Music of a Life

by Andrei Makine

  But it was still more improbable to imagine him walking at her side in these springtime streets, meeting her classmates. No, no! The very picture of such a couple made her cringe. Besides, how had she ever thought that one day she could reveal this man's existence to the circle of friends around which her whole life now revolved? Talk to them about that dinner with him, her stupid tears? No, it was a long winter's hallucination that the sun had dissipated.

  She did not care to admit to herself that this fantasy had enriched her, that thanks to this soldier hidden away in the crow's nest, she had learned a multitude of feminine wiles, so useful for manipulating a man; that he had been her toy; that she had used him. In an attempt to silence these disturbing little admissions, on one occasion she began to play "The Little Tin Soldier," trying to imitate the mistakes he generally made, laughing at them, almost without forcing herself. Then she played "The Waltz of the Doves," which she had also taught him, a much more cheerful tune, but one which suddenly made her sad.

  She experienced the same sadness when one day she caught sight of him through the drawing room window. The car was parked in front of the entrance, waiting for the general. Stella saw the open car door, a hand holding a cigarette, and, mirrored in the windshield, the pale shape of his face. "He'll spend his whole life waiting," she thought and felt guilty, for in her case too many good things lay in wait for her: this beautiful spring, then, after the exams, the prom, then university, the intoxicating freedom students have, and then… All she could picture was a vast surge of brilliance in the days to come.

  During these moments of compassion, she also felt gratitude. Why, in the course of that stupid dinner he could have undressed her, taken her, she might have become pregnant! The idea was so appalling, so compromising for her future, that she shook her head to be rid of it. And began to loathe him, for he was in fact in a position to ruin everything, almost without wishing to do so.

  Ultimately, this whirligig of regrets, joy, pity, anger, and faded dreams made the exciting newness of this spring all the more piquant. Real life was about to begin.

  He saw Stella only once more during these weeks of sunshine. One evening, instead of going home, he parked the car in the street behind a newsstand. He knew it was the day for her music lesson. She came into view, wearing a light summer coat, and walked along the avenue where the trees were still barely tinged with green. Her silhouette stood out against the blue of the dusk with a clarity that hurt his eyes. For a long time after she had disappeared, he retained the picture of her there, at the turning of the avenue, and in the palm of his hand felt the very real sensation of touching her, of gripping the delicate outline of her shoulders with his fingers. The sensation was familiar to him: the suppleness of the dead squirrel on his palm.

  He drove off, plunging into the streets, now blue, now shafted with streams of copper from the sunset. He told himself that in this life there should be a key, a code for expressing, in concise and unambiguous terms, all the complexity of our attempts, so natural and so grievously confused, at living and loving. This beautiful evening in Moscow a year after the war's end. That pale cream coat disappearing around a corner. The unbearable pain and the futile joy contained in that moment. The memory of the squirrel, and there, above the bridge, the silvery white of the clouds, just the same as last winter, seen through the window of the crow's nest.

  It suddenly seemed to him as if all that had restrained him just now from getting out of the car and running after that pale cream coat in the avenue was the false name he had been dragging around with him for all those years. Violently he strove to convince himself that this was the only obstacle.

  * * *

  The next day he sent off a request for information concerning his parents, signed with this false name.

  A week later the general told him to come up to his office at the ministry with him. For a moment Alexei thought Gavrilov was going to talk about Stella, that he might even say, "You know, my daughter has told me she's in love with you." This crazy hope survived for a few seconds and lingered only to show him later how blind one can be when one is in love.

  "Listen, Sergei'," the general began in embarrassed tones, "yesterday some information about you was passed on to me… mere rumors, I hope. But these days, as you know very well, you can't be too careful. It appears that someone's been using your name, or at least… How can I put it…? Well, his family claim that you've taken, that is to say, not you yourself, but… To cut a long story short, they think their son's still alive. They know a friend saw him just before being demobilized but that he, you that is, don't want to go back to the village and you're hiding out. No one really knows why. Oh, boy, it sure is complicated. The fact is, it's a case of false identity, know what I mean? And, in the army, you bet, that's no joke. I don't have to tell you that. You get sent to a camp for far less than that… Well, I'm just telling you this for your own information. But if you think there's any kind of problem, you'd better let me know. With stories like this, you know, it's like land mines: better to defuse them before they go off."

  The telephone rang, and the general picked it up; his face grew relaxed, and he began dictating a long list of food, specifying quantities of sausages and smoked sturgeon and numbers of bottles of wine. In the crackling of the receiver Alexe'i recognized the voice of Stella's mother. He was waiting for the conversation to end so he could confess everything.

  The general hung up, licked his lips with satisfaction. "We're preparing a hell of a dinner for tomorrow night. And the guests are well worth the trouble. Future parents-in-law. Oh, yes, Sergei, time really flies. When I went off to the war our Stella was just a little girl. Now, lo and behold, we're going to marry her off. Her fiance's a great guy! And his father, this is just between us, mind you, has an excellent post at the Ministry of the Interior. He's the one, by the way, who tipped me off about that business of the false name. It's all in the family, you see… Otherwise they'd have carted you off without another word. Well, you can talk to me about that later. Now, about this dinner. I'm going to need you from dawn till dusk tomorrow and half the night as well. Stella's invited all her friends. Well, engagements these days aren't done the way they used to be – all settled in private. So you'll have to take them home in groups. The subway will be closed by then. In other words, maximum state of alert!"

  They installed him in the crow's nest, all piled high with winter coats. The door was left ajar, and he watched the guests arriving, couples (the fiance's parents: the sugary waft of the mother's perfume, the father's bass voice), a few single people, then small groups of school friends. Some of them lost their way, came into the cubbyhole where he was waiting, stared in perplexity at this man motionless amid the overcoats and piles of cardboard cartons, uncertain whether to greet him or not. Several times the general asked him to take the car and fetch this or that guest of note. Alexe'i did his bidding, then returned to his vigil. Vera, the housekeeper, brought him a cup of tea, almost spoke to him, changed her mind, and simply smiled, with a sour little twitch.

  He felt no bitterness, no jealousy, simply a pain so acute, so unremitting, that no other emotion could graft itself onto its cutting edge. Distractedly, he identified the sounds coming from the reception room that gave clues to the progress of the party. To begin with, there was a merry hubbub of voices, rhythmically augmented from time to time by deep bass notes. After this the popping of first one cork, then suddenly another, accompanied by shouts of laughter and squeals of panic. The words of the first toast being proposed by the general. And finally the clatter of knives and forks.

  Rigid with grief, he felt nothing when, half an hour later, after a chorus of pleading voices, the music rang out. He readily recognized the polonaise Stella had been practicing the previous winter. He even noted that the moment for this musical interlude was very well chosen: between the first glass that made the guests receptive and the subsequent food and drink that would dull their senses. He listened and, despite his absent state, noti
ced two or three imperceptible hesitations in her playing that were like secret reminders addressed to him alone and which made him feel still further isolated. The sound of clapping burst forth, and this applause and some shouts of "Bravo!" prevented him from hearing the footsteps running down the corridor.

  And now Stella's face was framed in the doorway. "Sergei! Quickly! Do come! This means so much to me!" Her excited whisper was redolent of intoxication, but it was more the intoxication of happiness than that of wine.

  Perplexed, he got up and allowed himself to be led by the hand into the reception room.

  "And now for a surprise!" announced Stella, holding out her arms toward him as if to invite acclaim for him. "Our Sergei's going to play us a little tune. I hope you'll appreciate his performance… and my modest talents as a music teacher. 'The Little Tin Soldier'!"

  The young people applauded; the parents and the older guests found the jest rather daring but went along with it all the same, clapping a little, not wishing to seem unduly severe.

  After the darkness of the crow's nest, he was blinded by the light in the reception room, embarrassed by the eyes fixed on him. Searching for a way to avoid the torment and not finding one, he had time to notice several faces; a woman's necklace with large pearls; the fiance, a tall, dark young man, seated among his classmates. In Stella's gaze, for a fraction of a second, something like a forgotten shadow flitted by. He saw that she was wearing the pale linen summer dress.

  The applause died down. He sat on the piano stool, sensing that his grief, the block of ice that had held him frozen, was breaking up, turning into shame, humiliation, anger, the stupid crimson flush that rose to his neck, the weight of his thick boots resting on the slippery nickel of the pedals.

  He performed, as in the days of their lessons, with the stolid application of an automaton. They were already laughing as he played, so comic was the sight of this soldier playing a little song about a soldier. Some of the young people sang the words of the chorus, which they knew. The wine was beginning to liven up the merriment. The applause was unanimous. "Bravo, the teacher!" cried one guest, whom Stella favored with a curtsy. The bass voice of the fiance's father rang out amid the laughter: "Well, I never, General. I had no idea that in your ministry the drivers were pianists as well." "A drink for the pianist," chanted one of the young men, and several voices joined in. A glass of vodka was passed from hand to hand in the direction of the piano. Stella raised her arms and shouted, so as to be heard above the noise from the table: "And now, the star item on the program: 'The Waltz of the Doves'!"

  Alexei put down his glass, turned toward the keyboard. Little by little the shouting and talking died down, but still he waited, his hands resting on his knees, sitting bolt upright, with an abstracted air. Throwing a wink at the guests, Stella whispered, like a prompter: "Go on, then! You start by playing middle  with your right thumb…"

  As his hands fell upon the keyboard, it was still possible to believe a beautiful harmony had been formed at random, in spite of him. But a second later the music came surging out, the power of it sweeping away all doubts, voices, sounds, wiping away the fixed grins and exchanged glances, pushing back the walls, dispersing the light of the reception room out into the nocturnal immensity of the sky beyond the windows.

  He did not feel as if he were playing. He was advancing through a night, breathing in its delicate transparency, made up as it was of an infinite number of facets of ice, of leaves, of wind. He no longer felt any pain. No fear about what would happen. No anguish or remorse. The night through which he was advancing expressed this pain, this fear, and the irremediable shattering of the past, but this had all become music and now only existed through its beauty.

  In the dim light of a winter's morning the train seems to be feeling its way as it approaches Moscow among the clusters of tracks that twist and turn beneath the snow. Berg's concluding words mingle with the heavy jolting of the wheels, the voices and footfalls of passengers in the corridor. Knocked off balance by this arrival, which we had given up hoping for, the narrative hesitates and is then polished off in a few hurried sentences: the years spent in a camp ("I didn't even benefit from the amnesty when Stalin died. I did my ten years, through to the last day"); then his visits to Moscow (in the hope of seeing Stella again? He does not say, no longer has time to say), clandestine visits, for he had been directed to live in a small town in eastern Siberia; a further arrest in the course of one of these trips to the capital; three years served close to the arctic circle, where he realized that he had finally become accustomed to that snow hell… It was there, under the sunless sky, that he would learn the year and place of his parents' death.

  The train stops. We take our first steps as if weightless – after days and nights of immobility, our feet plant themselves in the snow with the suppleness of a dance. In the frozen air the aggressive acidity of a big city stings the nostrils. Side by side with Berg, I walk along a dim, endless platform. The passengers stepping down from our train pause for a moment, irresolute, like sleepwalkers. In some of them one can sense a longing to sit down on a suitcase, curl up, and go to sleep again. Berg goes ahead of me; I see him slipping along through the drowsy crowd as it shuffles toward the station. For a second he becomes a passenger like the others, a provincial landing in Moscow at six o'clock in the morning. I watch him walking along and think of him arriving like this in the capital, in the old days, secretly, eager to melt into the crowd. I remember the end of his story: how Moscow was more dangerous than the depths of the taiga, how Vera, the general's old housekeeper, who once used to bring him tea in the crow's nest, now gave him news of Stella's life.

  Presented differently, all these missed encounters could have added up to a fine, tragic story. But they had been recounted helter-skelter amid the sounds of a train arriving in a great, dark, frozen city. And that was doubtless how they had been lived through, in the disconcerting simplicity with which broken lives are lived.

  We enter the immoderately lofty station hall, and in the midst of this emptiness, where it seems as if nothing personal can be said, Berg confides to me, without turning his head, "Her husband had some problems at work at the time of de-Stalinization. He began drinking, left her… She died at the beginning of the sixties, from cancer. Their son was seven. I did what I could, through the intermediary of a friend. A little money each month. I stayed up in the north. A job for madmen at fifty below zero. 'Twelve months of winter, the rest is summer,' as they say up there. But the pay was very good. Only the child wasn't to know. They still had me on file as a repeat offender."

  He looks at me with a smile, holds out his hand: "Well, then, safe journey, and no hard feelings."

  I shake his hand, I see him moving away. Three Stations Square is gloomy at this hour. The streetlights slice it up into bluish sections. The big trucks shake its frozen shell with their steely roar. The people hurrying along, wearing coats of coarse gray or black, look like something out of Stalin's time, the years of war, privations, silent heroism. Berg melts into this human tide, heads toward a subway station, is lost in the dark current pouring into the entrance. He has the same stiff gait, the same stoic determination. I manage to spot him in the crowd at the top of the staircase, then he disappears. Homo sovieticus, a slightly scornful voice murmurs within me. I am too sleepy to silence it.

  I return to the station hall. The hours of departure advertised on the board have a surreal air after our delay, after all those time zones I have crossed since the Far East, and above all, after the time past inscribed in me by Berg's story. But the strangest thing of all is that Berg suddenly reappears. Yes, he is there in front of me; it is not a dream.

  "I went off without asking you if you had a place to stay in Moscow. I hope you're not going to stand here at the station all day."

  I tell him I won't be leaving until the last train, at about midnight, and that I'm planning to go and see a museum, and before that I'll go to the early show of some movie, to sleep. He smiles; this
plan of going to sleep in the movies (ten kopecks for a show, an empty auditorium, and a nice warm seat) must remind him of his own past as a wanderer.

  "Let me give you the advice of an old Muscovite." His voice cannot conceal a secret delight. "You know, you're as likely to find a hotel room in Moscow as you are to get a bed for the night in the Lenin Mausoleum. But I have an old friend, a recidivist like me – "

  He guides me across the city, by subway, by bus, then on foot, taking shortcuts through courtyards, always with a touch of cheerful brusqueness, happy to be back on familiar territory, to show off his knowledge of the capital. I follow him with resignation, like a child walking along half asleep.

  At the hotel, weariness overwhelms me. I wake up for a moment in the middle of the day, an unreal vision presents itself to my eyes: stretched out on Berg's bed is a dark suit. It looks like a man squashed flat, emptied of his substance; a necktie hangs over the back of the chair, a strong smell of eau de cologne comes from the bathroom. Not having the strength to seek an explanation, I go straight back to sleep.

  When Berg wakes me up, I don't recognize him immediately. He has put on the suit that was laid out on his bed, and the tie. His hair is sleek and glossy.

  "I didn't want to disturb you before, you were sleeping so soundly… But it's already six."

  On the table I see two glasses in which tea is steeping, an immersion heater hooked onto the window latch.

  "Are you going… to the theater?" I say, trying not to betray my surprise at the change.

  "Yes – in a manner of speaking. Well, to a concert. And by the way, I thought that if you were interested…"

  We drink the lemon tea and eat bread, the same as had been wrapped in pages of sheet music, and some slices of salami. After the meal I wash up, comb my hair. Berg lends me a tie.