The next week, I was at our stop at nine o'clock. But no glowing face, no spring stalk of a figure. I'd seen only enough to know my woman actually existed. The one whose scarf could be either peasant kerchief or chic silk square; whose beauty was so artless that we'd never be stuck in intellectualism or pretense. Who, like me, was different, and would have helped me to be special while ending my loneliness.
Anastasia ^235
Her name was Anastasia. Or Nastya, Nastenka or Nastyusha, depending on place and mood. But she was the only Russian girl I was to know whose full name suited her more than any diminutive.
"I must pee," she declares, lashing her fingers around my wrist like a skier his pole. Irritation, desperation, even accusation are in her voice. Announcing her need is not enough; she must also complain of it. Someone is surely at fault for the affront of inconvenience.
"In here, hurry up. Stand in front in case someone comes."
She tugs me into the courtyard of an apartment building just off Arbat, a densely crowded shopping street. The surflike rumble of afternoon throngs trudging through slush is only yards away, and I'm nervous: Anastasia has relieved herself in improbable places before, but this one is too public. Wriggling with impatience, she interrupts my objections.
"Not worth the worry, my bronco. I'll only be a minute."
And in fact, she carries it off before anyone appears in the busy courtyard. Crouching behind a toolshed, she descants a trill to accompany the hiss and stands to adjust herself—all in twenty seconds. Then she gives the yield a proprietary glance: a lemon stain, still steaming in the snow.
We continue up Arbat and I sense her exhilaration. She has triumphed again: felt an urge, proclaimed and satisfied it on the spot. And got away with something, defied the world and its dreary conventions. Smiling her Vm-me smile, she leans on my arm and examines the shop windows, alert for dabs of color in the gray.
This is the quality I love most about her and fear correspondingly. She's never really known guilt and needs no one else's approval; it is enough for her to express her truly free spirit—and to be loved by me. She is a cliche only because her rareness has prompted so many to imagine her: a female animal who is what she looks like.
On the average, Anastasia must relieve herself hourly outdoors and at every intermission at the theater. The need becomes urgent within a minute or two of first being felt and her fastidiousness exacerbates the problem; gagging at the sight of an
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inevitably foul public toilet, she refuses to go in. Once she dashed into a well-known municipal building, found an empty corridor on an upper story and used a dark corner. It's impossible to know in what proportion her drive is due to purely physical need, as opposed to embellisment of instincts she esteems. This is the image of herself she likes and cultivates: a child of nature, harassed by powerful natural needs and society's preposterous obstacles—lack of cafes, Fellini films, goose liver—to satisfy them. However real the whims, she's acutely sensitive to the effect they produce. "The cold makes you pee," she declares, simultaneously explaining her behavior to me, underlining her approval of it, and inviting me to join in making even this a source of amusing self-expression. Or: "I purposely peed before I went out. Twice. Ye gods, can you imagine if I didn't?"
Yet the urges are genuine. Hypocrisy, false modesty and bureaucratic stupidity make her literally ill. Her body is litmus paper for registering the health and sanity of social arrangements. In her unqualified trust of it, she is convinced that discomfort to her proves stupidity by "them." To hell with all sociological-philosophical-ideological mumbo-jumbo proclaiming higher or lower criteria: a proper society is one in which her natural functions are easily gratified.
Her appetite for food is the most eccentric and tyrannical of the urges. Suddenly she is ravenously hungry, and nothing can be said, no other thought or occupation pursued, until her stomach is appeased. She hunts the meal—or prepares it, or spurs on others who are preparing it—with intense impatience and concern. Her ration must be delicious or unusuaclass="underline" this opportunity for pleasure will never return, and never mind that a similar one—but not the same—was seized hours earlier. As a schoolgirl, problems such as "Sunflower seeds give 50 per cent oil and peanuts 40 per cent; if a collective farm plants 100 hectares of the former . . ." consistently stumped her. She could not fight free of her reverie about the yummy nuts to set up the equations.
Moscow is a conspiracy against her appetite. She can't bear either the cheap cafeterias with the twenty-minute lines nor the hour's wait at tolerable places. When hunger stabs, she will lie, sham sickness, incur any wrath of those waiting in line to get into a restaurant quickly. And when the cafe we've dropped every-
thing to race to turns out to be locked—a third of Moscow's sprinkhng of eateries are closed for repairs, inventory and "sanitary operations" on any given day—she succumbs to wrath. Her challenges to doormen can wax shrill enough to attract a crowd—and sometimes policemen.
"I'm not being unreasonable, pantherkins, I'm appealing to reason. It's time for a civilized restaurant where people can eat in peace." Then she suggests sneaking into the Union of Journalists club to cop a steak reserved for members.
It's tricky to be with her when the great hunger, or even some lesser whim, comes on. We've lost hours to futile wandering in the cold because, in the middle of a sentence about antique furniture, she was suddenly dying for a cup of black coffee. Our quest for the vital fluid would take us hiking from one cafe to another a quarter of a mile distant. In vain: here an espresso machine is broken, there the ration of beans has given out, the staff of a third counter is "resting"; and most places offer milky mud alone. (No amount of hectoring will get it for you black: the menu of the Moscow City Soviet's Restaurant Trust stipulates coffee with milk, 150 grams, eight kopeks.) Where the right coffee is available, the line is impenetrable, and Anastasia threatens to turn nasty. One morning she jumped on a trolley and rode off, without saying good-bye and never mentioning the incident again, let alone where or why she had gone. When we met that evening, the irritation had long been replaced by enthusiasm for a just-bought book about monastery frescoes.
But the converse of her impatience is a heightened sense of enjoyment. When set before her at last, food gives her extraordinary pleasure. She eats with total concentration, swallowing with noises of gratification and self-congratulation. (A television nature film we saw showing a lioness seemingly caressing a just-killed zebra with great tenderness before devouring it turned her sentimental about all creatures' profound debt to their food.) Odd things at strange hours: a chunk of tough beef and fried potatoes the moment she wakes up, cold fried cod and dill pickles in the dead of night. Restaurant diners set down their knives and forks to watch her cleaning the bones of a cut of salmon; her performance with her portion is more interesting than ingestion of their own. Frequency of intake—five healthy snacks a day, on
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the average—accounts for the total volume, rather than bulk at any single sitting. She wolfs down the last morsel, savors her triumph for a time and is ravenous again two hours later.
And so with sleep; the same with sex. Every impulse of her nerves or libido is an expression of nature's will, any hindrance to which constitutes a moral wrong as well as a source of discomfort.
Physical frailness, she likes to say, is so fundamental to the human condition that philosophers overlook its implications. "First a person's hungry—and he eats. Then he needs to make love, and he's sleepy. Next there's a different call of nature—and he's hungry all over again. He has to drink, must take a walk, can't do without rest—it's always something manipulating him, which he doesn't even acknowledge in his fumblings to explain 'bigger' things. Respite is illusory: before you've finished relieving one urge, the next one is gathering force for an internal ambush. And this leaves out religious needs, which are acute in this country because the physical ones are so hard to satisfy. For example, I now require a lemonade."