“Grandfather had another heart attack last night,” the boy said. “In the stairwell on the way to the hospital. Our elevator’s broken. He died just before dawn.”
“I—I didn’t know,” Alexander said. But of course he knew, had known from the moment he had seen the boy walking unsteadily through the crowd with the precious volumes clutched in his bare hands, their spines crumbling with gilded leathery dust over his numbed fingers. He knew too that he should drop the books, and put his hands on the child’s shoulders, and tell him what he himself so wanted to believe, that Viktor Pyetrovich had left a sad, colorless place and gone to a place full of color, full of wonder, where he had only to arrest the world in its motley rotation by a finger planted on the convexity of a globe to be instantly transported to wherever his heart desired—ancient streets braiding hills into high-walled, fruit-scented towns, narrow boats gliding under white misty bridges, the shrill crying of peacocks in secret gardens at sunrise, chilled stars over desert temples, fierce, bright-eyed beasts prowling through vine-entwined jungles—all the places, all the things, all the adventures that did not exist here, in this life, in this place… But the boy’s gaze was clear and old, and the terrible, white, sunny silence continued, and people pushed past them, swearing, slipping on ice, and the automobile driver kept blaring his horn—and suddenly Alexander was unsure whether that would have been the afterlife Viktor Pyetrovich would have chosen—whether he would not have preferred to sit in his small kitchen instead, with his wife, who must have died long before, with his son, returned safe and well, with his grandson, his many grandchildren who could have been born and were not, drinking tea from their familial silver glass holders, talking about the apple harvest, the rain last night, the symphony of their famous relative on the radio, and the mirage of the heavenly city would sway beyond the curtains, its rooflines soft and peaceful, woven out of clouds, and they would have all the time in the world, the whole of eternity, his, theirs, always—
“I never asked, what’s your name?” he said.
“Igor,” said the boy. “And you’re Alexander. Grandfather talked about you all the time.”
The world rushed past them, dazzling and cold.
“Good-bye,” the boy said, still without moving.
“I’ll see you around,” said Alexander, and, wrapping the books in the fold of his jacket, let the stream of passersby carry him off.
At the kiosk, all was confusion. People were wandering around in hesitating little herds; a man was spitting out curses; a well-dressed woman sobbed, gathering her dissolved face into an elegant glove. Alexander found his family.
“So, it seems,” his father said flatly, “the tickets that went on sale last night weren’t the Selinsky tickets at all. They were for the Little Fir Trees show. Their kiosk burned down or something, I guess… And the Selinsky concert has been canceled. No tickets. Look, even the sign’s gone.”
Indeed, the CONCERT TICKETS sign, which for months had been baked by sun and washed by rain, was no longer nailed to the front of the kiosk. A new notice was posted in the window. A grim, mute crowd had gathered before it. Alexander came closer.
CONCERT CANCELED, read the fat block letters. KIOSK CLOSED FOR RESTOCKING. WILL REOPEN ON MONDAY.
It was astonishing how deeply he felt about so many things—unfamiliar, slow, wordless feelings that made him heavy and aching and full, almost as if he sensed, for the first time in his life, the presence of something real inside him, a soul perhaps—and yet how little he felt about this ticket, this ticket that no one he loved appeared to need after all.
Shoulder to shoulder with the others, Alexander stood and looked at the sign in the shuttered window.
By mid-morning, the day had turned brittle; clouds sliced through the pale sky like shards of ice, leaving white tears in the blue, and the waving black branches of naked trees swept the sky clean. Anna had taken her mother along on a shopping errand; Sergei and Alexander walked toward home together. They took their time, rambling aimlessly through the streets, pausing to dig out an icy bench from under a snowdrift, revealing in the process a few sparkling slashes of graffiti (“Oh, look,” Sergei said, “you have a namesake who likes to vandalize benches”), then sitting in the park until their faces grew numb and their fingers cold and stiff.
The park was deserted, but filled with the frozen breaths of recent passersby, filled too with the transparent gliding of its resident ghosts—an old man feeding pigeons, his spectacles blazing in the sun; a beautiful woman, no longer young, her face smeared with tears, peeling off her torn stockings; a man huddled over a mute tuba, listening to the music soaring in his head; a boy lying on his back in the sickly grass, staring up at the sky, imagining ships and caravans gliding across it… Sergei and Alexander were silent at first, then, slowly, began to talk—of light, irrelevant matters, it seemed; Alexander was explaining how much he liked winter because he never had to guess what any of the colors were. Gradually, though, they talked of other things; or did not talk so much as allude to them, passing them by quickly, as if having tacitly agreed that there would be time, time enough to discuss everything later, that the only thing needed now was a silent, forgiving acknowledgment of a few facts—such as the fact that Alexander had never tried for the university after all, or that one of his two best friends had died the night before and the other had been so badly wounded he might not recover, or that both his father and his mother had been fired months earlier—or that all of them had not been entirely honest when it came to the concert ticket.
And as they talked, Sergei nodded gravely, breathing on his fingers, and thought that they had arrived at the end of this strange, long year with seemingly nothing to show for it, with, if anything, things lost, things both tangible and intangible—money, jobs, friends, unrealized loves, alternative futures closed off forever—and yet he felt his world to be so much larger now, and, too, felt so much larger himself, as though in the course of this year of hoping, of waiting, this year of doing nothing, he had, without noticing, stepped across an invisible line and been taken apart, piece by piece, then put together again; but the order of the pieces was subtly different, or else they fit together in a different, looser way, with spaces left between them for air, or light, or music, or perhaps something else altogether, something ineffable that made him feel more alive.
When, an hour or two later, they entered the apartment, they found the women already home. The kitchen was full of smoke and banging; their frozen faces began to sting in the heat.
“What’s all the commotion?” Sergei asked.
“Oh, Mama has remembered some old recipes,” Anna said, dashing from the stove to the table. “I thought I’d try them out.”
“No chestnuts, though,” the old woman said wistfully.
“Chestnuts, grandmother?”
“It’s a long story, my dear. I’ll tell you tonight if you like.”