“Oh, what a draft,” murmured Ira, stirring. “It’ll snow soon.” She sat up, wrapping her robe more closely about herself. Joe slept on. “I saw Mitya in class. He said he’d been at a friend’s dacha last week, only thirty kilometers from town, and snow fell overnight.”
I shivered.
“Are you cold? Shut the window, would you? We’ll have flu by evening otherwise.” Ira got up and opened the refrigerator. “He asked after you.”
“What did he say?”
“Oh, nothing much.”
“Ira-”
There was a laugh in her voice. “He said, How’s Charlotte? And I said, Fine. He says he’s going to drop in.”
It isn’t only me, I’m sure, who associates the arrival of winter with impatience.
The first time Mitya and I went out, we got tickets to a reading by Garkusha, punk poet, dancer, and something of a cult figure for young Russians. Wet early snow had been blown in on the east wind the day before, hardly settling on the ground but picking out the city in white. It coated the east-facing sides of trees and buildings, the 3-D lettering above the shops, and one of Peter the Great’s rotund cheeks.
The yard outside the theater was packed with boys hoping for spare tickets. They were in their best gear, smoking papirosy, cigarettes with a long tube of cardboard for a filter. Most of them were no older than sixteen, slouched against the walls and chewing on their cigarettes, deadpan as cowboys. We squeezed past them and into an auditorium wedged solid with people.
“Over to the left,” Mitya said in my ear. He took my hand and pulled me to a corner where two guys were leaning against the wall and rolling a joint. “Privyet, Lapochka, how’s life? Hello, Horse.”
They shook hands and the Horse looked up from the joint and grinned. He had a strange, knobbly head, hairless apart from a little blond fur in places, bulging brown eyes, a nose like a potato on the end of a stick, ears that seemed to have gone to seed, and a smile of great charm.
“A gift for Garkusha,” uttered the Horse, gesturing at the joint, and Lapochka laughed and waved his arms about, as far as he was able in the crush. He was small and excitable, dressed in a ragged suit.
“There’s nothing as educational as good grass. Reeducation of the people is our aim. In the great struggle for the enlightenment of the people, we will be tireless,” he gabbled.
“Et cetera,” spoke the Horse.
“Precisely,” agreed Lapochka. “Et cetera and so on.”
Garkusha entered and the hall went off like an alarm clock. A gangly figure in white, he stood center stage looking vaguely about him. Flowers landed at his feet, followed by a bucket. There was a surge from the back that knocked all the air out of me; a boy behind me was yelling “Gark!” A familiar figure appeared on the stage—the Horse, who gave Garkusha the joint and loped off again. The crowd exploded with joy. Garkusha, tucking the gift behind his ear, pulled a pile of tiny pieces of paper from his pocket and began to read his poems.
I was finding it hard to concentrate on the performance. Mitya and I were squashed so close together, his face was no more than six inches from mine. As the crowd heaved against us, I was acutely aware of his arm around my back, holding me away from the flailing arms behind. He turned toward me and for a second I thought he was going to kiss me. Instead he said, “Shall we leave?”
I blushed. “OK. I can’t hear a thing.”
The cold made me gasp as we left the building. The temperature had dropped and outside the theater the snow, half-melted and then frozen, drooped and swagged from the railings like icing. Lacy frou-frou dressed the statues and the trees. Mitya and I fell silent. It was as though we had stepped into the set of a musical, the still air humming with romantic expectation. We both spoke at the same time, and stopped.
“Well,” Mitya started again. “Perhaps tomorrow we’ll go somewhere where there’s less of a crowd?”
I laughed, relieved. At the hostel the vakhtersha, the hostel concierge, refused to let Mitya farther than the hall. We shared a cigarette on the doorstep and then said good-bye awkwardly. He thrust his hands into his pockets and hunched his shoulders against the cold. I watched him until he rounded the corner, a dark figure against the bluish, snowy light.
It was impossible to be alone in the hostel. In our room, at any time of the day, Ira and Joe would be dozing, friends popping in and out, and there’d be a stream of queries at the door: Could we borrow a frying pan? A teaspoon? Five hundred rubles? Out in the corridor people were changing money, drinking, having crises of one sort or another.
Where else, then? Not Mitya’s apartment: his mother, father, brother, dog, and parrot would be bursting with friendly curiosity. There were no bars, and the neon-lit ice cream parlors were not inviting. The only place to be private was out in the open. At night, the ill-lit, potholed back streets were empty; an occasional, solitary figure hurried along, buttoned into his overcoat, thinking of home. There was little traffic, and the sound of televisions turned up loud in the houses that we passed only added to the sense of intimacy.
Most evenings, Mitya and I met at the Cinema of the Young Spectator. When I stepped off the trolleybus he’d be waiting, always smoking, beneath the huge hand-painted billboard. His eyes seemed to close entirely when he smiled. “Nu-ka, posmotrim—let’s have a look,” he’d say, fussing over my scarf. Winter had begun in earnest since we’d met. The snow that gleamed in the long stretches between streetlights would now stay until spring, and the thermometer hovered around five degrees below—nothing severe, like the plummets into double figures still to come in December and January, but enough to convince Mitya that I was dangerously incompetent at dressing for the cold. I confess it was a moment I enjoyed: Mitya, smoking with no hands and narrowing his eyes like a private detective as he tightened the toggles on my coat.
Then we’d set off, walking fast to keep warm. This was how I discovered the city, in the half dark, taking shortcuts through patches of wasteland and around the unfinished Party building, whose construction had come to a halt suddenly when perestroika began. The shops looked glamorous at night, lit by sparkling chandeliers, gilded, and full of recherché goods that I never saw at other times. One time I bought a furry green bowler hat, another a pair of leather ice skates. The evening we emerged from a shop, giggling, with a white periwig in a box, Mitya pulled me into a doorway and kissed me in the darkness.
Certain places we returned to and made our own. We drank beer on the hot-water pipes outside one of the few nineteenth-century merchants’ houses in Voronezh. Up by the church was a statue in the Soviet monumental style; we huddled in the shelter of its billowing greatcoat and gazed over the reservoir to the industrial zone on the left bank, which glittered like Manhattan. The statue had begun life as Stalin, but just as the finishing touches were put to it, Khrushchev made his celebrated speech condemning the “cult of personality.” So the municipal council whipped Stalin’s head off and substituted the head of Koltsov, a local poet noted for his love of nature.
Mitya liked that sort of thing. When we approached his favorite places—the statues in the Children’s Park, for instance, masterpieces of Soviet kitsch, or the place by the railway station where a heap of two-foot-tall steel letters spelling “All hail to the Communist Party of the USSR!” lay rusting in a heap—he’d take larger and larger steps and start waving his arms. “Look!” he’d shout. “Isn’t that wonderful!”