What does interest her is literature. In spurts, her reading is as voracious as the—misconceived—stereotype of the culture-hungry Russian. Rereading The Idiot, her eyes were riveted to the
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book from the moment she entered one metro station to her emergence at her destination—and then for the rest of the day and evening, for she skipped classes to finish it, murmuring constantly about Dostoyevsky's uncanny understanding of people she knew.
Classics unspoiled by force-fed learning and political vulgarization in school grip her, especially Lermontov's Byronesque tales. But her greater affection is for secondary, slightly offbeat masters—Alexander Green, Mikhail Saltyakov-Shchedrin, Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy, Andrei Platonov—whose recreation of the spirit of Russian life enchant her all the more for the authors' lack of world renown. The obscurer the writer, the chummier her patter to his pages.
"Exactly, and don't back down from it. . . ." "You've no right to assume that, thank God you did. . . ." "Yes, a hundred times yes. Clever man, you've omitted the main thing."
One mock-heroic tale delights her especially for its picture of daily routine. Entitled "Home Sweet Home," it is by a long-suppressed 1920s poet who called himself Sasha Chorny ("Sasha Black") in counterpoise to the great turn-of-the-century symbolist Andrei Bely ("Andrei White"). The scene is a communal apartment of screeching neighbors, dismal prospects and petty scores to settle; the images are of someone's child trying to give the cat an enema, the last drop of vodka that disappeared yesterday, a meditative cockroach perched on a plate like a large plum and a glum teen-age girl in a workjacket raping a piano that has a nasty cold.
Anastasia recites the sad-but-riotous lines with squinting eyes—to help, she says, visualize the Yaroslavl apartment where she and her mother once rented half a bedroom. But she loves the poem too for its playful use of the diminutives, colloquialisms, pen names, grammatical gaffes and peasant solecisms that enrich and personalize the language, conferring the same intimate candor to tete-a-tete communication as in all aspects of private Russian life. The sharp disparity between the outer, public world and the inner one of family and friends declares itself in the contrast between the two languages; sensitive, irreverent spirits show their affection for the unofficial one by savoring its
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subtleties and hints. Inventive argot heightens the sense of shared secrets, we-against-them loyaky—and even of sensual pleasure. Anastasia's flair for this—which is what Alyosha most loved— shows best in her vivacious appreciation of coined words.
For me, she begets hundreds in addition to the familiar ones—"my joy," "my dearest only own"—that would be inanely mawkish in English. One week, I am forms of "little bunny"— not just the usual zaichik, but half a dozen semantic varieties, all changing, but not interchangeable, in accordance with her mood. Or I'm ten variations of "kitten" or, lately, "kitten's paw," lapuska, lapinka, lapunik, lapunya, lapusik and lapushka.
"But lapa is any kind of paw," I pretend to protest. "How do I know I'm a kitten and not a tiger?"
"Can't you hear the way I say it, my tigroynok [fierce-and-gentle little tiger]?"
Or a nonsense word, changing daily, sometimes hourly, in play on the weather or the rhyme of a recently devoured delicacy. She is as much made for sweet nothings as for hedonism and passion.
We are in each other's arms on Alyosha's daybed, waiting for my renascence. Lit by a thinning afternoon whiteness through the window, the room I'll soon know so well seems suspended in space. Alyosha himself, who is still only Anastasia's somewhat mysterious older friend, has invented an urgent appointment somewhere to leave us alone, apologizing with elaborate pseudo-contrition that he can't return before evening. During a silence I ask Anastasia to tell me about her first lover.
Soon I shall give this up: something weak lurks under the cover of my contention that old adoration reinforces the new. But I sometimes feel tongue-tied during the wait, and to my secret hope that the girl's reminiscences will shorten it I have the added excuse here of investigating Russian ways. I half expect Anastasia to demur, but after a moment's hesitation, she answers matter-of-factly.
The first was a Czech engineer on assignment in Moscow. He was thirty-two; she—who was visiting the capital with her high-school class—had just turned fifteen. He spied her with her group on a street; she said she was eighteen and that night sneaked from the boarding school where the class was sleeping to
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meet him in the moonHt big city. Returning to her village the next evening, she found his telegram waiting. Throughout that year from Moscow and the next two from Prague, a stream of weekly gifts, photographs and letters arrived, pleading for marriage. . . .
Anastasia's pause becomes a full stop.
"That's all you have to say about him?"
"For now."
"What was his name?"
"Mirek."
"But what did yon feelT'
Together with relief that he didn't get her, / can feel an odd attachment to this story—and masochism for liking its ending. How could she have been so blase? Part of me is appalled by her teen-age heartlessness; another part recognizes that I protest too much and want to experience the same petty ruthlessness on myself, as when I rail against her being late.
"What was he like? Why did you answer only one letter?"
She says he was gentle and that she was flattered, then stops again. My jealousy stays bottled up because I think it is of her, not him; and for all the wrong reasons.
Later, we laugh together at Mirek's successors. Her high school's Young Communist secretary, who used to meet her, still underaged, in a coal room, satisfy himself in thirty seconds, and sneak out of the building first, like a burglar. The collective-farm driver who nearly died from a blade under the heart in the knife-hurling, Yul Brynner-imitating craze that followed the showing of The Magnificent Seven in the farm's Palace of Culture. But what I really want to hear about is her promiscuous period. The Moscow weekends during her final high-school year, when she allowed herself to be picked up in exchange for meals and her train fare back to the village. The nights with provincial factory directors or military officers. Once, two Georgian black marketeers half-abducted her, and after half-struggling, she joined their game. Together, they took her nine times in twelve hours. . . .
Again I'm full of sterile hurt, and of excitement. She ravished by Georgian lovers of Russian blondes—and I'm jealous of her, not enraged by them. All the more because she has remembered this incident with obvious satisfaction.
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She and Alyosha behave with each other like fond old friends with an almost benign ghost in their past. Neither speaks about their relationship, but he did before he acknowledged the intensity of ours, and she occasionally makes a comment about an unmistakable "man I once knew." From this—and her homely dormitory roommate—I've pieced together the story of their affair.
They met during her first year in the institute, when her language and clothes screamed "village" and "her nose ran like a farm kid's"—yet she was tenaciously independent from the first moment. She found his recruitment talk charming but would not enter the car, having for some reason decided not to be swept off her feet.