The Dream Life of Sukhanov

FOURTEEN

On the way up, Sukhanov had to share the elevator with an unsavory character. His mind aching with increasingly futile computations of dates, he avoided looking at the man too closely, only catching out of the corner of his eye a soiled denim jacket, a shaved head, and a salmon-colored scarf wrapped around a bulging neck. The man exited without a word—Sukhanov did not bother to see on what floor—and the doors slid shut, revealing, spread diagonally on the inside, the freshly scratched word “Aquarium,” the name of some semi-underground band, he seemed to recall. He shook his head at this unprecedented instance of vandalism so close to his inner sanctum, checked the time (it was almost nine o‘clock), and for a moment studied the twisted corpse of a cigarette in the corner. Then it occurred to him that the thin thread of greenish light trembling in the gap above the floor had not moved and that the elevator remained where it had been. Impatiently he jabbed at the button with a fading figure eight, and was startled when the doors opened instantly: it seemed he was already on his floor. Frowning, he stepped out onto the landing, wondering mechanically what business the normally staid Petrenko family from across the hall could have with such a shady visitor—and was just in time to see the edge of the man’s salmon-colored scarf disappearing inside his own apartment, admitted, he could briefly see, by an unfamiliar young girl who slouched smoking in the eerily wavering shadows of the entrance hall.

He stood frozen for a few heartbeats. The girl was about to shut the door when he shook off his stupor and, his feelings dangerously suspended, strode toward her with a demand for an explanation rising to his lips—but before he could deliver it, his hearing was assailed by a cacophony of voices and laughter and the jangling of guitar strings touched by an absent but practiced hand, all seemingly issuing from his very own living room. Taking an uncertain step inside, past the girl watching him with indifference, he saw, in the corridor’s dim, hazy, diminishing depths, a crowd of people talking excitedly, some holding glasses, most with cigarettes, all casting grotesque giant shadows in the unsteady light of candles—yes, endless candles, tall and short, dripping and flickering madly, perched on counters and along shelves and even on the floor….

He stared without moving, and the first thought flashing ridiculously through his disoriented mind was that the Burykins’ missing party had somehow relocated itself here, with its aged wines and aging dignitaries and all the rest…. But already he saw that this crowd was young and strange, and the candles leapt about out landishly, and the heavy smells of incense and some exotic spice drifted through the air in dizzying waves, and the darkly luminous space looked cavernous and foreign and not at all like an ordinary Moscow apartment—and in another breath he realized that this was all nonsense, this could never be his home, and in truth, the elevator must have taken him to the wrong floor after all, for hadn’t the concierge warned him about its recent malfunctions?

Trying to inhale evenly, he stepped back across the threshold and checked the bronze number displayed above the peephole on the door.

The number was fifteen. His number.

He considered it in seething silence, gathering his thoughts. He had told his daughter he would not be back until midnight, he remembered. Her name—Ksenya, Ksenya, oh Ksenya!—throbbed in his temples like a quickly advancing migraine.

“Well, are you coming in, or what?” drawled the girl in the doorway. “They’re starting in just a few seconds.” She pulled at the cigarette with studied carelessness and added inexplicably, “Good thing you brought your own tie. I hear they’ve run out.”

For a moment he debated ordering this insolent hussy out of his house—ordering all these people out, in fact, and flipping on all the light switches, and blowing out all the candles, and flinging open all the windows to air out the disgusting sweet smells, and putting a stop to the irritating singing he could now hear floating on the current of disparate guitar riffs, a man’s reedy voice bleating trite lyrics, something about great poets dying tragically before their time…. But immediately he thought he could try to confront Ksenya first—shame her before all her friends perhaps—and maybe, having trapped her against the wall with her repentance, finally manage to have the talk with her that he had been postponing for months if not years, ever since she had begun to drift away, hiding behind her writing, her music, her books, who knew what else…. Suddenly decisive, with a nod to the sullen girl, he walked inside, an anonymous, harmless guest, one of many, peering into the near-darkness through his fogging glasses.

Since the singing had started, the chatting guests had begun to fall silent and gravitate toward the music, and now only one couple was left whispering in the twinkling twilight of the hallway: a slender girl with a pool of night in place of her face and a long-haired man in a leather jacket and a tie slicing across his chest like a precise slash. Taking a few more steps, Sukhanov reached the edge of a dense crowd of badly dressed youths spilling over from the living room into the corridor, some standing, others sitting cross-legged on the bare floor, rhythmically bobbing their heads like Chinese dolls, their lips soundlessly mouthing the words of the song. It was even darker here, and stuffy, and as he tried to squeeze inside, he stepped on a few feet and possibly hands, was shushed at, and in the end found himself wedged somewhere on the outskirts, with his face awkwardly pressed into the broad back of a sturdy woman whose long, slovenly hair smelled of bitter almonds, and still unable to see above the swaying heads into the room, from which an angry young voice threw the borrowed words into the smoky silence:

“Good, isn’t he?” someone whispered into Sukhanov’s ear, spitting with enthusiasm.

Carefully Sukhanov turned his head and encountered the yellowish grin of the man from the elevator, inches away from his face.

“Not too original,” he replied dryly. “That’s by Vysotsky, if I’m not mistaken?”

“Oh, he’s just warming up,” the man whispered back, not taking offense. “He always starts with a thing or two by Vysotsky, as a sort of tribute to the fallen. He’ll sing his own stuff next. So, what’s your favorite?”

His face seemed insistently familiar, but Sukhanov was learning to disregard the feeling.

“Never heard any of it,” he said with distaste. “Who is he, anyway?”

The invisible singer’s voice drifted toward him as if from far away:

“Ah, stumbled in here by accident, did we now?” said the man from the elevator, his eyes glittering madly. “Well, be prepared to have your world shattered. This here is the great Boris Tumanov in person. Recognize the name, eh?”

Sukhanov remembered the drawn curtains, the echo of music, Ksenya lying on her bed with her eyes closed—yesterday, or the day before yesterday, or years ago, who knew any longer….

“My daughter likes him,” he said in a fallen voice.

The song ended, and everyone clapped, and the candles wavered.

“Ah yes, girls, they all like him, why wouldn’t they?” the man whispered confidentially, his hot breath scalding Sukhanov’s ear. “Naturally, he is taken, and twice over: has a wife and a girlfriend. His wife, well, she’s kind of a youthful mistake, never even comes to his concerts, but Ksiushka—Ksiushka is a different story altogether, these are her digs, you know—a first-class girl, likes to have a good time, if you get my meaning, even if her parents are really—”

“I…” said Sukhanov, a scream tightly walled up in his throat, “I think I have a headache.”

The man ceased whispering and, nodding, proceeded to fish for something in his pockets, but Anatoly Pavlovich did not see him any longer. All he saw was darkness.

And so perhaps—perhaps it had all been in vain. Perhaps she had already walked so far out of his and Nina’s lives that they had nothing more to give her, and now she moved, unrelenting, proud, and all alone, along a path he could not distinguish through the shadows, with waves of dreamy poems splashing through her head, a married underground idol for a lover, and a burning contempt for his own world, a world of the past, a world of acquiescence and accommodation for the sake of survival—and who was to say which of them had been right, and what intervention was powerful enough to make them understand one another? I’ve lost her, I’ve lost her, I’ve lost her forever, little hammers of despair beat inside his heart. And so piercing was his anguish that, without resisting, without thinking, he accepted two odd-looking bluish aspirin from the grinning elevator man, swallowed them with difficulty, his mouth dry, and then stood, closing his eyes in order not to see the pulsating sea of avid faces, stood waiting for his headache to subside, for the nightmare to end….

But as he waited, out of the confusion about him, out of the chaos in his mind, a voice rose, Boris Tumanov’s voice—the voice his daughter loved, or thought she loved, or hoped she loved—and despite himself, he found himself listening. And now this brittle, sensitive, floating voice began to sing other songs, unusual songs, songs that flowed without a perceptible melody, one verse spilling into another, words metamorphosing in mid-syllable, sometimes drowning despondently in the troubled strumming, sometimes soaring above a quiet lull—songs that were at times incoherent, at times jarring, occasionally lyrical and occasionally terrifying, but always gripping, always exacting a toll paid in raw emotion on the roads to their meaning—songs about the true color of souls dissected on a laboratory table in a secret government project; or a one-winged angel caught and exhibited in a cage in a Moscow zoo until set free by a drunken janitor; or a despairing genius walking on shards of glass to reach the gold at the end of a rainbow, only to meet there another unhappy, lost person with bleeding feet; or a saint who had spent all his years preparing for his grand entry into heaven, only to discover on his deathbed that heaven was not some blue expanse full of angelic string quartets and opalescent clouds, but an eternity granted for reliving one’s happiest moments, and that he had none to remember; or an old man who had wasted what talent he had for nothing, but now, at the very conclusion of his long, joyless, servile life, finally found the courage to fly—and was unable to stop crawling….

And the more he listened, the more his head swam and the more he knew these songs to be unlike anything he had ever heard, and yet in spirit—in their high-pitched mix of hope and anger and sadness and desire to change the world, to bring beauty into it—so much like the talks that had kept him up for dizzying twenty-hour stretches at the blessed gatherings of his own youth, his slightly postponed, second youth of 1956; and the intensely expectant faces around him were the feverishly serious faces of his past companions, his teachers, his friends, his brothers in awaited martyrdom if need be; and the very air in this suddenly unrecognizable place, this oddly churchlike place with smoking incense and dancing candles, was trembling once more with the faith of old. The faith he himself had upheld for a few short, inspired, brilliant years, the best years of his life maybe—the faith he had lost when faced, at Christ’s age of thirty-three, in the Year of Our Lord 1962, with his own fork in the road, his own choice between crucifixion and… and…

He caught himself tottering on the brink of the private hell to which he had long ago canceled all admission, and hastily opened his eyes, only to discover that they had always been open. The disembodied voice that had awoken such happy, such painful echoes inside him had faded away, and applause was sweeping through the world. He too clapped, trying to read his watch as he did so, but the hands seemed broken, rotating loosely and changing direction now and again. All the same, he knew hours had passed, for his soul was spent. Just as the invisible singer was announcing that in conclusion he would present the promised performance piece and nonsensically asking everyone to “please put on the ties,” Sukhanov made his unsteady way out of the press of excited humanity, back into the deserted corridor.

Things were largely amiss here, he saw quickly. Candles, left without observation, were jumping mischievously from counter to counter; a few paintings had turned upside down, sending villages, forests, and lakes down the skies in rivulets of running watercolors; nearby, a flock of horses had burst out of their frame and trotted gracefully, hooves up, along the underside of a bookshelf. As he walked, he tripped over shadows that lay on the ground like unswept leaves. Worse yet, most objects had a shimmering, hazy glow about them, making him suspect that as soon as he turned his back on them, they ceased to be what they pretended and transformed into something else entirely—a shoe into an umbrella, an umbrella into an imp, an imp into a cloud—or maybe even slipped altogether into some different, fourth, dimension, melting forever in the labyrinths of existence. In a way, it seemed only appropriate that everything should be so strange and uncertain, but his head hurt more than ever, his heart tingled unpleasantly, and he felt an urgent need to immerse himself in a pool of quiet and sleep for a while—or watch the colors flitting like zigzagging dragonflies across the underside of his eyelids.

Haltingly he moved deeper and deeper, farther and farther, with each step collecting the large, humid roses that fell off the wallpaper onto his upturned palms, then offering them, in one luxurious, aromatic bouquet, to a short-haired adolescent girl in a yellow dress who at that moment chanced to walk toward him, her small boyish face as familiar as everyone else’s (for, of course, he had seen them all before), her lips half open in laughter. The girl gave him a wide-eyed look and, letting the flowers drop to the floor, ran off, shouting a name he had seemingly heard before: “Ksiusha! Ksiusha!”

He followed her with tired eyes, then, crushing the delicate rose blossoms under his feet, turned into an alley, passed through a doorway almost invisible under the graffiti, rose up an evil-smelling staircase to the third floor, and after checking again the address scrawled on a tram ticket, knocked on one of the peeling doors. A fierce fellow with a spade-shaped beard let him in. Murmuring hellos, Anatoly navigated the smoky, sparsely furnished space of the crowded room and sank into a moaning couch at the back, almost out of sight, feeling a bit awkward because he knew only a couple of people here by name and no one at all closely, and the acquaintance who had invited him was running late. For almost an hour he sat quietly, nursing a glass of vodka and listening, with growing interest soon turning into excitement, to an older man with a nervously agile face, whose place this was, softly explaining his theory of art’s demise.

“From its very birth at the dawn of humanity,” the man was saying in a mild voice bred of generations of intellectuals, “pictorial art has served two separate functions: ritualistic and decorative. In its primitive stages, art amounted to, on the one hand, drawing pictures of slain animals on cave walls to ensure some friendly spirit’s help in a hunt, and on the other, fashioning necklaces out of seashells to make savage women more bearable to look at. Gradually, as man matured, these two original functions—communicating with the spirit world and making the present world more pleasant to live in—crystallized into what I see as art’s two great raisons d‘être, if you will: the search for the Divine and the search for Beauty. In the Dark Ages, when man was weighed down by superstitions, the Divine predominated at the expense of Beauty, but at the very peak of artistic development—and by that, of course, I mean the age of the Renaissance—the two searches grew more and more intertwined until they became one. And for one brief moment God was Beauty, nature was God, and the Divine and the Beautiful could be found equally in Titian’s voluptuous nudes and in Mantegna’s emaciated saints. This miraculous balance lasted hardly more than a century, yet it brought about a flowering of genius so extraordinary that it sustains us to this day. But inevitably, as the world moved on, life gained the upper hand over art, and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with their new mantras of enlightenment and reason, led to the beginning of the end. As art’s two purposes drifted apart once again, creation found itself boxed into increasingly narrow compartments: portrait, epic painting, genre painting, religious painting, landscape, still life…. Then, with the advent of our own monstrous age of machines and secularism, Beauty was killed by industrialization, God was declared persona non grata by so-called progressive thinkers, and thus, in a blink of time, both higher artistic purposes lost all meaning. What are we left with? A sad bunch of labels and occasional pathetic attempts to recover at least something of art’s previous glory, either by desperate proclaimers of art for art’s sake, who try to restore Beauty but invariably end up painting poodles and shepherdesses or the aesthetic equivalent thereof, or by eager revolutionaries who seek the Divine in a red banner of humanity, hoping to use art for the common good as if it were a loaf of bread or a pair of boots—needless to say, in vain, for a purpose does not become sacred merely by virtue of being noble.”

“So why continue to paint at all if art is dead?” the bearded man said, scowling.

“Christ was also dead once,” replied the other sternly. “It is precisely art’s resurrection that must become your mission as artists today.”

Loudly they cheered, and toasted each other’s health and palettes, and drank, and passed around the bottle, and drank again, and someone went off to find a jazz record a friend had just brought from Prague, and someone else was beginning to talk about a book of reproductions of some crazy Spanish artist he liked; but amid the general exuberance, no one had thought to ask the most important question—the only question really, as I saw it.

“How?” I said in an undertone, and when no one heard me, asked again, this time shouting over the noise, “How can we resurrect art? What are we supposed to do?”

Immediately everyone fell silent and turned toward me, perhaps trying to recall exactly who I was and who had brought me here—and just then the front door opened, and my long-awaited acquaintance walked in. Seeing them all looking at me, he said happily, with that radiant gift of a smile he possessed, “Ah, good, you’ve all met Tolya already.” And instantly, amid the erupting shouts of “Finally!” and “Levka, come here!” and “Lev Borisovich, do us the honor of accepting this glass of disgusting home brew!” my momentous question was forgotten.

Or rather, not forgotten but postponed, for after that exulted, inebriated night, I too became a regular at Yastrebov’s place. And all through the spring of 1956 we met at least weekly, and sometimes more often, and talked about history and Russia and life and death and, above all, art, the subject closest to our hearts—talked while perpetually drunk with exhilaration and daring and exhaustion, talked until tiny shards of smashed stars visible through a bleary window dissipated in the chilly white haze of another sunrise. And when we grew hoarse, we listened to jazz, the music of our private revolution, the sounds of its saxophones and trumpets filling our cramped quarters like gigantic, slowly unwinding golden coils, the sounds of its pianos soothing like cold fingers massaging away a headache; or excitedly passed around reproductions of Western painters, absently brought from abroad by well-fed and oblivious well-wishers with their diplomatic leather briefcases, or surreptitiously torn, by all of us in turn, out of those splendid art volumes we were allowed to handle briefly at the Lenin Library; or else discussed in half-whispers the precious nuggets of past truths mined collectively out of recent newspaper articles and our own, frequently misunderstood and misremembered, childhoods, comparing stories of grandfathers’ and fathers’ arrests—and sometime in the course of that breathtaking, galloping year, I was presented with the magnificent gift of Viktor Yastrebov’s dream.

He was always the most eloquent of us all, our teacher, our leader, our host; but one night in the early summer his mind seemed to soar as never before, and he talked about art being reborn like a phoenix, rising from its own ashes in a sublime union of the earthly and the divine—a union, he said, that was possible only here, in the one truly mystical land, and only now, as the country broke out of the confines of its dark, spiritually impoverished past. He talked about our duty as artists to find Beauty without and God within, and then carry our vision to the world—“For Russia shall become the new Italy, and ours will be the next Renaissance!”—and his words spread fire through our veins and wound up our souls. Lev alone sat silent through the hours that to me felt like one brief, dazzling, inspired flight: toasting with us, and nodding, but visibly unmoved.

We parted earlier than usual that night, each of us feeling that anything said or done after Yastrebov’s outburst would diminish the power of his generous message to us. By chance, Lev and I fell into step on the stairs and proceeded together along the deserted street.

“You looked bored tonight,” I said to him, almost with dislike. “Don’t you agree with what Yastrebov was saying?”

I had first encountered Lev Belkin a good half-decade before. Three years my junior, he too had attended the Surikov Institute, and although we had not known each other formally, our subsequent acquaintance caused me to extract a vague memory of seeing him between lectures in corridors the color of disease—I in my last year of classes, he in his second. In 1955, having graduated with distinction, Belkin was appointed as a teacher at my institute, and now introduced officially, we resumed our daily ritual of passing each other in this or that hallway. In his first week at work, he stopped by my studio, looked at my canvases, and left without saying anything; I found his attitude disdainful and paid him in kind. I did not know what prompted him one day the next spring, unexpectedly, to invite me to a gathering of his friends—perhaps something he thought he had glimpsed in my paintings, or more likely, the atmosphere of reverberating revelations that was sweeping Russia, and us, off our feet. Yet even though I owed to him my inclusion in Yastrebov’s circle, we had failed to become close and rarely, if ever, talked alone.

“It’s not that I disagree,” he replied thoughtfully. “It’s just that… Viktor is a brilliant conversationalist, of course, but… He says we can’t paint honestly until we find God within us—but what does that mean, exactly? What if every time I look too deeply, I keep seeing the devil instead of God? And even if I find God, how do I know for sure He’s the right one? Does it follow I shouldn’t paint until I figure it all out?”

“But aren’t these questions ultimately important?” I asked, taken aback.

“Important? Yes, of course,” he said slowly, “but important only to me as a human being, not to me as an artist. Man has mind and gullet and cock to satisfy, but a true artist has only eyes with which to see the world, soul with which to understand it, and hands with which to render it—nothing else. Sometimes all these words we throw at each other make me feel… I don’t know… suffocated, I guess. I keep thinking, we are not in the business of philosophy, we are in the business of painting—and instead of devoting so much energy to puzzling out some misty theories of God and Beauty, shouldn’t we just paint our hearts out and let the crowds, and the future, make what they will of us and our work?”

We were alone in the whole city, it seemed. Streetlamps along the boulevards glowed with cold lavender fire, dilapidated churches raised their black dragon heads into the clouded skies, and in the darkened islands of parks, drunks who were nightly tossed out of the chaos of Moscow onto vandalized benches moaned in their restless sleep. And it was precisely then that it happened—summoned to life not by all the past communal revelations of our gatherings but by Lev’s simple protest. It was then that I felt a desire to paint once again—paint truly, paint freely, paint as I last had done many years ago.

And for the next half-hour, as the two of us walked through the sleeping universe in wordless companionship, passing pale ghosts of blossoming lilac bushes and dark ghosts of linden trees on our way, I sensed other ghosts following me closely in the flower-scented obscurity, their steps soundless, their smiles fleeting, their lives begging to be spilled out onto canvas—an old Arbat professor in love with Italy, a shy provincial teacher who had tasted of Chagall’s blue soul, a broken man who had once been so passionate about flying, and his fourteen-year-old son who had once dreamt of discovering his own, never-before-seen colors…. And in that one half-hour, I understood with the utmost clarity that from now on, my existence could no longer consist of one protracted apology for my father’s unknown missteps, and that I myself was no longer content to serve as a voluntary cog in a disjointed mechanism by day and dream the unearthly dreams of others by night—and that the only things that counted for me now were a blank page, a brush, and a jewel-bright assortment of oils. And already that night, as Lev, whose own apartment was too far to reach on foot, fell asleep on my bed, I tore a sheet out of an old scrapbook, found some dried-out watercolors, and tried to paint the hour before the sunrise just as I saw it through my wide-open window: a light mist swirling over blackened roofs, a soon-to-be-released warmth in the silent air, a stray cat tiptoeing along a windowsill, and a blissful drunk drawing the red edge of the sun in the lower right corner of the paling skies….

During that summer, I became a less frequent presence at Yastrebov’s gatherings: I was too busy working. Lev came less often as well, not so much because of a difference of opinion, but because, as I heard it joked about repeatedly, he was preoccupied with courting some elusive flirt. After our talk that June night, he and I saw each other alone more and more, but I never asked about the girl, and he never told me—which was why in the end I was so unprepared to meet her when one day in early September he brought her to one of our evenings.

She walked into the room—and I would like to say that my friends fell silent or that the room lit up at once—but they did not, and it did not, and everyone but me continued drinking and shouting, and in any case, such stock phrases of a cheap novelist could never explain exactly how I felt when faced with my own perfect vision of beauty. She walked into the room, tall, thin, and graceful, and so young, a flimsy scarf the color of the sea trailing in the air after her, a pair of fluid spiral earrings dangling along her neck, the proud Lev following a step behind. Not in the least put out by the din, the crumpled newspapers, the heaps of records, the empty bottles, she moved through the room nodding to people and shaking hands and smiling as if she had always known them—and suddenly, there she was with her hand outstretched, her green mermaid eyes fully upon me.

“Nina Malinina,” she said serenely. Her hand felt cool in mine, and in my stunned mind, Pushkin’s immortal tribute to his beloved rang out like a clear crystal bell: Chisteishei prelesti chisteishii obrazets. The purest image of the purest charm.

“Malinina?” I repeated, and sensing that she was about to move on and desperate to hold on to her, hurriedly attempted to open a conversation. “Undoubtedly no connection to Pyotr Malinin,” I said, ignoring Lev’s wild signals behind her back, “that pompous old ass whose lectures I had the misfortune of attending at the Surikov?”

Her eyes, as she looked at me, paled to a grayer shade.

“That pompous old ass,” she said quietly, “is my father….”

“Damn,” said a voice from the distant bottom of a well, “he seems rather badly off.”

And another voice shouted, “Hey, someone, go get Borya! She says this old fogey passed out on the floor here is her father!”

A shuffle ensued, and jolted and prodded in several places at once, Sukhanov made an immense effort to raise his heavy eyelids. At first he felt he was drowning in glimmering, shifting milk, but after a while shapes began to emerge, and presently he found his fifty-six-year-old self lying on the carpet in his study, with a few curious faces leaning over him—and among them, amazingly, an eighteen-year-old Nina, her lips twisted with concern, and behind her, Lev Belkin, bright-eyed and disheveled and eternally young, for some reason clutching a guitar and wearing a wine-red tie. Sukhanov stared for a moment, then decided it was better to keep his eyes closed after all and just lie back, letting a familiar voice wash over him in anxious waves.

“Papa, Papa, are you all right?” the voice was saying. “This wasn’t supposed to happen, they were all going to be gone before you got home…. Oh God, I’m so sorry… Boris had this concert scheduled, but then the auditorium fell through at the last minute, and I thought… Papa, can you even hear me? Shall I call a doctor?”

He opened his eyes again. The contours of the universe had grown sharper. Ksenya, not Nina, was bending over him, and behind her knelt an unfamiliar man, still wearing the tie and, true, bearing some vague resemblance to the young Belkin—but not Belkin.

“Papa, please say something!” Ksenya kept repeating.

Sukhanov blinked and looked closer.

“Is… that… my… tie?” he said laboriously.

Her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh no, I forgot about those!” she said. The young man hastily started to tear the tie from his neck. “You see, Boris needed some ties… and by the way, this is Boris, my boyfriend…. He’s written this piece, performance art, you know—”

“‘Song of the Bureaucrats,’ ” pseudo-Belkin explained contritely.

“Shut up,” Ksenya said in a furious whisper, then went on rapidly. “He didn’t mean any harm, he just… just borrowed the ties last Sunday when he stopped by, and I only found out about it tonight. It was supposed to be a joke, see? Of course, he was very upset when I told him about Valya, but don’t worry, we’ll fix it, and the ties are all here, they’re all fine….”

“I spilled some wine on mine,” said someone from the back of the room. “Sorry.”

And suddenly it was all too much, and he was finding it hard to breathe, and pseudo-Belkin was rushing off to throw open a window, and a short-haired adolescent girl—whose name, he somehow knew, was Lina—was pressing a glass of water to his lips, while Ksenya squeezed his hand and repeated helplessly, in a thin voice, “I’m so sorry, it’s all my fault, you’ve fallen sick because of me—”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much about him, it will wear off shortly,” a new voice pronounced jauntily, and the grinning face framed by the salmon-colored scarf materialized in the fog above Sukhanov. Then matters quickly disintegrated into confusion once again. In the hazy distance, he heard Ksenya asking sharp, accusing questions whose essence he could not follow, and the elevator man protesting in an offended patter, then Ksenya shouting, “Grishka, how could you, you bastard!” and a multitude of other voices rising like mist from the edges of the room….

All of this, however, increasingly failed to concern him, for as he continued to look at the elevator man, he saw something wonderful happening—happening slowly but inexorably. An enormous balloon was emerging carefully, gently out of the man’s shaved head. Strangely, no one else seemed to notice, but that did not bother him in the ieast—in truth, it made the moment all the more precious. Once free, the gorgeous yellow balloon hung in the air for one wavering minute, and then with quiet dignity swam through the open window, rose into the skies, and there turned into a most golden, most perfect full moon.

Yes, of course, thought Anatoly Pavlovich with a happy little smile—and floated out the window after it.