He would call to her late at night, and she would open her door naked, cradling a cat that covered her breasts, a habit she’d developed after searching the building for it one too many times. After their lovemaking Yevgeni would lie awake and watch the ceiling fan, listen to the endless repetition of it cutting the air. He felt at ease with her, felt a possibility stir within him, but they didn’t spend enough daytime hours together for either of them to confirm their instincts. At moments like this, she still makes him wonder.
“Find another musician,” Maria tells him. “A cellist maybe, even a dancer, someone who understands.” But he never has.
SUCH RISKS SHE TOOK. Maria can barely grasp the scale of them in retrospect. Gambling with the boy’s future, with his safety. Alina’s too. At the very least he would have been prevented from setting foot in the Conservatory. She would have denied him doing the very thing that defines him. And for what? The Wall came down less than three years later, the Union was officially dissolved two years after that. Everyone got their freedoms and used them to elbow each other out of the way for whatever slice of the country they could get. Screwing each other as much as possible as quickly as possible.
Even her colleagues in the factory had no interest in communal action, in collective autonomy—all those phrases that had seemed so potent to her then—they just wanted more than they already had.
Despite all her worries, Yevgeni’s presence turned out to be irrelevant. When the power went out, they guided Sidorenko and the ministerial consort to a guarded room while Zinaida Volkova stood on the stage, proposed a strike, and read out their demands by torchlight to cheers and stamping of feet. The euphoria lasted until word went around that there was a citywide blackout. By the time the emergency generators kicked in, the stripping of the factory was well under way. They took anything that could be ripped out without mechanical aid. Even the supplies of water Danil had secretly stocked disappeared. The strike organizers fled, opting to stay anonymous. Who could blame them? Sidorenko, the minister, and management went home, and a couple of weeks later many of Maria’s colleagues were back in the plant, carrying out essential maintenance work.
Production was back up and running within a couple of months. The only gains the workers had made were the piles of scrap metal sitting in their baths and galvanized sheds.
Gambling her family on people who never believed in anything.
What lingers from that night is shame. It still has such a grip on her that she’s never been able to tell either of them what they avoided. Who did she think she was, playing God with their lives?
She never went back to the place. While work was suspended, Pavel managed to make enough space in his department to place her in a full-time tutoring position, and she’s stayed there ever since. The Lomonosov became her refuge through the new regimes. After the Union disbanded, it was probably the only institution in the city unaffected by the frantic tussle for wealth. Students still carried books, fell in love, turned in late papers, clustered together in the library. Her role, since then, has been in service to them, provoking them, encouraging them. The place has been good to her, perhaps too good. She got comfortable there, while the country needed good journalists—still needs them, now as much as ever.
But something has changed in her in the past few months, a surge of promise. Lately, she finds herself waking in the morning, placing her feet on the bedroom carpet. Curious. Captivated. Ready to soak in the coming hours. All her responsibilities have been played out. She is ready, finally, to live for herself.
The feeling has surprised her, delighted her. The result, she suspects, of something Yevgeni said on his last visit. She was setting a fire in the grate, and he remarked how Moscow didn’t seem like home anymore. He listed his grievances: the coarseness of the town, the flaunting of wealth, the teenage girls taking photographs of each other draped over the bonnets of sports cars, the muscle-bloated men wearing T-shirts plastered with cheesy American slogans, the neon-fringed boutiques selling leather dominatrix wear.
“But then again,” he said, “this has never been our city. It has always belonged to other people.”
She put a match to the fire lighter, kneeling close until the kindling began to smoke, then dusted down her jeans, gazed into the hesitant flames.
She paused and looked, taking in the crackle and spit of the young fire.
It was true. She had always been a stranger here. So much energy spent on staying as anonymous as possible.
“You’re right, it never has. Half my life I’ve been talking about leaving it.”
“You don’t owe it anything,” he told her. “Come to Paris. You always talk about how much you love it there.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m too old to move.”
“You’re too old to stay. Haven’t they told you? Anyone under twenty-five isn’t welcome. Any time I come back, I feel obliged to get my tongue pierced, just to fit in.”
“Well, maybe I’ll do that instead.” She laughed.
What he said has stayed with her though, awakened her to new possibilities, to change.
YEVGENI SHOWERS and takes his suit from the rail, puts on his underwear and trousers, and slides the plastic sleeve from the dry cleaner’s off his shirt, inspecting it for creases, still his mother’s child.
He sees her so rarely now. She got married again, ten years ago, to Arkady, an engineer who runs a building-supplies company in Odessa, a cousin of one of the women in the laundry where she used to work. When Yevgeni visits they run out of conversation after the first ten minutes. There are no common aspects to their lives, and they have never been able to speak about the past. So they fill the pauses with trivialities, they argue about politics, pass on any news about old neighbours. Maybe if they were on new ground it would be different, but his mother doesn’t like to travel, she’s reluctant to shed her old suspicions of the West. She’s never visited his adopted home in the fifteen years he’s been there.
At first he was resistant to accepting the State Prize. Standing in the Kremlin, in the seat of power, shaking the president’s hand in front of the assembled photographers, was, to Yevgeni, a tacit endorsement of the current regime. But then, he asked himself, what did it matter? No one ever voted according to the preferences of a pianist.
He took the award for his mother’s sake. A repayment of sorts, a way to thank her for all she had done for him. When the ceremony was finished, he handed her the medal in its box and insisted she take it, and she did so, her eyes filling with gratitude, and he was glad he had come here, glad he hadn’t been too proud to let her have this day.
Maria didn’t attend though, for which, no doubt, his mother would castigate her. But he was more than a little proud of her. Uncompromising to the end.
He’d like to show his mother how he lives now, the things he sees. The beauty, the awe, of his adopted city. He’d like to take her to the Sunday bird market on the Île de la Cité. She would enjoy listening to the red-faced men bellowing out their enticements, cajoling people as if they were trying to off-load used cars, instead of budgies and finches. They could wander around the corner to Notre Dame, she could stand in that building of overwhelming scale, or wander around the museums. Perhaps being exposed to centuries of great art would stir something in her, let her understand him better. She’s proud of his success but doesn’t have any feel for the music. The music, as she likes to say, is not for her. He’s seen her asleep too often at recitals to offer her tickets anymore.