Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

“No, those are statues. Or if they aren’t, they are the size of ants and have no faces, so they don’t count. There is a dot moving here, which looks like a girl my age wearing pajamas, but at this distance I can’t tell for sure—it may just be a smudge.”

“Well,” my father says, “perhaps all the people are inside. They are sitting around drinking wine—moderate quantities of well-diluted wine, mind you—and discussing philosophy or creating masterpieces or whatnot. This is a perfect city, after all, so they are content wherever they are, indoors or outdoors, see?”

I look again; but the evenly spaced windows are dark and dead, and the doorways gape blindly. A while back I discovered a delightful secret—some paintings possess a deeper layer of life below their still surface: if I concentrate, then glance away quickly, I can often catch things moving out of the corner of my eye, women powdering their noses above the stiff lacy collars, cherubs tickling each other, cardinals relaxing their glum faces to yawn or sneeze.

I am certain that there is no hidden life lurking here.

“There aren’t any people,” I say stubbornly. “There aren’t even any cats or dogs. And look, there are no doors anywhere, just these open passageways. People wouldn’t live in houses that have no doors.”

“Ah, but that’s where you are wrong,” he says, smiling. “If you listened to me with more attention, you would see that everyone in the ideal city is kind and honest, and there is no need for locks and chains.” He takes off his glasses, pulls out a folded square of suede always ready in his pocket, and begins to wipe the thick lenses, thoroughly, with deliberation, as he does everything, before putting the glasses back in their velveteen case. “But perhaps you are right and there are no people there,” he adds, no longer smiling. “Perhaps that is really the point. Ideals are all very fine until you start applying them to real life, you see. Just let people into your perfect city, just wait until they make themselves comfortable, and before you know it, well—”

Vivaldi has just stopped playing, and beyond the crackling of the radio void, I can suddenly hear the ticking of the clock on the desk. My father rubs the bridge of his nose in a gesture I know so well, then glances toward the window; I see an odd, stark look cross his face, a look of not quite anger, not quite grief. In the spare darkness of the early-spring night, the enormous construction site across the road is abbreviated to mere grayish hints of fences and sketchy gallows of cranes in the sky, but I know it is there all the same, as it has been throughout the ten years of my life. The rising edifice itself is only a shapeless bulk blotting out the stars. None of us has any idea what it will be when it is completed. “Temple of the People,” my father used to say when I was four or five and pestered him with endless queries.

My father pulls the curtains closed before turning back to me.

“Never mind,” he says briskly, “I’m not afraid to admit a mistake. Perhaps this was not the most fruitful subject for tonight’s discussion. Since you seem to miss people and dogs so much, how about some Fra Angelico? Here, let me show you.”

Once more he leafs through the Renaissance volume. This time the bookmark is pink, and so, I see, are the predominant colors of these new paintings, in which roses bloom, ladies blush, and saints are ruddy with health, all against a background of pink cliffs, red roofs, and churches aglow with sunrises. I am charmed. My father has already begun to speak when, against our custom, I plunge into his steady stream of dates and names with a breathless, out-of-turn question.

“Papa, are houses in Italy really so pink?”

“I suppose it is possible,” he says. “I’m glad you like these. But to continue, in 1436, Fra Angelico moved to Florence, to the new friary of San Marco, and there—”

And there are tiny yellow flowers in the swaying meadows and tiny blue flowers on the hems of the girls’ dresses, and tiny monsters bare their pointy little teeth in the soft swell of harbors, and bells ring, and birds chirp, and everyone, everyone, has a golden halo. A few chubby monks have clumsily dropped a slab of stone onto a writhing blue imp and now stand around with guilty downcast eyes, debating how best to rescue him. A mother sits encumbered by a fat baby in her lap, and as her gaze follows the flights of some great white birds soaring toward the sun on rainbow-colored wings, her sad face brightens with the desire to leave the baby behind and fly away with them. These paintings are like fairy tales, and while the stories do not all have happy endings—I notice a number of heads freshly detached from their bodies, floating in puddles of what looks like my mother’s strawberry preserves—they make me giddy with the premonition that somewhere, somewhere out there, a place so vivid, so alive, really exists.

“Haven’t you been to Italy?” I interrupt again, too excited to listen.

My father coughs shortly.

“No,” he says.

I tear my eyes away from the book. “You haven’t been to Italy?”

“No.”

“But you’ve been to Greece.”

“No, not to Greece either,” he says.

“To France, then? And England?”

“No.”

“But—to Egypt? China? India?”

Silent now, he shakes his head. I stare past him, at the lacquered spines of the art volumes lined up in their neat alphabetical rows on the shelves, as I struggle to find the right words for the enormity of my disappointment.

“But… but you’ve told me about all these places. I thought… Haven’t you ever wanted to go there?”

“Well now, you see,” he begins, then clears his throat, and again says, “Well, you see,” and falls silent. The telephone rings in the hallway. We listen to the rush of my mother’s slippers slapping toward the sound, the lilt of her muffled voice. In the next moment the door of the study is cracked open.

My mother does not come in.

“Sorry to interrupt, it’s Orlov,” she says from the corridor. She is cupping her hand over the receiver, the cord stretched as far as it will go. “He wants to discuss tomorrow’s seminar, but I’ve told him you’re busy and will call him back in—what shall I say, half an hour?”

“No need, I’ll take it, we are finished,” my father answers, as he closes the book and rises from his armchair. “We must do better on our choice of subject next week. Perhaps Andrei Rublev?” He speaks the last words already past the threshold, picking up the telephone. “Yes, hello?”

Stunned, I look at the clock on his desk. There are still twenty minutes left of the Culture Hour. He has never done this before. All at once I am certain it’s because I interrupted him so much, and I feel chastened.

I fall asleep to bursts of laughter behind the wall to my right and wake up, hours later, with the laughter, louder and looser, behind the wall to my left; the guests have moved from the study to the kitchen. I lie dozing for a few minutes, half traversing an arched bridge between the misty shores of some dream, half listening to the hubbub of blurred voices. The loudest of them, which I recognize as Orlov’s, appears to be propounding something, while two or three others burble up in the background whenever Orlov pauses for breath. The women, though, are still in the study: when I roll over in bed and press my ear to the wall, I hear a snippet of my mother’s exclamation, a saxophone wail from the record player turned down low.

The men must have gone to the kitchen to refill their glasses.

The dream bridge recedes farther into the fog as I realize I am terribly thirsty; this evening my mother let me stay up with the guests until well past my bedtime, snacking on pickled mushrooms and cheese with garlic. My thirst makes me more and more awake, until, giving up on sleep altogether, I toss off the blanket, lower my feet to the floor, and wait without turning on the light, hoping that the men will leave the kitchen at last.