“Oh. I see,” he said vaguely. “By any chance, do you know where your mother is?”
“She’s gone to the Tretyakovka with Fyodor Mikhailovich. He wanted to show her some of his favorite works.”
“Oh, I see,” he said again. “So it’s just us, then. Well, well.”
He turned to leave but paused with his hand on the doorknob.
“Ksenya, perhaps,” he said haltingly, “perhaps we could talk?”
She regarded him without enthusiasm.
“Let me guess,” she said. “You’re going to deliver a lecture on how to be a good daughter. Or will this be some sort of fatherly discussion of the facts of life? ‘Now that you are eighteen, my dear, you need to know there is more to boys than meets the eye’—that kind of thing? Well, don’t worry, I know already. I went to school, if you recall. We had sex education.”
He watched a small whirlpool of silence widen between them.
“It’s nothing like that, I just… I just thought we’d talk, that’s all,” he said meekly. “We hardly ever see each other, now that you are so busy with your work…. I wanted to tell you, I’ve read that Hoffmann story you recommended the other day. Very interesting, and you were right, it doesn’t have much in common with—”
Her face relaxed, and her eyes moved dreamily past him.
“Papa, I’m sorry,” she said, “but if it’s nothing urgent, now is really not a good time. I stayed up most of the night doing this assignment, and I was about to take a nap when you came in.”
“Oh,” he said brightly. “Of course. Some other time, then?”
“Some other time,” she said.
She was looking away already, searching for her headphones.
He tried to read the article for the next hour, but could never get past the epigraph—an excerpt from Chagall’s awkward yet oddly poignant poem, three lines of which kept alighting on the tip of his tongue like a stubborn moth, preventing him from moving any further, filling his mind with fluttering flocks of irrelevant associations.
Across the sky fly former inhabitants.
Where do they live now?
In my own torn soul.
The words circled round and round in his mind…. Soon he abandoned the manuscript altogether and stretched out on the couch, his gaze lost in the irregularities of the ceiling. By and by, the cumulative lack of sleep from the past few nights filled his limbs with lead and his thoughts with cotton, and the idea of a nap began to seem wonderfully appealing. In truth, he felt tired enough to sleep through several days in a row.
He had nearly drifted off when the bell rang. He went to unlock the door, pleasantly gliding just above the floor. There was no one on the landing, which was, of course, impossible, so, feeling stubborn, he strode off to check whether someone was hiding in the elevator—but the elevator itself was not there, and, losing balance, he started to fall down the shaft, and it was terrifying at first, this plummeting into the narrow, dimly glimmering abyss full of thick, creaking cables and misshapen shadows and “Do Not Enter” signs and medieval world maps hanging on the dripping walls, but gradually it became darker and darker, and easier and easier, until he found himself floating through the most delightful oblivion of blackness with a smile of full-blown happiness on his lips— and felt rather sorry when the doorbell rang again, cutting his flight short.
It appeared that he had slept for some hours, for it was suddenly late in the evening. The moon drifted brilliantly through the dining room windows as he walked past, and Nina and Dalevich, entering with the effortless laughter of two old friends, surprised him by saying they would not be joining him for supper as they had eaten already, in some nameless cafeteria upon which they had stumbled after their visit to the museum. It hardly mattered, for he did not feel in the least bit hungry, and his body still rang with an overwhelming desire for rest. Nodding agreeably, without listening (Dalevich, as usual, was trying to talk to him about some article he had written), he swam through the thickening air back to the study and, undressing this time, slipped under the blankets and fell asleep once again.
He continued to dream outlandish, not to say disturbing, dreams. Sometime in the middle of the night, he heard dogs barking incessantly in the streets. Their howling soon grew so hoarse and strained, nearly rabid with excitement, that he got up, passed through the sleeping house, and, with a presence of mind unnatural in a dream, found a coat to throw over his pajamas and some shoes in which to deposit his feet, then descended in the elevator (which was there this time), crossed the deserted, moonswept lobby, and expecting the unexpected, stepped outside. In the coolness of the August night, the mysterious woman with the exquisitely drawn features of Nefertiti was drifting aimlessly along the pavements of Belinsky Street, dressed in a diaphanous wedding gown, a pack of maddened homeless dogs following at her dainty satin heels. At his approach, she lifted her lovely, tear- stained face toward him, and said simply and sadly, “He’ll never marry me, I know it. He tells me he will, but he won’t. I understand now. He has a wife and a daughter. He is a very important man—a minister, no less. I understand.”
As she spoke, a delicate vein pulsated in her throat, her mouth was pale and pained like a wilting petal, her eyes glistened like melting, rain-washed gems, and, bright like her eyes, two diamond cascades flowed from her ears. He stared at her with a freedom allowed only in dreams. Behind him, as if mesmerized, the dogs too ceased their barking one after another and, watching her, carefully bared their teeth, dripping saliva onto her trailing gauze train. She said nothing more, only stood there, her piano player’s hands poised in an attitude of grieving supplication—and the whole world lay still and silent around them, like a starry sky’s reflection in the dark waters of an abandoned pond, like a particle of time frozen for all eternity in a marvelous painting, and it was frightening and heartbreaking and beautiful, this strange encounter, woven whole as it was from the moonlit, elusive fabric of the night….
It ended, as dreams must, with hasty, unbecoming absurdity. Unwinding a checkered woolen scarf left in the sleeve of his coat from some previous winter’s dream, Sukhanov tossed it at the dogs in a gesture that was of course futile yet perfectly sensible at the moment, and immediately, forgetting all about them, the pack fell onto the scarf, snarling, tearing, fighting over it. Grabbing her by the elbow, he dragged her inside, and through the echoing lobby, and up a few flights of stairs, to deliver her, slightly out of breath but unresisting, to the door of apartment number five, which he found standing wide open.
“He’ll marry you, don’t worry,” he said generously and insin cerely, as he gave her a gentle push across the threshold. “He’d be a fool not to.”
The last thing he remembered before mounting the stairs to his own eighth floor was the sight of her face, white and streaked with two grooves of running mascara, like a tragic Venetian porcelain mask, floating above a sea of silk and lace and sparkling with diamonds, lifted toward him from the dark cave of the gaping doorway.
After that, his duty performed, Sukhanov’s dream self returned to the couch (in passing hanging the ghostly coat on its hook and removing the nonexistent shoes) and fell into an even deeper slumber. Sometime shortly after dawn he had another dream, not full of melancholy wonder this time, but domestic and simple, containing a promise of happiness like a seed inside its warm soil. Nina, coming into his study on tiptoes, dressed in an old pair of slacks and a faded sweater with a thick, unfeminine collar, which made her look every day of her age and so familiar, so dear, bent over him briefly to drop a light kiss onto his cheek.
“I was hoping to talk to you last night,” she whispered, “but you went to sleep so early, and now I have a seven-thirty train to catch.”
“But where are you going?” he asked tenderly, smiling at the kiss in his sleep.
“To the dacha,” she said. “It may not have rained there. I need to check on the roses.”
“Ah yes, the roses, of course, beds and carpets and fields of roses,” said the dream Sukhanov. “But you’ll be back, my love?”
“I’ll be back,” the dream Nina promised softly. “In a few days.”
“The roses,” he said again, and nodding joyfully, began to sail away, only opening his eyes for an instant to see Nina’s hand hovering over his forehead before descending in a final, swift caress—but by then, he had already been washed onto new, unfamiliar shores.
