by Rose Tremain
Waiting for his night bus, on a tilting bench no wider than a plank, Lev remembered how, when Marina had worked in the Procurator’s Office of Public Works in Baryn, he used to imagine her as the guardian of his world, used to feel confident that whatever changes might be on their way, his wife would be one of the first to know about them. Even changes in the weather. The Office of Public Works had invested in what the procurator called a “reliable forecasting facility.” Marina always knew, for instance, when snowfall was expected. Her department would have overseen the oiling of ancient snowplows and authorized the call-up of the retired drivers of these machines, taken from their homes to be put on a fearful standby in the Baryn transport depot, where the only creature comfort was an antique samovar bolted to the wall and a stall of rusty urinals that were never cleaned.
“These old men,” Marina used to say, “have to use the urinals very often. I worry they will get some infection.”
Lev’s bus arrived and he climbed on and was glad of the weak warmth to be found inside and the lemonish light in the darkness. He wished someone could have warned him about the suddenness of change in the English seasons. He knew he’d become so accustomed to the fine weather he’d made no adjustments in his mind for a cold autumn. And now he could see the long tunnel of winter waiting ahead, the dark afternoons, that old middle-of-the-night sadness you could feel when you heard the wind tormenting the trees.
Lev closed his eyes. His back ached from his long shift at the sinks. He stuffed his hands inside the pockets of his jacket and clutched the precious money he found there. Memories of Marina’s office in the Public Works building now filled his mind. He could remember its fusty smell and the sound of its heavy door opening and closing and Marina’s nameplate on her desk.
It had been in winter that he and Marina had become entrapped in their one furious quarrel. Even at the time, Lev had known that the detestable way he was behaving toward his wife had something to do with the cold season, with lightlessness, with the too-thin blood in his veins. All along that dark time, he’d hated himself—his ranting voice, his hardened heart—but this hatred didn’t alter what he felt or what he did. All along that dark time, he had known he was probably mistaken, but he couldn’t recant, couldn’t cease to believe what had suddenly, in the space of a single day, become his blinding conviction.
He had accused Marina of being unfaithful to him. He believed that her lover was her boss, the procurator himself, the fifty-year-old Mr. Rivas, formerly known as Comrade Rivas.
This belief had been born on a cold Friday afternoon when work finished early at the Baryn sawmill. Lev had walked through the freezing town to Marina’s office. He went through the main door of the Public Works building, treading mud and sawdust onto the linoleum floor of the reception area, and the way was barred by the ugly, fire-breathing receptionist, who instructed him rudely to take off his shoes.
He did as he was told. In Baryn you obeyed public servants without questioning their authority. But Lev’s socks were damp and had holes in the heels. Climbing the stairs, clutching his muddy shoes, he felt humiliated and poor. He arrived at the corridor outside Marina’s office and, without knocking, opened her door.
She was sitting at her desk, reading some paperwork. The procurator, wearing his smart suit, was standing behind her, also reading— or pretending to read—the document on her desk, with his arm round Marina’s shoulders.
Lev stared at this tableau. Comrade Rivas jumped, withdrew his arm, and straightened up. Marina let out a tiny strangulated sound, which Lev heard as the sound of guilt. His gaze went from one face to the other. Nobody spoke until Marina said, “Mr. Rivas and I were just going over some new costings from the District Office of Heat and Light.”
Rivas looked at his watch. “Well, it’s true it’s getting late for a Friday,” he said. “Please do accompany your wife home.” Then he walked past Lev, without looking back at Marina, click-click, click-click in his shiny shoes, and went into his own office and closed the door.
Lev sat down on a leather chair. He laid his filthy work boots on the floor. His eyes didn’t leave Marina’s face. She began to tidy the documents on her desk and wouldn’t look at him. He could see that her face was red, that this blush had crept down her neck, and he imagined it spreading underneath her neat white blouse into the cleft between her breasts. “What have I just seen?” he asked.
Marina continued tidying the papers. “You haven’t seen anything,” she said. “Let’s go home.” She took her coat off its peg, wound a woolen scarf round her neck, patted her hair.
“Oh yes,” said Lev, “I’d do that if I were you: check your hair, where his hands have been. Check your lipstick, too? Or perhaps there’s no lipstick left on your mouth.”
“Don’t think what you’re thinking, Lev,” she said. “The procurator behaves in an affectionate manner toward all his staff, because he believes this humane attitude to be more productive than —”
“More productive of what?”
“More productive than old-fashioned hierarchical severity and —”
“I said more productive of what?”
“Please don’t shout in this office. Of cohesion. Of everybody working together —”
“And doing what else together?”
Marina didn’t answer. She took out a headscarf from her coat pocket and tied this round her hair. The sweetness of her face inside the scarf made Lev’s heart falter. “I hate you,” he said. “You’ve just ruined my life.”
They cycled home through the falling night. Lev rode ahead of Marina because he couldn’t bear to look at her, but all the while he could see the faint flicker of her cycle lamp following on behind.
It was January or February, the deep cavern of winter, and Lev thought that now this winter would be with him forever, and that even when spring returned it wouldn’t return for him.
Now, aboard the night bus, Lev remembered all the ways in which he’d punished Marina for her supposed love affair with Procurator Rivas. He left their bed and lay down on the floor outside the room where Ina and baby Maya slept. He stayed away some nights altogether, getting drunk with Rudi and finding himself unable to go to work the next morning. His job began to be under threat. He ignored his child. He bullied his mother. For Marina’s birthday, he wrapped up a lump of coal and put it into her faithless hands.
It was when Marina unwrapped the coal that she broke down.
She swore on the life of her child that she had never been near the bed of Procurator Rivas. She offered to resign her position at the Office of Public Works. She declared that nobody in Baryn, no woman in the world, loved her husband more than she loved Lev, and now that love was being poisoned—for the sake of a terrible misunderstanding. She beat the wall with her fists, then she laid her head against the wall and wept. Baby Maya, aged two, began screaming and Ina had to pick her up and take her outside, to try to divert her by feeding the chickens.
Lev remembered the sudden exhaustion that had overcome him at the moment when Marina began to beat the wall. It was as if, since the afternoon in the Office of Public Works, he’d been tramping across ice and snow, across glaciers and crevasses, on some fruitless expedition over wasteland and emptiness, carrying a terrible weight on his back, and now he was spent and near to dying—all for nothing, all for the sake of trying to wound the one woman in the world who made him happy.
He went over to Marina and took hold of her hands and stilled them by cradling them against his chest. He laid his head on her shoulder. He asked her to forgive him.
When the temperature in London had dropped still farther and the pub drinkers of Tufnell Park had swept themselves off the pavements into snug lounges and heated snooker rooms, Lev received a letter from Lydia:
Dear Lev,
I hope you’re surviving well in your job and that your room is comfortable.
I would like to say how sorry I am for what happened at Tom and Larissa’s house. I was a little drunk that night, and beh
aving like a schoolgirl—which, perhaps, all women do from time to time. I am sure you are a kind enough man to forgive me.
To make amends, I would like to invite you to a wonderful concert Maestro Greszler is giving in two weeks’ time with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Festival Hall on Sunday, 30 October. The program is Elgar and Rachmaninov. Maestro Greszler has given me two excellent seats, and the soloist for the Elgar cello concerto is the Russian genius Mstislav Rostropovich. I think this will be an extremely marvelous event. Rostropovich is old and makes only a few appearances now, but his genius is undiminished. I very much hope you will be my guest for that evening.
Yours ever, Lydia
Lev’s first thought was that Lydia always surprised him. On the coach, he’d imagined her as a woman of unremarkable gifts. But he’d been wrong. His next thought was that now he had someone else to call on his mobile. He first punched Lydia’s number into his phone’s memory system (where its alphabetical listing placed it between Damian’s mobile and Rudi’s distant landline by the cuckoo clock), then he dialed it.
“It’s Lev,” he said. “I have a mobile phone now.”
“Oh yes?” said Lydia. “That’s very technological of you.”
“I’m a ‘true citizen of London,’ so I’m told.”
“Yes, you are. And thank you for calling me on this lovely new phone. I hope it’s to say you can come to the concert.”
Lev was smoking one of Christy’s Silk Cuts. He inhaled deeply, then said, “I’ve never been to a concert like this, Lydia, only folk-music performances in Baryn.”
“Well,” said Lydia, “this is quite far from folk, but I think you would like it.”
“The other thing,” said Lev, “is that I can’t come because I have nothing to wear.”
There was a moment’s dejected silence before Lydia said, “Lev, you know that doesn’t matter. Just put on a tie. Won’t you?”
“I’m not sure . . .”
“Please,” said Lydia. “You will never regret this. To hear Maestro Greszler conducting and Rostropovich playing Elgar . . .”
“Who is Elgar?” said Lev.
“Oh, you don’t know? One of very few good English composers. This piece was written in the autumn of his life, and the slow movement is very famous and sad. It may make you cry, Lev. Please tell me you will come and cry.”
When Lev said at last that he would accept, he heard Lydia utter a little mew of delight. She told him to put the date in his diary and he promised he would. He didn’t tell her that he had no diary or that his days and nights all resembled each other in their unvarying routine.
Christy took him down the Holloway Road where, from a Saturday stall run by Irish friends of Christy’s, Lev bought a white cotton shirt and a tie the color of Waldo’s brûlée crust. He laid these clothes out on his bunk bed. He took his best pair of gray trousers to the Greek dry cleaner’s. He shined up his brown shoes.
“I note that you’re taking a lot of trouble for Lydia,” remarked Christy.
“No,” said Lev. “I take trouble to look smart at concert.”
“Well,” said Christy, “music is something worth taking trouble for. When I was a boy, me dad used to play the fiddle. We had a neighbor, Stan Lafferty, who must have been ninety if he was a day, but Stan and me dad used to make some good music down the pub on Saturday nights, and I and me ma would sit there, in our Saturday clothes, clickin’ our stupid fingers and bouncin’ our stupid feet. That’s the nearest I ever got to seeing me ma happy. She’d be overcome with that dancing music. Her face would get a grin on it and a shine . . . I think that concert’s going to raise your spirits, Lev.”
“Yes?”
“Yes, I do. Maybe you’ll even find Lydia more charming than before.”
“No,” said Lev. “I know what is Lydia to me.”
“Sure,” said Christy, “but it can change. Things like this are never what you’d call stable.”
Lev was now crossing Hungerford Bridge. An icy wind blew off the river, but he stopped in the middle of the bridge and gazed out at all the electric light flooding the buildings along the stately embankments of the Thames. Because of his fear of being late, Lev was very early for his rendezvous with Lydia, so he lingered on the bridge.
He rolled a cigarette and smoked it in an easy, automatic way, not taking his eyes from the panorama of the dazzling riverfront. That the steady flood of brilliance which illuminated the buildings had no purpose except to beautify impressed him and troubled him in a kind of equal measure. He couldn’t stop himself remembering how precious each hour of electricity was in his country and how people like his mother longed for light that would never go out. In the years since the fall of the Communist government, light stability was something that had been promised many times, but still the power cuts continued in Auror. Sometimes Ina would stare up at the electricity pylon in the darkness and curse and say, “Look at it! Taking the power right over our heads. And we’re left without. Nobody cares about the villages.”
Lev stubbed out his cigarette. He felt nervous. He wondered how long the concert would last and whether he could sit through it without fidgeting. He hoped he wouldn’t fall asleep, or start coughing. He could imagine all kinds of reproach in Lydia’s eyes.
Lydia was waiting for him near the bar, sitting alone at a table, with a glass of tomato juice in front of her. Lev noticed that her hair had been stylishly cut. She wore a black suit with a green blouse.
When she saw Lev, she stood up and they shook hands.
“Lev,” she said. “What a very nice tie.”
It was still early and the great gleaming foyer had few people in it, but still Lev could feel an air of anticipation about the concert, as if the audience was here to be cleansed or rebaptized.
Lydia was clutching a program and she said, “Now, Lev, I will tell you something about Elgar.”
Lev sat down. He wished he was wearing a better jacket than his old leather one, with its stained collar. Lydia’s eyes were bright as she said, “This man was Sir Edward Elgar, and very important to English music in the first part of the twentieth century. But he was like us: the beginnings of his life were quite ordinary. His father owned a little music shop in some provincial town.”
“A music shop?”
“You know, a small place selling instruments and music sheets. There is one in Baryn, on the corner of an old alleyway behind Market Square. Maybe you know that one?”
“No,” said Lev.
“Well,” continued Lydia, “the one in Baryn is very dusty, with secondhand flutes and violins and so on, and some of the music sheets are torn and with missing pages. So perhaps Elgar’s father’s shop was like this one in Market Square, because later in his life Elgar would say he was ashamed of his origins.”
“I would have thought a music shop would be a good place to start if you wanted to be a composer,” said Lev. “Why be ashamed?”
“Well,” said Lydia, “you are right, Lev. But, of course, that was very English of that time—for a man like Elgar to make his way, then feel ashamed of a humble past because those around him made him feel ashamed. Just as now, in our country, there is some shame among the old Communists because they are made to feel this shame. Communism was not their fault, just as to be born in a music shop was not Elgar’s fault. Do you see my connection?”
“Yes,” said Lev. “I suppose so.”
“But Elgar overcame his poor start with the dusty violas and so forth. He wrote very, very beautiful melodies, and his orchestration is extremely fine. You will hear. It is very complete. When he was a boy, he used to sit by the river—some river near that town where the music shop was—and listen to nature. He called it ‘fixing sound.’ And he said that the things he could hear made him long for something great. And then, eventually, this greatness —”
Lydia was interrupted by the arrival of a young man, one of the Festival Hall employees, with a name badge that said Darren. He bent down toward her. “Sorry to intru
de, Lydia,” he said, “but Maestro Greszler would like to see you.”
“Oh,” said Lydia. “Yes, of course. May I bring my guest, to introduce him?”
The employee, Darren, looked at Lev, then back at Lydia. “Yes,” he said. “I expect so. Please follow me.”
Lydia stood up. “You come with me, Lev,” she said, “and we will see if I can introduce you.”
“It’s all right,” said Lev. “I can wait here.”
“No, no,” insisted Lydia. “Come on. Then you can write home and tell your mother you’ve met Pyotor Greszler face to face.”
They were shown into a large, brightly lit dressing room where Pyotor Greszler sat alone, wearing a woolen dressing gown.
He was seventy years old. His body sagged in the leather-and-chrome chair. He was sipping morosely from a medicine glass containing a white substance. His long hair was also white, and a droopy white mustache gave his lined face an expression of pure melancholy. When he saw Lev, he slammed down the medicine glass and made a bad-tempered, sweeping gesture with his arm. “No, Lydia. No strangers in here! Who is this?”
“Sorry, Maestro,” said Lydia. “Only my friend Lev, from our country, who would like to be introduced —”
“No, he cannot be introduced now. He must go,” said Greszler. “Go. Go!”
“I’ll go,” said Lev, backing away.
“Come here, Lydia,” said the maestro crossly. “You must help me. We haven’t much time . . .”
Lev hurried away and closed the dressing-room door. Darren had disappeared. Along the corridor, Lev could hear snatches of music being practiced. He felt hot with embarrassment. He wished Rudi were there to make a joke of what had just happened. He tugged at his tie, to loosen it round his sweating neck.
After only a moment or two Lydia emerged from the room. Her face wore an expression of grave concern. “Come, Lev,” she said, and set off down the corridor in the direction from which they’d arrived. Then she made for the nearest door and tugged Lev out into the cold night.