The Dream Life of Sukhanov

by Olga Grushin

  Nina 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.

  “He’s become quite unpresentable, our Lev Borisovich has. Aged, unshaved, dressed in God knows what—some unimaginable bow-tie affair… I think he drinks. Of course, I would too if my life were such a dismal failure. But naturally, it was bound to come to this. Even his wife—”

  “Do you want anything else?” she interrupted. “If you are done, I’ll put everything away.”

  “Please,” he said, and set down his last, unfinished, éclair. “Even his wife left him. Remember Alla? Frankly, I’m surprised she lasted as long as she did.”

  Nina continued to open and close cupboards in silence. Pleasantly full, he leaned back in his chair, delicately muffled a chocolate burp in his napkin, and hummed the duel aria from Evgeny Onegin. The tablecloth had a fetching pattern of wildflowers on it, he noticed absently. He was already beginning to feel a welcome advent of drowsiness when Nina sharply slammed the strawberry jar in its place. Startled, he glanced up, and found her looking at him. Her gray eyes were cold.

  “His name is Vadim,” she said.

  “What was that, my love?”

  “Our chauffeur. Our chauffeur’s name is Vadim. Not Volodya. Not Vladislav. Not Vyacheslav. It’s Vadim. He’s worked for us for almost three years, and in all this time you haven’t made an effort to remember his name.”

  Sukhanov sat up straight.

  “So I did it again, didn’t I?” he said amicably. “But my love, he has one of these names I always get wrong. You know how I am with names.”

  “Oh, it’s not just names, Tolya, it’s everything,” she said, turning away. “In all my life, I’ve never met anyone with such a capacity to ignore and to forget.”

  The renewed kitchen silence ceased being comfortable. Frowning slightly, he rose to go.

  “A courier came by while we were away,” she said without looking in his direction, and dropped an avalanche of porcelain into the sink. “I put the envelope on your desk.”

  “I’ll go and see,” he said, and hesitated for a moment, then added with a somewhat ingratiating smile, “I simply don’t know how I’m going to work without your portrait hovering over me, my love. I’m so used to its happy presence.”

  “I’m relieved it’s gone,” said Nina dryly. “It felt like a constant reproach to me.”

  “How do you mean?” he asked after a pause, but she said nothing else. The water was running noisily. With a suppressed sigh, he left the kitchen.

  The large brown envelope contained three pages—two sheets of proofs, each in two pale columns of minuscule print, and a letter penned in sprawling handwritin
g, an intimate sign of particular respect. He skimmed it. Dear Anatoly Pavlovich, would you be so kind as to check the enclosed for any possible additions or corrections….

  The text, he already saw, was his own biography, to be included in an updated edition of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, scheduled to appear early the next year. Feeling inexplicably nervous, he pulled closer his desk lamp, with its yellow shade perched on an elaborate bronze stand in the shape of a rearing Pegasus (a gift from his father-in-law), lifted a silver-handled magnifying glass from its embossed leather case (“To our highly esteemed Anatoly Pavlovich from his loyal colleagues, on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday”), and bent over the busy rows of facts.

  “Born January 13, 1929, in Moscow. Demonstrated inordinate critical abilities early on. From 1947 to 1952, attended the Surikov Art Institute in order to acquire practical grounding for his theoretical studies. From 1952 to 1967, taught at the Moscow Higher Artistic and Technical Institute, during which period began to write his critically acclaimed works. In 1963, published his first article of major importance, ‘Surrealism and Other Western “Isms” as Manifestations of Capitalist Insolvency’ (reissued in monograph form in 1965), followed in 1964 by the equally significant Contemporary Applications of the Socialist Realism Method to Landscape and Still Life. Member of the Communist Party from 1964. Member of the USSR Union of Artists from 1965. In 1967, left his teaching job to head the Art Criticism Division of—”

  Satisfied that his beginnings were covered in just the right manner, with no unnecessary, one might even say harmful, details, Sukhanov exhaled and read the rest less attentively, lightly nodding at each new landmark in his soaring career: a flock of articles, a host of distinctions, a couple more dizzying leaps through the ranks; two definitive textbooks, on the history and theory of Soviet art, in 1968 and 1970 (currently in their fourth and sixth editions, respectively); a critical study of Western art movements, in 1972; and finally, and most victoriously, his appointment as editor of Art of the World in 1973. A long paragraph was devoted to the summary of his work: “A. P. Sukhanov’s studies achieve a brilliant synthesis of history and theory… invaluable for their practical applications to current developments… conclusive demonstration of impressionism, expressionism, and surrealism as movements in the service of capitalism… in his capacity as editor responsible for steering the field of Soviet art away from corrupting Western influences and toward true artistic principles…”

  The last sentence, modestly rounding up the fireworks of praise, read simply: “At present lives in Moscow with his wife and two children.”

  And this, neatly compressed into the three and a half columns of fine print, was his life in its entirety—one man’s conquering rise to prominence, with nothing to change and nothing to add, soon to be nestled side by side with greatness even greater than his in a massive compilation of Soviet accomplishment—the ultimate proof of having arrived.

  At any other time, this brush with immortality would have engendered in Sukhanov a most contented glow of satisfaction, not unlike the delectably smooth warmth caused by a sip of the very best French cognac, and immediately he would have hurried to Nina, hoping for one of her rare smiles. But tonight she seemed in a strange, unapproachable mood, and his inability to share this triumph with her dampened his elation considerably. In addition, her accusation of forgetfulness bothered him, unfair though it was. Certainly, he was not very good at places, faces, names, for he did not care for the daily chaff of existence, and large numbers of people never became anything more to him than chance occupants of some random, briefly shared space—anonymous dwellers under the same roof, featureless crowds swimming past his car at red lights, blank-eyed students passing notes and peeling oranges in big auditoriums where he was occasionally asked to preside. It was likewise true that there were a number of things he had tried to forget on purpose, since he saw no reason to clutter his mind with facts and events that had long since outlived their usefulness. All the same, he was positive that everyone engaged in incidental editing of the past in order to survive—and that his memory, retaining everything vital, was just as good as the next man’s.

  Take his biography, for instance. Born in 1929, more than half a century ago—and yet his earliest recollection dated from shortly thereafter, when he could not have been more than two years old. A dirty gray carpet, a barefoot child playing listlessly with its shedding fibers in front of a window, beyond which there is an equally gray sky. Then an unexpected shaft of sunlight breaks through the clouds and penetrates the dusty room, and simultaneously two major shifts occur in the world. First, I realize that this foot with its splayed toes is mine, that this hand drawing a circle on the floor is also mine, that this playing child is, in fact, me—and second, and somehow more important, the carpet suddenly reveals its true color, and it’s not gray at all, it’s green, the deepest, purest, greenest green, the overwhelming color of my happiness. Yes, that is what I remember best—the colors, the fleeting shifts of shadows, certain ephemeral combinations of light and darkness; and when I lift my face to the window, the sunlight plays on my skin, alive and warm, and when I close my eyes, there are flashing red circles swimming lustrously behind my eyelids, and when I open my eyes again…

  He opened his eyes, and was shocked to behold blackness instead of brightness behind the window and, reflected in the glass, the momentarily unrecognizable, vaguely unpleasant face of a middle-aged man with wide cheekbones, hair receding from a tall forehead, heavy jowls, small gray eyes swimming in two silver-rimmed holes of emptiness, and a thin mouth to which the lit windows in a building across the street imparted an illusory, horrible, golden-toothed smile…. Anatoly Pavlovich hastily took off his glasses. All at once it occurred to him that it was quite late, that it had been a very eventful day, that he was tired. Sighing, he slid the proofs neatly to the corner of his desk, pulled at a switch cord suspended between the bronze wings of Pegasus, and waded through familiar darkness to the bedroom where Nina was already sleeping, breathing in her soft, infinitely comforting way.

  No sooner had he slipped into the night than he saw Belkin again, but this time there was nothing objectionable in his presence. Dressed in a tight maroon livery, Belkin stood immobile like a toy soldier in a corner of a hall set for a lavish dinner party but amusingly full of ribboned horses. The horses pranced about, having quiet, dignified conversations among themselves. One of them, covered with an embroidered red cloth with little golden bells around the edges, trotted toward Sukhanov and neighed solemnly, “My daughter is a very pretty girl,” and he was just about to laugh in the horse’s face, when Belkin jumped, grabbed hold of the tablecloth on the longest table, and pulled, and all the plates and silverware and goblets cascaded onto the floor with an earsplitting crash. Scandalized by such uncivilized behavior, Sukhanov sat up abruptly—and realized that Nina’s soft breathing had stopped, and that she too was awake, leaning on her elbow in the dark next to him, listening intently. Tinkles of broken glass were still falling somewhere overhead, and now came a woman’s muffled scream followed by a stampede of frantic footsteps. Then all was silent.

  “What’s going on?” he whispered.

  “The woman upstairs has a sick father,” Nina whispered back. “He must be having a bad night.”

  They listened for a while longer, but all seemed quiet, and Nina laid her head back onto her pillow; soon her breathing grew even again. The phosphorescent clock by the bed showed a few minutes past four. Feeling a bit unsettled, Sukhanov closed his eyes as well, wishing he could return to his curious dream about the talking horse—and it was precisely then that the day played one last trick on Anatoly Pavlovich. His memory stirred, reshuffled itself—and he knew without the slightest doubt that at the moment when he had stopped paying attention, the Minister of Culture had been in the process of inviting him to one of his famed dacha gatherings, and that there had even been some hint of an incredible, celestial combination involving the Minister’s daughter and his own Vas
ily. Sukhanov moaned. Then, as if to console him, his memory obediently served up the image he had vainly sought to capture at the party—a fat, pompous hamster from a popular children’s cartoon, its cheeks swollen with stolen grain. The resemblance was indeed uncanny.

  FOUR

  On a brightly illuminated square, before gingerbread houses with red roofs and golden shutters, Swanilda and her friends threw their legs up in the air in a flurry of lace and enthusiasm. Sukhanov felt distracted. He was sitting so close he could hear the tentative creaks of the floorboards and the soft slaps of the dancers’ feet, could see that a braided wig on one of the women had slipped to the side, could almost guess at the multicogged machinery concealed in the wings, at any moment ready to set the silver foil of the moon gliding across a painted sky or wafts of smoke puffing cozily from two-dimensional chimneys. His box, draped in crimson velvet, sealed with an embroidered coat of arms, and almost hanging over the stage, was a clear mark of privilege, and yet, ironically, this very proximity revealed the dance to be replete with sweaty effort, robbing it of the magical illusion necessary for his enjoyment—so much so that he found himself envying the nobodies in the top gallery for whom the ballet must have seemed one blurry, whirling extravaganza of music, color, and light.

  During the second intermission, Vasily roamed the sparkling cavity of the theater with his binoculars, announced that he saw an acquaintance, and slipped out. Sukhanov was left alone with his mother. He had meant for this to be a full family outing, but Nina still complained of a headache, and Ksenya had declared a particular dislike for Coppelia. “This is a perfect illustration of the difference between the French and the Germans,” she had said. “Delibes takes Hoffmann’s sinister tale of love and insanity and turns it into a story of a village Don Juan who is courting two women at once. Read it, and you’ll see what I mean.” She had then tossed a weighty volume onto his desk, upsetting his papers and causing a sheet of his biography to flutter to the floor; but before he had had time to scold her, Vasily had asked whether he could borrow his cuff links, Valya had come knocking on the door with an invitation to tea, the chauffeur had called from downstairs to report that the car was ready—and now here he was, confined in the mothball-permeated, cherry-colored plushness of the box with his mother, making polite little noises of attention in her direction.