The Dream Life of Sukhanov (35 page)

They were silent for a while. Suddenly Belkin clasped his hand to his forehead.

“Of course,” he exclaimed, “that’s where they are!” Throwing open a desk drawer, he rifled through its depths and extracted a plastic container with a few stale honey cakes inside. “Might as well add some more water to our tea while I’m at it.”

“Please,” said Sukhanov, no longer listening. He was remembering the day in March of 1957 when Nina had stopped by his studio, and for the first time he saw it all. She had not been interested in him or his works—she was there to seek a reconciliation with Lev, for she and Lev were not speaking, and she was too proud, and he was Lev’s best friend; and the only reason she agreed to come to his place was that he had suggested he would invite Lev along, and the only reason she went was that she felt offended at Lev’s refusal—the refusal he had invented. And later, in the crammed shabbiness of his room, as she looked at his secret paintings, at the dark fantasies he had woven for her, already for her, only for her, she said, “I understand, he really isn’t a very good painter,” and she cried—and the angry tears she shed and the broken words she spoke were not meant for her father, just as their first kiss, that wonderful, leafy, sunny kiss on the lake, was not meant for him. No, they were all meant for the man she loved and the artist who failed her, the ever-present, invisible shadow dogging their steps through all their museum walks, all their conversations, all their memories being created—the same man who now, thirty years later, was nervously brewing him a cup of dreadful tea over a rusty sink. And slowly, as more recollections claimed him, all the accidentally intercepted glances and bitten lips and bright, insincere intonations slid into place, all the uncertainties were made certain, all the blank spots colored—and by the time Belkin turned to him with a new glass of colorless tea, he finally knew the truth, and his whole young past with Nina, with its sleepless rambles through the city, its flights of happiness, its ecstatic dreams, shifted, changed in tint, became dimmer, sadder, more transparent, and at the same time more real.

“That painting of yours,” he said quietly. “It was about us, was it not? Nina was Leda, you were the shepherd boy, her youthful, earthly love—and I was the swan, the winged divinity come to take her away with the force of my art. Except that she loved my art, but she never loved me, did she? She loved you. And to think that I quit painting for her, to make her happy...”

He thought now of the evening when he had told Nina of his decision, and of her spending the whole night kneeling in her thick white gown, like some medieval saint in fervent prayer, before the stacks of canvases in their room, looking at this or that one in the jaundiced light of the lamp, and crying, and begging him not to do it, promising that she would be stronger, that she would never complain, repeating over and over that he had no right to walk away from his destiny, that he had so much fire, so much power in him...

“Tolya, what nonsense is this?” Belkin exclaimed. “Of course she loved your art, and she was very upset about your decision to quit, but—”

“You spoke to her about it? She never mentioned it.”

The spoon clanged in Belkin’s glass.

“She came by my place the day your article was published. She had the magazine with her. She... she was crying, she needed someone to talk to....”

The unnatural quiet reigned in Sukhanov’s heart. They all, in the end, had their own betrayals to live with.

“Perhaps,” he said, standing up, “there has been enough reminiscing for one night. I should go now. Thanks for the tea.”

“Wait,” Belkin said, his eyes ravaged by guilt. “What I’m trying to tell you is that Nina made a choice. She chose
you,
art or no art, don’t you see?”

Briefly he thought of telling Belkin that Nina had left him, then changed his mind.

“You know,” he said, stopping in the low doorway, “what I said just now, about quitting for Nina... Of course, I believed it at the time, and it was a big part of it, I’m sure, but... I’ve realized a few things over the last week or two, and I think you were right all along, Leva—ultimately, I was afraid. Not so much of prisons or poverty or even unhappiness, though I thought about all that—we all did.... But mostly, I was afraid of failure. I was so terrified that my reality would not measure up to my dreams, that I would never quite fulfill my promise, that years later I would end up—”

“Like me,” said Belkin. He was looking past Sukhanov now, at the landscapes hanging on the walls of the next room. “Ironic, isn’t it? I guess one discovers many ironies in one’s middle age. Because if any of us had real talent, it was you, Tolya, always you—more than a talent, a gift, perhaps even genius...”

A small, clear voice spoke dispassionately from a darkened corner of Sukhanov’s mind: “Geniuses don’t sell out.” Suddenly protective of his hard-won serenity, he ordered the voice silent.

“Geniuses don’t quit,” he said aloud.

“Geniuses are human. Humans quit,” said Belkin. “Andrei Rublev stopped painting for decades.”

“Andrei Rublev seems to be everyone’s favorite proof of some pet theory these days. He makes a good candidate, since he probably never existed.”

“Oh, I don’t mean the historical Rublev. I’m talking about Tarkovsky’s Rublev. Brilliance, sheer brilliance, from the very first scene. Imagine, a fifteenth-century inventor who dreams of flying leaps off a church steeple on clumsy artificial wings and smashes to his death, yet somehow one feels his triumph, if only for a second! My God, if ever there was a sure sign that times are changing, this film being allowed in our theaters is it. Haven’t you seen it?”

Something caught in Sukhanov’s throat. He shook his head mutely.

“But you must!” Belkin cried. “Everyone must! I saw it last week, and I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s one genius envisioned by another. Here is Rublev, radiant as a god, capable of turning white walls into pastures of paradise at the lightest touch of his brush, yet refusing his calling because the world around him is mean and cruel and ignorant, because people kill each other, because the rulers are unworthy, because there seems to be no place for beauty under the sun. And so for years he wanders the dark, demented Russia—the greatest artist our soil has ever formed, alone, silent, unrecognized—until one day, bent with age, he meets a boy, a mere boy, who is struggling to create the most glorious church bell in the land. And something changes in Rublev, and after all that time, he goes to Moscow to paint our Kremlin.... And here is the fascinating thing, Tolya. The black-and-white film ends with this incredible flowering of color—Rublev’s actual frescoes and icons, the culmination of his lifelong search—the most important three minutes, really, in the whole three hours. But since the story appeared to be over, the crowds were leaving the theater in a trudging herd, never even casting a glance at the screen. And so I sat alone in the theater, and the lights began to come on while pale angels and saints were still passing before me, and I thought, yes, you were right that day, our world really is dark and ignorant, just as it was in Rublev’s time—but you were also wrong, because in spite of all the injustices, and horrors, and stupidity, beauty always survives, and there will never be a higher mission than making the world richer and purer by adding more beauty to it, by making one single person cry like a child at the age of fifty-three....”

He stopped, out of breath, his eyes glistening. And at that precise moment, as his former best friend fell silent, everything was finally revealed to Sukhanov, and his whole life’s plan lay before him, wondrous and clear. Dazed, he stepped across the threshold and into the void. There were no landscapes with lilacs and skaters on the walls now. Other paintings hung in the dazzling space—paintings unearthly in their sublimity and terrible in their wisdom, each an amalgamation of biblical truths and the essence of Russia’s soul, each a triumphant revelation in color and emotion.

Slowly Anatoly Sukhanov turned around, incredulously, gratefully soaking in the new universe unfolded before him. He saw the glorious greens of the Garden of Eden presided over by Adam, naked save for a pair of eyeglasses, absently eating a not yet ripened apple and covering himself with a thick, dusty book, while Eve, light and translucent as a breeze, danced an unconcerned, nimble-footed, solitary dance in the depths of a virginal forest, butterflies in her emerald hair. He saw the Oriental lushness of a palace, with honeyed wines flowing, and yellow roses blooming, and silk- and velvet-skinned guests lolling about on sun-drenched carpets, and Salome, still as a marble statue, her hands folded virtuously, her eyes downcast, listening with the slightest hint of a coy smile to a sermon read by John the Baptist’s head residing in the place of honor on a golden platter. He saw Noah’s Ark soaring into the blueness of the sky out of the blueness of the sea, its decks overflowing with strange, magnificent beasts and angels with azure wings and huge, scaly fishes gasping their last breaths with fat purple lips. He saw the blood-red fires of hell, and the sinners with blithely oblivious, ruddy faces drinking tea and playing cards and reading magazines among the flames, none of them realizing where they were. He saw an empty black cross rising into leaden skies, a pale man with pierced hands walking toward a midnight horizon, and a Madonna swathed in darkness, her face painfully white, turning away with a disappointed look in her eyes....

Many, many paintings were there, and each so rich, so overwhelming, that he felt as if he were flying away into a starry whirlwind of terror and delight, and there were no words for the wild, weightless sensation in his heart. And he knew that all the women in the paintings had Nina’s face, and that all these works he was seeing, all these visions of astonishing genius, were his, his own—brought into the world not by the man he had been once, but by the man he was now.

And as the ecstatic wave swelled inside him, he was sure he had uncovered the meaning of his life, its past and present and future. He had had talent once but had been too young to say anything of importance, for true wisdom could be distilled only in the retort of suffering. And it was only after twenty-three years of mute crawling through mud—only after he had felt the smooth taste of betrayal on his lips and the chilly weight of thirty pieces of silver in his sweaty palm, only after he had learned about the slow fattening of the soul, the anguish of wasted chances, the pain of love slipping away, the soft, horrifying slide into death—yes, it was only then that the elixir of life was granted him and his resurrection assured.

And that, he now knew with a lightheaded, effortless certainty, was the miraculous message of the past days, which he had misunderstood for so long—a message delivered to him again and again, with sublime simplicity, by a kind professor who, while himself vanishing in the dark whirlwind of history, had taught him that beauty was eternal; by an old teacher who had surfaced from some murky Russian depths to tell him that age was irrelevant, for it took a lifetime to learn one’s craft; by a cousin whose world he had overturned with his adolescent drawings; by a father who had given him the double gift of a divine madness and the courage to fly; by a mother who, discarding all his past, clumsy attempts at greatness, had so generously wiped his slate clean, preparing it for the acceptance of new revelations; by a woman who had left her only love in the name of his brushes and oils.... Again and again, the truth had grazed him with a feathery touch, but he had stopped up his ears and closed his eyes, imprisoned by fear, imagining the hand of some angered deity poised above his head, ready to exact revenge. Yet there never had been a revenge—only his strengthening genius shaking off its bounds of sleep, shedding off the incidental, the irrelevant in life—only art calling him back to the fold.

And now, in one sonorous moment, he heard the call, and saw, and understood. And as his dormant talent ripened into something else, something infinitely more precious and great, he felt the itching of budding wings under his skin.

TWENTY-THREE

A
n anxious voice stretched across the darkness.

“Tolya, can you hear me? Tolya? Tolya!”

He opened his eyes, though they had been open already. The perspective was all wrong: the walls with their bright little landscapes loomed over him at odd angles, and Lev Belkin crouched on the floor, sprinkling cold tea into his face.

“I’m fine,” he said, restraining a sudden urge to laugh. “I must have slipped. It’s nothing.” Slowly he pulled himself up and walked to the door; the linoleum was overgrown with gnarled roots that kept catching at his legs—or else it was Lev trying to stop him. In the doorway, he turned, put his hands on Lev’s shoulders, and looked into his face.

“Leva,” he said forcefully. “Never doubt that you did the right thing. Better to know the truth, whatever it is, than to wonder forever about what might have been.”

Lev’s face was rapidly dissolving into the superimposed angles and planes of a cubist portrait, and his lips were opening and closing like a pair of scissors. “Tolya, you’ve got to listen,” he was repeating, “you are ill. You need help, Tolya, do you understand me? Just wait here, I’ll only be a minute, just a phone call, Tolya, you’ll be fine, don’t go anywhere, it will only be a minute...”

Stumbling, Lev turned and disappeared inside a mediocre painting of a cramped room.

Smiling to himself, Sukhanov nodded and stepped across another threshold.

Still weightless, he danced down the street. Enormous August stars were falling from the skies, violin concertos were pouring from open windows, and his soul was waltzing. In a few blocks, a taxi with a blinking green light emerged out of nowhere. Inside, there drifted a faint scent of violets, and a pair of outmoded glasses and a funny sand-colored beard leapt through the shadows in the rearview mirror.

“Voskresensky Passage, please,” said Sukhanov, and obediently the car sped away through the night and the neon signs and the sounds of the city; and all he could think of were the magnificently white sheets of paper on the corner of his desk and the box of watercolors in an unfrequented drawer.

When they reached the place, he scooped the last remaining change out of his pocket, dropped it into a hand extended from the darkness, and walked inside the building, and across the lobby teeming with reflections, and toward the elevator. The elevator puzzled him briefly—the panel with its shining rows of buttons had a button for the seventh floor and another for the ninth, but none for the eighth on which he lived. Getting off at the seventh floor, he walked up a flight of stairs. It was not just the elevator, he saw then; his whole floor was missing, and the apartments jumped from number fourteen to number seventeen. He checked several times, but there was no mistake. He shrugged; it did not seem all that important in light of his new, trembling, unshakable happiness.

Taking the stairs all the way down—past the imposing leather-padded, nail-studded doors, two on each floor, every one of them hiding its own tragedy, its own madness, its own choice—he descended into the basement, traversed the unlit corridor, then stopped to knock. A sleepy girl with no eyebrows let him in and, without saying hello or asking what he wanted, wandered down a hallway that smelled of cabbage. He waited patiently, and in another minute Valya herself appeared, hurriedly wiping her hands on her apron. When she saw him, she threw her arms up, and wailed in a high, plaintive voice, “Anatoly Pavlovich, my dear, what’s happened to you? Please, please, come in, are you hungry, I can make you something to eat, and while you eat, I can wash these quickly, I—”

He took her head in his hands, and she fell silent, peering at him, shyly or fearfully perhaps, out of her slightly crossed eyes.

“You are a real Russian woman, Valentina Aleksandrovna,” he said earnestly. “Please forgive me.”

Then he drew her toward him, kissed her on the forehead, and walked away, feeling her eyes following him closely through the basement gloom all the way to the stairs. The last expression on her face had been strangely akin to pity, and he pondered it briefly, then dismissed it. Back in the lobby, he stopped by the concierge’s desk, to inform him that the eighth floor had vanished. Then he had an afterthought.

“I also need to borrow this, it belongs to my dream anyway,” he said, and leaning over the strangely still concierge, opened a drawer in the desk and pulled out the tattered, formerly checkered scarf. “It might be cold where I’m going,” he explained amiably, and wondering why he had never before noticed how much like a wooden marionette the old man looked, strolled outside, singing his favorite Tchaikovsky aria under his breath.

The taxi was still there, waiting at the curb. Sukhanov bent to the window.

“I don’t have any money,” he said, “and I need to go some distance.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll take you for free,” said the invisible driver, his yellow beard fluttering in the shadows. “I know where you want to go, I’ve been there before. Hop in.”

The car moved off again, but this time, the journey took much longer. There were streets and lights at first, then ugly clusters of apartment buildings amid the emptiness of deserted lots with weeds swaying in the breeze, then black cutouts of trees against the sky, then endless fields, then nothing. After another hour they arrived. The air was crisp, the church silhouetted clearly against the light blue of the waning night.

“Stop here,” Sukhanov said, smiling, from the backseat. “This is Bogoliubovka.”

He could tell that in the darkness ahead of him the invisible man with the canary-yellow beard was smiling too. Sukhanov stepped outside; the earth smelled of daffodils and sleep.

“Be happy,” said the driver, leaning forward and waving. For one instant, as the man’s face passed through the ray of a solitary streetlamp, Sukhanov saw the familiar features of the apothecary from DalÍ’s canvases; in the next moment, the painted man and the car with its lights melted away. “It makes sense,” he whispered joyously. “It’s all connected.”

In his excitement he ran up the hill. The church was as he remembered it, with its stale odors and pale processions of saints treading around the corners and crows cawing hoarsely in their dreams and the sky falling through the broken dome in sharp, jagged, brilliant fragments. He felt complete and at peace, as if he had never left here. The man he had seen earlier was gone, but on the threshold he stumbled against something bulky and was pleasantly surprised to discover his bag, stolen at the ghostly station who knew how long ago, he recalled, by another of Dalí’s doubles. Someone had already pulled out his favorite gray coat; it lay spread on the floor a few steps away. Unconcerned, he picked it up, shook the dust off, and wrapped himself in it, for winter was drawing near, and then carefully walked through the broken glass and crunching plaster, surveying his new canvas.

It was perfect, absolutely perfect, just as he knew it would be. Here, then, on these ancient walls, he would deposit the riches of his life—here he would paint his own angels and saints and gods, and perhaps a self-portrait or two—here he would live, eternally free, triumphantly unencumbered by the muddle of tedious obligations, the shame of daily compromises, the chaos of ordinary life....

Pausing in the doorway, he looked out into the night, silent, tranquil, undisturbed by human presence; only far, far below him, two or three scattered lights trembled in the invisible village. And then, as he stood watching their uncertain blinking in the darkness at his feet, somewhere in the hidden recesses of his soul a door recently closed seemed to swing open; and for a moment, for a single moment, a torrent of memories burst out of confinement. These were not the memories of his tragic, thwarted childhood or his brilliant, daring youth; these were the neglected memories of other, later times, uninspired, unremarkable, common—memories of bending with his wife over a cradle, studying, with a mixture of pride and alarm, the tiny red face of a newborn laboring over a cry; memories of strolling through a sun-sprinkled city park, laughing as his one-year-old son wobbled on unsteady legs from tree trunk to tree trunk; memories of reading a fairy tale late into the night to his six-year-old daughter, who lay in bed sick with the flu, her eyes feverishly bright, refusing to fall asleep until he turned the last page; memories of the four of them gathered in the evening around a fire on a deserted beach, listening to the breathing of the sea and the hissing of mussels in the flames.... And for one moment, while the door in his soul stayed open, these recollections pierced him with an unsustainable sorrow—and already in some deeper, dimmer layer of his being an ugly, unbearable suspicion was beginning to stir, and he almost wondered whether he had misunderstood everything after all—whether his newfound purpose was truly the dazzling revelation he had imagined it to be, or merely a ... a ...

And then the moment joined all the others on their way to oblivion. Exhaling, he slammed the door shut, this time forever, just as the last lights in the village below wavered and went out as if quickly covered by a giant hand. Everything was perfect, absolutely perfect, he told himself again. His path stretched clear before him, and he was not alone, he would never be alone—the whole world would be with him, helping him, watching over him, lending him branches for brushes, warm earth for pigments, and now and then, a falling star or two for inspiration.

He stepped outside, scooped up a handful of soil, crumbled it between his fingers, and smelled it, laughing softly. Then, once the echo of his laughter had faded, he began to mix the glorious rainbow of his new palette.