—
WASHING ONE’S HANDS AFTER a piss in Noah’s bathroom proved to be a difficult task. The sink, a giant piece of hand-blown art glass, was cleft by a giant crack. “Your sink’s broken!” Lenny hollered over the flushing sounds.
“So use the one in the kitchen!” Noah called back. Lenny shook his head and wiped his hands on his jeans. Noah’s proclivity for pretentious novelties always struck him as absurd. And still there was little comfort in the thought, as Lenny walked into the kitchen, that if he had Noah’s money he would put it to better use. Rinsing his hands in the kitchen sink, he watched Noah and Yana through the open bar. They were seated on the couch, comparing the sizes of their palms, Noah concupiscently gushing over the delicacy of Yana’s hands while Yana bemoaned how she had been diagnosed at age six with fingers too short to play the piano and therefore had taken up the violin. “And my mother—she would not let me go outside and play with my friends, or with balls, because my fingers would break.”
“Poor Yana.” Noah frowned sympathetically. “Poor, poor Yanochka.”
“I think I’m gonna take off,” Lenny announced.
Noah looked up. “No, stick around! Yana’s going to play for us.”
“Yes!” Yana said, briskly pulling back the fine exposed muscles of her shoulders as she stood up from the couch.
“I will be right back.” Noah left them alone while he went to fix drinks.
Yana was standing by the wall-sized window, admiring the view of Tsvetnoy Boulevard below. Her fingers, which did not look at all short to Lenny, touched the cold glass.
“Klass!” she said, somewhat blandly. “This is best view I see of Moscow.”
Briefly, Lenny let himself wonder how many such views she had to compare it with. “Where are you from?” he said.
“Voronezh.”
“Voronezh is nice.”
Yana turned and leveled him with a sarcastic look. “Ochen’.” As if. Her sudden switch to Russian had the effect of puncturing the low-key mood of urbanity and intimacy. How did they always know, Lenny wondered? Even when he hadn’t spoken a word of Russian to them, these girls could always tell he was from the old country.
“What do you do? I mean, during the day?” he said idiotically.
“Student. Gnesinka.” She pointed to the violin case.
“That’s a very impressive school.”
“Yes, very.”
“Do you want to be a concert musician—like, play in the Bolshoi Orchestra?”
Yana gave him an inscrutable look. She didn’t appear pleased with the familiarity and seriousness this conversation was taking. “As we say here, the colonels have their own children. And so do the musicians, as it happens.” She shrugged and turned back to the window.
Jesus, what was wrong with him? Why did he always try to chat up these birds of paradise and drag them down to the level of ordinary girls? Yana looked relieved when Noah waltzed back into the room with a tray of three cognac glasses and said, “Let the concert begin!”
—
WHEN YANA WALKED BACK into the living room, she wore her butterfly pendant and four-inch heels and nothing else. Her hair hung like Lady Godiva’s over two hard little tits, and she was guarding her lower half humbly with the polished violin. At her thigh, the bow swayed back and forth in her hand like a riding whip. “I will play for you Dvo?ák,” she announced, and in a single motion lifted the violin to reveal a prim, slender isosceles. She set her small chin down on the saddle and, with a quick intake of breath and a gaze out at the enormous city night, began to play.
In all his life, Lenny felt he had never heard such music. Snatches of high-pitched chords cut the silence and disappeared, radiantly, violently, like lightning punishing the earth. The music seemed to take possession of her body—rising from Yana’s painted toes up through her bent, pale leg, where a tender brown bruise bloomed. It vibrated up her long, slim torso before being released by her taut wrist to unlock the violin’s resonant moan. Only Yana’s face stayed pinched and vacant as her playing gathered momentum and shifted, with each turn of the bow, from wild defiance to something proud and almost scornful, to unfathomable sadness. She swayed on her teetering heels like a bridge, and from time to time her knee did a little gallop, as if to keep her from pitching forward. Her pale breasts, the pencil-eraser nipples pointing bashfully away from each other, bobbed along with her flushed performance.
Noah shook his head. “State of the fucking art,” he whispered. “I can’t tell if these chicks are sent from heaven or from hell.”
Lenny wished he’d shut up. He was battling both unspeakable heartache and a budding boner, all of which only added to the exquisite shame and loneliness he’d been feeling all afternoon. He watched as Yana—if that was even her name—attacked the violin. A sheen of sweat had formed above her lips and between her heartbreaking breasts. Lenny let his eyes fall shut and concentrated on each wailing phrase as it stacked up into a ladder of sound that went all the way up, up….To where? He wanted to follow the notes to their highest and thinnest abyss and dwell there forever. God, he hated this city. Yet he couldn’t bear the thought of leaving. Where else on earth could he ever find so much mercy?
My plane touches down just before eight in the evening. Moscow’s sky is still lucent, the undersides of the copper clouds catching the last of the long day’s sun.
I call Lenny from my cab. He’s spirited in his usual way as we talk about where to meet for dinner. “You like sirloin, Pop? Good, good. Or maybe Italian, pasta ’n’ clams?”
Great, I say, leaving out the fact that I’m never hungry after a long flight.