And I will say: I am ready.
He had not been back here since graduation—only a few months, but in that stretch of time his world had careened so far off its axis that it shocked him to find everything exactly as it had been: the reek of sweat and cafeteria gruel in the corridors, the magnified echoing of delinquent steps during the hush of classes, the forced enthusiasm of contests and day trips announced along the walls, the cavernous, unclean hopelessness of it all. He glanced at his wrist, then remembered and swore—he had sold his watch, along with some other trifles, to purchase a flashlight and a compass for his travels—then remembered again and, marveling at having already forgotten something that had seemed seared into his very bones by thousands of fearful repetitions, lifted his head to the enormous clock presiding over the entrance.
A class had started some fifteen minutes earlier.
He passed the dozing caretaker, took the stairs to the second floor, and halted, his hand raised, before the familiar classroom. A pupil’s timorous recitation had just fallen silent, interrupted by a woman’s admonishing, officious voice. The voice was not his mother’s.
He lowered his hand, considered the door, doubting his memory again, then, frowning, wandered over to the teachers’ lounge. It was deserted. The monthly schedule was posted on the wall. He studied it, but could not make out anything; whole portions of the grid were crossed out, “Substitute” slashing in a nasty red diagonal over some of the classes, names overwritten with names—
“Sasha, you’re here!” a high-pitched, fluttering voice exclaimed behind his back. “Oh, but how lucky, I have a free hour.”
He glanced over his shoulder, and was instantly dismayed. “I don’t have time to listen to music right now,” he said brusquely. “I’m looking for my mother.”
She did not seem to notice his rudeness.
“Oh, but I didn’t know your mother was here today,” she said.
“Where else would she be,” he snapped.
He expected a rebuke, but she only stared, her face unsettled, unsettling, quivering like a plate of dough about to rise. “Sasha, will you please come with me,” she said then, turning before he could refuse.
Feeling coerced and resentful, he followed her thick trotting back down the stairs, along hallways, around corners. She said nothing as they walked, and he too was silent, reluctant to ask a question, as if he had something to fear. Once inside the classroom, she closed the door behind them with care. “Please sit down,” she said.
He remained standing, his head bent, stubbornly studying the fraying laces of his aged shoes.
“I must warn you about something, Sasha.” Not looking up, he could hear her move to her desk with a nervous rapidity, jerk open a drawer, tug at something inside; there rose a rustle of crumpling, resisting paper. “Your mother doesn’t work here anymore. Now, I’m certain that she had her reasons to… not to… that is…”
She sounded so ill at ease that a feeling of pity seeped through his numbness. He lifted his eyes. “Zoya Vladimirovna, it’s all right,” he said, not knowing what he meant, knowing, in fact, that nothing was all right, that things were tilting and slipping and falling all around him.
“Oh no, how clumsy of me,” she mumbled as she dove to collect the cookies that had spilled out of the liberated paper bag and rolled crumbling under her chair. “I thought you might like them, they have jam inside… Still, if I just dust them off a bit, they’ll be quite… No?… Well, I do hope I’m not interfering, but you have so much to lose now, a student at our finest university, your mother was so proud, so proud. A few were surprised, to be honest, but I always knew, you always had so much potential…”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
She stopped fussing, turned to face him. “The concert, Sasha,” she said quietly. “There seems to be some sort of… It’s as if everyone connected with that line is being… That is, there was a regional inspector at the school and your mother had been missing for a week, sick, she said, but when he asked for a medical certificate, she didn’t have one. Then also the physics teacher, some pupils had complained about her past absences, the principal told us, but what kind of pupils complain about canceled lessons?… Do you understand what I’m saying? The chemistry assistant was let go as well, and some others, not just at our school either—”
The music room was flooded with cold white light, flattened lamps humming and muttering in the pockmarked ceiling. The few instruments arranged along the walls looked long dead, their dusty limbs stiff with graceless afterlife—instruments that had sinned perhaps, whether by playing mediocre music or by submitting to unclean fingers or lips, and were now being punished in the purgatory of a classroom. It occurred to him that if he were to run his hand up and down the piano keys, there would be nothing but a horrid wooden clacking.
“I don’t know what this has to do with me,” he said, his words viscous and slow, coming out with effort, as though he had to peel each one off the roof of his mouth.
“I feel it’s my duty to warn you, Sasha… Are you sure you wouldn’t like one, they’re only a little stale…” She had finished gathering the escaped cookies off the floor and was dropping them into the bag now; noticing a hair hanging off one, she blew on it, studied the cookie pensively, then placed it whole in her mouth.
“The concert,” she said indistinctly, “cannot take place, in any case.”
He caught a glimpse of her pale thick tongue, her moist gums working, and shuddered.
“Look, Sasha—” She paused to swallow, stepped closer to him. Her whisper smelled of shortbread. “I have a friend who has a friend who knows someone who sometimes travels Over There on State business. As a favor, the man occasionally brings back magazines and books about music. Between my friend and me, we can decipher four languages.”
An unpleasant urgency began to spread through him. He wanted to leave. “Congratulations,” he said; he sounded nasty, though he had not meant to. “I’ll be going now.”
“Wait, please wait.” Her tone had deepened into gravity, which somehow bothered him more than her chirping. “Some time ago I read an article about Selinsky’s last symphony, his ninth. The symphony was left unfinished, but what there is must be amazing. He was at his desk, you see, just where he’d spent most of his life, working on it, when he died.”
There was a silence then, and more silence, and silence still, even the lamps on the ceiling had ceased their low humming, until it seemed to him that the silence grew larger than the glaring white room crammed with dead sounds, muffling it, muffling them, in its fog—and he needed to say something, anything, to break free.
“It was in a foreign language, right?” His voice was harsh. “You misunderstood.”
“I used a dictionary. Igor Selinsky isn’t coming, Sasha. He died seven years ago. I like your mother very much, and I have every respect for your father, but this—this is dangerous. Please abandon the line.”
He looked at the aging woman standing before him in her bunched-up dress, crumbs in the corners of her mouth, her watery eyes enormous behind her glasses. He would have liked to throw some insult at her, to call her a coward, a liar, a joke, but he was too angry to speak. He turned to go, and a host of his reflections, a look of condemnation frozen in their eyes, ran in elongated rivulets down the dim sides of the brass instruments at his feet. She was fluttering after him now, warbling something about the Selinsky record, how she had been trying, she had not forgotten, in fact, a friend of hers might have something after all, not just yet but soon enough, she had even attempted to reach their apartment a few times, but her mother must have accidentally left a wrong telephone number in the school files, it was answered by an old woman who told her no Anna Andreyevna lived there—