“Well, some things change.” Nikolai wrested the bottle away from him, held it up to the light, shook it roughly. “See, almost gone now.”
He guffawed, or else hiccuped.
Alexander did not take his eyes off the tracks. “I come here a lot,” he said sternly. “Just to watch. But one day I’ll save enough money, and board one of these trains, and go—go far away.” He touched the wallet, still in his pocket, then frowned into the night, which dipped and shimmered in thrilling but disorienting ways before his eyes.
“East or West?” Nikolai asked.
“What?”
“You want to go East or West?”
Alexander giggled at the joke. No one ever went West anymore, except for diplomats and other important persons on special State missions; the borders had been closed for decades. Of course, not that many people went East, either: one needed work permits, residency registration, relocation documents, security clearance… Or at least he thought that one did; he had seen the conductors study passengers’ papers before letting them board.
“Yeah, I used to think about it myself,” Nikolai said. “Hey, watch where you’re stepping, people sitting here!… Goes down smooth, doesn’t it? Mind if I…? The gold mines in the East, the forests, the lakes—they say the water out there is bright blue, so blue you wouldn’t believe it, and the trees so green, I dreamed of seeing it all when I was your age.”
“I’m color-blind,” Alexander announced.
Nikolai opened his mouth, threw his head back, and there was his Adam’s apple again, wobbling up and down while he laughed. Watching it move, Alexander was unexpectedly seized with a vague worry. An enormous clock was hovering over the platform, but the numbers glowed with an unpleasant neon haze, melting into one another, making it impossible to see what time it was. He supposed he was feeling a bit… yes, just a little bit…
“Color-blind? Isn’t that like a family disease or something? Your parents have it too?”
“No, they see colors fine. Mother’s tone-deaf, though, and—” He was going to say something witty, something witty about his family, but instead blurted out, “She wouldn’t want tickets to any concert, so that was all right, leaving the line like that… I mean, she wouldn’t want to go, anyway.”
Nikolai stopped laughing, was quiet for a minute.
“My daughter loves music,” he said then. “Violins, symphonies, pretty melodies… She doesn’t get out much, though. And the symphonies, when they sell the tickets, they’re never for today or tomorrow. It’s stupid to throw money away on things like that. I mean, who knows if next November or December we’re even going to be—well, you know.”
“My parents believe I’ll enroll in the university in the fall,” said Alexander. “After I finish with school. But I won’t. There’s no point. I’ll just—”
A guttural voice, interrupting, rumbled a long, incoherent announcement from a speaker.
“Hey, listen, did you hear that?” Nikolai said, grabbing Alexander’s arm.
“What language was it in?” said Alexander, and chuckled. “Get it? What language—”
“No, listen, that’s the weekly eastern, crosses the whole country. Leaves in two hours. Go. You have the money. Go. You’ll be dipping your toes in the eastern sea come next week.”
“Very funny. You need all kinds of papers and stuff—”
“All you need is your passport and a ticket. You’re sixteen, right, old enough to have a passport? Two hours is plenty of time for you to go home, grab your things, get back here. Go.”
And suddenly Alexander feels a chill of coherence, a draft at the back of his head as if a window has opened there, and everything that has happened to him this day, that has ever happened to him, begins to make sense, the way he knew it would when he was given that wallet in that street, that remote street somewhere—the fence, the kiosk, the elderly men and women waiting, waiting for nothing—but not him, no, not him, because for him, he believes now, he has always believed, yes, for him there will be a splash of cold waves on a remote, desolate, beautiful shore, and strange birds dipping and rising overhead, and whispers of tall silver trees, and horses running, and the sea, the sea, rippling paths of invisible whales and fishing boats and sunrises so majestic he will see their flaming, golden colors at last…
He stumbles to his feet, and his legs buckle, but it’s all right, he can stand all right if he just leans against something, someone, if he just…
“Easy, easy there,” says his best friend, laughing. “I’ll wait for you right here, on the steps… And tell you what, why don’t I buy your ticket for you, just give me the—”
Perfect, perfect idea, he replies, or maybe he only thinks it, but in any case, here’s some, is this enough, well, just a couple more, then, yes, that should do it, I don’t have much left, anyway, just enough for a tram home and back, I’ll see you in just a bit… Some steps to navigate here, must be careful, very slippery, oh and look, a tram, there’s a tram, but they don’t want him to board for some reason, which is fine with him, he’ll just walk, it’s a wonderful frozen night full of snow, full of hush, the roofs sparkle, the trees are still, and maybe he’ll even miss all this a little, but only a little, when he is out there, with the sea, with the birds, with the horses. And as he walks, he imagines the train dissolving on the red sunburst horizon, and a wide, rolling freedom of space, the grasses waving, his chest filled to the point of bursting with bracing air, a rhythmic, pulsating alteration of dark and light, sunrises over new towns, sunsets in dazzling blue lakes, and the women, the women with red hair—a life, a real life!—and then his building runs into him before he expects it. He tiptoes up the stairs very quietly, and unlocks the door with no noise so he can steal into his room, pick up his bag, his documents, a sweater or two—but the whole place is flooded with lights, and his mother is pacing up and down the corridor, her hands at an unnatural angle.
Oh my God, she moans, oh my God—I thought you were—oh my God; and his father says, You have a lot of explaining to do, young man. Things do get a bit squashed together after that, one minute running into another running into another, all stuck together, and the floor keeps moving as if he were on a ship, or at least he thinks that’s what a ship would be like, because he has never been on a ship. And suddenly he knows that he will not see the sunrise over the eastern sea next week, or ever, and because his heart feels like it’s breaking, he grows angry and tells them he has been mugged, and that he left their stupid line because it was only for concert tickets, some stupid symphony, someone said, and not until next December, anyway.
And then there is another stretch of confusion, but they are all in the kitchen now, and the sink’s enamel is comforting, cool against his forehead, and his father is talking with much excitement, though not to him, saying something about some composer. Igor Selinsky, he keeps repeating, this must be the symphony, I’ve been trying for days to find out where they’ll sell the tickets, no one knows, but this must be it, it would be in December, so I heard, the genius forced to leave the country, Igor Selinsky, and his mother, who seems distracted and somehow concerned about the sink, keeps asking, Who is that, who is that? And then he knows that he must tell them the truth, so he straightens up and explains to them that being color-blind is really not as bad as it sounds, it’s not like you see everything in black-and-white, unless, of course, it’s very dark or it’s winter, which, now that he thinks about it, it always is in this goddamned place. His mother tries to stop him, something about the neighbors who might be listening, but he doesn’t care about any neighbors, in fact, it might enlighten them to know, it’s not like you can’t see any colors, you just get a few of them mixed up, the reds and the greens mostly, but on the plus side, and this is kind of funny, all the banners are green in his world, and all those idiotic garlands they put up on their idiotic holidays, and the portraits, and not even a nice green, but a dirty, brown, unappetizing sort of green, the color of vomit, though as he says that, he feels he should have used a different word, because his mother is looking distressed again.