“I’m fine,” he said morosely. “I was just sleeping. A ridiculous situation, this. My keys were stolen, and no one’s home. I’ve been sitting by the door for hours. I… I had to return to the city on an urgent matter.”
The man—Volodya, perhaps, or Vyacheslav—glanced at his watch.
“How unfortunate,” he said. “And where is Nina Petrovna? Here, let me help you off the floor.”
Ignoring the outstretched hand, Sukhanov heaved himself up.
“My wife has decided to stay in the country for a few more days,” he said stiffly. “Gardening or something.”
A look of relief passed across the man’s face.
“A few more days, really?” he said. “Well, that’s lucky. Because as it turns out, it wouldn’t be easy for me to… That is, I wouldn’t be able to pick her up this afternoon. I was actually coming by to leave a note on your door—I was in the neighborhood anyway, and I couldn’t reach you on the phone, so…” He crumpled a piece of paper in his hand and looked away uncomfortably. “The thing is, Anatoly Pavlovich… It seems I won’t be driving you any longer. They’ve reassigned the car. A matter of departmental reorganization at the Ministry, they told me.”
“Ah,” said Sukhanov without surprise. It could be Vladislav, he supposed. Something with a V, in any case.
“I hope I’m not leaving you in the lurch,” said the man, with another anxious glance at his watch. “Of course, you’ll get a new driver in a matter of days, just in time for Nina Petrovna’s return from the dacha, but if you need a lift in the meantime and I happen to be available, we could always work something out—privately, so to speak.”
Sukhanov leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. The darkness under his lids was soothing, but he longed to find himself once more amid the vivid colors of a recent dream that lingered faintly in his memory— something about an empty museum in a hushed predawn hour, a violin player flying over the roofs of a turn-of- the-century town, a foretaste of greatness rising within him… But a stray image of rats abandoning a sinking ship in a dreary procession kept fighting its way to the foreground of his mind, and the man’s increasingly impatient voice lapped at the edges of his hearing, distracting him, reminding him of a host of irrelevant, disagreeable matters that probably needed to be addressed; and he could do nothing but wordlessly wait for it all to end. Finally, as if from afar, the man said, “Well, that’s settled, then,” and Sukhanov heard a rustle of leather followed by steps thumping across the landing and down the stairs, raising a brief flurry of agitated barks in their wake, growing more hollow as they descended, then dissolving in the hazy mid-morning silence. Alone at last, he again sank to the floor and drifted to sleep.
And he was close to catching the tail of his delightful dream when the quieted dogs renewed their barking and the steps sounded in the stairwell again, closer and closer, until the rustle of leather was all about him. Sleepily he wondered whether time had perhaps decided to play yet another little joke on him by rewinding the past few minutes—and whether he would just keep slipping deeper and deeper into the past in this terribly amusing reverse order, until he found himself once more an alert child playing with his toes on a bright green carpet, gazing down the length of his two years into the dark vortex of the unknown, so akin to death and yet so much less frightening…. But already he was being pulled up, and shaken awake, and the square-jawed man with the uncertain name was propping him up, saying almost belligerently, “No, Anatoly Pavlovich, I can’t just leave you here like this, you seem unwell. Come, the car’s downstairs, just tell me where you want to go. Does Nadezhda Sergeevna have a spare key to your place? No? How about your father-in-law?… All right, Gorky Street it is.”
Sukhanov drowsily allowed himself to be propelled into the elevator, and across the lobby, and into the street. The familiar black Volga—once his—was parked at the opposite curb, but two people were already sitting inside, one in the passenger seat and the other in the back; he could not see them clearly for the shadowy reflections of boughs swaying ceaselessly in the windows. The man asked him to wait, then ran across the road and tapped on the glass. As the window slid down, Sukhanov glimpsed a young woman with the petulant face of a broken porcelain doll—the man’s wife, most likely. For a while they appeared to argue, in fierce, inaudible voices, the man seemingly pleading. Then the woman said hysterically, “Well, if you must!” and rolled up the window.
The man turned and waved, and Sukhanov trudged toward him.
“Don’t mind Prince, he’s quite tame,” said the man enigmatically, opening the back door. Sukhanov peered in and was startled to discover that the person in the back was not a person at all but an enormous dog with brown, matted fur and a sour expression around its unmuzzled nose; but before he could object, he was bundled inside and the car moved away, precipitating a miniature snowstorm within the plastic sphere hanging from the rearview mirror and causing a yellow suitcase on the seat next to him to bump painfully against his knee. The next few minutes were profoundly unpleasant, for the man had made no introductions, and no one said anything, and the air in the car was unbearably sweet with perfume, and the dog kept looking askance at Sukhanov, salivating mutely; and after a while, he noticed that the woman in front was making a hushed, sniffling sort of sound, and realized she was crying. He had no time to wonder about it, however, for just then they came to a skidding stop, and the man announced, “Here we are.”
Hastily murmuring “Thanks” and “So long,” Sukhanov clambered out of the car.
After a few steps, he glanced back. The man without the name and the woman with the face of a porcelain doll were kissing, kissing with the embarrassing, awkward hunger of adolescents—and as he quickly averted his eyes, he knew that he had seen the woman before, and that she was not the man’s wife at all, and that the explanation for the whole thing was very simple and somewhat sordid and possibly a bit happy but mainly terribly, terribly sad…. And then the magnificent courtyard enclosed him darkly, and the necessity of facing Pyotr Alekseevich Malinin in just a few moments forced everything else from his mind.
At the mention of Sukhanov’s name, the concierge waved him through: he was expected. Too impatient to wait for the elevator, he ran up the stairs to the fifth floor, stopping only once to right his tie and gather his courage. An instant later, before he had even lifted his hand to ring the bell, the imposing door opened, and Nina stood on the doorstep. She was smiling, but he could see that she too was nervous.
“Did you remember the wine?” she whispered, ushering him into the hall. “Good. We’ll eat right now, it’ll be easier that way, and you’ll tell him later in the evening, before dessert. Don’t worry, you’ll like each other, he’s nothing like his public persona…. Only please, Tolya, you promised, no art discussions.”
I nodded, barely listening, suddenly disoriented by the world revealed just past the door—the brilliant expanse of polished floors, the gleaming void of enormous mirrors, a table rising importantly on leonine paws, an officer with a proud mustache gazing pensively out of a gilded frame (“Mama’s father,” said Nina in passing), and beyond, an infinite perspective of unfolding rooms. Even though she had charted the floor plan for me only the other day, explaining where our bedroom would be and which space I could convert into my studio, I had had no warning that the schematic drawing on the napkin would translate into a vision of all this foreign splendor, and no idea that in the year 1957 anyone in Moscow still lived in such old-fashioned luxury. Overwhelmed, I followed Nina through the vastness of the place, catching glimpses of a cupboard full of rose-tinted porcelain (“Mama used to collect china,” explained Nina) and the elegant curve of a lustrously black piano (“Mama was the only one who played”); and when we finally arrived at a high-ceilinged hall with an elaborately set table, and a handsome middle-aged man in a velvet blazer rose from an armchair, his hand extended, his smile dry, I felt almost incapable of speaking—for in those few minutes I had understood, fully and for the first time, how different my life was from hers, how great a gap lay between us, and how truly uneven our union would be.
The dinner was not a success. Nina burned the main course; Malinin did not remember me from his lectures at the Surikov, visibly disliked the wine I had brought (it had cost me a week’s salary), and considered it beneath him to pretend otherwise on both counts; feeling suffocatingly out of my depths, I kept discoursing lamely on the impressive growth of Moscow since the war and the accomplishments of Soviet composers. After the meal, when Nina had refilled our glasses and with conspicuous haste vanished into the kitchen to “check on that pie,” I struggled to explain to this self-satisfied man who sat frowning at his wine across the table that I loved his daughter madly, that she and I were, in fact, engaged to marry, that the date had already been set for September twenty-second, less than a month away… I had hoped to find words that were meaningful and sincere, but ended by simply blurting it out. He listened calmly, pressing the tips of his fingers together, avoiding my eyes. When I finished, he demonstratively pushed aside his half-full glass and cleared his throat.
“Do you know, young man, I’ve been hearing things about you,” he said. “Leonid Penkin, your director, is an old friend of mine. He tells me he is quite disappointed in your prospects. It appears that, well, how shall I put it…
