"What time will you be there?"
"Quarter after six." Pause. "I promise."
"You always promise."
"I don't always have something to tell you. Let's make it six."
I come at ten to six with a sprig of snowdrops and eagerness for her news. The third bell rings at six-thirty, hurrying the last stragglers inside. Like witnesses to a cleared accident, hopefuls
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for last-minute tickets disperse, leaving me with my resentment. I've spent the entire day preparing to please her with these tickets. All I ask is that she be on time—and show me some appreciation.
I try to look unruffled as I wait. I envy not only the ticket-holders already inside but also the evening passersby. Yes, they're down and out; but they have dignity. They are preoccupied with mature pursuit of caloric and intellectual nourishment, not with what others think of them because a date is late. Strong Russian faces: I admire even the solemnity.
She arrives at last, one hand clutching her gloves, the other a cellophane bag with her theater shoes. Her handbag is wide open and she is breathless, having rushed frenziedly from her dormitory but several minutes ago—when she was already late.
"Hurry up, let's dash. We'll just make the curtain. I . . . couldn't get a cab."
If I persuade the usher to admit us, the first act—usually ninety minutes long, in good Russian tradition—and the satisfaction of her beauty at my side drain my irritation. During the intermission, she mentions the real reason for her delay. She was in her bath, and the water was so warm, the peacefulness so delicious, that she couldn't force herself out. (With twenty girls sharing it, how does she get the tub at peak time every evening? Most Russian girls share cheerfully by instinct, but with her classmates as with me, Anastasia takes for granted that she deserves the cream.) Or she was listening to a Bach prelude on the radio—such a rare joy that she couldn't tear herself away. I boast of these fetching replies to friends, but also feel misused.
Her excuse can be barer. When the moment for dressing came, she felt "dreamy." Somehow, she wasn't "craving" to go out as she'd expected. Or it was storming outside and she was "blissfully snug" in her room. She relates this information matter-of-factly, as if her mood constitutes an incontestable explanation. Far from censure, she deserves recognition for her keen sense of responsibility. For in these difficult cases, didn't willpower vanquish her languor, that awesome force of nature, in the end? Naturally, the battle put her several minutes behind schedule, which is as nothing compared to the obstacles overcome.
On the evening after our first hours of truly abandoned
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lovemaking she did not appear at all. We were in a traveling sculptor's studio that she had secured through the owner's lover. Later we fell asleep in the room's afternoon darkness, but I woke to thoughts of our evening plans. Slipping from under the quilt, I dressed quietly and left to make the clinching arrangements for the tickets, Anastasia mumbling she'd meet me outside the theater. It wasn't cold there, but my humiliation stung more than ever. I could only wait there: the studio had no telephone and I'd forgotten its address. After an hour I went inside for the second act, facing the ignominy of an entire audience registering the empty seat at my side. Public desertion by a girl just made love to.
I once asked a Radcliffe girl whether she preferred more bed for that evening or a concert. "Oh, the concert,'" she answered appreciatively—but Anastasia was just the opposite, and my training in a different culture made me miss her dozen hints. My leaving had insulted her; and she couldn't betray her instincts by sitting through a performance. But how could I have known then that our private pleasure transcended an evening out, which she usually relished? Later I learned that she slept there until morning, returning to her institute hungry and blue.
I am purposely raising the difficulties before confirming that she was indeed the girl I'd always wanted, for I want to fix her in my own mind as unsentimentally as I can. The queer coolness with which she accepted gifts, even items, such as a Swiss watch or an English trench coat, that she'd never dreamed of. (This too I understood later. It wasn't reserve but an outgrowth of our closeness. Of course she should receive goodies from me, just as she offered me everything she owned and knew. Giving and taking merited no fuss.) How she would suddenly look the peasant girclass="underline" with a Liberty silk square tied around her head, her too-large "shitwader" boots, as she called them, tapping her slender calves, and her lips in a pucker because she'd finished her ice cream—a creature of such uniqueness and animation that I kept hugging her. The pucker itself, a blend of spontaneous sentiment and instant play on it for dramatic possibilities— tinged, as always, with a hint of eye-batting innocence.
Her perverse refusal to jot down even the most essential
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reminders in a pocket notebook, and the rage with which she ravaged her handbag and drawers for a crucial telephone number preserved on an old napkin. Again and again she repeated this Russian celebration of anarchy, turning even angrier when I entreated her, for her own sake, to be orderly at least in this. But no matter how often she was late and whom she kept waiting—even when she lost the card of the director who asked her to audition for a television play about medical students—she would not submit to dreary good sense.
The way she switched in the blink of an eye from a movie mogul's sophisticated Stockholm mistress to farmer's daughter with a yen for unpasteurized milk; these two aspects of her were like an optical illusion. The mole on her collar bone; the line of her back as she waited, lying on her stomach and cupping her mannequin's breasts. Her frail clearness one warmish day when, for the hell of it, we toured the All-Union Exhibition of Economic Achievement, and in those square miles of bulldozers and spaceship models, nostalgia for her enfolded me, as if I were seeing her from the perspective of twenty years hence.
This is what I want to remember: she as a sovereign being, independent of her involvement with me. I must keep the two separate: a likeness of Anastasia Serigina and the story of our bust.
Much happened in the month following our first encounter to make me accept that I'd never see her again. Then the second meeting, a coincidence too bizarre to illustrate anything—yet the kind that keeps overtaking me here. Ah—as Alyosha says with quite different inflection—if I could relive that sweet night!
In October, a busload of foreign students was treated to a trip out of Moscow—to Yaroslavl, proud township of ancient Rus. Seven rattling hours north and we entered its provincial hollowness and turn-of-the-century industrial gloom. A membrane of dirty ice coated Mother Volga; winter's gray subdued most movement by midafternoon. Touring the splendid sixteenth-century Kremlin, we retired to a restaurant on Freedom Street, its neon strand providing the urban centerpiece.
Leaving the hotel at midnight for fresh air, I was absorbed into an album of prerevolutionary photographs. Darkened log cabins.
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a pair of drunken workers stumbling in snow, a lone mongrel prowling a side street. . . . For something to drink, I made my way to the railroad station, where peasants blanketed the waiting room benches like battlefield corpses. My heart thumped in the oblivion of this outpost of civilization. A baby cried, then took the breast. Great sadness deepened the grip of provincial isolation.
I saw beer at the buffet and joined the line. The brownish shawl covering the back of the woman in front of me seemed as tacky as the waiting room, and as she began turning her face toward mine, I wondered absentmindedly what the hard-up stranger might want of me. Before the thought ended, those eyes were again on mine.
A current tingled my skin. The huge hall was airless. "You!" I said in a melodramatic bray. And was filled with a rush of happiness because her shining countenance was no less than I'd remembered. A modern icon framed by the shawl—and it was endearingly familiar, already mine.