City of Ghosts by Ben Creed (most important books of all time txt) 📕

moving forward, Revol, placing one foot in front of the other. Now, perhaps, the only way to escape death will be to court it.

Rossel sat back in his own chair.

‘A special someone?’

Nikitin took out a cigarette, a foul Bulgarian import, and lit it. Then he blew out a ring of smoke that floated towards the soot-covered ceiling before curling into nothingness.

‘They didn’t give a name. They never do. But I think I can guess.’

31

Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich and Nikolai Vronsky. Either as a student or a professor, they had all walked this walk, across Leningrad’s Theatre Square towards the classical façade of the conservatory. Rossel had passed by many times since he left, in the summer of 1941, just before he had been called up to protect the city with the civil defence. But this was the first time he had ever attempted to go back inside.

The grey and white painted stone was looking a little shabby, but the imposing frontage with its oblong and arched windows still made his heart miss a beat as he stood in front of it, remembering the first day he had arrived here as an awkward teenager, believing he might, in some small way, follow in the footsteps of his heroes.

He turned and stared back across the square at the Kirov Theatre, with its green and white stuccoed walls. The two buildings were separated by only a few hundred feet, but the musical journey between them – that of starting out as a student at the conservatory and ending up on stage or in the pit of the Kirov – was a chasm. Nevertheless, it was one his old violin teachers had expected him to make. Until he had been diverted to make his confession to Major Nikitin.

*

Inside the conservatory, everything was just as he remembered. Branching out from a central staircase were long, airy corridors of rooms for practising, teaching and lectures. As a student, he loved to linger here in the evenings, when lessons were over but the rooms still full. Better to practise here than in the hostel, where other students were always crashing around, shouting and singing.

If you walked slowly enough along these corridors you could wander into a Beethoven sonata and pass through into a Chopin étude, like slipping through an aural curtain – passing from one reality to the next, from C minor to A-flat major, from darkness into light. You could stop and moor yourself in one world for a while or move on to the edge of another; something comforting and familiar yet, at the same time, hard to discern until you took only two more steps and passed into the storms of a Rachmaninov prelude. And all the time, out on the edge of hearing, out on the edge of your very self, was the siren call of a Tchaikovsky violin concerto, or the sarabande from a Bach cello suite, or an aria from The Tsar’s Bride.

It was, Sofia had once said, a little like being in Heaven’s aviary.

The halls were busy with chattering students moving between the classrooms and the rehearsal halls but he spotted Professor Lebedeva immediately. She walked directly towards him. She looked older, of course, he tried to calculate her age – mid-sixties now, at least. Her hair, once garishly red, was now almost completely white. She was still trim and behind some small wire-framed glasses – a new addition – her green eyes flashed the intelligence that he had always found, even as her student, a little beguiling.

‘Revol, it really is you!’

‘Yes, Professor, it really is.’

He took a step forward and kissed her formally on the cheeks, three times.

*

Rossel brought out his notebook and opened it at a place where he had written down all four names and, then, a question mark to signify the still unidentified fifth victim.

Sofia Fedotova

Maxim Avdeyev

Felix Sorokin

Nadya Bazhanova

?

They were sitting before the stage of the conservatory’s concert hall, beneath an ornate ceiling on which were painted clouds, cherubs and a muse in a Grecian robe playing a golden harp. The walls of the room were pure white and crystal chandeliers glittered in the October sunlight that shone through a row of large, arched windows.

Rossel had performed here countless times but all those memories eluded him. Instead, it was Sofia whose presence filled him, just as it filled the concert hall – the pang of jealousy he had felt seeing her laughing with another student after a rehearsal, jealousy he could still taste. The longing as he watched her prepare for a solo in one of the Mahler lieder, eyeing her from his seat in the orchestra.

His sense of Sofia, of everything he had lost, was tangible here, in this grand room, amongst the ghosts of their shared past and, for a moment, he was lost.

He tapped on the notebook with a finger, using this small motion to pull himself back together.

‘Do you remember them, Professor?’

Professor Lebedeva glanced down at the notebook and then back up at him.

‘Felix, yes, naturally, how could I forget Felix? So mischievous. And of course, I taught him, as I did you. I used to wonder why he bothered, frankly, given the amazing amount of practice he didn’t do. I nearly kicked him out of my class but he was entertaining so we would talk instead of playing. He was the only lazy student I have ever tolerated. A real charmer.’

Lebedeva glanced down at the four names again and sighed.

‘Memories. Sofia, so charming and sweet. Beautiful of heart. Her voice had a magical purity about it, though she had yet to learn control. The other two, I have some recollection of the names, but that’s all really. I have been teaching violin here for twenty years now. That’s a lot of students. And not all of them as talented as you, such a shame. What happened?’

‘The war happened, Professor.’

‘Do you miss playing?’

Rossel shook his head.

‘No. Not anymore.’

He put the notebook away.

‘What else connects them?’