Mitya was out of town for most of the week at a wedding, and there was no way of letting him know the news. But on Friday he returned and phoned to say he was coming ’round; instantly, he was on his way.
Emily and Yuri had gone to Moscow the day before. Edik, Ira, and Joe had been with me all afternoon drinking tea, but they grinned when they heard Mitya was coming and immediately stood up to go. Suddenly I was alone. I put on lipstick, wiped it off again, and stared at myself in the mirror. I brushed my teeth and instantly felt embarrassed at the idea that Mitya would notice the smell, so I drowned it with a glass of the Uvarovs’ Armenian brandy, which tasted disgusting after toothpaste. In the mirror I caught sight of my grimace and laughed at myself. My pulse was racing, and I laughed at that, too. I flung myself on the sofa to read, nonchalantly, but a second later sprang up again to make my bed.
Just as I’d pulled the sheets back, Mitya arrived. He showed no signs of noticing the bed or the blush that burned all the way down to my collarbones. He was covered in powdery snow, out of breath, saying “Look!” He pulled back the curtains. “Blizzard.”
Out of the darkness, snow was coming at the window, swirling past on a vicious wind. Beyond it, we could see only the glimmer of a few streetlights wreathed by flakes. Nothing was still; it was like a storm at sea. As we watched, the lights went out all down the street! A power cut.
By candlelight, Mitya prepared Russian Bloody Marys. “You pour the tomato juice in first,” he said. His hair, still a little damp, fell in two curls on his forehead. “Then you take a knife and slide the vodka down it, slowly, so that it sits on top.” Around our table with its few candles the world seemed to have fallen quiet.
“It feels as though we are the only survivors of a disaster,” Mitya murmured.
“We’ll have to stay in our bunker for twenty thousand years.”
“Exactly. How will we pass the time?”
I laughed. “Oh, well, haven’t we learned to be patient by now?”
“Patient!” Mitya burst out. “Only when we have to be. Come here—”
Much later, in the little bed with its red velvet curtains, Mitya looked at me slyly. “We have a responsibility, after all,” he remarked, “being the only survivors.”
“Mmm?”
“To refound the human race—”
“Oh God, I hadn’t thought of that.”
The snow pattered against the window. Mitya pulled the blankets up over us, over our heads. I could feel him smiling in the darkness. “Although on the other hand,” he remarked, “it’s all right being on our own.”
At half past seven on Saturday morning I woke up. Mitya had left to go to classes, my head had been replaced by a large blunt object, and I couldn’t work out what that remote ringing sound meant. At last I realized: it was Mr. and Mrs. Uvarov pressing their own doorbell. They must have caught an early train. I grabbed my robe and ran into the kitchen, kicking a brimming ashtray across the room. At midnight, seeing as the sink was already full, it had seemed a good idea to stack the dirty dishes on the floor. The tablecloth was covered in candle wax and tomato juice. I was just trying to stuff it into a bucket when the Uvarovs, giving up on me, opened the door with their key.
With one glance they took in my robe, the state of the apartment, the empty vodka bottle, and my frozen, guilty expression. They did not utter a single reproach, but Mrs. Uvarov let out a tiny sigh. She was disappointed. Silently we tidied the apartment and I left as soon as I could to go to classes. Our friendship never wholly recovered from this blow. Yet once I was on the street, I couldn’t stop myself from grinning and breaking into a run.
6
A Short Russian Grammar
Translate into Russian: It is necessary, said Stalin, that the workers and peasants work efficiently, and that the Red Army strike the enemy even harder.
Lesson I: Practice
On the first night we’d arrived in Moscow, back in September, a frenzy to speak to the nearest Russian had taken hold of me. We were crossing Paveletsky station, lit by neon strips that threw an inadequate, harsh glare. A great crowd was hurrying and jostling, breathing steam into the darkness and heaving too heavy bundles. Packages, bedrolls, boxes were piled in corners, with little old women no bigger than dolls perched on top of them, looking fearfully from side to side. Young men smoked and kept guard. Women produced hard-boiled eggs from their handbags and fed their blank-eyed children. What was this great exodus? I had no way of finding out: all the Russian I’d ever known had vanished. Except for one word, which I was determined to use.
“Son,” I blurted out to the porter pulling the group’s luggage on a cart. “Do you have a son?”
He stopped and raised his eyebrows. “Do I have a son?” he repeated indignantly. “What business is it of yours?”
I blushed. “None, nothing—”
He unloaded the bags, still annoyed. “Son! What’s that about? Here I am struggling to make a living and they mock me with their questions.”
For some time my Russian produced unpredictable results. I learned by ear, slipping words that I liked into sentences without quite knowing what they meant. The expression naoborot—on the contrary—sounded to me the height of linguistic sophistication.
“How’s things?” people would ask.
“On the contrary, very good,” I’d reply.
The few poems I’d learned in Russian were wheeled out again and again. Lermontov’s meditation on a lonely white sail at sea supplied several useful phrases. For instance, when the windows in the bus were broken I could remark in beautiful Russian, “The wind whistles, and the mast creaks and groans!” When a cockroach scuttled out of our room, I exclaimed wittily, “Alas, he is not seeking happiness, nor is he fleeing from it.” When I was tired, there was Pushkin: “It’s time, my friend, it’s time; my heart begs for peace.” Sometimes people were taken aback: their eyes popped as though a small pig had just quoted their national poet. They corrected me: “No, no, that is by our Russian genius, A. S. Pushkin!” As though I’d uttered the sacred formulation by accident.
Slowly my vocabulary began to grow. I had already found that all theatrical terms in Russian are simply borrowed from French; soon I discovered that, just like the English, Russians like to give anything a bit fancy a French name. If you’re talking about food, clothes, literature, or lovemaking and you can conjure up a little Frussian, then not only will you probably be understood but you’ll come across as having—how shall I put it?—a certain savoir-faire. German is useful if you want to discuss military matters, maps, cigarette holders, or shipbuilding. English comes in handy for conversations about computers, business, finance, and so on; also for hippie slang: hair means long, flat, greasy hair; shoesy means a fashionable pair of shoes; and, best of all, beatly, from the Beatles, describes something very, very cool.
I learned to speak as Russian students do. I began to answer “How’s things?” with a laconic “Normal,” and to sprinkle my speech with slang that had evolved so elaborately, I didn’t recognize the obscenity at its core. I even picked up something of a Voronezh accent—a soft, guttural tone that sounded faintly Ukrainian. People began to look at me askance and ask if, perhaps, I was from Poland? Or could it be the Baltics? Because they speak oddly, a bit like you.
One day two old ladies tugged at my coat on the bus. “What’s that funny language you’re talking at?” they demanded.