The evening was deepening, floating on a wave of cool, radiant dusk. He searched for, and failed to find, that initial disappointment that had gripped him some days earlier, when he had first realized he was in for a longer wait. With a clean, young, forgotten kind of pleasure, he filled his lungs with the small nighttime breezes as he drifted in and out of conversations, listened to Pavel sing in a reedy yet oddly stirring voice, watched the thin chill of darkness slowly transform Sofia Mikhailovna’s pallid features until, once again, they acquired that fragile, feathery purity of an old painting. Later, at ten o’clock, just as he was about to take his reluctant leave, the bearded organizer moved down the line, marking off names and informing everyone that the neighboring Nightingales kiosk had received an unexpected delivery of tickets at two in the morning and that it might make sense to stick around longer tonight. Sergei’s heart leapt with a surprising, fierce gladness; and he was suddenly grateful to the selfless man with the list, to the people in line around him, these strangers who held dear the very things that were dear to him.
“Two in the morning?” he said loudly. “That’s outrageous, what next!”
“An alphabet game?” inquired Pavel. “I give you a letter, you give me a composer. Vladimir Semyonovich, are you in?”
“You bet,” said the man with the shoe-brush mustache.
When he came home that night, pale squares of windows swam through the darkness; the sky was already holding its frosted breath in anticipation of a new day. Leaving the place unlit, he walked to the kitchen. On the threshold he halted. There was a chaos of indistinguishable shapes on the table, on the chairs, on the counter—small, discrete, mysterious gaps in the fabric of shadows. For an instant he felt a peculiar sensation in his nose, in the cavity of his mouth, as if something viscous and sweet were pushing its way through some invisible barrier; but before he quite made up his mind to investigate, the deepest accumulation of shadow resolved itself unmistakably into the curved spine of his wife collapsed asleep at the table, her cheek on her outstretched arms.
A heady rush of unease swept him off into the bedroom, and kept him in a state of sleepless, tense immobility all through the early-morning hours, even while she softly called his name as she readied herself for work. After her departure, he drifted off to some frozen terrain, the gliding ice field of a dream dipping unsteadily through cold black waters. Waking up with a start an hour later, he was so hurried to get to the theater on time that he cast only the most cursory glance into the kitchen, and saw, through the spiraling of his tuba, a pattern of plates he did not recognize, of candles melded into saucers with careful spillages of wax, of glasses neatly arranged, as though in readiness for something. But as he chased an errant trolley down the street, another windy day got tangled up in what was left of his hair and wiped his puzzlement out; and by the time he met her on their usual corner, he had forgotten all about it, overwhelmed as he always was by a weak-kneed surge of guilty relief—another afternoon passed, and the tickets hadn’t gone on sale yet, not on her watch, not on her watch—
She seemed about to speak, was peering at him with some timid yet urgent purpose.
“I’ll see you at the usual time,” he said quickly, already moving away to prevent her words from being born; but later that evening, the bearded organizer announced that he thought it prudent to extend their waiting for another night or two, just in case. When darkness crept in, the line began to twitch with unrest. People came and went; old characters, their faces worn thin by the weeks of vigil like profiles on coins long in circulation, slunk off in search of undamaged telephone booths, new characters stepped into the fray, and the organizer swore with passion as he struggled to keep up with the rapidly metamorphosing list. At ten, Pavel made his exit, announcing that his replacement would be by in a bit, and in another half-hour, Sofia Mikhailovna turned upon Sergei her bruised gaze of a medieval angel and, thanking him quietly for his kind offer, gave him her number, her fingers brushing his palm in passing—unintentionally, he was sure—and left in turn.
He spent the rest of his time in a trance of exhaustion, his eyes closed, his wife’s number folded in his right hand, Sofia Mikhailovna’s in his left, the enormity of the wait beginning to bear down on his spirit at last. At two o’clock he staggered away, feeling as if the tips of his curled fingers had dissolved in chilly numbness. A bearded old man sat smoking on the curb, flipping a matchbox up into the air, catching it, tossing it up again. As Sergei stumbled into a drifting cloud of smoke, the dark street beyond shimmered and vanished. The old man looked up.
“Patience,” he said thoughtfully. “It will be worth it.”
“What?” Sergei paused involuntarily.
When the old man smiled, his features became impossible to discern, obliterated by a cobweb of minute lines. “The music,” he said. “The most beautiful music you’ve ever heard.”
Sergei’s eyes followed the flips of the matchbox—up and down, up and down, up and down in the wide strip of lavender streetlight went the sky-blue box with the golden script on one side… In the end he said nothing, only nodded, and walked home, his head ringing with hollow lightness from lack of sleep; and in the morning, after waiting, with his eyelids pressed tightly shut, for the front door to close behind his wife, he threw the blanket aside and, leaping barefoot into the hallway, cornered his son on his way out.
“All right,” the boy said morosely. “It will cost you a fiver, though.”
Sergei considered him in disgusted silence, thought of launching into a speech about their lost savings, went to retrieve his pants instead (a glance cast into the kitchen revealed the two small armies of glasses and candlesticks still confronting each other across the table in a perplexing battle formation), turned his pockets inside out.
“Two now,” he conceded. “Three more later, if you actually show up.”
To his surprise, Alexander did, not precisely at ten, to be sure, but soon enough after. Sofia Mikhailovna had left a few minutes before; she too had arranged for a substitute, someone in the family, he gathered, to join the line shortly. He walked off, careless of the direction, thinking vaguely that he did not wish to go home just yet; it was, after all, a perfect night for a stroll. A street away, he chanced to glimpse her, and quickened his steps—then realized that she was talking to someone, a man; he could see the man’s back curving like a tall question mark inside a light coat. He slowed down, fell back, his mood abruptly, inexplicably, soured; but in another minute, the man turned and shuffled forth with a laborious, aged tread, looking through Sergei with the pale bespectacled eyes of another injured angel. Her father, a voice shouted in his mind, and, exhaling, he ran down the street, heedless of the muddy stains from the rain that had trudged through the city earlier that day.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s you. You gave me a bit of a start.”
“A pleasant evening,” he said, out of breath. “Strange to be awake, yet not in line.”
“Thank you again for last night. For keeping my place, I mean. I was very tired.”
“Of course. Anytime.”
They stood looking at each other in silence, then spoke at once.
He said, “If you like, I could walk you home, it’s getting quite—”
She said, “It’s late, but if you like, we could stop by my work, I’ll play you some—”
Their words, colliding, intercepted each other in mid-flight.
She said, “Oh, thank you, I’d like—”
He said, “Sure, that would be—”
They laughed then, a short, embarrassed laugh, but a laugh all the same, and somehow the moment filled with lightness, and as they walked to the Museum of Musical History, a half-hour away, he thought that if he tilted his head up, he could watch the moment turn airborne and float away, small and carefree, through streaks of smoking streetlamps, through pockets of night, up over the roofs and the churches of the old city, growing nebulous and pearly until it became just another wisp of an April cloud.