The Dream Life of Sukhanov (16 page)

In the first few years after Anatoly’s return to Moscow, Romanov had sent him frequent letters, with effortless sketches of lacelike dragonflies and demure mermaids scattered between the lines and faintly colored, oil-stained fingerprints on the margins, but Anatoly, numbed by his father’s death, had tossed them indifferently, at times unopened, into a drawer, postponing his answer in expectation of a thaw in his soul, until eventually the one-sided correspondence had tapered off. Later, after he entered the Surikov Institute, his interest in life returned, but he lacked the time needed to compose a sincere, worthy reply—one that would truly explain his silence of the preceding years. Or perhaps, if he was to be completely forthcoming with himself, the time had been there all along, but the path he had chosen, his determination to use the nimbleness of his brush to secure a comfortable livelihood, his constant struggle to squeeze from his manner the last lingering consequences of Romanov’s unorthodox teachings, made him feel vaguely uneasy, dishonest, unclean—a mild enough discomfort, but one that kept him from writing all through his student years, and that proceeded to intensify into a sensation of acute guilt soon after his graduation. Along with a few other promising young artists, Anatoly was appointed to teach at the Moscow Higher Artistic and Technical Institute, the very place from which Romanov had been exiled to Inza in disgrace some two decades before, accused of “undue impressionism” in his works.

With time, Anatoly’s sense of guilt paled, of course, along with the memory of the man who had inspired it, and obscurely he felt the oblivion to which he had consigned his early artistic discoveries to be an essential ingredient—perhaps the basis—of his continuing peace of mind. He led a measured existence, dutifully moving between the quietened Arbat apartment (the elder Morozov, his son Sashka, and the merry construction worker had all perished in the war, and Anatoly had eventually shifted his modest belongings into one of the empty rooms), the auditoriums in which he staunchly repeated the very phrases and gestures that had once made him draw vicious caricatures of the speakers in his student notebooks, and a studio at the institute, where he produced his canvases of grimy, industrious peasants and grimly determined soldiers, with soulful vistas opening behind their broad, sturdy backs. In 1953, when Stalin died, he and his mother grieved along with everyone; he painted a small commemorative portrait for a local school. Nadezhda Sukhanova was proud of him, and appeared content. They were placed on a waiting list to receive their own flat, and at the end of 1954 moved across the city to the Liubianka neighborhood. His works were occasionally purchased by a garment factory or a Young Pioneers club. He had no close friends, but his days were busy enough without them. He was never cynical in his actions (celebrating the people’s accomplishments that had come at such terrible cost was a worthy pursuit, he had no doubt), but simply uninspired and incurious; he had acquired a habit of adjusting to his surroundings with unquestioning acquiescence, and ceased to distinguish between art and craft—a difference of only two letters, after all. By the time he turned twenty-six, he believed he could follow this path into old age, obtaining in due course an amiable wife and two or three children, making a quiet, pleasant, useful way through the world.

And then came the year 1956, and everything he had once held true—all the comfortable ideas and beliefs and ways of life—was swept away. And as the past certainties melted, dizzying drops and hidden false bottoms were revealed in their stead—and in the whirlwind that followed, my soul, which had weathered the intervening years between adolescence and adulthood by retreating deep into its own rainbow-colored world and dreaming secret, fleeting, iridescent dreams of birds and flowers and stars and angels, emerged once again, and was as before, alive and demanding.

Then, awakening abruptly and discovering only emptiness where warmth and friendship should have been, I tried to find Oleg Romanov across the ravages of space and time. But neither repeated letters to the Inza school nor persistent inquiries among colleagues brought any results—the man had moved, the man had vanished, the man had probably died.... And now, three decades later, Anatoly Sukhanov sat in his sun-flooded office on the top floor of the eighteenth-century mansion in the heart of Moscow, trying to calculate how old his teacher would be (only a few years older than his father-in-law, so it was possible), and watching, with irregular heartbeats, Liubov Markovna’s contrite approach.

“Sorry for the delay,” she said in a voice so low it verged on a whisper, as she slid the manuscript across his desk. He had meant to wait until she left the room, but his eyes descended onto the page before he could prevent it. “Chagall: One Man’s Universe,” the title declared in capital letters. Underneath, he saw the name—D. M. Fyodorov.

Exhaling, he picked up the article and dropped it negligently into his briefcase.

The relentless advance of the past had been finally halted.

“I’m going home now,” he said airily, “but tell Sergei Nikolaevich that I’ll let him know as soon as I can.”

“Yes, Anatoly Pavlovich,” Liubov Markovna whispered behind his back. “Of course, Anatoly Pavlovich. Right away, Anatoly Pavlovich.”

H
e had hoped to glance at the text during his metro ride home, but spent the minutes in transit with his nose pressed between the chintz shoulder blades of an elderly woman with a multitude of bags, one of which was quite perceptibly oozing a trickle of ice cream onto the floor, while a gangling, pimply fellow sank his chin meditatively into Sukhanov’s neck. On the way out, mildly befuddled, he attempted to exit through a glass door that read, in mirrorlike inversion, “ECNARTNE,” and a very large, formidable figure in a pigeon-gray uniform—whether man or woman, he could not tell—shouted at him in a booming prison guard’s voice that made passersby start and turn and stare, “Where the hell do you think you’re going, old man? Have you gone blind?”

He staggered into the street feeling shaky, tightly clutching his briefcase as if expecting it to be violently torn from his grasp at any moment. When he arrived at his building at last, he wanted to collapse with relief. The lobby embraced him with its familiar marble coolness, and the ancient concierge was already shuffling across the floor to summon the elevator. The two of them stood side by side without speaking, listening to the laborious creaking of the machinery floors above. Nearly a full minute later came a heavy thump, and a light shone through the crack between the folds of the door. The concierge began to swing open the gate.

“Oh, Anatoly Pavlovich, I nearly forgot,” he said in a voice dry as an autumn leaf. “There have been some problems with the elevator, so they asked me to tell everyone on the upper floors to be a bit more careful.”

“What do you mean?” Sukhanov asked inattentively, stepping inside.

“Oh, nothing much,” the concierge replied with an ambiguous smile. “Just make sure the elevator is actually
there
before you enter it on the way down. Wouldn’t want anyone falling to their deaths, would we now, heh heh heh! Had a close one, too. Two days ago, Ivan Martynovich—you know, that songwriter who lives below you—”

The elevator doors, closing with jerks and shudders, swallowed the rest of his sentence.

Sukhanov felt inordinately glad to find himself at home.

“Hello, I’m back!” he called out hopefully—but the place stayed silent, save for a few spoons that rattled dejectedly in the dining room cupboard. The air in the hallway was damp; the windows had remained open during the previous night’s rain. A ghostly trace of music sent faint vibrations into the corridor from Ksenya’s room. Frowning, he knocked on her door, then, not hearing a response, knocked louder. There was still no answer.

Sukhanov walked in.

The heavy green curtains were drawn, softening the room’s stark, book-filled angularity, and in the semidarkness he heard the shadow of music grow to a stronger presence, more like a whisper or a persistent memory of a song. His daughter was lying flat on her bed, fully dressed, a pair of headphones on her ears, her eyes closed, a strange, tight little smile flickering on her lips. As he bent over her, the music expanded, and he could distinguish a man’s voice singing, although the words remained a soft electronic blur.

“Young people nowadays,” he murmured—partially to dispel with the sound of his own voice the sensation of unease that suddenly brushed him with a darting, clammy, alien touch, not for the first time in Ksenya’s presence. After a moment’s hesitation, he placed his hand on her shoulder. She screamed and sat up so abruptly their heads nearly collided; and for an instant her eyes, dark and veiled, were full of swinging chaos. Then, like a pair of pendulums slowly coming to a stop, her pupils became still in the gray irises.

Breathing out, she tore off the headphones.

“You scared me,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Ah yes, the power of music,” he said, trying to smile. “What are you listening to?”

“No one you’d know.”

“Try me.”

“All right then, Boris Tumanov,” she replied, shrugging. “It’s a homemade tape, he’s part of the new underground.”

“Oh. I see,” he said vaguely. “By any chance, do you know where your mother is?”

“She’s gone to the Tretyakovka with Fyodor Mikhailovich. He wanted to show her some of his favorite works.”

“Oh, I see,” he said again. “So it’s just us, then. Well, well.”

He turned to leave but paused with his hand on the doorknob.

“Ksenya, perhaps,” he said haltingly, “perhaps we could talk?”

She regarded him without enthusiasm.

“Let me guess,” she said. “You’re going to deliver a lecture on how to be a good daughter. Or will this be some sort of fatherly discussion of the facts of life? ‘Now that you are eighteen, my dear, you need to know there is more to boys than meets the eye’—that kind of thing? Well, don’t worry, I know already. I went to school, if you recall. We had sex education.”

He watched a small whirlpool of silence widen between them.

“It’s nothing like that, I just ... I just thought we’d talk, that’s all,” he said meekly. “We hardly ever see each other, now that you are so busy with your work.... I wanted to tell you, I’ve read that Hoffmann story you recommended the other day. Very interesting, and you were right, it doesn’t have much in common with—”

Her face relaxed, and her eyes moved dreamily past him.

“Papa, I’m sorry,” she said, “but if it’s nothing urgent, now is really not a good time. I stayed up most of the night doing this assignment, and I was about to take a nap when you came in.”

“Oh,” he said brightly. “Of course. Some other time, then?”

“Some other time,” she said.

She was looking away already, searching for her headphones.

H
e tried to read the article for the next hour, but could never get past the epigraph—an excerpt from Chagall’s awkward yet oddly poignant poem, three lines of which kept alighting on the tip of his tongue like a stubborn moth, preventing him from moving any further, filling his mind with fluttering flocks of irrelevant associations.

Across the sky fly former inhabitants.

Where do they live now?

In my own torn soul.

The words circled round and round in his mind.... Soon he abandoned the manuscript altogether and stretched out on the couch, his gaze lost in the irregularities of the ceiling. By and by, the cumulative lack of sleep from the past few nights filled his limbs with lead and his thoughts with cotton, and the idea of a nap began to seem wonderfully appealing. In truth, he felt tired enough to sleep through several days in a row.

He had nearly drifted off when the bell rang. He went to unlock the door, pleasantly gliding just above the floor. There was no one on the landing, which was, of course, impossible, so, feeling stubborn, he strode off to check whether someone was hiding in the elevator—but the elevator itself was not there, and, losing balance, he started to fall down the shaft, and it was terrifying at first, this plummeting into the narrow, dimly glimmering abyss full of thick, creaking cables and misshapen shadows and “Do Not Enter” signs and medieval world maps hanging on the dripping walls, but gradually it became darker and darker, and easier and easier, until he found himself floating through the most delightful oblivion of blackness with a smile of full-blown happiness on his lips—and felt rather sorry when the doorbell rang again, cutting his flight short.

It appeared that he had slept for some hours, for it was suddenly late in the evening. The moon drifted brilliantly through the dining room windows as he walked past, and Nina and Dalevich, entering with the effortless laughter of two old friends, surprised him by saying they would not be joining him for supper as they had eaten already, in some nameless cafeteria upon which they had stumbled after their visit to the museum. It hardly mattered, for he did not feel in the least bit hungry, and his body still rang with an overwhelming desire for rest. Nodding agreeably, without listening (Dalevich, as usual, was trying to talk to him about some article he had written), he swam through the thickening air back to the study and, undressing this time, slipped under the blankets and fell asleep once again.

He continued to dream outlandish, not to say disturbing, dreams. Sometime in the middle of the night, he heard dogs barking incessantly in the streets. Their howling soon grew so hoarse and strained, nearly rabid with excitement, that he got up, passed through the sleeping house, and, with a presence of mind unnatural in a dream, found a coat to throw over his pajamas and some shoes in which to deposit his feet, then descended in the elevator (which was there this time), crossed the deserted, moonswept lobby, and expecting the unexpected, stepped outside. In the coolness of the August night, the mysterious woman with the exquisitely drawn features of Nefertiti was drifting aimlessly along the pavements of Belinsky Street, dressed in a diaphanous wedding gown, a pack of maddened homeless dogs following at her dainty satin heels. At his approach, she lifted her lovely, tear-stained face toward him, and said simply and sadly, “He’ll never marry me, I know it. He tells me he will, but he won’t. I understand now. He has a wife and a daughter. He is a very important man—a minister, no less. I understand.”