Vasily Innokentievich, called in for advice, mostly so that they would have someone to argue with, rose to the occasion. He voiced crushing arguments, the most persuasive of which was that if the boy didn’t learn to adapt in childhood, if he weren’t run through the ringer at school, he would stand out like a sore thumb later in life, and was sure to end up in prison.
His mother and grandmother exchanged glances, then sent him off to be run through the ringer. The first five years of school were almost like being in solitary confinement. For some reason no one took any notice of him, as though he were invisible. And he cultivated his invisibility, insulating himself from boyish roughhousing and teasing with a polite smile. His relationship with his classmates was one of estrangement, nothing more.
A miracle occurred at the beginning of the sixth grade, however—a kitten, tormented by a dog and his classmates, laid down his life, thus laying the cornerstone of the friendship of Sanya and Ilya and Mikha. And this friendship was cemented when they revealed to one another the deepest secrets of their souls at the time.
But toward the end of their school years, new secrets grew up in them that they chose not to confess. The friends were almost grown, and reconciled to the notion that every person has the right to a private life. Sanya’s secret had no name, but he was afraid of being found out: What if Ilya and Mikha discovered in him what he himself could not even name? His future had still not managed to take root and ripen; it had not yet given way to anguished experiences, only a dull longing. They were aware of silences cropping up everywhere, yet these silences did not hamper their friendship.
They never quarreled. They managed to transform any differences of opinion into playful banter, ephemeral, spur-of-the-moment theater, the rules of which were known only to the three of them—the Trianon.
But even if Sanya had wanted to, he could not have revealed to his friends the secret he had discovered—the words were lacking. And telling them in approximate terms, using whatever words came to mind, would not have been possible, because of his inner need for accuracy and precision.
Only Liza was able to understand. Vasily Innokentievich’s granddaughter was a kindred spirit, as well as kin, to him. She was a pianist. Almost a professional one, although she had not yet entered the Conservatory. But she would. And Sanya would not.
Only with her was Sanya able to share his suspicion that the world in which people brushed their teeth with mint powder in the morning, cooked food, ate it, then unburdened themselves of this food in the WC, read newspapers, and went to bed at night, placing their heads on a pillow—that this world was unreal. Music was the incontrovertible proof of the existence of another world. Music was born in that world, then found its way into this one in some mysterious way. And it wasn’t just the music that filled the rooms of the Conservatory, or the disorganized cacophony that roamed the corridors of the music school, or the music that lurked in the dark grooves of a record. Even the music that poured out of a radio receiver, with its gaps, its rising and sinking notes, even that squeezed through the crack between worlds.
Sanya was paralyzed with fear at the horrible suspicion that this world, the one in which his grandmother, the tooth powder, and the WC at the end of the corridor seemed to exist was a fraud, an illusion, and if the crack were to open just a bit wider, everything in this world would burst like a soap bubble in a washtub.
“Do you know what I mean? It’s suffocating here, nauseating. It’s impossible. But we can’t get into that other world, they won’t let us in. Am I some sort of freak, do you think?”
Liza shrugged and said:
“Well, of course! As for being a freak—that’s nonsense! But of course there’s a boundary between these worlds … and when you play, that’s where you are, over there.”
She was certain that many people knew this. Most likely because she had studied at the music school, and her classmates all played eight hours a day on the piano, or the violin, or the cello, and were chained to a musical staff by invisible shackles.
In his final year of high school, Sanya hardly touched the instrument. For him, everything was over. He refused to take any more private lessons, and Anna Alexandrovna could only sigh.
They went to concerts.
Going to a concert with Liza was even better than going with his grandmother. They listened and compared, communicating with the subtlest signs of comprehension—a half nod, a half sigh, a suspended breath, and, the most expressive sign, a touch of the hand. They were perfectly in tune with each other. Then Sanya would walk Liza to the trolleybus stop, and sometimes accompany her home, all the way to Novoslobodskaya. They talked about Chopin and Schubert, and when they were a bit older about Prokofiev and Stravinsky, about Shostakovich. And it was impossible to imagine then that they would have these musical conversations their whole lives, until one of them died—about Bach, Beethoven, Alban Berg. And they would fly across the world to hear a one-off performance by some great musician in Paris, in Madrid, or in London, so together they could savor first the music, then the conversation that went on till morning, until they flew back home to the opposite ends of the earth.
And anyway, could he have admitted to Liza about the storeroom, about the darkness, about the coitus with this pitch-darkness, about the anguish that gripped him after this celebrated manly act? About Nadia and her glistening gums?
Shortly after the New Year, Nadia was expelled from school, which was unjust: she was quite a good student. Nature had endowed her not only with a healthy physique, but with a good head to go with it. And you couldn’t have faulted her for bad behavior in school—she sat drowsily through the lessons, never talking back to the teachers, and earning her Bs honestly. The school principal called her in, laid out all the facts that had been leaked to her about the storeroom, and ordered her to take her school records and leave. Nadia cried and took her records. She transferred to a trade school for working-class youth, which was only fitting.
Her former friends came by to see her, though she never had much time—from early morning she worked in a bakery on Pokrovka, and in the evening she attended classes.
Although Sanya and Nadia still lived in the same neighborhood for a few more years, they ran into each other only once, near the Uranus movie theater on Sretenka, completely by chance. Sanya was with Anna Alexandrovna, and Nadia was with her girlfriend Lilka. Sanya bowed to her in greeting from afar; she started giggling and whispered something into her girlfriend’s ear.
Sanya turned away: forget it ever happened … forget all about it … never breathe a word to anyone … never. And it went away, as though it had sunk to the bottom of his memory.
* * *
Oh, Liza, Liza! You are … beyond words!
She was crystalline, fragile; it was impossible to imagine that she was made of the same stuff as the fleshy Nadia, and that she wore the same elastic harnesses—a bra, an elastic belt holding up her stockings. It was sacrilege even to think about it. Sanya dismissed these unworthy suspicions: angels, naturally, don’t wear elastic.
But Sanya was cruelly mistaken. The angel wore all those accoutrements and was not at all unfamiliar with those elemental forces Sanya had discovered in the storeroom. Slowly, but very surely, Liza had begun a romance with a young violinist, a student from the Conservatory who hailed from a well-known musical family. A bearlike fellow with a florid, porous complexion and a shaggy dark head of hair, this corpulent Boris—it was unfathomable!—had captured Liza’s heart. Perhaps the name of his grandfather on a commemorative marble plaque in the lobby of the Minor Hall of the Conservatory added to his appeal. Sanya learned about their relations only four years later, not long before they got married, and was deeply shaken. All male-female corporeality was distasteful to him, tainted by the storeroom goings-on, and completely antithetical to the pure world of sound. How could Liza have succumbed to that? She played better and better. She had long ago left her apprenticeship behind and acquired her own sound, her own tone. Liza, with that fat
Boris? No, it wasn’t jealousy he felt; more like bewilderment.
Two weeks before Liza and Boris’s wedding they played a duet—Mozart sonatas for piano and violin. Sanya sat in the half-empty hall and suffered: he knew these sonatas well and was agonized by the incompatibility of the two parts—there was no mutual support, no union of voices, but rather an alarming mutual inaudibility. There was no spiritual commingling between the piano and the violin, and he hated Boris for being so dull, egotistical, and so very conceited. Liza simply couldn’t marry him, she couldn’t!
He left without giving them the flowers he had brought. The three red carnations, wrapped in white paper and stuffed into the sleeve of his coat, he threw into a trash can next to the Tchaikovsky monument.
The wedding reception was held at home. It was simultaneously modest and sumptuous. There were not many guests, only parents and close friends and relatives. There were twenty-four people altogether, corresponding to the number of place settings of good china that had remained intact, given to Boris’s grandmother and grandfather at their own wedding.
A portrait of his grandfather Grigory Lvovich, a well-known violinist and teacher, looked out from a frame hanging next to a portrait of his young grandmother Eleonora, which was the work of Leonid Pasternak, father of the famous writer. His grandfather had died, a victim of the campaign against “rootless cosmopolitanism”; but his grandmother, who had once upon a time been a singer, had survived cosmopolitanism, and her husband, and her son. Now, with an iron fist, she ruled her highly organized home according to the highest social standards, as only she knew how.
The table gleamed like an iceberg under the sun. The silver had been polished to a bright sheen, the crystal goblets sparkled. On the oval and round serving dishes lay translucent slivers of fish and cheese. Like the illustrious Teacher, she, too, would have been able to feed a multitude with five loaves of bread, because she knew the art of fine slicing. In truth, there were never any leftovers. The food on offer was always meager, though the dishes were many. The newlyweds wore their concert garb—Boris was in a tuxedo, and Liza in a lacy, pale-yellow gown that was not at all flattering.
Among the guests were four of the most celebrated musicians in this part of the world, with their wives. The bald pate of a great pianist shone; the soft body of a great violinist seemed to be melting into the chair. A fifth performer, also considered a musical genius, was the only unaccompanied woman. She had never married. She placed her shabby handbag, a green bottle of kefir sticking out of it, on the table next to the gleaming silverware. A great cellist, a close friend of Boris’s late father, picked at his teeth with a sharpened matchstick. A famous, though not yet great, conductor masticated with his diminutive teeth, looking around to see what was on each plate and pretending not to notice his wife’s angry glances. Not counting the new relatives, nonmusical society was represented by a couple who were neighbors from the dacha—a professor of chemistry and his wife. Eleonora Zorakhovna, a consummate socialite with a genius for prestigious social gatherings, was disappointed, however. The wife of a great composer had just called to say that they wouldn’t be able to make it after all.
The gathering of the century, as she had conceived it, was falling apart.
“Déjà vu,” whispered Anna Alexandrovna to her grandson. “I was here for Eleonora’s wedding fifty years ago. In this very apartment. It was 1911…”
“With the same guests?” Sanya said, laughing.
“Just about. Alexander Nikolaevich Scriabin was here. He had just come from abroad.”
“Scriabin? Here?”
“Yes. He did show up, unlike Shostakovich, who wouldn’t condescend to it. Everyone loved Grigory Lvovich; and no one loved Eleonora.”
“Who else was there?”
“Leonid Osipovich Pasternak and Rosalia Isidorovna Pasternak. She was a marvelous pianist. Anton Rubinstein remarked on it when she was just a little girl. It was a select circle. Birth, affinity, profession … I was here in this house at your age—no, I was younger, of course. That wedding has stayed in my memory my whole life. As you will remember this one,” she added, and sighed.
“How did you come to be at that wedding?”
“My first husband was a musician. He was a friend of the groom’s. I’ll tell you about it another time.”
“Strange that you’ve never mentioned it before.”
Anna Alexandrovna grew angry with herself: she had long ago decided not to burden this gentle soul, her grandson, with her entire past. The friend of the groom was sitting opposite her at the moment, picking his teeth. That was enough—just like that she had been moved, and said too much.
“Liza won’t have an easy time of it here,” she said, changing the subject abruptly.
Liza was comporting herself beautifully. Vasily Innokentievich and his son Alexei, Liza’s father, were strangers in this company; but both of them were well-known doctors, and this put them on an equal footing with the musicians, in some sense. Liza’s mother, on the other hand, was completely out of place. She was overweight, with clearly bottle-blond hair, and very much aware of not fitting in among these guests.
At one time she had been a nurse in a field hospital during the war. It was a “frontline” marriage, unequal and accidental, but solid: their daughter held it together. On the face of the new mother-in-law one could read pride, boorishness, confusion, and awkwardness. Liza sat next to her mother and stroked her hand from time to time, making sure she didn’t drink too much.
Anna Alexandrovna sat on Sanya’s right. To the left of him was a bohemian-looking man with a mane of hair parted down the middle, wearing a black-and-yellow leopard-print ascot. Was he a singer? An actor? They called him Yury Andreevich.
When dinner was halfway over, and they had already cleared away the bouillon cups and the empty serving dish of tiny savory pies (exactly twenty-four of them, according to the precise number of guests), but before the main dish had been served, he stood up to make a toast.
“Dear Liza and Boba!”
Ah, so he’s a close friend, since he calls Boris “Boba,” Sanya noted.
His mouth was unusually mobile. The upper lip was etched with a deep furrow; the lower one protruded slightly.
“You have embarked on the dangerous path of matrimony! Perhaps it is not so much dangerous as it is unpredictable. I wish for you what I consider to be the most important thing in marriage: that it not prevent you from hearing music. This is the greatest possible happiness—to hear with four ears, to play with four hands, to take part in the birth of new sounds that were never heard in the world before you. Music, once it is released by your hands, lives only for a moment before dying away, dispersing into waves moving through space. But the ephemerality of music is just the other face of its immortality. Forgive me, Maria Veniaminovna, for saying such trivial things in your presence. Boba, Liza, my dear friends! From the bottom of my soul I hope that music never deserts you, that it grows ever deeper and fuller in you.”
“Nora!” a low, somewhat rasping voice called out. “Wonderful pies! Give me a few to take home with me, please!”
Eleonora answered with a spiteful glare.
“I’ll have them wrapped up for you, Maria Veniaminovna. They’ll be wrapped up.”
“This is for your memoirs, Sanya. Don’t forget it,” Anna Alexandrovna whispered.
Sanya was already spellbound, as though he had a front-row seat in the theater, in the midst of all these great ones. And the man next to him in the leopard-print ascot was not merely a chance person at table; he knew something important, you could see that at a glance. But who could he be? The old lady who had asked to take home the pies, Maria Veniaminovna, had been Sanya’s idol since the first concert at which he had heard her perform during his childhood.
After dinner, which passed without any ancient Russian exhortations of “It’s bitter!,” they all moved into the study. This was one of the last remaining aristocratic apartments on Marx and Engels Street, formerly Mal
y Znamensky Lane, behind the Pushkin Museum. In addition, this may have been the only family in the entire country that had lived in the building since its construction, in 1906. The great-grandfather, grandfather, father, and now Boris—none of them had been forcibly removed or had their property confiscated. None of them had been forced to communalize and partition the apartment into smaller units, admitting strangers into their midst. None of them had been arrested. Family legend had it that it was in this very apartment, and not Peshkov’s, that Lenin heard Issay Dobrowen, Eleonora Zorakhovna’s younger brother, perform Beethoven’s Sonata no. 23. Here, in the room next door, he spoke the words (unless Gorky had made them up, for some reason of his own): “Sublime, superhuman music … But I can’t listen to music too often. It works on my nerves and makes me want to say sweet nothings, to pat on the head those people who can create such beauty, despite living in a dirty hellhole…”
And the nothings turned out to be not so sweet after all, and the heads that he patted rolled by the thousands …
All these family legends, which had now become her own, Liza told Sanya when they went out on the balcony to talk. And something else: Dobrowen had not played the “Appassionata” that evening at all, but Sonata no. 14, the “Moonlight” sonata. The experts had mixed things up.
In the study, they had started smoking. A servant served coffee on a tray.
“Everything’s so British,” Sanya whispered to his grandmother.
“No, Jewish,” Anna Alexandrovna said.
“Nuta, that sounds quite anti-Semitic. I’m surprised at you.”
Anna Alexandrovna took a deep draw of her cigarette, flaring her delicate nostrils. She let out the smoke, shaking her head.
“Sanya, in our country, anti-Semitism has always been the exclusive privilege of shopkeepers and the nobility. By all accounts, our family is part of the intelligentsia, though rooted in the aristocracy. I love Jews, you know that yourself.”
The Big Green Tent Page 24