The Dream Life of Sukhanov

by Olga Grushin

  Without a word, he strode into the corridor, closed his fingers on the handle of a hallway closet, and paused, ignoring the burst of his mother’s alarmed cries at his back, preparing instead for what he knew he would find just behind this door—windows into his past, windows into his soul, whole stacks of them, piled negligently this way and that, just as he had left them two decades ago, some facing away, some slightly graying, perhaps, with deposits of dust and old-woman smells, maybe even a wary touch of mildew, others certain to throw themselves at him with their wild colors and violent shapes like so many untamed beasts long in confinement. He suddenly found it uncanny that this closet had always been here—that his paintings had always been here—that there had always been only this thin partition between his present and that other world, once wholly his, now full of unfamiliar, wonderful, terrifying marvels—and that he had known it all along, yet spent years learning how to forget so he would not have to hear the muted, sorrowful call of the ghosts on those rare occasions when he sat in his mother’s living room, drinking lukewarm tea, eating repulsive pastries, talking impressively about a new edition of his book, his son’s excellent grades, Nina’s autumn trip to Paris….

  Now, in a single moment, as he stood feeling in his palm the weighty coolness of the door handle, he remembered it all—all, at least, that was left to remember of a life that, with the appearance of a February 1963 issue of Art of the World, had started on its way to safety, constancy, tranquillity. That first article had been followed by a rapid succession of short pieces, culminating in early 1964 with a lengthy monograph, Contemporary Applications of the Socialist Realism Method to Landscape and Still Life, whose loudly hailed publication, as well as his timely membership in the Party, had helped him obtain later in the year, just as Nina had become pregnant, a two-room Arbat apartment for his mother. After Nadezhda Sergeevna moved out, he converted the spare room into a studio—for, of course, he had never fully intended to give up painting—but at first a steady stream of lectures and magazine assignments left him unable to work, whether from exhaustion or from some deeper, darker emotion that he did not want to define, and then Vasily was born, and Nina needed space for drying his sheets and ironing his clothes, and Pyotr Alekseevich made them a gift of a crib that was charming but unwieldy, and little by little, he found his canvases and oils relegated further and further into unobtrusive shadows, until the only painting remaining in full view was a portrait of a discreetly expectant, dreamily happy Nina, presented to them by Malinin and soon placed prominently over Sukhanov’s recently acquired, gor geously carved desk.

  After that, something began to happen to the fabric of time: it grew thinner and silkier and passed through his hands so lightly that he barely noticed the patterns and colors in its smooth, flowing skin. Another year passed, Nina was pregnant again, they were awaiting a move to a significantly larger apartment, Ksenya was born, Nina left her job, those in the know whispered of his impending nomination to an important position as the head of the art criticism department at a certain well-respected institute, and a number of friendly colleagues, led by the director Penkin himself, started to drop by now and then with bottles of cognac, ostensibly to gossip and to coo over his children. He decided that it would be wiser to move his underground art out of the way for the time being, at least until the promised position materialized, and one evening crammed all his paintings into his new Zhiguli, drove over to his mother’s (she had more room than she needed, anyway), and calming her fears with assurances that it was only temporary, rapidly, as if their touch burned his fingers, piled the canvases, with their manifold scents of fairy tales and nightmares, into a hallway closet. After closing the door, he stood still for a long minute, perhaps willing himself to memorize the weighty coolness of the door handle in his palm as a promise to return someday soon; then turned, and walked away. But as he walked away, he already knew in some concealed, murky layer of his soul that he would never be back to claim his dark treasure—and knowing this, tried not to listen to the chorus of disembodied voices whispering, pleading at his back, tried to ignore the strange, chilling certainty that for him the flow of time had suddenly ceased, that at this very instant his life was over, irrevocably, forever—

  And of course, the feeling was ridiculous, and of course, time did not stop, and his life continued, and over the years there were plenty of changes, all for the better—the new apartment, the new position, the children growing up, the acclaimed books, the purchase of the dacha, the eventual staggering promotion to the helm of Art of the World, speedily rewarded by another, still more splendid apartment in the Zamoskvorechie and a personal chauffeur—yet now, as he stood so close to his past, his fingers curled around the door handle, his knuckles white, he felt that the previous two decades of his life had meant nothing, had been nothing, had vanished into the emptiness whence they had been born—and that only today, after all this waste, he finally had the power to make time flow once again.

  He threw the door open.

  A strong smell of mothballs escaped into the corridor. Two old coats hung on metal hangers in one corner, and in another, a monstrous vacuum cleaner, its dust bag deflated, leaned against the wall. There was a shelf he did not remember; a woolen mitten dangled off it into space. He looked at the mitten for a while, as if trying to fathom its purpose, then slowly closed the door, and returned to the kitchen. His mother had stopped talking, and was staring at him with unblinking eyes.

  “How about some tea?” a funny-looking bearded man offered brightly. “I’ll get another cup, don’t stand up, Aunt Nadya.”

  Sukhanov knew the man well; he was a relative of some sort, a childhood playmate perhaps; it seemed that they had recently quarreled. It did not matter any longer.

  “Mother,” he said, his voice quiet and oddly strained. “Mother, where are they?”

  A cup rang out against a saucer as the relative clumsily dropped them onto the table.

  “Mama, please, this is important,” he said, brushing away a brief sensation of repeating his own, seemingly recent words. “Where are my paintings?”

  Her mouth was working convulsively

  “Well, they are not here, are they?” she said with shrillness.

  “Did you move them somewhere? Why didn’t you tell me? I thought—”

  “I know what you thought! You thought, how convenient, turning your mother’s place into a storage dump! Did it ever occur to you that I might not like it, that I have needs too, that I’m not just someone to order around?”

  “Mama, what are you talking about? No one ordered you around. I just—”

  “No, it never occurred to him!” She was shouting now. “And just look at him, barging in here after all this time, going through my closets without permission, expecting everything to be just the way he left it twenty years ago, as if I don’t live here, as if I’m nothing to be concerned with, as if I don’t have the right to do what I please in my own home—”

  Perhaps she saw something strange in his face, or else she ran out of breath; all at once she fell silent. The relative, a fixed smile on his lips, finished cutting the cake into uneven slices, set the knife down, picked up his hat, and cautiously crept out into the corridor and tiptoed away; somewhere in the apartment a door opened and closed. Sukhanov stood without moving. The sun had already vanished over the rooftops, but the air was still luminous, and in its warm crimson glow the small kitchen, with its table ready for tea, its old porcelain clock on the wall, the richness of the creamy bird‘s-milk dessert crumbling on the plates, the leaves rustling against the windows, seemed wonderfully cozy and intimate and at the same time eternal, like some masterly painting of family togetherness, some vision of an ideal life….

  “So you threw my paintings away,” said Anatoly Pavlovich in a flat voice, and lowering himself onto the chair, covered his face with his hands—and cried.

  And for a while the world was so silent that it felt as if a deep hush, a hush of finality, of lost chances, of all the
things that had gone wrong and could never be changed, enveloped it, never to lift again. Yet after some time—whether a fragment of an hour or another lonely stretch of a century—uncertainly, out of the soundless void, timid noises began to emerge: the whispering of trees, the barking of far-off dogs, the chirping of a canary on a windowsill, the trembling voice of an old woman talking, sighing, imploring someone named Tolenka to please understand, to please forgive, she had never thought he would need them again and she had been so afraid to live with all those monstrosities, but even so, she would never have done it had she not believed that it was the best thing for him, getting rid of it all, yes, she had always feared his pictures would lead to no good, and was it not her duty as a mother to keep him safe, to help him make the best of his life, to steer him away from his father’s fate—

  He lifted his head, remembering his mother’s presence for the first time. Her eyes were moist; her hand hovered over his, ready to descend at any instant.

  “My father’s fate?” he repeated blankly. “Was that why? You destroyed all my work because you were afraid I’d end up like my father?”

  And as he spoke, he already felt the disbelief, the emptiness, the grief inside him turning into anger—anger of a heart-searing, soul-wrenching kind he had never known before, anger at this pathetic little woman with a frightened face who had once given him life.

  “You don’t know what I went through with your father, Tolenka,” she whispered.

  “What does it matter what you went through? Times have changed. You don’t honestly think they throw people in jail for paintings these days?”

  She pulled her hand away. “You mustn’t talk to me like that,” she said. “You’ve never heard the whole story, you can‘t—”

  He felt as if he did not know who she was.

  “What story?” he said, standing up, furiously pushing his chair away. “You and my father had the misfortune of living through a very dark period. He was arrested, they broke him, he committed suicide. Tragic things like that happened all the time in the thirties—not in the sixties or the seventies! And it certainly didn’t give you the right to throw away—”

  “It wasn’t about that, Tolya!” she cried. “Your father wasn’t arrested, I just—”

  She stopped abruptly, searched the table with frantic eyes, lifted a cup of cold tea to her lips. The cup rattled loudly when she put it down, breaking the silence.

  He stared at her.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said slowly. “I always thought you produced that tale for the sake of a ten-year-old boy, but you’ve actually managed to convince yourself, haven’t you? Hospitalized for years, is that right? With the flu! My God, and to think I never realized how the thirties warped your mind! Just what kind of a world do you live in, Mother, what kind of a sick, delusional—”

  She sat averting her eyes, her hands clasped tightly together.

  “Not the flu,” she said, and her voice was different now, low and brittle. Taken aback by the change of her tone, he swallowed the harsh words on his tongue and leaned to look closer into her face. The early twilight had laid deep shadows along her cheeks and in the corners of her mouth, stamping her features with the unfamiliar, stark, sorrowful look of some fifteenth-century saint. Suddenly uneasy, he reached for the lamp switch.

  “Please, no light,” she said in the same unrecognizable voice. “It’s… easier this way. Sit down, Tolya. I didn’t mean to tell you, I always felt it was my burden alone, it just slipped out…. But I guess it’s time you knew.”

  “Knew what?” he asked, his throat dry. He remained standing.

  “Your father never was in prison. It’s true. He was… ill, very ill. It happened in Gorky, they had to put him in a hospital.” She swallowed audibly. “A mental hospital. His doctor telephoned me, told me the name of his condition and everything—”

  “But Mama,” he exclaimed in desperation, “don’t you see, they did these things all the time—took people away and lied to their families! The man who called you, I’m sure he wasn’t a doctor, he must have been a—”

  “Tolya,” she said evenly, “don’t you think I considered that? But it was true. I knew it was true. I myself had noticed that he was becoming… well, different. Already in Moscow, he was beginning to say strange things, but I thought he was just being fanciful, joking with me, nothing more. Then, after he moved to Gorky, he became preoccupied with this crazy idea he had, only he didn’t think it was crazy—it was his ‘great discovery,’ it was going to change the world…. He grew so earnest about it, working on it every night, hardly sleeping. It frightened me. He became secretive, too—always worrying that his colleagues would find out and take away his ‘project,’ as he called it.” She was mincing the cake on her plate into chocolate dust with quick, nervous stabs of a spoon, not looking up. “The doctor told me it was common for… for people with his illness to become obsessed with some idea in this way, and that they would work with him, it was a good hospital, he only needed to receive some shock great enough to snap him out of it, and many other things, I forgot a lot of it, I was too upset….”

  A draft of silence passed between them.

  “So how long was he—” he said thickly.

  “Almost three years. October 1939 to May 1942. That was when they released him to work at a military factory. They thought that the war had helped him—that when he heard the country needed him he abandoned all his fantasies at last. I thought so too, until he sent me that last letter. He wrote that he had finally finished his great project but asked me to say nothing about it yet, it was all going to be such a wonderful surprise…. I cried all day, and it was hard, I had to hide it from you because you were so happy—we were to see him in just a few weeks. I remember I so much wanted to believe everything would be well….”

  The shadows lengthened along the kitchen floor, and the tangerine-colored moon, still round but already on the wane, sleepily sailed from behind a roof into the pale sky.

  “His project,” he said quietly. “What was it, do you know?”

  “When they took him away, they found dozens of notebooks in his office, covered front to back with squiggles, drawings of birds, crazy numbers—they could make no sense of them at all. But I always knew what he was trying to do. It started in Moscow, in the early thirties. There was a museum show once, winged suits for people or something, I don’t recall exactly. Your father took you to it, I think, but of course you were too young to remember. Well, something at that show must have impressed him, because that was when he first began to talk about it—whether it was possible for a man to fly without a plane or a parachute or anything—to fly as birds fly. The finest human accomplishment it would be, the perfect exercise of sheer will, he used to say, greater than anything art or science had ever invented, and other eloquent things—I’m not an educated woman, I didn’t understand much, I just laughed, except that he was serious all along….” She looked up, and her eyes were intent, desperate, searching for some sign in her son’s face. “After… after he died, Tolenka, my greatest fear was that… that you also… because the doctor warned me it could happen again, these kinds of illnesses can be passed on… But everything was going so well for a while—and then you started to paint these dark, strange pictures of yours—and I don’t know, it was as if something happened to me, as if every time I looked at them, I was staring at your father’s death, and I grew so afraid, I wanted to make you stop, to make you forget, to make it all disappear, and that was why… They were heavy too, I had to carry them down the stairs, and I was so scared the neighbors might see me…. But please, Tolenka, you were right to give it up, you have a perfect life now, you make us all proud, all these books you write—”

  And still she talked, but her words faded, faded, faded… And as he stood in the darkened kitchen, he saw once again a whirlwind of rainbow-tinted pigeons soaring into the sky over the gray monument of a mournful genius, and a three-year-old boy saying eagerly, “When I grow up, I want to fl
y without machines,” and a decade later, his father framed by a bright, rain-sleeked window, raising his hand in a greeting, then spreading his arms, smiling a joyful smile, a smile of shared triumph—and stepping into the void….

  For so many years he had thought the moment of his maturity had been rooted in suicide and defeat—yet all along it had been nothing but dreams, and hopes, and one proud man who had been mad enough, or brave enough, to believe he could fly, and who had wanted to give this gift to the people he loved, his wife, his son…. And what had he, Anatoly Sukhanov, done with this gift? How had he understood his father’s parting words, “Don’t let anyone clip your wings”—he, a man who had obligingly shed his own wings and then spent decades listlessly watching ugly, atavistic stubs sprout in their stead?

  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.