The Music of a Life

by Andrei Makine

  His thoughts slid on to the days spent at the dacha, in that village with the melodious name of Bor. To the peeling back of the decal as that body emerges from the schoolgirl’s dress and abandons itself to the boldest of caresses, to a carnal struggle, to that laughing violence from which they both emerge breathless, their vision blurred by tears of pent-up desire. At the last moment the young body shies away, closing in on itself like a shellfish over its virginity. And this maneuver pleases Alexeï. In her resistance he reads a commitment to future fidelity, the promise of a responsible and sensible young woman. Only once does doubt arise. He wakes up in a sunlit room after a brief sleep and through his eyelashes sees Lera, already up, at the door. She turns and, believing he is still asleep, throws a glance at him that makes his blood run cold. It reminds him of the looks the long-nosed masks used to give him. To banish this resemblance, he leaps up, catches Lera on the threshold, and drags her back toward the bed in a battle that is a mixture of laughter, love bites, and attempts to get free. When she finally manages to escape, he feels not the exhilaration of happiness but a sudden weariness, as at the end of a drama he has been obliged to act out. And he senses that this female body, simultaneously offered and forbidden, this smooth, full body, belongs to a life that will never be his. Oh, yes, it will, he corrects himself at once; he will marry Lera, and their life will be made of the same stuff as this spring afternoon. One thing, though; he must forget the melody of the violin strings snapping in the fire. The life they are to lead will have the ring of music composed for a parade in a sports stadium. He remembers how one day he tried to tell Lera about those notes escaping from the strings as they burned. She cut him off with precisely this piece of enthusiastic advice: “And what if you wrote a march for sports parades?”

  In the courtyard in front of the apartment building he could not avoid a brief stab of anxiety: “The Battleship game!” One day during the years of the terror that was how all the windows in this façade had appeared to him, with those belonging to their own apartment right in the middle: squares on a sheet of paper struck through by an invisible — unforeseeable! — hand, as it hurled the occupants into a black car that arrived in the wee hours and drove off again with its prey. Next morning they would learn that this or that apartment was now empty, “hit and sunk.”

  His gaze slid along to those three windows, three squares untouched amid so many vessels sunk. The old fear was gone. His present happiness was too intense to leave room for it. Alexeï only regretted one thing: a very important phase of his life had been surgically removed by those accursed years, one that he would have found hard to define. The time of youth’s first flush, an age of dreaming and exaltation, when one poeticizes woman, making a divinity of her inaccessible flesh, living in wild anticipation of the miracle of love. None of all that for him. He had the impression that, in a sudden leap, he had been catapulted from childhood, from that sidewalk shaking with the destruction of the dynamited cathedral, right over the years of terror into an already adult life, to face the nakedness of the beautiful, muscular body Lera offered him almost in its entirety, reserving that little “almost” for marriage.

  He went up the stairs, and on each landing noted the number of departures and arrivals that had occurred, especially when the Battleship game was at its height in 1937, ‘38, ‘39. People dragged from their sleep, experiencing their departure as a dream that skidded into horror. There was the apartment beneath their own: a family, a little girl who had met him in the street only a few days before their nocturnal departure and talked with him about a new flavor of ice cream they were selling on the boulevards….

  He quickened his step and began singing an operatic aria from his mother’s repertoire, a love song replete with heady, smoldering key changes. She heard him through the door and, smiling, came to open it.

  TWO DAYS BEFORE THE CONCERT he went back to the factory’s house of culture for the final rehearsal — “the dress rehearsal,” as he had announced it to his parents during lunch. He worked all afternoon, played through the entire program, and then stopped, remembering his mother’s advice: sometimes by dint of rehearsing you can lose the intimate thrill of novelty, the tiny element of miracle or conjuring trick that art cannot do without. “You know, it’s like stage fright,” she added. “If you don’t have it at all, it’s a bad sign.”

  On the way home he was thinking about this beneficial fear, the shiver that spurs one on. It had been lacking that time, during the rehearsal. “Yes, but playing in a steam bath like that…” he excused himself. It was a heavy, hot, milky day. A day with no color, no life in it. “No stage fright in it,” he said to himself, smiling. His mother had also told him about young actresses who claimed they never had stage fright, and to whom Sarah Bernhardt, ironically indulgent, would promise: “Wait a while. With talent, it will come.”

  Even beneath the greenery of the boulevards the muggy torpor hung there, stagnating, muffling sounds, swathing the trees, the benches, the lampposts, in a gray light, that of a day already lived through once before, into which one seems to have stumbled by mistake. Alexeï was leaving the main avenue to take a shortcut when all of a sudden a figure he instantly recognized emerged from a row of trees: a neighbor of theirs, a retired man who could often be seen sitting in the courtyard, bent over a chessboard. Just now he was advancing with a hurried and oddly mechanical gait, coming straight toward him, and yet seeming not to have noticed him. Alexeï was already preparing to greet him, to shake his hand, but without looking at him, without slowing down, the man walked straight past. At the very last moment of this abortive encounter, however, the old mans lips moved slightly. Very softly but quite distinctly, he breathed, “Don’t go home.” And he walked on faster, turning off into a narrow side street.

  Taken aback, Alexeï remained perplexed for a moment, not believing his ears, unable even to grasp what he had just heard. Then he rushed after the old man, caught up with him near a crossroads. But before he could ask him for an explanation, the neighbor, still avoiding his eye, whispered, “Don’t go back. Run for it. Things are bad over there.” And, with the red light against him, the old man scuttled across in front of a car, which honked its horn. Alexeï did not follow him. In the face turned away from him he had just caught sight of the long-nosed mask.

  Pulling himself together, he realized to what extent the old man’s words were absurd. “Things are bad over there.” Sheer madness. An accident? An illness? He thought of his parents. But then why not say so clearly?

  He hesitated, then, instead of going directly into the courtyard, walked around the whole block of dwellings, went up into the building where the windows in the staircase well had a view across to the façade of their house. On the top landing there were no apartments, just the exit leading out under the roofs. He knew this observation post, as it was where he had smoked his first cigarette. There was even a lingering presence of that vaguely criminal feeling. Through a narrow semicircular window he could see the whole courtyard, the bench where the retired folk read their newspapers or played chess, and, if he pressed his brow against the panes of glass, he could also make out the windows to his parents’ bedroom and the kitchen. And as he peered across, the taste of the first puffs of tobacco came floating back.

  He spent a long time with his face pressed to the glass. The façade of the building was familiar to him down to the smallest cornice, down to the designs on the curtains at the windows. The foliage of a linden tree that rose almost to the level of their apartment hung there, motionless in the dull heat of the evening, as if waiting for a sign. For a May evening there were surprisingly few people in the courtyard. Those who crossed it slipped along soundlessly and disappeared swiftly into the drowsiness of the alleys. Even the stairwell remained silent; no one seemed to be entering or leaving. The only noise: the creaking of a little bicycle on which a child was pedaling tirelessly around a bed of campanulas. At one point he stopped, looked up. Alexeï shivered, moved away from the window. It felt as if
the boy were directing a precise, hard gaze at him, an adult’s gaze. A sly little adult on his bicycle.

  The creaking of the wheels began again. Alexeï decided his fear was stupid. Just as stupid as this waiting behind a dusty pane of glass, just as stupid as the old chess player’s warning: he must have mistaken him for someone else.

  He had an impulse to go down quickly, to return home, to get there ahead of his fear. “Stage fright,” he laughed to himself nervously under his breath, and began racing down the stairs. But two floors below he stopped. A couple had just come in and were beginning to climb, forcing him to retreat to his refuge. He studied the windows of the apartment once more, and those of their neighbors on the floor below. Suddenly he realized what was keeping him here….

  During the years of the terror that apartment had witnessed three departures. First of all they had taken away the aircraft manufacturer and his family. Rumor in the courtyard had it that his assistant had denounced him to have his job and this apartment. He had moved in there with his family, had just had time to buy new furniture for the dining room and to feel they were a permanent fixture. Six months later, the night when their turn came, people heard the wailing of their child, still half asleep, crying out for its favorite doll, which in the haste of the arrest no one had thought to take. A week later a man moved in who wore the uniform of the Commissariat for State Security. When he passed his neighbors on the staircase, he stopped and stared at them obstinately, waiting for them to greet him. And his son looked like a young boar. In any event, it was with that animal’s brutish violence that he had one day pushed Alexeï up against the wall and muttered between clenched teeth, “So, rotten intelligentsia. Still banging away on your stinking little piano, are you? Well, just you wait. One day I’m going to take a hammer and nail down the lid on your music!” Alexeï had said nothing about it to his parents. And in fact, shortly after that, toward the end of 1938, the apartment was emptied once again….

  He pressed his forehead against the glass. The curtains in his parents’ apartment seemed to be moving. No, nothing. His mind went back to that young boar-man, his bulging face, his scorn. And especially to the threat, quite fanciful, of course, but one that had often seemed very real: his piano, its lid nailed down with great carpenter’s nails. In fact, if he was still watching at this cobweb-covered window now, it was because of that young boar. Thanks to the man’s disappearance one December night, he had realized no one was safe. Not even the victors. Not even those who had fought valiantly against the enemies of the people. Not even these fighters’ children.

  At this moment he saw the chess player crossing the courtyard with a measured tread. The old man raised his arm in greeting to a woman watering the flowers at her window, then disappeared through an entrance door. The dusk was already making it impossible to see the expressions on people’s faces. And, as if in response to this perception, the light came on, lending a glow of color to his parents’ bedroom curtains. A shadow appeared, very familiar. He was sure it was his mother. He even caught sight of a hand, her hand, of course, tugging at the curtains. “I’m a total jerk and the worst kind of coward,” he said to himself, feeling a marvelous sense of relief in his chest. His gaze now slipped smoothly along the rows of windows that were beginning to light up, peaceful, almost sleep-inducing, in the calm of a May evening. Down below, in the building where he had taken refuge, a door slammed. The click of a lock, voices, silence. He decided to wait for one more minute, but this was now merely to avoid inquisitive glances. “And besides, I’ve got my concert on Saturday,” a confident voice affirmed within him. This argument seemed to banish once and for all the danger invented by the old madman he had passed on the boulevards. “I’ll go home. I should be able to practice for an hour before the neighbors start raising hell.”

  He took one last look at the apartment building, and it was with this glance, already careless and wearied by the tension, that through the dimness of their kitchen window he saw a uniformed officer staring down at the courtyard.

  It seemed to him as if the staircase would never come to an end. Rounding corner after corner in a frenzied gallop, he followed the zigzags of the handrails that continued interminably, as if by an optical illusion. In the streets, then in the corridors of the subway, and at the station, he still felt as if he were thrusting downward in the murky spiral of that stairwell, dodging past doors that threatened to open at any moment. And his eyes carried with them the vision of a window at which the silhouette of a uniformed man wearing a shoulder belt stood out clearly. He was not running, he was falling.

  His fall came to a halt at the ticket windows. The woman at the ticket counter extracted a little pink sphere from a box of candies and popped it into her mouth. And even while her fingers were taking the money and handing over the change, her lips were moving, pressing the candy against her teeth. Alexeï stared at her in blank amazement: so beyond the glass flap of the ticket window an almost magical world began, made up of this wonderful routine of candies and yawning smiles. A world from which he had just been cast out.

  He was so struck by the way this life continued serenely without him that he was not surprised at what happened in Bor at the dacha. Leras father, the professor, generally cloistered in his study and deaf to all shouting and bells ringing, on this occasion opened the door to him almost immediately. At eleven o’clock at night. Nor did Alexeï find it surprising that the old man hardly listened to him, in his haste to offer him a meal that seemed to be already waiting on the kitchen table. Furthermore, in response to his attempts to explain what was happening to his parents, all the professor could say was: “Eat up, eat up! Then try to get some sleep. You’ll see things more clearly in the morning.” He repeated this wise saying abstractedly several times, as if he were reaching the end of a train of thought that the young man’s visit had interrupted.

  Strangely enough, despite the fever that shook him, Alexeï sank rapidly into a brief, deep sleep. He wanted to hide himself in it, hoping to wake up on the other side of the ticket window behind which that young woman had been sucking a candy. He had a dream in which the window was located very low, almost on the ground. This basement window had taken the place of the ticket woman’s, and you had to stoop to catch sight of the face at it: Lera’s face. But an ambiguous Lera, revealed in an unmentionable activity. The old chess player was there too, seated on a rain-soaked bench. Alexeï was playing with him, setting down the pieces not on a chessboard but on the pages of an anatomical atlas, in which the pictures were obscurely connected with their game. And his sleep was permeated by a fear of not grasping these connections, though they were obvious to the old man. Finally there was the figure of his mother, reciting lines of verse and suddenly singing them in a voice so shrill and desperate that he awoke with a stifled cry in his throat.

  He looked at his watch: half past three. Outside the window the night was beginning to grow pale. Alexeï studied the room, the outlines of the furniture, and thought, almost calmly, But of course! He’s going to turn me in! In a flash, all the strange elements he had ignored the evening before coalesced into an inescapable logic. The professor, who never went to bed late, had opened the door at the first ring, fully dressed. His wife, without whom he could not go anywhere, was absent. So was Lera. In the bedroom, it was as if everything had been ready to receive a guest…. No, he won’t turn me in, he’ll simply open the door to them….

  He jumped out of bed, threw on his clothes, fastened the catch on the door, climbed out through the window….

  At the start of the path he and Lera generally took to go and bathe in a pool, he hesitated, turned toward an old shed behind the house, sat down on a chopping block, and decided to wait. He did not have to wait long. From the far end of the main street that divided this cluster of dachas in two came the sound of an engine. The car stopped. In the still nocturnal silence he heard the sound of banging at the door, the whispering of men’s voices, and more distinctly, in imploring tones, but striving to pre
serve his dignity, the professor’s voice: “Comrades, you promised me…. He’s a delicate young man. I beg you! I’m sure his parents —” Someone cut him off in an irritated tone: “Listen, Professor, don’t stick your nose in something that doesn’t concern you! You’ll get your chance to speak when you’re being interrogated.”

  Hurling himself along the path, Alexeï heard the hammering coming from inside the house.

  Much later, when he was well versed in the pitiless mania life has for playing at paradoxes, he would come to realize that in reality he owed his survival to the Germans. Ever since the month of April in this year of 1941, and even earlier, but more confusedly, people in Moscow had been talking about the impending threat from the West. On such occasions his mother’s thoughts turned to her sister’s family, who lived in a remote village in the Ukraine — poor relations, so to speak, and never invited to Moscow. They pictured them in their hamlet very close to the Polish border, exposed to the increasingly predictable war. “But come, now,” his father would interrupt her, “our army will never let the Germans cross the frontier. And even supposing by some remote chance they manage to drop a few bombs, there’d be nothing to fear. I simply take the car, drive to your sisters, and quick as a wink, I bring them back to Moscow.” This scheme for an evacuation by car would come up again from time to time in their family evenings together.

  Alexeï recollected it now when he reached the suburbs of Moscow on foot at about six in the morning. His head buzzed with the names of fellow students at the conservatory who might come to his aid, names that, reviewed one by one, faded into uncertainty. Then he thought about this aunt in the Ukraine, remembered the plan for a journey by car, and eagerly seized on the idea before it came to seem too far-fetched.