Olga Grushin - The Concert Ticket

“Me? Sure, whatever,” Alexander said with a nonchalant shrug, and abandoned his place in the line.

They moved through the frozen black-and-white city in silence.

“So, do your tastes run to simple or refined?” the man asked after a few blocks.

Alexander looked at him blankly.

“Vodka or cognac?” the man elaborated.

Alexander thought of the time when he and two classmates had met after school, emptied their pockets of ice cream money, bus money, absentminded neighbors’ money, sent in the tallest of the three, whose upper lip was already shaded with the premonition of a mustache, and afterward sat for some hours on a bench in the park, waiting for the darkness to dim their eager conspiratorial faces. Later they passed the bottle one to another until the world grew bright and angry before turning muddled, which was when the third classmate, the one without a mustache, claimed that this stuff wasn’t real vodka anyway but some horrible cheap concoction corroding their innards, even as he took another, unfairly generous swill, and that it probably wouldn’t burn if they set a match to it. Alexander left to accost frightened passersby for matches, and by the time he came back his two classmates had quarreled terribly and the shorter of the two had a cracked lip, though in the end he turned out to have been right, for a poisonous purplish, or maybe bluish, flame flickered briefly, then went out, and Alexander was spectacularly sick in the bushes.

“I’m a cognac man,” he said.

“Excellent, I know just the thing, then,” said the man merrily.

They strode through the streets, diving into alleys, cutting across passageways, walking in the shadow of a drunken fence for a spell. Alexander prided himself on knowing his neighborhood down to every boil of graffiti on its concrete expanses, but he was beginning to feel disoriented by the time the man stopped to pull open the door of an old apartment building. Pale spills of the January daylight dimly fleshed out an unclean staircase descending into nether regions, its top steps gleaming with the slush of many snow-coated footsteps.

Alexander hesitated on the threshold. He had no idea where he was.

“Care to join me, then?” the man’s voice boomed from the bottom of the stairs. “Don’t worry, you’ll be all right if you stick with me.” And when Alexander caught up, the slippery steps he had run down resounding like deep, rapid beats in his heart, he guessed at a quick brightening of the man’s teeth in the underground murk. “Of course, if you tell anyone about this little place, well—” Smiling still, the man drew a finger across his throat.

With a cold kind of thrill, Alexander realized he did not know whether the man was joking.

They traveled through low, faintly lit corridors at a brisk pace, pipes erupting moistly beside them, pockets of sudden hot air gushing into their faces with the concentrated smells of fried onions and detergent from the floors above. Then the man veered off, threw his shoulder against a wall. Invisible hinges moaned, and unexpectedly they were outside, stepping into a large courtyard closed off by low buildings.

Alexander halted. A derelict church slumped among the snowdrifts in the middle of the yard, gilt still streaking down its domes, shallow lakes of paint splashed on the peeling plaster. Of course, there were dozens like it in the city, tucked away in many forgotten, decaying corners, some with laundry drying between the twisted columns of their porches, others echoing shelters for colonies of crows or packs of homeless dogs; yet what surprised him about this one was the restless, purposeful activity he seemed to detect underneath its sagging arches.

He squinted to see better.

Strikingly stylish fellows were darting in and out of the gaping doorway.

“Hey there, you awake?” the man tossed over his shoulder as he too disappeared inside the ruin. Alexander ran.

When the church’s shadow fell over him, the brisk, frosty air of the midwinter day seemed to alter, growing somehow looser, damper; unsettling smells of urine, dust, and dissolution reached him through the slits of the empty windows above. Again he hesitated, then, with a small shudder, followed the echoes of the man’s assured steps inside. The sun had not yet set, but it was almost night within; the chill deepened here, and the cavernous dimness hung heavy on the crossing beams of many lanterns. Their flares of cold white light called into transient existence the hands, boots, faces of men loitering among a bewildering profusion of objects piled on invisible crates along the walls or revealed in brief flashes from under the sleek lining of the men’s leather jackets. As Alexander hurried across the ancient stones, trying not to wonder about the unpleasant sound of something bone-dry crunching underfoot, he glimpsed a bouquet of silver spoons with intricate handles; a pitcher with a pointy stopper that broke a flashlight’s ray into pieces and threw one jagged bright edge into his eyes; a fanned-out pack of curious-looking pictures, which appeared tantalizingly as so many pale curves in the shifting twilight and at which he wouldn’t have minded taking a closer peek; a magnificent, hefty knife, right next to the cracked icon of an old saint whose stark gaze condensed out of the darkness and pursued him uncomfortably for a few steps before melting back into the darkness; a small army of bottles glinting in a pool of light from a kerosene lamp hanging on a hook overhead—

“Just what we need,” said the man, braking so precipitately that Alexander nearly smashed into him. “You can always count on Stepan to deliver the goods. This one, I think.”

The fellow he addressed bent to pick up a plump bottle with a swelling of wax on its long throat; as his face passed in and out of a strip of light, Alexander saw a youth who looked to be only two or three years older than himself, with a short, angry scar under his left eye.

Straightening, the youth held up the bottle, named the price in a voice at once contemptuous and uneasy. Alexander swallowed.

“Could have just bought a fiver from a State store, sure,” said the man, “but I figured you’d appreciate the best there is. It’s from Over There, you know.” He paused; in the dimness, Alexander could hear him patting his jacket, rustling inside his pockets. “Bad luck, it appears I’ve left my funds at home. Well, next time, perhaps—”

“My treat,” said Alexander, stepping forward into the lamplight. “I’m flush today.”

Producing his wallet with a casual flourish, he leafed through the bills, then cast the smallest of glances at his companion.

“Good of you,” said the man. “Anything else your heart desires? Look around, go on.”

It might have been only the treacherous flickering of the shadows, but he did not appear overly impressed, or indeed all that surprised—and almost immediately Alexander felt his shaky surge of elation grow hollow, flutter into his stomach like the queasiness of indigestion.

“That knife over there,” he said tersely, as if arguing with someone.

The man nodded, already turning to go.

Back in the sickly light of the basement, the man beat the snow off his shoes, then expertly sliced through the bottle’s wax with the knife’s edge, pulled out the sweet-smelling cork, and took a slow swig. Alexander stared at his bobbing Adam’s apple, bristling with rough, graying hairs. Lowering the bottle, the man wiped his lips and looked back at him.

Alexander stretched out his hand.

The man went on looking at him in silence—and all at once, Alexander became aware of the echoing isolation of the stairwell and the man’s burly bulk and the tumorous growth of his mother’s wallet in his pocket. His hand wavered, but he did not withdraw it.