When we pick her up in her school-uniform pinafore with the chaste white collar, Nadya says she's seventeen, but admits she may have "added a year or so." A Norman Rockwell sapling with bony knees and batting eyes, she devours a quarter-kilo chunk of apple tart held to her mouth like a chipmunk, then performs a surprisingly witty striptease, bowing to our applause. Legs extended, she examines herself in the mirror, delighting in our assurance that she looks fine down there.
Suddenly she jumps out of bed, throws on her clothes and glissades over the ice to a telephone booth. (Alyosha's phone is dead again, probably until the recording tape is changed on the morning shift.) Returning with Winesap cheeks, she announces that she's invited her best friend. "Verochka mustn't miss this . . . and she might not believe me if I just told her, with no proof"
Something in her very innocent enthusiasm prompts a wincing suspicion that it was not at all a friend she called, but her parents—or the police. She's an unpredictable child, after all. But Vera does arrive within the hour: a prettier girl with a snub nose and more developed curves. The two share a double desk in their homeroom class.
Naked again, Nadya greets Vera as if they'd met on some corner to stroll to school. Vera undresses in the bathroom and appears in a towel. In response to appreciation of her breasts, she reveals that she and Nadya are fifteen. Before they grow sleepy, they alternate between sharing giggling discoveries and friendly competition to restore erections. "No, it's my turn now. . . . Doit to me like she just tried it. . . . Verochka, lie over here and let them show you this.''
When Alyosha is attending to the car in the morning, I ask the classmates, for want of more enlightening conversation, whether
152^MOSCOW FAREWELL
they've been together Uke this before. No, this is their very first time. Then how have they managed the new, er, games with such aplomb?
"Oh, we're not so young as you think. We've been hoping to meet some interesting men. Hoping and waiting . . ."
Alyosha owes his handsome, akhough irregular, income and much more cherished command of his own time to a partial exception to Soviet economic rules. He is one of thirty lawyers in a cooperative called a Juridical Consultation Office—which, despite the political and professional restrictions of state control, Western eyes would recognize as a law office. Schedules of permitted fees and heavy taxes notwithstanding, the members of this legitimate sanctuary of semiprivate enterprise work largely for themselves, running their own practices and working lives— and, if unusually energetic and capable, earning a schoolteacher's weekly salary in a matter of hours. Besides, knowing defendants slip twice the maximum official fees under the table to all established law counselors, hoping for more conscientious briefs and better luck at their trials. Thus Alyosha's relative riches.
Thus too his intimate familiarity with the meshed operations of state and self-interest. The information and experience of years in court, access to confidential whispers and trusting relationships with speculators and other former clients supplement a powerful native practicality, finely attuned to beating the system through bribes and inside intelligence. And he protects himself through his meticulous understanding of bureaucratic, legal and political dangers, allowing him maximum area of maneuver with minimum risk.
Yet the gaps in his knowledge are as instructive as his operator's expertise. As privy as he is to the secrets of whom to see for assignment of a new apartment in a railroad workers' building, which black market duke can supply a Parker pen or Yugoslav refrigerator, how much to shell out for a Moscow residence permit, he knows almost nothing of the sociopolitical stuff of New York—or even sophisticated Moscow—dinner party conversation. This ignorance too is a deliberate good-time Charlie's blind. "Why work myself up about the persecution of
AIyoshaXl53
this errant intellectual or which mental asylum that dissenter is languishing in?" Beyond learning the names of the new martyrs —Fainberg today, Gorbanyevskaya tomorrow—such details, he says, reveal nothing new about the nature of Soviet rule or his place under it, both learned long ago. Nor do newspapers, which he pretends are sold for wrapping contraband and for patching walls. "What do a thousand Pravdas contain that we don't know? That has the slightest bearing on our lives, on what concerns us?""
What concerns us is exclusively the fixing that affords comfort and pleasure to our daily lives. The ceaseless barrage of hosannas, production figures and political indoctrination has no more relevance to our hunt for lemons, Alyosha says, than to insects boring through bark. The whole of the official world is a giant exercise in lies and fantasy—better to be consciously blocked out than simply ignored. Since the Soviet version of foreign events makes them farcical irrelevancies, Alyosha also knows and cares almost nothing about them. Only occasionally does he put a question, assuming my Western sources will provide an easy answer. Have Arab terrorists killed neutral civilians at European airports? Are peasant refugees fleeing the Vietcong? Did America react violently to the Soviet "education tax" imposed on would-be Jewish emigrants? In these queries, he wants to confirm hunches about certain sequences of events, deduced from the Soviet presentation's very fallaciousness.
But such interest is incidental; and he usually avoids more than the political aspect of social thought. "Heavy" films, plays, novels and conversations—anything smacking of "culture" and meaning-of-life rumination—are equally shunned. "Has it got a Hollywood ending?" he asks when I suggest a play. "A good cancan somewhere? . . . Splash and flash, a bit of leg—you know what the likes of us need." He insists that And God Created Woman —seen at a special, closed showing for cinema personnel— has done more for mankind than Hamlet; that Peter Ustinov is more humanitarian, because he offers more relief to the masses, than Dostoyevsky; and declares people unbalanced who spend money, let alone their precious free time, subjecting themselves to gloomy theater. The novelist's and dramatist's obligation is to give the psyche two hours' rest from the injustice, hardship and tragic futility that are the stuff of Soviet life.
154^MOSCOW FAREWELL
"We don't need art to stimulate morbid meditation; good old life takes care of that. No sir, escape's the thing: a good beat in the sound track, frolics on the screen."
But of all his attempts at self-deception, this is the most obvious. The sham preference for "gladden-the-heart" entertainment is a dead giveaway to the depth of his feeling about art's true function. It is to avoid Soviet drama's half-truths and falsifications—which deprive a wounded people even of catharsis for their inexplicable sufferings—that he fakes disdain for "the theater of masochism" and pretends, when handing me yellowed volumes of his favorite novels and prose poems, that he's happy to rid himself of old junk.
This has a more intimate meaning too. "Escape's the thing" draws me to him and absolves me from heeding ordinary rules and norms. The distinction between us in our private passageways to subterranean chambers and the outer world through which we conspiratorially burrow is as real as a child's make-believe. But although we lose ourselves wholly in our diversions and levity, our very escapism makes keener and more personal the conditions and thoughts we banish from conversation. Unhappi-ness is a step away, held back by our self-made timbers.
Cruising noonday Moscow in the trusty Volga, worrying about the effect of trenchlike winter potholes on its busted shock absorber, and about nothing else in the world. Puddles from my boots on the car's bare steel floor—the rubber mats are long departed and substitute linoleum was stolen last week—and my window cracked open to the sweet wet air. Alyosha's gloveless left hand gripping the top of the wheel cowboy-style, the right coaxing Czechoslovak jazz from the newly patched radio. ... I am in my soothing semitrance, gazing lazily at whatever passes my eyes. I hear no calls to scholarship, conscience or duty to get ahead in the world—not even to focus my vision on significant buildings. Aware that no Russian is as free to wander as Alyosha nor as savvy about Moscow's hurly-burly, I feel myself exceptional as his companion, but without the means or desire to advertise this to a third party. The city's labyrinths and sprawl, encrusted fa9ades and clumping crowds still exude enough