by Olga Grushin
“I hope I can fall asleep after all this,” he said. “What time is it?”
“Five past four,” she replied, sliding back under the covers, and added with a sigh, “How sad that must be…. Poor girl!”
“Your poor girl probably cheats on him left and right,” he said unpleasantly. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
She looked at him with silent reproach and switched off the light.
He was about to retire as well, when some odd association reminded him he had a small matter to attend to. Murmuring that he would be back in a moment, he made his way to the study (in the process tripping over his slippers, which for some reason lay sprawled just past the threshold). The painting on the wall was illuminated, as before, by the yellow light of the streetlamp, but gazing at the swan sat the tremulous black-haired Leda—not in the least like the serene blonde Nina, of course.
His arms around the frame, Sukhanov carefully began to push it upward, maneuvering to slide the painting off its hook. When it was freed, he carried the heavy canvas out into the hallway, tiptoed past the bedroom, past the arched entryway to the living room, past the velvet magnificence of the dining room, past the doors that led into his children’s mysterious lives, and onward, through the kitchen, and to a cramped closet. There he released his burden and, smiling with satisfaction, watched as Leda slid along the wall and settled in the shadows, looking rather forlorn among all the mops and shoes and discarded stuffed animals and who knew what other neglected, unloved things that crowded inside this dim space with its damp smell of oblivion. But as his eyes lingered on the painted girl’s slim waist, narrow shoulders, stretched-out neck, her whole long-legged, warm, softly gleaming shape, he felt an unwanted trembling in his chest, as if in an unguarded moment or a careless dream some particle of his soul had accidentally caught a whiff of a real, if fleeting, resemblance—or perhaps not so much an actual resemblance as an overall familiarity, a certain congruence of moods, a spiritual likeness to something, to someone…
And then, all at once, a monstrous birth took place in his innermost, darkest depths. He sensed a repulsive, slimy, impossible creature stirring, stretching, rising sluggishly from its murky abyss, already twisting his insides, almost ready to trespass into his mind, to poke its ugly snout onto the surface of his thoughts—and he feared that once the snout broke through, the poisonous words of his premonition would be released, and there would be no taking them back, and he would have to face the possibility that all these many years ago Lev Belkin had… had…
“What nonsense,” said Sukhanov promptly, perhaps a bit louder than was advisable in the sleeping house, and slammed the closet door shut.
The floor reverberated with his decisive steps as he marched back to the study. There he threw open a cabinet, rummaged through its obscure contents, and finally unearthed a small still life, already framed. Forcefully humming the duel aria from Onegin, he installed it on the orphaned wall and stepped back to consider. His father-in-law’s perfectly round, red apples shone in an abundant pile on a yellow ceramic dish. The overall effect rather pleased him—and even more important, the bright cheerfulness of the composition turned out to be conducive to his productivity, as he discovered the very next day, when, the unpleasantly turbulent night shrugged away, the disappearance of Leda left without comment, the city stretching cloudy and still below his window, he sat at his desk, sipping his morning coffee, wrapped comfortably in his robe, and mused over the article.
SIX
The article presented a curious problem.
Sukhanov felt for a bookmark in a tattered volume on his desk, opened it, and reread the underlined conclusion to a chapter: “Surrealism can thus be rightfully called a betrayer of the people, locked as it is in deadly opposition to all humanistic values and traditions. It cherishes madness and cultivates decadent indifference toward social good. Its sickening visions strive to drive a healthy man into the realm of fantasy, distracting him from the noble goal of combating world capitalism. Therefore, as a movement it has nothing of value to offer to the mature artistic perceptions of the Soviet people. Moreover, some of its more harmful elements, such as its obsessions with horror and pornography, represented most fully in the work of Salvador Dalí…”
He shut the book and regarded the distinguished gray of the cover, on which the indented letters of the author’s name—his own—glittered dully with fading golden print. Then, frowning thoughtfully, he pushed the volume aside. Though published in 1965, his monograph on Western art served him still as an inexhaustible source of assertions that could be reused on most occasions, with only minor rephrasing and retouching; this time, however, he felt certain that something else—something, in fact, quite different—was expected.
As a rule, Sukhanov no longer wrote any articles himself: at his level of importance, creation had by necessity sunk to the bottom of his list of priorities. He was content with regulating the general flow of things—supervising the obsequiously smooth workings of his staff, distributing a monthly set of preselected themes among a trusted handful of critics, then poring through their texts to weed out a few chance occurrences of names better left unmentioned or to nudge two or three carelessly straying phrases back into the herd. He prepared each glossy, pleasantly substantial issue of Art of the World according to the same simple yet unfailing recipe: Take a doughy theoretical discourse on the methods and principles of Revolutionary art, stuff it with two or three well-seasoned essays portraying Repin and Fedotov as precursors of socialist realism and Levitan as an enemy of tsarism, mix in a sugarcoated biography of a famous Soviet master in the vein of Malinin and a spicy discovery of some unjustly ignored genius of the Italian Renaissance who was vilely persecuted by the Church, whisk in, for a bit of exotic flavor, an interview with this or that diamond-in-the-rough from a remote Asian republic (whose artistic development was clearly born of the wonders of Soviet education), and finally, generously pepper the whole with quotations from Marx and Lenin. Above all, Sukhanov was famous for his skillful omissions. While he would occasionally allow a cautious account of some contemporary Polish or Bulgarian artist (who invariably celebrated in his canvases the wonderful friendship blossoming between his and the Soviet people), Western art of the present century wandered through the pages of the magazine like a mildly embarrassing hallucination—a mute, befuddled, miserable ghost who was ridiculed, kicked, and exorcised, but whose name was never pronounced and whose face was never revealed.
This state of affairs had existed unchanged for years, from the day Sukhanov had first assumed the reins—and until a routine staff meeting one month ago. At that meeting, Sergei Nikolaevich Pugovichkin, the assistant editor in chief and Sukhanov’s second-in-command, had let slip a disturbing rumor that had somehow filtered through the ranks. It appeared that somewhere in the celestial above, certain nebulous changes had been transpiring ever since the ascension of the new Party leader in March, and among other things, a Very Important Someone (who, naturally, remained unnamed) had been overheard expressing the hope that Art of the World might begin dedicating at least one article per issue to a “prominent Western artist,” starting, for instance, with Salvador Dalí—for, as that enigmatic personage had been reputed to observe, “Dalí’s as good as anyone, and one must start somewhere.” Trying not to betray the shock he had felt at the idea of Dalí’s melting clocks making an appearance in the pages of his magazine, Sukhanov had shrugged nonchalantly and announced that he might as well tackle the subject himself. He was, after all, universally acknowledged as the foremost expert in the field.
This, then, was the article in question. The problem lay in the fact that the more specific he became about Dalí’s life—the more he occupied himself with dates of exhibitions, titles of paintings, and places of residence—the harder it was to sustain that pure pitch of abstract condemnation he had always felt compelled to cultivate when writing about surrealism. As the voice of authority, Anatoly Pavlovich Sukhanov was unmerciful, unwavering, un
forgiving—and exceedingly vague. Viewing his entrusted task as not so much educational but ritualistic in spirit—a task of juxtaposing good and evil, day and night, East and West—he had for years presided over the roasting of the surrealist specter on a spit of righteous class indignation as the drums beat louder and louder, the dance around the fire grew more and more exuberant, and the victim became increasingly obscured by clouds of billowing smoke. Yet now, unbelievably, he was being asked to describe the curl of the victim’s mustache, the occupations of his parents, and the colors of his palette. It was little wonder that for the past few weeks Sukhanov had felt ill at ease whenever he had thought about the subject.
Now, however, as he shut his monograph, stirred sugar into a fresh cup of coffee, and stared at the shiny abundance of Malinin’s red apples on the wall, he chanced to recall an amusing anecdote from Dali’s life that might just provide the angle he needed. Encouraged, he began to bang out hasty paragraphs on his unwieldy typewriter, and was already nearing the end of the third page when Nina’s voice sounded across the corridor: “Tolya, don’t you have a staff meeting at twelve? Vadim will be here in less than half an hour!”
He glanced at the clock on his desk and completed his sentence with an exclamatory punch. Continuing to trace every possible permutation of the thought in his mind, he stepped in and out of the shower, combed his hair, buttoned his shirt, overcame the resistance of newly pressed pants, and finally, struggling with his right cuff link and simultaneously debating the prudence of introducing the word “pathological” into the discussion, drifted toward a bedroom closet, pushed its door open with his elbow—and was brought to an abrupt stop.
There, on the top shelves, lay his neatly folded sets of beige and blue pajamas; here, on the bottom shelves, towered pale stacks of cotton handkerchiefs, embroidered with discreet indigo initials and permeated with faint cologne smells, and dark stacks of socks, flashing diamonds and zigzags; underneath, in the hazelwood cavities of three open drawers, glistened the shiny coils of his numerous belts. But the inside of the door—the inside of the door was empty, unexpectedly empty, and the little metal hooks, bereft of their entrusted weight, sparkled conspicuously all along the tie rack. His ties were gone; gone also were his three or four velvet bow ties (perfectly respectable specimens, black, white, and crimson, worn exclusively on Bolshoi Theater evenings). Only two orphaned pairs of suspenders dangled sadly in the void that the day before had been ordered into vertical silk stripes of so many noble colors.
Sukhanov stood for a minute contemplating the closet. When his vexation had ripened sufficiently, he walked to the living room. Nina was curled up in an armchair by the window, eating a sliced peach and gazing vacantly at the gray skies sliding over the roofs. A book lay forgotten beside her.
“Next time you decide to take my ties to the cleaners, my dear,” he said in consternation, “it might be useful to leave me one or two. I do have an office to go to.”
She looked up. Her lips were bright with the juice of the fruit, and her eyes were vague.
“Ties?” she said. “I haven’t taken any of your ties.”
In a moment they were confronting the emptiness together.
“How very strange,” Nina said after a puzzled pause. “When was the last time—”
He had last put on a tie the previous morning, while dressing for Coppelia, and had not opened the closet since. (Upon his return, he had tossed the used tie onto the back of a chair, where its subdued blue pendulum had swung for a few beats before coming to a stop, and where it hung now in rumpled solitude.) The mysterious removal of his property must have taken place between his and Vasily’s departure for the Bolshoi and his arrival home at seven that evening. Nina seemed just as perplexed as he was, and Vasily flatly denied any knowledge of the matter. Ksenya had already left for Komsomolskaya Pravda, where she was interning for the summer; but naturally, as Nina pointed out, she had no reason to venture into his closet, and practical jokes were simply not in her nature.
Sukhanov was beginning to feel incensed.
“It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “And in any case, you were in bed with a headache all day, so no one could have sneaked into the bedroom without you seeing them!”
It seemed to him that a silvery shadow flickered swiftly through her eyes, but it must have been a trick of light, for just then a tentative tentacle of sunshine, the first of the day, probed the bedroom, playfully touching the closet’s bronze doorknobs and glittering off the belt buckles. Nina busied herself with verifying the obvious once again—checking among the socks, between the pajamas, under the handkerchiefs.
“I’m sure we’ll find them,” she was saying as she sifted through the clothes. “Perhaps you moved them somewhere yourself? Because there was no one here except me and Ksenya, and—”
“Well, I’ll be damned!” Sukhanov said suddenly. “Of course, it’s that woman!”
Nina straightened and regarded him blankly.
“Well, she was here as well, wasn’t she?” he said. His mouth had grown tight. “I knew we never should have let her into the house, she’s nothing but the wife of a drunk. I bet she pinches things here and there, and he sells them on the black market!”
“Please tell me you aren’t talking about Valya,” said Nina slowly.
Breathing with an effort but looking ominously collected, he scooped up his lone surviving tie, strode into the entrance hall, stiffly stomped his feet into a pair of shoes, and began to unlock the front door. Nina flew after him but slipped on the parquet floor, shedding a feathered slipper, which flipped over in the air like a small wounded bird. He was already crossing the threshold when she grabbed hold of his arm.
“Please, Tolya”—she spoke in a rush—“there must be some explanation, I beg you, don’t do this, she’s worked for us for ten years, and I don’t know a more honest—”
A telephone exploded shrilly in the hallway, and simultaneously something heavy crashed onto the floor above their heads. Startled, Nina turned around. Freed of her imploring touch, Sukhanov marched onto the landing, slammed the door behind him, and not waiting for the elevator, which had just come to a grating halt somewhere in the bowels of the house, descended the stairs.
The stairwell split the gray monstrosity of the building in half, laying it open like an enormous, overripe fruit, with the imposing leather-padded, nail-studded doors, two on each floor, embedded in its yawning pulp like dark seeds, every one of them containing its own luxurious blossom of success. Here, on the seventh floor, across from the unhinged composer, resided a corpulent opera singer from Tbilisi who had left the stage years before but still treated her numerous guests to tremulous arias accompanied by the velvety barking of her three fat, indolent basset hounds; whenever she gave one of her homespun concerts, some mysterious arrangement of pipes would carry the disembodied barking and trilling through walls and floors and carefully deposit their echoes in Sukhanov’s study, annoying him to no end. On the sixth floor, below the composer, lived a high-ranking Party official, a jovial fellow with an amazing profusion of warts on his chin and a plump wife who looked like his sister, and on the fifth, the elevator sometimes dropped off a sad little man in tortoiseshell glasses who resembled a poor relative from the provinces but whom Sukhanov knew to be one of the foremost classics of Soviet literature, the author of the celebrated trilogy We the Miners.
After that, more than thrice removed from his own eighth-floor domain, the inhabitants grew anonymous. As he reached the fourth floor, he heard children’s cries seeping out from under a door, and on the third, after a particularly long flight of stairs, punctuated by the comma of an orange peel spilling out of the trash chute, he leaned against the railing to steady his trembling legs and thought he detected the sweet fragrance of lilies and the light tinkling of a piano in the depths of apartment number five. The fleeting combination of sounds and smells reminded him that once, in a predawn hour, coming home from a New Year’s Eve party, he had encountered a tantalizingl
y reticent, elegantly perfumed woman with features of Nefertiti, pearls swaying fluidly in her ears, stepping out of the lobby and disappearing into a chauffeured automobile as gray as the sky—but before he had time to glance curiously at the door, the wintry recollection turned and escaped him, and his thoughts, in chasing after it, inadvertently stumbled upon a vision of another chauffeured car, another perfumed woman.
He found himself thinking of the past Saturday evening, of his father-in-law’s retrospective at the Manège. And then, as if merely waiting for their chance to intrude, a multitude of unnecessary, uncivilized associations crowded his mind—the offended Minister, the unbearable encounter with Belkin, the indignity of the near-mugging, the loss of the blue-eyed Nina presiding tranquilly over his work, the subsequent invasion of his sanctuary by the shameless swan-loving nude at the head of a flock of disturbing dreams and irrelevant suspicions… No matter, the nude was gone, he reminded himself quickly—and in any case, these were all minor occurrences, to be forgotten in another day or two—and certainly no reason for him to be standing here, on an unfamiliar landing, feeling as unsettled as he did, no reason at all. And murmuring angrily (What nerve the woman has, can you believe it, stealing like that!), he purposefully walked down the remaining flights—was that a plate breaking in apartment three?—and arrived in the lobby, with the sun, now fully out, splashing brilliantly on the marble floors.
Here he hesitated, not knowing where the caretaker lived; but the concierge was already rising from behind the desk with a cloyingly respectful, insincere smile, and, suddenly embarrassed, Sukhanov nodded coldly and hastened down another staircase, markedly narrower and darker, which disappeared into the obscure strata of the building. Before he knew it, he was staggering through the uncharted territory of the basement, crisscrossed with low-ceilinged, cramped, poorly lit corridors. The smells of cabbage stew and detergent clung to walls the color of sickness; an ill-looking striped cat slunk past him, its invisible tail bristling; shapeless objects cringed in the corners, briefly suggesting rags, pails, brooms, a rolled-up poster, a three-legged chair, a doll with a missing arm, then sinking back into the shadows…. After the sparkling expanse of the lobby, the building’s faintly unclean, unsavory underside jarred his senses, and he felt a dull oppression descending on him, as if all nine stories of human existence above were weighing heavily on his spirit.