A Simple Scale

by David Llewellyn

  “Please, everybody, look straight at me,” says the photographer, again in Russian, though the guests appear to understand. Almost everyone faces forward, frozen in the moment of performing for the camera. The flash explodes, flooding their eyes with light, and the photographer moves on to another corner of the room.

  “Splendid!” says Remizov. “Splendid!”

  Sergey rubs his eyes to wipe away the flashing blotches of purple and green. The guests begin talking among themselves. The young American is talking with Bernard. They seem familiar. Not just familiar. Bernard places a hand on Solomon’s shoulder and leaves it there. He whispers something in his ear. There has been an argument.

  Two American women are speaking to him, and Sergey pretends to listen, but his eyes remain fixed on the boy. They exchange another glance, both now pretending to listen to someone else. Will these two women ever stop talking? Solomon looks over again and rolls his eyes. Something catches Sergey’s breath. Finally, they approach one another and meet in the centre of the room.

  “Solomon, yes?”

  “Sol.”

  “I am Sergey.”

  “I thought your ballet was wonderful,” Sol says, his eyes bright and glistening in the soft light of the ballroom. “How do you say ‘wonderful’ in Russian?”

  “Chudesniy,” says Sergey.

  The lad repeats it back to him.

  “Perfect!”

  “And the theatre,” says Sol. “It’s splendid I mean it’s just so beautiful we don’t really have anything like that in New York I mean there’s Carnegie Hall I guess and there’s Radio City Music Hall and the Metropolitan Opera House and I guess the Met is kinda similar but they’re really nothing compared to that place…”

  “Slow down,” Sergey laughs. “My English. Is not so good. You say something about Carnegie Hall?”

  “Yes,” says Sol, and then, more slowly, “Your theatre, the Kirov, is very beautiful. What’s ‘beautiful’ in Russian?”

  “Krasiviy,” says Sergey. “Ochyen krasiviy.”

  “Ochyen krasiviy.”

  “That’s it! Now you are Russian!”

  There’s something tangible in the air, the space between them charged, like the moments before a storm.

  “How are you here?” he asks. “You know these people?”

  Sergey gestures to the other Americans.

  “Mr Bernard is my tutor at Juilliard.”

  “I have heard of Juilliard,” says Sergey. “And he brought you to Russia, your teacher?”

  Sol nods: Yes.

  “He is communist?”

  “I… well… I don’t… I mean, that is to say, I think he has opinions, but…”

  “It’s alright. It is not test. You don’t have to say anything.”

  “That’s okay. I guess what I mean is that Mr Bernard, Ronald, he has opinions, but coming here, it was more about the music. He wanted to hear the music you make in Russia. We don’t always hear a great deal of it in America.”

  “It is same here. We do not hear much American music. I hear of Mr Bernard, but I do not think I know his music. And you? You are composer?”

  “I don’t know whether I’d call myself that,” Sol says, his cheeks flushing with colour. “I’ve written a couple of pieces. Nothing good.”

  “That will come,” says Sergey. “Everything I write before now is… what is word? Dyermo, we say in Russian. Not good.”

  Sol laughs, his cheeks and throat turning pink. He sweeps his fringe nervously to one side. Again, their eyes meet, and they become two magnets, trembling in the seconds before they spin together and lock.

  “You are enjoying this party?” Sergey asks.

  Sol nods without conviction.

  “Very much so,” he says.

  “You are a bad liar,” says Sergey. “It is boring party, I think. No?”

  “I’m having a splendid time.”

  “But you are young, and everyone here is old.”

  “You’re not.”

  “No,” says Sergey. “This is true. What are young men like us doing here?”

  Sol laughs. “I don’t know.”

  They leave the ballroom and step out onto a narrow terrace overlooking Vorovsky Square. The night air is cold, and the younger man shudders, patting his arms to keep warm. Sergey takes off his jacket and hands it to him. It’s several sizes too big. They talk about music, their favourite composers, their favourite symphonies. Sergey asks Sol when he first heard an orchestra.

  “Carnegie Hall,” Sol replies. “Toscanini was conducting. They played the overture from Dvořák’s Othello. It was incredible.”

  Sergey smiles. “My first time?” he says. “Otmichi People’s Orchestra. In an old village church. Nutcracker. It was terrible.”

  Remembering the orchestra makes him laugh. In a flash, he sees the expression on his father’s face; a sort of pained grimace each time the celesta player hit the wrong note, or the pizzicato fell out of time. Even though Sol can’t possibly picture the scene, Sergey’s laughter is infectious, and soon the pair of them are laughing at the thought of it, their laughter carrying across the square.

  What brought Sol here? Who is he? Sergey doesn’t recall seeing him at the Kirov. And now he seems like something impossible, miraculous. More than that, he’s untainted; by the Kirov, by Leningrad, by Remizov. Entirely pristine. Someone they can’t touch.

  They go back inside. At the far end of the ballroom Tatiana and Vasily are conspiring like naughty schoolgirls, glancing occasionally at Sergey and Sol. At the other end of the room, Remizov has his ear cocked towards Ronald Bernard, but his eyes are on them. Tatiana and Vasily and Remizov aren’t the only ones watching them.

  Enough. This is no longer his night. It never was. Everything has been in the service of the union and the republic. His work is done. He whispers in Sol’s ear:

  “I’m leaving.”

  “But it’s early.”

  “You could come with me.”

  Sol looks across to Bernard and Remizov. Sergey is still leaning in close and when he breathes he feels his breath rebound off the boy’s skin. The urge to kiss his throat is overwhelming.

  “Okay, let’s go,” Sol says. “But he can’t see me leave.”

  **

  The night is cold, and Sergey immediately sets about lighting a fire and two paraffin lamps. When he’s done he and Sol stand either side of the room, as if neither of them dares to move. Always the chance, in a moment like this, that he might have misread things. Make the first move, and he might be snubbed, pushed away. But surely not this time.

  Sol makes a face – What now? – and Sergey crosses the room and kisses him on the mouth. He pauses, waiting for rejection, and Sol cups Sergey’s face in his hands and returns the kiss with greater force, the kind of kiss given after years of absence.

  They don’t make it as far as the bedroom. Their clothes fall in unkempt piles and they make love on the hard floor next to the fire. Sol’s skin is soft, but beneath it is a wiry strength, his body tensing in moments of pleasure. They become an island in the middle of this darkened room. Everything else goes away. This is the first and last night they will ever spend together, and they make love knowing this, unable to forget.

  Chapter 29:

  MANHATTAN, OCTOBER 2001

  Natalie could hear Rosa and Jamilah laughing as she entered the house, but as she walked into the kitchen the laughter stopped. Rosa smiled at her. Jamilah held up that morning’s edition of the Wall Street Journal. Natalie had enough time to catch the word KABUL before the paper was slapped back down against the table.

  “Can you believe this bullshit?”

  Natalie nodded and shrugged at the same time.

  “How many people from Afghanistan were flying those planes? Zero. Not one of them. And now we’re invading Afghanistan and raining bombs on them and what good’ll it do?”

  “I don’t know,” said Natalie.

  Rosa clutched a blue dish towel against her chest like a rosar
y. “It’s terrible,” she said. “Just terrible. But these people. These Taliban. They harbour terrorists. This is why. This is why.”

  “That’s if you believe Bush’s bullshit,” said Jamilah.

  Rosa winced.

  When they’d left, Natalie made Sol a cup of tea and joined him in the study, taking the books she had borrowed from the library.

  “How you feeling today?”

  “Oh, yes, you know,” he said. “Funny thing this morning. A Cape May warbler, right outside my window.”

  It was a good day. Not just a good day, but one of the better ones. She asked him what a Cape May warbler was.

  “A bird. What else would it be?”

  “What kind?”

  “Bright yellow. Yellow and brown. You don’t see many of them in the city.”

  He drifted for a moment, gazing at an upper corner of the study as though the bird itself was perched there.

  “You wanted to ask me something. What is it?”

  She sat close by and opened one of the books in her lap, showing him the photograph taken at the Kirov.

  “That’s you, isn’t it?” she said, pointing to the blurred figure, the second “Unknown”, standing beside Langdon Brunel.

  He moved slightly. Rested again. What was going on in there? No trace of anything in his eyes. No sadness, no joy, no familiarity. How was he meant to recognise a blurred face?

  “It is you, isn’t it?” she asked again. “You remember this, don’t you? You went there with Ronald Bernard. You lied about it later, but you went to Russia, and you heard that music…”

  “The march,” said Sol.

  Natalie drew breath. She hadn’t mentioned anything about the Pechorin March. Not now, while they were looking at that photograph.

  “Sergey,” Sol said.

  “You remember.”

  He moved again and began shaking his head.

  “Why are you looking at me that way?”

  It was the most she would get from him. She had been lucky to get this much. Besides, it took little effort for her to imagine how it would have happened. A morning in the summer of 1978. Sol sitting at his desk to begin work on this new project. They wanted something epic. They wanted something almost exactly like Star Wars. He had nothing. He listened to Holst, to Stravinsky, Strauss. Nothing. In interviews, he would talk about inspiration, how the word means to literally inhale an idea, breathing in whatever the muse has to offer. But there was no inspiration that day. He could go for a walk, listen to music. Most likely, he cracked open a bottle of Johnnie Walker. He was still a heavy drinker in those days. A functioning alcoholic by some accounts. He would have lost a day, and then another day, and then another.

  Deadline looming. Still no theme. And what was this show, anyway? A pilot, the script cranked out to cash-in on the latest big movie, till the kids stopped caring about spaceships and robots and the next big thing came along. Probably wouldn’t even go to a full series.

  What did a theme for something like that even matter? And who would be watching it? Kids too engrossed in rock music or disco music or whatever they listened to these days to care. How many of them had known the Lone Ranger theme was by Rossini? And that’s when it came to him. A piece he’d carried around for years. A fanfare and a march; a little bombastic, perhaps, but underscored with melancholy.

  It was perfect.

  Did he hesitate before beginning? Did he worry that someone, anyone might know? How could they? The months and years had passed without word from Sergey Grekov. His name and music simply vanished. And even if he was still alive, they’d never see this show… what was it called again? Battle Station Alpha? They’d never see it in Russia, anyway, so…

  He wrote quickly and without compunction, and by the time he’d finished, adding his own little touches here and there, perhaps he convinced himself it was entirely his own work.

  Natalie took the book away and left it face down on the kitchen counter. She made coffee and went up to the roof terrace. Still that murky haze to the south, but a clear sky, two white jet trails forming a cross.

  This could all be done in minutes. Call Pavel. Tell him what she knew, or what she thought she knew. Call Carol. Call the Times or the Journal or CNN. But all those questions. All those conversations she would have to have and explanations she’d have to give on Sol’s behalf. And for what? However good Grekov’s ballet might be, no-one had chosen to remember it but his son and grandson. Sol’s music was loved by millions.

  This wasn’t just about a piece of music. She realised that now. It was about a decision; one choice representing familiarity, routine, the other offering change, but a change she couldn’t control.

  And so much had already changed. She kept hearing people say it. Everything changed in September. September changed everything. Change was the altered skyline and the yellowish pall hanging over the city. Change was the sense that nothing could ever go back to how it was.

  She took Sol to a deli a few blocks away, where he ate his favourite lunch – pastrami on rye with mustard and gherkins – served with black coffee and followed by a slice of key lime pie. The waitress knew him by name.

  “Haven’t seen you in a while, Sol,” she said. “How you doing?”

  Sol frowned at her and looked out through the window.

  He wouldn’t know. If she made it public, he wouldn’t know. It wouldn’t make any difference to him.

  Natalie picked at her own lunch, taking only a few bites from her sandwich. Sol finished every last crumb. The key lime pie revived him. Maybe it was the sugar. He still didn’t remember the waitress’s name, but he recognised her and gave her a kiss on the cheek as they left.

  “A penny for them?” Sol asked, as they were walking back to East 73rd Street. It wasn’t often he asked her anything like that. She wasn’t even sure he wanted or expected an answer.

  “Oh, nothing,” Natalie replied. “Nothing at all.”

  She took him the long way home, walking along Fifth Avenue by the park. Orange and yellow leaves gathered at the sidewalk’s inner edge. The wind ruffling through the trees sounded like the pages of a manuscript falling to the ground.

  “I love the changing colours,” said Sol. “The seasons are what I always miss in LA.”

  “Miss”, not “missed”. He was there, but only just. At the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 74rd Street they came upon a payphone, and Natalie stopped to use it.

  Chapter 30:

  WASHINGTON D.C., APRIL 1951

  There’s a heat given off by this concentration of people gathered in a single room. If this is what it’s like in April, imagine how it’ll be if the hearings run on through July. Ron once told you that Washington D.C. is a southern swamp pretending to be an East Coast city, and you can believe it. The room simmers. So many spectators and press.

  You’re not the big draw here today – there’s a well-known character actor from New York scheduled to appear this afternoon – but the press learned early on that even some nobody can dish the dirt on a major star. No-one wants to miss out on that moment. Anyone can become famous in this room.

  “Order! Order!”

  John Wood. Grey-black hair slicked across in a side-parting; mouth like a sea bass. He slams his gavel three times and the chatter fades to silence, or the closest thing to silence a room of five hundred people can muster.

  “Order!” he says again, and then, turning to the man seated to his left: “Mr Tavenner?”

  Frank Tavenner – jowly and jug-eared with the shoulders of a movie mobster – leans into his microphone.

  “Could you please state your name?”

  “Yes, sir. Solomon Conrad.”

  “And was that the name you were born with, Mr Conrad?”

  “No, sir.”

  “In that case, could you also state the name with which you were born?”

  “Cohen. Solomon Cohen.”

  “Cohen?”

  Jews, queers and unionists…

  “Yes, sir.”
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  To Wood’s right, Francis Walter. White-haired, weak-chinned and wearing heavy, black-rimmed glasses. He leans towards the microphone.

  “And why did you change your name?” he asks.

  You tell him you were encouraged to.

  “By whom?”

  “A teacher, sir. At Juilliard.”

  “Gentlemen,” says Wood. “I believe we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Mr Tavenner?”

  “Of course,” says Tavenner. “Mr Conrad. What is your present occupation?”

  “I’m a composer.”

  “A film composer, is that correct?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And how long have you been a composer of film music?”

  “Almost two years.”

  “And is that also how long you’ve lived in Los Angeles, Mr Conrad?”

  “It is.”

  “And before then you lived in New York City?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Tavenner pauses to remove his glasses. You know the next question before he asks it.

  “And are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”

  You tell him, “I am not.”

  “Not now, but have you ever been?”

  “No, sir. Never.”

  You feel like a child.

  “And do you presently know the names of any writers, actors, fellow composers… do you know the names of anyone working within the motion picture or entertainment industries who is, or has been, a member of any branch of the Communist Party?”

  It has come to this. You haven’t rehearsed anything, not even in private. You didn’t come here with answers, only with a fork in the road, the possibility of two paths.

  “I would kindly ask that you be more specific, sir,” you reply.

  “Very well,” says Tavenner. “Did you know a woman by the name of Mary Lafitte?”

  “I did.”

  “And could you explain, for the benefit of the committee, the nature of your relationship with Miss Lafitte.”

  “She was my neighbour.”

  “And Miss Lafitte passed away in January of this year, yes?”

  “That’s right.”

  “While she was a patient at…” He consults his notes. “The Camarillo State Mental Hospital.”