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for it. When surfeited on the anonymous bodies, I'll be the better man she deserves, capable of unconditional faithfulness. Fit to achieve the sublime devotion I've always yearned to achieve.
The concern she transmits to Alyosha for my whereabouts strengthens everything I feel about us. Two weeks go by in swelling love for her, for the sweetness of my separation ache, for the comfort of knowing we'll be together again, more steadfastly than ever.
Cruising in districts I know would please her, I jump out of the Volga to call—and replace the receivers of half a dozen phone booths: I want to intensify the expectations yet more. Meanwhile, Alyosha's confidence and kindness with women expands me, also contributing to us. This is how I deal with images of her during the orgies.
Another week quickly passes. Although I love her for the way she misses me, my guilt for what I suspect of my self-deception is rising to the safety-valve level. I drink alone and go to the telephone booth across the street from her dormitory. My suspense is enrapturing after this long lapse; apprehension of her reaction to my cruelty is atomized in the alcohol. She can't have been offended; she trusts me to do what I had to. I hear my charming, witty, tender answers to her questions, all lavishing on her the devotion she deserves after her faithful wait. She will ask neither about my mysteriousness in disappearing nor my de-votedness in calling now, as she always knew I would when my task was complete. For the first time, I'm totally fluent with her.
Her approach to the telephone pushes me higher toward ecstasy. "You/" she utters in response to my brief adoring greeting. I drink in the flaxen timbre with the trace of northern accent, its crowning glory.
"Do you think we should know each other's names?" I say, repeating her Yaroslavl pauses with her words. "When we meet again, 'you' might be inadequate."
She receives this like a hack performance at the theater. I rush to something even more trite. "I'll need that book of yours back—forgot to pen the dedication."
"Something about never forgetting old friends, no doubt."
"Something about eternal infatuation for a woman of instincts. I'll find a suitable line from one of the reverent verses."
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She shifts to a lower octave. "You know the saying? 'When the barrel's empty, it's late to conserve the wine.' "
I don't know the saying and can't decipher its moral now. I am too frozen by the chilling new self-assurance and secrecy in her voice. Throughout the hiatus, I have pictured her wrapping her red scarf around her head and rushing gleefully to our reunion. It is midnight, the perfect time for this flourish. But she won't even talk about joining me.
"Someone said 'When we meet again' a whole five minutes ago. I've heard that prolonged waiting for your desideratum damages the heart."
She gives this the grunt it deserves, and stays put. She doesn't say she's just washed her hair or is tired; simply that she doesn't want to go out now. Her tone asserts that my gesture of appearing at this hour is puerile, not romantic. "Let's set a better time and place," she says.
As I try to continue bantering, maggots of doubt multiply in me as on the Eisenstein meat. What have I done with my appalling absence? Suddenly I realize I must raise the stakes.
"For God's sake, I love you, I've always loved you, I always—"
And she'll always love me, she interrupts, her inflection suggesting my feelings are melodramatically exaggerated and her "love" for me is a prima ballerina's for a reporter. The whole conversation is nauseatingly out of character.
"Please, I must see you for a minute. Otherwise something terrible will happen."
If I like we can meet after classes tomorrow. Sorry, she's busy in the evening, can't get free even for a ballet. A fellow student must use the telephone now; she's looking forward to tomorrow, five o'clock. . . .
Although I knew my punishment would start soon, I felt only stunned, as in the moments immediately following a blow to the face. The blood of an overwhelming desire shot to my head, then seeped down through my being, from the moment I accepted she actually wasn't coming. I had to look at her face. Put my arm in hers. Know that she loved me.
Everything after this was weighted by monumental banality. My reactions to the shock conformed to a story: "Whenever life
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is at its most dramatic, it is least able to escape the commonplace. ... At the so-called great moments, we all behave like characters in a penny novelette." But recollection of this passage, written by Koestler about what he endured awaiting imminent execution in a Franco cell, provided no satisfaction. My pain controlled me no less, but I could take no pride in it. I had to live with the dreary reality that everything I felt was utterly hackneyed.
On the following day at five o'clock—she came on time!—her presence suspended my longing. While she was with me, I believed she had never left, or that my old attraction for her would quickly pull her back. Even when she explained, 1 was enlivened rather than depressed. It was we two together: better than old times because our discussion was more urgent. She wore the same green sweater, sipped the same tea without sugar. The workaday cafe took on an intriguing atmosphere. Her terrible news was from the same penny novelette which we'd soon laugh at, then forget.
On a very low day two weeks ago, she was trying to finish an experiment. A man from the institute's staff" entered the laboratory and saw her weeping. She did not want his comfort but they talked—and talked again after completing the experiment. Walking to the dormitory with him, she felt each step separating her from us, but only now, warmed by his intelligence, did she realize how lonely she had been in my absence.
No, she did not love him. But she could not leave him. Their give-and-take was very different from ours but must not be trampled on.
I implored her to go away with me on the weekend. To Leningrad, Sochi, the country's best. I would use any trick, offer any bribe for permission to travel together. No; she would be with him in a scholarly retreat on a nearby lake. Now she must leave.
I spent the dismal January evening in the cafe's intense atmosphere of restless boredom, feeling I understood the despair of its bleary drunks. It was no longer a lark; I needed anesthesia.
Outside the institute the next morning, I met a bantam student named Alek who had sometimes accompanied Anastasia and me for a walk after classes to talk about American cars, his
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passion. He identified the man as a thrice-married professor of neurology who appealed to pretty students despite his scraggli-ness. He, Alek, wondered what they saw in him—especially Anastasia, who had loved me so.
This struck me so violently that I yearned to lie down. I loved her—like no one else on earth. The rest had been incidental, even my cruel games and emotional stinginess. The heart and soul of her was so close to my own—but better than my own—that I couldn't go on alone.
Two days passed; the thought of a lifetime without her was unbearable. If only I hadn't known her uninhibited tenderness, her support, her affection—which made me a hundred times finer than a purposeless screwer. I couldn't believe her handbag's frayed handle was no longer mine to toy with while she was in some restaurant toilet, from which she would wind her way through all other tables to mine. That her exhilarated whisper would not be in my ear as we walked down a street, turning me into a man I could admire.
I remembered a recent account of Moscow life by a good-natured Englishman who was depressed by the drabness and gloomy weather, but never felt so happy to feel so sad. How perceptive this seemed until the real sadness I'd brought on myself began taking me to the bottom.
The cliches sprouted so abundantly that I had to hack through the undergrowth of my own hackneyed thoughts. To my horror, I noticed that our old love talk of code words and private jokes embarrassed her, as if I were offering to doll her up in shoplifted clothes. Then I tried to blackmail her with my desire, which of course had returned. When she next saw me after her weekend at the lake, I brushed against her with the hardness that used to make her carol. She forced a chuckle, as if for an acquaintance who had told a boorish story.