The Dream Life of Sukhanov

EIGHT

On Tuesday morning, Sukhanov woke up late and was surprised to find himself smiling; he must have had an especially pleasant dream. Casting around his memory for its fading shimmer, he emerged yawning into the hallway and was surprised again, even more pleasantly, by the delicious smell of fried onions zestfully seasoning the whole apartment. Thinking that his life without Valya’s culinary talents might turn out to be acceptable after all, he sleepily followed his nose into the kitchen—and upon entering, was shocked to see Dalevich bending over the stove, wearing Nina’s apron and flourishing a spatula.

“You’ve got to try this,” said Ksenya, speaking with her mouth full. “The best omelet I’ve had in my life!”

Conscious of the ridiculous figure he cut standing in a wide shaft of sunlight, dressed in polka-dot pajamas that betrayed the rotundity of his stomach, with an undulating weave of the sofa’s pattern printed across his cheek, Sukhanov announced that he was not really hungry (Nina’s eyebrows rose slightly), not to mention that he needed to return to work without further ado—and would Ksenya be so kind as to bring him some coffee when it was ready? Then, murmuring unintelligible apologies to Dalevich, he retreated, past his son’s door, which was still demonstratively shut, back to the study. By the time he established himself at his desk, the last traces of his blithe morning mood had melted away like a desert mirage, and a long caravan of tedious, unhappy thoughts plodded across his mind. There was the matter of the room that needed to be arranged for that nuisance of a relative, and Vasily, whose slippery gaze and scoffing remarks had started to trouble him in earnest, and of course, the problem at hand—this insufferable essay on Dali that had been foisted upon him with so little ceremony.

The essay, at least, was resolving itself, he concluded after reviewing the text from the previous day. He had begun his narrative with a providentially remembered anecdote, which, being not only amusing but also undeniably metaphorical, spared him the unpleasantness of resorting to such harsh words as, for instance, “abnormal.” Once, during an arranged breakfast with a prominent Soviet poet, Dalí had commented in passing on the stunning beauty of an atomic mushroom cloud rising in purple ripeness into the skies. Justifiably outraged by such lack of humanity, the Soviet celebrity, at a loss for a fitting repartee, promptly spat in Dalí’s coffee. The artist remained unruffled. “I’ve tasted coffee with cream and sugar, with milk and various liqueurs,” he observed thoughtfully, “but never before with spittle”—and savoring the moment, he slowly carried the cup to his mustachioed lips.

Setting the emptied cup back into its porcelain nest, Sukhanov fed a blank page into his ancient typewriter. Strangely, in spite of the auspicious beginning, he felt singularly uninspired and for a while sat without typing, lightly tapping his index finger against the space bar and looking at his shelves. He knew the contents of his work library down to the spine. Starting with the subdued yet foreboding drumroll of a short essay collection by Marx and Engels, it continued with the tremulous flutelike notes of Plekhanov and Lunacharsky, then, with a wide, powerful sweep, moved into the avalanchine brasses of the maroon-clad marching band of Lenin’s Complete Works, and finally, passing through an unwavering chorus of the next sixty years of Soviet criticism (his own specimens proudly present in the multicolored glory of all their editions), disintegrated rather incongruously into a random assortment of art books, with the chaotic wheeze and rattle of surrealist castanets, gongs, and cymbals all but drowning out the Renaissance violins. (The surrealist gathering included a perplexing brochure, published in New York, entitled “Safe Surrealist Games for Your Home,” and a catalogue whose cover pictured a man in a bowler hat with a bird in place of his face.)

He sat gazing at the books for many empty minutes, ostensibly debating the choice of a quotation suitable as commentary on the Dali episode, in reality letting his thoughts wander somewhere far, far away; but eventually the shelves swam back into focus, and sighing, he reached for the most dog-eared volume of Lenin’s Works. It fell open predictably in just the place he sought, so often had he made use of these few thickly underlined paragraphs. Barely consulting the page, he began to type: “As Vladimir Ilyich Lenin said in his famous 1920 speech at the Third Congress of the Russian Communist Youth Union, ‘For us morality, taken apart from the human society, does not exist; it is a fraud. For us morality is subordinate to the interests of class struggle of the proletariat. Morality serves for the human society to ascend higher, to get rid of the exploitation of labor.’” He paused to consider, then went on, much more haltingly: “Without doubt, the same truth applies to art. Any art devoid of its underlying human principle can only lead to moral chaos, and…”

Each word dragged itself with an effort, like a half-dead prisoner burdened with lead weights at his ankles, and the world around seemed to conspire to make Sukhanov distracted and uncomfortable. The sun, rising higher, merrily danced off the bronze Pegasus at his elbow, tossing handfuls of annoying little flashes into his eyes. The customary piece of toast that Nina brought in at eleven o‘clock tasted vaguely of herring. The robe he wore felt stifling and unclean, but he was forced to perspire in helpless irritation since his clothes were trapped in the bedroom closet and he did not want to risk another awkward encounter with Dalevich. The telephone kept ringing with muffled persistence in the distant reaches of the apartment, making him lose what little concentration he could muster. After a mostly fruitless hour punctuated by sporadic bursts of typing, he pulled the page out of the typewriter and considered his single paragraph with a displeased frown. For a moment his pen hung poised over the lines like a bird of prey ready to swoop down for the kill; then, descending swiftly, it moved across the paper with such violence that a few sharp tears appeared in the text.

The new version was markedly shorter.

“In the well-known words of V. I. Lenin,” it read now, “ ‘Morality, taken apart from the human society, does not exist [tear]…. Morality serves for the human society to ascend higher [larger tear]….’ In certain ways, these words may apply to art.”

Here the paragraph ended, clearly leading nowhere. After some thought, Sukhanov crumpled the page and tossed it away, sending after it the three pages from the previous day. He missed the wastebasket every time. He then rolled a new sheet into the typewriter and banged out angrily: “Salvador Dali was born in 1904 in a small Spanish town. The artist’s father was…” At which point he stopped, and stared at nothing.

When, another futile hour later, an apologetic knock sounded on his door, he was glad for the interruption. It was his cousin, inviting him to dinner.

“I’ve taken the liberty to roast a small chicken,” said Fyodor Mikhailovich with a self-deprecating shrug, looking more than ever like a pleasant gentleman from the turn of the century.

At dinner, Vasily was absent again; he had apparently left sometime before, to spend the day at a friend’s dacha. “Ah yes, those last joys of summer,” said Sukhanov with a short laugh, addressing no one in particular. Nina had wanted to set the table in the dining room, since they had a guest, but Dalevich had implored her not to do anything special on his account. “Please don’t pay any heed to my presence,” he had begged in a heartfelt voice. In truth, it was rather hard to ignore his presence, as the man dominated all conversation. A curator of some northern folk museum, he had come to Moscow, it seemed, for the purpose of researching a book on icons, and now, his beard bristling, his glasses dancing, spoke with an endless, tiresome enthusiasm about egg yolk and cinnabar and what it must have meant for an artist to extract the colors for his masterpieces with his own hands from the world around him, from the earth upon which he had walked….

Sukhanov soon grew restless. “So, Fyodor,” he interrupted with a thin smile, “what do you think, did Rublev really exist, or is this just another myth of art history?”

Dalevich looked startled. Then he laughed.

“The only reason people doubt the existence of Rublev—or Shakespeare, for that matter,” he said, raising a gnawed chicken leg for emphasis, “is that it’s hard for ordinary minds like ours to imagine a genius of such magnitude. It makes us feel safer, wouldn’t you agree, to split a giant into several more manageable, only moderately oversized figures. And yet, however much it may dwarf us, I’m certain that the giants did live.” He paused for a discreet nibble on the chicken leg, then said mildly, “I hear, Tolya, you are writing a book as well?”

Sukhanov ceased smiling.

“An article,” he said stiffly. “About Dalí. The surrealist.”

“Ah, but how fascinating!” Fyodor Mikhailovich exclaimed with delight. “So what’s your opinion of him, if I may ask?”

Avoiding references to either capitalism or socialism, Sukhanov carefully discoursed on the harmful irrationality of surrealist works, which set out to pervert the sacred purpose of art—that of leading mankind to new triumphs, to the greater and fuller realization of its potential. Fyodor Mikhailovich nodded with polite interest.

“Naturally, your article must express the official viewpoint of your magazine,” he said when Sukhanov finished. “I was more curious to find out what you yourself thought about Dali. Do you like his paintings, Tolya? Do you think they are good art?”

Ksenya tried to suppress a snicker and failed—and once again, Sukhanov had the strange, disorienting feeling that his life had made yet another circle, that someone had asked him these very questions before.

He looked at his cousin with barely hidden hostility.

“Is it so inconceivable that my own viewpoint actually coincides with that of my magazine?” he said sharply. “What do you think about Dali? You like him, I take it?”

“No, I can’t say I do,” said Fyodor Mikhailovich thoughtfully. “True, the man once had undeniable talent. His early visions are haunting, don’t you find—those pulpy, dripping clocks, those burning giraffes, Venus de Milo with drawers carved all along her body—great, dark metaphors for our nightmarish century. Unfortunately, after these first brilliant steps, he stopped striving and began to repeat himself—more clocks, more giraffes, more drawers, all those sleek juxtapositions of random objects that seem striking for a moment but are devoid of any real meaning, all those amusing tricks for the eye, like Raphael’s Madonna fitted into an ear, you know it? He managed to trivialize himself completely. True art, in my modest opinion, must uphold a harmonious balance between form and content, and content is precisely what he’s lost. The man is nothing but a trickster now. A pity, really. He allowed the surrealist form he once invented to overtake him and thus failed to live up to the demands of his own gift, becoming just another small man cursed with a great talent…. Nina Petrovna, are you all right?”

Nina slowly moved her eyes away from her husband’s face.

“I’m sorry, I was just thinking about something,” she said quietly. “Would anyone like more chicken?”

Late in the evening, Sukhanov went for a walk. Walks were not in his habit, but as the day dragged on sluggishly, moving through the customary time markers of work, dinner, work, supper, its cumulative effect made him long to step outside the confines of the familiar setting, if only for a quick turn around the neighborhood. For the first time in years, being inside the four walls of his home imparted no sense of well-heeled security; rather, it made him feel claustrophobic and helpless, as if he were a minor character in some minimalist novel, sent to travel the corridor between the kitchen and the study forever and ever by a cruel, uncaring author, while he, powerless to break out of the hateful paragraph, dreamt perhaps of being magically transported from a bedroom yawn to a small rented boat on a public park’s pond, with the first summer sunlight warming his face and a girl in a flowing green scarf nibbling on an ice cream cone, and laughing, and looking into his eyes…. Of course, the boat had long since carried the girl away into the mists of the past, thought Sukhanov with an odd pang of regret as he stopped to watch a leaf fluttering through the air. The woman she had become still wore flowing scarves from time to time, but she did not laugh very much and hardly ever looked into his eyes. But perhaps this was as things were supposed to be when one ceased to be young, and it was simply the advent of autumn, both in the world around him and in his own life, that caused him to indulge in such melancholy reflections.

The leaf touched the ground; he walked away, shrugging.

At ten o‘clock, the streets of the Zamoskvorechie were quiet and dark, with only an occasional streetlamp depriving the night of a peeling façade, a solitary branch glowing with emerald fire in the depths of an invisible tree, or strikingly, a bright flowering of domes above the low rooftops. The rarefied jingling of a late trolley reached him from Bolshaya Polyanka Street, a courtyard away; a solitary guitar twang fell from a window open somewhere above his head. Another gloomy, poorly lit street, empty save for the ghosts of portly merchants who had inhabited this quarter of Moscow in centuries past and who now hurried obliviously, crossing themselves, in and out of a dilapidated church, led him to the Tretyakovskaya Gallery, which sat in the middle of its illuminated yard like a multilayered cake on a platter. The day’s foreign crowds had all washed away until morning, leaving unfamiliar-looking soda bottles, crumpled ticket stubs, and cigarette butts in their wake. Now only rare intertwined couples strolled through the echoing night, heads close together, quarreling or giggling, perfectly indifferent to the fact that just a few walls away hung the highest accomplishment of Russian art—The Trinity by Andrei Rublev, the legendary fifteenth-century icon painter who might or might not have existed.

Sukhanov too walked without pausing. For twelve long years, he had lived mere minutes from here—could, in fact, see the glint of the gallery’s roof from his kitchen windows—yet in all that time he had been inside only on two or three obligatory visits with his then pre-adolescent children. Apart from Ksenya’s bright-eyed fascination with Vrubel’s Demon and Vasily’s tepid curiosity about the dress of eighteenth-century courtiers, they had remained on the whole uninterested. “Why do they put everything under glass?” Ksenya had whined in every room. “I can see nothing but my own reflection!”

Underneath this innocuous layer of infrequent memories lay another, deeper deposit, dating from the years when he and Nina, still young, still childless, had lived on the other side of the river, and every day Nina had passed through the halls of the Tretyakovka as one of its many anonymous curators. Briefly Sukhanov wondered whether she still came here from time to time; if she did, she never mentioned it. Then, unwilling to probe any further into this particular pocket of darkness, as if afraid of all the bats that might fly screeching into his face out of the void, he forced his thoughts away. Past the museum, a short, crooked alley swallowed him into its ill-smelling shadow and, before he had time to suck in his breath, spat him out into the sudden lights of a square, with a red M swimming through a pinkish haze and two or three neon signs with gaping holes of burnt-out letters flickering in the dimness beyond. The ice cream kiosk, he saw, had closed for the day only minutes earlier. A short-haired girl in a yellow dress, hurrying toward the metro, was just beginning to strip her Eskimo of its wrapper. Sukhanov watched her absently. When she vanished down the staircase leading underground, he turned to go back home.

He was already nearing his building when a taxi pulled up a few paces away. Its door swung open, and a tall, slim youth in a sleek blazer spilled out into the night, chased by the contentious voice of the driver. The words traveled shrilly down quiet Belinsky Street: “Hey, golden boy, and what about these wine stains on my seat?” The passenger shrugged with a loose haughtiness of inebriation and sent a negligent bill flying through the taxi’s window.

“Buy yourself a new car with the change, why don’t you?” he said, walking away

The man was Vasily.

Displeased, Sukhanov stopped and watched him weave unsteadily in and out of pale strips of light—but as he watched, he began to smile, and as he smiled, he unexpectedly found his recent feeling toward his son changing, lightening, shifting from that of wary bemusement to that of an amiable, generous, fatherly tolerance. Surprising himself, he called out, and Vasily turned and haltingly waded toward him, careful to circumnavigate every dense concentration of shadow on the pavement.

“Doesn’t anyone clean the streets anymore?” he queried garrulously. “I swear, that janitor does nothing but drink…. Papa, is that you?”

Chuckling with amusement, Sukhanov guided him to a bench, which materialized obligingly five steps away, sat down himself, and feeling more and more expansive by the minute, accepted a sip from a half-empty bottle of wine the boy extracted, after some fumbling, from an inner pocket of his blazer. He had braced himself for a cheap, pungent taste, but discovered the wine to be truly excellent, velvety and rich, lingering on the tip of his tongue with a nobly understated sweetness. Gently he wrested the bottle away from Vasily and, curious, turned it this way and that, trying to discern the label through the darkness, until the red-and-golden letters flashed on the distinctive black background.

“But this is Kindzmarauli,” he said, surprised. “Must have been some party!”

He took another sip, savoring it this time, letting his memory drift to his own youth, to that unforgettable trip to the sea he had taken with Nina the summer after their wedding, to the nights filled with overripe peaches and stars falling like rain and the cheap wines of Georgia, sold by the barrel in small mountain settlements—nothing like this one, of course, and yet sharing with it the same sunshine, the same air, the same undercurrent of happiness, enough for the present superior taste, by dint of relatedness, to reawaken in his being echoes of a thousand trifles that had once made him feel so alive. Suddenly the desire to reminisce overwhelmed him. Putting his arm around Vasily’s shoulders, he imagined himself talking about so many things, telling so many stories—about a small boy chasing pigeons, and a brilliant engineer in love with his country, and an old man nicknamed the Professor who, unbeknownst to himself, had possessed something very akin to magic—all the things that he had never had time or inclination to share with his children, all the barely expressible and deeply personal things that lived, poignant, precious, endlessly important, beyond the common property of dull biographical facts. He thought how much he would have given to talk like this with his own father, and how unique this moment was, with the two of them sitting side by side, passing wine to each other in an eloquent silence of true intimacy, separated from the whole universe by this hour of understanding, with the solemn August night lying expectantly at their feet and the city watching over them with its hundreds of lit windows, and how, years and years from now, Vasily would still remember the words that he was just about to—

“Yes, not too bad,” Vasily said. “You should have seen the man’s digs!”

It took Sukhanov a long minute to recall the comment he had made just before boarding his present train of thought. Mechanically, he said, “Ah yes, the party. What man? Weren’t you at Olga’s dacha? And by the way, I meant to ask you—”

Olga was a charming girl involved with Vasily in a romance that had lasted for several lukewarm years now, and it occurred to Sukhanov that the subject might serve as a suitable introduction to a momentous discourse on youth, happiness, and other matters distilled by his lifelong wisdom.

“Of course I wasn’t at Olga‘s,” said Vasily in a surprised voice. “Didn’t you know where I went? Remember that little get-together planned by the Minister of Culture?”

“The Minister of Culture?” Sukhanov repeated blankly.

“Yes, he invited both of us to come to his dacha tonight, remember?” said Vasily offhandedly

A dog began to bark hoarsely a few streets away. Sukhanov looked at his son in deepening silence. The boy’s eyes had narrowed, and he did not seem half as tipsy as before.

“Oh, that’s right, you forgot to tell me about it!” he said with a cold smile. “Slipped your mind, did it? But I happened to see the Minister’s wife at that matinee at the Bolshoi, and she mentioned it to me. As a matter of fact, she wanted to make sure we’d be there. I told her you were rather busy nowadays, but as for me, I’d be delighted.”

“Vasily,” said Sukhanov slowly. “You must understand, it wasn’t an intentional… I didn’t… I just wasn’t sure we were invited, you see. I wish you had told me, I myself would have liked to… Ah, forget it. That was lucky, you running into the woman.”

“Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it luck,” said Vasily “I overheard she was going to be at the theater. Why else, do you think, would I agree to suffer through three hours of boredom? I mean, no offense, but Grandma isn’t exactly a bundle of laughs, and I find Coppelia greatly overrated.”

“Oh,” said Sukhanov. “Oh, I see. Well, I’m glad it worked out. Many interesting people at the party, I suppose… By the way, did you meet their daughter? I hear she is pretty.”

“No, not particularly, unless, of course, your preferences run to tiny eyes and a general absence of neck. Which, personally, I’m willing to live with if they belong to a minister’s offspring. We hit it off rather well, I believe. I’m taking her out to dinner. Another sip?”

“No, thank you,” said Sukhanov cheerlessly. For some reason, he failed to feel happy for his son. Instead, he found himself strangely rattled by the conversation, so different from the one he had pictured. “And what about Olga?”

“Oh well, I figure we both need a change of scenery,” said Vasily with a shrug.

It was drawing closer to midnight; the lights were starting to go out in the houses around them, and the bench had turned cold. A leaf fell into Sukhanov’s lap; he picked it up and twirled it in his fingers. The dog, now barking only a street away, was joined by another, and their howling made him edgy and sad at the same time, as if he had lost something vital.

“Were you ever even in love with her?” he asked quietly.

Vasily looked vastly amused.

“I don’t believe it,” he drawled. “You, of all people, are going to lecture me about love?”

“What is that supposed to mean?” said Anatoly Pavlovich, straightening with slow dignity. “Your mother and I married for love!”

“But it sure was nice that she wasn’t the daughter of a bus driver, right?” Vasily replied, smiling. “I mean, how fortunate that her famous father was just the person to help you start your wonderful little career in art criticism. Talk of lucky coincidences!”

And that was when Sukhanov looked at his son—and saw a grown man whom he did not recognize. The man had light blue eyes and dark blond hair. The man was wearing a perfectly tailored blazer and drinking expensive wine. The man looked altogether like someone he had once known, but the man was an impostor. Had to be.

Sukhanov began to stand up.

“Let’s go home, I’m getting cold,” he said expressionlessly. “And by the way, Fyodor is staying with us for one more night. I expect you to be polite.”

“Do you know what your trouble is?” said the man on the bench, not attempting to move. “You do everything halfway. So you married up, so you sold out, wrote ideological nonsense you didn’t believe in, fine and good—but what did you get for it? A comfortable apartment in the Zamoskvorechie, a nice dacha, and a cushy little job at some magazine! Honestly, Father, was that the extent of your ambition, was it even worth all the sacrifice, to become an important man in such a small world? Do you realize how high you could have risen with Grandpa’s connections if only you had wanted to? But then again, maybe you couldn’t have, maybe you simply didn’t have it in you, maybe—”

Anatoly Pavlovich turned and walked away with heavy steps, feeling his age in his shoulders and knees. In another moment, the empty bottle clanged dully as it rolled under the bench, and Vasily followed him, still talking—talking about his own plans, his influential grandfather, some place in the Crimea, the Minister, the Minister’s overweight daughter… Sukhanov was no longer listening. When the elevator arrived, boxlike and lurching, and the smiling concierge swung open its iron gate, he waited for his son to pass inside the dismally mirrored coffin and then announced he was going to take the stairs instead.

“Good for one’s health,” he explained to the concierge.

“So I’ve heard,” replied the concierge enthusiastically. “They say every step up adds a second to a man’s life!”

For a moment Sukhanov wondered whether he wanted these extra seconds, these tiny units of life, pulsing with animation, stored in his body for future usage. Then he nodded and began to climb. On the third landing, he heard a plate smashing onto the floor in the apartment belonging to the mysterious woman with Nefertiti’s profile. As he continued to ascend, he thought that an altogether unusual amount of porcelain was being broken nowadays in building number seven, Belinsky Street, in the city of Moscow.