Olga Grushin

by The Dream Life of Sukhanov (v5)

  “Tolya,” Dalevich said softly. “Hello. Aunt Nadya told me you were here.”

  His expression was as mild as ever. He wore Dalí’s suit and Magritte’s hat, and held a boxed cake in one hand—Sukhanov could read the name “Ptich‘e Moloko” on the lid—and a thin folder in the other. Nadezhda Sergeevna followed a frantic step behind.

  “Well, well,” Sukhanov said after a lengthy pause, filled with barely articulated, violent thoughts. “I must say, you do look marvelously convincing—just like a real person. ‘Aunt Nadya’ was a charming touch too.”

  Dalevich looked at him sadly. “I understand you are still angry with me,” he said, “but I hope this meeting will give me another chance to explain. Please, Tolya, I’ve already told your mother everything, and she believes me. Let me just—”

  “Oh, I doubt very much you’ve told her everything. I bet you’ve failed to enlighten her on the subject of Dalí.”

  “I’m sorry about your article, I really am,” Dalevich protested meekly. “The whole thing was an accident, I never intended to interfere with your job. In fact, now that I’ve finished my research here, I’m returning to Vologda, my leave has ended anyway—”

  “You know damn well I’m not talking about some article!” Sukhanov hissed, slapping his hand against the table. “And you can’t even lie convincingly—it only occurred to you to say Vologda because of that idiotic folksong they were broadcasting on television just now!”

  A seemingly confused look appeared on Dalevich’s face. He played his role well.

  “Aunt Nadya,” he said haltingly, “I think I’d better be going, I don’t want to upset anyone.... Here, I’ll just put the cake on the table. And these, Tolya, I was going to leave them with Aunt Nadya, they are for you, I’ve meant for a long time to—”

  Holding out the folder, he started to edge into the corridor.

  In a high-pitched voice that did not belong to him, Sukhanov shouted, “Oh no you don‘t, you surrealist bastard!” and, his glasses sliding sideways, the whole room tilting, rushed wildly at the doorway.

  He had imagined Dalevich ripping at the impact like a taut canvas, but the shoulders he gripped and shook had the solidity of an ordinary body. Dalevich, his eyes round with fake astonishment, weakly lifted his hands to his face, dropping the folder he had been clutching—and immediately a flock of pastel-colored pages burst out of their cardboard confinement and fluttered onto the floor.

  The movement was so unexpected that Sukhanov glanced down mechanically and saw, landing on his foot, a pale watercolor of a birch tree whose leaves were transforming into translucent green butterflies and taking off on their first, quivering flight. The lines were clumsy, and the colors childish; but as he looked at it, a feeling of recognition trembled in his heart, and slowly releasing Dalevich, he bent to pick up the page, bringing it close to his face, doubting his sight, doubting it could be possible....

  And yet it was—one of his own first works, drawn under the tutelage of Oleg Romanov, when he had been only a thirteen-year-old boy, and subsequently lost in the whirlwind of the war. Incredulously, he turned around the kitchen, while his mother and Dalevich watched him with nervous expectation. There, under the table, rested an ink sketch he had done of their Inza street awash with melting snows, and a quick study of a weeping woman with a coarse peasant face holding a winged child in her arms; here, by the sink, lay a bleak landscape of a winter field crisscrossed by wires dotted with ruffled sparrows (which, he remembered with a start, spelled out with secret irreverence, each bird a tiny note on its wire, a musical line from a popular song about the Motherland), and next to it, a portrait of his teacher Romanov, his small figure drawn in black-and-white, the world around him blossoming into lush colors from the touch of a raised brush. He leaned to see better—and then, beneath the window, he glimpsed a drawing of a tall man in a coat, standing in a doorway with a brilliant smile on his face—that waking dream he had had so often as a boy....

  “How?” he said hoarsely. “How did you get these?”

  “But you gave them to him yourself, don’t you remember, Tolya?” said his mother hastily. “Oh, how I wish you two would stop fighting! You boys got along so well that time we stayed with Irochka Dalevich, after the . . . after we came back to Moscow in ‘forty-three.”

  “Who on earth is Irochka Dalevich?”

  “Irochka Dalevich, my second cousin—Fedya’s mother! Surely you remember?”

  “Mama told me not to bother you,” Dalevich added readily, “but I was so fascinated by you I followed you around constantly, until you made me a present of your drawings—to get rid of me, I suspect. I was only ten at the time, but I clearly remember thinking I’d never seen anything more beautiful in my life. As a matter of fact, it’s entirely to you, to these drawings of yours, that I owe my interest in art. I know you didn’t pursue it as a career, but all the same, you had a real gift, Tolya, to be able to change people’s lives like that—”

  He continued to talk in the same soothing voice; and as Sukhanov stared at the moving lips half concealed by the blond beard, he became aware of a memory that had stirred in the recesses of his being at his mother’s words and was now gathering momentum, until in a hazy sequence there began to pass before him the dismal wallpaper, the bathtub on clawed feet, the low ceilings looming over him through nightmare-ridden sleep, the skinny, sharp-nosed little woman placing a miserable succession of barely warm suppers on the table, and present through it all, a quiet yellow-haired boy, a few years younger than he, watching him, always watching him, with curious, guarded eyes....

  He looked again at the pages scattered on the kitchen floor—the first real evidence, delivered after a quarter of a century, that he had not dreamt it all, that he had, indeed, led a different life once—and then everything ceased to matter, everything but these drawings of a child, rescued so miraculously from the vortex of time and deposited so neatly at his feet. So perhaps Dalevich was no malevolent avenger but merely a bumbling, well-meaning relative from the misty Russian North; perhaps he himself, and no one else, was to blame for the loss of his position, his family, his sense of self; perhaps all the destruction in his life was, in fact, the inevitable, logical conclusion to the choices he had made all those years before.... Yet startling as these potential revelations would have seemed only an hour earlier, they were of little interest to him now. Unaware of the tense silence in the kitchen, he gathered the pages off the floor and methodically smoothed them out on the table, peering at each one closely, with eyes dimmed by decades of skimming over slick productions of socialist realism. No longer used to the sight of his own lines, his own colors, he felt suddenly anxious to test each work for timid traces of uniqueness, for an early testimony of talent—at times lifting this or that drawing against the light as if expecting to see some sign emerging through the watercolors like a transparent watermark, at times following a meandering outline with a finger—and wondering, wondering with a new, surprising sense of near-discovery, whether he could have been wrong that December night so long ago—whether paintings continued to lead their own secret, joyous, eternal lives after all, in the hidden crevices of people’s memories, in the deepest drawers of people’s houses, in the shadows of museum basements—and whether it was possible that once upon a time he had really had a gift.... And then an urgent need to confirm some truth he had just begun to suspect was upon him.

  Without a word, he strode into the corridor, closed his fingers on the handle of a hallway closet, and paused, ignoring the burst of his mother’s alarmed cries at his back, preparing instead for what he knew he would find just behind this door—windows into his past, windows into his soul, whole stacks of them, piled negligently this way and that, just as he had left them two decades ago, some facing away, some slightly graying, perhaps, with deposits of dust and old-woman smells, maybe even a wary touch of mildew, others certain to throw themselves at him with their wild colors and violent shapes like so many untamed beasts long in confinemen
t. He suddenly found it uncanny that this closet had always been here—that his paintings had always been here—that there had always been only this thin partition between his present and that other world, once wholly his, now full of unfamiliar, wonderful, terrifying marvels—and that he had known it all along, yet spent years learning how to forget so he would not have to hear the muted, sorrowful call of the ghosts on those rare occasions when he sat in his mother’s living room, drinking lukewarm tea, eating repulsive pastries, talking impressively about a new edition of his book, his son’s excellent grades, Nina’s autumn trip to Paris....

  Now, in a single moment, as he stood feeling in his palm the weighty coolness of the door handle, he remembered it all—all, at least, that was left to remember of a life that, with the appearance of a February 1963 issue of Art of the World, had started on its way to safety, constancy, tranquillity. That first article had been followed by a rapid succession of short pieces, culminating in early 1964 with a lengthy monograph, Contemporary Applications of the Socialist Realism Method to Landscape and Still Life, whose loudly hailed publication, as well as his timely membership in the Party, had helped him obtain later in the year, just as Nina had become pregnant, a two-room Arbat apartment for his mother. After Nadezhda Sergeevna moved out, he converted the spare room into a studio—for, of course, he had never fully intended to give up painting—but at first a steady stream of lectures and magazine assignments left him unable to work, whether from exhaustion or from some deeper, darker emotion that he did not want to define, and then Vasily was born, and Nina needed space for drying his sheets and ironing his clothes, and Pyotr Alekseevich made them a gift of a crib that was charming but unwieldy, and little by little, he found his canvases and oils relegated further and further into unobtrusive shadows, until the only painting remaining in full view was a portrait of a discreetly expectant, dreamily happy Nina, presented to them by Malinin and soon placed prominently over Sukhanov’s recently acquired, gor geously carved desk.

  After that, something began to happen to the fabric of time: it grew thinner and silkier and passed through his hands so lightly that he barely noticed the patterns and colors in its smooth, flowing skin. Another year passed, Nina was pregnant again, they were awaiting a move to a significantly larger apartment, Ksenya was born, Nina left her job, those in the know whispered of his impending nomination to an important position as the head of the art criticism department at a certain well-respected institute, and a number of friendly colleagues, led by the director Penkin himself, started to drop by now and then with bottles of cognac, ostensibly to gossip and to coo over his children. He decided that it would be wiser to move his underground art out of the way for the time being, at least until the promised position materialized, and one evening crammed all his paintings into his new Zhiguli, drove over to his mother’s (she had more room than she needed, anyway), and calming her fears with assurances that it was only temporary, rapidly, as if their touch burned his fingers, piled the canvases, with their manifold scents of fairy tales and nightmares, into a hallway closet. After closing the door, he stood still for a long minute, perhaps willing himself to memorize the weighty coolness of the door handle in his palm as a promise to return someday soon; then turned, and walked away. But as he walked away, he already knew in some concealed, murky layer of his soul that he would never be back to claim his dark treasure—and knowing this, tried not to listen to the chorus of disembodied voices whispering, pleading at his back, tried to ignore the strange, chilling certainty that for him the flow of time had suddenly ceased, that at this very instant his life was over, irrevocably, forever—

  And of course, the feeling was ridiculous, and of course, time did not stop, and his life continued, and over the years there were plenty of changes, all for the better—the new apartment, the new position, the children growing up, the acclaimed books, the purchase of the dacha, the eventual staggering promotion to the helm of Art of the World, speedily rewarded by another, still more splendid apartment in the Zamoskvorechie and a personal chauffeur—yet now, as he stood so close to his past, his fingers curled around the door handle, his knuckles white, he felt that the previous two decades of his life had meant nothing, had been nothing, had vanished into the emptiness whence they had been born—and that only today, after all this waste, he finally had the power to make time flow once again.

  He threw the door open.

  A strong smell of mothballs escaped into the corridor. Two old coats hung on metal hangers in one corner, and in another, a monstrous vacuum cleaner, its dust bag deflated, leaned against the wall. There was a shelf he did not remember; a woolen mitten dangled off it into space. He looked at the mitten for a while, as if trying to fathom its purpose, then slowly closed the door, and returned to the kitchen. His mother had stopped talking, and was staring at him with unblinking eyes.

  “How about some tea?” a funny-looking bearded man offered brightly. “I’ll get another cup, don’t stand up, Aunt Nadya.”

  Sukhanov knew the man well; he was a relative of some sort, a childhood playmate perhaps; it seemed that they had recently quarreled. It did not matter any longer.

  “Mother,” he said, his voice quiet and oddly strained. “Mother, where are they?”

  A cup rang out against a saucer as the relative clumsily dropped them onto the table.

  “Mama, please, this is important,” he said, brushing away a brief sensation of repeating his own, seemingly recent words. “Where are my paintings?”

  Her mouth was working convulsively

  “Well, they are not here, are they?” she said with shrillness.

  “Did you move them somewhere? Why didn’t you tell me? I thought—”

  “I know what you thought! You thought, how convenient, turning your mother’s place into a storage dump! Did it ever occur to you that I might not like it, that I have needs too, that I’m not just someone to order around?”

  “Mama, what are you talking about? No one ordered you around. I just—”

  “No, it never occurred to him!” She was shouting now. “And just look at him, barging in here after all this time, going through my closets without permission, expecting everything to be just the way he left it twenty years ago, as if I don’t live here, as if I’m nothing to be concerned with, as if I don’t have the right to do what I please in my own home—”

  Perhaps she saw something strange in his face, or else she ran out of breath; all at once she fell silent. The relative, a fixed smile on his lips, finished cutting the cake into uneven slices, set the knife down, picked up his hat, and cautiously crept out into the corridor and tiptoed away; somewhere in the apartment a door opened and closed. Sukhanov stood without moving. The sun had already vanished over the rooftops, but the air was still luminous, and in its warm crimson glow the small kitchen, with its table ready for tea, its old porcelain clock on the wall, the richness of the creamy bird‘s-milk dessert crumbling on the plates, the leaves rustling against the windows, seemed wonderfully cozy and intimate and at the same time eternal, like some masterly painting of family togetherness, some vision of an ideal life....

  “So you threw my paintings away,” said Anatoly Pavlovich in a flat voice, and lowering himself onto the chair, covered his face with his hands—and cried.

  And for a while the world was so silent that it felt as if a deep hush, a hush of finality, of lost chances, of all the things that had gone wrong and could never be changed, enveloped it, never to lift again. Yet after some time—whether a fragment of an hour or another lonely stretch of a century—uncertainly, out of the soundless void, timid noises began to emerge: the whispering of trees, the barking of far-off dogs, the chirping of a canary on a windowsill, the trembling voice of an old woman talking, sighing, imploring someone named Tolenka to please understand, to please forgive, she had never thought he would need them again and she had been so afraid to live with all those monstrosities, but even so, she would never have done it had she not believed that it was the best t
hing for him, getting rid of it all, yes, she had always feared his pictures would lead to no good, and was it not her duty as a mother to keep him safe, to help him make the best of his life, to steer him away from his father’s fate—

  He lifted his head, remembering his mother’s presence for the first time. Her eyes were moist; her hand hovered over his, ready to descend at any instant.

  “My father’s fate?” he repeated blankly. “Was that why? You destroyed all my work because you were afraid I’d end up like my father?”

  And as he spoke, he already felt the disbelief, the emptiness, the grief inside him turning into anger—anger of a heart-searing, soul-wrenching kind he had never known before, anger at this pathetic little woman with a frightened face who had once given him life.

  “You don’t know what I went through with your father, Tolenka,” she whispered.

  “What does it matter what you went through? Times have changed. You don’t honestly think they throw people in jail for paintings these days?”

  She pulled her hand away. “You mustn’t talk to me like that,” she said. “You’ve never heard the whole story, you can‘t—”

  He felt as if he did not know who she was.

  “What story?” he said, standing up, furiously pushing his chair away. “You and my father had the misfortune of living through a very dark period. He was arrested, they broke him, he committed suicide. Tragic things like that happened all the time in the thirties—not in the sixties or the seventies! And it certainly didn’t give you the right to throw away—”