Rhapsody (12 page)

"May I—?" Dmitri began.

"Dmitri Levin?" barked one of the suits
harshly. He flashed a red identity booklet, but Dmitri couldn't
make out what it said before the man snapped it shut and replaced
it in his jacket.

"Yes, I am Dmitri Levin," he responded,
trying to keep the nervousness out of his voice. He was loath to
let these minor functionaries hear the fear that he felt, but he
was unable to control the cold sweat that suddenly broke out on his
face or the slight tremor that made his hands appear to have a life
of their own.

The men in suits, not waiting for an
invitation, shoved their way past Dmitri into the room. The
militiamen tromped in on their heels.

Dmitri slowly closed the door behind them,
then turned to them, mustering up as much dignity as he could under
the circumstances. "What do you want here?" he asked, knowing deep
down inside what then- answer would be.

"I am comrade Vladimir Sergeyovich Kazakov,"
the larger of the two men announced. His face was beet red and
vodka-bloated. "This is comrade Ivan Mikhailovich Kuznetzov." He
nodded toward the other suit, whose eyes were flicking from wall to
wall, ceiling to floor, from paintings to consoles, chairs to
porcelain, rugs to chandeliers, taking in the room's ornate
furnishings. Kuznetzov didn't bother acknowledging Dmitri.

Sonia watched them intently from the table.
She noticed that the young militiamen with their badly shorn fair
hair and pale eyes, so typical of the north, were ogling the room,
wide-eyed and open-mouthed.

Such stupid expressions on their faces, she
thought unkindly. They were nearly all farm boys, these militiamen.
Suspicious and ignorant provincials. And that, she knew, was all
the more reason to give them a wide berth. I must try to control my
anger, she thought.

Then the one called Kazakov unceremoniously
placed his briefcase on the grand piano with a loud thud. Sonia
recoiled with distaste, and glaring, she practically jumped to her
feet, her back to Misha, as if to hide him from their sight.

"What do you want here?" she asked in an
imperious tone of voice.

"You are the wife? Sonia?" Comrade Kazakov
asked, flipping through thin sheets of official-looking documents
he had produced from his leather briefcase. He didn't look over at
her.

"Yes," she replied. "Who wants to know?" She
watched him as he continued to riffle through the documents. "What
do you want here?" she repeated, more irritably this time.

Dmitri quietly crossed the Bessarabian rug to
his wife's side and took one of her hands in his, but she didn't
seem to be aware of him, staring at Kazakov as she was.

Comrade Kazakov locked eyes with her, a smug
expression on his face.

Piggy eyes, Sonia was thinking. He's got
little piggy eyes. Like so many of his sort. Little piggy eyes
squinting out from between those ugly red folds of vodka fat.

"It is my duty to inform you," Kazakov said,
"that the housing authority will be taking over your apartment. I
have your papers here. You will be moving to new, more appropriate
accommodations."

"What—?" Dmitri gasped. He felt Soma's hand
squeeze his, as if trying to draw strength from him. He knew she
was making a great effort to control her temper.

"These militiamen here," Comrade Kazakov
continued, indicating the young men behind him, "will remain here
to make certain that you finish packing today."

"Today!" Sonia burst out, unable to remain
silent any longer. "That's ...that's impossible!"

Despite the anger in her voice, Dmitri
recognized the sound of defeat underlying it. He glanced at her and
saw the sudden look of fear, of dread and loss, that appeared on
her face as the realization of what was happening dawned in all its
horror. He could see that she, too, finally knew what this was all
about. Her words, he knew, were mere posturing.

Dmitri pressed her hand reassuringly, then
put an arm around her shoulders.

"Papa, what—?" Misha began. He looked as if
he might burst into tears at any moment. The boy didn't understand
what was happening, but he knew that something was very wrong.

"Shhh," Dmitri whispered. He took his son's
plump little hand in his free one. "Quiet now," he said, forcing a
smile to his lips. "We have to hear what our visitors have to
say."

He turned and directed his gaze at Comrade
Kazakov. "We haven't been informed of any of this," Dmitri
protested. "We—"

"You are being informed now," Comrade Kazakov
snapped. "You are to begin packing immediately, and you are to
finish by this evening. This apartment will be sealed off tonight.
New tenants will be moving in tomorrow."

"This is criminal," Sonia spat. "Criminal!
You don't know what you're doing! I'll go to the union with
this!"

"It is your union which has taken this
apartment," Comrade Kazakov said evenly. "For someone else." A
smile revealed tobacco-stained teeth. He obviously relished his
role. "So you can discuss it with whomever you choose, but it will
do you no good."

With these words Sonia and Dmitri saw the
futility of any further protests. Circumstances doubtless were even
more serious than they had at first imagined. They had always been
protected by their union membership and high- level teaching and
performing careers. It appeared that now all of that was for
nought. Their security had vanished in one fell swoop.

"You are to pack your clothing and other
personal possessions," Comrade Kazakov went on. "You are to leave
all furnishings as they are."

"You must be crazy!" Sonia shouted. "You
can't do this! All of these things belong to us!" As she said them,
she realized her words would have no effect, but she couldn't stop
herself.

"You can see for yourself," Comrade Kazakov
said, dramatically slapping one of his documents down on their
breakfast table.

Sonia and Dmitri both glanced at the
official-looking document, but there was no point in reading it.
They knew what it said.

"The piano!" Dmitri suddenly protested. "It
is our livelihood! We—?"

"You are to pack whatever you can in
suitcases and boxes and get out," Kazakov interrupted. "There is a
truck downstairs, and the militiamen will help you load it. They
will take you to your new home." He nodded at his partner, who was
examining a small porphyry urn decorated with ormolu, an avaricious
gleam in his eye. "Comrade Kuznetzov will accompany you."

Sonia thought for a moment that she wouldn't
be able to stop the tears that threatened to spill from her eyes,
but she could not let these brutes see her cry. She simply stared
at Comrade Kazakov, her eyes filled with pure, unadulterated
hatred.

"But where are we to go?" Dmitri asked. "What
will we do?" He despised the emasculated, helpless sound of his own
voice in his ears.

"Your new address is listed on page three.
There." Kazakov pointed at the document he had placed on the
breakfast table, then turned his attention to Comrade Kuznetzov.
"Ivan Mikhailovich."

His partner looked up at him and set down the
porphyry urn, a guilty expression on his face. "Yes?"

"See that this move is completed tonight,"
Comrade Kazakov said. Without another word he turned and strode
toward the door.

Dmitri had taken Misha in his arms. The boy
watched over his father's shoulder as the stranger opened the

door and let himself out, leaving the door
ajar. Misha had never before been confronted with evil, and he
didn't understand it. His eyes filled with tears, however, because
he knew instinctively that their lives had been changed.

Sonia slumped down onto a chair, her head in
her hands. It's all my fault, she thought, engulfed in self-
hatred, its poison washing over her in bilious waves, threatening
to make her sick. All my fault. I should have been content to let
Misha study here. I should have been content with what we've got.
But, no. I had to apply for exit visas, didn't I? She choked back
tears. The exit visas. That's why they're doing this. Now they'll
never leave us alone. We'll never have any peace.

She looked up and saw Misha, still in his
father's arms, his large, dark eyes observing her worriedly. For an
instant she wanted to scream, to tear her hair out, but instead she
put all of her considerable resources into smiling up at her son.
Then, she quickly got to her feet and kissed his cheek.

"Dmitri," she said, "we must hurry. We must
take everything we can."

"Mama? What is it?" Misha looked at his
mother, an anxious expression in his large, dark eyes. "Are you
sad, Mama?"

Sonia was all choked up. For a moment she
could not speak. Then she turned away, surreptitiously wiped a tear
from her eye and squared her narrow shoulders, and turned back
around. She smiled bravely.

The child has endured more than any child
ever should, she thought.

"No, of course I'm not sad, Misha," she lied,
distressed that she should cause her son worry.

He can read me like a book, she thought. It
was perplexing to her, this ability of his to sense her every
mood.

"I was simply thinking. Wondering when your
father would be back, that's all."

"You shouldn't worry, Mama," he said in an
effort to cheer her. "Probably the shop lines are long today."

Sonia and Dmitri took turns doing the
shopping, and today it was Dmitri's turn to wait in the
interminable lines for groceries.

"You're right." Sonia forced a smile onto her
lips. "Now then, let me listen to your Chopin. Start with the
nocturnes."

Misha sat down at the piano and adjusted the
seat. He put his head down and closed his eyes, as if in prayer. It
was a moment of mental preparation Sonia knew very well. She had
seen it countless times in the last two years. He was clearing his
mind for the music and the music alone.

She watched him as he began to practice, but
after a few minutes she turned her head and gazed out through the
rain-streaked window. She listened to the beautiful but melancholy
music of Chopin wafting from behind her. What a contrast it was,
this beautiful music, to the bleak landscape that greeted her
eyes.

Cement and asphalt, she thought. Nothing but
desolate expanses of concrete and asphalt, nearly as far as the eye
can see. There was hardly a tree in sight, and the precious few
there were had been mutilated by vandals, stripped of their lower
branches, defaced by graffiti.

It was a numbing sight, this postapocalyptic
landscape. Virtually barren, even now in spring, it was of a drab,
uniform grayness, punctuated here and there by high- rises of
dirty, weathered cement, parking lots with pathetically maintained
cars—no fancy Zils or Chaikas here—and cheerless playgrounds.
Stolen or abandoned cars, many of them stripped down to mere
shells, sat on the streets, as if they were caught in some dreadful
limbo.

Like us, she thought grimly. Two years in
limbo.

She drew her gaze in, glancing at the buckets
and basins she'd placed under leaks in the ceiling. The spring
rains, which she'd always welcomed in the past, nourishing the
city's plants and flowers as they did, were now no more than a
dreaded nuisance. There were no plants or flowers in this district,
none to speak of anyway, and the rain simply meant more work for
her.

She sighed aloud. That's certainly the least
of it What was a leaking roof compared with the rest of the endless
stream of problems that had confronted them in the two years since
being forced to leave their beloved attic apartment in central
Moscow?

It was like a palace in the sky, she thought
wistfully.

There, she had never minded climbing the old,
rickety stairs to their grand, but homey, rooms. Here, she
begrudged every single step she had to take to reach the small,
seventh-floor room the three of them shared. There was an elevator,
but it rarely functioned. It had been broken down nearly every day
since the week they had moved in. When it did work, it invariably
stank of urine, and its walls were smeared with the vilest
obscenities, sometimes in excrement.

Even the mailboxes downstairs didn't escape
desecration. They were blackened from the fires that vandals
regularly set to them. And the security! It's a joke, she thought.
In a project such as this, where security was vital, the door locks
to the lobby were nearly always broken. If not, no matter: the
security code was scratched neatly on the door for all to see.

Sonia shivered and clasped her arms around
herself, as if to give herself warmth and comfort. It is
disgusting, she thought. Utterly disgusting, this place. But what
else could you expect? she asked herself. The people here— the very
dregs of humanity, most of them—are cooped up in such an execrable,
soulless place that it only reinforces their basest, most
animalistic instincts.

Their neighbors were no exception. There were
three other families on their floor, and they shared a communal
kitchen. The kitchen always reeked with the stench of boiled
cabbage, an odor that permeated the entire building, seeping into
their clothes, as did the strong, foul- smelling tobacco of the
papirosy
, the tube cigarettes that everybody in the
building, young and old alike, seemed to chain-smoke. Sonia had
quickly determined that she would have to get a minuscule
refrigerator to keep in their room, but it wasn't only the
unpleasant odors of the kitchen that had driven her to it. Their
food in the communal refrigerator vanished as quickly as she put it
there—more than once—with denials all around, of course. She could
put a container of her borscht—the simplest, cheapest
concoction!—in it to cool, and it would disappear before it even
had a chance to lose its warmth. She had finally resorted to
cooking on a hot plate in their room, inconvenient as it was, so as
to avoid the kitchen and their neighbors as much as possible.