Free The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushin Page B

talk to Ksenya and Vasily about his or their lives and that their family map shone with uncharted white spots of terra incognita, entire regions where he had never thought it wise or necessary to venture, hadn’t they shared so many pleasant times over the past two decades—so many leisurely vacations by the sea, Black and Baltic, so many lovely theater evenings, so many content suppers at home like the one tonight—all of them moments of warmth and wordless understanding? Yes, after all these years they were simply bound to know one another with a knowledge of love, truer, deeper, more perfect than any other kind of knowledge.... Sukhanov swallowed a small sigh and, remembering he had an important article to finish by Thursday, abandoned the last bite on his plate and left for the study.
    As soon as he crossed the threshold, he felt that something had changed in the room in his absence, as if the very air had become suffused with a different meaning; but it was not until he turned on the lamp that he realized what had happened. The empty space on the wall across from his desk, the space awaiting the return of Nina’s portrait, was no longer empty—a large oil painting now hung in its place. He looked at it, and his heart beat unsteadily.
    A raven-haired girl sat by dark moonlit waters. The luminous curve of her nude body was misty as a dream, even slightly transparent, so that, if one looked very closely, one could just make out pale shapes of water lilies visible through her honey-colored, unearthly flesh. An indistinct silhouette of a youth, perhaps an admiring shepherd, was crouching in the rushes behind her, but she took no notice of him. She was gazing away, over the waters, to a horizon where a magnificent white swan was floating, slowly, majestically, triumphantly, moving closer and closer. Zeus and Leda, the seducer and the seduced ... The whole thing was beautiful but at the same time oppressive, and one was tormented by the inability to see the expression on Leda’s face, for it was turned away, affording only the gentlest hint of a profile, the tender angularity of a cheekbone, the barest outline of full tips—not nearly enough to see whether she felt exultant at the god’s imminent approach, or whether she was afraid. In the lower left corner was a date, 1957, and next to it sprawled a familiar, proud signature.
    Sukhanov took off his glasses, extracted a handkerchief from his pocket, rubbed the lenses, folded the handkerchief away, put the glasses back on, cleared his throat, and called for Nina. She came unhurriedly and stopped in the doorway, her bare arms crossed, turquoise bracelets clicking faintly on her wrists.
    “What is this?” he asked, frowning ever so slightly, tapping his fountain pen against the proofs of his biography.
    “Oh, don’t you remember?” she said, shrugging. “Lev gave it to us on our wedding day. I thought you’d remember.”
    “I do remember,” he replied dryly. “What I mean is, why is it here?”
    “I just thought the wall looked too bare as it was,” she said. “And then our last night’s conversation about Lev, and your going to see Swan Lake, reminded me that we had this somewhere. It goes well with the overall color scheme, don’t you think?”
    “We didn’t see Swan Lake,” he said, trying to keep his voice even. “We saw Coppelia.”
    “Did you really? I was sure it was Swan Lake. In any case, you can take it down if it bothers you,” she said with the same air of indifference, and gliding out into the shadows of the hallway, softly closed the door, her bracelets jingling.
    Unwilling to admit that the painting’s presence did unnerve him, Sukhanov resolutely turned to the article he was writing. But the specter of his reflection in the window again distracted him, the spectacles sparkling blindly in a skull-like face; the swan kept glancing at him with its malevolent golden eye; and his thoughts refused to follow their prescribed direction,