Голубые ступени / Stepping into the blue. Михаил Садовский

incarcerated for «ten years with no outside communication permitted».1 Neither he nor his mother had been afraid at the time, they hadn’t rejected her family, as had many of their other acquaintances,2 but three years later his father died at the very outset of the war.

      They had become friends right off, since both of them immediately found themselves at the edge of the mainstream. He didn’t know how to stand up for himself – he didn’t like noisy games or rough-housing – while she was shy about her awkwardness.

      But, even more than by this physical weakness, they were united by something else. They felt themselves ’chosen’, even among their own kind – not by birth but by their ability to hear what their friends and schoolmates were saying. They were both endowed with an acute sense of hearing – maybe not an absolute pitch, but still a kind of hearing that was very rare, capable of distinguishing dozens if not hundreds of overtones. They especially liked listening to the ring of church bells, but of course that kind of opportunity didn’t come along very often.

      She imagined what it would be like after the operation, and even stood on tip-toe. Three centimetres. She shut her eyes tight and just stood there. Three centimetres meant she would be able to reach his face, his lips – so sweet, so sweet! And she could not bring herself to even think that this might not happen, since «impossible» was simply out of the question! Then why should she picture it to herself, and fantasize?

      She opened her eyes again. A gentleman passer-by looked at her – after all, she was pretty and she knew it. She had a perfectly formed nose – a rarity, just like the way Pushkin3 called «two pairs of slender legs» a rarity. Her hair, too, could be called luxuriant, as it did not hang down straight but fell around her face in ever-so-soft waves of lush dark brown.

      The man averted his eyes and walked on. Would he look back or not? He did, and she smiled: everything would turn out all right. She had guessed he would, and he did – and that meant everything would turn out all right!

      The springtimes, as indeed the years, had rolled by virtually unnoticed – perhaps because they were always together. The world for her always began with him, and everything that happened in the world was connected with him – study, leisure, mutual friends. As for girl-friends of her own – she didn’t have any.

      After graduating from a special school for the musically gifted they had both gone on to post-secondary studies, even ending up in the same classes with the same professors. Once again, nothing had changed externally – they just had a whole lot of new friends.

      And the leisure-time activities available to them were by no means a source of division – quite to the contrary. They didn’t go to dances – she for obvious reasons and he because he didn’t know how to dance and was shy around girls. Besides, the thought of going to a dance simply never even entered his head – why should it? Why, indeed? Like everyone else, they would go to the movies. Television had only just made its appearance and few people had a set. They would buy rush tickets to the theater, and of course did not miss any opportunity to go to a concert, especially at the Conservatory, where they almost always could get in free of charge.

      Music indeed was a unifying factor in their lives. There they were equals, and she never felt from him even the slightest hint at her misfortune, though it was something that she, with her uniquely acute perception of the world around her and her sense of being punished by it, would have undoubtedly felt if there had been the slightest hint at it. No. Not once did he ever think of her physical handicap, either with pity or with annoyance. She, for her part, was sure that she was being punished for the sins of one of her forebears, and that now it had fallen to her to atone for that person’s guilt.

      Without letting him know (it was the only thing she ever kept secret from the closest person in the world to her) she read books on the subject, on the eternal existence of souls, on re-incarnation. There was nobody she could even dare ask about it, only learn what she could on her own. If they ever found out about this at the Conservatory, she would pay dearly. A cruel price. She could even be expelled.

      And he lived next door to her. He didn’t notice other girls, other women, as most of the fellows his age did. He didn’t even look upon her as a woman. It simply never entered his head – they were just friends. And that was it. She had been happy about that, comforting herself with the patronizing thought: «He’s still young. Boys mature later, as a rule.»

      All at once the sun went behind a little dark cloud. The sharp change in light broke her train of reflection. «Okay! Okay!» she muttered to herself. «Okay!» She looked at her watch. «Five minutes to go!»

      She shook her head, remembering the fear she had experienced in connection with their first term papers. She had written about the composer Shebalin, he about Prokofieff. They had helped each other, read their papers aloud to each other. And it had paid off! First came the praise from their professors, and then from journal readers, as both papers were recommended for publication.

      By now she had become quite busy, and she had begun running short on time – exccept where he was concerned. He was her primary advisor and critic. He was the first she shared her joys with, to whom she inscribed her pages with their scent of fresh printer’s ink. Nobody else even asked her any more. She was his and he was hers.

      As she stood there people floated one after the other past her eyes…

      As the time for graduation approached, it had dawned on her that the worst part of all was now at hand – work assignments. She couldn’t imagine that soon they would be forced to see each other only rarely. They had studied together for so many years – a rare stroke of luck indeed that it had lasted that long.

      Now there would come graduation, and then it would be off to work – he to one place, she to another. No, this she could not even imagine. She just couldn’t and that was it. Her lovely face with just a hint of a heavy chin became very tense – she herself noticed it in the mirror. She also caught a glimpse of how the masculine look that had been cast upon her would first flare up and then slip off to one side. She felt it wasn’t so much the result of her ’deformity’ (as she thought of it) as of the tension written all over her face and dwelling in her eyes. No, she would accept anything – anything but being apart from him. Everything within her cried out with this desperate plea!

      But why? She protested to herself: «We can’t spend our whole life together!»

      Why? And once more she countered: Why not? And the answer that came to her of its own accord stunned her: «Because I love him!» Oh Lord, how did this happen? Oh Lord! Who else could possibly give her an answer?

      He for his part had noticed nothing. Where had he been when she herself was only guessing at it?! He didn’t seem to need any other female companionship – he was happy being with her.

      Everybody was fond of him, as they are fond of any cheerful fellow they have got accustomed to who never refuses to help, and if an extra rouble comes his way (an extremely rare occurrence), is always ready to give it to someone else. «Well, he might need it,» he would reply to her pragmatic warning that «he’ll only just fritter it away in any case».

      «But he’ll still need it!» He couldn’t see how he could refuse.

      She protested against the approaching separation with her whole being, tense and super-sensitive as it was. She had no idea how she would live or what she would do. The main thing was not to make a spectacle of her feelings, and not to impose herself, so that he would not suffer on her account. That would never do! But without him? Without him – what would she ever do without him? Such a thought was unreal! For her there simply could never be a ’without him’.

      But nobody could possibly have predicted the way it actually turned out.

      All

1

Ten years with no outside communication permitted – a Soviet euphemism indicating execution by a firing squad.

2

It was a common occurrence for families of anyone imprisoned as an ’enemy of the state’ to be ostracized by most of their acquaintances.

3

Alexander Pushkin – a celebrated Russian poet of the early 19th century, considered by many to be the father of Russian literature.