A year later one of his former pupils helped him to return to Leningrad, found him this little room in a communal apartment.
Volsky did not feel unhappy, just a little overtaken by the speed of the changes.
One day his neighbors informed him that a big move was being planned, a complicated exchange that would allow each of them to have a self-contained one-room apartment in the suburbs. He did not grasp all the details of the scheme. Quite simply he now saw smartly dressed men coming in and out, talking about square meters and works to be undertaken, calculating in dollars. A blond woman often appeared among them, talking about makes of tiles, bathtubs, furniture. The men called her Yana. Volsky liked hearing her voice. He even thought that someday he might be able to tell her his life story…
Then one evening he heard a conversation outside the door of his room. Yana and several men were having a somewhat heated discussion about a move that was taking a long time to happen. Suddenly Volsky grasped that they were talking about him. “Listen, be realistic,” Yana was saying, evidently trying to calm things down. “The old man’s here. There’s nothing to be done about it. Obviously it would suit us if he departed this vale of tears in the meantime, but let’s not be too optimistic. He may be deaf and bedridden, but he could live to be a hundred. What I’m proposing is a very reasonable solution…”
Volsky stopped listening and from that day forward no longer replied when spoken to. They took him now for a deaf-mute. He noticed that this made no great difference to his relationship with the people bustling around the apartment. Their attitude may even have become less hypocritical.
And Shutov remembers now. He has heard the name “Volsky” in his youth. Thirty years ago. Articles speaking of a teacher who used drama to bring new life to handicapped children and young delinquents. For journalists in the days of censorship such topics offered a rare zone of freedom: a unique individual who refuses honors and a good career is already in discreet revolt against the massive concrete structure of the regime.
The old man drinks his cold tea. The television, with the sound switched off, shows videos of blond girls and young black men swaying their hips with expressions ranging from the arrogant to the lascivious. Nighttime TV. The light of a lamp fixed to the back of the bed, a dark window, this almost empty room. In a few hours the paramedics will come to take the old man away. So it really is the end of this nocturnal recital.
Shutov is still eager to know what became of the sky where two loving gazes used to meet during those long years. But it is too late to ask, Volsky’s life has merged into that of the country’s battered past: wars, camps, the utter fragility of any bond between two human beings. A heroic life, a life sacrificed. A life Shutov might himself have encountered, since he spent his own childhood in an orphanage. “Yes, I could have had Volsky as my singing teacher,” he thinks.
“You know, I’ve got nothing against your friend Yana,” says the old man, putting his cup down on the night table. “Nor the others, either. Their life isn’t at all enviable. Imagine, they have to own all this!”
He makes a broad gesture and Shutov sees clearly that “all this” is Yana’s new apartment but also the vast television screen and the documentary about the Russian elite settling in London, their town houses, their country residences and the cocktail party where at this moment they are all meeting, and this wholly new way of life that Shutov simply cannot comprehend.
“When it comes down to it, we had such an easy life!” says the old man. “We had no possessions and yet we knew we were happy. In the space between two bullets whistling past, as you might say…” He smiles and adds in jesting tones: “No, but look at those poor people. They’re not happy!” A reception can be seen at a luxury hotel in London, the tense smiles of the women, the glistening faces of the men. “We used to pull faces like that at the Conservatory when they made us listen to cantatas glorifying Stalin…” He laughs softly and his hand makes the same gesture again: “all this.” Very physically, Shutov feels that the world thus referred to is one that spreads itself out horizontally, flat and perfectly level in each of its components. Yes, a flattened world.
“If you could switch off now…,” asks Volsky. Shutov seizes the remote control, gets confused (on the screen an old streetcar appears, slipping along silently, disappearing up a street), finally succeeds in switching off.
Volsky’s face resumes the same expression as at the start of the night: calm, detached, perhaps even a little distant. Shutov does not expect any further word from him. It has all been said, all that remains to be done is to bid him good night and take a few hours’ sleep before Vlad and the paramedics arrive.
The voice that rings out is strikingly firm.
“I have never ceased meeting her gaze. Even when I learned that she was dead… And nobody could forbid me to believe that she saw me too. And tonight I know she is still looking up at the sky. And nobody, you understand, nobody will dare to deny it!”
The voice is so forceful that Shutov stands up. It is the voice of a former singer or perhaps an artillery officer calling out orders amid explosions. Shutov sits down again, ventures a brief gesture, on the point of speaking, but remains silent. Volsky’s features relax, his eyelids close lightly. His hands rest motionless alongside his body. Shutov realizes that it was not the determined voice that had brought him to his feet. The old man’s words had summoned up a lofty radiance in this flattened world, one that seemed to raise the ceiling of that little room.
In a very much fainter echo of that cry comes a whisper of regret that Volsky keeps more or less to himself: “A shame, though, not to have seen the Lukhta again… The shore where we gave our last concert… The trees I planted with Mila… You go to sleep. Don’t worry… I can manage very well on my own…”
He grasps the switch on the lamp above his bed. Shutov stands up, goes to the door. He takes slow steps, looking as if he were trying to delay his departure, to come up with some last word that he had to say and that he had forgotten.
“Wait, just a moment!” he finally blurts out, and rushes into Vlad’s office. Beside the telephone, the list of useful numbers the young man had left for him when he went out: ambulance, police, taxi… Shutov makes a call, orders a taxi, comes running back into Volsky’s bedroom, gets his words in a tangle, apologizes, explains his plan to him. The old man smiles: “I’m partial to adventures, but I shall need to put on my Sunday best. There, on the hook, behind the door, a windbreaker and pants…”
Shutov asks the taxi driver to come up and help him carry “an invalid” downstairs, he says, keeping things simple. At once the powerfully built, stocky young man begins to express his displeasure. When he learns that this will not be a simple trip to a hospital but a long drive outside the city he goes off the deep end: “Forget it! I don’t do tourist trips. You should have hired a minibus, buddy…” Shutov insists, clumsily, realizing that current parlance has changed, as well as everything else, and that his arguments (an old soldier who wants to revisit the places where he fought in the war) must seem surreal.