The Concert Ticket

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First published as The Line in the USA by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2010

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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The Concert Ticket

Olga Grushin was born in Moscow in 1971. Her novel The Dream Life of Sukhanov was shortlisted for the Orange Award for New Writers 2006 and the LA Times Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction 2006. Grushin was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists 2007. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian, Granta and the Partisan Review. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband and two children.

For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope:

for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?

But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.

—ROMANS 8: 24–25

PART ONE

WINTER

“No idea, but I’m hoping for something good. Maybe some gloves, my hands are cold.”

“You don’t want much, do you, woman? Silk scarves, indeed! It’s toothpaste, someone told me.”

“Toothpaste? Toothpaste?! You idiot, would all these people wait here for toothpaste?”

“Both of you shut up, it’s not toothpaste. A man up front was saying they just received a shipment of women’s boots, genuine leather.”

“But what if he wasn’t married, now? What would he need with a pair of women’s boots if he wasn’t married?”

“A lady friend! Do you hear that, a lady friend, and him with a mug like that—worse than that fellow over there!”

“Hey, what—did he just call me ugly?… You there, yes, you, did you just call me ugly?”

“I’ll show you who’s ugly, let me just get a hold of you, move there, people, move—”

“Oh God, there she goes again with the toothpaste! It’s not toothpaste, it’s not toothpaste, you stupid cow, how many times must you be told, it’s not toothpaste!”

“Oh, bother, looks like no one knows what they’re selling. Could be something really good, though… Well, I have some time on my hands, might as well join in for a while. Are you last in line?”

ONE DAY IN NOVEMBER, returning home from work, Anna walked a different way. Her usual street was flooded with a spontaneous citizens’ parade celebrating the thirty-seventh anniversary of the Change. Ordinarily she enjoyed such diversions, but today she felt too tired to shuffle for hours in a press of other passersby, even though she knew her husband was likely to be marching, his tuba propped up on his shoulder, in the midst of the volunteer neighborhood band whose dull brass snails were even now crawling up behind her, devouring the city in an explosion of triumphant sound.

It was only three o’clock in the afternoon, but the air hung heavy with the nearing of the night, the swelling of the snow. The world smelled of heated copper and wilting carnations. In a few blocks, the streets grew deserted; everyone had left for the demonstration, and the neighborhood, on the outskirts of the city, lay bare, damp, and gray, like the bottom of some northern sea with its dregs exposed by a receding tide. Anna’s flat-heeled shoes fell to the pavements with loud thumps. Striding quickly as if trying to escape the echoes of her passage, she turned into an alley, crossed a courtyard, its sky eliminated by gloomy, drooping buildings, rounded a corner—and slowed her steps.

A small crowd of fifteen or twenty people stood lining the sidewalk before her; autumn’s last brown leaves twirled above the dark curves of their backs. Another parade preparing to set off, Anna decided after a moment, and walked faster now, clutching her bag to her chest.

She wanted to move past, then stopped, afraid that her refusal to take part in the communal merriment might appear unpatriotic—but already she noticed that the people on the sidewalk did not resemble a joyful gathering of neighbors. Hushed and oddly solitary, they waved no homemade banners, chanted no slogans; she saw an aged woman leaning on a cane, a youth with the sharpened cheekbones of someone recently ill. Uncertain, she looked back at the man who had spoken. He was dressed in a threadbare, earth-colored coat; the stealthily creeping shadows had eaten away most of his face, becoming tangled in his untidy beard, gouging deep lines in the parchment of his skin, pooling his eyes with darkness. His unblinking, sorrowful gaze unsettled Anna, and she glanced away—and it was then that she saw the kiosk.

She had been wrong, she realized, relaxing her grip on the bag. This was not a parade—merely a line. The little kiosk before her was nondescript, with no sign above it. Its single window was boarded shut, a handwritten notice tacked onto it; she was too far away to read the words. She could not recall seeing any kiosk here before, but then, it had been so long since she had last found herself deviating from her daily route—months, maybe even a couple of years, possibly longer; time had all run together for quite a while, merging into a solid, hard, flat essence, a bit like concrete, she thought unexpectedly, yes, like a vat of frozen concrete, undistinguished save for a succession of doled-out State festivities, a smattering of red and yellow candy wrappers sucked here and there into the concrete’s monolithic mass.

The old man smiled, and as his wrinkles multiplied, a deeper darkness suffused them.

“They are selling,” he said, “whatever you’d most like to have. What would you like?”

She stared at him. A leaf slowly sailed through the congealed air. The people around them were quiet, their faces hazy, averted. The old man is mad, she understood with a precipitate chill, and stepped away abruptly. The sign in the window, she saw as she hastened past, announced in a scrawl: Gone to the parade. There were more words scribbled below, but she did not stop to decipher them, keeping her eyes focused on some invisible, faraway destination instead, sensing all the while the weight of the old man’s gaze upon her, sliding the length of her, from her hair, along her back, to the scuffed-up soles of her shoes.

That night, she waited for her husband to return from his march before calling the family to supper. It was, perhaps, the uncustomary lateness of the hour that made the kitchen seem somehow smaller, darker than usual; the black-and-white clock up on the wall, big, round, and bare-faced just like a clock at a train station, had presided indifferently over the departure of the last fleeting light, the arrival of the slow, ponderous shadows. From her corner at the stove, pretending to spoon a second serving into her bowl, Anna watched her mother mince a morsel of meat, watched her son listlessly construct a potato fortification all along the rim of his plate, lumpy towers rising, then mash it into dust. When, having finished their silent meal, her mother and son departed, she poured two cups of tea, added a cube of sugar to hers, and for another minute watched her husband blow at the scalding liquid, his mouth set in sullen lines, his jaws moving in some internal rhythm she could not follow.

At last, suppressing a sigh, she turned away, looked out the window. Through the gap in the curtains, which rippled faintly with the insidious autumnal drafts, the night gazed back at her with a gentle face molded by light, obscured by shadow, reshaped by darkness into a hazy semblance of a once familiar, soft, youthful beauty.

“Something strange happened to me this afternoon,” she said quietly, as if to herself. “I was walking down this empty street, and—”

Anna’s eyes met the eyes of the woman floating outside, and the night seemed to fill those eyes to the brim. She turned back to her husband.

“No, no,” she said. “I went. Of course I went, to hear you play. It was very good, I mean wonderful as always, of course.”

“Of course,” he said, but his voice had deflated, and he resumed sloshing the weak tea in his cup. She waited, then dropped another sugar cube into her water, listened to it fall with a small plop, took a sip. Her husband asked nothing else, and after a while she stood up, crossed to the sink, and carefully poured out her nearly full cup.

The next few weeks at school were very busy, and Anna soon forgot about the gathering of people at the kiosk, until one day in December, between classes, she came upon two teachers whispering in the corridor. As she paused at a bulletin board to pin the announcement of the annual composition contest (“The Revolutionary Hero I Would Most Like to Meet” was this year’s topic), she overheard Tatyana Alekseyevna say in an agitated undertone, “It appeared out of nowhere not long ago, and no one, no one at all, knows what they’re selling!”

Anna lingered with the thumbtack in the hollow of her hand, pretending to skim the other notices, her back suddenly tense.

The bell thrashed shrilly above their heads. She looked back just in time to see the math teacher bend to shout the end of the sentence into the physics teacher’s ear and the physics teacher ripple like dough in inaudible astonishment. She was tempted to intrude, but Tatyana Alekseyevna had already tied her lips into a prim little bow and pranced off down the hall, trailing a mawkish vanilla scent in her wake, while Emilia Khristianovna had been rolled away in the opposite direction by a stampede of children late for class.

That afternoon, on her way home, she found herself halting for a moment at a turn in the road, then, feeling vaguely embarrassed, continued straight; but in the soggy predawn hours of that night, with the wind rattling the windowpanes on their sixth floor and the world the shade of lead, she dreamed of turning left, and reaching the street with the kiosk. The dream street did not resemble the actual street, that graying afterthought of a shortcut with an abandoned old church at one end, a fence meandering like a sparsely toothed grin at the other, a row of dour six-story buildings in between. It was a slice of some outlandish town instead, like nothing she had ever seen, with a ruined clock tower rising like an accusing finger where the church should have been, eggshells and potato scum running down the gutters, and bald, faceless mannequins contorted in flooded shop windows—yet as she rushed past, her hair flying in a honey-smelling, sun-colored halo about her head, her arms heaped with flowers, she knew the street to be the same. The people were there still, waiting, but she had no desire to stop. She kept glancing at her hands—the delicate, smooth hands, with pearly pink petals of perfect fingernails and a lovely ring on one finger. And then that mad old man lifted his face to her, and his eyes were two round black mirrors, with clouds and branches and her own self reflected in them; but in his eyes she saw no honey mane of hair and no flowers, only an aging, badly combed woman in a shapeless brown skirt.

Anna disliked dreams. Dreams had an unpredictable, shimmering quality to them, seemed to her to be cut from the same illusory, wavering, precarious essence as life before the Change, the way she imagined it from history lessons, at least; she had been too young to remember much herself. Hers was a good life, a stable life. None of them ever went hungry, their apartment was warm in winter, they had their fair share of comforts and, too, more than a few accomplishments; last spring, for instance, she had been named District Teacher of the Year and received a roll of red silk—not real silk, but very smooth and gleaming all the same—from which she had made two pretty pillows for the bed. Not everything was perfect, of course, but if she could change one thing, any one thing, about her life, she was not sure what that thing would be, because her life was good, she said to herself once again as she sat behind her desk in class later that day. But as she thought it, her lips must have moved, or perhaps she even whispered it half audibly, for a few children stopped writing and were now staring at her with flat, incurious eyes resembling buttons and beetles. Looking down quickly, she found herself studying her hands, the weathered, naked hands of a woman no longer young, with blunt nails and fingers that were too short, their tips crumbling with pale chalk—and then she knew where she would go as soon as she was set free into the glittering white stretch of the afternoon.

When she turned into the street, she let out a gasp. More than fifty people stood before the kiosk, back after back, taking over the width of the sidewalk. The kiosk was closed as before, another sheet of paper pasted to its shuttered window.

A wide-faced woman in a fur hat, her mouth painted the color of ripe cherries, shrugged.

“You imbecile, they don’t sell children’s coats in kiosks,” hissed a massive old woman next to him. “Cakes is my guess. Layered cakes with coconut shavings on top.” She smacked her lips. “The kiosk by the tram stop had them last week, but they ran out before my turn.”

“No one knows, then,” Anna said thoughtfully, and checked her watch again. She had half an hour to spare. Of course, on any other day, she would hardly consider wasting her time waiting for God knew what. Today, though—today was different; today, she realized suddenly, she wanted to be surprised; felt entitled to a surprise, in truth. Making up her mind, she hurried down the line, blinking at the snow; the descending sun made things bright and hazy, breaking the city into blinding triangles of chill and brilliance. She took her place at the end. A cake would be lucky, she mused—she loved the anticipation of a sweet mouthful traveling down her tongue, narrowing the whole universe to a pinpoint of one flaking, sugar-sprinkled moment—but of course, she would like any number of nice things: a pair of sheer stockings with their faintly chemical smell, for instance, or a ruby-red drop of nail polish in a square glass bottle, or a smooth pebble of jasmine soap. Once, on a winter afternoon just like this, she had chanced upon a kiosk selling oranges; true, the oranges had turned out to be sour and riddled with hard, bitter seeds, but their smell had been beautiful, beautiful, making her remember something she had not known she remembered, something from the dimmest reaches of childhood: the twilight deepening in a great, silk-lined, velvet-cushioned space, the majestic swaying of crimson and gold as the curtain rose, the rush of sound and motion and color, the stiffness of the lacy collar scratching her chin, the porous spiraling of the aromatic rind under her clumsy fingers as she leaned over the padded edge of the balcony, struggling to peel an orange, her eyes on the stage, now on the fruit, now on the stage again, and the disembodied voice, her father’s voice, breathing into her ear, “There—there she is, in white, do you see her—”

The question startled her out of her reverie into a world that was being swiftly drained of color. Gray hollows were already stretching by her feet like shadowy, somnolent beasts wearied by the passing of another day. Lazy snowflakes wandered through the air.

She frowned at the pale, skinny boy before her; she did not recognize him from school. He could not be more than ten; she was reminded of her own son when he had been that age, though the boy looked nothing like him.

“But if you don’t know what it is,” said the boy, “how do you know you need it?”

“I’m sure it will be something good,” Anna replied patiently. “Otherwise all these people wouldn’t be here.”

The boy appeared puzzled. His eyes were two tiny pieces of a wintry sky; she could see herself in them, just like in her dream—two dark little figures drowning in a swirling of clouds, then gone in a blink, erased by a sweep of eyelashes wet with snow.

“And in any case,” she said impulsively, “it’s better this way, not knowing. It might be something you don’t need but really like. Like a present. Like flowers—”

Anna glanced at her watch and was astonished to see that it was after four. “Would you like to take my place?” she asked. “I have to go, they’ll be worried about me at home.”

“He’s just a boy,” said Anna reproachfully, but the boy had already slunk away. “Shame,” she sighed, not certain what she meant precisely. Then, having cast one last glance at the boarded window, she ran through the disappearing city.

She burst into their apartment all out of breath, rehearsing some plausible explanation for being late—for some reason, she felt reluctant to confess to her futile two-hour wait in the waning light of the year—but no one asked her. She busied herself at the stove. At seven o’clock, they sat down to supper; her husband had been granted an evening off for the occasion. When she began to pour hot water over damp, odorless tea leaves saved from the previous teatime, her mother rose and, as always, wordlessly departed for her room. Anna set three cups on the table, looked from her husband to her son across the shadows of the dim, stuffy kitchen.

In a small hush, she could hear the clock’s hand rustling toward the next minute, the gulp of liquid traveling down her husband’s throat. “Do you remember,” he said without raising his head, “in the old days, they put those skinny candles into birthday cakes, as many candles as you had years, and then you’d make a wish and blow them out?”

She laughed and protested in a flirtatious, insincere voice: “No, no, there wouldn’t have been space enough!”—yet already imagining the swoosh of the air escaping her lungs, the flickering dance of forty-three candles casting warm spells of golden-red light upon the convexity of the teacups, the concavity of the spoons, before rearing up and dying all at once—already wondering what she would have wished for, what special, unexpected, lovely thing…

Her husband did not contradict her but stared into his cup instead, and her son said, “Well, anyway, happy birthday!”

That night, tiptoeing along the unlit corridor, Anna collided with her mother, and her mother wound her thin arms about Anna and stood clinging to her for a moment, light as a bird, then, releasing her, flitted away, as before, in silence.

The next morning, she chanced to leave the house early, so she had time to walk the longer way; it was, after all, not that much of a detour, only a few extra blocks. The sun had not yet risen, and the kiosk was still closed—most places did not open until nine—but people were already starting to come by, drifting down sidewalks like pockets and patches of the departing night in the limpid green twilight of the last predawn hour. Noticing the bright-mouthed woman in the fur hat at the end of the line, Anna approached with hesitant steps.

“A big fat nothing,” the woman said, flicking her flimsy scarf over her shoulder. “The cursed kiosk never reopened. Today’s the day, though, I can feel it. Whatever it is, it’ll go fast.”

“Oh.” Anna fiddled with her glove to keep from staring at the mesmerizing rotation of the woman’s earrings. “If you don’t mind… I have to go to work for a few hours—a school just around the corner—I’m a literature teacher… Would you be so kind as to hold the place for me, I’ll come as soon as I can—”

“The nerve,” said the woman indifferently. “The nerve of it. You think just because you’re educated, you don’t have to wait like everyone else?”

“Oh no, it’s not… I didn’t… I’ll be happy to replace you as soon as I… I mean, we could take turns—”

A few shadows around them tsked and shook their heads, and the woman turned away with a liquid toss of her earrings. Mortified, Anna pulled her gloves back on and stumbled off without looking up; but all day in school she felt stabs of acute shame at the memory of her audacity, mixed with a profound impatience that made her yearn to rush out in the middle of class, not waiting for the pupil to finish reciting “Ode to the Industrial Accomplishments of the Eastern Region,” and fly down the white streets, her unbuttoned coat flapping behind her. She felt like crying when the vice-principal, dropping by during her last hour, moved his pale fishlike lips and gleefully informed her that she must stay a while longer, to supervise a boy in detention. It was after five o’clock when she finally gathered her papers, struggled into the tight confinement of her sleeves. The night had already drawn its shutters over the city; windows were glowing with dull, steady lights, and the sky waved back and forth in a skeletal dance of black branches. She arrived just in time to see the line dispersing, to see the woman in the fur hat disappearing into the darkness with furious strides. The kiosk was boarded once again.

Slowly she came closer, and stopped. There was a new notice pasted to the window.

She strained to read it in the wavering light of the streetlamp, the branches’ shadows constantly tossed over the words, and at last made it out.

Footsteps shuffled behind her. A man was plodding away, his face blotted out by a raised collar, his shoulders hunched against the wind, muttering, “They think they can do anything, do they? Some joker comes by, puts up this garbage, then just saunters off—”

Her heart started to beat. “Excuse me,” she called out, “but—could you tell me—did they say what they would be selling? On Monday?”

She discovered that she was afraid of the answer—afraid that the night would throw back at her: “Laundry powder!” or “Socks!” She no longer wanted it to be a mundane, a trivial, thing. It was as if, unreasonable as she knew it to be, she had really begun to think of—of whatever it was—as some sort of a mystery birthday present meant for her.

The man was half a block away now, almost invisible, a denser darkness in the dark, but his words sliced sharp and angry through the empty street: “Nobody knows, woman! Why don’t you wait in line yourself if you’re so curious?”

Exhaling, Anna gathered up her bags and walked through the snow, raising small sparkling flurries with each step. At the corner, the mad old man from her dream sat on the curb, drawing some glowing symbol in the air with the burning tip of his cigarette; she smiled absently as she passed him, was smiling still as she unlocked her door.

She spent the next few days distracted, moving mindlessly through her chores and routines. On Sunday night, the night before the kiosk was set to open, she lay in bed unable to sleep, watching rare headlights stumble over the lump of her slumbering husband, thinking of the day, five, no, not five, seven years ago now (they had been celebrating Three Glorious Decades since the Change, and the city had shaken with garlands of festive flags mauled by the November wind)—the day when she had brought home the square tin box.

There had been a picture on the lid—an elephant under some exotic-looking, richly embroidered cloth in vibrant red and yellow patterns. She had hesitated to open it for the longest time, sitting alone at the kitchen table, cradling the box in her hands under the feeble glare of the lightbulb. At last she carefully slid the edge of a knife around the lid to loosen it, then prodded it free, releasing that dry, dense, delicious fragrance that did not smell of anything exactly and yet, she found, seemed to contain within it a wealth of other smells. They tumbled one after another into the cramped kitchen—the bright watermelon aroma of a chilly sunrise in the country in May, the intoxicating daffodil sweetness of a full-mooned June evening, the grassy ripeness of July on the veranda of a light-walled house tipping into the blue well of the night on a wave of laughter.

Funny, she thought, how her memory kept the smells, kept them perfectly, collected them like precious, rare specimens laid out on the black velvet lining of its few secret drawers, ready to spill its darkly glittering secrets whenever a long-forgotten smell sprang its lid open. Her mother had rented that house the last summer before the Change. There had been other children there, neighbors, friends. In an immediate, breathless rush, she recalled spoons clicking against cups, and the charmed, weightless leaps of the sad melody her mother had played so much on that funny rickety piano as their guests gathered for tea. Anna had never had an ear for music—indeed, she did not even like music all that much, she preferred the quiet—but this melody was special, it was sad and simple and special, and every time she had heard it, it had been as if someone’s cold, agile, silver-tipped fingers had slid swiftly up and down the clavichord of her spine.

She tried to hum it as she bent over the tin box with the elephant on its cover, but the tune proved elusive. Then the floor creaked, and her mother was looking at her, her eyes quiet, her long, painfully thin fingers pulling the purple velvet of her old robe tight at her throat. Anna struggled to empty her face of all traces of happiness—and then her mother spoke.

“Real eastern tea, how nice, shall we have a cup together?” she said in a casual, even voice, quite as if she spoke to Anna all the time, quite as if she had not maintained an aloof, maddening silence for so many years—and Anna felt that she had been granted permission to keep the happiness on her face just a while longer, and had to turn away and stare at the impossibly straight silhouette of her mother in their kitchen window, to hide the sudden welling in her eyes.

She had saved the box after the tea was gone, of course. Every so often, when sure that no one was watching, she would open it and press her nose against its cold metallic insides and breathe, and breathe, and try to remember; but no new memories came, the music did not distill into a clearer melody, and after some time, her mother reverted to her habitual thin-lipped silence. In another year or two Anna filled the box with an assortment of mismatched buttons. Her son had impatient fingers and was always pulling buttons off his clothes.

On Monday morning, she did the unthinkable: she rang her school and sneezed into the phone. “Oh yes, there’s a flu going around,” said the secretary sympathetically. “Emilia Khristianovna’s sick also. Squeeze a lemon into hot water.”

“I will,” Anna lied, and dressed quickly, then extracted the family’s savings from inside a sock in the bureau’s bottom drawer (just in case, one never knew, it might be something pricey), and walked out, pressing her handbag to her chest.

It was early, but some thirty or forty people already stood before the kiosk. One of them, a stocky woman in felt boots, rather resembled the physics teacher, but a garish knit scarf obscured her face, and Anna was not sure. She pulled her own scarf closer to her eyes all the same; then, opening the book she had brought along—the latest collection by the country’s most honored poet, whose work she frequently assigned to her pupils for memorization—she began to read, forming the words half volubly, a teacher’s habit:

The works of cruel gods

In ruins lie.

Above the crumbs of columns

Swallows fly.

And men are joyful

Slavery to avoid.

Where mighty temples stood

Now lies—

“You shouldn’t be cutting in front of anyone,” she said. “The end’s over there.”

“Fine, I wasn’t asking you for a favor anyway,” the woman announced airily, and walked off with a haughty click of her elegant earrings.

“I hope they run out of it just before your turn!” Anna cried, and, just as the squat woman who might or might not have been Emilia Khristianovna appeared to twitch in her direction, hastily hid behind her volume, embarrassed already by her unlikely outburst.

For an hour or two she tried to read, but found the poems difficult to like, whether because she could not concentrate or for some other reason. As the morning condensed into a dreary afternoon and the strengthening wind started to throw heavy hours back and forth like smudged, icy snowballs, she shut the book decisively and stood still, listening to conversations rise and collide and fade around her. People argued about the unknown merchandise at the end of their wait; every so often someone abandoned the line after much complaining; others joined. Anna soon gathered that over the past two months the kiosk had become a neighborhood obsession. It had appeared in the fall, but, unlike other local kiosks, which, regularly and with no secrecy, dispensed cheap cigarettes and vegetables or, on thrilling and brief occasions, chocolates and cosmetics, this kiosk had never sold anything at all, not even on those rare days when a fake blonde with a pasty face made surly appearances in the kiosk window. The woman would answer no questions, thereby deepening the general suspicion of some momentous mystery. As weeks went by, speculation and agitation only mounted. Rumors had spread; people whispered of imported crystal or ingenious toys or exclusive book subscriptions, or tickets for a new State lottery in which one could win an automobile or a vacation by the sea. An enterprising man had recently begun to take bets on the day of the week and the time of day when the nebulous something would finally go on sale. There were, of course, a few nonbelievers—“cynical, dried-out souls,” a man behind Anna grumbled—who predicted it would turn out to be something pathetic, say canned soup or matches, and who often came by the line to mock the trusting fools freezing off varied pieces of their anatomy; but many of those who lived nearby made it a habit to spend at least a couple of weekly hours at the kiosk, just in case. A handful even arrived by tram from farther out, and there were not a few, among housewives and pensioners, who waited daily. And the more Anna heard, the more filled she was with a sure presentiment of a change, whether small or boundless she did not know—but in any case, something, she thought, to make her and her family happier, or lend some simple beauty to her everyday life, or perhaps even infuse her entire existence, working into its minute cracks and voids, knitting it into a tighter, brighter, fuller fabric.

Shortly after four, the line surged forward. She felt someone’s chin prodding her back, and, looking up, saw a uniformed man unlocking the kiosk door. In the next moment her nose was driven into the back before her, her face flattened against a damp coat, her body trapped in a crush of other bodies.

The world closed in on her, brown and hushed, warm with collectively held breath. The next minute stretched on, slowly, inexorably, spreading outward like a dense, viscous spill. A sharp heel grazed her foot; something hard and angular smashed painfully against her hip. She closed her eyes, let her whole being go still, settled into the faintly sour, furtive scents of wet wool and steaming whispers and anticipation.

The crowd slackened. Anna fought her way clear of coats, knees, and elbows just in time to see the shutter chomping down. The uniformed man emerged, manipulated the lock on the door. In the dejected silence, she could hear the muted screech of metal resisting metal, could smell the rust. As the man strolled away, she wanted terribly to follow, to ask, to demand, but she did not move.

Then a polite voice called out: “Pardon me, but what might they be selling here, exactly?”

“I don’t know about you,” said the bright-lipped woman, flying past in a blur of silk and fur, “but I’ve just about had enough of this!” People muttered, dispersing. Anna lingered for a while longer, even though it was clear to her that no one else was going to appear, nothing else was going to happen. At last she too turned toward home. She had, of course, resolved to be here on the first day of the new year. Surprisingly, she did not seem to mind all that much.

She felt purposeful and light, and strangely hopeful, as she moved along the darkening streets, chased by the dull rhythm of her flat heels slapping the frozen pavements.

A FEW DAYS LATER, Sergei woke up in a mood of suppressed anticipation. He tried to steel himself against disappointment, convinced that fate would do its best to cheat him yet again at the last possible moment: the director telephoning to inform him that his services for the evening were no longer required, or else his slipping in the street on the way and breaking an arm, or—or any number of scenarios on which he preferred not to dwell. He moved through his day with deliberation, pretending that nothing out of the ordinary awaited him. He ate an unhurried breakfast, perused the front page of a newspaper, then spent his customary two or three hours behind the closed bedroom door playing what his wife called his “songs.”

He knew, of course, that such rigorous practicing was excessive, since the music he was routinely called upon to perform was of a crude, simple nature—brass exclamations punctuating anthems and marches, not worth his time, not worth his breath, not worth the very air he sent vibrating. He despised it, in fact; despised, too, those of his fellow citizens who, uncoerced, attended his band’s performances or, year after year, meekly followed its hollow booming as the parades rolled through the streets. Despising it, he indulged in it daily all the same. The mere act of fleshing out a series of notes on his tuba always filled his chest with an expansive, cresting excitement, until, closing his eyes, he could imagine other instruments weaving into the phrase, swelling with a full orchestral glory, the melody in his mind moving farther and farther away from the threadbare score before him, sounding more and more like the brilliant, complex, unique symphony he had dreamed of hearing, and playing, for so long.

At three o’clock, setting his tuba aside, he meticulously polished his special-occasion shoes, removed a few invisible dust motes from the lapels of his best suit, and started to get dressed; he chose not to notice that the jacket had grown somewhat tight in the armpits. At three-thirty, fully attired, he looked at his watch, picked up the tuba, and practiced some more. As the low, furry-clawed sounds resumed shuffling up and down invisible stairs like clumsy circus bears, the musically challenged downstairs neighbor again began to bang her broom against her ceiling; he did his best to ignore her. At four he laid the tuba down, looked at his watch, found a remnant of the morning newspaper, read an editorial. At three minutes past four, he sighed. At five minutes past, he looked at his watch. At seven minutes, he crumpled the newspaper, grabbed his tuba, threw the bedroom door open, and plunged into the corridor.

The corridor was hazy with smoke. He fought his way into the kitchen, coughing. Soft blue dusk was already rising in the solitary kitchen window like water poured slowly into a glass; beneath it, a splayed chicken corpse lay decomposing on the plastic tablecloth in a pool of oily lamplight. His wife stood at the stove, wagging a ladle in a pot.

“I’m afraid the onions will be a bit crisp,” she said with an apologetic smile, and glanced up, and paused in her stirring. “Oh, Serezha, you didn’t have to, it’s just the four of us, nothing fancy—but you do look really—”

“Yes, that,” he mumbled. “I meant to tell you, we have an important engagement in the city, sort of last-minute. Ivan Anatolievich asked me in person. I won’t be staying for supper.”

Emitting a little gasp, she splashed her hands. The ladle clunked onto the floor, and drops flew everywhere; a murky tear of some viscous substance trickled down the wall.

“But Serezha,” she said, “I’ve borrowed a piece of cheese and a tomato from downstairs. I was planning a soufflé for the second course. It is, after all—”

Her mother glided into the kitchen, straight and small and royal, without a word, without a noise. They watched her float gracefully between the disorder of pots and pans, pour tea into a porcelain cup with a thin gilded edge, reserved for her use alone, and glide away, her earlobes flashing with those precious earrings she always wore.

“Don’t forget your tuba now,” she said, and added, a pitiful smile struggling on her lips, her voice flaking ever so slightly about the edges, “See you next year!”

He remembered the sound of her laughter, light and girlish, curling up at its ends into delighted little half-squeaks—in the beginning, so many years ago… His heart contracted. Giving his laces one final tug, he rose, opened the door with a jerk.

She might have said something in reply, but he had already descended a flight of stairs.

The streets stretched deserted, the haloes of recently lit streetlamps turning blue with the cold. He chanced upon a miraculous trolley, boarded it with all the haste his unwieldy instrument allowed him, and from inside the jaundiced, loosely jangling, drafty box watched the frozen apartment blocks slip on ice and tumble backward into the night. Monolithic and shabby at first, the city grew brighter, less geometrical, as he approached its heart, sprouting frivolous little balconies and plump caryatids along the façades of pastel-colored palaces from distant, sleepy centuries. At last he was disgorged onto a sidewalk before an imposing yellow mansion caged behind a stern row of columns; its gates, he saw, were already letting in a timid trickle of middle-aged men in baggy coats bent all out of shape beneath their bulky burdens.

He handed his documents to the guard in a booth, shifted from foot to foot, listened to the snow moaning under his shoes. The shoes, more than a decade old, pinched.

There was the briefest glowing, astonishing glimpse of marble and crystal set aflame and multiplied in a great mirrored chamber visible through a succession of doorways just ahead; but already he was being ushered into a small windowless room, no different from any of the rooms in which his life customarily took place. The security search was thorough and humiliating. When it was over, he was swept along a blind corridor and down a service staircase to another windowless room, where a few of them already waited, standing awkwardly along the walls, bleak brasses gleaming, strings lifeless in their black coffins; he noticed Sviatoslav in the corner, looking oddly deflated behind the bloated barrels of his drums.

There was only one chair in the room, next to a desk piled high with folders; in the chair sprawled a sleek-haired man in a much nicer suit than his own. The man was talking. Too anxious to follow the speech—something about the honor to have been selected as the State’s representatives in this bastion of foreign power, the trust that had been accorded them by the country—Sergei looked around the room, nodded to a couple of acquaintances, shifted his hold on the tuba. As his wedding ring grazed it, the metal emitted a loud, hollow clang, and he found the man’s lead-colored eyes boring into his. “And do not, I repeat, do not, address or make eye contact or communicate in any way with any of them,” the man said, holding Sergei with his flat, lusterless gaze. “Naturally, there is no need to remind you of the scrutiny to which each and every one of you will be subjected during and after this evening.”

He smiled a thin, ominous smile and, leaning forward slowly, tapped the stack of folders on the desk. The dry sound of his knuckles scratching cardboard made Sergei’s skin grow clammy, as if a nail had been deliberately dragged along a windowpane.

“Dismissed,” the man said, and, looking thoroughly bored, reached for a drawer.

A different corridor filled with the disconcerting echoes of invisible sentries’ footsteps, always seemingly marching toward them yet never arriving, led them farther down, to the basement, where the rest of the orchestra, some twenty of them altogether, had by now gathered. Another man, this one in a resplendent tuxedo, strode past them, briskly distributing sheets of music. Breathlessly, Sergei watched the tuxedo’s officious progress across the room. At last his fingers closed over his own set of pages, and a swift, chilled, delicious gust of anticipation blew through his chest, cleansing it of fear. Anyone chosen for these events signed an oath not to disclose anything witnessed or performed, but he had heard rumors, whispered half-confidences amidst deafening cacophonies of wearying parades, semi-voiced intimations of flight, of daring—enough to convince him that music from Over There was nothing like the turgid State-sanctioned drivel that drowned his lungs every day—enough to make him believe that tonight he would finally have something real, something special, to play, something to justify all the hours, the years, of practices, his neighbor stabbing the floor beneath his feet with her broom, his son slamming his door shut, his wife tiptoeing past him, massaging away her headache, careful not to lift toward him her dull, tortured gaze…

“We’ll be coming for you around nine. We trust that is sufficient,” the man in the tuxedo said from the doorway, and, stepping outside, closed the metal-bound door behind him.

The Concert Ticket

Contents

The Concert Ticket

For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope:

for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?

But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.

—ROMANS 8: 24–25

PART ONE

WINTER

1

2

3

The Concert Ticket

Contents

The Concert Ticket

For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it. —ROMANS 8: 24–25

PART ONE

WINTER

1

2

3

For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope:

for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?

But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.

—ROMANS 8: 24–25