"You're the most beautiful woman I'll ever see—but did you know you're plump? Not slim like strangers see you, but round and radiating like . . . like a New York artist who paints the sun and moon as concentric circles: the warmth of day and holy light of night. . . . Wait, he was Russian! Doesn't that prove I'm right?"
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If only we could go on in this euphoria forever, hearing my in vino Veritas adoration of her that stills all skeptical voices. While I implore her shamelessly to return, she strokes my hands, saying she understands, it's hard for me. She is my best friend again, helping me through a bad patch.
"I'm fond of you," she says. "I don't enjoy seeing you wriggle."
"The suffering's not the main thing now. It's . . . I'm a stray dog without you."
"You're what you always were. A fine young man."
I wonder whether it is her praise or devastating put-down that is swelling my lump. Her "fine" was for describing chicken broth.
"Look at my face," I murmur. "Listen to my heart. I've lied before, but—"
I go to my knees, pressing hers with my forehead. But I believe enough of our fellowship has returned to make ourselves comfortable with one another, even in this preposterous situation. I also sense I am making progress, which must be consummated in physical union. I can break all barriers and finish the professor by crushing my mouth on hers, lifting her into bed.
I drink a full glass of cognac and let my tongue wag.
"Did you know that breasts can be off-putting? Embarrassing when inadequate, deadening when too large. . . . I've never seen perfection like yours. Your nipples are symbols of you; instantly sensitive to the touch."
With reverence for her godlike femininity, I raise my fingertips to the edge of her rising. Breasts in her homemade lemon blouse, like Aztec shrines.
"Takeyour hand away."
Only the transformation of her expression convinces me her rebuff isn't banter. Nothing has changed, she says; why must I spoil the evening?
"I come to have a meal with a friend and he dishes himself up as Tristan and Paris. I wish you'd stop moaning. I wonder whether you know how much it detracts from you."
While I'm still speechless, she tries to soften the blow. "When you find the goal you need, you won't imagine you love me so much. Your limbo makes you exaggerate my importance."
While I wait for an answer to this truth, the futility of knowing
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I've become a bore and a burden undermines my will to fight. But I plod on.
"If you won't accept my feelings, teach me how to smother them. I can't by myself"
"When will you understand I'm with someone else?"
"And can't come back to me now."
"I don't want to."
This can't be true. I must win something back. But I'm too drained to try; my hot air is exhausted.
She says good-bye, insisting I not take her home. I feel I am sealing my own doom by not overriding her objections and going with her; that to obey now would be the same fatal flaw of failing to prove my affection when we were together. But I'm too unsure of myself for an all-or-nothing bid. Despising my meekness, I kiss the hem of her overcoat.
"For the last time, Nastenka. Are you bluffing?" Like a subordinate asking permission to rebel, my question claims the worst of both worlds. She need not answer it. Long after the ground-floor door has slapped behind her and the gust of night air splashed my face, I remain on the dark landing of the stairwell, reproaching myself for being not quite submerged enough in my disorientation to ignore the cabbage smell.
The emptied apartment asks what disguise I'll now assume. The chair cushion still holds her shape. Tenderly, I wash our dishes, seeking nobility in defeat.
The following weeks, I cut a comic figure scheming new treats for her. But I am young and eventually will go the way I swore I wouldn't. Alyosha takes me ice-skating while the rinks are still well-frozen, and his orgies are more fun than my Wertherisms. In most ways, life is much easier with him as my buddy instead of her.
The first smell of spring arrives when he is trying his drugs case in Alma-Ata, and I decide to celebrate with a symphonic concert. Riding the bus from the University, the one in which the jonquil first showed itself, puts me deeper in the mood of regret and nostalgia for Anastasia than in many weeks. Oddly, she never said where she was going that September morning, but one day I'll see her again just to ask her. I want to hallow the
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experience, raise it through knowing all the details to a better state than my bungling left it.
Does she still read from my book of poems? I do, from the secondhand copy I searched bookshops for, a would-be knight faithful to his errant lady. The Esenin verses are an almond paste of sweetness and provocation, like her first smile in the bus. My favorite explains why I lathered under her impetuousness from the first moment.
You remember.
Remember every moment, of course: How I waited, back to the wall; And you paced the room in agitation, Flinging stings into my face.
You said
The time had come for us to part;
That you were sick of my foolheaded ways
And had to return to real things,
While I pushed on—downward, toward my lot.
My darling!
You did not love me.
Didn't understand that amidst the city throngs,
I was like a horse foaming with exhaustion;
And goaded by a daring rider's spurs.
You did not know that the dense smoke of my disassembled
existence Is what caused my anguish: preventing me from seeing Where fate's strange tricks were leading us.
Do these lines move her too? The bus slithers to a halt on Lenin Prospekt. A powerful deja-vu seizes me, and I try to understand what has prompted it before slipping into my old Weltschmerz. "What is boundless cannot be bounded"—this saying she liked comes to me, together with its image of arms trying to embrace the infinity of universal mysteries. Suddenly I recognize a signpost identifying this as the stop.
My thoughts stampede into planes of time and space, fate and human destiny. These mute buildings, streetlamps, stunted trees
SOO^MOSCOW FAREWELL
that have stayed the same while I was thrashing about in my drama harbor answers to the riddles of existence. Organic and permanent, they provide everything lacking in mortal, perishable us.
This inane grandiloquence exasperates me even as I think it; yet the sense of revelation persists, far more dizzying than mere coincidence could produce. Maybe this is the very bus. I look toward its back platform. A girl is therel running toward the open doors, her cheeks flushed in the frigid darkness . . .
Frost on my window blurs her badly, but I swear it is she. Her red scarf floated by forward notion, she is already reaching for the railing at the rear steps, which she misses only because the driver sees to it with a spiteful start. My inner ear hears "Black plague," her curse for such occasions.
My heart races the diesel's detonations. Maybe not emotion has been tilting me, but occult forces. I am aware of the bus's forward motion only when I begin cursing myself for not leaping out of the back door and seizing my miraculous second chance with her. We are at the next stop, where I searched for her that morning in the metro foyer. I fumble toward the exit, which an infuriating disorientation prevents me from reaching in time. A sharp start in a broken first gear, a missed grasp at an overhead strap and my overcoat is sopping with the floor's rusty slush.
I return to my seat and tell myself I must think. A ramshackle bus with a half-inch of window rime because of a busted heater. At the opposite end of the spectrum of the ordinary and the fantastic, the religious coincidence of her specter there. . . . I'll never find her if I get off" now. But the driver's beer-hall bass announcing the next stop over his microphone is trying to tell me what to do: "Comrade Serigina, off^at Herzen Street." That's it, she too is going to the Conservatory\ Never mind that she's never been there on her own, and doesn't suspect that The Rite of Spring is the feature of tonight's program. Sheer instinct is drawing her to me; that's why she had the plastic bag in which she carries her theater shoes. Her appearance at the concert will be the proof of our inseparability.