Nobody approved of Alexander Ivanovich Villuan’s idea to adopt that urchin. The renowned pianist caught her stealing from his carriage—all eyes, hollow face, no name, no nothing. An abandoned slip of a girl. Despite his husband’s first impulse to call the constables on her, Alexander Ivanovich refused. He wanted a child.
Once Laska had settled in the Villuan mansion and befriended her guardian, she began learning piano from him. The street rat’s fingers got quickly accustomed to the instrument. Alexander Ivanovich was ecstatic to teach her. After all, the arts were the family business, and Villuan was a household name.
Then cholera hit.
A few months after her death, Laska visited Alexander Ivanovich in a moonlight feebler than her dying breath. “I’ve painted your portrait,” she said. “I’ll play for you. Listen.” Though her skill was virtuosic, and each note came elegant and sharp, it wasn’t hers. It wasn’t anyone else’s, either. It was just brilliant.
A man of art himself, Alexander Ivanovich couldn’t allow his ward’s creations to be lost. Every night, Laska played another finger-twisting composition, and he, barely awake, rushed to capture it: he scribed and scrawled, chromatic scale sprawled across the sheets, passages paced by the rhythm of his heartbeat.
“What’s with the gloves?” Laska asked one night.
“These? I’m just cold.” Alexander Ivanovich stared at his hands sheathed in white velvet, then attempted a joke. “A pianist doesn’t want his fingers to freeze off.”
“Funny. That the glove is your friend.” Laska shifted on the piano bench. “You never minded cold before.”
Alexander Ivanovich pinched his brow. Didn’t he? In winter, when they used to go on riverfront walks and watch the tramways being laid on ice, he would always forget his gloves or hat on the cabinet in the parlor. A hundred thousand years ago. Yesterday. He would talk about the similarities between the river and music; the rails were octaves of broken glass, and the horsecars-turned-trams ran across the frozen river like arpeggios. Turning music into stories was how Laska learned best.
Under the authorship of “Katerina Anatolievna,” a nonexistent woman from Kazan backed by the proper names and recommendations, Alexander Ivanovich sent Laska’s works for audition to the philanthropist in the capital, his good acquaintance from soirees. The philanthropist warmly welcomed Katerina Anatolievna’s music and wanted to put it on a stage.
Oh, how the audience cheered her études, suites, sonatas. Cheered Alexander Ivanovich, a humble proxy, performing with gloved hands. Soon Petersburg churned with news of the incognito genius. How many bouquets were thrown on the stage for her talent, how much gossip her mysterious figure stirred, how many fell in love with her—
But Laska didn’t care. Her intravital apathy for high society remained. Fops, she called them. Fops invading the shack when her guardians hosted a party. Alexander Ivanovich, a fop supreme, would wink at her and say, “My friend, let’s make more enemies,” and they would whirl about the ballroom, terrorizing the guests until Laska fell asleep (after stealing biscuits from the kitchen—old habits and all).
“Do you want to go see the trams?” Alexander Ivanovich asked awkwardly, gloves lingering on the flats. “You liked how the wires spark.”
Laska sat at the piano beside him, her head thrown back and eyes shut, strumming the keyboard. “What about the piece?”
“Right. Later then.” Alexander Ivanovich sighed and played the seventh chord. “Just imagine the reception once it’s finished! Twenty— No, thirty minutes of applause! We’ll get you a double string of pearls for the concert.”
Laska watched him like a shadow while they worked.
Alexander Ivanovich kept up appearances. He dressed well, wore his cravat and damask shirt with starched grace, and was polite when asked about his clandestine melodist from Kazan. Inevitably, the slander regarding the nature of their relationship spread. Alexander Ivanovich laughed at this nonsense and assured the audience that the only love they had ever shared was the love of music.
He inventively defended his fabrication’s privacy against a polyphonic, desirous capital that demanded an interview and more music, new music. Each night, he stayed awake a little longer, thinning himself over the re-creation of Laska’s tunes from the night before, a tremor in his hands as he crumpled the sheets.
Alexander Ivanovich replaced creamy silks with dour houndstooth, a suit as poignant as grief. He fed stray cats and hated Sundays. He wept in the mornings. His gloves stumbled too often, missing the notes. People he used to call friends stopped smiling when they happened upon him in the street. His estranged father, a tempestuous patriarch, finally disowned him—not over the scandalous marriage or adoption but the baggy-eyed ennui.
Meanwhile, Laska still inhabited the corners of the Villuan mansion, the liminalities that light found so repulsive. A lithe shade trailing behind her guardian, alive only between twilight and its death, she transcribed herself, note by note, into a musical tome, a recollection of chord charts. Her—their—masterpiece. Only once did she still her fingers, and suddenly her voice sounded like the first frost, equally transparent, equally unfirm: “Stop it. You need to rest.”
Her words were wrong, but Alexander Ivanovich couldn’t articulate their wrongness. It didn’t sound like Laska. At least, he didn’t think so. He couldn’t remember.
Alexander Ivanovich tried a tune, but the sound came out flat. “We should finish the piece.”
“You will die if you continue like this. Why do you want to tear yourself apart?”
But Laska may as well have been speaking another language as the meanings behind her words mixed with the rhythms itching inside Alexander Ivanovich’s skull. She was miles away. Decades away. In a future that would never come, as an artist she would never grow into.
“I thought I wouldn’t compose again.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I will never be able to create something like this.” Alexander Ivanovich gestured to the piano, a chord chart spread in front of them, as his mind spiraled back to the long, raving moments when he had screamed at the heavens and sworn never to touch the instrument again. “I hate music.”
He played a long diminuendo, low and lonely as a dirge, or dusk, or regret. The glove faltered on a key, his tone slipping away. “Laska, my dearest Laska. Why must the world forget you? Your vision, your talent… But I can salvage it. I’ll make them remember you.”
Laska looked him in the eyes, but not right, not truly. Hers had long gone distant and glassy. She drew a whole scale of minor-key sighs, high and muffled, out of the polished steel pedals, as though hopping between the rails along a frozen river, and spoke to him no more.
On the first of March, 18xx—Laska’s sixteenth birthday, as they had agreed since she had no papers to confirm—Petersburg listened to her latest piece, an avant-garde concerto, and its success was yperite. After the curtain and an encore, when all bravos had been shouted, all flowers thrown, and the claps had subsided, Alexander Ivanovich arrived home placid. He collapsed in the drawing room, drifting into a sleep untroubled by dreams, and when he woke, his memory was only a memory—not broken semitones, not octaves. After that, Laska disappeared.
So grievously dark in the parlor; so lonely. Alexander Ivanovich’s eyes, no longer able to differentiate between day and night, searched for something, a silhouette too timid to do more than scruple at the periphery of his vision. He took off his gloves. Smears of bruises glided up and down the venous-tendon insides of his forearms, following a loss he couldn’t even remember. Alexander Ivanovich took off his coat. He whimpered.
The sun emerged from the earth’s bosom like Arachnida devouring its prey, grabbing it with cheliceral rays. It suffused the cemetery and the teeth of tombstones. Spectral scalpers mobbed a tiny grave overlaid with an inscribed marble slab: Laska Villuan.
Death is as sudden as it is unbefitting. Laska had died as people always die: unchoreographed, once and for all. Look away, she said, did not say, never said. I am only the ink on the sheets. I am only the blur of sleep. Alexander Ivanovich almost heard the voice, reaching him as a barely audible whisper, that he had mistaken for something it never was.
“Will you remember me?”
Music did not permit the statement of things that were not true.