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exoticism—and Alyosha's command of time enough sense of purpose—that I need only be here, luxuriating in passivity as in my childhood fantasy of surveying the Casbah from a magic bed.
It is a warmish Wednesday that is turning ice to slush. Alyosha has fetched me outside the University to accompany him on his rounds, a standard agenda of appointments and errands. The first stop is to leave an antique samovar with a metalworker for polishing. Bought during his latest redecorating crusade, it will doubtless soon be sold to pay for a rainy day's fete.
(At the moment, however, we are filthy rich, thanks to a lucky professional coup. Two months ago, the wealthy parents of a swaggering Georgian convicted of rape approached Alyosha for help. Knowing his reputation in such cases, they could not, however, have hoped for the coincidence that saved their son: the victim happened to be a well-liked Erstwhile. Persuading her that the parents' cold cash would be more useful than her abuser's imprisonment, coaching her in a story attributing the assault to nightmares, arranging the payment of the bribes—involving great amounts, since the prodigal was already in a labor camp—Alyosha managed to spring the prisoner last week, pocketing a handsome commission on all the transactions.)
For ten minutes we ride in silence, something easier with Alyosha than anyone I know. The memory of my discomfort on our first outings^my habitual awkwardness in response to unearned generosity—only enhances my present sense of well-being. I used to wonder what animated his affection. Girls were one thing, but why did a man of his years and standing dash to the market for fresh greens for my supper? What, in fact, prompted him to invite me to that first party for the actress—and beam when I agreed to drive to a nearby village with him the following morning? But precisely his fondness has shown me that such questions need not always be asked. I've come to accept that he simply likes me with him, above all cruising in the car, and that I need do nothing in return. Certainly not provide the intellectual stimulation—the seeking of common ground through earnest discussions of The Youth Problem or Developments in Western Art—required by many Russians and foreigners recon-noitering toward a relationship; it was weeks before Alyosha and
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I first mentioned politics or literature. For some reason, he took to me at sight, and showed it freely and openly, like the uncle I liked best, who died at Alyosha's age off Anzio. . . .
The first stop. With the potbellied samovar, we jog down crumbling back stairs to the metalworker's place, a basement room straight from a mad-scientist movie. A refugee from a nineteenth-century ghetto, the old Jew who hears each outside sound as a pogrom's starting signal peers through an inch of opening in the bolted door of his illegal shop. At the sight of Alyosha, the exception to his rule of not traffickirig with gentiles, his face relaxes from suspicion and terror to mere tragedy and hypercaution; doom has been postponed until the next knock.
The business is concluded in a minute: the samovar will be ready next week and Alyosha will pay then; from him, no deposit is needed. As we leave, "Pops" manages a glance up into our eyes and a smile, as if we three have entered an alliance against maurauding mankind.
In the car again, Alyosha turns talkative. "It's no accident," he says in parody of Marxist historians, "that I fell for a Yank and a child of Israel." I take this as a new way of tossing me a compliment, but in fact it is an introduction for musing about his relationship to Jews. In black market affairs, his preference for them is practical. "With Jewish traders, a deal's a deal. They're sober and responsible—mature enough to trust." With Russians, by contrast, even the minority who know their craft or trade, vodka or indolence usually queers the arrangements. The promised article is not delivered; its supplier turns stoolie, disappears, or curses you for bothering him. "A Russian with money in his pocket thinks first of spending it, usually on a fling. About doing a job well, even protecting his reputation, he rarely cares."
But what of Alyosha's affinity for Jews as company? Here there is no sound sociological explanation; he simply feels less kinship to Russians, even those of his own cosmopolitan instinct. This puzzles him, and he wonders whether his never-seen father—a university student whom the family banished after the seduction that sired him—was Jewish.
The next stop is a nearby foodshop's spirits department, to return the unbroken wine and vodka bottles among the sixty-odd
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that have been chinking and smashing in the trunk. On to a secondhand bookstore where an old Erstwhile has promised to keep a lookout for a prerevolutionary dictionary I can sell at Harvard for a small fortune. Then to a secondhand clothing store that, under Alyosha's name, has taken a pair of my old boots on consignment. When the sale is made—not yet, as Alyosha is informed in the office—we'll split the twenty rubles: a concession to ritual, since money changes hand between us as if from the same pocket. Next, a women's shop, all plate glass and fluorescent lights, where a tip has it that mohair scarves are on sale to mark the grand opening. No luck: the goods were either never there, as the assistant manager assures us, or, as a salesgirl insists, were whisked from the counter to prevent damage to the new fixtures. Then to a private shirtmaker who is sewing ten pairs of underpants for Alyosha on the pattern of mine from Macy's. He is enthused about this because domestic models are made without openings.
"After fifty-five years of Soviet rule, we're on the way to engineering a fly in our drawers. Life's important things, as they say, take time. Meanwhile, when nature calls, a hundred million Russians try to work their he-man fingers around five hundred million buttons—zippers, presumably, are a nasty bourgeois trick—or reach in like this to dig out their dings through a leghole. Jesus Christ, pissing in this country is a trauma . . . Oops!" (He points to the Volga's roof, where a KGB microphone may be hidden. Although less certain that "ears" have been planted in the car than in the apartment, we try to confine all incriminating talk to the open.) "Oops, but we don't lynch blacks, do we, or bomb Asians. All progressive mankind is grateful for the inspired leadership of the USSR. And you and I, muchacho, must pledge yet again to intensify our fight against the dirty imperialist war in Vietnam."
Down Lenin Prospekt, with its growing busyness of cars and lights and back toward the center of town. As always, Alyosha's coat is open and his thin Soviet shoes soaked with slush; immune to winter, he rejects boots as oflhandedly as headgear. I can't remember Moscow before these rides, although this one has not been typicaclass="underline" we've spied but two girls, both unreachable in the traffic. Even the conversation about them has been limited to
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Alyosha's casual question of what I have in mind for the evening. I wouldn't mind inviting Marya the Muff, I answer, referring to a sloe-eyed teen-ager who has provided us with exceptional pleasure.
"But you had heryesterday,^^ Alyosha sighs in mock puzzlement over my "perversity"—and, I think, in a gentle campaign to make me sexually more like him. We're already so close; why not be brothers?