popular with Czarist nobility and Soviet commissars: one of the paintings depicted the quintessential outdoor scene, a troika, a family going out for a ride: excitement, overcoats, fur rugs, caps, covers, the snowstorm, the steppe, birch trees, an endless horizon ⦠The other painting, all interior, showed a dim bedroom, a bed in which a young woman lay dead. By her side, standing, a doctor, his satchel on the floor, feeling for her pulse. The composition called for her pale arm to be extended, for the doctor to hold her long, thin hand. In a film (for example, Anna Karenina with a different ending) the doctor would have shaken his head sadly. Here, the dramatic commentary was provided by a babushka sitting in a wing chair in the foreground, consoling a child in a nightgown who stares heavenward with angelic eyes to the infinite that infuses the bedroom.
The room on the other side of the foyer was the reception room and it was decorated in a conspicuously Spanish style. There was a piano with a lace shawl tossed over it. The furniture was Moorish and the painting, in the style of Romero de Torres, showed bullfighters and gypsies, gold flowers and red satin capes. On the shawl were a group of photographs in silver frames. I didnât recognize their subjects; all the photos, I realized as I looked at them, were from the period before the Spanish Civil War. There were men in the uniforms of the Imperial Russian Army, and others in uniforms of the Moroccan infantry. The women, all dressed in white, belonged to a generation caught between the virtues of the past century and the unavoidable (and anticipated) sins of the new one; they resisted giving up their bustles, cameos, and elaborate hairstyles, just as Monsieur Plotnikov clung to his old-fashioned clothing.
The dancers were the exception: there were two or three portraits of a spectacularly beautiful woman, all long legs, narrow waist, filmy clothing, smooth arms, swanâs neck, bright makeup, dark gemstones in equally black hair cut short: her body arched passionately and gracefully toward the ground, poised to give life or to lose it: who knows. I couldnât identify Mr. Plotnikov in these photos; who knows, who knows. There were no photos of the man acting such and such a role. I understood the reason. He wanted a complete life, not a fragmentary one, he had told me. History wanted to divide it; he resisted. There would be no photo of him in Uncle Vanya or The Seagull (was he blessed with the self-critical humor necessary to play Konstantin Treplev?).
I heard an invisible wingbeat in the salon, as my attention was drawn to a photo: Mr. Plotnikov standing, in almost the same pose as the ballerina, but this time he was the one leaningâgray hair, his youth goneâover Constancia, dressed in white, my wife at fifteen or sixteen, radiant, holding a child in her lap, a child whose features were difficult to make out, blurry, as if he had moved just as the photo was being takenâbut also blurry, I suspected, because of his unformed youth: his age was impossible to determine, but he seemed to be about a year or fifteen months old.
The three of them, I thought to myself, all three of them, I said over and over again, as I ran upstairs, just as Constancia does when she is mad at me.
I say ran. Itâs not true. The deeper I penetrated into Monsieur Plotnikovâs nineteenth-century house, the more completely I was gripped by torpor, an unaccustomed sluggishness that possessed and divided my body and soul. My body seemed to go in one direction and my soul in the other, a strange mood rose within me as I climbed the stairs, as if the vapors given off by the two rooms, the Russian dining room and the Spanish living room, had united to create a thin but suffocating atmosphere, heightened by the constant noise, a sound of wings beating against the roof of the house. I climbed to a height greater than the distance from one floor to the other, I was
The room on the other side of the foyer was the reception room and it was decorated in a conspicuously Spanish style. There was a piano with a lace shawl tossed over it. The furniture was Moorish and the painting, in the style of Romero de Torres, showed bullfighters and gypsies, gold flowers and red satin capes. On the shawl were a group of photographs in silver frames. I didnât recognize their subjects; all the photos, I realized as I looked at them, were from the period before the Spanish Civil War. There were men in the uniforms of the Imperial Russian Army, and others in uniforms of the Moroccan infantry. The women, all dressed in white, belonged to a generation caught between the virtues of the past century and the unavoidable (and anticipated) sins of the new one; they resisted giving up their bustles, cameos, and elaborate hairstyles, just as Monsieur Plotnikov clung to his old-fashioned clothing.
The dancers were the exception: there were two or three portraits of a spectacularly beautiful woman, all long legs, narrow waist, filmy clothing, smooth arms, swanâs neck, bright makeup, dark gemstones in equally black hair cut short: her body arched passionately and gracefully toward the ground, poised to give life or to lose it: who knows. I couldnât identify Mr. Plotnikov in these photos; who knows, who knows. There were no photos of the man acting such and such a role. I understood the reason. He wanted a complete life, not a fragmentary one, he had told me. History wanted to divide it; he resisted. There would be no photo of him in Uncle Vanya or The Seagull (was he blessed with the self-critical humor necessary to play Konstantin Treplev?).
I heard an invisible wingbeat in the salon, as my attention was drawn to a photo: Mr. Plotnikov standing, in almost the same pose as the ballerina, but this time he was the one leaningâgray hair, his youth goneâover Constancia, dressed in white, my wife at fifteen or sixteen, radiant, holding a child in her lap, a child whose features were difficult to make out, blurry, as if he had moved just as the photo was being takenâbut also blurry, I suspected, because of his unformed youth: his age was impossible to determine, but he seemed to be about a year or fifteen months old.
The three of them, I thought to myself, all three of them, I said over and over again, as I ran upstairs, just as Constancia does when she is mad at me.
I say ran. Itâs not true. The deeper I penetrated into Monsieur Plotnikovâs nineteenth-century house, the more completely I was gripped by torpor, an unaccustomed sluggishness that possessed and divided my body and soul. My body seemed to go in one direction and my soul in the other, a strange mood rose within me as I climbed the stairs, as if the vapors given off by the two rooms, the Russian dining room and the Spanish living room, had united to create a thin but suffocating atmosphere, heightened by the constant noise, a sound of wings beating against the roof of the house. I climbed to a height greater than the distance from one floor to the other, I was
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