The slamming of the front door, when it sounded at last, untied the knot at once, and he wept, a silent, dry, relieved weeping. He heard Alexander’s shoes drop onto the floor, heard Anna’s voice clucking along the corridor; she had probably been up most of the night herself, listening to every noise, waiting.
He ran his hand over his face; it was not wet. He walked out of the room.
Alexander stood without moving on the doormat.
An unfamiliar youth briefly met his eyes in the mirror—a jacket with its pockets torn out, a crumpled face, black in places, with a thick bandage on the bridge of his nose and an ugly cut clotted on his left cheek, and something dark, something vast, in his gaze… Alexander turned away hastily, facing his parents instead, his father in a wrinkled shirt and a pair of pants that he appeared to have slept in, his mother, whose eyelids were swollen with recent fear. He heard her gasp as she came closer. He cleared his throat.
“The tickets went on sale last night,” he said.
Another door thrust into the hallway, and he was blinded by the solid rectangle of sunlight that fell crashing onto the floor. It was, he realized, a bright morning outside; he had not noticed.
“Oh, my dear,” his grandmother said, “what…”
Her words wandered off into silence.
“The tickets went on sale last night,” he repeated.
He was not sure how to say the rest.
His mother began to speak then, quickly, quickly; he was reminded of the woman in Viktor Pyetrovich’s apartment, the one with the eyes like dark holes torn by someone’s thumb in the white sheet of her face, and his thoughts swam anxiously, and only after some minutes did he realize what his mother was saying in her rushed, panicked voice. The ticket is yours, Sashenka, do you hear, we’ve all decided, it’s the best thing, you deserve it after all the time you’ve spent helping us, your grandmother no longer wants to go, and your father and I, we talked it over and we thought, such a unique event, you’ll tell your grandchildren someday—
He filled his lungs with air, then let it out.
“I lost our place,” he said.
All was still. He could see minute particles of dust swarming in the rectangle of light, obeying some radiant, airborne laws, shimmering constellations forming and dissolving, small and orderly planetary systems floating around brighter suns of larger dust motes, then dancing away along invisible orbits of their own; and he thought, None of this matters, everything is pointless and random. Then, abruptly, the light dimmed—the sun must have been swallowed by a cloud—and as the dust vanished, there emerged once again the shadowy hallway, and the mirror, and in it, the youth with something new, something pained, in his eyes, in his broken face; and Alexander knew that it was not true, that things mattered to him quite a bit after all. He looked at his family crowding in the corridor around him, found all three of them looking back at him—and, since the silence continued, realized he must have only imagined saying the words aloud, and tried again.
“I lost our place in the line,” he said.
Their suspended expressions did not change. They must have heard him already.
“What happened to you, Sasha?” his mother asked.
“Someone was sick, I had to get him home, that’s when the tickets—”
“No, what happened to you?”
“Oh, that. I was mugged on the way back. They took me to a clinic. I’m all right, honest. My nose may look a bit different.” He added after a short pause, “Sorry about the ticket.”
She breathed out audibly, then stepped toward him, as if finally granted permission; in the brown gold of the mirror’s depths, he glimpsed her—made somehow unfamiliar, younger and brighter, by worry—touch a hesitant hand to the bruised cheek of that unfamiliar, older and darker, youth.
His father moved forward too, bent to extract his shoes from behind an umbrella stand. “I think,” he said, crouching to untie the shoelaces, “I’ll go over to the kiosk, just to check.”
The hallway flashed and vanished in a dusty haze; the sun had come out again.
“Let’s all go,” said his grandmother briskly. “I daresay I could use a walk.”
Some minutes later, they squeezed into the elevator—bulky coats, scarves, elbows, smells of winter soaked into collars and shoes, along with some light, flowery scent Alexander found surprising. The elevator groaned with the unaccustomed weight, dipped, then stalled for an instant between floors. His mother laughed unexpectedly. “Do you realize,” she said, “this is the first time in something like a year, since we began with the line, I mean, that all four of us have been together… Imagine getting stuck right now.”
They landed with a heavy thud. She laughed again.
Outside, the pavements were slippery, searingly white in the sun; his grandmother held on to his elbow with a hand as small and hard as a bird’s claw. The old woman was wearing a peculiar little hat with a moth-eaten feather bobbing in its velvet band, and a pair of funny sharp-edged boots with pencil-thin heels; the feather tickled his chin. It baffled him that no one seemed concerned about the ticket; indeed, his mother appeared almost giddy now, and his father’s eyes ran away from his own with a limping, oddly apologetic gait. When his parents walked on ahead talking, he felt a strange certainty that they were not discussing the concert.
He glanced at his grandmother, coughed uneasily.
“About your earrings,” he said. “I sold them, for lots of money, but the money was in my pocket, and those men—I guess it was a bad night all around, I’m really, really—”
“What did you get for them, anyway?” she interrupted. “Ah. Well. You’ve been had twice, my dear, they’re worth ten times that. A pity. I have to say, our nighttime streets are in a shocking state. But perhaps it’s for the best—easy come, easy go… Is the snow always this color? I remember it differently. And what, pray, did they do to that church?”
There were more people in the street now, groups of them hastening in the same direction, some silent, others burbling with agitation. Alexander saw familiar faces from the line, and found himself walking faster. A block away, the crowd grew denser still, spilling off the sidewalks into the road; an automobile was fuming on a corner, unable to squeeze through, its driver vainly leaning on the horn. As they circumvented the heaving car, he thought he spotted a darkhaired boy weaving through the throng on the other side of the street, and pulled on his father’s sleeve. “Go ahead without me,” he said. “I’ll catch up.”
The boy was crossing the street now, trudging toward him; Alexander had already seen a stack of books in his hands.
“Aren’t you cold without a hat?” he called out.
“No,” the boy said, stopping. “Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve been looking for you all morning. I brought you these, I know you liked them.”
“So then, which hospital is Viktor Pyetrovich in?” Alexander asked, hurriedly, loudly, as he freed the books from the boy’s hands. “Is he allowed visitors today? I’ll come by later, I have something to tell him, he shouldn’t worry, everything will be fine, maybe the tickets haven’t sold out yet, and, see, I have my own ticket now, which I don’t need, I’m not really into music all that much, so your grandpa can have it, he can go to the concert, do you understand”—but as he talked, the boy stood quite still, and, looking at his painfully reddened ears, at his coat buttoned wrong, at the boy’s eyes that appeared almost white in the glaring sun, sliding past his bruises and cuts without expression, Alexander felt himself letting go of his bright words, one after another, little exhalations of sounds leaking out, until he was silent at last.