Three guitar chords—then they tumble down the scale. Three chords, then back down. The drums kick in, and suddenly two men’s voices sing out in simple English, perfect harmony, not just one line but a thick, lush landscape of sounds.
Oh yeah, I’ll tell you something, I think you’ll understand
When I, say that something, I wanna hold your hand …
We are no longer in the dead of a Russian winter. Instead we skip across a beach, in Georgia perhaps, looking across the Black Sea as sunlight and sand kiss our toes. It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard before. It isn’t dark and heavy and crushing like Russian music, nor is it treacly and false like what our comrades put forth as a pretense of pop. It is so real, so unusual, so removed from anything I’ve ever seen or heard.
And when I touch you, I feel happy inside
It’s such a feeling, that my love … I can’t hide
I can’t hide
I can’t hide …
The song rolls into a sour mood, but only long enough to tug my heart from my chest until it turns joyous again. It’s over too fast—only a few minutes in length. I open my eyes and find Valentin staring back at me with the same glassy-eyed hunger for this music that I feel pounding through my veins.
“And this—” I wet my parched lips. “This is American pop music?”
“Actually, they’re English. Call themselves the Beatles. This is their brand new single. Kruzenko had it imported from England just for me.” He smiles, and lies on his side, propped up on his elbow. “I have a few other songs for you, if you want to—”
“Yes!” I tumble onto my back with a laugh, my head angled toward him. “Yes, more. Please!”
“All right.” He leans over me to change the records, blushing furiously as he does. “This is Bob Dylan, and he sings in the American style called ‘blues,’ which is similar to the jazz I love so much…”
A mournful guitar patters along for a while before a man sings, deep-throated but crisp, and Valentin translates in my head the sad story of a house in New Orleans that chews up lives and spits the souls back out.
Valentin nestles onto the floor beside me again, shoulder hovering near mine close enough that I can feel his warmth. His temple radiates a pleasant lack of thought. There is no fear, no overwhelming responsibility in this room; only wonderful music and Valentin and me.
After that song ends, and he has played a few more—Elvis Presley with a dark chocolate voice who “Can’t Help Fallin’ in Love,” and another Beatles song, imploring me to hear their secrets—he tilts his head toward me. “You are happy?” he asks, his words flowing across the floor.
“It’s incredible. Is this what the rest of the world sounds like?”
“Not all of it.” He props one hand on his forehead, and his fingertips touch my hair. “But this is music, music when restraints have been lifted. It’s the difference between plants growing in a fenced-in garden, and the same plants left to conquer an entire field.”
“Music is very important to you,” I say. Stupidly, I know. Music is his soul, and all those afternoons I basked in his piano playing—he shared more of himself with me then than he could ever speak.
He nods. “It’s a language for things we can’t put in words.”
I roll my head toward his and our noses brush together. We have similar dark hair, olive skin; his eyes dark and brooding, mine wide but no less dark. Genetics mark us both as Georgian, he a Sorokhin and I a Chernina. Like most human beings, we share ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent of our DNA. Perhaps even closer—we share whatever strange gene gives us this mental prowess, if it can be explained with science at all. And yet there are things about each of us that neither will ever understand. That we can only admire from afar, like a Fabergé egg under glass whose gears will never be exposed.
“When did your family leave Georgia?” I ask. Papa always spoke of visiting his grandparents back in Tbilisi, before Stalin’s days.
“We didn’t leave,” Valentin says. His chest settles and our noses press closer. “Father and I were taken from there.”
“What was it like?” I want his soft, thick hair in my fingers, as though I were sifting through sand. I raise my hand, tentatively; his hair doesn’t disappoint. His eyes half close but he is still watching me, every bit as alert. Yevtushenko’s poem bleeds through my music. We can do so much, denied our earth—tenderly embrace as lovers in a darkened room. Never mind that he was talking about corpses in a mass grave.
“We lived in a tiny town in northern Ingush.” He raises a hand and tangles it in my hair, mirroring me. “I woke up every morning to the smell of sea salt from our back porch. I practiced piano while the sun came up, and at night, I walked the beach. Even after my mother passed, we survived, we…” He hesitates. “Her memories were like happy ghosts around us.”
“It sounds like a charmed existence,” I say.
He shakes his head. “I had no idea, at the time, what work my father did to give me such a life. That there were debts we’d have to pay.”