The Dream Life of Sukhanov (33 page)

Wordlessly Sukhanov bent to kiss his mother on a wet cheek, then turned, and leaving his drawings scattered about the table, walked out of the kitchen, out of the apartment, down the staircase. She did not try to stop him. The landings were unlit, the steps slippery; a sluggish headache hummed in his temples. Outside the front door, a peculiar-looking man with a canary-yellow beard grasped his sleeve and began to talk rapidly, swearing his undying devotion, inviting him to visit some museum in Vologda.... Just then a window swung open above, and an agitated voice shouted, “My Malvina! She escaped! My Malvina escaped!” The peculiar-looking man exclaimed, “Oh my goodness!” and threw his hands up, peering toward the commotion through his turn-of-the-century glasses.

Free of his grasp, Sukhanov quickly strode down the street.

TWNTY-TWO

A
s the city contours grew softer and hazy streetlamps began to pop out of the shadows one after another, he wandered the streets of the old Arbat, his mind churning darkly in some lonely, wordless space. His steps were aimless, directed only by a restless urge to move; but after a while, when an unexpected shortcut deposited him at the fetid mouth of an eerily familiar courtyard, he stopped, looked about, and became suddenly aware of the path his feet had followed of their own accord. Somehow, unthinkingly, he had walked along the broad, pastel-colored streets and the tree-shaded alleys where he had played as a happy five-year-old, six-year-old, seven-year-old-and the unfolding of time had led him to the spot that had marked the end of his first childhood dream.

Obeying some dimly understood impulse, he stepped through the murky, low passage into the yard. A rock-and-roll beat pulsated from one of the apartments, but at its heart the yard was still and dark, its edges lit unsteadily by the pale squares of burning windows, just as it had been almost fifty years before, when a frightened boy had slid an album of Botticelli reproductions into a snowdrift. In the corner where the snowdrift had been there was now a brand-new sandbox; but as he approached, it seemed to him that the sand gleamed with a pearly, roseate, unearthly tint in the faint light.... He stared for a breathless moment, then saw it was only the cast-off shadow of a garishly pink lampshade visible in the nearest window. Some child had forgotten a toy spade in the sand. His past was no longer here.

Leaving the courtyard, he walked unresisting down a deserted side street, keeping his eyes to the ground until he was almost at the end, then looking up sharply, his heart flushed with a new, trembling, imprecise feeling. He had not been here since they had moved away in 1954. The building had aged even more; the yellowish paint was peeling off the façade; the rusting balconies sagged. The fifth-floor windows were lit. On one of the windowsills an overfed cat slumbered next to a potted cactus; the curtains were splattered with merry orange flowers. The place had a quiet, almost rustic air about it. He stood still for a few minutes, wondering how different things would be now had he known the truth on that terrible day—had he believed that Pavel Sukhanov was not a coward—had he... had he ...

The front door opened with a piercingly familiar squeak, and an old woman carefully hauled her overweight body toward a nearby bench.

“Are you lost, my dear?” she asked, studying him with sleepy eyes. “This is number three in Lebedinov Lane. Used to be Rozhde stvensky Passage, before the war.”

Briefly he thought of telling her that he had lived in this building for years, that he was Anatoly Pavlovich, Anatoly, Tolya, Tolik.... The cat stretched and crept away from the fifth-floor windowsill; the old woman watched him with a heavy, indifferent gaze. He noticed the ugly, hair-sprouting mole above her upper lip.

“Thank you,” he said after a silence. “I did get a bit sidetracked, but I finally know where I am.”

Without another glance, he turned away from his childhood and moved off into the deepening dusk. The city felt abandoned. He crossed a dank courtyard, followed a gloomy alley into a dead end, took a wrong turn, crossed another yard, this one piled high with broken furniture, emerged onto a poorly illuminated, quiet street, and no longer noticing where he was going, quickly walked past a decrepit church, a small garden, a basement converted into an art gallery, with posters in the pavement-level windows advertising some exhibition, a neighborhood bakery, already locked for the night... Then, abruptly, he stopped and retraced his steps, certain that it could not be, that his fleeting glimpse had misled him—yet all the same in need of a second, reassuring look.

It could not be, and yet it was. On the posters in the gallery windows, motley letters bobbed jarringly up and down, proclaiming: “L. B. Belkin. Moscow Through a Rainbow.”

The small print underneath announced that the gallery was open from eleven to six. Sukhanov’s watch still showed thirteen minutes past ten of some lost, forgotten day, but he recalled hearing seven strikes of a remote clock reverberating through some alley. Relieved to find the place closed, he peered into the windows—and was startled to see a light inside and, in its bright electric circle, the indistinct blur of paintings on a wall and, shockingly, Lev Belkin himself, wearing his old velveteen blazer and bow tie, talking to someone hidden from view.

He hesitated, then, resolving to wait, moved off into obscurity on the opposite side of the street. After a passage of time he no longer had the capacity to measure, the basement door opened, and out came Belkin, supporting the elbow of a neatly dressed old man with a shrunken, hauntingly familiar face. The door slammed behind them.

“Are you sure you won’t stay the night?” said Belkin, and his words rang through the empty street with the hollow emphasis of an actor on a booming stage. “My place isn’t much, but I do have a moth-eaten couch.”

“No, thank you, but no,” replied the old man. “I should be getting home.” The echoing walls amplified and carried his lisp, and all at once Sukhanov knew who he was—the chance passenger seated next to him on the nightmarish train that had delivered him from the crumbling darkness of the frescoed church to the paling dawn over the museum cell full of banished paintings. “You know how it is when work is calling, and unlike you young people, I don’t have much time left. Most obliged to you for the tour of the gallery, it was highly illuminating.”

Lifting a hand to the brim of a nonexistent hat, the old man turned and shuffled away. Belkin called out, “Honored to meet you! The metro will be on your left!” and for a minute watched the man’s stooped back descend into the night; then, fishing out a handful of keys from his pocket, he bent to lock the door. Sukhanov remained still. In another moment, Belkin dropped his keys back into the velveteen depths of his blazer and strode down the street after the old man, whose painfully slow progress had already been obliterated by shadows.

He had nearly reached the corner when Sukhanov took a step forward and, his heart sliding sideways into a warm, indistinct fog, quietly said, “Leva.” The echoes caught the name, tossed it back and forth with an increasingly empty, meaningless sound. Belkin froze, then walked back slowly, peering into the dusk.

“Tolya?” he said uncertainly. “Is that you?”

Sukhanov took another step and was trapped like a bug in amber in the watery light of the only streetlamp on the block. An incongruous thought flickered through his mind: at this instant, after the phantasmagoria of the last few days, with one lens of his glasses cracked, his shoes muddy, his clothes reeking with sour, displaced smells of stations, trains, staircases, and courtyards, he must look infinitely more pathetic than Belkin, whose worn-out blazer and maroon bow tie had seemed so amusing to him only a short while ago, on the steps of the Manège, under the aegis of the proud banner proclaiming his father-in-law’s grand retrospective....

He cleared his throat.

“Hello, Leva. I was in the neighborhood, visiting my mother,” he said. “Thought I’d drop by. I know it’s after hours, but the light was on.” Belkin had halted a few paces away and was looking at him strangely. Was it possible there were still traces of tears on his face, Sukhanov wondered. He swallowed, went on loudly, “So, how is the gallery business treating you?”

“Oh, fine, thanks for asking,” Belkin replied with a quick, forced laugh. “Not that I’ve sold anything yet, but all in good time, I say. Actually, I’m usually not here, there is a girl who runs things, but she’s having a bit of a domestic crisis, her husband—one of these new underground hippie singers or something—has just left her. So I thought, why not, might as well sit here for a few days. A dose of reality is always good for the artist, and you can’t imagine how humbling it is to hear what people say about your paintings when they don’t know you are standing behind their back.”

“No,” said Sukhanov in a slightly pinched voice. “No, I can’t imagine that at all.”

“Yes, well, one gets used to it,” said Belkin awkwardly. There was a small, awful silence. “Oh, but I did meet an extraordinary man just now. An artist of the old school, over eighty years old, and still painting as hard as ever. Lives in a small town, the devil knows where, makes all his own pigments out of spices, earth, and whatnot, can you believe it? Last month, he said, he finally began the best work of his life. ‘Remember, young man,’ he told me, ‘it takes a lifetime to learn one’s craft.’ Amazing, the spirit some men have.”

“What is he doing in Moscow?” Sukhanov asked, not caring about the answer, only desperate to avoid another dangerous, sob-swelling lull.

“He was a little vague about it. Said he had come to find some former pupil of his. He had a phone number, address, and everything, but I gathered no one expected him, so he spent the day going to art shows instead, ‘keeping in touch with the youth,’ as he put it. He claimed he had learned to paint from Chagall, but frankly, I didn’t believe him—so many people nowadays... Tolya, are you all right? You look—”

“It’s nothing, I’m just tired,” said Sukhanov weakly. For an instant he struggled with a desire to sink onto the pavement and hide his face in his hands. “I ... I’ve been having quite a day. Tripped and fell, broke my glasses, you see.... Don’t let me hold you up though, you were going somewhere.”

“Home, I was only going home. Nothing to rush to there,” said Belkin, shrugging. “Listen, I’ve got an idea. If you’re free right now, why not visit the gallery? We can sit and talk, I have some tea and cakes stashed in the office.”

Sukhanov was silent for a moment.

“Oh, why not,” he said then.

The door gave in with a pained moan. The hallway beyond was dim and small, crowded with a jumble of hats, shoes, lopsided umbrellas, greeting him with fading smells of Alla’s mawkishly sweet perfume and a recently dismembered dried fish.

“Well, don’t just stand there, come on in,” Lev said gruffly.

“Are you alone?”

Lev nodded. He looked as if he had not shaved in a week.

“Good.” Tightly clutching a sheaf of pages I had typed the night before on Malinin’s typewriter, I followed the fish odors through the familiar clutter of the cramped corridor into the kitchen, Lev at my heels. In the depressingly bright light of the naked bulb dangling over the table glistened a half-empty glass of clear liquid; the bony remains of an unappetizing meal lay scattered on a greasy newspaper.

“I’m working on a still-life composition called
Repast of a Failed Artist Whose Wife Is Out with Her Girlfriends, or So She Says,”
said Lev blandly. “Sit down. Anything the matter? I’d offer you a glass, but it’s really disgusting, and of course you never—”

“I’ll take it,” I said, and pushed the manuscript across the table. “Here, I want you to have a look at this.”

Lev scanned the title.

“‘Surrealism and Other Western “Isms” as Manifestations of Capitalist Insolvency’?” he said disgustedly. “Surely you don’t expect me to waste my time on such—”

“Just read it, will you?”

He shrugged, took an unhurried sip, and flipped the page. I studied the patterns of melted snow forming at my feet on the yellow-and-black-checkered linoleum, watched a befuddled out-of-season fly stumble drowsily on the windowsill, drank the unpalatable vodka. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lev glance at me once or twice in the beginning; then he lifted his head no longer and sat silently rustling the papers and frowning. A half-hour passed, then another ten minutes. He slammed the last page against the table.

“What is this shit?” he said. “Who wrote it?”

I finished my drink at a gulp. My insides were burning.

“I did,” I said. “I wrote it.”

His eyes narrowed. “Tolya,” he said slowly. “Is this a sick joke of some sort?”

“It’s not a joke, it’s going to be published. I wanted you to read it first, so I could explain... No, hold on, just listen for a minute, will you?” My face was burning too now. “I’ve been thinking more about Khrushchev closing our show. And you know what I realized? When he shut us down he wasn’t acting as a representative of the state cracking down on a handful of outspoken artists. He was acting as a representative of the people, our people, who do not understand—cannot understand—the alien things we stand for. The Russian people do not want our art, Leva. Never did, never will. They dislike seeing Filonov’s tormented faces, Chagall’s flying beasts, and Malevich’s black squares—they have enough tragedy, surrealism, and emptiness in their daily lives. In the past they wanted soothing icons; now they want the pseudo-art of someone like my father-in-law—a pat on the head reassuring them that their future is bright, a slap on the back letting them know that they are part of an important whole, that their toils have a purpose—”

The fly buzzed sleepily against the windowpane; in the bluish haze beyond, oblique snow was falling. Lev was looking at me, and there was a new expression in his heavy gaze. I talked for a long time—talked about the dim, oppressive centuries of Russian art struggling against Russian history, about the walls of silence destined to surround each and every one of us forever, about casting our pearls before swine, about our fates condemning us to this dark, ungrateful soil, leaving us no other choice but to step away into anonymity, into comfort, into the minute preoccupations of an uninspired, private existence...

And then Lev spoke.

“You’ve said so many clever things here,” he said quietly, “but do you know the only thing I’ve heard? Fear—nothing but fear. Well, I understand fear, I’m afraid too....” He was silent for a few heartbeats. “Tell you what, Tolya. Everyone has unworthy moments, and you are my best friend. Let’s go out onto the landing, throw this abomination page by page into the trash chute, come back to finish the bottle, and I’ll promise you never to mention any of it again. Agreed?”

The pool of water at my feet had dried out. The snow was still whirling in the sky. The fly had ceased buzzing, falling back into its winter stupor of sleep. I rose, gathered the pages scattered about the table, and walked into the corridor. Lev ran after me, and when I turned at the front door, I saw that his face was transformed by that special, warm, radiant smile I loved so much. Quickly I looked away, unable to watch the light go out of his eyes. In silence, I groped on the counter for my hat, put on my coat, opened the door, and still keeping my gaze averted, stepped across the threshold and closed the door behind me. And then, though he did and said nothing to stop me, for a whole long minute, my heart beating painfully, I lingered outside on the landing, knowing that in three weeks the article would be published, knowing that Lev would never speak to me again—and still I stood there as if waiting for something, as if hoping that a miracle was somehow possible, that the door would open again at any moment, and that he would smile his wonderful, forgiving smile, and say, “Please, Tolya, come in....”