“This incident will be recorded in your dossier,” the guard hissed.
Recovering his speech, Sergei began to stammer. He was one of the most reliable members of his orchestra, ask anyone, ask the drummer, he has known me all my life, he will vouch for me, ask the director, just don’t put this stain on my blameless record, a simple misunderstanding, two men obeying the call of nature, could happen to anyone, I would never, I’m forty-seven years old and in all this time I never—
The heavy stare was pawing, pawing at his face.
“We will be watching you closely,” the guard said at last. “Resume your duties.”
The dim lightbulb of the guard’s stare went out. He was free to return to the ballroom stage, to continue breathing a bouncy beat into his tuba.
It was close to four in the morning when they were finally divested of their tuxedos. The festivities had long since unraveled, the rooms lay empty and echoing; a solitary woman in a low-cut satin dress sat on a sofa in a corner, her mask askew, absently dropping green grapes into her gaping, drunken mouth. Sergei made his way to the exit, a trembling tightness in his stomach, praying that his documents would be returned to him without trouble. He was crossing the vestibule when, through the open front door, he saw two men smoking on the steps outside, conversing loudly in a foreign tongue. He halted. Their faces were bare now. One of them said something, and they both laughed, and tossed away their half-finished cigarettes.
“Wasteful bastards,” Sviatoslav grumbled, overtaking him. “Coming?”
Recollecting himself, Sergei hurried across the threshold after the drummer, nearly slipping on the sleek polished floors; but already the two foreigners had turned to go in, and he had to step aside to let them pass. In the doorway, the taller of the two, a grayhaired man with clear gray eyes and a thin aristocratic nose, glanced at Sergei with a small yet significant smile, and a footfall later Sergei heard the soft sound of something light hitting the stones.
A flat blue box lay on the steps where the men had just stood.
He cast a panicked look around him. No one was watching. The last members of the orchestra were receiving their papers at the booth ahead, the tuxedoed backs were retreating into the mansion behind him. He bent down, grabbed the tiny box, which threw a golden flash in his eyes, nearly dropped it at the unexpected dry rattle it emitted—there was something inside—stuffed it into his pocket, and, his upper lip glistening with sweat, his heart wobbling, caught up with the other musicians.
His documents bore no mark of the evening’s events.
In another two or three minutes, he was through the gates.
The embassy’s façade was still ablaze, and as the light welled through the bright silk draperies, the snow along the wrought-iron fence glimmered in pale squares of crimson and green and blue. A few steps beyond, they were cast into the darkness, the chill, the silence. Horns, trombones, and a timid, bug-eyed violin exchanged dispirited farewells and trudged off in different directions; snow crunched for some minutes, then all was quiet again.
“Well, that was some party,” Sviatoslav said, his massive jowls shuddering with a flattened yawn. “Sure, their music’s fluff, but they know how to have a good time, you have to give them that.” He brought his face close to Sergei’s. “Don’t tell anyone, this is risky, but I smuggled something out for my better half, look—”
Blindly Sergei nodded at the confusion of crumbs wrapped in a greasy napkin.
“Hey, want to drop by my place, have a drink? I tell you, the women we saw tonight, all trotting about like giraffes in those heels! Too skinny, though, if you ask me—”
“Listen, I’m worn out,” Sergei said. “See you at the theater, all right?”
The last of the trolleys had ceased running hours earlier, in the previous year; the first day of January pressed heavily onto the ground. As he strode through the deserted city, he thought of the New Years of his childhood, before he was ten, before the Change, when the city had still glowed with the soft, deep enchantment of sugared angels spreading their sparkling wings in bakery windows, and bells whose limpid sounds rose like the sea at a moonlit tide, and glass ornaments turning slowly this way and that on dark tree branches, gathering in their reflections the whole wondrous, promise-filled world.
His fingers were tightly curled around the mysterious object in his pocket—his own, private communication from a different life.
He was not far from his building when he stopped. The street did not look familiar. There was a dilapidated church at one end, a squat little kiosk with a boarded window at the other. The solitary streetlamp was lavender in tint, low and sickly. He withdrew his hand, unlocked his cramping fingers, looked at the small sky-blue box on his palm. It was made of cardboard; one side was blank, the other had two words engraved on it. He deciphered the foreign script, which he had learned as a boy. Café Apollo, the letters spelled out in curly gold. With a careful finger, he pushed at the inside of the box, ready to receive the final mystery.
The inner compartment slipped out.
There were matches in it. Sturdy white matches with generous red and yellow tips.
Sergei gazed at the matches for a long minute, until his fingers began to burn with cold, then gave a laugh so short and harsh it sounded like a bark, and threw the foreign matchbox into the night—and the night seemed to solidify, to lunge toward him in a flowing, shifting shape. He felt a stab of indistinct yet acute fear, then, blinking, saw it was only an old man in an odd baggy cape, of the kind gnarled hermits wore in the lavish illustrated books he had found as a child underneath the glittering tree.
The old man brushed the snow off his knees, stepped forward into the light.
“Matches falling from the sky into my lap, must be my lucky day,” he said, smiling. “Now, if only I could get some cigarettes. You don’t smoke, do you?”
Sergei shook his head, already moving off.
“Didn’t think so, or you wouldn’t be throwing good matches away,” the old man observed to himself. “Curious, what’s this, something written on it, let me see if I can make it out, my eyes aren’t what they used to be… ‘I-gor Se-lin-sky,’ yes, that’s it, Igor Selinsky—”
He was back in one leap, snatching the matchbox from the old man’s grasp, turning it in the streetlamp’s scanty light, forgetting to breathe, yes, indeed, he had missed it somehow—the golden engraving Café Apollo on one side, and on the other, scribbled in a hasty, almost indecipherable hand across the matchbox’s glossy underbelly: Igor Selinsky. He laughed and would have embraced the old man but did not, crying instead, “Keep it, keep it!”—pushing the matchbox into the man’s hands, hard and twisted like ancient tree bark, and running down the streets, and up the stairs, humming, no, singing, exuberantly singing the melody that had burst with such immediate triumph into his mind, that melody he had learned to play in his tenth year—the melody that, he had once believed, would change his whole life—a deceptively simple tune, simple and sad, one of Selinsky’s early pieces, yet already containing within it a promise, a dazzling promise of things that were to come but that never came, not for him, not for them, not here, not in this dark, cold place oppressed by winter—but somewhere else perhaps, yes, somewhere else for sure, somewhere luminous and bright and full of music, where life was like art and art like life, and soon to be his, theirs, here, because times were changing, because life was changing at last.
When he finally managed to control the shaking in his hands long enough to fit the key in the lock and push the door open and stumble inside, he was blinded by the light springing into life and his wife rising from the kitchen table.