All these family legends, which had now become her own, Liza told Sanya when they went out on the balcony to talk. And something else: Dobrowen had not played the “Appassionata” that evening at all, but Sonata no. 14, the “Moonlight” sonata. The experts had mixed things up.
In the study, they had started smoking. A servant served coffee on a tray.
“Everything’s so British,” Sanya whispered to his grandmother.
“No, Jewish,” Anna Alexandrovna said.
“Nuta, that sounds quite anti-Semitic. I’m surprised at you.”
Anna Alexandrovna took a deep draw of her cigarette, flaring her delicate nostrils. She let out the smoke, shaking her head.
“Sanya, in our country, anti-Semitism has always been the exclusive privilege of shopkeepers and the nobility. By all accounts, our family is part of the intelligentsia, though rooted in the aristocracy. I love Jews, you know that yourself.”
“I know. You love Mikha. It’s a matter of indifference to me whether someone is a Jew, a non-Jew, or otherwise. But for some reason, of my two closest friends, one and a half are Jewish.”
“That’s what I’m talking about. Maybe there’s a heightened sensibility?”
Anna Alexandrovna truly did have an aversion to anti-Semitism; she had meant something else by her comment. In her youth, she had refused to marry Vasily Innokentievich, who continued to love her his whole life. Now fate was taking revenge: Liza, his granddaughter, had rejected her refined, sensitive Sanya in favor of this flabby young Jewish man.
Anna Alexandrovna’s version of things was somewhat off the mark, since Sanya had never proposed to Liza, and had wanted from her only amicable loyalty and heartfelt intimacy. Liza had had no grounds on which to reject him. But from their early childhood years, Anna Alexandrovna had been certain that these children were made for each other. In her heart she reproached Liza, believing her choice to be self-serving careerism. And, somehow, in her mind, his Jewishness figured as one of the unpleasant characteristics of Liza’s new husband.
Liza came up to Sanya, a goblet in hand. Her new wedding ring shone on her finger. She was leading the man in the leopard-print ascot with the other.
“Have you met Yury Andreevich? He’s a professor of music theory, Sanya. Here’s a person who might be able to resolve all your musical problems.”
“It’s rare that one meets someone with musical problems,” Yury Andreevich said, looking at Sanya with lively interest.
“Oh, what nonsense, Liza.” Sanya was both embarrassed and affronted. How could she have been so tactless?
Before Sanya could say anything else, he saw the cumbersome old lady, her handbag under her arm, trundling up to the piano.
Eleonora Zorakhovna had not foreseen this impromptu performance. According to her plan, dessert was the next point on the agenda: coffee, ice cream, and small pastries that the servant was already bringing out from the kitchen. But the performer, paying no attention to the tray with pastries, was drawn to the piano like a boxer to the ring, her massive head lowered, her hands still hanging loose at her sides. She dumped her heavily laden handbag on the floor to the right of the pedals, rummaged around in it, and extracted, from under the kefir bottle, her sheet music, which she placed on the music stand. Then she sat on the swiveling piano stool, her large body swaying slightly, and looked up, as though trying to decipher some message written on the ceiling. Covering her eyes, having apparently received her message, she struck a chord heavy as a watermelon. Then there was a second, and a third. They were strange chords in and of themselves, and augured something unprecedented.
“Sit down,” Yury Andreevich whispered. “This will last eighteen minutes, if she keeps up the tempo.”
Sanya had never heard music like this before. He knew that it existed, agitating music, hostile to the romantic tradition, which trampled on the old norms and canons. He had picked up on the waves of disapproval and mistrust it awakened, but he was hearing it now for the first time with his own ears.
He was listening to something absolutely new, and he didn’t understand how it was constructed. He was adept at listening to another kind of music, “normal” music—far more intelligible and predictable. He loved the internal movement of the music familiar to him, the almost importunate touch of the sounds; he anticipated its resolutions, foresaw the ends of the musical phrases.
He knew how absurd and empty the attempts to paraphrase the content of music through a specially evolved pseudo-poetic language were, how contrived and pompous they always sounded. The content of music was not amenable to translation into literary or visual imagery. He hated all those dreary concert-program notes—how one should perceive Chopin, or what Tchaikovsky had intended.
He viewed it the way a small child views the activities of adults, with perplexed indignation—how stupid they are!
What he was listening to now demanded intense concentration, all his attention. It’s like something written in a foreign language, Sanya thought.
The music summoned by the old lady’s hands rose in a stupefying crescendo of sound. Even in the past, Sanya had rarely experienced music so viscerally. He felt the music filling his skull and expanding it. It was as though some unknown biological process had been unleashed in his body, as though he could feel it producing hemoglobin or releasing powerful hormones in the blood. Something as profoundly inherent and natural as breathing, or photosynthesis …
“What is this?” he whispered, thrown off guard, to his neighbor.
The man smiled with his sculpted upper lip.
“Stockhausen. No one performs him here.”
“It’s like the end of the world…”
Sanya didn’t mean the end of the world in a religious or scientific sense. It was simply a notion current among the youth, the jargon of the decade. But Kolosov regarded the young man with interest. As a theoretician, he assumed that this new music signalled the end of one era and the beginning of an unknown new one, and he ascribed great significance to this transfiguration, which was invisible and hidden from most people. He valued very highly those like himself, who were aware of the shift—possibly a shift in the evolution of the world, in human consciousness. They were few and far between, the temporal forerunners of humanity, people who not only presaged the new world, but were also able to analyze and research it.
“I don’t understand how it works, how it’s constructed,” Sanya told Kolosov, falling at once into his mode of thought. “Perhaps it’s not even a new style, but another way of thinking altogether. It’s stunning, disorienting…”
Kolosov felt happy.
“You’re a musician, of course?”
“No, not at all. I would have been … but I was injured. A childhood accident. I only listen to music now.” He showed him his right hand, with its two bent fingers. “I’ll be graduating from the Institute of Foreign Languages next year.”
“Come to see me. I think we’ve got a lot to talk about.”
* * *
Everything that happened that evening after Stockhausen was a blur in Sanya’s memory. Even the image of Maria Veniaminovna herself faded a bit. He only remembered accompanying the young couple to the train station to see them off. They were going to the Baltics for their honeymoon.
What stayed with him was the sense of some portentous event. The next day Sanya went to see Yury Andreevich at the Conservatory, after the class he taught was over. They picked up the conversation where they had left off the evening before.
Later, they went together to a remote district on the outskirts of the city, first by subway and then by trolleybus. This was where Yury Andreevich lived, in an unsightly high-rise in the dreary middle ground between a village that was not quite extinct and the encroaching urban sprawl. They had agreed that Yury Andreevich would give him private lessons.