Lying alone on that big empty bed with his hands ice-cold and his heart and throat so tight with the tension of waiting for the black telephone to ring or not ring ever again anymore, he eventually realized that it would not ring, because the darkhaired woman must have finished at the Conservatory hours ago, so he dialed the number without worrying about anybody in raspberry-colored boots, not to mention that other man, Vigodsky; when the other man answered he hung up; an hour later he called again, this time succeeding in hearing her sleep-husky voice, a voice ritenuto, to which he choked out: I want so much to have you on top of me here on this bed, Elena; I need you on top of me, kissing and kissing and kissing me . . .
Then he turned out the light and lay there beginning to taste blood inside his throat. He switched on the radio, just to, you know. It was Klavdia Sulzhenko singing “The Blue Kerchief”: The machine-gunner fights for the blue kerchief those dear shoulders wore. He silenced her, not that she didn’t have a certain something; it was just that he, anyhow, our life is such a comedy. The next morning he put on a highcollared shirt because his neck was bruised by the kind woman’s fingers, which had been almost as white and perfect as the darkhaired woman’s teeth.
2
Last October, when they’d met around the corner from the Eliseyev department store three hours before the premiere of his Eleventh Symphony, it had been snowing and they were both late. She had adjusted his necktie just like a wife. He requested her to please leave him gently if she ever left him, to which she replied that they no longer were and never would be together anyway.—Oh, you’re a wise one! he laughed. Give me another English lesson!—Then, overcoming his agony, he insisted, mezzo piano, that of course they were together. He knew what he knew; didn’t she know it, too? Hadn’t she herself admitted that she sometimes kept silent instead of saying whatever it was that she might be feeling? Whenever he came to Leningrad, which was often nowadays, there always being something new to rehearse, she saw him either every day or else almost every day, and when she sat across from him at the hard currency bar she nearly always smiled so tenderly! How could she deny that? Therefore, he explained to her, she probably still loved him, at least to a degree, which was precisely why he had telephoned her so late that night to tell her how much he longed for her to be with him now in this hotel room, lying on top of him, kissing him, kissing him, to which on the next day, after Rostropovich had driven him to Komarovo, she had replied by telephoning him there (he’d given her his itineraries, hotels, residences and numbers, especially his sister Mariya’s) to declare in her soft firm voice that she didn’t want him to whisper any more messages like that into her ear ever again because they were too sad.
The pain which this caused him was nearly beyond expression, but only nearly; musically there’s always a way to, how should I say. He could never “have” her in his intended sense of having her lie down on top of him in an empty room and hold him tight, not even for one hour, let alone for ever and ever. Even at the Philharmonic he didn’t dare to, if you see what I’m saying, take any chances which might, so to speak, make him noticed. He’d sent her a pair of tickets for the premiere last October. It was nice of them to come; Vigodsky bestowed upon him that strangely French smile of his. If only she could have, well, but he himself had to sit next to Margarita, who’d really tarted herself up, the little . . . Sometimes he hardly knew why he . . . Akhmatova could inevitably be spotted in the audience, usually in the company of her friend Z. B. Tomashevskaya. Was her son still away? Poor lady; poor lady! She was extremely, well, you know. He steered clear of both those ladies, fearing that Akhmatova in particular might have learned too many of his secrets. There in the fourth row sat the darkhaired one; she smiled at her husband, impersonally he hoped, then, unfortunately, laid down her head on his shoulder. Why couldn’t she at least . . . ? Once upon a time, on a linden alley at Tsarkoe Selo, they’d been kissing on a bench and then she’d rested her head on his shoulder and her hair, oh, my God, her long, dark hair. And now she was doing it with Vigodsky, which he found extremely . . . When he sat alone at these Leningrad rehearsals he always wished that she were beside him, but of course that would have been especially, so to speak, demonstrative. Perhaps if Glikman could act as go-between once again she might at least sort of, I mean, but even that would be impossible; one aspect of her he especially admired was how quietly and immovably she could say no. Nina had also been like that. On the other hand, in every other sense he did have Elena; he could love her; he could think about her; better yet, just as the gentle arch of the Blue Bridge offers us the way to Saint Isaac’s domes, so Opus 40 helps us over the cold dark waters of reality to the place where Elena is; Lyalka she liked me to call her, when we still . . . Elena, help me! Elena, I can’t bear this! But you’re the one person who must never comfort me for the same reason that you’re the only one who could. Isn’t that curious? I have represented this dilemma many times with ostinato. Tonight I’ll . . .
I’ve already said that when he stayed over in Leningrad she met him almost every day, so that he could gaze into her beautiful eyes and sit close enough to touch her, on condition that he not touch her; he could tell her anything; she told him some things; in short, he could go on and on proudly loving her and being with her as long as he could tell her everything. But now she was saying that they had never been together and that he was not permitted to tell her everything. That was why he felt the strangling pain.
3
When the richly plump girl, who was even darkhaired, started kissing him so deeply with her paddle-shaped tongue, he stroked her hair and desired her, which is to say that he didn’t desire her in and of herself; he simply needed to sojourn in any woman’s body; so he took her into his arms on one of those empty double beds he slept in, but the instant he began to ride her, prestissimo con moto if he could say so himself, he saw the face of the woman he loved gazing at him right through the flesh of the substitute, whose whiteness might have been tracing paper, so little did it conceal that intensely looking and listening face of the darkhaired woman with its not quite sad quarter-smile of red, red lips which crazed his desire into something which could be expressed only chokingly, by falling on his knees when she wasn’t there to be molested by his prayers; yes, so little could strange flesh conceal the dark, dark hair which glowed through it; and so his hands withered and fell away.
Thus, she, the one he loved, lay, not between them exactly, but beyond them, more real than either he or this other whom he was now inside; even with his eyes shut he could not help but see her face gazing steadily at him through the other woman’s flesh; her eyes, unflinching and sad, remained on him; it was just as if she were sitting next to him on the sofa; she’d said that he didn’t need to hide anything from her, that he could tell her anything . . .
He made the richly plump girl very happy, grateful even, and that was something, something to solve his own loneliness partially, and something good in and of itself.
Than he went to see the woman with the dark, dark hair.
How’s your daughter, Elena?
She’s well; thank you for asking—
Then he said to her: I believe you’re trying not to, so to speak, love me, but I, I also believe you love me just the same.
What do you want, Mitya? It was so long ago—
And whenever you try to pretend that we’re not together now—
We aren’t.
Or that we never were together, when in fact—
She was turning away.
In point of fact, you, well. Recently I passed by that dacha near Luga. If you remember, you wrote our initials behind the head of the bed and told me not to look, so this time I, I, it turns out that the heart you drew is also still there; it survived the Germans.
I don’t remember. I was never there; I hardly know you . . .
This is precisely what gives me hope, my dear Elena, when you, yes, yes, yes, I’m so sorry that now you’re, please forgive me.
The next time he saw
her he asked for her photograph again and she said no; the time after that he whispered: Do you have a photograph for me? and Elena smiled; she smiled with a lazy smile and said: Maybe.
Night after night he came to know the ambiguous boundary in that photograph between her yellow-ivory face and her hair, her dark, dark hair which framed it to the latitude of her lower lip so that her temples and her cheeks blended into something both gold and black, essence of tiger, while the white light frozen on each upcurling hair on her face’s right side made a more zebra-ish contrast. If he could simply, well, or if she could meet him alone at Komarovo, which would have been out of the question, then . . . Margarita wouldn’t care as long as he . . . She’d even make the bed afterward! Oh, Elena, you’re so lucky you didn’t marry me.
She was smiling at him, her dark eyes elongated by that smile, a smile which seemed to see and know him even though she hadn’t met him in that year when the photograph was taken; he hadn’t yet married Nina, either; the smile seemed to say: I accept your love and acknowledge it although I will never be yours; I will be your sky; you will always be able to look up and see me; I will never stop smiling upon you.
Needless to say, she’d been much younger when she was happily, lovingly, sincerely smiling in that way with her perfect red lips and perfect white teeth—how can a smile be described? Everybody has a mouth, you know! (Lebedinsky would understand. But he couldn’t tell anyone, not even Lebedinsky. He’d promised her.) And her hair, her dark hair which she might have started dyeing by now, for she was forty-five, which he could hardly believe, had been just a little lighter in the sunlight of those days; his ballet “Bolt” had just premiered and she was sixteen; her hair had been almost reddish, because it had been so dark that it was almost every color, and every hair of her perfect eyebrows was visible against her fair, fair face; her dark eyes were smiling at somebody else, the unknown photographer; who it was she didn’t remember, or said she didn’t remember; later she said that it might have been her best friend Vera Ivanova; since then her face had tanned slightly and her hair had darkened.
As she got older, her eyes elongated less often into any smile; they gazed with loving intimacy at the other man, then at the other man after him; her deeply red lips which only the other man would ever taste half-smiled at the other man as they sometimes did at him who now possessed this photograph to be a relic and a comfort to him forever; and that hair, that dark, dark hair, brown or black depending on the light, made a living loving darkness in which the other man could rest.
Whenever he fell into that photograph, sinking far past the way that her face widened at the cheekbones and then, just below the mouth, drew in to make a long chin whose strange grace reminded him of a flute-note in a Haydn sonata, he was able to believe if he could have just waited and been patient for he’d never know how many years, she might perhaps have found herself able to give him more of herself without thereby damaging herself. Until she’d given him the photograph, the difficulty had been that he couldn’t be sure that he possessed any part of her at all except for the handshake-equivalent which almost anybody would give almost anybody; for she was correct; that summer morning near Luga had never happened; Glikman was the one who had gone there for him and returned to say: My dear Dmitri Dmitriyevich, I’m sorry to tell you that only one wall is standing. A direct hit from a Tiger tank . . .
One night in Riga, where the connection wouldn’t have been very good anyway, he didn’t telephone her because, unable to endure his need for her, he’d gone to sleep beneath the kind woman who liked him very much, so that she could half-strangle him again, and the corporeal comfort of that woman’s hands upon him, the balm of her liking (perhaps she even loved him now), the knowledge that had he nicely asked her to, she would have strangled him all the way to death—yes, she would have killed him so that he would sleep safely and forever in a woman’s hands!—all this was indescribably assuaging at the very same time that it compounded his loneliness because he was quite aware that this woman who liked or loved him was not the woman with the dark, dark hair. So he couldn’t telephone that night; that was the first night that he didn’t; and in the morning, exhausted and even lower-voiced than usual, she confessed that she’d gotten literally hysterical, so much so that the other man had nearly noticed; and as soon as she had said this he realized that she had now let him inside herself, and then even before he’d laid down the telephone he became selfishly happy, although his happiness knew that the anguish of going back to that place of not being certain would be unendurable.
He knew that he had to be careful now in case his happiness panicked her in the same way that her hysteria had made him happy. Several measures later, as he rode to Leningrad in Rostropovich’s car, they were discussing the color of a certain violin tremolo in his Jewish cycle and he was imagining what it would feel like if he could somehow persuade Rostropovich’s wife Galina, the eminent soprano, to meet him somewhere and play his throat like a xylophone—an inexcusable fantasy, to be sure, which shamed him and rendered him deserving of punishment, since Rostropovich was as loyal as a leech—and then Rostropovich offered him a shy question about Prokofieff which he seemed to be pondering until Rostropovich, glancing away from the snowy road, saw that he had in fact retreated into the world beneath the black slabs and white snow of the piano keys. Her photograph had become the one place where he could be with her even if she wasn’t with him. Her face, which had grown more sad and closed since the days of the photograph (or perhaps it appeared sad only when she was with him), he now knew better than his own. She should have been his.
On a morning as white as the sun-gleam upon her red, red lips in that photograph he was lying on the double bed in Leningrad with the telephone receiver against his face. He heard her usual silence, and then she very quietly said: You know, I’m going to have to ask for it back. I did the wrong thing. I hurt him and me and you. I’m sorry.
Well, that’s quite true, to be sure. I fully . . . Maybe you’ll change your mind again, Elena; that’s my hope.
No. I won’t change my mind.
All right.
There was a silence, and she said: We won’t talk about it anymore. I won’t say anything. Just, next time you see me, you can give it to me without saying anything.
But if you don’t say anything I’ll, you see, keep supposing that you might have changed your mind.
No. I won’t. Just give it back and don’t say anything. It was my fault. I’m sorry.
He determined never to ask her why, and in this labor, whose immensity wearied him far more than the construction of a symphony, whose essence is merely communication instead of that greater song called silence, he succeeded, thanks to something which he named, and why not, love, thank you very much. Meet me in the Summer Garden. Oh, take no notice, Elena, take no notice. I’m well aware that years ago I should have, you know. Soon he was going to accompany the orchestra to England and France for performances of the Eighth Symphony. Five rehearsals at least, and then the dress rehearsal; he could hardly . . . He’d also better lay in munitions against loneliness; high time to telephone that richly plump girl with the paddle-shaped tongue. And vodka! T. Nikolayeva would surely stop by and play a duet—good girl! Should he divorce Margarita? He must see Glikman, who was such a faithful listener, and then . . . Well, but why must she take her picture back when it had meant so little to her and so much to him to give it to him in the first place? Then he understood: That was precisely why she had to do it.
The next morning his anguish had diminished by the time he awoke because he’d convinced himself that someday she might change her mind again since she had already changed her mind once, and even if she didn’t, well, he had once thought that he, speaking frankly, couldn’t quite, couldn’t, you know, couldn’t keep on doing this, but now he knew that he could; he could do this forever; he could go on and on.
4
Knowing that he would have to get everything he could out of the photograph now since he’d never
see it again (never mind, he told himself; this will just be one more little death), he rememorized that delicately female face, with its smile of youth now replaced by a smoldering look which had borne much and could bear almost anything.
Desperately concealing his desperation (I should say attempting to conceal it) in the garments of a jest, he’d again remarked that he could face the approach of their next meeting, when it was understood that he’d give the photograph back, because his hopes kept expanding, to which she replied in her low and perfect voice: No. I won’t change my mind anymore. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I want you to return the photo without saying anything else, and then we’ll never talk about it again.
So there was that photograph which he would soon have to honorably relinquish either forever or until she, she, you know, that face in the photograph more beautifully remote from him than ever, shining through the envelope he’d already sealed in token of obedience and fidelity since what it contained no longer belonged to him. Oh, he still had several days left; she wouldn’t have blamed him, or at least said anything, or even known, had he kept drinking in the photograph, kissing it and sleeping with it under the adjacent pillow of the empty double bed; but he wouldn’t rape; he wouldn’t spy; he wouldn’t force himself on that to which he had no right.
Closing his eyes, he found her smile more noncommittal now than it had been in the photograph. Oh, yes, her teeth were as crystalline as the Jupiter Symphony! The thrill of waiting for her, of drawing strength from the memory of her voice, was nearly unbearable. That strange way she had of being everywhere untouchable, like the sky, he could almost be instructed by that. Plato says that as one learns to love, the image of any specific beloved can be left behind for knowledge of the Good. This might not have been true in his case, there being nothing more Good or beloved than the darkhaired woman, but because everything she was and did had to be, as I said, Good, then her retraction of the photograph had to be Good, which meant that if he understood and accepted it as he had her every other act, then his faithfulness could only strengthen. He said to himself: What kind of love would it be, if it needed any external image of her?—He had been the merest fetishist. Could he only pass beyond superstition and corporeality, he would love her all the more truly.
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