Yana closes the door and raises her eyebrows with a sigh. “For someone of his generation it would have been better to depart this world before the latest upheavals. Do you know what monthly pension he gets? One thousand two hundred. Rubles. Forty dollars. That’s enough to strike you dumb. After fighting in the war all the way to Berlin. But, you know, these days, nobody could give a damn! And it’s a crying shame we can’t hear his voice anymore. He was a professional singer. His neighbors told me that in the war, well, during the siege of Leningrad, he went out with a whole choir to sing to the troops…”
She starts walking again, stops in front of an open window. A bright fresh May evening, strangely autumnal in feel. “You see, when we were young we didn’t have time to talk to people like him. But now he’s the one who can’t speak…”
Shutov is preparing to tell her why he came, to remind her of their youth… “Guess what this is!” Yana insists, resuming her tour guide’s voice. A huge marble hand placed on an occasional table in the entrance hall to the apartment. “It’s Slava’s hand!” Perceiving Shutov’s puzzled expression, she pulls a surprised face, as if failing to recognize “Slava’s hand” were a flagrant breach of taste. “Yes, Rostropovich’s hand. He’s a friend. It was my idea. Everyone has visiting cards these days and I thought our guests could leave their cards in this hand… People generally put out one of those earthenware things but a hand is much more original…” Shutov reflects that in the days of his youth he never saw anyone in Russia taking out a visiting card. Yes, their youth…
“You know, I didn’t come here for the celebration…,” he says with slightly gruff insistence. “I thought that…” Yana’s cell phone rings. “Yes, I’m on my way. I was in a traffic jam. Well, have you seen the chaos? I’ll be there in a quarter of an hour…”
She shows Shutov the two bedrooms he may choose between and races away. That “owner’s tour” of hers was also, in fact, a way of taking evasive action. Yana kept on talking, laughing, addressing other people, as if she were afraid of what he might have to say about their past. But how, in any case, could he have brought up those distant days that still form a bond between them? “I love you, Nadenka…” Shutov smiles. Yes, he could have quoted Chekhov.
He leaves the apartment five minutes after Yana. The gravitational pull of the city sucks him in, thrusts him toward a life in which he will be himself once again, speaking the language of his childhood, immersed in a human mass to which he belongs by origin. He feels like an old actor who has been performing in an overlong play (“my life in the West,” he thinks), now casting aside his tattered finery and losing himself in the crowd.
Not far from the Admiralty policemen bar his way. He makes a detour and encounters another street closed. Heads toward the Palace Embankment and finds himself thrust back into Millionnaya Street. He tries to argue, then, naively, demands an explanation, and finally walks away, no longer trying to reach the site of the celebrations. The festival is at its height, so close, just a few blocks away, yet inaccessible, as on a tortuous path in a nightmare. “You should have read the papers,” grunts one of the policemen. “They showed all the closed-off districts…”
He keeps moving, guided by increasingly vague indications. The luminous hiss of a firework, a gust of wind, autumnally sharp, coming from the Neva… Or else the two couples, walking along squabbling, who seem to know the route to the festivities. He is about to approach them but they get into a car, drive off…
He is so weary that when he comes to the Summer Garden he mistakes the high grille for yet another barrier. He grips the iron bars, his face straining toward the fragrant darkness of the pathways. The foliage is delicate, as always in this fleeting foretaste of summer. He has to force himself to concentrate so that the words dreamed of for so long can be spoken with fitting gravity: “Beneath these very trees, thirty years ago…”
He hears a groan, moves away from the grille, hesitates over what attitude to adopt. The young woman he sees appears to be drunk. Or rather… She has just trodden on a shard from a bottle and cut herself. The festive streets are strewn with fragments of glass. “You need rubber boots here…,” she moans. Shutov tells her to sit down on the ledge beside the railings, takes hold of the gashed foot, cleans the wound with the towel they gave him on the plane. The girl must be seventeen or eighteen. The age Yana was, he thinks. And he was right: she is drunk, she staggers, he needs to escort her as far as the metro. He goes down with her. The train comes so quickly they do not have time to exchange a single word. Beyond the closing doors he glimpses her sitting down, already absorbed into a life where he does not exist. And yet his hand still retains the ephemeral impression of that delicate injured foot.
He goes back to Yana’s new apartment after midnight. Vlad lets him in, his ear glued to his cell phone. The conversation is in English: the young man is talking to a client in Boston. Without breaking off he leads Shutov to the kitchen, shows him where the coffeemaker is, opens the refrigerator with a gesture of invitation, smiles, goes away.
Shutov eats, amazed by the variety of the food, the quality of the coffee. This is the kind of apartment, the type of food, which in the Soviet era the Russians used to picture when they spoke of the West… And here it is, they have re-created a quintessence of the West that he himself never really experienced in the West at all. A paradox that helps him feel less behind the times.
He goes to look for the bedroom Yana assigned to him, gets lost, smiles. “Why not go to sleep on the doormat, here upon the threshold of this new world?” In the great bathroom the taps gleam like weighty museum pieces. “Scythian gold…,” he murmurs, continuing on his way.
How should he regard this new life? With delight? With regret for its frenzied materialism? After all, in ten years’ time the young may well feel no feverish excitement when confronted by this intrusive stuff. Young Vlad, here, lounging on a leather sofa in front of the television. He sips a beer while on the screen, in almost the same pose, a young man embraces a blond girl whose shoulder is gradually bared in time with their sighs. A commercial break cuts short their clinch: a head of hair enriched by a particular shampoo flits by; a cat pounces upon the gleaming contents of a can; a tall, dark, handsome man inhales his cup of coffee; a car embeds itself in a sunrise… Shutov remembers the slogan and mentally repeats it: “To be on time, when every second counts!”
The old man’s door is ajar. A bedside lamp, a blanket, the outline of a motionless body. And suddenly the rustle of a page. Should he go in? Speak to him, even without any hope of a reply? Or simply say good night? Shutov hesitates, then resumes his journey: if he starts from Vlad’s office he can remember the way better.