“Happy birthday, my dear,” her mother said softly.
“But—how—where—”
“A girl in the line was selling them. An amazing coincidence, she said she got them from someone at the train station,” Sergei explained, was explaining still; but her mother had already risen from the table and was guiding Anna to the foyer mirror, urging, “Well, try them on, try them on!” Stunned, she blinked at her blinding reflection, while her mother bobbed behind her, almost too small to be reflected herself.
Later, after they had eaten the cake, she stood alone by the sink, pretending to wash the dishes, letting hot water run over her hands until her fingers became white and puckered, thinking about all the things she had recently learned to let go—her youth, the wild transports of girlish happiness, the vulgar bouquet of romantic commonplaces—so she could keep other things, quiet things, simple things, secret things, things that, she believed, would ripen with the passage of time into a warm, rich, mature contentment. After a while, she turned off the water, and, resolved, went to her mother’s room, forcing the earrings open as she walked, though her swollen fingers would barely obey her.
The door was cracked; she opened it and stopped just past the threshold, talking already, having started to talk in the hallway, saying the words she had run through her mind in preparation: “Mama, I can’t have these. I’m so relieved you found them, but they’re yours, and they remind me of… Oh sorry, I didn’t realize—”
Her mother, she saw, was undressing. Becoming aware of the sheen of the faded black silk carefully laid out on the chair—not a new dress, just one she had not seen in some twenty-five years—of the old woman’s milky-white legs exposed, as she bent forward, between the folds of the last-century robe, Anna hastily averted her gaze.
“Come in, come in, it’s all right…” Anna heard the bed creak lightly, heard the rustle of the robe being drawn. She entered the room, closed the door behind her, then stepped over to the dresser and gently placed the earrings on its scratched surface, where they lay glittering and sinister, a pair of brightly carapaced bugs from some exotic, unimaginable land.
“I would really like you to have them, Anya,” her mother said slowly behind her back. “I want you to wear them to—on a special occasion.”
“What special occasion?”
“When I was dancing in the West,” her mother said, “I met Selinsky.”
Anna turned. Her mother was now sitting on the edge of the bed, her small body hidden within her regally voluminous robe.
“You did? You never told me.”
“It was not safe to mention his name, my dear. Then too, you might have noticed, I was not a talkative sort. But times are changing now. I knew Igor Fyodorovich well. I danced in his first two ballets. I rehearsed the third one as well, but I had to leave the city before it opened. The new soloist was magnificent. He married her later, I heard, but it didn’t last.”
“Oh,” Anna said. “I didn’t know he wrote ballets.”
A short silence stole between them, then deepened; and as her mother’s moist dark eyes rested quietly on her face, Anna felt all at once overwhelmed—overwhelmed by an irrational and terrible certainty that something momentous was about to be said in this stuffy, faintly perfumed box of a room forever trapped in the wrong century—something that would change her life in some enormous new way she could not possibly foresee or expect; and, unable to move, unable to breathe, she looked away, the cold blue fire of the diamond earrings nipping at the corner of her eye, and still the silence continued, and she thought she could not possibly stand another instant of—of—
“I’m not going to go to the concert,” her mother said.
Her breath released, Anna stared at her. The old woman’s face was serene, her back straight, her bare ankles unsettlingly brittle and sharp, lost in the dust-colored slippers two sizes too large that Anna had given her on some birthday long past.
Sitting down next to her, Anna touched her hand gently, as if she were a bird that might fly away. “But Mama—” she said in a near-whisper.
Her mother smiled, a surprising smile, warm and quick; and unexpectedly Anna thought of her dutiful childhood visits to vast, cavernous studios that reeked of State-sanctioned effort, with pale winter drafts whistling through white windowpanes, and mirrors along sloping floors reflecting her mother’s tight-lipped struggles to impart grace to the thick limbs of clumsy peasant girls in sweaty tights, which little Anya had found faintly disgusting, and the following years of injuries, illnesses, and exhaustion, and an early retirement rewarded, in negligent fashion, with a medal engraved “For Unwavering Devotion to the Future of Our Ballet”—a medal, she recalled with a quick flush of shame, that she had not seen among the treasured keepsakes in her mother’s dresser—and, dimly, she understood, the protests dying in her throat.
“And the ticket?” she asked softly.
“The ticket,” said her mother, “is yours. Put on the earrings, my dear, and go to the concert, the music will be beautiful, you remember that summer I—”
Anna felt her eyes beginning to well up but fought her desire to cry, tightening her hold on her mother’s hand instead, bending to press her cheek to her mother’s palm, then rising, speaking feverishly, not noticing whether her mother was talking still, the words of gratitude leaping off her lips—“Serezha will be so happy, so happy!”—and somehow, in the next moment, finding herself already running down the corridor to the bedroom, pursued by the staccato of her rushed steps; pursued, too, by a darkening look, oddly like disappointment, or else resignation, in her mother’s eyes—or perhaps it was only the wavering of light in the room, the trembling of the world through her tears, the shifting of things as they found their rightful places at last.
Sergei was sitting in the armchair in the corner, writing in a thick notebook, the shadow of his swiftly moving hand flying across the wall behind him; as she lowered herself to the floor by his feet, she glimpsed a page scribbled over with a hurried procession of many-legged insects, clusters of berries, curling eyelashes.
She pressed her head to his knee.
“Mama has given us the ticket,” she said in a muffled, laughing murmur.
He was frozen for a long moment, one second, two, three, four… When she lifted her face, yellow lamplight fell squarely upon her; her gaze shone. He looked at her blankly.
“Do you hear, the ticket is ours now,” she cried.
It was not the lamplight, he realized then; everything about her was bright—her eyes, her teeth, her disheveled hair… His chest received a painful nudge; he could see her former beauty rising in her worn-out face. He glanced away, spoke with an effort.
“Your mother doesn’t want the ticket?”
She shook her head, laughing again.
“It’s ours now,” she said, “I mean, it’s yours. You can go to the concert!”
All was quiet within him—quiet, and dark, and still, devoid of thoughts.
He moved his lips, tried to say it, but the words had no sound.
“What was that, I didn’t hear—”
She was smiling, smiling up at him—radiant, and gentle, and young, so young, as if she had somehow moved backward in time, merging with an early memory he had of her…
He tried again, and this time heard his voice, or what sounded like his voice.
“I think you should go instead.”
“What?” she said, smiling still.
“I think you should go to the concert.”
And as the words escaped him, what had seemed only a nonsensical dream an instant before—the harsh yellow light, the difficult melody he had been trying to pin down to the page, the happy, dancing, golden-green gaze of the beautiful woman he had known in some other, better, time, the astonishing gift falling into his lap, which he longed to accept with every particle of his being, and which, with the cruel logic of dreams, he was powerless not to refuse—all of it suddenly became a fact, and lay before him, cold and small, and unchangeable, forever unchangeable now.