Nor did his occupation either strengthen or ease his own satyriasis. Work and play were kept prudently apart (except behind a locked consulting room door in the new Juridical Consultation Office); trials were one thing, fetes another. And so it goes to this day. Fifty yards from a courthouse where he has defended a man charged with unnatural practices, he recruits new girls for an evening that will include many of the same sodomitic acts.
Only the sheer number of his former darlings effects an occasional meeting between business and pleasure. One client,
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for example, raped an old friend of Alyosha's on his first charge six years ago, then a second Erstwhile soon after his release. One pretty victim, the former typist of a minor official, got her boss indicted for "Compelling an Economically Dependent Woman to Enter into Sexual Intercourse" but confessed, when Alyosha interviewed her as defense counsel, that she was willing to drop the charges out of consideration for the happy week her mother had spent with him, Alyosha, after the war. A Young Communist representative of a shoe factory appealed, in the name of her "entire collective" and in phrases of the highest socialist morality, for a severe sentence against one of its workers accused of rape—not disclosing, of course, that weeks before she, the representative, had brought along two teen-age gluers from the same factory to share Alyosha's bed. . . . Alyosha's explanation of these coincidences is that Moscow, by which he means the circles who are active and alive, is incongruously small. To me, they are illustrations of the stranger-than-fiction eccentricity that flourishes in its daily life, and the qualities in him which consistently bring them out.
We move our skull session to Edik's, out of earshot of the apartment's microphone. A mother has heard of a "filthy debauch" involving her seventeen-year-old daughter, and is threatening to "ruin" Alyosha. He immediately summoned the evening's other participants and, like a prosecutor preparing a show trial, drills the wide-eyed teen-agers about what to say if the police make inquiries. Totally trusting, they accept their obligation to dissemble for his protection without a second's hesitation. He knows that three eyewitnesses with the same story of innocently passing the evening in question will invalidate one mother claiming perversion—but also that a single deviation from the common alibi will disastrously weaken the defense. Hence a hard afternoon of memorization and quizzing.
That very evening, we leave the Peking Restaurant at closing time with two bonny language students. Although we're all groggy from too much food and drink, we wander in and out of side streets in the cold before going home. Tipsy as he is, Alyosha senses plainclothesmen are stationed in the lobby and feels it unwise to be seen entering a car in our condition. The Volga
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may be followed or its license recorded, all the more because our girls had been practicing their French with two foreign businessmen at the adjoining table.
Wherever we are, the sixth sense he has developed to gauge how far to go in any criminal defense also screens him in his potentially perilous sexual adventures and his meetings with me. Beneath the jauntiness, his reflexes are constantly alert, peripheral vision cast as wide for policemen as for girls. And when driving me to the American Embassy for an errand, he's like a Captain approaching shifting underwater hazards. While he's waiting for me two prudent blocks away one day, a policeman opens the door to demand to know who it was who just left the car and why he entered the Embassy. Alyosha replies that I'm The Worker correspondent come to investigate the number of Negroes lynched this year—and when I reappear, vigorously shakes his head "No!" to my move toward a beautiful girl in sight of the same glowering cop.
"Wowing her here might have been less than entirely discreet," he apologizes as we drive off"—and although this emerges as Peter Sellers burlesquing a spy, his purpose is deadly serious. He even senses when he had better speak for me on the telephone because my accent might provoke the suspicion of a girl's parent, neighbor or office colleague.
Only someone so skilled in precaution can afford to be so cavalier.
The procession continues. Will anyone believe how ridiculously easy it is? (Under Alyosha's guidance, that is. With girls I pick up alone, I can't direct the progression from opening banter to bed with his touch or speed.) By now, it's less the numbers than the variety of stories that baffles me. The curious and coincidental cases that spice the progression of anonymous girls seem teasingly implausible.
There is Chekhov Tanya, the picture of one of his innocent heroines in a wide-brimmed hat—although at sixteen, she's had literally twice as many lovers as years. And Anomaly, a blushing thirty-year-old who has sought out Alyosha to "become a woman" but flees into the corridor at the last minute. (Alyosha calls Lev Davidovich, who will take her to a concert.) Later, a
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former convict girl whose breasts release a thin flow of milk when touched: she gave birth ten days ago.
A smattering of celebrities also appears in curious new lights. A young visitor to Moscow casually mentions that she's the niece of the celebrated Alexander Stakhanov—the first of the "Stakh-anovites"—and that when she last saw the old man he was swilling his inflated pension and kicking the neighbors' cats. A quiet graduate student remarks that her best friend, a girl of twenty-five, is a favorite of Rudenko, the feared Procurator-General who made his name at the Nuremberg Trials. The intriguing oflspring of a Russian father and Georgian mother claims that the former was once Khrushchev's driver—and that she couldn't care less. Nor do the wives of actors, colonels and Honored Artists of the Russian Republic show an interest in their husbands' achievements. We represent an afternoon's diversion to them, during which talk of their status would be out of place. But they all seem to live a story. Changing jobs like lovers, drifting with the currents of emotion and the breakers of social upheaval, they are the plankton of the country's land mass, totally independent from the ship of state on top.
The Chip off the Old Block. She strongly resembles him, the corpulent chest of medals in the second rank behind the Politburo, taking the salute in Red Square; a veteran with porcine eyes and the reputation of a die-hard Stalinist. Through her pudgy prettiness, the family resemblance shows in the mouth, wide shoulders and faintly muscular chest. To her mother's dismay and father's fury, she has run away from home, abandoning the restricted luxury shops, government-staffed villas and grand stables on closed state preserves. Sickened of Party bosses and playboy sons' unearned wealth, she dropped out several weeks ago and plans to join Uzbek shepherds in the spring: a hippie in a land where very few can afford or get away with it.
Meanwhile, she will not take advice, put on her brassiere or leave the flat. She sits cross-legged and bare-breasted in a corner for days, drinking cocktails of sweet wine and vodka, taking on one after another of Alyosha's friends who drop in. Convinced that her father the General has ordered a search, Alyosha begs her to move the dynamite of her presence elsewhere.
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"Alyoshik, there's nothing to worry about, / can assure you. You must learn to say 'screw you' to Papa. If people understood this, the world would be a better place."