Snow in May: Stories (26 page)

“‘Come in now, Comrade Makin, if you’re not in a hurry,’ I told him. ‘My wife just made a wonderful
plov
with beef.’

“Baba Mila almost fainted when she saw Makin in our room. She rushed up to him and kissed his hand as if he were a king. She later told me she knew this was inappropriate, but, she said, she did it instinctively. She didn’t know how else to express her heartbreak over Makin’s situation. Whatever anybody decreed, she said, Makin was lonely in a way that only few could truly understand. At that point many people still remembered him—their youth was colored by his beautiful melodies—but it was they who benefited from this, in safety, not he. Such a kind and wise woman your grandmother was. She comes to my dreams almost every night.” Deda Misha looked down at his lap, silent.

“I miss her, too,” Sonya said, although the time she remembered most clearly was the summer of Baba Mila’s death. Deda Misha had taken her out of the hospital and was administering natural therapy at home. Sonya remembered being scared of her grandmother’s legs, which had become as thin as her own. And she was scared to ask Deda Misha whether it was true that he forbade anyone to tell Baba Mila that she had cancer, for fear of upsetting her. That’s what Baba Olya had told her.

Was Baba Mila living a different life now, as a little girl? Maybe somewhere exotic and warm, like Brazil. And did she remember Sonya, her only granddaughter? Deda Misha now lived with another woman, whom he’d met in a village outside Kiev. She was nice, too.

“We sat with Makin, ate the
plov
and drank tea, and talked about the upcoming winter,” Deda Misha went on. “He told us he was writing new songs he’d like to record. Of course, he was forbidden access to a recording studio. He didn’t have to say it. Baba Mila got your father out of his crib. He’d just woken up and was preparing to start the siren. ‘Look at those long eyelashes,’ Makin said and shook Tolik’s chubby hand. He sang one of the famous old Russian songs, ‘
Dance and sing, beautiful creature, and while you dance, I’ll laugh. And while you laugh, I’ll laugh with you, but inside I am burning
.’ Makin’s voice reached into my chest and wrung out my soul. By the time he finished, your father was rolling with laughter, and Baba Mila was crying. Makin himself was almost in tears. It is a love song, like most songs.

“Since that first tea performance, I began thinking nonstop about Makin’s desire to record. We had a national treasure in our hutches, staring at the snow through his window, wasting away. We could help him resume work as a singer. That would be valuable both for him and for the people of Kolyma. You can’t fight destiny, but you should always try to befriend it—that is my motto. I knew everyone in Magadan, from the regional head of education to the chief veterinarian at the poultry plant, and my engineer’s mind began to work, calculate, draw connections,
tak tak tak tak
. At that point, Makin was employed at the library, typing up catalog cards and shelving books.

“Me, by the way, I understand music.” Deda Misha crossed his arms on top of his hernia and nodded. “When I was at the Petroleum Institute back in Grozny, I sang in a men’s a cappella group. I also played drums in a band. Musical accompaniments for banquets, weddings, funerals, groundbreaking for a new factory—for a small fee and a piece of kielbasa. You come from a very musical family, Sonya. Baba Mila sang, too, arias from
Prince Igor,
and played piano.”

“As good as Mama?” Sonya said, on purpose.

Deda Misha pretended not to hear. “I decided to take Makin under my wing and invited him to sing at our Petroleum Workers’ Club,” Deda Misha carried on. “He agreed with pleasure. When I announced that we would have a special guest as a closing number in our musical evening in the person of Comrade Vadim Andreevich Makin, the same famous Makin, my otherwise respectable workers began to holler like monkeys, demanding Makin immediately and Makin all night. Those ensembles scheduled to perform before Makin, including my a cappella group, gladly stepped down. Maestro was in the house.

“Makin marched toward the piano in an impeccably ironed black suit. By the way—a curious detail for you—instead of sheet music, he clutched a small rubber cat to his chest.”

“A cat!” Sonya exclaimed, about to tell Deda Misha that Oleg, too, had mentioned a toy cat at the party. She caught herself in time. She wanted to hear the end of the story, after all.

“Two hundred people held their breath as he began to sing. He sat at the piano half turned to the audience, emphasizing certain phrases with a pitch of his body or a movement of his hand. I remember the first song. ‘
When youth leaves, the nights seem longer … What could’ve been said before, cannot now be said. When youth leaves, one loves differently. When youth leaves, one loves even stronger
.’ His voice was spellbinding. One forgot certain details of his biography as long as this voice poured and poured. Even now I remember with goose bumps. I felt like my soul was getting undressed in front of everyone.” Deda Misha tugged at the skin of his Adam’s apple. “A part of me even wanted him to stop. Such is the power of art—yes, a sudden, gripping power. It was too late to try to contain him. He had gone out of orbit … in more than one way.

“He sang until he was about to collapse—old favorite songs and new songs in front of an audience for the first time. There was so much cheering, so much ‘Bravo!’ and ‘
Bis
!’ that the police showed up. They stared at Makin like at a tropical bird, but they enjoyed his singing, too. They didn’t even ask to see anyone’s papers, which was the bulk of their duties, you know.” Deda Misha chuckled.

“I felt tremendous satisfaction in bringing Makin to the people. I developed the petroleum supply infrastructure that powered the extraction of valuable natural resources in Kolyma: gold, uranium, tin, fish, crab. In the arts sphere, Makin was our gold. I was building my family. Your aunt Angela would be born soon. The next fifteen years were the happiest and most fruitful time of my life.”

Deda Misha took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, smiling into the past.

“I organized a few more concerts for Makin at our Workers’ Club and found him his own piano accompanist in the person of Galochka, one of our accountants. Remember this name, Sonya, for our story. Makin himself said that though she played too loudly, as if trying to outplay the racket of dishes in a restaurant, she had the soul of a real musician. Makin sang for free, of course, for the rehabilitation of his reputation.”

“What do you mean, ‘rehabilitation’? Like after an accident?”

“What are they teaching you in your English Lyceum? American slang? Rehabilitation is for those who were sent to the Gulag or executed without a good reason. Amnesty. The official restoration of civil rights and a good name.”

“Oh, right.” Sonya didn’t remember studying that at school.

“I talked to Gumenyuk (a Ukrainian, by the way)—he was the head artistic producer at the Magadan Musical and Dramatic Theater—about organizing Makin concerts there. By the way, he told me that the imprisoned artists had performed at the theater. All the local party bosses and MVD apparatchiks sat in the front row with their wives, while the guards with machine guns sat in the wings and in the balcony and took the performers back to the camps before the applause died down. Makin performed, too. He was the biggest celebrity in Kolyma.”

“This was at our theater?” Sonya said. “Are you sure?” She thought about all the portraits in the theater’s hall; the biggest one was of Frenkel, the director, staring into middle distance. And the black-and-white photographs of old productions along the grand staircase with the red carpet held down by metal rods. The actors forever frozen in the heat of the fight or a love confession—were some of them prisoners? Would she be able to tell if she looked very carefully next time?

“Same theater, probably before I got to Magadan. I’ve never seen any armed guards at a concert. But now Makin would be returning as a free man. The theater was in a hole: intrigue backstage, boredom onstage. The socialist realism plays from the capital weren’t popular with Magadan folk. We brought in Makin, and he sold out every performance, even the seats in the orchestra pit. He saved the theater. The following year he was hired full-time, though without any media fanfare or the northern coefficient. Makin didn’t mind, he was happy to perform again. He also had a fan in the person of Konstantin Kazakov, the director of the regional guild of radio broadcasting, and this Kazakov began recording him secretly in Magadan’s radio studio. I found this out only recently, through the grapevine of old acquaintances.

“It was brave of Kazakov. Makin was no longer a prisoner, and Stalin was dead, but there was still the unspoken ban on Makin. It was brave of me, too. If the KGB rang my doorbell at three at night and asked me why I was so interested in Makin’s career, I would have told them it was for the benefit of the Soviet people. It was the truth. If they’d asked me if I, how to say, was of a similar persuasion as Makin, I’d have told them: I have a beautiful wife and healthy children. There isn’t a single stain on my reputation.”

Deda Misha licked the white corners of his dry lips as he talked. “I had noticed that our accountant-accompanist Galochka had taken an interest in Makin right away. At the first rehearsal for his debut at the Workers’ Club, Galochka put her shawl around his shoulders—it might’ve been cold that evening. The next time, Makin brought her a casserole that, he said, he had cooked from a French recipe. We all had a taste after the rehearsal. Very exotic. After that, Makin and Galochka acted like they’d been best friends since diapers. About a year later, as Makin was gaining traction, Galochka was replaced by someone from the newly founded Magadan Philharmonic, but they remained inseparable.” Deda Misha took long pauses between sentences. “I ran into her several times on the stairs of our apartment building. She was always bringing him food. A woman from the depot had told me in confidence that she’d heard Galochka boasting about the Italian silk stockings Makin had procured for her. Not my business, I said. Everyone gives what they can, and that’s the only thing Makin could give a woman. Silk stockings. I almost asked him for a pair of tights for Baba Mila—after all, I was working hard on his behalf—but I didn’t want to risk any rumors of foreign schemes. Commercial speculation was illegal. I was the director, you remember.”

Sonya had fallen into the story’s dreamy trance. Inexplicably, it felt like her life had somehow become intertwined with Makin’s, years before her birth. Maybe she’d known him in her past life. She finally grasped what word Deda Misha didn’t want to say out loud, as if the walls and teacups still had ears. That word and its female counterpart were popular insults at school this quarter, even though all girls who were best friends held hands.

“In a few years, through tireless negotiation with heads of this and that at the municipal and regional levels, Gumenyuk and I managed to arrange for Makin to go on a solo concert tour around Kolyma. He gave his all, at every performance, not the lip-synching that goes on with the pop singers these days.

“In the next few years he toured not only Kolyma but all of Siberia, Yakutia, Kamchatka, Chukotka, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands. He sang for the deer farmers, fishermen, petroleum workers, submarine sailors, geologists, scientists. He sang in small towns, too, and was more popular than any other touring shows. If people heard that Makin was in town, they would run over to his performance instead of attending concerts or plays from the capitals, full of award-winning artists. Can you imagine such a blow, when they sent telegrams to the Ministry of Culture in Moscow? He began receiving letters from his old fans. Many were surprised he was still alive. He told me himself. He even looked younger and healthier. His gypsy eyes burned with the fire of life again. He told me he was writing a new cycle of songs about Magadan and Kolyma, about its unique natural beauty, the rare kindness of its people. But I wasn’t satisfied yet, silly me. I thought that the real comeback would be for him to return to Moscow with a solo concert. Gumenyuk and I continued to work on that. Our progress was slow: Makin was still blacklisted in central Russia. But we were able to convince some big artists we’d gotten in touch with in the process to add Magadan to their touring itineraries on the promise that they would get to meet the legendary Makin. And that was an unexpected benefit for everyone.

“Makin stayed involved with the music program at the Workers’ Club. Your baba Mila kept telling me to lighten his voluntary obligations, but a man, especially an artist, is only truly alive when he is working. Just as she herself had said before. You stop working, you start dying, and that’s all there is to it. He had Galochka, but I’m sure he missed his friends and admirers at the petroleum depot, too. He was such an inspiration to our amateur musical ensembles.

“Listen carefully now, Sonya. There is nothing out that window. One day in the early sixties, Galochka came to my office for advice on a matter of the heart. I was used to fixing people’s marital and personal problems, but this turned out to be a special case. She told me she’d been in love with Makin ever since that first rehearsal all those years ago, and she couldn’t bear loving in secret any longer. I almost fell off my chair. Makin was teaching her to sing, Galochka rattled on, and explained to her the secrets of the old songs. He personally knew many of the authors who had written them and was apparently very upset about the vulgar interpretations of modern singers. One example she gave was about the way they announce on TV that ‘Coachman, don’t race the horses’ is the national coachman’s song. It irritated Makin because, according to him, it was written in his childhood home in St. Petersburg by some Baronessa von Ritter as an answer to another song—‘Race, coachman, faster into the distance.’ Such answers to songs were popular at the turn of the century, Galochka said.”

Sonya liked this very much. Answer-songs. Baronessa von Ritter. Maybe that’s who she was in her past life, a beautiful and wealthy baronessa. She went on sleigh rides hitched to a troika of white horses, warm under a bear blanket. Sonya looked out the window again. She really should start worrying about Max, but all she could think of was how great it would be to ride in a sleigh with her best friend, Sabrinka. She wouldn’t have to wonder the whole time whether Max was waiting for a kiss.