“How about a little stroll? To stretch our legs. Our friends will cover for us.”
His voice was casual, but there was something unfamiliar, something heavy, in his eyes.
“All right,” Alexander said after a moment’s hesitation.
Nikolai moved through the night with a purposeful air; Alexander walked a step or two behind, hurrying to keep up. “Where are we going?” he asked a few blocks later—though he had guessed by then, of course.
Nikolai stopped, turned to face him, gripped his shoulders.
“I have a sixteen-year-old daughter,” he said fiercely, “only a few years younger than that girl. This kind of thing—we can’t allow it, it’s a matter of honor, do you understand?”
He was off again, almost running now, before Alexander could reply.
When they arrived, the street was empty, the Nightingales’ kiosk locked, its TICKETS sign glistening dark and wet, as if newly painted, under a streetlamp; the announcement in the window stated that the Little Fir Trees would play on December 27 and the tickets would go on sale a week in advance.
“Well,” Nikolai said, lighting a cigarette, “what do you say to camping out here for a bit, in case anyone turns up? I happen to have some fuel with me, it will feel like the good old days.”
“Sure,” Alexander said, without much enthusiasm; but a while later, after the darkness had grown so obscure that he had to feel for the bottle’s neck with his increasingly tentative fingers, he found himself settling into the night, leaning back into it as on one of those couches he remembered from his time in the sleeper car, and the night soon began to move off, rocking gently, just like a train departing for some remote destination from the station he had not visited in many months, and the full October moon bounced from roof to roof like one of the train’s wheels. And after a stretch of distance, or perhaps a length of time, he saw that there was not one but two beautiful, hazily radiant wheels speeding off into unknown celestial regions, and marveled at them, openmouthed, glad that life held so many surprises for him still—and then, in a rush, remembered everything once again. The nauseating suspicion gnawed anew through his insides, slowing the night down, merging the two brilliant wheels into one small, flat moon, making the train within him come to a halt at last with a grinding sigh; and, stumbling over his words, he found himself telling Nikolai about the music teacher, and the concert that would not take place, and Selinsky’s death at some desk in some place with a foreign name, some random point on the globe, seven years ago.
“That,” Nikolai said thickly, “is nonsense. Three hundred people can’t be wrong. Your teacher is a fool.”
“You really think so?” Alexander cried—and instantly felt that something within him, something vast and bright, was giving way, being released. He pressed his face into Nikolai’s shoulder, and the man’s thick jacket smelled of smoke and, unexpectedly, good home cooking, and Alexander wept, and couldn’t stop weeping, like the child he had been once—weeping for this life in which nothing ever happened, weeping for his mother, and his father, and Viktor Pyetrovich who had wasted so much time waiting for something to happen, waiting in vain, for nothing ever happened in anyone’s life; and then, somehow, he knew, without looking up, that Nikolai was weeping too, heaving with huge, childish sobs, his voice wobbling between gulps somewhere above him: “Listen, Sashka, I never—I never meant to sell the ticket, it’s for my daughter, my daughter’s sick, very sick, so I thought maybe, if she could only hear someone famous, someone great, she would get up, she would go, perhaps she would even feel better, they say music can cure people… But the kiosk seller, that bitch, we made her a good offer, but she wouldn’t listen, so now we all wait, my wife, my wife’s brother, he is helping too, he’s a good fellow even if he’s a fairy, has a beautiful voice… But those bastards, nothing is sacred to those people, they’d trample on anyone’s hopes, they—”
He fell silent, choking on wet gasps, and Alexander was overcome by a tremendous warmth, an urge to proclaim all the gratitude, all the affection he suddenly felt for this man. He yearned to find the words, but his thoughts kept scattering, so he wrested the bottle away, and, holding it up to the light of the streetlamp, blurted out, “Thank you, friend, that’s good stuff, not like that poison I once had that wouldn’t even burn.”
Nikolai lifted his head. His wet face sloshed in the light.
“What did you say?”
“I said thank you for this, I think you’re—that is, I’m glad that you and I—I mean—”
“That,” Nikolai said, leaping to his feet, “is precisely what we need. Any paper in your bag?”
Alexander watched, stupidly but without protest, as Nikolai upended his bag. Two books flopped to the ground, followed by a couple of school notebooks Alexander kept meaning to toss out, and some crumpled odds and ends.
“These will do as kindling,” Nikolai said, appropriating the notebooks, kicking the rest aside. “Even sorry fellows like me know better than to damage books.”
Together, they balled up the lined and checkered pages crisscrossed with teachers’ markings; then Nikolai sloshed what was left in the bottle against the back of the kiosk. “There’s no streetlamp on this side, so it’s less risky here,” he said grinning. “More private.” After that, things grew a bit hazy in Alexander’s mind. He remembered Nikolai swearing and blowing on his fingers as match after match hissed and wavered and went out, and the first, cautious lick of a flame shriveling a page, and another, and all at once a spreading blaze, a rush of light and heat, the rearing of something bright and great and angry, like the anger Alexander himself was now feeling, anger at the lies, at the lines, at the inability ever to know anything for sure, at the inability to break the hollow bonds of time, the painful bonds of place, that bound them all—but break out he would, he promised himself as he ran down the street laughing, Nikolai running and laughing in the darkness somewhere ahead, break out he would, and his life would be different, one way or another it would be different, full and brilliant like—like the full, brilliant life of the mysterious genius Igor Selinsky, who was alive, of course, alive somewhere, and not bent over some desk, either, but having glorious, fantastical adventures—or the full, brilliant wheels rolling over the skies, drawing closer and closer to some faraway, brightly lit, wondrous place—or the fire he recalled seeing somewhere not that long ago, the full, brilliant fire that danced behind his closed eyelids as he was falling asleep in his small, drafty room.
Just before he drifted off completely, he remembered with a jolt that Viktor Pyetrovich’s books, the books he had borrowed that evening, remained lying on the ground among the jumbled contents of his raided bag, and was touched by a chill of apprehension. But his apprehension flickered and died like another clumsy match, and he laughed softly into the pillow, seeing the frenzy of the flames before his eyes, their magnificent, dazzling red color.
3
FOR A VERY LONG TIME, possibly an hour, maybe longer, Sergei sat on the bench looking at the folded note in his lap, at the treble clef on its back. The note was crumpled, frayed, almost furred at the edges. She must have written it weeks earlier, and someone had neglected to pass it along; or else it had traveled for days up and down the line, gathering mold and crumbs from the insides of anonymous purses and pockets, ending up at last in Sasha’s bag. He hesitated to read it, fearing that it might disintegrate in his grasp—or so he told himself.