"Jeez, look what you've done," I lectured the first time I observed a register thus disposed of "I'm glad I've got gloves." The little notebook that had disappeared into a post-office urn soggy with cigarette butts and spittle contained the "coordinates" of two or three dozen girls so lusty, friendly and willing that I was certain he'd made an unconscious mistake.
"Some people feel such collectanea should be burned," he pretended to explain the "error." "But this is a free country. All that Pentagon paranoia about staying eternally security-conscious, it's not needed here. We're secure enough just to throw old things out."
The disposition of these "encumbering" archives helps explain the poverty-amidst-plethora paradox of Alyosha occasionally finding himself without a soul to call. This usually happens after 7 P.M. on weekends, when the streets have largely emptied of
Alyosha^Hl
likely pickings and many pretty girls, already out for the evening, are unavailable by telephone. The last such occasion found Alyosha and me stuffed in a forlorn telephone booth on a street desolate of buildings and trees. While the wind flayed us through its broken panes, he racked his memory for a promising candidate.
"For the love of God," I pleaded, pulling a fat register from his ancient sheepskin's pocket. "Let's be fussy next time. Just call one of these."
"Naw," he mumbled, "that's a superseded book." And he resumed retracing his recent movements to recall the new face that would make the evening.
It should be said that exceptional names in old books are usually transferred to the new one—and also that Alyosha's memory allows him to contact cadres recorded in books disposed of months ago. Nevertheless, it still represents a research loss equivalent to a graduate student destroying a month of dissertation notes. But Alyosha's analogy is quite different. "Old cards," he says, answering my persistent double take. "Are you hungry? Want something solid to eat?"
His address, by contrast, is the feature entry of a thousand otherwise blank-paged engagement books rattling in bare teenage pocketbooks; a steady troop of "Erstwhiles" use it as a guide to swinging Moscow, and more. Although most quickly accept the improbability of repeating their sexual festival with him, let alone developing a romantic attachment, they continue to bring him a domestic court variety of personal problems. Driven by his own compulsion, burdened by a dozen daily concerns ranging from where to find a camshaft to how to repay his oldest debts, he stoically adds others' delicate errands to his ever-growing list. One girl—whom he hasn't seen for three years—wonders how to retain squatter's rights to her dying mother's apartment; another has been caught stealing candy from her factory (she hid the chocolates in her hair) and is desperate to keep her job; a third has a boss who demands a kickback on her wages—and, incidentally, she is troubled by crabs. (When Alyosha's salve eliminates them, she brings two girl friends similarly afflicted— with whom he "joins" after checking the results with a magnifying glass kept specially for the purpose.) But the case of the girl
142.^MOSCOW FAREWELL
trying to obtain support for her baby from a father whom a misled court officer wrongly freed of his alimony obligation takes first precedence. Alyosha is the man to turn to in such emergencies: if it is possible to place the bribe, pry loose the information from a congenitally secretive bureaucracy, procure an expensive medication not available to the general public, he can be counted on to accomplish the mission.
Other Erstwhiles come just to see him—to find a place somewhere in his living room-bedroom-dining room-cabaret, leaf through the alluring stack of dirty Lifes and Elles and enjoy the charged atmosphere his movements generate in any room: the fission of excitement and action in a city devoid of night life. Alyosha's attraction is more than the goodies of his kitchen and repertoire of jokes, larger than his whimsical-yet-supercharged commentary on the day's events. He provides nothing less than the "love of life" which every newspaper claims daily for the slogging Soviet people ("joyous and life-loving, we follow Lenin's path . . ."), but which is as absent on the evening streets as everything else for which propaganda is served up as a substitute.
Somewhere Alyosha too is very sad. On New Year's Eve, the only time I've seen him conspicuously drunk, he told me that aging libertines and clowns disgust even themselves. (This was the one time too when raw bitterness showed beneath his layers of political sophistication and sarcasm. "I hate these Kremlin bastards," he said. "Those stupid animals who've done this to all of us—I'd like to take a machine gun down there and do the world a favor.") Yet he revels in life, taking and giving delight with elements of Candide, Tom Jones and Puck. Only cliches— Western "zest for life" as well as Soviet "life-affirming"—can suggest his effect on others, for he's more like a jolly fictional hero than gravity-gripped flesh and blood. The more I try to fix the sources of his appeal, the farther I slip from the elusive buoyancy, for all that is most lovable about him—the impromptu repartee, happy-go-lucky saunter, eyes screwed up with the full range of human emotion—is the least describable. His audience is kept in smiles even between stories, convinced that they too can love life and be happy.
This is what prompts girls to spend their evenings "out" simply sitting as onlookers in his heroically cluttered room. In twos and
Alyosha^l43
threes, they beat a path to his out-of-the-way apartment house and find their way, uninvited, to his tumbledown door, sometimes years after he had spent his few hours with them. One evening, five separate pairs arrived on their own between 7 p.m. and midnight. When business has delayed him in town, he returns home some evenings to find small gatherings encamped on the log bench which has been cleared of snow in the village-like courtyard.
To pass their waiting hours, the shivering Erstwhiles make each other's acquaintance and drift into gossip, a practice that has led to the formation, independently of Alyosha, of half a dozen pairs of best friends. Bouncing home with bottle-stuffed pockets and an accumulation of newspaper-wrapped provisions miraculously balanced on both arms, Alyosha introduces the waiting girls to the new ones accompanying him, and all mount the stairs in quiet single file. He runs back down to the car for his briefcases, which vie with his nose as his best-known trademark. The battered skins are so outrageously packed with jars, cans, bottles and hunks of soup bones—never office papers, which are crammed into pockets—that many girls can't lift them. After the food and dancing, which is for everyone, the old girls watch television or skim magazines while Alyosha, several feet away in the small, undarkened room, "joins with" the new.
Highly inventive in his lovemaking—although that image is somewhat imprecise, all possibilities of experimentation having been exhausted thousands of bodies ago—Alyosha fondles and kisses his new sweetheart's sex, often squatting beneath her as she straddles him on the weary bed. While the satisfaction of lust wafts lymphatic odors through the room, only the shyest of Erstwhiles remove themselves to the kitchen or bathroom. Most keep to their magazines and small talk, neither staring nor averting their eyes, protesting nor offering to leave. So many Russian girls—or are they only Alyosha's devoted?—blushed scarlet when he first stopped them on their aimless strolls, but now watch their counterparts copulating as if they were vacuuming a rug.
Whatever the explanation of this, I've never seen Alyosha turn a visitor away. "Christ, it's cold out there," he'll say, as if apologizing to me for opening up to yet another unannounced
144^MOSCOW FAREWELL
caller. "Poor things probably came on an unhealed bus. Let's give them something to munch. . . ." Very occasionally—during the final moments of "plumbing" a new girl, for example—he will refuse to answer any but the current version (cha cha cha-cha-cha) of the code knock for his closest insiders. But once the door is opened, his face creases deeply with tickled surprise, welcoming the guest more warmly with it than by his sometimes inflated salutations.