“
For some time I studied an object lying on Lev’s open palm. It was round and black and shiny, and had four small holes in it; a frayed bit of thread was sticking out of a lower hole. It looked odd, like some puzzling artifact of an ancient, forgotten civilization. Then, through the resounding silence in my mind, one thought emerged: Nina.
“Nina is coming to the Manege at two o‘clock,” I said dully. “I was going to show her around. I’d like her to see my painting hanging on the wall at least once. It’s a painting of her, and she would really—”
Lev looked away.
“They are taking everything down as we speak,” he said slowly. “Nina knows already, I called her. I’ve been looking for you for over an hour.” After a small pause, he added, “Sorry about your coat”—and pressed the torn- off button into my hand.
The days that followed were a wretched blur. There were the rooms at the Manege, the walls bare now, with a draft off the street tossing homeless shreds of wrapping paper from corner to corner and a few square-shouldered, square-faced young men in freshly pressed suits shrugging noncommittally when a frantic, disheveled Roshchin begged them to disclose the fate of our works. There were the hours at the institute when Lev and I struggled through our meaningless lectures while the whispers of the Manege affair spread behind our backs, and that splendidly sunny morning when Leonid Penkin pushed his corpulent belly through my door and in a bored drawl relieved me of my position. There was the miserable evening I spent at Lev’s place, with Lev, also fired, sitting stony-faced at the kitchen table, pouring himself glass after glass of vodka, while Alla shrilly lamented her wasted youth. Worse yet, there was the silent disapproval in my own home, with the television loudly reciting victories of socialist labor behind my mother’s closed door and Nina moving about the kitchen like the ghost of a housewife doomed for all eternity to miming a multitude of imaginary chores, too busy to talk, avoiding my eyes, as if she blamed me for what had happened—but mainly, through it all, behind it all, there was an emptiness, a vast, cold, ever-present, all-pervasive emptiness inside me that kept me awake for hours every night, without thoughts, without hopes, trapped in a heavy darkness alone with the barely visible shadows of my paintings, now damned forever.
As the week neared its end, our worst fears, at least, had not been realized—though a few of us had lost our jobs, and the rest had received official reprimands, no one had been arrested, and even Roshchin, who had vanished mysteriously the day after the fateful opening, prompting his distraught mistress to make incoherent, sobbing calls to all his friends, turned up the next morning, with a black eye and reeking of drink but otherwise unharmed. Yet the sense of impending disaster continued to oppress us, and Lev kept nervously proposing extended trips to the country. “The thing to do right now,” he repeated, “is to lie low until they forget about us.” I would merely shrug in response. As time dragged on, irresolute and despondent, I found myself increasingly indifferent to my ultimate fate, and felt a listless calm when the telephone screamed at four in the morning on two consecutive nights and then hummed with pregnant silence into my ear, or when one evening, just as my mother and I were sitting down to supper (Nina was in bed with a migraine), there sounded a harsh knock on the door and I discovered a strange man on the landing, wearing a glossy beaver hat down to his eyebrows and carrying a bunch of artificial carnations (the kind one places on graves), who, proclaiming with a sinister smile that he must have mistaken the door, persisted in peering over my shoulder into our apartment. Nina did not share my detachment. After the man’s appearance on our doorstep, she grew tense whenever she heard steps on our floor and disliked answering the telephone; and thus it was I who lifted the receiver when, exactly one week after the catastrophe, my father-in-law rang our place.
He had to name himself: in the past five years we had exchanged only a few static-filled sentences, and I did not recognize his voice.
“Nina’s asleep,” I said curtly—it was only nine o‘clock, but I could see no light under the door to our room.
“Actually, Anatoly,” he said, “I wanted to talk to you. Not on the phone, though. Would you be so kind as to come over? Take a pen, I’ll give you my address.”
“I remember it,” I said, then added pointedly, “I have a very good memory, Pyotr Alekseevich.”
“Indeed?” he said without expression. “Then I’ll see you in half an hour.”
The cold seeped beneath my upturned collar and damp snow slapped my face as I crossed the night between our homes. Although I tried to assure myself that I owed Nina the courtesy of this visit, my mood worsened by the minute. In the lobby I had an altercation with the concierge, who for a long time refused to let me pass; and once I reached Malinin’s landing, still seething from the argument, I was stopped by a middle-aged blonde in a lacy apron who, emerging from the apartment next door, kept talking about some Crimean resort, smiling and pressing a bunch of keys into my hand. Over her shoulder hovered a pimply youth who stared at me with disconcerting curiosity, then exclaimed nonsensically, “I know you, don’t I? You are that mister with the tie, from the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge, I owe you two kopecks!”—but at that moment Malinin’s lock clicked, and the imposing figure of Nina’s father rose on the doorstep, dressed in a floor-length robe, holding a pear-shaped goblet of cognac in his hand, reflected in the gilded mirrors.
“Please come in,” he said, majestically sweeping his arm inside.
The door closed behind me.
In silence Malinin led me along the corridor. Nothing here had changed in the five years since my first, and last, visit. The Polish officer glared out of his heavy frame at the coat I tossed on the counter and the wet footprints I left on the immaculate floors; the piano, untouched in almost two decades—since Maria Malinina’s premature death—glistened with its dark, useless grandeur in the depths of the drawing room; and through another half-open door I glimpsed, with a sense of oppressive recognition, the crystal chandelier, the mahogany grandfather clock, the crimson velvet curtains—the bourgeois decorations of the scene of my past outburst. No, nothing had changed—and yet, without Nina’s soft domestic presence, the whole place seemed dimmer and dustier and somehow sad; and when, still without speaking, Malinin showed me into the living room, sat me down, poured me a drink, and lowered himself into an armchair across from me, I looked at him closely and suddenly doubted why I was here. I had supposed he had invited me to gloat over my failure; now I was not sure. For a minute we sat uneasily sipping our drinks. Then he cleared his throat.
“I’ll come straight to the point,” he said. “I’ve spoken with your director Penkin, and he is willing to take you back. Naturally, upon certain guarantees.”
“Such as?” Caught by surprise, I sounded sharper than I had intended.
“You understand, of course,” Malinin said coldly, “he can’t afford to damage his reputation by sheltering dubious elements as members of his staff. You must stop dabbling in your underground brand of art, avoid scandalous exhibitions, and stick to painting harvests and whatnot. A few tractors in the wheat ought to make matters right between you. Not unreasonable, under the circumstances, don’t you think? Anatoly?”
When I swirled the cognac in my glass, it gleamed with a rich honey tint, and I thought how much I would love to find the precise color for its luxurious shade. I had planned the second painting in my series in a predominantly yellow palette—the lush saffron of Oriental carpets, the brightness of sunshine on a child’s face, the translucent amber of tea rose petals, the opulent sheen of gold against the cream of a woman’s throat, and perhaps, I realized now, the intoxicating smoothness of liqueurs.
“I had to pull quite a few strings on your behalf,” Malinin’s voice sounded in the distance, “so I would be much obliged if you would at least give me an answer.”
“I’ve quit painting such tripe,” I said indifferently, still studying my glass.
“Oh, have you, now? Must have been recent,” he said.
I shrugged.
“A pity. You weren’t half bad at it, from what I hear…. Excellent, isn’t it? Our ambassador to France dropped it off the other day. A little more, perhaps?… Well, no matter, there are other ways of recommending yourself to your director.” The clock in the next room tried to announce a quarter past the hour, but its valiant rumble was
