Pravda (12 page)

The band played ensemble for a few bars. The saxophone took a short solo over the chord sequence. The trumpet followed. And then, almost hurriedly, they were back together. This was a song not so much fast as urgent, a song of avowal in an importuning six/eight.

One by one, the other musicians began to withdraw from the tune, like a ballet chorus inching toward the wings in anticipation of the grand jeté of the principal male. The horn players stepped back from their microphones, a quickened fade; then, stealthily, the bass player likewise dropped away, leaving just Arkady and Yevgeny. Old friends, these two, and Henry found himself leaning toward their play along with everyone else. Arkady began to let his fingers work a little faster, running mini-scales around and around and up and down, loosening the knots of time, until the beat itself began to crumble away and Yevgeny likewise disappeared into silence.

And suddenly the piano was alone.

There was something tight in the lines of Arkady's brow that Henry had not seen before. Something strange was happening to Arkady's relationship to the piano too. It was as if he had begun to live—breathe, talk, move—only through the keyboard. As if the instrument were becoming part of him, the keys no more than an extension of his arms and his arms merely a lateral articulation of the keys, the dampers, the singing wires themselves. To eye now, as well as to ear, pianist and piano were one and the same. As a man might inhabit his own body, so Arkady appeared to inhabit the mass or density of his instrument, as if he had assumed command not only of sound but also of the space and time that the piano occupied—could ever occupy—as if every capability of the instrument was known and understood and all alike were his to deploy or withhold on the instant. As if the quick of his will was alive in the grain of the soundboard.

At first he stayed with what was familiar—clearly recognizable variations on the tune, each bowing decorously and paying due respect to its progenitor; but bar by bar he began to stretch convention, risking more, straying further. The room's breath was stilled and the tune was unrecognizably transformed, and the notes were shimmering and shimmying, pouring and pouring, cascading out of the piano in great glittering waterfalls of sound, dazzling, dancing, and yet each individual purposely lit in its own special livery of color and tone. He was playing as Henry had never heard him play: back
and forth across rhythm and time signatures, the first beat of the bar long ago discarded (though hiding somewhere, Henry could sense, in between notes). And yet the Russian seemed determined that no single person be left behind on his journey, so he kept doubling back to the almost-forgotten tune, sounding echoes in adjacent registers, raising finger posts, urging the whole club along with him, stragglers too, all bound, faster and faster, for some new upland of music that he wanted to show them ... And now, just as they were all arriving on the very summit, just as people were raising their hands to clap, as if by magic, he was gone. Vanished through some secret trapdoor, only to reappear somewhere far below them all ... And where did all this sudden sadness come from? Or was this the tune again? Not quite. Not quite. Something else, something heartbreaking, something profound, something solemn ... And then, just as Arkady seemed lost for good, here he came once more, racing back with his left hand to greet the momentarily beleaguered audience, a wide grimace spreading across his face that became now almost a grin, and in three quick figures he had brought the whole swirling madness under control, and—astonishingly, astoundingly—there was that old beat again, that importuning six/eight, and one by one the other musicians picked up their instruments and stepped forward and Arkady was back in the original key and his arms were open wide in warm-hearted musical invitation, and in they all came in perfect formation, because yes, there it was again—beat number one, and only in that moment of resolution, somehow, did the entire solo make sense, and the old men in their Soviet jackets were clapping and even the endless self-appraisal of the Gucci couples was finally vanquished, and on the Mongeese went, all together, Arkady looking around, catching the eyes of the others, finger briefly raised to poke them up a semitone from F to F sharp, the nightmare key, but no matter or fear, for all five of them were playing as if there were nothing else in the world to say or do but sound these very notes this night in this very order, and neither Henry nor anybody else in the club ever saw or heard anything like it ever again, because on learning that his fragile world might be about to collapse back into the misfortune and misery from which it had so briefly risen, Arkady Alexandrovich had taken a private vow: to free himself from the endless agony of these contingent circumstances, to never again sit down to play another piano until he knew for certain that he could play forever or not at all and be damned.

At noon the following day, Wednesday, Gabriel walked due west along Nevsky, passing among the crowds clustering at the metro station, looking neither right nor left but waiting self-possessed in their midst to cross at the lights, then on again, stepping up the high curb and so to the Kazansky Bridge—cries in coarse Russian from below, the canal-tour boats, a tout shouting in English, the muddy water silent. Glancing neither down nor across the dusty road at the great curved colonnades of Kazan Cathedral, he went on, the narrow angle of dead ahead all that he permitted himself.

The crowd congealed, forcing him to slow almost to a halt. He felt as if he were deep underwater now: he could not hear and people loomed, swam at him, disappeared on either side. He seemed to have lost time and connectedness too: the day past, the day present, all days future—impossible to believe in, impossible to experience, minutes swollen to years, hours shrunk to seconds.

He had hoped to appear anonymous today, in blue jeans (wallet in the front, following the manner of his father, to counter pickpockets real or imagined), in cornflower blue shirt with breast-pocket cigarettes, in light brown running shoes, with black backpack over one shoulder, in sunglasses. A would-be tourist. Except ... except that it was such a beautiful day. And how could all these people not be aware? How could they not guess? He brought the heel of his hand to his cheekbone and dropped quickly into the dim underpass, away from the sun, moving to the outer stream of the throng, slowing, then stopping, then trying to press himself unobtrusively into the side shadow of the illegal-CD seller's stall, turning his face to the
gray nothing of the wall, removing his glasses, bringing thumb and forefinger to bear additional pressure on his eyelids, already squeezed tight shut against this new leak.

He was horrified that he had started. Somehow, with Connie tears were limitable, containable, there was someone to pull him out; but on his own—Christ. There was no control. He was terrified that he might cry forever.

He had not slept a single moment. For all its kindness, the careless
life
of Yana's bedroom had become a kind of torture. The soft pillows, the posters, the photographs, the ancient teddy bear, the casual tangle on the dressing table. And so all through the long night, all he could think to do was smoke at the window. Because ... because it seemed as meaningless to speak as to cry, to pray as to wish, to sleep as to stare, meaningless even to feel. Nothing changed: she was dead, forever dead.

No one in the underpass had noticed. But soon the storekeeper was sure to wonder what he was doing, part the side curtain, peer around and ask him what he wanted. No matter. He was already moving on, already emerging into the enthusiastic sun, already stepping past the old woman's cart of drinks, placed deliberately athwart the pedestrian stream on the pavement.

There were bound to be bad moments, of course. On the first day. And it
was
only the first day—yes, it was bound to be bad. This much he knew. Had he not edited an entire issue of
Self-Help!
on this very thing? Grief comes in tightly bound packages, his experts said: vast at first—mighty deliveries that take days and nights to unwrap, waiting on the doorstep of consciousness first thing each morning; but they become gradually smaller, less regular. Or at least you learn how to deal with them. How to go on living despite.

But if this wisdom meant anything, which he doubted, then he understood it only in the abstract, as a man understands that the Earth is hurtling through space. Simply, he did not feel old enough for this to have come to him yet. And he wished to God that he weren't so alone today. He just had to make it through until Isabella arrived. That's all he had to do. Hold it together.

Most of all he wished he could trust himself again; he wished that his heart would stop playing tricks on him: one moment he was sure of it, the next a new reality would unveil itself and beckon him further within and he would find himself in a completely new place—suddenly steeled, or suddenly destroyed, or suddenly businesslike, or desperate, or resolute, or resigned, or full of a new despair, or madly
joyful. And each time he thought he had entered the right and final chamber. And each time it was not so.

Just now—past the bank and the tourist-crammed Literaturnoe Café—just now, for instance, he had felt as lucid as he could ever remember feeling in his whole life. His mind as sharp and clear as a ten-year-old swimmer's. Then he had turned right, off the Nevsky, the Triumphal Arch ahead, and suddenly he was fogged and reeling and seasick again. It was the other people passing by that did it—seeming to him to be no longer individuals, nor even crowds, but merely animate reminders of the context of his mother's death. It was all this evidence of birth, of life, of soon-to-come death, all this evidence of the teeming world that somehow made it worse, somehow drove the swelling sadness harder down the channels of his heart. And it was the sun in the great square ahead, the uncontrived beauty of a day she would never see—the incongruity (for surely there could not be such a loss on a day like this); the very azure of the sky; and yes, there ahead, before him now, the pale beauty of the Winter Palace.
Let's see one more painting today—let's see what Mr. Rembrandt can show us about human nature.
It was the other people. It was the sun. It was the Winter Palace. It was people, sun, and Winter Palace that sent him desolate against the cold stone walls and held him fast in the shadow of the arch.

Then he came jolting and shuddering and shaking out of it. And he was standing in the queue for his ticket, noticing details of other people's clothing, breathing his way determinedly out of whatever latest insanity he had been in, and a rational coping-calmness suffused him. Not clarity this time, nor nausea, but yes, a curious, coping, soft-focus calmness. And he believed (with fervent relief) that he knew himself again. Christ, this must be shock, this must be it! And he realized that of course these others did not know his mother had died—how could they?—and that they did not suspect him of crying or grief or madness or anything else, and that they were just a happy French family, standing in line like him for a ticket to the Hermitage Museum, just a group of German students, just two old—what?—Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, he had no idea. Simply other people, neither hostile nor friendly.

A ticket for one, please. No concessions.

And then he went over everything coolly again, forward and backward: Lina, Isabella, Julian Avery (he jogged up the wide Rastrelli stairs), his gratitude to Yana. He must do something to thank her
and her mother, and Arytom too. (Left past that ludicrous ceremonial coach that the tourists loved.) And Jesus—Yana's face as she told him to leave the room and collect some of his mother's fresh clothes while she wiped his mother's body clean of dried saliva and the discharge he had pretended not to notice. (Left past the tapestries.) Then Yana, so young, urging him to leave the clothes, which smelled of his mother on the floor, and go! go now, Gabriel! go! and wait in the kitchen. And those unreal minutes staring at a Chinese-patterned tea caddy. (Ignoring
silly little Cezanne.)
Then Yana shouting that it was okay to come in now. (Moving from Winter Palace to Hermitage.) Then Yana in solemn, solemn Russian on his mother's phone. The world's most solemn language. (Toward the Peacock clock, which always made him smile, and so self-consciously forcing himself to do so three steps early, dreading that none would otherwise come.) And then their arms around each other (hanging garden to the left) as they sat there on the window bench in the middle of a rainstorm, waiting for the ambulance, his mother lying on the floor because he couldn't bring himself to move her and had no idea where to move her to, except the bed, which seemed as pointless as the ambulance itself.

Turn right.

Rembrandt.

Portrait of Rembrandt's mother.

Acquired for Catherine in 1767. Gabriel, look at her eyes: very slightly askew. Thin lips. Black silk dress. But she's not looking directly back. And I don't think she was really his mother.

He sat on the chair on which his mother always liked to stop, and closed his eyes.

The night was scratched forever on the thin varnish of his childhood; its exact disfiguring pattern likewise etched on every single pane through which he might look back. In the drafty old-fashioned kitchen in the basement of the Highgate house, the halfpast seven radio had predicted fog, predicted cold, predicted bad conditions for motorists. But father and children and the children's two friends were all in other rooms, unconscious of flights grounded or the murky freeze fingering its way up the Thames.

It began just before eight.

First the record jumped; then the needle broke and the dancing stopped; then, slowly, the ruptured stump began to drag itself across the vinyl. The newly purchased speakers clawed, rasped, snarled, screeched, but all the same, he heard his father's fury before Nicholas had even left his study in the room above.

Gabriel stopped dead still, his sister the same. A sidelight fizzed, then appeared to brighten, and the room seemed to stretch itself taut in terrified anticipation.