All That Is Solid Melts into Air (34 page)

April 2011

Chapter 28

S
ilence.

His fingers float upwards, vibrations still running through them, molecules quivering against each other, the sound dissolving somewhere over the orchestra, funnelling into the microphones that dangle above them.

A thousand people exhale.

Yevgeni opens his eyes.

The keys settle in their binary opposition, black and white, returning to stillness, released from his energy. He turns left, to the first and second violins, the violas, the woodwinds in the background, forward to the cellos and basses, black jackets, white shirts, black dresses, white skin, and nods to all in gratitude, and they raise their instruments in appreciation, and then he turns right to the audience, the glaring lights, the gale of applause, ranks of them holding up their phones to capture this moment.

It’s been several years since he’s played in his native city, but still he is not here with them, at least not immediately. He is on the other side of the Tverskaya, back in his old mentor’s apartment; Mr. Leibniz and his wife listening still.

Some minutes of bowing, alone, then with the conductor, twenty years older than he; a look in the man’s eye: pride, gratitude—a look Yevgeni is familiar with. The conductor’s grey hair is pasted onto the side of his head with sweat, a night of true exhilaration for him; Yevgeni has demanded that the man climbs to the upper levels of his talent. He has had some minutes backstage to gather himself as Yevgeni played solo, but still he is gliding upon the sensation of his accomplishment.

Yevgeni walks from the stage and through a warren of magnolia corridors. Someone hands him a white hand towel, and he wipes the sweat from his fingers, dabs his face, his neck. Technicians and stage managers take his hand as he walks, pat his elbow, his shoulder, as he moves away, until at last he opens the door of his dressing room, and closes it.

Alone. Leaning on the dressing table. Looking in the mirror. The fluorescent light above it buzzing as it gains full strength.

This evening was a lap of honour of sorts, a victory concert. He spent the afternoon in the Kremlin receiving the State Prize for his “services to the Russian state as a virtuoso of the highest order.” Such idiocy. So many layers to his craft that he hasn’t yet discovered. Already, some of the strands of this evening are reaching for his attention, filaments that he needs to fuse together. He knows that later, at dinner, he’ll pick apart the technicalities, the unintentional modulations of tone, replicate finger positions on a table or an armrest. Tomorrow, he’ll need a rehearsal room before his flight back to Paris, enough time to right his wrongs. Otherwise, he’ll be sullen for the following couple of days, he’ll allow the lapses of concentration to colour his whole memory of the performance.

Right now, though, he just wants to savour the feeling. The residue of his childhood lapping along the tips of his fingers, the faint surge of an outbound tide.

The Grieg nocturne is only a recent addition to his repertoire. Until a few months ago, he had rarely played it since his earliest days in the Conservatory. He dropped it not long after his audition because of his hunger to learn newer pieces, to stretch his capabilities. Later, as a young man, he was wary of the piece becoming routine. He wanted to retain the frisson that charged him when, doing exercises, he happened to stray upon some of its chord sequences and would then play a couple of bars—like a fleeting glance of a former lover as she stepped onto a bus, or handed her cinema tickets to an usher.

After Mr. Leibniz died the piece became too painful to play; it sounded leaden, morose, under his touch. It remained that way until his doctorate students in Paris cajoled him into coming to their Christmas party and he heard it in close proximity, in a small book-lined apartment in the Sixth Arrondissement, tucked away behind the St. Sulpice church. Not unlike the old man’s place: three floors up, a rickety staircase, the same warm wood panelling inside. He sat in an armchair with a broken armrest, a ridiculous paper crown perched on his head, a mug of mulled wine warming his palm, and listened to a young Spaniard make it come alive for him again, drawing out its smoky hues. Its patterns seemed more peaceful than he remembered, the two-beat rhythm of the right hand creating a steady, determined tempo, the three of the left wrapping itself around the melody rather than driving through underneath. He cast his eyes around the apartment, with everyone else focused on the keyboard, and what came back to him were not the specifics of that night but, instead, the atmosphere of the old man’s home, the tenderness with which he led his wife between their three rooms, always presenting his forearm for her to lean on, the gentle warmth of his voice when he reassured her in her confusion, extinguishing her distress.

He plucks off his bow tie and bundles his jacket on a chair. A case of fine Scotch sits in front of the ranks of bouquets. He unclasps the lid and flips it open; a satisfying weight to it, a beautiful thing a wooden box, the triangles of dovetail joints hugging each other. He pours the whiskey into a glass, the warm amber sluicing around. He reaches into the breast pocket of his jacket and takes out a golden ring and puts it on the middle finger of his right hand. His father’s wedding band. A graduation gift from his mother which he removes only for recitals.

The communal hum of the departing audience comes through from a speaker somewhere in the corner of the room. It’s gratifying to hear his own language being spoken by a large group—a few years since he’s heard it in this context. The elongated sentences, a certain curvature to the words, the nuances of meaning that crackle in his ear. Fifteen years in France and he still can’t connect with his adopted language in this way, never feels truly comfortable with those throwaway expressions that are reserved for those who took to it from birth.

He listens to people greet each other, inquiring about mutual friends, swapping stories about their children. Of course he’s attuned to any words of acclaim that filter into his room, so much sweeter to him when the praise is delivered without his presence. His need for approval lessened as he began to fill large auditoria, but he can’t yet bring himself to stand and turn down the volume, quench the chatter. Someday he will be oblivious to this too, his petty vanities finally laid to rest.

MARIA SIDESTEPS
through the crowd, moving against the flow. She left her scarf at her seat and she’s glad of the excuse to grab a few minutes to herself, away from Alina and her husband. Already they’re positioning themselves to take advantage of the free champagne. She wants to stave off, for as long as possible, the handshakes and small talk, the feigned interest in who she is. She misses Grigory more intently at these kinds of occasions. No one to link arms with, to exchange ironic commentary with. No one to rescue her from a particularly sterile conversation. The preserve, she remarks to herself once again, of the lonely widow.

She finds her scarf tucked under the armrest and pulls it out, and the seat levers down then flips back up, and the sound echoes around the auditorium, emphasizing its scale, the place charged with what it contained fifteen minutes before, the beauty of Yevgeni’s encore piece still stirring inside her.

She sits and watches the musicians pack up, quietly. Can she detect a certain reserve amongst them also, a reverence for what has just occurred, or is this simply a natural assumption you make when watching a group of people in formal wear go about a mundane task?

Stagehands come and wrap the piano in a fitted blanket, tie it in place, then move off somewhere else, and the chairs and music stands remain pointed towards it, watching over it as it sleeps. She thinks of her nephew tucked into his small bed, hair fanned out against the pillow as she kissed him good night.

That child has become the main accompanist to her adult life. He has always been near. Even in her most difficult times, she has been kept afloat by the currents of his talent. His music, even in his absence, flowing through her, lifting her.

She had once believed that words would be her legacy. A book picked up at a secondhand stall, fifty years after her death. An article that a researcher stops upon, skimming through microfilm files. But language has always been her betrayer. She, as much as anyone, knows its limits, its devious ways. The things that are most precious to her now are beyond articulation. Each has adopted the other, aunt and nephew—Alina is too far away from both of them now ever to bridge the divide—and if, at fifty-seven, she has nothing else to show for her life, then there is always this: Yevgeni sitting on that stage, holding a note in suspension, taking her breath with it, his fluid hands dancing, as they once did, on her typewriter keys, at nine years of age.

How close it all came to never happening.

HE CLINKS THE RING
repeatedly against his glass, a metronome to pace his thoughts.

Yevgeni has never asked his mother why she kept it for him, why she didn’t let his father take it to his grave. Such a question would be too revealing for both of them, would open up too much. Old habits still lingering.

Perhaps she felt guilt at not providing a male presence for him. Perhaps, at his graduation, she wanted to remind her son where he came from, that though he was about to flourish in a new, sophisticated world, he would always be a kid from the outskirts. His wearing of it surely indicates he does feel an obligation, a debt, to his father, but Yevgeni remembers the man so vaguely that he’s merely a shadowy presence, a ghost who climbs his walls on long winter evenings.

It’s the only possession he has that’s older than himself, and he wears it, in truth, out of fidelity to the past. To remind himself that, one generation before, an artist with his talent, with his profile, should expect to spend half a lifetime freezing in a gulag: chopping wood, laying roads. That the prospect of a life such as his has driven many better musicians, better men, to madness.

The heat of the Scotch licks over him. He takes pleasure in the charred aftertaste, a reward for his work; he can allow himself this. These minutes after a recital are the only time he truly feels at peace, feels equal to his ambition.

The chatter from the auditorium has quietened, the audience continuing their conversations in the lobby, only an occasional stray note from loosened strings as the orchestra packs up their instruments.

The ring has since proven a constant source of speculation for women over a certain age. Almost every day he gets questions about it, little jokes about him transferring it onto the other hand, making it a wedding band once again. Such comments never used to bother him, but now, in his midthirties, they carry a sting. He simply doesn’t have an answer when they ask if there’s a woman in his life. There have been missed opportunities he has seen only in retrospect, too unwilling to compromise his focus, the last of which was a historian who lived in a former hotel that had been through the most superficial of reconversions. The lift had a sliding iron gate, the brass plate outside still announced he was entering the Hôtel Jean Jaurès. He presumed it was no accident that a historian would choose to live in a building named after one of the founding pillars of French socialism. He presumed this but never thought to confirm it with her.

He would call to her late at night, and she would open her door naked, cradling a cat that covered her breasts, a habit she’d developed after searching the building for it one too many times. After their lovemaking Yevgeni would lie awake and watch the ceiling fan, listen to the endless repetition of it cutting the air. He felt at ease with her, felt a possibility stir within him, but they didn’t spend enough daytime hours together for either of them to confirm their instincts. At moments like this, she still makes him wonder.

“Find another musician,” Maria tells him. “A cellist maybe, even a dancer, someone who understands.” But he never has.

SUCH RISKS SHE TOOK
. Maria can barely grasp the scale of them in retrospect. Gambling with the boy’s future, with his safety. Alina’s too. At the very least he would have been prevented from setting foot in the Conservatory. She would have denied him doing the very thing that defines him. And for what? The Wall came down less than three years later, the Union was officially dissolved two years after that. Everyone got their freedoms and used them to elbow each other out of the way for whatever slice of the country they could get. Screwing each other as much as possible as quickly as possible.

Even her colleagues in the factory had no interest in communal action, in collective autonomy—all those phrases that had seemed so potent to her then—they just wanted more than they already had.

Despite all her worries, Yevgeni’s presence turned out to be irrelevant. When the power went out, they guided Sidorenko and the ministerial consort to a guarded room while Zinaida Volkova stood on the stage, proposed a strike, and read out their demands by torchlight to cheers and stamping of feet. The euphoria lasted until word went around that there was a citywide blackout. By the time the emergency generators kicked in, the stripping of the factory was well under way. They took anything that could be ripped out without mechanical aid. Even the supplies of water Danil had secretly stocked disappeared. The strike organizers fled, opting to stay anonymous. Who could blame them? Sidorenko, the minister, and management went home, and a couple of weeks later many of Maria’s colleagues were back in the plant, carrying out essential maintenance work.

Production was back up and running within a couple of months. The only gains the workers had made were the piles of scrap metal sitting in their baths and galvanized sheds.

Gambling her family on people who never believed in anything.

What lingers from that night is shame. It still has such a grip on her that she’s never been able to tell either of them what they avoided. Who did she think she was, playing God with their lives?

She never went back to the place. While work was suspended, Pavel managed to make enough space in his department to place her in a full-time tutoring position, and she’s stayed there ever since. The Lomonosov became her refuge through the new regimes. After the Union disbanded, it was probably the only institution in the city unaffected by the frantic tussle for wealth. Students still carried books, fell in love, turned in late papers, clustered together in the library. Her role, since then, has been in service to them, provoking them, encouraging them. The place has been good to her, perhaps too good. She got comfortable there, while the country needed good journalists—still needs them, now as much as ever.