A Simple Scale Read online

  “He knew about us, you know,” says Vasily, through a succession of dry coughs. “Remizov.”

  Sergey nods. “I know.”

  “No idea who told him. One of the boys from the reserve troupe, I imagine. Bloody gossips. I hear he wasn’t best pleased. Still… I suppose we should be grateful he didn’t tell anyone. Well… He didn’t have a chance. No sooner had you gone, than so had he. And then the war happened, and everyone was gone. At least, that’s how it felt.”

  “You stayed here?” Sergey asks. “During the war?”

  “You were lucky,” Vasily says with a nod. “To be elsewhere.”

  “Was it so bad?”

  Vasily begins to chuckle, his laughter bubbling up out of him uncontrollably. His eyes grow moist. “Was it so bad?” he says. “Was it so bad? Oh, Sergey Andreievich. Like you wouldn’t believe. Everything… everything just fell apart. I don’t remember the Civil War, I was too young at the time, but my father told me this was so much worse. The sense that everything was coming apart at the seams. He didn’t have much time left. He died in the first January. We still had a little money to pay for his burial, and when we took his casket to the cemetery the corpses there were piled up on the roadside. Like so much refuse. There must have been hundreds of them. And the bodies on top of each pile had been stripped. First of their clothes. Then their flesh.

  “They looked ridiculous, these corpses, with their oversized heads and bloated bodies. Arms and legs nothing but bones. Like marionettes.”

  Vasily laughs again, and Sergey experiences a wave of nausea.

  “What happened to the place on Sadovaya Street?” he asks, wishing to hear no more about the blockade. “Why aren’t you living there?”

  “Oh, Sadovaya Street!” says Vasily. “Well. First, it was damaged. Mortar attack, or some such. Not a direct hit, you understand, but a shell landed in the square. Blew out every last window. They said I had to move, so they could fix it up. Moved me into this place. I think the previous tenants starved. Or perhaps it was typhoid. Anyway. The place was empty, so I moved in. And then, when the apartment on Sadovaya Street was all fixed up they told me I couldn’t have it back. Some party member wanted it, after his house was destroyed. Charming. Anyway. I’ve been here ever since. I know it’s not much, but it’s cosy enough.”

  “And you don’t see anyone else?” Sergey asks. “No-one from the Kirov?”

  “They’re all gone, I think. Either like you, or during the blockade. Tatiana Dmitrievna, well… the Little Barn Owl flapped her wings and flew off to Paris and then America. All very scandalous, of course. Seems the times finally caught up with her and that rancid little queen of hers. Even she couldn’t get away with living like that, not even with all her Party friends. So she left. I don’t think whatsisname was so lucky. Anyway… We don’t talk about any of that.”

  “But you’re still here.”

  Vasily grins, bearing ashen gums and the small black spaces where he’s lost one or two teeth.

  “Yes,” he says. “I’m still here.”

  “And the dancing?”

  Vasily begins to laugh again, a nervous giggle that escalates into something braying, almost hysterical.

  “Dancing?” he says. “Oh, Sergey Andreievich! Do you remember a dancer called Vasily Sidorov? If you do, you have a better memory than me. No. I haven’t danced in years. The Kirov was damaged during the war, so there was nowhere to dance. Then I was ill, pneumonia, that first winter. I pulled through, but I missed the season when they shipped everyone off to Kuybyshev and Perm. And then, to cap it all off, after we’d gone hungry for so long… well… look at me.”

  He sighs, waving one hand over a body that looks shrunken, consumptive.

  “But do you remember how I danced?” he says, rising clumsily from his chair and taking another sip of vodka. “Remember your ballet?”

  “I remember,” says Sergey.

  “I was Pechorin. The hero.”

  Vasily places his cup on an otherwise empty mantelpiece and performs an exaggerated march across the sitting room, humming a melody Sergey hasn’t heard in several years. The dance is now an ugly parody of what it once was.

  “It was a wonderful ballet,” says Vasily. “Such a shame.”

  “It was a long time ago,” says Sergey. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Short of breath, Vasily braces himself against the back of his armchair and looks down at Sergey with that same appalling fascination with which he studied him in the café.

  “I’ve just remembered!” he says. “I have it here somewhere.”

  He crosses the room to a small bureau and begins opening and closing its drawers, rifling through the papers in each one before producing a manuscript bound with a cover of purple card.

  “Here!” he says.

  “What is it?”

  “Your ballet.”

  Vasily hands him the book, and Sergey begins thumbing through the pages, seeing, written in his own hand, snatches of melody both surprising and immediately familiar.

  “You kept this?” he asks. “Even after everything that happened?”

  “Yes,” says Vasily, beaming. “Even then. I thought someone should. You left it here. After the party. Do you remember?”

  Sergey offers the manuscript back, but Vasily tells him it’s his, that he should keep it.

  “I can’t do that,” says Sergey. “You’ve had it all this time, and besides…”

  “Oh, I insist. Leave it here much longer and I may finally succumb to the temptation to burn it for a bit of warmth. And besides. I can’t imagine they let you keep much of your work, where you were.”

  They hadn’t. Not a page of it. There was little music in Komi. Sergey takes back his manuscript and holds it tightly against his chest.

  “This could have got you in a lot of trouble.”

  “I didn’t care. I thought that if I kept it here, one day you’d come back to collect it, and perhaps…”

  “Perhaps what?”

  Vasily shrugs with a disingenuous smile, and for a moment Sergey recognises the boy he first met in the Kirov’s studio. There is that same wounded longing, edged with something calculating.

  “How are you here?” says Vasily. “In Leningrad, I mean. The others, when they get out, they’re sent elsewhere. They’re never allowed back. What is it Akhmatova says about Dante? ‘Even after death he did not return to his old Florence.’ And yet here you are. How come?”

  “I don’t know,” Sergey replies. “When I first got there, they said there’d been a mistake with the paperwork.”

  “A mistake? They don’t make mistakes.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” says Sergey. “They said there was another Grekov. A thief. They thought perhaps he should have been sent north, and that I…” His voice trails off. He knows how to finish the sentence, but also knows some sentences should go unfinished. “You’re right, though. Most people are sent east, or they’re moved on to other cities.”

  “But you came back.”

  “I came back.”

  “Why? What was here for you in Leningrad? You have no family. And like I said, our friends, our old friends, are all gone. Why did you come back?”

  Sergey drains the last vodka from his glass, and suppresses a brief, stomach-bracing heave.

  “Leningrad is all I know,” he says.

  “Perhaps you thought you’d see some of your old friends?” says Vasily, folding his arms across the back of the chair. “Is that it?”

  “I didn’t know who would be here,” says Sergey. “I didn’t know if anyone was still alive.”

  “Did you think you would see me?”

  “I didn’t know who I would see.”

  “Did you miss me?”

  Sergey rises and crosses the room to Vasily’s coat stand. His was the second coat hanging there, and taking it away leaves it looking spindly and bare.

  “Where are you going?” says Vasily. “I thought you might stay a while.”

  “I
have to go,” says Sergey. “But thank you for the vodka, and your hospitality.”

  Vasily follows him to the door and Sergey awaits an ultimatum, an offer caged inside a threat. Stay a while, or else. Stay a while, or as soon as you step outside this building there will be men waiting for you, men who will put you on the first train back to Komi.

  Instead, Vasily calls after him: “I’ll see you around, yes?”, and Sergey nods, descending the staircase quickly and without saying another word.

  There are no men waiting outside the building, nor is he followed at any point between Vasily’s street and the place where he catches the Kirovskiy tram. The tram is crowded and smells of damp coats and cheap booze. Standing beside him in the aisle, a young woman cradles her small boy, two or three years old, against her shoulder. The boy smiles at him, and Sergey smiles back. Sergey pokes out his tongue and crosses his eyes, and the boy laughs. The boy’s mother scowls at Sergey and he turns away, blushing.

  He had forgotten how much people changed, those last few years before he was sent away; the hardness they acquired. No sense of anything but proximity binding them together, and a kind of caustic animosity hanging in the air between each person, as if it would take very little for them to turn on one another like dogs.

  Stepping off the tram, he’s welcomed by a claggy, chemical stench that seems to cling to the back of his throat. Something heavy, industrial. A smell he can taste. His tenement building, situated opposite the factory, is old, dating back to before the Revolution. What it was before its rooms became kommunalkas, he couldn’t say, but its cold lobby has a look of faded grandeur, a veneer of toffee-coloured paint covering its marble walls and pilasters. He’s met there by the building’s commandant, an older woman whose greying black hair is hacked close around her ears and sticks out from beneath a peaked cap.

  A cursory glance at his paperwork. “You’re Grekov?”

  Sergey nods.

  “And you came from Komi?”

  “Yes. Komi.”

  “That’s unusual. We don’t get many from Komi. How long were you there?”

  “Twelve years.”

  Her expression, previously so unflinching, softens. The force of resentment behind it, whatever it was that made her dislike him on some deep, fibrous level, begins to fade.

  “And you were in Komi the whole time?”

  “Not all of it,” Sergey says. “During the war I was in Kotlas. I worked as a clerk, on the railroad. Then they sent me back.”

  “Still. Twelve years. Come. I’ll show you to your room.”

  The elevator is “awaiting repair” – she doesn’t tell him how long this has been the case – and so they climb four flights of stairs to his room. The steps are made of mottled stone; the walls painted a military shade of green. The commandant moves with the perfect rhythm of someone who has climbed these steps a thousand times, her head and shoulders stooping forward, as if she is being drawn along by some other force.

  His room is small, partitioned off from its neighbours with walls of plywood that don’t quite reach the ceilings. The kitchen, bathroom and toilet, a short way down the corridor, are shared with these rooms and several others on this floor.

  “You’ll report to the factory on Monday, at 8am,” the commandant says, handing him a piece of paper printed with the factory’s details and the name of his overseer. In a hushed and sympathetic voice, she adds, “Best make sure you’re there on time. Don’t give them any excuses.”

  Once she’s gone, Sergey is truly alone for the first time since the day of his arrest. He takes the manuscript, the score to his ballet, out of his overcoat and places it beneath his bed, nudging it into the shadowy corner of the room.

  Soon enough, exhausted by the journey, he falls asleep. He doesn’t dream – or if he does, those dreams are instantly forgotten – but he wakes thinking of Vasily. He was rude to leave so suddenly. Few men are lucky enough to go back where they began, let alone be reacquainted with old friends. Most of the time, you must start over, somewhere new. He shouldn’t have left him like that.

  Vasily told him that he goes every day to the café where they met, and so Sergey takes the tram across town and heads straight to Moskovsky Prospect. There, he orders coffee and rassolnik and black bread, as if these things might make Vasily appear through sympathetic magic, and he waits. In the coming months, he will visit this café many times, always ordering the same thing, and as winter fades into spring he’ll search the neighbouring streets for Vasily’s building, but in vain. He will neither see nor hear from Vasily Sidorov again.

  Chapter 3:

  LOS ANGELES, MAY 1950

  A low-ceilinged basement room on the edge of the Capitol lot. A ceiling fan whirs away full tilt but does nothing to clear the stale air. Two facing desks, two chairs, a filing cabinet and a wall calendar with a picture of somewhere tropical. Later in the day, the Venetian blinds will cast noirish shadows across the wall.

  Sitting opposite you, Angela Daniels. Plaid shirt and blue jeans. Hair short and tousled, like Gloria DeHaven. She taps her pen against her teeth and sighs and your eyes meet hers across the desk.

  You say, “What?”

  She says, “What?”

  “Why the big sigh?”

  “I’m struggling,” she says. “What’s that you’re working on?”

  “Cowboys and Indians.”

  “Powwow or battle scene?”

  “Battle scene. You?”

  “Stuck on a duel. Wanna swap?”

  You spent all last week writing duels. All those close-ups of squinting eyes and hands twitching near holsters.

  “I’ll pass.”

  There are eight rooms along this semi-subterranean corridor, each almost identical to this one, shared between sixteen composers; all working on stock music, stings and cues for the Capitol Pictures music department. Facing those offices, a row of ten smaller rooms nicknamed the Meat Lockers – soundproof cells, each containing an upright Steinway.

  A knock at the door. Could be one of your neighbours, asking to borrow a pencil or some staff paper. Most likely, it’s Henderson, the music department’s very own vampire of mirth.

  “Enter,” says Angela, grandly, like a dowager countess in a costume flick, and Henderson enters the room: side parting, bow tie and sweater vest, holding a clipboard.

  “Miss Daniels, Conrad,” he says. Always calls men, the men who work under him, by their surnames, as if he believes it makes him sound more masculine. One of the guys.

  “Hey, Henderson,” you say. “I’m almost done on the circus stuff. I’ll have it on Peggy’s desk by lunchtime.”

  “I’m not here about the circus stuff,” says Henderson. “What circus stuff?”

  “Circus movie. Mature and Lamarr. He’s the kind-hearted strongman, she’s the acrobat with a secret.”

  “Oh. That circus movie. Sure. No. I’m not here about that. You hear anything about the Irving Gold picture, just got the green light? Lois Chandler and Chuck Logan?”

  “Nope. Angie?”

  “Chuck Logan,” she says. “Remind me. Is that the prize-fighting pound of ham?”

  “Sure as hell acts like one.”

  Henderson breathes loudly through his nose. “Neither of you are funny. But if you don’t want the job…” He turns, a little theatrically, to the door.

  “What job? You didn’t mention a job. Which job?”

  Henderson pauses, smiles.

  “The Irving Gold picture,” he says. “They’re looking for a composer.”

  “Sole credit?”

  “Sole credit.”

  “What’s the picture?”

  “Scarlet Letter.”

  “The Hawthorne novel?”

  “Correct.”

  “They’re making a movie of The Scarlet Letter with b-actors?”

  “Come now, Conrad. You know we –”

  “…don’t make b-movies. I know. But The Scarlet Letter, that’s one of the… Angie? What’s the word I’m looking for?�
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  “Cornerstones?”

  “That’s exactly the word. How do you do that? It’s one of the cornerstones of American literature. And they’re making it with Chuck Logan?”

  “I know. What can I say? There wasn’t much enthusiasm for it over in the West Block, but they owe Gold a favour, so…” Henderson shrugs.

  “What made everyone so unenthusiastic?”

  “The title. Scarlet. Red. You get the idea.”

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

  “Could you not curse around the lady?”

  “She swears like a sailor! Are you telling me there are people who think The Scarlet Letter is a communist tract?”

  “I guess so. And look at the subtext.”

  “What subtext? It’s a hundred years old.”

  “But if you tell that story now…”

  “The book is a hundred years old.”

  “Be that as it may, it made some people nervous. So it’s starring Chandler and Logan and the budget is one-point-four rather than two-point-eight and Laguna Beach will be standing in for Massachusetts Bay.”

  “Nice. Authentic. This town is full of idiots.”

  “No comment. Now, do you want the job or not?”

  “Is that aimed at both of us?”

  “Just you, Conrad.”

  “Gee, thanks,” says Angela.

  “No offence, Miss Daniels, but Mr Gold doesn’t like women composers. So, Conrad, do you want me to put your name down?”

  “It isn’t mine for the taking?”

  “Not yet. I’ll have to run a few suggestions past Mr Walsh.”

  He’s talking about Talbot Walsh, head of the music department. Henderson’s boss. Everyone’s boss. Collector of four Academy Awards, often for scores he neither wrote, arranged nor conducted. You’ve never met the man, but given his reputation you’re more than happy to have Henderson act as intermediary.

  “Which names are you running past him?”

  “You. Jerome. Levine.”

  “Jerome? For a period piece? Isn’t he a little screwball?”

  “Walsh likes him.”

  “And Levine? Levine’s good, but he’s not that good.”