Moscow farewell

"You'll stay in touch?"

"Of course! What's on for Sunday?"

We disperse into the afternoon darkness, then the slogging rush-hour crush. At this hour, the city center swarms with dark-coated robots with shopping bags, bunching up at traffic lights, crisscrossing in and out of shops, pushing to their destinations like beetles in a box. The sounds are trolleys whining and ten thousand booted feet tramping in the slush.

My own route takes me down the Twenty-fifth of October Street, past GUM's dingy posterior to the top of Red Square. In this homey district of once-thriving retail trade, the restrictions on commercial activity have left a hollow melancholy, matching the weather's. Above the unsmiling crowds, buzzing strands of neon starkly announce "Milk" and "Bread." Plaster busts of Lenin guard every office-entrance, like the motionless sentries at His mausoleum. Everything is submerged in the gloom I felt when my friends and I could think of nothing to do with ourselves on winter afternoons after school.

Several minutes early for my appointment, I linger outside the Historical Museum, wondering what connection might possibly exist between this bleakness and the lush hours we relished in Edik's apartment. Outdoors, not so much as an advertisement dresses the stores; not a single bikinied form enlivens kiosks plastered with political magazines and Central Committee brochures. The whole of the puritanical public setting seems like camouflage for our dissipation.

Walking the somber streets, shivering in the blank cold, I'm struck again and again by this paradox of nature. How did these Tahitian attitudes take root here?"

The next time we meet Lyuba, it is in her family's musty room in a communal apartment where they all live, as if in a fourth-class pensione. (Both parents work until late afternoon.) Edik has joined us again, but this time I'm the one who is taking no part, except for holding Lyuba's breasts. Prohibition from anything more is my "measure of social correction" for making us a girl short by allowing Blondie Bella to wander away from

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the car while the others were shopping for provisions on the way to Lyuba's. More excited than ever by my enforced frustration, Lyuba takes wholly seriously someone's playful proposal that I be pardoned after an hour.

The next time we meet Voluptuous Valya, it is the afternoon when Alyosha is the duty lawyer in his Juridical Consultation Office. At last the enterprise has moved to its new quarters in a sloppily renovated apartment house, of which the pride of office fashion and convenience are half a dozen consulting rooms instead of the old premises' toilet-sized cubicles. Here counselors can meet their clients in private—even, should they desire, behind a locked door. Checking in at the office, Alyosha takes the key to one of these tiny new chambers from the matronly secretary, and with a flourish, invites Valya and me inside. The key is turned, a bottle swigged at, a moment taken to recount recent events. Then Valya undresses and climbs on the desk.

Fucking in a Soviet office? With telephones ringing, clients arriving and the Chairman — a Party man of course—giving advice in the corridor outside? Yes, but it's with Alyosha, who knows when to practice the unheard-of On this quiet afternoon, he judges, our room won't be needed, we'll remain undisturbed.

It's not for nothing that he served on the committee to expedite the three-year renovation. The chambers are smaller than he wanted, and positioning is tricky on the cheap little desk. But Valya is experienced, having first favored him precisely here, after he stopped her on the sidewalk outside. In any case, she will not tolerate the "indignity" of using the floor.

I wonder whether his elderly secretary knows why Alyosha asks for the key. Surely his reputation suggests why young ladies flocked to him for private consultations after the move to the new office. When we leave she wears a knowing expression. Yet her fondness for Alexei Evgenievich, Alyosha's office name, helps protect him. He is the man who arranged for her husband's admission to an excellent cancer clinic—which cured him—and whose gifts of chocolates on holidays and occasional daffodils brighten her life.

The next morning, we meet when the sun has finally established full-fledged day and are joined by an old friend of

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Edik's who, on rake-offs from the dental laboratory he supervises, dresses like a Midwestern college professor. (Alyosha claims he has perfected another first for Soviet dentistry: extracting bad teeth through the anus. "It's a great new technique for people who can't open their mouths.") The entire day lies before us to fritter away, and despite our failure to accomplish anything in life—despite everything that keeps us down enough to be grateful for small favors—we are wrapped in an idler's sense of luxury. Lolling in this, Edik's friend says it first: "Kovo ebat budyemP" —not "Whaddya wanna do tonight, Marty?" but "Who are we going to fuck?"

It is always said with an element of parody, this private motto: a mocking of the girls who will submit after feeble excuses; of ourselves for our self-indulgence and abdication from more constructive interests; of the system that demeans values and trivializes existence, reducing us to this childishness. Kovo ebat budyem? expresses the futility of striving for noble goals—and our relief from the need for such exertion.

We saunter to the car and drive around, searching for a leash for the new boxer of Edik's friend. (Although there is apparently a pet shop somewhere that sells them, he will not humiliate his animal by making her wear an item of Soviet manufacture, and is willing to pay the outrageous price for a secondhand Western one.) But when he repeats the motto after lunch, it has a more straightforward ring: unable to get free every day, he's concerned lest this afternoon not produce the planned consummation. Reassuring him playfully, Alyosha makes some calls and we pick up our girls as they leave work in the Ministry of Light Industry. Somehow the day was richer before they appeared.

Her body is the socialist-realist statue of "Woman Exercising" in every park; her face, a film poster of a kerchiefed milkmaid. In fact, she is the daughter of Moscow factory hands who herself worked for a year in a rubber plant after high school. Then she studied theatrical makeup and was expelled for truancy. At a second institute, she tried industrial design, quickly leaving of her own will. Next was a language school, where she hung on long enough to acquire a household serfs command of French. She applied for a job with Aeroflot.

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A smitten personnel man gave her the job despite her repulse in a taxi. Soon she was earning as much as her parents.

When promoted to international service, she started, according to custom, with the "democratic" countries. It was a nice break: raincoats bought in Prague and sweaters in Warsaw considerably enhanced her style—and her income, when items were re-peddled to eager friends. Now she aspired to work Western routes. On capitalist territory, Embassy and KGB officers watched their own almost as closely as enemy agents; during the two-hour London turnaround, she had heard, no one could leave the plane alone. But there was always the occasional bad-weather layover with its openings for shopping and sightseeing. The prestige alone of Western travel warranted the added straight-and-narrow demands, and although her looks militated against her now—to lower the possibility of defection, Aeroflot assigned its least prepossessing staff for capitalist routes—her proletarian background was strong recommendation. She was careful to dress plainly and talk "patriotic" with the political types.

But her best friend, also a stewardess, married a Frenchman and settled in Paris; and she was soon summoned by the KGB. "We're not prohibiting you from writing to her, but not recommending it. Don't ruin your career. You know what we mean."

She did, of course, but decided to answer through a third stewardess whom she thought she could trust. A week later, she was back on domestic routes, where a pretext was found to cut her salary. Thus began her sharp decline in mental energy as well as in work. Now she is a substitute stewardess, called on principally in emergencies. Her wardrobe is ragged; she spends her afternoons at the movies or eating ice cream with girl friends.

Underlying everything is her placid resignation. She tells her story without a trace of resentment toward Aeroflot or the KGB—or, of course, her lucky friend in Paris. Blows of state are like the acts of nature her parents and grandparents endured.

But to bed again. She gives her plastercast body with good-humored warmth—but why get overly worked up about this either? When she leaves, it is to meet her former husband, who divorced her for a girl who flies to Cuba.

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Alyosha and I grow fonder of wandering at night, when the whole sleeping city is ours, providing as much stimulation as Cannes or Nice for our game of playing tourist. We are silent for hours, conscious of something scratching in our relationship, like chicks inside shells. We will not be able to separate easily after my year will be up. What began as a good-time lark has developed according to its own laws.

"Gimme a cigarette," he says, informing me with his inflection that he too is thinking these thoughts.

"Gimme a left turn on Petrovka Street, and easy past the you-know-what."

Turning the corner, we almost hit two cars that have apparently crashed into each other minutes before. One contains a small boy with a gory face and a woman wailing about what had possessed her to drive him home at this hour. Because the damaged cars must not be moved until the police arrive, we rush mother and son to a nearby clinic, then cruise for another hour, hardly talking.

But the boy's wounds have somehow introduced yet another element to our relationship, and Alyosha begins reminiscing about his military service, the period that has long intrigued me. The link is blood, but I press him to begin at the beginning. . . .

He was first inducted during the shock of the Finnish campaign in 1939. A foul-mouthed orphan of seventeen whose world was poker, fistfights and occasional errands for shysters on Moscow's toughest streets, he half-welcomed his induction as a break with this aimlessness and as a possible opportunity to acquire the profession he already sensed he needed. Together with the last of his innocence, this notion disappeared within a week.

Basic training was brief, penal and brutish. And insanely inadequate; although cursed by bellowing officers, whose opacity he could hardly believe after the slyness of his card-playing mentors. Private Aksyonov did not fire a single round of live ammunition during his training. Thus prepared—and similarly equipped: one of his two changes of underwear was reclaimed as the camp's shortages grew more severe—the new infantryman was shipped directly to the Karelian Front, an army group

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assigned to cut Finland in half at its waist. He arrived in early January, 1940, the nadir of the war.

Only the enormity of Russian disasters preceding and following the Winter War can explain why its suffering has been largely forgotten. The few soldiers who survived both the northern Finnish slaughter and Stalingrad actually preferred the latter: less hunger and irreversible chaos; more hope, at least, for survival. The day after arriving, Alyosha, who still knew ludicrously little about his rifle, understood that something was horrendously wrong. Compared to the fighting army's confusion, mindlessness and paralysis (fostered by decimation of the general staff and field officer ranks in purges completed the previous year), basic training seemed almost quaint in retrospect. In the field, muzhiks with nothing but fatalism and dumb political faith—the backbone of the new Stalinist army—wore the boots of Russia's executed officers. And they were frightened rigid as well as ignorant: after the purges, guessing wrong on the simplest decision might lead to unmasking as a saboteur. Initiative was more feared than the Finns; staff and field officers cringed in mutual suspicion; on the front line, even tactical withdrawals— another quick route to a firing squad for "defeatism"—^were beyond consideration. "In a sense, muddle is endemic to this country and has a comic element, but this one was beyond description and very sad. No one knew anything; nothing worked."

The fighting took place three hundred miles below the Arctic Circle, in the coldest winter ever recorded there. Alyosha's unit was woefully undersupplied, even with winter overcoats. Their opposites in almost everything, the Finns had superb snow parkas and rifles with German telescopic sights. From steel pillboxes and skillfully camouflaged positions in the overlooking hills, they methodically picked off their targets; it was documented that one rifleman dispatched over a thousand individual Soviet troops. Khaki bull's-eyes against the snow, the Russians crouched as ordered, awaiting bullets in their stomachs. In the first five days, two thirds of Alyosha's company, including the uncomplaining lads to his left and right, got theirs. Clutching their wounds, they sank quietly to their knees as if commanded by higher will.

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"This was literally a massacre of the innocents; few of the boys had had enough knowledge or joy from life to feel sorry for themselves about leaving it. Their problem was limited to whether to take an overcoat from a dead body, which would help with the cold but also make them cleaner targets. Most simply waited their turn, wondering only whether a canteen might appear so there'd be some hot soup first."

Before his own turn could come, Alyosha was dispatched on a reconnaissance patrol. A pair of binoculars was found and reluctantly entrusted to his sergeant. When he was shot an hour later, the glasses passed to one of the two other privates sharing the mission. When they were both killed, Alyosha snatched them and ran. A sudden, violent snowstorm engulfed him; profoundly exhausted and hopelessly lost in the white vastness—divisional headquarters had refused to give the sergeant a proper map of the region because he was not entitled to such security information—he was grateful to the numbing cold for helping prepare a peaceful death. At dawn the following morning, he was still alive. The snowfall having eased, he was able to use the binoculars, and put them to his eyes to amuse himself in his final hours. There was no point walking, even if he had had the strength. Without a map, one mute hill was like all the others, and a small valley in the distance might as well have been on the moon.

(Hearing how the humble sergeant had entreated for a map, I suddenly understand Alyosha's fixation for always knowing his precise location. Of everything for which he mocks Soviet rule, only his grievance over the perpetual shortage of road maps crosses the line from irony into rancor. Even the few available, he curses, are deliberately falsified: roads, bridges, and railways are moved out of true position; university cartographists are among those denied the "secret information" of accurate data. The purpose is to confuse enemy rockets and bombers—futile nonsense, he says, in the age of satellite mapping, whereas the dupe's real victims, as always, are the Russian people. "A million ditch diggers tunneling a few yards off, twenty million drivers taking wrong turns—or getting run over as they get out of their cabs and stand on the asphalt scratching their heads over the puzzle of some heterotypic road. . . . Fishing boats have been lost, hikers a.ctua.\\y frozen to death because a stream meanders right instead of

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left. That sums it up, muchacho: the Pentagon knows every hayshed's position while we all grope around, trying to dope out what belongs where in our brave new world." But despite this, Alyosha saves every map he sees; the apartment is full of them.)

The fading private played aimlessly with the binoculars. Suddenly he held his breath. Through the frosty lenses, he distinguished a large Soviet force, seemingly an armored division, straddling the road of that distant valley. Before his system could fully respond to the joy of rescue, he made out several figures. Incredulous, he dragged himself closer. Hundreds of soldiers were frozen literally stiff beside tanks and field guns. The scene's ghoulishness was doubled by his beholding it alone in the whole white world. Rifles clutched by arms frozen outstretched; mouths opened in shouts and snorts, even conversational grins, as if flesh had instantaneously turned to stone. (Like monuments too, the black faces were heavily dusted with last night's snow.) Dozens of men had been praying; one officer held his cap in his teeth. But most were on their backs with limbs stretched skyward, like horses in rigor mortis. Shrieking, seventeen-year-old Alyosha established that nothing moved.

He ran again. Instinct ordered him not to die like this. But even if it weren't starting to snow again, even if he could do no more without snowshoes than thrash about like a doomed man, he had no more idea of which direction to take than of whether last year was a good one for Burgundy. It was remarkable that his wobbly circling led anywhere at all. Somehow it did; and extracting the last calorie of his extraordinary endurance, he stumbled back to his camp.

Somehow too, he remembered that it was to reconnoiter that he had been sent out the day before, and he conjured up a few-more minutes of strength to report the spectacle of the lost division to his lieutenant—who led him to headquarters to repeat the story. A major with a beetle's face listened without comment, and told Alyosha that for one more word about his "subversive rumor" to anyone, he would be shot.

Suddenly everything was clear about his obligations to himself and to society. In those thirty-three hours, he shed his tough-guy affectations and became not just an adult, but roughly the kind he was to remain: cynical and cunning, a master manipulator of

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the system. Deciding that he wanted to Hve, he simultaneously recognized that the principles of Soviet rule made this synonymous with living cunningly and well. Honest men were peons or cannon fodder; there was no third choice.

The following morning, he launched his personal war of survival. By evening he'd wangled the job of headquarters messenger, a few hundred splendorous yards from the front. An intelligence perceived as exceptional in comparison to his fellow peasant-soldiers won him rapid advancement to divisional postman: opportunity to inch farther away from the carnage. Here too his ability to memorize names (training for the girls?) and to remember a few consecutive sentences—above all, his facility with pencil and paper—made itself known, and his next promotion was to divisional clerk. But his recognition of the obtuseness and rigidity of men in command was more important than all his quick learning of army forms and procedures. Because divisional officers struggled to formulate simple sentences without errors, he was increasingly called upon to draft their dispatches. His own disillusionment and cynicism now absolute, he made the stunning discovery that his superiors still thought in the language of patriotism, duty, belief in authority. His salvation lay in that very obtuseness, which would keep them from suspecting his scheming.

The next promotion made him ghost-writer of the divisional wall-newspaper for the Party commissar: as the soldiers continued to slog forward to be chopped down, Alyosha composed the necessary paeans to the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist leadership inspiring their glorious victories. (In the end, twelve of his company's one hundred and eighty enlisted men survived, four without permanent injury.) When the political commissar was killed, Alyosha was temporarily entrusted with the additional duty of censor, one of the lapses—since Alyosha was non-Party— for which the officer responsible was subsequently executed.

Although relatively safe from snipers' bullets and entitled to hope that his wits might see him through, Alyosha's single interest was to get as far away from Finland as fast as he could. "War and obligations to History, defending the sacred Motherland and world Communist cause—such noble instincts can impair your health." Although he wanted nothing less on

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earth—except to remain near the front—than to become an officer of the Army of Workers and Peasants, this, he discovered through his access to secret circulars in headquarters, was his sole escape. He applied for officer's training, was quickly accepted, and feigned modesty at his commanders' gratification that a local boy should hear the call to higher duty—simultaneously pretending to be full of regret over leaving the front while socialism's treacherous enemies still breathed life.

It was now late February. Packed with limbless and lice-ridden soldiers, Alyosha's railroad car resembled tsarist convict wagons before Alexander II's nineteenth-century reforms; but as it struggled—south!—down the single track, he kissed its clammy wall.

The officers' training school was located in a dismal base in the western Ukraine. His arrival there having served its purpose, his goals altered accordingly: at all costs, he now had to avoid becoming an officer—that disastrous prospect, with years of obligatory service—and, if possible, part company forever with army life. His plan was to demonstrate himself as manifestly unfit for a commission: as incompetent as zealous. This seemingly sensible scheme was foiled by an underestimation of the army's sorry condition and extreme need. Desperate for recruits, the school accepted for training "everyone who had four limbs and could remember his birthday."

"Once in, you didn't get out. Each new body was a prize; only outright spastics were rejected. Even the hack doctors were surprised at some of the types. And you had to be a genius to flunk the so-called entrance tests."

Industrious and conscientious as in no school exam, Alyosha worked two dozen eye-popping grammatical errors into the single-page composition designed to test knowledge of the Russian language. The unreadable narrative was marked "B." During the ensuing physical exam, he managed to fall over a chair and to collide with the senior doctor—Act One in his mime of appearing virtually blind. Under his breath, he admitted to a medical corpsman that his vision was blurry beyond ten meters and headaches had tormented him since childhood. He was pronounced fit for combat.

When the course began, Alyosha became anxious. Rejecting a

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plan to stutter in favor of continuing the eye gambit, he was unable, however, to attract anyone's interest in his seeming disability, even though it kept him from properly making up his cot. "So help me, I couldn't stand out. Some of my colleagues couldn't cope with th^ principle of bed-making." Only after weeks of scrupulous and sometimes painful melodrama—crashing into doors, plummeting into trenches—was he given his chance to botch a re-examination of his eyes one afternoon while a painful sprain was being dressed. Finally, grudgingly, he was pronounced unfit, and during weeks of cleaning horrendous latrines, impatiently awaited his orders. Would he be assigned to clerical duty? Discharged from the Army entirely? Good God no, he was ordered to return to his unit—back, that is, to the Karelian front.

"Finland, by Jesus. Back to the slaughter! I had to puncture the ploy, of course. I waylaid the doctor and told him a wondrous whack on the head by my drill corporal's rifle had restored me to perfect vision. Oozing compliments about my patriotism, he considered that the circumstances excused this transparent lie: I'd flunked the eye test so badly that there was no sense even trying me again. Do you know the Russian saying about wit generating woe?"

As the train rolled north this time, Alyosha brooded while earnest green soldiers in his wagon broke into song about Stalin's wisdom providing fearlessness in battle. By now, his old divisional commanders were probably killed or executed; he'd have to start as a foot soldier at the front again, a lamb awaiting sacrifice at the altars of officers' incompetence and terror. When the train approached Moscow, where he was to change, it occurred to him to write a last postcard to the aunt who had helped raise him.

Stepping from the Kiev Station into Moscow's now dear streets, he thought better of his idea: why not visit auntie in person? Indeed, why not take a short holiday in the capital of world socialism before proceeding north to die for the great cause itself? Living hand-to-mouth among his Damon Runyon friends, he stayed two months in the relatively-undisturbed-by-war city. By this time, the spring flowers were in full bloom and a peace treaty had been signed. Wangling his way onto a train, he returned to his unit, which was now guarding the newly

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expanded frontier. Six weeks later, he was demobilized. As he had foreseen, his papers were lost in the bureaucratic farrago and never arrived from the officers' training school; traveling alone, he was lost cargo. No one knew or cared about his Moscow detour.

A civilian again, he was back in the capital by June—to become, while pondering possible professions, a poker player, school janitor, truck driver and warehouse watchman. He had discovered literature and was reading widely in the Russian classics, but his musings about writing himself were always quashed by the recollection that nothing about the Moscow he knew and loved—and cherished more than ever after his experience of Karelia—could be penned; like everyone else's, his material would have to be hosannas to socialism and Stalin. Recognizing the agility of his hands, he considered training for surgery. Meanwhile, the eighteen-year-old continued to drift and observe, not hurrying to make up his mind.

The resumption of war made it up for him. Six weeks after the German invasion, Alyosha was called up again—but his bones balked. The accumulation of agitprop lectures about "Finnish aggression" which he had endured as a soldier generated a suspicion that the current line about the treacherous Nazi invader was similar propagandistic perversion. The more strident the broadcasts about "everyone's sacred duty to battle the fascist foe with his bare teeth," the stronger his conviction that Stalin and Hitler were somehow in league, and that this war—perhaps any war—was not his.

Among his reprobate acquaintances was a certain Abram Aronberg, known to friends as Abrasha Abramchik and celebrated by them as one of Moscow's cleverest raconteurs and most adroit cardsharps. An "underground" tailor of great girth, undersized hands and an appearance decades older than his thirty-odd years, he was in a relatively jovial mood that summer because a host of physical impairments, from severe boils on his neck to feet painfully inadequate to cope with his weight, had earned him one of the highest categories of unfitness for military service. The lucky man—who was to die of food poisoning that autumn—tried to lift Alyosha from his draft-notice depression by agreeing to present himself as Aksyonov at the latter's induction

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physical. Both surmised that the disastrous miHtary situation had aggravated the Army's bureaucratic muddle. Abrasha Abram-chik's shrewd gambling sense assessed their ruse an odds-on bet to work.

But Alyosha again ran afoul of the Army's unpredictable standards. Although Aronberg was indeed accepted as Aksyo-nov—no one questioned the hastily forged identity papers they'd bought—the physical wreck was pronounced fit for combat and ordered to report for induction almost immediately.

"To his own horror, he flunked for me—that is to say, he actually passed. Poor Abrasha couldn't hold his cards steady. He wouldn't even eat. He was terrified he'd pass muster on his own examination next time around."

When sober the following morning, Alyosha dispatched an irate letter to his examining board, protesting that a deplorable error by the induction clinic had confused him with another draftee. It was a venture that few Russians would have risked, even if genuine victims of such a mistake. But Alyosha had guessed shrewdly again. And when directed to report for a second physical, he fell back on his tried success with eyes, this time choosing a weasel of a pickpocket for his surrogate—who, when his heavily besmudged eyeglasses were removed, had to be told that the chalky blur on the wall was the chart. This fine fellow failed admirably for Alyosha, affording him respite until the next call.

Meanwhile, the Wehrmacht was closing in fast on Moscow, whose bomb damage and ominous rumors—radio sets having been confiscated—"rather less than compensated for panic and food shortages." In early November, Alyosha joined thousands of citizens similarly impressed, digging antitank trenches on the city's western approaches. That evening, he visited a library to contemplate a map of his native land; he had decided on a quick self-evacuation. "Was it Lenin who coined the phrase about discretion and valor? Besides, there was talk that Stalin himself had snaked out of town. I chose not to insinuate I was braver than he."

Since only the south promised both distance from the advancing Germans and a hospitable climate, Alyosha's choice of haven seemed to make itself. Walking, hitchhiking and riding the rails

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of guarded, war-packed trains, he made his way to the Black Sea coast, setthng, for no particular reason, in the sleepy Georgian town of Sukhumi, where asses outnumbered cars on the packed-dirt streets. Although hardly a gay resort even by Soviet standards, Sukhumi enchanted Alyosha even beyond a venturous young man's first discovery of the seaside. He fell in love with the sun, palms and evening air's scent of dissipation; he learned to swim great distances and to carry himself among the clannish Georgians. For work, he was hired as a handyman by the local dramatic theater, a pretentious palace on the central promenade with more columns on its facade than productions in its repertoire. As the theater's personnel were drafted one by one, he was propelled up the slender hierarchy, becoming an actor and ending with appearances in major supporting roles. By this time he was also a star in the town's scanty society, to which he brought energy as an organizer of parties as well as linguistic amusement. The summer heat seemed to swell rather than deplete his strength. He had always been unusually robust; now he became the very picture of tropical health. He had a quiet love affair with a tender Russian girl who sewed him shirts and trousers. It was the best year of his life.

But by the end of it, the Germans had reached the Caucasus, from which they threatened the entire coast. Knowing he'd be drafted again sooner or later, Alyosha staged a week of parties and "gave myself up." Although this was less an expression of patriotism than restlessness, he had begun to believe that fascism must really be stopped. For some reason (he did not yet suspect that his never-seen father might have been Jewish), Russian anti-Semitism disgusted him, and by this measure, the Germans were probably that much worse.

Although he spent two years at the front, the record of his service itself was less interesting, because more commonplace, than his long avoidance of it. He spurned the commission his Sukhumi friends offered to arrange, preferring a soldier's dismal rations and serflike treatment to an officer's obligatory hypocrisy and troubled conscience. First a cavalryman, later a mechanic, he was finally transferred to tanks, in which he fought in the great battle at Kursk—which weakened the Wehrmacht more than Stalingrad had—and across the Ukraine, through Poland

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and into central Germany: a thousand-mile, village-by-village slog including some of the hardest fighting in the history of warfare. "Our invincible-armed-might-of-the-Soviet-Motherland films have it right—except that those prebattle 'hurrahs' from us were actually for an issue of a few grams of vodka or a lick of jam. Believe me, we were too scared, exhausted and wary of our own officers for any unauthorized exuberance."

(His early months in the cavalry reinforced his obsession with cartography. When he overheard staff" officers ordering company commanders to capture Wehrmacht maps as the first step in counterattacks, the symbolism of Russia's condition which this suggested now stung him less than the universal acceptance of absurdity as a guide to action. Apologizing for nothing, leaders behaved—with officers whose lives were at stake—as if the need to steal information about one's own country from the enemy were utterly normal. "No one questioned it. Even mentioned it in passing. Communism hasn't turned this land of ours surrealistic; it's the monkeyshine of a whole, mute people pretending-—or believing!—that black is white.")

Although wounded twice by enemy fire and once, severely, by the crash of a Soviet fighter beside his tank, he was never again subjected to the stark horror of the Finnish campaign. Indeed, the war ended with an episode which Alyosha saw as a kind of reversal of the first satanic weeks in Karelia. In the euphoric days after the Allies' historic meeting at the Elbe, a contingent of American soldiers crossed the Soviet lines for celebrations with hand-picked politically rock-solid Russians who would uphold the Party line while making merry. From a safe distance behind a row of potato sacks, Alyosha stared at the first Westerners he could remember seeing in person. More than their informality— open-necked uniforms, jokes and drinks swapped with officers— he was fascinated by what their gestures revealed about their state of mind. The GIs were loose, happy, unafraid. One glance established that they knew nothing of commissars and Marxist-Leninist chants, witch-doctor myths and inexplicable prohibitions—of everything that, in trying to account for and remedy clumpish hardships, only made them worse. These were children of the land where he belonged!

Overcome by a divination that the calling for which he had

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been waiting had arrived, Alyosha began to sweat. He knew he must escape. The vision of himself sprinting to the Americans (somehow expanding on "the man I love . . . kiss me again, my darling . . . Pennsylvania, five, five thousand"—the sum and substance of his English vocabulary) repeated itself so vividly in his mind that his fingernails pierced the muddy potatoes. And remained there well after the Americans were led away to the entertainment.

Aware that he had cheated his destiny, he returned to the sacks the next morning as though on a voyage to his birthplace. The mistake of his citizenship could have been rectified; he should have shifted to the world suited to his reflexes and temperament, where he'd have devoted himself to something real.

"I was twenty-three then," Alyosha says quietly. "I had energy. Do you think I'd have made a go of it in the West?"

"How on earth did you expect to get out?" I play the straight man. "The GIs would have handed you straight back to your officers. They understood nothing. Anyway, they'd have had no choice."

Alyosha's expression reveals that he has always known this, and hoped not to. "Do you think I'd have made a life for myself in America? I always wanted to see the Rio Grande. ... I might have been able to do something in films."

"Mother Volga beats the Rio Grande, in case you still want to go romantic. No, I see you a bit further north in California. A playboy-producer of television trash—filthy rich and despicable. You virtuous types turn shamefully crass on exposure to real action."

Pleased at my image, Alyosha grins and takes a moment to contemplate himself driving a convertible in the Hollywood he knows by way of Hollywood. "Yeah—but over there you have to work. All those plush-office millionaires, and so pressurized, so nervous. It's true, isn't it, muchacho? You and I together, we've got more of what they're really scrambling for than the lot combined. . . . I'd have flopped in America: no ambition, no real drive."

I do not state the obvious: that Alyosha's enormous drive would surely have been channeled and he could not have helped but make something unusual of himself Nor do I say that I shall

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never visit anywhere beautiful or exciting in the West without thinking of him. Two years ago, his appHcation for a holiday tour on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast was rejected; now he's working on a scheme to visit Prague, but his friendship with me has probably killed forever all chances of any foreign travel. About a trip to America, we do not even fantasize.

"That's what I like about you, Yank," he drawls to dispel the melancholy. "The moment I laid eyes on you, I knew^ou were no millionaire. With an extra ten years you could pass for one of those Elbe GIs with . . . er, the common physiognomical touch."

He throws his arm around me and laughs the laugh of our friendship. He has driven me home during his narrative, parking outside the deserted University. We get out together and walk to the gate. But as always, we make our way back to the car, then stroll up and back around the iron fence, aimlessly turning over tomorrow's avowedly important plans. The real reason for not parting goes unmentioned.

Did the Army damage him? Surely this is too simple—like the notion that he is damaged at all. I, who know him best, understand that in his way he is righteous. Arm tight in arm, we continue to pace the fence's vast perimeter, totally alone except for shawl-swaddled watchkeepers at the gates, an autocratic sky and the silent University skyscraper. We are in step, and happier with ourselves than ever. If our relationship includes a homosexual element—the anonymous girls serving as a vehicle for our vicarious contact—I'm glad it is with him. I yearn to do something grand to repay his love—^no, to sustain it, for somehow I constantly fear that such generosity can't last. It's not enough to be the "Yank" who brings back lost illusions. If I could invite him for a visit to the West, I'd spend my last penny to show him the best. We'd go to the smartest "21" places, the kind for which I have no taste on my own. Acapulco, Capri, Cannes—anything he wanted would be his, and he, who makes a holiday of a walk along the Moscow River, would revel in it like the whole of a cruiser's crew on leave in Hong Kong. For one glorious month, I'd be the guide.

A haunting moon is rising over Lenin Hills, barely illuminating the dome of a disused church. In its wan light and my surge of tenderness for him, his shaggy head suddenly seems frail; more

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than ever, I perceive the hide-and-seek child inside the clever operator. The unreality of my fantasy about giving him one dazzling fling squeezes my chest. I know that he senses my affection and sorrow. With comic grandiloquence, he is composing a courtly complaint about my recent snapshots of him in which his teeth appear bad and his nose "more protusile" than usual. From a satirical discourse on the ethical implications of "photographs don't lie" he moves to an exposition—simultaneously twitting his own vanity and Socialist Realism, while reminding me of my life's vastly greater opportunities—of the artist's duty to illuminate mankind's "progressive" nobility rather than irrelevant individual defects. Nonsense phrases— "the aesthetic prophylaxis of the creator's proboscis perception, in a society underpinning vigilant development"—are sprinkled among the pseudo-philosophical contemplation, and my inability to stifle belly laughter intensifies my heartache. Steaming like dry ice, the moon tries to burn brighter. A passing police car slows to inspect us. When we finally kiss good-bye, I like myself too for feeling what I do behind the previously taboo gesture.

"Amber teeth, lad, mean meat in the larder. It's an old Russian saying."

"For God's sake, don't take a detour on the way home. Amateur bards need sleep."

But having coaxed the engine back to life, he jumps out again and runs back to the gate for our nth rehearsal of tomorrow's rendezvous arrangements. Parting is such bumblingly protracted sorrow.

The tidal wave of depression that submerges me the next day is as strong as any before I met him. Only his exhortation extracts me from bed. Convinced at last that something is wrong with me, he parks the car where we happen to be: alongside Lubyanka.

"What's the point of feeling blue? What's there to be blue about? The sun's shining; you don't have to kill the day in the shadow of a bar—of justice, I mean. But Fm listening, go ahead."

How to tell him what troubles me? His problems—the Finnish front, everything symbolized by the dreaded yellow structure whose shadow darkens the car at this moment—are real; mine a

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silly collection of New York neuroses. Lack of parental affection, ha ha? The breakdown of my career; loss of Anastasia? Blessed with everything denied to him, I can't explain the subconscious mess that lays me low at these times, nor that my life will never be rich the way he assumes. For all our closeness, we're sometimes strangers; but another lesson I learn now is that best friends need not be psychic twins.

Our long drive ends in a village whose single street is a cortege of battered trucks spewing noxious gases. During a stroll through the dreary village to escape the Volga's ears, Alyosha is talking about B.B., our code for the scheme that increasingly preoccupies him. Big Business. He will obtain some superb icons suitable for smuggling to the West; two or three will make us both rich.

It is a hazardous plan which can easily bring the KGB on us, but he's determined. If I'm discovered with the goods, I'm to say that I bought them from an unknown street pusher. If the smuggling succeeds but he is caught with the dollar profits, he'll concoct an explanation that avoids implicating me. No matter how strong the circumstantial evidence and pressure to confess, his trial experience tells him that conviction for conspiracy is unlikely if we stick, stick, stick to our stories. And although he might get ten years, they'd probably limit themselves to permanent expulsion for me.

"Listen, muchacho, I trust no one on this tricky earth. Only you. Because . . . well, I know you. And if you're worried about this end, I'm going to make a speech. They can do what they want to me. Hack me up in little pieces, I'll never rat on my Yank."

I know this is true, and that Alyosha has said it with an intention broader than just to reassure me about the operation. He and I against the world through icons; and I won't disappoint him, despite my dread. With this danger to cope with, my depression subsides, his words thumping in my ears. "They can hack me to shreds, I'll never sell out on you."

The climax of the next day's errands is an urgent consultation with two friends from Alyosha's smart-set days. Painters rich on book illustrations and "underground" canvases flogged to Westerners, they dashed off" an erotic drawing one drunken night, which found its way to splash publication in a recent edition of a

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Hamburg magazine. The Union of Artists' answer was to end their careers by depriving them of their studios.

Forsaking their customary finery, the wives join the despairing conference about how to avoid ruin of their swank Ufe-style. Cross-examining the doomed about the Union's discipHnary procedures and about their own movements on the fatal night, Alyosha advises them to beg for mercy but also to explain that the woman depicted in a lewd position was intended as Stalin's daughter. The revanchist magazine, they should say, foully distorted a patriotic, if tasteless, sketch by removing the "Svet-lana Alliluyeva" on her forehead, together with "bourgeois press" and "monopoly-capitalism," the labels on the penises inserted in her, and the drawing's title: "Traitress to the Motherland, Prostitute for Dirty Dollars." At first irritated by what they take for untimely wisecracking, the painters are persuaded of Alyosha's serious intent and, lacking a better plan, agree to consider his.

We are far away, shopping for a coffee-grinder, when Alyosha mentions he once had an affair with the more elegant of the wives. For the rest of the day, I can't suppress the sad question of whether Fll ever feel as casual about Anastasia as Alyosha about the tense woman on the couch. Once again, I ask him how he and Anastasia met, but he adds nothing to the story, saying he still doesn't understand what went wrong with us, nor why I don't claim her instead of pining.

"With your looks, muchacho, you can rouse Sleeping Beauty. Two slim meters you are, suave from head to toe . . . she's the lucky party in this suit."

I can't explain why I still love Anastasia so after our split, but his cool conviction that she'll be mine if I truly want her brightens my longing. With a thump, I realize that if Fd satisfied myself vagabonding with him before Fd met Anastasia, we might be married now. But I knew her first; the paradox is that she led me to Alyosha. I suppose that's life, and Fm not complaining, but my happiness would be complete if there were somewhere a place for Anastasia in all this.

Desperately late again for the usual reason—a blue-eyed pedestrian—Alyosha pushes the Volga past trucks hogging an icy

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road. When the bald tires lose their grip, he whoops at the skid's challenge, lets the wheel find itself and stomps the accelerator again. We are rushing to visit King-size Natasha who, we've just heard, had an abortion this morning.

The hospital is a modern building in an outlying district. Our risks on the road were in vain, for we arrive after visiting hours, and Alyosha's cheeriest song and dance about being a Ministry of Health sanitary engineer cuts no ice with a sour Chief Nurse at the desk. Contemplating the purse of her lips, Alyosha decides this is not an instance for pushing his luck, but he thinks fast as we leave. From a telephone booth outside the grounds, he calls on cheek, flair and practiced skill to cut through the obstacles separating us from Natasha. The first trick is eliciting the hospital's number from waspish operators; the last, flirting with a ward nurse until she summons the convalescent in her charge. Soon the large-boned girl is waving to us from a third-floor window.

We plod through a field of unbroken snow until we're directly below her, and she tosses down a roll of cotton cord, whose end Alyosha ties to a shopping net filled with the sausage, biscuits and chocolate we bought on the way. Natasha hauls up the booty and blows us a chortling kiss. We shout plans to taxi her home tomorrow evening, and start back toward the road.

Then it begins. A dozen bored girls in uniform bathrobes appear at the adjoining windows of the abortion ward, teasing us to shimmy up for a visit. Suddenly two at separate windows recognize Alyosha and squeal. "Alyoshka, come rescue me." "Alyoshik, be a knight!" Inviting one and all to a recovery celebration, Alyosha calls up his telephone numbers "in case anyone has an emergency requisition." The commotion alerts the authorities in the persons of a stout nurse appearing in a window and an angry watchman struggling through the knee-deep snow toward us. As he blusters, we race for the car.

"Jesus, did you see that beauty next to King-size?" sings Alyosha over the motor. "I've been a tax-paying citizen of this burg for forty years; how the hell have I never met her before?"

She is loitering in the corridor of a People's Court into which Alyosha has dashed, a tall girl with a tasteful scarf Yes she'll

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come with us, she says after our introduction—but can we be patient? Unfortunately, she must wait for a certain verdict. Twenty minutes later, a judge stands up in a musty little courtroom to announce his court's finding. The young defendant, probably dark and handsome before his capture, has been reduced to a pitiable creature. Crushed by defeat, prison-shaved skull hanging like lead on his powerful chest, he cannot raise his eyes above his filthy boots. The judge sentences him to seven years in labor camps for robbery. It is the graceful girl's husband.

"But won't you even write to him?" I persist as Alyosha opens a bottle of Bull's Blood at the apartment. "You say he has no one. He stole for you. His life is ruined."

"Mine's not."

About Alyosha's postwar life, I learn in snatches. Demobilized in late 1945, he returned to his personal status quo ante bellum—specifically, the need to acquire a vocation. Acting no longer appealed to him, and although he had an impulse to try movies as a cameraman or director, it was soon suppressed. Fashioning the obligatory panegyrics to factory and collective farm of Stalin's postwar cinema—"or to the great victories in 'defense' against the Finns"—directors had less chance of personal satisfaction and lived under greater risk of labor camp or execution than dealers in black market penicillin. Black market penicillin was precisely what an old friend of Abrasha Abram-chik offered to cut him in on, but although it would have made him a millionaire, Alyosha declined.

Returning to odd jobs in warehouses, he weighed alternative careers while coping with the memory of his day on the Elbe. In postwar Russia, where one's own sense of humor provided the only vapor of gaiety, the fifty yards which had separated him from the Stars and Stripes seemed alternately infinitesimal and infinite. Yes, everyone knew it was impossible to cross that mine field; but everyone was usually wrong. Ending his youthful illusions that he would somehow grow up rich and happy, the war, however, had changed nothing for the better in the country. Whether or not Russia was psychologically and morally sicker than in 1939—as it clearly was physically—Alyosha perceived it as such. The stupendous edifice of strain, isolation and ideologi-

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cal perversity—the chants to the takers and cripplers of Hves— seemed to him less hypocritical than insane. Yet even intelligent people pretended not to notice. To keep themselves in power, the authorities had created a centralized system of permanent terror and depression. An entire population was toiling to make life harder for themselves under a Kafkaesque antiphilosophy based on forcing society as far from possible from what was normal. By comparison, even the devastated Germany through which his tank had clambered seemed a haven of enlightenment and comfort. It was now clear that a lifetime of odd man out awaited him in this ocean of sullen poverty. Yet when his chance to escape peeped out, he hadn't dashed for it. For such stakes, why hadn't he taken the risk? . . .

In 1946, he worked on the wall newspaper of a Moscow subway line under construction, using the Glorious Victory lessons he'd learned during the war to achieve the proper prose bombast. Then he was briefly a darkroom assistant. For all his pondering, it was an accident that made him a lawyer. The ambitious girl he married in 1947—she already had a foot in the door of the capital's tiny upper class of wheelers and dealers— was a Jewish student in the Moscow Juridical Institute, where he too enrolled. It was she with whom he was soon to lay in bed at night, bursting with hardness for others.

In keeping with its role in Marxist-Leninist theory and in Soviet governmental practice, law had become the least intellectual of disciplines. Studying in his spare time, Alyosha finished the three-year course in less than two. The curriculum was designed for the solidly proletarian lads who (like roommate Viktor) would quickly take their places as the nation's judges, prosecutors and Ministry of Justice officers. Less backward than provincial army officers, many were nevertheless unequal even to the primers that reduced all legal theory to easily memorizable formulas, applicable to any case without thought.

"Lecturers recited the bold print, we intoned the answers. No music: it was a recitative Mass."

Alyosha was again reminded that underestimating the stupidity in official places prejudiced one's survival and well-being as much as insufficient caution. The course taught the smattering of cosmopolitan youths who were to be Moscow's successful advo-

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cates that one gets ahead by exploiting the pervading apathy and ignorance.

For these reasons, law provided a happy choice. In half the time it took most of his colleagues—a fifth of the average Soviet work week—Alyosha earned a relatively handsome income: enough from his first month as a practicing lawyer to enjoy restaurant meals and presents for sweethearts. Within a year, he had met Georgian speculators and other "businessmen," the cream of the criminal lawyer's clientele. His long affair with Moscow's cafe society was beginning.

As with almost all his prosperous colleagues, Alyosha solicited under-the-table payments from criminal defendants or their relatives. But unlike some, he kept his private fees reasonable, which is why brothers and uncles of robbers and embezzlers he'd once defended sought him out when they too came a cropper. This was true even when these robbers and embezzlers had been convicted and shot, for Alyosha's best arguments sometimes came to nothing, even in the rare cases when he believed his clients innocent.

In a non-Soviet court, his agility of mind and precision of expression would have made him brilliantly successful; here, he was careful to use a goodly part of his powers to control the other parts from exercising their natural abilities. Beyond certain limits, defense of a "criminal" in the dock was not merely unseemly, but anti-Soviet. Thus Alyosha walked a narrow line not only between prosperity and greed with relation to his clients, but also between integrity and discretion vis-a-vis judges. Since a vigorous defense, especially one that punched holes in the indictment, might anger the judiciary, he had to disguise his thrusts, even when the indictment was full of blunt contradictions or where evidence of police mistakes or prosecution wrongdoing might have mitigated the sentence. Quite calculatingly, he repressed his briefs almost to the level of his former fellow students, now the plodding representatives of Soviet jurisprudence on the bench.

Nevertheless, Alyosha's clients trusted him to adapt his tactics to the circumstances. He became known as a connoisseur of which judge would stand for what amount of "legalism" (read "introduction of previously unnoticed, exculpating facts") in the

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defense case, or of "unhealthy oppositionism" in general to a prosecution conducted in the service of the Party and the Soviet people. Sometimes suspected but never disliked, the young lawyer with the easy smile learned that sensitivity to moods and character on the bench— and to Party-organized campaigns against this or that public abuse—was as important to his craft as knowledge of the law.

Of all his rewards as a lawyer, Alyosha most cherished the uncommon luxury of being almost his own boss. Apart from court appearances and the occasional volunteer stint for the sake of his record as a good citizen, his involvement with the system that monopolized ninety-nine of every hundred lives was minimal. Taking the cases—and vacations—he wanted, he worked an average of ten hours a week: just enough for food, drink and gasoline.

Over the years, he handled every kind of case, from bank robbery and murder to wrangles over square inches of floor space between estranged husbands and wives forced by housing conditions to continue sharing the same room. But commercial considerations prompted a preference for criminal rather than civil trials; the highest-paying clients remained embezzlers and captains of speculation, which shortages nourished like ragweed. Despite the narrow limits of his ambition, his reputation grew, especially within the sparse ranks of the Moscow advocacy. Trusted to split fees honestly as well as never to betray a venal colleague, he was referred choice cases that others were too busy to accept.

The making of his name in a specific area of the criminal code was as accidental as his choice of law itself. One day, a former client asked him to represent a nephew charged with rape. The accused was no less than the center forward of Moscow Dynamo, one of the country's most popular soccer teams. But instead of having his indiscretion hushed up, the usual practice with athletic and other celebrities, he was apparently in for a severe sentence, as demanded by Evening Moscow's squib about the crime. Rumor had it that the stadium hero had earlier taken liberties with a niece of a Central Committee member, and that this was the moment for a drastic lesson.

Titillating talk about the case swelled greatly when it came to

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trial and the heavy sentence was approvingly publicized. As a side effect, the newspaper's incidental mention of Alyosha provided him with more popular publicity than a Soviet lawyer could attract in a lifetime of squatting on a flagpole. From Murmansk to the Urals, requests streamed to "Defense Counsel A. Aksyonov," as he had been identified, from relatives of young men accused of sex crimes. When the parents were of the upper middle class or the black market bourgeoisie, they paid handsomely. Alyosha discreetly left unmentioned the curious circumstance of his professional expertise now running dead parallel with his personal.

"Not so curious at all," he said when I put it this way. "Not when you know what's happened to others. Whose fate do you know that isn't erratic in our happy land?"

Although his reputation as a sex crimes specialist slowly diminished over the years, Alyosha still handled many more sexual cases than the average lawyer, and continued to be visited by an improbable assortment of clients, from schoolteachers to generals, seeking confidential advice about conjugal duties and rights. Alyosha gave it objectively. With his adroit use of humor and of matter-of-fact tolerance to human diversity, he also tried to soften the vindictiveness of narrow-minded judges but, even within possible limits, never actually advocated sexual liberation. His attitude toward obtaining satisfaction was summed up in a ditty he liked to quote: "Kolya's fucking someone/Someone's fucking Kolya/And what's it to you, Tolya?" But although this was intended to satirize the whole panoply of Soviet intrusion on private lives—the idiocy of armies of inspectors, investigating "what The People think when they pee"—he felt it wiser to affect professional detachment on all larger issues.

Nor did his occupation either strengthen or ease his own satyriasis. Work and play were kept prudently apart (except behind a locked consulting room door in the new Juridical Consultation Office); trials were one thing, fetes another. And so it goes to this day. Fifty yards from a courthouse where he has defended a man charged with unnatural practices, he recruits new girls for an evening that will include many of the same sodomitic acts.

Only the sheer number of his former darlings effects an occasional meeting between business and pleasure. One client,

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for example, raped an old friend of Alyosha's on his first charge six years ago, then a second Erstwhile soon after his release. One pretty victim, the former typist of a minor official, got her boss indicted for "Compelling an Economically Dependent Woman to Enter into Sexual Intercourse" but confessed, when Alyosha interviewed her as defense counsel, that she was willing to drop the charges out of consideration for the happy week her mother had spent with him, Alyosha, after the war. A Young Communist representative of a shoe factory appealed, in the name of her "entire collective" and in phrases of the highest socialist morality, for a severe sentence against one of its workers accused of rape—not disclosing, of course, that weeks before she, the representative, had brought along two teen-age gluers from the same factory to share Alyosha's bed. . . . Alyosha's explanation of these coincidences is that Moscow, by which he means the circles who are active and alive, is incongruously small. To me, they are illustrations of the stranger-than-fiction eccentricity that flourishes in its daily life, and the qualities in him which consistently bring them out.

We move our skull session to Edik's, out of earshot of the apartment's microphone. A mother has heard of a "filthy debauch" involving her seventeen-year-old daughter, and is threatening to "ruin" Alyosha. He immediately summoned the evening's other participants and, like a prosecutor preparing a show trial, drills the wide-eyed teen-agers about what to say if the police make inquiries. Totally trusting, they accept their obligation to dissemble for his protection without a second's hesitation. He knows that three eyewitnesses with the same story of innocently passing the evening in question will invalidate one mother claiming perversion—but also that a single deviation from the common alibi will disastrously weaken the defense. Hence a hard afternoon of memorization and quizzing.

That very evening, we leave the Peking Restaurant at closing time with two bonny language students. Although we're all groggy from too much food and drink, we wander in and out of side streets in the cold before going home. Tipsy as he is, Alyosha senses plainclothesmen are stationed in the lobby and feels it unwise to be seen entering a car in our condition. The Volga

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may be followed or its license recorded, all the more because our girls had been practicing their French with two foreign businessmen at the adjoining table.

Wherever we are, the sixth sense he has developed to gauge how far to go in any criminal defense also screens him in his potentially perilous sexual adventures and his meetings with me. Beneath the jauntiness, his reflexes are constantly alert, peripheral vision cast as wide for policemen as for girls. And when driving me to the American Embassy for an errand, he's like a Captain approaching shifting underwater hazards. While he's waiting for me two prudent blocks away one day, a policeman opens the door to demand to know who it was who just left the car and why he entered the Embassy. Alyosha replies that I'm The Worker correspondent come to investigate the number of Negroes lynched this year—and when I reappear, vigorously shakes his head "No!" to my move toward a beautiful girl in sight of the same glowering cop.

"Wowing her here might have been less than entirely discreet," he apologizes as we drive off"—and although this emerges as Peter Sellers burlesquing a spy, his purpose is deadly serious. He even senses when he had better speak for me on the telephone because my accent might provoke the suspicion of a girl's parent, neighbor or office colleague.

Only someone so skilled in precaution can afford to be so cavalier.

The procession continues. Will anyone believe how ridiculously easy it is? (Under Alyosha's guidance, that is. With girls I pick up alone, I can't direct the progression from opening banter to bed with his touch or speed.) By now, it's less the numbers than the variety of stories that baffles me. The curious and coincidental cases that spice the progression of anonymous girls seem teasingly implausible.

There is Chekhov Tanya, the picture of one of his innocent heroines in a wide-brimmed hat—although at sixteen, she's had literally twice as many lovers as years. And Anomaly, a blushing thirty-year-old who has sought out Alyosha to "become a woman" but flees into the corridor at the last minute. (Alyosha calls Lev Davidovich, who will take her to a concert.) Later, a

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former convict girl whose breasts release a thin flow of milk when touched: she gave birth ten days ago.

A smattering of celebrities also appears in curious new lights. A young visitor to Moscow casually mentions that she's the niece of the celebrated Alexander Stakhanov—the first of the "Stakh-anovites"—and that when she last saw the old man he was swilling his inflated pension and kicking the neighbors' cats. A quiet graduate student remarks that her best friend, a girl of twenty-five, is a favorite of Rudenko, the feared Procurator-General who made his name at the Nuremberg Trials. The intriguing oflspring of a Russian father and Georgian mother claims that the former was once Khrushchev's driver—and that she couldn't care less. Nor do the wives of actors, colonels and Honored Artists of the Russian Republic show an interest in their husbands' achievements. We represent an afternoon's diversion to them, during which talk of their status would be out of place. But they all seem to live a story. Changing jobs like lovers, drifting with the currents of emotion and the breakers of social upheaval, they are the plankton of the country's land mass, totally independent from the ship of state on top.

The Chip off the Old Block. She strongly resembles him, the corpulent chest of medals in the second rank behind the Politburo, taking the salute in Red Square; a veteran with porcine eyes and the reputation of a die-hard Stalinist. Through her pudgy prettiness, the family resemblance shows in the mouth, wide shoulders and faintly muscular chest. To her mother's dismay and father's fury, she has run away from home, abandoning the restricted luxury shops, government-staffed villas and grand stables on closed state preserves. Sickened of Party bosses and playboy sons' unearned wealth, she dropped out several weeks ago and plans to join Uzbek shepherds in the spring: a hippie in a land where very few can afford or get away with it.

Meanwhile, she will not take advice, put on her brassiere or leave the flat. She sits cross-legged and bare-breasted in a corner for days, drinking cocktails of sweet wine and vodka, taking on one after another of Alyosha's friends who drop in. Convinced that her father the General has ordered a search, Alyosha begs her to move the dynamite of her presence elsewhere.

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"Alyoshik, there's nothing to worry about, / can assure you. You must learn to say 'screw you' to Papa. If people understood this, the world would be a better place."

The Scholar. A handsome woman of twenty-eight ("Ye gods, I'll be running an old-age home next," moans Alyosha) in a well-tailored suit, she has come to Moscow from Sverdlovsk to obtain a black market copy of something by Freud. Any Freud, it hardly matters which, so long as it "you know . . . explains about sex." Scholarly ignorance and popular indifference in this field are a Russian plain of darkness. What are we to make of our chance meeting with this provincial belle of maverick interests?

"Actually, I'm not a sexologist yet; that's what I want to be. I'm a psychology student in Sverdlovsk University. But sex is so important, don't you think? I want to make it my life's study."

"In theory or practice?" Alyosha chimes in, wriggling his ears. "You know Lunacharsky's admonition about book learning estranged from the people's daily life."

"Oh, practice is valuable too. I never realized Lunacharsky was involved with it."

While Alyosha is searching for the telephone number of an old friend likely to own a prerevolutionary copy of Freud's treatise on dreams, she undresses, placing one finger in her mouth and another in her sex. . . . Two hours later, she asks for the names of other potential "fellow-students."

"I only have a couple of days left in Moscow, and I have to find a book by Avid [sic!] too."

The Volunteer. Again and again, she promises to return for "whatever you want" next week; but she simply can't let us "have it" tonight.

"No I won't stay over; I've already stayed too long. Where's my coat, I'm leaving this minute." She has something terribly important to attend to early tomorrow morning and must not be late.

"Eight o'clock on a Sunday morning?" Alyosha's inquiry is a polka of skepticism and cheery confidence that the new prize, a fornicator's dream of lewdly beckoning breasts and buttocks, is on the verge of abandoning her improbable excuse. His experience of ten thousand fibs and feints have honed a sixth sense about genuine and invented appointments. To help recruits keep

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the former, he will drive any distance in any weather; but he is correspondingly deft at dismantling spurious defenses.

"You're a Catholic then, my darling? Tomorrow's your holy confirmation? Nothing to worry about. We'll fix you up with a peccadillo for confession; everyone will feel finer for it." The incongruity of this—not one practicing Catholic in ten million girls her age—is lost on the amateur acrobat, who laughs because "confirmation" is something naughty boys do, and you can't call that "holy." With her lemon hair and tarty makeup, she seems unlikely not only to attend church but to have anything but monkey business planned for a Sunday morning.

But when she rises early and returns to last night's plea, Alyosha becomes convinced. Rushing with breakfast, he repairs the toilet for her use and cranks the Volga alive. Relieved at being sped toward her required address at last, she reveals the nature of her business. Today is election day and she's an agitprop volunteer for turning out the vote.

I jump on the chance to learn something about the infamous agitprop, terror's repellent henchman in my textbooks on totalitarianism. No, she replies thickly, of course she didn't offer to do it. As her wallpaper factory's newest hand, she was instructed to volunteer, told where to report. No, she couldn't say what the work would be. Something about ringing doorbells and reminding the Comrades of their socialist duty to vote. The candidate? What candidate? Oh, the one she'll be canvassing for. Well, what about him?

"Who is he for a start?"

"How am / supposed to know, they didn't tell me. Anyway, what difference does it make? . . . Shall I come back this afternoon?"

The Star. We spy her in a new record store, this winner of Cannes prizes and most internationally celebrated of Soviet actresses who, in Moscow, is as well known for her visits to mental hospitals and persistent nymphomania. A shrill mockery of herself in her immensely popular movies, she reviles us from the moment of entering the car.

"You want to fuck me? Okay, you can fuck me. All studs want to fuck me. But get out and hail a taxi. A decent one, a

Alyosha^221

limousine. You cunt-lappers think I'm going to ride in this shit-heap?"

On television last month, my third viewing of the film that made her a public idol again moved me as deeply as the first and second. She played a girl of haunting purity who loses her lover to war. Now, en route to Alyosha's, she demands cigarettes and vodka—"Western fags, goddam it. And my own bottle."

"You can fiick me up my asshole, that's what you scum want. But bring me Stolichnaya, not coffin varnish, you cheap bastards."

His aplomb slightly frayed, Alyosha buys two bottles of the best vodka, serving them in the apartment on a tray with gleaming glasses. She shatters hers against the wall and drinks straight from her bottle. Glugging noisily, she lowers it to her other lips and inserts the neck, groaning with forced pleasure like a has-been diva. Later she snorts like a laughing record, vomits into the sink, curses us for palming off rotgut on her. Still retching, she demands champagne.

Smacking of a Hamburg cabaret, the sex has been so degraded that Alyosha and I need a tramp through the snow after she has sobered up enough to leave. Staggering from the Volga toward her entryway in an apartment building for Party and cultural big shots, she warns that she'll set the police on us for seducing her.

"You dirty bastards, I'll send you to a labor camp. You won't get away with trying those tricks on me."

Having met his match, Alyosha drives off like a bank robber on the getaway.

"I told you we take in too many movies," he mutters. "Makes us too starry-eyed to handle real life's challenges."

After a rest come two post-office file clerks wooed from an ice cream parlor on Saturday afternoon, who mention that they must testify at a trial on Monday. Alyosha too will be in court the day after tomorrow. Because his case seems a nasty one—the defendant and his Georgian friends apparently robbed as well as raped two Russian girls slow to submit to them—the parents have promised him a whopping six hundred rubles under the table. But such matters are far from our minds as, during

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leisurely preparations for a fete, we explore our guests' ungrudgingly presented charms. The table gradually acquires its customary clutter while the two eighteen-year-olds nibble on olives and toy with Alyosha's stuffed monkey.

"I'm not hungry," says Alia feebly, in response to the aroma of roasting meat.

"Got any good records?" asks Olya. "I know a boy who was in France and saw the Rolling Stones."

"The trial's early," muses Alia, returning to their Monday-morning devoir. "If it's over in a couple of hours like they said, will we have to go to work in the afternoon?"

Alyosha and I quickly gulp the rest of our beer in order to shout our double-take "Whoops!" together. Like news of a bounced check, it dawns on us simultaneously that our callers are none other than the rape victims he is due to meet across the courtroom two days hence. The fete must be canceled: even a hundred rubles is too much to sacrifice for the favors of two pleasant but wholly ordinary postal clerks—precisely the kind who might kiss and tell on the stand. Sleeping with the prosecution's principal witnesses on the eve of a trial could cause permanent disbarment.

Like a clown in sorrow, Alyosha gazes adoringly at his unattainable prizes who, still unsuspecting, are distributing herring morsels on large cuts of bread. Even my homily that all is not lost forever—after all, we can safely reinvite them after the trial a not unendurable forty-eight hours hence—does nothing to dispel the hammy pain from his eyes. Squeezing Alia on his one side and Olya on the other, he pronounces a melancholy discourse on modern life's killing pressures, wherein invidious business is "always" smothering pleasure.

Then submits to the logic of his own self-lampoon. "What the hell, some say you're only young once," he intones happily, freeing a hand to propose a toast. "Temptation's evil, it's our duty to fight it—in the form of filthy lucre, I mean. . . . Anyway, divide by two"—he pats each girl lovingly between her legs— "and it's a mere three hundred rubles each, si, muchacho?"

This is his way of saying that he wants to sacrifice the extraordinary fee for Alia and Olya's favors. The thought of this wild extravagance—six hundred rubles is a worker's income for

Alyosha^223

half a year—transforms the otherwise ordinary fete into a luxurious revel and gives our companions an aura of exceptional allure, as if they were fabulously costly call girls. I know Alyosha has made the gesture partly to provide something extra for my weekend. Nothing—especially such outrageously expensive pleasure—is now for himself. All discoveries and disappointments, every tale told by every new girl, is nourishment for our friendship. And offerings to appease omniscient skuka, god of Overpowering Boredom.

We spend the weekend together in feasting and brief outings. Monday morning, we drive to the courthouse. Alia and Olya to report as required, Alyosha to disqualify himself from the case on the grounds—-which he must argue ardently to overcome the judge's so-whats?—that having dined at the adjoining table in the restaurant where the rape was planned, he felt personally involved.

By the somber light of Monday afternoon, Alyosha decides to sell the new samovar to pay off pressing debts for which the Georgian bonanza had been budgeted. But he has no regrets about the weekend, not even now that it's over.

On the Sunday when Agitprop Tanya is helping turn out the vote, Alyosha too performs his civic duty. To lose the taste from his mouth "before it spoils the Sabbath," he likes to vote early. In a school corridor near the apartment, he turns from the officials' table where he has been handed his premarked ballot and, in the same motion, drops it into the box without having given it a glance.

I leave quickly because I assume I'm not supposed to witness this spectacle and am afraid my expression might give me away. The very ordinariness of the ten-second ritual of totalitarian control makes it deadlier than I had expected, and Alyosha's smirk hides neither his humiliation nor disgust.

"An informed electorate makes its choice with dispatch and resolution," he says on the school steps. "Rest in Peace, the election results will be gratifying. And what else is new? Kovo ebat budyem?^''

Rest in Peace, our code for the propaganda's inane edge, comes from the story of the eulogist's farewell as his factory

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director is lowered into the ground: "Rest in Peace, dear Comrade; the plan will be fulfilled." A spoof on the standard description of Soviet leaders' firm final words to his "comrades-in-arms" about strengthening the Party's unshakable unity and raising productivity, it reminds us of Edik's influential father, and we call the prodigal son from a booth. He asks to meet us tomorrow. Alyosha often gets his pickups excused from work by obtaining a chit certifying they appeared as trial witnesses; now Edik needs this proof for a schoolteacher who missed two days of classes last week for a spree with him.

The clinic where an Erstwhile of Alyosha's supplies medical excuses from work if his favorite court secretaries are unavailable happens to be our next stop. It is part of a huge complex for oncology and internal medicine, but Alyosha doesn't reveal his business here and even says I'd better not come in with him.

"Happily, hombre. What's the attraction of a cancer clinic on Sunday?"

"Chief doctors are away, comrade nurses like to play. The heater's on, I'll be a minute."

But he is gone an hour, looks wan when he reappears—from a different building—and apologizes with uncharacteristic formality.

"You're not sick, seiior?" I quip.

"Sick of winter. Let's home it for a bit. I'll do soup."

A broth made from dried, wild mushrooms, it is my favorite. We have just started spooning when a knock sounds. I open it to a woman wearing a pasted smile and a dirty coat I seem to recognize. It is Aksyona, our disappeared railroad friend.

"I know. It took all my courage to face you. But I'll explain everything, may I come in?"

She finishes the leftovers together with the soup, explains nothing but asks to borrow twenty-five rubles. After sharp chastisement for stealing from individuals when there's a whole huge State around, Alyosha gives her thirteen in single bills. Aksyona takes a long bath, but perceiving no great demand for her favors, leaves with a promise to return "when I feel I can tell."

We stretch out together for a rest on the bed. Folders containing Alyosha's current cases crown piles of less important

AlyoshaX225

papers scattered everywhere, and as always, we talk in whispers because half our topics—exchanging dollars for rubles, my obtaining Pall Malls and a Sinyavsky book for acquaintances of Alyosha, the Palestine and girl situations—are taboo or illegal. These conspiracies are part of nature now. The strange peace I feel, despite the underlying dread, in succumbing to the limbo of being Tonto to his Lone Ranger is strongest on Sundays. Abandoning the last pretence of library work has been a relief. The possibility of my expulsion because of this or for some convenience to the authorities is all the more reason to spend my rationed hours here.

I flip on the radio to a selection of oh-so-Russian folk songs in a superpatriotic arrangement of a provincial choir. "Music to vote by," comments Alyosha dryly, threading the Ray Charles tape "for jamming" on this Election Day.

Our plan is to spend the rest of it enjoying the easier weather—wind tasting of oozing earth beneath the snow—with a walk in the countryside, but first Alyosha wants to consult a colleague about a truck driver he defended who was sentenced to eight years for manslaughter in a highway accident. Ordinarily resigned to miscarriages of justice, he is distressed for the doomed man, who was not only blameless but also accepted ruin by hanging judges without a word of protest. For months, Alyosha has been pursuing every avenue of appeal and pardon, all on his own initiative since the convict's wife cannot spare a kopek from the meager income she scratches together to support their children. The final hope lies with the Supreme Court, and since all previous rulings have ignored his mass of technical evidence, he wants advice—not to be trusted to the telephone—about whether to approach one of its members.

The aged lawyer welcomes us to his apartment. After the consultation, we drive to a peasant market, where Alyosha buys a chicken for today, lamb for tomorrow and, despite my protests, a handful of murderously expensive tomatoes. "Enough bravado. I know how fast Yanks run down without fresh vegetables and chewing gum." It is three o'clock and we haven't talked of women for the evening. A counter girl in a white smock—normally perfect prey—goes unnoticed.

We climb into the car, then out immediately because we

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haven't discussed B.B.—the icons. Keeping voices low and distance safe from aHen ears, we pace the old fence that conceals the eyesore of the market, apprehension making me excited yet weak. Estimating our wealth, plotting and double-checking our moves, we rehearse the entire operation, as we did yesterday and the day before.

". . . yeah, but real masterpieces, okay? . . . more fakes than informers . . ."

". . . knows monastery sources. He's a vodka priest; once defended him . . ."

"... still the one crucial step. Got to get into that diplomatic pouch ..."

". . . not more than three trips . . . something safer than a tourist; they've really started to check . . . fetch fifty thousand dollars—or pounds?—in London . . ."

I will smuggle Alyosha's cut back to Moscow—the more on the first go, the better chance of buying museum pieces for "reorder" and the greater our eventual wealth. But if I can't return, at least one of us will be rich.

"The right one, muchacho. It's anomalous to live under capitalism without capital. . . . Besides, Rockefeller's pile can't change my style or, er, domicile. You're the new generation, you need the stake."

A voice in me gloats at the prospect of these crooked riches. When I return home—without Alyosha, prospects, even interests, fit only for nostalgia about this, my great adventure—I'll be alone. Different from everyone. This lump sum will be my compensation. I'll invest well and live the life of an Alyosha in New York. . . .

Yet the dream only increases my foreboding about the future. In my heart of hearts I know that something will go wrong—and anyway, how can we raise ten thousand rubles for a museum piece when we must sell some rag for tomorrow's food and drink? B.B. is sheer escapism—not even proper wishful thinking, for at bottom neither Alyosha nor I want to be rich. What we do want is to do something princely for one another; and to court danger together along the way. His riches and mine will be our only link when I'm home and he's here, a world apart. Meanwhile, we try to lift the conspiracy to this charitable objective.

AIyosha^227

"Take your time selling. Maybe a private collector instead of the auctions, that's where your judgment counts. . . . Remember, they count on panic and confession. If anything flubs, we stick to our stories."

"Right, and stay with those art books. It's hot air until you find the right goods. What about the museum right now?—No, better not be seen there together. . . ."

Provisions safely in the trunk, we proceed with a reduced agenda of Sunday errands. A stop at a dry cleaning outlet so that Alyosha will have his suit in the morning. An in-and-out visit to admire Volodya Z's new boxer pup.

But we skip the rest, and Alyosha is not going to attend his lecture about the highway code, a spiteful cop's punishment for crossing a lane line last week. For the sky has suddenly cleared to an early spring sun, and we drop everything in the usual rush to the great outdoors. Fresh air is at least as important as fresh cadres.

In our early weeks, when I was still making appearances at the library, Alyosha lamented the "pessimism" that kept me inside the somber building irrespective of whether the sun was shining. "It's a common-law crime to waste such an opportunity," he pleaded at the first sniff" of mildness. And I'd chuckle at this childish order of priorities, until I adopted his sense of values and began to cherish each bright hour like a personal gift.

"When the sun appears, heed the call of duty. To the countryside, quick!"

After our late start, we choose the nearest park reasonably free of Sunday crowds. There the sun is glinting in a million drops of melted snow. Despite the slush sloshing into Alyosha's shoes, we stroll for hours along rambling paths, talking about an Erstwhile chosen for a screen role and another whose indiscreet remarks to a Dutch journalist has landed her in an asylum; and about our plan to marry two sisters who work in the powerplant so that I can invite him—as my relative—to New York. Full of admiration for my "feat," Alyosha questions me about my wandering through Europe without guides or fixed routes on a college summer vacation. We have started toward the car when a shout rings out.

"Aksyonov! Hey, Aksyonov—my God, you're a sight!"

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A sight herself, the woman is chasing us like a goose on the run. Forty pounds and a quarter of a century ago, she was Alyosha's favorite for a winter. Now she's a grandmother: this —she exposes the bundled face of the infant in her arms—is her daughter's son. Did anyone suspect life would pass so fast?

"How wonderful to see you," Alyosha interjects. "Tanechka darling, you haven't changed a bit."

Beaming at his recognition, Tanya, which is indeed her name, says she's been following Alyosha's amatory progress by word of mouth, and warns she's considering a "refresher" visit herself Pleased with herself, she waddles her pram away.

The evening chill and our appetite for the market chicken make us eager for the apartment. But approaching the Volga, we notice a black car parked twenty yards behind: one of the KGB teams that follow us occasionally, in conformance with no pattern we can decipher. This pair is drowsy, no doubt because their heater is on full blast, and Alyosha simulates clumsiness to sound his horn while settling into the driver's seat.

"Hello darlings, it's the good guys—no, I mean the suspicious elements," he mimes to the beefy men. To me—between phrases of a patriotic song, anesthetizing the microphone—he whispers that if we leave unobserved, the apartment will be patrolled for a week.

"Our sleuths' dislike for being outsmarted contributes handsomely to the common interest. Learning to play dumber than them, the brains of the nation are sharpened."

When we stop to telephone Fawn Galya, he holds open the booth door with his foot, the more visible to make the exaggerated cooing and wooing expressions that demonstrate to the detectives he is surely talking to a girl, not enemy agents. Galya isn't home but her younger sister has answered. "What's that again?" gasps Alyosha, who senses his flattering banter is about to bear new fruit. "But maybe you feel sixteen, what's a year between old friends? Mistakes are made in birth certificates, you know. . . . What can we do, then, Natashinka? ril wait for you."

Watching him at work, knowing that when fifteen-year-old Natasha attains the age of consent next year, a hundred beloveds and a thousand errands from now, Alyosha will remember to call her, I think of his inimitable qualities. The impulsive generosity

AIyoshaX229

on borrowed rubles and self-parody that makes him a metaphor for humanity trekking its eternal route; the mascot nose and the slightly undersized physique—-which, despite everything, makes his philandering funny. "Mother Nature didn't want everything perfect," he sighs when contemplating his defects in the mirror. "Even the sun has spots."

I also question myself because I don't want to fool myself concerning him. Would I be as moved by his taking me in were it not that few Russians dare invite me even overnight? Is it his acceptance, in fact, that I'm grateful for—or through it, my open sesame to the back doors of Russian life? Would this friendship have happened, or Alyosha himself have been spawned, in another land, or only where gloom and fatalism weigh the air, giving us day after day to ourselves and our private pursuits? In other words, is Alexei Aksyonov a straightforward freak of nature or the kind that reveals more about ordinary life than a hundred average types?

Is it odd or logical that my best friend is Russian; that five thousand miles and a political eon from New York, I feel that I'm home? I wonder. And can't decide whether the cave-in of my plans explains my need for him as the personification of health and dynamism; or whether he prompted the academic collapse. He who makes me feel I'm watching a nature film about the miracle of creation and of life-energy.

Everything is jumbled together: his qualities, the ones in me that respond to protective openheartedness, the relationship of these personal questions to what Russia gives and takes. When I'm an old-timer looking back, I'll complete the equations. Meanwhile, with him near, I needn't worry about what I'm going to be or do. I know that when I'm blue, he will drop everything to be there outside the University gate. Never mind that his standard remedy of an afternoon fete is becoming less effective; he'll even endure a television documentary if mindless distraction is what I want. That if I ask him to make inquiries about some state secret tonight or to drive me to Siberia tomorrow, he'll fill up with gas and set off". (He's already made plans to microfilm certain Revolutionary legal brochures in a closed archive—the material, he insists, for a quick dissertation, which I must finish, even though I'll be icon-rich.) That when I

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perform some task, he'll make a great fuss over my ability to cope with Russian life: watching me complete a telephone call or fight my way to a spirits counter before closing, he beams with pride and affection—just as he laughs delightedly at my weakest witticism. Whatever else is incomplete about him, his central trait of unqualified, unconditional affection is what was missing from my modern education: the commitment not to what I do or know, but to me.

Yes I love him, in the end, for his loving me. The other attributes, even his trace of Chaplinesque genius, are bonuses. We are not going to Siberia tomorrow, of course, but will cruise around on our permanent junket. Our limitations and self-delusions will ride inside us, yet we'll feel as footloose as Dos Passos' heroic bums. If a supply of the first spring crayfish has arrived at a certain specialty store, he'll boil me a potful to be wolfed down by the dozen with the best beer. A hubcap filled with unobtainable oranges will sit on the table because once, in the throes of a bad cold, I mentioned a craving for citrus. After supplying the medical chit for Edik's "fiancee," he'll drive me to a funeral—of a Party official, for extra pomp—simply because I'm curious.

I'll give him the Japanese turtleneck I bought in a hard currency shop and he'll put it on immediately, according to custom, and wear nothing else until it has holes. (After a washing, he'll don it again before it's fully dry, but remain impervious to cold and to the flu epidemic.) When he spurts forward on a new lovely's trail, I'll try to distract him—not because I don't want her too, or because the current pocket notebook is full of telephone numbers we haven't had time to call, but because the accommodations necessary for any third person will pull us that fraction apart. But if the girl prefers an hour with me alone, or if I want privacy with her, he will make an excuse to leave the apartment, mentioning what's most tempting in the refrigerator and apologizing for the unironed sheets.

Waiting for a bus that passes near the apartment, images of what awaits me often irradiate the dusk. I will be welcomed, fed, entertained with code expressions—"Rest in peace. Comrade, the plan will be fulfilled!"—and new stories. Girls who look like

Alyosha\v231

bit players in a spy film will be impressed by my un-Russian height and haberdashery and will come to bed without effort. That this may be the evening of the KGB raid will add to my tingle; that Anastasia might hear of our goings-on heightens the excitement even more, although I no longer know whether this is good or bad. The next day, I'll have the deliciousness of doing nothing in a state of total depletion. . . . The air at the bus stop is frosty clean, but when I take a deep breath at the sight of the bus, I go dizzy with anticipation, as if my lungs were filling with incense.

But despite the wonder of this, I'll be just as happy if no girl has appeared and we go for our late-night drive alone. I've only a few months left in Moscow. Who would have guessed that a supply of time—for wasting together—^is as luscious as willing breasts and thighs? What crazy luck I had to meet him!

V Anastasia

It was three weeks after I'd arrived in Moscow that I caught sight of her for the hrst time. She was in the rear of a bus that had stopped on Lenin Prospekt, and I was waiting to get on. It was just after nine in the morning, and the bus was packed Uke a stockyard runway — as are many, for that matter, at any hour. And in the herd of solemn countenances surrounding hers, faces worn by weather and hard times, by too many potatoes and a lack of them, hers was a jonquil. This sounded all the odder in the pressing Russian fall, but jonquil is what crossed my mind the Brst instant. It was a face related to things blooming in spring: white, gold, soft, clean. And it had a wide-eyed, slightly startled look, as if discovery of womanhood had made it keen to uncover similar delights in the stolid boulevard.

I happened to be holding a slim volume of lyric poetry, bought not to enjoy the verses — my Russian was too shaky for such pleasures then — but in imitation of my more purposeful

Anastasia^233

colleagues who were busy accumulating personal libraries of classic literature. When the bus slithered to a halt and its doors creaked opened, the pressure of overcrowding evicted several bodies; only two of the dozen people waiting ahead of me managed to hght their way aboard. As the girl turned toward their grunts, a photograph of the beloved young Esenin on my dust jacket caught her eye. She glanced at it, then up at me, and made a teasing motion hinting, "Throw me your love poems if you dare."

As the doors thumped closed, I tossed the book over shaggy hats and heads. She raised both arms above the crush and caught it, laughing at her success. As the motor groaned for takeoff, she placed her eyes on mine again and smiled. The almond paste of sweetness and provocation sent a surge of happiness through me, tempered only by a need to recall where I had felt its source before. To my further elation, I remembered. "And suddenly," went the Bulgakov line I'd read on the plane about the Master's 6rst sight of Margarita in a Moscow crowd, "completely unexpectedly, I understood that all my life I had loved precisely that woman. Some joke, eh? You'll say Tm crazy, of course."

All my life, Fd dreamed of meeting my stranger and being equal to the occasion. She had performed exactly according to my scenario.

The Embassy warnings of female perils only served to enhance my exhilaration. If I were being followed during my first weeks here, would such behavior be dangerous in my dossier? Had I broken some municipal law? Long lists of rules for using public transport were posted here and there, and duty policemen sometimes led unwitting offenders from the metro. But no police gray was in sight, and a teen-ager in the lighter hue of a school uniform gave me a companionable nod. No one else in the somber bus-stop cluster allowed my triumph to penetrate his weekday morning cares.

Fighting my way into the next bus with a veteran's callousness, I defended my position next to the door. Fd already observed the custom several times: when Russians are separated by a crowd or a spiteful driver, the one who has boarded waits at the next stop for the friend who hasn't. This next stop was the usual half a mile away, toward, which my coughing conveyance strained at its

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maddening pace. I was not in a trance; not too overwhelmed to regret not having worn a better shirt. But the rush of pure instinct still gripped me, dissolving almost all doubt about who I was and what I was doing at this longitude and latitude. To have spied her at last, my age-old picture of the fair yet natural woman, was sufficient to explain my determination, previously curious even to me, to come to Russia. My tenderness extended to every passenger on the bus. Squeezed together into a continuum of flesh, breathing air damp with old clothing and exhalation, they bore themselves with Russian forbearance and dignity. I loved them all, my fellow travelers.

But my joy was not waiting at the next stop. She was nowhere in the swarms for various trolleys and buses there, nor in a little square facing the metro entrance. It was a warm September morning; I remember underarm sweat stains on calico blouses as I searched lines at stalls selling postcards, grapes and crude jars of cold cream. A massive lady peddling kvass from a tanker truck said she'd seen no one like that; a man with one leg was too drunk to respond. I looked in a bakery and a smelly flsh store across the square, then sprinted back to the metro's cool marble foyer to recheck the people waiting for rendezvous beneath an overpainted mosaic of Stalin. Maybe this was a game of hers. Of Russian girls in general. But if I'd imagined her gesture, why had she taken the book?

Then I understood. Clever girl, she'd returned to the stop of our meeting. It was faster to run back than to wait for yet another bus. But I was too late. When I gave up searching at the original stop, almost an hour had elapsed after our moment of sighting. Another passed riding to the end of the line and hunting in the courtyards of the old University and the entrances to Red Square. I sat on a bench and visualized the prism of her cheek.

The next week, I was at our stop at nine o'clock. But no glowing face, no spring stalk of a figure. I'd seen only enough to know my woman actually existed. The one whose scarf could be either peasant kerchief or chic silk square; whose beauty was so artless that we'd never be stuck in intellectualism or pretense. Who, like me, was different, and would have helped me to be special while ending my loneliness.

Anastasia ^235

Her name was Anastasia. Or Nastya, Nastenka or Nastyusha, depending on place and mood. But she was the only Russian girl I was to know whose full name suited her more than any diminutive.

"I must pee," she declares, lashing her fingers around my wrist like a skier his pole. Irritation, desperation, even accusation are in her voice. Announcing her need is not enough; she must also complain of it. Someone is surely at fault for the affront of inconvenience.

"In here, hurry up. Stand in front in case someone comes."

She tugs me into the courtyard of an apartment building just off Arbat, a densely crowded shopping street. The surflike rumble of afternoon throngs trudging through slush is only yards away, and I'm nervous: Anastasia has relieved herself in improbable places before, but this one is too public. Wriggling with impatience, she interrupts my objections.

"Not worth the worry, my bronco. I'll only be a minute."

And in fact, she carries it off before anyone appears in the busy courtyard. Crouching behind a toolshed, she descants a trill to accompany the hiss and stands to adjust herself—all in twenty seconds. Then she gives the yield a proprietary glance: a lemon stain, still steaming in the snow.

We continue up Arbat and I sense her exhilaration. She has triumphed again: felt an urge, proclaimed and satisfied it on the spot. And got away with something, defied the world and its dreary conventions. Smiling her Vm-me smile, she leans on my arm and examines the shop windows, alert for dabs of color in the gray.

This is the quality I love most about her and fear correspondingly. She's never really known guilt and needs no one else's approval; it is enough for her to express her truly free spirit—and to be loved by me. She is a cliche only because her rareness has prompted so many to imagine her: a female animal who is what she looks like.

On the average, Anastasia must relieve herself hourly outdoors and at every intermission at the theater. The need becomes urgent within a minute or two of first being felt and her fastidiousness exacerbates the problem; gagging at the sight of an

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inevitably foul public toilet, she refuses to go in. Once she dashed into a well-known municipal building, found an empty corridor on an upper story and used a dark corner. It's impossible to know in what proportion her drive is due to purely physical need, as opposed to embellisment of instincts she esteems. This is the image of herself she likes and cultivates: a child of nature, harassed by powerful natural needs and society's preposterous obstacles—lack of cafes, Fellini films, goose liver—to satisfy them. However real the whims, she's acutely sensitive to the effect they produce. "The cold makes you pee," she declares, simultaneously explaining her behavior to me, underlining her approval of it, and inviting me to join in making even this a source of amusing self-expression. Or: "I purposely peed before I went out. Twice. Ye gods, can you imagine if I didn't?"

Yet the urges are genuine. Hypocrisy, false modesty and bureaucratic stupidity make her literally ill. Her body is litmus paper for registering the health and sanity of social arrangements. In her unqualified trust of it, she is convinced that discomfort to her proves stupidity by "them." To hell with all sociological-philosophical-ideological mumbo-jumbo proclaiming higher or lower criteria: a proper society is one in which her natural functions are easily gratified.

Her appetite for food is the most eccentric and tyrannical of the urges. Suddenly she is ravenously hungry, and nothing can be said, no other thought or occupation pursued, until her stomach is appeased. She hunts the meal—or prepares it, or spurs on others who are preparing it—with intense impatience and concern. Her ration must be delicious or unusual: this opportunity for pleasure will never return, and never mind that a similar one—but not the same—was seized hours earlier. As a schoolgirl, problems such as "Sunflower seeds give 50 per cent oil and peanuts 40 per cent; if a collective farm plants 100 hectares of the former . . ." consistently stumped her. She could not fight free of her reverie about the yummy nuts to set up the equations.

Moscow is a conspiracy against her appetite. She can't bear either the cheap cafeterias with the twenty-minute lines nor the hour's wait at tolerable places. When hunger stabs, she will lie, sham sickness, incur any wrath of those waiting in line to get into a restaurant quickly. And when the cafe we've dropped every-

thing to race to turns out to be locked—a third of Moscow's sprinkhng of eateries are closed for repairs, inventory and "sanitary operations" on any given day—she succumbs to wrath. Her challenges to doormen can wax shrill enough to attract a crowd—and sometimes policemen.

"I'm not being unreasonable, pantherkins, I'm appealing to reason. It's time for a civilized restaurant where people can eat in peace." Then she suggests sneaking into the Union of Journalists club to cop a steak reserved for members.

It's tricky to be with her when the great hunger, or even some lesser whim, comes on. We've lost hours to futile wandering in the cold because, in the middle of a sentence about antique furniture, she was suddenly dying for a cup of black coffee. Our quest for the vital fluid would take us hiking from one cafe to another a quarter of a mile distant. In vain: here an espresso machine is broken, there the ration of beans has given out, the staff of a third counter is "resting"; and most places offer milky mud alone. (No amount of hectoring will get it for you black: the menu of the Moscow City Soviet's Restaurant Trust stipulates coffee with milk, 150 grams, eight kopeks.) Where the right coffee is available, the line is impenetrable, and Anastasia threatens to turn nasty. One morning she jumped on a trolley and rode off, without saying good-bye and never mentioning the incident again, let alone where or why she had gone. When we met that evening, the irritation had long been replaced by enthusiasm for a just-bought book about monastery frescoes.

But the converse of her impatience is a heightened sense of enjoyment. When set before her at last, food gives her extraordinary pleasure. She eats with total concentration, swallowing with noises of gratification and self-congratulation. (A television nature film we saw showing a lioness seemingly caressing a just-killed zebra with great tenderness before devouring it turned her sentimental about all creatures' profound debt to their food.) Odd things at strange hours: a chunk of tough beef and fried potatoes the moment she wakes up, cold fried cod and dill pickles in the dead of night. Restaurant diners set down their knives and forks to watch her cleaning the bones of a cut of salmon; her performance with her portion is more interesting than ingestion of their own. Frequency of intake—five healthy snacks a day, on

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the average—accounts for the total volume, rather than bulk at any single sitting. She wolfs down the last morsel, savors her triumph for a time and is ravenous again two hours later.

And so with sleep; the same with sex. Every impulse of her nerves or libido is an expression of nature's will, any hindrance to which constitutes a moral wrong as well as a source of discomfort.

Physical frailness, she likes to say, is so fundamental to the human condition that philosophers overlook its implications. "First a person's hungry—and he eats. Then he needs to make love, and he's sleepy. Next there's a different call of nature—and he's hungry all over again. He has to drink, must take a walk, can't do without rest—it's always something manipulating him, which he doesn't even acknowledge in his fumblings to explain 'bigger' things. Respite is illusory: before you've finished relieving one urge, the next one is gathering force for an internal ambush. And this leaves out religious needs, which are acute in this country because the physical ones are so hard to satisfy. For example, I now require a lemonade."

These thoughts come in a tone suggesting she's saddened by the tyranny of appetites. But her eyes are sparkling.

"Then, of course, the teeth need brushing after eating, the dishes need washing. . . . What's left for us?"

I can only answer in terms of why she finds all this important. Although resentment of foolish convention and dreary routine accounts for some of her concern, the opposite is also true: she is trying to inject an element of conscious enjoyment, even of creativity, into what she calls "the dead half of life."

Two or three times a week, we whet "the live half" with a concert or play. Eager to be lifted into the realms of art and fairy tale, Anastasia comes prepared to contribute to her own treat—at least until the curtain rises.

When it does, she often galls everyone near us. She will not control her reactions. When the performances are good, she comments audibly, laughs in midline, anticipating its conclusion, and claps at will—not so much applauding as encouraging, asking for more. When they are very good, she becomes rigid, squeezing her hands together until they whiten, while a characteristic gurgling of pleasure gathers in her throat. But these are

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the exceptions. When the standard provincial bathos of most Russian theater is being dished up, Anastasia suffers real physical distress, squirming and groaning at the moral offense of the artistic failure.

"W^i// you behave, young lady?" hiss voices front and back. "This is a theater.^''

The rebuke is utterly serious. Despite the wide Russian nature, many theatergoers display a petit bourgeois stuffiness that survives only in Vienna if anywhere in the West. Theater is a place of sedate manners and Reverence for (pickled) Art; the mainstay of the audience is the churchgoing type, seeking moral and cultural enlightenment. When the house lights come on, the incongruity gives them a second shock: her face made those rude noises?

Her critical reactions too slight the general public's. As she is the only customer in a long store line to complain that the cashiers are doubling everyone's wait by relieving one another instead of working in pairs as intended, she is often the sole dissenter among the spectators. Crowd-captivating pomposity, the lure of so many productions, makes her shudder. While the audience cheered an elderly matinee darling named Evgeny Samoilov—father of Tatyana Samoilova, the famous film star— making Hamlet ludicrous with hair-rending poses, Anastasia writhed.

"Can that be Hamlet? I'm going home." She had never read the play—but knew.

Weeks later, the touring New York City Ballet disappointed a huge audience in the Palace of Congresses. Accustomed to Bolshoi pageantry—a hundred sumptuously costumed dancers on stage, executing a De Mille-like extravaganza—^the Moscow public resented Balanchine's sparse, avant-garde sketches. But Anastasia sensed the performance's brilliance, and her bravos elicited a final curtain call. Afterward, she was ecstatic: she'd discovered a new kind of art.

The theater is where she reveals herself publicly as a creature of instinct, attuned not to education, imitation or cultural training but to her own reflexes; reacting instantly to what is genuine and what spurious in any work. Not actual but artistic truth moves her; some of her favorite stories begin, "Once upon a

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time," and the twentieth reading of a Lermontov tale can give her joy. When Boris Godunov^s beggar wails his sorrowful aria, tears wash mascara over her milky cheeks. That aria, she gasps, is her people's suffering. I treasure her for this.

Yet the theater is also where she's at her worst. The performances begin at six-thirty, and our standing agreement is to meet at the entrance fifteen minutes beforehand. I pace around columns, making my way through the forest of black overcoats and searching the frost-flushed faces, or, when the cold is too painful, stand in the vestibule scanning the incoming concourse. She's sworn solemnly that this time she won't be late. I try to keep this in the context of general Russian nonchalance about appointments. "So what?" say people who have failed to show up. "It was cold out there. I knew you wouldn't wait forever." But even measured by this, her disdain for the first rule of social intercourse is exasperating.

The remaining minutes evaporate, the second bell sounds, a hundred normal couples greet each other and hurry to their seats—and my resentment soars. The festive crowd is gone, leaving me with the half-dozen unfortunates who can't attend for some reason and must sell their tickets. Will she stand me up again? At best, we've missed the first scene. Why does she put me in this humiliating position? Never think of others, never show any consideration. But the penchant to be late for everything is also integral to her personality. And a portion of her critical sense applauds the Noble Savage pose.

I'm angry because it was she herself who first expressed interest in the play, after which I dropped everything to spend the day spieling, bribing, pleading to get us in. Fighting through a chaos of telephone calls to a belligerent box office and rude assistant manager, flirting with secretaries and traveling to an Intourist hotel's entertainment desk or the theater itself when the telephone turns useless. I've blustered my way past the woman guarding the entrance, outlasted denials that "the bosses" are in their offices, and obtained the tickets from the manager himself through shameless supplication, spiced by the white lie that I'm leaving Moscow tomorrow, this is my last chance to see his vital work. (I know as well as he that he's keeping a block of the best seats in reserve on the off" chance some Party nabob telephones a

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last-minute order.) Despite this time-consuming, nerve-frazzling procedure, the foreigner's advantage in procuring everything of any value in the country extends to attending the theater; on her own, Anastasia would have had no chance.

But my umbrage also derives from the advantage her tardiness gives her over me. Her nonchalant treatment of the tickets demonstrates that whereas I have nothing important to do all day—the truth is that I dropped nothing for the hustling—her life is crowded with work, enthusiasms and optimism. And the deeper reason, which I do not want to act on, is her free spirit. She has precisely the independence of convention that my talk has long claimed for me. Waste the tickets for an important performance? Lose the money? (My money almost always, but she's equally negligent of her own.) I can never make the gesture without bourgeois qualms; she truly doesn't care.

Envy of this abandon, which rides tandem with my hurt pride when she doesn't appear, is the weak flank of our relationship. I resent the silly halfway position she leaves me in. Among my friends, I'm known as the man of impulses who wanders far from graduate-school convention. I too propagandize instant gratification: making love with Anastasia at the planetarium and skipping the second act of Prince Igor for a glass of mango juice. But she knows my stronger inhibitions will make me withdraw first from the truly outrageous. I'm forced into the role of the sensible adult. The very freedom I laud to others puts me on the defensive, acting on me not only as a token of her charm, but also of the discrepancy between myself and my self-image.

Each time holds the promise of a new start. I telephone her triumphantly.

"We're in! The manager said 'inconceivable,' but I got them in the fourth row."

"Wonderful. I'm dying for some real entertainment."

"What time will you be there?"

"Quarter after six." Pause. "I promise."

"You always promise."

"I don't always have something to tell you. Let's make it six."

I come at ten to six with a sprig of snowdrops and eagerness for her news. The third bell rings at six-thirty, hurrying the last stragglers inside. Like witnesses to a cleared accident, hopefuls

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for last-minute tickets disperse, leaving me with my resentment. I've spent the entire day preparing to please her with these tickets. All I ask is that she be on time—and show me some appreciation.

I try to look unruffled as I wait. I envy not only the ticket-holders already inside but also the evening passersby. Yes, they're down and out; but they have dignity. They are preoccupied with mature pursuit of caloric and intellectual nourishment, not with what others think of them because a date is late. Strong Russian faces: I admire even the solemnity.

She arrives at last, one hand clutching her gloves, the other a cellophane bag with her theater shoes. Her handbag is wide open and she is breathless, having rushed frenziedly from her dormitory but several minutes ago—when she was already late.

"Hurry up, let's dash. We'll just make the curtain. I . . . couldn't get a cab."

If I persuade the usher to admit us, the first act—usually ninety minutes long, in good Russian tradition—and the satisfaction of her beauty at my side drain my irritation. During the intermission, she mentions the real reason for her delay. She was in her bath, and the water was so warm, the peacefulness so delicious, that she couldn't force herself out. (With twenty girls sharing it, how does she get the tub at peak time every evening? Most Russian girls share cheerfully by instinct, but with her classmates as with me, Anastasia takes for granted that she deserves the cream.) Or she was listening to a Bach prelude on the radio—such a rare joy that she couldn't tear herself away. I boast of these fetching replies to friends, but also feel misused.

Her excuse can be barer. When the moment for dressing came, she felt "dreamy." Somehow, she wasn't "craving" to go out as she'd expected. Or it was storming outside and she was "blissfully snug" in her room. She relates this information matter-of-factly, as if her mood constitutes an incontestable explanation. Far from censure, she deserves recognition for her keen sense of responsibility. For in these difficult cases, didn't willpower vanquish her languor, that awesome force of nature, in the end? Naturally, the battle put her several minutes behind schedule, which is as nothing compared to the obstacles overcome.

On the evening after our first hours of truly abandoned

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lovemaking she did not appear at all. We were in a traveling sculptor's studio that she had secured through the owner's lover. Later we fell asleep in the room's afternoon darkness, but I woke to thoughts of our evening plans. Slipping from under the quilt, I dressed quietly and left to make the clinching arrangements for the tickets, Anastasia mumbling she'd meet me outside the theater. It wasn't cold there, but my humiliation stung more than ever. I could only wait there: the studio had no telephone and I'd forgotten its address. After an hour I went inside for the second act, facing the ignominy of an entire audience registering the empty seat at my side. Public desertion by a girl just made love to.

I once asked a Radcliffe girl whether she preferred more bed for that evening or a concert. "Oh, the concert,'" she answered appreciatively—but Anastasia was just the opposite, and my training in a different culture made me miss her dozen hints. My leaving had insulted her; and she couldn't betray her instincts by sitting through a performance. But how could I have known then that our private pleasure transcended an evening out, which she usually relished? Later I learned that she slept there until morning, returning to her institute hungry and blue.

I am purposely raising the difficulties before confirming that she was indeed the girl I'd always wanted, for I want to fix her in my own mind as unsentimentally as I can. The queer coolness with which she accepted gifts, even items, such as a Swiss watch or an English trench coat, that she'd never dreamed of. (This too I understood later. It wasn't reserve but an outgrowth of our closeness. Of course she should receive goodies from me, just as she offered me everything she owned and knew. Giving and taking merited no fuss.) How she would suddenly look the peasant girl: with a Liberty silk square tied around her head, her too-large "shitwader" boots, as she called them, tapping her slender calves, and her lips in a pucker because she'd finished her ice cream—a creature of such uniqueness and animation that I kept hugging her. The pucker itself, a blend of spontaneous sentiment and instant play on it for dramatic possibilities— tinged, as always, with a hint of eye-batting innocence.

Her perverse refusal to jot down even the most essential

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reminders in a pocket notebook, and the rage with which she ravaged her handbag and drawers for a crucial telephone number preserved on an old napkin. Again and again she repeated this Russian celebration of anarchy, turning even angrier when I entreated her, for her own sake, to be orderly at least in this. But no matter how often she was late and whom she kept waiting—even when she lost the card of the director who asked her to audition for a television play about medical students—she would not submit to dreary good sense.

The way she switched in the blink of an eye from a movie mogul's sophisticated Stockholm mistress to farmer's daughter with a yen for unpasteurized milk; these two aspects of her were like an optical illusion. The mole on her collar bone; the line of her back as she waited, lying on her stomach and cupping her mannequin's breasts. Her frail clearness one warmish day when, for the hell of it, we toured the All-Union Exhibition of Economic Achievement, and in those square miles of bulldozers and spaceship models, nostalgia for her enfolded me, as if I were seeing her from the perspective of twenty years hence.

This is what I want to remember: she as a sovereign being, independent of her involvement with me. I must keep the two separate: a likeness of Anastasia Serigina and the story of our bust.

Much happened in the month following our first encounter to make me accept that I'd never see her again. Then the second meeting, a coincidence too bizarre to illustrate anything—yet the kind that keeps overtaking me here. Ah—as Alyosha says with quite different inflection—if I could relive that sweet night!

In October, a busload of foreign students was treated to a trip out of Moscow—to Yaroslavl, proud township of ancient Rus. Seven rattling hours north and we entered its provincial hollowness and turn-of-the-century industrial gloom. A membrane of dirty ice coated Mother Volga; winter's gray subdued most movement by midafternoon. Touring the splendid sixteenth-century Kremlin, we retired to a restaurant on Freedom Street, its neon strand providing the urban centerpiece.

Leaving the hotel at midnight for fresh air, I was absorbed into an album of prerevolutionary photographs. Darkened log cabins.

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a pair of drunken workers stumbling in snow, a lone mongrel prowling a side street. . . . For something to drink, I made my way to the railroad station, where peasants blanketed the waiting room benches like battlefield corpses. My heart thumped in the oblivion of this outpost of civilization. A baby cried, then took the breast. Great sadness deepened the grip of provincial isolation.

I saw beer at the buffet and joined the line. The brownish shawl covering the back of the woman in front of me seemed as tacky as the waiting room, and as she began turning her face toward mine, I wondered absentmindedly what the hard-up stranger might want of me. Before the thought ended, those eyes were again on mine.

A current tingled my skin. The huge hall was airless. "You!" I said in a melodramatic bray. And was filled with a rush of happiness because her shining countenance was no less than I'd remembered. A modern icon framed by the shawl—and it was endearingly familiar, already mine.

The waltz of her laugh through the murkiness brought a second wave of pleasure. She bridled the words on her lips. When she said them at last, her voice was an octave lower than I had imagined.

"Clever to find me here. But do you think we should know each other's names? If we meet again, 'you' might be inadequate."

"I can't believe this."

"I almost can't, unless you've come for your book. . . . Do you read Bunin? Lucky people begin believing they embody special virtue."

I felt we were making the sweet small talk of beautiful people tipsy on champagne. Again I thought of The Master and Margarita. "Do you read Bulgakov?" I countered, but again waited before explaining.

We talked about chance and traveling. She took my foreign-ness as casually as my proffered glass of beer, asking neither why I was in Russia nor what I was doing in a back-country railroad station. It might have been our old custom to take a weekend drink there—in the dead of night when, except for the station, the city was long asleep.

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"Are you tired?" I found it natural to ask.

"Not like last night. . . . Why are so many men sailing the world solo?" she said, gazing at the train departures. "Do you think people are trying to protect their fantasies against a universal commonwealth?"

"Are you a loner?" I asked in reply.

"Anything but. My panda attends me."

"But you protect your inner thoughts."

She examined my eyes again. "Less than you, serious one. Much less than you."

We shared more beer, then brandy for antifreeze. She led me through the gelid night to her uncle's room, half of a log cabin even more rustic than those I'd previously seen because it stood alone, in a village-like outskirt. Gulping the sweet wine for which Anastasia had hiked to the station, the old-timer stared into his oil lamp, cackling a monologue about a pilot incinerated in a Liberator that had crashed ferrying supplies to his unit during the war.

I wouldn't have believed that anything I'd see during the trip would be more remote from my world than Volga moonlight and the station's shadowy eeriness, but the hut and its dilapidation were farther into fairyland. Accusing me of not helping him with his chores last week, the scrawny uncle embraced me in forgiveness, repeating an old Russian aphorism about everyone being a sinner.

Anastasia guided me up a homemade ladder and into an attic containing a dresser and a bed. It was not a "night of love" because only hours remained before I had to answer our "guide's" roll call at the hotel; and also because I was too full of bewildered admiration—for the smoothness of her skin, suppleness of her limbs, provocative matter-of-factness. Too edgy at the strange surroundings, risk of detection, challenge of performance. She smelled of Seville oranges. Although her uncle slept days and brooded at night, she assured me he was deaf Even during our first embrace with her long legs, I noticed that she accepted our adventure as it came, concentrating on its physical sensations, while my thoughts rebounded in compartments for analyzing unusual phenomena and appraising my reactions. What did it mean that I was with her in this incredible situation?

Anastasia X 24 7

In the darkness before dawn, she walked me to the hotel and my day of group touring of monuments and a tire factory. At the weatherworn peasant market, we persuaded a woman to sell us her steaming pirozhki before opening hours, and I was introduced to her celebration of food. If it were in me, I'd have loved her as much as the knight—as she could already make me feel about myself for moments—who had stumbled on his Russian princess. But it was just these symbols, which the dramatic night and I had cast up, that prevented me from being real.

Despite associations with Romanov heraldry and the Winter Palace, hers is a peasant name; she is a country girl. Therefore, I wonder where her sprucelike individualism germinated. Her attitude toward religion, for example, typically centers about herself, rather than Church or State. Contemptuous of the Orthodox church in general and of its obscurantist subjugation of believers—the spectacle of ragged women's foreheads on a crumbling vestry floor makes her wince—she is nevertheless drawn to murky cathedrals: to the mystique of candles flickering on icons and choirs chanting their captivating dissonance; and she pulls me in with her, especially to a dark one near her dormitory, at every chance. Shuddering at the Gunga Din prostration, she simultaneously exults that primordial Russian forces have a hold on an unfathomable part of her.

The same ambiguity surrounds her own origins. She is appalled—and excited—by the mud and vodka of village life and often guides me on a walk from the last metro stop to absorb the countryside's psychic stimulation and strange grant of peace. We tramp for hours along meandering trails and eroded stream beds, saddened and gladdened at the rural backwardness and resistance to change. Even polluted ponds and dumps of old pipes heighten the haunting desolation.

About Russia itself, Anastasia's feelings shift sharply. Most days, she knows it as a coarse, dreary place best suited to proving Dostoyevsky's maxim about misery being as important as happiness to the human race. She scorns the superstitious, passive masses who acclaim their oppressors almost as acidly as the leadership's frauds. She can't remember Lenin's birthplace on the Volga or the cruiser Aurora of the first revolutionary

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shot—which are repeated a dozen times daily (in case someone missed the hundreds of school lectures) on every radio station.

Ordinarily she will not glance at a newspaper or popular magazine. Bored waiting for a train at a suburban station, she once picked up Pravda and tried to read, but the onward-to-Communism tone switched her off as emphatically as when she witnessed Samoilov's mutilation of Hamlet. Plowing through the leads of several articles, she pushed the paper back at me and closed her eyes to nap, her frown indicating she'd not repeat that mistake for another year.

Her reaction to such things derives not from any interest in politics, but from her intuition that the Soviet setup is "a big bother" because it prevents her from tasting the world's treats: the cup of espresso, a visit to Rome. "Bananas and cream?" I once answered her query about the phrase encountered in her reading. "That's an expression we know from childhood. Like corned beef and cabbage, or ham and eggs."

"Of course," she replied with sudden annoyance. "In Russia we too have an expression. Bread and lard." The real fault of the system, or curse of the country, is that it deprives her of so many delights of the stomach and eye. No French restaurant in Moscow or the entire country!

What's strange about such sentiments is their lodging in a born hick. Ordinarily, they'd be muttered by disaffected—and relatively rich—Moscow intellectuals, who give them a more political slant. As with her personal hygiene, so scrupulous that "that place" is always as fresh-smelling as her hair, she's the exception that proves the rule: a mutation from the village girl species.

But although she laments the country's condition, I must be careful not to "slander." Occasionally she erupts into Russian-earth ardor more fervent than a dozen Viktors. Once we were in a village and I was shaking my head—in commiseration, not disparagement—at the sight of a peasant whose frostbitten face and splayed earflaps spoke of a lifetime of draft-animal labor; whose cottage cried out with slovenliness. Her response was violent.

"I'm sick to death of people denigrating Russia. Smooth Westerners who'll never understand the truth of this country, who don't know its suffering, even its pleasures, because they're

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insulated from real life—even their own. By what measure do you suppose you are superior to that man?"

"What's this, Long Legs? I'm with you on the countryside— even the country. I've got nothing against him, and you know Fm not smooth like that."

She softened just as quickly. "I suppose not, but I've had too much of people criticizing everything. Russia is everybody's butt; it's humbled enough without your'mockery."

To say that she was the one inclined to "criticize everything" would only have rekindled her pique. Besides, it would have been only literally correct, as I'd just been reminded. The larger truth is that while her spoken comments about Russia are consistently reproachful, what she leaves unsaid contains much affection. This was summed up in her observation that foreigners not only look much happier than Russians, but seem trained to look happy. And despite her aversion to propaganda, she weeps irrepressibly when viewing relentlessly repeated films of the Nazi invasion. I wonder what effect this will have when the crunch comes and she must think about leaving the country.

Yes, leave with me: a voice whispered the forbidden word "marriage" from the very beginning. I knew that if I ever took a wife, she must be Russian. Meanwhile she gave me far more than an introduction to the local ways, in accordance with the traditional prescription for a young man's best method of learning about a country. Going to the theater with my splendorous Russian companion was a triumph as well as an occasion. Acclaim for myself becluttered my thoughts of her. Ending my isolation—this was still November, when Alyosha was only a man who sometimes lent us his room—she also began my longed-for romance.

She returned from Yaroslavl on the day after me. Her long hours of classes, at Moscow's Second Medical Institute, often kept us apart, but her free time was a shared gift. We walked for hours, feeding on back-street scenes, sharpening our appetites to splurge on smoked salmon and shashlik in hard-currency dining rooms. I came to see my boyhood image of springtime Paris in the city's autumn glumness. Forsaken leaves clinging to slender

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trees made Volzhsky Boulevard as picturesque as any Latin Quarter postcard; fall wind and rain blew the last stalwarts onto our raincoats. The very banality of my associations made them surprising: who would have pictured Moscow a city for lovers? But eyesores drew us together as tightly as the dapplings of charm, proving that our tenderness for each other tinted our perceptions rather than the other way round. Rehearsals for the November 7th parade in Red Square dragged on for weeks. One evening when snorting military equipment was learning its route, we found ourselves on the Krimsky Bridge above the river, its graceful cables etching the sky's darkening mauve while black vehicles, glistening in the drizzle, rumbled along the embankment underneath. United by the ugly beauty—the sinister splendor of the tanks, finest item of local manufacture—she turned her Lapland face to me at the instant I was seeking her lips. The river burbled below us, the sky turned pearly, tank after sleek tank roared on its way. As we clung to each other, our passion sent regards through my heavy trousers and her thick skirt. Only her eyes were made up. She smiled with them. I had never kissed like this.

We are on the streets so often partly because of the difficulty of finding refuge. Anastasia's Yaroslavl uncle, whom she visits twice a year, is her closest relative in the geographical sense; her immediate family is further north, on a swampy tract near the town of Vologda. She herself shares a dormitory room with three classmates. Even discounting an unusually strict entrance guard, the others' presence eliminates her bed for our use.

Although my room is easier to sneak into, she has rendered it unusable. The first time went according to plan. I gave her my pass; she negotiated the gate by flashing its cover while hurrying through; I joined her inside by persuading the guards I'd left mine in my room. The following weekend, a different shift— alerted, no doubt, by Anastasia's striking yet unfamiliar face— told her to open the pass. Before she could retreat, the ruse was exposed.

In this situation, Russians apologize grovelingly and implore a once-and-only, life-and-death exception to the rules to visit a sick brother or save a depressed friend from suicide. Had Anastasia

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conformed, she might have been admitted, even though unmasked. But she disdains "the sensible thing." It is a matter of principle that officials must trust her, and when caught violating precisely such trust she is outraged. True to form, she now produced a scene instead of an excuse.

"This system. We're a socialist country, it's supposed to be the people's university. Take those hands off me, I'm going through."

Angry now, the battle-axe biddies gripped her, chortling as if they'd caught a pickpocket. Two beefy security men sprinted out of their strategically placed office and led her away. Only after a full hour of scary interrogation was she ejected. Still huffing that she could sneak into Brezhnev's office if necessary, she did not, however, return to the University for months.

Thus we stayed on the streets. If I were Russian, the responsibility for finding an empty room, the crucial male desideratum for courting in Moscow, would be mine. Anastasia substitutes when she can by asking for the sculptor's keys or taking me to Alyosha's. And by settling for makeshift. As winter waxes, we explore the stairwells of mouldering apartment houses near her institute. In their basements or on their top landings, she makes herself available on the banister. Her panties are in my pocket. Her body is immaculate after the latest languishing in the bath. Against the background of staircase grime, the slight lankiness of her limbs changes to sylphlike grace. With them, and because of our unusual positions, she grips me hard, as proud of her command of these muscles as of all her physical urges.

The stairwell's dank chill plates our cheeks. The building is a Bronx tenement soon to join a black slum; the courtyard from which we've entered is strewn with rotting timbers and junk. Domestic sounds—from television movies, kettles, irritated vocal chords—reach us through flimsy plaster, and steps sometimes resound on the dusty stairs themselves—occasionally shuffling, for tipplers straggle home at this hour of evening. When we stop for a moment, our hearts beat with the Benzedrine of apprehension and passion; when we resume, we continue to hold our breath. Then she arches her back and bears down. Her eyes are open. The frankness of their desire gives my narcissism wings.

She turns around and thrusts herself upward. Later, to play it safe, or to indulge our fancy for variety, we move to a staircase on

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a parallel street. "Again, please," she urges. We're pushing our luck; our fear of discovery grows. To compensate for not being naked, she makes use of her fingers, bringing them up from time to time with her customary appetite for exotic tastes. "Now you sit down," she whispers. "Here, spread my coat. Don't you love exchanging roles?"

The freedom to act out our fantasies fills us with confidence that nothing important is beyond our grasp. "Oh what a love it was," said Zhivago. "Utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth."

She loves jokes, especially about resistance to work, interpretations of social messages to justify embezzling, and bureaucratic malapropisms. One of her favorites is about the ailing factory worker told to produce a specimen of his feces. Abashed by the strange medical terminology, he brings his material in the customary match box, but cringing embarrassment prevents him from asking whom to give it to. Finally, he charges a nurse. "Where's the place for leaving your shit for the stool?"

It is the worker's endearing resort to his class's real language that delights her, but this joke in particular provides one of her rare conversational references to medicine.

Her perfunctory interest in her studies shows in her greater enthusiasm for almost everything else. The health of dumb animals concerns her distinctly more than that of human beings; the only time I saw her excited about anything faintly medical was during the birth of kittens to a tough stray she'd come to feed outside one of our stairways. During war films, the sight of wounded horses upsets her most. Convinced that "no species is crueler—lower" than Homo sapiens, she often accepts man's inhumanity to man but gnashes her teeth at his barbarity to beasts. Her mother and father, wanted her to become an engineer, their image of social virtue and personal success. Medicine was an afterthought, but I doubt that any profession would stir her—certainly none requiring long "crazy boring" hours of study.

What does interest her is literature. In spurts, her reading is as voracious as the—misconceived—stereotype of the culture-hungry Russian. Rereading The Idiot, her eyes were riveted to the

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book from the moment she entered one metro station to her emergence at her destination—and then for the rest of the day and evening, for she skipped classes to finish it, murmuring constantly about Dostoyevsky's uncanny understanding of people she knew.

Classics unspoiled by force-fed learning and political vulgarization in school grip her, especially Lermontov's Byronesque tales. But her greater affection is for secondary, slightly offbeat masters—Alexander Green, Mikhail Saltyakov-Shchedrin, Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy, Andrei Platonov—whose recreation of the spirit of Russian life enchant her all the more for the authors' lack of world renown. The obscurer the writer, the chummier her patter to his pages.

"Exactly, and don't back down from it. . . ." "You've no right to assume that, thank God you did. . . ." "Yes, a hundred times yes. Clever man, you've omitted the main thing."

One mock-heroic tale delights her especially for its picture of daily routine. Entitled "Home Sweet Home," it is by a long-suppressed 1920s poet who called himself Sasha Chorny ("Sasha Black") in counterpoise to the great turn-of-the-century symbolist Andrei Bely ("Andrei White"). The scene is a communal apartment of screeching neighbors, dismal prospects and petty scores to settle; the images are of someone's child trying to give the cat an enema, the last drop of vodka that disappeared yesterday, a meditative cockroach perched on a plate like a large plum and a glum teen-age girl in a workjacket raping a piano that has a nasty cold.

Anastasia recites the sad-but-riotous lines with squinting eyes—to help, she says, visualize the Yaroslavl apartment where she and her mother once rented half a bedroom. But she loves the poem too for its playful use of the diminutives, colloquialisms, pen names, grammatical gaffes and peasant solecisms that enrich and personalize the language, conferring the same intimate candor to tete-a-tete communication as in all aspects of private Russian life. The sharp disparity between the outer, public world and the inner one of family and friends declares itself in the contrast between the two languages; sensitive, irreverent spirits show their affection for the unofficial one by savoring its

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subtleties and hints. Inventive argot heightens the sense of shared secrets, we-against-them loyaky—and even of sensual pleasure. Anastasia's flair for this—which is what Alyosha most loved— shows best in her vivacious appreciation of coined words.