“I hear an old folk song,” I say. “Is there a radio somewhere?”
“No, no.” She shakes her head with a smile and drops her arm. The music dissipates like steam. “It’s how we guard our thoughts, you see. We can’t redirect them, so we must shield them instead. Straighten up.” She taps my hip. I scowl and stand upright, but fold my arms protectively across my chest. “Now choose a song—one you won’t get sick of.”
I mull over the possibilities. Tchaikovsky’s oeuvre is bursting with loud, ponderous music, perfect for concealing thoughts, and I pause on the dark, heavy opening to his piano concerto. No, it’s too much. What have I heard on the radio? A few snatches of American pop songs—wonderful sunny songs, about girls in California and shining chrome-trimmed cars—but I’d only caught a few bars before the static curtain of the radio jammers closed on the frequency.
The radio triggers another memory—huddled in Aunt Nadia’s kitchen with Mama, Cousin Denis, and Zhenya just a few months back. The new voice of Russia, the poet Yevgenni Yevtushenko, was reading his poem that decried the Nazi slaughter of Jews in the Ukraine. But there was more than just words. Dmitri Shostakovich conducted his Thirteenth Symphony live, set to the reading, in a delirious and dangerous waterfall of violent strings, blunt elbows of brass, slow bleeding drums.
The melody rises in my mind, and Yevtushenko’s words guide it along. No monument stands over Babi Yar. A steep cliff only, like the crudest of headstones. My gaze drifts down the cliffs to the Moskva River below us.
“Interesting choice,” Kruzenko says.
I lurch forward, startled by her voice, and the melody falters, slipping through my thoughts as if it’s turned to sand. I try to catch it, but the farther away it goes, the more thoughts pop up in my head. Everything I wouldn’t want Kruzenko—or anyone—to know. How long until my next period. Where Mama hid our rubles. The more I reach for the melody, the more absurd my thoughts turn. Sergei’s luscious muscles. Cleaning up after Zhenya when he’s been too lost in his own world to visit the toilet. Valentin skewering me like a reindeer kabob with that gaze of his. How I’m already memorizing the patrol routes of all our guards. The time I walked in on Cousin Denis kissing his best friend Timofei—
“I am not judging you for your thoughts,” Kruzenko says. “Empty your mind, and let only the music in.”
The horns sound in the distance, mournful; the drums hint at soldiers on the march. A banal thought trickles through the trees—hunger. Yes, the buckwheat porridge at the KGB holding cell was not enough to last me through the day. But Yevtushenko’s voice booms over the stray thought, bouncing off the shadowy snow. When will we be eating? As the violins slide in to have their say, I suspect I will be stuck here for far too long. No, I must focus: the sawing cello matches my pounding heart, until there is nothing more.
“And just like that, I cannot hear your thoughts.” Kruzenko smirks. “Well—you are no longer broadcasting them to the whole world, at least. You must keep practicing. Any time you feel it falter, call up the melody again.”
I open my mouth to speak, but the music stutters. Two tries, three—around the seventh try I think I can manage it. “I—I think I understand.”
She nods. “Eventually, it will be as natural as breathing.”
I take a deep breath and gust it out. Shostakovich’s melody plays at the back of my mind, but I can fit other thoughts in my head now, too; they don’t have to drown him out. It’s a comfort to have him there, like an extra blanket in winter.
Major Kruzenko reaches into her pocket. “Now let us tame your gift—enough for you to participate in today’s class.”
Mama’s necklace spins before me. My heart lurches, but I smother it in my new music. I can’t panic.
“Admittedly, you are the first I have encountered whose powers work primarily through touch. But I understand some of it. Memories and thoughts can cling to objects like a film, and the psychic—you—must sift through the layers to find the correct memory.”
I reach for the medallion, but she pulls it out of my reach. “Gently, child. Try the lightest brush of skin, so only the most recent memory flakes away.”
I extend my index finger until it barely bumps against the medallion. Kruzenko nods at me, and I close my eyes.
Thrashing—water rushing up my nose. I suck in air but darkness floods my lungs instead. Images drift past me like bubbles: Kruzenko holding the necklace out to me in the interrogation room; Kruzenko in an office, one I’ve never seen, discussing the pendant with a uniformed man. I can’t see his face, but there’s that buzzing sound again, overwriting her gypsy song.