“Do come in,” Belkin repeated. “Watch your head, the ceiling is a bit low.”
Sukhanov gingerly squeezed inside the gallery’s tiny foyer. The air smelled of glue, dust, and transience; posters advertising past exhibitions were stacked on the floor in one corner.
“Not too impressive, I’m afraid,” said Belkin jovially, “but it’s a beginning. This way.”
They passed into an adjacent room. There were canvases hanging here, most of them smallish urban landscapes done in a bright impressionist manner: a view of a slanting street with green balcony railings and a blossoming lilac bush; a single yellow leaf on a glinting bench and, in the background, passersby with purple and red umbrellas; an evening skater flying over the blue sheen of an icy pond, surrounded by merry orange windows lit in nearby buildings. Sukhanov slowly circled the walls, read a few labels:
Autumn on Gogolevsky Boulevard, Pionerskie (Patriarshie) Ponds, Winter Roofs of the Zamoskvorechie
...
A voice behind him spoke with a nervous chuckle: “My abstract phase didn’t last, as you see, though I’m still experimenting with styles”—and Sukhanov suddenly became aware of an urgent need to say something, anything at all, about the paintings before him.
“Very lyrical,” he offered hastily, “the skater especially. This night scene too—the Moscow River, isn’t it? Really, congratulations, Leva, this is great. Sorry Nina and I couldn’t make it to the opening, we wanted to, but you know how it is....”
“Of course, of course, don’t mention it,” said Belkin, looking uncomfortable. “Well, this is all there is. Very modest, as you see... A cup of tea, then?”
“A cup of tea would be good,” Sukhanov said.
The narrow, windowless space in the back—hardly more than a closet—was crowded with a desk and two chairs, their surfaces littered with crumbs of long since digested meals, tattered remnants of aged newspapers, and a nondescript overflow of paintings and sculptures from previous shows, a few price tags still dangling from pedestals and frames. While Belkin busied himself with rinsing and filling two yellowed glasses at a sink in the corner and sliding heating coils into the cloudy water, Sukhanov cleared one chair of its accumulations, sat down, and surveyed the mournful debris of bypassed art—a portrait of a man in a sailor suit with a grinning cat perched on his shoulder, a still life with a matchbox and a half-eaten herring, a number of multicolored cubes resembling children’s toy blocks gathered in a flock on the desk... The sight of the cubes stirred some hazy recollection in his mind, and mechanically he picked one up, turned it over in his hand.
The cube was upholstered in black and purple, and the label on its side read: “A soul. Don’t open or it will fly away.”
And then, unexpectedly, there it was, descending on him—the whistle of a remote train, the creaking of logs in the fireplace, the motes of reflected light dancing in a glass of red wine, and Nina’s quiet voice speaking into the shadows.
I can’t stop thinking about what might have been hidden inside. Would there be another dark cube that said, “Too late, it’s gone, told you not to open it”? Or was there instead a bright red or blue cube, or one wrapped in golden foil, perhaps, that said, “The daring are rewarded. Take your soul, go out into the world, and do great deeds”? ...
For a minute Sukhanov stared at the small, light object on his palm, fighting the desire to crush it. Then, setting the cube down, he slowly moved his eyes around the room until they rested heavily on Belkin.
Belkin must have felt the gaze.
“Patience, only a moment longer,” he said cheerfully, glancing up. “I can’t find the cakes, but the water’s already—”
Noticing the expression on Sukhanov’s face, he stopped uncertainly.
“Nina...” Sukhanov said in a halting voice. “Nina was here, wasn’t she?”
Belkin hesitated briefly, then nodded.
“She was. She came to the opening last Wednesday.”
“I never told her about your opening, Leva,” said Sukhanov stonily.
Belkin placed the glasses of pale tea on the desk, dropped a sugar cube into each, pushed one glass toward Sukhanov, and pulled up a chair.
“I know,” he said. “But you did tell her you ran into me, and she called me the next day—got my new phone number through Viktor Yastrebov. As it turns out, both of us have been visiting him from time to time, bringing him food and such, now that he is old and sick and all alone.... Anyway, we met that same Sunday for a stroll, and I mentioned the exhibition. She said she wanted to come, but she thought you’d be upset if you knew. Look, Tolya, I’m really sorry I didn’t say anything earlier, it’s just that I wasn’t sure...”
His words trailed off. Staring into space, Sukhanov took a sip of his tea. And then, as the hot, sweet, tasteless liquid slid down his throat, he felt a new kind of calm descending on him—a calm not of detachment but rather of understanding, as if in the last few hours some invisible yet great change had been secretly wrought in the very fabric of his being and he could contemplate his life without bitterness. Perhaps it was a calm born of emptiness and despair; it hardly mattered now, he supposed. For a while he sat without moving or speaking, marveling at the swelling of the tranquil wave inside him. Then, looking up, he saw Belkin watching him tensely across the close dimness of the room.
“Leva, it’s all right,” he said. “Really, it is. Though I suppose I would have been angry a few days ago.” He smiled without mirth. “She said she was home with a migraine all day Sunday, and on your opening night she told me she was going to a play with a girlfriend. She never mentioned Viktor either.... But I’m glad that she came to see you. I should have been here too.”
A melting sugar cube tinkled lightly against a glass. Belkin blinked, whether relieved or embarrassed, Sukhanov could not tell.
“Well, you are here now,” he said, “that’s what matters. Anyway, to tell you the truth, this whole exhibition affair isn’t working out quite as I imagined. And the strange thing is, having Nina at the opening made it... well, worse. I mean, here I am, milling about with a few of my friends who have all seen my works before, chatting about their children and vacations, nothing in particular, yet all the while basking in this pleasant glow of being somehow important—the hero of the day, you know? And suddenly the door opens, and she walks in, beautiful as always and so young-looking, in these silver earrings she used to wear in her student days, and she looks at everything so seriously, almost urgently—and after a while, I begin to see this slight hint of disappointment in her face.... Oh, of course she was very kind and polite, and we had tea and talked about art, and all seemed well. But after she left, after everyone left, I looked at my paintings through her eyes, and I saw just a handful of second-rate landscapes stuck in a basement.”
“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself,” Sukhanov said quickly. “After all, you said yourself, it’s a beginning—”
“Please, what beginning, who am I fooling?” said Belkin, waving his hand. “No, I’m just not capable of anything original. Actually, I’ve known it for a long time, Nina’s visit only made it... final somehow. Funny, the way life turns out. It seems only yesterday that the late fifties were here, and we were constantly on fire with our work, proud of our poverty, brave in our shared struggle against the old, drunk with our newfound gift of expression.... You remember, don’t you, Tolya? Our days flowed into nights, our nights were endless, and every windbag who talked about Russia, God, and art was a brother, every artist a genius, every painting a miracle—and the world did not know us yet, but we were together, we were brilliant, we were destined to light up the skies.... And then you blink, and all at once you yourself are in your fifties, still poor but no longer so sure of all those eternal truths, and alone now, because most of your old friends have crawled into their own nooks and crannies of misery and your wife has left to have children with another man. And on occasion, when you are hungover and the only thing in your kitchen is pickled cabbage, even the colors of the rainbow all begin to seem dirty and drab—and that’s when the world finally chooses to turn in your direction, and you suddenly find that after all these years, all you have to show for yourself are a few hard-earned calluses on your hands and a landscape with lilac bushes. And then all those things that seemed so earth-shattering in the past, all those experiments with religion, eroticism, surrealism, abstraction, all those exuberant departures from the commonplace, appear for what they are in the harsh light of the day-self-indulgent exercises in passing time, pathetic imitations of fashions the West tried and discarded decades ago. And you realize that all our names are fated to become only a condensed and condescending footnote to Russian history, lumped together under the heading ‘Khrushchev’s Thaw,’ and... What? Why are you looking at me like that? Wasn’t always so eloquent, was I? I guess I’ve had a lot of practice talking to myself over the years.”
“It’s not that,” Sukhanov said hesitantly. “It’s just that I didn’t expect you to sound so ... Well, it almost seems as if you are regretting your life, the choices you made.”
“Ah, that would be rather ironic, wouldn’t it? After all, I despised you so much for quitting. In the beginning especially, when I kept seeing your dreadful articles in every magazine and hearing from former colleagues about your dizzying climb up the ladder of success—and I had to survive by loading and unloading vegetable trucks. Alla always complained that my clothes stank of rotting potatoes, I remember.... Then Yastrebov took me to a doctor acquaintance of his, and for a bottle of brandy this fellow provided me with a certificate stating that I was mentally ill. After that I lived on state allowance, pretending to be mad. Of course, it was very little money, but things were finally getting better—I had all my time to myself, I could paint all I wanted—and then Alla left me. And it’s strange—I never really thought I loved her that much, but after she was gone it all somehow started to fall apart. Maybe I just grew out of my twenties, I don’t know.... Anyway, that was when I first suspected that what I had taken for talent had been only youth and energy, nothing more. I puzzled over my last conversation with you and your decision, and, well... I began to have doubts. And yes, Tolya, I still do, perhaps more than ever—so much so that at times I almost wish... I mean, look at the two of us! At least you have your family, and I... I...”
Averting their eyes from each other, they drank their weak tea.
“It would be nicer with lemon, I think,” said Belkin, lifting his glass to the light. “I used to have one somewhere, but it’s gone now.... By the way, I went to Malinin’s retrospective the other day. Saw that blue portrait of Nina. Amazing, isn’t it, that even he was capable of capturing beauty on that one occasion. She made a wonderful muse, I suppose.” He smiled, but it seemed to Sukhanov that he detected a quiver of strain in the corners of Belkin’s mouth; then Belkin leaned back, and the shadows around his lips shifted and dissipated.
Sukhanov nodded. “My first truly original work was inspired by her,” he said. “You remember the one with her reflection in the train window? The one lost in the Manège disaster?”
“Well, life plays funny jokes. Maybe it’s now gracing some bureaucrat’s office.”
“Ah, sort of like your Leda gracing mine!”
No longer smiling, Belkin carefully set down his glass. “That was the best thing I did in my life,” he said. “Perhaps the only thing. You really have it in your office?”
“I did for a while.... Well, to be honest, for a day only. Nina put it up, but ...”
“I understand,” Belkin said, and looked away.
The light moved again, and for one instant the face Sukhanov discerned through the shadows was that of a young man with dark, mournful, beautiful eyes—the face he had known twenty-five years ago. Feeling suddenly, unaccountably sad, he swirled the lukewarm liquid in his glass, its brim browned with traces of countless lonely teatimes, and thought of that painting, Lev’s gift to him and Nina on their wedding day, a mythical nocturnal landscape with water lilies on the surface of a still lake, and a gleaming swan, and a shepherd, and a young nude sitting on the shore, her back tense, her face averted, her honey-colored body strangely reminiscent of someone he knew....
“You know, Leva,” he said, “there is something I’ve always wanted to ask you. Well, no, not always—it’s really something I’ve wondered about only recently—or maybe... It doesn’t matter.” Lev’s gaze was on him now, still and black and deep, and he could feel his heart fluttering in his throat. He glanced down; his hands, resting on the edge of the desk, trembled slightly. “Were you and Nina lovers when I met her?” he asked.
Lev recoiled as if slapped.
“No, listen,” said Sukhanov softly, “I won’t be jealous or angry, I just need to know. You see, how can I explain this... For many years I thought I understood my life so well—it was all so clear, so even, so well arranged. But recently... recently things have been happening to me, and, well... Please, I just really need to know.”
There was no sound, for one moment, then another, then yet another.... When Lev spoke, his voice was hoarse. “I loved her, Tolya. You knew that, of course. I always loved her. We met when we were in the seventh grade, and I loved her then.”
“And did she... Was she in love with you?”
He turned away. “We were children,” he said. “But yes, we thought we were in love. We started seeing each other when we were eighteen, the summer after the exams, and stayed together all through our student years. It was innocent, of course—walks in the moonlight, kisses in the shadow of blossoming jasmine branches, trembling whispers, clumsy poems—you know how first love is. Then, when I was finally appointed to my teaching position, I asked her to marry me, and that was when the quarrels began. She had all these romantic notions 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.”