and alone as he had felt forty-eight years ago, on the night when those polished black shoes had invaded their Arbat existence for the third, and final, time.
The first time he barely noticed, lost as he was in his new world. His routine of classes, holidays, meals in the months following his attempt to steal Gradsky’s manuscript had become a mere backdrop to the radiant, unearthly discoveries that awaited him almost nightly in the Professor’s dusty, cramped room, where the shouts of boys chasing one another in the yard and the familiar smells of meat pies and hot asphalt never penetrated and where, in the green glow of the lampshade, the precious gilded books slowly released their unforgettable fragrance, that scent of brittle paper and mustiness that for Anatoly would forever be the scent of previously unimaginable beauty. He moved through the summer of 1937 in a haze of secret excitement, inaudibly intoning the sonorous names of men who had walked the streets of strange watery and golden cities in centuries past and yet seemed to him more real than the flesh-and-blood inhabitants of his apartment—shadowy, inconsequential presences with whom he held shadowy conversations or who on occasion subjected him to somewhat less shadowy beatings.
Afterward, all he could recall of the poor unlovely Zoya Vienberg in those final weeks was the nearsighted, trembling fussiness with which she had spent the last day before the new school year sorting her dull brown folders, stuffed to the point of bursting with sheet music, on their kitchen table between meals, and the hysterical note that had stolen into her voice once or twice when she had addressed Galka Morozova. Then, one afternoon in October, Anatoly returned from school to find Zoya Vladimirovna’s door branded with a formidable-looking seal, and his mother and the Gradsky couple oddly reluctant to reply when Anton Morozov proclaimed indignantly that he was not surprised—that, in fact, he had suspected something like this all along. The music teacher never came back, and in another few weeks Morozov’s sister Pelageya matter-of-factly moved into the unoccupied room.
I hardly wondered about it at first, for the woman’s absence was never discussed and our life remained largely the same. But as the autumn deepened, I noticed that some change, slow and painful like corrosion, was eating away at the happiness of my evenings with the Professor. He appeared distracted or uninterested, and would often pause in the middle of a sentence, forgetting to turn the page and listening intently—whether to the dry cough of his ailing wife behind the wall or to some other sound he expected to hear, I was not sure; and gradually, as the cold crept through the cracks of our old rambling building, a sense of unease furtively worked its way into my heart. And then one night, shortly before my ninth birthday, I woke up in the chilly December darkness to a silence that had ceased to be silent, that was filling with the muted sounds of stolidly shod feet trampling through our apartment, through our life.
In the morning, there was a tossing whirlwind of snow outside the windows, and the Professor ran out without a hat and was gone all day. My mother spent the afternoon frantically pleading with remote telephone operators, and then suddenly broke down crying and, clutching my shoulders, told me, in a voice I had never heard before, that my father might be staying in Gorky for a while longer and that I was the only thing she had left. And later that day, Anton Morozov stopped me in the corridor and, towering over me like some hirsute, sour-smelling mountain, asked me whether I knew that Tatyana Gradskaya’s family had all been vicious tsarists and that, before Lenin had set things right, our apartment had actually belonged to the Gradsky couple.
I had not known, and the idea of two people once owning the whole vast unfolding of space where so many lives, including my own, were now concentrated shocked me deeply. I thought of a twisted stump in our ceiling that must have once held a crystal chandelier of the kind I had seen in one of the Professor’s books, and of a large pale patch that I had noticed on the wallpaper in the Morozovs’ room and which, I now recalled the Professor telling me, marked the place where a piano used to stand. I imagined the blue-haired, quiet little woman and the soft-spoken, kindly old man, whom I had thought I knew so well, waltzing through all that magnificent expanse sparkling with the glass and silver and lacquer of a thousand marvelous, elegant, foreign things—and I felt bitter, I felt betrayed.
Beauty did, after all, belong to the bourgeois.
That night, when the front door opened and closed and the unrecognizable steps of an ancient man scuffled across my hearing, I followed him into his study and told him I would visit him no longer.
The Professor’s face was erased by grief; his room lay in ruins about him.
“Yes, it’s best, I think,” he said flatly, avoiding my eyes. “I myself was about to suggest…” Taking off his glasses, he began to rub the lenses with the underside of his jacket, meticulously, needlessly, endlessly. When he spoke again, his voice had aged many years. “Well, Tolya, I have enjoyed our friendship. You know, I was going to make you a present on your birthday—that Botticelli album, actually. You can take it now if you like. I meant to write an inscription, but I’m not sure whether…”
It was strange to see him like this, and I hesitated for a long moment.
“I’ll take it,” I finally said, “but I don’t need the inscription.”
He nodded without surprise, and finding the volume in the chaos of books on the floor, dusted it lightly and handed it to me.
“She’s done nothing wrong, you know,” he said, attempting a smile. “It’s all just a temporary mistake, I’m sure…. Maybe, once she comes back, you and I could resume our delightful art evenings? I would like to think so, Tolya. Well, so long now. Be happy.”
Suddenly uncomfortable, I mumbled, “Thanks,” and left, pretending not to notice his outstretched, embarrassingly trembling hand. As I was closing the door behind me, a rising clump in my throat made me turn and cast a glance back. The Professor was still standing uncertainly amid his mistreated books, his face expressionless in the green glare of the lamp, his unseeing eyes gazing at the empty surface of the desk, where, only the day before, his nearly completed manuscript, the work of his life, had been stacked in neat piles, chapter by chapter.
They took him away two nights later. I was lying awake, and heard the pounding and Morozov’s voice muttering a hurried explanation in the hallway and more voices and heavy steps. Seized with some madness, I crawled through the darkness and, cracking open our door, looked out—for one instant only, because immediately my mother, who must have been lying awake as well, screamed at me in a furious, panicking whisper, and obeying, I drew away.
For a long time we waited, huddling together, she and I, listening to the faraway, barely discernible sounds of papers torn and spirits broken, until more steps, some sharply heeled, others soft and scuffling, traveled from end to end of our apartment, and the front door slammed once again, leaving behind a wary hush.
“It’s over,” my mother whispered in a collapsing voice, but I felt no relief, neither then, nor the next day, nor the day after that—for that momentary glimpse I had had of the broad leather backs and polished black shoes receding into the dimness of our corridor had been enough to inspire me with a numbing, lonely terror that would last for weeks. Night after night I would lie awake, touching the edge of the Botticelli album under my pillow and imagining with a halting heart that soon, soon, any day now, they would learn that I too was different, that I too deserved their righteous anger, that I too had been tainted by enemies of the people—and they would return once more, this time for me. Finally, one evening in February, unable to sustain this wordless, guilty fear any longer, I stole outside with the damning book hidden under my coat, ran down our street, ducked into a courtyard a few houses away, and there, in a murky, quiet corner, cringing under the accusing glare of a few lit windows behind which other boys were surely doing their homework or building nice toy planes with their fathers, I buried my dangerous treasure in a giant drift of snow and darted away.
With the advent of spring, a semblance of normality returned to my life. A new resident, a jocular construction worker who knew amazing card tricks, moved into the Professor’s study, my mother began to talk again about my father’s return and smile her wan, anxious smile, and the Morozov boys grew bored with tormenting me.
“Want to see something funny?” Sashka said to me one day. “In a courtyard down the street, the snow is turning all sorts of crazy colors!”
And so I went and stood in a crowd of children and with them laughed at the golden green and the pearly pink and the brightest copper rivulets of the melting snowdrift. And as I laughed, the last remnants of my secret dread lifted from me, for at that moment I saw that I was finally safe, that I was one of them now, that I could simply forget all about those brilliantly tinted revelations in the darkly glowing room of the treacherous old man who had possessed so many dusty wonders. And yet, somewhere deep, deep inside me, the memory of the rainbow-colored marvels must have survived—and so did the fear, because for the next three years, until the beginning of the war, I would awaken every so often gasping from a nightmare in which I flew down bullet-riddled
