The Dream Life of Sukhanov

by Olga Grushin

  “Well, finally!” Pugovichkin spoke cheerfully. “I was beginning to wonder. Listen, I’m so glad you decided to keep the Chagall piece unchanged. I promise you’ll be pleased with the issue, it was all finished yesterday, a real beauty—we put his Self-Portrait with Muse on the cover, and inside—”

  “Ah,” said Sukhanov, “then yesterday was Saturday after all.”

  A small silence fell. He buried his hands in the mass of his stained, wrinkled, mistreated ties and twirled their silk corpses about his fingers. Somehow, the Chagall controversy had lost all its urgency in his mind, overshadowed by other, infinitely more vital matters. He felt his whole being expanding with grief for things misplaced, and forfeited, and possibly missed forever—and where such grief reigned, petty anger could find no place.

  “Anatoly Pavlovich, is everything all right?” Pugovichkin said uncertainly. “You sound… odd.”

  “Oh, I just woke up,” Sukhanov explained. “I was drugged last night.”

  His recollection of the previous night’s events dissolved at some nebulous juncture into a shimmering, emotional haze filled with visions of himself worshipping some deceased divinity in the solemn sonorousness of a cathedral, and his past and present ran together confusingly; but he remembered the subsequent burn of the carpet on his neck, the feeling of heavy, helpless humiliation, and Ksenya’s face close to his, begging him, begging him to forgive her…. He wondered how he would find her today—meekly apologetic still, or stubborn and remote, as unapproachable as ever.

  “By whom? Drugged by whom?” Pugovichkin’s increasingly shrill voice repeated in the distance. “Drugged where?”

  “Here, at my place,” said Sukhanov. “There was an underground concert, and then this fellow with a balloon inside his head—”

  His eyes fell on a folded piece of paper lying on the table, with the words “To papa” scrawled across its whiteness. As the rest of the world faded away, he reached for it, held it in both hands for an instant, then opened it and, swallowing, began to read.

  Dear papa, what happened yesterday was ugly and unnecessary, and I’m very sorry about it. But maybe it’s better to know than to stay ignorant, and now you’ve bad a glimpse of who I really am, of the things that are important to me, of the man in my life. I should tell you that he is married, but it doesn’t matter to us….

  Sharply he drew in his breath, and all at once became aware of a crackling void on the other end of the line.

  “Listen, Sergei Nikolaevich,” he said weakly, “this isn’t a very good time. Unless there was something in particular you wanted to tell me—”

  “As a matter of fact, there is, Anatoly Pavlovich,” said Pugovichkin’s hesitant voice. “Now, please don’t take this the wrong way, we value your work immensely, but we’ve all been a little worried about you, and, well… we think it might be good for you to get some rest.”

  “Rest?” repeated Sukhanov. He kept tracing the next few lines of the note with his finger, desperately trying to uncover some other possible meaning—any other meaning apart from the one that had just slapped him in the face. I don’t expect you to like it, nor do I expect you to understand it. You have your principles, whatever they are, and I have mine. After last night, I believe you will not want to see me for a while, so I’m moving out. I think it’s best for now….

  “Yes, take two or three weeks off,” Pugovichkin was saying uncomfortably, “even a month, if you like. Relax, go to the countryside, spend some time rereading the classics—”

  “And what if I don’t want to relax?” said Sukhanov flatly. Don’t worry about me, I’ll be staying with good friends of mine. “Whose idea is it? Yours? Ovseev’s?”

  “Yes, mine, and Ovseev’s too,” said Pugovichkin quickly. “Well, actually… Listen, I don’t think I’m supposed to say anything, but what the hell, I owe it to you, Tolya. Mikhail Burykin called me confidentially this morning—you know, that big shot from the Ministry of Culture—and… I can’t guess who’s spreading this rumor, and of course, I tried to do my best to dissuade him, but… he was quite convinced you were somewhat… er… unwell. A bit too… wound up, you know? He said Art of the World was better off without you for the time being, and… and I hate to tell you this, but it seems the Minister agrees with him. But it will be for a short time only, you understand, and your absence will of course be voluntary, just while they review your case—”

  “They are letting me go,” said Sukhanov slowly. “Looks like he did it after all.”

  “Burykin? You’ve had run-ins with him before?”

  “Not Burykin, Burykin is just a pawn. My fake cousin is the one behind it….” Sukhanov exhaled, then said after a pause, in a different, suddenly quivering voice, “Not that it matters any longer. I hate doing it anyway. Always hated it. Going through other people’s texts as through dirty laundry, deleting every avoidable reference to God and lowercasing all the unavoidable ones, ferreting out the names of all the blacklisted artists, always sticking these Lenin quotes everywhere—how disgusting! Not the kind of thing that makes your children respect you, you know? Or do your children still respect you, Serezha?”

  The note trembled in his hand. I hope you feel better today. Grishka is such a—The phrase was crossed out. I’m sorry if I hurt you, but I think it was bound to happen, one way or another. These are my friends, and this is my life, and I’m not ashamed of it even if you are. You and I are very different people, papa. I suppose you know I love you—but as I’ve recently discovered, love solves nothing, nothing at all. If anything, it only causes more problems. Ksenya. P.S. Mama will know how to reach me.

  After a long, embarrassed silence, Pugovichkin was talking again, mumbling that this whole thing was temporary, he had no doubt they would let him come back to the magazine soon, of course they would, how could they not, after everything he, Sukhanov, had done for them….

  “Never mind all that,” Sukhanov said, and folded the note. He waited for his voice to lose its sobbing edge, then asked, “How was the fishing? Catch anything good?”

  For the remaining afternoon hours he wandered through his deserted kingdom like a ghost of his former self. Lost my position, lost my son, lost my daughter, he kept repeating, his voice running up and down the scale of despair, from a nearly silent whisper to a fist-smashing-into-the-wall shout. His job did not concern him any longer, but his children—his misjudged, his misguided children, his responsibility, his punishment… He could not bear to think how blind he had been all these years—so proud of Vasily, the smooth-talking boy with wintry eyes, so disapproving of Ksenya, with her bristling remarks and unnervingly dark adolescent poems—and all along, Vasily had been the reflection of what was worst in him, and Ksenya of what was best, and he had not stopped the one, and had not helped the other, and now it was simply too late, for they had moved forever beyond his reach. He had failed—he had failed both of them.

  And then he felt tired, so very tired, of every past and present burden of guilt that all he wanted to do was collect his many failures—failure as a critic, as a father, and a few others besides—yes, collect them all and bring them to Nina, and dropping them at her feet, beg her for forgiveness, beg her for absolution…. He wanted, he needed her near him, as never before. His hands unsteady, his fingers repeatedly missing the digits, he dialed their dacha number, heard a hateful busy signal, waited a few minutes, and dialed again. This time he listened, with bated breath, to the faint sounds of distant ringing. There was no answer.

  Sighing, he rose and slowly walked through the still rooms, everywhere seeking and finding cherished echoes of her presence: foreign fashion magazines discarded on ottomans and sofas, a lonely slipper poking its pink silky nose from underneath a chair, a face mask resting by the bathtub, her features still lightly imprinted on it…. But as he followed Nina’s recent trail around the apartment, he felt surprisingly little comfort, and in a while found himself moving faster and breathing heavier in his chase of her shadow—for unexpectedly he had
begun to perceive signs of an uncharacteristic absentminded-ness, perhaps even secret restlessness, behind all her abandoned, forgotten things. He stumbled on a pair of ruby earrings tossed onto a bookshelf, a peach pit left to dry on a windowsill—inexplicable, disconcerting lapses; and as his attention sharpened, little details from the past, a whole multitude of oddly demanding trivial details, buzzed in his memory like a swarm of disturbed bees. He thought of the vague expression on her face as she had sat looking out the window, her chin running with fruit juice: when their eyes had met, he had felt he could almost see a mermaid’s glistening body dive with the startled wave of a tail into the green waters of her far-off gaze. He recalled her listless movements at recent meals, and her frequent migraines, and that Sunday she had spent in bed, yet wearing a profusion of bracelets as if for an outing—the very same Sunday, he realized with a jolt, when Ksenya’s boyfriend must have walked into the bedroom unseen by anyone and taken all his ties…. A chill crept stealthily up his spine. Had she been napping perhaps and not woken up at the sound of closet doors shutting and clothes being ripped.off the hooks—she, the lightest sleeper he knew?

  Ceasing to roam, he stood very still, seized with a sudden terror of losing her too. The feeling was, of course, irrational, for did not their twenty-eight years of marriage offer him reassurance enough? So she had not been home that Sunday afternoon—could she not have stepped out to buy dessert for her tea or to chat with their neighbors? Yet with so many losses wreaking devastation in his heart, he felt compelled to tread carefully now, lest he offend some envious divinity even further with undue presumptuousness and ungrateful complacency. No, never again would he dare to accept any certainty with that bovine sense of simply receiving his due….

  And in truth, spoke a tiny insidious voice inside him, just how certain a certainty was it, really? How confident of their closeness was he—how well did he know the inner workings of one Nina Sukhanova? She had never been easy to understand, and he had long since learned to allow her small pockets of privacy by not dwelling on her manifold silences and not pursuing to its hidden origin her every expression or gesture or even absence, habitually interpreting these mysterious lacunae as evidence of her unique brand of feminine mystique. Now, for the first time, he felt unsure. He saw that little by little, as these omissions had multiplied between them, the very essence of Nina’s life had somehow become obscured, until he could guess at neither the timbre of her thoughts nor a roster of her activities. Oh, naturally, he knew all about her museum visits with his fake relatives and her theater outings with her fashionable girlfriends; yet between these major blocks of time, each day still contained numerous cracks, small enough to pass unnoticed but wide enough for… for…

  And again he froze, his thoughts running aground on another disturbing half-memory he had so casually misfiled in the cabinets of his past. On the evening when Nina had gone to see the play at the Malyi, she had told him, her lips gleaming with that unfamiliar shade of lipstick, that their chauffeur had wanted the night off—yet Vadim had acted almost affronted when Sukhanov had mentioned it later. He paced along the corridor, willing himself not to panic. And he had nearly succeeded in burying the incident in a communal grave with the safely vague epitaph “Misunderstanding,” when yet another unbidden recollection rose, and not for the first time, to the foreground of his mind, and he finally perceived the main reason for his feeling of unease—a feeling that had been there all along. The memory of the mangled theater bill from the Malyi’s last season, which the August wind had deposited so deftly at his feet, presented him now with a clear mental snapshot of a soggy May date printed at the top—and in doing so, triggered his belated realization of a plain fact of life in Moscow. All city theaters closed their doors for the summer, reopening again only in the early days of September.

  No, most theaters, he corrected himself in desperation—most, but not all—and it was altogether possible that the Malyi had begun its season earlier this year. What had she said she’d gone to see that Wednesday? Three Sisters, had it been, or Uncle Vanya? He did not remember. Then, before he could stop himself, it occurred to him that a Sunday newspaper would carry the list of weekly performances—and that his answer therefore lay close, only eight floors below, in the mailbox of apartment fifteen….

  Disgusted with his doubts, he forced himself to turn his thoughts away, to find some occupation for his restlessness. Again he walked through the rooms, picking up random novels and dropping them after reading a page or two, snacking on frozen carrots from a solitary package he discovered in the fridge, leafing through a family address book in search of he knew not whose number. Chancing upon the letter V, he was surprised to see, among a multitude of Var lamovs and Vostrikovs, most of them his work contacts (now former), a single line in Nina’s delicate handwriting. “Viktor,” it said next to the number. No last name, no way of knowing when the entry had been made… Thoughtfully he looked at it, then stood, and moving as if in a dream, picked up his keys and went out to the elevator.

  Perhaps his hands shook too much, or maybe there was some unknown trick to opening the mailbox—Valya had always brought up their mail; he himself had not bothered with it in years. Whatever the cause, the key became promptly stuck in the lock, and as he tugged at it in frustration, he felt it beginning to bend. Swearing soundlessly, he looked up, and found the ancient concierge watching him with malevolent curiosity from his perch behind the desk.

  “A problem, Anatoly Pavlovich?” the old man inquired, his lips rustling dryly against toothless gums.

  “The key is stuck,” Sukhanov replied, and shrugged with studied indifference. “No matter, I’ll come back later. I just wanted to scan the newspaper.”

  “No point in reading newspapers nowadays,” said the concierge, getting up with a great show of difficulty. “I remember the time when every day you’d wake up to read about a new hero of socialist labor or an overperforming collective farm. A man’s heart was always full of joy and pride in his country.” He shuffled across the hall at a funeral pace. “But the distasteful things they print today…” He made as if to spit, then thought better of it, and simply waved his hand. “Listen to an old man, Anatoly Pavlovich, don’t read the garbage.”

  “I won‘t,” Sukhanov promised. “Now, about this key… It appears I can’t pull it out.”

  “Allow me,” said the concierge, bending over the lock. A faint odor of smoked fish emanated from his cardigan. “Apartment fifteen, let me think…. Aha, just one tiny little push down, like so… and now a sharp turn to the right, like this… and here you are.”

  He performed the operation with astonishing agility, twisting the key in some complicated and seemingly well-practiced ritual, and Sukhanov’s initial surprise turned to distaste. As the mailbox swung open, the concierge peered inside.

  “That’s funny—no newspaper,” he said, and quickly, before Sukhanov could even move, scooped inside the box and emerged with three pieces of mail grasped firmly in his yellowing fingers. “Now, what might this be? Aha, a telephone bill, something official-looking addressed to you, and a private letter—to Nina Petrovna, by the looks of it… Well, here you go, Anatoly Pavlovich.”

  The letter, in a small white envelope, had a stamp with a golden deer on it; its address was penned in lavender ink, in handwriting Sukhanov did not recognize. As he accepted it, his hands trembled, and the presence of the old man hovering before him, watching him with those nastily glinting eyes, made him feel suddenly dirty, as if the two of them had just violated some sacred trust, irreparably damaged something fragile and beautiful…. Wincing, he slipped the mail into his pocket without a second glance and, with a curt “Thank you,” began to walk away.

  “Wait a second, Anatoly Pavlovich, I have something for you,” the concierge called out from his desk. “Found it on the sidewalk this morning.” From a creaking drawer he extracted a filthy rag of checkered wool and proffered it to Sukhanov. “Your scarf, I believe?”

  Sukhanov looked
at it for a full minute.

  “No,” he finally said, and turning away, pressed the elevator button. “It’s not mine.”

  “Strange, I could swear I saw you wearing it last winter,” said the concierge, smiling suggestively. “Although you probably wouldn’t want it anyway. Looks like some dogs have mauled it pretty badly. Still, maybe Nina Petrovna could use it as a washrag. I mean, now that Valentina Aleksandrovna doesn’t work for you anymore.”

  “It’s not mine,” Sukhanov repeated—and then, mercifully, the elevator arrived.

  Back in his study, he impassively skimmed an impersonal message from the publishing staff of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia informing him that the planned edition with his biography was being postponed until further notice, then gave the telephone bill a cursory look, noting a call to Vologda he did not remember making, and set them aside, along with the letter to Nina. The absence of the newspaper, though irritating, was not out of the ordinary; it was at times misdelivered by the postman, and occasionally stolen, perhaps by the very concierge who appeared so skillful with locks. In any case, his brief sojourn downstairs had convinced him to abandon his distrustful pursuit, for he had sensed that it belonged in spirit to an underworld of sinister old men and disgruntled domestics who poked through people’s mail and gossiped by trash chutes in search of their betters’ soiled little secrets. Shuddering squeamishly, with one last glance at the tetter—addressed, with a rather peculiar familiarity, to “N.S.”—he left to try the dacha number again. There was still no answer.

  He returned to the study later that evening. Darkness was stealing in rapidly; he switched on his Pegasus lamp. A few manuscripts were gathering dust in the corner of his desk, all of them materials to be reviewed for future magazine issues—now never to be subjected to his famously strict scrutiny, he thought, and smiling without mirth, brushed them to the floor with one sweeping gesture. A whirlwind raised by their heavy fall caused a tiny fluttering movement that caught his eye, and he found himself once again looking at the strange letter lying before him.