“What are you reading, my love?” he asked, feeling oddly like someone seeking reconciliation after a quarrel.
“Van Gogh’s letters to his brother,” she replied without looking up.
“Maybe you should try some clever detective story instead,” he offered with a tentative smile. “I could recommend one or two.”
But she said nothing, and with an inexplicable sinking of spirits, he wormed his way under the blanket on his side of their enormous bed. For a few minutes he leafed through a novel he had picked up from his nightstand, but the words meant nothing, all the characters seemed to have the same name, and he could not find the place where he had stopped previously. Giving up, he lay back in the crispy stillness of the sheets, lit on one side by Nina’s pink lampshade, and listened to a car honking a few streets away, a dog barking listlessly in the courtyard, his wife turning the pages of her book...
“The light bothers me,” he said finally.
She nodded, placed her velvet bookmark between the pages, clicked off the lamp, and slid into the darkness, her back toward him. He remained still, waiting for her breathing to acquire the nebulous weightlessness of dreams; but time passed, and he sensed that she was still awake.
“An amazing thing happened to me today,” he whispered. “I remembered something wonderful from my childhood. May I tell you?”
But there was no answer; she must have been asleep after all. For a long while he struggled with the night in a vain attempt to follow her, employing every trick he knew—studying his measured heartbeats, counting backward, drawing complicated figures behind his closed eyelids, picturing a trotting line of sheep, camels, elephants juggling multicolored balls with their trunks—yet sleep continued to elude him. After an hour of torture, his head swimming with garlands of figures and caravans of beasts, he climbed out of bed and, his feet somehow condensing into slippers, walked back to the study to do more work.
A yellow rectangle of light from a streetlamp on the corner of Belinsky Street sliced through the window and fell directly onto Belkin’s painting, making it glow in the obscurity of the room with a strange, almost three-dimensional intensity. Casting an involuntary glance on it, he noticed with surprise that Leda no longer had her flowing black tresses: a blonde now sat by the lake, her short hair resting in a perfectly curled wave on the elongated nape of her neck. At the sound of his footsteps, she turned, and with a painful start he recognized Nina—Nina enveloped by the sweet, sinful aromas of the lilies, lulled by the lazy lapping of the waters, her fifty-two-year-old body still glorious, still gleaming—a perfect middle-aged Leda awaiting her feathered god.
She looked at him without recognition and then indifferently moved her eyes away, to an unseen horizon on which the white question mark of the swan’s neck was about to materialize in a few casual brushstrokes. Frozen in the middle of the room, he felt helpless and suddenly aged in his old-man polka-dot pajamas, dreading the inevitable divine seduction yet unable to turn away—but something else happened as he watched. A ripple ran through Nina’s flesh, and it paled to a shade lighter than moonlight: her back was sprouting a pair of beautiful swan wings. In a dazzling flash of whiteness, she rose to her feet—and as she did so, he heard a rustle at the window behind him. He swung around and felt terribly disoriented for one dizzying moment. Then, at once, he understood.
The painting on the wall was not a painting at all, but a simple mirror whose frame neatly contained the reflection of the window; and there, only a few steps away, standing on the windowsill, was the real Nina, winged and naked, cautiously trying the temperature of the sky with her big toe, that little gesture of hers he knew so well (she disliked cold water). With a startled cry, he rushed toward her, to prevent, to stop, to catch... He was too late. Already, with that maddening fluid grace she possessed, she glided into the black translucence of the night, leaving behind a solitary feather fluttering slowly to the floor—and although he wanted to shout, to protest, to implore, no words came to him, none at all, and silently, knowing she would never return, he watched as she flew farther and farther away, melting amidst the cold stars above the fairy-tale city of Moscow....
When she was gone, he collapsed into his chair in despair. The rearing Pegasus underneath the lampshade regarded him with sympathy out of the corner of its bronze eye and then, unexpectedly, tore its mouth wide open and neighed, loudly, violently, in an operatic bass, “Damnation, damnation to her!” Embarrassed, Sukhanov mumbled, “Well, I wouldn’t put it quite like that,” and began to fumble with the lamp switch, trying to make it stop. But the sound would not cease—and he saw that their bedroom was once again lit with a pink glow, Nina’s side of the bed was empty, the balcony door stood ajar, and from somewhere outside there flowed into the room a powerful voice singing, “Damnation, damnation to her for all of eternity!”
Unhappily Sukhanov scrambled out of bed. His slippers were nowhere to be found, and cursing inaudibly, he walked out onto the balcony barefoot. Nina was leaning over the railings. The predawn breeze swelled her apricot-colored nightgown, filling it with gentle brightness, so that she appeared trapped in a glowing cocoon of orange air. She barely glanced at him, but he saw that she looked worried.
The operatic chant clearly issued from the apartment directly below.
“What the hell is this? Who’s making all that noise?” he asked in a whisper.
“Ivan Svechkin,” Nina whispered back. “You know, the composer who lives downstairs. He writes children’s songs. ‘That Happy Day in April When Our Ilyich Was Born’ is one of his.”
“Well, this sounds like a church chant,” he said with irritation. “I suppose he has a good reason for treating his neighbors to a nice bit of liturgy in the middle of the night?”
There were signs of sleepy stirrings on all four sides of the courtyard—windows lit, shadows peering from behind curtains, balcony doors slamming.
“I’ve heard he has a very unhappy marriage,” said Nina quietly. “His wife is twenty years younger, and he gets jealous, can’t stand to have her out of his sight.... He must be having some kind of nervous breakdown.”
They fell into an uneasy silence, listening. The rhythmical liturgy went on and on: “Damnation, damnation to her, damnation to her for all of eternity!” And as the minutes passed, it began to seem to Sukhanov that their warily expectant courtyard was being gradually transformed into the interior of a great, roofless, solemn church. The Big Dipper swung like an incense holder, spraying drops of stars into the skies above; gilded squares of lit windows all around them turned into jeweled icons, encircled by candle flames, glimmering with blackened lacquer on ancient stone walls—and for an instant he even imagined that the spirit of some fallen angel was truly being cast out by communal condemnation into the chilly August nothingness....
Then a police siren exploded nearby. Someone must have called to complain about public disturbance tinged with religious propaganda. The illusion of the church vanished. Windows went out one by one, and clicking, shutting, banging noises echoed and reechoed through the courtyard. The singing wavered, then stopped abruptly in the depths of the apartment below, and they heard the faint sound of a woman weeping. Nina winced and walked back inside; he followed, closing the balcony door behind him. The crying grew indiscernible.
“I hope I can fall asleep after all this,” he said. “What time is it?”
“Five past four,” she replied, sliding back under the covers, and added with a sigh, “How sad that must be.... Poor girl!”
“Your poor girl probably cheats on him left and right,” he said unpleasantly. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
She looked at him with silent reproach and switched off the light.
He was about to retire as well, when some odd association reminded him he had a small matter to attend to. Murmuring that he would be back in a moment, he made his way to the study (in the process tripping over his slippers, which for some reason lay sprawled just past the threshold). The painting o
n the wall was illuminated, as before, by the yellow light of the streetlamp, but gazing at the swan sat the tremulous black-haired Leda—not in the least like the serene blonde Nina, of course.
His arms around the frame, Sukhanov carefully began to push it upward, maneuvering to slide the painting off its hook. When it was freed, he carried the heavy canvas out into the hallway, tiptoed past the bedroom, past the arched entryway to the living room, past the velvet magnificence of the dining room, past the doors that led into his children’s mysterious lives, and onward, through the kitchen, and to a cramped closet. There he released his burden and, smiling with satisfaction, watched as Leda slid along the wall and settled in the shadows, looking rather forlorn among all the mops and shoes and discarded stuffed animals and who knew what other neglected, unloved things that crowded inside this dim space with its damp smell of oblivion. But as his eyes lingered on the painted girl’s slim waist, narrow shoulders, stretched-out neck, her whole long-legged, warm, softly gleaming shape, he felt an unwanted trembling in his chest, as if in an unguarded moment or a careless dream some particle of his soul had accidentally caught a whiff of a real, if fleeting, resemblance—or perhaps not so much an actual resemblance as an overall familiarity, a certain congruence of moods, a spiritual likeness to something, to someone...
And then, all at once, a monstrous birth took place in his innermost, darkest depths. He sensed a repulsive, slimy, impossible creature stirring, stretching, rising sluggishly from its murky abyss, already twisting his insides, almost ready to trespass into his mind, to poke its ugly snout onto the surface of his thoughts—and he feared that once the snout broke through, the poisonous words of his premonition would be released, and there would be no taking them back, and he would have to face the possibility that all these many years ago Lev Belkin had... had...
“What nonsense,” said Sukhanov promptly, perhaps a bit louder than was advisable in the sleeping house, and slammed the closet door shut.
The floor reverberated with his decisive steps as he marched back to the study. There he threw open a cabinet, rummaged through its obscure contents, and finally unearthed a small still life, already framed. Forcefully humming the duel aria from Onegin, he installed it on the orphaned wall and stepped back to consider. His father-in-law’s perfectly round, red apples shone in an abundant pile on a yellow ceramic dish. The overall effect rather pleased him—and even more important, the bright cheerfulness of the composition turned out to be conducive to his productivity, as he discovered the very next day, when, the unpleasantly turbulent night shrugged away, the disappearance of Leda left without comment, the city stretching cloudy and still below his window, he sat at his desk, sipping his morning coffee, wrapped comfortably in his robe, and mused over the article.
SIX
The article presented a curious problem.
Sukhanov felt for a bookmark in a tattered volume on his desk, opened it, and reread the underlined conclusion to a chapter: “Surrealism can thus be rightfully called a betrayer of the people, locked as it is in deadly opposition to all humanistic values and traditions. It cherishes madness and cultivates decadent indifference toward social good. Its sickening visions strive to drive a healthy man into the realm of fantasy, distracting him from the noble goal of combating world capitalism. Therefore, as a movement it has nothing of value to offer to the mature artistic perceptions of the Soviet people. Moreover, some of its more harmful elements, such as its obsessions with horror and pornography, represented most fully in the work of Salvador Dalí ...”
He shut the book and regarded the distinguished gray of the cover, on which the indented letters of the author’s name—his own—glittered dully with fading golden print. Then, frowning thoughtfully, he pushed the volume aside. Though published in 1965, his monograph on Western art served him still as an inexhaustible source of assertions that could be reused on most occasions, with only minor rephrasing and retouching; this time, however, he felt certain that something else—something, in fact, quite different—was expected.
As a rule, Sukhanov no longer wrote any articles himself: at his level of importance, creation had by necessity sunk to the bottom of his list of priorities. He was content with regulating the general flow of things—supervising the obsequiously smooth workings of his staff, distributing a monthly set of preselected themes among a trusted handful of critics, then poring through their texts to weed out a few chance occurrences of names better left unmentioned or to nudge two or three carelessly straying phrases back into the herd. He prepared each glossy, pleasantly substantial issue of Art of the World according to the same simple yet unfailing recipe: Take a doughy theoretical discourse on the methods and principles of Revolutionary art, stuff it with two or three well-seasoned essays portraying Repin and Fedotov as precursors of socialist realism and Levitan as an enemy of tsarism, mix in a sugarcoated biography of a famous Soviet master in the vein of Malinin and a spicy discovery of some unjustly ignored genius of the Italian Renaissance who was vilely persecuted by the Church, whisk in, for a bit of exotic flavor, an interview with this or that diamond-in-the-rough from a remote Asian republic (whose artistic development was clearly born of the wonders of Soviet education), and finally, generously pepper the whole with quotations from Marx and Lenin. Above all, Sukhanov was famous for his skillful omissions. While he would occasionally allow a cautious account of some contemporary Polish or Bulgarian artist (who invariably celebrated in his canvases the wonderful friendship blossoming between his and the Soviet people), Western art of the present century wandered through the pages of the magazine like a mildly embarrassing hallucination—a mute, befuddled, miserable ghost who was ridiculed, kicked, and exorcised, but whose name was never pronounced and whose face was never revealed.
This state of affairs had existed unchanged for years, from the day Sukhanov had first assumed the reins—and until a routine staff meeting one month ago. At that meeting, Sergei Nikolaevich Pugovichkin, the assistant editor in chief and Sukhanov’s second-in-command, had let slip a disturbing rumor that had somehow filtered through the ranks. It appeared that somewhere in the celestial above, certain nebulous changes had been transpiring ever since the ascension of the new Party leader in March, and among other things, a Very Important Someone (who, naturally, remained unnamed) had been overheard expressing the hope that Art of the World might begin dedicating at least one article per issue to a “prominent Western artist,” starting, for instance, with Salvador Dalí—for, as that enigmatic personage had been reputed to observe, “Dalí’s as good as anyone, and one must start somewhere.” Trying not to betray the shock he had felt at the idea of Dalí’s melting clocks making an appearance in the pages of his magazine, Sukhanov had shrugged nonchalantly and announced that he might as well tackle the subject himself. He was, after all, universally acknowledged as the foremost expert in the field.
This, then, was the article in question. The problem lay in the fact that the more specific he became about Dalí’s life—the more he occupied himself with dates of exhibitions, titles of paintings, and places of residence—the harder it was to sustain that pure pitch of abstract condemnation he had always felt compelled to cultivate when writing about surrealism. As the voice of authority, Anatoly Pavlovich Sukhanov was unmerciful, unwavering, unforgiving—and exceedingly vague. Viewing his entrusted task as not so much educational but ritualistic in spirit—a task of juxtaposing good and evil, day and night, East and West—he had for years presided over the roasting of the surrealist specter on a spit of righteous class indignation as the drums beat louder and louder, the dance around the fire grew more and more exuberant, and the victim became increasingly obscured by clouds of billowing smoke. Yet now, unbelievably, he was being asked to describe the curl of the victim’s mustache, the occupations of his parents, and the colors of his palette. It was little wonder that for the past few weeks Sukhanov had felt ill at ease whenever he had thought about the subject.
Now, however, as he shut his monograph, s
tirred sugar into a fresh cup of coffee, and stared at the shiny abundance of Malinin’s red apples on the wall, he chanced to recall an amusing anecdote from Dali’s life that might just provide the angle he needed. Encouraged, he began to bang out hasty paragraphs on his unwieldy typewriter, and was already nearing the end of the third page when Nina’s voice sounded across the corridor: “Tolya, don’t you have a staff meeting at twelve? Vadim will be here in less than half an hour!”
He glanced at the clock on his desk and completed his sentence with an exclamatory punch. Continuing to trace every possible permutation of the thought in his mind, he stepped in and out of the shower, combed his hair, buttoned his shirt, overcame the resistance of newly pressed pants, and finally, struggling with his right cuff link and simultaneously debating the prudence of introducing the word “pathological” into the discussion, drifted toward a bedroom closet, pushed its door open with his elbow—and was brought to an abrupt stop.
There, on the top shelves, lay his neatly folded sets of beige and blue pajamas; here, on the bottom shelves, towered pale stacks of cotton handkerchiefs, embroidered with discreet indigo initials and permeated with faint cologne smells, and dark stacks of socks, flashing diamonds and zigzags; underneath, in the hazelwood cavities of three open drawers, glistened the shiny coils of his numerous belts. But the inside of the door—the inside of the door was empty, unexpectedly empty, and the little metal hooks, bereft of their entrusted weight, sparkled conspicuously all along the tie rack. His ties were gone; gone also were his three or four velvet bow ties (perfectly respectable specimens, black, white, and crimson, worn exclusively on Bolshoi Theater evenings). Only two orphaned pairs of suspenders dangled sadly in the void that the day before had been ordered into vertical silk stripes of so many noble colors.
Olga Grushin Page 7