The Dream Life of Sukhanov

by Olga Grushin

  He continued to look at her without comprehension.

  “But it can’t be,” he finally muttered. “Because I dropped off my article at the office yesterday, and it was Thursday, I remember clearly, that’s when it was due, and Pugovichkin told me I had until Saturday afternoon, which was the day after tomorrow, and—”

  “Or maybe a cup of tea?” she said gently, placing her hand on his sleeve.

  For a moment he stared at her with unseeing eyes—and then, all at once, was seized with panic, and desperate to look at a calendar, to take full stock of his memory’s transgressions, to measure his grasp on reality…

  And the request for a calendar had nearly touched his lips when it occurred to him that the woman might merely be playing some monstrously cruel joke on him, and that, in fact, her husband, Mikhail Burykin, could easily have been the very man responsible for forcing the Chagall article onto his magazine in the first place—for hadn’t someone high up at the Ministry been involved? He imagined that snake Dalevich lurking somewhere in the shadows of this still place, gleefully orchestrating his present misadventure, and the air seemed to enter his lungs in painful gasps.

  “I’d love to stay, Liudmila Ivanovna,” he said faintly, “but I’m afraid I can’t just now…. Please give my regards to Misha, sorry for the confusion, you’re so very kind….”

  And murmuring apologies, his eyes glued to the carnations so he would not have to meet her oddly compassionate gaze, he backed out of the Burykins’ apartment.

  In the car, under the dim light of a tiny overhead bulb, Vadim was writing something against the dashboard. Sukhanov tore the door open.

  “Take me home,” he said in a near-whisper, pulling at his father-in-law’s tie as if it were about to strangle him. “Please.”

  FOURTEEN

  On the way up, Sukhanov had to share the elevator with an unsavory character. His mind aching with increasingly futile computations of dates, he avoided looking at the man too closely, only catching out of the corner of his eye a soiled denim jacket, a shaved head, and a salmon-colored scarf wrapped around a bulging neck. The man exited without a word—Sukhanov did not bother to see on what floor—and the doors slid shut, revealing, spread diagonally on the inside, the freshly scratched word “Aquarium,” the name of some semi-underground band, he seemed to recall. He shook his head at this unprecedented instance of vandalism so close to his inner sanctum, checked the time (it was almost nine o‘clock), and for a moment studied the twisted corpse of a cigarette in the corner. Then it occurred to him that the thin thread of greenish light trembling in the gap above the floor had not moved and that the elevator remained where it had been. Impatiently he jabbed at the button with a fading figure eight, and was startled when the doors opened instantly: it seemed he was already on his floor. Frowning, he stepped out onto the landing, wondering mechanically what business the normally staid Petrenko family from across the hall could have with such a shady visitor—and was just in time to see the edge of the man’s salmon-colored scarf disappearing inside his own apartment, admitted, he could briefly see, by an unfamiliar young girl who slouched smoking in the eerily wavering shadows of the entrance hall.

  He stood frozen for a few heartbeats. The girl was about to shut the door when he shook off his stupor and, his feelings dangerously suspended, strode toward her with a demand for an explanation rising to his lips—but before he could deliver it, his hearing was assailed by a cacophony of voices and laughter and the jangling of guitar strings touched by an absent but practiced hand, all seemingly issuing from his very own living room. Taking an uncertain step inside, past the girl watching him with indifference, he saw, in the corridor’s dim, hazy, diminishing depths, a crowd of people talking excitedly, some holding glasses, most with cigarettes, all casting grotesque giant shadows in the unsteady light of candles—yes, endless candles, tall and short, dripping and flickering madly, perched on counters and along shelves and even on the floor….

  He stared without moving, and the first thought flashing ridiculously through his disoriented mind was that the Burykins’ missing party had somehow relocated itself here, with its aged wines and aging dignitaries and all the rest…. But already he saw that this crowd was young and strange, and the candles leapt about out landishly, and the heavy smells of incense and some exotic spice drifted through the air in dizzying waves, and the darkly luminous space looked cavernous and foreign and not at all like an ordinary Moscow apartment—and in another breath he realized that this was all nonsense, this could never be his home, and in truth, the elevator must have taken him to the wrong floor after all, for hadn’t the concierge warned him about its recent malfunctions?

  Trying to inhale evenly, he stepped back across the threshold and checked the bronze number displayed above the peephole on the door.

  The number was fifteen. His number.

  He considered it in seething silence, gathering his thoughts. He had told his daughter he would not be back until midnight, he remembered. Her name—Ksenya, Ksenya, oh Ksenya!—throbbed in his temples like a quickly advancing migraine.

  “Well, are you coming in, or what?” drawled the girl in the doorway. “They’re starting in just a few seconds.” She pulled at the cigarette with studied carelessness and added inexplicably, “Good thing you brought your own tie. I hear they’ve run out.”

  For a moment he debated ordering this insolent hussy out of his house—ordering all these people out, in fact, and flipping on all the light switches, and blowing out all the candles, and flinging open all the windows to air out the disgusting sweet smells, and putting a stop to the irritating singing he could now hear floating on the current of disparate guitar riffs, a man’s reedy voice bleating trite lyrics, something about great poets dying tragically before their time…. But immediately he thought he could try to confront Ksenya first—shame her before all her friends perhaps—and maybe, having trapped her against the wall with her repentance, finally manage to have the talk with her that he had been postponing for months if not years, ever since she had begun to drift away, hiding behind her writing, her music, her books, who knew what else…. Suddenly decisive, with a nod to the sullen girl, he walked inside, an anonymous, harmless guest, one of many, peering into the near-darkness through his fogging glasses.

  Since the singing had started, the chatting guests had begun to fall silent and gravitate toward the music, and now only one couple was left whispering in the twinkling twilight of the hallway: a slender girl with a pool of night in place of her face and a long-haired man in a leather jacket and a tie slicing across his chest like a precise slash. Taking a few more steps, Sukhanov reached the edge of a dense crowd of badly dressed youths spilling over from the living room into the corridor, some standing, others sitting cross-legged on the bare floor, rhythmically bobbing their heads like Chinese dolls, their lips soundlessly mouthing the words of the song. It was even darker here, and stuffy, and as he tried to squeeze inside, he stepped on a few feet and possibly hands, was shushed at, and in the end found himself wedged somewhere on the outskirts, with his face awkwardly pressed into the broad back of a sturdy woman whose long, slovenly hair smelled of bitter almonds, and still unable to see above the swaying heads into the room, from which an angry young voice threw the borrowed words into the smoky silence:

  “And Christ was thirty-three, he was a poet, he used to say,

  ‘Thou shall not kill! And if you do, I’ll find you anywhere!’

  But they put nails into his hands so he wouldn’t try anything funny,

  And into his forehead so he wouldn’t write or think so much.”

  “Good, isn’t he?” someone whispered into Sukhanov’s ear, spitting with enthusiasm.

  Carefully Sukhanov turned his head and encountered the yellowish grin of the man from the elevator, inches away from his face.

  “Not too original,” he replied dryly. “That’s by Vysotsky, if I’m not mistaken?”

  “Oh, he’s just warming up,” the man whisper
ed back, not taking offense. “He always starts with a thing or two by Vysotsky, as a sort of tribute to the fallen. He’ll sing his own stuff next. So, what’s your favorite?”

  His face seemed insistently familiar, but Sukhanov was learning to disregard the feeling.

  “Never heard any of it,” he said with distaste. “Who is he, anyway?”

  The invisible singer’s voice drifted toward him as if from far away:

  “But present-day poets have somehow missed the deadline,

  Their duel has not taken place: it is postponed.

  And at thirty-three, they are crucified, but not too badly….”

  “Ah, stumbled in here by accident, did we now?” said the man from the elevator, his eyes glittering madly. “Well, be prepared to have your world shattered. This here is the great Boris Tumanov in person. Recognize the name, eh?”

  Sukhanov remembered the drawn curtains, the echo of music, Ksenya lying on her bed with her eyes closed—yesterday, or the day before yesterday, or years ago, who knew any longer….

  “My daughter likes him,” he said in a fallen voice.

  The song ended, and everyone clapped, and the candles wavered.

  “Ah yes, girls, they all like him, why wouldn’t they?” the man whispered confidentially, his hot breath scalding Sukhanov’s ear. “Naturally, he is taken, and twice over: has a wife and a girlfriend. His wife, well, she’s kind of a youthful mistake, never even comes to his concerts, but Ksiushka—Ksiushka is a different story altogether, these are her digs, you know—a first-class girl, likes to have a good time, if you get my meaning, even if her parents are really—”

  “I…” said Sukhanov, a scream tightly walled up in his throat, “I think I have a headache.”

  The man ceased whispering and, nodding, proceeded to fish for something in his pockets, but Anatoly Pavlovich did not see him any longer. All he saw was darkness.

  And so perhaps—perhaps it had all been in vain. Perhaps she had already walked so far out of his and Nina’s lives that they had nothing more to give her, and now she moved, unrelenting, proud, and all alone, along a path he could not distinguish through the shadows, with waves of dreamy poems splashing through her head, a married underground idol for a lover, and a burning contempt for his own world, a world of the past, a world of acquiescence and accommodation for the sake of survival—and who was to say which of them had been right, and what intervention was powerful enough to make them understand one another? I’ve lost her, I’ve lost her, I’ve lost her forever, little hammers of despair beat inside his heart. And so piercing was his anguish that, without resisting, without thinking, he accepted two odd-looking bluish aspirin from the grinning elevator man, swallowed them with difficulty, his mouth dry, and then stood, closing his eyes in order not to see the pulsating sea of avid faces, stood waiting for his headache to subside, for the nightmare to end….

  But as he waited, out of the confusion about him, out of the chaos in his mind, a voice rose, Boris Tumanov’s voice—the voice his daughter loved, or thought she loved, or hoped she loved—and despite himself, he found himself listening. And now this brittle, sensitive, floating voice began to sing other songs, unusual songs, songs that flowed without a perceptible melody, one verse spilling into another, words metamorphosing in mid-syllable, sometimes drowning despondently in the troubled strumming, sometimes soaring above a quiet lull—songs that were at times incoherent, at times jarring, occasionally lyrical and occasionally terrifying, but always gripping, always exacting a toll paid in raw emotion on the roads to their meaning—songs about the true color of souls dissected on a laboratory table in a secret government project; or a one-winged angel caught and exhibited in a cage in a Moscow zoo until set free by a drunken janitor; or a despairing genius walking on shards of glass to reach the gold at the end of a rainbow, only to meet there another unhappy, lost person with bleeding feet; or a saint who had spent all his years preparing for his grand entry into heaven, only to discover on his deathbed that heaven was not some blue expanse full of angelic string quartets and opalescent clouds, but an eternity granted for reliving one’s happiest moments, and that he had none to remember; or an old man who had wasted what talent he had for nothing, but now, at the very conclusion of his long, joyless, servile life, finally found the courage to fly—and was unable to stop crawling….

  And the more he listened, the more his head swam and the more he knew these songs to be unlike anything he had ever heard, and yet in spirit—in their high-pitched mix of hope and anger and sadness and desire to change the world, to bring beauty into it—so much like the talks that had kept him up for dizzying twenty-hour stretches at the blessed gatherings of his own youth, his slightly postponed, second youth of 1956; and the intensely expectant faces around him were the feverishly serious faces of his past companions, his teachers, his friends, his brothers in awaited martyrdom if need be; and the very air in this suddenly unrecognizable place, this oddly churchlike place with smoking incense and dancing candles, was trembling once more with the faith of old. The faith he himself had upheld for a few short, inspired, brilliant years, the best years of his life maybe—the faith he had lost when faced, at Christ’s age of thirty-three, in the Year of Our Lord 1962, with his own fork in the road, his own choice between crucifixion and… and…

  He caught himself tottering on the brink of the private hell to which he had long ago canceled all admission, and hastily opened his eyes, only to discover that they had always been open. The disembodied voice that had awoken such happy, such painful echoes inside him had faded away, and applause was sweeping through the world. He too clapped, trying to read his watch as he did so, but the hands seemed broken, rotating loosely and changing direction now and again. All the same, he knew hours had passed, for his soul was spent. Just as the invisible singer was announcing that in conclusion he would present the promised performance piece and nonsensically asking everyone to “please put on the ties,” Sukhanov made his unsteady way out of the press of excited humanity, back into the deserted corridor.

  Things were largely amiss here, he saw quickly. Candles, left without observation, were jumping mischievously from counter to counter; a few paintings had turned upside down, sending villages, forests, and lakes down the skies in rivulets of running watercolors; nearby, a flock of horses had burst out of their frame and trotted gracefully, hooves up, along the underside of a bookshelf. As he walked, he tripped over shadows that lay on the ground like unswept leaves. Worse yet, most objects had a shimmering, hazy glow about them, making him suspect that as soon as he turned his back on them, they ceased to be what they pretended and transformed into something else entirely—a shoe into an umbrella, an umbrella into an imp, an imp into a cloud—or maybe even slipped altogether into some different, fourth, dimension, melting forever in the labyrinths of existence. In a way, it seemed only appropriate that everything should be so strange and uncertain, but his head hurt more than ever, his heart tingled unpleasantly, and he felt an urgent need to immerse himself in a pool of quiet and sleep for a while—or watch the colors flitting like zigzagging dragonflies across the underside of his eyelids.

  Haltingly he moved deeper and deeper, farther and farther, with each step collecting the large, humid roses that fell off the wallpaper onto his upturned palms, then offering them, in one luxurious, aromatic bouquet, to a short-haired adolescent girl in a yellow dress who at that moment chanced to walk toward him, her small boyish face as familiar as everyone else’s (for, of course, he had seen them all before), her lips half open in laughter. The girl gave him a wide-eyed look and, letting the flowers drop to the floor, ran off, shouting a name he had seemingly heard before: “Ksiusha! Ksiusha!”

  He followed her with tired eyes, then, crushing the delicate rose blossoms under his feet, turned into an alley, passed through a doorway almost invisible under the graffiti, rose up an evil-smelling staircase to the third floor, and after checking again the address scrawled on a tram ticket, knocked on one of the peel
ing doors. A fierce fellow with a spade-shaped beard let him in. Murmuring hellos, Anatoly navigated the smoky, sparsely furnished space of the crowded room and sank into a moaning couch at the back, almost out of sight, feeling a bit awkward because he knew only a couple of people here by name and no one at all closely, and the acquaintance who had invited him was running late. For almost an hour he sat quietly, nursing a glass of vodka and listening, with growing interest soon turning into excitement, to an older man with a nervously agile face, whose place this was, softly explaining his theory of art’s demise.

  “From its very birth at the dawn of humanity,” the man was saying in a mild voice bred of generations of intellectuals, “pictorial art has served two separate functions: ritualistic and decorative. In its primitive stages, art amounted to, on the one hand, drawing pictures of slain animals on cave walls to ensure some friendly spirit’s help in a hunt, and on the other, fashioning necklaces out of seashells to make savage women more bearable to look at. Gradually, as man matured, these two original functions—communicating with the spirit world and making the present world more pleasant to live in—crystallized into what I see as art’s two great raisons d‘être, if you will: the search for the Divine and the search for Beauty. In the Dark Ages, when man was weighed down by superstitions, the Divine predominated at the expense of Beauty, but at the very peak of artistic development—and by that, of course, I mean the age of the Renaissance—the two searches grew more and more intertwined until they became one. And for one brief moment God was Beauty, nature was God, and the Divine and the Beautiful could be found equally in Titian’s voluptuous nudes and in Mantegna’s emaciated saints. This miraculous balance lasted hardly more than a century, yet it brought about a flowering of genius so extraordinary that it sustains us to this day. But inevitably, as the world moved on, life gained the upper hand over art, and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with their new mantras of enlightenment and reason, led to the beginning of the end. As art’s two purposes drifted apart once again, creation found itself boxed into increasingly narrow compartments: portrait, epic painting, genre painting, religious painting, landscape, still life…. Then, with the advent of our own monstrous age of machines and secularism, Beauty was killed by industrialization, God was declared persona non grata by so-called progressive thinkers, and thus, in a blink of time, both higher artistic purposes lost all meaning. What are we left with? A sad bunch of labels and occasional pathetic attempts to recover at least something of art’s previous glory, either by desperate proclaimers of art for art’s sake, who try to restore Beauty but invariably end up painting poodles and shepherdesses or the aesthetic equivalent thereof, or by eager revolutionaries who seek the Divine in a red banner of humanity, hoping to use art for the common good as if it were a loaf of bread or a pair of boots—needless to say, in vain, for a purpose does not become sacred merely by virtue of being noble.”