To begin, finally, at the beginning: how Oktyabrina appeared.
One morning in December, I was at my desk working on an article for the Sunday edition. The desk is a splintery old book-keeper’s, but a dozen correspondents have added makeshift extensions to it over the years, and it now hogs most of the office. The office itself, is a converted bedroom of my apartment, which is in a large building inhabited exclusively by members of the 'foreign colony’. The apartment, in turn, is the whole of the Moscow Bureau of the Chicago , my generally agreeable employers.
It’s decidedly humble as the apartments of Western correspondents go, and after my wife left for good, I spent two solid weeks pleading for new quarters before the Soviet agency that deals with foreigners. This was less for professional reasons than to escape from memories of a purposeless marriage that clung to this apartment. Which is all I need say about my former wife.
I never got the new apartment: my paper’s Washington influence is considered slight and our requests go to the bottom of the list. I suppose I could wheedle a separate office in time, but the memories have left and I’ve had my fill of hardmouthed bureaucrats. And if I make a nuisance of myself, they’ll probably assign me a full-time housekeeper — meaning a full-time domestic spy. Besides, I’ve become accustomed to my office, even to the sourish smell of decaying Soviet newsprint. The bookshelves literally groan with yellowing Pravdas and Izvestiyas going back to 1944.
That morning, fresh coffee dispelled the newsprint smell. I was writing what my editor calls an ‘in-depth backgrounder’ about the average Muscovite’s reaction to recent border clashes with China. The piece was going well. It was one of those rare political stories with room for tolerable honesty because public opinion fully supported the leadership, if not for the desired reasons. I’d managed to convey that the average Russian hates China and the very thought of seven hundred million Chinese, and to hint - cautiously, not to antagonize the Press Department - that the
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so as
hatred had nothing whatever to do with 'distortions of Marxist-Leninist teachings’, but sprouted from unadulterated racism.
I was rewriting the lead-in, planning an effective way to foreshadow my conclusions, when the telephone rang, just before noon. A seething voice bellowed from the other end.
‘Volodya? Dammit, I asked you for someone!’
Scrambled and amplified by the sadistic Moscow telephone network, the roar made my ear throb. There was a pause, a cough, and a second throaty crescendo. This time I deciphered, ‘Gimme Volodya Mitkin fast’.
I said it must be a wrong number. The man snarled ‘mother-fucker’ with heroic rage, but a quick chuckle began before the receiver crashed down.
I put out my cigarette, bundled up as quickly as I could in my coat, hat, scarf, gloves and boots, and left the building, nodding, I hoped casually, to the police sentry in the courtyard. Then I crossed the boulevard in the burning cold, and walked toward a back-street residential quarter.
I was heading for an out-of-the-way telephone booth,
that was certain not to be tapped. The wrong number had been a signal from Kostya Kostomarov: call him from a safe place immediately.
Kostya was my closest friend in Moscow - the closest friend of almost everyone who knew him. He was a clown, a libertine, a black-marketeer, an impossible cynic: someone you could trust. The all-American boy, he liked to call himself, raised on the vodka and tears of Mother Russia. He knew enough, as his friends put it, to send half the city to a labor colony for life: anyone who couldn’t keep his exploits or guilt to himself spilled them out to Kostya Kostomarov.
‘Hurry, c’mon over,’ he croaked when I finally got through to him from a booth impregnated with urine. ‘Specialties of the house and two bottles of Stolichnaya, some of it’s left.’ His words were slightly furry, the limit of his disability after consuming enough vodka to amaze even his Russian friends.
I said that I had a story to finish, but Kostya cut me short.
‘Procrastination on the nourishment front would be the gravest mistake,’ he warned. He’d just heard that the Kremlin was ‘cooking up’ a new agricultural reform. ‘Which means that thinking people had better drop everything immediately and have a big lunch - before it’s too late.’
‘I’ll see you later,’ I answered. ‘When I’ve worked up an appropriate appetite.’
‘Do it here - I’m sympathetic about alcoholism.’
‘And listen, stop using the wrong-number system for invitations to lunch. One of these days you’re going to want it for something serious, and I’ll have a stomach ache.’
‘Oh my,’ he whispered with mock chagrin. ‘Still my worst pupil. I’m trying to provide you with needed practice in undercover maneuvers - and you simply miss the whole point.’
He then embarked on an old monologue with obvious relish. ‘It’s that dangerous free-world upbringing of yours. You must rid yourself of telephone-trusting and all former bad habits. It’s called socialist re-education, remember? You happy-go-lucky alien types somehow can’t adapt to our higher form of life.’
‘Let’s guess what you’re adapting to. The fumes are choking me over the telephone.’
He chuckled again, but I overrode his interruption. ‘Hide the bottles under the bed and pretend you can’t find them. It’s excellent practice in undercover maneuvers.’
‘What you smell, my friend, happens to be perfume. Of the tapping operator. It’s our latest hit for the world market - a new scent from virgin land wild flowers called “Brezhnev’s Breath”. Anyway, let’s have a little celebration together. Today must be Lenin’s birthday, first-day-of-school day, wrote-his-last-sermon day or something. When was he bar-mitzvahed, anyway?’
‘It’s going to be lose-my-last-job day if I don’t finish this article. Stay put and I’ll be there by three o’clock.’
‘Right you are, Hemingway - but you work too hard. You don’t care about your friends. No one’s here and it’s lonely. Leave now and you can be here in twenty minutes.
'Save some fodder. Three o’clock.’
'And watch out for your tail, OK? You need the practice .’
Kostya lives a mile or so north of me in an old thieves’ quarter called Marina’s Grove. I took a trolley instead of my
car: you develop the habit of keeping as quiet as possible about visits to Russian friends - which means not parking your special 'foreign journalist’ license plates outside their doors. Besides, trolley 22 goes from my building almost directly to Kostya’s. It was after two o’clock when I boarded an old one, whose joints clanged and groaned in the cold. Its windows were covered by an extravagant thickness of frost.
Half a dozen passengers were huddled on wooden seats in the unheated interior. I dropped four kopeks into the cash box and ripped off a paper ticket. The trolley had hardly found its momentum on the icy tracks when I saw the omen.
Tickets on Moscow busses and trolleys are identified by six figures. When - according to local superstition - the sum of the first three equals the sum of the second, the bearer will soon experience great good luck or a sharp change of fortune. In two years. I’d examined a thousand tickets with no luck. But the red numeral on this one leapt from the paper: 393393. The nonsense made me smile - but I’ve always had a superstitious streak.
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The ‘Kostomarov Residence’ looks like a survivor from the 1812 fire, with an exterior of logs and a pitted tin roof. Kostya lives on the top floor, in the former servants’ quarters. The names of the four families that share his com-12
munal apartment are scrawled on greasy cards next to the doorbell.
I pulled the bell three times, Kostya's ring, and he was at the door in an instant, smelling of a night without sleep. He greeted me with a wink, but according to his ‘house rules’, we said nothing until reaching the safety of his room. Don’t advertise your accent, Kostya had warned me before my first visit. One person in every communal apartment is on retainer to report unusual occurrences to the police.