by Olga Grushin
For a minute Sukhanov stared at the small, light object on his palm, fighting the desire to crush it. Then, setting the cube down, he slowly moved his eyes around the room until they rested heavily on Belkin.
Belkin must have felt the gaze.
“Patience, only a moment longer,” he said cheerfully, glancing up. “I can’t find the cakes, but the water’s already—”
Noticing the expression on Sukhanov’s face, he stopped uncertainly.
“Nina…” Sukhanov said in a halting voice. “Nina was here, wasn’t she?”
Belkin hesitated briefly, then nodded.
“She was. She came to the opening last Wednesday.”
“I never told her about your opening, Leva,” said Sukhanov stonily.
Belkin placed the glasses of pale tea on the desk, dropped a sugar cube into each, pushed one glass toward Sukhanov, and pulled up a chair.
“I know,” he said. “But you did tell her you ran into me, and she called me the next day—got my new phone number through Viktor Yastrebov. As it turns out, both of us have been visiting him from time to time, bringing him food and such, now that he is old and sick and all alone…. Anyway, we met that same Sunday for a stroll, and I mentioned the exhibition. She said she wanted to come, but she thought you’d be upset if you knew. Look, Tolya, I’m really sorry I didn’t say anything earlier, it’s just that I wasn’t sure…”
His words trailed off. Staring into space, Sukhanov took a sip of his tea. And then, as the hot, sweet, tasteless liquid slid down his throat, he felt a new kind of calm descending on him—a calm not of detachment but rather of understanding, as if in the last few hours some invisible yet great change had been secretly wrought in the very fabric of his being and he could contemplate his life without bitterness. Perhaps it was a calm born of emptiness and despair; it hardly mattered now, he supposed. For a while he sat without moving or speaking, marveling at the swelling of the tranquil wave inside him. Then, looking up, he saw Belkin watching him tensely across the close dimness of the room.
“Leva, it’s all right,” he said. “Really, it is. Though I suppose I would have been angry a few days ago.” He smiled without mirth. “She said she was home with a migraine all day Sunday, and on your opening night she told me she was going to a play with a girlfriend. She never mentioned Viktor either…. But I’m glad that she came to see you. I should have been here too.”
A melting sugar cube tinkled lightly against a glass. Belkin blinked, whether relieved or embarrassed, Sukhanov could not tell.
“Well, you are here now,” he said, “that’s what matters. Anyway, to tell you the truth, this whole exhibition affair isn’t working out quite as I imagined. And the strange thing is, having Nina at the opening made it… well, worse. I mean, here I am, milling about with a few of my friends who have all seen my works before, chatting about their children and vacations, nothing in particular, yet all the while basking in this pleasant glow of being somehow important—the hero of the day, you know? And suddenly the door opens, and she walks in, beautiful as always and so young-looking, in these silver earrings she used to wear in her student days, and she looks at everything so seriously, almost urgently—and after a while, I begin to see this slight hint of disappointment in her face…. Oh, of course she was very kind and polite, and we had tea and talked about art, and all seemed well. But after she left, after everyone left, I looked at my paintings through her eyes, and I saw just a handful of second-rate landscapes stuck in a basement.”
“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself,” Sukhanov said quickly. “After all, you said yourself, it’s a beginning—”
“Please, what beginning, who am I fooling?” said Belkin, waving his hand. “No, I’m just not capable of anything original. Actually, I’ve known it for a long time, Nina’s visit only made it… final somehow. Funny, the way life turns out. It seems only yesterday that the late fifties were here, and we were constantly on fire with our work, proud of our poverty, brave in our shared struggle against the old, drunk with our newfound gift of expression…. You remember, don’t you, Tolya? Our days flowed into nights, our nights were endless, and every windbag who talked about Russia, God, and art was a brother, every artist a genius, every painting a miracle—and the world did not know us yet, but we were together, we were brilliant, we were destined to light up the skies…. And then you blink, and all at once you yourself are in your fifties, still poor but no longer so sure of all those eternal truths, and alone now, because most of your old friends have crawled into their own nooks and crannies of misery and your wife has left to have children with another man. And on occasion, when you are hungover and the only thing in your kitchen is pickled cabbage, even the colors of the rainbow all begin to seem dirty and drab—and that’s when the world finally chooses to turn in your direction, and you suddenly find that after all these years, all you have to show for yourself are a few hard-earned calluses on your hands and a landscape with lilac bushes. And then all those things that seemed so earth-shattering in the past, all those experiments with religion, eroticism, surrealism, abstraction, all those exuberant departures from the commonplace, appear for what they are in the harsh light of the day-self-indulgent exercises in passing time, pathetic imitations of fashions the West tried and discarded decades ago. And you realize that all our names are fated to become only a condensed and condescending footnote to Russian history, lumped together under the heading ‘Khrushchev’s Thaw,’ and… What? Why are you looking at me like that? Wasn’t always so eloquent, was I? I guess I’ve had a lot of practice talking to myself over the years.”
“It’s not that,” Sukhanov said hesitantly. “It’s just that I didn’t expect you to sound so… Well, it almost seems as if you are regretting your life, the choices you made.”
“Ah, that would be rather ironic, wouldn’t it? After all, I despised you so much for quitting. In the beginning especially, when I kept seeing your dreadful articles in every magazine and hearing from former colleagues about your dizzying climb up the ladder of success—and I had to survive by loading and unloading vegetable trucks. Alla always complained that my clothes stank of rotting potatoes, I remember…. Then Yastrebov took me to a doctor acquaintance of his, and for a bottle of brandy this fellow provided me with a certificate stating that I was mentally ill. After that I lived on state allowance, pretending to be mad. Of course, it was very little money, but things were finally getting better—I had all my time to myself, I could paint all I wanted—and then Alla left me. And it’s strange—I never really thought I loved her that much, but after she was gone it all somehow started to fall apart. Maybe I just grew out of my twenties, I don’t know…. Anyway, that was when I first suspected that what I had taken for talent had been only youth and energy, nothing more. I puzzled over my last conversation with you and your decision, and, well… I began to have doubts. And yes, Tolya, I still do, perhaps more than ever—so much so that at times I almost wish… I mean, look at the two of us! At least you have your family, and I… I…”
Averting their eyes from each other, they drank their weak tea.
“It would be nicer with lemon, I think,” said Belkin, lifting his glass to the light. “I used to have one somewhere, but it’s gone now…. By the way, I went to Malinin’s retrospective the other day. Saw that blue portrait of Nina. Amazing, isn’t it, that even he was capable of capturing beauty on that one occasion. She made a wonderful muse, I suppose.” He smiled, but it seemed to Sukhanov that he detected a quiver of strain in the corners of Belkin’s mouth; then Belkin leaned back, and the shadows around his lips shifted and dissipated.
Sukhanov nodded. “My first truly original work was inspired by her,” he said. “You remember the one with her reflection in the train window? The one lost in the Manège disaster?”
“Well, life plays funny jokes. Maybe it’s now gracing some bureaucrat’s office.”
“Ah, sort of like your Leda gracing mine!”
No longer smiling, Belkin careful
ly set down his glass. “That was the best thing I did in my life,” he said. “Perhaps the only thing. You really have it in your office?”
“I did for a while…. Well, to be honest, for a day only. Nina put it up, but…”
“I understand,” Belkin said, and looked away.
The light moved again, and for one instant the face Sukhanov discerned through the shadows was that of a young man with dark, mournful, beautiful eyes—the face he had known twenty-five years ago. Feeling suddenly, unaccountably sad, he swirled the lukewarm liquid in his glass, its brim browned with traces of countless lonely teatimes, and thought of that painting, Lev’s gift to him and Nina on their wedding day, a mythical nocturnal landscape with water lilies on the surface of a still lake, and a gleaming swan, and a shepherd, and a young nude sitting on the shore, her back tense, her face averted, her honey-colored body strangely reminiscent of someone he knew….
“You know, Leva,” he said, “there is something I’ve always wanted to ask you. Well, no, not always—it’s really something I’ve wondered about only recently—or maybe… It doesn’t matter.” Lev’s gaze was on him now, still and black and deep, and he could feel his heart fluttering in his throat. He glanced down; his hands, resting on the edge of the desk, trembled slightly. “Were you and Nina lovers when I met her?” he asked.
Lev recoiled as if slapped.
“No, listen,” said Sukhanov softly, “I won’t be jealous or angry, I just need to know. You see, how can I explain this… For many years I thought I understood my life so well—it was all so clear, so even, so well arranged. But recently… recently things have been happening to me, and, well… Please, I just really need to know.”
There was no sound, for one moment, then another, then yet another…. When Lev spoke, his voice was hoarse. “I loved her, Tolya. You knew that, of course. I always loved her. We met when we were in the seventh grade, and I loved her then.”
“And did she… Was she in love with you?”
He turned away. “We were children,” he said. “But yes, we thought we were in love. We started seeing each other when we were eighteen, the summer after the exams, and stayed together all through our student years. It was innocent, of course—walks in the moonlight, kisses in the shadow of blossoming jasmine branches, trembling whispers, clumsy poems—you know how first love is. Then, when I was finally appointed to my teaching position, I asked her to marry me, and that was when the quarrels began. She had all these romantic notions about my becoming the next Chagall or Kandinsky, but she said I didn’t push myself hard enough, she wanted me to be more daring, she would marry me only if I showed her what I was capable of…. She could be very cruel at times—she knew how to make me feel so small. Of course, she only hoped to inspire me, but… Well, she was young then. Finally, at the end of 1956 I think it was, shortly after you’d met her, we quarreled horribly for the last time, and that was that. I saw her again only when all of us went boating the next summer, and you were with her then.”
They were silent for a while. Suddenly Belkin clasped his hand to his forehead.
“Of course,” he exclaimed, “that’s where they are!” Throwing open a desk drawer, he rifled through its depths and extracted a plastic container with a few stale honey cakes inside. “Might as well add some more water to our tea while I’m at it.”
“Please,” said Sukhanov, no longer listening. He was remembering the day in March of 1957 when Nina had stopped by his studio, and for the first time he saw it all. She had not been interested in him or his works—she was there to seek a reconciliation with Lev, for she and Lev were not speaking, and she was too proud, and he was Lev’s best friend; and the only reason she agreed to come to his place was that he had suggested he would invite Lev along, and the only reason she went was that she felt offended at Lev’s refusal—the refusal he had invented. And later, in the crammed shabbiness of his room, as she looked at his secret paintings, at the dark fantasies he had woven for her, already for her, only for her, she said, “I understand, he really isn’t a very good painter,” and she cried—and the angry tears she shed and the broken words she spoke were not meant for her father, just as their first kiss, that wonderful, leafy, sunny kiss on the lake, was not meant for him. No, they were all meant for the man she loved and the artist who failed her, the ever-present, invisible shadow dogging their steps through all their museum walks, all their conversations, all their memories being created—the same man who now, thirty years later, was nervously brewing him a cup of dreadful tea over a rusty sink. And slowly, as more recollections claimed him, all the accidentally intercepted glances and bitten lips and bright, insincere intonations slid into place, all the uncertainties were made certain, all the blank spots colored—and by the time Belkin turned to him with a new glass of colorless tea, he finally knew the truth, and his whole young past with Nina, with its sleepless rambles through the city, its flights of happiness, its ecstatic dreams, shifted, changed in tint, became dimmer, sadder, more transparent, and at the same time more real.
“That painting of yours,” he said quietly. “It was about us, was it not? Nina was Leda, you were the shepherd boy, her youthful, earthly love—and I was the swan, the winged divinity come to take her away with the force of my art. Except that she loved my art, but she never loved me, did she? She loved you. And to think that I quit painting for her, to make her happy…”
He thought now of the evening when he had told Nina of his decision, and of her spending the whole night kneeling in her thick white gown, like some medieval saint in fervent prayer, before the stacks of canvases in their room, looking at this or that one in the jaundiced light of the lamp, and crying, and begging him not to do it, promising that she would be stronger, that she would never complain, repeating over and over that he had no right to walk away from his destiny, that he had so much fire, so much power in him…
“Tolya, what nonsense is this?” Belkin exclaimed. “Of course she loved your art, and she was very upset about your decision to quit, but—”
“You spoke to her about it? She never mentioned it.”
The spoon clanged in Belkin’s glass.
“She came by my place the day your article was published. She had the magazine with her. She… she was crying, she needed someone to talk to….”
The unnatural quiet reigned in Sukhanov’s heart. They all, in the end, had their own betrayals to live with.
“Perhaps,” he said, standing up, “there has been enough reminiscing for one night. I should go now. Thanks for the tea.”
“Wait,” Belkin said, his eyes ravaged by guilt. “What I’m trying to tell you is that Nina made a choice. She chose you, art or no art, don’t you see?”
Briefly he thought of telling Belkin that Nina had left him, then changed his mind.
“You know,” he said, stopping in the low doorway, “what I said just now, about quitting for Nina… Of course, I believed it at the time, and it was a big part of it, I’m sure, but… I’ve realized a few things over the last week or two, and I think you were right all along, Leva—ultimately, I was afraid. Not so much of prisons or poverty or even unhappiness, though I thought about all that—we all did…. But mostly, I was afraid of failure. I was so terrified that my reality would not measure up to my dreams, that I would never quite fulfill my promise, that years later I would end up—”
“Like me,” said Belkin. He was looking past Sukhanov now, at the landscapes hanging on the walls of the next room. “Ironic, isn’t it? I guess one discovers many ironies in one’s middle age. Because if any of us had real talent, it was you, Tolya, always you—more than a talent, a gift, perhaps even genius…”
A small, clear voice spoke dispassionately from a darkened corner of Sukhanov’s mind: “Geniuses don’t sell out.” Suddenly protective of his hard-won serenity, he ordered the voice silent.
“Geniuses don’t quit,” he said aloud.
“Geniuses are human. Humans quit,” said Belkin. “Andrei Rublev stopped pain
ting for decades.”
“Andrei Rublev seems to be everyone’s favorite proof of some pet theory these days. He makes a good candidate, since he probably never existed.”
“Oh, I don’t mean the historical Rublev. I’m talking about Tarkovsky’s Rublev. Brilliance, sheer brilliance, from the very first scene. Imagine, a fifteenth-century inventor who dreams of flying leaps off a church steeple on clumsy artificial wings and smashes to his death, yet somehow one feels his triumph, if only for a second! My God, if ever there was a sure sign that times are changing, this film being allowed in our theaters is it. Haven’t you seen it?”
Something caught in Sukhanov’s throat. He shook his head mutely.
“But you must!” Belkin cried. “Everyone must! I saw it last week, and I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s one genius envisioned by another. Here is Rublev, radiant as a god, capable of turning white walls into pastures of paradise at the lightest touch of his brush, yet refusing his calling because the world around him is mean and cruel and ignorant, because people kill each other, because the rulers are unworthy, because there seems to be no place for beauty under the sun. And so for years he wanders the dark, demented Russia—the greatest artist our soil has ever formed, alone, silent, unrecognized—until one day, bent with age, he meets a boy, a mere boy, who is struggling to create the most glorious church bell in the land. And something changes in Rublev, and after all that time, he goes to Moscow to paint our Kremlin…. And here is the fascinating thing, Tolya. The black-and-white film ends with this incredible flowering of color—Rublev’s actual frescoes and icons, the culmination of his lifelong search—the most important three minutes, really, in the whole three hours. But since the story appeared to be over, the crowds were leaving the theater in a trudging herd, never even casting a glance at the screen. And so I sat alone in the theater, and the lights began to come on while pale angels and saints were still passing before me, and I thought, yes, you were right that day, our world really is dark and ignorant, just as it was in Rublev’s time—but you were also wrong, because in spite of all the injustices, and horrors, and stupidity, beauty always survives, and there will never be a higher mission than making the world richer and purer by adding more beauty to it, by making one single person cry like a child at the age of fifty-three….”
