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divorced husband continue to occupy officially divided, giving her individual rights to seven square meters.
The hearing is so routine that I look for something better in the corridor. Divorces, petty theft and the usual collection of hooliganism cases—ragged young men awaiting severe sentences for carousing with vodka and knives—predominate. One dock is occupied by a handsome, silver-haired athletics coach, the very image of his profession. While supervisor of recreation of "Post Office Box 1844," obviously a large enterprise, he allegedly swindled three weeks' salary from some forty workers on the fraudulent promise of supplying them with sweatsuits through his sporting connections. Throughout the workers' dooming testimony, he holds himself erect, a good sport in defeat.
Finding me among the spectators, Alyosha affects surprise that I should be watching such slobber. "If people learned to control their greed for sweatsuits, they'd be sans souci," he whispers. "And the social order would stay sound as a roach, as we say."
His own hearing ended, he takes a few minutes to consult with an elderly colleague. Then we drive off on an errand of mercy for a neat woman named Galya, who in looks and bearing is the exception to the rule of "investigators," the rigid, much disliked detectives-cMw-examiners who assemble the prosecution case. At the moment, Galya is also so nervous that she fails to notice the back seat is still unrepaired, and she's sitting on bare springs. Two days ago, she interrogated a suspected thief in Butirsky Prison, taking along the man's pleading wife out of compassion. Because she, the appointed investigator in the case, was conducting the interview, the warders relaxed their surveillance and the wife exploited this to slip her husband some sausage. Discovered during the search before he was returned to his cell, the grave violation of the rule about transferring things to prisoners threatened at least Galya's career.
I wait in the car a block from the prison while she and Alyosha go through their paces in the office. Their main objective is to dissuade the Chief Warden from informing the district procurator, Galya's boss. Imploring, beseeching, pleading that the poor woman was tricked, that it will never happen again, that public disgrace would destroy her young family, they prevail in the end. Even in jail, even after a genuine violation of security regula-
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tions, the time-tested tactics of humble contrition—Galya's ashen face supporting Alyosha's adjuring—achieve the usual cover-up.
In the car again, the rescued damsel badgers Alyosha and me to come home to a celebratory supper. "I'll nag you worse than the warden; I'll see your clients all get fifteen years ..." When we agree to fix a later date, Galya, still trembling, kisses us and alights at a metro station. To my surprise, I hear that Alyosha has known her only professionally and volunteered his help solely because of her unusual fairness to his clients. But he won't accept her invitation because his reputation might embarrass her with her husband.
Alyosha is oddly moody today. He chides me for lack of charity in a remark about the courthouse, then throws an arm around my neck while steering with his left hand. "You won't get a nightingale's song from a donkey," he says. "At my age, spring fever can mean 'headache.' "
Unstockinged legs lure powerfully in the warmth, but we drive past many pairs without stopping. The hard-to-get play of Alyosha's new actress would probably end on this second day, but he doesn't call, mumbling instead about the need for a good walk and suggesting we go to Golovinskoye Cemetery, in case I've never seen it.
Of course I have, when he himself drove out to show me my first Russian funeral, one of the more memorable of our early outings. A February day of a new Ice Age; Alyosha and I trying to make each other wear my hat, like two friends jousting for a restaurant check; following a brass band's dirges as it tramped over the snow to a far corner of the cemetery. The echoes led us to the burial of a factory director. The eulogy was straight out of our oldest joke: "Rest in Peace, Comrade. The plan will be fulfilled."
The hushed whiteness of that morning has yielded, won-drously, to variegated greens; but how unlike Alyosha, who can remember the course of inconsequential conversations that took place months ago, to forget! Deep inside the cemetery, we turn to a section on the right. Although the mood is less phantom-like than in winter, spiked iron fences surrounding most graves and tinctured portraits of the deceased sustain the eerie effect. Tinny crucifixes on the headstones, peacefully unkempt plots . . .
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Negotiating a maze of dirt pathways, I realize Alyosha is searching for something. It is his mother's grave.
"But I thought your mother died in Central Asia." He's told me little more about her than her death from typhoid fever, and I sense he himself knows less than he'd like.
"She caught it there but came back to Moscow. Nice little train ride."
The failure of his sense of direction is as odd as his lapse of memory; stranger still is the sudden call itself to visit his mother's remains instead of catching the last hours of sun in the countryside. In the end, we don't find the grave because it is no longer there. We learn this by consulting lists in the cemetery office, then hearing a caretaker's explanation—at which Aly-osha's eyes flinch perceptibly—that plots unattended for two years may be cleared for a new burial.
"It doesn't matter," Alyosha says in a voice openly betraying how much it does. Returning to the car, he tells me, as if apologizing, that he stopped taking care of the plot because of the war.
Driving back to the apartment, we pass a cinema to which Anastasia and I once journeyed to see a revival of Lieutenant Kije, the 1930s film with the Prokofiev music. How we liked each other that night! Even more for seeking out the old classic in the improbable theater attached to workers' housing. The sight of it by daylight reminds me of everything. It is mine, tender and private.
"Has she called?" The ritual is for Alyosha to ask, "Has who called?"
"I think you two should tie the knot and end the agony. Or, ah, vice-versa."
"Has she called?"
"She's lost my number."
I don't tell him what I'm thinking because he's still convinced I'm playing a melodramatic act. Besides, he keeps insisting that I can easily win her back—although he won't be entirely happy with this—if that's what I really want.
We turn a corner to one of the Cartier-Bresson-like scenes that seem to manifest Moscow's spirit. On a fence concealing a construction project, remnants of a "we will complete the
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YEARLY PLAN AHEAD OF SCHEDULE!" banner flutter in the spring breeze. Against the warping boards, a line of dusty workers zigzags from a stall offering draft beer, for which the men cheerfully endure a twenty-minute wait and the inevitable cheating of the stout vendor blatantly whipping up the foam. But the customers are delighted with their find. Tossing the skin of their salted fish on the ground, squinting in the sun and swapping stories, they swallow their proletarian rewards with so much gusto that we leave the car to join them.
"If there's beer, just great; if not, we'll wait," quotes Alyosha as we inch forward. The old peasant saying tells everything about Russian patience and gratefulness for small treats. Pity that the brew itself is watery.
Back in the car, Alyosha reminisces about a local Fagin who bought him his first beer in 1935. We cruise slowly, dreamy with the motion, until a Moskvich dappled with repaintings stalls abruptly at the mouth of Krasnopresnenskaya Square and Alyosha must brake hard to avoid a collision. The driver doesn't even see us until we lean out of our windows to glower. Of all people, he turns out to be Ilya, one of Alyosha's old friends.