by Olga Grushin
The dinner hour was approaching, and the girls on the second floor surreptitiously powdered their noses, ready to disperse among the neighborhood cafeterias. Their conversations, swerving in shallow eddies from wall to wall, rolled back like an ebbing tide at Sukhanov’s passage but left single phrases behind, to be picked up by his incurious hearing. “A pair of Italian leather boots, just around the corner!” he heard someone say excitedly. As he ascended the stairs, the chatter faded behind him.
The third floor, a yellow corridor with a stained carpet and two rows of doors whose nameplates read like the magazine’s masthead, was quiet and, it struck him after a moment, oddly deserted. The doors were ajar, the offices of his senior staff empty. Quickening his steps, he walked to the far end, toward a recess presided over by Liubov Markovna, his personal secretary, a marvelously efficient woman of indeterminate years with a penchant for painfully pointy pencils. She was at her desk, whispering into the telephone. Seeing him, she abruptly let go of the receiver and, stretching out her arms as if trying to catch something hurtling toward her, began to prattle in an unbecoming manner, “Anatoly Palych, Anatoly Palych, wait a second!”—but the momentum had already carried him across the threshold.
There he stopped and looked about in puzzlement.
The managing editor, Ovseev, a tall, thin, balding man resembling a praying mantis, was sitting in his, Sukhanov‘s, leather chair, reading some items from a pad with a surprising air of authority, while the diminutive, wide-eyed, skittish Anastasia Lisitskaya, Ovseev’s secretary and rumored mistress, tottered on nine-inch heels by his side, taking notes. Pugovichkin, the assistant editor in chief, his shape as small, rotund, and faintly comical as his name, was there too, consulting with the department heads; a few others meandered about the room. In itself, this gathering was not necessarily remarkable, since editorial meetings always took place in Sukhanov’s office—but no meeting was scheduled for another three weeks, and no meeting had ever taken place without his presence.
“What is the meaning of this?” Sukhanov said in a measured voice.
Startled, the editors looked up from their pads, and a hush fell among them.
“Anatoly Pavlovich,” said Ovseev, hurriedly rising from Sukhanov’s chair.
“Why are you all here?”
“Anatoly Pavlovich, we had to call an urgent meeting to discuss a few last-minute changes to the current issue—and since you were supposed to be out of town—”
Lisitskaya’s heels pattered across the floor as she darted to hide behind Ovseev.
Sukhanov marched to his desk, regained possession of his chair, and opened his briefcase with a harsh snap, all his gestures meant to reassert his momentarily lapsed command.
“What nonsense, I wasn’t out of town,” he said curtly. “How could I be, with that Dalí article on my hands? Speaking of which, someone should take it to the printers right away.”
“But,” said Ovseev, “surely you know…” He did not finish the sentence.
“I have it right here, hold on just one… What did you say?” Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a few people gingerly tiptoeing out of the office, while Pugovichkin drew closer and hovered above him. Looking up, Sukhanov found an exaggerated concern wrinkling the man’s kindly pancake of a face.
“Anatoly Pavlovich, I don’t believe it!” moaned the assistant editor in chief. “Could it be you haven’t heard?”
Sukhanov stared at him blankly.
“I’m afraid,” Pugovichkin said, spreading his plump hands outward in a gesture of futility, “the Dali piece has been postponed.”
“We hope it didn’t give you too much trouble,” Ovseev added with an ingratiating smile. “Of course, it will be published soon, if not in the next issue, then in the one after that for sure—”
“And how, I’d like to know, could this decision be made without me?” Sukhanov thundered incredulously. “How can any of this be happening without me?”
Lisitskaya’s heels fled into the corridor with the sound of a frantic drumroll.
“Well, you see,” said Pugovichkin quickly, “we received this phone call the day before yesterday.” He raised his eyes meaningfully to the ceiling, to indicate a far-off, heavenly sphere of influence—their accepted shorthand for communications from the magazine’s Party liaison. “It appeared that a more… more timely subject had come to someone’s attention, and we were to be sent a new article that very afternoon. On Chagall. We were told that, in view of his recent death… You know, of course, he died this past March…. And since you were leaving…”
“Chagall,” Sukhanov repeated, his voice ominously steady. “They want Art of the World to publish an article on Chagall, and you have actually agreed to it? Be so kind as to tell me I’ve misheard you, Sergei Nikolaevich. Or have you lost your mind?”
The few remaining people slunk outside, and Sukhanov was left alone with his second-in-command. Pugovichkin was talking now, in a rapid, offended monotone, gathering momentum, trying to convince him of something, but for a few minutes Sukhanov heard nothing as he sat staring at the dust particles twirling before him in the stuffy, sun-lacerated air. True, he had allowed the questionable Dali article to be forced upon the magazine, grudgingly resigning himself to this one-time challenge to his authority—but a piece on Chagall would take matters to an entirely new level. The difference between Dali, outrageous by virtue of his foreign birth and viewed therefore as a mere curiosity akin to a two-headed goat in some little-frequented Kunstkammer, and Chagall, who had come from Russia’s own backyard, been appointed Commissar of Fine Arts after the Revolution, taught in a Soviet art academy, and then chosen to leave Russia behind in order to become foreign and outrageous, was just as wide and impassable as the difference between some poor jungle savage who knows nothing beyond the cruel and nonsensical superstitions of his tribe and a man of civilized faith who proceeds to give it up in order to murmur incantations and slaughter chickens. Publishing an article on Chagall would be universally interpreted as an act of rebellion, an absolute break with decades of steadfast traditions of Soviet criticism, which he himself had helped to invent, and as likely as not would prove tantamount to career suicide for him and his senior staff.
Publishing such an article was impossible.
“It will be most welcome, I was assured,” Pugovichkin was saying, trotting back and forth across the office. “In fact, I’ve been told that the Ministry is thinking of organizing a Chagall retrospective in a year or two. Wouldn’t that be something?”
Sukhanov lifted his head. He was no longer angry, only tired, very tired.
“Don’t be so naive, Serezha,” he said quietly. “You sound just like an excitable eighteen-year-old girl I met the other day. Changes, changes, spring in the air, Soviet art is inferior, let’s all say what we think! At least she has the excuse of being young—but you and I, we should know better, we went through it all once before, didn’t we? Honestly, can you not see that this whole Chagall business is nothing but a provocation, a test of loyalty, if you will? The Ministry has no intention of putting on any ‘retrospective.’ It simply hopes to flush out the handful of enthusiastic fools who will believe in all their fine promises and start getting carried away, saying unwise things and publishing unwise articles—and before one has time to blink, they’ll have lost their jobs and been sent off to the provinces, or worse, and new people in their places will say and write the same old things as before.”
Pugovichkin stopped pacing and leaned over the desk.
“I understand your worries,” he said earnestly, “but I think you underestimate the nature of what is happening in the country this time around. Look, Tolya, it’s been less than six months since the leadership change in March, and already, the man has said some pretty radical things. His Leningrad speech, with its barbs at the old guard—”
Sukhanov waved his hand to cut him off. “You don’t know what will happen any more than I do,” he said, “but my prediction is, absolutely nothin
g. It’s all smoke and no fire. Chagall, imagine that! Who’s next, Trotsky? By the way, who’s the author?”
“Someone with a very Russian name, like Petrov or Vasiliev… I’ll remember in a moment. No one we’ve ever heard of, a curator from somewhere or other—but clearly with friends in high places. If nothing else, it may not be prudent to get them upset.”
“Well, I suppose,” said Sukhanov, frowning, “if written from a certain critical perspective, it might—with some heavy editing, of course—”
“It’s already at the printers,” muttered Pugovichkin, averting his eyes.
Sukhanov looked at his right-hand man across a sudden gap of silence, palpable and unpleasant like an acrid taste in his mouth.
When Pugovichkin spoke, his voice was almost hostile with defensiveness. “Well, what would you have done in my place? I was put on the spot. I was told in no uncertain terms to publish the damn piece. Think about it, the issue must be typeset by Monday, and you were going away, as far as we knew. What was I supposed to—”
“Just why does everyone think I was going away?” Sukhanov interrupted heatedly.
“Must we now belabor the obvious? I called you as soon as I heard, on Tuesday morning, and you weren’t there, but—”
“Tuesday, you say? I was home most of the day.”
“No, you weren’t. I spoke to Vasily, and he told me you were out. I left a detailed message with him, explaining the situation. He said he was about to go to the Crimea with you.”
Sukhanov sat back in his chair.
“Vasily said that?” he asked slowly.
Pugovichkin shrugged. “I think his exact words were ‘with the old man.’ Frankly, at the time I was rather perplexed that you hadn’t mentioned your vacation. I gather you changed your mind about it? In any case, since none of us ever heard back from you, we assumed you’d received the word, agreed to the whole thing, and gone off to the sea with your son. Did he not give you my message?”
Forcing his scattering thoughts to order, Sukhanov recalled the unbearable Tuesday morning he had spent working on the article, with Vasily sulking behind his closed door and the remote telephone ringing intermittently throughout the sluggish, torturous hours. The boy had been angry with him about his failure to convey the Minister’s invitation to a party, he remembered. It suddenly seemed like an event from a very long time ago.
“The issue won’t go to print without my complete approval, and that’s that,” he said in his most formal tone. “Kindly stop the presses and get someone to bring me a copy of the article. If I don’t like it, my Dali goes instead. I’m still in charge here unless I’m told otherwise—and unless I’m told by someone directly. Do you understand me, Sergei Nikolaevich?”
Pugovichkin considered him bleakly.
“I understand perfectly, Anatoly Pavlovich,” he said after a pause, “but if you decide to pull it, you’ll be the one to do all the explaining afterward, as it’s bound to make a couple of very important people very unhappy. And whatever you choose to do, you must let me know by Saturday afternoon at the latest. The typesetters are already complaining as it is.”
“Of course,” replied Sukhanov with a brief nod.
Pugovichkin hesitated for a moment, then walked out of the room, shutting the door behind him with pointed precision. Sukhanov remained sitting at his desk, drumming his fingers against its lacquered edge. Initially, his mind was in a whirl, his feelings undistinguished and pained, the very rhythm of his breathing punctuated by small, distressed, wordless cries of disbelief at so much betrayal—betrayal by the trusted Sergei Nikolaevich and all the rest of his colleagues, betrayal by his son, betrayal even by some nebulous influential individual whom he had probably never met but who nonetheless clearly intended to compromise him by forcing on him this impossible choice….
Then, gradually, a dull premonition of dread began to steal over him like an encroaching shadow, suppressing all other thoughts and emotions; but it was not until some minutes later, when a knock so timid it was almost a scratch sounded on his door and Liubov Markovna crept inside after his second “Come in,” her head pulled into her shoulders, a stack of papers in her outstretched hands, that he knew what it was he so absurdly feared—whose name he was so irrationally certain to see on the title page as a reproachful harbinger of his impending downfall. It would be a most fitting conclusion, he thought with the bitter ghost of a smile, to his disquieting slide into the past. “A very Russian name,” Pugovichkin had said—and what name could be more Russian than that of a three-hundred-year-old dynasty of Russian rulers, what man better suited to write about Chagall than one of his own students? It must be, it had to be him—Oleg Romanov, the stern, courageous, maverick painter who almost half a century ago had so painstakingly fine-tuned one boy’s vision in order to render it receptive to the richness of the world.
In the first few years after Anatoly’s return to Moscow, Romanov had sent him frequent letters, with effortless sketches of lacelike dragonflies and demure mermaids scattered between the lines and faintly colored, oil-stained fingerprints on the margins, but Anatoly, numbed by his father’s death, had tossed them indifferently, at times unopened, into a drawer, postponing his answer in expectation of a thaw in his soul, until eventually the one-sided correspondence had tapered off. Later, after he entered the Surikov Institute, his interest in life returned, but he lacked the time needed to compose a sincere, worthy reply—one that would truly explain his silence of the preceding years. Or perhaps, if he was to be completely forthcoming with himself, the time had been there all along, but the path he had chosen, his determination to use the nimbleness of his brush to secure a comfortable livelihood, his constant struggle to squeeze from his manner the last lingering consequences of Romanov’s unorthodox teachings, made him feel vaguely uneasy, dishonest, unclean—a mild enough discomfort, but one that kept him from writing all through his student years, and that proceeded to intensify into a sensation of acute guilt soon after his graduation. Along with a few other promising young artists, Anatoly was appointed to teach at the Moscow Higher Artistic and Technical Institute, the very place from which Romanov had been exiled to Inza in disgrace some two decades before, accused of “undue impressionism” in his works.
With time, Anatoly’s sense of guilt paled, of course, along with the memory of the man who had inspired it, and obscurely he felt the oblivion to which he had consigned his early artistic discoveries to be an essential ingredient—perhaps the basis—of his continuing peace of mind. He led a measured existence, dutifully moving between the quietened Arbat apartment (the elder Morozov, his son Sashka, and the merry construction worker had all perished in the war, and Anatoly had eventually shifted his modest belongings into one of the empty rooms), the auditoriums in which he staunchly repeated the very phrases and gestures that had once made him draw vicious caricatures of the speakers in his student notebooks, and a studio at the institute, where he produced his canvases of grimy, industrious peasants and grimly determined soldiers, with soulful vistas opening behind their broad, sturdy backs. In 1953, when Stalin died, he and his mother grieved along with everyone; he painted a small commemorative portrait for a local school. Nadezhda Sukhanova was proud of him, and appeared content. They were placed on a waiting list to receive their own flat, and at the end of 1954 moved across the city to the Liubianka neighborhood. His works were occasionally purchased by a garment factory or a Young Pioneers club. He had no close friends, but his days were busy enough without them. He was never cynical in his actions (celebrating the people’s accomplishments that had come at such terrible cost was a worthy pursuit, he had no doubt), but simply uninspired and incurious; he had acquired a habit of adjusting to his surroundings with unquestioning acquiescence, and ceased to distinguish between art and craft—a difference of only two letters, after all. By the time he turned twenty-six, he believed he could follow this path into old age, obtaining in due course an amiable wife and two or three children, making a quiet, pleasant, use
ful way through the world.
And then came the year 1956, and everything he had once held true—all the comfortable ideas and beliefs and ways of life—was swept away. And as the past certainties melted, dizzying drops and hidden false bottoms were revealed in their stead—and in the whirlwind that followed, my soul, which had weathered the intervening years between adolescence and adulthood by retreating deep into its own rainbow-colored world and dreaming secret, fleeting, iridescent dreams of birds and flowers and stars and angels, emerged once again, and was as before, alive and demanding.
Then, awakening abruptly and discovering only emptiness where warmth and friendship should have been, I tried to find Oleg Romanov across the ravages of space and time. But neither repeated letters to the Inza school nor persistent inquiries among colleagues brought any results—the man had moved, the man had vanished, the man had probably died…. And now, three decades later, Anatoly Sukhanov sat in his sun-flooded office on the top floor of the eighteenth-century mansion in the heart of Moscow, trying to calculate how old his teacher would be (only a few years older than his father-in-law, so it was possible), and watching, with irregular heartbeats, Liubov Markovna’s contrite approach.
“Sorry for the delay,” she said in a voice so low it verged on a whisper, as she slid the manuscript across his desk. He had meant to wait until she left the room, but his eyes descended onto the page before he could prevent it. “Chagall: One Man’s Universe,” the title declared in capital letters. Underneath, he saw the name—D. M. Fyodorov.
Exhaling, he picked up the article and dropped it negligently into his briefcase.
The relentless advance of the past had been finally halted.
“I’m going home now,” he said airily, “but tell Sergei Nikolaevich that I’ll let him know as soon as I can.”