The Dream Life of Sukhanov

confidence of a casual university friend.

For in the most private recess of his mind, he had no doubt that was all it was—a little note from Liusya, perhaps, dashed off self-indulgently right after the play they had gone to see and redolent with girlish affectations. Darling Ninusya, he would read as his hands shook and his damned soul fell, it was so unlike me to ask you to come on such short notice—but that’s what I get for marrying a reporter with a predilection for leaving on an assignment just when we have two tickets to my favorite play. But I just know I can always count on you! And didn’t it feel so much like the old days-rushing into the theater as the curtain was rising, just the two of us, drinking in Chekhov’s divine cadences, and at the intermission watching overdressed provincials and laughing and snacking on those tiny caviar sandwiches they always serve! The glass of champagne at the end was pure rapture, and I certainly hope-

Oh, he was sure, he was sure that was all it would be—and never mind that Sunday afternoon, or Vadim’s evening off, or the theater season, or the unknown Viktor in their address book…

Sukhanov switched on the light and ruthlessly tore at the envelope.

My beloved, the two closely written pages began, letters are dangerous, but you don’t let me call you, and in any case, I would never dare to say what I’m about to write. Seeing you so quiet and sad on our last evening together made me realize that things simply can’t go on like this for much longer. You made me swear never to bring up our “fake lives,” and it is unlike me to renege on a promise-but you must see that it is a much lesser crime to break a promise than to lose something as perfect as what we share. For a long time now, I’ve tried to do as you asked: to be satisfied with furtive meetings, whispered phone calls, poor, random snatches of your presence. But my nerves are wearing thin, my love, and the unmentionable shadow of your marriage grows darker every time I have to let go of your voice because you think you hear a noise in your entrance hall, every time you emerge from your house and pretend not to notice me waiting just down the street for fear of someone watching at the window, every time we kiss surreptitiously in some doorway.

My heart has been broken so many times that even our dearest memories cause me nothing but pain now. Do you remember that December night when, a glamorous presence in your short fur-trimmed coat, you knocked on my car window and haughtily asked for a ride across town, and as I slowly drove through the storm, you suddenly broke down crying? The snow was falling and falling, and when I stopped the car in some alley, it soon turned into one big, white, sparkling cave… And every time I recall that snowfall, without you by my side, my eyes go black, and helplessness overwhelms me.

And this Wednesday, as I watched you reapply your lipstick and then walk away dejectedly—as I saw you disappear around the corner, not knowing when you would be able to get away again—I finally realized the truth. Dearest, I can no longer bear these constant farewells. I can no longer be content with having you in my present and my past only: I must have you in my future as well. Although I’ve never told you, you know, you must know, that I have wanted to leave Svetlana ever since that first snowbound kiss—I have just been waiting for you to ask me. I have waited for almost a year now. What are you afraid of, my beloved? Believe me, no comfortable routine of shared space and time could replace the love you and I have stumbled upon, so unexpectedly, so magically—a love that tightens one’s throat, tingles in one’s veins, makes every moment spent together unquestionably justified and infinitely precious. And it is in the name of that love that I must beg you now: let us be free and selfish like gods, let us leave all our habits and lies behind and start anew, just the two of us, rid of the endless torture of our double lives—and let us do so soon, before the constant humiliation of secrecy, the guilt I feel every time I look at my daughter, the pity you have for your husband slowly drain all joy from our hearts. We both know that what we have is worth any sacrifice we can offer. A long time ago, you told me your husband was kind to you. The truth is, he has never known how to love. You and I do. Please never forget what a rare gift it is.

I must hear from you soon, unless you want me showing up on your doorstep. Your V

And so it was.

And there were no friends or lovers to whom he could pour out his heart—and no memories that he could uncork and inhale like some miraculously soothing elixir—and no forces of heaven or hell that he could invoke or curse, or to which he could pray—no benevolent divinities, no merciful guardian angels, no dark spirits of the abyss…. There was nothing in the whole world but the two pages crumpled in his hand, and the empty black skies of August over his head, and a trembling hole where his soul used to be. For when it finally happened, he saw he was completely alone—alone to stumble, lost, through the ruins of his past life, collecting the remaining pieces— alone to walk through the future dreariness with that gaping void in his insides—and alone to die when the time arrived.

Anatoly Pavlovich Sukhanov methodically smoothed out the pages, slipped them back into the envelope, placed it on the desk, and looked at it in silence. And after a passage of time, when his heart had stopped gasping for air, he understood the source of his deepest pain. The loss of Nina was not the most shattering loss he had suffered: it was the loss of the image of Nina that he mourned the most—that “purest image of the purest charm” he had fallen in love with and cherished for so many years in the most sacred cache of his memory. For the woman in the letter was not the reserved, quietly dignified beauty with whom he had thought he had spent his life, but rather an indecorously middle-aged femme fatale who trotted about the city, wearing her fashionably short fur coat, armed with her bright little lipstick, engrossed in an abandoned affair she had started in a parked automobile and carried on in smelly doorways, with a man so vulgar he could write of love tingling in his veins and of being free and selfish like gods. How could this unbearably trite image, which reeked of life’s cheapest perfume, be the answer to the mystery of Nina’s dreamy silences? How was it possible to reconcile his decades of accumulated recollections with this pitiful missive smacking of some nineteenth-century epistolary novel, from the painful grandiloquence of its contents to that theatrical “N.S.” on the envelope? How could he continue to live with the knowledge that—that—

The envelope.

My God, the envelope!

Sukhanov stared, stared so intensely that the white rectangle swam before his eyes, its very fabric seemingly dissolving into a shimmering leapfrog of particles—only to reassemble a minute later (as a tear, finally released, ran down his cheek) into a creature from an altogether different dimension. The number—the number in the address line—the number he had barely glanced at before, taking it for granted, just as the postman must have done earlier—was it really, truly possible?… He moved his hand across the paper, brushing away the optical illusion, but it was still there: that little horizontal dash that was bending a tiny bit to the left instead of to the right and, with that one hair’s breadth, granting him life yet again.

Things clicked into place like pieces of a puzzle that only moments before had appeared to suggest some surrealist atrocity—a pale Madonna rolling in a trough with swine—but now revealed a shady flowering garden on a sunny day in late summer, with dark red roses climbing a whitewashed wall. The apartment number was thirteen, not fifteen. The apartment directly below him, then—the apartment of the man who a week earlier had treated his neighbors to a sonorous church chant at four in the morning. The apartment of the songwriter Svechkin, who had had the misfortune of marrying a much younger woman.

But did the name of Svechkin’s wife begin with an N?

Tossed so abruptly from such despair to such hope, he had no strength left to wrestle with the remnants of doubt in his heart. He had to know the answer now—and be rid of the darkness forever. The concierge would be able to tell him, of course, but the notion of submitting himself once again to the old man’s insinuating scrutiny (“Ah, yes, a pretty lady, isn’t she, Anatoly Pavlovich? So, is Nina Petrovna still out of town?”) seemed too unbearably ugly a conclusion to such an unbearably ugly day.

After the briefest hesitation, Sukhanov dropped the letter into his pocket, walked out of his place, descended the stairs, and promptly rang the bell of apartment thirteen.

The door opened almost immediately, releasing onto the landing the thundering chords of Beethoven’s Fifth and a faint smell of medicine. A short, plump man of Sukhanov’s years, in a gabardine jacket, stood on the threshold. He looked at Sukhanov without seeing him, his eyes full of quiet anguish, and just as Sukhanov prepared to launch into a neighborly request for some kitchen utensil (designed to draw out a hollered “Natasha!” or “Nadya!”), said expressionlessly, rubbing his temples as if in pain, “I believe we did it again, didn’t we? So terribly sorry, it’s all these baths she takes…. I’ll go tell her to get out, then.” And leaving the door wide open, with