Arkady, who had been lying in his customary position across the sofa for the past thirty minutes, now raised the long index finger of his left hand and pushed up the peak of his cap.
“Everything is bullshit today, Henry. Everything.”
“Surely everything is bullshit every day. This is Russia. This is life. What else do you expect?” Henry laid an errant disk gently in the case that he had at last located. “I’m afraid we’re all just waiting for the next big idea, society-wise. Sorry I can’t hurry it up for you.”
They spoke in English—Arkady was almost fluent these days, though his accent was inflected not only with the intonations of his native tongue but with his native disposition. “Everything I see or hear—full of bullshit. Every person I meet—full of bullshit. Every place I go—full of bullshit.” He let his head loll back on the ridge of the sofa’s arm so that he was addressing the ceiling. Or a much discredited eavesdropper. “Every minute, more bullshit.”
“It could be worse,” Henry said softly.
“Yes. We could be fucking goats on the TV to get famous.” Arkady pulled the English-language newspaper over his head. “Perhaps I will donate my balls to the war on terror.”
Henry considered the top of the piano, where a foolscap-sized flier advertising the evening’s concert had been placed carelessly over an untidy pile of sheet music. He picked it up, noticing again that all the scores beneath were perfectly clean—his flatmate never marked a single note for fingering. Arkady stared out from the color publicity picture. Large-handed, cragged, inscrutable: sunken and steady eyes, hollow cheeks (forever unshaven in light shades of brown that looked almost gray), unruly blond hair that straggled out from beneath the ubiquitous cap and over his collar—and all without the usual compensating vulnerability in the mouth or that carefully oblique invitation to would-be admirers in the artist’s brow. Not so much defiant as distant. Unconnected. Arkady Alexandrovitch was neither handsome nor plain, so Henry often thought, but like some feature of the landscape for which such fastidious descriptions were beside the point. A face that it was as pointless to oppose as it was to champion or implore. The face of a rag-and-bone man or a prophet-king returned in disguise.
Henry looked up. “I cannot believe you mean what you say, Arkasha.” He sometimes used the customary Russian nickname for Arkady, though he was careful never to say it with any hint of saccharinity. “Otherwise, why would you practice ten hours a day? But… well, even if everything is bullshit, I am afraid that the great dictatorship of the here and now continues. And as outraged and ill-equipped as we are, humanity is nonetheless commanded to get on with it. We have no other choice.” Henry glanced toward where his friend lay. “What time are you supposed to be there tonight?”
“I feel like a Swedish wankpit.”
“Around seven?”
“And it’s going to rain again.”
“What time are you supposed to be there tonight?”
“Half past ten.”
“I’ll walk with you—if you are going to walk.”
Arkady batted off the newspaper and placed his cap firmly over his face.
Henry smiled his anemic smile again and wandered over to the window to take stock of the weather: immediately to the left, the other tower blocks; below, street squalor, gray decay, refuse; to the right, acid-rain-stained concrete and a tall crane, like some oddly skeletal single finger; directly ahead, rusted docks that had never taken themselves seriously; disrepair and dilapidation on all sides, and yet none of it detained the eye for more than a moment—because spread across the wide horizon beyond was the sea, light-spangled and sapphire-glorious in the still commanding sun. And now—just now—the beauty was truly extraordinary: the sea, angle-lit from the south and here-and-there sparkling, was nonetheless shading darker and darker, slate to a bluish black, as that resolute line of bruised purple clouds low-scudded in from the west. The island of Kronstadt and the dam had already vanished, and in a few minutes those clouds would obscure the sun altogether.
It happened like this. Though son and mother never did see or speak to each other again, Henry found himself acting for Arkady while Zoya continued to work for Maria Glover. Perhaps some sense of a secular mission prompted Henry to intervene. Or perhaps it was some new and bold reckoning in his dispute with the God from whom he could not quite flee. Either way, the deal had been struck.
Many an intention had blurred since then, but even at the time, more than two years ago, Henry had chosen not to examine his motives too closely—were not most human interactions thus shaded? Just the same, were he capable of being honest with himself on the subject, Henry had sensed then (as he sensed still) that desire was down there, lurking and smirking among the innocents, if ever he had mind enough to look. And yet he could not face bearing his torch so deep, for fear of discovering who or what held sway in these darkest crypts. Besides which, when he was in his lighter mood, such thoughts seemed like huge misapprehensions, echoes of a daydream from a time long ago, before he canceled himself out, before he shut down his sex drive and opened up his veins.
In any case, theirs began as a straightforward friendship. Henry had been out with a group of mainly English expatriates at one of Arkady’s Magizdat gigs at the JFC Jazz Club. A veteran of a thousand classical concerts and five times as many recordings, he had thought that he recognized something exceptional in the Russian’s playing. Later, Arkady had joined the table—there was talk of gigs in Vilnius and Tallinn—and Henry had translated. Though it was no business of his, Henry had then offered to teach Arkady English at half his normal rate—out of an unmediated eagerness to assist such talent in any way he could. But perhaps Arkady surprised him by taking his offer seriously, turning up twice a week at eight in the morning at Henry’s old flat behind the Nevsky, well prepared and with the vocabulary learned. And perhaps Henry was pleased to be thus surprised.
Indeed, for the next six months, Arkady studied with the tenacious application of a last-chance student—far harder than the rest of Henry’s pupils. And within a few months they were practicing English conversation. Initially Arkady told Henry only the barest outlines of his circumstances—that he knew nothing of his parents and that he had grown up in Orphanage Number 11, called Helios, and that it was “like a house for the fucking of pigs.” But over the weeks Henry coaxed out the greater part of his history. (As so often happened, Henry noticed, Arkady was far more relaxed and open in his emerging second language. Curious, too, how quickly the Russians mastered obscenity.) Like a thick central pillar which alone supported the roof and around which everything else revolved was the main fact of Arkady’s life: that he had trained as a classical pianist. This confirmed what Henry had felt must surely be the case when he first heard him perform—though “trained” hardly described the experience that Henry discovered Arkady to have undergone. His various teachers had well and truly made him a pianist—fashioned him, beaten him, worshipped him, forced him, encouraged him, praised him, hounded him, persecuted him, pushed him, cajoled him, inculcated him, taught him his art in the least compromising and most effective of all teaching methods: old-school Soviet style. For as long as he had been able to read, Arkady had been reading staves. It was not Russian that was Arkady Alexandrovitch’s first language at all—it was music.
And it was no exaggeration to say that Arkady had been a child prodigy—the proud boast of Petersburg youth orchestras and the boy chosen to play for Gorbachev himself in 1984. “They love orphans for Soviet times, Henry. We do not have problem of mothers, fathers. We are heroes of the great state. No parents to take the glory away.” Certainly by the time he was seventeen, everything was set for Arkady’s smooth transition to the St. Petersburg State Conservatory and from there surely to Moscow and international stardom.