In the old mansion where the museum was housed, he followed her from room to room. The corners were full of theatrical, dusty moonlight and indifferent late-shift caretakers and old instruments with lovely curves and stretched, sinuous necks. Standing so close to her that their shoulders almost touched—almost, but not quite—he marveled at the light azure lacquer of harpsichords with garlands of ivory cupids cavorting along their sides, and brittle violins with delicate landscapes blossoming inside their cases; and as she pointed out her favorite pieces, which she had known and tended for years, for which she had made up little affectionate nicknames, he imagined these rooms not bleak and dusty but brilliant with lights, adorned with silk, pastel-colored trifles, and her in a long, narrow dress, seated at one of the azure harpsichords, playing melancholy, lingering music, or absently caressing a gold-throated harp with her pale hands—but as he glanced at her hands, he caught the glint of a ring on her finger, and his vision dimmed.
“Shall we go listen to your songs, then?” he asked brusquely.
“Of course,” she said after the slightest pause. “This way. Could you please turn off the light on the way out?”
She led him along a corridor with many closed doors, into a small place crowded with a herd of gramophones. She appeared to hesitate briefly among their yawning black-tongued maws, then walked over to one with an air of daring. “The earliest model we have. A bit cranky, but so nice. Special. Here, you’ll like this, I’m certain—”
She sat across from him, her eyes closed; he now discovered that the thin blue veins on her eyelids had not been a trick of the evening light after all. He forced himself to look away, to listen as the creaky gramophone whined about fates crossing and stars falling and grasses swaying, the whole world setting off on a treacherous, intoxicating ride toward distant horizons where horses galloped and winds whistled and lovers died young and doomed and maddeningly happy. Then his thoughts wandered. He remembered meeting Anna, two decades ago now, in the neighborhood doctor’s dingy vestibule; neither of them had been ill, but both needed the doctor’s signature on a document required by their place of employment; both had been bored and distracted, wedged next to each other in a restless crowd of coughing supplicants. He had incurred some crone’s wrath for allowing Anna to go in before him, out of turn, and later, leaving the office, had been touched to find her there still, waiting for him in the windowless trap of the room before the forbidding blind door. He thought too of all the many closed doors he had glimpsed in the secret reaches of this place, opening, he imagined, onto polished vistas of grand pianos and mysterious little gardens of imperceptibly vibrating violins and deep moonlit pools of symphonies and sonatas flitting about with the shimmer of chance reflections, with the grace of rare butterflies—
“So what did you think?” she asked.
The song had ended. She was looking at him.
“You were right,” he said, rising. “It was special.”
An hour later, having seen her to her building, he slowly walked home. His way took him past the kiosk. The line had dispersed, but a few characters still clustered in the moist darkness, their lit cigarettes circling about their heads like a flock of dull red moths. He saw his son talking to some man whose face was invisible, whose shadow made wild leaps across the pavement; the streetlamp blinked erratically, for the bulb needed replacing. He called out across the street, watched one burning moth dive to the ground, become hastily squashed.
He thought of speaking sharply to the boy, then said nothing.
Their steps kept falling out of rhythm as they crossed what was left of the night.
“Mother came by the line looking for you,” the boy said. “She had a pie with her.”
“A pie?”
“A pie or a cake. Something she baked. She wanted you to have it.”
“How silly,” Sergei said absently. “Why not wait till I get home.”
He wondered whether she wore perfume. He would never know, he supposed; it was not the kind of thing one could casually ask—though perhaps he would ask, on the evening of the concert. For the first time openly, without willing himself to suppress the indulgent thought, he dared to picture the unrolling staircase, Sofia’s small hand trembling lightly in the crook of his arm, a row of soft velvet chairs, the girlish angularity of her pale cheek inclining gently to his shoulder, a hush so perfect, so palpable, it would rise like a cloud to the immensity of the ceiling, and then the communal intake of breath, Selinsky, Selinsky, it’s really him, the flying steps, the flying tuxedo coattails, the flying white hair—and then the first, dizzying twirl of a baton flying through the awed air—and then… But here his fantasy grew vague, then stalled altogether. The draining necessity of daily evasions, the stress of worrying about the ticket falling into his wife’s oblivious possession, the harrowing prospect, in the event of his success, of having to concoct some explanation for his empty-handed return from the line, of then finding a safe place to hide his treasure, of erecting another precarious scaffolding of lies to obscure his absence on the night of the concert—the constant, unclean exertion of it all oppressed him again, and again he assured himself it was only right that he should be the one to hear Selinsky, he was not a dishonest man, he was entitled, yes, entitled—for had his whole life, with all its missed chances, its unrealized longings, its reversals of fortune, not guaranteed him this music, this gift, this—
“They told everyone to hang around till two again tomorrow,” his son said with a sideways glance, and, when Sergei did not respond, offered, “I can replace you at ten like today, if you want. For another fiver.”
“Math isn’t your strongest point, is it? Do you know what my salary is?”
“Three, then, I’ll do it for three,” Alexander said quickly.
They stopped before their building. Sergei looked at him for a moment. It would be madness, he knew, to try to explain; the boy could never understand what it meant to desire something with such ache, such fierceness…
“You can’t stay out till two on a regular basis,” he said at last. “You have school.”
“It’s not regular. It’s only two days, today and tomorrow. I just want to help.”
Sergei hesitated.
“Well, all right,” he said then. “Just one thing. If the tickets go on sale on your watch, bring the ticket to me. I want to give it to your grandmother myself. Agreed?”
“Sure, whatever,” Alexander said, though he wouldn’t quite meet his father’s eyes.
Struggling to disregard the bitter taste in his mouth, Sergei hunted for his wallet.
3
“YOU MUST BE NEW, I haven’t seen you here before.”
“Yeah, just helping out with the late shift.”
“Ah yes, the late shift! Some people are complaining, you know, what are the chances, they say, that the tickets will go on sale at one in the morning. But I say to them, you never know, these things can’t be predicted, and in any case, a little extra hope never hurt anyone… Have one to spare, perhaps? And a light?… Thank you, thank you kindly. And then, let’s face it, it’s not like we’d rather be somewhere else. I suffer from insomnia, you know—used to sit in the dark for hours, talking to myself. Now I come here, meet people, shoot the breeze, it’s something to do. Folks trade jokes, there’s a fellow who sings over there… Ah, I see another new face, a boy, must have come to help out his father. See the man walking away? A great expert on music, that one, he and that other fellow, the one with the mustache there—”