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,
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.
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
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,
