The Dream Life of Sukhanov (22 page)

Anatoly Pavlovich Sukhanov methodically smoothed out the pages, slipped them back into the envelope, placed it on the desk, and looked at it in silence. And after a passage of time, when his heart had stopped gasping for air, he understood the source of his deepest pain. The loss of Nina was not the most shattering loss he had suffered: it was the loss of the image of Nina that he mourned the most—that “purest image of the purest charm” he had fallen in love with and cherished for so many years in the most sacred cache of his memory. For the woman in the letter was not the reserved, quietly dignified beauty with whom he had thought he had spent his life, but rather an indecorously middle-aged femme fatale who trotted about the city, wearing her fashionably short fur coat, armed with her bright little lipstick, engrossed in an abandoned affair she had started in a parked automobile and carried on in smelly doorways, with a man so vulgar he could write of love tingling in his veins and of being free and selfish like gods. How could this unbearably trite image, which reeked of life’s cheapest perfume, be the answer to the mystery of Nina’s dreamy silences? How was it possible to reconcile his decades of accumulated recollections with this pitiful missive smacking of some nineteenth-century epistolary novel, from the painful grandiloquence of its contents to that theatrical “N.S.” on the envelope? How could he continue to live with the knowledge that—that—

The envelope.

My God, the envelope!

Sukhanov stared, stared so intensely that the white rectangle swam before his eyes, its very fabric seemingly dissolving into a shimmering leapfrog of particles—only to reassemble a minute later (as a tear, finally released, ran down his cheek) into a creature from an altogether different dimension. The number—the number in the address line—the number he had barely glanced at before, taking it for granted, just as the postman must have done earlier—was it really, truly possible?... He moved his hand across the paper, brushing away the optical illusion, but it was still there: that little horizontal dash that was bending a tiny bit to the left instead of to the right and, with that one hair’s breadth, granting him life yet again.

Things clicked into place like pieces of a puzzle that only moments before had appeared to suggest some surrealist atrocity—a pale Madonna rolling in a trough with swine—but now revealed a shady flowering garden on a sunny day in late summer, with dark red roses climbing a whitewashed wall. The apartment number was thirteen, not fifteen. The apartment directly below him, then—the apartment of the man who a week earlier had treated his neighbors to a sonorous church chant at four in the morning. The apartment of the songwriter Svechkin, who had had the misfortune of marrying a much younger woman.

But did the name of Svechkin’s wife begin with an N?

Tossed so abruptly from such despair to such hope, he had no strength left to wrestle with the remnants of doubt in his heart. He had to know the answer now—and be rid of the darkness forever. The concierge would be able to tell him, of course, but the notion of submitting himself once again to the old man’s insinuating scrutiny (“Ah, yes, a pretty lady, isn’t she, Anatoly Pavlovich? So, is Nina Petrovna still out of town?”) seemed too unbearably ugly a conclusion to such an unbearably ugly day.

After the briefest hesitation, Sukhanov dropped the letter into his pocket, walked out of his place, descended the stairs, and promptly rang the bell of apartment thirteen.

The door opened almost immediately, releasing onto the landing the thundering chords of Beethoven’s Fifth and a faint smell of medicine. A short, plump man of Sukhanov’s years, in a gabardine jacket, stood on the threshold. He looked at Sukhanov without seeing him, his eyes full of quiet anguish, and just as Sukhanov prepared to launch into a neighborly request for some kitchen utensil (designed to draw out a hollered “Natasha!” or “Nadya!”), said expressionlessly, rubbing his temples as if in pain, “I believe we did it again, didn’t we? So terribly sorry, it’s all these baths she takes.... I’ll go tell her to get out, then.” And leaving the door wide open, with a pathetic little wave of his hand, he wandered off down the unlit corridor.

Perplexed, Sukhanov waited. The place, or what he saw of it, looked barely lived in. The entrance, the hallway, a slice of one room visible through a cracked door mirrored his own apartment in arrangement, yet resembled a train station in appearance, so transitory everything seemed, so unloved, so full of a jumble of accidental objects—a beach towel tossed over an empty yellow suitcase, a half-peeled orange, a woman’s wide-brimmed hat, a glass half full of moldy tea. An enormous brown dog emerged from the darkness and padded in his direction, its head hanging down, then veered to the side, and vanished. The music continued to pour into the corridor, its sounds pockmarked with radio static. All at once, Sukhanov felt certain that very unhappy people lived here—and when in another minute a young woman in a robe walked toward him indolently, smelling of steam and sin and some sweet, dramatic perfume, her face that of a broken porcelain doll, he knew he could leave that instant without ever hearing her name, and his heart would be at peace.

“I’m sorry we keep flooding you, Semyon Semyonovich,” she started to say in an indifferent voice, “but you understand, we’ve been a bit preoccupied ever since Vanya had his little breakdown”—but he had already extracted the ripped envelope from his pocket and was handing it to her in silence.

She looked at it without moving, frowning nearsightedly.

“What’s this?” she said, and then, swinging around sharply, shouted with startling shrillness, “Will you turn down that infernal noise? I can’t hear a word Semyon Semyonovich is saying!” Her eyebrows were two thin, delicate threads painted on her face.

“I believe it’s yours,” said Sukhanov softly. “They delivered it to me by accident. I’m afraid I opened it. Naturally, you can count on my—”

She tore the letter out of his hand before he could finish, and carried it close to her eyes; he saw her brightly painted lips begin to tremble. Embarrassed, he nodded and, without another word, turned to leave. Rooms away, Ivan Martynovich Svechkin switched off his music, and his sorrowful voice rang out in the sudden lull behind Sukhanov’s back, “Terribly sorry if it was too loud, Nel lichka, but you know how I love Beethoven!”

Sukhanov slowly walked upstairs, unaccountably saddened on behalf of that meek little stranger whose life was falling apart.

SIXTEEN

T
hat night he reclaimed his bedroom, but his sleep was uneasy. The seemingly boundless bed engulfed him like a dark, voluminous shroud, and for hours he wandered, crying softly, in majestic forests of giant fir trees where light barely penetrated through overgrown branches and the air smelled of loneliness, oppression, and for some unfathomable reason, violets—a smell that, surprisingly, remained in the room when, shortly after four in the morning, having just been swallowed by the yawning earth, Sukhanov awoke with a gasp and, throwing off the covers, sat peering into the shadows.

It must have been the aftershave used by Dalevich, he realized unhappily after a minute. For some time he struggled to fall asleep again, but the stillness of the world rang in his ears and the aroma of violets stole furtively into his lungs. Finally, giving up, he got out of bed, walked onto the balcony, and stood suspended between the vast, empty city and the indifferent, autumnal heavens, listening to the rarefied sounds of the night. A distant car briefly tore the fabric of communal sleep; a gust of wind rustled the trees; a crow flew cawing raggedly over the Zamoskvorechie in search of sunrise.

Then he heard a whisper trailing like smoke from somewhere above him.

“My late wife loves to waltz,” an ancient voice said mournfully from the skies.

Recognizing the madman from upstairs, Sukhanov looked up warily, half expecting a burning newspaper to fly into his face; but nothing stirred on the ninth-floor balcony. Unsettled, he was about to go inside when the sad voice spoke again.

“She died forty-seven years ago. She learned to waltz in Paris. Her parents took her there when she was a young girl, before the Revolution. We met there. She still speaks French like an angel, and when she drinks champagne, she purses her lips as if for a kiss. We are celebrating her birthday today—she has just turned ninety”

The words floated down, slow and dry and broken like dead leaves from some great, invisible, heavenly trees, and Sukhanov felt strangely stirred in spite of himself.

“Hello?” he called out gently. “Are you speaking to me?”

“I am speaking to no one,” said the quiet voice after a pause, “but you are welcome to listen. Perhaps you are a nobody yourself. Most people are, after all. They all think I’m crazy, but I’m the only sane one among them. Their lives are tedious and gray, but in my life, marvelous things happen all the time—ah, such adventures! My wife and I, we walked along the Seine the other night. The moon was full over Notre Dame, and she said—”

His voice fell silent abruptly, as if tripped by a sob. Sukhanov pictured the monkey-faced old man crouching in the darkness mere inches above his head, perhaps with his eyes closed, the better to see his madman’s dreams, or maybe staring into the Russian night with its gloomy houses, flickering streetlights, deserted churches, frozen stars, and all the futile, thwarted lives, just like his own, that were at this moment stumbling through thousands of private nightmares under moonlit roofs—and his heart contracted with inexpressible pity

“Forget about Paris,” the hushed voice sighed. “I have better stories to tell.”

And the old man talked, talked of things that were past, or more likely had never happened; and his tone held the measured, heartbroken lucidity of someone who no longer had anyone to listen to him. He talked of riding horses across the rolling hills of Andalusia, and reciting Virgil among the starlit ruins of the Colosseum, and dancing to the golden strains of Strauss on the deck of a yacht as it crossed the purple Mediterranean on its way to some forgotten tiny island of the gods—always the two of them, he and his dead wife, always basking in an illusory glow of Elysian happiness; and gradually, as the old man’s whisper drifted over the sleeping city, Sukhanov found himself slipping away on the current of his own thoughts. The pain of Nina’s near-loss and the joy of her miraculous recovery echoed in an oddly urgent note through his being, and the words from the intercepted letter—
Your husband has never known how to love
—constricted his heart with a feeling not unlike grief, until he knew he could not brush them aside simply because they chanced to refer to someone else.

The air was already suffused with pale light when the sad voice from the skies finally faded into an exhausted, wordless reverie. Anatoly Pavlovich walked inside, pulled a bag from a closet, and moved through the apartment, collecting shirts and socks. Shortly after noon, he left for the dacha.

T
he ride lasted almost two hours. Looking up, Sukhanov kept seeing Vadim’s unusually bloodshot, brooding eyes flitting in the rearview mirror. Apart from an occasional clarification of directions—it had been so long since Sukhanov’s last visit to the country that Vadim had forgotten the way—they did not talk. Once the congested heart of the old city with its dusty boulevards, blind bakery windows, and peeling mansions had released them, they began to pass shapeless neighborhoods with gray apartment blocks erupting dismally from empty, ill-kempt lots; then, gradually, as Moscow slid back faster and faster, the spaces between the buildings widened until precipitately, without so much as a comma, they changed into fields, bracketed by fire-tipped rowan trees and punctuated here and there by the exclamation point of a leaning bell tower or an ellipsis of dilapidated log houses—and Sukhanov envisioned the whole drive as one endless, unstructured, rambling sentence, and thinking of Nina, of the girl she had been once, of the woman she was now, was barely able to follow all of its clauses, until, veering from yet another unpaved turn in the local road, they arrived quite suddenly at the long-sought period of his country home.

Sukhanov rolled back his shoulders, exhaled, and climbing out of the car, told Vadim to return tomorrow, around three or four in the afternoon. Then, as the Volga lumbered back to the road, he pushed open the gate in a tall wooden fence and, chased by the frenzied barking of Coco, the neighbor’s fat, asthmatic poodle, walked down the winding path.

Here, in the countryside, the summer still lingered as if charmed. A rich smell of cut grass rose into the air along with a midday chorus of somnolent crickets; bumblebees hovered with contented weightiness under a sky blue as the brightest faience; orchard trees rippled in the breeze, revealing flashes of the light green of Antonovka apples among the dark green of restless leaves. On both sides of the path, tumbling branches of blossoming wild roses, red and white, rained petals onto his feet, and their sweet, heavy scent unexpectedly summoned to his memory a delightful tea Valya had occasionally brewed from rose hips. In a few more strides, the white stone walls of the house gleamed through sun-dappled branches of a young oak, reminding him of some impressionist study of color and light. Swinging his bag back and forth like an impatient child, he ran up the steps.

The front door stood ajar; he walked inside. He saw her right away. Sitting by an open window on a glassed-in veranda, she leafed through an art book and picked plums from a ceramic bowl before her; a pile of pits glistened on a saucer at her elbow. The mellow afternoon light that filtered into the room through the gently swaying reddening ivy imparted to her skin the golden glow of a Vermeer portrait.

At the sound of his rushed steps, she looked up, and he saw a slight wrinkle form momentarily between her eyebrows, then vanish just as quickly.

“Tolya,” she said, rising. She was dressed in a loose shirt and an old ankle-length skirt, black with rows of bright little cherries, which she wore only when puttering about her small vegetable garden behind the house.

“You seem unwell,” she said, coming closer. “Are you feeling all right?”

She did not smile, but everything about her—her words, her movements, the tone of her voice—was comforting, tender, softly colored, and he had to fight the urge to weep with relief.

“I ... I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I have a headache. It’s not important.”

She put her cool hand on his forehead; her fingertips smelled of fruits and earth.

“No, you don’t feel hot,” she said, taking her hand away. “Come, I was just about to make tea. I have some wonderful apple pie, Katya brought it over this morning. There are some leftovers from yesterday too, if you are hungry.”

Realizing that he was indeed famished, he followed her inside the sunlit house. As they drank their tea, she spoke, leisurely yet with a touch of uncharacteristic animation, about the surprising harvest of plums, the late blooming of roses, a tame wagtail that visited her on the terrace every morning.... He found himself silently watching her lips shape the words. He had planned to tell her about the rift with Dalevich, the loss of his position, the trouble with Ksenya—had, in fact, spent most of the morning rehearsing the half-indignant, half-pained expressions in which he would couch all his sufferings. Yet now, as he listened to her meandering stories, originating in a reality so different from his own and released lightly, almost lovingly, into this glowing afternoon lull, he felt his need for her pity fading away along with the last complaints of his hunger. And all at once his presence here, conceived and executed with such proprietary ease, and accepted by Nina with such unquestioning simplicity, produced in him a deliciously light-headed sensation of being freed—being rescued—from the whole of his recent existence. He felt astonished that this verdant, warm, rustic world existed not one hundred kilometers from his dark, tormented Moscow universe; and slowly, indulgently, gratefully, he allowed himself to enter the unlikely new life Nina was describing, or possibly creating, before his eyes—a life whose essence lay in the prolonged note of a bird singing in a tree, the hesitant flight of a butterfly alighting for a moment on a windowsill, its velvety brown wings closing and opening in a rhythm of deep, sleepy breathing, and the flickering advance of a dappled, aromatic shadow across a beautiful woman’s face....

Later she took him into the garden. Together they wandered the paths twisting among flower beds and vegetable plots and gooseberry bushes. She showed him her flaming yellow and orange marigolds, a pile of twigs in a hollow behind the toolshed where two days earlier she had glimpsed an old hedgehog, and the lacquered leaves of a rare tea rose about to bloom. He walked a step behind, nodding at the unfamiliar names of plants and weeds, feeling somehow attuned to every tentative shift in the universe—the gradual cooling of grasses, an early hint of vespertine dampness creeping through the air, the measured flow of time itself, its colors changing from the swaying green-gold of the breezy, leafy afternoon to the translucent lavender-silver of the cool, misty evening. A few houses away, someone had started a fire; a thin rivulet of smoke rose above a neighbor’s roof, and the smell of burning leaves made the air tingle.

He stopped, breathed in deeply.

“Why don’t we gather some branches and have a fire of our own?” he said then. “It will probably be cold enough for the fireplace.”

“That sounds nice,” she replied. “I think there is a bottle of red in the pantry.”

T
he pleasingly chilly night was already pressing against the windows when he finally managed to start a good fire, fed by a three-year-old issue of Ogonyok. The contours of the room disappeared into wavering shadows, and darkly glowing crumbs of the disintegrating pages threw dull reflections into Nina’s pale eyes as she sat staring into the flames, her wine neglected.

He watched her over the rim of his glass, then asked, “What are you thinking about, my love?”

She shrugged, not moving her eyes from the fire.

“There is an artist, I forget her name,” she said. “She makes these cubes. They look like children’s toy blocks, only they are upholstered in fabric, and they have texts on them—short poems, cryptic statements, that kind of thing. And sometimes a bigger cube might open up to reveal a different-colored smaller cube inside, and it might say something too, like an answer to a question posed on the outside.”

“Where have you seen them?” he asked in mild surprise.

“An exhibit I went to recently. Anyway, there was this one cube. Its fabric was ugly, black with purple flowers, like an old woman’s dress or a ribbon on a funerary wreath, and its label read, ‘A soul.’ Underneath, there was a warning: ‘Don’t open or it will fly away.’”

“And?” Sukhanov said after a pause.

“And nothing. The lid wouldn’t open, it was glued shut. But I can’t stop thinking about what might have been hidden inside. Would there be another dark cube that said, ‘Too late, it’s gone, told you not to open it’? Or was there instead a bright red or blue cube, or one wrapped in golden foil, perhaps, that said, ‘The daring are rewarded. Take your soul, go out into the world, and do great deeds’?”

“Most likely there was nothing inside,” he said, refilling his glass. “Why bother creating something if no one will see it? These kinds of trifles aren’t real art, anyway.”

“It’s just that I can’t stop thinking about it,” she replied.

For a while after that, they sat in silence. The wine tasted of youth and sun; in the fireplace, hidden moisture hissed within slender aspen branches; two rooms away, in the kitchen, the cuckoo in the old clock reluctantly coughed eight times. Beyond the window, Sukhanov imagined he could see the glint of stars circling unhurriedly through the skies.

“Funny, I never liked being in the country very much,” he said meditatively, emptying the last of the wine into his glass, “yet now I can almost see myself living here.”

Nina stirred as if waking from her own reverie.

“I never asked you,” she said. “How long are you planning to stay?”

“Vadim is picking us up tomorrow afternoon. But I think we should come back soon, don’t you agree, spend a few days, maybe even a week—”

“I don’t think I’ll be ready to leave tomorrow,” said Nina softly, almost to herself.

“More garden work?” he asked with a smile. “I thought you said you’d be done by Tuesday. Well, we could postpone our return by a day or two. I’ll call Vadim.”

“No, what I mean is,” she said, “I want to stay here for a while.”