guitar and wearing a wine-red tie. Sukhanov stared for a moment, then decided it was better to keep his eyes closed after all and just lie back, letting a familiar voice wash over him in anxious waves.
“Papa, Papa, are you all right?” the voice was saying. “This wasn’t supposed to happen, they were all going to be gone before you got home…. Oh God, I’m so sorry… Boris had this concert scheduled, but then the auditorium fell through at the last minute, and I thought… Papa, can you even hear me? Shall I call a doctor?”
He opened his eyes again. The contours of the universe had grown sharper. Ksenya, not Nina, was bending over him, and behind her knelt an unfamiliar man, still wearing the tie and, true, bearing some vague resemblance to the young Belkin—but not Belkin.
“Papa, please say something!” Ksenya kept repeating.
Sukhanov blinked and looked closer.
“Is… that… my… tie?” he said laboriously.
Her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh no, I forgot about those!” she said. The young man hastily started to tear the tie from his neck. “You see, Boris needed some ties… and by the way, this is Boris, my boyfriend…. He’s written this piece, performance art, you know—”
“‘Song of the Bureaucrats,’ ” pseudo-Belkin explained contritely.
“Shut up,” Ksenya said in a furious whisper, then went on rapidly. “He didn’t mean any harm, he just… just borrowed the ties last Sunday when he stopped by, and I only found out about it tonight. It was supposed to be a joke, see? Of course, he was very upset when I told him about Valya, but don’t worry, we’ll fix it, and the ties are all here, they’re all fine….”
“I spilled some wine on mine,” said someone from the back of the room. “Sorry.”
And suddenly it was all too much, and he was finding it hard to breathe, and pseudo-Belkin was rushing off to throw open a window, and a short-haired adolescent girl—whose name, he somehow knew, was Lina—was pressing a glass of water to his lips, while Ksenya squeezed his hand and repeated helplessly, in a thin voice, “I’m so sorry, it’s all my fault, you’ve fallen sick because of me—”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much about him, it will wear off shortly,” a new voice pronounced jauntily, and the grinning face framed by the salmon-colored scarf materialized in the fog above Sukhanov. Then matters quickly disintegrated into confusion once again. In the hazy distance, he heard Ksenya asking sharp, accusing questions whose essence he could not follow, and the elevator man protesting in an offended patter, then Ksenya shouting, “Grishka, how could you, you bastard!” and a multitude of other voices rising like mist from the edges of the room….
All of this, however, increasingly failed to concern him, for as he continued to look at the elevator man, he saw something wonderful happening—happening slowly but inexorably. An enormous balloon was emerging carefully, gently out of the man’s shaved head. Strangely, no one else seemed to notice, but that did not bother him in the ieast—in truth, it made the moment all the more precious. Once free, the gorgeous yellow balloon hung in the air for one wavering minute, and then with quiet dignity swam through the open window, rose into the skies, and there turned into a most golden, most perfect full moon.
Yes, of course, thought Anatoly Pavlovich with a happy little smile—and floated out the window after it.
FIFTEEN
For a while he lay without moving. A wide patch of sunshine crept across his face, and from its brightness he deduced that it was late, at least ten o‘clock, perhaps drawing closer to eleven; yet he felt reluctant to open his eyes, enjoying as he was this leisurely moment—a man half asleep, resting in his bed on a Saturday morning (here a needle of unexplained anxiety pricked his heart, but he pushed on stubbornly), yes, resting in his bed, in his freshly laundered pajamas, on a summer morning, as was his right, with nothing in particular to do, and nowhere to go, and a whole pleasant day ahead of him. He was nearly awake, but a few shadowy creatures from a recent dream still scurried about the hazy edges of his memory—and the most nonsensical dream it had been too, involving a misshapen angel in a zoo cage, a man whose head gave birth to an inflated balloon, and a crowd of hippies and rock musicians holding a disreputable concert in his very own living room. Groggily, he marveled that a mind normally so devoid of surprises could be capable of such nightmarish notions.
A telephone began to ring, loud and insistent. After each ring there was a pause just long enough to make him hope it would stop, but invariably the next ring would come, torturously protracted, filling his head with reverberations of the headache he now realized he had. Grumbling, he groped for the nightstand on which the telephone rested, then, not able to feel it, opened his eyes with an effort—and found himself confronted with several truths. He was not in his bedroom but in the living room, crammed painfully between the armrests of a decoratively small couch. He wore a pitiful-looking suit. The air smelled of stale incense, and his mouth tasted as if a small animal had died somewhere inside his entrails. It was no longer morning—the clock on the opposite wall showed half past one; and it was possibly not Saturday either. On the coffee table, next to the screaming telephone, lay a pile of sad remains that on closer observation proved to be his once proud collection of ties.
And of course, he had known it, known it since the very first moment of semiwakefulness, felt it in his nauseated, aching body, guessed it with his sickened heart—and still had tried to move as far away from it as possible, to hide like a frightened child in the soft oblivion of lingering sleep—for sleep at least was peaceful, sleep at least did not assault him with the terrifying dreams that were becoming his life, his daily life. And now his life was right here, pressing down on him, breathing into his face, demanding that he get up and answer the ringing telephone, and go apologize to Valya, whom he had offended so badly, and face his daughter, whose friends were all madmen and drug addicts and who was probably a drug addict herself…
Stumbling off the couch, he yanked at the receiver.
“Well, finally!” Pugovichkin spoke cheerfully. “I was beginning to wonder. Listen, I’m so glad you decided to keep the Chagall piece unchanged. I promise you’ll be pleased with the issue, it was all finished yesterday, a real beauty—we put his
“Ah,” said Sukhanov, “then yesterday was Saturday after all.”
A small silence fell. He buried his hands in the mass of his stained, wrinkled, mistreated ties and twirled their silk corpses about his fingers. Somehow, the Chagall controversy had lost all its urgency in his mind, overshadowed by other, infinitely more vital matters. He felt his whole being expanding with grief for things misplaced, and forfeited, and possibly missed forever—and where such grief reigned, petty anger could find no place.
“Anatoly Pavlovich, is everything all right?” Pugovichkin said uncertainly. “You sound… odd.”
“Oh, I just woke up,” Sukhanov explained. “I was drugged last night.”
His recollection of the previous night’s events dissolved at some nebulous juncture into a shimmering, emotional haze filled with visions of himself worshipping some deceased divinity in the solemn sonorousness of a cathedral, and his past and present ran together confusingly; but he remembered the subsequent burn of the carpet on his neck, the feeling of heavy, helpless humiliation, and Ksenya’s face close to his, begging him, begging him to forgive her…. He wondered how he would find her today—meekly apologetic still, or stubborn and remote, as unapproachable as ever.
“By whom? Drugged by whom?” Pugovichkin’s increasingly shrill voice repeated in the distance. “Drugged
“Here, at my place,” said Sukhanov. “There was an underground concert, and then this fellow with a balloon inside his head—”
His eyes fell on a folded piece of paper lying on the table, with the words “To papa” scrawled across its whiteness. As the rest of the world faded away, he reached for it, held it in both hands for an instant, then opened it and, swallowing, began to read.
Sharply he drew in his breath, and all at once became aware of a crackling void on the other end of the
