The Dream Life of Sukhanov

the ripened fruits of all those years.

And then, unexpectedly, magically, the day came, at the end of a particularly trying month in a trying year, shortly after Nina’s thirtieth birthday.

Nina still tried to pretend, to herself as much as to me, that she was the same girl who one day in 1957 had left her home, breaking with her father, forsaking her old life, and had stood next to me, wearing that white, narrow-waisted dress I liked so much, her back straight, her smile proud, her eyes shining, while an officious woman with thick ankles had monotonously recited solemn commonplaces from a worn compendium of Soviet marriage transactions and Lev’s Alla had giggled into a bunch of wilting gladioli; but even though she continued to call herself the “high priestess” of my art and uncomplainingly slipped away to the kitchen to give me space to work, I could sense the beginning of a change, an insidious, stealthy, corrosive change, in the air between us.

On the evening of November third, the day she turned thirty, she came home from her job at the Tretyakovka wearing that slightly pinched expression I had been noticing of late, and when I unveiled her present—a portrait of her as a mermaid I had worked on in secret, to surprise her—she smiled with her lips only and said in a toneless voice, “Oh. Another painting.” Then she left for a dinner party at her father’s (after years of stubborn resentment, he had offered her a semblance of peace, which failed to include me). I was still up, waiting for her, when she returned, well after midnight. Her face, as she walked in, arrested me, so uncommonly animated it was, and more beautiful than I had seen it in months: her cheeks flushed, I imagined with compliments and expensive liqueurs, her gaze brightened, perhaps with golden memories of her fairy-tale youth; but my impulse to tenderly tilt her head back, look into her eyes, salvage at least something of our day together died a hurried death when I noticed a peacock-blue scintillation following her passage through the shadows of our crowded room. She was wearing a pair of sapphire earrings, and it was they, nothing else, that lent a deep blue brilliance to her gray irises and suffused her pallid skin with an excited warmth.

“What are these?” I asked sharply, knowing the answer already.

“A gift from my father.”

“We can’t accept such things from that man.”

“He is my father,” she said. “He loves me. He wanted to do something nice for my birthday. And you…” She stopped, looked away. “You don’t know anything about him.”

I had the impression she had meant to say something else but changed her mind.

“I know enough,” I said. “I know what he is. I know what he does—bargains away his dignity piece by piece to the highest bidder, paints trash so he can have his cushy life—”

“You paint trash too,” she interrupted. “Your studio at the institute—”

My breath caught. “I paint trash so I can do this,” I said, shoving my chin at the dusty deposits of canvases in the corners, no longer bothering to keep my voice down. “What I do at the institute is irrelevant—this is who I really am.”

“And how do you know who my father really is?”

“Oh, I see—after a day of prostituting himself, he plays the violin or something?”

“Have you ever considered, Tolya,” said Nina slowly, “that you may actually be wrong about something or someone? You think my father is an amoral, selfish man, but maybe…” She paused. “Maybe he just wanted to make me and my mother happy.”

Again I had the feeling that some other, harsher words had alighted on her lips, then been discarded—and it was these unspoken reproaches and accusations, combined with her unnatural calm, that sent a wave of fury crashing over me.

“Well, how noble of him,” I shouted. “He sold his soul to the devil so you could have your jewelry, and your mother her piano and her gilded teacups!”

I regretted my words as soon as they had escaped me, but it was too late. Nina’s face, now drawn and pale in the yellow glow of a bedside lamp, seemed suspended between expressions; then she walked to the window and, staring out into the dreary darkness punctuated by anemic streetlamps, carefully removed the earrings, balanced their tiny blue radiance on her palm, and considered them briefly before setting them down on the windowsill. When she faced me, her eyes held no love, no emotion at all.

“So my mother collected porcelain and was passionate about music,” she said softly. “Is it so wrong to want to have beauty in your life? Not everyone is willing to live… to live like this. And is it really so contemptible to want to give beauty to someone you love?”

Then, not waiting for my answer, she turned and, usually private to a fault, started to undress as if I were not there. In silence I watched her step out of the sea-colored dress her father had brought her years earlier from a trip to Italy, which she still wore on every birthday and New Year’s Eve, gently smooth its creases before hanging it in our makeshift wardrobe, then take off her stockings and, sliding her hand inside, raise them against the light and in a seemingly familiar, tired ritual check for fresh runs. As I looked at the silky shimmer spread between her fingers, I thought mechanically that stockings were very hard to come by nowadays; and on the heels of that thought, the famous words of Chekhov popped into my mind: “A human being should be entirely beautiful: the face, the clothes, the soul, and the thoughts.” And suddenly I was frightened—frightened that something irreparable had happened between us. I thought of the squalor of our dingy place, which had more space for paintings than for us; and the stairs that always reeked of urine; and the anxious hovering of my mother, who kept imagining footsteps outside our door and strange clicks on our phone line, and who, in truth, did not like Nina very much and referred to her, with pursed lips and barely out of earshot—for our communal quarters were too cramped for secrets—as “your fine lady”; I thought too that none of it was ever likely to change.

And then, for one moment, I almost believed that all my creations of the past five years—all those flights of fancy, all those sleepless nights, the bouts of despair, the transports of happiness, the smuggled revelations, the full moons, the museum vaults, the lingering dreams, the stolen moments of love—all of those things were nothing but idle imaginings, youthful indulgences, rainbow dust on a butterfly’s wing; and that my real life was here, now, in this unlivable room with its odors of ancient pipes, dust, and paint, with this silent woman who was lying in bed, her back toward me, pretending to be asleep…. And so unbearable was the thought that I did not move for a long time, and the shadows twitched and cavorted in the corners, and my mother murmured in haunted nightmares behind the wall, and my works, my gifts, my children, begged to be released into the light, and Nina’s breathing gradually assumed a different, measured rhythm, and still I stood in the dark, and after perhaps an hour Nina suddenly said without turning, “You know, Tolya, there is more than one way to lose your soul.”

And then, after several dismal, mostly silent weeks, the telephone rang.

For the full first minute, with Lev stuttering in his excitement and Alla shrieking in the background, I understood nothing. “Pinch me, I’m dreaming,” he kept repeating. Then Nina walked into the corridor, her face remote, her eyelids swollen with insomnia.

“Please don’t shout like that,” she said flatly. “It’s seven-thirty in the morning.”

My hands were jumping so much I could not immediately fit the receiver into the cradle; then, drawing her to me, “Listen, you won’t believe this,” I said, already anticipating the wondrous light about to come into her eyes.

A couple of months earlier, a major retrospective—Thirty Years of Moscow Art— had opened at the Manege. Lev and I had gone and, having found the whole affair, with a few exceptions, staid and uninspiring, had pronounced it worthy of being displayed in the former stable. But now an event little short of miraculous had taken place. A benevolent official from the Ministry of Culture had approached a few openly experimental artists with an offer to join the show, among them Ilya Beliutin, who ran an unofficial studio, and his students; and as Beliutin happened to be an old acquaintance of our Yastrebov, the loose invitation had been extended to the members of Viktor’s circle as well—the bearded Roshchin, and Lev, and myself. True, we were allowed only one work each, but all the same, it was a beginning, was it not, and one should be glad even of such—

“Oh Tolya,” Nina interrupted, clasping her hands, “so what if it’s only one painting—it’s the Manege, millions of people will see it, and you will be noticed, I know you will be! My God, it’s wonderful, just wonderful…. When does it start?”

It was all happening with the rapidity of a dream: we had been told to bring our paintings by tonight; Lev and I were meeting by the Manege that evening; the show was to open to the public the very next day. Mother and Nina left for work, but I quickly summoned an impressive cough for the benefit of a sympathetic secretary on the other end of the line and spent several hours in an incredulous, delightful haze, leafing through my canvases as