Olga Grushin

by The Dream Life of Sukhanov (v5)

  “I’m fine,” he said morosely. “I was just sleeping. A ridiculous situation, this. My keys were stolen, and no one’s home. I’ve been sitting by the door for hours. I ... I had to return to the city on an urgent matter.”

  The man—Volodya, perhaps, or Vyacheslav—glanced at his watch.

  “How unfortunate,” he said. “And where is Nina Petrovna? Here, let me help you off the floor.”

  Ignoring the outstretched hand, Sukhanov heaved himself up.

  “My wife has decided to stay in the country for a few more days,” he said stiffly. “Gardening or something.”

  A look of relief passed across the man’s face.

  “A few more days, really?” he said. “Well, that’s lucky. Because as it turns out, it wouldn’t be easy for me to ... That is, I wouldn’t be able to pick her up this afternoon. I was actually coming by to leave a note on your door—I was in the neighborhood anyway, and I couldn’t reach you on the phone, so ...” He crumpled a piece of paper in his hand and looked away uncomfortably. “The thing is, Anatoly Pavlovich ... It seems I won’t be driving you any longer. They’ve reassigned the car. A matter of departmental reorganization at the Ministry, they told me.”

  “Ah,” said Sukhanov without surprise. It could be Vladislav, he supposed. Something with a V, in any case.

  “I hope I’m not leaving you in the lurch,” said the man, with another anxious glance at his watch. “Of course, you’ll get a new driver in a matter of days, just in time for Nina Petrovna’s return from the dacha, but if you need a lift in the meantime and I happen to be available, we could always work something out—privately, so to speak.”

  Sukhanov leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. The darkness under his lids was soothing, but he longed to find himself once more amid the vivid colors of a recent dream that lingered faintly in his memory—something about an empty museum in a hushed predawn hour, a violin player flying over the roofs of a turn-of-the-century town, a foretaste of greatness rising within him ... But a stray image of rats abandoning a sinking ship in a dreary procession kept fighting its way to the foreground of his mind, and the man’s increasingly impatient voice lapped at the edges of his hearing, distracting him, reminding him of a host of irrelevant, disagreeable matters that probably needed to be addressed; and he could do nothing but wordlessly wait for it all to end. Finally, as if from afar, the man said, “Well, that’s settled, then,” and Sukhanov heard a rustle of leather followed by steps thumping across the landing and down the stairs, raising a brief flurry of agitated barks in their wake, growing more hollow as they descended, then dissolving in the hazy mid-morning silence. Alone at last, he again sank to the floor and drifted to sleep.

  And he was close to catching the tail of his delightful dream when the quieted dogs renewed their barking and the steps sounded in the stairwell again, closer and closer, until the rustle of leather was all about him. Sleepily he wondered whether time had perhaps decided to play yet another little joke on him by rewinding the past few minutes—and whether he would just keep slipping deeper and deeper into the past in this terribly amusing reverse order, until he found himself once more an alert child playing with his toes on a bright green carpet, gazing down the length of his two years into the dark vortex of the unknown, so akin to death and yet so much less frightening.... But already he was being pulled up, and shaken awake, and the square-jawed man with the uncertain name was propping him up, saying almost belligerently, “No, Anatoly Pavlovich, I can’t just leave you here like this, you seem unwell. Come, the car’s downstairs, just tell me where you want to go. Does Nadezhda Sergeevna have a spare key to your place? No? How about your father-in-law? ... All right, Gorky Street it is.”

  Sukhanov drowsily allowed himself to be propelled into the elevator, and across the lobby, and into the street. The familiar black Volga—once his—was parked at the opposite curb, but two people were already sitting inside, one in the passenger seat and the other in the back; he could not see them clearly for the shadowy reflections of boughs swaying ceaselessly in the windows. The man asked him to wait, then ran across the road and tapped on the glass. As the window slid down, Sukhanov glimpsed a young woman with the petulant face of a broken porcelain doll—the man’s wife, most likely. For a while they appeared to argue, in fierce, inaudible voices, the man seemingly pleading. Then the woman said hysterically, “Well, if you must!” and rolled up the window.

  The man turned and waved, and Sukhanov trudged toward him.

  “Don’t mind Prince, he’s quite tame,” said the man enigmatically, opening the back door. Sukhanov peered in and was startled to discover that the person in the back was not a person at all but an enormous dog with brown, matted fur and a sour expression around its unmuzzled nose; but before he could object, he was bundled inside and the car moved away, precipitating a miniature snowstorm within the plastic sphere hanging from the rearview mirror and causing a yellow suitcase on the seat next to him to bump painfully against his knee. The next few minutes were profoundly unpleasant, for the man had made no introductions, and no one said anything, and the air in the car was unbearably sweet with perfume, and the dog kept looking askance at Sukhanov, salivating mutely; and after a while, he noticed that the woman in front was making a hushed, sniffling sort of sound, and realized she was crying. He had no time to wonder about it, however, for just then they came to a skidding stop, and the man announced, “Here we are.”

  Hastily murmuring “Thanks” and “So long,” Sukhanov clambered out of the car.

  After a few steps, he glanced back. The man without the name and the woman with the face of a porcelain doll were kissing, kissing with the embarrassing, awkward hunger of adolescents—and as he quickly averted his eyes, he knew that he had seen the woman before, and that she was not the man’s wife at all, and that the explanation for the whole thing was very simple and somewhat sordid and possibly a bit happy but mainly terribly, terribly sad.... And then the magnificent courtyard enclosed him darkly, and the necessity of facing Pyotr Alekseevich Malinin in just a few moments forced everything else from his mind.

  At the mention of Sukhanov’s name, the concierge waved him through: he was expected. Too impatient to wait for the elevator, he ran up the stairs to the fifth floor, stopping only once to right his tie and gather his courage. An instant later, before he had even lifted his hand to ring the bell, the imposing door opened, and Nina stood on the doorstep. She was smiling, but he could see that she too was nervous.

  “Did you remember the wine?” she whispered, ushering him into the hall. “Good. We’ll eat right now, it’ll be easier that way, and you’ll tell him later in the evening, before dessert. Don’t worry, you’ll like each other, he’s nothing like his public persona.... Only please, Tolya, you promised, no art discussions.”

  I nodded, barely listening, suddenly disoriented by the world revealed just past the door—the brilliant expanse of polished floors, the gleaming void of enormous mirrors, a table rising importantly on leonine paws, an officer with a proud mustache gazing pensively out of a gilded frame (“Mama’s father,” said Nina in passing), and beyond, an infinite perspective of unfolding rooms. Even though she had charted the floor plan for me only the other day, explaining where our bedroom would be and which space I could convert into my studio, I had had no warning that the schematic drawing on the napkin would translate into a vision of all this foreign splendor, and no idea that in the year 1957 anyone in Moscow still lived in such old-fashioned luxury. Overwhelmed, I followed Nina through the vastness of the place, catching glimpses of a cupboard full of rose-tinted porcelain (“Mama used to collect china,” explained Nina) and the elegant curve of a lustrously black piano (“Mama was the only one who played”); and when we finally arrived at a high-ceilinged hall with an elaborately set table, and a handsome middle-aged man in a velvet blazer rose from an armchair, his hand extended, his smile dry, I felt almost incapable of speaking—for in those few minutes I had understood, fully and for the firs
t time, how different my life was from hers, how great a gap lay between us, and how truly uneven our union would be.

  The dinner was not a success. Nina burned the main course; Malinin did not remember me from his lectures at the Surikov, visibly disliked the wine I had brought (it had cost me a week’s salary), and considered it beneath him to pretend otherwise on both counts; feeling suffocatingly out of my depths, I kept discoursing lamely on the impressive growth of Moscow since the war and the accomplishments of Soviet composers. After the meal, when Nina had refilled our glasses and with conspicuous haste vanished into the kitchen to “check on that pie,” I struggled to explain to this self-satisfied man who sat frowning at his wine across the table that I loved his daughter madly, that she and I were, in fact, engaged to marry, that the date had already been set for September twenty-second, less than a month away ... I had hoped to find words that were meaningful and sincere, but ended by simply blurting it out. He listened calmly, pressing the tips of his fingers together, avoiding my eyes. When I finished, he demonstratively pushed aside his half-full glass and cleared his throat.

  “Do you know, young man, I’ve been hearing things about you,” he said. “Leonid Penkin, your director, is an old friend of mine. He tells me he is quite disappointed in your prospects. It appears that, well, how shall I put it ... You are not quite the stuff of which successful artists are made. Frankly, it doesn’t surprise me—my daughter has never been careful in her choice of acquaintances. Though at least she’s given up that awful Jewish fellow, what’s his name ...”

  His voice was low—he must not have wanted Nina to overhear—and his meaning unmistakable. In stunned silence, I looked at myself through his coolly calculating eyes, and saw a pathetic little teacher breathlessly eager to enter into a lucky alliance with a race of demigods. Flushed with humiliation, I wanted to leave at once, but felt unable to move, as if trapped in a nightmare—a slow, perverse nightmare in which darkness seeped into the room through the heavy crimson curtains, seconds rustled quietly in the grandfather clock in the corner, the gold-rimmed dessert plates glittered emptily on the table, the crystal chandelier sparkled coldly, and in a precise near-whisper the man whose face resembled so much the face of my love was talking about his own position in life at my age, and some nice young man named Misha Buryshkin or Broshkin or Burykin who was also in love with Nina and promised to go far, very far, at the Ministry of Culture, and certain comforts that Nina, in the pride of her youth, might think she could do without but which were really in her blood ...

  And as he spoke, the dreary colors and communal smells of my own impoverished childhood rose unsought in my memory, and I thought of Professor Gradsky, and the twisted stump of the chandelier in the ceiling of our room, and the day I had learned that the old man and his wife had once lived alone in our vast six-room apartment—and all at once my humiliation gave way to another, more powerful feeling. The old anger, the anger of the deprived and the dispossessed, reared its righteous head inside my soul. For a minute I tried to control it, but the conceited man in the velvet blazer went on talking in his insultingly reserved voice, and the chandelier went on sparkling, and finally, standing up so abruptly that I knocked down the chair, I told him, with the freedom of someone dreaming, exactly what I thought about his so-called comforts and his protégé at the Ministry and his unflattering opinion of his own daughter ... As my voice climbed higher and higher, I no longer knew what I was saying. Everything was hot and swirling around me, and at first he was smiling derisively, but soon his face grew taut and white—possibly when I shouted that his success as an artist was a sham, a joke of history, that he couldn’t paint worth a damn, that of the two of us—

  And at that instant I saw Nina standing in the doorway, pale and wide-eyed, a soapy, dripping plate in her hands. I stopped in mid-sentence, looked at her, looked at her father, then picked up Malinin’s glass of wine, and finished it in one gulp.

  “Sorry,” I said flatly, and walked across the room, past the frozen Nina, past the piano and the porcelain, along the endless corridor, and out onto the landing. Carefully I closed the door behind me and remained still for a while, waiting for the swirling to stop. But as I stood there, trying not to think, knowing full well I had lost her, I gradually became aware of a growing din, a rising tumult of incoherent voices, the sound of a broken plate; and in another minute, the door was flung open, Nina flew sobbing into my arms, and somewhere close behind, her father cried, “I swear, if you leave this house now—”

  With a violence that shook the walls, Nina slammed the door shut, and his voice cut off. The two of us were left facing each other across a shocked silence.

  Then someone cracked open a door on the opposite side of the landing, and a middle-aged blonde in a lacy apron edged her head around the jamb.

  “What’s all that noise?” she asked with disapproval, looking at Sukhanov. “No use knocking like that, Pyotr Alekseevich is out of town. He’s gone to the Crimea with his grandson.”

  Sukhanov stared at her dully.

  “Won’t be returning for at least a week either,” the woman added almost gleefully.

  “Oh,” Sukhanov muttered. “Of course. How could I have forgotten?”

  And suddenly he could visualize it so clearly: a crystal bowl melting into its reflection in the still, black surface of the lion-footed table just on the other side of this wall, and in the bowl, among a jumble of many temporarily displaced but potentially useful odds and ends (a button not yet matched to a garment, a solitary cuff link, a mysterious screw), a bunch of keys, seemingly ordinary yet possessing the power of some fairy-tale genie to transport him to a marvelous, self-contained world of hot baths and fresh clothes and steaming teas and strawberry jams and maybe even strong liqueurs—a world that was now twice removed, separated from him not by one but by two locked doors.... He turned away and plodded toward the elevator, and the aging blonde across the landing followed his steps with such curious eyes that, glancing up with his finger already poised over the elevator button, he thought of saying something cutting—and then saw one last chance of cheating his fate.

  “Pardon me,” he said with all the dignity he could muster in his broken glasses and mud-stained pants, “but you wouldn’t know if anyone here has a key to Pyotr Alekseevich’s place? He might have left one with a neighbor.”

  The woman’s birdlike eyes narrowed suspiciously. He hastened to explain who he was, told her in an entreating voice about his being locked out of his own house, his hunger, his need of sleep.... She softened perceptibly.

  “You are in luck,” she said after a brief hesitation. “I keep his spare key. Wait here, I’ll go call the resort.”

  The ease of this resolution had an almost dreamlike quality to it. She returned a few minutes later. Pyotr Alekseevich, she had been told, was taking his customary promenade along the sea. She would try phoning again in a short while, for, naturally, she would not presume to release the keys without his permission, not even to his son-in-law. As she talked, she cracked her door wider, and Sukhanov smelled a rich aroma of mushroom soup and saw a stretch of cozy blue carpet in the hallway and, on the wall, a girlish fur-trimmed coat and an oversized purple jacket; and, filling in the blanks—a daughter, a son, a leisurely family dinner—he found himself envying this stranger her quiet domestic world, and longed to be a part of it, if only for an instant, if only—

  “So you’ll have to come back in a bit,” the woman said. “Half an hour or so. I’d ask you in, but I’m in the middle of cooking.”

  “Oh, certainly,” he said. “I understand. You’re very kind as it is.”

  And smiling sadly, he pressed the elevator button.

  Back in the street, he strolled aimlessly along the pavement. When he neared the corner by the Hotel National, where Gorky Street emptied into the square, the many-columned building of the Manège filled his view. The air had grown much colder now, and presently a snowflake melted on his cheek. He paused to file away, for some future us
e, the liquid reflections of headlights in the slush of the road, the powdery dust beginning to flicker in the pastel glow of streetlamps, the white columns, the black trees, the blue shadows, and above it all, the quickly darkening skies, luminously pregnant as they could be only on an evening before a snowfall. Then, at once aware of the ache in his fingers, he rapidly crossed Marx Avenue and, lowering his unwieldy parcel to the ground, prepared to wait. He was there only for a minute when Lev Belkin strode across the square, a bundle under his arm, and even at this distance I could tell he was smiling broadly.

  “Glad?” Lev shouted.

  “You bet!” I shouted back.

  “Nervous?” Lev said, closer now.

  “Not a bit,” I replied, picking up my load. “I have a feeling it will all go splendidly.”

  Together we entered the Manège.

  It was the last day of November in the year 1962, and I already imagined it emblazoned on my future memory as the date on which my prolonged apprenticeship was finally destined to end, and to the sonorous cymbals of public acclaim, my heart trembling with gladness, I, Anatoly Sukhanov, a name among names, would enter the gladiators’ ring of art history, stepping into the long-awaited spotlight out of the dim shadows of anonymous toil.

  I had lived in anticipation of this day for a long time. The thaw whose first astonishing inroads into the snowdrifts we had witnessed in 1956 was melting its way through history and literature, but had barely made itself felt in the arctic bleakness of Soviet art; and even though for me the preceding years had been rich with that indescribable richness of small-scale triumphs that only an artist knows in his sweaty task of creation, yet little by little my inability to share my canvases with anyone but a handful of close friends, my struggle to maintain my precarious position at the institute, the precautions I continued to take in order to conceal my real self from colleagues and chance acquaintances, the effort of teaching what I no longer believed in—in short, the pervasive duplicity of my existence—poisoned my joy in living, my joy in working, my very desire to paint; and with fading hope, I dreamt of a day when I would tear away the suffocating shroud of falsity and show them, show them all, the ripened fruits of all those years.