“Well, good night, then,” she said softly.
For a long time, his heart muttering, he lay awake in the muffled chill of their darkened bedroom. The clock ticked, measuring out the empty leakage of his existence, prodding the year toward a close he was no longer able to imagine. His thoughts rambled. He thought of meeting Sofia, of meeting Anna, of the parchment-colored lamp glowing on his parents’ veranda through a moth-whipped procession of summers lined in deep velvet; thought, too, of a few weeks in his childhood that he had spent practicing a violin solo in preparation for a school competition. It was to be the event of the school year: it was rumored that the piece’s famous composer himself would come to judge the performances. All his classmates hoped to win, of course—the ambitious ones, to add another medal to their collection of distinctions; the obedient ones, to please their parents; the more farsighted ones among them, to attract the composer’s benevolent interest in their future careers. He did not care about any of those things. He saw the piece as a puzzle that he had to solve, a deceptively simple mechanism of a sad melody that, if unlocked, would spring open to reveal a hidden compartment full of magical meaning. He followed the prescribed notation in class, but in the evenings, ensconced in the autumnal sonorousness of the unfolding high-ceilinged rooms of his parents’ winter mansion as if inside a giant reverberating bell, he secretly embellished the phrase until, continuing along invisible trajectories and modulations that seemed inevitable to him, he transformed it into something different—something his own.
He tore through the final week before the competition in a state of shaky, joyful anticipation, imagining first the astonishment, then the understanding, pleasure at last, dawning on the as yet unseen face. His excitement crested in leaps and jolts, a wild bright-eyed beast cavorting with glad abandon in his ten-year-old soul—but just days before the event, men ran down the city streets in muddy boots, and windows shattered and shuttered, and someone soft-voiced spoke with a slight burr on the radio, assuring the populace of the good of something that he himself, enveloped in the safe warmth of his childhood, did not understand—and he never got to stand onstage before the celebrated composer, a violin trembling beneath his chin.
Half asleep, he wondered whether that might not have been his happiest day ever, the last, perfect day swelling with the immensity of his secret intent, secret creation—the day before everything changed—the day before he realized, for the first time, yet with absolute finality, just how small his private immensity really was when measured against that other vast, dark, impersonal immensity, call it God, or history, or simply life.
Anna had already left when he awoke the next morning. His head ached after a bumpy night filled with potholed dreams, though for just one instant, before his headache had set in, he seemed to sense a piercing vibration in the air, a lingering coda of a winding, heartrending melody that swiftly faded out of his reach before he could fully hear it in his daytime mind, its silver shadow diving deeper into the murk of the night’s oblivion. In the kitchen he discovered a cup of lukewarm tea, a slice of ossified toast, and a folded note addressed to him in Anna’s most elaborate script. He shoved the toast into the trash can, and the note, unread, into his jacket pocket, and left for work.
The rain had ended at last; the fall sky stretched pale and remote over the city. In the sharp morning clarity, the theater was dingy as a basement, its windows squares of imitation daylight hung in a laundry line of unwashed sheets on the gloomy red walls. The unnatural dusk of the orchestra pit pressed on Sergei’s eyelids; all through the performance, he felt as if he was struggling, and failing, to open his already opened eyes. The brandishing of the banners, the barking of the brasses, finally, mercifully, over, he headed up the stairs to the director’s office. He was met halfway by Ivan Anatolievich himself, just descending. Forced to halt two steps below the man’s bulging peacock-colored vest, Sergei had to tilt his head far back, to address him from the undignified, humiliating position of a beseecher.
“Ivan Anatolievich, I would like a favor,” he said, a bit curtly, fighting to control his irritation. “The matinee hours are no longer convenient for me, you see, so I thought—”
As he talked, he could feel his neck growing stiff. The director listened, stroking the iridescent swell of his satin stomach, visibly amazed. “I don’t think you quite comprehend your situation,” he said at last, squinting down at Sergei; seen from below, his lips crawled between his jowls like two fat, glistening caterpillars. “It’s my duty as the head of this establishment to make sure each and every citizen in my care will reach his fullest potential, and therefore—” Sergei tried to sidestep him so they were level, but the director’s belly was in the way. His anger was returning, its blind, wild flames licking at his insides, spreading, spreading… The officious voice continued to drone. “—and since your political maturity at this juncture is a matter of grave concern, I would not deem it possible, in view of the event of which you are well aware—the black mark on your record, so to speak—”
“How do you live with yourself, you sanctimonious pig!” Sergei suddenly roared. “I urinated alongside a foreign national!”
They stared at each other.
“You,” the director boomed, “are fired.”
In the hallways, musicians scattered; out of the corner of his eye Sergei saw Sviatoslav vanishing with great alacrity around the corner. He looked directly into the fat man’s shaking, reddened face, not moving for the duration of one full, liberated inhalation.
Then he nodded and, in silence, turned and walked down the stairs.
Outside, the day had deepened in color, was blue and cool and crisp, threaded with gossamer flashes of cobwebs flying by in the wind; the leafy chill in the air crinkled like the cellophane wrapper of a candy mauled by an impatient child. People waited at tram stops, rustling their newspapers with resignation; he glimpsed the front-page headlines, damp with smudged red print, proclaiming from benches and sidewalks: “No Place for Indecisiveness in Our Race to the Finish Line!” The city was already starting to accumulate air in its lungs in preparation for the trumpet blast of yet another anniversary of the Change. He strolled past, his hands in his pockets—a man in no hurry to be anywhere, a man who had fallen wholly outside the bustle and fuss of history, a man with a tremendous weight, the weight of a century, lifted from him. As his hands nested deeper in his pockets, he felt something flimsy catch between his fingers. He withdrew the note, paused to unfold it.
“Happy forty-eighth, Serezha!!” Anna had written. “May it be your best year yet.”
For a minute he gazed at the two exclamation points, then opened his fingers; the note became a leaf in a whirl of leaves and spiraled away.
They met in the street with the abandoned church at one end and the kiosk at the other.
“All taken care of,” he said brightly. “I can do the morning shifts now.”
“Oh, good,” she said, but her voice was restrained, as if some other intonation beat against it. “I’ll be switching to evenings, I guess. When do you start your new schedule?”
Only now did he understand the full implications of their revised arrangement. He sucked in his breath, thought briefly, agonizingly, of saying, Listen, I’m happy to do mornings, but let me keep evenings as well, I don’t mind, I don’t actually have—that is, I’ve been temporarily—I mean, sooner or later, I’m sure, it will be—