THIRTEEN
But didn’t she tell you?” Dalevich said, peering anxiously into Sukhanov’s face.
The morning was quiet and sunny, and a bird in a nearby tree repeated its bright little song over and over in a hollow imitation of pastoral happiness.
“Anyway, it’s only for a few days,” Dalevich added helpfully. “She just needs to water the flowers. She should be back by Tuesday at the latest.”
Sukhanov persisted in rubbing his glasses with the edge of the tablecloth, thinking of an important party to which he and Nina were invited this evening and to which he would now have to go alone. “Of course,” he finally murmured, starting to stand up.
“Listen, Tolya,” said Dalevich hastily, “we never finished our talk the other day, and there was something in particular I wanted to—”
“Of course,” said Sukhanov again. “Except that right now I have this article I must review. Urgent work, I’m sure you understand.”
“Oh, completely,” said Dalevich. “And as a matter of fact, I was just about to tell you—”
“Let’s talk at dinnertime, shall we, then?” Sukhanov said.
The bird continued to strain its throat with throbbing exuberance. As he trod the long corridor to his study, he felt his cousin’s eyes on his back.
He spent the rest of the morning behind the closed door, in a semidarkness of tightly drawn curtains, stubbornly warding off all thoughts of Nina’s desertion and poring over the Chagall article. It was, he had to admit, exceptionally well written. Instead of delivering a dutiful recital of dull biographical facts, D. M. Fyodorov (whoever the devil he was) had chosen to present the artist’s development through a series of defining encounters: a stuttering meeting of the chaperoned adolescent with a kindly Judel Pan, a pedestrian but endearing Vitebsk painter who would become Chagall’s first teacher and in whose studio the youth would struggle to draw plaster busts but lapse time and time again into unacceptable lilac colors; an accidental introduction to Bella, daughter of a local jewelry merchant, in whose radiant black gaze his soul would find its eternal home; then, already in the capital, a timid, excited audience with the celebrated Leon Bakst, founder of the famous St. Petersburg art school, leader in the influential World of Art movement, and proud proclaimer of art for art’s sake, who to the young Chagall seemed the triumphant incarnation of all European traditions, but who, after a mere few months as his tutor, began to appear too stylized, too refined, and in the end too cold and foreign in Chagall’s eyes—too small for his expanding, deepening universe of pain and joy; and finally, completing his formation as an artist, a momentous meeting in pre—World War I Paris with Anatoly Vasilievich Lunacharsky—Lenin’s future mouthpiece on the subject of art in the service of the Revolution, and Bakst’s ideological negative—to whom Chagall politely showed his works and, noticing the man’s puzzlement, said serenely, “Just don’t ask me why everything on my canvases is blue or green, or why a calf is visible in a cow’s stomach. Let your Marx, if he is so smart, come back from the dead and explain everything to you.”
This position of a genius whose art had grown too universal both for aestheticizing detachment and for political partiality would make it hard for Chagall to be appreciated in Russia before the Revolution and impossible for him to remain there much longer afterward, but in a sensitive omission, D. M. Fyodorov had elected not to dwell on Chagall’s subsequent exile and wanderings. Instead, he had devoted the rest of the article to a poetic tribute to the master’s lifelong themes—his “poignant, eternal world, radiant like a window opening from the darkness of our souls into bright blue skies, filled with flying fiddlers, green-faced lovers, and mysteriously smiling cows,” as he wrote in his conclusion, “a world that seems childlike and simple and yet achieves truly biblical proportions, touching the very core of our being.”
Frowning, Sukhanov tapped his pen against the stack of paper before him. Of course, he would never have allowed this piece anywhere near his magazine under ordinary circumstances, but he supposed Pugovichkin was right—it was always wiser not to cross those more important than oneself. And in any case, it could have been worse: at least it read more like a philosophical discourse on the nature of art than a subversive manifesto. All the same, it was apparent that, inspired though it might be, the text could not remain unaltered. It lacked a proper critical attitude. Even more problematic, it betrayed an openly religious sensibility, what with its constant references to the Bible, its assertion of love as the unifying principle of Chagall’s universe, its comparisons between his manner and traditional iconic art, and… and…
For one uncomfortable moment, the by now familiar sensation of fleeting recognition, of his past and present endlessly reflecting off each other in a multiplying infinity of mirrors, visited Sukhanov again, disrupting the flow of his thoughts; but in a quick outburst of determination he shrugged it off and lifted his pen. The Lunacharsky scene had to go—or better yet, he would keep it (naturally, omitting Chagall’s scandalous mention of Marx) in order to use it as a departure point for a stern reevaluation of Chagall’s work. Perhaps something along these lines: “While the painter was able to perceive the insolvency of the bourgeois art of Bakst and his school, he lacked the maturity needed to appreciate the noble truth of Lunacharsky’s position, thus failing to understand the real purpose of art as the people’s weapon in their struggle against oppression.” Yes, indeed, this would serve as the perfect introduction to a subsequent discussion of the artist’s themes: their childish, fairy-tale nature, their total isolation from reality, their slavish reliance on religious motifs… As Sukhanov’s pen flew across the pages, crossing out every occurrence of “biblical” and “eternal” and putting a fat question mark next to every mention of “love,” he was beginning to think that it was possible, just possible, to keep the wolves full and the sheep whole. Thus occupied, he did not hear the soft knock on the door, and was presently startled by his cousin’s apologetic voice close to his ear.
“Dinner’s ready,” said Fyodor Mikhailovich, spreading his hands in a rueful gesture. “All I do is interrupt your work.”
A heap of dumplings lay steaming before them, with a dollop of sour cream sliding weightily down the bowl’s rim. Ksenya helped herself to a hearty serving. Despite the early afternoon hour, the lamp was lit, and its garish orange light irritated Sukhanov’s eyes. His gaze kept straying to the empty seat—Nina’s seat—at the end of the table.
“Shall we resume our earlier conversation?” Dalevich suggested readily.
“Ah, yes,” Sukhanov replied without much interest. “Where were we, exactly?”
“Innovation versus tradition. Or to use my example, the universe of Kandinsky versus the universe of Chagall. Which actually brings me to the very subject I was hoping to—”
Sukhanov lowered his fork.
“The universe of Chagall?” he repeated distractedly. “Why, that’s a curious—”
He was about to say “coincidence,” but he never did, for in the next instant his memory, with an almost perverse precision, delivered to him Dalevich’s comment from two days earlier. Chagall’s “childlike universe of flying fiddlers, green-faced lovers, and mysteriously smiling cows,” his cousin had said. And those words—those words mirrored to an uncanny degree the phrase he had read not an hour before—the phrase written by the unknown Fyodorov. Naturally, a literal duplication was impossible, so it must have been a simple trick of the mind: under the fresh impression of the article, he must have somehow distorted Fyodor’s original words…. Unless, that is… unless… could it be…
For one prolonged moment of disbelief, he stared at the man sitting across his kitchen table. He stared at the man’s yellow beard, his sparkling, oddly shaped glasses, his moving thin lips—stared without hearing one word of what the man was saying. Then the possibility of truth overwhelmed him. His eyelids felt heavy and hot as if dusted with sand, and he had to close his eyes.
“… the very subject I was hoping to address,” Dalevich was saying just then. “You see, some years ago I wrote a series of essays analyzing the influence of Russian iconic art on modern artists, and naturally, one of my first studies was on… Tolya, are you all right?”
Slowly Sukhanov opened his eyes. It should not have come as such a shock; there had been warning signs, after all. “A curator from somewhere or other,” Pugovichkin had told him, and he had indeed felt something hauntingly familiar in the unfolding of Fyodorov’s arguments. Then there was the now apparent matter of inverted names, so easy to see through…. Yet it shocked him deeply all the same.
Sukhanov moistened his dry lips before speaking.
