He departed without anyone’s having seen him.
They covered the distance to her home almost at a run, not talking. He felt the neighborhood streets stretching tediously like an accordion, his impatience a drawn-out note, his thoughts a feverish, excited, apprehensive whirl. At last they were there. One, two, three, four—but now the echoes of their footsteps merged together, the resistance of the front door yielding magically under his hand; and already they were leaving the blank outside darkness to enter the enchanted darkness inside.
She pressed the elevator button. He imagined the cramped cage sliding open before them, the cigarette butts and spittle on its rickety floor, and how close they would stand, and was all at once nervous and distracted; but after she had held her finger on the button for a long, frustrating moment, it became clear that the elevator was stuck somewhere above.
“It’s only the fourth floor,” she said. “I’m sorry. Please watch your step, the lights are out.”
He followed her, blindly feeling his way along the banisters, her silhouette dissolved in the murkiness of the unlit flight of stairs, then outlined, briefly, tantalizingly, against the pale glow of a narrow window on the landing, and dissolved, and outlined again. With each ascending step, he sensed the nearing of so many nighttime mysteries, simple and inevitable as breathing—even if it was his own, somewhat labored, middle-aged breathing as he trudged up, and up, and up; but also, and no less compellingly as he climbed higher, pressing the precious parcel against his chest, glimpsing the increasingly distant floating of the streetlamp spheres in the city that was being left below, he began to anticipate at last the unwinding of the as yet unheard Selinsky melody—that ecstatic rising from note to note, that rare, exultant, vertiginous moment he loved most of all, when his very essence seemed drawn out of his body after a piercing surge of music, when all the inexpressible, mute feelings, all the neglected longings of his soul, found a language full and perfect and forgiving, flowing freely in some other place where beauty was as ever-present as air, where future was pure time, endless time, allowing space enough for anything and everything, all the hopes he had ever cherished, all the greatnesses he had ever wanted to accomplish, all the dreams from which he had ever woken up—
“I apologize for the smell,” Sofia said, turning. “Cats, you know.”
He started, stumbled, nearly laughed, and, slipping on something mushy—a potato skin, maybe—descended heavily to his knees, his bag tangled below him.
“Are you all right?” she asked quickly, reaching out to catch him, her eyes moving in the dimness, a hovering, concerned angel with a pale bluing of the temples.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he said, rising with stiff dignity.
He tried not to dwell on the unmistakable sensation of something plastic snapping beneath him as his weight had come down to the floor.
In the doorway, she put her finger to her lips.
“It’s late,” she whispered, “people are sleeping.”
He was not sure whether she was talking about neighbors whom she did not want alerted to a stranger’s visit so close to midnight, or about someone living in her apartment. He stepped into the darkness after her, and then her hand was in his. He pressed her fingers, her ring pinching him painfully, and the darkness swirled around them, fast, faster, in breathless eddies that pulsated with the enormous pounding of his heart; but her hand resisted his pressure, pulling him forward instead. Obeying, he moved after her between the corners of unseen furniture, a straggling light from the street below fleshing out the many frames that glinted on the wall—no doubt paintings, soft, honey-rich paintings he would see in the daylight soon—and a hump of blankets on the sofa where, he supposed, her father lay slumbering, dreaming of plush slippers and small bowls of preserves and other simple comforts of uneventful old age—
I am not old, he thought with defiance, I am not old yet, I am only forty-seven, I will not be old for a long time… A door opened, shut behind them, her hand eluded him, the light went on. He closed his eyes for an instant as the sun exploded in his head, then saw a room emerging.
“Please, sit down,” she said. “I’m sorry about the mess, I didn’t expect—”
There was a chair; he sat. The curtains were powder-blue, and the small space seemed to undulate with a profusion of clothes, cloths, fabrics; the night wind blew the curtains, the shadows, the cooling of August, inside through an open window, and the sleeve of a discarded blue blouse moved ever so lightly, like a wing rising and falling, like the breath of someone peacefully asleep. He felt as if he had found himself at the heart of a cool blue jewel filled with faint, fluid breezes, brushing through him like the advent of happiness.
The room was so narrow that his knees touched the edge of her bed, but he did not look at the bed. He watched her back instead as she bent over the record player on her dresser, watched her hands as she carefully wiped the spindle with a square of cloth.
She straightened, picked up the record, gazed at him. “Do you know what I imagine?” she said. “Something so new I can’t even imagine it. I was born three years after he left. Something I don’t know, then. Something I can’t suspect exists, do you understand?”
Their eyes fit together at last, and there it was—the dizziness, the night wind caressing her hair, his heart losing its mooring, falling somewhere, somewhere joyous, the music spiraling into the skies through the gash of the window, higher, higher, her clothes cascading to the floor as she took a barefoot step, leap, flight toward him, the violins sobbing over a life that was nearly wasted, but not quite, not quite…
Turning back to the player, she slid the record out of its sleeve.
He heard a pained intake of breath.
“What is it?” he asked.
“The record is badly cracked,” she said in a near-whisper. “I don’t know whether—I’ll try, of course, but I don’t think—see, it’s almost broken in half—”
He stood from his chair, looked in turn. The wind died in the room.
As the record began to rotate, the tonearm shook and jumped and jerked, and there were horrible hiccups, and the noise of teeth grinding, and, most heartrending of all, a tiny snippet of a melody—three, four notes, which kept repeating themselves, reaching the edge of beauty again and again a mere heartbeat before going over into a crackling chasm.
He attempted to talk, but his lips only rustled like dried insect wings.
The tonearm shivered to a stop.
“I’m so sorry, but it won’t work,” she said, taking the record off.
“No, no, let me, I will, I might—” He tore the record out of her hands, and pressed it back on the turntable, and pushed, and pulled, and kneaded, his trembling fingers trying to cajole the sound into life, in vain, for things kept jamming, and some invisible machinery groaned in protest, until, gently wresting the record away from him, she said, “Please, Serezha, it’s no use, you’ll just break the player.”
On the other side of the wall, sofa springs complained as someone shifted.
“I should be going,” he said, and stood motionless for another silent moment.
“I’ll walk you out,” she said.
In the hallway, they paused. She had left the door to her room open, and the low, blue-tinted light splashed about their shadowy reflections in the mirror.
“Sergei Vasilievich, really, it’s all right,” she said softly, “you’ll hear the real thing in only three months, three or four, very soon now, don’t be so upset.”