Where Music Becomes Light. Tom 1

And Ksyusha felt that.

What she valued most in him was not his words. Not even his actions, though his actions mattered. She valued the sensation that came over her beside him: that at last nobody was trying to remake her into a convenient shape.

He wanted to understand her.

Not to correct her, not to subdue her, not to make her resemble his expectations.

To understand.

And that is rare.

People often say “I want to understand you” and mean: explain yourself in a way that makes me comfortable. Dmitry wanted something else. He could argue, he could disagree, he could be heavy going, stubborn, difficult, but at the very bottom of his feeling for her lay the essential thing: he did not consider her an accident in his life.

With him Ksyusha felt herself a woman.

But not only a woman.

Beside him she felt herself a soul that was needed.

Not an ornament, not a habit, not a function in somebody else’s life.

A soul that is seen, heard and cared for, even when it is not always understood correctly the first time.

That mattered more to her than wealth, fine promises and loud words.

Money was never at the centre of their world. It could be necessary, it could make things comfortable, it could settle domestic questions, but it was not what held them together. Dmitry and Ksyusha both seemed to understand that there are things which cannot be bought, cannot be replaced, and cannot be explained to people who measure a bond by advantage.

What mattered to Dmitry was her.

What mattered to Ksyusha was him.

It did not sound like poverty. On the contrary, there was a rare abundance in it.

One evening they were walking along the street beside each other. It was cool. The city had begun to light its windows, though the sky still held the remains of blue. Ksyusha was silent longer than usual. Dmitry noticed, but did not ask at once. He knew by now that sometimes she had to arrive at words herself.

She stopped by a shop window in which they were both reflected. Not directly, not clearly — the glass divided the reflection into layers: the street, the lights, their two figures, the silhouettes of strangers going past.

Ksyusha was looking not at the window but as if through it.

“Dima,” she said quietly.

“Yes?”

“Did you really see me before?”

He knew what she meant.

The question had been between them from the very beginning. It came up now and then — not as suspicion but as a wish to touch the impossible. To check that it had not gone.

Dmitry was silent for a long time.

He did not want to answer beautifully. Beautiful answers often lie, even when they sound convincing.

“Yes,” he said at last. “But not the way you see a person in the street.”

Ksyusha turned to him.

“How, then?”

He looked at her reflection in the glass. At the red hair with the light of the window caught in it. At a face he knew so closely by now and which was new to him every time.

“As an image. As a sensation. Sometimes in sleep. Sometimes in music. Sometimes simply…” He stopped, searching for the words. “Simply, you would appear inside me. With no name. With no place. But I knew that if I ever saw you, I would not walk past.”

Ksyusha lowered her eyes.

“That is strange.”

“Yes.”

“And a little frightening.”

“I was frightened as well.”

She gave a half-smile, and there was no mockery in it.

“You don’t look like a man who is ever frightened.”

Dmitry looked at her gently.

“I simply don’t always show it.”

She said nothing.

Then, slowly, she took his hand.

A simple gesture. No theatre. No words. But for Dmitry there was more trust in it than in any long declaration she might have made.

Her fingers were warm.

He pressed them carefully, the way one holds not a hand but a promise.

They walked on.

And the city around them seemed to grow quieter.

It did not vanish. It did not dissolve. It simply stepped back and left them a little space.

At such moments Dmitry understood with particular clarity: Ksyusha had not merely come into his life. She had altered its acoustics.

Before her, many days had sounded muffled, as though through a thick wall. There had been work, people, roads, obligations, interests, knowledge, training, pain, tiredness, the occasional joy. All of it existed, and inside there remained the strange echo of an empty room.

With Ksyusha the sound changed.

The world did not become easier.

The illnesses did not go away.

The past was not rewritten.

The mistakes were not cancelled.

Age did not stop being a difference.

The difficulty of two characters did not go anywhere.

But a fine, bright frequency appeared that went through all of it.

Dmitry called it, to himself, by her name.

Ksyusha.

The name did not merely sound. It shone.

In his inner space it was warm and rounded, a golden copper with soft green lights at the edges. Sometimes like sunset on water. Sometimes like a fire in a window. Sometimes like the first note of a song that must not be lost, because if you lose it the whole melody falls apart.

He did not tell her all of this in such detail.

Not because he was hiding it.

But because he was afraid the words would make smaller what was larger than words.

Ksyusha felt things in her own way.

She did not see music as Dmitry did. She did not walk into it through rooms and colours and volumes. But she felt people. Sometimes too strongly. Sometimes another person’s mood reached her before he had managed to say anything at all.

Dmitry she felt at once.

On that first evening, when he came up to her, she did not think: what an interesting man, or why is he talking to me. Something else arose inside her, almost bodily: this man is not going past.

And something more: he had been walking a very long time.

Not to the bus stop. Not towards her across a few yards of wet tarmac.

Towards her — across years.

She could not have explained it then. Nor would she have tried. People break fine things too easily when you make them explain in coarse words.

But she felt how he reached towards her.

Not pressure. Not pursuit. Not the wish to possess.

The wish to be near her.

And these are different things.

Pressure frightens.

Pursuit humiliates.

The wish to possess closes round you.

The wish to be near you warms.

Ksyusha did not give her trust all at once. She had caution enough not to throw herself blindly into a feeling. But something in Dmitry disarmed her by degrees. Not promises. Not fine phrases. Constancy.

He could be wrong, but he came back to the conversation.

He could fail to understand, but he tried to.

He could be silent, but he did not disappear.

He could be tired, ill, busy, sunk in his music or his own thoughts, but in the essential thing he stayed near.

And that built between them the thing that cannot be built quickly.

Trust.

Not loud. Not perfect. Not without cracks.

Real.

One morning Ksyusha woke before he did. Outside it was a grey morning. The light lay pale and even on the walls. Dmitry was sleeping heavily, the way people sleep who rarely allow themselves truly to switch off. Even in sleep his face kept a trace of strain, as though somewhere inside the work went on — a thought, a piece of music, a struggle with himself.

She lay beside him and looked at him.

It became very clear to her all at once that this man had lived through a great deal before her. More than he said. And that not all of his wounds had visible edges. Some were hidden so deep that he had probably grown used to counting them as part of his character.

Ksyusha touched his shoulder carefully.

He did not wake.

She thought: “I want him to have peace.”

Not happy every second. That is impossible. Not perfect. There is no such thing. Not without pain. Life does not ask.

Peace, precisely.

So that beside her he need not hold a defence all the time.

So that he could be strong without being obliged to be stone.

So that his past would not govern every one of his tomorrows.

So that music would stop being only a way of surviving and become a way of loving as well.

Perhaps it was that morning she understood that she loved him not only for his strength.

She loved him for his tiredness as well.

For his depth.

For his strangenesses.

For the way he fell silent when there was too much feeling.

For his hands, for his look, for his obstinacy.

For being difficult and never hollow.

For the fact that beside him she wanted to be better, not from fear of losing him but from a wish to be equal to something real between them.

Dmitry woke later.

He opened his eyes and saw that she was looking at him.

“What is it?” he asked hoarsely.

Ksyusha smiled.

“Nothing.”

“Do I look terrible?”

“No.”

“Then why are you looking?”

She thought for a moment.

“Memorising.”

It took him a moment to find an answer.

“What for?”

Ksyusha shrugged.

“So that I have it.”

Dmitry looked at her, not quite awake, and felt music beginning inside him.

Very quiet.

An acoustic guitar.

A single soft picking pattern.

A warm low sound.

Almost without words.

He did not yet know that one day he would write songs in which she would be a star, a lighthouse, a fire in the dark. Did not know that her name would become a title, a chorus, a light on a cover, a story that other people would hear.

But at that moment he already knew the essential thing.

If music is ever able to tell the truth about love, it will have to begin with the way she looked at him.

With the way Ksyusha looked at him in the morning.

Without performance, without demand, without fear.

Simply near.

And perhaps that was why, on that day, he thought for the first time not as a man afraid of losing something but as a man who wants to build.

Not a song, not an image, not a handsome story.

A home.

Not necessarily one made of walls.

A home made of trust.

Of conversations; of warm hands; of patience; of words said in time; of forgiveness; of faithfulness.

Of that rare feeling that in an enormous, noisy, often cruel world there is one person to whom your soul returns.

For Dmitry that person was Ksyusha.

And for Ksyusha it was becoming clearer and clearer: Dmitry was not simply a man who had appeared in her life.

He was the one beside whom the noise inside her grew quieter.

The one she wanted to believe, not because he promised an easy road but because he was ready to walk a hard one.

The one whose name was gradually becoming not a habit but a direction.

Dimka.

She did not yet know how many songs would be born out of that name.

Did not know how much pain and light they would have to pass through.

Did not know that love, when it is real, does not always resemble a celebration. Sometimes it resembles a long road along which two people walk holding on to each other, even when the wind is in their faces.

But in that period she did not need to know everything.

One thing was enough.

She wanted to be near him.

And he wanted to be near her.

Everything else they decided to learn to understand together.

Chapter Four

Learning to Be Near

Love seldom begins with skill.

At first it comes as light.

As a sudden warmth in the chest.

As the wish to write, to hear a voice, to see a face.

As a strange certainty: here is the person towards whom everything inside you leans.

As joy in simple things — a message, a look, an accidental touch, a shared silence.

And then, when that first light becomes part of the everyday, love begins to ask questions.

Not fine ones.

Not festive ones.

Real ones.

Can you hear?

Can you speak at times other than the ones that suit you?

Can you keep out of your pride when you are hurt?

Can you admit that the other person is not an extension of your wishes but a whole universe near you?

Dmitry and Ksyusha could not do it straight away.

They wanted to very much.

But wanting and being able are different things.

In the early days their life together was like a long evening after rain: the city still wet, the air fresh, the lights reflected in the tarmac, and everything around seeming a little deeper than it had been the day before.

They walked a great deal.

Sometimes with no purpose. They simply walked beside each other, and that was enough. Dmitry loved such walks: in them nothing had to be proved. The city chose the scenery for them itself — lamps, windows, the occasional car, the warm light of a café, a damp wind, the smell of autumn, sometimes the distant bark of a dog or the sound of a tram passing somewhere behind the houses.

Ksyusha walked beside him easily, but not thoughtlessly. She might stop suddenly at a shop window, look at the sky, laugh at some thought of her own, ask a question he was not ready for.

“Are you always this serious?”

He looked at her.

“No.”

“When are you not, then?”

“When I’m asleep.”

Ksyusha snorted with laughter.

“Then I shall have to watch you sleep more often.”

“Is that a threat?”

“It’s research.”

Her laughter went through him in a warm wave. Dmitry did not always show how strongly such small things worked on him. He could keep his face. The years had taught him that. But inside, at such moments, something softened.

With Ksyusha he was learning simplicity again.

Not the simplicity that has no depth.

But the kind in which you need not be collected, guarded and braced for a blow every second.

She might take his arm simply because she felt like it.

Might put her head on his shoulder.

Might say, “Dima, you’re tired,” before he had admitted it to himself.

Might be silent beside him in a way that never let the silence become a wall.

For the first time in a long while Dmitry began to understand that closeness is not only passion and not only talking into the night.

Closeness is when someone sees your tiredness and does not require a performance of strength from you.

But there were other days.

Days when the difference between them stood up not as a number but as an entire language.

Fifteen years is not simply age.

It is a different childhood.

Different music in one’s youth.

Different films, phrases, habits, fears; different ways of living through an injury; different expectations of love; different speeds of inward reaction.

Dmitry often wanted to come straight to the point. It seemed to him that when a misunderstanding arose you should sit down and work it out. Calmly. Honestly. To the end. Find the root, name the problem, come to an agreement.

Ksyusha could not always do it that way.

Sometimes what she needed was not an explanation but the sense that he was near her now. Not after analysis. Not after a pause. Not after he had found the right words. At once — living, warm, real.

She could shut herself away if it seemed to her that he was being too rational.

He could be at a loss if she went into feeling and did not explain what exactly she felt.

She expected subtlety from him.

He expected directness from her.

Both expected love.

And both sometimes forgot that love speaks a different language in each of us.

Once they quarrelled over a trifle.

Afterwards, of course, it turned out that the trifle had only been the surface.

It always is: a cup, a message, the wrong tone, the wrong pause, a word said at the wrong moment. People rarely quarrel about the cause itself. More often the cause is a door through which something long overdue comes out.

That evening Ksyusha turned sharply to the window. Beyond the glass the city was slowly darkening. The sky was low and grey, as though someone had laid a heavy damp cloth over the houses.

Dmitry stood behind her and said nothing.

He already knew he had said the wrong thing.

He had not insulted her. Had not betrayed her. Had done nothing terrible on the face of it. He had simply answered too drily where she had needed warmth.

Sometimes what wounds the heart is not a blow but the absence of a hand.

“Ksyusha,” he said quietly.

She did not turn round.

“What?”

“Look at me.”

“I don’t want to.”

He nodded, though she could not see it.

Once, in another life, he might have closed up as well. Gone into silence. Decided that if a person does not want to talk, then there is no need. Pride is good at passing itself off as dignity. Especially in those who have been wounded many times.

But with Ksyusha he did not want to win.

That was new.

In what had gone before, people had often tried to defeat one another. Who was right. Who was stronger. Who would give in first. Who needed whom more.

With Ksyusha the very thought of winning seemed wrong.

Because if one of them won, both would have lost.

He came closer but did not touch her.

“I didn’t mean to be cold.”

She gave a short laugh.

“But you were.”

“Yes.”

That “yes” came out unexpectedly, even to him.

Not a defence, not an explanation, not “you misunderstood”, not “that isn’t what I meant”.

Simply an admission.

Ksyusha turned her head a little, but still did not look at him.

“Sometimes you talk as though I were a problem to be solved.”

Dmitry lowered his eyes.

The remark had gone home.

It hurt not because it was unjust but because there was truth in it.

He really did sometimes try to understand her as he understood texts, music, the body, illness, training, a system. Find the structure. Take it apart. Restore it. Put it right.

And Ksyusha was not in need of putting right.

What she needed was to be loved alive.

“Forgive me,” he said.

She said nothing.

“I can’t always do it another way,” he went on. “But I want to learn.”

Ksyusha closed her eyes.

A car went past outside, and its headlights slid across her face for a second. Her red hair flared in the half-dark room, and Dmitry felt an almost physical pain of tenderness for her.

He took another step.

“I really do want to,” he said.

Then she turned.

There were tears in her eyes. Not large ones, not for show. Simply a wet brightness she had perhaps not wanted him to see.

“And I don’t want to be difficult for you,” she said, almost in a whisper.

Dmitry shook his head.

“You aren’t difficult. You are real.”

“Is that the same thing?”

“No.”

“Sometimes I think it would be easier for you with somebody else.”

He looked at her for a long time.

A great many words rose up inside him. Too many. That easier does not mean more needed. That he had not been looking for a convenient woman. That he had spent a lifetime growing tired of half-presence, of empty talk, of people beside whom there is a body and no soul.

But he said only the essential thing:

“I don’t want anybody else.”

Ksyusha looked at him as though testing whether the words would bear the weight of reality.

“Even if I am hard work?”

“Especially then.”

She frowned.

“Why?”

Dmitry smiled faintly.

“Because when it is hard, you find out whether the thing is real or not.”

She said nothing.

Then she said quietly:

“I want to learn too.”

“Learn what?”

“Not to run away inside myself when I am hurt.”

He put out his hand.

This time she let him touch her fingers.

They stood in the middle of a room where a few minutes before there had been a cold tension, holding each other’s hands as carefully as if they had just lifted something fragile off the floor.

Not love.

Love was not fragile.

Trust was the fragile thing.

It had to be looked after.

That night they talked for a long time.

Not beautifully. Not in a literary way. Not the way characters talk in films, where every word goes straight to the heart. They stumbled, went back, grew irritable, softened, fell silent, began again. Sometimes Ksyusha cried. Sometimes Dmitry covered his face with his hands because he could not immediately find the right phrase.

But they did not walk away.

That mattered more than anything.

They stayed in the conversation.

Even when it hurt, even when they wanted to close up, even when it would have been easier to say, “all right, forget it”.

They did not forget it.

They tried to understand.

And it was on nights like that that something stronger was built between them than on the days of easy happiness.

Easy happiness is beautiful.

But it does not always test the depth.

A conversation after pain does.

In the morning Ksyusha fell asleep on his shoulder. Dmitry sat almost without moving so as not to disturb her. A pale dawn was beginning outside. The city was still quiet. Somewhere far off the first car hummed, someone was hurrying to work, someone was coming home after a night out, someone was opening a kitchen window.

The ordinary world went on.

And Dmitry sat and looked at her face.

After the tears she seemed particularly young and particularly real. Not weak — no. Simply without defences. And that trust was almost sacred to him.

He carefully moved a strand of red hair from her cheek.

Ksyusha did not wake.

Dmitry thought that love is perhaps not the feeling people most often describe. Not a storm, not a celebration, not a flame, not perpetual rapture.

Love is when, after a hard conversation, you look at a sleeping person and want not to prove yourself right but to see that they are never hurt like that again.

He remembered that morning.

Later it would come back to him in music.

As a soft acoustic guitar.

As a low bass, barely audible.

As a thin line of synthesiser, like light under a door.

And as a voice — almost a whisper, because there are admissions that cannot be sung loudly, only entrusted to silence.

Ksyusha woke when the sun had climbed higher.

She opened her eyes, did not understand for a few seconds where she was, then looked at Dmitry.

“Didn’t you sleep?”

“A little.”

“Why?”

He shrugged.

“I was looking.”

“At what?”

“At you.”

She frowned, though a smile flickered in her eyes.

“Studying me again?”

Dmitry shook his head.

“No. Memorising.”

Ksyusha remembered her own word from another morning and smiled quietly.

“So that you have it?”

“So as not to lose it.”

She moved a little closer and laid her palm on his chest.

“You won’t lose it.”

He covered her hand with his own.

“Do you promise?”

Ksyusha looked at him seriously.

“If you don’t go losing yourself either.”

It was not a vow out of a handsome book.

But it meant more to them than one.

Because you can lose yourself without going anywhere.

You can lose yourself in a grievance.

In silence, in fear, in old wounds, in work, in music, in pride, in waiting for the other person to guess.

They both understood that they would have to look for each other more than once.

Even while near each other.

Especially while near each other.

After that quarrel something between them changed.

It did not become perfect. No. Perfection was never their road at all.

But it became more honest.

Dmitry began more often to ask not “what has happened?” but “what are you feeling now?”. The difference seemed small, and for Ksyusha it was enormous. Because “what has happened” demanded a report, while “what are you feeling” gave her the right to be alive.

Ksyusha began more often to speak directly, even when at first it came out unevenly.

“I am not angry,” she would say. “I am frightened.”

And Dmitry was learning to hear fear behind sharpness, a request behind silence, and behind a grievance the wish to be closer.

She was learning to see in his seriousness not coldness but an attempt to hold himself together. In his silence, not indifference but inward work. In his tiredness, not an absence of love but a body that sometimes found it hard to carry everything he had taken on.