He’s crying, Alexander thought, and, frightened, averted his eyes.
“Only a little way now,” he said brightly.
They set off again. He tried to walk faster, time pushing him in the back, tick-tock, tick-tock, must be fewer than a hundred people left before him in the line, faster, faster… Viktor Pyetrovich’s head was bobbing up and down as if tied to a string, and his lukewarm breath brushed Alexander’s neck in wheezing exhalations, but he could discern little more than “Selinsky” and “concert.” “Everything is all right, you’ll be all right, don’t worry,” Alexander was repeating mechanically. “They’ll hold our tickets, don’t worry.” Just as he felt unable to walk any farther, there was the building, the familiar oily smells of the foyer. The elevator was broken, of course, so, gritting his teeth, Alexander half carried Viktor Pyetrovich up the endless flights of stairs, terrified at the soft, apologetic moans issuing from somewhere in the old man’s throat, maneuvering his body past overflowing trash chutes and blind little windows through which winter gleamed bleak and white and unclean, like shut, swollen eyes ripening with disease; and with each laborious step his hope of ever escaping it all lessened, lessened, until at last, sweaty and breathless, he fell against the door, groping for the bell in the dark.
The protracted ringing, the scrape of steps, the middle-aged woman with eyes like pockets stretched out with their habitual load of misery, the fearful stumbling through unlit rooms, that little boy wandering lost in the sudden forest of clumsy adult legs, the water splashing onto the floor out of a cup pressed to lips that did not obey by a hand that could not stop shaking, the confetti of pills spilling out of a bottle, the spectacles clanking on the nightstand—everything seemed in slow motion now. Alexander pushed Viktor Pyetrovich onto the bed, battled blankets and pillows, the boulders of wet shoes, can’t be more than eighty or seventy people now, no matter how slow the line, faster, faster, please…
Viktor Pyetrovich was mumbling, imploring someone named Sonechka to leave him, run, get to the line in time for their turn, didn’t she know how important, how very, very important—
“I will do no such thing,” the woman said firmly. “Lie still, I think I hear the medics.”
And then the room was empty.
“I should get back,” Alexander muttered, “but it’s all right, you mustn’t worry, even if you can’t come to the concert, Igor Fyodorovich will certainly pay you a visit here—”
The old man’s fingers closed over Alexander’s hand with a shockingly strong, cold grip.
“I can’t die without seeing him again,” he whispered in a horrible torrent of thick, misshapen words, “my only son, taken away because of nothing, because of his being related to Selinsky, but times are changing, if Igor Fyodorovich could only get the foreign press behind him, something could be done, I must go, do you understand, he would never come here, he probably doesn’t even remember me, he has so many distant relatives, he—”
“But of course he remembers!” Alexander cried. “All the letters, all the postcards he’s sent you!…”
Viktor Pyetrovich closed his eyes. For a few heartbeats it was horrifyingly quiet, a deep chasm opening between the sounds, time falling away—and then Alexander knew with an absolute certainty that there never had been any letters. In the next moment the room erupted with people, coats, smells of snow and medicine, the stomping of boots, a bright-voiced heaving, moving, shifting. Liberated at last, Alexander walked out, carrying away Viktor Pyetrovich’s pained white gaze, unfocused without his spectacles, the final dry scratch of the old man’s whisper against his ear, “Do you understand?” Slowly, as if asleep, he drifted past the shadowy accumulations of bulky furniture meant for some other existence, herded into this shabby place by a violent contraction of history, past a gilded clock on the wall, which either had stopped on some dull, dead, dusty afternoon when nothing much had happened or was telling him that it was now past one in the morning, reminding him to climb out of this hushed pocket of timelessness into which he had somehow fallen and run, run, couldn’t be more than fifty people left now—but just then the darkness of the hallway parted, bearing the woman with those strange eyes. She touched his sleeve shyly, then began to talk, quickly, disjointedly. “I know who you are, he’s so proud of you, please tell him I’m not angry with him—or no, don’t tell him that, tell him instead that I will always—or better yet, don’t say anything, just—”
“It will be all right,” he said, gently moving her hand away, and stepped over the threshold. Falling silent, she stood in the doorway, watching him. All at once he was seized by sadness at not knowing the right words with which to tell her how enormously sorry he was. Pausing on the landing, he shook his head at the elevator grate. “Doesn’t work,” he said loudly. “They should fix it someday.” Then, without looking back, he descended the stairs, gathering speed from floor to floor, bursting at last into the stinging night.
The city flew past him—hazy streaks of streetlamps spreading out like the tails of bleary comets; infrequent passersby hurtling like disoriented meteors from one nonbeing into another; lighted windows coming to pale, glowing life like remote, clouded stars, dissipating no warmth, then falling back; black holes of courtyard entrances reeking of smoke and trash, of some deep, invisible processes of cosmic rotting—and as he ran, light and night, night and light, passed through him again and again, time accelerating in rhythm with his accelerating heart, and he felt its substance changing, changing with the roaring of the chill in his ears, until his universe, which before last year had stood completely still, his entire universe accelerated too, became a spinning, vertiginous blur of colors and winds, then rested, hard and brilliant, on one sharp, well-defined moment, the pinhead of time, a crystal on the head of a needle, balancing precariously as he ran, chanting silently, I will be on time, I will be on time, on time, on time, on time—
He was only two streets away now. There were voices ahead. He cut through a yard. Trees clinked with ice as he passed. Two men stepped out of the darkness.
“Hey, you there, have a light?” one called out.
Not slowing down, Alexander thrust his hand in his pocket, tossed out a matchbox, just like the one he had sold to that foreigner in the shadow of the church, so long ago… It was very quiet; his steps crunched in the snow and the trees sang a tinkling ditty.
“Always prepared for arson, isn’t he?” the first man said.
The second joined hoarsely, “It’s him, I just saw his face.”
The crunching of the snow came to a halt. The men were standing in his path.
“Hey, what—” he said, and tried to sidestep them. The first blow bent him in half.
“Hey,” he said again, hopelessly now, and put up his hands to protect his face. An overhead branch shook, and there was more melodious tinkling; icy powder descended on his head, dusting his eyelids with delicate, sprinkling touches. The men were working wordlessly, with satisfied grunts. Trying to ward off their blows, through the pounding and the sparkling and the ice, he thought he heard a remote tread of heavy boots, drawing close, closer, a voice crying, “Sashka, what the hell are you doing there, our turn is coming, what—!”
The voice, near now, cut off with an expletive.
As the flashing ceased in Alexander’s temples, he saw Nikolai rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, his thumbs hooked in his torn jacket.
“Take a walk,” the first man suggested. “This is between the three of us.”
“Yeah, we’re reeducating a young criminal here,” said the other man. “He set our kiosk on fire, I saw him running away laughing. He isn’t laughing now, though, is he?”