“In what sense?”
Tanya laughed.
“Go swimming, roll around in the sun.”
She dove into bed under the sheet and hugged him around the neck.
“Everything I like, he likes. Word of honor.”
She was a wonderful girl, and his fear had passed, while his desire remained. And in fact there was even a certain appeal to that taut belly of hers, those tense nipples, and the intensified womanliness that derived of her being pregnant. They spent the whole day in the hotel room, leaving only once to get mineral water . . .
In the evening the musicians gave another concert, and Tanya could not take her mind off Seryozha’s music for a minute—it was the continuation of their new love. Then they spent the night together, collected some very respectable money for their performances in the morning, and left. Tanya ran over to Nanny Goat’s place for a minute, grabbed her travel bag, planted kisses on the top of Misha’s head and on Vika’s cheek, and disappeared from Nanny Goat’s sight forever.
15
THE JAZZ TRIO’S TOUR RAN FROM THE MIDDLE OF SUMmer until late autumn. They called themselves GAZ—Gabrielian, Aleksandrov, Zvorykin. It was their first year as a group, they were still just learning to function as a single organism, and things were just beginning to come together. Every day they made a new discovery. Although they did not give up their usual drinking habits, they essentially got drunk not on wine, but on the high that came from the music they made. The eldest and driving force behind the project was Garik Gabrielian, the only professional musician among them, who had been expelled in his last year from the Leningrad conservatory and effected a mind-boggling escape from the castle of classical beauty into the free zone of jazz improvisation. The drummer, Aleksandrov—a former engineer, mad with exotic ideas and at that particular moment preoccupied with levitation, but also having an unhealthy predilection for abominable snowmen, aliens, and extraterrestrial civilizations—banged out signals to unknown forces on his four booming drums and multitude of percussive rattles and clappers. He assured all that with proper percussive technique flight was as natural a phenomenon for humans as, for example, swimming. He had never, by the way, learned how to swim. Seven years later he chanced upon the golden vein of shamanism and ultimately flew off into the great beyond straight from his cot at a wretched psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Leningrad . . .
Saxophonist Sergei Zvorykin also belonged to the breed of musical maniacs. By this point he had abandoned his studies at the Technological Institute in Leningrad, and having quarreled irrevocably with his father, a professor of communist philosophy, left home and married a forty-year-old retired ballerina, thereby driving the last nail into the coffin of his reputation as a sane human being. That was Tanya’s chosen man and his friends. It turned out that the people Tanya had taken so close to heart, the people for whom she had so longed, were not doctors, like her father, the best of the best; not scientists, like MarLena Sergeevna, armed with scissors and tweezers for poking around in the depths of a pregnant rat’s uterus; not tenacious and inspired dissidents, like old Goldberg and his sons; not Nanny Goat Vika’s loud and clueless semibohemians, but precisely these men of few words and vague thoughts—or rather no thoughts at all when it came to crucial real-life issues, be they moral, social, or political. They did nothing, they sought to achieve nothing, and they aspired to nothing: they simply played their music, played at their music, and entrusted it to speak for them, taking joy in that fact that it, their music, turned out to be so good at doing that . . .
Tanya listened closely, not only at rehearsals and concerts, but all the time, from morning until night, from night until morning. It turned out that the music never stopped; it sounded not just in those moments when keyboards were pounded or horns blown.
She told Sergei about her discovery. He just nodded his head.
“Why, of course. And in dreams too. Especially in dreams . . .”
Tanya strained her memory, or imagination, or some other organ responsible for nocturnal consciousness, and recollected, that yes, dreams do have music, only it’s impossible to remember it . . . From that day on a musical sound track appeared, running parallel to the world in which she was a participant, a stream uninterrupted and ever changeable, just like the view from a train car, inseparable from the movement of the train itself . . .
The jazzmen’s music was but a component part of everything that moved alongside it, that lived and sang in the rustling and splashing and sounds of human speech—not in the dull sense of words, but in the timbre of voices, their banter back and forth, their intonations and rhythmic patterns . . . The sounds of machines and the natural voices of the sea, the wind, the rain—receding and approaching—existed like background noises, occasionally gathering strength and assuming the lead part . . . This lasting music had no preconceived plan; it existed beyond the limits of the chorus form, was full of arbitrariness or chance, but was nonetheless music, not musical chaos, and for all its uninterruptedness and infiniteness, it ultimately resolved to a cadence, culminating at logical points and taking off once again from almost any chance note . . .
Once, when lying on the warm sand of a rather filthy beach, Tanya attempted to express this sensation verbally. Sergei nodded matter-of-factly.
“Aleatoric. It is called aleatoric music. Chance contains a wealth of possibilities.”
“Like fragments of glass in a kaleidoscope?” Tanya brightened.
“You could put it that way. Talk to Garik, he’s a wiz at music theory; I’ve just picked up what I need along the way.”
“Man, everything’s been figured out already,” Tanya said in dismay. “No matter what you discover, it’s been studied and described . . .”
“You’re silly,” laughed Sergei. He stroked the rolling hill of her firm belly.
“You’re not going to overheat, are you? Let’s go sit in the shade, huh?”
In the space of two weeks he had grown as accustomed to Tanya and her belly as if he had spent the last six years with her and not with the retired ballerina Elvira Poluektova, who was totally devoid of female bulges or softness, which, it bears mentioning, he liked a lot.
Following two more weeks of gigs in Odessa, the trio headed for the Caucasus mountain region.
“First we’re going to put you on a train, and then we’ll head out,” Garik announced to Tanya.
Tanya asked them not to send her off and to let her stay until the end of their tour. Sergei added: “At least for one week, Garik. We’ll do Sochi and send Tatiana from there. Besides, it’ll be easier to get tickets by then.”
This was absolutely true: train or air tickets were hugely difficult to obtain at the end of August.
“What about her belly?” Garik frowned. He had two children, and he was the only one of them who knew from firsthand paternal experience that pregnancies inevitably ended with birth.
Tanya folded her thin arms over her belly.
“Garik, honey, I still have two more months ahead . . . Don’t banish me now. I’ll be good for something.”
Garik raised his hands in defeat.
“You’re just like the Frog Princess . . . Ultimately, it’s Seryoga’s decision. Not mine.”
Garik was a classic Caucasian womanizer, who considered it his sacred duty to bang any and every big-busted blond at the same time he idolized his bright and scholarly wife, a Georgian woman grown old before her age, with a Ph.D. and a letterless bra size. He was prepared to approve of any of Seryoga’s affairs, particularly because he couldn’t stand that stuck-up and stupid ballerina, but Tanya’s pregnancy was a dilemma for him.
“Are you sick, Seryoga? Tanka’s a nice little girl, but how you can fuck her with another man’s goods inside, I’ll never know.”