Why don’t you go sleep it off now, she says in a tired voice. He wants to shout at her, but after thinking a minute, or not thinking, exactly, just kind of swaying a bit, he turns and stumbles to the door instead—which is when he realizes, when they all realize, that this horrible, horrible woman is standing there on the kitchen threshold, has been standing there for who knows how long, in that horrible decaying robe of hers, in those painfully bright earrings, bursting, bursting with explosions of unbearable light into his eyes. She opens her thin, white lips, but she can’t possibly be saying anything, he thinks, she has not spoken to anyone for years, she is his grandmother, she is insane, and then indeed she is speaking, and everyone gasps, and her words are drowned, so she opens her lips again, and repeats it.
And what she says is, “I would very much like to go to this concert, please.”
5
THE NEXT MORNING, Sergei rose well before sunrise and groped for his clothes without switching on the lamp. His socks proved elusive, but at last he cornered two—one under the bed, the other still balled up inside his shoe. His wife did not wake up. He dressed, tiptoed outside, and strode through the darkness torn here and there by the stab of misty streetlight. As he drew closer, he found himself walking faster and faster, until he was running, winter surging in and out of his lungs in chilly fits, the excitement billowing inside him like a sail full of wind. When his ears started to burn, he realized he had forgotten his hat, but he did not slow down.
The night was just beginning to be diluted by a thin blue haze when he arrived at the kiosk. He approached panting, feeling somehow years younger after his wild, bare-headed sprint through the empty predawn streets. A few lone figures were already shuffling about, hanging streamers of steamy breaths in the frozen air; a piece of cardboard was propped in the shuttered window. Will reopen upon restocking, read the handwritten notice, and underneath, in smaller, printed letters: REGULAR WINTER HOURS 10 TO 5.
“It will be today for sure, though, right?” he said, looking up with a smile. Shadows shifted between scarves and hats where faces should have been; no one replied. His smile faded.
“So, who’s last here?” he asked after a moment, raising his collar.
He waited until early afternoon, but the window remained blind. All the same, the elated certainty that had gripped him the night before—a certainty not unlike a sense of fate, reaffirmed by the immensity of the coincidence that placed the concert with such neatness within his reach, constructing the tickets kiosk so obligingly in his own corner of the city—the certainty, then, that this was the very place he had sought, did not waver in the slightest, though, oddly, no one in the growing line appeared to have heard about the symphony. Some concert tickets had, indeed, been sold the day before, “only it wasn’t any what-do-you-call-it,” he was told by an elderly man whose voice kept getting lost amidst layers of wool, “it was a visiting song-and-dance group. A good one, I’m hoping they haven’t run out. Who’s this Selyodsky, anyway?”
Shortly before three o’clock, Sergei left for work. For some blocks he kept glancing over his shoulder, tensing his legs for a dash back, until the kiosk vanished from sight behind the drifting snow. After the clear white stretches of a day so vast with possibility, the dim cavern of the People’s Theater, its walls the color of dried blood, its stage decorations a claustrophobic cardboard forest of smokestacks and assembly plants, struck him as unusually oppressive. He spat his thawing breaths into the tuba with increasing impatience, attempting to catch Sviatoslav’s eye through the monotonous seesawing of the trombones. During the intermission, when most of the orchestra crowded smoking and chatting around the spittoon in the stairwell, he pulled his friend aside.
“Listen,” he said in an urgent undertone, “I have some amazing news.”
“I’ve got some for you too,” the drummer whispered. “I overheard—”
“Later, later!… It’s about Selinsky, you know, the concert rumors I told you about, well, I think they’re actually selling the tickets just around—”
Sviatoslav pushed his walruslike mustache into Sergei’s face. “Forget Selinsky, you have troubles enough. I overheard our director on the phone, talking about you, making excuses. He sounded almost frightened. Something about the embassy. What the hell happened?”
A heartbeat of silence welled between them.
“No idea,” Sergei said in a flattened voice.
“Come on, you can tell me.”
He saw again the marble lavatory, the dripping water, the gray eye winking in the lustrous mirrors… Sharp little hammers beat at his temples. “It’s nothing.”
“Fine,” Sviatoslav said dryly, releasing him. “By the way, your socks don’t match.”
Through the rest of the performance, he kept searching other faces for secret signs of his disfavor, repeatedly missing his cues, recalling himself only upon discovering the monumental elbow of a fellow tuba player embedded painfully in his side. Well, let the bastards fire me, this concert changes everything, he thought as snowdrifts settled on his shoulders while he waited at the kiosk the next day. So I’ll become a tram conductor, a truck driver, I’ll even sweep the streets—but at least I won’t have to spend evening after evening playing their thumping songs, wasting my life away in that hellhole. And maybe, maybe, as I sweep the streets through the year, the melodies I once dreamed of composing will come to me at last—and notes will alight on my staffs like scores of migrant birds returned home. At the end of the year I will gather the pages, I will go to the concert, I will at last see the man I should have seen on that day thirty-seven years ago. In the stunned hush that will descend after he lowers his baton, just before the world explodes with applause, I will make my way to the stage, and our eyes will meet briefly, and—and—and here the vision blurred a little, for Sergei could not remember Selinsky’s features, which he must have glimpsed as a boy in those pre-revolutionary photographs where tuxedoed men in unnaturally exalted poses swam in the oily glow of hazy backgrounds; but he quickly filled the blank with a genius’s expansive forehead, an aristocratic thin nose, an attentive gray gaze—and I will toss him a bouquet wrapped in my secret score, my address concealed in a corner. That night, well after midnight, there will be a knock on my door. He will be alone. Grasping my hand in his own, he will say, “This dazzling masterpiece you showed me—this divine music—could it be that here, in this place, in this time, there still live such giants”—and he will ask me—and I will reply—and then—and afterward—
And afterward, that evening, in fact, standing mute and diminished amidst the expanses of the director’s office, he tried to hold his future conversation with Selinsky intact in his mind, brilliant and hard like a diamond, turning it to this or that facet, this or that phrase, to keep his dread at bay; but as the heavy silence continued, Selinsky’s noble features quivered, reverted to the sepia fog of a forgotten snapshot, then dissipated altogether. He shifted from foot to foot, bumped against his tuba, which lay curled up on the floor like a beaten dog, stared at the artificial plants on the windowsill, the monstrous ashtray shaped like a dying swan, the director’s fat neck piled in loose folds on the maroon silk of his collar.