Toward evening Sergei came to Tanya’s window with his saxophone. Usually visitors called up to their Veras and Galyas from the dusty lawn below, and the women would hang their milk-swollen breasts and victorious smiles out the window. Among the dozen or so local, fresh-baked poppas—sailors, criminals, and merchants—Sergei was the only one who was thin, long-haired, and sober. Moreover, what he experienced was not the collective joy of childbirth, but his own personal alarm and terror, which had settled at the bottom of his stomach, apparently, because his ulcer, healed over long ago, did not exactly hurt, but was sending ominous signals . . .
Tanya was on the third floor, but Sergei decided not to shout from the lawn. He took his instrument out of its case, put the reed to his lips, and made it speak slowly.
Tan-ya . . .
Tanya heard, but was not able to come to the window right away. When she lifted herself from her pillow, her head started to spin, and a wave of nausea came over her. But her stomach had been emptied long ago, and enduring the sharp and pointless spasms, she dragged herself to the window. Her legs ached desperately with each step, while her belly seemed to be filled with lead . . . She popped her head out the window only after Sergei had extracted his mournful “Tan-ya” for the third time from the thin metal throat of his instrument.
At first he did not recognize her: she had piled her hair in a bun on the top of her head, just as her mother had worn hers all her life. And the hospital gown–prison shirt made her seem strange and bulky . . . She waved her hand: the gesture was Tanya’s own, imitable by no one. Looking at him from above, Tanya recognized her favorite moment: when he took his instrument in hand, and this cute but nondescript young man metamorphosed into a musician in the same way a horse turns a person into a rider, and weaponry turns a man into a warrior: when the sum of human and inhuman exceeds the value of each separately.
Sergei held his saxophone in his hands. His right hand was below, fingers on the keys, his left hand higher up, on the octave pin near the crook of the metallic body, his chin pointed upward, and his lower lip protruded—right inside was that tender callus she could touch with her tongue . . . He held the saxophone—a generally silly creature, the fantasy of an instrument-maker, a hybrid of wood and metal with a piece of plastic thrown in, that in terms of shape was far from perfect, its keys protruding not very elegantly from the body, and the bell, likely, too sharply turned outward . . . Among the wind instruments there were no few beauties: the flute with its ancient simplicity, and all its ingenuous relatives—from the syrinx to the tsevnitsa; the maple bassoon with its vestigial bell and beaklike head; the ascetic trombone that looked like something out of an apothecary; the pedantically curled brass cornet with its silly valve mechanisms; and the snail-twirled stately French horn . . . And what about the oboe’s bell? Or the funnel of the trumpet, curled back to the depths of its soul? The saxophone, of course, was not the most perfect, but the overtones of its voice could transmit human gradations of tenderness, triumph, or sorrow. And, in addition to everything else, they—Sergei and his saxophone—mutually resonated each other . . . Together the two of them were capable of uttering that which Sergei never could on his own. He placed the reed between his tensed lips, pressed his teeth up against the fold inside his lower lip, worn with years of playing, and a velvety deep-blue A-note said: “Let’s begin!”
And they, Sergei and his “Selmer,” began—lightly, easily, and without having to think about what they wanted to tell Tanya that was so important. It was Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” and Tanya immediately recognized the breathless music that progressed through major thirds—C–E–G♯—the key changing three times over the course of the theme, but Sergei did not play to the end, swerving off into his own solo, then progressing by way of rising arpeggios to the top, looking back, and ascending once again to the point where the saxophone’s possibilities ended, and then carefully descending down the blues scale, and Tanya began to recognize something vaguely familiar, something she had heard many times . . . perhaps Haden’s “Always Say Good-bye” . . . or something like it . . . or Seryozha’s . . .
She remembered how she had written him a letter full of grandiloquent nonsense from the maternity hospital three years ago, in Piter, when she had given birth to Zhenka . . . About how wonderfully they—Sergei and his instrument—got along without any words, and about how now, if this entire episode ended well, she would never again talk nonsense, because talking nonsense was shameful when there was music, which never spoke nonsense . . . Now the music spoke distinctly, gravely, and not at all glibly . . . , as it might seem to someone not fluent in its clear and transparent language: say good-bye, say good-bye . . . always . . . forever say good-bye . . . The small sounds—sharp, jagged, metallic—were just as unrelenting as they were marvelous . . .
Tanya held her pain-wracked belly with both hands. Would he really die, their little boy, with his palms folded under his chin, his soft ears, his mouth still sealed shut, blond, resembling Seryozha, with an upper lip that hung slightly over the lower . . . Poor Pavlik . . . Poor unborn Pavlik . . .
Sergei did not see Tanya alive again. Nor did Pavel Alekseevich. He arrived from the dacha and found two telegrams stuffed in the door: one from Sergei with a request that he come; the second, written two days later, with the notarized signature of the chief physician, informing him of the death of Tatiana Pavlovna Kukotskaya.
A day later Pavel Alekseevich stood alongside a table covered with spotted tin, and it was the bitterest moment of his life. The delicate flame of life, the greenish tinge of a working heart, the clots of energy produced by the various organs, were already all shut down. She was an olive-plastic color, his suntanned little girl, with hematomas on her forearms and calves, with autopsy sutures of the like to indict these so-called doctors of a grave crime against nature. He had already seen the forensic report. They also showed him her backdated case history. The entire hospital—from the chief physician down to the last nurse—froze in horror, awaiting retribution. With a single glance Doctor Kukotsky had determined that over the first two days following admission to the hospital no diagnosis had been made and no treatment administered, that the required tests had been done too late, that pregnancy had only made the situation worse . . . and that he would have been able to save his little girl, had he arrived from the dacha not on Tuesday, but on Friday . . .
Tanya’s resemblance to her mother was incredible and tormenting. A quarter century ago he had stood exactly the same way over young Elena, close to death, and had seen her gathered chestnut hair, her thin nostrils, and her brushy brows from precisely the same angle.
“Never. Elena will never know about this,” he thought, and was stunned by an instantaneous epiphany: might Elena have departed for her empty, enigmatic, mad world so as never to learn about what her prophetic heart had glimpsed long ago . . . ?
He proceeded to the chief physician’s office and asked him to gather the section heads. The chief attempted to object, but Pavel Alekseevich cast him such a general’s look, that he rushed to call his secretary to invite them all immediately to his office. Five minutes later six doctors sat in the office. The forensic report and the patient’s history lay before Pavel Alekseevich.
“This case demands a special investigation,” uttered Pavel Alekseevich. The doctors exchanged glances. “The quantity of blunders, errors, and medical crimes exceeds all bounds. A patient with a communicable infection was placed in the pathology ward. No biochemical blood tests or bacteriological analyses were performed. No diagnosis was made. I am assuming that what we have here is Weil’s disease, Morbus Weili. If it is leptospirosis, then immediate measures need to be taken.”