In those years, the mania for reading—of a very particular kind—infected Sanya, too. He threw himself into reading musical scores, and spent all his free time in the music library. Unfortunately, borrowing privileges did not extend to many of the scores. His crippled hand limited him so drastically that now and then he was visited by compensatory dreams, one of which had recurred no fewer than five times in the past decade. In the dream, he was playing, and he experienced intense physiological gratification from this activity. His very body was transformed into a musical instrument, like some sort of multistemmed flute. From the tips of his fingers he filled up with music; it traveled through the marrow of his bones and collected in the resonator of his skull. His powers grew limitless. The instrument on which he played resembled a special, very complex kind of piano that produced unearthly sounds. He was aware of hearing music that was at the same time very familiar and completely unprecedented. The music was original, of the moment, freshly minted—but it was simultaneously also his, Sanya’s, own.
Sight-reading allowed him to grasp a musical text, and even came with some advantages. “Reading” with his eyes turned out to be a more ideally refined activity, and technical difficulties ceased to exist. The music poured directly from the page into his consciousness.
Sanya derived enormous pleasure from analyzing the scores. He delighted in the art of instrumentation, the vast opportunities for interpretation. The visual—and, through it, cognitive—perception of music offered him an added dimension of pleasure: sound and sign merged into one, and an exciting picture emerged, an amalgam that contained, possibly, its own indecipherable, illegible content. Even before he had read the notes he vaguely discerned some sort of textual-semantic formula, an interweaving of textual levels or planes, and it seemed to him that the key to the very secret of music was just within reach.
It seemed to him that music, too, was subject to the laws of evolution, the same ones that governed the self-organization of the world, arising from the simplest forms and becoming ever more complex. This evolution could be traced not only in sound, but even in musical notation, the semiotic reflection of the musical thought of an era. He discovered—though this was not a great discovery, since it had been made long before, by others—that musical notation, albeit belatedly, followed the changes that occurred in musical cognition through the ages. This insight led him logically to the attempt to find the laws of development of this cognition—in other words, the evolutionary law of systems of pitch.
When Sanya began, very cautiously, to set forth to Kolosov his ideas about the evolution of music, he stopped him in the middle of his halting explanation, and, with a brusque movement, pulled an American music journal out of a pile of sheet music lying under the table. He turned right to the page he was looking for. This was an article about the composer Earle Brown. The journal had reproduced the score of a piece called “December 1952.” It was a page of white paper covered with a multitude of black rectangles. While Sanya was examining this page in astonishment, Kolosov, chuckling, told him that this wasn’t the end of the story. Subsequently, Earle Brown had written a composition titled “Twenty-five Pages,” and this was, literally, twenty-five pages covered in drawings that could be performed in any order, by any number of musicians. In light of this article, the picture that Sanya was trying to develop acquired staggering potential, according to Kolosov.
If only Yury Andreevich hadn’t been emitting caustic little snorts and coughs under his breath. When Sanya realized that his teacher was mocking him and not taking him seriously, he grew upset and stopped talking altogether.
But the murky evolutionary ideas didn’t abandon him. He experienced a surge of unprecedented boldness and began pursuing in secret the creation of a single law, a kind of general theory of musical systems. The only thing comparable in scope and ambition would have been the Grand Unified Theory. Like a silkworm tirelessly drawing a precious thread from its own being, he fashioned a shining cocoon around himself, and was on the verge of withdrawing into it completely, passing over into a purely speculative, but more authentic, world. This was dangerous; if he had let himself go, it would have been easy to descend into a world of pure madness.
When Sanya graduated from the Conservatory, Kolosov, with whom he still spent a great deal of time, managed to land him a position as an assistant professor in the department of the history of foreign music. (There were no openings in the department of music theory.) In the fall, Sanya began teaching, but he was still preoccupied with his theoretical constructs. Relations between Kolosov and Sanya began to unravel. Sanya wanted Kolosov’s support and approval, but he was met with a skeptical grin. This hurt him.
From time to time, a sense of alarm stole over Anna Alexandrovna’s heart: had her boy, perhaps, chosen too high a register in life?
GIRLFRIENDS
Galya Polukhina, nicknamed Polushka, and Tamara Brin, whom Olga affectionately called Brinchik, had always felt a bit constrained in Olga’s presence. She was the only friend either one of them had. They felt they should avoid saying too much. But not for any other reason than that they loved her, and didn’t want to disappoint their girlfriend with insufficiently high-minded, or even downright vulgar, thoughts and opinions.
Both girlfriends were devoted to Olga, and apart from the irrational aspect of their love, which it was senseless to question, each of them had her own reasons, and very clear-cut ones, for admiring her.
Galina Polukhina came from a poor family. She lived in a semibasement apartment in Olga’s venerable building. She wasn’t particularly pretty, and was an average student—and even that took some effort. In the third grade, Olga was appointed to the task of “pulling up” Galya to improve her grades, and Olga was full of sympathy for her. Olga’s magnanimity was selfless. There was no condescension of the rich and beautiful to the poor and mediocre; this poor and mediocre creature wound around the thick stem like a vine, clinging with its aerial rootlets and sucking gently. Olga, with her superabundant gifts and talents, didn’t notice this.
Polushka was a placid soul. She didn’t know the meaning of envy, she had no insight into the dynamics of human interrelationship, and she was filled with grateful adoration.
Things were different with Tamara Brin. In contrast to Olga, who was diligent and disciplined, Tamara was an “effortless” A student. She appraised the scholastic wisdom on offer with a single glance of her dark eyes, and imbibed it, with a flutter of the sad wings of her eyelashes. Her appearance was striking and strange. She looked like an Assyrian king from the textbook of ancient history; except that the crimped beard of the king, which descended below his lower lip, changed places on Tamara. She had a bush of hair that rose straight up from the top of her forehead. She was, in her own way, a beauty. A beauty for the connoisseur. As a Jew she inhabited a cocoon of untouchability and bore the universal repudiation bitterly but with dignity. Toward Olga she felt a certain kind of rapturous gratitude. In the winter of 1953, when the terrible word was constantly whispered behind the back of the nine-year-old Tamara, Olga was the only one in the class who rushed to the defense of the ideal of internationalism and multiculturalism, and in particular, to the defense of Tamara. When she heard the word kike thrown at Tamara, she cried out through hot tears:
“You’re Fascists! Monsters! Soviet people don’t act that way! You should be ashamed of yourselves. In our country, all cultures and nations are equal!”
Tamara never forgot Olga’s characteristic unadulterated fury, and only due to the righteous wrath of the best girl in the class was she able to come to terms with the horrible school, with the world of enmity and humiliation.