The Dream Life of Sukhanov

by Olga Grushin

  “Tolya, is that you? Tolya, speak louder!” Nadezhda Sergeevna was saying from an immeasurable distance. “You what?… Who?… Ah, Fyodor! Well, I’m so glad he’s finally with you. I’m sure you’ll like him, he is such a nice young man. So thoughtful of him to give me my Malvina.”

  “Malvina? That silly canary?” Sukhanov shouted against the noise. “You got your canary from that man? Just who the devil is he?”

  His mother’s voice dipped into a static-filled chasm, replaced by a rich baritone that said, very close to his ear, “And don’t forget to make sure your boots have no leaks.” Then Nadezhda Sergeevna hazily surfaced again.

  “… and no need to swear,” she said disapprovingly. “I should think that after all these years you’d be glad to see your cousin again.”

  “What on earth do you mean, cousin?” he cried. “I don’t have any cousins!”

  Dipping in and out of the fog, Nadezhda Sergeevna talked rapidly.

  “Don’t you remember… Irochka, I called her… grandmother’s cousin’s only daughter… used to live in Moscow, and once we even… Surely you remember how… But then they moved to… She died a few… her husband also, and Fyodor is their only… an educated man… at a museum there, and now he is writing… Very interesting, he’s told me all about… I’m sure you’ll be glad to get to know him during his stay, he’s such a nice…”

  “What was that last thing?” Sukhanov gasped. “Did you just say that this Dalevich fellow will be staying with us?”

  There was another unnatural, creaking stillness, and then the same baritone announced heatedly, “No, listen, it’s better to dig for fresh worms once we get there.”

  “… shouldn’t mind too much, since it’s only for a week or two,” his mother’s voice returned from afar. “Well, give my regards to Fyodor. Spokoinoi nochi, Tolya.”

  “A week or two?” he shouted in disbelief. “Mother, wait, what do you expect me to—”

  The line went dead. Seething, he dialed her number again, and got a busy signal.

  When Sukhanov returned to the kitchen, he found his dubious new cousin presiding at the table in his place, heartily devouring the inedible cutlets and between bites drawing sinuous shapes on a napkin. Nina and Ksenya were following the quick movements of his hand with interest; Vasily sat frowning, tapping his spoon against a saucer. “Most people think that the window carvings are purely ornamental,” Dalevich was saying, “but in fact, many of them are symbolic designs going back to pagan times. This one, for instance, is believed to bring good luck and prosperity, and this one, to ward off—”

  Noticing Sukhanov on the threshold, he hastily put down the pen.

  “Your family has been most kind in indulging me,” he said with a flustered smile. “Northern architecture is one of my favorite subjects and I could bore you all for hours, but I really should be going now. Tolya, I can’t tell you how sorry I am for barging in on you like this. It appears that you never did receive my letter. I simply can’t imagine how… But no matter, I won’t burden you any longer, you’ve been too patient with me as it is. Nina Petrovna, thank you for the most delicious supper. Now, where did I put my hat?”

  Sukhanov had to restrain himself from laughing with relief.

  “Oh, no bother at all, Fyodor!” he said expansively. “It’s always nice to see family. In fact, if you are staying in Moscow for the next few days, why don’t you drop by again sometime—”

  “But Fyodor Mikhailovich,” said Ksenya, “where exactly are you going?”

  Dalevich had already stood and was fussing with a lock on his suitcase.

  “Please don’t worry about me,” he said earnestly. “I have an acquaintance or two in Moscow, they’ll find a corner to spare. Here, Tolya, before I go, I brought you a little something—just a souvenir from the Russian North, nothing special.”

  And he pulled an elaborate lace tablecloth out of his suitcase.

  “But it’s lovely!” Nina exclaimed.

  “Yes, very pretty,” Sukhanov said uncomfortably. “You really shouldn’t have. If you need my help getting in touch with your friends, I could—”

  “Surely you see that we can’t let him leave,” Nina interrupted with a withering look at her husband. “Fyodor Mikhailovich, it’s already past nine o‘clock, so why don’t you just stay with us tonight, and we’ll figure out what to do tomorrow.”

  “Oh, that’s so terribly nice of you,” Dalevich mumbled in visible confusion. “I wouldn’t like to presume, and I do feel awful about that letter…. But perhaps, if you had a couch somewhere…”

  “You can have my room,” Ksenya said impulsively.

  Dalevich’s words stumbled once or twice and sank under the weight of his gratitude. A brief silence fell. Then Vasily emphatically put down his cup and rose, scraping his chair against the floor with a long, nasty sound.

  “How touching,” he said with a disdainful smile. “Long-lost relatives reunited and all that. I suppose this is the moment when I offer my room as well, and then we all sit arguing about it for another hour, wallowing in the pleasant glow of familial kindness.”

  “Vasily!” Nina said sharply.

  And then Sukhanov felt that the day was running circles around him, and that all of this—Vasily’s derisive remark, Nina’s chastising reply, the hollow sensation in his stomach after the unsatisfactory meal, the strange yellow-bearded man apologizing effusively, the burnt smell lingering in the air—all of this had happened before, had, in fact, happened repeatedly, and he was forever trapped in a nightmarish cycle of domestic disasters. Bleakly, without interfering, he watched his son leave the kitchen, as if hoping that with his departure the vicious circle would somehow break and normal life would return. When a door slammed a corridor away, Sukhanov sighed, shook off his immobility, and excusing himself, walked out as well. Growing fainter behind him, Dalevich’s voice was imploring Nina not to be angry, the young man’s feelings were understandable, it was all really his, Dalevich‘s, fault, he should never have imposed like this, he could not tell her how sorry… Sukhanov had a sudden urge to spit.

  Before Vasily’s room, he hesitated, then thought better of it, and proceeded into the dining room to pour himself a brandy. Its prickling warmth comforted him a little, and when Nina’s steps sounded in the hallway, he hastened to intercept her. She went into the bedroom, and he followed her meekly. The darkness, aromatic with the memories of her creams, briefly caressed his skin like a cool, soothing hand. A moment later she switched on the light; in the pink glow of the lamp, her face was chilly.

  “Look, I honestly had no idea he was coming,” he said, trying to catch her gaze. “In fact, I’m not even sure who he is, exactly, some thrice removed cousin or something, I don’t think I’ve ever met him.”

  “He remembers meeting you,” she remarked as she busied herself with extracting stacks of fresh linens from a closet. “He says you made a big impression on him when he was a child.”

  “I’m sure he does,” he said, shrugging. “Anyone would if it got them room and board. Anyway, I know it’s very inconvenient, but it’s only for one night, and first thing tomorrow morning… My love, what are you… Why are you doing this?”

  Nina was tearing the sheets off their bed.

  “We are giving Fyodor the bedroom,” she said matter-of-factly “It’s the least we can do after Vasily’s inexcusable behavior, don’t you think?”

  He watched her methodically tuck the starched edges of a new sheet under the mattress corners. “So where are we to sleep?” he asked.

  “I thought I’d take the living room couch, and you can have the one in your study, it’s comfortable enough,” she replied evenly. “I’ll bring you your linens. You may want to grab a blanket too, the nights are getting cold.”

  “I’ve noticed,” he said with bitterness, and turned to go. In the doorway he paused to cast a furtive glance back at her. Today she wore no sparkling earrings, no clinking bracelets, and her features, bereft of the glossy glamou
r that makeup lent them, seemed soft and hazy, as if glimpsed imprecisely through a light curtain of rain. Suddenly, prompted by an oddly urgent impulse, he swore to himself that if she looked up, if only for an instant, he would reenter the pink stuffiness of the room—and talk to her, really talk to her, for the first time in who knew how long. He would confess what he had felt when he had seen Belkin walk away in the downpour; he would share with her the happy childhood memory of his father and the upsetting dream about her flying away; he would take her in his arms and tell her that she still looked beautiful, in spite of those resentful lines tugging at her mouth…. For a long moment he waited, but she did not look up.

  He nodded curtly and left.

  In the middle of the night, having grown at once aware of a rapidly solidifying cramp in his lower back, Sukhanov rose and headed for the bathroom. Barely awake, he moved through the darkness, automatically went through the motions of emptying his bladder, sleep-walked his way back through his familiar kingdom, and unthinkingly pushed open the bedroom door. Here he stopped, first blinded by unexpected light and then befuddled by the sight of his conjugal bed empty and the figure of a man in a robe hunched over in the armchair in the corner, scribbling busily on his knee. And then, for just one instant, before the man lifted his head, Sukhanov was seized by a powerful, disorienting feeling, not unlike vertigo, as if he had been snatched out of his state of semiwakefulness only to be hurled, his mind dizzy, into a darker, deeper vortex of dreaming. But the moment passed, and the world righted itself. His tottering step back was checked by the solidity of a half-unpacked suitcase; the seated man looked up, revealing the old-fashioned glasses, blond beard, and amiably questioning smile of Fyodor Dalevich; and already, feeling perfectly clearheaded, Sukhanov heard himself apologizing gruffly for walking through the wrong door, misled as he had been by the force of habit.

  The insignificant incident over, he returned to the study; but the couch, far from comfortable at the best of times, now positively bristled with springs and angularities, and the accidental vision of a man sitting in an armchair with a notebook on his knee tormented him with the nagging persistence of a well-known name or connection that inexplicably escapes one’s memory at the precise instant of alighting on one’s lips and then haunts one for long, helpless hours. Restless minutes followed one after another into the predawn hush, and still he lay tossing. Then the same shadowy radio he had heard the night before carried through an open window the echo of the Red Square clock striking four times—and astonishingly, he had it. As the sought piece of the puzzle slid into its place in the past with a satisfying, liberating click, there surfaced before him the gentle face of an old man from the communal Arbat apartment on whom an unhappy little boy had once been persuaded to play a senseless, cruel prank.

  It happened in the spring of 1937, some three months after Pavel Sukhanov had left Moscow. The mystery enveloping his father’s job had lifted from young Anatoly’s mind one day shortly after his eighth birthday. On that January day, when the whole world was particularly white and cold and every word seemed to hang in the air a bit longer, as if frozen, his smiling but curiously red-eyed mother sat him down and explained that a new factory near Gorky needed the help of a talented engineer with an unparalleled knowledge of building airplanes. It would only be for a little while, she said; and even though his eyes glistened, he nodded with the seriousness of an adult and felt proud of his father’s importance to the country.

  But after his father had gone, with a handshake so strong that for days afterward he could recall its grip in his fingers, things started to change—imperceptibly at first, then faster. Nadezhda Sukhanova now wandered through life without animation, leaving dirty plates in the sink and forgetting to turn off the lights in the shared bathroom, and Anatoly’s school days, with no one to ask about them, chased one another into bleak oblivion. Then gradually, as the winter melted into spring and his evenings were slowly drained of all hope of his father’s speedy return, the presence of the Morozovs began to make itself felt in the rambling six-room apartment. The head of the family, Anton Morozov, a burly thirty-three-year-old man with hairy arms and a face resembling a slab of beef, left obnoxious cigarette stubs in the music teacher’s teacups, and was once heard to inquire in a conspicuously loud voice, his eyes narrowed shrewdly, why the old couple who sat at the Sukhanovs’ table were occupying two rooms between them when one would suffice just as well. Morozov’s sister Pelageya, when hanging lines of stockings and camisoles to dry, took to casually usurping the other half of the kitchen, and a few times at supper, his wife, Galka, sharply berated the nervously perspiring Zoya Vienberg for the weekly singing lessons she gave, threatening to complain to the authorities about the noise.

  In late March, when the icicles started to break off the roofs, smashing onto the pavement below with precise crystal explosions, and there was still no sign of Pavel Sukhanov, the Morozov boys seemed to notice Anatoly’s existence for the first time. The younger of the two viciously tripped him in the hallway and, as he sat up, surprised and hurt, hugging his scraped knee, snickered coldly and told him to run and cry in his mother’s lap; and a week later, the older boy got hold of a nice red notebook in which Anatoly had been laboriously drawing the unsteady round letters of his homework and, grinning with pleasure, fed it page by page into a trash chute before Anatoly’s eyes. Their shouting and guffawing disturbed him almost nightly, populating his dreams with wide-mouthed, red-faced, thick-armed, terrifying bullies. And when one day the two cornered him in the yard and, nudging each other, told him about the old man’s manuscript, it was in the hope of shaking off his nightmares, of showing them that he was not to be ridiculed—that, indeed, he could be one of them—that Anatoly swallowed and, his eyes bright, said quickly, “Sure, I’ll do it.”

  In spite of seeing him and his blue-haired wife daily at the kitchen table, I knew almost nothing about the old man. His name was Gradsky; he seemed to be in his late sixties; his hands were delicate, frail, and yellow, like ancient papyrus. Anton Morozov derisively called him “the Professor.” Apart from quiet greetings spoken into his meticulously trimmed beard, he said very little, and I never heard him talk about himself, but the Morozov boys claimed to have found out quite a bit about him—including the interesting fact that every night, after his wife retired to the neighboring bedroom, the light continued to seep out for hours from underneath the door to his tiny study. Once, when the door had stood briefly ajar, they had caught a glimpse of him dozing over a thick stack of papers on his desk. He was writing some book, they said to me; they had overheard him referring to it as the work of his life. If I returned successful from my mission, they told me smiling, they would fold the pages into boats and set them traveling with the merry blue waters of melting April snows down the widest streets of Moscow.

  “Great,” I said to them, my throat dry.

  That night my soul wept with loneliness as I lay awake, adapting my shallow, anxious breathing to my mother’s measured breaths and delaying, delaying for as long as I could. When the predawn dampness crept in through the cracks in the windowpanes, I rose and tiptoed barefoot along the creaking corridor. The stillness rippled with the great whistling snores of Anton Morozov. No light marked the thresholds. When I reached the next-to-last door, I stopped and hesitated, feeling all the while the expectant malice of the Morozov boys at my back, thinking especially of the slanting eyes and the slow grin of Sashka, the older one. Then the cuckoo, sounding peevish, announced four o‘clock from its perch in the kitchen, and, my heart leaping wildly through my rib cage, I pushed the door open. As I stole in, the hinges issued a sharp little squeak.

  If I had ever entered Gradsky’s study before, I had been too young to remember. The darkness, suffused with a pale gray light falling through the narrow rectangle of the room’s solitary window, rarefied here and condensed there into deeper pockets of shade in patterns unfamiliar to me. I guessed at a bookcase, a desk, the silhouette of a stocky lamp. Navigating stealt
hily around invisible edges, I crossed the room to the desk, groped for the lamp’s cord, and pulled. A green-shaded light flooded the world, immediately blinding me, but after a few blinks I saw the peeling wood surface strewn with stacks of paper covered in neat, minuscule handwriting—and an instant later, something else, which made my heart shoot up into my throat. I had, of course, expected the study to be empty, but there, in an armchair in the corner, a man in a heavy robe sat hunched over, a notebook reposing on his knee. For one wild, panic-filled second, I imagined myself gathering the scattered pages, then dashing, his cries ignored, through the slumbering apartment to the safety of my room, and once there, tearing open the windows and throwing the whole armload of papers into the fading night, to watch them twirl like hundreds of white birds against the brightening skies and then slowly flutter down, down, from the fifth floor to the yard below, to the torrents of melting snows that would wash them away forever…. But in another erratic heartbeat I remembered the heavy tape that still ran around the windowpanes, binding them shut to keep out the winter drafts, and my thoughts darted in confusion—and already the old man in the armchair was stirring, lifting his head, revealing his neat silver beard, his flashing glasses…. Squinting with surprise, he regarded me in silence. I stood before him, lost and frightened, thinking of the hurt expression that would settle on my mother’s face when she found out what I had tried to do. Then, unexpectedly, he smiled.

  “Oh, it’s you, Tolya,” he said. “Can’t sleep, can you? Well, in truth, neither can I. I was just resting my eyes. Nice of you to visit me.”

  I remembered the respectful words my father had always found for him, and grew suddenly ashamed of myself. At the same time I disliked the old man intensely, both for the feeling that rose in me and for the kindness with which he spoke; and the strangeness of his room, which I now saw clearly for the first time, made me feel uneasy. It was small and stuffy, this room, with a disproportionately high ceiling and an unusual smell of leather, mold, and dust permeating the air; and although its scanty furnishings were no different from any others in the apartment, many disturbingly foreign things caught my eye. There were towers of books on the floor, the volumes thick and brown and etched, unlike any I had ever seen at the school library, and more books with gilded spines organized in grave processions behind the glass doors of a bookcase; a magazine lying on the desk, its cover bearing a long-haired woman with a fantastically coiled fishtail and glittering with golden letters, some familiar and others odd and curly-looking; a round convex glass that made a few words on the page beneath it swim up to its surface enlarged and distorted; and next to it, strangest of all, a small transparent dome whose depths blossomed with multitudes of tiny flowers, white, crimson, and purple, their artificial petals so delicate, so lovely…