The Dream Life of Sukhanov

Western art of the present century wandered through the pages of the magazine like a mildly embarrassing hallucination—a mute, befuddled, miserable ghost who was ridiculed, kicked, and exorcised, but whose name was never pronounced and whose face was never revealed.

This state of affairs had existed unchanged for years, from the day Sukhanov had first assumed the reins— and until a routine staff meeting one month ago. At that meeting, Sergei Nikolaevich Pugovichkin, the assistant editor in chief and Sukhanov’s second-in-command, had let slip a disturbing rumor that had somehow filtered through the ranks. It appeared that somewhere in the celestial above, certain nebulous changes had been transpiring ever since the ascension of the new Party leader in March, and among other things, a Very Important Someone (who, naturally, remained unnamed) had been overheard expressing the hope that Art of the World might begin dedicating at least one article per issue to a “prominent Western artist,” starting, for instance, with Salvador Dali—for, as that enigmatic personage had been reputed to observe, “Dali’s as good as anyone, and one must start somewhere.” Trying not to betray the shock he had felt at the idea of Dali’s melting clocks making an appearance in the pages of his magazine, Sukhanov had shrugged nonchalantly and announced that he might as well tackle the subject himself. He was, after all, universally acknowledged as the foremost expert in the field.

This, then, was the article in question. The problem lay in the fact that the more specific he became about Dali’s life—the more he occupied himself with dates of exhibitions, titles of paintings, and places of residence—the harder it was to sustain that pure pitch of abstract condemnation he had always felt compelled to cultivate when writing about surrealism. As the voice of authority, Anatoly Pavlovich Sukhanov was unmerciful, unwavering, unforgiving—and exceedingly vague. Viewing his entrusted task as not so much educational but ritualistic in spirit —a task of juxtaposing good and evil, day and night, East and West—he had for years presided over the roasting of the surrealist specter on a spit of righteous class indignation as the drums beat louder and louder, the dance around the fire grew more and more exuberant, and the victim became increasingly obscured by clouds of billowing smoke. Yet now, unbelievably, he was being asked to describe the curl of the victim’s mustache, the occupations of his parents, and the colors of his palette. It was little wonder that for the past few weeks Sukhanov had felt ill at ease whenever he had thought about the subject.

Now, however, as he shut his monograph, stirred sugar into a fresh cup of coffee, and stared at the shiny abundance of Malinin’s red apples on the wall, he chanced to recall an amusing anecdote from Dali’s life that might just provide the angle he needed. Encouraged, he began to bang out hasty paragraphs on his unwieldy typewriter, and was already nearing the end of the third page when Nina’s voice sounded across the corridor: “Tolya, don’t you have a staff meeting at twelve? Vadim will be here in less than half an hour!”

He glanced at the clock on his desk and completed his sentence with an exclamatory punch. Continuing to trace every possible permutation of the thought in his mind, he stepped in and out of the shower, combed his hair, buttoned his shirt, overcame the resistance of newly pressed pants, and finally, struggling with his right cuff link and simultaneously debating the prudence of introducing the word “pathological” into the discussion, drifted toward a bedroom closet, pushed its door open with his elbow—and was brought to an abrupt stop.

There, on the top shelves, lay his neatly folded sets of beige and blue pajamas; here, on the bottom shelves, towered pale stacks of cotton handkerchiefs, embroidered with discreet indigo initials and permeated with faint cologne smells, and dark stacks of socks, flashing diamonds and zigzags; underneath, in the hazelwood cavities of three open drawers, glistened the shiny coils of his numerous belts. But the inside of the door—the inside of the door was empty, unexpectedly empty, and the little metal hooks, bereft of their entrusted weight, sparkled conspicuously all along the tie rack. His ties were gone; gone also were his three or four velvet bow ties (perfectly respectable specimens, black, white, and crimson, worn exclusively on Bolshoi Theater evenings). Only two orphaned pairs of suspenders dangled sadly in the void that the day before had been ordered into vertical silk stripes of so many noble colors.

Sukhanov stood for a minute contemplating the closet. When his vexation had ripened sufficiently, he walked to the living room. Nina was curled up in an armchair by the window, eating a sliced peach and gazing vacantly at the gray skies sliding over the roofs. A book lay forgotten beside her.

“Next time you decide to take my ties to the cleaners, my dear,” he said in consternation, “it might be useful to leave me one or two. I do have an office to go to.”

She looked up. Her lips were bright with the juice of the fruit, and her eyes were vague.

“Ties?” she said. “I haven’t taken any of your ties.”

In a moment they were confronting the emptiness together.

“How very strange,” Nina said after a puzzled pause. “When was the last time—”

He had last put on a tie the previous morning, while dressing for Coppelia, and had not opened the closet since. (Upon his return, he had tossed the used tie onto the back of a chair, where its subdued blue pendulum had swung for a few beats before coming to a stop, and where it hung now in rumpled solitude.) The mysterious removal of his property must have taken place between his and Vasily’s departure for the Bolshoi and his arrival home at seven that evening. Nina seemed just as perplexed as he was, and Vasily flatly denied any knowledge of the matter. Ksenya had already left for Komsomolskaya Pravda, where she was interning for the summer; but naturally, as Nina pointed out, she had no reason to venture into his closet, and practical jokes were simply not in her nature.

Sukhanov was beginning to feel incensed.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “And in any case, you were in bed with a headache all day, so no one could have sneaked into the bedroom without you seeing them!”

It seemed to him that a silvery shadow flickered swiftly through her eyes, but it must have been a trick of light, for just then a tentative tentacle of sunshine, the first of the day, probed the bedroom, playfully touching the closet’s bronze doorknobs and glittering off the belt buckles. Nina busied herself with verifying the obvious once again—checking among the socks, between the pajamas, under the handkerchiefs.

“I’m sure we’ll find them,” she was saying as she sifted through the clothes. “Perhaps you moved them somewhere yourself? Because there was no one here except me and Ksenya, and—”

“Well, I’ll be damned!” Sukhanov said suddenly. “Of course, it’s that woman!”

Nina straightened and regarded him blankly.

“Well, she was here as well, wasn’t she?” he said. His mouth had grown tight. “I knew we never should have let her into the house, she’s nothing but the wife of a drunk. I bet she pinches things here and there, and he sells them on the black market!”

“Please tell me you aren’t talking about Valya,” said Nina slowly.

Breathing with an effort but looking ominously collected, he scooped up his lone surviving tie, strode into the entrance hall, stiffly stomped his feet into a pair of shoes, and began to unlock the front door. Nina flew after him but slipped on the parquet floor, shedding a feathered slipper, which flipped over in the air like a small wounded bird. He was already crossing the threshold when she grabbed hold of his arm.

“Please, Tolya”—she spoke in a rush—“there must be some explanation, I beg you, don’t do this, she’s worked for us for ten years, and I don’t know a more honest—”

A telephone exploded shrilly in the hallway, and simultaneously something heavy crashed onto the floor above their heads. Startled, Nina turned around. Freed of her imploring touch, Sukhanov marched onto the landing, slammed the door behind him, and not waiting for the elevator, which had just come to a grating halt somewhere in the bowels of the house, descended the stairs.

The stairwell split the gray monstrosity of the building in half, laying it open like an enormous, overripe fruit, with the imposing leather-padded, nail-studded doors, two on each floor, embedded in its yawning pulp like dark seeds, every one of them containing its own luxurious blossom of success. Here, on the seventh floor, across from the unhinged composer, resided a corpulent opera singer from Tbilisi who had left the stage years before but still treated her numerous guests to tremulous arias accompanied by the velvety barking of her three fat, indolent basset hounds; whenever she gave one of her homespun concerts, some mysterious arrangement of pipes would carry the disembodied barking and trilling through walls and floors and carefully deposit their echoes in Sukhanov’s study, annoying him to no end. On the sixth floor, below the composer, lived a high-ranking Party official, a jovial fellow with an amazing profusion of warts on his chin and a plump wife who looked like his sister, and on the fifth, the elevator sometimes dropped off a sad little man in tortoiseshell glasses who resembled a poor relative from the provinces but whom Sukhanov knew to be one of the foremost classics of Soviet literature, the author of the celebrated trilogy We the Miners.