The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushin

elevator, which had just come to a grating halt somewhere in the bowels of the house, descended the stairs.
    The stairwell split the gray monstrosity of the building in half, laying it open like an enormous, overripe fruit, with the imposing leather-padded, nail-studded doors, two on each floor, embedded in its yawning pulp like dark seeds, every one of them containing its own luxurious blossom of success. Here, on the seventh floor, across from the unhinged composer, resided a corpulent opera singer from Tbilisi who had left the stage years before but still treated her numerous guests to tremulous arias accompanied by the velvety barking of her three fat, indolent basset hounds; whenever she gave one of her homespun concerts, some mysterious arrangement of pipes would carry the disembodied barking and trilling through walls and floors and carefully deposit their echoes in Sukhanov’s study, annoying him to no end. On the sixth floor, below the composer, lived a high-ranking Party official, a jovial fellow with an amazing profusion of warts on his chin and a plump wife who looked like his sister, and on the fifth, the elevator sometimes dropped off a sad little man in tortoiseshell glasses who resembled a poor relative from the provinces but whom Sukhanov knew to be one of the foremost classics of Soviet literature, the author of the celebrated trilogy We the Miners.
    After that, more than thrice removed from his own eighth-floor domain, the inhabitants grew anonymous. As he reached the fourth floor, he heard children’s cries seeping out from under a door, and on the third, after a particularly long flight of stairs, punctuated by the comma of an orange peel spilling out of the trash chute, he leaned against the railing to steady his trembling legs and thought he detected the sweet fragrance of lilies and the light tinkling of a piano in the depths of apartment number five. The fleeting combination of sounds and smells reminded him that once, in a predawn hour, coming home from a New Year’s Eve party, he had encountered a tantalizingly reticent, elegantly perfumed woman with features of Nefertiti, pearls swaying fluidly in her ears, stepping out of the lobby and disappearing into a chauffeured automobile as gray as the sky—but before he had time to glance curiously at the door, the wintry recollection turned and escaped him, and his thoughts, in chasing after it, inadvertently stumbled upon a vision of another chauffeured car, another perfumed woman.
    He found himself thinking of the past Saturday evening, of his father-in-law’s retrospective at the Manège. And then, as if merely waiting for their chance to intrude, a multitude of unnecessary, uncivilized associations crowded his mind—the offended Minister, the unbearable encounter with Belkin, the indignity of the near-mugging, the loss of the blue-eyed Nina presiding tranquilly over his work, the subsequent invasion of his sanctuary by the shameless swan-loving nude at the head of a flock of disturbing dreams and irrelevant suspicions... No matter, the nude was gone, he reminded himself quickly—and in any case, these were all minor occurrences, to be forgotten in another day or two—and certainly no reason for him to be standing here, on an unfamiliar landing, feeling as unsettled as he did, no reason at all. And murmuring angrily (What nerve the woman has, can you believe it, stealing like that!), he purposefully walked down the remaining flights—was that a plate breaking in apartment three?—and arrived in the lobby, with the sun, now fully out, splashing brilliantly on the marble floors.
    Here he hesitated, not knowing where the caretaker lived; but the concierge was already rising from behind the desk with a cloyingly respectful, insincere smile, and, suddenly embarrassed, Sukhanov nodded coldly and hastened down another staircase, markedly narrower and darker, which disappeared into the obscure strata of the building. Before he knew it, he was