Music of a Life

by Andrei Makine

  Alexe'i pulled his cap down over his forehead and climbed the stairs. A crowd of young girls burst out onto one landing, rushed downstairs in a twittering cascade. He realized that the passage of time provided a better mask than the peak of his cap.

  On the wall, beside the door of their apartment, he saw three doorbells, three rectangles of paper with names on them. A communal apartment… Back in the courtyard he located two windows on the façade: the kitchen, his parents' bedroom. Washing hung there, in abundance and great variety. The irresistible way life had of taking root like this seemed to him at once touching and futile.

  During those first weeks in Moscow he often heard talk of amnestied prisoners who did not have the right to enter the big cities but could settle in the Urals, Siberia, Central Asia. He pictured his parents in one of these remote places and told himself that in time, by embarking on circumspect research, he might find them again. And that from now on, only his false identity risked jeopardizing such a reunion.

  The general was promoted to an even higher rank and now worked at the Ministry of Defense. He had doubtless forgotten his promise to treat his driver like a son but still remained benevolent, and one October day when they arrived at his home, he even said, "Listen, come on up with me. I've got some paperwork to put together, it's going to take some time… No ifs or buts about it. I'm not going to have you freezing here in the car in weather like this."

  They went up. A silent, elderly housekeeper showed Alexei into a little room beside the entrance hall and brought him a glass of tea. The room, half cloakroom, half storeroom, had a tiny window, outside which the flakes of the first snow were floating down. He immediately felt very much at ease in this quiet corner, as if the place signaled a homecoming at last. Absentmindedly he watched the snowflakes slipping by: it was as if they were fluttering past on a day long ago, onto a forgotten city. The tea, too, had a flavor of old times. As did the silence of this vast apartment at nightfall. As did the invisible presence of the housekeeper, whom he heard sighing in the kitchen. And suddenly, muffled by the corridor, a few hesitant notes sounded. Then a whole melodious phrase. Then this music.

  He left the room, took a few steps along the corridor, had no desire to go farther. What he saw was enough for him. A deep blue velvet dress, the glow of fair hair, a right hand he could see when it slipped along toward the high notes, the left hand, whose pressure he could guess at without seeing it. He remained motionless in the dim light of the corridor, his shoulder against the wall, conscious that the universe had just attained perfection. The snow outside the window, the mystery of this huge unknown apartment, this music. Above all, the imperfection of this music! For from time to time the hands came up against a combination of notes difficult to separate out, went back a little, regained their momentum. These deviations, he sensed, were essential to the plenitude of what had just been revealed. Impossible to add anything at all. Except, perhaps, the glance from the old housekeeper as she walked mutely along the corridor and gave him a brief look that seemed to him both understanding and bitter. Nothing else.

  But these moments, which would have been enough for him, were extended and gave rise to further times spent waiting in the little room, then to the first meeting ("Oh, so you must be… yes, Papa told us about you…"), and to other meetings, and to the beauty of the open, smiling face of this girl of seventeen, to the delicacy of that hand when they first touched ("Stella… It was Mama who chose my name… I think it sounds horribly silly with my patronymic, Vassilyevna, don't you?"), to the conviction that the deep blue tone of the velvet dress was the key ingredient, at once overt and coded, of happiness. And that the other ingredients were the snowflakes outside the windows, the early dusk, and the notes whose hesitations occasionally hinted at the youthful fragility of the fingers.

  He was living out this love in the past, drawn back toward the years of the great terror, when the long-nosed masks were everywhere he turned, those three years of his youth when he should have experienced exactly what was happening today: this encounter with a girl his own age, first love. He was twenty-seven now. But the girl at the piano made this question of age irrelevant, for he felt he was outside the ordinary current of days, in a parallel time, in which he could relive those three years spent amid the masks.

  Sometimes he came to his senses, observed his life as if over the banister of a staircase, with a feeling of giddiness: so many living and dead people stood between him and the girl at the piano. He clenched his fists, the powerful, scarred fingers, remembered that these hands had killed, had learned to handle female flesh boldly – the flesh of that woman with a big cat's yellow eyes, whom he had met at a friend's birthday party, at the end of the summer, and had taken when she was half asleep, drunk, experiencing something akin to disgust for this big, indifferent, lazy body… Remembering this, he told himself that it would have been better if he had stayed in the car, not accepted the general's invitation… But in the little room where he drank his tea and which the general, a sailor in his youth, referred to as "the crow's nest," he forgot everything and blended into the swirling of the snow, the sound of the notes, and the anticipation of those footsteps whose rapid tread he knew, and that voice: "What are you doing here in the dark? Come…"

  Stella would seat him beside her, begin to play, sometimes asking him to turn the pages of the music: "I'll give you a signal, like this, with my chin." He did her bidding, watched her face, pretending to look out for the signal, occasionally stole a glance at the music and rapidly turned his eyes away.

  She found in him the stuff of dreams, easily molded by her young girl's imagination. This Sergei Maltsev was someone sufficiently well defined: the native of a little village, a man of twenty-seven (which is to say almost an old man for her at seventeen), and with his brow furrowed by that horrible scar. So, a man who, to all appearances, was not the one she was secretly waiting for.

  But on the other hand, he was sufficiently enigmatic: a man who had certainly made plenty of female conquests but who, according to Stella's father, lived alone, somewhere in the snowbound streets in the outskirts of Moscow, a silent man, who often brought the general home as night was falling and disappeared into the same night, in driving rain or swirling snow. At moments like this he could easily be pictured in the guise of a mysterious stranger, whose face and life story she was constantly reshaping. Besides, had her father not one day told her that this driver had saved his life during the war?

  Little by little she was caught in her own game. She needed this man who drank his tea in the crow's nest. She needed to summon him, to see his face, to forget his face, no longer to see his soldier's uniform, to picture him as pale, refined, handsome (which he was in his way, but differently), to dress this shade in black, to thrust him onstage into plots she had dreamed up the previous night.

  Beyond that, all she required of this stand-in was that he listen to her practicing and turn the pages of her music. One day he missed the brisk movement of her chin, their agreed signal. She stopped playing, saw him sitting up very straight on the chair beside her, his eyes tightly shut, as if seized by a bout of pain.

  "Don't you feel well?" she asked him anxiously, touching his hand. He opened his eyes and murmured, "No, no, it's all right…" staring intently at the fingers lightly resting on his hand. After a moment of embarrassment she exclaimed, "Hey, I've got a great idea! I'm going to teach you to play a little yourself. Oh, yes, you can. It's as easy as anything. It's just a children's song."

  The tune was called "The Little Tin Soldier." Alexe'i turned out to be a clumsy pupil of modest abilities. Stella often found herself obliged to tug at his stiff fingers, so as to guide them toward the right keys.

  Thanks to "The Little Tin Soldier" she was able to elaborate her scenarios. The man she had at her beck and call could be scolded, flattered, sweetly tormented, complimented on an arpeggio well played, comforted after a mistake. She was discovering one of the most intensely appealing aspects of love, that of making ones
elf obeyed, manipulating the other person and depriving him of his liberty with his own fervent consent.

  This man's silence, as he drank his tea peacefully while waiting for the general, no longer satisfied her. Now she wanted to make him talk, make him tell her about his life, about the war, to marvel or be jealous as she listened to his tales.

  One day, under insistent questioning, he tried to venture into this wartime past but felt at a complete loss confronting memories in which everything led to partings, solitude, death. He guessed that what she was expecting from him was a love story set against the backdrop of war, but his memory was struggling among the bodies of mutilated men, among the bodies of women possessed in haste and vanished beyond recall. All he was left with was the smell of iodine on a woman's hands, but how could he talk about that, especially to this young girl, as she listened to him wide-eyed? Talk about himself? But who was he? That soldier washing in a pool of water after a bout of hand-to-hand combat, and the water turning red, with his own blood and the blood of those he had just killed? Or that youth shaking a dead man to get his boot off him? Or else that other one, watching at a dusty window, in another life, in a forbidden past? No, what was most real in all those years was the day he lost consciousness in the cemetery, when he was as good as dead and when all there was between him and the world was that unsteady line: an unknown woman sleeping beside him and giving him her warmth…

  Under pressure from her questions, he began talking about the squirrel: a halt on the march, a fine spring day, the little animal flying from tree to tree. Suddenly he remembered how the story concluded, broke off, became confused, and invented a vague happy ending. Stella gave him a sulky smile. "Papa told me you fought like a hero… And you tell me about a squirrel! Pooh."

  He fell silent, remembering the smooth warmth of the fur in the palm of his hand. Everything that had happened after that, he now realized, was linked to the killing of that animal: his assignment with the general, very probably his survival, his coming to Moscow, and his meeting with this young Stella who was now engaged in teasing him. She must have guessed that this man, whom she thought she had tamed, domesticated, had unspeakable deeds, shameful actions, and sorrows hidden away in his life, as in an underground cave. And the fact that his demeanor in front of her was embarrassed and tongue-tied gave him a childish air.

  "I didn't mean to offend you. Not at ah. It was very amusing, the squirrel," she said, and put her hand on his, which still held the cup of cold tea. The moment lasted. Outside the window the dusk became tinged with deep blue. The fronds of hoarfrost writhed across the windowpane. Somewhere at the end of the corridor, the general's voice could be heard growling into the telephone. She shook his hand gently, as if to rouse him: "Now, let's practice our 'Little Tin Soldier,' shall we?"

  * * *

  During those weeks of great frosts she did not herself notice at what moment her make-believe story became confused with reality. Perhaps it was the evening when she proposed that they use first names. Or later, when they chanced to meet outside the entrance to the apartment building: he had just driven the general home, she was returning from her music lesson. With a resolute step she climbed in beside him, and they went for a drive along the streets of Moscow, in a slow progress through the white flurries.

  Or perhaps it was that other night. Her parents, in Kiev for the birthday of an old fellow soldier of the general's, decided to stay there for one more day and asked Stella to warn the driver. Having waited in vain for them at the station, Alexe'i rang the bell at the apartment, and she told a lie: her father, she said, was going to telephone late that night… Alexe'i saw that she was wearing a pale linen dress, a summer frock, and had piled her curls high in a style that gave her a formal look. Her cheeks were burning, as if with a fever.

  Heroically, she made a show of nonchalance, inviting him into the reception room, offering him dinner ("They may not telephone till one in the morning. There's no point in our dying of hunger"), opening a bottle of wine. Beneath the very thin fabric of her dress her body was shaking; her movements betrayed an ill-controlled brusqueness that she tried to pass off as casual bravado. Alexe'i realized that everything in this improvised soirée had been so well, so feverishly well, prepared that only a walk-on part was left to him. The whole scenario could have been acted out without him, in Stella's daydreams.

  But he was there and understood that at any minute now his turn would come to play the part, to speak the lines, to step into a role that was at once obvious and absurd.

  He stooped to pick up first a napkin, then a piece of bread she had dropped in her excitement; he poured wine, in obedience to a theatrically imperious wave of her hand, but most of all, taking advantage of his ghostly state, he was observing this girl, who appeared almost undressed in her summer frock. Her bare arms, with their bluish veins that looked as if they had been drawn on with schoolboy's ink, her neck, pink with excitement, her slender waist, and when she turned toward the stove, the delicate contours of her shoulder blades. He listened to her voice as it grew increasingly resonant and elated, sensing that the moment was approaching when he would have to embrace these shoulders, feel the delicacy of the shoulder blades beneath his hands.

  He did not desire her. Or rather, it was quite another desire. For this night with her he would have been ready to… He saw himself reliving the war years and had the feeling that he would have gone through them all again for this one evening. But what was being acted out that night was intended for someone other than himself.

  She had already drunk three glasses and was eyeing him in a brazen manner, at once aggressive and vulnerable, that he found painful. "Perhaps we should ring them now," he suggested, glancing at the clock. "No," she cut in, "it's still much too early!" Clapping her hands together, she declaimed in the tones of a circus ringmaster: "And now, our musical program!"

  She swung around on the piano stool, seized a piece of sheet music, and beckoned to him. He saw it was the Rachmaninov elegy she had worked on several times without success. She attacked it, managed to clear the first few hurdles with the courage of drunkenness, fell at the next. Started again, no longer concealing her anger, stumbled…

  He listened to her, his eyes half closed, absent-mindedly. At the third, almost desperate attempt, as she hesitated again, he murmured, without thinking, "There's a sharp there…"

  She broke off, looked at him. The effort of reading the music must have cleared her mind for a moment. She saw this man, sitting motionless beside her, his eyes closed, a man she had for a moment believed capable of saying what she had heard (I really am drunk, she thought). He looked very old and exhausted, and the pink spots left by the stitches on the scar across his brow were clearly visible.

  He roused himself when he heard her weeping. Her elbows on the keyboard, she was sobbing, trying to speak: "You can go now, Sergei. They're not coming till tomorrow. You have to be at the station at nine o'clock." Despite her tears, a conspiratorial tone lingered in her voice. This was the admission she had rehearsed as part of the night's scenario.

  And then there was that other evening, in March, when the streets, roads, and buildings were blotted out by a snowstorm, the last one of the winter. And it was also the last time the general invited him up to the crow's nest to drink tea.

  Stella came in to see him; they remained for a moment watching the white fury outside the window. She had shut the door when she came in, and the sound of her mother's voice reached them, muffled by the interminable corridor, calling out to the housekeeper: "Vera, do wipe up the hall floor. That driver's left snow everywhere." Stella pulled a wry face and made a gesture, as if seeking to make up for these words, then suddenly leaned over toward Alexe'i as he sat there, his cup of tea in his hands, and kissed him. He felt her lips on his brow where it was marked by the scar… Out in the corridor a cloth could be heard scrubbing the floor.

  The following day he was going off with the general, who had several garrisons in the north to inspect.


  The inspection trip lasted almost a month. They traveled back and forth across regions still immobilized by ice, skirted the White Sea, drove through forests where for the moment not a glimmer of spring could be sensed. Just as if winter had returned. As if the days of the war had returned with the columns of troops being reviewed by the general, tanks with their tracks grinding the frozen earth, the bleak concrete of the fortifications.

  With every mile on their return journey it seemed to them as if they were taking shortcuts back into spring. And no trace remained of those wartime winters, apart from the sheet of ice on which the general one day slipped and sprained his ankle. Alexe'i had to carry him to the car. "Hey, do you remember that time at the front, Sergei?" he said with a quiet chuckle. "You lugged me under the Fritzes' noses for eight miles." And, without admitting it to themselves, they both had the thought that if they could laugh about it now, the war really was over.

  In Moscow, this springtime laughter could be heard everywhere – in the April sunshine that already burned the skin, just as it did in summer, in the clatter of the streetcars on the gleaming steel rails, in the carefree faces of the crowds of young people for whom the war was no more than a childhood memory. And it was such a pleasure to remain outdoors that it no longer even occurred to the general to invite Alexeï to come up and warm himself and drink tea.

  Stella realized that the winter had been a long dream – sometimes dream, sometimes nightmare – from which she was now well and truly awakened. In the little crow's nest Vera, the maid of all work, piled up the coats, strewed the furs with mothballs. The tiny window, bombarded by sunlight, was blocked with a thick rectangle of cardboard. In this place now it was impossible to imagine a man sitting there with his cup of tea, a man disfigured by a white scar across his brow and wearing a soldier's uniform.