Free The Suitcase by Sergei Dovlatov Page B

Léger?”
    “Once we were very close. Then I was friends with his widow. I told her about you. Nadya went into the closet, took out that jacket and handed it to me. She said that Fernand asked her to befriend all kinds of riff-raff.”
    I put on the jacket. It fitted. I could wear it over a warm sweater. It was like a short fall coat.
    Nina Cherkasova stayed till eleven. Then she called a taxi.
    I spent a long time staring at the splotches of paint. Now I was sorry that there were so few. Only two — on the sleeve and by the lapel.

    I started remembering what I knew about Fernand Léger.
    He was a tall, powerful man, from Normandy, a peasant. In 1915 he went off to the front. There he had occasion to cut bread with a bloody bayonet. Léger’s frontline pictures are filled with horror.
    Later, like Mayakovsky, he struggled with art. But Mayakovsky shot himself, while Léger survived and won.
    He dreamt of painting on the walls of buildings and train cars. A half-century later New York hooligans fulfilled his dreams.
    He thought that line was more important than colour. That art, from Shakespeare to Edith Piaf, lived in contrasts.
    His favourite words were, “Renoir depicted what he saw. I depict what I have understood.”
    Léger died a Communist, having fallen once and for all for the greatest charlatanism of all time. It may be that, like many artists, he was stupid.
    I wore the jacket for about eight years. I put it on only on special occasions. Even though the corduroy wore out so much that the oil paint disappeared.
    Not many people knew that the jacket had been Fernand Léger’s. I hardly told anyone. I liked keeping that pathetic secret.
    Time passed. We ended up in America. Nina Cherkasova died, leaving my mother fifteen hundred roubles. That’s a lot of money in the Soviet Union.
    It was hard getting it to New York. It would have involved incredible effort and created hassles.
    We decided to do it differently. We gave power of attorney to my older brother. But that was complicated, too. I spent two months on the paperwork. One of the documents was signed personally by Mr Schultz.

    In August my brother informed me that he had received the money. No expressions of gratitude followed. Maybe money isn’t worth it.
    My brother sometimes calls me early in the morning. That is, late at night, Leningrad time. His voice over the phone is suspiciously husky. Besides which, I hear female exclamations: “Ask about make-up!” Or: “Tell the jerk that fake mink coats sell best…”
    Instead my brother asks, “Well, how are things in America? They say that vodka is sold round the clock?”
    “I doubt it. But the bars are open, of course.”
    “What about beer?”
    “As much beer as you want in the all-night stores.”
    A respectful pause follows. And then, “Good for the capitalists! They know what they’re doing!”
    I ask, “How are you?”
    “Starts with ‘S’,” he says, “for swell.”
    But we’ve digressed. Everything’s swell for Andrei Cherkasov, too. This winter he will become a doctor of physics. Or mathematics… What’s the difference?

A Poplin Shirt
    M Y WIFE SAYS, “It’s madness, living with a man who sticks around simply because he’s too lazy…”
    My wife always exaggerates. Although it’s true, I do try to avoid unnecessary trouble. I eat whatever’s within reach. Get my hair cut when my appearance becomes less than human. But when I do, I have it shaved. Then I don’t have to get another cut for three months.
    In short, I’m reluctant to leave the house. I want to be left alone.
    When I was a child, my nanny, Luiza Genrikhovna, did everything distractedly, living in fear of arrest. Once she dressed me in shorts and shoved both legs into one opening. I walked around like that all day. I was four, but I remember that day well. I knew that I had been dressed wrong, but I kept quiet. I didn’t want to change. I still don’t.
    I remember many stories like that. Even as a child I