Summit (24 page)

Her accent was good; the line sounded rehearsed. Was she a spy? But he was just a piano player; why spy on him? In the light he noticed that the hair peeking out from beneath the kerchief was blond.

"I was at your recital," she said when he didn't reply. "I—I have never heard anything so beautiful in my life."

That didn't sound rehearsed. "Were you here at the hotel when I came back afterward?" he asked.

She nodded.

"Everyone else has gone home. Why did you stay?"

"How can I return to the real world, after visiting heaven?"

Once again, rehearsed. Had she been practicing the conversation in her mind while she waited? He had encountered rabid fans before, of course, the kind who write you twenty-page letters and send you hand-knit scarves and follow you on tour. But there was something about this one.... "Would you have stayed here all night if I hadn't come out?"

She shrugged. "A militiaman would probably have sent me away eventually."

A gust of wind blew through the square; Fulton pulled up the collar of his jacket. "It's cold out here—I'd think this wind would make you forget heaven pretty fast."

She shook her head. "I'll never forget it."

He stared at her. She didn't
seem
crazy. He had, after all, been magnificent; there was reason for her to be moved. And she was pretty enough. Perhaps she would do. "What's your name?" he asked.

"Valentina."

A nice, romantic sort of name. "Would you like to go someplace and have a cup of coffee with me, Valentina?"

"There's no place open."

She stared back at him. No trace of the knowing smile now. She was simply waiting for her fate to be decided. He didn't want to bring her back to his hotel room. Anyway, the floor-lady would probably call out the Red Army if he tried it. "Where do you live, Valentina?"

"In a tiny apartment, like everyone else."

"Is it near?"

"Not very."

"Would you like to offer me a cup of coffee in your apartment, Valentina?"

She looked undecided; maybe she hadn't got this far in her rehearsal. Maybe, he realized, she was embarrassed by her apartment. "I have no coffee," she said finally. "Would you like tea, or vodka?"

"Sure. Tea would be great. Let's go."

She hesitated, and then smiled. A real smile this time, one that lit up her face with a joy unlike any he had seen in a long, long while.

The metro was closed, and there were no taxis around, but Valentina knew what to do. She flagged down a passing car, whose driver was more than happy to take them to her apartment for a few of Fulton's certificate rubles.

Valentina lived in a dilapidated house south of the river. "We keep hearing it will be torn down to make room for an apartment building," she told Fulton, "but they never seem to get around to it." She led him up a dark flight of stairs to a small hallway lit by a dim, naked light bulb. She unlocked a door, turned on a light, and Fulton saw for the first time how a Russian lived.

The apartment was tiny, all right: one room stuffed with a bed, a desk with a hot plate on it, tottering bookcases, and a sofa. On the wall over the bed was a publicity poster of Daniel Fulton seated at the Steinway, looking sexy and soulful. This apartment was reason enough to stay out in the cold all night, he decided. "It is a mess," she said. "I'm sorry."

"Nonsense. It's charming." It was depressing.

Valentina took off her coat and kerchief. She was wearing a plain blue dress—probably the best she owned—and a string of fake pearls. Her hair was long and fine; it caused faint but familiar stirrings in him. She went down the hall to the communal kitchen and came back with a kettle of water, which she set to boil on the hot plate. Fulton cleared a space for himself on the sofa and sat down. He put the rose down next to him. Valentina sat on the bed, her legs tucked under her, her arms folded tight on her chest. She looked very nervous. His poster loomed over her like a guardian angel—or a devil. It was unnerving.

He knew he should go into his sexy pianist act—the act he had practiced far more than Valentina had practiced her conversation with him outside the hotel. But somehow he didn't feel like it. Probably the dismal surroundings, he thought at first. Or no, it was the cheers still ringing in his ears, the triumph still flowing through his fingers, the feeling that tonight was different from every other night.

Or perhaps it was this woman, who sat on her bed nervously waiting for him to do whatever he was going to do. But why this woman? She was pretty, but not as pretty as many women he had known. If she was smart or talented, she hadn't shown it yet. She was certainly not stylish, at least by American standards. But there was something....

"What do you do, Valentina?"

"This month I am a shop clerk in Food Store Number One. Next month..." She shrugged.

"You change jobs a lot?"

"Nothing interests me. But I have to keep working or I lose my residence permit."

"Did you go to school?"

"I was at the university. I studied English. I thought I might become an interpreter and perhaps get to go abroad. But everyone wants to do that. You need the right background, the right connections. I didn't have them. It was hopeless, so I dropped out."

"You speak English very well."

She shrugged again. "I speak English like someone who has learned it from books."

The water had boiled. Valentina went over to the hot plate and brewed the tea. She served it to him in a chipped glass along with a stale-looking piece of cake. There was no milk or sugar, but she had a saucer of jam. She spooned a little of the jam into her own tea.

"And you like music," he said to keep the conversation going.

She sat back down on the bed. "It is my salvation," she replied.

Like
heaven,
another religious word. But Fulton was used to such words being used about music and about his playing. He took a bite of the cake; it wasn't bad. Maybe she got it at work. The tea was very strong. "Do you play an instrument?"

She shook her head, then abruptly put down her teacup and turned her head away, as if fighting back tears. Oh Lord, she wasn't going to be one of the crazies after all, was she? "Uh, Valentina, is something the matter?"

She took a couple of deep breaths, then turned back to him. Her eyes were wide and moist; she clutched at her fake pearls. She spoke, finally, and his life changed. "None of this matters," she whispered. "We are soul mates, Daniel Fulton."

* * *

She was driving through the outskirts of the city now. Gray factories belched smoke that could not obscure the insipid slogans on their roofs: The Ideas of Lenin Live and Conquer; The People and the Party Are One. Inside, the heroic workers would be drunk or goofing off, unless the push was on to make their quotas. She wanted to go even faster, to get this all behind her, but Daniel seemed worried by her driving. He remained silent, and she too could think of little to say just yet. There was too much to remember.

* * *

"We are soul mates, Daniel Fulton." It was taking a terrible risk to say such a thing, but she could not continue the bland conversation they had fallen into, as if they were strangers passing time in a railway car. These were the most important moments of her life, and she could not let them slip away.

He looked at her with the wariness of a man facing a dog that might be mad. No reason for him to look at her any other way. "I
know
you," she went on. "You have an amazing gift—it is your joy and your despair. It has ruined your life, but you cannot imagine life without it. You play a role, and you are very good at it—perhaps in a way it
is
you. But the real you is somewhere else: it looks at your life and it wonders
why?
But it doesn't know what to do, how to change anything, how to make things right. So you go on, and the world is grateful that you do, but it is so hard. And you are very unhappy."

His gaze had changed from wariness to puzzlement. Yes, it was true. She could tell it was true. She had thought about him for so long that she could not be wrong. "What makes you think you know me?" he demanded. "From my albums? From interviews you've read? You're inferring quite a bit from very little evidence. Why are you so sure of yourself?"

"Because we are soul mates." She wished she could say it all in Russian; she could make things so much clearer in Russian. "Because I have felt the same things you have felt."

"Oh really? What is it that you've felt?"

He was defensive now, of course.
You are just a shop clerk—what do you know about anything?
She looked at the way his long fingers curled around the glass of tea. He is wondering how he can get out of here.
She is not pretty enough to be worth all this.

And yet...

She didn't need the interviews; she didn't need the evidence. She understood so much. "Do you know the city Akademgorodok?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"It is in Siberia. I was born there. I never knew my parents. There had been an accident with some nuclear materials while my mother was pregnant with me, and both she and my father died shortly after I was born. There were no close relatives, so I stayed with foster families in Akademgorodok.

"I think the accident affected me somehow, as well as my parents. That's as good an explanation as any, I suppose. Whatever the reason, I found out very early that I had powers."

"Powers?" he repeated dubiously.

"I was about four when I understood. I became angry one day because I could not open a jar of jam. I could not ask anyone to help, because I was forbidden to eat the jam. So I thought angry thoughts at the jar. And then it exploded. In my hands. My thoughts made it explode." She held her hands up to her face, thinking of Daniel Fulton's lovely, long fingers and the chubby, childish fingers that had held the jam jar so long ago. "My hands turned red from the jam and the blood. I can still see the scars."

She put her hands down and looked at Fulton. He seemed impressed—at least a little. At least he did not leave. "Did anyone believe you?" he asked.

"Not at first—just as perhaps you are not sure you believe me now. I was punished and warned not to tell lies. But Akademgorodok is a city built for scientists. It has streets named Thermodynamics and Molecular Biology. Many of the people there are young and open to new ideas—that is why they choose to live in Siberia, as far as they can get from the government in Moscow. Eventually the scientists started to notice me.

"It was fun at first to be noticed—to do things that astonished the scientists, that made them whisper together and look at me and wonder if I had cheated somehow. But it was not fun for long. I wanted to be normal, but no one would let me. The other children thought I was a witch and ran away from me. The scientists wanted me to do nothing but take their tests, and they became angry if I failed one. And then there were the other people—not the scientists—who stayed in the background, but watched everything I did."

"Government people?"

She nodded. "The KGB. I know that now, but I did not know it then. They went away when the powers went away."

"When was that?"

"When I was about twelve. The powers didn't really go away, you see. I just decided to stop passing all the tests. The scientists made up theories about what had happened, and then everyone left me alone."

"And you tried to be like everyone else?"

"That's right. I joined Komsomol and studied hard and I was as nice to everyone as I could be. But it was too late, Daniel. In Akademgorodok I would always be the strange one, the witch. So eventually I came to Moscow to study. Here I am a stranger. No one cares about me. And I don't mind that at all."

Fulton sipped his tea. Waiting for something more, she realized. It all seemed so trivial when spoken aloud.
I broke a jam jar, and I passed some tests.
How did that make her the soul mate of the legendary Daniel Fulton? "Could I have some more tea, please?" he asked.

"Of course." She got up from the bed and filled his glass.

At least he was still here. Someone shuffled along the hallway to the kitchen. Probably Vera from upstairs, unable to sleep since her husband left her. It was a hard life.

"We both possess powers that have made us unhappy, is that what you're saying, Valentina?"

"Yes, yes. Do you see?"

"But your powers haven't done you much good, apparently. Whereas mine have brought me wealth and fame and glamour. That hardly makes us soul mates, does it?"

She shook her head. "Those things do not matter to you. I
know.
What matters is the
aloneness."
Was that a word? She didn't care. He understood; he had to understand. And she began to talk more about herself, to put into words all the memories and feelings she had stored up for the day when there would be someone to tell them to.

She talked about walking in winter past the massive new buildings dedicated to science, content for once in her loneliness. And then an old woman recognizes her—too late to cross the wide, empty street—and the woman averts her face and mutters a charm against evil spirits as she passes by. And Valentina wonders, not for the first time, if she really is evil, if her life is a punishment for a sin she didn't realize she had committed.