“Did you notice what a long face the other guy pulled? I told him that these were payouts from the KGB! And we had to sign that we had taken the dough. He’s such a square, I love teasing him now and then.”
Ten minutes later the professor came down. They went to a restaurant. The guests were agog at the decorative plasterwork and the abundance of mirrors, and the writer clucked his tongue, saying:
“Real Communist luxury!”
He turned out to be quite a glutton, ordering hors d’oeuvres, and soup, and two main dishes. He polished off one and a half bottles of wine, and demanded to know all about the local cuisine. The professor was more low-key, and looked tired. After dinner, the writer asked Olga to take them straight to Red Square.
“I wouldn’t mind walking around a bit, either,” the professor said.
“It’s nearby, just a few minutes’ walk from here,” Olga said.
“No, in your case I’d advise against it. I was here in 1957, at the Youth Festival. There’s a national custom—you can only approach the mausoleum on your knees.”
The professor was filled with alarm, and started waving his arms.
“No, no, no, Pablo, I won’t go. I’ll stay in the hotel room.”
Olga immediately picked up on the fact that this was a practical joke. The writer winked at her, as if urging her to get into the spirit of things. Which she did.
“No, they changed that custom! You don’t have to approach on your knees anymore. That’s only for the true diehards…”
The writer guffawed. The professor shook his head and started to laugh.
“Oh, go to hell! I should have known, you’re always … me…” Olga didn’t catch the expression, but she understood the gist of it.
The schedule was grueling. Every day there were two meetings with other writers, breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, trips to the Bolshoi and the Tretyakov Gallery. And with each passing day, the writer seemed to grow more bored, as though he had expected something completely different from this trip.
Then they went to Leningrad. In Leningrad, the writer cheered up. He had never been there before, and he was delighted with the city, which he justifiably compared with Amsterdam and (though it was a stretch) Venice.
Olga was unable to offer any views on the matter, since all cities beyond the boundaries of the USSR existed primarily in the realm of her imagination, as a literary mirage, while this South American writer from some banana republic in the back of beyond was a citizen of the world. He had studied in Paris and New York, and had traveled throughout Europe. He ate and drank copiously wherever he went, read and wrote whatever he wanted, and lived life to the hilt, everywhere, without respite. Even the “snain,” the snow mixed with rain that fell unabated the whole time they were in Leningrad, pleased him. In the morning, in the corridor of the hotel, Olga noticed a powerfully built hooker, with the face of a grenadier, leaving his room.
It’s none of my business, she thought on her way to the elevator.
The last stop on their itinerary was Tashkent. The journey was exhausting, with a layover and a delay. The airports were freezing. Finally, they arrived at their destination. When they came out of the airport, it was dawn, and the air was warm. The sun was floating up over the horizon, right in front of their eyes.
Olga had never been to Central Asia, and she had long wanted to see this part of the world. Ilya was very partial to it. They had planned to travel here together, but it had never worked out. The Baltic countries were as far as they had gone together.
Unfortunately, they didn’t get a chance to see anything. They flew out of Tashkent on the evening of the following day, hastily and under a cloud.
On the first morning, they were taken to a government building in the style of Stalinist barracks and ushered into a long hall with a table covered in Central Asian dishes. Along the entire length of the table, on both sides, sat middle-aged men in identical suits and ties—the Eastern men with skullcaps, the non-Eastern men without. It was a warm, almost hot February day, and the hall smelled of last year’s sweat. The reception was a red-carpet welcome; Party heads, municipal authorities.
Evidently there had been some kind of misunderstanding. For some reason the local bigwigs thought they were receiving a government delegation from a friendly nation.
Chile, Peru, Colombia—they were all the same to the Party functionaries. They had a job to do. And their job consisted in making speeches.
From the very start of the first speech, Olga fell into despair: it was untranslatable. Olga leaned over to Pablo and told him this. He nodded and requested that she recite some Russian poetry—the sounds of the Russian language were very pleasant to his ear, and he easily committed the sounds to memory.
“All right, I’ll recite Eugene Onegin, Pushkin’s novel in verse.”
And Olga launched into a recitation from memory, echoing the cadences and intonations of the orator’s words. She inserted pauses and line breaks that coincided with the periods of speech and the expression of the orators.
Pablo grew tired by the fourth chapter. The professor looked like he was about to fall into a dead faint.
“All right, that’s it. This nonsense has to stop. José, I beg you, play along with me, just this once!” said the writer.
When the next (but not meant to be the last) orator had finished making his speech and everyone was clapping, Pablo jumped from his place of honor, pulling his comrade, who was balking, and Olga, who needed no coaxing, in his wake. He stopped next to the tribune, festooned with red plush, and intoned in a deep, sonorous voice:
“In my homeland, we have the custom of singing a song of gratitude to our friends. And so I will sing you our favorite song, which Christopher Columbus brought to America from Spain five hundred years ago.”
And he began to sing. The song was “La Macorina,” a top-ten pop hit that had not yet reached Moscow, not to mention Tashkent. He galloped around, flailing his arms and pulling José toward him. This time, weary of the role that had been forced on him of older and wiser friend, an easy target for mockery, José gave himself over completely to the singer’s instructions.
The refrain of the song, “Put your hand on me here, Macorina!,” was repeated about ten times, during which Pablo placed José’s hand on various parts of his body, gradually inching toward the locus of maximum masculine vulnerability.
When he had finished his performance, Pablo raised his clenched fist in an archaic gesture completely unknown in this part of the world, and said to Olga, “And now, translate! Long live the teachings of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin! Proletarians of the world, unite!”
And he began applauding himself, after which the skullcaps, completely baffled, joined in good-naturedly. Next to Olga stood the official who was responsible for leading receptions at the highest level. His face was as pale as it was possible for a face burned day after day by the Central Asian sun to be, and he whispered:
“Olga Afanasievna! What is the meaning of this? What is he doing? It’s our heads that will roll for this! He’s ruining the entire event!”
“Olga, tell him that we are leaving today. Have him change the tickets. Tell him to go to hell, that we have a meeting tomorrow at the highest levels!” The Colombian writer rolled his eyes in indignation, and, inflating his fleshy cheeks so that his thick mustache twitched, he blew out a stream of air. “Say whatever you want!”
Olga translated.
“What about Central Asia? You were so eager to see it.”
“I’ve seen enough. Screw it!”
“We haven’t booked a hotel room in Moscow for tonight!” Olga put forth a rational argument against their headlong departure, but Pablo would have none of it.
“We’ll sleep in your kitchen!”
“Are you crazy, what do you mean, sleep in my kitchen?”