The Dream Life of Sukhanov

mother’s words, even if she pretends to now, she’ll come to hate everything about them when she finds herself alone at forty.”

It was not an answer to the question I had asked—but it was an answer. For a moment it was so quiet I could hear the mattress springs moaning under Nina’s weight in the next room. Then, averting my eyes from my mother’s reddened face, her pink and green curlers, the slightly soiled lace of her nightgown’s collar, I stood up and, muttering about the late hour, slipped out into the corridor and closed her door, behind which I could already discern the renewed ululations of the folk chorus Samotsvety.

For an endless minute I waited unmoving in the dark, trying not to give in to the vast, unknown terror that crouched at my back like a beast poised to leap, fighting the desire to cry. Then the minute passed, and breathing more evenly, I picked up Malinin’s book and took it into the kitchen. And in the same green circle of light in which Nina and I had shared a tangerine on that wonderfully happy night before the Manege opening—only a week ago, yet so long past—I pored over purple deserts swarming with menacing statues, somnolent faces mutating into giant insects, musical instruments drooping like soft organic matter, empty squares of ancient towns flooded with harsh yellow light, contorted bodies dissected into drawers or supported on stilts, brightly feathered canaries trilling inside rib cages; and gradually the quiet but persistent chirping of birds filled the shadowy crannies of my mind, and the air began to shimmer with strange, luminous phantoms, elusive, beautiful, and terrible like dreams; and instead of mulling over the article I was to write for my father-in-law, I sat still for a while, vacantly gazing into the street, where the snow was no longer falling, and seeing paintings before my eyes—tens, hundreds, thousands of paintings that lived inside me and that I might never paint now….

Slippered footsteps dragged along the floor, and when I turned around, I saw my mother in the doorway. I stared at her. She wore a button-down housedress, the curlers were gone from her hair, and her face had aged twenty-some years since the conversation we had had only an hour earlier.

“Tolya, are you sure you are well?” she said. “You look a bit… Goodness, you broke your glasses! I thought right away there was something funny about you.”

Disconcerted, I moved my eyes around the kitchen, recognizing nothing. A kettle was about to whistle on the stove, two cups were set out on the table amid a profusion of sugar cookies, a clock on the wall announced five in the afternoon, and a brightly feathered canary in a cage chirped quietly but persistently in its corner. A tranquil Arbat alley rustled with the yellowing leaves of early autumn outside the window. I could suddenly taste cognac in my mouth.

My mother was watching me with puzzlement.

“And what’s that you are reading?” she asked.

Cautiously I lowered my eyes. The book of surrealist reproductions had not been a dream within a dream, I saw then—it was still lying open before me; I must have picked it up during my muddled visit to Malinin’s place. And off the page a face looked up at me—a face almost nondescript, yet horrifying in its familiarity… I blinked, pressed my hands to my temples, turned the page over and back, hoping I was mistaken, hoping to God I was mistaken—and still it was there, impossible, absolutely impossible, and yet so real.

The painting was by Salvador Dali, dated 1936, titled The Pharmacist of Ampurdan in Search of Absolutely Nothing. Across the gleaming reproduction trod a small, pudgy man in a faded brown suit, with reddish-blond hair and a sharp little beard. Incredibly, there he was again, on the opposite page, carefully lifting the soft corner of a molten piano—and two pages later, peering from behind a monstrously decaying body in Dali’s Premonition of Civil War, wearing the same brown suit, his face bearing the same mild expression suitable for a provincial apothecary.

But the man in the Dali paintings was not a provincial apothecary.

The man in the paintings was my pseudo-cousin, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dalevich.

TWENTY-ONE

At first, the world was filled with an inebriated buzz. Then, slowly, out of darkness, out of chaos, islands of thought began to rise, small at first, then more and more far-reaching, forming chains, archipela goes, merging into continents, until the fog lifted fully, and he was standing on solid ground. Of course, he had always known Dalevich for a malicious presence—but only now did he realize how much of the puzzle had been hidden from him before, and how different the completed picture was; and he felt the frightened exhilaration of a man who, after an eternity of blind groping along the narrow walls of a familiar prison, eventually stumbles upon a light switch, flips it warily, and finds himself not among the stale smells and predictable dangers of his narrow cell but in some barren landscape, caught in a blue snowdrift under a black sky, watching strange shadows weave an eerie dance in the cold, starry distance.

He had spent twenty-some years maligning, kicking, slapping, insulting, and ultimately crucifying art in general, his former god, and surrealism in particular, his former idol; now, he saw, art was simply having its revenge. With the calm, omnipotent patience of a spurned ancient divinity, some invisible force of the universe— call it God, or fate, or justice—had allowed him to rise as high as he ever would, so it might bring him down all the more harshly. And it was, of course, during that magnificently full evening of Malinin’s celebration at the Manege, at the very moment when the Minister of Culture had approached him with an invitation to a private party, that the unerring and unstoppable mechanism of punishment had been triggered. Yes, he thought, as he stared with unseeing eyes at the Dali painting before him, at that moment the cup of his success had finally run over and the walls of his long-lasting defenses had begun to shudder under the swelling pressure of unbidden synergies pushing him toward his past—another opening at the Manege, another painting of Nina, another encounter with Lev Belkin in the shadow of those neoclassical columns…. And then, after a theatrically sustained pause of two days, an unprepossessing phantom called Fyodor Mikhailovich Dalevich had stood on his doorstep, profusely apologetic for disturbing his supper.

Fate’s modest delivery man, art’s neatly efficient avenger, summoned by the hostile god from a surrealist painting, clothed in middle-aged flesh, furnished with a suitcase, a hat (painted by Magritte), a canary (courtesy of Ernst), the meek manner of a provincial relative, a wealth of provocative artistic ideas, and a transparent last name (and, indeed, it occurred to Sukhanov, the first name and patronymic of Dostoyevsky, author of The Double, the story of a man whose life was taken over by his own ghost), Dali’s Dalevich had clearly been dispatched into Sukhanov’s well-ordered existence to wreak whatever havoc he could in the present while simultaneously orchestrating a disturbing slide into the past—a double task at which he had excelled. There was the earliest memory of Sukhanov’s father, released by his mother’s comment about Malvina, the surrealist bird Dalevich had presented to her; and the childhood supper culminating in the arrival of his father, which at the last instant had given way to Dalevich’s arrival; and the sight of Dalevich hunched over in an armchair at night, which had brought to the surface the Morozov boys, Professor Gradsky, and his first discovery of art; and the stroll with Dalevich, which had led him to the evacuation years and his art lessons with Oleg Romanov…

Nadezhda Sergeevna delicately coughed into her palm.

“I think you should go home and take a nap,” she said. “A nap will be good for you. I happen to be expecting someone over for tea anyway. Of course, I’m very glad you dropped by—”

“That’s all right,” Sukhanov said, rising. “I only wanted to say hello, I was passing—”

The bell rang in the hallway.

“Oh,” she said, and glanced at him anxiously. “Oh, that must be my guest.”

“Don’t worry, I’m leaving already,” he said. The bell rang again. She seemed about to wring her hands. “Well, aren’t you going to let them in?” He attempted to smile. “Go on, I’ll stay a moment.”

When her shuffling steps had retreated into the dimness, he walked to the window and wrestled with the windowpane, still bound with last winter’s insulating tape. Finally throwing it open, he breathed in the air of the August evening, as deeply aromatic as the evenings of his childhood, redolent of linden trees, meat pies, and tiptoeing coolness. Then, hearing hushed voices in the hallway behind his back, he lifted the birdcage in his arms —it was heavier than he had expected—and after sliding the bar on its door, held it out the window and shook it. The canary tumbled out and sank onto the windowsill, staring at him with a puzzled black eye. “Off, off you go, you evil minion!” Sukhanov whispered, slamming the window shut, then hurriedly placed the empty cage back in its corner, turned around with an absent look on his face—and was just in time to see Fyodor Mikhailovich Dalevich