The pianist picked quietly at some song that was definitely not of the domestic variety, but soulful in its own way. It used to be that Zinaida Nikiforovna did not like this newfangled music, but then it grew on her. They played jazz here.
The drummer arrived and set up his drums. He started to warm up. The really hot one was the one with the horn. But he was running late.
It grew dark outside, and lights went on in the club. People started showing up. There was rarely a crowd here.
Tanya felt more and more like sleeping. The piano gloriously purred out one and the same tune, but in different variations, which was rather interesting musically and slightly intoxicating, and she had no desire to get up. Then the horn’s voice rang out. It cut through the piano’s murmur with a dramatic and bitter sound. Tanya turned toward the stage. A not very tall, thin boy held a saxophone with both hands, and it seemed as if the instrument wanted to tear itself from his grasp as he tried to hold it back. What torturous music it was—sweetly painful, bitterly salty, sadly joyous . . . These were improvisations on Miles Davis’s old album ’Round Midnight, the saxophone following Coltrane’s dramatic lead, but at that moment Tanya knew none of this.
The musicians played as if slightly out of sync, the drummer holding back, the pianist heading off ahead then slowing down, while the saxophone followed its own separate road, and occasionally they all came together as if accidentally, carrying on an exchange at the point they met, a question-answer session—about something important, but incomprehensible . . . They all played very precisely and subtly, but the saxophonist was the best of all . . . The wind spun around him, fluttering his straight, blond hair, and Tanya had the urge to place her face right under the sound of his horn . . . She didn’t even notice that Nanny Goat went off to dance with a foreign sailor who looked too scrawny and intelligent for so masculine a profession. Some creep approached Tanya, and she jolted in fright: no, no. He went away. Nanny Goat continued dancing with scrawny-guy and was even communicating something in a mix of German and French, which somehow overlapped with his English and Swedish . . .
“Why did I give up music? Dad was right: sit at the piano; it flows from your fingers; you’re just a container, a mechanism for making the transfer from sheet music to sound . . . I don’t remember why I gave it up . . . Because of Tomochka, that’s why . . . The Komsomol consciousness of the idiot . . . It wasn’t the right music anyway. Music like this I’d never have given up . . . That and that,” she thought, noting the sighs of the saxophone and the heartbeat of the drummer . . .
“Whatever dragged me into that scientific rat’s nest? I could have studied music . . . How expressive that saxophone is! I never realized that it had the intonations of a human voice. Or is the musician that talented? Yes, probably the latter . . .”
The Swede escorted them back to Zinaida’s place. The two of them liked each other, but it was clear that this evening would be the end of something that wasn’t even started. He gave Nanny Goat a present, a notepad that already had writing in it, with a black leather cover—really classy. He didn’t have anything else. He wrote his address on the first page. Rune Svenson. And that was it. Because the next morning his ship was heading out to who knew where and forever. What a shame!
They were let in by Zinaida’s sister, who lived in the same communal apartment and had kept watch over Misha’s sleep. By the time Mama Zina, who worked until three, returned, everyone was asleep. In the morning she saw her guests to the bus station, and they set off on the flat, dusty road. Sitting in the jolting, sweltering bus, Tanya remembered that that night she had had a dream with yesterday’s music in it, but in proportions larger than life, and it was performed by unusual sounding instruments . . .
Odessa and its suburbs ended about forty minutes later, giving way to a dusty, bumpy road, to fields annihilated by heat, to burned-out corn, and to feather grass. Nanny Goat was the first to get sick: she and her Swedish comrade had got carried away not just dancing, but with an exotic combination of cocktails that wrenched her Russian stomach even without the jolty road. Then little Misha threw up. Tanya held out the longest, but three hours of jostling suitable only for cosmonauts in training and not for delicate beings—particularly pregnant ones—unglued her as well.
They crawled out of the bus near a string of whitewashed peasant huts turned gray from the dust of orchards and tomato gardens. This miracle of nature was called Kurortnoe, “Resort Town.” Only there was nothing of a resort about it. Just more of the same dusty fields, with the sea nowhere in sight. In short, there was nothing there but heat and ferocious sun. They asked a woman passerby with a bucket full of tomatoes where the sea was.
“Over yonder,” she waved in no particular direction. “You lookin’ to rent?”
“Yes, to rent.”
The woman led them toward her place. Along the road they ran into two more women. They stopped and chatted quickly in not quite understandable Russian. After which the first woman passed them on to one of the others, and she led them off in a different direction. Sickly cypresses came into sight, with something resort-looking behind them. It was a resort hotel, behind which more little white houses appeared, and the new arrivals were taken to one of them. They rented a separate little house in a garden alongside a wooden outhouse with a tin sink attached with a huge rusty nail to a ridiculous lone wall—all that remained of a demolished shed. Beds of tomatoes stretched around the little house: they were “oxhearts,” a rare variety, huge lilac-crimson beauties, sooner fruit than vegetable . . . This was the sole local tourist attraction, the sole local delicacy, and almost the only food there was for people, pigs, and chickens. The tomatoes were used to make borscht and jam; they were boiled down into paste, dried, and left to rot. As the new arrivals figured out the next day, the local store had no bread, no butter, no cheese, no milk, no farmer’s cheese, no meat, and no lots of other things, but they did sell a low-grade flour, vegetable oil, canned fish, and chocolate candies . . . For the time being, having consumed the travel rations Mama Zina had provided, they set off to find the sea, which they still had not set eyes on and about which their landlady had said, waving in a certain direction, “over yonder.”
They set out in the indicated direction along a beaten path through the feather grass and arrived at a steep cliff. The land ended, and the sea began. It lapped—invisible and inaudible—far beneath their feet and merged with the sky in the blinding gray haze seamlessly, without even a hint of a horizon.
An earthen staircase haphazardly reinforced with wooden posts led to the water. Down it Tanya and Nanny Goat led a recalcitrant Misha, who was a bit cowardly and rather lead-footed. Having overcome about a hundred feet of crumbling steps, they found themselves on a sandy shore that was peopleless and touchingly sad, like the shore of an uninhabited island.
“Awesome,” said Nanny Goat.
“The end of the earth,” Tanya confirmed.
“There’s nothing here,” Misha whined in disappointment.
“What’s not here?” Nanny Goat said in surprise.
“Where they sell ice cream, and in general,” Misha explained his disappointment.
The sea was shallow, warm, and gray . . . It pretended to be calm, tame, as if it never battered the local shore with its autumnal storms that eroded many miles of barren, but hard earth . . .
They went in for a dip, gave Misha swimming lessons, built a maze out of wet sand, then fell asleep, waking up only toward evening when the sun had relented and a breeze blew from the sea . . .
Their landlady, a cook at the local resort hotel, turned out to be simply a treasure. In the evening she took them to the kitchen and showed them the cellar, whose shelves were lined with jars of butter preserved in salted water and pyramids of stewed meat—Soviet man’s daily bread.