The Dream Life of Sukhanov (3 page)

Sukhanov started as if emerging from a trance. He had a broad smile on his face.

“Of course,” he said, twisting the card and smiling, smiling. “That is, I’ll have to check my schedule, but I’ll be glad if I can... Nina too, I’m sure ... Most glad ...”

Belkin looked at him closely, then averted his eyes.

“It would mean a lot to me,” he said softly “But I’ll understand if you’re busy, I know this is rather short notice.... Please say hi to Nina for me. Good night, Tolya.”

“Good night, Leva,” said Sukhanov, still smiling.

Belkin raised a hand in one last farewell and walked off, grappling with his glistening absurdity of an umbrella. Sukhanov remained where he was, crushing the card in his fingers, smiling the same frozen smile as he gazed into nothingness. In a short while the rain began to diminish, rarefy, slow down, until it reverted to the same innocuous drizzle with which it had started earlier—an hour or an eternity ago, depending on one’s point of view.... Sukhanov blinked, shook the water off his shoes, buried the wet invitation in his pocket, and briskly set off in the opposite direction from the one in which his former best friend had disappeared.

He was halfway across Red Square when it occurred to him that he had forgotten to say congratulations.

THREE

T
he black face of the giant clock on the Spasskaya Tower swam ominously in the floodlit clouds; as its golden hand shivered and leapt to a new notch, the chimes announced a quarter to an hour. It had been years, if not decades, since Sukhanov had last found himself in Red Square so late at night, and the virtually deserted, brightly illuminated expanse made him feel uneasy. The greenish cobblestones, slippery from the rain, glistened coldly, and the cathedral of Vasily Blazhennyi rose before him like a many-headed, iridescent, scaly dragon from some tale with an unhappy ending. A youth in an oversized purple jacket appeared from nowhere and followed him for a while, his steps echoing loudly and menacingly in the surrounding stillness; then, just as abruptly, he was gone. Sukhanov nervously touched the lining of his breast pocket and walked faster. As he neared the end of the square, it seemed to him that someone tittered from the dense shadows. He reached the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge almost at a run.

There he stopped and leaned against the parapet to catch his breath. His legs were aching. Below, the Moscow River moved its slow, dense, brown waters, and from their depths emerged a flimsy upside-down city that existed only at night, created by a thousand shimmering intertwinings of streetlights, headlights, floodlights. The walls, the churches, the bell towers of the underwater city trembled with a desire to break free, to float away with the current, to leave the oppressing, crowded, dangerous Moscow far, far behind; but the night held them firmly, and they stayed forever tethered to their places by infinite golden chains of reflections. Other things were luckier in their flight—dead branch, a billowing white scarf, a fleet of cigarette butts, a gasoline stain widening in the beam of light ... Unable to tear his eyes away, Sukhanov looked at the rainbow-colored film spreading across the water. The invitation burned in his pocket, and that unnameable feeling was beating its great black wings in the hollow of his soul.

Suddenly the sounds of someone running banged along the pavement, growing closer. He swung around. The youth in the purple jacket stood behind him, grinning and breathing noisily. Sukhanov glanced up and down the bridge in desperation, but there was no one, no one at all; only cars flew in and out of the night, too quickly, too quickly ... His heart pushed in his throat.

“Nice tie you have there, mister,” the youth said conversationally. “What’s the label?”

Sukhanov swallowed. “What do you mean, ‘label’?”

“I mean, who made it?” the youth said. “It’s got to be written on it.”

Moving slowly as if underwater, Sukhanov lifted his favorite wine-red tie and read in a faltering voice, with a sense of nearing doom, “It’s ... er ... Christian Dior.”

“How nice for you,” the youth said, clicking his tongue in appreciation.

“Listen, what do you want?” Sukhanov said hoarsely. “Do you want this tie? Take it.”

“Nah, thanks, don’t need it,” said the youth, “not my style. How about two kopecks, though?”

“You want two kopecks?” Sukhanov repeated dully.

The youth nodded, and his eyes darted crazily in his pimpled face. Knowing that something unthinkable was about to befall him, Sukhanov reached a shaking hand into his pocket and held out a few coins. One single thought fluttered in him like a dying moth—why didn’t I take the metro, why didn’t I take the metro, why didn’t I ... The bridge was deserted, and he imagined himself flying, falling endlessly through the night, plunging toward a dark, cold death below, and this monster laughing, laughing above him.... The youth bent over his hand, so close that Sukhanov could smell the stale smoke on his breath.

“Let’s see what you have here. Five, ten, another five ... Aha, here we go!” He picked a small copper coin from Sukhanov’s palm. “Well, thanks so much, mister. Got to go call my mom now. She always worries when I stay out late.”

And with these words he turned and walked off, back toward Red Square. In an instant the bridge seemed filled with people. Two drunk girls stumbled along, singing over and over, “We wish you happiness,” a line from a popular song; a middle-aged couple passed, arguing about a burnt teakettle; a group of six or seven little Asian men in suits trotted by, carrying a gigantic map of the city unfolded between them, taking countless pictures of the river, chattering in some birdlike tongue. Sukhanov stared about in astonishment, unable to comprehend what had just happened. Then, all at once, he understood, and a wave of laughter washed over him. That boy—that hooligan with the lunatic eyes—had simply needed change for a public phone.

And at that glorious moment of realization, all the misfortunes of the evening turned trivial in Sukhanov’s mind, and even the whole Belkin incident did not matter any longer. The beating of the black wings ceased in his heart. Oh, it was all quite obvious really, not worth another thought. Of course, the man had come for the sole purpose of humiliating him—him, Sukhanov, who had accomplished so much in life! Yes, he had come to fling his success in Sukhanov’s face—but in truth, there was no success, just a measly little show that had arrived a lifetime too late and meant nothing. Still laughing, Sukhanov pulled the invitation out of his pocket. The glossy paper had hardened with dampness, but after a brief struggle he overcame its resistance, ripping it along the middle, then again, then again.... As he threw the pieces over the parapet and watched them spiral down into the lead-colored water, he felt perfectly at peace with himself. One shred fluttered in the air and landed on the railing; he saw three brightly colored letters, blue, indigo, and violet—the very tail of the rainbow. For an instant he looked at the letters with narrowed eyes, then shrugged and sent the shred into the dim, glimmering void with an adroit flick of his finger.

The rest happened with the magic facility of a dream. Immediately as he turned to go, a taxi approached with a welcoming green light burning behind its windshield. Incredibly, it pulled to a stop even before he had time to raise his hand, and then there he was, in the backseat, leaning forward to give the address.

After his brush with death, everything seemed impossibly amusing to him—the quickening flicker of shop signs beyond his window, the cab that, for some unfathomable reason, smelled of violets, the driver whom he could not see clearly in the shadows but whose funny straw-colored beard and old-fashioned glasses leapt in continuous jolts through the rearview mirror, and most of all, the stubborn solemnity with which the man kept assuring him that his street did not exist.

“Belinsky Street?” he was exclaiming. “Believe me, comrade, I know Moscow like my own hand”—every time he said that, he lifted a delicate, childlike hand off the wheel and wiggled his fingers— “and there is no such street anywhere near the Tretyakovskaya Gallery.”

“There most certainly is, I guarantee you,” Sukhanov repeated. “I’ve lived on that street for the past twelve years, so I should know.”

This argument would make the man fall quiet for a minute or two, but invariably he would start again, and his beard’s reflection would flit about in agitation as the darkness inside the taxi breathlessly chased the darkness outside.

“Of course, it’s your business, comrade. If you want to be taken to a place that does not exist, who am I to stop you? Why, I take people places all the time, and half of them end up somewhere they had no intention of going, but me, I never object, I—”

“Turn left here,” Sukhanov interrupted. “The gray building on the right, you see?”

“This?” the driver said triumphantly. “I knew it! This here is no Belinsky Street. This is Voskresensky Passage. Let me back up to the sign and I’ll show you, hold on.”

Sukhanov smiled indulgently. The tires squealed. The square black letters on the white background spelled out “Belinsky Street,” as, naturally, he knew they would. There was a momentary silence, and then a long, sorrowful sigh sounded in the dimness.

“I don’t believe it!” the man wailed softly. “They’ve renamed this one too! And the old name was so much better.... Please accept my apologies. I’ve memorized the whole map of the city, you see, the street names, the intersections, everything, but my map is a bit out of date—it was printed before the Revolution—so this kind of thing is bound to happen from time to time.”

“And does it happen often?” Sukhanov inquired innocently.

The man suppressed a sob. “Almost always,” he confessed in a tragic whisper.

What a loon, thought Sukhanov, as he extracted a ten-ruble bill from his wallet.

“Perhaps you should buy yourself a new map with the change,” he said generously, and chuckling under his breath, stepped out of the car, catching as he did so the last sparkle of the glasses and a farewell wave of the yellow beard bristling on the man’s invisible chin.

N
ina was standing in the illuminated doorway, her face tired and pale, her fingers drumming on the doorjamb.

“I saw the taxi from the window,” she said. “I was getting worried—Ksenya and Vasily returned over an hour ago.... Oh, but your jacket is all wet!”

“The rain was nothing,” said Sukhanov nonchalantly. “On the other hand, I did nearly get mugged.”

Nina clutched the golden-edged blue robe at her throat.

“It’s all my fault, isn’t it?” she said. “I should have waited for you in the car.”

A few minutes later Sukhanov, wrapped in a matching red robe, sat in the brightly lit kitchen, under a low-hanging orange lampshade, drinking cognac-laced tea and energetically devouring strawberry preserves. Around him, his family was gathered.

“And then I said to the man, ‘You want my tie, eh? Well, I don’t think so, I’m rather partial to it myself. Here, take these two kopecks instead, that’s all you are good for,”’ Sukhanov was saying with enjoyment between the sweet spoonfuls.

“But Tolya, he could have hurt you!” Nina exclaimed. “What if he had a knife?”

“He probably did,” he said airily “Ksenya, pass the sugar, please.... But when he saw I wouldn’t make an easy victim, he just took his two kopecks and ran off.”

“Father, you really are something,” said Vasily, smiling.

“Yes, I wouldn’t envy anyone who meets him one-on-one in a dark corner,” said Ksenya.

“Wait a minute, that’s hardly a compliment!” Sukhanov objected with a laugh.

In a short while, Vasily and Ksenya slipped away, and their doors closed in the far reaches of the corridor, his softly, hers with a bang. Nina and Sukhanov were left alone in the kitchen. He was in a wonderful mood.

“To be honest,” he said, “I’m relieved this whole business wasn’t Volodya’s fault.”

She glanced at him and moved her lips, but said nothing.

“He’s a decent fellow, I would have been sad to let him go,” he elaborated.

“I’m just glad everything ended well,” she said, and pushed a plate of chocolate éclairs toward him. “Try these, they are really fresh. Valya bought them this evening.”

For some time they drank their tea without speaking. Occasionally his or her spoon would graze the edge of a cup, and its silver click would fall like a pebble into a translucent pool of stillness, redefining it, making it cozier. The gentle light of the lamp wove a golden cocoon of tranquillity, perhaps even happiness, around them, closing them off protectively from the night, in whose shady courtyards and blind alleys unpleasant things were no doubt continuing to transpire this very moment—somewhere far, infinitely far away from the warm, sparkling, well-stocked kitchen of apartment fifteen, on the eighth floor of the nine-storied building number seven, Belinsky Street, in the heart of old Moscow. Indeed, at this instant, at nearly one o‘clock in the morning on a chilly August night in the year 1985, just after the rain had washed over the roofs of the city, the familiar and delightful world of Anatoly Pavlovich Sukhanov existed quite independently of the world outside. The éclair melted deliciously on his tongue, and his tea was strong, just as he liked it. Row upon row of little jars containing concentrated tastes of the waning summer glittered evenly in cupboards all around him, and the air whispered of apples and cinnamon: Valya, their help who came in daily, had made his favorite apple pie only the day before, and the smells still lingered. A seemingly endless expanse of rooms unfolded behind his back, their comfortable dusk scintillating with the honeyed luster of parquet floors, damask wall upholstering, golden-flecked book bindings, crystal chandeliers opening like flowers in the high ceilings, many-antlered silver candelabra, and countless other precious possessions that the dim light hinted at tantalizingly, splendidly, as it seeped through the heavy velvet drapes. Somewhere in the recesses of his home, his two children were falling asleep, one a future diplomat, the other a future journalist, both equally gifted; and next to him, enclosed in the glowing circle of light, sat Nina, pale, disheveled, and so beautiful, her lips lightly traced with a glistening chocolate line. This was his world, and it was safe. The ebbing night had tried to meddle with him, to suck him into a dark, hidden, dangerous void—yet here he was at the end of the day, in his robe and slippers, eating his third pastry, and feeling content.

“You have some chocolate at the corner of your mouth, my love,” he said. “Oh, and by the way, you’ll never believe what happened just as I was ... No, a bit higher ... Now you’ve got it.... Yes, only imagine, as I was leaving the party, I ran into Belkin.”

Nina set down her cup, missing the saucer. Some tea splashed out on the table.

“You saw Lev?” she said quietly.

“Lev Borisovich in person, the one and only,” he replied with a wry smile.

The brown stain slowly devoured the tablecloth between them.

“What was he doing at the Manège?” she asked, her radiant green gaze fixed on his face with an unfamiliar, almost hopeful, expression. “Did he come to—”

“Oh, it was just a coincidence, nothing more,” he said quickly. “He happened to be walking by when the rain began, and decided to wait it out under the portico. Practical things like umbrellas never occur to a man of his nature.”

Her face suddenly remote, she looked down, noticed the stain, and started to dab at it assiduously with a dampened napkin. Sukhanov kept talking.