Well, I suppose the one example of Russia’s most famous musical export here at the SunHouse would indeed sing… if I knew the first thing about tuning one, or playing one once tuned.
The balalaika in question is one of the last items from Timothy’s music closet to find a new home. (The other is his full-size lute, crafted and bought in England in 1985 or thereabouts. I’m still figuring out what to do with that treasure.)
I bought the balalaika for him as a birthday surprise in 1988 or 1989. I had been sent off — accompanied by the appropriately named Natasha from shipboard services — to sample Ocean Cruise Lines’ newest itineraries in the Baltic Sea. The idea was if I’d actually been there, the better I’d write about them in our brochures and shore excursion materials.
Natasha and I went ashore in Leningrad as some sort of exalted species of crew member. To my surprise, as crew, our Intourist minders mostly left us to our own devices. We had a day to take abbreviated tours of a museum or two, browse the shops that took dollars or sterling, and dodge black marketeers offering to buy our denim jeans off our bodies as we walked back to the port.
In one shop, I bought some lace, because I thought it would remind my mother of lacework made by my Lithuanian grandmother. In another, two LPs, because the sleeves were attractive, all snowy landscapes and peasants with horse-drawn sleighs… (And if the music turned out to be atrocious, I thought Tim might fob them off on his Russian-descended parents.)
But for Timothy, I bought the most fabulous, outlandish thing I could think of for a master of jazz guitar and student of lute: a balalaika.
Natasha was entrusted with hiding the thing when we returned to the UK, only a few days before Tim’s birthday. While he made his way to Momo, our favourite Japanese restaurant, Natasha and I met surreptitiously at North Ealing tube station, where I collected the tissue-wrapped instrument. It’s hard to say who was more astonished at its unwrapping: Tim or the Japanese waitresses who had been topping up our sake all evening.
For many years, the balalaika hung in a place of honor in Tim’s music studio in Ealing and then in St Albans. When he turned to architecture, and we began our peregrinations up and down America’s west coast, the balalaika often lingered — once again wrapped safely in bubble wrap and tissue — in the closet with old guitar amps and well-used music books.
I dusted off this golden treasure with care. I smiled as I did so, at the memories of my adventures in travel and his adventures immersed in all byways of music. And our past lives intertwined, like the intricate patterns of Russian folk music.
A side note: Timothy and I both loved the Gershwin movie musical Shall We Dance. Fred Astaire, as Petrov, tries to impress Ginger Rogers with a few Russian-inflected remarks, like “Ochi chornya” and the instruction to “tweest” for him. When Tim thought I needed to loosen up, his go-to remark, hissed under his breath, was “tweest!”