Olga Grushin

by The Dream Life of Sukhanov (v5)

  “No, no, that’s not necessary,” Sukhanov interrupted, groping for his glasses in the crevices behind his seat. “In fact, why don’t I come up myself for a minute? Might as well say hello to ... Ah, yes, here they are.... Well, so long, Vadim, thanks for the ride.... Might as well say hello to Pyotr Alekseevich, don’t you think?”

  And restoring his glasses to the bridge of his nose, he stepped out of the car.

  Vasily opened the door to the apartment with his own set of keys, which rather surprised Sukhanov: he thought of his father-in-law as a highly territorial man not forthcoming with gestures of trust. He followed his son inside. Since his last visit here, some half a year before, the vast entrance hall seemed to have slid even deeper into the two full-sized mirrors that stood on either side of the door, and all the solid antique furnishings—an oak hat stand, a bronze umbrella stand, a carved end table, a splendidly framed portrait of a morose Polish officer with a handlebar mustache, Nina’s maternal grandfather—all these genteel symbols of a well-established life, multiplying into infinity inside a diminishing progression of glass, had an unexpectedly oppressive effect on his spirit. He inhaled sharply, felt the smells of shoe polish, violet-scented hand soap, shortbread cookies, and, more delicately, old age trickle into his lungs, and was seized with an urgent desire to murmur some hasty excuse to Vasily, turn around, and leave—but the steady creaking of the hardwood floors had already announced Pyotr Alekseevich’s imminent approach.

  In another moment the old man emerged into the hall from one of its many doorways. Coming toward them with his straight-backed, imposing stride, he embraced Vasily in a show of warmth that struck Sukhanov as excessive and for some reason highly unpleasant. Then, with one hand outstretched, Pyotr Alekseevich turned to his son-in-law

  “Ah, Tolya. What a surprise,” he said flatly. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  Sullenly Sukhanov looked at Malinin’s handsomely aged features, to which the habit of serving as a constant recipient of awards and a frequent subject of self-portraits had imparted a permanently noble, reserved expression—but then, instead of his usual irritable acquiescence, he felt a light tinge of amusement, uncertain at first, then growing more and more demanding, until a long-suppressed tide of merriment rose inside him and his mind was flooded with startling visions of his father-in-law’s face. The face was already lionized but a few decades younger, and suffering endless distortions and permutations—bristling with ridiculous whiskers, sporting bushy eyebrows and elegantly curved horns, covered in poisonous, hair-spurting warts, or even balanced precariously atop a giraffe’s neck, reaching for a star-shaped leaf with greedy lips.... Naturally, he had long since discarded all his notebooks in whose margins such secret malicious phantoms had sprouted by the dozen during so many tedious lectures, when all that had kept him from falling into a doze had been a game of rendering the lecturer as hideous as possible while keeping within the laws of portraiture. All the same, the mnemonic gift of his more successful efforts seemed revenge enough—almost enough—for all those past hours of unspeakable boredom.

  He had felt bored for most of his time as a student, of course, but the class on Soviet art theory—taught in 1952, his last year at the Surikov Institute, by the recent recipient of the coveted Stalin Prize, the prominent painter, theorist, and glorified representative of state art, the forty-six-year-old star Pyotr Alekseevich Malinin—proved to be a particularly taxing exercise in patience. In truth, young Anatoly found patience to be one of the two qualities most required of him in the course of his studies; caution was the other. In his first semester, when presented, in the ranks of other eager youths, with a simple anatomical sketch or some suitably patriotic landscape, he discovered to his unease that something was wrong, that sometime previously, perhaps during the drab wartime evenings spent in the makeshift classroom with Chagall’s former pupil Oleg Romanov leaning over his shoulder, he had acquired a dangerous trait it was best to do without—namely, individual style—and maybe a touch of something else besides; for as was quickly becoming apparent, his works differed from those of the others. Anatoly’s paintings suffered from a fault, a twist, an uncommon streak of whimsy, and as much as he tried to follow the prescribed form, something strange, something alien, would always sneak into his renditions of Soviet reality, be it a cloud, above a perfectly ordinary industrial vista, whose shape resembled the spire of a great, sky-wide cathedral, or an incongruous herring skeleton found at the foot of a worker beaming proudly in the act of receiving a medal, or a wild riot of pearly, unearthly colors exploding in the background of an otherwise respectful harvesting scene. And all these absurdities seemed to drip from his brush so freely, so naturally, so completely apart from his conscious will, that it took him long months of diligent application to eradicate them from his canvases, from his thoughts, from the very texture of his being.

  Yet gradually his efforts started to pay off, his name was increasingly mentioned among the more promising members of the new generation of artists—and only in his most private moments would he ever dream of painting enormous transparent bells raining music from the skies, or groves of springtime trees whose blossoms turned into twittering birds and flew away, or faces of women so ideal they melted as soon as you looked at them, or ...

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” said Pyotr Alekseevich Malinin to his son-in-law, “but I do have to finish my packing. Was there something you wanted to tell me?”

  Sukhanov looked at the pompous old man standing before him, and suddenly wanted to tell him many things, not the least of them being the story of his recent meeting with Lev Belkin and the news of Belkin’s exhibition. Yes, for one rebellious moment he felt a rising desire to erase the tranquil, self-assured expression on the old man’s face with that name from the past that they had tacitly agreed never to mention again.

  After a long pause, he spoke.

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I’d like to borrow a tie or two. Would you mind?”

  TWELVE

  The offices of Art of the World occupied the two upper stories of a three-storied eighteenth-century mansion with a once magnificent turquoise façade, which had since become faded, and a cornucopia of frivolous curlicues over the windows, whose precise shape was obscured by years of relentless pigeon deposits. The first floor consisted predominantly of a maze of mysterious corridors and blank doors, which terminated, in somewhat disappointing fashion (as Sukhanov had chanced to discover upon getting lost once or twice in his first year as editor), in a glass partition with the laconic sign “Accounting” over it and a sour-looking woman knitting a sweater behind it. There was also a pet store in a corner of the building, a dark, cramped, sad little place, with somnolent guinea pigs and torpid white-eyed fish languishing in thick-walled aquariums beneath dusty plants; its proximity inevitably caused all sorts of useless, repulsive creatures to gravitate to the cubicles of the more tenderhearted of Sukhanov’s secretaries and junior editors. Anatoly Pavlovich harbored a great dislike for all things scaly, crawling, and gill-breathing, and he navigated the long corridors of his private kingdom at a rather brisk pace, preferring not to look too closely at the surrounding desks for fear of meeting the stony stare of some new clammy monstrosity trapped in a mayonnaise jar or a vase too ugly for flowers.

  The dinner hour was approaching, and the girls on the second floor surreptitiously powdered their noses, ready to disperse among the neighborhood cafeterias. Their conversations, swerving in shallow eddies from wall to wall, rolled back like an ebbing tide at Sukhanov’s passage but left single phrases behind, to be picked up by his incurious hearing. “A pair of Italian leather boots, just around the corner!” he heard someone say excitedly. As he ascended the stairs, the chatter faded behind him.

  The third floor, a yellow corridor with a stained carpet and two rows of doors whose nameplates read like the magazine’s masthead, was quiet and, it struck him after a moment, oddly deserted. The doors were ajar, the offices of his senior staff empty. Quicke
ning his steps, he walked to the far end, toward a recess presided over by Liubov Markovna, his personal secretary, a marvelously efficient woman of indeterminate years with a penchant for painfully pointy pencils. She was at her desk, whispering into the telephone. Seeing him, she abruptly let go of the receiver and, stretching out her arms as if trying to catch something hurtling toward her, began to prattle in an unbecoming manner, “Anatoly Palych, Anatoly Palych, wait a second!”—but the momentum had already carried him across the threshold.

  There he stopped and looked about in puzzlement.

  The managing editor, Ovseev, a tall, thin, balding man resembling a praying mantis, was sitting in his, Sukhanov‘s, leather chair, reading some items from a pad with a surprising air of authority, while the diminutive, wide-eyed, skittish Anastasia Lisitskaya, Ovseev’s secretary and rumored mistress, tottered on nine-inch heels by his side, taking notes. Pugovichkin, the assistant editor in chief, his shape as small, rotund, and faintly comical as his name, was there too, consulting with the department heads; a few others meandered about the room. In itself, this gathering was not necessarily remarkable, since editorial meetings always took place in Sukhanov’s office—but no meeting was scheduled for another three weeks, and no meeting had ever taken place without his presence.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Sukhanov said in a measured voice.

  Startled, the editors looked up from their pads, and a hush fell among them.

  “Anatoly Pavlovich,” said Ovseev, hurriedly rising from Sukhanov’s chair.

  “Why are you all here?”

  “Anatoly Pavlovich, we had to call an urgent meeting to discuss a few last-minute changes to the current issue—and since you were supposed to be out of town—”

  Lisitskaya’s heels pattered across the floor as she darted to hide behind Ovseev.

  Sukhanov marched to his desk, regained possession of his chair, and opened his briefcase with a harsh snap, all his gestures meant to reassert his momentarily lapsed command.

  “What nonsense, I wasn’t out of town,” he said curtly. “How could I be, with that Dalí article on my hands? Speaking of which, someone should take it to the printers right away.”

  “But,” said Ovseev, “surely you know...” He did not finish the sentence.

  “I have it right here, hold on just one ... What did you say?” Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a few people gingerly tiptoeing out of the office, while Pugovichkin drew closer and hovered above him. Looking up, Sukhanov found an exaggerated concern wrinkling the man’s kindly pancake of a face.

  “Anatoly Pavlovich, I don’t believe it!” moaned the assistant editor in chief. “Could it be you haven’t heard?”

  Sukhanov stared at him blankly.

  “I’m afraid,” Pugovichkin said, spreading his plump hands outward in a gesture of futility, “the Dali piece has been postponed.”

  “We hope it didn’t give you too much trouble,” Ovseev added with an ingratiating smile. “Of course, it will be published soon, if not in the next issue, then in the one after that for sure—”

  “And how, I’d like to know, could this decision be made without me?” Sukhanov thundered incredulously. “How can any of this be happening without me?”

  Lisitskaya’s heels fled into the corridor with the sound of a frantic drumroll.

  “Well, you see,” said Pugovichkin quickly, “we received this phone call the day before yesterday.” He raised his eyes meaningfully to the ceiling, to indicate a far-off, heavenly sphere of influence—their accepted shorthand for communications from the magazine’s Party liaison. “It appeared that a more ... more timely subject had come to someone’s attention, and we were to be sent a new article that very afternoon. On Chagall. We were told that, in view of his recent death ... You know, of course, he died this past March.... And since you were leaving ...”

  “Chagall,” Sukhanov repeated, his voice ominously steady. “They want Art of the World to publish an article on Chagall, and you have actually agreed to it? Be so kind as to tell me I’ve misheard you, Sergei Nikolaevich. Or have you lost your mind?”

  The few remaining people slunk outside, and Sukhanov was left alone with his second-in-command. Pugovichkin was talking now, in a rapid, offended monotone, gathering momentum, trying to convince him of something, but for a few minutes Sukhanov heard nothing as he sat staring at the dust particles twirling before him in the stuffy, sun-lacerated air. True, he had allowed the questionable Dali article to be forced upon the magazine, grudgingly resigning himself to this one-time challenge to his authority—but a piece on Chagall would take matters to an entirely new level. The difference between Dali, outrageous by virtue of his foreign birth and viewed therefore as a mere curiosity akin to a two-headed goat in some little-frequented Kunstkammer, and Chagall, who had come from Russia’s own backyard, been appointed Commissar of Fine Arts after the Revolution, taught in a Soviet art academy, and then chosen to leave Russia behind in order to become foreign and outrageous, was just as wide and impassable as the difference between some poor jungle savage who knows nothing beyond the cruel and nonsensical superstitions of his tribe and a man of civilized faith who proceeds to give it up in order to murmur incantations and slaughter chickens. Publishing an article on Chagall would be universally interpreted as an act of rebellion, an absolute break with decades of steadfast traditions of Soviet criticism, which he himself had helped to invent, and as likely as not would prove tantamount to career suicide for him and his senior staff.

  Publishing such an article was impossible.

  “It will be most welcome, I was assured,” Pugovichkin was saying, trotting back and forth across the office. “In fact, I’ve been told that the Ministry is thinking of organizing a Chagall retrospective in a year or two. Wouldn’t that be something?”

  Sukhanov lifted his head. He was no longer angry, only tired, very tired.

  “Don’t be so naive, Serezha,” he said quietly. “You sound just like an excitable eighteen-year-old girl I met the other day. Changes, changes, spring in the air, Soviet art is inferior, let’s all say what we think! At least she has the excuse of being young—but you and I, we should know better, we went through it all once before, didn’t we? Honestly, can you not see that this whole Chagall business is nothing but a provocation, a test of loyalty, if you will? The Ministry has no intention of putting on any ‘retrospective.’ It simply hopes to flush out the handful of enthusiastic fools who will believe in all their fine promises and start getting carried away, saying unwise things and publishing unwise articles—and before one has time to blink, they’ll have lost their jobs and been sent off to the provinces, or worse, and new people in their places will say and write the same old things as before.”

  Pugovichkin stopped pacing and leaned over the desk.

  “I understand your worries,” he said earnestly, “but I think you underestimate the nature of what is happening in the country this time around. Look, Tolya, it’s been less than six months since the leadership change in March, and already, the man has said some pretty radical things. His Leningrad speech, with its barbs at the old guard—”

  Sukhanov waved his hand to cut him off. “You don’t know what will happen any more than I do,” he said, “but my prediction is, absolutely nothing. It’s all smoke and no fire. Chagall, imagine that! Who’s next, Trotsky? By the way, who’s the author?”

  “Someone with a very Russian name, like Petrov or Vasiliev ... I’ll remember in a moment. No one we’ve ever heard of, a curator from somewhere or other—but clearly with friends in high places. If nothing else, it may not be prudent to get them upset.”

  “Well, I suppose,” said Sukhanov, frowning, “if written from a certain critical perspective, it might—with some heavy editing, of course—”

  “It’s already at the printers,” muttered Pugovichkin, averting his eyes.

  Sukhanov looked at his right-hand man across a sudden gap of silence, palpable and unpleasant like an acrid taste in his
mouth.

  When Pugovichkin spoke, his voice was almost hostile with defensiveness. “Well, what would you have done in my place? I was put on the spot. I was told in no uncertain terms to publish the damn piece. Think about it, the issue must be typeset by Monday, and you were going away, as far as we knew. What was I supposed to—”

  “Just why does everyone think I was going away?” Sukhanov interrupted heatedly.

  “Must we now belabor the obvious? I called you as soon as I heard, on Tuesday morning, and you weren’t there, but—”

  “Tuesday, you say? I was home most of the day.”

  “No, you weren’t. I spoke to Vasily, and he told me you were out. I left a detailed message with him, explaining the situation. He said he was about to go to the Crimea with you.”

  Sukhanov sat back in his chair.

  “Vasily said that?” he asked slowly.

  Pugovichkin shrugged. “I think his exact words were ‘with the old man.’ Frankly, at the time I was rather perplexed that you hadn’t mentioned your vacation. I gather you changed your mind about it? In any case, since none of us ever heard back from you, we assumed you’d received the word, agreed to the whole thing, and gone off to the sea with your son. Did he not give you my message?”

  Forcing his scattering thoughts to order, Sukhanov recalled the unbearable Tuesday morning he had spent working on the article, with Vasily sulking behind his closed door and the remote telephone ringing intermittently throughout the sluggish, torturous hours. The boy had been angry with him about his failure to convey the Minister’s invitation to a party, he remembered. It suddenly seemed like an event from a very long time ago.

  “The issue won’t go to print without my complete approval, and that’s that,” he said in his most formal tone. “Kindly stop the presses and get someone to bring me a copy of the article. If I don’t like it, my Dali goes instead. I’m still in charge here unless I’m told otherwise—and unless I’m told by someone directly. Do you understand me, Sergei Nikolaevich?”