The Lost Souls of Angelkov (37 page)

She answers simple questions about the estate, the flight of the serfs, and agrees about the relief of the fall’s coolness after the heat of summer.

She drinks the glasses of champagne she’s offered, although she declines the food. Throughout the musical performance she stands at the back of the room. She enjoys the music, watching the eight men without seeing them: they are like a flock of moving black birds making beautiful sounds. But at the end of their last set, when the pianist plays the first chords of Glinka’s Separation in F Minor, she feels as though she’s been thrown into a pond of icy water.

She sees Mikhail, clutching his little composition booklet as he runs after his father.

Setting down her glass with a shaking hand, she stares at the violinist. She is once more in her father’s home, listening to Valentin Vladimirovitch accompany the pianist after he had made love to her mother.

He knows he last saw the woman in black at one of the grand estates that dot the countryside of northern Pskov. When Valentin had been owned by the wealthy Prince Sergius Denisovich Yablonsky, the prince dictated when, what and to whom his carefully chosen orchestra would play. To the audiences in the various opulent salons and ballrooms, the serf orchestra was an evening’s pleasant entertainment. To Valentin, it was his life: the soaring freedom of the music combined with the imprisonment of being owned by Yablonsky.

Now, all that is changed. He’s a free man, and can choose where he wishes to play, with whom and for whom. Yes, everything in Russia has changed since the emancipation.

And she—the woman—is changed as well. Her face is thinner, almost translucent in its paleness, and there’s something about the eyes … She looks older, Valentin decides, but not older in the natural way of the passage of time, of the—what is it, a decade or more? since he saw her. No, this is something deeper. He’s seen this look before, although not usually on the faces of nobility. He’s seen it on the faces of the peasants, those who were so recently serfs, those whose lives have been altered without their control. So something has happened to her, something more than time. All in black, she’s a dark shadow in this room of vibrant colour, though the gown sets off her pale skin so that her neck and hands glow.

Valentin shifts his gaze in her direction for brief seconds as the orchestra members lift their instruments and begin. He lowers his bow as the viola picks up and carries the melody, and stares openly at her, finally remembering. It was at the Olonov estate, her name day fete; she stood at the back of the room. It’s the same today: she stays back, unlike the other women, who politely fight their way for the best seats in the first rows.

At her own celebration, she’d appeared uninterested while the orchestra played, staring at the baroque border around the high ceiling as if intrigued with the detail of the sumptuous room. And yet he also recalls the occasional movement of her eyebrows, the way her head moved like an animal’s that hears an unexpected sound nearby. It had given her away. Unlike the cool, detached exterior she displayed, she was listening with the utmost concentration. He knows music—he has known music all his life—and he recognizes those who also know it. The other young women in their rustling gowns had gazed at the players in front of them with
languorous expressions. They kept their heads tilted sweetly to one side, lips wet, slightly parted, as if waiting to hear their names whispered by the strings of the violins and cellos, or blown softly from the mouthpieces of the wind instruments. They thought only of themselves; they weren’t part of the music. It didn’t enter their blood, rushing through them to create the sensation of a sudden, dizzying fever, too hot and then too cold.

Now, Valentin looks at the woman at the back of the room, trying to remember what he had seen on her face so long ago. Valentin loves women—all women—and has a wonderful memory for them. He has slept with too many to count, but he remembers details about each.

This one he hadn’t made love to, but … Ah. It had been her mother, the Princess Olonova. The daughter … what did he remember about her? There was longing on her face, but not the longing of the beautiful, shallow
devushkas
. Hers wasn’t the need for flirtation and an enviable marriage; hers was for something entirely different. There had been no guile there, in spite of the intelligence in her eyes. Were they blue or green? Possibly grey? They were a changeable, irregular colour, which he sensed would shift from one shade to another, depending on whether viewed in candlelight or sunlight, whether she was excited or weary or sad. He had seen eyes like hers before, although only once, in the face of an old woman. He didn’t know if she was his grandmother or his
nyanya
or simply a stranger who had cared for him at some point in his childhood. Like so many of his memories from his earliest days, the old woman was like something from a dream.

The last time he had seen this woman, she had, finally,
stared into his eyes as he played, and while he knew he should feel shame for how she had seen him with her mother, he didn’t. After that final evening, when they had spoken—he does remember speaking to her—Valentin had lain on a narrow cot in the dank room he shared with the first flautist and the cellist in the servants’ quarters, and thought of her.

He liked having a woman to think of when he played. It filled him with desire as he leaned his jaw more deeply onto his violin and shut his eyes. He would feel the desire come through in his playing. The hunger created a passion that ran down his arms and into his fingers and onto the bow. And then it—the bow—slid smoothly, as if slick with lust, over the strings. His blood ran warm through his veins, along his limbs and into his groin, and he grew aroused as he played, but it was an arousal of the emotions, not the body. As he played, thinking of a particular woman, it was as if his heart grew larger, firmer, pulsing as it waited for … for what? Fulfillment? Some sort of release? Release from what was never clear to him. Sometimes his closed eyes burned with a yearning for what he didn’t recognize.

He had known he would think of her, the Olonova princess. And he did, for the next few weeks, as he closed his eyes and played for rooms of strangers, although she had never again been in the audience.

And after all this time, here she is. What was her name? It was a beautiful name, something elegant, but he can’t remember.

Valentin is weary. He travelled for three days in a drafty
britchka
from St. Petersburg to the small capital city of Pskov, where he played with a group at the afternoon birthday celebration of a baroness. Then he had spent another three
hours getting here—the home of Prince and Princess Bakanev. He only had time to eat a bowl of fish soup with a piece of dark bread and gulp some bitter, lukewarm tea in the kitchen of the servants’ quarters before the two-hour rehearsal, leaving time to change into his evening clothes. The soiree began at eight. Now it was after midnight. Tomorrow, though, he would take up a new position in the household of the prince and princess: he would be music instructor to their two nieces, who were visiting with their parents from Smolensk until at least the New Year.

Is his life much different as a free man than it had been as a serf musician? When the emancipation was announced, Prince Yablonsky had allowed his musicians to take their instruments and musical scores as he dismissed them. Others were not as lucky; many had to leave their beloved instruments and precious scores behind when they were set free from their former owners.

In St. Petersburg, it is easier for Valentin than for some: he has the patronage of Madame Golitsyna, a wealthy émigré from France who had been married to a Russian count. The widow—older than Valentin by twelve years—has taken him under her wing. In exchange for his company and certain favours, she allows him to stay with her when he is in the city, and buys him the clothing he needs for performing.

Valentin learned young—during his first year in Yablonsky’s orchestra, when he was fifteen—that he had something to offer to women. That he could use that gift to get some of what he wanted from life. Since the first gloriously dressed and scented woman took him to a curtained carriage after a performance and showed him how to please her, giving him a small purse of rubles afterwards, Valentin
has used his charm. It made his life as a serf musician more interesting, and the occasional payments in the form of rubles or a fine piece of clothing or expensive cigars allowed him a more pleasurable existence.

Now a free man, Valentin plays when he can at soirees in St. Petersburg, but when work is scarce, he has to take country jobs. These mean uncomfortable travel and longer hours—all without the comfort of coming home to a warm meal and a warm bed with Madame Golitsyna.

Yes, he is now paid for his work, but it’s a pittance.

Nevertheless, he kneels every morning and evening and thanks God that he is a young man in this auspicious time. Now he answers to no one, and no longer lives in fear that his violin will be taken from him on a whim by Prince Yablonsky. He doesn’t have to worry that he will be sent to the fields, never again to feel the satin of the chin rest, the lightness of the bow.

Yes, Valentin Vladimirovitch is grateful to God and Tsar Alexander II, but he now has to live entirely by his wits. He is always watching for the next opportunity—or for the next woman—to create a better life for himself.

Tonight, Valentin sees that the woman who was a girl on the Olonov estate comes in after the orchestra has warmed up. She slides into the back of the music salon lightly, as if her bones are porous and fragile, just at the moment when the pianist lifts his fingers over the keys and bows hover over strings. She moves like a feather falling from the breast of a mourning dove. He knows that when she walks, her footsteps make no sound. After all, hadn’t she entered her mother’s bedroom so noiselessly that her presence startled him?

As before, she doesn’t sit but stands, her hands clasped in front of her black taffeta waist as though at any moment she might lift them in prayer. She fixes her gaze on the ornate fringed draperies over the windows, and she stays like this, unmoving but for her eyebrows. He remembers that she requested the orchestra play Separation in F Minor. He can always recall a woman, and a piece of music.

He’ll have the orchestra play it for her again tonight, and maybe she’ll look at him and recognize him. He wants her to know that he remembers her.

He leans over and sends the message to the rest of the orchestra that they will play the Glinka nocturne as the final number.

“Shall we announce the change in program to the audience?” the pianist asks him.

Valentin shakes his head. He doesn’t care if the audience is displeased. He only cares about getting the attention of the Olonova woman, or whatever her name is now: she would have been married for years. Then again, her black attire suggests that she’s a widow.

He lifts his bow and waits for the pianist to begin. He watches the woman as the sweet notes of the nocturne build, and when he touches his bow to the strings, she blinks—no, perhaps more of a flinch—then looks straight at him. He feels a surge of pleasure. In the next instant, though, he realizes that it’s as if she doesn’t see him. Her eyes shine, glittering and too bright. He can see the green even from this distance. But there’s no recognition on her face.