A man was striding toward them, his face scrambled by shadows, a list of names in his gloved hand. People shuffled uneasily; a few timid voices rose among them, pale as steam: “What did he say?” “I beg your pardon?” “Did you hear him?”
“Your papers,” repeated the uniformed man. “We’ll be checking your papers during each shift, to weed out any undesirable confusion. Order must be maintained. Anyone without proper identification will be asked to leave.”
“But this isn’t how we normally do it,” someone offered meekly. “There’s a nice fellow here, you see, a sort of organizer, he takes care of—”
“The comrade in question will no longer be joining us,” the official said impassively. “Your papers, please.”
There fell a profound stillness, which lasted only one moment before dissolving in a rustling of pockets and bags hastily turned inside out. A confused elderly man who had no documents on him was forced out of the line; he hobbled down the darkened street without glancing back. A younger woman behind Anna, with whom over the previous weeks she had exchanged chance comments about the weather, started to cry soundlessly, not even trying to wipe her face; Anna offered the woman her handkerchief. Later, long after the official had departed into the gathering night, jotting something in the margins of his list, murmurs began to crawl. Some said the hapless organizer had been taken away, like the business-minded fellow with the chairs or Vladimir Semyonovich, that man with the mustache rumored to wear a cross under his shirt, you know the one I mean; but an ancient crone who claimed to live on the first floor of the organizer’s nearby building dribbled some whispers through her toothless gums into a neighbor’s ear, and by the end of the shift the word was that he had not been taken away after all but had been followed from the line late one night, whether by the Nightingales or by someone discontented with his methods of keeping track of the Selinsky tickets, no one could be sure, and had been brutally beaten just steps from his front door, behind some lilac bushes, causing a pack of stray dogs to howl two streets away.
“Here,” said the woman behind Anna, holding out Anna’s handkerchief. “Thank you.”
Her cheeks were still streaming, but it was drizzling now anyway, the chilly mist turning into ice in midair; it would not have made any difference.
“Are you all right?” Anna asked, peering at her closely. “Do you have an umbrella?”
The woman’s eyes were swimming in the blank of her face.
“Oh, I don’t need one, I’ll be fine,” she said.
When she tried to smile, a sense of familiarity brushed Anna, as if she had seen her face, with that tormented smile and those pale eyes under invisible eyelashes, somewhere before, somewhere outside the line; then the feeling passed. “It’s wet,” she said decisively, taking hold of the woman’s arm, lifting her own umbrella above them. “Come, I’ll walk you home. I’m in no hurry.”
They trudged through the city in silence. After a few blocks, the younger woman stopped.
“You’re very kind,” she said, “but I’ll be all right from here, it’s no longer raining. I—I don’t know what came over me earlier, I just felt… I just suddenly forgot why we were there—like the concert no longer existed, no longer mattered, you know, and we were somehow condemned to wait forever, like—like being punished for something…”
The street stretched black and glistening before them; the light from the corner lamp drooled in a wan, exhausted trickle, drowning bleakly in the folds of the disheveled umbrella at Anna’s feet, splashing hollow and white in their faces.
“This ticket you’re waiting for, is it for you?” Anna asked softly.
She had spoken unconsciously, voicing a thought, and immediately felt startled by her boldness; for while the question had been a simple one in the early days in the line, it had become something else in the past few months, a momentous, compelling inquiry into one’s nature almost—
“It’s for my husband’s father,” the woman said.
“He loves music?”
The night drizzled around them, and in its limpid, cold, glinting darkness, the woman’s eyes were enormous and filled with light—the feeble, flat light of the streetlamp above, and, beneath it, hidden in a secret pocket, another light, dark and luminous, like a candle flame briefly covered by a hand. “It’s not about music for us.” She spoke quietly, yet her voice was all at once reckless, defiant. “It’s about my husband. He—they took him away seven years ago.”
“Oh no, what did he do?” Anna exclaimed.
The woman looked down. As the streetlamp reflections fled her eyes, her whole face seemed to have gone out, and Anna saw it as she had seen it first, devoid of color, pinned behind glass to the wall of the boy’s apartment, next to the photograph of her laughing husband. She pressed her hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“You’re lucky,” the woman said, and in her eyes, when she raised them, there was no anger, only sadness. “I used to think like that too, until it happened to us. Sometimes—sometimes things just happen, I think… They don’t need to have a reason, you see. We’ve tried everything to get my husband released, but we don’t even know where he is. Now my father-in-law thinks that going to the concert might help. I’m not so sure. Still, we can only try—”
Anna touched the younger woman’s hand.
“You must really love him,” she said gently. “Your husband.”
The woman was silent.
“Do you know, I turned thirty-four last month,” she said at last with a small, pinched smile. “When I was a girl, I read old-fashioned novels and I believed in love and happiness. But life is not about happiness, nor is it about love, or at least not the kind of love they write about in novels. My husband was—my husband is a good man whom I haven’t seen in nearly a decade, whom my son does not remember, and who now, right now, is in some faraway place, suffering horrors I can’t even begin to imagine, and I—I met someone, you see, someone else, but it doesn’t matter, I would never… I’m sorry, I have no idea why I’m telling you all this. I should be going, thank you for everything.”
Anna felt her chest expanding with pity.
“Of course,” she said. “Good night. See you tomorrow.”
She followed the woman with her eyes, until she was only a blurry white haze moving from streetlamp to streetlamp through the sleet and the darkness. Then, slowly, Anna turned and walked home, feeling obscurely different, cleansed somehow; holding on to that large, light feeling as she stood in line the next day, and the day after that, and through another celebration of the Change, which carried the strained puffs of brass instruments and the dismal crashing of cymbals from streets far removed from their own solemn, expectant street, with its kiosk at one end and its neglected church at the other. The people of the line had grown silent, weary, casting furtive glances at the faceless officials who prowled the sidewalks, yet at the same time, Anna sensed, there had been, since the beginning of fall, since the fall of darkness, an imperceptible drawing closer, quite as if their communal, increasingly dangerous wait had rubbed their souls raw, had made their emotions transparent, had marked them all with an invisible sign of shared time, of shared expectation, so that every once in a while they could turn to one another with a kind of heedless, naked urgency and talk as they would talk only to their families, and perhaps not even to them, united by fear and hope and trust under black, pregnant skies.