When Alyosha first approached the girls on Kirov Street, flustered blushes showed through the glow of their cheeks in the cold. Two tallish, robust lasses in worn overcoats and clodhopper boots, who caught his lynx eye amid a shopping street's thinning evening crowd. Arm in arm, unlipsticked lips pressed close to thick ear muffs for transmission of girlish chitchat, they were wending home after work with the telltale look of having nothing to do, no money to spend, too few memories—certainly of good times with gallant suitors—to reminisce about. Offspring of the Moscow proletariat and dreamers of romance, having read Pushkin and Lermontov last year in school, who had begun to perceive that their lives would be spent behind cheese counters or with husbands, when hooked, who preferred vodka.
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A strand of neon painted their faces as they crossed the otherwise shadowy street. Spying them from the driver's seat, Alyosha braked, parked and leaped out in a single motion. Of all I love in him, the great constant is the contrast he represents to everything surrounding him: his agility in unrelievedly ponderous streets, deftness in the homeland of the stolid and slow-moving, spontaneous wit where solemnity is a national institution. Alyosha the graying leprechaun in the country of hulk and drudge. His charm begins with his movements, whose fluidity predisposes even weary bystanders to smile, recalling carefree childhood moments. When I caught up, he had already introduced himself to the girls—"Please forgive me, ladies, may I stop you for just a moment?"—and induced the first laugh.
"Some consider iady' a nasty bourgeois slur. In which case, I take it all back. Comrades. What's a little solecism among friends?"
Mockery of his own eagerness as well as of the human and Soviet condition showed through his ever-so-earnest imploring. Swiftly drawing new women to his confidence and bed, the act of recruitment also prompts old chums to shake their heads in affection. "There's Alyosha for you. Still the naughty boy at fifty; he'll never change."
This particular pursuit took its fated course. While girlish modesty kept the "devoted friends" walking vaguely in their former direction, contending they couldn't consider a stranger's invitation, toothy grins showed that Alyosha's disarming one had done its work. Even when his humor is at their expense, new girls sense that good feeling underlies the mischievous enticements, and that sexual danger will leave them otherwise unharmed.
"Surely no one reared with our humanitarian precepts can be so heartless. IVhy won't you say where you're going? Will you 'fess up if I guess?"
Like a silent movie stock figure, the taller girl tried to mask her delight with a frown of proper affront. Convinced they had protested enough, the other betrayed apprehension that Alyosha might become discouraged. He did not.
"You're en route to an engagement? The conservatory, perhaps? You are—let's think—contrabassoonists? . . . / know: you're late for the evening plane to Cameroon. The country's
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going to pot: Black Africa gobbles up all our best exports. In you go, I'll rush you to the airport."
Giggling openly now—in response to the flattery of his attentions rather than appreciation of the patter: neither had heard of Cameroon or bassoons, let alone the understood triple entendre about "pot"—the girls allowed themselves to be guided into the car. Under a layer of refrigerated air, their overcoats smelled of years of use. Because we knew what was coming, Alyosha and I sensed in their breath, the residue of a cheap brand of bologna on which they had lunched, a fragrance of sex. He stretched a hand toward the back seat to squeeze the girls' in a clinching gesture of welcome, then stopped the car to rearrange the blanket over the bare springs on which they were riding, apologizing for the inconvenience in Fernandel-style profusion. In that one moment he had given them more courtly affection and entertainment than they had seen in real life.
But certain as it was, the lovemaking would come only after preliminary rituals. Alla's apartment, available while her husband was inspecting provincial factories, is near the center of the unfinished development with the sidewalks of bottles and broken bricks. When we arrived, she was frying the potatoes and cubing Alyosha's find of tender beef for Stroganoff. The girls wore the limp skirts and sweaters of my high school's poor twenty years ago. Welcoming them as old friends, although she'd been expecting only Alyosha and me, Alia offered them a bath and ran their water.
Emerging pink and chatty, they experimented with Alla's black market cosmetics, a treat followed by examination of her new Amerika magazine while we three completed the meal's preparations. Alyosha occasionally leaped from the kitchen to attend to their uncertainly held cigarettes with a French butane lighter whose shininess alone flattered their self-esteem. In between, he entertained us all with commentary about why native scientists led the international field in the study of mathematical probabilities and deviation, ending with a homemade punchline blending innuendo and burlesque to suggest it was all sublimation, since no one could deviate in real Soviet life. Then he donned his dark glasses in aid of his theory that human
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beings can fool themselves about anything—in this case, that Moscow was Sun City.
It was an evening like a hundred others. A table laden with Alyosha's provisions of vodka, wine and hors d'oeuvres. Toasts that appeared to grow funnier; laughs that got unmistakably louder; an outpouring of random talk to match the consumption of food and to enhance a sense of stolen well-being that waxed into sensuousness. Old tapes, transcribed from black market records, of the Cream and Diana Ross on a straining, throbbing recorder. Free-for-all dancing with energy and endurance in inverse proportion to its lack of refinement. And Alyosha pulling us up again for one more fling, tipping the bottle for one more drink, remembering one more joke—about the Bible salesman posing as a Serbian philologist—to fit that moment's theme.
Beyond the extravagance of the occasion, the girls understood little. Heads already spinning from the Hungarian salami and Revlon lipstick, even from their joyride in Alyosha's car, they succumbed to their lucky destiny, with only a pro forma contempt for vodka in the usual platitudes. Savoring their individual chocolate bars and sipping the last of their wine, they spoke of their preferences for film stars and summer plans.
The lovemaking followed in its turn, after the brief shock of Alla's undressing and the girls' mandatory declaration of unwillingness. "Individualistic" at first (while Alia patiently waited), we were soon five bodies entwined together, laughing, grunting, exchanging, teasing a tattered stuffed panda. Liberated from everything but astonishment about themselves, the new girls thrust their loins proudly in our faces. The more sophisticated Alia—who was also more experienced in group evenings, having known Alyosha for weeks—used a leaf of the rubber plant to invent an anatomical quiz.
In the morning, the girls begged Alyosha to concoct an excuse to free them from work. "Alyoshka, please Alyoshinka—can't we spend just today with you?"
Behind the surface of ice and prudery, irritability and drabness, this hedonism flourishes like jungle foliage. I've often seen such lust before, but never this surrender to it: sex to the
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limit of human appetite, as in the legendary—and real—Russian capacity for food and drink.
The memory of my first evening with Alyosha stands out from the jumble of all later ones. Although he knew me only as Anastasia's new lover, with whom he'd barely exchanged a few jesting hellos when lending us his apartment for trysts, he invited me to a party and regaled me with caviar and anecdotes. More poised and elegant than almost all who would follow, the girls were an aspiring actress and two models sporting trouser suits acquired from tourists. I hadn't seen false eyelashes in Moscow before, or that degree of female chic.