SPRING
1
THE DAYS WERE LENGTHENING, turning pale and deep. Under skies the shade of northern porcelain, the snow had begun to melt, and the glittering, leaking, rushing unrest of waters filled the city with a noise like that of a constant twittering of birds. Their home, though, lay quiet and still, as if under a snowdrift. His mother spent her afternoons waiting in line, and his father moved through the rooms in a sulking, taciturn mood, slamming doors and spitefully banging his tuba against corners. Alexander himself felt depressed and, to make matters worse, was having trouble sleeping: since the beginning of March, their building appeared to have sprung numerous leaks, through which the outside world seeped in unsettlingly—little drafts of a springtime hum and bright, breezy smells, which wafted through the lifeless air of their apartment, keeping him awake.
In the middle of the month, he had a particularly restless night. Some neighbors were talking, and snippets of strange conversations kept invading his dreams. “Pardon me?” someone was saying somewhere, quietly but distinctly. “No, I’m afraid that was not exactly true, the jar wasn’t lost in the revolution. Many things were, some tangible, some rather less so—but not the beads. It just makes the story more dramatic, don’t you find?” There was a pause, and he had just begun to fall asleep when the same old voice embarked on a long, pointless story about two men in workmen’s overalls carrying a gigantic crystal chandelier through crooked medieval streets. The chandelier was all trussed up like a felled beast on a stick, and the crystals clicked softly, and wisps of the light watercolor skies became entangled like silk petals amidst the pieces of radiant glass, and some little girl stopped openmouthed and stared, then followed after them as if charmed, and it went on and on, and he thought, half awake, The walls in this damn building are absurdly thin, is this coming from above or below, and who spouts such inane nonsense at three in the morning anyway; and he even considered banging on the floor or the ceiling, though he was not sure which—and though a part of him rather wanted to hear how the tale ended—when suddenly there was silence.
He was starting to drift off once more, or had perhaps drifted off already, when the voice—his grandmother’s voice, he knew all at once—said coyly, “Oh, so you’ve noticed at last. Yes, I did stop wearing them. Why? Because they are diamonds, and diamonds, my dear, are worn only in winter. Spring has come.”
Awaking with a start, he realized that his grandmother’s terrible earrings, which she never took off, had somehow slipped into his dream brewed from the neighbors’ idiotic conversation. He lay in bed for some time after that, populating the mounds and hollows of his ceiling with shadowy profiles and downy limbs, then, giving up, rose. His parents’ door was cracked open; the dark silence inside seemed denser than in the hallway. He slipped past. On the kitchen threshold, he shut his eyes against the unexpected glare.
“Mother?” he said, moving his head blindly from side to side.
“I can’t sleep,” her voice replied. “I keep hearing things—a radio somewhere, I guess—”
Unclenching his eyelids, he watched her emerge from the aching nothingness into a white haze, then, shedding the halo, slowly acquire untidy hair flattened by hours of insomniac tossing, a thick flannel gown the color of boiled milk, a piece of paper held in her fingers swollen from a recent wash. “What’s that you’re reading?” he asked, squinting.
They had barely spoken since the night he had lost the money; yet now, with his temples humming from the exhaustion of dammed dreams begging to be let out, he felt startled, or else released, into talking.
“It’s nothing, just a recipe,” she said. She sounded wistful. “For a date tart. It’s been making the rounds in the… that is, your physics teacher copied it for me.”
He bent over her shoulder, read aloud: “Cream the butter and sugar until light, next stir in the ground almonds and the orange flower water—”
“Better than poetry, no?” She folded the page carefully, smoothed its creases. “Some poetry, anyway. Of course, I’ll never be able to make it, dates are impossible to find. There is this woman who keeps saying she can get anything, she eats dates every week, so she says, but I don’t suppose it’s true. She’s always saying things.”
“A woman. What woman?”
“Oh, just someone I’ve met in the line. You might have seen her yourself the time you—”
She stopped.
He shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot, suddenly aware of the cold linoleum beneath his bare toes. The hour floated around them, weightless and unreal; the train-station clock on the wall had slid into a deep crevice of shadows, and the whole kitchen had ceased to exist beyond their circle of undiluted, naked lamplight, beyond the two of them blinking owlishly at each other. And as the silence swelled, then brimmed over with a quiet click of the invisible clock’s hand leaping from one notch to the next, Anna looked at her sixteen-year-old son standing before her in his touchingly childish pajamas, with a border of little sailboats along the cuffs too high on his wrists, and felt, for the first time since that night, that she had forgiven him, and was seized with an urge to tell him about the people in the line, about all the small, trivial encounters, conversations, nudges that made up her unrecorded, unshared days. That insufferable woman at 136, for instance, never tired of repeating that she was there only as a favor to her husband, who was a man of importance and intended to use the ticket to clench some deal with a highly cultured colleague. Anna did not like her. The boy at 138, now—him she liked very much. She had learned that he came from a family of musicians and was hoping to get the ticket for his grandfather, who would turn seventy-eight in December; she kept trying to talk to him, but he was always looking away, gnawing on his fingernails. Not that she had no one to talk to, of course: she often chatted with Emilia Khristianovna; they now worked around their schedules, spotting each other on alternate mornings. Emilia Khristianovna, it turned out, had a son only a couple of years older than Alexander, she wanted to tell him—did you know that, did you meet him in school perhaps? She’s knitting a scarf for her boy, fretting that the colors don’t go well together; orange and pink is all the wool she has left—
“My feet are frozen,” Alexander mumbled. “I better get back to bed.”
“Oh,” Anna said. “Of course. Have a good night.”
In the doorway he turned.
“Why do you do it?” he asked.
“Do what?”
“Stand in that line for hours.”
“Because your grandmother asked me to,” she replied wearily.
“But why does she want to go to some random concert? She never goes anywhere. Do you even know? Has she spoken to you at all since—I mean, has she even thanked you?”
She considered him in stony silence. He waited on the threshold for another minute, and still she said nothing. He nodded, and walked away, and, back in bed, fell into sleep as into still, dark water. In the morning, when he tried to disentangle sleep from wakefulness, the chandelier jolted by the two men striding through ancient streets hung vivid and bright in his mind, and the predawn conversation with his mother swayed like a shadowy, vaguely shameful, half-forgotten dream.
The following Monday, reopening after the midday break, the kiosk seller shook her dyed curls and announced that a batch of tickets was expected shortly.
“Finally!” said the wife of the important man, and tossed a bag at Anna. “Here, catch.”