by Olga Grushin
This was, of course, the collection of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s novellas that Ksenya had tossed at him on the morning of the Bolshoi performance. He had forgotten all about it. The ballet Coppelia, she had said, was based on Hoffmann’s story “The Sandman”; she had wanted him to read it. For her age, Ksenya was extremely well read and opinionated, uncomfortably so at times; indeed, of late, her air of intellectual arrogance made it increasingly difficult for him to talk to her, especially as she made no secret of her absolute disdain for his work. A few years ago, she had gone through a period of fascination with Greek mythology and out of some footnote had mined a nickname for him, which, irritatingly, had survived all the subsequent upheavals of her adolescence. She called him Cerberus to this day. As she had pointed out on one occasion, the original Cerberus, that monstrous three-headed dog guarding the kingdom of the dead, devoured not only the spirits of the dead who tried to escape into the light of day but also the living who attempted to descend into the underworld.
“A fitting metaphor for Soviet art, the sad fate of any artist who still has some living spirit left in him, and the role of a critic in bringing that fate about, don’t you think?” she had said to him without smiling—his own daughter, at that time barely fifteen years old…. It was ironic, he thought, choking on a quick, bitter laugh, that of his two children, one rejected what he did so completely, while the other—the other, in accepting it, was willing to go to lengths that he himself would consider amoral. Musing, he picked up the Hoffmann volume and weighed it in his hand. Reading the story would at least give him something to discuss with Ksenya over breakfast.
From the very first page, the language struck him as pompous, filled as it was with verbal equivalents of wringing hands and brimming eyes, the hero repeatedly lamenting, in the true fashion of a humorless romantic, the “dark presentiments of a dreadful fate that hovered over him like stormy clouds.” Yet little by little, Sukhanov became engrossed in the story of the young man haunted since early childhood by the image of a mysterious Sandman. The boy’s mother nightly evoked the Sandman’s nearing arrival as a simple metaphor for sleep, whose advent makes children’s eyes heavy as if sprinkled with sand, but in Nathaniel’s imagination the Sandman evolved into an eye-stealing monster from an old maid’s tale—a monster the boy believed embodied in the town’s sinister notary, Coppelius. When, years later, Nathaniel encountered a foreign spectacles salesman who bore a striking resemblance to the Coppelius of his childhood nightmares, his tranquil daily life gave way to a dream full of ominous forebodings, and his mind began a tortured slide toward insanity.
One aspect of the tale in particular interested Sukhanov. Were all the strange occurrences in the story merely the result of the hero’s unbalanced mind—his private hallucinations—or did he lose his sanity as a result of strange occurrences that were indeed real but that, thanks to some dark gift of clairvoyance not unlike the artistic intuition of a genius, he alone of all his friends and family could perceive? Unfortunately, it seemed the question would be left unanswered, for Hoffmann was losing the battle with mediocrity by giving in to the cowardly impulse of supplying his readers with a happy ending. Surrounded by the tender care of his loved ones, Nathaniel was fully cured of his afflictions and, having implausibly received a substantial inheritance, began to plan a move to a country manor with his longtime sweetheart. Now the cooing couple were climbing the town hall tower to cast one last look at the place where they had lived, loved, grieved, et cetera, et cetera. Sukhanov felt bored, and heavy with sleep, as if his own eyelids had been weighed down by sand. Yawning, he flipped the page and at the same time stretched his hand to a lamp by the couch, ready to turn it off after the last sentence.
He never read the last sentence.
On top of the tower Nathaniel suffered a final outburst of madness. Spotting the notary Coppelius in the gathering crowd below, he shouted, “Lovely eyes, lovely eyes!” and flung himself over the parapet. “Nathaniel was lying on the pavement with his head shattered,” Sukhanov read—and stopped, and let the book slowly drop to the floor. Lulled into drowsiness, he had not foreseen this—had not had time to erect his usual defenses—and it hit him in his most tender center with sickening precision.
For a long minute he did not move. Then, abruptly, he groped for the suddenly elusive light switch and, finding it, flooded his eyes, his mind, his soul with darkness. Lying on the pavement with his head shattered… His own dreadful fate had caught up with him after all, just as he had feared it would.
They had expected his father to return from Gorky sometime in the summer of 1938, but he did not. His presence was still needed at the factory, Nadezhda Sukhanova would say repeatedly; but as one season spilled into the next, the conviction in her voice lessened, and Anatoly began to catch that quick, cringing look in her eyes that with time would become her habitual expression. On several occasions, always on birthdays, he shouted to his father over the static of telephone lines. Pavel Sukhanov’s voice, traversing a distance of four hundred thirty-nine kilometers, arrived in the boy’s ear sounding muffled and somewhat distracted, as if it had collected dust along the way, but cheerful enough, and occasionally even tinged with impatient pride—an intonation that was new to him.
One conversation Anatoly remembered in particular.
“I’m close to a groundbreaking discovery that will alter the whole course of aviation,” Pavel Sukhanov had told his son, but refused to divulge any details. “Best to keep it secret from everyone until the time is right,” he had said mysteriously, and Anatoly could hear a smile softening the edges of his voice.
That was in the summer of 1939, and in the autumn something happened. One day the phone in the Arbat apartment rang uncomfortably early, and his mother ran into the corridor to answer it, her bare feet slapping against the floor with a newly orphaned sound. She left the door wide open behind her, and, my mind still wrapped in the thick cotton of a dream, I watched her pick up the receiver. The light that morning was like steamed milk, white and misty, and the contours of her long nightshirt seemed to dissolve in the air before my drowsy eyes. She asked a short, breathless question, then listened in silence, and I saw her put her hand up to her mouth as if to hide a yawn. Later, she slowly walked back into the room and lowered herself onto my mattress. Her eyes were standing still.
“I have some bad news,” she said, her hand hovering over my forehead like a nervous bird afraid to alight. “Your father has fallen ill, and they have to keep him in the hospital for a while.” The illness was going to be lengthy but not dangerous, she continued—not unlike a severe flu. He was expected to recover completely in a matter of months. “We won’t be able to talk to him for some time, but that’s fine, we’ll just write to him, won’t we?” she said with false brightness, avoiding my eyes. I was only ten years old at the time—too young to suspect the lie behind her words.
Over the next two years, the date of my father’s release from the unspecified hospital kept being postponed, although, according to my mother, he was always close to getting well. He wrote to us regularly, of course, but all his letters were lost in the mail. Shortly after the beginning of the war, we left Moscow without having heard from him, joining thousands of people in a worried exodus to the east.
Then, sometime in the spring of 1942, I learned that he had been cured at last and was returning home, to work at an important defense facility in the vicinity of Moscow. A trickle of letters started between us, unpredictable and accidental like all wartime correspondence, but real, oh so real after the desperate years of silence. My mother read each precious missive aloud, clutching it tightly as if doubting its existence, and pausing often, sometimes visibly skipping a line or two with her startled, red-rimmed eyes. The letters released in me a warm burst of new hope. I knew that, after all this time, our meeting was drawing near, and, inspired by my recently discovered gift, I spent hours trying to render, on scraps of rough brown paper, margins of newspapers, discarded envelopes, and whatever else dri
fted into my life, everything I could remember of his laughter, his gestures, his walk, the way he squared his chin when he listened, the way my heart felt solid and warm and in place when his big hands rested on my shoulders…. We received his last letter in October of 1943, just as we began to prepare for our own return home. He knew we were coming. He wrote that he had a wonderful surprise planned for us—he had finally made the great discovery of his life. My mother looked queasy.
The city was slick with sleet and rain when, at two in the afternoon on the sixteenth of November, we disembarked from the overcrowded train and made our halting way across the platform. The night before, while we had waited for hours at some nameless, unlit station, I had traced my father’s name in the grime of our car’s window, but in the morning someone had slid the window open, and as the rain lashed inside, the letters ran down in dirty rivulets, growing slowly unrecognizable.
He himself was not there to meet us.
“That’s fine, that’s fine, we’ll manage, that’s fine,” my mother kept saying in a small, fluttering voice I did not like. We had few belongings: a bag stuffed with clothes, another full of kitchen utensils, a bulky lampshade she had refused to leave behind, and a folder bulging with my drawings and watercolors, my most—my only—cherished possession, which I carried under my coat, pressed to my chest, imagining all through our journey how I would spread them out on the table before my father’s eyes and wordlessly, my heart skipping with fear and joy, await his judgment. The city unwound before me like a tormentingly sluggish movie reel that seemed never to end. Then somehow it did—and there we were already, walking on our familiar Arbat street, slipping on the glistening pavement under the weight of our bags.
The deserted street is so quiet I can almost hear the liquid echo of our slushing steps. Most of the windows in the houses around us are dark, some even boarded—but I can already see that in the building ahead of us, our building, the windows on the fifth floor, our floor, are lit, lit brightly, lit bravely, overflowing with a nearing, already tangible happiness—and… Is it truly possible? Yes, a tall, broad-shouldered man is silhouetted against one of the windows, and as we draw closer, so close that I have to tilt my head back until my neck hurts, I see that it’s him, it’s really him, he is standing there waiting for us, and he is smiling, and the whole thing seems so much like a recurring dream I have had for years that I am a bit afraid to wake up. And just as I think that, the man in the window, my father, raises his hand in greeting to us, and then pushes the rain-sleeked window frame outward and, with a quick movement, steps on the windowsill; and for one brief moment, ignoring my mother’s soft, horrified gasp behind me, I frenziedly try to guess the words that he is about to shout to us—the first live words I will hear from him in years.
But my father does not shout. In the next instant, still smiling joyfully, he takes a step forward, and walks off the windowsill—walks off into nothing at all.
A heartbeat wells in me, large and hollow and deafening, like the rushing sound of a monstrous waterfall, and all I know, all I believe, all I love, hangs in a confused, incredulous balance. Then, emitting a kind of strained moan, my mother grabs my head and roughly pushes my face into her coat, painfully pressing my cheek into a button, and, suddenly enveloped in her woolly darkness, I close my eyes and inhale the sharp smell of damp cloth and the faint smells of stale smoke and dried meat—the manifold odors of the rain falling on the hateful city and of our last night’s train to nowhere. And as I stand without moving, it seems without breathing, my feeling of living in the present tense, my perception of reality, the very memory of my identity leave me like crumbling shells of things that have died, and the world itself falls away from my senses.
After that, the rain began to turn to snow, prickling the exposed skin of Anatoly’s neck and hands like tiny cold needles, and there were people running from somewhere and shouting, and then he was suddenly running himself, faster and faster, hugging his folder of drawings with both arms, and there were darkening streets swerving before him, and an old woman who exclaimed with fright on some corner and then cursed angrily at his back, and a mangy dog that followed him for a while whimpering lightly, and after that, some quiet yard with water dripping dully, incessantly, from the branches of naked trees and all the cornices and all the windowsills—and again, the world gently slipped away like a child’s clumsily folded paper boat being swept away by the current….
It was in that yard, hours later, that Sashka Morozov found him, sitting motionless on the ground, watching bits and pieces of torn paper as they drowned in the downpour. Talking loudly all the while, Sashka held him firmly around the shoulders and led him somewhere, and there were more people, some of whom he probably knew, and others whom he did not, and that night they put him and his mother into a car and drove them across the river, to some place with a multitude of tiny rooms opening into one another like a series of mousetraps. He remembered oppressively low ceilings, ugly wallpaper in brown and red zigzags in the hallway, and a giant rusty bathtub resting on funny-looking clawlike feet. A skinny woman with a sharp nose kept fussing over him in visible embarrassment, pressing a cup of lukewarm soup on him and calling him “poor dear”; and a serious yellow-haired boy, no more than ten years old, surreptitiously followed him with curious, shining eyes wherever he went, whatever he did, as if expecting him to change into something strange at any moment.
Anatoly gave the boy his few remaining drawings to play with; he did not want them any longer. They must have stayed with these nameless, unnecessary people for some time, a few days at least, perhaps a whole week, because he was still there when the tenacious, numbing grief, which had paralyzed his being for so long he had ceased to understand time, began to release him slowly, breath by breath, until one evening he was finally able to sit, dry-eyed and oddly unfeeling, repeating, “There, there,” while his mother cried with relieved abandon on his shoulder. That night they moved across snow-buried Moscow back to the Arbat apartment.
He never did find the surprise his father had prepared for them. There was no trace of any important discovery among the man’s scanty possessions. His desk contained a neat stack of engineering manuals, a framed photograph of Nadezhda Sukhanova as a very young, touchingly awkward girl, and a volume of Pushkin’s works bookmarked in a few places, with two impatient exclamation points in red pencil in the margins next to the sentence “A scientist without talent is akin to that poor mullah who cut up the Koran and ate it, thinking thus to be filled with the spirit of Mohammed.” There was also a picture, torn out of some children’s magazine and thumbtacked to the wall, of a brightly colored—crimson, white, and golden—hot-air balloon, one of the early models, across which Pavel Sukhanov had written in his slanting, confident handwriting: “Don’t let anyone clip your wings.”
In the following months Anatoly often puzzled over that phrase, wondering whether it had been a random scribble or something more meaningful, his father’s personal motto perhaps, a promise of courage which in the end he had not been able to keep—for was not a self-willed departure from life, especially in the midst of so much death, the ultimate act of cowardice? Choosing to stage the exit before their very eyes seemed an additional cruelty to Anatoly, unworthy of the man he thought his father had been, and in a hidden, most childlike cranny of his mind he kept alive the possibility that none of this had been intended, that it had all been a tragic, absurdly needless accident—that his father had simply slipped on the wet windowsill in the act of some clownish, extravagant greeting. (Indeed, there would always remain this maddening touch of uncertainty, even in later years, when he well understood that Pavel Sukhanov had never been in any hospital—that, like the poor music teacher, like Gradsky and his wife, like hundreds of thousands of others, he had been arrested as an “enemy of the people” and, having survived who knew what private hell, had been subsequently freed during the war, when the country had felt an acute need for skilled officers and military specialists, experienced aviation en
gineers among them, and a wave of hasty releases had swept through the labor camps—and that sometime in the preceding years of horror, his spirit must have been broken, never to mend again.)
His mother, who might have had a better understanding of what had happened, grew tearfully reproachful every time Anatoly alluded to the matter, and he soon learned to ask her no questions. Already in the first post-victory year, he watched her slightly edgy reply “My husband died during the war” change into the dignified statement “My husband died in the war,” thus making their own, very private and uncertain, pain gradually seem part of a different pain, clear and bright and noble, shared by millions of people and imbued with a sense of great purpose. He let it be—it was easier that way.
Then, in May of 1947, only a few weeks before his school graduation, there came a night when, in the darkness of their room, with his mother sighing in uneasy sleep behind a partition, he lay on his back watching the fireworks of the second victory anniversary light up the ceiling in uneven flares—and suddenly, just as a particularly dazzling red burst ricocheted off the chandelier stump, he understood the true meaning of the words he had come to regard as his father’s farewell message to himself. “Don’t let anyone clip your wings,” Pavel Sukhanov had written, and it was not, as Anatoly had previously believed, a bequest of bravery, a proud expression of defiance. It was a warning instead, a cautioning reminder that the only life worth living was a life without humiliation, a free life, a safe life—and the only sure way to avoid having one’s wings clipped was to grow no wings at all.