by Olga Grushin
And he did not dare ask the question he most wanted to ask, because now, for the first time ever, he suddenly doubted the answer—and he felt his soul dying yet another small, bleak death at the looming of the truth.
“No, I dreamt of a holy mission in life.” Her words were again well practiced, and cold. “Living in close proximity to art, religiously watching over its creation, assisting at its birth with a thousand details that were in themselves mundane and yet would add up to a great, sacred trust, a short footnote next to my name for all eternity: ‘Nina Sukhanova, born Malinina, the daughter of a hack, the wife of a genius.’ Pathetic, isn’t it—all those young Russian girls raised on nineteenth-century novels, searching for an idol at whose plaster feet they might sacrifice their own aspirations, only to wake up decades later, aged and bitter, to find their visions of vicarious greatness shattered, their husbands average, talentless nobodies… Only that’s not exactly how it turned out with us, is it, Tolya—and to tell you the truth, I sometimes think I’d prefer such a trite, unambiguous ending to… to…”
“Please, Nina,” he said thickly, “please, let’s not…”
She stopped, looked at him in silence. The long, motionless minute that followed felt icy, crisp, multifaceted, as if time itself had hardened into crystals. Anatoly Pavlovich saw the room with astonishing clarity, from the whole of its darkened, wood-paneled expanse to the faint reflection of the dying fire on the surface of his wineglass. He saw Nina’s face, the left side in dancing shadow, the right landscaped by bright light; he saw the flames gleam in her nearly transparent eyes. Irrelevantly, he thought about the colors he would use if he were to paint her portrait at this moment—the soft grays, the reserved reds, a poignant touch of liquid gold here and there—and wondered whether it would be possible to find a shade delicate enough to convey her fingernails, which glowed like so many translucent crescent moons every time she lifted her hands to the fire in that chilled gesture of hers. He also thought, disjointedly, how long it had been since she had allowed him to hold her in his arms—a dejected, months-long eternity of everyday preoccupations, distractions, headaches, which would now stretch on, stretch on indefinitely, in a glittering, echoing Moscow apartment where he was condemned to live from this day forward, exiled from his work, his family, his very existence, talking to no one for weeks at a time save his own reflection and the madman from the ninth floor…
In the next instant, the absurdity of the image made him laugh aloud—a bitter little laugh that startled him out of his trancelike state. Then, feeling all at once afraid to linger in this seductively warm, deceptively cozy, subtly poisonous place that belonged to him no longer, he stood up unsteadily and headed out of the room.
The air was much colder in the drafty corridor that led past the gaping cavern of an unlit kitchen to the front door. Behind him, he heard Nina ask where he was going.
“Back to Moscow,” he said without stopping. The wine he had drunk—half a bottle, it must have been, or quite possibly even three-quarters—made his steps sluggish, and mechanically he chided himself for having briefly forgotten his age. As if from afar, Nina’s feet pattered across the floor as she dashed after him, exclaiming, “But that’s crazy! Let me make supper, we’ll go to bed early, and tomorrow we can talk this over calmly. Please, Tolya, nothing’s decided, we can still—”
Already on the veranda, he fished out his city shoes from a dim corner, then felt for his bag on the floor where he had dropped it just hours before. It was unnecessarily, mockingly heavy
Catching up with him, Nina grabbed his sleeve.
“Please,” she gasped, “you can’t leave like this, it’s already past nine, how are you going to get home, do you even know the train schedule, please…”
He saw her standing there, green-eyed, flushed, and out of breath like a young girl, and his heart bled with the certainty that he had been too late with her as well. And then he understood how laughable it had been to imagine, only one day ago, that the loss of some romanticized image of a thin-blooded, composed Madonna who for years had graced his idea of a perfect home with a mysterious, elegant presence would be in any way comparable to the loss of this flesh-and-blood woman before him—this woman who had once been ready to follow him to whatever amazing new horizons he might take her, this woman who could still find the strength to listen to him when he was sad and make him tea when he was tired, this woman whose fingertips smelled of fruits and earth….
And for one moment, confronted with a bleak monotony of future despair, so unlike the dramatic vision of offended virtue that he had entertained over the purloined letter of a neighbor, he caught himself longing for the Nina of yesterday, furtive and unfaithful, perhaps, but still near him, instead of this new Nina, pure as always—but far away, so far away, with ninety-seven kilometers of solitude and indifference and disappointed hopes to separate them for God knew how long…. And simultaneously it occurred to him how surreal this parting was, how lifeless—how like a labored scene from some novel whose meaning faded amidst the flowery exchanges between unfeeling, cardboard characters—how unlike this bleeding wound that was tearing his living soul in two.
And in truth, why was he standing here, on the threshold of darkness, still and speechless? Shouldn’t he plead with her, shouldn’t he reproach her, shouldn’t he remind her how much he had done for her—how comfortable her life had been with him, how successful he had become for her sake, how many lovely things she had always had at her beck and call? Shouldn’t he throw her ingratitude back into her face, forcing her to remember the pitiful failure of Lev Belkin’s existence, perhaps grabbing her roughly by the shoulders and shouting, “Is that the kind of life you wish we had?” Or should he confess instead how much he needed her? Should he… shouldn’t he…
Still talking about train schedules, Nina was trying to wrestle away his bag. “Please understand, Tolya,” she was saying rapidly, “there’s no need to react like this, I only want a temporary—even brief—”
He knew with perfect conviction what an unfathomable thing it would be to walk away right now, without saying another word, without attempting to restore their life to the way it had been—yet at the same time, he felt strangely unable to break out of his stupor. And deep inside his heart, he sensed that his inaction stemmed from his ultimate acceptance of unhappiness, perhaps even a kind of perverse satisfaction at the thought that an ultimate justice was being served.
For deep inside his heart, he realized that he deserved it all.
Moving Nina’s fluttering hands away, Sukhanov turned and walked through the door. The terrace steps were slippery with evening dew, and the twisting shadows of the path embroiled his shoes in dimly aromatic, faintly menacing coils of invisible rose branches. He stopped and listened briefly: she had not followed. Then, greeting his rightful fate with a quiet smile, he extricated himself from the roses, pushed open the gate—and exited into the night.
SEVENTEEN
The station was in the nearby village of Bogoliubovka. A few summers ago, Sukhanov had gone there with Nina to meet some friends arriving by train. Beyond the gated cluster of well-appointed houses of the privileged, they had walked through a pleasant birch forest, rosy in the light of the morning sun, and on the way through the village, Nina had surreptitiously picked moist, sweet raspberries off bushes spilling over low fences—altogether an effortless little stroll through the Russian countryside in the comfortably familiar, occasionally maudlin style of Levitan.
Now, in the dark, the terrain seemed dramatically altered. The ordinarily smooth road tripped him with devious potholes; ghostly dogs strained on their chains behind his back, growling rabidly at his trespass; fat, furry moths beat a repulsively soft, flickering rhythm against streetlamps; and many-armed, troll-like silhouettes shifted feverishly in the lit windows of neighboring dachas, engaged in some dim, ugly activities of living. He passed through it all, indifferent to the strangeness of the world. But when the last of the imposing houses melted away in
the wavering circle of the last streetlamp, and a watchman—a mere contour carelessly sketched by the night around the glowing pinpoint of a cigarette-pushed the gates closed behind Sukhanov’s back, he was startled to see the path ahead of him swallowed by the black mass of the forest.
He hesitated before stepping under the trees.
The night was deeper here, the silence complete, the air musty with pungent smells of dampened moss and sweetly rotting leaves and poisonous mushrooms. He moved cautiously, barely able to see the ground beneath his feet. After a while, he felt the first twinge of worry. From his past walk, he had preserved an impression of this wood being transitory, nearly transparent, with dazzling splashes of clearings visible almost immediately between the birches—yet now, with every passing moment, the trees seemed to draw closer and closer together, crowding him with their motionless presence, and the infinite silence tolled in his aching head like a giant bell. He quickened his pace, and still the forest went on; and as he entered farther into its breathless darkness, he imagined it altering slowly, growing more menacing and strange with each new step. Gradually his eyes began to distinguish murky, twisted shapes, whether dead stumps and gnarled branches or some clumsy, frightening creatures of the earth, creeping after him along the ground or leaning above him from the trunks; and after some time, the profound quiet of the place filled with a multitude of insidious, secret sounds—a rustling shudder of leaves, starting unexpectedly, without wind, and falling still just as incomprehensibly; the hollow moan of an insomniac bird or else a dispossessed spirit; the sharp creak of a twig snapping under a mysterious foot… And all at once he knew that the sunlit birch grove of his summery recollection had long given way to the oppressive, cathedral-like woods of his recent nightmare, and he felt weak with the fear of wandering off his obscure path and becoming forever lost in a suffocating, torturous labyrinth of evil dreams.
He walked faster and faster, until he was running, hurtling headfirst through the chilly blackness, heedless of roots and ghosts. His middle-aged heart pounded painfully, and his mild but persistent inebriation tangled his feet. When the trees finally started to part, revealing pale flashes of the night sky between them, his knees were about to dissolve in trembling aches, and his right shoulder was numb from the weight of his bag. Once in the open, he paused to catch his breath—and as he waited, he became aware of the unfamiliar landscape before him. He had expected to see the lights of Bogoliubovka just beyond the forest, but instead, a wide meadow swayed in the blue light of a dying moon. Shouldering his bag once again, he waded across the expanse, at first simply glad to have outrun his nightmare, then increasingly uneasy. Tall grasses brushed against his legs, heavy and moist; the unseen earth yielded softly under his feet; stars rolled down the skies like drops of rain; and fog rose in uneven patches off the ground and drifted past him in an eerie procession of limbless, faceless spirits.
There was no village in sight.
His steps grew hesitant then, his thoughts wary. The meadow descended into a steep ravine, overgrown with wild hazel trees; on the way down, he stumbled and smashed his knee against a shadow of a rock. Suspecting now that he must have taken a wrong turn somewhere in the woods, he remained still for a long while, nursing his wound and watching the remote skies. But when he groped his way to the other side, he found himself presented with the gift of a solitary streetlamp on a distant hillside, spilling rarefied purple light onto an indistinct building that could only be the Bogoliubovka train station.
He limped toward it—and the anticipated station slowly underwent a shimmering, disorienting transformation, shrinking in length and growing in height, until it condensed before his eyes first into the Kremlin’s Spasskaya Tower (what nonsense, he thought tiredly), then into a vanquished fairy-tale monster (Sukhanov blinked), and finally into a small church. He went closer, half awaiting another metamorphosis. The church was a pitiful ruin, with four of its domes beheaded and the fifth, central, one bereft of its cross and sagging around a shadowy gash, the whole edifice falling into the paling abyss of the peasant night. He regarded it morosely, no longer doubting that he was lost—the place was entirely new to him. Then, noticing a weed-choked path climbing past the church into the darkness, he rubbed his smarting knee and listlessly walked along it.
When he neared the ruin, the sparse, cold light of the streetlamp seeping through a yawning portal granted him a glimpse of a bare interior—the floor buried under decades of rubble, bulky shapes of sundry bales stacked high in the corners, years of indifference and misuse… Suddenly a puzzling flash of green alighted on the periphery of his vision. Surprised, he stopped and peered into the moldy dimness, waiting for his eyes to adjust. And then he saw the walls. Brittle under the weight of centuries, darkened by numberless summers of rains, faded by numberless winters of snows, the walls of the church were covered with frescoes.
After a moment’s hesitation, he set his bag down and gingerly stepped inside. The heavens leaked starlight through the many tears in the roof, and in the wreckage of the solitary dome, wings of invisible sleeping birds rustled. The air had a heavy smell of age and oblivion, with a sour undercurrent of bird droppings, and with every halting step he made, he crushed underfoot rotting wood and damp plaster—and possibly, he thought with a start, priceless masterpieces of disintegrating medieval art.
The diffused light from outside was not enough for him to see things clearly, but gradually, as he strained his eyes, he managed to distinguish first a few colors, then a few shapes. Here an owl-eyed monk with a disapprovingly pursed mouth clutched a bricklike book, there a poorly proportioned headless beast cavorted among unconvincing fires of hell. Above a collapsed arch, a hand was raised in stiff benediction, its body long dissolved by the rains, and nearby a seraph with the features of a mean child fluttered on sharp little wings of an unlikely tangerine tint. Along a far wall, a better-preserved procession of aged saints walked with tired tread, their gowns still glowing with ghostly green and blue and crimson, their faces mostly washed away, only here and there revealing conventional traces of solemn, empty eyes. He shrugged and looked away regretfully. The frescoes he had wrested from obscurity were nothing but a recital of religious commonplaces, fading odds and ends of an un-memorable and unremembered artistic life—mediocre seventeenth-century imitations of hundreds if not thousands of other imitations currently crumbling into dust in countless former churches across the whole of Russia.
But as he turned to leave, the shadows shifted with his movement, and he glimpsed a strange figure rising in the farthest corner. He stared incredulously into the poorly lit depths of the church, doubting his sobriety, doubting his sight. Unmistakably, it was there. To one side of the obediently treading crowd of soft-hued saints, an astonishingly lifelike apparition of a tall, stooping, bearded man with wildly outstretched arms gazed from the wall. He too was a saint, yet a saint unlike the others—his face consumed by a dark, powerful passion, his eyes stark and troubled, his gaunt body draped in harsh, funereal tones; and it seemed to Sukhanov that under the heavy eyelids, the painted irises glittered with a piercing, unearthly intensity, a hundredfold more brilliant than anything ever created by the immortal hand of Goya or Rembrandt….
For a long, long minute, without moving, Sukhanov blinked and squinted at the wonder before him. And then, slowly, with renewed certainty, he began to feel that his life, with all its questionable choices, all its doubts, all its pangs of guilt, was justified yet again—was it not? For here, in this stale backwater, on the outskirts of an insignificant village, in a church that now served as a warehouse for dim-witted dacha owners, on a wall ravaged by time and sun and frost, flowered a masterpiece created by an artist whom no one needed, whom no one noticed, whom no one even knew—and yet Sukhanov believed, as strongly as he had ever believed in anything, that by some miracle he had just been brought into the presence of the most original, most amazing mind ever to emerge from the dark ages of Russian art. For in the universe of stifling traditions and sl
avish adorations, only a genius, and one vastly ahead of his time, could have had the courage to paint such a frightening truth—to confront so boldly the beatific, pastel-colored fools of prescribed sainthood with one living, suffering, tragic human being, a man for whom faith was so visibly a struggle, a cross, perhaps even a curse…. An incomparable, precious gift to humanity this fresco was, yet it had been bypassed, overlooked, forgotten, exposed to the elements, diminished to a mere memory of its former, jewel-bright glory; and soon even its last few traces would be lost forever in the monstrous communal grave of all the pure talent in this damned country—this country that Sukhanov and the eternally unknown artist shared, this country that had changed so little throughout the centuries….
His sharp laugh sounded like a bark in the silence of the ruined walls.
“Behold,” he shouted, “the destiny of the true genius in Russia! All this beauty, all these revelations wasted! And is this the fate I too should have hoped for? My God, wasn’t I right in turning away from this lot?”
All at once, the church exploded into panicked echoes as a dozen startled crows flew off into the darkness, cawing hoarsely. Still laughing, he followed their escape past the crashed domes, toward the heavens. And when the avalanche of flapping wings died away among the stars, he thought he heard a different, quieter noise behind him—a rustle of clothes, an intake of breath…. He turned—and was rooted to the spot, his legs filled with lead, his heart leaping through his body like a fish thrown out of water. The disheveled dark saint—the unparalleled masterpiece of the unknown creator—had walked off the wall and was standing a few paces away, looking directly at Sukhanov with that burning, penetrating gaze of his.
For a horrifying eternity of a second, all was suspended. Anatoly Pavlovich was only dimly aware of falling to his knees, of closing his eyes…. He thought of nothing—and at the same time, he probably thought of dying, and that he had been crazy to hurl challenges to the skies in this terrible, decomposing lair of night and art, and that, in spite of everything he had ever witnessed, God existed after all—and that, most likely, God was not pleased with the way he, Sukhanov, had lived, had wasted, his life…