The Dream Life of Sukhanov (18 page)

Steadying himself with one hand, Sukhanov stood up and pushed away his chair; it balanced precariously on two legs, then crashed to the floor. In the doorway he stopped.

“I should turn you over to the authorities,” he said, not looking directly at Dalevich, “but it’s not worth the bother. You have half an hour to clear out of my place. I’m sure your important friend will happily welcome you into
his
home. Perhaps you might even try your tricks on him next, now that you’ve had some practice. After all, his job and apartment are probably nicer than mine.”

He slammed the door on the way out. As he walked away, he heard the same ringing silence behind his back.

S
ome hours later, reclining in the backseat of his Volga, Sukhanov watched lit rectangles of lower-floor windows emerge from the evening shadows and then slowly glide backward and out of sight in a long, uninterrupted procession of cozy domesticity. He had left his own uncomfortably quiet apartment shortly before seven. Ksenya had followed him into the entrance hall to lock up behind him; her face, heavy in the gathering darkness, had seemed void of expression.

“The Burykins never serve their main course until well after ten,” he had said, “so I don’t expect to be back before midnight,” and already from across the threshold, he had added with a tentative smile, “Sure you don’t want to come with me? Since your mother isn’t coming, it might be nice.... And the food’s always good.” She had said nothing in response, only shaken her head, and shut the door. The sound of the turning lock resonated on the landing with brisk finality.

The Burykins—Mikhail a top official at the Ministry of Culture, Liudmila his charmingly hospitable third wife—lived across the street from the massive American embassy and were famous for their dinner parties, invariably well stocked with imported liqueurs and important people. On the way, Sukhanov bade Vadim stop the car and darted out to buy a bouquet for the hostess from a portly Azerbaijani woman near a metro station. The air smelled strongly of gasoline and early autumn, and faintly of decaying stems. He could see fading red petals, slimy leaves, and shards of a rising moon floating on the surface of the dirty water in the woman’s flower-filled buckets.

“Roses for the lady of your heart?” she said greedily, baring a golden tooth.

“How about that bunch of carnations over there?” he said quickly.

The lobby of the Burykins’ building was even more imposing than his own, its veined marble floors slippery, its walls smooth with mirrors, the guard behind the desk bearing a disconcerting resemblance to a bulldog. He inquired after Sukhanov’s name with an indifferent lift of an eyebrow and then, instead of allowing him through right away, proceeded to trace a fat finger along the list of residents, dial a number, and conduct a long conversation in a hushed voice, while Sukhanov foolishly stood before him, trying in vain to avoid looking at the hundredfold reflections of an aging man dressed in a borrowed tie and a suit that was wrinkled rather more than usual, holding a bunch of unpleasantly pink, rapidly wilting flowers in his hands.

Finally the guard issued a curt nod, and Sukhanov slid along the marble floor, soundlessly rehearsing an involved story of some ambiguous emergency that would explain Nina’s embarrassing lapse of memory or manners. As alternating patches of light and darkness flitted in the crack between the elevator doors, he found himself, to his own surprise, anticipating the evening with some eagerness. In truth, his oppressive mood had started to lift shortly after his perfectly justified afternoon outburst—as soon, to be precise, as his front door had closed on one Fyodor Mikhailovich Dalevich, pseudo-cousin and first-rate scoundrel. The man had left wordlessly and without a fuss, and as Sukhanov had leaned out the window to watch the solitary figure in the ridiculously outmoded hat lug the bulging suitcase toward the metro, he had understood Dalevich’s defeated departure to be the beginning of a long-needed restoration of balance in his household. Without a doubt, now that the poisonous viper had been banished from his hearth, the vexing malfunctions in his family mechanism were bound to smooth out, and soon they would all return to their pleasant daily routines. Naturally, there remained some loose ends that still filled him with ill-defined unease. When he had subsequently attempted to reach his office with instructions to withdraw the cursed Chagall article, he had found no one there, and when he had tried Pugovichkin’s home, the assistant editor’s wife had announced in a phlegmatic voice that her husband had gone fishing, as if this were normal behavior on a work-day. Yet infuriating as this delay was, Sukhanov had until the next afternoon to set matters straight; and already, with each passing hour, his sense of life inching back into its customary, comforting confines grew more and more tangible. As he rang the Burykins’ bell, he looked forward to a night of excellent food and banter in the presence of much success, sure to strengthen his quiet sense of victory.

His first ring was followed by a protracted wait. He pressed the button again, more firmly this time, and heard hurried steps inside the apartment. The door swung open, and Liudmila Burykina stood on the threshold.

“Anatoly Pavlovich! How nice, you shouldn’t have,” she said with a peculiar, unfocused smile as she accepted his flowers, and added unnecessarily, “The concierge just called to say you were on your way up. Please do come in.”

The darkened rooms unfolded in perfect silence—no sounds of clinking glasses, no music, no voices rising toward one another in greeting. Sukhanov glanced at his watch.

“So,” he said loudly, “first one to arrive, it seems. Not too early, am I?”

Ordinarily elegant, today she wore a surprisingly plain frock that made her look rather like a merchant’s wife from some Ostrovsky play—the motherly kind who spends all summer making preserves and all winter sewing and who is allowed to emerge from her well-stocked pantry only two or three times for the sake of comic relief.

Her black eyes flickered uncertainly up to his face.

“Anatoly Pavlovich, I’m afraid I—”

“Lovely painting you’ve got there,” he interrupted, pointing to an indifferent seascape. “Not Aivazovsky, is it?” And immediately, without awaiting an answer—for the silence of the place was starting to unnerve him—he asked, “Is Misha not back from the office yet?”

Her hair, he noticed, was flattened on one side, the remnant of a long nap.

“Misha’s at the sauna, Anatoly Pavlovich. He won’t be back until ten,” she said.

“Sauna?” he repeated incredulously. “Tonight?”

She began to walk away from him, and, baffled, he followed, stepping on a trail of falling petals and feeling increasingly awkward. In the dusk of the dining room, an enormous table, bereft of a tablecloth, was stacked high with faintly gleaming, seemingly dirty china. He stole another anxious look at his watch.

“Do you mind, I must find a vase,” she was saying lightly. “Please, in here, Anatoly Pavlovich. Sorry for the mess, my help has the day off, and I myself haven’t yet gotten around... Oh, by the way, would you like something to eat? Though I’m afraid I can’t offer you anything but leftovers from yesterday.” Absolutely still now, he watched her adroit plump hands amputate the moist ends of the stems with a pair of scissors. “Too bad you and Nina couldn’t... that is ... Tell me, do you think they’d look better in a crystal one?”

She had slid the disheveled carnations into a ceramic vase and was glancing back at him with a questioning half-smile-and suddenly he understood that she was chattering so rapidly because she too found the silence embarrassing. They had obviously moved the party to an earlier date and forgotten to tell him, and now here she was, the perfect hostess who for once had failed to be perfect, with nothing to give her guest but crumbs from a past feast, no doubt suffering pangs of guilt and yet not willing to acknowledge the situation out of some stubborn housewifely pride, letting them both pretend that he had simply dropped by for a little unscheduled visit.

Though displeased with the turn of events, he chose to be gracious.

“My goodness, Liudmila Ivanovna,” he said in a jocular tone, slapping his forehead, “you are too polite not to set me straight—but I fear I missed your party, didn’t I? I could swear it was supposed to be on Friday. How terribly absentminded of me to get the date wrong!”

He did not like the way she was searching his eyes with hers; it felt intrusive. Then, looking away, she started to pull the flowers out of the ceramic vase.

“Actually, the party
was
on Friday, Anatoly Pavlovich,” she said uncomfortably. “And Nina sent your regrets. She said... I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, since there seems to be some miscom munication here ... but she said you were under a lot of stress and needed rest.”

He barely heard anything past the first sentence.

“But it couldn’t have been on Friday,” he said, still smiling mechanically, yet already feeling a strange hollow sensation in the pit of his stomach. “Today is Friday.”

“No, Anatoly Pavlovich, Friday was yesterday,” said Liudmila Burykina, again studying his face. “Today is Saturday. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, you are here now, so let’s just forget all this, and I’ll fix you a nice drink, all right?... Yes, the crystal vase is definitely an improvement, don’t you agree?... Do you prefer whiskey or cognac?”

He continued to look at her without comprehension.

“But it can’t be,” he finally muttered. “Because I dropped off my article at the office yesterday, and it was Thursday, I remember clearly, that’s when it was due, and Pugovichkin told me I had until Saturday afternoon, which was the day after tomorrow, and—”

“Or maybe a cup of tea?” she said gently, placing her hand on his sleeve.

For a moment he stared at her with unseeing eyes—and then, all at once, was seized with panic, and desperate to look at a calendar, to take full stock of his memory’s transgressions, to measure his grasp on reality...

And the request for a calendar had nearly touched his lips when it occurred to him that the woman might merely be playing some monstrously cruel joke on him, and that, in fact, her husband, Mikhail Burykin, could easily have been the very man responsible for forcing the Chagall article onto his magazine in the first place—for hadn’t someone high up at the Ministry been involved? He imagined that snake Dalevich lurking somewhere in the shadows of this still place, gleefully orchestrating his present misadventure, and the air seemed to enter his lungs in painful gasps.

“I’d love to stay, Liudmila Ivanovna,” he said faintly, “but I’m afraid I can’t just now.... Please give my regards to Misha, sorry for the confusion, you’re so very kind....”

And murmuring apologies, his eyes glued to the carnations so he would not have to meet her oddly compassionate gaze, he backed out of the Burykins’ apartment.

In the car, under the dim light of a tiny overhead bulb, Vadim was writing something against the dashboard. Sukhanov tore the door open.

“Take me home,” he said in a near-whisper, pulling at his father-in-law’s tie as if it were about to strangle him. “Please.”

FOURTEEN

O
n the way up, Sukhanov had to share the elevator with an unsavory character. His mind aching with increasingly futile computations of dates, he avoided looking at the man too closely, only catching out of the corner of his eye a soiled denim jacket, a shaved head, and a salmon-colored scarf wrapped around a bulging neck. The man exited without a word—Sukhanov did not bother to see on what floor—and the doors slid shut, revealing, spread diagonally on the inside, the freshly scratched word “Aquarium,” the name of some semi-underground band, he seemed to recall. He shook his head at this unprecedented instance of vandalism so close to his inner sanctum, checked the time (it was almost nine o‘clock), and for a moment studied the twisted corpse of a cigarette in the corner. Then it occurred to him that the thin thread of greenish light trembling in the gap above the floor had not moved and that the elevator remained where it had been. Impatiently he jabbed at the button with a fading figure eight, and was startled when the doors opened instantly: it seemed he was already on his floor. Frowning, he stepped out onto the landing, wondering mechanically what business the normally staid Petrenko family from across the hall could have with such a shady visitor—and was just in time to see the edge of the man’s salmon-colored scarf disappearing inside his own apartment, admitted, he could briefly see, by an unfamiliar young girl who slouched smoking in the eerily wavering shadows of the entrance hall.

He stood frozen for a few heartbeats. The girl was about to shut the door when he shook off his stupor and, his feelings dangerously suspended, strode toward her with a demand for an explanation rising to his lips—but before he could deliver it, his hearing was assailed by a cacophony of voices and laughter and the jangling of guitar strings touched by an absent but practiced hand, all seemingly issuing from his very own living room. Taking an uncertain step inside, past the girl watching him with indifference, he saw, in the corridor’s dim, hazy, diminishing depths, a crowd of people talking excitedly, some holding glasses, most with cigarettes, all casting grotesque giant shadows in the unsteady light of candles—yes, endless candles, tall and short, dripping and flickering madly, perched on counters and along shelves and even on the floor....

He stared without moving, and the first thought flashing ridiculously through his disoriented mind was that the Burykins’ missing party had somehow relocated itself here, with its aged wines and aging dignitaries and all the rest.... But already he saw that this crowd was young and strange, and the candles leapt about out landishly, and the heavy smells of incense and some exotic spice drifted through the air in dizzying waves, and the darkly luminous space looked cavernous and foreign and not at all like an ordinary Moscow apartment—and in another breath he realized that this was all nonsense, this could never be his home, and in truth, the elevator must have taken him to the wrong floor after all, for hadn’t the concierge warned him about its recent malfunctions?

Trying to inhale evenly, he stepped back across the threshold and checked the bronze number displayed above the peephole on the door.

The number was fifteen. His number.

He considered it in seething silence, gathering his thoughts. He had told his daughter he would not be back until midnight, he remembered. Her name—Ksenya, Ksenya, oh Ksenya!—throbbed in his temples like a quickly advancing migraine.

“Well, are you coming in, or what?” drawled the girl in the doorway. “They’re starting in just a few seconds.” She pulled at the cigarette with studied carelessness and added inexplicably, “Good thing you brought your own tie. I hear they’ve run out.”

For a moment he debated ordering this insolent hussy out of his house—ordering all these people out, in fact, and flipping on all the light switches, and blowing out all the candles, and flinging open all the windows to air out the disgusting sweet smells, and putting a stop to the irritating singing he could now hear floating on the current of disparate guitar riffs, a man’s reedy voice bleating trite lyrics, something about great poets dying tragically before their time.... But immediately he thought he could try to confront Ksenya first—shame her before all her friends perhaps—and maybe, having trapped her against the wall with her repentance, finally manage to have the talk with her that he had been postponing for months if not years, ever since she had begun to drift away, hiding behind her writing, her music, her books, who knew what else.... Suddenly decisive, with a nod to the sullen girl, he walked inside, an anonymous, harmless guest, one of many, peering into the near-darkness through his fogging glasses.

Since the singing had started, the chatting guests had begun to fall silent and gravitate toward the music, and now only one couple was left whispering in the twinkling twilight of the hallway: a slender girl with a pool of night in place of her face and a long-haired man in a leather jacket and a tie slicing across his chest like a precise slash. Taking a few more steps, Sukhanov reached the edge of a dense crowd of badly dressed youths spilling over from the living room into the corridor, some standing, others sitting cross-legged on the bare floor, rhythmically bobbing their heads like Chinese dolls, their lips soundlessly mouthing the words of the song. It was even darker here, and stuffy, and as he tried to squeeze inside, he stepped on a few feet and possibly hands, was shushed at, and in the end found himself wedged somewhere on the outskirts, with his face awkwardly pressed into the broad back of a sturdy woman whose long, slovenly hair smelled of bitter almonds, and still unable to see above the swaying heads into the room, from which an angry young voice threw the borrowed words into the smoky silence:

“And Christ was thirty-three, he was a poet, he used to say,
‘Thou shall not kill! And if you do, I’ll find you anywhere!’
But they put nails into his hands so he wouldn’t try anything
funny,
And into his forehead so he wouldn’t write or think so much.”

“Good, isn’t he?” someone whispered into Sukhanov’s ear, spitting with enthusiasm.

Carefully Sukhanov turned his head and encountered the yellowish grin of the man from the elevator, inches away from his face.

“Not too original,” he replied dryly. “That’s by Vysotsky, if I’m not mistaken?”

“Oh, he’s just warming up,” the man whispered back, not taking offense. “He always starts with a thing or two by Vysotsky, as a sort of tribute to the fallen. He’ll sing his own stuff next. So, what’s your favorite?”

His face seemed insistently familiar, but Sukhanov was learning to disregard the feeling.

“Never heard any of it,” he said with distaste. “Who is he, anyway?”

The invisible singer’s voice drifted toward him as if from far away:

“But present-day poets have somehow missed the deadline,
Their duel has not taken place: it is postponed.
And at thirty-three, they are crucified, but not too badly....”

“Ah, stumbled in here by accident, did we now?” said the man from the elevator, his eyes glittering madly. “Well, be prepared to have your world shattered. This here is the great Boris Tumanov in person. Recognize the name, eh?”

Sukhanov remembered the drawn curtains, the echo of music, Ksenya lying on her bed with her eyes closed—yesterday, or the day before yesterday, or years ago, who knew any longer....

“My daughter likes him,” he said in a fallen voice.

The song ended, and everyone clapped, and the candles wavered.

“Ah yes, girls, they all like him, why wouldn’t they?” the man whispered confidentially, his hot breath scalding Sukhanov’s ear. “Naturally, he is taken, and twice over: has a wife and a girlfriend. His wife, well, she’s kind of a youthful mistake, never even comes to his concerts, but Ksiushka—Ksiushka is a different story altogether, these are her digs, you know—a first-class girl, likes to have a good time, if you get my meaning, even if her parents are really—”

“I...” said Sukhanov, a scream tightly walled up in his throat, “I think I have a headache.”

The man ceased whispering and, nodding, proceeded to fish for something in his pockets, but Anatoly Pavlovich did not see him any longer. All he saw was darkness.

And so perhaps—perhaps it had all been in vain. Perhaps she had already walked so far out of his and Nina’s lives that they had nothing more to give her, and now she moved, unrelenting, proud, and all alone, along a path he could not distinguish through the shadows, with waves of dreamy poems splashing through her head, a married underground idol for a lover, and a burning contempt for his own world, a world of the past, a world of acquiescence and accommodation for the sake of survival—and who was to say which of them had been right, and what intervention was powerful enough to make them understand one another? I’ve lost her, I’ve lost her, I’ve lost her forever, little hammers of despair beat inside his heart. And so piercing was his anguish that, without resisting, without thinking, he accepted two odd-looking bluish aspirin from the grinning elevator man, swallowed them with difficulty, his mouth dry, and then stood, closing his eyes in order not to see the pulsating sea of avid faces, stood waiting for his headache to subside, for the nightmare to end....

But as he waited, out of the confusion about him, out of the chaos in his mind, a voice rose, Boris Tumanov’s voice—the voice his daughter loved, or thought she loved, or hoped she loved—and despite himself, he found himself listening. And now this brittle, sensitive, floating voice began to sing other songs, unusual songs, songs that flowed without a perceptible melody, one verse spilling into another, words metamorphosing in mid-syllable, sometimes drowning despondently in the troubled strumming, sometimes soaring above a quiet lull—songs that were at times incoherent, at times jarring, occasionally lyrical and occasionally terrifying, but always gripping, always exacting a toll paid in raw emotion on the roads to their meaning—songs about the true color of souls dissected on a laboratory table in a secret government project; or a one-winged angel caught and exhibited in a cage in a Moscow zoo until set free by a drunken janitor; or a despairing genius walking on shards of glass to reach the gold at the end of a rainbow, only to meet there another unhappy, lost person with bleeding feet; or a saint who had spent all his years preparing for his grand entry into heaven, only to discover on his deathbed that heaven was not some blue expanse full of angelic string quartets and opalescent clouds, but an eternity granted for reliving one’s happiest moments, and that he had none to remember; or an old man who had wasted what talent he had for nothing, but now, at the very conclusion of his long, joyless, servile life, finally found the courage to fly—and was unable to stop crawling....

And the more he listened, the more his head swam and the more he knew these songs to be unlike anything he had ever heard, and yet in spirit—in their high-pitched mix of hope and anger and sadness and desire to change the world, to bring beauty into it—so much like the talks that had kept him up for dizzying twenty-hour stretches at the blessed gatherings of his own youth, his slightly postponed, second youth of 1956; and the intensely expectant faces around him were the feverishly serious faces of his past companions, his teachers, his friends, his brothers in awaited martyrdom if need be; and the very air in this suddenly unrecognizable place, this oddly churchlike place with smoking incense and dancing candles, was trembling once more with the faith of old. The faith he himself had upheld for a few short, inspired, brilliant years, the best years of his life maybe—the faith he had lost when faced, at Christ’s age of thirty-three, in the Year of Our Lord 1962, with his own fork in the road, his own choice between crucifixion and ... and...

He caught himself tottering on the brink of the private hell to which he had long ago canceled all admission, and hastily opened his eyes, only to discover that they had always been open. The disembodied voice that had awoken such happy, such painful echoes inside him had faded away, and applause was sweeping through the world. He too clapped, trying to read his watch as he did so, but the hands seemed broken, rotating loosely and changing direction now and again. All the same, he knew hours had passed, for his soul was spent. Just as the invisible singer was announcing that in conclusion he would present the promised performance piece and nonsensically asking everyone to “please put on the ties,” Sukhanov made his unsteady way out of the press of excited humanity, back into the deserted corridor.

Things were largely amiss here, he saw quickly. Candles, left without observation, were jumping mischievously from counter to counter; a few paintings had turned upside down, sending villages, forests, and lakes down the skies in rivulets of running watercolors; nearby, a flock of horses had burst out of their frame and trotted gracefully, hooves up, along the underside of a bookshelf. As he walked, he tripped over shadows that lay on the ground like unswept leaves. Worse yet, most objects had a shimmering, hazy glow about them, making him suspect that as soon as he turned his back on them, they ceased to be what they pretended and transformed into something else entirely—a shoe into an umbrella, an umbrella into an imp, an imp into a cloud—or maybe even slipped altogether into some different, fourth, dimension, melting forever in the labyrinths of existence. In a way, it seemed only appropriate that everything should be so strange and uncertain, but his head hurt more than ever, his heart tingled unpleasantly, and he felt an urgent need to immerse himself in a pool of quiet and sleep for a while—or watch the colors flitting like zigzagging dragonflies across the underside of his eyelids.

Haltingly he moved deeper and deeper, farther and farther, with each step collecting the large, humid roses that fell off the wallpaper onto his upturned palms, then offering them, in one luxurious, aromatic bouquet, to a short-haired adolescent girl in a yellow dress who at that moment chanced to walk toward him, her small boyish face as familiar as everyone else’s (for, of course, he had seen them all before), her lips half open in laughter. The girl gave him a wide-eyed look and, letting the flowers drop to the floor, ran off, shouting a name he had seemingly heard before: “Ksiusha! Ksiusha!”