The girl from Petrovka

The Girl from Petrovka

When I have some free time in the early afternoon and its not unbearably cold, I often take a walk along Petrovka. Its not a ritual or anything symbolic, but simply a way to stretch my legs and absorb some sights and sounds of city life after a solitary mornings work and the winter sullenness that invades my office through the window. Petrovka starts just round the corner from the office and runs about half a mile almost due south, ending beside the Bolshoi Theatre at Sverdlov Square, near the very center of town.

The street has unpleasant connotations because of the dominant building at the near end - near to my office, that is. This is the notorious ‘Number 38’, headquarters of the Moscow Criminal Police. Number 38 is a large stone structure with the look of a mental hospital. It’s carefully maintained and surrounded by a ten-foot iron fence - one of the few buildings of its age in Moscow with straight angles and a facade unblemished by peeling plaster. Outside, a cordon of armed policemen patrol in overcoats cut to the uppers of their boots; they wave black limousines through the gates from time to time and never smile. Muscovites don’t say ‘police headquarters’ but simply ‘Petrovka thirty eight’ -‘he was whipped off to thirty-eight’ - and there are disturbing rumors about interrogations in the basement. The captain of the guard (presumably three or four rotate the twenty-four-hour watch, but they all have the same gross features, like the town bullies of Gorky’s youth) peers at each passer-by, and it’s assumed someone’s stationed behind

the bars of a ground-floor window with a telescopic camera. For prudence, therefore, I always keep to the opposite sidewalk. I pass there almost every day, and years have convinced me that this is enough to make police superintendents, and most Soviet officials of any kind, suspicious.

I used to seethe at this need for caution - the stupidity of such things here, the hundred daily humiliations. Time trains you to swallow them. There are so many more abhorrent pressures to rail at when the railing mood comes on that petty irritations like these pass almost unnoticed. Besides, you learn not to complain about the major wrongs too - unless you’re unhappy enough to court expulsion. 1 myself can’t risk that now; I must remain in Moscow for at least three more years.

In any case, I avert my eyes almost instinctively when I pass the blank fortress now. You must be very brave, very angry or very foolish to pry into matters like police work here. Number 38 occupies almost a full block near Petrovka’s northern end. Just below this the old thoroughfare takes on its own personality, and it’s here, in the center, yet back-

woods, of the city, that I love to wander. Petrovka at this point is an ancient, bustling shopping street, lined with former merchants’ houses built at the turn of the century and peeling, sagging, rotting under a hundred layers of chalky yellow paint. On the ground floor, the weary old houses are now a jumble of offices, small shops and proletarian cafes. The floors above are given over to decrepit three-beds-to-a-room apartments. It is an urban Russian salad.

The pavements bordering the houses are as jammed as an Oriental bazaar; their pedestrian traffic spills out into the roadway, ignoring the railings erected specifically to prevent this, as well as the fierce whistles of policemen who yearn to establish order. Fat old women in mountains of smocks and shawls are hawking greasy pirozhki and a bizarre assortment of books they can’t read. A forty-minute line has formed for a truckload of pathetic chickens sold directly from their muddy crates: a professorial-looking

gentleman is wrapping his in the morning's Pravda and stuffing it into his tattered briefcase. Stalls selling ice cream, foul-smelling soap, runty lemons (at the equivalent of two dollars each), theater tickets and odd items of flimsy clothing obstruct the already impossibly crowded alleyways. Here as everywhere on Russia's back streets, the ordinary people, the anonymous masses, join in their daily, and eternal, struggle to acquire the necessities of life. The street is awash with bulging black overcoats colliding in a kind of human kinetic motion, bumping and jostling each other without resentment - without, one would swear, even feeling the contact.

The shops are shabby and battlescarred, with the look of worn, wooden Woolworths recovering from the depression. Inside, crowds ten to twenty deep are fighting toward the counters, resolved to buy sausage, panties, pencils, anything before supplies are exhausted. The salesgirls, school dropouts with crudely bleached hair, compete in demonstrating contempt for the supplicating customers.

Occasionally one jolts out of her studied indifference to abuse a customer. ‘How do I know if this pen works. You're the one who wants to use it, not me. Get out your money or leave.'

Some of the shops have been modernized recently on what was presumed to be a Western model, but the signs are so primitive and metal fronts so amateurish that the effect is more pathetic than smart. Petrovka is what Petrovka was; the changes themselves, even those wrought by the Revolution, speak more than anything of the continuity of Russian life. The rag-tag, cosy spirit conveyed in paintings of peasant markets in the seventeenth or eighteenth or nineteenth century - it does not matter which - is the spirit now.

This is why I take my walk on Petrovka and drift among its crowds. It is the heart and soul of Russia, the real Russia, not the mask I write about in my newspaper or Soviet journalists in theirs. I'm not a Soviet expert and still less a Slavophile; just a rather veteran Chicago reporter who was

posted here almost three years ago because in my last year at night school - the year both America and Russia entered the Second World War - I had an impulse to study Russian and liked it enough to continue on my own. None of this was planned, any more than this assignment. Nor fated: at my first sight of Petrovka, I felt only pity for its impoverished people. But slowly I came to understand the street and love it, as if it were somehow mine.

I don’t want to overstate all this. At my age you veer too easily towards cynicism or sentimentality - and in Russia, curiously, sentimentality can be the greater danger. But something moves me in the spirit of Russia’s vagrant, peeling streets, as in the spirit of her eroded river banks. They are slovenly but dearer than a mile of chrome. Despite the ‘eastem-ness’ and dirt, I feel an indefinable communion here with the mystery and meaning of the world.

This illustrates, I think, why a peasant loves his sliver of barren land. We all infuse with patriotism and emotion whatever we have or know, however humble - especially when humble. Something about Petrovka makes this phenomenon, or paradox, especially tangible. On this street more than any other, you are engulfed by an involuntary affection for the Motherland of sadness and misfortune. Oh backward, drunken, tortured Russia, said Gogol. How miserable you are - and how we love you!

But I’m far afield already. Rambling - as Petrovka rambles - is an occupational disease in Russia, perhaps caused by the pace of life and the geography: fields and forests without beginning or end. It’s not Petrovka itself I want to write about but the person who introduced me to it. And to Moscow and Russia - the parts I’d believed no longer existed. Oktyabrina went with Petrovka like bread, as the Russians say, goes with salt. Although I’d lived literally next door for years before she appeared, it was through her eyes that I began to know and love it.

To begin, finally, at the beginning: how Oktyabrina appeared.

One morning in December, I was at my desk working on an article for the Sunday edition. The desk is a splintery old book-keeper’s, but a dozen correspondents have added makeshift extensions to it over the years, and it now hogs most of the office. The office itself, is a converted bedroom of my apartment, which is in a large building inhabited exclusively by members of the 'foreign colony’. The apartment, in turn, is the whole of the Moscow Bureau of the Chicago , my generally agreeable employers.

It’s decidedly humble as the apartments of Western correspondents go, and after my wife left for good, I spent two solid weeks pleading for new quarters before the Soviet agency that deals with foreigners. This was less for professional reasons than to escape from memories of a purposeless marriage that clung to this apartment. Which is all I need say about my former wife.

I never got the new apartment: my paper’s Washington influence is considered slight and our requests go to the bottom of the list. I suppose I could wheedle a separate office in time, but the memories have left and I’ve had my fill of hardmouthed bureaucrats. And if I make a nuisance of myself, they’ll probably assign me a full-time housekeeper — meaning a full-time domestic spy. Besides, I’ve become accustomed to my office, even to the sourish smell of decaying Soviet newsprint. The bookshelves literally groan with yellowing Pravdas and Izvestiyas going back to 1944.

That morning, fresh coffee dispelled the newsprint smell. I was writing what my editor calls an ‘in-depth backgrounder’ about the average Muscovite’s reaction to recent border clashes with China. The piece was going well. It was one of those rare political stories with room for tolerable honesty because public opinion fully supported the leadership, if not for the desired reasons. I’d managed to convey that the average Russian hates China and the very thought of seven hundred million Chinese, and to hint - cautiously, not to antagonize the Press Department - that the

9

so as

hatred had nothing whatever to do with 'distortions of Marxist-Leninist teachings’, but sprouted from unadulterated racism.

I was rewriting the lead-in, planning an effective way to foreshadow my conclusions, when the telephone rang, just before noon. A seething voice bellowed from the other end.

‘Volodya? Dammit, I asked you for someone!’

Scrambled and amplified by the sadistic Moscow telephone network, the roar made my ear throb. There was a pause, a cough, and a second throaty crescendo. This time I deciphered, ‘Gimme Volodya Mitkin fast’.

I said it must be a wrong number. The man snarled ‘mother-fucker’ with heroic rage, but a quick chuckle began before the receiver crashed down.

I put out my cigarette, bundled up as quickly as I could in my coat, hat, scarf, gloves and boots, and left the building, nodding, I hoped casually, to the police sentry in the courtyard. Then I crossed the boulevard in the burning cold, and walked toward a back-street residential quarter.

I was heading for an out-of-the-way telephone booth,

that was certain not to be tapped. The wrong number had been a signal from Kostya Kostomarov: call him from a safe place immediately.

Kostya was my closest friend in Moscow - the closest friend of almost everyone who knew him. He was a clown, a libertine, a black-marketeer, an impossible cynic: someone you could trust. The all-American boy, he liked to call himself, raised on the vodka and tears of Mother Russia. He knew enough, as his friends put it, to send half the city to a labor colony for life: anyone who couldn’t keep his exploits or guilt to himself spilled them out to Kostya Kostomarov.

‘Hurry, c’mon over,’ he croaked when I finally got through to him from a booth impregnated with urine. ‘Specialties of the house and two bottles of Stolichnaya, some of it’s left.’ His words were slightly furry, the limit of his disability after consuming enough vodka to amaze even his Russian friends.

I said that I had a story to finish, but Kostya cut me short.

‘Procrastination on the nourishment front would be the gravest mistake,’ he warned. He’d just heard that the Kremlin was ‘cooking up’ a new agricultural reform. ‘Which means that thinking people had better drop everything immediately and have a big lunch - before it’s too late.’

‘I’ll see you later,’ I answered. ‘When I’ve worked up an appropriate appetite.’

‘Do it here - I’m sympathetic about alcoholism.’

‘And listen, stop using the wrong-number system for invitations to lunch. One of these days you’re going to want it for something serious, and I’ll have a stomach ache.’

‘Oh my,’ he whispered with mock chagrin. ‘Still my worst pupil. I’m trying to provide you with needed practice in undercover maneuvers - and you simply miss the whole point.’

He then embarked on an old monologue with obvious relish. ‘It’s that dangerous free-world upbringing of yours. You must rid yourself of telephone-trusting and all former bad habits. It’s called socialist re-education, remember? You happy-go-lucky alien types somehow can’t adapt to our higher form of life.’

‘Let’s guess what you’re adapting to. The fumes are choking me over the telephone.’

He chuckled again, but I overrode his interruption. ‘Hide the bottles under the bed and pretend you can’t find them. It’s excellent practice in undercover maneuvers.’

‘What you smell, my friend, happens to be perfume. Of the tapping operator. It’s our latest hit for the world market - a new scent from virgin land wild flowers called “Brezhnev’s Breath”. Anyway, let’s have a little celebration together. Today must be Lenin’s birthday, first-day-of-school day, wrote-his-last-sermon day or something. When was he bar-mitzvahed, anyway?’

‘It’s going to be lose-my-last-job day if I don’t finish this article. Stay put and I’ll be there by three o’clock.’

‘Right you are, Hemingway - but you work too hard. You don’t care about your friends. No one’s here and it’s lonely. Leave now and you can be here in twenty minutes.

'Save some fodder. Three o’clock.’

'And watch out for your tail, OK? You need the practice .’

Kostya lives a mile or so north of me in an old thieves’ quarter called Marina’s Grove. I took a trolley instead of my

car: you develop the habit of keeping as quiet as possible about visits to Russian friends - which means not parking your special 'foreign journalist’ license plates outside their doors. Besides, trolley 22 goes from my building almost directly to Kostya’s. It was after two o’clock when I boarded an old one, whose joints clanged and groaned in the cold. Its windows were covered by an extravagant thickness of frost.

Half a dozen passengers were huddled on wooden seats in the unheated interior. I dropped four kopeks into the cash box and ripped off a paper ticket. The trolley had hardly found its momentum on the icy tracks when I saw the omen.

Tickets on Moscow busses and trolleys are identified by six figures. When - according to local superstition - the sum of the first three equals the sum of the second, the bearer will soon experience great good luck or a sharp change of fortune. In two years. I’d examined a thousand tickets with no luck. But the red numeral on this one leapt from the paper: 393393. The nonsense made me smile - but I’ve always had a superstitious streak.

2

The ‘Kostomarov Residence’ looks like a survivor from the 1812 fire, with an exterior of logs and a pitted tin roof. Kostya lives on the top floor, in the former servants’ quarters. The names of the four families that share his com-12

munal apartment are scrawled on greasy cards next to the doorbell.

I pulled the bell three times, Kostya's ring, and he was at the door in an instant, smelling of a night without sleep. He greeted me with a wink, but according to his ‘house rules’, we said nothing until reaching the safety of his room. Don’t advertise your accent, Kostya had warned me before my first visit. One person in every communal apartment is on retainer to report unusual occurrences to the police.

Kostya kicked the door closed with a bare foot and led me quickly down the grimy corridor past the communal kitchen and rooms of other families to his own, a flyblown rectangle with just enough room to squeeze between the chest of drawers and the bed. The floor and shelves were crammed with a massive assortment of junk. There was a collection of rusted draftsman’s tools, broken bits and pieces of several television sets and large rag dolls, a blackened piano keyboard, and four or five ancient car batteries from the garage where he worked - the hopeful beginnings of his own car. Ail this was covered with a medley of pots, pans and empty bottles - and, in areas that hadn’t recently been touched, a thick layer of dust. The once emerald walls were spattered with several decades of curdled grease.

‘Hi, Zhoe buddy. You’re just in time for our daily bread.’

‘Hello yourself, Kostya. How’s it going?’

‘So-so. How the hell can it go?’ He tossed my coat on the bed and gave my shoulders a quick rub-down with his exsailor’s, -miner’s, -boxer’s hands. For some reason, he always pretended that I was approaching infirmity, although we were almost the same age. ‘You look cold,’ he said, casting about amidst the junk for a bottle that wasn’t yet empty. ‘A man of your age must keep his tank full. Keeps the mind clear and arteries open.’

Kostya handed me a large water glass and filled it to the brim with ‘fuel’, his code-word for vodka. For himself, he poured a clear liquid called spirit, a home-brew of ninety-

nine per cent alcohol obtained from a 'certain source’ on the nursing staff of a gynaecological hospital. It was murder to swallow.

'Chin-chin - to you and yours/

‘And to every one of us. Cheers/

He tossed down his glass in a gulp and broke into a John Garfield grin. 'Great stuff/ he winked. 'Heals cuts and bruises from the inside - it’s pure/

He slipped off his trousers and black turtleneck, revealing a worn pair of swimming-trunks. Kostya liked to be at home in his bathing suit during the winter months; it encouraged him to daydream, he said, of everything he’d been deprived of by history, geography and fate. Hands on his still muscular stomach, he surveyed his treasured room with distinct pleasure — one of the few in the city enjoyed by a bachelor alone. On a two-burner hotplate — he preferred not to use the communal kitchen - he was cooking a cauldron of his famous borscht.

‘Nu stranger,’ he said, warming himself in the steam of the soup. 'How is it you’re avoiding me? You’ll give me a complex - my labor productivity will suffer/

‘I’ve had to stay sober. You won’t know it, but there’s been lots of news lately. Work/

‘Rationalize the journalistic process and you’ll have it licked. Like Pravda : it’s a cinch to write a couple of weeks’ news in advance. Anyway you’re dying to tell: what is the latest from our planet?’

'Kosygin arrived in Berlin yesterday for a big ceremony. There’s some speculation about why Suslov went with him. It’s in preparation for the giant hundred and fiftieth year memorial for Karl Marx/

'Are you serious? Who’s Kosygin? Why should I know a character with a label like Marx? I’ve told you a hundred times - you Americans have your friends, we have ours/

He poured a second round of drinks and fetched a fat herring from the improvised refrigerator between his double windows. 'My home’s your home,’ he pronounced, skinning 14

the herring. ‘Humble apologies for the temporary disorder. Be a good guest and consume that little glass/

I handed him a packet of Gillettes from the Embassy commissary. Razor blades had disappeared from Moscow shops six weeks before, and he’d asked me, somewhat sheepishly, for something to shave with.

‘Comments will not be tolerated under this roof,’ he said with mock-irritation. ‘No ideological subversion from a pawn of the monopoly-capitalistic press. My dear fellow, it’s easy enough for you over there to make toiletries: you exploit the working class. Besides, who needs razor blades? The Soviet people scorn such invidious bourgeois enticements; we have sputniks. Soviet cosmonauts are dancing in space at a billion rubles a waltz - that thrills us deeply as we fondle our stubble. To hell with your imperialistic razor blades. Shut up.’

He examined the packet delightedly and cleared a place of honor on a steamer trunk.

‘Upon reflection, I might be persuaded to accept them,’ he said. ‘You Westerners invest so much ego in your industrial products - it’s my duty to avoid an international incident.’

‘Many thanks, I’m so relieved. They’ve run out of Tampax. Need anything else in a hurry?’

‘Not at the moment. Well yes, now that you mention it. I require some Italian sunglasses and a sky blue Cadillac. It would be an aesthetic incongruity to use Moscow’s public transport with a Gillette shave.’

The room was warming up. Kostya inhaled a Camel and closed his eyes, spinning out his pleasure.

‘Peace to one and all’ he sighed. ‘We’re a very peaceful people anyway, we hate to fight. You’ve noticed the absence of duels on the streets of our glorious capital? Yet another accomplishment of Communism. You have to drop a glove to start a duel, after all. So you stand in line for a couple of hours to buy a pair - and by that time nobody remembers why he was angry/

He sliced some dried mushrooms and tossed them into the soup together with spoonsful of sour cream. Then he threaded a tape of Ella Fitzgerald on his recorder and sang along with her, miming the lyrics he didn't understand.

'Appropriate appetite achieved/ I announced. 'No doubt there's a forceful reason why you didn’t go to work today?'

‘I happen to have an official chit,' he said with dignity. ‘Stamps, seals, everything.'

'Not the witness role again,' I asked. Whenever he saw a traffic accident, Kostya always dropped everything and dashed to it. This required his appearance in court as a witness, which afforded at least one day off work in return for his hour of testimony.

‘ Nyet , this time I’m on the critical sick list. Strange and terrible pains in my duodenal tract - can't you see?'

Kostya grinned again and explained in exquisite detail how five sfipped-in-the-bra rubles and a promise of a halfbox of Tampax had induced a pretty young doctor to 'fiberate' him for the day. ‘What the hell, we'll just have to steel ourselves and wait one labor day more to reach Communism. . . . Come to think of it, what's the rush?'

He gulped another swig of spirit and lay back on the sagging, unmade bed. ‘Anyway,' he added, ‘I have to stick around today to feed the kid.’

‘Who's the kid?’

‘Just a lassie who’s been visiting me.'

‘I see. I don't suppose she's over twenty-one?'

‘She's a vigintinerian, I think. Times are tough. Soon I'll be running an old-age home.'

‘So you've got another one.' Kostya had literally hundreds. Some days half a dozen ‘lassies' called on him between noon and midnight - he gave them two-hourly appointments. And he liked them young. He kept a clay jug under his chest-of-drawers into which they were all trained to pee. Serious trouble would descend if his neighbors in the apartment observed a procession of teenagers filing to the communal bathroom.

‘Not exactly. I mean she’s not on the first team. I’m just keeping an eye on her until she finds her feet.’

‘I can imagine. Who is she then? What’s her name?’

‘Oktyabrina, She’s a ballerina who came in from some provincial company to make her name. That’s all anyone knows about her. She turned up a few weeks ago, tired and hungry.’

‘Sounds right up your alley.’

‘There’s an exception to every rule, to borrow Lenin’s saying. You’ll understand when you see her. As a matter of fact, I was wondering.

He lit another Camel and let the thought die.

‘As a matter of fact, I’m worried about her. Look, Zhoe, I know it’s a bit tricky for you, but I was thinking maybe you could.

At that moment, the bell rang three times. Kostya threw on his trousers and sweater, and dashed towards the door. ‘Zounds, if the neighbors see the likes of her traipsing in here, that’s all I need.’

The girl who appeared in the doorway behind Kostya was not merely unlike any other in Moscow. She was outlandish enough for Greenwich Village or the King’s Road. Her face oozed make-up: a runny pool of pancake, mascara and lipstick, all applied as if the object were to test the absorbency of skin. I had the impression that a childish ingenue hid behind the mask, but it could be no more than a guess. Only the absurdity of the smears and splotches kept them from being unsavory.

She followed Kostya into the room and succumbed to a profound shiver - which, having caught Kostya’s worried glance, she tried to convert into a joyful hallelujah gesture.

‘Aloha, Kostya precious. You’re in that dreadful sweater again. I told you.’

She herself was wearing what must once have been an evening coat - a summer model, unlined. A patch near the pocket, apparently treated with a cleaning fluid, suggested

the coat was blue silk. ‘How do I look, angel? I purchased it from the most inspiring old woman. She wore it the evening she was seduced by Rasputin/

She held her hands coyly beneath the threadbare velvet collar and executed a shaky pirouette before Kostya’s fragment of a mirror. Something both comic and pathetic showed in the way she arched her neck and tilted her head. She’d probably seen a photograph of Audrey Hepburn in a movie magazine smuggled into Russia years before and passed hand-to-hand by a hundred girlfriends.

It s my being-seduced-despite-everything-by-powerf ul-men wrap,’ she disclosed, stroking the coat. ‘This morning it drove a victim wild, almost caused a skandal on Gorky Street. He runs an atomic factory or something in a place called Dubna. Demonstrated what they’re working on out there at the moment, a hush-hush project he called radioactive love.’

Kostya shook his head and looked at me with pained yet delighted eyes. The girl sounded like a precocious pupil of his; the irreverent mention of Dubna, the nuclear research center near Moscow, pleased him visibly. For some reason, his curious friend produced a faint pang in me. My inclination to laugh was supplanted by a notion that I’d seen her before — long before, which made the notion impossible. But she too seemed to flash me a recognition signal.

Kostya registered our exchange of glances and cleared his throat. Zhoe, he said gravely, ‘I’d like to present the kid. Kid, this is my old friend Zhoe — I mean, my friend of old. Virtue’s my mate and all that, but in a jam - say some kind of cell - I’d rather have Zhoe.’

Oktyabrina offered her hand from the tattered coat. Her fingers were frozen.

You two provincials ought to get on famously,’ Kostya continued. ‘Zhoe’s an imported product too. Transatlantic in fact - from America.’

‘How marvelously exciting,’ exclaimed Oktyabrina. ‘I’m from the Kingdom of Tanganyika myself/ She curtsied to 18

the floor and they both laughed.

‘It’s an expression/ Kostya explained. “I’m from America” stands for something far-fetched, like outer space - no one takes it seriously/ He pierced the ends of a raw egg with a corkscrew and pushed it at Oktyabrina. 'Drink this, kid, you need some emergency protein/

‘Thanks loads, darling, but I’m not the slightest bit hungry. And I can only stay a second. I just dropped by to see if you need anything. You’re absolutely certain you’re OK?’

Her speech was something I’d never heard before, a kind of Russian version of a clever Brooklyn girl parodying herself. She had begun to flutter about the room, picking up things and peering into comers to determine, I guessed, if there were new additions to Kostya’s stock of discarded, mislaid and forgotten cosmetics. Soon she discovered a bottle of something streaky and added a layer to her face. Then she sank into the bed, sighed profoundly and closed her eyes. A moment later she was up again.

‘Ciao children, I’m off. Into the snowy wastes. The most delicate errand of mercy/

‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Kostya demanded.

‘Really darling, don’t even ask. Actually, I’ve got an urgent appointment with a certain terribly important official. He’s a frightful Don Juan as well as a balletomane - I must decide this minute whether to mix business and pleasure.’

‘Balls,’ barked Kostya. ‘Sit down and scrape off the lipstick. You’re going to have a feed/

Ignoring her feeble show of opposition, he forcibly removed her coat. Underneath were layers of ratty sweaters over a washed-out green dress. The outfit was consummated by a scarlet ribbon tied across the chest as a sash. Near its center over her snippet of a bust, was pinned a hand-cut oval: a yellowed photograph of a Victorian woman wearing a crown.

Oktyabrina observed my gape from the comer of her eye

visibly pleased by her effect. Tm planning to do Odette next season/ she explained soberly, nodding down to the photograph. ‘Swan Lake. I mean a ballerina worth anything must live her parts day and night, don't you agree?'

It sounds logical to me,' I said, encouraged that she'd finally said something that was open to an answer.

‘I suppose you've seen Spesivtseva's Odette in Monte Carlo,' she said, apparently encouraged herself. ‘And you're terribly sad when you remember the old days. I don't understand what’s happening to ballet in this country.'

She paused to catch her breath and remove her boots, which had apparently been lacquered with nail polish. Swans, she continued, ‘are an ancient folk symbol for purity, as you probably know. Purity, grace and redemption - which is why the part is so crucial. The symbolism happens to come from the old Teutonic legend of the Swan Queen. That, as well as the legend's Slavic variations, was Tchaikovsky's inspiration.'

And the Teutons took it from Marx of course — the father of all our culture,' Kostya broke in. ‘Now stop that psychopathic chatter and sit down.'

Kostya quickly seated her on the trunk and hunted for his wooden ladle. Soon he divided the mellow borscht into three large serving bowls. Then he jumped up again. ‘What a disgrace!' he exclaimed. ‘I've actually served without napkins.' He hurriedly ripped up an old Pravda and offered the segments on his arm, bowing elegantly like the proprietor of a grand establishment. ‘Your very own serviettes, my lords and ladies.'

Oktyabrina wanted to laugh, but was too busy attacking the soup. In the seconds between large, slurping spoonfuls, however, she managed to blurt out an announcement. ‘A man marries for soup ... a woman for meat . . . it's an old Russian saying.’ Then she too jumped up, to search for her handbag. When she’d found it, she removed a sprig of dill from the bottom and sprinkled some into my bowl.

Dill is important,' she confided. ‘For masculine powers.

No, Kostya darling, you’ve had enough of this particular herb/

She returned to her own bowl with noises of effort and pleasure. It was her eyes, I realized as she wolfed down the steaming soup, that were her most intriguing feature. They were a kind of greyish green, a mongrel mixture, but so large compared to the bones of her face that they would have been breathtaking had she been beautiful. But she wasn’t in fact beautiful, not even pretty in a conventional sense - certainly not by Kostya’s milkmaid standards.

‘Do you thrill to the dance?’ she asked me when her bowl was empty but her mouth stiff full of fatty soup meat and black bread.

‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘I suppose I do like ballet. More than motor-cycle racing, for example.’

‘How marvelous! Actually I only fall in love with men who are manly enough to appreciate the subtle things. An artist can never separate her loves from her art.’

‘I watched a ballet once,’ Kostya confessed, scenting an opportunity to introduce one of his World War II stories. The ballet had taken place on a battle-weary cruiser on which he was serving as a gunner’s mate. After VE day, the ship was despatched to Dubrovnik on a triumphant good-will visit - but for fear the crew would be contaminated by alien ideas, only the Captain and three senior officers were permitted ashore. In sight of Croatian beauties waving from shore, the crew were soon in a bad way, even for sailors. ‘Even for Soviet sailors. Ever hear of socialist masturbation? “All together now - stroke.” ’

Frustration, the Adriatic sun and dashed hopes of a new deal after victory heated the crew’s blood to danger level. At last the Captain sanctioned entertainment by local girls. The cruiser vibrated with excitement as a stage was improvised on the main deck. Finally the curtain was raised . . . on excerpts of Giselle , performed by an amateur ballet group.

‘ Giselle , would you believe it? Giselle! We all took a

socialist oath never to see another ballet. Or talk to a ballerina. The kids an exception because - well . . . she's OK. You wont rat on me, will you, kid?'

Who did Giselle?' Oktyabrina asked impatiently. ‘Did you all fall desperately in love with her?' Except for a gleam in her eyes, I d have sworn that the point of the story had escaped her.

Anyway, I m glad I never got ashore,' said Kostya, ‘never set foot on foreign soil and never will, thank God. Everybody I know is dying to swap ten years of his life for a weekend in Paris — and its insanity. You go abroad, see what real civilisation is like and you're ruined forever. I

don t want to find out I've been fooling myself all these years.’

Poor precious, purred Oktyabrina, casting a skinny arm around his shoulders. ‘Some day I’m going to take you on tour with me. To Paris, Rome, everywhere. You’ll be my distinguished elderly gentleman - I'll buy you a cape and a cane. We 11 sit in the sun and 111 take care of you, all right?'

‘Promise?’

‘If you throw away that awful rotgut.'

Kostya’s grin cut deep lines into his cheeks. He was more than ordinarily paternal with Oktyabrina, but she pretended not to notice and plunged into a lecture about Giselle. The crucial difficulty of the role, she explained, is the inversion of the plot line. ‘The first act throbs with passion, but in the second, you re all cool and celestial. The dramatic tension is fantastically difficult to maintain.'

‘I knew a boxer once who specialised in dramatic tension, said Kostya. It was otherwise known as “taking a dive . He was the favourite of a certain commissar in Odessa....'

But I stopped Kostya. It was time for me to leave: my China story had to be telegraphed from the central post office before five o clock. I shrugged on all my outdoor paraphernalia before going to the door, in accordance with Kostya s principle of shaving every possible second from 22

the time his guests spent in the corridor.

‘Are you really American?’ asked Oktyabrina, studying my rather ungainly boots. ‘I thought Americans were so marvelously dashing .’

‘He had a difficult childhood,’ said Kostya. ‘Hunger, exploitation, class struggle - life’s sheer hell over there.’

The concern that spread over Oktyabrina’s face looked like a schoolgirl’s at the movies. ‘Yes, but please don’t worry,’ she cooed. ‘Because you’re here now. A good friend is worth more than a hundred relatives - it’s an old Russian saying.’ She gazed into my eyes again, an obvious artifice to make me feel special - which nevertheless worked.

‘You’ve got it all wrong again, kid,’ sighed Kostya. “‘A rich father-in-law is better than a hundred hundred friends.” Or: Whatever the prophets say, marry like Adzhubei.’

‘Kostya, darling, give me back my dill. I’ll speak to you anon.’ She turned to me with an expression suggesting that Kostya’s soul was lost, but there was still hope for mine.

‘Has anyone shown you Moscow properly?’ she asked. ‘If you’re an authentic foreigner, there’s absolutely too much to see. I really must recommend myself as your . . . well,

I managed to stifle my smile. ‘Thanks awfully, Oktyabrina. But I’ve been here just a bit too long for a guide.’ She was an engaging creature, but it wasn’t wise for someone of my age and in my position to become involved with a capricious child in Moscow. Perhaps that was a pretext. After the divorce, I needed a period of no involvement with anyone.

‘Hell, no. It’s a brilliant idea,’ exclaimed Kostya. ‘Of course he needs a guide - he’s just shy.’ And before he hustled me down the corridor to the door, he’d arranged that Oktyabrina would telephone me when she was free and identify herself as ‘Tanya’ - the signal to meet exactly half an hour later at the fountain just below Petrovka, in Sverd-lov Square.

The call came a few days later. The voice was a strained falsetto, perhaps caused by the excitement of the subterfuge, or, as it seemed, the sport of operating a public telephone alone.

‘It’s me , Mr Washington. You remember Tanya, your dear old friend. I’m calling you from inside a telephone booth. Just to see how you’re getting on.’

Oktyabrina sounded even sillier without Kostya. Yet her voice, like her eyes, somehow made me feel more alive. On the other hand, perhaps it was simply the thought of a change - any kind of change. The choices of what to do in the evenings boiled down to bridge again with the how-terrible-Russia-is Embassy crowd or a love-thy-factory film show alone on the hard bench of some local theater. In early winter, Moscow can be dismally empty for a foreigner. I was getting used to living alone again, but the few unmarried journalists I knew spent too many evenings drinking and brooding.

I replaced the phone in a better mood and checked the latest copy on my agency wires. The major news was a cabinet crisis in Rome - and the very notion of Italy, with a Mediterranean climate and Latin temperament, seemed like fantasy. I tuned into Moscow Radio while I dressed: a stitcher in a clothing factory was sighing that she worked on each garment as if it were meant for her dear leader Lenin himself; it exhilarated her - and helped her raise her productivity. I listened to the next story too - about an asbestos plant - because I didn’t want to arrive early for the appointment. After a full twenty minutes, it was time to go.

I left the apartment feeling foolish excitement. A passing taxi had room for one more passenger and soon dropped me at Sverdlov Square. I wrapped my scarf tight, hurried the 24

few yards to the fountain - and waited. The air was like iron. After five minutes, my toes were too numb to feel my own stamping.

It was still early evening but the square, the streets, the entire city center were virtually deserted. Most Muscovites seal themselves early into their rooms for the greedy winter night, as if fear of wolves-after-dark fingered in the folk subconscious - or perhaps the Building of Communism precluded anything so socially wasteful as night fife. From time to time a furtive black overcoat slithered along a path leading to the dormant fountain. It was so cold that my watch seemed to have slowed down. I played the game of trying not to look at it for a pre-determined number of minutes.

Oktyabrina arrived half an hour late, strolling. An oversized aquamarine caste mark decorated her forehead. My thoughts raced at the sight of her: what was I doing with this odd waif? Yet something pulled me towards her -something more than the wild contrast she presented to everything around her. She arched her back and deposited a kiss on my cheek.

‘Aloha, darling. Are you frozen? Who sold you that funny little hat?’

‘Hello, Oktyabrina. What on earth kept you? As a matter of fact, I’m half icicle/

‘I’m dreadfully sorry, darling. Just imagine: there I was, dashing to wonderful you, when I ran into two of the most superb weightfifters. It took hours to reconcile them - they almost came to blows over who'd seen me first. Hows the world ever going to have peace and friendship if men can't even stop fighting over me? 7

She sighed delightedly, and slipped her arm in mine. ‘Isn't Moscow heavenly at night? The bustle everywhere. The traffic. All the lights 7

The ‘traffic' was a handful of World War II surplus trucks rattling laboriously along the icy expanse of Marx Prospekt. The lights emanated from a buzzing, single-strand neon

sign over a lopsided shop: ‘GL RY TO THE SO IET P OP E!’

‘It’s super to see you again,’ she continued. ‘Kostya says I should hearken to you carefully and remember what you say. You might be the steadying influence I need.’

‘Kostya’s wonderful at ambiguous compliments. Now, then, what’s my personal guide arranged to show me this evening? It might be pleasant to get indoors rather quickly/

She tugged on my arm. ‘The list begins brilliantly, with the National Cafe. Why that curious wince, Zhoseph? You’ll positively love the National/

It was simultaneously a dismal prospect and the inevitable choice. Moscow’s range of ‘nightspots’ is limited to a handful of besieged restaurants and cafes. Without coffee houses or pubs, not to speak of bars or cabarets, the object is always to find some place - any place - as a refuge from the cold. The National was as close as any.

We walked past several deserted government buildings to the inevitable cluster of pleading, would-be customers outside the cafe. When I finally convinced the doorman that I was a foreigner, he reluctantly slid back his stave and let us in. The blue-faced supplicants who’d been waiting for hours were sad but not angry: Russians have long been resigned to people with privileged status jumping every line and laying claim to every ‘deficit’ item.

The National Cafe looks out across Manyezh Square onto the Kremlin walls. It is a cavernous hall full of funereal furniture, neo-Victorian gilt and all the charm of a self-service cafeteria. As in Russian peasant huts, the windows are sealed shut for the winter, making the clammy heat inversely proportioned to the cold outside. The air reeks of acid perspiration and potatoes fried in suspect grease.

Despite all this, the National - helped by the absence of competition - was then enjoying a noisy vogue. It was recognized as the ultimate of Moscow swank and mecca of its beau monde : underground jazz enthusiasts, pimps and currency speculators; would-be-actresses and middle-aged 26

officials in search of would-be actresses; sons and daughters of the bureaucratic elite who had read about Paris and hoped against hope that some day, somehow, the National would become a real cafe; assorted dandies whose achievement of eminence was attested by the wearing of black-market Western clothing. A young man of the last category shared our table: a handsome country lad with black curls and a big smile. He sported a mohair sweater of unmistakably non-Soviet make that sagged to his knees and made him drip sweat in the suffocating air. He grinned and loftily exhibited the Italian label.

‘Wanna sell your shoes?’ he whispered the moment we were settled. ‘Your shirt? Socks? I don’t suppose your girl friend’s got some spare er . . . unmentionables? He had moved his chair almost flush with mine, and spoke in an earnest whisper.

‘The underwear of his girl friend,’ pronounced Oktyabrina with a significant glance at me, ‘happens to be the creation of Moscow Cotton Factory Number 4. Fashioned, alas, by honest proletarian hands. In brief, you wouldn’t want it.’

‘Go on, you’re kidding.’ The boy could not believe that such a creature in such an outfit — she was wearing the green print dress again, but the sash was now pink - could be Russian.

‘If you appreciate the finer things,’ Oktyabrina added, ‘I’ll be happy to arrange a consultation at a later time. But please desist from all commercial propositions now. My escort and I’ - she gazed at me again - ‘are here to celebrate a memorable beginning.’

The boy took the rebuff good-naturedly and insisted on pouring us some syrupy brandy from his carafe to toast our acquaintanceship. ‘You’re in films, aren’t you?’ he winked to Oktyabrina. ‘Come on, admit it. All the big stars come here.’ Throughout the next hour he contemplated the room and its occupants as if this were Sardi’s after a premiere. From time to time he raised his glass with a flourish and

pronounced, ‘Blesk! Blazhenstvo!’ - This is heaven! Bliss! -in recognition of his good fortune. He made a benign and gentle drunk.

Oktyabrina’s enjoyment was more active. She wriggled in her chair to indicate rapture and batted her eyes to suggest that I’d been extraordinarily gallant to arrange such a supper - even if my motive was seduction. Her enthusiasm was somehow infectious: for the first time I glimpsed what Muscovites see in the cafe. Much depends upon imagination.

When the waitress finally appeared, we ordered caviar. Oktyabrina commented on its 'procreative powers’, then wolfed down her double portion and appropriated a spoonful of mine. Rubbery veal followed with potatoes in congealing grease. Oktyabrina ate with the intensity of a hamster, occasionally stuffing bread into her mouth with both hands; and in a volume out of all proportion to her size. She approached vodka respectfully, however, screwing up her face before her one and only sip and swallowing it with a jerk and a glower, as if the act were her duty as a proper Russian.

'Isn't this the gayest place?’ she bubbled. 'Let’s drink this toast to dear, exciting Moscow.’ She had begun to relax and the broad vowels of provincial Russia breached her affected Moscow accent.

‘It’s time to tell me about yourself, Oktyabrina. Who are you for a start?’

‘You’re such an endearing boy sometimes, one can’t put into words who one is!

'Just some facts, then. Like what you’re doing in Moscow.’

'Zhoe darling, I’m simply useless at small talk. It’s so petit-bourgeois.’

She lit a cigarette flamboyantly, choked on the first puff, and we both laughed.

'Do I trust you with everything, then?’ she said. 'MQye closer.’ Then she launched herself on her autobiography 28

with a curious excitement, as if in the third person.

She was born twenty years ago in Omsk, a small city in southwestern Siberia. She never knew her father: he was one of the earliest World War II aces, having downed fourteen Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs before being shot down himself and killed heroically in 1944. Her grandfather was a minor nobleman whose estate had been in Omsk Province. He was shot from the saddle while commanding a regiment of White cavalry during the Civil War.

"Didn’t that cause the family hardship?’ I asked.

"Nothing unimaginably ghastly. You see, my family was never very political as such; after all, Mama and Papa named me in honor of October. That proves they never took the Revolution personally.’

Her mother was guided by the family motto - Glory Forever in Aspiration - more, perhaps, than the noble side itself, even though she’d been bom a peasant. Self-educated at first, she won her way into medical school to become a revered doctor and the senior surgeon in Omsks leading clinical hospital. She died tragically in a room above her own ward, of yellow fever contracted from a patient.

‘I adored Mama. She was a selfless heroine. And I was her only child. She used to say I generated so much love in her that armfuls were left over for a thousand patients.

Oktyabrina, now eleven, was placed in an orphanage the day after her mother’s death. The shock made her first years there disastrous; she was the only girl in the history of the orphanage to make eight escapes. The staff were patient: both her parents, after all, had died heroically in the Motherland’s service. Oktyabrina was eventually assigned an individual tutor, a kind of personal commissar, in the hope of mitigating her influence on the other girls. Everyone despaired for her future. But she was destined to undergo a sudden metamorphosis.

Soon after her fourteenth birthday, a second-string ensemble of the Kiev Ballet visited Omsk, and the orphanage

children were taken to a matinee as a May Day treat. The

dancers were glorious; Oktyabrina was thunderstruck. The next day she applied for Omsk’s primary school of ballet. She spent the rest of her adolescence working terribly hard in preparation for a magnificent career in the dance.

‘You see, I always longed to be a ballerina. And I am going to be one, I’m going to . . . why are you smiling like that, you rat?’

Tm not smiling, I’m listening. It’s nice to hear someone like you talk.’

‘Don’t be a nasty old man, Zhoe darling. They always warned us in school about your type!’

‘Flattery again. And when did you come to Moscow?’

‘Let’s see - almost eight entire months ago. Can you imagine being stuck in Omsk all your life? I mean, don’t you think it’s everybody’s highest duty to expand to his absolute limit?’

I said I used to think exactly that. I might have said more, but the cafe was now too clangorous and hot for the simplest introspection.

‘Inside, I felt a drive for expansion. My dancing required the influence of the capital. So I decided to come here to study.’

‘You mean you were sent here to study.’

‘Not exactly. What’s the difference? Take the reins yourself and you’ll arrive faster - it’s an old Russian saying.’

‘But what about the current rules?’

‘Really, you’d think it was some sort of staggering achievement. This is a free country. You get on a train and in three days you’re here.’

The thought that she might be serious stifled my laugh. ‘But I always thought you can’t stay in Moscow without documents. What about your propiska? y

She reached for my cafe glace , appropriated the ice cream and slowly melted a large spoonful in her mouth. I was beginning to recognize her expression. She produced it when caught in something drolly mischievous, like a child confident its prank will provoke amusement rather than SO

anger.

‘What about the propiska ?’ I repeated.

‘The truth is Tm frightfully busy these days, darling. I’ve been meaning to attend to it.’

‘Oktyabrina!’

‘Oktyabrina da, propiska nyet. The situation on the document’s front is ah .. . fluid.’

‘Perhaps you’d better crystallize it soon,’ I said as gravely as I could. ‘You can be sent out of Moscow tomorrow, you know. You can even get two years in a labor camp - it’s a crime.’

At this moment our table companion snapped out of his stupor. Suddenly the boy was lynx-eyed sober.

‘Crime?’ he hissed. ‘That’s a lie. There’s nothing criminal here, try and prove it.’ Oktyabrina required several minutes to quell his agitation.

‘For God’s sake, Comrade,’ he pleaded to me under his breath. ‘Pipe down and speak cleaner Russian. This place has ears. It’s crawling with informers.’

‘Where are they?’ I asked, now whispering too.

‘Everywhere, goddammit. They’re assigned to strategic tables and sit around all evening in civvies, listening for hot conversations. They swarm to the National like flies to garbage.’

It was not the time to appreciate the humor of the boy’s implied reflection on his cafe society. I cautiously examined the occupants of the neighboring tables, trying to remember whether we’d said anything incriminating.

‘Relax,’ murmured the boy, now reassuringly. ‘You can always spot them anyway - it’s a certain kind of face.’ He nodded towards a dour man in a heavily padded suit. ‘Besides, they give themselves away. Sit around all evening reading Pravda and splurging with two dishes of ice cream.’

Oktyabrina was much amused by our exchange. ‘You two should swap lessons on the facts of life,’ she laughed.

She insisted on lighting another cigarette to re-test her

skill. This somehow led to another series of toasts. Had the waitress not disappeared for almost an hour, the lad would have spent his last kopek on more brandy.

As it was, the evening had slipped by so quickly that my watch now seemed to be racing. I had to admit that Oktyabrina was absorbing company. And to admire her determination in face of her childhood hardships. It explained a good deal about her, I realized. Behind costumes and makeup - now tacky in the heat - lay dedication and courage.

We left for the exit, where five or six stalwarts were still hoping against hope to 'climax’ their ‘evening’ with at least a coffee, and stepped into the shock of the night air.

‘A glorious, enchanting, truly memorable evening,’ said Oktyabrina. ‘Zhoe darling, you know how to make a woman positively bloom.’

I tried to think of how to thank her too. ‘Let me take you home,’ I offered. ‘If you promise not to meet any weight-lifters on the way.’

‘Next time, Zhoe dearest. You’re really a sweetheart. I just wish you wouldn’t look so worried.’

Its common sense. You know what can happen without a pwpiska.

Nothing happens, silly. You just train yourself not to have anything to do with them. Keep out of offices and things and never sign anything. No one official knows you exist. . . . Anyway, documents are so tiresome. After my debut, they’ll beg me to accept residence in Moscow.’

‘I’m sure they will. But meantime, there’s your school -you can’t avoid signing things there.’

‘Oh the school doesn’t mind. That’s its secret, actually: one hundred per cent dedication to art, with no bureaucratic insanity.’

‘You’re extremely lucky. What’s this paradise called?’

She drew herself up. ‘The Institute of Academic Dance.

We approached Sverdlov Square, which at that hour appeared to be under blackout. ‘Look, Zhoe, I’ve got a super idea. Why don’t you come to a rehearsal on Friday?’ 32

'I’d love to. But a foreign journalist couldn’t get permission to visit a barber shop by Friday.’

'No, no, you just come along with my permission. We’re a nice, informal specialized institution - it’s not the Bolshoi, after all.’

She aimed a kiss at my cheek. A minute later she was skipping ahead towards the bottom of Petrovka, her breath making dense clouds in the frigid night air.

4

It was even colder on the day of the rehearsal - one of those days when an entire nation postpones everything possible to stay in bed. But the memory of Oktyabrina’s enthusiasm overcame my own inertia. I took the metro to the nearest station and plodded on by foot. Moscow street maps are virtually useless for details of these areas, and the sprinkling of passing workers I questioned shrugged their shoulders without allowing the cold to seep between their scarves; and without stopping. In that weather, everyone had to keep moving, even if he - abnormally - wanted to be polite.

Finally I found the street and number. It was indeed not the Bolshoi. It was an ancient, one story structure of crumbling red brick - a warehouse. And it was set on a cul-de-sac in Avtozavodakaya, a grimy, industrial section of town. I was certain I had the wrong address.

A woman as hoary and ravaged as the building was guarding the gate. She was enthroned on an old crate, her felt boots propped on a mound of dirty snow.

'Is there a ballet rehearsal inside, grandma?’

‘Nye znaiyu. Don’t know.’

'I’m looking for a dancing school.’

‘Shto?’

‘A dancing school. Young people. Music.’

Suddenly, inexplicably, she was venomous. ‘Listen grand-

pa, don t grandma me. Til be drinking my tea — with sugar — long after the like of you is stiff in his grave. Limp home for your hot-water-bottle while there’s still time/

I was just wondering whether there’s dancing instruction somewhere around here.’

‘Nichevo nye znaiyu. Ni-che-vo .’ She spat the shell of a sunflower seed past my face.

I had started to investigate the adjoining building, a crumbling, abandoned church, when feeble echoes of an old piano playing ballet exercises escaped from the warehouse and crept across the snow. The old babushka instantly broke into the wail of a tragic peasant ballad - which did not, however, quite drown out the piano. She sang at the top of her voice while contemplating me from the comer of her eyes, unmistakably supplicating for my disappearance. I hurried back to her.

When I approached the gate again, she was crossing herself furiously and bowing, as if I were a Cossack with a knout. They re just having some games in there, Comrade Inspector. Children playing. I m innocent, God in his mercy knows it. You’re from the police?’

Not immediately — for the old woman required considerable calming - she led me to a side door and into the build-ing. A glance disclosed that this was no ordinary warehouse. It was an agitprop depository for some of the mammoth stockpile of decorations which bedizen the city on May Day and the Anniversary of the October Revolution. Red flags, red banners, red posters, banners with Lenin, banners with slogans, Presidium portraits, Party icons, photographs of Lenin, mosaics of Lenin, tinted paintings of Lenin - the whole panoply of Party propaganda aids for pranking the streets was there. It was all stacked helter-skelter from floor to ceiling as if abandoned prior to an evacuation of the city. In one comer lay a thousand-odd portraits of Smiling Khruschev. They were roped off and labelled with handwritten signs: ‘SUPERSEDED^! DO NOT USE!!’

The old woman clumped down a rotten stairway near the back of the building into a deep frozen basement. Signs, posters, banners, portraits of Lenin, socialist slogans, parts of Glory-to-Communism floats - again the paraphernalia reached to the ceiling. At last Grandma stopped and pointed. The ‘Institute of Academic Dance’ was a clearing of concrete, surrounded by giant portraits of Suslov and Brezhnev.

Oktyabrina was in the centre of the space and in dusty leotards, attempting an arabesque. She suspended it when she saw me and affected a sweeping curtain-call curtsey. The smirk on her face was enigmatic; was she actually stage-proud — there ? She risked the arabesque again, teetered, then held it precariously, biting her lip. Her trembling could have been caused by her effort, or simply by the cold.

‘ Ochen khroshow ,’ wheezed a man who was evidently the teacher. ‘Very good. Excellent!’ He ran his cane up Oktyabrina’s leg to her bottom and thrust it gently in. Oktyabrina removed it just as gently, smiling with an indulgence that did not quite disguise embarrassment. The teacher was a wizened creature, certainly over eighty, in a threadbare overcoat, bespattered ascot and over-large beret. Goateed, nicotined, hunched apparently by arthritis, he stood no more than a head taller than his cane.

A second pupil labored behind Oktyabrina: a tubby, pre-pubescent girl who chewed her fingers during the exercises. And in a dark comer under a papier-mache sickle hovered a fat mother-hen of a woman, presumably her mother. The exercise bar was the frame of a lurid ‘FORWARD TO THE VICTORY OF COMMUNISM!’ poster. The music was not in fact produced by a piano but by a pre-revolutionary victrola. The sound horn was ruptured.

The teacher cranked the handle, maneuvered his feet into a loose compromise between first and third positions and fixed his gaze on Oktyabrina’s tiny breasts. From time to time he pronounced, ‘very good, excellent’, and hummed a

measure or two of the music in a wheezing voice. This comprised the better part of his instruction. Several times he reminded the little fat girl to point her toes, and once explained to Oktyabrina that The meaning of this movement is expressed through the position of the pate'. There were elements - to be fair, more than trappings - of authentic instruction in his unlikely classroom. But even if the old man were once a genuine teacher, he no longer had the physical or mental powers to watch a class competently, not to speak of conducting one. Soon after I came he suffered a sharp diminution of energy. He alternated between striking a pose when announcing an exercise and drifting into a quasi-trance during its execution. Back hunched, eyes misted over, he failed to notice the steady souring of the music as the victrola’s power ran down.

Reassured that I was neither detective nor government inspector, Grandma bragged about her part in the underground school. For her work as the Institute's lookout - ‘to keep the meddlers and art-lovers out' - the ‘professor' paid her a ruble for every class. Life was hard, she sighed: God was in heaven, but on earth a body had to put some fat on its bones - and what's wrong with a little private enterprise, after all? Only quacks call it a cancer in the socialist system. Socialism is the salvation of the common people, but you can't bake bread without a little yeast.

She returned to her post, and I concentrated on Oktyabrina’s efforts. After the initial embarrassment, her dancing no longer seemed awkward, but simply unformed. She was serious, industrious, zealous - but woefully untrained. As her meager limbs flailed, the flush of severe exertion never left her face, as if she were Pinocchio learning to walk. It was an unhappy demonstration that natural grace - which Oktyabrina did not lack - has little to do with the language of classical ballet.

The class lasted a full hour after I'd arrived. A series of simple exercises was climaxed by a brief solo by both pupils. The fat girl's effort was calamitous, but Oktyabrina ran 36

through some elementary steps to a Chopin waltz and was nearly steady throughout. Evidently it was her show piece.

As Oktyabrina approached the "finale’ of her performance, the teacher revived. He approached me, twirling the knob of his cane between his hands and beaming.

"You came to observe our little Oktyabrina, I presume? I have the pleasure to report her progress is very gratifying/ His voice was unctuous, but suggested a measure of selfamusement. "We’re very hopeful for her; she’s our very best pupil. . . . You don’t, I suppose, have a filter cigarette?’

The fat girl’s mother smothered her in kisses and bundled her away, slipping several bills into the teacher’s deft hand as she passed. Oktyabrina unwrapped the ribbons of her shoes with a delight-in-exhaustion expression. When she had combed her hair, donned her layers of clothing and curtsied to the teacher - who was relacing his tattered spats with a length of old string - we made our way out of the warehouse and walked towards the metro together.

Sustaining a soft humming as we walked, Oktyabrina packed and repacked the ballet-shoes in her bag. She was obviously waiting for a comment from me, but I could think of nothing encouraging.

"I still have more work to do,’ she declared at last. "On my hands. Hands are very important nowadays in places like Sadler’s Wells.’

Finally her patience ran out. "Don’t be bashful. How much did you appreciate my work?’

My silence was uncomfortable. At last I thought of an escape.

"It was rather cold in there, wasn’t it? The Institute seems to save substantially on heating bills.’

"Stiffness is indeed a major problem,’ she said seriously. ‘Go on.’

‘That teacher of yours is quite a character. Seems to like poking people with his stick/

"Is that all you have to say? I’m very sorry for you. Mister Narrow-Mind. It turns out you’re a little man.

'Oktyabrina dear, I’m not a critic. I only know it’s a long hard road to become a ballerina. And if you have extra . . . well, inconveniences like that fellow and that place, all those Politburo types, you’ll be worn out before you start. I think you’re very .. . courageous.’

7 think condescension is unbearable. Snideness too, but neither even graze me. Because no one gets anywhere without obstacles. Mature people learn to make sacrifices for their art.’

'Art? The old man’s certainly artful. But I wonder what he knows about art.’ This was too strong; I regretted the words as soon as they emerged.

‘If you’re trying to say I put up with certain peccadillos from my ballet master, you’re hardly revealing anything new. What you are doing is degrading yourself rather sadly. The first thing sensitive people learn is to make allowances for dedicated artists.’

‘He’s not an artist, Oktyabrina, and you know it. I hope you know it. I honestly wonder whether he knows a plie from a pirouette.’

‘Bravo - the dilettante has exhibited his two highborn words.’

‘Has he ever danced anywhere? Seen a proper ballet?’

‘Evgeny Ignatievich, for your information, was once the most promising young character dancer in the Mariinsky. In its heyday. When an enraptured world turned up to be thrilled and uplifted.’

‘What happened to his great promise? Why hasn’t anybody heard of him?’

‘Everybody who knows and loves the dance knows him perfectly well. It happens, however, that he was forced to leave the Mariinsky before he achieved supreme world acclaim.’

‘The plot thickens.’

‘His is a tragic story. I’m not going to tell it to a cynic. If you must know, when the Bolsheviks took over the Mariinsky Theater, they dismissed every male dancer with certain 38

instincts towards other men. Evgeny Ignatievich was the greatest loss/

From my memory of Soviet history, this was nonsense. If homosexuals had in fact been purged from the famous Imperial Company, it would have been only with Stalinism’s flowering in the mid-1980s, after St Petersburg had become Leningrad and the Mariinsky Theater was renamed the Kirov. And when Oktyabrina’s teacher would have been at least fifty.

Besides, his current behavior no more supported the story than Soviet history: he certainly didn’t use his cane like a homosexual. He was obviously an old confidence trickster, but it wasn’t clear whether Oktyabrina knew it. Her voice was hurt - but I thought I detected the faintest trace of irony too.

‘Then he was blackballed from ever dancing again on a public stage. He was humiliated, hounded - a martyr to his art. The body and soul of genius mangled and wasted. It’s an honest-to-God drama - a tragedy , do you understand?’

She ran out of breath. When she resumed, it was in a pleading tone.

‘We’re his only pupils, Natashinka and I. He doesn’t even get a pension - fives on I-don’t-know-what.’

‘How much does he charge for the lessons?’

‘Kopeks. It’s three rubles an hour, if I remember correctly; four for rehearsals. He won’t take more.’

‘I don’t believe it! Ulanova doesn’t make four rubles an hour.’

She gazed at me, shaking her head. ‘Please just don’t bother to come to rehearsals any more. And let’s not talk about this particular subject, all right? It’s extremely disappointing, you know - an American making a big fuss over small change/

She moved a demonstrative step away from me and we walked on in silence. Behind an old mill, we passed the driver of a cement truck fitting a tube from his fuel tank to that of a private car. It was the usual back-street barter: the

truck driver supplying a quantity of fuel tapped from the state in exchange for a bottle of vodka. Oktyabrina observed the operation in fascination. Then she snuggled to my side again and took my arm. ‘Listen/ she cooed, and by the time we’d reached the metro station, she had extracted a promise from me to supply Evgeny Ignatievich with my old clothes.

5

A few days later Oktyabrina took me to ‘her’ bench on a quiet part of old Gogol Boulevard. She picked her way through the slush and ice with exaggerated caution, as if encountering them for the first time - but managed to slip half a dozen times nevertheless. After each near fall, she tightened her sparrow’s grip on my arm and emitted a half-nervous, half-exhilarated giggle.

‘Honestly, darling. I don’t know how some women do it. I’m a mess when I have to walk somewhere without a strong man.’

It was a raw day but the wind had subsided. Oktyabrina and I had discussed kittens, camels, beards, veal goulash, and the correlation between fame and talent by the time we reached the boulevard. It is one of the finest in Moscow, with a touch of faded elegance, surrendering peacefully to inexorable decay. The strolling is done on a wide dirt path, a kind of old-fashioned promenade, with a strip of park on both sides. It’s called ‘gardens’ in Russian, but that suggests something far too formal for the place itself: a tangle of boot-beaten paths and tumbledown benches.

Alongside the promenade, a dozen chubby children wrapped in furs and scarves were hard at work making snow pies with brightly painted toy shovels. When Oktyabrina was spied a chorus of happy squeals sounded as they all swarmed to her side. She produced two handfuls of cheap candy from both pockets and distributed one to each 40

child. They clutched the tiny prizes in oversized mittens and shoved their little, fur-bordered circles of open face forward for a kiss.

‘Thank you, Aunty Oktyshka! Thank you, thank you -you brought the best kind! Come and see what were making today/

Oktyabrina broke into her curtain-call beam and petted the toddlers tugging at her skirt. One of the shrunken old grandmothers in charge of the children re-wrapped the black shawl aroimd her head and blessed her with the traditional Orthodox movement. ‘That’s Oktyabrina Vladimirovna/ she revealed to a somewhat less withered companion. ‘The lady from the theater/

Oktyabrina’s bench seemed to grow out of the trunk of a poplar on the edge of the promenade. She brushed the morning’s snow from its sagging slats and curled up in a comer. ‘Close your eyes and you can smell the snow,’ she said, squeezing her eyelids shut and sniffing loudly. ‘Plenty of snow, the crops will grow. It’s an old Russian saying/

An indescribable feeling of timelessness, boundlessness and peace pervades these places, as if you were somewhere on the steppe, far removed from a major city and the twentieth century. We watched the children playing, and I smoked several cigarettes. Oktyabrina began to chatter about herself in her usual way, and soon she was telling me the story of her first love. ‘Every girl should tell her admirers how she was first seduced - if it was magnificent, of course. It sets a standard for them to aspire to/

Oktyabrina’s first time was excruciatingly beautiful. It happened in Omsk when she was a child of sixteen in pigtails and a school uniform. One morning, a note fell at her feet while she was on her way to school. It was in a bold, stylized script; 7 have been watching you from my window. You are my muse, my dream. In the name of everything sacred in art , come to me this afternoon ... /

The note was signed simply ‘Dubnikov’. Fuller identification was unnecessary: Dubnikov was the leading man of the

local theater, tall and dark, with a mane of wavy black hair and a deliciously frightening reputation; a latter-day Eugene Onegin. When Oktyabrina entered his room after school, his dark eyes blazed. He stood up from his desk, uncovered a pistol from under his papers, and raised it to his temple.

‘I can remember his exact words to this very day. He said his love for me was slowly killing him and unless I accepted him, he was going to complete the process swiftly/

Oktyabrina was certain that the gun wasn’t loaded. Dubnikov fired a shot into the ceiling, causing a chunk of plaster to crash to the floor. An instant later, they raced for each other. The snow from Oktyabrina’s collar melted on Dubnikov’s bronzed face.

T allowed him to take me, of course. It was all absolutely perfect from the first minute. We had a short but very passionate and beautiful affair - once he ripped out the telephone with his bare hands because it rang at an inappropriate moment. Of course he couldn’t be seen with me publicly because of his position. But he dedicated stacks of poems to me and a story that can simply never be published. In the end, we were forced to terminate the liaison by mutual consent. It was absolutely destroying our concentration on our chosen careers/

Oktyabrina cuddled herself beneath her layers of clothing and watched my reaction. T suppose you think sixteen’s shockingly early to become somebody’s mistress,’ she prompted.

‘Not really. Some girls are mature at sixteen - it depends.’

‘Not that I could help myself anyway. You could say I was raped in a way.’

‘You could, if you had to tell an abbreviated version/

‘Men are always so terribly demanding. The minute you don’t give them what they want, they start fighting and shooting. You’re not the violent type, are you, Zhoe?’

‘Not ordinarily. But with someone like you, you know ’

‘Well, what do you think’s better the first time - to be 42

absolutely forced that way by some terrible power involving life or death, or to surrender after a long and desperate courtship by a brooding type?’

‘You tell me - it’s your story, after all.’

‘I suppose that means you don’t believe me. You needn’t plaster that distrust all over your face, you know. It makes you look quite nasty.’

‘Oh I believe you completely. It’s just that something about Dubnikov doesn’t ring true. I suspect he was actually a bastard behind that Romeo fagade.’

This surprised Oktyabrina, but after a moment’s thought the idea seemed to appeal to her. She scooped up a mitten-full of snow and blew it slowly into the air. ‘As a matter of fact, you’re absolutely right - how on earth did you make him out? He was the most terrible philanderer. . . . Can you imagine? He preyed on girls even younger than me.’

‘And you parted after his trial on charges of corrupting minors - at which you testified in his defense as dictated by your noble instincts, but on the private understanding he’d never try to see you again.’

Oktyabrina threw her hands in the air. ‘That’s absolutely marvelous , Zhoe darling. I’m proud of you. You must write a forceful short story about it. It’s bound to set the world ablaze and make you rich. When I’m a famous ballerina, of course.’

We both broke out laughing, and Oktyabrina snuggled as close as she could to me through my overcoat.

‘You’re not angry with me, are you, Zhoe? I mean when I tell you certain things.’ Her voice was now very grave. ‘Maybe the reason I like men so much is because I grew up an orphan.’

‘Of course I’m not angry, Oktyabrina. But look here, you needn’t make up stories - not for me, anyway. I used to concoct them myself. But then you realize you don’t need them with people who like you. It’s one of the nicer things about growing older.’

I believed this when I said it; I even felt a wave of con-

tentment over having come this far in life and achieved this kind of understanding. But as I looked down at Oktyabrina, the opposite thought quickly intruded. One of the nicer things about being young, by contrast, was the ability to pretend that things are better than they are. It’s an expression of still uneroded optimism about yourself and human nature. I missed that now.

The best thing about Oktyabrina was the way she used her own pretense. Her imagination seemed to work at several layers above and below the surface of her tales.

Oktyabrina raised her mitten to my nose and applied a playful tweak. Her lips seemed to compress into a hint of a kiss.

‘What a beautiful oration ,’ she murmured. ‘Not making up stories with the people who like you. I’ve never even begun to think of life that way.’

‘On second thoughts, perhaps you shouldn’t take my word on things like this.

‘But do you really like me, Zhoe? Aren’t I too terribly young?’

‘No, you’re not too young. Nobody’s too young.’

She looked at me again with her innocent expression. ‘You’re a wonderful man - a kind of very special man, are you aware of that? And because you are - and if you really really like me - I’ll make a pact with you. From now on. we’ll tell each other absolutely everything. The whole truth, without fear or favor - OK?’

She sighed happily and rested her head on my shoulder. A one-legged man had sat down near me and was feeding a flock of pigeons with a loaf of fresh bread. We stayed on the bench enjoying the peace until the cold produced a sharp shiver in Oktyabrina.

When we left, she identified all the girls among the little bundles of fur and gave them extra candies.

‘It’s only fair,’ she explained. ‘Boys get all the advantages in life anyway.’

Despite the pact, weeks passed before I had pieced together even an outline of the ‘whole truth’ about Oktyabrina. She did not deliberately conceal the major headaches - where she lived, what she did - but simply dismissed them, as if talking about such things would be uncouth. The essential facts revealed themselves slowly, therefore, during ‘trial trysts’ on Gogol Boulevard and Petrovka.

From the orthodox Soviet standpoint, the most important was that she had no job. Nor, as her conversation made amply clear, any intention of seeking one. This was an outrage to socialist morality: ‘He Who Doth Not Work, Neither Shall He Eat’ is still the first commandment of Soviet citizenship. And not only of morality, but also law: new decrees had been enacted not long ago, giving lower courts authority to exile ‘parasites’, in the official language, to hard labor in Siberia. Since then a powerful campaign had been mounted to rid Moscow of parasites and hooligans.

Despite this, it was hard to picture her working at a real job, even if she’d wanted to. And even if permitted - which, under the circumstances, was highly improbable.

To get a proper job, she would have needed a valid labor book. And for the labor book, the prime prerequisite was a propiska : police permission, stamped in Russians’ identity papers, to five at a specified address in a specified city. There was extremely scant hope that she could ever procure one for Moscow; to move into the capital from anywhere else, a Russian must be officially invited, almost always for a skill vital to defense, research or other high-priority state requirements. An important position, in other words, can yield its own Moscow propiska. But without it, you can’t even apply for an ordinary job.

In short, Oktyabrina was caught up in one of the vicious circles that the Soviet bureaucracy forges, seemingly better than it does anything else. With the difference that this circle served a practical objective.

The conditions of life and supply of consumer goods are so much better in Moscow than in the provinces that if the

interdictions were lifted, half the Soviet Union’s rural popu-lation would be selling their cows and mattresses and riding, hitching or walking to the capital within a week. It was precisely to exclude people like Oktyabrina - even hardworking families eager for a better life - that the cumbersome rules 'closing’ Moscow were devised.

In time, I stopped reminding Oktyabrina about the danger of living as a kind of un-person. Thousands of drifters do manage to live almost permanently in the capital, simply by avoiding all contact with everything official -especially, of course, with the police.

Oktyabrina apparently managed as well as anyone, although she hadn’t been ‘underground’ long enough to learn the more sophisticated tricks. On the other hand, the simplicity of her life helped her avoid unwelcome encounters. Lessons and rehearsals occupied her three or four mornings a week, and the effort and cold so exhausted her that she rested at home, inventing outfits and sponge-bathing from an iron tub, during most of the afternoons.

The sponge-bath was both indispensable and adventurous. The water was heated on an encrusted, tum-of-the-century stove whenever the landlord left to play dominoes -out of doors! - with his pals in the courtyard of a nearby recreation center. The -sponge was a real one, one of Oktyabrina’s prized possessions - but she had to carry it with her when she went out. If she left it at home the landlord sniffed it for dampness, and denounced her until spittle formed on his lips because she had wasted his gas.

All this took place in what she called ‘Domolinart’ - short for ‘Young Intellectuals’ and Artists’ Club’. This was a pathetic copy of imposing official establishments like the Writers’, Composers’ and Cinema Workers’ Clubs, which are all located in large buildings nearby, with special restaurants, closed cinemas and other privileges for their chosen members. Domolinart was a room above the comer of Stoleshnikov Lane and Petrovka. Strictly speaking, Oktyabrina’s quarters were not this room, but a three-by-eight 46

corner of it, behind a tattered curtain rigged around her cot.

The room itself belonged to a former railway pensioner whose most exciting moment in life was seeing a train which had been traveled on by Lenin! He rented out one comer of his room to Oktyabrina and the opposite one to another un-person, a shy young man called Leonid, a former graduate student who was trying to stay in Moscow somehow after expulsion from a physics institute. Oktyabrina talked wistfully of his gentleness and melancholy.

I saw Leonid only once during these days - a shaggy head of dark hair and glasses with one broken lens were what stood out about him - because I visited the room only once. It was on Railway Workers’ Day when the old pensioner had gone to a mass meeting and was certain not to return until late afternoon. Nevertheless, Oktyabrina was categorically forbidden to entertain visitors, and she rushed me in and out of the room in a minute.

Which was more than I cared to stay. The room was as depressing as any I’ve seen. Everything in it exemplified that combination of cheapness, neglect and pure grime that drove tens of millions of Europe’s poor to steerage passages for the New World. Oktyabrina had once tried to relieve the gloom by buying patterned red-and-chartreuse curtains in a shop on Petrovka. But the old man came home unexpectedly as she was hanging them, found her tip-toeing on a chair, and ordered her to get back in her comer, and keep her rags to herself.

No doubt he later regretted this: although he was indifferent to curtains, their being free would have given him satisfaction. For he was as stingy as he was testy. And as mercenary: he paid the standard three or four rubles a month for his state-assigned room, and charged Oktyabrina and Leonid twenty-five each for their prized and illegally sublet comers. This fifty rubles nearly doubled his pension, but he still breakfasted and supped on black bread, onions and tea, treating himself to only one full meal daily of heavy soup and kasha.

As for Oktyabrina, the twenty-five rubles for rent, although exorbitant, was a drop in the sea. Her expenses for cosmetics - she insisted on Western brands, obtained almost entirely on the black market - and for pop clothes, of which she was the first and perhaps still the only devotee in Moscow, were obviously very substantial. It could not have cost her less than 150 rubles a month to live, more than the wages of a skilled engineer.

I mention money not because it played a normal part in Oktyabrina’s life - ten-ruble notes often parachuted from her pockets like so much used Kleenex - but because the source of it was part, at least, of the elusive whole truth. Oktyabrina was kept. The man was never referred to by name, but by title: ‘The Minister’. ‘The Minister gets furious when I’m late,’ Oktyabrina would say, dashing from one of our brief afternoon walks. ‘The Minister’s depressed, poor dear. He tried to drive his car without the chauffeur and the motor came apart.’ ‘The Minister’s wife issued an ultimatum last night: she gets a Persian lamb by New Year’s Eve or he sleeps in the kitchen - on the floor.’

Kostya never met him, but had formed a clear idea about his character. ‘He’s the Marxist-Leninist version of a sugar-daddy. Keeps his girls according to socialist principles: without giving them enough to eat. Your typical Minister.’

As I understood it, however, the Minister was not in fact that, but Chairman of one of the Ministry of Agriculture’s myriad research commissions or First Secretary of one of its even more multitudinous departments. Still, he was a senior official, the kind I would have given a great deal to interview professionally - a vain wish, because bureaucrats of that rank are unapproachable even by Soviet journalists. For some reason, presumably Byzantine in origin, even agricultural officials live and work in a remote corridors-of-power world, hidden away in carefully guarded office buildings and behind thick white curtains across the rear windows of their cars.

The Minister’s car sported these very curtains and a

‘MOS’ license plate, indicating it was an official government vehicle. I first saw it parked in front of Oktyabrina’s lodging house the evening I took her to Uncle Vanya at a small theater just off Petrovka and walked her home after the amateurish but moving performance. It was the only vehicle in sight, an immaculate black Volga whose running motor generated a great cloud of frozen exhaust. Oktyabrina froze too when she saw it. Then she clutched me, stepping up on my boots.

‘Oh my God. He’s here. Zhoe darling, disappear’ She found her feet again and pushed me with both hands against my chest. ‘Round the corner - quick.’

But before I could disappear, before I realized why I ought to, the car had begun to back up and was almost upon us. The man who emerged from the back seat was large and loose, with Groucho Marx eyebrows and a moustache longer than his lips. He caught the sleeve of his Persian lamb-collared overcoat on the door handle, entrapped the arm further in his urgent efforts to disengage it, succeeded at last, and duck-walked towards us with a fleshy smile. Oktyabrina waved to him with one hand; with the other, she continued to push me away.

‘Run along now, Uncle Vanya, it’s time you got some rest.’ This was meant for me but almost shouted in the Minister’s direction.

Even now, I’m still embarrassed by Moscow’s unwritten code of bad etiquette. A foreigner’s overriding responsibility to avoid casting suspicion on his Russian friends accounts for one of the cardinal rules: if when in the company of a Russian friend he encounters one of his friends accidentally, you disappear at once. In this case, the Minister’s position reinforced the obligation. I backed away to the comer and went the long way home.

‘Are you Jewish, Zhoe?’

‘What’s that, another expression?’

‘No really - are you?’

‘Not that I know of. What makes you ask?’

‘Because you’re nice. You don’t get angry.’

It was early the following afternoon; we were entering Sverdlov Square from the bottom of Petrovka. Over the columns of the Bolshoi Theater, gigantic portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Brezhnev were being mounted in preparation for the evening’s celebration of an obscure revolutionary anniversary.

Oktyabrina gingerly slipped her arm under mine. The sight of the sun after three weeks had infected everyone with a touch of childish exuberance. A woman laborer in overalls and a cotton quilt jacket was chasing her work partner, an identically dressed man, with a broom. Both fell giggling into a snowbank.

Oktyabrina giggled with them briefly, but caught herself short. ‘I knew a Jew once,’ she said seriously. ‘In Omsk. He never told anyone but me he was Jewish. He was the sweetest little man with about four hairs on his head and very, very good hands.’

An old peasant couple stopped us for directions to GUM. When they’d moved off, Oktyabrina continued.

"Actually it was this man more than any other who taught me to develop my mind. I think Moishe Issakovich wanted me urgently, but he always sublimated his desire in the most creative way possible: by converting it into an artistic assault on my mind. Even when I was compelled to ignore him as a man, he never, never got angry.’

"I got the message about Omsk some time ago, Comrade Circe. I’m rather more interested in the company you’re 50

presently keeping/

‘I was coming to that, Zhoe darling. You aren't terribly cross, are you? Because I just cant help myself. The Minister’s so madly jealous/

'That’s nothing I can’t achieve if I tried/

‘He actually suffers with it, the poor dear. I simply can’t let him see me with another man. Even when it’s ineffably pure - like you and me, I mean/

She paused again, straightened her hat - a home-made sombrero - and nodded grandly to a startled passer-by. ‘The Minister’s not Jewish either,’ she said slowly. ‘But he looks it, so it’s almost the same thing. I heard a man call him a dirty Jew at the airport. There ought to be a pill or something to make funny-looking people more romantic/

‘He looks well enough off with that coat and car. At his age, that’s a pleasant compensation. How long have you known him?’

‘All my life, practically. He says his conscious life started when the clouds parted to reveal me/

‘Of course. How long have you known him?’

‘He was on the train when I came to Moscow. Invited me to share his first-class compartment and insisted I accept all kinds of sweet things. He’s really terribly cuddly when you give him a little respect/

‘He must have a couple of divisions of office staff to take care of that. What does he do to rate that Volga? I mean his title on the door/

‘He masterminds some kind of vegetable strategy, I think. Mostly it’s all kinds of meetings and absolute stacks of paperwork. That’s probably what infatuates me most about him: he’s always crushed by work. I don’t think people would describe it as sheer love . . . I’m hungry. Want something delicious?’

She stopped at an ice-cream cart run by an exceptionally old babushka and bought us each a cup of the most expensive brand. Then we slowly walked back to my car and drove to the Novodyevichy Monastery (‘New Monastery of

the Virgin’), which is on a quiet bank of the river, two miles or so upstream from the Kremlin. The monastery is bordered by a cemetery where Russia’s elite have been buried for centuries. Solitary flowers and sprigs of pine adorned the graves of Gogol and Chekhov, but the largest bouquet lay at the plain marble tombstone of Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin’s first wife. The sadness of her suicide corresponded to the monastery’s mood - even its very name. Boris Godunov was elected Lord Protector there in the sixteenth century, and something of the spirit of those hard days imbued the grounds. Oktyabrina and I were both very moved.

Novodyevichy was my selection. After our false start, we’d returned to the idea of seeing Moscow 7 together properly. Dropping the pretense of Oktyabrina playing guide, we concentrated on visiting celebrated landmarks. Oktyabrina or I chose a new one every other day or so from an old Tsarist guidebook she’d found in a secondhand shop. We both attacked the project earnestly, partly, I suppose, because neither had anything more pressing to do most afternoons. It was soon much more than a w r ay to pass the time.

The best places were the oldest ones, and the powdery guidebook was a rich source of finds. I remember visits to crypts, crumbling cathedrals, places where Peter the Great slept, estates of Tsarist nobles. One day we drove to a village called Tsaritsino, where Catherine the Great had ordered a palace in bizarre Moorish-cum-Gothic style, only to abandon it in mid-construction. The gloomy skeleton still stands, together with the ruin of something called the Temple of Love, which of course captivated Oktyabrina. Next was an outing to a splendid eighteenth-century estate called Arkhangelskoye, which was once owned by Prince Yussupov, Rasputin’s assassin. This was enough to make it bewitching, even without its Pushkin-like charm.

Oktyabrina herself was an essential part of the outings: she

gave familiar sights the freshness of new eyes. Although I was the supposedly observant journalist, it was usually she who noticed the icon-like quality of the faces in a fresco, the Minister’s moustache on an old portrait, the angle of a broken statue which complemented the angle of a medieval arch. I never admired her more than at these creative moments. She would fling out her finger to designate the spot and blurt out her observation. Then she glowed -partly, I think, because she sensed a communion with me in these discoveries.

This was her positive side as a sightseer. Her negative side generated singular complications. The first problem was usually Oktyabrina’s power of concentration - which fell rather short of proverbial Russian endurance.

The first forty minutes usually went well. But then she became hungry. Or thirsty. Acutely thirsty, acutely tired or acutely in need of a bathroom. She was crying out for relief with a well of reproach in her eyes. Unless her needs were satisfied almost instantly, she whimpered from genuine physical distress.

She could not use a public toilet because the filth and odor made her retch. She hated cafeterias and the grim little snack-bars called ‘buffets’ because cheap food - and there is hardly any cheaper - upset her even when she was ravenous. Yet waiting the necessary hour or so outside a restaurant was torture. Her metabolism and fastidiousness, coupled with the dearth of consumer services, kept her on the brink of crisis, like a diabetic inexperienced in regulating his system.

Her interests also made her a rather dangerous companion. Oktyabrina was attracted to museums and landmarks principally because they told a ‘life story’. What interested her most about famous people were the intimate details of their private lives. I learned to stand a discreet distance away when I sensed this interest arising, for Soviet landmarks are meant to be shrines of Education and Reverence, and their intoning guides do not value questions about

love affairs and decolletage.

She coaxed me several times to the Lenin Museum on Red Square. It was one of her favorites, partly because its location made it convenient for thawing-out during long walks. Although the rooms are stuffed with the same mass-produced Leniniana displayed in a hundred provincial Lenin Museums, the oil paintings here are original and represent a fortune in canvas alone. Lenin thinking, Lenin writing, Lenin reading, Lenin haranguing the grateful crowd. . . . The tableaux are so immense and so reverent that you feel overwhelmed, if not impressed.

But what attracted Oktyabrina was the room where Lenin’s childhood is traced with appropriate veneration. She was fond of young Volodya, the plump, adorable and obviously pampered child in his party dress and blond curls. She visited this room a dozen times until an incident in January made us personae non gratae throughout the museum.

The incident is inexplicable without an appreciation of Lenin’s place in Soviet orthodoxy - and the faith of the Russian masses. Lenin is not a man, not a mortal politician or philosopher, but Marx reborn and redeemed in the sacrament of revolution: the saviour of mankind. ‘Lenin Is More Alive Than The Living!’ All the fundamentalist fervor of the Orthodox Church is lavished upon him in daily liturgies of praise and devotion; and since the state conducts the stupendous operation, his image literally cannot be avoided for more than an hour.

The Central Lenin Museum is this religion’s holy of holies. Squads of guides recite incantations on their tours; each one is followed by a cluster of peasants who have entered the museum for an hour of reverence on their trips to Moscow. Smelling powerfully of onions and old clothes, they devour the sermons, perhaps just because they’ve already heard them thousands of times.

Oktyabrina was oblivious to all this; what interested her was Lenin’s life story. She plied the guides for information 54

about adorable little Volodya and his transition to adolescence. They tolerated her questions about Lenin’s disconcerting lisp. They managed to control themselves when she mentioned his premature baldness. (‘The trouble probably started when he lost his hair and got lonely, the poor man/) But late one afternoon when the second floor was unusually packed with worshipful peasants, Oktyabrina raised the question that intrigued her most: Why did Lenin take so long to marry his girlfriend, Krupskaya?

T mean, was it really just platonic all those years when they were hatching the Revolution? Or did they respond to things better as man and mistress, because that way it was marvelously thrilling?’

The guide’s mouth went slack. He backed towards a mammoth painting - Our Leader Inspiring the Workers of Petrograd - and gazed up at Lenin’s sunlit face, imploring forgiveness for the stunning disgrace. The peasants, by contrast, wanted not forgiveness but revenge. After a moment of stupefied silence, they advanced on Oktyabrina with a collective growl, and her big eyes narrowed with the approaching danger. ‘Excuse me, I have an engagement now,’ she spluttered. She dashed from the room, through the corridor, down the stairs, and out.

I overtook her in the cobblestoned expanse of Red Square, where she was alternately trembling and laughing. We hurried into GUM for warmth, and drifted among the surging crowds for the tranquilising effect. After an icecream and more dalliance, I returned to the museum’s cloakroom for our coats.

After that, we confined ourselves to the landmarks of Old Russia. Oktyabrina missed the child Volodya, but begged me not to worry since ‘actually I’m beginning to see the whole country’s a kind of Lenin Museum’.

The building in which I saw the Minister again is not strictly speaking a landmark, but ought to be - all the more because of its present sorry function. It is a fine eighteenth-

century mansion near the Kremlin that once belonged to Prince Volkonsky, Tolstoy’s maternal grandfather, who figures prominently in War and Peace. There is a charming Renaissance courtyard, a handsome entrance, a splendid staircase crowned by a lavish mirror - all in perfect proportion and suffering from a chronic malaise. For the building is now a Foreign Ministry 'reception hall’, used for the elaborately staged and totally un-newsworthy press conferences to which foreign reporters are invited six or seven times a year.

The conference that morning was devoted to tractors and fertilizer production: a 'new’ campaign to cure the country’s ailing agriculture. Its strategy was apparently devised after the full damage wrecked by the deposed Mr Khrushchev had become clear. Nevertheless, production targets were again being raised to those of his discredited campaigns several years before. This glaring inconsistency was concealed under a torrent of statistics, sophistry, soaring harvest predictions, promises for 1980, comparisons with Tsarist misery and hosannas for socialist achievements that managed not to mention the Khrushchev plans at all. Or the fact that eggs had again disappeared from Moscow and the countryside was returning to a diet of bread and potatoes. It was not a press conference as known anywhere else but a succession of punctilious re-statements of an official declaration in the morning’s Pravda.

I gazed at the filigree moulding on the wall behind the official table and imagined how the Volkonskys, not to speak of Tolstoy himself, would have blanched at hearing this bastardized tongue, Sovietese, spoken in their drawingroom. At the table sat the Minister of Agriculture and a brigade of serge-suited subordinates, all arranged in a row at the front table behind microphones, a Chaplinesque parody of mediocrity, self-importance and stocky bureaucratism. Oktyabrina’s Minister was behind a pile of charts near the far end of the table, roughly twenty places from the dais.

As the leading officials droned on, I debated whether to speak to him. Under ordinary circumstances, I wouldn't have considered it seriously. The rules for foreign journalists are explicit and categorical: no interview may be attempted with any Soviet citizen except with the express approval of the Foreign Ministry’s Press Department. Of course it’s easy enough, and only marginally risky, to ask questions of someone on a street. But no one would dream of approaching even the lowest official without permission - which, after an interval of many weeks is customarily denied, without explanation.

But in the Minister’s case, curiosity was again undermining my caution. And something about his expression, as he stared towards the ceiling, made him seem approachable. He was wearing a clip-on tie that had come unsnapped, and drawing heavily on Bulgarian cigarettes. His eyes were as dark as his hair and had a soulful glow, from the reflection of the chandeliers. From time to time, he snapped out of his reverie and gossiped with his neighbors at the table - who were paying as little attention to the speeches as was the audience. Finally the last peroration dragged to its end, someone announced the press conference was over, and the Minister and his fifty-odd colleagues got up happily and shook hands all around, while the journalists closed their pads on a quarter of a page of useless notes. The Minister gathered his unused charts and left the room with a look of slight puzzlement. I gathered my courage and stopped him in the corridor, on his way to the toilet.

My hunch proved right. He had to rush off immediately to deliver a report about the press conference at an agricultural institute, but promptly agreed to meet me that very afternoon. He was surprised, naturally enough, by the way I introduced myself, but more than anything, he seemed flattered. I think I understood what Oktyabrina saw in him: the painful shyness of a confirmed introvert. And the pain of waiting while he forced forth his words was equally embarrassing. He had a wracking, eye-fluttering stutter.

‘F-f-f-fine. Ill p-p-pick y-you up a-a-at.. / and distressing seconds passed before he named a place to meet.

Outside, the mansion's courtyard was jammed with pompous Chaika and Zim limousines, the drivers waiting in the cold for their bosses, the Ministry's upper strata. The Minister's Volga wasn't there, nor in the hierarchical line of cars belonging to the next-to-upper strata parked at the curb outside the building. But just as I entered my own car a block away, I happened to see the driver. He drove up swiftly in the Volga, screeched to a stop, and pocketed a ruble from a passenger whom he'd been taxi-ing ‘on the left', as the Russians say, while supposedly waiting for the Minister.

7

There is a certain kind of Russian who is unable not to bare his soul to a stranger on the slightest provocation. Spend twenty minutes with him and you are more than his friend; you are his long-lost brother, a fellow member of the human family, oppressed by the world's burdens and your own propensity to sin. He is revealing himself, flaying himself, confessing his secret fears, intimate desires and darkest thoughts. No matter how weak and tainted his inner self, he knows you will understand.

It is not always an agreeable quality: however endearing their artlessness, Russians, like anyone else, can have dreary intimate thoughts and wearisome souls. In any case, these observations do not apply precisely to the Minister because he was not Russian but Armenian: bom and raised in the ancient, sacred capital of Yerevan. And the solvent that dissolved his inhibitions to expose his soul was not vodka but cognac: five-star ‘Jubilee', the best Armenian brand,

His report at the institute had gone badly; he was tired and depressed. He greeted me like an old friend and 58

plunged quickly into confession. His tone was matter-of-fact, his principal themes incompetence and irresolution. We started drinking in his car, which was parked in an alleyway so the driver could join in. The first bottle was downed from a cloudy water glass kept in the glove compartment for that purpose; the second went down direct. When it was dark, a band of urchins began pelting the car with snowballs, but none of us managed to get out and repulse them. By that time, we were tearfully maudlin, hopelessly drunk.

I remember a few things about the evening. The driver climbed into the back seat and seized every opportunity for solemn handshaking with the Minister, whacking me rather painfully in the stomach, for I was sitting in the middle. The Minister talked about his cousin in Los Angeles, an Armenian boy who had become a millionaire in the dry-cleaning business, a success. Someone turned the radio on somehow and following upon some searingly patriotic hymns, there was a melodrama about the birth of the first Soviet tank. While stretching over the seat in an attempt to shut it off, the Minister spilled a large pool of cognac on the upholstery. The car reeked of sweet grapes. The driver was extremely annoyed, and it took him some time to re-establish his pose of admiring deference towards his superior.

I think there was food at some point. A policeman patrolling a railroad station snack-bar looking for drunks demanded our papers quite late at night, and saluted nervously when, after minutes of fumbling, the Minister produced a cardboard document from inside his coat. The counter girl plunked three hunks of smelly fried fish on scraps of paper for us. Before we could eat it, the driver accused her of tipping the scale with her finger to double the price of the fish. The policeman returned for more explanations.

The Minister had long been trying to tell a joke, but was constantly interrupted by someone or something, often himself. Finally he shepherded us back to the car and started from the beginning again. The story was about a proud new

Second Lieutenant just assigned to his first post, guarding the Motherland with a border division in East Germany. He was a model soldier in every way, except for a thumping stutter. On the first evening, he assembled his platoon and carefully rehearsed the sentries’ arrangements.

‘A-a-and re-re-remember, m-men,’ he repeated. 'The p-p-password is, the p-password is B-b-blue B-b-boy. B-blue b-boy.’ He drew a deep breath and rallied. 'B-but if th-there’s no a-a-answer r-r-right a-a-away, d-d-don’t sh-sh-sh-shoot. D-d-don’t sh-shoot - it m-m-may b-b-be m-m-me!

Something ruthless as well as ingratiating sounded in the drivers roaring laughter. Perhaps sensing this, he told a joke of his own, directed at himself. What’s the transitional period, he asked us, from socialism to Communism? We dutifully said we did not know.

'The transitional period from socialism to Communism,’ he repeated. ‘Alcoholism!’ He tipped his bottle to his lips.

The driver’s physical stamina approached the heroic. Miraculously, he piloted the car without mishap - although he’d reverted to vodka, as any upstanding Russian proletarian would have, and downed half a bottle alone. Somehow, he found his way to my building. Before I got out, he had begun to promise the Minister that he’d never sign a denunciation about the evening. He would never report a single thing about me - not even that we’d met.

‘They can cut me up into little pieces - I won’t know anything. Anyway, this American’s the good type!’ Then he began confessing to the Minister that he was paid - kopeks! - to spy on him. Not spy on him exactly, but keep an eye on him; and from a fat organization like the KGB, the money was insulting. ‘It’s a gross case of exploiting the workers -as usual.’

The Minister failed to react because the news was stale; the driver, he informed me, made this confession every time they drowned sorrows together. He told the driver he knew perfectly well he was under-paid, both for driving and the ‘other thing’, and assured him again that he would never 60

denounce him for stealing gas and the Volga s spare parts. Or for lifting certain sacks of experimental com seed from a laboratory and shipping them to his village.

The driver, nearly weeping now, said it wasn’t really stealing - it was for the private plots of his hungry relatives on a sad collective farm. And wasn’t it terrible anyway, he continued, that he and the Minister had got themselves hooked into agriculture instead of something profitable like stockings or sweaters.

‘For God’s sake,’ the driver continued, hoarse with suspect sincerity. ‘I grew up on a farm, I know it’s hopeless. The only way to solve the agricultural problem is to smash every collective farm fast, and have every man for himself.’

At that moment every man in the car was far from for himself, but overwhelmed by the troubles of the others. We sat in a kind of stupor, gazing at a clanging snow-removal machine and night-crew of women wielding battered shovels and brooms. The snowflakes made a steady patter hitting the windshield. Finally we got out, shook hands all around, threw our arms round each other in a close embrace of overcoats and paunches, and pumped hands again vigorously. As always on that kind of night, there was a feeling of sublime comradeship, utter understanding. I was making my way to the door when the Minister lurched forward to present me with a symbol of all this - his clip-on tie. I gave him a packet of Gillettes.

After that, I saw the Minister often. Each time, he added new details to the unhappy tale of his life. The final injury was that even this story was ordinary: it lacked the makings of genuine tragedy - which the Minister might have achieved had he not been ‘f-f-fated to b-be th-the m-man in the m-m-middle, n-not f-fish or m-m-meat’.

It started in a sun-baked hut on what was then the outskirts of sleepy, dirty Yerevan. The Minister, twelfth of thirteen children, was an awkward and withdrawn boy, struck by the stutter on his first day of school. But in school

he was befriended by the physics teacher, a kindly man who owned a real camera and lent the Minister back copies of the new Soviet photography magazine. This gift would sustain him in all his solitary hours. He was not yet ten years old when his passion for films sired a hunger to create. While his fellow pupils talked of soccer and girls, he was consumed by thoughts of his adult mission: translating his own truths for the cinema.

In Yerevan s donkey lanes of the 1920s, film was a new world, an unprecedented vehicle for artistic enrichment and enlightenment. And in the Soviet Union as in no other country, this vehicle would bring truth and beauty to the masses who had so little of either — to the children of forgotten people, like the Minister himself. He was going to be a director, Eisenstein’s first Armenian disciple. He was destined to make honest and memorable revolutionary films. His ragseller parents gave him to know that he was a special boy whose aspirations would be fulfilled, precisely because they were so exalted. Even now his daydreams were scenes from his own abortive scripts.

But fate was already mocking him. By the time the Minister finished secondary school, the Eisenstein era had ended, the entire Soviet artistic world had been Stalinized’, and the only films produced were sterile potboilers glorifying Five-Year-Plan, Motherland and Leader. After a paralyzing crisis of conscience, he resolved to abandon his calling. On the morning of his twentieth birthday, his application papers to Moscow’s Film Institute were burned in an outhouse. The act required supreme resoluteness - ‘w-w-which p-p-perhaps explains why s-so 1-1-little r-remained f-for f-f-future years’.

After the bitter decision, there was a shortlived, tragicomic attempt to transfer his creative impulses to the violin. Then he tried his hand at half a dozen unskilled jobs in as many factories and warehouses. The war descended, and the Minister survived six years of it in and around Vladivostok; he was officially a medical corpsman and actually a 62 7

General’s flunkey. Back home, faute de mieux , he entered the local agricultural college, wh-which t-t-took anyone w-w-who c-could wr-wr-write his n-name and w-w-wasn’t a t-t-total sp-spastic’.

After graduation, his career was a series of minor admini^* trative billets in obscure provincial offices, befitting an above-average product of a third-rate institution. But in 1956, Khrushchev assumed full command of Party and state and he, the Minister, was summoned to Moscow. Khrushchev plucked him from obscurity, as he plucked so many other old cronies and new hopefuls, and made him a kind of Knight of the Order of the Socialist Economy. For he had written his undergraduate thesis on the advantages of com as livestock fodder, and Khrushchev had a vision that com and com alone was the panacea for Soviet agriculture. The Minister was made a standard-bearer in the race to overtake the West.

Corn gave the Minister a Moscow propiska , together with a comfortable apartment in a Ministry building and all the prestige and relative riches of an established government post. But the memory of his childhood dreams of artistic creativity and the accompanying ache of remorse increased in proportion to his advance up the ministerial hierarchy. 'They g-give you a car and a fat salary, a-all k-kinds of privileges - t-together with a terrific sense of g-guilt.’

The Minister seemed less unhappy at plying a trade in which he had no real interest than having become accidentally a considerable success at it. He couldn’t make up his mind how to react to this: resign once and for all, or work even harder to justify his privileges. In fact, he did the latter. He was always rushing from one conference to the next, fumbling in transit with a briefcase that swelled daily with ever more reports. But none of the meetings he attended, resolutions he signed, decisions he approved -nothing he did all day changed a single thing on a single farm. His job was a Dante-esque ordeal of perpetual bureaucracy; his working day a vicious cycle of more and more

meetings - that is, of squandered time.

To make things worse, his wife loved the life. She had been a year ahead of him at Yerevan’s agricultural institute; they met during a field seminar on silage. After graduation she worked as a dairy technician - in other words, cow-barn boss. When the Minister was called to Moscow, she decided it was unseemly for a wife of ministerial rank to soil her now-manicured hands with work.

Moreover, the moment she sampled lady-of-leisure life, she discovered that she was not only made for it but appreciated its subtlest refinements. She acquired a taste for chocolates, liqueurs and canasta, which she played most afternoons with the wives of the Minister’s ministerial superiors. Soon she, like they, had hired a domestic for the cleaning - having developed a loathing for dirt and all other reminders of farms - and was collecting bits and pieces of an imported wardrobe. If the Minister, as she reminded him every morning when he brought in the tea, would only behave like a normal human being with certain people at certain parties, he too might go abroad next year to some kind of conference, and bring her back a proper outfit - co-ordinated with matching coat and dress - like the wives at the Ministry of Heavy Industry were wearing.

It was his lack of refuge that disturbed the Minister most. His home was no more his castle than his work was a source of pride. The bitterest pill was the use made of him by three of the Minister of Agriculture’s highest aides. They operated large tracts of Ministry land, officially set aside for experimental soil control, as private hunting parks for themselves and their cronies. The Minister had been designated to deal with the necessary paper work, making him an accomplice in a fraud he especially despised.

Almost every time he told his story, the Minister quoted a passage from Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich about a certain Tsarist privy councillor who was a ‘s-s-superfluous m-m-member of v-various s-s-s-superfluous in-in-institutions’. Such men are ‘obviously unfit to hold any responsible posi-64

tion, and therefore posts are specially created for them, which though fictitious, carry salaries of from six to ten thousand rubles that are not fictitious and in receipt of which they live on to a great old age\

‘You can’t improve on Tolstoy for delineation of character’, he stuttered. ‘The point is, some of those p-privy councillors probably wanted to do s-something meaningful with their fives, and s-simply didn’t know how. Oh, w-what’s the use of b-boring youT

At this point I would try to calm the Minister. This wasn’t as improbable as his station in life might have made it seem, for most Russians - apparently Armenians too - have a broad childish streak. Sometimes this manifests itself in simplicity and artlessness; at other times in a very embarrassing inferiority complex, even, or especially, on the part of the bureaucratic elite. The Minister would wait for my words, as if I had something important to tell him about how to arrange his life. And when it turned out to be something trite and unhelpful, he pressed my arm and smiled, as if I’d been trying to be kind by showing him I too could be banal.

What I usually talked about was my two post-college years in a cold-water Chicago tenement. Under the influence of an inspiring seminar in American literature, I’d decided to become a writer and was at work on my first novel. It was the low point of my life, for reasons involved with a pretense that it was the high point. I wore a trench coat and black polo-neck sweater; I waited for people to ask what I did, and answered ‘I write’ with overtones of melodrama and nonchalance. All the necessary props were there to enhance the romantic figure I fancied myself, including a girl friend: my first real companion, as well as lover. She was a kind of ingenue - too innocent to recognize that anxieties about my manhood and place in the world forced me to be unkind. When she went to five with a professor twice my age, I was actually young enough - insensitive enough and deranged enough - to feel relief instead of

grief. When the bubble burst, and I found I had nothing to say, I stayed in bed for weeks. Finally I was well enough to win a job on a four-page weekly.

The Minister would listen in a kind of reverie. Once his notes fell from his knees onto the floor. ‘Very few of our contemporaries fulfilled our own notions of our own promise/ I said. ‘Perhaps this will sound terribly callous; I know Stalinism caused unimaginable suffering. But in a way, it relieved some other people of bitter disappointment - of discovering their own limitations, I mean. I think I’d have welcomed some kind of external tragedy to let me drop writing without facing my lack of talent. Well, maybe not. . . .’

The Minister would shift in his chair and put his floppy hand on mine.

‘Anyway’, I continued, to lead us away from our awkward introspection, ‘anyway, the trouble with our century is that we all encountered magnificent, inspiring literature in our youth. This fooled us into believing we should be able to produce art of the same level - like a Sunday tennis player watching world champions in a stadium. It looks so easy that he runs home for his racket to do it himself.’

By contrast, Oktyabrina - when she was with us - said little. She would lift the tip of the Minister’s moustache and peck five quick kisses on the comers of his lips. The Minister’s heavy-set face immediately flushed with affection and relief. The five kisses were a kind of ritual, followed by loud sighs, romping squeezes and a standard fragment of dialogue.

‘Is it going to be all right, my dauntless one?’ Oktyabrina would ask.

‘B-but I t-told you f-f-from the f-first m-moment on the t-train. It’s g-g-going to be perfect.’ Then it was the Minister’s turn: ‘Is it g-g-going to be a-a-all r-right, my p-princess?’

‘It’s going to be super*

‘When?’ they shouted together.

‘Now!’ they shouted louder. Then they embraced clumsily

but enthusiastically - the Minister seemed puzzled about where to position his long, loose arms - and Oktyabrina rubbed her cheek on the fur of his overcoat and laughed a real laugh.

She was calmer with the Minister than I’d seen her before. On Sundays, we often went on an outing to the woods north of Moscow, and I think the silent, melancholy countryside calmed her too. As soon as we crossed the city limits, she was like a country girl romping up the lane to her village after years away, and rejoicing when she hears the bark of her old dog.

The Minister had the use of a well-equipped dacha in a huge, high-fenced government reserve, but we went instead to a tiny room of an unpainted cottage he’d rented privately from a peasant family. It was agreed that should we encounter one of the Minister’s colleagues, Oktyabrina would be presented as my friend, and I as a journalist from one of the ‘democratic’ countries - East Germany, say, or Poland.

But, in fact, we never did meet anyone we knew. And for my part, I told no one in the Western colony about those days, even though from a journalist’s standpoint, a close association with someone like the Minister would have been considered a major coup. My western colleagues would never have believed that nothing the Minister said was newsworthy in any way.

Our Sundays had a pattern. We would meet in the morning to buy provisions, usually in ‘Food Store No. I’, a wildly incongruous emporium built by a pre-revolutionary entrepreneur in the style of a brothel for robber barons. The garish interior was always packed from wall to ornate wall with resolute workers amassing the week’s provisions, and we’d all stand in four or five separate lines at counters and cashiers to expedite the convoluted shopping process.

On the way out of town, the Minister would stop for gas at an ancient, one-pump garage, serving himself in

the Soviet manner. While he fumbled with the filthy hose, a large woman in a greasy jacket - the manager - shouted

insults at him, together with every other customer in sight. The Minister could have avoided all this, as well as the hour-long line of cars at the pump, by instructing the driver to fill up in the Volga’s regular government garage. In fact, he could have avoided the whole hard shopping grind, and saved himself considerable money too, by buying his provisions in the special shops for high officials.

But the Minister liked everything to be on a do-it-yourself basis. Much of the day’s meaning for him lay precisely in the ritual of ‘r-r-rubbing in with r-r-real 1-life’. ‘O S-sacred S-s-simplicity,’ he liked to pronounce as he fumbled, now dirty-handed, with the car keys, promising himself he was going to track down the quotation as soon as he was a bit less busy.

Unfortunately, do-it-yourself also meant the Minister liked to ‘t-take the h-h-helm’ of the Volga and do all the driving. Once we simply left the road - and this was in the light of midday, when the asphalt happened to be dry and ice-free. Incredibly, he failed to notice that all conversation ceased every time a truck passed us or we approached an oncoming car. What saved us was his notion of speed, which he seemed to tailor to the era of the Grapes of Wrath villages along the way.

Finally we arrived at our own village, a typical settlement of ramshackle houses strung out along the main road. The Minister’s cottage stood alone, just below the woods. We unloaded the provisions, tied on our snowshoes, and set out on the day’s highlight, called the'Long Walk. The landscape was neither distinguished nor decorative; just a slightly rolling tract of snow-covered farmland with a blotch of a duck pond and the usual drifting paths and rotting fences. Still, it managed to convey an overwhelming beauty and sadness. A disused church, now serving as a grain storehouse, stood exactly where it had to, at the crown of the rise above the village. A landscape painter would know what this means, for that humble scene somehow inspired sublime feelings, like a work of art.

Our route took us to the top of the rise and into the woods, which smelled sharply of snow and evergreens. We followed animal tracks where they crossed the snowed-over paths, and the Minister and I fed Oktyabrina’s tingling curiosity about the terror of being alone and lost in a Siberian forest. Even with snowshoes it was hard going over the unbroken paths, but the unspoken rule was to be thoroughly chilled and famished before returning to the cottage.

We always bought enough sausage, pickles, cheese and sprats for hors d’oeuvres for six people, but almost everything disappeared before it was properly set out on the little table. Then we each made our own portions of shashlik on the wood-burning stove in the comer, and for dessert, I supplied something exotic like chocolate bars or tinned pineapple from the American Embassy commissary. My little treats provoked the usual questions about life in the fairy-tale West, especially in Hollywood. I never knew whether to paint the West gloriously, to satisfy their expectations, or dismally, to soothe their hurt at knowing they’d never see it for themselves. Besides, I myself had actually forgotten what life 'on the outside’ was like; it was beginning to seem almost as mythical to me as to Oktyabrina and the Minister. And how to explain to them that they would not have been happier or felt closer to the important things anywhere else than in that creaking cottage?

After the last glass of brandy, the Minister perused some papers, apologizing that the work load increased with the approach of the planting season. By this time, it would have been inexcusable to break the tacit ban on shop talk and ask him exactly what he did. But he himself volunteered that his principal job was running a research laboratory specializing in corn. And he continued to muse about his fate. 'It’s funny when you think of it,’ he stuttered one afternoon. 'This whole system we h-have. The Russians took over Armenia. The B-Bolsheviks took over R-Russia. All these violent changes. Without them, I s-sometimes wonder what

I would have b-been?’

After the meal we would venture into the fields again if the light was good. This was when the Minister photographed Oktyabrina with his 8mm movie camera, an excellent Japanese model that he’d been brought by a traveling colleague. He posed her with painstaking attention to detail and a natural sense of composition. Following his directions, Oktyabrina pulled at branches, disappeared down trails, sat on tree stumps looking elated or pensive - sequences she performed with great earnestness and, I thought, surprising grace.

This was usually the end of the day, for the Minister had to plan for the protracted drive back, and dared not be late: eight o’clock was starting time for his wife’s regular Sunday soiree. One evening after we’d returned to Moscow and the Minister had dropped us off, Oktyabrina confided to me that she occasionally considered abandoning ballet. But she always mastered the temptation - for the Minister’s sake more than her own. ‘He’s counting on me to make good. Because of his own artistic disappointment, of course. It’s a terrific pressure, actually. I can’t let him down.’

She spent almost an hour that evening dipping into a stack of popular pamphlets with titles like Further Triumphs of Collectivized Agriculture and The People's New Five-Year Plan and the Farm. This was part of her campaign to ‘read what the Minister reads’ so that she would ‘understand what the Minister understands and suffer what the Minister suffers. As his alter ego, I can hardly do anything less.’ But the pamphlets - cheap adulation of Soviet agriculture that managed to be simultaneously vainglorious, heavy and hollow - defied reading for more than a page at a time. Oktyabrina salved her conscience by dashing to a kiosk, whenever she saw one, to buy the latest issue of an equally impossible maeazine called Farm Life. She carried a copy with her religiously, and spoke in a language I couldn’t decipher to the photographs of the milking herds.

The plans to celebrate the Ministers birthday were laid days in advance, pondered, rehearsed, and revised half a dozen times. In the end, Oktyabrina decided to give him an ‘intimate reception' at home in Domolinart. The food and drink were to be supplied by the maitre d’hotel of an Armenian restaurant called the Ararat, and paid for from the sale of some of Oktyabrina’s better cosmetics. It was to be excellent value because the maitre d’hotel ran his ‘take-out’ service on supplies filched from the restaurant. The railway pensioner was bribed with two bottles of vodka to stay with friends for the evening. Oktyabrina herself paced about her room, squinting to visualize the arrangements in her mind’s eye. It was to be her first venture as a hostess and it required a supreme effort of self-control not to tell the Minister all about his own surprise.

At the last minute, however, there was a frantic change of plans. The maitre d’hotel informed us apologetically that he could not deliver the food to Oktyabrina’s room. An investigation by a team of People’s Controllers had been sprung on him, and certain irregularities discovered: watered wine, reduced portions, and soup without the required ounces of meat. Unless he was able to place a bribe quickly, he was in danger of being arrested for embezzlement and speculation - his second rap. He returned Oktyabrina’s sixty rubles and, deeply regretting that the money would go to the state instead of into the fund for his new dacha, he suggested the party be transferred to the Ararat itself. The least he could do, he said, was to reserve us a good table, ensure the bugging equipment was on the blink, and assign us waiters who weren’t informers.

Oktyabrina was deeply disappointed. The intimacy she’d been designing was all in ruins, and she might never have

71

another chance to be a real hostess.

The evening went surprisingly well nevertheless. We had the table of honor, which stood in a pseudo-oriental alcove with an oil painting of radiant Armenian girls driving muscular Russian tractors and a potted palm of matching taste. It was so hideously pretentious that the combined effect was somehow homey. The Minister had been told he was wanted at the restaurant for consultation about the preparation of a traditional Armenian stew. When the unmistakable swish-clump of his galoshes resounded along the cracked tile floor, everyone fell silent and straightened in his chair. At the sight of the table, the Minister blinked; for the first five minutes, he remained quietly bewildered. The more he thought about things after this, the deeper he was moved. He reached across the table and touched Oktyabrina’s hair with shaky fingers. Several large tumblers of cognac steadied his hands without dulling his emotion. He kept declaring that he didn’t deserve the honor, and dabbing freely at his cheeks.

To everyone’s surprise and relief, the Minister and Kostya took an immediate liking to one another. As his birthday present, Kostya gave him a pair of handsome morocco gloves - which were more than symbolic because they had obviously cost at least a week’s salary at some black market source. ‘In the old days,’ said Kostya as he presented them to the Minister, ‘when people wanted to imply a man was a Don Juan, they’d say he changed his women like gloves. Well, socialism’s cleansed us of our nasty old bourgeois habits. Now a comment like that is the highest compliment to a man’s fidelity - because we change our gloves once a decade, if we’re lucky. . . . Anyway, I’m sure we don’t want to pursue this . . . er particular subject with this evening’s guest of honor. But we do all want to wish him what he bestows upon others: long years of tranquility. And of happiness and health.’

Beaming and blushing, the Minister gazed fondly at Oktyabrina, and whispered something into her ear while 72

trying on his present. Then Kostya launched into a genuinely choice selection of suggestive political jokes and the Minister laughed so hard that he developed hiccups and pleaded for respite.

Kostya complied for a time, which gave everyone a chance to compliment Oktyabrina extravagantly on her skill with the arrangements. The clamor of soup being slurped, particularly from the corner occupied by Evgeny Ignatievich and Oktyabrina's favourite lady from Gogol Boulevard, testified eloquently to the enjoyment of the victuals. Then Kostya stood again and proposed an elaborate, highly elegant toast to the Minister’s future, wishing him long life and as many devoted and admiring friends forever as were gathered there at that ‘humble’ table.

The Minister responded in the same spirit despite the stutter. Then, surprised and delighted by his own recklessness, he asked our indulgence to a joke of his own. It was an extremely stale one about members of a rich collective farm dreaming of Communism: they would all have a private airplane in which they could fly to America for potatoes. Everyone roared although - or perhaps because -we’d all heard the story a dozen times before. ‘Of c-course I’m corny,’ the Minister said in my ear, ‘but try to explain that to these 1-lovely chaps.’

The party gathered momentum as it progressed. The usual screeching of waitresses and cooks resounded from the kitchen: who worked harder than whom; whose mother was a stupid cow. But the supreme informality only made everyone more relaxed. The maitre d’hotel was charmed by Oktyabrina in her lacy pinafore, and dragged a chair to our table to join us. Perhaps sensing the days until his arrest were numbered, he ordered more food and drink at the restaurant’s expense. Evgeny Ignatievich assured us he could not remember a more successful evening, even during the heyday of St Petersburg salons. He was absolutely enchanted by Kostya’s girls, two rather pretty, if unwashed, assistants in a neighboring dairy he’d picked up on his way

to the Ararat. The girls were somewhat dumbfounded by the lavishness in which they suddenly found themselves. Between bursts of giggling and attempts to hide their soursmelling working smocks, they kept whispering to one another, presumably about how to respond to Evgeny Ignatievich's persistent under-the-table exploration of their legs. Oktyabrina hardly had time to notice: her eyes kept darting from glass to plate; she flurried about making certain that neither was empty for a second. In between, she tried hard to keep a conversation alive between the Minister s aide, a silent type, and the Gogol Boulevard woman who’d called her ‘the lady from the theater.

The restaurant itself was in excellent spirits. The band produced a non-stop medley of apparently wildly popular Armenian songs. It was a bizarre ensemble of trombones, violins and ancient Armenian stringed instruments. The musicians were correspondingly diverse: sweating, shirtsleeved young men, clearly dashing in their own image, cheek-by-jowl with middle-aged women with enormous arms and moustaches. Together they played so deafeningly that you had to shout info your neighbor's ear to ask for the salt. Most of the diners at neighboring tables were singing; none pretended to be sober. At one point a man stood up on a chair, clapped for silence, and made a public declaration of love for his frowzy but delighted wife. A group of extremely swarthy, conspiratorial-looking men in black market nylon shirts, probably black marketeers themselves, sent their respects to our table, together with four bottles of native wine they insisted we sampled. Then, hearing an American was present, they inquired whether it was true that Franklin Roosevelt had Armenian blood. I sensed it would do no good to disappoint them, and the gift of a fifty cent coin managed to distract them into a flurry of entrepreneurial deliberations.

Even Leonid was drawn out of his depression. He had arrived late and drank a surprising amount for someone of his age and his intellectual bent. He was wearing a clean 74

white shirt and patterned tie that Oktyabrina had given him. The Minister said if he wanted his hair cut, he would send around a mowing brigade of Communist labor to give

him an estimate - but joking apart, his generation was the hope of us all, and he prayed they wouldn’t abandon their ideals.

When his turn came, Leonid offered a joke based on his own background and inside professional knowledge. Who invented the X-ray? he asked us. No, not Roentgen - not any German, in fact. Or Englishman, Frenchman or American. In the late seventeenth century, no one else but a certain Ivan Ivanovich, an upstanding Volga muzhik who was serving his statutory twenty-five years in the army. Rumors reached him that his wife was distributing her favors to one and all back in their village. He wrote her a letter through the battalion scribe: ‘Dear Masha. You can’t fool me with your goings-on. You fat bitch, I see right through you.’ The letter had recently turned up in an archive, and Leonid’s former physics Institute was in the process of preparing a paper on this incontrovertible proof of the precursor of the X-ray. I see right through you ; Mother Russia was first again, as always.

There was only one awkward moment all evening, caused by Kostya’s pointed and somewhat crass joke about a KGB bureaucrat. A fleeting interval of embarrassed silence was ended by Kostya’s suggestion that everyone dance to escape his ‘big clumsy trap’.

Dancing to that music - and in our incongruous pairs -was something to be seen. The black marketeers came over to invite Kostya’s girls, but they dissuaded outsiders because by that time the birthday party had developed a kind of family reunion warmth. Free of ballet’s restrictions, Oktyabrina was wonderfully light on her feet.

We all left together when the restaurant closed after eleven o’clock. For the first time, a smell of spring was in the air, blown into our faces by a wet wind. We walked down to the river and listened to the happy sound of ice

breaking up as it flowed past swiftly in the dark. When the familiar Kremlin chimes struck midnight, everyone congratulated the Minister heartily again and thanked Oktyabrina with considerable ceremoniousness. It was only then she revealed that her own birthday was ‘not far hence’. There was a chorus of ‘ohs’ and ‘ahs’, and befitting pressure to make her divulge the date; but she held fast to her refusal. She was not, she said modestly, going to spoil this glorious birthday now with thoughts of another one, belonging to someone so manifestly less deserving....

A policeman approached to peruse our little group, but was impressed enough by its respectability actually to lift his hand to the Minister in a kind of salute. Soon after this, Evgeny Ignatievich gallantly offered to accompany the elderly lady home to Gogol Boulevard, and the rest of our group strolled along the quay for a while, playing a traditional game called ‘Frankness’. Anyone was allowed to ask anyone else any kind of question, and the answer, on one’s honor, had to be scrupulously honest. The Minister’s aide, who had hardly said anything all evening except in a private conversation with Leonid, was the last subject - or victim, as he called it. It was discovered rather quickly that he had been celibate for almost a year, not by his own choosing. Kostya then arranged that he ‘borrow’ one of the dairy girls, with her giggling permission, for the night, provided he give her taxi money to get to work in the morning. And exhilarated by the change of weather, he invited us all to another intimate reception in his room the following Saturday. It was to be the first of his ‘pre-May-Day celebrations’ combined with a ‘coming-out party’ for a crew of girls he’d recently met who worked in a candy factory.

Less than a week later, the Minister got his bad news. In connection with the new chemical fertilizer crusade, the Ministry had been subjected to another radical reorganization. The Minister’s entire research laboratory was to be liquidated by the end of the financial quarter, and the staff 76

reassigned to ‘actual field production' on laggard farms, meaning plowing and weeding in stony northern latitudes. It was the standard treatment for junior agricultural medicine men who had failed to work a miracle cure. The Minister himself had been ordered to a teaching job in Saratov, a provincial city on the Volga.

Our last drowning-sorrows fling took place the following evening, with the vodka and cognac augmented by a fifth of bourbon so that I could swallow my full share. But instead of getting drunk, I was car-sick. My sense of loss was compounded by how much I’d disliked and distrusted the Minister before I’d met him, a few weeks ago.

The Minister himself took the blow calmly. Com, he explained, had fallen from favor years ago, together with Khrushchev; ever since ‘that p-poor dreamer’s’ overthrow, he’d know that his own Moscow days were numbered. He sounded more relieved than hurt when he told Oktyabrina and me the details, ‘just: think. All that g-good land plowed up and p-p-planted in c-com w-when it really should have been 1-left in gr-grasses and p-pasture. M-mil-lions of acres turned to d-dust bowls. As if I needed a c-colossal tragedy 1-like this in my 1-life.’ He smiled apologetically and lowered his eyes.

Oktyabrina, on the other hand, was frantic with distress. ‘Oi, mamachka , mamachkal she wailed, and fell into the Minister’s perplexed arms, rending her hair. It was a gesture-for-gesture duplication of the scene in every Soviet war film where the wife, mother or sweetheart is informed that her man, the smooth-cheeked soldier with plans to be a nuclear scientist, has been killed at the front.

But the truth is that Russian women do take personal loss with this gushing emotion. Oktyabrina’s instincts told her that the Minister would come to grief. Apparently she interpreted his reassignment as a kind of criminal sentence; all that day she talked about the ‘calamity’ and kept referring to Saratov as ‘Siberia’, as if the Minister were being sent into exile with hard labor. ‘I’m not interested in geo-

graphy and require no cosy consoling/ she snapped. ‘That man’s gentleness cannot take another chilling. Hell never be the same again/

But she slowly allowed herself to be convinced by the Minister that his new post was in fact a gratifying promotion which he couldn’t reasonably turn down. They exchanged elaborate promises about long, daily letters and week-end trips to Moscow - Saratov was only twelve hours away by train, after all, and ‘r-remember what traveling by r-rail m-means to us both’. Oktyabrina was to be given the Minister’s office plants to look after because he would clearly soon be returning permanently to Moscow where he’d need them again. ‘If t-there’s one c-certainty at all in the M-Ministry, it’s that n-nothing is final/ The research laboratory would be resurrected one day, even Khrushchev might be rehabilitated. The Ministry and its roulette wheel were eternal; ‘Only the 1-1-land suffers in the 1-1-long run. . ..’

By the following day, Oktyabrina was enumerating the advantages of the temporary Saratov assignment. Moscow wasn’t really good for the Minister, after all; he needed a change and a rest. This way they could spend whole weekends together, and in between he would get back to research. He could invent some new kind of marvelous plant, a hundred times better than corn. When his Lenin Prize was presented, everyone would feel terribly ashamed about the way he d been wronged.. ..