by Olga Grushin
“Yes, Anatoly Pavlovich,” Liubov Markovna whispered behind his back. “Of course, Anatoly Pavlovich. Right away, Anatoly Pavlovich.”
He had hoped to glance at the text during his metro ride home, but spent the minutes in transit with his nose pressed between the chintz shoulder blades of an elderly woman with a multitude of bags, one of which was quite perceptibly oozing a trickle of ice cream onto the floor, while a gangling, pimply fellow sank his chin meditatively into Sukhanov’s neck. On the way out, mildly befuddled, he attempted to exit through a glass door that read, in mirrorlike inversion, “ECNARTNE,” and a very large, formidable figure in a pigeon-gray uniform—whether man or woman, he could not tell—shouted at him in a booming prison guard’s voice that made passersby start and turn and stare, “Where the hell do you think you’re going, old man? Have you gone blind?”
He staggered into the street feeling shaky, tightly clutching his briefcase as if expecting it to be violently torn from his grasp at any moment. When he arrived at his building at last, he wanted to collapse with relief. The lobby embraced him with its familiar marble coolness, and the ancient concierge was already shuffling across the floor to summon the elevator. The two of them stood side by side without speaking, listening to the laborious creaking of the machinery floors above. Nearly a full minute later came a heavy thump, and a light shone through the crack between the folds of the door. The concierge began to swing open the gate.
“Oh, Anatoly Pavlovich, I nearly forgot,” he said in a voice dry as an autumn leaf. “There have been some problems with the elevator, so they asked me to tell everyone on the upper floors to be a bit more careful.”
“What do you mean?” Sukhanov asked inattentively, stepping inside.
“Oh, nothing much,” the concierge replied with an ambiguous smile. “Just make sure the elevator is actually there before you enter it on the way down. Wouldn’t want anyone falling to their deaths, would we now, heh heh heh! Had a close one, too. Two days ago, Ivan Martynovich—you know, that songwriter who lives below you—”
The elevator doors, closing with jerks and shudders, swallowed the rest of his sentence.
Sukhanov felt inordinately glad to find himself at home.
“Hello, I’m back!” he called out hopefully—but the place stayed silent, save for a few spoons that rattled dejectedly in the dining room cupboard. The air in the hallway was damp; the windows had remained open during the previous night’s rain. A ghostly trace of music sent faint vibrations into the corridor from Ksenya’s room. Frowning, he knocked on her door, then, not hearing a response, knocked louder. There was still no answer.
Sukhanov walked in.
The heavy green curtains were drawn, softening the room’s stark, book-filled angularity, and in the semidarkness he heard the shadow of music grow to a stronger presence, more like a whisper or a persistent memory of a song. His daughter was lying flat on her bed, fully dressed, a pair of headphones on her ears, her eyes closed, a strange, tight little smile flickering on her lips. As he bent over her, the music expanded, and he could distinguish a man’s voice singing, although the words remained a soft electronic blur.
“Young people nowadays,” he murmured—partially to dispel with the sound of his own voice the sensation of unease that suddenly brushed him with a darting, clammy, alien touch, not for the first time in Ksenya’s presence. After a moment’s hesitation, he placed his hand on her shoulder. She screamed and sat up so abruptly their heads nearly collided; and for an instant her eyes, dark and veiled, were full of swinging chaos. Then, like a pair of pendulums slowly coming to a stop, her pupils became still in the gray irises.
Breathing out, she tore off the headphones.
“You scared me,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Ah yes, the power of music,” he said, trying to smile. “What are you listening to?”
“No one you’d know.”
“Try me.”
“All right then, Boris Tumanov,” she replied, shrugging. “It’s a homemade tape, he’s part of the new underground.”
“Oh. I see,” he said vaguely. “By any chance, do you know where your mother is?”
“She’s gone to the Tretyakovka with Fyodor Mikhailovich. He wanted to show her some of his favorite works.”
“Oh, I see,” he said again. “So it’s just us, then. Well, well.”
He turned to leave but paused with his hand on the doorknob.
“Ksenya, perhaps,” he said haltingly, “perhaps we could talk?”
She regarded him without enthusiasm.
“Let me guess,” she said. “You’re going to deliver a lecture on how to be a good daughter. Or will this be some sort of fatherly discussion of the facts of life? ‘Now that you are eighteen, my dear, you need to know there is more to boys than meets the eye’—that kind of thing? Well, don’t worry, I know already. I went to school, if you recall. We had sex education.”
He watched a small whirlpool of silence widen between them.
“It’s nothing like that, I just… I just thought we’d talk, that’s all,” he said meekly. “We hardly ever see each other, now that you are so busy with your work…. I wanted to tell you, I’ve read that Hoffmann story you recommended the other day. Very interesting, and you were right, it doesn’t have much in common with—”
Her face relaxed, and her eyes moved dreamily past him.
“Papa, I’m sorry,” she said, “but if it’s nothing urgent, now is really not a good time. I stayed up most of the night doing this assignment, and I was about to take a nap when you came in.”
“Oh,” he said brightly. “Of course. Some other time, then?”
“Some other time,” she said.
She was looking away already, searching for her headphones.
He tried to read the article for the next hour, but could never get past the epigraph—an excerpt from Chagall’s awkward yet oddly poignant poem, three lines of which kept alighting on the tip of his tongue like a stubborn moth, preventing him from moving any further, filling his mind with fluttering flocks of irrelevant associations.
Across the sky fly former inhabitants.
Where do they live now?
In my own torn soul.
The words circled round and round in his mind…. Soon he abandoned the manuscript altogether and stretched out on the couch, his gaze lost in the irregularities of the ceiling. By and by, the cumulative lack of sleep from the past few nights filled his limbs with lead and his thoughts with cotton, and the idea of a nap began to seem wonderfully appealing. In truth, he felt tired enough to sleep through several days in a row.
He had nearly drifted off when the bell rang. He went to unlock the door, pleasantly gliding just above the floor. There was no one on the landing, which was, of course, impossible, so, feeling stubborn, he strode off to check whether someone was hiding in the elevator—but the elevator itself was not there, and, losing balance, he started to fall down the shaft, and it was terrifying at first, this plummeting into the narrow, dimly glimmering abyss full of thick, creaking cables and misshapen shadows and “Do Not Enter” signs and medieval world maps hanging on the dripping walls, but gradually it became darker and darker, and easier and easier, until he found himself floating through the most delightful oblivion of blackness with a smile of full-blown happiness on his lips—and felt rather sorry when the doorbell rang again, cutting his flight short.
It appeared that he had slept for some hours, for it was suddenly late in the evening. The moon drifted brilliantly through the dining room windows as he walked past, and Nina and Dalevich, entering with the effortless laughter of two old friends, surprised him by saying they would not be joining him for supper as they had eaten already, in some nameless cafeteria upon which they had stumbled after their visit to the museum. It hardly mattered, for he did not feel in the least bit hungry, and his body still rang with an overwhelming desire for rest. Nodding agreeably, without listening (Dalevich, as usual, was trying to talk
to him about some article he had written), he swam through the thickening air back to the study and, undressing this time, slipped under the blankets and fell asleep once again.
He continued to dream outlandish, not to say disturbing, dreams. Sometime in the middle of the night, he heard dogs barking incessantly in the streets. Their howling soon grew so hoarse and strained, nearly rabid with excitement, that he got up, passed through the sleeping house, and, with a presence of mind unnatural in a dream, found a coat to throw over his pajamas and some shoes in which to deposit his feet, then descended in the elevator (which was there this time), crossed the deserted, moonswept lobby, and expecting the unexpected, stepped outside. In the coolness of the August night, the mysterious woman with the exquisitely drawn features of Nefertiti was drifting aimlessly along the pavements of Belinsky Street, dressed in a diaphanous wedding gown, a pack of maddened homeless dogs following at her dainty satin heels. At his approach, she lifted her lovely, tear-stained face toward him, and said simply and sadly, “He’ll never marry me, I know it. He tells me he will, but he won’t. I understand now. He has a wife and a daughter. He is a very important man—a minister, no less. I understand.”
As she spoke, a delicate vein pulsated in her throat, her mouth was pale and pained like a wilting petal, her eyes glistened like melting, rain-washed gems, and, bright like her eyes, two diamond cascades flowed from her ears. He stared at her with a freedom allowed only in dreams. Behind him, as if mesmerized, the dogs too ceased their barking one after another and, watching her, carefully bared their teeth, dripping saliva onto her trailing gauze train. She said nothing more, only stood there, her piano player’s hands poised in an attitude of grieving supplication—and the whole world lay still and silent around them, like a starry sky’s reflection in the dark waters of an abandoned pond, like a particle of time frozen for all eternity in a marvelous painting, and it was frightening and heartbreaking and beautiful, this strange encounter, woven whole as it was from the moonlit, elusive fabric of the night….
It ended, as dreams must, with hasty, unbecoming absurdity. Unwinding a checkered woolen scarf left in the sleeve of his coat from some previous winter’s dream, Sukhanov tossed it at the dogs in a gesture that was of course futile yet perfectly sensible at the moment, and immediately, forgetting all about them, the pack fell onto the scarf, snarling, tearing, fighting over it. Grabbing her by the elbow, he dragged her inside, and through the echoing lobby, and up a few flights of stairs, to deliver her, slightly out of breath but unresisting, to the door of apartment number five, which he found standing wide open.
“He’ll marry you, don’t worry,” he said generously and insin cerely, as he gave her a gentle push across the threshold. “He’d be a fool not to.”
The last thing he remembered before mounting the stairs to his own eighth floor was the sight of her face, white and streaked with two grooves of running mascara, like a tragic Venetian porcelain mask, floating above a sea of silk and lace and sparkling with diamonds, lifted toward him from the dark cave of the gaping doorway.
After that, his duty performed, Sukhanov’s dream self returned to the couch (in passing hanging the ghostly coat on its hook and removing the nonexistent shoes) and fell into an even deeper slumber. Sometime shortly after dawn he had another dream, not full of melancholy wonder this time, but domestic and simple, containing a promise of happiness like a seed inside its warm soil. Nina, coming into his study on tiptoes, dressed in an old pair of slacks and a faded sweater with a thick, unfeminine collar, which made her look every day of her age and so familiar, so dear, bent over him briefly to drop a light kiss onto his cheek.
“I was hoping to talk to you last night,” she whispered, “but you went to sleep so early, and now I have a seven-thirty train to catch.”
“But where are you going?” he asked tenderly, smiling at the kiss in his sleep.
“To the dacha,” she said. “It may not have rained there. I need to check on the roses.”
“Ah yes, the roses, of course, beds and carpets and fields of roses,” said the dream Sukhanov. “But you’ll be back, my love?”
“I’ll be back,” the dream Nina promised softly. “In a few days.”
“The roses,” he said again, and nodding joyfully, began to sail away, only opening his eyes for an instant to see Nina’s hand hovering over his forehead before descending in a final, swift caress—but by then, he had already been washed onto new, unfamiliar shores.
THIRTEEN
But didn’t she tell you?” Dalevich said, peering anxiously into Sukhanov’s face.
The morning was quiet and sunny, and a bird in a nearby tree repeated its bright little song over and over in a hollow imitation of pastoral happiness.
“Anyway, it’s only for a few days,” Dalevich added helpfully. “She just needs to water the flowers. She should be back by Tuesday at the latest.”
Sukhanov persisted in rubbing his glasses with the edge of the tablecloth, thinking of an important party to which he and Nina were invited this evening and to which he would now have to go alone. “Of course,” he finally murmured, starting to stand up.
“Listen, Tolya,” said Dalevich hastily, “we never finished our talk the other day, and there was something in particular I wanted to—”
“Of course,” said Sukhanov again. “Except that right now I have this article I must review. Urgent work, I’m sure you understand.”
“Oh, completely,” said Dalevich. “And as a matter of fact, I was just about to tell you—”
“Let’s talk at dinnertime, shall we, then?” Sukhanov said.
The bird continued to strain its throat with throbbing exuberance. As he trod the long corridor to his study, he felt his cousin’s eyes on his back.
He spent the rest of the morning behind the closed door, in a semidarkness of tightly drawn curtains, stubbornly warding off all thoughts of Nina’s desertion and poring over the Chagall article. It was, he had to admit, exceptionally well written. Instead of delivering a dutiful recital of dull biographical facts, D. M. Fyodorov (whoever the devil he was) had chosen to present the artist’s development through a series of defining encounters: a stuttering meeting of the chaperoned adolescent with a kindly Judel Pan, a pedestrian but endearing Vitebsk painter who would become Chagall’s first teacher and in whose studio the youth would struggle to draw plaster busts but lapse time and time again into unacceptable lilac colors; an accidental introduction to Bella, daughter of a local jewelry merchant, in whose radiant black gaze his soul would find its eternal home; then, already in the capital, a timid, excited audience with the celebrated Leon Bakst, founder of the famous St. Petersburg art school, leader in the influential World of Art movement, and proud proclaimer of art for art’s sake, who to the young Chagall seemed the triumphant incarnation of all European traditions, but who, after a mere few months as his tutor, began to appear too stylized, too refined, and in the end too cold and foreign in Chagall’s eyes—too small for his expanding, deepening universe of pain and joy; and finally, completing his formation as an artist, a momentous meeting in pre—World War I Paris with Anatoly Vasilievich Lunacharsky—Lenin’s future mouthpiece on the subject of art in the service of the Revolution, and Bakst’s ideological negative—to whom Chagall politely showed his works and, noticing the man’s puzzlement, said serenely, “Just don’t ask me why everything on my canvases is blue or green, or why a calf is visible in a cow’s stomach. Let your Marx, if he is so smart, come back from the dead and explain everything to you.”
This position of a genius whose art had grown too universal both for aestheticizing detachment and for political partiality would make it hard for Chagall to be appreciated in Russia before the Revolution and impossible for him to remain there much longer afterward, but in a sensitive omission, D. M. Fyodorov had elected not to dwell on Chagall’s subsequent exile and wanderings. Instead, he had devoted the rest of the article to a poetic tribute to the master’s lifelong themes—his “poignant, etern
al world, radiant like a window opening from the darkness of our souls into bright blue skies, filled with flying fiddlers, green-faced lovers, and mysteriously smiling cows,” as he wrote in his conclusion, “a world that seems childlike and simple and yet achieves truly biblical proportions, touching the very core of our being.”
Frowning, Sukhanov tapped his pen against the stack of paper before him. Of course, he would never have allowed this piece anywhere near his magazine under ordinary circumstances, but he supposed Pugovichkin was right—it was always wiser not to cross those more important than oneself. And in any case, it could have been worse: at least it read more like a philosophical discourse on the nature of art than a subversive manifesto. All the same, it was apparent that, inspired though it might be, the text could not remain unaltered. It lacked a proper critical attitude. Even more problematic, it betrayed an openly religious sensibility, what with its constant references to the Bible, its assertion of love as the unifying principle of Chagall’s universe, its comparisons between his manner and traditional iconic art, and… and…
For one uncomfortable moment, the by now familiar sensation of fleeting recognition, of his past and present endlessly reflecting off each other in a multiplying infinity of mirrors, visited Sukhanov again, disrupting the flow of his thoughts; but in a quick outburst of determination he shrugged it off and lifted his pen. The Lunacharsky scene had to go—or better yet, he would keep it (naturally, omitting Chagall’s scandalous mention of Marx) in order to use it as a departure point for a stern reevaluation of Chagall’s work. Perhaps something along these lines: “While the painter was able to perceive the insolvency of the bourgeois art of Bakst and his school, he lacked the maturity needed to appreciate the noble truth of Lunacharsky’s position, thus failing to understand the real purpose of art as the people’s weapon in their struggle against oppression.” Yes, indeed, this would serve as the perfect introduction to a subsequent discussion of the artist’s themes: their childish, fairy-tale nature, their total isolation from reality, their slavish reliance on religious motifs… As Sukhanov’s pen flew across the pages, crossing out every occurrence of “biblical” and “eternal” and putting a fat question mark next to every mention of “love,” he was beginning to think that it was possible, just possible, to keep the wolves full and the sheep whole. Thus occupied, he did not hear the soft knock on the door, and was presently startled by his cousin’s apologetic voice close to his ear.
