Hearing that we lack permanent attachments, she pleads that we come live with her in Irkutsk. She has a room of her own there; we will love Siberia. She'll cook and clean for us, wash our clothes—
"I'm a foreigner," I say to nip the false hope. "I can't go fifty
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kilometers from Moscow without permission, let alone five thousand."
"But no one has to know where you're from," she bubbles. "Just get on a train—I'll buy the ticket. We'll say you're my fiance."
For two days, Sweet Svetlana lives at Alyosha's, washing curtains and singing, tempting us with promises of Siberian freedom and fun. Then she disappears and we get a postcard from Irkutsk. Three weeks later, she knocks on the door. Since we wouldn't come to her, she says, she returned to us. But she met a handsome engineer on the plane and is living with him. This is just a sentimental visit—and can we help her get a residence permit?
Alyosha leaves Moscow for a week to appear at a trial in distant Alma-Ata. (He will defend two Armenians accused of peddling marijuana, one of the rare drug cases I've heard of here, although he predicts considerable growth in its use and severe tightening of the laws penalizing it within a few years.) While he is gone, a suspicion that I have exaggerated his flair and significance works on me, fusing a sense of cheapness to my loneliness. In his absence, my musings about our flings make them seem synthetic, like the bragging of for-the-asking sex in magazine articles about Swedish girls' mythical delights. To test my memory and feelings, I decide to record the first fete after Alyosha's return.
He returns, in fact, a day earlier than expected, calls me gaily from the airport and suggests a "homecoming fiesta" to celebrate our reunion and Aeroflot's skill in wafting him both ways without mishap. (He is genuinely relieved to be home: Alma-Ata's judges make Moscow's appear enlightened by comparison; the hotel had bedbugs; the city was short of meat.) At the University gate, he greets me with a bear hug and suggests we invite Ira, who must be called before leaving work because she has no home telephone. Have I any objections?
Ira offers to make her own way to Alyosha's but has not arrived a full hour after the agreed seven o'clock. In the interval, I contemplate the apartment's natural state.
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A one-room "Khrushch-slum" apartment with attached kitchen and bath, it is decorated in a grease-stained burgundy wallpaper that Alyosha hung himself, seemingly after removing it from a Barcelona bordello. Of the furniture, only a bookcase surviving from his salad days rises above the nondescript. On top of it, held in place by a threadbare tire and a stack of disused pots, teeters a coffee table with broken legs. This sets the pattern for the chaos at floor level, five feet below.
Tattered stuffed toys and an assortment of wooden Russian dolls covered in dust. A row of pistons and connecting rods dappled with candle wax. The well-known flower-child poster— equivalent in rarity value to a Picasso lithograph on Park Avenue—of the nude blonde and pony in a field of high grass. A set of medical syringes—for treating girls' venereal diseases—laid out in a cigar box balancing on an old cauldron. Stacks of paint cans; a whole old overcoat turned cleaning rag; an ancient enlarger for picnic and pornographic photography; a large supply of the best toilet paper—he's fussy about this. And sprinkled in the general jumble, a hundred jars, bottles, books, butcher's tools and artifacts lying where they were dropped on the divan, television set and cigarette-burned rug. The gaping disrepair of the apartment building itself is most noticeable in the steps missing on the staircases. I first thought Alyosha was joking when he said it was erected only eight years ago—and by a construction trust as housing for the very workers who slapped it together.
The knock sounds well after eight. It is not Ira, however, but a thin neighbor who has come for her weekly injection of vitamin B-11, prescribed by Alyosha as a winter cure. He quickly sterilizes the needle and gets her over her embarrassment to let me see where she will be jabbed. Her shyly pirouetted behind makes me plump for her to pinch-hit for the evening, but she is far too familiar to interest Alyosha. Besides, she's late for a sewing class.
By eight-thirty, we agree it's time to call a substitute. Moskvichki disregard appointments as casually as they make them: having arranged a rendezvous, many first-timers fail to keep it and are never seen again—or turn up at the apartment
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after months. Alyosha's latest address book is already in our hands when we hear Ira's saucy knock.
An ambitious girl with aspirations to marry a scientist or diplomat, she is better groomed than average and carries traces of good breeding. (Her father is a Polish officer who was detained in Russia long after the war.) Although her job in a laboratory for evaluating clothing affi"onts her pride, she hangs on for its opportunities to meet young chemists.
Ira is a womanly nineteen; Maya, whom she has brought with her, a year younger: a shorter, pudgier colleague—whom we've never seen before—with large eyes and Clara Bow lips. She remains on the threshold stammering that she shouldn't have come, that Ira dragged her—until Alyosha happily whisks her in.
He coaxes the bashful Maya to name her preference for drink, hides his wince when she designates the syrupy substance called port and hurries to the nearest cafe while the guests start on the salami. Between mouthfuls, they describe a futile trip from their lab to a distant store supposedly selling East German tights— which has put them in a mood to be, well, feted. Returning before they've thawed, Alyosha pronounces a toast that wends from tardiness (Ira's) to tartness to tarts, but which flatters rather than offends. Overcoming Maya's eye-blinking protest, he sets down her glass and persuades her to show us "the source of your own honeyed wine, milk of—God grant it—a clutch of providential infants." Remonstrating feebly, Maya undoes her buttons, liberating a Renoir breast. Aroused by Alyosha's tongue on it, or by rivalry, Ira strides to the bathroom and emerges naked except for her boots. A lithe figure despite her fullness, she assumes a position on the bed favored during her previous visit, her temptress's wink so superfluous that I chuckle to myself And I adore Maya's inevitable "Must you really do that?" as she makes room for my hand in her panties.
I touch her wonderful bush. The lovemaking begins with a rush. Maya changes partners affably, then back again, assuring us redundantly that she doesn't quite know where to go in this unusual "hoofing" for her supper. The tape recorder has picked up Ray Charles's faithful beat, filling the air with nostalgia and ritual, transforming the room into our private cabaret. Tele-
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phone rings go unanswered but the television set is still documenting a Czech delegation touring a steel works. I catch a glimpse of Alyosha's head deferentially lowered between Ira's legs—as curious a spectacle as the Bessemer furnaces on the flickering screen. In place of the revulsion I'd have for another man, I feel as if I'm taking a bath with the family. I know his smooth, clean body as well as my own, and in some way I suspect that this moment of hardness together is more an expression of our companionship than of lechery. Yet I love Maya too, clenching her chubby fists beneath me. Sweet Maya, who is giving me this trust of her body at first sight. My cup runneth over again. Jesus.
Alyosha's rolling on his back, finished. Ira transfers her attention to Maya and me, encouraging us—"Harder!"—somewhat condescendingly. When she tongues our nipples, I respond with a surge for her, still inside Maya. Now the dizzy joy of pure carnality takes hold of me. I hold still in the pungency of Maya while kissing Ira's mouth, then switch. This is what I was born for. My head spinning, I hate the voice that says I should try to record this. Through pumping and whirling, I make out a pile of cookbooks I've never noticed before. "Oh my handsome one," says someone—but our swish-sloshing is the only sound I fully hear. I come. Trade to start again almost immediately. The second release gives me a moment's slumber.