about my becoming the next Chagall or Kandinsky, but she said I didn’t push myself hard enough, she wanted me to be more daring, she would marry me only if I showed her what I was capable of…. She could be very cruel at times—she knew how to make me feel so small. Of course, she only hoped to inspire me, but… Well, she was young then. Finally, at the end of 1956 I think it was, shortly after you’d met her, we quarreled horribly for the last time, and that was that. I saw her again only when all of us went boating the next summer, and you were with her then.”
They were silent for a while. Suddenly Belkin clasped his hand to his forehead.
“Of course,” he exclaimed, “that’s where they are!” Throwing open a desk drawer, he rifled through its depths and extracted a plastic container with a few stale honey cakes inside. “Might as well add some more water to our tea while I’m at it.”
“Please,” said Sukhanov, no longer listening. He was remembering the day in March of 1957 when Nina had stopped by his studio, and for the first time he saw it all. She had not been interested in him or his works—she was there to seek a reconciliation with Lev, for she and Lev were not speaking, and she was too proud, and he was Lev’s best friend; and the only reason she agreed to come to his place was that he had suggested he would invite Lev along, and the only reason she went was that she felt offended at Lev’s refusal—the refusal he had invented. And later, in the crammed shabbiness of his room, as she looked at his secret paintings, at the dark fantasies he had woven for her, already for her, only for her, she said, “I understand, he really isn’t a very good painter,” and she cried—and the angry tears she shed and the broken words she spoke were not meant for her father, just as their first kiss, that wonderful, leafy, sunny kiss on the lake, was not meant for him. No, they were all meant for the man she loved and the artist who failed her, the ever-present, invisible shadow dogging their steps through all their museum walks, all their conversations, all their memories being created—the same man who now, thirty years later, was nervously brewing him a cup of dreadful tea over a rusty sink. And slowly, as more recollections claimed him, all the accidentally intercepted glances and bitten lips and bright, insincere intonations slid into place, all the uncertainties were made certain, all the blank spots colored—and by the time Belkin turned to him with a new glass of colorless tea, he finally knew the truth, and his whole young past with Nina, with its sleepless rambles through the city, its flights of happiness, its ecstatic dreams, shifted, changed in tint, became dimmer, sadder, more transparent, and at the same time more real.
“That painting of yours,” he said quietly. “It was about us, was it not? Nina was Leda, you were the shepherd boy, her youthful, earthly love—and I was the swan, the winged divinity come to take her away with the force of my art. Except that she loved my art, but she never loved me, did she? She loved you. And to think that I quit painting for her, to make her happy…”
He thought now of the evening when he had told Nina of his decision, and of her spending the whole night kneeling in her thick white gown, like some medieval saint in fervent prayer, before the stacks of canvases in their room, looking at this or that one in the jaundiced light of the lamp, and crying, and begging him not to do it, promising that she would be stronger, that she would never complain, repeating over and over that he had no right to walk away from his destiny, that he had so much fire, so much power in him…
“Tolya, what nonsense is this?” Belkin exclaimed. “Of course she loved your art, and she was very upset about your decision to quit, but—”
“You spoke to her about it? She never mentioned it.”
The spoon clanged in Belkin’s glass.
“She came by my place the day your article was published. She had the magazine with her. She… she was crying, she needed someone to talk to….”
The unnatural quiet reigned in Sukhanov’s heart. They all, in the end, had their own betrayals to live with.
“Perhaps,” he said, standing up, “there has been enough reminiscing for one night. I should go now. Thanks for the tea.”
“Wait,” Belkin said, his eyes ravaged by guilt. “What I’m trying to tell you is that Nina made a choice. She chose
Briefly he thought of telling Belkin that Nina had left him, then changed his mind.
“You know,” he said, stopping in the low doorway, “what I said just now, about quitting for Nina… Of course, I believed it at the time, and it was a big part of it, I’m sure, but… I’ve realized a few things over the last week or two, and I think you were right all along, Leva—ultimately, I was afraid. Not so much of prisons or poverty or even unhappiness, though I thought about all that—we all did…. But mostly, I was afraid of failure. I was so terrified that my reality would not measure up to my dreams, that I would never quite fulfill my promise, that years later I would end up—”
“Like me,” said Belkin. He was looking past Sukhanov now, at the landscapes hanging on the walls of the next room. “Ironic, isn’t it? I guess one discovers many ironies in one’s middle age. Because if any of us had real talent, it was you, Tolya, always you—more than a talent, a gift, perhaps even genius…”
A small, clear voice spoke dispassionately from a darkened corner of Sukhanov’s mind: “Geniuses don’t sell out.” Suddenly protective of his hard-won serenity, he ordered the voice silent.
“Geniuses don’t quit,” he said aloud.
“Geniuses are human. Humans quit,” said Belkin. “Andrei Rublev stopped painting for decades.”
“Andrei Rublev seems to be everyone’s favorite proof of some pet theory these days. He makes a good candidate, since he probably never existed.”
“Oh, I don’t mean the historical Rublev. I’m talking about Tarkovsky’s Rublev. Brilliance, sheer brilliance, from the very first scene. Imagine, a fifteenth-century inventor who dreams of flying leaps off a church steeple on clumsy artificial wings and smashes to his death, yet somehow one feels his triumph, if only for a second! My God, if ever there was a sure sign that times are changing, this film being allowed in our theaters is it. Haven’t you seen it?”
Something caught in Sukhanov’s throat. He shook his head mutely.
“But you must!” Belkin cried. “Everyone must! I saw it last week, and I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s one genius envisioned by another. Here is Rublev, radiant as a god, capable of turning white walls into pastures of paradise at the lightest touch of his brush, yet refusing his calling because the world around him is mean and cruel and ignorant, because people kill each other, because the rulers are unworthy, because there seems to be no place for beauty under the sun. And so for years he wanders the dark, demented Russia—the greatest artist our soil has ever formed, alone, silent, unrecognized—until one day, bent with age, he meets a boy, a mere boy, who is struggling to create the most glorious church bell in the land. And something changes in Rublev, and after all that time, he goes to Moscow to paint our Kremlin…. And here is the fascinating thing, Tolya. The black-and-white film ends with this incredible flowering of color—Rublev’s actual frescoes and icons, the culmination of his lifelong search—the most important three minutes, really, in the whole three hours. But since the story appeared to be over, the crowds were leaving the theater in a trudging herd, never even casting a glance at the screen. And so I sat alone in the theater, and the lights began to come on while pale angels and saints were still passing before me, and I thought, yes, you were right that day, our world really is dark and ignorant, just as it was in Rublev’s time—but you were also wrong, because in spite of all the injustices, and horrors, and stupidity, beauty always survives, and there will never be a higher mission than making the world richer and purer by adding more beauty to it, by making one single person cry like a child at the age of fifty-three….”
He stopped, out of breath, his eyes glistening. And at that precise moment, as his former best friend fell silent, everything was finally revealed to Sukhanov, and his whole life’s plan lay before him, wondrous and clear. Dazed, he stepped across the threshold and into the void. There were no landscapes with lilacs and skaters on the walls now. Other paintings hung in the dazzling space—paintings unearthly in their sublimity and terrible in their wisdom, each an amalgamation of biblical truths and the essence of Russia’s soul, each a triumphant revelation in color and emotion.
Slowly Anatoly Sukhanov turned around, incredulously, gratefully soaking in the new universe unfolded before him. He saw the glorious greens of the Garden of Eden presided over by Adam, naked save for a pair of eyeglasses, absently eating a not yet ripened apple and covering himself with a thick, dusty book, while Eve, light and translucent as a breeze, danced an unconcerned, nimble-footed, solitary dance in the depths of a virginal forest, butterflies in her emerald hair. He saw the Oriental lushness of a palace, with honeyed wines flowing, and yellow roses blooming, and silk- and velvet-skinned guests lolling about on sun-drenched carpets, and Salome, still as a marble statue, her hands folded virtuously, her eyes downcast, listening with the slightest hint of a coy smile
