Walking the somber streets, shivering in the blank cold, I'm struck again and again by this paradox of nature. How did these Tahitian attitudes take root here?"
The next time we meet Lyuba, it is in her family's musty room in a communal apartment where they all live, as if in a fourth-class pensione. (Both parents work until late afternoon.) Edik has joined us again, but this time I'm the one who is taking no part, except for holding Lyuba's breasts. Prohibition from anything more is my "measure of social correction" for making us a girl short by allowing Blondie Bella to wander away from
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the car while the others were shopping for provisions on the way to Lyuba's. More excited than ever by my enforced frustration, Lyuba takes wholly seriously someone's playful proposal that I be pardoned after an hour.
The next time we meet Voluptuous Valya, it is the afternoon when Alyosha is the duty lawyer in his Juridical Consultation Office. At last the enterprise has moved to its new quarters in a sloppily renovated apartment house, of which the pride of office fashion and convenience are half a dozen consulting rooms instead of the old premises' toilet-sized cubicles. Here counselors can meet their clients in private—even, should they desire, behind a locked door. Checking in at the office, Alyosha takes the key to one of these tiny new chambers from the matronly secretary, and with a flourish, invites Valya and me inside. The key is turned, a bottle swigged at, a moment taken to recount recent events. Then Valya undresses and climbs on the desk.
Fucking in a Soviet office? With telephones ringing, clients arriving and the Chairman — a Party man of course—giving advice in the corridor outside? Yes, but it's with Alyosha, who knows when to practice the unheard-of On this quiet afternoon, he judges, our room won't be needed, we'll remain undisturbed.
It's not for nothing that he served on the committee to expedite the three-year renovation. The chambers are smaller than he wanted, and positioning is tricky on the cheap little desk. But Valya is experienced, having first favored him precisely here, after he stopped her on the sidewalk outside. In any case, she will not tolerate the "indignity" of using the floor.
I wonder whether his elderly secretary knows why Alyosha asks for the key. Surely his reputation suggests why young ladies flocked to him for private consultations after the move to the new office. When we leave she wears a knowing expression. Yet her fondness for Alexei Evgenievich, Alyosha's office name, helps protect him. He is the man who arranged for her husband's admission to an excellent cancer clinic—which cured him—and whose gifts of chocolates on holidays and occasional daffodils brighten her life.
The next morning, we meet when the sun has finally established full-fledged day and are joined by an old friend of
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Edik's who, on rake-offs from the dental laboratory he supervises, dresses like a Midwestern college professor. (Alyosha claims he has perfected another first for Soviet dentistry: extracting bad teeth through the anus. "It's a great new technique for people who can't open their mouths.") The entire day lies before us to fritter away, and despite our failure to accomplish anything in life—despite everything that keeps us down enough to be grateful for small favors—we are wrapped in an idler's sense of luxury. Lolling in this, Edik's friend says it first: "Kovo ebat budyemP" —not "Whaddya wanna do tonight, Marty?" but "Who are we going to fuck?"
It is always said with an element of parody, this private motto: a mocking of the girls who will submit after feeble excuses; of ourselves for our self-indulgence and abdication from more constructive interests; of the system that demeans values and trivializes existence, reducing us to this childishness. Kovo ebat budyem? expresses the futility of striving for noble goals—and our relief from the need for such exertion.
We saunter to the car and drive around, searching for a leash for the new boxer of Edik's friend. (Although there is apparently a pet shop somewhere that sells them, he will not humiliate his animal by making her wear an item of Soviet manufacture, and is willing to pay the outrageous price for a secondhand Western one.) But when he repeats the motto after lunch, it has a more straightforward ring: unable to get free every day, he's concerned lest this afternoon not produce the planned consummation. Reassuring him playfully, Alyosha makes some calls and we pick up our girls as they leave work in the Ministry of Light Industry. Somehow the day was richer before they appeared.
Her body is the socialist-realist statue of "Woman Exercising" in every park; her face, a film poster of a kerchiefed milkmaid. In fact, she is the daughter of Moscow factory hands who herself worked for a year in a rubber plant after high school. Then she studied theatrical makeup and was expelled for truancy. At a second institute, she tried industrial design, quickly leaving of her own will. Next was a language school, where she hung on long enough to acquire a household serfs command of French. She applied for a job with Aeroflot.
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A smitten personnel man gave her the job despite her repulse in a taxi. Soon she was earning as much as her parents.
When promoted to international service, she started, according to custom, with the "democratic" countries. It was a nice break: raincoats bought in Prague and sweaters in Warsaw considerably enhanced her style—and her income, when items were re-peddled to eager friends. Now she aspired to work Western routes. On capitalist territory, Embassy and KGB officers watched their own almost as closely as enemy agents; during the two-hour London turnaround, she had heard, no one could leave the plane alone. But there was always the occasional bad-weather layover with its openings for shopping and sightseeing. The prestige alone of Western travel warranted the added straight-and-narrow demands, and although her looks militated against her now—to lower the possibility of defection, Aeroflot assigned its least prepossessing staff for capitalist routes—her proletarian background was strong recommendation. She was careful to dress plainly and talk "patriotic" with the political types.
But her best friend, also a stewardess, married a Frenchman and settled in Paris; and she was soon summoned by the KGB. "We're not prohibiting you from writing to her, but not recommending it. Don't ruin your career. You know what we mean."
She did, of course, but decided to answer through a third stewardess whom she thought she could trust. A week later, she was back on domestic routes, where a pretext was found to cut her salary. Thus began her sharp decline in mental energy as well as in work. Now she is a substitute stewardess, called on principally in emergencies. Her wardrobe is ragged; she spends her afternoons at the movies or eating ice cream with girl friends.
Underlying everything is her placid resignation. She tells her story without a trace of resentment toward Aeroflot or the KGB—or, of course, her lucky friend in Paris. Blows of state are like the acts of nature her parents and grandparents endured.
But to bed again. She gives her plastercast body with good-humored warmth—but why get overly worked up about this either? When she leaves, it is to meet her former husband, who divorced her for a girl who flies to Cuba.
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Alyosha and I grow fonder of wandering at night, when the whole sleeping city is ours, providing as much stimulation as Cannes or Nice for our game of playing tourist. We are silent for hours, conscious of something scratching in our relationship, like chicks inside shells. We will not be able to separate easily after my year will be up. What began as a good-time lark has developed according to its own laws.
"Gimme a cigarette," he says, informing me with his inflection that he too is thinking these thoughts.