"It seems you have winter here already. Quite extraordinary."
His face free of a spark of acknowledgment, the officer
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accepted the Indian's passport as if it were a glass of soda from a dispensing machine.
"Win-ter? So soon? But you cope, you are a hardy people."
The robot's eyeballs clicked down, locked onto the Indian and surveyed him without reply. (Where is Kemal? I wondered. Finished at the University, rejected at American campuses; I'll never see him again.) Retreating, the gentleman gasped to his wife, "Such a welcome to this land!" But from a minibus near the plane, a group of Aeroflot stewardesses spilled out to link arms, squeeze waists and kiss cheeks. "Do svidaniya, pet, send me a postcard." "Don't forget the sweater, Sveta." "Galka, call Kolya for me, I forgot to say good-bye. " Clinging to each other before separation, the girls unselfconsciously showed the other side of the coin of the country's personal relationships.
I hadn't been mistaken: it was the home of quintessential types. The rustic soldier at the passport desk who read everyone's visa from top to bottom four plodding times. And after our misrouted baggage had finally arrived, the barmaid of a customs officer who scrutinized every scrap of printed material, confiscating my Time because of a photo of some starlet in a new headgear style called "Romanov," but winking at my two dozen pairs of tights for gifts.
"I'll take your word that the clothing contraband doesn 't hide an atomic bomb," she quipped, resetting her stern countenance to daunt the next suspect.
The taxi driver grumbled about his local beer hall closing to build a theater. I cleaned my window and stared at the streets.
The Delhi businessman notwithstanding, winter was a good month off; but while Hyde Park was still emerald, fall here had bled the leaves. Fd forgotten how dim the streetlights were, and the early dusk's Halloween-like palpitations. How did it stay so poor, this Moscow without a single store to equal an Aldwych market stall? But it was precisely this lackluster I loved — for quenching any demands that I myself be a bright light. Frazzled like a genuine home, the Russian scene depressed other Westerners; but I was grateful for feeling accepted into the humbleness. Even the million slogans I liked to mock — now dunning for a fitting work contribution to honor the forthcoming
InterludeX359
Twenty-fourth Congress of Our Revered Communist Party — welcomed me back.
The driver waited at the University gate while I dumped my things. I bulled my way through without initiating the process of acquiring documents or meeting my new roommate. Alyosha — who didn't know I had my visa, let alone that Vd arrived — was the reason for this journey. The buildings flanking the route to his place were totally alien and utterly familiar, as if families were preparing tea for me behind their granite-like fagades. Alyosha's was under repair again; I climbed over scaffolding boards strewn across the shortcut to the dear, chummy courtyard. Upstairs, his door was ajar. The omen unnerved me. How far had he gone, he with the girls and the deals, to forget to lock it? Afraid to ring, I tiptoed in.
In the living room, an elderly woman was gazing upward, forcing her eyes toward heaven against the weight of disapproval and pity. Before I could follow them, I was visited by the dread—to the tenth power — of mounting the stage to read my poems to an auditorium of parents. The woman was surely the aunt who had helped raise Alyosha. I did not want to know why she was here, what had happened to him.
But the fear was unfounded. He was alive and whole! Pounds thinner in the face, but as lithe as when we had crossed a flooded stream last April, teetering on wet rocks. Now it was his dictionaries that were wobbling as they lay in a stack on the kitchen chair. His toes on the top one, he was rummaging through the old clothes heap atop his wardrobe closet. As quickly as Vd recognized his aunt, I sensed that this was connected with hospital preparations. I moved up behind him.
"What's your price for the skivvies, partner?"
This came out too softly, but for a moment I wondered whether he might not want to hear me and my banter.
"It's me, Alyosh. They gave me a visa."
He pivoted on the balls of his feet, a spaghetti of 1950s ties oozing through his Angers. Something went momentarily out of balance, almost tipping the chair. The old woman gave out a panicked bleat.
"My friend, " he said, using the strong word droog, as in his letter. "Buddy-boy, I told you not to come. "
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I caught him under the arms, Uke my favorite uncle with me when I used to climb upon his fence and not be able to get down. (My favorite uncle drowned.) Alyosha's body too was much thinner, but I knew he lost weight every summer.
''Give the old man a hug, " he directed with a trace of command, as if unaware that for long moments I'd been doing precisely this. He was wearing a Lacoste turtleneck, and I thought of everything it meant to be gripping one of my own shirts; of how much had changed, how little I'd suspected, when I bought it in Bloomingdale's. He kissed me on the jawbone. His smell contained a new component: cancer, I thought, recoiling slightly — but perhaps it was only medicine.
Finally, he held me at arm's length. "You've lost five kilos, you waif When was your last hot meal?" He fiddled in the kitchen and I displayed his presents, as if we were trying to demonstrate that pan-fried beef for me and a pair of Levis for him had the same significance as ever. Like a woman who has attended too many family funerals, his aunt said only that she had to return to her invalid half-sister in Rostov next week.
I was narrating the "Sunday" episode in order to lead up to the real questions about his condition when a big white poodle bounded through the open door, almost knocking him down. By way of introduction, he plunged into a discourse on an old Russian saying about a dog's tail remaining in the same place no matter how you spin the body. It was the usual stuff, and it overcame what it had to to keep me laughing. If I didn 't know, I'd have fallen for the act. There was just a whit too much interest in canine affairs — and of relief when I suggested we visit "King-size" Alia II some other day.
old Meda
As Alyosha lost weight, the poodle gained. Like Russians interrupting the grinding year with periodic flings, she alternated between hours of slumber and minutes of dish-breaking cavorting. Outdoors, she trod between us: a third Musketeer. Although quickly accepting me as a lone companion for toilet strolls, she sulked unless Alyosha himself set out her food.
He had bought her from a private breeder in July, rechristen-ing her from "Mini" to "Maxi" in August. But it would have been glib to call this a need for companionship in my absence last summer. The general context was a booming vogue for dogs—conspicuous evidence of prosperity after the petless war years and desperate overcrowding—among the fashionable intelligentsia in their new co-op apartments. Western leashes and collars, with stratospheric black market prices, were the ultimate swank. Alyosha had acquired a French set in matching burgundy, underlining the element of throwback to his dandy days
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in his whole undertaking of keeping a pet. But the handsome accessories lay unused under the laundry pile, and shaggy Maxi herself of the stamped pedigree papers went undipped, proclaiming her owner's independence of fashion. Both approaches seemed designed to bolster his "life as usual" determination.
She cooperated perceptively. At "Maxi, for a walk," she charged the door like a battering ram, or shook her head "no," waiting for our laugh. When he was in pain, she lay motionless at his feet. And used the toilet rather than ask to go out; even lowered both halves of the broken seat with her nose, feeling safer on wood than on ceramic.