Olga Grushin - The Dream Life of Sukhanov

And then he felt tired, so very tired, of every past and present burden of guilt that all he wanted to do was collect his many failures—failure as a critic, as a father, and a few others besides—yes, collect them all and bring them to Nina, and dropping them at her feet, beg her for forgiveness, beg her for absolution…. He wanted, he needed her near him, as never before. His hands unsteady, his fingers repeatedly missing the digits, he dialed their dacha number, heard a hateful busy signal, waited a few minutes, and dialed again. This time he listened, with bated breath, to the faint sounds of distant ringing. There was no answer.

Sighing, he rose and slowly walked through the still rooms, everywhere seeking and finding cherished echoes of her presence: foreign fashion magazines discarded on ottomans and sofas, a lonely slipper poking its pink silky nose from underneath a chair, a face mask resting by the bathtub, her features still lightly imprinted on it…. But as he followed Nina’s recent trail around the apartment, he felt surprisingly little comfort, and in a while found himself moving faster and breathing heavier in his chase of her shadow—for unexpectedly he had begun to perceive signs of an uncharacteristic absentminded-ness, perhaps even secret restlessness, behind all her abandoned, forgotten things. He stumbled on a pair of ruby earrings tossed onto a bookshelf, a peach pit left to dry on a windowsill—inexplicable, disconcerting lapses; and as his attention sharpened, little details from the past, a whole multitude of oddly demanding trivial details, buzzed in his memory like a swarm of disturbed bees. He thought of the vague expression on her face as she had sat looking out the window, her chin running with fruit juice: when their eyes had met, he had felt he could almost see a mermaid’s glistening body dive with the startled wave of a tail into the green waters of her far-off gaze. He recalled her listless movements at recent meals, and her frequent migraines, and that Sunday she had spent in bed, yet wearing a profusion of bracelets as if for an outing—the very same Sunday, he realized with a jolt, when Ksenya’s boyfriend must have walked into the bedroom unseen by anyone and taken all his ties…. A chill crept stealthily up his spine. Had she been napping perhaps and not woken up at the sound of closet doors shutting and clothes being ripped.off the hooks—she, the lightest sleeper he knew?

Ceasing to roam, he stood very still, seized with a sudden terror of losing her too. The feeling was, of course, irrational, for did not their twenty-eight years of marriage offer him reassurance enough? So she had not been home that Sunday afternoon—could she not have stepped out to buy dessert for her tea or to chat with their neighbors? Yet with so many losses wreaking devastation in his heart, he felt compelled to tread carefully now, lest he offend some envious divinity even further with undue presumptuousness and ungrateful complacency. No, never again would he dare to accept any certainty with that bovine sense of simply receiving his due….

And in truth, spoke a tiny insidious voice inside him, just how certain a certainty was it, really? How confident of their closeness was he—how well did he know the inner workings of one Nina Sukhanova? She had never been easy to understand, and he had long since learned to allow her small pockets of privacy by not dwelling on her manifold silences and not pursuing to its hidden origin her every expression or gesture or even absence, habitually interpreting these mysterious lacunae as evidence of her unique brand of feminine mystique. Now, for the first time, he felt unsure. He saw that little by little, as these omissions had multiplied between them, the very essence of Nina’s life had somehow become obscured, until he could guess at neither the timbre of her thoughts nor a roster of her activities. Oh, naturally, he knew all about her museum visits with his fake relatives and her theater outings with her fashionable girlfriends; yet between these major blocks of time, each day still contained numerous cracks, small enough to pass unnoticed but wide enough for… for…

And again he froze, his thoughts running aground on another disturbing half-memory he had so casually misfiled in the cabinets of his past. On the evening when Nina had gone to see the play at the Malyi, she had told him, her lips gleaming with that unfamiliar shade of lipstick, that their chauffeur had wanted the night off—yet Vadim had acted almost affronted when Sukhanov had mentioned it later. He paced along the corridor, willing himself not to panic. And he had nearly succeeded in burying the incident in a communal grave with the safely vague epitaph “Misunderstanding,” when yet another unbidden recollection rose, and not for the first time, to the foreground of his mind, and he finally perceived the main reason for his feeling of unease—a feeling that had been there all along. The memory of the mangled theater bill from the Malyi’s last season, which the August wind had deposited so deftly at his feet, presented him now with a clear mental snapshot of a soggy May date printed at the top—and in doing so, triggered his belated realization of a plain fact of life in Moscow. All city theaters closed their doors for the summer, reopening again only in the early days of September.

No, most theaters, he corrected himself in desperation—most, but not all—and it was altogether possible that the Malyi had begun its season earlier this year. What had she said she’d gone to see that Wednesday? Three Sisters, had it been, or Uncle Vanya? He did not remember. Then, before he could stop himself, it occurred to him that a Sunday newspaper would carry the list of weekly performances—and that his answer therefore lay close, only eight floors below, in the mailbox of apartment fifteen….

Disgusted with his doubts, he forced himself to turn his thoughts away, to find some occupation for his restlessness. Again he walked through the rooms, picking up random novels and dropping them after reading a page or two, snacking on frozen carrots from a solitary package he discovered in the fridge, leafing through a family address book in search of he knew not whose number. Chancing upon the letter V, he was surprised to see, among a multitude of Var lamovs and Vostrikovs, most of them his work contacts (now former), a single line in Nina’s delicate handwriting. “Viktor,” it said next to the number. No last name, no way of knowing when the entry had been made… Thoughtfully he looked at it, then stood, and moving as if in a dream, picked up his keys and went out to the elevator.

Perhaps his hands shook too much, or maybe there was some unknown trick to opening the mailbox—Valya had always brought up their mail; he himself had not bothered with it in years. Whatever the cause, the key became promptly stuck in the lock, and as he tugged at it in frustration, he felt it beginning to bend. Swearing soundlessly, he looked up, and found the ancient concierge watching him with malevolent curiosity from his perch behind the desk.

“A problem, Anatoly Pavlovich?” the old man inquired, his lips rustling dryly against toothless gums.

“The key is stuck,” Sukhanov replied, and shrugged with studied indifference. “No matter, I’ll come back later. I just wanted to scan the newspaper.”

“No point in reading newspapers nowadays,” said the concierge, getting up with a great show of difficulty. “I remember the time when every day you’d wake up to read about a new hero of socialist labor or an overperforming collective farm. A man’s heart was always full of joy and pride in his country.” He shuffled across the hall at a funeral pace. “But the distasteful things they print today…” He made as if to spit, then thought better of it, and simply waved his hand. “Listen to an old man, Anatoly Pavlovich, don’t read the garbage.”