Behind her Maria heard the quiet growling of a car engine. She pressed herself against the railings of the embankment and waited apprehensively to see what would emerge from the smoke. Several seconds went by, and then a long black automobile slowly swam past her, a ‘Chaika’ decorated with ribbons of various colours - she realized it was a wedding car. It was full of silent, serious-looking people; the barrels of several automatic rifles protruded from the windows and on the roof there were two gleaming yellow rings, one larger and one smaller.
Maria watched the ‘Chaika’ as it drove away, then suddenly slapped herself on the forehead. But of course, now she understood. Yes - that was it. Two interlinked rings - Bridegroom, Visitor, Sponsor. She still couldn’t understand what alchemical wedlock was supposed to be, but if anything untoward happened, she had a good lawyer. Maria shook her head and smiled. It was so simple, how could she have failed to see the most important thing of all for so long? What could she have been thinking of?
She looked around, orientating herself approximately by the sun, and held out her arms towards the West - somehow it seemed clear that the Bridegroom would appear from that direction.
‘Come!’ she prayed in a whisper, and immediately she could sense that a new presence had appeared in the world.
Now all she had to do was wait for the meeting to take place. She ran on joyfully, sensing the distance between herself and the Bridegroom diminishing. Like her, he already knew, he was walking towards her along this very embankment - but unlike her he wasn’t hurrying, because it wasn’t in his nature to hurry.
Miraculously managing to leap across an open manhole that appeared suddenly out of the smoke, Maria slowed down and began feverishly rummaging in her pockets. She had suddenly realized that she had no mirror and no make-up with her. For a moment she was plunged into despair, and she even tried to recall whether she had passed a puddle in which she could view her own reflection. But then, when she remembered that she could appear to her beloved in whatever form she wished, Maria’s despair vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
She thought about this for a while. Let him see a very young girl, she decided, with two ginger plaits, a freckled face and… and… She needed some final touch, some naive and endearing detail -perhaps earrings? A baseball cap? Maria had almost no time left, and at the very final moment she adorned herself with padded pink earphones which looked like a continuation of the flame-bright flush of her cheeks. Then she raised her eyes and looked ahead.
In front of her, among the tattered wisps of smoke, something metallic gleamed for a moment and then immediately vanished. Then it appeared a little closer, only to be concealed again in the murk. A sudden gust of wind drove the smoke aside and Maria saw a tall glittering figure advancing slowly towards her. At the same moment she noticed, or so she thought, that with every step the figure took the ground shook. The metal man was much taller than her and his impassively handsome face expressed not the slightest trace of emotion. Maria was frightened and stumbled backwards - she remembered that somewhere behind her there was an open manhole, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the metal torso bearing down on her like the bow of some immense destroyer approaching an ice floe.
At the very moment when she was about to scream, the metal man underwent an astonishing transformation. First of all his gleaming thighs were suddenly clad in very domestic-looking striped underpants, then he acquired a white vest and his body took on the normal colour of tanned human skin and was promptly clad in canary-yellow trousers, a shirt and tie and a wonderful crimson sports jacket with gold buttons. That was enough to lay Maria’s fears to rest. But the delightful sight of the crimson jacket was soon concealed beneath a long grey raincoat. Black shoes appeared on the Visitor’s feet and sunglasses with glittering lenses on his face, his hair set itself into a gingerish crew cut and Maria’s heart skipped a beat for joy when she recognized that her bridegroom was Arnold Schwarzenegger - but then she realized it could never have been anyone else.
He stood there saying nothing and staring at her with those black rectangles of glass; the ghost of a smile played about his lips. Maria caught a glimpse of her reflection in his glasses and adjusted her earphones.
Ave Maria,’ said Schwarzenegger quietly.
He spoke without expression, in a voice that was hollow but pleasant.
‘No, my sweet,’ said Maria, smiling mysteriously and clasping her hands together over her breast, ‘just Maria.’
‘Just Maria,’ Schwarzenegger repeated.
‘Yes,’ said Maria. ‘And you’re Arnold?’
‘Sure,’ said Schwarzenegger.
Maria opened her mouth to say something, but suddenly she realized she had absolutely nothing to say. Schwarzenegger carried on looking at her and smiling. Maria lowered her gaze and blushed, and then, with a gentle but irresistibly powerful movement, Schwarzenegger turned her round and led her away beside him. Maria looked up at him and smiled her famous stupid-mysterious smile. Schwarzenegger put his hand on her shoulder. Maria sank slightly under the weight, and suddenly her memory threw up something unexpected, a picture of Lenin carrying a beam at one of those communist working Saturdays. In the picture only the edge of the beam could be seen above Lenin’s shoulder and Maria thought that perhaps it wasn’t a beam after all, but the hand of some mighty creature at which Lenin could only glance up with a defenceless smile, as she was now glancing up at Schwarzenegger. But a moment later Maria realized that such thoughts were entirely out of place, and she promptly banished them from her mind.
Schwarzenegger turned his face towards her.
‘Your eyes,’ he intoned monotonously, ‘are like a landscape of the dreamy south.’
Maria trembled in surprise. She hadn’t been expecting words like these, and Schwarzenegger seemed to understand this immediately. Then something strange happened - or perhaps it didn’t really happen, and Maria simply imagined the faint red letters flickering across the inside surface of Schwarzenegger’s glasses, like running titles on a TV screen, and the soft whirring sound inside his head, as though a computer hard disk drive had been switched on. Maria started in fright, but then she remembered that Schwarzenegger, like herself, was a purely conventional being woven by the thousands of individual Russian consciousnesses which were thinking about him at that very second - and that different people could have very different thoughts about him.
Schwarzenegger raised his empty hand in front of him and flicked his fingers in the air as he looked for the right words.
‘No,’ he said at last, ‘your eyes aren’t eyes - they’re orbs!’
Maria clung tightly to him and looked up trustingly. Schwarzenegger tucked his chin into his neck, as though to prevent Maria from seeing under his glasses.
‘There’s a lot of smoke here,’ he said, ‘why are we walking along this embankment?’
‘I don’t know,’ answered Maria.
Schwarzenegger turned round and led her away from the railings, straight into the smoke. After they’d gone a few steps Maria felt frightened: the smoke was so thick now that she couldn’t see anything, not even Schwarzenegger - all she could make out was his hand where it clutched her shoulder.
‘Where’s all this smoke from?’ asked Maria. ‘Nothing seems to be burning.’
‘C-N-N,’ Schwarzenegger replied.
‘You mean they’re burning something?’
‘No,’ said Schwarzenegger, ‘they’re shooting something.’
Aha, thought Maria, probably everybody who was thinking about her and Schwarzenegger was watching CNN, and CNN was showing some kind of smokescreen. But what a long time they were showing it for.
‘It’s okay,’ said the invisible Schwarzenegger, ‘it’ll soon be over.’
But there seemed to be no end to the smoke, and they were getting further and further away from the embankment. Maria suddenly had the terrible thought that for several minutes someone else could have been walking along beside her instead of Schwarzenegger, perhaps even the being that had put its arm round Lenin’s shoulder in that same picture, and this thought frightened her so badly that she automatically adjusted her earphones and switched on the music. The music was strcnge, chopped into small incoherent fragments. No sooner had the guitars and trumpets launched into a sweet song of love than they were swamped by a sudden electronic wailing, like the howling of wolves. But anything was better than listening to the sound of distant explosions from the area of the parliament building and the indistinct hubbub of human voices.