The girls chat about rising prices and their disappointing pay, but can't come home with us because their troupe is going on tour early in the morning. Soon we drive off on a roundabout circuit of old wooden Moscow, then along the river. It's the dead of night now; even the heavily traveled quay is empty except for an occasional construction truck.
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Although we've been in the car since morning, we set out to burn our new gas. Roaming roads at random, we discuss this and that, including, of course, the night life at this hour in the West. "Paris?" says Alyosha, mocking his inability to thrust his nose close to the Soviet border. "We'll need another ten liters. Paris is"—pointing to Bolshaya Serpukhovskaya Street—"just down there and to the left."
Returning to the center, we park in front of the Bolshoi Theater's columns. Perhaps because we're the only car in sight, a policeman approaches us and, having scrutinized Alyosha's license and the Volga's ownership papers, salutes politely: the exception to the rule of boorish traffic cops. As we're about to push off again, we spy a well-dressed man teetering across Sverdlov Square whom, through the mist, Alyosha recognizes as an old friend. The son of an impresario who founded an important Moscow theater, he is filthy drunk and searching for more vodka. While we drive him home, he tries to tell a story about his weekend in an artists' retreat, as if he and Alyosha had met last week rather than a year ago.
For some reason, the new dormitory for Aeroflot crews we pass on our way back reminds me of the Newark hamburger joint where, acting out my teen-age bum fantasies by living in the YMCA, I first groped for the courage to pick up girls. Then I think of my new confidence, of all the barriers Alyosha has guided me through. Learning the inner workings of Moscow life has somehow opened me up to larger discoveries about life in general and about myself. For the moment, there are a dozen questions I need not ask, a hundred worries that need not be worried. Anastasia and I will ultimately have a happy ending. Meanwhile, Marya the Muff will come around tomorrow, perhaps with her much-touted friend. Everything's in place.
Pleasantly exhausted, I savor my nightcap of Alyosha's stories about inventive embezzlers he has defended. The strange thing is that although our talk and pursuits skim the surface of life, it is the substance of his personality underneath, about which almost nothing is said, that makes me at home with him.
"Zonks," he says. "We forgot."
"What?"
AIyosha^l63
"To borrow a reel from my friend. Want to go ice-fishing when the sun comes up?"
It has been a beautiful day on my magic carpet.
The fetes take place roughly every third evening. In addition to Alyosha's apartment, friends' quarters are occasionally used: the basement studio of a dandyish photographer; an important mathematician's luxurious apartment borrowed by his son while his father is away; the mildewed room of a recently divorced actor in the Theater of the Leninist Komsomol. The setting shifts; the props and scenario hardly vary.
The principal feature is a bountiful supper, enjoyed for itself in the spirit of Russian feasting as well as to prepare the guests. (Many are more impressed by chocolate bars and my contribution of Kents than Alyosha's chicken soup or lucky find of smoked sprats. For factory girls, the old cheese and bologna hors d'oeuvres, not to mention Alyosha's supply of leftover Western cosmetics and magazines, would be seductive enough.) The drink matches the food: an assortment of vodka or cognac, wine or beer in their dirty-lipped bottles, all drunk in sequence as haphazard as the use of knives, spoons and hands. The jokes are as motley—crude scatological humor mixed with choice selections from the vast repertoire of political satire. The music, last year's pop hits taped from Voice of America broadcasts or black market records, plays over and over, again and again, to the point of hypnotic effect, the provocatively un-Soviet sound of throbbing electric guitars casting a stronger spell than in its native setting, and prompting associations with the birth of jazz as a vehicle of black liberation. We are immersed in noise, gluttony and food-alcohol-stuffy-room smells. But although Moscovskaya oso-baya vodka, oranges and the new rock make the parties exciting, it is even more true that the parties enhance the deliciousness of the treats.
Alyosha is occasionally bored and faintly dissatisfied with himself for returning yet again to this ritual entertainment, and I'm sometimes slightly nervous at the start. But vodka speeds our transformation to the spirit of celebration and languid indulgence infusing the hot, hutlike room. Although a detached
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observer might specify vulgarity as the parties' dominant trait, something simuhaneously upHfting is at work, releasing the participants from the heaviness of the national environment. Eating, laughing, dancing, watching an ice-skating competition in Budapest on television, dancing again—free of any thought of how foolishly ragged we look—making love, changing girls immediately to make it again, holding on to the last glasses of wine because not a square inch for them remains free on the table, spitting sunflower seeds onto the floor, cramming into the bathtub for a mass wash, playing Ray Charles's "What I Say" one last time and then a last-last time. . . . We are here to do what we want—nothing more, nothing less. No sober discussion of the national condition or the cultural scene; never an attempt to impress with what we do, how much money we make, how intelligently we can converse. For neither pretension or rationalization are needed to justify our surrender to gratification.
That we have met the girls only that afternoon does not seem strange, even to them. Each new group is bound together by the sacred obligation to spend this evening in the present company as happily as possible. After the first hour, even the most reserved are steeped in this camaraderie, behaving as if they, or their ancestors, have enjoyed such revels ("orgies" somehow implies a greater element of self-consciousness and planning) since the beginning of time. Fate has brought us together; life is short and hard. These few hours, this auspicious opportunity, can never be repeated. We must honor them by putting aside all other thoughts.
But in the morning, we take pains to appear irreproachably respectable as we descend the stairs and step outdoors with all the decorum required by Soviet public standards. Like all others, Alyosha's apartment block is the preserve of a censorious state. Neighbors are watching; the police may be called. Nothing must be done—seem to be done!—that might offend a dutiful citizen in the form of a puffy cashier, schoolmarm or self-righteous housewife; or the scrawny pensioner whiling away his golden years at a window overlooking the courtyard. To a pillbox of a woman there whose black pupils follow us like eyeballs in an observation slot, Alyosha tips an imaginary fedora. His flouting of the winter-hat convention is enough to arouse her suspicions!
Alyosha^l65
We take our ladies' arms to help them over the ice—anything more might appear to violate socialist behavioral norms—and deliver them to their jobs or convenient metro stations. The night's activities are not mentioned; they have ended, and sex talk in the cold light of day is dirty-minded. Again the curtain is drawn on our private pursuits. With the smell of snow in our nostrils and the worry that the Volga will further delay our late start, the lingering images of our paganism seem wholesome.
And I remain entranced by the miracle of the girls. Taller and shorter, brunette and dusty blonde; yet all deriving from one model in my mind's eye: of Olga, my summer camp swimming instructor, whose incredible naked body I spied through the showerhouse knothole when I was fourteen. The city teems with this leggy loveliness, squeezing through crowds, pushing into buses, fighting into stores and onward toward the counters. They often travel in twos and threes, maintaining their reassuring physical contact. Linking arms, holding hands, grasping waists— and chattering, humming, giggling with an air of buttery healthiness, as if they'd carried water from the river that morning, then come home to try out their first lipsticks.