These thoughts come in a tone suggesting she's saddened by the tyranny of appetites. But her eyes are sparkling.
"Then, of course, the teeth need brushing after eating, the dishes need washing. . . . What's left for us?"
I can only answer in terms of why she finds all this important. Although resentment of foolish convention and dreary routine accounts for some of her concern, the opposite is also true: she is trying to inject an element of conscious enjoyment, even of creativity, into what she calls "the dead half of life."
Two or three times a week, we whet "the live half" with a concert or play. Eager to be lifted into the realms of art and fairy tale, Anastasia comes prepared to contribute to her own treat—at least until the curtain rises.
When it does, she often galls everyone near us. She will not control her reactions. When the performances are good, she comments audibly, laughs in midline, anticipating its conclusion, and claps at will—not so much applauding as encouraging, asking for more. When they are very good, she becomes rigid, squeezing her hands together until they whiten, while a characteristic gurgling of pleasure gathers in her throat. But these are
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the exceptions. When the standard provincial bathos of most Russian theater is being dished up, Anastasia suffers real physical distress, squirming and groaning at the moral offense of the artistic failure.
"W^i// you behave, young lady?" hiss voices front and back. "This is a theater.^''
The rebuke is utterly serious. Despite the wide Russian nature, many theatergoers display a petit bourgeois stuffiness that survives only in Vienna if anywhere in the West. Theater is a place of sedate manners and Reverence for (pickled) Art; the mainstay of the audience is the churchgoing type, seeking moral and cultural enlightenment. When the house lights come on, the incongruity gives them a second shock: her face made those rude noises?
Her critical reactions too slight the general public's. As she is the only customer in a long store line to complain that the cashiers are doubling everyone's wait by relieving one another instead of working in pairs as intended, she is often the sole dissenter among the spectators. Crowd-captivating pomposity, the lure of so many productions, makes her shudder. While the audience cheered an elderly matinee darling named Evgeny Samoilov—father of Tatyana Samoilova, the famous film star— making Hamlet ludicrous with hair-rending poses, Anastasia writhed.
"Can that be Hamlet? I'm going home." She had never read the play—but knew.
Weeks later, the touring New York City Ballet disappointed a huge audience in the Palace of Congresses. Accustomed to Bolshoi pageantry—a hundred sumptuously costumed dancers on stage, executing a De Mille-like extravaganza—^the Moscow public resented Balanchine's sparse, avant-garde sketches. But Anastasia sensed the performance's brilliance, and her bravos elicited a final curtain call. Afterward, she was ecstatic: she'd discovered a new kind of art.
The theater is where she reveals herself publicly as a creature of instinct, attuned not to education, imitation or cultural training but to her own reflexes; reacting instantly to what is genuine and what spurious in any work. Not actual but artistic truth moves her; some of her favorite stories begin, "Once upon a
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time," and the twentieth reading of a Lermontov tale can give her joy. When Boris Godunov^s beggar wails his sorrowful aria, tears wash mascara over her milky cheeks. That aria, she gasps, is her people's suffering. I treasure her for this.
Yet the theater is also where she's at her worst. The performances begin at six-thirty, and our standing agreement is to meet at the entrance fifteen minutes beforehand. I pace around columns, making my way through the forest of black overcoats and searching the frost-flushed faces, or, when the cold is too painful, stand in the vestibule scanning the incoming concourse. She's sworn solemnly that this time she won't be late. I try to keep this in the context of general Russian nonchalance about appointments. "So what?" say people who have failed to show up. "It was cold out there. I knew you wouldn't wait forever." But even measured by this, her disdain for the first rule of social intercourse is exasperating.
The remaining minutes evaporate, the second bell sounds, a hundred normal couples greet each other and hurry to their seats—and my resentment soars. The festive crowd is gone, leaving me with the half-dozen unfortunates who can't attend for some reason and must sell their tickets. Will she stand me up again? At best, we've missed the first scene. Why does she put me in this humiliating position? Never think of others, never show any consideration. But the penchant to be late for everything is also integral to her personality. And a portion of her critical sense applauds the Noble Savage pose.
I'm angry because it was she herself who first expressed interest in the play, after which I dropped everything to spend the day spieling, bribing, pleading to get us in. Fighting through a chaos of telephone calls to a belligerent box office and rude assistant manager, flirting with secretaries and traveling to an Intourist hotel's entertainment desk or the theater itself when the telephone turns useless. I've blustered my way past the woman guarding the entrance, outlasted denials that "the bosses" are in their offices, and obtained the tickets from the manager himself through shameless supplication, spiced by the white lie that I'm leaving Moscow tomorrow, this is my last chance to see his vital work. (I know as well as he that he's keeping a block of the best seats in reserve on the off" chance some Party nabob telephones a
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last-minute order.) Despite this time-consuming, nerve-frazzling procedure, the foreigner's advantage in procuring everything of any value in the country extends to attending the theater; on her own, Anastasia would have had no chance.
But my umbrage also derives from the advantage her tardiness gives her over me. Her nonchalant treatment of the tickets demonstrates that whereas I have nothing important to do all day—the truth is that I dropped nothing for the hustling—her life is crowded with work, enthusiasms and optimism. And the deeper reason, which I do not want to act on, is her free spirit. She has precisely the independence of convention that my talk has long claimed for me. Waste the tickets for an important performance? Lose the money? (My money almost always, but she's equally negligent of her own.) I can never make the gesture without bourgeois qualms; she truly doesn't care.
Envy of this abandon, which rides tandem with my hurt pride when she doesn't appear, is the weak flank of our relationship. I resent the silly halfway position she leaves me in. Among my friends, I'm known as the man of impulses who wanders far from graduate-school convention. I too propagandize instant gratification: making love with Anastasia at the planetarium and skipping the second act of Prince Igor for a glass of mango juice. But she knows my stronger inhibitions will make me withdraw first from the truly outrageous. I'm forced into the role of the sensible adult. The very freedom I laud to others puts me on the defensive, acting on me not only as a token of her charm, but also of the discrepancy between myself and my self-image.
Each time holds the promise of a new start. I telephone her triumphantly.
"We're in! The manager said 'inconceivable,' but I got them in the fourth row."
"Wonderful. I'm dying for some real entertainment."