Not listening, he yanked the door open. As if on cue, the bell exploded with shrillness in the corridor. “Wait, please,” she gasped, folding a piece of paper with nervous hands, “give this to your father, just a few words, I’ve written down my number so he can call about the record—”
He tossed the note into his bag’s yawn without looking.
“Please remember what I told you, Sasha. I wish you well!” She had to shout now, as the hallways trembled with the thumping and roaring of the approaching stampede.
He met her fearful, pleading eyes. “There is a cookie all the way under the piano,” he said through his teeth. “You’ll have to crawl.”
She began to say something in response, but a wave of children had already swept her back into her classroom.
For a long time Alexander mindlessly walked the streets. When his soles felt numb and his toes ached from the confinement of the shoes he had outgrown, he headed to the park, preceded by the noiseless glide of dusk, followed by the orbs of dim lights popping up one after another in hazy rows in the skies above. In the park, leaves were falling darkly along the damp paths; his solitary steps rustled and crackled. There was someone sitting hunched over on his bench; through the thinning trees, he saw a dejected slump of shoulders in a gray jacket.
At the sound of his approach, the man looked up listlessly.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said. “You never came by with the money.”
“Maybe I spent it,” Alexander said.
“Did you?” His father’s voice was devoid of expression. “No tickets today anyway.”
“Mother wasn’t at school, if you really want to know.” He hesitated. “Had a day off or something. Shouldn’t you be at the theater?”
“I too have a day off,” his father said, his gaze dipping back to the ground.
He looked unwell, Alexander noticed, unkempt and somehow lost, graying at the edges of his unshaven face, his hands hanging limply between his knees.
“You all right?” he asked after a moment filled with an odd, tormented uncertainty.
“I’m fine, I’m fine. Hey, want to sit and talk? You have a while before your shift.”
Surprised at the small leap of gladness in his chest, Alexander sat down.
“I feel like we haven’t spoken in months,” his father went on.
“You can tell me all about your lectures, and I actually—that is, there is something I—”
Alexander had risen abruptly. “I’ve just remembered, I have this thing, I really must… Oh yeah, I have a note for you, where was it, it should be somewhere in here—”
His hands were blind with anxiety as he scooped along the bottom of the bag, closed his fingers at last on a piece of paper, threw it into his father’s lap, and strode away.
“Thank you, Sasha,” his father called out after him. He sounded peculiar, as if something harsh had squeezed his throat, but Alexander was too shaken to wonder about it.
That was close, I really must tell them, he thought, yes, I will sometime soon.
He crossed the street, briefly debating whether to stop by the line and confront his mother, then, deciding against it, hurried in the opposite direction. The building’s elevator had finally given up its ghost at the end of the summer; he assailed the staircase in leaps and bounds, mentally sorting through the stack of old books awaiting him on Viktor Pyetrovich’s desk, choosing the next few to borrow. A little boy he had seen in the line opened the door and wandered off without a word. In the dim, sad kitchen, where there clearly had been no cooking that day, Alexander brewed two cups of potent tea with exotic tea leaves he had procured on the black market some weeks before; by now he had necessarily grown adept at small domestic gestures, for Viktor Pyetrovich struggled with chores, awkwardly clutching his cane under his arm to free his hands, as often as not dropping it on the floor with a bonelike clatter and then striving painfully to pick it up, until Alexander rushed in from another room to relieve him. When the tea ceased its steaming, the two of them sat side by side on the checkered blanket spread over the old man’s bed in a close amber circle of light, drinking out of the silver glass holders, which was part of their ritual; and as the window before them slowly grew deep and blue, welling with the soft fall evening, Viktor Pyetrovich told him a marvelous story about Selinsky’s being accidentally locked up for the night in an ancient tomb, where bats’ wings slashed through the darkness like whispers and rare starlight drizzled down mysterious shafts in the massive walls, bringing hot, gamy wafts of deserts and camels and strange, nameless fruits whose mush tasted of girls’ kisses—and where Selinsky took a calm nap in the cold sarcophagus of some dusty pharaoh, and later, waking up to the same unending darkness, for hours sat testing the patterns of hollows and monoliths with the echoes of his singing, which some months hence became, of course, his celebrated Chamber of Echoes.
Every so often, glancing at the old man’s painstakingly shaven cheeks, at the excitable sparkle of his round glasses, Alexander would remember the horrible music teacher and her lies, and his chest would yawn with an immediate, frightening emptiness. He forced the feeling away. Shortly before ten o’clock, he helped Viktor Pyetrovich to his feet, and they walked to the line together, Alexander’s hand discreetly hovering just below the old man’s elbow. A few blocks away, someone was running along the opposite sidewalk, his unbuttoned jacket the color of night. Alexander paused for an instant, peering at the receding back that streaked in and out of shadow, wondering whether he had only imagined the man to be his father, wondering whether to call out. Then the instant passed; moving on, they arrived at the kiosk—and stepped into chaos.
People were dashing everywhere, hovering in agitated groups, shouting to one another: “Did you come out all right?”—“I’m fine, and you?” Alexander’s heart bolted. The tickets—the tickets must have finally gone on sale, it’s my mother’s shift, that means she’s got it, he thought with a rush of misgiving and, at the same time, inexplicable relief. His hold on Viktor Pyetrovich’s elbow tightening, he pushed through the throng, to where he could already see Nikolai towering over the crowd. He shoved his way closer. Nikolai was cursing in a frothy rage, spitting out, along with mouthfuls of saliva and blood, “Damn bastards, drunken thugs, they think we’re all spineless professors and fairies here, that they can just waltz in and do whatever the—”
Not the tickets.
“What happened?” Alexander screamed over the noise.
Voices tossed about.
“The Nightingales. They came and insulted us and things got out of hand and—”
“And there was a scuffle, they threw stones, some people were hit—”
“A woman’s badly hurt. They ran when they saw the ambulance—”
“A middle-aged woman with light hair?” Alexander said quickly.
“A thin woman in her thirties?” asked Viktor Pyetrovich, and touched the coat over his heart.
“No,” Nikolai said, and spat again, revealing a freshly chipped tooth. “It’s Vera, the girl who had the baby this summer. Bastards, I’ll get them for this, who do they think they are—”
Gradually the turbulence died down, the shouting subsided. The bearded organizer walked along the line with his nightly list. Someone started a game of solitaire on the curb, and, in the brittle fall air, the slapping of cards against concrete mixed with the clapping of pigeons’ wings in their abbreviated flights from windowsill to windowsill and the sharp shots of windowpanes slammed shut against the chill. After his outburst, Nikolai was unusually quiet. Their shift was halfway over when he spoke for the first time.