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His bashful mother had been sent to good schools until she met his future father in an art class. When she disclosed her pregnancy to Grandfather, he thundered that the painter could barely support himself, let alone a wife and child. He gave the young artist a purseful of rubles and a train ticket to Tashkent.
When Alyosha was a year old, his mother heeded the call of letters delivered by a loyal art student as intermediary, and followed her beloved to wild Central Asia. The baby stayed home while she supposedly took the waters, planning to win Grandfather over by returning home married: loving mother and father of the child Granny himself adored. She caught typhoid fever in Tashkent and returned in six months instead of two weeks—to die. Alyosha's Rostov aunt was summoned to help raise him, but he was unmanageable by the age of twelve and grew up largely on Moscow's rowdy streets.
The only person who might have controlled him had also died prematurely. Tough old Granny's ruin was accomplished in stages, starting with the confiscation of most of his property soon after the Revolution, only to have some returned during Lenin's later policy of encouraging small-business private enterprise to revive the country's gasping economy. But Stalin shifted the line again, more violently than ever; those who had been urged to cultivate their own gardens were first to be harvested in Bolshevik baskets. Grandfather paid the punishing taxes, and new collectors knocked. He sold everything, but the assessments only rose and he was dragged to jail for nonpayment. The circumstances of his death were never established. Rumors reached Alyosha that someone had denounced him for hoarding gold and that he was starved in an attempt to make him reveal his nonexistent treasure chest; but the young boy had no way of checking. By the time he became skilled in researching such matters after the war, the records, if they had ever existed, were lost.
"And your grandmother?"
"Took off" with my aunt for her old village where there was more chance to save us. They tried like hell to keep me there and raise me, but of course I ran away."
We were about to drive off" to an early movie when he asked
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me to circle around the back of an apartment building facing the attractive little park where the V^olga had been parked.
"Know what Young Communist Ponds was before?'" he queried.
"Something better." I remembered that he sometimes went out of his way to pass this spot—for the sake, I thought, of its touch of the Russian outdoors.
"It was Patriarchal Ponds. They changed it."
But this was more than the lead to one of his discourses on the renaming of everything evocative in the country. The building we now went out to look at had been the site of one of his grandfather's two hotels. This one, moreover, housed one of the city's best and most rollicking restaurants, an emporium of gypsy girls, lavish-spending merchants and eccentric characters, of suckling pigs and a hundred delectable, now forgotten, native dishes. A veritable microcosm of Old Moscow with private rooms for whoopee and thirty varieties of vodka—and, in fact, it had been featured in an obscure book called Moscow and Muscovites that celebrated the most colorful prerevolutionary haunts.
"They demolished it in 1933. Cost too much to run without Granny; and anyway, it didn't fit in with the new Soviet capital. Had the wrong associations; they stuffed it with dynamite."
Suddenly I realized many things. Alyosha would have been heir to a minor fortune if not for the Revolution: might have been precisely the kind of playboy I used to picture him in California. But until now, he'd never so much as hinted that personal loss played any part in his lampooning of Soviet rule. His complaints of the lackluster and "anti-pleasure principle" of Moscow life never mentioned his grandfather's unwilling contribution to the general sacrifice of merriment and color. Perhaps something in the story shamed him; perhaps only thoughts about life and death—the operation was coming next week— regenerated these memories. In any case, I couldn't ask: telling the story of Grandfather had tired him; he wanted to say no more for the moment.
But I had only begun to think. I felt I was approaching an understanding of how his intelligence and wisdom were related to the sirhple-minded wenching that first attracted me to him. Might his fondness for feeding Moscow's girls be an unconscious
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link to the self-made innkeeper who provided the only model of sturdiness in his fluid childhood? Was that the source, in any case, of his extraordinary energy, rationalism and quickness with figures?
But Granny's persecution reminded me of something I sensed would be even more important when I could place it. It came during the movie: Alyosha was closer to Till Eulenspiegel than the Peck's Bad Boy I used to see in him. Like the German lad's, his wandering adventures had been set going by an inexplicable witch hunt of an innocent Grandfather. Properly interpreted, he and his practical jokes had the makings of a twentieth-century legend. And the fetes, I realized abruptly, were not foolish, but as symbolic of Russia's condition as Pushkin's Feast During the Plague. Alyosha was the sustainer of this tradition.
We drove to the Juridical Consultation Office. Having transferred his best cases, he was waiting for an under-the-table cut from the defense of a former vice-minister's son. Party instructions to the prosecutor made it a fascinating case, but I could only think of the epic of Alyosha and his grandfather. There was much more here than a century of sad, wild and triumphant episodes; even more than one peasant family's turbulent chronicle. It was a potential allegory of national life, since Granny was the ceaselessly enterprising and ambitious kind who would have taken over the country if the Bolshevik cadres hadn't, and under other circumstances, Alyosha too might have been the opposite of a pleasure-seeker.
The rest of the day, I had to keep myself from blurting out that he must write his life story. At last I'd recognized its full importance. It would be a spellbinding saga; just the sketches of his clients alone, the long list of rogues and misfortunates, promised a hundred amazing yarns. Mixed with a record of his own peregrinations, it would tell more about Russia—and whatever The Russian Idea stood for in life, politics and literature—than anything I could think of And he was the man to write it. The structural elegance of his legal briefs, comic fluency of his letters and vividness of his conversation guaranteed a narrative masterpiece with just a bit of effort. All this must not be allowed to die—which was precisely the reason why I couldn't think of a tactful way to put this to him.
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We picked at a snack, lit the candles and settled into chairs. As if he'd been reading my mind, he again began to talk about his grandfather's skills. The old man could predict which peasant produced the best wheat for which millers and bakers; and although hardly aware of it as a child, this expertise, all but forgotten in the country, was now acquiring a strange importance for him. He even had a notion to write about it, and put down a few things about his own life at the same time.
I jumped up to applaud. I'd smuggle out the manuscript, I pressed—and if he could prove his father was Jewish in order to emigrate, the royalties would give him life security abroad. Again and again, I urged him to begin; what I did not say was that if the operation went badly, at least there would be a record of the extraordinary phenomenon he was. But he sensed this too.
"You've got a deal. I've got a baby to give birth to. 'My Issue,' edited and translated by muchacho.''''
The next day passed without the promised start. And the following morning we had to be at the clinic early for an examination by the senior consultant. Trying not to nag, I mentioned the Confessions, as we'd already titled them, as often as I could, suggesting that he begin with the tape recorder. I had the sinking feeling that this would join the hundred projects forgotten in the chase of one more girl, the throwing together of yet another last-minute supper. But this time the failure was more understandable and less admissible. It was too late. Alyosha could continue coasting, but he was too tired for anything of such grand design.