“She’s always been proud of her hair. There are so many evenings I would come home to her hunched over the bath wearing one of my vests, pouring beer over her head or cracking an egg on it. Always these strange-smelling potions over the sink, oddly shaped bottles. She used to have such lovely, dark, healthy hair. She’d love it when I would run my fingers through it. It would lighten her mood instantly.”
Mr. Leibniz takes a step back and bounces her hair in his hands and looks critically at his work, then to Maria.
“What do you think?”
“I think I should get you to cut my hair.”
“I’m a butcher. But I try my best. Wait till it dries out—you won’t be inviting me anywhere near your head then.”
“You’re being modest, you’re not just cutting and slashing. I can see you have experience.”
“I had four younger sisters. I learned to cut hair quickly. And also the war. When I was in recovery in the military hospital I became an unofficial hairdresser to the nurses. They were all preoccupied with looking good. They see all that blood, they want a haircut. It was their way of escape.”
“I’m sure you capitalized on your vital role.”
He points the scissors at her in delight.
“I was ruthless.”
Mr. Leibniz brushes the hair from his wife’s shoulders, then unties the cloth around her neck. He goes to the kitchen to fetch a sweeping brush, and Maria looks at the woman and feels an impulse to wave a finger in front of her face, to see if her eyes will follow, a small test of how responsive she is, but of course she suppresses this, keeps her hands folded together on her lap.
When he’s finished sweeping he asks Maria if she’d like anything, a drink maybe, and she declines and he brings the dustpan and brush back into the kitchen. Maria can hear a rustling at the bin and a trickle from the sink as he washes his hands, and when he comes back he takes a towel from a cupboard and dries his wife, dropping the towel over her head and mussing her hair, and she doesn’t object, remains totally still, and he drapes the towel over her shoulders to catch any remaining drops and runs a brush through the strands, smoothing the hair back with his free hand, and after that’s done he sits on the divan beside Maria, and they both look at her sitting there, glowing like a spring morning, and Maria shares his sense of satisfaction, even though she’s done nothing to earn it.
“How long has she been like this?”
“It’s hard to say really. It’s been two or three years since we’ve had a completely rational conversation. It sneaked up gradually.”
He pauses to see if she is just asking the question to be polite, but he can tell by her attentiveness that she’s interested, and so he continues.
“Katya was always busy—needlework or visits to elderly neighbours—she was always interested in things going on in the outside world. She was the one who kept us informed. I’ve only ever really cared about music, some literature maybe. She clipped things out of newspapers, old photographs and suchlike, and kept them in a scrapbook. Every few months she’d take out an old scrapbook from a previous year and look through it. I think it was her way of marking time.”
Maria nods.
“Anyway, one day I looked in one of her most recent books, and the first few pages had neatly clipped articles, carefully spaced out, and then as the pages went on it was a paragraph or two, chopped off with ragged edges, and as the pages moved on they had less and less coherence, until at the end there were only blocks of colour or text, plastered on top of one another, like a collage.”
He looks out of the window.
“All her forgetfulness and unfinished sentences were probably what led me to take down the book in the first place, but it wasn’t till I looked at the pages that I put it all together.”
“Did you ask her about it?”
“Yes. She was as shocked as I. She couldn’t remember sticking them in. That was almost four years ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No. It’s not so bad. She has times where she’s lucid, and I’m grateful for them, and there’s often a strange pleasure when she experiences the past. She looks at me sometimes like she did when we first met—the awe of first love. It has many unexpected blessings.”
“Alina said she was a teacher.”
“Yes. They let her keep her job when I was arrested. Her father was part of the nomenklatura. She cut off all contact with him, but he obviously couldn’t bring himself to let her starve or have her taken.”
He has an angled nose, broken at some point, a shoulder that drops away, disproportionate to the other. But he sits with beautiful poise, direct and upright, despite the natural inclination of his body. His voice has an unusual richness to it, a honeyed rasp.
Maria is tempted to ask him more, but she’s here for a reason. She shifts position.
“Zhenya.”
“Yes.”
“What’s the problem?”
“There’s not an easy answer to that. I don’t presume to know the child, I just teach him piano.”
“He says he’s not happy with having to play the tarantella. He says he doesn’t want to play Music for Children, he thinks it’s patronizing.”
“It’s a very proud child you have there, a very stubborn child.”
“Try living with him. Does he want to choose another piece?”
“He’s nine years old. He doesn’t have the first idea what he wants.”
A raise of her eyebrows, a downturn of her mouth.
“My manager is very set upon the selection. I’m not sure we could get permission to change it regardless. He likes the image. In his mind, I think, even if Zhenya isn’t all we say he is, he doesn’t lose too much face. Prokofiev wrote it for children, it’s not supposed to be perfect—this is his attitude, or at least that’s what I imagine it to be.”
“It sounds as though you don’t have full confidence in the child either.”
She shrugs, no need for pretence; this man has done some serious living.
“I feel as though I’ve placed him in a difficult situation against his will. But I know you think we smother him.”
“I think a musician plays because they need to play. They don’t whine because the lighting is bad or the room is too cold or they’re not ready. A natural musician attacks the keyboard, tames it. They’re willing to fight, no matter the circumstance.”
Mr. Leibniz’s tone changes, a more formal diction. Maria feels like a student herself.
“So his sense of timing?”
“His sense of timing, nothing. He practises what, four days a week, a few hours each time. This is completely ridiculous. He still believes he can just think the music into being. He hasn’t spent enough time immersed in the notes, he doesn’t know how to read the flow of a piece. His instincts are fine. The boy has incredible natural musicality. But music is a demanding mistress. It requires total commitment. He has to understand it before he can charm it or beat it into submission.”
“He’s only nine years old. It’s a little too young for a death sentence.”
“You know what Prokofiev was doing at Zhenya’s age?”
“I don’t think I want to.”
“Writing operas, that’s what. And the boy complains because he has to play a piece with a prissy name.”
“Do you think he’ll make an impression on Sidorenko? Tell me honestly.”
“It depends on Sidorenko. Most of the graduates of the Conservatory come out with incredible technique and very little appreciation for natural musicality. They play like our footballers, all coaching and drills and tactics, very little individual skill. Zhenya is blessed with a musical language that’s all his own, but right now he’s too caught up in right and wrong, in technicalities. But you can’t learn what the boy has. Maybe Sidorenko understands enough about music to recognize this. On the other hand, maybe he doesn’t know how to listen.”