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.
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.
(In the street he saw a man slip his arm around a woman and that was extremely painful.)
He tried to understand (which merely means to believe) that what she was really saying was this: I will be your sky; I will never stop smiling upon you; but now you will not see that smile anymore.
And so the very next time he saw her (she’d come from far away to meet him here at the Eliseyev store) he gave her the envelope, murmuring: I have something that doesn’t belong to me. She accepted it in silence. And after that, neither one of them ever mentioned the photograph again. ‣