The bus rattles across an empty October Square and down Dmitrova Street, past the French Embassy. Once she risked coming to a reception in the old mansion, during the time we
Anastasia ^301
couldn't keep our hands from each other. We backed into an anteroom and fondled one another, pretending to be searching the pile for our coats. Our appetites were—yes, boundless.
One chance in a million to have seen her at our stop; in a hundred million if she appears at the Conservatory. Yet I already picture her in the crowd, searching for a spare-ticket seller from the pedestal of Tchaikovsky's statue. I circle back to take her arm from behind. Her larynx laugh goes up: "Well done, clever one. I knew you'd be here."
She'll wait at my side, protecting her face with her scarf against the Bulldog Drummond fog, taking it for granted that I'll somehow get us inside. We two risking the unorthodox again, united for sensual experience. Waving my passport, I'll claim in loud American that I'm the advance man for the orchestra's New York tour.
Then our entrance into the concert hall, the eighteenth-century music room with the severe white walls and gleaming organ pipes. And the Stravinsky—even better, because its dissonances are more electrifying, than on Proposal Evening. Her face is as gold and clean as the hall. We are merged by the exquisite setting, the magnificent coincidence of our meeting, the enthralling Russian paganness of the music. The rite of our spring. We will be together. . . .
But stop. I'm tired of this tale before forcing myself to live it. At last I'm beginning to see: far from the patron of love it tries to pass for, my urge to dramatize and romanticize relationships is an unconscious wrecking device. Before we meet again, I must have an honest word with myself. Theatrical props don't work for her. She lives fairy tales too, but somehow without hamming up her own life: while I was convincing myself the episode was heaven-sent, it was enough for her to catch the Esenin book and ride on. Yes, before I see her again, I must learn to see, and see for, myself
Besides, if I keep her as a symbol, the best of her will enrich me for years. I can spend a thousand dreamy hours pitying myself, gauging how far she departed from the Russian norm, trying to analyze how much of her glory was in my idealization. My memories are as moving as the moments themselves. I'll picture her at sleep, head thrusting out from beneath the covers and
302^MOSCOW FAREWELL
laying claim to each breath as if oxygen were one of her adored foods. Or removing her watch before sex, like an athlete before a game. Her antipathy to it in bed was so strong that if she noticed it still on, she flung it away.
I'll remember how she made herself up, examining her mirror image with a narcissism so uninhibited that it crossed the line of vanity to artlessness. Privy to the secrets of her toilet, I felt a part of her, and of the sheer physical grace I'd always wanted. What luxury to lie on the covers and do nothing but watch her minister to our beautiful eyes!
I'm grateful to her, even for her rejection. Even while best friends, I've always felt us competing in a strange rivalry, which there's still a chance I'll eventually win by converting this experience into some kind of elevating growth. "Man is born to live, not prepare for life," said Zhivago. She does the one and I the other—but who'll be happy in the end?
Someday I'll separate who she is from what I want of her. Meanwhile, the bus is pulling me away from her like a Greyhound on a turnpike.
VI The President's Day
The day of Nixon's arrival in Moscow dawns in fat pastel clouds. Air as fragrant as a cow's breath licks my skin through the wide-open dormitory window. What world capital can compare to the rambling village called Moscow when the spring sun shines and the smell of earth makes you free as Huck Finn? The dust won't rise for hours. The Kremlin is Disneyland on a lavender horizon. Nothing yet moves in the dormitory except Viktor's lips for his rhythmic snore and Kemal's slippers pacing the communal kitchen. I hurry past to avoid turning down his glass of tea, which comes with entreaties for advice now that M.I.T. and a university in Illinois have rejected him.
My unprecedentedly early start is to catch Zhenya on this final opportunity, and perhaps come by one of his "underground" drawings. But "underground art" can summon up more than one misleading image in this city. Some Westerners assume it is necessarily creative and good—a corollary of their supposi-
304^MOSCOW FAREWELL
tion that persecution renders political dissenters honest and saintly as well as brave. Unsentimental critics, by contrast, have seen so much sterility, pomposity and vacuous self-advertisement—feeble plagiarism of Chagall, shallow experimentation in Op Art—that they've come to expect only exhibitionistic imitation of Western vogues in rebels' flyblown studios. And to assert that nothing more can be expected of an artistic community cut off" from its roots for forty years, force-fed with Social Realist philistinism, and now painting exclusively for Western patrons of dissident art, many of whom can't tell the top of a canvas from its bottom. When they open up to foreigners, many Moscow intellectuals and artists burn with conviction that theirs are important talents, unrecognized only because of political repression. The tedious truth behind this heartwarming illusion is that some deserve as much sympathy for this conception of their meager gifts as for their relegation to the outhouses of the cultural establishment.
To all this, Zhenya the Giant is a happy exception. His basement studio is as foul as any, dungeon of leavings and smells. But his talent attracts even certain Ministry of Culture officials, who drop by—secretly, of course—to see his newest work: pencil drawings and canvases as divorced from Social Realism as Pasternak's poems from Pravda editorials. The best are oils of thrones in the cosmos and costumed girls on moonlike beaches— always with strongly understated color, hints of erotic surrealism and unsettling omissions that force the viewer to complete the work. Nostalgic, ominous, tantalizing with inexpressible perceptions and truths . . . the mood rarely fails because Zhenya, for all his dirtiness, avarice and indifference to Art—he couldn't care less about the Hermitage, let alone the Louvre—has a rare gift.
He will be leaving this afternoon for Israel via the train for Vienna: one of the year's charmed thirty thousand. When I arrived, hopes for such an exodus were dismissed as unreal, but Zhenya obtained his papers with a tenth of the trouble he'd expected. The hardship cases featured in the Western press still languished in their terrible limbo, refused both permission to leave and to support themselves; condemned by pure vindictive-ness to begging and despair. ("We don't want you here; we
The President's DayX305
deprive you of your jobs and pensions. But neither shall you go, traitorous Jewish scum.") But Zhenya's relatively easy success with the visa reinforced his assumption that progress toward his prosperity is the natural course of events.
Zionism still roiled him. He was rude to let-our-people-go activists who appeared with congratulations and suggestions as soon as word traveled of his application. (Without their activism, of course, it would never have occurred to him that he might go abroad, let alone emigrate.) He stormed against American Zionist committees who took it upon themselves to speak for his three million oppressed brothers, arguing that three quarters of them did not want to leave, and that this included the "Commie fucks": Jews in the Party and government whom Israel or any Western country would be crazy to accept. And the thought of settling in Israel appalled him. He simply knew Russia was past hope and that he'd had enough of it. The only escape was to Israel, where he intended to stay very briefly before moving on to the States. The next step was to allow his sister, a gym teacher, to pump him with sufficient courage to apply for the visa. It was taken for granted that she would go with him, to make his suppers and occasionally sweep out his room. He did not bother until later to tell his mother.