In 1934, she moved to Moscow with her husband, a talented engineer, and their infant daughter, the joy of their lives whom the neighbors called "Angel." Now a doctor. Mama worked double shifts in a tuberculosis hospital. Two years later, the child died of meningitis, unknowingly passed by Irina Sergeevna from a patient in her ward. Only her husband's night vigils kept her from going mad.
Her nightmares stopped on the blessed day she realized that she was pregnant again. Maybe it was wrong to bring another child into their world of terror of purges, but at a time when even faithful friends feared to exchange an honest word, the solitary couple needed a baby on which to lavish their normal instincts. Their one hope for hope itself was this replacement for buried Angel. They touched the swelling stomach, worked harder than ever, counted the weeks.
With fifteen to go, the engineer was arrested. Answering a call from Peter the Great, an ancestor had immigrated to Kazan from Wiirttemburg in the early eighteenth century. He still bore his family's German surname: proof he was a Gestapo agent.
Irina Sergeevna joined the horde of mute and hysterical wives, mothers, daughters who swarmed around offices in hopes of hearing whether their husbands, sons and fathers were alive. Trekking from prison to prison, enduring day-long lines in winter's cold, she miscarried, losing the purpose of her life and
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her ability to produce another. Upon discharge from the hospital, she learned her husband had been shot.
During the next few years she lived like a zombie. The war began. A niece off to the front as a nurse revived her by putting her daugher in her care, but someone—probably Burly Boy, the neighbor—denounced her as the wife of an enemy of the people, unfit to raise a Soviet child. The baby was removed to a home.
Irina Sergeevna tended war-wounded. On V-E Day, a surgeon proposed marriage, but a Party official in the hospital warned against an alliance of a tainted woman and a "cosmopolitan." The suspect Jew was sent elsewhere; Irina Sergeevna returned to tuberculosis and her eccentric lover of the theater, becoming a middle-aged pensioner before she knew it.
Remembering her tale, I yearn to do something elevating for her—and for myself. It's sacrilegious to compare the tragedies, but my loss of Anastasia has helped me understand Irina Sergeevna's deprivations. In one tiny way, I even envy her: her loneliness was caused by others' cruelty; mine by my pathetic illusions. My compulsion to make a mess of my affairs, then to pity myself—ye gods, am I a drip!
Drip, it hits me smack in the forehead—the first drop of a sneaky summer shower, blown hard by an ambushing wind. I rely on my bottle again to inure me to the soaking. My lousy luck. Or maybe some kind of rain god telling me to shut my trap; I talk too much.
The cafe to which I dash after a quick search for nearby shelter is a squat new one at the focus of the local shops. For no apparent reason, half the tables sport "No Service Here" cards, and the waitresses defend their empty sections by shooing me away. But it's hailing now too, and after being pelted a bit in the line, I push back inside and claim one of the free seats.
Damn clever of me, since the floor show's better than most. In full view of the drenched line-standers, a clutch of waitresses is enjoying a smoke in the kitchen passageway. The maitre d'hotel, a frowzy woman with a Lenin pin, is swallowing meat patties at the corner table. Finally a customer abandons hope for his own supper and scolds her for the scandalous mess, from driving citizens into the wet to her own "gobbling" while others wait.
"Eat?" The reply is an outraged shriek. "And why shouldn't I
340^MOSCOW FAREWELL
eat? I've been here since six this morning. You're the only one with the right to nourishment? I should slave until I drop?"
After the usual bickering, a neat man at my table manages to order a meal, then steadily ups the volume of his fork-taps on the oilcloth to demonstrate his impatience at the dragging wait. Finally our waitress slaps down his three courses simultaneously, pleased that his soup will be cold and fish sauce congealed before he finishes his eggplant salad. Next, she takes on the woman on my other side, who has asked for a pepper shaker with pepper.
"I've got to walk my son both ways to school every day, so don't you try to needle me," the waitress hisses. "I've got a husband who drinks but never helps." The woman mumbles an apology and forgoes the pepper. By this time, the man on my right has been turned analytical by the appearance of food in his stomach. "A few drunks an evening does it," he reflects. "They make enough cheating them blind to send the rest of the customers to the mother of hell."
What they don't suspect is how much I'm enjoying this. The whole evening's been too goddam solemn. For some obscure reason—or perhaps because Nixon's name stands out on the front page of the Pravda that the man's making into a rain hat—the scene reminds me of the nearness of my President. A mile or so south in the Kremlin, he'll be having his State dinner just about now: caviar, sturgeon in champagne, filet of beef and smoked venison with fruit—the works. And rendering his and Pat's sincere thanks for the hospitality. I imagine his style: "The United States and Soviet Union are both great powers . . . ours are both great peoples. . . . We meet to begin a new age in the relationships between our two great and powerful nations. . . . Never have two peoples had a greater challenge or a greater goal. ..."
Picturing the toasts in the Kremlin Banquet Hall makes me happier than ever in this dive, and I raise my chipped glass with a smirk. To sustain my cheer, I'm quaffing Crimean vino, the only alcohol not crossed off" the menu at this hour. I've also ordered some hash that the woman urges me to finish because I'm "thin." . . . Suddenly, I've had too much of one or the other and must leave for air.
Outside again, I remember my uncollected change and resent
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the bitch of a waitress for cheating me out of three rubles. But what the hell, I admire her too—and my table companion for his tactful warning of how it was going to happen to me. The rain lies in large puddles on the sidewalks, but other parts of the wavy asphalt are already drying. To help with my swaying, I play a game of avoiding the water, but trip into the gutter, coating my suede sleeve with a layer of muck. Hearing "He's lapped his fill," from a passing couple, I rise with dignity.
Time to call it an evening? Telephoning the professor again, I'm half sorry he's not home so I could cancel the final act. Drink claustrophobia prevents me from holing up in my hiding place, but the courtyard is soundless now and I'll hear them approach in time to slip behind the gate. I make it fine when a car turns the corner—a false alarm. I wonder if time can really move backwards, as they claim in the new physics. A bulletin board at the professor's entryway announces a free course of lectures on "New Forms of the World Class Struggle." The note underneath offers an ironing board for sale, used but cheap.
I drift into nostalgia so wistful that the score for it, Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel, plays in my ears. I am thinking of my first Saturday job as a paint store stockboy when the boss said that I was obviously trying but he had to let me go because business was bad. Putting aside my gratitude for the gift of memory, I'm trying to seize the key to my life offered by this forgotten incident when a taxi pulls up. I know it's theirs because I've lived this moment before.
Not fear but incomprehension paralyzes me: I can't sort out the competing impulses to my limbs. May's moon is freeing itself from the last of the rainclouds. Anastasia materializes at the gate, followed by the professor, who bumps a long leg on the frame. She's wearing the Bolshoi dress and clasping a handbag; I know they've been to a good theater. And that although loyalty and intellectual appreciation still bind her, she can't breach his aloofness; they're already unhappy together.