He considered writing an essay that would trace some of the stable elements in Russian life through delineation of the girls' attitudes: the uncomplicated goodness, exemplified by the unself-conscious physical contact that comforts and fortifies the beleaguered nation. In this time of women's lib, his contribution would be as relevant as his stillborn chronicle of Tashkent. But he got bogged down deciding whether to make it a sociological study or an account of his personal observations. Too detached to capture Russian girls' beguiling informality, a scholarly treatise would mislead more than enlighten; too frivolous-sounding to be taken seriously, a first-person sketch might damage his academic career. This project too was abandoned.
But not thoughts about it. "I think I'll pack it in with you for the day," he says as we leave the cafeteria. "Wait for me in the main hall? I'll show you something."
I do wait while he pulls himself up the stairs to the reading
The Lenin Library"^ 123
room and hands in his books. The lines at the cloakroom counters have almost disappeared, and one of the attendants is displaying his dental work to a female colleague. When Joe comes down again, past the check-out matron and the policewoman, we put on our overcoats and step into the momentarily refreshing cold. He leads me over a bus and trolley route, grinning when I press him for our destination. I spent one afternoon with him searching for Ray-O-Vac batteries for a gadget fanatic, and a full day trying to establish whether a 1921 one-hundred-dollar bill, which a prerevolutionary publishing family had fearfully hid in an attic these fifty years, is still legal currency in America. But he'll only say that I'm in for "something completely different" in a moment.
We turn a corner to an impressive new physical culture institute that trains sports coaches and "amateur" athletes. One of the few Americans willing to risk bluffing his way past the pass-checkers at gates, Joe takes the lead today by talking to me in Russian about weight lifting loudly enough for the guard to overhear. Our final steps lead to the balcony of a huge gymnasium, below which a class of girl gymnasts is training, the cheeky sexiness of their tight boobs and behinds protruding from wash-shrunken leotards. I whistle to myself thinking of my best friend Alyosha—who has probably screwed half the class; and for the other half, if he'd only see them as I am now, he would swing down to the floor mats by overhead ropes, like Tarzan.
For a half hour, we stare explicitly at their darling parts, but this fails to penetrate their concentration on splits, twirls and headstands, just as old Joe's probing elbow went unnoticed in metro crowds. The blondie I find myself following most is almost my mind's eye image of Barbara. As the afternoon wanes, I suddenly realize something about my friend.
"You come here often. Professor?"
"Pipe down. There's research and research. Does it beat the Lenin Library?"
Alyosha
Seven o'clock one February morning: the gauntest hour I've seen on land. Cold so prodigious that the continent seems paralyzed, squeezing a chant from my depths to the cosmic forces. Wind moaning as if through Arctic forests and snow reflecting the stars' phantom gleam while a specter probes the eastern horizon: not yet dawn, but promise of an end to the deathly night. Frost on my eyebrows and the mittened hand of a girl called Alia clutching mine as we pick our way through drifts and debris toward the road, two tire tracks meandering along the horizon. (When we reach it, will we see the top of the world?) My head throbs with fatigue, my senses pound with the eerie beauty—and with a premonition of danger: my activities here would anger the American authorities as well as the Soviet.
We are somewhere in the western outskirts of the city, in a new housing development with the look of a Siberian industrial site cut from the forest. Finished now, as construction here is finished,
AIyosha^l25
with pipes unconnected and unopenable doors, the raw buildings are fully inhabited by grateful tenants, although a tangle of dirty paths over the ice must serve for sidewalks, haphazard in the Russian manner and strewn with bottles and broken bricks. But in the tundra-like vastness swallowing the twelve-story structures, what significance has disorder as petty as this?
Around us, mute figures in black overcoats are setting out to work, feeling their way over the paths and through the hoary mist as if moved by radio signals from some Orwellian Ministry of Labor. Like us, they are making obliquely for the distant road. At the closest curve, a battered construction truck bounces along it, lights on, groaning and rattling, trailing a banner cloud of frozen exhaust and the night's new snow. The pedestrians trudging along the shoulder disperse mechanically at the sound, unwilling to raise their faces from the sanctuary of their collars. In the distance, a group has clustered at the lone streetcar stop, bunching together like peasants fleeing the Nazi advance at a railroad crossing.
Alia and I have said nothing since leaving the apartment; we are silenced by the shock of moving directly from that world to this. She strides along the path ahead of me now, head down and teeth chattering. Ruled by my feeling for her, an unaccountable combination of comradeship and prurience, incest and pastoral innocence, I follow in her intrepid footsteps. Or is my awe of the natural forces aggrandizing my conception of her? I know the adventure I'm living inclines me to rhapsodize, but even the plodding part of me I keep in reserve can't separate the effects of a universe of numbing cold from the instincts of self-preservation that drive us through it. Of the mute whiteness that subdues everything beneath it to the body heat of AUa's loins and legs. If I idealize her flesh, it is through the same perception that senses something exalted in this climate's cruelty; the exhilaration of being tested and surviving. This is the link—the zoological instincts of sex and life—between yesterday's lust and the morning's forward motion.
The crunching of snow crust under her boots gradually quickens. She is a physiotherapist at a clinic near St. Basil's and must be there, in uniform, by eight o'clock. I'm going back to my room to sleep. We have just come from another orgy during
126^MOSCOW FAREVS^LL
which we made so much love, so freely and furiously, that Alyosha's thick morning coffee has made me slightly sick.
Last night we were five: Alia and I, Alyosha Aksyonov and two girls recruited earlier in the evening, en route to the "fete"—counter girls in a dingy dairy whose last names were neither asked for nor offered, although they gave body and soul to the paganism. Essential virgins (except for a cellar episode or two with tanked Russian boys) who went speechless when Alia suddenly gulped the last of her wine and stripped to her panties.
Again, it was the girls' reaction that most fascinated me. So many new pairs repeating the pattern, yet confounding me each time with whether to believe what I see. Since I knew what to expect from them, the other characters in the small cast, although more extraordinary, surprised me less. "Efficient" Alia, the stewardess-like twenty-three-year-old whom Alyosha has been seeing for weeks, and who had to stay home yesterday— bringing the party to her apartment—for the expected call from her traveling husband. Older and higher-class than the average participant, she is also more laconic and outwardly self-contained. And Alexei Aksyonov, the fabulous, notorious, adored and much-imitated Alyosha who lives the charmed life of a playboy and universal fixer and has become, after too long without one, my best friend. My tutor, protector and indulgent provider—everything summed up in muchacho, his nickname for me, pronounced as if I'm a newly discovered nephew.