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
SIX
The article presented a curious problem.
Sukhanov felt for a bookmark in a tattered volume on his desk, opened it, and reread the underlined conclusion to a chapter: “Surrealism can thus be rightfully called a betrayer of the people, locked as it is in deadly opposition to all humanistic values and traditions. It cherishes madness and cultivates decadent indifference toward social good. Its sickening visions strive to drive a healthy man into the realm of fantasy, distracting him from the noble goal of combating world capitalism. Therefore, as a movement it has nothing of value to offer to the mature artistic perceptions of the Soviet people. Moreover, some of its more harmful elements, such as its obsessions with horror and pornography, represented most fully in the work of Salvador Dali…”
He shut the book and regarded the distinguished gray of the cover, on which the indented letters of the author’s name—his own—glittered dully with fading golden print. Then, frowning thoughtfully, he pushed the volume aside. Though published in 1965, his monograph on Western art served him still as an inexhaustible source of assertions that could be reused on most occasions, with only minor rephrasing and retouching; this time, however, he felt certain that something else—something, in fact, quite different—was expected.
As a rule, Sukhanov no longer wrote any articles himself: at his level of importance, creation had by necessity sunk to the bottom of his list of priorities. He was content with regulating the general flow of things— supervising the obsequiously smooth workings of his staff, distributing a monthly set of preselected themes among a trusted handful of critics, then poring through their texts to weed out a few chance occurrences of names better left unmentioned or to nudge two or three carelessly straying phrases back into the herd. He prepared each glossy, pleasantly substantial issue of
