The Dream Life of Sukhanov

Two hours later, he stood on a sidewalk, his briefcase in hand, and squinting against the sun, watched the chauffeur haul a gigantic suitcase into the trunk of the car. Vasily himself was already sprawled in the backseat amid more of his belongings, drawing on a cigarette and looking bored. He was going to spend the last two weeks of August with his grandfather, at an exclusive Party resort in the Crimea, doubtlessly replete with cypress-scented, starlit promenades, sonorous cicadas, and all sorts of people whom it would be most useful to meet—apparently a plan of a monthlong standing, with which everyone was well familiar and which Sukhanov alone, even after passing his memory through a sieve of intense scrutiny, could not recall ever hearing.

Vasily rolled down the window.

“Ah, you’re still here,” he said indifferently. “Want a lift somewhere?”

The boy acted as if he had all but forgotten their painful conversation of two nights before—and quite possibly, he truly had, the details buried in the haze of his intoxication; or else he simply had not considered the matter particularly worthy of amends. Sukhanov, on the other hand, had found neither oblivion nor forgiveness an easy proposition. After an initial, vaguely hurt reaction, the news of his son’s impending absence had filled him with a feeling surprisingly like relief, and it had been in the hope of dispersing uneasy prompt ings of guilt that he had conceded to Vasily the use of his Volga.

“I need to go by the office to drop off a manuscript,” he pointed out somewhat dryly. “The train station is nowhere near it.”

“We are picking up Grandpa first,” said Vasily, and having flung away his still-glowing cigarette, started to roll up the window. “But I don’t care, it’s up to you.”

Sukhanov’s father-in-law lived in a palatial apartment overlooking Gorky Street, only a few short, crooked, linden-shaded blocks from the building occupied by Art of the World. Sukhanov hesitated, but Vadim had already shut the trunk and was now swinging the front door open, saying briskly, “Get in here, Anatoly Pavlovich, there’s no space in the back—just watch out for the dog hair.” A dog, what dog? thought Sukhanov gloomily, squeezing his substantial body into the seat next to the chauffeur’s.

He was accustomed to riding luxuriously spread out in the back, and the cramped quarters, permeated by the faint smell of some hirsute animal and a recent cloud of perfume, too sweet and dramatic to have been Nina‘s, as well as the sudden proximity of the driver, fiddling with the keys only inches away, soon began to vex him. Vasily appeared to have gone to sleep the moment the motor started. Sukhanov sighed, coughed, toyed with his wedding band, picked a few brown hairs off his trouser leg, then stared before him. From the rearview mirror, he noticed for the first time, dangled a small plastic sphere, with a tiny blue-roofed cottage inside surrounded by nail-sized fir trees. No sooner had they reached the end of their street than the car dove into its first pothole, and at the jolt a miniature storm of brightly tinted snowflakes soared inside the sphere, hung in the air for one chaotic, densely sparkling instant, then descended on the gingerbread house. Sukhanov watched with idle interest. The thing seemed embarrassingly sentimental and out of place—most drivers, after all, favored decorations of a different sort, like key-chain figurines of half-naked women—and he found himself wondering absently whether Vadim had chosen the tasteless trinket himself or it had been a gift from someone.

And all at once it occurred to him that, in truth, he knew oddly little about this man whom he saw almost daily. Vadim was a competent driver, perhaps a bit aggressive but on the whole reliable; he had the appearance of a man who liked regular exercise; he lived somewhere on the dim, desolate outskirts of Moscow with a wife named Svetlana or Galina or Tatyana, Sukhanov could not remember exactly, as well as a daughter, whose age had slipped off into the void yet again, and possibly a big hairy dog—but beyond that stretched a fog of uncertainties and conjectures. Nina’s recent reproach rose unbidden in his mind. He’s worked for us for almost three years, and in all this time you haven’t made an effort… Wincing, he cast a quick look to his side. Vadim’s profile was impassive, but as he drove he drummed his gloved fingers against the wheel as if following some nervous internal rhythm; he might have been upset about something. Resolved to be friendly, Sukhanov cleared his throat.

“I always mean to ask you, what is this?” he said casually, pointing at the sphere, in which another cheap snowstorm was subsiding. “A children’s toy?”

The man shrugged. “Just a souvenir,” he said.

“It’s nice,” Sukhanov said pleasantly. “Fun to watch.”

Vadim nodded without taking his eyes off the road. A silence fell between them, as awkward as an endless elevator ride with a vaguely familiar stranger to whom one has nothing to say. They were very close now. Vasily woke up and lit a fresh cigarette.

“So,” Sukhanov said in a bright tone, “did you have a good time last night?”

Vadim glanced at him sharply.

“On your evening off, that is. Do anything fun?”

“My evening off,” Vadim repeated with the beginning of a frown—but just then a blue Zhiguli with a smashed door swerved wildly into their lane, and Vadim honked and swerved in turn, so abruptly that Vasily was pitched forward, bespattering his shoes with ash, and Sukhanov’s glasses took a scintillating leap into the sunny, suddenly hazy space. An instant later the last traffic light turned green before them, and, grumbling about the crazy Gorky Street drivers, Vadim pulled into the cavernous courtyard of Malinin’s building.

“I’ll probably be a while,” said Vasily, yawning, “so if you want, he can take you directly to your office and then come back here, there’s plenty of—”

“No, no, that’s not necessary,” Sukhanov interrupted, groping for his glasses in the crevices behind his seat. “In fact, why don’t I come up myself for a minute? Might as well say hello to… Ah, yes, here they are…. Well, so long, Vadim, thanks for the ride…. Might as well say hello to Pyotr Alekseevich, don’t you think?”

And restoring his glasses to the bridge of his nose, he stepped out of the car.

Vasily opened the door to the apartment with his own set of keys, which rather surprised Sukhanov: he thought of his father-in-law as a highly territorial man not forthcoming with gestures of trust. He followed his son inside. Since his last visit here, some half a year before, the vast entrance hall seemed to have slid even deeper into the two full-sized mirrors that stood on either side of the door, and all the solid antique furnishings—an oak hat stand, a bronze umbrella stand, a carved end table, a splendidly framed portrait of a morose Polish officer with a handlebar mustache, Nina’s maternal grandfather—all these genteel symbols of a well-established life, multiplying into infinity inside a diminishing progression of glass, had an unexpectedly oppressive effect on his spirit. He inhaled sharply, felt the smells of shoe polish, violet-scented hand soap, shortbread cookies, and, more delicately, old age trickle into his lungs, and was seized with an urgent desire to murmur some hasty excuse to Vasily, turn around, and leave—but the steady creaking of the hardwood floors had already announced Pyotr Alekseevich’s imminent approach.

In another moment the old man emerged into the hall from one of its many doorways. Coming toward them with his straight-backed, imposing stride, he embraced Vasily in a show of warmth that struck Sukhanov as excessive and for some reason highly unpleasant. Then, with one hand outstretched, Pyotr Alekseevich turned to his son-in-law

“Ah, Tolya. What a surprise,” he said flatly. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Sullenly Sukhanov looked at Malinin’s handsomely aged features, to which the habit of serving as a constant recipient of awards and a frequent subject of self-portraits had imparted a permanently noble, reserved expression—but then, instead of his usual irritable acquiescence, he felt a light tinge of amusement, uncertain at first, then growing more and more demanding, until a long-suppressed tide of merriment rose inside him and his mind was flooded with startling visions of his father-in-law’s face. The face was already lionized but a few decades younger, and suffering endless distortions and permutations—bristling with ridiculous whiskers, sporting bushy eyebrows and elegantly curved horns, covered in poisonous, hair-spurting warts, or even balanced precariously atop a giraffe’s neck, reaching for a star-shaped leaf with greedy lips…. Naturally, he had long since discarded all his notebooks in whose margins such secret malicious phantoms had sprouted by the dozen during so many tedious lectures, when all that had kept him from falling into a doze had been a game of rendering the lecturer as hideous as possible while keeping within the laws of portraiture. All the same, the mnemonic gift of his more successful efforts seemed revenge enough—almost enough—for all those past hours of unspeakable boredom.

He had felt bored for most of his time as a student, of course, but the class on Soviet art theory—taught in