After spending the morning observing Pavel Glinski’s class in world history and listening to him explain to a skeptical student that the North Pole was not discovered by the Russian Otto Schmidt, as the official Soviet line insisted, but rather by the American Rear Admiral Robert E. Peary, a civil engineer, Sasha spent the lunch hour with Pavel discussing the inadequacy of Russian textbooks.
“I wouldn’t go so far as to use the word ‘bias,’” said Pavel, “but omissions make my task all the more difficult. It would be one thing if the textbooks acknowledged other points of view, but in ours, we receive only the Bolshevik side of things.”
“As you know, you have my full support to ‘fill in the blanks.’”
Pavel stirred some sour cream into his steaming beet soup and sipped it slowly. The table had cold cuts and cheeses and a bowl with hard-boiled eggs. A loaf of black bread had been baked that same morning. Although Sasha had tried to dissuade teachers from taking a nip at lunch, a bottle of vodka stood within reach. Pavel never touched it, though he was known to be a tippler. He took a piece of brown bread, peeled and salted an egg, and remarked casually, almost apologetically, that he’d heard about Sasha having been denounced.
“We’ve come to a pass in this country,” Pavel observed sadly, “where a man—or a woman—will denounce another for making eye contact. Suddenly, the evil eye has become a favorite complaint.”
Sasha reached for an egg and stacked the shells like Chick-Chick, in the shape of a letter S. Pavel stared, as if expecting some magical effect to issue from the placement of the shells. But nothing unusual occurred.
“Do your students ever ask about Trotsky and his role in the revolution? As we all know, the subject is poison, and especially so for someone in my position, director of a school.”
Holding up his hands, in a posture of surrender, Pavel replied, “Everyone—students and teachers alike—observe the unwritten but sacred rule that Trotsky is a disappeared person, never to be mentioned or even alluded to.”
Sasha shook his head and said nothing. He reminded himself that Filatov wanted a report bearing on Brodsky. Galina had left the school office early. This afternoon was as good as any to call on the erstwhile director. Besides, he owed him a visit, having read Radek’s essays. After his dessert of figs and yogurt, he would return to the farmhouse, remove the controversial book from his stewing pot, and set out for Brodsky’s cottage. As a parting comment to Pavel, Sasha said, “If I can find less ‘biased’ textbooks—my word, not yours—I’ll try to include them in your curriculum.”
With the country now in winter, Sasha pulled up his fur collar, pulled down the ear flaps on his ushanka, and trudged home. Opening the door, he smelled a delicious odor. Petr was cooking a stew—in the very pot that Sasha used to hide Radek’s book. Looking around and failing to see it, he stifled his fear and asked Petr casually, “Where’s the book I stashed in the pot?”
Unruffled, Petr stirred the stew and replied, “I put it on the kitchen table, and Galina picked it up.” He then ladled a spoonful of stew into his mouth and casually remarked, “Needs more spice.”
Sasha knocked on Galina’s door.
In a distracted voice, she asked, “Who is it?”
“May I come in? You have a book of mine that I need.”
She opened the door and handed him Radek’s collection. Perhaps because of the rupture between them, she stared at the floor. “You do know,” she said, “that Radek’s early essays are on the prohibited list?” Before he could respond, she added, “The bookplate says Avram Brodsky. For a man sentenced to internal exile, he’s running quite a risk. And frankly so are you.” She paused. “I thought you had no interest in politics.” Lifting her gaze, she smiled wanly. “But if you are, I’m glad to see you reading the Left Opposition and not the Right, and especially not the Stalinists.”
Over her shoulder, he could see into her bedroom. The door was ajar. He noticed that her bed, which she always made before leaving for work in the morning, was in disarray. His mind rapidly calculated. Alya had gone off to her tutor. Galina had quit work before lunch. Petr seemed unusually buoyant stirring the stew. The facts were few, but they all pointed in one direction: that husband and wife had engaged in a stew of their own. Sasha’s first reaction was jealousy, but at once he reminded himself that the couple was married. Had he liked Petr less and Galina more, he would have felt betrayed. Without envy or anger, he pointed past her and said, “You forgot to make the bed.”
He tucked the book under his coat and crunched through the light snow toward Brodsky’s cottage. From a distance he could see smoke issuing from the chimney, and a minute later, he could smell the sweet scent of birch and maple, both of which, no doubt, were crackling in the fireplace. A single rap brought Avram to the door. Inside, Sasha immediately handed him the book, wishing to be rid of it. After stuffing his gloves in a pocket, he hung his coat and hat on a peg next to the door, and stomped on a mat to dislodge the snow from his felt boots. Then he followed Brodsky to a chair in front of the fire, rubbing his hands and gladly accepting Brodsky’s offer of a shot of vodka, which he downed in the Russian manner, with one swallow.
“Well?” asked Brodsky. “What did you think?”
“I knew Radek’s general view from the work I did on my history thesis. A Trotskyite.”
“But not now.”
“So I gather.”
“He’s helping write the new constitution,” said Brodsky, adding mordantly, “A lot of good that will do.”
“His help or the document itself?”
“The 1924 constitution provided liberties that this new draft will no doubt omit. Just wait.”
An uncomfortable silence settled between the two men. Who would talk first? Brodsky was either trying to draw out Sasha or had carelessly stated his own view of current affairs. In either case, Sasha kept telling himself, “Keep your own counsel.”
“Mark my words,” continued Brodsky, “this new document is Stalin’s constitution, not the people’s.”
Still Sasha said nothing.
“We were freer in 1924 than we are now,” Brodsky added. “Don’t you agree?”
Unwilling to take the bait, Sasha tried a diversionary tactic. He asked a question.
“You’re asking me,” said Brodsky, “what I did before I took over the directorship of the school? I thought you knew. Didn’t the major tell you?”
Actually, Sasha did know, but feigned ignorance.
Brodsky went on to explain how his family had owned a chicken farm, and how he spent a great deal of his youth collecting eggs, cleaning them by hand with a rag dipped in a solution of vinegar, weighing them, and separating the white from the brown and the larger from the smaller for market distribution. He said that the chickens his family put on their own table were first ritually killed by a shochet, a rabbi of sorts, and that memories of those days drove him to excel at his studies to escape the life of a farmer. In his spare time, after classes, he liked to write. A kind teacher urged him to send one of his stories to a magazine. It was published, and the editor encouraged him to write a play. That experience led him at university to study literature and to write for the school theater. By the time he graduated, commissions had come his way from Soviet state radio for fifteen- or thirty-minute plays.
Now that Sasha had Brodsky reminiscing, he wanted him to continue. A few well-selected memories are the equal of a thousand photographs. The more he learned about Brodsky, the more selective he could be in his report to Filatov—and the safer. He hoped, therefore, that Brodsky would avoid self-incriminating statements and his year in Kolyma. To keep him away from politics, Sasha prompted him to talk about radio plays.
“My director—every writer was assigned one—behaved like a decent fellow. He treated the actors well, and he didn’t demand too many script changes. The only thing that raised his hackles was tardiness. If an actor arrived late for rehearsals or taping, he would threaten to discharge the person and bring on another.”
“Did you write science fiction, realism, fantasy, children’s stories, fairy tales, what?”
Normally, Brodsky could talk and smoke at the same time, exhaling plumes from both nose and mouth. But Sasha observed that the more animated Brodsky became, the less inclined he was to light up. Before Sasha had posed his last question, Avram had reached for a cigarette, but on hearing the question, he put it down and launched into an aesthetic explanation of writing for radio as sight unseen.
“It relies on imagination, which is richer than any photographic realism. Your own mind sets the stage and pictures the action.”
Avram said that most people prefer realism, with which they can identify. “They prefer feeling to thinking. Nonrepresentational art may work for painters, but not for writers, nor for Stalin. When characters represent ideas, as they did in classical and medieval drama, and fail to express their pain and suffering and confusion and happiness, listeners can’t see themselves in the characters, an identification that most people want. Tearful stories rank higher than ethical dilemmas, unless the latter show the anguish that the characters feel from having to make a Hobson’s choice. Admittedly, the best writers can describe sentiment without crossing the line into sentimentality, but there are more poor writers than good ones. The result: bathos, mawkishness, nostalgia, romanticism, mendacity. Just add music and you have melodrama and soap operas.”
Sasha was well aware of Soviet realism, plays written to please the Vozhd. He remembered one in which poultry farmers lost their animals to diseases, like fowl pox, influenza, infectious bronchitis, and Newcastle’s, until a Soviet veterinarian appeared on the scene and saved the day, that is, the animals.
Eventually, after talking about radio drama and the power of the unseen on the imagination, Brodsky asked whether Sasha had suffered any more denunciations. Having shared his fears at the time with the older man, Sasha appreciated Brodsky’s concern. Avram hazarded that the truth-telling curriculum was probably no better than the Soviet one, and that the students, having been cowed in elementary school, were unlikely to ask embarrassing questions. Pausing to stroke his chin in a reflective attitude, he changed the subject. What did Sasha know about a Goran Youzhny who wanted to take Avram’s picture? And what did he think of the Radek essays? Surely he had an opinion about them.
Equivocation in the Soviet Union had become a national disease, but Sasha had beheaded two men without hesitation. When he thought about this paradox, he shuddered at the bloodthirsty contradiction that ran through his veins. Perhaps he was one of the untold descendants of Genghis Khan. It certainly felt that way to him on occasion, like now. Summoning his courage and suppressing his suspicions, he went straight for Brodsky’s last question.
“Like Radek, I would rather die for the country than against it. I admit that politics fail to arrest my interest. In Russia, they are either too unsophisticated or too ruthless. If at one time I believed that the best ideas eclipse the poorer ones, I no longer do. But I believe in the country. If at times I may wish to separate myself from it, I cannot. I am a Russian, even when my countrymen behave absurdly and abominably, and all too often barbarously. We live in a country where surgery is performed not with a scalpel but an ax. Radek would probably disagree, believing the Party is all, sick and degraded though it is. Frankly, I do not wish to die for it, as he seems willing to do. But he does recognize that the more the Party kills its critics and detractors, the more it kills itself.”
As Sasha spoke, Brodsky devoured several cigarettes. Now he handed the vodka bottle to Sasha and said, “You are only partially right. Take a drink.” He snuffed out his cigarette and immediately lit another. “When you have lived your whole life for the Party, as I have, you accept its judgments, even when those include exile or death.” He paused to exhale a stream of smoke. “Not to accept is to nullify your whole existence.”
Sasha warily noticed that Brodsky had said, “as I have,” not “as I did.” Was he saying, then, that he still supported the Party—after Kolyma, after all the innocent men and women who had frozen or starved to death, and the many yet to die in the future?
With the room growing dark and the embers fading, Brodksy’s cigarette shone like a firefly. For a moment, Sasha imagined Brodsky not as a man but as a floating, bodiless red spot, a distant star, a Cyclopean eye. “The country has about it,” said Avram, “the feel of a snowball gaining momentum and size as it hurtles to the bottom. One falsehood leads to another. Suddenly the Russians believe they have discovered the North Pole, and Darwin’s theory of evolution has been eclipsed by Lysenko’s theory of hybridization. We have already put Mandelstam and Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva on the black list. What will come next? Will Marx and Lenin replace Plato and Aristotle in the pantheon of philosophers? Or have they already? How many more people will be expunged from Soviet history and become non-persons? When we finish rewriting history, our textbooks will tell not of continuous human effort but only of Soviet exceptionalism.” He threw back another shot of vodka. “As a teacher I cannot deny the facts. For better or worse, Comrade Sasha, the original snowball, which is now an avalanche, is hurtling toward us. A mountain is threatening to engulf us. Surely, you see that? We have been trained and educated to serve this regime. What else do we have? We are its creatures, its misbegotten children. Don’t you understand what has happened—don’t you see? That’s why you, too, Sasha, must be loyal!”
Brodsky’s appeal brought the discussion to an end. In the darkened room, the loudest sound was the crackling of dying coals. The pause gave Sasha time to think, and he suddenly regretted his outburst, knowing full well the cost in Russia of truth telling; but he also felt relieved. Brodsky said nothing.
✷
On his way back to the farmhouse, Sasha stopped at his office. Turning on the hall light, he saw immediately on the bulletin board the large poster: “Trotsky Lives!” How many others had seen it? If no one, he was safe. The fat was in the fire if word got around. He removed the poster, folded it in four parts, and pocketed it to study later. Perhaps the handwriting would look familiar, though he doubted having such luck. The poster and the red crayon used to letter it might be traceable. Such supplies were not easily obtained in a country suffering from a shortage of paper and pencils.
Deep in thought when he arrived home, he almost missed seeing the light in the photo lab and Goran at work. Sasha stopped to ask him about his interest in photographing Brodsky.
“All the other directors of the school,” said Goran, “have their pictures in the main hallway. Only Brodsky’s is missing. I thought I’d add it to the collection.”
According to Filatov, Avram’s face had for many years been among those framed in the hall, but once he joined the Left Opposition, down came the picture. Oppositionists did not deserve remembrance. To replace his picture was tantamount to heresy.
“Perhaps not now,” said Goran, “but in fifty years a new government might want a complete record. If no photographs of Brodsky exist, then the record can never be complete.”
Sasha impatiently said, “I understand your point, Goran, but where do you suggest we store the picture until that rosy time in the future? Brodsky, you know, is considered a non-person. He is out of favor, so how can he exist?”
“In print and on celluloid.”
“Not if his plays are banned and pictures erased.”
An archive of the damned, thought Sasha, would make for remarkable reading, especially if it included not only what the pariahs had written, but also what others had written about them. Vice made better reading than virtue. Such a collection would be a gold mine. He wondered about all the people who had fallen out of favor with Stalin. Did their photographs still exist? Perhaps one day, historians would find in old attics all manner of materials: diaries, letters, address books, manuscripts, photographs, paintings, wood carvings, metal works. The list of possibilities was virtually endless. Then, too, there were the radio and screen interviews and appearances. Where would those archives be kept, or had they already been destroyed? Again the question of history and what it means came to Sasha’s mind. If you destroy the record of an event does that mean the event never took place? Were we back to the old philosophic chestnut: If a tree falls in the forest and no living person is present is there a sound? Sasha had heard that question asked innumerable times in school, but not until this moment did he have an adequate reply. There may not be a sound (if perception is reality), but there will certainly be a downed tree.
Goran handed Sasha a portfolio and invited him to look at the pictures. The first, taken in the Balyk marketplace, showed a dour Bogdan Dolin. “Did you know,” said Goran, “I interviewed him. He’s unusually reticent, but he’s not stupid. His Kolyma tales are worth recording. As a historian, Director Parsky, I think you would find them valuable.”
“I’m sure I would.” Sasha pointed at a new piece of equipment. “What’s that?”
“An enlarger. It brings out finer details, like the features of people in the background of pictures.”
“From your uncle and our mutual friend?”
“Yes, they made it possible, and even had it delivered.”
“By special courier?” asked Sasha ironically. “I never saw the postman deliver it.”
Goran merely shrugged.
As he flipped through the pictures in the portfolio, Sasha had to concede Goran’s artistic abilities. His sense of design and detail were impeccable, highlighting this man’s beard or that woman’s apron, thus giving definition and character to a picture. Sasha had heard indirectly that the townspeople loved being photographed, most of them issuing from peasant stock and never before being treated as persons of interest. Goran gave them copies of his photographic portraits, and they in turn blessed him, hung religious medals around his neck, and invited him to share their meals.
Without asking Goran, he pondered why Bogdan Dolin and Avram had captured his attention. Hearing the horrors of a work camp held no fascination for Sasha, but perhaps Dolin had more than Avram to offer about how abominably people treat one another.
✷
Petr’s delicious stew kept discussion to a minimum, as the party of four lost themselves in the savory tastes. Judging from Petr’s diary, Sasha would never have guessed that the soldier loved to cook. His thoughts drifted to the locked chest in which he kept the diary, as buried as the unrecognized but meaningful skills of Petr Selivanov.
“Have you ever tried working as a chef?” asked Sasha.
“During the time I was gone, when the occasion warranted, I would fill in for an absent cook.”
In jest, Sasha replied, “Ukraine could use you. From what I hear, the food there is awful: day one herring and borscht; day two borscht and herring.”
“You forgot to mention potatoes,” Galina added.
Suppressing a chuckle, Petr remarked that while he was traveling, he came across a great many peasants who believed that potatoes were the fruit with which Eve tempted Adam, and therefore they refused to plant or eat them.
“I gather,” said Sasha, “that the government’s attempt to stamp out religious ignorance hasn’t been completely successful.”
“Nor has their attempt to quash reverence for the Tsar.”
Here was Sasha’s opening. He took from his pocket the folded poster and opened it. “What do you think of this? I found it pinned to the school bulletin board.”
Alya read the words out loud, “‘Trotsky Lives.’ What does it mean?”
“Good question,” said Sasha. “I’ve been asking myself the same thing. Maybe someone here can tell me.”
Galina immediately made it clear that she had left her school office early and had not seen the poster.
“Are you worried?” asked Petr.
“If others have seen it, yes. Otherwise, no.”
Alya sat wide-eyed.
“It is either a prank or a serious protest,” Sasha said. “But how can one know?”
Petr recounted similar experiences in the army. Drafted soldiers would post statements intended to embarrass or hurt senior officers. Hardly a single culprit was ever caught. “But,” Petr added, “I can tell you what the officers did. They posted their own notices pointing out the error or malice of the first one. You might want to do the same. In these troubled days, defensive action is often called for.”
“Who is Trotsky?” asked Alya. “I thought it was a swear word, like when one kid calls another a Trotskyite.”
The three adults at the table exchanged glances before Sasha ventured an explanation. “Our Supreme Leader and Trotsky disagreed, so Stalin sent Trotsky to live and work in a faraway part of the country. But some people think that Trotsky’s ideas were better than those of the Vozhd. And nobody likes to be thought of as second best. Right?”
Alya shrugged, but her indifference vanished when she asked excitedly, “Where did the person find crayons?”
Galina shook her head in agreement, remarking, “It might be a clue to the poster’s author. Don’t you think so, Sasha?”
For the first time since learning about the murders taking place at the Parsky farm, she’d called him “Sasha,” instead of “you.”
“So too might the poster cardboard, which is hard to find.”
Petr nearly leapt from his chair. “Goran has thin cardboard.”
“How do you know?” asked Galina.
“The other night, he was working late, so I strolled over to see him. You know I’ve always been interested in photography. He was using cardboard for backing on a picture he intended to frame.”
Sasha mumbled to himself, “The uncle in Moscow.”
“What’s that?” asked Petr.
“Nothing.”
Alya deepened the mystery when she remarked, “I sometimes see an old man go into the studio. He’s from town, not the school.”
“You know him?” Galina asked.
“No, but I’ve seen him in the village square. He’s sort of scary.” She waved her hands and described his mushroom-like hair. “You’ve seen him, too, Mamma.”
Although Petr knew nothing of the “death cap,” Sasha and Galina did. At that moment, Sasha knew whom to ask about Dolin: Brodsky. Goran had photographed Bogdan Dolin, and, in fact, had volunteered that he found him worth talking to. Bogdan had served time in the Arctic wastes, where many ex-prisoners married and remained, and yet he had returned to Balyk. Why? Was he from this town or area? Given his antipathy toward Brodsky, Bogdan may have crossed swords with Avram, in which case Brodsky could tell him about this man. Sasha leaned over the table and patted Alya’s hand.
“You may have solved the riddle.”
Gleefully, Alya said, “Have I?”
“I think I know the person.”
“Tell me!”
“In this country, Alya, you never name names unless you are absolutely certain, and even then you have to think twice.”
Sasha had come close to sharing his suspicions, but in the current environment the least said the better.
✷
Wednesday nights, Galina conducted her male chorus in patriotic and classical songs. Four of the twelve young men actually had promising voices, two tenors, a baritone, and a bass. She had never learned music formally in a conservatory, but from her grandmother who played the balalaika and a beautiful accordion inlaid with ivory. The older woman had taught her granddaughter to read music, play a violin, and sing. Galina most enjoyed voice lessons because she could sing in virtually any venue, whereas she could hardly carry around a violin with her to play when she felt in the mood. Her pitch was perfect and her ear unerring. If a singer failed to hit the note perfectly, too sharp or too flat, she could immediately identify the offending voice.
Benjamin Korsakov, a countertenor, was one of the “tin ears.” He keenly loved to sing and had a bellows for a chest, but he could never quite land on the note. “Benjamin Korsakov,” she would say, “if you must sing flat, then sing softly.” Although the other students snickered, they loved “Benjie” for his passion. They also loved him for his uncomplaining nature, despite a feckless father who treated learning as the devil’s dung, and a sickly mother so thin you could see through her nearly transparent skin to her ailing arteries. An only child, Benjie stuttered, except when he sang; and then, as if to dispel his frustration, he sounded like Gabriel’s horn. When the chorus performed for the public, Benjie’s mother was sure to be found front and center. His father attended only once, dozed off, snored, and was led from the room objecting to having been awakened. Benjie’s classmates pretended that the incident never happened.
Neither a slow student nor a particularly gifted one, Benjie had been admitted to the Michael School for mysterious reasons. His parents had no money, and, as Devora Berberova knew, the state wasn’t paying. So who was? Benjie’s father never worked, spending his days producing ash. He was a prodigious pipe smoker. Yet another mystery was who provided his tobacco money. The only saving grace was that the bronchitic and stenotic Ivan Korsakov suffered from narcolepsy, which meant that his habitual smoking was regularly interrupted by sleep. How he had found time to father Benjie was a standing joke.
Natalia Korsakova, Benjie’s mother, who had once cooked and cleaned for Avram Brodsky during his tenure as director of the school, performed domestic duties around Balyk and worked as a midwife, a skill that had been passed down in her family from mother to daughter. It was rumored that she had delivered Benjie without assistance while her husband slept. Needless to say, Benjie was the apple of her eye, and she had sung to him from his first day in the cradle. As a young boy, he had a high-pitched voice that remained with him well into adulthood. Before the Balyk church had been closed and services banned, Benjie’s soprano-like voice had gained him a place in the choir, and everyone in town looked forward to hearing his soaring countertenor, even though his pitch was frequently off. It was suggested by more than one person that the Michael School had admitted Benjie for his voice, but Galina knew that the townspeople had so little music training themselves that they wouldn’t know a flat from a sharp. Tutoring him, as she often did, she treated him as a surrogate son, inviting him to dinner and watching him make loneliness less familiar to Alya, who never forgot him.
Alya’s memory was remarkable for how much she could remember and from such an early age. In her adoptive home, she normally suppressed her memories and lived in the present, but on winter days, a certain slant of light brought to mind her parents and the happy times they’d spent together. The Selivanovs had kept her parents’ names alive, Maja and Yefim Boujinski, and Alya had even managed to rescue a photograph of the three of them in a park, she on a swing, and they standing on either side of her. Her memories were always of places, phrases, and disembodied particulars. She remembered snowflakes disappearing in a river, a pair of yellow woolen mittens, a zippered bear suit dyed blue that she wore on the coldest days, a luge, a hill that children thronged to when the snow was right for sledding, a gully at the bottom of the hill that capsized more than a few of her friends, a woodland path in a birch forest, melodious birdsong, foxes with white tails, a pony ride in a nearby ring, a sliding board, a merry-go-round, a calliope, a man playing the accordion and leading a monkey on a chain, a bird seller, winter festival chocolates and choristers, Easter and painted eggs and the smell of incense, fasting during the day for Ramadan (she had insisted on imitating her parents) and stuffing herself in the evening on sweet meats and homemade bread and honey, her father’s Koranic readings to the family, his barbering tools, and especially the silver comb and delicate inlaid brushes, her mother’s shoes, which she loved to try on, neatly arrayed in the closet.
Unlike Alya’s tutor, Ekaterina Rzhevska, a retired elementary-school teacher who had settled in Balyk to be near her son, Benjie had a way with Alya. Ekaterina came to the Michael School each day and tutored Alya and three other children, the offspring of teachers. Sasha had equipped a small room at the back of the school for this purpose. Katia, as the children called her, grounded her lessons in language and literature, and in the basic elements of arithmetic. What she lacked was a sense of humor and flexibility. She looked and acted like a ferule. Straight as a pole and thin as a pipe cleaner, she wore her gray hair tightly pulled back in a bun. Her face resembled a skin stretched to its limits, forcing her to speak out of a constricted mouth. Fastidious in her habits, she checked the children’s fingernails each day. Not a naturally warm person, Katia could, when the situation demanded, embrace an ailing child. Neither Galina nor the other parents complained.
In comparison to Katia’s stoicism stood Benjie, all mirth and merriment. He didn’t tutor Alya but he brought out her playful qualities, introducing her to card and board games, sharing his scrapbooks with pictures of movie stars, and making up stories. Galina frequently observed that Benjie would one day write fiction. Given the stories he told, Galina predicted he’d become a teller of fairy tales. One “word” story that both Galina and Alya liked concerned a beautiful firefly, Gloriana, who often misbehaved and refused to come home at a decent hour, wishing to spend the evening making dazzling loops and turns and flips and dives and dips. When her mother chided Gloriana and said that her behavior was sinful, Gloriana merely performed another trick and replied, “I want to sin till late.”
Everyone would laugh at the pun, but most of all Benjie.
✷
Galina had assigned each singer a solo part and, in some cases, divided the part so that every member of the choir would have the opportunity to sing. For their next concert, Benjie asked if he could sing a soprano aria from The Marriage of Figaro: “Dove sono I bei momenti di dolcezza e di piacer” (Where are the beautiful moments of sweetness and pleasure?). The aria, one of Mozart’s most poignant, seemed a strange choice—until his moment came. Then everything changed. In the opera, the countess is remembering the former happy days she spent with her husband, who is now running after other women. Benjie took a step forward on stage. The audience, composed mostly of students and townspeople, also included teachers, minor Soviet officials, school maintenance workers, Father Zossima, Sasha, Petr, and Alya. With the opening notes, Benjie dispelled Galina’s fear that he would sing flat. He was right on key. But instead of the famous Italian words “Dove sono . . . etc.” Benjie substituted the Russian words “Here sits my beautiful mother, who gives me pleasure and joy.” Before the audience could react, he continued and concluded in Italian. At the end, the audience sat stunned. Was it from Benjie’s audacity or the brilliant manner in which he had introduced Russian into the aria? In this moment of awe, Benjie bowed and stepped back into the chorus. Before the audience could respond, his fellow choral members, who knew never to applaud one of their own, clapped and stomped their feet. An instant later, the audience followed suit and demanded that Natalia Korsakova take a bow with her son. She slowly ascended the stage and embraced Benjie, both of them now in tears. The audience, equally moved, called for an encore. With his mother smiling and looking out over the heads of the audience, Benjie repeated his love song to his mother.
Sitting there, as affected as the others, if not more so, Sasha, thinking of his own mother, and perhaps all mothers, could not help but wonder at the Russian people’s great store of feeling. At that moment, political parties, personal jealousies, poseurs, Stalin’s paranoia—none of it mattered. What mattered was the music and Benjie, and Benjie was the music.
Although Brodsky kept up with news about the chorus—their performances and the music they’d sung—Sasha wished that Avram’s exilic life did not exclude concerts. They could talk about the Mozart tomorrow night, when Sasha planned to ask Brodsky about Bogdan Dolin. Except for an occasional walk in the woods and his Sunday chats in the square, Brodsky remained at home. It was his study and cell. An elderly woman from town brought him food. Where he found the money to pay her was anyone’s guess, but he never seemed short of food, drink, warm clothes, books, or cigarettes.
After the concert, Galina stayed behind to congratulate the students and to share some food and wine that Sasha had paid for out of pocket. Something about Benjie, other than his voice, had strangely moved him. He wanted time to think and volunteered to see Alya home—it was past her bedtime. Petr remained to help Galina. As Sasha and Alya tramped through the snow, he repeated to himself Shelley’s line: “If winter comes can spring be far behind.” Of course, Shelley had in mind more than the seasons. He was thinking of political change, as well. Perhaps Benjie’s wonderful moment would be a harbinger of better things to come. Among those better things, he knew not to count Lukashenko’s assassination. Sasha would have to dissuade Petr from abetting Viktor’s madness, which could lead only to a life of bitter, black years.
Alya, who had understood the reason for Benjie’s interpolation, asked whether other singers—professional ones—did the same. No, of course, they didn’t, but her question made him think of those innocent men and women brought before the bar who subsequently change their stories. An interpolation of sorts. I am not guilty; I am guilty. A difference of one word, but a word powerful enough to decide life and death. If only an aria had that much authority.