Olga Grushin

by The Dream Life of Sukhanov (v5)

  But my father does not shout. In the next instant, still smiling joyfully, he takes a step forward, and walks off the windowsill—walks off into nothing at all.

  A heartbeat wells in me, large and hollow and deafening, like the rushing sound of a monstrous waterfall, and all I know, all I believe, all I love, hangs in a confused, incredulous balance. Then, emitting a kind of strained moan, my mother grabs my head and roughly pushes my face into her coat, painfully pressing my cheek into a button, and, suddenly enveloped in her woolly darkness, I close my eyes and inhale the sharp smell of damp cloth and the faint smells of stale smoke and dried meat—the manifold odors of the rain falling on the hateful city and of our last night’s train to nowhere. And as I stand without moving, it seems without breathing, my feeling of living in the present tense, my perception of reality, the very memory of my identity leave me like crumbling shells of things that have died, and the world itself falls away from my senses.

  After that, the rain began to turn to snow, prickling the exposed skin of Anatoly’s neck and hands like tiny cold needles, and there were people running from somewhere and shouting, and then he was suddenly running himself, faster and faster, hugging his folder of drawings with both arms, and there were darkening streets swerving before him, and an old woman who exclaimed with fright on some corner and then cursed angrily at his back, and a mangy dog that followed him for a while whimpering lightly, and after that, some quiet yard with water dripping dully, incessantly, from the branches of naked trees and all the cornices and all the windowsills—and again, the world gently slipped away like a child’s clumsily folded paper boat being swept away by the current....

  It was in that yard, hours later, that Sashka Morozov found him, sitting motionless on the ground, watching bits and pieces of torn paper as they drowned in the downpour. Talking loudly all the while, Sashka held him firmly around the shoulders and led him somewhere, and there were more people, some of whom he probably knew, and others whom he did not, and that night they put him and his mother into a car and drove them across the river, to some place with a multitude of tiny rooms opening into one another like a series of mousetraps. He remembered oppressively low ceilings, ugly wallpaper in brown and red zigzags in the hallway, and a giant rusty bathtub resting on funny-looking clawlike feet. A skinny woman with a sharp nose kept fussing over him in visible embarrassment, pressing a cup of lukewarm soup on him and calling him “poor dear”; and a serious yellow-haired boy, no more than ten years old, surreptitiously followed him with curious, shining eyes wherever he went, whatever he did, as if expecting him to change into something strange at any moment.

  Anatoly gave the boy his few remaining drawings to play with; he did not want them any longer. They must have stayed with these nameless, unnecessary people for some time, a few days at least, perhaps a whole week, because he was still there when the tenacious, numbing grief, which had paralyzed his being for so long he had ceased to understand time, began to release him slowly, breath by breath, until one evening he was finally able to sit, dry-eyed and oddly unfeeling, repeating, “There, there,” while his mother cried with relieved abandon on his shoulder. That night they moved across snow-buried Moscow back to the Arbat apartment.

  He never did find the surprise his father had prepared for them. There was no trace of any important discovery among the man’s scanty possessions. His desk contained a neat stack of engineering manuals, a framed photograph of Nadezhda Sukhanova as a very young, touchingly awkward girl, and a volume of Pushkin’s works bookmarked in a few places, with two impatient exclamation points in red pencil in the margins next to the sentence “A scientist without talent is akin to that poor mullah who cut up the Koran and ate it, thinking thus to be filled with the spirit of Mohammed.” There was also a picture, torn out of some children’s magazine and thumbtacked to the wall, of a brightly colored—crimson, white, and golden—hot-air balloon, one of the early models, across which Pavel Sukhanov had written in his slanting, confident handwriting: “Don’t let anyone clip your wings.”

  In the following months Anatoly often puzzled over that phrase, wondering whether it had been a random scribble or something more meaningful, his father’s personal motto perhaps, a promise of courage which in the end he had not been able to keep—for was not a self-willed departure from life, especially in the midst of so much death, the ultimate act of cowardice? Choosing to stage the exit before their very eyes seemed an additional cruelty to Anatoly, unworthy of the man he thought his father had been, and in a hidden, most childlike cranny of his mind he kept alive the possibility that none of this had been intended, that it had all been a tragic, absurdly needless accident—that his father had simply slipped on the wet windowsill in the act of some clownish, extravagant greeting. (Indeed, there would always remain this maddening touch of uncertainty, even in later years, when he well understood that Pavel Sukhanov had never been in any hospital—that, like the poor music teacher, like Gradsky and his wife, like hundreds of thousands of others, he had been arrested as an “enemy of the people” and, having survived who knew what private hell, had been subsequently freed during the war, when the country had felt an acute need for skilled officers and military specialists, experienced aviation engineers among them, and a wave of hasty releases had swept through the labor camps—and that sometime in the preceding years of horror, his spirit must have been broken, never to mend again.)

  His mother, who might have had a better understanding of what had happened, grew tearfully reproachful every time Anatoly alluded to the matter, and he soon learned to ask her no questions. Already in the first post-victory year, he watched her slightly edgy reply “My husband died during the war” change into the dignified statement “My husband died in the war,” thus making their own, very private and uncertain, pain gradually seem part of a different pain, clear and bright and noble, shared by millions of people and imbued with a sense of great purpose. He let it be—it was easier that way.

  Then, in May of 1947, only a few weeks before his school graduation, there came a night when, in the darkness of their room, with his mother sighing in uneasy sleep behind a partition, he lay on his back watching the fireworks of the second victory anniversary light up the ceiling in uneven flares—and suddenly, just as a particularly dazzling red burst ricocheted off the chandelier stump, he understood the true meaning of the words he had come to regard as his father’s farewell message to himself. “Don’t let anyone clip your wings,” Pavel Sukhanov had written, and it was not, as Anatoly had previously believed, a bequest of bravery, a proud expression of defiance. It was a warning instead, a cautioning reminder that the only life worth living was a life without humiliation, a free life, a safe life—and the only sure way to avoid having one’s wings clipped was to grow no wings at all.

  And that night, as the brilliant traces of celebration trailed down the sky, Anatoly saw his own choices clearly for the first time: his need to live without the fear of someone coming to pound on his door in the hushed hours before dawn; his desire to protect his mother, who could not survive another loss; his hope to watch his own child grow up one day; his anticipation of the modest achievements of some respected, quietly useful profession—a yearning, in short, for the existence of an average man who chooses not to dream, who chooses not to fly, who prefers instead the wisdom of simple, everyday living. He made a vow to himself, cemented in the grief of his previous years, to carve from the world around him a small, secure happiness, all his own. By the time morning drew near, he had compiled a mental catalogue of his abilities and, concluding that drawing was the only real skill he possessed, decided to try for the Surikov Art Institute—an education as good as any.

  A ball of blazing light drew a crimson trajectory across his field of vision, interrupting the flow of his thoughts. Momentarily disoriented—were the victory fireworks still going on?—Anatoly Pavlovich blinked and peered into the obscurity around him. It took him an instant to remember that the year was 1985, that he was fifty-six
, that he lay on the uncomfortable couch having yet another heartbreaking vision from the past. A damp chill pervaded the study. Realizing that his blanket had slipped off during the night, he leaned over and felt unhappily for its woolly mass on the floor—and then a fiery ball of orange-red sparks, escaping the confines of his dream, sailed past his balcony again, immediately followed by another, and another, and another after that. A soft rain of fire was falling from the Moscow skies.

  He stared for a few disbelieving seconds, then, hurriedly disentangling himself from the sheets, ran across the room, threw open the balcony door, and rushed outside. On the balcony above, the monkey-faced madman was audibly busy tearing newspapers apart, crumpling their pages into loose balls, lighting them, and tossing them down in quick, glowing succession. Sukhanov could hear the crinkling of paper, the agitated striking of matches, and the carefree, toothless whistling. Tilting his head back, he shouted angrily toward the heavens, “Hey! Hey! Stop that right now, you hear?”

  The burning balls ceased falling, and the old man’s face emerged over the balcony railing, his cheeks smeared with soot, his eyes drowned in absurd happiness.

  “Too late,” he said blithely. “You’ve missed our revolution by five minutes. Didn’t I tell you four o‘clock sharp? Now you’ll have to wait for the next one.”

  And before Sukhanov could think of a sensible reply, the old man ducked away with surprising agility, and a moment later an entire unfolded newspaper sheet drifted indolently past, in flames. Sukhanov could see a few words—“change,” “crucial,” “youth”—flare up briefly, black on melting gold, before the page disintegrated into a flock of darkly luminous shreds and landed on a balcony a few floors below. It was only a matter of time, of course, before something, somewhere, caught on fire.

  Anatoly Pavlovich swore with quiet fury and went inside to call the fire station.

  ELEVEN

  A single night of uninterrupted sleep,” said Vasily. ”Is that so much to ask for, really?”

  For once, the entire family was present at the breakfast table, with Fyodor Dalevich, in an already established tradition, officiating at the stove. As Sukhanov stumbled into the kitchen, he could not help noticing that the man seemed especially energetic and amiable today—a striking contrast to the haunted, dark-rimmed look he himself had encountered earlier that morning in a morose, unshaved, altogether unpresentable individual in the mirror (who, to judge by his appearance, had been suffering greatly in some through-the-looking-glass world, quite possibly from tormenting memories, crazy neighbors, inefficient firemen, and a painfully prolonged acquaintance with the wires, bumps, and corners of a most uncomfortable couch). It was nice to know, Sukhanov thought bitterly, sitting down to a cup of cold coffee and trying not to look in his relative’s direction, that at least someone was enjoying a good night’s sleep—not to mention a recently acquired, wonderfully soft, imported bed.

  And then Nina’s question from a moment before filtered into his lagging mind.

  “Do you need any help with your packing?” she had asked matter-of-factly

  He understood the meaning of her words—and felt instantly light headed, as if his insides had filled with a swarm of exclamation points.

  “Leaving us, are you?” he addressed his cousin’s back in a voice of insincere regret, his tongue stumbling over the word “finally” just in time to avoid it. Strangely, Dalevich did not respond but continued to prod something sizzling in a pan with a cautious fork; and it was Vasily who dropped his cup onto its saucer with a needless clang and spoke in a tone of exasperation, “How many times do I have to tell you, Father? Honestly, do you ever listen to any of us?”

  “A rhetorical question if ever I heard one,” said Ksenya.

  Slowly, Sukhanov turned and regarded his son with a darkening gaze.

  Two hours later, he stood on a sidewalk, his briefcase in hand, and squinting against the sun, watched the chauffeur haul a gigantic suitcase into the trunk of the car. Vasily himself was already sprawled in the backseat amid more of his belongings, drawing on a cigarette and looking bored. He was going to spend the last two weeks of August with his grandfather, at an exclusive Party resort in the Crimea, doubtlessly replete with cypress-scented, starlit promenades, sonorous cicadas, and all sorts of people whom it would be most useful to meet—apparently a plan of a monthlong standing, with which everyone was well familiar and which Sukhanov alone, even after passing his memory through a sieve of intense scrutiny, could not recall ever hearing.

  Vasily rolled down the window.

  “Ah, you’re still here,” he said indifferently. “Want a lift somewhere?”

  The boy acted as if he had all but forgotten their painful conversation of two nights before—and quite possibly, he truly had, the details buried in the haze of his intoxication; or else he simply had not considered the matter particularly worthy of amends. Sukhanov, on the other hand, had found neither oblivion nor forgiveness an easy proposition. After an initial, vaguely hurt reaction, the news of his son’s impending absence had filled him with a feeling surprisingly like relief, and it had been in the hope of dispersing uneasy prompt ings of guilt that he had conceded to Vasily the use of his Volga.

  “I need to go by the office to drop off a manuscript,” he pointed out somewhat dryly. “The train station is nowhere near it.”

  “We are picking up Grandpa first,” said Vasily, and having flung away his still-glowing cigarette, started to roll up the window. “But I don’t care, it’s up to you.”

  Sukhanov’s father-in-law lived in a palatial apartment overlooking Gorky Street, only a few short, crooked, linden-shaded blocks from the building occupied by Art of the World. Sukhanov hesitated, but Vadim had already shut the trunk and was now swinging the front door open, saying briskly, “Get in here, Anatoly Pavlovich, there’s no space in the back—just watch out for the dog hair.” A dog, what dog? thought Sukhanov gloomily, squeezing his substantial body into the seat next to the chauffeur’s.

  He was accustomed to riding luxuriously spread out in the back, and the cramped quarters, permeated by the faint smell of some hirsute animal and a recent cloud of perfume, too sweet and dramatic to have been Nina‘s, as well as the sudden proximity of the driver, fiddling with the keys only inches away, soon began to vex him. Vasily appeared to have gone to sleep the moment the motor started. Sukhanov sighed, coughed, toyed with his wedding band, picked a few brown hairs off his trouser leg, then stared before him. From the rearview mirror, he noticed for the first time, dangled a small plastic sphere, with a tiny blue-roofed cottage inside surrounded by nail-sized fir trees. No sooner had they reached the end of their street than the car dove into its first pothole, and at the jolt a miniature storm of brightly tinted snowflakes soared inside the sphere, hung in the air for one chaotic, densely sparkling instant, then descended on the gingerbread house. Sukhanov watched with idle interest. The thing seemed embarrassingly sentimental and out of place—most drivers, after all, favored decorations of a different sort, like key-chain figurines of half-naked women—and he found himself wondering absently whether Vadim had chosen the tasteless trinket himself or it had been a gift from someone.

  And all at once it occurred to him that, in truth, he knew oddly little about this man whom he saw almost daily. Vadim was a competent driver, perhaps a bit aggressive but on the whole reliable; he had the appearance of a man who liked regular exercise; he lived somewhere on the dim, desolate outskirts of Moscow with a wife named Svetlana or Galina or Tatyana, Sukhanov could not remember exactly, as well as a daughter, whose age had slipped off into the void yet again, and possibly a big hairy dog—but beyond that stretched a fog of uncertainties and conjectures. Nina’s recent reproach rose unbidden in his mind. He’s worked for us for almost three years, and in all this time you haven’t made an effort... Wincing, he cast a quick look to his side. Vadim’s profile was impassive, but as he drove he drummed his gloved fingers against the wheel as if following some nervous internal rhythm; he
might have been upset about something. Resolved to be friendly, Sukhanov cleared his throat.

  “I always mean to ask you, what is this?” he said casually, pointing at the sphere, in which another cheap snowstorm was subsiding. “A children’s toy?”

  The man shrugged. “Just a souvenir,” he said.

  “It’s nice,” Sukhanov said pleasantly. “Fun to watch.”

  Vadim nodded without taking his eyes off the road. A silence fell between them, as awkward as an endless elevator ride with a vaguely familiar stranger to whom one has nothing to say. They were very close now. Vasily woke up and lit a fresh cigarette.

  “So,” Sukhanov said in a bright tone, “did you have a good time last night?”

  Vadim glanced at him sharply.

  “On your evening off, that is. Do anything fun?”

  “My evening off,” Vadim repeated with the beginning of a frown—but just then a blue Zhiguli with a smashed door swerved wildly into their lane, and Vadim honked and swerved in turn, so abruptly that Vasily was pitched forward, bespattering his shoes with ash, and Sukhanov’s glasses took a scintillating leap into the sunny, suddenly hazy space. An instant later the last traffic light turned green before them, and, grumbling about the crazy Gorky Street drivers, Vadim pulled into the cavernous courtyard of Malinin’s building.

  “I’ll probably be a while,” said Vasily, yawning, “so if you want, he can take you directly to your office and then come back here, there’s plenty of—”