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
“Did you really? I was sure it was
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!”
