“Look, Debbie, they stayed in this hotel in 1922. This is where her love affair with Sergei Esenin began!”
Debbie lifted her hands to the sky in a gesture of prayer.
“My God! It’s unbelievable! And I’m staying here, too! And I’m not even having a love affair!” She laughed. “No, I’m having a love affair with Russia!”
The following day, accompanied by Olga and Ilya, for moral support, they went to the Palace of Matrimony on Griboyedov Street, the only place where male foreigners could solemnize their marriage to a Russian woman. This was a rare instance in which a Russian man was marrying an American woman. Debbie’s American documents were so well prepared that she even had a few papers too many. Sanya didn’t have his birth certificate with him, so he had to take a taxi and go home to find it, not very confident of success. But Anna Alexandrovna didn’t let him down now, either. On the shelf with his favorite books, between the French novels, in a folder that was very familiar to him, Sanya found all his documents, arranged in perfect order, beginning with his birth certificate and ending with his Conservatory diploma and certificates of vaccination.
The documents were accepted. The wedding date was set for May.
“Our Fanya always said that you shouldn’t marry in May, or you’ll rue it the rest of your life,” Olga said.
Ilya and Olga fully backed this marriage venture. Olga was eagerly taking part in establishing the matrimonial union: she made borscht and cooked dumplings.
Debbie was over the moon about Moscow, and about borscht, and the Russian people she met. She loved everything about the Soviet country except the position of women. She came to her conclusions after observing how Olga prepared dinner, washed the dishes, and took care of their adolescent son, and Ilya didn’t lift a finger to help her. When she tried to express her indignation about this, Olga simply didn’t understand.
On her last day in Moscow, Debbie ended up at Sanya’s apartment. The visit was unplanned. They had been walking around Kitai-gorod, and she desperately needed to use the bathroom. The closest one, it turned out, was at Sanya’s. Neither his mother nor his stepfather were home. Debbie threw her mink coat on Nuta’s chair, and proceeded to walk through the communal apartment to the communal WC. After her rest stop, she glanced into the communal kitchen.
The Texas native experienced another shock. She had not been sympathetic to communism before now, and a single WC and kitchen for twenty-eight people did not increase her regard for the social system. The next shock came when she sat down in Anna Alexandrovna’s armchair and looked around: an old piano, a voluptuous dressing table on claw feet, painted with flowers and birds, bookshelves containing books in three languages, sheet music, paintings, a valuable chandelier gleaming with crystal … She found it hard to reconcile the poverty of the shabby communal apartment with the splendor of Sanya’s room.
“Try to warm up. Do you want some tea? I’ll put on some music.”
“Why don’t you play something yourself?”
She took the gnome’s cap off her head, and her red Irish hair crackled with dry static.
Sanya sat down on the round piano stool. He thought a bit, and began to play Prelude no. 1 in C Major.
Debbie sat listening, her hands folded over her stomach like a peasant, and analyzed the situation that had unfolded. She was not as stupid as Sanya thought she was. She liked this Russian boy—he was over thirty, and three years younger than she was—very much.
He was younger, better educated, and, besides, he clearly came from a higher class of people than she had ever had anything to do with.
By the time Sanya had finished playing, Debbie had made a decision: since this strange and absurd proposition had already come about somehow or other, let it not be merely for show. She would marry this boy for real.
Sanya had not suspected that things might take such a dangerous turn.
* * *
The weather broke on the last evening, as though Moscow had grown sick of trying to make a good impression on Debbie. A damp wind began to blow, it grew warmer, and icy snow started to fall. Sanya wanted to take Debbie to a Richter concert, but it was canceled. They went to Olga and Ilya’s on foot.
Olga fed her friends what she called a “prenuptial dinner.” By that time, Sanya had grown weary of the endless walks with his bride, and even the idea of the marriage had begun to pall. It hadn’t even been his idea in the first place!
Olga served salads and pies. Ilya brought the vodka out of the cupboard built into the kitchen window—the original refrigerator from the time of the building’s construction, before the advent of modern fridges.
Debbie ate a lot, and drank a lot as well. She sat next to Sanya and kept trying to tickle him and paw at him; but she did this as though in jest, as if it were all a game. She pushed her smiling face into his, and he noticed, all of a sudden, the glistening pink strip of her gums above her upper row of teeth. It prompted a sharp adolescent memory—Nadia’s gums! Potapovsky Lane!
“Sah-nee-a! Why do you resist? If you are so cold toward me, I won’t marry you! But if you are a good boy, I’ll just put you in my bra and smuggle you out as contraband!”
“Debbie, that wasn’t our agreement! When we get married I’ll be an ideal husband—you won’t even see me at all!”
“No, no, I’ve reconsidered! I think you might suit me both in the kitchen and in the bedroom.”
* * *
The next day, Sanya took her by taxi to Sheremetevo Airport. They kissed when they said good-bye. Before she disappeared down the passageway, she waved her hand, clutching the red gnome cap, at him. Sanya went back home by bus. Outside, a snowstorm raged, and snowy porridge stuck to the bus’s windows.
* * *
I won’t go home. I don’t want to go to Ilya’s. I’ll go see Mikha, Sanya thought.
And then it hit him again. Mikha was gone. Anna Alexandrovna was gone. His mother was all but gone, too.
What is left is the unhappy Alyona, and Maya, and my mother, who is nothing like me; and the horrible Lastochkin. And a bit of music, that absurd circumstances deprived me of. So Pierre must be right, and his only choice was to flee all of this. Or should he lie down and stare at the tapestry pillow again? Or, like Mikha?
He shuddered. Depression was stalking him.
* * *
Debbie arrived in Palo Alto without warning.
The California winter did not resemble the Russian winter in the least: 59 degrees Fahrenheit. While she was trudging up to the third floor, dragging her mink coat behind her, she tried to remember the formula for converting Fahrenheit to Celsius. She remembered precisely that in Moscow it had been minus 25 degrees Celsius.
She pushed on the door to the apartment. It was open. She called out from the doorway.
“Pierre! Russian minus twenty-five Celsius—how much in American degrees?”
Pierre knew the formula.
“Well, about minus thirteen.”
From the doorway Debbie flung her fur onto a chair, and it slithered onto the floor.
“Are you crazy? You should have called, I just got home! I might not even have been here,” Pierre said angrily.
“I just flew in myself! I don’t need your old fur coat! It’s totally useless in our climate, anyway! It’s insulting, actually!”
“Wait a minute! Have you changed your mind? What’s insulting? We agreed about all of this!”
On a small table stood a bottle of whiskey, already opened. Debbie rushed over to it. Pierre grabbed the bottle from her hand, and poured a third of a glass.
Debbie tossed off all of it, then slammed the wet glass down on the glass table with a dangerous, earsplitting crash.
“After all, he could marry me for real, couldn’t he? Why not? Why doesn’t he want to marry me?”
“Hold on, hold on. We had a formal agreement—the mink coat as an advance, and the money after the marriage takes place. What is the problem?”