The Concert Ticket

1

ALEXANDER VISITED THE PLACE with stubborn frequency in the early days of December, to check on Stepan’s progress in obtaining a pair of shoes.

“I want padded soles,” he repeated on the second Friday of the month, “also, if possible, silver arrows running along the sides, I’ve seen a picture in a magazine.”

Ordinarily Stepan would nod with patience, but on that afternoon he appeared distracted, and anxious to be left alone. “Can’t talk now, I’m unloading some merchandise I’ve been trying to get off my hands for a while,” he said at last, glancing at the door to the yard, then at his watch. “Stop by in two days.”

On his way out, in the cramped maze of the basement, Alexander met his father.

“Thanks for letting me know,” his father said. “Is he there now?”

“Yeah, waiting for you with that pile of junk. How was this morning, any trouble?”

“No, all was calm today.”

“They hauled two more off last night,” Alexander said quietly.

“Who?”

“Some woman, she had no documents on her—claimed someone had stolen them in a tram. And a really old fellow with a beard, he’s been around forever. He spoke out for her, so they searched him and found some incriminating stuff in his pocket, I didn’t see what it was—a napkin or a menu or something from a foreign restaurant, I heard.”

Sergei was silent for a moment.

“Listen, Sasha,” he said then, “I think you should stop coming here, our position is precarious enough as it is. You must think about your future, you’re a university student now.”

“Yeah, about that, I keep meaning to tell you,” the boy said, “I actually—”

A door banged upstairs, and there were echoing steps above their heads.

“Let’s talk at home,” Sergei whispered. “Thanks again, and oh, button up, it’s snowing.”

At four in the afternoon, dusk had already congealed, and the courtyard lay patchily illuminated by the windows of the surrounding buildings, a giant chessboard of light and dark. As he strode toward the man he could see leaning against the church wall, toward the precious parcel resting by the man’s impeccable footwear, a memory of other windows lighting up other snowdrifts on a street he had walked almost a year ago, clutching in his sweaty hand a matchbox the cloudless color of a foreign sky, anticipating some deep inti mation of another, truer, life that would somehow transform his own—the memory of it, vivid and painful, rose and tangled in his mind with an unfolding vision of the future, making him slow his steps.

The man was so close now Sergei could discern the dry folds in his leathery cheeks. Ah, so you got my message, good, and the money? Right here, the agreed price. Yes, pleasure as always, be careful not to drop it, it’s rather heavy. Then the rush across the city, the familiar building, the elevator eternally out of order, the breathless assault on the staircase, he is not old yet, not old, nothing is over, her face framed in the door, her eyes yet again filling with that tremulous light. I’ve kept my word, this is for you. Oh no, I can’t accept it. Please, this is all I can give you, you see, I was hoping to give you my ticket, but things have changed, I owe it to—to someone else now… For a moment he is afraid that she will again stiffen, push him away, but she does not, and with a clunk his gift is abandoned in the dusk of her hallway to exchange rattling reminiscences of bygone days with its reflection in the dusty mirror, and there is that melting he remembers, and the softness of her hair, and the surprising, timid dryness of her lips, and here the shadows become deep and golden and draw over them like curtains, and when he pulls the curtains apart, he finds the world bright with brittle wintry joy and her room blowing with chilled breezes and light, blue-tinted scents he has never smelled before, and, half rising on her elbow from the swirling foam of sky-blue sheets, she whispers, “Serezha, I’ve managed to get extra tickets, would you like to come with me?”

Two weeks later the tickets go on sale during his shift, he hands the ticket over to his wife, to his mother-in-law, and, with this simple discharge of duty, he is freed from all future duty, his life wiped like a slate, and, clean, free, he waits until the last evening of the year, until the entrance he has rehearsed so many times that it now slides past hardly invading his imagination—the rapid, well-practiced succession of stairs, chandeliers, seats, her cheek on his shoulder—and then the old gray-eyed man with the noble profile swiftly dances out onto the stage, and the lights dim, and the man’s arm is raised.

It is curious, he realizes now, that in all this time, through all his manifold replays of the intricately constructed scenario—the glorious reward at the end of his tortured wait, which he could visualize down to the marble veining of the conservatory columns—his thoughts have invariably stopped just short of the actual music, never once daring to push past the lifting of the baton, never once daring to imagine the sound he is about to hear. This, then, is the moment of unveiling, the ninth symphony of a genius—and though he has in his hand the concert program (printed with luxuriously raised lettering on beautiful cream paper), which he will take to his new home, her home, and treasure for decades as a keepsake of their beginnings, though he could easily look down, then, and skim the description of the symphony’s conception, history, influences, he will not do so, he will close his eyes instead, and merely listen.

What was it that someone in the line said so long ago—an overview of the history of civilization, from tribal dances to the present day… And indeed, this is how it starts, with a solitary drum that emerges out of expectant silence, in the beginning only a low, arrhythmic pulse, the first rumblings of humanity lifting its still somewhat furry head, then growing louder, more assured, being joined by other drums, and cymbals, and more drums, cresting to a cacophonous, monstrous, exhilarating explosion of sound, of conscience, and gradually, out of chaos, acquiring a rhythm, a wild rhythm full of fires flickering in nights pitted with menacing stars and callused palms slapping the taut animal skins of primitive instruments. The beat becomes faster, faster, and then slower, more ritualistic, until it is dignified and almost stern, until the orgiastic splashes of cymbals fall away and trumpets enter in a celebratory fanfare, and the music transforms into a military march, sloe-eyed legions passing north in precise geometric formations, through jungles, along rivers, across deserts, carrying on their outstretched arms the building blocks of the first great civilizations, of pyramids and temples; yet somewhere deep below the marching, the earthy heartbeat remains, the faint but persistent throbbing of dark soil, of dark blood, of sacrifices to cruel gods of the southern sun. But as the parade across sands and ages thunders farther north, it becomes drier, lighter, cleanses itself of excess sound, and suddenly there is a hush, out of which a lone flute is born, a lucid, beautiful, seaborne melody, the classical harmony of antiquity, already swelling with other flutes into a pure, swanlike song, which, he knows, will soon turn languid, luxurious, Oriental, perversely wind itself around the militant theme, then be drowned in a newly erupting chaos of barbaric hordes, yet with the sole flute surviving like a slender silver thread beneath the noise, to stretch and surge out of the darkness with the unexpected strength of a human voice.

And as the orchestra falls silent, more voices soar in a heavenly chorus, and he thinks, Ah, I see, that’s who these people were, standing about the stage in mute blue-and-silver ranks. Listening, he is astonished by how perfectly everything fits together, how one thing flows into another, how easily thousands of years translate into a seemingly uninterrupted musical phrase, how naturally the chorus of the eastern empire becomes tired and fades, yet not before passing its sound, moments before expiring, to an organ half the known world away, how gloriously the organ then carries it forth into the somber sonorousness of cresting medieval cathedrals, toward radiant devotions of sunlight splintered into a skyful of stained-glass rainbows, to be overcome, in turn, by a soft triumph of cellos unfolding and uniting in the fullness of humanity’s rebirth. This unity is then dispersed by multiplying, thinner voices of violins, each thrusting its own increasingly shrill, diverging tune into the stream of time. He already senses what will happen to the music next, guesses, in a sort of visionary echo preceding the melody itself, the unraveling of beauty from its luminous peak, a mirrorlike unwinding, a repetition, in reverse, of the symphony’s beginning; but the repetition is a little smudged and hurried, an imperfect, inferior reflection, as if mankind is now impatient and impoverished, merely going through the motions—the exotic eastern whine tamed for polite society, the classicism of flutes grown hollow and pompous in a strained imitation of ancient serenity, the marching warlike precision losing in strength what it gains in terror as it ushers in the present century—all of it disintegrating at last into a horrifying burst of noise, then silence, then the hoarse whisper of a lone, uncertain drum.

The curtains drew shut. He stood still, breathing.

Snowflakes were descending invisible ethereal ladders.

“By all means, take your time,” the man with the leathery face said acidly from under the weather-stained, crumbling arches. “I’ve got all day, I’ll be happy to wait some more.”

“I’m sorry, I was somewhere else, I guess,” Sergei said, and stepped forth into the shadows.

“I suppose you’d like to see for yourself,” the dealer offered, beginning to remove the wrappings. Sergei gazed about. The doorway to the church gaped dark, empty of its secretive, erratically lit activity; the courtyard too was nearly deserted. Absently he watched a sharp-faced youth in a pink-and-orange scarf, whom he had seen with Sasha once or twice; the youth was sitting on the porch steps, fidgeting, checking his watch now and then, occasionally producing a small red box from his pocket, pushing it open to steal a glance inside as if to verify something, then hiding it back in his pocket, checking his watch once more.

“Almost done,” the leathery man announced. “It requires a delicate approach.”

As the box slid open again, Sergei caught the unmistakable flash of gemlike fire, and bent forward to see better.

The youth shoved the box shut.

“A beauty, isn’t it,” the man said fondly.

Sergei’s heart was flailing. The future he had just rehearsed was retreating, back into the dreamlike, unconvincing realm from whose thin fog it had formed, and as it lost its substance he knew he would not see her again—unless, perhaps, he happened upon her by chance, as all of them constantly happened upon one another within the invisible boundaries of their small world, so confined that after some time even random encounters, even coincidences, began to appear predictable—yes, unless he happened upon her waiting in some neighborhood line, for milk for her father-in-law, maybe, or pencils for her boy, and tried to explain, in public, hurried, failed words, that he was unable to find the right model.

“But this isn’t what I asked for,” he said.

The dealer considered him without expression. Sergei’s lips started to move mechanically around some explanation. The ensuing argument crisscrossed in the air, vague and abusive, until the man, losing his contemptuous calm, gathered the gramophone in its wrappings and departed, directing a final salvo at several generations of Sergei’s family.

Exhaling, Sergei meandered over to where the youth was again consulting his watch.

“Hello,” he said.

The youth frowned but did not reply.

“Sasha’s father, remember? Nice scarf you’ve got there, unusual colors.”

“Do you have anything to sell, or what?” the youth said reluctantly.

“Not today—but this item of yours, can I see it?”

“I already have someone lined up. She should be here any minute.”

“Oh, I just want to look,” Sergei said, sitting down on the step next to him.

The youth shrugged, reached into his pocket. For an instant Sergei was horrified at the thought that he had been mistaken, that he had just casually, without deliberating, committed yet another betrayal—and committed it in vain. But he had been right. Pushing their heads close together in the winter dusk, they gazed at the icy sparkling confined within filigree settings, the diamonds burning darkly in the dim light, and he thought, These are the trifles that summon thrilling visions of grace and delight, golden curlicues of theater boxes, waltzes across grand mirrored ballrooms, poems in some aromatic hour past midnight, music, laughter, champagne, the bright, delicate, swiftly whirling foam of life—but not for me. They will consign me to years of shared habits, rooms brown and low-ceilinged like lingering hibernation, an infinity of homemade meals, a bed quietly creaking; and perhaps one is worth the other, perhaps one has always been worth the other…

The youth, stifling a yawn, moved to close the cardboard box. It had a dark strip running along one side, Sergei noticed now—a matchbox, he realized, and laughed a short, silent laugh, and placed his hand on the youth’s wrist. “These,” he said evenly, “belong to my mother-in-law. They were taken from my wife just around the corner from here, on her walk through the park.”

It was so quiet he imagined he heard the crunch of snow under the feet of a crow crossing the dusky yard, the small collapse of dampened plaster in the church at their backs.

“I don’t know about any parks,” the youth hissed, trying to jerk his hand away. “I got them from a man at the train station.”

His face was half obscured, illuminated in streaks and blotches, but Sergei could see a rash of tiny, loathsome pimples on his forehead, a base fear stealing like fog over his eyes.

“I’m not asking where you got them,” Sergei said, “I don’t want to know. I want the earrings. I will pay.” Releasing his grip, he glanced behind him; they were alone. He began to pull out handfuls of bills, which probably smelled of rotten fruit, unloved musical instruments, lost familial keepsakes, furtive, unclean transactions—the sum of his life’s worth. Two or three notes fell in the slush by his feet; he did not stoop to pick them up. “That’s all I have. If it’s not enough, I can send the rest with my son later, just name your price.”

“That’s fine,” the youth said thickly, and for one moment Sergei saw him as a little boy, freckled, his lower lip trembling at some transgression, not that long past, before his face had been marked with a scar in some alleyway brawl. “That’s fine.”

The youth’s hands shook as he crammed the money into his jacket.

Back on the street, Sergei turned left instead of right, narrowly avoiding a collision with a passerby who flashed past him, slapping his nose with a damp end of her scarf. Three blocks away he stopped, and stood in a pool of darkness, gazing at the people beneath the falling snow, gray, hunched over, faceless in the shadows, indistinguishable save for an occasional sleeve or boot thrust into a pocket of spilled, sickly light; but he thought he could see a place in the line where two women leaned toward each other, talking, their heads, their hats—one light, one dark—drawn close together.

He wondered briefly what would happen to his life if he approached them. Then he turned and walked away, and the music of the symphony he had imagined moved through his mind, softly at first, then gaining in volume, and he let it linger this time, running this or that phrase over his lips, humming this or that fragment, as he wandered the city and the night.

2

“ONLY ONE MORE WEEK! I won’t know what to do with my time once this is over.”

“Me, I can’t wait to get out of here. My cousin’s brother-in-law has a car, he’s agreed to lend it to me, so I’m going on a trip… Of course, there’s a waiting list for driving lessons, but I’ve put my name down already, they say it won’t be long, no later than next fall.”

“I’m thinking of taking up sports, but my doctor says I should lose some weight first.”

“And you?”

“I guess I might do some painting. An artist lives in my building, he’s always having pretty girls over. Or maybe I’ll learn to play the piano. Or write a book. I haven’t decided yet.”

There was a somewhat deflated silence. The snow was coming down faster now.

Anna turned behind her.

“It’s a year to the day today,” she said, “since I first joined this line. December twenty-third. I remember I was hoping for a cake. A cake would have been simpler, but I’m glad. Of course, I’ve lost my job as a result, but apart from that…”

Sonechka breathed on her fingers; she looked almost transparent with cold. “I dropped a glove somewhere,” she said, glancing up with a pale smile. “Are you interested in working at the Museum of Musical History?”

“You have an opening?”

“We will soon. They’re letting me go. They think I’ve stolen a valuable piece from the museum. It accidentally got broken, you see… But it was inevitable in any case, times are changing, and with my husband where he is, I’m a liability.”

“But Sonechka, what will you do?” Anna exclaimed.

“I don’t know. Stay home and learn to cook, maybe. Spend more time with my son… I still have friends at the museum, though, I’d be glad to put in a word for you if you like—”

Snow groaned under three or four pairs of boots; the uniformed men were striding down the sidewalk for the evening inspection. Anna turned away hurriedly, searching for the documents in her bag. After all this time, the line’s really nearing its end, she thought, strangely affected by the realization; and even though she knew that in the coming year all of them would still be shopping in the same bakeries, sitting on the same benches, and seeing the same films at the local theater, she had a vertiginous sensation of breaking away, quite as if they were taking leave of one another before each setting sail on a mysterious expedition to different, unknown shores.

The feeling was as sad as any farewell, yet exciting at the same time.

That night, when she walked home, the air was soft, filled with the gentle movement of descending snow; apartment windows glowed through the snowfall in hazy patterns that seemed to form the letters of some heavenly alphabet, spelling out a word she could almost decipher. Wrapping the winter around her in the folds of her coat, she moved farther into the darkness; and as the air grew colder, she felt the year rushing along on its ice-bound, sparkling way toward its certain conclusion. She had always known that the tickets would go on sale during her shift—the line contracting in thrilled little spasms toward the kiosk, the seller beaming at her, a ticket stub in her naked, freezing hand. A cursory knock on the door, Mama, you won’t believe this, Mama, look! Thank you, my dear, you don’t know how happy you’ve made me. Her mother’s scent as they embrace—not the sour whiff of old age, but a faint flowery scent of the past century kept like a dried blossom between the pages of some much-treasured book. Then the next few days, spent in busy, glad preparation as she bustles about the kitchen during evenings that are suddenly brimming over with time that is hers, hers alone—and at last New Year’s Eve, the night of the concert, her mother returning just before midnight, looking younger by decades; and as the four of them raise their glasses in a toast, she thinks to herself, Yes, this year will be truly new, everything about it will be new, her family, her job, her life; and now, in her kitchen, with the clock striking twelve and champagne foaming over and everyone laughing, she can already feel her life deepening, can feel herself sailing off on the slow, tranquil journey of her future years—Sergei’s hand on the small of her back, the taste of a perfectly baked date tart on the lips she is kissing, the candles nodding in glowing unison, Sasha’s excited university stories, her mother thanking her again with shining eyes, It was wonderful, wonderful, my dear—and oh, turn it up, listen, they are playing the symphony on the radio right now, Sergei can hear it too—and the music, yes, the music, just like—here her thoughts stumbled a little—just like that melody from her childhood, the only melody she could ever hum.

When she unlocked the door, winter scampered inside the apartment like a frozen little creature at her heels. Divesting herself of her coat, she walked into the kitchen, and stopped short: Sergei and her mother were sitting at the table, their faces turned toward her as if in expectation. “Ah, there she is,” her mother said, smiling.

“Mama, is that a new dress?” she asked, startled—and in the next moment saw the large white box presiding over the table, and somehow missed her mother’s answer. Smiling also, Sergei reached over and lifted the box’s lid; and immediately the kitchen filled with the bittersweet smells of chocolate and cream. She stared at the pink rose in the middle of the cake, two or three petals squashed.

“No candles, sorry,” Sergei said. “And it’s too bad Sasha’s stuck in the line.”

“I too have something for you,” her mother said. “I’m afraid it’s not wrapped.”

Flushed, she accepted a small rectangular box from her mother’s hands. Something hard rolled inside it as she pushed it open. She grew still.

“Happy birthday, my dear,” her mother said softly.

“But—how—where—”

“A girl in the line was selling them. An amazing coincidence, she said she got them from someone at the train station,” Sergei explained, was explaining still; but her mother had already risen from the table and was guiding Anna to the foyer mirror, urging, “Well, try them on, try them on!” Stunned, she blinked at her blinding reflection, while her mother bobbed behind her, almost too small to be reflected herself.

Later, after they had eaten the cake, she stood alone by the sink, pretending to wash the dishes, letting hot water run over her hands until her fingers became white and puckered, thinking about all the things she had recently learned to let go—her youth, the wild transports of girlish happiness, the vulgar bouquet of romantic commonplaces—so she could keep other things, quiet things, simple things, secret things, things that, she believed, would ripen with the passage of time into a warm, rich, mature contentment. After a while, she turned off the water, and, resolved, went to her mother’s room, forcing the earrings open as she walked, though her swollen fingers would barely obey her.

The door was cracked; she opened it and stopped just past the threshold, talking already, having started to talk in the hallway, saying the words she had run through her mind in preparation: “Mama, I can’t have these. I’m so relieved you found them, but they’re yours, and they remind me of… Oh sorry, I didn’t realize—”

Her mother, she saw, was undressing. Becoming aware of the sheen of the faded black silk carefully laid out on the chair—not a new dress, just one she had not seen in some twenty-five years—of the old woman’s milky-white legs exposed, as she bent forward, between the folds of the last-century robe, Anna hastily averted her gaze.

“Come in, come in, it’s all right…” Anna heard the bed creak lightly, heard the rustle of the robe being drawn. She entered the room, closed the door behind her, then stepped over to the dresser and gently placed the earrings on its scratched surface, where they lay glittering and sinister, a pair of brightly carapaced bugs from some exotic, unimaginable land.

“I would really like you to have them, Anya,” her mother said slowly behind her back. “I want you to wear them to—on a special occasion.”

“What special occasion?”

“When I was dancing in the West,” her mother said, “I met Selinsky.”

Anna turned. Her mother was now sitting on the edge of the bed, her small body hidden within her regally voluminous robe.

“You did? You never told me.”

“It was not safe to mention his name, my dear. Then too, you might have noticed, I was not a talkative sort. But times are changing now. I knew Igor Fyodorovich well. I danced in his first two ballets. I rehearsed the third one as well, but I had to leave the city before it opened. The new soloist was magnificent. He married her later, I heard, but it didn’t last.”

“Oh,” Anna said. “I didn’t know he wrote ballets.”

A short silence stole between them, then deepened; and as her mother’s moist dark eyes rested quietly on her face, Anna felt all at once overwhelmed—overwhelmed by an irrational and terrible certainty that something momentous was about to be said in this stuffy, faintly perfumed box of a room forever trapped in the wrong century—something that would change her life in some enormous new way she could not possibly foresee or expect; and, unable to move, unable to breathe, she looked away, the cold blue fire of the diamond earrings nipping at the corner of her eye, and still the silence continued, and she thought she could not possibly stand another instant of—of—

“I’m not going to go to the concert,” her mother said.

Her breath released, Anna stared at her. The old woman’s face was serene, her back straight, her bare ankles unsettlingly brittle and sharp, lost in the dust-colored slippers two sizes too large that Anna had given her on some birthday long past.

Sitting down next to her, Anna touched her hand gently, as if she were a bird that might fly away. “But Mama—” she said in a near-whisper.

Her mother smiled, a surprising smile, warm and quick; and unexpectedly Anna thought of her dutiful childhood visits to vast, cavernous studios that reeked of State-sanctioned effort, with pale winter drafts whistling through white windowpanes, and mirrors along sloping floors reflecting her mother’s tight-lipped struggles to impart grace to the thick limbs of clumsy peasant girls in sweaty tights, which little Anya had found faintly disgusting, and the following years of injuries, illnesses, and exhaustion, and an early retirement rewarded, in negligent fashion, with a medal engraved “For Unwavering Devotion to the Future of Our Ballet”—a medal, she recalled with a quick flush of shame, that she had not seen among the treasured keepsakes in her mother’s dresser—and, dimly, she understood, the protests dying in her throat.

“And the ticket?” she asked softly.

“The ticket,” said her mother, “is yours. Put on the earrings, my dear, and go to the concert, the music will be beautiful, you remember that summer I—”

Anna felt her eyes beginning to well up but fought her desire to cry, tightening her hold on her mother’s hand instead, bending to press her cheek to her mother’s palm, then rising, speaking feverishly, not noticing whether her mother was talking still, the words of gratitude leaping off her lips—“Serezha will be so happy, so happy!”—and somehow, in the next moment, finding herself already running down the corridor to the bedroom, pursued by the staccato of her rushed steps; pursued, too, by a darkening look, oddly like disappointment, or else resignation, in her mother’s eyes—or perhaps it was only the wavering of light in the room, the trembling of the world through her tears, the shifting of things as they found their rightful places at last.

Sergei was sitting in the armchair in the corner, writing in a thick notebook, the shadow of his swiftly moving hand flying across the wall behind him; as she lowered herself to the floor by his feet, she glimpsed a page scribbled over with a hurried procession of many-legged insects, clusters of berries, curling eyelashes.

She pressed her head to his knee.

“Mama has given us the ticket,” she said in a muffled, laughing murmur.

He was frozen for a long moment, one second, two, three, four… When she lifted her face, yellow lamplight fell squarely upon her; her gaze shone. He looked at her blankly.

“Do you hear, the ticket is ours now,” she cried.

It was not the lamplight, he realized then; everything about her was bright—her eyes, her teeth, her disheveled hair… His chest received a painful nudge; he could see her former beauty rising in her worn-out face. He glanced away, spoke with an effort.

“Your mother doesn’t want the ticket?”

She shook her head, laughing again.

“It’s ours now,” she said, “I mean, it’s yours. You can go to the concert!”

All was quiet within him—quiet, and dark, and still, devoid of thoughts.

He moved his lips, tried to say it, but the words had no sound.

“What was that, I didn’t hear—”

She was smiling, smiling up at him—radiant, and gentle, and young, so young, as if she had somehow moved backward in time, merging with an early memory he had of her…

He tried again, and this time heard his voice, or what sounded like his voice.

“I think you should go instead.”

“What?” she said, smiling still.

“I think you should go to the concert.”

And as the words escaped him, what had seemed only a nonsensical dream an instant before—the harsh yellow light, the difficult melody he had been trying to pin down to the page, the happy, dancing, golden-green gaze of the beautiful woman he had known in some other, better, time, the astonishing gift falling into his lap, which he longed to accept with every particle of his being, and which, with the cruel logic of dreams, he was powerless not to refuse—all of it suddenly became a fact, and lay before him, cold and small, and unchangeable, forever unchangeable now.

The smile slowly ran off her face. “It won’t be worth a year of waiting,” she said, rising from her knees. “I won’t be able to appreciate the music.”

“Let’s give it back to your mother, then, she’s the one who should have it.”

“She won’t take it. Can you—” Her voice buckled. “Serezha, I understand why my mother doesn’t want it. This—this I don’t understand. I thought you’d be so glad… Can you just tell me why?”

Because it is impossible, he thought, because it is too late. If only this had happened earlier—before you put on a silk dress and waited for me on that park bench, before another woman stood without moving in the window and said, “Please, don’t,” before I broke something precious, and lied, and plotted, before I crossed the line—before a concert ticket changing hands stopped being a matter of concert attendance, became instead my only means of proving to myself that I’m not completely unworthy of everything I hold dear, be it music or love or—or simple human decency.

Because, you see, I will not be rewarded for my doings of the past year, of many past years.

He pulled her next to himself, carefully stroked her hair.

“Because I’ve learned a lot about Selinsky’s music,” he said, “and I doubt that his new symphony would be to my liking. His recent stuff is disappointing, too formalistic. I’d rather remember him for his early pieces, you know. There was this one thing I played when I was a boy—beautiful, beautiful…”

A moment tiptoed by. She sighed. He felt her settling into his shoulder.

“How did it go?” she asked.

Some hours before sunrise, as he lay awake in the dark, the ticket being passed in his tired mind from his mother-in-law to his wife to him, then back to his mother-in-law, and again to his wife and again to him, in an infinite, tedious, hopeless exchange, he heard a key turning in the lock, and was struck by an idea. He climbed out of bed and stumbled barefoot into the foyer to intercept the boy, but found only a damp coat tossed on the counter, saw only a thin sliver of muted light seeping out into the corridor as the door to the old woman’s room drew shut.

Having closed the door behind him, Alexander faced his grandmother.

“You wanted to talk to me?” he asked, puzzled.

“I wonder if you could do me a favor, my dear,” the old woman said briskly. She reached out her hand, her bony wrist adrift in the heavy velvet of the cuff; he squinted across the shadows at something dazzling on her childlike palm. “Can you get rid of these for a good price?”

His surprise deepened.

“Are you sure? Aren’t these like souvenirs or something—”

“Oh, I’m absolutely sure. An admirer once bought them for me in a foreign city, but I find I no longer want to keep them around. Now, where was that silly matchbox?”

Frowning, he watched her fuss about her dresser, opening drawers, energetically shifting bundles of ancient, mysterious things; he could see dust rising into the air in pale, scented puffs.

“I didn’t know you lived in a foreign city,” he said. “Mother never told me. When was it? And where? And what was it like?”

She glanced over her shoulder, studied him for a moment, then extracted something from a drawer, shut it with another explosion of aromatic dust, and nodded at the chair. “Sit, and I’ll tell you a story,” she said. “It’s rather late, of course, but then, you’re a late bird like me… Just throw this over the light, be a dear, it’s too bright for my eyes.”

Obediently he tossed the old shawl over the lamp, and immediately the night trapped in the small, hot room grew flushed with a peculiar deep glow, the color of fire, he thought, gleaming darkly on the walls of some ancient cave. He felt disoriented and a little uneasy, yet also secretly thrilled, as if he had found himself in some unfamiliar, outlandish place. In bed now, his grandmother regarded him with alert black eyes from under the blanket; and when she spoke, he knew that her voice sounded just like a voice he had been hearing for a very long time.

“My parents first took me there when I was eight, you see. It was early spring when we arrived. The sky was like translucent silk, the roofs were like wet glass, the trees like hieroglyphics carved upon the air. My father rented an apartment just off the boulevards. I studied ballet in the afternoons, but I spent my mornings at home. One morning our bell rang, and three small liveried men came in carrying an enormous carpet on their shoulders. They set it down in the dining room and began to unroll it. Its inside was soft and blue, rich with golden birds, and I got down on my knees to see it better. And it was then that I noticed the first one.”

She fell silent abruptly.

Alexander leaned forward in the red glow.

“The first what?” he asked.

3

ALEXANDER WOKE UP tired and vaguely unsettled. He moved through the day yawning, his hand tightened around the matchbox in his pocket, his head muffled with insomniac visions of chimney sweeps dancing on tiptoes across tiled roofs, and bright petals swimming in buckets of flowers sold by mysterious girls on the corners of foreign boulevards. When the dreary afternoon had bled its shadows into the black evening, he walked to the familiar courtyard. The place was nearly empty, as it often was this winter; people were being more careful. On the porch steps, a drunk with a reedy, goatlike beard swayed above a fence of warped, worm-nibbled icons; a frightened-looking boy crouched beside him, his skinny arms protectively encircling something that glittered weakly in the dusk—a pair of tarnished silver candlesticks, Alexander saw as he came closer. Four or five fellows in enormous fur hats stumbled past him through the poorly lit snowdrifts, excitedly jabbering to one another in what, he registered with a start, was foreign speech; behind them trailed a fat man with no neck who mumbled in native undertone, nervously glancing around: “You can’t find these in the official, State-run, stores—unique pre-revolutionary relics here, pieces of history, bargain prices—”

The group rounded the corner, but one man lingered behind, craning his neck at the peeling church domes that were quickly merging with the night. Alexander strode up to him and casually slipped the matchbox open. Just then a window lit up on the first floor of a nearby building, casting a pale rectangle at their feet; the diamonds flared up.

“Over two hundred years old,” Alexander said under his breath.

The tall, elderly foreigner bent to examine the offering with shrewd gray eyes.

“A celebrated jeweler of the tsar,” Alexander added hastily. “Museum quality. My grandmother was a countess, priceless gems, do you understand?” More windows were softly emerging in the deepening dusk around them, and with each new flash, it seemed more and more as though he held a small piece of fire on his palm.

The man was nodding, smiling down his long, distinguished nose.

Back in the basement, Alexander counted the money again, and thought in disbelief, People are such fools. He walked to the line, now and then touching the bulge in his back pocket, continuing to run his hand over it, to reassure himself, all through the night.

It grew increasingly cold; the unfortunates in the last, midnight, shift were still, all in their own muffled worlds of jealously guarded heat, clouding their raised collars with effluvia of onion stews and weak teas. Rare voices arrived in explosions of steam.

“He picked the wrong time to come back,” someone said with grim satisfaction. “Let’s hope he hasn’t grown too tender among his orange groves and seaside resorts.”

“Oh, he’ll be all right in his foreign furs. Better to worry about yourself!”

“That’s what I keep saying, we’ll all get sick, this is inhumane! The kiosk closes at five o’clock, so what’s the use of our hanging about till—”

“What, I can’t hear you, that van is so noisy—”

“A van, what van?”

“There, look, it’s coming to a stop at the corner.”

Alexander glanced up. The headlights chug-chugged to a halt, damp slush mixing with the limp snow that tossed back and forth beneath the recently repaired streetlamp. The van’s door was kicked open from within; the driver emerged and, looking neither left nor right, proceeded to the kiosk. The line squirmed with cautious excitement. The man dug into a pocket; keys jingled. The line gasped and compressed forward, holding its three-hundred-headed breath. Alexander was watching closely now. The man disposed of the lock with astonishing efficiency and vanished inside. A woman squealed.

The grate over the kiosk window was being pushed up.

“Bet you your ticket,” whispered Nikolai, “it’ll be another notice—‘Seller out till the Second Coming,’ or ‘We ran out of trees to print tickets,’ or—”

The window now glowed from within, an egg of desirable light and warmth, from which hatched the van driver’s head. A uniformed official approached, and the two conversed briefly. Alexander craned his neck until it ached. The official was already walking back, switching on his flashlight, unfolding some papers. “Straighten up, straighten up!” he shouted. “The tickets will be distributed in strict accordance with the list, only one per person. When you hear your name read, produce your documents and step forward.”

The wildfire of voices ran up and down.

“The tickets, did you hear, did he really say—”

“Well, I’ll be damned!” Nikolai cried, slapping Alexander on the back.

Behind them, the line gave in like collapsed dough.

“Ah!” Viktor Pyetrovich sighed softly, sorrowfully, and Alexander half turned to catch his heavily settling body against his shoulder.

“Are you all right?” he asked, his eyes glued to the kiosk window. Viktor Pyetrovich did not reply, his weight crushing Alexander’s collarbone. Alexander glanced back.

The old man’s face was the shade of yesterday’s ash, his lips shaking in a pitiful attempt to assemble themselves in a smile; his gloved hands crawled unseeingly over his coat as if trying to ascertain the presence of something very important underneath its cheap fabric.

“Are you all right?” Alexander repeated, more urgently, gazing into Viktor Pyetrovich’s face through the increasingly frantic shadows; the line was trembling, jerking, leaping now, and the darkness darted here and there like a flock of maddened bats, trying to escape the agitated slicing of flashlights.

“I—” the old man mouthed. “I—”

The voice would not squeeze out of his throat, and Alexander had the sudden unpleasant image of old toothpaste congealed in a tube. With rising alarm, he pulled on Nikolai’s sleeve.

“He’s sick or something,” he said fiercely.

It was impossible to see what was happening at the kiosk window now; the backs had multiplied and grown violent, huffing, shoving, pressing.

Nikolai gathered the old man like a rag doll. “Damn it,” he spat out. “Might be a heart attack, he needs an ambulance. I’ll hold him, run!”

Alexander ran.

He ran slipping on snow, tripping over pavements, the icy wind stinging his face. Alleys crept out of the night with the drunken leers of unsteady, decaying streetlamps; the solitary silence of winter rang in his ears like the beating of blood, the rasping of breath, the tolling of bells long since fallen mute in the skies. Oh, the hateful city, where time is communal and worthless, where seasons follow one another like obedient comrades shuffling forward in line, where age erases identical, meaningless lives before they are even written…

His chest was tight with frenzied tears.

Two streets away, the phone booth shone dimly through the snow, a glass full of hazy, chilled milk. He dashed to it. A large man was inside, his back plastered against the door. The door was cracked, and out leaked the lived-in, soured warmth of a big body and the monotonous rumble of a low voice dictating to someone on the other end of the line. “And also one kilo of sausage,” Alexander heard, “and half a dozen eggs, and dried fish, not the kind you got last time, but the kind he likes, you know the kind—” Alexander knocked, then tore off his glove and knocked again. Slowly the man rotated, until his stomach was squashed flat against the side of the booth, and he peered from the milky light into the outside darkness with small eyes that glistened like fish scales. His voice continued to drone. “And half a kilo of cheese if you can get it, give her fifteen for it, and also—” Still talking, his face enormous and bare, he jerked the door toward himself, and the crack vanished, and the voice became a wordless hum.

Alexander started to pound the heel of his hand against the glass, shouting, “A man’s life, life and death, do you understand?”—but the fish scales only glimmered coldly; and suddenly lives no longer seemed to Alexander identical and meaningless, nor was time communal and worthless.

It was very particular, and very precious.

He flew farther, his toes numb in his inadequate shoes, and the park dragged at him with an oblivion of branches and benches and bottles, and there was that other phone booth he remembered across the road, but it was dark, and the light would not come on even when he pulled the door open. The receiver dangled heavy and dead, icy to the touch, and still he tried to push his coin into the slot, with shaking, treacherous hands, pleading with the silence for a whole minute, then, nearly crying, ran back to the first booth, and found the large man gone and the wires viciously torn out of the wall, a tangle of multicolored metallic bits and pieces spilling out like entrails.

He stared for a heartbeat, then stumbled back to the kiosk, sobbing under his breath, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…” The line had not moved much—it was maybe ten or fifteen people shorter; the window was dripping with shrill sounds of indignation, but he had no time to stop and listen. Viktor Pyetrovich’s cheeks were flushed, yet his lips were deathly white, as though smudged with winter. “I’m fine, fine now,” he breathed, “but I fear I must leave, it might be better for me to lie down, I—”

Nikolai released him, and he collapsed against Alexander.

“You’re in no condition to walk by yourself,” Alexander snapped. “I’ll take you home.”

“Sasha, what are you doing, the tickets!” Nikolai protested hotly in his ear.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes, his place is nearby. And if my turn comes before I’m back… But I’ll be back, just—just hold them off somehow if you can.”

Viktor Pyetrovich had seemed skinny, insubstantial, but his weight was hard and unwieldy against Alexander, sharp angles bruising him—knees, shoulders. The old man’s feet kept catching each other, and Alexander weaved from left to right under his burden, leaving an unsteady braid of tripped, tipsy footsteps in the snow. His struggling heart would not stop, jumping from his chest to his throat and back. I have to, I can’t just leave him, I’ll manage, there will be time, plenty of time… His arms ached. On a corner he paused to rest, propping Viktor Pyetrovich against a lamppost, and at last clearly saw the old man’s face, deadened in the poisonous electric glare, glistening with two sleek ruts.

He’s crying, Alexander thought, and, frightened, averted his eyes.

“Only a little way now,” he said brightly.

They set off again. He tried to walk faster, time pushing him in the back, tick-tock, tick-tock, must be fewer than a hundred people left before him in the line, faster, faster… Viktor Pyetrovich’s head was bobbing up and down as if tied to a string, and his lukewarm breath brushed Alexander’s neck in wheezing exhalations, but he could discern little more than “Selinsky” and “concert.” “Everything is all right, you’ll be all right, don’t worry,” Alexander was repeating mechanically. “They’ll hold our tickets, don’t worry.” Just as he felt unable to walk any farther, there was the building, the familiar oily smells of the foyer. The elevator was broken, of course, so, gritting his teeth, Alexander half carried Viktor Pyetrovich up the endless flights of stairs, terrified at the soft, apologetic moans issuing from somewhere in the old man’s throat, maneuvering his body past overflowing trash chutes and blind little windows through which winter gleamed bleak and white and unclean, like shut, swollen eyes ripening with disease; and with each laborious step his hope of ever escaping it all lessened, lessened, until at last, sweaty and breathless, he fell against the door, groping for the bell in the dark.

The protracted ringing, the scrape of steps, the middle-aged woman with eyes like pockets stretched out with their habitual load of misery, the fearful stumbling through unlit rooms, that little boy wandering lost in the sudden forest of clumsy adult legs, the water splashing onto the floor out of a cup pressed to lips that did not obey by a hand that could not stop shaking, the confetti of pills spilling out of a bottle, the spectacles clanking on the nightstand—everything seemed in slow motion now. Alexander pushed Viktor Pyetrovich onto the bed, battled blankets and pillows, the boulders of wet shoes, can’t be more than eighty or seventy people now, no matter how slow the line, faster, faster, please…

Viktor Pyetrovich was mumbling, imploring someone named Sonechka to leave him, run, get to the line in time for their turn, didn’t she know how important, how very, very important—

“I will do no such thing,” the woman said firmly. “Lie still, I think I hear the medics.”

And then the room was empty.

“I should get back,” Alexander muttered, “but it’s all right, you mustn’t worry, even if you can’t come to the concert, Igor Fyodorovich will certainly pay you a visit here—”

The old man’s fingers closed over Alexander’s hand with a shockingly strong, cold grip.

“I can’t die without seeing him again,” he whispered in a horrible torrent of thick, misshapen words, “my only son, taken away because of nothing, because of his being related to Selinsky, but times are changing, if Igor Fyodorovich could only get the foreign press behind him, something could be done, I must go, do you understand, he would never come here, he probably doesn’t even remember me, he has so many distant relatives, he—”

“But of course he remembers!” Alexander cried. “All the letters, all the postcards he’s sent you!…”

Viktor Pyetrovich closed his eyes. For a few heartbeats it was horrifyingly quiet, a deep chasm opening between the sounds, time falling away—and then Alexander knew with an absolute certainty that there never had been any letters. In the next moment the room erupted with people, coats, smells of snow and medicine, the stomping of boots, a bright-voiced heaving, moving, shifting. Liberated at last, Alexander walked out, carrying away Viktor Pyetrovich’s pained white gaze, unfocused without his spectacles, the final dry scratch of the old man’s whisper against his ear, “Do you understand?” Slowly, as if asleep, he drifted past the shadowy accumulations of bulky furniture meant for some other existence, herded into this shabby place by a violent contraction of history, past a gilded clock on the wall, which either had stopped on some dull, dead, dusty afternoon when nothing much had happened or was telling him that it was now past one in the morning, reminding him to climb out of this hushed pocket of timelessness into which he had somehow fallen and run, run, couldn’t be more than fifty people left now—but just then the darkness of the hallway parted, bearing the woman with those strange eyes. She touched his sleeve shyly, then began to talk, quickly, disjointedly. “I know who you are, he’s so proud of you, please tell him I’m not angry with him—or no, don’t tell him that, tell him instead that I will always—or better yet, don’t say anything, just—”

“It will be all right,” he said, gently moving her hand away, and stepped over the threshold. Falling silent, she stood in the doorway, watching him. All at once he was seized by sadness at not knowing the right words with which to tell her how enormously sorry he was. Pausing on the landing, he shook his head at the elevator grate. “Doesn’t work,” he said loudly. “They should fix it someday.” Then, without looking back, he descended the stairs, gathering speed from floor to floor, bursting at last into the stinging night.

The city flew past him—hazy streaks of streetlamps spreading out like the tails of bleary comets; infrequent passersby hurtling like disoriented meteors from one nonbeing into another; lighted windows coming to pale, glowing life like remote, clouded stars, dissipating no warmth, then falling back; black holes of courtyard entrances reeking of smoke and trash, of some deep, invisible processes of cosmic rotting—and as he ran, light and night, night and light, passed through him again and again, time accelerating in rhythm with his accelerating heart, and he felt its substance changing, changing with the roaring of the chill in his ears, until his universe, which before last year had stood completely still, his entire universe accelerated too, became a spinning, vertiginous blur of colors and winds, then rested, hard and brilliant, on one sharp, well-defined moment, the pinhead of time, a crystal on the head of a needle, balancing precariously as he ran, chanting silently, I will be on time, I will be on time, on time, on time, on time—

He was only two streets away now. There were voices ahead. He cut through a yard. Trees clinked with ice as he passed. Two men stepped out of the darkness.

“Hey, you there, have a light?” one called out.

Not slowing down, Alexander thrust his hand in his pocket, tossed out a matchbox, just like the one he had sold to that foreigner in the shadow of the church, so long ago… It was very quiet; his steps crunched in the snow and the trees sang a tinkling ditty.

“Always prepared for arson, isn’t he?” the first man said.

The second joined hoarsely, “It’s him, I just saw his face.”

The crunching of the snow came to a halt. The men were standing in his path.

“Hey, what—” he said, and tried to sidestep them. The first blow bent him in half.

“Hey,” he said again, hopelessly now, and put up his hands to protect his face. An overhead branch shook, and there was more melodious tinkling; icy powder descended on his head, dusting his eyelids with delicate, sprinkling touches. The men were working wordlessly, with satisfied grunts. Trying to ward off their blows, through the pounding and the sparkling and the ice, he thought he heard a remote tread of heavy boots, drawing close, closer, a voice crying, “Sashka, what the hell are you doing there, our turn is coming, what—!”

The voice, near now, cut off with an expletive.

As the flashing ceased in Alexander’s temples, he saw Nikolai rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, his thumbs hooked in his torn jacket.

“Take a walk,” the first man suggested. “This is between the three of us.”

“Yeah, we’re reeducating a young criminal here,” said the other man. “He set our kiosk on fire, I saw him running away laughing. He isn’t laughing now, though, is he?”

The square of the yard was white and still, the snow slow, theatrical; the night had deposited an unreal, metallic taste in Alexander’s mouth—or perhaps it was the taste of blood. He felt unreal himself, as if everyone were an actor reciting poorly written, forced lines, going through stiff, predictable motions. The light of the streetlamp flaring along the blade of a knife—his friend’s knife, formerly his own, he realized with an internal half-chuckle, half-sob—seemed to belong to the same unlikely, artificial play, as did another explosion of pain somewhere and the cascade of dazzling white stars in the blackness of his head and the muddled sight of the two men falling upon the third, the man with the knife, his friend, he reminded himself through the pain that would not stop but was spreading with slowly widening concentric circles. Then there was the cold against his cheek, snow, he guessed dimly, and cries and steps above him, something smashing into his side, a shoe maybe, a beautiful athletic shoe with silver arrows along the sides, he saw through his closing eyelids, through the steady rotation of the world, through the fading, the fading, the fading of things. And then there was nothing—only the darkness, the crystal of the universe glinting on its pin black and small, shrunken, and the old man sitting in the kitchen, sipping hot tea, with cautious lips puckered in an attitude of gentle blowing, from a glass set in a lovely silver glass holder, talking as he did one autumn day, during one of Alexander’s last visits.

“So, then, Viktor Pyetrovich,” Alexander asks, “what do you suppose happens to us when we die? After, I mean?”

“I read something once in a clever book,” the old man says between sips. “Maybe each of us gets whatever he believed in. A dead Hindu spends his eternity among a pantheon of blue-faced gods squirming with hundreds of arms and trumpeting through elephant trunks. A dead Muslim strolls in a rose garden fondling almond-eyed maidens and reciting poetry. A dead Christian floats amidst clouds filled with angels making music as Saint Peter strides past shaking his keys. And whoever believes there will be nothing after death gets precisely that—nothing. A small room full of spiders.”

“But what do you believe, Viktor Pyetrovich?”

Viktor Pyetrovich smiles. “I’m hoping to arrange a fulfilling afterlife for myself. Another cup?” And as Alexander watches a stream of hot, steaming liquid splash into his glass, he suddenly thinks, What if my afterlife is only more of the same, this city I can never escape, the shoddy apartment blocks, the sharing of bottles in the dismal little parks, the lines, the winter, the dreary snow, the nausea in the mornings, the trains always departing without me, the eternal wait for something, anything, to happen—and then, horrified, sends a silent plea to whatever heavenly scribe might be up there in pearly-curly paradise jotting down prayers with a swan’s feather in some gigantic compendium of life, No, no, please don’t write that down, I don’t really believe that, it was only a stray thought—but already Viktor Pyetrovich begins to thin out, to turn transparent, the glass, the tea growing darker, merging with the darkness all around him, and as he opens his eyes, he sees a square of black sky, the spilled sugar of stars, naked branches moving above him, stirring the air like spoons in a cup, the round coin of the moon, the kind one needs to make a call from a booth, unless the telephone’s broken, and the snow, and the yard—and he sits up with a moaning, frightened whisper, “Oh, no.”

His body aches, and his hand comes away wet from his face. His nose is quite possibly broken, and maybe a rib or two. His fear abates a little; he feels too sore to be dead. There is an old man crouching before him, but he is not Viktor Pyetrovich. Alexander frowns at him, then recognizes the uncombed beard, the grieving eyes, the ancient man from the line.

“I thought you were arrested,” he says, and tries to stand up, and sits back down.

“So I was,” says the ancient man kindly. “Not the first time, nor the last, I reckon. They can never hold me for long.”

“Am I dead?” Alexander asks, just in case.

“Nothing wrong with you except a few scratches,” the man replies. “They ran away when I came upon them. Your friend’s badly hurt, though. A knife wound. Help should be here soon.”

And only now Alexander notices the man, his friend, Nikolai, lying on the snow, and he manages to pull himself together, and crawl toward him, and touch his forehead, which feels clammy, cold; and there is the knife, his old knife, which he picks up and holds for a moment, its familiar weight in his hand, then tosses it away into a snowdrift; and the snow around him, he sees, is red, bright red, a vivid, beautiful red, the color of fire, the color of a sunrise over the eastern sea. Other men appear then, and help Alexander up, and take Nikolai away, and Alexander comes with them, his head is humming, he too must be checked out, he can ride with the stretcher, they tell him. The ambulance is waiting on the corner, and as he limps toward it, he remembers something, and feels the back pocket of his pants. It is as he expected.

When they drive along the familiar street, he looks out through a small, dim window in the back door.

The kiosk is boarded shut, the pavement empty.