Moscow farewell

The same Zhenya is thriftily stuffing the last of his dirty socks into a suitcase. Someone wonders aloud whether he'll succumb to copying groovy styles in the West, forfeiting his own artistic vision. If he becomes the darling of salons and foundations, another voice adds, his creative future is gloomy. Next, the concerned—and envious—gathering considers his chances of sustaining his helpless artist role to persuade people to pay his way. Even in Moscow, the bearded rebel made use of the Artists' Union's "creative retreats," always leaving early and scorning the "corrupting privileges," lest someone get the wrong idea. The young scrounger will become an old one, says someone out of Zhenya's earshot; but he'll strike rich veins along the way.

The party flags. Leaving for work, some of Zhenya's friends kiss him on the mouth; others walk away with an overcasual "so

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long," affecting that they'll meet tomorrow. When his sister arrives, I say I must be off. Simultaneously exulting in and whining about his future, Zhenya Walks me up into the courtyard, a rare gesture of hospitality.

"See you in New York, old man. You can take me to a good dinner." His handshake crunches my bones. I don't mention the little pencil drawing he's often promised in return for small favors, or the superb one of the world floating in a lake that Anastasia forgot to take—and that I want even more.

"Yeah, good old New York." Although the thought of myself there, let alone Zhenya, sounds like more of his bull, I wish him good luck.

"And stop worrying. Smart operators—and with talent too— can't lose in the Big Tent."

Alyosha has asked me to lunch. To enjoy the scent of spring leaves instead of diesel fumes, I return by a back route to the peasant market, where I want to buy a contribution. After the strutting at Zhenya's, the market's ragtag population is a relief From a Mercedes parked outside, three spifFy African journalists make a grand appearance to select fresh vegetables for their dinner. A provincial lady remarks to her companion that a good Russian winter ought to whiten their cruddy skins.

Scrutinizing my obviously imported shoes, a wiry Georgian vendor sidles up to me in half-steps as if to offer feelthy pictures.

"Pssst," he buzzes, "wanna buy some . . . tomatoes? What's the look? I'm serious."

Several red spheres—yes, real tomatoes!—plop into his hand from their place of safekeeping in his smock sleeve. When I indicate interest in all five, a miniature scale appears from somewhere else, and I'm warned that the damage is five rubles, a skilled worker's daily wage. Encouraged by the transaction, the Georgian offers to show me a genuine cucumber.

No taxis are in sight outside the market, so I iiail passing cars with the sign that I'll pay the standard ruble for delivery in central Moscow. The driver who stops is at the wheel of a new Volga belonging to one of the ubiquitous organizations known by a post-office box number because it is too secret even to be named. He comments on the sun and his fishing, then describes

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last weekend's visit to his grandmother on a collective farm in the north, where, attempting a joke, he mentioned her starchy size and suggested she eat fewer potatoes.

"That's not funny. We haven't seen a potato in months."

The eighty-year-old lady's pension was too small even for bread. Only contributions from relatives and part-time work as a farm laborer enabled her to survive. . . . The driver was skeptical of his grandmother's peasant craftiness until he saw a young lad watching him eat his picnic pork. He'll return to the farm next weekend with sacks of potatoes bought in Moscow.

"Like taking a samovar to Tula, I guess." He smiles wryly and soon is enumerating his new car's defects in comparison to the Volvo he once drove for an embassy. Naturally, neither his grandmother's plight nor the Volga's flaws dent his cheerful conviction of Soviet superiority.

Alyosha is not home. He has recently erected a tin garage in the no-man's-land behind his courtyard for when the BMW of his fantasies replaces the Volga. On a crate inside is seated a hag who used to limp the street like a stray until Alyosha gave her use of the garage to warm her feet. Her muttering that Alyosha has been taken to the hospital sounds like her usual ranting.

Two new girls in summer dresses stroll across the courtyard, mount the stairs and ring Alyosha's bell. I can't persuade them to stay but they promise to telephone later. Walking around front again, I watch the thin traffic avoiding a cavity that has sundered the roadway since the first November freeze and thaw. Soon I'm waving to the Volga's pommeled nose as it appears in its standard place from behind the bend.

I notice a slight wanness to Alyosha's complexion, probably because he has to work this afternoon or had a boisterous night, but there is nothing exceptional in his hearty arm around my waist. After a sparser meal than usual, he remains in the bathroom for an unbantering twenty minutes, but this fits the pattern of his slight indisposition and meager appetite since March. As usual, we have shady business to transact. Although the two Jimi Hendrix records I've brought—they'll be well sold to a collector by the weekend—are not expressly illegal, we effect the exchange with the gestures, unfinished whispers and microphone-evading step onto the staircase that lend a sense of style to

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our every meeting. Today's only missing element is the quip that would have set us laughing at the system and ourselves.

We are still on the stairs when up strides No-nickname Ira, whom I never see without thinking of her story. Her mother, a Jewess with a hysterical manner, was head of the French division of the Writers' Union's Foreign Department in the 1960s and also a KGB Colonel whose work included supervising the watch on French-speaking Africans visiting the country. In that capacity, she saw to it that the susceptibles met coached girls, and sometimes told her daughter about the excellent photographs she arranged of the ensuing action.

But Ira had no thought of this when, at fourteen, a young man stopped her on her way home from school, said she was extremely photogenic, and invited her to his studio to pose. Ira feared to tell her mother about the rape but a girl friend informed for her. The enraged Colonel saw to it that the rapist was sentenced not to the maximum seven years but, under the section of the law dealing with "extremely grave consequences," to death. Ira's discovery of this years later caused the final break with her mother, whom she never saw again. She lived her own life as a translator and wife to several successful husbands.

She has come now to find out whether a friend of Alyosha's who is going abroad will be free to buy some books for her in Paris. (Actually, I am that friend, but Alyosha thought it prudent not to mention this when he promised her.) Her smart spring suit prompts the thought that I've never seen her fully clothed before. But although willing to perform for us now, Alyosha alleges we must be off^ immediately to our afternoon appointments, and she retires in some puzzlement over not being invited in even for a glass of wine.

On time for once, we drive leisurely to the People's Court where Alyosha most often works. A former merchant's house, revolutionary headquarters, clinic and medical archive, the building has been repainted recently, but the smells of its hundred years linger in the corridors. The warm weather has lured pensioners outside to park benches, leaving only a handful to while away their day watching the spicier cases. Alyosha's is in a former maid's room rigged with three benches for spectators. His client is suing to have the room that she and her recently

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divorced husband continue to occupy officially divided, giving her individual rights to seven square meters.

The hearing is so routine that I look for something better in the corridor. Divorces, petty theft and the usual collection of hooliganism cases—ragged young men awaiting severe sentences for carousing with vodka and knives—predominate. One dock is occupied by a handsome, silver-haired athletics coach, the very image of his profession. While supervisor of recreation of "Post Office Box 1844," obviously a large enterprise, he allegedly swindled three weeks' salary from some forty workers on the fraudulent promise of supplying them with sweatsuits through his sporting connections. Throughout the workers' dooming testimony, he holds himself erect, a good sport in defeat.

Finding me among the spectators, Alyosha affects surprise that I should be watching such slobber. "If people learned to control their greed for sweatsuits, they'd be sans souci," he whispers. "And the social order would stay sound as a roach, as we say."

His own hearing ended, he takes a few minutes to consult with an elderly colleague. Then we drive off on an errand of mercy for a neat woman named Galya, who in looks and bearing is the exception to the rule of "investigators," the rigid, much disliked detectives-cMw-examiners who assemble the prosecution case. At the moment, Galya is also so nervous that she fails to notice the back seat is still unrepaired, and she's sitting on bare springs. Two days ago, she interrogated a suspected thief in Butirsky Prison, taking along the man's pleading wife out of compassion. Because she, the appointed investigator in the case, was conducting the interview, the warders relaxed their surveillance and the wife exploited this to slip her husband some sausage. Discovered during the search before he was returned to his cell, the grave violation of the rule about transferring things to prisoners threatened at least Galya's career.

I wait in the car a block from the prison while she and Alyosha go through their paces in the office. Their main objective is to dissuade the Chief Warden from informing the district procurator, Galya's boss. Imploring, beseeching, pleading that the poor woman was tricked, that it will never happen again, that public disgrace would destroy her young family, they prevail in the end. Even in jail, even after a genuine violation of security regula-

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tions, the time-tested tactics of humble contrition—Galya's ashen face supporting Alyosha's adjuring—achieve the usual cover-up.

In the car again, the rescued damsel badgers Alyosha and me to come home to a celebratory supper. "I'll nag you worse than the warden; I'll see your clients all get fifteen years ..." When we agree to fix a later date, Galya, still trembling, kisses us and alights at a metro station. To my surprise, I hear that Alyosha has known her only professionally and volunteered his help solely because of her unusual fairness to his clients. But he won't accept her invitation because his reputation might embarrass her with her husband.

Alyosha is oddly moody today. He chides me for lack of charity in a remark about the courthouse, then throws an arm around my neck while steering with his left hand. "You won't get a nightingale's song from a donkey," he says. "At my age, spring fever can mean 'headache.' "

Unstockinged legs lure powerfully in the warmth, but we drive past many pairs without stopping. The hard-to-get play of Alyosha's new actress would probably end on this second day, but he doesn't call, mumbling instead about the need for a good walk and suggesting we go to Golovinskoye Cemetery, in case I've never seen it.

Of course I have, when he himself drove out to show me my first Russian funeral, one of the more memorable of our early outings. A February day of a new Ice Age; Alyosha and I trying to make each other wear my hat, like two friends jousting for a restaurant check; following a brass band's dirges as it tramped over the snow to a far corner of the cemetery. The echoes led us to the burial of a factory director. The eulogy was straight out of our oldest joke: "Rest in Peace, Comrade. The plan will be fulfilled."

The hushed whiteness of that morning has yielded, won-drously, to variegated greens; but how unlike Alyosha, who can remember the course of inconsequential conversations that took place months ago, to forget! Deep inside the cemetery, we turn to a section on the right. Although the mood is less phantom-like than in winter, spiked iron fences surrounding most graves and tinctured portraits of the deceased sustain the eerie effect. Tinny crucifixes on the headstones, peacefully unkempt plots . . .

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Negotiating a maze of dirt pathways, I realize Alyosha is searching for something. It is his mother's grave.

"But I thought your mother died in Central Asia." He's told me little more about her than her death from typhoid fever, and I sense he himself knows less than he'd like.

"She caught it there but came back to Moscow. Nice little train ride."

The failure of his sense of direction is as odd as his lapse of memory; stranger still is the sudden call itself to visit his mother's remains instead of catching the last hours of sun in the countryside. In the end, we don't find the grave because it is no longer there. We learn this by consulting lists in the cemetery office, then hearing a caretaker's explanation—at which Aly-osha's eyes flinch perceptibly—that plots unattended for two years may be cleared for a new burial.

"It doesn't matter," Alyosha says in a voice openly betraying how much it does. Returning to the car, he tells me, as if apologizing, that he stopped taking care of the plot because of the war.

Driving back to the apartment, we pass a cinema to which Anastasia and I once journeyed to see a revival of Lieutenant Kije, the 1930s film with the Prokofiev music. How we liked each other that night! Even more for seeking out the old classic in the improbable theater attached to workers' housing. The sight of it by daylight reminds me of everything. It is mine, tender and private.

"Has she called?" The ritual is for Alyosha to ask, "Has who called?"

"I think you two should tie the knot and end the agony. Or, ah, vice-versa."

"Has she called?"

"She's lost my number."

I don't tell him what I'm thinking because he's still convinced I'm playing a melodramatic act. Besides, he keeps insisting that I can easily win her back—although he won't be entirely happy with this—if that's what I really want.

We turn a corner to one of the Cartier-Bresson-like scenes that seem to manifest Moscow's spirit. On a fence concealing a construction project, remnants of a "we will complete the

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YEARLY PLAN AHEAD OF SCHEDULE!" banner flutter in the spring breeze. Against the warping boards, a line of dusty workers zigzags from a stall offering draft beer, for which the men cheerfully endure a twenty-minute wait and the inevitable cheating of the stout vendor blatantly whipping up the foam. But the customers are delighted with their find. Tossing the skin of their salted fish on the ground, squinting in the sun and swapping stories, they swallow their proletarian rewards with so much gusto that we leave the car to join them.

"If there's beer, just great; if not, we'll wait," quotes Alyosha as we inch forward. The old peasant saying tells everything about Russian patience and gratefulness for small treats. Pity that the brew itself is watery.

Back in the car, Alyosha reminisces about a local Fagin who bought him his first beer in 1935. We cruise slowly, dreamy with the motion, until a Moskvich dappled with repaintings stalls abruptly at the mouth of Krasnopresnenskaya Square and Alyosha must brake hard to avoid a collision. The driver doesn't even see us until we lean out of our windows to glower. Of all people, he turns out to be Ilya, one of Alyosha's old friends.

Protagonist of many yarns about motoring into potholes, the plump former dandy is the manager of a well-known dramatic theater, tickets for which he skillfully barters for everything from restaurant reservations to his frequently needed body work in the city's every official and illicit garage. Hurrying to the trotting races to crown a four-hour workday, he persuades us to join him. Alyosha and I hesitate briefly to ride in his accident-prone Moskvich, but it is microphone-free, promising easier talk than in the Volga.

Driving to the Hippodrome, Alyosha gazes passively through the window—as I often do—while the ebullient Ilya tells the morning's latest joke, a variation on the new vogue of turning everything into its opposite to spoof the Hegelian principle adopted by Marx. The scene is Brezhnev's private Kremlin den, to which, late this very evening of May 22, he will proudly lead Nixon after their sumptuous feast. Heavy eating and drinking have intensified their shared predilection to see themselves as knights of their silent majorities and noble friends, misunderstood by their own intellectuals.

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"Tell me, Lenny," says the President. "How's it really going over here? The rabble, I mean."

"Honest, Dick, Russians are fabulous. We arrest the lousy dissenters—and not a word. Raise the price of bread; still nothing. Wipe out inflationary savings by voiding our compulsory bonds—still they applaud the Party. You can't beat the Russian people."

"Jesus," moans the envious Nixon. "How can I inspire some genuine patriotism?"

Brezhnev rests his hand on Nixon's knee. "Sorry, Dick: I've promised Kissinger not to export revolution. . . . But maybe we should bump off the meddling Jew?"

The joke pleases Ilya with its penetration into the topsy-turvy cynicism—every last principle abandoned on both sides—that cements the new Soviet-American detente. Encouraged by my chuckle, he offers a quick resume of other new stories and schemes to beat the system. His commercial curiosity has been aroused by the enterprise of a fellow theatrical official who worked his way into a group visiting Japan. The thousand rubles for the package tour—nearly the average Russian worker's annual wage—was hell to raise, but the traveler bought two large mohair blankets in Tokyo. Cutting them into forty strips on his return, he sold them as shawls for twenty-five rubles each. This covered the trip; the felt pencils and other trinkets represented pure profit.

Whistling at the feat—or the rumor, which serves the purpose —Ilya proceeds to his own latest exploit, devised to overcome the spare parts famine. Repair of a privately owned Volga can usually be bought or biibed at a government garage, since most official agencies use this car; but mending a Moskvich can stymie even procurers of his standing. Nevertheless, his own car has just been completely overhauled. It was only necessary to extend the factory guarantee by a trifling eight months, a minor forgery performed by a steady-handed dentist for less than the price of a gold inlay. "It's morally satisfying to fool the plant that produced your lemon."

He works his way out of his usual quota of wrong turns and onto Leningradsky Prospekt. A million policemen are assembling here: this is on Nixon's route from the airport. In the wide road's

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comparative safety, Ilya drifts into a monologue about his family obsession, many times stronger than autos and racehorses.

Ilya's people were Jews from Odessa, Russia's prerevolutionary Marseilles of waterfront hurly-burly, racial mixtures and criminal craft. His grandfather, a society tailor who journeyed to Paris annually for designs and for the pleasure of speaking French, was a superfluous organism in the new union of workers and peasants. And indeed: a month after the establishment of Soviet rule in the city, recruits of the Cheka, forerunner of the NKVD and KGB, visited to have a look at him and to expropriate possessions that caught their eyes. When the toughs had slammed the door, grandfather set to work hiding the rest of his gold and valuables in scattered caches in the walls. Then the city soviet requisitioned six of the apartment's eight rooms, settling them with toilet-clogging members of the lumpen proletariat. Three quarters of the fortune was thus immediately lost. To try to sneak in and recover it, even to propose a deal to the new neighbors —who were whipped up with the class hatred of victorious underdogs—was unthinkable. One accusing word to the authorities might easily have the former exploiter shot.

Without even the pleasure of stealing an occasional gaze at his riches, the former baron of southern Russia's clothiers quickly aged. Besides, he now took home just enough food to feed his children: less than enough for himself. Even when provisions were available, the threat of denunciation prevented him from buying more, and he died in 1921, so near to and far from his treasure. Returning from the cemetery, the family found the seventh room occupied by new neighbors, and their remaining furniture plundered. Now led by Ilya's father, a comic writer of magazine feuilletons, the five members squeezed into the remaining room: three generations within fifteen square meters. The valuables in those four walls tided them over several unthinkable crises during the ensuing famines and purges. They triumphed—that is to say, survived.

But when Ilya's father returned from his World War Two service, it was not to that room—nor to Odessa altogether, whose large body of Jewish writers were just then being liquidated in the fearsome postwar campaign against "cosmopolitans." Provincial Kaluga, where he settled his family, was far safer from

330^MOSCOW FAREWELL

denunciation and execution. Again they survived intact until Stalin's death liberated them from terror—but the buried treasure was farther than ever from their grasp. This roiled them—especially Ilya, who himself was now grown and living handsomely in Moscow. He had started on his high life of imported clothes, expensive restaurants and glamorous women, for which jewels and gold were badly needed. Not that he hated Soviet rule—not, anyway, for the sole reason of family grievance. But politics aside, the utter waste of the money made him ill.

He made several visits to the house near Odessa's celebrated Deribasovskaya Street. His palms sweated as he gazed at it. He could/^^/ the treasure inside—but could devise no way to attain it. In each instance, he paced a week and went home. Three years ago, when he learned the old homestead was scheduled for rebuilding as a historical museum annex, his agony shot up and consultations with Alyosha assumed new urgency. As today, he never misses a meeting to kick around, as he says wistfully, his collection of futile plans.

Approaching the Hippodrome, he breaks off to concentrate on driving and parking. This operation completed, we hurry on foot to join the fine-weather crowd for the final races.

Like an amusement park, the Hippodrome is fun to visit every once in a long while. The notion of gambling in the Soviet Union is a laugh, but the racetrack itself is as dreary as a jazz combo from Volgograd. Faces in the crowd are the best entertainment: shabby pensioners who spend every possible hour and their last kopeks at the track; would-be racketeers with pencil moustaches. Periodic newspaper campaigns demand that the course be closed, citing fixed races, compulsive gamblers embezzling state funds, and the "dregs of society" who swarm to this intolerable eyesore in the nation's capital. But everyone here is nose-close to his form sheet as if the indignant articles concerned some development on the African continent.

Physically too, the creaking wooden stands smack of Coney Island. Pushing past toughs and teen-agers, who run small-time operators' errands as Alyosha once did, we find a place among the enthusiasts at the rail. The afternoon is at last taking shape. I have no real wish to be here but can think of no place I'd prefer

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for this moment, and sense that a bit of action will clear the ambiguities.

Our first race, the ninth and penultimate on the program, is off at 3:40—and then 3:45 because the starting car stalls and the rigs must be lined up again. "Who do you like?" challenges an urgent last-minute voice above the babble, and as the seven trotters prance past, a chorus of "C'mon, c'mon" goes up, in a universal intonation. But when the winner is announced— Burma, driven by a muscled woman—the curses of disappointed bettors are distinctly stronger than at Yonkers.

"Shit."

"The whore."

"A cunt of a nag, she took a dive."

When Alyosha and Ilya go off to place their bets for the final race, I contemplate the woman on my right, a crone in boots and a winter overcoat. Gradually, I become aware of a man in a windbreaker nudging me on the other side. I begin the small talk. He yacks in a country dialect about luck, life and the hardships of Siberia, which he has "er, visited once," but for some reason balks hard when I ask where he hails from. At last he mutters "Odessa," but when I ask about his occupation there, thinking of Ilya's house, he becomes pugnacious. I turn away from the odd stranger, but he fingers the cloth of my pants and asks where / hail from, the busybody. . . .

"You're American. But no. Really-really? Let's drink to that. I want to share a bottle with you—/ insist."

I manage to demur by citing my companions, and soon we're smiling the idiot smile of nothing further to say. But minutes later, his lips are in my ear again.

"Over there in your America—-have you got crime?"

I affirm the sad truth.

"That's what our newspapers always say, but . . . well, you know. Good to hear it from a straight-shooter. Tell me, how much goes on?"

"Too much."

"Wait now, don't mix me up. For example, have you got any karmanchiki.'^"

My memory supplies the translation, but my imagination isn't

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working. Visibly pleased by my reply—of course we have pickpockets—the thin man turns thoughtful, only to wheel around again a minute later.

"Send them our respects. To American pickpockets from their Russian colleagues: we embrace them, in true peace and friendship."

When I decipher the clues—what had so interested him in my clothes, why he'd stood so close, what he was doing in Siberia—I pull an instinctive step away. The nifty professional reads my eyes. "Don't worry, for God's sake, I'm not going to do you. Stick up Uncle Sam? I'm no double-crosser."

It's my day for being reacted to as an American. Hearing the news, the taxi driver on the way to the University lectures me about my President, who has already arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport. Gor'blimey cap down to his eyes, the driver is lamenting the ninety minutes lost because much of the city center is closed for the cavalcade. A squad of policemen ordered all drivers on his street to the curb, ignoring pleas to move on by an alternative route until their orders changed. But despite his temper, he's surprised I'm not cheering Richard Milhous among the sidewalk crowd.

"Your own President, aren't you proud? People should stand up for their country or it'll grow weak. Take us for example. Even your American bosses come here to learn. To bargain for agreements—because we're strong."

I left Alyosha and Ilya after the last race to attend to some things in my room. Ilya had acknowledged our four-ruble winnings with a playful "Our Luck Lies in Our Own Hands," a slogan for prodding productivity—to which Alyosha retorted with an old Russian saying: "There's no such thing as luck—and don't bother waiting for happiness either." In keeping with this out-of-character pessimism, and with his odd behavior all day, he asked Ilya to pinch-hit at a five o'clock appointment with a lovely. He was going home and asked me to come as soon as I could.

The dormitory is almost gay in the spring afternoon. Before starting my nuisance errands, I respond to a note from Masha asking me to come by immediately. Gesturing to the ceiling—a

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bit of silliness: surely her room's not bugged—she steps into the corridor to tell me that Chingiz has been arrested.

She's almost certain. He was led away last night. To prevent Jewish activists from causing embarrassment, the causes celebres were rounded up for the duration of Nixon's visit, and rumors are flying through the dormitory and the Philological Faculty that Chingiz had volunteered some services for them or was otherwise involved in the dissident movement.

We find privacy in the stairway. Masha blurts out a story that punishes me for my part in Chingiz's trouble. A month ago, he was summoned to an office in the main building and handed a manuscript. It was a draft of a newspaper article cataloguing my sins, from "debauchery" to "disrespect for elected Soviet representatives," and had been prepared, he gathered, for instant publication in case I was expelled for running with disreputable elements. Among the testimony exposing me as an instigator of anti-Soviet conversations was a quote from Chingiz. The author, a middle-aged journalist specializing in the Western colony's sins, asked him to sign.

Chingiz said he had neither heard such remarks from me nor observed me as described. Storming that this was not the behavior of a Soviet citizen, the journalist threatened him with expulsion. The rector's relative liberalism and reporter's extremely weak case convinced Chingiz that this was a bad bluff", but Masha feels the episode is connected with his arrest. Perhaps the correspondent had worked through the pro-rector, known for his Stalinist inclinations. Chingiz's selection to be one of the students "quoted" by whoever ordered the article is also ominous.

The news is like a many-pronged attack. Since Masha is not in the fraternity of temperamental opposition, I'm uneasy talking politics with her. Weeks ago, out of the blue, she accused me of considering Palestinians subhuman, "like all Americans do." Our relationship is grounded on avoiding everything separating East and West, and only such an emergency could have prompted her to open up to me about the pressure on Chingiz and the journalist's tricks. But of course the brunt of the blow is on him. All I can do for him now is do nothing; until where and why he was taken is known, bringing the story to a Western

334.^MOSCOW FAREWELL

correspondent might worsen his position. Recognition of our helplessness gives Masha and me a moment of camaraderie before she returns to her resentment, silently blaming me for involving Chingiz with my foolish liberalism.

The truth is that he dismissed my political notions. Unlike other dissenters, if that's what he really is, he still regarded Marxist socialism as the ultimate hope for progress. Although more aware than most that Soviet society was less democratic in many ways than the worst tsarist reigns, he insisted that this could change if the dictatorship were displaced; whereas the outward manifestations of choice in the West—one vote for a banker, one for an unemployed black—only pointed up the impossibilities. A substructure of contradictions, hypocrisy and greed, capitalism could never support anything shining.

At our last meeting, we discussed Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, which he'd laboriously studied with his rudimentary English. What impressed him was not the murderous Soviet drive for control of Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War; he'd fully expected that ruthlessness. But Orwell's enduring faith in democratic socialism strengthened his own. He read me a passage he'd painstakingly copied: "In every country in the world, a huge tribe of party hacks and sleek little professors are busy 'proving' that socialism means no more than planned state capitalism with the grab motive left intact. But fortunately there exists a vision of socialism quite different from this."

Thus Chingiz nourished his idealism with Orwell as he had with Mayakovsky—despite both men's severe reservations and disillusionments. He too needed commitment to something noble. The final irony is that Homage, which I'd obtained for him, was a banned book. But I can't raise any of this with Masha. For all the wrong reasons, I'll be losing part of her friendship together with Chingiz, if he's truly gone.

Awaking on my trusty cot, I feel better. Maybe it wasn't the Chingiz news that made me so tired, but being up since six o'clock. The light has dropped to twilight intensity, giving the translucence of spring evening in the north. I lie still, simultaneously feeling the great freedom of an entire city at my disposal

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with no obligation to anyone and a larger limitation on all and any freedoms. Chingiz's trouble already seems fated.

Seeing I'm awake, Viktor turns up the radio: "... Brigade of Communist Labor . . . voluntary pledge . . . annual plan for linoleum production . . ."A rousing chorus of "Russia, Motherland Mine" contributes to my sense of being caught. And what of Viktor, who no doubt contributed to the journalist's quotes, yet stayed soundless in respect for my nap?

I can't bother with my chores. I feel like doing only one certain thing just now, and the knowledge that I'll succumb fills me with a mulled pleasure of self-indulgence spiced by guilt. Yes, I'll go have a look at Anastasia.

To calm a dissenting voice, I have a good gulp at a bottle I keep in my trunk, then walk to the metro, after-shower smooth. The semitrance I fall into when obeying the call to Anastasia blurs my gleaming train when it arrives: filters all sights in my line of vision from fully registering. I can only breathe in the fragrance of the swollen river as we cross the bridge. The whole earth is active, like a stimulated gland. How much closer these sensations could draw us than trysts in damp stairwells! Sweet spring, when nature calls all pairs together; when my own nature is so much happier and we could enjoy so much more together than in pinched winter.

But the train goes underground on the other bank. The ride between stations is eternal; I fight down a claustrophobic premonition that I'll never get off^. The respectable citizens opposite me look as prim as a row of burghers, and I wonder whether they saw me take a nip from my pocket-size bottle. Like the old Times Square Camels ad, "Reserved for Children and Invalids" and "Do Not Lean Here!" imprint their stencils on a plate of my memory. ... At last we're in a handsome new station and a party of tourists is appropriately agog—but what are they doing in this offbeat part of town? And why am I riding up this interminable escalator when I know the moment of self-indulgence I've come for will only drag me down?

The professor lives on First Troitsky Lane, a humpbacked side street near Alyosha's old office. My first time, I had the usual trouble finding it. Of course a Second and a Third Troitsky

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Lanes wound around the First, as well as an intersecting Troitsky Street. But no one had heard of Troitsky in any form, and the man who finally did gave the familiar vague wave and laconic "over there," as if too much order must be avoided even in this. But this very uncertainty strengthens my sense of being home now that I know my way through the maze.

Bit players run through their parts against the backdrop of the mild evening. Local teen-agers are loitering, smoking, cat-calling to girls in a small playing field I pass, and in a grocery on Petty-bourgeois Second Street, customers crowd the liquor department for their joy. I join their tribute to vodka's power with a new nip at my own bottle, then take a shortcut across a lot, where a heavy woman rises from a bench to ask me to thread a needle in the fading light. Oh the artlessness of the Russian people in their large, sometimes happy family! She knows I'm high from the way I keep missing, and calls me "my son."

At the booth I use for this, I telephone the professor: no use waiting to catch them coming home if they're already there. A girl says "Hello," and before I realize it's a wrong number, I take her for Anastasia and hang up fast. Then I chuckle, thinking of how Alyosha would have pursued the anonymous teen-aged contralto. A gulp of white magic to steady my hand, two no-answers to establish that the prey is actually out. I take up the watch quickly before they return.

My position is inside the entrance to his courtyard. They must pass here because the front door is permanently locked, but won't see me behind the gate they themselves will open. Squatting on a layer of last fall's leaves, I check the scene across the street from under the rusty bottom frame. Nothing suspicious, no one checking me. The neighborhood is a mixture of new prefabricated housing and sagging log houses converted into communal apartments. The professor's prerevolutionary apartment house is the solidest building in sight except for the spire of the Soviet Army Club, which I squint to see in the distance.

There's something reassuring as well as demeaning—a link to my inner self, evidence that I'm the same person—in my still going on with these childish pranks. The eighth grade again, spying on the girl I "liked." ... I wonder what I'm going to be when I grow up. ... I wonder how much time has passed and

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why I can't stand to wear a watch. More swigs reheve the stiffness in my knees, but where the hell is AnastasJa? I want to see her while my high is in balance. It's like old times: she keeping me waiting.

The Tijuana Brass blares through an open window, drowning out a Mozart piano sonata being practiced several floors beneath. In the darkest corner of the courtyard, a teen-age couple are registering the progress of his hand in her blouse. Huffing about public behavior, a burly man in a sateen undershirt appears from the back stairway to chase them off. The girl cringes, her swain retreats, muttering, "Kiss my ass." A younger boy dashes by in pursuit of a stray cat.

The burly man returns to his room to watch television on a set with a smudgy magnifying glass. I know this because I knocked on his door when first searching for the professor's apartment. The protector of socialist morals was picking his teeth with a pen knife. Eyes on a soccer game, he conversed about my accent, which I had said was Czech to allay suspicion. He informed me that Russian is the world's best language, spoken by the most developed people. "You're an example; you see the need to learn Russian. Nobody's anybody without it now. Science and culture —everything important's in the Mother tongue." I asked what other languages he knew, and was backing toward the stairway when the flush hit his face.

When he has well and truly disappeared, Irina Sergeevna clumps into the courtyard on disintegrating slippers. Ironically, I first heard of her from him, her ghastly neighbor in their communal apartment. Passing her door, he snorted gratuitously, "She's out—at the theater.''' "Theater" was obviously a dirty, class-enemy word. Actually, she was seeing The Cherry Orchard, her thirtieth time in forty years.

I know I'll sober up by thinking about Irina Sergeevna's life, but maybe that's better. I visualize the fading snapshots she's shown me: a lithe woman holding her husband's hand. She's wearing a flapper hat in one; in another, a lacy veil. I never used to think people cared about such things during the first Five-Year Plan.

Eight years earlier, she was a scholarship orphan in the best Kazan gymnasium. Fresh from the Civil War triumph, two

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Communists—the first she'd evep seen—burst into her French class to instruct the teacher about his new, sociahst curriculum. Apart from the epithet "bourgeois," neither spoke a word of French. But more than this, it was the new local lords' Russian, a riffraff patois blending thugs' jargon and malevolence toward their betters, that gave the timid schoolgirl the lesson of her life.

Until then, the school's anti-Bolshevik tattle had caused her secretly to admire the mysterious Lenin. But whatever he was trying in Moscow, one look at the types in control at the grass roots was enough to gauge the direction the country was likely to take. Irina Sergeevna knew the danger of antagonizing beer hall habitues, but neither inherent meekness nor conscious self-effacement, practiced from that revealing moment in class, saved her from the fate of millions less careful—which is why her companions are plays and books.

In 1934, she moved to Moscow with her husband, a talented engineer, and their infant daughter, the joy of their lives whom the neighbors called "Angel." Now a doctor. Mama worked double shifts in a tuberculosis hospital. Two years later, the child died of meningitis, unknowingly passed by Irina Sergeevna from a patient in her ward. Only her husband's night vigils kept her from going mad.

Her nightmares stopped on the blessed day she realized that she was pregnant again. Maybe it was wrong to bring another child into their world of terror of purges, but at a time when even faithful friends feared to exchange an honest word, the solitary couple needed a baby on which to lavish their normal instincts. Their one hope for hope itself was this replacement for buried Angel. They touched the swelling stomach, worked harder than ever, counted the weeks.

With fifteen to go, the engineer was arrested. Answering a call from Peter the Great, an ancestor had immigrated to Kazan from Wiirttemburg in the early eighteenth century. He still bore his family's German surname: proof he was a Gestapo agent.

Irina Sergeevna joined the horde of mute and hysterical wives, mothers, daughters who swarmed around offices in hopes of hearing whether their husbands, sons and fathers were alive. Trekking from prison to prison, enduring day-long lines in winter's cold, she miscarried, losing the purpose of her life and

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her ability to produce another. Upon discharge from the hospital, she learned her husband had been shot.

During the next few years she lived like a zombie. The war began. A niece off to the front as a nurse revived her by putting her daugher in her care, but someone—probably Burly Boy, the neighbor—denounced her as the wife of an enemy of the people, unfit to raise a Soviet child. The baby was removed to a home.

Irina Sergeevna tended war-wounded. On V-E Day, a surgeon proposed marriage, but a Party official in the hospital warned against an alliance of a tainted woman and a "cosmopolitan." The suspect Jew was sent elsewhere; Irina Sergeevna returned to tuberculosis and her eccentric lover of the theater, becoming a middle-aged pensioner before she knew it.

Remembering her tale, I yearn to do something elevating for her—and for myself. It's sacrilegious to compare the tragedies, but my loss of Anastasia has helped me understand Irina Sergeevna's deprivations. In one tiny way, I even envy her: her loneliness was caused by others' cruelty; mine by my pathetic illusions. My compulsion to make a mess of my affairs, then to pity myself—ye gods, am I a drip!

Drip, it hits me smack in the forehead—the first drop of a sneaky summer shower, blown hard by an ambushing wind. I rely on my bottle again to inure me to the soaking. My lousy luck. Or maybe some kind of rain god telling me to shut my trap; I talk too much.

The cafe to which I dash after a quick search for nearby shelter is a squat new one at the focus of the local shops. For no apparent reason, half the tables sport "No Service Here" cards, and the waitresses defend their empty sections by shooing me away. But it's hailing now too, and after being pelted a bit in the line, I push back inside and claim one of the free seats.

Damn clever of me, since the floor show's better than most. In full view of the drenched line-standers, a clutch of waitresses is enjoying a smoke in the kitchen passageway. The maitre d'hotel, a frowzy woman with a Lenin pin, is swallowing meat patties at the corner table. Finally a customer abandons hope for his own supper and scolds her for the scandalous mess, from driving citizens into the wet to her own "gobbling" while others wait.

"Eat?" The reply is an outraged shriek. "And why shouldn't I

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eat? I've been here since six this morning. You're the only one with the right to nourishment? I should slave until I drop?"

After the usual bickering, a neat man at my table manages to order a meal, then steadily ups the volume of his fork-taps on the oilcloth to demonstrate his impatience at the dragging wait. Finally our waitress slaps down his three courses simultaneously, pleased that his soup will be cold and fish sauce congealed before he finishes his eggplant salad. Next, she takes on the woman on my other side, who has asked for a pepper shaker with pepper.

"I've got to walk my son both ways to school every day, so don't you try to needle me," the waitress hisses. "I've got a husband who drinks but never helps." The woman mumbles an apology and forgoes the pepper. By this time, the man on my right has been turned analytical by the appearance of food in his stomach. "A few drunks an evening does it," he reflects. "They make enough cheating them blind to send the rest of the customers to the mother of hell."

What they don't suspect is how much I'm enjoying this. The whole evening's been too goddam solemn. For some obscure reason—or perhaps because Nixon's name stands out on the front page of the Pravda that the man's making into a rain hat—the scene reminds me of the nearness of my President. A mile or so south in the Kremlin, he'll be having his State dinner just about now: caviar, sturgeon in champagne, filet of beef and smoked venison with fruit—the works. And rendering his and Pat's sincere thanks for the hospitality. I imagine his style: "The United States and Soviet Union are both great powers . . . ours are both great peoples. . . . We meet to begin a new age in the relationships between our two great and powerful nations. . . . Never have two peoples had a greater challenge or a greater goal. ..."

Picturing the toasts in the Kremlin Banquet Hall makes me happier than ever in this dive, and I raise my chipped glass with a smirk. To sustain my cheer, I'm quaffing Crimean vino, the only alcohol not crossed off" the menu at this hour. I've also ordered some hash that the woman urges me to finish because I'm "thin." . . . Suddenly, I've had too much of one or the other and must leave for air.

Outside again, I remember my uncollected change and resent

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the bitch of a waitress for cheating me out of three rubles. But what the hell, I admire her too—and my table companion for his tactful warning of how it was going to happen to me. The rain lies in large puddles on the sidewalks, but other parts of the wavy asphalt are already drying. To help with my swaying, I play a game of avoiding the water, but trip into the gutter, coating my suede sleeve with a layer of muck. Hearing "He's lapped his fill," from a passing couple, I rise with dignity.

Time to call it an evening? Telephoning the professor again, I'm half sorry he's not home so I could cancel the final act. Drink claustrophobia prevents me from holing up in my hiding place, but the courtyard is soundless now and I'll hear them approach in time to slip behind the gate. I make it fine when a car turns the corner—a false alarm. I wonder if time can really move backwards, as they claim in the new physics. A bulletin board at the professor's entryway announces a free course of lectures on "New Forms of the World Class Struggle." The note underneath offers an ironing board for sale, used but cheap.

I drift into nostalgia so wistful that the score for it, Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel, plays in my ears. I am thinking of my first Saturday job as a paint store stockboy when the boss said that I was obviously trying but he had to let me go because business was bad. Putting aside my gratitude for the gift of memory, I'm trying to seize the key to my life offered by this forgotten incident when a taxi pulls up. I know it's theirs because I've lived this moment before.

Not fear but incomprehension paralyzes me: I can't sort out the competing impulses to my limbs. May's moon is freeing itself from the last of the rainclouds. Anastasia materializes at the gate, followed by the professor, who bumps a long leg on the frame. She's wearing the Bolshoi dress and clasping a handbag; I know they've been to a good theater. And that although loyalty and intellectual appreciation still bind her, she can't breach his aloofness; they're already unhappy together.

So my rival is also weak! I'd like to greet him before hiding but my feet are still stuck in the rain-made mud. Anastasia's every movement is profoundly familiar, like the Dvorak Slavonic Dance my cerebral orchestra is now playing. I want to formulate something about her looks, but can only think to say that living

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with a man has burnished her splendor. She's an untouched-up Catherine Deneuve.

But I've been ideahzing her too long, deleting her sensuous-ness. The slight Asian protuberance of her mouth reminds me of her frankness in lovemaking: the unlipsticked lust. Blood is pumping away from my sodden stomach—-faster now, for her reaction to seeing me is flattered delight. But wouldn't you know, she converts it immediately to what-a-foolish-youth disapproval, expressed by pursing lips.

What a mistake to be half-hidden by a tree instead of in the open! She'll think I've been trying to peep through her windows—which I did once, climbing the old poplar as I'd seen children do afternoons; but not tonight. She approaches me as if I'm the courtyard naughty boy. I yearn to be imposing yet humble, to show my new worth and to press her hand to my forehead—a hundred things at the same time. The much-tortured alleycat scurries between us and toward the gate, distracting her from the declaration she's preparing for me. I long to hear my fate from the highborn princess, now advancing to strains of Scheherazade. The professor catches up with her, his expression revaling he knows who I am and is flustered. The poor fellow is quite willing for me to take his difficult ward for the night, but I have no such pretensions. Dearest Nastenka, I only came to drink in your beauty.

"Dearest Nastya, I didn't mean to drink. I only came ... to wish you well."

"For goodness sake, you don't even like it. You can't blame your tricks on alcohol."

What tricks? Does she know I still sometimes follow her in the metro?

The professor hesitates because he wants to invite me in, but Anastasia strides past and he mounts the stairs in her train. Her scent follows: a fairy's fragrance visiting the courtyard's earthy odors. And moonlit flaxen hair on black jersey, lingering on my optic nerves like a television dot when the set is switched off".

Sonorous quiet again. The moment was far too quick. I lie down on the bench favored by babysitting grandmothers. Wisps

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of cloud are still up there. The certainty of her rebuff cleansed my confusion; the only hurt now is that she's better than ever, more meant for me.

But it's time to move on. Roll off and take the first step. Leaves in the breeze above remind me of Moscow's huge advantages for living over New York. Green to see, air to breathe, no doormen to avoid.

I find another bench on the walk to Alyosha's. It's good to be on my way at last, but there's no need to rush. We'll have a midnight snack and listen to the Ray Charles. I forgot to tell him my news about my application for a Black Sea trip so we can spend some of the summer together on a beach before I leave forever. And I must remember to mention Chingiz, in case he can help.

He doesn't answer the bell. Strange—the car's in the courtyard and his lights are on. I play the new la-de-da, then the special, special ring only I know. A teen-age factory lass lives on the opposite side of the landing, together with her parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts. She used to sneak across to the apartment for clothes-on copulation until her older brother came searching for her one day with murderous intent. Alyosha parried so well that the brother ended by inviting us to join a team stealing tar paper from his construction brigade.

But something's ominous about his not answering. Wait now: something's been off all day. Founding's out because of the neighbors. I sit down on the stairs, deciphering the random pattern of the concrete.

And I go queasy when I hear steps jerking their way to the door. Alyosha plastered? That's impossible no matter what he guzzles—and wrong, because the appeal of his dissipation is his always being in control of it, like mental breakdown depicted in art. I can be morbid sometimes, even in May.

He fumbles with the catch. I step back in horror. He's not only slobbering drunk but deranged, like a man with a family wiped out by fire. I'm not even certain he recognizes me—or cares.

Suddenly I remember the hospital this morning. The howling clues that have escaped me all day. He is sick.

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"I know it's that. For God's sake tell me, Alyoshinka. We'll face it together."

I am cold sober again, tasting vomit in my gullet. Something loathsome has attacked my friend. A deathly film blears the eyes of the symbol of life. He was waiting for me all these hours, drinking alone in his room.

I help him lie down, but he gets up again to look out of the window.

"Alyosha, buddy, speak to me. Modern medicine works."

He will not talk. But when he does, it is worse than I've imagined. He has intestinal cancer.

It has spread from his rectum to his duodenal tract. A young internist he knows socially and trusts more than the clinic doctors has told him, under pressure, that the malignancy looks fierce.

He opens another bottle. And I join him because he wants me to. I wish to God we could be closer now than ever, united in adversity, but we are too hopelessly drunk to be truly aware of each other. Like shapeless heaps, we grunt and bark.

We grope for each other and try to dance. I remember an odious joke the day after President Kennedy died. I was working nights as a copy boy in a radio station, and a slick news announcer appeared for his morning stint, this time to narrate a memorial documentary. He was the kind who never let you pass without a gag. "What will John-John get for Christmas this year?" he drawled. I waited; he timed the punchline. "A jack-in-the-box." And I laughed.

We want to walk. I think we try to go out doors. Alyosha suspects he left some rum in the car. Later we ransack the drawer with his old photographs. There are a few of him in Sukhumi during the war, posing on the beach in a white-belted bathing suit. He whimpers again.

Toward dawn, I doze off in the armchair. A movieola of vignettes mellows my sleep, and I'm troubled only by a peripheral awareness that I must wake up soon. I imagine that Alyosha will trick the hospital as he did his draft board; that he's the subject of a malicious police campaign; that these dreams are reality and the cancer is the dream.

The radio has been left on. In the far, far reaches, I hear the

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news. And I am no longer dreaming, but putting everything together. The answer is a Nixon plot. Why did that creep have to come here? Break into my life with his Big Government and Big Business? Do this to Alyosha?

Walking the friendly half-slums ofBattersea, I remembered roommate Viktor. He was all excited when I first told him I might spend the summer in London: the spy novel he was reading had a KGB captain musing that "the only people who can even try to outwit us are the Order of Jesuits and the English Intelligence Service."

I also caught glimpses of the crank I'd become. I conversed with half a dozen people during the seven weeks, each time mentioning Russia within minutes. Although my quick notification of my connection with the exotic land was intended to cast myself in a dashing light, a larger truth was that I felt incompetent to discuss anything else, even with myself The greengrocers were full of fat avocados. I couldn 't say, "Look at those nice avocados," but "In Moscow, we don't have avocados. We don't have string beans or even leeks." I remembered a man I knew in New York who'd written eleven books about other

Interlude ^347

subjects, yet whose frame of reference for everything was still the Soviet Union he visited in 1935. "In Russia it's worse. In Russia they do it differently. . . ."

To my surprise, London 's streets had girls who were prettier — as well, of course, as more chic — than Moscow's, and because of Moscow, I moved to pick them up. But I backed down at the last minute. "Pardon me, miss, may I stop you a moment?" would have been a washout on Bond Street. So many elemental things seemed easier in the land of hardship.

And more important. Everyone's fascination for the dominion of enigmas and mystery strengthened my impression that other countries and subjects were irrelevant to life's inner truths. Even Vietnam talk seemed abstract compared to the pull of sadness and escape in Moscow's streets and flats. The heightening of feeling, the jumble of emotion. I kept trying to place the quote — Pushkin? Gogol? — that chugged in my ear: "Oh Russia, how miserable you are, how full of senseless pain and struggle. And how I love you!"

I also felt that Russia owed me something. This sensation never left me, but since I couldn't identify precisely what was due me, I began to calculate that the debt had better be paid in cash. For weeks, I toyed with what had been called, in derision of the fallen Nikita, "hair-brained" schemes for producing some. Write an expose of the joys of Russian girls? Tell Fleet Street what I'd heard about Raya Brezhneva, the boss's "piquant" daughter? One way or another, I had to turn a penny with my inside knowledge.

After three days in a Marble Arch hotel, I moved to a bed-and-breakfast place off the bad end ofWestbourne Grove. Beyond cardboard walls, my neighbors were clusters of Greeks, Indians and Pakistanis harder up than I was and desperate for work permits because of wailing babies. A sign over the peeling portico declared the former Regency town house to be a hotel. The corridor smelled of down-and-out damp, curry cooked on hotplates and a rug tramped by bare feet making for the toilet. Even on sunny days my sheets stayed clammy. Transient London. The landlady claimed it was the rainiest summer since the war.

I might have moved to a better place if it weren 't for my

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misadventure. As it was, I was so broke that supper was two portions of beans on toast in a transport cafe ("kaf") behind Paddington Station. A sHght story attached to the disappearance of my money. Having left Moscow with Uterally the clothes on my back — all shirts, ties, sweaters and T-shirts, everything but my old overcoat, had been distributed to friends —/ made for Oxford Street to stock up on sweaters. My jacket rested on the counter seven seconds while I tried on a turtleneck. The store detective, a lady out of an Alec Guinness movie, said the July sales were Mecca for pickpockets, but that my passport was little use and might be returned. The wallet had contained my summer nestegg; from then on, I had to squeeze by on the bills in my trouser pocket.

In a way, being robbed was liberating. It released me from the urgent missions whispered by every second Russian who'd heard I was going abroad.

"You'll be in London?"

"That's right."

"Please help me, please. We need medicine. "

"What medicine? Where's it manufactured?"

"I don't know exactly. Japan, France — somewhere in the West."

"What's it for, then? The name of the disease."

"I'm not certain. But you must find it. If you don't bring some back, my sister will die."

Being broke also tendered inherent rewards. From Hampstead to the East End docks, I walked London's streets, discharging my nervousness into the padding of perpetual motion. Sausages in pubs cost almost as little as tomatoes in street markets. I got tired; I could sleep. But the most satisfactory part was the matching of my financial circumstances to my position in life. Orwell had the answer to salon Communists telling workers that half a loaf is as good as none at all: that type knew zilch about the working class. On the other hand, as Orwell also knew, there were moments of joy in feeling you had nothing to lose. I tasted a tramp's freedom. I spent a pound in Petticoat Lane on an umbrella for the drizzle. It was my walking stick and friend.

Something would turn up; it had to. And did: Joe Sourian 's

InterIudeX349

Betty Vogl. Earlier in the summer, she had visited Joe in Cincinnati, calling him from her hotel room and asking if he had seen The Graduate. Then she was off to London on a two-week BOAC tour. Joe wrote me of this — on Cincinnati University stationery, for he was already an assistant professor there — in case I wanted the pleasure of her company. In the event (as I was learning to say), I had a bath in her room and a supper in her hotel coffee shop. But compared to Joe, she found me thin and listless — the latter, of course, a reflection of what I saw in her. I preferred tramping.

Something else would turn up; my fate was now blessedly out of my hands. What release in semivagabonding, what aspirin for ego-tension! Besides — never mind the contradiction —/ had a terrific plan. I always knew Russia would make me rich.

My miracle-product was Sunday, an unknown Tolstoy novel I'd unearthed in Moscow, which an Erstwhile recommended and I read in a spree when Alyosha was away on a case. Although not quite Anna Karenina or War and Peace, it was certainly profound stuff (and made me rather proud of having coped without a pony).

But what did my opinion matter about a new blockbuster by Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy?! Because I wasn 't in London a week before discovering it had never been translated. A Tolstoy masterpiece, and nobody even knew about it! It clinched my point about Western ignorance of Russia; but even I never dreamed the terra incognita atmosphere extended to classical literature. It took spunky me, living like a native, to dig out a cultural treasure as important as the Tutankhamen relics causing bedlam at the British Museum — and probably more valuable in hard currency. The copyright had surely expired. I'd do a quick translation to establish my rights, then a polished job — and make a crazy fortune.

You never know about life. I hrst realized what I had twenty-one hours after my wallet had been lifted. One accident squashes you; the next one is deliverance. A man in a Russell Square pub who, to my temporary embarrassment, knew much more than I about Russian literature, had never heard of Sunday— so much for his supercilious expertise. I checked Foyles and the Slavonic School. All the other classics were there, from

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Childhood to The Kreutzer Sonata; but mine might never have existed.

The secret sounded in me like Solzhenitsyn 's invocation of the four Beethoven chords. Fabulously rich and famous overnight! Specialists to restore Alyosha; recuperation in stately Riga. Through everything ran my sage insight that this was not blind luck striking, but natural law providing fair compensation. Had I plugged on with work and career in Moscow instead of squandering the year, Vd have missed this supreme opportunity. . . .

To fix the taste of poverty in my memory, I waited another day before calling a publisher. I had to map tactics too: offer world rights in one lump or sell separately in every country? A fund for any living Tolstoys would probably best express my quiet generosity. Then it was time to move. The greatest publishing coup since the Depression was up for grabs.

Which is exactly how I put it to the junior editor whose Bloomsbury basement audience I finally obtained. I reckoned a strong approach would trim wasted time before he brought me upstairs to his chief His Etonian fingers reaching from a pin-striped sleeve to a Russian dictionary behind him was the dart to my bubble. Td had the title absolutely right. But as his forefinger reproved, 'Voskrensenye " translates not only as "Sunday" but also as "resurrection. " While he went out for sherry glasses, I si inked up the stairs.

To the drizzly streets again, and no sneak return for my forgotten umbrella. But the dismal episode also made clearer than ever my need to go the other way, away from riches and back to Russia. I needed Moscow's adventures and sense of struggle to bring me back to life. Fd return and recapture Anastasia whom, in London's polite foreignness, I more and more treasured as my future wife. And I had a mission. Alyosha's young internist friend had given me a list of medicines, including an experimental Swiss one, that might save his life.

Another omen was the scholarship committee's quick consent to sponsor me for a third semester. My virtual disappearance during the first two should have got me disowned, but a ten-page letter claiming Fd wangled access to city Soviet archives just before leaving in July and extolling their handling of the

Interlude^ 351

exchange program — in paragraphs they could quote for further funding from Ford — did the trick. The chairman published a paean to samizdat literature every three months in The New York Times Magazine, and I casually mentioned how well his (useless) sociopolitical insight had guided me. With only a few nervous reminders to me of my previous academic achievement, the committee declared faith in my judgment if I felt it important to return.

The Soviet side was less obliging. Unlike the students preparing to leave from America, for whom the committee coordinated and channeled the paperwork, I had to arrange my own visa. The mess ripened under the gaze of the Soviet Consulate's guilt-framed Lenin. Counselors Kuznetsov, Kutuzov and Rasskazov, the three musketeers of the propaganda-stacked waiting room for tourist visas, couldn 't understand the immensity — or cheek? — of my request. Oh no —they were not so easily fooled. If I wanted what I pretended, how could I explain the presence of a student of the American exchange program in London? . . . They should cable to their Washington embassy to check my story? Ho ho, and would I next suggest they fly me to the moon?

No, Meester, their cables went to Moscow, thank you; they knew their own jobs. A so-called "American student" couldn't be abroad without his government's knowledge and consent; why, therefore, wasn 't the proper Washington agency sorting out my problems? And if I wanted someone to check an American so-called Scholarship Committee's correspondence about me with the Soviet State Commission on Special Higher Education, why did I come to them with my dubious request? Did I know what building I was in? And that it closed at one o'clock; all, er, guests must be out."

The workings of the Soviet consulate brought everything back. Better than Moscow offices because it had a veneer for foreigners, but with the same antagonism to petitioners; the same resentment, suspicion and surliness to the public it supposedly served. To what category — rat? snooper? spy? — does this disturbing foreigner belong? Will we have to spend money on him? (Xerox copies are devilishly expensive in Moscow: a vice-minister of trade was recently rebuked for running through

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an unnecessary sheet to show off a new machine, thereby wasting nine-tenths of a cent of hard currency.) The switchboard operator — in central London! — answered with an angry "da" (guess where he was trained) and knew almost no English. In any case, Kuznetsov was not at his desk, Kutuzov was away and he'd never heard ofRasskazov. Better to call again in the afternoon (when the Consulate was closed).

The next day, Kuznetsov was away, Rasskazov not at his desk and nobody could imagine where Kutuzov was. I took a bus to Hackney for a new place to walk.

In mid-August, the sun shone most mornings and a committee check for expenses upgraded my suppers to take-out curry from a Queensway shop. A Soho chemist, the seventeenth I begged, sold me a dozen tubes of an ointment called "5 FlurouraciV without a prescription. They were to ease the X-ray burns on Alyosha's buttocks. But he couldn't get the Swiss medicine, and a Fulham Cancer Clinic consultant, having listened to my translation of Alyosha's diagnosis, said he could not prescribe treatment for someone not his patient. Besides, the potion itself could be lethal. I could do nothing more humanitarian now, he concluded, than to help my Russian friend prepare for his death. He was an upper-class English turd who informed me that Nixon should have leveled Haiphong.

The next day, I invaded the Embassy as well as the Consulate. (Telephoning was becoming harder. When switchboard operators heard the bleeps indicating an incoming call from a public booth, they hung up before I could push my two-pence in.) Kuznetsov and Kutuzov were on vacation in Moscow — which was no longer even faintly comic. A voice raised as high as mine said there was no word about my case and nothing to do but wait. It "seemed unlikely,"however, that a consulate assigned to conduct Soviet business in the United Kingdom would be empowered to issue a student visa to an American. Why didn't I fly to my homeland? Accustomed to "logical"problem-solving, Moscow would approve this "more straightforward" approach.

I sat among Hyde Park's nannies, alternately storming and trembling. Bureaucratic stupidity —/ couldn't allow myself to think it was more — was a personal insult: Russia defaulting on its

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debt to me. One more week and I'd have to borrow money and actually fly to Washington. Alyosha needed the medicines; I needed to be with him. We had worked on a scheme to meet in Bucharest if I couldn 't return: pleading the gravity of his disease, he'd get doctors to support a petition for special dispensation to travel abroad. But his oldest medical friends, who'd signed a thousand absent-from-work chits for his girls, shrugged unhappily. They could get Alyosha a visa as easily as Pravda thunder could free the Scottsboro boys. He would go nowhere. It symbolized our relationship's unnatural change of balance that everything now depended on me. I had to find the strength to make up for the decline of his.

At the lowest point, I recognized his handwriting on an envelope from the top of my hotel stairs. "News from a foreign country came/As if my treasure and wealth lay there. " Dreading the worst and hoping for the miracle, I trembled as I coped with the glue.

"Hello there, muchacho! Summer skies are blue and the radish crop gluts our markets. Accept our congratulations on the advent of Machine-Tool Workers' Day. I know I can count on you to continue saluting our patriotic holidays. For our part, we're planning a fitting fete ..."

Corny as it was, a censor might take this at face value, predisposing him to pass the rest. But my tears were forming because these first words I'd received from him since I left showed that at least part of him was undamaged.

Machine-Tool Workers' Day was on September 29 this year, he continued. His advance warning was because all my mail to him, sent throughout July and August, arrived in one delivery the previous week. "No doubt the English mates are on strike again. It's not for me to interfere, but can you really expect an efBcient postal service on exploited labor?"

He objected to two of my postcards — of Queen Elizabeth in regalia and a Modigliani nude — that had obviously pleased him, comparing them unfavorably to his enclosed one of the famous Worker and Peasant statue, which, under the guise of admiration for its sickle-waving Amazon, slipped in the sweater size of a new clothes-conscious lovely. A hilarious sketch of a visit to the Exhibition of Economic Achievement followed, the real message

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of which was an account of his icon hunt in the Zagorsk Monastery, where a sanctimonious priest talked prices between the lines, much as he was doing now. Like a plumber discoursing with a naturahst, they couldn't be certain they understood each other, and the priest balked before selling.

"Oh yes, vandals swiped the Volga's remaining strip of headlight chrome from the monastery parking place for Western tourists. But this is not the tragedy some would make of it, inasmuch as no purloining of ornamentation can affect the saloon's riding qualities."

The car was enjoying a few days' rest just now, while he spent them in a clinic — an excellent one, run by the Central Institute for Advanced Medical Training — for an evaluation of the first series of X-ray treatments. (Tirst series? I shuddered when I understood the implication of this.) The various analyses were almost completed, and justified every hope for more decades of honest toil. "After all, my pension is ages away." If he asked again for the "5 Flurouracil" it was largely because his doctors were eager to try it. He was writing this from his clinic cot, where a dozen Samaritans — including Anastasia — had visited him. The food was fine; it was only the regularity of three daily squares, served by well-meaning others, that indisposed an amateur cook. Speaking of that, what was poor I eating now that the Soviet government had bought a billion bushels of grain to save Western farmers from bankruptcy?

Only one section revealed the deep pessimism still in him. "I can't forgive myself for that outburst," he wrote. "Those hrst days I felt I had to share my despair and therefore sloshed you with gloom. It looms sillier than ever now that I'm in constant high spirits (as opposed to strong spirits, which — an odd streak of obscurantism in our otherwise progressive clinics — the chief nurse unaccountably considers detrimental to recuperation). I'm confident of a future oflithoid (horny) health, and since I can't reach your shoulder without a chair in any case, promise not to slobber again on your chest. Despondency is an enemy of the people."

The self-reproach was superHous. We had woken at noon after the drunken night when the disease was confirmed. That day and the next, he occasionally cried, insisting that his strain of

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cancer was unresponsive to medicine and any treatment would be self-deceptive. His mental process of preparing for burial, he said, had already begun. What changes happen in life! How he loved his empty existence! But these few days were the full extent of his "unpardonable burden " on me, for which he had already apologized effusively before I left. After that, he took himself in hand, declaring his optimism "incorruptible'' — and this new reference to the first blow was a bad sign.

The letter ended with a toast for my "luck, love, happiness, richness, health; choose your own arrangement, add what I forgot" and was signed, "Your old friend, your trustworthy colleague. " But "trustworthy" could also mean "reliable" as we always applied it to the faithful Volga: a promise that despite minor breakdowns, he would roll on indefinitely. And by satirizing the Sovietese use of "colleague" with its phony representation of a virtuous official toiling for The People, he conjured up a dozen images of our bootleg activities together. It was a satiric disquisition for an audience of one. And although it contained no direct mention of my return — before I left, Alyosha kept insisting I must get on in life, and shouldn 'f press my luck by coming back — each of the four packed pages was like an appeal floated in a bottle.

The P.S. was written with a different pen. "Big hugs and kisses from me. (My malady is not contagious.) It's grand to have time for reading again; any suggestions for enlightening books? Incidentally, it's becoming chic here to pass evenings, in reading or other useful activity, by candlelight rather than under vulgar bulbs. So if your power shortages occasionally leave you without electricity, you can turn to more fashionable sources of light. Whenever you say the word, I can mail you some candles. And resign yourself to long boring letters. With clinical greetings, Alexei."

The term for exchange students was to begin on September 8 — Tankists' Day on the "Leninist Calendar" displayed in the Soviet Embassy. I went to the consulate immediately, knowing that failure today, September 6, would make me miss the start: a clear sign they had no intention of letting me back. A man who was probably the Musketeers' M. de Tr6ville glanced at my Hie,

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cupped his hand over a question on an internal telephone and slipped a visa into the pages of my passport, all within two minutes. It was somehow obvious that my permission had been in his desk for weeks, awaiting his last-minute stroke, the implication of which escaped me.

"You are going to our capital to study?" It wasn 't clear whether the idea itself or my pretension to it was preposterous. "You will inform the State Committee the exact moment of your arrival. Good luck. "

Mother Russia's gravity pulled me to Heathrow hours early, also dulling my senses with apprehension and relief A clutch of Russian tourists — shoes as blunt as faces, suits screaming "Soviet" though bought specifically for Western Trip — huddled around their leader in the lobby. Years ago, I used to approach such groups to try out my Russian, but their pathetic recoiling taught me to desist. Fear of being compromised, of informers' reports, of the outside world itself . . . What drew me to the land that produced this?

(In the Embassy one morning, I had caught sight of bantam Alek, Anastasia's chum, in a delegation of medical students. When he turned and saw me, he so sustained the blank in his eyes that for a moment I wondered whether Fd made a mistake. Catching on, I pretended not to notice him, but wildly searched the others with my eyes in case Anastasia had come too. Then I remembered that her association with me was enough to keep her from ever getting out with an official group.)

"Air India, Flight 506, via Moscow to Delhi. "Are you a vegetarian, sir?" . . . "Drinks will be served, do you tolerate spirits?" . . . Nevermind; the pilot was surely British-trained, and he took off on the dot. The Indian rajahs Hew first-class while Soviet officials and Western tourists crowded together in economy, mutually humble victims of this third-world hoax.

The Boeing's altitude was breathtaking. The afternoon sun waned somewhere in northern Europe as we sped east, away from the giver of warmth and light. As if the plane knew its direction — at this exalted height, toward the Arctic's Holy Spirit — the cabin grew cool. Stewardesses in saris served mango juice, but the sensation of terrestrial bleakness grew with the

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murkiness of new time zones. Dipping back below the clouds on the Moscow descent, we passed mile after mile of Russia 's swamps and uninhabited forests. I wanted to reach out and stroke the continent of enduring sadness.

We touched down at Sheremetyevo International, taxied, stopped near the terminal — and were ignored. Four hours before, Heathrow had been a Woolworth's-cum-World's Fair, bustling, throbbing, hawking shiny wares and briskly shuttling passengers to a Hit Parade of flights. Here we were the only plane in the disembarking area, and the air quivered with abandonment, not urgency. A skinny neon Moscow tried to stay alive. The crew operating the passenger ramp bided its time: three clump-booted workmen placidly rummaging for matches. I read their lips.

"Nu, Fedya, let's go."

"Easy friend, FU finish my smoke. "

"I heard a big shot's on this one."

"He'll hold his water; do him good."

A huge raven perched on a radar tower. Mud, fir needles dripping autumn rain and tommy guns greeted arrivals. And workmen cooing over the miracle of a dispatcher's swaddled baby. Through the airtight fittings and into the cabin seeped Russia's smell, an oily, dusty blend ofdiesel exhaust, dill, tar, sweat-soaked wool, birch sap, latrine disinfectant and Balkan tobacco. . . . A tarted-up Intouristguide was roasting the driver of our bus. Nothing had changed. I bathed in the fever of being lost in desolation, yet awake to spirits that roam the land mass like prairie wind, sighing about the futility and importance of existence.

Finally, the hatch opened to a blast of bracing air and an armed Army officer in the ankle-length overcoat of the full winter uniform. Striding into the cabin, he completed an eye-rolling scrutiny with an order for "pass-ports!", its sharpness startling the passengers whose first word this was from a Russian on home soil. While soldiers took up stations between the ramp and bus, a diminutive gentleman in transit to Delhi tried to make contact.

"It seems you have winter here already. Quite extraordinary."

His face free of a spark of acknowledgment, the officer

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accepted the Indian's passport as if it were a glass of soda from a dispensing machine.

"Win-ter? So soon? But you cope, you are a hardy people."

The robot's eyeballs clicked down, locked onto the Indian and surveyed him without reply. (Where is Kemal? I wondered. Finished at the University, rejected at American campuses; I'll never see him again.) Retreating, the gentleman gasped to his wife, "Such a welcome to this land!" But from a minibus near the plane, a group of Aeroflot stewardesses spilled out to link arms, squeeze waists and kiss cheeks. "Do svidaniya, pet, send me a postcard." "Don't forget the sweater, Sveta." "Galka, call Kolya for me, I forgot to say good-bye. " Clinging to each other before separation, the girls unselfconsciously showed the other side of the coin of the country's personal relationships.

I hadn't been mistaken: it was the home of quintessential types. The rustic soldier at the passport desk who read everyone's visa from top to bottom four plodding times. And after our misrouted baggage had finally arrived, the barmaid of a customs officer who scrutinized every scrap of printed material, confiscating my Time because of a photo of some starlet in a new headgear style called "Romanov," but winking at my two dozen pairs of tights for gifts.

"I'll take your word that the clothing contraband doesn 't hide an atomic bomb," she quipped, resetting her stern countenance to daunt the next suspect.

The taxi driver grumbled about his local beer hall closing to build a theater. I cleaned my window and stared at the streets.

The Delhi businessman notwithstanding, winter was a good month off; but while Hyde Park was still emerald, fall here had bled the leaves. Fd forgotten how dim the streetlights were, and the early dusk's Halloween-like palpitations. How did it stay so poor, this Moscow without a single store to equal an Aldwych market stall? But it was precisely this lackluster I loved — for quenching any demands that I myself be a bright light. Frazzled like a genuine home, the Russian scene depressed other Westerners; but I was grateful for feeling accepted into the humbleness. Even the million slogans I liked to mock — now dunning for a fitting work contribution to honor the forthcoming

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Twenty-fourth Congress of Our Revered Communist Party — welcomed me back.

The driver waited at the University gate while I dumped my things. I bulled my way through without initiating the process of acquiring documents or meeting my new roommate. Alyosha — who didn't know I had my visa, let alone that Vd arrived — was the reason for this journey. The buildings flanking the route to his place were totally alien and utterly familiar, as if families were preparing tea for me behind their granite-like fagades. Alyosha's was under repair again; I climbed over scaffolding boards strewn across the shortcut to the dear, chummy courtyard. Upstairs, his door was ajar. The omen unnerved me. How far had he gone, he with the girls and the deals, to forget to lock it? Afraid to ring, I tiptoed in.

In the living room, an elderly woman was gazing upward, forcing her eyes toward heaven against the weight of disapproval and pity. Before I could follow them, I was visited by the dread—to the tenth power — of mounting the stage to read my poems to an auditorium of parents. The woman was surely the aunt who had helped raise Alyosha. I did not want to know why she was here, what had happened to him.

But the fear was unfounded. He was alive and whole! Pounds thinner in the face, but as lithe as when we had crossed a flooded stream last April, teetering on wet rocks. Now it was his dictionaries that were wobbling as they lay in a stack on the kitchen chair. His toes on the top one, he was rummaging through the old clothes heap atop his wardrobe closet. As quickly as Vd recognized his aunt, I sensed that this was connected with hospital preparations. I moved up behind him.

"What's your price for the skivvies, partner?"

This came out too softly, but for a moment I wondered whether he might not want to hear me and my banter.

"It's me, Alyosh. They gave me a visa."

He pivoted on the balls of his feet, a spaghetti of 1950s ties oozing through his Angers. Something went momentarily out of balance, almost tipping the chair. The old woman gave out a panicked bleat.

"My friend, " he said, using the strong word droog, as in his letter. "Buddy-boy, I told you not to come. "

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I caught him under the arms, Uke my favorite uncle with me when I used to climb upon his fence and not be able to get down. (My favorite uncle drowned.) Alyosha's body too was much thinner, but I knew he lost weight every summer.

''Give the old man a hug, " he directed with a trace of command, as if unaware that for long moments I'd been doing precisely this. He was wearing a Lacoste turtleneck, and I thought of everything it meant to be gripping one of my own shirts; of how much had changed, how little I'd suspected, when I bought it in Bloomingdale's. He kissed me on the jawbone. His smell contained a new component: cancer, I thought, recoiling slightly — but perhaps it was only medicine.

Finally, he held me at arm's length. "You've lost five kilos, you waif When was your last hot meal?" He fiddled in the kitchen and I displayed his presents, as if we were trying to demonstrate that pan-fried beef for me and a pair of Levis for him had the same significance as ever. Like a woman who has attended too many family funerals, his aunt said only that she had to return to her invalid half-sister in Rostov next week.

I was narrating the "Sunday" episode in order to lead up to the real questions about his condition when a big white poodle bounded through the open door, almost knocking him down. By way of introduction, he plunged into a discourse on an old Russian saying about a dog's tail remaining in the same place no matter how you spin the body. It was the usual stuff, and it overcame what it had to to keep me laughing. If I didn 't know, I'd have fallen for the act. There was just a whit too much interest in canine affairs — and of relief when I suggested we visit "King-size" Alia II some other day.

old Meda

As Alyosha lost weight, the poodle gained. Like Russians interrupting the grinding year with periodic flings, she alternated between hours of slumber and minutes of dish-breaking cavorting. Outdoors, she trod between us: a third Musketeer. Although quickly accepting me as a lone companion for toilet strolls, she sulked unless Alyosha himself set out her food.

He had bought her from a private breeder in July, rechristen-ing her from "Mini" to "Maxi" in August. But it would have been glib to call this a need for companionship in my absence last summer. The general context was a booming vogue for dogs—conspicuous evidence of prosperity after the petless war years and desperate overcrowding—among the fashionable intelligentsia in their new co-op apartments. Western leashes and collars, with stratospheric black market prices, were the ultimate swank. Alyosha had acquired a French set in matching burgundy, underlining the element of throwback to his dandy days

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in his whole undertaking of keeping a pet. But the handsome accessories lay unused under the laundry pile, and shaggy Maxi herself of the stamped pedigree papers went undipped, proclaiming her owner's independence of fashion. Both approaches seemed designed to bolster his "life as usual" determination.

She cooperated perceptively. At "Maxi, for a walk," she charged the door like a battering ram, or shook her head "no," waiting for our laugh. When he was in pain, she lay motionless at his feet. And used the toilet rather than ask to go out; even lowered both halves of the broken seat with her nose, feeling safer on wood than on ceramic.

The sharpest pain was from skin burned by the current— second—series of cobalt-ray treatment, dispensed thrice weekly in a clinic opposite the Hippodrome. My London salve—the only medicine I was able to obtain, and the least important since it was irrelevant to the disease itself—helped, but the sting on his buttocks made driving arduous. He cut the spine of the driver's seat and blocked it back like a naval ship's captain's chair so he could pilot the Volga, with as much caution as he used to show daredevil, in a half-reclining position, propped up by a collection of pillows. The former combination of Hell's Angel bike and My Friend Flicka became a pathetic rather than a mischievous wreck.

Second to sex, his infirmity showed most here. My grandfather, a refugee of a Polish ghetto, used to stretch his neck manfully to peer through the bottom inches of his Nash's windshield, holding himself on guard against the outside world that was permanently preparing a missile for him. It was spooky to see the same muscle movements in Alyosha's straining for vantage above the Volga's dashboard. Playing on the slang for "outperform," which is literally "outspit," he challenged Ilya to a contest of whether they could avoid each other on a narrow street.

Maxi increased Alyosha's handicap by licking his face, easily reachable in his lowered position. And we were vulnerable to bad-tempered traffic cops as well as faster cars. The knowledge that if stopped in his condition, his license would be revoked on the spot until he passed a stiff new physical bolted him upright at the sight of a gray uniform, he commenting on his own lunge in

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the voice of a fervent sports announcer. If this was too late and the law insisted on a closer look, he played the radiantly healthy yet properly humble citizen, who had been creeping at twenty kilometers out of respect for Alexandra Kollontai, whose date of decease Comrade Constable surely remembered. These diverting little skits of eagle eyes and obstinate will cheered us on our way to some minor errand.

When they became more forced, I took the wheel. Eager to help, or uneasy about my inexperience, Maxi volunteered to move her bulk to the back seat, regarding us with dubious eyes from there. Fall drizzle and mud camouflaged her whiteness.

Despite the sharp risk of my driving without a license, we prepared no excuse. Somehow we assumed that the emergencies, unspokenly defined as the times when Alyosha wasn't well enough to drive, made everything possible for us, as if we were on our way to report to the War Cabinet during this time of national crisis. I thought about our escapades on last winter's ice, which took more skill than I could have imagined before handling the tank myself. Under five miles an hour, the wheel required a wrestler's strength; over five, I practically had to stand on the brake to achieve a gradual stop. And the clutch rasped for its master's touch.

What saved me was the "wingman's" directions. Alyosha allowed me to concentrate on mechanical operations by calling out obligatory right turns, unlit road signs and police traps forty yards in advance. His keen coaching on the welter of singular traffic patterns was the introduction to a campaign to impart general knowledge of the city, for he had reversed his earlier objection to my returning and now suggested I settle in Moscow, preferably as a correspondent.

"Luxury on minimum work. Five or six annual R & R's in Helsinki or the fleshpot of your choice. Of course I can't say how far you'd go in the States, but a local sinecure might be appealing. Think it over, muchacho.^''

Then we went to a dramatization of Ballad of a Sad Cafe at a theater he used to scorn for its highbrow repertoire, including a carefully pessimistic selection of Western plays. An interest in serious literature had replaced his urge for frivolous entertainment. In this, and especially in his eagerness for me to have the

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life of free time and easy money he used to, he was a dying man, concerned about fruitful expenditure of his remaining days and about his heir. It was a fitting twist that I was the one to get the tickets. How childish I'd been, resenting Anastasia for not praising my skill at it last year. What a big deal I made of myself; how much happier we could have been with her appetite for cultural enrichment, which was almost opposite to Alyosha's last-opportunity one. I waved my passport in the same box-office lines, but it was the November of life. And the ticket sellers were growing tired of me.

Yet in our way, Alyosha and I were happy too. We accepted the worst only at the deepest level. Some days were normal enough to fool girls who dropped by, not having heard. We shrugged off "corporal tenderness" with them: even without the general malaise of X-ray bombardment, Alyosha would not show his burns, which disfigured his lower stomach too. Instead, we joined matronly types taking constitutionals on a tree-lined boulevard near his house. And hunted for gas fittings and clean plywood: Alyosha was redoing his kitchen in contemporary studio style with a fitted unit combining refrigerator and cabinets. His plan was a Paris-Match advertisement that brought out his hammer and saw and brought down the wall between the kitchen and the main room the very day he saw it in August. He was sick of the pigpen style, he kept insisting. No more zinc sink, no blackened stove, no stretching across one to reach the other. A Yugoslav exhaust fan for "modern disposition" of cooking smells. "Who says technology's not for the people?"

He played his enthusiasm straight and I honestly couldn't tell—or, of course, ask—whether the project expressed faith in a better future or the desperation of doom. For we still didn't know his prognosis. If there was self-deception in this, it was partly genuine too: the specialists' unwillingness to promise anything made more credible their assurances that recovery was possible. It depended on where the cancer had spread and how it was responding to treatment—which could still only be guessed at. The doctor in direct charge of his case said it was not permitted to discuss a patient's progress except with immediate relatives; and even with them, they were usually less frank. She was bending the regulations for me in recognition of my loyalty in

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coming all the way from abroad to be with Alyosha, who had talked of me all summer. Besides, I'd donated three extra tubes of the salve to her department.

She was a thirtyish blonde whom Alyosha nicknamed "Luxuriant" in honor of her cherubic bottom. "You've opened the final horizon for me, Doctor. I thought I knew about positions to assume for cultivated women. And thanks to your, er, skill, I don't feel a bit embarrassed."

She blushed delicately, and accepted his box of bonbons. Like a widowed landlady titillated by a notorious lodger's charms, she took pleasure in his mellow palaver. Even she called him "Alyosha" instead of Patient so-and-so, exempting her favorite from clinical bossiness.

This helped gild the pill of the medical hours. And the cost of the treatment itself was surely a good omen. Together with the use of the capital-intensive X-ray equipment, he was being injected with a new American solution for better tissue response. From what we knew about the Soviet approach, neither would have been so liberally given if it were felt he'd never rejoin the nation's work force. And his clinic, the Central Institute for Advanced Specialist Training, was one of the country's best.

What puzzled us was why they weren't keeping him permanently there, as with most patients of his type, and as they had during his own first X-ray series in August. Now he slept at the institute only twice a week; on the other days, they merely told him to stay in bed four hours daily. Alyosha was so happy to be home that he often did rest for two or three hours, and never raised the question, in case the arrangement was a mistake.

But the real mistake was his failure to have sought help long ago. He had had a year for this. His general health and attitude conspired to preclude it.

The first sign had been a watery spot on his underpants noticed during his Black Sea vacation the previous summer and attributed to a scratch on an underwater rock. The little lesion didn't heal and some days its stain was not quite so tiny; but Alyosha ignored it—and, except for a passing wisecrack, the slight diminishment of his energy—until a month before Nixon's arrival last spring, when he saw blood on his sheets. The wound seemed to be growing deeper and there was a lump in his groin.

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This combination was finally enough to overcome his distaste for medical assistance.

Diagnosing piles, his local clinic's duty doctor arranged an operation in a municipal hospital, whose chief surgical consultant confirmed the diagnosis and signed the final papers when Alyosha's turn before him came several weeks later. By then, the other groin also had a sore nodule, and he could feel the first growing from morning to evening. He consulted a medical encyclopedia, then called a brilliant young internist whose father he'd once helped on a case.

He lowered his trousers and lay on the daybed. After a minute's examination, his friend went white and looked up at his face. He called contacts to arrange Alyosha's immediate acceptance by the Advanced Training Institute, and treatment began as soon as the biopsy had verified malignancy. . . . This story, the details of which I heard only now, laid me low for weeks. Alyosha had cancer ever since I knew him — during the entire time I was glorying in his energy and health! And he could have recovered easily if we hadn't been so blind. The doctors all agreed that it began with a relatively mild skin disturbance, with over a ninety per cent chance of complete cure.

The diagnosis was cancer spinocellulare. Sorting out his bureau drawers months later, I saw it written as such on a postcard he'd never sent me, probably because its tone was downcast and chief message a request for more medicines. The main tumor encircled the anus, with one hundred per cent metastases to the lymph nodes of both groins. Major surgery was planned for next month; meanwhile, the X-ray assault continued as before, and on the lower intestine too for prophylactic purposes, even though it was uncertain the malignancy had reached there.

On the days I hadn't slept over, I arrived at the apartment for breakfast. At eleven o'clock, we drove toward the Hippodrome along a route I already knew without instructions. His clinic was in a cluster of medical institutes something like the grander one on Manhattan's East River. We were admitted with almost no formality and made our own way to the radiology department. It was excellently equipped, but the building itself had the curious Russian plainness of research laboratories and technical insti-

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tutes, which can give the mistaken impression that the scientific apparatus is also obsolete. I felt I was back in my old high school.

Despite our purpose there, its genial efficiency had a calming effect. Only the chief administrator compressed his lips as if cancer sufferers were an inconsiderate burden, and pursed them when I identified myself. Otherwise, the novelty of professional courtesy instead of the elbows and nyets of most public institutions lifted our spirits, at least until Alyosha's turn under the machine. When he was summoned inside for this, I continued waiting in the anteroom alongside patients with appointments after his. A man with the hands of a half-century of manual labor was often there, confused by the elaborate attention awarded him at this late hour of his life, craving a cigarette despite his deathly wheeze. And a nine-year-old girl whose mother couldn't decide whether to spoil her appetite for lunch by letting her open Alyosha's chocolates or to spoil her in the other sense because the doctors couldn't guarantee she'd live to be ten. To young and old, the staff was unpatronizingly gentle. Even teenage nurses whose contemporaries were already snarling from behind store counters spoke in the tones that allow the hospital sick to feel slightly less useless.

One morning, I was alone in the anteroom. Through the wall, I heard the hum of the rays penetrating Alyosha's intestines— "trembling vectors of electric and magnetic fields, unimaginable to the human mind." I was trying to think of a drive he'd enjoy in the afternoon when the door opened and I felt my face being studied. Then the disapproving chief administrator entered, choosing the inches next to me on the bench to seat himself in the otherwise empty room. I stiffened. Things had too long been too friendly here; this was my time for being thrown out.

Quite the contrary, he had taken this moment to express concern for my friend. Life's tragedies united people in a larger loyalty, he said. People of every kind. He leaned closer. Americans once helped him greatly; one day he'd explain—but Alyosha was the priority now. Soviet medicine's utter humaneness was a matter of record, but some remedies inevitably outperformed others. Especially with carcinoma, the newest ones couldn't be widely prescribed until they'd been exhaustively tested and, frankly, because of their expense. However, in certain

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clinics, patients died only if nothing on earth could prevent it.

He admired Americans. He knew a certain professor who had saved . . . well, some extremely important people. He couldn't promise anything, but was I willing to give Comrade Aksyonov this chance?

He took my telephone number at the dormitory and volunteered to approach the specialist. Meanwhile, it might be kinder not to arouse my friend by talking of mere possibilities. Good-bye, but hopefully not farewell.

Alone again, I thought of how little I had learned in life. To have judged the chief administrator, the one man who both grasped the scale of the tragedy and was in a position to help, by his homeliness—as if I hadn't had enough examples of saintly souls in scrawny physiques. His only increased my new tenderness toward him.

Alyosha emerged from his session, teasing a nurse about her surer skill in dropping than raising underpants. I drove to lunch at the Hotel Moscow's fifteenth-floor cafe where we'd had our vernal equinox meal. Looking down at the scurrying, scarf-wrapped pedestrians, I felt even higher and happier. All afternoon, I saw him as a patient who had passed his crisis. If I could be the middleman who procured the expertise for his cure, I'd never again feel cheated by Providence. This one break would be enough to explain why I was in Moscow; to justify my existence.

Like commandos cautious not to jinx a raid, we hardly mentioned the operation. The doctors had made clear that this would be the do-or-die assault, for which X-rays were mere preliminary bombardment. Wholly calm on the surface, Alyosha revealed through stress lines across his temples how much he wanted to survive his battle.

For a week, I had my own strain of waiting for the chief administrator's call without telling Alyosha, and of trying to find out why he had disappeared from the clinic after our conversation. Then a two-day hailstorm descended, which seemed to bury forever the queer waiting-room encounter with him. The raising of my hope was no more cruel than the news itself of the cancer in May; the promise of a magic cure no odder than the warnings,

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entreaties and riddles whispered to me last year by an assortment of strangers. All helped stipple the Russian scene with that occasional weirdness I would never be able to fathom. Alyosha and I lived out our strangely peaceful days, with some unhurried work on the kitchen and a meal in an out-of-the-way restaurant to avoid the fuss of being seen at the better places. Evenings, we were at home in candlelight, and some visitors were convinced enough that nothing serious was amiss to complain of the slack entertainment.

At this level, the entire experience of sickness and treatment was an elaborate charade we had undertaken to act out for inexplicable reasons. Or, when confronted by the smell of his charred skin, it was someone's tedious practical joke. How to make real to yourself that your best friend may be mortally ill?

Our reality was based on the opposite premise—and with some cause. The salve worked well on the burns. Much more significant, the "nasties" themselves, as Alyosha called them, had begun responding to the X-rays: the groin lumps and little ulcers that had appeared on his stomach were growing smaller and less painful. He "felt himself up" and chuckled.

"Listen, buddy, you're still a neophyte in thrills. The little buggers have had enough—behold this.^'

I did look, encouraging myself to smile at the uncooperatively indistinct improvement. The London doctor's extreme pessimism, I told myself, had not accounted for Alyosha's strength. Besides, what did I know? I much preferred following his party line, which was stouter than ever. He was going to recover. His life would still be very full. He'd cut back a bit on activity and eliminate the summer trips to soak up his beloved southern sun: his own research had told him that strong ultraviolet rays were a permanent threat. But this was a blessing in disguise. He was sick of the Black Sea anyway; we'd go to the cooler Baltic coast, with its European touches. And take our best friends. "Everybody paired off according to age: Lady Anastasia with 'little dog' Maxi; you and old me."

Such talk usurped any serious discussion of his infirmity. Even if the damn nuisance did exist, which we sometimes actually doubted, the treatment would tame it for unreserved riddance by the operation—the success of which depended largely on his own

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positive attitude. Nothing so insignificant as "crabs" could get the better of him Some days I even detected gratitude for a salutary change of perspective.

"Kismet's taken pity and done for me what I couldn't myself That jostling in the market every day, the skirt-chasing—never a minute to think. What can be better than sitting in your own place with a mute doorbell? When this is over . . ." He never completed the thought, but it was understood the old life was finished.

Meanwhile, his deterioration proceeded in stages. In late September, we had a fragrant spell of "old woman's summer." He'd been scheduled for preoperation rest in the clinic that week, but was so buoyed by the Vermont-like days that "Luxuriant" gave him the time off, except for the treatments. Still unable to think of him as an ordinary patient, she let us drive her home for the sake of his chitchat.

Then we went to a river beach where he used to spend at least a few hours of most summer days before going south. Hundreds of bathing-suited girls were recruited here, but it was even better just to lie on the sand, cherishing the fall sun that built up under our sweaters. Just the two of us—he still looking much younger than his fifty years—shooting the breeze about his Army and my Navy days, next year's hikes together in the Carpathians. The next day we drove to Arkhangelskoye, the former Golitsin manor on the banks of the same Moscow River twenty-five kilometers from the center—far more beautiful, because simpler and more lyrical than any country estate I'd seen in Europe. The new restaurant for foreign tourists there was uncrowded because of the season, and I got Alyosha to eat a full bowl of borscht.

But he slumped when the weather turned. October arrived wet and raw; his protests were mild when he was told it was time for his complete clinic rest. After a week, he was permitted out for a few hours daily. He said he wanted to drive, but soon asked me to take over, joking about himself in terms of the fairy princess who feels the pea through twenty mattresses and twenty featherbeds. His body had begun to hurt "in general."

We took to making our outing in late afternoon; rush-hour traffic lifted his spirits. In mid-October, we came upon the tanks rehearsing for the Revolution Day parade—the spectacle Ana-

I

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stasia and I had blocked out with our kiss. On the way back, I had to stop the car for him to be sick.

When the call came, I had to think for a moment. Before my memory clicked, the chief administrator was apologizing for being away, soothing me like a family friend in a confidential matter. And I felt a current passing between the poles of confidence that this man would fix everything and conviction of his phoniness.

Was I listening? Although things were still in flux, they'd advanced enough to justify a meeting. This was no time to make merry, but "the tongue feeds the head": it was an old Russian custom to eat while talking. And important people had indeed agreed to talk to me. He named a time and place.

The evening was stranger than the sum of its parts: a propitious atmosphere, my optimistic side reckoned, in light of the unorthodoxy of the undertaking itself. Something was wrong somewhere—as it had to be in order for Alyosha to be accorded treatment reserved for the headmen. Someone was lying, as people must to get spare parts through back doors. The very air of dissimulation heightened my anticipation—and queasiness. It was too late when I guessed which feeling was right.

The caviar was in little iced pots at each setting. Seven double portions but six diners: early in the meal, the chief administrator returned from a telephone call to announce that the specialist had been detained. We began without him, attacking a spread of hors d'oeuvres stipulated at receptions for official guests of upper-middle importance. The numbers surprised me more than the luxury: the chief administrator had said nothing about bringing so many staff". The dinner was crowned by Georgian specialties, for we were in a private room of the esteemed Aragvi restaurant, observing the Soviet custom of approaching important business through a banquet.

One of the doctors questioned me about Alyosha's medical history; another took notes. They were far from my kind of Russians, but my kind didn't reach high places. Perhaps they weren't doctors in fact, but some sort of medical administrators, conceivably even attached to the mysterious clinic; but as in so many Soviet situations, it seemed wrong to ask. A new West

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German preparation called "DMSO" was mentioned. I had tried so hard to get it in London that dvukhmetilovaya-okissera, the Russian translation, remained in my mind. If this was one of the prizes, it was worth any unease in this inlaid atmosphere.

"Another drop of the white stuff, young man? Come on, you need to relax." I lifted my glass—kept filled by a team of waiters from a bountiful collection of bottles—to join in their toasts to good-fellowship; and even told a few self-conscious stories myself

No action was taken. It was agreed that Alyosha should be given an exhaustive examination, starting from the very beginning. And that we all must meet again soon—no doubt for further screening of me: the five pairs of eyes were recording my moves like television cameras as we honored the Georgian custom for downing the final glass. Maybe it was the old awe of Americans, even at this level. They were all childishly curious about my life in New York.

Outside, they were exaggeratedly solicitous about how I would make my way back to my dormitory. I said I'd take the metro and they climbed into their cars, obviously amused. At the notion of an American on foot while they were chauffeur-driven? I couldn't decide whether they cared about Alyosha or, at bottom, whether they had been shy or supercilious with me.

"He started by selling flour for something called 'French buns,' later rechristened 'Soviet buns' of course. His father was a serf He made his pile by driving himself more than your ordinary muzhik, not necessarily being smarter. Everybody called him 'granny,' the employees too. It confused me for years; I thought that was his name. ..."

We were parked alongside Young Communist Ponds, a leafy residential corner, while Alyosha was reminiscing. He mentioned his family more often now, although seemingly stopping short of the stories he wanted to tell. Feeling this would come, I withheld my questions.

Again that afternoon, his grandfather intrigued him most: a peasant-turned-landlord who had much in common with the type described by Gorky. A shrewd, sometimes imperious man, extremely indulgent to his sole grandchild and principal heir. Alyosha was raised under his roof and domination.

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His bashful mother had been sent to good schools until she met his future father in an art class. When she disclosed her pregnancy to Grandfather, he thundered that the painter could barely support himself, let alone a wife and child. He gave the young artist a purseful of rubles and a train ticket to Tashkent.

When Alyosha was a year old, his mother heeded the call of letters delivered by a loyal art student as intermediary, and followed her beloved to wild Central Asia. The baby stayed home while she supposedly took the waters, planning to win Grandfather over by returning home married: loving mother and father of the child Granny himself adored. She caught typhoid fever in Tashkent and returned in six months instead of two weeks—to die. Alyosha's Rostov aunt was summoned to help raise him, but he was unmanageable by the age of twelve and grew up largely on Moscow's rowdy streets.

The only person who might have controlled him had also died prematurely. Tough old Granny's ruin was accomplished in stages, starting with the confiscation of most of his property soon after the Revolution, only to have some returned during Lenin's later policy of encouraging small-business private enterprise to revive the country's gasping economy. But Stalin shifted the line again, more violently than ever; those who had been urged to cultivate their own gardens were first to be harvested in Bolshevik baskets. Grandfather paid the punishing taxes, and new collectors knocked. He sold everything, but the assessments only rose and he was dragged to jail for nonpayment. The circumstances of his death were never established. Rumors reached Alyosha that someone had denounced him for hoarding gold and that he was starved in an attempt to make him reveal his nonexistent treasure chest; but the young boy had no way of checking. By the time he became skilled in researching such matters after the war, the records, if they had ever existed, were lost.

"And your grandmother?"

"Took off" with my aunt for her old village where there was more chance to save us. They tried like hell to keep me there and raise me, but of course I ran away."

We were about to drive off" to an early movie when he asked

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me to circle around the back of an apartment building facing the attractive little park where the V^olga had been parked.

"Know what Young Communist Ponds was before?'" he queried.

"Something better." I remembered that he sometimes went out of his way to pass this spot—for the sake, I thought, of its touch of the Russian outdoors.

"It was Patriarchal Ponds. They changed it."

But this was more than the lead to one of his discourses on the renaming of everything evocative in the country. The building we now went out to look at had been the site of one of his grandfather's two hotels. This one, moreover, housed one of the city's best and most rollicking restaurants, an emporium of gypsy girls, lavish-spending merchants and eccentric characters, of suckling pigs and a hundred delectable, now forgotten, native dishes. A veritable microcosm of Old Moscow with private rooms for whoopee and thirty varieties of vodka—and, in fact, it had been featured in an obscure book called Moscow and Muscovites that celebrated the most colorful prerevolutionary haunts.

"They demolished it in 1933. Cost too much to run without Granny; and anyway, it didn't fit in with the new Soviet capital. Had the wrong associations; they stuffed it with dynamite."

Suddenly I realized many things. Alyosha would have been heir to a minor fortune if not for the Revolution: might have been precisely the kind of playboy I used to picture him in California. But until now, he'd never so much as hinted that personal loss played any part in his lampooning of Soviet rule. His complaints of the lackluster and "anti-pleasure principle" of Moscow life never mentioned his grandfather's unwilling contribution to the general sacrifice of merriment and color. Perhaps something in the story shamed him; perhaps only thoughts about life and death—the operation was coming next week— regenerated these memories. In any case, I couldn't ask: telling the story of Grandfather had tired him; he wanted to say no more for the moment.

But I had only begun to think. I felt I was approaching an understanding of how his intelligence and wisdom were related to the sirhple-minded wenching that first attracted me to him. Might his fondness for feeding Moscow's girls be an unconscious

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link to the self-made innkeeper who provided the only model of sturdiness in his fluid childhood? Was that the source, in any case, of his extraordinary energy, rationalism and quickness with figures?

But Granny's persecution reminded me of something I sensed would be even more important when I could place it. It came during the movie: Alyosha was closer to Till Eulenspiegel than the Peck's Bad Boy I used to see in him. Like the German lad's, his wandering adventures had been set going by an inexplicable witch hunt of an innocent Grandfather. Properly interpreted, he and his practical jokes had the makings of a twentieth-century legend. And the fetes, I realized abruptly, were not foolish, but as symbolic of Russia's condition as Pushkin's Feast During the Plague. Alyosha was the sustainer of this tradition.

We drove to the Juridical Consultation Office. Having transferred his best cases, he was waiting for an under-the-table cut from the defense of a former vice-minister's son. Party instructions to the prosecutor made it a fascinating case, but I could only think of the epic of Alyosha and his grandfather. There was much more here than a century of sad, wild and triumphant episodes; even more than one peasant family's turbulent chronicle. It was a potential allegory of national life, since Granny was the ceaselessly enterprising and ambitious kind who would have taken over the country if the Bolshevik cadres hadn't, and under other circumstances, Alyosha too might have been the opposite of a pleasure-seeker.

The rest of the day, I had to keep myself from blurting out that he must write his life story. At last I'd recognized its full importance. It would be a spellbinding saga; just the sketches of his clients alone, the long list of rogues and misfortunates, promised a hundred amazing yarns. Mixed with a record of his own peregrinations, it would tell more about Russia—and whatever The Russian Idea stood for in life, politics and literature—than anything I could think of And he was the man to write it. The structural elegance of his legal briefs, comic fluency of his letters and vividness of his conversation guaranteed a narrative masterpiece with just a bit of effort. All this must not be allowed to die—which was precisely the reason why I couldn't think of a tactful way to put this to him.

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We picked at a snack, lit the candles and settled into chairs. As if he'd been reading my mind, he again began to talk about his grandfather's skills. The old man could predict which peasant produced the best wheat for which millers and bakers; and although hardly aware of it as a child, this expertise, all but forgotten in the country, was now acquiring a strange importance for him. He even had a notion to write about it, and put down a few things about his own life at the same time.

I jumped up to applaud. I'd smuggle out the manuscript, I pressed—and if he could prove his father was Jewish in order to emigrate, the royalties would give him life security abroad. Again and again, I urged him to begin; what I did not say was that if the operation went badly, at least there would be a record of the extraordinary phenomenon he was. But he sensed this too.

"You've got a deal. I've got a baby to give birth to. 'My Issue,' edited and translated by muchacho.''''

The next day passed without the promised start. And the following morning we had to be at the clinic early for an examination by the senior consultant. Trying not to nag, I mentioned the Confessions, as we'd already titled them, as often as I could, suggesting that he begin with the tape recorder. I had the sinking feeling that this would join the hundred projects forgotten in the chase of one more girl, the throwing together of yet another last-minute supper. But this time the failure was more understandable and less admissible. It was too late. Alyosha could continue coasting, but he was too tired for anything of such grand design.

"Yes, I must," he kept saying. "I want to." The next day he talked about pitching in after the operation, when his mind would be freer and he'd need something constructive to fill the boring recovery weeks. I soon dropped the subject until a better time. Reminders only depressed him.

I reread his summer letters to see if they might fit some literary form, but none went beyond banter to reveal the thoughts that now concerned him.

Greetings, Redcoat!

Everyone who gets wind of your rash intention to visit an old buddy here is much taken by the implied loyalty. 'Now

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there's a true friend'—to which I reply that no less of this virtue resides in me, inasmuch as if anything should happen to you, God forbid, I'd want to set out in your direction instantly. Furthermore, I'd even visit you over there without a convincing excuse, no indisposition necessary. . . . True, I won't be able to embark during the coming few days. I'm going for a high on something called cobalt. . . .

On he went to describe the sunglasses needed to consummate our fancy-wrought Hungarian holiday. It seemed to me that everything would be saved if only he could complete his book. But if so, he'd have no need to write it.

The final cobalt treatment was the day after tomorrow.

When our "presurgery soiree" was well started and Alyosha was drinking as he hadn't since May, he began calling his 1950s friends. They arrived within the hour in their new Soviet Fiats: movie producers, theater managers, songwriters waving bottles as they mounted the stairs, like studio stand-ins invited by a Hollywood magnate. Their mistresses swelled the ranks of Erstwhiles, and the intellectual and philosophical thrusts with which they tried to impress the scores of lovelies and themselves brought a touch of a free-wheeling seminar on the state of the arts and the soul to the otherwise sprawling blast. It was so loud that I couldn't make out even our Ray Charles theme song. When the floor space was exhausted, people stood on the stacks of kitchen cabinet plywood. It was one of those parties whose very diversity generates a unified life of its own.

Gradually the presence of two plainclothesmen became felt. They had appeared ostensibly because of the noise, perhaps to investigate why a dozen cars were parked in the courtyard and street.

"What's the excessive revelry. Citizens?"

Suddenly everyone remembered why in fact he was here, and stopped in midmotion. The silence was strained enough to convince the detective that he had uncovered something suspicious. Finally Alyosha himself broke the tension, in his driest deadpan.

"It's a little early this year. Marshal. We're seeing in the Jewish New Year."

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A sense of relief—this was the vintage Alyosha who'd never change—spiked the roar. But having laughed, only a handful of determined merrymakers could forget where Alyosha would be tomorrow. The party slid downhill; within an hour, everybody had self-consciously wished Alyosha merde and left. He roamed the empty room, guzzling last drops from bottles and declaring he didn't give a damn what some fool surgeons found inside him.

The following morning, we drove to the Order of Lenin Infirmary named after S. P. Botkin, a highly reputed clinical hospital in the same cluster of medical institutes. The operation was scheduled for five days from then, after tests, rest and making ready. He was worried where I'd spend the time, and for a moment, talked of calling everything off". If he was going to die—which he didn't believe for a moment—let him, without the damned nuisance of being cut open and laid up. Then he took himself in hand again, reasserting the order-of-the-day optimism.

"Kovo ebat budyem," he said as the hospital appeared, but it came out feebly and he wished he hadn't tried.

The flower vendors outside the new building nettled me with their callousness. Some people will trade on anything. The staff" was more understanding, but politely refused to let me into his ward. We parted quickly and he walked down the corridor swinging my BOAC bag, which contained his overnight things. Proud of it, he was asking a nurse for a hospital gown "of equivalent elan." Anyone who didn't know would have taken him for a peppy man in his prime.

A second Moscow fall is far gloomier than the first. With the novelty exchanged for knowledge of what awaits you, the descent to winter is like the early months of military service. As if for spite, the compensations of snow and frosty air were delayed this year; instead there was rain, rawness and the remorseless trap of grim climatic forces. Environment Determines Consciousness.

The afternoon murkiness was worst. I felt I was being sucked into whatever it was that had retarded certain parts of Europe— Slovakia, Albania, Transylvania—for centuries. My new room looked out on a small railroad depot, full of messy piles of ties and greetings to the Twenty-fourth Party Congress. How could I have thought them quaint on the day I arrived? The same

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slogans leered like cretins from every public room. One more poster, the very next radio program, would snap my nerves.

My new roommate was cut from the cloth of the Party banners: a fine figure of a careerist Young Communist who talked in newspaper language. We had nothing to say to one another. Joe Sourian was gone, together with his magazine- and fun-packed room, which had been like a base canteen for whenever you didn't know what to do with yourself in the dormitory. As if to underline the loss, the Edward who begged Westerners for pity because he informed on them now lived in Joe's old room. I knew none of the new crop of exchange students, nor did I want to in their initial period of mothering by the Embassy.

Forty-eight hours before the operation, when Alyosha was in an isolation ward with radioactive needles doing the final preparation on his ulcers, the suspense and loneliness in my dormitory room crossed some line of tolerance. I called the chief administrator at the institute. Whatever I already suspected about him, there was a possibility he might obtain what he had offered, and I damned the scruples that had made me wait this long.

He tried to make his surprise at hearing from me emerge as delight, then excused himself and promised to call the following morning—which he did. That evening, I went to the second meeting.

It was in a smaller room with fewer hosts and a correspondingly less luxurious table. The atmosphere was even odder. There were occasional mentions of mutual help, but nothing more than hints about any for Alyosha. My health was inquired about, as if I were the purpose of "our consultations." Many of the comments were made with the slightly overquick anticipation of an amateur group performing a whodunit play, and long silences between the lines suggested that my fellow diners were doubling as the murdered corpses. We poured our own vodka. I drank, and felt nothing.

The specialist, they said, was on an extended trip abroad. But cooperation between peoples of good will never depended on a single patient's progress. We could only wait.

The rotting bait of Alyosha's cure killed my appetite. It was

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easy enough to sense I was in something unclean; but not how to pull away. Someone volunteered that Alyosha's present treatment was devilishly expensive, but "of course" The People's State never considered such things. The threat was both preposterous and real: whoever these men were, they surely had some connection with Alyosha's care.

One murmured that everything possible was being done. He may have been a genuine doctor, and ashamed. I was given to understand I should not ask about the chief administrator, who was neither present nor mentioned. The dour man at my left took a persistent interest in where I'd tried to "acquire" the Western medicines Alyosha had asked for. I couldn't specify what trouble this might get us in, but his tone suggested he knew they came from a CIA fund, and I was already developing the facility of weighing my words from every possible angle yet giving the appearance of a simpleton abroad. Instinct told me to talk effusively—and emptily. My long, earnest description of the London clinic's coolness to foreigners was intended to convey a burning desire to damn capitalism's well-known flaws in all my American naivete, while giving me the needed seconds to think what might be dangerous for Alyosha or me. I think my act fooled them but it also dragged me further in. The friendlier I made myself appear in order to ward off" some ominous threat, the more I was their pet.

I kept thinking of the fool I'd been to rekindle their interest by volunteering to meet them again. And I slowly became aware of the man—Bastard—who was going to be my persecutor when this party was over and I'd be alone with him at a series of suppers grim as Goya on war. He said nothing, but his eyes stuck to my skin like leeches, making their blackness felt even when my back was turned. The wart on his cheek was something from an evil dream.

I thrust ahead with long, steady strides, yet made no progress toward his ward, as if I were walking against the current of an airport pedestrian conveyor. The five days of tests and rest, the operation, then four days when I couldn't see him and was told only that he was "as expected." Four days when I actually began writing a scholarly article because nothing else would kill the

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time. And no trick in the book of special pleas made any impression on the hospital staff.

But their permission this morning was a good sign. Postsurgical patients could ordinarily be seen only by their immediate family; this exception for me wouldn't have come if things had gone poorly for him. He was just at the end of this shiny corridor, if I could ever reach it. The thousand things I had to tell him all came down to two or three. The operation had to work; all alternatives were unthinkable.

I reached the ward. It was clean, uncrowded, reassuringly antiseptic-smelling. But the forms languishing on its beds broke my hope like kindling. I knew I was crossing the Styx.

Most patients retained too little strength to scream and could only join a chorus of moans, one relieving the other to keep the sound constant while the first gasped for breath. Was Alyosha somewhere among these tortured mutilations? He'd strolled down the corridor just over a week ago, waving. Whatever was festering inside him, and aside from the X-ray burns and occasional nausea, he had nothing in common with them.

Something kept me going. It was my first look at a cancer surgery ward, in Russia or anywhere else. I remembered Tolstoy's sketches of the Crimean War wounded. Part of me wanted to swap bodies with him, another part to accept that all was finished and to run. Then I saw it. Gazing toward the ceiling, the yellow copy of his face with a blankness in place of his spark. All the theory, plans and logic on which we'd lived since my return burned in one searing instant, like a strip of magnesium.

I took a breath and said his name. During the long minute between his accomplishing a turn of his head when he heard me and forcing something through his teeth, I welled up with guilt for having disturbed him. He had to repeat himself because I couldn't decipher his mumble.

"Hello muchacho . . . place to sit down."

The nurse had said that since the anesthetic had worn off his pain was "fairly bad." I was afraid of being sick.

His eyes tried to smile. They were the same, but looked very different, like the headlights of a wreck, still on after a hideous highway accident—because everything else had degenerated. He

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was encased in bandages from ankles to waist and had to lie in a persecuting scrunch designed for recovery from his operation. But it was his moisture of weakness when I bent down to kiss him that told me he would never again be the Alyosha all Moscow knew, even for the time it took to deliver a single punch line.

His face had shrunk and his mouth had begun to sink, giving him an eerie resemblance to his faintly Neanderthal Rostov aunt. The overnight aging of some men who long looked much younger than their years was only part of his transformation. He had become decrepit.

I remembered the young internist who had originally rushed him to the Advanced Training Institute. Leaving the apartment after a visit in September, he broke down under my wheedling and divulged his personal prognosis: that the cancer was furiously malignant and had already spread to some internal organs; only Alyosha's constitution was keeping him on his feet. And the operation? I pressed. In one chance in a million, it would help. Otherwise, it would weaken him—and spread the metastases even faster through his system. Then he, the brainy little Jewish boy who loved Alyosha, repeated almost word for word the advice of the upper-class London consultant who had urged me to "help the patient prepare for death" instead of writing the prescriptions Alyosha needed. The Englishman had straightened his Bond Street cuff, whereas Alyosha's friend broke down with me. "I'm only a doctor," he said, his face turning to baby's blubber. But both specialists feared the operation would only shorten his life. And they were right.

All this I knew before Alyosha and I exchanged a sentence. And he knew I knew. But he was also deeply grateful to see me—all the more because he hadn't suspected I could talk my way into his ward. As if it represented some important sacrifice, he asked if I could stay until the nurse told me otherwise. But well before this, he went silent: he was too weak to talk.

The staff allowed me in every day. They were the only Russians I'd ever met who were embarrassed by little gifts—not to be confused with bribes, because they wanted to help. And the flower vendors I'd earlier condemned seemed to be performing a noble service; all the more because I stopped bringing delicacies,

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which, lying uneaten on his Httle table, turned to the wrong kind of symbols. Besides, he was surprisingly fond of "posies," as if in compensation for his loss of appetite. Like a child waiting for a present from parents returning home, he looked toward my hands as I entered.

Bastard was a caricature of his service. All the general talk and specific stories I'd heard suggested that many KGB officers were above average in looks, intelligence and education. Masha's lover in Perm, a feckless Yalta agent who became Alyosha's friend after being tossed out for drinking—a fair share of essentially decent blokes filled the modern ranks. Chingiz once mentioned that the KGB boss of a Volga town where he worked was the most enlightened man for miles. Nothing more significant than bad luck stuck me with my repulsive hack. I kept hoping for a substitute.

The first impression he conveyed when on his own was of malevolence trying to pass for self-importance. He was permanently angry—at his own physique, if nothing better was handy; at nature's mistake in assigning a janitor's countenance to a Big Man.

Next I noticed his leer, which exposed his jaundiced resentment of me under attempted congeniality. Envy of my height, my shirt, my freedom—everything. His bile was so sour and his cover pose so weak that whatever they were supposed to be saying, his every word and gesture in fact proclaimed his relish for exercising power over me. Once he came right out and said it, pointing up to a radiator grill above our table.

"Supposing our conversations here are being recorded, what of it? We've got nothing to be ashamed of This is a cozy supper with honest heart-to-heart talk among friends. Now let's drink to your health and happiness, which is all that really counts."

To his bosses monitoring the tapes, the greasy sham of revealing "confidences" would broadcast as a standard feint to put a prey at ease. But Bastard's larger purpose was to gloat that he not only had me imprisoned but could toy with me like a laboratory animal. And I had to pretend I understood nothing, for that was the role I'd got myself into—and feared to change, lest he explode and get at Alyosha by expelling me. All pretense

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about helping Alyosha had been abandoned, but my personal keeper clearly had the power at least to recommend expulsion to those who decreed it. Besides, playing simpleminded seemed the best way of saying too little for use if they doctored the tapes. So I sat there, faking gullibility and controlling my revulsion at his skull, which gleamed below the chandelier like Repin's painting of semi-Mongolian tribesmen petitioning the Turkish sultan.

"You're no child any more. What's this drifting around, the trying to 'find yourself flimflam? Your parents know better. A hippie is a weakling." . . .

"I'll tell you frankly, not everyone trusts you. An American with wide circles of rootless "friends"—-the facts indicate cultivation of useful contacts. There was that incident with a nitwit called . . . Chingiz—firing his follies, preaching antisocialism. Some dire mistakes have to be made up for." . . .

"You're not eating. Taste these mushrooms; go on, try them. And learn to relax. Forget my official position; I'm here as your friend. I left my work at the office just so we could enjoy ourselves." . . .

"The escapades with that 'medical student.' Tailing her around, convincing my colleagues of your intelligence background. And your orgies! University officials wanted to expel you; they argued you were no student at all. Only came here to besmirch socialist morality, violate Soviet rules. People wanted to make an example of you with a newspaper expose. But I laid myself on the line to postpone it, because / think there's good in you somewhere . . ."

His lips were oily with the pleasure of both the expense-account caviar and of kicking the boot of his lies in my face. The waiter knocked and cleared the table to Bastard's self-satisfied command, glancing in curiosity at the guest in this special room, and at Bastard to demonstrate deference. This was my introduction to the intimate delights of restaurant rooms for two about which I'd often read—while Alyosha languished alone.

"I enjoy life now. I suppose you think it's not worth much to live in this condition. I can only say it doesn't work that way."

Alyosha's goal was "two or three more years of this," and he was now urging me outright to stay for this period. He had

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recovered his senses and was trying to accommodate them to the new circumstances.

"It's the first time I understand the main things: how good it is to Hve in general, as opposed to Hving 'well.' To breathe, see the patterns in the ceiling—you fill up with happiness. I'm glad if I'm down for a thousand days or so just looking around."

I made up my mind. I'd stay with him, whatever I'd have to take from Bastard. The doctors now looked away when I asked, but it was clear enough that two or three years was the outside guess.

"You haven't mentioned our get-togethers to Alyosha?"

"Why should I?"

"That's good. Why worry him? Very good. He has his own problems."

Bastard's use of the diminutive "Alyosha" was more repulsive even than his calling me "tu." But I hadn't mentioned him to anyone else; for once I could tell him the unequivocal truth. Meanwhile, the softening-up continued in all its rawness.

"I'll tell you straight, your chatter about 'not getting involved with politics' isn't worthy of you. Everything is political; you're not a baby or coward to pretend you can stand aside from mankind's struggle. Evasion puts you in the ranks of reaction. . . . You claim you're for peace, not any one ideology. But you have to fight for peace. It's time to prove your manhood. Show us where you stand by doing something for peace." . . .

"You can't live on a student stipend all your life. A man's nothing without money in his pocket. I tell my friends you're growing up and starting to think about your dignity and your wallet." . . .

"Law number one is that all states serve class interests only. The difference is we're a Peoples' State, while certain others are armed agencies of monopoly capital. No American worker ever got a fair trial. Thousands of innocent students rot in jail for refusing to join Saigon's exploitative massacre. That kind of trampling on justice, the terrible curbs on free expression, can't exist in the genuine democracy of a People's State. Your own passport is not valid for travel to China or Albania—that's what you call freedom? The FBI has powers over every American that

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our Constitution and citizens wouldn't stand for. Besides, we're an agency of peace, working for everyone's freedom." . . .

"This girl stuff of yours—/ don't mind, but it behooves you to behave decorously. The Soviet people feel strongly about cleansing their society of perversions. And why advertise your weaknesses? I want to protect you against anyone who might try to exploit them."

"Be more discreet, let people know you're a serious person. With your own FBI and CIA too—don't give them a lever on you through childish excesses. What good is signing useless protests against the Vietnamese war—which only get you on a list, spoiling your chance for real peace work. Criticizing your own government, even to Russian students, is ill-advised for you. You don't want your officials to suspect you're not a loyal American."