The story of Suede Svetlana. Met on Sunday, in the ticket niche of the Metropole Cinema. (Though signally inadequate for the weather, her suede coat is too treasured not to be displayed.) Reluctant to join us because she has a ticket for the next showing, she comes to the apartment on Tuesday, drinks half a bottle of dessert wine and undresses. Her dimensions match her calling: she's a construction worker. On Wednesday, she is waiting impatiently at the door when Alyosha and I return in the car.
148^MOSCOW FAREWELL
Thursday, she suggests dirty photographs, poses energetically, but leaves in offense when other girls arrive. On Friday, I recognize her under a thick quilt jacket: she is the cement mixer for the new University building on the way to the metro—the one I happened to notice weeks ago, while passing with Masha from the dormitory. This time she is one floor higher on the building's shell, whither I yell.
"Hello there, Svetlana! Come to the cafeteria for some lunch with me."
"Can't just now; have to get on with this."
Monday, she is not on the site, and I never see her again.
It is not enough for Alyosha to supply food—even good or varied food which, for Russians without foreign currency or Intourist coupons, is so scarce that Westerners would regard details of the shortages and deteriorating quality as crude anti-Communist propaganda. "Naturally, caviar's too rich for Russian blood," he sighs. "But we used to get sturgeon, smoked salmon—at a pinch, bream or eel. Twenty piscatory varieties worthy of a guest. Now you're lucky—and understand me, I'm offering my thanks—to find a salted herring with enough fat to keep its bones moist." Nevertheless, he drives miles for the prize purchase that will make the meal. He judges meat quickly by color, texture and smell, and distinguishes Bulgarian from Polish frozen chickens at a glance. Rushing home, he finds a place to transfer the coffee grinder's components—it has been waiting weeks for repair—and plunges into work, plucking the chicken, scaling the fish or trimming the roast with his butcher's cleaver.
His dishpan hands are as resourcefiil in such operations as in repairing electric motors and—because of the abysmal professional service—effecting his own plumbing. He will try anything: carp baked in sour cream, chicken tabak in homemade hot sauce, raw scallops with his house dressing of lemon mayonnaise, mustard and dill. Fresh herbs, as rare and expensive in winter as copies of Penthouse, play a principal part in his specialties. Like a juggler, he clears a space to serve them, hunting for the last meal's cutlery to wash for the next.
Alyosha also likes catering to his visitor's whims. Even in late evening—when ninety-nine Russians in every hundred instinc-
Alyosha^l49
tively suppress their hunger in the knowledge that any foraging for soup and bread would be futile—he takes orders. When, in the city's midnight muteness, a sad-eyed provincial textile worker just recruited in a railroad station hints at a fondness for eggs, he changes direction for a hibernating village north of town, wakes the occupant of a ramshackle cottage and bargains for all the angry hens will relinquish at that moment. (Because of a periodic slump in Moscow's supply, we ourselves haven't had eggs for weeks.) Twenty minutes later, the hungry waif is spooning down a half dozen, fried in butter, and sprinkled lightly with petmshka, a spicy parsley. Probably because she knows few gentlemen among swilling foremen and muzhiks—not, incidentally, that she has often enjoyed eggs sur le plat in a lifetime of bread, kasha and potatoes—she rummages for a pail and rags to express her gratitude by washing the turbid foyer floor.
"Tomorrow's another day, Evgeniya darling," Alyosha gently reproves, setting her on the bed to remove her shoes.
When a stock girl in an inferior department store mentions she's never tasted voblya, the dried, salted little Volga fish exalted by Russian palates (and, like many traditional delicacies, disappearing even from the daily vocabulary), he scouts about among his warehouse contacts and manages to have a bucketful for her—with fresh, Zhigulovskoye beer, the brand we love to pronounce—the next time she appears.
"What the hell, let the child taste something exceptional before we import Coke," he explains en route to fetch his allotment of voblya (and simultaneously quickening his pace to intercept a brunette with superbly pouting lips). "What can she look forward to, macaroni day in the cafeteria? And when our Leninist Party, in its wisdom, buys pasta, it's reject stuff" the Sicilians or Syrians were tickled to unload."
This is the standard explanation for his intense commitment to the notion that everyone should secure maximum enjoyment from his nourishment. But the longer I know him, the more I perceive—unwillingly, because I do not want to know about his sadness—the deeper causes of his preoccupation. The devotion to indulging the appetite is also part of a hedonist's blind to convince himself that life is short and senseless, and that any striving for larger social or intellectual good is doomed from the
150^ MOSCOW FAREWELL
Start. This, in turn, is used to prove that pursuit of artistic or humanistic values is grandiloquent self-deception: the farther people stray from animal needs, the greater their emotional disturbance and potential for causing do-gooder's damage. How much more honest and constructive, he argues, to find and prepare a leg of lamb than to improve the mind by composing odes to collective-farm shepherds or a new panegyric about the happiness of socialist sheep. "The country's real, operative rules are nasty and brutal," he says; "nothing significant in the sources of oppression will change in our lifetime. Trying to achieve something honest and worthwhile might deliver some good, but would probably also increase the pain to living people. The more mature responsibility is alleviating a few friends' blues." Filling his day with a thousand market errands, Alyosha simultaneously demonstrates his theory's partial truth and his need to believe it is the sum and substance of life.
The flaw in his cynicism is his own love of rationalism—and poetry—which peeks out when his guard is down. Whatever it also says about Russia's fate and the hardships of his youth, his compulsion to keep his hands busy and his mind occupied with chores is surely a diversion from an unconscious recognition of the dissipation of his gifts. In this sense, food joins sex as an escape from grievous truths about wasted energy and talent: his personal contribution to the country's tragedy and folly of the human condition.
But such speculation wholly misrepresents the gaiety of our days and genuineness of his generosity. Clanging his iron pots in the kitchen with the sink reachable only by stretching across the refrigerator and the forever faulty gas water heater, he bones his fish and salts his roast because it delights him to feast friends amid gastronomic famine. I've never known such happy giving, and his underlying wistfulness only sharpens its joy. The sad element is that he himself is largely indifferent to food except for new tastes—he yearns to sample artichokes and oysters—or on special occasions. Despite his promiscuous drinking ("Water can never quench a thirst /Once when broke, I tried it first") he often goes a full day without nourishment, a cook untempted by his own sauces. Or he'll have an early breakfast of bread and coffee
AlyoshaXl51
and nothing further until a supper of boiled frankfurters. If hunger does come, he's content with leftovers. Sometimes I awaken to a sound at night and, peering over young female shoulders slumbering between our places on the bed, I see him at the bottle-strewn table, spooning down some cold casserole lying between picked bones on someone's plate.