I understand now, my dear. My past is just that, past, and my silence is over. After so many years of wading through the mists of remembrance, I no longer need to spend two hours pinned to a straight-backed chair striving to catch a painful echo of my youth. So this, then, is what I would like. I would like you to put on your best shoes, your most beautiful dress—and oh, do not feel bad about my earrings, they were always yours, I only wish I had something else to give you. I would like you to cross the city whose ugliness will be concealed by New Year snow, soft and forgiving—your favorite time of the year when you were little, do you remember, all the sledding you did, laughing, your mouth full of snow? I would like you to enter the brilliant hall with the same excitement with which you entered the theater as a child to watch me dance when I still danced, in the brief years before the Change, though I’m sure you’ve forgotten that also, and walk down the velvet aisle, and immerse yourself in the plush of the night. I would like you to look at the man who will come striding across the stage, and I would like him to look at you.
And oh, you should hear his music, my dear, for it is truly not of this world, though it should belong to everyone in it. It will one day soon, that I know.
This is a small thing, you see, the beginning of my amends. I will not be going to the concert. This ticket, my child, is for you.
PART FIVE
DECEMBER
1
ALEXANDER VISITED THE PLACE with stubborn frequency in the early days of December, to check on Stepan’s progress in obtaining a pair of shoes.
“I want padded soles,” he repeated on the second Friday of the month, “also, if possible, silver arrows running along the sides, I’ve seen a picture in a magazine.”
Ordinarily Stepan would nod with patience, but on that afternoon he appeared distracted, and anxious to be left alone. “Can’t talk now, I’m unloading some merchandise I’ve been trying to get off my hands for a while,” he said at last, glancing at the door to the yard, then at his watch. “Stop by in two days.”
On his way out, in the cramped maze of the basement, Alexander met his father.
“Thanks for letting me know,” his father said. “Is he there now?”
“Yeah, waiting for you with that pile of junk. How was this morning, any trouble?”
“No, all was calm today.”
“They hauled two more off last night,” Alexander said quietly.
“Who?”
“Some woman, she had no documents on her—claimed someone had stolen them in a tram. And a really old fellow with a beard, he’s been around forever. He spoke out for her, so they searched him and found some incriminating stuff in his pocket, I didn’t see what it was—a napkin or a menu or something from a foreign restaurant, I heard.”
Sergei was silent for a moment.
“Listen, Sasha,” he said then, “I think you should stop coming here, our position is precarious enough as it is. You must think about your future, you’re a university student now.”
“Yeah, about that, I keep meaning to tell you,” the boy said, “I actually—”
A door banged upstairs, and there were echoing steps above their heads.
“Let’s talk at home,” Sergei whispered. “Thanks again, and oh, button up, it’s snowing.”
At four in the afternoon, dusk had already congealed, and the courtyard lay patchily illuminated by the windows of the surrounding buildings, a giant chessboard of light and dark. As he strode toward the man he could see leaning against the church wall, toward the precious parcel resting by the man’s impeccable footwear, a memory of other windows lighting up other snowdrifts on a street he had walked almost a year ago, clutching in his sweaty hand a matchbox the cloudless color of a foreign sky, anticipating some deep inti mation of another, truer, life that would somehow transform his own—the memory of it, vivid and painful, rose and tangled in his mind with an unfolding vision of the future, making him slow his steps.
The man was so close now Sergei could discern the dry folds in his leathery cheeks. Ah, so you got my message, good, and the money? Right here, the agreed price. Yes, pleasure as always, be careful not to drop it, it’s rather heavy. Then the rush across the city, the familiar building, the elevator eternally out of order, the breathless assault on the staircase, he is not old yet, not old, nothing is over, her face framed in the door, her eyes yet again filling with that tremulous light. I’ve kept my word, this is for you. Oh no, I can’t accept it. Please, this is all I can give you, you see, I was hoping to give you my ticket, but things have changed, I owe it to—to someone else now… For a moment he is afraid that she will again stiffen, push him away, but she does not, and with a clunk his gift is abandoned in the dusk of her hallway to exchange rattling reminiscences of bygone days with its reflection in the dusty mirror, and there is that melting he remembers, and the softness of her hair, and the surprising, timid dryness of her lips, and here the shadows become deep and golden and draw over them like curtains, and when he pulls the curtains apart, he finds the world bright with brittle wintry joy and her room blowing with chilled breezes and light, blue-tinted scents he has never smelled before, and, half rising on her elbow from the swirling foam of sky-blue sheets, she whispers, “Serezha, I’ve managed to get extra tickets, would you like to come with me?”
Two weeks later the tickets go on sale during his shift, he hands the ticket over to his wife, to his mother-in-law, and, with this simple discharge of duty, he is freed from all future duty, his life wiped like a slate, and, clean, free, he waits until the last evening of the year, until the entrance he has rehearsed so many times that it now slides past hardly invading his imagination—the rapid, well-practiced succession of stairs, chandeliers, seats, her cheek on his shoulder—and then the old gray-eyed man with the noble profile swiftly dances out onto the stage, and the lights dim, and the man’s arm is raised.
It is curious, he realizes now, that in all this time, through all his manifold replays of the intricately constructed scenario—the glorious reward at the end of his tortured wait, which he could visualize down to the marble veining of the conservatory columns—his thoughts have invariably stopped just short of the actual music, never once daring to push past the lifting of the baton, never once daring to imagine the sound he is about to hear. This, then, is the moment of unveiling, the ninth symphony of a genius—and though he has in his hand the concert program (printed with luxuriously raised lettering on beautiful cream paper), which he will take to his new home, her home, and treasure for decades as a keepsake of their beginnings, though he could easily look down, then, and skim the description of the symphony’s conception, history, influences, he will not do so, he will close his eyes instead, and merely listen.
What was it that someone in the line said so long ago—an overview of the history of civilization, from tribal dances to the present day… And indeed, this is how it starts, with a solitary drum that emerges out of expectant silence, in the beginning only a low, arrhythmic pulse, the first rumblings of humanity lifting its still somewhat furry head, then growing louder, more assured, being joined by other drums, and cymbals, and more drums, cresting to a cacophonous, monstrous, exhilarating explosion of sound, of conscience, and gradually, out of chaos, acquiring a rhythm, a wild rhythm full of fires flickering in nights pitted with menacing stars and callused palms slapping the taut animal skins of primitive instruments. The beat becomes faster, faster, and then slower, more ritualistic, until it is dignified and almost stern, until the orgiastic splashes of cymbals fall away and trumpets enter in a celebratory fanfare, and the music transforms into a military march, sloe-eyed legions passing north in precise geometric formations, through jungles, along rivers, across deserts, carrying on their outstretched arms the building blocks of the first great civilizations, of pyramids and temples; yet somewhere deep below the marching, the earthy heartbeat remains, the faint but persistent throbbing of dark soil, of dark blood, of sacrifices to cruel gods of the southern sun. But as the parade across sands and ages thunders farther north, it becomes drier, lighter, cleanses itself of excess sound, and suddenly there is a hush, out of which a lone flute is born, a lucid, beautiful, seaborne melody, the classical harmony of antiquity, already swelling with other flutes into a pure, swanlike song, which, he knows, will soon turn languid, luxurious, Oriental, perversely wind itself around the militant theme, then be drowned in a newly erupting chaos of barbaric hordes, yet with the sole flute surviving like a slender silver thread beneath the noise, to stretch and surge out of the darkness with the unexpected strength of a human voice.