"What's this, Long Legs? I'm with you on the countryside— even the country. I've got nothing against him, and you know Fm not smooth like that."
She softened just as quickly. "I suppose not, but I've had too much of people criticizing everything. Russia is everybody's butt; it's humbled enough without your'mockery."
To say that she was the one inclined to "criticize everything" would only have rekindled her pique. Besides, it would have been only literally correct, as I'd just been reminded. The larger truth is that while her spoken comments about Russia are consistently reproachful, what she leaves unsaid contains much affection. This was summed up in her observation that foreigners not only look much happier than Russians, but seem trained to look happy. And despite her aversion to propaganda, she weeps irrepressibly when viewing relentlessly repeated films of the Nazi invasion. I wonder what effect this will have when the crunch comes and she must think about leaving the country.
Yes, leave with me: a voice whispered the forbidden word "marriage" from the very beginning. I knew that if I ever took a wife, she must be Russian. Meanwhile she gave me far more than an introduction to the local ways, in accordance with the traditional prescription for a young man's best method of learning about a country. Going to the theater with my splendorous Russian companion was a triumph as well as an occasion. Acclaim for myself becluttered my thoughts of her. Ending my isolation—this was still November, when Alyosha was only a man who sometimes lent us his room—she also began my longed-for romance.
She returned from Yaroslavl on the day after me. Her long hours of classes, at Moscow's Second Medical Institute, often kept us apart, but her free time was a shared gift. We walked for hours, feeding on back-street scenes, sharpening our appetites to splurge on smoked salmon and shashlik in hard-currency dining rooms. I came to see my boyhood image of springtime Paris in the city's autumn glumness. Forsaken leaves clinging to slender
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trees made Volzhsky Boulevard as picturesque as any Latin Quarter postcard; fall wind and rain blew the last stalwarts onto our raincoats. The very banality of my associations made them surprising: who would have pictured Moscow a city for lovers? But eyesores drew us together as tightly as the dapplings of charm, proving that our tenderness for each other tinted our perceptions rather than the other way round. Rehearsals for the November 7th parade in Red Square dragged on for weeks. One evening when snorting military equipment was learning its route, we found ourselves on the Krimsky Bridge above the river, its graceful cables etching the sky's darkening mauve while black vehicles, glistening in the drizzle, rumbled along the embankment underneath. United by the ugly beauty—the sinister splendor of the tanks, finest item of local manufacture—she turned her Lapland face to me at the instant I was seeking her lips. The river burbled below us, the sky turned pearly, tank after sleek tank roared on its way. As we clung to each other, our passion sent regards through my heavy trousers and her thick skirt. Only her eyes were made up. She smiled with them. I had never kissed like this.
We are on the streets so often partly because of the difficulty of finding refuge. Anastasia's Yaroslavl uncle, whom she visits twice a year, is her closest relative in the geographical sense; her immediate family is further north, on a swampy tract near the town of Vologda. She herself shares a dormitory room with three classmates. Even discounting an unusually strict entrance guard, the others' presence eliminates her bed for our use.
Although my room is easier to sneak into, she has rendered it unusable. The first time went according to plan. I gave her my pass; she negotiated the gate by flashing its cover while hurrying through; I joined her inside by persuading the guards I'd left mine in my room. The following weekend, a different shift— alerted, no doubt, by Anastasia's striking yet unfamiliar face— told her to open the pass. Before she could retreat, the ruse was exposed.
In this situation, Russians apologize grovelingly and implore a once-and-only, life-and-death exception to the rules to visit a sick brother or save a depressed friend from suicide. Had Anastasia
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conformed, she might have been admitted, even though unmasked. But she disdains "the sensible thing." It is a matter of principle that officials must trust her, and when caught violating precisely such trust she is outraged. True to form, she now produced a scene instead of an excuse.
"This system. We're a socialist country, it's supposed to be the people's university. Take those hands off me, I'm going through."
Angry now, the battle-axe biddies gripped her, chortling as if they'd caught a pickpocket. Two beefy security men sprinted out of their strategically placed office and led her away. Only after a full hour of scary interrogation was she ejected. Still huffing that she could sneak into Brezhnev's office if necessary, she did not, however, return to the University for months.
Thus we stayed on the streets. If I were Russian, the responsibility for finding an empty room, the crucial male desideratum for courting in Moscow, would be mine. Anastasia substitutes when she can by asking for the sculptor's keys or taking me to Alyosha's. And by settling for makeshift. As winter waxes, we explore the stairwells of mouldering apartment houses near her institute. In their basements or on their top landings, she makes herself available on the banister. Her panties are in my pocket. Her body is immaculate after the latest languishing in the bath. Against the background of staircase grime, the slight lankiness of her limbs changes to sylphlike grace. With them, and because of our unusual positions, she grips me hard, as proud of her command of these muscles as of all her physical urges.
The stairwell's dank chill plates our cheeks. The building is a Bronx tenement soon to join a black slum; the courtyard from which we've entered is strewn with rotting timbers and junk. Domestic sounds—from television movies, kettles, irritated vocal chords—reach us through flimsy plaster, and steps sometimes resound on the dusty stairs themselves—occasionally shuffling, for tipplers straggle home at this hour of evening. When we stop for a moment, our hearts beat with the Benzedrine of apprehension and passion; when we resume, we continue to hold our breath. Then she arches her back and bears down. Her eyes are open. The frankness of their desire gives my narcissism wings.
She turns around and thrusts herself upward. Later, to play it safe, or to indulge our fancy for variety, we move to a staircase on
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a parallel street. "Again, please," she urges. We're pushing our luck; our fear of discovery grows. To compensate for not being naked, she makes use of her fingers, bringing them up from time to time with her customary appetite for exotic tastes. "Now you sit down," she whispers. "Here, spread my coat. Don't you love exchanging roles?"
The freedom to act out our fantasies fills us with confidence that nothing important is beyond our grasp. "Oh what a love it was," said Zhivago. "Utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth."
She loves jokes, especially about resistance to work, interpretations of social messages to justify embezzling, and bureaucratic malapropisms. One of her favorites is about the ailing factory worker told to produce a specimen of his feces. Abashed by the strange medical terminology, he brings his material in the customary match box, but cringing embarrassment prevents him from asking whom to give it to. Finally, he charges a nurse. "Where's the place for leaving your shit for the stool?"
It is the worker's endearing resort to his class's real language that delights her, but this joke in particular provides one of her rare conversational references to medicine.
Her perfunctory interest in her studies shows in her greater enthusiasm for almost everything else. The health of dumb animals concerns her distinctly more than that of human beings; the only time I saw her excited about anything faintly medical was during the birth of kittens to a tough stray she'd come to feed outside one of our stairways. During war films, the sight of wounded horses upsets her most. Convinced that "no species is crueler—lower" than Homo sapiens, she often accepts man's inhumanity to man but gnashes her teeth at his barbarity to beasts. Her mother and father, wanted her to become an engineer, their image of social virtue and personal success. Medicine was an afterthought, but I doubt that any profession would stir her—certainly none requiring long "crazy boring" hours of study.