The Big Green Tent (81 page)

He took a cassette tape out of his pocket and put it in her hand.

“Thank you, Sanya. I'm not arguing with you, for the most part. But Eschenbach always has something of the tongue-twister about him. Sviatoslav Richter has a different articulation altogether, much cleaner…”

They had parted a year and a half before in Vienna, where Sanya had traveled to hear her perform. Now, on the way to visit a home to which they had been invited, they were picking up the conversation where they had left off in Vienna.

Maria opened the door.

Obligatory air kisses.

“Good evening. Anna is sick. I put her to bed downstairs. Take off your coats, and go upstairs. I'll be right up.”

Somewhat distant and disengaged, as always. Of course, her child was sick. It was natural for her to be preoccupied.

Maria's collarbone jutted out of the low-cut collar of her blue dress. Her Venetian glass jewels rolled across it with every movement she made.

“Is the weather awful?”

“Worse than awful. Windy, cold, and damp,” Sanya affirmed.

“This weather pursues me everywhere this year. It seems that my performance schedule has coincided with some sort of low-pressure atmospheric system. Wherever I happen to be—Milan, Athens, Stockholm, Rio—there is rain mixed with snow. It started in the middle of November.”

The master heard their voices and came out to greet them. The stairs leading to the upper floor were rather narrow, and he stood at the top, smiling.

They went upstairs. Sanya glanced at the table in the room—a Roman anthology was lying open on top of it. It was another coincidence, as so often happened. At home, Sanya was reading Ovid.

“Come in, come in. You see, Liza? We've gotten to see each other again after all.”

They kissed.

“I've been hearing that phrase from you for the last twenty years. Do you say it so that I'll value you more when next we meet? That isn't necessary. I value our meetings without being reminded of it!”

“No, I'm just letting you know that we don't have another twenty years,” the master quipped.

In his hand he held an unlit cigarette that he lit up and began to smoke after they had kissed.

“You still haven't quit?”

“No, I won't quit smoking. Just wait a while, it will quit me soon enough!”

“But you were going to try!” she said in an old woman's plaintive voice. “You're cutting short your last twenty years!”

The master laughed.

“Liza, I'm cutting into them from the other end, not from this one. Maybe it's not so bad for me. Besides, these years are a gift.”

“A gift?”

“If I had stayed in our homeland, I would have died of poverty, frayed nerves, and poor medical care long ago.”

Sanya turned away and looked at the heavy curtains, as though he could see out the window.

Yes, even with the best medical care imaginable, my end is not far to seek
, Sanya thought.

He must have known that his own illness, already with him for the past eight years, was incurable.

On the table were takeout cartons from a Chinese restaurant. The door opened up just a crack. Maria appeared out of the semidarkness, like a photograph developing.

“Anna won't settle down. She wants to see Sanya before she goes to bed.”

“May I?” Sanya stood up.

“Of course,” Maria said, nodding.

“I'll go down, too,” the master of the house said.

With Maria leading the way, and the rest of them walking in single file behind her, they went downstairs and along a hall, then stopped in front of a door that was slightly ajar. A little girl was sitting on the bed, radiating fever. The light of a lamp that stood behind her next to the bed turned her tousled hair golden. It sparkled like Christmas tree tinsel.

“Papa, you promised…”

“What, my kitten?”

My God! This child doesn't speak Russian!
Liza thought.

“I don't remember what it was, but you promised,” she said, her mouth crumpling. She began to cry.

“Look, here it is,” Sanya said, holding something up to her in his closed fist.

The little girl took his hand and tried to pry his fingers apart, but Sanya kept them closed.

“Careful, Anna. This little thing might break.”

Then he opened his palm, on which lay a small glass mouse.

“Do you remember what I promised you? That Sanya would come and bring you a glass mouse.”

“That's not true! You didn't promise me Sanya's mouse! It's not a promised mouse, it's just a plain mouse. Thank you. No one ever gave me a mouse before.”

“Will you go to sleep with the mouse now?” Maria asked.

“Yes,” the girl assented. “But don't turn the light off, Mama.”

“I'll leave the night-light on.”

“The mouse will be scared.”

“All right, all right. Tell everyone good night, and close your eyes.”

The golden-haired child in the white pajamas embroidered with strawberries, her face flushed with fever, with little swollen lips, settled down in her bed, shifting her arms and legs, and kneading her pillow and blankets to make a little nest for herself. He had a strange sensation that this had all happened before: the golden-haired girl, the glass mouse, tears …

Liza waited in the doorway, keeping her distance from the little girl
.

How amazing, at this age, when grandchildren should be on the way … He's happy … No, no, I don't need it, I never did. Not then, not now
.

From the love that she had been true to since childhood, children had not been born.

Maria stayed with the child a bit longer, and then joined the guests upstairs. The remains of food from the Chinese restaurant sat on a tray on the floor next to the door. They didn't drink tea after dinner. That Russian custom had faded after a quarter of a century in emigration. They drank Italian wine.

The master ate pastries from a cardboard box. He wiped his mouth unceremoniously with the back of his hand.

“Well? Will you recite something?” She was both sincere and well brought up, but sincerity prevailed in her. She felt somewhat abashed at her own directness, but she need not have. The poet read without any prompting. He himself needed to hear them spoken aloud—the trembling of the air proof of life itself.

“Small towns, where they don't tell you the truth.

And why would you need it? That was already—yesterday…”

He read this poem, which was a new one, and then another.

Sanya noticed that Liza was folding her hands in some sort of mudra. Since childhood she had suffered from crippling headaches, and she had tried treating them with pills, with homeopathic remedies, and, lately, through these curious hand configurations. Indian magic. Liza's headaches usually began after performances, sometimes after intercontinental flights. And now, apparently—from poetry. It would seem that contemplating verse was not an easy task.

Liza, her fingers interlaced, pressed her palms against her temples.

The master interrupted his reading. He drank some wine.

He has a headache, too
, Sanya thought.

“Is it all right if Sanya puts some music on? Very quietly?” Liza said.

“Do you want a pill?” the master asked her.

“No, but I'll lie down for a bit, if you don't mind.” And Liza lay down on the couch.

Sanya put the tape on. It was Beethoven's last sonata, performed by Eschenbach. In fact, Sanya hated mixing music with conversation.

“Here's some Eschenbach for you.” Sanya pressed the button.

Liza and Sanya exchanged glances on hearing the first notes.

The poet caught their glances and told his wife:

“They hear what ordinary people can't hear.”

She nodded with only her chin.
A flawlessly beautiful face … Lippi's
Madonna
? No. But the same type. Where have I seen it before? Natalia Goncharova. Of course!
Sanya smiled to himself at his belated discovery.

A bit later Maria went down to check on their daughter. She came back, sat with them for another ten minutes, then took leave of the guests for the evening.

They drank another bottle of wine. It was excellent.

Then the master led the guests down to the front door, and crossed the threshold onto the porch with them.

Outside there was no rain, no snow, no wind. Everything was quiet and still. It was warmer. Everything—the asphalt under their feet, the walls of the houses, the branches and trunks of the trees—was covered with a thin layer of ice. It sparkled in the streetlights.

“I'm so glad that we visited him. And glad about … everything…” Sanya made a vague gesture toward the icy trees gleaming in the soft light.

The door slammed unexpectedly loudly. Liza smiled.

“You're the only person in the world who catches on to my migraines.”

“You're the only person in the world who catches on … at all.”

And, unexpectedly, he asked something he could have asked thirty, or even twenty years ago.

“Liza, why didn't we ever get married? Back then, when we were young?”

“You really don't know?”

“Well, I can guess … that fat Boris…”

“I never suspected you were so thick! What does Boris have to do with it? Two years afterward he left me for my girlfriend, and that was the end of it. But with you and me—it would be an incestuous relationship. The Egyptians permitted that sort of thing, but in our world, brothers and sisters can't marry. Even cousins! Although we're only second cousins, we're still related. Anna Alexandrovna and my grandfather are cousins.”

“No, Liza, no. That wasn't the problem. Grandmother loved her second husband, the actor, who died in the camps. That seems to have been a happy marriage. But I've never seen any other happy marriages. Remember Ilya and Olga? It all ended very badly. Mikha and Alyona … even worse. What a beautiful man he was.”

“They were all killed by Soviet power. It's horrendous,” Liza said, her mouth contorted.

“Not all. Alyona, it seems, is alive and well. She married some sort of artist, a Latvian or Lithuanian. She's living a peaceful life somewhere in the Baltics. And it wasn't just the Soviet authorities who were to blame. People die no matter who is in power. That goes without saying. There's more and more of the past, less and less of the future…” he said, smiling. At the past? The future?

Liza smiled, too.

“Oh yes, I wanted to tell you why I don't like Eschenbach. Not because he has a different tempo, but because the energy is somehow alien. It's because at the very core of his music is a desire to please the public. He plays so that they will like it. Yudina never lowered herself like that.”

Liza plucked at Sanya's sleeve, like she used to do when they were children.

“So what? Rachmaninoff lowered himself in that way—even lower! He cut parts of his music out altogether when the audience got bored! And Richter? He's a genius, a true artist! But he's a bit of a clown, too! He indulges his audience.”

“Still, I insist—Maria Veniaminovna didn't depend on her audience in the least bit. She raised the audience to her own level.”

“Liza, those times are finished. That's clear. It's clearest of all in music. Music itself has changed, has become something altogether different.”

“Nevertheless, neither Beethoven nor Bach have been replaced. Consider the repertoires of young performers. Do you hear them play Cage very often?”

“Well, often enough. But I'm talking about something else, Liza. Of course, no one will ever replace Beethoven or Bach. Even if they wished to, it wouldn't be possible. But that form of culture is over, and another form of culture has begun. Culture has become a patchwork, a web of citations. The previous dimension of time is over. All of culture is like a complete sphere. The second avant-garde has entered culture, entered that part of it that wasn't outmoded. Innovations age more quickly than anything else. Stravinsky, Shostakovich, even Schnittke, who betrayed the avant-garde, have become classics. Cyclical time keeps revolving, absorbing everything new into itself; and the new is no longer distinguishable from the old. The idea of the avant-garde outlived its usefulness, because there is no progress in culture, in the sense of a phenomenon that is finite and revealed, once and for all…”

“Sanya, I've been wanting to ask you for a long time—‘A grand piano floats off the earth in a self-made storm, raising its polished sail…'—do you think he doesn't understand?”

“He doesn't understand, apparently, that the storm isn't self-made,” Sanya said.

“Don't worry about him. He understands a great deal that we have no clue about.”

“Of course. But you know that all the storms here are only reflections, pale shadows, of those he called ‘self-made'?”

They stood in the middle of the empty street, having walked a ways from the house, and talking.

“Of course we know that. What did you think of him? How is he?” Sanya asked.

“He seems happy,” Liza answered without much conviction.

“Women,” Sanya said, and grimaced.

“Did I say something wrong?” Liza said, alarmed.

“No. But I thought he looked tired. And he was unusually quiet tonight.” Sanya put his arm around her shoulders.

*   *   *

It was very slippery. Liza held Sanya by the arm, and they walked slowly and cautiously in the direction of the subway.

“Now it has become clear to everyone that he's a genius. In the Russian sense of that word, not the European.”

“I don't understand what you mean,” Liza said, becoming uneasy. She was used to catching his meanings from the slightest word or gesture.

“Well, he's not simply a person with a divine gift for poetry or music, but a person who, like an icebreaker, moves ahead of time and smashes walls, breaks apart the ice, forges new roads, so that all the little ships and boats can sail behind in his wake. The most sensitive people, the most gifted and capable, follow in the path of the genius, and the crowd surges after them—and what was once a discovery becomes a commonplace. Average people—and here I mean myself, not you—are only able to grasp things through the efforts of genius and the general unfolding of time. The people of genius are harbingers; they precipitate the movement of time.”