To my desperate plying, she confirmed that our sex had been "good," but she couldn't turn it on like a faucet. "And I'm bad at dual allegiances. You have different notions about passion."
Unavailable, she became irreplaceable. In our previous state, which had so dissatisfied me, I came to see a richness I could never again hope to achieve, and prayed to exchange the rest of my days for a week of our former bliss. In short, I was the
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rejecting lover whose tactics had backfired and heart burst with self-pity. Now that she was unobtainable: how predictable it all was, how tasteless and self-serving! And how little this recognition helped!
And how I wished to make something grand of my misery. I reread the Cancer Ward scene where a former labor-camp prisoner tries to make sense of a department-store customer asking for silk shirts.
Men were . . . being thrown into mass graves, into shallow pits in the permafrost; men were being taken into labor camps for the first, second, and third times, being jolted from station to station in prison trucks; men were wearing themselves to nothing with picks . . . and here was this neat little man who could remember the size not only of his shirt but also his collar!
This was the picture of niggling me, with no way to emulate Solzhenitsyn's stalwart victims.
I kept dreaming I'd been born when I'd have been forced to prove my guts instead of pampering my bourgeois neuroses. My wishy-washy generation experienced less suffering than any on earth and read more about it. I knew about the terrible sacrifices of the Spanish Civil War, the excruciating bestiality of the Nazis; in groups that I could cite were a million of the Continent's finest men and women whose reward for selfless dedication to mankind's betterment was unspeakable torture. Ludicrous as my hurt was in comparison, I grieved for myself
For it was all I had. I knew literature, not life. Raised on middle-class melodrama, I wanted the heroism of suffering, which is why I despised myself while I cried—and why I missed all the more the only woman I'd known who had something heroic in her, from which I was "incomprehensibly" cut off.
The world had the pallor of a morning before a snowstorm. I lay on my cot for days, dreading the moment when I would have to move my limbs to make a cup of soup. Frightened by my moans, roommate Viktor summoned a doctor—who diagnosed the flu that had lain low half the University, and slapped me with mustard plasters. "Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may
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have existence." I quoted this in English. He checked me again for delirium.
When bed became tiresome, I swung into "action," keeping Anastasia in flowers and refining the mawkishness of the accompanying notes:
My Darling, I shouldn't send you these. For when they've withered, what will you then think of my love?
I bought a medical bag, entered her institute, lurked in corridors to watch her changing classes. It was her kind of exploit; she should have laughed. Chatting with fellow students, she passed me by with a chilly nod. Not even my skill in sneaking in drew acknowledgment from her.
I went to the cafeteria with bantam Alek, who had secretly adored her since their first day at the institute. Together we kept watch for a tender sign—as his size, my new acquaintance with pain told me, might make him wait for someone the rest of his Hfe.
Challenged at the old building's entrance, I moved my vigil to her dormitory, maintaining surveillance on her window from the roof of an adjoining apartment house. A re-enactment of my teen-age capers—when I could prove my dauntlessness because the girl had already left—the stunts also answered my calling to explore Russian life. What other foreigner has not only loved but been rejected by a Russian Helen? My intrepidness in finding roses, hens' teeth in winter Moscow, also stirred my self-admiration. Anything for a gesture.
The roommate closest to her, a homely Svetlana, came to lunch and gave me the solace I begged for by predicting the quick separation of the incompatible couple. I invested further hope in the purgatory of sitting close to the gawky girl's bad breath. My buoyancy collapsed when our conversation was exhausted fifteen minutes later.
Shadowing the slow-gaited professor, I remarked to myself, was as close to undercover work as a Westerner wants to go in this country. A rumpled Galbraith, he led me lumberingly to his apartment house. The nights I spent outside it were surely as cold as Greenland, but I welcomed physical punishment as a shipmate to my psychic variety. Hiding in a blind inside the
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courtyard, I watched them pass on their way home—as unreachable, I said to myself, as Alyosha's Yanks.
My frozen fingertips yearned for the touch of their old friend, the weave of her overcoat. She was shiny-eyed and incredibly alive, but also slightly uneasy with his remoteness, even when she took his arm. A slight darkness under her eyes—from nights of love?—was the finishing touch to my crushing.
I remembered Svetlana's comment after they didn't fall apart in her predicted week: "He's not for her—but Nastya has a way of falling for her lovers." The notion of her Swedish model's legs in his bed seemed farfetched then; now I had the sickening firsthand proof of a light going on, then off, in his fourth-floor window. A secret darkness, an invulnerable enemy. One day, I'd have a much more luxurious apartment. One day the creep would die. But strange as it still seemed, I was more jealous of her than of him.
I snuck into their entryway and inched up the mute staircase toward their door, imagining the miracle that would strike me on the next step and hesitating to take it. The frozen iron and stone held an aura of profound mystery, as if I'd stumbled on a residence of Trotsky's. It was crazy to be there at that witching hour, crazier still to know the old stairway's every ripple of paint, every word of instruction for a pay phone. My study of gouges in the landings was preparation for recapturing her on the other side of the massive wall. No building anywhere in the world was so intimately mine. Minute by unbearable minute, I relived the scene outside the institute when she was mine and I backed away. It was as if I had lost my birthright.
The trip down, away from my idol, was always worse. The streets were deserted except for rare night workers who might mistake me for the very plainclothesman I half hoped would arrest me—initiating the tearful reconciliation when she visited the jail. Like a soap-opera writer bawling at his own episodes, I took my own games seriously. When day came again, the masochism of throwing an occasional bouquet at her feet as she walked to her bus stop was all the cheaper because it cost nothing except further decline in her estimation. But nothing else filled the void.
There was only puppy-like wandering on the streets where she
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walked and wasting my precious moments with her pleading for more of them. Her very stressing that we would still see each other underlined how rationed my time with her was. When I persisted, she interrupted in a tone I'd never heard before.
"I'd prefer not to say this but I'm busy with exams. And frankly, others have first claim on my free time."
How could I win her back when she denied me the time to do it? How was she going to learn about my new chastised self? My Russian Sovereign Anastasia, resorting to censorship.
I kept walking. With its radiance extinguished, Moscow was as stark and remote as a moonscape, black holes replacing the bits of color she used to blink at. A sidewalk stall's fresh cheburekhi made me gag: together with the aroma, I tasted the memory of her delight in it. How could I have cheated enough to pretend the quickness of her "Yes, of course" came from anything but her certainty?