The Dream Life of Sukhanov

by Olga Grushin

  The deer on the stamp displayed its antlers proudly; there was no return address. The abbreviated “N.S.” now struck him unpleasantly, giving the impression of someone in a feverish rush to send off the epistle—or else someone breathlessly intimate with the addressee…. After a moment’s hesitation, he bent to pick it up, with the intention of placing it on Nina’s nightstand. All at once, jolted by the precipitate movement, his glasses started to slide off his nose, and he raised his hand—the hand holding the letter—in a quick attempt to intercept them. As the envelope accidentally became positioned between his eyes and the lamp, he could not help seeing it at the precise instant when the paper grew suffused with a warm coral glow of pervading light. Two or three pages were folded inside, dense and impenetrable at their heart; but a few words, escaping to the margins, emerged to the surface like lucid watermarks. The whole thing had been completely unplanned, he told himself—it had transpired too swiftly—it could not have been prevented. He saw the loose scraps of sentences, read them involuntarily, then lowered his hand slowly, turned off the lamp, and for a long, silent while looked away into nothingness.

  The words he had chanced to see were “unlike me,” “marr…,” “know” (underlined), “just the two of us,” and the last one, “… pture” or “… rture.” Torture? Rapture?

  As Anatoly Pavlovich sat in the darkness, sliding his finger back and forth along the edge of the envelope, he mused about choices that sometimes ambush a man so unfairly, without a moment’s warning, and wresting from him an almost instinctive reaction, in the space of a mere minute change the rest of his life. He could let go of the weight in his hand and, still surrounded by blackness, feel his way out of the room, close the door on his base mistrust, and in a day or two, when Nina returned from the dacha, lightly mention that a letter awaited her on his desk—and afterward, and for all their remaining years, try not to torment himself with not knowing the truth every time he beheld her cold, unreadable, beautiful gaze—yet failing, always failing not to wonder…. Or, just as easily, he could flip the light switch, and right here, right now, violently rape the envelope, making it yield all its secrets in pale lavender ink—and immediately, now and for all eternity, feel ashamed, feel deeply, darkly ashamed, feel it like a bad taste in his mouth every time he looked at Nina’s tired, dear face that age was already beginning to erase at the edges, forever remembering that on one late-summer evening when his heart had wavered, he had proven unworthy of her and their past—and all for some meaningless bit of women’s gossip, some gushing confidence of a casual university friend.

  For in the most private recess of his mind, he had no doubt that was all it was—a little note from Liusya, perhaps, dashed off self-indulgently right after the play they had gone to see and redolent with girlish affectations. Darling Ninusya, he would read as his hands shook and his damned soul fell, it was so unlike me to ask you to come on such short notice—but that’s what I get for marrying a reporter with a predilection for leaving on an assignment just when we have two tickets to my favorite play. But I just know I can always count on you! And didn’t it feel so much like the old days-rushing into the theater as the curtain was rising, just the two of us, drinking in Chekhov’s divine cadences, and at the intermission watching overdressed provincials and laughing and snacking on those tiny caviar sandwiches they always serve! The glass of champagne at the end was pure rapture, and I certainly hope-

  Oh, he was sure, he was sure that was all it would be—and never mind that Sunday afternoon, or Vadim’s evening off, or the theater season, or the unknown Viktor in their address book…

  Sukhanov switched on the light and ruthlessly tore at the envelope.

  My beloved, the two closely written pages began, letters are dangerous, but you don’t let me call you, and in any case, I would never dare to say what I’m about to write. Seeing you so quiet and sad on our last evening together made me realize that things simply can’t go on like this for much longer. You made me swear never to bring up our “fake lives,” and it is unlike me to renege on a promise-but you must see that it is a much lesser crime to break a promise than to lose something as perfect as what we share. For a long time now, I’ve tried to do as you asked: to be satisfied with furtive meetings, whispered phone calls, poor, random snatches of your presence. But my nerves are wearing thin, my love, and the unmentionable shadow of your marriage grows darker every time I have to let go of your voice because you think you hear a noise in your entrance hall, every time you emerge from your house and pretend not to notice me waiting just down the street for fear of someone watching at the window, every time we kiss surreptitiously in some doorway.

  My heart has been broken so many times that even our dearest memories cause me nothing but pain now. Do you remember that December night when, a glamorous presence in your short fur-trimmed coat, you knocked on my car window and haughtily asked for a ride across town, and as I slowly drove through the storm, you suddenly broke down crying? The snow was falling and falling, and when I stopped the car in some alley, it soon turned into one big, white, sparkling cave… And every time I recall that snowfall, without you by my side, my eyes go black, and helplessness overwhelms me.

  And this Wednesday, as I watched you reapply your lipstick and then walk away dejectedly—as I saw you disappear around the corner, not knowing when you would be able to get away again—I finally realized the truth. Dearest, I can no longer bear these constant farewells. I can no longer be content with having you in my present and my past only: I must have you in my future as well. Although I’ve never told you, you know, you must know, that I have wanted to leave Svetlana ever since that first snowbound kiss—I have just been waiting for you to ask me. I have waited for almost a year now. What are you afraid of, my beloved? Believe me, no comfortable routine of shared space and time could replace the love you and I have stumbled upon, so unexpectedly, so magically—a love that tightens one’s throat, tingles in one’s veins, makes every moment spent together unquestionably justified and infinitely precious. And it is in the name of that love that I must beg you now: let us be free and selfish like gods, let us leave all our habits and lies behind and start anew, just the two of us, rid of the endless torture of our double lives—and let us do so soon, before the constant humiliation of secrecy, the guilt I feel every time I look at my daughter, the pity you have for your husband slowly drain all joy from our hearts. We both know that what we have is worth any sacrifice we can offer. A long time ago, you told me your husband was kind to you. The truth is, he has never known how to love. You and I do. Please never forget what a rare gift it is.

  I must hear from you soon, unless you want me showing up on your doorstep. Your V

  And so it was.

  And there were no friends or lovers to whom he could pour out his heart—and no memories that he could uncork and inhale like some miraculously soothing elixir—and no forces of heaven or hell that he could invoke or curse, or to which he could pray—no benevolent divinities, no merciful guardian angels, no dark spirits of the abyss…. There was nothing in the whole world but the two pages crumpled in his hand, and the empty black skies of August over his head, and a trembling hole where his soul used to be. For when it finally happened, he saw he was completely alone—alone to stumble, lost, through the ruins of his past life, collecting the remaining pieces—alone to walk through the future dreariness with that gaping void in his insides—and alone to die when the time arrived.

  Anatoly Pavlovich Sukhanov methodically smoothed out the pages, slipped them back into the envelope, placed it on the desk, and looked at it in silence. And after a passage of time, when his heart had stopped gasping for air, he understood the source of his deepest pain. The loss of Nina was not the most shattering loss he had suffered: it was the loss of the image of Nina that he mourned the most—that “purest image of the purest charm” he had fallen in love with and cherished for so many years in the most sacred cache of his memory. For the woman in the letter was not the rese
rved, quietly dignified beauty with whom he had thought he had spent his life, but rather an indecorously middle-aged femme fatale who trotted about the city, wearing her fashionably short fur coat, armed with her bright little lipstick, engrossed in an abandoned affair she had started in a parked automobile and carried on in smelly doorways, with a man so vulgar he could write of love tingling in his veins and of being free and selfish like gods. How could this unbearably trite image, which reeked of life’s cheapest perfume, be the answer to the mystery of Nina’s dreamy silences? How was it possible to reconcile his decades of accumulated recollections with this pitiful missive smacking of some nineteenth-century epistolary novel, from the painful grandiloquence of its contents to that theatrical “N.S.” on the envelope? How could he continue to live with the knowledge that—that—

  The envelope.

  My God, the envelope!

  Sukhanov stared, stared so intensely that the white rectangle swam before his eyes, its very fabric seemingly dissolving into a shimmering leapfrog of particles—only to reassemble a minute later (as a tear, finally released, ran down his cheek) into a creature from an altogether different dimension. The number—the number in the address line—the number he had barely glanced at before, taking it for granted, just as the postman must have done earlier—was it really, truly possible?… He moved his hand across the paper, brushing away the optical illusion, but it was still there: that little horizontal dash that was bending a tiny bit to the left instead of to the right and, with that one hair’s breadth, granting him life yet again.

  Things clicked into place like pieces of a puzzle that only moments before had appeared to suggest some surrealist atrocity—a pale Madonna rolling in a trough with swine—but now revealed a shady flowering garden on a sunny day in late summer, with dark red roses climbing a whitewashed wall. The apartment number was thirteen, not fifteen. The apartment directly below him, then—the apartment of the man who a week earlier had treated his neighbors to a sonorous church chant at four in the morning. The apartment of the songwriter Svechkin, who had had the misfortune of marrying a much younger woman.

  But did the name of Svechkin’s wife begin with an N?

  Tossed so abruptly from such despair to such hope, he had no strength left to wrestle with the remnants of doubt in his heart. He had to know the answer now—and be rid of the darkness forever. The concierge would be able to tell him, of course, but the notion of submitting himself once again to the old man’s insinuating scrutiny (“Ah, yes, a pretty lady, isn’t she, Anatoly Pavlovich? So, is Nina Petrovna still out of town?”) seemed too unbearably ugly a conclusion to such an unbearably ugly day.

  After the briefest hesitation, Sukhanov dropped the letter into his pocket, walked out of his place, descended the stairs, and promptly rang the bell of apartment thirteen.

  The door opened almost immediately, releasing onto the landing the thundering chords of Beethoven’s Fifth and a faint smell of medicine. A short, plump man of Sukhanov’s years, in a gabardine jacket, stood on the threshold. He looked at Sukhanov without seeing him, his eyes full of quiet anguish, and just as Sukhanov prepared to launch into a neighborly request for some kitchen utensil (designed to draw out a hollered “Natasha!” or “Nadya!”), said expressionlessly, rubbing his temples as if in pain, “I believe we did it again, didn’t we? So terribly sorry, it’s all these baths she takes…. I’ll go tell her to get out, then.” And leaving the door wide open, with a pathetic little wave of his hand, he wandered off down the unlit corridor.

  Perplexed, Sukhanov waited. The place, or what he saw of it, looked barely lived in. The entrance, the hallway, a slice of one room visible through a cracked door mirrored his own apartment in arrangement, yet resembled a train station in appearance, so transitory everything seemed, so unloved, so full of a jumble of accidental objects—a beach towel tossed over an empty yellow suitcase, a half-peeled orange, a woman’s wide-brimmed hat, a glass half full of moldy tea. An enormous brown dog emerged from the darkness and padded in his direction, its head hanging down, then veered to the side, and vanished. The music continued to pour into the corridor, its sounds pockmarked with radio static. All at once, Sukhanov felt certain that very unhappy people lived here—and when in another minute a young woman in a robe walked toward him indolently, smelling of steam and sin and some sweet, dramatic perfume, her face that of a broken porcelain doll, he knew he could leave that instant without ever hearing her name, and his heart would be at peace.

  “I’m sorry we keep flooding you, Semyon Semyonovich,” she started to say in an indifferent voice, “but you understand, we’ve been a bit preoccupied ever since Vanya had his little breakdown”—but he had already extracted the ripped envelope from his pocket and was handing it to her in silence.

  She looked at it without moving, frowning nearsightedly.

  “What’s this?” she said, and then, swinging around sharply, shouted with startling shrillness, “Will you turn down that infernal noise? I can’t hear a word Semyon Semyonovich is saying!” Her eyebrows were two thin, delicate threads painted on her face.

  “I believe it’s yours,” said Sukhanov softly. “They delivered it to me by accident. I’m afraid I opened it. Naturally, you can count on my—”

  She tore the letter out of his hand before he could finish, and carried it close to her eyes; he saw her brightly painted lips begin to tremble. Embarrassed, he nodded and, without another word, turned to leave. Rooms away, Ivan Martynovich Svechkin switched off his music, and his sorrowful voice rang out in the sudden lull behind Sukhanov’s back, “Terribly sorry if it was too loud, Nel lichka, but you know how I love Beethoven!”

  Sukhanov slowly walked upstairs, unaccountably saddened on behalf of that meek little stranger whose life was falling apart.

  SIXTEEN

  That night he reclaimed his bedroom, but his sleep was uneasy. The seemingly boundless bed engulfed him like a dark, voluminous shroud, and for hours he wandered, crying softly, in majestic forests of giant fir trees where light barely penetrated through overgrown branches and the air smelled of loneliness, oppression, and for some unfathomable reason, violets—a smell that, surprisingly, remained in the room when, shortly after four in the morning, having just been swallowed by the yawning earth, Sukhanov awoke with a gasp and, throwing off the covers, sat peering into the shadows.

  It must have been the aftershave used by Dalevich, he realized unhappily after a minute. For some time he struggled to fall asleep again, but the stillness of the world rang in his ears and the aroma of violets stole furtively into his lungs. Finally, giving up, he got out of bed, walked onto the balcony, and stood suspended between the vast, empty city and the indifferent, autumnal heavens, listening to the rarefied sounds of the night. A distant car briefly tore the fabric of communal sleep; a gust of wind rustled the trees; a crow flew cawing raggedly over the Zamoskvorechie in search of sunrise.

  Then he heard a whisper trailing like smoke from somewhere above him.

  “My late wife loves to waltz,” an ancient voice said mournfully from the skies.

  Recognizing the madman from upstairs, Sukhanov looked up warily, half expecting a burning newspaper to fly into his face; but nothing stirred on the ninth-floor balcony. Unsettled, he was about to go inside when the sad voice spoke again.

  “She died forty-seven years ago. She learned to waltz in Paris. Her parents took her there when she was a young girl, before the Revolution. We met there. She still speaks French like an angel, and when she drinks champagne, she purses her lips as if for a kiss. We are celebrating her birthday today—she has just turned ninety”

  The words floated down, slow and dry and broken like dead leaves from some great, invisible, heavenly trees, and Sukhanov felt strangely stirred in spite of himself.

  “Hello?” he called out gently. “Are you speaking to me?”

  “I am speaking to no one,” said the quiet voice after a pause, “but you are welcome to listen. Perhaps you are a nobody yourself. Most pe
ople are, after all. They all think I’m crazy, but I’m the only sane one among them. Their lives are tedious and gray, but in my life, marvelous things happen all the time—ah, such adventures! My wife and I, we walked along the Seine the other night. The moon was full over Notre Dame, and she said—”

  His voice fell silent abruptly, as if tripped by a sob. Sukhanov pictured the monkey-faced old man crouching in the darkness mere inches above his head, perhaps with his eyes closed, the better to see his madman’s dreams, or maybe staring into the Russian night with its gloomy houses, flickering streetlights, deserted churches, frozen stars, and all the futile, thwarted lives, just like his own, that were at this moment stumbling through thousands of private nightmares under moonlit roofs—and his heart contracted with inexpressible pity

  “Forget about Paris,” the hushed voice sighed. “I have better stories to tell.”

  And the old man talked, talked of things that were past, or more likely had never happened; and his tone held the measured, heartbroken lucidity of someone who no longer had anyone to listen to him. He talked of riding horses across the rolling hills of Andalusia, and reciting Virgil among the starlit ruins of the Colosseum, and dancing to the golden strains of Strauss on the deck of a yacht as it crossed the purple Mediterranean on its way to some forgotten tiny island of the gods—always the two of them, he and his dead wife, always basking in an illusory glow of Elysian happiness; and gradually, as the old man’s whisper drifted over the sleeping city, Sukhanov found himself slipping away on the current of his own thoughts. The pain of Nina’s near-loss and the joy of her miraculous recovery echoed in an oddly urgent note through his being, and the words from the intercepted letter—Your husband has never known how to love—constricted his heart with a feeling not unlike grief, until he knew he could not brush them aside simply because they chanced to refer to someone else.