The girl from Petrovka

As for herself, she was going to dedicate herself more than ever to work. ‘This might be just what I’ve needed all along, don’t you think, Zhoe darling? I mean, now I’ll have a higher motive for becoming a success. Because if things somehow don’t work out brilliantly for the Minister in his lab, I could bring him back to Moscow as my personal impresario/ She said this quite flatly, while devouring the last of a huge chunk of halvah for quick energy. She was exhausted and famished, having just cleaned up her comer of Domolinart and carried down back issues of Farm Life 78

for transfer to the Minister.

On the morning of his departure, however, she was emphatically sullen. She wore little make-up except for white powder and grey semicircles under her eyes, and her principal adornment was a velvet armband of a mulberry color, presumably to signify mourning. She insisted on going to the station to watch the Minister board the train. This turned out to be physically difficult as well as psychologically tense because the funeral of an Artillery Marshal had caused a massive diversion of traffic. As usual on these occasions, main thoroughfares were sealed off without notice, and hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting people, we included, had to wait over an hour while the Wagnerian ceremony ran its course. Luckily for the people caught on the street, the temperature that morning was only a degree or so below freezing. But the delay spoiled Oktyabrinas plan to hide a book of Volga folklore in the Minister's compartment before he'd arrived at the station.

In the end, we literally saw him off, but without saying goodbye. When he found his train, his wife was the first thing in sight - a smaller woman than we'd expected, who was wearing an Austro-Hungarian kind of hat and carrying a parrot in a pink-painted birdcage. She was giving orders to a porter, a conductor and the Minister's driver in a way that discouraged us from approaching. Instead, Oktyabrina and I watched from the opposite platform. She’d hardly said a word to me all morning, except to mutter acidly about the funeral, as if I were somehow at fault. ‘And this is the miserable send-off the Minister gets,' she mused, ‘after all his heroic labors.'

The train was bedecked with little red plaques testifying that its crew were members of a Brigade of Communist Labor. The Minister settled his wife in a first-class compartment and then reappeared, sweaty and flustered, on the platform. He was wearing a cloth cap I hadn't seen before, apparently a new acquisition for country life. It made him look like a veteran Chicago cabbie.

When the first warning whistle sounded, the driver embraced him and whispered something into his ear; then the two men waited side by side for the next warning, obviously uncomfortable because they had nothing further to say. Finally, the Minister boarded, the doors were closed and the immensely long train pulled out, quickly disappearing into an underpass. Oktyabrina gazed in its direction for a long moment and sighed profoundly; the end of an era.

Within a few minutes, I was aware not only of the Ministers absence, but also the vacuum he’d left between Oktyabrina and me. For weeks we’d hardly seen each other without his company or talk of him; I realized we were almost strangers again. And although the Minister himself wouldn’t have believed it, he had a certain ease that made his relationship with Oktyabrina entirely unselfconscious. I found myself wondering what to say.

‘Let’s go to the country, Oktyabrina. For a picnic or something.’

‘Not today, thank you. I have ... an engagement.’

We started back down the empty platform, walking in an aimless half step. And no longer together: Oktyabrina was now yards behind me, with a glaring every-person-is-aione-in-the-world expression. When we reached the waiting-room, she sat down on a bench amidst a horde of peasants and their bundles of potatoes, chickens and rags.

‘You needn’t wait for me all the time,’ she muttered. ‘I can quite well take care of myself - in my own country.’

‘Of course you can. I wanted company for lunch.’

‘Can’t you see I must be in solitude now? Have your high and mighty lunch - while the Minister’s delivered to his fate.’

‘Please call me when you feel better.’

‘This is a grievous tragedy. I cannot be expected to rally soon.’

I set down the plastic carryall bag containing her leotards and paraphernalia and walked towards the exit at the far end of the waiting-room. After the loss of the Minister’s 80

support, Oktyabrina’s demonstration of independence was transparent enough, and fully understandable. What puzzled me was my own rather childish uncertainty about how to behave. Was I meant to assume the Minister’s role? What was his role?

Just inside the exit to the street I saw a magazine I wanted at a kiosk and joined the short line at the counter. Before my turn came, the sounds of a swelling commotion echoed through the hall. It was a typical Russian skandal , with a dozen participants squawking indignantly at each other in place of a real fight - and above the other shouts rang Oktyabrina’s newly arrogant voice. It was delivering a long tirade I couldn’t make out at that distance, except that it wobbled with outrage. I hurried back to the bench. A crowd had gathered around it, relishing the action. In the center, Oktyabrina was face-to-chest with a large policeman. He was sweating in the heat of his uniform overcoat, and his expression was slowly changing, like a cop’s in a silent film:

first dumbfounded, then scandalized, finally furious.

‘Will you leave her alone or will you not?’ Oktyabrina screeched at him. ‘She’s a poor, ordinary person. Working class - just like yourself.’

The policeman slowly opened his mouth, but apparently had not yet composed a response.

‘She’s your comrade, for God’s sake,’ Oktyabrina continued, ‘if you could understand anything. Aren’t you ashamed ?’

Oktyabrina’s ‘poor, ordinary person’ was a matronly woman in a fur-collared coat, distinctly better groomed than average. The spectators - who from time to time supported Oktyabrina with cautiously quick and spontaneously dispersed remarks - informed me sotto voce that the matronly woman was an old-time speculator who often operated in this railroad station. This time she had been peddling black-market slips from a suitcase when the policeman spied her and made an arrest. It had happened directly in front of Oktyabrina’s bench.

‘You just have to show off your authority, don't you? All of you. Arrest people - close down laboratories. Ruin people's lives.’

The policeman slowly recovered from his shock. He ordered everyone to move back, gripped Oktyabrina by the wrist and pronounced her arrested. Just then, the spry old speculator saw her chance. She bent down as if to fasten her boots, satisfied herself that the policeman hadn't noticed the movement, and slipped nimbly through the crowd. Soon she was outside it, and scampering towards the exit. Only now did the policeman catch sight of her. He looked back to Oktyabrina, his second catch, frenziedly weighed his choice, and started in pursuit of the old woman, freeing Oktyabrina’s wrist. But the crowd closed ranks, and he lost more minutes struggling through. Someone brushed the cap from his head. By the time he recovered it, the woman had made a clean escape.

At the same time, Oktyabrina dashed the opposite way, towards the emergency exit. She was struggling with the illicit suitcase as well as her own plastic bag, but saw me as she emerged from the crowd.

‘Hello again, Zhoe darling,’ she panted happily, handing me the suitcase and bag. ‘Can you manage with both these little things? They're the most wonderful crinoline slips. Meet you outside in a minute - I'm simply starved

9

At lunch, Oktyabrina began questioning me about my apartment. It had occurred to her that it was time to pay me a call, ‘just to see how a bard of current events actually lives'. On the heels of her triumph in the station, it was futile to impress her with the risk. Not one (sober) Russian in a hundred will visit an apartment in the foreign colony; at the very least, it means an entry about him in a big black book. 82

But Oktyabrina did promise solemnly not to draw attention to herself as we entered, and her costume gave her a fair chance of being taken for a foreigner, provided she kept mum.

In one sense, precautions like this are useless, together with any and all conspiratorial safeguards observed with Russian friends. Kostya and I, for example, realized that the KGB had known about us for years. By now they surely knew about my friendship with Oktyabrina. Still, there is always a pressure to be as careful as you can, if only for the relief of taking some kind of action in face of the danger. And perhaps a larger benefit accrues too: one reason why a few Russians see Westerners without interference may be their observance of certain discretional rules.

Oktyabrina rehearsed her part. I parked the car in the lot behind my building and we emerged laughing, according to the script. Oktyabrina nodded in vigorous agreement at my steady stream of booming English; she understood nothing of course, but managed to control her giggle. When we approached the sentry in the courtyard, she held her breath and strode past with a passable imitation of nonchalance. In the safety of the lift, her triumphant grin unfolded: she knew she could dupe another silly policeman, and I had to admit I thought she had.

"Not bad for a dancer, my beauty. Perhaps you should act/

"Zhoe darling, you stole the show. You can really talk that funny noise/

Oktyabrina entered the apartment with a symbolic ballet leap and another sigh: the beginning of an era?

"You will offer your caller a Coca-Cola, won’t you Zhoe darling? I’ve heard absolutely everything about its devas-tatingly decadent effects.’

"Throw your coat anywhere. One can of Pepsi coming right up/

She sniffed her glass suspiciously before proposing a toast. "To dearest Zhoseph and his wonderful maturity.

There’s scant peace in a home’ - she winked knowingly ‘where the hen clucks and the cock remains silent’.

The apartment was in its usual disorder, but it swept Oktyabrina’s breath away, despite her efforts to appear blase. She trod back and forth from room to room, feeling her way into corners and cupboards like a cat in a new home. Did I really live here all alone ? It was a little lunatic wasn’t it? - all these rooms for one person. She fingered the sheets on the bed, tested the water in the bidet, and stretched out tentatively on the old davenport in the living-room.

‘Does it look absolutely incongruous to see me hereabouts? I can just picture all the women you’ve seduced, on this very divan. Not that I blame them - it’s kind of romantic here. All this spaceV

More than anything, she was dazzled by the bathroom’s ‘romance’, which was actually a cheerless reminder of the hasty departure of one of my predecessors from the apartment. Near the middle of his assignment, he contracted a severe case of a common professional disease: an obsessional craving for something to remind him of real luxury. One of his projects was to have the bathroom wallpapered in crimson velvet imported from Helsinki. The job was completed just before he left Russia suffering from a minor breakdown. This was several years ago. Since then, the velvet had torn away in critical spots making it more tacky than most of the furniture and carpets left behind by other correspondents. But Oktyabrina crept around the room, stroking the walls and oohing.

‘Zhoe darling, it expresses a side of you I hardly even imagined. What absolute perfection ! I simply wouldn’t change a thing! She paused to let her glad tidings sink in. ‘But you simply must do something about the kitchen. It’s going to be crawling soon.’

She scrubbed the stove furiously, expressing increasing concern about my eating habits and the condition of the apartment. Her point was restated in reflections about older 84

men who live alone; they needed someone understanding to look after them, and wasn’t it scandalous that nowadays you could never find a housekeeper with a heart? There was a certain mature man in Omsk - my age - who lived alone and was absolutely lost until she joined him - although no one would believe they never actually had an affair. . . .

Suddenly she spied a pair of cockroaches on the floor, creeping with the cheeky sluggishness bred in infested cities. Oktyabrina swooped down with her fingers and disposed of them without a break in her narrative.

She never officially moved in. Towards the middle of the evening, she would pull herself up, yawning, and return to Domolinart. When we walked back together we would pass groups of students celebrating spring with guitars. They winked at Oktyabrina and me, assuming we were lovers. Neither of us minded this; it was a nice touch to our unspoken understanding not to initiate any sexual approach. Each of us had our own reasons for avoiding even talk of a physical relationship, although the divorce’s effects weren’t going to keep me numb forever.

During the day, Oktyabrina encamped on the davenport, and surrounded herself with a growing assortment of junk. From time to time, she’d make a quick survey of ‘her’ comer of the room, as if guarding a claim to squatter’s rights. Soon little piles of underwear, knick-knacks and cosmetics marked the boundary of her territory.

She usually arrived in mid-moming with a scrap of news or gossip. She disappeared into the bathroom almost immediately for lengthy stints of washing hair, sweaters and underwear. Ivory Flakes enchanted her almost as much as the wallpaper, and when the door was locked for hours without the toilet flushing, I think she was contemplating herself in the full-length mirror. One morning, she brought me a glass of tea at my desk and hovered over it until I was fully distracted.

‘Drink, Zhoe darling, you must be positively dying of

Do

thirst. A good glass of tea makes a writers pen free. . . . you have a lover at the moment?’

'What?’

'You are such an adorable prude. I asked you whether you’re involved in a current entanglement.’

'My sweetest, this household has only one serious rule. In case you’ve forgotten: please let me concentrate until lunch. It pays the rent.’

'Well, I think it’s marvelously convenient. Just think: we can both have a nice little intermission from that sort of thing. Don’t be angry, darling, but you look as if you need some recuperation. Foreigners just aren’t made for our Russian winter.’

The next day a battered cardboard suitcase made an appearance near the head of the davenport. When its lid was up, it appeared to contain a collection of old clothing, but I was sworn never to open it myself. The following morning, the Minister’s plants were transferred too, and stood on the floor beyond the knick-knacks because Oktyabrina couldn’t make up her mind exactly where they belonged.

A happily uneventful week passed. The plan was to call Oktyabrina ‘Marina’ because my apartment was certainly bugged. But everything was so untroubled that we forgot our own subterfuge by the end of the first day. When we did remember after that, it provoked giggles and a happy sense of triumph.

Our routine was simple and relaxed. I did my morning’s work in the office as usual, or pressed on with my reading in Russian when there were no urgent stories. Oktyabrina, her enthusiasm for ballet tapering rapidly, would stretch out in the living room, ‘slimming’ her 'literary backlog’. This meant leafing through whatever Soviet magazines were lying about and trying her hand at the puzzles quaintly called crossvord in Russian. She rarely completed more than four or five entries before exhaling with great weariness and turning to a fresh puzzle. Yet I was often inter-86

rupted by urgent requests: ‘Who wrote “The Teaching of Marx is Invincible Because It is True”? Five letters - starting with >K - I think/

But her favourite occupation was browsing through back issues of Life and Look. She devoted herself to this for hours, sometimes putting a magazine she’d just perused on the bottom of a pile, to be returned to yet again. Although she couldn’t decipher a word of the text, she loved the photographs and was positively transfixed by the advertisements, especially for Westinghouse kitchens and stunning ladies admiring General Motors cars. By the end of the week, she was no longer tearing off her reading glasses and hiding them under the pillow every time I walked into the room. The frames were plain beige plastic-the only ‘square’ Soviet thing she owned, no doubt because glasses can’t be bought privately or made at home. They magnified her eyes even more, making her a caricature of the pretty young thing in the boudoir comedy who affects spectacles to fool her father.

In the afternoon, we often went sightseeing. Although it was still cold, dauntless spring grew stronger almost daily, encouraging the hope that justice exists in the world. Despite the terrible odds, relief and redemption were approaching. Old women were clearing the cotton wadding from the outer windows of their rooms, preparing for the magic day when they’d be flung open to the streets. The water of melting snow cascaded down broken drainpipes and along sidewalks; pedestrians were splashed to the hip in muddy slush. But the lifting of winter’s siege had an irrepressibly uplifting effect on everyone.

When Oktyabrina took a box of cookies with her to blunt her recurrent hunger, our walks often extended to several hours. We were both pleased when no special itinerary suggested itself: this meant a stroll along the regular route, Petrovka. The old street felt cosy in early spring despite the slush, vast puddles and smell of wet decay. The crowds were larger than ever.

I grew accustomed to the sights of Petrovka. In clothing shops with floorboards almost worn through, there would be a melee around a rear counter signifying a batch of cotton socks that elsewhere would be discarded as rejects. The entrance to an old department store was always so packed that the last woman to join the line yards away would lower her shoulder to drive against the last back. The jostled woman would not complain — wouldn't even turn around. She would be too busy driving against the back in front of her.

But the street was always full of more important sights. The lines on the faces of the women who worked the stalls, and the stoop of their backs, bent by ponderous clothes and heavier burdens. The bundles of tightly wrapped laundry carried by women shoppers - which, on closer inspection, proved to be infants, miraculously alive and breathing in their winter swaddling. The fagades of the grander buildings, encrusted with sculptures, pillars, pediments and porticos, a typical blend of pretentiousness and decay, part Greek, part Roman, and all the more Russian for their labored imitation of the West. The steamy, sweaty basement cafeterias where weary shoppers compete for mess-kit utensils of bent aluminium, or rip off hunks of unidentifiable meat with impatient teeth because the last wobbly knives were stolen months ago and not replaced. The smell of diesel exhaust, tar, bitter tobacco, antiseptic cleaner and sour, sweat-soaked wool: the unmistakable smell of Russian industry and earth. The girl friends linking arms and waists and the men friends sneaking gulps of vodka and baring souls in tiny clearings on the sidewalk. The intensity of physical and emotional contact which nourishes the human spirit despite — or because — of the elements that are hostile to it. The understanding of why Russia always was and will be a land of hardship and suffering - and of compassion for those who endure hardship and suffering.

Sometimes we walked up one side of the street and down the other, then reversed the order for a second trip. At other 88

times we walked on to where Petrovka becomes Coach Row Street and then Red Proletariat Street both, despite their names, slices of the same life, with the same bad asphalt and sagging houses. But most often, we lingered in and around the lower part of Petrovka itself, investigating its. jumble of shops and savoring the primordial Russian flavor. Oktyabrina studied fabrics and trinkets with the diligence of a comparison buyer, but it was the street itself that moved her - moved us both.

'Tired but happy, they returned home,’ Oktyabrina would say after our walk, mocking the cliche of Russian travel stories and simultaneously emphasizing the idea of ‘home Sweet home’ - my house was also hers. She would make directly for the davenport, collapse on it, and cover her legs with an old blanket to which she’d pinned some pink satin-It was nice to see her there, in spite of the added disorder. After years of occupancy by bachelor correspondents and then my wife’s departure, the apartment had become hollow-I couldn’t help thinking that neither ‘older men’ nor ‘younger girls’ should live alone.

‘I don’t have to be a super-star overnight, do I, Zhoe darling,’ she said late one evening while postponing her return to Domolinart. ‘I can be happy if I just get on the stage some day and bring some little glow into people’s lives.’

She herself glowed so brightly when I asked her for help with a Russian word or gave her something like a pair of old cuff-links - with a story, of course, about their romantic origin - that I sometimes invented questions for the sake of her reaction. For her part, Oktyabrina produced a dozen, questions to my one: why are typewriter keys covered with glass? in what State was I bom in America? how much does nail-polish cost in France? I jotted down the queries for several successive days in an attempt to unravel her train of associations. Nothing fitted, except that questions about shoes and books seemed to be followed or preceded by thoughts about children.

And that curiosity about the mechanics of sex hovered in the wings, although rarely expressed itself explicitly. One morning she found a diaphragm lying, in its case, on a high-up kitchen shelf. I’d seen it there myself a month before, but had then conveniently forgotten its existence. It was my wife’s - she was fond of leaving it on the bathroom sink whenever we had visitors. Oktyabrina approached my desk, examining the open case as if it contained something fascinatingly nasty, like a centipede.

‘Zhoe precious, what on earth is this?’

She could not have known. A few diaphragms are sold in Russia, but their quality is crude and the idea is almost unknown. When the Bolshoi Ballet first traveled to New York and made the discovery of American technology, nine-tenths of the corps - according to an interpreter I know -dashed to doctors to be fitted up.

‘What on earth is what? Oh, that’s a . . . a . . .’ But I didn’t even know the Russian word.

Oktyabrina was now holding the diaphragm itself between two fingers and at arm’s length. Having scrutinized me meaningfully, she dropped the device into my waste-paper basket.

‘Whatever it is, it has an odor’ she announced. ‘I will bottle you those pickles, Zhoe darling - but Mother Russia will be blasphemed if you cover the jars with that’

Then something paradoxical happened. At this moment, I think for the first time, it struck me that Oktyabrina would soon be a flesh-and-blood woman. Somehow her girl-next-door innocence awakened me to something very different underneath. The thought dissolved quickly and we went to a movie together in place of our walk, to enliven the drizzly afternoon. It was a sublimely bad Soviet-counterspies-smash-imperialist-agents adventure, during which we annoyed the audience considerably by groaning during the most ‘heroic’ scenes. Films like this were one of our private jokes, together with a particularly silly-sentimental song for Pioneers, which Oktyabrina had sung throughout her child-90

hood. The melody was so infectious that we returned to it four or five times a day.

‘Let there always be sunshine Let there always be glee Let there always be Mama Let there always be MET

A few days later, I was scanning a new book in the living-room when she emerged from the bathroom and her daily hour-long soak in the tub. A small towel covered her from armpits to knees. There was something terribly fragile about her with a face of scrubbed pink instead of the usual layers of make-up. Her shoulders were so thin and her waifs eyes so trusting that I got up and kissed her before I realized why. She smelled of soap and hair, like a little girl before going to bed.

A surge of happiness swept over me. I had made the gesture; a barrier was broken.

As I stepped back to my chair, Oktyabrina’s face screwed up as if in pain. She uttered a wail and began crying in long, looping sobs.

‘For goodness sake, what’s the matter?’ I asked.

‘You too,’ she blubbered.

‘Me too what?’

‘You too. Every man’s always grabbing for the same thing. Just because I’m unclad - I don’t want to be kissed all the time.’

I didn’t believe her. Who could take offense at such a gesture? At someone who’d never grabbed anything, who offered her only protection, with no strings attached?

‘You’re all some kind of . . . machines. You don’t know what it’s like to be kissed all the time.’

‘What are you talking about? I don’t try and kiss you all the time.’

‘No no no. Just the first time I’m easy prey.’

It was then that I realized the depth of her fear. I’d been

a Platonic dud with her - glad of the company of someone sexually undemanding, but wondering nevertheless how and when to apologize for my paralysis. And now it turned out she really needed to be left alone: virginity so shone through her bravado that I couldn’t even talk seriously about these things with her. But why was I so hurt? Why was I sorry to see her fumbling with a shirt to cover her shoulders, and, after it was on, to sense a defeat for us both?

‘For goodness sake, Oktyabrina, snap out of it. There are kisses and kisses. Can’t you tell what kind that was?

She studied me from her corner of the room. Kisses and kisses,’ she murmured. ‘Then the dark-haired Ruslan bent slowly over the fair Ludmilla, still sleeping in her deathly paleness. He kissed her with aching sweetness, and the spell was broken.

‘I was just trying to say “hello”. And let me tell you: for my own reasons, I’m no threat to you.’

The sobbing subsided slowly, like a child’s who is appeased after a fall. ‘I know, I know that of course,’ she mumbled at last. ‘It’s just that ... I happen to have a very infectious cold, if you must know everything. I didn’t want you to

catch it - Westerners are such easy prey.’

She retreated to the bathroom in a gay saunter, returning

a few minutes later in sloppy trousers and an oversized sweater. The glass of tea she presented me was thick with sugar. As I sipped it, she pronounced a declamation.

‘I do love you very much, Zhoe dearest. I want you to know that for ever and ever. But there is also love and love - do you understand?’ She adjusted the cushions on my chair and leaned over precariously to place a musical kiss on my cheek. The telephone rang again, and when I returned to the living-room, she was curled up on the floor next to the chair. Her hand was running back and forth over the carpet in a large arc, as if through thick grass.

‘Zhoe, listen to me carefully. I don’t know you very well yet, but I’ll tell you something very few people understand. Every woman really needs three men in her life, do you 92

understand? Every woman needs a lover, a husband and a father. Sometimes the three are combined in one person, but that’s tragically rare. Anyway, I’ve always pictured journalists as fathers. I suppose it’s because they have to write things they dislike for the sake of the state - it’s like protecting your family by sacrificing something cherished of your own, I think it’s frantically noble. ... To tell you the absolute truth, of the three sides, it’s the fatherly one women need most.

During the next few days, she was extremely attentive. She arrived in the morning with bottles of yoghurt and buttermilk for my lunch; a man of my age and sedentary occupation couldn’t be too careful. When the gas man came to read the meter, she directed him to check all the fittings on the stove and hot water heaters, all of which she insisted on overseeing because ‘you can’t trust repairmen’. By this time, the sentries in the courtyard were giving her their little respect-for-foreigners nod when she came and went. I don’t think we fooled them - or their bosses; despite their policemen’s uniforms, they actually work for the KGB. But they rarely stop someone they’re used to seeing. And there is always the chance that one shift assumed another made the report on her. At least that was our hope.

The next time she had a bath, she talked about it, by way of describing her new Polish pine salts, for an hour in advance. I didn’t ask whether this was meant to warn me or to indicate the earlier incident had been forgotten. She emerged from the bathroom wrapped from neck to toe in my bathrobe, with the towel wrapped around her head. She marched into the office with her arms folded, imitating a sirdar - but I was less certain than ever about who she really was.

It was when she was in the tub that afternoon that I got up and looked through some of her things. They had spilled from her open handbag on the floor next to the davenport, and a small pool of cream was leaking onto the carpet. I screwed the lid back onto its jar and then, to my own

embarrassment, began investigating. Among handkerchiefs smeared with lipstick, flattened tubes and old bus tickets,

I saw her ‘passport’.

‘Passport’ is in quotes because it’s a document for internal identification, rather than foreign travel; every Soviet citizen is supposed to carry his at all times, something like papers in an occupied country. I know of nothing expressly secret about them, but this was the first one I’d seen. It was in an olive drab binding embossed with the Soviet state emblem; slightly smaller than an ordinary passport and quite dirty and frayed. Inside, there was a photograph of Oktyabrina: a skinny adolescent in a woven peasant blouse. It was a head-and-shoulders view only, but you pictured the rest as a farm kid in bare feet. The following information was listed on the first page:

1. Surname, given name and patronymic: Matveyeva Oktyabrina Vladimirovna.

2. Date and place of birth: 14 April 1950. Village of Nikolaiyevka, Omsk Province.

3. Nationality: Russian.

4. Party affiliation: Not a member of the Party.

5. Social status: School pupil.

6. Military status: Not obligated to serve.

All the following pages were empty, but the last one bore a police stamp showing she was registered to live at a certain street address in the village of Nikolaiyevka. It was true, then, that she had no Moscow propiska. But what did Nikolaiyevka mean when she’d talked about her native city of Omsk? I looked for it in my atlas without success. Then I searched on the large wall map of the Soviet Union in the corridor. Finally I found a tiny dot, several kilometers northeast of Omsk. Perhaps it had later been incorporated within the city limits.

It was only much later that I awoke to the other discrepancy. According to the passport, she was not twenty at all, 94

but had barely turned eighteen!

The other disquieting matter was the disappearance of cigarettes. I noticed it only when my consumption had mounted to three cartons a week. Still, I often give packs as tips, and it never would have occurred to me that Oktyabrina was involved until I noticed her inspecting me one morning when I opened my drawer and discovered only two packs were left. I then tried an experiment: I bought the usual three cartons and kept track of my consumption. Sure enough, a small but steady depletion was unaccounted for. One day it was one pack, the next day two; they were taken from the middle of a carton so their absence would be inconspicuous.

It was a trivial loss. I buy cigarettes in the hard-currency store at duty-free prices: two dollars a carton — one of the foreign colony's thousand privileges. And Oktyabrina's coveting them was understandable: a pack of Camels provides considerable prestige and even more actual barter value among ‘underground’ contacts. I would have supplied her with all she wanted, of course - and did give her a few packs whenever she asked. But it was unsettling to have genial domesticity at one level and senseless petty theft at another.

We were driving to a movie early one evening when I raised the matter cautiously. I pretended to have forgotten my cigarettes and asked Oktyabrina if she happened to have a Western one.

‘Anything for you, Zhoe darling. I adore the way your forehead scrunches up when you drive.' As usual, she was extremely pleased with the prospect of an evening ‘out'. She had opened her handbag and begun searching for the cigarettes before she realized what producing a pack of Camels would mean. The handbag snapped shut.

‘I was mistaken. Sorry.'

‘Have a look in your pockets, will you, sweet? Maybe there's an old pack. I’m desperate.’

‘Why do you imagine cigarettes would appear in my pockets? I don't indulge in common habits. Certainly not on the street. . . . Sweetheart, what is it? I happen not to carry cigarettes for my men, is that a crime?'

No cigarettes were missing during the next few days. Then the leakage started again, but never more than one packet at a time. Oktyabrina often blinked - it could not quite be called a wink - when she saw me open a new pack. And when Gelda appeared, she conspicuously presented her with two full cartons.

10

The whole course of Oktyabrina’s involvement with Gelda was set by how and where they met. It happened during the opening gush of a rainstorm. No April showers mood obtained because in Russia - testimony to its pinched warm season - ‘May thunderstorms’ occupy that place in spring's song and verse. This was a prosaic, chilling rain, pouring down, as the Russians say, as if from a bucket.

Oktyabrina and I were strolling up Petrovka, talking about why I divorced and whether parents should drink in front of their children. The downpour struck suddenly. In the clownish moments before feeling soaked, we sang a chorus of ‘Let there always be sunshine. . . .' Then Oktyabrina's mascara washed down her cheeks like ink in a sink.

‘ Refuge , Zhoe. No rain without clouds, no tears without sadness -- and I need both like a whale needs an umbrella,'

We were alongside a long, low building with sharply sagging windows and chipping ochrey paint: refuge had to be taken in one of its four or five ground-floor shops. A sign tacked to the comer of the building announced its impending demolition and replacement by a sleek skyscraper. The sign was almost illegible with age, for the demolition had been scheduled for years before; it was now part of the 96

landscape, like the faded poster above it: Lenin haranguing a massive crowd of workers at the Putilov works in St Petersburg.

The crowds in the downpour that afternoon were almost as dense. Oktyabrina chose the door with the least resistance, above which a sign read ‘Secondhand Bookstore No 44\ Inside, there was a murkiness caused by the dust of powdering paper and city soot.

Oktyabrina blotted her mascara with my handkerchief. When my eyes adjusted, I saw walls stuffed with old books from floor to lofty ceiling. Every millimeter was crammed, causing the old shelves to bend radically under their burdens. Lenin was inside too: as in every bookstore, new and used, throughout the country, the most prominent department was devoted to politics - principally works by and about Vladimir Ilyich. But in this decaying shop at least, he provided some much needed decoration. Plaster busts and full-color portraits of him were everywhere, accompanied by well-known citations on decaying crimson banners about the inevitable victory of Communism, the wisdom of the working class and importance of reading books.

A tight knot of shoppers and employees were engaged in one of those shouting matches without which no shop can function. I followed Oktyabrina around it and found myself staring into the eyes of the cashier. This was not accidental: she had looked up from her work and was examining us with a rapt gaze which seemed to combine hostility and defensiveness, passivity and aggression.

Even at first glance, this strange girl was commanding in spite - or because - of her appearance. She was inside the cashiers booth, sitting on a stool that had been augmented by several thick volumes to raise her to normal height. Black hair, matted and streaked with grey, clung like mattress stuffing to her oily, pitted cheeks. But everything was redeemed by the eyes - which went quizzical when they shifted back from me to Oktyabrina. It was the first time I understood the lyric paeans to solid, coal-black * Russian*

eyes.

I couldn't make out Oktyabrina’s air-sent message to her. It was followed by quick strides to the booth, the opening of its door and the whispering of a quip into the girl’s ear. When she dismounted from her stool, ignoring the line of customers at her window, she proved to be almost a head shorter than Oktyabrina. This meant that Oktyabrina s presentation of a soggy paper-flower necklace from her own neck to the girl’s formed a downward movement - although she somehow managed to create the impression of looking up, as if the girl were the General.

Gelda was with us every minute of the next four days, except when she worked. This subtracted only a few hours, since we met on a Thursday and Gelda took the following afternoon off to lengthen the weekend. She and Oktyabrina closeted themselves in my bedroom for hours, chattering like maiden aunts. When the door finally opened, the exhaust was a heavy vapor of smoke, moist exhalation and feminine odors.

Gelda told me nothing of their conversation, hinting at confidences that would be revealed in good time. But during meals and Oktyabrina’s brief absences, we had our own spirited exchange. I soon knew more about her background than Oktyabrina’s.

Books drew us quickly together. I owned some novels that are wildly prized by Moscow intellectuals: emigre editions of great Russian writers - Nabokov, Pasternak, Zamyatin, Bulgakov - that are taboo in Russia. Gelda’s curiosity about my shelves swelled to intense excitement when she spied these titles. When I gave her several, she gushed with gratitude, as if they were priceless first editions.

For her part, she quickly compiled a list of books for me which, while not prohibited, are so long out of print and so rare as to be virtually non-existent. She was eager to introduce me to a body of literature hardly known outside intellectual circles but which, she promised, described aspects 98

of Russia better than the great masters. She offered to find some of the books themselves for me, and give me the first of them on Monday.

‘Geldechka, you promisedl Oktyabrina was annoyed by the digression to literature. ‘You’re not going to work on Monday. Were going to buy you an outfit. In the latest pastels/

‘Yeah/ replied Gelda. ‘Pastels will work wonders for me - like a haircut helps a hanged man/

But Gelda and I would have cottoned on to each other even without the ‘contraband’ of books. She was articulate and intelligent, and when she talked about herself, which was whenever she was asked, she wove each episode of her life into a kind of capsule chapter of Russian history. Her only reluctance in this was prompted by characteristic misgiving: it was too narrow; she should be talking about the human condition. Otherwise, her attitude towards herself was entirely straightforward - meaning, under the circumstances, incurably fatalistic. Her voice was often disagreeably nasal, but lacked the faintest hint of self-pity or shame.

Gelda was only four years older than Oktyabrina, but like the offspring of most prominent intellectual families under Stalin, she had been exposed to an abundance of ‘life’ (meaning, as usual, death) at an early age, and become middle-aged, like Europe’s post-war novelists, while still an adolescent. Adolescence was some ten years ago; now her matted hair and bony cheeks gave her the look of a forgotten actress, eking out her twilight years in bilious poverty.

Acting once ran in her family. Gelda’s namesake was a paternal aunt who had been a character actress in the Moscow Art Theater just before and after the Revolution.

Another aunt designed costumes for the Bolshoi. In fact, her entire family were minor celebrities in Moscow’s artistic-intellectual elite. Now Gelda was the only survivor except for an elderly uncle, and two cousins who worked in an upholstery factory near Kiev,

The family was destroyed because it was Jewish, liberal

and recklessly outspoken. Gelda’s father, a talented editor, was shot as a 'rootless cosmopolitan’ in 1950. In keeping with contemporary protocol, no one was informed of the execution: the man was simply dragged away, fumbling for his glasses, after a knock on the door at two a.m. - and was never heard from again. Gelda’s mother, an Estonian cellist, went mad soon after this and took to submerging her hands, together with Gelda’s, in a cauldron of scalding chicken soup at dinner-times on Sundays.

The mother spent two years trekking from prison to prison seeking news of her husband, even though his fate was painfully obvious to everyone. She caused acute embarrassment and sometimes panic by talking obsessively about the case to relatives and friends. In whispers, they begged her to forget her husband and think of a new life. Soon people avoided her entirely. It was cruel, but in Stalin’s last mad years the risk to oneself and one’s own family of asso-ciating with this woman was too great.

The hands-submerging ritual continued, despite Gelda’s variety of attempted escapes at the first scent of chicken soup from their apartment’s communal kitchen. Gelda’s mother also continued to play the cello, but her dementia deepened. After years, a neighbor in the apartment could no longer endure the querulous hag and her daughter’s Sunday whimpers. She reported Gelda’s mother, a medical investigation was launched, and the woman was committed. By that time, Gelda was nine, and abnormally short. The medical investigators also concluded that she was both mentally and socially retarded, but did not know that she had already absorbed more literature than many of her school-teachers. Compulsive reading in the bad basement light had already weakened her eyes.

She was also fat, unclea*n and ugly in a way that children can be only when severe deprivation affects them before they can understand its cause, encouraging them to attribute the guilt to themselves. As so often, the guilt had physical effects: Gelda was 'a lump of rashes’ and sickly obesity. 100

The great watery weight evaporated during adolescence, and she was now almost gaunt, existing principally on canned cod livers, a hard-to-find delicacy, and prostok-vasha , a thick, refreshing soured milk. She also chainsmoked papirosi , the cigarettes with the long cardboard holder usually associated with the clenched, brownish teeth of a truck driver.

What had not changed from youth was Gelda’s personality. She belonged to the category of deprived children who react with a kind of involuntary magnanimity, together with occasional belligerence, and spend much of their lives effacing themselves and indulging in inordinate generosity to others. Gelda was always the ‘easy’ one: the girl in her class of whom any favor or unpleasant errand could be

demanded, and who volunteered when not asked. This was so ingrained in her character that she preferred not to use her lunch break at the bookshop - except to see Oktyabrina and me - but to give extra time to one of the salesgirls. She called them The children', and looked almost like their mother, although in fact most of them were roughly the same age as she.

The salesgirls, in turn, were a godsend to Gelda’s need for self-sacrifice: except for an elderly lady with long service, they were all relative newcomers with no special knowledge of books, and needed frequent coaching and reminding. Gelda herself had worked in the shop for almost six years, ever since her graduation from a vocational high school. She knew every phase of its operation far better than the manager, a Party functionary with a green suit and stuffed-animal mentality, who had been given this sinecure of a job after an ignominious failure as director of a small bottle works. Without Gelda’s managerial help, especially in keeping the books (his early attempts at embezzlement had got him into an impossible tangle), he faced certain downgrading again.

In contrast to the manager too, Gelda had read literally

thousands of the books that passed through the store. She

was the only member of the staff permitted to take them home, a grave violation of the rules about the protection of state property. Her current book was always open at her side, even in the cashier’s booth. Yet like most members of the intelligentsia, she never laid eyes on a newspaper: the turgid stvle and moralizing repelled her, even when there were no recognizable distortions or lies. She enjoyed taunting the manager by flourishing a torn page of Pravda when marching to the toilet - its intended function, in the perpetual absence of toilet paper, was obvious. The manager himself always pondered Pravda s every word searching for clues to shifts in the Party line.

Despite this, and despite the total disparity of their life styles, the manager and Gelda had achieved a relatively smooth working rapport. The only serious trouble came when Gelda fell into one of her terrible moods. Gelda even introduced Oktyabrina to the manager, and he volunteered that he might ‘do something for the little girl’ when his luck changed and he got another plum job. (He was now angling for the management of a railroad depot that handled imported consumer goods.) The offer to help Oktyabrina was prompted by less than pure chivalry: the manager carried a not-so-secret torch for the oily-cheeked Gelda and often tried to coax her into his cubby-hole of an office for what she called a ‘quick sniff and the usual three minutes of pawing’.

The extraordinary thing about Gelda was that despite everything, she was attractive to men. A significant percentage who entered the bookshop, especially the rougher-looking types, took stock of her in the way that indicates desire. Something about her, if only the attraction of 'ugly beauty’, was stubbornly sexy. But Gelda herself looked at no man unless he sported a moustache - and if it turned out to be thin, short, wispy or limp, she rarely looked twice. Her obsession with moustaches was overpowering, and she happily succumbed to it. Her last important lover had, as 102

she put it, a ‘Serbian smugglers one’. She showed me his photograph. It was badly blurred, but the moustache was indeed thick and black - I would have said Mexican rather than Serbian - and the man himself was correspondingly dark and powerful-looking.

They met in a line for suitcases at the East German shop. The man remarked that a good suitcase was an essential refinement of life. But before they’d reached the counter Gelda enticed him to her cramped attic room. He told her he taught acting in the Shchukin Academy, one of Moscow’s best known drama schools. Through her old family contacts, Gelda learned that her man had nothing to do with the Academy - where she felt he might have been a janitor, for she herself had quickly determined that he knew nothing whatever about drama and little about school. Soon after this, she discovered his real occupation, for objects began disappearing from her room in order of their value. The transistor radio, the long-playing records, the horn comb (one of the last of her mother’s mementos), finally the box of talcum powder....

Still, Gelda clung to him, leaving him to his profession when she left for work in the morning. After work, she bought him supper and arranged for the evening’s entertainment, usually a band concert or sporting event - never the theater because he refused to ‘mix professional obligations with pleasure’. Gelda saw through everything and dismissed everything for the sake of the moustache and the special things he did with it. The Serbian was the most compelling love of her fife.

When he finally disappeared, it was with every object in the room except the furniture. He even took the wormy wooden frame in which her father’s photograph had stood, leaving the yellowed photograph itself on the bare, badly-stained mattress of the bed.

Gelda’s attractiveness to men and her own attraction to moustaches were not her only curious qualities. She kept a handsome aquarium in her room, only eighteen inches wide,

but almost as long as the bed. (The Serbian had emptied half the water and tried to carry this away too, but had abandoned it in the corridor because of the weight.) In it she nurtured a collection of tiny, violently colored tropical fish which she bought in the so-called pet market at outrageous prices. She read widely in the literature of this subject, limited as it is in Russia, and had started a correspondence - in German, with the help of a language teacher — with Konrad Lorenz, whose books she herself paid to be -translated. They began by writing about cichlids and blue triggers, but soon drifted to Lorenz’s observations of human behavior, Gelda being curious about her own psychological make-up. But she was summoned by the Party Secretary of the Retail Book Trust and ‘advised’, as the euphemism has it, that the correspondence was ‘not in her own best interests’. She was forced to drop Lorenz. Then remembering that her own uncle was engaged in behavioral research, she began meeting him. The old man, her father’s elder brother, had also suffered badly during the most virulent anti-Semitic years and developed near fatal cases of ulcers and diabetes simultaneously. But he survived, and now worked in the medical department of the Moscow City Soviet. According to Gelda, he had recently presided over a massive public health survey about a supposedly secret subject. Its purpose was to determine, by means of obligatory physical examination,' the sexual habits of Moscow school-girls. The team found, among other things, that twenty-seven per cent from the ages of fourteen to seventeen were virgins. The younger doctors were said to be surprised that the percentage appeared so high. Variations of this story are so rife in Moscow that I was at first sceptical of Gelda’s uncle. But she, of all people, had no reason to misrepresent such things, and since she mentioned the survey to me only once, I came to believe her.

To Oktyabrina, however, Gelda mentioned the survey not once but a dozen times in my hearing and presumably st ill more often in the seclusion of the bedroom. ‘Brinchka’, 104

as Gelda called her, was exceedingly curious about the team’s statistics and methods of obtaining them: did the school-girls actually uncover their all in the presence of male doctors? Flare their lower limbs? Can any doctor be absolutely certain about a woman’s virginity, knowing that certain of them experience mystical erotic . . . er, episodes, even in youth?

'Yeah, it’s terribly mysterious,’ said Gelda through the teeth clenching her papirosa. 'A stiff prick finds its mark, even during a blackout. Is there radar in the tip, or an uncanny sense of smell?’

We were having a snack in the kitchen; Oktyabrina blanched and spilled her coffee. When she had recovered, her expression was like a young boy’s when given a taste of beer: while shuddering, he pretends to smack his lips.

‘ How absolutely to the point, Geldechka — if you’ll pardon the pun. Anyway, what’s so important about who’s a virgin?’

Despite this, and her shock at Gelda’s graphic bluntness, Oktyabrina’s interest in the survey persisted. She steered the conversation frequently to the subjects of 'chastity’, 'deprivation of chastity’ and 'the inauguration of carnal gratification’. Gelda was impatient with this level of analysis. To her, sex was interesting as an expression of human nature, about which she was caustic. 'Let’s face it,’ she’d say. 'Human beings use others and discard them when they’re through, like squeezed lemons. We’re animals - why expect anything else?’

‘Darling Geldechka, at a certain point, cynicism about human nature becomes utterly tragic. Your faith can be restored by using a bit of foresight. For example, Vve always found that the hairiest lovers are also the most . . . well, ruthless. So you must be exceedingly cautious about future moustaches.

But Gelda had tired of this theme. She returned the conversation to her passion of that hour, a bizarre pre-revolutionary writer named Vasily Rozanov. Rozanov was unknown to all but a handful of Russians: a mystical, anti-Semitic

Jew, obsessed by sex, death and the Orthodox Church. Gelda’s extemporaneous discourse, intertwined biographical detail, literary appreciation and historical perspective - a dazzlingly instructive performance.

Without a break, she turned to an examination of Vsevolod Meyerhold, the brilliant avant-garde director who was shot in 1939. Afterwards she tossed her papirosa stubs into an untouched cup of coffee and went to the bathroom, leaving the door open while she coughed and urinated. Before she’d come out, she was declaiming again, but Oktyabrina led her to the bedroom and closed the door.

On Sunday evening, I took leave of the girls through the bedroom door, eager for the respite of a walk alone. My head was buzzing with information and emotion. A weekend of Gelda was like a non-stop wade through both Crime and Punishment and War and Peace. I hoped to see more of her - but in hourly doses.

When I returned to the apartment around midnight, she was gone, together with Oktyabrina. The bedroom was a mess: ripped pillowcases and a shattered glass, which had apparently been hurled against a wall. On my desk was a note from Oktyabrina, obviously written in great haste: ‘Dearest Zhoe will explain absolutely everything later love me.’

Monday was the anniversary of Lenin’s birthday. The campaign to ‘befittingly greet the sacred day’ - by overfulfilling production norms - lacerated the country like the fanfare of a million film-set trumpets. Oktyabrina did not visit the apartment that morning, but telephoned with a scrap of stale news. Her voice was overly off-hand.

‘Where are you?’ I asked. ‘At the bookshop?’

‘WhereP Oh, you mean that noisome bookshop. No, I’m not there - why should I be?’

‘Gelda’s not working again? Why don’t you bring her around for coffee - tomorrow, I mean, or the day after.’

‘Zhoe dearest, what’s this sudden fascination for shop-106

girls? Gelda’s not exactly my sister, you know/

‘What was the brawl in the bedroom yesterday?’

‘As a matter of fact, she’s not only not my sister, but that’s probably her underlying trouble: naturally her family s madness makes her frantically envious of my own parental bliss. . . . Anyway, Zhoe darling, I’ve some important people to meet now. I’ll probably see you tomorrow/

This confirmed my supposition that the bedroom mess had been caused by tension between the girls. Other clues followed quickly: Oktyabrina declined to talk about Gelda, and took pains to avoid not only the bookstore for several days, but Petrovka itself.

‘I’ll tell you what caused the ordeal,’ she said when we first returned to Petrovka. ‘Only you must pledge two things on your honor. Do you promise?’

‘Will it hurt?’

‘Do you promise? Believe me, Zhoe dearest, it’s for your own peace and sanity/

‘I promise, my love/

‘Then you must never condemn Gelda for what I’m about to tell you - it’s not her personal fault. That’s one vow. The other is that you must never try to see her again. You see, Zhoseph, Gelda is eine katatonische Schizophrene. You can look up the rest in Konrad Lorenz/

‘She’s a what?’

‘Neither you nor I can help in the slightest,’ Oktyabrina declared. ‘Or anyone - Gelda suffers from incurable fits*

‘I suppose she has every reason.’

‘It’s not my duty to rock other people’s children/ Oktyabrina adjusted her bonnet in the reflection of a window and changed to her strolling-on-the-town expression. As far as she was concerned, she said firmly, the subject of Gelda was now - and for evermore - closed. But a few days later, she found a fishstore with a supply of cod liver and arranged for twenty-five tins to be delivered to the bookshop.

‘Gelda is society’s debt,’ she explained. ‘I’m sorry that I

can risk no more than this gesture. It’s simply too perilous: that glass just missed my face, you know.’

‘I was afraid of something like that. Still, there’s something splendid in that girl. The best hope is her awareness of her own affliction/

‘Zhoe darling, maybe you and I need less outside . . . er, divertissement. I used to think we were both a little daft, but compared to other people, we re pure, old-fashioned euphony together/

‘Oktyabrina darling, let’s make another pact. We’ll try to steer clear of strays and passers-by. Now slip your ann in mine....’

Two days after this, we received separate notes from Gelda. Oktyabrina thought it best not to show me hers. Mine was inside a crumbling old book by Rozanov. It was full of explanation and apology about the inevitable bad end to her, Gelda’s, friendships - which she very much wanted to prevent with both of us. She felt rotten about losing us, but at least we had each other. Marriage, she wrote, was a piteous hoax, but she was sure we’d try it one day - more she would not reveal of Oktyabrina’s confidences - and bon voyage to us both.

11

On May Day, I was up early to cover the parade in Red Square. The entire center of the city had been sealed off - a much wider area and with far stricter security than for funerals - and reporters had to be in their places by eight o’clock. The vigilance smacked of an occupying army preparing a major roundup: platoons of soldiers patrolled the otherwise empty streets, ensuring that only people with passes entered the restricted area. Starting at the metro exit, there were six checkpoints within the few hundred yards to the stands, and I had trouble at all of them because 108

one letter of my name had been misspelled on my pass and ‘contravened' my passport. Finally, I convinced a colonel who I was, and he escorted me to my place in the foreigners section opposite the Lenin Mausoleum, and beneath a gigantic ‘FORWARD TO THE VICTORY OF COMMUNISM!' banner. Bedecked with painting and signs in this vulgar evangelical style, the great, austere square seemed scaly, like a medieval dragon.

The ceremony started at the chimes of ten o clock. Marshal Malinovsky, the Minister of Defense, reviewed the troops from a bulbous limousine, while thousands of soldiers shouted battle cries in unison. A violent harangue from him followed, warning the enemies of socialism. Then the parade itself in the traditional sequence: thundering tanks and missiles the length of football fields, accompanied by divisions of soldiers, sailors and cadets. Finally the massive civilian procession was set in motion. The thought that some of the tens of thousands of floats, banners, and portraits of Marx and Lenin had no doubt come from Evgeny Ignatievich's warehouse provided the long mornings only moment of relief.

For nothing in the world less conveyed the impression of spontaneous joy it sought than the elaborately rehearsed pageantry streaming through the square. Everyone knew that all of the hundred thousand odd ‘demonstrators had been drafted and painstakingly drilled - and that no one would dare refuse to ‘volunteer’. Hundreds of signs read simply ‘HAPPINESS!' - one of the blessings that Communism has officially conferred on the Russian people. This was the moment when the full sorrow of the paradox descended: deeply unhappy Russia with its cruel climate and history, its crushing political backwardness, proclaiming to the world that it has established Happiness on Earth. The land of Ivan the Terrible, Stalin, and mendicant mystics is somehow fated to go on this way, limping from tragedy to tragedy, sacrificing generation after generation - and always searching frenziedly for the path to paradise and

redemption. The deeply religious roots of all this were demonstrated again that morning by the thousands of portraits of radiant Lenin, just as icons had been borne aloft by the Orthodox Church’s ragged, unquestioning faithful.

Yet most Russians themselves would dismiss these ‘insights’ as patronising foreign humbug. The procession’s hundreds of thousands of participants were thinking not about historical or philosophical abstractions, but about the big bowl of borscht waiting for them at home. It was a holiday, after all, and people were in a holiday mood. They might have preferred to stay in bed rather than spend the morning on a forced walk; but the sun was shining and May the First had fallen on Friday, meaning that absenteeism on Saturday was going to be prodigious, and a self-declared three-day weekend had begun.

When I had filed my copy and arrived home, Oktyabrina was also in a holiday mood. She dashed to the door in a lacy white dress, a kind of peasant bridal gown - her ‘homage to spring’.

‘Do you really approve?’ she said, twirling happily. ‘May Day, you know, is the opening of the “love season” - it’s an old Russian tradition. I’ve a marvelous inspiration for how to celebrate.’

Her inspiration was to see La Dolce Vita. Somewhere, she’d heard the news that it was to have a private screening that evening at the Cinema Workers’ Club. Oktyabrina had an idea of the movie’s motif from a story in one of my old magazines, which convinced her it was 'precisely her kind of thing.

Foreign correspondents get passes fairly easily for these closed screenings, and I telephoned the office which makes the arrangements. But I had no luck there, or with any other of the calls I made during the afternoon. The reason was obvious: foreign films like this one are screened under the fiction of inspection for possible purchase, but in fact to allow a handful of chosen people to sample the forbidden fruit. La Dolce Vita's reputation was known, and the news 110

of its one and only showing had raced through the city’s intellectual elite.

Besides, most of the tickets had already been requisitioned. A thousand Party first secretaries, heads of censorship departments and ideological specialists on The New Soviet Man and other moral themes were dying to treat their wives or sweethearts to a really choice evening of bourgeois decadence. Tickets were simply unobtainable; not even Kostya’s excellent contacts produced results.

Oktyabrina removed her white dress and sulked on the davenport. ‘What a way to start the love season,’ she said, fixing an eye on me. ‘This year things aren’t exactly auspicious!

Suddenly, she jumped up and lifted the telephone herself. She searched through my notes on the pad and picked out the number of the Party bureau in the Cinema Workers’ Club. While she dialed, her face turned hard; for a second I saw a resemblance between the faintly Mongoloid cut of her jaw and Marshal Malinovsky’s much fatter one at the microphone that morning.

‘Whom am I speaking to?’ she said in a vicious, splitting voice. ‘Oh yes? Well, you are talking to Comrade Vinogradova.’ She paused. ‘I’m with five Comrades from the Ukrainian Central Committee. We’re here on the May Day project and require recreation. Reserve us six tickets for your film tonight, is that absolutely clear?’ She paused again. ‘Of course not, no. We are far too busy for any picking-up. Have them waiting at the door directly before the start -and no slip-ups , do you understand?’

She slammed down the receiver with all her might. Then she turned to me with her triumphant grin. ‘I’m hungry, Comrade correspondent. You may serve tea.’

It was a chance in a hundred, but when we arrived at the large stone building that houses the Club, the burly doorman, while holding back the crowd with one hand, produced an envelope with the other. It was marked ‘ For Comrade Vinogradova , Ukrainian Central Committee Dele -

gation. Inside were six tenth row tickets.

Oktyabrina was exultant. Nobody would have believed a story about two tickets, she explained in a vainglorious whisper - and with a corresponding gesture distributed the four extra ones among the swarm of beseeching hands outside the door. Then she collected five rubles from me, the winnings of our bet, and strolled into the auditorium with more self-importance than the celebrities who belonged.

The movie itself, however, disappointed her hugely - so

much so that she was fidgety and full of sonorous yawns after the first twenty minutes and dozed intermittently until the dunking-in-the-fountain scene near the end. Afterwards, when we stepped into the fresh air, Oktyabrina was irritated by the buzz of ecstatic praise from other members of the audience. The whole exercise was much too talky - nor could she understand why Marcello Mastroianni was so spiritless or what was so wonderful about that decadent life.

T mean, those people didn’t believe in anything. Didn’t love anything, even feel anything. All those furs and cars and things gave you the creeps, like in some mausoleum. Please take my arm, Zhoe darling/

"Fellini’s a master at making you feel cold-bloodedness, you should see it as a modern morality play.’

"But why does he believe that beauty and luxury must be stone dead like that? Kostya’s right - I wouldn’t trade a hundred Romes like that for dear Moscow.’

"We’re in our happy period now, aren’t we, Zhoe? It’s so unfair, how people squander the joy of plain domestic peace/

Oktyabrina handed me an apple and settled in the armchair to attack hers. It was a Friday morning; she had recently arrived and I was finishing an article on arms limitation. The radio was introducing a drama based on Lenin’s skill in reading and taking notes. The minor domestic traumas of the past weeks were forgotten; our understanding of each other was steadily waxing, like the spring 112

sun. It was indeed our happy period - and also the calm before the storm. It broke twenty-four hours later.

Oktyabrina had never taken the slightest interest in my work until that Saturday - when it spoiled our plans. We'd meant to spend a happy afternoon at a French industrial exhibition in Sokolniki Park, one or two or three major Western exhibits a year, all of which are inevitably packed. Rows of giant machinery would seem to interest only engineers, but there are usually enough photographs of the magical sponsoring country to fascinate the general Moscow public. Displays of fashions and consumer goods are also bewitching, not to speak of in-the-flesh trouser-suited guides. Even Embassy wives, having forgotten these visual delights, spend days at the fairs.

Oktyabrina and I planned to consummate our tour with supper at a restaurant just outside the fair grounds. The ordinarily dismal establishment had been temporarily taken over by Maxim's as the exhibition's most alluring ‘side show’. Oktyabrina prepared for it during most of the morning; her outfit was going to be a surprise.

Just before we planned to leave, the Press Department telephoned. I was informed that an interview I'd requested exactly seventeen weeks before had been granted, and could be conducted that afternoon - and that afternoon only. The man I was to see was the Vice-Minister of Public Health, the author of a long article in Komsomolskaya Pravda , the newspaper of the Young Communist League. It was an indignant attack on Siberia's spoilage by ruthlessly expanding Soviet industry. If the man was anything like his prose, an interview with him would be quite a prize.

Oktyabrina's disappointment over the interview's scheduling was mild compared to mine over its substance. I drove to the Ministry of Public Health with real hope; this was a non-political story, after all, and once in a blue moon a Soviet official says something meaningful. My illusions dissolved the moment we sat down to talk.

It was in the ubiquitous reception room of every public institution, with the bottles of mineral water arrayed on the green felt 'conference’ table. The mere sight of this setting, Soviet officialdom’s obligatory 'parlor’, tends to stifle any free flow of ideas. But the more direct cause of rigidity and futility was the two attendant supernumeraries. The Vice-Minister met me with an 'interpreter’ - whose real function was instantly clear to all three of us, since not a word of English was used during the entire hour. The man sat silently at the Vice-Minister’s right, wiping his glasses fastidiously, and unconcerned by the transparency of his disguise.

On my right was stationed a small jovial reporter from the Novosti Press Agency who, throughout the proceedings, beamed at me as if to indicate pleasure that the international fraternity of journalists had been reconvened, and occasionally jotted a note onto the margin of his newspaper. His presence was explained - by the interpreter - in terms of a 'remarkable but highly gratifying’ coincidence: Novosti too happened to be investigating ‘control of industrial waste’.

This might have been true, for Novosti does like to steal stories suggested by Western reporters - and then, having denied permission to these Western reporters, to hawk the articles (for hard currency) in Western capitals. However, Novosti’s function that afternoon was not to poach my idea, but to send a back-up man for .the 'interpreter’. This was clear from what I overheard when hurrying back into the building to retrieve the Vice-Minister’s card, which he’d presented me ceremoniously when he at last appeared, and I’d inadvertently left on the table. The Novosti man was in the foyer, complaining to the interpreter: ‘Tell me next time, will you, for God’s sake? At least the subject! Pollution , of all things. I could’ve prepared some statistics or something, instead of playing the friendly dummy the whole time.’

As it happened, statistics were the sole offering of the Vice-Minister himself. In crushing abundance: the percent-114

age of improvement in air cleanliness, water cleanliness and pollution controls . ... In his droning assemblage of figures, he not only said nothing in elaboration of his article, but produced a mass of mumbo-jumbo to refute it.

Obviously, someone higher had ordered him to correct the ‘subversive’ impression his crusade had produced in the Western press. There was no serious pollution problem in Soviet society, he was saying; and under socialism, there could be none. He slipped into a chronicle of the Russian people’s miseries under Tsarism and the striking superiority of Soviet public health to that of American imperialists. ‘Pollution is wholly insignificant in comparison to our people’s immense strides under our Leninist Party’s unshakable leadership.

Not one paragraph of this ‘interview’ was usable, except perhaps in a backgrounder about the mechanics of interviewing in Russia — which would have infuriated the Press Department. However, there was nothing unusual about the Vice-Minister’s performance. The episode assumed importance only because of my ensuing discussion with Oktyabrina.

I’d dropped her at the exhibition grounds on my way to the Ministry. When I returned, only ten minutes late, she was waiting at the gate as we’d planned. Her fingers drummed against her handbag, to indicate that she was heroically controlling her exasperation.,

‘Don’t bother to hurry, Mister Busy,’ she called. ‘It’s too late for the restaurant. They said there was still an evening table if you’d reserved even an hour ago.’

‘It’s just as well really. I’m not in the mood for a grand

meal just now.’

‘Just as well? Thanks awfully. What about snails? What about crepes suzettes? Your seductive descriptions.’

‘We’ll come back during the week, I promise.’

‘How do you know I’ll be free during the week? You already promised. For today, Saturday, the eighteenth of May Old Style. Which is the fifth and my mother’s Saint’s

Day on the Gregorian Calendar, in case that fancy journalist s date-watch of yours has corroded/

The disappointment of the interview was still in my throat, spoiling the taste for banter. And for fighting the crowds to enjoy the exhibition. Since Oktyabrina had already seen much of what interested her, we set out towards the northern, unpeopled comer of the huge park. It had turned cold again, like a raw day in early March.

‘Whats the matter with you, Zhoe darling?’ Oktyabrina said at last.

‘Nothing.’

‘Something/

‘Nothing serious/

‘Something rather serious. One just doesn’t ask a lady to supper and ruin everything that way for no reason at all/ ‘Well?’ she said again in her half-teasing, half-daunting contralto.

‘Dearest Oktyabrina, believe me. There is a reason. It’s the reason for everything miserable here. This hypocritical government of yours. The medieval system .’

‘Zhoe darling, once upon a time you attempted to spank me for being “mysterious”. Now stop brooding and tell your confidante what’s gone wrong/

In the end, I did tell - and everything. I traced the history of my campaign to see the Vice-Minister, and the worthless result. Once the dam had broken, a catalogue of frustrations gushed out, including several I’d forgotten. I described the straight-jacket I was in, the refined or clumsy obstacles erected around every story, the impossibility of doing even a half-honest job. Finally, 1 returned to the Vice-Minister, and the stupidity, the cynical crudeness of his muzzling and my being handed the old propaganda line. . . .

In releasing the steam, I momentarily forgot Oktyabrina. When I glanced down for her reaction, I saw that she’d stopped a few paces back, where an elderly couple were walking their dog. She was fingering the little mongrel’s leash - an old bathrobe belt.

‘For heaven’s sake, Oktyabrina. Let’s go home.

‘What’s the matter now?’

‘I was telling you something. You didn’t hear a word.

‘I heard absolutely everything darling, and I think it’s positively hideous. You must be awfully worn out.

‘I’m exhausted and I’m sick of this place.’

‘Only you do like to dramatize things a bit, don t you?

‘Wait a minute. I said that man didn’t utter a single honest word. That’s a statement of fact, not a dramatization.’

‘Of course it is, darling. But why torment yourself about it? Put down what you like - that man won’t mind.’

I assumed this was badinage - an offshoot of Kostya’s standard quips about Pravda journalism. But Oktyabrina was in dead earnest. She was offering me what she thought I wanted: advice to write up the interview with that ‘delicious diplomat man’ in the way that would best suit me. ‘After all, he’ll never read a provincial American newspaper, will he? He probably doesn’t even know English.’

‘Good thinking; that takes care of him. But unfortunately there’s still me. I’m a journalist you see, not a liar.’

She snickered. ‘If you ask me, it’s an actor your inner self is really seeking. You might do character parts. But I suggest a firm director: there’s a tendency to over-play the “oppressed-and-aggrieved” emotion.’

‘Most countries, you know, have the government they deserve. Lies are told because people want to believe them. The Vice-Minister didn’t say an honest word - you haven’t understood a single word.’

‘I’ve understood every silly syllable. Despite your sour innuendoes - what it does to your accent, Zhoseph. What I don’t understand is you: whom you’re trying to impress and why? Write your Very Important Article. Dash to your desk this instant if necessary; you’ve already ruined the evening. Only stop gnashing your teeth, the wounded-hero pose pushes you over the thin line into comedy.’

‘I’m trying to tell you that I cannot write the article.

Because I have no facts’

She lowered her voice and organised her shame-shame expression. ‘Really, Zhoseph, why shout? Posturings so unnecessary with someone who likes you/

‘When I try to write.

‘People particular about “facts” aren't in the habit of reading newspapers. Not to mention writing for them/

‘Why is this leaking out now? What are you getting at?' ‘First you spoil our day, then you invent a castle of self-imposed “professional” hardships. Really Zhoseph, it's so simple. Your newspaper wants a tsk-tsk story about dreadful Soviet pollution. The Vice-Minister won’t ever see the stuff you write.

Suddenly, I realised what she was driving at. What she’d been thinking - not just then, but ever since Kostya introduced us and she assumed the role of my coquette - ‘guide’. And throughout the months when she’d cooed about journalists being marvelously paternal. A stab of anger pinched my eyes.

‘Do you really think I’m a journalist like Soviet journalists? Do you believe newspapers are a pack of lies in civilized countries? That’s the worst of it: your newspapers he and it infects you all. You all assume everyone else tells them/ ‘Must you shout? Is that how people behave in civilized countries?’

‘I do not publish lies. I write articles about what I know, not what might make me look good. Or my newspaper or my government. You can’t understand that because in your country you’ve never learned the difference between fact, invention and pure lie.’

There was a momentary pause. I relaxed because she seemed to understand at last. But she answered in a harder tone.

‘I suppose your country is better. Yes. Very much better -at burning villages in Vietnam. Lynching innocent Negroes right in your own homeland. Sucking blood from the poor and the defenseless everywhere - and then being very superior, of course, because you have sparkling kitchens and 118

fancy cars/

‘We are talking about journalism. The pursuit of truth in newspapers.’

‘The pursuit of wretchedness , you mean/

‘The possibility of approaching the truth. And you are proving my point: a country’s shortcomings must be searched out and reported. By journalists - that’s our job. Otherwise, you’d know nothing about the treatment of Negroes or anything else that disturbs us both/

‘What a narrow view of truth you have. A collection of what you call facts, the uglier the better. Digging out other people’s mistakes and misfortunes, then shouting your head off about them with all that glee.

‘That is nonsense/

‘Yes, you’re secretly happy when you find something painful. Then you can parade your righteousness - although you’ve done zero to improve anything or help anybody/

‘The first step towards alleviating misfortune is knowing the facts. Progress is impossible without them/

‘Your sermons insult my intelligence.

‘Use your intelligence. Face the issue.

‘Face your own issue - I happen not to be fascinated by newspapers. I’m interested in something called life, the mystery of existence. Journalists think newspaper is a password that excuses every rudeness and selfishness. That they can invite people to dine one minute and abandon them the next. Be so very superior about.

4 1 see. What really bothers you is Maxim’s and nothing but Maxim’s. Your blather about people’s misfortunes is as synthetic as the line about my being your father. . . .

‘Find fault and be so very superior about a country that bled itself white to defeat fascism and keep carpers like you alive. Yet you preach about ‘ the truth as if you speak for humanity. It’s the people who suffered and died who have that right - and above all, that means the people of this country you hate so much/

‘Let’s end this farce. You’re up to your ears in sophism -

in propaganda. According to you Hitler attacked Stalin and people suffered terribly - which justifies continued suffering today. You confuse.

‘We don't need foreigners telling us what we confuse. Or how to run things. I'm sick and tired of all you Great-God Westerners coming in here like missionaries to tell us what we do wrong.'

‘That's a parody of my attitude and you know it.'

‘Preaching to people to do everything your wonderful Western way. The way you dropped the atomic bomb on yellow people. The way you yourself shake your head oh-so-mournfully if you must stand in some line for a minute -oh yes, we're backward , you feel so infinitely superior. The way you dole out your hallowed Camels and expect people to kneel in holy gratitude.

‘Camels? You must be ill, you know. Or simply can't tell right from wrong - you steal my cigarettes and then think you have a right to....'

‘Your cigarettes? You’re so wrapped up in capitalist morality that you don't know how to live. Your precious cigarettes - and let a million people in Hiroshima burn. I never stole cigarettes. I distributed a few to people who needed them. Who just happen not to be rich enough to afford them because they weren't bom in seventh-heaven America and raised on imperialist silver spoons.'

‘Why didn’t you ask me? I'd have given you a carton a day. Or ten cartons, if that’s patronizing - a hundred cartons. But try to be sensible. Taking someone’s things without asking is wrong - under Communism as well as capitalism.'

‘And by the way, if you were so certain you only write the truth in that fabulous newspapers of yours, you wouldn't be beating your breast about it. Why all the Hollywood speeches about facts ? I'll tell you: because you know somewhere that you don’t write the truth of truths.'

‘Please let’s stop. You can't follow the line of your own thought.'

‘It’s vou who won't follow. I said that without Russia. 120

you'd be in some concentration camp. That it was the people of my country who died to stop the Nazis - and my father happened to be among them. Yes, our suffering was sometimes caused by our own political mistakes too. But only because we were trying to practice the “brotherhood” Westerners preached for a thousand years. We took the sermons seriously - because that's what Russia really means: a kind of purity and striving for genuine goodness. We've always taken the important things seriously - like higher ideals, not newspaper “truth”. So we suffer. And you gloat over our tragedies because it makes exciting journalism.'

'Just answer one thing. How does this justify lies - the Vice-Minister’s or anyone’s?'

T don't wish to explain anything further to you. Until you learn to listen.’

By this time we were no longer at the top of our voices, but snapping spitefully at each other. We had come to a bench bordering the path in a secluded part of the park. I shall never forget the pain of the young girl sitting on the edge of it. She was deeply humiliated, perhaps even frightened by her parents. The father, a large unshaven man, tried to force her to eat a large dill pickle while he swigged at his bottle; the mother was a disheveled hag with a mass of filthy hair. Both were very drunk.

Lost in their vodka and wretchedness, the parents were oblivious to us. The girl looked up, almost pleading that bitter sounds from us too would be more than she could bear. Oktyabrina and I were silenced. Tired and unhappy, we turned back towards the exit of the park. When I resumed the discussion, it was to make peace - to offer a truce on issues she and I were powerless to resolve. What hurt me was not so much her disdain for my work itself, but for my intentions.

'So you do understand that I don't invent things,' I said. 'I didn't want to blacken Russia. Pollution is a critical problem in America. I genuinely wanted to hear the Vice-Minister's ideas.'

‘I don’t. I want you to understand just that one thing -about me, if not about journalism in general.’

She said nothing for several minutes. Then she hissed a declaration she’d apparently been preparing.

‘Journalism in general is prostitution. No matter who you work for and in what country - it’s using words for something cheap instead of literature. Instead of art.’

‘Please don’t.’

‘Newspapers are for wrapping fish.’

‘Nicely put,’ I said - now calmly, because I suspected this would be the last time I’d see her. ‘Now, please explain what a person of art is doing with a prostitute. And half living off his immoral earnings.’

‘I’ve got nothing against prostitutes. They can be as noble as . . . doctors. It’s self-righteousness I can’t stand. That line about bleeding for the truth, it makes me sick.’

‘I think I’d better take you home.’

‘I think we may meet again one day. If and when you’ve learned you can’t shunt people around at your convenience. Like serfs.’

It had started to rain. Oktyabrina pivoted on the wet path and strode again towards the depths of the park. I watched her, but watched myself watching instead of trying to stop her. The scene expressed something inevitable, as if I’d lived through it before; as if it were fated. It was not the first time a rage of misunderstanding had dissolved one of my friendships. Then I was invaded by an irrelevant reflection which prevented me from thinking about what I should have: the injury to our relationship. I was sure she would take the metro home because it was quickest and she didn’t know the bus routes. I also knew she would be dying to get back because she’d been without a bathroom for several hours. But just to be stubborn, she sallied forth in the opposite direction. It was typical. And the rain now plastered her stringy hair to her skull and to the rayon remnant meant to be a cape.

122

On Sunday, an envelope lay under the front door of the apartment. It was postmarked Saratov and addressed to Oktyabrina, care of the old pensioner at Domolinart. Inside was a letter to us both from the Minister.

The Ministers handwriting was cursive and surprisingly elegant. Most of the letter was a profuse apology for not having written to his ‘dear friends’ sooner. Nothing in the world could excuse his negligence, he explained, but there had been a few extenuating circumstances. The most weighty was the search for a place to live amidst Saratov’s housing shortage. At last he’d found a room in a communal apartment. This was surely temporary; soon new housing for the teaching staff would be completed. Construction had been interrupted because the Chairman of the Construction Trust had been convicted of embezzlement after a long trial also involving senior city officials. The new Chairman, wary that he too might be charged with something, would not complete the change of command without an inventory of every nail.

Otherwise, life in Saratov was satisfactory - even pleasant in many ways. Only the food was . . . well, frankly, rather woeful. You had to queue all Saturday morning for stewing meat, and who would have thought there was no salami in a city this size? Luckily however, forty-five carloads of canned crabmeat had arrived in Saratov instead of Moscow

by mistake. This meant a whacking trial of railroad engineers and certain Food Trust officials, but meanwhile, stores were stacked to the ceiling with the wonderful cans. . . .

In general, however, he wouldn’t want to give the impression that he was unhappy. Far from it; in many ways, life was more honest and rewarding in Saratov than in Moscow. You had a feeling you could trust your colleagues more -

123

except, of course, the young bureaucrats who would sell their mothers to the devil for a chance of promotion to Moscow. You could walk the length of Lenin Boulevard, the central thoroughfare, from its far end to Lenin Square in twenty minutes, and a strand of neon never looked so good. You could fish for almost anything your heart desired in the Volga - who could tire of Dear Mother Volga? - and there was a rumor that the sport store had been allocated a case of reels for the coming financial year. . . .

But enough about boring old him; how were we getting on? Were we keeping alive the traditional Sunday outings? We mustn’t forget: the rent on the cottage was paid up until next autumn and . . . Yes, he missed us. Why try and hide it? - Especially now, when the spring verdure begged for a camera and friends. As soon as he could get time off he’d be coming to Moscow for as long as a week. Unfortunately new teachers were saddled with supplementary sessions of the Dialectical Materialism courses. . . .

The letter was signed ‘M-m-minister’, and followed by a PS: T just wanted you to feel as close to me as I to you. Oh yes, please answer poste restante. Unfortunately, the minute we moved into our room, my wife started issuing orders to everyone in the apartment. She’d forgotten how touchy provincial people - her own kind, actually - can be. Then somebody took revenge by informing the local security police we were secret Khrushchev sympathizers, plotting his restoration. So our post is opened. Frankly, I can’t blame the informer. On the other hand, it’s been hell for the wife: no chocolates, no canasta. She tries to tell everybody whom she used to have tea with in Moscow, but not even the old watchman believes her.

I reread the letter before folding it back into the envelope. After yesterday’s disaster and the apartment’s bleakness without Oktyabrina, it deepened the Sunday gloom. The refrigerator clicked on and whirred at intervals. There was no taste in my mouth.

I set out on a walk, but because it was still raining, turned 124

back for my car. With the heater on, I went for a drive where the wheels took me — which turned out to be a purposeless tour of some dull, wet countryside. The radio offered a drama about a Finnish schoolgirl who’d learned Russian in order to read Lenin’s letters to his mother; it was so bad that I stopped to take notes. The rain continued to pelt the windshield and I remembered the old peasant saying: A downpour is no real help.’ The one comforting thought was that it had been Oktyabrina who’d slipped the Minister’s letter under my door. This meant she too didn’t want an irrevocable break. Or was she trying to shame me into feeling worse?

When I returned home, there was a note tacked to my door, scrawled in crayon and in Oktyabrina’s unmistakable, childish script. ‘Mind your own business about my country. YANKEE GO HOME!’

I waited until Wednesday to pass Domolinart. Two black Volgas with ‘MOS’ plates were parked near the entrance, and I decided not to drop off the note I’d written. On Thursday morning, she telephoned.

‘Good morning, it’s Tanya/

‘Good girl. Would you care to meet me today? At one o’clock - please ?’ c No. Now/

‘Now it is. How late will you be?’

‘That’s not amusing. This is no time for banter. Now or not at all.’

When I arrived at Sverdlov Square, she was pacing around the fountain, clearly agitated. Having seen me, she turned away and made for Petrovka, indicating I should follow. Before I’d quite caught up with her, I suggested lunch at Maxim’s with a bottle of their best champagne. I felt it would be quite Russian to seal our reconciliation in extravagance. Oktyabrina said nothing, but maintained her rigid march until we were beyond everyone’s earshot.

‘I didn’t meet you/ she sputtered nervously, To discuss

your personal debts to me. This is serious. You must help*

‘What’s wrong now?’

‘Something awful. Leonid is about to be destroyed/

This sounded like her usual hyperbole, but I was glad of any excuse to patch things up. Then she began a shaky narration, and it was soon clear that Leonid was in fact in desperate trouble.

Last year, she explained, he had signed ‘a pronouncement’. It was a letter of protest against the persecution of Alexander Ginsburg, the young intellectual who had compiled a record of the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. This was what had brought about his dismissal from the physics institute. Last month, he signed a second petition condemning the persecution of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Against everyone’s advice, he had included his address. This second offense, regarded as insolence, incensed the KGB.

Four angry officers had raided Domolinart the evening before. They tore through Leonid’s things and removed all the written material, together with Leonid himself. Oktyabrina saw them manhandling him into a car as she was returning home from an errand. He just had time to call a goodbye to her before he was slapped and the two cars drove away. Oktyabrina ran off and, too terrified to go home, spent the entire night walking.

That day came to be called ‘Black Thursday’. We both knew that something had to be done - and also, at bottom, that we would do nothing. Because nothing could be done except to implicate ourselves. When Kostya patiently expounded this to us, we reproached him for his cynicism, but knew he was right - and he knew we had to hear it from someone else.

‘Believe me, I know the score. If the KGB has him, he’s finished and you haven’t got a chance. A bit of sausage and cheese will help him a hell of a lot more than getting yourselves arrested.’

Nevertheless, Kostya did go to KGB headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square -- the dreaded Lubyanka - to inquire 126

what would happen to Leonid. It was an act of considerable bravery. Oktyabrina and I waited a block away. Kostya was told - rather politely, to his surprise - that Leonid would be exiled from Moscow for five years. He would probably be sent to a construction settlement in central Siberia and assigned to hard labor - mixing cement and handling blocks - for a new dam on the Angara river. 'It’s the largest in the world/ said the neatly-groomed KGB officer blandly to Kostya. 'Now, are there any other questions? Or do you want me to ask you one - I mean your name?’

When Kostya returned he took me aside and gripped my arm. 'Leonid’s finished, Zhoechik. As we say, they’ve slipped the sickle around his balls. The solution for us lies in some Egyptian rum.’

In the evening, Oktyabrina and I sat on the bench in Gogol Boulevard and tried to think. ‘But it’s not fair,’ she said. 'Leonid’s a beautiful boy, a living martyr. He’s suffering for his purity and his ideals' She dropped the little-girl whine. 'Can fives really be crushed like this? I always thought it was dramatic accentuation.’

Later she was troubled by her own role. 'I always suspected he was involved in those things. Was it my deep moral obligation to stop him?’

'I don’t know,’ I said. ‘When a friend wants to make a sacrifice for public good - I honestly don’t know.’

‘At least you can do something about it.’

'I wish I could.’

‘What’s written with a pen . . . can’t be expunged by evil men. You can write an absolutely sizzling article about it. Stir up the Western world.’

‘I’ve been thinking about it. It’s probably better to write nothing.’

‘Why?’

'Anything I write about Leonid, can only stir the wrong people in the wrong way. They’ll investigate how I got the information, and eventually narrow it down to you. Then you’ll be in trouble - and probably Kostya. With no hope of

changing anything. Is it worth it?”

When she answered, her tone was more weary than challenging. ‘This is a crucial article. What about your dedication to the truth?’

‘I sometimes make compromises. Which makes me scream all the louder about honesty now and then, and sound self-righteous/

She waved away my offer of a cigarette and I lit one for myself. ‘What about your scorn for journalism? Exploiting people’s misery?’

T sometimes make generalizations. About journalism, for example. The silver lining is what I’ve learned about you.’ She reached for my hand and pressed her palm to mine, as she’d never done before. Her hand was tired and unaffected - as womanly as her voice at that moment.

‘It’s been a terrible day. I didn’t sleep last night. I’d rather not go back to Domolinart just yet . . . Zhoe, let’s go to the apartment - I can snooze a bit on the davenport/

Again I felt the kind of stirring that had disappeared since the final acid months with my wife. I knew that Oktyabrina was less frightened now. Had it been another evening, were I not so wary myself, I would have taken her to sleep with me. ‘You’d better have the bedroom Oktyabrina -after what you’ve been through. I’m used to the davenport/

‘I’d love clean sheets. And a bath!

Inertia kept us on the bench for another half-hour, soothed by the mild May evening and the neighborhood’s sights

and sounds. A mother called to her daughter from an open window of an apartment house: ‘Natasha, Natashinka, come home this minute. It’s terribly late, you should be in bed/ ‘Please mamachka, just five minutes more, please! On the next bench, a girl pleaded to her cloth-capped swain from under his embrace. ‘Oi, Andrusha, Andrushka mine, not here, I beg you. What are you doing to me?’ A peasant woman passed, flopping in the remains of her slippers. She was carrying a heavy bundle on her back, and stank of herring and onions. A young man helped his sleepy son to 128

urinate on a tree stump.

‘But you don't want life to continue/ Oktyabrina said, ‘when something like this happens to your friend. How can we treasure spring with Leonid in a dungeon? Or is that being synthetically dramatic?'

‘Have you ever really been in love?'

‘I might have been. I can be.'

‘Because life goes on afterwards. Even though you feel like a traitor for taking part in it again.’

‘That's it exactly, Zhoe dearest. Life's so indefinite . All these lack-luster compromises instead of something shining and solid so you know what to build.' But before we got home, she was experimenting with a story about how her love for Leonid would have made his exile bearable, if only the tragic arrest hadn't cut the bud before it bloomed.

The next day Oktyabrina slept as if drugged until noon. Then she left to sound out the possibilities of a new room among her ‘underground people’. She returned in midevening with an excellent find. The new room was in a dreary district called Ismailovsky, a good forty-five minutes from the center of town by metro. But she was happy to exchange the crabby old pensioner for a kindly widow. Her new landlady had lost her four sons as well as her husband in the war, and she took in paying boarders as a kind of charity and comfort to herself, giving them more in food from her tiny pension than she charged in rent.

Oktyabrina never collected her things from Domolinart. We thought it too dangerous; the room might still be watched, or the old pensioner under orders to turn her in. Luckily, at least half her wardrobe was in my apartment. All she really missed was a new leotard and a box of Czech face pow^der. But even this loss wasn't painful - or rather, the pain was sweet, because she was planning to wear no make-up at all for at least two weeks. It was to be an outward sign of her inner remorse over Leonid's fate -for her own part in it, as well as the state’s.

For she would never forgive herself for not having given body and soul to him. Love was there , literally under her nose - love with a tragic, heroic figure - and she hadn't fully realised it until too late. Was she congenitally unresponsive to love? Would she die an old maid? No, she’d learned her lesson; the very next time love appeared she would seize it like a water gourd in the desert. The trouble was there wouldn’t he a next time. Anyway, she couldnt seize it, out of respect for Leonid. Or, with his penchant for martyrdom, would he want her to be happy with another man? ....

She arrived at the apartment later in the mornings now because of her long metro ride. Some days, she did not appear at all, although she rarely went to Evgeny Ignatievich’s class. When she did come, we resumed the old routine. We knew each other much better now, and Leonid’s tragedy had cemented our friendship. Still, the old bantering ease we’d had was never quite re-established. The argument gave us something, but also took something away.

13

In late May, a cable arrived from my foreign editor with instructions to go up to Leningrad. I was to cover a conference between a delegation of American Senators and Deputies to the Supreme Soviet. I intended to go for the three days of the conference only, but ended by staying over a week. This was by personal rather than professional choice. Once away from Moscow, I realised how much I’d needed the break. Five months of steady routine made the overnight trip a happy adventure.

The conference was the usual kind: wholly uninformed and puffily ignorant politicians seeking ‘mutual understanding’ and ‘the path to lasting amity between our two great nations’, and exchanging toasts, banalities and disingenuous misinformation generously on both sides. The texts of the 130

solemn official declarations contrasted predictably with the participants’ behavior during off-hours. Souvenirs, dirty

stories and free alcohol were the real preoccupations.

As usual, the most interesting stories were the unreportable ones. The American delegation was headed by a rabid anti-Communist and the Russians by a notorious Stalinist who once published a vicious magazine attack in Kom-munist on the ‘worst club in the world, the malodorous American Senate’. Yet these two patriots got on together better than anyone else at the conference — got on, in fact, as splendidly as old members of a small town Rotary Club. It was only fitting that they also looked like brothers: both with roughly the same amount of surplus weight on short frames, distributed to match their gleaming pates and constricted by boxy suits. They exchanged tales of Kansas and Voronezh Province while measuring the relative merits of bourbon and vodka.

Each fed the other’s self-admiration, fondness for ‘plain country folks’ and loathing of effete intellectuals. At the final banquet, they grasped each other around the waist, and through the smoke and my own slight alcoholic haze, I remembered Orwell - for it was impossible from my seat to make out which one was the dirty Commie and which the blood-sucking imperialist.

After the conference, I stayed on in the old Astoria Hotel. Many people exaggerate the differences between Moscow and Leningrad. You can be pushed around just as roughly by Leningrad crowds, and the waitresses can snarl just as nastily. But especially in spring, Leningrad can have a fight and civilized - almost European - air, and you can avoid Moscow’s peasant cloddishness. I wrote a story about an exhibition of paintings by young artists, and another about a department store on the Nevsky Prospekt where the salesgirls actually smiled and asked the customers if they needed help. Afternoons, I walked along the glorious quays and in the Summer Garden. No one knows what would have happened if this Russia had been allowed to grope its way

towards the realities of the Twentieth Century, But when you compare the relics of the ancien regime to vast aesthetic wastelands of Soviet construction, you sometimes wish it could be revived, for all its grievous faults.

When I returned to Moscow, the trees were maturing into their full summer green. Oktyabrina greeted me nonchalantly, grumbling vaguely that the lilies of the valley she'd bought for my arrival had died days ago, and the place was again a mess. It was, but she'd placed bunches of wild violets in cups and glasses, filling the living-room with a pungent smell.

'Aren't you happy to see me, Zhoe darling?'

‘I'm delighted to see you. It's rotten to return to a dead apartment.'

‘Yes, do look around,’ she said slyly. ‘Don't you perceive anything new?’

She broke into her triumphant-smile-that-cannot-quite-be-suppressed look, which announced she was enormously pleased with herself. And indeed: love had come her way again, miraculously. She could hardly believe she deserved this bliss. The new suitor was named Alexander. And Sasha, Sashka and Sashinka, in ascending order of endearment and delight.

My first view of Alexander was in the form of a photograph that had been clipped with bobby pins to a cardboard backing and was propped against the lamp on the table beside the davenport. I wondered whether the subject of such a gloriously propagandistic photograph could be real flesh and blood. But that very evening, Oktyabrina displayed him in person at a metro station called Kirovskaya.

They came together, Oktyabrina curled seemingly two or three times around his smartly-angled arm. She was in step with him and a half step behind; from my angle her legs were wholly hidden behind his boots, and she appeared to be floating. The impression was reinforced by her face, which was raised towards his with adoration and beatitude.

‘How wonderful to see you, Zhoseph dear,’ she said gaily

when she saw me. ‘You’re terribly sweet to take time off from your work/ She slipped between me and Alexander to introduce us. ‘Sasha, this is an old, dear friend. He’s a leading correspondent from . . . fraternal Poland. Zhoseph writes about our Soviet achievements and simply adores everything here.’

The officer clicked his heels effortlessly and brought a graceful salute to his gleaming visor. His voice was a twangy tenor and his speech the Russian equivalent of a small-town GI’s,

‘Greetings, brother. The name’s Zavodin, Alexander Sergeevich. But please don’t call me anything formal like that - I’ll think I’m in hot water.’

He shook my hand vigorously and flashed me a winsome smile - which, together with his beaming eye, flitted over my shoulder for an instant to several flustered, short-skirted girls hovering about in the hope he would look in their direction. His smile returned to me and broadened. I smiled too - as did everyone in the plaza. It was the kind of happy appreciation and involuntary uplift you receive from watching a well-drilled marching band. Alexander was obviously accustomed to this, for he paused to give everyone a full minute’s gaze. Somehow this emerged as a gesture of indulgence to them rather than of vanity on his part.

Yet he had justification for limitless vanity: Alexander was as dazzlingly handsome as his photograph, and his uniform, in sharp contrast to most Army officers’ crumpled sacks, was as neatly pressed. The body underneath was proudly carried and obviously solid - perhaps two or three inches short for Greek-statue perfection, but with a gymnast’s proportions.

His face was even more impressive: the classic Nordic type, garnished with flaxen hair. From head to toe, Alexander was the picture of the glowing, resolute-yet-carefree young proletarian soldier of propaganda posters, standing guard over the map of the Soviet Union - or the grateful world, depending on the theme of the campaign - with a

collection of serene children playing at his feet.

And in fact, Alexander had been a model for one of these very tours de force on the cover of a magazine called Soviet Warrior. It was a copy of this very photograph, smiling and invincible, that Oktyabrina cherished. Alexander had presented it to her on the afternoon of their first meeting, having penned an inscription in a loose hand over the lower corner: 'In War and Peace, in Our Metro and With Our Missiles - On Guard for You Always, Sasha’.

Alexander’s splendor prevented me from getting a more comprehensive impression of him, especially as our first meeting was so brief. He had to report at his dormitory by seven o’clock sharp. 'Regulations are regulations,’ he informed me with an ambiguous wink, adding that 'Chipmunk’, bless her, understood nothing about military timing and discipline. He adjusted his cap so that - or was this accidental? — a lock of lemon hair fell effectively across his forehead.

Alexander offered me his hand again, pivoted and stepped briskly off. Oktyabrina shouted after him petulantly: he’d forgotten her goodbye kiss. He hurried back to peck at her loftily offered cheek. When he strode off again, the sight of him caused a succession of double-takes from passing pedestrians. A little Irish-looking imp in a school uniform tagged by his side.

When he had finally passed from sight, Oktyabrina confessed that the meeting had not gone as well as she had hoped. Alexander was terribly distracted by his work at the moment; it was something fiendishly important and dangerous, which naturally made him appear preoccupied. Besides, he was actually very shy - with strangers, that is. Which made his passion for her - when they were all alone, one and together - all the more precious arid unique. 'And when you take all these difficulties into consideration, the romantic brilliance of our first meeting was all the more . . . well, frankly transcendental.’

For the next two weeks I was to hear about Sasha and nothing but Sasha. He was ‘delicious’, ‘madly gallant’, ‘sensitive in a very special natural way’ and, of course, ‘the absolute quintessence of manliness’. Oktyabrina’s day was a lingering preparation for the evening - not the entire evening, alas, but for the few minutes that Alexander squeezed from his exhausting training schedule. If he couldn’t manage this, Oktyabrina planned and primped for the following evening, or the one after, keeping up a steady stream of talk to herself at the mirror.

Several facts were repeated often enough to seem reliable. Alexander was in training at a new, highly prestigious establishment called the Tactical Missile Academy. The curriculum was merciless. And although young officers merited liberal passes, this had to be understood in the context of Soviet Army traditions - which meant a precious few hours a week. Alexander’s rusty mathematics and physics sometimes made him forgo even that. This is what kept him from seeing Oktyabrina ‘as much as he was burning to’.

When they did meet, it was usually for a few moments at Kirovskaya metro station. Sometimes Alexander brought along a somewhat younger officer named Petya, in which case the conversation, understandably flowed largely between the two soldiers. Oktyabrina came to have mixed feelings about Petya’s presence.

In fact, she had mixed feelings about certain aspects of the romance itself.' ‘I’m going to be excruciatingly honest with you, Zhoe darling,’ she said one morning, ‘because you know me best. This entanglement is not idyllic, and I’m not the kind to build castles in the air. Because one part of me has remained entirely clear-headed while the other part is hopelessly swept off its feet.’

I checked the wire services. When I returned, her monologue seemed grounded at exactly the same point.

‘The sober part tells me he worships me and rejoices. He even has the grace to court me patiently, I mean for my carnal favors. Which is simply inspired for a warrior -

they’re usually so animal... are you listening, Zhoe darling? What’s that dreadful cackle on the radio? . . . But I do recognise that our affair has imperfections. For one thing, it requires utterly fantastic patience from me. And positively superhuman love from him — because the trouble is, there s no time to kindle the ardor. I sometimes don’t know what’s greater, my happiness or suffering.’

However, she had one source of comfort. ‘At least my Sashinka doesn’t look at other women. That’s probably his clean country upbringing. It’s so terribly vulgar, the way city-bred men ogle every passing skirt.

At this point she was silenced by a blast of Tschaikovsky on the radio. It was the opening bars of the First Piano Concerto, which resound four or five times a day to diverse patriotic themes, this time was as background music to a story about Lenin’s First Reading of Marx. But the crashing chords were oddly appropriate because Oktyabrina was preparing to narrate the story of her own discovery again: the First Meeting with Sasha.

Oktyabrina recounted the story - ‘the incredible saga of that first meeting almost daily. But the account finally made sense only after my second meeting with Alexander, at a cafe on Kirov Street, of the same class as those on Petrovka and elsewhere. Because I’d come along, Alexander was able to free himself for a full half hour. His cap lay on an empty chair to avoid smudges on the plastic visor. While Oktyabrina performed the narration, he studied her; his open face expressed a slight amusement that made it more handsome and likable than ever.

It happened on Alexander’s first day in Moscow - his very first day in the capital, and one of his first in any metropolis. He’d arrived by train in the morning from a base in the western Ukraine, on orders to the Academy. He reported to the duty officer and was given an afternoon pass to see the city.

He was overcome by its fantastic size and sweep. He walked from one comer to another, drinking in the famous 136

landmarks and fabulous sights. At last he understood the Red Army saying: ‘Give your life for Mother-Moscow, the jewel of the whole wide world/ Thrilled, exhilarated, awed and (yes, he confessed it) slightly nervous, he sat down on a park bench to rest. For he was also exhausted — more so by the asphalt sidewalks and city noises than by a week of maneuvers. And when a sad peasant woman pleaded with him to buy her flowers, he succumbed, even though he’d never done anything remotely similar in his life. He bought her largest bouquet, simply because of his triumphant mood and eagerness to share his good fortune. The old woman blessed his kindness and promised the flowers would bring him love.

As the time to report approached, he found his way to a metro station. He d never seen anything like it in civilian life; the expense and engineering, the incredible sweep of the concept! And the hydraulic mechanism of the escalator! It could only be compared to the artillery’s best shellhandling equipment. But on his way down to the trains, a power failure occurred - the first one, Oktyabrina later established, in over a decade. (It was all undeniably fated.)

The escalators stopped dead; everything was plunged into total darkness. No panic threatened among the crowds, but on the up escalator just below Alexander, a girl began whimpering in fright. Gently but firmly, he directed her to take control of herself: Soviet citizens, after all, must be courageous and self-disciplined in any emergency. But the girl’s sobs grew louder, and he felt her trembles from the opposite stairs.

He was confused and apprehensive. As senior officer present, he knew that he must take command of the situation, but he’d never been tested by a crisis like this before. Perhaps it happened regularly in Moscow. On the other hand, continued crying by the girl might lead to demoralization, even defeatism! Then he remembered the bouquet, whose stems had grown slightly sweaty in his hand. He reached across and placed it near the girl’s face. The weep-

ing subsided instantly - Sasha thought of a kitten being distracted by a string - and slowly diminished to an occasional sighing sob.

‘Lilac?’ the girl asked, barely audibly.

‘I just bought them, just now.’

‘And narcissus? Tulips?’

‘I think so. Yes of course - you’ve got a fine sense of smell.’

‘My name’s Oktyabrina. I’m not frightened any longer/

‘I’m Alexander - they call me Sasha. Everything’s going to be all right.’

In the darkness, they talked about themselves, recited capsule biographies, and reached for each other’s hands. His were strong but gentle; hers were as delicate as the promise of her voice. The bouquet kept sliding down the railing. Someone had a sneezing fit and they began to laugh.

Then the power came on as suddenly as it had failed, propelling the escalators apart at their usual speed. ‘We waved frantically to each other as his escalator hurled him downward and mine bore me on high - as if on a pedestal. At the bottom landing Sasha dashed onto the up stairs -but at the top, I dashed onto the down. We zoomed past each other again, laughing at our own predicament as if we were the oldest, fondest friends. ... By the time we actually met, dear Zhoseph - well, neither of us is religious, of course, but we both perceived that this was something anointed.’

‘Aw shucks,’ said Alexander softly. ‘You’re too much, little Chipmunk. You add something new every time.’

‘Shame on you Sashka darling. You’ve forgotten half already. If I don’t remember, who else will?’

Oktyabrina gazed at him aglow with a delirious-happiness-at-my-man’s-side expression. But a moment later, a discrepant expression took command: the desperate-need-for-a-bathroom look, no doubt caused by the excitement of her long narrative.

‘I’ll be right back ,’ she warbled. ‘Don’t dream of saying anything juicy while I’m away.’ She dashed towards the 138

door, trailing her gauzy mantilla over the dirty floor. When she’d gone, Alexander gracefully withdrew a quarter-liter bottle of vodka from under his tunic and offered me a swig. Under-the-overall vodka boozers in that kind of cafe are usually the sort who literally drink away their pay and lurch home to punch their wives. But Alexander’s gesture was so open, and he in general was so artless and good-natured that I would have been coarse to refuse.

He retrieved the bottle and wiped the lip with his palm. His boyish smile remained fixed during his own swig, allowing a trickle of vodka to escape down his chin. He wiped it with the back of the same hand and examined the bottle.

Tm not really fond of this white stuff,’ he admitted. ‘But the pressures of modern life. . . . Frankly, I’m beginning to spot plain hogwash - higher up, where there should be solid sense.’

‘What seems to be troubling you, Alexander?’

‘Nothing really. Only I wish they’d stick to the missiles and battle games, without all that ideology we have. Ideology, political vigilance - all that stuff makes you stiff in the ass.’

The second swallow of vodka was more pleasant than the first. Alexander was in an uncommonly loquacious mood.

‘I don’t know how you teach it in Poland, of course. But what’s troubling me, frankly, is the confusion in our Party line. On one front, we’re battling the American imperialists - that I understand. But now the enemy’s also inside the socialist bloc - Yugoslav revisionists, Chinese adventurists... What do I care? Let them all catch the plague.

He inspected my cigarette fighter at arm’s length. One eye was closed, as if he were sighting a rifle.

‘What do you do for your political exams?’ I asked, sensing a story. ‘I’d imagine “catching the plague” is a fairly weak answer.’

‘That’s the trouble: I keep forgetting the new answers.’ He leaned closer and lowered his voice. ‘But whenever I’m in real trouble, brother, I reach down in my memory for a

juicy quote about the Party's relentless struggle against all enemies of the working class. And sprinkle Lenin's name everywhere - it gets them every time.'

He treated himself to another large swig. ‘Yes sir, most people is just aching to be bamboozled.’

‘Never mind, Alexander. In vodka veritas.'

‘The girls, for instance. That yam about never seeing a big city before - it always gets them, every dam time. Works even better in Leningrad - you should see the broads dying to drop their drawers in that old town. You should see the drawers up there - genuine nylon!’

It was no doubt my expression which caused the swift transformation of his. Suddenly, I felt a wave of repugnance for this fop of a soldier and his implications. To take advantage of Oktyabrina and boast about it required a special vulgarity. Just as suddenly, he became humbly repentant, like a Norman Rockwell kid caught at the wheel of a neighbor's car.

‘Listen brother, you've got things wrong. I didn’t mean to insult your gal. Anything you do with the Chipmunk is fine with me. The more loving you do, the less fighting and hating you’ll get into, I always say. ... So about the Chipmunk: relax, 1 don’t mind. If you're poking her, good luck to the both of you!’

This was too much. First he seemed to be bragging about his conquests - now about mine.

‘Now listen yourself, Zavodin. She's not my “gal" and I'm not making love to her. Nobody is. Can't a veteran Romeo like you see that?'

‘Sure I see that about the Chipmunk, I ain’t blind. Only I didn't see it then, on the escalator - you couldn't see nothing until the power came on. A city packed with classy nookie and I meet her the first day! Skin and bones - and her rags for camouflage. ... Foul luck, brother - and now you won't drink with me.'

It was my turn for repentance. ‘So you did meet in the metro,' I said. ‘That's something, at least. Tell me exactly 140

what happened, from the beginning/

That s where we met all right, but not the way she likes to invent. I never knew nothing until she was shoving some posies up my nose. Posies make me sneeze. Then, out on the street, she keeps tailing me - I can’t hurt her feelings, can I? I never do, even when I don’t want to poke them. So I say hello Little One” — and that’s my mistake: it gets harder to escape, day by day. You tell me how to slip the collar, I can t think. The wrong word from me - it’ll break her little Chipmunk’s heart/

At this moment an outburst shattered the cafe’s listless routine. A filthy man at the counter began cursing the girl who was dishing out the soup. While gazing at Alexander, she apparently scalded the man’s hand with a misaimed ladle. He reached for her, slipped, and demanded a glass of vodka. The girl was joined in defense by several colleagues in dirty smocks.

Without a word, Alexander and I rose, and went to the door through which Oktyabrina had gone. When she reappeared a few minutes later, the mantilla was wrapped around the lower part of her face.

‘Guess who , darling/ she sang to Alexander. ‘For a man in love, no disguise conceals the eyes. . . . Please don’t go back to those dreadful barracks now. Succumb to your instincts and let’s do something glorious tonight/

Alexander glanced at me with puzzlement and desperation. He took Oktyabrina’s hands in his; she touched her head to his shoulder. He flushed, making an interesting contrast between the smooth skin of his neck and the starched olive drab of his collar.

After this, it was painful to see them together. I joined them just often enough to have a picture of their ‘wooing’ moments. They would meet at the metro station and set forth on a short walk. Two or three saucy working girls would be sure to follow them, swinging their handbags gaily and chattering to be overheard. This was a daring

deed; however submissive Russian girls are, they almost never take such obvious initiative. But Alexander was strong bait, and gave them the necessary encouragement: when Oktyabrina s attention was momentarily deflected by a shop window, he would glance back, hardly moving his body, and transmit to them a devastating come-closer smile.

But of course Oktyabrina’s attention was not really caught by any shop window; she was scrutinizing Alexander’s every

movement through his reflection in the dirty glass. She was also fighting back tears of despair, for she’d pretended not to notice the girls. Finally, her control would give way. ‘Those pathetic creatures’ she would say, ‘making a spectacle of themselves. Shall I chase them away, Sashka beloved? Are you exhausted this evening?’

‘Chase who away?’ Alexander would ask, frowning intently. ‘Gosh, you mean them girls? Ain’t they a silly sight!’

Eventually the girls would turn a comer, to Alexander’s disappointment and Oktyabrina’s greater relief. But before they’d parted, more pairs would have succeeded them. Alexander kept track of the last pair’s movements, for after having kissed Oktyabrina goodbye, he would search for them. After the resolution of our misunderstanding, he confided to me that his secret was always letting girls give the first signal. When he tried to ‘corral’ one of his own liking, he invariably felt awkward; and in ten to twenty per cent of the cases, the girls wouldn’t ‘take the poke’ the first time. But when they took the initiative, success was almost certain. The only trouble was finding a place. He often did it by standing a girl against a tree in a park and ‘coming in backwards’. But this sometimes bothered him because he remembered certain men’s fondness for farm animals in his old village. ‘Maybe we’re animals too,’ he said solemnly, ‘but at least we can make it comfortable for our mates.’

There was an old Army saying that particularly disgusted him: ‘A sheep’s face will do - it’s the cunt you screw.’ He may be a bit of a rogue himself, he admitted, but there was something beautiful about girls, each and every one of them. 142

They were more like butterflies than sheep. The trouble was there were so many of them to admire, and they all died so soon. ...

14

Meanwhile, we had settled into the steady warmth of early summer. Throughout Russia, it is a quietly joyous time -more fervently embraced and venerated than elsewhere because winter is so much longer and more cruel. A burden is lifted from the psyche as overcoats are lifted from the shoulders. Hope and levity, even frivolity, infuse the air - intensified by everyone’s repressed knowledge that the escape is ephemeral: in a dozen weeks, winter’s avant-garde will be waiting to numb you again. You receive warm days with reverence, therefore - not because you deserve them, but because the Russian psychology of siege and hardship has convinced you that the reprieve is not deserved.

I was working now at somewhat less than my usual pace, which was far too slow for someone running a bureau alone. But my conscience had melted soon after the last dirty snowbank, and I surrendered to belated spring fever. My office window was wide open, filling the room with diesel exhaust from trucks lumbering below the building. But there were also whiffs of moist earth and greenery, and I thought how strange it was to savor the smells of Michigan and Minnesota at a distance of ten thousand miles, in a disparate world.

I found myself spending more time than in winter with two American colleagues - somewhat younger men who wrote for influential East Coast newspapers. Perhaps the nostalgia of summer smells prompted this; perhaps a shift in my feelings about America and Americans. Like most other aspects of life here, this one is subject to stages.

I’d now reached the stage where I could do without the

American Embassy's mothering, and avoid almost all of its social calendar without wholly sacrificing the company of Americans themselves. I hadn’t had a close American friend since the correspondent of the other Chicago paper had been reassigned over a year before. But I liked to pass an occasional evening with my two younger colleagues, perhaps because their freedom from wives also freed them from Embassy obligations and tensions. One man was a summer bachelor whose wife had departed for a long Florida vacation, the other was recently divorced and badly wanted the company of a Russian girl friend - almost badly enough to dismiss the Embassy's dire warnings about such arrangements. There was no need with these men to exhibit love of everything ‘back home' and disapproval of everything Soviet, or vice-versa. It was simply a few hours of poker and beer - which began under natural light, since it was now bright well after supper. Bourbon and old locker-room stories often supplemented the beer.

Kostya and I were seeing more of each other too, almost in direct proportion to the rise in temperature. Our meetings took place not in his room or my apartment (in which he prudently never set foot) but in the great Russian outdoors. Every year Kostya waited impatiently for the first faint hint of warmth from the sun's rays through a closed window. When the signal came, he dashed to a nearby pond, reservoir or river to tear off his clothes and ‘soak up Helios’s potence’.

‘As everybody knows,’ he'd say in his pseudo-somber voice, ‘Communist sunshine blindingly transcends capitalist. Because it's free for all the people. Unobstructed by the clouds of exploitation, etcetera. Thank you again, dear Party - and let us not forget the sky and stars, together with the Lamp of Heaven - oops, of Lenin.'

Alongside the river or pond,- it could still be too chilly to take off your jacket, not to speak of shirts and underclothes. But Kostya would strip to his prized Japanese swimming trunks and spread-eagle without a towel on the damp clayey 144

bank. It was often in Silver Pine forest, a river-bound island that serves as a municipal retreat. Trucks and barges shuttling to raw construction projects jarred the ancient countryside's beautiful harmony, but enough old houses and stretches of eroded river bank remained to evoke the spirit of old Russia and its serene sadness.

We would laze about on the rich-smelling bank - together with a grateful ‘lassie' or two, if Kostya had brought them -and the afternoons slipped away before we'd fully settled in. Kostya talked about his Navy days and plans for his summer vacation, already well advanced. Almost every year, he contrived to spend two full months in the luxurious south, on or near the Black Sea. This meant wangling permission somehow for double the normal leave from his job, then finding accommodation in one of the resorts — usually by means of a healthy, well-placed bribe - and scraping together the comparative fortune needed for finance. Altogether it required a considerable effort in his metier of metiers; beating the system.

At the moment, he was maneuvering to secure a place on a hiking tour of the Caucasus for the girls of a Geology Institute. He d sold his beloved Philips tape recorder, and was using the proceeds to ‘encourage' the tour's organizer, an elderly assistant professor, to ‘co-opt' him on to the expedition. His aim was to be classified as a patriotic volunteer to carry the sleeping bags and pitch the tents.

‘Who needs Monte Carlo? What sane man would spend his vacation in the rat-race called Capri? Listen, Zhoe, buddy: all those spots are unhealthily overcrowded, and the profound humanity of our Public health services saves us from risking our vigor there. Write an article about me with twenty-two exploration-happy University females, two strong-limbed lassies to a tent, and every Riviera playboy will beg to swap places with me in my naked mountain pass.,'

Kostya asked about ‘the kid’. Oktyabrina, he complained, had stopped coming around since meeting ‘the sniper boy’.

She’d told him she had no time; Alexander took every minute and was madly jealous besides. Kostya was uncharacteristically annoyed by this, perhaps because he had a record of staying in touch with all his old girls. He disapproved of soldiers on principle, and for some reason, felt jealous on my behalf. ‘If I were you I’d boot the boy in the jodhpurs and lay it on the line with the kid/

‘I knew a career officer in the army once/ he said. ‘It was back in ’37 when we were working twelve hours a day down coal mines in the Donbass. This lovely fellow was in charge of the People’s Security - vigilantly averting sabotage by the likes of us, the happy working class. The Colonel used to get rather annoyed by losing his monthly salary in our poker game. So he arrested the steady winners and exposed them as enemies of the people. They finished life in labor camps, and he began taking a few pots. Yes sir, the regular Army’s the place for Soviet humanism - ail brains and heart.’

A man with a badly matched wig and blaring transistor radio settled himself above us on the bank. The program was about a cement factory that had volunteered for higher production norms. When Kostya could stand it no longer, he shouted a request to change programs. The man tuned in the other station, which was offering a medley of revolutionary marching songs.

‘That’s a bit better, don’t you think, Zhoe buddy?’ asked Kostya. ‘I’ve heard that you Westerners actually love that patriotic stuff. Maybe I’ll cut an album and ship it to Hollywood. I’ll call it Music to Vote By. Make a fortune - but of course I’d never agree to touch the dirty dollars without gloves/

It was inevitable that Oktyabrina would one day see Alexander outside their rendezvous time. Whenever we were out of doors together, her neck was craned and eyes peeled for him like a gazelle at a water hole. When it came,, their encounter was the product of an extraordinary combination 146

of circumstances. The first element was a sudden blistering heatwave, in late June. It had the usual Moscow characteristics: a searing sun generating tropical vapors and occasional prodigious clouds, with lightning seemingly changed by the whole of the continental land mass. The hardest element was the lack of air. Russian buildings are made for Russian winter; many windows have been permanently sealed, and without an edict, shop managers are reluctant even to open both panels of a door.

The noon news report announced the temperature was ninety-one degrees and climbing. I wrote a brief story about the heat, omitting any mention of the smells it generated -a sudden shortage of toilet soap a week before had emptied store shelves - and planned to stay in refuge in the flat. Oktyabrina was profoundly listless. Alexander was on duty that whole weekend, she reported. He couldn’t manage a single meeting.

Our patience ran out in mid-afternoon. The humidity was oppressive, yet exhilarating - even exotic. A steamy, sensual throbbing pulsed on the streets. It lured us towards some cheap distraction.

We followed the call to Gorky Park of Culture and Recreation, which houses the largest collection of what the day cried for: amusements and rides. Unfortunately, half the city’s population had hearkened to the same call. Like a double-header crowd converging on Wrigley Field, a torrent of amusement-seekers surged toward the park from the metro exit. Once swept into the sea of damp flesh blocked up at the entrance, it was impossible to get free, even if we’d changed our minds. The smell was overwhelming. A ludicrously pretentious, totally superfluous Greco-Roman portal straddled the gate - the final Coney Island touch. At last Oktyabrina and I reached the end of the sieve and were shot into the park, like particles by a cyclotron.

Inside, fractionally more air and room were available,

but a convoy of farm trucks bearing down on a village could not have kicked up more dust from the paths. Crews of maintenance workers hosed them down - taking pleasure in dousing everyone in range - but it was so hot that the water evaporated instantly, and a hundred thousand pairs of shuffling feet continued to propel gritty clouds into the air and our faces.

‘Shall I give you an old Russian saying about heat?’ asked Oktyabrina gaily. ‘Or about crowds, if you prefer. Close your eyes and you can picture Hades with a shortage of gas masks. . . . But there’s something marvelously abandoned about all this holy mess, isn’t there, Zhoe, darling?’

‘I haven’t had so much fun since KP in basic training.’

‘“KP” meaning Kommunisticheskaya Partiya ? You rascal, why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Careful, Oktyabrina darling. That ice cream is headed straight for your nose.

The threatening cone was held aloft by a hand whose owner was untraceable in the tangle of bodies. How he or she had managed to buy it was a mystery: the lines at the stalls beggared description. Even without lines, it took minutes to negotiate a few yards along the paths, and policemen were busy trying to drive everyone from what was left of the grass. Oktyabrina and I found ourselves entrapped in a monumental jam behind the open air auditorium, where a political agitator with a microphone was delivering a deafening harangue. The subject was ‘The Victory of Leninist Proletarian Internationalism in the Yemen’. To this hymn, weary hundreds were gratefully dozing in their seats. At least they’d found some kind of entertainment, and a place to rest.

Elsewhere the noise was equally devastating: caterwauling babies racked with thirst, charwomen shouting in snack bars, a public address system blaring Sunday Leniniana. . . . Yet the extraordinary thing was that most people were enjoying the day not as something camp, but at face value. Just being in the park was a treat; it was enough to watch 148

the lucky few who had secured places on the ferris wheel, and were now ooh-ing and ah-ing in appreciation and alarm as their gondolas swung upward towards cleaner air and a splendid panorama of the baking city.

Oktyabrina and I watched the ferris wheel too. A rare helicopter hovered over it for a moment, then flew off on its limping way up river, towards the Kremlin. Because of this, or because of her trouble seeing over the wall of shoulders, it is possible that she did not notice the olive-drab in a gondola starting its descent. The uniform belonged to Alexander - a model, despite the weather, for a Coke ad in Times Square. Across from him was a smaller officer with a crewcut - evidently Petya.

Petya’s girl was attractive in a clean-cut way; Alexander s was a sizzling young tart. She had a gymnast’s build - the perfect complement to his - and was fully aware of it, even while making a show of fright on the wheel. She thrust her cheeky breasts towards Alexander’s face and gripped him in the armpit. The sun’s hard rays blazed on the chemical topaz of her hair; one poster-perfect leg, visible through the gondola’s mesh, wound itself round Alexander’s. Altogether, she was a sexy combination of vulgarity and health.

I called Oktyabrina’s attention to a young father near us, carrying handsome twins on his shoulders. She was enchanted by the sight. Then we pushed our way towards the river bank in search of fresh air. Alexander was not mentioned. I now felt there was a good chance she hadn’t seen him; otherwise, she’d surely have wanted to examine the girl. As it was, she soon wished to go home and he down - to lose herself in sacred solitude for at least a year. But this could have been caused by the crowds and an entirely understandable exhaustion.

When we staggered home at last, Oktyabrina poured herself a glass of milk, the ‘liquid of life’, but her ‘Pull the teats without heart, the milk will be tart! ’ emerged as wanly as her smile. She retired to the bedroom and closed the door. I made a mental note to forgo amusement parks for

another ten years, and congratulated myself on preventing a too-brutal confrontation with the truth in the park. Why is self-congratulation so often premature?

15

On Monday it was even hotter and the infatuation with the novelty of sweltering had turned to general fatigue. The newspapers had already begun their campaign for Metallurgists’ Day on the coming Sunday, but half of Moscow’s metal workers, together with anyone else who had the imagination, were playing truant from work.

On Tuesday, it was a shade cooler. Shortly after Oktyabrina arrived at the apartment, we went down for mineral water and beer, since the supplies were certain to be exhausted by noon. When we stepped out into the dazzling sun, a company of soldiers was trudging up a street leading from the Ring Road. They were presumably headed for the Central Club of the Soviet Army, a half mile away. The marching order was sloppier than usual, no doubt because of the heat. In their ponderous, year-round boots and coarse tunics they looked as happy as polar bears in an African zoo.

Oktyabrina’s practiced eye explored the ranks rapidly, and for some reason she appeared relieved that Alexander wasn’t there. Then we saw him simultaneously: he was leading the company. Sweat had soaked through his tunic in the back, and for the first time he looked older than twenty.

Before I missed her, Oktyabrina had ducked into the food shop where we’d been headed. She must have jumped the line at the dairy counter and slapped down a ruble without waiting for change. For in less than a minute, she emerged with a half-liter bottle of milk.

The scene that followed was not as remarkable as it might seem because there is an old tradition of Russian women 150

pressing loaves of bread and jars of water into the hands of grateful soldiers and convicts trudging dusty steppe roads. Nevertheless, the glint in Oktyabrina’s eye suggested not almsgiving, but revenge.

The bottle was pearly in the sun and dripped freely with condensation. She held it with outstretched arms like an offering, and marched steadfastly towards Alexander. He observed her from the comer of his eye while his head wheeled in a search for an escape route. In vain: the ambush was perfectly laid.

When Alexander turned directly to Oktyabrina, as a last resort, his blue eyes gushed pain and pleading: please disappear, I’ll give you anything you want later, but not in front of my soldiers. Oktyabrina marched resolutely towards him with a serene face and Mona Lisa smile, through which she was humming ‘Forward Comrades for Party and Motherland , a well-known Army song. By this time, several people on the sidewalk had noticed the spectacle and were spreading the word about it. Sensing a good laugh, the ranks of Alexander’s company revived.

Alexander raised his arm and was about to say something, but Oktyabrina got in the first word. She was now directly across the street from him, but she shouted loud enough for the last rank to hear and savor.

Aloha, Sashinka, darling — wait for me. I brought you something wonderfully refreshing. Take this and sip

Alexander looked despairingly at his men, hoping against hope that they would take Oktyabrina for an eccentric stranger.

‘My beloved, you’ve lost at least a kilo since Friday. On duty all weekend like that in the heat . . . you’re dangerously dehydrated. Now stop this silly marching for a moment and refresh yourself. Drink drink drink!

‘I always knew it,’ said Alexander miserably, humiliation disfiguring his splendid countenance. ‘You’re no Chipmunk, you’re a polecat - you need a cage. Now scram , before I. .. before I. . .’

Oktyabrina strode on through the bunched soldiers. They had broken rank for the view, but now parted again to clear her path for presentation of the 'refreshment’ to Alexander. Their guffaws concentrated on the implied slur of the bottle’s contents and possible connection with Alexander’s pretty face. It was 'baby’s milkie’ instead of the drink of real men, above all Army men - especially Russian Army men.

‘Shame shame on you,’ Oktyabrina chided them collectively. A cow in the yard means milk on the table — that s the kind of national heritage you big burly things are supposed to be defending. Only a dunce sees pleasure in vodka.

This struck the soldiers as so charmingly zany that they seized Oktyabrina and flung her into the air in the traditional Russian toast to heroes and good fellows. A happy cheer and spray of sweat accompanied each airward trip. Oktyabrina clutched the bottle; her expression alternated between rapture over the attention she’d secured and terror of physical hurt. Alexander tried desperately to restore order, knowing that were a senior officer to drive past his career would be mangled.