Moscow farewell

For me, she begets hundreds in addition to the familiar ones—"my joy," "my dearest only own"—that would be inanely mawkish in English. One week, I am forms of "little bunny"— not just the usual zaichik, but half a dozen semantic varieties, all changing, but not interchangeable, in accordance with her mood. Or I'm ten variations of "kitten" or, lately, "kitten's paw," lapuska, lapinka, lapunik, lapunya, lapusik and lapushka.

"But lapa is any kind of paw," I pretend to protest. "How do I know I'm a kitten and not a tiger?"

"Can't you hear the way I say it, my tigroynok [fierce-and-gentle little tiger]?"

Or a nonsense word, changing daily, sometimes hourly, in play on the weather or the rhyme of a recently devoured delicacy. She is as much made for sweet nothings as for hedonism and passion.

We are in each other's arms on Alyosha's daybed, waiting for my renascence. Lit by a thinning afternoon whiteness through the window, the room I'll soon know so well seems suspended in space. Alyosha himself, who is still only Anastasia's somewhat mysterious older friend, has invented an urgent appointment somewhere to leave us alone, apologizing with elaborate pseudo-contrition that he can't return before evening. During a silence I ask Anastasia to tell me about her first lover.

Soon I shall give this up: something weak lurks under the cover of my contention that old adoration reinforces the new. But I sometimes feel tongue-tied during the wait, and to my secret hope that the girl's reminiscences will shorten it I have the added excuse here of investigating Russian ways. I half expect Anastasia to demur, but after a moment's hesitation, she answers matter-of-factly.

The first was a Czech engineer on assignment in Moscow. He was thirty-two; she—who was visiting the capital with her high-school class—had just turned fifteen. He spied her with her group on a street; she said she was eighteen and that night sneaked from the boarding school where the class was sleeping to

Anastasia X 255

meet him in the moonHt big city. Returning to her village the next evening, she found his telegram waiting. Throughout that year from Moscow and the next two from Prague, a stream of weekly gifts, photographs and letters arrived, pleading for marriage. . . .

Anastasia's pause becomes a full stop.

"That's all you have to say about him?"

"For now."

"What was his name?"

"Mirek."

"But what did yon feelT'

Together with relief that he didn't get her, / can feel an odd attachment to this story—and masochism for liking its ending. How could she have been so blase? Part of me is appalled by her teen-age heartlessness; another part recognizes that I protest too much and want to experience the same petty ruthlessness on myself, as when I rail against her being late.

"What was he like? Why did you answer only one letter?"

She says he was gentle and that she was flattered, then stops again. My jealousy stays bottled up because I think it is of her, not him; and for all the wrong reasons.

Later, we laugh together at Mirek's successors. Her high school's Young Communist secretary, who used to meet her, still underaged, in a coal room, satisfy himself in thirty seconds, and sneak out of the building first, like a burglar. The collective-farm driver who nearly died from a blade under the heart in the knife-hurling, Yul Brynner-imitating craze that followed the showing of The Magnificent Seven in the farm's Palace of Culture. But what I really want to hear about is her promiscuous period. The Moscow weekends during her final high-school year, when she allowed herself to be picked up in exchange for meals and her train fare back to the village. The nights with provincial factory directors or military officers. Once, two Georgian black marketeers half-abducted her, and after half-struggling, she joined their game. Together, they took her nine times in twelve hours. . . .

Again I'm full of sterile hurt, and of excitement. She ravished by Georgian lovers of Russian blondes—and I'm jealous of her, not enraged by them. All the more because she has remembered this incident with obvious satisfaction.

256^MOSCOW FAREWELL

She and Alyosha behave with each other like fond old friends with an almost benign ghost in their past. Neither speaks about their relationship, but he did before he acknowledged the intensity of ours, and she occasionally makes a comment about an unmistakable "man I once knew." From this—and her homely dormitory roommate—I've pieced together the story of their affair.

They met during her first year in the institute, when her language and clothes screamed "village" and "her nose ran like a farm kid's"—yet she was tenaciously independent from the first moment. She found his recruitment talk charming but would not enter the car, having for some reason decided not to be swept off her feet.

Instead, her sass captivated him. Ignoring his "if at first you don't succeed, pass to the next" maxim, he called her twice a day. She replied only at whim; he parked outside her dormitory for hours, "like a poor man's Paolo to her Francesca, er, da Rimini." Again and again he swore not to waste another hour on the "demon-nymphet," but just this self-will is what made him happy—and grateful for the surprise that he could still be bewitched—when she did succumb, sitting chastely at his side for long drives.

He plied her with flowers. Eventually, she allowed him to take her to restaurants and exclusive film showings at the Union of Cinema Workers. Most of all, they argued—about everything. Sometimes they sat in the car until morning ruthlessly debating the talent of an actress or the declension of a noun. She demanded treatment as an equal, taking for granted nothing he said about the meaning of a movie, the implications of a war, the intention of one of his friends' remarks. Or he would open her books and coach her for the next day's classes, stopping for pseudo-medical commentary and laughs.

Her refusal to be touched "until you have an operation for satyrism" drove him to delight. According to his probes, her defense relied on physical nimbleness or quickness of repartee. He courted—and enjoyed—her more assiduously than a thousand of his standard prey.

When she came to the apartment at last, it was under agreed terms. She sat alone in the armchair, demurely sipping wine. It

AnastasiaX 257

was insanely cold outside; he had fed her beautifully and put on a Frank Sinatra tape. Suddenly he was making love to her with his mouth. She realized he had planned everything to the last drop of Bull's Blood, but this no longer mattered. She looked down at the shaggy gray head that was doing such wonderful things and realized she adored him. His face between her legs became a symbol of something important, which she herself could not explain.

"How long did you love him?" I ask, lost in the image. Somewhere I'm jealous; somewhere glad. They are my older brother and sister. "How long did it last?"

"Three weeks."

"And then?"

"He couldn't go on."

It's very strange: neither of us want this conversation, but she is answering matter-of-factly, perhaps because she doesn't want to be asked again.

"Alyosha's made for good times and when you need help. You can't even suffer properly with him, if that's what you want from love. It's not what /want, lapuska.'"

I wonder why I continue with this. I know she's telling the truth, and it's a simple one that doesn't disturb me. I feel nothing much more than that I should feel more.

"Yet you kept seeing him."

Her sigh says this should finish more quickly. "There's only one Alyosha to go to when you're disgusted with everything or deep blue. Or"—she squeezes my waist—"when you need an empty apartment."

"You still love him. So witty, such a lover."

"Enough silliness, let's go wash our ears."

There's nothing more to it, except that I still feel there should be. Anastasia and Alyosha seem to represent two sides of me that otherwise were entirely separate. I wish we three could set up house together. I wish I were older. And that I understood why the story of the forty-six-year-old him courting the nineteen-year-old her is so important to me.

Today I have found a place. A girl named Evgeniya who picked me up last September saw me again crossing a street and

258^MOSCOW FAREWELL

offered me her "all-new pad." Evgeniya belongs to the growing caste of semiprostitutes to the foreign compounds, whose life consists of affecting Western manners to go with their imported clothes. But the gesture of handing me her keys—and drawing me a map—reminds me that even her kind of Russian is good at sharing.

A long ride by metro, another by trolley, a tramp to a tumbledown cottage and furtive sneaking over ancient floorboards into a dowdy room. Anastasia tears off her clothes as if resenting them for restricting her body. "Hurry, hurry,''^ she says, gazing almost worshipfully at the part of me most straining for her. "Skorei, skorei, my dearest, my tiger."

My slightest touch of her nipples elicits shuddering and groans. I remember the scene in Koestler's Age of Longing, which I always felt rang false, where a man brings his mistress to a climax—also climaxing the novel—by manipulating her breasts. Something important must happen to us soon.

We fill the tiny room with our limbs and passion. She takes my face in her hands and sobs with joy, then falls back exhausted. As she lies there with eyes closed and locks adorning her breasts, I think of her as Slovene or Magyar—and remember what she said during our first restaurant feast, days after Yaroslavl. "Sex isn't like eating. You get what you give."

One day a nurse in an old age home will ask me if that was the best I ever had.

"No, but the most beautiful."

She adores: cheap garlic sausage; organ recitals in the Tchaikovsky Conservatory; sarcastic taxi drivers; Byron's most romantic poetry; buckwheat kasha swimming in butter; the circus; stripping to skinny-dip in half-frozen streams (she never goes in); a superb, almost unknown Soviet film entitled Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, the down-and-out beer hall next door to Alyosha's old office on Collective Farm Square. . . . She despises: ballet on television; ice-skating on television (which the masses adore); Nikita Khrushchev—about whom she knows almost nothing, yet about whom she will not listen to a word; organized physical exercise; Dr. Zhivago (a copy of which I smuggled to

Anastasia^ 259

her); Soviet films about children that win prizes in the West; American women in Intourist hotels. . . .

I also remember her shortness with her friends when she was annoyed with them. The memory of her temper, of her childishness—which I didn't protect because of my own—allows me to wonder whether I might be putting too much blame on myself for our failure. Besides—I assure myself—many of our misunderstandings were inherent in our circumstances.

For example, there was the incident that began with Evge-niya's telephone call, urging that we meet immediately. An hour later, we were outside the Metropole Hotel.

"It's only for your sake," she said. "Only to protect you from a danger you can't understand." Her information was dead certain because it came from a cousin high in "the organs."

"Well the long and short of it is that your Anastasia's on the KGB payroll."

Her last words curled up like a scorpion's tail. Never mind that she was showing herself a vile liar as well as a tart; she had managed to flick out and poison us. For even before I had time to reject her words, they had formed an image: Anastasia an informer. I crumpled with the bite's outrage and nausea.

The worst came when one feeble station on the shortwave band of my thoughts wondered whether the accusation might conceivably be true. I remembered that this very Metropole, almost the only hotel open to foreigners during Stalin's time, always crawled with informers. One evening when we were dancing in its rococo restaurant, Anastasia mused about what would have happened to her if she had dared to do the same "in the old days." Even then it struck me that this was an uncharacteristic remark.

Maybe she was one of those who "reported" irrelevancies and nonsense just to keep the KGB, paradoxically, as far as possible from their genuine lives and thoughts. Maybe she'd kept quiet in order to spare me. Still crumpled, I tried to think of what to do. Poor Anastasia, even—or especially—if a scrap of this were true.

When Alyosha's investigation was complete, the evidence confirmed envy as Evgeniya's motive. She had seen me with Anastasia in restaurants and was piqued that I hadn't called her

260.^ MOSCOW FAREWELL

after what she considered our opening night. Here was a chance for revenge—all the easier to play on the basis of her own unquestioned assumption that a beautiful Russian girl could not keep company with an American without KGB sanction. But before these facts emerged, I'd broached the matter to Anastasia; the evil was done. She wilted. My stomach turned as when I, an eight-year-old, accidentally poisoned our rabbit.

It was the mistake of the husband who confesses. For although I recognized no such hidden cruelty in my news—/ hadn't ratted on her, after all; and wouldn't the silly business draw us closer?—she was stung by the scintilla of uncertainty that had prompted me to tell it. How could / believe that oi her, even for an instant?

Like the wife who hears the unwanted breast-beating, she could no longer hold my hand in pristine trust. I was to encounter people far grander than Evgeniya, including some of the carefully rebellious intelligentsia, who trade on precisely such narks' gossip—but as in so much else, Anastasia's loathing of it was an exception. We both were innocent, both felt dishonored.

The injury was only to our illusions, but it had been just those illusions that had encouraged us to see a message in our bond. Our alliance had been bolstered by the uplift of two people born five thousand miles apart, and in antagonistic supercultures, reacting more similarly to stimuli than the kids we grew up with. After the accusation we talked less of this. Skipping the second act of a much-praised play because our behinds were asleep or "adopting" a tot to get us admitted to a children's zoo suddenly seemed less inspired. Formerly, we had invested our tricks with the belief we were illustrating something about necessary priorities, teaching the stuffed shirts of the world. Now we were two friends trying something clever.

The next week, I invited Chingiz to join us in a countryside tramp. Before meeting Anastasia, my rambles with him past pine trees and frozen streams were of much the same spirit. Liking them both, I was confident they would like each other.

Exchanging greetings at our rendezvous in a metro station, I was struck by the likeness in handsomeness and temperament between my two student friends. Chingiz saw a pamphlet about

Anastasia X 261

his beloved Mayakovsky at the station bookstall and excused himself to check. While we waited, Anastasia pronounced him a "shallow phony."

"Believe me, he cares nothing for Mayakovsky except to pass off self-boosting sentimentalism picked up from some university crowd. And that stuff about shepherds loving his Communist father—don't make me laugh."

About Chingiz's father, she knew only what I myself had told her over the weeks. About his feeling for Mayakovsky, she judged on the basis of one remark when he spied the pamphlet: that the tempestuous poet might have found reason to kill himself even if the Revolution hadn't soured. It was hardly an original comment, yet in no way offensive; she might have said something similar herself. Yet she took his departure to declare the whole of him, with his complex ways, a fraud.

"On what evidence?" I asked, hoping to keep my plans for the day from falling apart.

"Don't ride me. You're not my teacher."

After this, nothing Chingiz might have said all day could have cleared him: she was staying loyal to her intuition. For the first time, I realized how dismaying her keen artistic instinct could be in situations requiring objectivity. How easily she condemned not only actors that displeased her, but people. Embarrassed and ashamed for her, I changed the subject.

Chingiz returned and their antipathy flashed. But neither was willing to insult me—oh, this paradox!; if only they had!—by calling off the outing. We went to an undeveloped tract just outside the city limits, the vagueness of their dislike for each only increasing the tension.

Laconic on the best of days, Chingiz said almost nothing for the first hours, my efforts to draw him out only clamping tighter his jaw. It was a piercing morning of individual snow crystals and fir branches with sunlit icicles: as perfect a winter day as I'd ever seen. Its beauty deepened our aloneness. In the immense silence of a horizonful of unspoiled countryside, the squeaking of our six boots was as in a prison yard.

Again, I could blame circumstances. My contribution to the misery had been breaking the rule that foreigners should not introduce one Russian friend to another. For obvious reasons, of

262^MOSCOW FAREWELL

which Evgeniya's deceit should have made me fully conscious, the parties can only mistrust each other. I thought of this when I saw the darkness in both their faces, each trying to feel out whether the other's relationship with me, the American, was clean.

But I also remembered a wise man's warning. "In every triangle, there are two corners on the base. The third one is the lonely apex." Why had I really chosen to form this tight-lipped triangle? The hazy notion nagged that I had invited Chingiz out of some fear about my ability to entertain her: to spice up our relationship, which was already blander than the promise of our savory first meetings. Our respect for each other was also tarnishing: there was Anastasia, hiking up ahead—as usual, evading her responsibility to cope with unpleasantness. Whenever we landed in anything distasteful, even through her caprice, she solved the problem by walking away, leaving it to me.

"Nastinka, I've been telling Chingiz—remember the day when we saw the hare with the rear end?"

"No."

She marched on, pretending to be too absorbed in nature to notice us. I thought of what I'd have said to her if we were alone, as on our last outing to a country estate. "Let's not spend our money on a palace when we're rich and famous. Let's hire women to shell our sunflower seeds."

Suddenly a bird darted from a glorious aspen toward the incredible azure, the sun spangling the tips of its feathers.

"Chickadee," said Chingiz. "They're in pollution trouble."

Anastasia shouted back, without turning round. "In central Russia, a bluetit is usually recognized when seen." Her voice oozed sarcasm. "Maybe not literary scholars, but a poet's first obligation is to know wildlife."

A repugnant squabble flared, kept above the level of Anasta-sia's comment—her mention of central Russia to the half-Kalmyk Chingiz was barely disguised racism—by Chingiz's restraint. I'd seen the bird best and thought it a humble sparrow, but tried to make them laugh by swearing it was a pelican. The attempt fell wretchedly flat. I went home with Chingiz because Anastasia had stalked off, sparing me the choice.

Anastasia X 263

If the presence of a third party diminishes every couple's special language, it was understandable that ours, based on the proposition that it expressed a rare compatibility of disparate backgrounds, suffered more than most. But this grim outing did worse. It lodged the vile suspicion in us that if Chingiz could reduce us to strangers, not only our sparkling language of shared observations and associations but our very rapport was a carnival souvenir.

Logically, our inability to sustain the happy freedom of our own company in Chingiz's presence should have made us prize it even more—but it didn't. Our sense of uniqueness in taking a rattling bus ride or taking in a bad movie on ancient plywood seats was further diminished.

Only with Alyosha could we be ourselves, although I still knew him only slightly. He would fry us a steak if we liked, then leave with a droll apology. His was the sole apartment in the city of eight million she liked, and where we felt no obligation.

We were there one evening when he returned, whistling a happy warning, with two girls. After some dancing, those three climbed into bed while Anastasia and I laid out the rubber mattress on the kitchen floor. Soon their room resounded with romping, and I sat up for a look through a crack in the door. These games were still new to me. Anastasia followed in time to see the prettier of the two girls beckon me to join—and to notice the gesture make me ready again, although we'd finished a moment before.

"Alyosha's busy and the hungry one's calling for help," she whispered. "Why are you snubbing her?"

"Are you serious?" I hoped she was. Or wasn't; most of all I wanted her to tell me clearly. But her smile was truly enigmatic. I thought it said what I was learning for myself from so many girls at Alyosha's: what does it matter if I move on to someone else for a quick screw?

"Why should I mind, she won't snap it off"," she added. "Go on to her. But hurry back to me."

She urged me to my feet. A sudden memory of her tale of the two Georgians who took her nine times in twelve hours convinced

264^MOSCOW FAREWELL

me she was in earnest. After all, she herself had told me about her promiscuous streak. I went to the bed. The girl rolled over, opening her warm legs to me.

When I returned to the kitchen, Anastasia was asleep. Months later, when Alyosha told me she was feigning this after watching my performance in furious hurt and loathing, I realized I'd misinterpreted everything, even why she had been willing to talk of her earlier lovers. It was all done to observe my reaction: she already suspected I was going the way of Alyosha in bed.

"Apparently she loved you," said Alyosha to my plying. "I didn't know. She swallowed a pile of pride to stay after her test of you that night."

The incredible thing was not that I needed someone else to tell me I'd behaved like a pig, but that even then, when my insensitivity clinked in my ears, I pretended not to have known what I did to her while I was doing it. It was "just a screw."

She could not see me the rest of the week. On the weekend, we had our first row. Naturally it concerned trivia.

She had lost her "passport," the identification document Russians are supposed to carry at all times. It was her second loss of the vital folder since I knew her, but this could hardly explain my pique. She, not I, had to waste a Saturday afternoon on police lines for a replacement. I pressed the bills for the fine on her, silently contemptuous of her for her eternal carelessness, and of myself for my hypocrisy in playing the benefactor. My disgust for my own meanness shifted back to her negligence, without which my shoddy reactions wouldn't have been provoked.

The next day, she was caught on a bus without a ticket, the inspector adding a lecture to his fifty-kopek fine. Anastasia's temper snapped. "For God's sake stop the 'social responsibility' song, it grates." The inspector summoned a cop who led her to his precinct station, me trailing behind, wondering whether my presence would help or hinder. With lesser looks she might have spent fifteen days for hooliganism in a stinking jail.

We emerged impossibly late for a restaurant lunch to which I'd invited Alyosha. I bought two ice-cream sticks to celebrate her release and waited until our nerves had recovered.

Anastasia ^265

"What was the point of that, scrumptious? You told me you'd paid the damn fare."

She strode on, not answering.

"Whatever were you trying to prove?"

"Oh stop," she snapped. "I didn't have the right change."

"Why didn't you ask me? You never pay when you do have change."

"Drop it, I don't want to have this discussion." The peremptory nastiness in her voice pulled me up. It struck me that she was always trying to prove something with her demonstrated uninhibitedness. With nowhere to go and no way to telephone Alyosha, we were just wandering—toward the Krimsky Bridge, I noticed, of our enchanted kiss. I realized my grievance would pull us down further from that seemingly distant exaltation, but could not suppress it.

"Sure I'll drop it—having bailed you out of the station. You can pretend you're above everything again."

My bitterness amazed me. The worst was not my anger at her using me—taking my help when needed but rejecting every word of accompanying advice—but shame, somewhere, for the shabbi-ness of my resentment; which of course amplified it. I was allowing a young girl to dominate me, even asking for it; and she scorned me, rightly, for my pettiness.

"Why are you beside yourself about five kopeks for a bus? Why can't you let me worry about what's fair for myself—about who does the real cheating around here?"

"I'm the first to agree that the way the system cheats you, you deserve a million free rides. But what's the advantage of striking back with these kind of 'victories'? The real reason is your infatuation with playing the naughty innocent."

She stepped off in another direction. When I caught up with her, she exploded; and the argument dredged up personal grudges that dismayed us. I spat up resentment, growing clearer by the minute, that beneath her captivating recklessness lay a spoiled child's heedlessness of others.

"You always want to be 'liberated' from the 'petty rules' binding 'less sensitive' people. Like paying your way, or coming on time for an appointment. Elevate cheating to a principle—a splendid way to demonstrate superiority."

266^ MOSCOW FAREWELL

She hissed back that bragging about helping her in the poHce station would have been far beneath Alyosha but was characteristic of me, since I was trying to ape him, with none of his maturity or generosity.

"You're often an imitator, artificial. You're not guided by your feelings, but by what you think they should be. That's why you always react first to the secondary things: theater tickets and bus fares, not people. Lacking real instincts, you try to act on the basis of—ugh!—of what you read."

Oh God, how right she was! How I yearned to be able to laugh with her about the police sergeant and passport fine. But I pretended that my stodginess was linked to some better part of me that tried, at least, to understand others'* arguments. The proof of her perception about my being guided by what I thought I should feel was that I held myself back and tried to make peace, congratulating myself at not stalking off in her kind of fury.

Letting her have the last salvo, I took her arm, which she surprisingly hugged to her side. We were still walking aimlessly. One of her best qualities was the ability to make up almost instantly after an outburst. But I no longer felt I had to love her: I was beginning to see her as an ordinary person. And although she might help me get beneath my measly poses and defenses, the closer we approached our inner cores, the stronger I sensed our essential dissimilarities. We came to a river beach and she herself summarized one of the most important.

"The difference is that my ambition is only to see what happens to me. I could be happy sunning here for a whole summer. You'd be nervous because you weren't accomplishing something—which is why you will one day."

"The difference is that you've lain on fewer beaches. Naturally you want more of it."

But this was a half-truth, offered to avoid further debate. We were products of different societies. Growing up in hers, it was natural that she saw freedom as getting away with something, the good life as lazing on a beach. Instead of feeling constantly inferior, / had something to tell her about goals in life, but she didn't want to hear.

The twist of me urging her to be a better Soviet citizen was part of it. What I wanted to say was that not giving a damn

Anastasia^ 267

about accomplishing anything wasn't the answer. And that my irritation over her bus caper was connected with the notion that true individuaHsm demands more worthy expression.

"Look, Nastyusha," I kept saying—to myself. "When rebellion comes, it should be useful to mankind, not your mosquito bites." This pompousness provided the laugh at myself I was after, but Anastasia's fancy-free stance remained frayed. She was a little like Zelda, doing everything in her delicious power to keep Scott down. However insignificant I was compared to him, I sometimes longed to be myself, rather than the more dashing but less true variant affected in her presence.

We needed more walking. It was strangely asexual, as if revealing even as much as I did to her had bled away my potency. We came to an area of wooden cottages and suddenly I was thinking of the Brooklyn house where we lived until I was four. Whenever we returned from somewhere the sight of it brought a flush of comfort, but almost immediately the anxiety began and I was afraid to go inside. The roof would collapse, I sobbed; termites might be undermining the timbers this very minute. I could put no trust in this home where I hated myself for hoping my parents would go on screaming at each other instead of me; this seemingly sound structure that might crumble before my eyes. . . . How hard it was to come to terms with Anastasia's defects, already weakening our beams. How I wanted her strength to match her beauty!

We parted before supper and I went to Alyosha's alone. The comforts and distractions oihis house were growing daily. He had a bottle of Polish vodka. The main thing to forget was why, those few days after witnessing my obscenity from the kitchen floor, she was in a mood to lash out at the bus inspector. The remark of hers that rasped loudest in my ears was the reference to "who does the real cheating around here."

Alyosha and I went to a movie. Anastasia continued to ignore the cash boxes of buses and trolleys. On principle.

The following weeks the weather was dismal. Days passed like a column of prison coats in a labor camp. A combination of normal cold and unusual damp pained fingers and toes, no matter how you dressed. The stufl'in the air and on the sidewalks

268^MOSCOW FAREWELL

was Russian slyakot rather than ordinary "slush" or "slime." Little relief could be found indoors. The movies and plays were bad: we'd already seen almost everything of interest. Returning to the circus was a disaster. And the restaurants had turned depressing.

The same meals in the same handful of places had lost all their exhilaration. The objective reason was Russian gastronomy's winter decline. Even in The Berlin, our "Old World" favorite, the service wore at our nerves. Waiting the sweaty hour between courses, I occasionally had to choke down the bile of frustration that had been my prevailing taste in Intourist restaurants before meeting Anastasia. The music gave us headaches, the chairs cut into our thighs. We used to drop such evenings in the middle, but now we stayed, prolonging our unhappiness: the small things were working in reverse. We caught each other's eyes as they returned from observing other tables and shuddered with a common, unspoken vision of our relationship's flimsiness—based, as it was becoming, on the sham luxury of these socialist bordellos. Their link to real Russian life was providing three wretched hours of escape from its deeper wretchedness.

"If only we'd had our own apartment!" I entreated under my breath to the strangers sharing our table. Hers, mine, her uncle's; anywhere to be in bathrobes, alone with a book or a television movie. The artificiality of those long evenings out would evaporate; we'd be ourselves—which was still best friends, although our passion was subsiding. Meanwhile, we saw ourselves as victims of winter and Soviet circumstances, and waited to be nuzzled by spring.

Soon we were returning for second viewings of our favorite plays. Her spontaneity in the audience still sharpened my senses, and I had the added pleasure of being seen with her on my arm. Half the orchestra of the best houses is occupied by members of the Western colony who know only a handful of especially authorized Russians encountered in their work and value the most casual social contact with the least prepossessing nonofficial citizen as evidence of penetration into native life. Anastasia's obviously Russian loveliness produced gratifying whispers and stares. It was the same winter and same Soviet circumstances, but

Anastasia "^269

the same me—with my blocks to going deeper—enjoyed the shallow pleasure of flattery to my vanity.

One evening in late January, we went to three one-act ballets at the Bolshoi, the theater we loved more than all the others together, including the shinier new ones. From the outside, the building is smaller and less impressive than its name implies, and triumphant Russian disorder asserts itself even here to dent the roof and send streaks from rusty gutters down the yellow plaster. But the interior exudes other-worldly magic. Russians would trudge the snow barefoot to reach its lavishness.

It was the only place in Moscow that allowed me to forget I was there. The thick crimson velvet, friendly gilt, fusion of opulence and intimacy are more warming on a black winter night than the extravagant performance itself We were lifted from seediness and sadness into the kingdom of illusion the moment we entered.

I loved Anastasia again in these surroundings. She wore a black jersey dress I'd bought from a French diplomat, which deepened the white of her skin and the sheen of her hair. She was fairer than ever, as ethereal as a fable. I walked down the aisle behind her to her seat with a premonition that something extraordinary was going to happen. The first ballet was Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kije. Unplayed through much of the Stalin era, the score, with its echoes of Kurt Weill's sardonic jazz, helped make it an "avant-garde" favorite when revived forty years later. Delighted with the respite from its Swan Lake-Les Sylphides-Giselle treadmill, the company enlivened its usual technical skill with verve. Anastasia gurgled.

I went for something to drink during the intermission. To my disappointment, she insisted on staying in her seat. When I returned, she was at the opposite end of our aisle, laughing with Joe Sourian.

"He's invited us after the theater," she said when resettled in her seat. "To an American correspondent's. They're having a party."

"How do you know Joe?"

She chuckled. "Who doesn't?"

Again my twinge of irritation. Or jealousy—but of Joe Sourian?

270^MOSCOW FAREWELL

"What party? I don't think we should go."

"Why do you always assume you'll decide for us both? You still picture yourself dispensing goodies to native girls. Arranging their movements."

She was always wrong about content, feeling out my weak spots in order to belittle my advice; but right about me. Here we were trying to forget our last row, but starting another one— which might be our last.

"Please spare us an argument this evening. I just think it's foolish for you to be reported with other Americans. One's risky enough."

"Nonsense."

"You know it's good sense."

"But not the real reason. You have something against Joe. Maybe even that he's broken your 'monopoly' on Russian friends."

"Oh Nastya."

"I accepted. I haven't danced in ages. Some of your countrymen know how to have fun."

I didn't answer. Nor reply to her "last word" on the matter: that I was purposely playing up the danger of informers; she knew her own country, thank you. But she'd never been near a diplomatic compound, let alone had any idea of the surveillance.

I wanted to pull her out of her seat and take her . . . where? If only she weren't so beautiful tonight. Too splendid to lose, too exasperating to be with; full of unique qualities that only I could appreciate—and of lapses from what she should be. She was so close to what I needed; the perfection she almost gave me made me want it—and resent her—all the more.

The house lights went down. Geologists, the second ballet, was a hackneyed propaganda piece about steadfast prospectors discovering mineral deposits for the Motherland. Anastasia's squirms produced the usual indignation in the people near us, while her attitude toward me, indicated by an arched back and refusal to look, was the equivalent of a mild pout for being held back by some "sensible" restriction.

She came to the buffet with me during the second intermission and for the first time in my life I ordered champagne. If I'd thought about it, I might have done this to effect a reconciliation

Anastasia X 2 71

in style—to best my countrymen who "knew how to have fun." But I couldn't think. After the first glasses, I was already succumbing to an overpowering spell. Everything irrelevant faded into the background as I moved toward my true thoughts.

It was closer to a pot high than anything the champagne could have produced, for I was lifted to the miraculous state where time stretches without limit in both directions. Crammed with a psycheful of perceptions about myself, all the most honest and profound I could produce, each minute seemed a day.

Some of the reflections were so piercing that I felt touched by an oracular gift. Sitting at our table, I detected lines in Anastasia's hands and face I'd never noticed before. She wasn't simply more beautiful; she had attained a higher level of beauty, which I recognized through a new feeling of communion with her as a fellow being with her own links to the awesome source of universal life that was streaming into me. Walking back at my side, I saw a figure of sacred dignity taking her place, in the black gown, on the throne of the audience.

The third ballet plunged me deeper into visions. Petrushkd's first flute call haunted me as if I had never heard it before; the dancers in the motley crowd of its opening scene were like the first performers I'd seen on a stage. I immediately realized that what I had taken for fanciful episodes portrayed, on the contrary, the profoundest truths of national character; that I was about to see not a ballet but a revelation coming from the creators' deepest unconscious sources. Russia's history and art, everything that made it sad and great, were passing before my eyes. The sidewalk player lifted his concertina; I understood why man needs music and Passion plays. The gesture was boundlessly melancholy and hopeful, totally mystifying and revealing. Free of time and space, I floated toward ultimate causes.

Although most of the visions were forgotten in the same microsecond of their divulgence, some landmarks remained in my sight, as if after the illumination of some cosmic lightning. The old man—still in the first scene, before I caught my breath—beckoning passersby into the show booth where the puppets would perform explained why my grandfather left his Lvov ghetto in 1901, an event whose importance to me I had never acknowledged even to the extent of asking the question.

272^MOSCOW FAREWELL

Next the hoi polloi milling in the Saint Petersburg street were showing me that I and my failures were part of humanity, somehow related to art's eternal concerns.

Snare drums beat out a foreboding tattoo: something fatal was going to happen in this tableau. An old juggler, the symbol of carnival magic, took command of the theater. Slowly I became aware that a titanic debate had started between my pro- and anti-Anastasia forces and was quickly building in the context of the larger apocalypse. The moment I understood what was going to happen to poor Petrushka and the light-headed Ballerina, I saw that Anastasia and I must not continue as we were. No compromise alternative was available for a Russian and a foreigner; the only remedy was . . . marriage.

Matrimony, holy wedlock, eternal union—I wanted their absolution. But would the cure be worse than our ailment?

The world was there, on the spell-struck stage. The juggler was toying with it; the sounds of his enchanted flute told me that was the decision of my life, and only the premonition that something I'd glean from his tricks would make it for me kept me from groaning with tension.

Recognizing that the verdict would determine whether I was to be a phony gay blade forever or a normal man, virulently antagonistic sides of me joined forces for the battle. That my leaning toward lifelong bachelorhood always derived from a suspicion that a girl like her could never love me—a dodge against admitting I was unable to love—had strengthened the fear of committing myself. I might conquer that now. But did this unorthodox creature merit sealing all escape routes?

The stakes were all or nothing. Not marrying was losing her forever; I couldn't pop over from New York for weekend visits. It wasn't a marriage but an irreversible break with the past—for her, too, since she'd be moving to a new world.

She might travel badly. Her capriciousness could be disastrous in the West: a child of nature who keeps losing her own passport might refuse to take telephone messages, throw away my notes, discover a principle for supermarket shoplifting. Wouldn't it be crazy for me, with my milksop's sense of loyalty, to assume this triple risk?

Yet only a marriage with some extraordinary challenge could

Anastasia^ 273

tempt me to take any risk at all. The attraction was precisely in the uncommonness. I'd backed away from a dozen arrangements with the Wellesley girls I was supposedly destined for. I'd never take a vow unless it promised the total commitment I needed.

The fight rages across my skull like a Hopalong saloon brawl. The anti- forces score a tremendous knockout. The notion of such a marriage is so preposterous that only I, in my goalless groping, could have entertained it. The temptation is finished forever; she's my best girl in the port of Moscow, but no more. The immense relief of this certainty lasts long enough for a street dancer's bounds across the stage. It is already being undermined by doubts, longing and sadness at my loss when shock troops strike a stunning blow for the pro- side. Suddenly I see incontestable signs that Anastasia is my one-and-only. To give her up would be my greatest possible act of self-destruction. Thank God I've seen the light in time; thank God the decision has been made for me! I savor my relief, while the next counterattack advances from my innards to my brain.

I must do something, must decide; I'm back in the panic of recognizing that being fit for nothing else, I'll also never be a professor. All hope for redemption turns on the right decision, while the wrong one will deprive me of her splendor, extinguishing every chance for what I've always yearned. Anastasia is unique; she's manifestly not good enough. She has an incomparable capacity to enjoy; she lacks intellect. She'll be a dazzling success in New York; she'll seem a second-rate hick. And the decision is crucial; I must have the best because ... I don't know why, but in this crucial matter I'm special and deserve it—which, of course, is why I don't. . . .

I know I'll marry only once. But if I do it now I'll never have a chance at the others. Never Liv Ullmann, the librarian in the Frick Museum; not even the new Tanya on our dormitory floor, who gave me to know I wasn't fantasizing: I can have her. Committing myself to Anastasia is substituting real for visionary beauty, which is always more glorious, isn't it?

This battle in my head! And now my squalid stinginess sneaks in some lower blows. Will I have to support Anastasia in America? Maybe she won't want to study, but get a fat job as a model instead. Disgust for this selfishness pushes me to think of

274^MOSCOW FAREWELL

whether she can be happy away from Russia. Because Fll have the extra bonus of talking Russian all my life—her kind, with the instant plays on words. She'll be my movable Russian feast with the permanent taste of this year's adventure. And in Paris, Venice, Barbados, her sensitivity will heighten my own. Who else could respond to the cabman with the gypsy girls on the stage as she is responding now, with every cell of her being?

The deafening ding-dong quickens in pace, like a gargantuan metronome breaking its springs. Yes, no, relief, horror, grin of victory, moan of defeat. Concertina, balalaika, piccolo. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all my days—and the suspense will end. Yes, I'll beg for her hand. No, no, i must not; it can't work even for a single day. I want to swim clear of the tension but can't remember which way is up.

Yet I'm still transfixed by the performance, beholden for its unique aesthetic gift. The company plays and dances as if atoning for the forty-year unpersoning of Stravinsky, Diaghilev and Nijinsky, the geniuses of twentieth-century ballet. Each glittering dissonance of the score—truant clarinets, burlesque bassoons, tender-jazzy piano—tingles my imagination. The carnival bear romps on his leash; suddenly I understand the symbolic place of bears in the Russian consciousness. The old juggler brings Petrushka, Ballerina and Blackamoor to life with his magic flute, and the human sap animating their floppy limbs revitalizes my long desiccated emotions. I'm alive!

With my senses opened, I am discovering that the ballet is nothing more or less than reportage of Russian life, more piercing than a hundred heavy volumes. The tipsy muzhiks attending the carnival are the Russian muzhiks, whose brief jig reveals everything about cheerful peasant resignation, key to the country's moods. The fat merchants, fussy policemen, flashing gypsies . . . I am absorbing the last word—in music and movements!—on their classic types. And not only in Shrovetide Saint Petersburg of the 1830s, but this very afternoon on Gorky Street, Sretenka and the Arbat. Now I know what the Moscow throngs have always been trying to tell me.

The puppets break into a folk dance. I devour the daily Russian stew of gaiety and carefreeness, pettiness and melancholy. The infinity of gloom underlying the market's festiveness,

AnastasiaX 275

the apparitions that rise up from the very humbleness of the jumbled street scenes. As Chagall perceived the spirit of a Russian village as figures drifting over mud and moon, Petrushka's creators recognized the phantasmal strains—the puppets' inner world—in their outwardly ragged market. No explanation is required of how Petrushka, Ballerina and Blackamoor can be consumed by love and jealousy. In this theater more than any, such "absurdities" are ineffable truths; and with the woman who loves "Once upon a time" stories rigid at my side, they reveal their place in the country's—and her—temperament and outlook. How wrong I was to judge her on whether she forgets appointments—the criteria of petty rationalism. She's made of dreamier—Russian—stuff.

The lilt of "Down Peterskaya Street" draws up affection for Russia in me like the moon with the tides. But I must remember that her most exasperating traits, the I-don't-give-a-damn forget-fulness, are Russian, too. At last I'm on the verge of the real question. Are we compatible? I must know whether we will make each other better or worse. Will she understand that I have it in me to achieve something, that I can be less petty than I seem? And will I allow her to enjoy her individuality? All the niggling rest is trivial.

Bang! the door of Petrushka's room is flung open. Kicked out, he seeks solace in his love for Ballerina. I see, grieve, understand. Booted from my academic ambition and American assumptions, I too have sought comfort in love for a Princess. But Ballerina is indifferent, and humble Petrushka begins his famous lament. Weeping, agonizing, dying of despairing adoration. To hell with compatibility; I must be with Anastasia whatever the cost. Must defeat my tendency to bring Petrushka's heartbreak on myself. Look how he fills with gladness, trembles with joy, at one half-friendly glance from her.

If I don't settle this tonight, she'll go to the correspondent's party. My Anastasia must not be corrupted by that kind of American's flattery. I know this is jealousy, but it's also for her sake. I know it is superstitious to credit anything to the signs I see in Petrushka's suffering, yet I believe them because they confirm objective truths.

A fanfare stops me. An alarming tremolo of strings. Petrushka

276^MOSCOW FAREWELL

and Blackamoor are quarreling while Ballerina swoons. How much does my resentfully admiring perception exaggerate Ana-stasia's excesses of instinct? To what extent does she shine only in comparison to the steel teeth of the dumpy Russian masses? I must not judge by Russia's standards, where even I stand out as a member of a taller, handsomer race. I must stop judging at all and just do what's right.

I'm so utterly exhausted! How long can this blind festivity continue at the show booth? Petrushka rushes out of it, but is chased by Blackamoor who deals him death with his saber. The betrayed and beaten reacher for beauty who was so innocently good has had his head bashed in. The juggler picks up the puppet, pitifully lifeless without love, and returns to the booth while the crowd disperses as if nothing had taken place.

But suddenly Petrushka's ghost appears over the booth, shaking his fist in triumphant revenge. This is not the end!

Somewhere I see the audience statue-like for a moment, then surging forward with cheers. I reach for Anastasia's hand. She too has remained seated. Our fingers lock. We are the only two unwilling to profane the experience with clapping.

The emptying of the house leaves us serenely exalted. Cleaning details appear with homemade mops, sealing our bond to the theater. I know I must speak while we are still inside, but otherwise feel no need to rush; my decision took itself as the curtain fell.

Anastasia lingers in the empty foyer: I think she's even guessed. Her overcoat and red headscarf have returned her from elegant princess to peasant girl. I am thinking of how best to present my case, avoiding theatricality. At last I can give.

The black and white of the foyer floor is coming to an end. My submission is abrupt but quiet.

"Will you be my wife?"

Before I have time to gird for the suspense, even to hear the echo of the fateful phrases, she has answered.

"Yes, of course."

The three words emerge as one, and so lacking surprise and stress that I want to restate the question.

Of all I'm about to ponder, this moment will have pride of place. After the religious revelation that made my decision, the

Anastasia X 2 7 7

supreme matter-of-factness of her reaction seems to promise a lifetime of anticlimax. "Yes of course"—as if I'd asked whether she wants wafers with her ice cream. And I've been so careful not to ham up the dramatic element she should supply. We've been shortchanged.

Which is why I question her. At first, I swear it, I'm as certain as I was; my prodding is intended merely to elicit some indication that she appreciates this venture's importance. She once chided me for being too voluble about love: "If we know it's there, why must we pronounce it so?" But surely the emotion of forging this wonderful union should be seen as well as felt?

She knows what it means to me, I've often talked about remaining a bachelor. And I know she's pleased. Why doesn't she throw her arms around me, like the thrilled girl she should be? Why must I wait for her to be first?

We step outside; stand at the top of the steps for a moment spotlighted together with our columns; walk in the square across the street where we first met after Yaroslavl. She carries herself very straight, but with the faintest hint that she will follow my lead as my bride.

I'm careful to talk about her grave problems rather than my letdown. Of the uncertainty of an exit visa even after the wedding; of the possible prevention of the marriage itself. I think of Lenin Library Maya and Joe Sourian's Barbara, reminders that the worst possible outcome for her would be to apply to marry a foreigner but be refused. With all my heart, I swear never to fail her on my end. But is she absolutely certain she wants to take on these perils with m

"Yes, pantherkin. A sailor who likes mango juice: all the omens are auspicious." With puffed rosy cheeks, she blows a fair wind.

"You can put up with my faults? You don't know half of them. I want to tell you that, for the sake of our future. And that I don't know what I'm going to do, where we'll live."

"Won't we live together?"

"Darling, be serious for a moment. For a start the institute will expel you. Do you care about your career?"

"I have to think about that. I am being serious; I'm bad at those questions."

278^MOSCOW FAREWELL

"And what about leaving Russia?"

"These aren't the main things, you know."

"Of course not. But so many immigrants grieve. Can you be happy in the States?"

"That's not the main thing."

Although I know this and am determined to attain that main thing—of what has eluded me since Yaroslavl as well as of this conversation—we slip onto another tangent: my plans for tomorrow's first steps and her needed fortitude against KGB pressure. A homosexual eyeing us from the square's fountain moves us on; a dreary Aeroflot sign drags me into the realm of everyday. "Cheap, Fast, Comfortable"—and the anemic neon is flashing from stilts atop the Evgeniya-defiled Hotel Metropole. The gloomy, deserted streets are a darting image of our recent emptiness. As if to supply the eagerness I expected from her, I find myself pronouncing on the importance of marriage in general and the wonder of ours in particular. But I'm aware of how different this is from what I envisioned; how curious this form of role-reversal. And somewhere I know she is waiting for me to complete my proposal. Why can't I open up plainly and simply and say I love her, nothing else matters?

Suddenly she takes my head in her hands. Through her gloves I feel the awaited tenderness at last.

"This is an enormous step for you," she murmurs. "Are you certain you want to take on so much?"

The very predictability of my protest betrays its vulnerability. Questions I believe silenced forever are already drifting back, like Petrushka's ghost gone haywire.

"Don't be silly, it's you who's taking the giant step. . . . I've never been happier. I'm proud of having asked, proud of being accepted, proud of you."

The reward for this comes on her night-cold lips. I feel a tremble in her mouth. We want very much to have a place to ourselves now, but merely cross under Prospekt Marx to circumvent the Metropole, the clamminess of the underground passageway pulling us together, yet apart.

"If I weren't Russian," she says. "If I weren't Russian, would you have thought twice about me as your wife?"

Anastasia "^279

I think twice now. "But thank God you are Russian, you'd have been something different. You're you, the only one."

"All the same, there's an old Russian saying: 'Measure seven times before cutting the cloth.' "

How odd this sounds on her impulsive lips! How I admire her for giving me this escape, for considering my interests at this crucial moment more than her own. What better proof that she isn't heedless of others? It is the ultimate testament of her goodness and the wisdom of my decision.

Yet strangest of all this evening's strangeness is the slight ambiguity precisely this wise counsel leaves me in. I've broken my emotional barrier. Asked and been accepted. Volunteered to tackle the bureaucratic procedures tomorrow. Yet it's far lessJinal than I'd pictured; I am less changed.

Are we engaged? It is too raw to walk, too hard to get a taxi, too late to wangle a restaurant table. How can we have a fitting celebration?

Wary of Soviet feints, I sought preliminary counsel about marriage applications in the American Embassy. The cultural attache, who doubled as exchange students' advisor, knew me from the Harvard gym. My news swept away his chumminess; he went straight to a warning tightly laminated of political gravity and personal concern.

Marriage to a Soviet girl would make me suspect in America forever. Any girl: the KGB had a lien on them all. As a favor to him, might I "rethink the whole situation" for twenty-four hours? Meanwhile he'd bend the rules for an old friend and postpone informing Washington, in case I wanted to "contain" my youthful impulse.

I wandered among pensioners in the zoo, trying to think of what to say when Anastasia emerged from classes, feeling the awkwardness of last night's anticlimax thicken in the January day like leftovers in a refrigerator. Having agreed on our bold venture—if that is what we did; it was still less than absolutely clear—ordinary conversation with her seemed paltry. I wanted to say something that would stave oflf the descent to our previous imperfection.

280^MOSCOW FAREWELL

The attache's discouragement wouldn't do for this, of course— nor my response to it. Instead of blazing up at his cold-blooded Washingtonese, which I'd do one day when I needed to shunt the blame for my spinelessness, I agreed to his suggestion. Despising myself, I thanked him—even hoped, somewhere, that he would take over my responsibility.

The squeak of my boots pinched my nerves. Each hour apart from Anastasia increased the importance of producing tidings big enough for our new roles. I decided to wait until I could announce that at least my Embassy end was straightened out. I knew I wouldn't hear from her: she was giving me time to reconsider.

Next morning I shared the elevator with an older Embassy official who quipped about tying the knot to a Russian maid. I demanded to know how he'd heard.

"The outgoing Washington cables—isn't it official?"

I pushed the ground-floor button and left. The attache's betrayal was so shaming, I told myself, that I couldn't see him, let alone tell Anastasia. Explaining my reaction in the Evgeniya affair, I used to say that a free country's respect for the individual had badly prepared me to cope with double-dealing. Far more than clothes or meals, it was this I wanted to give my bride; this promise the Embassy had smeared. The less certain I was of myself, the more my country mattered. I felt I could not introduce it to her by way of official guile.

Another day passed in limbo. More ebb after the Bolshoi crest; even stronger presentiment that the longer the silence, the more necessary to break it dramatically. Hoping her eyes would prompt the necessary words, I went to the institute. She descended from the building alone, wrapped in thoughts and scarves. The very need for me undisguised on her face unmanned me; calling out to her mentally, I backed away. If my most mellifluous voice were asked, it would say that I truly wanted her for my wife, but wasn't ready. If it were the most honest, the answer would be in terms of girls and goodies too yummy to sacrifice. But there was no such questionnaire; I simply sensed a distance between us—which is all I felt; the rest of me was desensitized. Her hair fell over her eyes. She was so lovely in her faint melancholy that I feared to disturb it.

AnastasiaX281

I now left my room in early morning, and to kill thoughts of what to do, spent my waking hours with Alyosha. One day, I knew, Anastasia and I would laugh at the sorry functionary called a cultural representative. We'd thank him, too—for providing a background of his shabby sense of bureaucratic loyalty against which the importance and beauty of our own would more brightly shine. Meanwhile, I thought of how best to protect her from reprisals when we did go to the marriage office—which would be soon. And of how to make unimaginative me good enough not just for glittering theater evenings with her, but for a lifelong commitment of weekdays.

Soon I sensed that my absence itself was taking care of this. Our communion in such things was so strong that there was no need to say when I'd return, even why I was away. Her sense of dramatic timing would tell her how a temporary separation now could only increase the romantic tension, enhance our mutual dependence, make my heart even fonder.

And despite this self-deception put out to cover my mangy retreat, I'm foresighted at least in this: by the end of the week, I cherish her more than ever. I know her so intimately, am so certain of the affinity of our reactions, that I can feel her attachment growing in step with mine.

Evidence appears of precisely this: worried about my whereabouts, she discreetly telephones Alyosha. As I've asked, he says only that I'm well—and brooding.

She surely still feels I'm trying to copy him and that this is a mistake. More and more certain that we're sexual twins, Alyosha, by contrast, can't understand my "hypertensive" interest in her when "you'll only be bored soft in the end." The truth is that neither is right. I have long wanted two lives, one to dedicate to family and utter constancy, and the other for the opposite ultimate of abandon and debauch. Anastasia and Alyosha have been revealed as the two summits I must attain, but a beneficent god—which is what my guilt calls my duplicity —has arranged it that both can be squeezed into my single lifetime.

More—that one will prepare me for the other. For I'm hooked now on the intoxicating round of fetes and syllogize that far from spoiling me for my one true love, the profligacy is purifying me

282^MOSCOW FAREWELL

for it. When surfeited on the anonymous bodies, I'll be the better man she deserves, capable of unconditional faithfulness. Fit to achieve the sublime devotion I've always yearned to achieve.

The concern she transmits to Alyosha for my whereabouts strengthens everything I feel about us. Two weeks go by in swelling love for her, for the sweetness of my separation ache, for the comfort of knowing we'll be together again, more steadfastly than ever.

Cruising in districts I know would please her, I jump out of the Volga to call—and replace the receivers of half a dozen phone booths: I want to intensify the expectations yet more. Meanwhile, Alyosha's confidence and kindness with women expands me, also contributing to us. This is how I deal with images of her during the orgies.

Another week quickly passes. Although I love her for the way she misses me, my guilt for what I suspect of my self-deception is rising to the safety-valve level. I drink alone and go to the telephone booth across the street from her dormitory. My suspense is enrapturing after this long lapse; apprehension of her reaction to my cruelty is atomized in the alcohol. She can't have been offended; she trusts me to do what I had to. I hear my charming, witty, tender answers to her questions, all lavishing on her the devotion she deserves after her faithful wait. She will ask neither about my mysteriousness in disappearing nor my de-votedness in calling now, as she always knew I would when my task was complete. For the first time, I'm totally fluent with her.

Her approach to the telephone pushes me higher toward ecstasy. "You/" she utters in response to my brief adoring greeting. I drink in the flaxen timbre with the trace of northern accent, its crowning glory.

"Do you think we should know each other's names?" I say, repeating her Yaroslavl pauses with her words. "When we meet again, 'you' might be inadequate."

She receives this like a hack performance at the theater. I rush to something even more trite. "I'll need that book of yours back—forgot to pen the dedication."

"Something about never forgetting old friends, no doubt."

"Something about eternal infatuation for a woman of instincts. I'll find a suitable line from one of the reverent verses."

Anastasia ^283

She shifts to a lower octave. "You know the saying? 'When the barrel's empty, it's late to conserve the wine.' "

I don't know the saying and can't decipher its moral now. I am too frozen by the chilling new self-assurance and secrecy in her voice. Throughout the hiatus, I have pictured her wrapping her red scarf around her head and rushing gleefully to our reunion. It is midnight, the perfect time for this flourish. But she won't even talk about joining me.

"Someone said 'When we meet again' a whole five minutes ago. I've heard that prolonged waiting for your desideratum damages the heart."

She gives this the grunt it deserves, and stays put. She doesn't say she's just washed her hair or is tired; simply that she doesn't want to go out now. Her tone asserts that my gesture of appearing at this hour is puerile, not romantic. "Let's set a better time and place," she says.

As I try to continue bantering, maggots of doubt multiply in me as on the Eisenstein meat. What have I done with my appalling absence? Suddenly I realize I must raise the stakes.

"For God's sake, I love you, I've always loved you, I always—"

And she'll always love me, she interrupts, her inflection suggesting my feelings are melodramatically exaggerated and her "love" for me is a prima ballerina's for a reporter. The whole conversation is nauseatingly out of character.

"Please, I must see you for a minute. Otherwise something terrible will happen."

If I like we can meet after classes tomorrow. Sorry, she's busy in the evening, can't get free even for a ballet. A fellow student must use the telephone now; she's looking forward to tomorrow, five o'clock. . . .

Although I knew my punishment would start soon, I felt only stunned, as in the moments immediately following a blow to the face. The blood of an overwhelming desire shot to my head, then seeped down through my being, from the moment I accepted she actually wasn't coming. I had to look at her face. Put my arm in hers. Know that she loved me.

Everything after this was weighted by monumental banality. My reactions to the shock conformed to a story: "Whenever life

284^MOSCOW FAREWELL

is at its most dramatic, it is least able to escape the commonplace. ... At the so-called great moments, we all behave like characters in a penny novelette." But recollection of this passage, written by Koestler about what he endured awaiting imminent execution in a Franco cell, provided no satisfaction. My pain controlled me no less, but I could take no pride in it. I had to live with the dreary reality that everything I felt was utterly hackneyed.

On the following day at five o'clock—she came on time!—her presence suspended my longing. While she was with me, I believed she had never left, or that my old attraction for her would quickly pull her back. Even when she explained, 1 was enlivened rather than depressed. It was we two together: better than old times because our discussion was more urgent. She wore the same green sweater, sipped the same tea without sugar. The workaday cafe took on an intriguing atmosphere. Her terrible news was from the same penny novelette which we'd soon laugh at, then forget.

On a very low day two weeks ago, she was trying to finish an experiment. A man from the institute's staff" entered the laboratory and saw her weeping. She did not want his comfort but they talked—and talked again after completing the experiment. Walking to the dormitory with him, she felt each step separating her from us, but only now, warmed by his intelligence, did she realize how lonely she had been in my absence.

No, she did not love him. But she could not leave him. Their give-and-take was very different from ours but must not be trampled on.

I implored her to go away with me on the weekend. To Leningrad, Sochi, the country's best. I would use any trick, offer any bribe for permission to travel together. No; she would be with him in a scholarly retreat on a nearby lake. Now she must leave.

I spent the dismal January evening in the cafe's intense atmosphere of restless boredom, feeling I understood the despair of its bleary drunks. It was no longer a lark; I needed anesthesia.

Outside the institute the next morning, I met a bantam student named Alek who had sometimes accompanied Anastasia and me for a walk after classes to talk about American cars, his

Anastasia X 285

passion. He identified the man as a thrice-married professor of neurology who appealed to pretty students despite his scraggli-ness. He, Alek, wondered what they saw in him—especially Anastasia, who had loved me so.

This struck me so violently that I yearned to lie down. I loved her—like no one else on earth. The rest had been incidental, even my cruel games and emotional stinginess. The heart and soul of her was so close to my own—but better than my own—that I couldn't go on alone.

Two days passed; the thought of a lifetime without her was unbearable. If only I hadn't known her uninhibited tenderness, her support, her affection—which made me a hundred times finer than a purposeless screwer. I couldn't believe her handbag's frayed handle was no longer mine to toy with while she was in some restaurant toilet, from which she would wind her way through all other tables to mine. That her exhilarated whisper would not be in my ear as we walked down a street, turning me into a man I could admire.

I remembered a recent account of Moscow life by a good-natured Englishman who was depressed by the drabness and gloomy weather, but never felt so happy to feel so sad. How perceptive this seemed until the real sadness I'd brought on myself began taking me to the bottom.

The cliches sprouted so abundantly that I had to hack through the undergrowth of my own hackneyed thoughts. To my horror, I noticed that our old love talk of code words and private jokes embarrassed her, as if I were offering to doll her up in shoplifted clothes. Then I tried to blackmail her with my desire, which of course had returned. When she next saw me after her weekend at the lake, I brushed against her with the hardness that used to make her carol. She forced a chuckle, as if for an acquaintance who had told a boorish story.

To my desperate plying, she confirmed that our sex had been "good," but she couldn't turn it on like a faucet. "And I'm bad at dual allegiances. You have different notions about passion."

Unavailable, she became irreplaceable. In our previous state, which had so dissatisfied me, I came to see a richness I could never again hope to achieve, and prayed to exchange the rest of my days for a week of our former bliss. In short, I was the

286/^ MOSCOW FAREWELL

rejecting lover whose tactics had backfired and heart burst with self-pity. Now that she was unobtainable: how predictable it all was, how tasteless and self-serving! And how little this recognition helped!

And how I wished to make something grand of my misery. I reread the Cancer Ward scene where a former labor-camp prisoner tries to make sense of a department-store customer asking for silk shirts.

Men were . . . being thrown into mass graves, into shallow pits in the permafrost; men were being taken into labor camps for the first, second, and third times, being jolted from station to station in prison trucks; men were wearing themselves to nothing with picks . . . and here was this neat little man who could remember the size not only of his shirt but also his collar!

This was the picture of niggling me, with no way to emulate Solzhenitsyn's stalwart victims.

I kept dreaming I'd been born when I'd have been forced to prove my guts instead of pampering my bourgeois neuroses. My wishy-washy generation experienced less suffering than any on earth and read more about it. I knew about the terrible sacrifices of the Spanish Civil War, the excruciating bestiality of the Nazis; in groups that I could cite were a million of the Continent's finest men and women whose reward for selfless dedication to mankind's betterment was unspeakable torture. Ludicrous as my hurt was in comparison, I grieved for myself

For it was all I had. I knew literature, not life. Raised on middle-class melodrama, I wanted the heroism of suffering, which is why I despised myself while I cried—and why I missed all the more the only woman I'd known who had something heroic in her, from which I was "incomprehensibly" cut off.

The world had the pallor of a morning before a snowstorm. I lay on my cot for days, dreading the moment when I would have to move my limbs to make a cup of soup. Frightened by my moans, roommate Viktor summoned a doctor—who diagnosed the flu that had lain low half the University, and slapped me with mustard plasters. "Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may

Anastasia"^ 287

have existence." I quoted this in English. He checked me again for delirium.

When bed became tiresome, I swung into "action," keeping Anastasia in flowers and refining the mawkishness of the accompanying notes:

My Darling, I shouldn't send you these. For when they've withered, what will you then think of my love?

I bought a medical bag, entered her institute, lurked in corridors to watch her changing classes. It was her kind of exploit; she should have laughed. Chatting with fellow students, she passed me by with a chilly nod. Not even my skill in sneaking in drew acknowledgment from her.

I went to the cafeteria with bantam Alek, who had secretly adored her since their first day at the institute. Together we kept watch for a tender sign—as his size, my new acquaintance with pain told me, might make him wait for someone the rest of his Hfe.

Challenged at the old building's entrance, I moved my vigil to her dormitory, maintaining surveillance on her window from the roof of an adjoining apartment house. A re-enactment of my teen-age capers—when I could prove my dauntlessness because the girl had already left—the stunts also answered my calling to explore Russian life. What other foreigner has not only loved but been rejected by a Russian Helen? My intrepidness in finding roses, hens' teeth in winter Moscow, also stirred my self-admiration. Anything for a gesture.

The roommate closest to her, a homely Svetlana, came to lunch and gave me the solace I begged for by predicting the quick separation of the incompatible couple. I invested further hope in the purgatory of sitting close to the gawky girl's bad breath. My buoyancy collapsed when our conversation was exhausted fifteen minutes later.

Shadowing the slow-gaited professor, I remarked to myself, was as close to undercover work as a Westerner wants to go in this country. A rumpled Galbraith, he led me lumberingly to his apartment house. The nights I spent outside it were surely as cold as Greenland, but I welcomed physical punishment as a shipmate to my psychic variety. Hiding in a blind inside the

288^MOSCOW FAREWELL

courtyard, I watched them pass on their way home—as unreachable, I said to myself, as Alyosha's Yanks.

My frozen fingertips yearned for the touch of their old friend, the weave of her overcoat. She was shiny-eyed and incredibly alive, but also slightly uneasy with his remoteness, even when she took his arm. A slight darkness under her eyes—from nights of love?—was the finishing touch to my crushing.

I remembered Svetlana's comment after they didn't fall apart in her predicted week: "He's not for her—but Nastya has a way of falling for her lovers." The notion of her Swedish model's legs in his bed seemed farfetched then; now I had the sickening firsthand proof of a light going on, then off, in his fourth-floor window. A secret darkness, an invulnerable enemy. One day, I'd have a much more luxurious apartment. One day the creep would die. But strange as it still seemed, I was more jealous of her than of him.

I snuck into their entryway and inched up the mute staircase toward their door, imagining the miracle that would strike me on the next step and hesitating to take it. The frozen iron and stone held an aura of profound mystery, as if I'd stumbled on a residence of Trotsky's. It was crazy to be there at that witching hour, crazier still to know the old stairway's every ripple of paint, every word of instruction for a pay phone. My study of gouges in the landings was preparation for recapturing her on the other side of the massive wall. No building anywhere in the world was so intimately mine. Minute by unbearable minute, I relived the scene outside the institute when she was mine and I backed away. It was as if I had lost my birthright.

The trip down, away from my idol, was always worse. The streets were deserted except for rare night workers who might mistake me for the very plainclothesman I half hoped would arrest me—initiating the tearful reconciliation when she visited the jail. Like a soap-opera writer bawling at his own episodes, I took my own games seriously. When day came again, the masochism of throwing an occasional bouquet at her feet as she walked to her bus stop was all the cheaper because it cost nothing except further decline in her estimation. But nothing else filled the void.

There was only puppy-like wandering on the streets where she

Anastasia^289

walked and wasting my precious moments with her pleading for more of them. Her very stressing that we would still see each other underlined how rationed my time with her was. When I persisted, she interrupted in a tone I'd never heard before.

"I'd prefer not to say this but I'm busy with exams. And frankly, others have first claim on my free time."

How could I win her back when she denied me the time to do it? How was she going to learn about my new chastised self? My Russian Sovereign Anastasia, resorting to censorship.

I kept walking. With its radiance extinguished, Moscow was as stark and remote as a moonscape, black holes replacing the bits of color she used to blink at. A sidewalk stall's fresh cheburekhi made me gag: together with the aroma, I tasted the memory of her delight in it. How could I have cheated enough to pretend the quickness of her "Yes, of course" came from anything but her certainty?

Only Anastasia knew about us and, therefore, the extent of my deprivation. But she wasn't here to comfort me, depriving me even of this satisfaction. Losing the one person needed to talk to about the tragedy of the loved one was beyond all bounds of reasonable unfairness.

Yet I also knew I was bearing not the "cruel injustice" of my plaints, but the just deserts of my personality. When / had abandoned her, she took the normal, healthy course instead of whining, proving even more conclusively that when the mess ended, this whole woman who stood on her own two feet was worthy to be my wife.

I also understood that my expectation of her to cheer the conquering hero on his return from the month-long disappearance was only the most absurd manifestation of the cold-heartedness that from the beginning had kept me from thinking of how she felt, what she wanted. This was somehow connected to my diminishing desire for her before the break, just because she was so loving and available. I was good enough at poses to attract an Anastasia, but too self-serving, too sadistic in "love play" to provide what she needed after the dazzling start.

But this too was a pose. For I worked to describe my contrition eloquently to myself—therefore to her—in the same cause of winning her back: "It's not that I wounded you; I don't deserve

290^MOSCOW FAREWELL

you." Yet I hoped the very confession would make her beHeve the contrary. I was on an old cycle that led me to mocking deception whenever I played at attaining the real, real truth about myself. Instead of fading away in accordance with my own knowledge of my unworthiness, I convinced myself that this recognition enabled me to make her happy now. This was me in a slicker disguise.

Meanwhile, I clung to my hurt, seeking wisdom even in radio ballads, elevating an amateur Bing Crosby's "I can't live without you" to the paragon of understanding. "Why did you leave me before I felt I could tell you the truth?" I strained for solace in every sloppy ditty, opening myself to the other broadcasting messages. Two hundred million tons of steel at the end of the Five-Year Plan? Splendid, Comrades; how can I help? I must do something to join the rest of honest hardworking humanity.

She was ignoring my telegrams now. Each ring of the telephone in the common room jolted me because it might be her returning one of my calls, then harder because it wasn't. I had to record my supplications on paper.

Notes from a Twelfth-Story Window

Dawn. I just noticed the pattern of the formal gardens at the approach to the University complex. Kindly covered by snow, the outline nevertheless reveals itself at this height, like old trench lines seen from a plane. The garden is as stiff as a Central Committee declaration, but I used to want the flowers to grow well this spring to please Anastasia when she stood at my window. So she'd have the aesthetic pleasure — and seeing her, Fd have mine.

The wind whistling out there; I think: I know that sound, Anastasia listened to it with me. Anastasia 's with me, she hears the wind. The laundry grinds my buttons to powder — and I catch her sweet, scolding "snip off, sew on, save sorrow." . . . And a line that keeps repeating: "Give us this day our daily bread."

Anastasia^291

But why didn 'f / tell you this? That I love you for your shoulders in your ''Monday" suit? Your one and only smell, your biting into an apple as if it's the last on earth. For the cut of your jib — which I've written in English because some day you'll understand.

Do you know it's Anastasia I need? The round warmth that gives me beauty and peace; the woman who's so much more human than anyone Vve known.

A radio program for children playing. "And don't forget, gang, that LENIN (sigh) loved Pushkin. Throughout his revolutionary life, Lenin found time to refresh himself with this greatest Russian poet." Violins, followed by one-two-three, Comrades: the usual morning exercises.

Yet Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors was what you said. Lyric, honest, perfect. I don't understand how inspired works like this are shown while the censors grind far lesser unorthodoxies into sausage meat. We must talk about this. About why these rare films are released that probe life as few Western productions can, implicitly demonstrating that no word the Party ever uttered has any relevance to the important truths. Now I hear there's a new one by your Vasily Shukshin about a criminal — can you believe it? — who ends tragically for all the wrong ideological reasons.

Can it be we won't see it together? Here it is again, my burden. I try to carry it silently, but the more I concentrate on a "neutral" subject and approach its inner meaning, the closer I veer toward you, my inner meaning. And one more plaint. You promised you'd save the new Cherry Orchard for me, but friends tell me you've seen it with someone else. Perhaps mine is a feminine jealousy. But didn't you too like changing roles?

You reminded me of my stupid remark to Chingiz while we were crossing the stream, and it stung. I wanted to tell you that, and why. But I fell into an old despair of mine that no one can ever get to the full truth about anything. I tried to limit the hundred background causes so that we could discuss the principal ones of what had gone wrong on the walk — and with

292^MOSCOW FAREWELL

us. But I kept being overwhelmed by the larger, philosophical problem of everything being interdependent, then gave up because of the impossibility of a truly honest explanation.

You asked me why I was silent. I answered that I couldn 't tell you. Because I didn't want to lie, or play the hero with sham profundity. My very need for a completely truthful exchange with you was the undoing.

So my motives were okay in that case — unlike now, when I'm making precisely the kind of half-truth justification I avoided then. But no justification can possibly exist for my cursed month "away." Only an inadequate explanation: I was so certain of our perpetuity that it never occurred to me you might think it was the end. Why didn 't I come to put my arms around you, tell you that you were dearer than ever? That's what I was thinking the entire month — and the paradox is, I was learning how from Anastasia. . . .

Roommate Viktor is actually readingThe Kreutzer Sonata. He's not sure whether he's angry at himself for wasting the time, or proud for persevering; whether to be appalled at or applaud Tolstoy's prerevolutionary misogyny. The better I know him, the less there is to talk about because we can't agree on a single sentence. But he's wonderfully kind in his way. Seeing me up during the night, he worried. He thinks the winter's too much for me.

Have you any idea how wretchedly empty this building is without you? "Since you were gone/My barren thoughts have chilled me to the bone." And all the more because I imagine how I left you alone in your dormitory.

The things we did in bed, those things, were beautiful because honest. Hemingway was wrong: it happens only once in a man s life. Dear Anastasia, "love" evokes your image.

Now the Pravda summary on the radio, the editorial ending with the line about "continuing and intensifying the struggle," which I interpret in my own way with respect to Citizen Anastasia Serigina. I haven't told you how my thoughts of you consume me. The important thing wasn 't love but trust. And opening up to the true and beautiful in life. That's what you gave me and what mustn 't die. If you believe I exaggerate it may be

AnastasiaX 293

because you're younger, you haven't had time to see the dreariness of everything else.

But whatever happens, I thank God for your beauty. He must make you happy — with me if possible, without if not.

Incidentally, I still haven't told you that story about the emigre who first taught me Russian.

The white Hes were minimal. Despite the spontaneity affected, I rewrote a dozen times, hoping the prose would evoke our best days. The hint about putting it down after a sleepless night was also misleading: I worked on it an entire day, adding the first paragraph as an afterthought. But in the sense that earlier sleepless nights in my room and outside her dormitory were the equivalent, this was poetic licence.

I merely omitted the central truths: that the real reason for my disappearing act was cowardice, plus greed for the girls at Alyosha's. In that sense, it had the elegance of simplicity.

I took the occasion to enter a library for the first time in months, borrowing a Russian style book from there. My other loan was of a typewriter for the final draft, partly to give myself something to do the following day too: a clean Russian page took an hour. And to preserve my heartbreak in carbon. I hadn't written anything for ages. I liked the embellishment of my anguish.

Time imposed its humdrum relief True to the platitudinous pattern, part of me continued to resent my reconversion from tragic hero to old me, even drearier without my princess. But I also resisted rehabilitation because the thought that life might become tolerable without Anastasia was itself intolerable: the recovery of an amputee reconciling himself to a legless future. At this stage too, my impulse to dramatize my sense of loss did not prevent me from genuinely feeling it. Everything was true.

I'd started spending every day with Alyosha. And I did forget, sometimes even gloated. Other times I went down a different pit and could no more feed a line to, let alone sleep with, some salesgirl than eat coal. This polarity extended to Anastasia. Some mornings in bed, I choked with desire for her as a purely carnal object. My tongue licked the air where I visualized her body's

294^MOSCOW FAREWELL

shapes and smells. But usually my respect for her soared above lust; I limited my longing to becoming her buddy again. With that comfort, I could survive, simultaneously proving my purity.

Daydreaming of six months hence, I sometimes saw myself as a daring gambler who had stoically lost on his highest card. But in the hours when my sorrow filled me with tenderness for every living creature, I felt that this new capacity to feel could not be for nothing. My trial had been imposed to temper me for a truly holy union—perhaps not even with Anastasia, although I tried to suppress the blasphemous thought.

The relapses were like muscle cramps. I am on an old shopping street sanctified by our strolls. I pass the flower shop into which I dashed one afternoon having asked her mysteriously to wait and returned to delight her with a bunch of lilies. The sight of the same window causes a spasm, and I push through crowds searching for a telephone booth like an asthmatic seeking oxygen.

Temples pounding, I dial her dormitory. Blessedly, she comes to the telephone. I try not to overdramatize, simply stating, as if she is already a doctor, that her absence is suffocating me. Amazingly, she says she will see me this evening. My relief is instantaneous.

The rest of the day is a thicket of joyful chores. Alyosha gives me the apartment to entertain her "at home." But I buy the food, grateful for this project, at last, worthy of my time. An obliging American correspondent helps me get steaks and tomatoes from the Western colony's sources and I pick out an embroidered tablecloth from the best folk-crafts store. The final hour goes to folding napkins, polishing glasses, much trivia I'm good at. This is the kind of giving—like supplying Revlon nail polish and theater tickets—I always puffed up because I somehow tried to make it substitute for the more important things I held back. But I admit these failures now.

The table gleams; she'll be pleased. Forty-five minutes after the time, I begin to plead. Please come Nastenka, even if you're three hours late. To my dismay, my anxiousness swirls over the line to the old resentment when she made me wait.

I've started the steak. It won't be rare, as she loves it. She never let me perform at my best—even for her.

Anastasia^ 295

I remember my vexation over her favorite irrationalisms. Her willingness to let food rot—remains of the treats Alyosha set out for us—because putting it back in the refrigerator was boring. I'm a fool to have spent a frantic day on this lavish meal she'll spoil. When all is said and done, it was instinctive wisdom that saved me from the trap of her impetuousness.

But she's knocking! My heart leaps to answer, my profane resentment burning out like a defective match. She has responded to my plea and is framed in the doorway, her face as glorious as I remembered.

A new lemon blouse, the old amber necklace: she has dressed up for me. Her eyes focus on the foie gras, then rise to me. Once again she is high on delicacies, seasoning each dish with a graceful compliment. And perhaps my brief anger has helped loosen it, my tongue is equal to my table. I do not mention today's telephone-booth crisis, let alone The Subject. She sits in her straight-backed way, cocking her head in amusement during my story of a Christmas spent in Dallas. Through the chatter, I attend to her wine glass with an Alyosha-like deftness as host.

I switch from Vivaldi to Rachmaninov on the record player. The concerto's lilt transforms the room, and she has a new nickname for me, playing on kulik and kulinar: woodcock and culinarian. It's going so well that the measly part of me hopes it ends soon, before I run out of entertaining jabber. Partly to make things more exciting, but also because I already feel the withdrawal pangs of when she'll go, I relax my control and begin questioning.

"But how could this have happened to us? This impossible separation."

"I don't know. I'm sometimes appalled myself."

Her voice has a new wisdom that will teach me, I swear, how to sustain romance forever. At last we're going to have our heart-to-heart talk. I suspect I have engineered everything, even the break, just for this.

"We're so much better than others," I say. "Even this evening."

She straightens her new pleated skirt. I visualize the old one, which made her plainer but more obtainable. I want them both.

296^MOSCOW FAREWELL

the superior woman and the collective-farm maid; want to dominate and submit to a female being of disdainful grace.

"I want to tell you in the spirit of our friendship," I say gravely. "You mustn't throw away devotion of this magnitude; you may never find it again."

She blinks. I rush ahead because I'm afraid she may laugh.

"Ours was opening up to possibilities in ourselves that few people have. Believe me, I'm older."

"You've already pointed that out. Tell me something new. What are you and Alyosha up to?"

Ignoring this, I cautiously ask about her "friend." She says only that to leave him now would tear her in half. I curse my amorphous age.

"But logically you're mine. My feeling for you is as strong as the survival instinct."

I can't quite believe that at just this moment she has to excuse herself Walking out like an office secretary, she closes the bathroom door instead of inviting me, as of old, to the celebration of her peeing. Confronted with our lost intimacy, I have to start from the beginning when she returns.

"I'm deeply grateful to you, but you still don't know why. I'm grateful for introducing me to love and its colors. In my ignorance, I always dismissed fairy tales, poetry, romantic novels as fakery. Now I understand: how Paris stole Helen, why Tristan will never forget Isolde, what motivates the families in this very building. The real and allegorical meanings in life and literature—that's what you've given me."

She puts a finger to her lips, but again her eyes permit me to continue. The emergence of my literary allusions without conscious thought reinforces the dependence they proclaim, like prayer strengthening faith. But I can't tell what she's thinking beyond wanting more wine. The professor has obviously taught her to drink a lot.

"You're the most beautiful woman I'll ever see—but did you know you're plump? Not slim like strangers see you, but round and radiating like . . . like a New York artist who paints the sun and moon as concentric circles: the warmth of day and holy light of night. . . . Wait, he was Russian! Doesn't that prove I'm right?"

Anastasia^ 297

If only we could go on in this euphoria forever, hearing my in vino Veritas adoration of her that stills all skeptical voices. While I implore her shamelessly to return, she strokes my hands, saying she understands, it's hard for me. She is my best friend again, helping me through a bad patch.

"I'm fond of you," she says. "I don't enjoy seeing you wriggle."

"The suffering's not the main thing now. It's . . . I'm a stray dog without you."

"You're what you always were. A fine young man."

I wonder whether it is her praise or devastating put-down that is swelling my lump. Her "fine" was for describing chicken broth.

"Look at my face," I murmur. "Listen to my heart. I've lied before, but—"

I go to my knees, pressing hers with my forehead. But I believe enough of our fellowship has returned to make ourselves comfortable with one another, even in this preposterous situation. I also sense I am making progress, which must be consummated in physical union. I can break all barriers and finish the professor by crushing my mouth on hers, lifting her into bed.

I drink a full glass of cognac and let my tongue wag.

"Did you know that breasts can be off-putting? Embarrassing when inadequate, deadening when too large. . . . I've never seen perfection like yours. Your nipples are symbols of you; instantly sensitive to the touch."

With reverence for her godlike femininity, I raise my fingertips to the edge of her rising. Breasts in her homemade lemon blouse, like Aztec shrines.

"Takeyour hand away."

Only the transformation of her expression convinces me her rebuff isn't banter. Nothing has changed, she says; why must I spoil the evening?

"I come to have a meal with a friend and he dishes himself up as Tristan and Paris. I wish you'd stop moaning. I wonder whether you know how much it detracts from you."

While I'm still speechless, she tries to soften the blow. "When you find the goal you need, you won't imagine you love me so much. Your limbo makes you exaggerate my importance."

While I wait for an answer to this truth, the futility of knowing

298^MOSCOW FAREWELL

I've become a bore and a burden undermines my will to fight. But I plod on.

"If you won't accept my feelings, teach me how to smother them. I can't by myself"

"When will you understand I'm with someone else?"

"And can't come back to me now."

"I don't want to."

This can't be true. I must win something back. But I'm too drained to try; my hot air is exhausted.

She says good-bye, insisting I not take her home. I feel I am sealing my own doom by not overriding her objections and going with her; that to obey now would be the same fatal flaw of failing to prove my affection when we were together. But I'm too unsure of myself for an all-or-nothing bid. Despising my meekness, I kiss the hem of her overcoat.

"For the last time, Nastenka. Are you bluffing?" Like a subordinate asking permission to rebel, my question claims the worst of both worlds. She need not answer it. Long after the ground-floor door has slapped behind her and the gust of night air splashed my face, I remain on the dark landing of the stairwell, reproaching myself for being not quite submerged enough in my disorientation to ignore the cabbage smell.

The emptied apartment asks what disguise I'll now assume. The chair cushion still holds her shape. Tenderly, I wash our dishes, seeking nobility in defeat.

The following weeks, I cut a comic figure scheming new treats for her. But I am young and eventually will go the way I swore I wouldn't. Alyosha takes me ice-skating while the rinks are still well-frozen, and his orgies are more fun than my Wertherisms. In most ways, life is much easier with him as my buddy instead of her.

The first smell of spring arrives when he is trying his drugs case in Alma-Ata, and I decide to celebrate with a symphonic concert. Riding the bus from the University, the one in which the jonquil first showed itself, puts me deeper in the mood of regret and nostalgia for Anastasia than in many weeks. Oddly, she never said where she was going that September morning, but one day I'll see her again just to ask her. I want to hallow the

Anastasia X 299

experience, raise it through knowing all the details to a better state than my bungling left it.

Does she still read from my book of poems? I do, from the secondhand copy I searched bookshops for, a would-be knight faithful to his errant lady. The Esenin verses are an almond paste of sweetness and provocation, like her first smile in the bus. My favorite explains why I lathered under her impetuousness from the first moment.

You remember.

Remember every moment, of course: How I waited, back to the wall; And you paced the room in agitation, Flinging stings into my face.

You said

The time had come for us to part;

That you were sick of my foolheaded ways

And had to return to real things,

While I pushed on—downward, toward my lot.

My darling!

You did not love me.

Didn't understand that amidst the city throngs,

I was like a horse foaming with exhaustion;

And goaded by a daring rider's spurs.

You did not know that the dense smoke of my disassembled

existence Is what caused my anguish: preventing me from seeing Where fate's strange tricks were leading us.

Do these lines move her too? The bus slithers to a halt on Lenin Prospekt. A powerful deja-vu seizes me, and I try to understand what has prompted it before slipping into my old Weltschmerz. "What is boundless cannot be bounded"—this saying she liked comes to me, together with its image of arms trying to embrace the infinity of universal mysteries. Suddenly I recognize a signpost identifying this as the stop.

My thoughts stampede into planes of time and space, fate and human destiny. These mute buildings, streetlamps, stunted trees

SOO^MOSCOW FAREWELL

that have stayed the same while I was thrashing about in my drama harbor answers to the riddles of existence. Organic and permanent, they provide everything lacking in mortal, perishable us.

This inane grandiloquence exasperates me even as I think it; yet the sense of revelation persists, far more dizzying than mere coincidence could produce. Maybe this is the very bus. I look toward its back platform. A girl is therel running toward the open doors, her cheeks flushed in the frigid darkness . . .

Frost on my window blurs her badly, but I swear it is she. Her red scarf floated by forward notion, she is already reaching for the railing at the rear steps, which she misses only because the driver sees to it with a spiteful start. My inner ear hears "Black plague," her curse for such occasions.

My heart races the diesel's detonations. Maybe not emotion has been tilting me, but occult forces. I am aware of the bus's forward motion only when I begin cursing myself for not leaping out of the back door and seizing my miraculous second chance with her. We are at the next stop, where I searched for her that morning in the metro foyer. I fumble toward the exit, which an infuriating disorientation prevents me from reaching in time. A sharp start in a broken first gear, a missed grasp at an overhead strap and my overcoat is sopping with the floor's rusty slush.

I return to my seat and tell myself I must think. A ramshackle bus with a half-inch of window rime because of a busted heater. At the opposite end of the spectrum of the ordinary and the fantastic, the religious coincidence of her specter there. . . . I'll never find her if I get off" now. But the driver's beer-hall bass announcing the next stop over his microphone is trying to tell me what to do: "Comrade Serigina, off^at Herzen Street." That's it, she too is going to the Conservatory\ Never mind that she's never been there on her own, and doesn't suspect that The Rite of Spring is the feature of tonight's program. Sheer instinct is drawing her to me; that's why she had the plastic bag in which she carries her theater shoes. Her appearance at the concert will be the proof of our inseparability.

The bus rattles across an empty October Square and down Dmitrova Street, past the French Embassy. Once she risked coming to a reception in the old mansion, during the time we

Anastasia ^301

couldn't keep our hands from each other. We backed into an anteroom and fondled one another, pretending to be searching the pile for our coats. Our appetites were—yes, boundless.

One chance in a million to have seen her at our stop; in a hundred million if she appears at the Conservatory. Yet I already picture her in the crowd, searching for a spare-ticket seller from the pedestal of Tchaikovsky's statue. I circle back to take her arm from behind. Her larynx laugh goes up: "Well done, clever one. I knew you'd be here."

She'll wait at my side, protecting her face with her scarf against the Bulldog Drummond fog, taking it for granted that I'll somehow get us inside. We two risking the unorthodox again, united for sensual experience. Waving my passport, I'll claim in loud American that I'm the advance man for the orchestra's New York tour.

Then our entrance into the concert hall, the eighteenth-century music room with the severe white walls and gleaming organ pipes. And the Stravinsky—even better, because its dissonances are more electrifying, than on Proposal Evening. Her face is as gold and clean as the hall. We are merged by the exquisite setting, the magnificent coincidence of our meeting, the enthralling Russian paganness of the music. The rite of our spring. We will be together. . . .

But stop. I'm tired of this tale before forcing myself to live it. At last I'm beginning to see: far from the patron of love it tries to pass for, my urge to dramatize and romanticize relationships is an unconscious wrecking device. Before we meet again, I must have an honest word with myself. Theatrical props don't work for her. She lives fairy tales too, but somehow without hamming up her own life: while I was convincing myself the episode was heaven-sent, it was enough for her to catch the Esenin book and ride on. Yes, before I see her again, I must learn to see, and see for, myself

Besides, if I keep her as a symbol, the best of her will enrich me for years. I can spend a thousand dreamy hours pitying myself, gauging how far she departed from the Russian norm, trying to analyze how much of her glory was in my idealization. My memories are as moving as the moments themselves. I'll picture her at sleep, head thrusting out from beneath the covers and

302^MOSCOW FAREWELL

laying claim to each breath as if oxygen were one of her adored foods. Or removing her watch before sex, like an athlete before a game. Her antipathy to it in bed was so strong that if she noticed it still on, she flung it away.

I'll remember how she made herself up, examining her mirror image with a narcissism so uninhibited that it crossed the line of vanity to artlessness. Privy to the secrets of her toilet, I felt a part of her, and of the sheer physical grace I'd always wanted. What luxury to lie on the covers and do nothing but watch her minister to our beautiful eyes!

I'm grateful to her, even for her rejection. Even while best friends, I've always felt us competing in a strange rivalry, which there's still a chance I'll eventually win by converting this experience into some kind of elevating growth. "Man is born to live, not prepare for life," said Zhivago. She does the one and I the other—but who'll be happy in the end?

Someday I'll separate who she is from what I want of her. Meanwhile, the bus is pulling me away from her like a Greyhound on a turnpike.

VI The President's Day

The day of Nixon's arrival in Moscow dawns in fat pastel clouds. Air as fragrant as a cow's breath licks my skin through the wide-open dormitory window. What world capital can compare to the rambling village called Moscow when the spring sun shines and the smell of earth makes you free as Huck Finn? The dust won't rise for hours. The Kremlin is Disneyland on a lavender horizon. Nothing yet moves in the dormitory except Viktor's lips for his rhythmic snore and Kemal's slippers pacing the communal kitchen. I hurry past to avoid turning down his glass of tea, which comes with entreaties for advice now that M.I.T. and a university in Illinois have rejected him.

My unprecedentedly early start is to catch Zhenya on this final opportunity, and perhaps come by one of his "underground" drawings. But "underground art" can summon up more than one misleading image in this city. Some Westerners assume it is necessarily creative and good—a corollary of their supposi-

304^MOSCOW FAREWELL

tion that persecution renders political dissenters honest and saintly as well as brave. Unsentimental critics, by contrast, have seen so much sterility, pomposity and vacuous self-advertisement—feeble plagiarism of Chagall, shallow experimentation in Op Art—that they've come to expect only exhibitionistic imitation of Western vogues in rebels' flyblown studios. And to assert that nothing more can be expected of an artistic community cut off" from its roots for forty years, force-fed with Social Realist philistinism, and now painting exclusively for Western patrons of dissident art, many of whom can't tell the top of a canvas from its bottom. When they open up to foreigners, many Moscow intellectuals and artists burn with conviction that theirs are important talents, unrecognized only because of political repression. The tedious truth behind this heartwarming illusion is that some deserve as much sympathy for this conception of their meager gifts as for their relegation to the outhouses of the cultural establishment.

To all this, Zhenya the Giant is a happy exception. His basement studio is as foul as any, dungeon of leavings and smells. But his talent attracts even certain Ministry of Culture officials, who drop by—secretly, of course—to see his newest work: pencil drawings and canvases as divorced from Social Realism as Pasternak's poems from Pravda editorials. The best are oils of thrones in the cosmos and costumed girls on moonlike beaches— always with strongly understated color, hints of erotic surrealism and unsettling omissions that force the viewer to complete the work. Nostalgic, ominous, tantalizing with inexpressible perceptions and truths . . . the mood rarely fails because Zhenya, for all his dirtiness, avarice and indifference to Art—he couldn't care less about the Hermitage, let alone the Louvre—has a rare gift.

He will be leaving this afternoon for Israel via the train for Vienna: one of the year's charmed thirty thousand. When I arrived, hopes for such an exodus were dismissed as unreal, but Zhenya obtained his papers with a tenth of the trouble he'd expected. The hardship cases featured in the Western press still languished in their terrible limbo, refused both permission to leave and to support themselves; condemned by pure vindictive-ness to begging and despair. ("We don't want you here; we

The President's DayX305

deprive you of your jobs and pensions. But neither shall you go, traitorous Jewish scum.") But Zhenya's relatively easy success with the visa reinforced his assumption that progress toward his prosperity is the natural course of events.

Zionism still roiled him. He was rude to let-our-people-go activists who appeared with congratulations and suggestions as soon as word traveled of his application. (Without their activism, of course, it would never have occurred to him that he might go abroad, let alone emigrate.) He stormed against American Zionist committees who took it upon themselves to speak for his three million oppressed brothers, arguing that three quarters of them did not want to leave, and that this included the "Commie fucks": Jews in the Party and government whom Israel or any Western country would be crazy to accept. And the thought of settling in Israel appalled him. He simply knew Russia was past hope and that he'd had enough of it. The only escape was to Israel, where he intended to stay very briefly before moving on to the States. The next step was to allow his sister, a gym teacher, to pump him with sufficient courage to apply for the visa. It was taken for granted that she would go with him, to make his suppers and occasionally sweep out his room. He did not bother until later to tell his mother.

One day, I accompanied him to have a look at the application office, a division of the Ministry of the Interior run by the KGB. In the outer office, the archetypal setting for refugees at the mercy of unreachable bureaucrats, the line to see the officers in their cubicles was one hundred and forty-eight people long at 8:40 in the morning. A mean sergeant behind the reception desk was lashing out at everyone, but preferably at women over sixty. One—who was trying to visit a nephew in Belgium, her only living relative—was eighty-five, and her hands so failed her that she asked Zhenya's help in filling out the application form. "I've done it five times in five years," she apologized. "I can't remember everywhere I lived before 1905, so I keep putting down something different. Will that finish me?" There were collective farmers in cotton quilt jackets, painted tarts in foreign suede boots—they were applying to leave with their new husbands, Arab students—and elderly men wearing Brigade of

306^MOSCOW FAREWELL

Communist Labour medals to help their chances. And it was democratic: emerging from their interviews, young and old both wept. . . .

Zhenya's studio in an apartment building off Dobrininskaya Square is dominated by a statue of Lenin that could serve as a parody of its genre. Evenings the courtyard is dark to save electricity, but a bulb atop Vladimir Ilich illuminates his bald dome for passersby. As a daily reminder of what to rebel against, it has contributed much to Zhenya's search for new forms, and he often touches The Leader's shoe when coming home, in thanks for the "dialectical stimulation" toward genuine art. I pass the pedestal now, hurry down Zhenya's broken steps and pound on the door. He'll be glad to see me on D-Day, especially because I have some New York addresses he's requested.

Ten full minutes later, it comes to me that my knocking might attract unwanted attention. There has been no sound from behind his door.

To kill time, I wander toward the basement of an adjoining entrance on the courtyard. It is the building's "management office," a combination of repair center, ideological checkpoint and conduit for informing about suspicious goings-on. Of course I'm accustomed to mysteries and slipups in Moscow, to little working as it's supposed to. Zhenya himself has broken more appointments than he's kept. But at this moment, he's supposed to be up to his eyes in packing for his, mildly speaking, important trip. What's gone wrong? Over my shoulder, I scan the cars parked outside: last-minute arrest of parting Jews is a KGB hallmark. None look suspicious, but an army supplies depot guarded by armed sentries across the street moves me on.

The damp management office is festooned with the usual Lenin posters, interspersed with slogans exhorting more and better work. From behind the desk, a middle-aged woman with the hat of a volunteer social worker is beseeching a workman in grimy overalls to attend to a toilet with a history, and to pull himself together and face the day. His eyes are bleary and cheeks slack: vodka-drunk at eight o'clock. And he is not about to take orders from Frilly Hat. Who says the proletariat has no real power in this country? The embarrassed lady is happy to be interrupted by a telephone call.

The President's Day^307

"Hello, Mamachka, yes, it's early but I'm fine. . . . 'The early bird catches the worm,' as they say." She is so full of bright sayings and good intentions that it seems impossible the KGB has arrested Zhenya, ten yards away.

I push off in the direction of Dobrininskaya peasant market. This section of the city, mostly untouched by rebuilding, has a small-town flavor. In a decrepit "snack room" I breakfast on kasha and gritty coffee. After eying me, the ragged man sharing my stand-up table volunteers that he spent the decade 1944-54 in concentration camps, mostly in the notorious Vorkuta complex. Fingers are missing on both hands—Vorkuta was above the Arctic Circle, he reminds me—and he has difficulty swallowing a bun; might I spare a few kopeks? His crime was to be taken prisoner by the Germans in 1942, when his unit disintegrated near Rostov. Worked and starved to a living skeleton, he escaped, made his way to his own lines, and was immediately sentenced because former P.O.W.s were regarded as probable traitors. He is the first I've actually met of the hundreds of thousands so treated, and I had no idea how badly off" some still are.

"Keep well, brother," he says, and although he's a habitual beggar, this does not ring as pat thanks for my coins.

I find a working telephone booth to call Alyosha. One of the two girls using it while I wait—squeezed together, clutching briefcases, giggling—once visited him in the Juridical Consultation Office, but she doesn't recognize me. When I get through, Alyosha allows he's dejected because an actress met last evening spurned his "fraternal salaam," leaving him all alone. As if for spite, he must murder some of today's sunshine because a judge won't postpone a case he's trying. His final indignity is having to report to the hospital this morning.

"The hospital?" I respond, waiting for his punch line.

"Don't worry, I'm good at induction physicals. Cairo will hold out sans me. ... I'll be home by lunchtime; what do you fancy?"

It is almost nine-thirty. Hurrying back to Zhenya's for another try, I bump shoulders with Lev Davidovich, the lawryer who drops by to discuss personal problems with Alyosha. He says he's now handling a deeply disturbing case, which he'd better keep

308/^MOSCOW FAREWELL

confidential. I find myself walking him to his metro station while, his qualms notwithstanding, he spills the beans. He's been assigned by a court to defend a schoolboy charged with murdering his parents. Both victims were well-liked lawyers; respect for their memory makes him unhappy about appearing for the defense.

The accused is a typically pampered progeny of the professional class. The trouble began with his parents refusing permission, required for offspring under eighteen, to marry his paramour, an older shopgirl. Citing lack of common interests, the middle-aged lawyers also argued that the girl gave him her body, but not her love. Enraged by the latter imputation, the boy resolved a weekend-long wrangle by chopping mama and papa to death in their suburban dacha.

But Moscow's lawyers were even more distressed by the recruitment of sixteen-year-old Oleg as an accomplice. The aggrieved son first tried conscripting his younger schoolmate by simple bullying. "Don't be a stupider fool than you are," he blustered. "Alone, I can't be sure of finishing them both. And it's too risky if I miss one. Are you or aren't you my buddy?"

Although he did not blink at his friend's plan, Oleg was less malleable than his promise. "What's in it for me?" he asked with teen-age shrewdness.

"I'm reasonable. Name your price."

Oleg gave another moment to thought. "Don't try bargaining, I won't do it for less. Will you take the English exam in my place?"

"The written one? Yeah, I can swing that."

"It's a deal. But no welshing."

A second ax was obtained for Oleg and he joined his friend hacking off" limbs of the parents he'd never seen before. Exceptional brutality put the crime in a category about which the press is silent, and for which the KGB is brought in. From the unforced entrance into the dacha, the detectives deduced that the family knew the killers and they followed the son. He brought a bloody flannel shirt for washing to his ex-girl friend; for unrelated reasons, she no longer cared to see him—and, accompanied by friends consoling him for his terrible loss, searched department stores for an identical garment. The

The President's DayX309

blatancy of the evidence suggested that the boy was trying to give himself away, but when Lev Davidovich raised this during a prison interview to prepare the defense, his questions about motive eUcited only shrugs.

"You don't have much chance," said Lev Davidovich in the jail's special cubicle. "Do you know what will happen to you now?"

"They'll shoot me. Got a cigarette?"

Oleg, who also faced certain execution, cried.

When Lev Davidovich has disappeared into his metro station, I spy a telephone booth. No answer at Zhenya's studio, but since once is never enough on Moscow's telephone system, I dial twice again. The final time, the receiver is lifted on the tenth ring, but my greeting goes unanswered. "Zhenya?" I ask the ominous blankness. I'm tense again: who's on the other end? Possibly a KGB captain supervising a raid. I wonder whether to call Leonid, the clique's Jewish sidekick, who introduced me to Zhenya months ago.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," says a gravelly voice. "C'mon over. Still a few things to pack."

I underestimated the filth. Without the sketches and paintings that formerly covered its walls, the studio seems solely grime. Mice droppings and jars of putrid pickle brine are exposed in corners once stacked with canvases. Two hangings remain, one a drawing of the world floating in a lake that Anastasia bought, paid for with her own money, and never collected. (Nor did Zhenya remind her.) The other, centered on the most prominent wall, is a quotation lettered on rice paper—to help, Zhenya claimed, see the surrealism in daily life.

THE CLEAVAGE BETWEEN PROGRESSIVE AND REACTIONARY TENDENCIES IN LANDSCAPE PAINTING NOW BECAME PARTICULARLY SHARP. REACTIONARY CRITICS OF THE 1890s TRIED TO PRETEND THAT THE LANDSCAPE WAS AN ART FORM FREE FROM THE IDEOLOGICAL STRUGGLE.

— Russian Art from Ancient to Present Times Moscow, "Art" Publishing House, 1972

310.^MOSCOW FAREWELL

Zhenya too, and his rank beard, seem larger than ever against the bareness. Or maybe it's because he is full of himself. Tackling last-minute tasks with a hammer and chisel, he recounts his triumphs in the concluding stages of his emigration battle. Never mind that early this very morning, his courage had so failed him that he took refuge in a friend's flat, which explained the studio's desertion when I arrived and his later telephone precautions. Now his own dauntlessness inspires him.

In defiance of logic—they are trying to leave the country, not enter—prospective emigrants must produce letters of recommendation from the Party committees and state agencies that have supervised their lives. The clinic to which Zhenya applied for his tuberculosis certificate declared itself out of film; just as predictably, his cash bribe quickly produced the desired X-ray. But if such successes were commonplace, others demonstrated his keen mercantile imagination. Although his studio was merely on loan from the Union of Artists, he managed to sell an unsuspecting Russian artist nonexistent rights to it, using the profits to meet the blood-money charges for his exit visa and the necessary renunciation of his citizenship. Matching the government's thousand-ruble extortion with his own fraud of the same proportions heathily reinforced his self-esteem.

"I never mind their chiseling. As long as Russians stay so easy to swindle back."

The telephone rings. As with my first calls, Zhenya doesn't answer—but perhaps now out of unwillingness to be distracted rather than fear of KGB subterfuge. For he is recounting his proudest coup: "How He Evaded The People's Theft of his Paintings." It is a typical beat-the-bureaucracy tale by an opponent not branded "enemy" because in grasping for his selfish interests—behavior the authorities understand—he made no noises about struggling for freedom. Zhenya's game has always been to break the rules, not fight them.

The instrument of expropriation was the prohibition against anyone, even the creator himself, exporting an original work of art without ministerial permission. If this seemed mad with respect to Zhenya's nonconformism—what rational government simultaneously prevents the exhibition of "decadent" art and its departure abroad as a "national treasure"—it was only an

The President's Day^311

extension of the policy under which masterpieces by Kandinsky, Chagall, Lissitzky and others are carefully preserved in storerooms closed to the public. Zhenya knew both the hopelessness of protesting on principle and the foolishness of submitting without deviousness of his own.

To the Tretyakov Gallery, seat of the commission for initial review of export requests, he sent his dutiful sister bearing fifty of his best compositions. "It's just my scribbling and scrawling," she mumbled as coached. "Souvenirs of physical therapy sessions; as you see, the stuff lacks artistic value."

The secretary suggested she go home and fetch Zhenya. Had she not personally known his work—several of his drawings were in the closed graphics repository of the Tretyakov Gallery itself—the ruse might conceivably have worked at this stage. But even the typist recognized Zhenya's use of perspective.

Arriving at the Tretyakov—with an additional hundred canvases, completing the oeuvre he wanted to take—he was greeted by the same secretary and a member of the commission, who also prized his work. Zhenya took the offensive.

"Listen, friends. If I want, I can get all my things out without you." (Part bluff and part bargaining point, this was a hint about Western customers with access to diplomatic pouches.) "I only came here to do things legally, which could save us all some bother if you're square with me."

"Listen, Zhenya," the young official answered. "If it were up to us, we could set a duty of one ruble apiece and write passes for the whole hundred-and-fifty. But you know the Ministry reviews everything. Let's be sensible and avoid attracting their suspicions, which'd be bad news for all of us."

Opening positions thus established, the two sides settled down to bargain about the collected compositions. Word spread of this last chance to see Zhenya's work, drawing members of the Tretyakov staff into the room like an auction audience. Controlling his vanity, Zhenya haggled. Setting aside only a few works as unsuitable for export, the commission fixed duty of from five to fifteen rubles on the others, and everyone present offered Zhenya handshakes and good luck.

When he arrived for his appointment at the Ministry of Culture, the list had been reviewed and prices raised by twenty

312.^MOSCOW FAREWELL

per cent, in keeping with the general policy of squeezing harder. A staff expert had attended to this; the Deputy Minister himself, a veteran Party official, knew as much about contemporary art as about Harlem jargon. But it was he Zhenya demanded to see upon learning that another forty paintings had been judged too abstract to leave the country at any price.

"For God's sake, I want to export them, not bring them in. If they're dangerous, you should be happy to unload them."

The bureaucrat lit a cigarette and searched in a drawer. When it came, his response was in the voice of a gatekeeper whose authority to check cars had been challenged.

"What you think is irrelevant; you're not running this country. The Soviet people have a nose for your kind of depravity. And . . . you're not as smart as you think."

He called Zhenya back for his afterthought. "It's not as easy to fool me as you 'artists' think. You want to get your junk out and sell it to some 'exhibition' to discredit the Motherland. Not while I'm in charge of vigilance. Now out before I change my mind about the rest."

The following evening, Zhenya actually treated his friends to a bottle of wine. Not only had he got permission to take out more works at a lower cost than anyone had expected, but he sneaked out most of the embargoed ones too. Calculating that customs officials would be unable to distinguish one painting from another—yet unwilling to admit this—Zhenya simply crated the prohibited compositions together with the authorized ones. Sure enough, while the belongings of cowed emigrants before and after him in the freight depot were ransacked for diamonds and manuscripts, no one checked his canvases against the long, vague inventory. Nor was his exchange with the Deputy Ministry in vain: recounted in the West, it would enhance the value of his works. The whole scene in the Ministry was a smokescreen to mask his crating scheme, and the provincial thickwit suspected nothing.

"That's what I dig in good old Russia's ruling caste. Light-years behind."

Zhenya completes this parable about himself in a beard-parting, self-esteeming grin. Not mentioning his sister's version of

The President's Day^313

the story—which had him messing his underpants and sleeping in railroad stations for fear of returning home—I pass him my New York addresses, together with a guidebook procured by Joe Sourian. Jamming my offerings into his briefcase, he returns to his hammer. In the months of our acquaintance, I've given him shirts and Skira art books—which he sold at top ruble to bookshops—and paid his surprisingly stiff prices for three drawings. He never offered me so much as a cup of coffee, even when making one for himself, and now he's annoyed that I haven't brought the dollars he wanted. But he's been unfailingly entertaining, and I'm grateful for his talent. I think he's one of the few self-styled geniuses who'll achieve more in the West than a week's publicity as "dissident" victim.

In quick succession, two salvos of knocks shake the basement door. Enter a translator and an editor of a medical journal: fortyish, leather-jacketed members of the joy-through-black-humor community of Moscow bohemians, as they solemnly call themselves. As if Zhenya's packing were for a weekend trip rather than the once-and-forever exodus, the three plunge into their daily conversazione about soccer scores, mutual acquaintances' follies and official stupidity. A program about quarterly production achievements in the Yakutsk Autonomous Republic coming from a kitchen radio augments the atmosphere's commonplace element. Learning my nationality—and, from Zhenya, that I'm okay to hear strong talk—the medical editor recounts an adventure that recently befell his best friend.

The friend is a poet whose samizdat verses about occupied Czechoslovakia put an end to his publication. Six weeks ago, he was invited to the Academy of Sciences, a bewildering honor occasioned by his consuming interest in extrasensory perception. Driven by forbidden-fruit curiosity and unrestricted by ideological prohibitions, many Russian hobbyists know more than professionals of such esoteric matters—especially, as in this case, where the subject is alien to Marxist-Leninist materialism and much Western research is written up by men, such as Koestler, who are anathema for coincidental reasons. But in this case, the poet's knowledge was not sought of and for itself. The Academy had been asked for an audience by a celebrated Californian

314^MOSCOW FAREWELL

parapsychologist visiting Moscow, and wanted to take this opportunity to interview an expert firsthand, without reveaUng its own weakness in the field.

Given money for new shoes, the poet was vaguely promised good things in return for playing professor for a day. His respectable English, in which he'd read most Western literature in the field, was a positive advantage. More so was his youth, which would help impress the visitor with the onrush of Soviet studies.

"How many people have you working in the field, Professor?" asked the Californian. The ingenuous man was on his first visit to Russia; but even such Americans are not always fooled, and a mistake would dash the poet's chances of coming out of this with something for himself Seeking guidance, he glanced at the Academy oflScials flanking him. But he was on his own; all the Secretaries and watchdogs together knew less than he.

"Actually, eight scientists at the moment." He added "full-time" in a feigned afterthought.

The intention of this outrageous exaggeration was to make the old Motherland look good. But the guest perceived it on the Californian scale: eight scientists meant eight lack-for-nothing laboratories—and if he knew anything about Russians, this was a cagey understatement. Weeks after his return home and an agitated report to Washington, the Nixon administration allocated twenty million dollars of unspent Health and Education funds to emergency parapsychological research, citing the Soviet threat in this potentially sinister field. Its own emergency over, the Academy dropped its recruit "like a Bible down a Kremlin John."

A month later, a cable arrived at his apartment inviting him to lecture at the California Institute of Technology and mentioning a round-trip ticket waiting at Moscow's Pan American oflfice. After his expulsion from the Writers' Union, he worked in a warehouse and lacked six rubles to telegram his refusal. In any case, he knew the genuine professor would not believe a word of the truth by now, regarding it only as a crude attempt to sabotage Washington's reply to the Soviet E.S.P. challenge. So much for mutual understanding. Nor does the editor now expect

The President's DayX315

that I'll believe the story—although, as Zhenya can confirm, it is gospel.

By the sheerest chance, I happen to know that Soviet scientists have been experimenting with E.S.P. since at least the 1960s. But the translator obviously believed every word, and Zhenya shook his head "Yes" throughout, like a hippie listening to an expose of middle-class pretenses.

More knocks sound at the door, announcing the arrival of several beat-looking friends who exist on cigarettes and cynicism. Soon a small party is in progress, young men and women coming and going with an air of importance prompted by the occasion, and with a sense of the tragic, for the departure of so many Jews attenuates even further Moscow's already thin cosmopolitan atmosphere.

Pouring himself a large drink from a bottle brought by a provident acquaintance, Zhenya plays host with the residue. Preschool children play with mudpies in the courtyard while their grannies try to peer through the dirt obscuring the studio windows: our gathering is producing what they hear as fascinating noise.

The men at the center of the room's knots are mainstays of Moscow's "leftwing" intelligentsia. One critic is pronouncing Nabokovian scorn for stupes who fail to recognize Vladimir Vladimirovich as the greatest living Russian writer. (Much of the fortune he gives for Nabokov's black market books comes from his own snide articles about him for a literary newspaper.) Another principal is defending Solzhenitsyn against trendy belittling of his martyr complex. When all's said and done, the intense man argues, what counts is Alexander Isaiyevich's genius.

"Yeah, genius. For religious quacks and Western boobs who convince themselves of Russia's 'grandeur.' Why can't he see real people? Why the fuck doesn't he write about usP^^

"Of all the stupid . . . Whom do^ou represent? What the hell are we in this place but extraneous waste?"

"We're talking about Solzhenitsyn."

"About Jesus-pure Christ, who can't write without posing as Russia's new Savior. And who's got the answers for all mankind's salvation too, just for good measure."

316^MOSCOW FAREWELL

"Are we talking literature or idiocy? Name one great Russian writer without a cargo of crazy ideas. You've read Tolstoy's 'philosophical' articles?"

"The vegetarian who pretends not to notice the meat in his soup. And our new Saint Alexander plays his poverty bit. Praises black bread, damns Western materialism—on his way to a hard-currency shop."

"Old man, you've proved my point."

Elsewhere, the exchanges heat up in proportion to ignorance of the subject being discussed: the efficacy of Scandinavian medical care, Salvador Dali's artistic integrity. In defense of "fundamental principles" against the offense of seemingly innocent remarks, several interlocutors nearly come to blows. But the main debate lingers on Solzhenitsyn, especially his lament that the Revolution's most awful destruction was of the Russian people's friendliness. Every traveler since the sixteenth century, someone claims, spoke of the Russian peasant as essentially happy and hospitable; but that was when mere hundreds of thousands, rather than tens of millions, were exterminated by the country's tragedies. Now every day is a potential danger, and the people's traditional good nature is replaced by Soviet vigilance—

"Of course you've always had this unquenchable love for the people," someone cuts in. "All your earlier stuff about them being 'dumb animals' was clever acting. A great passion—and how about a little idealizing of golden tsarist times to deepen the hurt?"

A decorative girl on the periphery raises the old Khrushchev conundrum: how much might have been put straight if he and his 1960s thaw had continued. An artist sporting hundred-ruble Levis ordinarily would have disdained such triteness but has taken a visible fancy to her tits and rewards her offering by arguing that it's not a valid question. Nikita's very downfall proved the impossibilities: the Party establishment is far too strong, even if the masses really cared about who paints and writes what. "Nobody but us misfits really wants freedom—and we wouldn't know what to do with it. Besides, Khrush himself was no angel: as Ukrainian Party boss, he presided over three million killings."

The President's Day^317

"One million," says the petulant girl, proving her point about the former chiefs goodness.

That nothing said changes the opinion of anyone in the room, let alone in the government, helps loosen the conversational flow. The dialogues relate to the country's social life as Monopoly to Wall Street. The proof of this is the zestful iconoclasm, even though everyone knows some of the guests inform for the KGB: harmless little reports that earn equivalent little privileges. And although who actually does the dirty deed is a matter of some speculation, each party whispering about the other, almost all agree that one man—a writer now propounding Bulgakov to surrounding smaller fry—not only reports but also invents. Known as a freedom-fighter in the West and a fink here, he is simply treated with slight extra caution, rather than avoided.

"Hey Zhenya, going to get clipped in Tel-Aviv?"

Having exchanged socialist morality for superstitious Jewish ritual, Zhenya's zealously Communist father decided his son mustn't be circumcised. He, the father, now detests the Party, but can't resign unless willing to suffer revenge for a despicable insult to Soviet rule. And Soviet hospitals won't truck with foreskins.

"Hey Zhenya, going to treat the great Western public to lectures on the Dobrininskaya bohemia?"

The party is in full swing. An historian who writes about the unspeakable evils of the 1918 Allied intervention is drinking hard and owning up to me. "Fourteen fucking anti-Soviet armies were on Russian soil. Why oh why couldn't you crush Soviet rule before it really got started?" Next to me, two profiles lit by the dirty window do not hear each other at all, but this does not interfere with the smooth mesh of their arguments. After all they've been rehearsing for years—and one is now married to the other's former wife.

Kandidat of Philological Science

Book Illustrator

. . . gap of political backwardness widening as Russia's rottenness grows .

. . . fleeing to the West, which no

318/^MOSCOW FAREWELL

longer even seeks a Lost Paradise, is suicide for an artist . . .

. . . obscurantism, misery, brutality; and the main thing—the choice oi either tyranny, or anarchic bloodshed—will take another century to change . . .

. . . rationalist-legalistic-materialist West: Westxnghons^ refrigerators bulging with produce, and you pretend that feeds the soul? . . .

. . . sick to death of the romanticism that goes prospecting for nobility in Old Russian pigshit . . . the same self-deception that ruined us . . .

... a cynical dictatorship, yes—but /'d never go where the inner ethic is also corrupted . . .

The Kandidat's much advertised hangover allows his stronger adversary to carry the day. "Yes, we're ruled by bullies with their whips and Marxist-Leninist bullshit. But I say we're freer, and happier, than where everybody volunteers to work for General Motors. . . . Pasternak said it all in that New Year's message of his. Socialism's only our attempt to put into practice the Christianity they preached for centuries. We took the sermons seriously because we're backward and naive—and of course bungled everything for the same reasons. Suffered horribly for our mistakes. But why do they hate us for this?"

I push across to the other side of the room. Not long ago, I couldn't get enough of socialism talk, but the monotony becomes as bad as the phoniness—which would be obvious enough after a few months, even if you didn't know that the book illustrator fond of proclaiming his detestation of Western corruption lives handsomely on propaganda drawings for reactionary publishing houses. He's not above some really vicious things—East German

The President's Day^319

peasants tall and happy; West Germans bent and frightened— for children's books.

His protests that a Russian belongs to Russian culture are all the louder because of the unspoken comparison of his talent and future to Zhenya's. And because bright lights in all the arts—the genuinely creative handful who have stayed uncorrupted—are evacuating in the Jewish emigration. They leave behind the rest of the artistic elite, much of which is slimy with dishonesty. The dachas and club privileges for which they sell their hack stuff seem more pitiful as better people turn their backs on them.

By contrast, Zhenya's close friends, who are bunched near the kitchen, are reliving their trips to the provinces where, on commission to paint murals, they fucked everyone from daughters of collective farm chairmen to convict women in lumber camps. I used to like this talk even more. It was the real thing: free-and-easy bohemian life, the participants dropping everything for a month of hand-to-mouth adventures because they care about nothing except good vibes. But the truth is that they all suck someone as a source of income, like West Coast hippies with monthly parental checks—only the Russians live on much less. And although the discussion of who had whom last night and which vodka makes cunt taste sweetest can be amusing, they worry more than many Muscovites about sex. An ex-girl of Zhenya's once told me that if a new lady isn't impressed with him at the first glance, he can barely talk to her. He's so unsure of himself, she said, that he needs a fix of immediate approval, and only after this can he be his super-casual self In any case, I suspect that a few of Zhenya's friends are carefully taking notes for samizdat reportage about Moscow life, in which they themselves will appear as the antihero heroes.

Elbowing me aside on his way to the spotlight, a movie director bumps me into the oldest person in the room, an elfish fat man. When I pick up the thread of his monologue, he is reminiscing about his youth. Born in Poland, he grew up an anomaly: a Jewish soccer-player. He wasn't "a blimp like this, but beautiful slim as a pencil, oh boy, oh boy." Then the Nazis invaded; he ran east to where the Red Army was carving out its half, and was soon in NKVD hands. His prison train to Siberia was unfit for pigs, and he existed like a caveman in the

320^MOSCOW FAREWELL

unbelievably primitive settlement, gathering berries and sharpening stone to chop his wood. But if many died during the first winter, it was better than being gassed, like most of his family. He never lost his affection for every new day, nor his gratitude to the Russians, who didn't kill him.

While still in Siberia, he took his first flutters on the black market, to which most immigrants—Russians too—directed most of their working thoughts. Whole trainloads were sold and resold by steel-nerved operators, he,says; in some lines, seventy per cent of the production went astray. Investigators arrived from Omsk or Moscow, confiscated the loot, and unloaded it at top price—to the apprehended swindler if his bid was highest. His Krakow ghetto had hardly been a cultural center, but Russia's jungle laws took his breath away.

"I learned the lessons, and quick. You have a mouth, eat. A prick,yuc/:. A brain, wangle money. Never waste a minute thinking politics. And socialism? What are those two"—he points to the book illustrator and the Kandidat—"talking about? Oi, don't make me laugh."

The strange thing is, he continues, that the skinny postwar years could be a laugh if you had some wits and liked physical enjoyment. These rewards no longer tempt him, but it's too late to leave, even though he has a cousin in Massachusetts or could arrange an invitation from Israel. But Zhenya's right to go. Russia's satisfactions wear thin as a man wears out. . . .