Inside, food is the first concern. A psychiatrist might offer several explanations for his determination to feed all guests fully and well. Was he himself hungry as a child? (Not exactly, according to my understanding of his hardest early years.) Despite his merry insistence that sex has as much emotional significance as eating a grape, does he feel guilty about his vineyards of conquests? (Of the stupendous Niagara of socialist-Bolshevik-Marxist-Leninist social theory, only Alexandra Kol-lantai's famous dictum—subsequently repudiated by Lenin— that "in Communist society the satisfaction of sexual desires will be as simple and unimportant as drinking a glass of water" appeals to him.) Or, as one old friend insists, is his inordinate libido sublimated maternalism: does Alyosha want to be mother to the world's girls? Whatever the inner truth, he is so solicitous of his guests' appetites that when evening newcomers arrive to a refrigerator already emptied by earlier hospitality, he scoots off for new supplies—even though much of the day has been given to acquiring provisions for and preparing meals already consumed. He is a recognized customer at the city's five or six best peasant markets: grudging little concessions to private enterprise where vigilantly watched, vindictively taxed growers are permitted to sell a portion of their personally tended produce—always far superior to the stunted offerings of ordinary, state-run groceries— at stunning prices. Thanks to his steady emoluments—and that rarest of phenomena in public places: his good-natured smile— Alyosha is also known by the managers and tenders of strategic counters in a handful of the best-supplied meat, fish, salami and cheese departments. If there is any chance of parting these public servants from some of the latest shipment of rump steak or perch, much of it automatically reserved for their families and friends, it is Alyosha's.
AlyoshaXl45
These daily extravagances have something in common with the progressively steeper borrowing of certain Russian aristocrats to finance brilliant balls to obliterate thoughts of their debts. Especially in winter, when four greenhouse tomatoes cost an engineer's daily wage and a pound of veal is a conversation piece, Alyosha leaves behind what the Russians call "a heap" on each dash into a market or shop. Where he gets his income is a separate story, not all of which I know. How he sustains the perseverance for his shopping forays—attracting the attention of besieged counter girls, darting from their lines to those stretching from the cashiers' booths, surveying a dozen stores, packed from wall to wall with gawking, babbling, pushing, waiting-for-a-miracle shoppers, as at noon in a Moroccan souk—is yet another matter. In ten minutes, he is in and jauntily out of such sea-of-downtrodden-humanity establishments, briefcases bulging with acquisitions that many would consider an afternoon's work.
Again, sheer physical energy—a rumba through the crowd to flirt with the counter girl, a deft backpedal to the entrance to smile to the dumpy cashier, a sprint to the nearest telephone, then to one that works (to call Gay Galya, as arranged, at precisely three o'clock) while the halvah is being wrapped—allows him to wriggle through and stretch over Muscovites' catalogue of obstacles to securing the perquisites for daily life. Occasionally he sighs that he's growing old fast, and old means ill; a shell of his former self, he is infected by a strange lassitude (but driven on by habit). Once he made this sound more than his usual self-mocking banter and spoke of visiting a clinic. But no doctor has laid eyes on him in almost thirty years, since his last haphazard checkup in the army. He has not been sick since—has not allowed himself to be: when he caught infectious hepatitis several years ago, he swallowed several aspirin, temporarily forsook vodka and returned to what for him was normal life after three days in bed.
Like poverty and the British royal family, illness and Alyosha are wholly unrelated aspects of life. My mind's eye image has him tanned, smooth-skinned and in quintessential health. Easygoing muscles, a slight sleekness of winter weight, a body that is not large, cared for or visibly powerful, but endowed with a charmed indestructibility that protects him even from the colds
146/^ MOSCOW FAREWELL
and influenza that lay low much of vitamin-starved Russia from October to May. He's the only adult I know who dispenses with a hat on all but the worst cold snaps, his shaggy pepper-and-salt hair presenting a quaint spectacle, since the other uncovered heads belong to teen-age boys demonstrating their toughness. And if his youthful endurance is in fact waning, he still requires only four to five hours of sleep a night, even after the craziest of his overloaded days.
For the self-invited guests who arrive late in the evening, finding food is distinctly more difficult. After 9 p.m., Alyosha must drive to one of the handful of late-closing shops, the location, staples and incidental specialties of which he knows better than most Moscowcityretailgrocerytrust officials. Up a murky street, through some deserted back alleys (in one of which live three teen-age sisters, consecutive Erstwhiles of a torrid week last summer), on foot across a final shortcut to a store whose principal objective is apparently to conceal itself from the public. "Of course it's hard to find," he sighs, setting up his favorite comment about Soviet rule's guiding precept. "Otherwise life might be marginally easier for people."
This particular Gastronomia, as it modestly calls itself, is a prewar relic with a sputtering sign and snarling counter women in soiled smocks. But its monumental obscurity provides a reverse advantage. Alyosha knows that even if its edible cheeses and occasional cans of crabmeat are exhausted at this hour, some chewable beef might be left, which could be nicely turned out with his dill sauce. Besides, the manageress of a smaller store only five minutes away can sometimes be persuaded to part with a few of the items pilfered for her just-married son.
If the last of these late-hour establishments is closed, Alyosha races to the one with the most bribable cleaning woman. Pounding on the bolted door, brandishing a handful of rubles— yet concealing them from police and public view—sustaining an attention-attracting jig and a stream of enticing patter punctuated by under-the-breath laughs at himself for submitting yet again to this ludicrous posture, he calls upon his most artful flattery to plead for delivery of a few items from a crone wielding a handleless mop. This having failed, he drives to the nearest restaurant and advances into the kitchen during the clanging
AlyoshaXl47
moments before closing. Actually, this is not a restaurant but a relatively new cafe whose aluminium moldings have already begun warping away from steamy plate glass: a refuge—for proletarian curses, drunken bellylaughs and winter release— which few members of Moscow's intelligentsia, let alone foreigners, would have reason to enter. To discourage this, the scenes at the tables and in the toilet are quite enough, while the exchange of abuse and ultimatums in the kitchen, together with the utter disorganization of equipment and staff, make the establishment's reopening tomorrow, if ever, seem impossible. Only the Russian masses, unconscious of mere earthly comfort, could enjoy themselves in such squalidness; I want to both laugh and cry for them in their merry oblivion.
Alyosha is simultaneously at home here and totally alien, like a missionary with his loving natives. Amidst the cook's bellows, outraged shrieks of peasant dishwashers and mutterings of a drunken diner trying to reattach a sleeve onto his jacket, Alyosha does a deal with a venal waiter and the duty manager. (Years ago, when director of a better restaurant that foreigners are encouraged to visit, this manager used to transact a substantial volume of back-door trade with Alyosha, who himself then traveled in correspondingly higher circles. The restaurateur was dismissed for masterminding the theft of a relatively modest truckload of vinegar.) For a slight premium over the inflated menu prices, Alyosha's fallen friend supplies him with several portions of leftover chicken stew and a sufficient volume of (watered) wine. Successful at last, he gingerly sidesteps tables heaped with leavings and runny pools on the floor, and quickly drives home his catch to the waiting mouths. Then he watches them feed, washes, woos and wangs them to exhaustion.