"Listen, muchacho, I trust no one on this tricky earth. Only you. Because . . . well, I know you. And if you're worried about this end, I'm going to make a speech. They can do what they want to me. Hack me up in little pieces, I'll never rat on my Yank."
I know this is true, and that Alyosha has said it with an intention broader than just to reassure me about the operation. He and I against the world through icons; and I won't disappoint him, despite my dread. With this danger to cope with, my depression subsides, his words thumping in my ears. "They can hack me to shreds, I'll never sell out on you."
The climax of the next day's errands is an urgent consultation with two friends from Alyosha's smart-set days. Painters rich on book illustrations and "underground" canvases flogged to Westerners, they dashed off" an erotic drawing one drunken night, which found its way to splash publication in a recent edition of a
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Hamburg magazine. The Union of Artists' answer was to end their careers by depriving them of their studios.
Forsaking their customary finery, the wives join the despairing conference about how to avoid ruin of their swank Ufe-style. Cross-examining the doomed about the Union's discipHnary procedures and about their own movements on the fatal night, Alyosha advises them to beg for mercy but also to explain that the woman depicted in a lewd position was intended as Stalin's daughter. The revanchist magazine, they should say, foully distorted a patriotic, if tasteless, sketch by removing the "Svet-lana Alliluyeva" on her forehead, together with "bourgeois press" and "monopoly-capitalism," the labels on the penises inserted in her, and the drawing's title: "Traitress to the Motherland, Prostitute for Dirty Dollars." At first irritated by what they take for untimely wisecracking, the painters are persuaded of Alyosha's serious intent and, lacking a better plan, agree to consider his.
We are far away, shopping for a coffee-grinder, when Alyosha mentions he once had an affair with the more elegant of the wives. For the rest of the day, I can't suppress the sad question of whether Fll ever feel as casual about Anastasia as Alyosha about the tense woman on the couch. Once again, I ask him how he and Anastasia met, but he adds nothing to the story, saying he still doesn't understand what went wrong with us, nor why I don't claim her instead of pining.
"With your looks, muchacho, you can rouse Sleeping Beauty. Two slim meters you are, suave from head to toe . . . she's the lucky party in this suit."
I can't explain why I still love Anastasia so after our split, but his cool conviction that she'll be mine if I truly want her brightens my longing. With a thump, I realize that if Fd satisfied myself vagabonding with him before Fd met Anastasia, we might be married now. But I knew her first; the paradox is that she led me to Alyosha. I suppose that's life, and Fm not complaining, but my happiness would be complete if there were somewhere a place for Anastasia in all this.
Desperately late again for the usual reason—a blue-eyed pedestrian—Alyosha pushes the Volga past trucks hogging an icy
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road. When the bald tires lose their grip, he whoops at the skid's challenge, lets the wheel find itself and stomps the accelerator again. We are rushing to visit King-size Natasha who, we've just heard, had an abortion this morning.
The hospital is a modern building in an outlying district. Our risks on the road were in vain, for we arrive after visiting hours, and Alyosha's cheeriest song and dance about being a Ministry of Health sanitary engineer cuts no ice with a sour Chief Nurse at the desk. Contemplating the purse of her lips, Alyosha decides this is not an instance for pushing his luck, but he thinks fast as we leave. From a telephone booth outside the grounds, he calls on cheek, flair and practiced skill to cut through the obstacles separating us from Natasha. The first trick is eliciting the hospital's number from waspish operators; the last, flirting with a ward nurse until she summons the convalescent in her charge. Soon the large-boned girl is waving to us from a third-floor window.
We plod through a field of unbroken snow until we're directly below her, and she tosses down a roll of cotton cord, whose end Alyosha ties to a shopping net filled with the sausage, biscuits and chocolate we bought on the way. Natasha hauls up the booty and blows us a chortling kiss. We shout plans to taxi her home tomorrow evening, and start back toward the road.
Then it begins. A dozen bored girls in uniform bathrobes appear at the adjoining windows of the abortion ward, teasing us to shimmy up for a visit. Suddenly two at separate windows recognize Alyosha and squeal. "Alyoshka, come rescue me." "Alyoshik, be a knight!" Inviting one and all to a recovery celebration, Alyosha calls up his telephone numbers "in case anyone has an emergency requisition." The commotion alerts the authorities in the persons of a stout nurse appearing in a window and an angry watchman struggling through the knee-deep snow toward us. As he blusters, we race for the car.
"Jesus, did you see that beauty next to King-size?" sings Alyosha over the motor. "I've been a tax-paying citizen of this burg for forty years; how the hell have I never met her before?"
She is loitering in the corridor of a People's Court into which Alyosha has dashed, a tall girl with a tasteful scarf Yes she'll
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come with us, she says after our introduction—but can we be patient? Unfortunately, she must wait for a certain verdict. Twenty minutes later, a judge stands up in a musty little courtroom to announce his court's finding. The young defendant, probably dark and handsome before his capture, has been reduced to a pitiable creature. Crushed by defeat, prison-shaved skull hanging like lead on his powerful chest, he cannot raise his eyes above his filthy boots. The judge sentences him to seven years in labor camps for robbery. It is the graceful girl's husband.
"But won't you even write to him?" I persist as Alyosha opens a bottle of Bull's Blood at the apartment. "You say he has no one. He stole for you. His life is ruined."
"Mine's not."
About Alyosha's postwar life, I learn in snatches. Demobilized in late 1945, he returned to his personal status quo ante bellum—specifically, the need to acquire a vocation. Acting no longer appealed to him, and although he had an impulse to try movies as a cameraman or director, it was soon suppressed. Fashioning the obligatory panegyrics to factory and collective farm of Stalin's postwar cinema—"or to the great victories in 'defense' against the Finns"—directors had less chance of personal satisfaction and lived under greater risk of labor camp or execution than dealers in black market penicillin. Black market penicillin was precisely what an old friend of Abrasha Abram-chik offered to cut him in on, but although it would have made him a millionaire, Alyosha declined.
Returning to odd jobs in warehouses, he weighed alternative careers while coping with the memory of his day on the Elbe. In postwar Russia, where one's own sense of humor provided the only vapor of gaiety, the fifty yards which had separated him from the Stars and Stripes seemed alternately infinitesimal and infinite. Yes, everyone knew it was impossible to cross that mine field; but everyone was usually wrong. Ending his youthful illusions that he would somehow grow up rich and happy, the war, however, had changed nothing for the better in the country. Whether or not Russia was psychologically and morally sicker than in 1939—as it clearly was physically—Alyosha perceived it as such. The stupendous edifice of strain, isolation and ideologi-