The Dream Life of Sukhanov

FOUR

On a brightly illuminated square, before gingerbread houses with red roofs and golden shutters, Swanilda and her friends threw their legs up in the air in a flurry of lace and enthusiasm. Sukhanov felt distracted. He was sitting so close he could hear the tentative creaks of the floorboards and the soft slaps of the dancers’ feet, could see that a braided wig on one of the women had slipped to the side, could almost guess at the multicogged machinery concealed in the wings, at any moment ready to set the silver foil of the moon gliding across a painted sky or wafts of smoke puffing cozily from two-dimensional chimneys. His box, draped in crimson velvet, sealed with an embroidered coat of arms, and almost hanging over the stage, was a clear mark of privilege, and yet, ironically, this very proximity revealed the dance to be replete with sweaty effort, robbing it of the magical illusion necessary for his enjoyment—so much so that he found himself envying the nobodies in the top gallery for whom the ballet must have seemed one blurry, whirling extravaganza of music, color, and light.

During the second intermission, Vasily roamed the sparkling cavity of the theater with his binoculars, announced that he saw an acquaintance, and slipped out. Sukhanov was left alone with his mother. He had meant for this to be a full family outing, but Nina still complained of a headache, and Ksenya had declared a particular dislike for Coppelia. “This is a perfect illustration of the difference between the French and the Germans,” she had said. “Delibes takes Hoffmann’s sinister tale of love and insanity and turns it into a story of a village Don Juan who is courting two women at once. Read it, and you’ll see what I mean.” She had then tossed a weighty volume onto his desk, upsetting his papers and causing a sheet of his biography to flutter to the floor; but before he had had time to scold her, Vasily had asked whether he could borrow his cuff links, Valya had come knocking on the door with an invitation to tea, the chauffeur had called from downstairs to report that the car was ready—and now here he was, confined in the mothball-permeated, cherry-colored plushness of the box with his mother, making polite little noises of attention in her direction.

“I think the costumes and the sets are lovely,” she replied in answer to his question, glancing at him in her quick, habitually frightened manner. “Only I can’t quite figure out… If Coppelia is the boy’s fiancée, then who is this other girl?”

“No, Mother, it’s Swanilda who is the fiancée,” he said, swallowing a sigh. “Swanilda is the village girl, and Coppelia…” Ruffling the program, he read the mildly ridiculous synopsis to her once again. “‘And in the end,’ “he finished patiently, ”‘the village celebrates its new church bell, and Franz and Dr. Coppelius each get a bag of gold.’”

Nadezhda Sergeevna nervously readjusted her ill-fitting purple dress.

“But I thought Dr. Coppelius was a negative character,” she said with another frightened look at her son.

Before he could answer, the lights began to dim, the yellow tassels on the curtain quivered and started to slide, a burst of music erupted, and Vasily tiptoed back to his seat, stepping on his neighbors’ feet and murmuring apologies. Sukhanov resigned himself to another stretch of melodious boredom. A little girl directly behind him, the daughter of someone in the Bolshoi’s top administration, was unwrapping a lollipop, noisily, endlessly, infuriatingly, and her mother kept imploring her to stop, in a loud, tragic whisper; there were always too many children at matinees. Mercifully, the performance ended quickly.

As the three of them emerged from the shadowy forest of the Bolshoi’s columned lobby, his mother leaning heavily on his arm, the slanting afternoon sun that set fire to pools of yesterday’s rainwater disoriented Sukhanov for a moment. They had not yet descended the steps when Vasily said he had to meet some friends. It seemed to Sukhanov that his son’s eyes were cold and his parting abrupt; but of course, his perceptions might have been colored by the previous night’s realization that, through an accidental blunder on his part, he had deprived the boy of a potentially brilliant twist of fate. He had tried to forget that unlucky brush with august favor, but a faintly nauseating feeling, strangely akin to a feeling of guilt, kept stirring inside him, and it was almost with relief that he watched Vasily run down the staircase and vanish in the crowd of theatergoers. Most likely, it was the same feeling of guilt that prompted him, in the very next breath, to accept his mother’s offer of tea—for it had been her invitation to Malinin’s opening that he had given to Ksenya, thinking Nadezhda Sergeevna a bit unpresentable for an event of such importance.

In truth, Sukhanov rarely enjoyed his mother’s company. Apart from her grim button-down dresses, her long gray hair pulled back in a fastidious bun, her eternal air of watchful uncertainty accompanied by fluttering gestures and startled looks, and the cloyingly sweet smell of Krasnyi Oktyabr, a perfume she had used all her life—in short, apart from the things one gleaned within the first half-hour of being in her presence—there seemed to be nothing material about her. She used to work in one of those ubiquitous patriotic organizations with a conspiratorial acronym for a name that had mushroomed in the first days of the Revolution, but which had, unlike most others, survived the tossings of history and continued to exist in some forgotten corner of Moscow. She had spent thirty years there as an accountant, although she had no formal education and no particular acuity for numbers. Sukhanov had always found it difficult to imagine her bent for hours over some massive desk in a poorly lit office with a rain-stained view of a littered courtyard and a few dying plants on the windowsills, writing down columns of meaningless arithmetic; but at least her job, vapid as it had been, had offered her a peg on which to hang her days, her weeks, her years. Ever since her retirement two decades earlier, her life had lost what little shape it had. He had never seen her with a book, walking made her tired, and the arts left her indifferent; he had no doubt it was only her misplaced sense of duty that made her timorously, with neither enjoyment nor understanding, accompany him every few months on some cultural outing. She had no acquaintances that he knew of, and no living relatives except himself. Her two-room apartment, in an old Arbat building with no elevator, invariably made him feel that her private clock had stopped many years before, as if the very notions of past and future had long since lost their relevance here. Everything was spotless, precisely placed, and absolutely unchanged from his previous visit, all his previous visits—from the time, in fact, when she had first moved here, in 1964. Purple bouquets of artificial flowers bristled pompously in black vases on her bureaus, whose surfaces were covered with yellowing doilies; a small reproduction of Shishkin’s Pine Forest decorated the wall above her drab green couch with its primly arranged profusion of lacy pillows; the same aluminum-encased clock that showed a red-lettered date in the narrow slot in its base stood on top of the old-fashioned television set that she stubbornly refused to relinquish in favor of a newer model. Even the air in the apartment did not play or move but simply hung, and Sukhanov involuntarily began to breathe deeper and talk louder the moment he walked inside, as if trying to drown out a persistent feeling of sadness.

“Just one more, Tolya, eat one more,” she pleaded, pushing at him a plate piled with sugarcoated confections he abhorred. “Are you sure? Well, at least take a few home to the kids, I have plenty. Here, why don’t I wrap them up for you, come to the kitchen.”

“Mother, please,” he protested, “the kids are no longer kids, they don’t need—”

But her mincing steps were already pattering down the corridor. Sighing, he followed her from the living room, where she always served him tea out of some dim notion of good manners. She was waiting for him on the threshold of her tiny kitchen, looking back with an unexpected sly smile.

“Come on in,” she said, beckoning. “I want to show you something.”

Mildly surprised by this departure from routine, he stepped inside, dipping his head under a low arch—and saw it right away. On top of a squatting cupboard by the window, next to a tower of boxes containing the unpalatable sugared treats, stood a round cage. A small yellow bird on a miniature swing cheerfully moved its short tail up and down, and neatly deposited a compact white drop on a crumpled newspaper below.

“You’ve got yourself a canary,” he said, trying to keep the disgust out of his voice.

“Yes, isn’t she sweet,” said Nadezhda Sergeevna, pressing her hands together. “I’ve named her Malvina.”

“How nice. Where did you get it?”

“Oh, from an acquaintance. You do think the name suits her, don’t you?”

“What acquaintance?” he asked, his surprise deepening.

She mumbled vaguely about someone’s cousin staying with relatives on a visit, and then, clearly considering the matter closed, began to sigh over her acquisition, imploring him to look, just look at this dainty beak, the color of these feathers, these bright beady eyes, so pretty, so intelligent…. Growing bored, Sukhanov stared outside. An old man was hobbling along the pavement, once in a while bending to pick something up, a cigarette butt most likely; a homeless dog darted from one courtyard to another; and over at the corner he saw—with another inexplicable tremor of guilt, though weaker this time—Vadim dozing over a newspaper, behind a lowered window of the Volga. His mother kept talking. For some reason the bird did not sing, although she was sure it would in time, it just needed to feel welcome…. A new smell, a slightly acrid smell of fowl droppings, was stealthily seeping into the familiar smells of shortbread cookies and tvorog.

Stifling a yawn, Sukhanov began to take his leave.

“But Tolya, you do like her, don’t you?” Nadezhda Sergeevna asked from the doorway, smiling anxiously.

“As long as it makes you happy,” he said absently, as always searching for an elevator button, as always remembering a moment later. “Frankly, I don’t really care for birds myself.”

“Well, I don’t know why you wouldn‘t,” she said in a petulant voice. “You did when you were a child.”

He looked at her with immediate interest. She had never told him any stories about his childhood, even on those rare occasions when he had pleaded with her for a word, a family anecdote, a particular gesture or expression he might have used when he was little—anything at all to imbue with life a few black-and-white prewar snapshots of a skinny boy posing expressionlessly, unnaturally, between the gray covers of her photo album.

“I used to like birds?” he asked in amusement.

A frightened shadow flitted across her face, as if she had said more than she should have.

“You and every other child your age,” she muttered with that little grimace of nervousness he knew so well. “Good night, Tolya.”

“Good night, Mother,” he said with a sigh. “The tea was delicious.”

Pressing the shapeless package of sweets to his chest, he descended the stairs. For the duration of all six flights he could hear her fumbling tremulously with the lock; then the heavy front door slid closed behind him with a muted bang, and he was pushed into the softly glowing evening.

It was warm, warmer than the day before, and the sun, about to glide below the stubble of antennas on the neighboring roofs, suffused the air, the trees, the peeling stucco façades with a vespertine lucidity, imparting to the old quarter of Moscow that precious quality of rosy precision occasionally found in faintly colored nineteenth-century photographs of city vistas. Sukhanov walked past the houses with yawning gateways, which, in their depths, after one’s gaze had traveled through a sour-smelling, graffiti-covered, slightly menacing dusk, miraculously revealed flashes of cool green leafiness swaying on a light breeze in small, secret gardens. A couple of buildings down, the swift movement of a hairy hand pushed open a window. As its frame swung out, the sun shot through the glass in a fiery orange zigzag, and out into the street spilled the zesty smell of roasted chicken and the rich honey of some classic romance; the performer’s old-fashioned tenor sang caressingly of a solitary sail gliding through the blue mist of the sea. And suddenly Anatoly Pavlovich felt an odd, poignant tug at his heart, as if at that moment all these colors, smells, and sounds of a Moscow evening came together in just this way solely in order to re-create some long-forgotten combination—that of another quiet Arbat street lit by another nearing sunset, seen by a child peering out of the open window of a cramped kitchen where another chicken, a remote ancestor of this one, had been roasting in an oven, while somewhere in the dim heart of the apartment a phonograph had whined soulfully, swelling with the very same romance by Varlamov….

He slowed down, looked around him again, with different eyes this time, and thought how strange it was that he came here so rarely, only a few times a year, on these reluctant, vaguely embarrassing tea-drinking visits—and yet it had been just a few crooked, rambling, wonderful streets from this very spot that he had spent so much of his life; and all these courtyards, all these boarded-up churches, the stucco decorations of the façades, the darkening alleys he was now passing with the mild apprehension of a middle-aged man—all of this he must have once known with the most intimate knowledge of scraped knees and cut-up palms, the knowledge of a lively, inquisitive, troublesome boy. Former street names, learned from an old neighbor, rose to his lips like a charming tune from the past—Filippovsky Lane, Malyi Afanasievsky, Bolshoi Afanasievsky… And when, at the corner, the houses finally fell apart, revealing the wide beginnings of Gogolevsky Boulevard, and Vadim appeared from under the newspaper, yawning as he scrambled to wakefulness, Sukhanov surprised himself.

“Drive down the boulevard and meet me at its lower end, by the metro, will you?” he said airily. “The evening is so nice, I’d like to take a little walk.”

Aware of his Volga pulling out into the street immediately behind him, he crossed with an unaccustomed recklessness, at a yellow light, and entered the shade of the trees surrounding a statue of Gogol. The author of Dead Souls was, as usual, stiffly striding forward with a sarcastic half-smile on his lips. Sukhanov hesitated; but the reddening sun dappled the ground so alluringly and the leaves rustled so lightly that he shrugged and sat down on the nearest bench—only for a minute, he told himself as he gazed about him, pleasantly stirred by the proximity of his earliest years. All the other benches were occupied, mostly by embracing couples, with a sprinkle of solitary women here and there; one of them, with the prim face of a provincial schoolteacher, was tossing crumbs at an undulating sea of pigeons. A bit farther down the boulevard, a pack of small children played noisily, climbing over a wooden mushroom, falling off, laughing, climbing again. I might have come here as a toddler, he thought sentimentally.

The other end of the bench dipped heavily, and he emerged from his sun-drenched reverie to find an individual of indeterminate age and highly disreputable appearance tilting toward him with a loose, unfocused grin.

“Guess what I have inside my head?” the character whispered with a conspiratorial wink.

Sukhanov surveyed the man’s gleaming eyes, shaved head, inflamed cheeks, gapped yellow grin, and the stained salmon-colored scarf wrapped around his neck, then turned away in prohibitive silence.

“What, too proud to talk to me?” the man said accusingly behind his back, louder this time. “Why don’t you answer my question? What do I have inside my head?”

A nearby couple looked up with curiosity. Wincing, Sukhanov turned back.

“I have not the slightest idea,” he said in an icy tone.

The man roared in drunken triumph. “No one ever guesses!” he bellowed right into Sukhanov’s face. Surprisingly, there was no alcohol on his breath. “But I like you, so I’ll tell you anyway. I have an inflated balloon inside my head, that’s what I have, yeah, and it feels great! Of course, you’re probably just as ungrateful as the rest of them, but I sense great affinity between us, so I’m going to tell you how I did it.”

Sukhanov regarded the man with loathing—and then a solution occurred to him, so simple and mischievous he almost laughed with the malicious pleasure of a boy.

“Why don’t you go and tell that lady over there instead?” he said quietly, nodding at the stern schoolteacher who was still feeding her pigeons. “I’m sure she’ll be happy to know.”

The madman swung around and studied the woman, chewing thoughtfully at one end of his scarf. After a long minute he broke into an ecstatic smile, heaved himself up, and murmuring under his breath, headed toward her with the unsteady jerks of a cotton doll. On reaching the gray sea of birds that spilled away from her bench in shifting, cooing waves, he appeared briefly confounded, then raised his arms high over his head, yelled something, and plunged forward stumbling. The woman shrieked, and a hundred pigeons took off at once, tearing the air, erasing the trees and the roofs, obliterating even the confidently smirking, striding Gogol—and forgetting everything else, Sukhanov stared, stared at their flight, stared at their wings….

The birds flew in rustling, sparkling, ever-widening circles above his head, their hundreds of wings lifting and falling in reverberant staccato, glowing with rosy translucence against the sunset—and when, after many pounding heartbeats, they began to descend to the ground, one after another, like so many falling petals, he saw a different statue revealed in the same place. This too is a Gogol, but one sitting heavily slumped forward, an ill, lonely, heartbroken man—the very same Gogol, indeed, whose mournful aspect will be eventually declared to “misrepresent Soviet reality” and who will then, in the year 1952, be removed, replaced, abandoned in some unfrequented nook of the city. And here, barely reaching the sad man’s feet on the pedestal, I stand with my head tipped back—a three-year-old who has just chased a flock of pigeons and is now watching their circling flight in open-mouthed fascination. Yes, I demand to be brought here day after day for this very reason, for I never tire of the excitement of breaking into a sudden run and startling these wonderful creatures with their puffed-up chests and iridescent throats and hoarse calls, setting them aflutter again and again, and then breathlessly staring after them, trying to catch the precise, brilliant moment when the sun bursts goldenly through the chinks in their flapping wings—until one day a face, a man’s face, a giant’s face with laughing eyes the color of pigeons’ wings, materializes out of the birds’ flickering and fluttering. The face moves closer and closer, until it is level with mine, and then I hear a voice—a voice that I somehow know already, a voice I have always known.

“So you like birds, Tolya, do you? Come then, I want to show you something.”

My hand timidly finds its way into the giant’s hand, and we walk—walk along the tree-lined Gogolevsky Boulevard, past kiosks selling tepid lemonade, past noisy children climbing a wooden mushroom that I find boring, past yellow-and-white mansions flecked with the sun, then through low gates of cast iron, and up an imposing marble staircase—and finally I stand in a long hall with dimness in the corners, and high above me, almost touching the ceiling, revealed in a majestic sweep of light, trembles an enormous creature with dark metal veins running through its spreading, transparent wings.

“An inventor made this,” the giant tells me. “These are artificial wings for a man, you see, so he can put them on and fly. Would you like to fly, Tolya?”

I imagine myself rising, rising with the beautiful, graceful creatures over that unhappy man of stone, spiraling higher into the glowing sky, and, overwhelmed, I nod quickly, repeatedly, and my eyes must be shining, because the man who is with me smiles at me—but already I see that the creature under the ceiling looks clumsy, gigantic, unyielding, not at all like the birds I know, and my certainty wavers.

“I don’t like it, it’s ugly,” I say disappointedly. The man laughs and ruffles my hair and takes me away; and as we walk outside, into the noise and the sunlight and the smells of hot pastries, he says to me, “This flying machine is an important step toward the dream, Tolya, but it’s not the dream itself. You are right, man hopes to fly without any machines one day, soaring up and up with his will alone, free as a bird—and that day, if it ever comes, will be humanity’s most glorious triumph.”

“When I grow up, I want to fly without machines,” I tell him, and as I look up, I see the most brilliant smile trembling under the mustache on his joyful, his dear face, seconds before the street, the light, the man himself begin to fade out like the last scene in a silent film….

His eyes closed, Anatoly Pavlovich sat on the bench, taking shallow breaths, feeling as if a flock of birds had just traveled singing through his mind. In what murky subliminal cavern had it been lying dormant all these years, this priceless burst of a memory, only to yield itself in all its vivid colors at the lightest touch of fate? True, a factual basis for the discovery had been there for a long while. Once, in his reading, he had chanced across a curious tidbit about Vladimir Tatlin, an avant-garde artist who in middle age had become obsessed with flight and had spent years building models, and whose flying glider had been exhibited in 1932 at the State Museum of Fine Arts, now the Pushkin Museum, not ten minutes away from here. Sukhanov had carried that irrelevant scrap of information with him for many years, probably because the glider’s name, Letatlin, had amused him with its ingenious merger of inventor and invention, of Tatlin and letat‘, “to fly”; yet it had remained only a piece of textbook knowledge—until now, when a lucky convergence of words, shades, and gestures succeeded in tearing one magically prolonged glimpse of the past from the steely grip of oblivion and ensconcing it in his soul, quivering and alive.

Naturally, he did not doubt that the vision was faulty in places and that his later knowledge superimposed itself now and again over the lacunae of memory. For one thing, the man of his recollection sported a mustache, looking, in fact, exactly like the dashing suitor offering a bouquet of roses in a black-and-white photograph over Nadezhda Sergeevna’s bed; and even though his mother had told him that Pavel Sukhanov had shaved his mustache once and for all on the day of their wedding, the face bending over him stubbornly refused to shed it. And of course, he did not really believe he had succeeded in reproducing his father’s actual words, for the phrasing was suspiciously sophisticated and would not have been understood, much less remembered, by a three-year-old. All the same, he knew the essence of the encounter had been captured. Tatlin’s glider rose in his mind’s eye with perfect clarity, the general meaning of the conversation was intact—and most important, he was sure, absolutely sure, of the wonderful smile that had lit up the man’s face when the little boy had said, “I want to fly.”

Sukhanov had been too young to salvage much of value from the few years he had shared with his father. In a meager collection of his childhood mementos, no more than snapshots really, the man faded in and out of sight, crossing a hallway, gulping scalding tea over a counter, bending to tie his shoelaces, saying a rushed good-bye—always stepping into a frame only to step out of it an instant later. The gift he had received this summer evening was thus made all the more precious, for not only was it his earliest memory of Pavel Sukhanov—it was also one of the brightest, possessing as it did genuine life and warmth.

Sukhanov stood up, dusted his pants, and smiling a secret little smile, absently floated down the boulevard, through the city that was being washed away by darkness. Only a few paces later, he encountered Vadim, who was almost running toward him. He shrugged, brushing away the chauffeur’s questions—of course he was all right, it had been only a minute or two, had it not? Just as absently he climbed into the backseat of the suddenly manifested car, and a moment later, when they came to an abrupt stop, was surprised to see his own building looming above him.

He had already taken a few steps toward the door when something occurred to him, and returning, he rapped on the front window.

“Listen, how old is your daughter?” he asked. “Eight, isn’t she?”

“She turned eleven last week,” Vadim replied with a startled glance.

“Simply incredible how time flies,” murmured Sukhanov. “But never mind, she’ll still have a sweet tooth. Here, why don’t you take these for her, she’ll like them….”

And thrusting the crumpled package of crumbling sweets at the perplexed chauffeur, he smiled the same secret, dreamy smile, and was off.