Rhapsody (13 page)

Pavel and Nyushka, their neighbors on one
side, fought like wild animals, often arguing long into the night.
Pavel frequently beat up his wife in drunken rages. Sonia didn't
think she'd ever seen Nyushka without bruises, but when she tried
to come to her aid, she was rebuffed, met with furious hostility,
in fact. Old Ivan, on the other side, was a
zakhleba
, a
guzzler. He reeked of cheap vodka day in and day out, sweating it
from his very pores. He was often slumped downstairs, sometimes
outside in deadly, freezing weather, incoherent, if not passed out,
unable to climb to his room. Like so many of the men around these
projects—even some of the women—he would swallow anything he could
get his hands on to render himself unconscious. Paint thinner, she
had discovered, was a popular alternative to vodka, and airplane
glue and other inhalants—she didn't know what most of them
were—were a staple as well.

The youngsters in these dreary environs had
already learned all too well how to cope with such violent,
unloving families and their gloomy prospects for the future. They
emulated their elders, drinking, sniffing, snorting,
smoking—anything they managed to find. Their youthful energies,
when not focused on sex and fights, were used to defile every
conceivable surface in their midst, rendering an already hideous
world even more so. Nothing was spared, not even their own bodies,
which they desecrated with abandon. Many of them proudly wore the
scars of gang warfare and various initiation rites and ugly
homemade tattoos.

Sometimes Sonia felt that she understood
their utter hopelessness, their desire to simply abandon this awful
world, slowly but surely killing themselves, leaving their problems
behind them.

She had heard of this other Moscow when they
had lived in the cushioned opulence of their attic, but she had
never actually encountered it firsthand. She had often visited
friends in the monstrous, sterile projects that housed most of
Moscow, but they had been well kept, constantly patrolled, and more
modern.

We have been relegated to a gulag right here
in the city, she told herself. Thank God I've been able to protect
Misha from the worst of it.

She turned, her dark eyes alighting on his
long, slender, six-year-old body. So much like mine and his
father's, she mused with pride. He was going to be a strapping,
handsome man one day.

He sat erect now, a look of control on his
still childlike face. It was certainly not a look that was always
there, especially when he was having difficulty with a piece of
music, struggling to make it his own. But he was still playing
Chopin—music that seemed to be second nature to him—and was having
no such difficulty. As she listened, he switched from the
melancholy and relatively easy nocturnes to the Piano Concerto no.
1, op. 11, in E Minor, a more challenging piece.

He was unaware of the smile that suddenly lit
up Soma's olive-complexioned features, the warmth that suffused her
heart with so much love that sometimes she thought it would surely
break, that it simply couldn't contain the love she felt for this
brilliant prodigy she and Dmitri had brought into the world. The
struggle, the hardships, the daily unpleasantness—all of it came to
nothing when she looked upon her son.

We have been blessed with him, she thought.
And if truth be told, we've had our share of luck since that
dreadful day two years ago when we lost our home. We've got a lot
to be thankful for. Why, I could make a whole list of mercies!

She nodded to herself with satisfaction, and
her thoughts turned to Arkady and Mariya Yakovlevna, for they would
surely be placed at the very top of that list. The elderly
couple—they were in their early eighties— who lived downstairs had
been like a gift from the angels in this most unlikely, godless of
places. They were retired teachers and, like the Levins, had been
relegated to this project, only years earlier. They had been lucky
not to be sent to one of the gulags. Their offense: conspiring
against the state. In their case, writing religious tracts in
Yiddish that were not "Communist-directed." Yet even amid the
cultural wasteland that surrounded them here, they had tried to
create a little garden of civilization.

Cautiously at first, then gradually becoming
more expansive as they let down their guard, they had opened up
their lives to Sonia, Dmitri, and Misha. It was a tiny, one-room
world, but it was a jewel-like microcosm of a cultured world, much
like that world that Sonia and Dmitri had once known. It was their
little spinet studio piano that was now in the Levins' room, and
that piano had made teaching Misha possible for the last two
years.

Ah, yes, Sonia thought. That's more like it.
I feel better now. Much better. Just seeing Misha at practice and
thinking of Arkady and Mariya Yakovlevna had that effect.

It was Arkady and Mariya Yakovlevna who cared
for Misha when neither Sonia nor Dmitri could be home. They were
loathe to place him in one of the state-controlled day-care
centers, and he became the child Arkady and Mariya had never been
able to have, although he was more like their grandchild. They
smothered him with affection, giving him welcome respite from the
grueling hours at the piano that Sonia and Dmitri outlined for him.
For it was their firm belief that Misha should be allowed to be a
child as well as a prodigy.

Storytelling, card games, reading, and chess
were part of their regimen. Injected into many of their discussions
with the youngster were stories about the Jewish people and the
Jewish faith. Arkady and Mariya Yakovlevna knew that Sonia and
Dmitri were agnostic and had little appreciation for their cultural
heritage or faith. They had descended from artists and considered
themselves artists, first and foremost, with little or no interest
in politics or religion.

Arkady and Mariya hoped that Misha would
retain some of the stories they told him and that they could
instill in him an awareness of his heritage and a degree of pride
in it.

Sonia and Dmitri, for their part, knew what
Arkady and Mariya Yakovlevna were up to, but they held the couple
in such great respect and affection that they let them contribute
whatever they might to Misha's education. Besides, Misha loved the
old couple dearly, and they were doing no harm, the Levins
felt.

In the meantime, she and Dmitri had worked
out a program that would prepare him for a career in music. They
took turns working with him, and he had blossomed during the last
two years. The future, indeed, held the possibility of great
promise. They had turned the losses of their home and their incomes
into an opportunity. Their teaching and performing duties had been
cut back significantly two years ago—and of course their pay with
it—but as a result, one or the other could be at home to work with
Misha nearly all of the time.

Increasingly, however, she fretted about his
future. She and Dmitri had already taught him nearly everything
they possibly could, and there was only one recourse open to
them—at least here in Moscow. At the age of six, he should enter
the famous Moscow Gnessin School of Music for Gifted Children. It
would normally be a simple matter. Misha, after all, was
extraordinarily gifted. She and Dmitri, of course, knew some of the
faculty well, but intervening considerations had complicated the
issue: the matter of their having applied for exit visas.

They had been told by the administrators that
"perhaps" in the coming fall, Misha "might possibly" be admitted to
a place in the school. As he had turned six on January the ninth,
he hadn't been old enough the previous autumn, though exceptions
were always being made. Despite the "perhaps" and "mights" of the
administrators, Sonia felt heartened by the possibility. The
Gnessin was a rigorous school, a great school, which turned out the
best musicians in all of the USSR. If the Levins must be in Moscow,
she surmised, then they could do no better. If indeed the school
finally accepted him.

Sonia looked over at her son now, head bent
in concentration. If only we could provide the best for him! she
thought for the thousandth time. If only we knew what to expect in
the coming months from the authorities.

They did know certain things. Through her
various contacts in the music world, she had discovered that, if
Misha were indeed admitted, under no circumstances would he be
allowed to study under Anna Pavlovna Kantor. This, for Sonia and
Dmitri, was a crushing blow. Kantor was without exception the
greatest teacher in all of Russia, and orders—they had been told in
the greatest confidence—had already been given that she would not
be permitted to teach their son.

If only we would be permitted to emigrate! If
only they would give us our exit visas! In the last two years many
Jews had been permitted to leave. There had, in fact, been a
veritable exodus of the Jewish intelligentsia to the West and to
Israel. Why, she asked herself, are we being held back here? Why
are we being made to suffer?

At that moment the thud of fists pounding
heavily reverberated from the door. Sonia was jerked out of her
reverie, and Misha missed a key on the piano, then abruptly stopped
playing. He turned and looked questioningly at his mother.

When she nodded wearily, he hopped off the
piano stool and cautiously approached the door. Sonia put down her
knitting, which had lain unworked on her lap all this time, and
reluctantly got to her feet and followed him.

Through the locked door she could hear old
Arkady shouting ...and it sounded as if he was raging
incomprehensibly against heaven.

Misha undid the lock and opened the door.
"Arkady!" he whispered.

The old man was slumped against the door
frame, gasping for breath, his snow white hair in Einsteinian
disarray.

"Arkady?" Sonia asked tremulously, barely
able to subdue her panic as she reached the door.

She put an arm around him and helped him into
the apartment. In her strong arms, he was tiny and felt practically
weightless, like a wounded bird, and he was nearly limp with
fatigue or fright or . . .

Sonia didn't yet know.

"What is it? Arkady! What has happened?" she
asked.

Misha closed the door behind them and threw
the bolt.

"I... I... oh ... oh ... oh," the old man
muttered, weeping now as if he were a child, tears running down his
creased cheeks in rivulets.

"Tell me, Arkady," Sonia persisted. "What is
it?"

"Mariya ...Mariya Yakovlevna," he cried.

"What is it?" she repeated. Sonia shook the
old man by the shoulders. "What, Arkady? Tell me. What has happened
to Mariya Yakovlevna?"

With a great effort the old man tried to
compose himself. He took a perfectly pressed white linen
handkerchief from a pocket in his trousers and wiped his face, then
blew his nose. When he was done, he carefully refolded the
handkerchief and replaced it in his trouser pocket.

Sonia took his shaky hands in hers while he
caught his breath and began to speak.

"Mariya Yakovlevna was coming home from the
shops." He looked up into Soma's eyes. "You know .. . you know how
I ... I can't bear to see her go alone, but my hips were so bad
today, my arthritis, I could hardly walk."

"Yes, yes," Sonia said. "Go on, Arkady. Go
on." She felt her heart beating wildly in her chest as a mounting
sense of horror gripped her.

"A gang of boys ...hooligans ...attacked her.
Somewhere ...somewhere near the project," Arkady gasped. "They
...they stole her groceries and what . .. what little money she
had." Suddenly his voice broke, and he began weeping like a child
again. He couldn't continue.

Sonia held him in her arms, stroking his back
with her hands. "Please, Arkady, You must finish. We must know, so
we can do something."

After a few moments the old man recovered
himself enough to resume his story. "They kicked her ...and ...beat
her ...and ...and left her there to die," he cried.

"What is she, Arkady?" Sonia asked, her eyes
huge with terror. "Where?"

"The hospital... the one over . . ." He was
pointing to the east with one of his hands.

"The one near the ring road?" Sonia
asked.

He nodded his head. "Yes, that one."

Sonia let go of the old man and grabbed her
coat off its wall hook. "Misha," she said, "you stay here with
Arkady. Make him some tea. Okay?"

"Sure, Mama," Misha said.

"No, no," Arkady said. "I must go, too." His
voice was a pathetic plea.

"No, Arkady," she said. "You stay here and
wait for Dmitri. He's out shopping and should be back any minute.
The next hour or so at the most. When he gets back, he'll bring you
to the hospital."

"But—" The old man had an imploring look on
his wrinkled, distraught face.

"No," Sonia said with certainty. "You must
stay here with Misha and rest. Have some tea. I will see to Mariya
Yakovlevna." She quickly patted Arkady on the cheek, then leaned
down and kissed Misha.

"You will take good care of Arkady for me?"
she asked.

"Yes, Mama," Misha said. "Don't worry. I'll
make him tea." He hoped that his mother didn't see the worry and
fear that he felt, but if she did, she didn't acknowledge it.

Sonia shrugged into her coat and unlocked the
door. "Lock it behind me," she said. Then she was gone, almost
running to their friend.

Sonia rushed breathlessly into the vast white
and yellow expanse of the hospital's lobby. Pausing to catch her
breath, she looked about her. The lobby was soiled and ill-kept,
its once white walls now gray, its yellow tiles beige with
grime.

Oh, God, no, she thought. One of the
pigsties.

In Moscow the hospitals and clinics could be
pristine, like the Kremlin Clinic, but they could also be shabby
and ill-equipped. Here, if the lobby was any indication, she could
see that Mariya Yakovlevna would be lucky to get decent treatment.
The trouble with many of the hospitals, even though they had
adequate facilities and reputable physicians, was that patients
would develop complications from infections because of the filth.
The lack of adequate sterilization in many facilities was
notorious.