“What’s that you’re singing?” she said, with a strange lapsing in her voice.
“Oh, Anya, you wouldn’t believe what just—” “But you’re traipsing snow everywhere!” she exclaimed, and, surging toward him, fussed about, shaking him out of his wet coat. “Did you have far to walk? Your shoes must be soaked through. Here, I’ll hang that… Do you think you’ve caught a cold? You’d better have a cup of tea, I’ll make it for you, sit down, sit down—”
He looked at the pots in the sink, their insides clotted with grayish lumps, and the pile of thick stockings in a basket on the windowsill, waiting their turn to be mended, and his wife’s broad back bending over the teakettle.
Silent now, he lowered himself onto a chair, began to pry his frozen shoelaces loose.
“Here,” she said, “nice and hot, with lemon… So what was that song, then?”
“Just something I heard on the radio the other day,” he said shortly.
He finished his cup, then walked off, leaving her at the table, and in the graying predawn bedroom fell into a humming, gleaming well, which overflowed with barely audible melodies he strove to hear through the rush of waters, and satin women playing cheerful little songs with silver spoons on ripened grapes, and, toward midmorning, when the light outside the window had grown broad and white, the old man with the scraggly beard and deep dark eyes standing under the streetlamp before the boarded-up kiosk, smiling a cunning smile.
4
THE FIRST TWO WEEKS of January there was no school. This fact made little difference to Alexander. As always, he left the apartment in the morning, and as always, he did not go to school. The second Friday of the new year found him sitting on a bench in a small park some blocks from home, watching pigeons root through the garbage that spilled out of trash cans. He was not all that curious about pigeons—indeed, he found them revolting, the way they appeared so puffy and glossy, so cozily substantial, but would, he knew, be skinny and tremulous to the touch, tiny, mousy bodies palpitating inside a ball of feathers. All the same, sitting here, in the cold, empty park, watching the birds, whiled away the time.
When the pigeons had stuffed their bellies with trash and waddled off, he rested his head against the bench’s back and did not move for many long minutes, staring upward at the flat gray sky that was sliding past him, unceasingly, quickly, spreading its wind-filled clouds like powerful sails and departing somewhere—perhaps toward another, brighter, deeper sky far, far away—leaving behind the pathetic park, the immobile city, the paralyzed day. At last he stirred as if awakening, sat up, groped for a splinter of a broken bottle under the bench, then proceeded to scratch his initials into its frozen wood; there was a bare patch amidst all the clumsy hearts, anatomical schematics, and equations that would never add up, all these adolescent confessions, O + N = LOVE.
“There,” he said aloud when he was done. “My contribution to humanity, my immortality.” He considered adding a short yet expressive word, but the glass felt brittle and icy in his gloveless fingers, and in any case, there was no room. He tossed the jagged piece into the snow and rose, and drifted through the city.
A few streets away, men were unloading large crates from a truck, slapping their padded gloves together with halfhearted grunts; he stopped and looked until one of them shooed him away. The movie theater was just around the corner, so he walked there next. The deserted foyer smelled of damp shoes and stale cigarettes growing in spittoons. He read the announcements on the wall, though without much interest: they had been running the same two features since November—a documentary called The Anvil of Righteousness and a historical epic, whose poster depicted three fierceeyed, bare-chested slaves trampling into marbled dust an effeminate degenerate in a jeweled toga. He had seen neither film; he never had the money. He was just tilting his head sideways, studying a potentially promising toppled statue in the poster’s lurid background, when the double doors groaned open, and there dribbled out a few people who had attended the matinee. He peered hopefully into their faces as they stumbled past him one by one; sometimes, if he caught them at the precise instant when they stepped squinting into the pale wintry light from the theater’s shadows, just before they adjusted their expressions, buttoned their coats, and trudged off toward the rest of their day, he was able to see their faces naked, split open like ripened fruit—and in their eyes, raw and urgent, unhappiness, or loneliness, or yearning. Catching such glimpses gave him brief comfort—he felt less alone. Today, though, the six or seven women who emerged into the foyer looked merely tired. One of them dragged a reluctant little boy by the hand; another yawned, and paused, and glared.
“What are you gawking at?” she snarled.
Alexander moved off.
The pet shop across the road, another one of his haunts, turned out to be locked, a sign on the door stating, tersely and indefinitely: Closed for accounting. He pressed his nose to the dim window, trying to discern, in the gloom beyond, the enormous, dusty aquarium in which, he knew, lethargic, bleary-eyed fish were pushing through the faintly illuminated water as through thick jelly; but it was rather like peering inside a bottle of dense brown glass. He gave the door a cursory kick, then cut through an alley, crossed a courtyard, swung into a street with a kiosk at one end. He had passed here before; the kiosk never seemed to be open, yet it always had a line before it. Lines depressed him, and he strode past with quick, determined steps, debating whether to make a trip to his favorite place of all before evening fell—a place that was breathing, throbbing, heaving on the other side of the city, a private place he had sworn never to share with anyone—when someone called his name. The name was common, so he took a few more resolute steps, and heard his name again. Looking up, he saw an aging woman in a lopsided coat, with a round face and unevenly drawn eyebrows, waving at him from the thick of the line.
It took him a second to recognize her as his mother.
He wondered whether he could just keep walking, but it was obvious that she had seen that he had seen her. “Ah, Sasha, how good that you happened by!” she exclaimed, even before he approached. Her tone was unnatural, too cheerful, too loud; as she spoke, she half turned to someone behind her, though not addressing anyone exactly. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw fur and glitter, but did not care to look closer.
“What are they selling?” he said sullenly. “Tablecloths? Curtains?”
“No, not—I don’t actually…” Her voice dipped lower. “Why? Do you think we need new curtains? In the bedroom, maybe? Have you noticed that hole? I mended it, but maybe it’s—”
“Our curtains are fine,” he said.
“Well, anyway, it’s lucky you came by, I just remembered I haven’t yet ironed your father’s shirt for his important performance tonight”—she pronounced the words in that same unnecessarily loud voice, her head turned to the side—“so I must run home, but you won’t have to wait long, no more than an hour, perhaps only forty—”
“I’m busy,” he said.
“Oh, I’ll be right back, half an hour, no longer. Here, take this, just in case. I don’t want to lose my place, I’ve been here two weeks, it’s supposed to reopen any day now, but of course not in the next twenty minutes. Just wait for me to get back, a quarter of an hour, all right?”
He looked at the wallet she had pressed into his hand.