She swung around on the piano stool, seized a piece of sheet music, and beckoned to him. He saw it was the Rachmaninov elegy she had worked on several times without success. She attacked it, managed to clear the first few hurdles with the courage of drunkenness, fell at the next. Started again, no longer concealing her anger, stumbled…
He listened to her, his eyes half closed, absent-mindedly. At the third, almost desperate attempt, as she hesitated again, he murmured, without thinking, "There's a sharp there…"
She broke off, looked at him. The effort of reading the music must have cleared her mind for a moment. She saw this man, sitting motionless beside her, his eyes closed, a man she had for a moment believed capable of saying what she had heard (I really am drunk, she thought). He looked very old and exhausted, and the pink spots left by the stitches on the scar across his brow were clearly visible.
He roused himself when he heard her weeping. Her elbows on the keyboard, she was sobbing, trying to speak: "You can go now, Sergei. They're not coming till tomorrow. You have to be at the station at nine o'clock." Despite her tears, a conspiratorial tone lingered in her voice. This was the admission she had rehearsed as part of the night's scenario.
And then there was that other evening, in March, when the streets, roads, and buildings were blotted out by a snowstorm, the last one of the winter. And it was also the last time the general invited him up to the crow's nest to drink tea.
Stella came in to see him; they remained for a moment watching the white fury outside the window. She had shut the door when she came in, and the sound of her mother's voice reached them, muffled by the interminable corridor, calling out to the housekeeper: "Vera, do wipe up the hall floor. That driver's left snow everywhere." Stella pulled a wry face and made a gesture, as if seeking to make up for these words, then suddenly leaned over toward Alexe'i as he sat there, his cup of tea in his hands, and kissed him. He felt her lips on his brow where it was marked by the scar… Out in the corridor a cloth could be heard scrubbing the floor.
The following day he was going off with the general, who had several garrisons in the north to inspect.
The inspection trip lasted almost a month. They traveled back and forth across regions still immobilized by ice, skirted the White Sea, drove through forests where for the moment not a glimmer of spring could be sensed. Just as if winter had returned. As if the days of the war had returned with the columns of troops being reviewed by the general, tanks with their tracks grinding the frozen earth, the bleak concrete of the fortifications.
With every mile on their return journey it seemed to them as if they were taking shortcuts back into spring. And no trace remained of those wartime winters, apart from the sheet of ice on which the general one day slipped and sprained his ankle. Alexe'i had to carry him to the car. "Hey, do you remember that time at the front, Sergei?" he said with a quiet chuckle. "You lugged me under the Fritzes' noses for eight miles." And, without admitting it to themselves, they both had the thought that if they could laugh about it now, the war really was over.
In Moscow, this springtime laughter could be heard everywhere – in the April sunshine that already burned the skin, just as it did in summer, in the clatter of the streetcars on the gleaming steel rails, in the carefree faces of the crowds of young people for whom the war was no more than a childhood memory. And it was such a pleasure to remain outdoors that it no longer even occurred to the general to invite Alexeï to come up and warm himself and drink tea.
Stella realized that the winter had been a long dream – sometimes dream, sometimes nightmare – from which she was now well and truly awakened. In the little crow's nest Vera, the maid of all work, piled up the coats, strewed the furs with mothballs. The tiny window, bombarded by sunlight, was blocked with a thick rectangle of cardboard. In this place now it was impossible to imagine a man sitting there with his cup of tea, a man disfigured by a white scar across his brow and wearing a soldier's uniform.
But it was still more improbable to imagine him walking at her side in these springtime streets, meeting her classmates. No, no! The very picture of such a couple made her cringe. Besides, how had she ever thought that one day she could reveal this man's existence to the circle of friends around which her whole life now revolved? Talk to them about that dinner with him, her stupid tears? No, it was a long winter's hallucination that the sun had dissipated.
She did not care to admit to herself that this fantasy had enriched her, that thanks to this soldier hidden away in the crow's nest, she had learned a multitude of feminine wiles, so useful for manipulating a man; that he had been her toy; that she had used him. In an attempt to silence these disturbing little admissions, on one occasion she began to play "The Little Tin Soldier," trying to imitate the mistakes he generally made, laughing at them, almost without forcing herself. Then she played "The Waltz of the Doves," which she had also taught him, a much more cheerful tune, but one which suddenly made her sad.
She experienced the same sadness when one day she caught sight of him through the drawing room window. The car was parked in front of the entrance, waiting for the general. Stella saw the open car door, a hand holding a cigarette, and, mirrored in the windshield, the pale shape of his face. "He'll spend his whole life waiting," she thought and felt guilty, for in her case too many good things lay in wait for her: this beautiful spring, then, after the exams, the prom, then university, the intoxicating freedom students have, and then… All she could picture was a vast surge of brilliance in the days to come.
During these moments of compassion, she also felt gratitude. Why, in the course of that stupid dinner he could have undressed her, taken her, she might have become pregnant! The idea was so appalling, so compromising for her future, that she shook her head to be rid of it. And began to loathe him, for he was in fact in a position to ruin everything, almost without wishing to do so.
Ultimately, this whirligig of regrets, joy, pity, anger, and faded dreams made the exciting newness of this spring all the more piquant. Real life was about to begin.
He saw Stella only once more during these weeks of sunshine. One evening, instead of going home, he parked the car in the street behind a newsstand. He knew it was the day for her music lesson. She came into view, wearing a light summer coat, and walked along the avenue where the trees were still barely tinged with green. Her silhouette stood out against the blue of the dusk with a clarity that hurt his eyes. For a long time after she had disappeared, he retained the picture of her there, at the turning of the avenue, and in the palm of his hand felt the very real sensation of touching her, of gripping the delicate outline of her shoulders with his fingers. The sensation was familiar to him: the suppleness of the dead squirrel on his palm.
He drove off, plunging into the streets, now blue, now shafted with streams of copper from the sunset. He told himself that in this life there should be a key, a code for expressing, in concise and unambiguous terms, all the complexity of our attempts, so natural and so grievously confused, at living and loving. This beautiful evening in Moscow a year after the war's end. That pale cream coat disappearing around a corner. The unbearable pain and the futile joy contained in that moment. The memory of the squirrel, and there, above the bridge, the silvery white of the clouds, just the same as last winter, seen through the window of the crow's nest.
It suddenly seemed to him as if all that had restrained him just now from getting out of the car and running after that pale cream coat in the avenue was the false name he had been dragging around with him for all those years. Violently he strove to convince himself that this was the only obstacle.