Olga Grushin

by The Dream Life of Sukhanov (v5)

  And that was when Sukhanov looked at his son—and saw a grown man whom he did not recognize. The man had light blue eyes and dark blond hair. The man was wearing a perfectly tailored blazer and drinking expensive wine. The man looked altogether like someone he had once known, but the man was an impostor. Had to be.

  Sukhanov began to stand up.

  “Let’s go home, I’m getting cold,” he said expressionlessly. “And by the way, Fyodor is staying with us for one more night. I expect you to be polite.”

  “Do you know what your trouble is?” said the man on the bench, not attempting to move. “You do everything halfway. So you married up, so you sold out, wrote ideological nonsense you didn’t believe in, fine and good—but what did you get for it? A comfortable apartment in the Zamoskvorechie, a nice dacha, and a cushy little job at some magazine! Honestly, Father, was that the extent of your ambition, was it even worth all the sacrifice, to become an important man in such a small world? Do you realize how high you could have risen with Grandpa’s connections if only you had wanted to? But then again, maybe you couldn’t have, maybe you simply didn’t have it in you, maybe—”

  Anatoly Pavlovich turned and walked away with heavy steps, feeling his age in his shoulders and knees. In another moment, the empty bottle clanged dully as it rolled under the bench, and Vasily followed him, still talking—talking about his own plans, his influential grandfather, some place in the Crimea, the Minister, the Minister’s overweight daughter... Sukhanov was no longer listening. When the elevator arrived, boxlike and lurching, and the smiling concierge swung open its iron gate, he waited for his son to pass inside the dismally mirrored coffin and then announced he was going to take the stairs instead.

  “Good for one’s health,” he explained to the concierge.

  “So I’ve heard,” replied the concierge enthusiastically. “They say every step up adds a second to a man’s life!”

  For a moment Sukhanov wondered whether he wanted these extra seconds, these tiny units of life, pulsing with animation, stored in his body for future usage. Then he nodded and began to climb. On the third landing, he heard a plate smashing onto the floor in the apartment belonging to the mysterious woman with Nefertiti’s profile. As he continued to ascend, he thought that an altogether unusual amount of porcelain was being broken nowadays in building number seven, Belinsky Street, in the city of Moscow.

  NINE

  It happened the way he had always imagined—an explosion of ruthless knocks on the front door ripping through the stillness of sleep. The first volley merged with his dream, which immediately turned noisy and violent, with him dashing through grimy, bullet-riddled corridors, pursued by a mob of men with hairy arms and faces like slabs of beef; but when another salvo of raps slit his nightmare wide open, Sukhanov sat up and listened, his skin tightening with a sense of unreality. All was quiet about him, yet the silence rang with that menacing hollowness that follows upon a loud, sharp sound.

  He rose and, struggling with his robe (which, clownishly, ridiculously, frighteningly, had grown a third sleeve and kept escaping him), traversed the predawn darkness as if in slow motion; the thuds of his slippers fell upon the floor like his own uneven heartbeats. In the entrance hall, he tripped against the ghosts of two umbrellas forgotten by the wall and, swearing, was just about to flip the light switch when the shadows exploded with knocking once again, unbearably close now. No longer able to pretend it had been a dream, he stood staring, staring at the front door, without moving, almost without breathing, feeling suddenly afraid and alone—as afraid and alone as he had felt forty-eight years ago, on the night when those polished black shoes had invaded their Arbat existence for the third, and final, time.

  The first time he barely noticed, lost as he was in his new world. His routine of classes, holidays, meals in the months following his attempt to steal Gradsky’s manuscript had become a mere backdrop to the radiant, unearthly discoveries that awaited him almost nightly in the Professor’s dusty, cramped room, where the shouts of boys chasing one another in the yard and the familiar smells of meat pies and hot asphalt never penetrated and where, in the green glow of the lampshade, the precious gilded books slowly released their unforgettable fragrance, that scent of brittle paper and mustiness that for Anatoly would forever be the scent of previously unimaginable beauty. He moved through the summer of 1937 in a haze of secret excitement, inaudibly intoning the sonorous names of men who had walked the streets of strange watery and golden cities in centuries past and yet seemed to him more real than the flesh-and-blood inhabitants of his apartment—shadowy, inconsequential presences with whom he held shadowy conversations or who on occasion subjected him to somewhat less shadowy beatings.

  Afterward, all he could recall of the poor unlovely Zoya Vienberg in those final weeks was the nearsighted, trembling fussiness with which she had spent the last day before the new school year sorting her dull brown folders, stuffed to the point of bursting with sheet music, on their kitchen table between meals, and the hysterical note that had stolen into her voice once or twice when she had addressed Galka Morozova. Then, one afternoon in October, Anatoly returned from school to find Zoya Vladimirovna’s door branded with a formidable-looking seal, and his mother and the Gradsky couple oddly reluctant to reply when Anton Morozov proclaimed indignantly that he was not surprised—that, in fact, he had suspected something like this all along. The music teacher never came back, and in another few weeks Morozov’s sister Pelageya matter-of-factly moved into the unoccupied room.

  I hardly wondered about it at first, for the woman’s absence was never discussed and our life remained largely the same. But as the autumn deepened, I noticed that some change, slow and painful like corrosion, was eating away at the happiness of my evenings with the Professor. He appeared distracted or uninterested, and would often pause in the middle of a sentence, forgetting to turn the page and listening intently—whether to the dry cough of his ailing wife behind the wall or to some other sound he expected to hear, I was not sure; and gradually, as the cold crept through the cracks of our old rambling building, a sense of unease furtively worked its way into my heart. And then one night, shortly before my ninth birthday, I woke up in the chilly December darkness to a silence that had ceased to be silent, that was filling with the muted sounds of stolidly shod feet trampling through our apartment, through our life.

  In the morning, there was a tossing whirlwind of snow outside the windows, and the Professor ran out without a hat and was gone all day. My mother spent the afternoon frantically pleading with remote telephone operators, and then suddenly broke down crying and, clutching my shoulders, told me, in a voice I had never heard before, that my father might be staying in Gorky for a while longer and that I was the only thing she had left. And later that day, Anton Morozov stopped me in the corridor and, towering over me like some hirsute, sour-smelling mountain, asked me whether I knew that Tatyana Gradskaya’s family had all been vicious tsarists and that, before Lenin had set things right, our apartment had actually belonged to the Gradsky couple.

  I had not known, and the idea of two people once owning the whole vast unfolding of space where so many lives, including my own, were now concentrated shocked me deeply. I thought of a twisted stump in our ceiling that must have once held a crystal chandelier of the kind I had seen in one of the Professor’s books, and of a large pale patch that I had noticed on the wallpaper in the Morozovs’ room and which, I now recalled the Professor telling me, marked the place where a piano used to stand. I imagined the blue-haired, quiet little woman and the soft-spoken, kindly old man, whom I had thought I knew so well, waltzing through all that magnificent expanse sparkling with the glass and silver and lacquer of a thousand marvelous, elegant, foreign things—and I felt bitter, I felt betrayed.

  Beauty did, after all, belong to the bourgeois.

  That night, when the front door opened and closed and the unrecognizable steps of an ancient man scuffled across my hearing, I followed him into his study and to
ld him I would visit him no longer.

  The Professor’s face was erased by grief; his room lay in ruins about him.

  “Yes, it’s best, I think,” he said flatly, avoiding my eyes. “I myself was about to suggest ...” Taking off his glasses, he began to rub the lenses with the underside of his jacket, meticulously, needlessly, endlessly. When he spoke again, his voice had aged many years. “Well, Tolya, I have enjoyed our friendship. You know, I was going to make you a present on your birthday—that Botticelli album, actually. You can take it now if you like. I meant to write an inscription, but I’m not sure whether ...”

  It was strange to see him like this, and I hesitated for a long moment.

  “I’ll take it,” I finally said, “but I don’t need the inscription.”

  He nodded without surprise, and finding the volume in the chaos of books on the floor, dusted it lightly and handed it to me.

  “She’s done nothing wrong, you know,” he said, attempting a smile. “It’s all just a temporary mistake, I’m sure.... Maybe, once she comes back, you and I could resume our delightful art evenings? I would like to think so, Tolya. Well, so long now. Be happy.”

  Suddenly uncomfortable, I mumbled, “Thanks,” and left, pretending not to notice his outstretched, embarrassingly trembling hand. As I was closing the door behind me, a rising clump in my throat made me turn and cast a glance back. The Professor was still standing uncertainly amid his mistreated books, his face expressionless in the green glare of the lamp, his unseeing eyes gazing at the empty surface of the desk, where, only the day before, his nearly completed manuscript, the work of his life, had been stacked in neat piles, chapter by chapter.

  They took him away two nights later. I was lying awake, and heard the pounding and Morozov’s voice muttering a hurried explanation in the hallway and more voices and heavy steps. Seized with some madness, I crawled through the darkness and, cracking open our door, looked out—for one instant only, because immediately my mother, who must have been lying awake as well, screamed at me in a furious, panicking whisper, and obeying, I drew away.

  For a long time we waited, huddling together, she and I, listening to the faraway, barely discernible sounds of papers torn and spirits broken, until more steps, some sharply heeled, others soft and scuffling, traveled from end to end of our apartment, and the front door slammed once again, leaving behind a wary hush.

  “It’s over,” my mother whispered in a collapsing voice, but I felt no relief, neither then, nor the next day, nor the day after that—for that momentary glimpse I had had of the broad leather backs and polished black shoes receding into the dimness of our corridor had been enough to inspire me with a numbing, lonely terror that would last for weeks. Night after night I would lie awake, touching the edge of the Botticelli album under my pillow and imagining with a halting heart that soon, soon, any day now, they would learn that I too was different, that I too deserved their righteous anger, that I too had been tainted by enemies of the people—and they would return once more, this time for me. Finally, one evening in February, unable to sustain this wordless, guilty fear any longer, I stole outside with the damning book hidden under my coat, ran down our street, ducked into a courtyard a few houses away, and there, in a murky, quiet corner, cringing under the accusing glare of a few lit windows behind which other boys were surely doing their homework or building nice toy planes with their fathers, I buried my dangerous treasure in a giant drift of snow and darted away.

  With the advent of spring, a semblance of normality returned to my life. A new resident, a jocular construction worker who knew amazing card tricks, moved into the Professor’s study, my mother began to talk again about my father’s return and smile her wan, anxious smile, and the Morozov boys grew bored with tormenting me.

  “Want to see something funny?” Sashka said to me one day. “In a courtyard down the street, the snow is turning all sorts of crazy colors!”

  And so I went and stood in a crowd of children and with them laughed at the golden green and the pearly pink and the brightest copper rivulets of the melting snowdrift. And as I laughed, the last remnants of my secret dread lifted from me, for at that moment I saw that I was finally safe, that I was one of them now, that I could simply forget all about those brilliantly tinted revelations in the darkly glowing room of the treacherous old man who had possessed so many dusty wonders. And yet, somewhere deep, deep inside me, the memory of the rainbow-colored marvels must have survived—and so did the fear, because for the next three years, until the beginning of the war, I would awaken every so often gasping from a nightmare in which I flew down bullet-riddled corridors pursued by a mob of Anton Morozov doubles in shining black shoes; and every time it happened, I would get out of bed, tiptoe to the front door, and stand there for a long while in a grip of clinging, cold fear, listening to the soundless void on the other side and imagining a volley of ruthless knocks that could shatter the drafty darkness at any moment....

  The knocking shook the door again, more impatient this time. With dizzying speed Sukhanov traversed forty-eight years of his life in the opposite direction and emerged onto the surface of reality.

  “Who is it?” he asked, his voice shaken.

  The answer came promptly.

  “Militia, open up!”

  Though far removed from the inarticulate, sinister, almost surreal menace of his nightmares, the words were nonetheless extremely disturbing, and he found himself clammy with apprehension as he fiddled with the locks. The landing was dim, full of wavering shadow; the bulb over the elevator gate had begun to flicker some days earlier. In the uncertain light he saw three figures looming before him—two uniformed militiamen and, behind them, a large woman of fifty-odd years in an unbecomingly flimsy tangerine kimono, her head blooming with a profusion of pink curlers. With a start Sukhanov recognized Tamara Bubuladze, the celebrated Amneris from the floor below.

  For a moment an uneasy silence hung between them, disturbed only by rare, drowsy barks of Bubuladze’s basset hounds reaching them mutedly from the stairwell. Then the older of the militiamen, with a potato-like nose, turned to the singer.

  “Seems quiet enough to me, Madame Bubuladze,” he said doubtfully, “and this man here doesn’t quite ... Are you sure this is the apartment?”

  “Of course I’m sure!” the woman cried, glaring at Sukhanov. “Sounds carry from their place to mine perfectly well. Shameless, positively shameless, and at his age! ... Ah, and this must be one of the hussies!”

  Turning, Sukhanov saw Ksenya’s nightgown gleaming faintly in the hallway behind him.

  “This hussy,” he said, “is my daughter. What exactly—”

  “Anyone else with you?” interrupted the younger militiaman, his cheeks red as tomatoes.

  “My wife, my son, and my cousin,” said Sukhanov dryly. “Now, can someone please tell me why I was dragged out of bed at ... What time is it, anyway?”

  Signs of confused stirring were spreading through the apartment: bedsprings creaking, an irritated yawn, the clicking of Nina’s slippers crossing invisible space, a lamp switched on somewhere.

  “Just past four,” said the potato nose in a deflated voice. “It appears there’s been a mistake. This lady called us about ... er ... a noisy party ...”

  “An orgy,” said the opera singer vehemently. “I called you about an orgy, and no need to mince words. An orgy is precisely what I heard.”

  “Yes, well,” said the tomato cheeks cautiously, “but it obviously wasn’t these people here, was it now, Madame Bubuladze? Seems they were all asleep. Maybe you just had a ... a bad dream? Why don’t we take you back to your—”

  “That,” said the woman, “was no dream. I’m not crazy, I can still tell a dream from reality, thank you very much.”

  “If it’s all the same to you, Tamara Eduardovna,” Sukhanov interjected pointedly, “I’d like to get back to bed sometime tonight. If you comrades want to come in and make sure—”

  The vegetables exchanged quick looks.<
br />
  “No, no, that’s not necessary,” said the potato wearily. “Sorry for the disturbance.”

  As he shut the door, Sukhanov caught one last glimpse of the heaving, boulderlike breasts and heard the once famous mezzo-soprano shriek, “And I say, such behavior must not be—” The door’s heavy padding sliced the edge off the sound just as it rose to its highest note of indignation.

  He appeared disgruntled as he explained the incident to a perplexed Nina before retiring to his couch—but in truth, he found it rather amusing (especially as its comic absurdity had rescued him from a further onslaught of dark recollections), and it was with unfeigned laughter that he emerged for breakfast the next day. The whole family, it seemed, had already dispersed on their morning errands; Dalevich alone sat in the kitchen, cutting an apple into thin, precise slices and feeding them delicately to his beard.

  “What a night!” he said, smiling. “Is it always so exciting around here? I see what they mean about life in the big city.”

  “I’d say the past few days have been somewhat more eventful than usual,” Sukhanov replied with a chuckle. “That woman clearly has a loose screw. I hope you were able to fall asleep again.”

  “To be honest, I didn’t try,” said Dalevich. “I spent the rest of the night working on my book. I prefer writing at night anyway. My ideas flow better when it’s dark and quiet.”

  “Excellent pancakes,” observed Sukhanov. “Did Nina make them? ... Ah, I suspected as much.... Speaking of your book, Fedya, I’ve been thinking about, how did you put it, this ‘harmonious balance between form and content’ that you say characterizes all true art, and I’m curious about something. In terms of form, the old Russian icons are, you must agree, quite primitive—all those stilted processions of Byzantine saints with unnaturally small faces, short arms, trite golden locks, and eyes the size of saucers, tacked onto flat backgrounds. With their form so imperfect, how can you regard your icons as great art?”