You are not quite the stuff of which successful artists are made. Frankly, it doesn’t surprise me—my daughter has never been careful in her choice of acquaintances. Though at least she’s given up that awful Jewish fellow, what’s his name…”
His voice was low—he must not have wanted Nina to overhear—and his meaning unmistakable. In stunned silence, I looked at myself through his coolly calculating eyes, and saw a pathetic little teacher breathlessly eager to enter into a lucky alliance with a race of demigods. Flushed with humiliation, I wanted to leave at once, but felt unable to move, as if trapped in a nightmare—a slow, perverse nightmare in which darkness seeped into the room through the heavy crimson curtains, seconds rustled quietly in the grandfather clock in the corner, the gold-rimmed dessert plates glittered emptily on the table, the crystal chandelier sparkled coldly, and in a precise near-whisper the man whose face resembled so much the face of my love was talking about his own position in life at my age, and some nice young man named Misha Buryshkin or Broshkin or Burykin who was also in love with Nina and promised to go far, very far, at the Ministry of Culture, and certain comforts that Nina, in the pride of her youth, might think she could do without but which were really in her blood…
And as he spoke, the dreary colors and communal smells of my own impoverished childhood rose unsought in my memory, and I thought of Professor Gradsky, and the twisted stump of the chandelier in the ceiling of our room, and the day I had learned that the old man and his wife had once lived alone in our vast six-room apartment—and all at once my humiliation gave way to another, more powerful feeling. The old anger, the anger of the deprived and the dispossessed, reared its righteous head inside my soul. For a minute I tried to control it, but the conceited man in the velvet blazer went on talking in his insultingly reserved voice, and the chandelier went on sparkling, and finally, standing up so abruptly that I knocked down the chair, I told him, with the freedom of someone dreaming, exactly what I thought about his so-called comforts and his protege at the Ministry and his unflattering opinion of his own daughter… As my voice climbed higher and higher, I no longer knew what I was saying. Everything was hot and swirling around me, and at first he was smiling derisively, but soon his face grew taut and white—possibly when I shouted that his success as an artist was a sham, a joke of history, that he couldn’t paint worth a damn, that of the two of us—
And at that instant I saw Nina standing in the doorway, pale and wide-eyed, a soapy, dripping plate in her hands. I stopped in mid-sentence, looked at her, looked at her father, then picked up Malinin’s glass of wine, and finished it in one gulp.
“Sorry,” I said flatly, and walked across the room, past the frozen Nina, past the piano and the porcelain, along the endless corridor, and out onto the landing. Carefully I closed the door behind me and remained still for a while, waiting for the swirling to stop. But as I stood there, trying not to think, knowing full well I had lost her, I gradually became aware of a growing din, a rising tumult of incoherent voices, the sound of a broken plate; and in another minute, the door was flung open, Nina flew sobbing into my arms, and somewhere close behind, her father cried, “I swear, if you leave this house now—”
With a violence that shook the walls, Nina slammed the door shut, and his voice cut off. The two of us were left facing each other across a shocked silence.
Then someone cracked open a door on the opposite side of the landing, and a middle-aged blonde in a lacy apron edged her head around the jamb.
“What’s all that noise?” she asked with disapproval, looking at Sukhanov. “No use knocking like that, Pyotr Alekseevich is out of town. He’s gone to the Crimea with his grandson.”
Sukhanov stared at her dully.
“Won’t be returning for at least a week either,” the woman added almost gleefully.
“Oh,” Sukhanov muttered. “Of course. How could I have forgotten?”
And suddenly he could visualize it so clearly: a crystal bowl melting into its reflection in the still, black surface of the lion-footed table just on the other side of this wall, and in the bowl, among a jumble of many temporarily displaced but potentially useful odds and ends (a button not yet matched to a garment, a solitary cuff link, a mysterious screw), a bunch of keys, seemingly ordinary yet possessing the power of some fairy-tale genie to transport him to a marvelous, self-contained world of hot baths and fresh clothes and steaming teas and strawberry jams and maybe even strong liqueurs—a world that was now twice removed, separated from him not by one but by two locked doors…. He turned away and plodded toward the elevator, and the aging blonde across the landing followed his steps with such curious eyes that, glancing up with his finger already poised over the elevator button, he thought of saying something cutting—and then saw one last chance of cheating his fate.
“Pardon me,” he said with all the dignity he could muster in his broken glasses and mud-stained pants, “but you wouldn’t know if anyone here has a key to Pyotr Alekseevich’s place? He might have left one with a neighbor.”
The woman’s birdlike eyes narrowed suspiciously. He hastened to explain who he was, told her in an entreating voice about his being locked out of his own house, his hunger, his need of sleep…. She softened perceptibly.
“You are in luck,” she said after a brief hesitation. “I keep his spare key. Wait here, I’ll go call the resort.”
The ease of this resolution had an almost dreamlike quality to it. She returned a few minutes later. Pyotr Alekseevich, she had been told, was taking his customary promenade along the sea. She would try phoning again in a short while, for, naturally, she would not presume to release the keys without his permission, not even to his son-in-law. As she talked, she cracked her door wider, and Sukhanov smelled a rich aroma of mushroom soup and saw a stretch of cozy blue carpet in the hallway and, on the wall, a girlish fur-trimmed coat and an oversized purple jacket; and, filling in the blanks—a daughter, a son, a leisurely family dinner—he found himself envying this stranger her quiet domestic world, and longed to be a part of it, if only for an instant, if only—
“So you’ll have to come back in a bit,” the woman said. “Half an hour or so. I’d ask you in, but I’m in the middle of cooking.”
“Oh, certainly,” he said. “I understand. You’re very kind as it is.”
And smiling sadly, he pressed the elevator button.
Back in the street, he strolled aimlessly along the pavement. When he neared the corner by the Hotel National, where Gorky Street emptied into the square, the many-columned building of the Manege filled his view. The air had grown much colder now, and presently a snowflake melted on his cheek. He paused to file away, for some future use, the liquid reflections of headlights in the slush of the road, the powdery dust beginning to flicker in the pastel glow of streetlamps, the white columns, the black trees, the blue shadows, and above it all, the quickly darkening skies, luminously pregnant as they could be only on an evening before a snowfall. Then, at once aware of the ache in his fingers, he rapidly crossed Marx Avenue and, lowering his unwieldy parcel to the ground, prepared to wait. He was there only for a minute when Lev Belkin strode across the square, a bundle under his arm, and even at this distance I could tell he was smiling broadly.
“Glad?” Lev shouted.
“You bet!” I shouted back.
“Nervous?” Lev said, closer now.
“Not a bit,” I replied, picking up my load. “I have a feeling it will all go splendidly.”
Together we entered the Manege.
It was the last day of November in the year 1962, and I already imagined it emblazoned on my future memory as the date on which my prolonged apprenticeship was finally destined to end, and to the sonorous cymbals of public acclaim, my heart trembling with gladness, I, Anatoly Sukhanov, a name among names, would enter the gladiators’ ring of art history, stepping into the long-awaited spotlight out of the dim shadows of anonymous toil.
I had lived in anticipation of this day for a long time. The thaw whose first astonishing inroads into the snowdrifts we had witnessed in 1956 was melting its way through history and literature, but had barely made itself felt in the arctic bleakness of Soviet art; and even though for me the preceding years had been rich with that indescribable richness of small-scale triumphs that only an artist knows in his sweaty task of creation, yet little by little my inability to share my canvases with anyone but a handful of close friends, my struggle to maintain my precarious position at the institute, the precautions I continued to take in order to conceal my real self from colleagues and chance acquaintances, the effort of teaching what I no longer believed in—in short, the pervasive duplicity of my existence—poisoned my joy in living, my joy in working, my very desire to paint; and with fading hope, I dreamt of a day when I would tear away the suffocating shroud of falsity and show them, show them all,
