The Concert Ticket

1

ONCE ANNA HAD GONE TO BED, Sergei paced the unlit hallway, up and down, up and down, lying in wait for Sasha’s return, determined to speak with him about the ticket. When his vigil began to tire him, he went to the boy’s room, switched on the bleak overhead light. A clock on the desk shifted shadowy hands over an indiscernible face; he had to bend closely to read it. It was just past two; Sasha was running later than usual. He waited a little longer, then turned off the lamp, lowered himself heavily onto his son’s bed, and closed his eyes briefly, opening them minutes later to a stretched sheet of graying light—a window, he realized in another moment, a predawn window in his son’s room, to which his son still had not returned.

He rose. His back was sore. Crows were rending the air apart with hoarse cries. The clock, brighter now, as if time during the day were different in color from time at night, announced seven-thirty in the morning. He looked at it in consternation, with an undercurrent of worry, then sat in the chair, drummed his fingers against the edge of the desk. A thin stack of pages was lying on its surface, covered with Sasha’s sloppy handwriting—some lecture notes, no doubt, he thought absently as he let his eyes drift over the words.

Startled, Sergei hesitated for a moment, then flipped to the beginning, read the opening lines.

His hands unsteady now, he riffled through the stack, a sentence here, a paragraph there, then shoved the pages away, and for a long, long time sat staring into space, at the city rising from the murkiness outside the window like a photograph in the process of being developed, morning lifting it by its corner with a pair of gigantic pincers, shaking the shadows off. And as the light slowly ripened in the sky, there welled inside him a tightness, a knot, and he thought, here, in this city, which he once, not long ago, believed so entirely devoid of surprises, on the city’s dim outskirts, where centuries before wolves had roamed through snowed-in villages and where now grim apartment buildings grew along meandering, ill-lit streets, in an apartment in one of these buildings, in the three rooms of the apartment, three people lived alongside him, had lived alongside him for decades—his wife, his son, and his mother-in-law, whom he once, not long ago, believed he knew so well he was bored by them—and yet he now felt a terrible, heartbreaking certainty that he had somehow missed them completely, overlooked something vital about them, and by doing so, wasted years of possible happiness.

The slamming of the front door, when it sounded at last, untied the knot at once, and he wept, a silent, dry, relieved weeping. He heard Alexander’s shoes drop onto the floor, heard Anna’s voice clucking along the corridor; she had probably been up most of the night herself, listening to every noise, waiting.

He ran his hand over his face; it was not wet. He walked out of the room.

Alexander stood without moving on the doormat.

An unfamiliar youth briefly met his eyes in the mirror—a jacket with its pockets torn out, a crumpled face, black in places, with a thick bandage on the bridge of his nose and an ugly cut clotted on his left cheek, and something dark, something vast, in his gaze… Alexander turned away hastily, facing his parents instead, his father in a wrinkled shirt and a pair of pants that he appeared to have slept in, his mother, whose eyelids were swollen with recent fear. He heard her gasp as she came closer. He cleared his throat.

“The tickets went on sale last night,” he said.

Another door thrust into the hallway, and he was blinded by the solid rectangle of sunlight that fell crashing onto the floor. It was, he realized, a bright morning outside; he had not noticed.

“Oh, my dear,” his grandmother said, “what…”

Her words wandered off into silence.

“The tickets went on sale last night,” he repeated.

He was not sure how to say the rest.

His mother began to speak then, quickly, quickly; he was reminded of the woman in Viktor Pyetrovich’s apartment, the one with the eyes like dark holes torn by someone’s thumb in the white sheet of her face, and his thoughts swam anxiously, and only after some minutes did he realize what his mother was saying in her rushed, panicked voice. The ticket is yours, Sashenka, do you hear, we’ve all decided, it’s the best thing, you deserve it after all the time you’ve spent helping us, your grandmother no longer wants to go, and your father and I, we talked it over and we thought, such a unique event, you’ll tell your grandchildren someday—

He filled his lungs with air, then let it out.

“I lost our place,” he said.

All was still. He could see minute particles of dust swarming in the rectangle of light, obeying some radiant, airborne laws, shimmering constellations forming and dissolving, small and orderly planetary systems floating around brighter suns of larger dust motes, then dancing away along invisible orbits of their own; and he thought, None of this matters, everything is pointless and random. Then, abruptly, the light dimmed—the sun must have been swallowed by a cloud—and as the dust vanished, there emerged once again the shadowy hallway, and the mirror, and in it, the youth with something new, something pained, in his eyes, in his broken face; and Alexander knew that it was not true, that things mattered to him quite a bit after all. He looked at his family crowding in the corridor around him, found all three of them looking back at him—and, since the silence continued, realized he must have only imagined saying the words aloud, and tried again.

“I lost our place in the line,” he said.

Their suspended expressions did not change. They must have heard him already.

“What happened to you, Sasha?” his mother asked.

“Someone was sick, I had to get him home, that’s when the tickets—”

“No, what happened to you?”

“Oh, that. I was mugged on the way back. They took me to a clinic. I’m all right, honest. My nose may look a bit different.” He added after a short pause, “Sorry about the ticket.”

She breathed out audibly, then stepped toward him, as if finally granted permission; in the brown gold of the mirror’s depths, he glimpsed her—made somehow unfamiliar, younger and brighter, by worry—touch a hesitant hand to the bruised cheek of that unfamiliar, older and darker, youth.

His father moved forward too, bent to extract his shoes from behind an umbrella stand. “I think,” he said, crouching to untie the shoelaces, “I’ll go over to the kiosk, just to check.”

The hallway flashed and vanished in a dusty haze; the sun had come out again.

“Let’s all go,” said his grandmother briskly. “I daresay I could use a walk.”

Some minutes later, they squeezed into the elevator—bulky coats, scarves, elbows, smells of winter soaked into collars and shoes, along with some light, flowery scent Alexander found surprising. The elevator groaned with the unaccustomed weight, dipped, then stalled for an instant between floors. His mother laughed unexpectedly. “Do you realize,” she said, “this is the first time in something like a year, since we began with the line, I mean, that all four of us have been together… Imagine getting stuck right now.”

They landed with a heavy thud. She laughed again.

Outside, the pavements were slippery, searingly white in the sun; his grandmother held on to his elbow with a hand as small and hard as a bird’s claw. The old woman was wearing a peculiar little hat with a moth-eaten feather bobbing in its velvet band, and a pair of funny sharp-edged boots with pencil-thin heels; the feather tickled his chin. It baffled him that no one seemed concerned about the ticket; indeed, his mother appeared almost giddy now, and his father’s eyes ran away from his own with a limping, oddly apologetic gait. When his parents walked on ahead talking, he felt a strange certainty that they were not discussing the concert.

He glanced at his grandmother, coughed uneasily.

“About your earrings,” he said. “I sold them, for lots of money, but the money was in my pocket, and those men—I guess it was a bad night all around, I’m really, really—”

“What did you get for them, anyway?” she interrupted. “Ah. Well. You’ve been had twice, my dear, they’re worth ten times that. A pity. I have to say, our nighttime streets are in a shocking state. But perhaps it’s for the best—easy come, easy go… Is the snow always this color? I remember it differently. And what, pray, did they do to that church?”

There were more people in the street now, groups of them hastening in the same direction, some silent, others burbling with agitation. Alexander saw familiar faces from the line, and found himself walking faster. A block away, the crowd grew denser still, spilling off the sidewalks into the road; an automobile was fuming on a corner, unable to squeeze through, its driver vainly leaning on the horn. As they circumvented the heaving car, he thought he spotted a darkhaired boy weaving through the throng on the other side of the street, and pulled on his father’s sleeve. “Go ahead without me,” he said. “I’ll catch up.”

The boy was crossing the street now, trudging toward him; Alexander had already seen a stack of books in his hands.

“Aren’t you cold without a hat?” he called out.

“No,” the boy said, stopping. “Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve been looking for you all morning. I brought you these, I know you liked them.”

“So then, which hospital is Viktor Pyetrovich in?” Alexander asked, hurriedly, loudly, as he freed the books from the boy’s hands. “Is he allowed visitors today? I’ll come by later, I have something to tell him, he shouldn’t worry, everything will be fine, maybe the tickets haven’t sold out yet, and, see, I have my own ticket now, which I don’t need, I’m not really into music all that much, so your grandpa can have it, he can go to the concert, do you understand”—but as he talked, the boy stood quite still, and, looking at his painfully reddened ears, at his coat buttoned wrong, at the boy’s eyes that appeared almost white in the glaring sun, sliding past his bruises and cuts without expression, Alexander felt himself letting go of his bright words, one after another, little exhalations of sounds leaking out, until he was silent at last.

“Grandfather had another heart attack last night,” the boy said. “In the stairwell on the way to the hospital. Our elevator’s broken. He died just before dawn.”

“I—I didn’t know,” Alexander said. But of course he knew, had known from the moment he had seen the boy walking unsteadily through the crowd with the precious volumes clutched in his bare hands, their spines crumbling with gilded leathery dust over his numbed fingers. He knew too that he should drop the books, and put his hands on the child’s shoulders, and tell him what he himself so wanted to believe, that Viktor Pyetrovich had left a sad, colorless place and gone to a place full of color, full of wonder, where he had only to arrest the world in its motley rotation by a finger planted on the convexity of a globe to be instantly transported to wherever his heart desired—ancient streets braiding hills into high-walled, fruit-scented towns, narrow boats gliding under white misty bridges, the shrill crying of peacocks in secret gardens at sunrise, chilled stars over desert temples, fierce, bright-eyed beasts prowling through vine-entwined jungles—all the places, all the things, all the adventures that did not exist here, in this life, in this place… But the boy’s gaze was clear and old, and the terrible, white, sunny silence continued, and people pushed past them, swearing, slipping on ice, and the automobile driver kept blaring his horn—and suddenly Alexander was unsure whether that would have been the afterlife Viktor Pyetrovich would have chosen—whether he would not have preferred to sit in his small kitchen instead, with his wife, who must have died long before, with his son, returned safe and well, with his grandson, his many grandchildren who could have been born and were not, drinking tea from their familial silver glass holders, talking about the apple harvest, the rain last night, the symphony of their famous relative on the radio, and the mirage of the heavenly city would sway beyond the curtains, its rooflines soft and peaceful, woven out of clouds, and they would have all the time in the world, the whole of eternity, his, theirs, always—

“I never asked, what’s your name?” he said.

“Igor,” said the boy. “And you’re Alexander. Grandfather talked about you all the time.”

The world rushed past them, dazzling and cold.

“Good-bye,” the boy said, still without moving.

“I’ll see you around,” said Alexander, and, wrapping the books in the fold of his jacket, let the stream of passersby carry him off.

At the kiosk, all was confusion. People were wandering around in hesitating little herds; a man was spitting out curses; a well-dressed woman sobbed, gathering her dissolved face into an elegant glove. Alexander found his family.

“So, it seems,” his father said flatly, “the tickets that went on sale last night weren’t the Selinsky tickets at all. They were for the Little Fir Trees show. Their kiosk burned down or something, I guess… And the Selinsky concert has been canceled. No tickets. Look, even the sign’s gone.”

Indeed, the CONCERT TICKETS sign, which for months had been baked by sun and washed by rain, was no longer nailed to the front of the kiosk. A new notice was posted in the window. A grim, mute crowd had gathered before it. Alexander came closer.

CONCERT CANCELED, read the fat block letters. KIOSK CLOSED FOR RESTOCKING. WILL REOPEN ON MONDAY.

It was astonishing how deeply he felt about so many things—unfamiliar, slow, wordless feelings that made him heavy and aching and full, almost as if he sensed, for the first time in his life, the presence of something real inside him, a soul perhaps—and yet how little he felt about this ticket, this ticket that no one he loved appeared to need after all.

Shoulder to shoulder with the others, Alexander stood and looked at the sign in the shuttered window.

By mid-morning, the day had turned brittle; clouds sliced through the pale sky like shards of ice, leaving white tears in the blue, and the waving black branches of naked trees swept the sky clean. Anna had taken her mother along on a shopping errand; Sergei and Alexander walked toward home together. They took their time, rambling aimlessly through the streets, pausing to dig out an icy bench from under a snowdrift, revealing in the process a few sparkling slashes of graffiti (“Oh, look,” Sergei said, “you have a namesake who likes to vandalize benches”), then sitting in the park until their faces grew numb and their fingers cold and stiff.

The park was deserted, but filled with the frozen breaths of recent passersby, filled too with the transparent gliding of its resident ghosts—an old man feeding pigeons, his spectacles blazing in the sun; a beautiful woman, no longer young, her face smeared with tears, peeling off her torn stockings; a man huddled over a mute tuba, listening to the music soaring in his head; a boy lying on his back in the sickly grass, staring up at the sky, imagining ships and caravans gliding across it… Sergei and Alexander were silent at first, then, slowly, began to talk—of light, irrelevant matters, it seemed; Alexander was explaining how much he liked winter because he never had to guess what any of the colors were. Gradually, though, they talked of other things; or did not talk so much as allude to them, passing them by quickly, as if having tacitly agreed that there would be time, time enough to discuss everything later, that the only thing needed now was a silent, forgiving acknowledgment of a few facts—such as the fact that Alexander had never tried for the university after all, or that one of his two best friends had died the night before and the other had been so badly wounded he might not recover, or that both his father and his mother had been fired months earlier—or that all of them had not been entirely honest when it came to the concert ticket.

And as they talked, Sergei nodded gravely, breathing on his fingers, and thought that they had arrived at the end of this strange, long year with seemingly nothing to show for it, with, if anything, things lost, things both tangible and intangible—money, jobs, friends, unrealized loves, alternative futures closed off forever—and yet he felt his world to be so much larger now, and, too, felt so much larger himself, as though in the course of this year of hoping, of waiting, this year of doing nothing, he had, without noticing, stepped across an invisible line and been taken apart, piece by piece, then put together again; but the order of the pieces was subtly different, or else they fit together in a different, looser way, with spaces left between them for air, or light, or music, or perhaps something else altogether, something ineffable that made him feel more alive.

When, an hour or two later, they entered the apartment, they found the women already home. The kitchen was full of smoke and banging; their frozen faces began to sting in the heat.

“What’s all the commotion?” Sergei asked.

“Oh, Mama has remembered some old recipes,” Anna said, dashing from the stove to the table. “I thought I’d try them out.”

“No chestnuts, though,” the old woman said wistfully.

“Chestnuts, grandmother?”

“It’s a long story, my dear. I’ll tell you tonight if you like.”

On the table were pots and pans and a tub of flour and a sack of dried fruits of an unfamiliar kind and something wrapped in foil and a pair of candlesticks Sergei had not seen before; and as he stood gazing at all the abundance, he felt an odd, sweet, powdery tingling in his nose, at the roof of his mouth. “When I was a child,” he said, “my mother used to put up these big glass ornaments around the house during the holiday season. There were some red ones, I think, and also blue ones. They reflected candlelight beautifully.”

“Well, maybe we too could get some,” Anna said. “Now, could everyone please leave, I need the space. Oh, and Serezha, bring over the radio, would you?”

After she was left alone, she stood still for a long minute, inhaling the delightful scent of cinnamon. It was a bit like sliding down a hill on a sled, which she suddenly remembered doing as a little girl—faster, faster, a marvelous sensation of freedom ripping through her hair, through her chest, the snow winking in the air like tiny crystals of pure light. The radio announcer crisply informed the city that it was now two o’clock in the afternoon; then music began to play. At once aware of the time—Two already, and I have so much to do—Anna flew about the kitchen, mixing, and stirring, and sifting, and the music burbled along, quiet and light as a stream, until she found herself listening, singing a little under her breath as she worked.

2

HE ENTERED THE CITY in the first-class compartment of a luxury train. He liked the smooth efficiency of trains—the compact sparkle of the built-in ashtrays, the even processions of lamps along the ceilings, the soft window shades that kept out the light and the noise, allowing him to fall asleep among dismal eastern plains with bumps of graying villages and stretches of forbidding forests and wake up on a distant horizon dotted with pretty castles on gentle hills, soon to be ushered to a front-row seat in a smoothly choreographed dance of dignified train conductors and baggage handlers with round golden buttons on their starched uniforms, and limousine drivers vying with one another for the honor of delivering him to his hotel—all the easy trappings of civilization, which fit him like a well-tailored tuxedo and which he had rather missed during his year in that barbaric, if curious, country.

His wife would already be waiting for him at their suite. They had agreed to rendezvous in the city of their not-so-distant honeymoon for a pleasant holiday spell. It was drizzling when he arrived. From the limousine window he watched the elaborate shop displays splash onto the wet pavements of the boulevards with shimmering red and golden spills of light, the ornaments of the Christmas season, just over, still arranged in glittering symmetrical designs behind glass—pyramids and roses and garlands made of gilded fir cones and lacquered toy beasts and pink angels whose white wings were lavishly sprinkled with fake sugar.

These trite symbols of a happy childhood bored him.

A fine jeweler’s window attracted his waning attention, and, remembering, he asked his chauffeur to stop for a minute. Inside, he produced from his inner pocket the cheap red matchbox, which he had kept as a souvenir in its own right, a reminder of his fascinating little sojourn in the illicit bowels of that other city, kindly arranged by a local acquaintance who supplied the embassy with musicians. He watched in wry amusement the hesitating eyebrows of the jeweler, then pushed the matchbox open.

The jeweler’s face altered, his eyebrows returned to their places.

“Ah,” he breathed, “magnificent, magnificent! And unmistakable, of course, but let me just check to make sure… Ah yes, here it is, the master’s trademark, see this filigree detail, he alone in this city could—”

“They are from here, then?” he said, surprised and a little disappointed. “I was led to believe they were of Eastern provenance.”

“Oh no, monsieur, they were made here, no doubt about it. If you like, you could visit the place itself, it’s very near. Of course, he passed away two decades ago—a whole generation of secrets and skills vanished, a real tragedy! His son runs the business now.”

“Thank you,” he said, closing the matchbox.

He gave the new address to the chauffeur. The second shop was even more splendid than the first. A respectful clerk asked him to wait and disappeared into the opulent velvet depths, emerging a moment later with the elderly proprietor. The man allowed himself a few well-contained raptures. “Ah yes, I remember these well, he made only seven pairs,” he gushed softly. “See the hint of the lyre shape, so unique, so enchanting? Where did you happen upon these, monsieur, if I may be so bold as to… Oh, is that so? How interesting. Yes, I daresay my father’s creations were always popular among their nobility. In fact, one of these pairs was sold to a celebrated composer from over there—Igor Selinsky, one of my father’s most loyal customers, you’ve heard of him, perhaps—”

“Indeed,” he said politely.

He declined an offer to take a look around the shop, thanked the proprietor, and left. Back in the shadows of the limousine, he mused about the mysterious paths traveled by objects and men, the invisible threads linking lives over and over. He knew, of course, that the earrings could not have been the Selinsky pair—some destitute countess’s most likely, as that fool of a boy had told him—but the tentative connection struck him all the same. Stretched out on the plush backseat, absently watching the brightly lit boulevards give way to the soft, exclusive darkness of quieter streets in the fashionable embassy district, he thought about the Selinsky performance he had attended many decades ago, and the odd, tearful, raw feeling that would not release him for some time after, as if he, an established young diplomat with brilliant prospects ahead of him, had gotten something wrong, had missed something important—

Even now, the recollection struck him as uncomfortable, and ever so slightly he prodded his thoughts along. In the smoothly gliding glow of the holiday illumination, he imagined his third wife, younger by twenty-three years, shrieking with excitement as she turned her head this way and that, gazing at her dazzling reflection in the mirror. He imagined telling her that the earrings were two, no, three hundred years old, estate jewels held by the illustrious Selinsky family for many generations and worn in turn by both wives of the genius—or no, better yet, by some dark and secret passion of his life—and smiled at last, and asked the chauffeur to hurry.

Afterward, they would go out to a nice dinner, of course.

He had not had any decent champagne in a while.