“I don’t believe it,” he said slowly. “I always thought you produced that tale for the sake of a ten-year-old boy, but you’ve actually managed to convince yourself, haven’t you? Hospitalized for years, is that right? With the flu! My God, and to think I never realized how the thirties warped your mind! Just what kind of a world do you live in, Mother, what kind of a sick, delusional—”
She sat averting her eyes, her hands clasped tightly together.
“Not the flu,” she said, and her voice was different now, low and brittle. Taken aback by the change of her tone, he swallowed the harsh words on his tongue and leaned to look closer into her face. The early twilight had laid deep shadows along her cheeks and in the corners of her mouth, stamping her features with the unfamiliar, stark, sorrowful look of some fifteenth-century saint. Suddenly uneasy, he reached for the lamp switch.
“Please, no light,” she said in the same unrecognizable voice. “It’s… easier this way. Sit down, Tolya. I didn’t mean to tell you, I always felt it was my burden alone, it just slipped out…. But I guess it’s time you knew.”
“Knew what?” he asked, his throat dry. He remained standing.
“Your father never was in prison. It’s true. He was… ill, very ill. It happened in Gorky, they had to put him in a hospital.” She swallowed audibly. “A mental hospital. His doctor telephoned me, told me the name of his condition and everything—”
“But Mama,” he exclaimed in desperation, “don’t you see, they did these things all the time—took people away and lied to their families! The man who called you, I’m sure he wasn’t a doctor, he must have been a —”
“Tolya,” she said evenly, “don’t you think I considered that? But it was true. I knew it was true. I myself had noticed that he was becoming… well, different. Already in Moscow, he was beginning to say strange things, but I thought he was just being fanciful, joking with me, nothing more. Then, after he moved to Gorky, he became preoccupied with this crazy idea he had, only he didn’t think it was crazy—it was his ‘great discovery,’ it was going to change the world…. He grew so earnest about it, working on it every night, hardly sleeping. It frightened me. He became secretive, too—always worrying that his colleagues would find out and take away his ‘project,’ as he called it.” She was mincing the cake on her plate into chocolate dust with quick, nervous stabs of a spoon, not looking up. “The doctor told me it was common for… for people with his illness to become obsessed with some idea in this way, and that they would work with him, it was a good hospital, he only needed to receive some shock great enough to snap him out of it, and many other things, I forgot a lot of it, I was too upset….”
A draft of silence passed between them.
“So how long was he—” he said thickly.
“Almost three years. October 1939 to May 1942. That was when they released him to work at a military factory. They thought that the war had helped him—that when he heard the country needed him he abandoned all his fantasies at last. I thought so too, until he sent me that last letter. He wrote that he had finally finished his great project but asked me to say nothing about it yet, it was all going to be such a wonderful surprise…. I cried all day, and it was hard, I had to hide it from you because you were so happy—we were to see him in just a few weeks. I remember I so much wanted to believe everything would be well….”
The shadows lengthened along the kitchen floor, and the tangerine-colored moon, still round but already on the wane, sleepily sailed from behind a roof into the pale sky.
“His project,” he said quietly. “What was it, do you know?”
“When they took him away, they found dozens of notebooks in his office, covered front to back with squiggles, drawings of birds, crazy numbers—they could make no sense of them at all. But I always knew what he was trying to do. It started in Moscow, in the early thirties. There was a museum show once, winged suits for people or something, I don’t recall exactly. Your father took you to it, I think, but of course you were too young to remember. Well, something at that show must have impressed him, because that was when he first began to talk about it—whether it was possible for a man to fly without a plane or a parachute or anything—to fly as birds fly. The finest human accomplishment it would be, the perfect exercise of sheer will, he used to say, greater than anything art or science had ever invented, and other eloquent things—I’m not an educated woman, I didn’t understand much, I just laughed, except that he was serious all along….” She looked up, and her eyes were intent, desperate, searching for some sign in her son’s face. “After… after he died, Tolenka, my greatest fear was that… that you also… because the doctor warned me it could happen again, these kinds of illnesses can be passed on… But everything was going so well for a while—and then you started to paint these dark, strange pictures of yours —and I don’t know, it was as if something happened to me, as if every time I looked at them, I was staring at your father’s death, and I grew so afraid, I wanted to make you stop, to make you forget, to make it all disappear, and that was why… They were heavy too, I had to carry them down the stairs, and I was so scared the neighbors might see me…. But please, Tolenka, you were right to give it up, you have a perfect life now, you make us all proud, all these books you write—”
And still she talked, but her words faded, faded, faded… And as he stood in the darkened kitchen, he saw once again a whirlwind of rainbow-tinted pigeons soaring into the sky over the gray monument of a mournful genius, and a three-year-old boy saying eagerly, “When I grow up, I want to fly without machines,” and a decade later, his father framed by a bright, rain-sleeked window, raising his hand in a greeting, then spreading his arms, smiling a joyful smile, a smile of shared triumph—and stepping into the void….
For so many years he had thought the moment of his maturity had been rooted in suicide and defeat—yet all along it had been nothing but dreams, and hopes, and one proud man who had been mad enough, or brave enough, to believe he could fly, and who had wanted to give this gift to the people he loved, his wife, his son…. And what had he, Anatoly Sukhanov, done with this gift? How had he understood his father’s parting words, “Don’t let anyone clip your wings”—he, a man who had obligingly shed his own wings and then spent decades listlessly watching ugly, atavistic stubs sprout in their stead?
Wordlessly Sukhanov bent to kiss his mother on a wet cheek, then turned, and leaving his drawings scattered about the table, walked out of the kitchen, out of the apartment, down the staircase. She did not try to stop him. The landings were unlit, the steps slippery; a sluggish headache hummed in his temples. Outside the front door, a peculiar-looking man with a canary-yellow beard grasped his sleeve and began to talk rapidly, swearing his undying devotion, inviting him to visit some museum in Vologda…. Just then a window swung open above, and an agitated voice shouted, “My Malvina! She escaped! My Malvina escaped!” The peculiar-looking man exclaimed, “Oh my goodness!” and threw his hands up, peering toward the commotion through his turn-of-the- century glasses.
Free of his grasp, Sukhanov quickly strode down the street.
TWNTY-TWO
As the city contours grew softer and hazy streetlamps began to pop out of the shadows one after another, he wandered the streets of the old Arbat, his mind churning darkly in some lonely, wordless space. His steps were aimless, directed only by a restless urge to move; but after a while, when an unexpected shortcut deposited him at the fetid mouth of an eerily familiar courtyard, he stopped, looked about, and became suddenly aware of the path his feet had followed of their own accord. Somehow, unthinkingly, he had walked along the broad, pastel-colored streets and the tree-shaded alleys where he had played as a happy five-year-old, six-year-old, seven-year-old-and the unfolding of time had led him to the spot that had marked the end of his first childhood dream.
Obeying some dimly understood impulse, he stepped through the murky, low passage into the yard. A rock-and-roll beat pulsated from one of the apartments, but at its heart the yard was still and dark, its edges lit unsteadily by the pale squares of burning windows, just as it had been almost fifty years before, when a frightened boy had slid an album of Botticelli reproductions into a snowdrift. In the corner where the snowdrift had been there was now a brand-new sandbox; but as he approached, it seemed to him that the sand gleamed with a pearly, roseate, unearthly tint in the faint light…. He stared for a breathless moment, then saw it was only the cast-off shadow of a garishly pink lampshade visible in the nearest window. Some child had forgotten a toy spade in the sand. His past was no longer here.
Leaving the courtyard, he walked unresisting down a deserted side street, keeping his eyes to the ground until he was almost at the end, then looking up sharply, his heart flushed with a new, trembling, imprecise feeling.
