The Dream Life of Sukhanov

NINETEEN

Anatoly Pavlovich! Anatoly Pavlovich!”

He hesitated to open his eyes. The awakening had brought with it a flock of ugly sensations. His body felt broken, his skin seemed dusted with gritty sand, his head ached, and the right side of his mouth had developed a persistent tic. The floor beneath him was cold, and somewhere above, a worried voice was saying, “Anatoly Pavlovich, what happened? Why are you here? Are you ill?”

It could not be avoided for much longer. Sukhanov looked up unhappily and saw a landing with an elevator grille, a shaft of bleak light falling through a dusty staircase window, and looming above him, a sturdy man in his thirties, with pronounced cheekbones, a stubborn jaw, and bulging arms, dressed in a brown leather jacket.

“Oh, it’s you,” said Sukhanov vaguely. He knew the man—knew him rather well, in fact—but for some reason the name escaped him.

“Are you ill, Anatoly Pavlovich?” the man repeated. “Do you need an ambulance?”

Sukhanov shook his head, and immediately touched his temples to steady the pain.

“I’m fine,” he said morosely. “I was just sleeping. A ridiculous situation, this. My keys were stolen, and no one’s home. I’ve been sitting by the door for hours. I… I had to return to the city on an urgent matter.”

The man—Volodya, perhaps, or Vyacheslav—glanced at his watch.

“How unfortunate,” he said. “And where is Nina Petrovna? Here, let me help you off the floor.”

Ignoring the outstretched hand, Sukhanov heaved himself up.

“My wife has decided to stay in the country for a few more days,” he said stiffly. “Gardening or something.”

A look of relief passed across the man’s face.

“A few more days, really?” he said. “Well, that’s lucky. Because as it turns out, it wouldn’t be easy for me to… That is, I wouldn’t be able to pick her up this afternoon. I was actually coming by to leave a note on your door—I was in the neighborhood anyway, and I couldn’t reach you on the phone, so…” He crumpled a piece of paper in his hand and looked away uncomfortably. “The thing is, Anatoly Pavlovich… It seems I won’t be driving you any longer. They’ve reassigned the car. A matter of departmental reorganization at the Ministry, they told me.”

“Ah,” said Sukhanov without surprise. It could be Vladislav, he supposed. Something with a V, in any case.

“I hope I’m not leaving you in the lurch,” said the man, with another anxious glance at his watch. “Of course, you’ll get a new driver in a matter of days, just in time for Nina Petrovna’s return from the dacha, but if you need a lift in the meantime and I happen to be available, we could always work something out—privately, so to speak.”

Sukhanov leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. The darkness under his lids was soothing, but he longed to find himself once more amid the vivid colors of a recent dream that lingered faintly in his memory—something about an empty museum in a hushed predawn hour, a violin player flying over the roofs of a turn-of-the-century town, a foretaste of greatness rising within him… But a stray image of rats abandoning a sinking ship in a dreary procession kept fighting its way to the foreground of his mind, and the man’s increasingly impatient voice lapped at the edges of his hearing, distracting him, reminding him of a host of irrelevant, disagreeable matters that probably needed to be addressed; and he could do nothing but wordlessly wait for it all to end. Finally, as if from afar, the man said, “Well, that’s settled, then,” and Sukhanov heard a rustle of leather followed by steps thumping across the landing and down the stairs, raising a brief flurry of agitated barks in their wake, growing more hollow as they descended, then dissolving in the hazy mid-morning silence. Alone at last, he again sank to the floor and drifted to sleep.

And he was close to catching the tail of his delightful dream when the quieted dogs renewed their barking and the steps sounded in the stairwell again, closer and closer, until the rustle of leather was all about him. Sleepily he wondered whether time had perhaps decided to play yet another little joke on him by rewinding the past few minutes—and whether he would just keep slipping deeper and deeper into the past in this terribly amusing reverse order, until he found himself once more an alert child playing with his toes on a bright green carpet, gazing down the length of his two years into the dark vortex of the unknown, so akin to death and yet so much less frightening…. But already he was being pulled up, and shaken awake, and the square-jawed man with the uncertain name was propping him up, saying almost belligerently, “No, Anatoly Pavlovich, I can’t just leave you here like this, you seem unwell. Come, the car’s downstairs, just tell me where you want to go. Does Nadezhda Sergeevna have a spare key to your place? No? How about your father-in-law?… All right, Gorky Street it is.”

Sukhanov drowsily allowed himself to be propelled into the elevator, and across the lobby, and into the street. The familiar black Volga—once his—was parked at the opposite curb, but two people were already sitting inside, one in the passenger seat and the other in the back; he could not see them clearly for the shadowy reflections of boughs swaying ceaselessly in the windows. The man asked him to wait, then ran across the road and tapped on the glass. As the window slid down, Sukhanov glimpsed a young woman with the petulant face of a broken porcelain doll—the man’s wife, most likely. For a while they appeared to argue, in fierce, inaudible voices, the man seemingly pleading. Then the woman said hysterically, “Well, if you must!” and rolled up the window.

The man turned and waved, and Sukhanov trudged toward him.

“Don’t mind Prince, he’s quite tame,” said the man enigmatically, opening the back door. Sukhanov peered in and was startled to discover that the person in the back was not a person at all but an enormous dog with brown, matted fur and a sour expression around its unmuzzled nose; but before he could object, he was bundled inside and the car moved away, precipitating a miniature snowstorm within the plastic sphere hanging from the rearview mirror and causing a yellow suitcase on the seat next to him to bump painfully against his knee. The next few minutes were profoundly unpleasant, for the man had made no introductions, and no one said anything, and the air in the car was unbearably sweet with perfume, and the dog kept looking askance at Sukhanov, salivating mutely; and after a while, he noticed that the woman in front was making a hushed, sniffling sort of sound, and realized she was crying. He had no time to wonder about it, however, for just then they came to a skidding stop, and the man announced, “Here we are.”

Hastily murmuring “Thanks” and “So long,” Sukhanov clambered out of the car.

After a few steps, he glanced back. The man without the name and the woman with the face of a porcelain doll were kissing, kissing with the embarrassing, awkward hunger of adolescents—and as he quickly averted his eyes, he knew that he had seen the woman before, and that she was not the man’s wife at all, and that the explanation for the whole thing was very simple and somewhat sordid and possibly a bit happy but mainly terribly, terribly sad…. And then the magnificent courtyard enclosed him darkly, and the necessity of facing Pyotr Alekseevich Malinin in just a few moments forced everything else from his mind.

At the mention of Sukhanov’s name, the concierge waved him through: he was expected. Too impatient to wait for the elevator, he ran up the stairs to the fifth floor, stopping only once to right his tie and gather his courage. An instant later, before he had even lifted his hand to ring the bell, the imposing door opened, and Nina stood on the doorstep. She was smiling, but he could see that she too was nervous.

“Did you remember the wine?” she whispered, ushering him into the hall. “Good. We’ll eat right now, it’ll be easier that way, and you’ll tell him later in the evening, before dessert. Don’t worry, you’ll like each other, he’s nothing like his public persona…. Only please, Tolya, you promised, no art discussions.”

I nodded, barely listening, suddenly disoriented by the world revealed just past the door—the brilliant expanse of polished floors, the gleaming void of enormous mirrors, a table rising importantly on leonine paws, an officer with a proud mustache gazing pensively out of a gilded frame (“Mama’s father,” said Nina in passing), and beyond, an infinite perspective of unfolding rooms. Even though she had charted the floor plan for me only the other day, explaining where our bedroom would be and which space I could convert into my studio, I had had no warning that the schematic drawing on the napkin would translate into a vision of all this foreign splendor, and no idea that in the year 1957 anyone in Moscow still lived in such old-fashioned luxury. Overwhelmed, I followed Nina through the vastness of the place, catching glimpses of a cupboard full of rose-tinted porcelain (“Mama used to collect china,” explained Nina) and the elegant curve of a lustrously black piano (“Mama was the only one who played”); and when we finally arrived at a high-ceilinged hall with an elaborately set table, and a handsome middle-aged man in a velvet blazer rose from an armchair, his hand extended, his smile dry, I felt almost incapable of speaking—for in those few minutes I had understood, fully and for the first time, how different my life was from hers, how great a gap lay between us, and how truly uneven our union would be.

The dinner was not a success. Nina burned the main course; Malinin did not remember me from his lectures at the Surikov, visibly disliked the wine I had brought (it had cost me a week’s salary), and considered it beneath him to pretend otherwise on both counts; feeling suffocatingly out of my depths, I kept discoursing lamely on the impressive growth of Moscow since the war and the accomplishments of Soviet composers. After the meal, when Nina had refilled our glasses and with conspicuous haste vanished into the kitchen to “check on that pie,” I struggled to explain to this self-satisfied man who sat frowning at his wine across the table that I loved his daughter madly, that she and I were, in fact, engaged to marry, that the date had already been set for September twenty-second, less than a month away… I had hoped to find words that were meaningful and sincere, but ended by simply blurting it out. He listened calmly, pressing the tips of his fingers together, avoiding my eyes. When I finished, he demonstratively pushed aside his half-full glass and cleared his throat.

“Do you know, young man, I’ve been hearing things about you,” he said. “Leonid Penkin, your director, is an old friend of mine. He tells me he is quite disappointed in your prospects. It appears that, well, how shall I put it… You are not quite the stuff of which successful artists are made. Frankly, it doesn’t surprise me—my daughter has never been careful in her choice of acquaintances. Though at least she’s given up that awful Jewish fellow, what’s his name…”

His voice was low—he must not have wanted Nina to overhear—and his meaning unmistakable. In stunned silence, I looked at myself through his coolly calculating eyes, and saw a pathetic little teacher breathlessly eager to enter into a lucky alliance with a race of demigods. Flushed with humiliation, I wanted to leave at once, but felt unable to move, as if trapped in a nightmare—a slow, perverse nightmare in which darkness seeped into the room through the heavy crimson curtains, seconds rustled quietly in the grandfather clock in the corner, the gold-rimmed dessert plates glittered emptily on the table, the crystal chandelier sparkled coldly, and in a precise near-whisper the man whose face resembled so much the face of my love was talking about his own position in life at my age, and some nice young man named Misha Buryshkin or Broshkin or Burykin who was also in love with Nina and promised to go far, very far, at the Ministry of Culture, and certain comforts that Nina, in the pride of her youth, might think she could do without but which were really in her blood…

And as he spoke, the dreary colors and communal smells of my own impoverished childhood rose unsought in my memory, and I thought of Professor Gradsky, and the twisted stump of the chandelier in the ceiling of our room, and the day I had learned that the old man and his wife had once lived alone in our vast six-room apartment—and all at once my humiliation gave way to another, more powerful feeling. The old anger, the anger of the deprived and the dispossessed, reared its righteous head inside my soul. For a minute I tried to control it, but the conceited man in the velvet blazer went on talking in his insultingly reserved voice, and the chandelier went on sparkling, and finally, standing up so abruptly that I knocked down the chair, I told him, with the freedom of someone dreaming, exactly what I thought about his so-called comforts and his protégé at the Ministry and his unflattering opinion of his own daughter… As my voice climbed higher and higher, I no longer knew what I was saying. Everything was hot and swirling around me, and at first he was smiling derisively, but soon his face grew taut and white—possibly when I shouted that his success as an artist was a sham, a joke of history, that he couldn’t paint worth a damn, that of the two of us—

And at that instant I saw Nina standing in the doorway, pale and wide-eyed, a soapy, dripping plate in her hands. I stopped in mid-sentence, looked at her, looked at her father, then picked up Malinin’s glass of wine, and finished it in one gulp.

“Sorry,” I said flatly, and walked across the room, past the frozen Nina, past the piano and the porcelain, along the endless corridor, and out onto the landing. Carefully I closed the door behind me and remained still for a while, waiting for the swirling to stop. But as I stood there, trying not to think, knowing full well I had lost her, I gradually became aware of a growing din, a rising tumult of incoherent voices, the sound of a broken plate; and in another minute, the door was flung open, Nina flew sobbing into my arms, and somewhere close behind, her father cried, “I swear, if you leave this house now—”

With a violence that shook the walls, Nina slammed the door shut, and his voice cut off. The two of us were left facing each other across a shocked silence.

Then someone cracked open a door on the opposite side of the landing, and a middle-aged blonde in a lacy apron edged her head around the jamb.

“What’s all that noise?” she asked with disapproval, looking at Sukhanov. “No use knocking like that, Pyotr Alekseevich is out of town. He’s gone to the Crimea with his grandson.”

Sukhanov stared at her dully.

“Won’t be returning for at least a week either,” the woman added almost gleefully.

“Oh,” Sukhanov muttered. “Of course. How could I have forgotten?”

And suddenly he could visualize it so clearly: a crystal bowl melting into its reflection in the still, black surface of the lion-footed table just on the other side of this wall, and in the bowl, among a jumble of many temporarily displaced but potentially useful odds and ends (a button not yet matched to a garment, a solitary cuff link, a mysterious screw), a bunch of keys, seemingly ordinary yet possessing the power of some fairy-tale genie to transport him to a marvelous, self-contained world of hot baths and fresh clothes and steaming teas and strawberry jams and maybe even strong liqueurs—a world that was now twice removed, separated from him not by one but by two locked doors…. He turned away and plodded toward the elevator, and the aging blonde across the landing followed his steps with such curious eyes that, glancing up with his finger already poised over the elevator button, he thought of saying something cutting—and then saw one last chance of cheating his fate.

“Pardon me,” he said with all the dignity he could muster in his broken glasses and mud-stained pants, “but you wouldn’t know if anyone here has a key to Pyotr Alekseevich’s place? He might have left one with a neighbor.”

The woman’s birdlike eyes narrowed suspiciously. He hastened to explain who he was, told her in an entreating voice about his being locked out of his own house, his hunger, his need of sleep…. She softened perceptibly.

“You are in luck,” she said after a brief hesitation. “I keep his spare key. Wait here, I’ll go call the resort.”

The ease of this resolution had an almost dreamlike quality to it. She returned a few minutes later. Pyotr Alekseevich, she had been told, was taking his customary promenade along the sea. She would try phoning again in a short while, for, naturally, she would not presume to release the keys without his permission, not even to his son-in-law. As she talked, she cracked her door wider, and Sukhanov smelled a rich aroma of mushroom soup and saw a stretch of cozy blue carpet in the hallway and, on the wall, a girlish fur-trimmed coat and an oversized purple jacket; and, filling in the blanks—a daughter, a son, a leisurely family dinner—he found himself envying this stranger her quiet domestic world, and longed to be a part of it, if only for an instant, if only—

“So you’ll have to come back in a bit,” the woman said. “Half an hour or so. I’d ask you in, but I’m in the middle of cooking.”

“Oh, certainly,” he said. “I understand. You’re very kind as it is.”

And smiling sadly, he pressed the elevator button.

Back in the street, he strolled aimlessly along the pavement. When he neared the corner by the Hotel National, where Gorky Street emptied into the square, the many-columned building of the Manège filled his view. The air had grown much colder now, and presently a snowflake melted on his cheek. He paused to file away, for some future use, the liquid reflections of headlights in the slush of the road, the powdery dust beginning to flicker in the pastel glow of streetlamps, the white columns, the black trees, the blue shadows, and above it all, the quickly darkening skies, luminously pregnant as they could be only on an evening before a snowfall. Then, at once aware of the ache in his fingers, he rapidly crossed Marx Avenue and, lowering his unwieldy parcel to the ground, prepared to wait. He was there only for a minute when Lev Belkin strode across the square, a bundle under his arm, and even at this distance I could tell he was smiling broadly.

“Glad?” Lev shouted.

“You bet!” I shouted back.

“Nervous?” Lev said, closer now.

“Not a bit,” I replied, picking up my load. “I have a feeling it will all go splendidly.”

Together we entered the Manège.

It was the last day of November in the year 1962, and I already imagined it emblazoned on my future memory as the date on which my prolonged apprenticeship was finally destined to end, and to the sonorous cymbals of public acclaim, my heart trembling with gladness, I, Anatoly Sukhanov, a name among names, would enter the gladiators’ ring of art history, stepping into the long-awaited spotlight out of the dim shadows of anonymous toil.

I had lived in anticipation of this day for a long time. The thaw whose first astonishing inroads into the snowdrifts we had witnessed in 1956 was melting its way through history and literature, but had barely made itself felt in the arctic bleakness of Soviet art; and even though for me the preceding years had been rich with that indescribable richness of small-scale triumphs that only an artist knows in his sweaty task of creation, yet little by little my inability to share my canvases with anyone but a handful of close friends, my struggle to maintain my precarious position at the institute, the precautions I continued to take in order to conceal my real self from colleagues and chance acquaintances, the effort of teaching what I no longer believed in—in short, the pervasive duplicity of my existence—poisoned my joy in living, my joy in working, my very desire to paint; and with fading hope, I dreamt of a day when I would tear away the suffocating shroud of falsity and show them, show them all, the ripened fruits of all those years.

And then, unexpectedly, magically, the day came, at the end of a particularly trying month in a trying year, shortly after Nina’s thirtieth birthday.

Nina still tried to pretend, to herself as much as to me, that she was the same girl who one day in 1957 had left her home, breaking with her father, forsaking her old life, and had stood next to me, wearing that white, narrow-waisted dress I liked so much, her back straight, her smile proud, her eyes shining, while an officious woman with thick ankles had monotonously recited solemn commonplaces from a worn compendium of Soviet marriage transactions and Lev’s Alla had giggled into a bunch of wilting gladioli; but even though she continued to call herself the “high priestess” of my art and uncomplainingly slipped away to the kitchen to give me space to work, I could sense the beginning of a change, an insidious, stealthy, corrosive change, in the air between us.

On the evening of November third, the day she turned thirty, she came home from her job at the Tretyakovka wearing that slightly pinched expression I had been noticing of late, and when I unveiled her present—a portrait of her as a mermaid I had worked on in secret, to surprise her—she smiled with her lips only and said in a toneless voice, “Oh. Another painting.” Then she left for a dinner party at her father’s (after years of stubborn resentment, he had offered her a semblance of peace, which failed to include me). I was still up, waiting for her, when she returned, well after midnight. Her face, as she walked in, arrested me, so uncommonly animated it was, and more beautiful than I had seen it in months: her cheeks flushed, I imagined with compliments and expensive liqueurs, her gaze brightened, perhaps with golden memories of her fairy-tale youth; but my impulse to tenderly tilt her head back, look into her eyes, salvage at least something of our day together died a hurried death when I noticed a peacock-blue scintillation following her passage through the shadows of our crowded room. She was wearing a pair of sapphire earrings, and it was they, nothing else, that lent a deep blue brilliance to her gray irises and suffused her pallid skin with an excited warmth.

“What are these?” I asked sharply, knowing the answer already.

“A gift from my father.”

“We can’t accept such things from that man.”

“He is my father,” she said. “He loves me. He wanted to do something nice for my birthday. And you…” She stopped, looked away. “You don’t know anything about him.”

I had the impression she had meant to say something else but changed her mind.

“I know enough,” I said. “I know what he is. I know what he does—bargains away his dignity piece by piece to the highest bidder, paints trash so he can have his cushy life—”

“You paint trash too,” she interrupted. “Your studio at the institute—”

My breath caught. “I paint trash so I can do this,” I said, shoving my chin at the dusty deposits of canvases in the corners, no longer bothering to keep my voice down. “What I do at the institute is irrelevant—this is who I really am.”

“And how do you know who my father really is?”

“Oh, I see—after a day of prostituting himself, he plays the violin or something?”

“Have you ever considered, Tolya,” said Nina slowly, “that you may actually be wrong about something or someone? You think my father is an amoral, selfish man, but maybe…” She paused. “Maybe he just wanted to make me and my mother happy.”

Again I had the feeling that some other, harsher words had alighted on her lips, then been discarded—and it was these unspoken reproaches and accusations, combined with her unnatural calm, that sent a wave of fury crashing over me.

“Well, how noble of him,” I shouted. “He sold his soul to the devil so you could have your jewelry, and your mother her piano and her gilded teacups!”

I regretted my words as soon as they had escaped me, but it was too late. Nina’s face, now drawn and pale in the yellow glow of a bedside lamp, seemed suspended between expressions; then she walked to the window and, staring out into the dreary darkness punctuated by anemic streetlamps, carefully removed the earrings, balanced their tiny blue radiance on her palm, and considered them briefly before setting them down on the windowsill. When she faced me, her eyes held no love, no emotion at all.

“So my mother collected porcelain and was passionate about music,” she said softly. “Is it so wrong to want to have beauty in your life? Not everyone is willing to live… to live like this. And is it really so contemptible to want to give beauty to someone you love?”

Then, not waiting for my answer, she turned and, usually private to a fault, started to undress as if I were not there. In silence I watched her step out of the sea-colored dress her father had brought her years earlier from a trip to Italy, which she still wore on every birthday and New Year’s Eve, gently smooth its creases before hanging it in our makeshift wardrobe, then take off her stockings and, sliding her hand inside, raise them against the light and in a seemingly familiar, tired ritual check for fresh runs. As I looked at the silky shimmer spread between her fingers, I thought mechanically that stockings were very hard to come by nowadays; and on the heels of that thought, the famous words of Chekhov popped into my mind: “A human being should be entirely beautiful: the face, the clothes, the soul, and the thoughts.” And suddenly I was frightened—frightened that something irreparable had happened between us. I thought of the squalor of our dingy place, which had more space for paintings than for us; and the stairs that always reeked of urine; and the anxious hovering of my mother, who kept imagining footsteps outside our door and strange clicks on our phone line, and who, in truth, did not like Nina very much and referred to her, with pursed lips and barely out of earshot—for our communal quarters were too cramped for secrets—as “your fine lady”; I thought too that none of it was ever likely to change.

And then, for one moment, I almost believed that all my creations of the past five years—all those flights of fancy, all those sleepless nights, the bouts of despair, the transports of happiness, the smuggled revelations, the full moons, the museum vaults, the lingering dreams, the stolen moments of love—all of those things were nothing but idle imaginings, youthful indulgences, rainbow dust on a butterfly’s wing; and that my real life was here, now, in this unlivable room with its odors of ancient pipes, dust, and paint, with this silent woman who was lying in bed, her back toward me, pretending to be asleep…. And so unbearable was the thought that I did not move for a long time, and the shadows twitched and cavorted in the corners, and my mother murmured in haunted nightmares behind the wall, and my works, my gifts, my children, begged to be released into the light, and Nina’s breathing gradually assumed a different, measured rhythm, and still I stood in the dark, and after perhaps an hour Nina suddenly said without turning, “You know, Tolya, there is more than one way to lose your soul.”

And then, after several dismal, mostly silent weeks, the telephone rang.

For the full first minute, with Lev stuttering in his excitement and Alla shrieking in the background, I understood nothing. “Pinch me, I’m dreaming,” he kept repeating. Then Nina walked into the corridor, her face remote, her eyelids swollen with insomnia.

“Please don’t shout like that,” she said flatly. “It’s seven-thirty in the morning.”

My hands were jumping so much I could not immediately fit the receiver into the cradle; then, drawing her to me, “Listen, you won’t believe this,” I said, already anticipating the wondrous light about to come into her eyes.

A couple of months earlier, a major retrospective—Thirty Years of Moscow Art—had opened at the Manège. Lev and I had gone and, having found the whole affair, with a few exceptions, staid and uninspiring, had pronounced it worthy of being displayed in the former stable. But now an event little short of miraculous had taken place. A benevolent official from the Ministry of Culture had approached a few openly experimental artists with an offer to join the show, among them Ilya Beliutin, who ran an unofficial studio, and his students; and as Beliutin happened to be an old acquaintance of our Yastrebov, the loose invitation had been extended to the members of Viktor’s circle as well—the bearded Roshchin, and Lev, and myself. True, we were allowed only one work each, but all the same, it was a beginning, was it not, and one should be glad even of such—

“Oh Tolya,” Nina interrupted, clasping her hands, “so what if it’s only one painting—it’s the Manège, millions of people will see it, and you will be noticed, I know you will be! My God, it’s wonderful, just wonderful…. When does it start?”

It was all happening with the rapidity of a dream: we had been told to bring our paintings by tonight; Lev and I were meeting by the Manège that evening; the show was to open to the public the very next day. Mother and Nina left for work, but I quickly summoned an impressive cough for the benefit of a sympathetic secretary on the other end of the line and spent several hours in an incredulous, delightful haze, leafing through my canvases as through pages of my life, remembering each birth, at times tender and slow, at times furious and breathless, passing judgment on the sum total of my existence as an artist—my early studies of trains and reflections; the mythical and urban landscapes that had occupied me all through 1958; my subsequent fascination with surrealism, in an attempt to transplant the lessons of Dali and Magritte to Russian soil; and in the past two years, my ultimate arrival at what I believed to be my own, truly unique style—trying to choose from among them the one painting most representative of my philosophy of art, or possibly the one most original, or the one most beautiful, or perhaps simply the one most dear to my heart. In the early afternoon, when the air had already begun to thicken into blue softness outside the window and I was still at a loss, Nina called.

“Tolya, I’ve been thinking,” she said, and I could hear a smile in her voice. “What about that early one, with the reflection of a woman’s face in a train window, you know the one? Of course, it’s not as complex as your current pieces—but it may be easier for people to understand, and, well… It’s what made me realize how brilliant you were.”

“Oh,” I said, smiling also. “Well, since you put it that way—”

Once inside, we unwrapped our bundles. Lev had selected an abstract piece.

“What do you think?” he said uncertainly, turning it to the light. “It’s a new one.”

I did not have the heart to tell him the truth. Together we watched our paintings being mounted on the walls; I found it exhilarating and almost frightening to see a deeply private vision of mine splayed across the impersonal white surface under the clinical glare of gallery lamps, with a rectangular label bearing my name underneath. Roshchin and a few others of our acquaintance were milling about, all with the same slightly disoriented look on their faces, but I did not stay to talk to them. I wanted to preserve the sonorous fullness of this day unmarred by nervous banter, insincere compliments, exaggerated camaraderie, so I could carry it, slowly, carefully, like some precious elixir, through the gleaming blue city, through the quietly falling snow, through the softly illuminated streets and the darkened courtyards, and present it, with not a single drop spilled, to her, my Nina.

She met me on the landing, kissing me quickly. She wore the white dress of our wedding day, her bare arms were goose-bumped, and her eyes were bright; she had bought a bottle of champagne, and it was lovely to hear her laugh at the dry explosion of the cork later in the evening. My mother quit the dinner table without finishing her glass, her lips tightly pressed together, and we listened to her shuffling behind the closed door of her room, muttering darkly about reprisals and retributions, until the hum of the television drowned out her voice.

“Poor woman, she never stops worrying,” Nina whispered.

For a while after that, we sat silently in the cozily lit kitchen. I was watching the snow whirling outside the window, and Nina was peeling a tangerine, the first of the season. And all at once the scent of the fruit, sweet yet with the slightest hint of bitterness, and the light taste of champagne lingering on my tongue, and the soft, furry snowflakes dancing in the sky like some white winter moths, and Nina’s profile bent in the gentle glow of the green lampshade, and the knowledge of this wonderful change that was drawing closer and closer, all merged into a feeling of such intensity, such completion, that I felt this to be the happiest moment of my life—happier even than that luminous, color-mad moment when, with Chagall and Kandinsky for witnesses, Nina had promised to marry me—or perhaps it was still the same moment, now in its long-awaited fulfillment…. Smiling, Nina looked up.

“Here,” she said, holding out half of the tangerine. “It’s a bit sour, but so delicious.”

We did not sleep at all that night. The snow stopped soon after midnight, and immediately the sky grew dark and deep like velvet; then the grayness began to creep into the nooks and crannies of the world; and sometime later, in the pale light of a cold dawn, Nina lifted her face to mine and said, “Tolya, I’m so sorry about my birthday. I know I was unfair. It’s just that as a girl I always imagined what my life would be like at thirty, and, well… It was harder than I had expected, that’s all.”

For a minute unspoken words hung between us. Then she said with a small sigh, “But I never stopped believing in your talent, not for an instant, and I would have stood by you no matter what. Still, I’m so relieved this finally happened. We’ve waited for this for a long time.”

“Yes,” I said, kissing her lightly. “A very long time. I’m sorry too. But everything will be different now, you’ll see.”

And then the sunrise of December first was upon us.