Thus Chingiz nourished his idealism with Orwell as he had with Mayakovsky—despite both men's severe reservations and disillusionments. He too needed commitment to something noble. The final irony is that Homage, which I'd obtained for him, was a banned book. But I can't raise any of this with Masha. For all the wrong reasons, I'll be losing part of her friendship together with Chingiz, if he's truly gone.
Awaking on my trusty cot, I feel better. Maybe it wasn't the Chingiz news that made me so tired, but being up since six o'clock. The light has dropped to twilight intensity, giving the translucence of spring evening in the north. I lie still, simultaneously feeling the great freedom of an entire city at my disposal
The President's Day^335
with no obligation to anyone and a larger limitation on all and any freedoms. Chingiz's trouble already seems fated.
Seeing I'm awake, Viktor turns up the radio: "... Brigade of Communist Labor . . . voluntary pledge . . . annual plan for linoleum production . . ."A rousing chorus of "Russia, Motherland Mine" contributes to my sense of being caught. And what of Viktor, who no doubt contributed to the journalist's quotes, yet stayed soundless in respect for my nap?
I can't bother with my chores. I feel like doing only one certain thing just now, and the knowledge that I'll succumb fills me with a mulled pleasure of self-indulgence spiced by guilt. Yes, I'll go have a look at Anastasia.
To calm a dissenting voice, I have a good gulp at a bottle I keep in my trunk, then walk to the metro, after-shower smooth. The semitrance I fall into when obeying the call to Anastasia blurs my gleaming train when it arrives: filters all sights in my line of vision from fully registering. I can only breathe in the fragrance of the swollen river as we cross the bridge. The whole earth is active, like a stimulated gland. How much closer these sensations could draw us than trysts in damp stairwells! Sweet spring, when nature calls all pairs together; when my own nature is so much happier and we could enjoy so much more together than in pinched winter.
But the train goes underground on the other bank. The ride between stations is eternal; I fight down a claustrophobic premonition that I'll never get off^. The respectable citizens opposite me look as prim as a row of burghers, and I wonder whether they saw me take a nip from my pocket-size bottle. Like the old Times Square Camels ad, "Reserved for Children and Invalids" and "Do Not Lean Here!" imprint their stencils on a plate of my memory. ... At last we're in a handsome new station and a party of tourists is appropriately agog—but what are they doing in this offbeat part of town? And why am I riding up this interminable escalator when I know the moment of self-indulgence I've come for will only drag me down?
The professor lives on First Troitsky Lane, a humpbacked side street near Alyosha's old office. My first time, I had the usual trouble finding it. Of course a Second and a Third Troitsky
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Lanes wound around the First, as well as an intersecting Troitsky Street. But no one had heard of Troitsky in any form, and the man who finally did gave the familiar vague wave and laconic "over there," as if too much order must be avoided even in this. But this very uncertainty strengthens my sense of being home now that I know my way through the maze.
Bit players run through their parts against the backdrop of the mild evening. Local teen-agers are loitering, smoking, cat-calling to girls in a small playing field I pass, and in a grocery on Petty-bourgeois Second Street, customers crowd the liquor department for their joy. I join their tribute to vodka's power with a new nip at my own bottle, then take a shortcut across a lot, where a heavy woman rises from a bench to ask me to thread a needle in the fading light. Oh the artlessness of the Russian people in their large, sometimes happy family! She knows I'm high from the way I keep missing, and calls me "my son."
At the booth I use for this, I telephone the professor: no use waiting to catch them coming home if they're already there. A girl says "Hello," and before I realize it's a wrong number, I take her for Anastasia and hang up fast. Then I chuckle, thinking of how Alyosha would have pursued the anonymous teen-aged contralto. A gulp of white magic to steady my hand, two no-answers to establish that the prey is actually out. I take up the watch quickly before they return.
My position is inside the entrance to his courtyard. They must pass here because the front door is permanently locked, but won't see me behind the gate they themselves will open. Squatting on a layer of last fall's leaves, I check the scene across the street from under the rusty bottom frame. Nothing suspicious, no one checking me. The neighborhood is a mixture of new prefabricated housing and sagging log houses converted into communal apartments. The professor's prerevolutionary apartment house is the solidest building in sight except for the spire of the Soviet Army Club, which I squint to see in the distance.
There's something reassuring as well as demeaning—a link to my inner self, evidence that I'm the same person—in my still going on with these childish pranks. The eighth grade again, spying on the girl I "liked." ... I wonder what I'm going to be when I grow up. ... I wonder how much time has passed and
The President's Day^337
why I can't stand to wear a watch. More swigs reheve the stiffness in my knees, but where the hell is AnastasJa? I want to see her while my high is in balance. It's like old times: she keeping me waiting.
The Tijuana Brass blares through an open window, drowning out a Mozart piano sonata being practiced several floors beneath. In the darkest corner of the courtyard, a teen-age couple are registering the progress of his hand in her blouse. Huffing about public behavior, a burly man in a sateen undershirt appears from the back stairway to chase them off. The girl cringes, her swain retreats, muttering, "Kiss my ass." A younger boy dashes by in pursuit of a stray cat.
The burly man returns to his room to watch television on a set with a smudgy magnifying glass. I know this because I knocked on his door when first searching for the professor's apartment. The protector of socialist morals was picking his teeth with a pen knife. Eyes on a soccer game, he conversed about my accent, which I had said was Czech to allay suspicion. He informed me that Russian is the world's best language, spoken by the most developed people. "You're an example; you see the need to learn Russian. Nobody's anybody without it now. Science and culture —everything important's in the Mother tongue." I asked what other languages he knew, and was backing toward the stairway when the flush hit his face.
When he has well and truly disappeared, Irina Sergeevna clumps into the courtyard on disintegrating slippers. Ironically, I first heard of her from him, her ghastly neighbor in their communal apartment. Passing her door, he snorted gratuitously, "She's out—at the theater.''' "Theater" was obviously a dirty, class-enemy word. Actually, she was seeing The Cherry Orchard, her thirtieth time in forty years.
I know I'll sober up by thinking about Irina Sergeevna's life, but maybe that's better. I visualize the fading snapshots she's shown me: a lithe woman holding her husband's hand. She's wearing a flapper hat in one; in another, a lacy veil. I never used to think people cared about such things during the first Five-Year Plan.
Eight years earlier, she was a scholarship orphan in the best Kazan gymnasium. Fresh from the Civil War triumph, two
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Communists—the first she'd evep seen—burst into her French class to instruct the teacher about his new, sociahst curriculum. Apart from the epithet "bourgeois," neither spoke a word of French. But more than this, it was the new local lords' Russian, a riffraff patois blending thugs' jargon and malevolence toward their betters, that gave the timid schoolgirl the lesson of her life.
Until then, the school's anti-Bolshevik tattle had caused her secretly to admire the mysterious Lenin. But whatever he was trying in Moscow, one look at the types in control at the grass roots was enough to gauge the direction the country was likely to take. Irina Sergeevna knew the danger of antagonizing beer hall habitues, but neither inherent meekness nor conscious self-effacement, practiced from that revealing moment in class, saved her from the fate of millions less careful—which is why her companions are plays and books.