The Dream Life of Sukhanov

by Olga Grushin

  “So why continue to paint at all if art is dead?” the bearded man said, scowling.

  “Christ was also dead once,” replied the other sternly. “It is precisely art’s resurrection that must become your mission as artists today.”

  Loudly they cheered, and toasted each other’s health and palettes, and drank, and passed around the bottle, and drank again, and someone went off to find a jazz record a friend had just brought from Prague, and someone else was beginning to talk about a book of reproductions of some crazy Spanish artist he liked; but amid the general exuberance, no one had thought to ask the most important question—the only question really, as I saw it.

  “How?” I said in an undertone, and when no one heard me, asked again, this time shouting over the noise, “How can we resurrect art? What are we supposed to do?”

  Immediately everyone fell silent and turned toward me, perhaps trying to recall exactly who I was and who had brought me here—and just then the front door opened, and my long-awaited acquaintance walked in. Seeing them all looking at me, he said happily, with that radiant gift of a smile he possessed, “Ah, good, you’ve all met Tolya already.” And instantly, amid the erupting shouts of “Finally!” and “Levka, come here!” and “Lev Borisovich, do us the honor of accepting this glass of disgusting home brew!” my momentous question was forgotten.

  Or rather, not forgotten but postponed, for after that exulted, inebriated night, I too became a regular at Yastrebov’s place. And all through the spring of 1956 we met at least weekly, and sometimes more often, and talked about history and Russia and life and death and, above all, art, the subject closest to our hearts—talked while perpetually drunk with exhilaration and daring and exhaustion, talked until tiny shards of smashed stars visible through a bleary window dissipated in the chilly white haze of another sunrise. And when we grew hoarse, we listened to jazz, the music of our private revolution, the sounds of its saxophones and trumpets filling our cramped quarters like gigantic, slowly unwinding golden coils, the sounds of its pianos soothing like cold fingers massaging away a headache; or excitedly passed around reproductions of Western painters, absently brought from abroad by well-fed and oblivious well-wishers with their diplomatic leather briefcases, or surreptitiously torn, by all of us in turn, out of those splendid art volumes we were allowed to handle briefly at the Lenin Library; or else discussed in half-whispers the precious nuggets of past truths mined collectively out of recent newspaper articles and our own, frequently misunderstood and misremembered, childhoods, comparing stories of grandfathers’ and fathers’ arrests—and sometime in the course of that breathtaking, galloping year, I was presented with the magnificent gift of Viktor Yastrebov’s dream.

  He was always the most eloquent of us all, our teacher, our leader, our host; but one night in the early summer his mind seemed to soar as never before, and he talked about art being reborn like a phoenix, rising from its own ashes in a sublime union of the earthly and the divine—a union, he said, that was possible only here, in the one truly mystical land, and only now, as the country broke out of the confines of its dark, spiritually impoverished past. He talked about our duty as artists to find Beauty without and God within, and then carry our vision to the world—“For Russia shall become the new Italy, and ours will be the next Renaissance!”—and his words spread fire through our veins and wound up our souls. Lev alone sat silent through the hours that to me felt like one brief, dazzling, inspired flight: toasting with us, and nodding, but visibly unmoved.

  We parted earlier than usual that night, each of us feeling that anything said or done after Yastrebov’s outburst would diminish the power of his generous message to us. By chance, Lev and I fell into step on the stairs and proceeded together along the deserted street.

  “You looked bored tonight,” I said to him, almost with dislike. “Don’t you agree with what Yastrebov was saying?”

  I had first encountered Lev Belkin a good half-decade before. Three years my junior, he too had attended the Surikov Institute, and although we had not known each other formally, our subsequent acquaintance caused me to extract a vague memory of seeing him between lectures in corridors the color of disease—I in my last year of classes, he in his second. In 1955, having graduated with distinction, Belkin was appointed as a teacher at my institute, and now introduced officially, we resumed our daily ritual of passing each other in this or that hallway. In his first week at work, he stopped by my studio, looked at my canvases, and left without saying anything; I found his attitude disdainful and paid him in kind. I did not know what prompted him one day the next spring, unexpectedly, to invite me to a gathering of his friends—perhaps something he thought he had glimpsed in my paintings, or more likely, the atmosphere of reverberating revelations that was sweeping Russia, and us, off our feet. Yet even though I owed to him my inclusion in Yastrebov’s circle, we had failed to become close and rarely, if ever, talked alone.

  “It’s not that I disagree,” he replied thoughtfully. “It’s just that… Viktor is a brilliant conversationalist, of course, but… He says we can’t paint honestly until we find God within us—but what does that mean, exactly? What if every time I look too deeply, I keep seeing the devil instead of God? And even if I find God, how do I know for sure He’s the right one? Does it follow I shouldn’t paint until I figure it all out?”

  “But aren’t these questions ultimately important?” I asked, taken aback.

  “Important? Yes, of course,” he said slowly, “but important only to me as a human being, not to me as an artist. Man has mind and gullet and cock to satisfy, but a true artist has only eyes with which to see the world, soul with which to understand it, and hands with which to render it—nothing else. Sometimes all these words we throw at each other make me feel… I don’t know… suffocated, I guess. I keep thinking, we are not in the business of philosophy, we are in the business of painting—and instead of devoting so much energy to puzzling out some misty theories of God and Beauty, shouldn’t we just paint our hearts out and let the crowds, and the future, make what they will of us and our work?”

  We were alone in the whole city, it seemed. Streetlamps along the boulevards glowed with cold lavender fire, dilapidated churches raised their black dragon heads into the clouded skies, and in the darkened islands of parks, drunks who were nightly tossed out of the chaos of Moscow onto vandalized benches moaned in their restless sleep. And it was precisely then that it happened—summoned to life not by all the past communal revelations of our gatherings but by Lev’s simple protest. It was then that I felt a desire to paint once again—paint truly, paint freely, paint as I last had done many years ago.

  And for the next half-hour, as the two of us walked through the sleeping universe in wordless companionship, passing pale ghosts of blossoming lilac bushes and dark ghosts of linden trees on our way, I sensed other ghosts following me closely in the flower-scented obscurity, their steps soundless, their smiles fleeting, their lives begging to be spilled out onto canvas—an old Arbat professor in love with Italy, a shy provincial teacher who had tasted of Chagall’s blue soul, a broken man who had once been so passionate about flying, and his fourteen-year-old son who had once dreamt of discovering his own, never-before-seen colors…. And in that one half-hour, I understood with the utmost clarity that from now on, my existence could no longer consist of one protracted apology for my father’s unknown missteps, and that I myself was no longer content to serve as a voluntary cog in a disjointed mechanism by day and dream the unearthly dreams of others by night—and that the only things that counted for me now were a blank page, a brush, and a jewel-bright assortment of oils. And already that night, as Lev, whose own apartment was too far to reach on foot, fell asleep on my bed, I tore a sheet out of an old scrapbook, found some dried-out watercolors, and tried to paint the hour before the sunrise just as I saw it through my wide-open window: a light mist swirling over blackened roofs, a soon-to-be-released warmth in the silent air, a stray cat tiptoeing along a windowsill
, and a blissful drunk drawing the red edge of the sun in the lower right corner of the paling skies….

  During that summer, I became a less frequent presence at Yastrebov’s gatherings: I was too busy working. Lev came less often as well, not so much because of a difference of opinion, but because, as I heard it joked about repeatedly, he was preoccupied with courting some elusive flirt. After our talk that June night, he and I saw each other alone more and more, but I never asked about the girl, and he never told me—which was why in the end I was so unprepared to meet her when one day in early September he brought her to one of our evenings.

  She walked into the room—and I would like to say that my friends fell silent or that the room lit up at once—but they did not, and it did not, and everyone but me continued drinking and shouting, and in any case, such stock phrases of a cheap novelist could never explain exactly how I felt when faced with my own perfect vision of beauty. She walked into the room, tall, thin, and graceful, and so young, a flimsy scarf the color of the sea trailing in the air after her, a pair of fluid spiral earrings dangling along her neck, the proud Lev following a step behind. Not in the least put out by the din, the crumpled newspapers, the heaps of records, the empty bottles, she moved through the room nodding to people and shaking hands and smiling as if she had always known them—and suddenly, there she was with her hand outstretched, her green mermaid eyes fully upon me.

  “Nina Malinina,” she said serenely. Her hand felt cool in mine, and in my stunned mind, Pushkin’s immortal tribute to his beloved rang out like a clear crystal bell: Chisteishei prelesti chisteishii obrazets. The purest image of the purest charm.

  “Malinina?” I repeated, and sensing that she was about to move on and desperate to hold on to her, hurriedly attempted to open a conversation. “Undoubtedly no connection to Pyotr Malinin,” I said, ignoring Lev’s wild signals behind her back, “that pompous old ass whose lectures I had the misfortune of attending at the Surikov?”

  Her eyes, as she looked at me, paled to a grayer shade.

  “That pompous old ass,” she said quietly, “is my father….”

  “Damn,” said a voice from the distant bottom of a well, “he seems rather badly off.”

  And another voice shouted, “Hey, someone, go get Borya! She says this old fogey passed out on the floor here is her father!”

  A shuffle ensued, and jolted and prodded in several places at once, Sukhanov made an immense effort to raise his heavy eyelids. At first he felt he was drowning in glimmering, shifting milk, but after a while shapes began to emerge, and presently he found his fifty-six-year-old self lying on the carpet in his study, with a few curious faces leaning over him—and among them, amazingly, an eighteen-year-old Nina, her lips twisted with concern, and behind her, Lev Belkin, bright-eyed and disheveled and eternally young, for some reason clutching a guitar and wearing a wine-red tie. Sukhanov stared for a moment, then decided it was better to keep his eyes closed after all and just lie back, letting a familiar voice wash over him in anxious waves.

  “Papa, Papa, are you all right?” the voice was saying. “This wasn’t supposed to happen, they were all going to be gone before you got home…. Oh God, I’m so sorry… Boris had this concert scheduled, but then the auditorium fell through at the last minute, and I thought… Papa, can you even hear me? Shall I call a doctor?”

  He opened his eyes again. The contours of the universe had grown sharper. Ksenya, not Nina, was bending over him, and behind her knelt an unfamiliar man, still wearing the tie and, true, bearing some vague resemblance to the young Belkin—but not Belkin.

  “Papa, please say something!” Ksenya kept repeating.

  Sukhanov blinked and looked closer.

  “Is… that… my… tie?” he said laboriously.

  Her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh no, I forgot about those!” she said. The young man hastily started to tear the tie from his neck. “You see, Boris needed some ties… and by the way, this is Boris, my boyfriend…. He’s written this piece, performance art, you know—”

  “‘Song of the Bureaucrats,’ ” pseudo-Belkin explained contritely.

  “Shut up,” Ksenya said in a furious whisper, then went on rapidly. “He didn’t mean any harm, he just… just borrowed the ties last Sunday when he stopped by, and I only found out about it tonight. It was supposed to be a joke, see? Of course, he was very upset when I told him about Valya, but don’t worry, we’ll fix it, and the ties are all here, they’re all fine….”

  “I spilled some wine on mine,” said someone from the back of the room. “Sorry.”

  And suddenly it was all too much, and he was finding it hard to breathe, and pseudo-Belkin was rushing off to throw open a window, and a short-haired adolescent girl—whose name, he somehow knew, was Lina—was pressing a glass of water to his lips, while Ksenya squeezed his hand and repeated helplessly, in a thin voice, “I’m so sorry, it’s all my fault, you’ve fallen sick because of me—”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much about him, it will wear off shortly,” a new voice pronounced jauntily, and the grinning face framed by the salmon-colored scarf materialized in the fog above Sukhanov. Then matters quickly disintegrated into confusion once again. In the hazy distance, he heard Ksenya asking sharp, accusing questions whose essence he could not follow, and the elevator man protesting in an offended patter, then Ksenya shouting, “Grishka, how could you, you bastard!” and a multitude of other voices rising like mist from the edges of the room….

  All of this, however, increasingly failed to concern him, for as he continued to look at the elevator man, he saw something wonderful happening—happening slowly but inexorably. An enormous balloon was emerging carefully, gently out of the man’s shaved head. Strangely, no one else seemed to notice, but that did not bother him in the ieast—in truth, it made the moment all the more precious. Once free, the gorgeous yellow balloon hung in the air for one wavering minute, and then with quiet dignity swam through the open window, rose into the skies, and there turned into a most golden, most perfect full moon.

  Yes, of course, thought Anatoly Pavlovich with a happy little smile—and floated out the window after it.

  FIFTEEN

  For a while he lay without moving. A wide patch of sunshine crept across his face, and from its brightness he deduced that it was late, at least ten o‘clock, perhaps drawing closer to eleven; yet he felt reluctant to open his eyes, enjoying as he was this leisurely moment—a man half asleep, resting in his bed on a Saturday morning (here a needle of unexplained anxiety pricked his heart, but he pushed on stubbornly), yes, resting in his bed, in his freshly laundered pajamas, on a summer morning, as was his right, with nothing in particular to do, and nowhere to go, and a whole pleasant day ahead of him. He was nearly awake, but a few shadowy creatures from a recent dream still scurried about the hazy edges of his memory—and the most nonsensical dream it had been too, involving a misshapen angel in a zoo cage, a man whose head gave birth to an inflated balloon, and a crowd of hippies and rock musicians holding a disreputable concert in his very own living room. Groggily, he marveled that a mind normally so devoid of surprises could be capable of such nightmarish notions.

  A telephone began to ring, loud and insistent. After each ring there was a pause just long enough to make him hope it would stop, but invariably the next ring would come, torturously protracted, filling his head with reverberations of the headache he now realized he had. Grumbling, he groped for the nightstand on which the telephone rested, then, not able to feel it, opened his eyes with an effort—and found himself confronted with several truths. He was not in his bedroom but in the living room, crammed painfully between the armrests of a decoratively small couch. He wore a pitiful-looking suit. The air smelled of stale incense, and his mouth tasted as if a small animal had died somewhere inside his entrails. It was no longer morning—the clock on the opposite wall showed half past one; and it was possibly not Saturday either. On the coffee table, next to the screaming telephone, lay a pile of sad remains t
hat on closer observation proved to be his once proud collection of ties.

  And of course, he had known it, known it since the very first moment of semiwakefulness, felt it in his nauseated, aching body, guessed it with his sickened heart—and still had tried to move as far away from it as possible, to hide like a frightened child in the soft oblivion of lingering sleep—for sleep at least was peaceful, sleep at least did not assault him with the terrifying dreams that were becoming his life, his daily life. And now his life was right here, pressing down on him, breathing into his face, demanding that he get up and answer the ringing telephone, and go apologize to Valya, whom he had offended so badly, and face his daughter, whose friends were all madmen and drug addicts and who was probably a drug addict herself…

  Stumbling off the couch, he yanked at the receiver.