In short, everything was going swimmingly. She had more than enough money. She exchanged her small two-room apartment in the back of beyond for a three-room apartment in a stately Stalin-era building in an old Moscow neighborhood. She arranged for Timosha to undergo four surgeries, after which he was as pretty as Marfa had been in childhood, but much smarter. By the time he was six, all the required surgeries had been performed. The surgeons did not rule out the possibility that he might need more cosmetic surgery as an adult, when his face was fully formed. Timosha was a wonderful child—clever, affectionate, with a sound character. His black Asian hair was the only thing he had obviously inherited from his unknown father.
On the surface, everything was good. But Liza longed for another child. To carry, to bring into the world. Ideally, a girl. If there was one thing lacking in her otherwise prosperous and happy life, it was that she had never been married. She did not experience any great social discomfort because of this. She was surrounded by many unmarried, divorced, lonely people; and there were still more who were tormented by family life, constantly complaining about their husbands, former beauties desperately awaiting lovers. It was a commonly known fact that it was easier to chance it and get married when you are nineteen than to solve this problem at thirty, when you already understand the qualities a real partner should have. By that time, all the men who are worth their salt are already married. The only ones who are not taken are dyed-in-the-wool bachelors who are disinclined to family life, or those who have been rejected despite the meager supply of partners.
Liza’s last romance, with a married man who was very compatible with her, fizzled out by itself: they went their separate ways. After that, she got involved with Pasha, a young manager at her company—a biker, and a fan of some kind of otherworldly sport that involved scaling roofs. Liza became pregnant from him. Contrary to expectation, he was delighted. He immediately proposed to her, and in the most traditional form—with a bouquet of flowers and a ring in a red box. Liza was deeply touched, accepted the ring—but didn’t marry him.
The next attempt by fate to unite Liza and Yurik was also very clumsy. Liza was in the final stages of her pregnancy. They met at her travel agency by the Nikitsky Gates, where Yurik had come with Nora to buy a package deal to Croatia or Montenegro. Nora had suddenly been seized by the idea of such a trip, and within fifteen minutes she and her son were stopping by the nearest travel agency.
Liza was sitting at her desk, talking on the telephone. She waved to them and said, holding her hand over the receiver, “I’ll be with you in just a moment.”
A year had passed since their last meeting at the film festival, and this time Yurik recognized her. By her voice—rather low and husky, with a marvelous timbre.
Liza advised them not to buy a package deal. She offered to book them a hotel in Dubrovnik and suggested they buy plane tickets instead. From Dubrovnik they could take a trip to Montenegro for a day or two, by bus. It was cheaper, and they wouldn’t feel so constrained. Nora laughed: “But what about your premium? I don’t quite understand.”
Liza laughed, too, and said, “I don’t always understand myself. But I think you’ll like this option better.”
She drummed on her large belly with her long fingers like a trained hare in a circus, and booked the hotel for Nora.
After that, they didn’t see each other again for two years. Both of them were busy with their own affairs. Liza had a baby—a little girl she had named Olga. Timosha was happy. Liza could never have imagined the brotherly tenderness and delight that Timosha felt for his newborn sister. During Liza’s pregnancy, Pasha helped her a great deal. Now powerful paternal emotions had been awakened in him, and he moved in with her. It was a wonder how a fellow who was fairly unsophisticated, fairly rough around the edges, could be capable of so much tenderness and awe. After a month, when Liza was ready to hire a nanny for the children and go back to work, Pasha implored her to let him beg off work for good and stay home with the children. Timosha and Pasha had already formed a close bond. Liza decided to try it out. When Pasha had left his job and was staying home to take care of the children, Liza spent most of her time in the travel bureau; during her absence, the business had begun to go to rack and ruin. She threw all her energy into picking it up off the ground again.
Pasha, with just as much enthusiasm, threw himself into raising the children. They rented a dacha for the summer, and he took care of the little ones. His mother, who in the beginning had greeted Liza with hostility, gradually melted. Of course, Liza was too old for him—eight years his senior—but when all was said and done, she was without peer.
Pasha had grown up without a father, and family life, as he was now experiencing it, was very much to his liking. He liked Liza, too. None of his biker buddies had ever had such a remarkable woman—beautiful, calm, educated, and practical. Pasha was used to working off his emotions by driving fast and scaling roofs. Though he wasn’t given to strong passions, he valued having a good relationship. In short, everything was as fine as it could be. Liza came to the dacha on Friday evening and stayed until Tuesday morning, sometimes Wednesday. In this way, she managed to keep the business going, and the children were completely happy.
Still, summer was high season for the travel bureau, and Liza couldn’t abandon the office altogether. Whenever she wasn’t there, slips and blunders tended to happen. On a Tuesday in August, Liza was driving out of the entranceway of a residential building next to her office, where she parked her car, when she saw Yurik standing there with two guitars, trying to hitch a ride with a chance passerby. Stopping in this spot, in front of an entranceway on Novy Arbat, was forbidden, and he could have stood there for a long time without having any luck. Liza drove up to him and shouted: “Quick, get in!”
Yurik hopped into the car, and only recognized Liza when he was already sitting next to her. This was fate’s fifth try, if one counted Marfa’s funeral, where it was only by chance that they had not run into each other. But this didn’t occur to Yurik. Liza was the one who counted.
“Where are we going?”
Yurik named the address of a club that was popular among young people.
“Do you have a gig?”
“Something like that. I’m giving a lecture,” he said, smiling. “A lecture series. About the history of jazz. Tonight is the first one. I have no idea how it will turn out.”
“May I stay and listen?”
“Sure. That would be great. I’m not even sure if anyone will show up. So I’ll at least have an audience of one.”
There were about twenty people in the audience. Yurik sat at the head of a long table, assembled out of eight small ones, and asked Liza to sit opposite him. He knew from his experience in music that when you don’t know the public, it’s good to find someone in the crowd to perform for. He began the conversation about jazz like a good teacher showing the first letters to a group of first-graders—giving them a sense of discovery, something happening before their very eyes.
“Today we’re not yet going to talk about jazz, the parts of which came together during the course of twenty or thirty years. We’re going to talk about the musical realities that existed before it, that had always been there, that flowed together and spurred the development of a single huge current that falls under the general moniker ‘jazz.’”
He began to talk and to demonstrate to Liza all kinds of things she had never known before. He played the guitar, and tapped out rhythms on a small drum, and sometimes sang a musical phrase or two. He played the blues, the music of the American slaves, and excused himself for the banality he couldn’t avoid when he told the audience the already classic definition of the blues—“The blues ain’t nothin’ but a good man feelin’ bad,” in the words of Leon Redbone. He played and showed and sang lines in English, then translated them, then sang some more. Then he came to the subject of black gospel music, which had its roots in the singing of praise songs, of the Psalms, and of what came to be known as “spirituals.” After this, he interrupted himself, saying that he had gotten carried away and hadn’t stuck to the plan of his lecture at all, but that he would continue the lecture at exactly this point in a week. In parting, he played the most popular and well-known spiritual in the world, “Go Down, Moses.”