the skies above me floated a few lit windows, behind which families were probably gathered around pastel-tinted lampshades, engaged in some domestic, tranquil pastimes I could not imagine, and countless dark windows, their texture indistinguishable from that of the clouds, behind which other families were no doubt sleeping the dreamless sleep of well-being. And as I stood there, looking up, I understood, for the first time since the Manege disaster, just what my life was bound to become.
There was no hope of my finding stable employment now; I would be forced into driving a night bus at best, sweeping streets more likely. My earnings would be laughable, not enough to cover even a portion of the overpriced canvases and oils I would have to obtain on the black market (for, along with my position, I had lost my access to subsidized art stores); the three of us would go on living until our dying day in this intimate, humiliating closeness, our undergarments drying communally on bathroom pipes; and in a couple of years, when my mother retired, it would be Nina, Nina alone, who would have to bear the weight of supporting us all, of paying for my secret, dangerous calling—paying with long days and longer nights, paying by parting with every small pleasure in which she still indulged on occasion—a ballet seen from the top gallery, a chocolate-covered cherry savored with an evening tea—and paying with something else besides, something she might have wanted more than my art, something we never discussed….
I remembered the emptiness in Nina’s eyes on her thirtieth birthday, and all the words she was always on the brink of saying yet never said, and her growing reluctance to meet her old girlfriends, and her lying in bed night after night, her face to the wall, whether counting flowers on the wallpaper blotchily illuminated by a streetlamp in an attempt to trick her insomnia or thinking bleak thoughts, I did not know. And then the words I had tried to forget, Malinin’s words, sounded clearly in my mind—“For what would you sacrifice yourself—and not just yourself, may I remind you, but your mother and your wife as well?”—and I was chilled with a sudden fear that I had gotten it all wrong, hopelessly wrong, and that my heroic intent to carry on with my outlawed art was not the sacrifice I believed it to be, but merely an easy, selfish succumbing to my own desires, and that the true sacrifice lay in a seemingly craven decision to give it all up. I was still certain of the road I myself would take if offered the choice between comfort and immortality, even happiness and immortality—but did I have the right to choose it for others, for those I loved?
Then, too, exactly how confident was I of my posthumous fame, a small, cold voice inquired in my ear. Daydreaming, I used to envision a sunlit stretch of a museum corridor, precise little plaques with titles and dates, a generous chapter in art history volumes, printed on delightfully crisp, gleaming paper; but in the course of one week my vision had undergone a painful transformation and now found itself crammed into a windowless closet stacked with canvases that only janitors saw from time to time. For painting, unlike literature, was a tragic art: it could not be multiplied in a predawn hour on a rickety typewriter, or cross borders sewn into a coat lining, or live forever, weightless and unstoppable, in a dark, safe corner of someone’s memory. It was eternally bound to the earthly, the material—a canvas, an easel, oils, brushes, a wall—and ultimately to time and place; and to its time and place it owed its eventual survival or destruction. Russia had not been kind to artists. I thought of all the treasures burned in wars and revolutions, of priceless frescoes washed off cathedral walls by rains and snows, of Chagall’s masterpieces imprisoned in an anonymous storage room of the Tretyakovka, mildewing away brushstroke by brushstroke, inspiration by inspiration. I thought too of the persistent sadness weighing down my soul during my nightly vigils in the dusty graveyard of my own unwanted paintings, my stillborn children, and the dismal scent of failure mixing stealthily with the smell of turpentine; and then, for no apparent reason, my early memories flitted through my mind—the black shoes striding across the hushed Moscow night, the Professor holding out a trembling hand, my mother on the telephone covering her mouth as if to stifle a scream, the lonely, broken flight my father had taken from one darkness into another…
And already, in some deep, obscure corner of my soul, an even more terrible doubt was stirring. Was I really so sure of my talent to risk everything for it—to turn my back defiantly on this chance, this last chance, of giving Nina the happiness she deserved, all in the vague hope that one day I would create, amidst the misery and disappointment, something so unique, so beautiful, so great that it would fully justify our wasted lives?
The door of the building opened, and an adolescent came out, leading a disdainful greyhound on a leash. Beyond the dog’s arched back I caught another brilliant flash of the marble, the bronze, the light dancing in the mirrors… And then I knew that in the few minutes I had passed standing on this sidewalk before a trash can in the whirling snow I had traveled a dizzying distance.
I looked down at the book in my hands; its cover was running with water. I wiped it on my sleeve, slipped it inside my coat, and walked home.
By the time I climbed the stairs to our apartment, I was chilled to the bone. I let myself in without a noise. Silence and wretchedness seeped from under the closed door to our room, where Nina was probably lying awake in the dark, just as I had left her, but in my mother’s room the nightly news hummed faintly, and a thin streak of light leaked into the corridor. For a minute I stood hesitating; then, softly, I knocked. The noise of the television faded, and my mother’s voice asked, “Yes, what is it?”
The ceiling lamp was burning, but she was in bed, dressed in a thick, salmon-colored nightgown, her head wound tightly in curlers. An aging smell of Krasnyi Oktyabr, the perfume I remembered since childhood, hung in the air.
“Tolya, what happened?” she said anxiously, leaning on her elbow. “Your hair is all wet!” The sound was off now, but black-and-white figures continued to jerk across the screen, casting sickly shadows on her face.
“Nothing happened,” I said. “I was out, and it’s snowing out there.” Gingerly I sat down on the edge of her bed. “Mama, can I ask you something?” She was looking at me with frightened eyes. “I’m wondering,” I said awkwardly, “do you like my paintings?”
Her mouth grew tight.
“It’s not nice to treat your mother like this,” she said in a petulant voice and, reaching over to the television, turned the volume knob. “It’s late, my nerves are troubling me, you come in looking all wild, and here I’m already thinking God knows what—and you ask a silly question like that! Tolya, it’s not nice.”
“Mama, please,” I said. “This is important. I really need to know what you think.”
She looked at me uncertainly, as if trying to gauge whether I was joking.
“And now,” said the bright voice of the announcer in the background, “for those who are still with us at this hour, the folk ensemble Samotsvety will perform a song from Vologda.” A row of women in peasant dresses, holding the tips of their fingers under their chins, commenced wailing about some youth who refused to accept a chest of gold in place of his beloved. My mother switched the television off.
“It’s because of your problems at work, isn’t it?” she said with a sigh. “Well, Tolya, of course you can draw lovely things—faces, flowers, houses, just like a photograph.” She gave me a pat on the hand. “Remember that one picture you did, for your graduation I think it was, of a soldier riding a horse into a village? It made me proud, such a wonderful picture! Only I wish you’d draw like that again, Tolya, because the things you do now, I must tell you, they aren’t nearly as nice. It’s no wonder the authorities closed down your show…. No, don’t look away, you wanted your mother’s advice, so I’m telling you, your new pictures are unpleasant. I can’t imagine how your Nina even sleeps in the same room with this art of yours—she must have nightmares all the time.”
“Nina loves my paintings,” I said quietly.
“Sometimes I just don’t know about you,” my mother said, shaking her head. “You went to an institute, yet you don’t understand simple things.”
The cognac I had drunk was making the edges of my thoughts foggy. “What do you mean?” I asked. She peered at me across a small silence. I wondered if Nina was listening on the other side of the thin wall—and hoped she was not.
“I know you think I’m old, dull, and ignorant,” said my mother plaintively, “no match for your fine young wife—but I can still recognize an unhappy woman when I see one, and I tell you, Tolya, Nina is unhappy. Why don’t you two have children?”
“Mother, I—”
“Because of your pictures!” she interrupted. “Because you’ve turned our home into some sort of underground lair! Because you think a child would disrupt the important things you do! But I will say this to you, Tolya. The girl was twenty-four when you married her. She turned thirty last month. How much longer do you plan to wait? It may already be too late for her, and every day she leaves for work with her eyes red from tears, but you—you are so busy playing with your colors you don’t even notice! You think she loves your pictures? Mark your
