Summit

by Richard Bowker

"Don't mention it. Where will you be playing in Moscow, may I ask?"

  "The Great Hall of the Conservatory—where I played before."

  Khorashev nodded. "I have played in the Bolshoi Zal too," he murmured. "It has its memories. But keep in mind: you will be Daniel Fulton when you walk on that stage. Is all that matters."

  Fulton smiled at his old friend. "I'll keep it in mind," he said. Then he picked up his battered briefcase, put on his cloth cap, and walked out of the apartment.

  * * *

  Khorashev went back into his studio and sat at the piano. The pupil was waiting for him, but he did not want to see her just yet. He glanced at the matryoshka doll and thought of Daniel Fulton in Moscow, at the conservatory. Thought of his own days at the conservatory, practicing till his bones ached, wandering through the bookstores of the Arbat and buying dirty glasses of kvass from street vendors, picking mushrooms in the countryside, talking and drinking and laughing all night in some wretched student flat, young and happy and stupid. Thought of the glorious war, beating back the Fascists from the city's very suburbs, the giddy, insane pride he had felt in his motherland—a pride that covered a multitude of sins.

  Sins. Thought of the farm that his family had once owned, until the thugs came and dragged off his father and beat his mother while he cowered beneath the bed.

  Thought of the friends who disappeared and were not spoken of again.

  Thought of Zhdanov and his toady Khrennikov sitting in judgment of Shostakovich and Prokofiev and the rest, geniuses whose boots they were not fit to lick, throttling the musical spirit of the nation with their fat fingers. All to please the Great Leader, who sat in the Kremlin, invincible in his ignorance and his power, and destroyed lives with a twitch of his mustache.

  Thought of the fear that permeated his life like a fog. What can I play? Who can I speak to? What can I speak about? The fear that finally made him leave, impulsively, the first chance he had—a drowning man reflexively gasping for air.

  He had left, and now he would never return.

  His fingers idly played the three descending whole tones that began Les Adieux. Le-be-wohl, Beethoven had written above them. Farewell. Do svidanya.

  Americans expect the return to follow the farewell, the way the third movement must follow the first two; Russians know better.

  Khorashev got up from the piano and went to watch the end of Gilligan's Island with his pupil.

  * * *

  Fulton walked away from the elegant apartment building on Central Park, head down to avoid making eye contact with passersby. His mind was filled with music.

  It was another warm, sunny day. A horse-drawn carriage clip-clopped by; inside, a young couple—newlywed tourists, maybe—gawked at the metropolis. A taxi driver leaned on his horn. A black kid's boom box pulsated with a mindless rhythm. Life surrounded him. Why couldn't he be a part of it?

  Eventually he found himself by Rockefeller Center. He gazed across Fifth Avenue at Saint Patrick's Cathedral, and after a while he crossed, making his way past the pretzel vendors to stand in front of its huge doors. Saints stared out at him from the doors, recognizing him, daring him. He went inside.

  The back of the cathedral bustled with tourists. There were boxes asking him to donate money for peace, for the poor, for earthquake relief, for the maintenance of the cathedral. This wasn't what he wanted. He moved forward up a side aisle.

  A wizened old man in a shapeless suit grabbed Fulton's arm and gestured at his head. Terrified, Fulton tried to break free, and then realized he was supposed to take off his cap. He obeyed. The man nodded, appeased, and wandered off. Fulton slid into a pew.

  Now what? He half knelt, half leaned back against the seat and looked up at the high, vaulted ceiling. At the far end of his pew, a man in a business suit was reading the Times. A couple of rows in front of him, a black teenager with a Mohawk knelt, motionless, his face in his hands.

  Now he was supposed to pray.

  He remembered asking his mother once about religion. She frowned at him with the perpetual frown that seemed to be the natural state of her features. "Religion," she said, "is the last refuge of a failure. Only those who cannot succeed in this life need the promise of another one. Go practice."

  He had practiced.

  His mother was a high school teacher in Evanston, Illinois. That was not her idea of success, but success can also be experienced vicariously. She had put her husband through graduate school and helped him become a professor at Northwestern. And when Daniel came along and started picking out melodies on the old living room upright at the age of two, the course of the rest of her life was clear.

  She could not understand how someone could throw away his success like a pair of old socks. It was her success too, after all, that he was throwing away. And how could he explain it to her, when he didn't really understand it himself? They didn't speak anymore, and Fulton didn't know what to do about that.

  A couple of middle-aged women were staring at him intently. He buried his face in his hands. The black teenager could pray; why couldn't Daniel Fulton? Because he was successful? Hardly. Because he didn't believe? But he wanted to believe. Wanted to believe something. Fulton tried to imagine life as a believer. Things would be so easy, so comfortable then. The answers would all be there, and the only worry would be to do what you were told, and surely that would be easier than being told nothing.

  He thought about Moscow. He thought about Valentina Borisova and her frightened eyes. Tears at dawn. A rose lying on a chair. He hesitates, then picks it up, and then he walks away....

  He thought about playing the piano again. It had been in Moscow, walking through the cold early-morning city, that he had decided to quit. Perhaps it was inevitable that his departure and his return were so intertwined, like voices in a Bach fugue.

  Perhaps the answers are there, he thought. Yes, he was beginning to believe that they were. And that belief was better than nothing.

  He looked up, gripping the back of the pew in front of him. The women were gone; the black teenager hadn't moved. He could feel his fingers moving slightly against the hard wood. He stared at them as he listened to the music in his mind.

  They were flying through the intricacies of Les Adieux's third movement: The Return.

  Fulton smiled. It was time to start practicing.

  Chapter 12

  The quick spring yielded to Russian summer. Valentina slowly recovered and, as soon as she was able, she left Moscow behind and drove out to her ramshackle wooden dacha in the country.

  It wasn't much—no plumbing, some mismatched furniture, a little patch of garden in the back. But how many single women her age had such a place? Her neighbors, whom she avoided, probably speculated endlessly about her. Was she a Mosfilm starlet? Then why hadn't they seen her films? The mistress of a Central Committee member, perhaps? Then why was there never a Chaika parked along the rutted path, a portly man in a shiny suit paying a late-night call? Maybe they suspected who her employer was, but of course they never asked. Curiosity was not a virtue in this country.

  Her employer left her alone as well. Oh, she supposed the place was bugged, but that was to be expected. And besides, nothing objectionable ever happened here; she mostly just listened to music and stared out into the trees. She hoped the technicians who monitored her tapes liked Daniel Fulton.

  These were the times when she was closest to being happy. She was able to blot out the guilt and the fear for hours at a stretch and simply live like a normal person. She knew that it wouldn't last, of course, and so she wasn't surprised when the sound of an approaching automobile mingled with Kreisleriana as she sat in a rocking chair on her porch, listening to a tape of Fulton in Tokyo. She closed her eyes and felt the warm breeze waft over her, smelled the sharp aroma of the pines, and tried not to panic. When she opened her eyes, the black Volga sedan had come to a stop twenty meters away from her. Its doors opened, and Rylev and Trofimov got out.

  She studied them as they made their way up t
he dirt path to the porch. Trofimov was the taller of the two, but somehow also the more insubstantial. She knew that other people, like Doctor Chukova, thought less of him than she did, and at times like this she began to think that perhaps they were right. His long beard and uncombed hair and rumpled clothes somehow made him look more like a parody of a great absent-minded scientist than the real thing. And this disappointed Valentina, because she wanted very much for Professor Trofimov to be the real thing.

  There was no doubting the reality of Rylev, on the other hand. He was wearing a better-than-Soviet quality suit and leather shoes. He was un-Slavically thin, with pinched features and cold eyes; he looked as if everything inside him had been squeezed tight to remove all softness, leaving nothing but hard angles—on his face and in his mind. He was KGB, and Valentina hated him.

  "Good afternoon, Valentina," Rylev said over the music. "A beautiful day, is it not?"

  She nodded. She did not turn down the music. There were no other chairs on the porch, so the two men stood awkwardly above her. Rylev let his eyes rest on her bare thighs and American running shorts. Valentina was sure he had no interest in her thighs; he just wanted to make her feel uncomfortable.

  "You really should get a telephone out here, Valentina," Trofimov said. "It would make communication so much easier."

  "But I don't want to communicate with anyone," she replied.

  Rylev smiled. "And yet there are so many of us interested in you and your well-being, Valentina. Tell me: how are you feeling?"

  "I'm still very tired. Doctor Chukova examined me last week. You have her report, I'm sure."

  "But you look wonderful." His eyes moved up over her T-shirt until they met hers.

  She turned her head away. "How I look hardly matters," she said.

  "True. No one can know what goes on inside that head of yours. So we must make judgments, mustn't we? Your appearance, how this recovery period compares with past recovery periods—"

  "It keeps getting harder! It keeps getting worse! Can't you people understand that?"

  "We must make judgments, Valentina," Rylev said softly, and he almost sounded sympathetic. "We all know how difficult it is for you, but look at what we give you in return." He gestured at the dacha and the little Zhiguli parked in front of the Volga. "From each according to his abilities, my dear."

  The music stopped. There was tremendous applause, then nothing but tape hiss, birds singing in the pines. She was tired of the little game Rylev was playing. "When?" she asked.

  "In September, after the Peace Festival," Trofimov said. "And this will be different—much more exciting. I am making the hyperspace amplifier portable, you see. We're going to use it in London!"

  His excitement was phony, she knew. He was scared—scared that she would refuse, and that his own Zhiguli and dacha would be taken away. Because if she refused, he had nothing.

  They needed each other. Before she had come along, he had been on the outer fringes of respectability, expounding his theories to anyone (and there were very few) who would listen. Then he had found her, a guinea pig in someone else's experiments, a girl without theories, but with a strange talent that only he seemed able to focus. She didn't understand his explanations most of the time, but she found the intensity of his beliefs compelling—and reassuring. What happened was real—and it was not her fault. When they worked together, their success was far beyond anything they had achieved on their own.

  With their sudden success the KGB became interested, and then anything became possible for Trofimov: Why not his own laboratory, why not membership in the Academy, why not the Order of Lenin? But he had never found anyone else besides her who could make his machine work. And that meant that everything depended on her—which meant that his future was constantly in danger of collapse.

  Because she simply didn't care anymore. The pain was too great now; Zhigulis and dachas were not worth enduring that pain again. "I can't possibly be ready by September," she said.

  "But think of London," Trofimov urged her. "A chance to go abroad!" No stronger argument could be made to a Russian.

  "I don't care," she said. She glanced at Rylev, whose arms were folded tight, as if to make himself smaller—and therefore harder, like a lump of coal being squeezed into one glittering diamond of cruelty.

  But not caring gave her a freedom from Rylev's cruelty that Trofimov did not share. What could he do to her that was worse than the pain they were trying to convince her to experience? Even death did not scare her at this point. Better to die than to be trapped forever inside her dreamworld with the monsters she had created.

  "We would very much like to carry out this operation," Rylev said in his frighteningly polite voice. "And of course you are crucial to it."

  "All the more reason why you shouldn't rush me. We've failed before, haven't we, when you rushed me?"

  "Perhaps it wasn't because we rushed you. Perhaps you didn't try hard enough."

  "Then you should try harder to make me want to succeed." She longed to tell him she simply wouldn't do it, no matter how much time they gave her. But she lacked the courage; she couldn't bring herself to find out what they would do to her. She hated herself for this cowardice.

  Rylev suddenly reached down to her tape player and removed the cassette. There was a line of sweat around his collar. You bully, she thought. Are you going to steal my tapes?

  "Daniel Fulton," he said. "A well-known friend of the Soviet people." He turned to Trofimov. "Did I not read in Pravda, Maxim Maximovich, that he will be giving a recital during the Peace Festival?"

  Trofimov nodded, looking very uncomfortable.

  Valentina got up and snatched the tape back. "You're lying," she said. But why would he be? Her heart was pounding.

  "If you didn't choose to isolate yourself here, perhaps you would have read Pravda yourself," Rylev remarked. He smiled. "You make no secret of your admiration for the pianist Fulton, Valentina. So when we heard he would be playing in Moscow—well, we pulled a few strings—you know how it is...." He reached into the pocket of his suit coat and produced a small rectangle of cardboard. "And of course there is the reception afterward in the Great Kremlin Palace. Holders of certain tickets are admitted to the reception as well as the recital. I believe this is one of those tickets. Many famous and important people will be at the reception, I assure you. Everyone wants to meet this pianist. You would be astonished, Valentina, at how valuable these tickets have become on the black market. Or perhaps you would not be."

  Rylev held the ticket out to her, smiling. He didn't have to say anything more. The deal was clear, and Valentina knew she had to accept it. She took the ticket. "Very thoughtful of you," she murmured.

  "We want to keep you happy, my dear. You're very important to us."

  They were both silent. Valentina gazed at the ticket; Rylev gazed at her. "You'll be all right, Valentina," Trofimov said as the silence lengthened. "I'm certain of it. I'm making some adjustments to the low-frequency signal generation mechanism, and this should make it easier for you to project your thoughts. You have to trust me."

  Valentina wanted to trust him. But she trusted no one. She continued to stare at the ticket.

  "The end of August, I think, will be soon enough to begin work," Rylev said. "Until then, enjoy your summer, Valentina."

  Valentina reached down and turned the tape over. Fulton began playing Carnival. Rylev's smile was like a knife plunging into her brain. After a moment he turned away and headed back to the car.

  "You'll be all right, Valentina," Trofimov repeated in a whisper, and then he hurried after Rylev.

  She closed her eyes and leaned back in the rocking chair, clutching the ticket. The Volga backed down the path. A triangle of sunlight warmed a bare thigh. The festive music swirled around her.

  She had lived her life scrounging little rewards from her masters, a dog doing tricks in hopes of a bone. Guess which card I'm looking at. Make the man in the next room fall asleep. Tell me what color this is just
by feeling it. The tricks had become more complicated now, more dangerous, more important, and the rewards were correspondingly greater. But it had to stop.

  Not just yet, apparently. Not just yet.

  She thought about suicide, not for the first time. After the recital, of course. Blow her brains out while the joy still coursed through her body. That would stop it. That would wipe the smile from Rylev's face.

  But it was stupid to think about that now. She thought instead about Daniel Fulton. Hearing him play in person again, as she had three years—a lifetime—ago. Her mind went back to that night, the most memorable of her life. She was still trying to make sense of what had happened to her. Perhaps this would help. She would meet him at the reception after the recital and she would stare into his eyes and—

  Her imagination gave out on her. The reality of the ticket itself was too much to comprehend. Daniel Fulton. Again.

  She listened to Carnival with her eyes closed, and when it was over, she listened to the applause echo among the pines and the birches. And she held the precious ticket in both hands, afraid to let it go, afraid she would wake up and find out it was just one happy dream among all the nightmares.

  Chapter 13

  "Look, Dad, it says this guy signed the Declaration of Independence!"

  "Awesome!" Bill Sullivan glanced at the gravestone, but all he really wanted to do was look at his son, standing next to him in the Old Granary Burial Ground.

  "Dad, how much of a dead body is left after it's been buried for a couple hundred years?"

  "Not very much, I think. Depends on if you have an airtight casket, I suppose. But I guess they didn't have them back then anyway."

  "I guess not."

  They moved on to another grave.

  Maureen could veto New York, but she couldn't really object to Boston. Boston had more history in it than a dozen New Yorks—and it had Danny's grandmother, as well. So that's where Sullivan took his son on vacation.

  Vacations weren't often enough to see your only son, and that's why Sullivan stared so hard at him as they wandered through the cemetery with all the other tourists; the memories would have to suffice during a dozen long-distance calls. Danny had grown, of course, but what fascinated Sullivan was the way his features seemed to change while staying recognizably the same. At Christmas Danny had looked like his mother, with his blond hair and blue eyes and big ears. Now the Sullivan genes seemed to be asserting themselves—the hair was darker, the nose was thinner, and the ears approached normality, thank God. He was deeply tanned from the Florida sun, and he was lean and muscular from his swimming (although not as muscular as he'd be if he were still a left wing). He was the best-looking kid Sullivan had ever seen.