The smile slowly ran off her face. “It won’t be worth a year of waiting,” she said, rising from her knees. “I won’t be able to appreciate the music.”
“Let’s give it back to your mother, then, she’s the one who should have it.”
“She won’t take it. Can you—” Her voice buckled. “Serezha, I understand why my mother doesn’t want it. This—this I don’t understand. I thought you’d be so glad… Can you just tell me why?”
Because it is impossible, he thought, because it is too late. If only this had happened earlier—before you put on a silk dress and waited for me on that park bench, before another woman stood without moving in the window and said, “Please, don’t,” before I broke something precious, and lied, and plotted, before I crossed the line—before a concert ticket changing hands stopped being a matter of concert attendance, became instead my only means of proving to myself that I’m not completely unworthy of everything I hold dear, be it music or love or—or simple human decency.
Because, you see, I will not be rewarded for my doings of the past year, of many past years.
He pulled her next to himself, carefully stroked her hair.
“Because I’ve learned a lot about Selinsky’s music,” he said, “and I doubt that his new symphony would be to my liking. His recent stuff is disappointing, too formalistic. I’d rather remember him for his early pieces, you know. There was this one thing I played when I was a boy—beautiful, beautiful…”
A moment tiptoed by. She sighed. He felt her settling into his shoulder.
“How did it go?” she asked.
Some hours before sunrise, as he lay awake in the dark, the ticket being passed in his tired mind from his mother-in-law to his wife to him, then back to his mother-in-law, and again to his wife and again to him, in an infinite, tedious, hopeless exchange, he heard a key turning in the lock, and was struck by an idea. He climbed out of bed and stumbled barefoot into the foyer to intercept the boy, but found only a damp coat tossed on the counter, saw only a thin sliver of muted light seeping out into the corridor as the door to the old woman’s room drew shut.
Having closed the door behind him, Alexander faced his grandmother.
“You wanted to talk to me?” he asked, puzzled.
“I wonder if you could do me a favor, my dear,” the old woman said briskly. She reached out her hand, her bony wrist adrift in the heavy velvet of the cuff; he squinted across the shadows at something dazzling on her childlike palm. “Can you get rid of these for a good price?”
His surprise deepened.
“Are you sure? Aren’t these like souvenirs or something—”
“Oh, I’m absolutely sure. An admirer once bought them for me in a foreign city, but I find I no longer want to keep them around. Now, where was that silly matchbox?”
Frowning, he watched her fuss about her dresser, opening drawers, energetically shifting bundles of ancient, mysterious things; he could see dust rising into the air in pale, scented puffs.
“I didn’t know you lived in a foreign city,” he said. “Mother never told me. When was it? And where? And what was it like?”
She glanced over her shoulder, studied him for a moment, then extracted something from a drawer, shut it with another explosion of aromatic dust, and nodded at the chair. “Sit, and I’ll tell you a story,” she said. “It’s rather late, of course, but then, you’re a late bird like me… Just throw this over the light, be a dear, it’s too bright for my eyes.”
Obediently he tossed the old shawl over the lamp, and immediately the night trapped in the small, hot room grew flushed with a peculiar deep glow, the color of fire, he thought, gleaming darkly on the walls of some ancient cave. He felt disoriented and a little uneasy, yet also secretly thrilled, as if he had found himself in some unfamiliar, outlandish place. In bed now, his grandmother regarded him with alert black eyes from under the blanket; and when she spoke, he knew that her voice sounded just like a voice he had been hearing for a very long time.
“My parents first took me there when I was eight, you see. It was early spring when we arrived. The sky was like translucent silk, the roofs were like wet glass, the trees like hieroglyphics carved upon the air. My father rented an apartment just off the boulevards. I studied ballet in the afternoons, but I spent my mornings at home. One morning our bell rang, and three small liveried men came in carrying an enormous carpet on their shoulders. They set it down in the dining room and began to unroll it. Its inside was soft and blue, rich with golden birds, and I got down on my knees to see it better. And it was then that I noticed the first one.”
She fell silent abruptly.
Alexander leaned forward in the red glow.
“The first what?” he asked.
3
ALEXANDER WOKE UP tired and vaguely unsettled. He moved through the day yawning, his hand tightened around the matchbox in his pocket, his head muffled with insomniac visions of chimney sweeps dancing on tiptoes across tiled roofs, and bright petals swimming in buckets of flowers sold by mysterious girls on the corners of foreign boulevards. When the dreary afternoon had bled its shadows into the black evening, he walked to the familiar courtyard. The place was nearly empty, as it often was this winter; people were being more careful. On the porch steps, a drunk with a reedy, goatlike beard swayed above a fence of warped, worm-nibbled icons; a frightened-looking boy crouched beside him, his skinny arms protectively encircling something that glittered weakly in the dusk—a pair of tarnished silver candlesticks, Alexander saw as he came closer. Four or five fellows in enormous fur hats stumbled past him through the poorly lit snowdrifts, excitedly jabbering to one another in what, he registered with a start, was foreign speech; behind them trailed a fat man with no neck who mumbled in native undertone, nervously glancing around: “You can’t find these in the official, State-run, stores—unique pre-revolutionary relics here, pieces of history, bargain prices—”
The group rounded the corner, but one man lingered behind, craning his neck at the peeling church domes that were quickly merging with the night. Alexander strode up to him and casually slipped the matchbox open. Just then a window lit up on the first floor of a nearby building, casting a pale rectangle at their feet; the diamonds flared up.
“Over two hundred years old,” Alexander said under his breath.
The tall, elderly foreigner bent to examine the offering with shrewd gray eyes.
“A celebrated jeweler of the tsar,” Alexander added hastily. “Museum quality. My grandmother was a countess, priceless gems, do you understand?” More windows were softly emerging in the deepening dusk around them, and with each new flash, it seemed more and more as though he held a small piece of fire on his palm.
The man was nodding, smiling down his long, distinguished nose.
Back in the basement, Alexander counted the money again, and thought in disbelief, People are such fools. He walked to the line, now and then touching the bulge in his back pocket, continuing to run his hand over it, to reassure himself, all through the night.
It grew increasingly cold; the unfortunates in the last, midnight, shift were still, all in their own muffled worlds of jealously guarded heat, clouding their raised collars with effluvia of onion stews and weak teas. Rare voices arrived in explosions of steam.