"Yeah, some wop ship went aground," I hear Alyosha from the kitchen. "The Ministry of Foreign Trade keeps shifting our underground rocks."
This is his commentary on two bottles of Italian vermouth 1 spied in a downtown store this afternoon-—which also set the theme for his supper stories. Early one morning, he begins when we're all at table, the manager of a food store steps outside to tell all Jews in the line to leave. He tailors the message throughout the day to Kalmyks, Kirgizians and other minority groups, locking the door behind him on each return inside. As evening approaches, he tells the remaining Russians to go home too: the store is closed for inventory and will not open.
"See that?" says Kolya to Tolya, who has also waited all day. "The dirty Jews always get special treatment."
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The meal is like an after-dinner cigarette. The brandy is Zhenya, a chic "older" woman who arrives to talk to Alyosha about her failing marriage. Vexed at the sight of Ira and Maya—who is in an ancient bathrobe that she herself used to wear—she is distracted, however, by Alyosha's new Rolling Stones tape, and demonstrates her frug. After she allows the younger girls to admire her underwear too, we are suddenly in heat again, three pairs of thighs pointed toward the ceiling.
The sweet joy of dumb potency washes over me while Zhenya insists she has no time for this, I must first finish with her. I am aware that Alyosha has got up to answer another knock and that Lev Davidovich, a timid colleague, has entered, but I can't follow their corridor conversation. All I hear is that he wants to buy a barely used Volga from some speculator on the cheap but fears a new car might antagonize the Party overseer at the Juridical Consultation Office. He leaves without a peek at our balling.
I've had one drink too many. Or there's one woman too many; something is confusing. Tight in one with my fingers up the other two—but why am I laughing like a clown? The first time I saw Zhenya in the Journalists' Club, I thought she was a snob. She's trying to tell me something interesting about her husband, or that she will tell me later. I think she'll like it the back way. Maya and Ira want big-deal husbands too. Meanwhile, they decide to hold hands while sampling simultaneous fellatio with Alyosha and me. My hard-on is my head. Somebody's trying to thread a new tape. The recorder falls, smashing glasses on the floor. Zhenya suggests a screw for the road. C'mere baby: I'm shouting in English. I come and sprawl on my back, my stomach all wet.
I revive to Zhenya ordering Alyosha not to get up from her to answer the new knock. He's trying like hell to come but the sounds of an argument in the adjoining apartment—wife raging at drunken husband, he coaxing her to drink herself—make him laugh and slip out. Glasses of fresh tea are served, with Bulgarian cherry jam spooned from the jar. Searching for Ira's necklace, we improvise a game of sexual chain on the floor, with pats and licks, but no desire. Dressed again, we waltz to the Dr. Zhivago
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theme, rendered in our own la-la-la-la. Outside, a wind is driving thick new snow against the windows. We leave only when Zhenya really can't stay any longer.
During the following weeks, I'm like a scientist afraid that his new discovery will reveal itself to be a hoax. But the pattern repeats itself like a telephone weather report. Recruiting a bakery girl who has only an hour for adultery because she must hurry to the boy she married last week. Watching two nymphets, fellow-workers in a printing shop, racing to undress themselves: Alyosha has told them—"Socialist competition in all things, Comrades!"—that the first will win "a certain corporal prize." Stepping into the apartment the next afternoon to find three new teen-agers improvising a nude ballet. (One helps me with my overcoat while the other two dive for cover.) The arrival of a girl from Murmansk whom Alyosha met on the Black Sea last summer, and her lying down for me as if it were integral to entering the room. Above all, the meeting, celebrating, mating and return of the innocents—who, despite this, will somehow remain lifelong friends—to Moscow's multitude. Strangest of all is the strength I sense in this submissiveness, as if our easy conquests have something in common with the sucking of French and German armies into the Russian heartland for destruction.
Mornings, the girls sedately make up in the wavy mirror, as if we've known each other forever. Although the adventure started with Alyosha's traditional stop-you-for-a-mmuf^ ploy> some will stay days here, their new home. No one at their old homes is informed; no adjustment time is needed. Although meeting an American in these circumstances is as unlikely for them as coming across a snake charmer in Gorky Park, most accept my attendance as casually as everything destiny tosses them. We all belong to the big human family.
Sometimes I leave alone, making my way to a trolley that passes near the University. Hollowed by dissipation, pleased and disgusted with myself, feeling the after-tingle and dried secretions on my skin, I wait with old grandmothers at a stop outside crumbling yellow houses, knowing I am as close as I can be to the purifying mystical visions claimed by certain advocates of voluminous sex. What is commonplace elsewhere, perhaps even
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debased, here contains an element of the miraculous. I know why primitive man worshiped fertility symbols.
"To seduce all the girls in Moscow is impossible. But" . . . (heavy pause) . . . "toward this goal one must strive." Alyosha has compressed his girl-knowledge into such maxims, pronounced at appropriately incongruous moments in the oratorical tone of a radio announcer citing old Russian proverbs in substantiation of production claims. "A certain number of darlings resent granting their favors immediately," he also likes to ex-posit. "Roughly eleven per cent. I understand them; it's a matter of principle. 'No matter how much I like a man,' they say, 'I just won't succumb the first time.' To which I reply, 'Of course, honey, I'll drive you home. I guess it's good-bye for us—until tomorrow.'" At happy moments behind the wheel, he breaks into song, blessing the Motherland for its gift of orgasms and orifices instead of "organic unity" and the "orchestra of social sounds." And traditional limericks and verses are resurrected from obscurity to illustrate, with an altered word or phrase, salient points. The abundance of instant, anonymous sex, for example, is conveyed by slightly modifying a typically cloying Soviet ballad:
Lilac's blooming in our native fields as if glad.
Sweet Spring, she's always the same; A brigade leader's fucking a maiden like mad—
And wants to know her name.
Passing a secondhand bookshop, we see the famous poster of cloth-capped Lenin in a gingerbread countryside, with verses implying that the Father of the Communist Party, born in April, caused the buds to open and birds to sing. Alyosha reads it all—
The snow of the fields is melting,
Warm winds caress our ears; Flocks of birds without counting.
Frolic in the sun without fears.
Brooks babble in their fullness.
Slim birch trees, again all alive. Remind us of our heartfelt gladness, lenin's birthday means Spring's arrived.
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—changing only the final line: "lenin's birthday —enjoy an alft"esco jive."
His story for illustrating female submissiveness starts with Vanka, the sometimes sober village handyman, spying a pretty milkmaid in a barn.
"Hey, Mashka, c'mon up into the hayloft, we'll have some you-know-what."
"Fresh. I certainly will not."
"Why not?"
"Because I said so."
"Aw gee, Mashinka. C'mon."
Masha's sigh expresses the full futility of further resistance. "Oh all right. Bully, you wore me down."
The bread and butter of his expertise is knowledge of the richest pickup grounds: the exits to certain metro stations for tarts, several bustling shopping streets for counter girls, the telephone booths of certain major buildings for secretaries planning their evening. And throughout the day, the Central Post Office on Gorky Street, where local girls are telephoning friends to announce their purchases, and visiting lasses—who are even happier to find a bed—are calling Sverdlovsk and Kharkov to ask their parents to telegram thirty rubles. We sometimes drop by at five o'clock just to stand in earshot of the booths, keeping our fingers on the nation's pulse.