“Hey, I know that boy. Well, I better get to my place. See you around, then… Why, hello, looks like we’re neighbors, you’re number one thirty-seven? What, don’t you recognize me? Nikolai, remember?”
Alexander did not reply. He had spotted the bastard only a minute earlier, a hulking shadow in the misty blur of the streetlamp, sharing a smoke with some other crook, both of them turning to stare at him, and laughing, laughing… His breath still had not returned.
“So whatever happened to you?” the scoundrel asked cheerfully. “I waited at the station for three hours, but you never showed up.”
Alexander stood seething, directing his gaze above the man’s head.
“Ah, I get it. I get it. You think—you must think I cheated you out of your money or something. Well, I’m offended. I’m actually offended. I should make you eat that stupid ticket I bought you—had to wait in line for it, too—only I misplaced it somewhere.”
“Misplaced it. That’s rich,” Alexander said between his teeth.
“Believe me, don’t believe me, it’s all the same to me. It’s no good now, anyway. In any case, you shouldn’t care, you’re about to strike gold, why should you care?”
“Oh, yeah? And how am I about to do that, exactly?”
The thief seemed surprised. “You’re here for the Selinsky concert, yes?”
“So?” Alexander said, refusing to look at him.
“So just think.” He pushed his face so close that Alexander could smell his stale odor of drink and sweat. “A fancy composer returning home for one single concert! Hordes of folks will be dying to see him, but not everyone can spend their days hanging around this sidewalk. Get my meaning? Your time here is money, my friend. You buy at a low State price, pay a little visit to a certain little place you and I know, I introduce you to some good people, you walk away with your pockets stuffed.”
Against his will, Alexander’s thoughts flared out to let in the chilled church air that had seemed cut from a slab unlike the air outside, the rolling of flashlight beams over the half-glimpsed manifestations of his most secret, inarticulate desires, the expansive, generous feeling that for a few heartbeats had swelled his chest with an exhilarating foretaste of adulthood, the sense of something happening, happening at last, in his life…
“How much, do you think?” he blurted.
The man leaned in to whisper, his lips almost touching Alexander’s ear.
“Get lost,” Alexander gasped, staring.
The man nodded solemnly. “Maybe more. Enough to take your train three or four times over.”
And immediately Alexander’s thoughts shrank to a bright, glaring pinpoint of anger. The station, the slobbery confidences he had drunkenly drooled to the bastard, the humiliation of watching the trains together… His insides twisted hotly. He took a step back.
“This ticket isn’t mine,” he said in a voice strained with renewed fury.
The man shrugged good-naturedly. “Whatever, I’m only trying to help. You’d be doing your family a favor. I mean, if I were your mother, I’d rather buy something nice with the extra cash than spend two hours sitting in a stuffy room listening to creaky violins. But I guess she really loves music. I always say, there’s no accounting for people’s tastes—”
“Don’t waste your breath,” Alexander spat, and turned away.
The night slithered past, leaving everything moist and glistening in its wake. Just before midnight, his mother shuffled by, mortifying him with some smelly cake wrapped in a bundle. As it grew later, the last dim windows in the apartment buildings lining the street were extinguished one by one, and the city was erased until morning, sunk like a dull, heavy stone to the nightly bottom of its dreamless sleep. He stood staring into the spring vastness of the sky, which floated so high above that it seemed to belong to an entirely different city, and his thoughts floated after it, unsettlingly adrift. He was here for one night only, though, so there was no need to worry about what the man had said, he wouldn’t trust him anyway, nor would he be around when the tickets went on sale, there was no need at all…
In another hour, a fellow with a brigand’s beard, from the front of the line, announced that they should expect to stay late the next day as well, and possibly the day after that, perhaps through the end of the week; a late-night delivery, said the fellow, was quite likely. He could not help thinking about it then, at least in passing. Little by little he fell into an uneasy conversation with Nikolai. Nikolai told him stories. His stories transpired on the far edges of the land, where the trees came so close together that the sun could not reach the ground, and fierce animals roamed the shores of blinding lakes, and men with chins rough as sandpaper and arms the width of his thighs drove trucks along dangerous roads, across twisting canyons, through small, wild villages where almond-eyed women wore their hair long and loose, and barefoot boys rode unsaddled horses, and lives had the timeless inevitability of legends…
When he stopped to catch his breath, Alexander swallowed and said, “But what would I tell them?”
Nikolai grinned at him. “Have a cigarette. Let’s see, you were already mugged once, right?… Well, how about—it fell out on the way home because you have a hole in your pocket.”
“I don’t,” Alexander said. His throat felt burnt.
“Do you happen to have that knife on you still? I thought you might. Here, don’t move for a second… and there you go, you do now. What do they teach you in school, anyway?”
Alexander pushed his fingers through the rip, wiggled them a little.
“Hey, I think that man there is calling you.”
Alexander wheeled around and abruptly dropped his cigarette at the sight of his father.
“Oh, yeah, him,” he said. “A fellow I drink with now and then. Well, better be off.”
“See you tomorrow?”
“Yeah, maybe, if I’m not too busy.”
Anna woke up when her husband and son stomped past the kitchen. She did not lift her head, only opened her eyes and watched them from the darkness. Her neck was sore; for the third night, she had fallen asleep at the table. The lived-in space around her was dense with the odors of sugar and the barely present suggestion of a roach spray used some weeks before.
She felt invisible.
The next morning, Sergei was still asleep; he always was these days. She paused in the bedroom doorway, looked at the side of his face squashed against the pillow. For one instant she thought she saw his eye dart tensely beneath his lid, and held her breath, but there was no other movement; she tiptoed out. In the kitchen, she packed the date tart into her school bag.
She had stopped by the floor below on the previous evening, to return the glasses and candlesticks she had borrowed. Elizaveta Nikitishna, her voice simpering, had asked about the anniversary supper. “Your twentieth, wasn’t it?” she had exclaimed. “How did it go?”
“It was lovely,” Anna had replied, and the neighbor, who was not married, had pressed her hands together and breathed out, “Oh Annushka, you’re so lucky.”
“Yes,” Anna had agreed sadly, gazing over Elizaveta Nikitishna’s shoulder at the stretch of her shining parquet corridor, a broom resting discreetly in a corner, ready to be banged against the ceiling at the first sounds of the tuba.
In school, Anna stashed the tart in her desk drawer and closed it with care, to trap the scent of musky fermentation. She taught three classes that day. She had decided she would call her first class to attention just before the bell rang, extract the treat with a modest flourish, smile as the children clapped; but when the time came, it was only ten in the morning, and amidst the bright confusion of sunbeams crossing on the ceiling she did not yet feel ready to part with the image she had carried within herself for almost a month—her husband in the luminous, intimate shadows of the candles, leaning toward her as he asked for another piece—though she did not blame him for her disappointment, of course; she knew it was only the line, scraping their days empty of meaning and warmth, taking them away from each other, making their lives so much smaller. She let the second class go as well. The third period seemed to last longer than its allotted hour. A boy stood up to read a story he had written, about a man who lost an arm in a factory incident under the old regime and later led his fellow workers in a righteous rebellion, shooting the factory director with his one good arm in the triumphant final scene. The boy’s exultant diction disturbed her; she gave him the highest mark. A girl asked for permission to take a bathroom break, and crept back almost half an hour later, crying. Anna tried not to look in her direction, but she felt an odd touch of fear—not fear of these children, exactly, but of some presence she sensed in the room, vicious and strident. When the bell sounded, she watched them leave without moving.