Dmitry felt like he was back at the Moscow Institute of Art, but he was in the rich art collector’s fancy penthouse apartment, about to betray his mother. Surrounded by Russian paintings, he longed to take brush to canvas to cover his sins with thick oil paint.
Perhaps now he could paint something other than Kandinsky’s Fragment Number 2. He knew Kandinsky by heart: every trickle of red, s***h of black ink, and hemorrhage of gold. Each dissonant note in its allegro, the harmony in its adagio, and its deep blue intermezzo, formed a symphony he had memorized in his body.
Fragment Number 2He couldn’t say if Fragment 2 symbolized the Deluge, the Last Judgment, or the Resurrection. But it had become his religion, offering both redemption and pain, themes he’d studied in some of the very works
