After his torments under Mr. Kingsley, Yurik transferred to another class with another jazz-guitar teacher, James Lovesky. Their tastes were more similar. Every day opened new possibilities, but he needed more theory. Before, Yurik had played the guitar as if it were something like a wind instrument; now he began to understand polyphony. It was in the jazz-guitar class that he acquired his musical literacy, and began writing his first arrangements of jazz standards. This turned out to be the most interesting aspect of study for him.
Yurik attended the school for a year and a half. He played in the school jazz band, and was definitely considered to be a cool cat. He himself didn’t doubt this. He considered his former infatuation with the Beatles to be just a phase he’d had to go through—though a necessary one, and he still cherished the memory of his first musical love. Now he played what the great jazz guitarists played—Wes Montgomery, Charlie Byrd, George Benson. He imitated them, biting the inside of his lip, tense and focused. Among his numerous new musical influences, Django Reinhardt, a Belgian Gypsy with two fingers missing on his left hand, occupied a special place. He was simply beyond comprehension, the way a creature from another planet is beyond comprehension. There could never be another like him.
In the first year of his American life, Yurik discovered New York on his own, and fell in love with the city. It was the capital of his music, and the musical life of the street in the Big Apple captivated him most of all. It was the city of a dream come true. When he got there, he was ready to follow the first street musician he came across, as he had used to follow cats through the neighborhood in childhood.
Every Sunday, he wandered through the city, either with other classmates or on his own. When he grew bolder, he began to take his guitar with him and join up with musicians playing in the subway, or in the squares. Sometimes they chased him off; sometimes they let him play with them. But from that moment on, he never parted with his guitar. Wherever he went, the guitar went with him.
His relations with Martha were strong and positive, although she was often very worried about him, especially the first night when he failed to return from the city, staying overnight with a group of musicians and smoking weed with them. These all-nighters became more and more frequent. New York was so hospitable, so friendly … Long Island now seemed to him to be claustrophobic, like a village where nothing ever happened. This was not the case, of course—it had its own jazz festivals, its own in-crowds. But nothing could compare to New York.
Somehow or other, he managed to graduate from high school. He never learned to read Shakespeare in English, but his “home schooling” with Nora, her reading aloud, and the constant theater talk, in which Shakespeare received a lion’s share of attention, gave him a strong enough background so he could get passing grades. The math teacher, who occasionally had to wake Yurik up during class, was irritated by his somnolence; but she knew that the math problems, which his classmates sweated over, he could solve better than they, even in his head, and more quickly. They taught math better in Russia; or maybe Vitya’s genes had something to do with it … He had very good grades in his music subjects, and Martha, who had no ear for music, was excessively proud of his achievements and dreamed that he would continue his studies, perhaps at a first-rate music school, like Berklee.
At the end of his second year, Yurik had asked James, his favorite music teacher, “What would you do if you were me?”
“I would lock myself in my room for five years and play. You don’t need to do anything else.”
This suggestion was very much to Yurik’s liking. The only thing that didn’t appeal to him was the locked room. The city, which was everything but a locked room, beckoned to him. Life was lived to the hilt there, on every street corner. He wanted to learn by engaging in life, playfully.
Nora flew over for his high-school graduation ceremony. The plane landed early in the morning. She dropped her big suitcase off at Marina Chipkovskaya’s and went directly to Long Island.
Yurik was glad to see his mother, but he greeted her as though he had just said goodbye to her yesterday, and not a whole year and a half ago. He immediately grabbed his guitar to show her what he had learned during that time, and played for four hours straight.
After the trans-Atlantic flight, Nora was a bit groggy and disoriented. She hadn’t slept in two days. At first she was very happy about Yurik’s music; then she started nodding off, and ended up in a strange state between sleeping and waking. In her head, some sort of light show was set in motion: northern lights of blue and acid-green, a hideous scarlet and orange, and she slipped into some parallel musical space, where dangers lurked, and from which she couldn’t escape.
She stayed overnight at Vitya and Martha’s house, in the living room. Martha was kind and welcoming toward her. It seemed that her adoration of Vitya extended to Nora as well—amazing. Out of the corner of her eye, Nora noticed how Vitya squeezed Martha’s wrist affectionately, how he pulled the chair out for her when they were sitting down to dinner. Apparently, he had learned to see other people. Was it actually possible that a person who had taken a purely expedient view of other people his whole life had finally matured when he was in his forties? Could his love for a plain woman, no longer young, actually bring this about? It was also remarkable that Vitya never even asked about what was going on in Russia. Granted, what was happening there had no bearing on his professional activity, and he didn’t perceive any difference between Gorbachev and Yeltsin, as he didn’t perceive so much else.
The next morning, Nora and Yurik went to New York together. Yurik showed his mother around town, taking her to the musically hip spots that upstanding citizens and prosperous folk weren’t even aware existed. He took her to the Lower East Side, to all his favorite places. Nora, who had explored the city quite thoroughly on her previous visit, with Tengiz, marveled at how multifaceted it was—it seemed to contain a whole host of disparate cities, independent and aloof from one another, but blending seamlessly into a larger whole. On one end of the street, you saw well-heeled, manicured people in business suits rushing to and fro; at the other end, brash, down-and-out tramps and dangerous-looking fellows in ripped undershirts were hanging out on the street corner.
They had not gone two steps before they ran into a black musician, who was snacking on a hot dog, sitting among a collection of pots and pans arranged around him, some of them standing on the ground, others hanging. Yurik greeted him with a warm handshake and clapped him on the back, and they exchanged a few words.
“My mother,” Yurik said, pushing Nora toward the man. He held out his hand to her. For a plump hand, it was unexpectedly lively and mobile, like a small animal. The musician finished eating his hot dog and struck the hanging pot, which resounded with a surprisingly low sound. This was the overture. He let the sound fade out, then began tapping with his fingers, beating with his fists, and slapping with his palms, and in this way played his improvised drums.
“They call him ‘Pots and Pans,’” Yurik said proudly. “A local genius. The only one of his kind in the world.”
The City as Theater, Nora thought, still not having managed to explore all the little squares that deserved attention, its cozy, secluded stages and wings, utility rooms and workshops. Yurik did not just show her his favorite places, but revealed to her at the same time how the city accepted him as one of its own children, one of the multitude of players, dancers, the dissolute, the merrymakers. Nora didn’t fully understand at that time the degree to which this atmosphere of freedom and flight was fed by the fumes of marijuana, hashish, and other intoxicating substances. And heroin would never have occurred to her.