The Big Green Tent (32 page)

“How did you come to be at that wedding?”

“My first husband was a musician. He was a friend of the groom's. I'll tell you about it another time.”

“Strange that you've never mentioned it before.”

Anna Alexandrovna grew angry with herself: she had long ago decided not to burden this gentle soul, her grandson, with her entire past. The friend of the groom was sitting opposite her at the moment, picking his teeth. That was enough—just like that she had been moved, and said too much.

“Liza won't have an easy time of it here,” she said, changing the subject abruptly.

Liza was comporting herself beautifully. Vasily Innokentievich and his son Alexei, Liza's father, were strangers in this company; but both of them were well-known doctors, and this put them on an equal footing with the musicians, in some sense. Liza's mother, on the other hand, was completely out of place. She was overweight, with clearly bottle-blond hair, and very much aware of not fitting in among these guests.

At one time she had been a nurse in a field hospital during the war. It was a “frontline” marriage, unequal and accidental, but solid: their daughter held it together. On the face of the new mother-in-law one could read pride, boorishness, confusion, and awkwardness. Liza sat next to her mother and stroked her hand from time to time, making sure she didn't drink too much.

Anna Alexandrovna sat on Sanya's right. To the left of him was a bohemian-looking man with a mane of hair parted down the middle, wearing a black-and-yellow leopard-print ascot. Was he a singer? An actor? They called him Yury Andreevich.

When dinner was halfway over, and they had already cleared away the bouillon cups and the empty serving dish of tiny savory pies (exactly twenty-four of them, according to the precise number of guests), but before the main dish had been served, he stood up to make a toast.

“Dear Liza and Boba!”

Ah, so he's a close friend, since he calls Boris “Boba,”
Sanya noted.

His mouth was unusually mobile. The upper lip was etched with a deep furrow; the lower one protruded slightly.

“You have embarked on the dangerous path of matrimony! Perhaps it is not so much dangerous as it is unpredictable. I wish for you what I consider to be the most important thing in marriage: that it not prevent you from hearing music. This is the greatest possible happiness—to hear with four ears, to play with four hands, to take part in the birth of new sounds that were never heard in the world before you. Music, once it is released by your hands, lives only for a moment before dying away, dispersing into waves moving through space. But the ephemerality of music is just the other face of its immortality. Forgive me, Maria Veniaminovna, for saying such trivial things in your presence. Boba, Liza, my dear friends! From the bottom of my soul I hope that music never deserts you, that it grows ever deeper and fuller in you.”

“Nora!” a low, somewhat rasping voice called out. “Wonderful pies! Give me a few to take home with me, please!”

Eleonora answered with a spiteful glare.

“I'll have them wrapped up for you, Maria Veniaminovna. They'll be wrapped up.”

“This is for your memoirs, Sanya. Don't forget it,” Anna Alexandrovna whispered.

Sanya was already spellbound, as though he had a front-row seat in the theater, in the midst of all these great ones. And the man next to him in the leopard-print ascot was not merely a chance person at table; he knew something important, you could see that at a glance. But who could he be? The old lady who had asked to take home the pies, Maria Veniaminovna, had been Sanya's idol since the first concert at which he had heard her perform during his childhood.

After dinner, which passed without any ancient Russian exhortations of “It's bitter!,” they all moved into the study. This was one of the last remaining aristocratic apartments on Marx and Engels Street, formerly Maly Znamensky Lane, behind the Pushkin Museum. In addition, this may have been the only family in the entire country that had lived in the building since its construction, in 1906. The great-grandfather, grandfather, father, and now Boris—none of them had been forcibly removed or had their property confiscated. None of them had been forced to communalize and partition the apartment into smaller units, admitting strangers into their midst. None of them had been arrested. Family legend had it that it was in this very apartment, and not Peshkov's, that Lenin heard Issay Dobrowen, Eleonora Zorakhovna's younger brother, perform Beethoven's Sonata no. 23. Here, in the room next door, he spoke the words (unless Gorky had made them up, for some reason of his own): “Sublime, superhuman music … But I can't listen to music too often. It works on my nerves and makes me want to say sweet nothings, to pat on the head those people who can create such beauty, despite living in a dirty hellhole…”

And the nothings turned out to be not so sweet after all, and the heads that he patted rolled by the thousands …

All these family legends, which had now become her own, Liza told Sanya when they went out on the balcony to talk. And something else: Dobrowen had not played the “Appassionata” that evening at all, but Sonata no. 14, the “Moonlight” sonata
.
The experts had mixed things up.

In the study, they had started smoking. A servant served coffee on a tray.

“Everything's so British,” Sanya whispered to his grandmother.

“No, Jewish,” Anna Alexandrovna said.

“Nuta, that sounds quite anti-Semitic. I'm surprised at you.”

Anna Alexandrovna took a deep draw of her cigarette, flaring her delicate nostrils. She let out the smoke, shaking her head.

“Sanya, in our country, anti-Semitism has always been the exclusive privilege of shopkeepers and the nobility. By all accounts, our family is part of the intelligentsia, though rooted in the aristocracy. I love Jews, you know that yourself.”

“I know. You love Mikha. It's a matter of indifference to me whether someone is a Jew, a non-Jew, or otherwise. But for some reason, of my two closest friends, one and a half are Jewish.”

“That's what I'm talking about. Maybe there's a heightened sensibility?”

Anna Alexandrovna truly did have an aversion to anti-Semitism; she had meant something else by her comment. In her youth, she had refused to marry Vasily Innokentievich, who continued to love her his whole life. Now fate was taking revenge: Liza, his granddaughter, had rejected her refined, sensitive Sanya in favor of this flabby young Jewish man.

Anna Alexandrovna's version of things was somewhat off the mark, since Sanya had never proposed to Liza, and had wanted from her only amicable loyalty and heartfelt intimacy. Liza had had no grounds on which to reject him. But from their early childhood years, Anna Alexandrovna had been certain that these children were made for each other. In her heart she reproached Liza, believing her choice to be self-serving careerism. And, somehow, in her mind, his Jewishness figured as one of the unpleasant characteristics of Liza's new husband.

Liza came up to Sanya, a goblet in hand. Her new wedding ring shone on her finger. She was leading the man in the leopard-print ascot with the other.

“Have you met Yury Andreevich? He's a professor of music theory, Sanya. Here's a person who might be able to resolve all your musical problems.”

“It's rare that one meets someone with musical problems,” Yury Andreevich said, looking at Sanya with lively interest.

“Oh, what nonsense, Liza.” Sanya was both embarrassed and affronted. How could she have been so tactless?

Before Sanya could say anything else, he saw the cumbersome old lady, her handbag under her arm, trundling up to the piano.

Eleonora Zorakhovna had not foreseen this impromptu performance. According to her plan, dessert was the next point on the agenda: coffee, ice cream, and small pastries that the servant was already bringing out from the kitchen. But the performer, paying no attention to the tray with pastries, was drawn to the piano like a boxer to the ring, her massive head lowered, her hands still hanging loose at her sides. She dumped her heavily laden handbag on the floor to the right of the pedals, rummaged around in it, and extracted, from under the kefir bottle, her sheet music, which she placed on the music stand. Then she sat on the swiveling piano stool, her large body swaying slightly, and looked up, as though trying to decipher some message written on the ceiling. Covering her eyes, having apparently received her message, she struck a chord heavy as a watermelon. Then there was a second, and a third. They were strange chords in and of themselves, and augured something unprecedented.

“Sit down,” Yury Andreevich whispered. “This will last eighteen minutes, if she keeps up the tempo.”

Sanya had never heard music like this before. He knew that it existed, agitating music, hostile to the romantic tradition, which trampled on the old norms and canons. He had picked up on the waves of disapproval and mistrust it awakened, but he was hearing it now for the first time with his own ears.

He was listening to something absolutely new, and he didn't understand how it was constructed. He was adept at listening to another kind of music, “normal” music—far more intelligible and predictable. He loved the internal movement of the music familiar to him, the almost importunate touch of the sounds; he anticipated its resolutions, foresaw the ends of the musical phrases.

He knew how absurd and empty the attempts to paraphrase the content of music through a specially evolved pseudo-poetic language were, how contrived and pompous they always sounded. The content of music was not amenable to translation into literary or visual imagery. He hated all those dreary concert-program notes—how one should perceive Chopin, or what Tchaikovsky had intended.

He viewed it the way a small child views the activities of adults, with perplexed indignation—how stupid they are!

What he was listening to now demanded intense concentration, all his attention.
It's like something written in a foreign language
, Sanya thought.

The music summoned by the old lady's hands rose in a stupefying crescendo of sound. Even in the past, Sanya had rarely experienced music so viscerally. He felt the music filling his skull and expanding it. It was as though some unknown biological process had been unleashed in his body, as though he could feel it producing hemoglobin or releasing powerful hormones in the blood. Something as profoundly inherent and natural as breathing, or photosynthesis …

“What is this?” he whispered, thrown off guard, to his neighbor.

The man smiled with his sculpted upper lip.

“Stockhausen. No one performs him here.”

“It's like the end of the world…”

Sanya didn't mean the end of the world in a religious or scientific sense. It was simply a notion current among the youth, the jargon of the decade. But Kolosov regarded the young man with interest. As a theoretician, he assumed that this new music signalled the end of one era and the beginning of an unknown new one, and he ascribed great significance to this transfiguration, which was invisible and hidden from most people. He valued very highly those like himself, who were aware of the shift—possibly a shift in the evolution of the world, in human consciousness. They were few and far between, the temporal forerunners of humanity, people who not only presaged the new world, but were also able to analyze and research it.

“I don't understand how it works, how it's constructed,” Sanya told Kolosov, falling at once into his mode of thought. “Perhaps it's not even a new style, but another way of thinking altogether. It's stunning, disorienting…”

Kolosov felt happy.

“You're a musician, of course?”

“No, not at all. I would have been … but I was injured. A childhood accident. I only listen to music now.” He showed him his right hand, with its two bent fingers. “I'll be graduating from the Institute of Foreign Languages next year.”

“Come to see me. I think we've got a lot to talk about.”

*   *   *

Everything that happened that evening after Stockhausen was a blur in Sanya's memory. Even the image of Maria Veniaminovna herself faded a bit. He only remembered accompanying the young couple to the train station to see them off. They were going to the Baltics for their honeymoon.

What stayed with him was the sense of some portentous event. The next day Sanya went to see Yury Andreevich at the Conservatory, after the class he taught was over. They picked up the conversation where they had left off the evening before.

Later, they went together to a remote district on the outskirts of the city, first by subway and then by trolleybus. This was where Yury Andreevich lived, in an unsightly high-rise in the dreary middle ground between a village that was not quite extinct and the encroaching urban sprawl. They had agreed that Yury Andreevich would give him private lessons.

Within the demeaning confines of an almost Zamyatinesque cell, a one-room apartment with a metal number on the door (Sanya had just read the novel
We
), there was nothing but a piano and bookshelves, cabinets, and racks full of books and sheet music. There was no table to eat on, no bed to sleep on, no armoire where one could hang a coat. In his own home, Yury Andreevich looked as though he were just a guest—wearing a freshly pressed suit and a yellow ascot, in shoes polished to a high gleam and fit for the stage. For some time Sanya thought that this apartment was only the teacher's study, and that he lived in another one, more fit for human habitation. Then he spied a terra-cotta teapot and a wooden box containing Chinese tea in the kitchen. And, sometime later, Sanya realized that Yury Andreevich, in his freshly pressed suit, his ascots tied with almost military precision, was in fact a recluse, and that this masquerade costume concealed a true ascetic.

How did he manage to observe the demands of his musical monkhood in this vulgar and dirty world, amid the crushing reality of Soviet existence, nauseating and dangerous? It was completely improbable.