Maria doesn’t know what to do with her hands. She places them to her face, to her forehead, then takes them away. Hearing her say his name.
“Thank you. I didn’t want to ask. You have enough worries. Yes. Thank you.”
“Be careful. I mean it.”
“Yes. Of course, yes.”
They leave in separate directions and spend their return journeys looking around them, scrutinizing every face.
Chapter 21
Yevgeni is coming back from rehearsal, and he makes his way home through the yards. Everything here is at a loss, all of it clapped out or cracked or just plain ugly.
The carcasses of car seats, and a one-wheeled cart, and old speakers with their cone-shaped diaphragms dragged out, and mattresses with their springs shot through, and plastic crates, and the only cars are burnt-out shells with no doors or wheels or fittings of any kind, just pure black skeleton.
Everything of local lore happens here. Shooting games and card games, human fights and dog fights.
He doesn’t quite walk through it, more around it, skirting the periphery, sidling alongside its hazards, because he likes to look; there is always something to look at. The days here are not made up of the usual things. No homework or dinner or laundry or shoe polishing or pictures of Lenin. Different rules apply here. You can spit on the pavement, for one. You can put your hand down your pants, for another. There are always guys talking in groups with their belts slung low and a hand down their front, guys with scars and shaved heads. You walk in a slow drawl here, you drag your feet, scuff your sole off the concrete. Yevgeni doesn’t do this. He’s a kid. He doesn’t have the requisite experience to carry it off. Some things he isn’t so clever about, but this is something he knows.
If you look hard and are lucky, there’s the possibility of seeing sex in progress, the actual act. Two kids from his class once saw a couple doing it against the wall, trousers around their ankles. Yevgeni couldn’t understand why they didn’t just take their pants off, but this was another element of the great secret that everybody talked about but no one really understood. But the validity of these claims is not in doubt, because everybody who has passed through—and all those who claim to have passed through—have seen the shrivelled-up condoms lying in the afternoon light, spent balloons, which, if you looked hard enough, or went close enough, had clear jism weighing down their ends, and careful if you inspect one of these with another kid, because the custom is to pick it up and slug the other guy in the face, and there are stories, too, of kids running home with matted hair. And the joke is that you’d never go bald. And the prospect of seeing the act in action, seeing a man and a woman enacting the thing, intrigues Yevgeni, intrigues him and disturbs him in equal measure, because this place has the lure of these kinds of possibilities, but he also knows that if he actually witnessed something like that he’d run home terrified.
He hasn’t come here to see sex. He hasn’t even really come here to see anything. He just wants to be on his own, out of the reach of neighbours and his mother’s spies. He wants to be somewhere where nobody is watching.
The recital is a month away now. He’s been asked to play Prokofiev’s “Tarantella” from Music for Children. A folk dance. A kiddie tune. How cute.
The evening has been explained to him. Yakov Sidorenko will play Prokofiev’s first three piano sonatas. Then Yevgeni follows with the Tarantella. The Tarantella is for spoiled brats whose parents trot them out when they have guests over. Look how well my Leonid or Yasha plays. He’s said this to his aunt Maria, but she’s told him he has no choice. Her boss has decided, and that’s what he needs to do. Yevgeni could tell she felt bad about it, though. Her voice drops off at the end of her sentences when she’s feeling guilty.
Yakov Sidorenko won’t respect him if he just plays some kiddie tune. Yakov Sidorenko knows music. Yevgeni went last year with Maria to see him play a Liszt sonata in Tchaikovsky Hall. Sidorenko tiptoed through the notes, then he leaned back and played as if he were just hanging on, as if the music were a train that would come off its tracks at any moment, until, at the end, he crushed the keyboard, the music curled up into a corner, took its last breaths, and died all around them.
And they want him to play a kiddie tune in front of this man.
There are tables stacked on tables, great pyramids of them, and trolleys with wheels hanging in the air which turn merrily to a gust of wind. There’s grass coming up through the concrete, patches of it all around, and there’s a basketball hoop nailed to a wall through which many things are thrown but never a basketball; bottles and newspaper, cans and rocks, everyone at some point needing to test themselves against the challenge of the circle.
Yevgeni walks and looks and doesn’t stop and tries not to look like he’s looking.
A group of guys in fake leather jackets roast potatoes over a fire in an oil drum. There’s always an oil-drum fire going. Some of the older kids from school are there, the ones who don’t go to class but just walk in laps around the playground, or who smoke in the toilets. There’s one guy, Iakov, who plays in a rock band, so it is said, and he must be sixteen or seventeen, wise to so many things that Yevgeni can’t articulate or even imagine.
The barrel has burn holes in the side, which set free irregular bursts of sparks, but these never cause the guys to flinch. Even when a spark catches their jacket they just nonchalantly sweep it away with an open hand.
Iakov raises his head and spots Yevgeni, who has paused, staring at them, and Iakov slaps his friend on the arm and waves Yevgeni towards them, and Yevgeni puts his head down and keeps walking, even though they’ve probably seen him—of course they’ve seen him—but maybe there’s a chance that they’ll let it pass. Actually entering into the centre of things is not what he intended. He hears a whistle, shrill and piercing, which echoes around the buildings. There’s no way of ignoring it, a whistle means that you’ve been noticed, and don’t even think about running. He can whistle through the gap in his front teeth, a reedy sound, but this one is like the blast of a militia siren, two fingers wedged under the tongue. How they do it is beyond him. All those hours running arpeggios up and down the keyboard and still he can’t make the one sound that really matters. Get Mr. Leibniz to teach him this instead.
He looks up towards Iakov and looks behind him and points to himself—You’re calling me?—a dumb cover, and Yevgeni knows it and Iakov knows it, but he has to do something; he couldn’t just be open about the fact that he’d brazenly ignored him.
The only way to get through this is to show abject deference.
Iakov waves him over again, and they all turn to look, everyone giving a skulking look, a look that growls, and he runs towards them, his arms pumping, constricted by the straps of his schoolbag so that he can only really move his forearms up and down, which he knows makes him look ridiculous but better that than keep them waiting.
Iakov throws an arm around his shoulder and bends him forwards, rubbing his knuckles off Yevgeni’s head.
“This is the kid.”
“Which kid?”
He takes his arm from around Yevgeni’s head and stands him up, displaying him. Yevgeni’s face is by now the colour of the fire, a result of the run and the embarrassment and the jostling, all tinged with the element of dread.
“The gym kid.”
“Gym kid? What gym kid? He does cartwheels on top of moving buses?”
“Little fucking tomato muscles. Big fucking deal. He’s got superpowers or what?”
“Hey, kid, show us a handstand on this barrel.”