Instead, her sass captivated him. Ignoring his "if at first you don't succeed, pass to the next" maxim, he called her twice a day. She replied only at whim; he parked outside her dormitory for hours, "like a poor man's Paolo to her Francesca, er, da Rimini." Again and again he swore not to waste another hour on the "demon-nymphet," but just this self-will is what made him happy—and grateful for the surprise that he could still be bewitched—when she did succumb, sitting chastely at his side for long drives.
He plied her with flowers. Eventually, she allowed him to take her to restaurants and exclusive film showings at the Union of Cinema Workers. Most of all, they argued—about everything. Sometimes they sat in the car until morning ruthlessly debating the talent of an actress or the declension of a noun. She demanded treatment as an equal, taking for granted nothing he said about the meaning of a movie, the implications of a war, the intention of one of his friends' remarks. Or he would open her books and coach her for the next day's classes, stopping for pseudo-medical commentary and laughs.
Her refusal to be touched "until you have an operation for satyrism" drove him to delight. According to his probes, her defense relied on physical nimbleness or quickness of repartee. He courted—and enjoyed—her more assiduously than a thousand of his standard prey.
When she came to the apartment at last, it was under agreed terms. She sat alone in the armchair, demurely sipping wine. It
AnastasiaX 257
was insanely cold outside; he had fed her beautifully and put on a Frank Sinatra tape. Suddenly he was making love to her with his mouth. She realized he had planned everything to the last drop of Bull's Blood, but this no longer mattered. She looked down at the shaggy gray head that was doing such wonderful things and realized she adored him. His face between her legs became a symbol of something important, which she herself could not explain.
"How long did you love him?" I ask, lost in the image. Somewhere I'm jealous; somewhere glad. They are my older brother and sister. "How long did it last?"
"Three weeks."
"And then?"
"He couldn't go on."
It's very strange: neither of us want this conversation, but she is answering matter-of-factly, perhaps because she doesn't want to be asked again.
"Alyosha's made for good times and when you need help. You can't even suffer properly with him, if that's what you want from love. It's not what /want, lapuska.'"
I wonder why I continue with this. I know she's telling the truth, and it's a simple one that doesn't disturb me. I feel nothing much more than that I should feel more.
"Yet you kept seeing him."
Her sigh says this should finish more quickly. "There's only one Alyosha to go to when you're disgusted with everything or deep blue. Or"—she squeezes my waist—"when you need an empty apartment."
"You still love him. So witty, such a lover."
"Enough silliness, let's go wash our ears."
There's nothing more to it, except that I still feel there should be. Anastasia and Alyosha seem to represent two sides of me that otherwise were entirely separate. I wish we three could set up house together. I wish I were older. And that I understood why the story of the forty-six-year-old him courting the nineteen-year-old her is so important to me.
Today I have found a place. A girl named Evgeniya who picked me up last September saw me again crossing a street and
258^MOSCOW FAREWELL
offered me her "all-new pad." Evgeniya belongs to the growing caste of semiprostitutes to the foreign compounds, whose life consists of affecting Western manners to go with their imported clothes. But the gesture of handing me her keys—and drawing me a map—reminds me that even her kind of Russian is good at sharing.
A long ride by metro, another by trolley, a tramp to a tumbledown cottage and furtive sneaking over ancient floorboards into a dowdy room. Anastasia tears off her clothes as if resenting them for restricting her body. "Hurry, hurry,''^ she says, gazing almost worshipfully at the part of me most straining for her. "Skorei, skorei, my dearest, my tiger."
My slightest touch of her nipples elicits shuddering and groans. I remember the scene in Koestler's Age of Longing, which I always felt rang false, where a man brings his mistress to a climax—also climaxing the novel—by manipulating her breasts. Something important must happen to us soon.
We fill the tiny room with our limbs and passion. She takes my face in her hands and sobs with joy, then falls back exhausted. As she lies there with eyes closed and locks adorning her breasts, I think of her as Slovene or Magyar—and remember what she said during our first restaurant feast, days after Yaroslavl. "Sex isn't like eating. You get what you give."
One day a nurse in an old age home will ask me if that was the best I ever had.
"No, but the most beautiful."
She adores: cheap garlic sausage; organ recitals in the Tchaikovsky Conservatory; sarcastic taxi drivers; Byron's most romantic poetry; buckwheat kasha swimming in butter; the circus; stripping to skinny-dip in half-frozen streams (she never goes in); a superb, almost unknown Soviet film entitled Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, the down-and-out beer hall next door to Alyosha's old office on Collective Farm Square. . . . She despises: ballet on television; ice-skating on television (which the masses adore); Nikita Khrushchev—about whom she knows almost nothing, yet about whom she will not listen to a word; organized physical exercise; Dr. Zhivago (a copy of which I smuggled to
Anastasia^ 259
her); Soviet films about children that win prizes in the West; American women in Intourist hotels. . . .
I also remember her shortness with her friends when she was annoyed with them. The memory of her temper, of her childishness—which I didn't protect because of my own—allows me to wonder whether I might be putting too much blame on myself for our failure. Besides—I assure myself—many of our misunderstandings were inherent in our circumstances.
For example, there was the incident that began with Evge-niya's telephone call, urging that we meet immediately. An hour later, we were outside the Metropole Hotel.
"It's only for your sake," she said. "Only to protect you from a danger you can't understand." Her information was dead certain because it came from a cousin high in "the organs."
"Well the long and short of it is that your Anastasia's on the KGB payroll."
Her last words curled up like a scorpion's tail. Never mind that she was showing herself a vile liar as well as a tart; she had managed to flick out and poison us. For even before I had time to reject her words, they had formed an image: Anastasia an informer. I crumpled with the bite's outrage and nausea.
The worst came when one feeble station on the shortwave band of my thoughts wondered whether the accusation might conceivably be true. I remembered that this very Metropole, almost the only hotel open to foreigners during Stalin's time, always crawled with informers. One evening when we were dancing in its rococo restaurant, Anastasia mused about what would have happened to her if she had dared to do the same "in the old days." Even then it struck me that this was an uncharacteristic remark.
Maybe she was one of those who "reported" irrelevancies and nonsense just to keep the KGB, paradoxically, as far as possible from their genuine lives and thoughts. Maybe she'd kept quiet in order to spare me. Still crumpled, I tried to think of what to do. Poor Anastasia, even—or especially—if a scrap of this were true.
When Alyosha's investigation was complete, the evidence confirmed envy as Evgeniya's motive. She had seen me with Anastasia in restaurants and was piqued that I hadn't called her
260.^ MOSCOW FAREWELL
after what she considered our opening night. Here was a chance for revenge—all the easier to play on the basis of her own unquestioned assumption that a beautiful Russian girl could not keep company with an American without KGB sanction. But before these facts emerged, I'd broached the matter to Anastasia; the evil was done. She wilted. My stomach turned as when I, an eight-year-old, accidentally poisoned our rabbit.