The Dream Life of Sukhanov

TWNTY-TWO

As the city contours grew softer and hazy streetlamps began to pop out of the shadows one after another, he wandered the streets of the old Arbat, his mind churning darkly in some lonely, wordless space. His steps were aimless, directed only by a restless urge to move; but after a while, when an unexpected shortcut deposited him at the fetid mouth of an eerily familiar courtyard, he stopped, looked about, and became suddenly aware of the path his feet had followed of their own accord. Somehow, unthinkingly, he had walked along the broad, pastel-colored streets and the tree-shaded alleys where he had played as a happy five-year-old, six-year-old, seven-year-old-and the unfolding of time had led him to the spot that had marked the end of his first childhood dream.

Obeying some dimly understood impulse, he stepped through the murky, low passage into the yard. A rock-and-roll beat pulsated from one of the apartments, but at its heart the yard was still and dark, its edges lit unsteadily by the pale squares of burning windows, just as it had been almost fifty years before, when a frightened boy had slid an album of Botticelli reproductions into a snowdrift. In the corner where the snowdrift had been there was now a brand-new sandbox; but as he approached, it seemed to him that the sand gleamed with a pearly, roseate, unearthly tint in the faint light…. He stared for a breathless moment, then saw it was only the cast-off shadow of a garishly pink lampshade visible in the nearest window. Some child had forgotten a toy spade in the sand. His past was no longer here.

Leaving the courtyard, he walked unresisting down a deserted side street, keeping his eyes to the ground until he was almost at the end, then looking up sharply, his heart flushed with a new, trembling, imprecise feeling. He had not been here since they had moved away in 1954. The building had aged even more; the yellowish paint was peeling off the façade; the rusting balconies sagged. The fifth-floor windows were lit. On one of the windowsills an overfed cat slumbered next to a potted cactus; the curtains were splattered with merry orange flowers. The place had a quiet, almost rustic air about it. He stood still for a few minutes, wondering how different things would be now had he known the truth on that terrible day—had he believed that Pavel Sukhanov was not a coward—had he… had he…

The front door opened with a piercingly familiar squeak, and an old woman carefully hauled her overweight body toward a nearby bench.

“Are you lost, my dear?” she asked, studying him with sleepy eyes. “This is number three in Lebedinov Lane. Used to be Rozhde stvensky Passage, before the war.”

Briefly he thought of telling her that he had lived in this building for years, that he was Anatoly Pavlovich, Anatoly, Tolya, Tolik…. The cat stretched and crept away from the fifth-floor windowsill; the old woman watched him with a heavy, indifferent gaze. He noticed the ugly, hair-sprouting mole above her upper lip.

“Thank you,” he said after a silence. “I did get a bit sidetracked, but I finally know where I am.”

Without another glance, he turned away from his childhood and moved off into the deepening dusk. The city felt abandoned. He crossed a dank courtyard, followed a gloomy alley into a dead end, took a wrong turn, crossed another yard, this one piled high with broken furniture, emerged onto a poorly illuminated, quiet street, and no longer noticing where he was going, quickly walked past a decrepit church, a small garden, a basement converted into an art gallery, with posters in the pavement-level windows advertising some exhibition, a neighborhood bakery, already locked for the night… Then, abruptly, he stopped and retraced his steps, certain that it could not be, that his fleeting glimpse had misled him—yet all the same in need of a second, reassuring look.

It could not be, and yet it was. On the posters in the gallery windows, motley letters bobbed jarringly up and down, proclaiming: “L. B. Belkin. Moscow Through a Rainbow.”

The small print underneath announced that the gallery was open from eleven to six. Sukhanov’s watch still showed thirteen minutes past ten of some lost, forgotten day, but he recalled hearing seven strikes of a remote clock reverberating through some alley. Relieved to find the place closed, he peered into the windows—and was startled to see a light inside and, in its bright electric circle, the indistinct blur of paintings on a wall and, shockingly, Lev Belkin himself, wearing his old velveteen blazer and bow tie, talking to someone hidden from view.

He hesitated, then, resolving to wait, moved off into obscurity on the opposite side of the street. After a passage of time he no longer had the capacity to measure, the basement door opened, and out came Belkin, supporting the elbow of a neatly dressed old man with a shrunken, hauntingly familiar face. The door slammed behind them.

“Are you sure you won’t stay the night?” said Belkin, and his words rang through the empty street with the hollow emphasis of an actor on a booming stage. “My place isn’t much, but I do have a moth-eaten couch.”

“No, thank you, but no,” replied the old man. “I should be getting home.” The echoing walls amplified and carried his lisp, and all at once Sukhanov knew who he was—the chance passenger seated next to him on the nightmarish train that had delivered him from the crumbling darkness of the frescoed church to the paling dawn over the museum cell full of banished paintings. “You know how it is when work is calling, and unlike you young people, I don’t have much time left. Most obliged to you for the tour of the gallery, it was highly illuminating.”

Lifting a hand to the brim of a nonexistent hat, the old man turned and shuffled away. Belkin called out, “Honored to meet you! The metro will be on your left!” and for a minute watched the man’s stooped back descend into the night; then, fishing out a handful of keys from his pocket, he bent to lock the door. Sukhanov remained still. In another moment, Belkin dropped his keys back into the velveteen depths of his blazer and strode down the street after the old man, whose painfully slow progress had already been obliterated by shadows.

He had nearly reached the corner when Sukhanov took a step forward and, his heart sliding sideways into a warm, indistinct fog, quietly said, “Leva.” The echoes caught the name, tossed it back and forth with an increasingly empty, meaningless sound. Belkin froze, then walked back slowly, peering into the dusk.

“Tolya?” he said uncertainly. “Is that you?”

Sukhanov took another step and was trapped like a bug in amber in the watery light of the only streetlamp on the block. An incongruous thought flickered through his mind: at this instant, after the phantasmagoria of the last few days, with one lens of his glasses cracked, his shoes muddy, his clothes reeking with sour, displaced smells of stations, trains, staircases, and courtyards, he must look infinitely more pathetic than Belkin, whose worn-out blazer and maroon bow tie had seemed so amusing to him only a short while ago, on the steps of the Manège, under the aegis of the proud banner proclaiming his father-in-law’s grand retrospective….

He cleared his throat.

“Hello, Leva. I was in the neighborhood, visiting my mother,” he said. “Thought I’d drop by. I know it’s after hours, but the light was on.” Belkin had halted a few paces away and was looking at him strangely. Was it possible there were still traces of tears on his face, Sukhanov wondered. He swallowed, went on loudly, “So, how is the gallery business treating you?”

“Oh, fine, thanks for asking,” Belkin replied with a quick, forced laugh. “Not that I’ve sold anything yet, but all in good time, I say. Actually, I’m usually not here, there is a girl who runs things, but she’s having a bit of a domestic crisis, her husband—one of these new underground hippie singers or something—has just left her. So I thought, why not, might as well sit here for a few days. A dose of reality is always good for the artist, and you can’t imagine how humbling it is to hear what people say about your paintings when they don’t know you are standing behind their back.”

“No,” said Sukhanov in a slightly pinched voice. “No, I can’t imagine that at all.”

“Yes, well, one gets used to it,” said Belkin awkwardly. There was a small, awful silence. “Oh, but I did meet an extraordinary man just now. An artist of the old school, over eighty years old, and still painting as hard as ever. Lives in a small town, the devil knows where, makes all his own pigments out of spices, earth, and whatnot, can you believe it? Last month, he said, he finally began the best work of his life. ‘Remember, young man,’ he told me, ‘it takes a lifetime to learn one’s craft.’ Amazing, the spirit some men have.”

“What is he doing in Moscow?” Sukhanov asked, not caring about the answer, only desperate to avoid another dangerous, sob-swelling lull.

“He was a little vague about it. Said he had come to find some former pupil of his. He had a phone number, address, and everything, but I gathered no one expected him, so he spent the day going to art shows instead, ‘keeping in touch with the youth,’ as he put it. He claimed he had learned to paint from Chagall, but frankly, I didn’t believe him—so many people nowadays… Tolya, are you all right? You look—”

“It’s nothing, I’m just tired,” said Sukhanov weakly. For an instant he struggled with a desire to sink onto the pavement and hide his face in his hands. “I… I’ve been having quite a day. Tripped and fell, broke my glasses, you see…. Don’t let me hold you up though, you were going somewhere.”

“Home, I was only going home. Nothing to rush to there,” said Belkin, shrugging. “Listen, I’ve got an idea. If you’re free right now, why not visit the gallery? We can sit and talk, I have some tea and cakes stashed in the office.”

Sukhanov was silent for a moment.

“Oh, why not,” he said then.

The door gave in with a pained moan. The hallway beyond was dim and small, crowded with a jumble of hats, shoes, lopsided umbrellas, greeting him with fading smells of Alla’s mawkishly sweet perfume and a recently dismembered dried fish.

“Well, don’t just stand there, come on in,” Lev said gruffly.

“Are you alone?”

Lev nodded. He looked as if he had not shaved in a week.

“Good.” Tightly clutching a sheaf of pages I had typed the night before on Malinin’s typewriter, I followed the fish odors through the familiar clutter of the cramped corridor into the kitchen, Lev at my heels. In the depressingly bright light of the naked bulb dangling over the table glistened a half-empty glass of clear liquid; the bony remains of an unappetizing meal lay scattered on a greasy newspaper.

“I’m working on a still-life composition called Repast of a Failed Artist Whose Wife Is Out with Her Girlfriends, or So She Says,” said Lev blandly. “Sit down. Anything the matter? I’d offer you a glass, but it’s really disgusting, and of course you never—”

“I’ll take it,” I said, and pushed the manuscript across the table. “Here, I want you to have a look at this.”

Lev scanned the title.

“‘Surrealism and Other Western “Isms” as Manifestations of Capitalist Insolvency’?” he said disgustedly. “Surely you don’t expect me to waste my time on such—”

“Just read it, will you?”

He shrugged, took an unhurried sip, and flipped the page. I studied the patterns of melted snow forming at my feet on the yellow-and-black-checkered linoleum, watched a befuddled out-of-season fly stumble drowsily on the windowsill, drank the unpalatable vodka. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lev glance at me once or twice in the beginning; then he lifted his head no longer and sat silently rustling the papers and frowning. A half-hour passed, then another ten minutes. He slammed the last page against the table.

“What is this shit?” he said. “Who wrote it?”

I finished my drink at a gulp. My insides were burning.

“I did,” I said. “I wrote it.”

His eyes narrowed. “Tolya,” he said slowly. “Is this a sick joke of some sort?”

“It’s not a joke, it’s going to be published. I wanted you to read it first, so I could explain… No, hold on, just listen for a minute, will you?” My face was burning too now. “I’ve been thinking more about Khrushchev closing our show. And you know what I realized? When he shut us down he wasn’t acting as a representative of the state cracking down on a handful of outspoken artists. He was acting as a representative of the people, our people, who do not understand—cannot understand—the alien things we stand for. The Russian people do not want our art, Leva. Never did, never will. They dislike seeing Filonov’s tormented faces, Chagall’s flying beasts, and Malevich’s black squares—they have enough tragedy, surrealism, and emptiness in their daily lives. In the past they wanted soothing icons; now they want the pseudo-art of someone like my father-in-law—a pat on the head reassuring them that their future is bright, a slap on the back letting them know that they are part of an important whole, that their toils have a purpose—”

The fly buzzed sleepily against the windowpane; in the bluish haze beyond, oblique snow was falling. Lev was looking at me, and there was a new expression in his heavy gaze. I talked for a long time—talked about the dim, oppressive centuries of Russian art struggling against Russian history, about the walls of silence destined to surround each and every one of us forever, about casting our pearls before swine, about our fates condemning us to this dark, ungrateful soil, leaving us no other choice but to step away into anonymity, into comfort, into the minute preoccupations of an uninspired, private existence…

And then Lev spoke.

“You’ve said so many clever things here,” he said quietly, “but do you know the only thing I’ve heard? Fear—nothing but fear. Well, I understand fear, I’m afraid too….” He was silent for a few heartbeats. “Tell you what, Tolya. Everyone has unworthy moments, and you are my best friend. Let’s go out onto the landing, throw this abomination page by page into the trash chute, come back to finish the bottle, and I’ll promise you never to mention any of it again. Agreed?”

The pool of water at my feet had dried out. The snow was still whirling in the sky. The fly had ceased buzzing, falling back into its winter stupor of sleep. I rose, gathered the pages scattered about the table, and walked into the corridor. Lev ran after me, and when I turned at the front door, I saw that his face was transformed by that special, warm, radiant smile I loved so much. Quickly I looked away, unable to watch the light go out of his eyes. In silence, I groped on the counter for my hat, put on my coat, opened the door, and still keeping my gaze averted, stepped across the threshold and closed the door behind me. And then, though he did and said nothing to stop me, for a whole long minute, my heart beating painfully, I lingered outside on the landing, knowing that in three weeks the article would be published, knowing that Lev would never speak to me again—and still I stood there as if waiting for something, as if hoping that a miracle was somehow possible, that the door would open again at any moment, and that he would smile his wonderful, forgiving smile, and say, “Please, Tolya, come in….”

“Do come in,” Belkin repeated. “Watch your head, the ceiling is a bit low.”

Sukhanov gingerly squeezed inside the gallery’s tiny foyer. The air smelled of glue, dust, and transience; posters advertising past exhibitions were stacked on the floor in one corner.

“Not too impressive, I’m afraid,” said Belkin jovially, “but it’s a beginning. This way.”

They passed into an adjacent room. There were canvases hanging here, most of them smallish urban landscapes done in a bright impressionist manner: a view of a slanting street with green balcony railings and a blossoming lilac bush; a single yellow leaf on a glinting bench and, in the background, passersby with purple and red umbrellas; an evening skater flying over the blue sheen of an icy pond, surrounded by merry orange windows lit in nearby buildings. Sukhanov slowly circled the walls, read a few labels: Autumn on Gogolevsky Boulevard, Pionerskie (Patriarshie) Ponds, Winter Roofs of the Zamoskvorechie…

A voice behind him spoke with a nervous chuckle: “My abstract phase didn’t last, as you see, though I’m still experimenting with styles”—and Sukhanov suddenly became aware of an urgent need to say something, anything at all, about the paintings before him.

“Very lyrical,” he offered hastily, “the skater especially. This night scene too—the Moscow River, isn’t it? Really, congratulations, Leva, this is great. Sorry Nina and I couldn’t make it to the opening, we wanted to, but you know how it is….”

“Of course, of course, don’t mention it,” said Belkin, looking uncomfortable. “Well, this is all there is. Very modest, as you see… A cup of tea, then?”

“A cup of tea would be good,” Sukhanov said.

The narrow, windowless space in the back—hardly more than a closet—was crowded with a desk and two chairs, their surfaces littered with crumbs of long since digested meals, tattered remnants of aged newspapers, and a nondescript overflow of paintings and sculptures from previous shows, a few price tags still dangling from pedestals and frames. While Belkin busied himself with rinsing and filling two yellowed glasses at a sink in the corner and sliding heating coils into the cloudy water, Sukhanov cleared one chair of its accumulations, sat down, and surveyed the mournful debris of bypassed art—a portrait of a man in a sailor suit with a grinning cat perched on his shoulder, a still life with a matchbox and a half-eaten herring, a number of multicolored cubes resembling children’s toy blocks gathered in a flock on the desk… The sight of the cubes stirred some hazy recollection in his mind, and mechanically he picked one up, turned it over in his hand.

The cube was upholstered in black and purple, and the label on its side read: “A soul. Don’t open or it will fly away.”

And then, unexpectedly, there it was, descending on him—the whistle of a remote train, the creaking of logs in the fireplace, the motes of reflected light dancing in a glass of red wine, and Nina’s quiet voice speaking into the shadows. 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”?…

For a minute Sukhanov stared at the small, light object on his palm, fighting the desire to crush it. Then, setting the cube down, he slowly moved his eyes around the room until they rested heavily on Belkin.

Belkin must have felt the gaze.

“Patience, only a moment longer,” he said cheerfully, glancing up. “I can’t find the cakes, but the water’s already—”

Noticing the expression on Sukhanov’s face, he stopped uncertainly.

“Nina…” Sukhanov said in a halting voice. “Nina was here, wasn’t she?”

Belkin hesitated briefly, then nodded.

“She was. She came to the opening last Wednesday.”

“I never told her about your opening, Leva,” said Sukhanov stonily.

Belkin placed the glasses of pale tea on the desk, dropped a sugar cube into each, pushed one glass toward Sukhanov, and pulled up a chair.

“I know,” he said. “But you did tell her you ran into me, and she called me the next day—got my new phone number through Viktor Yastrebov. As it turns out, both of us have been visiting him from time to time, bringing him food and such, now that he is old and sick and all alone…. Anyway, we met that same Sunday for a stroll, and I mentioned the exhibition. She said she wanted to come, but she thought you’d be upset if you knew. Look, Tolya, I’m really sorry I didn’t say anything earlier, it’s just that I wasn’t sure…”

His words trailed off. Staring into space, Sukhanov took a sip of his tea. And then, as the hot, sweet, tasteless liquid slid down his throat, he felt a new kind of calm descending on him—a calm not of detachment but rather of understanding, as if in the last few hours some invisible yet great change had been secretly wrought in the very fabric of his being and he could contemplate his life without bitterness. Perhaps it was a calm born of emptiness and despair; it hardly mattered now, he supposed. For a while he sat without moving or speaking, marveling at the swelling of the tranquil wave inside him. Then, looking up, he saw Belkin watching him tensely across the close dimness of the room.

“Leva, it’s all right,” he said. “Really, it is. Though I suppose I would have been angry a few days ago.” He smiled without mirth. “She said she was home with a migraine all day Sunday, and on your opening night she told me she was going to a play with a girlfriend. She never mentioned Viktor either…. But I’m glad that she came to see you. I should have been here too.”

A melting sugar cube tinkled lightly against a glass. Belkin blinked, whether relieved or embarrassed, Sukhanov could not tell.

“Well, you are here now,” he said, “that’s what matters. Anyway, to tell you the truth, this whole exhibition affair isn’t working out quite as I imagined. And the strange thing is, having Nina at the opening made it… well, worse. I mean, here I am, milling about with a few of my friends who have all seen my works before, chatting about their children and vacations, nothing in particular, yet all the while basking in this pleasant glow of being somehow important—the hero of the day, you know? And suddenly the door opens, and she walks in, beautiful as always and so young-looking, in these silver earrings she used to wear in her student days, and she looks at everything so seriously, almost urgently—and after a while, I begin to see this slight hint of disappointment in her face…. Oh, of course she was very kind and polite, and we had tea and talked about art, and all seemed well. But after she left, after everyone left, I looked at my paintings through her eyes, and I saw just a handful of second-rate landscapes stuck in a basement.”

“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself,” Sukhanov said quickly. “After all, you said yourself, it’s a beginning—”

“Please, what beginning, who am I fooling?” said Belkin, waving his hand. “No, I’m just not capable of anything original. Actually, I’ve known it for a long time, Nina’s visit only made it… final somehow. Funny, the way life turns out. It seems only yesterday that the late fifties were here, and we were constantly on fire with our work, proud of our poverty, brave in our shared struggle against the old, drunk with our newfound gift of expression…. You remember, don’t you, Tolya? Our days flowed into nights, our nights were endless, and every windbag who talked about Russia, God, and art was a brother, every artist a genius, every painting a miracle—and the world did not know us yet, but we were together, we were brilliant, we were destined to light up the skies…. And then you blink, and all at once you yourself are in your fifties, still poor but no longer so sure of all those eternal truths, and alone now, because most of your old friends have crawled into their own nooks and crannies of misery and your wife has left to have children with another man. And on occasion, when you are hungover and the only thing in your kitchen is pickled cabbage, even the colors of the rainbow all begin to seem dirty and drab—and that’s when the world finally chooses to turn in your direction, and you suddenly find that after all these years, all you have to show for yourself are a few hard-earned calluses on your hands and a landscape with lilac bushes. And then all those things that seemed so earth-shattering in the past, all those experiments with religion, eroticism, surrealism, abstraction, all those exuberant departures from the commonplace, appear for what they are in the harsh light of the day-self-indulgent exercises in passing time, pathetic imitations of fashions the West tried and discarded decades ago. And you realize that all our names are fated to become only a condensed and condescending footnote to Russian history, lumped together under the heading ‘Khrushchev’s Thaw,’ and… What? Why are you looking at me like that? Wasn’t always so eloquent, was I? I guess I’ve had a lot of practice talking to myself over the years.”

“It’s not that,” Sukhanov said hesitantly. “It’s just that I didn’t expect you to sound so… Well, it almost seems as if you are regretting your life, the choices you made.”

“Ah, that would be rather ironic, wouldn’t it? After all, I despised you so much for quitting. In the beginning especially, when I kept seeing your dreadful articles in every magazine and hearing from former colleagues about your dizzying climb up the ladder of success—and I had to survive by loading and unloading vegetable trucks. Alla always complained that my clothes stank of rotting potatoes, I remember…. Then Yastrebov took me to a doctor acquaintance of his, and for a bottle of brandy this fellow provided me with a certificate stating that I was mentally ill. After that I lived on state allowance, pretending to be mad. Of course, it was very little money, but things were finally getting better—I had all my time to myself, I could paint all I wanted—and then Alla left me. And it’s strange—I never really thought I loved her that much, but after she was gone it all somehow started to fall apart. Maybe I just grew out of my twenties, I don’t know…. Anyway, that was when I first suspected that what I had taken for talent had been only youth and energy, nothing more. I puzzled over my last conversation with you and your decision, and, well… I began to have doubts. And yes, Tolya, I still do, perhaps more than ever—so much so that at times I almost wish… I mean, look at the two of us! At least you have your family, and I… I…”

Averting their eyes from each other, they drank their weak tea.

“It would be nicer with lemon, I think,” said Belkin, lifting his glass to the light. “I used to have one somewhere, but it’s gone now…. By the way, I went to Malinin’s retrospective the other day. Saw that blue portrait of Nina. Amazing, isn’t it, that even he was capable of capturing beauty on that one occasion. She made a wonderful muse, I suppose.” He smiled, but it seemed to Sukhanov that he detected a quiver of strain in the corners of Belkin’s mouth; then Belkin leaned back, and the shadows around his lips shifted and dissipated.

Sukhanov nodded. “My first truly original work was inspired by her,” he said. “You remember the one with her reflection in the train window? The one lost in the Manège disaster?”

“Well, life plays funny jokes. Maybe it’s now gracing some bureaucrat’s office.”

“Ah, sort of like your Leda gracing mine!”

No longer smiling, Belkin carefully set down his glass. “That was the best thing I did in my life,” he said. “Perhaps the only thing. You really have it in your office?”

“I did for a while…. Well, to be honest, for a day only. Nina put it up, but…”

“I understand,” Belkin said, and looked away.

The light moved again, and for one instant the face Sukhanov discerned through the shadows was that of a young man with dark, mournful, beautiful eyes—the face he had known twenty-five years ago. Feeling suddenly, unaccountably sad, he swirled the lukewarm liquid in his glass, its brim browned with traces of countless lonely teatimes, and thought of that painting, Lev’s gift to him and Nina on their wedding day, a mythical nocturnal landscape with water lilies on the surface of a still lake, and a gleaming swan, and a shepherd, and a young nude sitting on the shore, her back tense, her face averted, her honey-colored body strangely reminiscent of someone he knew….

“You know, Leva,” he said, “there is something I’ve always wanted to ask you. Well, no, not always—it’s really something I’ve wondered about only recently—or maybe… It doesn’t matter.” Lev’s gaze was on him now, still and black and deep, and he could feel his heart fluttering in his throat. He glanced down; his hands, resting on the edge of the desk, trembled slightly. “Were you and Nina lovers when I met her?” he asked.

Lev recoiled as if slapped.

“No, listen,” said Sukhanov softly, “I won’t be jealous or angry, I just need to know. You see, how can I explain this… For many years I thought I understood my life so well—it was all so clear, so even, so well arranged. But recently… recently things have been happening to me, and, well… Please, I just really need to know.”

There was no sound, for one moment, then another, then yet another…. When Lev spoke, his voice was hoarse. “I loved her, Tolya. You knew that, of course. I always loved her. We met when we were in the seventh grade, and I loved her then.”

“And did she… Was she in love with you?”

He turned away. “We were children,” he said. “But yes, we thought we were in love. We started seeing each other when we were eighteen, the summer after the exams, and stayed together all through our student years. It was innocent, of course—walks in the moonlight, kisses in the shadow of blossoming jasmine branches, trembling whispers, clumsy poems—you know how first love is. Then, when I was finally appointed to my teaching position, I asked her to marry me, and that was when the quarrels began. She had all these romantic notions about my becoming the next Chagall or Kandinsky, but she said I didn’t push myself hard enough, she wanted me to be more daring, she would marry me only if I showed her what I was capable of…. She could be very cruel at times—she knew how to make me feel so small. Of course, she only hoped to inspire me, but… Well, she was young then. Finally, at the end of 1956 I think it was, shortly after you’d met her, we quarreled horribly for the last time, and that was that. I saw her again only when all of us went boating the next summer, and you were with her then.”

They were silent for a while. Suddenly Belkin clasped his hand to his forehead.

“Of course,” he exclaimed, “that’s where they are!” Throwing open a desk drawer, he rifled through its depths and extracted a plastic container with a few stale honey cakes inside. “Might as well add some more water to our tea while I’m at it.”

“Please,” said Sukhanov, no longer listening. He was remembering the day in March of 1957 when Nina had stopped by his studio, and for the first time he saw it all. She had not been interested in him or his works—she was there to seek a reconciliation with Lev, for she and Lev were not speaking, and she was too proud, and he was Lev’s best friend; and the only reason she agreed to come to his place was that he had suggested he would invite Lev along, and the only reason she went was that she felt offended at Lev’s refusal—the refusal he had invented. And later, in the crammed shabbiness of his room, as she looked at his secret paintings, at the dark fantasies he had woven for her, already for her, only for her, she said, “I understand, he really isn’t a very good painter,” and she cried—and the angry tears she shed and the broken words she spoke were not meant for her father, just as their first kiss, that wonderful, leafy, sunny kiss on the lake, was not meant for him. No, they were all meant for the man she loved and the artist who failed her, the ever-present, invisible shadow dogging their steps through all their museum walks, all their conversations, all their memories being created—the same man who now, thirty years later, was nervously brewing him a cup of dreadful tea over a rusty sink. And slowly, as more recollections claimed him, all the accidentally intercepted glances and bitten lips and bright, insincere intonations slid into place, all the uncertainties were made certain, all the blank spots colored—and by the time Belkin turned to him with a new glass of colorless tea, he finally knew the truth, and his whole young past with Nina, with its sleepless rambles through the city, its flights of happiness, its ecstatic dreams, shifted, changed in tint, became dimmer, sadder, more transparent, and at the same time more real.

“That painting of yours,” he said quietly. “It was about us, was it not? Nina was Leda, you were the shepherd boy, her youthful, earthly love—and I was the swan, the winged divinity come to take her away with the force of my art. Except that she loved my art, but she never loved me, did she? She loved you. And to think that I quit painting for her, to make her happy…”

He thought now of the evening when he had told Nina of his decision, and of her spending the whole night kneeling in her thick white gown, like some medieval saint in fervent prayer, before the stacks of canvases in their room, looking at this or that one in the jaundiced light of the lamp, and crying, and begging him not to do it, promising that she would be stronger, that she would never complain, repeating over and over that he had no right to walk away from his destiny, that he had so much fire, so much power in him…

“Tolya, what nonsense is this?” Belkin exclaimed. “Of course she loved your art, and she was very upset about your decision to quit, but—”

“You spoke to her about it? She never mentioned it.”

The spoon clanged in Belkin’s glass.

“She came by my place the day your article was published. She had the magazine with her. She… she was crying, she needed someone to talk to….”

The unnatural quiet reigned in Sukhanov’s heart. They all, in the end, had their own betrayals to live with.

“Perhaps,” he said, standing up, “there has been enough reminiscing for one night. I should go now. Thanks for the tea.”

“Wait,” Belkin said, his eyes ravaged by guilt. “What I’m trying to tell you is that Nina made a choice. She chose you, art or no art, don’t you see?”

Briefly he thought of telling Belkin that Nina had left him, then changed his mind.

“You know,” he said, stopping in the low doorway, “what I said just now, about quitting for Nina… Of course, I believed it at the time, and it was a big part of it, I’m sure, but… I’ve realized a few things over the last week or two, and I think you were right all along, Leva—ultimately, I was afraid. Not so much of prisons or poverty or even unhappiness, though I thought about all that—we all did…. But mostly, I was afraid of failure. I was so terrified that my reality would not measure up to my dreams, that I would never quite fulfill my promise, that years later I would end up—”

“Like me,” said Belkin. He was looking past Sukhanov now, at the landscapes hanging on the walls of the next room. “Ironic, isn’t it? I guess one discovers many ironies in one’s middle age. Because if any of us had real talent, it was you, Tolya, always you—more than a talent, a gift, perhaps even genius…”

A small, clear voice spoke dispassionately from a darkened corner of Sukhanov’s mind: “Geniuses don’t sell out.” Suddenly protective of his hard-won serenity, he ordered the voice silent.

“Geniuses don’t quit,” he said aloud.

“Geniuses are human. Humans quit,” said Belkin. “Andrei Rublev stopped painting for decades.”

“Andrei Rublev seems to be everyone’s favorite proof of some pet theory these days. He makes a good candidate, since he probably never existed.”

“Oh, I don’t mean the historical Rublev. I’m talking about Tarkovsky’s Rublev. Brilliance, sheer brilliance, from the very first scene. Imagine, a fifteenth-century inventor who dreams of flying leaps off a church steeple on clumsy artificial wings and smashes to his death, yet somehow one feels his triumph, if only for a second! My God, if ever there was a sure sign that times are changing, this film being allowed in our theaters is it. Haven’t you seen it?”

Something caught in Sukhanov’s throat. He shook his head mutely.

“But you must!” Belkin cried. “Everyone must! I saw it last week, and I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s one genius envisioned by another. Here is Rublev, radiant as a god, capable of turning white walls into pastures of paradise at the lightest touch of his brush, yet refusing his calling because the world around him is mean and cruel and ignorant, because people kill each other, because the rulers are unworthy, because there seems to be no place for beauty under the sun. And so for years he wanders the dark, demented Russia—the greatest artist our soil has ever formed, alone, silent, unrecognized—until one day, bent with age, he meets a boy, a mere boy, who is struggling to create the most glorious church bell in the land. And something changes in Rublev, and after all that time, he goes to Moscow to paint our Kremlin…. And here is the fascinating thing, Tolya. The black-and-white film ends with this incredible flowering of color—Rublev’s actual frescoes and icons, the culmination of his lifelong search—the most important three minutes, really, in the whole three hours. But since the story appeared to be over, the crowds were leaving the theater in a trudging herd, never even casting a glance at the screen. And so I sat alone in the theater, and the lights began to come on while pale angels and saints were still passing before me, and I thought, yes, you were right that day, our world really is dark and ignorant, just as it was in Rublev’s time—but you were also wrong, because in spite of all the injustices, and horrors, and stupidity, beauty always survives, and there will never be a higher mission than making the world richer and purer by adding more beauty to it, by making one single person cry like a child at the age of fifty-three….”

He stopped, out of breath, his eyes glistening. And at that precise moment, as his former best friend fell silent, everything was finally revealed to Sukhanov, and his whole life’s plan lay before him, wondrous and clear. Dazed, he stepped across the threshold and into the void. There were no landscapes with lilacs and skaters on the walls now. Other paintings hung in the dazzling space—paintings unearthly in their sublimity and terrible in their wisdom, each an amalgamation of biblical truths and the essence of Russia’s soul, each a triumphant revelation in color and emotion.

Slowly Anatoly Sukhanov turned around, incredulously, gratefully soaking in the new universe unfolded before him. He saw the glorious greens of the Garden of Eden presided over by Adam, naked save for a pair of eyeglasses, absently eating a not yet ripened apple and covering himself with a thick, dusty book, while Eve, light and translucent as a breeze, danced an unconcerned, nimble-footed, solitary dance in the depths of a virginal forest, butterflies in her emerald hair. He saw the Oriental lushness of a palace, with honeyed wines flowing, and yellow roses blooming, and silk- and velvet-skinned guests lolling about on sun-drenched carpets, and Salome, still as a marble statue, her hands folded virtuously, her eyes downcast, listening with the slightest hint of a coy smile to a sermon read by John the Baptist’s head residing in the place of honor on a golden platter. He saw Noah’s Ark soaring into the blueness of the sky out of the blueness of the sea, its decks overflowing with strange, magnificent beasts and angels with azure wings and huge, scaly fishes gasping their last breaths with fat purple lips. He saw the blood-red fires of hell, and the sinners with blithely oblivious, ruddy faces drinking tea and playing cards and reading magazines among the flames, none of them realizing where they were. He saw an empty black cross rising into leaden skies, a pale man with pierced hands walking toward a midnight horizon, and a Madonna swathed in darkness, her face painfully white, turning away with a disappointed look in her eyes….

Many, many paintings were there, and each so rich, so overwhelming, that he felt as if he were flying away into a starry whirlwind of terror and delight, and there were no words for the wild, weightless sensation in his heart. And he knew that all the women in the paintings had Nina’s face, and that all these works he was seeing, all these visions of astonishing genius, were his, his own—brought into the world not by the man he had been once, but by the man he was now.

And as the ecstatic wave swelled inside him, he was sure he had uncovered the meaning of his life, its past and present and future. He had had talent once but had been too young to say anything of importance, for true wisdom could be distilled only in the retort of suffering. And it was only after twenty-three years of mute crawling through mud—only after he had felt the smooth taste of betrayal on his lips and the chilly weight of thirty pieces of silver in his sweaty palm, only after he had learned about the slow fattening of the soul, the anguish of wasted chances, the pain of love slipping away, the soft, horrifying slide into death—yes, it was only then that the elixir of life was granted him and his resurrection assured.

And that, he now knew with a lightheaded, effortless certainty, was the miraculous message of the past days, which he had misunderstood for so long—a message delivered to him again and again, with sublime simplicity, by a kind professor who, while himself vanishing in the dark whirlwind of history, had taught him that beauty was eternal; by an old teacher who had surfaced from some murky Russian depths to tell him that age was irrelevant, for it took a lifetime to learn one’s craft; by a cousin whose world he had overturned with his adolescent drawings; by a father who had given him the double gift of a divine madness and the courage to fly; by a mother who, discarding all his past, clumsy attempts at greatness, had so generously wiped his slate clean, preparing it for the acceptance of new revelations; by a woman who had left her only love in the name of his brushes and oils…. Again and again, the truth had grazed him with a feathery touch, but he had stopped up his ears and closed his eyes, imprisoned by fear, imagining the hand of some angered deity poised above his head, ready to exact revenge. Yet there never had been a revenge—only his strengthening genius shaking off its bounds of sleep, shedding off the incidental, the irrelevant in life—only art calling him back to the fold.

And now, in one sonorous moment, he heard the call, and saw, and understood. And as his dormant talent ripened into something else, something infinitely more precious and great, he felt the itching of budding wings under his skin.