"Rada loved Dean from the age of thirteen," Alla said. "Rada was a big girl [Art pulled his sweater again] whose ambition was to become famous or to meet famous people, and when she saw Dean on television, she loved him to death, even from afar, even when she was only thirteen years old." Alla drew breath.
Years and years passed. Rada collected all of Dean's records, went to his concerts, watched him on television, bought pictures of him, daydreamed about his slim waist and the way he moved. All the other girls she knew felt the same way. Unlike the others, Rada had a plan.
When Rada was sixteen, she went to work as a model for the painter Victor Kropotkin. She heard that Dean Reed was in Moscow, and she borrowed a nude portrait of herself from Kropotkin's studio. She hired a taxi and tied the big canvas on to the roof. She went with the taxi to the airport to greet Dean. Huge crowds were waiting to meet Dean and, with them, was Rada with her taxi and the picture of herself, naked, on the roof.
After the incident with the picture, according to Alla, Rada and Dean were inseparable. Or so she thought, because Rada was a very unstable sort of girl and everyone knew Dean had lots of women. Rada thought Dean would leave his wife and marry her, even though, during some years, they only saw each other once or twice, if Dean was in Moscow and had the time. She covered her ears when people told rumors about Dean. Rumors that he had an illegitimate child in Moscow, for instance. The truth was even worse. The truth was he loved his wife.
Maybe Dean did see other girls, but he told Rada that he could give himself entirely to two or three women a day. That's how it was for him. He could give that much. Rada was sure Dean loved her best. She was sure that he would marry her.
Then Dean died. There was hardly anything in the official press, but the news was known in Moscow. Rada took many pills. She drank a lot. She ended up in a mental hospital, where she had been before.
"The hospital was on the outskirts of Moscow, but Rada managed to escape." Here, Alla paused for effect and added: "Rada had her pockets full of pills! Next day," she whispered, "Rada's body was found, sprawled on a garbage dump on the edge of town. All that she left behind were her diaries."
Alla drank the vodkas that Svetlana handed her for comfort. She implored us to help her: Rada's mother wanted to sell her daughter's diaries, Alla said. Could I not help?
Art said: "Alla says Rada kept very good diaries. Her mother wants to get them published, not for the money, but because her daughter was the friend of a big star, which was almost like being a star."
"Rada was in love with Dean," said Alla.
"But he treated her so badly," I said.
Alla said, "He was a big star. He was a man. He had the right," said Alla.
Quietly now, Alla sat, crying. I wondered how many other girls he had left behind him, bruised, in Moscow, convinced that he had the right because he was a star. I wondered how much the diaries would, in the end, cost me.
After Alla finished her sad tale and had another good cry, she went home and we sat down to dinner. There was chicken and pickled garlic, cucumbers and cheese, chocolate cake and red wine.
"Stalin's favorite vintage," Art said examining the label.
At the end of the meal we had tea; Svetlana put cherry jam in hers and it was the only time in Russia I ever had what could pass for a race memory: my father liked to eat cherry jam with his tea. He said it was a Russian custom. Otherwise, I had never once felt Russian, never.
My grandparents had been among the Jews of the Pale of Settlement, an area of parts of what are now Belarus and Ukraine. From 1791, it was a kind of vast ghetto. Peasants and villagers like my own grandparents often did not speak Russian, only Yiddish. They were obviously not baptized, so there were no church records. They were barred from going to university and there were restrictions on what trades they could enter. Then came the murderous pogroms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those who could fled to avoid being killed by the Cossacks.
What was there for me to feel? When people asked where my ancestors came from, I would say, "Fiddler on the Roof without the music." I felt nothing. But I knew that for my great-grandparents it had been much, much worse than I could imagine and even the jokes were often bitter.
Svetlana, long legs stretched out in front of her, was preoccupied. We were all delighted by the onset of Glasnost and Perestroika: the restaurants that had suddenly opened, the way people talked with increasing candor about the system. In Moscow there was real excitement, a sense of drama, a lot of intellectualizing about the new revolution and its possibilities. The nascent free press, the sheer exuberance of free speech. Svetlana wanted action. Her vision of a better life was born in long lines at the butcher and waiting rooms at the doctor's office. If it was tough for her, for a well educated, urban, sophisticated Muscovite, what was it like for ordinary people?
"Did you ever believe in Communism?" I asked.
"Not for one single day in my entire life," she said. "When I was a little girl, I drew wigs on Lenin in my schoolbooks and my mother had to be called in to discuss the problem."
She did not believe in any of it, not even now. In the Soviet Union things would deteriorate, Svetlana believed. The lines would get longer. The meat would get scarcer. Everyone would get meaner, more vicious. And the men would keep on talking.
Maybe it was OK for the men, who sat around Moscow's restaurants with their Western pals, arguing, drinking, laughing. Boy, did they talk. Sometimes you felt Moscow's intellectuals would talk the whole enterprise to death. Maybe glorious Glasnost was OK for them, Svetlana said, but she saw no reason to stick around just to stand in food lines. If she could get out, if she could go to the West, she would go and happily.
"What good is this Glasnost if I have to wait in line for a chicken four hours?" she said.
"Why do we need a chicken?" asked Art.
"I don't care about a chicken. But you would care if our friends had nothing to eat. I don't want to wait for a chicken. I want to be doing my work," she said.
Svetlana turned to me. "Can I say this in Russian and Art will translate?"
"Yes, of course."
Eyes blazing, fists clenched, Svetlana suddenly let out a torrent of Russian.
"Well, the first thing I must say is that Svetlana is absolutely wrong, now I will translate what she says," said Art.
Svetlana turned away. She wanted to leave the country and her husband didn't get it.
Art, of course, did not want to leave. It was his moment. He was much in demand by visiting Westerners and anyhow things in the music business were jumping. He told me about his conceptual punk band. it was called Vladimir Illych.
"We wore Komsomol outfits and we had several big hits such as 'Lenin is Alive' and 'Lenin, Come Back', after Lassie Come Home. There was also 'Brezhnev is Knocking at Your Door'." Art picked up his glass of Advocaat liqueur. "Of course, the band only exist in our heads," he added. Then he looked at Svetlana and said, suddenly, "I think I will send Svetlana to the West."
"What? Like a parcel?" Svetlana banged her fists on the table; the plates jumped. "You don't understand," she said. This was addressed to Art. He looked bemused.
In her way she was much less sentimental and more astute about the world than Art. A year or so later, when they came to New York for the first time, I took her to Macy's. I asked if she was surprised.
"No," she said. "I think this is the normal way to live."
It was tough times in New York, plenty of homeless all over the city, crime, crack, poverty.