“Oh, just leave him alone, all of you! Poor thing, his hands are shaking… Stop shouting now, he’s trying to say something. Don’t mind them, grandpa, speak up, speak up!”
“Thank you for your kindness. The tickets to the Selinsky symphony, would you happen to know when they might be on sale?”
“The kiosk woman says any day now. Oh, and it’s only three hundred seats, so they’ll go fast.”
“Oh dear, in that case… Excuse me, if I may trouble you, are you last in line?”
“Yes,” Sergei said, opening his eyes, “but you can take my place, I’m leaving now.”
The darkness under his eyelids had become, almost without his noticing, the darkness outside; evening had fallen. A street away, men in enormous gloves tottered on ladders affixing slogans to dim streetlamps in preparation for Army Day. Blindly he trudged in and out of the strips of ailing light, vowing to waste no more time on this hopeless, heart-wrenching wait, not noticing his wife, who trailed a block behind him all the way home.
6
MY PARENTS TOOK ME there when I was seven, to study ballet with the most celebrated teacher of the day. It was winter when we arrived in the city. Winter there was not like winter here—not dark but translucent. Maybe it’s still like that, maybe not. Probably not. This century has trodden heavy, and nothing is the same, not even the seasons. But back then, the sky was like milky glass, the roofs like wet bark, the trees like cobwebs in the air. My father rented an apartment in an old, stately building on one of the boulevards. I went to my classes in the morning, and in the early afternoon I returned to our place. For hours I sat on the windowsill, watching lamplighters light the gas lamps, watching chimney sweeps tiptoe on invisible ropes across the evening, listening to the bells as they floated over the river.
One February day my mother came home accompanied by two small liveried men carrying an enormous gray roll on their shoulders. They set the rug down on the living room floor and began to unroll it. The inside was soft and crimson, abundant with flowers, and I got down on my knees to see it better. And it was then that I noticed the first one.
This is how I always imagine telling the story. I imagine someone sitting before me, leaning forward, listening eagerly, and at this point he always asks: The first what? But there is no one to hear my stories. So now, I close my door, cover my lamp with an old green shawl—I like the soft light, the shifting sea-green shadows—and wait until everyone in the house is asleep. Then I talk to myself.
So it was then that I noticed the first bead. There was a bead, a vivid blue speck of light, wedged in one of the cracks in the hardwood floor. When I saw it, I felt the same kind of stillness I used to feel playing a game I had invented as a very young child. I would dig in the snow, searching for what I called a “secret,” which I myself would have buried under a shard of glass some days before—a candy wrapper, a shred of silk cloth, any other small treasure I had mined from my winters in the countryside. Sitting on the floor as the two men with fluttering hands unrolled the carpet, I was brushed by the same kind of happiness I had felt when my stiff fingers would scratch away a hard layer of snow to reveal the bright burst of miraculous color.
One bead was all it took before I saw another one, and another, and another—before I realized that all the cracks in the living room floor were filled with beads.
They put the carpet down, but every afternoon when I returned home, I would lie on the floor, still in my damp dancing clothes, peel a corner of the carpet away, and labor at the cracks with the tip of a pin. After a while, my eyes would grow tired, and I would begin to imagine the whole world as one dark, flat, unclean expanse through which flowed threadlike lines of melted glass, of molten gold. Whenever I caught one bead stream with the sharp prick of the pin and liberated it from its confinement, its droplets would turn into jeweled grains and leap all over the floors. There were hundreds of them—cones striped red and white like circus hats, glowing glass balls, tiny cubes with silver splotches on their sides. In the end, all of them fit into a small caviar jar. I kept it for a long time. It was lost in the revolution.
Now, if I had a listener, he would ask, of course, where the beads came from. He would not know me well enough to distrust my answers. I would be glad to tell him. The beads were the last, forgotten fragments of a special, enchanted world, like petrified coral and shells left embedded in rocks centuries after the sea has retreated from its black depths to a shoreline with beach umbrellas and plastic buckets. I used to imagine it, this world. It had once been filled with joyful, mischievous creatures who flew on the backs of dragonflies, sewed curly clouds onto the skies, pretended to be mossy weathervanes on the spires of ancient castles, tossed sunbeams at one another. When the sunbeams fell to the floor, they crystallized into tiny pieces of glass.
Pardon me? Oh, is it really that important? Fine, then, they were probably spilled by a couple of children whose parents had rented the apartment before us. They might have left the city in a hurry—perhaps there’d been a violent upheaval in their country. Or maybe a weak-eyed seamstress had spent years in a cozy armchair by the window, doing handiwork for sale. Or else—or else a girl working on an embroidered wallet for her beloved had received sudden news of his death, and let it all fall from her hands.
So now you wish you hadn’t asked.
The real explanations are usually the simplest, and often the saddest.
7
ON A DREARY DAY toward the end of February, when tempers had worn raw, a particularly ugly brawl broke out in the line, complete with the usual threats to polish someone’s glasses clean and dust off someone else’s hat with a brick. People were scrambling to get out of the way of the impending fracas when a short man with a jet-black beard was seen stepping forth and addressing the warring factions. Inevitably, voices rose in doubt—“Who the hell is he?” “One of those stuck-up university folks, I bet.” “Nah, he looks like a pirate.” “All the same, why should we listen to him?”—but eventually the line agreed to hear him out. The man, it transpired, had a radical reorganization to propose, beginning with the separation of those waiting for the Northern Nightingales tickets from those hoping to attend the symphony, and ending with numbers, from 1 to 300, being assigned to everyone in the symphony camp. This line, he said, was unprecedented in its nature; they needed to devise a few basic rules, make a list, check off the names; life would become immeasurably more civilized for all involved.
He talked rather at length. Some were able to understand him.
There followed the times of chaos, the times of confusion, the times of arguments. For days snow fell without cease, in big flakes, which flared up, theatrical, brilliant, as they passed under the streetlamp. The arguments died down slowly. On the fourth day, when the snow had dwindled away at long last, a middle-aged woman with a tired face, dressed in an ill-fitting coat and wet low-heeled shoes, stood clutching a square bit of paper in her chilled, reddened fingers. Her number was 137. In front of her was a woman in her thirties, with a bright mouth and a fur hat low on her forehead, and behind, a small boy with fragments of a cloudy sky for eyes.
The woman with the tired face turned from the one to the other.
“I’ve seen you both many times, but I don’t know your names,” she said. “I’m Anna.”
PART TWO