He assured me that American agents in London had instructed me to return for the additional semester here, holding myself "in readiness." And explained the "real" workings of American society for me from the vantage point of his Lubyanka office. But it was his personal advice that made me feel contaminated, as if a weevil grub had crawled inside me to tell me what to do in life.
The excruciating pains lasted two weeks. Parts of his rectum had been removed, adding the humiliation of tube defecation to the pure physical anguish. Sedation provided the only intervals of relief from the burning, stinging and stabbing of his "giblets," as he tried to joke. His old blondie doctor, who was no longer looking after his case, told me that the location of the trouble put him near the top of the patients' agony list.
Some days it was easier to bear than I had feared. After all, this was the very worst that could happen and the world hadn't collapsed; we were somehow living through it. Other days, it was only part of the nightmare to call his suffering "life." I swigged at a bottle before visiting him.
Apart from twitching and writhing, he hadn't moved from the tormenting recovery position. Then the bandages were removed, providing release and the first psychological lift, which the convalescent timetable—he was scheduled to get to his feet in
Gold Medal^387
one more week—marginally reinforced. A tinge of color worked its way into his cheeks as he jested again, feebly.
"The entire Soviet people is toiling day and night to give labor presents to Our Party's historic Twenty-fourth Congress. This ill-timed indisposition prevents me from raising my personal production targets, but that's a mere glancing blow to my morale."
He'd asked that the crutches be brought early and liked to grip the handles, urging me, meanwhile, to procure some Rolling Stones records so we could flog them and live "a little wide" after the hospital. "You know my weakness for fine music," he said to disguise our trading intentions from an imaginary microphone under the bed—and also to convince us that he was going to have at least a period of non-invalid living.
"Toddle-dee day" was seventy-two hours away. All our outlook had adjusted to the "two or three more years." Then I entered the ward on a sunny morning and the terror on his face struck me even harder than his ghastliness after the operation.
"Look at this," he said like a pupil in a reading class. "See what is happening to me."
He opened his gown. His chill fingers guided mine. A new net of knots had appeared in his right armpit, and the lump on his neck was prominent enough to make out without touching.
I saw tears in his eyes: despair prying loose his party line as a killer wrenches his victim's hands from a window ledge. Nothing was going according to plan; the notion of even temporary recovery was a sham. He was back to May, when he first confirmed the doom of "cancer"—and again his courage briefly lapsed. He broke down and sobbed, grasping my hand, then pushing it away and turning over so that only our old mascot nose, which was becoming grotesque in comparison with the puckered rest of him, was visible. When he rolled back to see where I was, I read the terrible thoughts, the most dreadful prospect, in his eyes. There was nothing to do but to hold him, repeating my palliative phrases.
He recovered from this the same afternoon but remained dazed. He was in a bad dream, he said. He couldn't believe it could drag on so long without a cure. The law of probabilities said a lick of good luck had to slip into this year's run of punk.
388^MOSCOW FAREWELL
The next day he settled into something between extreme pessimism and his fancy that the encumbrance would somehow disappear. "Recovery is like a horizon that recedes as I approach it," he said. "You've traveled more than I have soyou dope it out: should I make haste or loiter?"
I knew that not answering Bastard's calls would only provoke him and that he would keep pestering me until I did. Even if his men weren't following me that day, there was nowhere I could say I'd been to explain an absence of more than several. hours. No hiding place from his advances, I thought to myself as I trudged toward one of the dormitory booths.
I picked up the telephone, picturing his smirk at the other end. He expressed his satisfaction in trapping me for another evening by breathing into the receiver before speaking.
"How's every little thing with my favorite student?"
The very unctuousness of the greeting was calculated to taunt me through demonstration of his control of my time. Sometimes he would ask where I'd been the previous evening, and if I said "a movie" he'd name the one, "casually" recommending I see it one day. Or feign surprise in a way that made it plain he had known all along and was establishing for the nth time that he had ways of checking my every movement. Nevertheless, the sting of his own repugnance spoiled his triumphant moment of delivering the invitational command. Despite everything, he was afraid he might be slighted, that I might refuse him. He was caught in the perversion of performing the very actions that made him most hateful.
"You've been losing weight," he drawled into the receiver held tight to his mouth. "Nothing you can do just sitting at the bedside: I'll take you someplace for a bit of a nibble."
The same canting generosity; the clumsy fraudulence of concern for my health, while the picture of his crapulous feeding on KGB funds during Alyosha's crisis brought bile to my throat. For the first time, I made a serious effort not to go. I wasn't feeling very well, I said, with the conviction of the truth.
His tone was transformed. Whenever he suspected I underestimated his power over me, he switched instantly from the fatherly policeman to the mean one, eager to punch.
Gold Medal^389
"Don't play the prima donna with me. It's now five-thirty. Be there at seven o'clock."
The "somewhere" we went for "a bit of a nibble"—he invariably used the same laboredly coy phrases—was the Aragvi. There was still a slim chance for reprieve. Twice previously, he had called back at the last moment to cancel, emphasizing his importance as an agent summoned to something more urgent, and underlining his mysteriousness. He thought it enhanced his prominence to tell me nothing whatever about himself and would smile his pretension to a significant smile when, for distraction, I asked whether he'd ever visited Leningrad. Or would turn the question around, urging me to tell him what / ought to about my travels. My every personal question—his taste in Black Sea resorts, which newspaper he preferred—was an insidious attempt to crack his identity, and while it sometimes seemed prudent to ply him with precisely these queries to kill time and flatter his self-importance, there was the opposite danger he would take them seriously as evidence that I was coached by the CIA.
But I did know he worked in Lubyanka, not only through his hints—this fact made him seem important and threatening enough to be exempted from his strict secretiveness—but by seeing his black car there one afternoon with the license I remembered. I also knew that his name was not the Evgeny Ivanovich Rastuzov he supplied. Hoping to cancel once, I called the emergency number he had given me for office hours. The three-minute failure at the other end to recognize his pseudonym and amateurish whispering with a hand over the receiver were enough to convince an adolescent television detective of its phoniness.
I also assumed he worked where he logically should have, in Lubyanka's department for resident Americans. Occasionally he disclosed knowledge of a genuine fact about America—a state capital, the senatorial term of election—that had probably been imparted in a background course for junior agents. He was proud enough of this too to breach his own silence with it; even to utter such phrases as "crime rate" and "drop out" in English. But resentment of my more fluent Russian curbed his desire to display his feeble linguistic skill.
390.^MOSCOW FAREWELL
I waited for the reprieve until the last possible minute, then hurried uphill from the metro station, pushing through Gorky Street's evening crowd: he was always worse when I arrived late. Mingling in the line outside the entrance, I enjoyed my last free frosty seconds until he saw me through the glass of the door, grinning a snake's welcome as he motioned to the doorman to admit me.
His greeting chimed with delighted surprise, as if the recent telephone summons had never been. Lifting his stubby arms to help me with my coat, he moved as he thought a kingpin should—and smugly, because this fake gesture at playing gracious host was his notion of irony to remind me of who in fact was master. In the rush I had forgotten to remove my brass-buckled belt, at which he scowled. Before I learned to dress down, he resented my pastels more than anything. His bully's flush bloomed at the provocation of my pink shirt, which humiliated him while defiling Moscow. A thousand old fogies in Viennese cafes couldn't have hated a thousand hippies more.
He was in his evening suit, darker than his office one but of the same boxy cut. However, the tie blocked tight into the white nylon collar most clearly identified him and what he represented. He stuck to the skinny black band out of fear to be seen by his masters in a colorful Western one. It was his badge of loyalty to Marxism-Leninism and to the Soviet system that galled him: the tyranny that made him what he was also kept him from being the smart detective he longed to be. The GUM garment symbolized the petty gangsters who do the dictatorship's menial work yet can't get the pickings—the Broadway cravats—they crave.
"Shall we partake of some refreshment?"
And his cheek wart! The bartender's mien that kept him even from fantasizing about himself as he wanted! He strode down the corridor toward our room, his aversion for his physical self and itch to lash out at others tensing his fists. He disliked walking in front of me for the vantage point it gave me to look down on his bald spot, but couldn't let me go first because he always had to lead the way. I pictured myself sneaking off but hiding close enough to enjoy his expression when he wheeled around to no one following.
Gold Medal^391
Paneled in walnut, the room was just big enough for two or three diners. Bastard felt better when the door was closed and he could assume his role without the interference of outsiders who elbowed him aside until shown the card in his wallet. He pointed to my customary chair. The table had been laid out in advance with the usual bottles and hors d'oeuvres, but the main course wasn't yet chosen because it was part of his pleasure to order for me.
"You look in the mood for something adventurous. Shashlik Caucasus-style?" (He almost always selected shashlik.) "Tell you what—make it two. It's not every day we can do the town together."
The waiter glanced at me to wonder whether I'd caught on or was still the dupe being led to slaughter. As always, Bastard chose the best Georgian red. He was much more a vodka than a wine man, but his greatest satisfaction seemed to come from the thought of the rich free feed than from the actual food or drink. Whatever else it was too, an Aragvi supper was the peak of Moscow's good life, and he reveled in it, fork spearing red cabbage, fingers splotched with the cold chicken's cream sauce. He had ordered enough for three—with the usual two half-liters of "vodka-kins"—but methodically cleaned the plates. A third of his bottle disappeared in ten minutes, and his face was florid with the gratification of a feast on a cold night.
"What's this disrespect for the savories? The salami's particularly recommended; give me your plate."
I said I was off^my form, trying to repeat the words I'd used on the telephone. Excuses sometimes annoyed him, but he let this one pass, merely repeating his supposed peasant saying about the medicinal powers of "the little darling white liquid."
Th'=' trick was to take token sips of the vodka, spilling an equal amount into my napkin: he had a weak sense of smell. He probably wasn't trying to get me drunk—it would have been easy enough to slip something into my glass, after all—but simply make me join his overindulgence as part of my fealty. At some level, he knew that the sight of him masticating made me queasy, even when I fought for my honor and my stomach by trying not to eat. . . . My other dodge was to talk enthusiastically about something that might delay his importuning. The weather—but
392^MOSCOW FAREWELL
not the Russian winter, for that would give him a lead for his sermon about my affection for, and duties to, the Russian people. What I'd been doing since our last meeting—but nothing about the hospital to avoid his hypocritical questions about Alyosha. Something neutral in the news.
He finished the last of the hors d'oeuvres and tossed back more vodka. Two more hours—he liked to leave at ten o'clock—and nothing nasty so far: my luck was holding. He permitted the waiter to serve the shashlik and pronounced himself satisfied with its preparation.
Then I made my first mistake. Bastard's "g's" for "kh's" and backwoods "o's" were unmistakable signs of a cracker upbringing: something else to be ashamed of This is what I failed to register when, to keep fending him off", I asked what part of the country he hailed from. He glowered at me for my impudence, his guard up like the dukes of a beery brawler.
"And what makes you think I wasn't brought up in Moscow?"
I was making no such assumption at all, I said; it had been a figure of speech. Still smoldering at the implied slur to his social standing, he remembered why we were here and bore down on me about my debt to the Soviet people—through him—for indulgences to Alyosha and me.
To feed his ego, I feigned disappointment not to have learned the origins of this masterful incognito operative; to make him feel smarter, I pretended be be in awe of his keen mind and Kremlin connections. Consumed by curiosity about all he couldn't reveal, I could not quite grasp his hints about the responsibility of a "true friend" to Russia. . . . Falling back on these standard defenses, I heard an echo of Alyosha's quip about sharpening the brains of the nation by "playing dumber than our sleuths."
The sleepiness of food and drink dissolved his veneer of artfully guiding the conversation. Patience gone, he snarled at the waiter and leaned his face across the table, inches from mine. Now each minute dragged like a speech to the Presidium. I had to convince him he was making progress with me, which would eventually penetrate my obtuseness and lead to what he wanted. The only way to do it, keeping clear of politics, was to talk about myself, emphasizing my self-doubts to show him how naively honest I was, how much I trusted him. Rikki-tikki-tavi came to mind and
Gold Medals393
I tried to remember whether it was the mongoose or cobra who owned Bastard's hypnotizing eyes.
The sounds of boisterous good times in the main hall faintly penetrated the door. Russians celebrating with the usual abandon, Georgians singing their clannish songs, Western tourists enamored of their artlessness, as I once was. I sweated and stole a glance at his watch. I even profaned my feelings for Alyosha by talking about them to consume another quarter hour. The tactics worked in the sense that he was satisfied with the evening's reapings but only through the humiliation of opening more of myself to him, and supplying more to be used against me next time. Parry, cover up, pretend to forget . . .
He ordered his favorite pastry. The worst was over: he always ended on a lighthearted note, with which the next invitation was supposed to harmonize. My response to his attempted joke about a haircut for me pleased him. What prompted my chuckle was in fact a memory of calling him "Doctor" during our first meetings.
Walking down the corridor, we passed the closed doors of six or seven small private rooms like ours. Bastard sighed. In a mellow mood now, he helped me with my coat and tipped the old cloakroom attendant handsomely for his bow. Outside the driver, who'd been waiting the three hours, scrambled to open both doors for us, but Bastard never pressed his offer to drive me home. I was grateful for the small mercy.
He removed a glove and squeezed my hand with a show of intimacy.
"What are your plans for tomorrow? Oh yes? Have fun, we've opened this country to you to show our trust. But remember your goal is establishing yourself."
I walked the whole way to the apartment. Spooky in the yellow of the swaying streetlamps, nighttime Moscow was both cruel and comforting for its assurance that "nothing can be done about it." I thought of Alyosha and Bastard urging me to stay; of Alyosha, even now, enjoying my hair after a shampoo and Bastard hating me for it. Maxi watched while I sandpapered the kitchen cabinets.
More surgery was immediately scheduled, to be followed by a third series of cobalt treatments. Alyosha submitted without
394^MOSCOW FAREWELL
interest. The declaration "To prevent further metastases" turned his head awry, as if it wanted to escape from his body.
The day before the second operation, he asked me to help him with his bath. I arrived early and wheeled him to the bathroom. When he undressed, I had my first acquaintance with the horror accompanying the tragedy. The incisions of the first operation were still unhealed. They had had to be reopened when the stitches were removed to drain lymphatic liquids gathering there. The effect of the radiation on the surrounding tissue prevented the clefts from knitting.
I had feared this moment since I first saw him mummy-like in the bandages. And the wounds were indeed fearful, but only momentarily, until my eyes did what was necessary to move to the greater awfulness of his groin. Three-inch cavities stared at me from both sides, like a revolting joke about the green eye of gangrene. The bottom of the hollows was raw meat, covered by blotches of puss.
I straightened up. A smell that I could hardly believe came from a living body was eating into my nostrils. "Sorry, old man," he apologized. "It's really rotten."
But the worst was what he as a whole had become. A desiccated, tormented body, hunched under the weight of his head. My sadness came in the Russian word gorye, with its connotations of human frailty and limitless hurt.
I washed what I could of him and shared his noontime soup. We talked about the time he had produced two pairs of roller skates and we whizzed down the whole of Gorky Street, dodging pedestrians and incredulous traffic cops. "I didn't want to grow up," he said. "Into what? 'Je ne regrette rien'—but you can do better."
"So while we're the vanguard of the proletariat, we simultaneously defend the interests of civilization as a whole. We represent the toiling masses and mankind's future; that's what real men want to serve."
He had started the dunning earlier this evening. Perhaps his bosses had told him to speed things up. I wished I could remember their faces at the group dinners: Bastard surely planned nothing on his own. But that was a diversion. There
Gold Medal^395
were a hundred and forty minutes to go, and I had to think of something embarrassing but unexploitable to confess, without making any sHps that might contradict my half-truths of last time.
The second operation caused less relative damage because Alyosha was too feeble for drastic decline. It only made a very sick man sicker, which was less shocking and more exhausting.
The hope was correspondingly shorter, for his thighs had new lesions within two weeks. The doctors theorized that the star-tlingly rapid spreading might somehow be driven by the same remarkable vigor that was keeping the patient alive. Alyosha's cancer was in the image of himself This probably meant little in terms of life expectancy, since the two forces would tend to cancel each other out, but it made the battle and pain exceptional. Yet the nurses still heard no more than an occasional gasp from him.
Not fortitude for its own sake moved him, but a desire to salvage something worthwhile of his remaining time. He stopped talking about the two or three years, transferring all his expectations to a final spring we'd enjoy together. Meanwhile, he wanted to read— Cancer Ward first. I brought him a copy of a pocket edition, convenient for sneaking past customs guards. Early the next morning, he was three-quarters through the long text; I realized he must have read most of the night. He was holding up the outlawed novel to the light, a photograph of triumphant factory smokestacks on the newspaper bookcover he'd made to avert questions. Two thin arms propping up the five-ounce volume as if it were a dictionary: this was Alyosha in his own cancer ward, devouring the account of patients in the other one facing their approaching deaths. I waited in the doorway, grateful that his concentration was undisturbed by the tiny print and the pain.
The brainstorm struck as he was greedily spooning the last of the caviar-chik, but I held back to polish the details. First let him know how impressed I was by his last lecture about the inevitable triumph of the world working class. Then keep a straight face when I came out with it, in my searching-for-the-truth-under-his-guidance voice.
396^MOSCOW FAREWELL
"Evgeny Ivanovich, I'm all confused. History says the Revolution will win in the end, but is this the right moment for a new popular front in France?"
And finally knit my brows in earnest interest as he dragged himself from his morsels, wiped his fingers into a napkin and undertook to reply.
He couldn't refuse. The same microphone that plagued me was keeping a check on him, and failure to answer well in terms of the current line might alert his bosses to his political unpreparedness. Nor could he vent his anger on me: the question, after all, seemed prompted by the success of his own indoctrination of me. Here was I, expressing an interest in the advance of the Communist movement, revealing a secret desire to be on the winning side!
But he, of course, didn't give a damn about France as a whole, let alone its stupid working class. He stared in frustration and disgust at this American punk with his idiotic curiosity. Hating the goddam Frogs, sweating over his ignorance of European politics, angrily suspicious, despite everything, that I had trapped him, he offered a rambling, incoherent "analysis" of French Communist intentions. In the end, he was so tangled in his doubletalk that he could only mumble, then half-shout, that our job was to leave the ideological challenges to the Party experts.
"Don't you worry, we've got lots of them—the best. They don't make mistakes."
I watched him squirm, surprised I could enjoy my little triumph. Its best part was the twenty minutes I'd managed to kill. Next time, I'd ask him about socialism in China and hear him gnash his teeth. Pavlov confirmed!
When it reached the lungs, neither X-rays nor surgery could be used. The last resort was chemotherapy. Somewhere I heard that it worked in sixteen per cent of such cases.
Rumors weaved their way through his ward: a miraculous new Swiss substance. West German ampules, an experimental Japanese pill. . . . Cursing myself for not having tried harder in London, I put a call through to the Royal Institute consultant I'd seen. He was abroad, and the man who took the call understood
Gold MedalX397
neither who I was nor what I wanted from Moscow. The American Embassy doctor, a bland last-straw, knew less about intestinal cancer than I did at this point. Abruptly, I remembered how Bastard entered my life. Perhaps there was a VIP clinic somewhere in the country—in which case it was only a tremolo to our curse.
The old Alyosha would have flirted and probed his way to the source of the rumors in a morning. His shadow waved a hand to indicate I shouldn't bother. He no longer believed in cure. The X-rays, operations, false leads had been a grand illusion to mask the theft of his numbered months. Although he had come to terms even with this, further effort would be "a profanation." He wanted only to keep free of escapism and to live until New Year's Eve, his champion holiday. To see the new year in together would be a fine finish and a portent of good luck. We'd celebrate in fitting style, at the Sovietskaya, where he first invited me to join his party for the actress and models. I placed a deposit on a table.
And passed on his attitude to the doctors in case he was unable to make himself clear. They agreed that the operations might better have never been performed; but medicine could not work in hindsight, only on judgment of what seemed best at the time. Now as then, their obligation was to continue pursuing every available means.
They were going to try an extremely powerful drug, used when other treatments fail. Perhaps because of my intercession, I was told he could not have visitors during the first two days. This was going to be so hard for him that I said nothing about it. On the third morning, I was ushered directly into an atmosphere tenser than ever before. He had been so weak, I was told, that he collapsed after the second injection and was heart massaged back from clinical death.
He himself knew nothing of this until later, but thought he'd been under sedation. His dreams were so compelling, he said, that he resented waking up. The cough that had been bothering him for weeks was now a steady series of salvos convulsing his body and threatening to burst his lungs. I tried reading to him, but my mistakes in Russian seemed to worsen the hacking and I let him doze.
398^MOSCOW FAREWELL
When Bastard got to the message for which he'd been preparing me—for which his entire operation had been mounted—I almost enjoyed another forbidden laugh. I knew perfectly well, he enlightened me, that I had invested too much in learning Russia's language and ways to waste by shifting to something else. Yes, and loved it too much; my heart would always be here. But neither sacrifice was necessary: I could settle in Moscow with my friends and my interests and earn the livelihood that would make me a real man. Never mind that my research had flagged; I wasn't cut out for scholarship anyway. My real interest was life itself, not egghead books. And he had convinced his colleagues to make everything possible by not opposing my presence in the capital.
"You'll always be welcome. Doors shut tight to other foreigners will open to you. Because we've come to like you. . . ."
What I must do, he confided, is return home after the semester and get a job that would quickly send me back. Become a Moscow correspondent or join the diplomatic service; I was free to choose the best path for myself, and once here they would provide me with information to advance me further. And as a full-fledged member of Moscow's American community, I'd be party to Embassy talk—precisely the "real life" he'd just mentioned. It went without saying that I would want to tell him about plans to wound or slander the Russia I loved.
"It's what you've always wanted as a person searching for himself through truth. Don't think I'd dream of asking you to perform espionage. We stand on the principle that you must do nothing against your own conscience—yes, and it's exactly the scheming that violates your conscience you'll want to discuss with people you trust. You can help us be sure of who is our friend and who isn't. Because a huge spy network is plotting against us here. . . ."
To the extent that the crudeness exceeded my expectation, I was relieved. The trick now was to avoid undertaking the smallest errand for him, which would lead to instant blackmail, yet not to prompt their revenge by refusing: more than ever, my job was to stay with Alyosha. Thank God, I'd begin with a week or more of clear sailing. I'd tell him I needed at least that much
Gold Medals399
time to think, and ask for a copy of the Twenty-fourth Congress's declarations on how the Party is pursuing its goal of world peace.
Word had gone around. Well-wishers came regularly, the new ones with the apprehensiveness of first visits to a cancer clinic. They sat briefly at his bedside, trying to cheer him up with snippets of news, or, if he was dozing, peeked from the corridor and talked to me about the incredibility of what was happening, with reminiscences about escapades with him to prove this point.
Most were happy to leave quickly, either not to tire him or to escape his coughing. Some said silly, self-serving things, such as reminding him of some favor they had performed in the business of acquiring him cloth for a suit or a reservation in a hotel room. Many fought not to disturb him by crying.
The mainstays were from the eclectric collection—the Ilyas, Ediks, Lev Davidovichs—he'd seen most often during the past four or five years. But some of the cultural achievers present at the preoperation soiree also came, as well as former clients he'd assumed, as he sometimes quipped on their way out, were still in the clink. And a smattering of Erstwhiles bearing touching, useless gifts.
And his former wife, who came twice a week since I first brought her at his request, and was less pleasant than I'd imagined from our brief meetings last winter. I wondered why he had taken such pains to continue seeing her all these years. Keeping her new husband away, she spoke of herself as Alyosha's closest living relative, a weakly disguised hint about inheritance, accompanied by eyes on the Volga.
Anastasia had been coming when I wasn't there. Ever since my plane touched down in September, the knowledge that I was near her again—that she was still here, in this closed world and within my reach—was my comfort as I tried to comfort Alyosha. Alek came by to apologize for his London behavior and to tell me of Anastasia's parting from the professor. I sensed we would start almost anew when we met again, for something had happened to make me want to know her, and not my dreams about us.
But we could not talk about our future during his ordeal; and to avert my old tendency to play a noble role, I did not want her
400^ MOSCOW FAREWELL
to see me at his side. We cooperated by avoiding each other, until I caught sight of her leaving the building one evening, her head hung, her hat askew. I remembered the hiding behind tree trunks to spy on her, and she looked up just then as if she'd known I was there. We smiled, perceived the importance of our forthcoming meeting, nodded. Everything took a long time, as though we were moving through water, whose current bore her off to a street on my right.
Still feeling obliged to try, the doctors asked the chief chemotherapist of the prestigious Blokhin Institute to examine Alyosha personally. The day before his appointment, I entered the ward to see him sitting up in bed.
"Give me your hand." The absence of greeting revealed how impatiently he had been waiting for me.
His ribs were like the struts of a Japanese lantern. On the damp skin stretched across the middle ones, I felt a lump the size of a meat ball. I wasn't startled, because I had noticed it two days before when shifting him to a more comfortable position.
"It's all over," he said, settling back into the pillow. "Nature taking its course." In the next minute I felt him making his peace not with his fate as before, but with death itself He was utterly calm.
"It might not be so bad," I ventured weakly.
"Oh, muchacho, I don't need that.''^
Silently, he showed me more lumps on his back and stomach, then broke into a grin like the limey POWs photographed when first catching sight of liberating British troops.
"What are we waiting for? Time to vacate the premises."
He knew that some terminal patients were allowed out and resented losing a single extra hour to bureaucratic delay. Home beckoned so powerfully that strength returned for plying me to get him discharged. But I hesitated about leaving medicine's keeping.
"It's going to be harder if I have to be cute with you too," he said impatiently. "I understand you think it strange, but I know everything and am prepared for everything. Let me go out with a memory of real life, as opposed to this hospital imitation."
Feeling I had no further duty to encourage him with
Gold MedaIX401
treatment, I argued his case to the doctors, who met informally the same afternoon and concurred that keeping him against his wishes served no purpose. The last X-rays had shown large voids in his lungs, and the disease was still spreading "as if it had something against him." The tricky question was who was going to look after him, but despite the extreme irregularity, I convinced them to accept me. I fetched his ex-wife, who still bore the name Aksyonova, despite her remarriage. It was agreed he be signed out to her official care, while the nursing procedures were explained to me.
I hurriedly packed his things. The doctors said that curative measures could be resumed at home in two weeks, but Alyosha did not need this pretense either. He thanked them warmly, each with a personal mention of what they did best. They slumped, as if not thoroughly used to this. The final examination and writing of the discharge would take place in the morning.
Bastard was drinking more than usual, probably because it was too early to expect my final decision, and this meal was merely to keep his presence felt. More for the microphone than for me, he was mouthing his old monologue about giving me the chance to atone for my mistakes. Some of his colleagues were still demanding retribution for my joining Joe Sourian as a CIA scout, inciting Chingiz to defect, using Alyosha's illness as a front for—
"For God's sake, stop," I said. "Why do you need the lies, what good do they do?"
I wondered why I'd snapped. He'd long been stuffing me with worse junk and graver implications. But there was no time to puzzle over this. In a flash, he was cold sober and ready for action, as if he'd never touched a drop.
"Watch your tongue and don't ever try to call me a liar. You're on the territory of the Soviet Union, not your Harvard playground. And I'm sick of your stalling, make up your mind."
For the first time, I thought I must forget the complications and go to the Embassy. But the cultural attache's lie when I had told him about Anastasia meant they trusted me as little as I them. They'd only suspect me of cooperating with Bastard—and in any case, KGB microphones in the Embassy building would
402^MOSCOW FAREWELL
probably give me away. . . . No, drawing them in would only worsen everything. They'd see to it that I, tainted, was expelled.
The fear of Bastard's threat the night before extended to every little thing. I was afraid of Maxi's attitude toward Alyosha, not having seen him since before the first operation. But the minute I wheeled him through the doors, she sent a howl of anxious greeting from inside the car. An assistant and I negotiated the chair down the ramp and settled the patient under his blankets.
He reached across to run a circle over the steering wheel. Passenger cars were beginning to crowd some streets, but when he had wangled the Volga thirteen years ago, he was the one Russian in a million with private wheels and his kind of grin in the driver's seat. In a cap I'd bought for the occasion, he now looked like John D. Rockefeller in his last, wizened years.
I had wanted to take a taxi because of a snowstorm and the doctors had ordered an ambulance, but Alyosha pleaded to go in the car that had taken him to the Black, Baltic, Azov and Caspian Seas in the days when that alone was enough to provide an illusion of freedom and indulgence. Now we intended to defy doctors' orders and drive out to the river beach where he used to swim every summer before his annual trip to the subtropical south. It was to be just a look, but he was deprived even of this because the motor stalled and neither of us could restart it. Alyosha was scrunching into the ball in which he had lain after the first operation and turning greener with each round of coughing. Appalled at my foolishness in helping with the discharge, I ran down the street, waving wildly for a push from passing cars.
At last the nightmare was over; we turned into his street. Neighbors in the courtyard whispered the feared word "cancer." Very slowly, I helped him up the stairs, Maxi following a step behind like a trained pointer, although Alyosha's new scent had made her nervous during the drive.
I plopped him into the daybed, which I'd moved beneath the window for his reading. But after a rest, he asked to "tour" the apartment. His weight on my arms, he shuffled down the corridor, in and out of the bathroom and across the living room to the kitchen. I'd completed the remodeling a few days before, painting the cabinets with a good semigloss I'd managed to
Gold Medal^403
obtain. I had sometimes worked late into the night: the term project to end term projects. Alyosha's smile was reward enough.
"A new kitchen is a fresh . . . Let's think of a nifty proverb, muchacho.^''
He was bathed in sweat, like a white trader with tropical fever. Shifting his grip to hug me in thanks, he suddenly began trembling. "Can't walk any more," he said abjectly. Slipping away from me, he leaned against the wall to rest, only to jerk straight up because of his sweat splotches on the new wallpaper.
"Ozj I've queered your beautiful job."
I helped him negotiate his last steps back to the bed.
He offered me a smoke—partly as a stand-in for this evening's carrot, for he had dropped the stick. But it was also to show off his access to the American cigarettes sold at the special stores for his Service. His attempt to do it casually—to convince me he saw nothing extraordinary in a pack of Marlboros—only accentuated his fawning regard for the red-and-white box.
"What's this hesitation? Why don't you trust us? Don't think we'd ever blackmail you, that's the last thing that would occur to us."
The homecoming was a shot in the arm. I caught myself hoping again. Alyosha himself spoke of his condition as "stabilized," and reckoned the chemotherapy had done some good after all. Again, he seemed to read my thoughts.
"All right, I do believe in miracles. I'll go on believing until the last day. But that's wildly futuristic, so will you please hatch a smaller commercial wonderwork to sanctify the redecorated kitchen with meat and potatoes?"
Ignoring my admonitions, he applied himself to an approximation of his old activity. I had to move back the bed in reach of the telephone, which he used constantly, calling business contacts to raise money, giving legal and personal advice to old friends together with medical reports about himself. These highly exaggerated his improvement: he was sensible enough not to encourage an exhausting stream of well-wishers.
Besides, he was planning to see everyone on New Year's Eve. Changing his mind again about the party—it was now to be a
404^MOSCOW FAREWELL
"recluse's extravaganza" at home—he sent me out for the LP's to finance it. Bastard's knowledge that I had no license provided another little lever for blackmail, but also an odd measure of protection against ordinary traffic cops.
One day, I returned to find a girl washing up in the kitchen, a homemade beret pulled over her ears despite the indoor warmth I maintained with extra heaters. Like a maid of many years, she moved on to the bathroom, stopping only for a comment about a scratch in the new sink. This was my introduction to Nina, an old Erstwhile. Tall and once probably attractive, she was already growing peasant-thick at twenty-three. But her very unobtrusive-ness gave her dignity. And her wide-lipped smile, which appeared at unpredictable moments, was the outward indication of an original sense of humor.
From then on, she was with us every day, taking over most of the domestic work, knitting in a corner when nothing was needed. She came at dawn, directly from the telephone exchange where she worked, and left in time for her night shift. At first she said nothing about her attachment to Alyosha; I thought she was simply a kind girl who, in the best Russian tradition, offered her large red hands for sweeping and scrubbing in a tragedy.
Bastard resumed his coaching after a short pause for effect. Back in America, he explained, I would overhear anti-Soviet plots. Contemptible articles being planned, "nefarious" agents preparing to pose as diplomats or tourists. But first I had to place myself in earshot.
"Travel around some: you're an active person, you don't like sitting in one place. To Washington, for example. You should know your own capital anyway, and also the State Department experts; you're curious about what makes people tick.
"And when you get wind of some filth, you take the next plane here. Forget the expense, the Soviet people aren't stingy defending peace—or rewarding peace fighters."
My head ached with envy of Moscow Americans who avoided this pimping by living "clean." And I had to clear it for something freshly timewasting.
"All right, Evgeny Ivanovich, Fm in Washington. And I hear something urgent but don't have enough money on me for a
Gold Medal^405
ticket; I can only contact you. Should I use the telephone number I have?"
His smile sagged into a grimace. Propelled by his shout, flakes of horseradish were splattering my jacket.
"No. I forbid it. Not from abroad."
His black eyes blazed in revenge for this attempt to take the initiative with him, the counterintelligence expert. But he wouldn't be tricked; he knew no one would ask for such information without CIA coaching. Yet this quick counterstroke did not abate his inner fury: not he but his superiors would have to take any decision about contact from the States—and he hated me for revealing his lowly status.
The question grew sorer with his puzzling delay dealing with it. Surely the KGB had dozens of suitable fronts? But during our next meetings, his admonishments that he would instruct me about contact procedure at the proper time only made it more obvious that he hadn't received his own instructions.
Finally, he produced the address and telephone number of an apartment and ordered me, as if he'd thought of the idea, to call or cable there if I had to make an emergency contact. Passing a telephone booth the same night, I wondered whether he'd named his own place. The test was so simple: I'd hang up when someone answered. No one did. There was no such number, and, as a quick taxi ride proved, no building at the given address.
Prone Alyosha was cocking a snoot at doomsday: propped high on pillows, declaring he thought he'd licked the pain, taking pleasure in the telephone's constant chiming. The talk was about tickets for Duke Ellington's forthcoming visit and about the weekend dog show, for which members of Moscow "society" were already grooming their entries. Suddenly he cupped his hand over the receiver and announced that Maxi was going to cop first prize.
A rush of pity and dismay washed over me. This was the sign I had been fearing: his unnatural cheeriness was working into mania, from which the inevitable plunge would leave him in \ unreachable depression. The Maxi fantasy was an unmistakable
symptom: however impeccable her breeding, it was unbalanced to expect even a mention for the never-groomed whelp in a first
406^MOSCOW FAREWELL
show. But Alyosha prattled on about painting one wall white for better display of the gold medal, almost snarling when I tried to talk sense to him.
Depressed myself with the futility of it and all it represented, I spent the rest of the day crisscrossing the city for a new head to fit a prewar German clipper he'd bought together with Maxi herself, but never used. It was one chance in ten thousand that his contacts could supply this recherche item, and I tried to think of a substitute distraction of some worth while going through the motions of searching. His new urge to spruce up his life-style, as in last week's insistence that I buy him "California-thick" bath towels to replace his stringy ones, had bogged him down in pathetic trivia, wholly detached from his future.
But I actually found a suitable shaving head. Gripping it in my fingers, I momentarily felt the queasy exhilaration of a powerful coincidence, as if fate were guiding me and anything were possible.
When I returned, Alyosha reached out as if I were handing him nothing more unusual than a glass of mineral water. I was immediately redispatched for every library and Central Canine Breeders' Association booklet on the care and training of poodles. The same evening, I was holding that bathed and carefully dried Maxi on the bed while Master and Nina bobbed her on the pattern of the books' photographs.
There was a trace of the old, Yankee-ingenuity Alyosha in his tackling this new, improbable project—but a reservoir of hysteria underneath. Last year, he'd have come no closer to a dog show than a choice bon mot. Now he was freakishly tense about the clipping, and although faint with exhaustion, snapped annoyance when I tried to make him rest. At the last minute he heard of someone with a new "championship" shaving head, and threatened to "write off" our friendship unless I promised to launch a new search in the morning.
With some new source of strength, he began training her, his voice and my body doing the work. For four days the room was a kennel. He had memorized the booklets and taken notes on a searching interview with the breeder while I held the telephone to his ear. Mastering commands and movements, Maxi's intelligence amazed us; I could have sworn that she understood what
Gold Medal^407
was at stake and wanted to give him a big gift. Like her master, she worked her heart out.
But it was Maxi's love of hfe, revived by this new interest in her, that dehghted us most. And her charm—which Alyosha nourished— "You're a splendid lady," he kept croaking to her, "the purest representative of your sex and breed—remember that, my darling."
As he weakened, his line of encouragement became more defiant. "You're not going to take it on the nose just because I am," he said. "You're brimming with beauty and health, you're meant to win.'''
On the Sunday of the show, his pain was back full force. I knew I shouldn't leave him; with an eerie combination of mock gruffness and feeble defiance, he insisted I go.
"And don't bother coming back without the gold medal. You or Maxi: handsome is as handsome is judged."
The Moscow Exhibition of Auxiliary Service Dogs was held, with all the confusion of a nonmilitary Soviet event, in an outlying field house. With Maxi's "passport," Alyosha's notarized authorization deputizing me to serve as her handler in the competition convinced the head-scratching officials I had the right to enter her. Maxi's medical certificates were also accepted, although at that moment she herself looked as unhealthy as I had ever seen her. The first sight of the thousands of competitors and spectators—bored time-passers and fanatic enthusiasts, the usual Russian ragtag of total amateurism and the most pedantic expertise—badly startled her. The first hour of barking, snarling and shouting then reduced her to cringing.
I wanted to go home even more than she did but dreaded the empty-handed return. Alyosha's kidding about the prize had been much too serious. Deepening as the moment of truth approached, my despondency about how to cope with his fantasy led to daydreams about bartering my sheepskin coat for someone's first prize. It was the kind of enterprise—like how to handle Bastard—that cried out for the finesse of Alyosha himself.
German shepherds, Great Danes, Spaniels; morning dragged into afternoon while patriotic speeches substituted for postponed decisions. The field house was a mass of whining puppies and children, nagged by exhaustion and thirst. At last it was the turn
408/^ MOSCOW FAREWELL
of the poodles and a hundred of them, chiefly brown and black, were going through their paces, all more neatly than the uncomprehending, irritable Maxi of the conspicuous new whiteness.
Then she came alive. With a cock of her head, she seemed to realize that the hours of waiting had been nonsense; this was the Big Show. Her flair grew every time she jumped one of the necessary barriers, climbed a ladder as we had coached her, gave her paw and—now like a circus performer—barked at my request. Her college try was suddenly so moving that a section of nearby fans began cheering for her. I loved her as never before for this: I could tell Alyosha honestly that she hadn't disgraced herself
I had heard that the judges were amenable to bribes, but when we began our parade around them—seven or eight relatively clean-suited men in the center of a dirt expanse—they seemed to belie this, for they kept advancing us, as if to toy with my hope against hope, from near the rear of the four-abreast column where we'd started toward the front, where the winners would be. Maxi held her neck as never before; she was brighter than the country snow outdoors. "You're a splendid lady," I kept saying in Alyosha's rasp, and she agreed with her shining eyes. We were moved up from nineteenth place to eighth to fifth to third. That was more than I dared think of out loud, but only the gold medal would do for Maxi, who began prancing, even smiling at the judges. They submitted to this winsomeness; she was the winner!
In glee, we dashed to the table, ignored our instructions to stay for the walk-past of best-of-breeds and ran for the exit. Driving back to the apartment, I pushed the Volga almost as hard as Alyosha used to. My key had hardly touched the lock when he cried out from bed.
"Where's that medal, lad? Hurry, I told you I want to see it."
Maxi bounded in to lick his face furiously. To spice his reward with a second's tease, I said the judges had been blind.
"Muchacho, how could you?" he howled, pushing Maxi away. "Not even the silver? What for, why have you dishonored us so terribly?"
Gold Medal^409
produced the gold medal. He was as triumphant as if vindicated of a Dreyfus-like wrong.
"Aha, what did I tell you?"
He took a sip of brandy with us to celebrate. The day had been like a "happy" episode in a very sad film I'd already seen. If only his uncanny guess about the prize were a symbol of something.
"I'm not asking you to steal your Embassy's codes. Join the CIA and hand me a list of its spies. I'm giving you a chance to prove your own principles and construct a real life for yourself."
The slump that ended his upswing seemed largely psychological. His mood changed again: he was detaching himself from all reality apart from his immediate surroundings and his reveries, which he kept to himself. I wondered whether the growth had reached his brain.
In the middle ground of the outside world, his intelligence shrunk. Too short of concentration for books, he took to newspapers, itself a dismaying regression, scouring them for human interest items which he reported to us like a cleaning woman telling movie plots. An Irtutsk man who had been sentenced again and again for drunkenness until it was discovered that a malfunctioning pancreas was secreting alcohol into his bloodstream. A counter woman in a Moscow department store who had won a public commendation for actually being polite. A group of factories in Rostov that received fifteen thousand railroad cars of gravel annually from Stavropol, two hundred miles away—while neighboring quarries in Rostov shipped an equal amount of the same material to Stavropol plants. . . . We tried to know whether to restrain or feed this giggly appetite for such babble.
His temperature fell and the tormenting cough virtually ceased, but was replaced by fits of agonizing shortwindedness, during which his eyes threatened to pop out in the effort to draw a breath. If he had to suffocate, I said to myself, let it come quickly to end his gruesome gasping. The spectacle of the shriveled thing writhing in pain was sometimes too horrible to watch.
410^MOSCOW FAREWELL
Occasionally he reached for Nina's or my hand; other times he begged us to go away, and for me to return to America. Why did we subject ourselves to his "performances"? But he clamped together his yellow teeth and still did not cry.
Nights were sometimes better, although Nina was away and Alyosha had no more than three hours' peace at a stretch despite the hospital's pills. I slept on the divan, moved near the bed. Before dawn one morning, a foreboding woke me. The lamp was on, as always. Alyosha of the starving Biafran's shoulders was sitting up in bed, pajama top removed and pressed up against his stomach.
Before my eyes focused, I was struck by the reek—the same as in the hospital bathroom weeks before, but concentrated to a new degree of putrid awfulness. I was about to go to him when I saw. Discharge from an open fission below his rib cage was soaking the pajama. Attending to himself silently, he looked for something dry, which is when he caught my eye and turned away. Stifling the urge to retch, I cleaned him with a fresh towel and held his face in my hands to drain away his horror of himself Then I switched off" the lamp to erase the ghostly light and shadows.
Soon we were used to this. The broken fistulas served as channels for blood, puss, endocrine fluids and unidentifiable liquids. New reddish-blue tumors were growing on the soil of the old, then opening up to spread the poison. He was rotting alive.
He named a prominent Yale professor of international relations who had arrived in Moscow two weeks ago for research. Before congressional committees and in popular periodicals, the professor had been urging caution on detente because, he warned, long-term Soviet intentions remained unchanged. And two years ago he had tried to do the right things for a Soviet exchange student who defected in New Haven, later announcing that Soviet diplomats threatened his family with reprisals. Bastard suspected that the professor had "played a dark role" in that "trumped-up" affair. "And in general, he's a corrupt man, paid to blacken socialism and poison Soviet-American relations." But he wasn't "absolutely certain," and wanted my help "exposing the truth."
GoldMedaI^411
"For your own sake, I urge you to see him. Take a couple of your girls to his room; why shouldn't two countrymen have some fun together?"
But the wile of photographing sex on a hotel bed was too obvious even for him. He lowered his sights.
"Just go meet him, find out how he sees things in today's changing world. A serious conversation will be rewarding for you. Believe me, there's nothing more noble than removing suspicion from an innocent man."
Whose suspicion, you aberration? But this was no time for tripping him up in his double-talk; Bastard's very lack of threats that evening told me his bosses had decided to test me. I had reached the end of the stalling line.
As it happened, I had met the prim professor at a seminar. But even at Yale, he would hardly have understood my need for a social call, let alone questioning him about detente. Yet I couldn't fake a claim to have met him; surely Bastard was having us both followed.
He was staying in the new Rossiya Hotel. On my way, I stopped in the Lenin Library, displayed my passport and obtained back copies of the Congressional Record from a closed archive. An hour of shaky searching produced one of his articles, on which I made notes. Then I went to his room, from which I had to extract him to prevent our talk being recorded. The bait—an invitation to sample "real" Soviet life through a foreign-policy harangue at the University—was genteelly swallowed and we were together two hours, hopefully seen but not overheard.
When I presented my summary of the professor's article as notes on our "free-ranging, off-the-record" conversation. Bastard's eyes bulged with exciternent over his success, tinged with angry suspicion because he understood almost nothing of my handwriting in English. Shuffling the pages, he grumbled that I had not "developed sufficient detail." But the fake won me my breather: I heard no more about my "report" nor the professor himself.
Alyosha stopped mentioning New Year's Eve, both the party and the date. "Let's talk about more important matters." But
412.^MOSCOW FAREWELL
even more than contact through words and thoughts, I sensed he wanted the solace of touch: reassurance that his unstanchable discharges had not made him disgusting. I got into bed and lay with his bones as something inside them tried to assert a claim to life by recalling images from one life story.
He rambled, repeated, forgot; he recounted the visit of a string quartet to baffled tank crews resting from battle only to fume because he couldn't remember where the incongruous concert had taken place. Many recollections seemed too much for his narrative power; while he gripped my hand in silence, I felt him reliving literally stirring episodes. He kept saying he wanted to make something clear about the days of "riding errands" with Granny in his wagon, but digressed into less significant vignettes. He explained he had left Moscow "society" ten years ago because it was a depressing collection of little people trying to be big through dachas, entree to the Cinema Club and the regime's pathetic privileges, but I sensed he was omitting the truly important memories for sheer lack of strength, and was unhappy with himself for waiting too long to try to put his life into some kind of perspective.
Occasionally a brilliant cameo emerged of a recollected person or place. A streetcorner in wartime Sukhumi where, among Parker pens and Remington shavers, you could buy battlefront decorations, impeccable draft exemptions and diplomas from any university in the land. A high-school dropout he once defended who had passed himself off as a chess master, ace fighter pilot, champion parachutist and high-school inspector, presenting medals in stadiums, collecting pensions as a Hero of Socialist Labor and touring the country in style as a hotel director, Aeroflot manager and financial inspector. Replacing a friend's head on his torso after a tank battle; collecting parcels for a violinist too terrified to go to the post office because they came from a sister in Paris.
Although trying to convey something with this jumble, he only commented "That's the way it was in those days, the screwy way it was." I had moved his bed back to the window. He looked up at it from upside down, his spiked nose like a bustard's beak. Despite the snow, a few leaves had freakishly stuck to the courtyard tree.
Gold Medal^413
"And that's what is left. I keep hoping they'll continue to cling. What nonsense!" And to Nina: "You must find your man, Ninochka. I get such pleasure from your health."
I studied his glinting skull through half-closed eyes, trying to decide whether I hated it enough to kill him if he pushed me. The paradox was that he was actually helping me "grow up," as he never stopped urging. I felt myself emerging from a prolonged childhood of witless optimism, grasping for the first time that at least half the world was hardship and evil—and that this is what made me feel, from the first weeks last year, that I had come home to Russia. I was learning to accept pain as the country did, to put my own defects in perspective, to recognize my American compulsion to be—to pretend to be—the strong, smiling success type for what it was. As centuries of senseless tragedy had taught Russians, even the most terrible failures need not outrage or shame you. This was not a meager lesson for an exchange student.
On the courtyard bench sat two women of the same certain age. The talkative one's Bronxlike voice was working up the scale of indignation.
"So I said to him, what presents did you ever give me? A skinny box of chocolates once; a pair of stockings? Some snapdragons— until it came out that you got them from your own students on graduation day. Let me assure you, I said, you should be ashamed to mention such 'gifts.' . . . And between you and me, darling, what it cost me, oi, to wring even them from him."
I looked to see if she was serious. Most certainly. Life was going on—and, I supposed, in Washington, where Nixon was enjoying his re-election; in Paris, scene of Kissinger's preparations to end the Vietnamese war; in Moscow itself, where Jews were still mourning the deaths of the Israeli Olympic athletes. But I couldn't think beyond this courtyard. From one window giving onto it, a thin man who looked like a former bookkeeper gazed down with a pensioner's blankness. He twiddled his thumbs—first this way for hours, then the other way. This helped him pass the winter; and it helped me, in my breaks for air, to pass mine by looking up at him.
414^MOSCOW FAREWELL
I had gone down while Nina was dealing with the putrescent sheets. Only she could have coped with Alyosha's wastes day after day without the slightest thought of sacrifice nor any need, as I had, for periodic escape. Her deep Orthodox faith inured her to just such earthly awfulness. A peasant child, she had been raised by an illiterate mother on a dishwasher's wages in a room of candles burning in front of the icons and adoration of Stalin. Alyosha stopped her five years ago as she was leaving a church. Her religious faith had kept her pure to share her life with one single man. When her few days with him were over, she was tortured by guilt as well as by desperate longing, and tried to throw herself under a car. Alyosha took her in for another fortnight, patiently coaching her to accept the facts of his life. At last she did, but prayed for him constantly from then on, never even imagining that she might ever love anyone else.
He motioned me back into bed with him. His voice was so weak that I had to hold my ear near his mouth. Something in his thorax reverberated at each word, like beads in a Raggedy Andy.
"Sometimes I don't have the slightest regret. This insipid, dingy, dreary life—who cares about pulling out of it? We have no art, no literature, nothing true. Only propaganda to keep us morons. . . . And my work was a travesty. I defended murderers, robbers, doorway rapists every day. Instead of redeeming that scum through enlightenment, we knout them; they end as animals. I had no profession, lived a useless life . . ."
The shaking of his inner beads ended in a fit of convulsive coughing. Finally he resumed in a softer tone, with long breaks between sentences.
"I wanted to talk about this to my friends. Why we live so purposelessly. They looked at me with bewilderment—with suspicion, mistrust. As if they didn't understand. Then it came to me: almost no one did. So / learned—to shut my trap.
"And to shag skirts. You're so much like me in some ways; yet it's been only a diversion for you, not a life. See a girl. Take her home, watch her undress. Cuddle her—but it's a pose; she doesn't really interest you. Next day she looks at you, puzzled: 'Is that all?' Yes, that's all. And it's when you wish you'd been born a century earlier, before the desecration called Soviet rule. Or a
Gold Medal^415
hundred years from now, when the specter of some civiHzation may again haunt our land. I popped up in the middle."
That night: "Good God, I'm saddling you with all my anger. Making it even tougher for you, which is crazy; you've no reason to be bitter. But you'd have found out for yourself If you stayed here, the bastards would eventually have dragged you under. Made you pimp for them; they kept on trying with me . . ."
When did they try? Again I couldn't ask.
The last-chance visitors included Erstwhiles too shy to come to the hospital and former clients with caps in their hands, like peasants at Tolstoy's funeral. When Alyosha recognized them, he was happy to pronounce their names.
At the beginning, I cherished a hope that Anastasia would come one day, like Nina, to help me nurse him. But when her blanched face appeared, I was very tired. The last time she was in this room, she stroked my hands while I sniveled about my heart. I thought more about her first time, when she succumbed to her inventive suitor, now the sack on the bed. All the genuine pain endured since then made even my conviction about our future irrelevant.
She sat down beside him, without tears or poses. I went out to leave them alone. She emerged later with the expression of what she had learned showing on her face and joined me on the courtyard bench. We watched the afternoon turn dark and talked.
"He's totally dependent on you. You're his son, and his parents—that must be some comfort to you in this madness."
"Six months, can it be true? If he lives to New Year's Eve, it will be seven. And he knew he was finished from the first."
"You've changed. He needs you when it's roughest. You're different, do you know?"
I remembered how I had longed for these words from her. Then recognized life's trick: the very change, if that was what to call it, had diluted their importance.
She said the winter was empty of everything. She had less interest than ever in medicine and a feeling that nothing was going to work out for her. She was talking of switching to an institute of literature when I realized what I owed her.
416^MOSCOW FAREWELL
"If you ever want to leave here, I'll do it for you," I interrupted. "You know what I mean."
"And I can count on you now?" But she pronounced this more as a declaration than a question, while her eyes thanked me for my offer.
"What a pity," she said matter-of-factly, "if you marry someone else." She squeezed my hand and left.
"Please, Alyoshinka, what harm can it do? Try a little corner."
Nina was pressing him, as she had been for days, to partake of a specially consecrated monastery hardtack reputedly able to absolve a dying person of unconfessed sins. Although this worked only on the eve of Easter, she had convinced a sympathetic priest to make an exception for a good man who might not last.
"You'll feel much better; a weight will be lifted."
Shivering in pain, he dropped his exception to the "black magic" and took a bite.
"Well?" she asked tremblingly.
"It's true. I feel better already."
His whisper was too feeble to tell whether it indeed had some psychological effect, or whether he was trying to comfort her.
"Hard to make sense of nature. Bestows perception upon Homo sapiens and forces him to contemplate his nonexistence the whole of his life. One way or another, we all wait for the appointed hour, knowing we're doomed." . . .
"Maybe that's the source of the excess anger in human nature. Evolution should have stopped a level or two earlier."
Later: "We'd enjoy life far more that way, because we wouldn't know the implications of time. I've been working it out: you're a wildcat; Nina's a llama. A platypus for me—they choose the right climate. And Anastasia's also from the lynx family, so your brood won't sprout tails where they should have ears."
That evening: "My biggest mistake: not to have children. I miss my girl and boy. . . . Remember my mother looking down at me the night before she left. Very tender, incredibly beautiful; she thought I was asleep. The forbidden sweet of my life. Don't even know whether I remember or dreamed that scene. ..."
His heart beat furiously with the effort.
GoldMedal^417
Bastard's exhalation into the receiver on the afternoon I dashed to the dormitory to change clothes disabused me of my notion that he had stopped calling out of consideration.
"And I've got something else imperative for a week or so. Some of your countrymen keep me busy, heh. But we'll catch up on everything when I return."
Somehow, his threats were less real and he himself seemed less disgusting. But it was Providence that drew him away just now. Distracted by this thought, I heard myself wishing him a good trip.
"What?"
He demanded an explanation of my levity.
When the resident who visited him every other day on her ambulance rounds saw the agony was intolerable, she prescribed morphine, instructing me how to inject and leaving supplies enough to last until her next visit. Bastard was still working his blackmail and elsewhere the bureaucracy remained as stupidly rigid as ever; but as a member of the little medical family caring for Alyosha, I was trusted with narcotic drugs.
He had been looking forward to this stage as a man with a broken leg awaits removal of his cast. Happy to be spending his last days "in modern comfort," he perked up enough to hatch final schemes. To pay part of his debt to Nina, he wanted her to inherit residence rights to the apartment—which could happen only if she married him.
"Use your stubborn brain, Ninochka. What's good for you is the only way I can do something good for me, can't you see?"
But she believed that since the healthy him hadn't needed her, marriage now would be collusion in his death. She beseeched him to retract his wish.
He turned to me. "Thank God you don't need a boost," he said, oblivious of our old icon talk. I'd make my own way, he assured me—to the top. But Maxi should ride with me. On American hamburger, she'd live a good twenty years, a living symbol of our friendship.
Notarizing his bequest wasn't enough; he wanted to see with his own eyes a document certifying that she could leave the
418^ MOSCOW FAREWELL
country with me. In his dozing hours, I coaxed the Volga—dying too without his repairs—to half a dozen offices that, each according to the previous ones, were empowered to sanction the emigration of a Soviet pet. I hurriedly filled out forms, composed affidavits, told the story at the Central Canine Breeders' Association, Central Customs Bureau, Ministry of Sport. Alyosha awoke and pointed to the gold medal as proof I'd eventually succeed.
There was no regulation against Maxi leaving; it was simply impossible to obtain permission. Never having heard of such a case, everyone spontaneously said no. One minion observed that Maxi was a medalist of an official body that was simultaneously a sporting association and a volunteer auxiliary corps. In other words, she might be needed in a state emergency, and in this sense was the People's property. Finally, a senior customs officer demanded a three hundred per cent duty on her estimated value: naked extortion of five hundred rubles for the Soviet treasury. Before I could deliver it, a Ministry of Foreign Trade official vetoed the deal.
Such benighted patriotic obstinacy brought back all Alyosha's old talk about a "normal" country. I cursed Russia for denying a dying man his last wish of willing his dog. Its fulfillment soon seemed as important as his recovery had once been. The more time I wasted away from him, the more compelled I felt to succeed. I rushed from one hulking building to another, pushing past the supplicating public, shouting at torpid faces behind petitioning windows. I had to snatch this final victory—and reassure Alyosha that I had the stuff to carry on alone.
I touched his eggshell of a forehead, assuring him we'd win. But his interest expired as my determination grew. Maxi was beginning to annoy him. Tail wagging and talk about walking her was too much for his system; he asked me to find her another home. I darkened the room with blankets to ease the stress on his eyes. Anastasia came again, but he did not acknowledge her.
He now cared only about his morphine, which I was injecting every three hours—into his arms, despite all the previous punctures, because of the open stew of flesh elsewhere on his body. The doctor supplied two supplementary pain killers; I used all three together, steadily increasing the dose to his more and
Gold Medal^419
more hopeless imploring. Laced with drugs, mouth open like a geriatrics patient, he descended into oblivion.
We stared at the bump under the quilt. It had stirred. "Not gone, still thinking." An hour later, another move. "Had so few friends ... we met so late." The next day, he tried to pull himself back. "Always feel good when thinking of you. Inasmuch as this is often, I'm usually happy. . . ."
Nina stayed home from work and stretched out on the divan. I used the Black Sea mattress. He barely looked at us with his drugged eyes, sometimes as if we were strangers.
He took a spoonful of egg one day, a glass of tea the next. A few sips of tea the day after that, then he couldn't swallow. Thirty-six hours passed with four words from him: "bitter" and "crazy, still here." Each breath was drawn with a noise like a death rattle past parched lips and a desiccated throat. Unable to stand this sound any longer, Nina put a teaspoon of water into his mouth. It remained there, swishing back and forth until it dribbled away.
The doctor said nothing could be done. Alyosha fell into what passed for sleep and I convinced Nina, who had been eating hardly more than he, to go out for bread. The dark wobbliness of the room was like a submarine stranded without power. When he awoke, I saw he had suffered a further drop, even from his previous level. The least possible quotient of life still flickered in him. I took his hand and words rushed past my lips.
I said that whatever happened to me, wherever I would be, I'd never have a friend like him, with whom I was so deeply happy just to be with. Just to sit and talk—or not to talk, like now.
My grief gushed out as if it stood for all the feelings I too often suppressed. "Dearest Alyosha, why are there so few good people? So little genuine friendship? I'll think of you always. Of the man who changed so much for me. . . . Alyoshinka mine, you're the rare presence that makes other things glad to live. The gift you have, the gift you give."
420^MOSCOW FAREWELL
He summoned all his strength to look at me. I think he understood.
Immediately, I felt guilty about tiring him, and urged him to relax. But my words began haunting me even before the sentence ended. To my horror, my injunction to sleep tranquilly came out as the punch line of our old joke about the factory director's funeral.
"Dearest friend, rest in peace."
The faintest wince crossed his face. It might have expressed either hurt for my indiscretion or appreciation of the black irony. I longed to explain that it had been unintentional and return to the spirit of my eulogy, but it would have been asking too much of him to listen to more from me. Clearing myself was not the most important consideration now, nor even what he thought of me. I had to live with the inexplicable burden that my last words to him—the last he would understand from anyone—had been a slip of the tongue. The gap between us was unbridgeable. The world was as meaningless as the floorboards. I knelt on them because this night I couldn't stand the use of a chair. . . .
After midnight his breathing became a ghastly convulsive rasp. I called the ambulance service again. A young doctor gave him a mercifully quick examination and an injection. I looked hard at him, trying to establish contact. Surely he knew these were the last minutes. But there was nothing but blankness and decay. An hour later, he drew a breath that gashed my ears. Then the room was silent. Perhaps the unimaginable would not come if I did not move. Alyosha was no more; Alyosha would never be.
The lifelessness of the aged rag doll on the bed added fear to paralyzing sorrow. Nina spoke to it as to a younger Alyosha. She told it about her fresh bread and rearranged the blankets. Suddenly she threw herself to the floor and banged her forehead against a leg of the bed.
Choking over her words, clinging to the body, she asked why he was depriving his friends of his goodness, abandoning us to darkness. She wailed in anguish—and I prayed she had enough strength to keep it up, because I had too little to cope with the numbness that would follow.
Gold Medal^421
When it was light, we washed the body, slowly, to protract our contact with him. Nina was already growing distant from me. The great emptiness had begun.
I switch off the hght and draw the half-curtain in case I'm being watched from a dormitory window overlooking mine. If the KGB acts, I think with surprising calm, it must be in the next few hours. December's predawn darkness affords a margin of safety, and anyway it's got to be now rather than never; left behind, the icon would be a trail of evidence.
In the glint of streetlamps on snow, I remove the square foot of crumbly gesso and wood from its hiding place and stash it between some legal journals and balalaika records near the bottom of my trunk. Although everything is still proceeding according to plan—New Roommate will be another ten minutes frying his breakfast in the communal kitchen—the suspense of what probably awaits The Madonna and me spikes my blood with adrenalin.
So I'm leaving Moscow as I arrived: edgy because of the country's harsh rules and my impulse to flout them. To cheat by
Come Again?^423
sneaking out contraband. One day—if I slip through at the airport— I'll no doubt attribute these palpitations to totalitarianism. I picture myself lecturing to college audiences about the Soviet citizen's subliminal dread. I alone will know that shouting at Kremlin evil helps drown internal whispers of my corruption; that there is a selfish temptation to diligently expose—and make capital of—the system's crimes.
The icon will rouse the customs crew to search for more. The real trouble will come from an envelope of Alyosha's notes about himself that I found in his wardrobe, including papers about cases he had tried. Classified as theft of state documents, they could teach me all about labor camp starvation for five years. And keep me from visiting Russia ever again: a severe sentence too, even though the thought of leaving—yes, for corny freedom! —has made me like a puppy whimpering for a walk throughout this last week.
I haven't time for that mood now. For the dream of getting out, breaking loose, escaping. Of freeing myself from the debasing fear that a capricious "they" will sooner or later get me—for doubting Communism, liking women, being me. After the funeral, I sometimes had to hold myself back from charging down the corridor, shouting my pride in being a lick-spitting dog of imperialist capitalism.
To assuage the longing for reprieve, I spent days in the offices of KLM and Air France studying timetables, rechanging routes —all to assure myself I could leave when my time was up. Just being in the office of a Western company bolstered my spirits. As with everything else, it took four times longer than in a normal country to fix a ticket; but while railing at the red tape and security mania, I was secretly pleased. For I could waste more time in an activity that passed for important and demanded no thought.
Yet the icon is a bleeper signal alerting officials to unmask me and keep me here, stamping their boots on my yearning to leave. A Virgin and Child with a tarnished brass cover and smells of unwashed generations in a peasant cabin, it would fetch no more than two hundred dollars if I ever thought of selling. Yet I must court this risk for it. All Russia's riches—never mind that they're riches of poverty—and Fm departing empty-handed after these
424.^MOSCOW FAREWELL
feverish sixteen months. A smuggled icon: token compensation.
Besides, it's the last survivor of the lot Alyosha was collecting for our get-rich scheme. We peddled most of the others for living expenses during the fall, and someone—probably a friend come to cheer him in his pain—made off with a few when I was out on an errand. Only this greenish one, with its touch of a souvenir-shop Christ, came down to me. And the flannel shirt for its wrapping, which Alyosha used to wear while greasing the Volga.
Locking the trunk, I look for things left behind. Thank God I got rid of the last of my dangerous books, the Khrushchev memoirs and emigre editions of samizdat. After the funeral, a stranger in a bus line whispered imploringly that my room had been searched in preparation for a trap. Although his scare might have been on instructions, I took no chances, quickly distributing a few copies to trustworthy people and mailing the rest to a professor who used to harangue Joe Sourian and me about Truman's wickedness.
The picture of the power-hungry academic frenziedly concealing the parcel of prohibited books from faculty colleagues awards me with a grin and I think of Heathrow, where my flight arrives in exactly twelve hours. Maybe I'll transfer straight to New York; might as well spend New Year's Eve in a plane, pretending Alyosha's with me for his last party. Or I'll stay a few days and walk the London streets I did when he was alive.
But now to finish packing before New Roommate reappears. How tiny this room is when you look at it; how barren compared to last year's. A final cigarette, then out to tackle my check-out documents. Since I first started planning this day, the main priority has been an early start for a long last walk around town.
I reopen the curtains. Sweatsuited enthusiasts are jogging into the winter dawn. Soon the nine o'clock news will be on, with announcers I know better than Walter Cronkite. The current broadcast is entitled "On the Soviet People's Vigilance Against Imperialism's Subversive Activities." The West is one large school for spies, the commentator is explaining. Detente is being used to train thousands of visitors to Lenin's homeland in espionage and psychological techniques to lower your ideological guard. . . . The communal kitchen is a babble of pans and sleep-grumpy voices. Someone is cursing the buffet woman for
Come Agam?X425
not having opened last evening, leaving him breadless. How familiar everything seems; how much hollower than it used to. My old "cosmic" ache fills only part of me.
The morning snow is heavy and wet. A woman with a walking stick asks directions to the "petitioning office" of the Supreme Soviet, then laments her husband's arrest as if I'm from her village. I point her toward her destination and unbutton my coat, despite the wet. Working people grumble that it started ten years ago, this ruining of Russian winters. "Sly Khrushchev was up to no good."
At the back of Soviet Square, I take a downhill street. Who lives in this building? Oh yes, "Uncle Grisha," the old cobbler who spends his fat profits entertaining pretty girls in restaurants. Who took me here? Yes, last semester's dusky Masha. She's in a different dormitory wing this year and I've hardly seen her, except when she's dropped by for Tampax. Once we slept together as a lark and my awkwardness was gone, so maybe I've gained something. Forfeited something too: she seemed less wholesome, and her stories of Perm life were turning stale.
Masha told me that Chingiz wrote from his Siberian exile, sending his regards to her "neighbor," a code word for me. He's coping, but I'll never see him again. Or the voracious book-borrower Semyon, who avoids me. Or Alyosha's Ilya, who's on a "working vacation" in Odessa, making a last try for the family gold. Half my friends have disappeared. When I bumped into the nicest of last year's clique, he said he'd like to talk now that he's learned a few things in the provincial radio station where he's working, but he'd better not. And Lev Davidovich of Alyosha's old Consultation Office begged me not to come again when I dropped in on him. We slunk away from each other like guilty ghosts.
Why are some people still happy to see me while others have been explicitly warned to stop? Leonid was told he'd never get the newspaper job he sought if we continued to meet. This was the straw that prompted his emigration application, despite his vows that he'd never trade Russia for Israel. His larger motivation was the general political situation, which he considers more hopeless than ever. Convinced that trade with America is only a
426^MOSCOW FAREWELL
new means for preserving the old dictatorial power, he sank into morbid pessimism.
After his application, he was summoned to the office of the editor he'd been seeing—who, as he knew, was also a KGB captain. The older man, a family friend, made a reference to "you Yids." The Leonid who had endured years of the clique's insults spit in his face.
Putting away his handkerchief, the editor quickly summoned the police while the documentary evidence of "Disrespect for an Official Person" was still on his cheek. The police's first order to Leonid was to expectorate on a paper for chemical analysis of his saliva. During his two weeks of jail for hooliganism—a reduced sentence because the editor-vigilante pitied his parents—his head was shaved and his resolve reinforced.
Shortly after this, he got a letter from Zhenya, whose sister is helping him sell canvases hand over fist to American tourists in Tel-Aviv. The Bearded Giant dislikes Israel less, but far more volubly, than he ever did Russia, abandoning all his Moscow caution about criticizing in public and spending much of his time lobbying to emigrate to New York. He blesses "Soviet humanism" for sharpening his wits in the matter of wringing an exit visa from a "miserable bureaucracy"—and this newfound flipness in safe surroundings angers Leonid, the new Zionist.
Thus do attitudes change—in keeping with the country's persistent search for nonexistent solutions. But, as always, its personal lessons are far more important than the social and political hash of new dreams from old it tries to offer up. Not only Alyosha is gone forever, but a close handful of others. The wisdom of the country where people disappear overnight is not merely that life goes on because it must. I sense I have been loaned a few friends to love—who have been taken away again so I will know how to behave with others in the future.
On old Stoleshnikov Lane, a man in an ankle-length overcoat pulls me toward a telephone booth. It's very important, he can no longer see well, I must help him dial. I get the same wrong number on three attempts and he clumps away without a word.
Stoleshnikov Lane is more crowded than ever today. Like sperm wriggling in the street, a hundred thousand shoppers are
Come Again?X427
hunting New Year's Eve treats. Incredible even by Moscow standards, the jewelry and liquor departments are thronged with gaping, glowering customers, faces set as if they do not recognize each other as being of the same species. Thirty rubles for a lacquered Lenin in his bank clerk's suit, forty for a crude clay plate: where do these working people get the wads for their splurges?
The humbler street stalls have temporarily lost their attraction; fat women peddling political pamphlets have time to gossip with fat women peddling stamps. A line stretches around the block to Petrovka Street from a clothing store with a supply of fedoras. A mother near its end is peeling an orange for her son with all the emotion generated by a land where each globe of fruit, each touch of mama's hand, is a tangible link to human existence.
I'm falling into a familiar mood again. The orange reminds me of the obsession of Chekhov's Trigorin. "Night and day, I'm a slave to a single inescapable thought," he complained. "I must write. / must write.'"
I see that cloud over there, shaped like a piano. And I think: in a story somewhere I've got to say that a cloud floated by, shaped like a piano. . . . Worst of all is that I'm in some kind of stupor, and often don't understand what it is I'm writing. ... I feel I must write about everything.
I wonder why I too feel compelled to see and memorize every detail. The brownish shawl on the woman slogging on in front of me—one of ten million exactly like it, in which every working-class woman over fifty is wrapped from October to May. I know it stands for something and must fix it in my memory. Somewhere I must record how snow lands on the nubby, soiled wool. How she walks, this block of a woman, clutching her canvas bag and wedging the phalanx of blocks ahead of her.
And that drainpipe—a tube of dented tin from which ice water dribbles to the wavy asphalt sidewalk. I'm constrained to study it too lest it disappear from my consciousness—which I equate with being dead.
The drainpipe belongs to a jumble of yellowish buildings whose submissive acceptance of fate provokes pity and love for them, myself, the human race. Here they stoop, asking only to
428^MOSCOW FAREWELL
share the same air; and the huge mural of the handsome Soviet Woman harvesting wheat and the confident Cosmonaut Conquering the Future leaves their essential humbleness unchanged. The cafeteria in the adjoining basement has good chicken soup: this is my last day, / must remember. Must remember the stories too that otherwise will be attic letters fed to an incinerator. Such as Alyosha's note from a fifteen-year-old Erstwhile made pregnant by a classmate. "Dear Alyoshik," she wrote from the maternity ward. "I wish little Natastinka were yours. People still make me feel ashamed. Please come see us if you're not busy."
Perhaps this episode must survive because of the dresses he bought mother and daughter. Yet deeper reasons lie in the Russia I'm leaving. Walking these self-effacing streets, I have been nourished by communication with the fire, water, air and earth that constitute the universe. These organic materials; this homemade planet. The atoms of that weatherworn fenceboard over there are related to mine. I have come to understand that I belong to the weary, all-forgiving whole known as Mother Earth.
I chide my feet for having taken me here; Red Square is for tourists. The Historical Museum, a fairy-tale witch's castle, which rumor says will soon be razed in Moscow's massive rebuilding into a "Communist" city of steel and glass. A busload of smart French tourists being guided toward the mausoleum. And the Central Lenin Museum—where, before meeting Aly-osha, I used to take my first pickups to escape from the cold, and to feel them up furtively in the shelter of bunched listeners to eulogies to The Leader.
The square's expanse is fuller than I've ever seen it except during State parades. Holding their children close, provincial tourists gawk at the landmarks or enjoy a break from the madness of GUM. Just before two o'clock, thousands bunch to see the changing of the mausoleum guard, the hourly celebration of the country's existence that blends the police state's religious idolatry with its veneration for arms. The clock produces its famous chime; the soldiers goose-step to their places, bayonets fixed, fanatic devoutness imposed on village faces. The crowd watches in boredom or awe, but not, apparently, with my
Come Again?X429
queasiness. I wonder what they really think of their iconic mummy on the slab inside.
"Won't their feet freeze?" a young girl asks her mother about the soldiers, now statue-like at the crypt's entrance.
"It's not cold today."
"What about other days?"
"Yes, it's hard for those boys to stand there without moving."
Behind them, one provincial man is enlightening another: "Stalin used to be there too. Now it's Lenin alone; things change."
An older mother is comforting her braided daughter: "Are you hungry, Tanyechka? We'll go home and fix you some nice soupchik."
So here too, at Leninism's sanctum sanctorum, the human element intervenes. It is this childlike innocence I'll sorely miss: the long-exploited, everlastingly misled Russian people falling for vast religious and political con games, yet retaining the purity and artlessness that can make you feel clean. It's still not too late: maybe I should stay here as a translator, subservient forever, but in contact with this gift.
Sounds of a disturbance interrupt this familiar musing. I push through to see a scarlet-faced major flaying a young dark-suit-and-white-dress couple celebrating their wedding with the traditional Red Square visit. The officer commands the hidden vantage point from which the holy place is kept under constant surveillance.
"So you like jokes?" he bellows. "This one won't go unrewarded. "Let's see your papers."
The mortified pair beg forgiveness. Their transgression was photographing each other with a bathroom cabinet, a wedding present just picked up in GUM, with the teacher's mausoleum "right there," in the background. Softened by a new fall of sodden snow, the major's threats of punishment for the sacrilege ring in my ears as I leave the Square my last time. Lenin is indeed "more alive than the living."
Winter's daylight ebbs; my time expires. The banality of the symbolism does not embarrass me: in a thousand ways, unspoiled
430^MOSCOW FAREWELL
Russia's movements are still determined by the angle of the sun. But my compulsion to exaggerate has had its own day. I walk up Kalinin Prospekt past the Lenin Library, remembering Ilya Alexandrovich, the aged prince. One look at the British Museum's listings on Admiral Kolchak was enough to recognize that Ilya will never produce more than an outline of White Russian records preserved abroad. The brave man's risky, crusading research has all been written up long ago, and better. Only in this closed world did his secret labors seem original and important—and I was quite willing to be taken in.
Have I blown up Alyosha too in this conspiracy to boost myself? But the truth is that Moscow withered after his death. The spark was gone; the common touch. Even people who hadn't known him well felt adrift. And phrases about him that propaganda overuse would otherwise have made extinct kept circling through the intelligentsia. Alyosha was "life-loving," "bubbling with life," "irreplaceable."
The morning I left for London the previous July was like a Three Stooges film. Although late as always, Alyosha and I had to conclude a last-minute deal involving a tie-clasp. Then stop for a pretty girl. Then race to the Tretyakov Gallery and talk our way in with a nutty pitch: we'd left our long-planned icon inspection for the last minute and it turned out to be the museum's monthly "sanitary day." Then to Gorky Street for the makings of blini, my last-lunch wish; but empty counters meant that the smoked salmon had to be bribed from the manager of the nearest restaurant.
Hurrying home, we drove right off again to a local foodshop for additional supplies: two girls waiting in the courtyard had to be co-opted to the party. The toasts split our sides. The blini were downed still sizzling from the pans. Leave the country without a proper celebration? Hell no! better to gorge, guzzle and joke against the clock.
Suddenly it occurred to us that empty valises—I'd sold or given away everything except the suit on my back—would alert customs as surely as if they'd been bulging with icons. Climbing on chairs, ripping at ancient cartons, Alyosha ransacked the room to supply me with "London outfits"—anything too old or ripped even for the secondhand stores—and taking the occasion
Come Again?^431
to proclaim to the microphone that the Soviet people spared the naked Western proletariat nothing. He crammed my bags with rags, grandly topping the pile with a sweater I myself had given him, now full of holes. Wide ties of the 1940s still bearing Western labels were best: how could a customs officer prove this stuff wasn't mine? "Pacesetting bon ton, sir; imitators years behind." Alyosha's double-talk sales spiel mocked everything we were and were trying to be, turning the incongruity of the clothes into a riotous, yet tragic, representation of our fated topsy-turvi-ness. We doubled up.
This was only six months ago, when the cancer was already marching toward his lungs.
We downed the last blinis in the car. A tire gave out in sight of the airport and he tried to fight off my help because I was going "there" and my hands should stay clean. Racing my things to the counter, he whispered facetious instructions for London life in my ear. Only his eyes betrayed a hope that something would cancel the flight.
Winter's daylight ebbs. Last laughs echo off the overcast.
She is just inside the little post office off October Square, the spitting image of a Siberian girl who urged me, an aeon ago, to hop on a train and play house with her in Irkutsk. She has the telltale look of having nowhere to sleep, no money to spend, nothing to do until something comes along to snap her boredom. I visualize her nipples as she dutifully exposes them; I remember my exultation of our parade. All the giving girls marching into the category of the people I'll never see again . . .
Inside, I think of filling my hollowness by handing her the rubles I no longer need. I go to the telegram counter and send them to Nina, trying to decide whether signing my name will slow her healing.
I couldn't get him into the cemetery where his mother had been buried, so the funeral was held here, in this new one. A rambling tract beyond a housing development's skeleton, but he'd have liked the name—Vostyakovskoye—for its old Slavic ring. Might have been touched, too, by the crowds: the caretakers said it was one of the largest private burials they could
432^MOSCOW FAREWELL
remember. He was a whitish death mask in his rough coffin, attended by colleagues, criminals, Erstwhiles, troupes of friends from various classes. The line for the ritual kiss of the cold forehead stretched into the muddy slush.
Then the eulogies: tender, funny, intensely personal yet universal. Subtle and honestly sentimental in the Russian oral tradition; worthy of him. The Chairman of his Juridical Consultation Office lauding his legal mind, a movie director reminiscing about the 1950s cafes, when the entertainment was either Alyosha himself or talk of his talent. . . . The wind blowing snow into eyes helped me drift into my private memories. I saw him bent under the lamplight, sewing his underpants as he sometimes did after returning from a gala evening, touched by the sad-humanity pantomime that makes a great clown. I remembered him backing out of the apartment one night when a girl wanted to be alone with me. I thought he had gone for a drive, but when I went to the bathroom afterwards, found him asleep in the tub, weary after a long day's running around. He looked at me fondly over the water and raised his fingers to his lips, "Shh . . . ," clowning that I needed reminding not to frighten the girl.
"The final moments slip by, one by one, irretrievable." Suddenly I was aware that his first wife was up on the little mound, denigrating his "juvenile behavior." Explaining that she had grown up but—this was his trouble—he never did. Everyone gasped but no one answered. I tried to make a speech, but my Russian went blurry just when it had to be most precise. Of the hundred pairs of eyes looking up at me, I recognized Anastasia's, thanking me because she understood.
His wife's attack was garnished by a moment of horse-trading by one cluster of mourners for the pitiful pickings of his possessions. Then two separate friends from his dandy days whispered that he had been reporting on me to the KGB all along. Their fables and faked concern bore all the marks of Bastard's touch. A country where people have to do that, even to the dead. And they didn't even have to: they had sold out for some little privilege.
The next day, Nina and I were alone at the grave. Our wreaths had been stolen. It was the work of teen-agers who sell
Come Again?X433
them to mourners arriving an hour later at the cemetery, making more this way than they could in a factory. This in the country that has "eliminated the objective causes of crime" and sentences people for questioning the dictum. Alyosha so liked flowers in the hospital. We had built little tents of fir branches to protect these from the frost.
The grave must wait a year for a headstone. I stand by its side until it gives me the power to go. No place on earth is so peaceful.
The icon is now in two trunks: mine and the car's. The bulbous Chaika cradles me as if I were one of the potentates for whom it was designed. We circle the Hotel Moscow, its heavy suspension cushioning the lean. We accelerate after a red light on Prospekt Marx, the front end dipping down before we surge ahead of lesser machines. Ours is from Intourist: I was instructed to go to the airport in their car rather than make my own way—and to be ready three hours before flight time.
These arrangements are a dead giveaway. Why the pointed gesture of sending a car for me? A Chaika limousine, the Central Committee's handmade chariot, for which policemen clear the way through ordinary traffic like Cossacks whipping their way through the rabble? Alyosha once showed me a leaflet distributed to Moscow drivers.
comrades! From Time to Time, You Will See "Chaika" Automobiles on the Streets of our capital. They Are In Use for Elected Officials of our party and Government, and the Soviet Union's Foreign Guests. Whenever You See a "Chaika," Pull to the Curb Immediately, Waiting Until It Has Completely Passed.
The driver's explanation—that the party of tourists scheduled to go with me canceled at the last minute—was clearly rehearsed. Loading my things, he scrutinized my face with an agent's curiosity about his quarry that dissolved the last uncertainty about what's waiting at the airport. Yet the trip out has already become one whose end can't be imagined, so perhaps won't come. I settle back to enjoy it. The seat nap smells like my father's new Buick when he first drove it home in 1950. I've had a fine snack of mushroom soup, pirozhki, and vodka in a
434.^MOSCOW FAREWELL
restaurant called The Central. What's so serious about a four-hour flight?
The ironies alone are worth the ride. The intrepid explorer of Backstreet Moscow leaving in a Chaika limousine. And accompanied not by the Russian friends in whom he's invested his emotion but by an American bachelor returning from his Christmas vacation to a London bank, who tries to strike up a conversation about the best hard-currency bargains.
The strange thing is that I don't resent this buttondown stranger as I would have a year ago. Unassumingly, he forces me to think about what I ought to. In the real world where I'll be tonight, who cares that in the Central Post Office we're now passing on the left, a dead man called Alyosha and I composed comic telegrams to each other while waiting for likely girls to waft into sight. My fellow passenger has usable know-how—in contrast to my inside knowledge of Moscow, which is worth far less than I pretend. I'm tired of being a bigger deal here than on the outside, just because I don't belong.
Besides, it's his chance to discover Russia. He's the type of American who's moving in and taking over. Moscow offices—of the First National City Bank, Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan, Univac and the rest—are opening everywhere, their expense-account staffs reserving the best restaurant tables. Beneath Lenin's portrait, the Minister of Foreign Trade contracts with Pepsi-Cola to produce millions of bottles annually. Comrade Brezhnev boasting he'll drink the first one. The Russian people will stand on line all day, and with Pepsi and chewing gum—yesterday's arch symbols of American vulgarity and imperialism—finally in their grasp the new revolution will be postponed another fifty years. They'll have made it; Orwell was right.
The penetration of the organization men started that day last May with the visit of Richard Nixon, former counsel to Pepsico International. Very soon "my" Moscow won't be the same.
The pleasant young banker moves closer to his window as I to mine. The street lights are on: evening at four o'clock. The Chaika's plush ride conspires to isolate me from the passing blur of shops and shoppers, but I concentrate on this last chance for refreshing my memories. The joyful moment when Anastasia and
Come Again?^435
I pressed against each other in that doorway over there, the labyrinthine entrance to the Bookshop Number One. "Let's get a taxi to Sokolniki Park," she said, instantly aroused. "I know a place for standing up."
Up the hill of Gorky Street, a favorite site for strolls. Past Mayakovsky Square and the Hotel Peking, where my bottle of scotch last winter for Ivan Petrovich, the restaurant manager, will always get me the table I no longer need. The driver's in a hurry to take me to his leader. Past the fortress doors of a store called "Armenia," where a hundred yards of well-dressed customers wait in thick sidewalk slush for baklavah to adorn their New Year's tables.
The line curls past massive facades and pathetic shop windows, gloomier than ever in the afternoon dark. The sodden snow soaks shoulders as it lands. Suddenly the key to this scene comes to me in a monologue of Prince Myshkin, Dostoyevsky's "Idiot," who explains that Russians subject themselves to extremes because they are driven
by fever, by burning thirst. ... As soon as we Russians reach a shore, as soon as we're certain it is a shore, we're so happy that we lose all sense of proportion. . . . It's not only we who are surprised by our passionate intensity in such cases, but all Europe. If a Russian converts to Catholicism, he's sure to become a Jesuit, and a rabid one at that. If he becomes an atheist, he'll surely demand that belief in God be eradicated by force. . . . Why such sudden fury? Because he has found his motherland at last, the motherland he has never had here; and he is happy. He's found the shore, the land; and rushes to kiss it. . . . Socialism too is the child of Catholicism. . . . Like its brother atheism, it too was begotten of despair ... In order to replace religion's lost moral power, to quench parched humanity's spiritual thirst and save it not by Christ, but by violence . . . "Don't dare believe in God! Don't dare own property! Don't dare have a personality of your own. Fratemite ou la mort/'^
This is the explanation for the willingness to wait two hours for the Armenia's sweets. No matter how small-minded some of their outward goals, no mere material comfort has ever driven Russians. Ten times more intense than the American dream, the
436^MOSCOW FAREWELL
Russian one is laced with religious notions of suffering for spiritual salvation. This world's meanness prompts fantasies of a braver one, for which they allow mad tyrants to starve and shoot them in their striving to attain it. I know because I feel this fever in me.
But as we stop for a light, the vulgar exaggeration in this turns me off. For every Dostoyevsky analyzing the anguished Russian soul and Solzhenitsyn demanding repentance, ten million Pavel Ivanovichs are troubled only by what movie to see on Saturday. Just off this very Gorky Street, I know an engineer more typical of the new urban masses than anything—by Russia-lovers or Soviet-haters—I've read. He cares about his children and his car, not guilt for the purges.
"All the brain-fucking, what's it for?" he once challenged me. "It's a myth that we go around agonizing. Talk of old troubles may precipitate new."
His truth cut me short. Only people who are themselves disturbed work at probing this country's hackneyed riddles and enigmas. Muscovites pick their noses, haggle over prices, steal everything not nailed down. At evening parties, so-called intellectuals take personal afTront over matters of "principle"— Gorky's real nature; Dali's motives—about which they know next to nothing. They argue sullenly or lunge with ignorant blows.
I had enough of this, and of the "soul-searching." The Russian people themselves don't really care; the endless contemplating of Great Questions—Who am I? What is Society? Whither Russia, and therefore the world?—is camouflage for their indolence. For their inability to cope with the simple things—unpolluted bathrooms, zippers on trouser flies—that the normal majority wants. The truth is that only against the poverty of my own emotions, as against that of daily Russian life, did the spiritual rummaging appear exhilarating. And this final hot-air discharge has me robbed of my last look at the Hippodrome and Alyosha's cluster of hospitals.
We've left Gorky Street and with a Chaika's immunity to police whistles are building speed on the Leningradsky Motorway. Past the boat station on the reservoir, where you can board
Come Again?^437
a river cruiser for a day of the Russian countryside's magic. Past the Ring Freeway, on which the old Volga could circumnavigate the city in an hour on a clear spring night. The city limits. The airport highway, an asphalt strip bearing the usual military-looking trucks, and the only memory of which I have is of a winter night when a young party I met celebrating a birthday in a restaurant took me out here, to a drunken orgy in a ramshackle cottage near the road. Discovering the following noon that literally our last kopeks had gone for the taxi out, we ransacked the room for something to peddle to a neighbor for bus fares back. Then the girls peered through the ratty curtain and went out to scout before I stepped outside, even though all such precautions were a farce if the police or KGB had followed us from the restaurant. Those days of simple-minded pleasures!
The driver's eyes on me in the rear-view mirror snap the memory. He handles himself as skillfully as the car, for although we both know his work, he is self-confident enough not to need small talk. Alyosha's notes about himself are mostly brief descriptions of time and place, but the legal materials are genuinely incriminating. His most recent murder file documents a case of startlingly sloppy work by an investigator, prosecutor and judge, which an appeals court confirmed out of aversion to "indulging" a man already sentenced. Alyosha's innocent defendant got ten years, having been told by one official to "stop whining—you won't be shot."
Zoom! we overtake a black government Volga, its chauffeured ftinctionary parting his curtains for a look at us as my fellow-passenger and I exchange weak smiles. Next we swish past a tanker truck serving as a snow plow, its kerchiefed woman driver straight out of a World War Two film. That's fine, but as the caught hostage being driven to the hoods, I'm an equally cliched movie character.
I'd rather think about summer, when everything changes. When sun bakes sultriness even into these fields, and the best Moscow evenings are all balmy air and strolling in summer dresses. Baseball gloves—worn by jabbering Cuban students— appear on the University's soccer grounds, Yanqui imperialists having cleverly forced the game on exploited Cuba decades ago
438^MOSCOW FAREWELL
so that Cubans would infect the Soviet homeland with it. The sound of ball and bat, of insects and nightingales; the profusion of Russia's wild flowers and heady smells . . .
The turnoff' to the access road. Another two minutes cutting across a Vermont postcard of unbroken snow and statuesque firs, each branch gloriously coated. Past the old airport and to Sheremetyevo International—right up to the front door, for this is not your honking Kennedy. The new terminal is full of the usual warps, fissures and cracks. They build things so badly here, brag so loudly about the results—and thank God: this same puffing weakness of theirs may make it easier for me inside.
Besides, it's New Year's Eve: maybe the customs staff" will be too busy covering for each other's backdoor bottle-nipping to organize serious searches. Good old Russian bungling may save me, and the lifeless terminal entrance looks like confirmation that nothing sinister is planned. I control my thumping impulse to hurry inside and dump the icon in a toilet.
The quiet American retrieves his streamlined suitcase and disappears with visible relief. The driver methodically helps me with my heavier things, but won't even take a ballpoint for a tip—which removes all doubt that he's no ordinary driver.
He watches in disbelief, almost stops me because I'm not making my way inside as I should but to a telephone booth at the corner of the building. I know he's convinced I'm about to pass the word on him to the American Embassy or someplace. But the hell with him, I've heard the signal I've been waiting for. I'm going to say good-bye to Anastasia again.
Not good-bye, really, but a genuine hello. Someday, somehow, I'll come back for her. I can't yet visualize how, but I know she will be my link with this land—because she represents its beauty and truth.
There's a danger of my old self-delusion here, but I'm fortified by a truth I suddenly realize about every great Russian writer. The government of the period may be cruel, the muzhiks drunk, the gentry or intelligentsia sniveling; but the women are noble. They rule the Russian novel because their inborn commitment to honesty lifts them above the daily muck. My own thoughts about Anastasia have been fumbling toward this psychological insight of Russian literature; Vvefelt this for months.
Come Again?^439
I won't burden her with this but will just remind her of our talk after the funeral, which she'll know excludes false promises. She needs just a bit more reassurance, and I can give it now. I'll say that one reason I want to go home is to see where we might fit in—into a semblance of the "real things" of our Esenin poem, not just summer idyls in Norway. That if I don't write through the mails, she must never doubt this. When the time comes, I'll find a way to get word to her.
And I want to know where she'll be so I can raise my glass at midnight. Luckily, I still have a supply of two-kopek coins for the phone, the last fruit of Alyosha's lessons. My fingers dial her number without having to think. Between the dark and the daylight: she'll be home at this hour. Damn, her dorm always takes a year to answer. At last someone does—wrong number.
I dial again. The same woman answers, this time cursing me before flinging down the receiver. What's this, of all madness? I know her number in my deepest sleep. Russia's million daily mechanical breakdowns checkmate you even when you know how to be a man. I've got to make the call of my life and of course it doesn't get through—because there's a system of right-and dignity-robbing obstacles that reduces you to insignificance in ways you hadn't even imagined.
But before my outrage boils over, a wiser voice tells me that railing at the telephone's flaws is an old device to shunt anger from my own. Setting down my stuff", I fish out my address book on the off"chance I've transposed figures in her number. Glancing frequently inside the terminal for instructions, my driver is making himself as obvious as police plants in the hard-currency stores. Last night, in preparation for disaster, I ripped out pages from my little black book identifying people the KGB might not be certain I knew. But the old listing under Jonquil is there, and my memory hasn't bungled her number.
Fluorescent lighting casts a ghastly glow from the terminal windows to the crusting snow and the silence is extraordinary, considering the place. It's amazing how a new challenge appearing just before a long dreaded one can disarm the second by changing your perspective. When I was twelve, I couldn't sleep for weeks because a store owner who caught me shoplifting threatened to come to our house. All that fear for nothing: when
440^MOSCOW FAREWELL
he did appear, my parents had just announced their separation and no one bothered with him. Now the trouble waiting at customs, even any punishment afterwards, is receding in the same pattern. The maximum sentence they'd dare is a couple of years, whereas putting things clearly to Anastasia and myself might affect our entire future.
My only fear is that something—a KGB device to foil communication from the airport?—has jinxed this telephone. I dial a third time: the number's busy. Then one try after the other, without interruption. The roar of a taxiing plane comes just at the wrong moment, when it will drown us out if our connection is bad. Still in the doorway, the driver actually nods his head in my direction. But I stick to my guns—and win!: the number rings. I somehow sense Anastasia herself will answer.
My God, it's the angry bitch again/
"Wait, please don't hang up!" I blurt this out before she can slam down, instinctively resorting to the most effective bid for attention from operators, gatekeepers and other strangers. "Don't cut me off again, please. I'm a foreigner and I can't understand why your number keeps—"
" A foreigner/" The woman's panicky shriek tells me she is an officer worker in her sixties widowed by the purges and pinched by decades of grind; still living by the Stalin era's laws—according to which a foreigner's call is a Mafia kiss. She hurls down the loathsome instrument in her hand, saving even her gasp until the danger is past.
So I'm beaten? Without knowing why? I wait for the solace of the new scheme that switches on automatically when my preceding one breaks down, but fail to discover anything sensible, let alone positive, in whatever it is that has thwarted this last word with Anastasia. If I really wanted to reassure her, the inspiration should have come in time for more than a stagy call from the airport. I will have to reach her another way, without the instant reward of her voice and new friendship. Anyway, for once I'd rather do something for her than promise it.
Life goes on. My hat goes on. I remember Alyosha's joke when he sewed its crown an inch smaller because I'd bought it too big. From the depths of his memory, he dragged up the phrase "swelled head" in English, adopting it to the reversed circum-
Come Again?X441
stances and simultaneously satirizing Malenkov. But the trick is to shunt some of this nostalgia-generating energy into the physical variety, since dreams won't get my trunk to the check-in counter.
It strikes me as odd that I haven't seen this final scene before. Free of deja vu, I lug the trunk toward the entrance, also coping with all my other gear in a clumsy gavotte of strained arms and stretched fingers. Although it has turned colder, my underwear is sweaty. No, I won't return to the telephone booth for my sheepskin gloves.
I reach the entrance, conscious of the eyes following my progress. The driver is talking to a younger man posing as a fellow chauffeur, but neither makes a move to help me with the double portals. Heavy doors again: I must write that essay. Although I should be supremely indifferent to the opinion of these two musclemen, something tells me to display fortitude by tackling the doors and struggling without resting. More than any possible arrest inside, I fear the humiliation of dropping my bags.
The numbness that relieves my arms also pleasantly unfocuses my vision. It's the well-known phenomenon of split-consciousness sundering my conscious and acting selves. The first thing I notice inside is that this is no international departure building, but a Mosfilm set for an espionage potboiler supposedly set in the West—the kind old roommate Viktor liked so much. Good old Viktor, whom I appreciated only after he was replaced by tougher types, just as Moscow intellectuals grew fond of Khrushchev during Brezhnev's reign.
A detachment of soldiers is crossing a large area of new flooring, its warps rippling in the fluorescent glare. A tourist couple searches nervously for the document listing their ruble purchases, which must be surrendered before they can leave the country. My fellow passenger in the Chaika is staring at me as if I'd risen from a bloody accident. What's on my face, I wonder, to cause his startled concern? How I admire him, that straightforward American with nothing to smuggle and no Russian illusions to defend or shatter.
Cleaning women, pudgy counter women, a few porters sustaining the motions of work. A microphone voice squawking about botched transportation for incoming passengers. But like a
442^MOSCOW FAREWELL
wildebeest's eyes fastening on a waiting lioness, my vision is drawn to an immobile object in this kaleidoscope of everyday disarray. Bastard is standing like a bludgeon under the messy sign announcing "Flight BE411, Moscow-London," gloves folded in a stubby hand like a collaborator imitating his Gestapo boss.
Bastard at the airport? Of course, as you knew he'd be. Since we both knew the Intourist girls had instructions to tell him before writing my ticket, his arduously blase questions about when I "might leave" was his usual phony dissembling to demean me. I'm just as sure now that New Roommate informed long ago about the icon—proof of Alyosha's judgment in urging me never to take one to my room.
I remember thinking that Bastard's itch to punish identified him as the type who supervised the mechanics of the purges. He wanted revenge in general; and in my case in particular, I always knew I'd have to pay for "spurning" him. I wonder whether he knows I'm Jewish; whether he swallows the newspaper stuff about the "Zionist conspiracy" to subjugate a hundred million Arabs and, by "impugning President Nixon's integrity," to sabotage the Soviet-American detente. He's the type to believe he's on the trail of an agent of Tel-Aviv and of the Pentagon simultaneously.
Even from here, I can make out the facial moles: plugs for spraying the vinegar of his countenance. He's checking his watch now, and the silliest of words— escapel —whispers itself to me. But where could I flee to or hide in? Assuming I somehow sneaked out of the building, should I try for the Turkish border? The notion makes me smile—a mistake because Bastard catches sight of me at this instant, and Bastard wants humble recognition of his mastery on my face. While he inspects me, the smile, to my dismay, becomes one of bumping into a shit in the subway and faking pleasure to conceal embarrassment. The triteness of this role I'm about to play with him makes me sheepish.
He grimaces and nods to his henchmen, seven or eight dicks in the uniform of customs officers or equally distinguishable KGB mufti. An announcement of a flight arrival in delightful Mata Hari English breaks my concentration. A woman waddles out from her currency-exchange booth to whisper to a passing stewardess, oblivious to everyone's opinion of her dignity. That's
Come Again?^443
what I love in these people. Russians squabble in a packed bus if they want to, slurp their soup in a crowded restaurant—because they're simply not selfconscious . . .
And I'm contemplating the Russian character even now, making me realize that this has encroached on everything I've done here, preventing me from thinking straight about Anastasia not as a type but as a person —and about myself. For some reason, I sought in this country's ambiance the missing keys to what I wanted to be and wasn't.
The joke is that one of the needs it promised to satisfy was my old one for punishment. It's not simply, as I used to reflect at my window, that Russia relieves neuroses by providing external adversity; even that it reminds you daily of the tragic essence of existence. Its subtler gift is a sense of retribution to fill out the primordial human knapsack of guilt. And if the underlying melancholy I welcomed is utterly contradictory to the happy Russian childhood I also sought—just like extolling Russians being themselves with Bastard striking his ludicrous pose twenty yards away—I can only venture that contradiction is the stuff" of human nature. That by laying bare some of my own, Russia has brought me alive. I feel closer to my own paradoxes, wiser because what I don't understand about myself has come nearer to the surface; some day I may grapple with it. The last irony is that I'll probably have my first taste of real persecution now, when I have less need for it because I want to go home, plant my feet on the ground, stop falling for illusions.
As I drag the trunk toward the counter, Bastard deploys one of his plainclothesmen. To reconnoiter? The deputy circles toward my blind quarter, eyes wide as if waiting for me to pull a gat, and at the same time trying to look inconspicuous, no doubt in accordance with his training. The guy's actually on his tippie-toes, and when I stare directly at him, continues snaking through the nonexistent grass, pretending he's still undetected. Meanwhile, the customs men clear a space to do a job on my luggage.
Outside this burlesque, life plods on. A middle-aged tourist is gushing awe of the Soviet people because a luggage-conveyor mechanic has handed her a glove she dropped. At a counter next to mine, a would-be Russian passenger, unmistakably a technician going abroad, is ordered sotto voce to stand the hell aside
444^MOSCOW FAREWELL
quick and let the foreigners check in first. An Aeroflot pilot appears, uniform crumpled and picking his teeth: surely the spitting image of the one in command at the time of Joe Sourian's crash.
Another deputy sallies forth. Certainly the airport personnel know what they're up to with me; it's old hat to them. But I'm amazed that none of the foreigners have an inkling. So this is how the 1930s roundups worked: no opposition because each marked man was totally alone. Cut off from all help—even here, at ye international airport. I'd shout, but what's the point of frightening innocent tourists? As it is, even the pilgrimage-to-socialism ones are nervous about getting out of the country. Besides, I'm guilty. Attracting their attention to the icon's exposure would propagandize them exactly the wrong way.
Better to go it alone. This isn't the challenge I'd choose if I had a new chance, but it's mine. Bastard picks up a telephone, announcing something as if this were his moment in Marxist-Leninist history. I don't want to hear the drawl he himself despises. Or look at his eyes.
He sneezes and turns angrier. That look I remember when he kept repeating something I couldn't understand one evening while I sustained my diffident "Pardon me." His thin amour propre corroded, he pressed on grimly with the word. Suddenly I deciphered "the leadership of Spiro Agnew" through his Laugh-In accent and laughed so hard that I spattered him with wine. Georgian red on Russian purple: gorgeous!
Now his plainclothesmen are badly blanched. Crazy man, what can they fear from the prey? But I can't miss it, even in my own nervousness. Maybe they're afraid they'll botch everything, like Bastard with his phony cable address.
The funny thing is that I'm in this having had almost no contact with the dissidents so important to most other Americans here. Sometimes I felt the names in the Western headlines were the least representative Russians, but the reason I didn't get involved was simply that I didn't happen to meet them. The one celebrated "opposition" writer I did run into once later defected during a trip to London, earning himself pages of hailing publicity—and doing me dirty in a way I then couldn't believe. To demonstrate his loyalty and avoid a last-minute cancellation
Come Again? "^445
of his visa, he concocted information about an American who'd supposedly tried to sell him dollars, choosing a real name—mine —for maximum verisimilitude. While the world press was extolling his gallant honesty, two men were slyly grilling me in the University—which is one reason Bastard wanted to meet me even before Alyosha got sick. But try to explain this mix-up, where I shared Bastard's opinion—but for very different reasons —of the I-chose-freedom hero to Bastard's one-track, enemies-of-the-Motherland mind. Try to explain it, for that matter, to Western worshipers of any Russian who hates Soviet rule, seeing him as a gloriously noble Dissenter in every instance.
No, I must steer clear of all such complications, and everything else too true to be invented. My job is to cook up a bluff for Bastard about the legal materials. I've done it before with him; can do it again in the clinch. I'll say I need a few real cases for worming my way in with Washington's Soviet experts, the better to ferret out information for him. "Evgeny Ivanovich, you yourself taught me how terrible our censorship is. We can never read about your legal system. All America will go wild over these priceless examples of true justice in action. . . ."
But you know something, I'm tired of mouthing stories. I don't even want to shout; don't even hate him any longer. In an odd way he's been preparing me to face my real conflict once I'm past his tackle and home, trying to find something more "me" to commit myself to than professorial briefcases and mortgages. The Russia he represents has helped me see the other one—of simplicity, instinct, fantasy—more clearly, and to accept that it's not all one nation; everyone must pick and choose. Partly through him, the limits of my feeling have been extended and I've learned the Russian lesson that it's all right to be yourself. Bastard, the emancipator from emotional inhibition!
What I resent is that he'll be pawing the papers that are the private, intimate property of Alyosha and me. And that I'm wasting final thoughts on him. All the people I've known, the episodes I want to contemplate—and he's the last Russian I'll talk to. I feel enormously beholden to the country, but the joke is that only the KGB is left to receive my thanks.
The counter has been cleared for me. I sense that I've straightened up and that this confuses Bastard, who likes his
446^MOSCOW FAREWELL
charges to lay their heads on the block. He's under my nose now, with all his symbolic power somehow gone.
"Let's not go through the song and dance, Evgeny Ivanovich." My voice surprises me with its mellow confidence. "You'd really rather sing and dance at some party tonight, wouldn't you? ■Somewhere, old chap, you're nice enough to dislike your work."
His reaction is amazing—yet commonplace. His eyes blaze but his feet pedal backwards, like those of any challenged bully. In this second, I see that I'm going to make it past him; that he'll only go through the motions of a search because he knows that if it comes to a trial, I'll disclose everything I know about him instead of playing along to reduce my sentence.
"I want to board as soon as I can. Please have someone help with my things."
Yes I'm nervous, but if necessary, I'll start telling what I know about him right here—and in loud, clear English too, for the benefit of the passengers. He knows this; he sees in my posture that I'm stronger than he. My only restraint will be for Anastasia's sake: a big fuss now would keep us apart for too many years.
Too many years. I think my need to postpone the real things has expired. I'm not afraid to give, to see, to feel, to be. To cherish her even though she is both purer than I and less perfect than my ideal. To love as I loved Alyosha, accepting that part of all such happiness must die. To know—and not shrink at the triteness of it—that whatever I eventually do in life is less important than what I am. I remember Maya at the counter of the Lenin Library. It doesn't matter now, I have my baby. I'm full of joyful gratitude for the power, at last, to understand her with more than my mind.
Still grimacing. Bastard is trying to think of a scare tactic to deprive me of this. But he doesn't want a confrontation with me, especially in front of witnesses. If he does find the contraband, he'll confiscate it quietly. And in the long run, this doesn't matter. I'll take the real things with me.
I
ТЕЛЕГРАМКанал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками
Книжный Вестник
Бот для удобного поиска книг (если не нашлось на сайте)
Поиск книг
Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах
Любовные романы
О психологии, саморазвитии и личностном росте
Саморазвитие
Детективы и триллеры, все новинки
Детективы
Фантастика и фэнтези, все новинки
Фантастика
Отборные классические книги
Классика
ВКОНТАКТЕБиблиотека с любовными романами, которая наверняка придётся по вкусу женской части аудитории
Любовные романы
Библиотека с фантастикой и фэнтези, а также смежных жанров
Фантастика
Самые популярные книги в формате фб2
Топ фб2
книги