“I know my mother is difficult, but she’s a sad woman, Serezha,” she said in a whisper. “Thank you for—well, you know.”
Shame rose in his throat like bile.
“It’s nothing,” he said, but after she fell asleep, he got up and left the room and hid in the blindness of the kitchen. He thought of the anticipation that held him, tight like clenched hands, all through his blurry days, and the evenings unfolding at last, resonant and deep, their blue spirals full of Pavel’s singing, and passionate arguments with Vladimir Semyonovich about music and courage and destiny and many other things he had never put into words before, and later, Sofia’s light heels etching a map of the mysterious city, the city in which he lived, had lived all his life, but which he no longer recognized through the gentle rain of falling white petals, through the mist of his near-happiness; and every evening, as he walked her to her building, talking about the concert, or their favorite composers, or the books they had read as children, or nothing at all, his happiness would expand until he would feel again that stab of pain, that tormented gasping for air, just as, after a soft good-bye, she would run up the stairs to her door, her ascending steps—one, two, three, the fourth cut off by the door bang—inscribing themselves on the black sheet of quiet as the notes of some elusive score he strove to decipher, and retain in his memory, so that he could keep at least a small part of it with him while he waited impatiently for the next evening, for the next walk…
The hour crossed over the threshold of midnight. Globes of lamplights floated above the pavements, smoking with dense, foggy illumination; dogs held involved conversations in the distance, and, just down the street, a drunken brawl scratched the surface of the darkness with a flash of broken bottle, a flourish of headlights sliding down a blade—and still he sat without moving, seemingly without breathing, until he grew inseparable from the fabric of the spring night alive with pained, joyful, heady longings, with some vast, inarticulate promise; so much so that when, well after two o’clock in the morning, Alexander stumbled inside and made for the pantry without turning on the light, he confused his father’s legs for a shadowy extension of a chair and went sprawling, and cursing, on the floor.
4
“MY FOLKS ARE BECOMING UNHINGED,” Alexander said the next night, cupping glowing fingers around a flickering match. “The line’s getting to them.”
“Lucky for you you’ll be making your escape any day now.” Nikolai’s teeth flashed briskly. “You’d better start packing, my friend.”
“Yeah, sure,” Alexander muttered. For a while they smoked in silence, two specks of light in the softly chilled darkness diluted by pale squares of windows above (the streetlamp had burned out the night before), the smell of cheap cigarettes mixing with the chemical smell of gasoline and something he could not immediately identify—something sharp and clean and not altogether unpleasant. “You know, I’ve been thinking,” he said at last, “all these people waiting here for so long, just to get these tickets? Ever wonder about this man, what’s his name? I guess he must be pretty special.”
Nikolai’s jacket rustled; Alexander guessed at a shrug.
“I’m just here for the money,” Nikolai said. “A coward isn’t worth my time. Ran off when things got tough, didn’t he? Probably hangs around with the wrong kind of crowd Over There, too, I wouldn’t be surprised—lots of fairies abroad, makes you sick!”
Alexander frowned at him. There might have been a new gathering of stormy color around Nikolai’s left eye, but in the absence of light Alexander could not be sure. Nikolai shrugged again, shook his pack of cigarettes, poked inside it, turned it upside down and shook it with more violence, then spat, and tossed the pack away. “Damn it. All right, I won’t be long. And if these louts try to start without me again, tell them I’ll come back and wring their necks. You in?”
“I lost everything I had yesterday,” Alexander said with reluctance.
“I’ll lend you some.”
“I won’t be able to return it. My father has stopped paying me.”
“No worries, we’ll work something out!” Nikolai shouted from across the street.
Alexander was still looking after him when a laborious shuffle began at his back; he caught a straining movement out of the corner of his eye. The shadow straightened.
“Would you be so kind as to hold my place a minute, please,” said an elderly voice.
Alexander grunted noncommittally. The old geezer in line next to him kept to himself; they had not spoken. The retreating taps of the cane scraped along the line’s vertebrae, carrying away, he knew without turning, the crumpled cigarette pack that Nikolai had thrown to the ground. The geezer was long in finding a trash can; when he returned at last, Alexander sensed his tall, threadbare darkness leaning forward, and thought with exasperation, Going to lecture me on the uncivilized practice of littering, or else the harm of smoking… He glanced back all the same, irked by some vague, uncomfortable impulse—not quite curiosity, not quite belligerence. In the twilight that eclipsed the old man’s small, neat, clean-shaven face, two round, gleaming holes flashed white and liquid in the light of a passing car before going dull again.
“It’s not true, you know,” the old man said mildly, righting his glasses.
“What’s not true?”
“The things your friend said about Igor Selinsky. They aren’t true.”
“What, he’s not a fairy?”
“He is not a coward,” said the old man after a short silence.
“Ah, so he is a fairy, then,” Alexander shot back, and instantly wished he had not; but just then there was a jolting up ahead, an uproar of voices spilling over, and as the line started to stumble, to trip over itself, Nikolai appeared out of nowhere to break up the fight—or perhaps he had been in the fight to begin with—and everyone shouted and ran here and there; and soon, trading jovial insults, they were already setting up empty crates on the sidewalk, preparing for their nightly game of cards.
And Alexander played that night, and lost some more money, this time not even his own, and lost again the next night, and the night after that, and after a week, Nikolai, in his usual cheerful manner, relieved Alexander of his knife, telling him that he could win it back anytime he wanted, of course, and in any case he could always borrow it for a day or two; and though Alexander was very sorry to see the knife go, he made no protest, because he had lost it fair and square, but also, mainly, because as he was handing it over, scowling to save face, he suddenly understood just how much he loved these nights—loved the brightening chill in the air past midnight, the freedom of going nowhere, doing nothing, existing in some secret, timeless pocket of invisibility, some private allotment of night, alongside these gruff, dangerous men; staying awake, alert, alive, while in identical, ugly buildings all through the city, nighttime windows quickened with identical, ugly lives moving like cutout puppets on dozens of lit stages in dozens of predictable plays, until one after another the windows, overripe, fell to the ground and were swallowed by darkness, and the hated city crawled into a torpor of communal slumber—and still they were there, gathered under the broken streetlamp, at one, at two in the morning, the men in their close, noisy circle pungent with the smells of nicotine and sweat and exotic fruit (dates, someone said, a limited shipment, once transported in the crates they used for tables and chairs), their faces a wild jigsaw of obscurity and light as the hours leapt by and emptied bottles clanked and rolled at their feet and the beams of their flashlights swung in increasingly erratic zigzags, sideways, and up, and down, illuminating a chin made doubly massive by its square deposit of shadow, a nose grotesque with nostrils that appeared to smoke with a thicket of bright yellow hairs, a hand of cards, a hand sliding a bill into a pocket, a hand landing a blow, a nose swelling with nostrils that ran black and dense down another unshaven chin—and above it all flowed that smell, crisp and clean and exuberant, which, he now knew, was simply the smell of the dying spring mixed with a trace of possible happiness.