The friends wanted to take photographs, but it was, first, too risky, and, second, too dark.
Mysteriously, the Czech beer suddenly reappeared, and they had to drink another two mugs each. They left sated and happy. As a parting gift Pierre gave Ilya his Hasselblad. Actually, he had first offered to exchange it for Ilya’s Fedya, but Ilya wouldn’t think of it.
“It was a gift from my father; it’s not a thing, but a part of my life.”
Then Pierre removed the strap from around his neck, and said:
“I understand. Here. It’s yours.”
* * *
Uncle Orlov gave them his accountant’s briefcase. It was laden with books. By the metro they parted ways, in different directions. Ilya and Pierre had decided to go on foot to the center of town. Orlov also went on foot, but in the opposite direction. He lived on Oktyabrskaya Square.
Mikha was carrying Orlov’s briefcase full of books. He and Sanya went down into the metro. The revels were still in full swing, though the festival had formally ended.
Happy, drunken crowds, somewhat the worse for wear after two weeks of festivities, were spending their last evening together.
The foreigners, who had temporarily brightened up the Moscow cityscape, were few. They had most likely gone to pack their suitcases, sleep, exchange their last gifts, sell the remainder of their hard currency, and give and receive their final kisses from the Soviet girls who had discovered the wonders of an affair with an Austrian, a Swede, or a citizen of independent Ghana.
The friendship of the peoples had triumphed. In spite of years of inculcation of the opposite view, it turned out that foreigners were decent people—they weren’t capitalists at all, but Communists and their sympathizers. Like Picasso the dove painter, and the progressive Federico Fellini.
Sanya and Mikha sat till deep in the night on a bench in the yard of the Vanity Chest house on Chernyshevsky Street, talking about the improving social mores and habits of Russia, praising Khrushchev, who had “opened” the iron curtain. Then they began talking about more personal matters: Mikha informed Sanya about what he had explained in so many words to the mocking Ilya—about poor Minna, about their impure relations, about the bitter aftertaste he would now have to suffer his entire life.
Sanya nodded in silence. He had always imagined this secret between men and women to be dirty and at the same time vulgarly attractive. He couldn’t fathom it—there were no words for it.
The two friends grieved, grumbled, and moaned, and then parted ways.
Outside, echoes of “Moscow Nights” still hovered in the air: “Not a whisper is heard in the garden, all grows still till morn, if you only knew how dear they are to me, these Moscow nights…”
Mikha forgot about the brown briefcase with the books under the bench. Sanya didn’t remember it, either.
Uncle Fedor, the street sweeper, immortalized subsequently by Yuly Kim, sobered up suddenly and went out to sweep the yard. He found the briefcase—there was nothing interesting in it. Just some books. He turned them in to the local police.
* * *
The parents of the stout Orlov’s former wife considered him to be a complete dolt, and they were very disturbed by his appointment to the diplomatic mission in Moscow. He was the first one in their family to cross the border of the Motherland in the wrong direction after 1918.
The briefcase contained a priceless gift—six volumes of The Journal of the Russian Christian Student Movement, and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, which had just been translated into Russian and published by Posev. It was unfortunate that the boys would read the book with a five-year delay, and only in a poor copy. The real misfortune, however, was that in a side compartment of the briefcase there was a letter from Masha, the wife who had left him. It had been sent in the diplomatic mail pouch. Orlov’s name was on the envelope, and it proved to be no problem to hunt him down.
The festival was over. The girls who were pregnant with brown-skinned babies had not had time to realize it, but Orlov was already in trouble. Luckily, they didn’t throw him in prison; but he was expelled from the country forthwith. His diplomatic career was over. His ex-wife and her parents now had indisputable proof that Nikolay Ivanovich was an absolute dolt, and that so he would remain.
But the boys came off unscathed.
THE BIG GREEN TENT
Dear little Olga, like a lovely pinkish-yellow onion bulb, slightly plump in her silky transparent skin, unmarked and smooth, was pleasing to men and women, cats and dogs alike. How was it that she, so healthy and cheerful, with her dimpled smile, had been born to such dour, aging parents, career Party officials whose services to the state were both significant and highly confidential, and who enjoyed all the outward signs of official favor: medals and decorations, private automobiles, a dacha in the Generals’ Compound, and groceries delivered to their door in brown paper bags and cardboard boxes through a closed distribution network?
Even more remarkable was how credulously, in what good faith, she absorbed all the good things they told her, and failed to notice the bad things they did. She grew up honest and principled, always putting collective concerns first, and personal concerns second. From her parents she inherited a hatred for the rich (where were they, anyway?), as well as respect for the working man (or woman)—Faina Ivanovna, their housekeeper, for example, or Nikolai Ignatievich, who chauffeured her father’s official Volga automobile, not to mention Evgeny Borisovich, the chauffeur of her mother’s gray one.
How joyfully easy it was to be a good Soviet girl! The Artek Pioneer Camp, with its blue nights and red bandanas, was perfectly in keeping with the closed grocery distributor; and her parents’ private cars, which dropped her off at the dacha on Saturdays, were not in the least incompatible with equality and brotherhood. She was guilty of nothing, before no one, and she loved Lenin-Stalin-Khrushchev-Brezhnev, the Motherland, and the Party, with a love both joyous and serene. She was morally stable and highly politically aware, as was noted in her letter of recommendation upon entering the Komsomol in seventh grade.
Afanasy Mikhailovich, Olga’s father, worked in the Army Construction Corps, and her mother was the editor of a magazine that had more to do with upbringing than with literature.
Antonina Naumovna, her mother (the descendant of Orthodox believers who named their children after the calendar of saints, and not in the least Jewish), had graduated from the Institute of Philosophy and Literature, and was thus practically a writer. Olga was being equipped, according to her parents’ wishes, to study in the philology department at Moscow State University.
The first year of university did not portend any ill. The girl eagerly carried out her mandatory stint of social volunteer work, was elected to the Komsomol committee board, studied zealously and with fine results, and acquired a fiancé—an upstanding young man. He was from a military family—a smart fellow, not a philologist, but a student at the Aviation Institute. Senior year. Antonina Naumovna liked Vova, as he was called—he was broad-shouldered, tallish, with fair hair that fell in a wave on his forehead. He was always immaculately clean and wore a hand-knitted reindeer sweater; but in winter he wore a leather bomber jacket, the epitome of chic in the 1930s, which made a strong impression on Antonina Naumovna.
The wedding took place after Olga had completed her first year of study, at the beginning of June so that Olga wouldn’t eventually “rue the day” by marrying in May, as Faina Ivanovna, the housekeeper—a true fountain of folk wisdom—warned.