Summit (25 page)

She told him about the kids who came to Akademgorodok every August, winners in a science Olympics, eager to taste the academic life that was so much better there than anywhere else. She would be friendly with those kids, and they, knowing nothing of her powers or her past, were perfectly willing to be friendly with her. She would go on hikes with them and swim in the Ob Sea and sing songs late at night in the dorm rooms, and it would be like a brief thaw in her perpetual Siberian winter. Then in September they would go away, to their families and their real friends, and winter would descend upon her once again.

And she told him about taking the bus through the flat, monotonous countryside into Novosibirsk and going into its huge opera house. There, in the company of Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky, she could give herself up to the cleansing, ennobling power of music, feeling the freedom that her life found nowhere else. "Music doesn't care who you are," she explained to him, as if he didn't understand. "Music has no laws. It speaks directly to your soul."

She told him everything she knew about herself, in the hope that it would make him feel what she felt. Her tea grew cold, the night lurched toward dawn. Fulton gazed at her, and listened, and said so little that she started to despair.

"Can you read my mind?" he asked finally.

She shook her head. "That isn't one of my powers."

"But you say you understand me. You say we're soul mates. So what am I supposed to do now, Valentina?"

He sounded almost harsh. But why? She had asked nothing of him; she never would ask anything of him. It was only that... "I was hoping that perhaps we could make each other happy," she whispered, "at least for a little while."

"But then it would only get worse afterward, wouldn't it? It's not as if I can call you up for a date on Saturday night."

"Just knowing that you are alive has made me happy. Knowing that you... know me would make me happier still."

"It's a sad sort of happiness, don't you think?"

Yes, yes it was. "It's the only kind I can hope for," she said.

He looked unhappy. "I'm sorry, Valentina," he said. "I just... I'm sorry."

And then she started to cry. She had no family, no friends, no future. No life. She had hoped that Daniel Fulton would give her life, but she should have known that he couldn't, or wouldn't. Perhaps he was too unhappy himself. Or perhaps she had gone about it all wrong, had wasted her one chance with him. The reason didn't matter. The loneliness and the sorrow were all that mattered.

And then she could feel him on the bed beside her; his arms were around her. It felt so perfect. Couldn't he feel it too? She clutched at him and sobbed into his chest. He stayed beside her for a few moments, and then gently moved away. "It would only make it worse for both of us," he whispered to her.

And then she heard his footsteps on the creaky old floor and the door opening. "But maybe someday," she heard him say from across the tiny room. And then the door closed, and he was gone.

But maybe someday.
The words only made her cry harder as she listened to his footsteps in the hall. But when the tears were gone, and she looked up at the gray predawn world she inhabited, the cold tea and the wretched apartment and the mind-numbing job, they were suddenly some consolation.

Because the rose she had given him was gone. Daniel Fulton had held her in his arms and said those words, and he had taken her rose. It would have to do.

Chapter 22

It started raining. Valentina muttered something that sounded like a Russian curse and pulled over to the side of the road. Fulton noticed that a couple of cars ahead of them had also pulled over. She reached behind her onto the tiny backseat, found what she was looking for, and got out of the car. She was holding a windshield wiper. She attached it on the windshield, got back inside, and drove off.

Fulton was hardly an expert on such things, but he knew that this didn't happen in America. "Why don't you leave the wiper attached?" he asked Valentina.

"It will get stolen," she replied. "There is a shortage of wipers. There is a shortage of everything."

"I thought that was changing under Grigoriev. He's reordered priorities or something."

"Russia is not ruled by Grigoriev. It is ruled by ten thousand clerks. Things do not change overnight."

They continued driving in silence; the only sounds were the hiss of the wet highway and the tick-tocking metronome of the wiper.

It was a different world, Fulton thought, as he had thought three years ago in the instant before Valentina came into his life. And she was a part of this world. She knew how to flag down cars at one in the morning outside the Kremlin; she put jam in her tea; she knew not to leave the windshield wiper on her car. She used phrases like "soul mate." Maybe the phrase was used all the time in Russian; in English it sounded archaic and slightly ridiculous. She said she understood him, but how could she? Even if she
could
read his mind, how could she make sense of his experiences and thoughts, as alien to her as hers were to him?

That whole night with her was slightly ridiculous, if viewed objectively. She could have made up her story to impress him. Even if it was true (and now he had no reason to doubt it), it hardly made the case that they were "soul mates." Most of the brilliant people he knew—the people with "powers"—were unhappy to one degree or smother. But he didn't feel any particular kinship with them. Why should he feel any with this young Russian woman with the big gray eyes and too much makeup?

And yet...

He remembered his first view of her, stepping out of the darkness by the metro station, rose in hand, trying desperately to act sophisticated and alluring. He remembered the way she sat on the bed with his poster floating above her, the intensity in her eyes as she recounted the sad little story of her life. He remembered the feel of her body, warm and helpless, as he held her before leaving.
But maybe someday.

He had remembered these things many times in the three years since that night.

Valentina turned off the highway finally and drove along a dirt road shaded by fir trees and beeches. After half a mile she veered onto a rutted path and came to a stop in front of a small cottage painted a faded green.

Fulton was vaguely disappointed. He had imagined dachas to be grandiose villas with landscaped grounds and bearskin rugs on the floor. Evidently he was wrong—or perhaps the word was more elastic than he realized. At any rate, they had arrived. They got out of the car and stood for a moment under the soggy sky looking at the place. Across the fence a neighbor was sawing wood while a tinny radio played Prokofiev. "It's really quite comfortable," Valentina said. "There's no plumbing, but it does have electricity."

"It's charming," he murmured, then grinned, remembering that he had said the same thing to her before. "Did they tear down that building where you were living?"

She nodded. "I do not miss it," she said.

"I don't blame you."

They walked across a muddy patch of lawn to the dacha. The porch was pleasant, but the inside was dark and smelled of mildew, and the furniture looked cheap and rickety. The paintings on the wall were of dreary peasant scenes. He could feel Valentina staring anxiously at him, awaiting his opinion, but he couldn't think what to say.

Her bedroom was different. It was bright and clean, with a small wooden bookcase next to the double bed. He glanced at the English titles on the top shelf:
The Call of the Wild, An American Tragedy, The Grapes of Wrath.
His poster stared down at him from above the bed. Valentina opened a window. "This is a nice room," he said.

She blushed. "Thank you." She looked very nervous. "I brought a luncheon," she said. "I didn't know what—what you were expecting, so I took the liberty—"

"That's marvelous. I'm starving."

She looked outside. "I think the rain is over. We could go into the woods, if you like, and eat it there."

"That sounds wonderful."

They went back out to the car, and Valentina got a picnic basket out of the trunk. They each took a handle and carried it past the dacha and its outhouse. Fulton didn't think he had ever seen an outhouse before. Behind it was a dirt path that led into the woods.

Walking into the dark, silent woods made Fulton feel as if he were entering the heart of Russia. It was as alien to him as the windshield wiper, but in a different way: the windshield wiper was everyday life, and these woods were the mystery that shimmered behind that life. Valentina seemed comfortable with both.

"Do you like mushrooms?" she asked.

"Well, yes, I guess."

She kicked at some growing by the base of a tree. "I don't. People like to gather them this time of year. It is a stupid pastime."

"It certainly sounds boring."

Valentina sighed. They walked on. The leaves were already turning color, Fulton noticed. Summer was very short here. Eventually he and Valentina came out of the woods and into a meadow. They crossed a stream on a wooden footbridge. An old man was fishing nearby; two crows cawed overhead. Fulton couldn't identify the strong, damp odor he was smelling. Wild onions, perhaps? The sun broke through the clouds.

They walked a little farther, then Valentina stopped next to a copse of birch trees. "Is this all right?" she asked.

"Couldn't be better."

They set down the basket. The grass was a little wet, but the sun was drying it fast. Valentina took out a blanket and spread it on the grass, then placed the food and plates on it: black bread, sausage, salted cucumbers, Georgian wine... enough for several luncheons.

"From Food Store Number One?" Fulton asked.

Valentina smiled and did not reply. She opened the wine and poured them each a glass. "To music," she said, holding up her glass.

It was a safe enough toast. "To music," he agreed.

The wine was sweet but pleasant. Valentina served the food, and Fulton ate greedily. He was always hungry the day after a performance. Besides, eating gave him time to think. He knew he would have to start explaining soon, but he didn't know where to begin the explanation—didn't really know if he
could
explain why he was having a picnic with this strange young woman in this alien land.

Valentina said nothing. She was waiting for him, he assumed. Maybe she figured she had gone about things the wrong way three years ago and didn't want to repeat her mistake. Her arms were folded tightly across her chest.
I
asked for this date,
he thought.
It's up to me to begin.

When the meal was just about finished, he poured himself another glass of wine. "You don't know the effect you had on me that night, Valentina," he began, not looking at her. "I doubt that it was exactly the effect you hoped for, though. I had just given the greatest performance of my life. Everything I wanted to do at the piano I was able to do. Then I met you, and suddenly it didn't seem to matter. What you said about me seemed so true. I saw myself in the same way you saw yourself, I think—in the grip of a power that would not let you live."

"But the powers are not exactly the same," she said, shaking her head. "The joy you give—"

"Didn't seem to matter. What mattered was how I felt. You know my life story, Valentina. It's your story, it's the story of every prodigy. I try to blame my parents for the way I grew up, with people forever poking and prodding at me, demanding more from me, but the fact is that I lived exactly the way I wanted to live. I didn't care about friends or baseball or television programs, I just wanted to play the piano."

"Do your parents love you?" Valentina asked, with the curiosity of an orphan.

"I don't know. I suppose so. Maybe they love me because they get to bask in my reflected glory—
look at what we produced!
Maybe that's unfair. I don't know." Thinking about his parents always confused him. He swallowed some of his wine as memories flashed through his mind: winter in Evanston, his mother driving him to his lesson through a snowstorm—nothing mattered more than his lesson; his father nodding his approval backstage after a performance of the Grieg piano concerto (and that nod meant more to him than the standing ovation on the other side of the footlights); both of them arguing with Hershohn about some clause in the management contract—Hershohn looking mildly amused and infinitely patient, while Fulton wondered where gratitude had to end and embarrassment could begin. But he was getting off the track. "The point is, I decided I couldn't keep it up. I needed to think about my life, to do some of the things I never had the time to do. So I finished my tour and canceled everything else. I didn't play the piano in public again until last night."