The Dream Life of Sukhanov

SIXTEEN

That night he reclaimed his bedroom, but his sleep was uneasy. The seemingly boundless bed engulfed him like a dark, voluminous shroud, and for hours he wandered, crying softly, in majestic forests of giant fir trees where light barely penetrated through overgrown branches and the air smelled of loneliness, oppression, and for some unfathomable reason, violets—a smell that, surprisingly, remained in the room when, shortly after four in the morning, having just been swallowed by the yawning earth, Sukhanov awoke with a gasp and, throwing off the covers, sat peering into the shadows.

It must have been the aftershave used by Dalevich, he realized unhappily after a minute. For some time he struggled to fall asleep again, but the stillness of the world rang in his ears and the aroma of violets stole furtively into his lungs. Finally, giving up, he got out of bed, walked onto the balcony, and stood suspended between the vast, empty city and the indifferent, autumnal heavens, listening to the rarefied sounds of the night. A distant car briefly tore the fabric of communal sleep; a gust of wind rustled the trees; a crow flew cawing raggedly over the Zamoskvorechie in search of sunrise.

Then he heard a whisper trailing like smoke from somewhere above him.

“My late wife loves to waltz,” an ancient voice said mournfully from the skies.

Recognizing the madman from upstairs, Sukhanov looked up warily, half expecting a burning newspaper to fly into his face; but nothing stirred on the ninth-floor balcony. Unsettled, he was about to go inside when the sad voice spoke again.

“She died forty-seven years ago. She learned to waltz in Paris. Her parents took her there when she was a young girl, before the Revolution. We met there. She still speaks French like an angel, and when she drinks champagne, she purses her lips as if for a kiss. We are celebrating her birthday today—she has just turned ninety”

The words floated down, slow and dry and broken like dead leaves from some great, invisible, heavenly trees, and Sukhanov felt strangely stirred in spite of himself.

“Hello?” he called out gently. “Are you speaking to me?”

“I am speaking to no one,” said the quiet voice after a pause, “but you are welcome to listen. Perhaps you are a nobody yourself. Most people are, after all. They all think I’m crazy, but I’m the only sane one among them. Their lives are tedious and gray, but in my life, marvelous things happen all the time—ah, such adventures! My wife and I, we walked along the Seine the other night. The moon was full over Notre Dame, and she said—”

His voice fell silent abruptly, as if tripped by a sob. Sukhanov pictured the monkey-faced old man crouching in the darkness mere inches above his head, perhaps with his eyes closed, the better to see his madman’s dreams, or maybe staring into the Russian night with its gloomy houses, flickering streetlights, deserted churches, frozen stars, and all the futile, thwarted lives, just like his own, that were at this moment stumbling through thousands of private nightmares under moonlit roofs—and his heart contracted with inexpressible pity

“Forget about Paris,” the hushed voice sighed. “I have better stories to tell.”

And the old man talked, talked of things that were past, or more likely had never happened; and his tone held the measured, heartbroken lucidity of someone who no longer had anyone to listen to him. He talked of riding horses across the rolling hills of Andalusia, and reciting Virgil among the starlit ruins of the Colosseum, and dancing to the golden strains of Strauss on the deck of a yacht as it crossed the purple Mediterranean on its way to some forgotten tiny island of the gods—always the two of them, he and his dead wife, always basking in an illusory glow of Elysian happiness; and gradually, as the old man’s whisper drifted over the sleeping city, Sukhanov found himself slipping away on the current of his own thoughts. The pain of Nina’s near-loss and the joy of her miraculous recovery echoed in an oddly urgent note through his being, and the words from the intercepted letter—Your husband has never known how to love—constricted his heart with a feeling not unlike grief, until he knew he could not brush them aside simply because they chanced to refer to someone else.

The air was already suffused with pale light when the sad voice from the skies finally faded into an exhausted, wordless reverie. Anatoly Pavlovich walked inside, pulled a bag from a closet, and moved through the apartment, collecting shirts and socks. Shortly after noon, he left for the dacha.

The ride lasted almost two hours. Looking up, Sukhanov kept seeing Vadim’s unusually bloodshot, brooding eyes flitting in the rearview mirror. Apart from an occasional clarification of directions—it had been so long since Sukhanov’s last visit to the country that Vadim had forgotten the way—they did not talk. Once the congested heart of the old city with its dusty boulevards, blind bakery windows, and peeling mansions had released them, they began to pass shapeless neighborhoods with gray apartment blocks erupting dismally from empty, ill-kempt lots; then, gradually, as Moscow slid back faster and faster, the spaces between the buildings widened until precipitately, without so much as a comma, they changed into fields, bracketed by fire-tipped rowan trees and punctuated here and there by the exclamation point of a leaning bell tower or an ellipsis of dilapidated log houses—and Sukhanov envisioned the whole drive as one endless, unstructured, rambling sentence, and thinking of Nina, of the girl she had been once, of the woman she was now, was barely able to follow all of its clauses, until, veering from yet another unpaved turn in the local road, they arrived quite suddenly at the long-sought period of his country home.

Sukhanov rolled back his shoulders, exhaled, and climbing out of the car, told Vadim to return tomorrow, around three or four in the afternoon. Then, as the Volga lumbered back to the road, he pushed open the gate in a tall wooden fence and, chased by the frenzied barking of Coco, the neighbor’s fat, asthmatic poodle, walked down the winding path.

Here, in the countryside, the summer still lingered as if charmed. A rich smell of cut grass rose into the air along with a midday chorus of somnolent crickets; bumblebees hovered with contented weightiness under a sky blue as the brightest faience; orchard trees rippled in the breeze, revealing flashes of the light green of Antonovka apples among the dark green of restless leaves. On both sides of the path, tumbling branches of blossoming wild roses, red and white, rained petals onto his feet, and their sweet, heavy scent unexpectedly summoned to his memory a delightful tea Valya had occasionally brewed from rose hips. In a few more strides, the white stone walls of the house gleamed through sun-dappled branches of a young oak, reminding him of some impressionist study of color and light. Swinging his bag back and forth like an impatient child, he ran up the steps.

The front door stood ajar; he walked inside. He saw her right away. Sitting by an open window on a glassed-in veranda, she leafed through an art book and picked plums from a ceramic bowl before her; a pile of pits glistened on a saucer at her elbow. The mellow afternoon light that filtered into the room through the gently swaying reddening ivy imparted to her skin the golden glow of a Vermeer portrait.

At the sound of his rushed steps, she looked up, and he saw a slight wrinkle form momentarily between her eyebrows, then vanish just as quickly.

“Tolya,” she said, rising. She was dressed in a loose shirt and an old ankle-length skirt, black with rows of bright little cherries, which she wore only when puttering about her small vegetable garden behind the house.

“You seem unwell,” she said, coming closer. “Are you feeling all right?”

She did not smile, but everything about her—her words, her movements, the tone of her voice—was comforting, tender, softly colored, and he had to fight the urge to weep with relief.

“I… I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I have a headache. It’s not important.”

She put her cool hand on his forehead; her fingertips smelled of fruits and earth.

“No, you don’t feel hot,” she said, taking her hand away. “Come, I was just about to make tea. I have some wonderful apple pie, Katya brought it over this morning. There are some leftovers from yesterday too, if you are hungry.”

Realizing that he was indeed famished, he followed her inside the sunlit house. As they drank their tea, she spoke, leisurely yet with a touch of uncharacteristic animation, about the surprising harvest of plums, the late blooming of roses, a tame wagtail that visited her on the terrace every morning…. He found himself silently watching her lips shape the words. He had planned to tell her about the rift with Dalevich, the loss of his position, the trouble with Ksenya—had, in fact, spent most of the morning rehearsing the half-indignant, half-pained expressions in which he would couch all his sufferings. Yet now, as he listened to her meandering stories, originating in a reality so different from his own and released lightly, almost lovingly, into this glowing afternoon lull, he felt his need for her pity fading away along with the last complaints of his hunger. And all at once his presence here, conceived and executed with such proprietary ease, and accepted by Nina with such unquestioning simplicity, produced in him a deliciously light-headed sensation of being freed—being rescued—from the whole of his recent existence. He felt astonished that this verdant, warm, rustic world existed not one hundred kilometers from his dark, tormented Moscow universe; and slowly, indulgently, gratefully, he allowed himself to enter the unlikely new life Nina was describing, or possibly creating, before his eyes—a life whose essence lay in the prolonged note of a bird singing in a tree, the hesitant flight of a butterfly alighting for a moment on a windowsill, its velvety brown wings closing and opening in a rhythm of deep, sleepy breathing, and the flickering advance of a dappled, aromatic shadow across a beautiful woman’s face….

Later she took him into the garden. Together they wandered the paths twisting among flower beds and vegetable plots and gooseberry bushes. She showed him her flaming yellow and orange marigolds, a pile of twigs in a hollow behind the toolshed where two days earlier she had glimpsed an old hedgehog, and the lacquered leaves of a rare tea rose about to bloom. He walked a step behind, nodding at the unfamiliar names of plants and weeds, feeling somehow attuned to every tentative shift in the universe—the gradual cooling of grasses, an early hint of vespertine dampness creeping through the air, the measured flow of time itself, its colors changing from the swaying green-gold of the breezy, leafy afternoon to the translucent lavender-silver of the cool, misty evening. A few houses away, someone had started a fire; a thin rivulet of smoke rose above a neighbor’s roof, and the smell of burning leaves made the air tingle.

He stopped, breathed in deeply.

“Why don’t we gather some branches and have a fire of our own?” he said then. “It will probably be cold enough for the fireplace.”

“That sounds nice,” she replied. “I think there is a bottle of red in the pantry.”

The pleasingly chilly night was already pressing against the windows when he finally managed to start a good fire, fed by a three-year-old issue of Ogonyok. The contours of the room disappeared into wavering shadows, and darkly glowing crumbs of the disintegrating pages threw dull reflections into Nina’s pale eyes as she sat staring into the flames, her wine neglected.

He watched her over the rim of his glass, then asked, “What are you thinking about, my love?”

She shrugged, not moving her eyes from the fire.

“There is an artist, I forget her name,” she said. “She makes these cubes. They look like children’s toy blocks, only they are upholstered in fabric, and they have texts on them—short poems, cryptic statements, that kind of thing. And sometimes a bigger cube might open up to reveal a different-colored smaller cube inside, and it might say something too, like an answer to a question posed on the outside.”

“Where have you seen them?” he asked in mild surprise.

“An exhibit I went to recently. Anyway, there was this one cube. Its fabric was ugly, black with purple flowers, like an old woman’s dress or a ribbon on a funerary wreath, and its label read, ‘A soul.’ Underneath, there was a warning: ‘Don’t open or it will fly away.’”

“And?” Sukhanov said after a pause.

“And nothing. The lid wouldn’t open, it was glued shut. But I can’t stop thinking about what might have been hidden inside. Would there be another dark cube that said, ‘Too late, it’s gone, told you not to open it’? Or was there instead a bright red or blue cube, or one wrapped in golden foil, perhaps, that said, ‘The daring are rewarded. Take your soul, go out into the world, and do great deeds’?”

“Most likely there was nothing inside,” he said, refilling his glass. “Why bother creating something if no one will see it? These kinds of trifles aren’t real art, anyway.”

“It’s just that I can’t stop thinking about it,” she replied.

For a while after that, they sat in silence. The wine tasted of youth and sun; in the fireplace, hidden moisture hissed within slender aspen branches; two rooms away, in the kitchen, the cuckoo in the old clock reluctantly coughed eight times. Beyond the window, Sukhanov imagined he could see the glint of stars circling unhurriedly through the skies.

“Funny, I never liked being in the country very much,” he said meditatively, emptying the last of the wine into his glass, “yet now I can almost see myself living here.”

Nina stirred as if waking from her own reverie.

“I never asked you,” she said. “How long are you planning to stay?”

“Vadim is picking us up tomorrow afternoon. But I think we should come back soon, don’t you agree, spend a few days, maybe even a week—”

“I don’t think I’ll be ready to leave tomorrow,” said Nina softly, almost to herself.

“More garden work?” he asked with a smile. “I thought you said you’d be done by Tuesday. Well, we could postpone our return by a day or two. I’ll call Vadim.”

“No, what I mean is,” she said, “I want to stay here for a while.”

“How long?”

“Perhaps until the first snows. Maybe longer.”

His thoughts derailed abruptly. “But… that’s at least two months! I know I just said I could live here, but frankly, I doubt I could stand it for that long, and even if I could, my presence in Moscow might be—”

Nina set down her half-finished wine. The glass made a small liquid chink against the floor. “Tolya, you misunderstand me,” she said. “I’m not suggesting that you stay here with me. I want to be by myself. Alone.”

The whistle of a train rose in the distance, piercing and solitary like the cry of a lost bird. She waited for it to die away before speaking again. Everything was moving in excruciatingly slow motion.

“I was hoping we could just have a nice day and talk about all this tomorrow, but, well… You haven’t yet heard from Vasily, I take it?”

“No, is something the matter? Is your father ill? Is Vasily—”

The air, dense with disbelief and rasping with erratic heartbeats, was hard to inhale.

“They are both fine,” she said. “As a matter of fact, they are having such a grand time together that Papa has asked Vasily to move in with him when they return. Vasily called me last night.”

“And what did he… What did you…”

“He likes the idea,” she said expressionlessly. “The location is much more convenient for him. More central. And it would be nice for someone to keep Papa company. He gets lonely, I think, even though he’d never admit it. So, since they both appear to want it, I don’t see why—”

She bent to prod the wood in the fireplace, and he followed a flurry of tiny sparks spiraling through the darkness. Somehow he felt no surprise at the news, only bitterness and a certain vague revulsion—not unlike the unpleasant sensation he had experienced a few days before at his father-in-law’s apartment when he had watched dozens of effusive old men embrace dozens of respectful youths in the gilded mirrors of the hallway. And then, as a clear snapshot of the scene emerged from the dimness of the past, he finally guessed at the source of his distaste. Pyotr Alekseevich and Vasily looked so amazingly alike that it had been rather like seeing an aged man give a young version of himself an infinite pat on the back. How odd, he wondered, that he had never noticed the similarity before—and how ironic that Vasily and Ksenya would both choose the exact same time to desert—

Sensing Nina’s eyes on him, he realized with a start that he must have spoken aloud.

“Don’t worry, Tolya,” she said with a sigh. “I already know about Ksenya. I talked to her yesterday.”

He let her words traverse his being slowly, very slowly, until he felt them coming to rest somewhere amid the chaos of his tossing thoughts. And at that precise moment, the tossing stopped, his pained bewilderment yielded, and anger began to glow hollowly in his heart—fed perhaps by a deeper current of guilt.

“Oh,” he said coldly. “I see. You mean to punish me for the rift with our children, do you? Of course, I’m the only one to blame here. After all, I’m such a dismal failure as a father. Why, I should have been there for them, I should have guided, I should have prevented, I should have known—whereas you, you were always so perceptive, so loving, so—”

“Tolya, I’m not assigning blame to anyone,” she said. “And anyway, Vasily is probably better off with Papa, we both know that. And Ksenya, I think she’ll be all right. She’ll be living at her friend Lina‘s, a wonderful girl. I like Boris a great deal too. Of course, I’ll worry about her, but I feel it’s time to let her do her own thing. She has grown up so much faster than I thought possible. That’s not why I—”

“You’ve met that good-for-nothing boy of hers, and you think she has grown up?” he said with hasty incredulity. “Well, talk of a lapse in parenting skills! Or has our dear daughter neglected to mention that he is married, or that he writes deranged songs about angels and suicides, or that he has a following of mad hippies, or that he is the one who stole all my—”

“I said ‘grown up,’ not ‘grown old,’” she interrupted. “Of course she makes mistakes—she is young, she and Boris both! Young and talented and in love and…”

Her outcry faltered, silenced by some invisible but powerful presence. When she spoke again, her voice was so low he had to strain his hearing to understand, and her words sounded oddly frail, and yet brave, as if balancing on a tightrope stretched across an abyss that only the two of them could see.

“My God, Tolya, don’t you remember what it feels like?” she said in a near-whisper. “To be in a hurry to live, to dream of overthrowing conventions, to hope to make the world a gift of something beautiful and everlasting? Don’t you remember, Tolya? Tolya?”

And for one hushed moment, as they sat facing each other across the night—she searching his face with a disconcerting, hopeful intensity, he struggling to find the only answer worthy of all their years together, of the past they had shared—for one brilliant, self-contained moment, everything seemed in flux, and everything was wonderfully possible, and he knew that if he could only discern the right words in the monstrous whirlwind of his mind, the universe would shift obligingly, the past and the present would merge with miraculous ease, and she would smile once more into his eyes, and their life would once again be surprising and full and precious, and… and…

“Of course, I should have known,” Nina said in a tired voice, turning away. “After all, you have such a way with undesirable memories…. Well, I just pray that as these children sort through things in the years to come, they will be different from us and won’t discard their dreams along with their messes.”

And he felt time resume its progress through the world, and the present imposed itself once more on his senses—the quiet darkness dispersed here and there by the yellow squares of neighbors’ lit windows, the stars dancing with chilly precision above the trees, the smells of plums and ashes in the air, the gentle scratching of aspen branches against the roof; except that now, it all began to seem strangely unreal, like a crudely painted stage decoration for some tragic and mildly ridiculous provincial play. Hopelessly he questioned the night for the expression of Nina’s eyes, but saw only the lines of her profile, pale and merciless like that of a pagan goddess of justice. Then he realized that her lips were moving, that she was speaking again.

“I’m sorry, that was unfair,” she was saying. “We both made our choices back then, and in all honesty, mine was probably much less admirable than yours.”

Her tone was one of defeat, and her words had no meaning. He made an effort to speak.

“Your choice?” he said. “What choice was that? Going along with whatever I decided? Forgive me, but that’s hardly a—”

She lowered her face, and the shadows closed over it greedily.

“It doesn’t matter now,” she said. “The time of decisions is past. And now, it seems, is our time to face the consequences. Our children leaving home may be one of them. I suppose my need to be alone is another.”

“So in essence,” he said after a pause filled with darkness, “you are leaving me because of something that happened almost twenty-five years ago?”

“I’m not leaving you, Tolya,” she said. “I just want to be by myself for a while. I’ve thought about it for so long—having a leisurely stretch of time, all my own—and now, with Vasily and Ksenya gone, I can finally do it. Don’t you understand? My whole life has been devoted to other people—first Papa, then you, then our children. But none of these things has worked out quite the way I hoped, and now—now it must be my turn. I like it here. It’s so silent, especially early in the morning and late at night, I can almost hear plants grow. I like making plants grow. It makes me feel alive, as if I’m part of something greater, something real….”

Her speech sounded rehearsed—she must have chosen her phrases carefully in anticipation of this conversation—yet he could barely follow it. The wine was making his temples throb dully.

“My God,” he said, “have you been so unhappy with me?”

She smiled a pale smile. “Happy, unhappy—these terms never really applied to us, did they? I didn’t marry you in search of happiness.”

And he did not dare ask the question he most wanted to ask, because now, for the first time ever, he suddenly doubted the answer—and he felt his soul dying yet another small, bleak death at the looming of the truth.

“No, I dreamt of a holy mission in life.” Her words were again well practiced, and cold. “Living in close proximity to art, religiously watching over its creation, assisting at its birth with a thousand details that were in themselves mundane and yet would add up to a great, sacred trust, a short footnote next to my name for all eternity: ‘Nina Sukhanova, born Malinina, the daughter of a hack, the wife of a genius.’ Pathetic, isn’t it—all those young Russian girls raised on nineteenth-century novels, searching for an idol at whose plaster feet they might sacrifice their own aspirations, only to wake up decades later, aged and bitter, to find their visions of vicarious greatness shattered, their husbands average, talentless nobodies… Only that’s not exactly how it turned out with us, is it, Tolya—and to tell you the truth, I sometimes think I’d prefer such a trite, unambiguous ending to… to…”

“Please, Nina,” he said thickly, “please, let’s not…”

She stopped, looked at him in silence. The long, motionless minute that followed felt icy, crisp, multifaceted, as if time itself had hardened into crystals. Anatoly Pavlovich saw the room with astonishing clarity, from the whole of its darkened, wood-paneled expanse to the faint reflection of the dying fire on the surface of his wineglass. He saw Nina’s face, the left side in dancing shadow, the right landscaped by bright light; he saw the flames gleam in her nearly transparent eyes. Irrelevantly, he thought about the colors he would use if he were to paint her portrait at this moment—the soft grays, the reserved reds, a poignant touch of liquid gold here and there—and wondered whether it would be possible to find a shade delicate enough to convey her fingernails, which glowed like so many translucent crescent moons every time she lifted her hands to the fire in that chilled gesture of hers. He also thought, disjointedly, how long it had been since she had allowed him to hold her in his arms—a dejected, months-long eternity of everyday preoccupations, distractions, headaches, which would now stretch on, stretch on indefinitely, in a glittering, echoing Moscow apartment where he was condemned to live from this day forward, exiled from his work, his family, his very existence, talking to no one for weeks at a time save his own reflection and the madman from the ninth floor…

In the next instant, the absurdity of the image made him laugh aloud—a bitter little laugh that startled him out of his trancelike state. Then, feeling all at once afraid to linger in this seductively warm, deceptively cozy, subtly poisonous place that belonged to him no longer, he stood up unsteadily and headed out of the room.

The air was much colder in the drafty corridor that led past the gaping cavern of an unlit kitchen to the front door. Behind him, he heard Nina ask where he was going.

“Back to Moscow,” he said without stopping. The wine he had drunk—half a bottle, it must have been, or quite possibly even three-quarters—made his steps sluggish, and mechanically he chided himself for having briefly forgotten his age. As if from afar, Nina’s feet pattered across the floor as she dashed after him, exclaiming, “But that’s crazy! Let me make supper, we’ll go to bed early, and tomorrow we can talk this over calmly. Please, Tolya, nothing’s decided, we can still—”

Already on the veranda, he fished out his city shoes from a dim corner, then felt for his bag on the floor where he had dropped it just hours before. It was unnecessarily, mockingly heavy

Catching up with him, Nina grabbed his sleeve.

“Please,” she gasped, “you can’t leave like this, it’s already past nine, how are you going to get home, do you even know the train schedule, please…”

He saw her standing there, green-eyed, flushed, and out of breath like a young girl, and his heart bled with the certainty that he had been too late with her as well. And then he understood how laughable it had been to imagine, only one day ago, that the loss of some romanticized image of a thin-blooded, composed Madonna who for years had graced his idea of a perfect home with a mysterious, elegant presence would be in any way comparable to the loss of this flesh-and-blood woman before him—this woman who had once been ready to follow him to whatever amazing new horizons he might take her, this woman who could still find the strength to listen to him when he was sad and make him tea when he was tired, this woman whose fingertips smelled of fruits and earth….

And for one moment, confronted with a bleak monotony of future despair, so unlike the dramatic vision of offended virtue that he had entertained over the purloined letter of a neighbor, he caught himself longing for the Nina of yesterday, furtive and unfaithful, perhaps, but still near him, instead of this new Nina, pure as always—but far away, so far away, with ninety-seven kilometers of solitude and indifference and disappointed hopes to separate them for God knew how long…. And simultaneously it occurred to him how surreal this parting was, how lifeless—how like a labored scene from some novel whose meaning faded amidst the flowery exchanges between unfeeling, cardboard characters—how unlike this bleeding wound that was tearing his living soul in two.

And in truth, why was he standing here, on the threshold of darkness, still and speechless? Shouldn’t he plead with her, shouldn’t he reproach her, shouldn’t he remind her how much he had done for her—how comfortable her life had been with him, how successful he had become for her sake, how many lovely things she had always had at her beck and call? Shouldn’t he throw her ingratitude back into her face, forcing her to remember the pitiful failure of Lev Belkin’s existence, perhaps grabbing her roughly by the shoulders and shouting, “Is that the kind of life you wish we had?” Or should he confess instead how much he needed her? Should he… shouldn’t he…

Still talking about train schedules, Nina was trying to wrestle away his bag. “Please understand, Tolya,” she was saying rapidly, “there’s no need to react like this, I only want a temporary—even brief—”

He knew with perfect conviction what an unfathomable thing it would be to walk away right now, without saying another word, without attempting to restore their life to the way it had been—yet at the same time, he felt strangely unable to break out of his stupor. And deep inside his heart, he sensed that his inaction stemmed from his ultimate acceptance of unhappiness, perhaps even a kind of perverse satisfaction at the thought that an ultimate justice was being served.

For deep inside his heart, he realized that he deserved it all.

Moving Nina’s fluttering hands away, Sukhanov turned and walked through the door. The terrace steps were slippery with evening dew, and the twisting shadows of the path embroiled his shoes in dimly aromatic, faintly menacing coils of invisible rose branches. He stopped and listened briefly: she had not followed. Then, greeting his rightful fate with a quiet smile, he extricated himself from the roses, pushed open the gate—and exited into the night.