Yevgeni pushes the door open and walks up the steps that wake with a moan and greets a cat patrolling the corridor with a waggle of his finger under its chin. It lingers against his hand, shunting his arm with its head. He opens a door gingerly and steps into a wood-panelled room and sits at its dominant feature, a baby grand that takes over about a third of the floor space and is turned at an angle so that there is room for the door to open fully. Yevgeni looks at it in the sallow light and wonders for the first time—it had never occurred to him before—how the hell they managed to get it in here, the windows and stairwell so incredibly narrow.
He runs his hands over the curved lid, the particular shape of it fitting his hands like no other object he knows. He flips it in half, revealing the tips of the off-white keys, and then flips it again, and somehow the whole lid miraculously slides its way into the body of the instrument. He loves the weight, the balance of the keys, how when you push a white one it bounces again in readiness for reuse, whereas the black ones are plodding and awkward, objecting to being disturbed from their slumber, hammering out strange sharp and flat tones, grumpy and hulking.
There are piles of sheet music on the top and in the secret section under his seat and spilling along the floor and in front of the fireplace and beside the sofa and on the windowsill and radiators. Mr. Leibniz reads music like others read books. Often when Yevgeni comes for his lesson the old man will be stretched out on the couch, his wife in bed, a sheaf of Shostakovich on his chest, and he will hold his finger up in the air to prevent Yevgeni from speaking; Let me get through this one last section, the finger is saying, as if he can’t wait to find out how it will end.
Yevgeni doesn’t have to search for the particular sheet. He locates it instantly. A lime-green cover with a photo of a man who could only be a composer, who looks as if he were born a composer, a great white walrus moustache and a womanly shock of white hair brushed back from his forehead, a bow tie taming his thick neck. He places the sheet on the stand, adjusts his seat, places his right foot on the pedal below and his fingers in the starting position, and brings his ear to the level of his fingers and pushes downwards, letting the vibrations rise from the wooden box and stream through his ear and soak into his body, and he knows he is ready for this, finally, he is equal to the music now, he will no longer buckle under its weight.
He lets the previous night run free through the notes on the page, Grieg’s Nocturne in C Major, the keys containing any hue he wishes to paint, all the richness of the city: the window frames, the darkened signs, the fake leather on the seats of cars that sit abandoned, stunned, on the pavements. He plays the drips that splatter down from cracked drainpipes. He plays the contents of washing-powder packets streaming through the air in white and blue granules. He plays the cards of the poker game, the intensity of the eyes of the looters. He plays Iakov’s kindness and menace. Yevgeni looks beyond the notes and time signatures and tonal suggestions and he realizes that the notation is merely a framework upon which to place all this understanding. All things coming together, his knowledge of music and his knowledge of sound, his experience of life, brief as it is but full, bursting from him, searing out in the energy under his fingernails. He plays his Grieg as the room grows lighter, sunlight drawing itself across the pages, until he hears his name being spoken and turns around and sees Mr. Leibniz, his eyes soft and watery, leaning in the doorway.
“Have you been out all night?”
“Yes.”
“Your mother is looking for you.”
“I know.”
“You should go.”
“I know. I’m sorry I let myself in. I just, I don’t know, missed it. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have woken you.”
Yevgeni stands up to leave. Mr. Leibniz’s wife comes into the room now, gliding past him, floating in her white nightdress, the ends of her hair catching the faint gusts of her movement, her face gleaming, alert. She sits on a chair and leans towards the piano, drawn to it, pointing at Yevgeni to return to his playing.
Mr. Leibniz sits too, takes her hand. “Perhaps once more,” he says.
And Yevgeni plays it again, differently than before, and then again, each time differently, so much to find within the patterns, his hands working separately and together, like the two figures seated near him, in their nightclothes, left and right, their easy compatibility, the freedom that it carries, the stretches of notes that weave themselves into an intricately complicated formation, fusing and separating, together and apart, timeless and in the moment. He could play this forever. He will play this forever. He knows it now. This is what he is meant to do.
April 2011
Chapter 28
Silence.
His fingers float upwards, vibrations still running through them, molecules quivering against each other, the sound dissolving somewhere over the orchestra, funnelling into the microphones that dangle above them.
A thousand people exhale.
Yevgeni opens his eyes.
The keys settle in their binary opposition, black and white, returning to stillness, released from his energy. He turns left, to the first and second violins, the violas, the woodwinds in the background, forward to the cellos and basses, black jackets, white shirts, black dresses, white skin, and nods to all in gratitude, and they raise their instruments in appreciation, and then he turns right to the audience, the glaring lights, the gale of applause, ranks of them holding up their phones to capture this moment.
It’s been several years since he’s played in his native city, but still he is not here with them, at least not immediately. He is on the other side of the Tverskaya, back in his old mentor’s apartment; Mr. Leibniz and his wife listening still.
Some minutes of bowing, alone, then with the conductor, twenty years older than he; a look in the man’s eye: pride, gratitude—a look Yevgeni is familiar with. The conductor’s grey hair is pasted onto the side of his head with sweat, a night of true exhilaration for him; Yevgeni has demanded that the man climbs to the upper levels of his talent. He has had some minutes backstage to gather himself as Yevgeni played solo, but still he is gliding upon the sensation of his accomplishment.
Yevgeni walks from the stage and through a warren of magnolia corridors. Someone hands him a white hand towel, and he wipes the sweat from his fingers, dabs his face, his neck. Technicians and stage managers take his hand as he walks, pat his elbow, his shoulder, as he moves away, until at last he opens the door of his dressing room, and closes it.
Alone. Leaning on the dressing table. Looking in the mirror. The fluorescent light above it buzzing as it gains full strength.
This evening was a lap of honour of sorts, a victory concert. He spent the afternoon in the Kremlin receiving the State Prize for his “services to the Russian state as a virtuoso of the highest order.” Such idiocy. So many layers to his craft that he hasn’t yet discovered. Already, some of the strands of this evening are reaching for his attention, filaments that he needs to fuse together. He knows that later, at dinner, he’ll pick apart the technicalities, the unintentional modulations of tone, replicate finger positions on a table or an armrest. Tomorrow, he’ll need a rehearsal room before his flight back to Paris, enough time to right his wrongs. Otherwise, he’ll be sullen for the following couple of days, he’ll allow the lapses of concentration to colour his whole memory of the performance.
Right now, though, he just wants to savour the feeling. The residue of his childhood lapping along the tips of his fingers, the faint surge of an outbound tide.