Everyone had it bad, while for these kids, in the 1960s, life was a wonderful time.
That is difficult to believe—convincing evidence is required, a survey of eyewitnesses, the testimony of onlookers. Over the many years since, a lot has been erased from memory, and each remembers his own: Goldberg—the insides of the camp; Pavel Alekseevich—Elena in her strange transitional state as she slowly departed the world of living people; Toma—long lines for food that she had to stand in despite the food rations PA brought home from work. Others remembered the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Searches and arrests. The underground. Gagarin’s launch into space. Radio-buzz and tele-pandemonium. Memories of how closed-in life was, of fear dissolved in the air like sugar in tea.
But these kids at play had a wonderful time. In their frivolity they lived without day-to-day fear, taking fright instead only for minutes at a time. Then, shrugging off their fears, they took up their redemptive music, which not just made them free, but was free in itself. This was where the invisible divide existed between Sergei and his parents. This was the very thing that had jarred the two of them—Sergei’s Marxist-Leninist father and the father’s musician hooligan son—apart. They were like sulfuric acid for each other . . . The child’s attachment and the parent’s love hissed and went up in acrid smoke, leaving neither pity nor empathy in the burnt-out hole . . .
Sergei and his parents had cut each other off long ago. His father referred to his son as none other than a bum and a renegade. His mother could not forgive her son’s betrayal, although she was unable to explain whose faith he had violated with whom. Funny, but it couldn’t have been with music! From Sergei’s neighborhood friends his mother learned that he had a daughter. She yearned for reconciliation but, fearing her husband, lacked the courage to take the first step. Sergei’s disgust with his parents was stronger than hatred. He had not seen them for eight years already, since his grandmother’s death, having left home as soon as he finished school.
“There is nothing human in them. Everything that they think and say and do is one big lie. Nothing human.” Talking about them wrenched his guts.
His mother sent Sergei’s former classmate—Nina Kostikova, one of the neighborhood girls who had had a crush on him since first grade—to visit him. She had a mission: to set up a family reunion.
“What’s the big deal?” Nina petitioned on Sergei’s mother’s behalf. “You could show them Zhenya.”
“Tell her that the kid isn’t mine, and she’ll calm down.” He took the baby in his arms, pressed her little forehead to his own, and cooed “ooh-ooh-ooh.” Zhenya jumped with joy. “Tell her that someone dropped her on my doorstep. In her mother’s lap.” He chuckled as if he were being God knows how witty.
Tanya arched her brow. “So what’s wrong with my lap? All right, next time I’ll deliver the kid right into your arms . . .”
She had not forgotten about a new child. Several times it had seemed to her that she was pregnant, but each time she was mistaken. She loved her little daughter very much, but she wanted a little boy, and this desire had a strange persistence, as if she were obliged to give birth to a boy for the sake of some unknown higher goals. From the vantage of their everyday existence a second child would be insanity. But the first one had not been any less so. They were completely bereft of so-called material resources. Although money came in from Sergei’s performances, and Pavel Alekseevich, who came to visit his children once every six weeks or so, also always left them money. This weighed slightly on Tanya, but she hoped that soon she herself would begin earning money. However, both of them—Sergei and Tanya—ruled out as an option the sweaty servitude of working for someone else, figuring that money for their livelihood should come about of its own, in the process of their free play . . .
In the meantime Tanya had become increasingly more engrossed in music. She even got herself a recorder and conversed with it occasionally, on the sly from Seryozha. The instrument was poor, but the sound was touching and childish . . . Tanya did not miss a single one of the performances of Sergei’s trio and went with him to hear other jazz groups, of which no small number had formed in Piter at the time. There were not that many truly worthwhile musicians: you could count them on one hand. Sergei’s idol at the time was Germann Lukianov, a Muscovite with conservatory training, of a different social breed entirely—a snob in black tails who played multiple instruments (at the time, principally the flügelhorn), and was an interesting composer as well. Later Sergei became disenchanted with him and got hooked on Vladimir Chekasin . . . But in general everyone was mad over Coltrane and Coleman. Each new album was a celebration; Sergei even celebrated the anniversary of the first time he had heard each album. He and Garik sucked every note dry and discussed every turn, every chord progression, every rhythmical shift, every tempo change, and the asymmetrical phrasing. Though Tanya far preferred listening to live music rather than these hours-long analyses, she completely understood what they were talking about: though it was not extensive, she did have musical training.
The most fortunate of their circumstances was the complete confluence of the components of their lives, which usually only somehow coexist, sometimes pulling a person in different directions. Tanya’s love, family, creative, and routine household interests all flowed in a single line, her everyday life lived “musically,” by the same laws as a musical composition—a symphony, for example—was organized. The analogy amused her, and early in the morning when Sergei was still asleep and Zhenya was already cooing in her crib, she would give herself over to a sonata-like allegro, a dual-themed harmony in which the first theme, Sergei’s, was initially stronger and more voluminous, then subsided and conceded to the child’s line, which was burbling and joyful. She caught the andante on the dark street, pushing the carriage ahead of her, and its tripartite form corresponded to the geography of the streets, with the last part, so to speak, the most indistinct, beginning at the Petrogradskaya embankment.
At her workshop the music initially stopped: she undressed her daughter, fed her water from a bottle, sat her on her pot, and tucked her back into her carriage for a nap before lunch. After that Tanya smoked her first cigarette of the day and went to her workbench. Here she was overtaken by the scherzo, which amused and lightly urged her on, rushing her as she lived for the finale, which led to the rondo, where the coda arose, a tender coupling of the morning’s theme connected to the sleeping Sergei, who would arrive toward lunchtime. A ring of the doorbell, and a very sweet recapitulation: AEACADAE.
In spring the music season began. Tanya wanted to go with Sergei to the jazz festival in Dnepropetrovsk and then to Crimea. Toward the end of the winter two or three of the Petersburg jazz clubs started to get boring, and the trio’s relationship with one of them, The Square, soured. Sergei did not suffer from ambition, was easy going and friendly, but Garik would periodically get into some stupid conflict with one of the city’s jazz elders, first with Goloukhin, then with Lisovsky. Tanya, by that time already familiar to a certain extent with the ins and outs of jazz life and having made the acquaintance of many musicians, thought that Sergei should leave Garik. They played great together, but Garik never gave Sergei the amount of freedom he had grown to deserve. Sergei did more and more composing. Garik looked down his nose at these exercises and made light of them, but once, when they had been drinking, he said sternly and unambiguously: “As long as you’re playing for me, we’re playing my music . . .”