He looked at the ground, his shoes, hers—and in the next instant remembered the broken silver heel he had found just inside the door upon his return home that night—that night…
“Monday,” he said blankly. “I can start mornings on Monday.”
2
“EVER THINK about the nature of time?”
(Time? The flowing river one can never enter unchanged. The snake swallowing its tail. A dainty watch on the wrist of a beautiful woman who, in walking through the city, fends off eternal queries called out from all sides: “What time is it, please, and if you have a minute to spare, would you like to go for a walk?” Time as a monster devouring its children, time as the breath of God, time as the chalk-crumbling formula of a physicist sanctified by a silver nimbus of hair. And, for most of us, our own small stretch, bleak and fast-rolling along its darkening bends, the happiest moments most likely spent hoping for something wondrous, something luminous—a brush, perhaps, with a tiny miracle of immortality, a sunbeam forever preserved in an amber tear, Faust’s doomed plea: “Instant, freeze, you are perfect!” Oh, I could tell you plenty about time, but I will stay silent, I will merely listen.)
“Time?”
“Yes, time. Here’s a question for you: Does waiting make time move faster, or slower?”
“Slower, of course. Everyone knows that time flies when you’re happy, but when you’re waiting, each moment crawls by.”
(Each moment, they say. Ah, but moments are akin to snowflakes, no two alike. Some extend back like powerful microscopes, zeroing their light on some spot in the past, until the recollection, bright, enlarged, is spread for your contemplation as if under glass. Others remind you of that curiously unpleasant mathematical paradox, that hapless runner trying to reach point B from point A in eternal increments of half the remaining distance, doomed never to arrive at his destination, the units of time sliding one out of another like endless smaller compartments hidden in larger ones, again and again and again, suspending time in an agony of futile anticipation. Then, of course, there are others, light and enjoyable, fleet and indistinct like dreams, like delightful childhood whooshes down a slide in some forgotten park, like so many of their moments spent waiting, spent daydreaming, here—if they but knew it. Here, then, is a better question for you: If you’re happy when you’re waiting, what happens to time then?)
“Me, I just can’t help wondering—we’ve given up almost a year of our lives for one or two hours of enjoyment. Is it worth it?”
“But what would you be doing with your year if you weren’t here? Let’s face it, most likely you’d just be wasting it. In fact, this year of waiting hasn’t been all that different from any other year of your life, has it—a whole lot of doing nothing—except now you can look forward to an hour of happiness at the end.”
(Oh, but your year has been different—you’ve felt awake, you’ve felt alive, you’ve merged your icy breath with snow, you’ve walked midnight streets dusted with petals, you’ve read poems etched by decaying leaves into the sidewalks, you’ve stepped inside other homes, other lives, you’ve been touched by a brighter world. Of course, I will not say it, I will keep silent, I will merely smile at you to give you hope.)
“An hour of happiness, eh? But what if the concert doesn’t live up to its promise, what then? Won’t we feel stupid!”
“Well, I don’t think it matters how good it will be. After a year of waiting it will seem wonderful, anyway. Haven’t you ever noticed, the longer you wait for something, the better it is?”
(There was a poem I read in an old book once, a beautiful poem about desire.
But it was decades ago, I forget now, there is just that snippet at the end, how did it go…?
Ah no, it’s all gone, quite gone now.)
“I disagree. The longer you wait, the higher your expectations. I suspect that’s why people are beginning to leave in droves. Afraid to be disappointed, that’s what I think.”
“Leaving in droves? Who’s leaving in droves?”
“Why, lots of people! Look around you. Where is that old woman with the carved cane? Or that fellow with the birthmark on his forehead? Or that other guy—you know the one—”
“Wait, you don’t suppose—you don’t think they might have been—well, you know—”
“What are you muttering there, I can’t hear you!”
“Nothing, nothing, I’m just… It’s nothing.”
“Well, if it’s nothing, you should keep your mouth shut, people are nervous enough as it is.”
Silence fell among them, but the knot would not loosen in Sergei’s insides; and when, sometime later, he turned to Sofia to say good-bye, to explain that he would no longer be here in the evenings, he found her absent.
“But—where is she?” he exclaimed involuntarily.
Vladimir Semyonovich had not appeared for two days. An unfamiliar schoolgirl whose face shone like a polished door handle stared at him with curiosity. “If you mean the mousy woman who always looks like she has a toothache, she had to leave early today. I’m holding her place till the next shift arrives. Does she owe you money or something?”
He shook his head, looking away already, his heart gone, replaced by a cold, hard pebble.
The morning light was somber, clouds sagging almost to the ground with their dank bellies. The city seemed flat, a black-and-white snapshot of itself, and the line, in which he took his place morosely, appeared to have shrunk as well, to have lost the wide, light-filled spaces where he had dwelled between the hours of waiting all through the spring and summer. The people around him had faces closed with worry—a girl who stared vacantly at the sky, a screeching basket by her feet; a brightly painted middle-aged woman with eyes like silver coins, whom he had seen on a few occasions talking to Pavel and who turned away when he attempted to greet her; a pale little boy behind him, who looked at him levelly and asked, “And who are you?”
“I’m Sergei Vasilievich,” Sergei said, “and what’s your name?”—but as the boy continued to regard him with a quiet, reproachful, painfully familiar gaze, his heart was back without warning, and sliding somewhere sideways, and for one moment he thought—he thought… But of course it couldn’t be, it wasn’t, he hastened to tell himself as he dove into his bag, fumbling for his book, not daring to look at the boy another time.
“There was a lady here before you,” the boy said, “she was kind and beautiful, she made cakes and told me many happy stories of her childhood—”
“Pleased to meet you, young man,” Sergei said firmly, already opening the weighty compilation of musical biographies.
When the endless shift was over at last, he was startled to discover a block of uncut time on his hands. He went home to pick up his tuba, as he would in the normal course of things, then trudged through the city. The park filled him with an obscure sense of shame, but there was no better place in the neighborhood for wasting hours undisturbed. He found a secluded bench and sat there until nightfall, watching the city turn into a negative of its daytime self—windows bright, skies black, houses blurry—watching time drop grain by grain from the greedy beaks of the frenzied pigeons fighting for crumbs on the paths, while his tuba rusted at his feet. Shortly before ten, he meandered along the streets she might pass on her way home. He did not see her; nor did he see her the next day, or the day after that.