Olga Grushin

by The Dream Life of Sukhanov (v5)

  He felt too worn out for anger, even when he remembered his expensive coat. Turning back in resignation, he lurched through the crammed aisle, navigating between feet and parcels, looking, with diminishing hope, for a place to sit. And it was then that he noticed, for the first time clearly, the other passengers, and his steps faltered uneasily. Pressing upon him in the unsteady light of a few bare bulbs were people in drab clothes, with stony, dark, prematurely aged faces, heads swaying loosely in time to the thudding wheels, vacant eyes staring into nothing, features distorted by grotesque deformities of sunken mouths, broken noses, monstrous warts, missing teeth ...

  These were not the people he met in the busy streets of old Moscow—they belonged rather among the medieval fiends of Bosch’s tortured landscapes of hell. He glanced about, covertly at first, then almost wildly, seeking out a splash of color, a pleasant countenance, a lively expression, a natural smile; but the grim, wordless, disfigured masses enclosed him on all sides like a silent gray sea. His unease began to slide into fear. He wondered to what final destination all these perversions of human beings could possibly be heading at this hour of the night, and peering closer, thought he saw disturbing, freakish objects protruding over the rims of their draped baskets or nestled in their yawning bags—a hoof of a severed bovine leg, a drooping neck of a bird, a rusty cemetery cross with clumps of reddened earth still sticking to it. And suddenly it seemed to him that he had accidentally stumbled on some secret nocturnal world, the unseen bowels of Russia, where no outsider was ever allowed—that he was painfully, obviously out of place here—that everyone was already starting to notice his presence, to stir, to mutter, to turn around, to devour him with those heavy, empty, terrifying, alien eyes—

  In the next instant he caught sight of a miraculously preserved wedge of space between a shrunken old man sleeping with his mouth agape and a fat woman fussing with a crumpled newspaper. Mumbling inaudible apologies, he squeezed through the still wall of monsters, lowered himself onto the edge of the bench, and hastened to close his eyes. Soon he was wading in and out of anxious dreams in which he again strode up and down the Bogoliubovka platform—and so real were the visions of the blinking lamp and the gleaming tracks that only the sporadic wakeful glimpses of the pink, childlike gums of the man on his left and the nauseating smell of vobla, the salty dried fish the woman on his right had eventually unwrapped from a Pravda editorial and was now eating with repulsive sucking noises, reassured Sukhanov that he was indeed on a train, moving closer and closer to Moscow with every passing moment.

  Yet after some time—twenty minutes maybe, or forty, or even an hour—he wondered through the haze of his slumber why they still rumbled on, with no announcements and no stops. Forcing himself awake, he attempted to look out the window, but the old man was leaning against it, blocking his view; all he could see were wide patches of blackness superimposed with bright reflections of the man’s gnarled hands. Feeling apprehensive, Sukhanov turned to his other neighbor and was met by the oily gaze of the half-eaten fish. The woman was busy picking at her teeth. She looked astonishingly like the wife of a certain theater critic he knew, he realized now. The thought dismayed him for some reason.

  “Pardon me,” he said, “but do you know how soon we’ll be arriving in Moscow?”

  On the other side, the old man stirred.

  “Moscow? We aren’t going to Moscow, my friend,” he said, not opening his eyes. He spoke with a funny lisp. “We are heading east—Murom, Saransk, Inza ...”

  Sukhanov swung around and stared at the man in horror.

  “Don’t listen to him, he’s not all there,” the woman’s voice blustered at Sukhanov’s back. “Old age will do it to you. I reckon we should be getting to Moscow in less than an hour.”

  “Oh,” said Sukhanov faintly. “Oh.”

  The old man dropped off to sleep without another remark, but a calm, knowing smile played on his lips. With blank eyes, Sukhanov watched the woman unhurriedly brush the fish remains onto the floor, fake amethysts the size of walnuts sparkling in her meaty earlobes. And all at once his presence here, among these strange people, in this train hurtling who knew where, seemed so unbearable that he could no longer remain sitting still, following the passage of time in his befuddled mind, guessing at the contours of the night they traveled through, his thigh squashed against the woman’s repugnantly voluminous side.... Nodding mechanically at the old man, he stood up and shakingly made his way back into the aisle.

  Here the press of bodies had become even denser. He pushed through, intending to position himself by the nearest window, when the sight of all these heads bobbing before the expanse of the lit wall punctuated by rectangles of framed darkness struck him as an unexpectedly familiar paraphrase of some other, distant scene. He paused for a moment, attempting to place his sudden déjà vu; then, giving up, resumed his efforts to get through.

  People were standing three and four deep, talking to one another in undertones, all eager to get a better look. He too felt the excitement rising from his feet, numb after so many hours of waiting in line to enter, into the tips of his fingers. Finally, there it was, unobstructed, before him: the fluid wisp of a girl acrobat balancing on a ball, with a misty desert behind her, and in the foreground, the muscular back of a man in repose, the whole scene glowing softly with pinks, blues, and grays—a poignantly lyrical metaphor of humanity as a carnival troupe of performers and freaks, a striking juxtaposition of strength and fragility, roughness and smoothness, immobility and motion. A masterpiece of Picasso’s early period.

  With many others, Anatoly stood and looked at the painting that had been rescued so magically from some terrible cave of a locked storage room, where it had languished for dark, musty decades. And after a while, it began to seem like a mysterious window into a new, tantalizingly foreign world where possibilities were endless, where truths were manifold, where an altogether different artistic language was spoken—a language I did not as yet know, did not as yet understand, but had been avidly trying to learn all through that year, the year of 1956. All the same, the grainy magazine reproductions and the black-and-white catalogues of across-the-ocean shows circulating at Yastrebov’s gatherings had not prepared me for the shock of coming face to face with an actual paint-and-brush work of Picasso, the giant of Western art, exhibited for the first time, unbelievably, here, in Moscow, in the very Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts where as a little boy I had seen Tatlin’s flying machine and where for many subsequent years one could find nothing but a dusty spread of lamps, flags, and carpets presented to Stalin on his birthdays. And even though most of Picasso’s other paintings on display left me vaguely puzzled and disappointed, that first sight of Young Girl on a Ball sustained its precious ringing note throughout my being, and that evening, as I ran home along the quickly darkening autumnal streets, my mind strove to absorb the revolutionary freedom of modernism and my hands ached to try these new, as yet unexperienced, colors and forms....

  Without warning the train pulled to a screeching stop. As Sukhanov toppled forward, his glasses plunged off his nose and were instantly lost amid the shuffling of uprooted feet. Immediately everything started to float away into a fog: the cloudy faces grimacing around him, the spectral station whose black-lettered name he squinted at hopefully but was unable to read, the shimmering glow of the sky above a distant town. After a moment of agonized indecision, he crouched down and groped along the filthy floor, the muddy shoes, the flabby convexities of bags, until, against every law of probability, just as the train jolted into motion again, his fingers closed on the welcome cold of the metal frames.

  Infinitely relieved, he returned his glasses to their place, only to discover, upon straightening up, that half of his world was now crisscrossed by a radiant, trembling cobweb: a star-shaped crack, the imprint of someone’s vengeful step, had shattered the left lens. The crack splintered the light into dozens of cubist fragments and imparted a rainbow-tinted brightness to one side of his vision, granting unwitting halo
es to a night brigade of women in orange overalls who were presently illuminated by the flickering beams of their flashlights on a parallel track, and, once the last vestiges of the unknown town had fallen into the darkness, endowing his own reflection in the window with the multifaceted eye of an insect and sending silver waves across that of a strikingly beautiful girl who had just passed behind him in the aisle.

  Greedily he looked at this newly altered universe, drinking in the colors, storing up his impressions, so that at the end of the day he could unburden his fresh load of discoveries onto yet another canvas. For months after that Picasso exhibition in October of 1956, he lived as if in an experimental laboratory of art, his mind always dissecting his surroundings in search of compositions, his hands always stained by oils, his heart always on fire. There were other shows as more and more paintings crossed the loosened borders or escaped the molder ing walls of Soviet prisons of forbidden creation—among them, French impressionists whose sun-spotted gardens, twirling parasols, and boating excursions he found simple but dear, and contemporary Americans whose abstract expressionism amused him with its cult of anti-art. He devoured everything he came across, and in his paintings copied, toyed with, and abandoned a multitude of techniques and styles. And all the while, my soul longed to pass through its appointed period of apprenticeship and, emerging tempered by its trials yet in essence unchanged, devise a language all its own.

  For the moment, however, my search remained a private one, transpiring on a secret plane parallel to my official, seemingly unaltered, existence. Although I talked freely among my artist friends at Yastrebov’s evenings, the exhilarating change in the air felt all too recent, the memories of the preceding years all too fresh, and I preferred to be careful. I still proclaimed the virtues of socialist realism in my lectures at the institute, churned out now and then the odd portrait for the leather-bound office of some factory director, and when a shrill-voiced girl stood up during a classroom discussion and denounced Picasso as a scion of capitalism, I thought it prudent not to object. For the same reason, I had chosen to paint my true works at home, while reserving the studio (visited by both my students and my superiors) exclusively for my torpid public productions. And thus it was that I had nothing to show her when she came by the institute one dazzlingly blue, gloriously fragrant, excruciatingly awkward afternoon.

  The month was March, the year 1957. Since our unfortunate meeting that past September, when I had so grossly insulted her father to her face, I had glimpsed her only a few times, always in Lev Belkin’s company, always from afar. I had not hoped to talk to her ever again. By now, Lev and I had grown so close that I considered him my best friend, but our almost daily contacts centered on our work, and the name of Nina Malinina never entered our conversation. I assumed he was in love with her, and attributed his silence to his private nature, or else to his innate sense of tact—for the impression she had made on me that ill-fated evening must have been apparent to everyone. For myself, I fervently continued to think of her as my unattainable ideal, and was reduced to near-stuttering when, after a cursory knock on my door, she walked into my life, the smells of melting snows in her wake.

  “I came to see Lev, but he is busy with some students, so I thought I’d stop by here in the meantime,” she said without a smile. “I’m curious to see the works of a man who deems himself so superior to my father.”

  That day, a portrait of a heavily decorated general with bushy whiskers was drying against a wall, while on my easel an uncommonly rosy-cheeked woman was proudly displaying a bucket of cucumbers. As she circled the room, she did not speak, but I saw her eyebrows rise, and my heart ached with humiliation. At the same time, I sensed it would be dangerous to tell her about my other, experimental, paintings, for she was the daughter of Pyotr Malinin, that pillar of officialdom, and I knew nothing at all about her—nothing except that she was beautiful, luminously, piercingly beautiful, moving lightly through the air alive with sunshine in that pearl-gray coat of hers, in those little black boots clicking so haughtily against the floor, her short hair the color of honey spilling in two or three curls from under a red beret, her transparent eyes distant, almost derisive, her lips—her lips—

  “This isn’t really what I do,” I heard myself saying recklessly. “I have other kinds of things at home. I ... I can show you if you like. I live nearby. With my mother.”

  I was certain she would say no at once, but she appeared to hesitate.

  “I’ll ask Lev to join us,” I added hastily.

  In silence, she pulled at the fingers of her glove, then, looking up, said, “All right.” Astonished, humbled, joyful, I ran down the hall, tenderly depositing in my memory the last, expectant look of her suddenly darkened eyes. Lev’s door, around the corner, was cracked. I saw him standing by an open window, gazing into the glistening yard; his students must have just left. He did not hear me approach, and I was about to call out to him—but my lips moved wordlessly and my shout died an unnatural death in my throat. For a minute I lingered in the corridor, looking at his tall, broad-shouldered silhouette pasted against the pale blue sky; then, deciding, I retraced my steps on tiptoe.

  She was still there, waiting quietly, twirling the glove in her hand.

  “He’s too busy to come,” I told her. “Of course, I understand if you don‘t—”

  I could not read her expression. Then, abruptly, she laughed.

  “No, let’s go,” she said brightly. “Take your scarf, it’s colder than it looks.”

  The city was streaming, dripping, splashing around us, sailing away on a dancing wave of early spring. She walked through it heedlessly, without noticing the torrents running off roofs and the pools of water at her feet; and so unreal seemed her presence next to me that I almost expected her to melt at any instant into the lustrous air. Yet after a mortifying interval filled with our passage through a littered building entrance, her stumbling on an unlit staircase landing, my embarrassed tugging at a key that had stuck in the lock (followed by a frantic dash into the apartment ahead of her, to throw a blanket over one painting I did not want her to see), and a blundering introduction to my startled mother who had exited the bathroom in curlers—there she was at last, standing in the middle of my cluttered room, uneasily playing with her gloves.

  I switched on the light.

  That year, I was fascinated by trains. I painted the in-between chaos of railroad stations, stained by the palpable sorrow of partings and the sad waste of vagrant destinies, yet occasionally pierced by the dazzling ray of a joyous meeting, a pure emotion; the mechanical rhythm of robotic multitudes swallowed and regurgitated ceaselessly by metallic monsters, with a rare living, feeling person swept screamingly along within the faceless mass; foreign, at times hauntingly lovely landscapes seen only fleetingly, through a dirty windowpane, over a pathetic repast of vobla laid out on a newspaper editorial; random lives thrown together for one moment, squashed against each other in the dim, narrow confines of a crammed car, sharing space and time, mingling their breaths in a parody of human closeness, yet each of them remaining tragically, eternally alone.... Nina Malinina silently looked at the canvases propped against the walls and piled on the floor; and when she finally spoke, there was a note of surprise in her voice.

  “Dark,” she said slowly. “Most of these are very dark, not at all what I expected. I love this one. Strange but ... so beautiful.”

  She pointed to a small painting of railroad tracks being repaired in the deep blue glimmer of moonlight by a brigade of melancholy, overweight angels with shining orange wings. And then, before I could stop her, she stepped across to my easel and in one swift movement lifted the blanket I had thrown over my latest work.

  With this canvas, more challenging in composition, I had hoped to complete the railroad series and begin exploring another subject that had interested me of late, that of reflections—of houses in pools of rainwater, of shaving men in bathroom mirrors, of wives in their husbands’ glasses, of constellations in cups o
f tea. The painting depicted a crowd of people in browns and grays standing hunched over in the aisle of a train car, all of them seen from the back. The sturdy, well-dressed man in the foreground was reflected faintly in a window. His face, hovering over a dark patch of a forest, was middle-aged and vaguely unpleasant, with a hint of a double chin, and eyes, small and furtive like insects, hidden behind metal-rimmed glasses—the face of someone who had led a comfortable, predictable, inconsequential life. At this instant, however, his bland reflected features wore an expression of shocked recognition, as if he had just glimpsed a missed dream of his youth and for one heartbeat realized the meaningless-ness of his whole existence; and his eyes stared at the silvery wisp of another, less distinct, reflection—the specter of a strikingly beautiful girl who seemed to be flitting through the air behind him but was probably simply walking along the aisle, just outside the imaginary frame, briefly positioned precisely where a viewer of the painting would be standing. The girl’s face had been the most difficult thing to paint, and I had spent almost a month battling with its complexities: it had to look both real and ethereal at the same time.

  “But,” said Nina Malinina haltingly, “but ... that’s me.”

  My voice louder than necessary, I started talking about generalized, classical features, instances of accidental similarity, the artist’s subconscious use of familiar material ... And then something strange happened: she began to cry. Unlike most weeping girls, she did not invite a comforting gesture; her face looked angry, and her tears were silent and spare.

  Unsettled, I turned away, waiting for her to compose herself.

  “I understand,” she said quietly after a minute, “he really isn’t a very good painter. I must be going now.”