“I’ll show myself out,” he said.
On the street, numbness descended upon him, and would not release him for days, for weeks. As October darkened into November, the line buzzed with agitation, but it was through a haze that he heard of the Nightingales attack, and the girl who had lost an eye and would not be returning, and the fire at the Nightingales kiosk, in which one of their own had been suspected until the authorities located a few illicit pieces of evidence at the crime scene (pre-revolutionary books glorifying life Over There, whispered two or three people in the know) implicating a certain music teacher at a local school, the leader of a conspiracy to seduce the youth away from patriotic music (a blackened scrap with her telephone number was recovered in the ashes, it was rumored). It was not all that surprising, people said in careful undertones, there was trouble at schools nowadays, did you hear about that physics teacher, fired for no reason, thankful to work as a janitor now, oh really, how unsettling, but you know what they say, where there’s smoke, and so on, and at our school, they let go the literature teacher, my son’s favorite, she read them things that were not part of the curriculum, but beautiful, beautiful, he brought home some poems last spring, something about a cuckoo, I seem to recall, well, maybe that’s why, then, cuckoos aren’t exactly patriotic, are they, they push their fledglings out of the nest or else foist them upon others, parasites, really, so this teacher of yours has only herself to blame, and please keep your voice down.
Sergei tuned the gossip out, preoccupied as he was. He had made inquiries; at his insistence, his son had taken him to a hidden courtyard with an old church, and introduced him to a couple of helpful acquaintances who eventually arranged a meeting with an expert, a taciturn man with a face the texture and color of seasoned leather. The man had listened politely, holding the tips of his leathery fingers at a joined incline under his chin, asked a few pointed questions in a leathery voice, then half closed his eyes and thought for a moment. “It’s challenging, but I trust I can find the right model,” he had announced at last. “It will take about a month. Perhaps sooner, perhaps later. I’ll let you know through that clever boy of yours.”
“And the price?”
The leathery lips exhaled an astronomical number.
“Pleasure doing business with you,” Sergei had said flatly.
For the next few weeks he kept busy. He sold a pair of golden cuff links he had inherited from his father; he sold all his ties, which, true, were of shoddy local manufacture and brought very little money, but which he did not need in any case, now that he was no longer performing; he sold his one good suit. His efforts to find a steady job were unsuccessful, but his fake medical certificate would cover him through the end of the year, and his son, who proved to have an impressive breadth of resources at his disposal and who asked no questions, put him in touch with some burly fellows in need of occasional help unloading fruit from trucks.
He was still short of the necessary sum, however, so one chilly, sunless afternoon he walked to the ruined church with his tuba slung over his shoulder. A street away, he was stopped by a group of men with red ribbons on their sleeves, rushing in the opposite direction.
“Where are you going?” they cried. “The parade’s over there!”
He gazed at them blankly.
“Ever heard of the Change?” a red-faced, heavy-chinned man asked, stepping forward, a burgeoning threat in his voice. With the same kind of blankness, Sergei stared at the man’s hands, huge, raw, blunt-edged slabs stirring, seemingly on their own, by the man’s sides.
“Nah, leave him alone,” another man said, pulling at the red-faced man’s sleeve. “He’s feeble-minded, can’t you see?”
The group fell silent, shifted uneasily, and, without addressing Sergei again, hurried off.
He stood watching their backs for a minute, then descended the stairs into the familiar basement, crossed the yard, and laid his tuba in front of the leathery man. The man’s lips curled in disgust. “This so-called instrument,” he said, prodding it carefully with the tip of his brilliant shoe, “has the air of an old bum. Has it been drinking heavily and sleeping under bridges? Appropriate, I daresay, for one of such revolutionary inclinations. Tubas are not in vogue nowadays, the thirty-eighth anniversary notwithstanding. This is all I can offer.”
As Sergei walked away, he listened to other tubas booming in the celebration parade a city stretch away—ghostly sounds in a ghostly city, carried off on the cold November wind like dead leaves, crumpled newspapers, torn cobwebs—while somewhere above them, somewhere else, the celestial music continued to play, undimmed, untouched, still out of his hearing yet drawing closer perhaps… Freed from his habitual brass weight, he found himself straightening, forcing his shoulders apart, filling with a lighter heartbeat. He thought he should feel at least a twinge of sorrow for his companion of so many years, for someone he had kissed scores upon scores of times, but he felt nothing—or rather, he realized as he entered his bedroom that night and saw the emptiness in the corner where the tuba had rested its weary coils for two decades, he felt an odd sense of relief, as if his life had become simpler, clearer, stripped of at least one lie.
He told Anna he planned to keep it at the theater from now on. They needed the space.
4
ANNA DISLIKED CONCEALING the truth from her family, but she did not want them to worry.
“It’s only temporary, of course,” Liuba had told her. “My brother goes south every winter, to, well, let’s just say, engage in some transactions. You can start right away. The pay isn’t much, but there are fringe benefits, if you see what I mean.”
“Thank you, I’ll do it,” she had said quickly.
She would leave home at the same early hour as before and walk to the nearby street. She had her own keys. She liked the flimsiness of the construction: on clear days, she had only to open the door to find herself framed in a rectangle of bright, blue crispness; on windy days, sudden vibrations of the walls made all the cans and jars perform little metal and glass jingles; on wet days, which were her favorite, raindrops pummeled the tin roof with such a hollow sonorousness that she felt herself a part of the soggy sky, separated from it by only the thinnest of membranes. The delivery van sneezed its way out of the morning fog shortly before eight; afterward, she enjoyed a quiet half-hour, allowing herself a luxuriant whiff or two from this or that bottle of perfume from under the counter. Once she pushed the window grate open at nine o’clock, she did not have many free moments, but she did not mind.
She had been waiting on the other side her whole life, and she liked having something that others might want to wait for.
In the afternoon, as soon as Liuba came to replace her, she hastened to the tickets line, bracing herself for another anxiety-ridden fading of daylight. The line had lost all traces of its summer tranquillity, had devolved into an unnerving shuffle of people who came and went, their schedules unpredictable, their errands murky, their tidings, bits and pieces overheard here and there in the city, increasingly disturbing. When they talked, they kept their voices low: a few uniformed men were now stationed at regular intervals along the street—for their own protection, they had been told, though the Nightingales had not returned since the night of the attack and the perpetrators had been apprehended. For some weeks the men did not address the line, merely patrolling up and down the pavements, pausing slightly when someone spoke with excessive agitation, until one evening in early November, Anna looked up from her volume of poems at a voice barking: “Everyone’s papers out, now!”