Moscow farewell

This particular pursuit took its fated course. While girlish modesty kept the "devoted friends" walking vaguely in their former direction, contending they couldn't consider a stranger's invitation, toothy grins showed that Alyosha's disarming one had done its work. Even when his humor is at their expense, new girls sense that good feeling underlies the mischievous enticements, and that sexual danger will leave them otherwise unharmed.

"Surely no one reared with our humanitarian precepts can be so heartless. IVhy won't you say where you're going? Will you 'fess up if I guess?"

Like a silent movie stock figure, the taller girl tried to mask her delight with a frown of proper affront. Convinced they had protested enough, the other betrayed apprehension that Alyosha might become discouraged. He did not.

"You're en route to an engagement? The conservatory, perhaps? You are—let's think—contrabassoonists? . . . / know: you're late for the evening plane to Cameroon. The country's

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going to pot: Black Africa gobbles up all our best exports. In you go, I'll rush you to the airport."

Giggling openly now—in response to the flattery of his attentions rather than appreciation of the patter: neither had heard of Cameroon or bassoons, let alone the understood triple entendre about "pot"—the girls allowed themselves to be guided into the car. Under a layer of refrigerated air, their overcoats smelled of years of use. Because we knew what was coming, Alyosha and I sensed in their breath, the residue of a cheap brand of bologna on which they had lunched, a fragrance of sex. He stretched a hand toward the back seat to squeeze the girls' in a clinching gesture of welcome, then stopped the car to rearrange the blanket over the bare springs on which they were riding, apologizing for the inconvenience in Fernandel-style profusion. In that one moment he had given them more courtly affection and entertainment than they had seen in real life.

But certain as it was, the lovemaking would come only after preliminary rituals. Alla's apartment, available while her husband was inspecting provincial factories, is near the center of the unfinished development with the sidewalks of bottles and broken bricks. When we arrived, she was frying the potatoes and cubing Alyosha's find of tender beef for Stroganoff. The girls wore the limp skirts and sweaters of my high school's poor twenty years ago. Welcoming them as old friends, although she'd been expecting only Alyosha and me, Alia offered them a bath and ran their water.

Emerging pink and chatty, they experimented with Alla's black market cosmetics, a treat followed by examination of her new Amerika magazine while we three completed the meal's preparations. Alyosha occasionally leaped from the kitchen to attend to their uncertainly held cigarettes with a French butane lighter whose shininess alone flattered their self-esteem. In between, he entertained us all with commentary about why native scientists led the international field in the study of mathematical probabilities and deviation, ending with a homemade punchline blending innuendo and burlesque to suggest it was all sublimation, since no one could deviate in real Soviet life. Then he donned his dark glasses in aid of his theory that human

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beings can fool themselves about anything—in this case, that Moscow was Sun City.

It was an evening like a hundred others. A table laden with Alyosha's provisions of vodka, wine and hors d'oeuvres. Toasts that appeared to grow funnier; laughs that got unmistakably louder; an outpouring of random talk to match the consumption of food and to enhance a sense of stolen well-being that waxed into sensuousness. Old tapes, transcribed from black market records, of the Cream and Diana Ross on a straining, throbbing recorder. Free-for-all dancing with energy and endurance in inverse proportion to its lack of refinement. And Alyosha pulling us up again for one more fling, tipping the bottle for one more drink, remembering one more joke—about the Bible salesman posing as a Serbian philologist—to fit that moment's theme.

Beyond the extravagance of the occasion, the girls understood little. Heads already spinning from the Hungarian salami and Revlon lipstick, even from their joyride in Alyosha's car, they succumbed to their lucky destiny, with only a pro forma contempt for vodka in the usual platitudes. Savoring their individual chocolate bars and sipping the last of their wine, they spoke of their preferences for film stars and summer plans.

The lovemaking followed in its turn, after the brief shock of Alla's undressing and the girls' mandatory declaration of unwillingness. "Individualistic" at first (while Alia patiently waited), we were soon five bodies entwined together, laughing, grunting, exchanging, teasing a tattered stuffed panda. Liberated from everything but astonishment about themselves, the new girls thrust their loins proudly in our faces. The more sophisticated Alia—who was also more experienced in group evenings, having known Alyosha for weeks—used a leaf of the rubber plant to invent an anatomical quiz.

In the morning, the girls begged Alyosha to concoct an excuse to free them from work. "Alyoshka, please Alyoshinka—can't we spend just today with you?"

Behind the surface of ice and prudery, irritability and drabness, this hedonism flourishes like jungle foliage. I've often seen such lust before, but never this surrender to it: sex to the

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limit of human appetite, as in the legendary—and real—Russian capacity for food and drink.

The memory of my first evening with Alyosha stands out from the jumble of all later ones. Although he knew me only as Anastasia's new lover, with whom he'd barely exchanged a few jesting hellos when lending us his apartment for trysts, he invited me to a party and regaled me with caviar and anecdotes. More poised and elegant than almost all who would follow, the girls were an aspiring actress and two models sporting trouser suits acquired from tourists. I hadn't seen false eyelashes in Moscow before, or that degree of female chic.

The celebration was in honor of the actress's November birthday, and of Alyosha's attachment to her, for they had once had an absorbing affair. During supper at an expensive Intourist restaurant, his hands stayed busy refilling glasses and adding food to heaping plates; his table was a refuge from every care in the world—including my first friction with Anastasia—except the stretching of stomachs and bladders. At midnight, we returned to his apartment for nightcaps and an hour's dancing.

One girl said she was tired and another remarked it was warm in the room—and suddenly, but nonchalantly, the three were taking off their clothes. Neither exhibiting themselves nor covering up, saying nothing in particular to me—as they hadn't all evening—they removed their underwear, ran a hand over their flat stomachs and reached for cigarettes, while I loved, feared, envied, wanted them.

Like a memory of my favorite sexy film, my mind's eye had already begun to rerun the miracle of their undressing. Brassieres cast off like gloves and breasts springing to life in slow motion as they were freed—with not a flicker of surprise, let alone of shame, on the three Slavic faces. Breasts so sylphlike that I remembered my adolescent doubt that I'd touch even one of that perfection in my life. Blood of astonishment flushed in my eyes as well as surging to my groin. Three white-skinned, long-limbed visions, as glorious as I'd ever seen, standing before me at the mirror, taking turns brushing their hair. Their nipples puckered. They were persimmon and pink. I had met these Aphrodites hours before.

Apprehension of the unknown topped off my astonishment. Thoughts of perversion, of my performance, of provocation and

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related dangers alone in a Russian apartment. I tried to imagine what Alyosha was planning for us and these exquisite three. And why this lavish generosity for me, a much younger, less interesting stranger? He was in the kitchen, washing glasses for tea. At a loss for what to do alone with them, I brought him some dirty dishes.

"My God, are they serious? What happens next?"

He cut me a fat slice of cake. "Orthodox custom stipulates rest after dinner, it's become something of a ritual. But maybe you're militantly anticlerical, muchacho? Shall we compromise on a nap?"

The models sashayed into the kitchen, two narrow-waisted cousins with Veruschka's cheekbones. Waiting with me for Alyosha to complete the tray, they put their arms on my hips as if we were at the rails of a skating rink. (With a lightning flick of the wrist, Alyosha drew the kitchen curtains. Whatever other danger was only in my imagination, that of neighbors seeing such a sight was wholly real.) I yearned, and feared, to kiss their lips—on the face first and then the others, with their russet covering. I hoped they didn't hear the boom-boom in my chest. I'd still not dared to make a move when the actress shouted to her friends, now flanking the refrigerator. "Not fair jumping the line out there, it's my birthday," she protested from the bed. A minute later, we were entangled together on it, the models chortling and moaning.

I woke up a dozen times before dawn, giving and taking what I wanted from the silky arms and legs. The warmth beneath the quilt smelled of cologne and sex. Thoughts about a provocation still lingered near me, to my annoyance; but if these were to be my last hours before a KGB arrest, I could only be grateful for the bargain. After many siren calls and echoes, a sweet soreness developed at the place of my passion, but like the Russian song, I reached for the taller model "one last time," while the younger one snuggled against us, cooing in semislumber. Then—final wonder!—the actress thanked one and all for her "yummy" night of love.

"No one can count the uncountable," goes the old Russian saying. Although it is impossible to speak of Alyosha without

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starting with his girls, it's no less possible to convey their numbers without resorting to a dry tally or some mechanical image. (Years ago, he himself attempted a count in order to parry stories he considered exaggerated. A nymphet's mother had caught him in the act, and before he could pacify her, there was a threat of prosecution and a need, in case things went to court, for facts. But after days of making lists on bits of napkin and notepaper, he gave up, estimating three thousand.) It can only be said that his conquests—a misleadingly mechanical image too, depriving the encounters of their shared communication through recklessness and laughter, not to mention the "victim's" own assertive pride—are a sea of Slavic flesh. A biblical multitude of rustic faces and springy bodies on the pattern of Masha's in the dormitory. Rarely do I return to his car after five minutes buying a bottle or picking up some tickets without a new one, or pair, bashfully waiting on the back seat to be driven to the place of their entertainment and seduction.

Although no Kremlinologist will ever hear of him, he is better known to the city's working class teen-agers than Podgorny or Suslov. Fully a quarter of those he approaches recognize the name "Aksyonov" from Moscow gossip, reacting to it with eager anticipation. Even factory girls in back-street areas know him by reputation: friends or friends of friends have enjoyed a few days with him themselves or have had him pointed out in a movie lobby or on a beach.

They are surprised, however, when Alyosha claims the name for himself Although he is a boyish fifty with soft hair and a handsome plane of cheek, his nose, as he puts it, "isn't a faultless fit." Too large, it also tends to redden. In general, the young audience had associated his notoriety with a taller, more dashing appearance.

"You're Aksyonov? I don't believe you."

He sighs. "As well you shouldn't. Moscow's teeming with you-know-who dying to impersonate the proletariat. Whisper your telephone number and I promise not to believe you."

Not noticeably cleverer than average, the statuesque brunette with the large, appealing mouth can only think to answer with a stubborn repetition of her doubt. The exchange is taking place in a fish store into which Alyosha has dashed for the makings of

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"luncheon" for another recruit, a Nordic-looking blonde strenuously coaxed from a minibus ten minutes earlier. With only a short lunch break from her office, the blonde is waiting restively in the car.

Not the least of Alyosha's urgent preoccupations is how to please her with a fresh carp without standing on the quarter-hour line which has formed for them. Because he is trying to hold the brunette's attention without leaving the store with her—in which case the self-respecting blonde, beholding his game, would instantly abandon him to his high jinks—Alyosha cannot spare more than ten-second dashes to charm the stout counterwoman weighing and wrapping the carp at the rear of the premises. At the same time, while we mentally calculate prices and count our money (behind fleetingly turned backs, so as not to "offend our new friend's dignity computing raw cash," as Alyosha explains) to see if the change will suffice for beer, a purchasing ticket must be punched at the head of a separate line to the cashier's booth, this time near the entrance. Trying to tiptoe into this second queue, Alyosha spies a People's Judge in the person of a square-jawed, box-bodied matron in whose court, a room of echoing pronouncements about the duties and moral obligations of Soviet citizenship, he sometimes appears. "Oh . . . er . . . top of the morning to you, Comrade," he singsongs, backing away from his line-butting and simultaneously trying to hide— but still not lose—the puzzled brunette. "It's a wonderful invention, don't you agree?" he continues, pointing to the cashier's abacus in an attempt to explain his behavior to the dour magistrate, and smooth his way free. "I'm always inspired by the skill of Soviet hands."

Having juggled brunette, counterwoman, judge, cashier and a former girl friend who appears in the shop at the last, disconcerting moment—Alyosha wants nothing at all from the latter except not to offend her with the sight of his new love—he will rush back to the car just as the impatient blonde is leaving and drive her to his apartment for a quick meal. No time to do justice to the carp. Then she must run; her turn will come after work tomorrow. But the brunette, who thought she came to the store for salted herring, is free for later this afternoon—and, with precious seconds ticking away, must be enticed on this final try.

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"Can you meet me at two? You won't consider it? I respect your principles, of course. Shall we then say . . . three?"

Alyosha knows that she will indeed meet him that afternoon unless prevented by an unusual exigency, and be spread-eagled on his bed within an hour or two. He is no less certain that unless exceptional in some way—as in the case of the blonde, who boasts a fey sense of humor—she will disappear from his life, in a sexual sense, by the weekend. Without analyzing his problem in any depth—although the driest of his sarcasm is reserved for self-commentary, he is not given to introspection—he recognizes that his Don Juan drive is an expression of a fundamental disturbance. "In case you haven't noticed, the symptoms are a preference for pairs, youth and brief encounters," he once said. "Quantity bewitches, quality unnerves. I give them all a bath, and myself a shifty laugh."

When he related how he first noticed his obsession, self-disparagement thinned his normally whimsical voice. "Libidinally speaking" he had a normal youth and adolescence, he said; he was even faithful to one girl friend throughout the war—which now seemed inexplicable. But one night several weeks after his marriage, he was in bed with his darling bride—divorced from him a quarter century ago, although their friendship is still the comfort of their lives—when he realized that she played no part in the animation of his erection. "It stood," he explained in the Russian vernacular, "but not for her.''''

He feigned sleep at her side for another dismaying month, almost bursting with a hardness she could not relieve. Although it quickly led him into his compulsive search for fresh bodies, his first brief session with a teen-age pickup gave him a kind of peace. Soon he needed daily fixes.

"I'm genuinely sorry to interrupt your private thoughts, but might you spare me a moment? Dare we break the senseless barrier of nonacquaintance estranging us?"

Countless repetition has so smoothed his patter that you'd expect the lines to be stale. You would assume he is weary, perhaps even resentful, of the compulsion to recruit. In fact, however, each time the pursuit is set in motion—be it the third time that morning and twentieth that week, be he fagged after days of furious activity and nights with little sleep—-a surge of

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fresh energy rejuvenates him. Each new lass is a challenge, a prize, a bewitching new world; never mind the thousands of identical worlds previously explored. Besides, despite his inability to go deeper, he genuinely likes the girls at sight, and they sense this affection even before the signals of sexual appetite. The curious combination of predatory hunger and paternal fondness expresses itself in his round vowels and Clark Gable smile.

A certain percentage of his sweethearts last weeks. Others, like Efficient Alia, are returned to occasionally when husbands are away or other circumstances make them temporarily available. A few special friends are "joined with," as he likes to put it, for months and, in the rarest cases, a full year; and under the duress of hurt vanity, Alyosha can sometimes "congress"—as he also says; like writers, he avoids repeating a word, in this case the lusty Russian for "fuck," in consecutive sentences—with dear old friends of many years. But in most cases, he loses interest, and therefore can't perform, after three or four times. "A played card," he says with some sadness. An "old card," by contrast, refers to girls over twenty-five, whom he ordinarily avoids.

The girl wore imported ski pants and a bemused expression that enhanced her charm on this frosty afternoon. But a shade of something odd piqued her relationship with Alyosha from the moment of their meeting two hours ago in the gay skating rink adjoining Lenin Stadium. Demurely accepting his invitation to the apartment, sipping a thawing measure of vodka and nibbling at his shashlik, she sustained her knowing-something-significant detachment. Her secret is revealed only when Alyosha is bearing down between her up-pointed legs.

"You don't remember me," she says coolly from beneath him. "Four years ago, here on the couch. I was a silly high-school kid."

Surprise, worry and perverse delight widen Alyosha's eyes, but his reply is pure deadpan. "Of course I remember, darling. How could I ever forget that unique, unforgettable night?"

But the knowledge of previous possession turns him soft. When she leaves the car, he turns to me for comfort. "Honest to God, I wish women wouldn't talk so much. . . . And what about me? Age is the scourge of memory cells."

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Alyosha's need for new partners keeps him in a state of perpetual quest, adding a relentless burden to his otherwise remarkably busy day. If only the energy expended coping with his self-imposed tasks had been channeled into some constructive pursuit, his artistic friends sometimes lament. Such a man!—who can converse with German tourists on the basis of a year's two-hours-a-week course in a slum high school thirty-five years ago; who steals the show at any table or party of Moscow wags. What a tragedy that all this, with nowhere creative to go, is dissipated in his fetes.

His discourse, say these friends, is by itself evidence of unusual mental gifts. Russian is a keener measure of intelligence than many other languages because its complexity and inflection force grammatical errors even from educated natives; yet it is supremely rich and flexible in the service of imaginative and exacting minds. Alyosha's everyday idiom is like an Irish diplomat's English: even when the substance is nonsense, the flow itself provides aesthetic pleasure. Sometimes too slick and cute, his conversation, however, is never commonplace, but full of vivid original allusions and intentionally obsolescent, as well as the newest, turns of phrase. In his personal campaign to keep the language fertile and precise, he spars with literary acquaintances about the meanings, declensions and conjugations of obscure nouns and irregular verbs. Does "to miss" in the sense of "to feel the absence of" always demand the prepositional case, or in certain circumstances can it take the instrumental with inanimate objects? Can a thing as well as a person be odyevat (dressed), or is nadyevat alone correct? After a stiff" debate, the proof is sought in one or another of his dictionaries of Russian and foreign words, a collection dominated by the classic twelve-volume Dahl which stands at the ready, often under a pair or two of panties, on a trunk alongside his bed.

Although other friends deny that he has any remarkable creative potential—Alyosha is best, they say, at what he now devotes himself to: playing to impressionable female audiences— most acknowledge that the makings of excellence are somewhere in him, atrophying daily. Yet each day is also testimony to his baffling vigor. I've seen him rise at six; renail his splitting toilet

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seat; change the brake fluid and hammer a bit on his bashed fender (to avoid a penalty for operating an eyesore on Moscow's streets); run an iron over a shirt washed for his appearance in court; buy and prepare breakfast for four; deliver his three guests to various parts of the city and himself, frantically late, to his 10 A.M. trial; sit in his courtroom all day, composing and delivering a forceful—and futile—summation for a client heavily sentenced for buying up his own factory's ties to peddle them on the black market; use the lunch break to bribe the friend of a friend for a plane ticket to Odessa which would otherwise require hours of standing in line; cruise the early evening crowds for new pickups; hustle again among the shopping throngs for supper provisions; deliver a friend's television set to an "underground" repairman; buy a pair of hardly worn shoes from one ex-girl friend for another's birthday; return to the apartment and answer a half dozen telephone calls from legal colleagues and friends proposing evening plans while scaling two kilos of fresh pike on a cutting board; finish making supper while entertaining his new guests with "home-brew" anecdotes from the kitchen; look up a disputed interpretation in the commentaries to the Criminal Code while the others are feasting; dig out the requested tapes for the evening's music from under a tumble of junk in the corner; lead the dancing with his singular blend of jitterbug and frug; and finally, take his pleasure with the new girl, or girls, even if a part of him would have been happy to dispense with the sexual consummation.

(In my longing for Anastasia, I will question him about his time with her, and he will single out her delight in language as the icing of her appeal. Telling The Seagull's Masha to "Close the window, tebe naduyet,'" one of the characters made an unintentional double entendre that could mean "you'll be knocked up" as well as "there's a draft on you." When in the whole of the Moscow Art Theater only they two laughed out loud, he knew he had to keep pursuing her.)

Having plopped prone after orgasm—which he can no longer reach easily, even when trying hard so that he can comply with his house rule, "Leave Naught Unfinished," and set out for an overdue appointment—he drags himself up again because he has remembered a final task. Donning a Finnish sheepskin jacket, one of the last surviving mementos of his gay blade days, over

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bare chest and underpants, he trudges into the 2 a.m. cold to drain his car radiator. Unable to find antifreeze for almost a month, unwilling to use alcohol because it would corrode the already suppurative hoses—replacement rubber is even harder to procure than antifreeze—he has been saddled with this before-bed imposition every night throughout the hardest part of the winter. It is a little touch of symbolism: little can be taken for granted here; nothing comes easy.

Ten years ago, he was a celebrity in Moscow's embryonic jet set of jazz musicians, beautiful women and car-owners: the several hundred hip personages who knew each other by sight or reputation, and whom certain doormen motioned to the head of the line, unbolting their portals. Although remarkably few for a city of this size, the sources of their status were, mutatis mutandis, those of the Chelsea set or swinging East Side. Good looks, rich parents, a collection of Beatles records, connections to the givers of good parties and to tipsters about where to find French perfume; it was often enough just to stand out, as Alyosha did most strikingly, in appearance, energy or savoir faire from Moscow's lackluster majority. The spice of every party and spinner of tomorrow-we-die illusions, he was beckoned to the tables of theatrical producers, underground icon suppliers and generals' sons. He also had his own supply of black market money for which, in addition to his vivacity, he was welcomed as a big spender in Moscow and on the Black Sea. And he was a dandy, dressing from socks to overcoats in then staggeringly expensive Western garments.

Even before his source of big wealth dried up, he began to retire from cafe society and operate as a loner. As his taste in women shifted from starlets to shopgirls, he tired of the pursuit of chic—sometimes more strident here, in proportion to the greater snob value of Italian boots—and grew increasingly fond of evenings with his anonymous brood. Still hailed on his occasional public flings to "in" places such as the Club for Cinema Personnel, he drifted to a simpler life, not bothering to replace his worn custom-made suits. Everything is homemade and makeshift, the freer to be of empty obligations.

For exercise he sometimes swims in the outdoor pool near the Kremlin or visits a banya for an hour of steam and birch besoms.

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But netless badminton, improvised during a picnic in four feet of snow, is more his style. Once a month, a massive cleanup puts his apartment into a kind of order. Car-owning friends call him for advice about valve troubles and bribable mechanics. He also works occasionally as a volunteer legal counsel for a financial watchdog commission: possible "insurance," in the form of testimony to his "Soviet probity" in case he is one day prosecuted for his manifestly un-Soviet way of life.

His car deserves a separate annalist. No time can be spared for the major overhaul each part cries out for; the goal is to get it going today, which calls for a unique blend of knowledge, patience and touch. The twelve-year-old Volga with the hand-made clutch, ceiling lined with dress material and riding characteristics of a surplus tank has not a single original moving part. It hauls literally everything: last week, a new bathtub from a warehouse to his apartment. (A hole had been punched in the old one at a party.) Alyosha's driving on icy back streets—and in accordance with Moscow's unilluminated road signs and tomes of rules— matches the native "Yankee ingenuity" of his make-do repairs. Even after consuming great quantities of vodka, his reflexes remain keen enough to negotiate vicious potholes on dim streets without sharp swerving, and to fool policemen who stop drivers at random, arresting all who betray the slightest sign of drink. When he zooms into side streets to check whether a KGB car is tailing us, it is always just casually enough not to betray the maneuver.

With all this to cope with, his sexual quest, which seems fueled by an independent source of energy, illustrates the old adage about only busy men having time to take on something new. Keeping eyes peeled for comely faces is an unshakable habit, as is the procedure of "registering" for later enjoyment discoveries who will not accompany him on the spot. The vagaries of communication here—many girls without home telephones who can be reached only at work, others who have moved or make mistakes in giving their new addresses—require care in recording "coordinates." Alyosha performs this job with characteristically swift, and distinctly un-Russian, attention to detail, jotting down names, telephone numbers, addresses and—with girls who have troublesome husbands or parents—third-party contacts. In two

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weeks, a pocket notebook is filled from cover to cover with such information in a neatly compressed hand, supplemented by three-word descriptions of each subject, lest he forget—although this is rare; his memory of a thousand look-alike Natashas is phenomenal—as well as sketches of cabins and houses and, where needed, coded doorbell rings, nasty neighbors to avoid in communal apartments and diagrams of lanes too small for mention on the Moscow map.

To help with identification, the "cadres" are entered with nicknames. Compared to its richness of idiom, Russian is disproportionately hard up for contemporary common names: of ten teen-aged girls, seven are Galya, Natasha, Tanya or Svet-lana. For us, therefore, there is "King-size" as well as "Angry-brother," "Cheeky-tits" and "Everest" Natasha; while "Efficient," "Toenails," "Two-at-once," and "Lickety-split" distinguish one Alia from the others. (All hell broke loose one evening—the rare exception to the rule of good fellowship in Alyosha's brood—when "Commissar" and "Left-wing" Galyas met on the same bed.)

Yet the life of these crammed notebooks is as limited as that of top-secret code sheets. When a new one is well started, the previous edition is casually discarded. Passing a trash basket, Alyosha will let drop a little black book without breaking stride and briskly walk on.

"Jeez, look what you've done," I lectured the first time I observed a register thus disposed of "I'm glad I've got gloves." The little notebook that had disappeared into a post-office urn soggy with cigarette butts and spittle contained the "coordinates" of two or three dozen girls so lusty, friendly and willing that I was certain he'd made an unconscious mistake.

"Some people feel such collectanea should be burned," he pretended to explain the "error." "But this is a free country. All that Pentagon paranoia about staying eternally security-conscious, it's not needed here. We're secure enough just to throw old things out."

The disposition of these "encumbering" archives helps explain the poverty-amidst-plethora paradox of Alyosha occasionally finding himself without a soul to call. This usually happens after 7 P.M. on weekends, when the streets have largely emptied of

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likely pickings and many pretty girls, already out for the evening, are unavailable by telephone. The last such occasion found Alyosha and me stuffed in a forlorn telephone booth on a street desolate of buildings and trees. While the wind flayed us through its broken panes, he racked his memory for a promising candidate.

"For the love of God," I pleaded, pulling a fat register from his ancient sheepskin's pocket. "Let's be fussy next time. Just call one of these."

"Naw," he mumbled, "that's a superseded book." And he resumed retracing his recent movements to recall the new face that would make the evening.

It should be said that exceptional names in old books are usually transferred to the new one—and also that Alyosha's memory allows him to contact cadres recorded in books disposed of months ago. Nevertheless, it still represents a research loss equivalent to a graduate student destroying a month of dissertation notes. But Alyosha's analogy is quite different. "Old cards," he says, answering my persistent double take. "Are you hungry? Want something solid to eat?"

His address, by contrast, is the feature entry of a thousand otherwise blank-paged engagement books rattling in bare teenage pocketbooks; a steady troop of "Erstwhiles" use it as a guide to swinging Moscow, and more. Although most quickly accept the improbability of repeating their sexual festival with him, let alone developing a romantic attachment, they continue to bring him a domestic court variety of personal problems. Driven by his own compulsion, burdened by a dozen daily concerns ranging from where to find a camshaft to how to repay his oldest debts, he stoically adds others' delicate errands to his ever-growing list. One girl—whom he hasn't seen for three years—wonders how to retain squatter's rights to her dying mother's apartment; another has been caught stealing candy from her factory (she hid the chocolates in her hair) and is desperate to keep her job; a third has a boss who demands a kickback on her wages—and, incidentally, she is troubled by crabs. (When Alyosha's salve eliminates them, she brings two girl friends similarly afflicted— with whom he "joins" after checking the results with a magnifying glass kept specially for the purpose.) But the case of the girl

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trying to obtain support for her baby from a father whom a misled court officer wrongly freed of his alimony obligation takes first precedence. Alyosha is the man to turn to in such emergencies: if it is possible to place the bribe, pry loose the information from a congenitally secretive bureaucracy, procure an expensive medication not available to the general public, he can be counted on to accomplish the mission.

Other Erstwhiles come just to see him—to find a place somewhere in his living room-bedroom-dining room-cabaret, leaf through the alluring stack of dirty Lifes and Elles and enjoy the charged atmosphere his movements generate in any room: the fission of excitement and action in a city devoid of night life. Alyosha's attraction is more than the goodies of his kitchen and repertoire of jokes, larger than his whimsical-yet-supercharged commentary on the day's events. He provides nothing less than the "love of life" which every newspaper claims daily for the slogging Soviet people ("joyous and life-loving, we follow Lenin's path . . ."), but which is as absent on the evening streets as everything else for which propaganda is served up as a substitute.

Somewhere Alyosha too is very sad. On New Year's Eve, the only time I've seen him conspicuously drunk, he told me that aging libertines and clowns disgust even themselves. (This was the one time too when raw bitterness showed beneath his layers of political sophistication and sarcasm. "I hate these Kremlin bastards," he said. "Those stupid animals who've done this to all of us—I'd like to take a machine gun down there and do the world a favor.") Yet he revels in life, taking and giving delight with elements of Candide, Tom Jones and Puck. Only cliches— Western "zest for life" as well as Soviet "life-affirming"—can suggest his effect on others, for he's more like a jolly fictional hero than gravity-gripped flesh and blood. The more I try to fix the sources of his appeal, the farther I slip from the elusive buoyancy, for all that is most lovable about him—the impromptu repartee, happy-go-lucky saunter, eyes screwed up with the full range of human emotion—is the least describable. His audience is kept in smiles even between stories, convinced that they too can love life and be happy.

This is what prompts girls to spend their evenings "out" simply sitting as onlookers in his heroically cluttered room. In twos and

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threes, they beat a path to his out-of-the-way apartment house and find their way, uninvited, to his tumbledown door, sometimes years after he had spent his few hours with them. One evening, five separate pairs arrived on their own between 7 p.m. and midnight. When business has delayed him in town, he returns home some evenings to find small gatherings encamped on the log bench which has been cleared of snow in the village-like courtyard.

To pass their waiting hours, the shivering Erstwhiles make each other's acquaintance and drift into gossip, a practice that has led to the formation, independently of Alyosha, of half a dozen pairs of best friends. Bouncing home with bottle-stuffed pockets and an accumulation of newspaper-wrapped provisions miraculously balanced on both arms, Alyosha introduces the waiting girls to the new ones accompanying him, and all mount the stairs in quiet single file. He runs back down to the car for his briefcases, which vie with his nose as his best-known trademark. The battered skins are so outrageously packed with jars, cans, bottles and hunks of soup bones—never office papers, which are crammed into pockets—that many girls can't lift them. After the food and dancing, which is for everyone, the old girls watch television or skim magazines while Alyosha, several feet away in the small, undarkened room, "joins with" the new.

Highly inventive in his lovemaking—although that image is somewhat imprecise, all possibilities of experimentation having been exhausted thousands of bodies ago—Alyosha fondles and kisses his new sweetheart's sex, often squatting beneath her as she straddles him on the weary bed. While the satisfaction of lust wafts lymphatic odors through the room, only the shyest of Erstwhiles remove themselves to the kitchen or bathroom. Most keep to their magazines and small talk, neither staring nor averting their eyes, protesting nor offering to leave. So many Russian girls—or are they only Alyosha's devoted?—blushed scarlet when he first stopped them on their aimless strolls, but now watch their counterparts copulating as if they were vacuuming a rug.

Whatever the explanation of this, I've never seen Alyosha turn a visitor away. "Christ, it's cold out there," he'll say, as if apologizing to me for opening up to yet another unannounced

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caller. "Poor things probably came on an unhealed bus. Let's give them something to munch. . . ." Very occasionally—during the final moments of "plumbing" a new girl, for example—he will refuse to answer any but the current version (cha cha cha-cha-cha) of the code knock for his closest insiders. But once the door is opened, his face creases deeply with tickled surprise, welcoming the guest more warmly with it than by his sometimes inflated salutations.

Inside, food is the first concern. A psychiatrist might offer several explanations for his determination to feed all guests fully and well. Was he himself hungry as a child? (Not exactly, according to my understanding of his hardest early years.) Despite his merry insistence that sex has as much emotional significance as eating a grape, does he feel guilty about his vineyards of conquests? (Of the stupendous Niagara of socialist-Bolshevik-Marxist-Leninist social theory, only Alexandra Kol-lantai's famous dictum—subsequently repudiated by Lenin— that "in Communist society the satisfaction of sexual desires will be as simple and unimportant as drinking a glass of water" appeals to him.) Or, as one old friend insists, is his inordinate libido sublimated maternalism: does Alyosha want to be mother to the world's girls? Whatever the inner truth, he is so solicitous of his guests' appetites that when evening newcomers arrive to a refrigerator already emptied by earlier hospitality, he scoots off for new supplies—even though much of the day has been given to acquiring provisions for and preparing meals already consumed. He is a recognized customer at the city's five or six best peasant markets: grudging little concessions to private enterprise where vigilantly watched, vindictively taxed growers are permitted to sell a portion of their personally tended produce—always far superior to the stunted offerings of ordinary, state-run groceries— at stunning prices. Thanks to his steady emoluments—and that rarest of phenomena in public places: his good-natured smile— Alyosha is also known by the managers and tenders of strategic counters in a handful of the best-supplied meat, fish, salami and cheese departments. If there is any chance of parting these public servants from some of the latest shipment of rump steak or perch, much of it automatically reserved for their families and friends, it is Alyosha's.

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These daily extravagances have something in common with the progressively steeper borrowing of certain Russian aristocrats to finance brilliant balls to obliterate thoughts of their debts. Especially in winter, when four greenhouse tomatoes cost an engineer's daily wage and a pound of veal is a conversation piece, Alyosha leaves behind what the Russians call "a heap" on each dash into a market or shop. Where he gets his income is a separate story, not all of which I know. How he sustains the perseverance for his shopping forays—attracting the attention of besieged counter girls, darting from their lines to those stretching from the cashiers' booths, surveying a dozen stores, packed from wall to wall with gawking, babbling, pushing, waiting-for-a-miracle shoppers, as at noon in a Moroccan souk—is yet another matter. In ten minutes, he is in and jauntily out of such sea-of-downtrodden-humanity establishments, briefcases bulging with acquisitions that many would consider an afternoon's work.

Again, sheer physical energy—a rumba through the crowd to flirt with the counter girl, a deft backpedal to the entrance to smile to the dumpy cashier, a sprint to the nearest telephone, then to one that works (to call Gay Galya, as arranged, at precisely three o'clock) while the halvah is being wrapped—allows him to wriggle through and stretch over Muscovites' catalogue of obstacles to securing the perquisites for daily life. Occasionally he sighs that he's growing old fast, and old means ill; a shell of his former self, he is infected by a strange lassitude (but driven on by habit). Once he made this sound more than his usual self-mocking banter and spoke of visiting a clinic. But no doctor has laid eyes on him in almost thirty years, since his last haphazard checkup in the army. He has not been sick since—has not allowed himself to be: when he caught infectious hepatitis several years ago, he swallowed several aspirin, temporarily forsook vodka and returned to what for him was normal life after three days in bed.

Like poverty and the British royal family, illness and Alyosha are wholly unrelated aspects of life. My mind's eye image has him tanned, smooth-skinned and in quintessential health. Easygoing muscles, a slight sleekness of winter weight, a body that is not large, cared for or visibly powerful, but endowed with a charmed indestructibility that protects him even from the colds

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and influenza that lay low much of vitamin-starved Russia from October to May. He's the only adult I know who dispenses with a hat on all but the worst cold snaps, his shaggy pepper-and-salt hair presenting a quaint spectacle, since the other uncovered heads belong to teen-age boys demonstrating their toughness. And if his youthful endurance is in fact waning, he still requires only four to five hours of sleep a night, even after the craziest of his overloaded days.

For the self-invited guests who arrive late in the evening, finding food is distinctly more difficult. After 9 p.m., Alyosha must drive to one of the handful of late-closing shops, the location, staples and incidental specialties of which he knows better than most Moscowcityretailgrocerytrust officials. Up a murky street, through some deserted back alleys (in one of which live three teen-age sisters, consecutive Erstwhiles of a torrid week last summer), on foot across a final shortcut to a store whose principal objective is apparently to conceal itself from the public. "Of course it's hard to find," he sighs, setting up his favorite comment about Soviet rule's guiding precept. "Otherwise life might be marginally easier for people."

This particular Gastronomia, as it modestly calls itself, is a prewar relic with a sputtering sign and snarling counter women in soiled smocks. But its monumental obscurity provides a reverse advantage. Alyosha knows that even if its edible cheeses and occasional cans of crabmeat are exhausted at this hour, some chewable beef might be left, which could be nicely turned out with his dill sauce. Besides, the manageress of a smaller store only five minutes away can sometimes be persuaded to part with a few of the items pilfered for her just-married son.

If the last of these late-hour establishments is closed, Alyosha races to the one with the most bribable cleaning woman. Pounding on the bolted door, brandishing a handful of rubles— yet concealing them from police and public view—sustaining an attention-attracting jig and a stream of enticing patter punctuated by under-the-breath laughs at himself for submitting yet again to this ludicrous posture, he calls upon his most artful flattery to plead for delivery of a few items from a crone wielding a handleless mop. This having failed, he drives to the nearest restaurant and advances into the kitchen during the clanging

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moments before closing. Actually, this is not a restaurant but a relatively new cafe whose aluminium moldings have already begun warping away from steamy plate glass: a refuge—for proletarian curses, drunken bellylaughs and winter release— which few members of Moscow's intelligentsia, let alone foreigners, would have reason to enter. To discourage this, the scenes at the tables and in the toilet are quite enough, while the exchange of abuse and ultimatums in the kitchen, together with the utter disorganization of equipment and staff, make the establishment's reopening tomorrow, if ever, seem impossible. Only the Russian masses, unconscious of mere earthly comfort, could enjoy themselves in such squalidness; I want to both laugh and cry for them in their merry oblivion.

Alyosha is simultaneously at home here and totally alien, like a missionary with his loving natives. Amidst the cook's bellows, outraged shrieks of peasant dishwashers and mutterings of a drunken diner trying to reattach a sleeve onto his jacket, Alyosha does a deal with a venal waiter and the duty manager. (Years ago, when director of a better restaurant that foreigners are encouraged to visit, this manager used to transact a substantial volume of back-door trade with Alyosha, who himself then traveled in correspondingly higher circles. The restaurateur was dismissed for masterminding the theft of a relatively modest truckload of vinegar.) For a slight premium over the inflated menu prices, Alyosha's fallen friend supplies him with several portions of leftover chicken stew and a sufficient volume of (watered) wine. Successful at last, he gingerly sidesteps tables heaped with leavings and runny pools on the floor, and quickly drives home his catch to the waiting mouths. Then he watches them feed, washes, woos and wangs them to exhaustion.

The story of Suede Svetlana. Met on Sunday, in the ticket niche of the Metropole Cinema. (Though signally inadequate for the weather, her suede coat is too treasured not to be displayed.) Reluctant to join us because she has a ticket for the next showing, she comes to the apartment on Tuesday, drinks half a bottle of dessert wine and undresses. Her dimensions match her calling: she's a construction worker. On Wednesday, she is waiting impatiently at the door when Alyosha and I return in the car.

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Thursday, she suggests dirty photographs, poses energetically, but leaves in offense when other girls arrive. On Friday, I recognize her under a thick quilt jacket: she is the cement mixer for the new University building on the way to the metro—the one I happened to notice weeks ago, while passing with Masha from the dormitory. This time she is one floor higher on the building's shell, whither I yell.

"Hello there, Svetlana! Come to the cafeteria for some lunch with me."

"Can't just now; have to get on with this."

Monday, she is not on the site, and I never see her again.

It is not enough for Alyosha to supply food—even good or varied food which, for Russians without foreign currency or Intourist coupons, is so scarce that Westerners would regard details of the shortages and deteriorating quality as crude anti-Communist propaganda. "Naturally, caviar's too rich for Russian blood," he sighs. "But we used to get sturgeon, smoked salmon—at a pinch, bream or eel. Twenty piscatory varieties worthy of a guest. Now you're lucky—and understand me, I'm offering my thanks—to find a salted herring with enough fat to keep its bones moist." Nevertheless, he drives miles for the prize purchase that will make the meal. He judges meat quickly by color, texture and smell, and distinguishes Bulgarian from Polish frozen chickens at a glance. Rushing home, he finds a place to transfer the coffee grinder's components—it has been waiting weeks for repair—and plunges into work, plucking the chicken, scaling the fish or trimming the roast with his butcher's cleaver.

His dishpan hands are as resourcefiil in such operations as in repairing electric motors and—because of the abysmal professional service—effecting his own plumbing. He will try anything: carp baked in sour cream, chicken tabak in homemade hot sauce, raw scallops with his house dressing of lemon mayonnaise, mustard and dill. Fresh herbs, as rare and expensive in winter as copies of Penthouse, play a principal part in his specialties. Like a juggler, he clears a space to serve them, hunting for the last meal's cutlery to wash for the next.

Alyosha also likes catering to his visitor's whims. Even in late evening—when ninety-nine Russians in every hundred instinc-

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tively suppress their hunger in the knowledge that any foraging for soup and bread would be futile—he takes orders. When, in the city's midnight muteness, a sad-eyed provincial textile worker just recruited in a railroad station hints at a fondness for eggs, he changes direction for a hibernating village north of town, wakes the occupant of a ramshackle cottage and bargains for all the angry hens will relinquish at that moment. (Because of a periodic slump in Moscow's supply, we ourselves haven't had eggs for weeks.) Twenty minutes later, the hungry waif is spooning down a half dozen, fried in butter, and sprinkled lightly with petmshka, a spicy parsley. Probably because she knows few gentlemen among swilling foremen and muzhiks—not, incidentally, that she has often enjoyed eggs sur le plat in a lifetime of bread, kasha and potatoes—she rummages for a pail and rags to express her gratitude by washing the turbid foyer floor.

"Tomorrow's another day, Evgeniya darling," Alyosha gently reproves, setting her on the bed to remove her shoes.

When a stock girl in an inferior department store mentions she's never tasted voblya, the dried, salted little Volga fish exalted by Russian palates (and, like many traditional delicacies, disappearing even from the daily vocabulary), he scouts about among his warehouse contacts and manages to have a bucketful for her—with fresh, Zhigulovskoye beer, the brand we love to pronounce—the next time she appears.

"What the hell, let the child taste something exceptional before we import Coke," he explains en route to fetch his allotment of voblya (and simultaneously quickening his pace to intercept a brunette with superbly pouting lips). "What can she look forward to, macaroni day in the cafeteria? And when our Leninist Party, in its wisdom, buys pasta, it's reject stuff" the Sicilians or Syrians were tickled to unload."

This is the standard explanation for his intense commitment to the notion that everyone should secure maximum enjoyment from his nourishment. But the longer I know him, the more I perceive—unwillingly, because I do not want to know about his sadness—the deeper causes of his preoccupation. The devotion to indulging the appetite is also part of a hedonist's blind to convince himself that life is short and senseless, and that any striving for larger social or intellectual good is doomed from the

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Start. This, in turn, is used to prove that pursuit of artistic or humanistic values is grandiloquent self-deception: the farther people stray from animal needs, the greater their emotional disturbance and potential for causing do-gooder's damage. How much more honest and constructive, he argues, to find and prepare a leg of lamb than to improve the mind by composing odes to collective-farm shepherds or a new panegyric about the happiness of socialist sheep. "The country's real, operative rules are nasty and brutal," he says; "nothing significant in the sources of oppression will change in our lifetime. Trying to achieve something honest and worthwhile might deliver some good, but would probably also increase the pain to living people. The more mature responsibility is alleviating a few friends' blues." Filling his day with a thousand market errands, Alyosha simultaneously demonstrates his theory's partial truth and his need to believe it is the sum and substance of life.

The flaw in his cynicism is his own love of rationalism—and poetry—which peeks out when his guard is down. Whatever it also says about Russia's fate and the hardships of his youth, his compulsion to keep his hands busy and his mind occupied with chores is surely a diversion from an unconscious recognition of the dissipation of his gifts. In this sense, food joins sex as an escape from grievous truths about wasted energy and talent: his personal contribution to the country's tragedy and folly of the human condition.

But such speculation wholly misrepresents the gaiety of our days and genuineness of his generosity. Clanging his iron pots in the kitchen with the sink reachable only by stretching across the refrigerator and the forever faulty gas water heater, he bones his fish and salts his roast because it delights him to feast friends amid gastronomic famine. I've never known such happy giving, and his underlying wistfulness only sharpens its joy. The sad element is that he himself is largely indifferent to food except for new tastes—he yearns to sample artichokes and oysters—or on special occasions. Despite his promiscuous drinking ("Water can never quench a thirst /Once when broke, I tried it first") he often goes a full day without nourishment, a cook untempted by his own sauces. Or he'll have an early breakfast of bread and coffee

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and nothing further until a supper of boiled frankfurters. If hunger does come, he's content with leftovers. Sometimes I awaken to a sound at night and, peering over young female shoulders slumbering between our places on the bed, I see him at the bottle-strewn table, spooning down some cold casserole lying between picked bones on someone's plate.

When we pick her up in her school-uniform pinafore with the chaste white collar, Nadya says she's seventeen, but admits she may have "added a year or so." A Norman Rockwell sapling with bony knees and batting eyes, she devours a quarter-kilo chunk of apple tart held to her mouth like a chipmunk, then performs a surprisingly witty striptease, bowing to our applause. Legs extended, she examines herself in the mirror, delighting in our assurance that she looks fine down there.

Suddenly she jumps out of bed, throws on her clothes and glissades over the ice to a telephone booth. (Alyosha's phone is dead again, probably until the recording tape is changed on the morning shift.) Returning with Winesap cheeks, she announces that she's invited her best friend. "Verochka mustn't miss this . . . and she might not believe me if I just told her, with no proof"

Something in her very innocent enthusiasm prompts a wincing suspicion that it was not at all a friend she called, but her parents—or the police. She's an unpredictable child, after all. But Vera does arrive within the hour: a prettier girl with a snub nose and more developed curves. The two share a double desk in their homeroom class.

Naked again, Nadya greets Vera as if they'd met on some corner to stroll to school. Vera undresses in the bathroom and appears in a towel. In response to appreciation of her breasts, she reveals that she and Nadya are fifteen. Before they grow sleepy, they alternate between sharing giggling discoveries and friendly competition to restore erections. "No, it's my turn now. . . . Doit to me like she just tried it. . . . Verochka, lie over here and let them show you this.''

When Alyosha is attending to the car in the morning, I ask the classmates, for want of more enlightening conversation, whether

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they've been together Uke this before. No, this is their very first time. Then how have they managed the new, er, games with such aplomb?

"Oh, we're not so young as you think. We've been hoping to meet some interesting men. Hoping and waiting . . ."

Alyosha owes his handsome, akhough irregular, income and much more cherished command of his own time to a partial exception to Soviet economic rules. He is one of thirty lawyers in a cooperative called a Juridical Consultation Office—which, despite the political and professional restrictions of state control, Western eyes would recognize as a law office. Schedules of permitted fees and heavy taxes notwithstanding, the members of this legitimate sanctuary of semiprivate enterprise work largely for themselves, running their own practices and working lives— and, if unusually energetic and capable, earning a schoolteacher's weekly salary in a matter of hours. Besides, knowing defendants slip twice the maximum official fees under the table to all established law counselors, hoping for more conscientious briefs and better luck at their trials. Thus Alyosha's relative riches.

Thus too his intimate familiarity with the meshed operations of state and self-interest. The information and experience of years in court, access to confidential whispers and trusting relationships with speculators and other former clients supplement a powerful native practicality, finely attuned to beating the system through bribes and inside intelligence. And he protects himself through his meticulous understanding of bureaucratic, legal and political dangers, allowing him maximum area of maneuver with minimum risk.

Yet the gaps in his knowledge are as instructive as his operator's expertise. As privy as he is to the secrets of whom to see for assignment of a new apartment in a railroad workers' building, which black market duke can supply a Parker pen or Yugoslav refrigerator, how much to shell out for a Moscow residence permit, he knows almost nothing of the sociopolitical stuff of New York—or even sophisticated Moscow—dinner party conversation. This ignorance too is a deliberate good-time Charlie's blind. "Why work myself up about the persecution of

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this errant intellectual or which mental asylum that dissenter is languishing in?" Beyond learning the names of the new martyrs —Fainberg today, Gorbanyevskaya tomorrow—such details, he says, reveal nothing new about the nature of Soviet rule or his place under it, both learned long ago. Nor do newspapers, which he pretends are sold for wrapping contraband and for patching walls. "What do a thousand Pravdas contain that we don't know? That has the slightest bearing on our lives, on what concerns us?""

What concerns us is exclusively the fixing that affords comfort and pleasure to our daily lives. The ceaseless barrage of hosannas, production figures and political indoctrination has no more relevance to our hunt for lemons, Alyosha says, than to insects boring through bark. The whole of the official world is a giant exercise in lies and fantasy—better to be consciously blocked out than simply ignored. Since the Soviet version of foreign events makes them farcical irrelevancies, Alyosha also knows and cares almost nothing about them. Only occasionally does he put a question, assuming my Western sources will provide an easy answer. Have Arab terrorists killed neutral civilians at European airports? Are peasant refugees fleeing the Vietcong? Did America react violently to the Soviet "education tax" imposed on would-be Jewish emigrants? In these queries, he wants to confirm hunches about certain sequences of events, deduced from the Soviet presentation's very fallaciousness.

But such interest is incidental; and he usually avoids more than the political aspect of social thought. "Heavy" films, plays, novels and conversations—anything smacking of "culture" and meaning-of-life rumination—are equally shunned. "Has it got a Hollywood ending?" he asks when I suggest a play. "A good cancan somewhere? . . . Splash and flash, a bit of leg—you know what the likes of us need." He insists that And God Created Woman —seen at a special, closed showing for cinema personnel— has done more for mankind than Hamlet; that Peter Ustinov is more humanitarian, because he offers more relief to the masses, than Dostoyevsky; and declares people unbalanced who spend money, let alone their precious free time, subjecting themselves to gloomy theater. The novelist's and dramatist's obligation is to give the psyche two hours' rest from the injustice, hardship and tragic futility that are the stuff of Soviet life.

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"We don't need art to stimulate morbid meditation; good old life takes care of that. No sir, escape's the thing: a good beat in the sound track, frolics on the screen."

But of all his attempts at self-deception, this is the most obvious. The sham preference for "gladden-the-heart" entertainment is a dead giveaway to the depth of his feeling about art's true function. It is to avoid Soviet drama's half-truths and falsifications—which deprive a wounded people even of catharsis for their inexplicable sufferings—that he fakes disdain for "the theater of masochism" and pretends, when handing me yellowed volumes of his favorite novels and prose poems, that he's happy to rid himself of old junk.

This has a more intimate meaning too. "Escape's the thing" draws me to him and absolves me from heeding ordinary rules and norms. The distinction between us in our private passageways to subterranean chambers and the outer world through which we conspiratorially burrow is as real as a child's make-believe. But although we lose ourselves wholly in our diversions and levity, our very escapism makes keener and more personal the conditions and thoughts we banish from conversation. Unhappi-ness is a step away, held back by our self-made timbers.

Cruising noonday Moscow in the trusty Volga, worrying about the effect of trenchlike winter potholes on its busted shock absorber, and about nothing else in the world. Puddles from my boots on the car's bare steel floor—the rubber mats are long departed and substitute linoleum was stolen last week—and my window cracked open to the sweet wet air. Alyosha's gloveless left hand gripping the top of the wheel cowboy-style, the right coaxing Czechoslovak jazz from the newly patched radio. ... I am in my soothing semitrance, gazing lazily at whatever passes my eyes. I hear no calls to scholarship, conscience or duty to get ahead in the world—not even to focus my vision on significant buildings. Aware that no Russian is as free to wander as Alyosha nor as savvy about Moscow's hurly-burly, I feel myself exceptional as his companion, but without the means or desire to advertise this to a third party. The city's labyrinths and sprawl, encrusted fa9ades and clumping crowds still exude enough

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exoticism—and Alyosha's command of time enough sense of purpose—that I need only be here, luxuriating in passivity as in my childhood fantasy of surveying the Casbah from a magic bed.

It is a warmish Wednesday that is turning ice to slush. Alyosha has fetched me outside the University to accompany him on his rounds, a standard agenda of appointments and errands. The first stop is to leave an antique samovar with a metalworker for polishing. Bought during his latest redecorating crusade, it will doubtless soon be sold to pay for a rainy day's fete.

(At the moment, however, we are filthy rich, thanks to a lucky professional coup. Two months ago, the wealthy parents of a swaggering Georgian convicted of rape approached Alyosha for help. Knowing his reputation in such cases, they could not, however, have hoped for the coincidence that saved their son: the victim happened to be a well-liked Erstwhile. Persuading her that the parents' cold cash would be more useful than her abuser's imprisonment, coaching her in a story attributing the assault to nightmares, arranging the payment of the bribes—involving great amounts, since the prodigal was already in a labor camp—Alyosha managed to spring the prisoner last week, pocketing a handsome commission on all the transactions.)

For ten minutes we ride in silence, something easier with Alyosha than anyone I know. The memory of my discomfort on our first outings^my habitual awkwardness in response to unearned generosity—only enhances my present sense of well-being. I used to wonder what animated his affection. Girls were one thing, but why did a man of his years and standing dash to the market for fresh greens for my supper? What, in fact, prompted him to invite me to that first party for the actress—and beam when I agreed to drive to a nearby village with him the following morning? But precisely his fondness has shown me that such questions need not always be asked. I've come to accept that he simply likes me with him, above all cruising in the car, and that I need do nothing in return. Certainly not provide the intellectual stimulation—the seeking of common ground through earnest discussions of The Youth Problem or Developments in Western Art—required by many Russians and foreigners recon-noitering toward a relationship; it was weeks before Alyosha and

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I first mentioned politics or literature. For some reason, he took to me at sight, and showed it freely and openly, like the uncle I liked best, who died at Alyosha's age off Anzio. . . .

The first stop. With the potbellied samovar, we jog down crumbling back stairs to the metalworker's place, a basement room straight from a mad-scientist movie. A refugee from a nineteenth-century ghetto, the old Jew who hears each outside sound as a pogrom's starting signal peers through an inch of opening in the bolted door of his illegal shop. At the sight of Alyosha, the exception to his rule of not traffickirig with gentiles, his face relaxes from suspicion and terror to mere tragedy and hypercaution; doom has been postponed until the next knock.

The business is concluded in a minute: the samovar will be ready next week and Alyosha will pay then; from him, no deposit is needed. As we leave, "Pops" manages a glance up into our eyes and a smile, as if we three have entered an alliance against maurauding mankind.

In the car again, Alyosha turns talkative. "It's no accident," he says in parody of Marxist historians, "that I fell for a Yank and a child of Israel." I take this as a new way of tossing me a compliment, but in fact it is an introduction for musing about his relationship to Jews. In black market affairs, his preference for them is practical. "With Jewish traders, a deal's a deal. They're sober and responsible—mature enough to trust." With Russians, by contrast, even the minority who know their craft or trade, vodka or indolence usually queers the arrangements. The promised article is not delivered; its supplier turns stoolie, disappears, or curses you for bothering him. "A Russian with money in his pocket thinks first of spending it, usually on a fling. About doing a job well, even protecting his reputation, he rarely cares."

But what of Alyosha's affinity for Jews as company? Here there is no sound sociological explanation; he simply feels less kinship to Russians, even those of his own cosmopolitan instinct. This puzzles him, and he wonders whether his never-seen father—a university student whom the family banished after the seduction that sired him—was Jewish.

The next stop is a nearby foodshop's spirits department, to return the unbroken wine and vodka bottles among the sixty-odd

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that have been chinking and smashing in the trunk. On to a secondhand bookstore where an old Erstwhile has promised to keep a lookout for a prerevolutionary dictionary I can sell at Harvard for a small fortune. Then to a secondhand clothing store that, under Alyosha's name, has taken a pair of my old boots on consignment. When the sale is made—not yet, as Alyosha is informed in the office—we'll split the twenty rubles: a concession to ritual, since money changes hand between us as if from the same pocket. Next, a women's shop, all plate glass and fluorescent lights, where a tip has it that mohair scarves are on sale to mark the grand opening. No luck: the goods were either never there, as the assistant manager assures us, or, as a salesgirl insists, were whisked from the counter to prevent damage to the new fixtures. Then to a private shirtmaker who is sewing ten pairs of underpants for Alyosha on the pattern of mine from Macy's. He is enthused about this because domestic models are made without openings.

"After fifty-five years of Soviet rule, we're on the way to engineering a fly in our drawers. Life's important things, as they say, take time. Meanwhile, when nature calls, a hundred million Russians try to work their he-man fingers around five hundred million buttons—zippers, presumably, are a nasty bourgeois trick—or reach in like this to dig out their dings through a leghole. Jesus Christ, pissing in this country is a trauma . . . Oops!" (He points to the Volga's roof, where a KGB microphone may be hidden. Although less certain that "ears" have been planted in the car than in the apartment, we try to confine all incriminating talk to the open.) "Oops, but we don't lynch blacks, do we, or bomb Asians. All progressive mankind is grateful for the inspired leadership of the USSR. And you and I, muchacho, must pledge yet again to intensify our fight against the dirty imperialist war in Vietnam."

Down Lenin Prospekt, with its growing busyness of cars and lights and back toward the center of town. As always, Alyosha's coat is open and his thin Soviet shoes soaked with slush; immune to winter, he rejects boots as oflhandedly as headgear. I can't remember Moscow before these rides, although this one has not been typical: we've spied but two girls, both unreachable in the traffic. Even the conversation about them has been limited to

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Alyosha's casual question of what I have in mind for the evening. I wouldn't mind inviting Marya the Muff, I answer, referring to a sloe-eyed teen-ager who has provided us with exceptional pleasure.

"But you had heryesterday,^^ Alyosha sighs in mock puzzlement over my "perversity"—and, I think, in a gentle campaign to make me sexually more like him. We're already so close; why not be brothers?

A snack of greasy cheburekhi sold from a booth. A quick stop at the Supreme Court of the Russian Republic: Alyosha must peruse a new directive, available to legal personnel but not to the public, in the revived campaign against state embezzlement. A longer call to a new enterprise equivalent to an advertising agency, where Alyosha is trying to get a secretary's job, through an acquaintance there, for an ex-girl. Then a visit to his own Juridical Consultation Office.

During the past few weeks, I've lost my apprehension about following him inside; this time, I have a good look while he collects his messages and confers with a colleague. For offices, the lawyers share nine toilet-sized cubicles in shifts throughout the day and evening. Each has a tiny desk and two chairs, one for the client; they all reek of urine because soused devotees of the beer hall next door piss nightly on the outside wall. For the thirty attorneys, two telephones are available in the corridor; in grave crises, a third, in the chairman's room, can also be used. Some clients dial literally all day without getting through, and energetic lawyers with urgent calls usually run a few hundred meters down the street, to the nearest pay phone.

How can they, who are among Moscow's best, work in such conditions? Reappearing in the corridor, Alyosha laughs. "Faith and dedication—we're a heroic lot. And inspired: Lenin's portrait in every room."

On the Bowery-like sidewalk outside the office, he briefly questions a witness about a forthcoming case. Then we're off on a considerable ride to a huge taxi garage in an industrial sector of the city. Alyosha scampers in and has word passed of his arrival to his current mechanic. When the towheaded youngster appears outside, we drive to a field of deep, wet snow several hundred

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yards behind the depot. Here, as if in battlefield emergency, a new shock absorber is to be installed. The cheerful lad is soon soaked through, but does the job quickly and well, happily accepting Alyosha's generous payment and obligatory bottle-of-vodka tip. Dropping him off, we're on our way again, and it occurs to me to ask why not do the repairs in the garage itself. Because if caught, he explains, the use of state premises to make a profit on stolen parts would compound the charge under the law. As it is, the mechanic's labor is "tolerably" illegal.

Setting ofT in our "brand-new conveyance," Alyosha swings the jalopy through side streets and shortcuts, pointing out historical curiosities as we pass: the site where the Mongols assembled their annual booty of virgins, the office building that collapsed during construction in the thirties, the execution of a dozen architects and engineers; the sagging house of a Tanya and prefabricated apartment of a Galya he drove home once and thought he'd forgotten. In this steppe of a city whose rambling mazes anger taxi drivers, he has an instinct for direction that derives from more than memory and knowledge; he loves Moscow with a curious proprietary solicitude. His favorite places are the few remaining haunts from the days when the streets were full of character: a beer bar, the least spoiled of the city's handful, jammed from door to counter with fierce and bedraggled types; a slop house of a restaurant on a river barge, frequented by bosses of minor speculation rings. An apartment in one of the Stalinesque skyscrapers where a game of poker can be joined at most times of the day and night.

Least of all, he likes the Sovietization that continues to blanch these remnants of local color, to smother the wheeling-dealing of urban life, to homogenize everything into a single stretch of prefabricated apartment blocks. And relentlessly rename tradition-laden streets: each new sign announcing the appearance of yet one more "Redproletarian," "Lenin," "Leninist," or "Marx" in place of a descriptive or old Slavic appellation is a personal wound.

"Splendid news: Kaluzhskaya Square becomes dear 'October.' Naturally, measures had to be taken: 'Kaluzhskaya' stood for something in the life of old Moscow, and had a comforting ring.

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Besides, millions of people knew where it was and didn't waste hours getting lost or trekking to one of the thirty other Octobers. Too pleasant, too convenient . . ."

On his personal count, eleven Moscow streets are now called "Leningrad," and he suspects he's missed a few. Like everyone else, he says, street-namers prefer a safe bet—that is, anything with Lenin in it—to risking Oak Tree Lane or something similarly untried. And every time we pass the famous open-air swimming pool a mile east of the Kremlin, a biting quip reminds me that before Lazar Kaganovich and Stalin stuffed it with dynamite, this was the site of the third largest church in Christendom, built to commemorate the victory over Napoleon. Only in the renaming of academies and institutes from "Stalin" to "Lenin" does he milk some satisfaction, for the former derives from "steel" while the latter, "appropriately," has the same root as the Russian word for "laziness."

Two more minor errands involving French swimming trunks and an old debt. Then a quick foray into a speciality food shop to inquire about grouse while we are waiting outside a metro station for Fantastic Natasha—who doesn't show up.

"Well lad?" he asks as the pallid street lamps go on.

"Let's take in a movie."

During the gung-ho film about Soviet counterespionage heroes he falls dead asleep, reviving as we emerge for a quick check on the sefioritas at the Central Post Office on Gorky Street; but on the way there, we notice we are almost out of gas. Instead, we go directly to an old section of town, full of log houses and trolley rails. One of the city's three gas stations that stay open evenings is located here, opposite a former monastery shorn of its bells.

It is only eleven-thirty, but apart from the station nothing is lit and nothing moves: we are immersed in the haunted village atmosphere I so love, with the moon casting long shadows on the snow and the wind's whine through electricity wires suggesting the old houses are deserted. The station itself is a decrepit affair with a single pump like that of an old Maine farm. It is also clean out of gas. This is announced, with gleeful spite, by its night manager, a powerful woman in boots and a greasy quilt jacket. Spitting her sunflower seeds almost in our faces, she

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grunts that the delivery to replenish her tanks may come by one o'clock—and, heh heh, may not.

Rather than wait, Alyosha decides to hail a passing truck and do his usual deal with its driver: a ruble for ten liters of the State's gas. The third truck stops and follows us into a dark side street, where Alyosha removes his trusty siphoning tube from its permanent place in the truck.

I have just read a Newsweek article warning against this very practice. ("Anyone who tries to siphon gasoline by sucking it through a single rubber tube is taking a tremendous risk. Four ounces, if swallowed, can be fatal, but even much smaller amounts can cause dangerous symptoms. If the siphoner should vomit after swallowing gasoline, he is likely to inhale some of it, and this can lead to chemical pneumonia, with a severe risk that the lungs will abruptly stop functioning due to the effect on the central nervous system. . . .") Although pleased by my plea for caution, Alyosha treats it like an alcoholic reminded that whiskey can impair clear thinking. He's done it a thousand times before, taken a thousand greater risks to maintain his life-style. And indeed, he completes the siphoning with such dispatch that the cheap, domestic gas causes only one grimace. Then he gives the country-boy driver a bonus of fifty kopeks for being so "alert." Both are happy to have done business so well.

When we emerge from the side street, the station's harsh light is shining upon two girls walking briskly past. Alyosha emits his parody of a war cry while speeding up for a closer look, but is cut short before deciding. "Allooo . . . , look who's here," cries the nearer one in gleeful surprise. An Erstwhile of three years ago, she is returning home with a girl friend after the circus, where both perform. Home is the peeling former monastery opposite the station, which is not the wartime billet it looks like in the midnight darkness but a dormitory for circus personnel.

The girls chat about rising prices and their disappointing pay, but can't come home with us because their troupe is going on tour early in the morning. Soon we drive off on a roundabout circuit of old wooden Moscow, then along the river. It's the dead of night now; even the heavily traveled quay is empty except for an occasional construction truck.

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Although we've been in the car since morning, we set out to burn our new gas. Roaming roads at random, we discuss this and that, including, of course, the night life at this hour in the West. "Paris?" says Alyosha, mocking his inability to thrust his nose close to the Soviet border. "We'll need another ten liters. Paris is"—pointing to Bolshaya Serpukhovskaya Street—"just down there and to the left."

Returning to the center, we park in front of the Bolshoi Theater's columns. Perhaps because we're the only car in sight, a policeman approaches us and, having scrutinized Alyosha's license and the Volga's ownership papers, salutes politely: the exception to the rule of boorish traffic cops. As we're about to push off again, we spy a well-dressed man teetering across Sverdlov Square whom, through the mist, Alyosha recognizes as an old friend. The son of an impresario who founded an important Moscow theater, he is filthy drunk and searching for more vodka. While we drive him home, he tries to tell a story about his weekend in an artists' retreat, as if he and Alyosha had met last week rather than a year ago.

For some reason, the new dormitory for Aeroflot crews we pass on our way back reminds me of the Newark hamburger joint where, acting out my teen-age bum fantasies by living in the YMCA, I first groped for the courage to pick up girls. Then I think of my new confidence, of all the barriers Alyosha has guided me through. Learning the inner workings of Moscow life has somehow opened me up to larger discoveries about life in general and about myself. For the moment, there are a dozen questions I need not ask, a hundred worries that need not be worried. Anastasia and I will ultimately have a happy ending. Meanwhile, Marya the Muff will come around tomorrow, perhaps with her much-touted friend. Everything's in place.

Pleasantly exhausted, I savor my nightcap of Alyosha's stories about inventive embezzlers he has defended. The strange thing is that although our talk and pursuits skim the surface of life, it is the substance of his personality underneath, about which almost nothing is said, that makes me at home with him.

"Zonks," he says. "We forgot."

"What?"

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"To borrow a reel from my friend. Want to go ice-fishing when the sun comes up?"

It has been a beautiful day on my magic carpet.

The fetes take place roughly every third evening. In addition to Alyosha's apartment, friends' quarters are occasionally used: the basement studio of a dandyish photographer; an important mathematician's luxurious apartment borrowed by his son while his father is away; the mildewed room of a recently divorced actor in the Theater of the Leninist Komsomol. The setting shifts; the props and scenario hardly vary.

The principal feature is a bountiful supper, enjoyed for itself in the spirit of Russian feasting as well as to prepare the guests. (Many are more impressed by chocolate bars and my contribution of Kents than Alyosha's chicken soup or lucky find of smoked sprats. For factory girls, the old cheese and bologna hors d'oeuvres, not to mention Alyosha's supply of leftover Western cosmetics and magazines, would be seductive enough.) The drink matches the food: an assortment of vodka or cognac, wine or beer in their dirty-lipped bottles, all drunk in sequence as haphazard as the use of knives, spoons and hands. The jokes are as motley—crude scatological humor mixed with choice selections from the vast repertoire of political satire. The music, last year's pop hits taped from Voice of America broadcasts or black market records, plays over and over, again and again, to the point of hypnotic effect, the provocatively un-Soviet sound of throbbing electric guitars casting a stronger spell than in its native setting, and prompting associations with the birth of jazz as a vehicle of black liberation. We are immersed in noise, gluttony and food-alcohol-stuffy-room smells. But although Moscovskaya oso-baya vodka, oranges and the new rock make the parties exciting, it is even more true that the parties enhance the deliciousness of the treats.

Alyosha is occasionally bored and faintly dissatisfied with himself for returning yet again to this ritual entertainment, and I'm sometimes slightly nervous at the start. But vodka speeds our transformation to the spirit of celebration and languid indulgence infusing the hot, hutlike room. Although a detached

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observer might specify vulgarity as the parties' dominant trait, something simuhaneously upHfting is at work, releasing the participants from the heaviness of the national environment. Eating, laughing, dancing, watching an ice-skating competition in Budapest on television, dancing again—free of any thought of how foolishly ragged we look—making love, changing girls immediately to make it again, holding on to the last glasses of wine because not a square inch for them remains free on the table, spitting sunflower seeds onto the floor, cramming into the bathtub for a mass wash, playing Ray Charles's "What I Say" one last time and then a last-last time. . . . We are here to do what we want—nothing more, nothing less. No sober discussion of the national condition or the cultural scene; never an attempt to impress with what we do, how much money we make, how intelligently we can converse. For neither pretension or rationalization are needed to justify our surrender to gratification.

That we have met the girls only that afternoon does not seem strange, even to them. Each new group is bound together by the sacred obligation to spend this evening in the present company as happily as possible. After the first hour, even the most reserved are steeped in this camaraderie, behaving as if they, or their ancestors, have enjoyed such revels ("orgies" somehow implies a greater element of self-consciousness and planning) since the beginning of time. Fate has brought us together; life is short and hard. These few hours, this auspicious opportunity, can never be repeated. We must honor them by putting aside all other thoughts.

But in the morning, we take pains to appear irreproachably respectable as we descend the stairs and step outdoors with all the decorum required by Soviet public standards. Like all others, Alyosha's apartment block is the preserve of a censorious state. Neighbors are watching; the police may be called. Nothing must be done—seem to be done!—that might offend a dutiful citizen in the form of a puffy cashier, schoolmarm or self-righteous housewife; or the scrawny pensioner whiling away his golden years at a window overlooking the courtyard. To a pillbox of a woman there whose black pupils follow us like eyeballs in an observation slot, Alyosha tips an imaginary fedora. His flouting of the winter-hat convention is enough to arouse her suspicions!

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We take our ladies' arms to help them over the ice—anything more might appear to violate socialist behavioral norms—and deliver them to their jobs or convenient metro stations. The night's activities are not mentioned; they have ended, and sex talk in the cold light of day is dirty-minded. Again the curtain is drawn on our private pursuits. With the smell of snow in our nostrils and the worry that the Volga will further delay our late start, the lingering images of our paganism seem wholesome.

And I remain entranced by the miracle of the girls. Taller and shorter, brunette and dusty blonde; yet all deriving from one model in my mind's eye: of Olga, my summer camp swimming instructor, whose incredible naked body I spied through the showerhouse knothole when I was fourteen. The city teems with this leggy loveliness, squeezing through crowds, pushing into buses, fighting into stores and onward toward the counters. They often travel in twos and threes, maintaining their reassuring physical contact. Linking arms, holding hands, grasping waists— and chattering, humming, giggling with an air of buttery healthiness, as if they'd carried water from the river that morning, then come home to try out their first lipsticks.

They have made outwardly austere Moscow endlessly provocative. I remember July evenings in New York, when the sultriness screamed of the sex I hadn't had for weeks. I'd prowl Third Avenue, my nerve endings pleading for the smart women in hot pants and halters. Anyone of a hundred from Forty-eighth to Fifty-ninth streets would do—or all of them together; their names and faces were irrelevant. Here, this fantasy is real. Make your choice. Pluck her away for an ice cream or a pastry; envision her fully revealed before midnight. With this secret knowledge, just to loiter on Mayakovsky Square is a forbidden pleasure, your body warm under your overcoat.

From the sea of silent shufflers that floods the downtown streets, a limitless stream, effortlessly tapped and funneled, ffows to our tables and our embraces. Only one sweetheart in a dozen stays with us long enough for us to remember her last name; yet collectively, I seem to know them better than any of the New York girls with whom Fve spent a thousand more earnest and less revealing hours. Fve been given a glimpse of the Russians' spirit and secret, something mysterious and profound in their

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very anonymity—for this is truly a country of the masses, an immense reservoir of sorrow and strength. This Nero's roll call of Galyas, Svetlanas and Natashas has a meaning I can almost grasp, something even more elemental than the lust they provoke and satiate. Something related to the attitude of Russian mothers, perhaps: the breast is here and full; take it when you will.

But when I try to probe this meaning, it wriggles from my grasp or drifts into patronizing cliches. I can only record the images, so strong that they must be symbolic. Ill-cut, loose-fitting skirts dyed dark brown as if, as among nuns, to discourage any thought of what lies underneath. (Or, in the shortage of dry-cleaning facilities and money, to conceal a winter's dirt?) Pink rayon brassieres stained by underarm sweat: supremely functional, wholly ungainly articles smacking of women war workers in Detroit. An odor of open pores and physical exertion, as outside the girls' gym in high school. Sometimes lurking under a sickly sweet eau de cologne, usually sharpened by the effects of the same garments worn daily, the scent is often spiced by the unexpectedly "southern" accent of garlic and onions. And the vodka goes down easily after the usual protests.

Faces that speak of peasant hardiness, refined but not smothered by city living: an intriguing combination of sensuousness and innocence. Bodies muscled by walking and work, protected against the cold by a coating of fat, yet surprisingly supple and lithe. A light growth of leg and body hair; rarely the stout squatness of the popular Western image of Russian women. Most will turn quickly to that after marriage and children, but in their youth the stereotype of Olympic gymnasts is closer to the truth. "Fresh, sturdy, comely, smiling"—just as Tolstoy wrote of the peasant girls of his prurient youth.

Unhappy about their brassieres and the clumsy bloomers of discoloring wool, the girls insist on undressing themselves, resentfully rebuffing any encroachment by us on a button or a zip. "That's my concern, I'll do it myself" Even many who have invited themselves for a second fete protest when a man's hand reaches for their skirts. But undressing effects a transformation: the girls have a startling lack of modesty about their naked bodies, especially their breasts (which are smallish compared to

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their hips and thighs). Within minutes of meeting, they are persuaded to expose them—to cup them out of their own blouses themselves—for appreciation and caresses.

The contradictions go further. Unashamed of their bodies in the presence of girls as well as of men, many of our guests reach out to one another. Kissing her mouth, adjusting the hair, fondling her breasts while murmuring their language's tender endearments, one helps prepare another—a stranger until the second rang Alyosha's bell forty-five minutes ago—for the mating she herself has just enjoyed. This seems no indication of homosexuality as such, but an expression of Russian "togetherness," always strongest among tight, private groups convened for pleasure. Often the sex itself is secondary to the larger satisfaction of sharing—especially, in the general gloom, the sharing of frivolity and flourish. I wonder whether this is the same instinct that moves Russian prisoners to divide their food parcels; or whether, as my University friend Leonid suggests, it is a hidden sense of shame, rather than good fortune, that they want to apportion.

But this lack of inhibition is wholly unrelated to the sophistication it may suggest. Ignorant of deodorants and contraceptive techniques, many girls also know little about the danger days of their cycles and blush fiercely when we ask. They would rather not be put through this shame than insure that the evening will be safe. And few use their hands, let alone fingers, before or during "bed-love" as they stiltedly call it; even those who groan lie almost still, scarcely moving themselves. Supposing orgasm to be a male pleasure, many consent to strive for their own only in the general spirit of accommodation. From deep in their upbringing, they sense that women should not be too active.

Free of complexes, modest of expectation—above all, they are complacent, seemingly in the spirit of the Russian masses' patient acquiescence. Scanning old literature, I repeatedly find the explanation of last night's revel in the serf mentality. "I motioned to something pink that looked very nice from a distance," Tolstoy confessed to his diary. "I opened the back door. She came in."

Seven of ten girls enter the car immediately on the strength of a genial invitation; one sends us packing and the other two

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promise to meet us later, with barely any compunction about cheating a new husband or skipping work. Guilt and superego being as absent as the pill and boutiques, many girls spend the next forty-eight hours lazily pottering around in Alyosha's apartment, insulated from the outdoor cold. The paradox—or law of nature?—is that in this rigid society, they are so personally free.

But what do I care about sociological paradoxes? I need not apologize for my plenitude, nor placate my professors with dispassionate analysis. I adore the darlings not for their artless-ness or innocence, but because they are mine. Lips like avocados, beings as simple to penetrate as warming to hug, they are my comfort and joy. Each one whispering "my closest sweetest precious" as she surrenders is dear; each shapely overcoat a searing temptation because it can be taken directly to Alyosha's to touch what makes it bulge from underneath. I become excited in the most unlikely places: spying a pretty face in a museum, pressed up against a young body in a creaking bus. "Excuse me, miss. May I trouble you for just a moment?" Surfeited on this vast harem, my appetite grows.

She is in the Central Post Office when I mail a letter one evening, and leaves with me as a matter of course, knowing she'll sleep wherever I arrange. Eighteen years old, just arrived from Irkutsk, she had nowhere to stay in Moscow, and didn't know where she'd go when the post office would close several hours hence. The look of her in the taxi so arouses me that my hands are inside her dress the moment Alyosha locks the door. Happy for this, she nevertheless questions my haste: can't we stay here the full night? Before morning, she has found the romance she wanted. Alyosha and I are "my darlings," "my dearest dear ones" and "my soulmates."

Hearing that we lack permanent attachments, she pleads that we come live with her in Irkutsk. She has a room of her own there; we will love Siberia. She'll cook and clean for us, wash our clothes—

"I'm a foreigner," I say to nip the false hope. "I can't go fifty

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kilometers from Moscow without permission, let alone five thousand."

"But no one has to know where you're from," she bubbles. "Just get on a train—I'll buy the ticket. We'll say you're my fiance."

For two days, Sweet Svetlana lives at Alyosha's, washing curtains and singing, tempting us with promises of Siberian freedom and fun. Then she disappears and we get a postcard from Irkutsk. Three weeks later, she knocks on the door. Since we wouldn't come to her, she says, she returned to us. But she met a handsome engineer on the plane and is living with him. This is just a sentimental visit—and can we help her get a residence permit?

Alyosha leaves Moscow for a week to appear at a trial in distant Alma-Ata. (He will defend two Armenians accused of peddling marijuana, one of the rare drug cases I've heard of here, although he predicts considerable growth in its use and severe tightening of the laws penalizing it within a few years.) While he is gone, a suspicion that I have exaggerated his flair and significance works on me, fusing a sense of cheapness to my loneliness. In his absence, my musings about our flings make them seem synthetic, like the bragging of for-the-asking sex in magazine articles about Swedish girls' mythical delights. To test my memory and feelings, I decide to record the first fete after Alyosha's return.

He returns, in fact, a day earlier than expected, calls me gaily from the airport and suggests a "homecoming fiesta" to celebrate our reunion and Aeroflot's skill in wafting him both ways without mishap. (He is genuinely relieved to be home: Alma-Ata's judges make Moscow's appear enlightened by comparison; the hotel had bedbugs; the city was short of meat.) At the University gate, he greets me with a bear hug and suggests we invite Ira, who must be called before leaving work because she has no home telephone. Have I any objections?

Ira offers to make her own way to Alyosha's but has not arrived a full hour after the agreed seven o'clock. In the interval, I contemplate the apartment's natural state.

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A one-room "Khrushch-slum" apartment with attached kitchen and bath, it is decorated in a grease-stained burgundy wallpaper that Alyosha hung himself, seemingly after removing it from a Barcelona bordello. Of the furniture, only a bookcase surviving from his salad days rises above the nondescript. On top of it, held in place by a threadbare tire and a stack of disused pots, teeters a coffee table with broken legs. This sets the pattern for the chaos at floor level, five feet below.

Tattered stuffed toys and an assortment of wooden Russian dolls covered in dust. A row of pistons and connecting rods dappled with candle wax. The well-known flower-child poster— equivalent in rarity value to a Picasso lithograph on Park Avenue—of the nude blonde and pony in a field of high grass. A set of medical syringes—for treating girls' venereal diseases—laid out in a cigar box balancing on an old cauldron. Stacks of paint cans; a whole old overcoat turned cleaning rag; an ancient enlarger for picnic and pornographic photography; a large supply of the best toilet paper—he's fussy about this. And sprinkled in the general jumble, a hundred jars, bottles, books, butcher's tools and artifacts lying where they were dropped on the divan, television set and cigarette-burned rug. The gaping disrepair of the apartment building itself is most noticeable in the steps missing on the staircases. I first thought Alyosha was joking when he said it was erected only eight years ago—and by a construction trust as housing for the very workers who slapped it together.

The knock sounds well after eight. It is not Ira, however, but a thin neighbor who has come for her weekly injection of vitamin B-11, prescribed by Alyosha as a winter cure. He quickly sterilizes the needle and gets her over her embarrassment to let me see where she will be jabbed. Her shyly pirouetted behind makes me plump for her to pinch-hit for the evening, but she is far too familiar to interest Alyosha. Besides, she's late for a sewing class.

By eight-thirty, we agree it's time to call a substitute. Moskvichki disregard appointments as casually as they make them: having arranged a rendezvous, many first-timers fail to keep it and are never seen again—or turn up at the apartment

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after months. Alyosha's latest address book is already in our hands when we hear Ira's saucy knock.

An ambitious girl with aspirations to marry a scientist or diplomat, she is better groomed than average and carries traces of good breeding. (Her father is a Polish officer who was detained in Russia long after the war.) Although her job in a laboratory for evaluating clothing affi"onts her pride, she hangs on for its opportunities to meet young chemists.

Ira is a womanly nineteen; Maya, whom she has brought with her, a year younger: a shorter, pudgier colleague—whom we've never seen before—with large eyes and Clara Bow lips. She remains on the threshold stammering that she shouldn't have come, that Ira dragged her—until Alyosha happily whisks her in.

He coaxes the bashful Maya to name her preference for drink, hides his wince when she designates the syrupy substance called port and hurries to the nearest cafe while the guests start on the salami. Between mouthfuls, they describe a futile trip from their lab to a distant store supposedly selling East German tights— which has put them in a mood to be, well, feted. Returning before they've thawed, Alyosha pronounces a toast that wends from tardiness (Ira's) to tartness to tarts, but which flatters rather than offends. Overcoming Maya's eye-blinking protest, he sets down her glass and persuades her to show us "the source of your own honeyed wine, milk of—God grant it—a clutch of providential infants." Remonstrating feebly, Maya undoes her buttons, liberating a Renoir breast. Aroused by Alyosha's tongue on it, or by rivalry, Ira strides to the bathroom and emerges naked except for her boots. A lithe figure despite her fullness, she assumes a position on the bed favored during her previous visit, her temptress's wink so superfluous that I chuckle to myself And I adore Maya's inevitable "Must you really do that?" as she makes room for my hand in her panties.

I touch her wonderful bush. The lovemaking begins with a rush. Maya changes partners affably, then back again, assuring us redundantly that she doesn't quite know where to go in this unusual "hoofing" for her supper. The tape recorder has picked up Ray Charles's faithful beat, filling the air with nostalgia and ritual, transforming the room into our private cabaret. Tele-

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phone rings go unanswered but the television set is still documenting a Czech delegation touring a steel works. I catch a glimpse of Alyosha's head deferentially lowered between Ira's legs—as curious a spectacle as the Bessemer furnaces on the flickering screen. In place of the revulsion I'd have for another man, I feel as if I'm taking a bath with the family. I know his smooth, clean body as well as my own, and in some way I suspect that this moment of hardness together is more an expression of our companionship than of lechery. Yet I love Maya too, clenching her chubby fists beneath me. Sweet Maya, who is giving me this trust of her body at first sight. My cup runneth over again. Jesus.

Alyosha's rolling on his back, finished. Ira transfers her attention to Maya and me, encouraging us—"Harder!"—somewhat condescendingly. When she tongues our nipples, I respond with a surge for her, still inside Maya. Now the dizzy joy of pure carnality takes hold of me. I hold still in the pungency of Maya while kissing Ira's mouth, then switch. This is what I was born for. My head spinning, I hate the voice that says I should try to record this. Through pumping and whirling, I make out a pile of cookbooks I've never noticed before. "Oh my handsome one," says someone—but our swish-sloshing is the only sound I fully hear. I come. Trade to start again almost immediately. The second release gives me a moment's slumber.

"Yeah, some wop ship went aground," I hear Alyosha from the kitchen. "The Ministry of Foreign Trade keeps shifting our underground rocks."

This is his commentary on two bottles of Italian vermouth 1 spied in a downtown store this afternoon-—which also set the theme for his supper stories. Early one morning, he begins when we're all at table, the manager of a food store steps outside to tell all Jews in the line to leave. He tailors the message throughout the day to Kalmyks, Kirgizians and other minority groups, locking the door behind him on each return inside. As evening approaches, he tells the remaining Russians to go home too: the store is closed for inventory and will not open.

"See that?" says Kolya to Tolya, who has also waited all day. "The dirty Jews always get special treatment."

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The meal is like an after-dinner cigarette. The brandy is Zhenya, a chic "older" woman who arrives to talk to Alyosha about her failing marriage. Vexed at the sight of Ira and Maya—who is in an ancient bathrobe that she herself used to wear—she is distracted, however, by Alyosha's new Rolling Stones tape, and demonstrates her frug. After she allows the younger girls to admire her underwear too, we are suddenly in heat again, three pairs of thighs pointed toward the ceiling.

The sweet joy of dumb potency washes over me while Zhenya insists she has no time for this, I must first finish with her. I am aware that Alyosha has got up to answer another knock and that Lev Davidovich, a timid colleague, has entered, but I can't follow their corridor conversation. All I hear is that he wants to buy a barely used Volga from some speculator on the cheap but fears a new car might antagonize the Party overseer at the Juridical Consultation Office. He leaves without a peek at our balling.

I've had one drink too many. Or there's one woman too many; something is confusing. Tight in one with my fingers up the other two—but why am I laughing like a clown? The first time I saw Zhenya in the Journalists' Club, I thought she was a snob. She's trying to tell me something interesting about her husband, or that she will tell me later. I think she'll like it the back way. Maya and Ira want big-deal husbands too. Meanwhile, they decide to hold hands while sampling simultaneous fellatio with Alyosha and me. My hard-on is my head. Somebody's trying to thread a new tape. The recorder falls, smashing glasses on the floor. Zhenya suggests a screw for the road. C'mere baby: I'm shouting in English. I come and sprawl on my back, my stomach all wet.

I revive to Zhenya ordering Alyosha not to get up from her to answer the new knock. He's trying like hell to come but the sounds of an argument in the adjoining apartment—wife raging at drunken husband, he coaxing her to drink herself—make him laugh and slip out. Glasses of fresh tea are served, with Bulgarian cherry jam spooned from the jar. Searching for Ira's necklace, we improvise a game of sexual chain on the floor, with pats and licks, but no desire. Dressed again, we waltz to the Dr. Zhivago

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theme, rendered in our own la-la-la-la. Outside, a wind is driving thick new snow against the windows. We leave only when Zhenya really can't stay any longer.

During the following weeks, I'm like a scientist afraid that his new discovery will reveal itself to be a hoax. But the pattern repeats itself like a telephone weather report. Recruiting a bakery girl who has only an hour for adultery because she must hurry to the boy she married last week. Watching two nymphets, fellow-workers in a printing shop, racing to undress themselves: Alyosha has told them—"Socialist competition in all things, Comrades!"—that the first will win "a certain corporal prize." Stepping into the apartment the next afternoon to find three new teen-agers improvising a nude ballet. (One helps me with my overcoat while the other two dive for cover.) The arrival of a girl from Murmansk whom Alyosha met on the Black Sea last summer, and her lying down for me as if it were integral to entering the room. Above all, the meeting, celebrating, mating and return of the innocents—who, despite this, will somehow remain lifelong friends—to Moscow's multitude. Strangest of all is the strength I sense in this submissiveness, as if our easy conquests have something in common with the sucking of French and German armies into the Russian heartland for destruction.

Mornings, the girls sedately make up in the wavy mirror, as if we've known each other forever. Although the adventure started with Alyosha's traditional stop-you-for-a-mmuf^ ploy> some will stay days here, their new home. No one at their old homes is informed; no adjustment time is needed. Although meeting an American in these circumstances is as unlikely for them as coming across a snake charmer in Gorky Park, most accept my attendance as casually as everything destiny tosses them. We all belong to the big human family.

Sometimes I leave alone, making my way to a trolley that passes near the University. Hollowed by dissipation, pleased and disgusted with myself, feeling the after-tingle and dried secretions on my skin, I wait with old grandmothers at a stop outside crumbling yellow houses, knowing I am as close as I can be to the purifying mystical visions claimed by certain advocates of voluminous sex. What is commonplace elsewhere, perhaps even

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debased, here contains an element of the miraculous. I know why primitive man worshiped fertility symbols.

"To seduce all the girls in Moscow is impossible. But" . . . (heavy pause) . . . "toward this goal one must strive." Alyosha has compressed his girl-knowledge into such maxims, pronounced at appropriately incongruous moments in the oratorical tone of a radio announcer citing old Russian proverbs in substantiation of production claims. "A certain number of darlings resent granting their favors immediately," he also likes to ex-posit. "Roughly eleven per cent. I understand them; it's a matter of principle. 'No matter how much I like a man,' they say, 'I just won't succumb the first time.' To which I reply, 'Of course, honey, I'll drive you home. I guess it's good-bye for us—until tomorrow.'" At happy moments behind the wheel, he breaks into song, blessing the Motherland for its gift of orgasms and orifices instead of "organic unity" and the "orchestra of social sounds." And traditional limericks and verses are resurrected from obscurity to illustrate, with an altered word or phrase, salient points. The abundance of instant, anonymous sex, for example, is conveyed by slightly modifying a typically cloying Soviet ballad:

Lilac's blooming in our native fields as if glad.

Sweet Spring, she's always the same; A brigade leader's fucking a maiden like mad—

And wants to know her name.

Passing a secondhand bookshop, we see the famous poster of cloth-capped Lenin in a gingerbread countryside, with verses implying that the Father of the Communist Party, born in April, caused the buds to open and birds to sing. Alyosha reads it all—

The snow of the fields is melting,

Warm winds caress our ears; Flocks of birds without counting.

Frolic in the sun without fears.

Brooks babble in their fullness.

Slim birch trees, again all alive. Remind us of our heartfelt gladness, lenin's birthday means Spring's arrived.

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—changing only the final line: "lenin's birthday —enjoy an alft"esco jive."

His story for illustrating female submissiveness starts with Vanka, the sometimes sober village handyman, spying a pretty milkmaid in a barn.

"Hey, Mashka, c'mon up into the hayloft, we'll have some you-know-what."

"Fresh. I certainly will not."

"Why not?"

"Because I said so."

"Aw gee, Mashinka. C'mon."

Masha's sigh expresses the full futility of further resistance. "Oh all right. Bully, you wore me down."

The bread and butter of his expertise is knowledge of the richest pickup grounds: the exits to certain metro stations for tarts, several bustling shopping streets for counter girls, the telephone booths of certain major buildings for secretaries planning their evening. And throughout the day, the Central Post Office on Gorky Street, where local girls are telephoning friends to announce their purchases, and visiting lasses—who are even happier to find a bed—are calling Sverdlovsk and Kharkov to ask their parents to telegram thirty rubles. We sometimes drop by at five o'clock just to stand in earshot of the booths, keeping our fingers on the nation's pulse.

Operating procedures are equally important. One of the most fundamental axioms is that Russian girls require a gentle push—coaxing, teasing, plying with vodka or laughs. Eighty per cent return for more, says Alyosha. But you must guide them through their little barriers.

Another canon is never to be without a supply of two-kopek coins. Calls sometimes must be made on the dot—when a girl has access to an office telephone—or from a suburb; and since the "deucer" is as scarce as evening taxis, not having one in your pocket for the nearest booth can lose you the ball game.

Other injunctions are to ask girls to repeat aloud all arrangements for future meetings before leaving them, and never to let a just-stopped lovely who won't join you immediately move on until her coordinates are recorded. If she has no telephone, a girl

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friend's who will serve as intermediary must be elicited, or an address for telegrams to fix rendezvous. Since her promise to call you is worth little, leaving your number is never enough. Not inhibition, Alyosha tutors, but Russian nonchalance is the great enemy. Girls lose slips of paper, become distracted, forget.

Boredom, on the other hand, is the great ally: the cosmic variety implied by the Russian skuka. Once I pushed for a serious explanation of the permissiveness. Was it the free-love propaganda of certain early Bolsheviks? Had the Orthodox church's social attitudes prepared the way? Without denying the relevance of traditional Russian tolerance of carnal sin, Alyosha's explanation was rooted in more immediate influences, especially the girls' great emptiness of routine. "It's a monotony of monotoneness: no entertainment, no excitement. On seventy rubles a month, they can afford either a movie or two a week or their daily sugared bun. On a larger scale, our social system has them dragging on in dreary poverty, with no 'bourgeois' escapes. Understand why Jaguar-driving playboys in sane countries are so much poorer than you and me?"

Without having set foot abroad (except as a soldier), Alyosha senses that he could not hope for a tenth of his popularity in the West. Like easygoing social relationships, he's convinced, quick sex is one of the reverse benefits of Soviet suppression, which leaves young women in a state of skuka. Where restaurants are few and primitive, people are concerned with their stomachs rather than a proper selection of knife and fork: hence the inelegant—but lusty—scenes at Russian tables. Where wages are depressed, television abysmal and pop groups banned, Alyosha's fetes are royal divertissements. But precisely this is what enlarges his burden. A compulsion to sleep with every attractive girl is one thing, but "the knowledge that you can do it," he sighs in mock complaint, "gives a man no peace. I keep telling you, bureaucratic error begat me in the wrong motherland."

But by now, I realize that Alyosha's ratio of conquests is not a wholly accurate measure of Moscow attitudes, not only because of his uncanny talent for disarming even the inhibited minority (he would make a superb sexual therapist) but also because most girls he stops have given indication of just this cosmic ennui. Like

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a predator selecting prey from a herd, he judges women by their posture and walk. Those slouching at a bus stop or trailing toward nowhere are the most grateful for attention, and register like off-guard gazelles in his peripheral vision.

As if to illustrate the point, we notice a sweet thing outside the TASS office. Yes, she'll come to the apartment now, but can we "put it ofT' for just a while? If we "do it" this afternoon, what will happen to her in the evening?

Desperately late for crucial appointments first thing this morning—mine with my faculty supervisor, a Stalinist hack threatening to inform the Embassy unless I produce some work; Alyosha's with a police captain, to quash a license-losing charge of drunken driving after a cop stopped us at midnight—we fly down Alyosha's stairs and into the courtyard, gorging our breakfast of leftover cake. Shoes still untied, laughing at the sun and a mangy neighborhood cat who greets us for scraps, we dash through the snow to the workhorse Volga. After last night's fete, the prospect of serious business in the outside world strikes us as diverting before we meet again for lunch.

Suddenly we remember, and jolt back in minor shock. The car won't start. Precious minutes must be wasted. Alyosha forgot to refill the radiator first thing this morning.

Counting every second, he sprints back up the stairs three at a time, fills cauldrons and kettles with hot water and, the faster to revive the frozen motor, heats them further on the stove's blackened burners. On ordinary mornings he submits uncomplainingly to this tedious routine, as to the thousand everyday frustrations that a lifetime of obstacles has trained him to endure cheerfully. But today, his hands are coarsened by the cold and the grease; and he badly stains his single respectable suit crawling under the battered car to reseal the stopcock. And we are now impossibly late.

His inspired driving recovers several minutes. While taxis crawl and private drivers stop to spread ashes, he plows, churns, spins and slides over the ice of an artful route of back streets. Although his appointment is minutes before mine, he insists on delivering me first. Skidding between a parked car and a

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towering snow bank, we turn a corner to cross the last of the main streets. There my heart sinks.

Head tihed, smihng to herself, the girl is swinging a briefcase as she saunters. Like a hound sighting the hare, Alyosha chortles and swings to the curb.

"Good God, no," I plead. "Not now. Any time but now. We don't need her."

I might have said more. The police captain has warned that Alyosha's case is very serious—a strident new anti-alcohol campaign is in progress—and that he will be available only before nine o'clock. We've made crazy detours before when rushing to a trial or to beat a Bolshoi Theater curtain; in fact, it's a rare drive that is not interrupted. But this delay is suicidal. Alyosha without a license would be like a postman without legs; and there is a real danger that my academic bankruptcy will get me expelled, especially if I make my self-admiring supervisor wait.

"I'll get you Elizabeth Taylor when she comes. Forget this one and let's get going."

Then I desist. More from me can only protract the inevitable. Before leaping out, Alyosha looks at me tenderly, explaining with his eyes that it can't be helped.

"Have a Chesterfield, I'll only be a minute."

In fact, he is three minutes. As they tick by, a wave of affection washes away my exasperation. Winning a wide smile in spite of the startled girl's effort to be prim, gesturing grandly toward the jalopy, trying to avoid the unseemliness of rushing her—he is inimitable, the Peck's Bad Boy of our time.

When the girl has settled warily on the back seat and Alyosha has introduced me with his customary fanfare ("Meet my buddy muchacho visiting from New York and Miami Beach—you know, next to Cuba . . ."), we speed off again—miraculously without penalty, for my supervisor arrives later than I, and although Alyosha must waste most of the morning in a corridor filled with worried petitioners, he manages to see the blustery police captain and prevail by offering free legal services in a suit against him by his angry ex-wife. Having waited uncomplainingly in the car, the girl spends the day playing house in the apartment.

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The following day we are dashing toward an important meeting only to stop dead in our tracks and zoom with equal speed in the opposite direction, in pursuit of some blonde hair and fetching calves. And two days after that, we are hoping against hope that we'll still be on time to catch a man who claims to have a fifteenth-century icon, but Alyosha stomps the brakes before we've covered five hundred yards.

"In the bakery doorway—look! Hallelujah! have you ever seen such a darling?"

"Not since noon, I haven't." In fact, we've spent the morning frolicking with two waitresses, but Alyosha ignores my allusion to this ancient episode—or pretends I'm agreeing that the new lass with the hand-knitted cap is indeed more fetching than the pair who departed four minutes ago.

"You're not suggesting we should let her get away?"

"We're holding up traffic. Some citizens might be—uh, late for important appointments.''''

"You're probably aware that thousands of icons were painted in the fifteenth century. How many living things, by your guess, are made like that work of art?"

Cap allows that she fancies visiting a girl friend in a distant district. Snow banks and one-lane traffic make us fifty minutes late for the appointment with the mysterious icon man, who, if he showed up at all, has undoubtedly left. "How did / know what was outside that bakery?" sighs Alyosha.

And so on. Rushing Efficient Alia to the airport for a flight to join her husband, we see a fair face framed by a bus window. In violation of two dozen road rules and with flagrant disregard for the cops on every other corner, Alyosha risks a spinning U-turn, then threads the traffic like a car-chase film to stay parallel with the vehicle transporting such loveliness. One hand rotates the wheel for these reckless maneuvers; the other is performing a repertoire of feverish waves, first to catch the beauty's lofty eye, then to cajole her into disembarking at the next stop—and then the next one as we follow our mile of detour despite Alla's moans about the disaster of trying to rebook an Aeroflot flight.

Hurrying to a compulsory foreign-policy lecture for lawyers one day, Alyosha is smitten by a trolleybus driver, who proves much easier to lure out than yesterday's passenger. The vivacious

Alyosha^lSl

lass stops her vehicle, emerges in her overalls and, pretending to adjust the trolley's leads to the overhead wires, delightedly announces the telephone number where she can be reached at four o'clock.

But the missed prizes cause him corresponding pain. "Vanished!" he yelps of a girl who has disappeared into a metro entrance or around a crowded corner. His voice is full of puppy hurt and genuine distress as the old self-parody wells up in his eyes. "A fine person, a distinct individual, and we may never see her again. . . ."

When they first met years ago, Alyosha knew her as the wife of a prodigious drinker and philanderer nicely suited to his actor's job in Moscow's worst theater. She refused him. Later, the husband crashed his tinny Zaporozhets, beheading that night's darling and so rupturing his internal organs that his doctors predicted a single drink would kill. He never had that one—nor ever slept with any other woman except his wife. Smashing his face, the accident also totally changed his character.

His new appearance precluding any work on the stage, he turned to writing, quickly winning fame and fortune with screenplays and television scripts. With no time for anything else, he began to hate restaurants and carousing as he had once loved them, often turning acrimonious when distracted from his typewriter. His asceticism was too much for his wife, whose normal interest in occasionally seeing the town developed, under the pressure of his severity, into an appetite for affairs. She comes to the apartment to offer herself and curses—but also laughs— when Alyosha declines, turning the tables.

This is the evening we've put off" for weeks, like schoolboys with term projects. Alyosha is home alone and I'm in the dormitory, each attending to neglected chores. Although my studies are past the point of salvaging, I must stay at my desk at least long enough to answer disquieted letters from my sponsors, a committee of high-principled scholars representing America's Soviet-studies establishment. Its letterhead and language stare at me like emissaries from another galaxy. Citing my failure to correspond with Harvard, the executive secretary has hinted at

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my recall in the absence of a satisfactory reply. To this task, I settle down at last, surprised and relieved at the tales of my nonexistent research that flow from my imagination to the letter paper—like the atmospheric hallucinations that prompted Gogol's fantasy?—and hopeful that ignorance, mysteriousness and the distance to Cambridge will keep secret my intellectual collapse.

His suspicion piqued by seeing me home at this hour, roommate Viktor peers at my table. In nothing is he so clumsy as trying to appear casual while scouting for "information"; but perceiving that I am writing in English, he desists with a grunt. Having exercised with his weights just long enough to spice the air with pungent sweat, he retires at his customary ten o'clock.

An hour later, Kemal summons me importantly to the telephone. It is Alyosha, protesting he is lonely, claiming he has something vital to tell me—and in a rush of enthusiasm, as if struck by a startling new idea, suggesting we find company for the "budding eventide." Although my emergency letters are unfinished, I agree to meet him outside my gate. Hearing his voice, I realize that the whole of my purpose in Russia has somehow come to simply spending time with him. More than spread legs or rompish escape, the lure is his boundless impulse to go somewhere, explore something, sniff" out what's happening. Forgo this for books? Never has the distinction between life and graduate school learning been more clear-cut.

It is nearly midnight when the Volga pads toward me over the snow like an old mascot; we must go, therefore, to one of the main railway stations, the only public places alive at this hour. Alyosha steers seemingly by memory and instinct over a route of muffled streets, in defiance of the windshield's near obliteration by pelting flakes. (The wipers were stolen again yesterday afternoon while the car was parked outside a courthouse.) Soon we are approaching Young Communist Square, a huge former marketplace where three major stations serving trains to the vast steppes of the north, northeast and northwest, stand almost shoulder to shoulder.

From dawn to dusk, the square swarms with provincial visitors come to Moscow to change trains, search for warm underwear or

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a new tablecloth, make a deal for their home-raised ducks or gawk in reverence at Lenin's mausoleum. From the sidewalks around the stations, the throng spills into the even larger roadway, cardboard suitcases and sacks of provisions clutched in burly hands, rag-wrapped rations stuffed into pockets, prize purchases—mattresses, armchairs and bolts of carpet—balanced on their heads. Searching, soliciting, gesticulating, glowering, haggling, conspiratorially whispering ("Psst—where'd you come into them boots?"), the army of workers and peasants clamors and claws about its business: craving a bargain, yet morbidly suspicious of being cheated; knowing their only rest is on their own haunches—not one in ten thousand wastes time even looking for a cot in a hotel—and that this year's trip must cover everything, since next year they might not be lucky enough to return.

But at night, this rousing multitude is gone without a trace, leaving the Colosseum-like expanse almost deserted. Now the very emptiness exerts a grip, tightened by silent mist. Only haphazard clusters of taxis loiter outside exits, their exhausts rising in thick clouds past Yaroslav Station's Russian fairytale facade and Kazan Station's Tartar tower. In this air, the unmistakable presence of illicit transactions drifts like Claudius's ghost. The quilt-jacketed taxi drivers refuse ordinary passengers with a sneer: their game is pimping or peddling vodka from under their seats, and for this, they are willing to wait hours, ignoring their passenger-mile norms as well as the iron cold. A handful of prostitutes has also assembled at this outpost of night life: a hag in an open coat near the metro entrance, foully abusing a man who has declined her advances; others in the relative comfort of clammy underground passages linking the stations and metro. A scattering of drunks and hangers-on completes the roster of outdoor personages: remnants of Moscow's prewar underworld to which Alyosha is drawn by nostalgia and a penchant for the colorful. (I used to wonder why the police don't simply clean up the square once and for all. The answer seems to be that disreputable elements are rooted out less vigorously than political dissidents. For all the drunks, prostitutes, "parasites" and petty criminals exiled from Moscow and

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foreigners' eyes, a small devoted band—"Shrunken," laments Alyosha, "but no more than everything else in the economy"— remains, to steal nightly to one of the stations.)

At the fortress-like doors of the Leningrad Station, a policeman stands watch from within his tent of a sheepskin greatcoat, turning away (one important measure of a new drive to cut hooliganism and crime by controlling the waiting rooms' vagrant population) everyone without a train ticket valid for tomorrow. His face purplish with cold and ill temper, the officer observes the traditions of his service by snarling, "That's prohibited!" at anything that moves. While Alyosha waits—my face is more innocent than his, he insists—I sidle up to the law's bulk and initiate a conversation by commenting sympathetically about night duty in this weather. Soon he is telling me about his two-year-old daughter, the same flatulent face radiating fatherly love and sentimental humor. Even with this bellowing bully, the standard stratagem of establishing personal contact quickly transforms his public surliness into an open-hearted comradeship that has him sharing his misery with you, as he would his last ruble for a bottle if he could. Happy to have met "friends," grinning at his new pack of Camels, he opens the door for us, hinting a warning about plainclothesmen in the waiting room.

In the murkiness of the hall itself, however, detectives-—if they are in fact there—cannot be distinguished from the rest of the depot-of-the-homeless assemblage. Foul-smelling peasants are asleep on the benches, faces cradled by their dusty bundles— which are also tied to their wrists to prevent theft. Impassive, submissive, ragged to their bones, they have been waiting days for a place on a train. Lacking friends to take them in and contacts among hotel personnel, less disheveled provincial town-dwellers too have settled in for the night. At the decrepit snack counter, a red-faced woman is dispensing the last of the pasty bologna together with a liquid called coffee. A child sighs in its sleep, another sucks noisily at a fierce-looking gypsy. Picking our way among this sampling of mostly non-Muscovite masses, we are transported back fifty years.

But the lure of vagabond adventure hangs in the air. Long rail journeys, as Koestler noticed, are Russia's social equivalent of transatlantic boat crossings. Dots of light and life in the roadless.

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oceanic land mass, trains are therefore the setting for much "shipboard" Hterature of strangers exposing secrets. And stations are only marginally less rich in dramatic possibilities. The time-machine holds a promise of unusual tales.

The female pickings themselves, our excuse for coming, are slimmer than average this evening. A handful of tawdry prostitutes with drunken gazes, cheeks smeared in lipstick and a layer of Vaseline—to simulate the Russian maiden's healthy flush. Certain disease. A sprinkling of teen-age saplings who would obviously be happier barefoot in their villages, together with several less bucolic provincial lasses—students waiting for telegrams with fare money—whose sleep we haven't the heart to disturb. Peasant wives too dumpy to merit this, even were their men not snoring on their boots. . . . Our choice—although it seems that she, not we, have made it—is a thirtyish woman whose eyes have been following us hopefully while the rest of her remained slumped on a bench in the far corner.

"Hello, may we trouble you for a moment?"

"Please don't look at me like that. You must think I'm used to this, that I make a practice of using waiting rooms."

Her clothes are soiled and she needs—and craves—a bath. But back in the apartment, when Alyosha runs one for her with a heap of East German salts, she demurs. Are we laughing at her? Taking her for what she's not?

Locking the door, she remains in the bathroom almost an hour. After she has eaten and arranged her underwear on the radiator to dry, we make love—with half the passion and twice the conversation customary with railway recruits. Recalling old photographs of Colette, her rounded shoulders and globular bottom confirm that she is a survivor of an earlier era. Ample thighs resting, quiet joy on lips, Aksyona gives herself as if this were a respite between migraines. When she tells her story, we understand why.

Her mother was a survivor of a noble family destroyed by Revolution, Civil War and purges; her father, a Kiev baritone who recorded surging war songs, and whose need for drink, as colossal as his size, kept the family near starvation despite his handsome earnings. Aksyona was seven when her self-sacrificing mother died of cancer and her father, after stupendous bouts

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with vodka, disappeared in grief and rage, bearing away the last of his wife's heirlooms. The upbringing of the bewildered child was taken over by a sister who had turned sixteen and supported them both, largely on bread and drippings, by leaving school for a job in a shoe factory. For reasons of her own, the sister refused to ask for police help in tracing her father, or for a kopek of state aid.

When Aksyona herself was sixteen, an elderly aunt wrote from out of the blue that their father was working on a collective farm north of Kazan. From that city, the daughters took a bus to the end of the line and thumbed a ride on the back of a truck. Falling out at a bend, the elder sister hit her head on a rock, suffered massive hemorrhaging and died, blood streaming from her mouth. The truck continued to the farm, but the former leading baritone, now a senile handyman with a speech impediment, did not recognize his younger daughter. After a shivering hour with him, she returned to Kiev alone.

And remained alone so long that she accepted spinsterhood and reclusion; she seemed made for school teaching. But after a dozen years of solitude she fell in love with a sixteen-year-old pupil in one of her classes. Their after-school trysts took place in her room—the same one, with the piano still smashed by her father's hand and cupboards peddled for his drink, where she had lived as a child. The strange, devoted couple were married when he was seventeen. Well before this, she had been disqualified from teaching.

When sexual drive subsided, shared comfort as pariahs held them together against callous attempts to pry them apart by police. Party supervisors and scandalized social workers. They lived carefully and quietly on the youth's salary as an apprentice librarian until a week ago, when he left her for a homosexual editor in Leningrad. In numb despair, she boarded a train for Moscow, not knowing what she was seeking there to save her. But the capital was frighteningly puzzling; she found herself bewildered by questions of why buses ran on streets and trains on tracks. From the Kiev Station where she arrived, she ventured out only to others, staying one night in each to avoid suspicion. When we met in the Leningrad Station, she had twenty-one kopeks in her handbag and nothing in her stomach for three days

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except scraps from a kindly counterwoman at one of the buffets.

Aksyona recounts her searing misfortunes as if they belong to a distant past. She has a grip on herself now, she asserts. Her strange marriage could not reasonably have lasted much longer; she's still young enough to start a new, realistic life. Meeting us has broken her enervating depression.

"I'll only stay a few days if you'll have me. You won't turn me out?"

"Relax, Teach," says Alyosha. "This is like the army, we don't bump nobody. Certainly not pedigreed ladies. . . . We seem to be clean out of handkerchiefs, so just use the sheet."

To soothe her, Alyosha muses about the etymology of "linen." Aksyona is in fact using the pillowcase for her tears, but soon reaches to us for more affection. Happy all night, she turns positively cheerful during morning ablutions. For a better breakfast, Alyosha and I go to the bakery—and return in ten minutes to an empty apartment! Aksyona has left no note; ten rubles from my jacket and Alyosha's new cigarette lighter are missing.

Alyosha is inured to girls stealing sweaters and toilet water from his room, just as he cleans up overindulgent young ones' vomit with the mien of a mother attending to diapers. Although such inconveniences are ordinarily part of the price, Aksyona's betrayal hurts. Was she a vagabond thief, like many waiting-room pickups? A novice prostitute who lost her nerve to ask for a fee? Alyosha, who has heard a thousand equally moving stories from con girls, as well as from genuine unfortunates, at first insists it is one or the other, and that we waste no time thinking about a clever little trick who can well look after herself. But the morning fails to erase thoughts of her possible suicide.

We spend the afternoon and two successive evenings searching Moscow's dozen stations. At the same time, Alyosha asks the chief prosecutor of a city district—whom he tells that Aksyona has been left an inheritance, to save her trouble in case she's found—to inquire whether news of her has reached the police. That no one has seen her allows us to reckon she's found a man or made her way home to Kiev. Although this is not our first encounter with such tragedy, we feel depressed, and have no wish for railroad action for some time.

188^MOSCOW FAREWELL

Tuesday afternoon with one of Alyosha's old friends, a stolid engineer called Edik. The apartment belongs to Edik's father, a mathematician engaged in high defense work. (Edik's ease in skipping work every third afternoon is attributed variously to the protection afforded by his important sire and the poverty of his own efforts at the drafting table.) A hundred yards from the Supreme Court of the Russian Republic, the quarters are suitably grand for a man of his stature; four large rooms in a high-ceilinged building that could pass in a residential district of nineteenth-century Prague. From the living-room window, a tip of the Kremlin is visible, its fortress wall impinging on our lives like a prison on the outskirts of a college town.

The apartment is a museum of low-grade Victoriana, so quintessentially shabby-genteel that the very concept might have originated here. All the rooms like this I've seen and the spirit they represent flood my memory. Tasseled lampshades, age stains and light-bulb browns dappling the sallow silk. Sagging armchairs that discharge heavy puffs at a touch, a broken grandfather clock, and threadbare oriental rugs, long dead of dust and thirst. All this and more—including the inevitable aspidistra, as if transferred from some defunct ministry—pressing in on the oversized, overstuffed divan where we are taking our pleasure with Voluptuous Valya, and Lyuba, her thinner, harder friend. Lyuba (from lyubov —"love") is one of the few girls I've met who can be called sexually voracious, but our nakedness is so cartoon-like in contrast to the bedizened room that we can't take her more seriously than ourselves.

A week's dirty dishes and leavings are stacked in every corner: Edik's housekeeper is sick and his father away on a project. (I suspect rockets but, of course, do not ask.) His tape recorder has been lent to a friend and the shortwave bands on his radio need new tubes; faute de mieux, therefore. Radio Moscow provides the background noise. While we squirm, pant and change partners, the announcer soars on in his go-team-go voice about a cement factory that has voluntarily raised its own quotas for this, the crucial second year of the historic new Five-Year Plan. But no one laughs at the program's wild incongruity: no one else has heard it. Nor would they notice even a declaration of war

Alyosha^l89

announced in those tones and these circumstances.

We are drinking a cocktail of gluey apricot nectar and medicinal spirit, which is almost pure alcohol. Although Edik swallows his straight from the jar, he takes no part in the communal sport, for he is wrestling with an individual problem: headlights he left on all night have irreversibly finished the battery of his father's car. From the edge of a chair facing the divan, he telephones one hot tip after another in search of a replacement— any battery, new or used, for trucks, buses or cars. Absorption in his quest blinds him to Valya's vulva wriggling ten inches from his nose.

"Edik, old pal, drop that a minute and give us, as they say, a hand."

"Are you kidding? My father's back tomorrow. Christ, Alexei —help me juice up that vehicle."

Lyuba borrows the telephone for a quick call to a girl friend. From the lend-lease gasoline canister in which the spirit is stored, Alyosha pours another round of drinks. Voluptuous Valya plants her six feet of Amazon flesh directly over Edik, the warmth of her parted legs—or his anxiety about the car—steaming his spectacles. He gulps his fifth inch of straight spirit and racks his brain for another contact to telephone. Wolfing a slice of bologna, Lyuba pulls us back onto the divan. The Kremlin bells record the passage of another hour in our under-their-noses hideout.

At five o'clock, the festivities end as if a factory whistle has sounded. Hurry-scurry, we dress and dash from the apartment, each to attend to his own, suddenly urgent business. Having clinched a deal for his battery, Edik searches anxiously for a taxi to claim possession of the used twelve-volter before a bigger bribe takes it elsewhere. After two consecutive days with us, Valya must rush home to make supper for her "jealous" husband. (But he's going to a Komsomol meeting afterwards, and she suggests we all meet again at nine o'clock.) Lyuba—who, it seems, is moody when clothed—is already late for her factory's second shift.

"Who says we're not a work-disciplined people with higher goals?" chirps Alyosha, enjoying our jerky haste after the squandered day. While he delivers the girls to their destinations, I hurry to the National Hotel for talk of Soviet legal trends with a visiting Columbia professor.

190^MOSCOW FAREWELL

"Z)o svidaniya, gents. Stay healthy."

"So long, privet.''''