by Olga Grushin
Without warning the train pulled to a screeching stop. As Sukhanov toppled forward, his glasses plunged off his nose and were instantly lost amid the shuffling of uprooted feet. Immediately everything started to float away into a fog: the cloudy faces grimacing around him, the spectral station whose black-lettered name he squinted at hopefully but was unable to read, the shimmering glow of the sky above a distant town. After a moment of agonized indecision, he crouched down and groped along the filthy floor, the muddy shoes, the flabby convexities of bags, until, against every law of probability, just as the train jolted into motion again, his fingers closed on the welcome cold of the metal frames.
Infinitely relieved, he returned his glasses to their place, only to discover, upon straightening up, that half of his world was now crisscrossed by a radiant, trembling cobweb: a star-shaped crack, the imprint of someone’s vengeful step, had shattered the left lens. The crack splintered the light into dozens of cubist fragments and imparted a rainbow-tinted brightness to one side of his vision, granting unwitting haloes to a night brigade of women in orange overalls who were presently illuminated by the flickering beams of their flashlights on a parallel track, and, once the last vestiges of the unknown town had fallen into the darkness, endowing his own reflection in the window with the multifaceted eye of an insect and sending silver waves across that of a strikingly beautiful girl who had just passed behind him in the aisle.
Greedily he looked at this newly altered universe, drinking in the colors, storing up his impressions, so that at the end of the day he could unburden his fresh load of discoveries onto yet another canvas. For months after that Picasso exhibition in October of 1956, he lived as if in an experimental laboratory of art, his mind always dissecting his surroundings in search of compositions, his hands always stained by oils, his heart always on fire. There were other shows as more and more paintings crossed the loosened borders or escaped the moldering walls of Soviet prisons of forbidden creation—among them, French impressionists whose sun-spotted gardens, twirling parasols, and boating excursions he found simple but dear, and contemporary Americans whose abstract expressionism amused him with its cult of anti-art. He devoured everything he came across, and in his paintings copied, toyed with, and abandoned a multitude of techniques and styles. And all the while, my soul longed to pass through its appointed period of apprenticeship and, emerging tempered by its trials yet in essence unchanged, devise a language all its own.
For the moment, however, my search remained a private one, transpiring on a secret plane parallel to my official, seemingly unaltered, existence. Although I talked freely among my artist friends at Yastrebov’s evenings, the exhilarating change in the air felt all too recent, the memories of the preceding years all too fresh, and I preferred to be careful. I still proclaimed the virtues of socialist realism in my lectures at the institute, churned out now and then the odd portrait for the leather-bound office of some factory director, and when a shrill-voiced girl stood up during a classroom discussion and denounced Picasso as a scion of capitalism, I thought it prudent not to object. For the same reason, I had chosen to paint my true works at home, while reserving the studio (visited by both my students and my superiors) exclusively for my torpid public productions. And thus it was that I had nothing to show her when she came by the institute one dazzlingly blue, gloriously fragrant, excruciatingly awkward afternoon.
The month was March, the year 1957. Since our unfortunate meeting that past September, when I had so grossly insulted her father to her face, I had glimpsed her only a few times, always in Lev Belkin’s company, always from afar. I had not hoped to talk to her ever again. By now, Lev and I had grown so close that I considered him my best friend, but our almost daily contacts centered on our work, and the name of Nina Malinina never entered our conversation. I assumed he was in love with her, and attributed his silence to his private nature, or else to his innate sense of tact—for the impression she had made on me that ill-fated evening must have been apparent to everyone. For myself, I fervently continued to think of her as my unattainable ideal, and was reduced to near-stuttering when, after a cursory knock on my door, she walked into my life, the smells of melting snows in her wake.
“I came to see Lev, but he is busy with some students, so I thought I’d stop by here in the meantime,” she said without a smile. “I’m curious to see the works of a man who deems himself so superior to my father.”
That day, a portrait of a heavily decorated general with bushy whiskers was drying against a wall, while on my easel an uncommonly rosy-cheeked woman was proudly displaying a bucket of cucumbers. As she circled the room, she did not speak, but I saw her eyebrows rise, and my heart ached with humiliation. At the same time, I sensed it would be dangerous to tell her about my other, experimental, paintings, for she was the daughter of Pyotr Malinin, that pillar of officialdom, and I knew nothing at all about her—nothing except that she was beautiful, luminously, piercingly beautiful, moving lightly through the air alive with sunshine in that pearl-gray coat of hers, in those little black boots clicking so haughtily against the floor, her short hair the color of honey spilling in two or three curls from under a red beret, her transparent eyes distant, almost derisive, her lips—her lips—
“This isn’t really what I do,” I heard myself saying recklessly. “I have other kinds of things at home. I… I can show you if you like. I live nearby. With my mother.”
I was certain she would say no at once, but she appeared to hesitate.
“I’ll ask Lev to join us,” I added hastily.
In silence, she pulled at the fingers of her glove, then, looking up, said, “All right.” Astonished, humbled, joyful, I ran down the hall, tenderly depositing in my memory the last, expectant look of her suddenly darkened eyes. Lev’s door, around the corner, was cracked. I saw him standing by an open window, gazing into the glistening yard; his students must have just left. He did not hear me approach, and I was about to call out to him—but my lips moved wordlessly and my shout died an unnatural death in my throat. For a minute I lingered in the corridor, looking at his tall, broad-shouldered silhouette pasted against the pale blue sky; then, deciding, I retraced my steps on tiptoe.
She was still there, waiting quietly, twirling the glove in her hand.
“He’s too busy to come,” I told her. “Of course, I understand if you don‘t—”
I could not read her expression. Then, abruptly, she laughed.
“No, let’s go,” she said brightly. “Take your scarf, it’s colder than it looks.”
The city was streaming, dripping, splashing around us, sailing away on a dancing wave of early spring. She walked through it heedlessly, without noticing the torrents running off roofs and the pools of water at her feet; and so unreal seemed her presence next to me that I almost expected her to melt at any instant into the lustrous air. Yet after a mortifying interval filled with our passage through a littered building entrance, her stumbling on an unlit staircase landing, my embarrassed tugging at a key that had stuck in the lock (followed by a frantic dash into the apartment ahead of her, to throw a blanket over one painting I did not want her to see), and a blundering introduction to my startled mother who had exited the bathroom in curlers—there she was at last, standing in the middle of my cluttered room, uneasily playing with her gloves.
I switched on the light.
That year, I was fascinated by trains. I painted the in-between chaos of railroad stations, stained by the palpable sorrow of partings and the sad waste of vagrant destinies, yet occasionally pierced by the dazzling ray of a joyous meeting, a pure emotion; the mechanical rhythm of robotic multitudes swallowed and regurgitated ceaselessly by metallic monsters, with a rare living, feeling person swept screamingly along within the faceless mass; foreign, at times hauntingly lovely landscapes seen only fleetingly, through a dirty windowpane, over a pathetic repast of vobla laid out on a newspaper editorial; random lives thrown together for one moment, squashed against each other in the dim, narrow c
onfines of a crammed car, sharing space and time, mingling their breaths in a parody of human closeness, yet each of them remaining tragically, eternally alone…. Nina Malinina silently looked at the canvases propped against the walls and piled on the floor; and when she finally spoke, there was a note of surprise in her voice.
“Dark,” she said slowly. “Most of these are very dark, not at all what I expected. I love this one. Strange but… so beautiful.”
She pointed to a small painting of railroad tracks being repaired in the deep blue glimmer of moonlight by a brigade of melancholy, overweight angels with shining orange wings. And then, before I could stop her, she stepped across to my easel and in one swift movement lifted the blanket I had thrown over my latest work.
With this canvas, more challenging in composition, I had hoped to complete the railroad series and begin exploring another subject that had interested me of late, that of reflections—of houses in pools of rainwater, of shaving men in bathroom mirrors, of wives in their husbands’ glasses, of constellations in cups of tea. The painting depicted a crowd of people in browns and grays standing hunched over in the aisle of a train car, all of them seen from the back. The sturdy, well-dressed man in the foreground was reflected faintly in a window. His face, hovering over a dark patch of a forest, was middle-aged and vaguely unpleasant, with a hint of a double chin, and eyes, small and furtive like insects, hidden behind metal-rimmed glasses—the face of someone who had led a comfortable, predictable, inconsequential life. At this instant, however, his bland reflected features wore an expression of shocked recognition, as if he had just glimpsed a missed dream of his youth and for one heartbeat realized the meaningless-ness of his whole existence; and his eyes stared at the silvery wisp of another, less distinct, reflection—the specter of a strikingly beautiful girl who seemed to be flitting through the air behind him but was probably simply walking along the aisle, just outside the imaginary frame, briefly positioned precisely where a viewer of the painting would be standing. The girl’s face had been the most difficult thing to paint, and I had spent almost a month battling with its complexities: it had to look both real and ethereal at the same time.
“But,” said Nina Malinina haltingly, “but… that’s me.”
My voice louder than necessary, I started talking about generalized, classical features, instances of accidental similarity, the artist’s subconscious use of familiar material… And then something strange happened: she began to cry. Unlike most weeping girls, she did not invite a comforting gesture; her face looked angry, and her tears were silent and spare.
Unsettled, I turned away, waiting for her to compose herself.
“I understand,” she said quietly after a minute, “he really isn’t a very good painter. I must be going now.”
Our eyes met, and I had a sudden feeling that she disliked me greatly. I was surprised when she agreed to let me walk her home. She lived with her father on Gorky Street, a quarter of an hour away. When we parted, she wrote down her phone number on the back of one of my drawings.
The next day, I had a talk with Lev I felt guilty about my encounter with Nina, and I did not want him to hear about it from her. I altered the truth ever so slightly: I told him that when I had come to invite him along, his door had been closed, and hearing the sounds of an animated discussion inside, I had decided against interrupting. He gave me an odd look, then shrugged.
“Stop sounding so damn apologetic,” he said. “I don’t own her or her time.”
“But I thought you were… Aren’t you and Nina…”
“You thought wrong,” he said curtly. “We are friends. Old friends. We went to school together. The first time we talked, we were fourteen. She brought a sandwich with caviar for lunch, while I had a piece of bread spread with butter and sprinkled with sugar—the only thing my mother could afford. She was so fascinated she asked me for a trade. Good luck with her, Tolya. Now, about this last piece of yours, I’ve been thinking it over, and I’m not sure the composition works. Wouldn’t it be better if—”
I felt relieved at having Lev’s blessing, and dizzy with possibilities. After that, I saw her often. She had numerous admirers, of course, many of them in the highest ranks of society, where she moved freely because of her father, and I had no hope of impressing her with my mildly successful position in life or my unremarkable material accomplishments. Neither had I that sleek suavity acquired through experience with women, for in spite of being twenty-eight, I could brag of nothing but three or four passing flirtations in the whole of my past. But as I soon discovered, she loved art—loved it with a passion surprising in someone of Malinin’s flesh and blood. Not being blessed with talent (as she herself readily admitted), she had studied art history at the Moscow State University and was now working as a curator at the Tretyakovskaya Gallery. Soon a visit to this or that museum, a walk through this or that exhibition became our habitual way of spending time together, and as I would treat her to a fiery discourse on the nature of Fra Angelico’s colors or van Gogh’s brushstroke, I would feel encouraged by the look of reluctant admiration I imagined at times in her wonderful mermaid eyes.
One evening in late May, I took her to the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge, to show her the garlands of liquid lights carried away by the river and tell her about a painting I had envisioned, with a mysterious city of golden churches and lacelike towers gleaming mistily under the still, dark waters of a lake, its quivering contours too incandescent to be a reality, too enchanting to be a reflection, too palpable to be a dream. And then I looked up and saw her standing there, in her narrow-waisted white dress, absently picking tiny blossoms off a branch of deep purple lilacs I had brought her and watching their twirling descent into the current below—and I could wait no longer. I told her I loved her, had loved her since the first time I saw her. She was quiet for a moment, then said expressionlessly that it was growing chilly, and could I please walk her home; but something in her face made my heart flutter like a mad butterny—and a few weeks later, she kissed me.
It was the first real day of summer, bright and green and hot, and we went for a walk in Gorky Park. Lev came too, with Alia, a giggling nineteen-year-old with an upturned nose and eyes blue and empty as glass, whom he claimed to have met a week before in an ice cream line. The four of us rented a boat, but it proved too small to hold everyone at once, and Lev and I took turns rowing the girls around the lake; and when, distracted by the glittering waves and the sun flashing into my eyes and Nina’s summery, lighthearted presence, I crashed the boat into the low branches of a willow tree, Nina began to laugh, and Lev and Alia waved and shouted from the shore, and as I tried to extricate us from the wavering, sparkling, leafy ambush, she suddenly leaned over—and kissed me.
When we parted later that day, I did not go home. Drunk with happiness, I walked the streets of Moscow, watching the darkness fall, watching windows pop up one after another and then go out, watching the sky grow thinner. When the first gray light touched the rooftops, the city unexpectedly rustled with a warm summer rain, and laughing, I ran to a nearby bus stop and waited in its glass-walled shelter. Half an hour passed, and still the rain gave no sign of abating. Realizing how close I was to the institute, I made a dash through the downpour and minutes later burst into the building.
Once in my studio, I immediately succumbed to the temptation of the virgin canvas that was stretched on my easel, for a certain image had haunted me all night—a lake, a boat, and in it, a woman—a demure, radiant nude with breasts, arms, and legs sprouting flowers, hundreds, thousands, myriad blue and white flowers whose fresh, fragrant profusion was gradually transformed into the blue, sun-dappled water on which the boat was floating gently. As I painted, I grew oblivious of the world around me—a hubbub of voices in the corridor, a patter of rain on the windowsill, a brisk knock on the door, a heavy step, a voice saying importantly, “There is a certain issue I need to discuss with you, Anatoly Pavlovich….”
Then, glancing up sharply, I saw a balding man e
ntering the room, his red face stony, his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his jacket. It took me a heartbeat to recognize Leonid Penkin, the institute director—and instantly I became aware of my unshaved chin, my rain-drenched clothes, the circles under my eyes, a possibly missed morning lecture, and worse yet, a bare breast quite visibly materializing under my brush amidst a torrent of bluebells. With scarcely a nod for a greeting, the director commenced striding back and forth across the floor, staring majestically somewhere over my head and talking—talking about certain rumors that had reached him, certain, so to speak, artistic gatherings in a certain questionable home that I surely knew about, certain actions, moreover, that he would very much regret to have to undertake in certain contingencies…. Praying that he would fail to notice my painting, I hardly listened to his vociferous rhetoric.
“The way I see it,” he was saying, “socialist art is like a fast train into the future, and I, for one, would be rather sorry to see someone with your potential get off that train, for let me tell you, young man, it’s the only train there is. But I’m afraid you must get off if… Are you listening to me? You must get off if you don’t produce a ticket this instant!”
“A ticket?” Sukhanov repeated in confusion. “What ticket?”
“I thought as much,” said the man, and pushed his red face closer to Sukhanov’s. “A stowaway! Well, time to take a walk. Unless, of course, you want to pay a fine. Pay up, or get off.”
The people around them murmured excitedly. Through his broken glasses, Sukhanov peered outside and saw another badly lit platform without a name, disconcertingly similar to the one he had left dreams and dreams ago, in Bogoliubovka. Shuddering, he said, “All right, all right, how much?” and hastily reached inside his pocket. He felt some loose change rolling behind the lining, but his wallet was not there. His wallet, he suddenly remembered with a sinking heart, was in a side compartment of his bag, and his bag—his bag had been stolen.