It was cold and I felt that I was about to wrench open an overgrown gate.
“Ready?” I muttered. The violinists’ eyes were wide, asking. “One two three, one two …” The first notes of Chopin’s second movement lifted up. I played a chord. I played a chord and a chord. It was not a beautiful sound so much as it was an orderly sound. There was no bombast, no soaring melody. Looking back, we ought to have played something gay and upbeat. A reel. It would have been a kindness. Instead we played this fragile concerto, snowfall music. It was as though we were filling the work zone with new trees, empty birches and bare white elms. The barracks, the guardhouse became a little harder to see. The stars seemed to come out again, like pinpoints on a map, placeholders. Babu played his lousy flute.
Then the guards said it was time to go, and the brigades began to take formation, and they began to trudge away, through the gate. We kept playing, serenading the workers as they left for their clearings and their pits. I watched my group go — hunched Vanya, tall Sergey, Nikola dragging his fur boots. Bigfoot at the end of the line, gazing back at us. Ten minutes later, when the camp was empty, the Cossack told us to put down our instruments and catch up with our crews.
THE CONCERT WAS A SUCCESS, I suppose. It was a success inasmuch as it gave the performers a few hours away from the wind. The major listened only for a few minutes, standing on the boardwalk, but then he put out a wider call for musicians and there were almost forty of us when we gathered, a week later, in the darkened hall of the cultural-education building. This was no amateur orchestra: there were players from the cities’ philharmonics, teachers from the conservatory. Alexander Alexanderovich Gushkin, concertmaster of the Moscow symphony. And I, their leader, at a rickety upright piano.
There were not enough instruments in the little closet. “I’ll get you some from the other camps,” the major told me. “I want you to play Boléro.”
“Ravel,” I said.
“A Frenchman,” he said, as if he were trying to impress me.
“Yes.” For a moment I was going to pretend that I was impressed, that the major had proven his knowledge and that we were somehow closer for it. But I did not have the energy for this performance. I felt so tired. “We will need a snare drum.”
Then the major said something in French that I didn’t understand.
FOUNDERED IN KOLYMA, I led the camp’s little orchestra. What did I know of conducting? We performed Boléro at night, before a seated audience. I did not play piano; I kept time with a little whittled twig and at the end of the performance the Cossack took it from me, lest I use it as a weapon, lest I use it on myself.
The major had invited officials from neighbouring camps and for the audience, for many of the musicians, it was a joyful event. The booming horns, the weaving woodwinds, the stately percussion. We were not in Kolyma; we were on a Mediterranean hillside, in a Spanish court. We were wearing bright colours, with carafes of red wine. We were in towers, on precipices, part of the major’s well-tended garden.
But I was not really with them. I led the little orchestra and I felt as if I was standing near an open window, watching the curtains shift. As the music rose up, it also vanished. Sometimes it is like this, listening to music: the steady bars let you separate from your body, slip your skin, and you are standing before the shuttering slides of memory. Shades of light, skies filled with cloud, old faces.
At the Paris Opera, I was a man with boxes and wires. Ravel himself listened from the darkness. The smell of tobacco. All this electricity, pretending.
On the deck of a ship, I saw a distant bridge. Harpists on the pier. “Mind the step,” someone said.
Me on the floor of my parlour, laughing, resting against Schillinger’s chair, and all of us passing around a bottle of bootleg rye. Slominsky the journalist — he called it inspiration. A bottle of inspiration.
And then, like a change of film, different intensities of colour, memories of you, Clara. Lamplit and candlelit. Sunlit. Sunlit Clara Reisenberg. Tableaux in which you turned and moved, and moved away. Tableaux in which you were visible only in the corner of the scene, almost hidden. I tried to suppress these images, brushing past to other things: Pash, Lavinia, former students. The pages of an old encyclopedia, the one I used to read in bed as a child. Lepidoptera; Agra; The Mechanical Turk. I tried to remember other faces. Yet you stayed. I looked away and you stayed. All these other things faded and passed, impermanent. Just fancies, gone. Your face was the strongest thing in all of my heart.
I remember when you said you wouldn’t marry me. You looked at me with a face like a question and said nothing. On the steps of a Harlem club, at dawn, with strangers passing on the street. You swallowed. Your hands clenched. I glanced at these small fists but immediately looked back again to your face. I did not want to miss anything. I was smiling like a damn fool. Waiting, smiling, pretending I did not see the way that fear had sprung into your cheeks, like a blush. You were twenty-one and you were not ready to be a wife. Or perhaps you did not love me. Even today it is difficult to write this. In that vital instant I was too ruined to see what was before me. As soon as I saw your clenched hands I was another man, shattered.
THE NEXT MORNING I went to work and I pushed a wheelbarrow full of rocks.
BY DECEMBER, MOST OF OUR living took place in the dark. The few hours of daylight seemed illusory, like silver dreams. We shivered on the road, staring into the circles of our lamps. Sometimes I lifted my eyes and was surprised by an orange sky, a pink sky, my lamplight disappearing into air. But mostly it was darkness, with fine falling snow, temperatures that vacillated and plunged. Men were dying faster. Bigfoot tripped in the ice and tore off two of his toes. He spent two weeks in paradise, in the infirmary, with a hot woodstove and clean white sheets and a nurse who brought him double portions of food, like a hallucination.
He was discharged on a starless morning. The moon always seemed so unkind. Crouched with me, chewing on bread that was nearly frozen, Bigfoot said, quickly, without adornment, “I feel as if I am doomed.”
IT WAS INTO THIS PLACE, into this moonlight, that there came a man in a green uniform.
I was returning from a day’s work, passing through the gate, when a guard called my name. The word cut through the cold and the darkness like a dart. Each of us has these experiences, three or four times in our lives, when the instant itself feels like a messenger.
“Termen!” shouted the guard.
I walked stiffly toward him, across the crushed snow. “Yes?” I said, through my scarf.
Beside the guard, a man in a green uniform sat on a wooden bench. His greatcoat was unbuttoned. He had black hair and thin lips, a simple face except for the large round nose. I had never seen him before.
“This is Termen,” the guard said.
The man in the green uniform mildly considered me, from my face down to my ragged boots. He gave the guard a small nod.