After a while, he glanced at his watch. Five minutes had passed since Sasha had left him.
He tore the note open, and his world flushed hot and bright.
It was brief, no greeting, no signature. “Visit me anytime,” it said, in large, shaky letters; she had scribbled it hurriedly, he saw, while standing in line, probably balancing the scrap of a score on her book. Underneath was the address. The lines were crucified by creases, nearly illegible, but enough to make out the apartment number—the number he had not been able to erase from his memory for weeks, the number at which he had stared for some tortured minutes at the end of the summer, lingering in the dimness of her landing, waiting, not daring to knock.
The hands of his watch continued to creep with tormenting slowness, as if the figures on its face were spread with glue; yet second by agonizing second, time squeaked along. Just before ten he rose and strode to her building, fast, faster now, until he found himself running, running through the shadows, through the chill of October, past some commotion exploding with cries a short distance away, then falling behind him, past some faceless passersby—a few men sprinting by, students perhaps, tossing jokes to one another with the high spirits of youth, a dutiful grandson leading his aged grandfather on a leisurely stroll—all of them sketched by the night in black ink on a black background, the city’s small, quiet gestures brushing by him like an autumn wind.
He was out of breath when he reached her street. He counted, one, two, three, four; the windows on her floor alternated light with darkness, and he did not know which one was hers. He stood looking up, until his neck grew stiff, then, gathering himself, went inside.
He did not want to ring her bell for fear of waking the invisible someone who slept on the invisible sofa under the invisible paintings, so he knocked softly, and after a while knocked again. The door opened suddenly, and there she was, her coat still thrown over her shoulders, her shadow falling across the threshold at his feet. He was pierced by an instant disappointment: she was not as he remembered her, as he had imagined her all these weeks, but drawn and plain and blanched, her eyes flat. Then her gaze met his, and she was as before, her face sewn out of tiny particles of pure, transparent light.
She did not seem surprised to see him, but quickly, before he could say anything, pressed her finger to her lips and moved away. He followed her through the unlit places to her room, and the room appeared subtly different, as though it had obtained more angles since his first and only visit, but he did not have time to notice anything else, for she now closed the door and turned to him, and his heart was again sliding somewhere flushed and vivid and happy.
“So kind of you to check on me,” she said in a low, urgent voice. “I’m all right, but poor Vera, oh, it was horrible, I’ve just been sitting here stunned ever since—”
He did not know what she was saying; he did not listen, could not listen. He took a step forward, and somehow so did she, and for a few heartbeats he felt her melting into his shoulder, his chest; but as he buried his fingers in her hair, so soft, so surprisingly soft, he sensed her stiffening, forcing him away, slipping back.
“I fear you’ve misunderstood, Sergei Vasilievich,” she said repressively.
They looked at each other without moving; her face was as it had been in the doorway, drained of light. She seemed on the verge of saying something else. He waited, watching her lips, watching her eyes, wondering wildly, desperately, whether he might somehow die at this suspended moment, the hands of his watch forever frozen now. Then, wordlessly, she turned away, crossed over to the window; and as he followed her weary progress, her coat dragging behind her like some heavy-limbed, wounded creature, he finally saw what was different about the room: its surfaces were erupting with bulky masses of the ancient gramophones from her museum, the corners crowded with a dark geometry of shapes. His breath scratched painfully at his chest; he remembered the night when she had played him gypsy romances and sat listening to the music with her eyes closed, her face solemn yet also ecstatic, angelic, remembered the blue hollows of her temples, the shape of her mouth as it formed the word “special”—
When he spoke, his voice barely held together.
“You got my note” (“I never got a note from you,” she whispered, still not facing him), “and you wrote me your note, inviting me here, and—”
“I never wrote you a note.”
This time he heard her.
“You never—why are you—you must think I’m—”
The paper trembled in his hand as he stretched it toward her across the darkness, trembled more in hers. “It’s not my handwriting,” she said faintly.
“It’s your address, whose handwriting can it possibly be?”
“My father-in-law.”
“Your who? Your—”
“My father-in-law. The concert ticket is for him. He lives here. I thought you knew I was—”
There was a minute of perfect blindness—a bright blindness, white and cruel and harsh, and a rush, a swishing of blood in his ears, like a drum, a tribal drum, and someone was screaming, and swinging, and all around, things were crashing to the floor, crashing with metallic, screeching noises of disintegrating machinery, shiny black cogs leaping away from the light like insects, horrible, meaningless insects that should be squashed, like this, like this, yes, all of it meaningless, and cacophonous, and never-ending… And then the door was thrust open, and in a sudden square of stark, orange illumination he saw himself standing in the middle of her room, a gramophone bleeding at his feet, and in the doorway a pale barefoot boy in an oversized nightshirt, blinking at them with frightened eyes the color of broken glass.
Her hands were at her mouth. The room was absolutely still.
The boy said, “Why are you wearing your coat, what happened, Mama?”
Sergei sat down on the floor.
“Nothing, nothing,” she was saying, “go to sleep, this is Sergei Vasilievich from the line, I accidentally dropped this and he’s helping me fix it, go back to sleep.”
The boy stared at them, then stumbled off, his face already vague with the next dream. The door remained open, but the orange light went out. Time slowly took off again.
The gramophone was quite dead now.
“Oh, God,” he said dully.
She kneeled next to him. Tiny mysterious pieces lay all around them.
“We can’t fix this,” she said quietly, not looking at him.
“Oh, God. I didn’t mean—I’ll buy you a new one, I—”
“This was the oldest model we had. The one—you remember.” “I remember.”
“I take them home once a year for special cleaning. You can’t buy them, there are very few of them left—”
“I’ll find one, I have connections, I know people who could… Please, let me help you.”
They spoke as if their voices belonged to others, and they still would not look at each other as their hands efficiently crept across the floor, avoiding accidental touches, hunting out sad misshapen remains from under her chair, from under her bed. After a while she said, “What’s that, is it smoke?” and, standing up, returned to the window, and opened it, and leaned out. “Something’s burning out there, can you smell it?”
“No,” he said, standing up also. “I should go. I must tell you I—”
“Please, don’t,” she said. She remained at the window. At the threshold of her room he dared to lift his eyes to her, but she was gazing out over the city, her face averted. With an ache that was unlike any he had ever known, small and hard and infinite, infinite, he thought, This is it, this is final, my last view of her—and he tried to gather her into his memory as she was, her shadowy back, her graceful fingers resting listless on the windowsill, the incline of her neck that seemed somehow hurt, as if her thoughts were too heavy for it to support them, the gentle curve of her pale cheekbone, her hair, so soft, so soft, he remembered without warning, remembered too her melting into his chest, only an hour, or was it a year, or a century ago…