They immediately hit it off. He said his name was Petya. It turned out, though, that he wasn’t just an ordinary Russian “Petya,” but a Belgian whose real name was Pierre Zand. He was of Russian descent, a student at the University of Brussels. They split the second round three ways, then went to wander through town. On Ilya’s advice, Pierre left the camera behind in the hotel room.
They strolled through the center of Moscow, and it would have been hard to imagine a better tourist than Pierre was. He recognized all the places where he had never once set foot—the reminiscences of his mother and grandmother, and a deep familiarity with Russian literature, were coming to life for him.
And the veteran LORLs were the best possible guides for Petya, with his nostalgia for a place he had never seen before.
At Trekhprudny Lane, by a small wooden house, Ilya stopped and said:
“Marina Tsvetaeva lived somewhere around here.”
Pierre seemed to melt and go soft, and all but wept, saying:
“My mother knew Marina Tsvetaeva well, in Paris. They won’t publish her here…”
“Tsvetaeva may not be published here, but we all know her,” Mikha said:
“Some are of stone, some are of clay,
But I am silver and sparkle!
My crime is betrayal, my name is Marina.
I am the ephemeral foam of the sea.”
“Actually, I like Akhmatova more. As for Ilya, he’s obsessed with the Futurists.”
* * *
But never mind their preferences. What was astounding was the fact that they were standing there with a real person, their own age, whose mother had known Marina Tsvetaeva in real life. For them, Pierre himself represented a vast, already nonexistent country that had gone into exile. While they were walking, he told them about his family, about that former Russia, which to his interlocutors seemed as insubstantial and distant as Brussels or Paris. And how bitterly Pierre hated the Bolsheviks!
* * *
Mikha and Ilya, who had often discussed the shortcomings of socialism, had for the first time met a person who didn’t talk about the shortcomings of the Communist regime—rather, he raked it over the coals, condemning it as satanic, dark, and bloody. He saw no fundamental difference between communism and fascism. In some unaccountable way, Pierre was able to unite a love for Russia with a hatred of its system.
For the next two weeks, they were almost inseparable. Thanks to Pierre, they all managed to cram themselves into a Belgian bus and get into the opening of the festival at Luzhniki Stadium. More than three thousand of the finest athletes bloomed in formation as a single flower, or spread themselves out in geometric patterns, hands, feet, and heads rising up or descending in perfect unison. It was a thrilling spectacle.
“They did this sort of thing at Hitler’s rallies, too,” whispered Pierre. “Leni Riefenstahl’s films were shown all over the world. The great power of mass hypnosis. But it really is powerful to witness it! And amazing!” Pierre sighed and pressed the button on his camera. Ilya did the same.
Then there was a jazz concert, a mass relay race with torches, some water ballet, along with countless song-and-dance ensembles of the Soviet Army and Navy, industry and trade groups, and cooks’ and hairdressers’ labor unions.
Pierre had absolutely no interest in the Egyptians chanting “Nasser! Nasser!,” the black citizens of newly independent Ghana, or the Israelis, who were also very popular among Soviet citizens branded with the same ethnicity in the “fifth line” of their passports.
On the third day of the festival, after he had recovered from another case of tonsillitis, Sanya joined them. For two more weeks they reveled, rushing around from one place to another and having fun. Mikha didn’t have time to dwell on Minna.
Nor did Ilya think about his unrealized attempt to enroll in the cinema engineering program, or Sanya his thwarted career as a professional musician. All of them were enamored with Pierre, whom they nicknamed “Pierrechik,” and not one of them contemplated how the foreign friend might influence their fates.
They learned that Pierre had been sent to the festival as a representative of a young people’s newspaper on an assignment to photograph life in Moscow. His photographs of Moscow were superb, in large part thanks to his new friends. He photographed the bread store when fresh bread was being delivered; the river port, with its tall cranes and stevedores; kindergartens; inner courtyards, with clotheslines and sheds; girls reading in the metro; old folks standing in lines; grown men kissing and hugging; and myriad other joys and pleasures.
Fast-forward, and the photographs were rejected by the editor of the newspaper. They were deemed to be inauthentic—mere Soviet propaganda. Pierre, who could never have been accused of sympathy for the Communist regime, accused the editor of bias, and they quarreled.
On the day before Pierre’s departure, they all went to Gorky Park together to drink beer. There was a wonderful Czech beer garden, masquerading as a restaurant. The line stretched all the way around the place, like foam around the rim of a beer mug, but they obediently went to stand at the tail end of it—they were in no hurry.
They had planned a rendezvous there with someone—a distant relative of Pierre’s, the second or third cousin of his mother, who was working in Moscow in the French embassy. Standing in line was not in the least dull; exciting things kept happening all around them. First a group of people on stilts galloped past, followed by a procession of Scottish bagpipers, Mexicans with maracas in their hands, and costumed Ukrainians.
Sanya and Mikha saved their place in line, while Ilya and Pierre kept darting off to get a good shot of something or other. They managed to capture a fight that broke out between a powerful, stocky black man and a Scot wearing a green-and-white kilt from some obscure clan. The fighters were surrounded by a crowd of boisterous people egging them on:
“Kill the blackie!”
“Nail the faggot!”
In short, the people amused themselves in the ancient and time-honored tradition of gladiatorial fights. Strains of Soloviev-Sedoy’s ubiquitous “Moscow Nights” were heard in the background as they battled—it was a song you heard everywhere you went that summer.
The black man threw the deciding blow, and the Scotsman crumpled into his skirt.
The music changed. “The youth will strike up a song of friendship, you cannot strangle it, you cannot kill it…”
The Scot stirred. “You cannot kill it, you cannot kill it,” the loudspeaker blared.
Two hours later, when the boys had already entered the pub, Pierre’s uncle found them. He was a Frenchman by the name of Nikolay Ivanovich, with the Russian surname Orlov. He was aging, pink, and rotund, reminiscent of the merry little pig Nif-Nif. He spoke in the Petersburg slang of another age. His clothes were funny—a straw hat and a Ukrainian peasant blouse with an embroidered collar—like Khrushchev’s. No one would ever have suspected that he was a foreigner. He resembled a provincial accountant with a small, tattered briefcase.
As soon as Pierre set eyes on him, he roared with laughter.
“What a getup!”
Pierre introduced the boys to his uncle so that they could keep in touch through him.
They didn’t trust the postal system. They exchanged phone numbers. It went without saying that they could make calls to him only from public pay phones. They agreed that they would continue to rendezvous at this same place by the Czech restaurant so that they wouldn’t have to risk saying anything over the phone.
So began their illicit dealings with a foreigner.
* * *
The famous Czech beer was a pilsener served in sweaty mugs, evidence that it was the ideal temperature. Of course, those mugs were on the neighboring tables. By the time their little group had entered the pub, the Czech beer had run out. The sausages were also gone. The waiters were serving Zhigulevskoe beer, a local brand, with salted pretzels, a hitherto unknown treat. At the adjacent table, they had smuggled in dried fish, which they were picking at like lint, and pouring vodka into their beer—under the table.