It was the mistake of the husband who confesses. For although I recognized no such hidden cruelty in my news—/ hadn't ratted on her, after all; and wouldn't the silly business draw us closer?—she was stung by the scintilla of uncertainty that had prompted me to tell it. How could / believe that oi her, even for an instant?
Like the wife who hears the unwanted breast-beating, she could no longer hold my hand in pristine trust. I was to encounter people far grander than Evgeniya, including some of the carefully rebellious intelligentsia, who trade on precisely such narks' gossip—but as in so much else, Anastasia's loathing of it was an exception. We both were innocent, both felt dishonored.
The injury was only to our illusions, but it had been just those illusions that had encouraged us to see a message in our bond. Our alliance had been bolstered by the uplift of two people born five thousand miles apart, and in antagonistic supercultures, reacting more similarly to stimuli than the kids we grew up with. After the accusation we talked less of this. Skipping the second act of a much-praised play because our behinds were asleep or "adopting" a tot to get us admitted to a children's zoo suddenly seemed less inspired. Formerly, we had invested our tricks with the belief we were illustrating something about necessary priorities, teaching the stuffed shirts of the world. Now we were two friends trying something clever.
The next week, I invited Chingiz to join us in a countryside tramp. Before meeting Anastasia, my rambles with him past pine trees and frozen streams were of much the same spirit. Liking them both, I was confident they would like each other.
Exchanging greetings at our rendezvous in a metro station, I was struck by the likeness in handsomeness and temperament between my two student friends. Chingiz saw a pamphlet about
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his beloved Mayakovsky at the station bookstall and excused himself to check. While we waited, Anastasia pronounced him a "shallow phony."
"Believe me, he cares nothing for Mayakovsky except to pass off self-boosting sentimentalism picked up from some university crowd. And that stuff about shepherds loving his Communist father—don't make me laugh."
About Chingiz's father, she knew only what I myself had told her over the weeks. About his feeling for Mayakovsky, she judged on the basis of one remark when he spied the pamphlet: that the tempestuous poet might have found reason to kill himself even if the Revolution hadn't soured. It was hardly an original comment, yet in no way offensive; she might have said something similar herself. Yet she took his departure to declare the whole of him, with his complex ways, a fraud.
"On what evidence?" I asked, hoping to keep my plans for the day from falling apart.
"Don't ride me. You're not my teacher."
After this, nothing Chingiz might have said all day could have cleared him: she was staying loyal to her intuition. For the first time, I realized how dismaying her keen artistic instinct could be in situations requiring objectivity. How easily she condemned not only actors that displeased her, but people. Embarrassed and ashamed for her, I changed the subject.
Chingiz returned and their antipathy flashed. But neither was willing to insult me—oh, this paradox!; if only they had!—by calling off the outing. We went to an undeveloped tract just outside the city limits, the vagueness of their dislike for each only increasing the tension.
Laconic on the best of days, Chingiz said almost nothing for the first hours, my efforts to draw him out only clamping tighter his jaw. It was a piercing morning of individual snow crystals and fir branches with sunlit icicles: as perfect a winter day as I'd ever seen. Its beauty deepened our aloneness. In the immense silence of a horizonful of unspoiled countryside, the squeaking of our six boots was as in a prison yard.
Again, I could blame circumstances. My contribution to the misery had been breaking the rule that foreigners should not introduce one Russian friend to another. For obvious reasons, of
262^MOSCOW FAREWELL
which Evgeniya's deceit should have made me fully conscious, the parties can only mistrust each other. I thought of this when I saw the darkness in both their faces, each trying to feel out whether the other's relationship with me, the American, was clean.
But I also remembered a wise man's warning. "In every triangle, there are two corners on the base. The third one is the lonely apex." Why had I really chosen to form this tight-lipped triangle? The hazy notion nagged that I had invited Chingiz out of some fear about my ability to entertain her: to spice up our relationship, which was already blander than the promise of our savory first meetings. Our respect for each other was also tarnishing: there was Anastasia, hiking up ahead—as usual, evading her responsibility to cope with unpleasantness. Whenever we landed in anything distasteful, even through her caprice, she solved the problem by walking away, leaving it to me.
"Nastinka, I've been telling Chingiz—remember the day when we saw the hare with the rear end?"
"No."
She marched on, pretending to be too absorbed in nature to notice us. I thought of what I'd have said to her if we were alone, as on our last outing to a country estate. "Let's not spend our money on a palace when we're rich and famous. Let's hire women to shell our sunflower seeds."
Suddenly a bird darted from a glorious aspen toward the incredible azure, the sun spangling the tips of its feathers.
"Chickadee," said Chingiz. "They're in pollution trouble."
Anastasia shouted back, without turning round. "In central Russia, a bluetit is usually recognized when seen." Her voice oozed sarcasm. "Maybe not literary scholars, but a poet's first obligation is to know wildlife."
A repugnant squabble flared, kept above the level of Anasta-sia's comment—her mention of central Russia to the half-Kalmyk Chingiz was barely disguised racism—by Chingiz's restraint. I'd seen the bird best and thought it a humble sparrow, but tried to make them laugh by swearing it was a pelican. The attempt fell wretchedly flat. I went home with Chingiz because Anastasia had stalked off, sparing me the choice.
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If the presence of a third party diminishes every couple's special language, it was understandable that ours, based on the proposition that it expressed a rare compatibility of disparate backgrounds, suffered more than most. But this grim outing did worse. It lodged the vile suspicion in us that if Chingiz could reduce us to strangers, not only our sparkling language of shared observations and associations but our very rapport was a carnival souvenir.
Logically, our inability to sustain the happy freedom of our own company in Chingiz's presence should have made us prize it even more—but it didn't. Our sense of uniqueness in taking a rattling bus ride or taking in a bad movie on ancient plywood seats was further diminished.
Only with Alyosha could we be ourselves, although I still knew him only slightly. He would fry us a steak if we liked, then leave with a droll apology. His was the sole apartment in the city of eight million she liked, and where we felt no obligation.
We were there one evening when he returned, whistling a happy warning, with two girls. After some dancing, those three climbed into bed while Anastasia and I laid out the rubber mattress on the kitchen floor. Soon their room resounded with romping, and I sat up for a look through a crack in the door. These games were still new to me. Anastasia followed in time to see the prettier of the two girls beckon me to join—and to notice the gesture make me ready again, although we'd finished a moment before.
"Alyosha's busy and the hungry one's calling for help," she whispered. "Why are you snubbing her?"