Viktor waited for the liquor to warm him throughout before he approached the bench. It was the only way he felt just brave enough short of stupid to lift the cover, dance his fingers over the keys. They were still so stiff – his fingers. He’d warmed them and cooled them, made fists and extended them fully, and they still wouldn’t always act on command. A smarter man, with more of a spine, might have blamed his father. He was, after all, the one who put the bottle through Viktor’s hand – no matter what the fever dreams and self-hatred said in the late, or early hours. No, Viktor had fashioned the resentment into an albatross of his own, hanging limp and heavy from his neck.
His fingers ghosted over the keys, soft and hesitant, like meeting a lover after so many months apart. And that’s what this was – wasn’t it? His first love: music, the piano, story through song. A whole world in percussion, the soft tap against taut string. Viktor loved women – and men, when he was feeling bold – but nothing so much as he loved the piano. Carefully, his fingers formed chords over the keys, but he withheld from pressing down. Silence could be many things: dangerous, suffocating. Tonight it was precious, a precipice Viktor stepped towards and curled his toes over. He had not touched a piano in months – more months than the space when his mother died. Nothing scared him more than the thought of sitting here, sheet music opened, unable to even run a scale.
With tender, aching hands, Viktor began to play.
Trigger warnings for: implied suicide, car accidents, violence and drug abuse
Viktor is born at the edge of the world. That is to say, he’s born in the last few breaths of the year, on the eastern most fingertip of the Soviet Union’s outstretched hand. He’s born screaming, and largely stays that way, a fussy child from the early hours onward. He hasn’t yet learned what that means for him, the son of a military man and school teacher. What it means to grow sideways, bent like a houseplant, in a home of strict rules and steady voices.
It’s not all quiet and somber silence, though it often feels that way. In the dark hours, when Viktor is tucked into bed and his door firmly shut, his mother indulges. In music, mostly – operas and concertos, Soviet and Western. Often in these moments she will rifle through her books, read herself to sleep. Viktor, for his part, is lulled near nightly by the gentle whispers of instruments he doesn’t yet know the name for.
He asks one evening, when his father is away and his mother has dusted off the record player in the last few minutes of waning daylight. He peers over her shoulder as she rifles through the records, musing softly to herself. When the music is playing, a glass of something dark and forbidden is in his mother’s hand, Viktor grows brave and asks what the music is. Where it came from, who wrote it, what it means. In the hours of indulgence, Viktor’s mother gives him this, too: music and theater and opera, symphony and art and stories. Very late one night, she cracks open the ancient upright sagging in the corner, brings her son’s small hands to the ivory keys, and neither acknowledge the way Viktor’s father huffs from the smokey kitchen.
When Vitkor is 12, the music cuts short. A car accident, the authorities say on the snowy doorstep, Viktor once again peeking over his father’s broad shoulders. Dangerous conditions, nothing to be done. Later, Viktor will wonder if driving down a road his mother had come through a thousand times could be an accident, if the way she kissed him in the morning, held him a beat too long, could be anything except goodbye. The funeral is a somber, silent affair. The upright gets older, untouched; the records packed away, the player sold.
Viktor pulls his first trigger not four months later, behind the house facing the dense wood. His fingers are shaking of cold and hunger and mostly nerves, but his face is cool and impassive as his father’s. He misses every can, bowl, and bottle, and stays out past dark, until he finally he hears the first, victorious ding.
They strike a silent bargain, the remaining Vasylenkos: Viktor continues his shooting practice, and he may be permitted to learn music in school. The upright goes untouched, the home a memorial to music. But in the daylight, surrounded in cinderblock, Viktor learns to play. His fingers are clumsy and undisciplined – he is, after all, still a terrible shot. The music is not like his mother’s, not beautiful or wonderful; no story to it. Not yet.
You see, it’s a hard thing to shake Viktor from something he’s set his mind to. He is not so married to the military lifestyle, but it is a means to an end. And so as he graduates from minuets and sonatinas, advances towards concertos and preludes, so too does he drag his marksmanship behind him, like cans banging behind his bumper. Like water coming to a boil, Viktor bursts through concerts and competitions. His father remains unconvinced, even in the faces of awards and accomplishments, newspaper articles and photographers at the front door. It’s not an honorable career, the arts, not nearly so much as the military, so much as serving your country.
Viktor comes home late, one evening, smelling of celebration and liquor and women. He forgets, for a moment, how quiet the house is at night, and promptly shatters the silence. His father’s been drinking, too, see – and neither of them can quite keep their words to themselves. Tensions are rising with Japan, his father says, they’ll need new boots and guns in the coming months. Not again, sighs Viktor, haven’t they done this already? He has a real shot at a career, at leaving for Leningrad, making great music, making his mother proud.
He doesn’t quite remember how the bottle went through his hand. Perhaps his hand went through the bottle? He remembers the neck of it his father’s fist, knuckles white, and then the bloody mess on the floor, Viktor’s skin in ribbons, red on the tile.
There’s a finality to the quiet, now; less a blanket and more a death shroud. Viktor’s hand is shattered, and his prospects. Money grows thin in their pockets, food stale and scarce in the cupboards. It’s then, in the hazy hours of the night, sluggish from rage and pain, that Viktor hears the music. Not his own, the jagged unfinished compositions or imitations of others far greater than him. He hears his mother’s music, drifting up and under the cracks of his bedroom door. It’s impossible, of course. The records are gone, the upright salvaged for parts. Still, Viktor falls asleep to the smell of amber drink and the final notes of Winter in Four Seasons.
Except, the music never quite stops. It slows and quiets, or hastens and grows louder, but no, it never goes quiet again. Viktor was not one to believe in ghosts, and yet. More than once he’d come downstairs in the night, eyes clouded with sleep, expecting to see – well, not his mother, but the evidence of her. A glass on the end table, stained with lipstick. Her books, long gone, spread out on the floor.
It is certainly a strange type of haunting, one that follows Viktor through the months of painful healing. He doesn’t speak much, almost afraid of what might come out of him if he does. He must be mostly music now, if not half a ghost. With no way to let it out, Viktor has let it fill him up, let it threaten to swallow him whole. He goes mad his last night before he leaves for Leningrad – a position in the concert hall, not particularly glamorous, but promised by a pitying former colleague – turns his whole room on its head. It doesn’t help; nothing seems to.
The first days in Leningrad are filled with cleaning stages and instruments. It’s mindless, thankless work, but it lines his pockets. Practice, in the quiet hours, is slow and unsteady. Viktor’s fingers ache before an hour is through. Ice baths help, and the medicine helps more, but it will be months before he can play a full piece in one go.
It’s a close thing, surrender. Viktor has done it many times in his life – mostly to his father. It’s close again, as his hands fail him and his job cuts at him each day. Victories are small, but precious. A full sonatina. A spare conversation with the first violinist. Slowly, the path begins to right itself. Viktor has spent almost two year in Leningrad before he is once again seated at a piano before a crowd. He’s never had to audition for a job position, not in Vladivostok, and now he feels he might faint under the lights. Pianist, for the Bolshoi? How could he begin to think such a thing, let alone believe it.
The job is his, but not without consequences. He moves to Moscow. There’s constant pain following him like a second unwelcome ghost. The doctors write him prescriptions, more with each week, but it only seems to numb the rest of him, dull him to the simple ache of living but not the failures of his father’s affection – no matter how many Viktor swallows in one go. Beneath the pain, there is a flicker of something new and unfamiliar. Something uncomfortable, strange, but not entirely unwanted.
