The Music of a Life

by Andrei Makine

  Before falling asleep I have time to note that my command of this magic phrase sets me apart from the crowd. I am like them, certainly, but I can put a name to our human condition and therefore escape from it. The frail reed, which knows what it is and therefore … Hah, that old hypocritical device of the intelligentsia, a more lucid voice whispers within me, but the mental comfort afforded me by Homo sovieticus quickly silences this objection.

  The music! On this occasion I have enough time to catch the reverberation of the last notes, like a silken thread emerging from a needle’s eye. I remain motionless for a few moments, listening for a fresh sound amid the torpor of the sleeping bodies. Now I know I was not dreaming, I have even more or less grasped where the music was coming from. In any case, it was only the brief stirrings of a keyboard, very spaced out, muted by the clutter in the corridors, muffled by the snoring.

  I look at my watch: half past three. Even more than the time and place where this music has emerged, what surprises me is its detachment. It renders my philosophical rage of a few minutes ago perfectly futile. Its beauty does not invite one to flee the smell of canned food and alcohol that hangs over the mass of sleepers. It simply marks a frontier, evokes a different order of things. Suddenly everything is illuminated by a truth that has no need of words: this night lost in a void of snow, a good hundred travelers huddled here, each seeming to be breathing gently upon the fragile spark of his own life; this station with its vanished platforms; and these notes stealing in like moments from an utterly different night.

  I get up, cross the waiting room, and climb the old wooden staircase. Feeling my way, I come to the bay window of the restaurant. The darkness is complete. Running my hand along the wall, I reach a dead end, stumble over a pile of sleeping-car blankets, decide to abandon my investigation. A very slow chord resounds lingeringly at the other end of the corridor. I make my way toward it, guided by the fading sound, push open a door, and find myself in a passage into which a little light now filters. Lined up along the walls stand banners, placards with portraits of the Party leaders, all the apparatus for demonstrations. The passageway leads to a room that is even more cluttered — two wardrobes with open doors, pyramids of chairs, piles of sheets. From behind the wardrobes shines a beam of light. I move forward, feeling as if I had caught up with the tail end of a dream and were taking my place in it. A man, whom I see in profile, is sitting at a grand piano. A suitcase with nickel-plated corners stands beside his chair. It would be easy to mistake him for the old man sleeping on the pages of his Pravda. He is dressed in a similar overcoat, longer perhaps, and wearing an identical black shapka. An electric flashlight laid to the left of the keyboard illuminates the mans hands. He has fingers that are nothing like a musicians fingers. Great, rough, lumpy knuckles, tanned and wrinkled. The fingers move about on the keyboard without depressing the keys, pausing, springing to life, accelerating their silent course, getting carried away in a feverish flight: one can hear the fingernails tapping on the wooden keys. Suddenly, at the very height of this mute pandemonium, one hand loses control, crashes down on the keyboard; a shower of notes bursts forth. I see that the man, doubtless amused by his own clumsiness, breaks off from his soundless scales and begins emitting little suppressed chuckles, the quiet mirth of a mischievous old man. He even raises one hand and presses it to his mouth to restrain these splutters of laughter…. All at once I realize he is weeping.

  I withdraw with awkward, hesitant steps, one hand behind my back, feeling for the door. Just as I am close to the exit, my foot catches against a flagpole; it falls, bringing a whole string of portraits on their long staffs toppling down in a noisy chain reaction. The beam from the flashlight sweeps along the wall and dazzles me. The man at once lowers it toward my feet, as if to apologize for having blinded me. A moments embarrassed silence gives me the chance to notice the deep groove of a scar, whitened with age, across his brow, and his tears.

  “I was just looking for a chair,” I stammer, glancing away. “Its absolutely packed downstairs.”

  The man switches off his flashlight, and in the darkness I hear his words and, in particular, a brief rubbing sound that enables me to guess at his gesture: he is swiftly wiping his eyes with the sleeve of his overcoat.

  “Oh, well, if its a chair you’re after, there’s all you could want up here. Only be careful, most of them have broken legs. I’ve got a whole sofa to myself, though there are several springs coming through, I have to admit.”

  I notice that the room is not totally dark. Two windows stand out in the blackness, illuminated by a streetlight and by the unremitting tornadoes of snow whirling about in the beam of light. I see the silhouette of the man as he makes his way around the wardrobes and disappears into a corner from which comes the shrill creak of springs.

  “If they should happen to announce a train is coming, kindly wake me up,” he says from his sofa.

  And he wishes me a good night. I pull up a chair and settle down amid the scattered portraits, resolved to maintain the pretense to the end, that I had just come in looking for a chair and had not caught sight of his tears.

  I pretend so well that I very quickly fall asleep, overcome by that deep slumber of the small hours that follows a sleepless night. It is the pianist who wakes me, his hand on my shoulder, the little flashlight throwing shadows onto the wall cast by tangled chairs, a suitcase, the open lid of the piano.

  “They’ve just announced the Moscow train! If it’s yours, you’d better hurry. It’ll be the storming of the Bastille out there.”

  He’s right. It’s a mob scene. A mad scramble of faces, with huge suitcases shuttling back and forth, shouting, and the tramp of feet along the trenches excavated through the deep snow on the platforms. In the midst of this jostling I quickly lose sight of the man who has just woken me up. A ticket inspector stops me in my tracks on the steps to a coach where I was about to climb in. “They’re completely packed in there like sardines, can’t you see?” The door to the next one is locked. Around the third is gathered a crowd from which a hubbub arises, alternately wheedling and menacing. The inspector checks everyone’s ticket, now and then allowing some lucky souls to board, according to some criteria it appears even he would find hard to explain. Stumbling in the snow pitted with footprints, I rush down the length of the train. An old woman stuck in a snowdrift is bewailing the fact that she has dropped her glasses. A soldier, on his knees, digs in the snow like a dog. A few yards from there his comrade urinates against a lamppost. The first one fishes out the glasses with a long string of triumphant oaths….

  I tramp from one car to the next, increasingly convinced I shall have to spend another day trapped in this town. My verdict of the night before returns, revived by the cold and my rage: Homo sovieticus! That says it all. At this point you could tell them to climb onto the roofs of the cars, or worse still, run behind the train, and not one of them would complain…. Homo sovieticus!

  Suddenly this whistle. Not the whistle of the train. A short street urchins whistle, a piercing, peremptory summons, intended for an accomplice. I raise my head above the crowd besieging the steps to the coaches. At the end of the train I see the pianist waving his arm.

  “They sometimes add one on, especially when there’s a holdup like this,” he explains to me as we settle into an ancient third-class coach. “We won’t be warm, but you’ll see, the tea’s even better here.”

  Which is more or less all he says to me throughout the day. His nocturnal recital already hardly seems real to me. In any case, questioning him about that silent music would be to admit that I had seen him crying. So … stretched out on the bare wood of the bench, I set about conjuring up images of the human caravanserai I had observed camped in the waiting room, who are now having a fabulous experience, without paying the slightest attention to it: crossing from Asia into Europe! Europe … Outside the window, in the small rectangle left clear by the frost, what rushes past is always the same infinity of snow, as far as the eye can see, impassive be
fore the breathless advance of the train. The white undulation of the forests. An icebound river, immense, gray, reminiscent of an arm of sea. And once more the sleep of the white, uninhabited planet. I turn slightly, study the old man, motionless on the opposite bench, his eyes closed, his fingers interlaced on his chest. Fingers that know how to play silent melodies. Is he thinking of Europe? Is he aware that we are approaching civilization, cities where time can have a value in stimulating social intercourse, meetings, the exchange of ideas? Where space is tamed by architecture, curved inward by the speed of a highway, humanized by the smile of a caryatid whose face can be seen from the window of my apartment, not far from the Nevsky Prospekt?

  Curiously enough, it is on the subject of the beauty of certain streets that our conversation finally takes off, when it is already nearly evening. We have just pulled out of a large city on the Volga. The train has been reorganized, and for a moment I was even afraid we might be abandoned on a siding. There is plenty of room here, as if people considered it beneath them to enter this archaic third-class coach.

  My companion gets up, fetches two glasses of tea. On learning that I know Moscow well, he becomes animated, talks to me about the capital with an unexpected precision, with a fondness for this street or that subway station. It’s the fondness of a provincial who has lived in the capital, I say to myself, and who likes impressing the people he is talking to with the originality of his personal guided tour. But the more he talks, the more I become aware that his Moscow is quite an odd city, with obvious gaps, with little networks of streets where my memory sees only broad avenues and open spaces. Paying closer attention, I notice several hiatuses in his narrative that the man attempts to avoid, sometimes by breaking off in mid-sentence, or again by telling an anecdote. “Before the war,” “During the thirties;” these traces of the past slip out and suggest to me that he is strolling through a city that no longer exists. He finally becomes aware of this, falls silent. At this moment of embarrassment his ear must have detected the same discordant tonality as last night, when I came upon him at the piano. To change the subject, I begin cursing the weather and the delays that will make me miss my connection in Moscow. We prepare our supper: hard-boiled eggs that I take out of my bag, the bread he says he has in his case. He produces a parcel, unwraps it. Half a loaf of black bread. But it is the wrapping that catches my eye — crumpled pages of old sheet music. He looks up at me, then begins smoothing the pages with the rough edge of his hand. He no longer speaks in the tones of a sentimental traveler as he did just now. And yet he is still talking about the same narrow Moscow streets — and about a young man (“In those days I counted myself the happiest man in the world,” he says with a bitter smile), a young man wearing a pale shirt soaked by a late spring shower, a young man stopping in front of a poster and reading his name with a beating heart: Alexeï Berg.

  IN EARLIER TIMES it used to be the name of his father, a playwright, that he would look out for on such posters, and also, from time to time, that of his mother, Victoria Berg, when she was giving recitals. On that day, for the first time, it was his own name that was being advertised. His first concert, a week from now, May 24, 1941.

  The shower of rain had made the paper almost transparent, so the previous poster (for a parachute jumping competition) showed through. And the picture of Tchaikovsky, all crinkled, looked like that of a court jester. Furthermore, the concert was to take place at the ball-bearing factory’s house of culture. But none of this could spoil his pleasure. The delight irradiated by this waterlogged blue sheet was much more complex than simple pride. There was the joy of the damp, luminous evening emerging, as the storm abated, with all the freshness of a picture printed from a decal. And the smell of foliage dusted with sundrenched raindrops. The joy of streets darkened by rain, along which he strolled absentmindedly, making his way back from the outskirts of the city, where the house of culture was situated, toward the center. Even the auditorium where he was due to perform, an auditorium whose walls were covered with photos of machine tools and whose acoustics left much to be desired, had seemed to him festive and airy.

  That evening Moscow was airy. Light beneath his tread in the network of little streets he knew by heart. Light and fluid in his thoughts. Pausing for a moment on the Stone Bridge, he looked at the Kremlin. The restless, gray blue sky lent an unstable, almost dancing air to the cluster of domes and battlements. And to the left of it ones gaze toppled over into the immense void left by the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, dynamited several years before.

  Several years … As he resumed his walk, Alexe’i tried to recall the sequence of those years. The cathedral had been destroyed in 1934. He was fourteen. Fantastic excitement as he felt the sidewalk shuddering after each explosion! Those were the years of happiness. Nineteen-thirty-four, 1935, 1936 … Then suddenly this long quarantine descends, as it would during an epidemic. The city grows oppressive around their family. One evening, going up the stairs, he hears the whispering of a man one floor above him, climbing laboriously, absorbed in an almost inaudible but frenzied soliloquy. “No, no, you can’t accuse me…. What proof do you have? What proof?” Alexeï hears these snatches, slows down, embarrassed to be eavesdropping like this, and suddenly recognizes his own father. This little old man muttering away is his father! … The quarantine lasts. Certain words can no longer be spoken. The Dictionary of the Theater, published by his father at the beginning of the 1930s, is withdrawn from all libraries. Certain names that he included in it have to disappear, since the people who bore these names have recently disappeared. In class Alexeï notices rapid chess moves being made: his fellow pupils change places so as not to sit next to him. “They’re castling,” he thinks bitterly At the school gates they move away from him, bobbing and weaving as they take off, like skiers on a descent strewn with obstacles. At the conservatory it seems as if the people he passes have all become shortsighted; they squint, to avoid catching his eye. Their faces remind him of those masks he once saw in a history book, terrifying masks with long noses, with which the inhabitants of cities invaded by the plague used to rig themselves out. His friends acknowledge his greetings, but only obliquely, furtively, turning their heads away, and this evasive action — half in profile, half face-to-face — stretches their noses into the long incurved stings of insects. They stammer out excuses for making off and gasp, as if they were inhaling the aromatic herbs that used to be stuffed into those antiplague masks…. During the winter of 1939, he overhears his parents deliberating in secret, then, in the middle of the night, sees them putting their plan into execution. They burn his fathers old violin in the kitchen stove. On two or three occasions Marshal Tukhachevsky, a friend of the family and a good violinist, had played on it for their guests after dinner. He was executed in 1937, and the little violin with its cracked varnish became a terrible piece of incriminating evidence…. That night they burn it, fearing arrest and interrogation. In his panic his father forgets to loosen the strings, and lurking behind the half-open door of his bedroom, Alexeï hears the swift arpeggio of the strings snapping in the fire…. After that night they begin to breathe more freely. One of his fathers plays is staged again. Still very occasionally, his mothers name reappears on posters. During 1940 an increasing number of people look Alexeï straight in the eye. As if thanks to some kind of ophthalmic miracle cure. He celebrates the new year in the company of these phony myopies. One of the tangos they dance to that night is called “Velvet Glances.” After the years of fear and humiliation, he has a shrewd idea what this velvety languor and the glances of the girls he holds in his arms are really worth. But he is only twenty-one and has a dizzying backlog of tangos, embraces, and kisses to catch up on. And he is fiercely determined to catch up on it, even if it were to mean forgetting that night, the smell of burning varnish, and the brief moaning of the strings in the flames.

  He moved away from the Kremlin now, diving in under the rain-bowed branches along the boulevards. The business with the violin, the nocturnal ter
ror, his years of loneliness as a plague victim, still came back to him from time to time, but mainly to give a keen edge to the happiness he was now enjoying. The whispering of his parents in the night, the acrid smell of burning varnish, this was the only residue of those three black years, 1937, ‘38, ‘39. Trifling matters beside the many varied pleasures that had filled his life since then. Why, just the wet shirt clinging to his chest and the simple delight he took in the feel of his young, supple, muscular body banished all the anguish of those epidemic years. But above all his concert, in a week’s time, and his parents, whom he pictured seated at the back of the hall (he had fiercely negotiated their incognito attendance) — and, in the front row, one of those girls with whom, on New Year’s Eve, he had danced to “Velvet Glances.” Lera.

  He was again reminded of the image of a decal. The whole world bore a resemblance to this trick with colors: all you had to do was to peel back a thin, grayish membrane of unhappy memories, and joy shone forth. Just as, at the beginning of May, Lera’s nakedness had shone forth from beneath that brown dress they had torn off together in the haste of still-secret kisses, their ears cocked toward the sounds in the corridor of the dacha: her father, an elderly physicist, was working on the veranda, and from time to time would call for a cup of tea or a cushion. Hers was a very wholesome nakedness, one of those bodies such as could be seen at that time, marching along dressed in flimsy sports shirts in parades to the glory of youth. What Lera said was also very wholesome. She talked about a family, the apartment they would live in, children. Alexeï sensed that this marriage would at last make him just like the others, banishing the figure of that youth secretly listening to the notes of the violin strings consumed in the fire. His own dreams, if the truth be told, were less of that young family nest and more of his father’s car, the broad, black Emka, as comfortable as a luxury cabin on an ocean liner, which he already knew how to drive. To put that frightened adolescent behind him once and for all, it sufficed for him to picture that car, himself, Lera, and the blue line of the forest on the horizon.