The Big Green Tent

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  “I know. You love Mikha. It’s a matter of indifference to me whether someone is a Jew, a non-Jew, or otherwise. But for some reason, of my two closest friends, one and a half are Jewish.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about. Maybe there’s a heightened sensibility?”

  Anna Alexandrovna truly did have an aversion to anti-Semitism; she had meant something else by her comment. In her youth, she had refused to marry Vasily Innokentievich, who continued to love her his whole life. Now fate was taking revenge: Liza, his granddaughter, had rejected her refined, sensitive Sanya in favor of this flabby young Jewish man.

  Anna Alexandrovna’s version of things was somewhat off the mark, since Sanya had never proposed to Liza, and had wanted from her only amicable loyalty and heartfelt intimacy. Liza had had no grounds on which to reject him. But from their early childhood years, Anna Alexandrovna had been certain that these children were made for each other. In her heart she reproached Liza, believing her choice to be self-serving careerism. And, somehow, in her mind, his Jewishness figured as one of the unpleasant characteristics of Liza’s new husband.

  Liza came up to Sanya, a goblet in hand. Her new wedding ring shone on her finger. She was leading the man in the leopard-print ascot with the other.

  “Have you met Yury Andreevich? He’s a professor of music theory, Sanya. Here’s a person who might be able to resolve all your musical problems.”

  “It’s rare that one meets someone with musical problems,” Yury Andreevich said, looking at Sanya with lively interest.

  “Oh, what nonsense, Liza.” Sanya was both embarrassed and affronted. How could she have been so tactless?

  Before Sanya could say anything else, he saw the cumbersome old lady, her handbag under her arm, trundling up to the piano.

  Eleonora Zorakhovna had not foreseen this impromptu performance. According to her plan, dessert was the next point on the agenda: coffee, ice cream, and small pastries that the servant was already bringing out from the kitchen. But the performer, paying no attention to the tray with pastries, was drawn to the piano like a boxer to the ring, her massive head lowered, her hands still hanging loose at her sides. She dumped her heavily laden handbag on the floor to the right of the pedals, rummaged around in it, and extracted, from under the kefir bottle, her sheet music, which she placed on the music stand. Then she sat on the swiveling piano stool, her large body swaying slightly, and looked up, as though trying to decipher some message written on the ceiling. Covering her eyes, having apparently received her message, she struck a chord heavy as a watermelon. Then there was a second, and a third. They were strange chords in and of themselves, and augured something unprecedented.

  “Sit down,” Yury Andreevich whispered. “This will last eighteen minutes, if she keeps up the tempo.”

  Sanya had never heard music like this before. He knew that it existed, agitating music, hostile to the romantic tradition, which trampled on the old norms and canons. He had picked up on the waves of disapproval and mistrust it awakened, but he was hearing it now for the first time with his own ears.

  He was listening to something absolutely new, and he didn’t understand how it was constructed. He was adept at listening to another kind of music, “normal” music—far more intelligible and predictable. He loved the internal movement of the music familiar to him, the almost importunate touch of the sounds; he anticipated its resolutions, foresaw the ends of the musical phrases.

  He knew how absurd and empty the attempts to paraphrase the content of music through a specially evolved pseudo-poetic language were, how contrived and pompous they always sounded. The content of music was not amenable to translation into literary or visual imagery. He hated all those dreary concert-program notes—how one should perceive Chopin, or what Tchaikovsky had intended.

  He viewed it the way a small child views the activities of adults, with perplexed indignation—how stupid they are!

  What he was listening to now demanded intense concentration, all his attention. It’s like something written in a foreign language, Sanya thought.

  The music summoned by the old lady’s hands rose in a stupefying crescendo of sound. Even in the past, Sanya had rarely experienced music so viscerally. He felt the music filling his skull and expanding it. It was as though some unknown biological process had been unleashed in his body, as though he could feel it producing hemoglobin or releasing powerful hormones in the blood. Something as profoundly inherent and natural as breathing, or photosynthesis …

  “What is this?” he whispered, thrown off guard, to his neighbor.

  The man smiled with his sculpted upper lip.

  “Stockhausen. No one performs him here.”

  “It’s like the end of the world…”

  Sanya didn’t mean the end of the world in a religious or scientific sense. It was simply a notion current among the youth, the jargon of the decade. But Kolosov regarded the young man with interest. As a theoretician, he assumed that this new music signalled the end of one era and the beginning of an unknown new one, and he ascribed great significance to this transfiguration, which was invisible and hidden from most people. He valued very highly those like himself, who were aware of the shift—possibly a shift in the evolution of the world, in human consciousness. They were few and far between, the temporal forerunners of humanity, people who not only presaged the new world, but were also able to analyze and research it.

  “I don’t understand how it works, how it’s constructed,” Sanya told Kolosov, falling at once into his mode of thought. “Perhaps it’s not even a new style, but another way of thinking altogether. It’s stunning, disorienting…”

  Kolosov felt happy.

  “You’re a musician, of course?”

  “No, not at all. I would have been … but I was injured. A childhood accident. I only listen to music now.” He showed him his right hand, with its two bent fingers. “I’ll be graduating from the Institute of Foreign Languages next year.”

  “Come to see me. I think we’ve got a lot to talk about.”

  * * *

  Everything that happened that evening after Stockhausen was a blur in Sanya’s memory. Even the image of Maria Veniaminovna herself faded a bit. He only remembered accompanying the young couple to the train station to see them off. They were going to the Baltics for their honeymoon.

  What stayed with him was the sense of some portentous event. The next day Sanya went to see Yury Andreevich at the Conservatory, after the class he taught was over. They picked up the conversation where they had left off the evening before.

  Later, they went together to a remote district on the outskirts of the city, first by subway and then by trolleybus. This was where Yury Andreevich lived, in an unsightly high-rise in the dreary middle ground between a village that was not quite extinct and the encroaching urban sprawl. They had agreed that Yury Andreevich would give him private lessons.

  Within the demeaning confines of an almost Zamyatinesque cell, a one-room apartment with a metal number on the door (Sanya had just read the novel We), there was nothing but a piano and bookshelves, cabinets, and racks full of books and sheet music. There was no table to eat on, no bed to sleep on, no armoire where one could hang a coat. In his own home, Yury Andreevich looked as though he were just a guest—wearing a freshly pressed suit and a yellow ascot, in shoes polished to a high gleam and fit for the stage. For some time Sanya thought that this apartment was only the teacher’s study, and that he lived in another one, more fit for human habitation. Then he spied a terra-cotta teapot and a wooden box containing Chinese tea in the kitchen. And, sometime later, Sanya realized that Yury Andreevich, in his freshly pressed suit, his ascots tied with almost military precision, was in fact a recluse, and that this masquerade costume concealed a true ascetic.

  How did he manage to observe the demands of his musical monkhood in this vulgar and dirty world, amid the crushing reality of Soviet existence, nauseating and dangerous? It was completely improbable.

  On that v
ery first evening, Sanya started preparing for the Conservatory entrance exam. He wished to enter the department of music theory. Yury Andreevich taught his student in the way a carpenter teaches an apprentice to drive in a nail with a single blow, a chef to slice onions and carrots with a precision measured in millimeters, or a surgeon to wield a scalpel lightly and with the utmost skill. He taught him the craft.

  And it wasn’t just the explanations themselves—what tone must be doubled when resolving a dominant seventh chord into the tonic chord, how to harmonize a tritone modulation, the interplay of corresponding registers of the extreme voicings at the golden-section point, and so on. The fact was that Kolosov taught with the same enjoyment as Sanya learned.

  “You don’t understand how lucky you were with your hand. A true musician is not a performer, but a composer, a theoretician. Above all a theoretician. Music is the quintessence, an infinitely compressed message; it’s what exists outside the range of our hearing, our perception, our consciousness. It is the highest form of Platonism, eidos descended from the heavens in its purest form. Can you grasp that?”

  Sanya didn’t understand it; rather, he felt it. But he suspected that his teacher was getting a bit carried away. He remembered too well his childhood joy when music was born under his very fingers.

  Nevertheless, this was the happiest year in Sanya’s life. The shell of the coarse and dirty world split open, and fresh new air gushed in through the gap. It was the only kind of air his soul needed to breathe. It was the same kind of upheaval that the sixth-graders had undergone ten years earlier, when Victor Yulievich arrived at their school and began showering the class with verse. The difference was that Sanya was now an adult, and, having overcome the devastating experience of parting with music forever, had discovered that his love had become even more profound. His gift, slumbering in the deepest part of him, had awakened and surfaced after a ten-year hibernation. The tedium of the solfeggio he had learned as a child was transformed into fascination with the science of musical structure. Several years later Sanya would become certain that solfeggio explained, in the simplest terms, as a rough approximation, the structure of the world itself.

  Twice a week Sanya spent an hour and a half at Yury Andreevich’s. He did complex dictations and countless ear-training exercises. Yury Andreevich played the piano, and Sanya tried to identify the various intervals and chords, progressions, and modulations.

  Sanya’s former piano teacher, Evgenia Danilovna, was summoned again. She was able to squeeze out two hours a week for Sanya from her tightly packed schedule (at that time she was training Wunderkinder, no fewer than ten of whom brought subsequent fame to the Central Music School). The well-known teacher, bent on producing superperformers, was only wasting her time with Sanya and his crippled hand; but she was a close friend of Anna Alexandrovna’s, and for someone of her generation it was unthinkable to refuse a friend such a request, although the child had no prospects whatsoever. Finally, with a new fingering that took into consideration his two crippled fingers, Sanya managed to master a very cleverly selected program, crowned by a performance of the Bach Chaconne in a transposition for the left hand only by Brahms. Anna Alexandrovna sold the remains of her jewelry that year—diamond earrings and a pendant—to pay for the lessons.

  Sanya flew to his lessons with Yury Andreevich as though to a lovers’ rendezvous. Yury Andreevich was no less taken with his new student, who could grasp everything on the fly, sometimes posing questions that far outstripped the material they were covering. Yury Andreevich would then bloom, and break into a smile, before immediately recovering his usual composure and severity of expression. He didn’t believe in indulging his students. The lessons ended precisely when they were scheduled to end. Once, when Sanya was fifteen minutes late because a bus had broken down, his teacher refused to extend the lesson to make up for the time lost.

  In addition to solfeggio, harmony, and the history of music, Sanya had to take exams in other subjects: writing, a foreign language, and the history of the USSR. He wasn’t in the least worried about these exams. The most challenging one for him was “general piano.” He would have to play a prepared program, as well as sight-read another piece. Naturally, students of music theory were not expected to master an instrument on a professional level, but Sanya was nervous nevertheless. From the time his tendon had been ruined by Murygin’s knife, he had lost the boldness of spirit necessary for performing.

  Sanya passed the theoretical subjects easily. Even “general piano” was quite satisfactory; Evgenia Danilovna had not spent her precious time in vain. But the most remarkable thing was that no one on the admissions committee had even noticed that two fingers of his right hand were crippled. This was his chief victory.

  In the autumn, when his fellow students at the Institute of Foreign Languages were beginning their fifth and final year of studies, Sanya began his first year in the theory department of the Conservatory. Anna Alexandrovna was happy, Evgenia Danilovna even more so. To mark the occasion, she gave Sanya some sheet music autographed by Scriabin himself. But by this time Sanya already had his doubts about Scriabin.

  * * *

  Victor Yulievich had been right a thousand times over—and Sanya agreed—when he said that finding the right teacher is like being reborn. Only now it was not Victor Yulievich, but another teacher, who introduced him to a new system of coordinates, who showed him new meanings and expanded his conceptions of the world. His brightest students discovered, with shivers that traveled up and down their spines, that they were dealing not only with music, but with the structure of the entire universe, with the laws of atomic physics, molecular biology, falling stars, and the rustling of leaves. It was a commingling of science, all of poetry, and every kind of art.

  “Form is what transforms the content of a work into its essence. Do you understand? The character of music arises out of its form like steam from hot water,” Yury Andreevich said. “With a solid understanding of the general laws of form, which encompass all that is amenable to formulation, one can, by groping further, perceive the individual, the particular. Then, subtracting the general, one can sense a residue where wonder lurks in its purest, most undiluted form. Herein lies the goal of theory: the more fully one grasps what is available for comprehension, the more intensely the ineffable shines. Listen, and try to grasp it!” He put a black disk on the record player. The needle drew out sounds that were not perfect in themselves; but by looking at the notes while he listened, absorbing them with his eyes, and through his eyes with his ears and brain, Sanya discovered a new conception of the world, and his thoughts were drawn into unknown spaces and dimensions.

  At the same time, his teacher scorned pathos, elevated words and expressions, and verbiage. He cut short any attempt to discuss music by resorting to literary devices and conceits.

  “We’re not applying algebra to harmony. We’re studying harmony! It’s an exact science, just as algebra is. And for the time being, we’re putting poetry aside!” He spoke passionately, as though he were disputing with an invisible opponent.

  His students adored him; the administration, always wary, regarded him with suspicion. There was something potentially anti-Soviet about him.

  Yury Andreevich Kolosov was a structuralist at a time when the term had not yet been established. And the powers that be, in all eras, are particularly wary about what they don’t understand.

  Kolosov expanded the horizons of the courses in harmony, the history of music and musical theory systems. He immersed the students in ancient history, and also exposed them to the newest, most innovative music, the second avant-garde, which had just begun to take hold in the USSR—spiritual heirs of Webern: Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono. And side by side with them, through the corridors of the Conservatory, walked their local avant-garde counterparts: Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina, Alfred Schnittke …

  All of this was still in its infancy, tentative and tremulous. Even the music of Schoenberg was still novel.

  Sanya�
��s head was awhirl with a powerful wave of myriad sounds: Baroque, early classical, the ubiquitous Bach, romantic music, overthrown, and then welcomed again with the passage of years, the later music of Beethoven, which approached the final threshold, it would seem, of classical music—and now all these new composers, with their new sounds and new ideas …

  In the world outside the rains came down, snows fell, the poplar trees released their summer fluff, and the unbearable political blather about achievements and victories—that soon we would catch up with America—continued unabated. People drank tea and vodka in their kitchens, illegal pages of paper rustled, and tape recordings of Galich and the young Vysotsky, who gave birth to more new sounds and ideas, whirred. But Sanya hardly noticed any of this. This all happened in the world of Ilya and Mikha, his friends from his school days, who were drifting further and further away from him.

  Khrushchev’s thaw was still under way, but Khrushchev himself had exited out the back door. At some Party powwow, he was heard to say: “The notion of some sort of thaw was just an invention of that shifty rascal Ehrenburg!”

  Thus, a signal was given, and received. The cold had set in again.

  At this historical juncture, the government music experts traded places with the government visual arts experts. Sanya only caught the tail end of rumors about a battle in the halls of the Manezh exhibition center, primarily through Ilya.

  Mikha seemed to have disappeared for good after he went to live and work in a school for children with special needs, outside of town. Anna Alexandrovna saw him more often than anyone else did. She was the one he confided in about his experiences working with the deaf-mute children, who had won his incautiously open heart. But his heart did not belong in its entirety to this younger tribe; the other half beat for Alyona, who had a habit of returning his affections, then vanishing like the Snow Queen in the rain. She was the living embodiment of this fairy-tale creature: icy, fluid, and volatile, she seemed to crystallize, flare, and fade at will.