And then, unexpectedly, magically, the day came, at the end of a particularly trying month in a trying year, shortly after Nina’s thirtieth birthday.
Nina still tried to pretend, to herself as much as to me, that she was the same girl who one day in 1957 had left her home, breaking with her father, forsaking her old life, and had stood next to me, wearing that white, narrow-waisted dress I liked so much, her back straight, her smile proud, her eyes shining, while an officious woman with thick ankles had monotonously recited solemn commonplaces from a worn compendium of Soviet marriage transactions and Lev’s Alla had giggled into a bunch of wilting gladioli; but even though she continued to call herself the “high priestess” of my art and uncomplainingly slipped away to the kitchen to give me space to work, I could sense the beginning of a change, an insidious, stealthy, corrosive change, in the air between us.
On the evening of November third, the day she turned thirty, she came home from her job at the Tretyakovka wearing that slightly pinched expression I had been noticing of late, and when I unveiled her present—a portrait of her as a mermaid I had worked on in secret, to surprise her—she smiled with her lips only and said in a toneless voice, “Oh. Another painting.” Then she left for a dinner party at her father’s (after years of stubborn resentment, he had offered her a semblance of peace, which failed to include me). I was still up, waiting for her, when she returned, well after midnight. Her face, as she walked in, arrested me, so uncommonly animated it was, and more beautiful than I had seen it in months: her cheeks flushed, I imagined with compliments and expensive liqueurs, her gaze brightened, perhaps with golden memories of her fairy-tale youth; but my impulse to tenderly tilt her head back, look into her eyes, salvage at least something of our day together died a hurried death when I noticed a peacock-blue scintillation following her passage through the shadows of our crowded room. She was wearing a pair of sapphire earrings, and it was they, nothing else, that lent a deep blue brilliance to her gray irises and suffused her pallid skin with an excited warmth.
“What are these?” I asked sharply, knowing the answer already.
“A gift from my father.”
“We can’t accept such things from that man.”
“He is my father,” she said. “He loves me. He wanted to do something nice for my birthday. And you ...” She stopped, looked away. “You don’t know anything about him.”
I had the impression she had meant to say something else but changed her mind.
“I know enough,” I said. “I know what he is. I know what he does—bargains away his dignity piece by piece to the highest bidder, paints trash so he can have his cushy life—”
“You paint trash too,” she interrupted. “Your studio at the institute—”
My breath caught. “I paint trash so I can do this,” I said, shoving my chin at the dusty deposits of canvases in the corners, no longer bothering to keep my voice down. “What I do at the institute is irrelevant—this is who I really am.”
“And how do you know who my father really is?”
“Oh, I see—after a day of prostituting himself, he plays the violin or something?”
“Have you ever considered, Tolya,” said Nina slowly, “that you may actually be wrong about something or someone? You think my father is an amoral, selfish man, but maybe ...” She paused. “Maybe he just wanted to make me and my mother happy.”
Again I had the feeling that some other, harsher words had alighted on her lips, then been discarded—and it was these unspoken reproaches and accusations, combined with her unnatural calm, that sent a wave of fury crashing over me.
“Well, how noble of him,” I shouted. “He sold his soul to the devil so you could have your jewelry, and your mother her piano and her gilded teacups!”
I regretted my words as soon as they had escaped me, but it was too late. Nina’s face, now drawn and pale in the yellow glow of a bedside lamp, seemed suspended between expressions; then she walked to the window and, staring out into the dreary darkness punctuated by anemic streetlamps, carefully removed the earrings, balanced their tiny blue radiance on her palm, and considered them briefly before setting them down on the windowsill. When she faced me, her eyes held no love, no emotion at all.
“So my mother collected porcelain and was passionate about music,” she said softly. “Is it so wrong to want to have beauty in your life? Not everyone is willing to live ... to live like this. And is it really so contemptible to want to give beauty to someone you love?”
Then, not waiting for my answer, she turned and, usually private to a fault, started to undress as if I were not there. In silence I watched her step out of the sea-colored dress her father had brought her years earlier from a trip to Italy, which she still wore on every birthday and New Year’s Eve, gently smooth its creases before hanging it in our makeshift wardrobe, then take off her stockings and, sliding her hand inside, raise them against the light and in a seemingly familiar, tired ritual check for fresh runs. As I looked at the silky shimmer spread between her fingers, I thought mechanically that stockings were very hard to come by nowadays; and on the heels of that thought, the famous words of Chekhov popped into my mind: “A human being should be entirely beautiful: the face, the clothes, the soul, and the thoughts.” And suddenly I was frightened—frightened that something irreparable had happened between us. I thought of the squalor of our dingy place, which had more space for paintings than for us; and the stairs that always reeked of urine; and the anxious hovering of my mother, who kept imagining footsteps outside our door and strange clicks on our phone line, and who, in truth, did not like Nina very much and referred to her, with pursed lips and barely out of earshot—for our communal quarters were too cramped for secrets—as “your fine lady”; I thought too that none of it was ever likely to change.
And then, for one moment, I almost believed that all my creations of the past five years—all those flights of fancy, all those sleepless nights, the bouts of despair, the transports of happiness, the smuggled revelations, the full moons, the museum vaults, the lingering dreams, the stolen moments of love—all of those things were nothing but idle imaginings, youthful indulgences, rainbow dust on a butterfly’s wing; and that my real life was here, now, in this unlivable room with its odors of ancient pipes, dust, and paint, with this silent woman who was lying in bed, her back toward me, pretending to be asleep.... And so unbearable was the thought that I did not move for a long time, and the shadows twitched and cavorted in the corners, and my mother murmured in haunted nightmares behind the wall, and my works, my gifts, my children, begged to be released into the light, and Nina’s breathing gradually assumed a different, measured rhythm, and still I stood in the dark, and after perhaps an hour Nina suddenly said without turning, “You know, Tolya, there is more than one way to lose your soul.”
And then, after several dismal, mostly silent weeks, the telephone rang.
For the full first minute, with Lev stuttering in his excitement and Alla shrieking in the background, I understood nothing. “Pinch me, I’m dreaming,” he kept repeating. Then Nina walked into the corridor, her face remote, her eyelids swollen with insomnia.
“Please don’t shout like that,” she said flatly. “It’s seven-thirty in the morning.”
My hands were jumping so much I could not immediately fit the receiver into the cradle; then, drawing her to me, “Listen, you won’t believe this,” I said, already anticipating the wondrous light about to come into her eyes.
A couple of months earlier, a major retrospective—Thirty Years of Moscow Art—had opened at the Manège. Lev and I had gone and, having found the whole affair, with a few exceptions, staid and uninspiring, had pronounced it worthy of being displayed in the former stable. But now an event little short of miraculous had taken place. A benevolent official from the Ministry of Culture had approached a few openly experimental artists with an offer to join the show, among them Ilya Beliutin, who ran an unofficial studio, and his students; and as Beliutin happened to
be an old acquaintance of our Yastrebov, the loose invitation had been extended to the members of Viktor’s circle as well—the bearded Roshchin, and Lev, and myself. True, we were allowed only one work each, but all the same, it was a beginning, was it not, and one should be glad even of such—
“Oh Tolya,” Nina interrupted, clasping her hands, “so what if it’s only one painting—it’s the Manège, millions of people will see it, and you will be noticed, I know you will be! My God, it’s wonderful, just wonderful.... When does it start?”
It was all happening with the rapidity of a dream: we had been told to bring our paintings by tonight; Lev and I were meeting by the Manège that evening; the show was to open to the public the very next day. Mother and Nina left for work, but I quickly summoned an impressive cough for the benefit of a sympathetic secretary on the other end of the line and spent several hours in an incredulous, delightful haze, leafing through my canvases as through pages of my life, remembering each birth, at times tender and slow, at times furious and breathless, passing judgment on the sum total of my existence as an artist—my early studies of trains and reflections; the mythical and urban landscapes that had occupied me all through 1958; my subsequent fascination with surrealism, in an attempt to transplant the lessons of Dali and Magritte to Russian soil; and in the past two years, my ultimate arrival at what I believed to be my own, truly unique style—trying to choose from among them the one painting most representative of my philosophy of art, or possibly the one most original, or the one most beautiful, or perhaps simply the one most dear to my heart. In the early afternoon, when the air had already begun to thicken into blue softness outside the window and I was still at a loss, Nina called.
“Tolya, I’ve been thinking,” she said, and I could hear a smile in her voice. “What about that early one, with the reflection of a woman’s face in a train window, you know the one? Of course, it’s not as complex as your current pieces—but it may be easier for people to understand, and, well ... It’s what made me realize how brilliant you were.”
“Oh,” I said, smiling also. “Well, since you put it that way—”
Once inside, we unwrapped our bundles. Lev had selected an abstract piece.
“What do you think?” he said uncertainly, turning it to the light. “It’s a new one.”
I did not have the heart to tell him the truth. Together we watched our paintings being mounted on the walls; I found it exhilarating and almost frightening to see a deeply private vision of mine splayed across the impersonal white surface under the clinical glare of gallery lamps, with a rectangular label bearing my name underneath. Roshchin and a few others of our acquaintance were milling about, all with the same slightly disoriented look on their faces, but I did not stay to talk to them. I wanted to preserve the sonorous fullness of this day unmarred by nervous banter, insincere compliments, exaggerated camaraderie, so I could carry it, slowly, carefully, like some precious elixir, through the gleaming blue city, through the quietly falling snow, through the softly illuminated streets and the darkened courtyards, and present it, with not a single drop spilled, to her, my Nina.
She met me on the landing, kissing me quickly. She wore the white dress of our wedding day, her bare arms were goose-bumped, and her eyes were bright; she had bought a bottle of champagne, and it was lovely to hear her laugh at the dry explosion of the cork later in the evening. My mother quit the dinner table without finishing her glass, her lips tightly pressed together, and we listened to her shuffling behind the closed door of her room, muttering darkly about reprisals and retributions, until the hum of the television drowned out her voice.
“Poor woman, she never stops worrying,” Nina whispered.
For a while after that, we sat silently in the cozily lit kitchen. I was watching the snow whirling outside the window, and Nina was peeling a tangerine, the first of the season. And all at once the scent of the fruit, sweet yet with the slightest hint of bitterness, and the light taste of champagne lingering on my tongue, and the soft, furry snowflakes dancing in the sky like some white winter moths, and Nina’s profile bent in the gentle glow of the green lampshade, and the knowledge of this wonderful change that was drawing closer and closer, all merged into a feeling of such intensity, such completion, that I felt this to be the happiest moment of my life—happier even than that luminous, color-mad moment when, with Chagall and Kandinsky for witnesses, Nina had promised to marry me—or perhaps it was still the same moment, now in its long-awaited fulfillment.... Smiling, Nina looked up.
“Here,” she said, holding out half of the tangerine. “It’s a bit sour, but so delicious.”
We did not sleep at all that night. The snow stopped soon after midnight, and immediately the sky grew dark and deep like velvet; then the grayness began to creep into the nooks and crannies of the world; and sometime later, in the pale light of a cold dawn, Nina lifted her face to mine and said, “Tolya, I’m so sorry about my birthday. I know I was unfair. It’s just that as a girl I always imagined what my life would be like at thirty, and, well ... It was harder than I had expected, that’s all.”
For a minute unspoken words hung between us. Then she said with a small sigh, “But I never stopped believing in your talent, not for an instant, and I would have stood by you no matter what. Still, I’m so relieved this finally happened. We’ve waited for this for a long time.”
“Yes,” I said, kissing her lightly. “A very long time. I’m sorry too. But everything will be different now, you’ll see.”
And then the sunrise of December first was upon us.
TWENTY
When I left the house that morning, I did not go directly to the Manège. Perhaps I feared the disappointment of seeing indifferent crowds stroll with scarcely a glance past my work; or maybe I simply wanted to prolong the anticipation, sensing it to be immensely richer than the most resounding acclaim could ever be. The bleak day smelled of winter, the sky and the houses were the running gray and yellow of a spare watercolor, and rare pedestrians glided through the pale landscapes in silent, chilled preoccupation, leaving behind black garlands of footprints filled with the glistening slush of yesterday’s melting snow. Wandering along the wet pavements in their wake, I did not think of the exhibition that at this very moment, perhaps, was opening its doors to eager visitors only a few streets and squares away; but a deep happiness, a kind of muted, exultant hum, underlay all my steps, all my breaths, all my heartbeats, infusing my walk with a triumphant spring and my soul with a glow of well-being.
And by the time I turned a random corner and unexpectedly saw the Manège rise into view, I had understood, with an effortless, wordless certainty, that I was finally ready to undertake my most ambitious project yet—a challenge I had cherished secretly for many years—a series of seven paintings that would merge everything I felt about Russia, and history, and art, and God.
Already impatient to return home and begin to sketch, I started toward the Manège. The sky was low before another snowfall, and the ancient towers of the Kremlin squatted morosely under the sagging clouds. Although there were more people here, it was suddenly so quiet I could hear the echoing steps of a man running along the street, heedlessly dogged by his own frantic shadow. I felt that my vision had never been sharper, as if all my artistic powers had been released at once. Happiness soared inside me like a mad angel. The first painting, I already knew, would be called The Garden of Eden, and its predominant color would be green—the lush, sunny green at the heart of a birch forest, the subtler, mysterious green of Nina’s eyes, the simple, joyful green of the carpet I had played on as a child.... A snowflake pricked the skin of my hand; the running man was closer; I could see he had no hat on. At the opposite end of the spectrum, on the other side of the gates of paradise, would be the dull green of a chain-link fence, the poisonous green of a neon sign, the oppressive green of hospital walls, the . . . the ... The running man was upon me now. His face was distorted, his eyes wild. It was Lev Belkin.
“It’s over,”
he gasped. “Where have you been? It’s all over.”
“What is it? What’s the matter?” I said, laughing as I arrested his flight, already anticipating some impish joke.
He shook himself free of my arms.
“Khrushchev and some bigwigs ... showed up at the Manège this morning,” he said between rasping breaths. “An official visit ... we weren’t told about. It was ... I can’t tell you what it was like. Where the hell have you been?”
It was not a joke after all. He sounded furious and, underneath it, frightened.
“I was just walking around,” I said quickly. “What happened?”
“I’ll tell you what happened.” He kept glancing over his shoulder as if worried he was being chased. “Khrushchev hated everything he saw. Abstract paintings in particular, but the rest as well. He went all red in the face and shouted that our works were good only for covering urinals, and other things too—terrible things.... Real art should ennoble the individual and arouse him to action, these kinds of pictures are amoral and anti-Soviet, they have wasted money on us, we should be sent far away and put to work cutting trees so we could pay back the state for all the paper we’ve besmirched—”
“Did he ... did he say anything about my painting?” I asked haltingly.
Lev grabbed my coat, so violently that I felt something rip. For a second I thought he was going to hit me. Then, slowly, his mouth softened.
“Your painting?” he said, releasing me. “Tolya, are you listening? Who cares what he thought about your painting? I’m sure he didn’t notice it—he didn’t really look at any of our things. He just saw something different and charged like a bull at a red cape. Roshchin thinks the whole affair was a provocation—that bastard from the Ministry who invited us to the show must have known about the state visit all along, and hoped that Khrushchev would have precisely this reaction. God, Tolya, don’t you understand? We are finished, we are all finished! They are declaring war on us—prison camps and all the rest!”
Olga Grushin Page 29