Snow in May: Stories (23 page)

A group of thirty children shuffled onto the stage. Sonya knew several of them as former students of her piano teacher, Faina Grigorievna. She had kicked them out for lack of talent. Sonya had studied with Faina Grigorievna since she was seven, half of her life. Her mother didn’t allow her to quit and her father always said: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Music School #1, on the other hand, accepted everyone, except the completely tone-deaf. According to some people at the arts college. The choir was dreadful. Sonya sank into her chair and watched the side curtains for any movement. She couldn’t believe this Makin would be late for his own concert.

After the choir finished its last song, two of the children brought out a large wreath of flowers and leaned it against Makin’s throne. Sonya would count to ten, she decided, and on ten Makin must appear. She counted to ten—no Makin. She counted again.

The theater director came out. He looked at the looming portrait.

“Dear comrades, unfortunately Vadim Andreevich is not here yet, but we cannot delay our show any longer. A special thank-you to our guests for making the journey all the way to our forgotten Arctic corner. Now we will celebrate the life of our dear Vadim Andreevich how he deserved to be celebrated a long time ago. Better late than never, yes, friends?
Nu,
of course, yes!”

The audience clapped. Sonya clapped, too—what else was there to do? Oleg had told her that Makin lived just across from the theater, on Port Street. So it couldn’t have been the distance. Or the weather: Magadan had known much fiercer winds.

The lights came up, then down again. Then Yakov Gutman came onstage with a cloth bag. Sonya had seen him many times on TV, but she hadn’t known that he was the most decorated singer in the history of both the USSR and the Russian Federation, as the theater director had remarked in his introduction. She’d always wondered whether his signature hairstyle—cut at sharp angles around his forehead—was a wig.

“I will now read passages from several telegrams and birthday cards received from Vadim Makin’s old stage friends and fans.” He pulled out a piece of cardboard paper from the bag. “‘My dearheart Vadimushka,’” Gutman addressed the throne in his distinct oily baritone, “writes Izabella Yurieva. You, of course, all know Yurieva, the legend of the Russian romance song. ‘So many years have passed,’ she writes, ‘so many lives we’ve lived, and we survived them all. Youth is in the soul, Vadimushka, keep singing.’”

The audience clapped, some whistled. Gutman put his finger to his lips and pulled out another piece of cardboard from the bag. “And this is a telegram from Yegor Tarasov, Junior Lieutenant, Veteran of the Great Patriotic War, residing in Rostov-on-Don. ‘When you sang,’ he writes, ‘hope was planted in our hearts and through all the noise and confetti, your angelic voice hewed a window to the essential, to the truth. You are not forgotten, Vadim Andreevich. Happy birthday.’” Gutman shook his head. “He is a poet, this comrade veteran, isn’t he? We should get our veterans to write our modern pop lyrics, eh?”

The audience laughed in approval. After the reading of postcards, a line formed at the base of the stage. People came up to Makin’s throne and piled on flowers, envelopes, and other gifts.

The theater director, Frenkel, lumbered on stage with a red folder. “We will now present a dramatic sketch about Makin’s life called ‘The World Spins Around the Song,’” he said. “Unfortunately, our respected Vadim Andreevich is still en route, but don’t despair, we have plenty of our own Makins waiting right here in the wings.”

Sonya was starting to feel cold and hungry. Her mother had insisted she wear her piano recital outfit—a brown corduroy dress with a three-tiered skirt that she couldn’t wait to grow out of. She wouldn’t want Max to see her like this. Despite herself, she searched for him in the audience again.

The theater director leaned on Makin’s throne and opened the red folder.

“Act One. It’s the dawn of the twentieth century…” He outlined some mountains in the air. “Revolutionary tremors are already quaking Russia, but certain families will be able to enjoy their privileged lifestyle a little longer.” Two boys from the Music School #1 Choir wheeled on an elaborately painted set piece of the St. Petersburg skyline. “Among such families is Makin’s: his father is a wealthy merchant, his mother—a beautiful gypsy, the great-niece of a famous gypsy singer, Varvara Vasilieva. Makin has seven sisters.”

An actress dressed in a gypsy costume and seven girls from the choir came out onstage to the sounds of “Gypsy Walks,” a song about the call of the gypsy star and following your true love over the edge of the earth. The girls knocked their feet against their ankles and squatted halfway in abysmal imitation of the gypsy dance. There were better dancers in Magadan and a much better children’s choir, the one at the arts college, Sonya thought with disappointment. Makin’s mother sat down at the piano, and the girls formed a circle around her. Then, a red-haired boy ran onto the stage and yelled into the ceiling, “Mama, I want to sing, too! I want to be a star!” Sonya almost fell off her chair. It was the director’s son, Zahar, Sonya’s classmate. A dedicated prankster. He looked nothing like Makin’s noble portrait, but the audience was rolling with laughter.

More people came out on stage, and the music-school boys brought out a fireplace with an electric fire and chairs.

“Makin’s father hosts cultural evenings in their opulent home on the Neva embankment and invites all kinds of historical personages, for example the young poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.” He pointed at an actor named Ruslan Belyaev, who played all the leads in the theater’s operettas. Belyaev was reciting: “… ‘Upon the scales of tinny fishes new lips summoned, though yet mute. But could you play right to the finish a nocturne on a drainpipe flute?’”

The audience clapped and laughed.

“Then came the revolutions.” Four girls in red leotards danced to Prokofiev’s
Romeo and Juliet
. “Makin dreamed of the sea since childhood, but he is expelled from the navy academy because of his bourgeois father.” The gymnasts tore off Zahar/Makin’s sailor cap and banished him off the stage, lashing him with their red ribbons.

The theater director talked about how Makin worked as a cargo loader at the port, put up handbills, and at night played tangos and fox-trots for the silent movies. How he was discovered singing at the Port Workers’ Club. Zahar/Makin acted all of this out, exclaiming, “I want to sing for the people!” Then he was replaced by a short, bald actor, who usually played fumbling villains. Makin recorded hundreds of songs and performed in private concerts for Stalin (Belyaev with a mustache). When the war started, he volunteered to travel to the front lines to perform for the soldiers, who hoisted terrified Makin over their heads and disappeared into the side curtains.

“He inspired our country to defeat fascism—for words, if they are true, can be a weapon as formidable as tanks or rockets!”

The lights lowered and began to flash with red. “Act Two. In 1942, Vadim Makin falls out of favor with Stalin and, along with hundreds of thousands of others, is sent to the labor camps.” Makin appeared stage right, still dangling precariously over the soldiers’ shoulders, and then was carried off stage left. The last soldier was dragging behind him a length of barbed wire.

“Luckily for us, Makin ends up here, in Magadan. When he is released, he makes Magadan his home. And that is Act Three,” the director concluded triumphantly.

Actors dressed as reindeer pulled a big sled onto the stage.

“I want to sing for the people!” Makin shouted from his burrow inside the sled, and waved a toy cat at the audience. A cat? Maybe it was for the better that the real Makin wouldn’t see the play, Sonya thought.

The red curtain fell and the lights went up to the sound of mad applause. The director announced he’d gotten word that Makin would arrive by the start of the second part of the concert. The celebrities had already disappeared from the audience.

“He is all right, Sonechka, don’t worry. Yakov Gutman himself spent an hour trying to persuade him to come,” Sonya’s mother said when Sonya saw her during the intermission. Her long red hair was done up in an old-fashioned updo. She looked tired. “Makin said he had nothing appropriate to wear.”

“Nothing to wear?”

“Somebody from Moscow even offered him his tuxedo. Makin refused. He said he hadn’t taken off his felt boots in five years, and a tuxedo didn’t go with felt boots.”

“Was he joking?”

Sonya wanted to ask Oleg if he knew anything, but he was busy interviewing some elderly people for his TV segment on Makin.

A third of the audience didn’t return after the intermission. Makin didn’t appear either.

In the fourth hour of the concert, the pop stars from Moscow sang Makin’s songs with lots of bass, synthesizers, and guitar riffs. Then recordings of Makin were played from a record player that somebody had put on the red throne. Sonya was shocked to finally hear Makin’s real voice. Through the crackle of years it came out strong and silvery, and so fervent—like he was confessing to a person who already knew everything and agreed, not a whole world of strangers. She felt her face get red. The accompaniment was simple, just piano or guitar.

The director announced that Makin would be joining the celebration in half an hour. Sonya put her head on the wide balcony railing. It was draped in scarlet velvet and smelled like the last century. She must have dozed off because when she opened her eyes Belyaev was singing to Makin’s empty throne, one arm hugging its back:
“Write to me, I beg of you. Write to me, if just a single line.”
Sonya’s mother was on stage, hunched over the piano keys.

At the construction site Sonya had told Max that she wanted to be a doctor, her childhood ambition, largely because he said he wanted to be an engineer—a respectable, practical profession. In truth, these days she dreamed of doing something artistic: acting in films, or, better yet, making films. But she said “doctor” because she thought everyone considered her too serious, too good of a student. Max would laugh. And then she had cried when the snowball hit her in the eye. If she had been brave enough to say “actress,” she could’ve at least pretended the crying was on cue, a demonstration of her skill.

The lights went up. Sonya couldn’t believe it was finally over. She got her coat, put on woolen leggings over her tights, and leaned against a column in the foyer downstairs to wait for her mother and Oleg. She didn’t feel the usual post-theater headiness (like her first taste of rum mixed with milk at her grandmother’s), when just walking around under the influence of the performance felt exhilarating, romantic. Though the concert had lasted almost six hours, the evening still felt unfinished. Her stomach ached from hunger. She spotted some people from the arts college in the almost empty foyer. The rest were pensioners, bundling up in slow motion.

“All set, cabaret-beauty?” Sonya recognized Oleg by his nasal voice before she turned around. He was stuffed into all black: tight jeans and a short leather jacket stretched over slouched shoulders. Even though he was slim (except for his potato nose), his clothes always looked too small. She didn’t like it when he called her cabaret-beauty. She wasn’t supposed to like Oleg at all. When her father had returned from Alaska last year, her mother packed her things, packed Oleg’s things, too—he’d been living with them in their old apartment for almost a year—and moved to Oleg’s minuscule room in a
kommunalka
apartment on the edge of town. A long time before that, her father had promised that the three of them—Papa, Mama, and Sonya—would move to America. Now Sonya shuttled between her mother and father like a silent messenger, afraid to ask whether they would be exiled in Magadan forever.

Since she was now going with Max, she probably wasn’t supposed to still want to go to America.

“Why didn’t Makin come?” Sonya asked Oleg.

“Yes, he embarrassed us in front of the Moscow guests. You know I saw him last night?”

“Last night?”

“My cameraman and I were the only local media allowed to the opening party. They built a whole museum dedicated to Makin in the three-bedroom apartment next door to his place, which, by the way, the city bought him for his birthday. Organized a special ‘retro corner’ with an antique gramophone, his old concert posters and photographs. Very elegant. There’s even a one-of-a-kind cherry-red grand piano that they transported from St. Petersburg and installed through his fifth-floor window with a crane. In that crazy wind! I got it all on film.” Oleg scanned the foyer. “Your mother is taking her time, as usual.”

They sat down on a bench next to the coat check.

“Gutman banged on the piano so hard, Makin’s old rubber cat fell on the floor. The same cat who’d seen Stalin and Beria, and Churchill in Yalta. You know, when Makin performed, he used to put a rubber cat on the piano.”

“A cat? How do you know it was the same one?”

“Makin stood up and sang the last few lines. His voice was weak now, so he overcompensated with passion. Everyone was a little uncomfortable. I managed get a glimpse of his nails.”

“There’s Mama.” Sonya’s mother was coming from the back stairs. She had already put on her fur hat and was barely holding on to her frost-proof fur coat, a thing so big and bulky it was known in the family as Little House.

“Our cabaret-beauty,” Oleg said. “There was a rumor that Makin had abandoned personal hygiene, and his nails grew so deep into his skin that he had to have surgery. But his nails looked completely normal to me, and he didn’t stink. He wore what they said he always wears now: a ratty turtleneck sweater with safety pins on the chest and felt boots.”

“Why was he wearing safety pins?” Sonya said. The story was making her sad.

“Protection against evil eye. And Gutman, I guess.” Oleg chortled.

“What are you talking about?” Sonya’s mother said.

“I haven’t even gotten to the good part.” Oleg tore Little House out of her arms and opened it up, a little too high for her. She climbed in. “In the middle of yet another round of toasts, an old woman in a housedress and slippers bursts in and starts assaulting the Moscow guests, screaming and flailing—something about Yeltsin’s mafiosos. She tried to drag Gutman out the door. To see a grandma curse like that…” Oleg shook his head.