As Sergei walked away, he listened to other tubas booming in the celebration parade a city stretch away -- ghostly sounds in a ghostly city, carried off on the cold November wind like dead leaves, crumpled newspapers, torn cobwebs -- while somewhere above them, somewhere else, the celestial music continued to play, undimmed, untouched, still out of his hearing yet drawing closer perhaps...Freed from his habitual brass weight, he found himself straightening, forcing his shoulders apart, filling with a lighter heart-beat. He thought he should feel at least a twinge of sorrow for his companion of so many years, for someone he had kissed scores upon scores of times, but he felt nothing -- or rather, he realized as he encountered his bedroom that night and saw the emptiness in the corner where the tuba had rested its weary coils for two decades, he felt an odd sense of relief, as if his life had become simpler, clearer, stripped of at least one lie.He told Anna he planned to keep it at the theater from now on. They needed the space.
from The Concert Ticket, an amazing novel by Olga Grushin
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