The Dream Life of Sukhanov (31 page)
The ceiling lamp was burning, but she was in bed, dressed in a thick, salmon-colored nightgown, her head wound tightly in curlers. An aging smell of Krasnyi Oktyabr, the perfume I remembered since childhood, hung in the air.
“Tolya, what happened?” she said anxiously, leaning on her elbow. “Your hair is all wet!” The sound was off now, but black-and-white figures continued to jerk across the screen, casting sickly shadows on her face.
“Nothing happened,” I said. “I was out, and it’s snowing out there.” Gingerly I sat down on the edge of her bed. “Mama, can I ask you something?” She was looking at me with frightened eyes. “I’m wondering,” I said awkwardly, “do you like my paintings?”
Her mouth grew tight.
“It’s not nice to treat your mother like this,” she said in a petulant voice and, reaching over to the television, turned the volume knob. “It’s late, my nerves are troubling me, you come in looking all wild, and here I’m already thinking God knows what—and you ask a silly question like that! Tolya, it’s not nice.”
“Mama, please,” I said. “This is important. I really need to know what you think.”
She looked at me uncertainly, as if trying to gauge whether I was joking.
“And now,” said the bright voice of the announcer in the background, “for those who are still with us at this hour, the folk ensemble Samotsvety will perform a song from Vologda.” A row of women in peasant dresses, holding the tips of their fingers under their chins, commenced wailing about some youth who refused to accept a chest of gold in place of his beloved. My mother switched the television off.
“It’s because of your problems at work, isn’t it?” she said with a sigh. “Well, Tolya, of course you can draw lovely things—faces, flowers, houses, just like a photograph.” She gave me a pat on the hand. “Remember that one picture you did, for your graduation I think it was, of a soldier riding a horse into a village? It made me proud, such a wonderful picture! Only I wish you’d draw like that again, Tolya, because the things you do now, I must tell you, they aren’t nearly as nice. It’s no wonder the authorities closed down your show.... No, don’t look away, you wanted your mother’s advice, so I’m telling you, your new pictures are unpleasant. I can’t imagine how your Nina even sleeps in the same room with this art of yours—she must have nightmares all the time.”
“Nina loves my paintings,” I said quietly.
“Sometimes I just don’t know about you,” my mother said, shaking her head. “You went to an institute, yet you don’t understand simple things.”
The cognac I had drunk was making the edges of my thoughts foggy. “What do you mean?” I asked. She peered at me across a small silence. I wondered if Nina was listening on the other side of the thin wall—and hoped she was not.
“I know you think I’m old, dull, and ignorant,” said my mother plaintively, “no match for your fine young wife—but I can still recognize an unhappy woman when I see one, and I tell you, Tolya, Nina is unhappy. Why don’t you two have children?”
“Mother, I—”
“Because of your pictures!” she interrupted. “Because you’ve turned our home into some sort of underground lair! Because you think a child would disrupt the important things you do! But I will say this to you, Tolya. The girl was twenty-four when you married her. She turned thirty last month. How much longer do you plan to wait? It may already be too late for her, and every day she leaves for work with her eyes red from tears, but you—you are so busy playing with your colors you don’t even notice! You think she loves your pictures? Mark your mother’s words, even if she pretends to now, she’ll come to hate everything about them when she finds herself alone at forty.”
It was not an answer to the question I had asked—but it was an answer. For a moment it was so quiet I could hear the mattress springs moaning under Nina’s weight in the next room. Then, averting my eyes from my mother’s reddened face, her pink and green curlers, the slightly soiled lace of her nightgown’s collar, I stood up and, muttering about the late hour, slipped out into the corridor and closed her door, behind which I could already discern the renewed ululations of the folk chorus Samotsvety.
For an endless minute I waited unmoving in the dark, trying not to give in to the vast, unknown terror that crouched at my back like a beast poised to leap, fighting the desire to cry. Then the minute passed, and breathing more evenly, I picked up Malinin’s book and took it into the kitchen. And in the same green circle of light in which Nina and I had shared a tangerine on that wonderfully happy night before the Manège opening—only a week ago, yet so long past—I pored over purple deserts swarming with menacing statues, somnolent faces mutating into giant insects, musical instruments drooping like soft organic matter, empty squares of ancient towns flooded with harsh yellow light, contorted bodies dissected into drawers or supported on stilts, brightly feathered canaries trilling inside rib cages; and gradually the quiet but persistent chirping of birds filled the shadowy crannies of my mind, and the air began to shimmer with strange, luminous phantoms, elusive, beautiful, and terrible like dreams; and instead of mulling over the article I was to write for my father-in-law, I sat still for a while, vacantly gazing into the street, where the snow was no longer falling, and seeing paintings before my eyes—tens, hundreds, thousands of paintings that lived inside me and that I might never paint now....
Slippered footsteps dragged along the floor, and when I turned around, I saw my mother in the doorway. I stared at her. She wore a button-down housedress, the curlers were gone from her hair, and her face had aged twenty-some years since the conversation we had had only an hour earlier.
“Tolya, are you sure you are well?” she said. “You look a bit ... Goodness, you broke your glasses! I thought right away there was something funny about you.”
Disconcerted, I moved my eyes around the kitchen, recognizing nothing. A kettle was about to whistle on the stove, two cups were set out on the table amid a profusion of sugar cookies, a clock on the wall announced five in the afternoon, and a brightly feathered canary in a cage chirped quietly but persistently in its corner. A tranquil Arbat alley rustled with the yellowing leaves of early autumn outside the window. I could suddenly taste cognac in my mouth.
My mother was watching me with puzzlement.
“And what’s that you are reading?” she asked.
Cautiously I lowered my eyes. The book of surrealist reproductions had not been a dream within a dream, I saw then—it was still lying open before me; I must have picked it up during my muddled visit to Malinin’s place. And off the page a face looked up at me—a face almost nondescript, yet horrifying in its familiarity ... I blinked, pressed my hands to my temples, turned the page over and back, hoping I was mistaken, hoping to God I was mistaken—and still it was there, impossible, absolutely impossible, and yet so real.
The painting was by Salvador Dali, dated 1936, titled
The Pharmacist of Ampurdán in Search of Absolutely Nothing.
Across the gleaming reproduction trod a small, pudgy man in a faded brown suit, with reddish-blond hair and a sharp little beard. Incredibly, there he was again, on the opposite page, carefully lifting the soft corner of a molten piano—and two pages later, peering from behind a monstrously decaying body in Dalí’s
Premonition of Civil War,
wearing the same brown suit, his face bearing the same mild expression suitable for a provincial apothecary.
But the man in the Dali paintings was not a provincial apothecary.
The man in the paintings was my pseudo-cousin, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dalevich.
TWENTY-ONE
A
t first, the world was filled with an inebriated buzz. Then, slowly, out of darkness, out of chaos, islands of thought began to rise, small at first, then more and more far-reaching, forming chains, archipela goes, merging into continents, until the fog lifted fully, and he was standing on solid ground. Of course, he had always known Dalevich for a malicious presence—but only now did he realize how much of the puzzle had been hidden from him before, and how different the completed picture was; and he felt the frightened exhilaration of a man who, after an eternity of blind groping along the narrow walls of a familiar prison, eventually stumbles upon a light switch, flips it warily, and finds himself not among the stale smells and predictable dangers of his narrow cell but in some barren landscape, caught in a blue snowdrift under a black sky, watching strange shadows weave an eerie dance in the cold, starry distance.
He had spent twenty-some years maligning, kicking, slapping, insulting, and ultimately crucifying art in general, his former god, and surrealism in particular, his former idol; now, he saw, art was simply having its revenge. With the calm, omnipotent patience of a spurned ancient divinity, some invisible force of the universe—call it God, or fate, or justice—had allowed him to rise as high as he ever would, so it might bring him down all the more harshly. And it was, of course, during that magnificently full evening of Malinin’s celebration at the Manège, at the very moment when the Minister of Culture had approached him with an invitation to a private party, that the unerring and unstoppable mechanism of punishment had been triggered. Yes, he thought, as he stared with unseeing eyes at the Dali painting before him, at that moment the cup of his success had finally run over and the walls of his long-lasting defenses had begun to shudder under the swelling pressure of unbidden synergies pushing him toward his past—another opening at the Manège, another painting of Nina, another encounter with Lev Belkin in the shadow of those neoclassical columns.... And then, after a theatrically sustained pause of two days, an unprepossessing phantom called Fyodor Mikhailovich Dalevich had stood on his doorstep, profusely apologetic for disturbing his supper.
Fate’s modest delivery man, art’s neatly efficient avenger, summoned by the hostile god from a surrealist painting, clothed in middle-aged flesh, furnished with a suitcase, a hat (painted by Magritte), a canary (courtesy of Ernst), the meek manner of a provincial relative, a wealth of provocative artistic ideas, and a transparent last name (and, indeed, it occurred to Sukhanov, the first name and patronymic of Dostoyevsky, author of
The Double,
the story of a man whose life was taken over by his own ghost), Dalí’s Dalevich had clearly been dispatched into Sukhanov’s well-ordered existence to wreak whatever havoc he could in the present while simultaneously orchestrating a disturbing slide into the past—a double task at which he had excelled. There was the earliest memory of Sukhanov’s father, released by his mother’s comment about Malvina, the surrealist bird Dalevich had presented to her; and the childhood supper culminating in the arrival of his father, which at the last instant had given way to Dalevich’s arrival; and the sight of Dalevich hunched over in an armchair at night, which had brought to the surface the Morozov boys, Professor Gradsky, and his first discovery of art; and the stroll with Dalevich, which had led him to the evacuation years and his art lessons with Oleg Romanov ...
Nadezhda Sergeevna delicately coughed into her palm.
“I think you should go home and take a nap,” she said. “A nap will be good for you. I happen to be expecting someone over for tea anyway. Of course, I’m very glad you dropped by—”
“That’s all right,” Sukhanov said, rising. “I only wanted to say hello, I was passing—”
The bell rang in the hallway.
“Oh,” she said, and glanced at him anxiously. “Oh, that must be my guest.”
“Don’t worry, I’m leaving already,” he said. The bell rang again. She seemed about to wring her hands. “Well, aren’t you going to let them in?” He attempted to smile. “Go on, I’ll stay a moment.”
When her shuffling steps had retreated into the dimness, he walked to the window and wrestled with the windowpane, still bound with last winter’s insulating tape. Finally throwing it open, he breathed in the air of the August evening, as deeply aromatic as the evenings of his childhood, redolent of linden trees, meat pies, and tiptoeing coolness. Then, hearing hushed voices in the hallway behind his back, he lifted the birdcage in his arms—it was heavier than he had expected—and after sliding the bar on its door, held it out the window and shook it. The canary tumbled out and sank onto the windowsill, staring at him with a puzzled black eye. “Off, off you go, you evil minion!” Sukhanov whispered, slamming the window shut, then hurriedly placed the empty cage back in its corner, turned around with an absent look on his face—and was just in time to see Fyodor Mikhailovich Dalevich enter the kitchen.
“Tolya,” Dalevich said softly. “Hello. Aunt Nadya told me you were here.”
His expression was as mild as ever. He wore Dalí’s suit and Magritte’s hat, and held a boxed cake in one hand—Sukhanov could read the name “Ptich‘e Moloko” on the lid—and a thin folder in the other. Nadezhda Sergeevna followed a frantic step behind.
“Well, well,” Sukhanov said after a lengthy pause, filled with barely articulated, violent thoughts. “I must say, you do look marvelously convincing—just like a real person. ‘Aunt Nadya’ was a charming touch too.”
Dalevich looked at him sadly. “I understand you are still angry with me,” he said, “but I hope this meeting will give me another chance to explain. Please, Tolya, I’ve already told your mother everything, and she believes me. Let me just—”
“Oh, I doubt very much you’ve told her
everything.
I bet you’ve failed to enlighten her on the subject of Dalí.”
“I’m sorry about your article, I really am,” Dalevich protested meekly. “The whole thing was an accident, I never intended to interfere with your job. In fact, now that I’ve finished my research here, I’m returning to Vologda, my leave has ended anyway—”
“You know damn well I’m not talking about some article!” Sukhanov hissed, slapping his hand against the table. “And you can’t even lie convincingly—it only occurred to you to say Vologda because of that idiotic folksong they were broadcasting on television just now!”
A seemingly confused look appeared on Dalevich’s face. He played his role well.
“Aunt Nadya,” he said haltingly, “I think I’d better be going, I don’t want to upset anyone.... Here, I’ll just put the cake on the table. And these, Tolya, I was going to leave them with Aunt Nadya, they are for you, I’ve meant for a long time to—”
Holding out the folder, he started to edge into the corridor.
In a high-pitched voice that did not belong to him, Sukhanov shouted, “Oh no you don‘t, you surrealist bastard!” and, his glasses sliding sideways, the whole room tilting, rushed wildly at the doorway.
He had imagined Dalevich ripping at the impact like a taut canvas, but the shoulders he gripped and shook had the solidity of an ordinary body. Dalevich, his eyes round with fake astonishment, weakly lifted his hands to his face, dropping the folder he had been clutching—and immediately a flock of pastel-colored pages burst out of their cardboard confinement and fluttered onto the floor.
The movement was so unexpected that Sukhanov glanced down mechanically and saw, landing on his foot, a pale watercolor of a birch tree whose leaves were transforming into translucent green butterflies and taking off on their first, quivering flight. The lines were clumsy, and the colors childish; but as he looked at it, a feeling of recognition trembled in his heart, and slowly releasing Dalevich, he bent to pick up the page, bringing it close to his face, doubting his sight, doubting it could be possible....
And yet it was—one of his own first works, drawn under the tutelage of Oleg Romanov, when he had been only a thirteen-year-old boy, and subsequently lost in the whirlwind of the war. Incredulously, he turned around the kitchen, while his mother and Dalevich watched him with nervous expectation. There, under the table, rested an ink sketch he had done of their Inza street awash with melting snows, and a quick study of a weeping woman with a coarse peasant face holding a winged child in her arms; here, by the sink, lay a bleak landscape of a winter field crisscrossed by wires dotted with ruffled sparrows (which, he remembered with a start, spelled out with secret irreverence, each bird a tiny note on its wire, a musical line from a popular song about the Motherland), and next to it, a portrait of his teacher Romanov, his small figure drawn in black-and-white, the world around him blossoming into lush colors from the touch of a raised brush. He leaned to see better—and then, beneath the window, he glimpsed a drawing of a tall man in a coat, standing in a doorway with a brilliant smile on his face—that waking dream he had had so often as a boy....
“How?” he said hoarsely. “How did you get these?”
“But you gave them to him yourself, don’t you remember, Tolya?” said his mother hastily. “Oh, how I wish you two would stop fighting! You boys got along so well that time we stayed with Irochka Dalevich, after the . . . after we came back to Moscow in ‘forty-three.”
“Who on earth is Irochka Dalevich?”
“Irochka Dalevich, my second cousin—Fedya’s mother! Surely you remember?”
“Mama told me not to bother you,” Dalevich added readily, “but I was so fascinated by you I followed you around constantly, until you made me a present of your drawings—to get rid of me, I suspect. I was only ten at the time, but I clearly remember thinking I’d never seen anything more beautiful in my life. As a matter of fact, it’s entirely to you, to these drawings of yours, that I owe my interest in art. I know you didn’t pursue it as a career, but all the same, you had a real gift, Tolya, to be able to change people’s lives like that—”
He continued to talk in the same soothing voice; and as Sukhanov stared at the moving lips half concealed by the blond beard, he became aware of a memory that had stirred in the recesses of his being at his mother’s words and was now gathering momentum, until in a hazy sequence there began to pass before him the dismal wallpaper, the bathtub on clawed feet, the low ceilings looming over him through nightmare-ridden sleep, the skinny, sharp-nosed little woman placing a miserable succession of barely warm suppers on the table, and present through it all, a quiet yellow-haired boy, a few years younger than he, watching him, always watching him, with curious, guarded eyes....
He looked again at the pages scattered on the kitchen floor—the first real evidence, delivered after a quarter of a century, that he had not dreamt it all, that he had, indeed, led a different life once—and then everything ceased to matter, everything but these drawings of a child, rescued so miraculously from the vortex of time and deposited so neatly at his feet. So perhaps Dalevich was no malevolent avenger but merely a bumbling, well-meaning relative from the misty Russian North; perhaps he himself, and no one else, was to blame for the loss of his position, his family, his sense of self; perhaps all the destruction in his life was, in fact, the inevitable, logical conclusion to the choices he had made all those years before.... Yet startling as these potential revelations would have seemed only an hour earlier, they were of little interest to him now. Unaware of the tense silence in the kitchen, he gathered the pages off the floor and methodically smoothed them out on the table, peering at each one closely, with eyes dimmed by decades of skimming over slick productions of socialist realism. No longer used to the sight of his own lines, his own colors, he felt suddenly anxious to test each work for timid traces of uniqueness, for an early testimony of talent—at times lifting this or that drawing against the light as if expecting to see some sign emerging through the watercolors like a transparent watermark, at times following a meandering outline with a finger—and wondering, wondering with a new, surprising sense of near-discovery, whether he could have been wrong that December night so long ago—whether paintings continued to lead their own secret, joyous, eternal lives after all, in the hidden crevices of people’s memories, in the deepest drawers of people’s houses, in the shadows of museum basements—and whether it was possible that once upon a time he had really had a gift.... And then an urgent need to confirm some truth he had just begun to suspect was upon him.
Without a word, he strode into the corridor, closed his fingers on the handle of a hallway closet, and paused, ignoring the burst of his mother’s alarmed cries at his back, preparing instead for what he knew he would find just behind this door—windows into his past, windows into his soul, whole stacks of them, piled negligently this way and that, just as he had left them two decades ago, some facing away, some slightly graying, perhaps, with deposits of dust and old-woman smells, maybe even a wary touch of mildew, others certain to throw themselves at him with their wild colors and violent shapes like so many untamed beasts long in confinement. He suddenly found it uncanny that this closet had always been here—that his paintings had always been here—that there had always been only this thin partition between his present and that other world, once wholly his, now full of unfamiliar, wonderful, terrifying marvels—and that he had known it all along, yet spent years learning how to forget so he would not have to hear the muted, sorrowful call of the ghosts on those rare occasions when he sat in his mother’s living room, drinking lukewarm tea, eating repulsive pastries, talking impressively about a new edition of his book, his son’s excellent grades, Nina’s autumn trip to Paris....
Now, in a single moment, as he stood feeling in his palm the weighty coolness of the door handle, he remembered it all—all, at least, that was left to remember of a life that, with the appearance of a February 1963 issue of
Art of the World,
had started on its way to safety, constancy, tranquillity. That first article had been followed by a rapid succession of short pieces, culminating in early 1964 with a lengthy monograph,
Contemporary Applications of the Socialist Realism Method to Landscape and Still Life,
whose loudly hailed publication, as well as his timely membership in the Party, had helped him obtain later in the year, just as Nina had become pregnant, a two-room Arbat apartment for his mother. After Nadezhda Sergeevna moved out, he converted the spare room into a studio—for, of course, he had never fully intended to give up painting—but at first a steady stream of lectures and magazine assignments left him unable to work, whether from exhaustion or from some deeper, darker emotion that he did not want to define, and then Vasily was born, and Nina needed space for drying his sheets and ironing his clothes, and Pyotr Alekseevich made them a gift of a crib that was charming but unwieldy, and little by little, he found his canvases and oils relegated further and further into unobtrusive shadows, until the only painting remaining in full view was a portrait of a discreetly expectant, dreamily happy Nina, presented to them by Malinin and soon placed prominently over Sukhanov’s recently acquired, gor geously carved desk.