Long Made Short

THE RARE MUSCOVITE

I can be such an egotistical self-righteous pompous son of a bitch; unaccepting, nonaccepting, I can’t think of the right word but it’s what I so often am and all of it’s what I was again. Moscow, my wife and I, she to research a book she’s anthologizing and introducing, I just to accompany her and see a city and be in a country I’ve never been to, and it’s really just the extra airfare, since restaurants are very cheap and the hotel room’s the same for one or two. She — Marguerite — speaks Russian, will be working all day in libraries and with Russian contacts so, through a colleague in America weeks before we left, got an interpreter for me for the five weekdays. Svetlana shows up at our hotel at nine, half-hour before she’s supposed to. I’m squatting in the little tub, reach over and push the door shut, and Marguerite lets her in. I overhear them: Good mornings in Russian, then “Please, if it’s possible, everything in English from now on. I want to sharpen my interpreting facilities even better from your trip, and I’m planning of visiting America in a year. And my earliness — tardiness? — earliness is because the metro got here faster than I thought and was less crowded than expected. Then our brave police downstairs let me up with a wave when I thought I’d have more difficulties. And I didn’t want to walk around in the slippery cold or sit in the dreary lobby with everyone blowing smoke and sturgeon fumes on me and talking in their loud German and English and American voices, present employers — employees? — excluded of course. I had a stroke, you see, two years ago. Recovered from this side being paralyzed to where I could barely walk. Twelve almonds a day, a healer from Kiev said — the doctors could offer no medicine but time for me. You might think it madness, I know so much how Americans rely on science, but the almonds worked, I’m sure of it, and I don’t want to get excited. I can’t afford to, you say? — by having to tell them off to their faces, all those bloated businessmen elephants blowing loud smoke and talk on me. I am one of those rare Muscovites who — whom? Let me get it correct now, who. Who detests those burning props.”

I get dressed in the bathroom, come out, introduce myself, make coffee for us, take out sugar packets and coffee cake and tiny Edam cheeses we got on the plane with our dinner and snack, offer her peanut butter and dried salami and crackers we brought with us. “You don’t get anything like this here,” she says, “unless you wait on line for hours or buy it in the dollar stores, which I’ll take you to,” she says to me. “Hams in tins, coffee in cans, the best sardines and cheeses and most overpriced caviar. You won’t need those perhaps, for only a week’s visit in a hotel. But if you have Russian friends who do or you want to make a gift out of to them, that’s also what they have there. And lemon and peppered vodka and Scottish scotch and Ararat, you know what that is?” “Da,” I say. “Ah, listen, wonderful — possible he doesn’t need an interpreter. But people say it can be as good or as better as the best French cognac. I wouldn’t know since I’m also rare in Moscow in that I’ve never had a taste for alcohol. Maybe for my bad tooth, as a girl, but nothing else. And also at the Beriozka American cigarettes to kill people is what you get there too. One carton of them, none other than Marlboros, would be equivalent to, at black market rubles for dollars, a month’s wages for the average worker here, or fifty rubles less. If you want to, we’ll go. For if you return to America and your wife tells Millie you didn’t have an opportunity to buy the best Russian whiskies and gifts, because I was taking you to all the more cultural places, I shall be very embarrassed and dismayed.”

“No no,” I say. “Any place you take me to is fine, since it’ll all be new to me. Though if we want Ararat and vodka, better I hear at the duty-free store at the airport going home.”

“But for use in your room? Marguerite tells me she’ll be entertaining scholars here. Perhaps you brought the much preferred American whiskey with you. Or you don’t drink or once did but went A. A., which is only beginning here. It’s not that? If it was, or should it be ‘were’?” He throws up his hands, points to Marguerite and says “She knows.” “Oh, small difference, since we both know what I meant, and I have the few places and hours the A.A. clubs meet each week. Anyway, it’s all up to you. I am simply here to coast you through. And the truth of the matter is that the Beriozkas, though something to see for their glamorous contradictions if not outright falsehoods to the rest of Moscow and present Russian life, have no real appeal to me.”

But what am I getting at with all this? I had an idea of saying right at the start “Happens again,” and then explaining what does. She gets a stroke our third weekday here, dies, and I didn’t especially care for her almost from the moment I heard her through the bathroom door — actually got irritated, but not visibly, by her almost incessant talking and parading of her knowledge and vast learning. She seemed to know something or a lot about everything we spoke about or saw. She was familiar with the details of Marguerite’s project and doctoral dissertation and knew the works of the people Marguerite was going to see, as well as every writer, painter and composer I mentioned and building we visited or I pointed out. Knew the dates, history, influences, inner meanings, could quote lines, cite pages and recite poems and so on — I, what? I forget what I started out saying. But she has this stroke, dies, police have to break down her apartment door to get her two days after her stroke and I feel very bad about it of course and guilty I bad-mouthed her so much to Marguerite and asked her to phone her to call her off after the second day, at least for a day and then I’d see how I felt. “I want to walk around alone, not meet any schedules, get lost on the metro if I want with only the few Russian words I know. Find a farmers’ market by myself and the Tolstoi museum and Tolstoi’s house again if I like, which I think I would but without her telling me who painted what picture on the wall and who the people are in the portraits and what famous composer played what famous composition on the grand piano there. I just want to feel the place, guess which side of the bed Tolstoi slept, and those desks of his and Sofia’s and no electric lights and that sad room behind theirs where their youngest son — I forget his name, though she told me, and I think he was the youngest — died of scarlet fever in that oversized crib she said was a typical seven year old’s bed then, or maybe he died in the hospital and she said he only got sick at home. For sure she had it right, whatever she told me. Or just to stay in our room finishing War and Peace and maybe going downstairs to the hotel café for a coffee and bun.” And I feel if I had let her continue being my interpreter and guide, though we never used that word, instead of giving her a paid day off — paid, it’s so absurd, since it was so little money and because she has no survivors we now don’t know whom to send it to — she might have somehow survived, or at worst been with me when she had the stroke and I could have got help for her and saved her life. Or been with us, if we again took her to the hotel restaurant for dinner that night — and why not? since she knew which foods were freshest, so was an asset of sorts, and she didn’t ask for more wages and the dinner was certainly cheap enough. But she died in her room that Wednesday, might not have had anywhere to go except to stand in the cold for hours on different food lines — she was retired but not even sixty. And maybe was incensed at me — knew I didn’t like her much for not very good reasons but stayed because she needed the money — or worried the job wouldn’t work out because of what she sensed I felt about her, or grieved or got angry over it or both or something else and that somehow provoked the stroke. But I feel partly responsible for it, also that I wasn’t there when I possibly could have been to help her when she got the stroke. And when I say “happens again” I mean because I’ve done things like that before. Bad-mouthed people for inadequate reasons — there probably aren’t any good ones — just to avoid seeing them that night, for example, because they were preventing me from doing something I thought I might want to — just their presence would — or they had achieved some sort of stature or success that let’s say I secretly wanted, which I’m not saying she did though I have to admit I admired her intelligence tremendously, and though nothing so bad as a stroke or anything near it happened to any of them I always knew I was wrong in this attitude and regretted it and told myself I wouldn’t do it again and sometimes only told myself I should try my hardest not to.

I didn’t say what I really wanted to there, only because for whatever it is — my inability to say things clearly and straight and because I really don’t have the means to — the language, words, I’m simply unable to do it well, on paper and orally most of the time also, besides not probably having the necessary kind of intelligence and insights. I don’t even know if what I just said makes much sense, but let me get on with this. I was where before? Where was I? I’m trying to convey another person and, without being explicit, a person’s feelings about her death and the way it changes ordinary life when it suddenly comes and what it can bring out in himself. That and more. Anyway, first place she takes me to that first day — Monday — is Red Square. “Krasnaya—‘red’—I’d also like to teach you Russian words connected to the places we go to, which is the easiest way to learn them — through practical identification. Like ulitsa—‘street’—which you’ll see everywhere after a word like Herzen or Gorki on buildings and street-post signs, but first I must also teach you the Russian alphabet. And we might as well get Krasnaya Ploschad out of the way — see what I mean now? You understood without questioning me. But you can’t be allowed to return home without saying you’ve been there, can you?”

“I think I can. But okay. Even though Marguerite and I went there the Saturday we got here — she insisted I see it at night — I never saw it in the day and nothing was open.”

“Shall we walk? It’s only two kilometers or and a half, and I can walk that far. It’s supposed to be healthy for me besides.” I ask how the sidewalks are—“It looks cold and wet out”—and she says icy and I suggest we take the metro or a cab. I didn’t want her falling or holding on to me for so long a walk. “If you have dollars to pay or packs of American cigarettes to show and give away we can get a cab, something most Muscovites can’t do here. I doubt you’ll want to see inside the Kremlin buildings. They’re rather vulgar — glittery jewels and gold and thrones — though you might want to see the domes over the Kremlin. But Saint Basil’s in Krasnaya Ploschad has some of the best of those and later today or tomorrow we’ll go to Novodevichy—novo, which is one of the forms of ‘new’—which I think has the city’s most beautiful of them. And I’d like taking you by train to Novgorod, which to me has the world’s most beautiful of all.”

She goes on like that. Steers me where she wants to go, doesn’t think much of my suggestions. Arabat Street, where I’d like to get my gift buying done with: matryoska or maritroska dolls — I can never seem to get the word right — and painted wooden boxes and barrettes and decorated potholders and things like that. “Exclusively for tourists,” she says, “who want their pockets combed through and gypsy beggar boys to steal their wallets and socks and shoes. Oh, they’ll do it, and with baby brothers on their backs to distract you. But if you insist to go there, I won’t stop you, but it’s walk walk walk through unruly crowds for practically one of your miles.” Chekhov Museum—“Ugly, not at all brings to vivid life the personality and living style of the man. But you love him, is that why? He’s not Tolstoi, but I like his work very much too. ‘Toska’—that’s ‘misery’ or ‘grief or really ‘long drawn-out sorrow’-not translatable as one word, and you can always remember it by the opera of the same name. A touching story. Very few as good except ‘Ivan Ilyich,’ which is more than touching — it’s terrifying. This man reconciling himself to death after such an empty, trivial — how should I say it? — unenlightened life? I read it once a year. Just as your War and Peace there I try to every three years or anytime I need some tranquillity of spirit and mind. You were right to bring only that book with you — it serves the place of an entire library. Unfortunately there is little left of the Russian soul that’s in that novel.” The most grandiose metro stations—“For tour buses to empty themselves out into only, except for regular riders like myself who truly use it. You’ll be staring up at the statuary and chandeliers while getting bumped by our rudest inhabitants, too ignorant or impolite or perhaps too eager in a rush to excuse themselves, even to foreigners. But you wish to see these stations — and the deepest you say, for some unexplained reasons? — then we’ll go to these too.”

After we all have dinner at the hotel restaurant and Svetlana leaves I say to Marguerite “Did you see the way she made those last-minute sandwiches? I mean, she got a free meal — I’m not begrudging her it, since it was cheap enough and she wasn’t too intrusive at the table and I had enough wine in me to ward her off when she was. And I know there’s a shortage of dairy stuff in Moscow. But Jesus, have some self-respect and maybe consideration for us, since this is our hotel, and don’t stuff the rest of the table bread into your bag and fill the two slices of bread left on your plate with a quarter pound of butter and wrap that up for home too. I shouldn’t be saying all this, right? since I probably don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“It’s that you forget. She asked our permission first. She’s giving the butter to an old woman in her building who can’t get any and the bread I guess she figures the woman will like also or else just that the kitchen will throw it away. But suppose she was drying the bread for herself and hoarding the butter for a day when she won’t have any, like tomorrow perhaps? So what.”

“Okay, fair. But also, when she talks to us I kind of get upset”—“You get very upset”—“I get a little less than that upset that she keeps me out entirely, and it’s in English. When I do say something when you’re around she often looks at me as if I were a kid who’s barged in when he’s been warned not to, as if this is adult conversation only so buzz off. You’re the big genius and intellectual toiler she’s saying — after all, it’s your project we’ve come here for. I’m just a stupid site-gazer — didn’t know Red Square wasn’t inside the Kremlin — but at least I was honest enough to admit it. Doesn’t know the difference between the Tver — that the way to say it? — and Novgorod Russian icon schools. Why should I know? Who does but an art expert of that period or field or someone who has few books to choose from in libraries and stores but all the time in the world to read? But credit me with a little intelligence and conversational interest or skills or whatever you want to call it. Someone who can on occasion talk with some knowledge and depth about the less poppy and mundane things. For instance, also credit me with — but nothing, when at the Pushkin, seeing me standing there staring at the Van Goghs for a few minutes, she asks me do I like them. ‘You bet,’ I said, which is what I usually say in front of Van Goghs, for what am I going to do when I’m still in a state of enthrallment, go into every crack, dab, dot and corner? But she gives me the French expression about each to his own taste or gut and then starts in with this pro-Monet and-Cézanne and anti-Vincent treatiselike argument or lecture I could hardly understand it was so over my head, or else she didn’t know how to deliver it clearly and succinctly in English. But how these three Van Goghs all on the same wall are critically puffed up by unscrupulous experts, dealers and museums so people — like me, I’m sure she’s saying — who know little to zero about art and artistry will pay fifty million bucks apiece for. My point is she thinks I’m uncultured, or barely cultured — certainly not intelligent. A walking talking absurdity when you think this shmuck also teaches at a university. Even if it were phys ed or home ec I taught — still, he represents the academy so should be much smarter, know several languages backwards, be able to communicate without hesitation and with full intellectual rigor and appropriate ornate words what he knows, sees and likes instead of being someone who probably always needs a thesaurus when he writes and talks. The typical example of the stereotyped American tourist she’s shown around Moscow or just interpreted for before. Except of course you — ah, the intelligentsia. And those rare nonacademic people like the ones in Boston who gave you her name — fancy journalists, magazines — but so cultivated she kept telling me: educated, eloquent, polyglottal — at least the guy — worldly and well read and with even an executed Decembrist count way back in his family. Because I’ve no advanced degrees or easy time with the spoken language and have little political feeling or at least nothing much to say about it for either of our countries, she thinks I’ve no mind of my own and so have to have everything explained.”

“It can’t be all that bad and she has a wonderful itinerary for you tomorrow. The Tolstoi Museum, a farmers’ market or two where you can get me some cracked walnuts and real Russian honey and anything that looks unusual there as gifts and will travel well for home. And the Andronikov monastery”—“Great, more icons”—“Don’t go if you don’t want, but also for its ancient tiny church and onion domes. And the G.U.M. department store to buy records for a quarter and a znachki shop there with the largest selection of them in the city. To impress her, pronounce the store ‘Goom.’” “Goom, Goom.” “Then step in with her someplace, get a taste of a workers’ restaurant or café—she knows it all, and maybe over food alone you’ll get to know and appreciate each other better. Anyway, she’ll show you the ropes, how to use the trolley and pay phone and to shop without being cheated and show your dollars without getting mugged. By the time she’s through with you, you’ll be exhausted but have a map of the city in your head. Then you have a day off and she from you. It’s for me too you’ll be doing this. I’ll be too busy to go shopping even one afternoon. And though I’ve seen most of it before you can tell me what you saw and also take pictures to show me and the kids later on.”

Svetlana shows up on the dot next morning. We see things by foot, trolley, metro, occasional cab for a five-dollar bill Marguerite was told to bring about twenty of to Moscow for just something like this. Svetlana says once “Am I talking too much?” She is but I say “Nope.” “I’ve tendencies towards talk, possibly for being sequestered in my slight space the rest of the days and the one woman I see most to take care of doesn’t say three words a time. But I’m an honest person, you’re visiting a culture where honest persons with words is almost a belief, so you want to be an honest person too, don’t you? Tell me to my face if I’m twisting your ears as the English like to say, and perhaps the Americans too, or showing you too many things too fast to digest.” “No no, I mean it, everything couldn’t be better, thanks.”

I don’t want to be with her for lunch so I say I think I’m still suffering from jet lag and would like a nap at my hotel, would she mind eating alone? I give her money for the first-floor café, go upstairs and lie on my bed and drink coffee and read, she rings from the lobby an hour later. More places and constant information and chatter. “Are you sure I’m not talking too much?” “Why, do you think you are?” “Well, I might be.” “No, absolutely not, it’s all fine.” Every monument and theater and famous person’s birth or living place and also every building we pass by foot, trolley and cab that looks interesting architecturally or stands out because of its size she has something to say about. “That so? Yes, hmm, so this is where it is, I didn’t know that.”

We meet Marguerite for dinner at a Georgian restaurant she had to make reservations for two days ago, and in the cab back to our hotel we drop Svetlana off at a metro station. She hands us each several candies. “Special, hard to get because individually wrapped and the ingredients very select. They’re made by an acquaintance of mine in the Kremlin’s confectionary kitchen and often given in droves to dignitaries and diplomats. We ought to export them simply for their colorful wrappers. Bears and squirrels — children would love them.” “That’s very kind, thank you,” I say. “I don’t eat candy myself but will definitely try one, though not now because I’m too full, and save the rest for my girls.” Marguerite’s told her tomorrow will be a paid day off and asks if she’d like the first three days’ pay now. “All at once, please. I wouldn’t want to ride the metro with it. Too much in dollars and one of our now many clever Moscow thieves might see it on my face.” “And on the fifth day?” I say. “Will he see it on my face you mean? No, since that day I’ll hire a taxicab or continue with yours, flush like an American tourist or spending as freely as one. But because I’m Russian, all for the sum or extra one of a dollar, and then hide the money in my room for one of your rainy days. That is yours?” “Ours and probably the English’s too.”

Later I say to Marguerite “Know why she wants all her wages at once?” “Something disparaging, I suppose.” “No, just conjecture born out of insight or something. Because she thinks we’ll have to give her a bigger tip for the whole fifty than if we only gave her her last day’s pay on Friday. She’s a shrewdie all right, and even shrewder how well she disguises it.” “Disguises what?” “Everything. Or just things — some. Holding back — being extra gracious to me when we’re alone when I know damn well what she thinks of me intellectually, or maybe just culturally — we’ve spoken of it. And this not wanting her pay day by day because of the increment, the incremental — because with more…well, you know — or maybe I’m being far-fetched on this. But other things.” “That’s what I’m asking, what? Did she ever do or say anything in particular to make you question her motives this way?” “As I said, just little things I’ve picked up but nothing right now, other than what I’ve mentioned, that comes to mind.” “Well I think you’re way way off about her. She’s a touch sad but decent, and energetic and enthusiastic. And I only wish I had the time to be taken around by such a knowledgeable person who knows the city so well, even if she is so garrulous, and you were the one doing the bookwork all day. Actually, I think you’d like that more.” “No, I’m enjoying my rest away from work. And true, I suppose I should feel lucky having her for so little money. But the greater truth is I feel luckier being on my own tomorrow. Anyway, not to change the subject, I was thinking just now: ‘da, da‘—what a nice soft way to say yes.”

But to move along. She doesn’t call Wednesday morning as she said she would to find out what time she should come Thursday morning. Marguerite calls her and she doesn’t answer. She doesn’t call Thursday morning. Marguerite calls her every fifteen minutes, thinking maybe she was out all night, slept at a friend’s — has a secret life she never gave us a clue about, she says — or got in after midnight last night, when Marguerite stopped calling, and didn’t call us after that because she felt it was too late, and was up and out for groceries or something early this morning. We leave the phone off the hook — each room has its own number, so it’s all direct — when we go to the hotel restaurant for our complimentary breakfast. Marguerite calls when we get back, then asks me to stick around an hour more before going out on my own if that’s what I plan to do. “When she was outside she might have had trouble getting a pay phone or misplaced our number or didn’t have the two kopecks on her and nobody could give her change — anything, and she just got hold of a phone. If you want, which you probably won’t, call every fifteen minutes or so — she might have just got home. But I’m a little worried about her, aren’t you?” and I say “Of course, it doesn’t seem like her, but I’m sure it’s nothing,” and she leaves for her appointment. I wait but don’t call, figuring if she just got home first thing she’d do would be to call. I leave after an hour, walk around the old section of the city, try to find some buildings in War and Peace Marguerite said are still supposed to be here — the Rostovs’ mansion, Pierre’s house — but can’t find the streets, even though they’re on my map, and no one, if they’re hearing me right and understanding the few Russian words Marguerite taught me yesterday to make myself understood in something like this, seems to have heard of them; stop in a café for “odin kofe, mineralenaya voda and dva bulka”—woman shakes her head—“bulki, bulka, two,” holding up two fingers and then pointing to some rolls on the counter behind her, “mais—but not sweet ones, nyet sakhar, pzhalesta,” and she gives me mineral water and coffee without the lump of sugar that usually comes with it and takes enough change out of my palm to pay for it while I’m trying to find in it what amount I think she said.

Marguerite calls Svetlana before we go to the hotel restaurant for dinner, calls when we get back to our room. “I’m really worried now,” she says, “I know something’s wrong. We know she isn’t the type to promise to come — to say she’ll call the night before to see precisely what hour we want her — and then just to disappear. And with that stroke she had two years ago—” “Oh yeah, that’s right, the stroke, I forgot. So what do we do?” She calls a scholar she met the other day who said he knows of Svetlana but he only has her phone number, not her address, and doesn’t know anyone who does; but he’ll make some calls. “Even if we had her address,” I say, “what would we do with it? She told me it’s about an hour’s metro ride to her stop — lots of changes and at the end of the line. Or a couple of changes, but anyway, ‘couple’ meaning what to her — two, three, four? We’d go out there at this hour when people all over the city are getting bumped on the head and robbed? Even by cab — or of course by cab if we could get one or one would take us that far — we’d be sure he’d wait? If he didn’t we’d be screwed.” “Not that. But say we found someone who knows her and lives near her? Or someone who doesn’t but as a favor to us might want to help her. Maybe that person could phone a friend and go over — two men. Or just you and him. What I’m saying is Russians still do that, put themselves out for strangers, especially one intellectual for another. And if this person didn’t want to do it but lived fairly close to her, which would mean you wouldn’t go because he couldn’t come in for you and then go back there and so on, I’d say we’d pay the fare — cab, anything. And would a carton of Marlboros — a few weeks’ salary for some at the regular exchange — encourage a friend of his to go along with him? Meaning, would it encourage him? But I’ve seen the way they’ve helped me. With leads, contacts, books, unpublished papers and notes and tapes very few American scholars would let me see and hear and copy down. And accompanying me clear across town for something and then waiting there while I worked or saw someone so they could take me back here.”

She calls several people she’s met, and through them friends and colleagues of theirs, but the one person who’s heard of Svetlana doesn’t even know her phone number. The first scholar she spoke to calls back and says nobody he contacted knows where she lives or how to find out. “I give up for now,” she says. “Maybe she’s okay and off doing something we haven’t thought of yet, but I seriously doubt it.” “I hope we’re wrong,” I say. “You mean you think it’s no good too?” “Looks it. But as you said, we’ve only just met her so there’s lots we don’t know.”

Little past midnight, we just got into our beds and shut the night table lights, the phone rings. A woman says “Abel, yes? Hello, I’m Katya Sergeyeva, very good friend of Svetlana. Pardon me for upsetting you if this is nothing, but I’m extremely worried for her. Was she with you all of today?” “Let me put my wife on please. This is very important so if there’s any language problem, she can speak Russian.” She tells Marguerite she and Svetlana have spoken every day with each other since Svetlana’s stroke. Yesterday she thought Svetlana went with us someplace outside of Moscow and got back late or stayed overnight at a hotel with us there. Now that she knows we haven’t seen her for two days she’s sure something’s wrong. She’s going to go over to her apartment now with a friend. If Svetlana doesn’t answer she’ll get the police to break down the door. Marguerite tells her we’ll do whatever we can to help so please count on us and call anytime tonight, no matter how late. We read for a few minutes, then she yawns and hearing it I yawn right after and we agree we should try to nap. I wake up once thinking maybe Katya called but we didn’t hear it in our sleep, though the phone only rings loudly, and cover Marguerite up and turn off the lights.

Katya calls just when Marguerite’s about to dial her. She didn’t get back to us last night because it was very late and things were still so unresolved. They got to the apartment, knocked, nobody answered and they didn’t hear anything behind the door so they called the police who said they couldn’t get there till ten this morning. “They couldn’t get there?” I say when Marguerite translates it for me while still on the phone. “What if she still has some breath this minute but dies a few seconds before they get there?” “Shh,” she says, signaling she can’t hear what Katya’s saying. Katya says she and several friends are going to meet the police now at Svetlana’s and she’ll call soon as she has some news, but she’s convinced now Svetlana’s dead. She also told Marguerite that after they knocked and called through the door last night they went to about twenty apartments in the building and nobody had seen Svetlana for two days. “They went around asking at one and two in the morning?” “I told you, people here do that. Not the police, as you heard, but you can call on your friends and most of your neighbors anytime.” “So why didn’t they all get together last night and knock down the door? Police wouldn’t come, hell with them, or is it it’s really maybe some highly penalizable crime?” “Possibly. Probably.”

Phone rings two hours later. Marguerite stayed around long as she could but then had to leave for an important appointment that couldn’t be rescheduled. “Abel, yes? Katya here, most unexpected news,” and then her voice cracks and she speaks excitably in Russian. “Speak English, please, I understand very little Russian. Nye govoryu po russki, nye govoryu po russki,” and she says “Nyet, nyet, not okay, can’t. Wait.” A woman gets on and says “Hello, I am Bella, good friend of Katya and Svetlana. It is terrible to speak to you, sir, only this once with only this terrible news for you. I speak English not good but try. Svetlana is dead. She has stroke Wednesday, your day, she must have, we and police today believe, that made her that way, killed her. Great pity. Much sorrow. Wonderful woman. Intelligent and kind and so nice to this building and people and everywhere she goes. It is very very sad.” “Very. I’m terribly sorry. Please tell Katya that. And what is her phone — telephone number, please, even though I think my wife took it. But what is it if she didn’t take it so she can phone Katya later,” and she gives me it.

For a couple of days after I think how I would have liked it to turn out. I wouldn’t show any signs I disliked her, was annoyed or irritated by her. If I did and it was evident to her I’d quickly apologize, saying it was something in me, personal, being away from my work maybe, maybe worried about my kids, too much of that good lemon vodka last night or bad sturgeon, other excuses, but nothing she’d done. If she apologized for being such a chatterbox, as she said of herself once, covering her mouth with her hand, I’d say “Great, chatter away, don’t hold back for my sake, because most of what you’re saying is interesting and new to me, and better someone who talks and makes sense than keeps sullen and still.” We’d go here, there, lunch, dinner with Marguerite, stop for coffee, tea for her, bulki, torte or whatever the plural for them, which I’d ask her for, I’d suggest she take me inside the Kremlin, the Tolstoi and Chekhov museums, whatever church and monastery she wants me to see in the city and outside it. At lunch I’d give her some of the plastic sandwich bags I brought from New York and would say “Butter all the bread you want and stick them in the bags and the bags into your pocketbook. Less messy, and the food’s only going to go to waste or be taken home by the kitchen staff. I’d take some myself but we do all that kind of buttering and cheese-taking and other secret hoarding at the hotel’s breakfast buffet every day.” Children’s toy store, Pushkin museum again, where I might say maybe she has a point about the Van Goghs and I’ve been duped as much as the next guy about his work, since I’m no art expert, exhibition hall of contemporary Russian painting she spoke about and I’d wanted to see but begged off because I didn’t want her lecturing me. I’d take her up on teaching me ten Russian words and a couple of phrases and one complete sentence a day and testing me occasionally on the Russian alphabet till I could read or at least sound out all the stores’ names and street signs. We’d talk about books and stories we’ve read, plays we’ve seen, she here, I in the States. Farewell dinner at a Czech restaurant Marguerite and I had talked weeks ago about ending our trip with. We’d toast to one another, to good literature, to Tolstoi and Chekhov and Babel, Ahkmatova and Tsvetaieva and the endurance of all great art, to the success of Marguerite’s project, to my work at home, to Svetlana and everything she does and for being such a fine interpreter and companion and friend and showing and teaching me things I never would have seen or known, to our two girls and all our families and friends, to returning to Moscow soon, to her visiting America and our being her sponsors and me her guide for a day or two, to continuing good relations between our countries, democracy in hers, to eternal peace between them, peace and disarmament everywhere and good health and happiness and cooperation everywhere too and more dinners for the three of us like this one, future toasts. Then we’d ask the restaurant to order a taxi and we’d drop her off at a metro station, kiss each other’s cheeks, give her her five days’ salary and a twenty-dollar tip and some kind of present — one of the scarves Marguerite brought as presents from America, cologne from America or probably both if she hasn’t given them away yet. Or I’d get out of the cab and help her out and then kiss her, or we’d drive her home no matter how far out of the way and wait in the cab till she got in her building. Or I’d walk her to her first-floor hallway and stay there till she was upstairs and in her apartment or had enough time to get inside. Or we’d cab straight to our hotel and give our presents and enough extra fare in dollars for the cab to take her home.

Back in New York Marguerite says “It’s so strange to think the last day you see some person, very active and energetic and seemingly healthy, is the last day of that person’s life, or the last night.” “Very odd,” I say, “very.” “And I forgot to tell you. That Katya — you remember her, Svetlana’s friend who went over there with the police? Well she said Svetlana was planning to give us a little party at her place after her last workday, or really not so little. After dinner, that she would invite some of her friends-interpreters and people in teaching and editing — and ask me for names of people I’d seen who might want to come, or anyone I wanted. I doubt many of them would have come, unless they lived close by. And I would have done what I could, without hurting her in any way, to dissuade her. But that’s something for her to want to do, since she was short of money and you’d think she’d be too tired that day to give it. I’m thinking now though. I’m having this very bad thought, without wanting to sound as if I don’t appreciate what she wanted to do, but that her stroke saved us from it. It would have been the last thing I wanted, at her place or any place but, to be honest, less at her place. Her friends were probably bright and nice but a bit dull. Or maybe not, but you know, I just wouldn’t see the reason for the party. I don’t know how we could have refused it though, do you?” “Too tired and busy. We were leaving in a day and a half and you needed to see some more people or do research or go over your notes or something. And we also had to pack and were almost too tired for even that.”