by Olga Grushin
The leaf touched the ground; he walked away, shrugging.
At ten o‘clock, the streets of the Zamoskvorechie were quiet and dark, with only an occasional streetlamp depriving the night of a peeling façade, a solitary branch glowing with emerald fire in the depths of an invisible tree, or strikingly, a bright flowering of domes above the low rooftops. The rarefied jingling of a late trolley reached him from Bolshaya Polyanka Street, a courtyard away; a solitary guitar twang fell from a window open somewhere above his head. Another gloomy, poorly lit street, empty save for the ghosts of portly merchants who had inhabited this quarter of Moscow in centuries past and who now hurried obliviously, crossing themselves, in and out of a dilapidated church, led him to the Tretyakovskaya Gallery, which sat in the middle of its illuminated yard like a multilayered cake on a platter. The day’s foreign crowds had all washed away until morning, leaving unfamiliar-looking soda bottles, crumpled ticket stubs, and cigarette butts in their wake. Now only rare intertwined couples strolled through the echoing night, heads close together, quarreling or giggling, perfectly indifferent to the fact that just a few walls away hung the highest accomplishment of Russian art—The Trinity by Andrei Rublev, the legendary fifteenth-century icon painter who might or might not have existed.
Sukhanov too walked without pausing. For twelve long years, he had lived mere minutes from here—could, in fact, see the glint of the gallery’s roof from his kitchen windows—yet in all that time he had been inside only on two or three obligatory visits with his then pre-adolescent children. Apart from Ksenya’s bright-eyed fascination with Vrubel’s Demon and Vasily’s tepid curiosity about the dress of eighteenth-century courtiers, they had remained on the whole uninterested. “Why do they put everything under glass?” Ksenya had whined in every room. “I can see nothing but my own reflection!”
Underneath this innocuous layer of infrequent memories lay another, deeper deposit, dating from the years when he and Nina, still young, still childless, had lived on the other side of the river, and every day Nina had passed through the halls of the Tretyakovka as one of its many anonymous curators. Briefly Sukhanov wondered whether she still came here from time to time; if she did, she never mentioned it. Then, unwilling to probe any further into this particular pocket of darkness, as if afraid of all the bats that might fly screeching into his face out of the void, he forced his thoughts away. Past the museum, a short, crooked alley swallowed him into its ill-smelling shadow and, before he had time to suck in his breath, spat him out into the sudden lights of a square, with a red M swimming through a pinkish haze and two or three neon signs with gaping holes of burnt-out letters flickering in the dimness beyond. The ice cream kiosk, he saw, had closed for the day only minutes earlier. A short-haired girl in a yellow dress, hurrying toward the metro, was just beginning to strip her Eskimo of its wrapper. Sukhanov watched her absently. When she vanished down the staircase leading underground, he turned to go back home.
He was already nearing his building when a taxi pulled up a few paces away. Its door swung open, and a tall, slim youth in a sleek blazer spilled out into the night, chased by the contentious voice of the driver. The words traveled shrilly down quiet Belinsky Street: “Hey, golden boy, and what about these wine stains on my seat?” The passenger shrugged with a loose haughtiness of inebriation and sent a negligent bill flying through the taxi’s window.
“Buy yourself a new car with the change, why don’t you?” he said, walking away
The man was Vasily.
Displeased, Sukhanov stopped and watched him weave unsteadily in and out of pale strips of light—but as he watched, he began to smile, and as he smiled, he unexpectedly found his recent feeling toward his son changing, lightening, shifting from that of wary bemusement to that of an amiable, generous, fatherly tolerance. Surprising himself, he called out, and Vasily turned and haltingly waded toward him, careful to circumnavigate every dense concentration of shadow on the pavement.
“Doesn’t anyone clean the streets anymore?” he queried garrulously. “I swear, that janitor does nothing but drink…. Papa, is that you?”
Chuckling with amusement, Sukhanov guided him to a bench, which materialized obligingly five steps away, sat down himself, and feeling more and more expansive by the minute, accepted a sip from a half-empty bottle of wine the boy extracted, after some fumbling, from an inner pocket of his blazer. He had braced himself for a cheap, pungent taste, but discovered the wine to be truly excellent, velvety and rich, lingering on the tip of his tongue with a nobly understated sweetness. Gently he wrested the bottle away from Vasily and, curious, turned it this way and that, trying to discern the label through the darkness, until the red-and-golden letters flashed on the distinctive black background.
“But this is Kindzmarauli,” he said, surprised. “Must have been some party!”
He took another sip, savoring it this time, letting his memory drift to his own youth, to that unforgettable trip to the sea he had taken with Nina the summer after their wedding, to the nights filled with overripe peaches and stars falling like rain and the cheap wines of Georgia, sold by the barrel in small mountain settlements—nothing like this one, of course, and yet sharing with it the same sunshine, the same air, the same undercurrent of happiness, enough for the present superior taste, by dint of relatedness, to reawaken in his being echoes of a thousand trifles that had once made him feel so alive. Suddenly the desire to reminisce overwhelmed him. Putting his arm around Vasily’s shoulders, he imagined himself talking about so many things, telling so many stories—about a small boy chasing pigeons, and a brilliant engineer in love with his country, and an old man nicknamed the Professor who, unbeknownst to himself, had possessed something very akin to magic—all the things that he had never had time or inclination to share with his children, all the barely expressible and deeply personal things that lived, poignant, precious, endlessly important, beyond the common property of dull biographical facts. He thought how much he would have given to talk like this with his own father, and how unique this moment was, with the two of them sitting side by side, passing wine to each other in an eloquent silence of true intimacy, separated from the whole universe by this hour of understanding, with the solemn August night lying expectantly at their feet and the city watching over them with its hundreds of lit windows, and how, years and years from now, Vasily would still remember the words that he was just about to—
“Yes, not too bad,” Vasily said. “You should have seen the man’s digs!”
It took Sukhanov a long minute to recall the comment he had made just before boarding his present train of thought. Mechanically, he said, “Ah yes, the party. What man? Weren’t you at Olga’s dacha? And by the way, I meant to ask you—”
Olga was a charming girl involved with Vasily in a romance that had lasted for several lukewarm years now, and it occurred to Sukhanov that the subject might serve as a suitable introduction to a momentous discourse on youth, happiness, and other matters distilled by his lifelong wisdom.
“Of course I wasn’t at Olga‘s,” said Vasily in a surprised voice. “Didn’t you know where I went? Remember that little get-together planned by the Minister of Culture?”
“The Minister of Culture?” Sukhanov repeated blankly.
“Yes, he invited both of us to come to his dacha tonight, remember?” said Vasily offhandedly
A dog began to bark hoarsely a few streets away. Sukhanov looked at his son in deepening silence. The boy’s eyes had narrowed, and he did not seem half as tipsy as before.
“Oh, that’s right, you forgot to tell me about it!” he said with a cold smile. “Slipped your mind, did it? But I happened to see the Minister’s wife at that matinee at the Bolshoi, and she mentioned it to me. As a matter of fact, she wanted to make sure we’d be there. I told her you were rather busy nowadays, but as for me, I’d be delighted.”
“Vasily,” said Sukhanov slowly. “You must understand, it wasn’t an intentional… I didn’t… I just wasn’t sure we were inv
ited, you see. I wish you had told me, I myself would have liked to… Ah, forget it. That was lucky, you running into the woman.”
“Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it luck,” said Vasily “I overheard she was going to be at the theater. Why else, do you think, would I agree to suffer through three hours of boredom? I mean, no offense, but Grandma isn’t exactly a bundle of laughs, and I find Coppelia greatly overrated.”
“Oh,” said Sukhanov. “Oh, I see. Well, I’m glad it worked out. Many interesting people at the party, I suppose… By the way, did you meet their daughter? I hear she is pretty.”
“No, not particularly, unless, of course, your preferences run to tiny eyes and a general absence of neck. Which, personally, I’m willing to live with if they belong to a minister’s offspring. We hit it off rather well, I believe. I’m taking her out to dinner. Another sip?”
“No, thank you,” said Sukhanov cheerlessly. For some reason, he failed to feel happy for his son. Instead, he found himself strangely rattled by the conversation, so different from the one he had pictured. “And what about Olga?”
“Oh well, I figure we both need a change of scenery,” said Vasily with a shrug.
It was drawing closer to midnight; the lights were starting to go out in the houses around them, and the bench had turned cold. A leaf fell into Sukhanov’s lap; he picked it up and twirled it in his fingers. The dog, now barking only a street away, was joined by another, and their howling made him edgy and sad at the same time, as if he had lost something vital.
“Were you ever even in love with her?” he asked quietly.
Vasily looked vastly amused.
“I don’t believe it,” he drawled. “You, of all people, are going to lecture me about love?”
“What is that supposed to mean?” said Anatoly Pavlovich, straightening with slow dignity. “Your mother and I married for love!”
“But it sure was nice that she wasn’t the daughter of a bus driver, right?” Vasily replied, smiling. “I mean, how fortunate that her famous father was just the person to help you start your wonderful little career in art criticism. Talk of lucky coincidences!”
And that was when Sukhanov looked at his son—and saw a grown man whom he did not recognize. The man had light blue eyes and dark blond hair. The man was wearing a perfectly tailored blazer and drinking expensive wine. The man looked altogether like someone he had once known, but the man was an impostor. Had to be.
Sukhanov began to stand up.
“Let’s go home, I’m getting cold,” he said expressionlessly. “And by the way, Fyodor is staying with us for one more night. I expect you to be polite.”
“Do you know what your trouble is?” said the man on the bench, not attempting to move. “You do everything halfway. So you married up, so you sold out, wrote ideological nonsense you didn’t believe in, fine and good—but what did you get for it? A comfortable apartment in the Zamoskvorechie, a nice dacha, and a cushy little job at some magazine! Honestly, Father, was that the extent of your ambition, was it even worth all the sacrifice, to become an important man in such a small world? Do you realize how high you could have risen with Grandpa’s connections if only you had wanted to? But then again, maybe you couldn’t have, maybe you simply didn’t have it in you, maybe—”
Anatoly Pavlovich turned and walked away with heavy steps, feeling his age in his shoulders and knees. In another moment, the empty bottle clanged dully as it rolled under the bench, and Vasily followed him, still talking—talking about his own plans, his influential grandfather, some place in the Crimea, the Minister, the Minister’s overweight daughter… Sukhanov was no longer listening. When the elevator arrived, boxlike and lurching, and the smiling concierge swung open its iron gate, he waited for his son to pass inside the dismally mirrored coffin and then announced he was going to take the stairs instead.
“Good for one’s health,” he explained to the concierge.
“So I’ve heard,” replied the concierge enthusiastically. “They say every step up adds a second to a man’s life!”
For a moment Sukhanov wondered whether he wanted these extra seconds, these tiny units of life, pulsing with animation, stored in his body for future usage. Then he nodded and began to climb. On the third landing, he heard a plate smashing onto the floor in the apartment belonging to the mysterious woman with Nefertiti’s profile. As he continued to ascend, he thought that an altogether unusual amount of porcelain was being broken nowadays in building number seven, Belinsky Street, in the city of Moscow.
NINE
It happened the way he had always imagined—an explosion of ruthless knocks on the front door ripping through the stillness of sleep. The first volley merged with his dream, which immediately turned noisy and violent, with him dashing through grimy, bullet-riddled corridors, pursued by a mob of men with hairy arms and faces like slabs of beef; but when another salvo of raps slit his nightmare wide open, Sukhanov sat up and listened, his skin tightening with a sense of unreality. All was quiet about him, yet the silence rang with that menacing hollowness that follows upon a loud, sharp sound.
He rose and, struggling with his robe (which, clownishly, ridiculously, frighteningly, had grown a third sleeve and kept escaping him), traversed the predawn darkness as if in slow motion; the thuds of his slippers fell upon the floor like his own uneven heartbeats. In the entrance hall, he tripped against the ghosts of two umbrellas forgotten by the wall and, swearing, was just about to flip the light switch when the shadows exploded with knocking once again, unbearably close now. No longer able to pretend it had been a dream, he stood staring, staring at the front door, without moving, almost without breathing, feeling suddenly afraid and alone—as afraid and alone as he had felt forty-eight years ago, on the night when those polished black shoes had invaded their Arbat existence for the third, and final, time.
The first time he barely noticed, lost as he was in his new world. His routine of classes, holidays, meals in the months following his attempt to steal Gradsky’s manuscript had become a mere backdrop to the radiant, unearthly discoveries that awaited him almost nightly in the Professor’s dusty, cramped room, where the shouts of boys chasing one another in the yard and the familiar smells of meat pies and hot asphalt never penetrated and where, in the green glow of the lampshade, the precious gilded books slowly released their unforgettable fragrance, that scent of brittle paper and mustiness that for Anatoly would forever be the scent of previously unimaginable beauty. He moved through the summer of 1937 in a haze of secret excitement, inaudibly intoning the sonorous names of men who had walked the streets of strange watery and golden cities in centuries past and yet seemed to him more real than the flesh-and-blood inhabitants of his apartment—shadowy, inconsequential presences with whom he held shadowy conversations or who on occasion subjected him to somewhat less shadowy beatings.
Afterward, all he could recall of the poor unlovely Zoya Vienberg in those final weeks was the nearsighted, trembling fussiness with which she had spent the last day before the new school year sorting her dull brown folders, stuffed to the point of bursting with sheet music, on their kitchen table between meals, and the hysterical note that had stolen into her voice once or twice when she had addressed Galka Morozova. Then, one afternoon in October, Anatoly returned from school to find Zoya Vladimirovna’s door branded with a formidable-looking seal, and his mother and the Gradsky couple oddly reluctant to reply when Anton Morozov proclaimed indignantly that he was not surprised—that, in fact, he had suspected something like this all along. The music teacher never came back, and in another few weeks Morozov’s sister Pelageya matter-of-factly moved into the unoccupied room.
I hardly wondered about it at first, for the woman’s absence was never discussed and our life remained largely the same. But as the autumn deepened, I noticed that some change, slow and painful like corrosion, was eating away at the happiness of my evenings with the Professor. He appeared distracted or uninterested, and would often pause in the middle of a sentence, forg
etting to turn the page and listening intently—whether to the dry cough of his ailing wife behind the wall or to some other sound he expected to hear, I was not sure; and gradually, as the cold crept through the cracks of our old rambling building, a sense of unease furtively worked its way into my heart. And then one night, shortly before my ninth birthday, I woke up in the chilly December darkness to a silence that had ceased to be silent, that was filling with the muted sounds of stolidly shod feet trampling through our apartment, through our life.
In the morning, there was a tossing whirlwind of snow outside the windows, and the Professor ran out without a hat and was gone all day. My mother spent the afternoon frantically pleading with remote telephone operators, and then suddenly broke down crying and, clutching my shoulders, told me, in a voice I had never heard before, that my father might be staying in Gorky for a while longer and that I was the only thing she had left. And later that day, Anton Morozov stopped me in the corridor and, towering over me like some hirsute, sour-smelling mountain, asked me whether I knew that Tatyana Gradskaya’s family had all been vicious tsarists and that, before Lenin had set things right, our apartment had actually belonged to the Gradsky couple.