a pathetic little wave of his hand, he wandered off down the unlit corridor.
Perplexed, Sukhanov waited. The place, or what he saw of it, looked barely lived in. The entrance, the hallway, a slice of one room visible through a cracked door mirrored his own apartment in arrangement, yet resembled a train station in appearance, so transitory everything seemed, so unloved, so full of a jumble of accidental objects—a beach towel tossed over an empty yellow suitcase, a half-peeled orange, a woman’s wide- brimmed hat, a glass half full of moldy tea. An enormous brown dog emerged from the darkness and padded in his direction, its head hanging down, then veered to the side, and vanished. The music continued to pour into the corridor, its sounds pockmarked with radio static. All at once, Sukhanov felt certain that very unhappy people lived here—and when in another minute a young woman in a robe walked toward him indolently, smelling of steam and sin and some sweet, dramatic perfume, her face that of a broken porcelain doll, he knew he could leave that instant without ever hearing her name, and his heart would be at peace.
“I’m sorry we keep flooding you, Semyon Semyonovich,” she started to say in an indifferent voice, “but you understand, we’ve been a bit preoccupied ever since Vanya had his little breakdown”—but he had already extracted the ripped envelope from his pocket and was handing it to her in silence.
She looked at it without moving, frowning nearsightedly.
“What’s this?” she said, and then, swinging around sharply, shouted with startling shrillness, “Will you turn down that infernal noise? I can’t hear a word Semyon Semyonovich is saying!” Her eyebrows were two thin, delicate threads painted on her face.
“I believe it’s yours,” said Sukhanov softly. “They delivered it to me by accident. I’m afraid I opened it. Naturally, you can count on my—”
She tore the letter out of his hand before he could finish, and carried it close to her eyes; he saw her brightly painted lips begin to tremble. Embarrassed, he nodded and, without another word, turned to leave. Rooms away, Ivan Martynovich Svechkin switched off his music, and his sorrowful voice rang out in the sudden lull behind Sukhanov’s back, “Terribly sorry if it was too loud, Nel lichka, but you know how I love Beethoven!”
Sukhanov slowly walked upstairs, unaccountably saddened on behalf of that meek little stranger whose life was falling apart.
SIXTEEN
That night he reclaimed his bedroom, but his sleep was uneasy. The seemingly boundless bed engulfed him like a dark, voluminous shroud, and for hours he wandered, crying softly, in majestic forests of giant fir trees where light barely penetrated through overgrown branches and the air smelled of loneliness, oppression, and for some unfathomable reason, violets—a smell that, surprisingly, remained in the room when, shortly after four in the morning, having just been swallowed by the yawning earth, Sukhanov awoke with a gasp and, throwing off the covers, sat peering into the shadows.
It must have been the aftershave used by Dalevich, he realized unhappily after a minute. For some time he struggled to fall asleep again, but the stillness of the world rang in his ears and the aroma of violets stole furtively into his lungs. Finally, giving up, he got out of bed, walked onto the balcony, and stood suspended between the vast, empty city and the indifferent, autumnal heavens, listening to the rarefied sounds of the night. A distant car briefly tore the fabric of communal sleep; a gust of wind rustled the trees; a crow flew cawing raggedly over the Zamoskvorechie in search of sunrise.
Then he heard a whisper trailing like smoke from somewhere above him.
“My late wife loves to waltz,” an ancient voice said mournfully from the skies.
Recognizing the madman from upstairs, Sukhanov looked up warily, half expecting a burning newspaper to fly into his face; but nothing stirred on the ninth-floor balcony. Unsettled, he was about to go inside when the sad voice spoke again.
“She died forty-seven years ago. She learned to waltz in Paris. Her parents took her there when she was a young girl, before the Revolution. We met there. She still speaks French like an angel, and when she drinks champagne, she purses her lips as if for a kiss. We are celebrating her birthday today—she has just turned ninety”
The words floated down, slow and dry and broken like dead leaves from some great, invisible, heavenly trees, and Sukhanov felt strangely stirred in spite of himself.
“Hello?” he called out gently. “Are you speaking to me?”
“I am speaking to no one,” said the quiet voice after a pause, “but you are welcome to listen. Perhaps you are a nobody yourself. Most people are, after all. They all think I’m crazy, but I’m the only sane one among them. Their lives are tedious and gray, but in my life, marvelous things happen all the time—ah, such adventures! My wife and I, we walked along the Seine the other night. The moon was full over Notre Dame, and she said—”
His voice fell silent abruptly, as if tripped by a sob. Sukhanov pictured the monkey-faced old man crouching in the darkness mere inches above his head, perhaps with his eyes closed, the better to see his madman’s dreams, or maybe staring into the Russian night with its gloomy houses, flickering streetlights, deserted churches, frozen stars, and all the futile, thwarted lives, just like his own, that were at this moment stumbling through thousands of private nightmares under moonlit roofs—and his heart contracted with inexpressible pity
“Forget about Paris,” the hushed voice sighed. “I have better stories to tell.”
And the old man talked, talked of things that were past, or more likely had never happened; and his tone held the measured, heartbroken lucidity of someone who no longer had anyone to listen to him. He talked of riding horses across the rolling hills of Andalusia, and reciting Virgil among the starlit ruins of the Colosseum, and dancing to the golden strains of Strauss on the deck of a yacht as it crossed the purple Mediterranean on its way to some forgotten tiny island of the gods—always the two of them, he and his dead wife, always basking in an illusory glow of Elysian happiness; and gradually, as the old man’s whisper drifted over the sleeping city, Sukhanov found himself slipping away on the current of his own thoughts. The pain of Nina’s near-loss and the joy of her miraculous recovery echoed in an oddly urgent note through his being, and the words from the intercepted letter —
The air was already suffused with pale light when the sad voice from the skies finally faded into an exhausted, wordless reverie. Anatoly Pavlovich walked inside, pulled a bag from a closet, and moved through the apartment, collecting shirts and socks. Shortly after noon, he left for the dacha.
The ride lasted almost two hours. Looking up, Sukhanov kept seeing Vadim’s unusually bloodshot, brooding eyes flitting in the rearview mirror. Apart from an occasional clarification of directions—it had been so long since Sukhanov’s last visit to the country that Vadim had forgotten the way—they did not talk. Once the congested heart of the old city with its dusty boulevards, blind bakery windows, and peeling mansions had released them, they began to pass shapeless neighborhoods with gray apartment blocks erupting dismally from empty, ill-kempt lots; then, gradually, as Moscow slid back faster and faster, the spaces between the buildings widened until precipitately, without so much as a comma, they changed into fields, bracketed by fire-tipped rowan trees and punctuated here and there by the exclamation point of a leaning bell tower or an ellipsis of dilapidated log houses—and Sukhanov envisioned the whole drive as one endless, unstructured, rambling sentence, and thinking of Nina, of the girl she had been once, of the woman she was now, was barely able to follow all of its clauses, until, veering from yet another unpaved turn in the local road, they arrived quite suddenly at the long- sought period of his country home.
Sukhanov rolled back his shoulders, exhaled, and climbing out of the car, told Vadim to return tomorrow, around three or four in the afternoon. Then, as the Volga lumbered back to the road, he pushed open the gate in a tall wooden fence and, chased by the frenzied barking of Coco, the neighbor’s fat, asthmatic poodle, walked down the winding path.
Here, in the countryside, the summer still lingered as if charmed. A rich smell of cut grass rose into the air along with a midday chorus of somnolent crickets; bumblebees hovered with contented weightiness under a sky blue as the brightest faience; orchard trees rippled in the breeze, revealing flashes of the light green of Antonovka
