The girl from Petrovka

Traffic stopped and a crowd of onlookers gathered. They began recounting their VE-Day experiences, the last time they’d seen such public spontaneity in an army unit. It was only after the troops were finally back in a semblance of rank that Alexander caught sight of me.

'How could she do it?’ he moaned. 'Wasn’t I trying to be nice to her? That outfit she’s wearing. And milk - do you realize I can never be in the saddle again?’

His men quickly supported this contention: although Soviet soldiers sing in response to specific commands, they broke into a full-throated chorus on their own initiative as they moved off. It was ‘Forward Comrades for Party and Motherland’.

‘How could I do what?’ said Oktyabrina as the company disappeared. Her voice was like a wounded bride s. But it s still so dreadfully hot. Sashinka was sweating so - ought I to stand aside and watch him become ill for lack of liquid?’ 152

Back in the apartment she made one of her statements of prepared ambiguity. ‘My Sasha could have all the girls with licentious legs he wants - if he wanted them. I’m not blind to that. But I’m the one who loves him only for himself -enough to brave scorn and supervise his health.’

Alexander’s note was delivered by Petya. Oktyabrina found this ‘outrageous’. ‘That pretty-boy lacks the' courage even to say adieu to me in person/ But in fact, she was pleased by the triumph this acknowledged, as well as by Petya’s behavior when he handed her the note. He scurried away,

evidently in fear that Oktyabrina might select him as her next victim.

The note was entirely straightforward. Alexander wasn’t angry, didn t even blame her, but she was plain dangerous. Although he wasnt calling her a subversive element, it came to the same thing. ‘Because a hundred like you exposed to the troops and morale will be busted. Believe me, the Chinks won t stop at Siberia. ... I know you could track me down, but I am warning you. I always promised I would never hit a woman because of Mother, but I’m warning you ’

Oktyabrina placed the note next to Alexander’s photograph and studied the documentary evidence of Beginning and End. Yes, Lieutenant Zavodin and I must go our separate ways,’ she sighed, pondering whether to rip up the photograph and/or the note, or preserve one or both. Diffuse post-mortems followed throughout the day. ‘If the love lacked joy, the parting will be sans agony,’ she said. ‘That’s

Lermontov, of course. Only sufferers fully understand his genius.’

The next day, we strolled down Petrovka in the post-heatwave breeze and Oktyabrina suggested a visit to a church still functioning inside the ancient Petrovsky Monastery. It was attended by wretchedly poor women wrapped in almost a winter lamination of dingy shawls. They kissed smoky icons, sank painfully to their knees and prostrated

themselves on the cold floor — all of which Oktyabrina saw in a new light.

‘It’s rather exalted in a way. . . . Do you think the Lieutenant was a sign for me to become a nun? Ive long suspected that my life was consecrated for the pursuit of physical

purity.

Religion, she thought, might be the answer for someone capable of giving a whole heart and all fibers of the soul. Love was such a boorish substitute. The trouble was that all women’s monasteries were probably closed now, because of the opium of the people they used to dispense. Still, she said, T could use some opium myself right now, or morphine.’

When we emerged onto Petrovka again, she considered a visit to the building directly across the street, a bizarre eighteenth-century mansion now identified by a red sign as "The Institute of Physiotherapy’. T spared you most of the details, dear Zhoseph, and shall continue to spare you. The Lieutenant’s coarseness should not be inflicted on any innocent third party. Still, you should know the general fact of my suffering.’

Her last comment was spoken quite happily. On the other hand, it was rather fascinating. A valuable life experience , you might say. The thing is, I cant quite make up my mind whether it was ennobling or degrading to have been desperately in love with a bastard.

16

I no longer try to analyze my attitude towards this country. There are too many layers and too many moods. The more "Russianness’ I see, the less I’m able to separate its virtues and deep flaws.

A tourist has a better chance of making up his mind. He may, for example, belong to the category that has a deep-

rooted craving to be thrilled by the Soviet people and prove to himself that socialism works. In this case, he’ll recognize an expression of universal humanity in a waiter shoving a menu at him after an hours wait. When taken on tour of dreary housing developments, he will marvel at Soviet achievements. When his Intourist guide (bored silly and long past embarrassment over the half-truths she recites) preaches about the productivity of socialist labor and purity of socialist-realist art, he 11 be moved by her shining wisdom. Above all, he’ll confirm what he’s always known: that Americans and Russians have a profound natural affinity. He may meet a Russian - the kind allowed to consort with tourists — and make the discovery that both peoples

share the habit of brushing teeth. With toothpaste! From a tube! r

On the other hand, he may belong to the category that despises the country ac first sight. Even in his Intourist accommodation — beyond ordinary Russians’ dreams of luxury — he will be irritated by the hopeless inefficiency: daily breakdowns of elevators, plumbing and nerves. He may not know he’s paying thirty-five times what a Russian does for the same room, but he’ll sense Intourist’s ruthless fleecing. When he ventures from his hotel, he’ll be depressed by universal shoddiness and shabbiness: the absence of smiles; unholy contrast between the paradise of propaganda and dreariness of everything else. By the third day, he’ll yearn to board a plane — any line but Aeroflot — and resume a real vacation in Rome.

If this categorization sounds snide, the trouble is that my own reactions bounce as fitfully from pole to pole. Neither Intourist’s transparent fictions nor the gloominess of the streets are a guide to anything important, but aren’t the country’s inner qualities equally contradictory? An extraordinary warmth and sensitivity survives under the surface Soviet rule. A heightening of perceptions and flooding of senses - the same qualities that have made Russian literature the most moving and universal in the world. Yet the

country is obscurantist, backward and exhausting. It is a cruel dictatorship in the grip of evil men: Southern-sheriff types who trample on civilized standards without even understanding their crimes. And their marks are everywhere, in slovenliness, darkness and weight. Libraries are written explaining Russian in terms of one or another theory: Marxism-Leninism; the artistic temperament; the mysteries of the Russian soul. But these abstractions manage to ignore the starkest fact: the country is dismally poor.

Why, then, am I drawn to it? Because I feel richer by comparison? Because I’m lionized for a pack of Camels or an old Beatles’ record? Because it’s easier to live where the problems are external - society’s fault rather than your own?

But these obviously aren’t the sole explanations, for it was also in a poor and backward country that I began to miss Moscow in gentle swells. The first weeks of my vacation had been blissful. As my plane crossed the Soviet border, an inexorable weight disappeared; back on the ground, I took pleasure in the luxury of shop windows and ordered drinks for the sake of holding a graceful glass and watching civilized service. The sun and sea were glorious, the

food spectacular by Russian standards. But something was missing.

I lay on the beach at Taormina, on Sicily’s eastern coast, and relived my last day in Moscow. It was frantic because, as on every trip ‘outside’, I didn’t know whether I’d be allowed back in. I’d been issued a double visa, for re-entry as well as exit; but the former is sometimes annulled when an ‘unfriendly’ correspondent is abroad and the authorities want to be rid of him. Leaving Moscow, therefore, is as different from leaving other places as living there is: you risk never seeing your friends again.

This thought makes you feel dramatic, but also frightened. The goodbyes have an altogether special meaning because they may be the last ones. You and your friends look into each other’s eyes and promise to remember, even if work, 156

politics or someone’s revenge happen to separate you. You thank each other for being friends and bringing some mean-ing into each other’s lives. Wars, famines, purges and midnight disappearances have familiarized Russians with this kind of parting; they perform it honestly and well. I haven’t yet learned to have grace, as Hemingway put it, under the pressure of this searing nostalgia and pathos.

Kostya gave a luxurious farewell supper the evening before my flight. It was attended by his new girl friend, an enchantingly pretty medical resident called Tamara. She’d been living with him for over a week, which indicated he was extremely fond of her and she would become a member of his permanent 'brood’ after the cooling of the romance. Having teased him about public health violations, she’d done the impossible in cleaning his Augean room, and Kostya gave her an ounce of Chanel, a magnificent gift, in appreciation. She used it that evening, even though perfume made her shy; and sprinkled a liberal volume on Oktyabrina’s lavender frock.

The summer plans were fixed. Kostya and Oktyabrina would be leaving for the Black Sea three days later. Kostya’s trip with the geology girls had fallen through, but a former lassie of his was the mistress of a secretary in the Union of Composers, and had arranged for him to have a cabin in one of the so-called 'Creative Retreats’ directly on the sea. The retreats exist under the fiction of providing creative artists a sequestered place to work, but in fact are a supplementary reward for the 'working intelligentsia’ who produce politically acceptable art, and are usually used for inexpensive and rather uninhibited vacations in luxury unavailable to the general public.

‘People can’t spell any more,’ said Kostya. ‘All these new ComPart abbreviations are turning the great Russian language into a science-fiction code. It’s procreative retreat - not “creative”. And nobody in the whole Union gets it right.’

He made sure to explain how composers use the colony

to duck their wives. ‘There hasn’t been a chord written there since Stalin ordered a requiem to himself in 1953 and shot a few “saboteurs” for composing below Mozart’s standards. At noon, every composer gets up and suns away his hangover. At sundown, they open their bottles and examine the girls they’ve selected on the public beach. Last year there was a proposal to chop up the piano for campfires, but the keyboards come in handy for hanging panties where they’ll be found in the morning.

Oktyabrina was going to travel with Kostya as far as Sochi - the largest resort on the coast, a kind of 1930s Miami Beach - from which she would survey the scene. It was her first trip to the Black Sea and she was full of the inevitable chatter about palm trees, luxury and romance. Nevertheless, she occasionally remembered to be blase about the trip. T simply cant remain in Moscow,’ she would say with heavy exasperation. ‘Everybody who’s anybody is leaving for the season. I’ve stopped fighting these boring conventions . . . and besides, someone must look after poor Kostya.

As a going-away present she gave me a small sixteenth-century icon. She’d had it cleaned by a restorer who removed several layers of overpainting to the original richly colored image. The subject was the Birth of Christ, an unusual one for the Orthodox Church, painted in the northern style. It was one of the most beautiful icons I’d seen outside a museum, and Oktyabrina declined to say where or how she got it, except that it had not been snatched from the Tretyakov Gallery. Even Kostya was impressed. He identified the three Magi in the painting as Brezhnev, Kosygin and Suslov, but studied it respectfully during breaks in the preparation of the supper.

Tamara helped him expertly in this, for she’d already mastered some of the secrets of his cuisine. She was very happy to be with him, even though she knew the romance would not last. Kostya gave his ‘steady’ girls, defined as those who were with him eight or more consecutive days, 158

an intangible but unmistakable deepening, which never left them and for which they were forever grateful. Many came to see him years, even decades, after their brief affairs, and he took great pride in recognizing them all, no matter how many husbands and children they'd had, and however drastically their shapes had changed.

Tamara's farewell gift to Oktyabrina was an almost new Italian silk scarf that one of her medical colleagues had bought from a Western tourist. Kostya gave me a slim volume with yellowed pages and a tattered cover. It was a collection of poems by Osip Mandelshtam, who died in a labor camp in 1938 and has never been republished, although most of the ‘underground' literary intelligentsia consider him Russia's best twentieth-century poet. Kostya had kept the book throughout the darkest Stalin years, when mere possession of literature by a liquidated writer terrified most people and could lead to denunciations. Inside the grease-stained cover, he'd written an inscription: To Zhoe, whom we ll miss whether he's gone two days, two months or . . . well, longer. If it’s the latter, try to understand these poems and think of us. We'll never forget you. From your buddy Kostya.'

. It was when Oktyabrina read this aloud that the realization we might never see each other again suddenly became real and immediate. We all stared at the floor for a long moment, feeling everything, but with nothing to say and no need to say it.

Oktyabrina broke the tension by presenting me with a ‘memorandum' which she’d been preparing for a week. It was a list of ‘import commodities' I was requested to bring in with me when I returned for the ‘Moscow season'. There were thirty-five items, all numbered in pencils of different colors. Most were Woolworth articles such as ribbon and zippers, and of course cosmetics, among them nail polish remover and lotions for pimples, all carefully described with trade names she'd taken from advertisements in my magazines. Kostya snatched the list and added item thirty-six:

One small collection of jade, to be delivered in the glove compartment of a sky-blue Buick sedan, with a musical horn and snow tires’.

After the huge supper, Oktyabrina lay back on the bed, her arm still clasping Tamara’s waist, as it had for an hour. Suddenly she jumped up and kissed Kostya on the lips and was back on the bed, sitting with mock primness, in a second. She examined me directly for my reaction, instead of from the comer of her eye. Our gazes became transfixed; for a moment we seemed lifted out of the flyblown room and on to a luxurious balcony in Monaco. 'So this is what it’s like,’ Oktyabrina whispered. 'Parting from a faithful friend.

She snapped to herself. 'Want to hear a new Russian saying? Please turn down the tape recorder, Kostya . . . "Whether far or near/Zhoe’s our special dear/And when he returns to us . . .’” She hesitated. 'Help me, you rats! Something better than "fear” or "tear”.’

The 'celebration’ came to life again, spiced by Kostya’s latest jokes. Tamara swallowed a large glass of vodka and

for the fun of it, unraveled an entire sleeve of a sweater she’d been knitting. Then she plunged into deep pensiveness and said something about the incomprehensibility of separation that would sound sentimental in the retelling, but on her lips had a perfect purity. Oktyabrina kissed her forehead.

Near midnight, the sky still held a faint trace of light, the remnants of early summer’s White Nights. I got up to leave because my flight was very early in the morning. Kostya reminded us of the old Russian custom and we all sat down again for several silent minutes to gather our thoughts and put our fives in perspective before a long trip.

I said my goodbyes in the room and Kostya hurried me down the corridor to the front door and fragrant night.

Later Kostya told me that Oktyabrina cried after I’d left. She had a premonition, she said, that something terrible was going to happen to me in over-rich, overstrung Europe.

I might be run over by a sports car or arrested as a Russian

spy. No, the real danger was worse: I would fall into the clutches of an overdressed, oversexed American heiress.

Sicily’s beauty was rendered irrelevant by the invasion of Czechoslovakia. My first news of the Soviet tanks came at breakfast on the twenty-first, through the medium of a florid Austrian at a neighboring table. He was outraged at the ‘barbaric Russians’ and feared their troops would march straight through to his beloved Vienna. But he was also sneakingly pleased. The Czechs deserved something like this, didn’t they? For being Communists themselves, of course. Besides, they were only Slavs in the first place: backward peasants who could never hope to govern themselves.

The morning passed in alternation between packing in my room and monitoring the grim radio reports in the lobby. My expected cable from Chicago arrived before lunch: ‘Proceed soonest to Prague’ to assist our East European man, who was already on his way. I got as far as Rome that evening.

The next week was exhausting. I couldn’t get a flight to Prague; every journalist in Europe was competing for seats. By the time I did secure a reservation, the Soviet army had established enough control to ensure Western journalists were refused visas at the border. This meant I now had no means of entry. When this became clear, Chicago sent me to Vienna to backstop our East Europe man, who had rushed from there to Prague on the twenty-first.

Vienna was a hard slog: relaying cables, culling secondary sources, interviewing refugees who’d already begun to stream from Czechoslovakia. I’d forgotten what it was like to do a real story, and keep at it round the clock. My Russian gave me the drift of Prague Radio’s underground reports: the heart-breaking encounters with Soviet tanks. My mind reeled with the tragedy and I think my stories conveyed its depths. But after five days of this, Chicago asked me to return to Moscow. The bureau was unmanned

except for a stringer and they wanted the Soviet side of the story covered more fully. I got a seat on the Aeroflot flight to Moscow the following afternoon.

17

When the plane landed at Sheremetyevo Airport, I felt a wave of vertigo. I was here again in this stifling, hermetic, bafflingly remote world. How can Russia be three hours from Europe - yet belong to a wholly different time and place? Everything seemed totally alien, yet achingly familiar, as if I’d come to see grandparents who died before I was born. The sharp smells of Russia seeped into the plane even before its doors were opened; a new neon sign proclaiming MOCKBA was sputtering in three places. Fifteen long minutes passed before we began disembarking: the crew assigned to the ramp - four ramps for a hundred odd planes - was lost somewhere on a smoke break. Nothing had changed; nothing would change. On the drive into Moscow, the woods were deep in yellows and browns: autumn in August. In the new, prefabricated outskirts, the inevitable lines for food attended bare housing developments: solemn people in plastic raincoats putting in the necessary hours for something dreary to eat. I’d forgotten how poor everything was.

A stack of cables awaited me in the office. They were full of queries that only members of the Politburo and General Staff could answer about details of the invasion’s preparation, of where Dubcek and the others had been held hostage, of their reactions during the sessions with their kidnappers. In the heat of an important story, stateside editors forget - because they’ve never fully understood — that the hard news they want simply doesn’t exist. The Pentagon reveals more about the battle plans of Polaris submarines than the Kremlin about its workings. My stories were lumps 162

of dough after Vienna’s ringing cries. The most f could hope was that a straight report of the screaming lies of the Russian press would demonstrate how far the Soviet government, in manufacturing its own logic and standards, departed from Western notions of truth and justice.

In the absence of hard news, Chicago asked for local color and man-in-the-street reactions. But the strangest aspect of the invasion - the aspect my editors could least understand, suspecting laziness on my part - was that the Moscow man on the street had no reaction at all to what their tanks were doing, except a mild 'serves the Czech wise-guys right’. When it became clear that the invasion would not involve Russia in a new war, few Russians gave it another thought. It was something taking place in the mythical, inaccessible 'outside’, about which Russians have no reliable knowledge and in which no real say - and therefore little interest. The whole world was holding its breath or trembling with indignation over Czechoslovakia and its consequences, but in Russia the problems were to find a dry-cleaner for your overcoat and elbow your way into department stores and busses. A few stunted apples and pears had appeared on the counters of selected grocery shops. Now was the time to grab them, five or six kilos at a time, or forget the taste of fresh fruit for another year.

Kostya obtained his fruit, including whole armfuls of fine Bulgarian grapes, without waiting in line: the supervisor of a nearby peasant market had been his girlfriend twenty years ago, when he was a young steel rigger in Magnitogorsk.

‘Czechoslovakia?’ he said with sham fervor when I tuned to a news report. ‘I’m delighted you’re taking an interest in the way we free citizens run our affairs. The entire Soviet people, all progressive mankind, is profoundly grateful to the Party for offering fraternal help to the happy comrades in Prague.’

He poured two tumblers of white Crimean wine, which he was serving with fresh zander bought in another market,

and fitted a new tape onto the recorder, a decrepit replacement for his Philips.

'But what the hell’s all the fuss about, I wonder?’ he continued. 'X myself remember the Czechs inviting our comradely army into the country, pleading with us to help save them from fascism.’

At this signal, I took out my notebook and pretended to jot down his Pravda -like quotes for publication throughout the world.

'Let’s see. . . . The Czechs extended the invitation in the summer of ’38 - just before Munich, I think. Naturally we thought it over carefully before sending our tanks in -- thirty years and two months later. Our Leninist Party spilleth over with humanitarianism; it never likes to rush for its guns.’

Kostya was tanned to a deep terra umbra, which lifted ten years from his appearance. He was now in splendid physical shape, having swum miles every day along the coast just outside Sochi. One day he struck out directly to sea to test how far he’d get before being stopped - frontier guards in the guise of life-savers patrol the whole of Russia’s Black Sea coast to prevent defections by water. A motor boat intercepted him about two miles from shore, and that very afternoon his papers were examined by a Sochi KGB agent posing as an ordinary policeman. For the fun of it, Kostya produced several bottles and drank the agent, who’d boasted of his capacity, under the table.

Otherwise, his vacation had been only a moderate success. Much as he loved the sun, Sochi was losing some of its luster after sixteen consecutive summers. He could hardly make a new conquest there; most of the beauties he spied on the beach turned out to be part of last year’s catch, or the year before’s. So many familiar physiques. . . .

As for Oktyabrina, he’d quickly lost contact with her. She went to sleep the first night with the intention of spending several weeks in exploration alone. But she soon found she wasn’t 'transported’ by Sochi and gave notice that she was moving on. The beach displeased her most: 164

she hadnt expected crowds of people ‘practically rubbing stomachs with each other — obese hairy stomachs\ And she disapproved on principle of deep tanning, or ‘the charring of flesh . Although it’s true that Sochi’s beaches are packed to bursting with some of the largest and least attractive bodies on earth, Kostya sensed that Oktyabrina’s aesthetic disappointment masked her own embarrassment to appear in a bathing suit. She wore long skirts and high-necked blouses in the sun, then fashioned a parasol out of an old umbrella frame and some emerald fabric, and pinked a pair of white work gloves into ‘lace’.

‘I caught her sniffing the sea like a baby seagull,’ said Kostya. ‘This was a few kilometers up the coast, on an empty beach.’

‘I wonder where she is now.’

‘I wonder where I’m going to get a new bathing suit. This ones shot. Plus about a thousand rubles I borrowed down there. The Japanese suit was indeed very worn; and Kostya refused to wash it because of the magic smell of salt. He slipped a pack of Camels into the limp elastic.

‘The theater season’s already started,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we go just once this year?’

Kostya wrapped his arm around my shoulder. ‘Relax: she’ll turn up any day now. It rains down there in the fall. Pre-ci-pi-ta-tion. Why the hell do you think anybody comes back?’

‘She didn’t say where she was going?’

‘Of course she did - she announced it. Departure for the Yalta because it was “certain to be more refined”. The Tsar’s summer palace, etcetera. Actually, I once knew a man who had quite an adventure with the daughter of the Tsar’s former cook. No - the daughter of the former Tsar’s cook. Anyway this happened back in ’32 when ’

‘Did she have any money? She doesn’t know anyone in Yalta.’

‘Zhoe buddy, you don’t understand how it works down south. It’s warm. So-lar energy. Puts everybody in a generic

ous mood. Stop worrying: even skinny girls do fine/

"I suppose so. .. /

‘You need another vodka - helps when you're short on emotional self-discipline/

‘Or on bullshit/

‘A few weeks away from Mother Russia in those Sicilies and Viennas and you come back oozing pessimism again. It's hellish, what imperialism does to a good man/

We filled our glasses again and listened gloomily to an extremely worn Ray Charles tape. Kostya balanced the empty bottle on his pyramid of empties. Every few months he hired a taxi, returned the heap to a neighborhood store and had a big ‘rejuvenation' celebration on the sum of the deposits. But now the prospect of a party seemed hollow.

Lets head down to Kalinin Prospekt!’ he exclaimed with attempted enthusiasm. ‘They say a juke box's been installed in a new cafe. A juke box is the latest Russian invention — know what it is?’

We did drive to Kalinin Prospekt, a recently reconstructed boulevard flanked by East German-type skyscrapers, and there was indeed an Italian juke box in one of the cafes -but also a tight knot of disappointed teenagers studying the tantalizing object through the window. The cafe, a crude imitation of a pre-war Howard Johnson's, had opened during the summer with considerable ballyhoo, and was already closed for general repairs.

We spent the rest of the evening strolling up and back along the wide new boulevard, which Kostya kept comparing unfavorably to Sochi, where you strolled in soft moonlight and balmy air instead of cold drizzle. ‘You Russian Question people never get to primary causes,' he said. ‘Everything wrong with this country starts with a single simple reality: the shock of slipping from a cosy womb into an angry climate. The plumpest foetus can get paranoic/

He told a tale about the latest promise of Soviet science. The country's roots, he said, would be cut by fantastically powerful laser beams and the entire Russian land mass 166

drifted fifteen degrees south, where ‘weather suitable for homo sapiens’ begins. The operation was highly secret because it was going to be implemented in honor of Lenin’s hundredth birthday the spring after next. ‘Oh yes, a few hundred million Indians, Chinese and the rest will have to be squashed down a bit towards the equator. What the hell, they 11 be jubilant to make way for Lenin’s homeland. . . .’

Before the lights were extinguished on the boulevard, Kostya told me about his first evening with Oktyabrina in Sochi s tender moonlight and gentle air. She kept reminding him that he mustn t seduce a girl on the first night out of respect to Tamara, and volunteered as his chaperon. Near midnight, they walked down to the port, where a horde of tourists and local peasants were struggling to pack themselves onto a cruise liner about to cast off for Yalta. Gentle wavelets rippled against the quay and the moon made a wide road, as Russian poets call it too, across the water. Oktyabrina breathed deeply of the tropical air. Nevertheless, the Black Sea, with its Moscow-style cafeterias and lines for newspapers, fell far short of its promised exotika.

Oktyabrina began to question Kostya about his youth. Were his parents alive? Did they introduce him to vodka? Cautiously, she steered the conversation to sex. In Omsk, she informed Kostya confidentially, some people still believed that the size of a woman’s mammary glands affected her capacity to experience sexual pleasure. That was one reason she just had to rip herself from her roots.

Her own enlightenment, thankfully, was early, complete and joyous. Being a sensitive, modem woman as well as a doctor, her mother had told her everything with great simplicity and beauty before she died. But the ignorance in the orphanage was so massive that the staff feared Oktyabrina’s knowledge would upset the other girls. Some thought that babies were conceived by the wife sitting in an armchair immediately after the husband, while the cushions were still warm....

Her own problem was not sex but children. Society made

hideous demands on young women: how could anyone be both a mother and an artist? That’s why her policy was to abandon men, even cruelly , rather than to bear their children at this stage. But even if certain nineteenth-century prudes rejected the logic of this modern solution and called her promiscuous. .. .

‘That’s enough theory, kid,’ Kostya interrupted. ‘I’m convinced - let’s go to bed.’

Oktyabrina dropped her scarf - Tamara’s present - on to the sidewalk and watched the breeze play at its corners. To gain time, she protracted the retrieving of the handsome silk.

‘Let’s go to bed, kid,’ Kostya repeated. ‘I’ve been mortifying my flesh for far too long - it’s a terrible toll on my health. I want to let my passion burst right into you.’

‘What about Tamara?’ asked Oktyabrina shakily.

‘Tamara will understand. If it’s you. Better than a stranger, after all - she’s very fond of you.’

‘Well . . . yes,’ said Oktyabrina, obviously trying to think of an escape. ‘You’re absolutely right, Kostya darling. When would you suggest - back in Moscow perhaps?’

‘I’d suggest in about ten minutes. I need an experienced woman like you.’

‘What an absolutely brilliant inspiration,’ she said uncertainly. ‘Sex is always best when garnished with a good laugh. With us, it’s bound to be a huge giggle. And dynamite too.

Walking home, Kostya put his arm low on Oktyabrina’s waist and felt her hip socket gyrating like locomotive connecting rods. Her mind seemed to be churning with equal energy to hatch a deliverance.

Not far from the composers’ colony, they heard the familiar strains of a famous pre-revolutionary ballad, that had recently become popular among students searching Old Russia for their roots. The singers, a group of young men and women on a walking tour, mouthed the refrain listlessly, probably because it was the day’s tenth repetition. But aided 168

by the sea noises, the old melody had enough heart-melting melancholy to generate a mood.

I was on my way home.

Riding home and thinking of you.

The moon shone sadly,

Through the coach's dingy windows ...

Oktyabrina held her breath. After the second verse, she sat down on the curb, clutched her face in her hands and mumbled through her fingers.

Kostya dearest, tell me what to think. Those words. That melody. I can’t begin to explain their meaning.’

Give it a try,’ said Kostya huskily. ‘Don’t worry about me, kid. I can take it.’

‘It was our song. Intrepid Vyacheslav and I. I never dreamed I’d hear it again like this.

And Vyacheslav,’ prompted Kostya, ‘was one of your most treasured lovers.’

Not one of the most. That son of heaven, my one and only idol - it was his children I so longed to bear.’

Kostya helped her gently to her feet. ‘I’m heartbroken,’ she whispered. ‘But of course you understand. I can’t pos-sibly give myself to you just now. This wound will take time.

Of course it will,’ said Kostya. ‘Tomorrow’s another day. C’mon, you’ll need help to struggle to your room.’

The following day, Oktyabrina appeared in black on the promenade bordering the beach. She shouted to Kostya that she was going to a sanatorium called ‘Lenin’s Path’ for treatment of her ‘ballad-shattered’ nerves. The day after that, she boarded a boat for Yalta.

Winters first spearhead arrived in late September. A grim, gunmetal cloud descended on central Russia and hung there, immobile, smothering all hopes for a break. The trees were already naked black and the streets swept clean of their soggy leaves, removing the city’s last trace of color. Cotton

wadding was stuffed again into the cracks of window frames, symbolizing the general mood.

By October the first wet snows had fallen and the awful burden arrived that makes Everyman an unwilling martyr: the unrelenting, unfair battle against the climate. A month of this clammy rawness passed that seemed like three; by the time the press was building up to its usual exultation over the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, a state of mental siege had returned.

This was stoutly reinforced by the Party’s new line. Even before Czechoslovakia, an ominous hardening could be felt in all domestic affairs. Leonid was a victim of this, together with hundreds of fellow intellectuals who dared object to the return of a full police-state atmosphere. The invasion accelerated the repression. It became known as ‘neo-Stalinism’, which described the retreat towards Stalin’s orthodoxy and restoration to power of many of his henchmen and admirers.

The general consequences of neo-Stalinism made subjects for carefully worded stories: ‘liberals’ dismissed from their jobs and exiled from Moscow; intensified censorship and corresponding deterioration in all branches of the arts; a furious campaign to root out ‘bourgeois’ influences -meaning anything not rabidly anti-Western - in every publication, television broadcast and film. But it was harder to describe the great depressive effect of this on the sliver of Muscovites who had aspirations for Russia’s progress to-170

wards Western standards. Once again, their hopes for healing Russia had been crushed. They reacted as the Russian intelligentsia has for centuries: by withdrawing to an inner world of favorite books and close friends.

The weather was equally gloomy. Snow had already fallen often, but the temperature pushed up again to a few degrees above freezing, leaving only mud and slush as if to remind everyone that autumn is the worst season of the Russian year. Besides the rawness, waiting for winter causes a palpable strain. A librarian once compared it to two and a half months of pre-menstrual tension.

During her breaks, I used to take this elderly woman, a member of an old intellectual family, to tea in the Lenin Library's basement cafeteria. Now she declined my invitations with a rueful smile. It was again a time to avoid social contact with foreigners. Together with the general tighten-ing up everywhere, there was a major campaign to warn about the growing danger of ‘alien' thoughts and influence. This was classified by the newspapers - in at least one article daily — as ‘ideological subversion', and it was said to be practised by a significant percentage of the Soviet Union's foreign guests. The press ‘reported’ case after case of innocent people having been duped by Western correspondents and tourists who seemed friendly to Russia, only to worm their way into citizens’ trust and sow the rotten seeds of doubt. Doubt of the Party's infallible guidance - an odious vice.

The most maddening refinement was the hypocrisy. At the very moment the ideological xenophobia was being whipped up, Intourist offices in every Western capital were straining to attract foreign tourists - meaning foreign currency. ‘Visit the USSR! Land of Caviar, Ballet and Friendship!' A translation of a single Pravda article about heinous imperialist spies, double-faced rats trying to gnaw at Marxism-Leninism, and verminous enemies of all socialist peoples would have kept all but a handful of masochists out of Russia forever.

I wondered about a connection between the xenophobia and Oktyabrina’s continued absence. Then I dismissed the thought and cursed myself for having entertained it. A certain kind of Russian ignores these campaigns, even when the peril to himself is very real. Whatever she wasn’t, Oktyabrina surely belonged to this category. In loyalty to friends - the primary test of character in Russia - I knew she was above reproach. But why had she disappeared for almost four months? Wherever she was, why didn’t she telephone? At least write?

Soon I began to doubt whether I’d see her again at all. This can happen in Russia, even with your best friends -and the fact that other old friends like Kostya are left alone only heightens the anxiety. Two years before, I’d been friendly with a young doctor whose passions were Tennessee Williams and Norman Mailer. We used to meet for walks and talks in Sokolniki Park, until one day he didn’t turn up as we’d arranged only an hour before. I never heard from him again.

The disappearances are not necessarily sinister. Many Russians have a powerful, inbred wanderlust which seizes them periodically. Despite all the rules and required documents - the identity papers, labor books, propiskas and hundred other devices designed to combat Russian chaos and establish order - despite all this, these restless people move about the country like Dos Passos characters in USA.

When you’re on a train in a relatively remote part of the country and you keep your identity quiet long enough, vodka will appear and stories will be swapped. The jumble of autobiographies in your compartment will amaze you. One man will have spent his life logging in the far North, and a woman will have wandered through the South after being a truck driver during the war. A crippled man will

have worked on the Volga or the Don, and his wife will have been Mikoyan’s personal nurse. Not one person in six will live in the city where he was bom. The vagueness of living patterns corresponds to the vagueness of the land: 172

the greatest of all wide open spaces.

I pictured Oktyabrina on a train somewhere, talking nonsense and stuffing herself with someone’s pickles and pirozhki. Did she still wince over a swallow of vodka? Was it really possible that I’d never see her again? I began to understand that I had been wrong to go abroad. If I’d taken her to the Black Sea, she wouldn’t have disappeared. Hadn’t she hinted that we should explore the Caucasus together, as we used to sightsee in Moscow?

I was no longer sightseeing now because the person I was keeping company with had only evenings free, and preferred to spend them at small dinner parties. Several weeks after my vacation, I’d met a woman who ended my paralysis at last: the Dutch Ambassador’s personal secretary. She was tall and graceful, worldly and intelligent. She wanted no permanent attachments because of her career, and had half-a-dozen suitors among the foreign colony’s bachelors. But she sometimes responded gaily to my calls and became a companion for a few of the long evenings and weekends. I told her nothing about Oktyabrina. She would have thought the whole affair absurd.

And what was there to tell? It couldn’t even be called an affair, after all. Besides, I was more and more certain that Oktyabrina would never reappear; more and more aware that with my usual insensitivity, I’d ignored a hundred opportunities to encourage her, to tell her why she was needed. As usual, I saw my mistake only after the friend was gone. Kostya heard a rumor that Oktyabrina had ‘fallen in with’ an important East German engineer who was taking a cure outside Yalta. He reported the news with unmasked sorrow. Selfishly, we were sorrier still when we heard a second rumor: she’d been picked up on the beach by an ageing film director, moved to Kiev with him, and was pregnant.

I’d not only stopped sightseeing, but for months hadn’t had a proper walk along Petrovka. The street had lost its appeal; I now walked north, away from the center of town.

Ordinarily tranquil children in the streets had become whiny and irritable because of the incomprehensibly protracted fall.

On 7 November, I covered the parade in Red Square. It was virtually an exact replica of the May Day affair and provoked the same reaction in me - only more intense because we were descending into winter instead of rising towards summer. 7 November marks the end of an era, when the last hopes for mild weather are laid to rest. I remembered Oktyabrina’s new white dress and ‘love season’ chatter after the May Day parade. It was time to put these thoughts to rest too, together with the tenderness for her which I produced so abundantly in her absence.

We were approaching mid-November: Tankists’ Day, Petroleum and Gas Workers’ Day, Workers of the Fishing Industry Day . . . and then came an ordinary Monday, without a title - but which should have one in terms of Oktyabrina’s adventures.

The day started in anything but a Monday mood: I had a new idea for a story. Since Czechoslovakia, they were harder than ever to find. The Press Department gave permission for an interview only if your idea was not just merely neutral, but positively pro-Soviet. At the same time, Chicago wanted more and more hard news, which was as unobtainable as ever. A reporter could satisfy neither side - nor himself.

My idea promised to tread the narrow middle ground. A new movie about Isadora Duncan had just opened in New York and I thought of writing about her strange Russian adventure. The way to start, I thought, was through her husband, Sergei Esenin.

Esenin was a brilliant and debauched lyric poet, still revered by Russian youth. He killed himself in 1925, joining many of the country’s best poets who could not work under Soviet rule. I made some telephone calls and discovered that he was buried in Moscow. An expressive lead to the story then suggested itself: a description of his grave.

I drove out to the cemetery after lunch. It lies behind the American Embassy, past the zoo and is bordered by a desolate old road called 1905 Street’. This is one of the city s forgotten corners of old houses, old logs, old unpainted doors - all having earned the compassion due old workhorses. It is fittingly expressed in the cadence and old Slavic resonance of the cemetry’s name: Va-gan-kov-sko-ye. A

plaque on the tumbledown fence announced that it had been founded in 1822.

Inside, I was immersed immediately in the eerie, almost occult atmosphere of all Russian cemeteries, which somehow evoke images of northern pagan rites rather than the Christian service. Although the grounds were extensive, gnarled trees and tottering shacks made everything seem as stuffed as a Russian sitting-room. The graves were also packed shoulder-to-shoulder, but each was defiantly segregated by a spiked, waist-high iron fence — as if a lifetime spent among the toiling masses made a claim to privacy vital in death.

The grounds were soundless except for the rush of the wind and cackling of immense crows. I found Esenin’s grave and described it in my notebook. It was a large black slab of marble in the ‘modernistic’, 1930s style with a gold-painted bas-relief of the poet in profile. The effect was so heavily ceremonious - so unlike Esenin and his poetry -that it seemed vulgar. This was only partially redeemed by the flowers, mostly artificial, that had been deposited on the wet pedestal, apparently during the course of the morning.

Later, I made my way back to the crumbling church near the entrance and asked an old man, seemingly a warden, whether I might see a burial one day. His response was an outpouring of hatred. Apparently he mistook me for a Soviet official and thought I’d come to mock the church, an amusement of certain Russians. This triggered all his fear, disgust and rage against Communist outsiders who cannot destroy God but are systematically annihilating His Church.

When the old mans hostility abated, however, he said that there were now very few burials: almost all the ground was occupied, and the authorities would allot no more to the church. Burial in Vagankovskoye was an honor, and even many Communists begged for a plot on their death beds - when it was too late. The last burial had been ten days ago: a poor one, without even a cross, although the deceased was so steadfast a believer that the Deacon had lent him hundreds of rubles from the Poor Box over the years. The new grave was ‘down there’ - he pointed vaguely - and I could go and see it for myself if I was so interested. . . .

I was interested. The grave was the last of a relatively new row in the farthest comer from the church. As I approached, I was aware that I knew the person standing over it, and also that I would not easily remember from where. Was she the child of someone in the Press Corps? A girl from the courtyard of my building? She was about twelve or thirteen, with a fat, pouting face - not easily mistaken for someone else, but I did not in fact remember until I read the name on the new grave. It was printed in white paint on a homemade wooden cross:

‘EVGENY IGNATIEVICH ZHADRIN.

Born January 5th, 1881; died November 4th, 1968. Eighty-seven years: a trice in the history of humanity, a glorious hour for those who knew and adored him.’

A smaller stake had been driven into the wet, freshly-dug soil about a foot in front of the cross. To it was pinned a yellowed photograph of a dancer, perhaps Nijinsky, in a spectacular costume, probably from an old Diaghilev production. It was protected by a piece of cigarette cellophane. Beneath the photograph was a cardboard rectangle with two brief epitaphs, printed in green ink:

\ %

Ars longa , vita brevis - Hippocrates 176

Seek, and Ye may not Find;

Strive, and perhaps you won’t Arrive.

But for a man with Courage and Imagination,

The World s wide open, and full of Fascination.

- Anonymous

The girl was absent-mindedly holding a hyacinth bulb. Her feet were planted in a wide stance and had settled several inches into the mud; she failed to register my approach. Perhaps she was lost in meditation or mourning for Evgeny Ignatievich, but her vacant eyes and unclosed mouth suggested not thought, but the absence of it.

Hello, I said. Dont be frightened. Where’s Oktyabrina?’

Far from being frightened, she was in a kind of peaceful trance. Her lips spread into a smile like gravy creeping across a cold plate.

I m sorry about Evgeny Ignatievich,’ I said more loudly. 'Can you tell me where Oktyabrina is?’

When finally achieved, the answer was in a delighted, sing-song soprano, as if the idea had titillated the girl.

She’s got an old-er friend. I know.’

'She’s what?’

'A guardian angel to Auntie Oktyushka like Auntie Oktyushka is a guardian angel to me.’

'That’s fine. Please tell me where she is.’

The girl backed a half step away and smiled triumphantly, as if having detected an attempt to engage her in a forbidden game.

'Oktyabrina’s in Moscow, isn’t she?’ I said as soothingly as I could. ‘I remember how nicely you danced with her.’

'She buys the flowers but I’m not to tell. She says I’m not to tell men if they ask any questions. So you see.

She did not finish her thought. Nor place the hyacinth on the grave - until I reminded her. This is what finally convinced her to 'tell’, but she apparently knew nothing concrete about Oktyabrina’s whereabouts. A tragedy had hap-

pened to ‘Auntie Oktushka’ - no! a transformation. She was very busy now and couldn’t always come to ‘Uncle Xgnatich’s new home. .. .’

‘What kind of tragedy? Where is she?’

‘I’m supposed to come every day. For thirty-three days, the crying period. If I don’t bring a flower, Uncle Ignatich will be dug out of his bed and burned. And Auntie Oktushka.

She could not finish her thought again. ‘Auntie Oktyushka what?’ I asked.

She giggled. ‘Auntie Oktyushka gives me a ruble every time I come. I’m going to buy my own um-brel-la. soon.

I pressed for more information as firmly as I could. Suddenly she remembered that she had a telephone number for emergencies. It was inked onto a piece of cotton and sewn inside her mitten, to thwart loss.

19

The telephone number was for a western district. The same man answered every time I called. He knew no one, he said politely, of that name or description living anywhere in the apartment. After the fourth call in four hours, he sounded irked.

The next day, the Dutch Ambassador gave a luncheon I couldn’t miss. By the time I got to the cemetery at five o’clock it was dark and no one was within sight of Evgeny Ignatievich’s grave. The day after that, I arrived much earlier. Oktyabrina was there, bent over the grave with a dust-pan. She was laboriously sweeping away the leaves and muttering to herself in encouragement and felicitation. ‘Come on, just a bit more, see how nice that looks, look at all you’ve doneV

Her skinny fingers gripped the dust-pan as they’d so often gripped my arm while negotiating mud and ice. I was 178

flooded by soap-opera sensations: a need to laugh and cry at once; many surges, canceling each other out.

If one mistake transcended all others in the history of my numbness towards her, it was not to follow my next instinct. I wanted to swoop down and hold her tightly. That was the critical moment - and having faced it, everything else would have fallen into place. I hesitated and was lost. Once the moment of spontaneity had passed, my heart beat as when I wanted to speak up at a professional dinner and knew I would not.

I swallowed my self-disappointment and inched forward, keeping half covered by a clump of hedges. Oktyabrinas appearance was puzzling. She was wearing a canvas raincoat streaked with soot and tattered at the cuffs. Underneath was a black high-necked sweater discolored by washing

and face powder. Strings of hair - black, in the fierce tint of Soviet dyes - clung to her cheeks. The cheeks themselves were powdered white except for dark circles under the eyes. The combined effect was a stage simulation of a woman of substantial years and intellect who’d lived life to the full, suffered her share of tragedy, and was now and forever alone in the world.

She scooped up the leaves as if the job would test a laborers strength. An elderly couple approached unsteadily from behind me. Oktyabrina heard their sobs, straightened up to look, and saw me.

A look of amazement and delight raced across her face, but was suppressed so quickly that I might have imagined it.

‘Oh it’s you, Zhoseph,’ she said blandly. ‘How are you keeping? You’re looking somewhat peaked.’

‘Hello, Oktyabrina. I’m just fine, how are you?’

‘Frantically busy, actually. But otherwise extremely . . . fulfilled . I suppose you feel madly daring without a scarf on a day like this.’

'Not really, I just forgot. I wish I had someone to sew me a reminder somewhere - I mean the Auntie Oktyushka

method/

She strenuously rolled up her raincoat sleeves, betraying no reaction to the hint about how I’d found her.

'I suppose you might be feeling a twinge of guilt/ I said, hopefully sounding playful. ‘You were going to call me the instant you got back from Sochi/

‘Busy busy busy/ she repeated, ignoring my chiding. ‘Be a nice male and make this pile of leaves somehow go over there’

Silence descended. A crow cawed furiously. The old couple disappearing down the lane looked like a nineteenth-century painting.

‘How long have you been back in town?’ I asked, trying a more direct approach.

She did not hear, or pretended not to. ‘What an extraordinary noise this wind is making/ she said, squinting into the distance. ‘It reminds me of ... of when the splendid autumn zephyr whistles down the hills above my beloved Omsk/

‘So you’ve been home?’ I asked, feeling relieved. Her having returned to Omsk after Sochi or Yalta might explain not only her apparel, but also the long absence.

‘You might say home - yes, spiritually home.’ She sighed. ‘Have you read The Kreutzer Sonata recently?’ she asked. ‘A frightening, but in a way a profoundly revealing study. You must read more, Zhoseph/

‘Indeed I must. For goodness sake, Oktyabrina, let’s stop clowning and talk.’

‘The Kreutzer Sonata is a late work of Tolstoy, you know

- I mean Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy. There is also Alexei Nikolaevich, of course. And Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy

- a rather more obscure writer, but quite important to students of that period/

It was my turn not to answer; I wasn’t sure how. I waited in vain for the punch line: Oktyabrina had nothing to add to her unaccountable interest in literature and the Tolstoys. Her new role was inscrutable.

'How did you like the Black Sea?’ I asked, taking another tack.

'The sea is pleasant enough , 5 she replied thoughtfully. 'Actually, it's rather blue. Serene and welcoming like . . . well, water s the symbol of womanhood, you know. But the ghastly public! Males are at their most absolutely abominable on the beach. Half of you go just to stare at us. To oogle like animals, leer, make remarks. ... Now Zhoseph, do let me complete my work. Frankly, Tve never seen so many leaves in one place. Where there's a grove of oaks, there's also a clump of birches - it's an extremely old, extremely true Russian saying.’

The conversation died again. Oktyabrina bent to her sweeping, arms flailing and brow puckered in concentration. Everything was so disappointing - so unreal - that I hoped I was imagining it, and that we could somehow begin the reunion again as it should be. What had happened to her?

To gain time, I moved to the neighboring grave, which was adorned with the portrait of a general and an epitaph about the Motherland. Oktyabrina quickly straightened up. 'May I trouble you for the time? I'm always light years off without the sun.'

'It's almost one-thirty. Time for a National Cafe lunch.'

'Twenty more minutes and then I must dash" she declared. 'I do wish that little man would hurry and repair my watch. It's difficult enough for a woman alone to keep herself.

A sharp gust of wind blew a cluster of new leaves from the adjoining grave against Evgeny Ignatievich's cross. Oktyabrina sighed wearily and turned to pick them up by hand. Then she stepped back to give the grave a final proprietorial examination, like a man who has just washed his car and can’t understand how he tolerated the dirt before.

'How did he die?' I asked.

She sighed again, this time with Weltschmerz. 'How did he die? Old age. Just old age, weary old limbs. And a certain dislocation of the soul.'

‘I brought him back a walking stick from Rome - which I

never delivered, of course. I’m sorry about that now/

'Please don't try to be sentimental, Zhoseph.'

'Plus some pretty things for his most promising pupil.

Please throw them away. My destiny is to become a real woman, not a doll. Males crave jewellery, costumes, flesh — anything at all to distract from the love and nobility of the real person inside/

Whats all this about? I can't help noticing a slight shift in your ... credo.'

The wind blew up again; Oktyabrina turned into it with a defiant expression. 'Yes, it's wet and raw,' she said. ‘And may continue to be for many more weeks. But people who are at ease with themselves hardly notice the weather. People who know what they are and aren't seeking heroes or magical changes.'

She rolled down her sleeves and prepared to leave. ‘Zhoseph, I'm not trying to be mysterious and don't want to offend you. The sensible solution for us is for each to hold to the satisfaction of one's own depths and one's work /

'You’ve found a new teacher already?' I asked, having waited in vain for an elaboration of work.

I ve dropped ballet once and for all, if that’s what you're trying to ascertain. It's a joy to be liberated from that humiliating pretence. Anyway, classical ballet happens to be dying. Not least because it’s every woman is a shallow caricature.'

'Then what about Evgeny Ignatievich You seem to be '

'Yes, Evgeny Ignatievich had certain virtues,' she interrupted, wiping his cross clean with a handful of soggy newspaper. 'But an old oak is as young as its newest root. His roots were deep in the acid soil of sexual injustice. It wasn't his fault, of course. He was a casualty of his time and upbringing. But the truth is, he practiced his deceptions on women. Because women are exploitable, women have hearts. And he had the endemic masculine cruelty to bleed them. In this sense, his passing was . . . well, inevitable .' "

This allocution was punctuated with short pauses, as if

Oktyabrina had long pondered the key phrases but was surprised to hear them spoken. Together with the world-weary costume, they were undoubtedly part of her new identity. The natural thing would have been to take her by the shoulders and shake the makebelieve out of her. But a straight line was often the longest distance to her secrets. Besides, there was now a hint in her expression that she was really very happy to see an old friend, and that if I remained patient, she’d explain everything at the proper time.

‘For someone who feels like that about Evgeny Ignatievich,’ I said gently, ‘you seem to be paying considerable attention to his grave.’

She thought for a moment. ‘That’s unquestionably true,’ she answered. T’d almost forgotten your perceptiveness about certain things.’

T’d almost forgotten your eyes.’

‘Oh God, dontl . . . The hard fact is that I’m not fully liberated from the male myth. Indeed, if you didn’t know the odds I’m fighting against, you might assume I’ve hardly begun. On the other hand, allowance must be made for my exposure to romantic pressures at an impressionable age ’

Something of the old Oktyabrina returned as she began analyzing herself in solemn detail. The tending of the grave, she confided, was indeed a sentimental indulgence to her past. On the other hand, it was a kind of symbolic last contact with her old way of life and its mushy illusions. That was why Gelda approved of it - well, not exactly approved, but made allowances for it. Women’s natural altruism must be patiently cultivated , like an orchid in. . . .

At last I caught the signal. ‘Gelda?’ I said. ‘You mean you’ve been with Gelda all this time?’

‘And when you compare me to my former state - no, I don’t like even to think about it. The past is a receding nightmare.’

‘When did you pick up with Gelda again, Oktyabrina? Do you still answer to Oktyabrina?’

This pleased her visibly, but she controlled her old

triumphant- smile - that - can’t- quite -be - contained expression and gazed over my shoulder, into the distance.

‘You never understood her inner nobility; I shan’t attempt to describe it. I simply can’t convey what Gelda stands for -certainly not to someone lacking our feminine instincts.’

I waited the required moments for the dramatic pause. Oktyabrina’s voice was like a radio announcer’s describing a steel plant. ‘Gelda is a beautiful person. A woman who’s learned that all women are used - and, in the end, remain alone. And she’s taken me under her loving wing again.’

We had nearly reached the car when Oktyabrina stopped short. ‘ Spooks! I’ve forgotten it!’ she exclaimed, and dashed back into the cemetery. When she returned, my old Maxwell House can was clanging against her dust-pan. She used to use it for storing hair-pins and rubber bands. Now it seemed to contain small worms - for Gelda’s fish? - but Oktyabrina concealed it behind her hip.

We drove past the zoo towards the center of town, stopping only to buy ice-cream. Oktyabrina gazed at the wet, somber streets as if in wonder.

‘It’s no longer simply Moscow that enthralls me,’ she sighed. ‘Life itself is so wholly intoxicating. My waking hours are literally an orgy of happiness.’

‘What’s the secret?’ I asked. ‘I’d like to write a story about it.’

‘The secret is simply to be yourself , with people who truly love you exactly as you are. Which stops life from being a mass of meaningless trivia.’

‘I suppose you’ve found the elusive inner peace that puts everything in its proper place.’

‘Exactly. For example, this very minute. The insides of my boots happen to be soaked with freezing mud, but I’m absorbing autumn’s beauty and hardly even notice it.’

The illogicality of this was so blatant that we both chuckled. ‘It happens to be true, Zhoseph, and I only wish it could be for you too. There are lots of ways a person can 184

change, but self-understanding’s the only real one.’

‘I’m very happy for you. And that happens to be true too, even if you want to make fun of it.’

‘Life’s so odd, isn’t it? Like when you return to a familiar place years later and stand there all dizzy because so much has changed-yet you’re still somehow you. I know perfectly well you sometimes worried about me. And here I am now, worrying about you.

Oktyabrina sucked the last of her ice-cream, the noises demonstrating that at least one part of her hadn’t changed at all.

‘And what about you, Zhoseph?’ she asked in an artfully casual voice. ‘Working hard?’

‘Not very. The usual.’

‘And still living all alone?’

‘ Still living all alone.’

‘I suppose you still see Kostya,’ she said in a harder tone. ‘How is our old exponent of the ethos of the bull?’

‘Same as ever. No - something seems to be leaving him. Somewhere he’s very sad, you know.’

‘I’m afraid there’s no hope for Kostya. To attain selfunderstanding and a sexual reality, I mean. But give him my . .. compliments .’

‘They’ll make him very happy. I’m sure he’ll want to throw a big reunion celebration.’

‘No,’ she said sharply. ‘I can’t meet Kostya yet.’ She lowered her voice, hinting renewed trust. ‘I won’t be coy with you about the reason why, Zhoseph. I’ll speak with utter forthrightness out of consideration for our old . . . well, association. Whatever it lacked in genuine understanding, I’m certain you never intentionally misled me. But I simply can’t consort with you two again. Say I’m not yet strong enough for social intercourse with notorious lady-killers, if you like. You know the rules for a reformed alcoholic.’

‘Only at second hand. I know the rules are very rigid. But I’m very happy for you, Oktyabrina. You’re obviously

deep in something invaluable. I wouldn't dream of interfering.'

This clearly disappointed her. She gazed serenely out of the window again - which meant, of course, that she was trying to think fast.

‘And yes,' she said at last, ‘there's a more crucial reason -I'm not ashamed of it. If you must know, I’d go to any lengths to conceal our renewed association from Gelda. It would shatter my last chance irretrievably. To become a real person, I mean.'

‘Quite right you are too. I admire people tremendously who sacrifice everything for their last chance.'

Then I resorted to one of her own favourite ploys — the purposefully ambiguous statement. ‘You've sacrificed even more than you know for this chance,' I said, and squinted as if following a distant thought. ‘You're one of the rare women who've defeated the tyranny of petit-bourgeois drives.'

She scrutinized me, but suppressed the question on her lips.

‘It's funny how things work out for the best,' I continued. ‘For months I’ve been trying to track you down just to give you the very thing you've resolved to renounce for ever. Now I see it would be sheer hell for you to have it.'

She sniffed my bait from every angle, like an old bass in a farmer's pond. When she finally signaled she was ready to hear what her sacrifice had been, and I revealed it was a flight bag of cosmetics and trinkets that I'd brought her from Rome, she affected annoyance over the ‘teenage trivia'.

‘Exactly,’ I agreed. ‘I’d hate myself if I'd actually tried to foist the stuff on you.'

‘Zhoe darling, stop clowning. Precisely what do you propose to do with that flight bag?'

‘What can I do? Empty it in the trash can, I suppose. Bit by bit, to avoid charges of hoarding deficit goods for black market speculation.'

Suddenly she slipped her foot past mine and jabbed the brake. ‘Zhoe, this means “Stop" to your buffoonery!'

The car careered dangerously. Oktyabrina yanked back her foot in a fright, whacking her knee on the steering wheel. Pain and embarrassment somewhat tempered her subsequent speech.

Of course she didn’t want that vulgar rubbish for herself. But it would be an absurd gesture, the very kind of theatrical posturing she’d been striving to shed under Gelda’s patient guidance, actually to waste the materials. ‘You see, I could very easily distribute the contents of that bag in an orphanage somewhere. Orphan girls absolutely adore that kind of thing - I can tell you myself.

In return for this, it was decided that Oktyabrina would not withdraw from my life again, but that we would resume a relationship of old friends who had lived through a certain disappointment, and therefore had a better understanding of each other’s inner needs. To seal the new pact, I made two promises: never to allude to any erotic adventure of her past in Gelda’s presence, and to shield them both from men on the make.

20

The next day, Oktyabrina escorted Gelda to my apartment. It was Artillery and Missile Warriors’ Day, which was a comic touch because of Alexander, whose graduation from the Academy probably took place that very morning to coincide with the holiday. A grimmer touch was the arrest of a husband and wife in Red Square.

The young couple had tried to mark the ‘holiday’ by protesting against the occupation of Czechoslovakia. From start to quick finish, their venture was a pathetic failure: plain-clothed KGB officers seized them before they could fully unfold their ‘Hands off Czechoslovakia’ banner. They had won no understanding, not to mention sympathy, from ‘the people’ they’d hoped to enlighten. Pedestrians uttered

curses and angry threats, and several good citizens left their places in the Lenin Mausoleum line to march to the site of the commotion and express their patriotism by spitting in the “sniveling traitors’ ” faces.

This is the account I put together after covering the story that morning. By afternoon, predictions were circulating that the young couple would be sentenced to five years in Siberia for ‘disturbing public order’. When Oktyabrina and Gelda arrived, I was in the mood that often paralyzes Russian intellectuals: black despair for themselves and their country, combined with searing anguish over the dictatorship’s remorseless injustices and people’s unconcern. On days like these, Russia is no more than a huge dungeon.

Gelda greeted me as if I’d last seen her six days ago rather than six months. Her features were unchanged, but it struck me for the first time that she had a considerable black moustache of her own. Her raincoat was an exact copy of Oktyabrina’s - or vice-versa; when she took it off to reveal a black high-necked sweater, the inspiration for Oktyabrina’s new costume became clear. Although I rarely talk of politics to Russians, the incident in Red Square had so depressed me that I turned up the radio to jam the apartment’s ‘ears’ and whispered the news to Gelda. She was unimpressed.

‘What did you expect from our Politburo pricks? A demonstration on Red Square yet; the kids can be happy

they weren’t beaten on the spot. At least they’ll be crucified for something they did!

Gelda then spoke of a friend who’d just been punished for something she hadn’t done. Last summer, the girl who’d translated Konrad Lorenz’s letters for her met a German tourist in a restaurant. Back in Hamburg, the German published an unflattering article about Brezhnev, about whom he’d never spoken to Gelda’s friend. She was summoned to an office, called a ‘stinking traitor and filthy whore’ and informed she would never work again as a teacher or translator. She now washed dishes in a cafeteria.

‘If I had a machine-gun/ said Gelda, remembering to whisper again, Td go to the Kremlin and shoot every one of them. In the balls, where they deserve/ She swallowed a pill. ‘On the other hand, what the hell for? Can anybody believe better bastards would replace them from the Russian masses?’

Oktyabrina hung tightly on her words; Gelda’s ripe language no longer made her flinch. The translator’s misfortune pained her, but she also seemed relieved: the rare talk of politics had smoothed our reunion, leaving questions about the past months unasked.

After a glass of tea, we all felt better. As always, politics were pushed to the back of our consciousness - to make life possible. Oktyabrina studied our tea leaves, and for good measure fetched a crystal ball - in the form of an empty prostokvasha jar from her carryall.

‘The spirits whisper to me/ she intoned. ‘No-stop deflecting my concentration. . . . The spirits want it known that dish-washers will become princesses - female of course. And that winter will end in February this year. . . . And they instruct dear Gelda and Zhoseph not to be dispirited. Because they are together again, and will grow to trust and love each other.’

Oktyabrina then inspected the apartment with proprietorial thoroughness, commenting on the women seduced on the davenport - by a notorious American heartbreaker - in her absence. Gelda talked of her new intellectual preoccupation. She’d moved on from Lorenz to Freud. But even with her unexcelled contacts among bibliophiles, she’d had great trouble securing a single volume of Freud’s papers published in Russian before the revolution.

When Oktyabrina took the tea glasses into the kitchen, Gelda spoke of her in the rudimentary Freudian terms with which she’d recently been acquainting herself. Oktyabrina’s inhibitions about men, she reasoned, surely lay deeper than in the trauma of that summer: somewhere in the pattern of her early childhood. ...

The trauma of that summer, she explained at my prompting, took place in a small seaside town called Alushta, just east of Yalta. Having exhausted her rubles, Oktyabrina was sleeping near the beach. As she lay there uneasily, a small boat approached from the sea and a large man in oilskins waded ashore. As luck had it, his torch quickly detected her. He was upon her in an instant, and since he’d been at sea for weeks, remained upon her for an hour. Oktyabrina’s screams died in the night; no one was near enough to hear. Since she was unwell at that time, it was a particularly brutal rape. . . .-

‘Do you believe that story?’ I asked.

‘Not literally. But something happened; she returned to Moscow in bad shape. Someone bruised her.’

‘You actually saw the wounds?’

‘I didn’t have to. She almost had a breakdown.’

Since then, Gelda - in the absence of Kostya and me from Moscow - had assumed the role of Oktyabrina’s guardian. During the first few days, Oktyabrina was in mild shock. Having recovered, she resolved to write a story about her ‘tragic adventure’. Weeks later, she burned the pages, all ten first drafts, because ‘it would be wrong to capitalize on misery’. In September, Gelda’s suggestion that Oktyabrina visit me was declined; Oktyabrina was already deep in her rejection of men. But Gelda felt that Oktyabrina’s real reason was fear of appearing disloyal to her.

The relationship between Gelda and Oktyabrina was not as one-sided as it had seemed at first. When Gelda was suffering a ‘fit’, she released the whole of her brutal resentment on Oktyabrina. Her insults and curses were restrained only by instincts developed during long years in communal apartments. She was merciless to Oktyabrina. Her curses were bad enough, but she also attacked Oktyabrina’s weakest spot. She called her a leech, a toady, a sponger, a sycophant, a parasite and a slut.

‘You’re as much use in this world as shit in an ice-hole,

You’re not whore enough to earn your bread from men. Not woman enough to have a man. So you lick my ass - the dirtier the better. I’m sick of it, do you understand? Disappear from my life, you cheap phoney - you corkscrew cunt.’

Oktyabrina bore everything, knowing Gelda’s need for catharsis. And indeed, this therapy worked better than Geida’s usual assortment of pills and compresses. Her fits lasted only a day or two, and when she emerged from them, she hugged Oktyabrina’s hips and stroked her hair. The hair was as close in shape and color to Gelda’s as Oktyabrina could make it, although the texture remained much finer despite the dye’s effects. The sight of the dwarfish, pitted woman with the papirosa in her teeth embracing the radiant girl with the imitative costume was as moving - and disturbing - as the recognition scene in Anastasia.

‘It’s better now?’ Oktyabrina would whisper.

‘It’s gone, Brinchka. You little idiot, why didn’t you run away?’

‘I’m starved , let’s go somewhere glorious.’

‘You must fly away somewhere: in this domain, angels come to no good.’

To celebrate, Gelda broke her usual diet in favor of a long heavy meal. They usually went to a restaurant called ‘Slavonic Bazaar’, which lies behind GUM in a region of important government offices. The Slavonic Bazaar used to be a ‘cafeteria’ for high-level Party officials, admitted only with passes. The food then was immeasurably better and cost much less than that of ordinary restaurants; caviar and steaks were always available, together with delicacies like fresh fruits and vegetables, even melon in January! Under ground passages linked the restaurant with nearby office buildings - according to rumor, even with the Kremlin -so that the Party oligarchs could avoid the twin inconveniences of mixing with The People and suffering a short walk in the cold.

After the government cafeteria had moved to more elabor-

ate quarters, and the Slavonic Bazaar was opened to the general public, its menu became as limited and expensive as any in the city - meaning very. But Gelda, both relieved and penitent after her fit, would merely short-change a few dozen customers on the afternoon of their fling, providing rubles to spare.

Since women are not permitted into restaurants alone, Gelda and Oktyabrina would approach the most likely-looking men in the line outside the door. For the consideration of a carafe of vodka to be ordered to their table inside, they induced the men to play the role of their escorts. Once at the table, however, the girls spoke a kind of pig Latin which Gelda had learned in order to keep things from her mother and passed on to Oktyabrina.

This caused the men great puzzlement. It compounded the earlier riddle about who these two odd women were and why they seemed suddenly unapproachable after the promise of a sure thing. Sensing that the strange language was meant to mock them, the men often progressed to anger. This, of course, added to Oktyabrina's delight - a delight which was produced by literally every element of the evening. She adored the restaurant, with its name and former reputation. She adored an evening out in general, and in particular one with Gelda. Most of all, she adored the thought of clear sailing ahead with Gelda, until the next fit. From time to time, Oktyabrina would glance disdainfully at the men sharing their table, sharpening her Tm-a-million-times-better-off-without-men look until even provincial types took the point. Speaking straight Russian again, in a sexy tenor, she’d advise the men to beg the cook for more dill, since 'dill works wonders for masculine aggressions’.

Yet Oktyabrina’s campaign against men was in no way inspired or encouraged by Gelda. Gelda was occasionally amused, but usually tolerated or ignored it, certain that it was a passing phase. Moreover, she continued to keep her own eye peeled for men - with moustaches, of course. She was no more lesbian than the burly Russian men who kiss on 192

the lips at airports and railroad stations are homosexual, or the peasant soldier-boys who hold hands while strolling through the wonders of the big city. Oktyabrina did not live in Gelda's room; Gelda never asked her to, although a cot could have been squeezed beside the aquarium. Oktyabrina flitted from one rented cubicle to another, bargaining for a place to sleep when her 'contacts' informed her that someone had left Moscow on vacation or assignment.

Otherwise, Oktyabrina copied Gelda in every possible habit and gesture except for smoking, swearing and cracking her knuckles. And was almost totally dependent on her, financially as well as psychologically.

In return, Oktyabrina made the motions of cleaning Gelda's little room. This was not difficult after the 'Serbian smuggler' had removed most of the furnishings - and even before, since Gelda was as unfastidious in her domicile as her person. Oktyabrina washed Gelda's stockings and smalls together with her own. She kept the room in fresh flowers, bought at sacrificial greenhouse prices, and presented Gelda with occasional prizes, such as pairs of imported tights. And she took charge of procuring the fish food.

She took along a book for the lines at the pet shop, for she had embarked on a reading crusade, also in imitation of Gelda. It was usually one of Gelda's, for she wanted to read what 'her dear friend' did, and resented the idea of being spoon-fed ‘easy’ literature. But the crusade was not proving a success; she hardly read more than a chapter of any one book before starting the next. With all of this, she hadn’t forgotten her fascination for back copies of my magazines. I gave her a large stack that had accumulated in her absence and she in return - because she always liked to give things in return - gave me an outsized matrioshka : a wooden doll with a series of successively smaller ones inside. This one had ten.

'Take this, Zhoseph,' she said, 'as a companion for your desk. And may the symbolism improve your writing through an appreciation - however subconscious - of the infinite

humanity of women / But this was accompanied by a wink instead of tartness.

On Sunday mornings Gelda and Oktyabrina went to the so-called ‘pet market’, one of the city’s most colorful spectacles. ‘Market’ is somewhat misleading, for there is nothing organized about this one: pet-lovers simply gather in a large empty lot, and the Sunday crowd spills out into the adjoining streets, milling about the vendors. No permission, tax or even registration is required to sell pets, provided they are raised domestically and without an intention to ‘profiteer’. It is a last outpost of capitalism and the old Russian tradition of street markets, where people come more than simply to buy and sell, but for the sake of something to do and for the satisfaction of bargaining. Most of the sellers are middle-aged men in ragged clothing. They cradle their wares - a pot-pourri of mongrel puppies, kittens, hamsters, tortoises, canaries, parrots, snakes, monkeys, rabbits and an occasional baby fox - tenderly in their hands or under their threadbare jackets, since cages and leashes, when available, are wildly expensive. And, of course, the market offers a wide assortment of tropical fish, usually displayed in pickle or yoghurt jars. Their popularity seems incongruous at first: tropical fish in such a northern country? But many Russians cherish them as they do tropical plants, no doubt for the same reason.

The market is located in a nondescript area of nineteenth-century houses and slapdash prefabricated blocks, which Gelda and Oktyabrina reached by metro and streetcar. Gelda was one of the best known and most respected of the market regulars, combining wide experience in handling tropical fish with extensive academic knowledge of pets in general. She was a kind of Queen-of-the-Gypsies to the other regulars, mostly poor pensioners who peddled a fish or two from dawn to dusk in quest both of company for their lonely lives and of a few extra kopeks to buy jam for their bread. They treated Gelda as if she were a young belle who could have her pick of husbands, but was waiting for one of her 194

own standards.

Oktyabrina took to the market immediately. It was her kind of place; she was enchanted by the buying, selling, haggling and milling about. Gelda encouraged her to go her own way, and she quickly learned the market’s secrets. Soon she was swapping small items of clothing, cautiously peddled by traders along with the pets. The patrolling of the market by plain-clothesmen - who kept watch for this, as well as for pickpockets and 'speculators’ buying and reselling other people’s pets - predictably enhanced Oktyabrina’s enjoyment of the atmosphere. She told Gelda she sometimes wished that they could open their own little business together on the lot. Perhaps an antique booth or the tiniest tavern. Gelda could manage the business and do the accounts, while Oktyabrina swept up and waited on customers. ...

After the market, Gelda and Oktyabrina sometimes went to a nearby cathedral, entering towards the end of the long Sunday afternoon service. The massive structure had been scheduled for demolition in the anti-religious fervor of the late 1930s, but war intervened, saving it through the general confusion and shortage of dynamite. Now it offered one of the most elaboiate and moving services of the handful of Moscow churches still functioning as such. Neither Gelda nor Oktyabrina was in any way religious; their interest was in the choir’s brooding, pagan-sounding melodies, the shadowy candlelight, the incense and faintly ethereal, faintly sinister atmosphere transmitted by bearded priests and the ragged, gnarled old faithful. Gelda lectured Oktyabrina in Russian history, including the role of the church as oppressors who were subsequently oppressed - the inevitability of darkness producing darkness.

The pet market hardly existed except for Saturdays and Sundays; no more than a dozen hard-core enthusiasts were there during the week. But when one of Gelda’s fish died, Oktyabrina traveled there alone, and secretly, to replace it.

This was an act of compassion on her part; she wanted to

spare Gelda the sorrow of a loved one’s death. And Gelda responded in kind by pretending not to notice the replacement.

21

The first day of genuine winter was like a national holiday. One morning the city was silent and white. It had a strangely incorporeal, almost sanctified quality, like the garments of a nun. In the long run, this signaled the beginning of five or six months of grinding cold - but no one thought of the long run that morning. The greyness, mud and slush were gone at last, and replaced by something shining and exalted, something even joyous. Russian winter had returned like your father after a fishing trip — someone you knew intimately, and from whom you expected much, even if he was stem. It was almost as exciting as the first day of spring. Even the old pensioners in black overcoats who’d seen it fifty or sixty times were moved.

It was the kind of day on which you telephone old friends. I called Kostya early in the morning; sure enough, he’d invented an excuse to skip work and was planning a day in the countryside with his ‘roommate’, a girl he’d met the evening before in a dry-cleaning outlet. He was brewing a large pot of potato-and-barley soup for the outing and promised me my own thermos if I came along.

‘You heard about the new furniture GUM just put on sale?’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s a long-awaited breakthrough in our consumer goods production: an all-pine triple bed. They call it ‘‘Lenin is Always With You” - and it’s selling like crazy.’ He chuckled happily and I could almost hear his grin. ‘I’ve got a hundred of them, Zhoe buddy - but not for the telephone. Leave your place now and you can join us in twenty minutes.’

I couldn’t leave until mid-aftemoon at the earliest: there were morning newspapers to look through and another disarmament story to write. I went back to work, tackling a series of Pravda articles inspired by the intensifying campaign against ‘hooligans’, then a long, tragi-comic ‘expose’ of new muddles in the distribution of soap powder. One investigation had revealed that over forty per cent of the soap production destined for Kiev was lost or stolen en route to the store shelves. I felt a wave of deja-vu: hadn’t this very article been run somewhere last year?

An hour later, a thunderous knock resounded from the front door. When I opened it, a liter-sized thermos plopped inside. A note from Kostya was tied around the neck: a man of my age, he’d written, should make certain to have soup every day throughout the winter. Instructions followed for meeting him in the countryside outside a certain village, if I managed to free myself before dark: \ . . after that last cottage, take the second trail on the left to a small clearing with a clump of birches. ... Go five paces further and look under the large fir on your right. You may see a rubber mattress. If it’s mine, you’ll recognize it. If we happen to be embracing on it, wait a few minutes discreetly in the clearing - my roommate’s strangely shy.

The soup was a meal in itself. I was on my second cupful when Oktyabrina called to tell me about the ‘sublimeness’ of the weather and invite me to share it with her, just the two of us, in some beautiful place. Gelda was unavailable because a team of government inspectors had descended on the bookshop to audit the books - ‘probably on purpose to spoil the day’. However, the snow had returned the old buoyancy to her voice and she cooed the ‘Zhoe darling’ with silvery affection.

‘Do let’s go somewhere,’ she said. ‘If you’re not working too hard, of course.’

H can’t accept invitations from you - unless I set the conditions. I’m a dominating male, after all.’ I said she’d have to discard her canvas rag and let me buy her an over-

coat.

‘You’ll probably make me get something outrageously ladylike. Zhoe darling, I know your clever little stratagems. ...’

Eventually, she allowed me to buy her a three-quarter length sheepskin at the hard-currency shop. It was surely the best and warmest coat she’d had: severe enough to let her pretend she cared nothing for style, yet stylish enough by Moscow standards to be stared at. After this we agreed on an afternoon walk in the Botanical Gardens, a favorite of our exploring-Moscow days. Driving there, Oktyabrina chattered happily about the novel she’d just started. She always knew, she confided, within the first five pages whether a writer was on her wave-length.

‘For example, you , Zhoseph. I genuinely think you’d move me deeply if only you’d take up fiction. Because you’re straightforward - kind of modem. Not full of melodramatic plot.’

The scenery silenced us. All the city’s peeling paint and blemishes were concealed by white fluff, and the cupolas of a dozen churches cast an enchanting spell. Not only the churches, but also the iron fences of the grand old mansions - even, somehow, the sagging wooden cottages and old trolley wires.

The gardens were almost too pretty. Snow fell so fast that flakes stuck together before hitting the ground, like typewriter keys punched too quickly. Each tree was a picture postcard. The air smelled of fresh snow and of something organic, as if the autumn apples hadn’t been harvested. Oktyabrina was so moved by the wintry glory that an hour passed without a call of nature. When the need did assert itself she walked ahead with no fuss at all and relieved herself in the fresh snow behind a clump of trees. Despite everything - I thought - she’d matured considerably in the year or so I’d known her.

When our faces were tingling we started back. Oktyabrina took my arm and snuggled up to me.

‘Zhoe darling, doesn’t this beauty make you feel terribly insignificant?’

‘I’m not sure. Small and great at the same time.’

'That’s it exactly - a writer understands. It makes you feel at peace with yourself because it puts things in proportion. How I hope my period of being silly has passed.’

She shook the snow out of my hat with her mitten.

‘How’s your embassy lady working out?’ she asked.

‘Not as well as I’d hoped. It’s a kind of dead end at the moment.’

‘I’m sorry, Zhoe darling. Really I am. . . . Funny - you never took me to meet her. Are you aware of that?’

‘Would you like to now?’

‘I’m not sure. I was simply dying to when your romance was at its most torrid. On the other hand, I was also secretly glad. . . . Because all this time, I never told you something rather important.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s why I didn’t come to see you all that time in the autumn. You see, it had nothing to do with Gelda, really. The real reason is I’d heard about your sweetheart and didn’t want to interfere.’

‘You’d heard about what?’ For a second, I imagined she was genuinely jealous, and my thoughts raced. But Oktyabrina reacted to my question as if to a challenge.

‘You’re right to doubt me,’ she asserted. ‘Why camouflage life’s dilemmas? Your love affair was a pretext. The real real reason concerned you and me - only you and me.’

She waited for my prodding. ‘You’re hinting that I somehow let you down before the summer vacation,’ I said.

‘Don’t be a sentimental goose,’ she said tenderly. ‘I simply felt it would be . . . well, somehow wrong to go on seeing you after our farewell ceremon)/. Perhaps my decision was influenced by autumn itself. Because there’s a time for everything in life: “Every season brings its own friends, like its own fruits” - do you understand?’

‘Not exactly. I think we might have braved the fall

together. It was fairly cold when we met, if 1 remember/

'Zhoe darling, don’t be so dense, this isn’t easy for me. What I mean is, I thought our friendship had seen its summer. Certain emotions can’t be relived. If you try to go back all you achieve is something dismally artificial .’

'But what about going forward? I was very fond of you, you know.’

Going forward to what ? — you were so distant, you gave me so little hope. . . . Besides, you’ve missed my main point. Which is that I’d changed utterly by the end of the summer. I simply wasn’t the spoiled brat you once cared for.’

She gulped audibly. 'To come directly to the point. I feared you’d be bored with me after I’d shed all my . . . well, affectations. I couldn’t bear the thought of you slowly drawing away from me. And not saying anything just to spare my feelings.’

‘Silly little Brincka. I think you’re serious.’ I said this jocularly, but the lump in my throat reappered. I felt it would not be long before we did go forward at last.

‘I was silly, wasn’t I, Zhoe? I mean, it turns out that we can still be friends. People don’t have to thrill other people every minute of the day and night, as long as they’re fond of each other. We can be even firmer friends now - genuine friends.’

When we hugged each other, Oktyabrina’s handbag fell deep into the fluffy snow and we both laughed. For some reason, it struck me that this was going to be a very long winter.

A few minutes later, we came to a greenhouse and this time I excused myself to go to the toilet. When I stepped outside again, it was to a scene that somehow reminded me of high-school days: Oktyabrina was engaged in a snowball fight with a young man. Her missiles fell apart in the air, his went wide - perhaps not purposely, from the look of his throwing arm. I felt like a father watching his daughter on a date. A fragment of her snowball nicked the tail of his overcoat, and she squealed in triumph. 200

I tossed my own snowball between them. ‘Oh Zhoe darling/ called Oktyabrina. ‘I want you to meet someone. Vladimir will be getting another degree very soon, post-graduate .’

The young man smiled nervously and hurried towards me, adjusting his hat. Tm extremely pleased to make your acquaintance/ he said shyly. ‘All joking aside, I never meet girls this way - your friend fell, she needed help/

He adjusted his hat again. ‘Anyway, I was just leaving. Between you and I, I shouldn’t be here now at all/

When we had dropped Vladimir oft at a nearby school, Oktyabrina sighed deeply. ‘Do you think Gelda will be hurt?’ she ventured. ‘I’d hate to cause her anguish/

‘I’m sure Gelda will be delighted/

Tm not so sure. And you?'

‘He seems a tolerable choice - now that you’ve shed your affectations/

‘Zhoe darling, you are a sweetheart. I do so want another chance. With someone suitable at last/

Soon she began to hum: a Soviet ballad with a line about ‘finding my beloved in twilight on a background of our Motherland’s white’.

To my surprise, Gelda was upset. Vladimir’s frequent presence - with Oktyabrina - in the bookshop made her feel cramped, she said; Vladimir was always watching her. And he was a teacher, whom she scorned ‘as a class’. Besides, I think she was jealous of losing so much of Oktyabrina’s veneration, especially to ‘a classroom creep’. The very sight of him got on her nerves.

This said more about Gelda than Vladimir, since nothing in his appearance could be offensive to anyone. He was a tallish young man with large feet and heavy rubber galoshes. His face was milky and slightly slack - distinctly intellectual except for a bulbous peasant ‘potato nose’. His lapel sported a large ‘Lenin-Is-More-Alive-Than-The-Living’ badge; not necessarily a clue to personality, since many people wear

them simply for decoration in the shortage of other costume jewellery.

He also wore an imitation karakul hat with the ear flaps down and string tied beneath the chin. The hat showed great signs of wear at the crown and was apparently a permanent fixture from September to May. This was because Vladimir was five minutes short’, as the Russians say, of being completely bald, and his mother would not let him leave the house with an uncovered head. In short, he looked like a typical young member of the “"working intelligentsia’: one of the tens of thousands who study all day in overcrowded reading rooms, wearing winter pallors and shiny trousers.

Vladimir sat all day not in a library, but at the teacher’s desk of the geography room of School Number 628. On Sundays, he was a volunteer custodian in the Museum of V. I. Lenin’s Funeral Train at Paveletsky Station. In addition, he was working towards a graduate degree with a dissertation provisionally entitled, ‘The Exploration and Development of Natural Resources in Kamensk Province During the Period of the First Five-Year Plan, 1928-1933’. Kamensk Province borders the Ukraine. With funds from his mother — and, at first, her attendance — Vladimir had made several journeys there to interview local geographers. They were his life’s adventure - until he met Oktyabrina.

Otherwise, his circumstances were typical of the Soviet professional class. He shared a flat with his mother, traveled to and from work by metro, and subscribed to Soviet Geographer , Teacher of the Motherlands Schools , and Socialist Geography. For sport, he concentrated on chess, in which he’d worked his way up in the hierarchy of these things to Chess Player Second Class. He instructed Oktyabrina for hours at a time. Since she hadn’t known the game before - the name ‘pawn’ annoyed her at first, just as the knights intrigued her - it was probably their only activity in which the roles of teacher and pupil were clearly defined.

Oktyabrina and Vladimir saw each other almost every even-

ing. At first, Gelda and I were dutifully informed of their plans, which usually featured the movies. On the evenings when Vladimir worked on his dissertation, Oktyabrina occasionally joined me. She was thoughtful and composed, in keeping with her position as the ‘life companion’ of an upstanding young man.

‘He says I’m like a little fawn/ she said one evening over an ice cream. ‘Always running, running, running - a frightened fawn in the faraway forest. But he’s the gamekeeper. He’s caught me once and for all, and now he’s going to tame me.’

But if Oktyabrina’s patter about Vladimir smacked of the old hyperbole, other elements in her attitude towards him were new. For one thing, rather than resenting his research - lacking a pass, she could not join him in the library - she encouraged him wholeheartedly. She recognized the dissertation’s importance not only as such, but for its enhancement of Vladimir’s self-esteem.

‘Every young man must prove himself in some desperate duel with his own will’, she confided. ‘It’s rather like St George slaying his dragon - only harder in a way because modem challenges are in offices and less dramatic. . . . When Vladimir conquers the dissertation, he’ll be a mans man. The least I can do is help.’

There was much to help with. Vladimir suffered the self-doubts of any shy, conscientious young man, plus several added burdens incurred by his position and his means of obtaining it. The headmistress of his school was an old chum of his mother from their days of volunteer social work in the 1930s. In fact, it was she who’d found Vladimir his job after graduation, as a favor to Mama: in her school, Vladimir would find support as a novice teacher. And indeed, the headmistress spent a few minutes in Vladimir’s classroom most mornings, before the opening bell. She helped him wipe the woodwork with a wet rag. . . .

Oktyabrina recounted this with surprising candor. ‘You’re aghast at the lack of heroics, aren’t you, Zhoe?

Because I m needed by Vladimir the man, not the symbol. His tiniest problems are mankind’s greatest for me: thats the joy of being a mature woman .’

As a dedicated Young Communist, Vladimir took the organization’s precepts seriously, especially those establishing the duty of teachers in instilling Communist moral principles. He sometimes wished he could ignore the responsibility, but everything in his background made him fight for right.

Thus, even if some teachers snickered at meetings of the Pedagogical Council and Young Communist Committee, he knew his duty was to expose boys who smoked in the lavatory and sneaked wine into political instruction sessions. Punishing the boys wasn’t the answer, but the problems had to be discussed. The headmistress deserved support. Vladimir s friends sometimes tried to catch his eye to suggest he sit down and relax. They knew that his vulnerability in class was as much the fault of his own zeal as the teenagers cynicism. To some extent Vladimir himself recognized this, and promised himself before each meeting to be realistic. But rebellion in the classroom - spitballs and wisecracks - corrupted the children themselves, and the social fabric

Its a genuine problem at last,’ said Oktyabrina. ‘How can I help?’

Vladimir s party waited for an evening when his mother was away at a conference, leaving their apartment free. It was the standard studio type in one of the new prefabricated developments. Vladimir slept in the kitchen; his mother on a convertible sofa in the living-room, which was crammed with mass-produced bric-a-brac and reproductions of cottage landscapes. A glazed bust of a pinkish Lenin on one of the sideboards told its own story amidst the collection of clay elephants. The furniture was protected by maroon slipcovers, a color that gives you a quick headache in remembrance of childhood Sundays visiting relatives.

Everything in the apartment spoke of a sizeable income, even by the intelligentsia’s standards. Vladimir’s mother, a senior inspector of schools, obviously poured most of her salary into furnishings. Her husband had left her when Vladimir was eight, and his name was not mentioned in the apartment.

Vladimir had invited a former classmate and his girl friend along with Gelda and me. He served a sweet wine and sliced bologna and cheese, both of which were sweating greasily when we arrived. The girl friend spilled her first glass of wine over her metallic party dress and suffered thereafter in tongue-tied embarrassment. Her boy friend, Vladimir’s classmate, could not tear himself from the television set. The noise of the set and banality of the program hardly contributed to a party atmosphere.

Oktyabrina tried to play hostess, but it was her first time in the apartment too, and Vladimir was on tenterhooks lest she break something. She found herself sunk in one of the overstuffed armchairs, trying to interest Gelda in the small talk of evening entertaining. Gelda’s irritation put an edge on the general pall. I yearned for a bourbon, or vodka. The wine was impossible.

At one point, I had a few words with Vladimir alone -what he called a ‘man-to-man talk over a glass of good vintage’. ‘All joking aside,’ he said, ‘I don’t know wines very well but I prefer red to white. On graduation night from my Institute I got so sick on white that I had to sleep at a friend’s. Mama wrote his mother a very strong letter about bad influences on me - I had to deliver it to her myself.

Between you and me, I think white’s got some kind of acid

• •» > in it.

Vladimir told me that despite his mother’s severity on certain days, she was full of charity on others. He loved her for her honesty and devotion to him; they read plays together after supper. And oddly, their roles were reversing. Now a lonely lady, Mama needed the release of bossing him more than he was distressed by her strictures.

He refilled my glass, obviously eager to talk. Yes, life was proceeding according to plan, he said. But in spite of everything, he somehow felt trapped.

I do all the right things. Volunteer work with the Pioneers, and I have a medal for helping at the Museum. But somehow everything seems so dull for me. Sometimes I daydream of throwing up everything and going north. To be an explorer or something . . . free and on my own/

It was now clear that Vladimir was what he seemed, an exceedingly tedious young man - ‘as boring as an English Sunday, in the words of a beloved Russian poet. He reminded me of everything I like to forget about my own youth: anxiety, excessive intensity, sweaty concern about making a bad impression or going unnoticed. What could Oktyabrina see in him? I wondered. Where was the heroism — even the charm? As if he’d read my thoughts, the answer followed. ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but you were her best friend. My Oktyabrina’s made the whole difference in my life. It’s a miracle, how I met her. But she’s so free about everything - what if she leaves?

Vladimir noticed that his other guests needed attention. He suggested chess, but only his classmate responded. Then he played several records from his collection; current Soviet ballads as exciting as his mother’s furniture. Oktyabrina had given him a recording of the song about finding one’s beloved ‘on a background of our Motherland’s white’.

Vladimir asked Gelda to dance, but she merely picked up a book. Gelda left almost immediately after this. She had to have air , she said. Panic flickered in Oktyabrina’s eyes as Gelda clumped down the stairs and she, Oktyabrina, remained at Vladimir’s side.

Suddenly I too needed air. What really disturbed me in Vladimir was the crucial difference between us: watching him fumbling with Oktyabrina, I realized that he had the sense to embrace something good, instead of pushing it stagily away, as was my tender habit with every girl who showed interest in me. Vladimir was manifestly too young 206 &

for Oktyabrina: wrapped up in his own anxieties, he failed even to notice her ravenous appetite. But it was humiliating to find myself making comparisons about who was more generous to a girl of Oktyabrina’s age.

It was after midnight when I got home. I looked at the empty davenport and realized what a fool I’d been to send Oktyabrina home at night when she’d lived with me in the spring. Suddenly I knew that she was sleeping with Vladimir. I telephoned my embassy friend. Irritated by the hour, she refused my suggestion of a nightcap. Life was as empty as it had ever been. I went for a walk, wondering what force in life had delivered me to where I was, the ancient streets of comatose Moscow, empty except for rugged snowclearing crews.

22

Oktyabrina appeared at the apartment early the next morning. With a wry smile, she handed me a packet of aspirin. She took two herself with a large glass of tea.

Then she made her first casual mention of getting a job. By the end of the morning, she was talking about little else. It was not, she assured me, that Vladimir was pressing her. Still, she wouldn’t deny that her enlightenment had come through his example. He worked and was a far better man for it. And although he treated her like a princess, she couldn’t help feeling somehow . . . lowly next to him. While he toiled nobly all day, she queued for worms.

Tn all honesty,’ she declared in her all-honesty voice, T won’t be comfortable at his side until I’m a person who earns his deep respect. I can’t expect to live my life through him, sort of begging and borrowing from the dignity he’s achieved for himself. I certainly can’t expect to be presented to his mother.

By the next day, she was spouting what Russians call

newspaper talk’. Where she’d learned it was a small mystery, for she never read a newspaper; her attitude towards journalism had been made clear. Still, her message was the State’s message: she must become a useful member of society. And the key to this, as the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism ordained, as the Bolshevik ethic had posited for fifty odd years, was honest labor.

‘In our socialist land, one must give his labor to society, then society will take care of the rest. It’s the only way to be genuinely happy. I see that now. A person not only becomes depraved but frightfully alienated, actually lost , when he ... oh for goodness sake, Zhoseph. Explaining something ethical to you is like asking a cow not to mess the stalls. Stop smirking.’

Stop smirking yourself. I’ve always been dead serious about work - welcome to the sufferers’ circle.’

‘Shall I continue? This is important to more than me.’

‘You don’t know how right you are.’

Where was I? ... A person becomes not only depraved but frightfully alienated, actually lost , unless he’s solidly rooted in honest toil. There’s still time for me to cast off my old, corrupted w T ays and find a shining purpose in life. . . . I’ve discussed the whole problem with Vladik.’

Not merely discussed it, but explored his underlying convictions. That’s why she knew her decision was right: it was grounded in Vladimir’s own principles.

‘He told me a person’s past isn’t crucial,’ she declared. T come from the former exploiting classes, so my present personality may still harbor some frivolous strains. But social origin can always be mastered by application of will. Look at Dzershinsky. At Lenin himself. My vital task now is simply to fall in step with the working class. Then my lineage can’t deflect me.

Whatever advice he actually gave, Vladimir himself was powerless to make Oktyabrina a working woman. She still lacked a labor book and all prerequisite documents. Any-208

one with reasonable contacts and roughly two hundred rubles could have fixed this easily enough - but Vladimir was hardly the man to negotiate a bribe.

As Oktyabrina's impatience swelled, Gelda realized that she alone could provide the longed-for job. With considerable misgiving, she arranged for the bookshop to hire Oktyabrina. She was to work the regular salesgirls' week but be paid from the manager’s fund, a small account achieved from profits, so that her name need not appear on the books. Gelda's sole quid pro quo was that Oktyabrina attempt no innovation in the shop's routine. Flushed with enthusiasm over her ‘new position', Oktyabrina had considered leading the sales force in morning callisthenics, to the radio's daily ration of music for this purpose.

She began work on a Monday, having asked me not to visit her for the first week. ‘Even the largest udders won't fill the pail in a new bam,' she explained. She made the motions of running her hand through her hair, but there was little to grasp. It had been cut short and bleached to look as close as possible to her natural dirty blonde. This was part of her new Proletarian Look, which also featured a secondhand overcoat and frayed ‘salesgirl's’ sweater. The effect of this costume, shared by literally millions of Moscow women, was ambiguous. It was conventional enough to let her pass unnoticed in a crowd. But the conventionality was so pointed — and her eyes so big and shining — that the first impression was of impersonation: the old Oktyabrina. The final touch was a kerchief with the Kremlin emblazoned in crimson and gold.

On the Saturday evening after Week One, Oktyabrina and Vladimir visited me in the apartment, on their way to a movie. Oktyabrina said she'd rather not talk about work, but about Vladimir, who was responsible for her first genuine contribution to the first socialist state in the world.

‘Vladik has helped me shape my personal will to History's,' she said. ‘By putting me in step with our society -meaning in step with mankind’s march to a far better world.'

But her week behind the counter left her too exhausted to continue.

When she went to the bathroom, I persuaded Vladimir to remove his hat and try his first sip of bourbon. "All joking aside, he said, she s working too hard, and I don’t understand why. I wish I could get exhausted for her.’

Vladimir told me that Oktyabrina insisted on paying him a kind of tithe of a quarter of her wages — to represent the taxes, union dues and Young Communist League contributions paid by official employees of the shop. Oktyabrina didn t want to give Vladimir the idea that she was working foi mere material compensation. Sacrifice was necessary . . . and besides, she said a little more money in my pocket might help me with Mama/

Vladimir shrugged his shoulders and manfully tried the bourbon again.

The following Monday, I went to see Oktyabrina at work. She had transmitted her final requests by telephone.

Look to your hearts content, Zhoseph — but please do not talk. Don t even show me your dear face unless absolutely necessary. Distraction fills me with dread when I’m toiling/

I walked to the bookshop after lunch. According to the exacting regulations for the protection of State property, the old door was festooned with iron padlocks and rusted bolts — although only a desperate burglar could have looked twice at these premises. Several bookshops in neighboring districts were closed again for inventory or repairs, making Number 44 more crowded than usual. Someone had dropped a jar of marinated mushrooms on the floor and the shopping herd obliviously wallowed through, spreading the slime with their boots. It was so slippery that two old ladies grasped each other for fear of falling and begged for help.

Gelda looked up from her abacus and nodded towards the rear of the store. Oktyabrina’s black rayon smock — the uniform of Soviet salesgirls - blended with the darkness, 210

obscuring her momentarily. She was in continual, fluttering motion, causing her glasses, which I hadn’t seen since spring, to keep sliding down her nose.

The usual crowd was pressed up against her counter. Everyone in it seemed amused except a large man in the center. By contrast, he was choking with spleen.

T said Mussolini ,’ he snorted. ‘Mus-so-li-ni. Want to hear it again?'

Tt’s not necessary, Citizen,’ replied Oktyabrina ingratiatingly. T’m not sure we have any volumes on that particular subject. Is it something those people eat?’

Tt is a man’ he bellowed. ‘The leader of Fascist Italy. I want a biography of him. Bi-o-gra-phy.’

‘Of course, Citizen. I’ll be delighted to fill your order instantly. We keep a list of every book.

T know you keep a fist,’ the man broke in. ‘For God’s sake, look at it.’

Oktyabrina whirled as if she’d just misplaced something and was trying frantically to remember where. Then she made her hallelujah gesture and dashed to the master catalogue at an adjoining counter. The deep bite of her lip brought no help to her nervous fingers as she tried to flip through the cards. The thumb-worn cards seemed both unintelligible and impossibly sticky. Long minutes passed in the examination of a single tray, and after she’d advanced to a second one, Oktyabrina suddenly returned to the first.

At last she went radiant. ‘We’ll be delighted to satisfy your quite proper request,’ she shouted, waving a card triumphantly. ‘With patience and hard work. . . . I’m certain you remember the old saying. Comrade.’

His appeasement was brief. Oktyabrina now struggled to navigate the ladder through narrow, book-strewn aisles. This was a tiring operation, but amusing exercise compared with the ensuing ordeal of climbing. With a safe ladder, Oktyabrina might have been calmer; this one was as old as anything in the shop.

Each step higher required an act of will. Oktyabrina

clutched the rungs like lifelines and tried not to look at the dusty floor below. Each time she did, an interval for recovery was needed. Her handbag dangled from her wrist, adding to her confusion about where to put what. The crowd at the counter grew tense.

Chance had placed the wanted book on the next-to-top shelf. Oktyabrina recognized the title and planned the move to net it, like someone confronted with a leap promising safety or death. Calculations of timing and balance registered on her face, together with deep sighs of do-it-noio resolution. But they all came to nothing: she could not force her hand to leave the ladder and reach for the book. Her attempts were successively more feeble, sapping her courage

not only to make the next one, but simply to remain on the ladder.

Real danger — of panic and played-out limbs — now faced her. But when she began to wobble, Gelda locked her drawer, climbed from her stool and drove ruthlessly through the crowd. She coaxed Oktyabrina down the ladder and into her arms.

Gelda herself then mounted the ladder and fetched the book, moving quickly despite her physique. "Who requested this volume?' she asked joylessly. The fat man snatched it without answering - and roared again.

I said Mussolini, he thundered. ‘Not Muscovy — Mus-so-H-ni. You people are idiots. I’m going to write a complaint/

Gelda had returned to Oktyabrinas side; each had an arm around the other s waist, and Oktyabrina was restraining tears. They were evidently waiting for the mans rage to spend itself, but he got a powerful second wind.

The skinny one s a menace, he shouted to the crowd. ‘Non compos mentis - or corporis. And the black dwarf encourages her - its an outrage. I'll get them both.'

Suddenly Gelda exploded in Oktyabrina’s defense. Since there was in fact no reasonable defense, she substituted a searing attack. I would have said she could not possibly

have bested the man, had I not known about her fits. A voice

in the crowd offered money on Gelda.

In short - for the struggle was brief and one-sided -Gelda s diatribe left the man stunned. He retreated awkwardly towards the door, where the two stranded ladies clutched at his overcoat. Gelda led Oktyabrina into a back room, ignoring the line at her booth, which had lengthened to some twenty people. One or two of them muttered mild curses, but the majority waited blankly until some higher force might intervene and provide them with service. This did not materialize during the ten minutes or so I remained in the shop.

A second week passed during which the job seemed a too-protracted joke. Oktyabrina confused Switzerland with Sweden, Romania with Bulgaria, Iran and Iraq. If these mistakes were explicable, others testified to passive gaps in her knowledge: what is the link between ‘Moslem’ and ‘mongoT? Marshal Zhukov was mistaken for Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s feared cultural overseer; and her failure to know Molotov caused another minor incident. Because Molotov has been an ‘unperson’ for ten years, a man whispered his name. Oktyabrina sang it out in her ‘working soprano’ to the hoots of half the crowd and growls of the other half.

She herself did not laugh - she seemed to have lost both the ability and desire. For her job was not a joke; it had become the crusade of her life.

She had more to overcome than the ordinary strains of a new job. They were aggravated by the pressure of the ubiquitous, clamorous throng, elbowing each other and screeching at her. Bred on the hard lessons of perpetual shortage, Russians break into an acquisitive fever as they cross the threshold of even a relatively peaceful store. Salesgirls at the front of the battle quickly become hardened or change their metier.

Finally there was the difficulty of mastering the ‘stock’. Books are a serious matter in this country, and the secondhand shops are patronized by extremely serious people.

Many make daily rounds of the dozen odd shops in central Moscow, hunting with heroic resolution for an old Proust thats been out of print for thirty years or a James Joyce in a Western language, one of possibly five copies in all Moscow because the novel isn t Soviet’ enough to have merited publication here. In other words, Oktyabrina had to cope with the most dedicated and knowledgeable corps of customers among Moscow’s hardened millions.

But she did cope; it was a triumph of will. And of brain -and, in a matter of speaking, brawn. For she prevailed only by enduring extreme drudgery and exhaustion. Mornings, she was in the shop with the cleaning women, an hour before opening time; evenings, she remained an hour after closing time, sorting, dusting and contemplating the titles of books. ‘A feeble brain gives no rest to the feet/ she said, eager to reduce her flutterings behind the counter. She copied whole trays from the master catalogue on slips of paper - authors on one side, titles on the other - and studied them, like a student learning Chinese. She read literary encyclopaedias and pestered Gelda for fists of important authors, schools, periods and fields of learning. 'Memorize, memorize, memorize/ she chanted. ‘A maiden s memory is like a cuckoo’s - and its time I stopped being both.

But*most of all, she learned by sheer concentration during her long hours in the shop. All her inventiveness and tenacity surged into the fight to fend off exhaustion and to remember . Had it come five years earlier, this drive alone might have made her an acceptable ballerina.

To speak of a salesgirl being respected in Moscow is misleading. But by the end of the month, Oktyabrina had a following. She recognized more and more steady customers and more and more authors, and began putting aside the volumes they’d requested. People liked her; she worked quickly; sales increased. Even the manager was pleased — and since the shop s sales plan was being overfulfilled, closed his eyes to Oktyabrina s occasional filching of a geography book for Vladimir’s dissertation.

In time the long stints exhausted her less. Although she didn’t quite believe it herself, she’d survived the test and become a working woman. She was making a ‘real contribution’ at last. But she’d grown thinner, paler and markedly more subdued.

In fact, she looked wasted. The Proletarian Look was no longer a costume: like so many of the working class, she was run down from too much work on too few vitamins, and had a nagging cold. It was now clear that by themselves, her features were entirely plain; it had been her dramatization of them, however outlandish, that had made her a personage - almost lifted her on to a higher plane. Unretouched, in the dull light of day, the peaked nose and thin mouth made her a provincial working girl, with the pinched look of English mill towns, despite the Slav accents of her cheeks. I never loved her more.

Oktyabrina had changed so much that when she came to lunch one Sunday, the sentry in my courtyard didn’t recognize her, and left his booth for a better look. I’d prepared a big meal of her favorite treats, but she ate without appetite. And praised Vladimir without enthusiasm, as if disgusted with her own talk of his ‘shaping her destiny’ with his ‘tuitional wisdom’.

Suddenly she pushed away her plate. ‘What’s the point of this nonsense,’ she whispered. ‘Why am I lying to you?’

‘What’s actually happening with you two?’

‘He keeps begging me to remember our beginning - to play chess with him like we used to. How can I tell him? What can I do?’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘First to tell you the facts of life. A salesgirl makes seventy-six rubles a month - a pair of shoes and two pairs of stockings. Vladimir makes two pairs of shoes. But it’s not the miserable scrounging that’s important.’

I waited for what was important. Of course, she said finally, she hadn’t expected anything uplifting from a bookshop, anything heroic from Vladimir. But both had turned

out to be so excruciatingly, hopelessly dreary .

Last week I finally realized that I must make him suffer to become a man. To sacrifice something for his passion. Then I saw how silly that was. Because it s vice-versa, you see: only real men ever suffer over real things. Anyway,

dear Zhoseph, I can t bear hurting him — so this is my last resort/

She unfolded a sheet of paper from her handbag and handed it to me. It was so carefully printed that I hardly recognized her hand.

Dear Vladimir’s Mother,

A million pardons for addressing you thus, but I don’t even know your name. Vladimir always calls you 'Mama’. My ignorance of your name is natural enough. But your not knowing my name is - I must say it - unhealthy. Not knowing even that I exist, that Vladik has had a female companion. How can I persuade you that Tm not hurt by this; the damage is to him.

Having lost my own mother - also a noble woman who died for her profession - I understand and respect his devotion to you. And you must surely be proud of him, who has perhaps the highest human virtue: never wanting to hurt anyone. I know that no outsider can advise two people about their own relationship. But, respected Lady, Vladimir needs to breathe. You must cut the apron strings. Boys of his age have a need to run a bit wild, even involve themselves occasionally in - well, sillv pleasures. And not-so-silly pleasures, although I am far from wanting to offend you. Vladimir is a sensitive person, and should spend more time with men to feel himself a man. And shouldn t he be allowed to lock the bathroom door without explanations?

I’d intended to write to you at respectable length, but these matters do not really befit a letter. If you accept the tone of my communication and my good will, please telephone me at my place of work. [Here followed the book-216

shop s telephone number.] I will tell you some things that I can’t even mention to Vladik himself.

You might be relieved to know that I’ll speak with total objectivity because I have no ‘designs’ on Vladimir. And that I’ll deeply sympathize with your position: that of a woman who has sacrificed for her country and her son — for mankind in a very real way - and wants to embrace what she has achieved. Of all life’s tragic trials, none demands more courage than watching one’s child step forward on his separate rocky road. Perhaps I can help.

With great respect, with genuine feelings,

Oktyabrina Vladimirovna Matveyeva.

‘What ... do you . . . think?’ she stammered. She was blowing her stuffed nose; I was letting my grin go at what was new in her, and what would never change.

‘What is your professional opinion , vox populi American as? To save you embarrassment, my epistle wasn’t penned as a joke.’

‘I think it’s very serious. Very beautiful.’

‘And won’t change anything. But I might know more about change than you think. . . . Give me an impressive envelope, please. I feel better already.’

She looked better too, and her appetite materialized. After the meal, she went to the mirror and laughed at her costume: the salesgirl’s sweater was now positively ratty, but she’d rejected a subsidy from Gelda and couldn’t afford even a good scarf on her salary.

‘Don’t think I’m in pain from this sacrifice,’ she said. ‘Vladimir’s like you in a way - he never beats his women.’

‘Or takes them to supper? Listen: if you come to supper with me, I’ll buy you a fantastic new dress.’

‘Yes!’ She ran to the mirror again to stroke an imaginary gown. ‘Let’s be happy again, Zhoe.’ Then her face fell. ‘Don’t be hurt, dearest: our revel must be postponed. I’ve come this far, you see - now I’m obligated to wait. For a reply to the epistle, I mean. Or maybe the young man him-

self will make some attempt.

Later, we walked down Petrovka to where she would mail her letter and catch a bus. It was snowing again and the wind burned our faces. The pole with the bus-stop sign also displayed a poster announcing the usual Saturday evening political lecture in a local club. ‘SOVIET FOREIGN POLICY IN THE LIGHT OF THE DECISIONS OF THE SEPTEMBER PLENUM OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION’.

I stepped round the corner to look for Oktyabrina’s bus. When I returned, she d crayoned a simpler message on the poster: Brinchka loved Vladik? Guess!’ She frowned at her handiwork and vigorously blacked it out, leaving a crayoned rectangle in the shape of a coffin.

Oktyabrina flung the crayon across the street. ‘Between you and me,’ she said solemnly, ‘my doodles were in bad taste. Think of Vladimir’s distaste for exposing our intimate emotions on that kind of poster. . . . That’s what I admire most about him, actually. He s the most superbly creative young man in keeping everything in its proper place.’

Vladimir s mother did not respond. From Vladimir himself there was a telephone call during which he was so upset that Oktyabrina had trouble understanding him. He called from a telephone booth — not for the reasons foreigners do, but in case his mother came home early.

What disoriented him most was not the loss of Oktyabrina but of a girl - any girl, the comfort of having one. Finally Oktyabrina calmed him with a promise that they’d be friends for ever and that he d have a fine girl in a year or two - he was only now entering the period of his most powerful attractiveness to deserving women. She splurged a week’s wages to send him a lacy plant, suitable for his mother. Then she called me to arrange our ‘revel’.

When Kostya heard our news, he insisted that he was due at the opera that evening — the premiere of something new

called “Red Star over White Moon’” - and that we use his 218

room. He canceled all appointments with his lassies, decorated the room with a handsome little spruce tree fes-tooned with birthday candles - he called it a ‘Maypole manque’ - and left two bottles of champagne between his windows, together with a whole side of smoked salmon, procured from the director of a warehouse for export foods. We ate the tangy fish with fresh black bread.

‘There are tons of fish in the sea, you can’t catch them all,’ said Oktyabrina. ‘Who needs a saying to explain that? If you’re happy, you love what you have.’ She winked and handed me a fat sandwich.

It was one of the rare evenings devoted to gaiety that surpass their promise. Kostya’s blowzy room was transformed by the candlelight. Oktyabrina wore a gypsy-like dress with a long skirt and puffed sleeves, and laughed happily when I asked when she’d found time to make it.

‘But I didn’t sew a stitch. A fairy godmother waved her wand - your godmother, Zhoe, because she wanted me refined , for you.’

We drank the champagne from Kostya’s souvenir ram’s horn because my godmother had forgotten to transform Oktyabrina’s old shoes into slippers. Oktyabrina proposed an affectionate toast to Kostya, praising him for leaving champagne instead of vodka and for his ‘occasional inspired insights into human nature’.

When the subject of Vladimir came up, Oktyabrina was ardent but unmannered. ‘That role simply wasn’t me. And why do I require roles? What are we afraid of, Zhoe? Why can’t I just be myself ?’

She was asking in earnest. ‘I think we’re afraid that our real selves look foolish or feeble,’ I said. ‘I happen to know something about that. The paradox is that the fear often sires creativity - your kind.’

‘But I’m not frightened with you, you know - I never have been. Because - well, it simply feels right. . . . Did you know I’m tendering my resignation from the bookstore soon? I want to do something suitable just for the change . 7

We danced to the tape recorder in the two square feet of floor space. I remembered a line from a Chekhov story called Champagne’: a middle-aged man reminiscing about himself recalls that 'at that time, I was young, strong, lusty, extravagant and stupid’. That story, or perhaps our own champagne, made me think, and when we sat down again, something remarkable happened: I was telling childhood stories that I d forgotten myself. The humiliation of an uncle s prison record and of a long illness of my mother. These memories had been stifled for decades, first by shame, later because they sounded like apologies. Then I began to talk about my marriage. Oktyabrina reached for my hand.

'Don’t stop, Zhoe. Somewhere inside me, I have the capacity to understand. Somewhere, somehow, I have the ability to love. Really love - I know I have. . . . But these things may take years. It may be a very, very long time

before I flower into the woman you deserve. Will you wait?’

My throat constricted again. Perhaps she was playing — but I saw her lead and knew I would bungle it again.

Dearest Oktyabrina, I m more than twice your age and I feel it. When we turn on the fights, you may notice that I can pass for an antique.'

She blew out a candle. 'A mature man’s worth a hundred saplings - it’s one of my most antique sayings. Now answer the question.’

But I did not. I was trying to picture us together in another country - to make the decision of my fife.

'How old are you, Zhoe? The gospel truth, if you please.’

‘Forty-four.’

Goodness me - why do you pretend one foot’s in the grave? What’s this role you cherish?’

Long minutes passed - a silence that could not be broken by a joke.

Of course 111 wait,’ I said. ‘I’m used to waiting. I can stick to it until you flower into the kind of woman you 220 *

deserve/

This was evidently more than she’d bargained for. ‘Phoo, you don’t expect me to believe that/ she said in her old all-men-are-rascals voice. T happen to be aware that Americans have no patience for anything. . . .’ Then she began to cry. The sounds were softer than her sobbing of our kiss-after-bath fiasco.

‘What’s the matter now?’ I whispered. ‘Please don’t say I’ve hurt you again/

‘Haven’t you ever seen tears of joy, you big brute? Why do all the beautiful things happen to me ?’

Her hair tickled my face. ‘You have a remarkably serious “happy” cry,’ I said. Her sobs grew louder. I held her, wondering whether they were genuine.

‘I don’t deserve this happiness yet,’ she blubbered. ‘Why don’t others have it too? ... I want to warn you right now: I’m absurdly demanding. Any man of mine will have to be stunningly rich: I want him to support an orphanage. We’ll start with the poor little girl from Evgeny Ignatievich’s class. She’s not an orphan, but hasn’t a chance.’

Wax sputtered onto the spruce, filling the room with an unforgettable spell. I poured more champagne. We sipped it silently.

‘As long as I’m making demands,’ added Oktyabrina, ‘you had better be gallant to Mishka, my teddy bear. Because he’s exceedingly jealous — I shall not sleep without him.’

23

Then Vladimir was taken ill. It was the sniffles at first, but he was apprehensive. With good cause: a heavy cold materialized and culminated in a nasty case of Asian ’flu -probably the vanguard of an epidemic that had been spreading, perversely, eastward from England.

Perhaps sensing that this was the time to prove his man-

hood to Oktyabrina, Vladimir foolishly attempted to treat himself. This resulted in his being sprinted to a hospital for Ministry of Education personnel. His mother made the arrangements. With some reluctance, Oktyabrina recognized an obligation to visit him.

What an untimely tragedy/ she said, mocking herself. T must go to him.’

I must go with you, I answered — superfluously, for we were together most of the time now.

We drove out after a concerted shopping effort. Oktyabrina bought apples, lemons, jam, honey, canned compote and a bottle of a strong pepper-vodka called pertsovka , a peasant remedy for colds. ‘I feel almost middle-aged/ she hummed. Being an angel of mercy for a former suitor/

The hospital lay in one of those Russian tracts whose roads, such as they are, seemed designed to confuse outsiders. This might actually have been their purpose, since the adjoining woods contained government dachas, where the public is manifestly unwanted. When we finally arrived, it was to a locked gate. The absence of a flock of relatives bearing food parcels meant it was obviously not a visiting day. A sign on the gate confirmed this, adding that ‘unauthorized persons' were ‘categorically forbidden’ to enter except during specified hours. This was enforced by a brick guardhouse and watchman inside who refused so much as to approach the petitioners window. He waved us away and returned to a tin of fish, morsels of which he consumed from the tip of a penknife.

Oktyabrina shouted about a ‘supreme emergency’, but it was obvious that nothing would move the guard. Having come this far, however, she couldn’t abandon the ‘mercy mission’. After we’d driven a few hundred meters back down the road, she asked me to stop the car. The fence of the hospital grounds was made of raw timbers, already sagging. Oktyabrina took the provisions from the car and I helped her climb over.

Her absence, she assured me, would be spectacularly

brief - not a tick more than half an hour, for I was due for cocktails at the British Embassy. The newspaper in which the provisions were wrapped tore as I passed them over the fence. I retrieved a jar of Bulgarian jam and put it in Oktyabrina’s little mitten, which peeked over the top board like a baby bird’s beak.

‘Thanks a million, Zhoe darling — for you and for absolutely everything,’ she shouted. ‘Half an hour, I hope to die. Please violate me if I’m late - even if I’m not. And darling, don’t worry.’

I wasn’t at all worried. Russian hospitals are notoriously lenient with strangers who’ve somehow sneaked inside. I heard Oktyabrina’s rabbit steps crunching along the snow crust as she advanced through the woods towards the complex. Then she fell, squealed, giggled and picked herself up again.

I’d allowed an hour for Oktyabrina’s visit. The woods softened the cold, and I spent most of the time outside the car. The newspaper from which the provisions had fallen had a wonderfully comic letter from an indignant grandmother, a Communist of forty years’ standing, complaining of a fur workshop in her district that dispatched its workers to stores to buy up its own products at state prices, then resold them for double on the black market. I blocked out an article on the theme, softening the conclusion to avoid trouble.

A bowlegged man appeared on the road, mumbling to his large, sad mongrel. To me, the man rambled about ‘ships from a foreign planet’ that had landed in nearby woods. They had come to make a deal with Politburo bigwigs, he said, to sell them a thousand pensioners a week as slaves. He urged me to return that night ‘for proof’.

Oktyabrina had been gone an hour when the man limped on. Waves of exasperation passed, and I returned to the gate in case she was waiting there. I scouted several hundred yards further along the fence in case she’d lost her

bearings. When I returned to the car, she’d been gone almost two hours; I had to leave for the British Embassy. The epithet I drew in the snow crust for her was a favorite of Gelda’s during her milder fits.

Gelda called the next evening: Oktyabrina had skipped work again. She was more irritated than worried — until the following day, when we faced the fact: Oktyabrina had disappeared again.

Gelda and I met after work to consider the possibilities. One theory of mine seemed worst: the emotions unleashed at our revel had somehow been transferred back to Vladimir. They had eloped.

Saturday was a visiting day at the hospital — but mention of Vladimir s name stopped us at the guardhouse. A younger guard scanned the registry book and scowled. A policeman joined him to question us about our identity. Together, they announced that Vladimir had left the hospital - they could not say for where.

We don’t inform strangers about former patients. He’s been discharged. You have no further business here.’

I drove Gelda to Oktyabrina’s latest room. It was in the basement of a converted monastery not far from Vladimir’s apartment. The windowless cubicle was empty; the family who let it hadnt seen Oktyabrina since the morning of the mercy mission . They refused to tell us more: detectives had come to examine Oktyabrina’s things — and to warn them that they faced prosecution for profiteering on their apartment.

The rest of the weekend was a see-saw of anxiety: we would dash somewhere on a fruitless lead, and return to pace Gelda’s room. The secretary at the Museum of V. I. Lenins funeral Train at Paveletsky Station — a trite propaganda palace - felt certain that Vladimir was still in the hospital, since his mother had telephoned to this effect that very morning, explaining his absence.

We traced Vladimir’s home telephone and Gelda called. 224

No one answered until evening. Then it was a woman, obviously Vladimir’s mother. When Gelda asked to speak to him, she replaced the receiver.

Sunday was election day for representatives to the Supreme Soviet. Gelda had to drop her ballot, pre-marked by machine, in the box at a school near her room; then we drove to the pet market. But Oktyabrina did not appear there during the whole of the long afternoon.

On Monday morning, the election results - 99.4 per cent for the unopposed Communist-picked candidates - were reported as a 'magnificent demonstration of the superiority of Soviet democracy’. I was writing up the story when Kostya telephoned. He had just heard from a typist in the Moscow City Council.

'The kid’s been taken to Petrovka.’

Before we could uncover more, the article appeared which made Oktyabrina a celebrity at last. It occupied six full columns in Komsomolskaya Pravda. But her name leapt from the sea of compacted print.

RIFF-RAFF - A Feuilleton -

The conversation was prolonged, painful and futile.

I went to the window. The street sparkled with festive lights, and happy smiles adorned the faces of thousands of strolling Muscovites. But I felt as if Vd swallowed a glass of castor oil.

Then she was led away hy the warders. We all fervently hope that this will be the last time she is under guard. But she gives us no encouragement.

Even now she is smugly unrepentant. Despite all she’s done and everything that awaits her, Oktyabrina Matveyeva clings to the intolerable squalor of her way of life. As our conversation ended, she told a last, pathetic story about her marvelous lovers’ who would ‘rescue her magnificently, like a tragic damsel in distress’.

Under the circumstances, after all that had happened, this fatuity was not affecting, but vulgar. Vulgar and gangrenous, Like everything she stands for. Like the condition of her soul. ...

But not like the first impression she makes. 1 met her accidentally ; as I was leaving Petrovka 38 a slight commotion at the entrance interrupted the buildings quietly disciplined, hard-working life. Eighteen-year-old Oktyabrina Matveyeva was being led in under guard.

My first thought was involuntary: had there been a mistake in the arrest of this sapling of a girl? A girl who, by the wide-eyed ‘innocent’ look of her, belonged almost anywhere else? Everything 1 knew about the work of the People’s police made this improbable. But in the end, I concluded that they had indeed erred - in not having arrested her much sooner.

She had been living in Moscow over a year. During this time, she was involved with nothing that was not illegal, immoral, degenerate or offensive to the Soviet way of life.

The contrast between her appearance and reputation intrigued me. I decided to follow the case - from Petrovka 38 to the place of detention to which she was subsequently delivered. It is a hard duty to report the filth I uncovered.

Oktyabrina Matveyeva was arrested in a hospital ward, where she had caused chaos and suffering to gravely ill patients - while remaining callously indifferent. This was entirely characteristic: screaming at doctors in a hospital ward - where she had no business whatsoever - was but the latest of a string of ‘exploits’.

Nine months ago, she deliberately tried to help a known speculator escape arrest in a major railroad station. A month earlier, she created a disturbance in our capitals beloved Lenin Museum - an uproar which the words ‘outrageous’,

‘scandalous’ and ‘revolting’ cannot encompass. In short, she spat on everything most cherished by the Soviet people. "

No one will be surprised that a person who endangers 226

hospital patients and gleefully blasphemes our Leader does not value honest labor. By her own admission, Matveyeva has not worked a single day during her ‘sojourn in Moscow.

He who does not work, neither shall he eat. But how does a non-worker exist? By being a parasite - a sucker of society's blood.

Each parasite steals in its own way. Matveyevas was to leech on spineless men. Her list was long - and did not fail to include members of the so-called foreign press corps: mole-like creatures who rummage through our society's garbage, from which they concoct their ‘reportage'. Matveyeva was not too fastidious to accept hand-outs from these pitiable outcasts. In other words, she was a prostitute.