The table gleamed like an iceberg under the sun. The silver had been polished to a bright sheen, the crystal goblets sparkled. On the oval and round serving dishes lay translucent slivers of fish and cheese. Like the illustrious Teacher, she, too, would have been able to feed a multitude with five loaves of bread, because she knew the art of fine slicing. In truth, there were never any leftovers. The food on offer was always meager, though the dishes were many. The newlyweds wore their concert garb—Boris was in a tuxedo, and Liza in a lacy, pale-yellow gown that was not at all flattering.
Among the guests were four of the most celebrated musicians in this part of the world, with their wives. The bald pate of a great pianist shone; the soft body of a great violinist seemed to be melting into the chair. A fifth performer, also considered a musical genius, was the only unaccompanied woman. She had never married. She placed her shabby handbag, a green bottle of kefir sticking out of it, on the table next to the gleaming silverware. A great cellist, a close friend of Boris’s late father, picked at his teeth with a sharpened matchstick. A famous, though not yet great, conductor masticated with his diminutive teeth, looking around to see what was on each plate and pretending not to notice his wife’s angry glances. Not counting the new relatives, nonmusical society was represented by a couple who were neighbors from the dacha—a professor of chemistry and his wife. Eleonora Zorakhovna, a consummate socialite with a genius for prestigious social gatherings, was disappointed, however. The wife of a great composer had just called to say that they wouldn’t be able to make it after all.
The gathering of the century, as she had conceived it, was falling apart.
“Déjà vu,” whispered Anna Alexandrovna to her grandson. “I was here for Eleonora’s wedding fifty years ago. In this very apartment. It was 1911…”
“With the same guests?” Sanya said, laughing.
“Just about. Alexander Nikolaevich Scriabin was here. He had just come from abroad.”
“Scriabin? Here?”
“Yes. He did show up, unlike Shostakovich, who wouldn’t condescend to it. Everyone loved Grigory Lvovich; and no one loved Eleonora.”
“Who else was there?”
“Leonid Osipovich Pasternak and Rosalia Isidorovna Pasternak. She was a marvelous pianist. Anton Rubinstein remarked on it when she was just a little girl. It was a select circle. Birth, affinity, profession … I was here in this house at your age—no, I was younger, of course. That wedding has stayed in my memory my whole life. As you will remember this one,” she added, and sighed.
“How did you come to be at that wedding?”
“My first husband was a musician. He was a friend of the groom’s. I’ll tell you about it another time.”
“Strange that you’ve never mentioned it before.”
Anna Alexandrovna grew angry with herself: she had long ago decided not to burden this gentle soul, her grandson, with her entire past. The friend of the groom was sitting opposite her at the moment, picking his teeth. That was enough—just like that she had been moved, and said too much.
“Liza won’t have an easy time of it here,” she said, changing the subject abruptly.
Liza was comporting herself beautifully. Vasily Innokentievich and his son Alexei, Liza’s father, were strangers in this company; but both of them were well-known doctors, and this put them on an equal footing with the musicians, in some sense. Liza’s mother, on the other hand, was completely out of place. She was overweight, with clearly bottle-blond hair, and very much aware of not fitting in among these guests.
At one time she had been a nurse in a field hospital during the war. It was a “frontline” marriage, unequal and accidental, but solid: their daughter held it together. On the face of the new mother-in-law one could read pride, boorishness, confusion, and awkwardness. Liza sat next to her mother and stroked her hand from time to time, making sure she didn’t drink too much.
Anna Alexandrovna sat on Sanya’s right. To the left of him was a bohemian-looking man with a mane of hair parted down the middle, wearing a black-and-yellow leopard-print ascot. Was he a singer? An actor? They called him Yury Andreevich.
When dinner was halfway over, and they had already cleared away the bouillon cups and the empty serving dish of tiny savory pies (exactly twenty-four of them, according to the precise number of guests), but before the main dish had been served, he stood up to make a toast.
“Dear Liza and Boba!”
Ah, so he’s a close friend, since he calls Boris “Boba,” Sanya noted.
His mouth was unusually mobile. The upper lip was etched with a deep furrow; the lower one protruded slightly.
“You have embarked on the dangerous path of matrimony! Perhaps it is not so much dangerous as it is unpredictable. I wish for you what I consider to be the most important thing in marriage: that it not prevent you from hearing music. This is the greatest possible happiness—to hear with four ears, to play with four hands, to take part in the birth of new sounds that were never heard in the world before you. Music, once it is released by your hands, lives only for a moment before dying away, dispersing into waves moving through space. But the ephemerality of music is just the other face of its immortality. Forgive me, Maria Veniaminovna, for saying such trivial things in your presence. Boba, Liza, my dear friends! From the bottom of my soul I hope that music never deserts you, that it grows ever deeper and fuller in you.”
“Nora!” a low, somewhat rasping voice called out. “Wonderful pies! Give me a few to take home with me, please!”
Eleonora answered with a spiteful glare.
“I’ll have them wrapped up for you, Maria Veniaminovna. They’ll be wrapped up.”
“This is for your memoirs, Sanya. Don’t forget it,” Anna Alexandrovna whispered.
Sanya was already spellbound, as though he had a front-row seat in the theater, in the midst of all these great ones. And the man next to him in the leopard-print ascot was not merely a chance person at table; he knew something important, you could see that at a glance. But who could he be? The old lady who had asked to take home the pies, Maria Veniaminovna, had been Sanya’s idol since the first concert at which he had heard her perform during his childhood.
After dinner, which passed without any ancient Russian exhortations of “It’s bitter!,” they all moved into the study. This was one of the last remaining aristocratic apartments on Marx and Engels Street, formerly Maly Znamensky Lane, behind the Pushkin Museum. In addition, this may have been the only family in the entire country that had lived in the building since its construction, in 1906. The great-grandfather, grandfather, father, and now Boris—none of them had been forcibly removed or had their property confiscated. None of them had been forced to communalize and partition the apartment into smaller units, admitting strangers into their midst. None of them had been arrested. Family legend had it that it was in this very apartment, and not Peshkov’s, that Lenin heard Issay Dobrowen, Eleonora Zorakhovna’s younger brother, perform Beethoven’s Sonata no. 23. Here, in the room next door, he spoke the words (unless Gorky had made them up, for some reason of his own): “Sublime, superhuman music … But I can’t listen to music too often. It works on my nerves and makes me want to say sweet nothings, to pat on the head those people who can create such beauty, despite living in a dirty hellhole…”
And the nothings turned out to be not so sweet after all, and the heads that he patted rolled by the thousands …