The Dream Life of Sukhanov

in view of his recent death… You know, of course, he died this past March…. And since you were leaving…”

“Chagall,” Sukhanov repeated, his voice ominously steady. “They want Art of the World to publish an article on Chagall, and you have actually agreed to it? Be so kind as to tell me I’ve misheard you, Sergei Nikolaevich. Or have you lost your mind?”

The few remaining people slunk outside, and Sukhanov was left alone with his second-in-command. Pugovichkin was talking now, in a rapid, offended monotone, gathering momentum, trying to convince him of something, but for a few minutes Sukhanov heard nothing as he sat staring at the dust particles twirling before him in the stuffy, sun-lacerated air. True, he had allowed the questionable Dali article to be forced upon the magazine, grudgingly resigning himself to this one-time challenge to his authority—but a piece on Chagall would take matters to an entirely new level. The difference between Dali, outrageous by virtue of his foreign birth and viewed therefore as a mere curiosity akin to a two-headed goat in some little-frequented Kunstkammer, and Chagall, who had come from Russia’s own backyard, been appointed Commissar of Fine Arts after the Revolution, taught in a Soviet art academy, and then chosen to leave Russia behind in order to become foreign and outrageous, was just as wide and impassable as the difference between some poor jungle savage who knows nothing beyond the cruel and nonsensical superstitions of his tribe and a man of civilized faith who proceeds to give it up in order to murmur incantations and slaughter chickens. Publishing an article on Chagall would be universally interpreted as an act of rebellion, an absolute break with decades of steadfast traditions of Soviet criticism, which he himself had helped to invent, and as likely as not would prove tantamount to career suicide for him and his senior staff.

Publishing such an article was impossible.

“It will be most welcome, I was assured,” Pugovichkin was saying, trotting back and forth across the office. “In fact, I’ve been told that the Ministry is thinking of organizing a Chagall retrospective in a year or two. Wouldn’t that be something?”

Sukhanov lifted his head. He was no longer angry, only tired, very tired.

“Don’t be so naive, Serezha,” he said quietly. “You sound just like an excitable eighteen-year-old girl I met the other day. Changes, changes, spring in the air, Soviet art is inferior, let’s all say what we think! At least she has the excuse of being young—but you and I, we should know better, we went through it all once before, didn’t we? Honestly, can you not see that this whole Chagall business is nothing but a provocation, a test of loyalty, if you will? The Ministry has no intention of putting on any ‘retrospective.’ It simply hopes to flush out the handful of enthusiastic fools who will believe in all their fine promises and start getting carried away, saying unwise things and publishing unwise articles—and before one has time to blink, they’ll have lost their jobs and been sent off to the provinces, or worse, and new people in their places will say and write the same old things as before.”

Pugovichkin stopped pacing and leaned over the desk.

“I understand your worries,” he said earnestly, “but I think you underestimate the nature of what is happening in the country this time around. Look, Tolya, it’s been less than six months since the leadership change in March, and already, the man has said some pretty radical things. His Leningrad speech, with its barbs at the old guard—”

Sukhanov waved his hand to cut him off. “You don’t know what will happen any more than I do,” he said, “but my prediction is, absolutely nothing. It’s all smoke and no fire. Chagall, imagine that! Who’s next, Trotsky? By the way, who’s the author?”

“Someone with a very Russian name, like Petrov or Vasiliev… I’ll remember in a moment. No one we’ve ever heard of, a curator from somewhere or other—but clearly with friends in high places. If nothing else, it may not be prudent to get them upset.”

“Well, I suppose,” said Sukhanov, frowning, “if written from a certain critical perspective, it might—with some heavy editing, of course—”

“It’s already at the printers,” muttered Pugovichkin, averting his eyes.

Sukhanov looked at his right-hand man across a sudden gap of silence, palpable and unpleasant like an acrid taste in his mouth.

When Pugovichkin spoke, his voice was almost hostile with defensiveness. “Well, what would you have done in my place? I was put on the spot. I was told in no uncertain terms to publish the damn piece. Think about it, the issue must be typeset by Monday, and you were going away, as far as we knew. What was I supposed to—”

“Just why does everyone think I was going away?” Sukhanov interrupted heatedly.

“Must we now belabor the obvious? I called you as soon as I heard, on Tuesday morning, and you weren’t there, but—”

“Tuesday, you say? I was home most of the day.”

“No, you weren’t. I spoke to Vasily, and he told me you were out. I left a detailed message with him, explaining the situation. He said he was about to go to the Crimea with you.”

Sukhanov sat back in his chair.

“Vasily said that?” he asked slowly.

Pugovichkin shrugged. “I think his exact words were ‘with the old man.’ Frankly, at the time I was rather perplexed that you hadn’t mentioned your vacation. I gather you changed your mind about it? In any case, since none of us ever heard back from you, we assumed you’d received the word, agreed to the whole thing, and gone off to the sea with your son. Did he not give you my message?”

Forcing his scattering thoughts to order, Sukhanov recalled the unbearable Tuesday morning he had spent working on the article, with Vasily sulking behind his closed door and the remote telephone ringing intermittently throughout the sluggish, torturous hours. The boy had been angry with him about his failure to convey the Minister’s invitation to a party, he remembered. It suddenly seemed like an event from a very long time ago.

“The issue won’t go to print without my complete approval, and that’s that,” he said in his most formal tone. “Kindly stop the presses and get someone to bring me a copy of the article. If I don’t like it, my Dali goes instead. I’m still in charge here unless I’m told otherwise—and unless I’m told by someone directly. Do you understand me, Sergei Nikolaevich?”

Pugovichkin considered him bleakly.

“I understand perfectly, Anatoly Pavlovich,” he said after a pause, “but if you decide to pull it, you’ll be the one to do all the explaining afterward, as it’s bound to make a couple of very important people very unhappy. And whatever you choose to do, you must let me know by Saturday afternoon at the latest. The typesetters are already complaining as it is.”

“Of course,” replied Sukhanov with a brief nod.

Pugovichkin hesitated for a moment, then walked out of the room, shutting the door behind him with pointed precision. Sukhanov remained sitting at his desk, drumming his fingers against its lacquered edge. Initially, his mind was in a whirl, his feelings undistinguished and pained, the very rhythm of his breathing punctuated by small, distressed, wordless cries of disbelief at so much betrayal—betrayal by the trusted Sergei Nikolaevich and all the rest of his colleagues, betrayal by his son, betrayal even by some nebulous influential individual whom he had probably never met but who nonetheless clearly intended to compromise him by forcing on him this impossible choice….

Then, gradually, a dull premonition of dread began to steal over him like an encroaching shadow, suppressing all other thoughts and emotions; but it was not until some minutes later, when a knock so timid it was almost a scratch sounded on his door and Liubov Markovna crept inside after his second “Come in,” her head pulled into her shoulders, a stack of papers in her outstretched hands, that he knew what it was he so absurdly feared—whose name he was so irrationally certain to see on the title page as a reproachful harbinger of his impending downfall. It would be a most fitting conclusion, he thought with the bitter ghost of a smile, to his disquieting slide into the past. “A very Russian name,” Pugovichkin had said—and what name could be more Russian than that of a three-hundred-year-old dynasty of Russian rulers, what man better suited to write about Chagall than one of his own students? It must be, it had to be him—Oleg Romanov, the stern, courageous, maverick painter who almost half a century ago had so painstakingly fine-tuned one boy’s vision in order to render it receptive to the richness of the world.

In the first few years after Anatoly’s return to Moscow, Romanov had sent him frequent letters, with effortless sketches of lacelike dragonflies and demure mermaids scattered between the lines and faintly colored,