The Big Green Tent (31 page)

“And there's no way to escape it?”

Anna Alexandrovna laughed.

“Maybe there is, but I never discovered it. And I wouldn't have wanted to. Everyone is sucked into that vortex sooner or later.”

She placed her cool, cruel hand on his forehead, and the touch was clinical and sterile.

“No temperature.”

Sanya took her bony hand, covered in rings, and kissed it.

He's a grown-up boy. And he's so good. But he's too gentle, too sensitive …
Anna Alexandrovna thought sadly.
He's going to have a hard time of it.

But Sanya's difficulties had begun much earlier than Anna Alexandrovna guessed. From the earliest years, even before he started school, he had been tormented by the suspicion that he was different from the other children his age, and, indeed, from everyone else, too—and that this was due to some flaw or defect in him. Or, a less dire option, to some peculiarity. He did not doubt that it was, in some inchoate way, connected to music. Like archangels with swords, his mother and grandmother stood watch over him, protecting him from the ordinary world, which was alien to him.

In their enormous, enchanted room, all 350 square feet of it, they created a beautiful sanctuary for him, and were themselves filled with anxiety and fear: How would he cope without them, beyond the threshold of the room, and even farther afield, when they died? At first they had thought of educating him at home rather than sending him to school in the outside world; but they finally decided against such a radical measure.

Vasily Innokentievich, called in for advice, mostly so that they would have someone to argue with, rose to the occasion. He voiced crushing arguments, the most persuasive of which was that if the boy didn't learn to adapt in childhood, if he weren't run through the ringer at school, he would stand out like a sore thumb later in life, and was sure to end up in prison.

His mother and grandmother exchanged glances, then sent him off to be run through the ringer. The first five years of school were almost like being in solitary confinement. For some reason no one took any notice of him, as though he were invisible. And he cultivated his invisibility, insulating himself from boyish roughhousing and teasing with a polite smile. His relationship with his classmates was one of estrangement, nothing more.

A miracle occurred at the beginning of the sixth grade, however—a kitten, tormented by a dog and his classmates, laid down his life, thus laying the cornerstone of the friendship of Sanya and Ilya and Mikha. And this friendship was cemented when they revealed to one another the deepest secrets of their souls at the time.

But toward the end of their school years, new secrets grew up in them that they chose not to confess. The friends were almost grown, and reconciled to the notion that every person has the right to a private life. Sanya's secret had no name, but he was afraid of being found out: What if Ilya and Mikha discovered in him what he himself could not even name? His future had still not managed to take root and ripen; it had not yet given way to anguished experiences, only a dull longing. They were aware of silences cropping up everywhere, yet these silences did not hamper their friendship.

They never quarreled. They managed to transform any differences of opinion into playful banter, ephemeral, spur-of-the-moment theater, the rules of which were known only to the three of them—the Trianon.

But even if Sanya had wanted to, he could not have revealed to his friends the secret he had discovered—the words were lacking. And telling them in approximate terms, using whatever words came to mind, would not have been possible, because of his inner need for accuracy and precision.

Only Liza was able to understand. Vasily Innokentievich's granddaughter was a kindred spirit, as well as kin, to him. She was a pianist. Almost a professional one, although she had not yet entered the Conservatory. But she would. And Sanya would not.

Only with her was Sanya able to share his suspicion that the world in which people brushed their teeth with mint powder in the morning, cooked food, ate it, then unburdened themselves of this food in the WC, read newspapers, and went to bed at night, placing their heads on a pillow—that this world was unreal. Music was the incontrovertible proof of the existence of another world. Music was born in that world, then found its way into this one in some mysterious way. And it wasn't just the music that filled the rooms of the Conservatory, or the disorganized cacophony that roamed the corridors of the music school, or the music that lurked in the dark grooves of a record. Even the music that poured out of a radio receiver, with its gaps, its rising and sinking notes, even that squeezed through the crack between worlds.

Sanya was paralyzed with fear at the horrible suspicion that this world, the one in which his grandmother, the tooth powder, and the WC at the end of the corridor seemed to exist was a fraud, an illusion, and if the crack were to open just a bit wider, everything in this world would burst like a soap bubble in a washtub.

“Do you know what I mean? It's suffocating here, nauseating. It's impossible. But we can't get into that other world, they won't let us in. Am I some sort of freak, do you think?”

Liza shrugged and said:

“Well, of course! As for being a freak—that's nonsense! But of course there's a boundary between these worlds … and when you play, that's where you are, over there.”

She was certain that many people knew this. Most likely because she had studied at the music school, and her classmates all played eight hours a day on the piano, or the violin, or the cello, and were chained to a musical staff by invisible shackles.

In his final year of high school, Sanya hardly touched the instrument. For him, everything was over. He refused to take any more private lessons, and Anna Alexandrovna could only sigh.

They went to concerts.

Going to a concert with Liza was even better than going with his grandmother. They listened and compared, communicating with the subtlest signs of comprehension—a half nod, a half sigh, a suspended breath, and, the most expressive sign, a touch of the hand. They were perfectly in tune with each other. Then Sanya would walk Liza to the trolleybus stop, and sometimes accompany her home, all the way to Novoslobodskaya. They talked about Chopin and Schubert, and when they were a bit older about Prokofiev and Stravinsky, about Shostakovich. And it was impossible to imagine then that they would have these musical conversations their whole lives, until one of them died—about Bach, Beethoven, Alban Berg. And they would fly across the world to hear a one-off performance by some great musician in Paris, in Madrid, or in London, so together they could savor first the music, then the conversation that went on till morning, until they flew back home to the opposite ends of the earth.

And anyway, could he have admitted to Liza about the storeroom, about the darkness, about the coitus with this pitch-darkness, about the anguish that gripped him after this celebrated manly act? About Nadia and her glistening gums?

Shortly after the New Year, Nadia was expelled from school, which was unjust: she was quite a good student. Nature had endowed her not only with a healthy physique, but with a good head to go with it. And you couldn't have faulted her for bad behavior in school—she sat drowsily through the lessons, never talking back to the teachers, and earning her Bs honestly. The school principal called her in, laid out all the facts that had been leaked to her about the storeroom, and ordered her to take her school records and leave. Nadia cried and took her records. She transferred to a trade school for working-class youth, which was only fitting.

Her former friends came by to see her, though she never had much time—from early morning she worked in a bakery on Pokrovka, and in the evening she attended classes.

Although Sanya and Nadia still lived in the same neighborhood for a few more years, they ran into each other only once, near the Uranus movie theater on Sretenka, completely by chance. Sanya was with Anna Alexandrovna, and Nadia was with her girlfriend Lilka. Sanya bowed to her in greeting from afar; she started giggling and whispered something into her girlfriend's ear.

Sanya turned away: forget it ever happened … forget all about it … never breathe a word to anyone … never. And it went away, as though it had sunk to the bottom of his memory.

*   *   *

Oh, Liza, Liza! You are … beyond words!

She was crystalline, fragile; it was impossible to imagine that she was made of the same stuff as the fleshy Nadia, and that she wore the same elastic harnesses—a bra, an elastic belt holding up her stockings. It was sacrilege even to think about it. Sanya dismissed these unworthy suspicions: angels, naturally, don't wear elastic.

But Sanya was cruelly mistaken. The angel wore all those accoutrements and was not at all unfamiliar with those elemental forces Sanya had discovered in the storeroom. Slowly, but very surely, Liza had begun a romance with a young violinist, a student from the Conservatory who hailed from a well-known musical family. A bearlike fellow with a florid, porous complexion and a shaggy dark head of hair, this corpulent Boris—it was unfathomable!—had captured Liza's heart. Perhaps the name of his grandfather on a commemorative marble plaque in the lobby of the Minor Hall of the Conservatory added to his appeal. Sanya learned about their relations only four years later, not long before they got married, and was deeply shaken. All male-female corporeality was distasteful to him, tainted by the storeroom goings-on, and completely antithetical to the pure world of sound. How could Liza have succumbed to that? She played better and better. She had long ago left her apprenticeship behind and acquired her own sound, her own tone. Liza, with that fat Boris? No, it wasn't jealousy he felt; more like bewilderment.

Two weeks before Liza and Boris's wedding they played a duet—Mozart sonatas for piano and violin. Sanya sat in the half-empty hall and suffered: he knew these sonatas well and was agonized by the incompatibility of the two parts—there was no mutual support, no union of voices, but rather an alarming mutual inaudibility. There was no spiritual commingling between the piano and the violin, and he hated Boris for being so dull, egotistical, and so very conceited. Liza simply couldn't marry him, she couldn't!

He left without giving them the flowers he had brought. The three red carnations, wrapped in white paper and stuffed into the sleeve of his coat, he threw into a trash can next to the Tchaikovsky monument.

The wedding reception was held at home. It was simultaneously modest and sumptuous. There were not many guests, only parents and close friends and relatives. There were twenty-four people altogether, corresponding to the number of place settings of good china that had remained intact, given to Boris's grandmother and grandfather at their own wedding.

A portrait of his grandfather Grigory Lvovich, a well-known violinist and teacher, looked out from a frame hanging next to a portrait of his young grandmother Eleonora, which was the work of Leonid Pasternak, father of the famous writer. His grandfather had died, a victim of the campaign against “rootless cosmopolitanism”; but his grandmother, who had once upon a time been a singer, had survived cosmopolitanism, and her husband, and her son. Now, with an iron fist, she ruled her highly organized home according to the highest social standards, as only she knew how.

The table gleamed like an iceberg under the sun. The silver had been polished to a bright sheen, the crystal goblets sparkled. On the oval and round serving dishes lay translucent slivers of fish and cheese. Like the illustrious Teacher, she, too, would have been able to feed a multitude with five loaves of bread, because she knew the art of fine slicing. In truth, there were never any leftovers. The food on offer was always meager, though the dishes were many. The newlyweds wore their concert garb—Boris was in a tuxedo, and Liza in a lacy, pale-yellow gown that was not at all flattering.

Among the guests were four of the most celebrated musicians in this part of the world, with their wives. The bald pate of a great pianist shone; the soft body of a great violinist seemed to be melting into the chair. A fifth performer, also considered a musical genius, was the only unaccompanied woman. She had never married. She placed her shabby handbag, a green bottle of kefir sticking out of it, on the table next to the gleaming silverware. A great cellist, a close friend of Boris's late father, picked at his teeth with a sharpened matchstick. A famous, though not yet great, conductor masticated with his diminutive teeth, looking around to see what was on each plate and pretending not to notice his wife's angry glances. Not counting the new relatives, nonmusical society was represented by a couple who were neighbors from the dacha—a professor of chemistry and his wife. Eleonora Zorakhovna, a consummate socialite with a genius for prestigious social gatherings, was disappointed, however. The wife of a great composer had just called to say that they wouldn't be able to make it after all.

The gathering of the century, as she had conceived it, was falling apart.

“Déjà vu,” whispered Anna Alexandrovna to her grandson. “I was here for Eleonora's wedding fifty years ago. In this very apartment. It was 1911…”

“With the same guests?” Sanya said, laughing.

“Just about. Alexander Nikolaevich Scriabin was here. He had just come from abroad.”

“Scriabin? Here?”

“Yes. He did show up, unlike Shostakovich, who wouldn't condescend to it. Everyone loved Grigory Lvovich; and no one loved Eleonora.”

“Who else was there?”

“Leonid Osipovich Pasternak and Rosalia Isidorovna Pasternak. She was a marvelous pianist. Anton Rubinstein remarked on it when she was just a little girl. It was a select circle. Birth, affinity, profession … I was here in this house at your age—no, I was younger, of course. That wedding has stayed in my memory my whole life. As you will remember this one,” she added, and sighed.