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The following day we are dashing toward an important meeting only to stop dead in our tracks and zoom with equal speed in the opposite direction, in pursuit of some blonde hair and fetching calves. And two days after that, we are hoping against hope that we'll still be on time to catch a man who claims to have a fifteenth-century icon, but Alyosha stomps the brakes before we've covered five hundred yards.
"In the bakery doorway—look! Hallelujah! have you ever seen such a darling?"
"Not since noon, I haven't." In fact, we've spent the morning frolicking with two waitresses, but Alyosha ignores my allusion to this ancient episode—or pretends I'm agreeing that the new lass with the hand-knitted cap is indeed more fetching than the pair who departed four minutes ago.
"You're not suggesting we should let her get away?"
"We're holding up traffic. Some citizens might be—uh, late for important appointments.''''
"You're probably aware that thousands of icons were painted in the fifteenth century. How many living things, by your guess, are made like that work of art?"
Cap allows that she fancies visiting a girl friend in a distant district. Snow banks and one-lane traffic make us fifty minutes late for the appointment with the mysterious icon man, who, if he showed up at all, has undoubtedly left. "How did / know what was outside that bakery?" sighs Alyosha.
And so on. Rushing Efficient Alia to the airport for a flight to join her husband, we see a fair face framed by a bus window. In violation of two dozen road rules and with flagrant disregard for the cops on every other corner, Alyosha risks a spinning U-turn, then threads the traffic like a car-chase film to stay parallel with the vehicle transporting such loveliness. One hand rotates the wheel for these reckless maneuvers; the other is performing a repertoire of feverish waves, first to catch the beauty's lofty eye, then to cajole her into disembarking at the next stop—and then the next one as we follow our mile of detour despite Alla's moans about the disaster of trying to rebook an Aeroflot flight.
Hurrying to a compulsory foreign-policy lecture for lawyers one day, Alyosha is smitten by a trolleybus driver, who proves much easier to lure out than yesterday's passenger. The vivacious
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lass stops her vehicle, emerges in her overalls and, pretending to adjust the trolley's leads to the overhead wires, delightedly announces the telephone number where she can be reached at four o'clock.
But the missed prizes cause him corresponding pain. "Vanished!" he yelps of a girl who has disappeared into a metro entrance or around a crowded corner. His voice is full of puppy hurt and genuine distress as the old self-parody wells up in his eyes. "A fine person, a distinct individual, and we may never see her again. . . ."
When they first met years ago, Alyosha knew her as the wife of a prodigious drinker and philanderer nicely suited to his actor's job in Moscow's worst theater. She refused him. Later, the husband crashed his tinny Zaporozhets, beheading that night's darling and so rupturing his internal organs that his doctors predicted a single drink would kill. He never had that one—nor ever slept with any other woman except his wife. Smashing his face, the accident also totally changed his character.
His new appearance precluding any work on the stage, he turned to writing, quickly winning fame and fortune with screenplays and television scripts. With no time for anything else, he began to hate restaurants and carousing as he had once loved them, often turning acrimonious when distracted from his typewriter. His asceticism was too much for his wife, whose normal interest in occasionally seeing the town developed, under the pressure of his severity, into an appetite for affairs. She comes to the apartment to offer herself and curses—but also laughs— when Alyosha declines, turning the tables.
This is the evening we've put off" for weeks, like schoolboys with term projects. Alyosha is home alone and I'm in the dormitory, each attending to neglected chores. Although my studies are past the point of salvaging, I must stay at my desk at least long enough to answer disquieted letters from my sponsors, a committee of high-principled scholars representing America's Soviet-studies establishment. Its letterhead and language stare at me like emissaries from another galaxy. Citing my failure to correspond with Harvard, the executive secretary has hinted at
182^MOSCOW FAREWELL
my recall in the absence of a satisfactory reply. To this task, I settle down at last, surprised and relieved at the tales of my nonexistent research that flow from my imagination to the letter paper—like the atmospheric hallucinations that prompted Gogol's fantasy?—and hopeful that ignorance, mysteriousness and the distance to Cambridge will keep secret my intellectual collapse.
His suspicion piqued by seeing me home at this hour, roommate Viktor peers at my table. In nothing is he so clumsy as trying to appear casual while scouting for "information"; but perceiving that I am writing in English, he desists with a grunt. Having exercised with his weights just long enough to spice the air with pungent sweat, he retires at his customary ten o'clock.
An hour later, Kemal summons me importantly to the telephone. It is Alyosha, protesting he is lonely, claiming he has something vital to tell me—and in a rush of enthusiasm, as if struck by a startling new idea, suggesting we find company for the "budding eventide." Although my emergency letters are unfinished, I agree to meet him outside my gate. Hearing his voice, I realize that the whole of my purpose in Russia has somehow come to simply spending time with him. More than spread legs or rompish escape, the lure is his boundless impulse to go somewhere, explore something, sniff" out what's happening. Forgo this for books? Never has the distinction between life and graduate school learning been more clear-cut.
It is nearly midnight when the Volga pads toward me over the snow like an old mascot; we must go, therefore, to one of the main railway stations, the only public places alive at this hour. Alyosha steers seemingly by memory and instinct over a route of muffled streets, in defiance of the windshield's near obliteration by pelting flakes. (The wipers were stolen again yesterday afternoon while the car was parked outside a courthouse.) Soon we are approaching Young Communist Square, a huge former marketplace where three major stations serving trains to the vast steppes of the north, northeast and northwest, stand almost shoulder to shoulder.
From dawn to dusk, the square swarms with provincial visitors come to Moscow to change trains, search for warm underwear or
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a new tablecloth, make a deal for their home-raised ducks or gawk in reverence at Lenin's mausoleum. From the sidewalks around the stations, the throng spills into the even larger roadway, cardboard suitcases and sacks of provisions clutched in burly hands, rag-wrapped rations stuffed into pockets, prize purchases—mattresses, armchairs and bolts of carpet—balanced on their heads. Searching, soliciting, gesticulating, glowering, haggling, conspiratorially whispering ("Psst—where'd you come into them boots?"), the army of workers and peasants clamors and claws about its business: craving a bargain, yet morbidly suspicious of being cheated; knowing their only rest is on their own haunches—not one in ten thousand wastes time even looking for a cot in a hotel—and that this year's trip must cover everything, since next year they might not be lucky enough to return.
But at night, this rousing multitude is gone without a trace, leaving the Colosseum-like expanse almost deserted. Now the very emptiness exerts a grip, tightened by silent mist. Only haphazard clusters of taxis loiter outside exits, their exhausts rising in thick clouds past Yaroslav Station's Russian fairytale facade and Kazan Station's Tartar tower. In this air, the unmistakable presence of illicit transactions drifts like Claudius's ghost. The quilt-jacketed taxi drivers refuse ordinary passengers with a sneer: their game is pimping or peddling vodka from under their seats, and for this, they are willing to wait hours, ignoring their passenger-mile norms as well as the iron cold. A handful of prostitutes has also assembled at this outpost of night life: a hag in an open coat near the metro entrance, foully abusing a man who has declined her advances; others in the relative comfort of clammy underground passages linking the stations and metro. A scattering of drunks and hangers-on completes the roster of outdoor personages: remnants of Moscow's prewar underworld to which Alyosha is drawn by nostalgia and a penchant for the colorful. (I used to wonder why the police don't simply clean up the square once and for all. The answer seems to be that disreputable elements are rooted out less vigorously than political dissidents. For all the drunks, prostitutes, "parasites" and petty criminals exiled from Moscow and