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
“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 facade, 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—
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
