Operating procedures are equally important. One of the most fundamental axioms is that Russian girls require a gentle push—coaxing, teasing, plying with vodka or laughs. Eighty per cent return for more, says Alyosha. But you must guide them through their little barriers.
Another canon is never to be without a supply of two-kopek coins. Calls sometimes must be made on the dot—when a girl has access to an office telephone—or from a suburb; and since the "deucer" is as scarce as evening taxis, not having one in your pocket for the nearest booth can lose you the ball game.
Other injunctions are to ask girls to repeat aloud all arrangements for future meetings before leaving them, and never to let a just-stopped lovely who won't join you immediately move on until her coordinates are recorded. If she has no telephone, a girl
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friend's who will serve as intermediary must be elicited, or an address for telegrams to fix rendezvous. Since her promise to call you is worth little, leaving your number is never enough. Not inhibition, Alyosha tutors, but Russian nonchalance is the great enemy. Girls lose slips of paper, become distracted, forget.
Boredom, on the other hand, is the great ally: the cosmic variety implied by the Russian skuka. Once I pushed for a serious explanation of the permissiveness. Was it the free-love propaganda of certain early Bolsheviks? Had the Orthodox church's social attitudes prepared the way? Without denying the relevance of traditional Russian tolerance of carnal sin, Alyosha's explanation was rooted in more immediate influences, especially the girls' great emptiness of routine. "It's a monotony of monotoneness: no entertainment, no excitement. On seventy rubles a month, they can afford either a movie or two a week or their daily sugared bun. On a larger scale, our social system has them dragging on in dreary poverty, with no 'bourgeois' escapes. Understand why Jaguar-driving playboys in sane countries are so much poorer than you and me?"
Without having set foot abroad (except as a soldier), Alyosha senses that he could not hope for a tenth of his popularity in the West. Like easygoing social relationships, he's convinced, quick sex is one of the reverse benefits of Soviet suppression, which leaves young women in a state of skuka. Where restaurants are few and primitive, people are concerned with their stomachs rather than a proper selection of knife and fork: hence the inelegant—but lusty—scenes at Russian tables. Where wages are depressed, television abysmal and pop groups banned, Alyosha's fetes are royal divertissements. But precisely this is what enlarges his burden. A compulsion to sleep with every attractive girl is one thing, but "the knowledge that you can do it," he sighs in mock complaint, "gives a man no peace. I keep telling you, bureaucratic error begat me in the wrong motherland."
But by now, I realize that Alyosha's ratio of conquests is not a wholly accurate measure of Moscow attitudes, not only because of his uncanny talent for disarming even the inhibited minority (he would make a superb sexual therapist) but also because most girls he stops have given indication of just this cosmic ennui. Like
178^MOSCOW FAREWELL
a predator selecting prey from a herd, he judges women by their posture and walk. Those slouching at a bus stop or trailing toward nowhere are the most grateful for attention, and register like off-guard gazelles in his peripheral vision.
As if to illustrate the point, we notice a sweet thing outside the TASS office. Yes, she'll come to the apartment now, but can we "put it ofT' for just a while? If we "do it" this afternoon, what will happen to her in the evening?
Desperately late for crucial appointments first thing this morning—mine with my faculty supervisor, a Stalinist hack threatening to inform the Embassy unless I produce some work; Alyosha's with a police captain, to quash a license-losing charge of drunken driving after a cop stopped us at midnight—we fly down Alyosha's stairs and into the courtyard, gorging our breakfast of leftover cake. Shoes still untied, laughing at the sun and a mangy neighborhood cat who greets us for scraps, we dash through the snow to the workhorse Volga. After last night's fete, the prospect of serious business in the outside world strikes us as diverting before we meet again for lunch.
Suddenly we remember, and jolt back in minor shock. The car won't start. Precious minutes must be wasted. Alyosha forgot to refill the radiator first thing this morning.
Counting every second, he sprints back up the stairs three at a time, fills cauldrons and kettles with hot water and, the faster to revive the frozen motor, heats them further on the stove's blackened burners. On ordinary mornings he submits uncomplainingly to this tedious routine, as to the thousand everyday frustrations that a lifetime of obstacles has trained him to endure cheerfully. But today, his hands are coarsened by the cold and the grease; and he badly stains his single respectable suit crawling under the battered car to reseal the stopcock. And we are now impossibly late.
His inspired driving recovers several minutes. While taxis crawl and private drivers stop to spread ashes, he plows, churns, spins and slides over the ice of an artful route of back streets. Although his appointment is minutes before mine, he insists on delivering me first. Skidding between a parked car and a
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towering snow bank, we turn a corner to cross the last of the main streets. There my heart sinks.
Head tihed, smihng to herself, the girl is swinging a briefcase as she saunters. Like a hound sighting the hare, Alyosha chortles and swings to the curb.
"Good God, no," I plead. "Not now. Any time but now. We don't need her."
I might have said more. The police captain has warned that Alyosha's case is very serious—a strident new anti-alcohol campaign is in progress—and that he will be available only before nine o'clock. We've made crazy detours before when rushing to a trial or to beat a Bolshoi Theater curtain; in fact, it's a rare drive that is not interrupted. But this delay is suicidal. Alyosha without a license would be like a postman without legs; and there is a real danger that my academic bankruptcy will get me expelled, especially if I make my self-admiring supervisor wait.
"I'll get you Elizabeth Taylor when she comes. Forget this one and let's get going."
Then I desist. More from me can only protract the inevitable. Before leaping out, Alyosha looks at me tenderly, explaining with his eyes that it can't be helped.
"Have a Chesterfield, I'll only be a minute."
In fact, he is three minutes. As they tick by, a wave of affection washes away my exasperation. Winning a wide smile in spite of the startled girl's effort to be prim, gesturing grandly toward the jalopy, trying to avoid the unseemliness of rushing her—he is inimitable, the Peck's Bad Boy of our time.
When the girl has settled warily on the back seat and Alyosha has introduced me with his customary fanfare ("Meet my buddy muchacho visiting from New York and Miami Beach—you know, next to Cuba . . ."), we speed off again—miraculously without penalty, for my supervisor arrives later than I, and although Alyosha must waste most of the morning in a corridor filled with worried petitioners, he manages to see the blustery police captain and prevail by offering free legal services in a suit against him by his angry ex-wife. Having waited uncomplainingly in the car, the girl spends the day playing house in the apartment.