The Concert Ticket

1

THE EVENINGS OF EARLY SUMMER were filled with lucid light, the day’s soft lingering. “Days in June have double bottoms,” Sofia said to him during their first night shift together, “have you noticed? Just when you think it’s over, another, secret drawer full of light slides open.”

Shortly after ten o’clock, the day’s second drawer would shut with a noiseless click and darkness would move in abruptly.

“As if someone careless has broken a bottle of ink in the sky,” she said that first night, glancing up. Sergei saw the hollow palpitating like a pale bruise at the base of her neck, just where a delicate, pearly button of her blouse had come undone, and looked away quickly. The evening crowd was now leaving; he watched Pavel and Vladimir Semyonovich depart together, deep in conversation. The line was already losing its well-defined contours, shifting into a shapeless, shifty mass, disintegrating into islands of indistinct figures seated along curbs or gathering under trees, dribbling unsteady flashlight beams onto shadowy preoccupations. Glasses clinked, cigarettes flared; he heard a fight erupt somewhere ahead. The streetlamp, he realized suddenly, was burnt out, probably had been burnt out for a while; and as the familiar surroundings of his evening vigils—the fence, the low buildings along the street, the cutout of the church against the pale sky—stepped back into the night’s expanding darkness, he witnessed a different, unrecognizable city come into being before him, one that was foreign, perhaps even vaguely dangerous, yet somehow larger than the earlier city, its great obscure stretches sheltering unpredictable, mysterious happenings and emotions.

He felt unmoored.

“Sergei Vasilievich, are you hungry?” Sofia called out.

She had walked over to a patch of wilted grass by the sidewalk and sat down on the ground. He hesitated. It had rained the day before, and the dampness lingered; briefly he worried about the grass stains likely to imprint themselves on his pants. Yet when he saw her gazing up at him expectantly, an unbearable thought took hold of him—What if she thinks of me as an affable, staid, prudent fellow, a type of uncle, soon to be fifty? He crossed over to her, and, throwing himself down, stretched out on his back and stared upward, at the vague white cloud hovering at the top of the dead streetlamp’s pole, at the trees, which in the daytime were stunted and scarred with graffiti, but now were only a black rustle of invisible leaves in the sky. “Isn’t it wonderful to lie in the grass in the early days of summer, looking at the stars?” he exclaimed; and oddly, though his words had sounded stiff and affected, a caricature of themselves, some part of him had meant some part of them.

She glanced at him with a slight frown, hunted for something in her handbag.

“I fear it’s not much,” she said, unwrapping a parcel.

Embarrassed, he sat up, murmured his thanks—but as he clumsily relieved her of a slice of bread, their hands touched in passing, and the unseen city behind them grew darker and larger, more thrilling.

In the morning he discovered that both his pants and his jacket had nasty green stains in their folds, but he no longer cared. They shared late suppers for the next two weeks. After the evening shift left, she would take out a loaf of rye bread, a container of butter, some parsley she had bought from a woman at the tram stop. “I’m sorry I don’t cook,” she kept apologizing; and he could not bring himself to tell her how much he loved the simplicity of their meals, how many times he wished he could preserve some small, random moment just as it was, unchanging, unmoving—the slow tide of nighttime conversations drifting in, distant cigarette sparks flickering in the shadows, the taste of butter and herbs in his mouth, the pensive incline of her neck, her thin, graceful hands slicing the bread, spreading the napkins…

The ring was on her finger, as before, but it upset him less now.

They talked as they ate, continued to talk after she had packed away the leftovers. As days went by, he felt they had more to say to each other, not less. One night in mid-June, they were talking still when, at two in the morning, characters wandering around the kiosk began to fade away and he helped her up and guided her past the drunks splattered over the sidewalk dealing cards, spitting on the ground, cursing some Sashka who had skipped out on them for the second week running. As always, he walked her to her building. They never discussed their daily lives. He had alluded to his family enough for her to understand that he was married to a school-teacher, had a nearly grown son, and found contentment in neither. He, in turn, had gathered that there had been some entanglement with an unlucky outcome in her past, but that she was alone now; as for her ring, she probably wore it because at her age—she was thirty-three, she had told him—spinsters were pitied. He felt certain that all the blank, reticent spots would be filled in time, but these nights, they talked about music. He told her about his childhood, his love for the violin, his parents who had believed in his talent, his teachers who had spoken of his promising future. Selinsky, by the way, had started out as a violin player himself, did she know?

“I didn’t know,” she replied. “I’ve never even heard any of his music.”

“You just need to be patient for a little while longer,” he said.

Her steps quickened. She seemed to force herself to slow down, to walk beside him.

“But you play the tuba now,” she said.

“Yes, well, my music school—” He caught himself deliberating, choosing his words, and felt instantly ashamed of his caution. “My parents were paying for the best musical education, but after the Change, the State enforced open admission to my school. ‘Bringing Art to the Masses,’ they called it. Of course, most of the newly enrolled were not interested in music. And those of us who were considered privileged were expelled or, if lucky, assigned to instruments regarded as sufficiently revolutionary. I was among the lucky ones, I got the tuba. My best friend got the drums. He could have been a true virtuoso. A pianist.”

She halted, touched his arm.

“Perhaps we were born at the wrong time,” she said softly, “but it will be different for our children.” She was looking up at him now, her hand still resting, warm and light, in the crook of his arm. His breath caught. He felt the night leaning closer against them, wrapping them in their own private darkness, the few glowing balloons of surrounding streetlamps drifting upward into the sky, where someone celestially indifferent had spilled ink anew—and already he was taking a step forward, so near her now, and already he was—but though there had never been another moment as perfect, as quiet, as self-contained, he saw something still and pained in her face, not quite as obvious as a bitten lip or a frown, rather a subtle, paling withdrawal…

He took a step back, small and endless. She exhaled.

“Well, here we are, then,” she said. “Thank you as always.”

He hadn’t realized they had stopped in front of her building.

“Of course,” he said, exhaling also. The pressure of her hand was gone. “Anytime.”

One click—two clicks—three clicks—four… On the top step, she turned, nothing but a smudged, wispy silhouette in the dark—a purse, a skirt, a hint of a glinting button—yet he imagined he could see the faint glow of her mournful eyes in her thin, shadowy face. “I meant to tell you, I won’t be doing late nights any longer, just evenings,” she said. She had never explained, but he had surmised that there was an illness in her family, her elderly father, perhaps. “And your son, is he still taking his exams?”

“Today was his last one,” he said, not knowing whether it was true. “In fact, I’m done with the night shift myself.”

“Ah. Well, thank you again. I’ll see you tomorrow evening.”

“Yes,” he said. “Good night.”

After the front door closed, he stood still for a while, willing himself not to give in to the dismal sense of finality that had threatened to overwhelm him, looking at the blind windows of the building, waiting for one of them to come alive. The windows stayed dark. He did not know what floor she lived on; she had never asked him to come up. He turned away.

The balloons of the streetlamps had returned to their perches by the time he reached home. Everyone was asleep. In the kitchen, he poured himself a cup of cold tea, to postpone his entombment in his wife’s bed, and sat at the table, Sofia’s words circling in his mind like a moth around the lamp lit on the veranda of his childhood summer house, where he used to while away evening after evening ensconced within the lamp’s soft green circle, a nine-year-old boy deciphering a score. It will be different for our children, it will be different for our children, it will be different… A neighbor’s radio muttered on the other side of the wall, and the lump of sugar refused to dissolve in the cold water, and he swirled his spoon in the cup, round and round, in the dull rhythm of her words, of the moth bumping against the lamp—“Serezhenka, sunshine, come inside, Katya has served the pastries and your tea’s getting cold!”—and still the radio program droned on and on, the elderly voice of an announcer tossed up and down on static waves, until, tuning in involuntarily, he realized it was the same odd program they had recently begun to broadcast late at night, which he heard through the wall now and then while he sat in the kitchen during his spells of insomnia.

He did not listen as he sipped the pale, tasteless liquid, because his thoughts were elsewhere, but also because the stories that the voice had read on those other occasions had always been drivel—something about a confectionery shop that sold enchanted chocolates with the power to bring to memory the most perfect day of one’s life; or the ghost of a cat named Cloud that haunted the wings of some theater in a distant city; or a girl spending all her wages on an extravagant, hideous hat in the shape of a violin on the day she had fallen in love with a boy whose job, if he had heard it right, was to light candles—yes, shockingly frivolous drivel, which had absolutely no place on the radio, and which, if he was to be honest with himself, made him sad for some unfathomable reason.

He did not listen, then, as he sat sipping tea in his wife’s dark kitchen at three in the morning, but the voice still rode the waves, and single words or phrases or at times whole passages surfaced on their crests—“a movement of piercing beauty… the sensation of the season… my costume was sewn with sharp spangles, and Vaslav cut his hands lifting me. When I took my bows, my dress was smeared with blood. An ill omen, they exclaimed as they flocked around me backstage, ah, such an ill omen…”

He set his cup down, spilling the tea, held his breath.

“… And finally, the Waltz of the Fireflies,” read the announcer. “The first modern waltz ever written, they called it. Once in a garden at night, just before a summer storm, he had seen hundreds of fireflies blinking on and off, drawing a glowing figure in the sky. That was when he conceived the theme—the gentle flickering, the first sinister notes of distant thunder, the chaos of light and darkness welling up just beneath the orderly movement, well, you’ve heard it, I’m sure, I don’t have to go on. Of course, the story of the fireflies was known to the music critics of the day, hence the name, but I was one of the few, perhaps the only one, who knew what the figure had been, the figure that the fireflies had drawn in the troubled sky—”

The voice grew muffled, as if the announcer had begun to speak into a pillow. Sergei leapt up, turning the chair over with a crash, rushed to the window, flung the pane open, and stuck his head out, and listened, hoping that the unknown neighbor might have her window open as well, hoping that the sound would reach him better here. The night outside hung enormous and warm and still, like a taut black sheet clipped to the heavens by some celestial housewife going about her chores. All was silent. Not giving up, he dashed to the bedroom, found his own radio in the dark, and for some minutes furiously mauled the dials. On one station a shrill-voiced choir jabbered patriotic songs; on the rest, there was only dead crackling. His wife stirred, sighing some indistinct word in her slumber; he switched the radio off. But as he was falling asleep, just before dawn, he thought again of her words, and he knew she was right, and nothing was over, and as he waded into a shallow dream, stream, dream, fireflies flickering above its water, his feeling of despair lifted at last, for she did not mean her children, of course, it was only a figure of speech—and soon, very soon, he would tell her.

When he awoke the next morning, the other side of the bed was deserted; bright birdsong and noisy sunlight filled the window. He lay still, measuring the silence in the apartment, then rose, slapped his barefoot way into the dim corridor, where the telephone, a large cranky animal prone to grunts and squeaks, resided in a nest of cords.

Sviatoslav had been asleep. “What?” he said hoarsely.

“Do you have any music by Selinsky?”

“Sergei? Is that you? What time is it?”

“It’s late, you should get up anyway. Selinsky, do you have anything by him? There must be some old records still around. It’s only a matter of time before they start performing his music everywhere, of course, but in the meantime—”

“Listen, I told you, I don’t want to get involved in this. And you, of all people—”

“How often do I have to tell you, it’s all right. It’s not just the concert anymore, either, there was a program about him on the radio last night, fascinating, did you know—”

“I’m going back to sleep,” Sviatoslav announced.

“Wait, you know the Firefly Waltz in his second ballet? Well, apparently… Hello? Hello?”

A door opened, and immediately a thin tongue of light darted across the corridor, licking his bare toes; his son walked out yawning. “Who are you talking to?” he asked.

“Nobody,” Sergei said, replacing the receiver. “So, how are your exams coming along?”

“Fine,” the boy mumbled with another yawn. “Just two left. Chemistry this afternoon, music tomorrow. Want me to go back to the line tonight?”

“What about tomorrow’s exam?”

“Oh, music’s a joke, really—we sing a couple of songs, our country this, our country that, eternal friendship of the peoples, I don’t have to be awake for it.”

Sergei thoughtfully watched his son’s retreating back, then caught up with him in the kitchen. Dusty yellow sunlight was everywhere here—in diamonds on the walls, in stripes on the floor, falling in big hazy chunks out of the open cupboard through which the boy was now rummaging—and still he knew it to be the same hushed, dark place where, the night before, he had received yet another sign that his life was building up toward a certain fulfillment.

“Fine, go tonight,” he said, “but can you do something for me?”

Alexander emerged with an aged bagel and, squinting, studied it gloomily.

“Could you ask Zoya Vladimirovna if, by chance, she has any records by Selinsky? Tell her I’d like to borrow some, she knows me. Do you think you could do that?”

“Yeah, whatever,” Alexander said, and dove back into the cupboard.

The next afternoon, Alexander rushed roaring through the school hallways with a few classmates at his heels, waving his blazer like a flag over his head, and, hoarse with yelling, flew down the steps into the courtyard. There the others stopped and, huffing like a herd of middle-aged walruses, began to discuss the admission policies of various institutes and the schedules of university entrance exams. “So what are your plans, Sasha?” one of them asked. Without warning, Alexander found himself staring into the rapidly telescoping depths of an empty summer followed by an empty year followed by an empty decade followed by—but here the telescope jammed, and he felt a blinding pain between his eyes quite as if he had been gazing into the white glare of the sun for too long. His classmates were silent, waiting for his answer.

“I’ve forgotten something inside,” he muttered, and turned and went back in.

Aimlessly he wandered through poorly lit, deserted spaces that smelled of starch and stale socks and wasted time, until he stood, without quite meaning to, before the music room. The corridor was empty save for two junior teachers who were shouting angry instructions at each other as they struggled to put up a poster unrolled crookedly between them. WELL DONE, GRADUATES! read its enormous letters, which appeared gray to him but were probably red.

“You there, how about some help?” one of the teachers called out.

“I have an appointment,” Alexander said, and pushed the door open.

Zoya Vladimirovna was sitting by the window, next to the silent bulk of the record player she used during lessons, a plate of powder-sprinkled pastila at her elbow. She looked up, her plump fingers, white with the sugar, splayed in midair, her eyes magnified and alarmed behind her thick glasses. “Ah, Sasha, come in, please come in!” she exclaimed. “Free at last, it must be a wonderful feeling! Oh, but if you’re wondering about your grade, it’s excellent as always… No surprise there, of course, what with your father being a musician—”

“A tuba player,” Alexander said, not moving from the doorway.

“Yes, yes, I remember.” Squeezed into the tight, oily dress she always wore during exams, her voice fluttering like nervous wings, she resembled a fat, aging dragonfly. “Oh, but please, help yourself to these, I always buy them for the finals, in case, well, in case someone stops by afterward, to, you know, to say good-bye—”

She laughed unexpectedly, an awkward, high-pitched laugh. He wanted to leave, but something about this moment—the unappetizing display of sweets, the hopeful dawning on the woman’s puffy face, the dazzle of the summer leaking pale and sickly through the grimy windows, the long, long life stretching before him—something about it, he did not know what, trapped him into taking a step inside, into saying, “Sure, I’ll have one.”

Her features sagged into a smile. “Lovely, lovely!” she breathed, heaving herself up. “Oh, and would you like to hear some music? Here, you’ll love this, a composer from the last century, unjustly forgotten, they—I mean, we—no longer teach him in schools… Oh, but he’s not banned or anything, of course—it’s marvelous, marvelous, just wait till you hear—”

He sank behind one of the desks, his lips stale with sugar dust. The music started with a quiet groaning of traction, with small creaks of rotation. Why the hell did I do this to myself, he thought. The tune, or whatever it was, seemed familiar in a vague, dreamy sort of way; it reminded him, he realized, of those times, long past, when his father used to burst out of the bedroom, his hair wild, his face “like a beet,” his mother would say, and cry about this or that masterpiece on the radio, spraying spittle in his excitement, asking them to please come, to join him, to listen… His mother would always beg off, claiming a need to attend to something burning on the stove, but Alexander, who was not yet Alexander to his father—at first Sashenka, later Sasha—not knowing how to refuse from the disadvantage of his eight, nine, ten years, would tread after him and collapse miserably onto the bed and, bored, watch the striped curtains strangling a stray sunbeam for unbearable stretches of time, while his father paced about, gesticulating with passion, humming “tahm-pahm-pahm,” moaning, “Sashenka, listen here, here, ah, isn’t that beautiful!”

Of course, his father no longer invited him to listen to anything, had not done so in years—not since that time, he remembered unhappily, when, aged twelve, he had shouted that only old fogies and dotards could like such depressing, pompous, toothache-inducing noise, that he, Alexander, was nothing like them, nothing like him, that he would never, no, not ever—

The music ended. In the abrupt lull he heard the two teachers still screaming at each other in the corridor outside; their voices’ panicking echoes tossed from wall to wall, frantic to escape the suffocating entrails of the school, and failing, failing…

He stood up, anxious to go.

“Oh, but it’s not over yet, that was just the first movement,” Zoya Vladimirovna gasped, rising also. The laborious sound of the music starting again scratched painfully at his hearing.

“I must run, I have to buy bread for supper,” he lied quickly. “Oh, yeah, I almost forgot, my father wanted me to ask if you have any Selinsky records, you know, the guy whose concert—”

“Yes,” she said. “Please tell your father I’m sorry, but the ban on Selinsky’s music hasn’t officially been lifted, he must not be aware… No one has anything.”

“Sure, whatever, I’ll tell him. You don’t like the guy’s stuff?”

In the white-walled, gray-windowed silence of the classroom, one note lingered, piercing, relentless. She glanced back at the closed door, stepped closer to him.

“Igor Fyodorovich Selinsky is the greatest composer of this century,” she said, quietly and sternly. Her voice had ceased fluttering.

“So why aren’t you waiting in that line? Everyone else is,” he said with sudden hostility.

The woman’s eyes swam inside their plastic frames in perfect, unblinking stillness; she was so near he could see the faint mustache darkening her upper lip.

“I don’t believe the concert will ever take place,” she said at last.

The high solitary note still trembled in his ears, refusing to go away. His dislike of her grew, fed perhaps by some darker, subterranean emotion. “Yeah? And why’s that?”

She looked at the door again, seemed to hesitate for a moment. “Tell your father I’ll try,” she said then. “I have a friend who… I’ll see if I can find a record or two. My mother used to teach at a music school before the… before the educational reforms, so I know something of your father’s story. I’d like to do something for him.”

Alexander moved to open the door.

“Father doesn’t have a story,” he said from the threshold.

The school courtyard was empty now, its asphalt sweating with the afternoon warmth. He stood still for some time, staring into the pale immensity of the sky. That night, he wanted to talk to Viktor Pyetrovich, but he was never alone; his friends were celebrating his return to the line and the beginning of his adult life. When the line dispersed at last, he walked home, through streets that oddly ran in many directions at once, veering off sharply, treacherously, bouncing him into walls with no warning, and across parks that were not parks at all but close, black, sinister forests filled with murderous benches leaping at him like tigers striped with planks of shadow, and a disconcerting signaling of bandits’ flashlights, which at closer quarters turned into glowing bugs and flew away, and along sidewalks that rose underneath him like rearing horses, so he had to straddle them firmly with his knees, repeating in a voice harsh with affection as he ran his fingers through their manes, “There, there, steady now!” Then someone laughed a nasty laugh above him, and the horses were gone. Picking himself off the ground, he continued to stumble through woods and fields, along train tracks, inside spirals of darkness, thinking vaguely that, maybe, taking the train east would solve nothing after all, until somehow, hours later it seemed to him, he made his tentative way into his kitchen, and turned on the light, and his father was blinded.

And as Alexander looked through the wavering haze at the man squinting before him, the middle-aged man going wide in the waist and loose in the face, he thought again—or perhaps he had never stopped thinking—of the tormenting creaking of music in the classroom, and those times when his father, younger, thinner, had pleaded with him to listen to something he loved; and the endless lectures he had endured, about time and choices and wisdom, which had seemed to him so tedious, so insincere—and somehow, before he knew it, he was saying things, heated things, surprising things, and his words were rushed, and wet, and heavy in his mouth.

Listen, I’m sorry, if you ever want me to hear some tunes you like, I won’t mind, and the ticket, you can have it, I won’t sell it, I’ll work hard, I’ll return what I owe you, I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry about your money, can’t we, can’t we just, can’t we just be—

Sergei considered his son with distaste. This was the third if not the fourth time he had seen him drunk. The boy stood before him blubbering, mumbling something incomprehensible about money, probably asking for more.

“Go to sleep, Alexander,” he said sharply.

The boy fell silent. Sergei was unsettled by a strangely naked, hurt look on his face. Then the boy turned and went away without saying another word. This is what he needs, Sergei thought uneasily, discipline’s good for him; but for some minutes after the door to his son’s room had closed, he sat blinking after him.

Eventually he moved to switch off the lights—he imagined he could hear better in the dark—and for another hour intermittently coaxed the dials on his radio and muted it to lie in wait for the neighbors’. There was nothing about Selinsky that night, or the next, or, in fact, for a week or two, though on one occasion the same announcer’s voice drifted to him through the wall, or possibly seeped in through the open window, to talk about an admirer taking a girl to a shop and, too poor to enter, standing on the sidewalk, gazing with her at a display window full of jeweled splendor, saddened by a pair of earrings that she liked but would never have. Finally, on one of the last June nights, the Selinsky series was resumed. He caught only a snippet. “The set was simple,” read the voice behind the wall. “The stage was the sea, a blue cloth piled up in undulating waves. We stood straight and quiet, everyone alone, evenly spaced, solitary islands submerged in silk up to our knees. It was his own idea. The choreographer was outraged. ‘How will they dance?’ he cried. ‘You can’t wrap the stage in fabric, they’ll trip, they’ll fall!’ But Igor Fyodorovich said, ‘They can dance with their hands. They can dance with their eyes.’ ‘There will be a scandal,’ the choreographer warned. ‘So be it,’ he said, ‘this is not about dancing. I want them to hear my music, I want them to…’ ”

The voice tapered off, but that night Sergei went to bed nearly happy, and for a long time lay awake, thinking of her as yet unseen home, and the antique gramophone, or was it a phonograph, from the museum, and the record he would gently slide out of a sleeve under her bright, misting eyes. And the record, black and shiny, would begin its measured circling, round and round, like a spoon in a cup of tea, like a moth round the lamp on his childhood veranda, and the night, black and shiny, would spin round and round too, and the night’s giant tonearm would draw closer, closer—and at last it would touch the black, circling surface, and, together, they would hear it at last.

2

“CAN YOU BELIEVE IT’S ALMOST JULY?”

“Don’t rub salt in my wounds! We had to cancel our vacation this year. My daughter spends her days playing in the dust.”

“My in-laws tell me, If you want to hear music so much, why not turn on the radio. They aren’t cultured people, my in-laws.”

No one says anything for some time after that. It is almost too hot to talk, the sun glossing their noses and melting the ice cream cones they take turns buying at a nearby ice cream kiosk.

“Do you know what’s peculiar?” someone ventures at last. “After all these months of standing in line, you’d think some people would have gotten sick of waiting and dropped out.”

“Sure, or died.”

“Or moved somewhere.”

Another small silence, this one concealing a chill at its heart—or maybe, Anna thinks uneasily, it’s only the ice cream running down the inside of her throat.

“Well, anyway, if people are leaving, how come the line isn’t getting any shorter?”

“Maybe they give their places to friends when they go. And those who die probably write it into their wills. Like an inheritance, right?”

“Or maybe it’s not them. You know that fellow with the black beard, the one who checks the lists and organizes everything? Why, do you suppose, has he taken all that work upon himself? I bet he’s running some underhanded scheme, pushing the available spots on the side.”

“Ooh, I’ve just had a terrible thought… Come closer, come closer… What if people who vanish from the line are being transferred somewhere, somewhere far away, and the man with the beard is in charge of the cover-up? Didn’t he get everyone to write their names and addresses down?”

The numbers system has long been abolished; they now mark their names directly on the list. This time the chill has nothing to do with the ice cream, Anna knows. They shouldn’t be discussing such things out in the open, or at all; and in any case, whenever people are transferred to remote places, she is sure they deserve it. She casts a worried glance at the boy—the two of them have had tea without tea leaves a few times this summer—but he does not look up from his book. A light breeze comes out of nowhere, tosses sun spots back and forth under their feet, shadows merging with the polka dots on their dresses, trees rustling pleasantly above. The girl two spaces in front exclaims, “This is ridiculous, people aren’t vanishing anywhere, I’ll just go and count everyone!”—and no one tries to silence her, they just watch as she waddles off. She often has impetuous moments of recklessness, this girl, but ever since the line shed its winter clothing, people have understood, and been forgiving; some women have even taken up knitting tiny socks and hats—it will be soon now.

“Well, did it add up?” they ask when she returns. She shakes her head. It’s hopeless, just as they knew it would be. Since the beginning of summer, the daytime line has become unruly, overflowing with children out of school whiling their time away jumping rope and drawing with chalk on the sidewalk, and old women sunning themselves on the fold-out chairs some enterprising man is renting out by the hour, and housewives wandering in and out of the sewing circle that congregates daily at noon, and pecking couples leaning on sunbeams, and no one seems to stand for long in one place, and there are pink and white rivulets of ice cream everywhere, so the ground itself has grown sticky; and gradually the light glinting off the leaves that have not yet dulled with a coating of grime, and the sweet, gummy smell of lindens, and the oily, hot smell of meat pies, which a harsh-voiced woman carries by the line a few times a day, and the evenly spaced rhythm of a rope hitting the pavement and small shoes coming down with a thump, and a thump, and a thump, the children shrieking giddily—gradually, then, another warm afternoon dissolves their wary hush in its green, bright, aromatic passage, and they start talking a little, then laughing, about recipes, and men, and books, and the day moves on.

Later, laden with vegetables from a nearby stall, Anna walks home through the evening. Streetlamps are beginning to come on, mild and hazy like dozens of moons, but there is no need for them, for it is still light, will stay light for hours. She is almost happy—and hers is not a calm, contented kind of happiness, but a young, leaping happiness with an undercurrent of excitement that feels much like rebellion, and a just rebellion at that; for after all the time she has spent swallowing her resentment, allowing that imperious, self-absorbed woman to silently rule her life, she has earned the right to do something for herself, has she not—to do something she herself wants to do…

She walks down the street, smiling a small, hidden smile, nursing her thought: I have a secret now, a purpose to my daily waiting. And as soon as I have the ticket in my hand, my life will change, my life will change.

3

LATE ONE MORNING in the second week of July, Alexander was lying dressed on his unmade bed, letting his gaze wander over the ceiling, imagining wisps of evil-smelling smoke drifting through a low, dark dive. On its dirty floor, men sprawled, their expressionless faces tough as hide, their jaundiced eyes watching the jagged flights of a shadow cast by a tall, pale stranger with an eagle profile. The stranger sat cross-legged in the yellow circle of a solitary kerosene lamp in a corner, scribbling in a notebook; and when the proprietor of the establishment bent over the man’s shoulder to ask his desire, he glimpsed a page covered in symbols that belonged to no language he knew—birdlike, teardroplike, dragonlike signs, with fast-flying tails and fantastic curls like the curls of the sinister smoke rising now toward the ceiling—but just then the ceiling was sliced by a blade of sunlight as the door opened with a cursory knock.

Alexander sat up.

“I wanted,” his father said, “to discuss your plans for the summer, and beyond. It seems we haven’t spoken in a while. Would you like me to go to the university with you?”

“What for?”

“To register for the admission exams. They start next month, do they not?”

“I’ve registered already,” said Alexander coldly. “And I can’t talk right now, I’m late for this study group I go to, I was just looking for my bag… Ah, here it is. See you later.”

Once outside, he stood undecided for a minute, then headed to the park; but the park had been empty for days, even the birds had fled its baked brown lawns. Halting, he rummaged in his bag, jerking his hand away as a discarded star-shaped school pin pricked his finger with its green point; then, diving back in, he dug out at last, from beneath abandoned compositions, dull pencil stubs, and an apple-core fossil from the previous fall, a crumpled ball of paper marked with a treble clef. He smoothed it out. The address was still legible.

Ever since Viktor Pyetrovich had answered his question, he had avoided discussing Selinsky with the old man, knowing that the explanation was likely to be some kind of a joke on Viktor Pyetrovich’s part, or else his hearing betraying him in the rustling rain, in the whistling wind—knowing it, of course, yet for some reason unwilling to part with the mystery. He looked at the note, hesitating again; then, irritated with himself, firmly strode down the street.

The city lay bleached by the sun; in its white, unkind glare, the building before which he stopped looked old, sullen, unkempt; the kind of building, he thought with a sinking heart, in which nothing out of the ordinary ever transpired. He pushed the front door open, stumbled in from the light, was immediately blinded by the dimness of the foyer. The ancient elevator gaped at him with its black toothless maw; he swerved around, groped his way up the stairs instead, the banisters slowly swimming up from the gloom as he ascended, skipping steps to escape the sharp stench of cat urine that lingered in the stairwell. For a long while after he rang the bell nothing happened. He checked the note again before dropping it into his bag, waited another minute. He was just turning to go, feeling an odd mixture of disappointment and relief, when a shuffle of slippers sounded inside, punctuated by the tapping of the cane. The door yawned.

“What a nice surprise,” Viktor Pyetrovich said from the shadows. “Please, please.”

Wiping sweat off his neck, Alexander followed the tapping inside, past a dark stretch of bookcases along the wall of one room, and into another room, so small it could have been a closet, or was a closet perhaps. “Do sit,” the old man said, patting the bed. “I’m sorry I’ve stopped coming to the park—my legs, you know. The line is all I can manage, and one can never have a decent talk there, funny how that is… Make yourself comfortable, I’ll be right back.”

The room too was disappointing, its sole furnishings a chair, a square of sunlight on the bare floor, a narrow bed under a drab checkered blanket, and a standard-issue world map on the wall, like the one they had used in school. Alexander was all at once certain that Selinsky would never bother with a man who lived in such a room. Dispirited, he walked over to the window with no curtains, looked out at the back wall of an apartment building across the yard, saw, in other windows, pots of wilting plants, dozing cats, leaping splashes of sun, a motley patchwork of drying laundry. He was about to move away when, on the sill of a particularly grimy window on the top floor, he caught a glimpse of a peculiar hat, tall and dark; he remembered seeing its like in an old photograph of a crowd strolling up a wide staircase of some columned building with white horses on its triangular roof, printed in their history textbook above the caption: “Idle ballet-goers: Decadent pastimes of the rich.” The incongruous hat made him strangely hopeful. He was still squinting, trying to see better past the smeared windowpane, when the tap-tap-tapping, the slapping of the slippers, rose behind him, along with a clanging of metal, a clinking of glass.

Bounding away from the window, he accepted the loaded tray from the old man’s hands.

“That was lucky, I nearly dropped it,” Viktor Pyetrovich observed mildly. “I would hate to have damaged these.”

The two glasses were set in silver glass holders; the silver was blackened, but the scrollwork was magnificent.

“I saw holders like these on a train once,” Alexander said. They felt cold and a bit clammy to his touch, as if kept in damp obscurity for a long while. “Except yours are a lot nicer.”

“They were in my family,” Viktor Pyetrovich said; and only now Alexander noticed the initials snaking amidst the tangle of fruit and leaves, and felt another tiny jolt of hope. Maybe, he thought. “I don’t use them much, special occasions only… There’s nothing sweet, my apologies. If you had come in the spring, I would have given you a cake. Though it wasn’t very good.”

“I don’t like sweets anyway,” Alexander said untruthfully.

Perched next to each other on the edge of the bed, they sipped their tea. It tasted slightly metallic, as if the silver had seeped into the water, and there was now a bitterness lingering in Alexander’s mouth. The old man held his glass with a gentleness that was almost a caress.

“So, you live here with your children?” Alexander asked.

“I have one son. He used to live here. He lives elsewhere now. You remind me of him, a little, when he was your age. He too shot up early… I’ve never asked you, by the way, why do you want the ticket? Do you like music so much?”

“It’s not for me,” Alexander said, and looked away. “It’s for my grandmother.”

“Ah. That’s kind of you. My grandson helps with the line, too. You’d like him if he were older.”

“Do you… Are you a musician?”

“I studied, but I never became one. I dreamed of traveling the world, but I kept putting it off, and then, well, you know… After the Change, I taught geography. I’m retired now, of course.”

The air in the room was stuffy, yet he was wearing a woolen cardigan, as if chilled; his buttoning was askew, Alexander noticed. Through the open window, he could hear a child in the yard shrilly calling his mother, the sudden gunshot of a tire blowing out some streets away, a sharp crackling of wings as a pigeon plunged off a roof. A small silence stretched in the patch of dusty sunlight before him. He did not want to ask; he wanted to ask; he opened his mouth, preparing to receive some pedestrian truth like a cold stone sinking into his chest.

“Is that how—I mean, did you meet Selinsky when you were a music student, then?”

Viktor Pyetrovich studied his empty glass; his eyes were invisible, only two silver glass holders hung gleaming darkly in the round blankness of his spectacles.

“I knew him from childhood,” he said, looking up at last. “Our fathers were related.”

“You—Selinsky is your relative?”

“A cousin. A distant one. We had a large family.”

Alexander gaped at him.

“It’s not something I tell people, ordinarily, so I hope you won’t—”

“I won’t tell anyone.” His heart was thumping, slow, hard, joyful, in the light, liberated hollow of his rib cage. “Is it possible… Could I maybe see some of his letters? The ones where he describes all those things, you know, his escape, the East, everything?”

“They’re a bit difficult to get to right now,” Viktor Pyetrovich said. “I keep them in a safe place, you see. Maybe next time… Would you like some more? No, no, leave it, then, I’ll wash it later… I do have something I can show you, though, hold on.”

Dazed, Alexander tried to decipher the sounds of fumbling and scraping against the wall of the next room. When the old man returned, he was carrying a framed photograph.

“Igor’s on the right,” he said, knocking on the glass with a yellowed nail. “I’m twenty-four, he’s seventeen.” I just turned seventeen five days ago, Alexander wanted to shout, but did not. July sun glared off the glass, making it hard to see, turning the two faces into blurs of light. “This was taken at a party at my parents’ country estate. You can’t tell here, but Igor is wearing a bright red cravat. He often wore red. Ironic, that. I asked him once, why red, but he pretended not to know what I was talking about. ‘Red?’ he said to me. ‘I never wear red.’ It got him in trouble, too. One time—but that was much later, of course—he was staying in a southern town. I have a postcard, I’ll show you someday… Anyway, he was walking to his hotel from a concert he’d given, and he happened to be dressed in a red blazer.”

“And?”

“And, well,” said Viktor Pyetrovich, his glasses twinkling, “it also happened to be the week of a town festival when they let all their bulls run free in their narrow streets, and by some coincidence, you see—”

Alexander felt the room widening, quite as if its walls had dissolved into new windows through which another, astonishing world was entering in large, luminous pieces. It was a world he had sensed before in the old man’s presence—a world he had fully expected to give up only an hour earlier—a place where no object was meaningless, no action inconsequential, where every word, every turn, every note led to some adventure resonating deep within one’s soul; but this time, he felt that he himself had been admitted to the story. And so urgent, so bright was his sense of inclusion that he did not for a moment begrudge Selinsky his rather unremarkable black-and-white face with no trace of an eagle profile; nor was he upset when, upon leaving in the early afternoon, he cast another glance outside, and saw that the window on the top floor of the opposite building was standing wide open and that the tall black hat on the windowsill, now sharply outlined by the sun, was nothing but an ordinary cooking pot.

It did not matter, for everything seemed possible—was possible—in that other world, and he knew with an absolute, invigorating certainty just how he was meant to gain his entrance to it.

“Stop by anytime,” Viktor Pyetrovich said from the doorway.

“Could I come tomorrow?” Alexander said quickly.

He nearly skipped as he ran home, past the line, past a short black-bearded man fuming over some list, past an ancient man with deep eyes smiling tranquilly into the sky, past the physics teacher who had given him a grade he had not earned, past an enormous girl who made him glance away in embarrassment, past his mother talking to that painted woman who had pressed a meat pie upon him some months before. He did not stop, only waved from across the street, for underneath his excitement, he did feel a bit troubled; but his father did not deserve the truth, he told himself as he rounded the corner, because the man understood nothing beyond his blinkered, self-righteous pigeonhole of accomplishments, clocks, and rules, and his grandmother was crazy, and as for his mother—as for her, he would take care of her once he was traveling the world with Selinsky, yes, he would send her many beautiful things, like those leather gloves he had once seen her admiring in a magazine, or a pair of high-heeled boots, if, of course, they weren’t too bulky to cross the border.

Anna followed him to the corner with her eyes.

“Liubov Dmitriyevna, look, that’s my son,” she said proudly.

“I’ve seen him around,” the woman replied with a shrug, and turned away.

Stifling a sigh, Anna resigned herself to more hours of patient boredom.

The day, the week, the month were dragging on slowly, so slowly. The sun beat down without cease, children shrieked in the dust, and the expecting girl in front complained of the sun, of the dust, of the children’s loud voices, day after day after day, until one day—“The twenty-second of July, mark your calendars!” someone exclaimed—the girl doubled up, then straightened and gazed about, slack-jawed and puzzled. Instantly there was a tumult, women shouting, urging the girl to breathe, fanning her with newspapers, the air smelling of ink and perspiration, someone running to telephone the girl’s husband, someone else to telephone a friend who had a friend who had a car. When the chugging automobile had finally taken her away, seated in the back between two women delegated by the line, Anna exhaled with relief. She had a distinct sensation that the summer had broken at last, that the waiting was over.

“I wonder if it’s a boy or a girl,” she said. “Liubov Dmitriyevna, what’s your guess? A fellow back there is taking bets, I heard.”

The woman’s eyeliner had grown sloppier over the past few weeks, and her lipstick often strayed onto her teeth. She stared at Anna without speaking, as if she hadn’t understood; then her eyes started to glisten.

“Are you all right?” Anna asked, astonished.

“Fine,” the woman snapped, and would not look at Anna for the rest of the afternoon.

The next morning, when the girl’s friends had rejoined the line, fresh from the hospital, delivering the word (it was a boy), Anna noticed the woman blowing her nose into a handkerchief, and went to buy two ice creams. “I just wanted to get rid of some change in my pocket,” she said offhandedly, ready to discard the extra one; but to her surprise Liubov Dmitriyevna took it, and ate it greedily, licking her fingers with large, ungraceful, pink-tongued licks. The day after that, a rain shower washed the heat away for a few hours, and, confined to shafts of dampness under their dangerously bony umbrellas, they exchanged some remarks about the weather; and the day after that, Liubov Dmitriyevna offered Anna a lipstick in a lovely golden case. “My husband’s given me three just like it,” she said breezily.

Anna accepted it with gratitude all the same.

That night she changed into a dress he used to love, and sat before the mirror in their bedroom, gazing at her face, at the round lines that used to be straight, at the straight lines that used to be round. Then, tenderly, she slid the lipstick out and began to draw the contours of her mouth. The lipstick was pale pink, shimmering with barely discernible particles of gold—a young, hopeful color, the color of a sunrise over warm pebbles somewhere by the sea, the color of satin petals in a happy bride’s hair. When she was done, she gave her lips one final pat with a square of toilet paper, then lay down on the bed, leafed through a volume of poems she had borrowed from her mother’s room. Her clock said it was nine. All at once exhaustion moved in her bones, subterranean and pervasive. As she read first this verse, then that, she felt time slowing around her, becoming denser, thicker, brighter, until it acquired the consistency of amber, and she herself was now a mote of dust, or perhaps a fly, yes, a fly suspended for a small, private eternity in this hour, this day, this never-ending year, time’s full, rich, golden luminescence enveloping her like a soft, gentle promise—If you want to live forever, she thought drowsily, spend your life waiting for some great future happiness—the light shining through her closed eyelids; or perhaps not a fly but a bird, a cuckoo, I live like a cuckoo in a clock, the clock saying it was now eight-thirty, which was impossible unless time was moving backward, backward, through all the concrete-walled corridors into a sunlit childhood room in a past so deep that its very air was scented with joy.

When, in another half-hour, Sergei came in, the lamp was lit, and his wife asleep on top of the bedspread, a book with a liver-spotted cover in her limp hand. She wore an unbecoming dress, which cut ugly red grooves under her arms and made the buttons on the front seem dangerously close to popping off; her chin was smeared in pink glitter. As he looked at her, his heart stilled, and a horrifying thought burst within him: What if my inability to be happy here, to feel love for this kind, selfless woman, has nothing to do with her failure to grasp my oh-so-lofty thoughts, to share my passion for music—what if it is, in truth, nobody’s fault but my own, some visceral flaw within myself, some deep-seated failure, some lack, some tragic lack—

He killed the light.

The next evening, standing before the kiosk, he felt restless and unsettled, worn-out, cut off from the mass of humanity, from the small agitations around him. When is it going to end, people were asking one another up and down the line, enough is enough. As she had done every day for the past month, just before six o’clock—the summer kiosk hours had been extended—the kiosk seller packed away her knitting, drew down the shutter, stepped outside to lock the door, then clicked away, wobbling a little on her needle-thin heels, watched by many hostile eyes. “We should follow her home one day,” someone muttered under his breath, “and put the question to her clearly, once and for all.” A few men laughed uneasily.

In a while the hot July dusk lengthened along the ground like a glossy-skinned animal stretching, and shadows yawned, lazy pink tongues of the first streetlamps flickering within their jaws. Later still, a band of unpleasant characters strolled by, from the Northern Nightingales line. Their concert had taken place back in April, to everyone’s great satisfaction; rumor had it that there would soon be tickets for a performance by the legendary folk ensemble the Little Fir Trees, but the kiosk was currently closed for restocking, and they had time on their hands.

“Enjoying yourselves?” a man shouted from across the street. “Overeducated idiots!”

A girl on his arm giggled.

“I bet there isn’t even any concert, they just like one another’s company!”

The line around Sergei shifted uncomfortably.

“Idiots yourselves,” someone suggested in a timid undertone, but no one else said anything. The Nightingales sauntered off, catcalling and whistling.

“I do wish they’d hurry up already,” grumbled Pavel.

“How about a song?”

“No, not tonight.”

“Oh, come on!”

“Listen, I’m not in the mood, all right?”

“Fine, I was just saying… Hey, did you hear the latest? Word is, the man up front, the organizer, you know, he isn’t… Well, but it’s probably nothing. Just a rumor.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m not sure I should tell you, but if you really must know—”

The elderly man a few spaces ahead was whispering to a circle of people, their heads close together; Sergei could hear only the frequently echoed word—“provocation”—and, amidst the whispers, the indignant exclamation of Vladimir Semyonovich, who strode away, fiercely kneading his mustache, spitting out: “What vile nonsense!” Sergei glanced after him, frowning, then shook his watch out of his shirtsleeve. It was nearly ten; Sofia, he saw, was already sliding her novel into her bag.

“May I walk you home tonight?” he said, though without any hope.

She had been quiet the past few weeks, ever since the end of their night shift, reading rather a lot, only rarely lifting her transparent eyes from the page. He still asked every night, even if she had declined his every offer.

“It’s very kind of you,” she said, not looking at him, clicking her bag shut with a crisp, precise snap, “but I’ll be fine, there’s still some light left—”

“You should take him up on it, you know,” Pavel interjected. “Lots of shady types out and about tonight. The Nightingales can get rowdy.”

“Well—” she said, hesitating.

“I’ll get your bag,” Sergei said quickly.

After a block or two, his meager attempts to start a conversation lapsed. They walked in silence, which seemed to him to grow more tense and awkward with every step; and as the habitual sequence of fences, apartment buildings, tram stops, benches, rows of dusty saplings unfolded before his eyes, the day’s accumulation of disturbing little incidents, its lingering malaise, grew huge within him and, welling over at last, resolved into a sharp, simple, terrible feeling. He was seized with the horror of old age creeping closer, of his life irrevocably hardening into a fixed, unchangeable shape of many bleak years to come—and against this nearing horror, the concert, he knew with unfamiliar anguish, was no longer enough.

He stopped abruptly. She stopped too. There was no one around; it was another anonymous street corner, another lukewarm streetlamp drooling light and shadow onto their faces. The nighttime city crouched behind them; he could sense its warm, expectant, animal breath on his neck. “What is it?” she asked.

He had not planned it—had not wanted it like this, on some random street, with the muggy blot of municipal light staining the skies above them, with shadowy, silent dogs swiftly pursuing some invisible prey along the pavements—but the almost physical sensation of his time running out was already squeezing the words, uncertain, enormous, out of his throat.

“Sofia Mikhailovna, there is something I must tell you. I—”

He faltered. She was searching his face with a gaze light and gray as a feather; he could see two tiny question marks of streetlamp reflections frozen in her eyes.

“What is it?” she repeated, and in her voice he heard an urgency that was oddly like fear.

One heartbeat, two heartbeats, three heartbeats, four…

“I have a surprise for you,” he blurted out. “A record of Selinsky’s music. I thought—since you wanted to hear—so you won’t have to wait until—”

“Oh,” she said, and he did not know what filled the small hollow in her exhalation, relief or disappointment. “A record of Selinsky? But how did you, where did you—I looked myself, it’s not—and have you heard it, what is it? That’s—oh, but that’s wonderful!”

The hollow was joy, he realized now, and he wanted to weep.

“I—I don’t have the right kind of player at home,” he said, not meeting her eyes.

“Oh, of course.” She began walking again, airy, happy steps, almost running; he followed, the pavement clutching at the soles of his shoes like mud. “Bring it to the line tomorrow, we’ll go to the museum afterward—”

“I’m afraid it can’t be tomorrow, I don’t have the record myself, it’s at a friend’s right now, so it will be a couple of days. A few. Maybe a week, the friend’s out of town.” Her building loomed at the end of the street, blocking the sky. He was talking very fast now. “And I’m not sure the museum is a proper place. You may not realize, but officially, his music is still banned. It might put you in an awkward position if someone were to come upon you at work—listening to banned records on State property, you know—”

“Yes, you’re right, home would be better,” she said, stopping again. “I do have a player that should work. Well, as soon as your friend comes back, we’ll figure it out. Oh, but this really is the most wonderful gift, thank you, thank you, Sergei Vasilievich—”

Then, unexpectedly, it happened—a swift, birdlike dash, the darkness leaping toward him, a single excited curl escaping the tight bun of her hair, brushing his cheek, her dress so soft in the cup of his hand, what fabric was that, her lips so close to his, yet not, not quite, only grazing his chin, her shoulders already slipping from under his arm, Good night, thank you again, one, two, three, four, the bang—and as he gazed at the closed door, he remembered the scene he had imagined so many times, the black luster of the record circling, the shadows moving on the ceiling of her room, the music rippling like liquid sunshine on their closed eyelids—and was deeply disgusted with himself.

The next morning he managed to catch his son just as he was about to run out the door.

“I’ve told you already, she doesn’t have it,” the boy said impatiently, shifting some books under his arm.

“Not her. I thought you might know some other people,” Sergei said in a lowered voice. “From the night shift. People who can get things, I mean.”

The boy appeared taken aback. “Well, I don’t know,” he said after a moment. “Maybe. I guess some of them might have, you know, contacts.”

“Please,” Sergei repeated. “Please ask around. Any record will do, any price, I don’t care.”

“Well, all right,” the boy said from the threshold. “Can’t promise anything, though.”

“Thank you, Sasha,” Sergei said quietly as the door closed.

He did not think his son had heard, but Alexander had, and, surprised, paused at the top of the stairs. That night he pulled Nikolai away from the kiosk.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Nikolai said, shrugging. “Stepan might know where to find it, I’ll talk to him. A pointless pursuit, but whatever, not my money. Let’s get back now, they’ve just opened a fresh one.”

He drank less than the others that night, and though it was so late when he got home as to be early, he stayed up reading for some time, one of the books Viktor Pyetrovich had lent him. The book was from another century, with miraculously preserved brittle pages and the quaint pre-revolutionary alphabet, which Viktor Pyetrovich had taught him; it was not that difficult, only a matter of a few odd-looking letters. There were stories of travels—not the galloping, tough adventures he had been spinning out of the fabric of his nights for some time now, but slow, meandering incidents with seemingly no beginnings and no ends, hushed conversations with strangers in narrow streets of somnolent towns, afternoons by some river, evenings spent drinking tea, chants of unfamiliar names and places—all of it filled with such quiet, ordinary beauty that he kept turning the pages even though he drifted off to a doze now and then, turning the pages, turning the hours, turning the corners of sleepy boulevards in cities red and golden and full like fairy-tale apples, drifting in a boat down a river through an infinite perspective of weeping willows, green and tranquil like monastery cloisters, and that old voice from behind the wall slipping in and out between the lines, the pages, the hours, telling him about a river, a boulevard, yes, walking down a boulevard with my beloved, hand in hand, happy as the full bloom of summer, and a mansion on the boulevard, and the cool of the stairwell, and the cool of our kisses in the stairwell, a friend’s apartment, a confusion with the keys, we were a bit tipsy that day, all that champagne, we had been celebrating another triumph, you remember, and then the sunny cool of that airy, breezy room, like a piece of the sky, our sky, the cool of the linens, do you remember, the small balcony where we stood afterward, looking at the river, and two years later, when I was already living somewhere else, with the man I had married, no longer dancing, you found a postcard at one of the book stalls lining the river, and there it was, in a brown photograph, our mansion, the stone nymphs gazing down at us with heartbroken forgiveness, the small curly clouds like sighs in the skies, and you marked the window with a cross, and you sent it to me across the continent, asking, Do you recognize it, do you remember?

I remember.

4

BY MID-AUGUST, the bright, green, delightful summer spell was long over, the heat unbearable, the city exhausted. Trees feebly stirred their sooty leaves, rare automobiles spat out clouds of scorching dust, and the air hung so thick with the smell of burning that it seemed to leave dirty, hot smudges on everything it touched. In the sullen line, feet swelled, pages of books turned gray and sticky, conversations dried out. The formerly pregnant girl now brought along her infant in a knitting basket, and his raisin of a face gaped in a constant pink-gummed scream.

“I’ve been very patient,” Anna said, “we all have, but surely it’ll end by autumn?”

“I know the kiosk seller, and she has no idea,” Liubov Dmitriyevna replied.

“You know the kiosk seller?”

The woman was weakly fanning herself with a glossy magazine; through the blur of radiantly smiling beauties riding well-shined horses along the foreign shores of cool, tranquil lakes, Anna glimpsed her cheeks running with pink and blue rivulets of makeup. “All of us in the area know one another,” the woman said, sighing. “Though this one’s new.”

“All of who?”

Liubov Dmitriyevna hesitated, a suede high-heeled boot flickering back and forth across her melting face, then said, cryptically and briefly, “Come with me later.” They did not talk much for the rest of the day, but at five o’clock, just as the evening shift was scheduled to replace them, she led Anna down an alley, across two streets, through the park, to another kiosk. DRY GOODS, announced the square black letters above; Anna remembered having bought some buttons here two or three summers earlier. The line before it was short, eight or nine women only, waiting in silence. Ignoring them, Liubov Dmitriyevna walked around, rapped on the door at the rear. The door gave in, revealing a tight, dim corner where a man, his back to them, was busy shrugging out of a kiosk seller’s smock, his elbows bumping against the cramped walls. He glanced around, grinning; as his eyes skidded like olives in the brown oil of his face, Anna recalled seeing him in the line on a few occasions. Divested of his uniform, he tossed it at Liubov Dmitriyevna, stepped outside, pecked her on a cheek, waved at the puzzled Anna, and walked off swiftly, calling behind him, “Keys in the door,” closely chased by a sharp smell of cologne. “Pashka, my younger brother,” Liubov Dmitriyevna said, pushing her arms through the smock’s grayish sleeves. “He works days here, I work evenings. We don’t close until nine.”

“Oh,” said Anna lamely. “I see.”

The waiting women stared at them with dull, glazed eyes the color of slush, their faces like unwashed laundry, not moving, not speaking.

“Can’t breathe in here, why must he always pour whole bottles of the stuff on himself? Of course it’s imported, but still… Well, come in, come in.” Grumbling, Liubov Dmitriyevna prodded Anna inside, then bolted the door behind them. It was, Anna thought looking around, a lot like finding oneself confined to a slovenly scented drawer. The air was overpoweringly sweet; dust swarmed in a wedge of stuffy, tired light that oozed through the square of the small window; there was barely space for the two of them to turn among all the boxes crammed into the place, some on the shelves at their backs, others, rather more mysterious, below the counter. Having nowhere to sit, Anna pressed herself against the far wall, and, awed, bent her head to gaze at a perky battalion of golden lipsticks, a cascade of stockings in gleaming crimson packages that made them look like candy bars or in shining oval containers that resembled painted eggs, a few tantalizingly opaque plump bottles, some tangled lengths of silky gauze, which may or may not have been an assortment of scarves, some of which she quite possibly recognized…

Liubov Dmitriyevna had just finished dismissing the last woman in the line. Pivoting on her stool, she leafed through the scrawled cardboard signs stacked on the counter—Anna glimpsed Closed for accounting and Seller sick until further notice—then pulled out one that read Back in 15 minutes and propped it up, blocking the window. Immediately, brown, claustrophobic dusk fell within their drawer; the only illumination was a narrow thread of late, pale sunlight that squeezed in from outside to hazily outline the sign. In the dimness, Anna heard the sounds of opening, fumbling, rustling, shutting; then she became aware of another smell, round, rich, soft, flowing in a dark, slow stream through the sharp sweetness of the cologne, and held her breath.

A bare lightbulb creaked into life on the ceiling. A small pink box, she saw, sat on the counter between them; within its ruffled rosy depths nested a flock of chocolate swans, black and white, each in its own glinting pool of silver foil.

“From Over There. I have a sweet tooth. Here, have one.” Liubov Dmitriyevna crammed a swan whole into her mouth, smearing dark chocolate and red lipstick over her chin, and spoke indistinctly: “Anyway, about the other kiosk. As soon as I heard of it, back in November, I went over to welcome the new arrival on the scene, we sellers have our little arrangements… Also, I’d been looking for a pair of boots, none of my contacts had them. But the new woman turned out to be useless. She’s from another bureau, I think. I couldn’t come to any agreement with her, had to wait in line like everyone else. She had no idea what her kiosk would stock, either. Didn’t know the first thing about kiosks, in fact. Then—then my husband heard about the concert.”

She fell silent. On the other side of the thin corrugated wall, Anna could hear a new line starting to form, steps shuffling, people lying in wait. She tried to think of something to say, but her head was beginning to swim in the perfumed, cramped, stuffy glare. Liubov Dmitriyevna fingered the crinkling pink tissues in the box, picked out and ate another chocolate.

“All those things I told you, about being a housewife, you know?” she said, not lifting her eyes. In the close confinement of the kiosk, under the unforgiving light of the bulb, below makeup glossy as an oil slick, her face lay exposed; and as Anna looked at her closely, she thought in surprise, Why, she’s not in her thirties, she’s no younger than me, older perhaps—and glanced away quickly, uncomfortably, as if she had just uncovered someone’s shameful secret. Liubov Dmitriyevna pushed the box toward Anna. “You haven’t had one yet, take it, take it… I just thought you’d turn up your nose at me if you knew. You were always going on about how your husband is an important musician, and your son is about to enroll in the university, and you with your fine education, reading poetry and all that—”

Anna gently wrapped the foil around a white swan and tucked it into her pocket. “Oh, no,” she said. “Not at all. I thought… Not at all. Liubov Dmitriyevna, would you—if you want, we could have tea at my place sometime. Maybe tomorrow?”

“I would like that,” Liubov Dmitriyevna said. “And it’s just Liuba.”

A few days later, she in turn invited Anna over. Her apartment proved to be exactly like Anna’s, in an identical building just two streets down; and though it overflowed with a great many desirable things, scattered on the surfaces, stacked darkly in the yawning wardrobes, glittering in the cupboards, they seemed to Anna, as she waded her careful way through the place, like pieces that did not form a whole, the chaotic back room of a secondhand shop. Following Liubov Dmitriyevna—Liuba, she reminded herself—into the kitchen, she glimpsed a silk blouse, its tag still attached, hanging in a doorway, a gathering of three bronze lamps without lampshades on a corridor counter, an open suitcase spilling its contents onto a crisp rug that smelled new and clashed with the wallpaper.

“Your place is nice,” she said insincerely. “Can I help?”

Liuba was clearing a patch off the kitchen table, brushing to the floor two or three pairs of stockings in unopened packages, an unused eastbound train ticket, a delicately painted Oriental fan. Falling, the fan flickered open in a momentary, heartbreaking vision of a different, clear, simple life—a tiny village, the shore of a blue lake, horses running in a meadow beyond—then shut abruptly. Liuba silently set the cups and the plates before Anna, flopped onto a chair, dropped her head in her hands, and started to cry, her shoulders shaking with big, sloppy, uncontrollable sobs.

Anna stood horrified before her, excruciatingly aware of her empty hands hanging by her sides. Then, sitting down so hurriedly that the chair legs scraped the floor with a jarring metallic moan, she put her arm around the woman’s shoulders as if trying to hold them down, to make them stop jerking in that awful, defenseless, rag-doll way. After a minute, the shoulders subsided. Anna removed her arm. “Try the cakes,” Liubov Dmitriyevna said, wiping her face roughly with the back of her hand, the last small sob caught in her throat like a hiccup, her mouth running with blood-red lipstick. “I got them through a special connection.”

“Thank you,” Anna said, picking up a pastry. “They’re wonderful,” she added after a pause, but Liubov Dmitriyevna—Liuba, just Liuba, she told herself again—did not respond. Humbled in the presence of someone else’s unfathomable grief, ashamed to be its witness, Anna looked out the window. The city was being rubbed out by dusk, and the dusk had a new quality to it: light around the edges, it now concealed at its heart a darker, chillier, autumnal kernel, like a cool pebble buried in damp sand; and there was her reflection again, stripped of the years, evenly meeting her gaze in the sky.

She was still staring outside when Liuba spoke. “My husband has a daughter who lives with us,” she said in a voice so quiet that Anna had to lean forward to hear. “You saw the closed door in the hallway?… The girl is ill, she never leaves her bed, and refuses chocolates. What kind of a child refuses chocolates? Her lips are so transparent you can almost see her teeth through them… And I, I don’t have any children, I’ve spent years and years hoping, but I’m forty-six, it’s too late now… And my husband, he drinks, and has no steady job, and risks his skin selling stuff in those places—well, you know—and lifts my things too. Two of my rings, my mother’s picture, and six spoons went missing not long ago, though he denies it, of course—”

“But does he love you?” Anna asked softly.

Liuba thought for a moment. “You know how it is,” she said with a shrug. “One day he’ll come home stewed and smack me a good one, then he’ll be all contrite, kisses, presents—stolen, mostly, but even so… Yeah, he loves me.”

Anna looked back at the window, watched her reflection’s eyes grow dark and still. “I think my husband doesn’t love me,” she said.

Liuba briskly blew her nose into a napkin, poured out more tea, pressed another pastry upon Anna, listened to her talk.

“What he needs is not pies in the kitchen, he’s sick of the kitchen,” she then said, nodding with authority. “You should meet him somewhere outside your home, somewhere romantic.”

“There’s the cafeteria,” Anna said uncertainly.

“No, honey, not the cafeteria, what’s romantic about the cafeteria?”

“I had an éclair pastry there once. With cream.”

“No, no. Somewhere in nature, I think. You lie on the grass, you listen to birds, you drink some wine. I saw that in a film once.”

“The park, maybe?” Anna said. “There are pigeons in the park. But they don’t sing, they just make those coughing noises like they’re choking—”

Liuba frowned. “The park might work,” she conceded at last. “You won’t see the trash cans and the dog shit once it gets dark. I’ll find you some wine that won’t give you a stomachache—don’t forget to open it beforehand, though, nothing worse than grunting over a cork when you’re trying to be romantic. And you said you’re preparing some surprise for him—well, don’t wait, surprise him now. Oh, and you’ll need to wear something he’s never seen, something tight and plunging, you know, and some makeup. You have a beautiful face but you don’t take care of yourself. I’ll lend you things, I have plenty, a pretty necklace, a pair of earrings—”

“Thank you,” Anna said, a bit stiffly. “I don’t need earrings, I have a pair already.”

“Listen,” Liuba said. “You have a husband who doesn’t drink, chase skirts, or squander away all your money, and a son, a handsome, healthy son who is about to become a student at the university. You are lucky.” As she spoke, she wouldn’t quite look at Anna.

Anna grew warm with pity and shame. “I’m so sorry,” she said, squeezing Liuba’s hand.

Liuba turned away, blew her nose again, turned back. “Hell,” she said, smiling a bright, devastated smile. “Let’s go look in my closet.”

A week later, her bag sagging in an oblong shape suggestive of a bottle, Anna watched Sergei turn the corner. He walked slowly, stooping a little in the thin gray jacket he had worn for years. He did not notice her until he was almost upon her, then looked up in surprise; but underneath the surprise she glimpsed another look, one of defeat, and her heart turned hot and tight in her chest. “When you’re done tonight,” she said, “could you come by the park?”

“Why?” he asked without interest.

Liuba had counseled her to turn the evening into an adventure, something new.

“Oh, Sasha asked me to tell you if I ran into you,” she said nonchalantly. “I guess he wants to see you before his shift. He’ll be waiting for you.”

After a short pause, he spoke. “I’ll be there, thanks.”

She followed him with her eyes, wondering whether she had imagined the unexpected brightening in his face, then ran home. She would have liked to take a bath, but there was no hot water—they shut it off for a month or two every summer, for maintenance, the notice on her building always read—so she put on a teakettle, then poured its steaming stream into a large pot filled with cold water, and ladled diluted lukewarm cupfuls over herself while she crouched in the tub. As a week’s worth of summer grime left her skin, she began to feel small whirls and lulls in the air, tiny pocket-sized breezes, dips and rises in temperature, the evening, the world, stirring alive in barely perceptible, hopeful ways.

She dashed from the bathroom as she was, unembarrassed by her nakedness, the linoleum cold against her feet, and in the bedroom pushed the window wide open, her full breasts grazing the sill. Breathing deeply, suddenly exhilarated, she looked at the flat roofs, the lamps starting to come on in other homes, the moistly gleaming fish scale of the crescent moon.

Liuba’s blue satin dress was carefully spread out on the bed; she touched its pearly softness to assure herself that it was real.

A little past nine o’clock, as she was applying a layer of matching blue paint to her eyelids, she heard the front door open and close. Throwing on a robe, she walked out of the bedroom. Her son was striding down the corridor toward his room, carrying a load of books in his arms. Studying so hard for his entrance exams, she thought, and stopped, seized with a desire to say something to him, something warm, something that would include him in her nearing happiness; but just then, the telephone jumped into shrill existence behind her back.

She answered. A boy’s voice asked politely for Sasha.

“It’s for you,” she said. He picked up the receiver.

“Yeah?” he said. “Oh, Stepka, hey!… Right now? Actually, I’m just… Oh, I see… Where?… Not a problem, I’ll be right there.”

She gazed after him a bit regretfully, sorry to have been checked in her generous impulse; she wished the night could be special for everyone she loved.

The park was deserted, shadows dense underfoot, the air deep, cool, charged with approaching autumn; a few dead leaves rustled on the path as Alexander hurried along.

His friend sat sprawled on a bench, tossing rocks at the streetlamp.

“That was fast,” he said, and waved his cigarette at his feet. “Here it is, then.”

Alexander bent, picked up the flat square-shaped parcel bundled in newspapers.

“What’s the damage?” he asked.

The youth threw another rock at the lamp as he replied. The metal post issued a hollow clang, swallowing Alexander’s gasp.

“Took some doing,” Stepan said with a shrug. “Almost impossible to find. Banned, right? This one’s from Over There. Might be a scratch on it, but it shouldn’t skip too much.”

He searched the ground for a bigger rock, took aim.

“When do you need the money?”

Glass shattered, and darkness leaked out, as if autumn had arrived abruptly in the park. The scar under Stepan’s eye vanished; his face dissolved into a vague, satisfied, smoke-wreathed blur. In the pale echo of light from the windows above them, Alexander watched him lean back, ease out a bottle from the crook of his arm.

“For you, no rush,” Stepan said. “I can wait till next week. Want some?”

“No, I should go, my shift’s coming up.”

“You and that line of yours—such dedication… Well, I’ll be here for a while if you feel like stopping by later. Been running around like crazy the last few days, I figure I deserve to sit back for a few hours, smell the roses.”

“Yeah, sure,” Alexander said. “Thanks, brother. See you around.”

Not willing to risk standing in line with the black-market merchandise in his possession, he walked back home. In the shaky dimness of the elevator, he ripped off the newspaper skin, a few stray phrases dangling in thin shreds under his fingers—“under the auspices of,” “repeatedly with a heated iron,” “to the glorious end”… He slid the record out of its sleeve and held it locked between his palms, the black brilliance of its concentric circles moving round and round between his hands like grooves of a tree trunk, the edges brittle and sharp, the label reading Igor Selinsky, Violin Concerto in—The doors jerked open, and, his eyes still on the label, he stepped out, and smashed headfirst into a woman in a horrid shiny dress.

He felt his hands go limp, heard the sickening crack of something hard hitting the concrete of the landing, her high, incongruously girlish giggle, “Ah, Sasha, it’s you, I just thought I’d go for a little walk, there are cold cutlets if you’re—” But already the doors were groaning, closing by fits and starts like creaking old jaws taking small bites out of the terrible vision of his mother, her face motley and glossy, her eyelashes twitching with mascara like the hairy legs of some squashed insect, her skin showing white and thick through the silky stockings, her smeared lips smiling, smiling at him for one instant from inside the elevator’s painfully, pitilessly illuminated box, in another instant nothing but a fissure of light going down, down…

Frantically he fumbled for his keys, let himself in, and, bursting into his room, thrust the record under his lamp, gave it a rapid onceover. There was a nasty slash running through it; he did not think it had been there before, but he could not be sure. He pushed it back into its sleeve, his hands trembling so much that he made another awkward movement, felt another creak-crack of plastic under his fingers. Leaving the record on his desk, he switched the light off and rushed out.

There was no trace of his mother on the street. He walked briskly, as if to flee his unease, and reached the kiosk before ten, just as the evening shift was departing. His father was there still; Alexander saw him wave, then turn to speak to someone behind him, and move toward him with broad, impatient strides. They met on a corner half a block away.

“You’re early, were you waiting for me at the park?” his father asked in a hurried undertone. “Do you have it?”

Alexander glanced at him in surprise.

“How did you… I didn’t know you knew… Never mind. Yeah, I have it. It’s in my room, on the desk. There might be a… it may skip a little. They want the payment by—”

His words choked as his father embraced him.

“Thank you, Sasha,” he said. “I’ll have the money. And anything you want, just ask.”

Sofia was waiting for him in the next street.

“Oh, Sergei Vasilievich, I can’t believe this,” she said. “To tell you the truth, I started thinking there was no record—that I somehow dreamed our conversation—”

He laughed with relief, lightly touching her elbow. They walked quickly, though not by the shortest route; they circumvented the park because it looked too dark and a drunken hollering interspersed with abandoned shrieks was rising in the heart of its shadows. Someone having a bit too much fun in a public place, Sergei thought with embarrassment, making an effort to ignore it, careful not to glance at Sofia until the shrieks became sobs, then drowned in the silence behind them. When they reached his building, he left her in the foyer by the mailboxes and, anxious, tiptoed inside his apartment, readying some innocuous lie for his wife. His wife, however, did not emerge from the bedroom—she must have gone to sleep early again—and there was the record, in a nest of torn newspapers on Alexander’s desk, just as the boy had promised.

He departed without anyone’s having seen him.

They covered the distance to her home almost at a run, not talking. He felt the neighborhood streets stretching tediously like an accordion, his impatience a drawn-out note, his thoughts a feverish, excited, apprehensive whirl. At last they were there. One, two, three, four—but now the echoes of their footsteps merged together, the resistance of the front door yielding magically under his hand; and already they were leaving the blank outside darkness to enter the enchanted darkness inside.

She pressed the elevator button. He imagined the cramped cage sliding open before them, the cigarette butts and spittle on its rickety floor, and how close they would stand, and was all at once nervous and distracted; but after she had held her finger on the button for a long, frustrating moment, it became clear that the elevator was stuck somewhere above.

“It’s only the fourth floor,” she said. “I’m sorry. Please watch your step, the lights are out.”

He followed her, blindly feeling his way along the banisters, her silhouette dissolved in the murkiness of the unlit flight of stairs, then outlined, briefly, tantalizingly, against the pale glow of a narrow window on the landing, and dissolved, and outlined again. With each ascending step, he sensed the nearing of so many nighttime mysteries, simple and inevitable as breathing—even if it was his own, somewhat labored, middle-aged breathing as he trudged up, and up, and up; but also, and no less compellingly as he climbed higher, pressing the precious parcel against his chest, glimpsing the increasingly distant floating of the streetlamp spheres in the city that was being left below, he began to anticipate at last the unwinding of the as yet unheard Selinsky melody—that ecstatic rising from note to note, that rare, exultant, vertiginous moment he loved most of all, when his very essence seemed drawn out of his body after a piercing surge of music, when all the inexpressible, mute feelings, all the neglected longings of his soul, found a language full and perfect and forgiving, flowing freely in some other place where beauty was as ever-present as air, where future was pure time, endless time, allowing space enough for anything and everything, all the hopes he had ever cherished, all the greatnesses he had ever wanted to accomplish, all the dreams from which he had ever woken up—

“I apologize for the smell,” Sofia said, turning. “Cats, you know.”

He started, stumbled, nearly laughed, and, slipping on something mushy—a potato skin, maybe—descended heavily to his knees, his bag tangled below him.

“Are you all right?” she asked quickly, reaching out to catch him, her eyes moving in the dimness, a hovering, concerned angel with a pale bluing of the temples.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he said, rising with stiff dignity.

He tried not to dwell on the unmistakable sensation of something plastic snapping beneath him as his weight had come down to the floor.

In the doorway, she put her finger to her lips.

“It’s late,” she whispered, “people are sleeping.”

He was not sure whether she was talking about neighbors whom she did not want alerted to a stranger’s visit so close to midnight, or about someone living in her apartment. He stepped into the darkness after her, and then her hand was in his. He pressed her fingers, her ring pinching him painfully, and the darkness swirled around them, fast, faster, in breathless eddies that pulsated with the enormous pounding of his heart; but her hand resisted his pressure, pulling him forward instead. Obeying, he moved after her between the corners of unseen furniture, a straggling light from the street below fleshing out the many frames that glinted on the wall—no doubt paintings, soft, honey-rich paintings he would see in the daylight soon—and a hump of blankets on the sofa where, he supposed, her father lay slumbering, dreaming of plush slippers and small bowls of preserves and other simple comforts of uneventful old age—

I am not old, he thought with defiance, I am not old yet, I am only forty-seven, I will not be old for a long time… A door opened, shut behind them, her hand eluded him, the light went on. He closed his eyes for an instant as the sun exploded in his head, then saw a room emerging.

“Please, sit down,” she said. “I’m sorry about the mess, I didn’t expect—”

There was a chair; he sat. The curtains were powder-blue, and the small space seemed to undulate with a profusion of clothes, cloths, fabrics; the night wind blew the curtains, the shadows, the cooling of August, inside through an open window, and the sleeve of a discarded blue blouse moved ever so lightly, like a wing rising and falling, like the breath of someone peacefully asleep. He felt as if he had found himself at the heart of a cool blue jewel filled with faint, fluid breezes, brushing through him like the advent of happiness.

The room was so narrow that his knees touched the edge of her bed, but he did not look at the bed. He watched her back instead as she bent over the record player on her dresser, watched her hands as she carefully wiped the spindle with a square of cloth.

She straightened, picked up the record, gazed at him. “Do you know what I imagine?” she said. “Something so new I can’t even imagine it. I was born three years after he left. Something I don’t know, then. Something I can’t suspect exists, do you understand?”

Their eyes fit together at last, and there it was—the dizziness, the night wind caressing her hair, his heart losing its mooring, falling somewhere, somewhere joyous, the music spiraling into the skies through the gash of the window, higher, higher, her clothes cascading to the floor as she took a barefoot step, leap, flight toward him, the violins sobbing over a life that was nearly wasted, but not quite, not quite…

Turning back to the player, she slid the record out of its sleeve.

He heard a pained intake of breath.

“What is it?” he asked.

“The record is badly cracked,” she said in a near-whisper. “I don’t know whether—I’ll try, of course, but I don’t think—see, it’s almost broken in half—”

He stood from his chair, looked in turn. The wind died in the room.

As the record began to rotate, the tonearm shook and jumped and jerked, and there were horrible hiccups, and the noise of teeth grinding, and, most heartrending of all, a tiny snippet of a melody—three, four notes, which kept repeating themselves, reaching the edge of beauty again and again a mere heartbeat before going over into a crackling chasm.

He attempted to talk, but his lips only rustled like dried insect wings.

The tonearm shivered to a stop.

“I’m so sorry, but it won’t work,” she said, taking the record off.

“No, no, let me, I will, I might—” He tore the record out of her hands, and pressed it back on the turntable, and pushed, and pulled, and kneaded, his trembling fingers trying to cajole the sound into life, in vain, for things kept jamming, and some invisible machinery groaned in protest, until, gently wresting the record away from him, she said, “Please, Serezha, it’s no use, you’ll just break the player.”

On the other side of the wall, sofa springs complained as someone shifted.

“I should be going,” he said, and stood motionless for another silent moment.

“I’ll walk you out,” she said.

In the hallway, they paused. She had left the door to her room open, and the low, blue-tinted light splashed about their shadowy reflections in the mirror.

“Sergei Vasilievich, really, it’s all right,” she said softly, “you’ll hear the real thing in only three months, three or four, very soon now, don’t be so upset.”

“Of course,” he said, forcing out a smile, then added, desperate to rescue something at least of his perfect evening, their first evening alone, “You know, maybe—maybe we could even go together, you and I—”

“I would love that,” she said, and looked away. “I would love that, but you see, the ticket’s not for me, I’m doing this for—for someone else. I’ve been meaning to tell you—”

“Oh,” he said, his voice deadened. “Oh, all right.”

She embraced him, quickly, fleetingly, a brush of her hand on his shoulder; he barely felt it. “Thank you anyway, I know you tried.” She was unlocking the front door now. “Here is the record, your friend must not have realized… Well, good night, see you tomorrow.”

The elevator opened on her floor, swallowing him, then hung without going up or down for a long while, or not that long perhaps, he did not care, he did not notice, until, for no reason, the doors slid back open, regurgitating him on her threshold. He stared at the number of her apartment for a heavy minute, thinking of that seed of something small and dark and imploring he had imagined in her eyes the instant before she had averted them.

Then he turned, and trudged down the stairs. He stopped on the second-floor landing to stomp on the record, throw its pieces into the trash chute. He cut his palm on a jagged edge, and for another stretch of time stood still, pressing his forehead against the sweating concrete wall. It was past midnight when he finally stepped outside. He could not face the thought of going home. The park where he was supposed to meet his son two hours earlier was quiet now, and he stumbled along its unlit paths, scraping pebbles in his wake, smashed his knee on a bench, sat down. Someone had abandoned a nearly full bottle on the ground, next to the shed skins of what looked like silk stockings. At least somebody was having a good time, he thought, suppressing a sickened laugh. The unsteady boat of the crescent moon swayed in the pale waves inside the bottle; he picked it up, pulled out the cork, sniffed it mechanically, but, of course, smelled nothing. It was too dark to read the label. He wiped its neck with his sleeve, then carried it to his lips, and drank, and looked at the bottle again. It was wine—a strange thing to find unfinished in a public park in this city, he thought with indifference, and drank again, and again, deeper now, until, gradually, his eyes adjusted to the shadows, and his hand stopped bleeding, and he remembered that for the first time tonight she had called him Serezha, just Serezha, and found that everything was shifting into focus at last, becoming clear.

She wanted to hear Selinsky’s music. He would make her a gift of it. He would wait in line, however long it took, and when he finally had the ticket, he would give it to her. He would give it to her, and this time, he would be worthy of her, he would expect nothing back, for she did not owe him any answers, did not owe him anything, he told himself sternly. But as the moon boat glimmered at the bottom of the bottle, rocking up and down in the sea breeze, smelling of all the wonderful things he had never smelled, the salt, the sand, a woman’s damp hair, he could not help thinking of their hallway reflections embracing in a different world, a silvery mirror world where things were simple, where an embrace became a kiss, where a kiss deepened, natural as a bud opening, and a man’s old-fashioned hat hanging on a nail transformed into a large shaggy bird and flew out the window, and a coat closet swung its doors wide, inviting them into its depths, and its depths were dark and soft, darker than the fur of a hundred fur coats, softer than the fluff of a hundred feather beds, and the softness, the darkness accepted them, two people who, in this simple mirror world, were not afraid to tell each other how they felt.

5

ANNA HAD BROUGHT her mother two full cups of tea, yet the old woman would not leave the room, and by half past nine Anna had grown restless. Liuba had advised her to wait until some minutes after ten (“You should be a bit late,” she had said, “it’s better to keep him in suspense”); but at nine-forty, unable to bear the insidious whisperings of the clock any longer, she stood up to go. Already at the threshold, she heard at last her mother’s light steps in the corridor outside, the lavatory door swinging and closing, water gushing into existence. Relieved, she ran into the empty room, tore at the drawer. The box of dark green velvet was there still; as its lid flipped open with the softest of plops, the trapped diamond light, in escaping, scratched at her eye.

The water stopped with one last noisy eruption. Anna shut the box, pushed it back into its musty grave, and hurried out.

On the landing, she unclenched her hand, the sharpness of the clasps imprinted on her palm like a snakebite. The jabs through her earlobes were painful—she had not worn earrings in a long while—and she was still gasping, wondering whether she had drawn blood, when the elevator spilled her son straight into her. She saw in his face one instant of blankness, a perfect lack of recognition, and felt a sudden thrill. Anya, is that really you? Sergei’s amazed voice said in the recesses of her mind. She stepped into the elevator smiling.

Outside, the city closed around her, dark and cool; the last bits of summer lay resting in buckets of roses sold at a night kiosk by the tram stop. She teetered along the streets as quickly as she could, though her ankles, unaccustomed to heels, kept betraying her. She imagined her shoes tattooing a graceful rhythm across the velvet underside of late August, carrying echoes to expectant girls who sat dreaming about life by their cracked windows; imagined, too, the shallow perspectives of the park already stretching deeper to admit her. Drumming on the back of his bench, bored by the prospect of a conversation with his son, he would see the silhouette of a lovely (if somewhat full-hipped) woman at the end of the alley and, intrigued, watch her approach through the leafy shadows, until slowly, slowly, his appreciation would deepen into astonishment and an exclamation would escape his lips.

“My God,” he would breathe out, “is that you? Oh Anya, you’re beautiful.”

And then—then the faint scents of grass and flowers and the golden bouquet of a wonderful wine, its grapes ripened by the southern sunshine in some mythical land where storks flap their weighty wings in nests made of cart wheels, and meadows sway in the breeze, and donkeys tread up winding mountain tracks loaded with jugs of the purest chilled water. A clinking of glasses coming together, his whisper in her ear, the tender cooing of dreaming pigeons. I wanted to surprise you, Serezha, the ticket you’ve been waiting for all this time—the ticket is for you, it’s yours, my gift to you, you can hear your music now, can’t we be happy like we used to be, or were we ever—Of course we were, we still are, thank you, thank you, Anya, I love you.

The park’s approaches yawned with blackness. She hurried along a deserted alley, saw, at its end, the outline of a man sitting on a bench. It was not yet ten; he had come early. Her heart licked at her breast with a few tentative, hopeful shudders.

The gravel crunched under her heels; the invisible pockets of intimate darkness on both sides of the path smelled damp and full, promising to disclose some soft, unbearably poignant secrets as soon as she stepped off it, dissolved in the night. The man rose, squinting at her across the late hour; the nearest streetlamp had gone out. Glad of the shadows, she took another wavering step, and another, and there was the bench, and the man lunged toward her, his fingers clamping down on her wrist.

“Well, well,” he said. “Just as I was getting lonely.”

His voice exhaled soured drink into her face. It was not Sergei. The darkness was packed tight around them, but accidental moonlight leaked through the trees, and his face skipped in and out like a voice nearing and fading. She glimpsed his youth, eighteen maybe, maybe twenty, and a vicious puckering under one eye, and an insolent, inebriated tilt to his mouth, and she wanted to scream, she screamed, she screamed louder, but no one was around, and already his face was shoving hers toward the bench, his hands groping at the seams of the dress that was not hers. She thought, as if from some other, safe, suspended place, It’s a lovely dress, I can’t damage it, she’d never lend me anything again. Then there were steps echoing along the boundary of the park, Sergei coming, she knew for one vast exhalation of relief, but the steps did not move closer, two sets of steps skirting the boundary of normal life, somewhere out there, and the brutality of it all swung at her like a fist, and she was screaming again, hoping someone would appear, someone would shake her awake. But the steps were retreating already, and the opened bottle of wine she had brought along tumbled out of her bag, rolled over her foot, and the darkness was blinding, thrusting toward her, and the man, the boy, was ripping, tugging, pulling at her edges, and she began to weep, “I’m a mother,” she sobbed, “I have a son your age, about your age,” and as the silk stockings Liuba had given her split open to let the night in, she collapsed onto the bench, crying, “Please, please, take these instead, they’re worth a lot of money—”

His arms tensed along her sides. There welled a heartbeat of stillness.

“Take what?” the boy’s voice said into her neck.

Her hands shook as she fought the clasps. The shadows leapt about, straining through the wetness in her eyelashes. “These,” she said, her palm open. A sudden cold draft swept at her exposed knees. “These, see?”

His eyes glinted.

“They’re real diamonds,” she pleaded. “Please.”

His hand swooped over hers, scooped hers out. As though from some vantage point above it all, she watched the moonlight fill hollow pockets of radiance between the boy’s fingers. In the next moment, the fingers clenched, the radiance drowned, the weight lifted. For a breathless minute she was afraid to move. Then, incredulously, she sat up, pulled the dress down over her knees, stared into the darkness. The darkness contained nothing now but the receding friction of shoes on gravel, a splash of reflected light in the wine rocking at her feet, a rustle of feathers—a pigeon dreaming, she guessed dully.

After a while, she stood up. Her stockings were torn, and her right heel had snapped when he had first slammed her toward the bench, but she was otherwise unhurt. She loosened the straps of her shoes, peeled off and discarded the stockings, and, barefoot and barelegged, her shoes in her hands, the night freely lapping at her thighs, ran home, numbly sidestepping smashed shards of bottles glistening here and there on the sidewalks. The kiosk by the tram stop was now shuttered, the roses gone; in the half-hour since she had passed here, late August had finally forced the summer out, and autumn rang in the air, clear and sharp and bright like a piece of cold glass. A passerby gave her a shocked look, and a dark stretch of the city later, she saw, in the mirror of her hallway, what he had seen: a pale aging face with hair plastered damply over the forehead, drops of dried pain congealed in one earlobe, temples blue and shining with smeared paint, lips bleeding crimson onto the chin, eyes blank with desolation.

For a long while she gazed at herself, her hands pressed to her cheeks, then, turning away from the mirror, knocked on her mother’s door, and walked in.

The light was on, the bed unruffled, the stuffy air tinted rosy brown, and darkly scented, and thick with silence, as it always was; time never moved here. She thought the room empty until the chair by the desk creaked around. Within its niche of shadow sat her mother, drowned in her ancient satin nightgown the color of moth wings, the color of fading memories, so small her feet barely touched the ground.

“I borrowed your earrings,” Anna said in a still voice, “but I was mugged, and I lost them. I’m sorry, I know how much they—how much you—”

Her mother’s eyes were dark and startled, a pair of beads. Anna’s words felt powdery in her throat, insubstantial and meaningless, blown on her breath, scattering into silence. She stood without moving, then turned, and stumbled to her room, and fell onto the bed, as she was, in her beautiful borrowed dress, her legs splattered with mud and leaves, the soles of her feet black with the dirt of the entire summer in the city. Lying facedown on the bed, she felt her chest at last heaving open with sobs; but as she pressed herself into the tight, close darkness that smelled of warmth and sleep and loneliness, she sensed a presence hovering about her, a hand brushing her back, light as a bird’s feather, a voice, which she scarcely recognized, her mother’s voice, repeating into her hair, “Don’t be upset, don’t be upset, my dear, it’s only things, and it serves me right, I haven’t taught you properly—diamonds should never be worn in the summer—don’t be upset, this isn’t what matters…” And somehow, as the hand continued to stroke her back, she felt calmer, and heavier, and smaller, until there she was again, a little girl curled up under a comforter of down, cradled in the hollow of the night, weighty with dreams, absolved from the grown-up complexities of existence, free to close her eyes, and listen to her mother’s fairy tales, and drift, weaving bright, magic fabrics from the patterns of words, from the texture of her mother’s even voice, secure in the knowledge that things would be easier, better, happier, upon awakening.

And as Anna allowed herself to fall asleep, she could not tell whether the hand continuing to brush her back was real or part of the night, whether the voice was there or in a dream, whether, at some nebulous junction in time, she had truly opened her eyes to find Sergei kneeling by the bed, grief deepening the lines of his swiftly aging face, or whether his face too was sewn from the shimmering predawn essence, along with the grand boulevards she traveled in silver heels, and the rivers passing slowly under medieval gargoyles, and the dream voice reaching through her sleep, gently tiptoeing up some narrow steps, depositing her in a cool, stony, whispery place with stained-glass windows that stretched floor to ceiling. It was a church in the heart of a foreign city, that place, an ancient church whose windows shone with many solemn colors—the blue birth of the world, the purple procession of prophets who had guessed at some purpose in mankind’s future, the proud red of martyrs who had taken that purpose on faith, the glowing green of the world’s lucid, liquid end—all etched in beauty, all unearthly.

I came here often on summer afternoons, after rehearsals, the dream voice said, to let perspiration turn to chill on my shoulder blades, to hear my steps echo under the vaults, to pass, again and again, through the wedges of the luminous colors.

I came here that day in August, I remember.

I was not feeling well that day, had not felt well for some weeks, some months. I would often succumb to queasy spells in the midst of pirouettes, and my body had grown unfamiliar in varied ways, some subtle, some rather less so; yet still I continued to dance. I would not hear of visiting a physician.

We were preparing his third ballet. The second one had been a great success, the toast of the previous season; there had been evening gatherings in salons exquisite as gilded teacups, and leisurely carriage rides through falling leaves, and late-night bouquets of roses delivered to our dressing rooms, jeweled bracelets snaking artfully about the glossy thorns. He too had money now. One night in autumn, as I was leaving after a performance, he waited for me on the steps, a shadow against a wall. He refused to tell me where we were going, but I recognized the streets shivering in the gaslights through the curtains on the carriage windows. When we stopped, the hour was close to midnight, but the pavement outside the shop was bright with the squares of illumination. Inside, two elegant flutes of champagne stood bubbling, just for us, and two or three young men slid by noiselessly with velvet trays of glitter in their manicured gloves, and a plump little proprietor with a glass protuberance grotesquely attached to his eye swept his cuff-linked hand over the displays, gushing respectfully: “Mademoiselle, mademoiselle—”

I wanted nothing.

He chose for me: a pair of diamond earrings much like the ones we had admired in the window the year before, when we had owned nothing but the river below a balcony and a sunbeam across a friend’s sheets and the exuberance of champagne drunk straight from the bottle after that first review had come out. I thanked him, and from then on I always wore them when I danced, but I often felt sad, as if, with the comforts of life advancing at us sleekly, softly, on velvet paws, something fierce and vital and young had been lost—though why that should be so, I did not know. We were still young then, even if we did not suspect it. Perhaps we believed that beauty or happiness had to be brief in order to live forever in one’s memory, like a dancer’s breathtaking leap, only one improbable second too long, lit, frozen, above the stage. Or it could have been simpler than that—perhaps he had merely fallen out of love. We had a new soloist that season; I saw him looking at her during rehearsals. I do not mean to say that what we had shared was not strong, my dear, only that geniuses are sometimes like that—they love their own fire, their own brilliance reflected in those around them, and there will always be someone whose mirror is brighter, or else newer and thus more given to reflections, than your own. Or at least, that was what Vaslav said, patting my hand as he consoled me, though he didn’t put it quite like that, of course. I hadn’t yet learned to be silent, you see.

I cried all winter, and in the spring I met a man from the city of my birth. He was old enough to be my father, his eyes were the light blue color of melting snows, and he made everything around me feel so solid and clear that I would sometimes forget the sadness I carried within me, curled up in the dusty wings of my soul like a once loved beast now eternally cold. Yet from time to time all through that summer, the summer of my queasiness, I would grow weary of my new, quiet contentment, and come to you in search of something else—something secret, something that frightened me, something that gave me joy. You stayed in hotels now, so we no longer had to borrow friends’ flats; the hotel rooms had scores of scores scattered everywhere, and expensive linens that did not feel cool against my skin, and, at times, silk things that did not belong to me, crumpled in out-of-the-way corners.

Whatever it was I searched for that summer, I never found it.

I do not remember exactly when I began to guess, but on that August day, after a particularly grueling practice, when I stood in the ancient church I liked to visit and looked down at the floor and saw my shoes filling with blood, I had known for a very long time. It was a bright afternoon. I remember the fractured sun falling all purple and green and blue on the stones around me, and the hollow drip-drip of blood on my sensible flat-heeled shoes, and a woman screaming next to me, and on my chest, the trembling projection of a vivid, sun-colored saint, and the knowledge, calm now, that I would not dance again—not here, not for you.

They took me to the hospital. My child was saved, and the man I had met in the spring got there fast, and, squeezing my hand so violently it hurt, kept repeating, “You should have told me, you should have told me—did you not know I would—did you think I wouldn’t—”

We were married in that church in the early fall. It was hardly ever used for ceremonies of the sort, but I had fame and Andrei had means and a special permission was granted. A week later, we left for his city, the city of my birth, his family home. The night before our departure, our suitcases packed, I escaped my own farewell party, and hurried along the foggy streets to a familiar hotel. As I splashed through its grand golden letters quivering on the wet sidewalk under my feet, I was hoping, hoping against hope, that it was not too late—but of course it was, and you were still not back from your two months touring on the other side of the ocean, and the concierge, peering into my face, instantly shed his icy tone and, his snowy gloves fluttering, his stare darting, asked for an autograph, and, changing my mind, I crumpled the letter I had written.

I walked back slowly through my dark, autumnal, beloved city, the invisible river lapping beside me, the mansions along its banks asleep save for the garret windows that glowed softly, secretly, with someone else’s happiness, and I thought, I will come back, I will come back soon, I will see you again; for, even though I understood it too late, I now knew it was possible, possible for the leaping dancer not to descend with the music every time. Back in my rooms, it was stuffy and merry, and Vaslav had become hysterical and Tamara’s Cloud escaped and we chased it meowing and squealing with laughter all up and down the stairwell until I was all out of breath and my husband begged me to rest and corks smashed into ceilings and no one noticed the look in my eyes and everyone promised to write.

The things we remember longest are not necessarily the most permanent or even the most meaningful, but they are often the brightest, and maybe that is why in the end they matter most. Forty-four years is a long time, my dear. When I heard of the concert, I thought, I will wait for the winter, and put on my earrings, and go.

I will still go, of course.

I do worry that you will not recognize me without them.

Perhaps it’s for the best, I do not know.

If only—if only I could forget my daughter’s face as she walked barefoot into my room.