Having juggled brunette, counterwoman, judge, cashier and a former girl friend who appears in the shop at the last, disconcerting moment—Alyosha wants nothing at all from the latter except not to offend her with the sight of his new love—he will rush back to the car just as the impatient blonde is leaving and drive her to his apartment for a quick meal. No time to do justice to the carp. Then she must run; her turn will come after work tomorrow. But the brunette, who thought she came to the store for salted herring, is free for later this afternoon—and, with precious seconds ticking away, must be enticed on this final try.
134^MOSCOW FAREWELL
"Can you meet me at two? You won't consider it? I respect your principles, of course. Shall we then say . . . three?"
Alyosha knows that she will indeed meet him that afternoon unless prevented by an unusual exigency, and be spread-eagled on his bed within an hour or two. He is no less certain that unless exceptional in some way—as in the case of the blonde, who boasts a fey sense of humor—she will disappear from his life, in a sexual sense, by the weekend. Without analyzing his problem in any depth—although the driest of his sarcasm is reserved for self-commentary, he is not given to introspection—he recognizes that his Don Juan drive is an expression of a fundamental disturbance. "In case you haven't noticed, the symptoms are a preference for pairs, youth and brief encounters," he once said. "Quantity bewitches, quality unnerves. I give them all a bath, and myself a shifty laugh."
When he related how he first noticed his obsession, self-disparagement thinned his normally whimsical voice. "Libidinally speaking" he had a normal youth and adolescence, he said; he was even faithful to one girl friend throughout the war—which now seemed inexplicable. But one night several weeks after his marriage, he was in bed with his darling bride—divorced from him a quarter century ago, although their friendship is still the comfort of their lives—when he realized that she played no part in the animation of his erection. "It stood," he explained in the Russian vernacular, "but not for her.''''
He feigned sleep at her side for another dismaying month, almost bursting with a hardness she could not relieve. Although it quickly led him into his compulsive search for fresh bodies, his first brief session with a teen-age pickup gave him a kind of peace. Soon he needed daily fixes.
"I'm genuinely sorry to interrupt your private thoughts, but might you spare me a moment? Dare we break the senseless barrier of nonacquaintance estranging us?"
Countless repetition has so smoothed his patter that you'd expect the lines to be stale. You would assume he is weary, perhaps even resentful, of the compulsion to recruit. In fact, however, each time the pursuit is set in motion—be it the third time that morning and twentieth that week, be he fagged after days of furious activity and nights with little sleep—-a surge of
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fresh energy rejuvenates him. Each new lass is a challenge, a prize, a bewitching new world; never mind the thousands of identical worlds previously explored. Besides, despite his inability to go deeper, he genuinely likes the girls at sight, and they sense this affection even before the signals of sexual appetite. The curious combination of predatory hunger and paternal fondness expresses itself in his round vowels and Clark Gable smile.
A certain percentage of his sweethearts last weeks. Others, like Efficient Alia, are returned to occasionally when husbands are away or other circumstances make them temporarily available. A few special friends are "joined with," as he likes to put it, for months and, in the rarest cases, a full year; and under the duress of hurt vanity, Alyosha can sometimes "congress"—as he also says; like writers, he avoids repeating a word, in this case the lusty Russian for "fuck," in consecutive sentences—with dear old friends of many years. But in most cases, he loses interest, and therefore can't perform, after three or four times. "A played card," he says with some sadness. An "old card," by contrast, refers to girls over twenty-five, whom he ordinarily avoids.
The girl wore imported ski pants and a bemused expression that enhanced her charm on this frosty afternoon. But a shade of something odd piqued her relationship with Alyosha from the moment of their meeting two hours ago in the gay skating rink adjoining Lenin Stadium. Demurely accepting his invitation to the apartment, sipping a thawing measure of vodka and nibbling at his shashlik, she sustained her knowing-something-significant detachment. Her secret is revealed only when Alyosha is bearing down between her up-pointed legs.
"You don't remember me," she says coolly from beneath him. "Four years ago, here on the couch. I was a silly high-school kid."
Surprise, worry and perverse delight widen Alyosha's eyes, but his reply is pure deadpan. "Of course I remember, darling. How could I ever forget that unique, unforgettable night?"
But the knowledge of previous possession turns him soft. When she leaves the car, he turns to me for comfort. "Honest to God, I wish women wouldn't talk so much. . . . And what about me? Age is the scourge of memory cells."
136^MOSCOW FAREWELL
Alyosha's need for new partners keeps him in a state of perpetual quest, adding a relentless burden to his otherwise remarkably busy day. If only the energy expended coping with his self-imposed tasks had been channeled into some constructive pursuit, his artistic friends sometimes lament. Such a man!—who can converse with German tourists on the basis of a year's two-hours-a-week course in a slum high school thirty-five years ago; who steals the show at any table or party of Moscow wags. What a tragedy that all this, with nowhere creative to go, is dissipated in his fetes.
His discourse, say these friends, is by itself evidence of unusual mental gifts. Russian is a keener measure of intelligence than many other languages because its complexity and inflection force grammatical errors even from educated natives; yet it is supremely rich and flexible in the service of imaginative and exacting minds. Alyosha's everyday idiom is like an Irish diplomat's English: even when the substance is nonsense, the flow itself provides aesthetic pleasure. Sometimes too slick and cute, his conversation, however, is never commonplace, but full of vivid original allusions and intentionally obsolescent, as well as the newest, turns of phrase. In his personal campaign to keep the language fertile and precise, he spars with literary acquaintances about the meanings, declensions and conjugations of obscure nouns and irregular verbs. Does "to miss" in the sense of "to feel the absence of" always demand the prepositional case, or in certain circumstances can it take the instrumental with inanimate objects? Can a thing as well as a person be odyevat (dressed), or is nadyevat alone correct? After a stiff" debate, the proof is sought in one or another of his dictionaries of Russian and foreign words, a collection dominated by the classic twelve-volume Dahl which stands at the ready, often under a pair or two of panties, on a trunk alongside his bed.
Although other friends deny that he has any remarkable creative potential—Alyosha is best, they say, at what he now devotes himself to: playing to impressionable female audiences— most acknowledge that the makings of excellence are somewhere in him, atrophying daily. Yet each day is also testimony to his baffling vigor. I've seen him rise at six; renail his splitting toilet
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seat; change the brake fluid and hammer a bit on his bashed fender (to avoid a penalty for operating an eyesore on Moscow's streets); run an iron over a shirt washed for his appearance in court; buy and prepare breakfast for four; deliver his three guests to various parts of the city and himself, frantically late, to his 10 A.M. trial; sit in his courtroom all day, composing and delivering a forceful—and futile—summation for a client heavily sentenced for buying up his own factory's ties to peddle them on the black market; use the lunch break to bribe the friend of a friend for a plane ticket to Odessa which would otherwise require hours of standing in line; cruise the early evening crowds for new pickups; hustle again among the shopping throngs for supper provisions; deliver a friend's television set to an "underground" repairman; buy a pair of hardly worn shoes from one ex-girl friend for another's birthday; return to the apartment and answer a half dozen telephone calls from legal colleagues and friends proposing evening plans while scaling two kilos of fresh pike on a cutting board; finish making supper while entertaining his new guests with "home-brew" anecdotes from the kitchen; look up a disputed interpretation in the commentaries to the Criminal Code while the others are feasting; dig out the requested tapes for the evening's music from under a tumble of junk in the corner; lead the dancing with his singular blend of jitterbug and frug; and finally, take his pleasure with the new girl, or girls, even if a part of him would have been happy to dispense with the sexual consummation.