Olga Grushin

by The Dream Life of Sukhanov (v5)

  Then they were gone, and their chauffeured car slunk away into the night behind my back, leaving the street empty again; but I remained still, abruptly snatched out of my mindless drifting of the past week. My mouth tingled with the burning aftertaste of my father-in-law’s cognac; the snow prickled the back of my neck, my bare hands; in the skies above me floated a few lit windows, behind which families were probably gathered around pastel-tinted lampshades, engaged in some domestic, tranquil pastimes I could not imagine, and countless dark windows, their texture indistinguishable from that of the clouds, behind which other families were no doubt sleeping the dreamless sleep of well-being. And as I stood there, looking up, I understood, for the first time since the Manège disaster, just what my life was bound to become.

  There was no hope of my finding stable employment now; I would be forced into driving a night bus at best, sweeping streets more likely. My earnings would be laughable, not enough to cover even a portion of the overpriced canvases and oils I would have to obtain on the black market (for, along with my position, I had lost my access to subsidized art stores); the three of us would go on living until our dying day in this intimate, humiliating closeness, our undergarments drying communally on bathroom pipes; and in a couple of years, when my mother retired, it would be Nina, Nina alone, who would have to bear the weight of supporting us all, of paying for my secret, dangerous calling—paying with long days and longer nights, paying by parting with every small pleasure in which she still indulged on occasion—a ballet seen from the top gallery, a chocolate-covered cherry savored with an evening tea—and paying with something else besides, something she might have wanted more than my art, something we never discussed....

  I remembered the emptiness in Nina’s eyes on her thirtieth birthday, and all the words she was always on the brink of saying yet never said, and her growing reluctance to meet her old girlfriends, and her lying in bed night after night, her face to the wall, whether counting flowers on the wallpaper blotchily illuminated by a streetlamp in an attempt to trick her insomnia or thinking bleak thoughts, I did not know. And then the words I had tried to forget, Malinin’s words, sounded clearly in my mind—“For what would you sacrifice yourself—and not just yourself, may I remind you, but your mother and your wife as well?”—and I was chilled with a sudden fear that I had gotten it all wrong, hopelessly wrong, and that my heroic intent to carry on with my outlawed art was not the sacrifice I believed it to be, but merely an easy, selfish succumbing to my own desires, and that the true sacrifice lay in a seemingly craven decision to give it all up. I was still certain of the road I myself would take if offered the choice between comfort and immortality, even happiness and immortality—but did I have the right to choose it for others, for those I loved?

  Then, too, exactly how confident was I of my posthumous fame, a small, cold voice inquired in my ear. Daydreaming, I used to envision a sunlit stretch of a museum corridor, precise little plaques with titles and dates, a generous chapter in art history volumes, printed on delightfully crisp, gleaming paper; but in the course of one week my vision had undergone a painful transformation and now found itself crammed into a windowless closet stacked with canvases that only janitors saw from time to time. For painting, unlike literature, was a tragic art: it could not be multiplied in a predawn hour on a rickety typewriter, or cross borders sewn into a coat lining, or live forever, weightless and unstoppable, in a dark, safe corner of someone’s memory. It was eternally bound to the earthly, the material—a canvas, an easel, oils, brushes, a wall—and ultimately to time and place; and to its time and place it owed its eventual survival or destruction. Russia had not been kind to artists. I thought of all the treasures burned in wars and revolutions, of priceless frescoes washed off cathedral walls by rains and snows, of Chagall’s masterpieces imprisoned in an anonymous storage room of the Tretyakovka, mildewing away brushstroke by brushstroke, inspiration by inspiration. I thought too of the persistent sadness weighing down my soul during my nightly vigils in the dusty graveyard of my own unwanted paintings, my stillborn children, and the dismal scent of failure mixing stealthily with the smell of turpentine; and then, for no apparent reason, my early memories flitted through my mind—the black shoes striding across the hushed Moscow night, the Professor holding out a trembling hand, my mother on the telephone covering her mouth as if to stifle a scream, the lonely, broken flight my father had taken from one darkness into another ...

  And already, in some deep, obscure corner of my soul, an even more terrible doubt was stirring. Was I really so sure of my talent to risk everything for it—to turn my back defiantly on this chance, this last chance, of giving Nina the happiness she deserved, all in the vague hope that one day I would create, amidst the misery and disappointment, something so unique, so beautiful, so great that it would fully justify our wasted lives?

  The door of the building opened, and an adolescent came out, leading a disdainful greyhound on a leash. Beyond the dog’s arched back I caught another brilliant flash of the marble, the bronze, the light dancing in the mirrors ... And then I knew that in the few minutes I had passed standing on this sidewalk before a trash can in the whirling snow I had traveled a dizzying distance.

  I looked down at the book in my hands; its cover was running with water. I wiped it on my sleeve, slipped it inside my coat, and walked home.

  By the time I climbed the stairs to our apartment, I was chilled to the bone. I let myself in without a noise. Silence and wretchedness seeped from under the closed door to our room, where Nina was probably lying awake in the dark, just as I had left her, but in my mother’s room the nightly news hummed faintly, and a thin streak of light leaked into the corridor. For a minute I stood hesitating; then, softly, I knocked. The noise of the television faded, and my mother’s voice asked, “Yes, what is it?”

  The ceiling lamp was burning, but she was in bed, dressed in a thick, salmon-colored nightgown, her head wound tightly in curlers. An aging smell of Krasnyi Oktyabr, the perfume I remembered since childhood, hung in the air.

  “Tolya, what happened?” she said anxiously, leaning on her elbow. “Your hair is all wet!” The sound was off now, but black-and-white figures continued to jerk across the screen, casting sickly shadows on her face.

  “Nothing happened,” I said. “I was out, and it’s snowing out there.” Gingerly I sat down on the edge of her bed. “Mama, can I ask you something?” She was looking at me with frightened eyes. “I’m wondering,” I said awkwardly, “do you like my paintings?”

  Her mouth grew tight.

  “It’s not nice to treat your mother like this,” she said in a petulant voice and, reaching over to the television, turned the volume knob. “It’s late, my nerves are troubling me, you come in looking all wild, and here I’m already thinking God knows what—and you ask a silly question like that! Tolya, it’s not nice.”

  “Mama, please,” I said. “This is important. I really need to know what you think.”

  She looked at me uncertainly, as if trying to gauge whether I was joking.

  “And now,” said the bright voice of the announcer in the background, “for those who are still with us at this hour, the folk ensemble Samotsvety will perform a song from Vologda.” A row of women in peasant dresses, holding the tips of their fingers under their chins, commenced wailing about some youth who refused to accept a chest of gold in place of his beloved. My mother switched the television off.

  “It’s because of your problems at work, isn’t it?” she said with a sigh. “Well, Tolya, of course you can draw lovely things—faces, flowers, houses, just like a photograph.” She gave me a pat on the hand. “Remember that one picture you did, for your graduation I think it was, of a soldier riding a horse into a village? It made me proud, such a wonderful picture! Only I wish you’d draw like that again, Tolya, because the things you do now, I must tell you, they aren’t nearly as nice. It’s no wonder the authorities closed down your show.... No, don’t look away, you wanted your mother’s ad
vice, so I’m telling you, your new pictures are unpleasant. I can’t imagine how your Nina even sleeps in the same room with this art of yours—she must have nightmares all the time.”

  “Nina loves my paintings,” I said quietly.

  “Sometimes I just don’t know about you,” my mother said, shaking her head. “You went to an institute, yet you don’t understand simple things.”

  The cognac I had drunk was making the edges of my thoughts foggy. “What do you mean?” I asked. She peered at me across a small silence. I wondered if Nina was listening on the other side of the thin wall—and hoped she was not.

  “I know you think I’m old, dull, and ignorant,” said my mother plaintively, “no match for your fine young wife—but I can still recognize an unhappy woman when I see one, and I tell you, Tolya, Nina is unhappy. Why don’t you two have children?”

  “Mother, I—”

  “Because of your pictures!” she interrupted. “Because you’ve turned our home into some sort of underground lair! Because you think a child would disrupt the important things you do! But I will say this to you, Tolya. The girl was twenty-four when you married her. She turned thirty last month. How much longer do you plan to wait? It may already be too late for her, and every day she leaves for work with her eyes red from tears, but you—you are so busy playing with your colors you don’t even notice! You think she loves your pictures? Mark your mother’s words, even if she pretends to now, she’ll come to hate everything about them when she finds herself alone at forty.”

  It was not an answer to the question I had asked—but it was an answer. For a moment it was so quiet I could hear the mattress springs moaning under Nina’s weight in the next room. Then, averting my eyes from my mother’s reddened face, her pink and green curlers, the slightly soiled lace of her nightgown’s collar, I stood up and, muttering about the late hour, slipped out into the corridor and closed her door, behind which I could already discern the renewed ululations of the folk chorus Samotsvety.

  For an endless minute I waited unmoving in the dark, trying not to give in to the vast, unknown terror that crouched at my back like a beast poised to leap, fighting the desire to cry. Then the minute passed, and breathing more evenly, I picked up Malinin’s book and took it into the kitchen. And in the same green circle of light in which Nina and I had shared a tangerine on that wonderfully happy night before the Manège opening—only a week ago, yet so long past—I pored over purple deserts swarming with menacing statues, somnolent faces mutating into giant insects, musical instruments drooping like soft organic matter, empty squares of ancient towns flooded with harsh yellow light, contorted bodies dissected into drawers or supported on stilts, brightly feathered canaries trilling inside rib cages; and gradually the quiet but persistent chirping of birds filled the shadowy crannies of my mind, and the air began to shimmer with strange, luminous phantoms, elusive, beautiful, and terrible like dreams; and instead of mulling over the article I was to write for my father-in-law, I sat still for a while, vacantly gazing into the street, where the snow was no longer falling, and seeing paintings before my eyes—tens, hundreds, thousands of paintings that lived inside me and that I might never paint now....

  Slippered footsteps dragged along the floor, and when I turned around, I saw my mother in the doorway. I stared at her. She wore a button-down housedress, the curlers were gone from her hair, and her face had aged twenty-some years since the conversation we had had only an hour earlier.

  “Tolya, are you sure you are well?” she said. “You look a bit ... Goodness, you broke your glasses! I thought right away there was something funny about you.”

  Disconcerted, I moved my eyes around the kitchen, recognizing nothing. A kettle was about to whistle on the stove, two cups were set out on the table amid a profusion of sugar cookies, a clock on the wall announced five in the afternoon, and a brightly feathered canary in a cage chirped quietly but persistently in its corner. A tranquil Arbat alley rustled with the yellowing leaves of early autumn outside the window. I could suddenly taste cognac in my mouth.

  My mother was watching me with puzzlement.

  “And what’s that you are reading?” she asked.

  Cautiously I lowered my eyes. The book of surrealist reproductions had not been a dream within a dream, I saw then—it was still lying open before me; I must have picked it up during my muddled visit to Malinin’s place. And off the page a face looked up at me—a face almost nondescript, yet horrifying in its familiarity ... I blinked, pressed my hands to my temples, turned the page over and back, hoping I was mistaken, hoping to God I was mistaken—and still it was there, impossible, absolutely impossible, and yet so real.

  The painting was by Salvador Dali, dated 1936, titled The Pharmacist of Ampurdán in Search of Absolutely Nothing. Across the gleaming reproduction trod a small, pudgy man in a faded brown suit, with reddish-blond hair and a sharp little beard. Incredibly, there he was again, on the opposite page, carefully lifting the soft corner of a molten piano—and two pages later, peering from behind a monstrously decaying body in Dalí’s Premonition of Civil War, wearing the same brown suit, his face bearing the same mild expression suitable for a provincial apothecary.

  But the man in the Dali paintings was not a provincial apothecary.

  The man in the paintings was my pseudo-cousin, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dalevich.

  TWENTY-ONE

  At first, the world was filled with an inebriated buzz. Then, slowly, out of darkness, out of chaos, islands of thought began to rise, small at first, then more and more far-reaching, forming chains, archipela goes, merging into continents, until the fog lifted fully, and he was standing on solid ground. Of course, he had always known Dalevich for a malicious presence—but only now did he realize how much of the puzzle had been hidden from him before, and how different the completed picture was; and he felt the frightened exhilaration of a man who, after an eternity of blind groping along the narrow walls of a familiar prison, eventually stumbles upon a light switch, flips it warily, and finds himself not among the stale smells and predictable dangers of his narrow cell but in some barren landscape, caught in a blue snowdrift under a black sky, watching strange shadows weave an eerie dance in the cold, starry distance.

  He had spent twenty-some years maligning, kicking, slapping, insulting, and ultimately crucifying art in general, his former god, and surrealism in particular, his former idol; now, he saw, art was simply having its revenge. With the calm, omnipotent patience of a spurned ancient divinity, some invisible force of the universe—call it God, or fate, or justice—had allowed him to rise as high as he ever would, so it might bring him down all the more harshly. And it was, of course, during that magnificently full evening of Malinin’s celebration at the Manège, at the very moment when the Minister of Culture had approached him with an invitation to a private party, that the unerring and unstoppable mechanism of punishment had been triggered. Yes, he thought, as he stared with unseeing eyes at the Dali painting before him, at that moment the cup of his success had finally run over and the walls of his long-lasting defenses had begun to shudder under the swelling pressure of unbidden synergies pushing him toward his past—another opening at the Manège, another painting of Nina, another encounter with Lev Belkin in the shadow of those neoclassical columns.... And then, after a theatrically sustained pause of two days, an unprepossessing phantom called Fyodor Mikhailovich Dalevich had stood on his doorstep, profusely apologetic for disturbing his supper.

  Fate’s modest delivery man, art’s neatly efficient avenger, summoned by the hostile god from a surrealist painting, clothed in middle-aged flesh, furnished with a suitcase, a hat (painted by Magritte), a canary (courtesy of Ernst), the meek manner of a provincial relative, a wealth of provocative artistic ideas, and a transparent last name (and, indeed, it occurred to Sukhanov, the first name and patronymic of Dostoyevsky, author of The Double, the story of a man whose life was taken over by his own ghost), Dalí’s Dalevich had clearly been dispatched into Sukhanov’s
well-ordered existence to wreak whatever havoc he could in the present while simultaneously orchestrating a disturbing slide into the past—a double task at which he had excelled. There was the earliest memory of Sukhanov’s father, released by his mother’s comment about Malvina, the surrealist bird Dalevich had presented to her; and the childhood supper culminating in the arrival of his father, which at the last instant had given way to Dalevich’s arrival; and the sight of Dalevich hunched over in an armchair at night, which had brought to the surface the Morozov boys, Professor Gradsky, and his first discovery of art; and the stroll with Dalevich, which had led him to the evacuation years and his art lessons with Oleg Romanov ...

  Nadezhda Sergeevna delicately coughed into her palm.

  “I think you should go home and take a nap,” she said. “A nap will be good for you. I happen to be expecting someone over for tea anyway. Of course, I’m very glad you dropped by—”

  “That’s all right,” Sukhanov said, rising. “I only wanted to say hello, I was passing—”

  The bell rang in the hallway.

  “Oh,” she said, and glanced at him anxiously. “Oh, that must be my guest.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m leaving already,” he said. The bell rang again. She seemed about to wring her hands. “Well, aren’t you going to let them in?” He attempted to smile. “Go on, I’ll stay a moment.”

  When her shuffling steps had retreated into the dimness, he walked to the window and wrestled with the windowpane, still bound with last winter’s insulating tape. Finally throwing it open, he breathed in the air of the August evening, as deeply aromatic as the evenings of his childhood, redolent of linden trees, meat pies, and tiptoeing coolness. Then, hearing hushed voices in the hallway behind his back, he lifted the birdcage in his arms—it was heavier than he had expected—and after sliding the bar on its door, held it out the window and shook it. The canary tumbled out and sank onto the windowsill, staring at him with a puzzled black eye. “Off, off you go, you evil minion!” Sukhanov whispered, slamming the window shut, then hurriedly placed the empty cage back in its corner, turned around with an absent look on his face—and was just in time to see Fyodor Mikhailovich Dalevich enter the kitchen.