In the final week of the month, the skies flooded at last, and it began to snow. Anna was talking with Viktor Pyetrovich, Sonechka’s father-in-law, who had taken Sonechka’s place in line in the past few days—she herself was home sick and Anna had brought her some soup that afternoon—when an elderly man approached them and peered into Anna’s face. “The woman with lovely eyes, just as he said,” he then pronounced smiling, and extended an envelope to her. “I hope it was nothing urgent, my daughter’s memory is like a sieve.”
Mechanically, Anna accepted the envelope, holding it stiffly with her gloved fingers.
“I’m sorry?” she said.
“My daughter was asked to pass this on well over a month ago, but forgot. She forgot your name too. My apologies.”
“But who is it from?”
“A man in the morning shift. In his fifties, she said, wears a gray jacket. Had a tuba with him once or twice.”
“Oh,” Anna said, “thank you,” and, tearing off the glove, hastily freed the sheet of paper from the envelope—and indeed it was Sergei’s handwriting. She read it, once, twice, three times, the letters starting to slip into one another, melting under the snow that was coming down faster now, large white flakes gently erasing the words before her eyes—or perhaps it was the sudden moist wavering of the whole city through her eyelashes. She folded the paper and hid it under her coat, pressing her fingers against it as if against her heart, to check its pulse, and waited, waited for the hours to end, the longest hours ever. At last, there was Sasha coming toward her to take over; she squeezed his hand gratefully as she passed. She walked to the corner, then, rounding it, began to run, her recently acquired boots skidding on pavements that shone astonishingly white and clean in the rich, soft darkness of the nearing winter; and as she ran, the two lines of his apology moved through her mind, round and round, round and round, an apology, she understood now, that he had been too ashamed to offer in person—I wanted the ticket for myself, but I’d like to give it to you now, I want nothing but to make you happy. I wanted the ticket for myself, but I’d like to give it to you now, I want nothing but to make you happy. I wanted the ticket for myself, but I’d like to give it to you now… And as she rushed home, as the words rushed within her, she felt the layers of buried misunderstandings, unvoiced resentments, solitary grievances sweeping away, the entire world around her opening, flooding with brilliant clarity, as though shutters were being lifted all over, so she could finally, finally, see that stooping old man in a disheveled fur hat being dragged on a leash by his giant dog, and two whispering shadows kissing by the fence, and the misty spheres of light floating above her, and the snow, the white, sparkling, wonderful snow, gliding over the streets like furry eyelashes lowered in slow assent, falling over the city, over the world, falling within her now, leaving her clear and vast and bright—free to live at last.
She did not have the patience to wait for the elevator. She burst in, out of breath, snowflakes melting with tiny pinpricks on her lips and eyebrows, and flew to the bedroom, her coat streaming behind her. He was lying on his side of the bed, fully dressed, gazing at a wall with unseeing eyes. Throwing herself before him, she cried, “Oh, Serezha, Serezha, things will be so different now, everything will be so happy, you’ll see! The ticket—I understand, it doesn’t matter, I wanted to give it to you anyway, you know, that night I tried to meet you in the park—”
He sat up, looking dazed; she saw things swiftly sliding in his face, a slackness overcoming it, more shutters being raised, though she could not quite discern what was behind them. “That night you tried to meet me in the park,” he repeated.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter now,” she whispered, hiding her face in his shoulder; his sweater smelled of sweet, decaying leaves, the change of seasons, the earth’s steady, joyful rotation. “I wanted to surprise you with it, you see, like a gift—but the ticket’s not important, let my mother have it, I already lost her most precious possession and she has so little else, while you and I—”
He shifted his shoulder away, cupped her cheeks in both hands, looked at her.
“Anya, I’m sorry,” he said slowly, his voice hardened, unfamiliar. “I’m not a good man, you deserve better than this, I must tell you I—”
“Please, don’t,” she said, moving quickly; and in the instant before she switched off the light she thought she saw his face bled of all expression, thought she saw a horrifying blankness, bleakness, in his eyes, and her heart was tripping, falling, could it be that she had been mistaken, could it be—but the room had just tumbled into darkness, and the snow dancing outside the window was slowly filling it with a pale, luminous glow, like the expanding, pure glow she again discovered within her, and she was crying now, and his breath was on her neck, his hand on her shoulder, and of course she had forgiven him completely, and it was nothing, it was nothing…
Later, he slept, his face pressed into the pillow. He looked at peace. She watched him for some time. As she in turn began to descend, slow and weightless as a feather, into a well of quiet, dark gladness, dreams met her at the bottom with a splash of warm, ancient waters on which there flickered fragmented reflections of the day, her husband promising to make her happy, the concert surging forth at last in a rising of white-shirted orchestral chests, her mother in the front row, everyone’s guilt erased, washed away, and the old sleepless voice was once more lulling her into a deeper dream, the voice she had been hearing so often in the middle of the night when she slept with her ear to the wall, the dream voice that always sounded so much like her mother’s, and the voice was telling her, I’m sorry too, I’m sorry for everything, my dear, in so many ways I am such a selfish old woman. You see, I did not stop talking all those years ago because I had nothing to say, or because I did not love you, or because I had grown muddled with age. I stopped talking because that was my way of preserving the past, of denying the pain that had torn my life in two unequal halves, of bottling what I so bitterly, so nearsightedly considered the better half inside me as if in a flask with a stopper that wouldn’t budge—all my precious memories, all my untold stories, fermenting in my soul until I walked through my days eternally inebriated with the heady magic of my childhood, with the sweaty music of my youth—until the memories had begun to conceal, underneath their enchanted sweetness, a soured darkness of rot—until I no longer knew you, your husband, your son—until I was alone.
Perhaps, too, walling myself off from the long rest of my life was a way of atoning for the guilt I felt about your father, atoning for that November day Andrei had run out without a hat, without a coat, seething from an unfinished conversation. It was the anniversary of a certain encounter I treasured. Feeling sentimental, I had talked about my past, my dancing, other matters. I was careless in my choice of words. He grew upset.
He crossed the street before our house not looking left or right.
I remember hearing the squeal of tires, a dead hush before the screaming started.
For a long minute I did not dare come to the window.
Afterward, I punished myself with silence. And then I became old, without noticing when or how, one year flowing into the next—empty, empty. Age did not make me wise. I never asked, and I never gave, and when I did ask, I asked for myself alone. But the night came when, bare-legged and barefoot, you walked in from the street, and I saw your face, and I heard your voice, and my present began to haunt me the way other people are haunted by their pasts.