Snow in May: Stories (14 page)

Eureka! The Uncatchable Avengers will find the legendary treasure guarded by the ghosts of the first prospector, Bilibin, and the ten helpers he killed to keep the gold all to himself. Genka can’t disagree with a plan like this; he can even keep some of the gold. The rest—chests upon chests of it—they will distribute equally among the people of the town. His mother will be happy. She will finally buy a new winter coat and beef to make her famous “snowstorm stew.” He will give some gold to Faina Grigorievna, too, so she could visit her family in Germany. The Avengers will give some of the gold to the school so the teachers never have to go hungry again. Well, only if they wanted to. He felt warmth spreading from his
nutro
to the rest of his body. His ears rang with distant music. Cymbals and timpani. He will hire private detectives from Moscow or London (like Sherlock Holmes!) to find the mayor’s killer. A hundred buzzing violins and violas were circling in on him like a swarm of bees. He will buy mountains of coal. He will melt the city so that spring and summer would come early and stay. Or not stay: he loved playing hockey with Genka in the winter, too. He began to rock, like he’d seen the pianists do at the concerts on TV, their hands springing about in gymnastic contortions. He’d been embarrassed for them before.

Without a doubt, his inability to play his piece through was more than a problem of concentration. Under the bright projector lights and the stares of the audience and the camera, the soldiers marching through the field were amplified to the size of the world. It clogged his still-young
nutro
. To play the simple march, he had to forget all about the Uncatchable Avengers, the murdered mayor, the hungry teachers, the Kolyma gold, and his poor mama. Or play another piece—a virtuoso concerto with full symphonic orchestra. He could already hear the way such fortes and such pianos could sound, as if the instrument were made not of wood and metal but of something alive and breathing. He wasn’t good enough of a pianist yet.

“This is your last chance,” Anna Glebovna growled. Some of the parents were still talking. The children, however, were quiet. They knew that no matter how much they’d practiced, Dima’s fate could befall them all.

“You are embarrassing Magadan’s entire musical community, Ushakov,” she continued. “Your so-called gifted program as well as my music school. This is unacceptable. Any fool with half a mind can play this march. Don’t play it well. Just play to the end, for God’s sake. I don’t know how else to tell you.”

“Are we ready?” the producer said. He had taken off his corduroy jacket. His face was red, his mustache twitchy. “Last take, then we’re moving on to the next participant. Audience, return your chairs to their original places and be ready for the camera. Pleasant faces, content faces. Art is the beauty of life, et cetera. Crew, stand by.”

He walked toward the monitors in the back, tugging on the collar of his turtleneck. “Silence in the studio!”

The microphone lowered above Dima’s head like a bomb on a string. The light panel seemed to have lit up even brighter. Suddenly, he felt a heavy presence behind him. Sandalwood perfume. Faina Grigorievna. He turned around to face her. Her green eyes were unreadable, like windows in an ancient abandoned house.

She bent toward his ear. At the same time that she said “Play,” Dima felt a sharp pain on the top of his left thigh. He looked at his lap: there was a small tear in the fabric of his pants. The spot around it was growing wet with something sticky. Blood. He looked up at Faina Grigorievna, but she was already gone.

“Silence in the studio!” the producer yelled again. He hadn’t noticed anything. Nobody had noticed that he’d been wounded. “Cameras rolling. And action!”

Dima began to play the march. His heart thumped in the gash.

—TaTaTatitati TaTa Tatitati Ta Ta Ta Ta Tatitatita tititata.

The soldiers marched and marched. He felt the pain bury deeper into his leg, spread to the rest of his thigh, then his calf and foot.

—TaTaTatitati TaTa Tatitati Ta Ta Ta Ta Tatitatita tititata.

He picked up and kicked out his fingers, pushing forward. He was losing blood. He had to finish before it began to drip on the cloverleaf floor.

—TuTuTurururu TuTu Turururu Tu Tu Tu Tu Tutututu Tu BAbaBA.

His hands marched on across the black-and-white desert, tired and weary, bleeding. He wanted to crawl to safety, key by key.

—TaTaTatitati TaTa Tatitati Ta Ta Ta Ta Tatitatita tititata.

—TaTaTatitati TaTa Tatitati Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta-tita-TITA.

Applause …

He was done.

“And cut!” the producer hollered from his corner. “Cut, oh saintly father, Lenin and Cheburashka!”

The clock read 12:14.

Dima stood up and walked to his seat in the first row. The applause died down. Did he do well? He was afraid to look at his mother or Faina Grigorievna. He pulled on the fabric of his pants. It hurt. The material had stuck to the cut. He had forgotten to bow.

“Next up is my Rita Larina and after her—Sonya Kovalchuk. Gather your brains while you have a chance, Sonya and all the rest of you, so we aren’t here till evening,” Anna Glebovna said.

Sonya was another one of Faina Grigorievna’s surviving students, and she was good.

“Silence in the studio,” the producer said. “One second, one second. Ushakov, be so kind and leave. We’ve had enough of you for today.”

Dima looked at the producer’s red face. He almost pitied this simple man, with his simple life. Sonya, who sat next to Dima, grimaced sympathetically and offered him a handkerchief.

He didn’t take it. He bolted from the studio, overturning his chair, and ran down the hallway. His mother caught up with him by the exit.

“Dimochka, your coat.” An unsteady smile swung across her face like an out-of-control dancer, bumping into her nose and ears.

They were outside now. Dima squinted at the fuzzy air and the pink sun. He wiped his flooding nose. Pink and yellow dilapidated buildings. Gray and white peeling
khrushchyovkas
. Everything was bathed in touchable light.

“You played so well, Dimochka,” his mother said and rubbed her eyes.

“Did you see that she stabbed me? She stabbed me with her nail file or maybe a knife!” His voice came out high and squeaky.

“Faina Grigorievna?” His mother was trying to get him to put on his coat.

Dima pushed her and took off. It was snowing, snowing in May! He ran half-mad, half-happy, delirious. The snow smelled like freshly cut cucumbers, like summer at Grandpa’s. At once he remembered that more than anything in the world he wanted a bike, one that had a tire-patching kit with the special glue. He bumped into passersby on the streets and shoved those who didn’t get out of his way. He overturned a trash can with glee, ran across the intersection in front of the honking traffic. If he had a bike, he would fly on it through Grandpa’s village in a cloud of dust.

He was running to burn last year’s yellow grass in the courtyard, before the snow and Genka got to it. He’d get the matches the Uncatchable Avengers had hidden at their secret headquarters the other day. He kicked a stone toward a stray dog. The dog barked and chased after him. As he ran, he thought of the inquisitive cows at the village and the uppity goats, the earthy carrots, the cold river with tickly blue fish, and the gang of dirty-footed kids his age who smoked cigarettes and could catch a goose with their bare hands.

Rumba

1996

Roman Ivanovich Chepurin first noticed her dollish hips during rumba at the spring competition. On the four-to-one and twist. The triangle of her panties, hugged by a slitted lime skirt, flashed then disappeared. Two, three, four—and twist. Away from him.

He had been standing at the back of the stage with the other judges, squinting under the lights. Headache, his cranky mistress, fluffed pillows behind his left ear, spurred on by three minutes of the same Latin music played over and over as the new dance pairs took the stage. Identical save for the colors of the girls’ dresses, they walked through their identical elementary routines. Roman Ivanovich was bored.

He didn’t know many of the children. He trained the junior and senior groups, while his teaching assistants waded through the endlessly replenishing pool of dancers under twelve. After twenty years of experience he knew what to expect. Some, for the life of them, wouldn’t flex their joints. They walked around like compasses, arms windmilling all over. Others twitched their shoulders as though trying to shake off a parrot, or wiggled their behinds like Papuans high on sun and coconut milk. Some couples stubbornly stepped between the beats.

Roman Ivanovich was long past the point where the efforts of these awkward, mostly talentless children endeared him. He and Nata, his wife and former dance partner, had coached only one pair to any kind of stardom. Lyuba and Pavlik now competed in quarterfinals in central Russia and Europe and returned to Magadan once a year to teach a master class at the Chepurin Ballroom Studio and Chess Club. Roman Ivanovich clutched his scoring clipboard to the sweat spot between his breasts and his belly, willing the competition to be over so he could go home and surrender his mind to the custody of the TV.

Then he saw her. He checked the number on her partner’s back against the list. Thirty-four: Nemirovskaya, Anastasia. To him she instantly became Asik. The little ace.

She was mostly leg. Her thighs were as slender as her calves, shades darker than he’d ever seen in still-wintry Magadan May. The ripe, gypsy-brown of her had to be natural: he prohibited the use of tanning sprays in her age group, six to eleven. Her bare back snaked without dragging in the shoulders. She moved as though her pelvis were suspended from the ceiling by an elastic string, weightless and pliable. Despite careless execution, her raw talent was hot.

The music had stopped and he hadn’t noticed. Applause. The other judges scribbled on the scoreboards, and Asik was already pulling her tree trunk of a partner toward the quivering side curtains, where Nata directed the sequin-and-tulled traffic. Away from him.

He decided on the spot to give Asik a good boy and make her a star by next winter’s competition. She’ll be his next Lyuba, he thought. No, she’ll go further. She had the mischievous sparklet that Lyuba—all step counting and obsession—lacked.

*   *   *

After the competition Roman Ivanovich established himself on a chair outside his office. The eternally cold studio smelled of sweat and hair spray. The girls exited the curtained changing room, their bright dresses hung over their arms in clear-plastic cocoons like discarded butterfly wings. The boys swept the floor with their tuxes. One by one they came up to say good-bye and wish him a good summer. Where was Asik?

The chess boys were cleaning up the postcompetition detritus and bringing the music equipment, lost shoes, tights, pieces of costume, and fake hair from the concert hall. Roman Ivanovich had one more chess match to officiate the following week, and then he would be done for the school year. As in summers past, Nata would be preoccupied with their anemic vegetable patch on the outskirts of town and with redecorating the apartment, which no rearrangement of furniture would make bigger or—against the view of the gray
khrushchyovkas
from their window—more inspiring.

He noticed a plump woman in a faded fox-collared coat trudging through the studio with a tall girl hooked in her elbow. They stopped by the black curtains of the changing room.

“How much longer? We’re suffocating here,” the woman yelled over the curtains. The girl looked with interest through the open doors of the office, where Nata was organizing a rainbow of rented dresses.

“Leave me alone,” a high voice hollered back. Asik, dressed in jeans and a giant blue flannel shirt, ran out with her costumes—the lime one and a coral number with a balding feather boa for the standard set. She returned them to Nata and started bickering with the woman. Roman Ivanovich hurried up to them.

“Ah, and you must be Anastasia’s mother and sister,” he said and turned to Asik. “Do you go by Nastya?”

“Asya,” Asik said. She looked frightened.

Up close she was snub-nosed and thin-lipped. Her eyes, big chocolate cherries. Her fake eyelashes had half come off, and strands of gelled black hair, released from her bun, stuck out around her head in question marks.

Asik’s mother turned and regarded him. “And you are?”

“This is Roman Ivanovich. Chepurin. As in Chepurin Ballroom Studio and Chess Club?” Asik said.

“Hello,” her sister said. Despite her long coat (vintage by necessity, clearly), he could tell she was well built. Her features were a watered-down version of Asik’s: a straighter nose, smaller eyes with irises the green-brown of weak tea. Classic, honest. Yawny. She lacked her younger sister’s playful slant, which sprang up now in Asik’s eyes, now in the flick of her wrist.

“Congratulations on your daughter’s success.” He’d made sure Asik reached the finals. “She has the kind of talent I haven’t seen here for the last ten years,” Roman Ivanovich added, continuing his customary pitch. Only this time he meant it. “When she joins my junior group in the fall, she’ll be eligible to have a personalized routine choreographed for her during private lessons. I’ll partner her up with a capable boy. With much practice and private coaching, she’s guaranteed to win first place here. Such talent. My wife will sew new costumes for her, order special fabric and rhinestones. Then take her to Moscow, the big races.”

By this point in his pitch, Roman Ivanovich would usually see in the glimmering eyes of even the poorest parents the accounting machinery rebalancing the family budget to accommodate the incubation of their very own star. Asik’s mother appraised him coldly, then looked at Asik, who was pumping up and down, her face a blur of runny makeup and thrill.

“We’ve had enough of this, Ivan Romanovich,” the mother said. Her eyes were bloodshot.

“Roman Ivanovich!” Asik said.

“We hardly get by as it is. I’m raising two girls by myself.”

So the mother was going to play that game. “I understand, of course. But dance is a very important part of a young girl’s education. A real classical education. It’s the Russian tradition. Everybody must learn to dance. Why don’t you dance?” he asked Asik’s sister.