"I'll only stay a few days if you'll have me. You won't turn me out?"
"Relax, Teach," says Alyosha. "This is like the army, we don't bump nobody. Certainly not pedigreed ladies. . . . We seem to be clean out of handkerchiefs, so just use the sheet."
To soothe her, Alyosha muses about the etymology of "linen." Aksyona is in fact using the pillowcase for her tears, but soon reaches to us for more affection. Happy all night, she turns positively cheerful during morning ablutions. For a better breakfast, Alyosha and I go to the bakery—and return in ten minutes to an empty apartment! Aksyona has left no note; ten rubles from my jacket and Alyosha's new cigarette lighter are missing.
Alyosha is inured to girls stealing sweaters and toilet water from his room, just as he cleans up overindulgent young ones' vomit with the mien of a mother attending to diapers. Although such inconveniences are ordinarily part of the price, Aksyona's betrayal hurts. Was she a vagabond thief, like many waiting-room pickups? A novice prostitute who lost her nerve to ask for a fee? Alyosha, who has heard a thousand equally moving stories from con girls, as well as from genuine unfortunates, at first insists it is one or the other, and that we waste no time thinking about a clever little trick who can well look after herself. But the morning fails to erase thoughts of her possible suicide.
We spend the afternoon and two successive evenings searching Moscow's dozen stations. At the same time, Alyosha asks the chief prosecutor of a city district—whom he tells that Aksyona has been left an inheritance, to save her trouble in case she's found—to inquire whether news of her has reached the police. That no one has seen her allows us to reckon she's found a man or made her way home to Kiev. Although this is not our first encounter with such tragedy, we feel depressed, and have no wish for railroad action for some time.
188^MOSCOW FAREWELL
Tuesday afternoon with one of Alyosha's old friends, a stolid engineer called Edik. The apartment belongs to Edik's father, a mathematician engaged in high defense work. (Edik's ease in skipping work every third afternoon is attributed variously to the protection afforded by his important sire and the poverty of his own efforts at the drafting table.) A hundred yards from the Supreme Court of the Russian Republic, the quarters are suitably grand for a man of his stature; four large rooms in a high-ceilinged building that could pass in a residential district of nineteenth-century Prague. From the living-room window, a tip of the Kremlin is visible, its fortress wall impinging on our lives like a prison on the outskirts of a college town.
The apartment is a museum of low-grade Victoriana, so quintessentially shabby-genteel that the very concept might have originated here. All the rooms like this I've seen and the spirit they represent flood my memory. Tasseled lampshades, age stains and light-bulb browns dappling the sallow silk. Sagging armchairs that discharge heavy puffs at a touch, a broken grandfather clock, and threadbare oriental rugs, long dead of dust and thirst. All this and more—including the inevitable aspidistra, as if transferred from some defunct ministry—pressing in on the oversized, overstuffed divan where we are taking our pleasure with Voluptuous Valya, and Lyuba, her thinner, harder friend. Lyuba (from lyubov —"love") is one of the few girls I've met who can be called sexually voracious, but our nakedness is so cartoon-like in contrast to the bedizened room that we can't take her more seriously than ourselves.
A week's dirty dishes and leavings are stacked in every corner: Edik's housekeeper is sick and his father away on a project. (I suspect rockets but, of course, do not ask.) His tape recorder has been lent to a friend and the shortwave bands on his radio need new tubes; faute de mieux, therefore. Radio Moscow provides the background noise. While we squirm, pant and change partners, the announcer soars on in his go-team-go voice about a cement factory that has voluntarily raised its own quotas for this, the crucial second year of the historic new Five-Year Plan. But no one laughs at the program's wild incongruity: no one else has heard it. Nor would they notice even a declaration of war
Alyosha^l89
announced in those tones and these circumstances.
We are drinking a cocktail of gluey apricot nectar and medicinal spirit, which is almost pure alcohol. Although Edik swallows his straight from the jar, he takes no part in the communal sport, for he is wrestling with an individual problem: headlights he left on all night have irreversibly finished the battery of his father's car. From the edge of a chair facing the divan, he telephones one hot tip after another in search of a replacement— any battery, new or used, for trucks, buses or cars. Absorption in his quest blinds him to Valya's vulva wriggling ten inches from his nose.
"Edik, old pal, drop that a minute and give us, as they say, a hand."
"Are you kidding? My father's back tomorrow. Christ, Alexei —help me juice up that vehicle."
Lyuba borrows the telephone for a quick call to a girl friend. From the lend-lease gasoline canister in which the spirit is stored, Alyosha pours another round of drinks. Voluptuous Valya plants her six feet of Amazon flesh directly over Edik, the warmth of her parted legs—or his anxiety about the car—steaming his spectacles. He gulps his fifth inch of straight spirit and racks his brain for another contact to telephone. Wolfing a slice of bologna, Lyuba pulls us back onto the divan. The Kremlin bells record the passage of another hour in our under-their-noses hideout.
At five o'clock, the festivities end as if a factory whistle has sounded. Hurry-scurry, we dress and dash from the apartment, each to attend to his own, suddenly urgent business. Having clinched a deal for his battery, Edik searches anxiously for a taxi to claim possession of the used twelve-volter before a bigger bribe takes it elsewhere. After two consecutive days with us, Valya must rush home to make supper for her "jealous" husband. (But he's going to a Komsomol meeting afterwards, and she suggests we all meet again at nine o'clock.) Lyuba—who, it seems, is moody when clothed—is already late for her factory's second shift.
"Who says we're not a work-disciplined people with higher goals?" chirps Alyosha, enjoying our jerky haste after the squandered day. While he delivers the girls to their destinations, I hurry to the National Hotel for talk of Soviet legal trends with a visiting Columbia professor.
190^MOSCOW FAREWELL
"Z)o svidaniya, gents. Stay healthy."
"So long, privet.''''
"You'll stay in touch?"
"Of course! What's on for Sunday?"
We disperse into the afternoon darkness, then the slogging rush-hour crush. At this hour, the city center swarms with dark-coated robots with shopping bags, bunching up at traffic lights, crisscrossing in and out of shops, pushing to their destinations like beetles in a box. The sounds are trolleys whining and ten thousand booted feet tramping in the slush.
My own route takes me down the Twenty-fifth of October Street, past GUM's dingy posterior to the top of Red Square. In this homey district of once-thriving retail trade, the restrictions on commercial activity have left a hollow melancholy, matching the weather's. Above the unsmiling crowds, buzzing strands of neon starkly announce "Milk" and "Bread." Plaster busts of Lenin guard every office-entrance, like the motionless sentries at His mausoleum. Everything is submerged in the gloom I felt when my friends and I could think of nothing to do with ourselves on winter afternoons after school.
Several minutes early for my appointment, I linger outside the Historical Museum, wondering what connection might possibly exist between this bleakness and the lush hours we relished in Edik's apartment. Outdoors, not so much as an advertisement dresses the stores; not a single bikinied form enlivens kiosks plastered with political magazines and Central Committee brochures. The whole of the puritanical public setting seems like camouflage for our dissipation.