by Olga Grushin
“Yes, but if some tyrant bans all facial hair, an ingenious person might contrive to grow a secret mustache, say, around his ankle, and that would be interesting, no? So in a way, you see, imposing limits on creativity may actually stimulate the appearance of better, or at least more innovative, art. Of course, in Russia, boundaries and rules—whether set by the Church, the tsar, or the Party—have always been an integral part of any artistic endeavor, and this may account—”
“Are we getting close now?” Sukhanov interrupted. For the past few minutes he had been asking himself with growing befuddlement why on earth he had agreed to visit a total stranger—an icon collector, of all things—on this busy, this extremely busy day.
“Almost there,” said Dalevich brightly. “Just through this gateway and across the yard. Anyway, as I was saying, this may account in part for the astonishing regularity with which our land has given birth to geniuses. Although, to be honest, the last five or six decades—”
A low archway in a nondescript wall led them from the bustle of Bolshaya Ordynka onto a narrow path twittering with invisible birds. A peeling one-story house, almost a shed, stretched on their right; on their left rose a toylike church, half concealed by tall purple-headed wildflowers swaying in the wind. Sukhanov paused in surprise. He had hurried with crowds on the other side of the wall scores of times and yet had never suspected the existence of this quiet little nook, shady, damp, and melancholy like some tenderly heartrending watercolor by Levitan—but of course, Moscow was full of such forgotten, crumbling corners, exiled reminders of a different life.
The church had a single darkened dome with no cross on it.
“How very old it is,” Sukhanov said, looking at the carvings of strange beasts covering the once white walls. “Fourteenth century, perhaps?”
Dalevich gently took his elbow and guided him along the path into an unkempt yard encircled by more low, peeling houses.
“Actually, no, it’s quite new,” he said readily. “Designed in a pseudo-Russian style by one Aleksei Shchusev, at the turn of the century. This used to be a convent, founded by the Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fyodorovna in 1908, if I’m not mistaken. Naturally, soon after the Revolution the convent was closed, the royal benefactress thrown alive down a mineshaft—and then, in a nice twist, Shchusev went on to build the Lenin Mausoleum and the ever-so-charming Hotel Moskva. The history of architecture—like any other history, I suppose—is simply full of these little ironies, don’t you find? Ah, and that over there is Oleg’s house, he rents a… Tolya?”
Sukhanov had stopped a few paces away with a wondering look on his face.
“So peaceful here,” he said with an apologetic half-smile. “I just wanted… Listen for a moment.”
Overcast stillness reigned about them, yet it was not altogether quiet. Dusty sparrows chirruped in the dense undergrowth; a young woman, her head covered with a somber kerchief, walked hurriedly across the yard, raising small, timid sounds in her wake—a pebble rolling, a door creaking on its hinges, a splash when her foot slipped into a pool of rainwater; and if one listened very closely, one could almost hear the purple flowers rustling against the church walls. In the early, aromatic days of summer, there would be many butterflies, yellow, white, and orange, spiraling like sunspots over these weeds, which, Sukhanov somehow knew, were called ivanchai—Ivan’s chai, Ivan’s tea—an odd, lyrical name that came back to him all at once from a remote childhood lesson, bringing with it a host of other soft-hued recollections of his fourteenth, his fifteenth years: the flowers he had pressed patiently between book pages for botany class; the birds calling to one another high in the trees during his solitary runs through the woods, with his head upturned to drink in the sun-dappled colors of the sky; the comforting, sweet, slightly decaying smells of the earth meeting him as he had fallen exhausted and newly rich into the grass…. Yes, this yard smelled a bit like that, of dying flowers and rain and past summers, and it was strange to think that only a stone’s throw away, on the other side of this wall, a monstrous city unfolded its hectic streets, rumbling with buses, crowded with people, littered with ticket stubs and candy wrappers and other chaff of tired, ephemeral enjoyments—for here, all around him, were the sounds and scents and colors not of the capital but of some small provincial town miles and ages away, a town that was dreary, neglected, yet somehow dear… A town, in fact, very much like Inza in the Ulyanovsk region, three crammed, malodorous, frightening train rides from Moscow, where my mother and I spent two years in wartime evacuation.
We lived in a drafty one-story house on the outskirts, taken in by a taciturn aunt of some chance family acquaintance. I shared a corner with the woman’s two sons, and every morning the three of us would stumble together through darkness and snow to a school on the other side of town. And it was there, in the early winter of 1942, that I met Oleg Romanov, a onetime pupil of Chagall and now an unprepossessing teacher of drawing—and in the course of one lesson, while my bored schoolmates passed notes and hand-rolled cigarettes across the freezing classroom, I unexpectedly had a glimpse of the truth.
I had long since decided that art was a dangerous, shameful secret of my half-forgotten early childhood, woven out of decadent dreams and seductive songs by demigods from magical far-off countries in centuries past, preserved for a brief while by devious betrayers of the state, then washed away forever with the melting Arbat snows. Now I saw that I had been mistaken. Art was not a private embarrassment or a wicked foreign enchantment. Even more amazing, art was not dead. It continued to live, today, now, in this sorry little town that had some two hundred houses and not a single paved street—and it was brought into existence on an average day by a modest man called Oleg Romanov—a man with a funny lisp and nearsighted eyes—a man who was not very different from other men I knew and yet who somehow, out of nothing, out of the cold, grave, broken world about him, could summon to life those misty, shining landscapes of unfolding vistas, so uniquely his own….
For several nights I barely slept, weighing my discovery and all its implications in my reeling soul. Then, at a lesson two or three weeks later, after I had spent a torturous hour struggling to draw an increasingly tricky cup, Romanov called me aside.
“You show potential, Sukhanov,” he said almost reluctantly. “An interesting effort—trying to depict both the outside of the cup and its contents with one image. I can give you private art lessons if you like.”
That was another revelation: Art, that glowing, elusive miracle, that sublime universe populated by divinities, could be taught—and an awkward sketch of a teacup could somehow hold the key to a priceless apprenticeship. It would be a lot of work, of course, Romanov said sternly. I would have to start noticing the world around me, learn its smells, its colors, its sounds, the shapes and textures of its creatures, from a deceptively plain sparrow and a common yellow butterfly to man, the glory of creation; I would wrest the secrets of dyes from the earth at my feet, memorize the tints of sunset and the shadows of rain, distinguish between the many shades of white, read a rainbow like a poem—and one day, after much effort, many sleepless nights, and mounds of broken pencils and matted brushes, I might finally arrive at… at…
“I’m afraid we are running late,” said the soft voice of Fyodor Dalevich.
And as Sukhanov emerged from his impossibly vivid daydream and met his cousin’s politely questioning eyes, he felt something new, something dark, stir inside him. And that something was dread, numbing, overpowering dread—for as he stood in the middle of the yard belonging to his evacuation years and listened to the echo of memories fading in the depths of his being, he understood precisely toward what future abyss his recollections were pushing him, mercilessly, inexorably…
“Forgotten something?” Dalevich inquired with a helpful smile.
“On the contrary,” Sukhanov stuttered, “I’ve just remembered I… There is something I must do. Please apologize to your friend—tell him some other time, perhaps….”
He turned to
walk away.
“Of course, I understand,” Dalevich called out after him. “Although I was hoping we could finish our discussion. I meant to tell you about this article I’ve written—”
Sukhanov glanced back at the quiet, overgrown yard, at the darkened windows, at the flaking paint on the low buildings, in one of which someone named Oleg was at this very moment awaiting his arrival….
“Some other time, perhaps,” he repeated flatly.
Then briskly, without another look, he strode toward his present.
TEN
The clock on Sukhanov’s desk showed ten past six when Nina cracked open his door and, without entering, told him that she was leaving to meet a friend for a play and would be home late.
“Don’t wait for me with supper,” she said, adjusting the clasp of her bracelet, which kept snapping open.
He noticed that she wore unfamiliar earrings, delicate silver spirals, which, dangling gently along her neck, made her face look thinner and somehow younger. Her lipstick seemed new as well, a girlish pink instead of her usual muted peach.
“A play?” he said. “I didn’t know you were going to see a play.”
“The Cherry Orchard, at the Malyi,” she explained quickly. The bracelet would not stay closed. “Liusya called yesterday, she has a spare ticket.”
Mechanically he recalled the stray playbill that the wind had delivered into his hands.
“It’s supposed to rain later tonight,” he said. “Of course, you are taking the car?”
“No, Vadim asked for an evening off. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”
“You should get a taxi back,” he suggested, and added, after the briefest hesitation, “Have I seen those earrings before?”
“A hundred times,” she replied with impatience. “I must go, I’m running late.”
She vanished in a gleaming whirl of white and gray silk, leaving a faint smell of lily of the valley behind her, and he heard her high heels hastily traversing the evening silence before being erased by the bang of the front door. For a moment he debated leaning over the balcony and following her sonorous progress down the darkening street, but the paralyzing dread he had experienced in the yard of the decrepit convent still hovered somewhere in the vicinity of his heart, and, oddly reluctant to move, he turned back to his desk instead and busied himself with the stiff workings of the typewriter.
It was nearly eleven when, under the disapproving eye of the bronze Pegasus, he typed the last sentence of his meandering, rather inconclusive conclusion and, having wrested the page from the jaws of the antiquated contraption, added it to a thin stack of paper, vengefully stabbed the whole with a bent paper clip, and leaned back, considering. The article, he knew, said shamefully little, barely straying beyond a meager smattering of facts. Salvador Dalí was born in 1904 in a small Spanish town. The artist’s father was… Feeling suddenly in need of fresh air, Sukhanov rose, erased the light with a flick of the wrist, pushed open the balcony door, and stepped outside, into the pale, cool night.
It had indeed begun to drizzle a while ago. The roofs and the church domes glistened, and the city rustled and splashed in a soft, newly autumnal rhythm, rising and falling with the wet sounds of infrequent cars sliding down the streets, a distant chorus of young, tipsy voices bellowing nonsensical rhymes to the tune of the “Ode to Joy,” and the regular tapping of a walking stick belonging to a shrunken old man who every night shuffled slowly along Belinsky Street, before him a giant black dog on a straining leash. A thinning wraith of cigarette smoke drifted from somewhere above, and from below, meeting it in midair, floated a scrap of quiet conversation; Sukhanov heard a woman’s voice saying sadly, “We’ll have such a harvest of apples this year—and no one to eat them….” And all at once, as he stood listening and watching, breathing deeply, the night seemed to him so full of hidden movement, so poignantly alive, so unlike the habitually stuffy stillness hanging, thick and immobile, in the room at his back, that he felt startled, just as he might if, leafing through the sixth edition of his textbook on Soviet art theory, he discovered a poem printed discreetly between two authoritative paragraphs—some short verse with no apparent sense and yet full of lilting grace, gray and gentle like rain itself….
And in that lucid moment of surprise, a realization that for the last few days had lurked in the shadowy recesses of his thoughts forced its way to the surface. Something was happening to him—something strange, something, in fact, extremely unsettling—something that he was unable to explain, much less stop or control.
He was being assailed by his past.
Anatoly Pavlovich had always made a habit of gluing shut the pages of passing years, leaving at hand only some brief paragraphs for basic reference and a few heavily edited sunny patches for sentimental indulgence. Yet of late, memories were welling up in his soul, unbidden and relentless—and if at first he had found them to be pleasantly nostalgic sojourns into the pastel-tinted landscapes of his early childhood, now they were beginning to grow bleaker, harsher, more disturbing, disrupting the tranquillity of his mind, of his life, bringing him closer and closer to the forbidden edge of a personal darkness he had not leaned over in decades. This morning, in the yard, he had caught himself on the verge of reliving the horror of that day in November of 1943—that single moment of suspended belief followed by an immensity of pain that had swept through his soul, wiping it clean, and afterward, that persistent sensation of being lost, wordless, adrift, in a fog teeming with grotesquely sympathetic strangers. The mere possibility of drawing near that memory produced a chilly numbness in the back of his head, and he knew he could not, must not, let it torment him, not now, not after all these years…
Again he forced his thoughts away with a trembling sensation of stepping, just in time, from the brink of the abyss. The night pattered and glimmered before him. He touched his hand to his forehead, then, suppressing a shudder, moved to go back inside, when another waft of smoke drifted from above and something solid hit him squarely on the head and, bouncing off the banister, plummeted into the bushes. Incredulous, he followed it with his eyes: it was a loaf of bread. Then, craning his neck as far as his stoutness allowed, he looked up and found himself confronted with an unfamiliar old man in a red ski cap, hanging over the railing of the top, ninth-floor, balcony. The old man’s body was invisible from that angle, and his small round face, with its beady black eyes, wrinkled yellowish skin, and snub nose, bore a remarkable resemblance to an aging marmoset. Sukhanov had an uncanny impression of a withering balloon with monkey features drawn on it and a cigarette glued to its surface, floating in the smoky fog.
The man winked, and the impression was gone.
“Good news, comrade,” the man whispered conspiratorially. “I’ve just spoken to Lenin, and he wants me to tell you that everything’s going according to plan. It will start at four in the morning, on the dot. Be prepared.”
“I beg your pardon?” Sukhanov said frostily. “Are you talking to me?”
The old man beamed at him with sly benevolence. “Just continue following the instructions,” he whispered brightly. “And beware of our enemies. Our enemies are everywhere. Always watch your back.”
At that moment the ceiling of Sukhanov’s study shook with an onrush of thumping steps, and a woman’s shrill exclamation escaped into the night: “Papa, why aren’t you in bed? Have you taken your medicine?” The apparition cast a furtive glance over his invisible shoulder, then turned back to Sukhanov, flashed him a toothless smile, dropping his cigarette in passing, and vanished abruptly, as if someone had jerked the string tied to the balloon. An instant later the balcony door above banged shut, muting the sounds of an ensuing struggle.
Eight floors below, a red flicker of the cigarette flared up and went out.
Wiping the drizzle off his face, Sukhanov walked inside and bolted the door behind him with an unsteady hand, muttering, “Honestly, has everyone in this building gone insane?” After the luminous softness of the night, the darkness of th
e room blinded him unpleasantly. He moved to switch on the lamp—and immediately a multitude of shadows leapt away from him like a herd of frightened, misshapen beasts. For a minute, before his eyes adjusted to the light, he had a jarring sensation of actual creatures, insubstantial, colorless, weightless like dust balls, huddling in hidden corners and watching him stealthily—from under the sofa, from behind the door, from over the rim of the wastebasket…
He blinked, rubbed his temples. It was at once clear to him that he was not getting enough rest, that the disturbances of the past few days were turning his thoughts hazy and uncertain like a watercolor forgotten in the rain; and he suddenly longed to retire with a light book and let himself drift into dreamless sleep on the wave of some author’s inconsequential rambling. It took him a moment to recall what novel he was reading—a poor translation of an absurd Western title published in the difficult-to-obtain, subscription-only series Science Fiction, with a paranoid, unlikable hero who was constantly being tossed in and out of strangers’ bodies; all in all, just the sort of vapid reading he favored after a long, exhausting day of mental acrobatics. On the heels of that thought, however, came the realization that the volume still lay where he had abandoned it a few days before—on the nightstand in the bedroom.
Slipping into the corridor, he irresolutely considered a thin strip of light seeping from under the closed bedroom door. He had been too busy to talk to Dalevich after their failed morning walk, and at this hour, the prospect of explaining himself to an overly polite man he hardly knew, likely to be attired in his pajamas and possibly half asleep, seemed an altogether awkward proposition. Sighing with annoyance, he tiptoed back, casting a glance into the faintly sparkling cavern of the unlit living room and noting Nina’s folded linens stacked neatly at the foot of the sofa. Plays certainly ran quite long these days, didn’t they…. Shutting the study door with a bit more force than he intended, he looked about his shelves with a frown—and then his eyes fell on a thick red book with golden lettering on its spine, lying half drowned amid the papers on his desk.