The Dream Life of Sukhanov (25 page)

And then he went numb with incoherent terror, and felt frantic to leave this dreadful ruin of a place, with this dreadful ruin of a person, far, far behind him.

Carefully averting his eyes, he edged toward the exit.

“Very sorry to have disturbed you,” he said in a hoarse whisper, “but I really must be—”

The man regarded him sadly, without moving.

“And here I hoped you would keep me company,” he said. “The nights have grown so long, and I don’t have anywhere else to go. I live here, you see. Do stay for a bit, eh? We can talk, I know so many different things, I can even tell you the story of my life—you won’t be bored.... Just don’t go away, not yet, please ...”

It occurred to Sukhanov that the man might be dangerous—after all, there was no predicting madness. He continued to back away, muttering about a train he had to catch, until he reached the molder ing door. There, with the breeze brushing his neck, he felt braver, and a desperate thought stirred weak hope in his heart.

“Listen, since you live here,” he said, trying to keep the pleading out of his voice, “can you tell me how to find Bogoliubovka? I was going to the station there, but I was a bit turned around on the way, and now it’s late and I’m completely lost.”

The stranger’s fleeting smile was disconcertingly familiar.

“I wish we were all as lost as you are,” he said. “You are in Bogoliubovka. The station is just down the hill, less than two minutes away. Only there’s no sense in going there tonight, there won’t be any trains until tomorrow. Plenty of space here, though ... How about it, eh?”

But Sukhanov was already heading down the path.

“Tolya, my name is Tolya!” a disembodied voice chased after him from the echoing shadows. “Perhaps you could stop by again some day? I’m always—”

The rest was carried off by the night. Not pausing, Anatoly Pavlovich murmured under his breath, “So, my personal patron saint, no less. Just in time too—if ever I needed divine intervention!”

And he even attempted to smile at his little joke; but as he ran toward the faint village lights scattered plainly across the darkness, he strove not to wonder how he had missed noticing them before, or why he had not recognized the Bogoliubovka church, which he had seen scores of times from the window of his chauffeured car on the way to the dacha. Above all, he avoided thinking about the small pieces of plaster, suspiciously like fresco fragments, that he had glimpsed strewn here and there in the beard of his mad namesake living all alone in the abandoned house of God.

EIGHTEEN

T
he hands of Sukhanov’s watch had stopped at thirteen minutes past ten, but he could sense that the night had already moved into that chilly, faintly unreal stretch of transitory weightlessness that lies like mist between the deepest, most silent hour of darkness and the first timid encroachment of light. The hour, however, mattered little; the important thing was that the train had come in the end.

Shivering with exhaustion, crammed on a hard-backed bench between an ancient man asleep with his mouth open and a corpulent woman noisily extracting something vile-smelling from the folds of a newspaper, Sukhanov found himself drifting in and out of fitful dozing, his head nodding to the rhythm of the wheels. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw the miserable train station, which hours and hours of waiting had carved indelibly into his memory—the tracks glinting under a blinking lamp; the littered length of the platform, empty save for a few shapeless figures sprawled in the shadows among bales and baskets; the drifting stench of urine; the boarded ticket window with a scribbled note glued underneath, at which he had squinted for long, dim minutes but managed to decipher nothing but “except on Tuesdays” and “without stopping at ...”

For the first half-hour, he had paced restlessly up and down the platform. Then he stopped and intently watched the tracks, replaying in his mind the image of the train emerging from the darkness, as if trying to summon it into being. After another half-hour, growing tired, he squatted squeamishly on top of his bag and gradually allowed himself to fall asleep.

He had a strikingly vivid dream. In the dream, realizing that the train would never arrive, he abandoned his futile vigil and stumbled through the night back to the ruined church. It was empty now, and the air inside brighter; the pale frescoes floated gently above the walls. Feeling curiously lighthearted, almost happy, he swept a corner free of rubble, pulled a coat out of his bag, and wrapping himself in it, lay down and sank into merciful, tranquil sleep, until someone tapped him on the shoulder amid a rising rustle of movement. He looked up reluctantly—and saw before him the dirty platform, the lamp flickering over the empty tracks, the vague, shifting figures. His mouth was dry, his hands stiff with cold; he must have been asleep for a while, perhaps for hours. A man in a fedora, his glasses flashing bleakly, his sand-colored beard fluttering, his features indistinct in the meager light, was bending over him, talking in an urgent voice.

“Only five minutes now,” the man was saying, “but they won’t let you board without a ticket!”

Sukhanov sat up and blinked in confusion. The man kept pointing to a small building across the tracks, repeating excitedly that there would not be another train, that Sukhanov needed to buy his ticket while there was still time, that he would gladly watch his bag.... Suddenly understanding, Sukhanov scrambled to his feet and, mumbling thanks to the kind stranger, hurriedly limped off, his legs still heavy with sleep. The next few minutes moved so fast and were so perplexing that he nearly mistook them for an extension of his dream. The tracks caught at his shoes with shards of bottles and tangled wires; the village disintegrated at his gasping approach into an ugly jumble of outhouses, laundry lines, and falling fences; he tripped against an enormous sack lying in the middle of the street and almost screamed when the sack muttered a drunken oath. When he finally pushed open the door of the building indicated by the man in the fedora, he expected to see a lit room, a counter, a woman in a window saying sullenly, “One way to Moscow, four rubles, three kopecks,” but was plunged instead into a darkness full of stale warmth and odors of manure and sounds of sleepy stirring. Something fluffy fled clucking from under his foot, and numerous wings broke out into frantic flapping above his head—and then, before he could gather his disoriented senses, the sharp whistle of a quickly approaching train tore through the night behind his back.

Cursing, he turned and dashed back to the station, pursued by the indignant cackling of chickens. He was still scampering over the tracks when a pair of dazzling lights blinded him in an outburst of oncoming noise. For one mad moment he stood still and stared, almost convinced that this night, this day—this whole past week, in fact—were but a disjointed nightmare, and that the shining thunder flying at him with such inevitability would bring with it a blissful promise of awakening. Then the moment passed, and he bounded in one last effort over the tracks and up the steps and, his heart flailing ominously, arrived at the platform, just in time for a powerful rush of air, a screech of brakes, a reluctant squealing of sliding doors, a dense press of people who from a few immaterial shadows had somehow grown into a shoving, pushing, striving mob.... He was trying to fight through the crowd in search of the man who had promised to watch his bag when a surging wave of bodies, baskets, bales, buckets lifted him forcibly and carried him off. In the next instant another whistle sounded, and as the floor skidded beneath his feet, he was hurtled forward into a thronging, reeking space.

The train had left the station.

In spite of the unreal hour, the car he found himself in was full to the point of bursting. As soon as he recovered his balance, he elbowed his way through, standing on tiptoe now and then in hopes of glimpsing the old-fashioned hat and the yellow beard. But the stranger was nowhere to be seen, and in a short while, Sukhanov started having nagging little doubts about a station office supposedly open so late at night, his stumbling through a chicken coop, the fact that no one seemed to demand a ticket from him after all.... And when the truth finally dawned on him, it was simple, as most truths are. He had been duped out of his bag.

He felt too worn out for anger, even when he remembered his expensive coat. Turning back in resignation, he lurched through the crammed aisle, navigating between feet and parcels, looking, with diminishing hope, for a place to sit. And it was then that he noticed, for the first time clearly, the other passengers, and his steps faltered uneasily. Pressing upon him in the unsteady light of a few bare bulbs were people in drab clothes, with stony, dark, prematurely aged faces, heads swaying loosely in time to the thudding wheels, vacant eyes staring into nothing, features distorted by grotesque deformities of sunken mouths, broken noses, monstrous warts, missing teeth ...

These were not the people he met in the busy streets of old Moscow—they belonged rather among the medieval fiends of Bosch’s tortured landscapes of hell. He glanced about, covertly at first, then almost wildly, seeking out a splash of color, a pleasant countenance, a lively expression, a natural smile; but the grim, wordless, disfigured masses enclosed him on all sides like a silent gray sea. His unease began to slide into fear. He wondered to what final destination all these perversions of human beings could possibly be heading at this hour of the night, and peering closer, thought he saw disturbing, freakish objects protruding over the rims of their draped baskets or nestled in their yawning bags—a hoof of a severed bovine leg, a drooping neck of a bird, a rusty cemetery cross with clumps of reddened earth still sticking to it. And suddenly it seemed to him that he had accidentally stumbled on some secret nocturnal world, the unseen bowels of Russia, where no outsider was ever allowed—that he was painfully, obviously out of place here—that everyone was already starting to notice his presence, to stir, to mutter, to turn around, to devour him with those heavy, empty, terrifying, alien eyes—

In the next instant he caught sight of a miraculously preserved wedge of space between a shrunken old man sleeping with his mouth agape and a fat woman fussing with a crumpled newspaper. Mumbling inaudible apologies, he squeezed through the still wall of monsters, lowered himself onto the edge of the bench, and hastened to close his eyes. Soon he was wading in and out of anxious dreams in which he again strode up and down the Bogoliubovka platform—and so real were the visions of the blinking lamp and the gleaming tracks that only the sporadic wakeful glimpses of the pink, childlike gums of the man on his left and the nauseating smell of vobla, the salty dried fish the woman on his right had eventually unwrapped from a Pravda editorial and was now eating with repulsive sucking noises, reassured Sukhanov that he was indeed on a train, moving closer and closer to Moscow with every passing moment.

Yet after some time—twenty minutes maybe, or forty, or even an hour—he wondered through the haze of his slumber why they still rumbled on, with no announcements and no stops. Forcing himself awake, he attempted to look out the window, but the old man was leaning against it, blocking his view; all he could see were wide patches of blackness superimposed with bright reflections of the man’s gnarled hands. Feeling apprehensive, Sukhanov turned to his other neighbor and was met by the oily gaze of the half-eaten fish. The woman was busy picking at her teeth. She looked astonishingly like the wife of a certain theater critic he knew, he realized now. The thought dismayed him for some reason.

“Pardon me,” he said, “but do you know how soon we’ll be arriving in Moscow?”

On the other side, the old man stirred.

“Moscow? We aren’t going to Moscow, my friend,” he said, not opening his eyes. He spoke with a funny lisp. “We are heading east—Murom, Saransk, Inza ...”

Sukhanov swung around and stared at the man in horror.

“Don’t listen to him, he’s not all there,” the woman’s voice blustered at Sukhanov’s back. “Old age will do it to you. I reckon we should be getting to Moscow in less than an hour.”

“Oh,” said Sukhanov faintly. “Oh.”

The old man dropped off to sleep without another remark, but a calm, knowing smile played on his lips. With blank eyes, Sukhanov watched the woman unhurriedly brush the fish remains onto the floor, fake amethysts the size of walnuts sparkling in her meaty earlobes. And all at once his presence here, among these strange people, in this train hurtling who knew where, seemed so unbearable that he could no longer remain sitting still, following the passage of time in his befuddled mind, guessing at the contours of the night they traveled through, his thigh squashed against the woman’s repugnantly voluminous side.... Nodding mechanically at the old man, he stood up and shakingly made his way back into the aisle.

Here the press of bodies had become even denser. He pushed through, intending to position himself by the nearest window, when the sight of all these heads bobbing before the expanse of the lit wall punctuated by rectangles of framed darkness struck him as an unexpectedly familiar paraphrase of some other, distant scene. He paused for a moment, attempting to place his sudden déjà vu; then, giving up, resumed his efforts to get through.

People were standing three and four deep, talking to one another in undertones, all eager to get a better look. He too felt the excitement rising from his feet, numb after so many hours of waiting in line to enter, into the tips of his fingers. Finally, there it was, unobstructed, before him: the fluid wisp of a girl acrobat balancing on a ball, with a misty desert behind her, and in the foreground, the muscular back of a man in repose, the whole scene glowing softly with pinks, blues, and grays—a poignantly lyrical metaphor of humanity as a carnival troupe of performers and freaks, a striking juxtaposition of strength and fragility, roughness and smoothness, immobility and motion. A masterpiece of Picasso’s early period.

With many others, Anatoly stood and looked at the painting that had been rescued so magically from some terrible cave of a locked storage room, where it had languished for dark, musty decades. And after a while, it began to seem like a mysterious window into a new, tantalizingly foreign world where possibilities were endless, where truths were manifold, where an altogether different artistic language was spoken—a language I did not as yet know, did not as yet understand, but had been avidly trying to learn all through that year, the year of 1956. All the same, the grainy magazine reproductions and the black-and-white catalogues of across-the-ocean shows circulating at Yastrebov’s gatherings had not prepared me for the shock of coming face to face with an actual paint-and-brush work of Picasso, the giant of Western art, exhibited for the first time, unbelievably, here, in Moscow, in the very Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts where as a little boy I had seen Tatlin’s flying machine and where for many subsequent years one could find nothing but a dusty spread of lamps, flags, and carpets presented to Stalin on his birthdays. And even though most of Picasso’s other paintings on display left me vaguely puzzled and disappointed, that first sight of
Young Girl on a Ball
sustained its precious ringing note throughout my being, and that evening, as I ran home along the quickly darkening autumnal streets, my mind strove to absorb the revolutionary freedom of modernism and my hands ached to try these new, as yet unexperienced, colors and forms....

Without warning the train pulled to a screeching stop. As Sukhanov toppled forward, his glasses plunged off his nose and were instantly lost amid the shuffling of uprooted feet. Immediately everything started to float away into a fog: the cloudy faces grimacing around him, the spectral station whose black-lettered name he squinted at hopefully but was unable to read, the shimmering glow of the sky above a distant town. After a moment of agonized indecision, he crouched down and groped along the filthy floor, the muddy shoes, the flabby convexities of bags, until, against every law of probability, just as the train jolted into motion again, his fingers closed on the welcome cold of the metal frames.

Infinitely relieved, he returned his glasses to their place, only to discover, upon straightening up, that half of his world was now crisscrossed by a radiant, trembling cobweb: a star-shaped crack, the imprint of someone’s vengeful step, had shattered the left lens. The crack splintered the light into dozens of cubist fragments and imparted a rainbow-tinted brightness to one side of his vision, granting unwitting haloes to a night brigade of women in orange overalls who were presently illuminated by the flickering beams of their flashlights on a parallel track, and, once the last vestiges of the unknown town had fallen into the darkness, endowing his own reflection in the window with the multifaceted eye of an insect and sending silver waves across that of a strikingly beautiful girl who had just passed behind him in the aisle.