All That Is Solid Melts into Air (29 page)

Nothing.

“Fine. You’ll have to come out, to eat, to pee. I’ll be waiting.”

She leans her back against the door, then slides down. This is just the beginning. Everything coming undone. It had to happen. She expected it, deep down. She starts to cry. Hopefully, he’ll hear her. She flings the running shoes down the corridor and they bounce off the walls, bounding into the kitchen, their energy somehow igniting hers again.

“They’re going out the window,” she calls back as she stands up and follows them, makes a point of sliding open the balcony door as loudly as possible in protest. Holds them in her hand, dangling them from their laces, pulls back her arm. But of course she can’t follow through. Who knows where he might have got them? They could belong to someone else, and, besides, good footwear can’t be wasted. They’re well made, they’ll last. They’re not a family that can throw good clothes away, even those of dubious origin. She looks at them, hanging from her fist, turning slowly in unison, joined in their fate, and she remembers she’s left the iron on.

She moves to unplug it, does so and leans against the counter. A shirtsleeve lifts in a stream of breeze, and she turns to the freshly pressed shirts lined up on their hangers, and reaches over and drags them all down, dropping with them. She grabs the whole bunch of them and wrings them into a bundle and bites them, bites down hard, stifling a scream, and they lie there, twisted, until Maria comes home.

Chapter 24

M
r. Leibniz lives in an old apartment in the Tverskoy district, in the same rooms where he spent his childhood. The walls are wood-panelled, faded and warped now, with intricately moulded covings and large double windows that open out onto the street. The building is four storeys high, weathered turquoise, with the brickwork showing in large, damp patches at street level, varnish peeling off the windows.

Maria has only been here in summertime, to watch Yevgeni play. She likes coming here; it has the same old-world look as their street in Togliatti. Approaching it alone, through narrow, cobbled streets and courtyards, allows her to relive some of her childhood, to gaze up at the high windows smattered with men in ushankas looking down upon her. Walking through the place allows the everyday to slip, momentarily, into the background. The stairway of the old house has an ancient smell, a nutty mustiness. She walks past the first landing, where Mr. Leibniz’s neighbour peeks his stubbled face out of his door, noting her arrival. Up two more flights. On each one, the steps are coloured with a mosaic of light from the small stained-glass window above the landing, each window cracked in its own distinctive way, a triangular notch missing from the first, the second with a hairline fracture that runs diagonally along its length which someone taped up years ago, so that now the tape has its own particular antiquity, parched and glossy, delicate to the touch.

The steps have an endearing groan. Maria imagines they’ve been consistent in their complaints throughout the years, never failing to let out a bleat of misery when pressed upon. An impulse with which she can empathize. She walks the steps with trepidation, the weight of all these developments resting upon her. She’s put so much on the boy. This is no situation for him to become involved in. She’s tried to put aside the thought that she’s endangering his future prospects, but such a thing is impossible.

She stands on the mat at the door and kicks the skirting board to dislodge the snow in her soles, cursing herself for not doing this on the way into the building. A small stack of snow is deposited on the mat, its surface sculpted with the pattern of her soles. She knocks on his door and hears him respond, and she turns the handle and walks inside, saying, “Hello,” softly as her head rounds the door.

Mr. Leibniz stands behind his wife, cutting and shaping her hair, a sheet draped around her body. They’re framed in the large window, almost two-dimensional, his wife sitting benignly in profile, wet hair sticking to the sides of her face, and Mr. Leibniz behind her, trapping hair between his fingers and chopping with the scissors. Mr. Leibniz waves a hand in greeting and smiles but stays at his post.

“Sorry. She was getting restless, so I’ve decided to give her a trim. It calms her down. Please, come in.”

Maria had picked some snowdrops from the gardens nearby, and she holds them forward uncertainly, feeling like a schoolgirl.

“Thank you. They’re beautiful. You’ll find something in the kitchen. Would you mind?”

“Of course not.”

She emerges a couple of minutes later with the flowers standing in a jug half filled with water. She walks towards the table and places the flowers down beside Mr. Leibniz’s wife, just out of her reach, and she smiles at them, a beautiful, clear smile, then looks at Maria, and confusion sweeps its way across her eyes, needing a cue, aware that she knows the face.

“This is Zhenya’s aunt. Maria Nikolaevna. You remember Zhenya?”

The smile unrelenting. Maria can tell she holds the smile as a way of staving off the confusion. Her look contains something else now, a shadow of distress, on some level an awareness that she should know this name, this woman, and a panic there too, unsure how to gauge the seriousness of her crime.

Mr. Leibniz leans over and takes his wife’s hand, running his thumb over the topography of soft veins. He introduces her again.

“It’s Zhenya’s aunt, Maria Nikolaevna. Don’t worry if you don’t recognize her. She’s only been here a few times.”

“Ah, good. Maria Nikolaevna. Come and sit. The bus will be along at any moment.”

Maria smiles and nods. “Of course. I’ll wait with you.”

They sit in silence for a few minutes. Maria finds this unnerving at first, but then realizes that Mr. Leibniz wants his wife to become used to her presence, to relax with a stranger in the room, and once she understands this, Maria too relaxes and just watches him at work, watches him combing and cutting, her own thoughts falling in tandem with the fine, white hair that laces together on the floor around the chair. He clips methodically. He combs the hair, then pinches it, then clips. Maria is impressed at the fluency with which he transfers the comb and scissors, the comb almost sidestepping them, slotting automatically between his fingers. Every few minutes he steps back and brings his eye line level with his wife’s shoulders and pulls the strands of her hair downwards on both sides simultaneously, ensuring symmetry. His wife sits with the sheet tied up around her neck, hands underneath, formless, just the bright, calm face, looking out the window. After a few minutes of this he begins to talk.

“She’s always been proud of her hair. There are so many evenings I would come home to her hunched over the bath wearing one of my vests, pouring beer over her head or cracking an egg on it. Always these strange-smelling potions over the sink, oddly shaped bottles. She used to have such lovely, dark, healthy hair. She’d love it when I would run my fingers through it. It would lighten her mood instantly.”

Mr. Leibniz takes a step back and bounces her hair in his hands and looks critically at his work, then to Maria.

“What do you think?”

“I think I should get you to cut my hair.”

“I’m a butcher. But I try my best. Wait till it dries out—you won’t be inviting me anywhere near your head then.”

“You’re being modest, you’re not just cutting and slashing. I can see you have experience.”

“I had four younger sisters. I learned to cut hair quickly. And also the war. When I was in recovery in the military hospital I became an unofficial hairdresser to the nurses. They were all preoccupied with looking good. They see all that blood, they want a haircut. It was their way of escape.”

“I’m sure you capitalized on your vital role.”

He points the scissors at her in delight.

“I was ruthless.”

Mr. Leibniz brushes the hair from his wife’s shoulders, then unties the cloth around her neck. He goes to the kitchen to fetch a sweeping brush, and Maria looks at the woman and feels an impulse to wave a finger in front of her face, to see if her eyes will follow, a small test of how responsive she is, but of course she suppresses this, keeps her hands folded together on her lap.

When he’s finished sweeping he asks Maria if she’d like anything, a drink maybe, and she declines and he brings the dustpan and brush back into the kitchen. Maria can hear a rustling at the bin and a trickle from the sink as he washes his hands, and when he comes back he takes a towel from a cupboard and dries his wife, dropping the towel over her head and mussing her hair, and she doesn’t object, remains totally still, and he drapes the towel over her shoulders to catch any remaining drops and runs a brush through the strands, smoothing the hair back with his free hand, and after that’s done he sits on the divan beside Maria, and they both look at her sitting there, glowing like a spring morning, and Maria shares his sense of satisfaction, even though she’s done nothing to earn it.

“How long has she been like this?”

“It’s hard to say really. It’s been two or three years since we’ve had a completely rational conversation. It sneaked up gradually.”

He pauses to see if she is just asking the question to be polite, but he can tell by her attentiveness that she’s interested, and so he continues.

“Katya was always busy—needlework or visits to elderly neighbours—she was always interested in things going on in the outside world. She was the one who kept us informed. I’ve only ever really cared about music, some literature maybe. She clipped things out of newspapers, old photographs and suchlike, and kept them in a scrapbook. Every few months she’d take out an old scrapbook from a previous year and look through it. I think it was her way of marking time.”

Maria nods.

“Anyway, one day I looked in one of her most recent books, and the first few pages had neatly clipped articles, carefully spaced out, and then as the pages went on it was a paragraph or two, chopped off with ragged edges, and as the pages moved on they had less and less coherence, until at the end there were only blocks of colour or text, plastered on top of one another, like a collage.”

He looks out of the window.

“All her forgetfulness and unfinished sentences were probably what led me to take down the book in the first place, but it wasn’t till I looked at the pages that I put it all together.”

“Did you ask her about it?”

“Yes. She was as shocked as I. She couldn’t remember sticking them in. That was almost four years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No. It’s not so bad. She has times where she’s lucid, and I’m grateful for them, and there’s often a strange pleasure when she experiences the past. She looks at me sometimes like she did when we first met—the awe of first love. It has many unexpected blessings.”

“Alina said she was a teacher.”

“Yes. They let her keep her job when I was arrested. Her father was part of the nomenklatura. She cut off all contact with him, but he obviously couldn’t bring himself to let her starve or have her taken.”

He has an angled nose, broken at some point, a shoulder that drops away, disproportionate to the other. But he sits with beautiful poise, direct and upright, despite the natural inclination of his body. His voice has an unusual richness to it, a honeyed rasp.

Maria is tempted to ask him more, but she’s here for a reason. She shifts position.

“Zhenya.”

“Yes.”

“What’s the problem?”

“There’s not an easy answer to that. I don’t presume to know the child, I just teach him piano.”

“He says he’s not happy with having to play the tarantella. He says he doesn’t want to play
Music for Children
, he thinks it’s patronizing.”

“It’s a very proud child you have there, a very stubborn child.”

“Try living with him. Does he want to choose another piece?”

“He’s nine years old. He doesn’t have the first idea what he wants.”

A raise of her eyebrows, a downturn of her mouth.

“My manager is very set upon the selection. I’m not sure we could get permission to change it regardless. He likes the image. In his mind, I think, even if Zhenya isn’t all we say he is, he doesn’t lose too much face. Prokofiev wrote it for children, it’s not supposed to be perfect—this is his attitude, or at least that’s what I imagine it to be.”

“It sounds as though you don’t have full confidence in the child either.”

She shrugs, no need for pretence; this man has done some serious living.

“I feel as though I’ve placed him in a difficult situation against his will. But I know you think we smother him.”

“I think a musician plays because they need to play. They don’t whine because the lighting is bad or the room is too cold or they’re not ready. A natural musician attacks the keyboard, tames it. They’re willing to fight, no matter the circumstance.”

Mr. Leibniz’s tone changes, a more formal diction. Maria feels like a student herself.

“So his sense of timing?”

“His sense of timing, nothing. He practises what, four days a week, a few hours each time. This is completely ridiculous. He still believes he can just think the music into being. He hasn’t spent enough time immersed in the notes, he doesn’t know how to read the flow of a piece. His instincts are fine. The boy has incredible natural musicality. But music is a demanding mistress. It requires total commitment. He has to understand it before he can charm it or beat it into submission.”

“He’s only nine years old. It’s a little too young for a death sentence.”

“You know what Prokofiev was doing at Zhenya’s age?”

“I don’t think I want to.”

“Writing operas, that’s what. And the boy complains because he has to play a piece with a prissy name.”

“Do you think he’ll make an impression on Sidorenko? Tell me honestly.”

“It depends on Sidorenko. Most of the graduates of the Conservatory come out with incredible technique and very little appreciation for natural musicality. They play like our footballers, all coaching and drills and tactics, very little individual skill. Zhenya is blessed with a musical language that’s all his own, but right now he’s too caught up in right and wrong, in technicalities. But you can’t learn what the boy has. Maybe Sidorenko understands enough about music to recognize this. On the other hand, maybe he doesn’t know how to listen.”

“What if we skipped the concert, just let him audition?”

“An audition will be more difficult. The committee will judge his schooling, his technique, they’ll want see he’s the right kind of candidate, that he’ll uphold their reputation.”

“And you don’t think they will?”

“I say it again, the child doesn’t even have a piano in his home.”

A movement from the corner. Mr. Leibniz’s wife raises her right arm. Mr Leibniz stands and guides the arm back down to her lap, but she raises it again, her head lolling, puppetlike, listening, tuning in to whatever silent impulses are surrounding her.

“Under the desks, under the desks.”

She calls this out in a warbled voice, no strength in the breath, but Maria recognizes something in the words, the force of intent there. This phrase formed a routine that cut through her school days too.

Flakes of snow ruffle against the window, and the old woman turns her attention to these, and Mr. Leibniz shows confusion, his eyes questioning. Maria realizes that his education took place at an earlier time.

“It was a school exercise. In case of nuclear attack.”

“Ah yes. Of course I’ve heard about them.” He sits beside his wife, holds her hand. “They must have been terrifying.”