The Concert Ticket

1

SEPTEMBER WAS SOAKED THROUGH, and the damp, rustling days soon began to smell of mildew. Some people claimed to find it a relief after the hazy heat of the summer, boiling in the city’s immense vat of concrete for weeks on end, but most complained. The man who had rented fold-out chairs for a handful of coins had not been seen since July, and the older women suffered; two or three even left the line for good, and one was taken away on a stretcher.

“Have you heard?” Emilia Khristianovna said one morning as Anna paused on the way to her place in line. It was raining again; when she lowered her voice to a whisper, Anna had to duck her head under the other woman’s umbrella to discern her words amidst the wet rush of the street. “They’re saying the man with the chairs was, you know, transferred. Someone saw him at dawn, getting into a car with tinted windows.”

“But why?” Anna asked, shifting; her own umbrella was leaking under her collar.

“Running an unauthorized business, I’m sure.” They were both silent for a moment, walled off by the rain from the rest of the glistening, shivering line. “Listen, Anna Andreyevna.” As the physics teacher looked away, her umbrella nudged the top of Anna’s head. “I meant to tell you, my schedule has changed, it will be difficult for me to spot you in the mornings like before. And they’re beginning to frown at our constant schedule-juggling, I’m worried that…”

Her voice trailed off. This close, Anna could see the pores in the woman’s kindly, anxious round face, the mole on her cheek, the plump lips chewing the unfinished sentence. Discomfited, she took a step away, dove back under her umbrella, receiving as she did so another rivulet of cold water down her neck.

“That’s all right,” she said quietly. “I’ll work something out, that’s all right.”

But when she crossed her name off the list the next afternoon, the organizer leafed through some notes, fiercely mauled his beard, and informed her that her early shift had not been covered and that they couldn’t let everyone do this, it would throw the whole system into chaos.

“Life’s catching up with people, I understand, I’m inconvenienced myself,” he said defensively, “but these are the rules, you know how it is.”

She nodded mutely.

The next day she called in sick at school, and again the day after that. On the third day Emilia Khristianovna, who had abandoned her wait earlier that week, came by to warn her. “I overheard the principal talking with her assistant, they were talking about you, they said—” When she leaned close to her ear, Anna could once again smell the peculiar mixture of damp wool and hot metal of classroom experiments.

“Thank you,” Anna tried to say, but could barely hear her own words over the constant drip-drop of water from the black, gleaming branches of the trees above.

That evening, after Sasha had finished his supper and left to study, and her mother had drunk her cup of tea (as she had done every night since the incident in the park, though she still said little beyond “No sugar, please” and “Thank you” and “Good night”), Anna remained in the kitchen. She sat by the window waiting, her hands listlessly crossed in her lap, the night breeze siphoning rain and gasoline from the outside world into the darkened mouse-hole of her home.

Sergei returned just past ten o’clock. He winced when he saw her.

“The leftovers are on the stove,” she said.

“I’m not hungry.”

“We need to talk,” she said.

Lowering himself onto a chair, he stared grimly at the rows of radishes lining their plastic tablecloth. He knew what was coming, of course. She had never convincingly explained her presence in the park that night—she said she had needed fresh air—but he had no doubt that she had heard rumors about him and Sofia and had set out in borrowed finery to spy on them. He tried to summon a feeling of anger and, failing, attempted to gather himself for the inevitable, terrible question she would now ask—

“I can’t cover mornings anymore,” Anna said. “My school schedule is different this fall.”

“What?” he said, glancing up with a start.

“My mother can’t stand in line.” She was looking at the floor, speaking in a flat, tired voice. “And Sasha’s a university student now, I don’t want to burden him more than he already is. We’re going to lose our place.”

He swallowed something like a sudden sob. “I—I can help,” he said.

“You can?”

“Sure. I can ask the director to shift my hours back. I’ll talk to him tomorrow.”

In the momentary silence, he thought he could hear the rain gently flicking at the windowpane, the splashing of footfalls through the puddles on the street six floors below, the slow, effortful lifting of Anna’s eyes in her pale, thinning face. Within her still irises, two tiny lightbulbs hung like deep, glowing scratches. “I wish I still could…” she began, and stopped, her voice wobbling with an excess of some emotion he could not identify. “That is, I had a gift for you, but I can’t now—not after losing her earrings—”

“A gift,” he repeated tonelessly. He did not want to feel any more gratitude, could not bear to feel any more gratitude. “What gift?”

She stood up, walked to the stove.

“It’s nothing,” she said with firmness, as though closing some door. “Just an idea for—for your birthday that didn’t work out. If you’re not going to eat, I’ll put it away.”

“No, wait,” he said. “I’ll have a bite after all. Go get some rest now, I’ll clean up.”

She left. He gazed after her for a long moment. Behind the wall, a neighbor’s radio started to broadcast a program about motherhood; the announcer’s familiar old voice talked of the somnolent delights of a child’s first year, a baby girl with a gurgling laugh and surprising green eyes. He listened as he ate, trying to ignore the strange, piercing feeling of regret—and something else, something else entirely, that kept rising in his throat like a half-digested belch, burning his insides, filling him with an insidious, impossible knowledge, about his wife, and his wife’s mother, and this radio program that, he had known all along, might not be a radio program at all—until the announcer drowned in static.

The next morning he knocked on Ivan Anatolievich’s door. The director was pushing his belly back and forth across his vast office with an air of beleaguered importance, the telephone receiver embedded deeply in the red folds of his neck, the cord trailing behind him like a puppet string. “Tomorrow, tomorrow, can’t you see I’m in the middle of something!” he bellowed, dismissing Sergei with an imperious wave.

Sergei barely prevented himself from slamming the door on his way out; and all through the day, a dull, heavy anger simmered inside him, so much so that later that evening, when shadows crept forth around the kiosk and a small crowd of Nightingales hoodlums gathered once again on the other side of the street, jeering and taunting, he shouted back at them: “Go home to your barns and haystacks where you belong!”

Someone from across the street threw a rock. It drew a violent arc through the twilight; the line watched it in an anxious hush. When a hurt gasp splashed a few backs ahead of Sergei, the Nightingales howled with laughter and scattered into the darkness.

“That,” said Vladimir Semyonovich quietly, “was uncivilized. You shouldn’t have provoked them. We aren’t like them.”

“Ah yes, turn the other cheek. That cross must be rubbing off on you,” Sergei snapped, and looked away, ignoring the stricken expression on Sofia’s face, and was silent for the rest of the shift. He felt furious still as he walked home—furious and helpless; and when some nondescript fellow of indeterminate age, whom he had glimpsed once or twice at the end of the line, fell into step with him and curiously asked what the spat was about and whether the mustachioed comrade back there had displayed religious leanings, Sergei brushed him off with an uncustomary rudeness.

At home, in the bedroom’s dimness, Anna’s face was expectant, her eyes drained of color above the soiled lace of her old peach-colored robe, his third-anniversary present. When he walked in and saw her standing in the middle of the room—not doing anything, just standing, her face turned toward the door, her arms by her sides, as if she had been standing like that the whole time he was gone, waiting for his return—he felt his fury seep out as abruptly as it had swelled inside him. “I—I haven’t yet cleared up my situation,” he mumbled.

She emitted a very faint “Oh,” less than a sound, more like a shape of her lips imprinted in a barely audible, disappointed exhalation onto the air.

He took an impulsive step toward her, touched his hand to her cheek; then, taken aback by his unexpected gesture, shifted away, began to unbutton his shirt, humming tunelessly. He would not look at her, but he could sense her starting into skittish motion, flitting swiftly about the room, readjusting the blankets, drawing the curtains, pushing up the lampshade to broaden the cone of beige light that fell onto the bed; he heard his tuba ring out as she stumbled against it, heard her laugh a tiny, flustered laugh.

“Sorry. Would you like—” she began.

He glanced up, his chest constricted.

She was holding out a shapeless white lump on her palm.

“It’s melted a bit, but it still smells wonderful,” she whispered.

He felt unable to move, suspended by the expectation of what she might say next, of what he might say in reply; but she was silent now, watching him, her head tilted, her eyes damp and tender, deepened by shadow. Shaking off his stillness, he hastily took the deformed chocolate from her hand, put it in his mouth, swallowed without chewing, all the while smiling wretchedly, his teeth smeared with untasted sweetness.

“Well, good night, then,” she said softly.

For a long time, his heart muttering, he lay awake in the muffled chill of their darkened bedroom. The clock ticked, measuring out the empty leakage of his existence, prodding the year toward a close he was no longer able to imagine. His thoughts rambled. He thought of meeting Sofia, of meeting Anna, of the parchment-colored lamp glowing on his parents’ veranda through a moth-whipped procession of summers lined in deep velvet; thought, too, of a few weeks in his childhood that he had spent practicing a violin solo in preparation for a school competition. It was to be the event of the school year: it was rumored that the piece’s famous composer himself would come to judge the performances. All his classmates hoped to win, of course—the ambitious ones, to add another medal to their collection of distinctions; the obedient ones, to please their parents; the more farsighted ones among them, to attract the composer’s benevolent interest in their future careers. He did not care about any of those things. He saw the piece as a puzzle that he had to solve, a deceptively simple mechanism of a sad melody that, if unlocked, would spring open to reveal a hidden compartment full of magical meaning. He followed the prescribed notation in class, but in the evenings, ensconced in the autumnal sonorousness of the unfolding high-ceilinged rooms of his parents’ winter mansion as if inside a giant reverberating bell, he secretly embellished the phrase until, continuing along invisible trajectories and modulations that seemed inevitable to him, he transformed it into something different—something his own.

He tore through the final week before the competition in a state of shaky, joyful anticipation, imagining first the astonishment, then the understanding, pleasure at last, dawning on the as yet unseen face. His excitement crested in leaps and jolts, a wild bright-eyed beast cavorting with glad abandon in his ten-year-old soul—but just days before the event, men ran down the city streets in muddy boots, and windows shattered and shuttered, and someone soft-voiced spoke with a slight burr on the radio, assuring the populace of the good of something that he himself, enveloped in the safe warmth of his childhood, did not understand—and he never got to stand onstage before the celebrated composer, a violin trembling beneath his chin.

Half asleep, he wondered whether that might not have been his happiest day ever, the last, perfect day swelling with the immensity of his secret intent, secret creation—the day before everything changed—the day before he realized, for the first time, yet with absolute finality, just how small his private immensity really was when measured against that other vast, dark, impersonal immensity, call it God, or history, or simply life.

Anna had already left when he awoke the next morning. His head ached after a bumpy night filled with potholed dreams, though for just one instant, before his headache had set in, he seemed to sense a piercing vibration in the air, a lingering coda of a winding, heartrending melody that swiftly faded out of his reach before he could fully hear it in his daytime mind, its silver shadow diving deeper into the murk of the night’s oblivion. In the kitchen he discovered a cup of lukewarm tea, a slice of ossified toast, and a folded note addressed to him in Anna’s most elaborate script. He shoved the toast into the trash can, and the note, unread, into his jacket pocket, and left for work.

The rain had ended at last; the fall sky stretched pale and remote over the city. In the sharp morning clarity, the theater was dingy as a basement, its windows squares of imitation daylight hung in a laundry line of unwashed sheets on the gloomy red walls. The unnatural dusk of the orchestra pit pressed on Sergei’s eyelids; all through the performance, he felt as if he was struggling, and failing, to open his already opened eyes. The brandishing of the banners, the barking of the brasses, finally, mercifully, over, he headed up the stairs to the director’s office. He was met halfway by Ivan Anatolievich himself, just descending. Forced to halt two steps below the man’s bulging peacock-colored vest, Sergei had to tilt his head far back, to address him from the undignified, humiliating position of a beseecher.

“Ivan Anatolievich, I would like a favor,” he said, a bit curtly, fighting to control his irritation. “The matinee hours are no longer convenient for me, you see, so I thought—”

As he talked, he could feel his neck growing stiff. The director listened, stroking the iridescent swell of his satin stomach, visibly amazed. “I don’t think you quite comprehend your situation,” he said at last, squinting down at Sergei; seen from below, his lips crawled between his jowls like two fat, glistening caterpillars. “It’s my duty as the head of this establishment to make sure each and every citizen in my care will reach his fullest potential, and therefore—” Sergei tried to sidestep him so they were level, but the director’s belly was in the way. His anger was returning, its blind, wild flames licking at his insides, spreading, spreading… The officious voice continued to drone. “—and since your political maturity at this juncture is a matter of grave concern, I would not deem it possible, in view of the event of which you are well aware—the black mark on your record, so to speak—”

“How do you live with yourself, you sanctimonious pig!” Sergei suddenly roared. “I urinated alongside a foreign national!”

They stared at each other.

“You,” the director boomed, “are fired.”

In the hallways, musicians scattered; out of the corner of his eye Sergei saw Sviatoslav vanishing with great alacrity around the corner. He looked directly into the fat man’s shaking, reddened face, not moving for the duration of one full, liberated inhalation.

Then he nodded and, in silence, turned and walked down the stairs.

Outside, the day had deepened in color, was blue and cool and crisp, threaded with gossamer flashes of cobwebs flying by in the wind; the leafy chill in the air crinkled like the cellophane wrapper of a candy mauled by an impatient child. People waited at tram stops, rustling their newspapers with resignation; he glimpsed the front-page headlines, damp with smudged red print, proclaiming from benches and sidewalks: “No Place for Indecisiveness in Our Race to the Finish Line!” The city was already starting to accumulate air in its lungs in preparation for the trumpet blast of yet another anniversary of the Change. He strolled past, his hands in his pockets—a man in no hurry to be anywhere, a man who had fallen wholly outside the bustle and fuss of history, a man with a tremendous weight, the weight of a century, lifted from him. As his hands nested deeper in his pockets, he felt something flimsy catch between his fingers. He withdrew the note, paused to unfold it.

“Happy forty-eighth, Serezha!!” Anna had written. “May it be your best year yet.”

For a minute he gazed at the two exclamation points, then opened his fingers; the note became a leaf in a whirl of leaves and spiraled away.

They met in the street with the abandoned church at one end and the kiosk at the other.

“All taken care of,” he said brightly. “I can do the morning shifts now.”

“Oh, good,” she said, but her voice was restrained, as if some other intonation beat against it. “I’ll be switching to evenings, I guess. When do you start your new schedule?”

Only now did he understand the full implications of their revised arrangement. He sucked in his breath, thought briefly, agonizingly, of saying, Listen, I’m happy to do mornings, but let me keep evenings as well, I don’t mind, I don’t actually have—that is, I’ve been temporarily—I mean, sooner or later, I’m sure, it will be—

He looked at the ground, his shoes, hers—and in the next instant remembered the broken silver heel he had found just inside the door upon his return home that night—that night…

“Monday,” he said blankly. “I can start mornings on Monday.”

2

“EVER THINK about the nature of time?”

(Time? The flowing river one can never enter unchanged. The snake swallowing its tail. A dainty watch on the wrist of a beautiful woman who, in walking through the city, fends off eternal queries called out from all sides: “What time is it, please, and if you have a minute to spare, would you like to go for a walk?” Time as a monster devouring its children, time as the breath of God, time as the chalk-crumbling formula of a physicist sanctified by a silver nimbus of hair. And, for most of us, our own small stretch, bleak and fast-rolling along its darkening bends, the happiest moments most likely spent hoping for something wondrous, something luminous—a brush, perhaps, with a tiny miracle of immortality, a sunbeam forever preserved in an amber tear, Faust’s doomed plea: “Instant, freeze, you are perfect!” Oh, I could tell you plenty about time, but I will stay silent, I will merely listen.)

“Time?”

“Yes, time. Here’s a question for you: Does waiting make time move faster, or slower?”

“Slower, of course. Everyone knows that time flies when you’re happy, but when you’re waiting, each moment crawls by.”

(Each moment, they say. Ah, but moments are akin to snowflakes, no two alike. Some extend back like powerful microscopes, zeroing their light on some spot in the past, until the recollection, bright, enlarged, is spread for your contemplation as if under glass. Others remind you of that curiously unpleasant mathematical paradox, that hapless runner trying to reach point B from point A in eternal increments of half the remaining distance, doomed never to arrive at his destination, the units of time sliding one out of another like endless smaller compartments hidden in larger ones, again and again and again, suspending time in an agony of futile anticipation. Then, of course, there are others, light and enjoyable, fleet and indistinct like dreams, like delightful childhood whooshes down a slide in some forgotten park, like so many of their moments spent waiting, spent daydreaming, here—if they but knew it. Here, then, is a better question for you: If you’re happy when you’re waiting, what happens to time then?)

“Me, I just can’t help wondering—we’ve given up almost a year of our lives for one or two hours of enjoyment. Is it worth it?”

“But what would you be doing with your year if you weren’t here? Let’s face it, most likely you’d just be wasting it. In fact, this year of waiting hasn’t been all that different from any other year of your life, has it—a whole lot of doing nothing—except now you can look forward to an hour of happiness at the end.”

(Oh, but your year has been different—you’ve felt awake, you’ve felt alive, you’ve merged your icy breath with snow, you’ve walked midnight streets dusted with petals, you’ve read poems etched by decaying leaves into the sidewalks, you’ve stepped inside other homes, other lives, you’ve been touched by a brighter world. Of course, I will not say it, I will keep silent, I will merely smile at you to give you hope.)

“An hour of happiness, eh? But what if the concert doesn’t live up to its promise, what then? Won’t we feel stupid!”

“Well, I don’t think it matters how good it will be. After a year of waiting it will seem wonderful, anyway. Haven’t you ever noticed, the longer you wait for something, the better it is?”

(There was a poem I read in an old book once, a beautiful poem about desire.

But it was decades ago, I forget now, there is just that snippet at the end, how did it go…?

Ah no, it’s all gone, quite gone now.)

“I disagree. The longer you wait, the higher your expectations. I suspect that’s why people are beginning to leave in droves. Afraid to be disappointed, that’s what I think.”

“Leaving in droves? Who’s leaving in droves?”

“Why, lots of people! Look around you. Where is that old woman with the carved cane? Or that fellow with the birthmark on his forehead? Or that other guy—you know the one—”

“Wait, you don’t suppose—you don’t think they might have been—well, you know—”

“What are you muttering there, I can’t hear you!”

“Nothing, nothing, I’m just… It’s nothing.”

“Well, if it’s nothing, you should keep your mouth shut, people are nervous enough as it is.”

Silence fell among them, but the knot would not loosen in Sergei’s insides; and when, sometime later, he turned to Sofia to say good-bye, to explain that he would no longer be here in the evenings, he found her absent.

“But—where is she?” he exclaimed involuntarily.

Vladimir Semyonovich had not appeared for two days. An unfamiliar schoolgirl whose face shone like a polished door handle stared at him with curiosity. “If you mean the mousy woman who always looks like she has a toothache, she had to leave early today. I’m holding her place till the next shift arrives. Does she owe you money or something?”

He shook his head, looking away already, his heart gone, replaced by a cold, hard pebble.

The morning light was somber, clouds sagging almost to the ground with their dank bellies. The city seemed flat, a black-and-white snapshot of itself, and the line, in which he took his place morosely, appeared to have shrunk as well, to have lost the wide, light-filled spaces where he had dwelled between the hours of waiting all through the spring and summer. The people around him had faces closed with worry—a girl who stared vacantly at the sky, a screeching basket by her feet; a brightly painted middle-aged woman with eyes like silver coins, whom he had seen on a few occasions talking to Pavel and who turned away when he attempted to greet her; a pale little boy behind him, who looked at him levelly and asked, “And who are you?”

“I’m Sergei Vasilievich,” Sergei said, “and what’s your name?”—but as the boy continued to regard him with a quiet, reproachful, painfully familiar gaze, his heart was back without warning, and sliding somewhere sideways, and for one moment he thought—he thought… But of course it couldn’t be, it wasn’t, he hastened to tell himself as he dove into his bag, fumbling for his book, not daring to look at the boy another time.

“There was a lady here before you,” the boy said, “she was kind and beautiful, she made cakes and told me many happy stories of her childhood—”

“Pleased to meet you, young man,” Sergei said firmly, already opening the weighty compilation of musical biographies.

When the endless shift was over at last, he was startled to discover a block of uncut time on his hands. He went home to pick up his tuba, as he would in the normal course of things, then trudged through the city. The park filled him with an obscure sense of shame, but there was no better place in the neighborhood for wasting hours undisturbed. He found a secluded bench and sat there until nightfall, watching the city turn into a negative of its daytime self—windows bright, skies black, houses blurry—watching time drop grain by grain from the greedy beaks of the frenzied pigeons fighting for crumbs on the paths, while his tuba rusted at his feet. Shortly before ten, he meandered along the streets she might pass on her way home. He did not see her; nor did he see her the next day, or the day after that.

When the week had expired, he wrote her a note. He hesitated over the phrasing; though he had little knowledge of such matters, dimly he felt that certain sentiments, when written down, lost their souls—yes, certain sentiments, like music, existed only as sounds—sighs, laughter, whispers, gasps—or not at all. He did use an intimate form of address, remembering that unbidden “Serezha” she had bestowed upon him the night of the billowing curtains, the night in her room; but his wording was restrained, and out of some vague sense of discretion he avoided addressing or signing the note.

Unable to find any means of passing it in person, he finally left it with the girl of the door-handle face, who had switched to morning shifts as well; the line had been in a state of restless flux for some time now. “Well, all right,” she said doubtfully, “I’ll ask my father to hand it over. The woman with the toothache, right?”

“The woman with lovely eyes,” Sergei said sternly. “Sofia Mikhailovna.”

The girl made a lukewarm effort to suppress a titter. “I’ll tell him,” she said, sticking the envelope negligently into her bag alongside a bunch of withered leeks.

He waited a day, then three, then a full week, but there was no word; he wanted to ask, but the girl had now been replaced by a large, matronly woman trapped behind the bars of a faded striped dress, peering at Sergei with hostile glances. He felt time drifting away from him; he stopped counting the days that passed, gray, chilled, damp, swiftly shrinking toward winter. One darkening afternoon, as he walked away from the line, he was approached by a man wearing a homburg and carrying a briefcase; the man’s face, hidden in the shadow of the hat, was indistinct.

“Do I have the pleasure of addressing Sergei Vasilievich?” the stranger inquired, amiably touching the hat’s brim. “Well, and in that case, are you not aware of the vagrancy laws, which state most clearly that all able-bodied citizens must be gainfully employed or be confronted by the consequences of their parasitism?”

The light was fading fast in the deserted street, and the man’s face too appeared to gray rapidly, his features becoming still harder to pin down; the black automobile that loitered at the next corner seemed merely a dark shape cut out of the nearing night and pasted onto the evening. Sergei felt as if he were being interrogated by a ghost—or else as if he were a ghost himself, insubstantial, invisible save to other ghosts, passing through the city, through life, through time as through dust, without leaving a trace. And as he stood staring into the obscure face of his interrogator, he remembered the pale, infinite sky he had seen the previous winter, in the early days of the line, and the clear crystal notes he had imagined ringing in its vastness, floating above the city, soaring higher and higher in imperceptible phrases of perfectly sustained beauty—and his heart sickened.

“I’m ill,” he stammered out.

“Ill?” his ghostly tormentor repeated, shaking his head in sympathy. “You don’t say. And where, then, is your certificate from a doctor?”

“At home,” Sergei replied, almost inaudibly.

“You will be so good as to present it tomorrow at the district bureau,” the man said gleefully. He touched his fingers to his ghostly hat again and strolled away toward his silhouette car.

Sergei spent the remaining hours of the day rushing along the corridors of a neighborhood clinic, pleading with cleaning women who irritably banged their filthy mops against his shoes, until at last, after dusting a few hallways with his jacket and having two or three doors slammed in his face, he found himself sitting across a scuffed desk from a fat, red-jowled man in a once white coat, who looked so much like the theater director that for a second, upon entering his office, Sergei had a vertiginous sensation of spaces and days slipping, colliding, overlapping, throwing him off his already precarious balance. The director’s twin gazed musingly into the middle distance until Sergei thought to empty the sad contents of his wallet onto the desk’s surface. His expression bored, the man counted the bills with an expert fluidity, wrote a few words on a scrap of paper, negligently stamped it with a round red stamp and a square blue stamp, and, still without looking at Sergei, reached for the telephone.

Sergei’s ghost, confounded and invisible as ever, edged out of the office.

The next morning, as he stood in line, feeling his empty pockets, wondering how he would pay if the tickets happened to go on sale just then, he glimpsed his son striding across the street. “Hey there,” he called out. “Lectures ended early?”

The boy approached, his face flickering with an odd expression, almost a cringe.

“Such a nuisance,” Sergei muttered, busy removing a leaf from the crook of his sleeve, “I seem to have forgotten my wallet at home. Could you stop by the school if you’re free, and ask your mother? I only need enough for the ticket—in case, well, you know—”

“Yeah, sure,” Alexander said, moving off.

He was anxious to escape before his father asked further questions.

They would find out soon enough, he supposed—but not yet, not just yet.

The pavements were slippery with shallow burials of sodden leaves; the air hung thick with the smells of mushroom pies, rain, and decay. Alexander had an odd, displaced feeling as he walked through the streets. For a decade the road to school, with its shuffled pack of familiar landscapes—the row of kiosks by the tram stop, the shortcut through the little playground, the alley with ugly brown buildings wedged into the recesses of dark mornings, the movie theater raising its Neanderthal’s brow over the sidewalk—had been the frame on which he had stretched his life, like predetermined lines connecting dots in an uninspired children’s game; yet now the streets were beginning to assume a kind of vagueness, the smudged unreality of an uncertain memory, and soon even that tenuous quality would dissipate, for soon, very soon now, this threadbare, graying city would be no more, this life would be no more, and he—he would be walking other streets in other cities, cities not at all like this one, cities brightly colored and tangible, bestowing upon him the long-awaited gift of their immense, stage-lit presence.

His practical preparations were nearly finished. He had gathered his few belongings and stored them under his bed, ready to be thrown into a bag at a moment’s notice; his shoes were too tight, but Stepan had promised to find him a suitable pair of sneakers. He had already written the letter (though he kept adding pages to it now and then); he planned to hand it over after the concert, when Viktor Pyetrovich took him backstage. “Here’s my address,” he would say in a measured, mature voice, as soon as the two cousins disengaged from their tearful embrace—or no, as soon as they stopped grasping each other’s hands, that was better, more fitting. “Please read this, Igor Fyodorovich.” Then he would run, no, walk, home, the snow crunching under his new shoes for the first and last time, and sit waiting in the dark, and hours would pass and the snow would fall and fall, and just as I begin to despair, there is a knock on my door, and he is standing in the shadows of the landing. I was so moved by your letter, young man, he says, or no, “young man” sounds condescending, he would just call me by name, Alexander, he will say, I see how alike we are, our two roaming, thirsty, adventurous spirits, you’re like the son I never had, I went to the embassy this evening and obtained permission for you to come with me, when can you leave?

And I will say: I am ready.

He had not been back here since graduation—only a few months, but in that stretch of time his world had careened so far off its axis that it shocked him to find everything exactly as it had been: the reek of sweat and cafeteria gruel in the corridors, the magnified echoing of delinquent steps during the hush of classes, the forced enthusiasm of contests and day trips announced along the walls, the cavernous, unclean hopelessness of it all. He glanced at his wrist, then remembered and swore—he had sold his watch, along with some other trifles, to purchase a flashlight and a compass for his travels—then remembered again and, marveling at having already forgotten something that had seemed seared into his very bones by thousands of fearful repetitions, lifted his head to the enormous clock presiding over the entrance.

A class had started some fifteen minutes earlier.

He passed the dozing caretaker, took the stairs to the second floor, and halted, his hand raised, before the familiar classroom. A pupil’s timorous recitation had just fallen silent, interrupted by a woman’s admonishing, officious voice. The voice was not his mother’s.

He lowered his hand, considered the door, doubting his memory again, then, frowning, wandered over to the teachers’ lounge. It was deserted. The monthly schedule was posted on the wall. He studied it, but could not make out anything; whole portions of the grid were crossed out, “Substitute” slashing in a nasty red diagonal over some of the classes, names overwritten with names—

“Sasha, you’re here!” a high-pitched, fluttering voice exclaimed behind his back. “Oh, but how lucky, I have a free hour.”

He glanced over his shoulder, and was instantly dismayed. “I don’t have time to listen to music right now,” he said brusquely. “I’m looking for my mother.”

She did not seem to notice his rudeness.

“Oh, but I didn’t know your mother was here today,” she said.

“Where else would she be,” he snapped.

He expected a rebuke, but she only stared, her face unsettled, unsettling, quivering like a plate of dough about to rise. “Sasha, will you please come with me,” she said then, turning before he could refuse.

Feeling coerced and resentful, he followed her thick trotting back down the stairs, along hallways, around corners. She said nothing as they walked, and he too was silent, reluctant to ask a question, as if he had something to fear. Once inside the classroom, she closed the door behind them with care. “Please sit down,” she said.

He remained standing, his head bent, stubbornly studying the fraying laces of his aged shoes.

“I must warn you about something, Sasha.” Not looking up, he could hear her move to her desk with a nervous rapidity, jerk open a drawer, tug at something inside; there rose a rustle of crumpling, resisting paper. “Your mother doesn’t work here anymore. Now, I’m certain that she had her reasons to… not to… that is…”

She sounded so ill at ease that a feeling of pity seeped through his numbness. He lifted his eyes. “Zoya Vladimirovna, it’s all right,” he said, not knowing what he meant, knowing, in fact, that nothing was all right, that things were tilting and slipping and falling all around him.

“Oh no, how clumsy of me,” she mumbled as she dove to collect the cookies that had spilled out of the liberated paper bag and rolled crumbling under her chair. “I thought you might like them, they have jam inside… Still, if I just dust them off a bit, they’ll be quite… No?… Well, I do hope I’m not interfering, but you have so much to lose now, a student at our finest university, your mother was so proud, so proud. A few were surprised, to be honest, but I always knew, you always had so much potential…”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

She stopped fussing, turned to face him. “The concert, Sasha,” she said quietly. “There seems to be some sort of… It’s as if everyone connected with that line is being… That is, there was a regional inspector at the school and your mother had been missing for a week, sick, she said, but when he asked for a medical certificate, she didn’t have one. Then also the physics teacher, some pupils had complained about her past absences, the principal told us, but what kind of pupils complain about canceled lessons?… Do you understand what I’m saying? The chemistry assistant was let go as well, and some others, not just at our school either—”

The music room was flooded with cold white light, flattened lamps humming and muttering in the pockmarked ceiling. The few instruments arranged along the walls looked long dead, their dusty limbs stiff with graceless afterlife—instruments that had sinned perhaps, whether by playing mediocre music or by submitting to unclean fingers or lips, and were now being punished in the purgatory of a classroom. It occurred to him that if he were to run his hand up and down the piano keys, there would be nothing but a horrid wooden clacking.

“I don’t know what this has to do with me,” he said, his words viscous and slow, coming out with effort, as though he had to peel each one off the roof of his mouth.

“I feel it’s my duty to warn you, Sasha… Are you sure you wouldn’t like one, they’re only a little stale…” She had finished gathering the escaped cookies off the floor and was dropping them into the bag now; noticing a hair hanging off one, she blew on it, studied the cookie pensively, then placed it whole in her mouth.

“The concert,” she said indistinctly, “cannot take place, in any case.”

He caught a glimpse of her pale thick tongue, her moist gums working, and shuddered.

“Look, Sasha—” She paused to swallow, stepped closer to him. Her whisper smelled of shortbread. “I have a friend who has a friend who knows someone who sometimes travels Over There on State business. As a favor, the man occasionally brings back magazines and books about music. Between my friend and me, we can decipher four languages.”

An unpleasant urgency began to spread through him. He wanted to leave. “Congratulations,” he said; he sounded nasty, though he had not meant to. “I’ll be going now.”

“Wait, please wait.” Her tone had deepened into gravity, which somehow bothered him more than her chirping. “Some time ago I read an article about Selinsky’s last symphony, his ninth. The symphony was left unfinished, but what there is must be amazing. He was at his desk, you see, just where he’d spent most of his life, working on it, when he died.”

There was a silence then, and more silence, and silence still, even the lamps on the ceiling had ceased their low humming, until it seemed to him that the silence grew larger than the glaring white room crammed with dead sounds, muffling it, muffling them, in its fog—and he needed to say something, anything, to break free.

“It was in a foreign language, right?” His voice was harsh. “You misunderstood.”

“I used a dictionary. Igor Selinsky isn’t coming, Sasha. He died seven years ago. I like your mother very much, and I have every respect for your father, but this—this is dangerous. Please abandon the line.”

He looked at the aging woman standing before him in her bunched-up dress, crumbs in the corners of her mouth, her watery eyes enormous behind her glasses. He would have liked to throw some insult at her, to call her a coward, a liar, a joke, but he was too angry to speak. He turned to go, and a host of his reflections, a look of condemnation frozen in their eyes, ran in elongated rivulets down the dim sides of the brass instruments at his feet. She was fluttering after him now, warbling something about the Selinsky record, how she had been trying, she had not forgotten, in fact, a friend of hers might have something after all, not just yet but soon enough, she had even attempted to reach their apartment a few times, but her mother must have accidentally left a wrong telephone number in the school files, it was answered by an old woman who told her no Anna Andreyevna lived there—

Not listening, he yanked the door open. As if on cue, the bell exploded with shrillness in the corridor. “Wait, please,” she gasped, folding a piece of paper with nervous hands, “give this to your father, just a few words, I’ve written down my number so he can call about the record—”

He tossed the note into his bag’s yawn without looking.

“Please remember what I told you, Sasha. I wish you well!” She had to shout now, as the hallways trembled with the thumping and roaring of the approaching stampede.

He met her fearful, pleading eyes. “There is a cookie all the way under the piano,” he said through his teeth. “You’ll have to crawl.”

She began to say something in response, but a wave of children had already swept her back into her classroom.

For a long time Alexander mindlessly walked the streets. When his soles felt numb and his toes ached from the confinement of the shoes he had outgrown, he headed to the park, preceded by the noiseless glide of dusk, followed by the orbs of dim lights popping up one after another in hazy rows in the skies above. In the park, leaves were falling darkly along the damp paths; his solitary steps rustled and crackled. There was someone sitting hunched over on his bench; through the thinning trees, he saw a dejected slump of shoulders in a gray jacket.

At the sound of his approach, the man looked up listlessly.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said. “You never came by with the money.”

“Maybe I spent it,” Alexander said.

“Did you?” His father’s voice was devoid of expression. “No tickets today anyway.”

“Mother wasn’t at school, if you really want to know.” He hesitated. “Had a day off or something. Shouldn’t you be at the theater?”

“I too have a day off,” his father said, his gaze dipping back to the ground.

He looked unwell, Alexander noticed, unkempt and somehow lost, graying at the edges of his unshaven face, his hands hanging limply between his knees.

“You all right?” he asked after a moment filled with an odd, tormented uncertainty.

“I’m fine, I’m fine. Hey, want to sit and talk? You have a while before your shift.”

Surprised at the small leap of gladness in his chest, Alexander sat down.

“I feel like we haven’t spoken in months,” his father went on.

“You can tell me all about your lectures, and I actually—that is, there is something I—”

Alexander had risen abruptly. “I’ve just remembered, I have this thing, I really must… Oh yeah, I have a note for you, where was it, it should be somewhere in here—”

His hands were blind with anxiety as he scooped along the bottom of the bag, closed his fingers at last on a piece of paper, threw it into his father’s lap, and strode away.

“Thank you, Sasha,” his father called out after him. He sounded peculiar, as if something harsh had squeezed his throat, but Alexander was too shaken to wonder about it.

That was close, I really must tell them, he thought, yes, I will sometime soon.

He crossed the street, briefly debating whether to stop by the line and confront his mother, then, deciding against it, hurried in the opposite direction. The building’s elevator had finally given up its ghost at the end of the summer; he assailed the staircase in leaps and bounds, mentally sorting through the stack of old books awaiting him on Viktor Pyetrovich’s desk, choosing the next few to borrow. A little boy he had seen in the line opened the door and wandered off without a word. In the dim, sad kitchen, where there clearly had been no cooking that day, Alexander brewed two cups of potent tea with exotic tea leaves he had procured on the black market some weeks before; by now he had necessarily grown adept at small domestic gestures, for Viktor Pyetrovich struggled with chores, awkwardly clutching his cane under his arm to free his hands, as often as not dropping it on the floor with a bonelike clatter and then striving painfully to pick it up, until Alexander rushed in from another room to relieve him. When the tea ceased its steaming, the two of them sat side by side on the checkered blanket spread over the old man’s bed in a close amber circle of light, drinking out of the silver glass holders, which was part of their ritual; and as the window before them slowly grew deep and blue, welling with the soft fall evening, Viktor Pyetrovich told him a marvelous story about Selinsky’s being accidentally locked up for the night in an ancient tomb, where bats’ wings slashed through the darkness like whispers and rare starlight drizzled down mysterious shafts in the massive walls, bringing hot, gamy wafts of deserts and camels and strange, nameless fruits whose mush tasted of girls’ kisses—and where Selinsky took a calm nap in the cold sarcophagus of some dusty pharaoh, and later, waking up to the same unending darkness, for hours sat testing the patterns of hollows and monoliths with the echoes of his singing, which some months hence became, of course, his celebrated Chamber of Echoes.

Every so often, glancing at the old man’s painstakingly shaven cheeks, at the excitable sparkle of his round glasses, Alexander would remember the horrible music teacher and her lies, and his chest would yawn with an immediate, frightening emptiness. He forced the feeling away. Shortly before ten o’clock, he helped Viktor Pyetrovich to his feet, and they walked to the line together, Alexander’s hand discreetly hovering just below the old man’s elbow. A few blocks away, someone was running along the opposite sidewalk, his unbuttoned jacket the color of night. Alexander paused for an instant, peering at the receding back that streaked in and out of shadow, wondering whether he had only imagined the man to be his father, wondering whether to call out. Then the instant passed; moving on, they arrived at the kiosk—and stepped into chaos.

People were dashing everywhere, hovering in agitated groups, shouting to one another: “Did you come out all right?”—“I’m fine, and you?” Alexander’s heart bolted. The tickets—the tickets must have finally gone on sale, it’s my mother’s shift, that means she’s got it, he thought with a rush of misgiving and, at the same time, inexplicable relief. His hold on Viktor Pyetrovich’s elbow tightening, he pushed through the throng, to where he could already see Nikolai towering over the crowd. He shoved his way closer. Nikolai was cursing in a frothy rage, spitting out, along with mouthfuls of saliva and blood, “Damn bastards, drunken thugs, they think we’re all spineless professors and fairies here, that they can just waltz in and do whatever the—”

Not the tickets.

“What happened?” Alexander screamed over the noise.

Voices tossed about.

“The Nightingales. They came and insulted us and things got out of hand and—”

“And there was a scuffle, they threw stones, some people were hit—”

“A woman’s badly hurt. They ran when they saw the ambulance—”

“A middle-aged woman with light hair?” Alexander said quickly.

“A thin woman in her thirties?” asked Viktor Pyetrovich, and touched the coat over his heart.

“No,” Nikolai said, and spat again, revealing a freshly chipped tooth. “It’s Vera, the girl who had the baby this summer. Bastards, I’ll get them for this, who do they think they are—”

Gradually the turbulence died down, the shouting subsided. The bearded organizer walked along the line with his nightly list. Someone started a game of solitaire on the curb, and, in the brittle fall air, the slapping of cards against concrete mixed with the clapping of pigeons’ wings in their abbreviated flights from windowsill to windowsill and the sharp shots of windowpanes slammed shut against the chill. After his outburst, Nikolai was unusually quiet. Their shift was halfway over when he spoke for the first time.

“How about a little stroll? To stretch our legs. Our friends will cover for us.”

His voice was casual, but there was something unfamiliar, something heavy, in his eyes.

“All right,” Alexander said after a moment’s hesitation.

Nikolai moved through the night with a purposeful air; Alexander walked a step or two behind, hurrying to keep up. “Where are we going?” he asked a few blocks later—though he had guessed by then, of course.

Nikolai stopped, turned to face him, gripped his shoulders.

“I have a sixteen-year-old daughter,” he said fiercely, “only a few years younger than that girl. This kind of thing—we can’t allow it, it’s a matter of honor, do you understand?”

He was off again, almost running now, before Alexander could reply.

When they arrived, the street was empty, the Nightingales’ kiosk locked, its TICKETS sign glistening dark and wet, as if newly painted, under a streetlamp; the announcement in the window stated that the Little Fir Trees would play on December 27 and the tickets would go on sale a week in advance.

“Well,” Nikolai said, lighting a cigarette, “what do you say to camping out here for a bit, in case anyone turns up? I happen to have some fuel with me, it will feel like the good old days.”

“Sure,” Alexander said, without much enthusiasm; but a while later, after the darkness had grown so obscure that he had to feel for the bottle’s neck with his increasingly tentative fingers, he found himself settling into the night, leaning back into it as on one of those couches he remembered from his time in the sleeper car, and the night soon began to move off, rocking gently, just like a train departing for some remote destination from the station he had not visited in many months, and the full October moon bounced from roof to roof like one of the train’s wheels. And after a stretch of distance, or perhaps a length of time, he saw that there was not one but two beautiful, hazily radiant wheels speeding off into unknown celestial regions, and marveled at them, openmouthed, glad that life held so many surprises for him still—and then, in a rush, remembered everything once again. The nauseating suspicion gnawed anew through his insides, slowing the night down, merging the two brilliant wheels into one small, flat moon, making the train within him come to a halt at last with a grinding sigh; and, stumbling over his words, he found himself telling Nikolai about the music teacher, and the concert that would not take place, and Selinsky’s death at some desk in some place with a foreign name, some random point on the globe, seven years ago.

“That,” Nikolai said thickly, “is nonsense. Three hundred people can’t be wrong. Your teacher is a fool.”

“You really think so?” Alexander cried—and instantly felt that something within him, something vast and bright, was giving way, being released. He pressed his face into Nikolai’s shoulder, and the man’s thick jacket smelled of smoke and, unexpectedly, good home cooking, and Alexander wept, and couldn’t stop weeping, like the child he had been once—weeping for this life in which nothing ever happened, weeping for his mother, and his father, and Viktor Pyetrovich who had wasted so much time waiting for something to happen, waiting in vain, for nothing ever happened in anyone’s life; and then, somehow, he knew, without looking up, that Nikolai was weeping too, heaving with huge, childish sobs, his voice wobbling between gulps somewhere above him: “Listen, Sashka, I never—I never meant to sell the ticket, it’s for my daughter, my daughter’s sick, very sick, so I thought maybe, if she could only hear someone famous, someone great, she would get up, she would go, perhaps she would even feel better, they say music can cure people… But the kiosk seller, that bitch, we made her a good offer, but she wouldn’t listen, so now we all wait, my wife, my wife’s brother, he is helping too, he’s a good fellow even if he’s a fairy, has a beautiful voice… But those bastards, nothing is sacred to those people, they’d trample on anyone’s hopes, they—”

He fell silent, choking on wet gasps, and Alexander was overcome by a tremendous warmth, an urge to proclaim all the gratitude, all the affection he suddenly felt for this man. He yearned to find the words, but his thoughts kept scattering, so he wrested the bottle away, and, holding it up to the light of the streetlamp, blurted out, “Thank you, friend, that’s good stuff, not like that poison I once had that wouldn’t even burn.”

Nikolai lifted his head. His wet face sloshed in the light.

“What did you say?”

“I said thank you for this, I think you’re—that is, I’m glad that you and I—I mean—”

“That,” Nikolai said, leaping to his feet, “is precisely what we need. Any paper in your bag?”

Alexander watched, stupidly but without protest, as Nikolai upended his bag. Two books flopped to the ground, followed by a couple of school notebooks Alexander kept meaning to toss out, and some crumpled odds and ends.

“These will do as kindling,” Nikolai said, appropriating the notebooks, kicking the rest aside. “Even sorry fellows like me know better than to damage books.”

Together, they balled up the lined and checkered pages crisscrossed with teachers’ markings; then Nikolai sloshed what was left in the bottle against the back of the kiosk. “There’s no streetlamp on this side, so it’s less risky here,” he said grinning. “More private.” After that, things grew a bit hazy in Alexander’s mind. He remembered Nikolai swearing and blowing on his fingers as match after match hissed and wavered and went out, and the first, cautious lick of a flame shriveling a page, and another, and all at once a spreading blaze, a rush of light and heat, the rearing of something bright and great and angry, like the anger Alexander himself was now feeling, anger at the lies, at the lines, at the inability ever to know anything for sure, at the inability to break the hollow bonds of time, the painful bonds of place, that bound them all—but break out he would, he promised himself as he ran down the street laughing, Nikolai running and laughing in the darkness somewhere ahead, break out he would, and his life would be different, one way or another it would be different, full and brilliant like—like the full, brilliant life of the mysterious genius Igor Selinsky, who was alive, of course, alive somewhere, and not bent over some desk, either, but having glorious, fantastical adventures—or the full, brilliant wheels rolling over the skies, drawing closer and closer to some faraway, brightly lit, wondrous place—or the fire he recalled seeing somewhere not that long ago, the full, brilliant fire that danced behind his closed eyelids as he was falling asleep in his small, drafty room.

Just before he drifted off completely, he remembered with a jolt that Viktor Pyetrovich’s books, the books he had borrowed that evening, remained lying on the ground among the jumbled contents of his raided bag, and was touched by a chill of apprehension. But his apprehension flickered and died like another clumsy match, and he laughed softly into the pillow, seeing the frenzy of the flames before his eyes, their magnificent, dazzling red color.

3

FOR A VERY LONG TIME, possibly an hour, maybe longer, Sergei sat on the bench looking at the folded note in his lap, at the treble clef on its back. The note was crumpled, frayed, almost furred at the edges. She must have written it weeks earlier, and someone had neglected to pass it along; or else it had traveled for days up and down the line, gathering mold and crumbs from the insides of anonymous purses and pockets, ending up at last in Sasha’s bag. He hesitated to read it, fearing that it might disintegrate in his grasp—or so he told himself.

After a while, he glanced at his watch. Five minutes had passed since Sasha had left him.

He tore the note open, and his world flushed hot and bright.

It was brief, no greeting, no signature. “Visit me anytime,” it said, in large, shaky letters; she had scribbled it hurriedly, he saw, while standing in line, probably balancing the scrap of a score on her book. Underneath was the address. The lines were crucified by creases, nearly illegible, but enough to make out the apartment number—the number he had not been able to erase from his memory for weeks, the number at which he had stared for some tortured minutes at the end of the summer, lingering in the dimness of her landing, waiting, not daring to knock.

The hands of his watch continued to creep with tormenting slowness, as if the figures on its face were spread with glue; yet second by agonizing second, time squeaked along. Just before ten he rose and strode to her building, fast, faster now, until he found himself running, running through the shadows, through the chill of October, past some commotion exploding with cries a short distance away, then falling behind him, past some faceless passersby—a few men sprinting by, students perhaps, tossing jokes to one another with the high spirits of youth, a dutiful grandson leading his aged grandfather on a leisurely stroll—all of them sketched by the night in black ink on a black background, the city’s small, quiet gestures brushing by him like an autumn wind.

He was out of breath when he reached her street. He counted, one, two, three, four; the windows on her floor alternated light with darkness, and he did not know which one was hers. He stood looking up, until his neck grew stiff, then, gathering himself, went inside.

He did not want to ring her bell for fear of waking the invisible someone who slept on the invisible sofa under the invisible paintings, so he knocked softly, and after a while knocked again. The door opened suddenly, and there she was, her coat still thrown over her shoulders, her shadow falling across the threshold at his feet. He was pierced by an instant disappointment: she was not as he remembered her, as he had imagined her all these weeks, but drawn and plain and blanched, her eyes flat. Then her gaze met his, and she was as before, her face sewn out of tiny particles of pure, transparent light.

She did not seem surprised to see him, but quickly, before he could say anything, pressed her finger to her lips and moved away. He followed her through the unlit places to her room, and the room appeared subtly different, as though it had obtained more angles since his first and only visit, but he did not have time to notice anything else, for she now closed the door and turned to him, and his heart was again sliding somewhere flushed and vivid and happy.

“So kind of you to check on me,” she said in a low, urgent voice. “I’m all right, but poor Vera, oh, it was horrible, I’ve just been sitting here stunned ever since—”

He did not know what she was saying; he did not listen, could not listen. He took a step forward, and somehow so did she, and for a few heartbeats he felt her melting into his shoulder, his chest; but as he buried his fingers in her hair, so soft, so surprisingly soft, he sensed her stiffening, forcing him away, slipping back.

“I fear you’ve misunderstood, Sergei Vasilievich,” she said repressively.

They looked at each other without moving; her face was as it had been in the doorway, drained of light. She seemed on the verge of saying something else. He waited, watching her lips, watching her eyes, wondering wildly, desperately, whether he might somehow die at this suspended moment, the hands of his watch forever frozen now. Then, wordlessly, she turned away, crossed over to the window; and as he followed her weary progress, her coat dragging behind her like some heavy-limbed, wounded creature, he finally saw what was different about the room: its surfaces were erupting with bulky masses of the ancient gramophones from her museum, the corners crowded with a dark geometry of shapes. His breath scratched painfully at his chest; he remembered the night when she had played him gypsy romances and sat listening to the music with her eyes closed, her face solemn yet also ecstatic, angelic, remembered the blue hollows of her temples, the shape of her mouth as it formed the word “special”—

When he spoke, his voice barely held together.

“You got my note” (“I never got a note from you,” she whispered, still not facing him), “and you wrote me your note, inviting me here, and—”

“I never wrote you a note.”

This time he heard her.

“You never—why are you—you must think I’m—”

The paper trembled in his hand as he stretched it toward her across the darkness, trembled more in hers. “It’s not my handwriting,” she said faintly.

“It’s your address, whose handwriting can it possibly be?”

“My father-in-law.”

“Your who? Your—”

“My father-in-law. The concert ticket is for him. He lives here. I thought you knew I was—”

There was a minute of perfect blindness—a bright blindness, white and cruel and harsh, and a rush, a swishing of blood in his ears, like a drum, a tribal drum, and someone was screaming, and swinging, and all around, things were crashing to the floor, crashing with metallic, screeching noises of disintegrating machinery, shiny black cogs leaping away from the light like insects, horrible, meaningless insects that should be squashed, like this, like this, yes, all of it meaningless, and cacophonous, and never-ending… And then the door was thrust open, and in a sudden square of stark, orange illumination he saw himself standing in the middle of her room, a gramophone bleeding at his feet, and in the doorway a pale barefoot boy in an oversized nightshirt, blinking at them with frightened eyes the color of broken glass.

Her hands were at her mouth. The room was absolutely still.

The boy said, “Why are you wearing your coat, what happened, Mama?”

Sergei sat down on the floor.

“Nothing, nothing,” she was saying, “go to sleep, this is Sergei Vasilievich from the line, I accidentally dropped this and he’s helping me fix it, go back to sleep.”

The boy stared at them, then stumbled off, his face already vague with the next dream. The door remained open, but the orange light went out. Time slowly took off again.

The gramophone was quite dead now.

“Oh, God,” he said dully.

She kneeled next to him. Tiny mysterious pieces lay all around them.

“We can’t fix this,” she said quietly, not looking at him.

“Oh, God. I didn’t mean—I’ll buy you a new one, I—”

“This was the oldest model we had. The one—you remember.” “I remember.”

“I take them home once a year for special cleaning. You can’t buy them, there are very few of them left—”

“I’ll find one, I have connections, I know people who could… Please, let me help you.”

They spoke as if their voices belonged to others, and they still would not look at each other as their hands efficiently crept across the floor, avoiding accidental touches, hunting out sad misshapen remains from under her chair, from under her bed. After a while she said, “What’s that, is it smoke?” and, standing up, returned to the window, and opened it, and leaned out. “Something’s burning out there, can you smell it?”

“No,” he said, standing up also. “I should go. I must tell you I—”

“Please, don’t,” she said. She remained at the window. At the threshold of her room he dared to lift his eyes to her, but she was gazing out over the city, her face averted. With an ache that was unlike any he had ever known, small and hard and infinite, infinite, he thought, This is it, this is final, my last view of her—and he tried to gather her into his memory as she was, her shadowy back, her graceful fingers resting listless on the windowsill, the incline of her neck that seemed somehow hurt, as if her thoughts were too heavy for it to support them, the gentle curve of her pale cheekbone, her hair, so soft, so soft, he remembered without warning, remembered too her melting into his chest, only an hour, or was it a year, or a century ago…

“I’ll show myself out,” he said.

On the street, numbness descended upon him, and would not release him for days, for weeks. As October darkened into November, the line buzzed with agitation, but it was through a haze that he heard of the Nightingales attack, and the girl who had lost an eye and would not be returning, and the fire at the Nightingales kiosk, in which one of their own had been suspected until the authorities located a few illicit pieces of evidence at the crime scene (pre-revolutionary books glorifying life Over There, whispered two or three people in the know) implicating a certain music teacher at a local school, the leader of a conspiracy to seduce the youth away from patriotic music (a blackened scrap with her telephone number was recovered in the ashes, it was rumored). It was not all that surprising, people said in careful undertones, there was trouble at schools nowadays, did you hear about that physics teacher, fired for no reason, thankful to work as a janitor now, oh really, how unsettling, but you know what they say, where there’s smoke, and so on, and at our school, they let go the literature teacher, my son’s favorite, she read them things that were not part of the curriculum, but beautiful, beautiful, he brought home some poems last spring, something about a cuckoo, I seem to recall, well, maybe that’s why, then, cuckoos aren’t exactly patriotic, are they, they push their fledglings out of the nest or else foist them upon others, parasites, really, so this teacher of yours has only herself to blame, and please keep your voice down.

Sergei tuned the gossip out, preoccupied as he was. He had made inquiries; at his insistence, his son had taken him to a hidden courtyard with an old church, and introduced him to a couple of helpful acquaintances who eventually arranged a meeting with an expert, a taciturn man with a face the texture and color of seasoned leather. The man had listened politely, holding the tips of his leathery fingers at a joined incline under his chin, asked a few pointed questions in a leathery voice, then half closed his eyes and thought for a moment. “It’s challenging, but I trust I can find the right model,” he had announced at last. “It will take about a month. Perhaps sooner, perhaps later. I’ll let you know through that clever boy of yours.”

“And the price?”

The leathery lips exhaled an astronomical number.

“Pleasure doing business with you,” Sergei had said flatly.

For the next few weeks he kept busy. He sold a pair of golden cuff links he had inherited from his father; he sold all his ties, which, true, were of shoddy local manufacture and brought very little money, but which he did not need in any case, now that he was no longer performing; he sold his one good suit. His efforts to find a steady job were unsuccessful, but his fake medical certificate would cover him through the end of the year, and his son, who proved to have an impressive breadth of resources at his disposal and who asked no questions, put him in touch with some burly fellows in need of occasional help unloading fruit from trucks.

He was still short of the necessary sum, however, so one chilly, sunless afternoon he walked to the ruined church with his tuba slung over his shoulder. A street away, he was stopped by a group of men with red ribbons on their sleeves, rushing in the opposite direction.

“Where are you going?” they cried. “The parade’s over there!”

He gazed at them blankly.

“Ever heard of the Change?” a red-faced, heavy-chinned man asked, stepping forward, a burgeoning threat in his voice. With the same kind of blankness, Sergei stared at the man’s hands, huge, raw, blunt-edged slabs stirring, seemingly on their own, by the man’s sides.

“Nah, leave him alone,” another man said, pulling at the red-faced man’s sleeve. “He’s feeble-minded, can’t you see?”

The group fell silent, shifted uneasily, and, without addressing Sergei again, hurried off.

He stood watching their backs for a minute, then descended the stairs into the familiar basement, crossed the yard, and laid his tuba in front of the leathery man. The man’s lips curled in disgust. “This so-called instrument,” he said, prodding it carefully with the tip of his brilliant shoe, “has the air of an old bum. Has it been drinking heavily and sleeping under bridges? Appropriate, I daresay, for one of such revolutionary inclinations. Tubas are not in vogue nowadays, the thirty-eighth anniversary notwithstanding. This is all I can offer.”

As Sergei walked away, he listened to other tubas booming in the celebration parade a city stretch away—ghostly sounds in a ghostly city, carried off on the cold November wind like dead leaves, crumpled newspapers, torn cobwebs—while somewhere above them, somewhere else, the celestial music continued to play, undimmed, untouched, still out of his hearing yet drawing closer perhaps… Freed from his habitual brass weight, he found himself straightening, forcing his shoulders apart, filling with a lighter heartbeat. He thought he should feel at least a twinge of sorrow for his companion of so many years, for someone he had kissed scores upon scores of times, but he felt nothing—or rather, he realized as he entered his bedroom that night and saw the emptiness in the corner where the tuba had rested its weary coils for two decades, he felt an odd sense of relief, as if his life had become simpler, clearer, stripped of at least one lie.

He told Anna he planned to keep it at the theater from now on. They needed the space.

4

ANNA DISLIKED CONCEALING the truth from her family, but she did not want them to worry.

“It’s only temporary, of course,” Liuba had told her. “My brother goes south every winter, to, well, let’s just say, engage in some transactions. You can start right away. The pay isn’t much, but there are fringe benefits, if you see what I mean.”

“Thank you, I’ll do it,” she had said quickly.

She would leave home at the same early hour as before and walk to the nearby street. She had her own keys. She liked the flimsiness of the construction: on clear days, she had only to open the door to find herself framed in a rectangle of bright, blue crispness; on windy days, sudden vibrations of the walls made all the cans and jars perform little metal and glass jingles; on wet days, which were her favorite, raindrops pummeled the tin roof with such a hollow sonorousness that she felt herself a part of the soggy sky, separated from it by only the thinnest of membranes. The delivery van sneezed its way out of the morning fog shortly before eight; afterward, she enjoyed a quiet half-hour, allowing herself a luxuriant whiff or two from this or that bottle of perfume from under the counter. Once she pushed the window grate open at nine o’clock, she did not have many free moments, but she did not mind.

She had been waiting on the other side her whole life, and she liked having something that others might want to wait for.

In the afternoon, as soon as Liuba came to replace her, she hastened to the tickets line, bracing herself for another anxiety-ridden fading of daylight. The line had lost all traces of its summer tranquillity, had devolved into an unnerving shuffle of people who came and went, their schedules unpredictable, their errands murky, their tidings, bits and pieces overheard here and there in the city, increasingly disturbing. When they talked, they kept their voices low: a few uniformed men were now stationed at regular intervals along the street—for their own protection, they had been told, though the Nightingales had not returned since the night of the attack and the perpetrators had been apprehended. For some weeks the men did not address the line, merely patrolling up and down the pavements, pausing slightly when someone spoke with excessive agitation, until one evening in early November, Anna looked up from her volume of poems at a voice barking: “Everyone’s papers out, now!”

A man was striding toward them, his face scrambled by shadows, a list of names in his gloved hand. People shuffled uneasily; a few timid voices rose among them, pale as steam: “What did he say?” “I beg your pardon?” “Did you hear him?”

“Your papers,” repeated the uniformed man. “We’ll be checking your papers during each shift, to weed out any undesirable confusion. Order must be maintained. Anyone without proper identification will be asked to leave.”

“But this isn’t how we normally do it,” someone offered meekly. “There’s a nice fellow here, you see, a sort of organizer, he takes care of—”

“The comrade in question will no longer be joining us,” the official said impassively. “Your papers, please.”

There fell a profound stillness, which lasted only one moment before dissolving in a rustling of pockets and bags hastily turned inside out. A confused elderly man who had no documents on him was forced out of the line; he hobbled down the darkened street without glancing back. A younger woman behind Anna, with whom over the previous weeks she had exchanged chance comments about the weather, started to cry soundlessly, not even trying to wipe her face; Anna offered the woman her handkerchief. Later, long after the official had departed into the gathering night, jotting something in the margins of his list, murmurs began to crawl. Some said the hapless organizer had been taken away, like the business-minded fellow with the chairs or Vladimir Semyonovich, that man with the mustache rumored to wear a cross under his shirt, you know the one I mean; but an ancient crone who claimed to live on the first floor of the organizer’s nearby building dribbled some whispers through her toothless gums into a neighbor’s ear, and by the end of the shift the word was that he had not been taken away after all but had been followed from the line late one night, whether by the Nightingales or by someone discontented with his methods of keeping track of the Selinsky tickets, no one could be sure, and had been brutally beaten just steps from his front door, behind some lilac bushes, causing a pack of stray dogs to howl two streets away.

“Here,” said the woman behind Anna, holding out Anna’s handkerchief. “Thank you.”

Her cheeks were still streaming, but it was drizzling now anyway, the chilly mist turning into ice in midair; it would not have made any difference.

“Are you all right?” Anna asked, peering at her closely. “Do you have an umbrella?”

The woman’s eyes were swimming in the blank of her face.

“Oh, I don’t need one, I’ll be fine,” she said.

When she tried to smile, a sense of familiarity brushed Anna, as if she had seen her face, with that tormented smile and those pale eyes under invisible eyelashes, somewhere before, somewhere outside the line; then the feeling passed. “It’s wet,” she said decisively, taking hold of the woman’s arm, lifting her own umbrella above them. “Come, I’ll walk you home. I’m in no hurry.”

They trudged through the city in silence. After a few blocks, the younger woman stopped.

“You’re very kind,” she said, “but I’ll be all right from here, it’s no longer raining. I—I don’t know what came over me earlier, I just felt… I just suddenly forgot why we were there—like the concert no longer existed, no longer mattered, you know, and we were somehow condemned to wait forever, like—like being punished for something…”

The street stretched black and glistening before them; the light from the corner lamp drooled in a wan, exhausted trickle, drowning bleakly in the folds of the disheveled umbrella at Anna’s feet, splashing hollow and white in their faces.

“This ticket you’re waiting for, is it for you?” Anna asked softly.

She had spoken unconsciously, voicing a thought, and immediately felt startled by her boldness; for while the question had been a simple one in the early days in the line, it had become something else in the past few months, a momentous, compelling inquiry into one’s nature almost—

“It’s for my husband’s father,” the woman said.

“He loves music?”

The night drizzled around them, and in its limpid, cold, glinting darkness, the woman’s eyes were enormous and filled with light—the feeble, flat light of the streetlamp above, and, beneath it, hidden in a secret pocket, another light, dark and luminous, like a candle flame briefly covered by a hand. “It’s not about music for us.” She spoke quietly, yet her voice was all at once reckless, defiant. “It’s about my husband. He—they took him away seven years ago.”

“Oh no, what did he do?” Anna exclaimed.

The woman looked down. As the streetlamp reflections fled her eyes, her whole face seemed to have gone out, and Anna saw it as she had seen it first, devoid of color, pinned behind glass to the wall of the boy’s apartment, next to the photograph of her laughing husband. She pressed her hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“You’re lucky,” the woman said, and in her eyes, when she raised them, there was no anger, only sadness. “I used to think like that too, until it happened to us. Sometimes—sometimes things just happen, I think… They don’t need to have a reason, you see. We’ve tried everything to get my husband released, but we don’t even know where he is. Now my father-in-law thinks that going to the concert might help. I’m not so sure. Still, we can only try—”

Anna touched the younger woman’s hand.

“You must really love him,” she said gently. “Your husband.”

The woman was silent.

“Do you know, I turned thirty-four last month,” she said at last with a small, pinched smile. “When I was a girl, I read old-fashioned novels and I believed in love and happiness. But life is not about happiness, nor is it about love, or at least not the kind of love they write about in novels. My husband was—my husband is a good man whom I haven’t seen in nearly a decade, whom my son does not remember, and who now, right now, is in some faraway place, suffering horrors I can’t even begin to imagine, and I—I met someone, you see, someone else, but it doesn’t matter, I would never… I’m sorry, I have no idea why I’m telling you all this. I should be going, thank you for everything.”

Anna felt her chest expanding with pity.

“Of course,” she said. “Good night. See you tomorrow.”

She followed the woman with her eyes, until she was only a blurry white haze moving from streetlamp to streetlamp through the sleet and the darkness. Then, slowly, Anna turned and walked home, feeling obscurely different, cleansed somehow; holding on to that large, light feeling as she stood in line the next day, and the day after that, and through another celebration of the Change, which carried the strained puffs of brass instruments and the dismal crashing of cymbals from streets far removed from their own solemn, expectant street, with its kiosk at one end and its neglected church at the other. The people of the line had grown silent, weary, casting furtive glances at the faceless officials who prowled the sidewalks, yet at the same time, Anna sensed, there had been, since the beginning of fall, since the fall of darkness, an imperceptible drawing closer, quite as if their communal, increasingly dangerous wait had rubbed their souls raw, had made their emotions transparent, had marked them all with an invisible sign of shared time, of shared expectation, so that every once in a while they could turn to one another with a kind of heedless, naked urgency and talk as they would talk only to their families, and perhaps not even to them, united by fear and hope and trust under black, pregnant skies.

In the final week of the month, the skies flooded at last, and it began to snow. Anna was talking with Viktor Pyetrovich, Sonechka’s father-in-law, who had taken Sonechka’s place in line in the past few days—she herself was home sick and Anna had brought her some soup that afternoon—when an elderly man approached them and peered into Anna’s face. “The woman with lovely eyes, just as he said,” he then pronounced smiling, and extended an envelope to her. “I hope it was nothing urgent, my daughter’s memory is like a sieve.”

Mechanically, Anna accepted the envelope, holding it stiffly with her gloved fingers.

“I’m sorry?” she said.

“My daughter was asked to pass this on well over a month ago, but forgot. She forgot your name too. My apologies.”

“But who is it from?”

“A man in the morning shift. In his fifties, she said, wears a gray jacket. Had a tuba with him once or twice.”

“Oh,” Anna said, “thank you,” and, tearing off the glove, hastily freed the sheet of paper from the envelope—and indeed it was Sergei’s handwriting. She read it, once, twice, three times, the letters starting to slip into one another, melting under the snow that was coming down faster now, large white flakes gently erasing the words before her eyes—or perhaps it was the sudden moist wavering of the whole city through her eyelashes. She folded the paper and hid it under her coat, pressing her fingers against it as if against her heart, to check its pulse, and waited, waited for the hours to end, the longest hours ever. At last, there was Sasha coming toward her to take over; she squeezed his hand gratefully as she passed. She walked to the corner, then, rounding it, began to run, her recently acquired boots skidding on pavements that shone astonishingly white and clean in the rich, soft darkness of the nearing winter; and as she ran, the two lines of his apology moved through her mind, round and round, round and round, an apology, she understood now, that he had been too ashamed to offer in person—I wanted the ticket for myself, but I’d like to give it to you now, I want nothing but to make you happy. I wanted the ticket for myself, but I’d like to give it to you now, I want nothing but to make you happy. I wanted the ticket for myself, but I’d like to give it to you now… And as she rushed home, as the words rushed within her, she felt the layers of buried misunderstandings, unvoiced resentments, solitary grievances sweeping away, the entire world around her opening, flooding with brilliant clarity, as though shutters were being lifted all over, so she could finally, finally, see that stooping old man in a disheveled fur hat being dragged on a leash by his giant dog, and two whispering shadows kissing by the fence, and the misty spheres of light floating above her, and the snow, the white, sparkling, wonderful snow, gliding over the streets like furry eyelashes lowered in slow assent, falling over the city, over the world, falling within her now, leaving her clear and vast and bright—free to live at last.

She did not have the patience to wait for the elevator. She burst in, out of breath, snowflakes melting with tiny pinpricks on her lips and eyebrows, and flew to the bedroom, her coat streaming behind her. He was lying on his side of the bed, fully dressed, gazing at a wall with unseeing eyes. Throwing herself before him, she cried, “Oh, Serezha, Serezha, things will be so different now, everything will be so happy, you’ll see! The ticket—I understand, it doesn’t matter, I wanted to give it to you anyway, you know, that night I tried to meet you in the park—”

He sat up, looking dazed; she saw things swiftly sliding in his face, a slackness overcoming it, more shutters being raised, though she could not quite discern what was behind them. “That night you tried to meet me in the park,” he repeated.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter now,” she whispered, hiding her face in his shoulder; his sweater smelled of sweet, decaying leaves, the change of seasons, the earth’s steady, joyful rotation. “I wanted to surprise you with it, you see, like a gift—but the ticket’s not important, let my mother have it, I already lost her most precious possession and she has so little else, while you and I—”

He shifted his shoulder away, cupped her cheeks in both hands, looked at her.

“Anya, I’m sorry,” he said slowly, his voice hardened, unfamiliar. “I’m not a good man, you deserve better than this, I must tell you I—”

“Please, don’t,” she said, moving quickly; and in the instant before she switched off the light she thought she saw his face bled of all expression, thought she saw a horrifying blankness, bleakness, in his eyes, and her heart was tripping, falling, could it be that she had been mistaken, could it be—but the room had just tumbled into darkness, and the snow dancing outside the window was slowly filling it with a pale, luminous glow, like the expanding, pure glow she again discovered within her, and she was crying now, and his breath was on her neck, his hand on her shoulder, and of course she had forgiven him completely, and it was nothing, it was nothing…

Later, he slept, his face pressed into the pillow. He looked at peace. She watched him for some time. As she in turn began to descend, slow and weightless as a feather, into a well of quiet, dark gladness, dreams met her at the bottom with a splash of warm, ancient waters on which there flickered fragmented reflections of the day, her husband promising to make her happy, the concert surging forth at last in a rising of white-shirted orchestral chests, her mother in the front row, everyone’s guilt erased, washed away, and the old sleepless voice was once more lulling her into a deeper dream, the voice she had been hearing so often in the middle of the night when she slept with her ear to the wall, the dream voice that always sounded so much like her mother’s, and the voice was telling her, I’m sorry too, I’m sorry for everything, my dear, in so many ways I am such a selfish old woman. You see, I did not stop talking all those years ago because I had nothing to say, or because I did not love you, or because I had grown muddled with age. I stopped talking because that was my way of preserving the past, of denying the pain that had torn my life in two unequal halves, of bottling what I so bitterly, so nearsightedly considered the better half inside me as if in a flask with a stopper that wouldn’t budge—all my precious memories, all my untold stories, fermenting in my soul until I walked through my days eternally inebriated with the heady magic of my childhood, with the sweaty music of my youth—until the memories had begun to conceal, underneath their enchanted sweetness, a soured darkness of rot—until I no longer knew you, your husband, your son—until I was alone.

Perhaps, too, walling myself off from the long rest of my life was a way of atoning for the guilt I felt about your father, atoning for that November day Andrei had run out without a hat, without a coat, seething from an unfinished conversation. It was the anniversary of a certain encounter I treasured. Feeling sentimental, I had talked about my past, my dancing, other matters. I was careless in my choice of words. He grew upset.

He crossed the street before our house not looking left or right.

I remember hearing the squeal of tires, a dead hush before the screaming started.

For a long minute I did not dare come to the window.

Afterward, I punished myself with silence. And then I became old, without noticing when or how, one year flowing into the next—empty, empty. Age did not make me wise. I never asked, and I never gave, and when I did ask, I asked for myself alone. But the night came when, bare-legged and barefoot, you walked in from the street, and I saw your face, and I heard your voice, and my present began to haunt me the way other people are haunted by their pasts.

I understand now, my dear. My past is just that, past, and my silence is over. After so many years of wading through the mists of remembrance, I no longer need to spend two hours pinned to a straight-backed chair striving to catch a painful echo of my youth. So this, then, is what I would like. I would like you to put on your best shoes, your most beautiful dress—and oh, do not feel bad about my earrings, they were always yours, I only wish I had something else to give you. I would like you to cross the city whose ugliness will be concealed by New Year snow, soft and forgiving—your favorite time of the year when you were little, do you remember, all the sledding you did, laughing, your mouth full of snow? I would like you to enter the brilliant hall with the same excitement with which you entered the theater as a child to watch me dance when I still danced, in the brief years before the Change, though I’m sure you’ve forgotten that also, and walk down the velvet aisle, and immerse yourself in the plush of the night. I would like you to look at the man who will come striding across the stage, and I would like him to look at you.

And oh, you should hear his music, my dear, for it is truly not of this world, though it should belong to everyone in it. It will one day soon, that I know.

This is a small thing, you see, the beginning of my amends. I will not be going to the concert. This ticket, my child, is for you.