by Sergey
“She could have used other methods.”
“She could not. And now she has no idea what came over her. She’s in pain.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“What?”
“It’s just . . . why don’t you feel sorry for her?”
“Why should I? Tomorrow she will decide it was the right thing to do. She gets so tired at work, her nerves are frayed, and her environment is unhealthy, furthering a weak immune system, and these people keep coming—human trash, these bare-assed hazards, pretending to be . . . something.”
Alyona spoke in one fluid breath, smiling slightly, but Aspirin felt a sudden jolt of fear.
“How do you know? How do you know all that?”
She smiled even wider, but gave him no answer.
Aspirin tried to recall the feeling that had washed over him at the first sounds of Alyona’s violin. It was probably fear. An instant fear, like a dream of a precipice. But, unlike that woman, he felt no revulsion or hatred blinding his senses—he experienced nothing of that sort. He wondered what would have happened if Alyona kept playing.
“Want a drop of brandy?”
Alyona shook her head. “I can’t. But you should offer Mishutka some honey.”
Aspirin winced, meaning to say something, but stopped short—something else struck him. “Did you know you were going to be harmed?”
“Why do you say that?”
“You didn’t bring Mishutka!”
Alyona sighed.
“Well, I didn’t know exactly that something like that would happen. But I thought someone might yell at me, or grab my hand . . . and you can’t explain that to Mishutka.”
She touched the top of her bandaged head gingerly.
“Does it hurt?”
“The anesthesia is wearing off. It’s not too bad though.”
“You should take a painkiller or something. How will you sleep?”
“I still have to practice.” It was as if she’d never heard him. “My hands feel wooden. But if even two measures come out right . . .”
“And if you . . . I mean, when you play everything correctly, then what happens? Everyone who hears you will attack and kick you, or beat you with their umbrellas, or lead pipes, or whatever else they find lying around? Is that what is going to happen?”
Alyona smiled. It was always that: a cold stare or a condescending smile. “You have quite a vivid imagination.”
“But if only two measures caused this woman to hit you—”
“Bad luck.” Alyona rubbed her cheek. “It’s fine, Alexey. I just need to play it well. All I care about is to play that song from the beginning to the end and not make any mistakes.”
Aspirin sat down facing her, then got up again.
“And there’s no other way to find your brother? If someone comes from out of nowhere, like you—people must notice, shouldn’t they? Maybe we should look at some police logs, or even just the newspapers for those months when he left, like accident logs, something like that. Maybe he is in a hospital, or a mental institution. Or even an orphanage. You said he could be any age? Maybe he’s a baby, like a foundling or something. If that’s the case, then why wouldn’t you at least try looking for him in some other way, without those strings of yours?”
“Those are not my strings.”
“Fine. His strings. But that brings up another point—how did he find you so easily, but you can’t find your brother.”
Alyona touched the top of her head again and winced, biting her lip.
“I already told you everything, Alexey. I told you the truth. You just don’t understand it. My brother—here he could be an old man, and it’s not like he appeared from out of nowhere—he’d have been here all his life, and he would remember all of it. And his children, his grandchildren, his wife—they would all remember. He’d have memories of the war, his family hiding from the bombs in the basement . . . he’d remember everything but who he really was and what he was doing in this world. Your newspapers would tell us nothing.”
Could this be real? Aspirin thought. Am I really sitting in my own kitchen, chatting with Alyona about this world and that world, about passages from here to there, and the temporal paradoxes caused by these passages?
“I am going to get some painkillers,” he said hopelessly. If nothing else, maybe they’d help with his headache.
“He will remember who he is when he hears that song,” Alyona said, lost in her thoughts.
“Will he? What if he’s not anywhere near you? What if he’s a thousand miles away?”
“He’s here.” Alyona was no longer smiling. “I took the same route. He’s here, he must be nearby.”
“Do you think the entire city walks through that intersection? And even if that were the case . . . You’d have to play this song day and night for him to hear it!”
“No. If I play it well—just once, but with no mistakes—he will show up, no matter where he is.”
Aspirin splashed some cold water from the kitchen faucet onto his face, then froze, shocked by a sudden suspicion.
“How long is that song? From the beginning to the end?”
Alyona was silent.
“How long is it?” Aspirin said. He couldn’t hear his own voice.
“One hundred and seventy-three minutes, in good tempo,” Alyona said dejectedly. “I told you I have to practice so much more, and you, with your ‘how long are you going to torture that instrument . . .’”
“I am sorry,” Aspirin mumbled.
It might as well have been one hundred and seventy-three years.
“Good evening,” Irina said. She must have just returned from a run, judging by her warm jogging suit and slippers. Her wet, dirty sneakers stood in the corner.
“I’m sorry,” Aspirin began. “This is turning into a nice tradition . . . more like a dumb tradition, but Alyona needs a painkiller, and I don’t have any.”
Irina sighed. She probably wanted to tell him how irresponsible this was, raising a child and having no first aid supplies in the house. Thankfully, she restrained herself; she simply went into the kitchen and came back with a small pharmacy container.
“Thank you,” Aspirin said. “I will bring it back, I promise. And I will buy some for myself. It’s just that I needed it so suddenly.”
“What happened to Alyona?”
“A head trauma.”
“What?”
Aspirin hesitated: “Umm, you know. Happens to children. We already went to see the doctor, there is no concussion, so . . .”
“Alyona is a very unusual child,” Irina murmured.
“You noticed.”
They stared into each other’s eyes for a few seconds.
“How are you, anyway?” Aspirin asked awkwardly. “How are things?”
“Fine. As usual. I work a lot.”
“Do you still run?” Aspirin nodded toward her sneakers.
“Yes,” Irina said vaguely. “I need to stay in shape. So I run. But you should go back to Alyona, give her the medicine.”
“I am going,” Aspirin stepped outside the door. “Thank you again. You should . . . call me if anything comes up.”
“If what comes up?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Aspirin said. “But you should call.”
Alyona had been winding his strings. Two were already coiled inside a plastic bag, the third one writhed in Alyona’s fingers. The fourth one waited for its turn on the now empty violin.
“Here.” He handed her a pill and a glass of water.
Alyona swallowed the pill and took a sip.
“How is she doing?” she asked, coiling the third string.
“Irina? She runs.”
“That’s not good.”
“It is good,” Aspirin objected, albeit without much conviction. “It’s healthy, and it helps to stay in shape and all that.”
“At ten in the evening? In the dark, in the rain?”
“How do you know she runs in the dark, in the rain?” Aspirin ha
d run out of the energy to be surprised.
“I saw her last night.” Alyona twisted the peg, freeing the last string. “And she did the same thing the night before last. She only runs at night, several laps around the building.”
“Maybe she has no other time—”
“No,” Alyona cut him off. “It’s because evenings are especially hard for her.”
On Monday he received his visa.
He stuck the passport into his pocket and went outside; the first snow, white and soggy, had replaced the rain. All he needed to do was to get to the airport on time. Or at the very least he should buy a ticket for tomorrow’s flight.
On the way home he considered asking Irina to watch over Alyona. Or was it a bad idea? Of course, his neighbor would ask for an explanation: how could a father leave his eleven-year-old daughter behind?
He decided against it. If Alyona needed anything, she’d ask Irina for help—Irina would never refuse her.
Or she wouldn’t say anything. He was abandoning her—what did he care?
But the idea that Irina would be around—this made him feel better, because in some sense Irina was more reliable than Aspirin himself. He was never home, he had no concept of girls’ clothes or girls’ needs, he didn’t even have a basic first aid kit in the house. He’d leave Alyona some money; she was good at budgeting.
What if she lost her keys?
She’d never lost them before.
What if the pipes burst?
So they burst. Alyona will call a plumber. And Aspirin would call her every now and then, just to see how things were going. And after all, Irina lives alone, why wouldn’t she care for a girl who also lives alone?
That wound on her head . . . Alyona said it was nothing, she was stubborn as a mule and proud as a granite monument. But Aspirin made a lousy nurse. He wouldn’t know how to treat himself, how could he help the girl? Irina, on the other hand . . .
Greeting Vasya, Aspirin knew he would be taking tomorrow’s flight. He’d do his morning shift, but say no to Kuklabuck, head to the airport, and let Whiskas and his “serious people” deal with the disappointment.
Although why would Whiskas or his people have to deal with the disappointment? No one would be there to stop them from going to Aspirin’s apartment and taking Alyona and Mishutka with them. This would not be exactly a black op, this task of capturing a little girl and her teddy bear.
A dozen chopped-up bodies, and that’s that. The stuffed toy would be eliminated.
And who would look for Alyona if she disappeared? No one. They would assume she went back to her mother, to Pervomaysk.
He shook his head. A vivid imagination was a curse for a modern individual.
The apartment was empty. On Mondays Alyona had lessons, and such a minor thing as a head wound would never stop her. Still in his raincoat and street shoes, Aspirin sat on the piano bench and opened the lid.
He had taken music lessons for four years. After that, no matter how much his parents pleaded with him, he fought vehemently for his independence. Occasionally, when the mood struck him, he would sit at the piano and pick out a tune or two; a year later he joined the school orchestra as a drummer. And that was how his path toward becoming a DJ started.
He played a couple of chords now, dull and lifeless. If he’d had Alyona’s willpower, could he have become a musician?
It wasn’t out of the question. But what would have been the point?
He tried to recall a piece that had stuck in his memory since preschool: “In the Garden.” He couldn’t remember the composer or the notes. Muscle memory extracted a few cheerful measures out of the piano. Aspirin cringed at the sound and pulled his hands off the keys.
What if he, Alexey Grimalsky, was Alyona’s lost brother? What if he’d forgotten himself, forgotten creativity, what if it was him, her spoiled, unanticipated bro?
He couldn’t stop giggling.
The key turned in the lock. Alyona walked in, holding her violin case and her music binder, the bear in the backpack, the edge of her bandage peeking out of her hat, her face pale, her eyes as stubborn as ever. She was surprised to see Aspirin by the piano.
“What?”
“Hey,” Aspirin said.
“Hey. Did you get your visa?”
“Yup.”
“Congratulations,” Alyona said after a second and started taking off her coat.
“Alyona,” he giggled.
“What?” She stopped in the doorway.
“Could I be your brother?”
“You could. Just like anyone else.” She answered immediately, without a hint of surprise. “I have thought about it.”
“So maybe it is me. And you and I will go into the sunset, holding hands?”
“I doubt it.” Alyona hung her binder on the door handle. “When is your flight?”
“Tomorrow. Wait, did you say ‘I could be’? And now I can’t?”
“You can’t. I’ve analyzed a few things,” Alyona spoke drily, very much like an adult, “and I realized that no, it is not you.”
“Why, because I don’t look like a fallen angel?”
“Not in the least.” Alyona put on her slippers. “But I told you many times that my brother is not a fallen angel.”
“That’s a shame,” Aspirin said.
Alyona sat down on the sofa and looked at him expectantly. With a heavy sigh, Aspirin got up and went into the kitchen.
The day, already quite short, was lost in the gray fog. There was no promise of snow: rain kept tumbling down in long gray ribbons. A streetlight switched on, making raindrops sparkle on their way down through its halo of diffused glow.
Aspirin looked down.
A woman in an athletic jacket with a hood pulled down low ran by the streetlight, her sneakers cutting through the puddles. Keeping her pace, she followed the road around the corner of the building, where he could no longer see her.
He remembered Alyona saying “Evenings are especially hard for her.” But it was still daytime, around four in the afternoon, no later than that. He could hear the sounds of a firm, steady, particularly harsh, mechanical-sounding musical scale from the living room.
“This is enough for about three months,” Alyona said after carefully counting the money.
“If you try hard enough.” Aspirin was unpleasantly surprised. “You could blow it in one day. Right?”
“And what about paying bills?” Alyona stacked up the money. “The apartment fee, the phone bill, the electricity bill . . . Of course, I could always buy candles, but the refrigerator requires energy, doesn’t it?”
“You are so practical,” Aspirin mumbled. “How do you do this? If you came from another world, your head should be in the clouds!”
Alyona looked at him. Aspirin knew that smirk of hers quite well, that unpleasant, grown-up, full-of-bile grimace.
“I don’t have any more cash on me,” he said, restraining himself. “I will send it to you later.”
“And I suppose I should use my birth certificate to receive it, shouldn’t I.”
“Then don’t pay the apartment fee!” Aspirin exploded. “And let them turn off the phone—you don’t need it anyway.”
“So I shouldn’t expect daily calls?”
He walked off, exasperated.
It was just after eight o’clock. The neighbors’ water pipes hummed noisily. Irina was doing laps around the building, her wet hood pushed down low on her face. She took breaks, then came back out and ran another couple of laps. Aspirin was amazed by her tenacity; he’d drop after four laps (and that is if he was being generous).
A pair of new socks, still in their packaging, lay on the bottom of a small suitcase. Aspirin shuffled around the apartment, moving clothes from place to place, losing things he needed, finding them, then immediately losing them again. Alyona played her scales: for the fifth hour in a row, she made them sound harsh, then soft, then smooth, then violent. The extraordinary force that lived in that flimsy-looking girl terrified Aspirin, a
nd yet it fascinated him more and more.
The phone rang. Aspirin flinched.
“Alyona! Get the phone! Tell them I am not here, I am away on business.”
The scale stopped.
“Hello. Good evening. No, he’s not here, he’s away on business. I don’t know. I don’t know. May I take a message? I will. Good-bye.”
“Who was that?” Aspirin said, taking a deep breath.
“Zhenya.” Alyona picked up her violin.
His cell phone chirped. Aspirin found the phone in his pocket, glanced at Zhenya’s number and declined the call.
“If you don’t want to talk to anyone, please turn off your phone,” Alyona said. “It’s distracting.”
Just as Aspirin pulled out his phone again to comply, another call came in on the landline. He felt like an unlucky soldier on a minefield.
“Will you—please?”
Alyona rolled her eyes, but didn’t argue.
“Hello. Good evening. Unfortunately, he is not home. He’s away on business. I don’t know. May I take a message? I will. Good-bye.”
“And who was that?” Aspirin took his phone back and turned it off.
“The editor of the Lolly-Lady magazine.”
Aspirin had completely forgotten about an article assignment for which he’d already gotten the advance payment. Deep in thought, he pulled his business suit out of the closet, threw it on top of his suitcase, and sat down on the edge of the bed.
Alyona started playing again. Aspirin admitted to himself that the endless scales and études that had aggravated him so much in the past now had a calming effect. The more she played, the better his brain functioned. Could it be that he’d simply gotten used to it?
He had to pack and consider tomorrow’s plan, but, as Aspirin’s head grew clearer, he simply sat on the bed, hunched over, thinking of his classmate Olga who had kissed him in the school lab. Olga now lived in America, and all was well with her.
And all was well with Aspirin. Except for the fact that he was a jerk and a coward, his life was a mess, and it was not clear how this crisis would resolve itself. His parents, of course, would support him; first, they would push his nose into his own mess, like a puppy, and then they would find him a job. Luckily, Aspirin’s English had always been pretty good.