Short Stories: Five Decades (68 page)

The week following the opening of the show marked the highpoint of Sergei Baranov’s early life. Feted, pointed out wherever he went, especially when accompanied by his wife, saluted in the press, urged to create murals to cover acres of walls, he swam in a bright stream of praise. The critic Suvarnin, who had barely acknowledged his greeting before this, even deigned to come to Baranov’s studio to interview him, and, breaking all precedent, appeared sober.

“Tell me,” said Suvarnin, squinting at Baranov through his pale, cold eyes, those eyes which had riddled holes in so many canvases before this, “tell me how a man who has only painted fruit before this comes to do such a painting.”

“Well,” said Baranov, who had recaptured some of his early loquacity and expansiveness in the past week, “well, it happened something like this. As you know, if you have seen any of my painting recently, my work has become more and more melancholy.”

Suvarnin nodded thoughtfully, agreeing.

“The palette became more and more subdued. Brown, dark brown, entered increasingly into the canvases. The fruit … well, the truth is, the fruit began to be withered, frostbitten, sad. I would come here to my studio and I would sit down and cry. For an hour. Two hours at a time. All by myself. I began to dream every night. Dreams of death, dreams of trains going out of stations, dreams of boats leaving me on the dock, in the rain, dreams of being buried alive and being sniffed at by dark brown foxes and other small animals …” Baranov spoke with lively animation, as a perfectly healthy man might describe symptoms of a dreadful disease which he has suffered and proudly conquered. “The worst dream, and one that I had over and over again, was that I was in a small room and it was crowded with women, only women. All the women could talk, but I couldn’t. I tried. I moved my lips. My tongue quivered between my teeth. The conversation around me filled the air deafeningly like locomotive whistles and French horns. And I could not make a sound. You have no idea how terrible this simple thing can be. It was like being committed each night to a new kind of awful prison. I began to fear going to bed. I would come and stare at the blank canvas on my easel, at the arrangement of potatoes and eggplants on which I intended to work, and I could not move my fingers to the brushes. An artist, as you know, must create out of his emotions. How could I transfer how I felt into the image of an eggplant, into potatoes? I felt I was lost. I felt I would never be able to paint again. I contemplated suicide.”

Suvarnin nodded. He even thought of making notes, something he hadn’t done for twenty years, since he was of the firm opinion that accuracy in reporting was the foe of creative criticism. He put his hand into his pocket for a pencil, but discovered he had neglected to bring one along with him. He took his hand out of his pocket and gave up the thought of taking notes.

“Suicide,” Baranov repeated, flushed with joy at having the redoubtable Suvarnin pay such close attention to his confession. “I moaned. I shrieked.” Baranov knew that he had done no such thing, and had, in fact, merely gloomed silently in front of the easel, but he felt that these active expressions of passion would sit well with the critic, as indeed they did. “I cried out. I despaired.” Suvarnin moved restively, glancing instinctively at the vodka bottle on the table, and licking the corner of his mouth, and Baranov hurried on, feeling anxiously that he had perhaps gone a little far with his synonyms. “I slashed out blindly at the canvas. I did not guide my hand. I did not search for colors. I did not look at the potatoes or the eggplant. My terrors painted through me. I was the instrument of my dreams. I hardly looked to see what I was doing. I painted all night long, one night after another. I did not know what I was doing …” By now Baranov had forgotten that he was trying to make an impression. By now he was letting the simple truth pour out. “All I knew was, that as the painting grew, a great weight was being lifted from me. My subconscious was being delivered from its prison. When I slept, I no longer dreamed of being struck dumb or being nosed by dark brown foxes. Now my dreams were of vineyards in the springtime and large-breasted young women I wished to approach on the streets. Finally, when I was finished, and I sat back and looked at the green nude and the ruins, I was as surprised by what I had done as if I had come into my studio and found that another man, a complete stranger, had used my easel while I was away on holiday. And I was grateful to him, whoever he was. And I was grateful to the green lady on the canvas. Between them,” Baranov said simply, “they had delivered me from Hell.”

Suvarnin stood up and silently shook the painter’s hand. “Out of anguish,” he said finally, “comes the great art. Out of the depths of despair only can we reach to the skies. Look at Dostoyevsky.”

Baranov nodded, although a little uneasily, as he had tried to read
The Brothers Karamazov
three times and had never got past page 165. But Suvarnin did not press the point. “Read my article on Saturday,” he said modestly. “I think you will be pleased.”

“Thank you,” Baranov said humbly, resolving to call Anna immediately Suvarnin left to impart to her the heady news. “I am in your debt.”

“Nonsense,” said Suvarnin, with the concision and gift for a phrase that had made his reputation secure in a dozen cities. “Art is in your debt. And now,” he asked, “what is the next painting going to be?”

Baranov smiled happily. “Cherries,” he said. “Six kilos of red cherries in a wicker basket. They are being delivered here at two o’clock from the market.”

“Good,” said Suvarnin. They shook hands once more and the critic departed, with only one tentative glance at the vodka bottle.

Baranov sat down, waiting dreamily for the arrival of the cherries, thinking, as he sat there, Perhaps it is time that I started a scrapbook for my reviews.

On Saturday, Baranov opened the magazine with trembling fingers. There, on the page with Suvarnin’s photograph, was a streaming black title, “FILTH IN THE GALLERIES.” Baranov blinked. Then he began to read. “Last week,” Suvarnin had written, “the Counter-Revolution struck one of its most audacious blows at Russian Art. From the bestial brushes of one, Sergei Baranov, who has until now concealed his heretical infamies under bushels of rotten fruit, and who now feels that he can come out boldly and shamelessly in his true colors, we have received a nauseating sample of decadent, bourgeois ‘art.’”

Baranov sat down, trying to get air into his aching lungs. Then he forced himself to read on. “In this gangrenous excrescence,” Suvarnin continued, using what Baranov, even in his extremity, recognized as a pet phrase, “the dying world of Capitalism, allied with the Trotskyst bandits, has served notice on the Soviet Union that its minions and agents have wormed their way into the heart of the fatherland’s cultural life. By what treachery and corruption the notorious Baranov managed to get his monstrosity hung on a gallery wall, we shall leave to the public prosecutor to discover. But while waiting for the reports on the investigation that will surely take place, we of the art world must join ranks to defend ourselves. We must not permit the insidious Baranov and others of his ilk, slavishly devoted to the fads and aberrations of their plutocratic masters, to desecrate our walls with these samples of dada-istic despair, reactionary cubism, retrogressive abstractionism, surrealistic archaism, aristocratic individualism, religiostic mysticism, materialistic Fordism.”

Baranov put the magazine down carefully. He did not have to read further. He had read it often enough before so that he could have recited the rest of the piece without glancing once more at the page. He sat on his stool, his world in ruins, staring unhappily at the six kilos of bright red cherries, arranged prettily in their wicker basket.

There was a knock on the door. Before he could say, “Come in,” the door opened and Suvarnin came in. The critic went directly to the table and poured himself five fingers of vodka and drained it. Then he turned to Baranov. “I see,” he said, gesturing toward the still-open magazine, “that you’ve read the piece.”

“Yes,” said Baranov hoarsely.

“Here,” said Suvarnin, taking some manuscript pages out of his pocket. “You might be interested in reading what I wrote originally.”

Baranov numbly took the sheets and stared at them. Suvarnin poured himself another drink while Baranov read through swimming eyes, “… a great new unfolding of talent … a courageous grappling with the problems of doubt and disillusionment which are the beginning of understanding … a blazing display of technical ability … a pioneering plunge into the depths of the modern psyche in paint …”

Baranov pushed the pages aside. “What … what happened?” he asked dimly.

“The Committee,” Suvarnin said. “They saw your painting. Then they saw my review. They asked me to make certain changes,” he said delicately. “That Klopoyev, the president of the committee, the one who has made eighty-four portrait heads of Stalin, he was especially anxious.”

“What’s going to happen to me now?”

Suvarnin shrugged. “Nothing good,” he said. “As a friend, I advise you … leave the country.” He went over and picked up the manuscript sheets of his first review. He tore them into small pieces, made a little pile of them on the floor and put a match to them. He watched until the flame had burnt itself out, then carefully scattered the ashes with his foot. He finished the vodka, drinking this time directly from the bottle, and went out.

Baranov did not dream that night. He was up all night listening to his wife.

She spoke vigorously from eight in the evening until eight the next morning, a full-length address in which every relevant topic was stated and developed with a balance and fullness which Edmund Burke, in another country and a more leisurely century, would have wholeheartedly admired. She had been notified that afternoon that their apartment was being taken over by a cellist with a cousin on the Central Committee and she had been removed from her position as head of the nursery system at five
P.M.
and relegated to the post of assistant dietician at a ward for backward and criminally inclined children in a penal camp some thirty kilometers outside Moscow. With these facts as a springboard and with her audience of one wanly rooted against the bedpillows, she ran through her eloquent twelve hours of recrimination without noticeably pausing for breath and without repeating herself.

“Ruined,” she said clearly, with no sign of hoarseness, as the eight o’clock factory whistles sounded outside, “we are completely ruined. And for what? For an idiotic, senseless daub that no one can make head or tail of! A man wants to be a painter. All right! It is childish—but all right, I do not complain. A man wants to paint apples. Silly? All right. But apples can be understood. Apples do not have political implications. Apples do not turn into bombshells. But this … this naked witch … Why? Why have you done this to me? Why?”

Dumbly, Baranov leaned against the pillows, staring at his wife.

“Come,” Anna called. “Come, you must have something to say. You can’t sit without speaking forever. Say something. Say one word.”

“Anna,” Baranov said brokenly, “Anna … please …” He hesitated. He wanted to say, “Anna, I love you,” but he thought better of it.

“Well,” Anna demanded. “Well?”

“Anna,” Baranov said, “let us have hope. Maybe it will all blow over.”

Anna glared at him coldly. “Nothing,” she said, “nothing blows over in Moscow.”

Then she got dressed and went out to the penal camp to report to her new job in the kitchen there.

Anna’s prediction proved only too well founded. Attacks which made Suvarnin’s article seem like an unrestrained paean of praise by comparison were loosed on him in newspapers and magazines all over the Soviet Union.
The New Masses
, in New York City, which had never before mentioned his name, printed, opposite a full page pen and ink drawing of Stalin by Klopoyev, a heated diatribe which called him, among other things, a “traitor to the working class of the world, a lecher after Western fleshpots, a Park Avenue sensationalist, a man who would be at home drawing cartoons for
The New Yorker
.” In a follow-up article, a writer who later joined the Catholic Church and went to work for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer preparing scenarios for a dog star used the Baranov case to point out that Michael Angelo had been the first proponent of Socialist-realism. In Moscow, a painters’ congress, led by the fiery Klopoyev, dropped Baranov from the Painters’ Union by the customary vote of 578 to nothing. On one morning, between the hours of ten and twelve, every painting of Baranov’s disappeared from every wall in Russia on which they had been hanging. Baranov’s studio, which he had held for ten years, was taken from him and given to a man who drew signs for the Moscow subway. Two large plainclothesmen appeared and followed Baranov day and night for three months. His mail was always late and always opened. Anna Kronsky discovered a dictaphone under the sink in the kitchen in which she now worked. Old friends crossed over to the other side of the street when they spotted Baranov in the distance and he no longer found it possible to get tickets for the ballet or the theater. A woman he had never seen before claimed that he was the father of her illegitimate child and when the case came to trial he lost and was ordered to pay 90 rubles a week for her support and only barely avoided being sent to a work-camp.

Sensing which way the wind was blowing, Baranov put an old camel’s brush and the goose-neck lamp into a bag, and haggard and thin, with Anna at his side, fled the country.

Six months later, in the summer of 1929, Baranov and Anna were established in Berlin. The climate of the German capital at that time was most propitious for artists, and Baranov, who had set to work industriously painting oranges, lemons, and apples, in his early edible style, enjoyed an immediate success. “We will be very happy here,” Anna prophesied, correctly. “You will paint only fruits and vegetables. You will use dark colors very sparingly. You will avoid nudes and political implications. You will keep your mouth shut and permit me to do all the talking.”

Baranov was only too happy to obey these simple and salutary injunctions. Aside from a certain vagueness of outline, a kind of subtle mist, which seemed to arise from the artist’s subconscious hesitancy to come out too definitely on any subject, even the exact location of a lemon on a tablecloth, his work compared very favorably with the first canvases he had done when he returned from the Revolution. He prospered. His cheeks filled out and grew rosy again and he developed a little paunch. He took a small chalet for the summer in Bavaria and rented a superb studio near the Tiergarten. He learned to sit in rathskellers and drink Munich beer and say, with a hearty laugh, when politics was discussed, as it often was in those days, “Eh, who knows? That is for the philosophers.”