The Dream Life of Sukhanov (28 page)

“What’s all that noise?” she asked with disapproval, looking at Sukhanov. “No use knocking like that, Pyotr Alekseevich is out of town. He’s gone to the Crimea with his grandson.”

Sukhanov stared at her dully.

“Won’t be returning for at least a week either,” the woman added almost gleefully.

“Oh,” Sukhanov muttered. “Of course. How could I have forgotten?”

And suddenly he could visualize it so clearly: a crystal bowl melting into its reflection in the still, black surface of the lion-footed table just on the other side of this wall, and in the bowl, among a jumble of many temporarily displaced but potentially useful odds and ends (a button not yet matched to a garment, a solitary cuff link, a mysterious screw), a bunch of keys, seemingly ordinary yet possessing the power of some fairy-tale genie to transport him to a marvelous, self-contained world of hot baths and fresh clothes and steaming teas and strawberry jams and maybe even strong liqueurs—a world that was now twice removed, separated from him not by one but by two locked doors.... He turned away and plodded toward the elevator, and the aging blonde across the landing followed his steps with such curious eyes that, glancing up with his finger already poised over the elevator button, he thought of saying something cutting—and then saw one last chance of cheating his fate.

“Pardon me,” he said with all the dignity he could muster in his broken glasses and mud-stained pants, “but you wouldn’t know if anyone here has a key to Pyotr Alekseevich’s place? He might have left one with a neighbor.”

The woman’s birdlike eyes narrowed suspiciously. He hastened to explain who he was, told her in an entreating voice about his being locked out of his own house, his hunger, his need of sleep.... She softened perceptibly.

“You are in luck,” she said after a brief hesitation. “I keep his spare key. Wait here, I’ll go call the resort.”

The ease of this resolution had an almost dreamlike quality to it. She returned a few minutes later. Pyotr Alekseevich, she had been told, was taking his customary promenade along the sea. She would try phoning again in a short while, for, naturally, she would not presume to release the keys without his permission, not even to his son-in-law. As she talked, she cracked her door wider, and Sukhanov smelled a rich aroma of mushroom soup and saw a stretch of cozy blue carpet in the hallway and, on the wall, a girlish fur-trimmed coat and an oversized purple jacket; and, filling in the blanks—a daughter, a son, a leisurely family dinner—he found himself envying this stranger her quiet domestic world, and longed to be a part of it, if only for an instant, if only—

“So you’ll have to come back in a bit,” the woman said. “Half an hour or so. I’d ask you in, but I’m in the middle of cooking.”

“Oh, certainly,” he said. “I understand. You’re very kind as it is.”

And smiling sadly, he pressed the elevator button.

Back in the street, he strolled aimlessly along the pavement. When he neared the corner by the Hotel National, where Gorky Street emptied into the square, the many-columned building of the Manège filled his view. The air had grown much colder now, and presently a snowflake melted on his cheek. He paused to file away, for some future use, the liquid reflections of headlights in the slush of the road, the powdery dust beginning to flicker in the pastel glow of streetlamps, the white columns, the black trees, the blue shadows, and above it all, the quickly darkening skies, luminously pregnant as they could be only on an evening before a snowfall. Then, at once aware of the ache in his fingers, he rapidly crossed Marx Avenue and, lowering his unwieldy parcel to the ground, prepared to wait. He was there only for a minute when Lev Belkin strode across the square, a bundle under his arm, and even at this distance I could tell he was smiling broadly.

“Glad?” Lev shouted.

“You bet!” I shouted back.

“Nervous?” Lev said, closer now.

“Not a bit,” I replied, picking up my load. “I have a feeling it will all go splendidly.”

Together we entered the Manège.

It was the last day of November in the year 1962, and I already imagined it emblazoned on my future memory as the date on which my prolonged apprenticeship was finally destined to end, and to the sonorous cymbals of public acclaim, my heart trembling with gladness, I, Anatoly Sukhanov, a name among names, would enter the gladiators’ ring of art history, stepping into the long-awaited spotlight out of the dim shadows of anonymous toil.

I had lived in anticipation of this day for a long time. The thaw whose first astonishing inroads into the snowdrifts we had witnessed in 1956 was melting its way through history and literature, but had barely made itself felt in the arctic bleakness of Soviet art; and even though for me the preceding years had been rich with that indescribable richness of small-scale triumphs that only an artist knows in his sweaty task of creation, yet little by little my inability to share my canvases with anyone but a handful of close friends, my struggle to maintain my precarious position at the institute, the precautions I continued to take in order to conceal my real self from colleagues and chance acquaintances, the effort of teaching what I no longer believed in—in short, the pervasive duplicity of my existence—poisoned my joy in living, my joy in working, my very desire to paint; and with fading hope, I dreamt of a day when I would tear away the suffocating shroud of falsity and show them, show them all, the ripened fruits of all those years.

And then, unexpectedly, magically, the day came, at the end of a particularly trying month in a trying year, shortly after Nina’s thirtieth birthday.

Nina still tried to pretend, to herself as much as to me, that she was the same girl who one day in 1957 had left her home, breaking with her father, forsaking her old life, and had stood next to me, wearing that white, narrow-waisted dress I liked so much, her back straight, her smile proud, her eyes shining, while an officious woman with thick ankles had monotonously recited solemn commonplaces from a worn compendium of Soviet marriage transactions and Lev’s Alla had giggled into a bunch of wilting gladioli; but even though she continued to call herself the “high priestess” of my art and uncomplainingly slipped away to the kitchen to give me space to work, I could sense the beginning of a change, an insidious, stealthy, corrosive change, in the air between us.

On the evening of November third, the day she turned thirty, she came home from her job at the Tretyakovka wearing that slightly pinched expression I had been noticing of late, and when I unveiled her present—a portrait of her as a mermaid I had worked on in secret, to surprise her—she smiled with her lips only and said in a toneless voice, “Oh. Another painting.” Then she left for a dinner party at her father’s (after years of stubborn resentment, he had offered her a semblance of peace, which failed to include me). I was still up, waiting for her, when she returned, well after midnight. Her face, as she walked in, arrested me, so uncommonly animated it was, and more beautiful than I had seen it in months: her cheeks flushed, I imagined with compliments and expensive liqueurs, her gaze brightened, perhaps with golden memories of her fairy-tale youth; but my impulse to tenderly tilt her head back, look into her eyes, salvage at least something of our day together died a hurried death when I noticed a peacock-blue scintillation following her passage through the shadows of our crowded room. She was wearing a pair of sapphire earrings, and it was they, nothing else, that lent a deep blue brilliance to her gray irises and suffused her pallid skin with an excited warmth.

“What are these?” I asked sharply, knowing the answer already.

“A gift from my father.”

“We can’t accept such things from that man.”

“He is my father,” she said. “He loves me. He wanted to do something nice for my birthday. And you ...” She stopped, looked away. “You don’t know anything about him.”

I had the impression she had meant to say something else but changed her mind.

“I know enough,” I said. “I know what he is. I know what he does—bargains away his dignity piece by piece to the highest bidder, paints trash so he can have his cushy life—”

“You paint trash too,” she interrupted. “Your studio at the institute—”

My breath caught. “I paint trash so I can do this,” I said, shoving my chin at the dusty deposits of canvases in the corners, no longer bothering to keep my voice down. “What I do at the institute is irrelevant—this is who I really am.”

“And how do you know who my father really is?”

“Oh, I see—after a day of prostituting himself, he plays the violin or something?”

“Have you ever considered, Tolya,” said Nina slowly, “that you may actually be wrong about something or someone? You think my father is an amoral, selfish man, but maybe ...” She paused. “Maybe he just wanted to make me and my mother happy.”

Again I had the feeling that some other, harsher words had alighted on her lips, then been discarded—and it was these unspoken reproaches and accusations, combined with her unnatural calm, that sent a wave of fury crashing over me.

“Well, how noble of him,” I shouted. “He sold his soul to the devil so you could have your jewelry, and your mother her piano and her gilded teacups!”

I regretted my words as soon as they had escaped me, but it was too late. Nina’s face, now drawn and pale in the yellow glow of a bedside lamp, seemed suspended between expressions; then she walked to the window and, staring out into the dreary darkness punctuated by anemic streetlamps, carefully removed the earrings, balanced their tiny blue radiance on her palm, and considered them briefly before setting them down on the windowsill. When she faced me, her eyes held no love, no emotion at all.

“So my mother collected porcelain and was passionate about music,” she said softly. “Is it so wrong to want to have beauty in your life? Not everyone is willing to live ... to live like this. And is it really so contemptible to want to give beauty to someone you love?”

Then, not waiting for my answer, she turned and, usually private to a fault, started to undress as if I were not there. In silence I watched her step out of the sea-colored dress her father had brought her years earlier from a trip to Italy, which she still wore on every birthday and New Year’s Eve, gently smooth its creases before hanging it in our makeshift wardrobe, then take off her stockings and, sliding her hand inside, raise them against the light and in a seemingly familiar, tired ritual check for fresh runs. As I looked at the silky shimmer spread between her fingers, I thought mechanically that stockings were very hard to come by nowadays; and on the heels of that thought, the famous words of Chekhov popped into my mind: “A human being should be entirely beautiful: the face, the clothes, the soul, and the thoughts.” And suddenly I was frightened—frightened that something irreparable had happened between us. I thought of the squalor of our dingy place, which had more space for paintings than for us; and the stairs that always reeked of urine; and the anxious hovering of my mother, who kept imagining footsteps outside our door and strange clicks on our phone line, and who, in truth, did not like Nina very much and referred to her, with pursed lips and barely out of earshot—for our communal quarters were too cramped for secrets—as “your fine lady”; I thought too that none of it was ever likely to change.

And then, for one moment, I almost believed that all my creations of the past five years—all those flights of fancy, all those sleepless nights, the bouts of despair, the transports of happiness, the smuggled revelations, the full moons, the museum vaults, the lingering dreams, the stolen moments of love—all of those things were nothing but idle imaginings, youthful indulgences, rainbow dust on a butterfly’s wing; and that my real life was here, now, in this unlivable room with its odors of ancient pipes, dust, and paint, with this silent woman who was lying in bed, her back toward me, pretending to be asleep.... And so unbearable was the thought that I did not move for a long time, and the shadows twitched and cavorted in the corners, and my mother murmured in haunted nightmares behind the wall, and my works, my gifts, my children, begged to be released into the light, and Nina’s breathing gradually assumed a different, measured rhythm, and still I stood in the dark, and after perhaps an hour Nina suddenly said without turning, “You know, Tolya, there is more than one way to lose your soul.”

And then, after several dismal, mostly silent weeks, the telephone rang.

For the full first minute, with Lev stuttering in his excitement and Alla shrieking in the background, I understood nothing. “Pinch me, I’m dreaming,” he kept repeating. Then Nina walked into the corridor, her face remote, her eyelids swollen with insomnia.

“Please don’t shout like that,” she said flatly. “It’s seven-thirty in the morning.”

My hands were jumping so much I could not immediately fit the receiver into the cradle; then, drawing her to me, “Listen, you won’t believe this,” I said, already anticipating the wondrous light about to come into her eyes.

A couple of months earlier, a major retrospective—
Thirty Years of Moscow Art—
had opened at the Manège. Lev and I had gone and, having found the whole affair, with a few exceptions, staid and uninspiring, had pronounced it worthy of being displayed in the former stable. But now an event little short of miraculous had taken place. A benevolent official from the Ministry of Culture had approached a few openly experimental artists with an offer to join the show, among them Ilya Beliutin, who ran an unofficial studio, and his students; and as Beliutin happened to be an old acquaintance of our Yastrebov, the loose invitation had been extended to the members of Viktor’s circle as well—the bearded Roshchin, and Lev, and myself. True, we were allowed only one work each, but all the same, it was a beginning, was it not, and one should be glad even of such—

“Oh Tolya,” Nina interrupted, clasping her hands, “so what if it’s only one painting—it’s the Manège, millions of people will see it, and you will be noticed, I know you will be! My God, it’s wonderful, just wonderful.... When does it start?”

It was all happening with the rapidity of a dream: we had been told to bring our paintings by tonight; Lev and I were meeting by the Manège that evening; the show was to open to the public the very next day. Mother and Nina left for work, but I quickly summoned an impressive cough for the benefit of a sympathetic secretary on the other end of the line and spent several hours in an incredulous, delightful haze, leafing through my canvases as through pages of my life, remembering each birth, at times tender and slow, at times furious and breathless, passing judgment on the sum total of my existence as an artist—my early studies of trains and reflections; the mythical and urban landscapes that had occupied me all through 1958; my subsequent fascination with surrealism, in an attempt to transplant the lessons of Dali and Magritte to Russian soil; and in the past two years, my ultimate arrival at what I believed to be my own, truly unique style—trying to choose from among them the one painting most representative of my philosophy of art, or possibly the one most original, or the one most beautiful, or perhaps simply the one most dear to my heart. In the early afternoon, when the air had already begun to thicken into blue softness outside the window and I was still at a loss, Nina called.