copied, toyed with, and abandoned a multitude of techniques and styles. And all the while, my soul longed to pass through its appointed period of apprenticeship and, emerging tempered by its trials yet in essence unchanged, devise a language all its own.
For the moment, however, my search remained a private one, transpiring on a secret plane parallel to my official, seemingly unaltered, existence. Although I talked freely among my artist friends at Yastrebov’s evenings, the exhilarating change in the air felt all too recent, the memories of the preceding years all too fresh, and I preferred to be careful. I still proclaimed the virtues of socialist realism in my lectures at the institute, churned out now and then the odd portrait for the leather-bound office of some factory director, and when a shrill-voiced girl stood up during a classroom discussion and denounced Picasso as a scion of capitalism, I thought it prudent not to object. For the same reason, I had chosen to paint my true works at home, while reserving the studio (visited by both my students and my superiors) exclusively for my torpid public productions. And thus it was that I had nothing to show her when she came by the institute one dazzlingly blue, gloriously fragrant, excruciatingly awkward afternoon.
The month was March, the year 1957. Since our unfortunate meeting that past September, when I had so grossly insulted her father to her face, I had glimpsed her only a few times, always in Lev Belkin’s company, always from afar. I had not hoped to talk to her ever again. By now, Lev and I had grown so close that I considered him my best friend, but our almost daily contacts centered on our work, and the name of Nina Malinina never entered our conversation. I assumed he was in love with her, and attributed his silence to his private nature, or else to his innate sense of tact—for the impression she had made on me that ill-fated evening must have been apparent to everyone. For myself, I fervently continued to think of her as my unattainable ideal, and was reduced to near-stuttering when, after a cursory knock on my door, she walked into my life, the smells of melting snows in her wake.
“I came to see Lev, but he is busy with some students, so I thought I’d stop by here in the meantime,” she said without a smile. “I’m curious to see the works of a man who deems himself so superior to my father.”
That day, a portrait of a heavily decorated general with bushy whiskers was drying against a wall, while on my easel an uncommonly rosy-cheeked woman was proudly displaying a bucket of cucumbers. As she circled the room, she did not speak, but I saw her eyebrows rise, and my heart ached with humiliation. At the same time, I sensed it would be dangerous to tell her about my other, experimental, paintings, for she was the daughter of Pyotr Malinin, that pillar of officialdom, and I knew nothing at all about her—nothing except that she was beautiful, luminously, piercingly beautiful, moving lightly through the air alive with sunshine in that pearl-gray coat of hers, in those little black boots clicking so haughtily against the floor, her short hair the color of honey spilling in two or three curls from under a red beret, her transparent eyes distant, almost derisive, her lips—her lips—
“This isn’t really what I do,” I heard myself saying recklessly. “I have other kinds of things at home. I… I can show you if you like. I live nearby. With my mother.”
I was certain she would say no at once, but she appeared to hesitate.
“I’ll ask Lev to join us,” I added hastily.
In silence, she pulled at the fingers of her glove, then, looking up, said, “All right.” Astonished, humbled, joyful, I ran down the hall, tenderly depositing in my memory the last, expectant look of her suddenly darkened eyes. Lev’s door, around the corner, was cracked. I saw him standing by an open window, gazing into the glistening yard; his students must have just left. He did not hear me approach, and I was about to call out to him —but my lips moved wordlessly and my shout died an unnatural death in my throat. For a minute I lingered in the corridor, looking at his tall, broad-shouldered silhouette pasted against the pale blue sky; then, deciding, I retraced my steps on tiptoe.
She was still there, waiting quietly, twirling the glove in her hand.
“He’s too busy to come,” I told her. “Of course, I understand if you don‘t—”
I could not read her expression. Then, abruptly, she laughed.
“No, let’s go,” she said brightly. “Take your scarf, it’s colder than it looks.”
The city was streaming, dripping, splashing around us, sailing away on a dancing wave of early spring. She walked through it heedlessly, without noticing the torrents running off roofs and the pools of water at her feet; and so unreal seemed her presence next to me that I almost expected her to melt at any instant into the lustrous air. Yet after a mortifying interval filled with our passage through a littered building entrance, her stumbling on an unlit staircase landing, my embarrassed tugging at a key that had stuck in the lock (followed by a frantic dash into the apartment ahead of her, to throw a blanket over one painting I did not want her to see), and a blundering introduction to my startled mother who had exited the bathroom in curlers—there she was at last, standing in the middle of my cluttered room, uneasily playing with her gloves.
I switched on the light.
That year, I was fascinated by trains. I painted the in-between chaos of railroad stations, stained by the palpable sorrow of partings and the sad waste of vagrant destinies, yet occasionally pierced by the dazzling ray of a joyous meeting, a pure emotion; the mechanical rhythm of robotic multitudes swallowed and regurgitated ceaselessly by metallic monsters, with a rare living, feeling person swept screamingly along within the faceless mass; foreign, at times hauntingly lovely landscapes seen only fleetingly, through a dirty windowpane, over a pathetic repast of
“Dark,” she said slowly. “Most of these are very dark, not at all what I expected. I love this one. Strange but… so beautiful.”
She pointed to a small painting of railroad tracks being repaired in the deep blue glimmer of moonlight by a brigade of melancholy, overweight angels with shining orange wings. And then, before I could stop her, she stepped across to my easel and in one swift movement lifted the blanket I had thrown over my latest work.
With this canvas, more challenging in composition, I had hoped to complete the railroad series and begin exploring another subject that had interested me of late, that of reflections—of houses in pools of rainwater, of shaving men in bathroom mirrors, of wives in their husbands’ glasses, of constellations in cups of tea. The painting depicted a crowd of people in browns and grays standing hunched over in the aisle of a train car, all of them seen from the back. The sturdy, well-dressed man in the foreground was reflected faintly in a window. His face, hovering over a dark patch of a forest, was middle-aged and vaguely unpleasant, with a hint of a double chin, and eyes, small and furtive like insects, hidden behind metal-rimmed glasses—the face of someone who had led a comfortable, predictable, inconsequential life. At this instant, however, his bland reflected features wore an expression of shocked recognition, as if he had just glimpsed a missed dream of his youth and for one heartbeat realized the meaningless-ness of his whole existence; and his eyes stared at the silvery wisp of another, less distinct, reflection—the specter of a strikingly beautiful girl who seemed to be flitting through the air behind him but was probably simply walking along the aisle, just outside the imaginary frame, briefly positioned precisely where a viewer of the painting would be standing. The girl’s face had been the most difficult thing to paint, and I had spent almost a month battling with its complexities: it had to look both real and ethereal at the same time.
“But,” said Nina Malinina haltingly, “but… that’s me.”
My voice louder than necessary, I started talking about generalized, classical features, instances of accidental similarity, the artist’s subconscious use of familiar material… And then something strange happened: she began to cry. Unlike most weeping girls, she did not invite a comforting gesture; her face looked angry, and her tears were silent and spare.
Unsettled, I turned away, waiting for her to compose herself.
“I understand,” she said quietly after a minute, “he really isn’t a very good painter. I must be going now.”
Our eyes met, and I had a sudden feeling that she disliked me greatly. I was surprised when she agreed to let me walk her home. She lived with her father on Gorky Street, a quarter of an hour away. When we parted, she wrote down her phone number on the back of one of my drawings.
The next day, I had a talk with Lev I felt guilty about my encounter with Nina, and I did not want him to hear about it from her. I altered the truth ever so slightly: I told him that when I had come to invite him along, his door
