Mikhail Sadovsky - Голубые ступени / Stepping into the blue

She stood there, her small tote-bag slung over her left shoulder, so that the hump-like deformity on the right side of her back was barely noticeable. She couldn’t bring herself to set foot on this shimmering pale blue surface. Feeling her heart thumping mightily, she was amazed to find herself still rooted to the spot, held against her will by this pale blue flood, as though drenched by it, brimming over with it, rejoicing in it and dumbfounded by it all at the same time. The people walking by were oblivious to the sky under their feet and trampled on it, shattering the image. But the sky behaved as it usually did after any kind of storm or clouds – it once again recovered its happy and pale blue self.

And all at once she became acutely aware that she might never see it again. Never see this sky! – she could not admit to herself that she would not be seeing it, or the one for whose sake she had come here. All at once nothing seemed to make sense to her – but she would not be seeing the sky.

She had lived on hope for so many years that neither she nor anyone else could destroy this hope in a flash. The thought «I shan’t be seeing this sky» was so much vaster and colder that somehow it didn’t seem to disturb her. While it was indeed a real possibility – that she wouldn’t see the sky, or walk beneath it, or fly through it, or breathe it in – all this was abstract. On the other hand, not to see him – this completely defied utterance, defied even formulation. Everything else she could take but that. Even the professor whose clinic she was now going to for the operation had not been able to change her mind. And here were these pale blue steps, this sky beneath her feet…

She realised, of course, that this image hadn’t presented itself to her sight simply by chance, and now she knew perfectly well that the professor was right, but this could no longer make any difference – even to the sky which had thrown itself at her feet across her path, which she now could not bring herself to set foot on. «All right, all right, just another moment, just a wee bit – and I’ll go on up, I’ll go through that door – nobody’s looking – I’m coming!»

One in ten – a slim chance, indeed – slim, yes, but for her that had long ceased to be significant, for without this operation she wouldn’t have any chance at all, not even one. Ever since she realized that she couldn’t – and wouldn’t – live without him, she hadn’t had any chances, not even one in ten.

When they were little they had gone to school together, right from the first grade, from day one. He was short too, even shorter than her by a wee bit, and the hump on her back wasn’t so noticeable back then. The doctors somehow tricked her Mama into believing that in time her back could become straight. After she had grown older and the hump had swelled into all its ugliness, she and Mama eventually realized that they had been lied to, and after delving into all the specialized literature on the subject, they were finally convinced.

Her Mama wasn’t completely literate, not like his Mama. But here was something they had in common – each of them had a mother on her own, with no father. Her father had been taken away even before the war and incarcerated for «ten years with no outside communication permitted». 1 1 Ten years with no outside communication permitted – a Soviet euphemism indicating execution by a firing squad. Neither he nor his mother had been afraid at the time, they hadn’t rejected her family, as had many of their other acquaintances, 2 2 It was a common occurrence for families of anyone imprisoned as an ’enemy of the state’ to be ostracized by most of their acquaintances. but three years later his father died at the very outset of the war.

They had become friends right off, since both of them immediately found themselves at the edge of the mainstream. He didn’t know how to stand up for himself – he didn’t like noisy games or rough-housing – while she was shy about her awkwardness.

But, even more than by this physical weakness, they were united by something else. They felt themselves ’chosen’, even among their own kind – not by birth but by their ability to hear what their friends and schoolmates were saying. They were both endowed with an acute sense of hearing – maybe not an absolute pitch, but still a kind of hearing that was very rare, capable of distinguishing dozens if not hundreds of overtones. They especially liked listening to the ring of church bells, but of course that kind of opportunity didn’t come along very often.

She imagined what it would be like after the operation, and even stood on tip-toe. Three centimetres. She shut her eyes tight and just stood there. Three centimetres meant she would be able to reach his face, his lips – so sweet, so sweet! And she could not bring herself to even think that this might not happen, since «impossible» was simply out of the question! Then why should she picture it to herself, and fantasize?

She opened her eyes again. A gentleman passer-by looked at her – after all, she was pretty and she knew it. She had a perfectly formed nose – a rarity, just like the way Pushkin 3 3 Alexander Pushkin – a celebrated Russian poet of the early 19th century, considered by many to be the father of Russian literature. called «two pairs of slender legs» a rarity. Her hair, too, could be called luxuriant, as it did not hang down straight but fell around her face in ever-so-soft waves of lush dark brown.

The man averted his eyes and walked on. Would he look back or not? He did, and she smiled: everything would turn out all right. She had guessed he would, and he did – and that meant everything would turn out all right!

The springtimes, as indeed the years, had rolled by virtually unnoticed – perhaps because they were always together. The world for her always began with him, and everything that happened in the world was connected with him – study, leisure, mutual friends. As for girl-friends of her own – she didn’t have any.

After graduating from a special school for the musically gifted they had both gone on to post-secondary studies, even ending up in the same classes with the same professors. Once again, nothing had changed externally – they just had a whole lot of new friends.

And the leisure-time activities available to them were by no means a source of division – quite to the contrary. They didn’t go to dances – she for obvious reasons and he because he didn’t know how to dance and was shy around girls. Besides, the thought of going to a dance simply never even entered his head – why should it? Why, indeed? Like everyone else, they would go to the movies. Television had only just made its appearance and few people had a set. They would buy rush tickets to the theater, and of course did not miss any opportunity to go to a concert, especially at the Conservatory, where they almost always could get in free of charge.

Music indeed was a unifying factor in their lives. There they were equals, and she never felt from him even the slightest hint at her misfortune, though it was something that she, with her uniquely acute perception of the world around her and her sense of being punished by it, would have undoubtedly felt if there had been the slightest hint at it. No. Not once did he ever think of her physical handicap, either with pity or with annoyance. She, for her part, was sure that she was being punished for the sins of one of her forebears, and that now it had fallen to her to atone for that person’s guilt.

Without letting him know (it was the only thing she ever kept secret from the closest person in the world to her) she read books on the subject, on the eternal existence of souls, on re-incarnation. There was nobody she could even dare ask about it, only learn what she could on her own. If they ever found out about this at the Conservatory, she would pay dearly. A cruel price. She could even be expelled.