Twenty, no, nearly twenty-one years later, the first time I went to visit him in Moscow — Hagar had already completed her army service — it happened that I asked him. In January one of the European newspapers he worked for sent him to write a series of articles on the upheavals in Russia, and Alek invited me to join him, and we were there together for a whole week.
One night I was standing in the hotel opposite the wide window sill, drunk with sex, sleeplessness, and vodka, and looking down from the thirty-sixth floor at the configurations of the cracks in the ice on the river below. Alek had parted the heavy curtains for me, climbed up, and opened the upper section of one of the tall double windows, and the icy air cleared my breathing body.
From the moment I had landed, my sense of distance had gone haywire, and at that moment it seemed to me that I could have put out a finger and touched the cracks in the ice, or the white marble of the parliament building on the other side of the river and the six-lane road. Something opened inside me, something opened and spread and adapted itself to the vast dimensions of the place. Alek lay on the bed behind me and smoked. I was electrified, I had wings, I was too awake even to lie down beside him. The height stimulated me. And ghosts of previous guests in the Stalinist tower, people who were once alive and were now dead. The privileged of the regime. The dead man on holiday who hung his suit up in the closet, the dead man who sat writing opposite the mirror, the dead man who, like me, dried his wet stockings in the bathroom — who were they? What nightmares did they have here on this bed? What nightmare did they imagine in detail when they were awake?
I thought: If somebody pushed me out of the window now I wouldn’t fall. Weightless, I would glide over the city like a bird.
There is a pose that may well only exist in old movies: a man and a woman exchange important declarations while standing not face to face, but face to elegant back. If I’m not mistaken, a lot of the dialogue in Casablanca takes place this way, and I apparently had a romantic echo of that kind in my head when I asked Alek: “October ’72 … I didn’t ask you then, but why did you propose marriage to me?” I imprisoned the cold air inside me until he answered me, and when he answered I could hear the smile in his voice. “Maybe I wanted to see how far you would go with it.” It was clear that he wasn’t talking about my politics. “Did you have any doubts?” I asked.
“Yes, I think I did.”
“It’s no big deal.”
“What do you mean?”
“That it all seems very small to me.”
“It all seems small to you … if you say so. I remember things differently.”
“What do you remember?” Alek sighed and didn’t reply. “What? Tell me,” I turned around to face him. “What do you remember?”
“I think it was hard for you.”
“So what if it was hard? Maybe it wasn’t hard for me at all. Maybe that was exactly how I wanted it.”
“Really?” He examined me with narrowed eyes.
“Yes, really. Why are you laughing?” I asked, laughter in my voice too, and I sat down on the windowsill with my profile to him.
“You’re beautiful.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“Actually I do believe. That’s beautiful too.”
“What? What? What’s beautiful?” The click of a lighter, and no answer. I put my hand on the window pane, tilted my head slightly, and with three fingers blocked the river. “You’re wrong. It was never hard for me, not really,” I said and examined the new window picture, “and on Wednesday too, when we say goodbye and I get on the plane, it won’t be hard for me.”
“If it isn’t hard for you, good. I’m glad.”
I freed the river and hid the road. “Have you noticed that someone could shoot straight into the President’s residence from here?”
“There’s already been a shooting here. But in the opposite direction. During the August putsch a photographer was shot in the window here. What are you doing there?”
“Looking at things,” I answered like an intoxicated child. “You know what I think? I think I have a lot of strength. You know how much strength I have?”
“Enough to stop a bolting horse and enter a burning house.”
“You’re making fun again.”
“I’m not making fun. Nekrasov wrote it. He wrote it seriously.”
“Try me.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“You want me to try your strength? That’s what you want?”
“Yes.”
The next movement looked like a response to my “Yes,” it was impossible to think anything else. It was close to three o’clock in the morning, and Alek got up and got dressed, and as he put the key to the room in his pocket he said, “I’ll be back. Don’t let anyone in.”
HOW FAR ARE YOU GOING WITH IT
The Moscow Alek was the same person, but nevertheless different. When he met me at the airport, at first glance he looked tired, and only afterwards, in the taxi, I realized that the eyelids which were beginning to droop a little gave him a new look of weariness or sad resignation, but that this deceptive expression was contradicted again and again by a lively smile, because Alek, at least during my visit, was as intoxicatingly alert as I was. Not only did he play the gentleman more attentively than ever — I already knew exactly what these gestures were worth — but from the moment he picked me up at the airport he made it clear in many little ways that, more than acting as my tour guide, he intended to be my bodyguard here. In the street he was careful to take my arm so that I wouldn’t slip on the ice. He tied the strings of my fur hat under my chin, carried my handbag, chose for both of us the moment to leap into traffic and cross the road. In addition to all this, he insisted, to my surprise, that I accompany him to all his meetings at the Journalists’ House, and to apartments steeped in the smell of smoke and wet old clothes, all of them either too cold or overheated. “I’m an egoist,” he said one night as we descended stairs stinking of cooking and urine in the dark, “maybe I shouldn’t have told you to come.”
“Why?”
“Nobody knows what could happen here.”
“I like not knowing,” I said.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“You’re like a little girl,” he said and pressed me against the wall, laughing and strangely excited. And when he removed his lips from my neck he lifted his head, looked up as if he was searching for something, and added: “This smell, I didn’t think I could get used to it again. We had a whole life in stairwells like these.”
“So what did they say could happen here?” I asked as he led me downstairs. He translated very little for my benefit during the interviews. “What could happen?” He replied: “History could repeat itself, or not repeat itself, and both possibilities are frightening. Moscow is paradise compared to what’s happening in other places. Already people have no gas, no food, no salaries, no pensions, no nothing.”
I was completely dependent on him, dependent on him physically as I had never been anywhere else. I needed him in order to ask for another cup of lousy coffee at the hotel, in order to open the window I was unable to budge, to cross the street safely, even to understand the dialing instructions and call Hagar in Israel and go on lying to her — when he summoned me to him, I lied to Hagar and told her that I had been invited to Moscow to lecture on behalf of the Jewish Agency, and I stuck to this story on my subsequent visits too. I have to admit that I enjoyed the helplessness, the total dependence on Alek, and for some perverse reason I even enjoyed the fear. In February of 1993 normal people didn’t go to Moscow as tourists, and it didn’t even occur to Alek to take me to any of the tourist sites. Under the splendour of the snow there were filthy tenements and palaces, patched with dark squares of boarded-up windows. Passive lines of people stood in the clouds of steam at the entrances to the Metro; bookshelves, clothes hangers, shoe closets, kitchen cabinets, glass-fronted sideboards were emptied for sale. In all of Alek’s meetings the warnings were repeated: don’t go there, don’t let her go, don’t do this, that, or the other thing. Despite his Russian and his connections, they lumped us together as naive foreigners who needed to have the dangers pointed out to them.