A Simple Scale Read online

  “Okay. We can meet, if you like. I’m free most evenings, or –”

  “Tonight.”

  She laughed as if her diary was crammed with appointments. It was not. Meet him, humour him, and if it turns out he’s a pervert or a psychopath, raise hell. But meet him somewhere public.

  She went through a mental list of bars that might be busy on a Tuesday evening. If her roommate, Gino, was anything to go by, gay men rarely took a night off, and so she told him to meet her at Julius Bar, on West 10th Street and Waverly. When she’d hung up she wrote Grekov’s name and the name of the bar on a Post-It note and stuck it to the kitchen notice board, where Dolly or Rosa would see it.

  She spent the rest of the afternoon with Sol, reading him a review of Idomeneo at the Met and slipping Sunset Boulevard in the video, but she was distracted and paid little attention to the film.

  There was no reason why she had to meet Pavel Grekov. She could go straight home, take a long bath, walk around the apartment naked for a while. Maybe get a couple of beers.

  No beers. Her headache had cleared by lunchtime but her stomach was still uncertain. She saw her wineglass falling into that lady’s handbag. Embarrassing in any circumstances, but the lady in question was someone senior from the Lincoln Center. She had gazed down into her wine-drenched bag with appal and Natalie apologised and tiptoed into another room as if making a stealthy getaway. She was still mischievous at that point; she hadn’t yet crossed the line into the final phase, the mean phase. Somebody should have put her in a cab long before then. She would be surprised if Carol and Louise ever spoke to her again.

  Jamilah returned shortly after five, her denim rucksack on her shoulder and a canvas book bag under her arm.

  “He been good today?”

  “So so.”

  “Hoping I’ll get a little peace tonight.”

  “He should be fine.”

  Even as she left the house, Natalie still hadn’t decided what she would do. She had always been this way. Capable of snap decisions or hours, days, weeks of deliberation, and nothing in between. Sometimes the snap decisions proved fruitful, like applying to NYU. Other times (the Dutch courage she’d had before Carol and Louise’s party) less so. But these hours of pondering were the worst. Like a mental paralysis. The world became so much white noise. It had been so much worse this last month.

  It took her an hour to reach East Village. Third Avenue was rush hour busy, and she had to elbow her way through legions of sightseers all across Midtown. Even after everything that happened, still so many tourists. Perhaps the flights were cheap.

  Her hangover still hadn’t entirely worn off. She wasn’t sure she could face another drink. And still, the shame of it all. Getting up on that chair, getting everyone’s attention by flicking her wine glass. “Toast! Toast!” The others laughing, thinking she was about to say something witty. The way their faces dropped when she didn’t.

  Hair of the dog. That was what she needed. A terrible excuse, really, but what else was she going to do? Go home and watch repeats of Ally McBeal on whichever channel wasn’t showing rolling news?

  There wasn’t enough time for her to go home and freshen up, and so Natalie went straight to Julius Bar. She was on time, almost to the minute. She looked around, scanning the faces for any likely candidates, and saw none. She contemplated ordering a Coke. She asked the barman for a bottle of Sam Adams.

  She was there for maybe a quarter of an hour before Grekov appeared. The door opened, she felt the breeze on her back, heard the sound of traffic on West 10th Street, and footsteps. She looked across and saw a young man, younger than she’d anticipated, with short dark hair and blue eyes.

  “You are Natalie.”

  She nodded.

  “Pavel Grekov,” he said, adding, as if she should know the name: “Sergey Grekov was my grandfather.”

  Natalie shrugged an apology. Never heard of him. She gestured to the bartender and ordered two more beers. Pavel Grekov took up the stool next to hers.

  “So,” she said. “How do you know Mr Conrad?”

  “I don’t know him. I only know what he did.”

  “And what was that?”

  “Stole my grandfather’s music.”

  That was a new one. Natalie laughed. She could guess where this was heading. Most likely, he was a grifter from no further afield than Brighton Beach. That’s if his name and accent were even genuine.

  “What music?” she asked.

  “Battle Station Alpha. You know…” And he hummed the theme, almost tunelessly, but close enough for her to recognise it.

  “You’re telling me your grandfather wrote the theme from Battle Station Alpha?”

  Grekov nodded. “He wrote it. For his ballet.”

  This guy was good. Ballet was a nice touch. Why would anyone make up a thing like that?

  “Which ballet?”

  “Geroy nashego vremeni. It’s based on a novel.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Hero of Our Time. This is what you call it.”

  She knew of the novel, but not the ballet. If he was lying, he’d put some effort into it. But then, isn’t that the nature of confidence tricksters? Don’t they all go into this kind of laborious detail? She would hold strong. Humour him a little while longer, but only till she got bored.

  “And where’s your grandfather now?”

  “He died when I was little.”

  “And where did he live?”

  “Leningrad. St Petersburg.”

  “Was he famous?”

  “In Russia, yes. As a young man.”

  “But only in Russia?”

  Grekov nodded. Natalie was warming to this now. The first beer had levelled things out. She was at the sweet spot of alcohol-induced confidence.

  “And his music… Was it performed in the States? Was it recorded?”

  “Not this piece.”

  She began to laugh again, and Grekov shifted uncomfortably on his stool.

  “You think this is funny,” he said. “What your boss did?”

  “No. What’s funny is you walking in here and accusing him of plagiarism. Were you trying to blackmail him? Is that it?”

  “Not blackmail,” said Pavel. “I came to New York, to speak with Sol Conrad.”

  “Well you can’t. And you won’t.”

  Pavel got up, his stool scraping against the floor, loud enough to make heads turn. “Fucking Americans,” he said. She let it pass. “So arrogant. And you are wrong.”

  “So prove it.”

  He glowered at her and her body tensed, anticipating violence. Maybe she’d pushed this too far.

  “There is proof,” Pavel said. “I have the, ah, the partitura… the music written down in a book…”

  “The score?”

  “Yes. The score. I have it in my hotel. Exactly the same. Do you read music?”

  “Yes.”

  “You read it, you will see. Exactly the same. But you don’t read it, fine. I will take it to a lawyer.”

  “Be my guest. I’ll wait for them to call.”

  Grekov stumbled out, clipping his shoulder against the doorframe as he left. Some of those sitting or standing along the bar looked at Natalie with condescending smiles. A lovers’ tiff, they were thinking. What had they been arguing about?

  Five minutes ago she’d found the whole thing hilarious, but now her hands began to shake. She ordered another bottle of beer, and chased it down with a shot of gin.

  Chapter 2:

  LENINGRAD, FEBRUARY 1950

  Another time, another place; the city grey, the snowflakes falling in the street like ashes. Beneath the station’s clock tower, two heavy doors swing open with a gasp, and Sergey Grekov steps out, his coat held around him and his gloveless hands clasped tightly in his armpits. Thirty-seven years old but prematurely grey and uncommonly thin, he looks at Leningrad as if it still might be a mirage.

  From everything he has been told these last few years, he was anticipating ruins. H
ollow buildings and charred timbers, streets strewn with rubble. Instead, he finds it repainted and rebuilt, and yet the place is different, as if everything has been moved around in his absence, as you might rearrange the furniture in an old room.

  He’s unaccustomed to choice. When he comes to a junction, he can go in any direction; left, right, straight ahead. The space is almost limitless. No perimeter fence, no watchtowers, no guard dogs. Yet this isn’t complete freedom. His papers tell him where to go and when. The tenement, the factory. Disobey them, and there’s every chance they could send him back.

  The streets around the station are almost empty. The few people he passes look shabby, not how he remembers them. Moscow was always the peasant city, the place where people look as if they’ve just arrived from the country. Not Leningrad. Not Piter.

  Moskovsky Prospect is busier, especially once he’s crossed the bridge. There, he moves through a shuffling black mass of other people, winter coats and hats dusted with snow. A xylophone-ribbed dog shivers and keeps pace with him along the gutter. Red and white trams whisper through the slush, passengers pressed against windows opaque with steam. The bell of a nearby clock strikes one.

  The last time he saw this street it was through the windows of a police car, in the early hours of a Tuesday morning. It was August then, the air already humid, and stuffier still inside the car. He remembers an agent, a lad barely older than twenty, lighting his cigarette for him – his own hands were cuffed – and the way the car was filled almost immediately with smoke.

  As a young man, Leningrad’s winters seemed so much colder than this – far too cold to consider walking very far – but the last leg of his journey was spent in a train compartment with ten others. They took it in turns to sit, but there was no room to lie down and sleep. Cold as it might be, it’s good to be out in the open. Besides, he has known far colder.

  His papers tell him to report to the tenement building no earlier than 3pm and so, to pass the time, he finds a café where he orders coffee, black bread and a bowl of rassolnik.

  The secret police and their informants were everywhere in the north; guards spying on prisoners and even prisoners spying on guards. No-one trusted anyone. But what about here, in this café? The skinny lad behind the counter, perhaps. The old woman eating some indeterminate grey mush out of a chipped bowl. The crooked figure hunched over a newspaper in the far corner.

  The soup, when it arrives, is mostly barley and carrots, little in the way of meat. Sergey dips his bread into the soup. He hasn’t eaten in more than a day. The broth dances on his tongue. Its warmth spreads out, from his chest and through his limbs and into his fingers and toes. He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again he senses someone staring at him. The figure in the corner; the small man with stooped shoulders, his face drawn, pinched and beetle-browed. Though as threadbare and hungry-looking as everyone else in the city, this man could be secret service.

  After studying him a moment longer, the stranger gets to his feet, tucks his newspaper into the inside of his overcoat, and crosses the café.

  “Seryozha?” he says, his smile a gash of yellow teeth and greyish gums. “Sergey Andreievich?”

  Sergey nods slowly, waiting for the stranger’s smile to fade, and for him to say there’s been a mistake, that Sergey should never have been released, that his rehabilitation is incomplete and that he will be placed on the very first train back to Komi, by orders of the MGB.

  “Do I know you?” he asks.

  The stranger laughs. “Know me? Sergey! Of course you know me! It’s me! Vasily Nikolayevich. Sidorov! Vasya!”

  Vasily Sidorov. A name he’s neither said nor spoken nor even thought about in years. When did they last see one another? Perhaps the night of the premiere, or in the days that followed. No, his memory of that time is too clouded to picture the exact scene. When he first laid eyes on him, however… this he remembers clearly.

  A rehearsal room, backstage at the Kirov. Secretary Remizov taking Sergey on a tour of the theatre, introducing him as “our latest genius”. Echoing against a polished floor, the sound of a piano playing one of Chopin’s nocturnes. In the studio, holding the bar, a young man, eighteen or nineteen, with dark, lightly curled hair, performing a series of degage, and stopping only when he noticed the presence of a stranger.

  Now, in the café, Sergey’s innards clench. He hardly recognises him.

  “Vasya?”

  The man draws out the facing chair and sits.

  “I knew it was you!” he says. “I work nights at the children’s hospital, and every day I come here for lunch, which is really supper, I suppose. But every day I come here, and I know everyone who comes in, if not by name then by face. I see them every day. But you, as soon as you walked in, I thought, ‘Hold on, he’s new.’ And then I looked at you again, and I realised it was you.”

  “Yes,” says Sergey, smiling almost painfully. “It’s me.”

  “How long has it been? Ten years? Fifteen?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Twelve years. Well. Can you imagine? Twelve years. Incredible. I heard you were up in Archangel, writing music for a theatre company. That’s what everyone was saying. Is it true?”

  Sergey shakes his head.

  “Oh,” says Vasily. “They must have got it wrong. But you’re here now.”

  Sergey nods.

  “And it’s so good to see you! I hardly see anyone these days. We were, well, you know… One oughtn’t say such things in public, but people like us, the artists, we weren’t exactly front of the queue when the rations were being handed out. Were you here at all, during the blockade?”

  Sergey shakes his head.

  “Of course not. Silly question. But you were lucky. Say, are you going to eat all of that bread?”

  “Yes.”

  “Only, if you weren’t, I have some wood in my flat that I could swap. It’s good, too. It’s not damp and it won’t burn too quickly, not like some of the cheap shit that’s going around.”

  “No, I’m quite hungry, so –”

  “Do you have a place to stay?”

  Sergey tells him that yes, he has a place to stay, in Kirovskiy, near the Kirov plant.

  “Nice, nice,” says Vasily.

  “Is it?”

  “Oh, yes. And prestigious, too. You’re lucky. Have you moved in yet?”

  “Not yet, no,” says Sergey. “I only got here an hour ago.”

  “Oh, well,” says Vasily. “If you’ve not moved in yet, they might not have wood. In your rooms, I mean. They don’t always give you fuel, when you move in. Some places, it takes weeks. So, you know, if you don’t have any…”

  Sergey draws his plate closer and dunks what’s left of his bread into the rassolnik.

  “You must be hungry,” says Vasily. “I know they don’t always have much bread on the trains. I’ve heard, a friend once told me, if you want a bigger ration of bread…” His voice drops to a whisper. “If you want a bigger ration of bread, you have to give the ticket inspector a blowjob. Is that true?”

  Sergey smiles. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Oh, then you must be hungry,” says Vasily, laughing and coughing at the same time. “Say, listen. I live near here. When you’re finished, let’s go to mine. I’m on the third floor, so it’s not too cold, and I have some vodka.”

  A loaded invitation, but Sergey has nowhere else to go and two hours till he can report to his tenement. When the bill is settled he and Vasily walk the short distance to Vasily’s building, just off Sennaya Square.

  Twelve years ago Vasily Sidorov lived not so far from here, in an apartment complex on Sadovaya Street, and Sergey remembers summer parties when they would congregate on a small terrace overlooking the square, and they would drink champagne; Soviet champagne, of course, but ice cold, and sparkling and as crisp as a fresh apple.

  Vasily’s new building has no terrace. One of its two entrances is sealed shut by a frozen snowdrift, and the other opens only when Vasily barges into it w
ith such force that Sergey worries he – and not the door – might break.

  Once inside, they are taken up to Vasily’s floor by a gloomy hallway and a flight of stairs that smells strongly of piss, while Vasily’s room smells mustily of tobacco smoke, mildew and dust. Sergey recalls Vasily having a small collection of illicit Persian rugs and a mantelpiece crammed with ornaments, but this new place – if it can be called new – is sparse, decorated only with a few pieces of old furniture. The floor and the walls are bare.

  “Please, sit,” says Vasily. “I’ll get us some vodka. I only have one glass. Do you mind having yours in a teacup?”

  “Not at all.”

  “What am I saying? You have the glass, I’ll have the teacup. As you may be able to tell, I don’t do much entertaining these days…”

  Vasily opens a cupboard and takes out the vodka, a chipped teacup and a cloudy tumbler. He crosses the room with an awkward, scuttling motion; bug-like, a spider creeping along a skirting board. He was once the most graceful man Sergey had ever met. Small in build, but not feminine. Women and men alike considered him beautiful. Now he reminds Sergey of a gargoyle or some grinning demon, a didko, from an old folktale. He takes to the sagging armchair opposite, and for a moment they sit in silence; Vasily still smiling at him, scrutinising him.

  “It’s incredible,” he says, at last. “That you came here. To Leningrad. It isn’t often men come back. Usually, well, usually they’re sent to some other place. Remember Remizov?”

  As if the room has grown a degree or two colder, Sergey flinches. “Yes,” he says. “I remember him.”

  Vasily goes on: “Ran into a spot of bother. Not long after you went away. Was trying to coerce some dancer into… well… you know. Didn’t realise the lad’s uncle was a party man in Moscow. Last thing I heard, he was teaching in Vladivostok.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Well, that’s what people said at the time. You know how it is. But no-one’s seen him since before the war.”

  Secretary Remizov, joining the ranks of the disappeared. The news feels almost like a small, if pyrrhic, victory.

  He and Vasily drink to “Peace and happiness for all men.” They clink cup and glass together and they drink. The vodka bites; as unfiltered as white spirit.