by Olga Grushin
For the full first minute, with Lev stuttering in his excitement and Alla shrieking in the background, I understood nothing. “Pinch me, I’m dreaming,” he kept repeating. Then Nina walked into the corridor, her face remote, her eyelids swollen with insomnia.
“Please don’t shout like that,” she said flatly. “It’s seven-thirty in the morning.”
My hands were jumping so much I could not immediately fit the receiver into the cradle; then, drawing her to me, “Listen, you won’t believe this,” I said, already anticipating the wondrous light about to come into her eyes.
A couple of months earlier, a major retrospective—Thirty Years of Moscow Art—had opened at the Manège. Lev and I had gone and, having found the whole affair, with a few exceptions, staid and uninspiring, had pronounced it worthy of being displayed in the former stable. But now an event little short of miraculous had taken place. A benevolent official from the Ministry of Culture had approached a few openly experimental artists with an offer to join the show, among them Ilya Beliutin, who ran an unofficial studio, and his students; and as Beliutin happened to be an old acquaintance of our Yastrebov, the loose invitation had been extended to the members of Viktor’s circle as well—the bearded Roshchin, and Lev, and myself. True, we were allowed only one work each, but all the same, it was a beginning, was it not, and one should be glad even of such—
“Oh Tolya,” Nina interrupted, clasping her hands, “so what if it’s only one painting—it’s the Manège, millions of people will see it, and you will be noticed, I know you will be! My God, it’s wonderful, just wonderful…. When does it start?”
It was all happening with the rapidity of a dream: we had been told to bring our paintings by tonight; Lev and I were meeting by the Manège that evening; the show was to open to the public the very next day. Mother and Nina left for work, but I quickly summoned an impressive cough for the benefit of a sympathetic secretary on the other end of the line and spent several hours in an incredulous, delightful haze, leafing through my canvases as through pages of my life, remembering each birth, at times tender and slow, at times furious and breathless, passing judgment on the sum total of my existence as an artist—my early studies of trains and reflections; the mythical and urban landscapes that had occupied me all through 1958; my subsequent fascination with surrealism, in an attempt to transplant the lessons of Dali and Magritte to Russian soil; and in the past two years, my ultimate arrival at what I believed to be my own, truly unique style—trying to choose from among them the one painting most representative of my philosophy of art, or possibly the one most original, or the one most beautiful, or perhaps simply the one most dear to my heart. In the early afternoon, when the air had already begun to thicken into blue softness outside the window and I was still at a loss, Nina called.
“Tolya, I’ve been thinking,” she said, and I could hear a smile in her voice. “What about that early one, with the reflection of a woman’s face in a train window, you know the one? Of course, it’s not as complex as your current pieces—but it may be easier for people to understand, and, well… It’s what made me realize how brilliant you were.”
“Oh,” I said, smiling also. “Well, since you put it that way—”
Once inside, we unwrapped our bundles. Lev had selected an abstract piece.
“What do you think?” he said uncertainly, turning it to the light. “It’s a new one.”
I did not have the heart to tell him the truth. Together we watched our paintings being mounted on the walls; I found it exhilarating and almost frightening to see a deeply private vision of mine splayed across the impersonal white surface under the clinical glare of gallery lamps, with a rectangular label bearing my name underneath. Roshchin and a few others of our acquaintance were milling about, all with the same slightly disoriented look on their faces, but I did not stay to talk to them. I wanted to preserve the sonorous fullness of this day unmarred by nervous banter, insincere compliments, exaggerated camaraderie, so I could carry it, slowly, carefully, like some precious elixir, through the gleaming blue city, through the quietly falling snow, through the softly illuminated streets and the darkened courtyards, and present it, with not a single drop spilled, to her, my Nina.
She met me on the landing, kissing me quickly. She wore the white dress of our wedding day, her bare arms were goose-bumped, and her eyes were bright; she had bought a bottle of champagne, and it was lovely to hear her laugh at the dry explosion of the cork later in the evening. My mother quit the dinner table without finishing her glass, her lips tightly pressed together, and we listened to her shuffling behind the closed door of her room, muttering darkly about reprisals and retributions, until the hum of the television drowned out her voice.
“Poor woman, she never stops worrying,” Nina whispered.
For a while after that, we sat silently in the cozily lit kitchen. I was watching the snow whirling outside the window, and Nina was peeling a tangerine, the first of the season. And all at once the scent of the fruit, sweet yet with the slightest hint of bitterness, and the light taste of champagne lingering on my tongue, and the soft, furry snowflakes dancing in the sky like some white winter moths, and Nina’s profile bent in the gentle glow of the green lampshade, and the knowledge of this wonderful change that was drawing closer and closer, all merged into a feeling of such intensity, such completion, that I felt this to be the happiest moment of my life—happier even than that luminous, color-mad moment when, with Chagall and Kandinsky for witnesses, Nina had promised to marry me—or perhaps it was still the same moment, now in its long-awaited fulfillment…. Smiling, Nina looked up.
“Here,” she said, holding out half of the tangerine. “It’s a bit sour, but so delicious.”
We did not sleep at all that night. The snow stopped soon after midnight, and immediately the sky grew dark and deep like velvet; then the grayness began to creep into the nooks and crannies of the world; and sometime later, in the pale light of a cold dawn, Nina lifted her face to mine and said, “Tolya, I’m so sorry about my birthday. I know I was unfair. It’s just that as a girl I always imagined what my life would be like at thirty, and, well… It was harder than I had expected, that’s all.”
For a minute unspoken words hung between us. Then she said with a small sigh, “But I never stopped believing in your talent, not for an instant, and I would have stood by you no matter what. Still, I’m so relieved this finally happened. We’ve waited for this for a long time.”
“Yes,” I said, kissing her lightly. “A very long time. I’m sorry too. But everything will be different now, you’ll see.”
And then the sunrise of December first was upon us.
TWENTY
When I left the house that morning, I did not go directly to the Manège. Perhaps I feared the disappointment of seeing indifferent crowds stroll with scarcely a glance past my work; or maybe I simply wanted to prolong the anticipation, sensing it to be immensely richer than the most resounding acclaim could ever be. The bleak day smelled of winter, the sky and the houses were the running gray and yellow of a spare watercolor, and rare pedestrians glided through the pale landscapes in silent, chilled preoccupation, leaving behind black garlands of footprints filled with the glistening slush of yesterday’s melting snow. Wandering along the wet pavements in their wake, I did not think of the exhibition that at this very moment, perhaps, was opening its doors to eager visitors only a few streets and squares away; but a deep happiness, a kind of muted, exultant hum, underlay all my steps, all my breaths, all my heartbeats, infusing my walk with a triumphant spring and my soul with a glow of well-being.
And by the time I turned a random corner and unexpectedly saw the Manège rise into view, I had understood, with an effortless, wordless certainty, that I was finally ready to undertake my most ambitious project yet—a challenge I had cherished secretly for many years—a series of seven paintings that would merge everything I felt about Russia, and history, and art, and God.
Already impatient to return
home and begin to sketch, I started toward the Manège. The sky was low before another snowfall, and the ancient towers of the Kremlin squatted morosely under the sagging clouds. Although there were more people here, it was suddenly so quiet I could hear the echoing steps of a man running along the street, heedlessly dogged by his own frantic shadow. I felt that my vision had never been sharper, as if all my artistic powers had been released at once. Happiness soared inside me like a mad angel. The first painting, I already knew, would be called The Garden of Eden, and its predominant color would be green—the lush, sunny green at the heart of a birch forest, the subtler, mysterious green of Nina’s eyes, the simple, joyful green of the carpet I had played on as a child…. A snowflake pricked the skin of my hand; the running man was closer; I could see he had no hat on. At the opposite end of the spectrum, on the other side of the gates of paradise, would be the dull green of a chain-link fence, the poisonous green of a neon sign, the oppressive green of hospital walls, the… the… The running man was upon me now. His face was distorted, his eyes wild. It was Lev Belkin.
“It’s over,” he gasped. “Where have you been? It’s all over.”
“What is it? What’s the matter?” I said, laughing as I arrested his flight, already anticipating some impish joke.
He shook himself free of my arms.
“Khrushchev and some bigwigs… showed up at the Manège this morning,” he said between rasping breaths. “An official visit… we weren’t told about. It was… I can’t tell you what it was like. Where the hell have you been?”
It was not a joke after all. He sounded furious and, underneath it, frightened.
“I was just walking around,” I said quickly. “What happened?”
“I’ll tell you what happened.” He kept glancing over his shoulder as if worried he was being chased. “Khrushchev hated everything he saw. Abstract paintings in particular, but the rest as well. He went all red in the face and shouted that our works were good only for covering urinals, and other things too—terrible things…. Real art should ennoble the individual and arouse him to action, these kinds of pictures are amoral and anti-Soviet, they have wasted money on us, we should be sent far away and put to work cutting trees so we could pay back the state for all the paper we’ve besmirched—”
“Did he… did he say anything about my painting?” I asked haltingly.
Lev grabbed my coat, so violently that I felt something rip. For a second I thought he was going to hit me. Then, slowly, his mouth softened.
“Your painting?” he said, releasing me. “Tolya, are you listening? Who cares what he thought about your painting? I’m sure he didn’t notice it—he didn’t really look at any of our things. He just saw something different and charged like a bull at a red cape. Roshchin thinks the whole affair was a provocation—that bastard from the Ministry who invited us to the show must have known about the state visit all along, and hoped that Khrushchev would have precisely this reaction. God, Tolya, don’t you understand? We are finished, we are all finished! They are declaring war on us—prison camps and all the rest!”
For some time I studied an object lying on Lev’s open palm. It was round and black and shiny, and had four small holes in it; a frayed bit of thread was sticking out of a lower hole. It looked odd, like some puzzling artifact of an ancient, forgotten civilization. Then, through the resounding silence in my mind, one thought emerged: Nina.
“Nina is coming to the Manège at two o‘clock,” I said dully. “I was going to show her around. I’d like her to see my painting hanging on the wall at least once. It’s a painting of her, and she would really—”
Lev looked away.
“They are taking everything down as we speak,” he said slowly. “Nina knows already, I called her. I’ve been looking for you for over an hour.” After a small pause, he added, “Sorry about your coat”—and pressed the torn-off button into my hand.
The days that followed were a wretched blur. There were the rooms at the Manège, the walls bare now, with a draft off the street tossing homeless shreds of wrapping paper from corner to corner and a few square-shouldered, square-faced young men in freshly pressed suits shrugging noncommittally when a frantic, disheveled Roshchin begged them to disclose the fate of our works. There were the hours at the institute when Lev and I struggled through our meaningless lectures while the whispers of the Manège affair spread behind our backs, and that splendidly sunny morning when Leonid Penkin pushed his corpulent belly through my door and in a bored drawl relieved me of my position. There was the miserable evening I spent at Lev’s place, with Lev, also fired, sitting stony-faced at the kitchen table, pouring himself glass after glass of vodka, while Alla shrilly lamented her wasted youth. Worse yet, there was the silent disapproval in my own home, with the television loudly reciting victories of socialist labor behind my mother’s closed door and Nina moving about the kitchen like the ghost of a housewife doomed for all eternity to miming a multitude of imaginary chores, too busy to talk, avoiding my eyes, as if she blamed me for what had happened—but mainly, through it all, behind it all, there was an emptiness, a vast, cold, ever-present, all-pervasive emptiness inside me that kept me awake for hours every night, without thoughts, without hopes, trapped in a heavy darkness alone with the barely visible shadows of my paintings, now damned forever.
As the week neared its end, our worst fears, at least, had not been realized—though a few of us had lost our jobs, and the rest had received official reprimands, no one had been arrested, and even Roshchin, who had vanished mysteriously the day after the fateful opening, prompting his distraught mistress to make incoherent, sobbing calls to all his friends, turned up the next morning, with a black eye and reeking of drink but otherwise unharmed. Yet the sense of impending disaster continued to oppress us, and Lev kept nervously proposing extended trips to the country. “The thing to do right now,” he repeated, “is to lie low until they forget about us.” I would merely shrug in response. As time dragged on, irresolute and despondent, I found myself increasingly indifferent to my ultimate fate, and felt a listless calm when the telephone screamed at four in the morning on two consecutive nights and then hummed with pregnant silence into my ear, or when one evening, just as my mother and I were sitting down to supper (Nina was in bed with a migraine), there sounded a harsh knock on the door and I discovered a strange man on the landing, wearing a glossy beaver hat down to his eyebrows and carrying a bunch of artificial carnations (the kind one places on graves), who, proclaiming with a sinister smile that he must have mistaken the door, persisted in peering over my shoulder into our apartment. Nina did not share my detachment. After the man’s appearance on our doorstep, she grew tense whenever she heard steps on our floor and disliked answering the telephone; and thus it was I who lifted the receiver when, exactly one week after the catastrophe, my father-in-law rang our place.
He had to name himself: in the past five years we had exchanged only a few static-filled sentences, and I did not recognize his voice.
“Nina’s asleep,” I said curtly—it was only nine o‘clock, but I could see no light under the door to our room.
“Actually, Anatoly,” he said, “I wanted to talk to you. Not on the phone, though. Would you be so kind as to come over? Take a pen, I’ll give you my address.”
“I remember it,” I said, then added pointedly, “I have a very good memory, Pyotr Alekseevich.”
“Indeed?” he said without expression. “Then I’ll see you in half an hour.”
The cold seeped beneath my upturned collar and damp snow slapped my face as I crossed the night between our homes. Although I tried to assure myself that I owed Nina the courtesy of this visit, my mood worsened by the minute. In the lobby I had an altercation with the concierge, who for a long time refused to let me pass; and once I reached Malinin’s landing, still seething from the argument, I was stopped by a middle-aged blonde in a lacy apron who, emerging from the apartment next door, kept talking about some Crimean resort, smiling and pressing a b
unch of keys into my hand. Over her shoulder hovered a pimply youth who stared at me with disconcerting curiosity, then exclaimed nonsensically, “I know you, don’t I? You are that mister with the tie, from the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge, I owe you two kopecks!”—but at that moment Malinin’s lock clicked, and the imposing figure of Nina’s father rose on the doorstep, dressed in a floor-length robe, holding a pear-shaped goblet of cognac in his hand, reflected in the gilded mirrors.
“Please come in,” he said, majestically sweeping his arm inside.
The door closed behind me.
In silence Malinin led me along the corridor. Nothing here had changed in the five years since my first, and last, visit. The Polish officer glared out of his heavy frame at the coat I tossed on the counter and the wet footprints I left on the immaculate floors; the piano, untouched in almost two decades—since Maria Malinina’s premature death—glistened with its dark, useless grandeur in the depths of the drawing room; and through another half-open door I glimpsed, with a sense of oppressive recognition, the crystal chandelier, the mahogany grandfather clock, the crimson velvet curtains—the bourgeois decorations of the scene of my past outburst. No, nothing had changed—and yet, without Nina’s soft domestic presence, the whole place seemed dimmer and dustier and somehow sad; and when, still without speaking, Malinin showed me into the living room, sat me down, poured me a drink, and lowered himself into an armchair across from me, I looked at him closely and suddenly doubted why I was here. I had supposed he had invited me to gloat over my failure; now I was not sure. For a minute we sat uneasily sipping our drinks. Then he cleared his throat.
“I’ll come straight to the point,” he said. “I’ve spoken with your director Penkin, and he is willing to take you back. Naturally, upon certain guarantees.”
“Such as?” Caught by surprise, I sounded sharper than I had intended.