A Simple Scale

by David Llewellyn

  “It’s out of print.”

  Pavel sighed, his shoulders slumped. If she told him she’d done everything she could, he would have to believe her, and maybe he would go and that would be the end of it. He looked so defeated.

  “But I know where we’ll find one,” she said.

  Pavel’s expression brightened and he beamed at her and Natalie gasped, almost a nervous laugh. This is happening, she thought, and for a moment she felt as if she might levitate out of her chair and keep going until she was touching the ceiling. Something is happening.

  Chapter 13:

  LENINGRAD, AUGUST 1938

  The man staring at him on the crosstown tram does so indiscreetly, never bothering to mask his intent. It’s the middle of summer, a hot, sticky day, and he’s wearing a grey overcoat that reaches down to his knees. He must be melting inside that thing. And why is he following Sergey in the first place?

  If Sergey was hiding something, involved in something, he might understand, but he’s a composer.

  Remizov. It started with him. The grubbiest kind of ultimatum. But it can’t be that. Does Remizov really have that much influence?

  They had a meeting at the Kirov yesterday to discuss next year’s Spring season. Sergey wasn’t invited. He hasn’t received a phone call or a message in weeks. They’re taking it too far. It’s one thing to have work criticised on the grounds of political failings but no-one ever said he was a terrible composer. Quite the opposite. Political failings are more powerful when the music is good. But why shouldn’t he be involved next year? And in the meantime, a man has to eat. The money from Hero ran out quickly. One too many parties. One too many lavish meals.

  “Feeling flush are we, Sergey Andreievich?”

  “Look at Comrade Moneybags, here.”

  “If this is the shape of things to come, I hope the Kirov perform nothing but Grekov ballets from now on.”

  They were good times, but if he’d cancelled a single supper he might have another hundred roubles in his pocket, rather than a handful of kopecks, barely enough to cover his tram fare.

  He steps off near the Alexander Garden and walks the rest of the way, to a pale blue building overlooking the canal. He doesn’t have an appointment, and so there’s every chance this will have been a wasted journey – not to mention a waste of money – and that he’ll return home with even less than when he set out.

  The building’s concierge is young. Plump and red-cheeked with a shapeless mouth and oily hair. Sergey’s arrival sends the lad into a fluster, as if he is the building’s first visitor in months.

  “I’m visiting Tatiana Ivanova,” says Sergey.

  “Right. Yes. Comrade Ivanova. Of course… I… do you have an appointment?”

  “I’m an old friend of hers.”

  The boy looks at him and an uncomfortable quiet spreads itself between them. The lad is like an actor bumbling a line. Hasn’t been in the job very long. Promoted, perhaps following a predecessor’s sudden, unmentionable absence.

  “You could call her,” Sergey suggests. “Speak with her assistant. Josef.”

  “Yes,” the concierge snaps. “I know that. And I shall.”

  He lifts the receiver, dials three numbers quickly, and waits.

  “It’s Alexei, on reception. I have a man here. Says he’s a friend of Comrade Ivanova’s.”

  A pause. He places his chubby hand over the receiver.

  “Name?”

  “Sergey Grekov.”

  “He says his name is Sergey Grekov.”

  What does Tatiana Dmitrievna make of the boy? That’s if she ever has to deal with him. She probably delegates these conversations to Josef. Any contact, even the briefest exchange, with someone like this would leave her feeling grubby.

  “You can go up,” the concierge says. “Fifth floor, third door to the –”

  “I know where it is,” says Sergey.

  Josef is waiting for him on the fifth floor, holding open the door to the apartment. He gives Sergey the same look he gives anyone and everyone except his mistress – a glance of sneering contempt – and takes him through.

  “This way, please. Mademoiselle Ivanova has company. An interview with Ogoniok. You’ll have to wait until they’re finished.”

  Sergey sits in the reception room, next to Tatiana’s salon. This place always feels like a relic. Grand, opulent, but in a way that’s strangely threadbare, as if it could disintegrate at any moment; paint peeling away from the walls, rugs consumed by mould, electric lightbulbs flickering their last. From the next room, voices; Tatiana’s and another woman’s, much younger.

  “And do you think you’ll ever retire?”

  “Retire!” Tatiana spits it out. “I hate this word, ‘retire’. Why should I retire? Why should I even consider retiring, when I feel as young today as I did when I was twenty-one? I shall retire only when I am unable to dance, and today I am able to dance.”

  He’d almost forgotten how melodramatic she can sound in full flow. Even with the wall between them, he can see the sweeping gestures of her arms, her pencil-thin eyebrows arching ever higher, her forehead furrowing. The way her make-up gathers in the lines around her eyes and mouth with each theatrical grimace.

  The interview carries on in much the same vein; the young interviewer’s flippant questions, Tatiana’s flamboyant answers. Josef passes nimbly along the hall and enters the next room, telling the young woman her time is up, and a moment later he shows her out of the apartment. Sergey catches a glimpse of them as they pass by in the hall. The journalist can’t be any older than twenty-two. She looks shaken. An experience never forgotten, that first encounter with the woman nicknamed the Little Barn-Owl by the press, by her fans, by those at the Kirov. But is it because of those big, expressive eyes, or her ability to pick off smaller prey without compunction?

  “You may now see Mademoiselle Ivanova,” Josef says, and Sergey follows him into the salon. As they enter the room, Josef announces, “Monsieur Grekov, mademoiselle.”

  Typical Tsarist old queen. One foot firmly in the past. Josef would have been a young man during the Revolution, yet still he acts like some 19th Century footman out of Anna Karenina. And calling Tatiana ‘mademoiselle’, as if she were still a mere slip of a girl. If she weren’t so famous the pair of them could be arrested, perhaps worse, carrying on this way.

  “Sergey Andreievich!” she says, rising from the chaise longue and gliding toward him in an invisible cloud of her own perfume, her fur-lined dressing gown trailing behind her. She kisses him on both cheeks and invites him to sit. “Josef. Would you be so kind as to bring us some tea? Or perhaps Monsieur Grekov would prefer something stronger?”

  “Tea will be fine”, Sergey says, and Josef leaves them, pausing at the door to flash him one last withering look.

  “Well,” says Tatiana. “This is a pleasant surprise. I’m sorry if you had to wait very long. I was talking to Ogoniok. Can you believe it’s five years since I was last interviewed by them? Five years! Outrageous. So…” She sits back, pulling her dressing gown across her knees. “What brings you here?”

  He hadn’t planned what he would say, didn’t even know if he would get this far. And now he’s here, what next? Every chance she’ll laugh him out of the apartment. And once he’s out of the door, everyone at the Kirov will know. He’ll be a laughing stock. Indignity heaped upon indignity. He glances down and notices a single crooked blue vein beneath her otherwise alabaster skin.

  “Well?” says Tatiana, her smile saying: I saw you looking, you naughty boy.

  “I wanted to see you,” he says. “That’s all.”

  “Really?”

  “And…” He pauses. Deep breath. He should have gone elsewhere. Remizov, perhaps. All this started with him, after all.

  “Well?” she says, her smile not breaking for a moment. “Spit it out. Come on.”

  “Listen,” he says. “Tanyoshka… I know last time we spoke, it didn’t… What I mean to say is I know we haven’t always see
n eye to eye.”

  “‘Eye to eye’? A touch cliché, even for a farm boy like you. And it really doesn’t do justice to what happened, now, does it?”

  He’s dizzy, nauseous. Two days since his last substantial meal, the larder in his rooms all but empty, what little money he has spent on tobacco and vodka.

  “Have you seen Vasily Nikolayevich lately?” she asks. “Little Vasya?”

  “I haven’t.”

  “He speaks of you quite often. I’m convinced he does it to upset me. Which means he doesn’t really know me at all. But I think, despite our little drama, he remains very fond of you.”

  Her expression hardens. She breathes in sharply through her nose and turns her gaze to the far corner of the room.

  “I’d thought,” she begins. A sigh. She faces him again. “I’d thought perhaps you might have come here to apologise.”

  “Apologise?”

  “Am I being unreasonable?”

  He lowers his head.

  “You can’t even look at me, Seryozha. So stubborn. I can see why you and Remizov had your little falling out.”

  “What do you know about that?” Sergey asks. “What did he tell you?”

  “He told me nothing. But I have the impression that you’re no longer this month’s favourite. Little Vasya was devastated. He thought we might get tangled up in your notoriety. I told him. ‘Vasya,’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t worry about such things. No-one ever blames the dancers. They believe we’re all quite brainless. Little more than marionettes.’ Is that what you believe, Seryozha? That dancers are stupid?”

  “No.”

  “You could have fooled me. And for a moment, you almost did.”

  There are few things more shaming than pride remembered after a fall. It makes him blush to recall how he acted, those first few months at the Kirov. So many people telling him how wonderful it was to work with fresh talent. Easy to believe the myth of his own potency. All eyes were on him, and he understood the power that gave him.

  Vasya was first. It was the night after they announced A Hero of Our Time. They were, as Remizov put it, “celebrating the launch of a great endeavour”; a new Soviet ballet that would be the envy of Europe. Let the bourgeois composers of Vienna or Paris experiment with ugly noise. Sergey Grekov’s ballet, based on the novel by Lermontov, would prove for once and for all the primacy of Soviet culture. This was not an age for understatement.

  In the theatre, the cast and crew assembled on an otherwise empty stage, lit with spotlights, the auditorium’s empty seats lost in the dark. They drank Soviet champagne, and all agreed that Sergey’s music was sublime. The “next Mussorgsky”, they said. It was always Mussorgsky, the only composer who stayed in fashion, who was never deemed unacceptable. There had been many “next Mussorgkys”. He should have known what to expect.

  After leaving the theatre, a group of them went on to a nearby café where they drank Georgian wine well into the early hours. When the café closed, Sergey and Vasily found themselves staggering in the vague direction of Vasily’s rooms. Sergey lived on the other side of town and so Vasily invited him in, offering his couch as a bed.

  They talked about Sergey’s music, and how Vasily should portray the role of Pechorin. He’s a hero only in the ironic sense, Sergey told him, and as for the title, well, that was Lermontov’s most cutting joke of all. The author looked upon his age as one of vanity. He saw in his generation only self-serving arrogance and hubris. Sergey tried explaining this using language which had been drilled into him at the academy. Wicked individualism. The nihilism of the bourgeoisie. He and Vasily talked and drank vodka until it began to get light, and with increasing frequency their conversation turned to the subject of sex.

  “It’s been so long for me,” said Vasily. “I can’t remember the last time I was fucked.”

  Sergey coughed and spluttered and told Vasily not to be so scandalous.

  “What’s scandalous about that? It’s the truth.”

  “But you shouldn’t say such things,” said Sergey. “Not at your age. Not at all, in fact. You don’t know who’s listening. Say ‘fucked’, and people know exactly what you are. Men fuck. Men aren’t fucked.”

  “Some are.”

  “You know what I mean. And you can be jailed for that.”

  “Locked up with lots of other sex-starved men. Sounds like a strange punishment, if you ask me.”

  “Well, that’s as maybe, but you should be more careful.”

  Somehow, words became actions. A hand lowered onto someone’s thigh, lingering there. Eyes locked. Every second seemed to vibrate. Vasily opened Sergey’s trousers button by button, and looked to him for approval with each button undone. Within moments, he was fucking the youth with an aggression that frightened him; though what disturbed him even more was Vasily’s breathless “thank you” when the act was done.

  Sergey believed what had happened that night – or rather, in the early hours of the morning – remained a secret between them. He left before the first workers took to the streets, and crossed the city in a mood that shifted from pride to shame and back again. It was several weeks before he received an invitation to join Tatiana in her dressing room.

  There, she told him she had heard “simply wonderful things” about A Hero of Our Time. “But of course,” she said, “it’s based on such an enchanting novel. A true Russian masterpiece.”

  She insisted they toast Sergey’s burgeoning success with champagne, and not Soviet champagne but the real thing. He asked where she got it, and Tatiana tapped the side of her nose.

  “I have my ways.”

  And so they drank champagne, and several times Tatiana mentioned the role of Princess Mary; how she had discussed this with their choreographer, how she felt the young princess’s movements should be brittle and awkward, like a child’s clockwork toy, particularly toward the ballet’s end.

  “And you have killed her, yes?” she asked, making it sound almost like an accusation of murder.

  “I have,” said Sergey.

  “Quite right, too. I never understood why Lermontov lets her live. What’s the point of her if she lives?”

  Sergey said he agreed, and that he had asked their choreographer to select a young dancer for the part, fresh from matriculation. Tatiana gave him a look – part bemused, part appalled – and reared back.

  “A new dancer? For Princess Mary? And he agreed? That’s absurd. Pick some girl from the reserve troupe and she’ll be all over the place.”

  With the greatest of tact, Sergey said he felt inexperience might suit the Princess better; that a little naivety could bring something unique to the role.

  Still reeling, Tatiana asked, “So who am I to play?”

  “I thought Vera,” he said, relieved he hadn’t suggested the part of Princess Mary’s mother.

  “That harridan?”

  “She’s not a harridan,” Sergey laughed. “She’s the love of Pechorin’s life. What’s more, a character like Princess Mary demands a girl’s passion. Awkward. Naïve. Vera calls for something deeper, more sophisticated. A woman’s passion.”

  “And which do you prefer, Sergey Andreievich? A girl’s passion, or a woman’s?”

  Again, he laughed. “A woman’s, definitely.”

  He watched her, waiting for a smile or even a blink, something inviting, but Tatiana remained impassive. She would never openly give him the license to have her. That would be vulgar. Instead, she expected him to come to her, to take what he wanted. He placed his glass on her dressing table and crossed the room to where she lay on an ornate couch; an antique that must have belonged to the theatre since long before the Revolution. Sitting beside her he placed his hand on her thigh, sliding it beneath her skirts. He had never before kissed a woman of Tatiana’s age. Her lips, though full, were curiously rigid, and the kiss was too mannered, too practised. When he looked into her eyes, searching for reflected desire, he saw only a performance staged for an audience of one.

  Through the weeks a
nd months that followed he continued visiting Vasily at his apartment and Tatiana in her dressing room. Sex with Tatiana remained as passionless as that first encounter, while with Vasya each coupling was more aggressive than the last. Neither made him truly happy, but the duplicity of it contained a thrill of its own. It was only a matter of time before one or both of them would find out. Little surprise how Tatiana reacted. The sound of a shattered vase from the far end of the corridor. A shrill, anguished roar. The reserve troupe girls gathered outside, leaning as close to Tatiana’s door as they dared.

  Now, in her salon, Tatiana is more composed. Almost glacial. She regards him with an amused expression. There’s nothing of the barn-owl about her. A barn-owl kills for food, and as quickly as it can. Only humans and cats ever seem to draw the process out as entertainment.

  “So why did you come here?” she asks.

  “Because no-one else will speak to me. No-one calls me, no-one has written. They have meetings at the Kirov to which I’m not invited…”

  “Ah, yes. I was there. I thought it curious that you weren’t.”

  “And I have no work. Nobody will commission me to write another piece, nobody will employ me.” He reaches into his pocket, producing his last handful of kopecks. “This is all I have left.”

  “So it’s money?” says Tatiana. “Oh, Seryozha. That is rather gauche of you, don’t you think?”

  “It isn’t just money,” says Sergey, helplessly. “I feel like my strings are being cut.”

  “Which strings?”

  “You said yourself. We’re marionettes.”

  “I was talking about dancers, darling.”

  “But it’s not just the dancers. We’re all puppets, in one way or another.”

  “Then who are our puppeteers?”

  He glowers at her, but can’t bring himself to answer.

  Presently, Josef returns, carrying a silver tray with a teapot and two glasses in ornate podstakanniks, and a plate of chocolate covered bouchées. He pours them each a glass of tea, handing one to Sergey with the briefest of nods before taking Tatiana hers with a graceful, sweeping gesture.

  “Mademoiselle,” he says, leaving the room in reverse with another bow.