he said in a voice strained with renewed fury.

The man shrugged good-naturedly. “Whatever, I’m only trying to help. You’d be doing your family a favor. I mean, if I were your mother, I’d rather buy something nice with the extra cash than spend two hours sitting in a stuffy room listening to creaky violins. But I guess she really loves music. I always say, there’s no accounting for people’s tastes—”

“Don’t waste your breath,” Alexander spat, and turned away.

The night slithered past, leaving everything moist and glistening in its wake. Just before midnight, his mother shuffled by, mortifying him with some smelly cake wrapped in a bundle. As it grew later, the last dim windows in the apartment buildings lining the street were extinguished one by one, and the city was erased until morning, sunk like a dull, heavy stone to the nightly bottom of its dreamless sleep. He stood staring into the spring vastness of the sky, which floated so high above that it seemed to belong to an entirely different city, and his thoughts floated after it, unsettlingly adrift. He was here for one night only, though, so there was no need to worry about what the man had said, he wouldn’t trust him anyway, nor would he be around when the tickets went on sale, there was no need at all…

In another hour, a fellow with a brigand’s beard, from the front of the line, announced that they should expect to stay late the next day as well, and possibly the day after that, perhaps through the end of the week; a late-night delivery, said the fellow, was quite likely. He could not help thinking about it then, at least in passing. Little by little he fell into an uneasy conversation with Nikolai. Nikolai told him stories. His stories transpired on the far edges of the land, where the trees came so close together that the sun could not reach the ground, and fierce animals roamed the shores of blinding lakes, and men with chins rough as sandpaper and arms the width of his thighs drove trucks along dangerous roads, across twisting canyons, through small, wild villages where almond-eyed women wore their hair long and loose, and barefoot boys rode unsaddled horses, and lives had the timeless inevitability of legends…

When he stopped to catch his breath, Alexander swallowed and said, “But what would I tell them?”

Nikolai grinned at him. “Have a cigarette. Let’s see, you were already mugged once, right?… Well, how about—it fell out on the way home because you have a hole in your pocket.”

“I don’t,” Alexander said. His throat felt burnt.

“Do you happen to have that knife on you still? I thought you might. Here, don’t move for a second… and there you go, you do now. What do they teach you in school, anyway?”

Alexander pushed his fingers through the rip, wiggled them a little.

“Hey, I think that man there is calling you.”

Alexander wheeled around and abruptly dropped his cigarette at the sight of his father.

“Oh, yeah, him,” he said. “A fellow I drink with now and then. Well, better be off.”

“See you tomorrow?”

“Yeah, maybe, if I’m not too busy.”

Anna woke up when her husband and son stomped past the kitchen. She did not lift her head, only opened her eyes and watched them from the darkness. Her neck was sore; for the third night, she had fallen asleep at the table. The lived-in space around her was dense with the odors of sugar and the barely present suggestion of a roach spray used some weeks before.

She felt invisible.

The next morning, Sergei was still asleep; he always was these days. She paused in the bedroom doorway, looked at the side of his face squashed against the pillow. For one instant she thought she saw his eye dart tensely beneath his lid, and held her breath, but there was no other movement; she tiptoed out. In the kitchen, she packed the date tart into her school bag.

She had stopped by the floor below on the previous evening, to return the glasses and candlesticks she had borrowed. Elizaveta Nikitishna, her voice simpering, had asked about the anniversary supper. “Your twentieth, wasn’t it?” she had exclaimed. “How did it go?”

“It was lovely,” Anna had replied, and the neighbor, who was not married, had pressed her hands together and breathed out, “Oh Annushka, you’re so lucky.”

“Yes,” Anna had agreed sadly, gazing over Elizaveta Nikitishna’s shoulder at the stretch of her shining parquet corridor, a broom resting discreetly in a corner, ready to be banged against the ceiling at the first sounds of the tuba.

In school, Anna stashed the tart in her desk drawer and closed it with care, to trap the scent of musky fermentation. She taught three classes that day. She had decided she would call her first class to attention just before the bell rang, extract the treat with a modest flourish, smile as the children clapped; but when the time came, it was only ten in the morning, and amidst the bright confusion of sunbeams crossing on the ceiling she did not yet feel ready to part with the image she had carried within herself for almost a month—her husband in the luminous, intimate shadows of the candles, leaning toward her as he asked for another piece—though she did not blame him for her disappointment, of course; she knew it was only the line, scraping their days empty of meaning and warmth, taking them away from each other, making their lives so much smaller. She let the second class go as well. The third period seemed to last longer than its allotted hour. A boy stood up to read a story he had written, about a man who lost an arm in a factory incident under the old regime and later led his fellow workers in a righteous rebellion, shooting the factory director with his one good arm in the triumphant final scene. The boy’s exultant diction disturbed her; she gave him the highest mark. A girl asked for permission to take a bathroom break, and crept back almost half an hour later, crying. Anna tried not to look in her direction, but she felt an odd touch of fear—not fear of these children, exactly, but of some presence she sensed in the room, vicious and strident. When the bell sounded, she watched them leave without moving.

She knew a little park near her building that was always full of pigeons; as she stood in line that afternoon, she considered walking over as soon as she was free, tossing crumbs on the ground, letting the feathery waves lap and flap and scramble at her feet. Then she thought of something else. Turning, she looked at the boy behind her.

He did not resemble the children in school.

“Do you like sweets?” she asked.

He said nothing, only nodded. He had been silent of late; the sky in his eyes had grown overcast. “I have something for you, then,” she said with an odd sense of relief, and added in a low voice, so as not to be overheard by the bright-mouthed woman before her (they had avoided speaking to each other since the dates incident), “I’ll give it to you once we leave here.”

The boy nodded again.

At five, she asked him to wait while she met with her husband. The afternoon was gray and quiet; as she hurried toward Sergei, she could hear his footsteps at the other end of the street falling in with hers, as though she were being approached by her own echo.

“Any news?” he said, stopping. It was his day off, but he looked tired, his eyes washed out, deeper shadows beneath them; within his absent, preoccupied face, the animated, handsome face of a man she had once known lay obscured as if by a layer of thin, translucent wax. It’s the line, she thought again, and looked away, pained, saying with a small, insincere smile, “Everyone says it will be soon now,” holding out their number. He exhaled—dismayed, she knew, that another afternoon passed and it wasn’t yet over—then moved beyond her; and immediately her chest felt hollowed out by a gust of panic, a sense of something precious escaping her, perhaps forever—

“Wait!” she cried, catching his sleeve.

He paused. “What is it?”

Hesitating, the bag with the tart heavy in her hand, she glanced back. The boy was where she had left him, standing on the corner, his eyes cast down, dragging his foot back and forth along the pavement, drawing some figure in the dust. Her heart twisted inside her.

“Nothing,” she said, releasing him.

“Well, don’t stay up for me tonight. I might be late. The line, you know.”

“I know,” she replied after a pause, and turned away slowly.

They walked, she and the boy, until the kiosk was out of sight; then she halted.

“I baked it myself,” she told him, taking out the wrapped tart and offering it to him. “You could invite some friends over for a party. Is your birthday anytime soon?”

“It was last month,” he said without moving.

“Well, then, just have a nice cup of tea with your parents.”

“Mama won’t be home for a few hours.”

She waited, but he did not add anything about his father, and she was conscious of standing before him like a supplicant, her hands outstretched, the hush closing in on her.

“You could come with me,” the boy said, staring at his shoes.

She thought of the meal she was expected to start preparing in another half-hour, as the spring’s transparent wings beat wildly against the kitchen’s steamed-up windowpanes—and was surprised to hear herself reply: “Thank you. I’d like that.”

They did not talk on the way. Beyond the sour depths of an alley with its plaster gouged out by vandals, the robust aromas of other families’ suppers reached her with efficient clicks of utensils through windows opened to the first warm evening of the year. At the end of the next street, the boy showed her inside a gray building lowered like a gloomy brow, and on, through the dim confinement of a foyer lined with darkened rows of mailboxes, to the elevator, which seemed only slightly larger than a mailbox and into which they squeezed like two letters through a narrow mail slot. He pressed a button with a tentative air, then waited, his head tilted; after a long pause, ancient cogs jerked moaning into reluctant motion somewhere beneath them, and the box shook upward, going dark, then light, then dark again as they passed the floors. Released onto the landing of the fourth floor, Anna inhaled a whiff of sour milk, glimpsed a blue-rimmed saucer, the darting streak of a homeless cat; then the door squealed inward.

“This way,” said the boy, gesturing, though there was only one way to go.

The living space beyond was small, badly kempt, driven into tight corners by the advance of heavy brown furniture, bulky tables, deep armchairs, all much too large for it. “I sleep on the sofa here,” he said as he switched on a lamp. In the blotchy light, she was startled to see photographs gleaming under glass amidst the faded floral garlands of the ancient wallpaper, each frame now containing a small, blinding image of the squat orange lampshade. Hesitantly she approached, found herself looking at two stiffly attired lanky youths, the older one smiling, the younger serious, their arms around each other’s shoulders.

“That’s grandfather with a cousin,” the boy explained, intercepting her glance. “They both studied music, a long time ago.”

She saw the elaborate, old-fashioned scroll designs in the margins of the picture, a child’s fingerprints glistening darkly along the edges of the dusty frame, and moved away in discomfort. She had been taught, though in such circumspect ways she was not even sure when or by whom, that old photographs possessed a vague air of menace, holding as they did a troublesome invitation to peer into thumb-sized, out-of-focus faces lined up in solemn tribute to forgotten occasions, family anniversaries, diminutive triumphs better left to lie concealed in the decaying obscurity of albums, nibbled by silverfish that scurried past.

“And who’s this?” she asked, pointing.

The boy considered the laughing thin-faced man for some moments, as if seeing him for the first time.

“My father,” he said then. “This was seven years ago, we don’t have any recent pictures. And that’s Mama… Here, I’ll show you the way.”

Anna followed him into the kitchen, which did not smell of food. He watched her with an odd look, shy yet avid, as she filled the teakettle with water, found two cups, got the tart out of her bag. “Only we don’t have a plate big enough,” he said. “Just some saucers.”

“We’ll cut it into small bits, then,” she announced. “Where do you keep your knives?”

She felt awkward opening and shutting cupboards in someone else’s house. Their insides breathed staleness; she caught a glitter of tarnished silver hidden behind a stack of mismatched dishes. The kettle would not boil for the longest time, minutes and minutes of waiting (she recognized the clock on the wall, big and round, its black-and-white face awash with excess blankness); when it did so at last, it whined like a forlorn provincial train, and the kitchen departed with a rickety, unsteady wobble for the nightly shadows.

“Can we just drink water?” the boy said, holding the open tea caddy. “Mama has only a couple spoonfuls of tea left.”

She watched him as he gingerly tasted the cake.

“It’s nice,” he said, and set it down on his saucer.

She tried it in turn, found her tongue glued to her gums with the cloying sweetness of rot.

“I’m glad you like it,” she said, setting her piece down as well. Must have kept the dates out on the windowsill for too long, she chided herself. For a while after that, they sat in silence, sipping hot water, inhaling the dim, stale, quiet smells of the kitchen filled with things unused, things not needed. “When I was little,” she said at last, looking past him, “we had a big family and many friends. On my father’s side. We had wonderful suppers together. My parents owned the most beautiful china, with thin golden rims, so delicate you could see candlelight right through it. Only one cup is left now, but once, there was enough for twenty-four people, and not one plate remained in the cupboards during our suppers, that’s how many guests we’d have.” As she talked, she felt the vague sketch of her childhood expanding around her, flooding with color, ringing with noisy children, warming with flames in glowing fireplaces—becoming real. “I remember soup smoking in the tureens. After we had our dessert, my mother would play the piano… Then my father died crossing the street. Automobiles were rare in those days, so people forgot to look. Before the Change.”

“My father isn’t dead,” said the boy. “He’s just away. He’ll be back someday.”

“Of course he will,” she said with a teacher’s bright intonation.

He looked at her mutely, and the clouds moved fast in his aged eyes.

She grew flustered then, and wanted to say something else, something meaningful, something he would remember, perhaps, years from now. For an instant she thought she sensed the right words: they were already crowding her mouth, powerful and wise, rolling like heavy, primordial boulders along her tongue—but as she was about to speak, a loud, leathery sound exploded in the next room, as if a demented bat had smashed into the wall.

The boy, who had been staring at her without blinking, waiting for something, quickly looked down at his hands. “Grandfather has a cough. It’s not contagious or anything,” he said.

The boulders rolled back down her tongue, smaller, smaller yet—mere rocks, then pebbles, then only sand, scratching, hurting her throat—until she no longer knew what they were, what they had been. “I thought you were alone,” she said, whispering for some reason.

“Grandfather always naps in the evenings.”

“I should go now.”

“You could stay to meet him. He’s awake.”

She shook her head, rising.

“They’ll be waiting for me at home,” she lied. “I—I’ll leave the cake for you.”

She walked uneasily past the black-and-white strangers on the walls, feeling as if she had peeked uninvited through a keyhole and seen the intimate, raw underbellies of lives she had no right to invade—the dead man with a radiant smile, his mousy widow-wife, her eyes under invisible eyelashes stretched thin with sorrow, the two gangly, overdressed youths from the previous century who might have once, amidst the gilt, the stateliness, the tranquillity of the past, dreamed courageous dreams of becoming great musicians, of escaping the ordinariness of their lots—of not ending their days in shabby apartments of dreary buildings, cherishing no hopes but to live long enough to attend someone else’s concert…

She walked slowly, but her heart beat as though she were fleeing.

Once outside, she ran, ran through the luminous April evening fresh with green twilight, through the light, clear smells that tugged at her hair, her clothes, her heart with fierce, wordless summons. When she got home, she hurried to the bedroom, and, consumed by urgency, plowed through a drawer, throwing clothes about in rising frustration, at last pulling out, from under a flattened layer of winter stockings, a brown-tinted snapshot, which fit inside her palm. She closed her hand over it, feeling the thickness of the paper under her fingertips.

“A big family and many friends on my father’s side,” she repeated aloud, indecisively, as if testing the truth of her words.

That night she did not sleep, groping for the contours of her past in the well of her memory the color of a winter night, encountering only the underside of strange, insubstantial feelings that scurried away from her touch like the cockroaches that ran off when the light came on in the kitchen. She had been only five at the time of the Change; she had forgotten more than she remembered. Sometime before dawn, she tiptoed down the corridor, and stopped, and listened; but of course, there was no voice, there had never been any voice, all was quiet. She wanted to burst inside, shake her mother awake, demand answers to all the things she did not know, all the things she had not thought to ask before. Tell me why you need a ticket to this concert. Do you miss your youth, your years in the ballet, before you had me, before everything changed? Tell me about your dancing. And my father, tell me about my father. Did he want you to keep dancing, or was he glad of me? Were you? And where did we live before that drafty communal apartment I remember from later? Did I have many friends? Did I dream up the fireplace, the piano, the suppers? And where were you on that day when my father stepped into the road without looking?

Did you cry for him?

Did you love him?

Were you happy?

She rested her hand briefly on the door handle, held its cold concealed in her palm, then returned to her bed, to her husband’s unnaturally measured snores. She spent the next week or two combing the neighborhood, and in the end, slightly queasy, bought a small framed portrait of a somber-eyed woman, someone’s aunt or godmother, perhaps, from a breezy character in a torn jacket who accosted her in a deserted alley, his breath vile, his pockets spilling with all sorts of pathetic, expiring knickknacks. At home, having mauled the corners of her father’s square photograph with the dull scissors she used for splaying open her special-occasion chickens, she crammed it into the oval frame. She had not discarded the unknown woman; a bit of the woman’s white dress still showed in a jagged rip produced by a nervous dip of her hand. When she was done, she studied her father’s stolid middle-aged face, his nearsighted, kindly eyes, the shadowy presence of the second chin; then, not finding what she sought, she carefully placed the newly framed picture on her nightstand.

Still, that recent feeling of urgency did not release her, and one evening in May, with her husband waiting in line, her son eating a solitary supper, and her mother drawing a bath, she slipped into the room that was not hers, and hastily, her movements ugly, violated a dresser, making it yield its long-preserved scents of dried flowers and aged frailty and graceful turn-of-the-century transgressions. Flushed, she fumbled through the neatly folded strata of decaying lace, of silk worn thin and brittle as old paper. At last, lifting the edge of a musty green shawl, she found what she wanted, and stealthily carried the bundle off to her bedroom.

There, some hours later, Sergei happened upon her, sitting on the edge of the bed with her arms wound around her knees, her knuckles white.

“Has something… Are you all right?” he asked.

She nodded, but would not meet his eyes. Her eyelashes were spiky with dampness.

“I know my mother is difficult, but she’s a sad woman, Serezha,” she said in a whisper. “Thank you for—well, you know.”

Shame rose in his throat like bile.

“It’s nothing,” he said, but after she fell asleep, he got up and left the room and hid in the blindness of the kitchen. He thought of the anticipation that held him, tight like clenched hands, all through his blurry days, and the evenings unfolding at last, resonant and deep, their blue spirals full of Pavel’s singing, and passionate arguments with Vladimir Semyonovich about music and courage and destiny and many other things he had never put into words before, and later, Sofia’s light heels etching a map of the mysterious city, the city in which he lived, had lived all his life, but which he no longer recognized through the gentle rain of falling white petals, through the mist of his near-happiness; and every evening, as he walked her to her building, talking about the concert, or their favorite composers, or the books they had read as children, or nothing at all, his happiness would expand until he would feel again that stab of pain, that tormented gasping for air, just as, after a soft good-bye, she would run up the stairs to her door, her ascending steps—one, two, three, the fourth cut off by the door bang—inscribing themselves on the black sheet of quiet as the notes of some elusive score he strove to decipher, and retain in his memory, so that he could keep at least a small part of it with him while he waited impatiently for the next evening, for the next walk…

The hour crossed over the threshold of midnight. Globes of lamplights floated above the pavements, smoking with dense, foggy illumination; dogs held involved conversations in the distance, and, just down the street, a drunken brawl scratched the surface of the darkness with a flash of broken bottle, a flourish of headlights sliding down a blade—and still he sat without moving, seemingly without breathing, until he grew inseparable from the fabric of the spring night alive with pained, joyful, heady longings, with some vast, inarticulate promise; so much so that when, well after two o’clock in the morning, Alexander stumbled inside and made for the pantry without turning on the light, he confused his father’s legs for a shadowy extension of a chair and went sprawling, and cursing, on the floor.

4

“MY FOLKS ARE BECOMING UNHINGED,” Alexander said the next night, cupping glowing fingers around a flickering match. “The line’s getting to them.”

“Lucky for you you’ll be making your escape any day now.” Nikolai’s teeth flashed briskly. “You’d better start packing, my friend.”

“Yeah, sure,” Alexander muttered. For a while they smoked in silence, two specks of light in the softly chilled darkness diluted by pale squares of windows above (the streetlamp had burned out the night before), the smell of cheap cigarettes mixing with the chemical smell of gasoline and something he could not immediately identify—something sharp and clean and not altogether unpleasant. “You know, I’ve been thinking,” he said at last, “all these people waiting here for so long, just to get these tickets? Ever wonder about this man, what’s his name? I guess he must be pretty special.”

Nikolai’s jacket rustled; Alexander guessed at a shrug.

“I’m just here for the money,” Nikolai said. “A coward isn’t worth my time. Ran off when things got tough, didn’t he? Probably hangs around with the wrong kind of crowd Over There, too, I wouldn’t be surprised—lots of fairies abroad, makes you sick!”

Alexander frowned at him. There might have been a new gathering of stormy color around Nikolai’s left eye, but in the absence of light Alexander could not be sure. Nikolai shrugged again, shook his pack of cigarettes, poked inside it, turned it upside down and shook it with more violence, then spat, and tossed the pack away. “Damn it. All right, I won’t be long. And if these louts try to start without me again, tell them I’ll come back and wring their necks. You in?”

“I lost everything I had yesterday,” Alexander said with reluctance.

“I’ll lend you some.”

“I won’t be able to return it. My father has stopped paying me.”

“No worries, we’ll work something out!” Nikolai shouted from across the street.

Alexander was still looking after him when a laborious shuffle began at his back; he caught a straining movement out of the corner of his eye. The shadow straightened.

“Would you be so kind as to hold my place a minute, please,” said an elderly voice.

Alexander grunted noncommittally. The old geezer in line next to him kept to himself; they had not spoken. The retreating taps of the cane scraped along the line’s vertebrae, carrying away, he knew without turning, the crumpled cigarette pack that Nikolai had thrown to the ground. The geezer was long in finding a trash can; when he returned at last, Alexander sensed his tall, threadbare darkness leaning forward, and thought with exasperation, Going to lecture me on the uncivilized practice of littering, or else the harm of smoking… He glanced back all the same, irked by some vague, uncomfortable impulse—not quite curiosity, not quite belligerence. In the twilight that eclipsed the old man’s small, neat, clean-shaven face, two round, gleaming holes flashed white and liquid in the light of a passing car before going dull again.

“It’s not true, you know,” the old man said mildly, righting his glasses.

“What’s not true?”

“The things your friend said about Igor Selinsky. They aren’t true.”

“What, he’s not a fairy?”

“He is not a coward,” said the old man after a short silence.

“Ah, so he is a fairy, then,” Alexander shot back, and instantly wished he had not; but just then there was a jolting up ahead, an uproar of voices spilling over, and as the line started to stumble, to trip over itself, Nikolai appeared out of nowhere to break up the fight—or perhaps he had been in the fight to begin with—and everyone shouted and ran here and there; and soon, trading jovial insults, they were already setting up empty crates on the sidewalk, preparing for their nightly game of cards.

And Alexander played that night, and lost some more money, this time not even his own, and lost again the next night, and the night after that, and after a week, Nikolai, in his usual cheerful manner, relieved Alexander of his knife, telling him that he could win it back anytime he wanted, of course, and in any case he could always borrow it for a day or two; and though Alexander was very sorry to see the knife go, he made no protest, because he had lost it fair and square, but also, mainly, because as he was handing it over, scowling to save face, he suddenly understood just how much he loved these nights—loved the brightening chill in the air past midnight, the freedom of going nowhere, doing nothing, existing in some secret, timeless pocket of invisibility, some private allotment of night, alongside these gruff, dangerous men; staying awake, alert, alive, while in identical, ugly buildings all through the city, nighttime windows quickened with identical, ugly lives moving like cutout puppets on dozens of lit stages in dozens of predictable plays, until one after another the windows, overripe, fell to the ground and were swallowed by darkness, and the hated city crawled into a torpor of communal slumber—and still they were there, gathered under the broken streetlamp, at one, at two in the morning, the men in their close, noisy circle pungent with the smells of nicotine and sweat and exotic fruit (dates, someone said, a limited shipment, once transported in the crates they used for tables and chairs), their faces a wild jigsaw of obscurity and light as the hours leapt by and emptied bottles clanked and rolled at their feet and the beams of their flashlights swung in increasingly erratic zigzags, sideways, and up, and down, illuminating a chin made doubly massive by its square deposit of shadow, a nose grotesque with nostrils that appeared to smoke with a thicket of bright yellow hairs, a hand of cards, a hand sliding a bill into a pocket, a hand landing a blow, a nose swelling with nostrils that ran black and dense down another unshaven chin—and above it all flowed that smell, crisp and clean and exuberant, which, he now knew, was simply the smell of the dying spring mixed with a trace of possible happiness.

He found himself hoping that the tickets would not go on sale, not just yet.

In the mornings, he would drag himself out of bed and into his school uniform, then leave with his book bag conspicuously slung over his shoulder. The bag had no books in it, only clothes. He would change in the stairwell, stuff the uniform into the bag, then limp to the neighborhood park and sleep off his hangover in the undergrowth behind an out-of-the-way bench. In the afternoons, he roamed the streets. The daytime city was just as drab as ever, but things felt different now, for the air tingled with possibilities, small chinks through which his other, secret life leaked in occasional, thrilling flashes. Often he would receive casual nods from men unloading trucks or disappearing into doorways—big, surly men whose faces seemed only half familiar in the daylight. Once, in the evening, a bejeweled woman in the window of a kiosk a few blocks from theirs beckoned to him as he passed, and, squinting at him through heavily caked eyelashes, gave him a meat pie and a miniature tube of foreign toothpaste, and would not take his money. “My husband owes you, anyway,” she said inexplicably, before dismissing him with a royal toss of her earrings.

On another occasion, when he had a particularly vicious headache and only the haziest recollection of the previous night, he had run into a schoolmate on a street corner, and they had just fallen into step when a youth with a fading scar under his eye ambled up to them. “Shit,” the schoolmate said under his breath. Alexander too shrank away, recognizing the character who that past winter had sold him the bottle of cognac in the abandoned church. He expected to be insulted or even hurt, but the youth thrust a couple of small bills into his hand instead, and, sauntering away, threw over his shoulder, “Thanks for yesterday, brother.”

“Sure thing,” Alexander called after him loudly. “Anytime.” After that, he was accorded so much respect at school that he even went once or twice, but it quickly lost its appeal.

Sometimes, when the pounding in his temples was not too fierce, he wondered whether his mother knew: she herself taught younger classes, but other teachers must have complained about his absences. Every morning, as she ironed his uniform, she sighed and said, “Sashenka, just what do you do to get it so wrinkled?” She never offered to accompany him, though (they had been leaving home separately since he was eight or nine), and never asked anything else—not until that Monday three weeks before his final exams, when she followed him to the door and, in the dimness of the foyer, placed her hands on his shoulders.

“Is everything all right with you, Sasha?” she said quietly.

Next to them, in the brown, sad depths of an old mirror, a dumpy middle-aged woman moved her lips without a sound, imploring, imploring a reedy young fellow for something important. As Alexander strained to read the words on the woman’s lips, his eyes met the fellow’s bleary, cagey eyes, and held them, and sneaked away.

“I’m fine,” he said to his mother, “just a bit tired. It’s, well—it’s the line, you know.”

She bowed her head. Her hair was thinning a little, he saw; he had really shot up in the last few months, was taller than she was now, taller than anyone in the family, in fact—they all wondered whom he had taken after. She seemed about to say something, then did not; but as he was stepping over the threshold, he cast an uneasy glance back, and the dumpy woman in the dark, abandoned cave of the mirror was speaking, speaking with passion, as if apologizing, as if thanking him for something…

He felt an odd wince of pity and guilt, an almost physical sensation of a hot hand reaching out to squeeze his throat, then letting go.

“Bye, Mama,” he muttered, and shut the door louder than he had meant to.

Left alone, Anna slowly walked back to her bedroom; she had called in sick at school, for the second time that month. She drew the curtains tight against the light, then sat down on the bed, reached under the mattress, and pulled out the bundle of postcards. She held them in her hands for a quiet minute before untying the balding velvet ribbon that bound them together and spreading them along the edge of the blanket in the amber dimness of the exiled morning. There were a few landscapes—a full moon over a lake, a night sea at the foot of some cliffs, a whitewashed village in the mountains. Most, though, were views of a city—foggy boulevards with rows of gas lamps shining through honey-edged mists; cobblestone streets, dark and ancient like dragon hide, winding up steep hills, small tables set out on the sidewalks; a mansion abloom with stone curlicues and nymphs, one of its windows marked with a green-ink cross; a chestnut alley, a river embankment, a cathedral, an arch. Men populating these places strolled along at a leisurely pace, carrying bouquets and walking sticks, pale gloves slung over one arm; women glided under lacy parasols and enormous hats, their faces in deep shadow.

She found it heartbreakingly beautiful.

She ran her hand over the postcards, tenderly touching the sepia-tinted paper, then flipped them over, one by one. She had hoped, had expected, to find among them her father’s letters, but in that she had been disappointed. Again she studied the delicate pastel-colored stamps, the foreign names of churches and squares printed along the edges in exaggerated gothic scripts; again she skimmed this postcard or that, picking out random sentences she now knew by heart.

She had fallen silent by degrees, small increments of shared joys and sorrows bleeding out through invisible cuts. By the time Anna had finished school, her mother often had what Anna thought of as quiet days, until there was a quiet week, and then—then silence, soft and comforting at first, a wise, forgiving presence presiding over the household, it seemed to Anna, then hardening into a crust of ice with the passing of years. But she had talked when Anna was young, not much, hardly ever about the past, yet enough for Anna to reconstruct her life’s simple geography. As a child she had studied dancing abroad, in a dazzling city of light at the heart of the cultured world, to which she returned much later with a touring ballet troupe, and where she gained fame, and stayed, and lived for years, a celebrated dancer in a legendary company, until she met a man from her native city, almost two decades her senior, and, having married him, departed with him on a brief visit to his family; and her daughter was born, and her husband died, and the revolution happened, and she never went back. These, then, were the postcards: the echoes from the life she had left behind, her dancing, her friends, her city.

There were different names, different handwritings. Vaslav’s was the girlish calligraphy on the backs of the impossibly romantic moonlit landscapes; Tamara, the one with the dead cat, wrote in unsteady lavender ink, the tails of her words flickering in wet smudges. There were nicknames, inside jokes, a couple of postcards signed “The Bow,” a few more from someone who called herself “Powder Puff” and scented her lines with a dramatic perfume whose ghost still floated nearly half a century later over her dips and curls. Hardly any were dated, but it was easy enough to trace their chronology. The early ones echoed with triumphant performances, sleepless nights, frequent heartbreaks—an unfamiliar, brilliant, intoxicating world of music by candlelight, glittering glances, sweet, heavy aromas of broken-stemmed lilies in champagne buckets, youth, exuberance, chaos, joy, pain, life. The later ones, fewer, contained guarded mentions of a small child, congratulations on her first, second birthdays.

After that, there was nothing.

When skinny parings of sunlight squeezed through the cleft in the curtains, Anna checked the clock and began to gather the postcards. Some minutes later, she entered the dusty twilight of her mother’s room, the bundle in her hand. She crossed to the dresser, opened its top drawer, and only then looked around. The room was empty; her mother was not there. She had wanted to be discovered, she realized now—had, indeed, held on to the postcards for so long in a vague hope of forcing her mother to speak. Disappointed, she listened to the sound of water running in the bathroom, then slid the postcards back into the drawer, between a small jar full of dung-colored beads and a box of dark green velvet. For another minute, she lingered, long enough to pull out the box, open it idly. In the perpetual rose-hued shadows of the place, the diamond earrings lay dull on their fraying cushion, their darkened facets empty of sparkle.

The water was still running.

Anna shut the box, shut the drawer, shut the door to the room.

But later that afternoon, waiting in line behind the woman who was there to further her husband’s career, in front of the boy who was hoping to make his grandfather happy, she thought that perhaps she had misunderstood, misunderstood everything. Perhaps it was not, as she had presumed, a record of loss. Perhaps, though none of the postcards was from her father, they were the only tangible, the only possible, evidence of a love he and her mother had shared, of a full, fulfilled life he had given her, if only briefly—a life, a family worth the sacrifice she had made.

She thought, then, about Alexander, who lied to her about school yet gave up his studies and his rest only to please her, to atone, she had guessed, for his long-forgiven lapse. She thought too about Sergei, who hardly talked to her, who had feigned sleep for weeks, yet who spent all his free time, day after day, standing in this soul-numbing line on her behalf, renouncing his own hope of attending the concert.

And then, growing quiet inside, she thought of something else—something she could do, something that, thrillingly, was in her power to do; and her early expectation of a surprise, of a present, of a change at the end of the line, which she had laid aside with such bitterness, flared up anew within her breast, this time vivid and certain.

That night she waited for her son to come home from his shift. He returned after two in the morning. She met him in the corridor; the smell sickened her, but she did not reprove him.

“Sasha, I need to ask you a favor,” she whispered, and shivered, and drew her robe closer about her. “If they sell the tickets on your watch, please bring the ticket to me.”

He stared at her with drowsy, bloodshot eyes, swaying slightly; she could not discern his expression in the dim yellow spill of the foyer lamp at his back.

“Not to your grandmother. To me,” she repeated. She was suddenly aware of the absolute stillness in the place, which seemed to surround her words, magnify them, lift them, clear and treacherous, into the air, for anyone to hear. “Will you—do you understand?”

His gaze shifted away, restlessly moved up and down the wall, as if caged by the stripes of the wallpaper. “Sure,” he murmured, and, veering wildly, stumbled off to his room.

Lying awake in the graying predawn light, nursing within herself the small, hopeful, newborn warmth of her private excitement, Anna felt sure, almost sure, that her mother, who had turned her back on her whole world for the man she loved, would understand, and forgive.

5

TWO WEEKS BEFORE HIS EXAMS, Alexander was dozing in the bushes behind his usual bench when it creaked under someone’s weight. Lifting his head, he peered, half asleep, between the bench’s legs, saw a beat-up pair of shoes and the pointed end of a cane, and, sinking once again to the ground, promptly tumbled back down a dark tunnel rushing with swift, whistling trains. When he woke up next, the shadows had moved from his left to his right, but the ancient shoes were there still. He brushed away the weave of sickly grass that had embedded itself into his knees and elbows, scrambled through the undergrowth, and strolled past the bench.

Sitting in the afternoon glare, reading a book, was the old geezer from the line.

“Hello,” the geezer said pleasantly. “Nice day to be out enjoying nature.”

Alexander considered him with suspicion. “It’s… you know… one of those May holidays,” he said, not certain what date it was. “School’s out.”

The old man did not appear to have heard him, busy fishing for something in the voluminous folds of his cardigan, producing at last an oily package.

“Bread and jam. Are you hungry?”

“I have homework to do,” Alexander said, moving off.

That night they nodded to each other in line, but did not talk. It rained for the next three days, so, to avoid getting soaked, Alexander idled the mornings away at school; but on Friday, passing through the park, he found the old man seated on the same bench.

“Another holiday?” the old man inquired, not lifting his eyes from his book.

“I’m skipping school,” Alexander said shortly. The exams were drawing closer and closer, and he was in a vile mood. The old man seemed unperturbed.

“Have you had breakfast yet?” he asked. “Fancy a boiled egg?”

Alexander looked at the shrunken egg laid out on a napkin in the old man’s lap.

“No,” he said. “And this is my bench.”

“This,” said the old man, “is a communal bench. Incidentally, shall we make our acquaintance? I’m Viktor Pyetrovich.”

Alexander glared at him. “Your glasses are cracked, did you know that?” he said, turning to go, and that night ignored the old man resolutely; but the next day, the old man was in the park again, feeding pigeons with bits of some dark, dense mass that stuck to his fingers.

“Trying to poison them?” Alexander inquired. “Commendable.”

“Gives me something to do,” the old man replied mildly. “Finding things to do is a problem at my age. You’ve read all the good old books by now, and discovered that there aren’t any good new ones. Though hopefully, things will be different in another sixty years.”

“My mother tells me not to say things like that.”

“And she is very wise, I’m sure. Old age has its advantages too. One is no longer afraid.”

“I’m not afraid.” Alexander fell silent, feeling the question push against his teeth, yet hesitating to ask. The old man glanced up at him; thrust into the light, his tidy little face flashed with two eyeless white suns, the left one split in the middle. Alexander squinted. “That one time, in the line—you said something about Selinsky. I just wondered what… what you know about him.”

“Quite a bit, as it happens.”

“Like—what?”

When the old man leaned back into shadow, the eyes abruptly emerged in his face, light and distant behind the old-fashioned silver-rimmed glasses. “Well, did you know, for instance, that when he found himself in the East—”

“The West, you mean.” Alexander sat down on the edge of the bench; the pigeons pressed against his feet with deep, throaty burrs.

“No, no, Selinsky went East first. During the civil war, he escaped to the southern sea. The war was spreading, and people were trying to flee across the sea, but boats were few, and the army was fast approaching. So with the last of his mother’s jewels, which he had smuggled out most ingeniously—but that’s another story—he purchased a small boat and started transporting refugees across the water. Of course, he never accepted payment for it, even though he himself had nothing left. Then one time, after his seventh crossing… But I shouldn’t be telling you things like this.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” Alexander said quickly. “I swear.”

“Well, I don’t know. Maybe just this one, then.”

The old man talked with his eyes half closed, sitting hunched forward and absolutely still, save for his long, bony fingers, which moved with a constant, nervous motion in his lap, tangling and untangling an invisible knot. Alexander listened, watching a solitary spot of light beneath his bench shift slowly across the gravel as the morning crept toward noon, watching the crazed pigeons with bloodied beaks chase one another away from the last sweet-smelling black crumbs. After a while, the warm, sunny air carried toward them the chiming of the hour from several radios set up before open windows in the buildings surrounding the park; having just begun, the chiming stopped, and, with a small exclamation, the old man consulted his watch, then hastily stood up and shuffled away, leaning heavily on his cane. Later, in the line, his bleached eyes were once again swimming in the bleak pools of quicksilver dusk lit up now and then by headlights, so Alexander could not be entirely sure; but it seemed to him that a look of fleeting understanding passed between them just before he joined the fellows for another spell of card-playing.

That night, as he lay awake, staring at the arrivals and departures of shadows on the ceiling, he imagined his room rocking slightly from side to side, imagined a man with proud eyebrows and the profile of an eagle bearing down on the oars of a small boat as it pulled away from shore, two families crowded inside its listing belly. The shore stood out black against the black sky; it was so quiet he could hear, beyond the lashing of the waves against the planks, the frantic hooves of invisible horses striking the pavement of the seaside promenade in the darkness beyond, and gunfire, and cries. The guide, a swarthy, gap-toothed youth on a second set of oars, allowed no light on board until the land was out of sight, but even when the danger was well past, no one rose to light the lantern in the prow, and no one spoke; only the guide muttered to himself the names of the constellations overhead.

The man with the eagle profile was a powerful rower. His shoulder blades were sore, but they did not slow down. Hours later, a point of light appeared dipping and rising in the shadowy swell before them and, nearing, resolved into the gray shape of a fishing boat, the lone fisherman holding up a lamp by its ring, the water lapping at the boat in brilliant flashes of many-splintered reflections. After a while there was another light in the distant fog, and another, and yet another, until he found himself straining to push his way through a floating mist of pale white stars, above and below and all around him. Then the sky grew warm, peach-tinted, the stars and the lamps faded, and the slender silhouettes of minarets pierced the musk-scented horizon.

“If you have any valuables on you,” the guide said through the gap in his teeth, “hide them now.”

That night, as always, he and the guide stayed at the house of a woman he knew, had known in another life. A long time before, when he was barely past twenty, in an elegant, pearl-colored city under remote pearl-colored skies, she had come to one of his concerts and tossed a bouquet at him from her velvet-padded box. Later, there had been the silky closeness of her carriage and a strand of pearls breaking in the dark, and later still, a secret exchange of letters, and that gray, chilly dawn when he had stepped outside his hotel, carrying his violin case and a small suitcase. A boy had run up to him all out of breath, and, inquiring after his name, thrust a note into his hand. As he stood reading it, the wind ripped it from his gloved fingers, but not before he had seen the words “returning unexpectedly today” and “mustn’t do anything rash”—

“Will there be a reply?” the boy had asked.

“No reply,” he had said, and dropped some coins in the boy’s proffered palm, and gone inside, and unpacked the suitcase, and let his life flow in a different direction, until, a decade later, after their second run across the sea, he and Marat were walking along the awakening bay in the rosy light of the eastern morning, and peacocks cried hoarsely in hidden gardens, and a middle-aged woman passed them, then stopped, and turned, and said slowly, “My God.”

“You’re here with your husband?” he had asked.

“My husband’s been dead eight years,” she had replied. “I have a place nearby, if you and your friend need somewhere to stay.”

And they had stayed at her place that night, and had returned, again and again, every time they had come into the city. On this night, the night of their seventh crossing, the youth fell asleep on a pile of rugs, in a first-floor room she had begun to rent out to a carpet shop next door; her money was running short. The two of them sat upstairs, by an open window, drinking the cool mint tea she had brewed, watching a large pale moth draw circles around the lamp.

“It’s over, you know,” she said after a while. “You can’t go back. Not this time.”

“I’ve made promises,” he said. “People need me.”

“You’ll be shot,” she said.

He was silent.

“I need you,” she said.

He thought of telling her that his music had remained behind, the dark symphony he had written in feverish bursts, to drown out the ugly staccato of gunfire in his ears; he had left the notes in a neat stack on his desk, a guarantee against a sudden attack of cowardice—

“You don’t need me,” he said.

She sighed—a small sigh, as if she had briefly forgotten how to breathe—then set down her cup, and took his cup out of his hand, and blew out the lamp; but after he had drifted off to sleep, she rose, and felt for a small sandalwood box in a secret drawer of her nightstand, and tiptoed downstairs, and shook the youth awake.

In the morning, he was untroubled to find his friend gone.

“Marat must be waiting for me at the bay,” he said. “I must go now.”

She kissed him as she always had, in the doorway, repeating, “Careful, not across the threshold,” standing on tiptoe to reach him.

“I’ll see you soon, I promise,” he said to her, also as always—and, surprised, searched her face; for her lips had not trembled.

She believed he would be returning before the sun turned white in the midday sky. She waited all through the evening, and at night stood by the window, staring into the street, enormous brown moths beating softly against her face. He never came back. He spent the night wandering by the harbor, looking across the dark roll of the waters toward the land to which he had not been allowed to bid farewell. When the sun rose, he turned and vanished into a maze of ancient streets; but as he passed watermelons glistening in the limpid early light and girls beating carpets, Alexander fell to wondering whether eastern girls left their faces draped or uncovered, and what musk and rose oil smelled like, and as his thoughts grew more and more muddled by sleep, he had somehow retraced his steps and found himself back in the woman’s house, drinking cool tea, only the woman was much younger this time, entwining soft, naked arms around his neck, and the pearls went bouncing off the luxurious rugs once again.

“So what happened to that music he left in his room?” he asked Viktor Pyetrovich when they met in the park the next morning.

“Gone,” the old man said. “The house burned down when the army set fire to the town.”

Alexander thought for a minute. “How do you know about it, anyway? Not the kind of thing they’d put in history books or whatever.”

“Oh, he’ll be in the next editions for sure,” the old man said with a smile. “Times are changing. All the same, I doubt I’ll live to see in print the story of his being mistaken for a spy in an opium den in the Far East, where he traveled collecting songs after leaving the minaret city.”

“How does that one go?” Alexander asked—and it was only much later, when the old man had departed, that he realized his other question had been left unanswered.

It drizzled for the next few days, and Viktor Pyetrovich did not come to the park. Alexander hesitated to address him while in line, and the puzzlement grew in his mind—how did the old man know, how could he possibly know such things? He often drifted into thinking about it, especially late at night when the city grew so quiet he imagined he could hear birds rubbing feathers in their sleep outside his window, and the rustle of cockroaches in the kitchen trash can, and that disembodied voice that some faulty conjunction of pipes carried from somewhere deep in the building—the ancient singsong voice that he had first heard in the early spring, and that now frequently rose in the predawn hours, talking of outlandish, theatrical things. Crisscrossing his sleep again and again, like a swift silver needle pulling a thread back and forth across the fabric of darkness, the voice would stitch the hours together, seamlessly merging its stories with his own dreams, his own thoughts, so he would often awaken with his head inhabited by a swarm of buzzing visions, half believing he had invented all of them himself—mermaids sipping frothy drinks from dainty little cups in terraced cafés, hiding their tails under elaborately ruffled skirts; songs extracted with special curved spoons from the rosy spirals of seashells sold in hidden street markets; goldfish languidly swimming inside the limbs of glass mannequins in the fashionable shops of some city—the faraway, fantastical, nonexistent city that the voice always haunted as it leaked through the tiny cracks in his slumber.

The voice did not sound every night, but as he fell into anxious sleep on the Saturday before his exams, he thought he heard it begin a story about a curtain rising over a stage in the heart of the fairytale city. Yes, the curtain rose at last; the musicians leapt into their melodies like swimmers into pools of startlingly cold, clear water; the dancers flew out from behind paper trees. The music was unlike anything ever heard before—the ballet had been written by a young composer of brilliant promise. They said he was living in the city at that time, but no one had seen him at the rehearsals. We were all curious, of course, but for me, it went beyond curiosity. As weeks of grueling practices went by and he did not appear, I began to feel restless.

I wanted him to watch me dance, you see.

“Geniuses are peculiar,” Vaslav said to me on opening night, and stroked my hand as one strokes a cat, tenderly and with caution. “You should know, my heart.”

The stage was a soft velvet void aglow with flickering lights: the floors and the walls had been draped in black, and hundreds, maybe thousands, of candles had been lit in tiny holders of gleaming black crystal—so many, indeed, that they had brought in two or three boys from the street an hour before the performance, to assist in lighting the wicks. I watched them from the wings, entranced by darkness coming alive, by the manifold eyes of light opening one after another.

I was nervous.

It was the hardest thing I had ever done, that solo dance, and also the most beautiful. There was one moment, toward the end, when the beauty became so terrible that I felt I was dying. But then, that was as intended: the candles, you see, were the stars, and I the moon, and I waxed, and I waned, and I died. On that first night, I danced, and danced, and danced, until my eyes grew blind, and my feet grew wings, until the world around me was waxing and cresting and fading with me, the lights dancing deep beneath my skin, the music an elusive trickle, then a roaring waterfall, then a drip-drop of falling stars in my ears, then a long, delirious moan. When the heartbreak of it all had whittled my soul down to nothing and my last silver veil had glided to the floor, I took that final, breathless leap through a black rip in the black sky. The next morning, they wrote about it in all their newspapers. Impossible, impossible, they exclaimed in their birdlike voices—“Oh, it looked just as if she was flying!”—and they crowded into the theater the next night, and the night after that, and for many more nights, to see me suspended in flight for that one extra heartbeat they claimed was unnatural. “She who doesn’t come down with the music,” they called me. And in truth, the leap was wrenchingly difficult. At rehearsals, the backup dancers would stand in the wings, waiting to catch me as I descended from my velvet heavens, and I would slip through their well-meaning, oblivious fingers, and crumple to the ground.

On that first night, though, there were no backup dancers in the wings—someone else arrested my flight, someone I did not know. And when my breath returned at last, there he was still, gazing at me from the shadows, and I recognized one of the boys who had helped light the candles. As I looked at him, I saw he was not a boy but a young man of twenty-three or twenty-four. He had a sad face, an expressive mouth, surprising green eyes. Then he spoke, and he seemed older still. “Thank you,” he said—and just like that, I knew who he was. Thank you, I wanted to say, but I could not, because suddenly I felt like weeping. But at this point, as often happened, the voice must have begun to slip away, diluted by Alexander’s dreams, for the mysterious candle boy turned out to be the reclusive composer Igor Selinsky, and, gaining courage, Alexander was soon asking him the question that was bothering him still, how did the old man know, how did he know all these things about you, and Selinsky, whose face was no longer a face, whose face was a candle flame guttering and waving, replied in a voice that was like a breeze through Alexander’s head, “He knows because he is me, because you are me, because I do not exist,” and then the moon waned and died, and at last Alexander slept fully.

The next morning, the last Sunday in May, his father intercepted him in the hallway.

“Your exams start in just a few days, don’t they?” he said. “I guess I’ll take over the night shift for a week or two, so you’ll have nothing to distract you for the duration. You’ve wasted too much time in that line as it is.”

“Sure, but I might as well go one last time tonight,” Alexander said offhandedly. “I have to—that is—”

He was racking his brains for some excuse to add when his father nodded and walked off; he seemed to be thinking about something else.

That night, it continued to rain. Viktor Pyetrovich fought a gigantic umbrella with a flapping edge; the cough from which he had suffered for a while had gotten worse. Alexander waited for a chance to speak. Sometime past midnight, his friends clustered in the bushes around a flashlight, shining it on small, faintly glittering things in their hands, discussing something incoherently but with passion; he could hear Nikolai’s voice raised among them. He turned back, ducking the umbrella’s bare spokes, which the wind was tossing above Viktor Pyetrovich’s head.

“You’ve stopped coming to the park,” he burst out, and immediately winced at how childish he sounded.

“I’m sorry,” said the old man. “I haven’t been feeling well lately. In fact, I’ll have to miss a few nights here. They want me to rest, this weather isn’t good for my bones. You can always stop by my place, though, if you want to talk. Here, I’ll jot the address down for you.”

Alexander held the umbrella, which kept trying to fly off into the glistening darkness, over Viktor Pyetrovich while the old man struggled to write. Receiving the scrap of paper, Alexander turned it over in his fingers, slippery with the rain. It was a corner of some score. He saw a treble clef, the only symbol he had ever learned to recognize after all of his father’s efforts to teach him musical notation; its tail ran thick and wet, smudged by a chance drop of water.

“Visit me anytime,” Viktor Pyetrovich had scrawled on the other side, above the address.

Nikolai was now returning from the shadows, calling out to Alexander across the road.

He shoved the note into his bag and, taking a step back, asked in a hasty undertone: “So then, how do you know about Selinsky?”

He had already looked away when the old man bent forward and whispered: “Selinsky writes to me.”

6

“SO WHAT DID YOU FIND OUT?”

“Nothing whatsoever. She wouldn’t talk to me. Said she was busy.”

“What’s she busy with? There are no tickets to sell anyway, she just sits there.”

“Well, maybe she has accounting to do, or ticket schedules to go over. She looks so cross she must be doing something. Though she could be knitting, I suppose… Oh, and by the way, I saw that relic of a man again, he never seems to leave, morning or night. Doesn’t he have any family to take over for him?”

“You mean the ancient fellow at number seven? He looks happy enough, always smiling at people. Perhaps he’s touched. I doubt he has anything better to do with himself, in any case. Waiting passes the time.”

“Very true, very true. Indeed, I sometimes worry that’s what it’s all about.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, what if there aren’t actually any tickets to any concert?”

“Are you mad?”

“What’s he saying? I’m hard of hearing.”

“He’s saying there won’t be any tickets.”

“What?!”

“Has the concert sold out already?”

“How is that possible, is there another kiosk somewhere that—”

“No, no, you misunderstand. All I’m saying is, there are hundreds of kiosks all over the city, and they are all selling something, and there are lines to all of them, you know?”

“Where is he going with this?”

“He’s gone daft, don’t pay any attention!”

“All I’m saying is, it’s a very efficient way of disposing of people’s time, don’t you see? Thousands of us, some waiting for stockings, others for symphonies. But what if there aren’t any stockings, what if there aren’t any symphonies, so to speak? What if all of this is just a means to keep the masses occupied and hopeful—a cheap solution to the problem of time?”

“Wait, does this idiot seriously believe that the State is maintaining a system of phony kiosks just so we waste our time waiting for things that don’t exist?”

“No, no, I’m not claiming that’s how it is, I’m only saying it philosophically. Like a metaphor, a metaphor of life, do you understand?”

“Well, metaphor or not, this smells of subversion to me. You’d do well to keep your voice down—”

“I’m not listening. I’m not listening. If anyone asks, I heard nothing!”

“Oh God, this is absurd. I’m going to march up to that woman right now and demand an answer. Surely she knows when the bloody tickets will be in.”