Our second autumn in the city, my mother told me that chestnuts contained new chestnut trees inside them. She was always teaching me the names of plants, the calls of birds, the wayward secrets of seeds. I was eight years old. The next day in the park, I stomped on a chestnut until it split open. It had a wrinkled kernel inside. I tried another, and another, and another—they were all the same. But I could not forget my mother’s words. I began to believe that some chestnuts were different, rare and precious like four-leaf clovers. The special chestnuts concealed inside them the gift of a real tree, half the size of my little finger, yet grown to miniature perfection, with hair-thin branches and droplets of pink and yellow blossoms. I started spending hours in parks and gardens, turning over damp, sweetly rotting leaves. Gathering handfuls of chestnuts, I broke them open, hoping that after two or three or four hundred attempts I would at last be rewarded with a tiny enchantment complete with gnarled roots and the smell of spring flowering.
The leaves yielded other secrets now and then; one day I uncovered a golden pendant shaped like a dainty slipper, and another time, a mildewed silk glove of a lovely turquoise tint. These small offerings only left me wistful. As twilight claimed the city, I would hurriedly cram more chestnuts into my pockets, into my dance bag, and bring them home, and, spilling them on the floor of my room, smash them open with a bronze paperweight in the form of a boot. Later I would secretly dispose of the dusty remains. They lost their velvety sheen when broken.
After a while I stopped prying the chestnuts apart. I let them accumulate instead, lined them along the walls, arranged them in curves and circles. I thought that perhaps, without my knowing, a hidden chestnut grove rustled and blossomed in my bedroom, and that was enough.
Eventually my mother noticed.
Our concierge knew a great number of chestnut recipes. Chestnut croquettes were her favorite. You mixed hot mashed chestnuts with egg yolks, thick cream, and sugar, then added essence of vanilla. My mother let me shape the paste into little balls. I became quite skilled at it.
Of course, you’ll ask whether I stopped believing, or whether I still thought that, perhaps—oh, pardon the—
On the other side of the wall, her mother coughed, and with a start, Anna opened her eyes. The place was absolutely still, but she suddenly had the same sense of marvelous, secret things ripening stealthily within the bud of the night—except that now she too was a part of it, she too was slowly growing, cresting within the darkness. Then, as she was, barefoot, in her nightgown, she rushed out to the landing, and down the steps, her feet burning on the icy concrete. Mercifully, the bag was still there, behind some empty bottles. She took it inside, and for a long, long time rinsed the fruit in warm water, trying not to notice the two or three small insects with whitish, bloated, segmented bellies that swam up and drowned and twirled away.
In the morning she almost cried as she remembered her dream—the translucent green glow under the closed door, the pocket-sized chestnut forest, the dates miraculously restored to the windowsill—but when she entered the kitchen, the dates were there, the dates were there!
She hummed under her breath while cooking her family breakfast.
She continued to hum for the next two weeks as she went about her stealthy errands, making inquiries of her acquaintances, standing in other lines, assembling little by little the impossible, precious ingredients. At last, just in time, all was ready; for surely, sugared water with a lemon squeezed into it would be just as good as orange flower water, whatever that might be, while strawberry jam (a gift from her downstairs neighbor) was much, much tastier than apricot—and almonds, well, never mind the almonds; all the saleswomen had laughed in her face at the mere question.
On a bright, windy afternoon in early April, just after five o’clock, she met Sergei at the corner to take his tuba from him and to hand over their number and a buterbrod wrapped in a napkin, as she did every day. “I’ll see you at the usual time, then,” she said, struggling to keep her excitement from breaking into her voice with an expectant, girlish giggle. Her fingers briefly lingered in his.
Withdrawing his hand, he slid the number into his pocket and his eyes past her face.
“Yes, yes,” he said. As he walked away, she stood gazing for a moment at his retreating gray jacket, smiling to herself. Then she ran home, the tuba impatiently nudging her in the back.
She was eager to begin their evening.
When he joined the line, Pavel, the tanned man at number 136, was there already, having just replaced a woman in a vulgar flowery hat; Sergei saw her motley scarf stream around the corner. The young woman with the pale eyelids appeared at the end of the street a half-hour later, as always, crossing the boundary between the clear dusk and the uncertain street illumination. In the last few days, a new sonorousness had spread through the air, as it did for a short time every April; her steps rang with a small crystal sound as if she were walking on a sheet of glass. He imagined the glass to be deep blue in color, vibrating lightly just beneath the veneer of the city.
“I’ve given your arguments some thought,” he was saying as he pretended not to watch her, “and I fear I can’t agree. Folk songs… Oh, hello, Sofia Mikhailovna, nice evening, isn’t it?… Folk songs do not come from the depths of the ‘national spirit,’ as you call it. On the contrary, they lie on the surface—simple music, wholly devoid of individuality or inspiration, field rhythms, chanted by peasant masses to avoid dozing off while planting potatoes and whatnot.”
“You do not, then, believe in the national spirit?” Pavel asked.
“There you go again,” Sofia Mikhailovna said without smiling.
“I do, I do wholeheartedly! But to my mind, it’s to be found elsewhere—namely, in the unique creations of our brightest composers, and the more original, the better. Like Selinsky. It’s precisely in these flashes of genius, born every generation or two—”
“Pardon me, I didn’t mean to eavesdrop,” interrupted a balding middle-aged man with a shoe brush for a mustache, two places behind, “but did I just hear you say that Selinsky embodies our national spirit? Because, and you must pardon me for the intrusion, that is nonsense.” Taking a step off the sidewalk, he bent down, scraped his fingers against the still-hardened ground; the bald spot on his head flushed red with the effort, and in the opening of his shirt Sergei glimpsed the swinging of a small pewter cross on a thread. “This,” the man said, holding up his hand smudged with dirt, “this is our national spirit. No more, no less. Selinsky chose to leave his country, and by doing so, betrayed his gift. He may well be a genius—and I for one will gladly sacrifice my time for the pleasure of listening to his music—but as he no longer stands on his native soil, his art can’t possibly have roots. An artist creates true art for his people only so long as he lives, and suffers, among them.”
“But surely you’re following the letter, not the spirit, of the matter!” Sergei objected. “Take our greatest writers of the past century—did most of them not spend years and years abroad, in the West? Yet no one questions their place in our culture… What do you think?”
“I believe one can carry one’s country within,” she said with her usual soft-spoken conviction. “It’s the depth of—of one’s affinity that matters, not one’s address… But I think you’re wrong about our folk songs. Maybe you’ve just never listened to them properly.”
“Perhaps,” he said, “but don’t you think—”