Эдвард Докс - Pravda ['Self Help' in the UK]

Henry looked up. “I cannot believe you mean what you say, Arkasha.” He sometimes used the customary Russian nickname for Arkady, though he was careful never to say it with any hint of saccharinity. “Otherwise, why would you practice ten hours a day? But… well, even if everything is bullshit, I am afraid that the great dictatorship of the here and now continues. And as outraged and ill-equipped as we are, humanity is nonetheless commanded to get on with it. We have no other choice.” Henry glanced toward where his friend lay. “What time are you supposed to be there tonight?”

“I feel like a Swedish wankpit.”

“Around seven?”

“And it’s going to rain again.”

“What time are you supposed to be there tonight?”

“Half past ten.”

“I’ll walk with you—if you are going to walk.”

Arkady batted off the newspaper and placed his cap firmly over his face.

Henry smiled his anemic smile again and wandered over to the window to take stock of the weather: immediately to the left, the other tower blocks; below, street squalor, gray decay, refuse; to the right, acid-rain-stained concrete and a tall crane, like some oddly skeletal single finger; directly ahead, rusted docks that had never taken themselves seriously; disrepair and dilapidation on all sides, and yet none of it detained the eye for more than a moment—because spread across the wide horizon beyond was the sea, light-spangled and sapphire-glorious in the still commanding sun. And now—just now—the beauty was truly extraordinary: the sea, angle-lit from the south and here-and-there sparkling, was nonetheless shading darker and darker, slate to a bluish black, as that resolute line of bruised purple clouds low-scudded in from the west. The island of Kronstadt and the dam had already vanished, and in a few minutes those clouds would obscure the sun altogether.

It happened like this. Though son and mother never did see or speak to each other again, Henry found himself acting for Arkady while Zoya continued to work for Maria Glover. Perhaps some sense of a secular mission prompted Henry to intervene. Or perhaps it was some new and bold reckoning in his dispute with the God from whom he could not quite flee. Either way, the deal had been struck.

Many an intention had blurred since then, but even at the time, more than two years ago, Henry had chosen not to examine his motives too closely—were not most human interactions thus shaded? Just the same, were he capable of being honest with himself on the subject, Henry had sensed then (as he sensed still) that desire was down there, lurking and smirking among the innocents, if ever he had mind enough to look. And yet he could not face bearing his torch so deep, for fear of discovering who or what held sway in these darkest crypts. Besides which, when he was in his lighter mood, such thoughts seemed like huge misapprehensions, echoes of a daydream from a time long ago, before he canceled himself out, before he shut down his sex drive and opened up his veins.

In any case, theirs began as a straightforward friendship. Henry had been out with a group of mainly English expatriates at one of Arkady’s Magizdat gigs at the JFC Jazz Club. A veteran of a thousand classical concerts and five times as many recordings, he had thought that he recognized something exceptional in the Russian’s playing. Later, Arkady had joined the table—there was talk of gigs in Vilnius and Tallinn—and Henry had translated. Though it was no business of his, Henry had then offered to teach Arkady English at half his normal rate—out of an unmediated eagerness to assist such talent in any way he could. But perhaps Arkady surprised him by taking his offer seriously, turning up twice a week at eight in the morning at Henry’s old flat behind the Nevsky, well prepared and with the vocabulary learned. And perhaps Henry was pleased to be thus surprised.

Indeed, for the next six months, Arkady studied with the tenacious application of a last-chance student—far harder than the rest of Henry’s pupils. And within a few months they were practicing English conversation. Initially Arkady told Henry only the barest outlines of his circumstances—that he knew nothing of his parents and that he had grown up in Orphanage Number 11, called Helios, and that it was “like a house for the fucking of pigs.” But over the weeks Henry coaxed out the greater part of his history. (As so often happened, Henry noticed, Arkady was far more relaxed and open in his emerging second language. Curious, too, how quickly the Russians mastered obscenity.) Like a thick central pillar which alone supported the roof and around which everything else revolved was the main fact of Arkady’s life: that he had trained as a classical pianist. This confirmed what Henry had felt must surely be the case when he first heard him perform—though “trained” hardly described the experience that Henry discovered Arkady to have undergone. His various teachers had well and truly made him a pianist—fashioned him, beaten him, worshipped him, forced him, encouraged him, praised him, hounded him, persecuted him, pushed him, cajoled him, inculcated him, taught him his art in the least compromising and most effective of all teaching methods: old-school Soviet style. For as long as he had been able to read, Arkady had been reading staves. It was not Russian that was Arkady Alexandrovitch’s first language at all—it was music.

And it was no exaggeration to say that Arkady had been a child prodigy—the proud boast of Petersburg youth orchestras and the boy chosen to play for Gorbachev himself in 1984. “They love orphans for Soviet times, Henry. We do not have problem of mothers, fathers. We are heroes of the great state. No parents to take the glory away.” Certainly by the time he was seventeen, everything was set for Arkady’s smooth transition to the St. Petersburg State Conservatory and from there surely to Moscow and international stardom.

Then Mother Russia fell apart—again.

At first Arkady’s rightful place was merely postponed for a year. “There were problems, so many problems, Henry You just had to wait—this was the way. Always in this bullshit country, we wait. For what? For nothing.” He was nonetheless required to leave the orphanage and seek what work he could find as an electrician, the secondary training they had given him by way of Soviet-style existential comedy.

Then, when the long year had dragged itself reluctantly around the calendar, the place was arbitrarily postponed again. But still Arkady could not bring himself to face the facts: that the nature of bribery and corruption had undergone a complete reversal and that advancement was no longer about the Party system or Party sponsorship; that in the new Russia it was all about the money and the guns. In 1991 the orphanage shut down. In 1992 his piano teacher died. He lost access to the last good piano he had been using. The second year passed and he was told to apply to the conservatory all over again—through the new system. He did so, this time without a sponsor. By midway through 1993, he knew he wasn’t going to make it. Even then it took him half a decade to abandon the greater part of his hope. And so he spent the last years of the millennium selling smuggled stereos around the back of Sennaya Square by day and (as much as to sit by a functioning piano as to stay alive materially) playing bullshit music in the new hotel bars by night, hour after hour, his fingers aching like ten desperate would-be lovers trapped in ten deadly marriages for something real… the Hammerklavier ’s embrace.

The shortage of playable pianos in Russia… Ah, yes—besides the English lessons, there was a second reason for the deepening of Henry and Arkady’s early association. Or perhaps it was the main reason. At any rate, a few months after Henry had begun teaching Arkady, he bought an upright C. Bechstein. Henry himself had once been a competent amateur, and maybe he did genuinely intend to pick up where he had left off at the age of eighteen—and yet, even as he and the seller’s three handsome sons heaved the piano through his front door, Henry knew well that Arkady would be the first to sit at the keyboard. Sure enough, as soon as the Russian saw it, he asked if he could play, and—the quagmire of the verb “to be” happily abandoned for the time being—Henry spent the next two hours sitting still at his teaching table, utterly rapt. Thereafter Arkady came around three or four times a week, practicing for hours on end, regardless of the lesson schedule.