5

SERGEI PEROVSKY was in his late twenties, around the same age as Michael himself. Slim, with the body of a dancer and the sort of face you never see in the West – a face where emotions and thoughts flitted across the mobile features with extraordinary transparency. He looked completely alive. But the sensuousness had a subtle austerity about it too, making it a strong, nearly cruel face, for although his mother was Ukrainian, Sergei had inherited his father’s Tartar blood.

He and Michael had liked each other on sight when they had met on the Kreshchatic, literally bumping into each other. And to Michael the scene inside this old empty wooden house on the outskirts of the city, where Sergei had brought him, was meat and drink.

‘This is what I’m about,’ he thought to himself. ‘Now and always.’ And in his heart he made his vows again.

It was like nothing he had ever come across before in his musical world. This was a rock band. Raw, absolutely bloody raw. Like a new-born creature lying there in the straw.

They played on anything they could get. They made music out of bits of steel and wood, a shovel and a piece of tin, even what looked like a dustbin lid. Someone played the saxophone. Someone else a wheezy cello. Among them all was a girl fiddler, standing, her feet a little apart, in a brown dress that swirled around her calves to the movement of her body as she played a precise, uninhibited and glorious top harmony above and over the cacophonic rock sound. She swirled like a bird over it, dipping and rising.

Sergei took off his coat, and offered Michael a chair with a broken back. Sergei was the one who held this lot together, Michael soon realised. He didn’t conduct in the usual sense, he sort of danced the music. And he became the embodiment of it. He controlled it.

Michael’s mouth went dry with excitement. This is what he’d come to this country for, he had known there was a reason. The music tore through his brain. He realised some part of him had been dead.

Watching Sergei and listening to the throb of the music, he thought this man was probably the most free human being he had ever met. There was an extraordinary wit there too. Both Sergei and his music were filled with wit. There was absolutely no naïvety about this harsh, exciting sound which was new to Michael. The excitement he felt was like a potent drink. He longed to be part of it all.

There were half a dozen musicians besides Sergei and the girl who played the fiddle. And there were a dozen or so people hanging round, listening and smoking. A couple danced in the corner, their whirling dance becoming a sexual display for each other. One painfully thin, huge-eyed man stared into space; oblivious to the cold, he was naked from the waist up and his torso was decorated with musical notes – clefs and minims, either tattooed or painted on, Michael wasn’t sure. His ribs stuck out like a famine victim’s.

The music throbbed through everyone like a heartbeat. The old wooden house vibrated and shook. It was fortunate that it stood in an isolated place, in a little clearing in a wood which was really the remnants of a village and had an abandoned air.

When the musicians finally packed up, Sergei took Michael’s arm and they wandered outside. Sergei, who was bathed in sweat, put on his old coat which came down to his ankles – it looked like an old military coat and had red insignia on the sleeves. The snow crackled under their boots.

They had wanted so much to communicate with each other, but neither had much command of the other’s language. Michael was saying, ‘Good, good,’ in Russian, and Sergei was slapping Michael on the back instead of using words.

Sergei stopped then and threw back his head, breathing the freezing air. ‘Come,’ he said to Michael, and led him to a battered old truck. ‘Come,’ he repeated.

Michael had all day to fill in. Maisie was at her lectures morning and afternoon. There were even lectures some evenings, he had noticed on the programme. He was going to be at a bit of a loose end. Though somehow, he thought, perhaps he wasn’t now.

Sergei was driving the rackety truck hell for leather down the rough track which led on to the main highway back to the city. He lived in a small flat in a crumbling modern block, with his wife Annya, and two little boys.

Annya smiled shyly at Michael, and the two boys sitting together in one chair looked at him gravely and intently, as they might a flamingo or polar bear that their father had brought home. Their intense stare became so fixed that Annya shooed them out of the room, afraid they would seem rude. But they soon came back.

Michael looked round the little room, a characterless box that had somehow been given life and warmth by the kind of people who lived in it. There was colour everywhere. An embroidered table-cloth, orange enamel dishes, a pot of shiny green leaves, a heap of little red and yellow apples, bright posters on the walls.

Annya was dishing up some sort of meatballs for their dinner. She pointed to a chair for Michael to sit with them. Sergei had brought home several bottles with foil tops which turned out to be vodka.

‘Thank you,’ said Michael in Russian, accepting the plate of food and the glass of vodka. ‘Spasseba.’

Sergei drank his vodka from the bottle. They ate with nods and smiles, but few words, Michael watching Annya and Sergei unobtrusively. Both parents were thin and agile. Annya had beautiful hooded eyes, blue as cornflowers, and a wide mouth. She had thin delicate wrists and long brown fingers and quick movements. They really looked rather alike in some ways, but Annya looked more dreamy then her husband – and kinder. Sergei, for all his wonderful good humour and obvious wit, had that cruel look to the mouth – at least, it could have been cruel. But not now, as he tenderly fed the younger child who had lost interest in his meal because of the strange flamingo at the table with him.

On his way back to the hotel, Michael saw Maisie and ran to catch up with her. She said she had been looking for him. He kissed her.

‘Good lecture?’ he asked.

‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘Werner on Byzantine ikon painting – the last phase. It was excellent material but he is an awful speaker. He has that way of making interesting facts sound incredibly dull.’

‘I’m glad I wasn’t there.’

They held hands as they hurried up the flight of steps to the hotel and he held the heavy door open for her.

‘Where did you get to?’ she asked.

‘I met Sergei – he asked me to his flat to meet his wife. He’s got two little boys.’

He didn’t mention the out-of-town music session. It occurred to him to tell her about it, perhaps he would later, but he realised suddenly that he could not convey to her properly what it had meant to him, so he might as well keep quiet. It wasn’t that he hadn’t the words, wasn’t articulate enough, it was that he knew Maisie would not really understand what he meant, couldn’t plumb the depths of all that. It wasn’t her world.

He watched her take off her flamboyant coat. Under the layers her slim body in the black woollen dress looked wistful.

‘Don’t you wish I was a professor, a scholar?’ he said. ‘An authority on Byzantium or something?’

‘Why should I wish that?’

‘Then I would be part of your world. We could talk about all the things you are interested in and spend our spare time in museums and art galleries. We would never be lost for words.’

‘You feel different,’ she said. ‘I suppose it’s because we’ve spent the day apart.’ She kissed him, trying to make him what he had been before.

‘Let’s go out, this room is beginning to get to me,’ he said.

‘We’ve only just got in.’

‘It’s such a queer shape.’

‘Mm. The proportions aren’t right, I must admit. They are not right for the human body in some way. The eighteenth century had it right. People feel right with it. It’s all a question of proportion.’

‘Come on,’ he said, picking up her coat from the bed and holding it open for her.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Just for a breath of air. I don’t want to analyse the architecture of this room. It’s got a bed in it, that’s all that matters.’

Outside, their breath smoked in the streetlights. Passers-by huddled up to the eyes hurried past, boots clacking like iron on the icy pavement. Lowry-like against the tall buildings.

‘They build on such a scale,’ said Michael. ‘It makes you feel like Gulliver in the land of the giants.’ He had a sudden longing to be in the kitchen of the farm in Ireland, womblike, dark and warm.

‘Now you are analysing the architecture. Anyway, what exactly did you get up to today?’

‘Nothing that matters,’ said Michael.

The words froze in the air and fell to earth at her feet.

‘Let’s go back,’ he said.

‘We’ve only just come out.’

She longed for him to be happy, or more truthfully, she longed to be the one to make him happy, to be the agent of his happiness. When he was apart from her, she wanted him to suffer and be miserable.

‘We’ll go back,’ she said. ‘I’ve got some whisky and some caviar – we’ll eat it in the queer-shaped room.’

He kissed her, his cold lips on hers, even colder.

‘You’re good at putting things right,’ he said.

The female of the species offers food, thought Maisie grimly.

Later that night, as they lay on the bed, Maisie took one of his hands and, holding it still, outlined his fingers with one of hers, drawing round his splayed-out hand in the air. Then he told her about what the day had meant to him. It frightened her and, although she tried to listen carefully, she only half-heard what he was saying.

He was talking about a great raw sound splitting the air. She heard him say it was the most exciting thing he had ever come across. And he was trying to interest her by telling her how physicists could produce sound on matter, the shape of the sound would make patterns, exquisite spirals and repeating wave patterns, and shapes like the markings on butterflies’ wings. And he wondered what shape Sergei’s music would make, perhaps it would make a whirling cosmic shape like a comet. Then he was talking about the wonderful Sergei and a girl like a swallow.

Maisie gave a small smile. She leaned across him and switched on their little radio and began to undress, sitting beside him on the bed.

‘I’ll find some music,’ he said. He began helping her to undress with one hand as he changed stations with the other. ‘Keep that on,’ she said, listening intently to the snatch of late night news. The Russian voice spoke too quickly for Michael to try to make out what was being said. He stroked Maisie’s back and waited while she listened.

‘They have sent troops in,’ she said. ‘It must be serious.’ Michael was running his finger down her backbone, from neck to coccyx.

‘I love backbones,’ he said. ‘Shall I find some music? An Orthodox service? Yes?’

‘The whole thing is fragmenting,’ said Maisie. ‘It needs an Ivan the Terrible to hold it together.’

‘Don’t let it all worry you. I love you.’

She was quiet, letting his words hang in the air. But he had said it quite lightly, she knew. It was not in the least a vow.

He began to undress. ‘I’ve got a present for you,’ he said. ‘Get into bed and I’ll give it to you.’

Maisie sat in bed, her thin shoulders hunched, breasts half-covered, her knees drawn up under the duvet. She watched him standing naked. She was fascinated watching him shave, she could have watched this for hours. The way he stood, his body planted there in front of the washbasin. She loved to see the practical movements as he drew the razor across his cheek and under his chin, the muscles in the back of his shoulders moving just slightly. He had a nice body, she thought, compact and strong. Leo had been a bit overweight, which made his body ever so slightly feminine and smooth. This man’s body was for her a kind of perfection in that she did not want to change anything, even its imperfections. The slightly thick neck, the brown birthmark on the thigh. Its imperfections were for her what perfected it.

He turned towards her, drying his face with the rough towel. How strange and complicated was the male sexual organ, having a life of its own, like a separate thing. It was like something fabled, not real, you would never have dreamed of it being like that. So curiously made. Like a sea creature which should have a shell.

‘Shut your eyes,’ he said. He hadn’t wrapped her present. It was in a large paper bag. It was a book of Russian fairy tales.

‘This is no ordinary book,’ she said, opening it with delight. ‘Did you know it was made just after the Revolution? It’s hand-printed – look at those lovely rich dyes, the thick paper. The government set up workshops just after the Revolution, and they produced this sort of thing. But this is lovely. Where on earth did you get it? Look, the Frog Prince – how green he is! And Babayaga – oh, she’s horrible, isn’t she?’

‘Trust you to know all about it. I thought you’d like it, though.’

Underneath her genuine pleasure in his gift, she felt secretly that she did not want him to give her things. For if the affair ever ended, and they parted, and she lost him, the things that he had given her would become unbearable. These same beautiful glowing pictures in her book would take on a different aspect.

‘Put out the light,’ she said.

‘I want to see you.’

‘No. Let’s put out the light.’

She switched out the light and the darkness swallowed them up. But in the dark she could see the bright edges of the Princess, and the Frog Prince and Babayaga and the horrible fence of bones round her house.

‘Will you come to the lecture tomorrow?’

‘I said I would meet Sergei. He wants me to try something out with them, wants me to sing. He’s heard me on record.’

‘Your fame has run before you.’

‘Sergei is the sort of bloke who would know about me if anyone would.’

‘A lucky meeting. Are we going to chatter all night?’

‘No.’ He drew her close to him and began kissing her with moth-like kisses.

Next morning they slept late, having spent half the night making love. Maisie was going to miss the beginning of a much-awaited lecture on Andrei Rublev, and she hardly said goodbye as she left on her own.

Michael went back to sleep, until Sergei thumped on the door, having created quite a lot of consternation at reception. Outside the hotel he had left the engine of his old truck running. When they got to the wooden house where the musicians met, everyone was having a break, messing about with their strange instruments. One of them had a file and was bending his piece of tin into a different shape and filing patterns on it, experimenting with the different sounds it made. The man with the notes painted on him had a seaman’s jumper on covering them up; he was asleep, curled round a car tyre. He looked dead.

Michael wondered what to sing. His music was so unlike Sergei’s savage rock sound. He hummed one or two things to himself. He had been working on a poem. It was Donne, he had set it to music – and over the last day or two had even tried, with Maisie’s help, to translate it into Russian. The language, new and exciting to him, was now part of his feeling about the song.

He began singing, eyes closed, almost to himself, in English.

‘Sweetest love I do not go

For weariness of thee …’

The girl with the violin was listening and picking up phrases. They worked together, like blind people feeling each other, a touch on the cheek, hands brushing against each other, groping towards something.

He sang a verse, inclined his head to the girl, who played a contrapuntal phrase and bowed to him as he took up the words and melody again.

Then he sang in Russian. He tasted and held the strange and beautiful and harsh sounds on his lips and tongue and in his throat. The sound of the words was like a love affair in itself.

And in the middle of it all Michael remembered her for a moment, remembered Maisie, remembered his lover. He was amazed at what she had done to him. He had thought it was just the music – but there was something else battering his heart. Careful, be careful, he thought.