She sighed delightedly, and slipped her arm in mine. ‘Isn't Moscow heavenly at night? The bustle everywhere. The traffic. All the lights 7
The ‘traffic' was a handful of World War II surplus trucks rattling laboriously along the icy expanse of Marx Prospekt. The lights emanated from a buzzing, single-strand neon
sign over a lopsided shop: ‘GL RY TO THE SO IET P OP E!’
‘It’s super to see you again,’ she continued. ‘Kostya says I should hearken to you carefully and remember what you say. You might be the steadying influence I need.’
‘Kostya’s wonderful at ambiguous compliments. Now, then, what’s my personal guide arranged to show me this evening? It might be pleasant to get indoors rather quickly/
She tugged on my arm. ‘The list begins brilliantly, with the National Cafe. Why that curious wince, Zhoseph? You’ll positively love the National/
It was simultaneously a dismal prospect and the inevitable choice. Moscow’s range of ‘nightspots’ is limited to a handful of besieged restaurants and cafes. Without coffee houses or pubs, not to speak of bars or cabarets, the object is always to find some place - any place - as a refuge from the cold. The National was as close as any.
We walked past several deserted government buildings to the inevitable cluster of pleading, would-be customers outside the cafe. When I finally convinced the doorman that I was a foreigner, he reluctantly slid back his stave and let us in. The blue-faced supplicants who’d been waiting for hours were sad but not angry: Russians have long been resigned to people with privileged status jumping every line and laying claim to every ‘deficit’ item.
The National Cafe looks out across Manyezh Square onto the Kremlin walls. It is a cavernous hall full of funereal furniture, neo-Victorian gilt and all the charm of a self-service cafeteria. As in Russian peasant huts, the windows are sealed shut for the winter, making the clammy heat inversely proportioned to the cold outside. The air reeks of acid perspiration and potatoes fried in suspect grease.
Despite all this, the National - helped by the absence of competition - was then enjoying a noisy vogue. It was recognized as the ultimate of Moscow swank and mecca of its beau monde : underground jazz enthusiasts, pimps and currency speculators; would-be-actresses and middle-aged 26
officials in search of would-be actresses; sons and daughters of the bureaucratic elite who had read about Paris and hoped against hope that some day, somehow, the National would become a real cafe; assorted dandies whose achievement of eminence was attested by the wearing of black-market Western clothing. A young man of the last category shared our table: a handsome country lad with black curls and a big smile. He sported a mohair sweater of unmistakably non-Soviet make that sagged to his knees and made him drip sweat in the suffocating air. He grinned and loftily exhibited the Italian label.
‘Wanna sell your shoes?’ he whispered the moment we were settled. ‘Your shirt? Socks? I don’t suppose your girl friend’s got some spare er . . . unmentionables? He had moved his chair almost flush with mine, and spoke in an earnest whisper.
‘The underwear of his girl friend,’ pronounced Oktyabrina with a significant glance at me, ‘happens to be the creation of Moscow Cotton Factory Number 4. Fashioned, alas, by honest proletarian hands. In brief, you wouldn’t want it.’
‘Go on, you’re kidding.’ The boy could not believe that such a creature in such an outfit — she was wearing the green print dress again, but the sash was now pink - could be Russian.
‘If you appreciate the finer things,’ Oktyabrina added, ‘I’ll be happy to arrange a consultation at a later time. But please desist from all commercial propositions now. My escort and I’ - she gazed at me again - ‘are here to celebrate a memorable beginning.’
The boy took the rebuff good-naturedly and insisted on pouring us some syrupy brandy from his carafe to toast our acquaintanceship. ‘You’re in films, aren’t you?’ he winked to Oktyabrina. ‘Come on, admit it. All the big stars come here.’ Throughout the next hour he contemplated the room and its occupants as if this were Sardi’s after a premiere. From time to time he raised his glass with a flourish and
pronounced, ‘Blesk! Blazhenstvo!’ - This is heaven! Bliss! -in recognition of his good fortune. He made a benign and gentle drunk.
Oktyabrina’s enjoyment was more active. She wriggled in her chair to indicate rapture and batted her eyes to suggest that I’d been extraordinarily gallant to arrange such a supper - even if my motive was seduction. Her enthusiasm was somehow infectious: for the first time I glimpsed what Muscovites see in the cafe. Much depends upon imagination.
When the waitress finally appeared, we ordered caviar. Oktyabrina commented on its 'procreative powers’, then wolfed down her double portion and appropriated a spoonful of mine. Rubbery veal followed with potatoes in congealing grease. Oktyabrina ate with the intensity of a hamster, occasionally stuffing bread into her mouth with both hands; and in a volume out of all proportion to her size. She approached vodka respectfully, however, screwing up her face before her one and only sip and swallowing it with a jerk and a glower, as if the act were her duty as a proper Russian.
'Isn't this the gayest place?’ she bubbled. 'Let’s drink this toast to dear, exciting Moscow.’ She had begun to relax and the broad vowels of provincial Russia breached her affected Moscow accent.
‘It’s time to tell me about yourself, Oktyabrina. Who are you for a start?’
‘You’re such an endearing boy sometimes, one can’t put into words who one is!
'Just some facts, then. Like what you’re doing in Moscow.’
'Zhoe darling, I’m simply useless at small talk. It’s so petit-bourgeois.’
She lit a cigarette flamboyantly, choked on the first puff, and we both laughed.
'Do I trust you with everything, then?’ she said. 'MQye closer.’ Then she launched herself on her autobiography 28
with a curious excitement, as if in the third person.
She was born twenty years ago in Omsk, a small city in southwestern Siberia. She never knew her father: he was one of the earliest World War II aces, having downed fourteen Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs before being shot down himself and killed heroically in 1944. Her grandfather was a minor nobleman whose estate had been in Omsk Province. He was shot from the saddle while commanding a regiment of White cavalry during the Civil War.
"Didn’t that cause the family hardship?’ I asked.
"Nothing unimaginably ghastly. You see, my family was never very political as such; after all, Mama and Papa named me in honor of October. That proves they never took the Revolution personally.’
Her mother was guided by the family motto - Glory Forever in Aspiration - more, perhaps, than the noble side itself, even though she’d been bom a peasant. Self-educated at first, she won her way into medical school to become a revered doctor and the senior surgeon in Omsks leading clinical hospital. She died tragically in a room above her own ward, of yellow fever contracted from a patient.
‘I adored Mama. She was a selfless heroine. And I was her only child. She used to say I generated so much love in her that armfuls were left over for a thousand patients.
Oktyabrina, now eleven, was placed in an orphanage the day after her mother’s death. The shock made her first years there disastrous; she was the only girl in the history of the orphanage to make eight escapes. The staff were patient: both her parents, after all, had died heroically in the Motherland’s service. Oktyabrina was eventually assigned an individual tutor, a kind of personal commissar, in the hope of mitigating her influence on the other girls. Everyone despaired for her future. But she was destined to undergo a sudden metamorphosis.