to a sermon read by John the Baptist’s head residing in the place of honor on a golden platter. He saw Noah’s Ark soaring into the blueness of the sky out of the blueness of the sea, its decks overflowing with strange, magnificent beasts and angels with azure wings and huge, scaly fishes gasping their last breaths with fat purple lips. He saw the blood-red fires of hell, and the sinners with blithely oblivious, ruddy faces drinking tea and playing cards and reading magazines among the flames, none of them realizing where they were. He saw an empty black cross rising into leaden skies, a pale man with pierced hands walking toward a midnight horizon, and a Madonna swathed in darkness, her face painfully white, turning away with a disappointed look in her eyes….
Many, many paintings were there, and each so rich, so overwhelming, that he felt as if he were flying away into a starry whirlwind of terror and delight, and there were no words for the wild, weightless sensation in his heart. And he knew that all the women in the paintings had Nina’s face, and that all these works he was seeing, all these visions of astonishing genius, were his, his own—brought into the world not by the man he had been once, but by the man he was now.
And as the ecstatic wave swelled inside him, he was sure he had uncovered the meaning of his life, its past and present and future. He had had talent once but had been too young to say anything of importance, for true wisdom could be distilled only in the retort of suffering. And it was only after twenty-three years of mute crawling through mud—only after he had felt the smooth taste of betrayal on his lips and the chilly weight of thirty pieces of silver in his sweaty palm, only after he had learned about the slow fattening of the soul, the anguish of wasted chances, the pain of love slipping away, the soft, horrifying slide into death—yes, it was only then that the elixir of life was granted him and his resurrection assured.
And that, he now knew with a lightheaded, effortless certainty, was the miraculous message of the past days, which he had misunderstood for so long—a message delivered to him again and again, with sublime simplicity, by a kind professor who, while himself vanishing in the dark whirlwind of history, had taught him that beauty was eternal; by an old teacher who had surfaced from some murky Russian depths to tell him that age was irrelevant, for it took a lifetime to learn one’s craft; by a cousin whose world he had overturned with his adolescent drawings; by a father who had given him the double gift of a divine madness and the courage to fly; by a mother who, discarding all his past, clumsy attempts at greatness, had so generously wiped his slate clean, preparing it for the acceptance of new revelations; by a woman who had left her only love in the name of his brushes and oils…. Again and again, the truth had grazed him with a feathery touch, but he had stopped up his ears and closed his eyes, imprisoned by fear, imagining the hand of some angered deity poised above his head, ready to exact revenge. Yet there never had been a revenge—only his strengthening genius shaking off its bounds of sleep, shedding off the incidental, the irrelevant in life—only art calling him back to the fold.
And now, in one sonorous moment, he heard the call, and saw, and understood. And as his dormant talent ripened into something else, something infinitely more precious and great, he felt the itching of budding wings under his skin.
TWENTY-THREE
An anxious voice stretched across the darkness.
“Tolya, can you hear me? Tolya? Tolya!”
He opened his eyes, though they had been open already. The perspective was all wrong: the walls with their bright little landscapes loomed over him at odd angles, and Lev Belkin crouched on the floor, sprinkling cold tea into his face.
“I’m fine,” he said, restraining a sudden urge to laugh. “I must have slipped. It’s nothing.” Slowly he pulled himself up and walked to the door; the linoleum was overgrown with gnarled roots that kept catching at his legs —or else it was Lev trying to stop him. In the doorway, he turned, put his hands on Lev’s shoulders, and looked into his face.
“Leva,” he said forcefully. “Never doubt that you did the right thing. Better to know the truth, whatever it is, than to wonder forever about what might have been.”
Lev’s face was rapidly dissolving into the superimposed angles and planes of a cubist portrait, and his lips were opening and closing like a pair of scissors. “Tolya, you’ve got to listen,” he was repeating, “you are ill. You need help, Tolya, do you understand me? Just wait here, I’ll only be a minute, just a phone call, Tolya, you’ll be fine, don’t go anywhere, it will only be a minute…”
Stumbling, Lev turned and disappeared inside a mediocre painting of a cramped room.
Smiling to himself, Sukhanov nodded and stepped across another threshold.
Still weightless, he danced down the street. Enormous August stars were falling from the skies, violin concertos were pouring from open windows, and his soul was waltzing. In a few blocks, a taxi with a blinking green light emerged out of nowhere. Inside, there drifted a faint scent of violets, and a pair of outmoded glasses and a funny sand-colored beard leapt through the shadows in the rearview mirror.
“Voskresensky Passage, please,” said Sukhanov, and obediently the car sped away through the night and the neon signs and the sounds of the city; and all he could think of were the magnificently white sheets of paper on the corner of his desk and the box of watercolors in an unfrequented drawer.
When they reached the place, he scooped the last remaining change out of his pocket, dropped it into a hand extended from the darkness, and walked inside the building, and across the lobby teeming with reflections, and toward the elevator. The elevator puzzled him briefly—the panel with its shining rows of buttons had a button for the seventh floor and another for the ninth, but none for the eighth on which he lived. Getting off at the seventh floor, he walked up a flight of stairs. It was not just the elevator, he saw then; his whole floor was missing, and the apartments jumped from number fourteen to number seventeen. He checked several times, but there was no mistake. He shrugged; it did not seem all that important in light of his new, trembling, unshakable happiness.
Taking the stairs all the way down—past the imposing leather-padded, nail-studded doors, two on each floor, every one of them hiding its own tragedy, its own madness, its own choice—he descended into the basement, traversed the unlit corridor, then stopped to knock. A sleepy girl with no eyebrows let him in and, without saying hello or asking what he wanted, wandered down a hallway that smelled of cabbage. He waited patiently, and in another minute Valya herself appeared, hurriedly wiping her hands on her apron. When she saw him, she threw her arms up, and wailed in a high, plaintive voice, “Anatoly Pavlovich, my dear, what’s happened to you? Please, please, come in, are you hungry, I can make you something to eat, and while you eat, I can wash these quickly, I—”
He took her head in his hands, and she fell silent, peering at him, shyly or fearfully perhaps, out of her slightly crossed eyes.
“You are a real Russian woman, Valentina Aleksandrovna,” he said earnestly. “Please forgive me.”
Then he drew her toward him, kissed her on the forehead, and walked away, feeling her eyes following him closely through the basement gloom all the way to the stairs. The last expression on her face had been strangely akin to pity, and he pondered it briefly, then dismissed it. Back in the lobby, he stopped by the concierge’s desk, to inform him that the eighth floor had vanished. Then he had an afterthought.
“I also need to borrow this, it belongs to my dream anyway,” he said, and leaning over the strangely still concierge, opened a drawer in the desk and pulled out the tattered, formerly checkered scarf. “It might be cold where I’m going,” he explained amiably, and wondering why he had never before noticed how much like a wooden marionette the old man looked, strolled outside, singing his favorite Tchaikovsky aria under his breath.
The taxi was still there, waiting at the curb. Sukhanov bent to the window.
“I don’t have any money,” he said, “and I need to go some distance.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll take you for free,” said the invisible driver, his yellow beard fluttering in the shadows. “I know where you want to go, I’ve been there before. Hop in.”
The car moved off again, but this time, the journey took much longer. There were streets and lights at first, then ugly clusters of apartment buildings amid the emptiness of deserted lots with weeds swaying in the breeze, then black cutouts of trees against the sky, then endless fields, then nothing. After another hour they arrived. The air was crisp, the church silhouetted clearly against the light blue of the waning night.
“Stop here,” Sukhanov said, smiling, from the backseat. “This is Bogoliubovka.”
He could tell that in the darkness ahead of him the invisible man with the canary-yellow beard was smiling
