Yes I love him, in the end, for his loving me. The other attributes, even his trace of Chaplinesque genius, are bonuses. We are not going to Siberia tomorrow, of course, but will cruise around on our permanent junket. Our limitations and self-delusions will ride inside us, yet we'll feel as footloose as Dos Passos' heroic bums. If a supply of the first spring crayfish has arrived at a certain specialty store, he'll boil me a potful to be wolfed down by the dozen with the best beer. A hubcap filled with unobtainable oranges will sit on the table because once, in the throes of a bad cold, I mentioned a craving for citrus. After supplying the medical chit for Edik's "fiancee," he'll drive me to a funeral—of a Party official, for extra pomp—simply because I'm curious.
I'll give him the Japanese turtleneck I bought in a hard currency shop and he'll put it on immediately, according to custom, and wear nothing else until it has holes. (After a washing, he'll don it again before it's fully dry, but remain impervious to cold and to the flu epidemic.) When he spurts forward on a new lovely's trail, I'll try to distract him—not because I don't want her too, or because the current pocket notebook is full of telephone numbers we haven't had time to call, but because the accommodations necessary for any third person will pull us that fraction apart. But if the girl prefers an hour with me alone, or if I want privacy with her, he will make an excuse to leave the apartment, mentioning what's most tempting in the refrigerator and apologizing for the unironed sheets.
Waiting for a bus that passes near the apartment, images of what awaits me often irradiate the dusk. I will be welcomed, fed, entertained with code expressions—"Rest in peace. Comrade, the plan will be fulfilled!"—and new stories. Girls who look like
Alyosha\v231
bit players in a spy film will be impressed by my un-Russian height and haberdashery and will come to bed without effort. That this may be the evening of the KGB raid will add to my tingle; that Anastasia might hear of our goings-on heightens the excitement even more, although I no longer know whether this is good or bad. The next day, I'll have the deliciousness of doing nothing in a state of total depletion. . . . The air at the bus stop is frosty clean, but when I take a deep breath at the sight of the bus, I go dizzy with anticipation, as if my lungs were filling with incense.
But despite the wonder of this, I'll be just as happy if no girl has appeared and we go for our late-night drive alone. I've only a few months left in Moscow. Who would have guessed that a supply of time—for wasting together—^is as luscious as willing breasts and thighs? What crazy luck I had to meet him!
V Anastasia
It was three weeks after I'd arrived in Moscow that I caught sight of her for the hrst time. She was in the rear of a bus that had stopped on Lenin Prospekt, and I was waiting to get on. It was just after nine in the morning, and the bus was packed Uke a stockyard runway — as are many, for that matter, at any hour. And in the herd of solemn countenances surrounding hers, faces worn by weather and hard times, by too many potatoes and a lack of them, hers was a jonquil. This sounded all the odder in the pressing Russian fall, but jonquil is what crossed my mind the Brst instant. It was a face related to things blooming in spring: white, gold, soft, clean. And it had a wide-eyed, slightly startled look, as if discovery of womanhood had made it keen to uncover similar delights in the stolid boulevard.
I happened to be holding a slim volume of lyric poetry, bought not to enjoy the verses — my Russian was too shaky for such pleasures then — but in imitation of my more purposeful
Anastasia^233
colleagues who were busy accumulating personal libraries of classic literature. When the bus slithered to a halt and its doors creaked opened, the pressure of overcrowding evicted several bodies; only two of the dozen people waiting ahead of me managed to hght their way aboard. As the girl turned toward their grunts, a photograph of the beloved young Esenin on my dust jacket caught her eye. She glanced at it, then up at me, and made a teasing motion hinting, "Throw me your love poems if you dare."
As the doors thumped closed, I tossed the book over shaggy hats and heads. She raised both arms above the crush and caught it, laughing at her success. As the motor groaned for takeoff, she placed her eyes on mine again and smiled. The almond paste of sweetness and provocation sent a surge of happiness through me, tempered only by a need to recall where I had felt its source before. To my further elation, I remembered. "And suddenly," went the Bulgakov line I'd read on the plane about the Master's 6rst sight of Margarita in a Moscow crowd, "completely unexpectedly, I understood that all my life I had loved precisely that woman. Some joke, eh? You'll say Tm crazy, of course."
All my life, Fd dreamed of meeting my stranger and being equal to the occasion. She had performed exactly according to my scenario.
The Embassy warnings of female perils only served to enhance my exhilaration. If I were being followed during my first weeks here, would such behavior be dangerous in my dossier? Had I broken some municipal law? Long lists of rules for using public transport were posted here and there, and duty policemen sometimes led unwitting offenders from the metro. But no police gray was in sight, and a teen-ager in the lighter hue of a school uniform gave me a companionable nod. No one else in the somber bus-stop cluster allowed my triumph to penetrate his weekday morning cares.
Fighting my way into the next bus with a veteran's callousness, I defended my position next to the door. Fd already observed the custom several times: when Russians are separated by a crowd or a spiteful driver, the one who has boarded waits at the next stop for the friend who hasn't. This next stop was the usual half a mile away, toward, which my coughing conveyance strained at its
234^MOSCOW FAREWELL
maddening pace. I was not in a trance; not too overwhelmed to regret not having worn a better shirt. But the rush of pure instinct still gripped me, dissolving almost all doubt about who I was and what I was doing at this longitude and latitude. To have spied her at last, my age-old picture of the fair yet natural woman, was sufficient to explain my determination, previously curious even to me, to come to Russia. My tenderness extended to every passenger on the bus. Squeezed together into a continuum of flesh, breathing air damp with old clothing and exhalation, they bore themselves with Russian forbearance and dignity. I loved them all, my fellow travelers.
But my joy was not waiting at the next stop. She was nowhere in the swarms for various trolleys and buses there, nor in a little square facing the metro entrance. It was a warm September morning; I remember underarm sweat stains on calico blouses as I searched lines at stalls selling postcards, grapes and crude jars of cold cream. A massive lady peddling kvass from a tanker truck said she'd seen no one like that; a man with one leg was too drunk to respond. I looked in a bakery and a smelly flsh store across the square, then sprinted back to the metro's cool marble foyer to recheck the people waiting for rendezvous beneath an overpainted mosaic of Stalin. Maybe this was a game of hers. Of Russian girls in general. But if I'd imagined her gesture, why had she taken the book?
Then I understood. Clever girl, she'd returned to the stop of our meeting. It was faster to run back than to wait for yet another bus. But I was too late. When I gave up searching at the original stop, almost an hour had elapsed after our moment of sighting. Another passed riding to the end of the line and hunting in the courtyards of the old University and the entrances to Red Square. I sat on a bench and visualized the prism of her cheek.