obtain later in the year, just as Nina had become pregnant, a two-room Arbat apartment for his mother. After Nadezhda Sergeevna moved out, he converted the spare room into a studio—for, of course, he had never fully intended to give up painting—but at first a steady stream of lectures and magazine assignments left him unable to work, whether from exhaustion or from some deeper, darker emotion that he did not want to define, and then Vasily was born, and Nina needed space for drying his sheets and ironing his clothes, and Pyotr Alekseevich made them a gift of a crib that was charming but unwieldy, and little by little, he found his canvases and oils relegated further and further into unobtrusive shadows, until the only painting remaining in full view was a portrait of a discreetly expectant, dreamily happy Nina, presented to them by Malinin and soon placed prominently over Sukhanov’s recently acquired, gor geously carved desk.
After that, something began to happen to the fabric of time: it grew thinner and silkier and passed through his hands so lightly that he barely noticed the patterns and colors in its smooth, flowing skin. Another year passed, Nina was pregnant again, they were awaiting a move to a significantly larger apartment, Ksenya was born, Nina left her job, those in the know whispered of his impending nomination to an important position as the head of the art criticism department at a certain well-respected institute, and a number of friendly colleagues, led by the director Penkin himself, started to drop by now and then with bottles of cognac, ostensibly to gossip and to coo over his children. He decided that it would be wiser to move his underground art out of the way for the time being, at least until the promised position materialized, and one evening crammed all his paintings into his new Zhiguli, drove over to his mother’s (she had more room than she needed, anyway), and calming her fears with assurances that it was only temporary, rapidly, as if their touch burned his fingers, piled the canvases, with their manifold scents of fairy tales and nightmares, into a hallway closet. After closing the door, he stood still for a long minute, perhaps willing himself to memorize the weighty coolness of the door handle in his palm as a promise to return someday soon; then turned, and walked away. But as he walked away, he already knew in some concealed, murky layer of his soul that he would never be back to claim his dark treasure—and knowing this, tried not to listen to the chorus of disembodied voices whispering, pleading at his back, tried to ignore the strange, chilling certainty that for him the flow of time had suddenly ceased, that at this very instant his life was over, irrevocably, forever—
And of course, the feeling was ridiculous, and of course, time did not stop, and his life continued, and over the years there were plenty of changes, all for the better—the new apartment, the new position, the children growing up, the acclaimed books, the purchase of the dacha, the eventual staggering promotion to the helm of Art
He threw the door open.
A strong smell of mothballs escaped into the corridor. Two old coats hung on metal hangers in one corner, and in another, a monstrous vacuum cleaner, its dust bag deflated, leaned against the wall. There was a shelf he did not remember; a woolen mitten dangled off it into space. He looked at the mitten for a while, as if trying to fathom its purpose, then slowly closed the door, and returned to the kitchen. His mother had stopped talking, and was staring at him with unblinking eyes.
“How about some tea?” a funny-looking bearded man offered brightly. “I’ll get another cup, don’t stand up, Aunt Nadya.”
Sukhanov knew the man well; he was a relative of some sort, a childhood playmate perhaps; it seemed that they had recently quarreled. It did not matter any longer.
“Mother,” he said, his voice quiet and oddly strained. “Mother, where are they?”
A cup rang out against a saucer as the relative clumsily dropped them onto the table.
“Mama, please, this is important,” he said, brushing away a brief sensation of repeating his own, seemingly recent words. “Where are my paintings?”
Her mouth was working convulsively
“Well, they are not here, are they?” she said with shrillness.
“Did you move them somewhere? Why didn’t you tell me? I thought—”
“I know what you thought! You thought, how convenient, turning your mother’s place into a storage dump! Did it ever occur to you that I might not like it, that I have needs too, that I’m not just someone to order around?”
“Mama, what are you talking about? No one ordered you around. I just—”
“No, it never occurred to him!” She was shouting now. “And just look at him, barging in here after all this time, going through my closets without permission, expecting everything to be just the way he left it twenty years ago, as if I don’t live here, as if I’m nothing to be concerned with, as if I don’t have the right to do what I please in my own home—”
Perhaps she saw something strange in his face, or else she ran out of breath; all at once she fell silent. The relative, a fixed smile on his lips, finished cutting the cake into uneven slices, set the knife down, picked up his hat, and cautiously crept out into the corridor and tiptoed away; somewhere in the apartment a door opened and closed. Sukhanov stood without moving. The sun had already vanished over the rooftops, but the air was still luminous, and in its warm crimson glow the small kitchen, with its table ready for tea, its old porcelain clock on the wall, the richness of the creamy bird‘s-milk dessert crumbling on the plates, the leaves rustling against the windows, seemed wonderfully cozy and intimate and at the same time eternal, like some masterly painting of family togetherness, some vision of an ideal life….
“So you threw my paintings away,” said Anatoly Pavlovich in a flat voice, and lowering himself onto the chair, covered his face with his hands—and cried.
And for a while the world was so silent that it felt as if a deep hush, a hush of finality, of lost chances, of all the things that had gone wrong and could never be changed, enveloped it, never to lift again. Yet after some time—whether a fragment of an hour or another lonely stretch of a century—uncertainly, out of the soundless void, timid noises began to emerge: the whispering of trees, the barking of far-off dogs, the chirping of a canary on a windowsill, the trembling voice of an old woman talking, sighing, imploring someone named Tolenka to please understand, to please forgive, she had never thought he would need them again and she had been so afraid to live with all those monstrosities, but even so, she would never have done it had she not believed that it was the best thing for him, getting rid of it all, yes, she had always feared his pictures would lead to no good, and was it not her duty as a mother to keep him safe, to help him make the best of his life, to steer him away from his father’s fate —
He lifted his head, remembering his mother’s presence for the first time. Her eyes were moist; her hand hovered over his, ready to descend at any instant.
“My father’s fate?” he repeated blankly. “Was that why? You destroyed all my work because you were afraid I’d end up
And as he spoke, he already felt the disbelief, the emptiness, the grief inside him turning into anger—anger of a heart-searing, soul-wrenching kind he had never known before, anger at this pathetic little woman with a frightened face who had once given him life.
“You don’t know what I went through with your father, Tolenka,” she whispered.
“What does it matter what you went through? Times have changed. You don’t honestly think they throw people in jail for paintings these days?”
She pulled her hand away. “You mustn’t talk to me like that,” she said. “You’ve never heard the whole story, you can‘t—”
He felt as if he did not know who she was.
“What story?” he said, standing up, furiously pushing his chair away. “You and my father had the misfortune of living through a very dark period. He was arrested, they broke him, he committed suicide. Tragic things like that happened all the time in the thirties—not in the sixties or the seventies! And it certainly didn’t give you the right to throw away—”
“It wasn’t about that, Tolya!” she cried. “Your father wasn’t arrested, I just—”
She stopped abruptly, searched the table with frantic eyes, lifted a cup of cold tea to her lips. The cup rattled loudly when she put it down, breaking the silence.
He stared at her.
