by David Grand
As Dr. Gamburg went on to cite Professor Tarkhov’s credentials and list the articles he had written, Professor Tarkhov tried again to find Arthur Brilovsky in the crowd, but there was no sign of him. The professor’s mind began to cloud with panic now, but when called to the lectern by Dr. Gamburg and the applause of the audience, he managed to clear his head enough to begin his lecture. He carefully tapped some crisp sheets of paper before him and smiled at the audience as best he could, looking over their distinguished-looking faces as he did so. “Evgeny Nikolayevich Rodhinsky,” he began, “was born in 1888 to a bourgeois family in the town of Tsarskoye Selo, not very far from the Summer Palace. His mother was a minor poet and his father was a political philosopher and schoolteacher.” Professor Tarkhov went on to chronicle the rather unextraordinary childhood of Evgeny Rodhinsky and described the tenuous relationship he had to his rather conservative father, whose political philosophy supported the rule of the czars. “Rodhinsky, who took pains in his youth to travel the countryside to discover the real Russia, despised his father for his lack of understanding and for conceiving social philosophies based on knowledge no more extensive than his immediate surroundings and books and articles he had read. In his passion to find truth and understanding, in his attempt to connect with his people,” Professor Tarkhov went on to explain, “Rodhinsky, who was an accomplished student of science in the gymnasium, ceased his studies and took up painting. He continued traveling the countryside, and while on the road, he painted the peasants at work. There are several sketches here from that early period,” the professor noted to the guests. “You can see from these sketches that Rodhinsky was a natural. His lines are impeccable and his eye for detail is nothing less than that of a genius. Rodhinsky drew and painted what he saw,” the professor continued, “in the style of the Renaissance masters. He was mostly concerned with the shape of the bodies he observed as they worked in the fields. In these early drawings and later the paintings made from these studies, you will always notice men and women bent and stooped, while at work and at rest; their skin is always baked from the sun; the young look nearly as old as the old. The landscapes are lyrical in their overall composition, but you will also notice, if you look closely, the rather benign-looking fields in all their earthen colors are jagged in shape, almost as though you are meant to look upon fields of broken glass. I believe it is in the shapes of the harvested crops, the crooked, bent shapes of the human figures working the fields, that we first see Rodhinsky, in a very naive and innocent state, move away from direct representation of the figures and the landscape before him and turn to more abstract geometric forms of representation. However, it isn’t until the war, when Rodhinsky visits the front in uniform, that we see the most dramatic shift in his technique. While on the open battlefield all along the snowy tundra of the western border of Russia, Rodhinsky was stifled by what he saw—the broken, shattered, dismembered bodies of his comrades, the bins of discarded limbs in the field hospitals, meatless bones and splayed entrails of human beings—scattered about in the snow and ice. It has been said by his comrades that Rodhinsky, so fascinated and disturbed by the horror of the landscape, would wander off in the middle of heavy fighting and go in search of the worst carnage on the battlefield, and while under fire he would sketch what he saw. These sketches, a few of which also survive in this room, show the dramatic break that Rodhinsky makes from the strict realistic representation of his earlier works to a decidedly abstract form of representation. We see snow-white backdrops and dismembered human shapes verging on strict geometric forms. He would come to give these paintings very mundane titles, such as Grenade Blast, Sniper Fire, Land Mine. As Rodhinsky developed these themes, his earlier work was discovered by the new official artists of revolutionary Russia. When he returned from the war to an overturned St. Petersburg, he and his peasant paintings were already well known and in the cities instantly became emblematic of the struggle for emancipation. Rodhinsky had never been politically minded as much as he was reactionary. He was a revolutionary in the strictest sense, in that he believed in what he saw, and that if he could make others moved by what he saw, then he would inevitably alter the course of history. When the Communist Party first began using his paintings and the style of his paintings as weapons of propaganda, he was delighted to see the images he had struggled to create magnified. He soon gained popularity and fame, and for a time his face was one of the great faces of the revolution. He became known by everyone and was soon a folk hero in his own right, and with this status, he flowered as a man and was irrepressible in the company of Soviet leaders. Rodhinsky, however, true to his pursuit of truth in art, grew tired of ‘the revolution’ as agitprop, and over the course of several years after the civil wars and collectivization, he found himself reacting once again to the flaws he found in humanity. He was yearning for an all-encompassing sense of spirituality. He started researching ancient forms of mysticism, and inspired by religious and philosophical texts banned by the government, his painting became more abstract than ever, relying purely on line and form, color and texture. The cosmos and its vastness was his preoccupation now. This, of course, ran counter to what was expected by the state. Socialist realism had already become the primary function for art in the Soviet Union. Rodhinsky, by painting and showing his work publicly, by continuing to run against the accepted aesthetic of this time, was running perilously close to being arrested for, more than anything, his sheer arrogance. Rodhinsky knew this. He knew this, and this was the point of this work as far as he was concerned. His intent was to create a work so free that it couldn’t possibly be undermined by propaganda. However, a very clever man running the Ministry of Culture, Sergei Varvarin, managed to find a way to incorporate the new style of Rodhinsky in such a way that it disparaged the form. He belittled it in posters for schoolchildren, denouncing Rodhinsky’s freethinking as a provocative social disease whose inevitable outcome was to promote bourgeois individualism. The posters fashioned after Rodhinsky’s designs, using the colors and textures of his paintings, were transformed into bacteria leaching away the life of healthy organisms represented as groups of cells in the body. This assault on his sensibility sent Rodhinsky into an inconsolable rage and in my estimation turned him insane. There is no saying what exactly was in Rodhinsky’s mind, for no one that I know would risk talking with him at this point, but it seems evident from this painting that sits before you today what happened next. It is safe to say that he was spiritually defeated, that the image he had of a just society, the belief he had that revolution and radicalism would transform the world into a more enlightened, transcendent realm, was obliterated. Over the period of a few months, Rodhinsky shut himself away in his studio absolutely intent on creating a final work that would resonate with whoever beheld it. When traveling extensively in his youth, he spent some time on the Dalmatian Coast, where he apprenticed for a brief time in a small cathedral with a master builder, to learn about masonry. When his short apprenticeship was over, the builder gave him as a gift a pickax like that you see in the painting. According to one man who claims to have visited Rodhinsky one afternoon to drop off some books, Rodhinsky took the pickax and wedged it between two floorboards, and while painting, would stand before it, painting his studio. For two months or so, he meditated over this ax, its point always up, waiting for him. He painted himself into the image as you see here, and, as you can see, Rodhinsky has now returned to painting as he once did, in the style of the Renaissance masters, with clarity of detail so real and so precise you would think he had been painting this way all his life. Yet, if you look carefully at the windows, in the shadows of the windows, you will notice that there, in the windows’ darkened stained glass, you will find the remnants of his entire career, dwarfed by the realism, the attention to corporeal form, the attention to perfect representation that he himself had inspired in the painters that started the socialist realism movement. And in the shadows of the windows, you can see, again in abstract form, the police outside the open windows c
oming for him. The night Evgeny Rodhinsky killed himself, he attended a party at the Ministry of Culture uninvited. He famously approached Sergei Varvarin and yelled at him, ‘Form without meaning is not a hand, but an empty glove filled with air!’ He admonished Varvarin for being a fool and a dimwit and condemned him and Stalin for the hands of tyranny they were using to suffocate the people’s minds. He then stormed out of the party. He returned home and locked himself in with the finished painting, and then, as you see in this painting, with all his might, he threw himself down on the ax. Evgeny Nikolayevich Rodhinsky was forty-four years old. His body was discovered by the secret police who had come to arrest him. According to some accounts, the painting was already missing when the police arrived; according to other accounts, the painting was there, and one of the policemen was so moved by the painting he hid it and then spread rumors of Rodhinsky’s death and what was found when the police arrived. Until now, the painting and Evgeny Rodhinsky’s suicide were the stuff of legend, but now, I am moved when I say that the legend has come back to life to haunt us.”
When Professor Tarkhov had thanked the audience for listening, he stepped back from the lectern to resounding applause. Dr. Gamburg returned to the lectern and thanked the professor for such an eloquent speech, and then started to introduce the auctioneer from Leslie’s. The Disappearing Body, which would be the last painting auctioned that afternoon, was taken from the stage by two art handlers. A less important work was put in its place and the auctioneer, reading from Professor Tarkhov’s notes, gave a brief description of the painting, which was already described in the catalog. Professor Tarkhov once again perused the audience for a sign of Arthur Brilovsky, but again, he was nowhere to be seen. It was then, as the professor’s eyes roamed the room, that he noticed at the back doors of the gallery a group of men dressed in dark suits. The men entered the room and walked toward the stage. There were six of them in total. One announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, Department of Investigations. Please don’t be alarmed. Please remain in your seats and don’t interfere with our business.” Two of the officers walked along the partition in the gallery, past the paintings, toward the stage. Professor Tarkhov remained seated. He was unable to move; his heart was beating so fast and his head was feeling so light he couldn’t possibly lift himself from his seat.
“Professor Michael Tarkhov,” one of the officers announced to the professor.
“Yes,” the professor responded weakly.
“You are under arrest for espionage.”
The professor looked puzzled. He couldn’t say anything in response to this. The guests at the auction let out a collective gasp, and several started asking what the meaning of this was and how dared they treat a man of distinction this way.
“I don’t understand,” the professor said.
“Please come with us. All will be explained to you.”
The professor willingly gave himself up. He rose to his feet and extended his hands. The officers took him by the arms and led him out of the gallery as the room erupted in boisterous discussion. As the professor walked with these men toward their cars, all he could think about was his wife and children. He wondered if his wife had ever received the telegram he had sent from Moscow. He wondered if she hadn’t simply been told that he had been arrested as they initially thought. He suddenly had an image of his wife believing forever afterward that her husband was somewhere in a gulag. He hated himself for having embraced Arthur Brilovsky the day before. He couldn’t for the life of him understand why he deserved this fate. He was a good man. He was a kind, sweet, gentle man. The thought of this alone, that this could happen to him, brought him such a great deal of misery.
Chapter 39
After Benny Rudolph bullied Arthur Brilovsky and Paulie Sendak into telling their stories to Faith early Saturday morning, he left them to the fates on the corner of Seventy-eighth and Halifax. Benny knew there was no one to whom he could hand them over without their ending up back in Tines’s hands, so he just let them loose. The sun was rising as he drove home to the Belvedere Arms to collect the records he had kept of his relationship with Tines. He planned on picking up the small bundle of notes and dropping it in the safety deposit box at International Trust Bank. Because he hadn’t slept, his lungs were tired and heavy, and when he reached his room, he started spitting up heavy clots of blood. He worked quickly to gather the scattered papers that lay around the room. He folded them neatly into a nice package, jotted a short note to Faith telling her where she could find him if she needed him, and then stuffed all into an envelope. He placed the thick envelope inside his coat pocket and, leaving everything else behind, made his way out to the street. When he stepped out of the building’s lobby, it came as no surprise to him that from his left and his right converged the two grizzled men, who took him by the arms before he saw them coming.
In many ways, Benny was grateful when his two colleagues took hold of him. Their grasp was reassuring. “Relax,” Sunshine said to him congenially. Benny, taking his advice, relaxed. And in this relaxed state, the three men, arm in arm, took a pleasant walk. The sky was clear and the air was crisp, and Benny had always wanted to die out of doors. Securely fixed in the grizzled men’s arms, he found that the lives of the men in Long Meadow, the truth, principles of justice and injustice, mattered very little. He wasn’t so arrogant as to think knowledge of his deeds would help or hinder the state of the world or the state of his eternal soul. He was at peace with himself now and understood that had he not exacted his revenge, no matter what the cost, he wouldn’t have been able to die feeling so at ease. He had successfully purged himself of his rage, and it was worth all the wrongdoing. For better or worse, his spirit had been cleansed.
The boys were kind enough to ask Benny where he would like to go. Benny wanted to sit by the river and watch the current of the water pass before him. He wanted to see the ships drifting toward the sea. He wanted to sense the open space before him and have his back to the City. He hated the idea of dying in the City. He hated the grid of its streets, the way the tall buildings dampened the sunlight; he hated the way the wind channeled through its canyons. He hated the obstructions. If he had had his choice, he would have hired a boat and sailed out the Narrows to the open waters and he would have waited until there was nothing but water surrounding him.
But Benny Rudolph would have to settle for the riverside, for a view of it through a chain-link fence behind some kid’s pigeon coop. The two grizzled men sat him down on a wooden crate covered in snow, so he could enjoy watching the passing tugs and freighters. Sunshine asked Benny if he would put up a fight, and Benny said he wouldn’t. So Sunshine walked behind Benny, and, holding the knife he kept sheathed on his leg, Sunshine held Benny’s forehead with his hand and pressed the back of Benny’s greasy pomaded hair against his coat, and with one precise cut he slit the artery in Benny’s neck.
As the black liquid ran down Benny’s chest and pumped out onto his feet and onto the snow, Sunshine held Benny’s head up as a mother would hold the head of a newborn babe. Benny and the two grizzled men watched the boats. They watched the boats and they watched the river adrift with ice. Benny watched the frozen river and he dreamed of the sea. He dreamed of the sea, and no sooner did he dream of the swirling sea than he was dead. And when he was dead, each of the grizzled men gave Benny a sympathetic pat on the chin. They then opened the kid’s pigeon coop and threw Benny inside.
Chapter 40
The night before, Freddy spent a long time walking around the park after leaving Stu Zawolsky at the Revolver. He walked along the edge of the lake, over the hills, through the wooded paths. As the storm pushed out over the ocean, heavy gusts of wind blew snow crystals from the branches of the trees. They drifted through the air, lit up like fireflies as they passed under the park’s lamps. Freddy crossed the great lawn, feeling the invisible contours of the ground on his feet. He tried to imagine what the park would look like in the spring bloom, the daffodils, the tulips, the cherry blossoms, the
dogwood, the magnolia, how when the trees’ leaves sprouted from their buds, they looked like burgeoning heads of cabbage. But as he saw this in his mind, the trenches and the battlefields appeared as well, the bodies piled one on top of the other as far as the eye could see, arms and heads and legs and chests, decomposing in piles of flesh and bone on top of clusters of dirt and rock, amid shovels and barbed wire and unexploded mortars and unexpressed screams on the stiff faces of the dead. However much time passed, the bodies would always be visible silhouettes in the most beautiful things in Freddy Stillman’s mind. They would always shadow his most pleasurable thoughts and fill them with dread and fear; they would inhabit the very concept of love and fill it full of suspicion.
As time slowed, slower than Freddy’s heartbeat, slower than the most instant flash of thought, Freddy could feel the most internal part of himself shutting down like a turbine with nothing to make it flow. It was early in the morning when Freddy returned home. The dark sky over the river faded with shafts of sunlight. At the top of his stoop, he removed from his coat the envelope containing the letter to Evelyn and his insurance policy, and he dropped the envelope in the mailbox. Freddy then went inside. He hung his coat on the rack beside the door, went to the bathroom, and, as best as he could, washed away the scabs of blood left by Gloria Lime’s hands. He then sat at his kitchen table and tried to find the image in his mind of Evelyn. He tried to see Evelyn and her child walking through the park in the spring.