The Dream Life of Sukhanov

FIVE

On the landing Sukhanov met Valya, who was just leaving for the day. Married to the caretaker of their apartment house, she lived somewhere in the building’s nether regions.

“They’re waiting for you with supper, Anatoly Pavlovich,” she said, and smiled shyly, revealing a gap between her front teeth. “I’ve made my vareniki with cherries you like so much, this being Sunday and all.”

Indeed, the whole apartment was seasoned with sweet, rich smells; the woman could certainly cook. Sukhanov ate in silence. He considered telling his family about the small mnemonic miracle that had befallen him earlier that evening, but Nina wore a pained look on her face and from time to time massaged her temples, Ksenya distractedly rolled a ball of bread around the rim of her plate, and Vasily was in the middle of a story about some diplomat he knew. Not for the first time, Sukhanov noticed that his son did not look as young as a twenty-year-old should and that his light blue eyes were flat and unfathomable like those oval pools of cold paint one saw in place of eyes on Modigliani’s faces. And unexpectedly, disjointedly, he wondered how well his children actually knew him, and how they would remember him when he was gone—whether in their minds he would amount to more than a dry encyclopedia article and a handful of snapshots to illustrate it: Anatoly Pavlovich at a lectern holding forth on the demise of Western art, Anatoly Pavlovich working at his desk, with the clickety-clack of his typewriter ricocheting off the study walls and the invisible sign “Do Not Disturb” on his closed door, Anatoly Pavlovich at this or that party, sporting this or that tasteful tie, conversing with this or that famous personage…

But immediately he scoffed at the notion. While it was true, perhaps, that he did not often talk to Ksenya and Vasily about his or their lives and that their family map shone with uncharted white spots of terra incognita, entire regions where he had never thought it wise or necessary to venture, hadn’t they shared so many pleasant times over the past two decades—so many leisurely vacations by the sea, Black and Baltic, so many lovely theater evenings, so many content suppers at home like the one tonight—all of them moments of warmth and wordless understanding? Yes, after all these years they were simply bound to know one another with a knowledge of love, truer, deeper, more perfect than any other kind of knowledge…. Sukhanov swallowed a small sigh and, remembering he had an important article to finish by Thursday, abandoned the last bite on his plate and left for the study.

As soon as he crossed the threshold, he felt that something had changed in the room in his absence, as if the very air had become suffused with a different meaning; but it was not until he turned on the lamp that he realized what had happened. The empty space on the wall across from his desk, the space awaiting the return of Nina’s portrait, was no longer empty—a large oil painting now hung in its place. He looked at it, and his heart beat unsteadily.

A raven-haired girl sat by dark moonlit waters. The luminous curve of her nude body was misty as a dream, even slightly transparent, so that, if one looked very closely, one could just make out pale shapes of water lilies visible through her honey-colored, unearthly flesh. An indistinct silhouette of a youth, perhaps an admiring shepherd, was crouching in the rushes behind her, but she took no notice of him. She was gazing away, over the waters, to a horizon where a magnificent white swan was floating, slowly, majestically, triumphantly, moving closer and closer. Zeus and Leda, the seducer and the seduced… The whole thing was beautiful but at the same time oppressive, and one was tormented by the inability to see the expression on Leda’s face, for it was turned away, affording only the gentlest hint of a profile, the tender angularity of a cheekbone, the barest outline of full tips—not nearly enough to see whether she felt exultant at the god’s imminent approach, or whether she was afraid. In the lower left corner was a date, 1957, and next to it sprawled a familiar, proud signature.

Sukhanov took off his glasses, extracted a handkerchief from his pocket, rubbed the lenses, folded the handkerchief away, put the glasses back on, cleared his throat, and called for Nina. She came unhurriedly and stopped in the doorway, her bare arms crossed, turquoise bracelets clicking faintly on her wrists.

“What is this?” he asked, frowning ever so slightly, tapping his fountain pen against the proofs of his biography.

“Oh, don’t you remember?” she said, shrugging. “Lev gave it to us on our wedding day. I thought you’d remember.”

“I do remember,” he replied dryly. “What I mean is, why is it here?”

“I just thought the wall looked too bare as it was,” she said. “And then our last night’s conversation about Lev, and your going to see Swan Lake, reminded me that we had this somewhere. It goes well with the overall color scheme, don’t you think?”

“We didn’t see Swan Lake,” he said, trying to keep his voice even. “We saw Coppelia.”

“Did you really? I was sure it was Swan Lake. In any case, you can take it down if it bothers you,” she said with the same air of indifference, and gliding out into the shadows of the hallway, softly closed the door, her bracelets jingling.

Unwilling to admit that the painting’s presence did unnerve him, Sukhanov resolutely turned to the article he was writing. But the specter of his reflection in the window again distracted him, the spectacles sparkling blindly in a skull-like face; the swan kept glancing at him with its malevolent golden eye; and his thoughts refused to follow their prescribed direction, swooping instead like a flock of pigeons over old Moscow, with all its abandoned houses, all its crushed church domes, all its forgotten faces from the past…. When he heard a ghostly radio somewhere outside transmitting the chiming of the clock in Red Square, he counted and, at the eleventh stroke, stood up heavily.

Passing along winding corridors whose parquet floors were slippery with many layers of polish, he imagined a barely perceptible musical rhythm pulsating like a prolonged moan behind the door to Ksenya’s room, and a moment later caught a snippet of a telephone conversation, Vasily’s indignant voice saying to an invisible someone, “I don’t understand how he could…” and then fading away, muffled by darkened distances. When he entered the bedroom, he found Nina already in bed, propped up against a pillow with a thick book, her pale face gleaming with the silvery pollen of some precious night cream.

“What are you reading, my love?” he asked, feeling oddly like someone seeking reconciliation after a quarrel.

“Van Gogh’s letters to his brother,” she replied without looking up.

“Maybe you should try some clever detective story instead,” he offered with a tentative smile. “I could recommend one or two.”

But she said nothing, and with an inexplicable sinking of spirits, he wormed his way under the blanket on his side of their enormous bed. For a few minutes he leafed through a novel he had picked up from his nightstand, but the words meant nothing, all the characters seemed to have the same name, and he could not find the place where he had stopped previously. Giving up, he lay back in the crispy stillness of the sheets, lit on one side by Nina’s pink lampshade, and listened to a car honking a few streets away, a dog barking listlessly in the courtyard, his wife turning the pages of her book…

“The light bothers me,” he said finally.

She nodded, placed her velvet bookmark between the pages, clicked off the lamp, and slid into the darkness, her back toward him. He remained still, waiting for her breathing to acquire the nebulous weightlessness of dreams; but time passed, and he sensed that she was still awake.

“An amazing thing happened to me today,” he whispered. “I remembered something wonderful from my childhood. May I tell you?”

But there was no answer; she must have been asleep after all. For a long while he struggled with the night in a vain attempt to follow her, employing every trick he knew—studying his measured heartbeats, counting backward, drawing complicated figures behind his closed eyelids, picturing a trotting line of sheep, camels, elephants juggling multicolored balls with their trunks—yet sleep continued to elude him. After an hour of torture, his head swimming with garlands of figures and caravans of beasts, he climbed out of bed and, his feet somehow condensing into slippers, walked back to the study to do more work.

A yellow rectangle of light from a streetlamp on the corner of Belinsky Street sliced through the window and fell directly onto Belkin’s painting, making it glow in the obscurity of the room with a strange, almost three-dimensional intensity. Casting an involuntary glance on it, he noticed with surprise that Leda no longer had her flowing black tresses: a blonde now sat by the lake, her short hair resting in a perfectly curled wave on the elongated nape of her neck. At the sound of his footsteps, she turned, and with a painful start he recognized Nina—Nina enveloped by the sweet, sinful aromas of the lilies, lulled by the lazy lapping of the waters, her fifty-two-year-old body still glorious, still gleaming—a perfect middle-aged Leda awaiting her feathered god.

She looked at him without recognition and then indifferently moved her eyes away, to an unseen horizon on which the white question mark of the swan’s neck was about to materialize in a few casual brushstrokes. Frozen in the middle of the room, he felt helpless and suddenly aged in his old-man polka-dot pajamas, dreading the inevitable divine seduction yet unable to turn away—but something else happened as he watched. A ripple ran through Nina’s flesh, and it paled to a shade lighter than moonlight: her back was sprouting a pair of beautiful swan wings. In a dazzling flash of whiteness, she rose to her feet—and as she did so, he heard a rustle at the window behind him. He swung around and felt terribly disoriented for one dizzying moment. Then, at once, he understood.

The painting on the wall was not a painting at all, but a simple mirror whose frame neatly contained the reflection of the window; and there, only a few steps away, standing on the windowsill, was the real Nina, winged and naked, cautiously trying the temperature of the sky with her big toe, that little gesture of hers he knew so well (she disliked cold water). With a startled cry, he rushed toward her, to prevent, to stop, to catch… He was too late. Already, with that maddening fluid grace she possessed, she glided into the black translucence of the night, leaving behind a solitary feather fluttering slowly to the floor—and although he wanted to shout, to protest, to implore, no words came to him, none at all, and silently, knowing she would never return, he watched as she flew farther and farther away, melting amidst the cold stars above the fairy-tale city of Moscow….

When she was gone, he collapsed into his chair in despair. The rearing Pegasus underneath the lampshade regarded him with sympathy out of the corner of its bronze eye and then, unexpectedly, tore its mouth wide open and neighed, loudly, violently, in an operatic bass, “Damnation, damnation to her!” Embarrassed, Sukhanov mumbled, “Well, I wouldn’t put it quite like that,” and began to fumble with the lamp switch, trying to make it stop. But the sound would not cease—and he saw that their bedroom was once again lit with a pink glow, Nina’s side of the bed was empty, the balcony door stood ajar, and from somewhere outside there flowed into the room a powerful voice singing, “Damnation, damnation to her for all of eternity!”

Unhappily Sukhanov scrambled out of bed. His slippers were nowhere to be found, and cursing inaudibly, he walked out onto the balcony barefoot. Nina was leaning over the railings. The predawn breeze swelled her apricot-colored nightgown, filling it with gentle brightness, so that she appeared trapped in a glowing cocoon of orange air. She barely glanced at him, but he saw that she looked worried.

The operatic chant clearly issued from the apartment directly below.

“What the hell is this? Who’s making all that noise?” he asked in a whisper.

“Ivan Svechkin,” Nina whispered back. “You know, the composer who lives downstairs. He writes children’s songs. ‘That Happy Day in April When Our Ilyich Was Born’ is one of his.”

“Well, this sounds like a church chant,” he said with irritation. “I suppose he has a good reason for treating his neighbors to a nice bit of liturgy in the middle of the night?”

There were signs of sleepy stirrings on all four sides of the courtyard—windows lit, shadows peering from behind curtains, balcony doors slamming.

“I’ve heard he has a very unhappy marriage,” said Nina quietly. “His wife is twenty years younger, and he gets jealous, can’t stand to have her out of his sight…. He must be having some kind of nervous breakdown.”

They fell into an uneasy silence, listening. The rhythmical liturgy went on and on: “Damnation, damnation to her, damnation to her for all of eternity!” And as the minutes passed, it began to seem to Sukhanov that their warily expectant courtyard was being gradually transformed into the interior of a great, roofless, solemn church. The Big Dipper swung like an incense holder, spraying drops of stars into the skies above; gilded squares of lit windows all around them turned into jeweled icons, encircled by candle flames, glimmering with blackened lacquer on ancient stone walls—and for an instant he even imagined that the spirit of some fallen angel was truly being cast out by communal condemnation into the chilly August nothingness….

Then a police siren exploded nearby. Someone must have called to complain about public disturbance tinged with religious propaganda. The illusion of the church vanished. Windows went out one by one, and clicking, shutting, banging noises echoed and reechoed through the courtyard. The singing wavered, then stopped abruptly in the depths of the apartment below, and they heard the faint sound of a woman weeping. Nina winced and walked back inside; he followed, closing the balcony door behind him. The crying grew indiscernible.

“I hope I can fall asleep after all this,” he said. “What time is it?”

“Five past four,” she replied, sliding back under the covers, and added with a sigh, “How sad that must be…. Poor girl!”

“Your poor girl probably cheats on him left and right,” he said unpleasantly. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

She looked at him with silent reproach and switched off the light.

He was about to retire as well, when some odd association reminded him he had a small matter to attend to. Murmuring that he would be back in a moment, he made his way to the study (in the process tripping over his slippers, which for some reason lay sprawled just past the threshold). The painting on the wall was illuminated, as before, by the yellow light of the streetlamp, but gazing at the swan sat the tremulous black-haired Leda—not in the least like the serene blonde Nina, of course.

His arms around the frame, Sukhanov carefully began to push it upward, maneuvering to slide the painting off its hook. When it was freed, he carried the heavy canvas out into the hallway, tiptoed past the bedroom, past the arched entryway to the living room, past the velvet magnificence of the dining room, past the doors that led into his children’s mysterious lives, and onward, through the kitchen, and to a cramped closet. There he released his burden and, smiling with satisfaction, watched as Leda slid along the wall and settled in the shadows, looking rather forlorn among all the mops and shoes and discarded stuffed animals and who knew what other neglected, unloved things that crowded inside this dim space with its damp smell of oblivion. But as his eyes lingered on the painted girl’s slim waist, narrow shoulders, stretched-out neck, her whole long-legged, warm, softly gleaming shape, he felt an unwanted trembling in his chest, as if in an unguarded moment or a careless dream some particle of his soul had accidentally caught a whiff of a real, if fleeting, resemblance—or perhaps not so much an actual resemblance as an overall familiarity, a certain congruence of moods, a spiritual likeness to something, to someone…

And then, all at once, a monstrous birth took place in his innermost, darkest depths. He sensed a repulsive, slimy, impossible creature stirring, stretching, rising sluggishly from its murky abyss, already twisting his insides, almost ready to trespass into his mind, to poke its ugly snout onto the surface of his thoughts—and he feared that once the snout broke through, the poisonous words of his premonition would be released, and there would be no taking them back, and he would have to face the possibility that all these many years ago Lev Belkin had… had…

“What nonsense,” said Sukhanov promptly, perhaps a bit louder than was advisable in the sleeping house, and slammed the closet door shut.

The floor reverberated with his decisive steps as he marched back to the study. There he threw open a cabinet, rummaged through its obscure contents, and finally unearthed a small still life, already framed. Forcefully humming the duel aria from Onegin, he installed it on the orphaned wall and stepped back to consider. His father-in-law’s perfectly round, red apples shone in an abundant pile on a yellow ceramic dish. The overall effect rather pleased him—and even more important, the bright cheerfulness of the composition turned out to be conducive to his productivity, as he discovered the very next day, when, the unpleasantly turbulent night shrugged away, the disappearance of Leda left without comment, the city stretching cloudy and still below his window, he sat at his desk, sipping his morning coffee, wrapped comfortably in his robe, and mused over the article.