We all shook hands, made rock and roll small talk and sat down at a table in the corner. I felt like crying, because on the table was more good food than I'd seen in all of Moscow: tomatoes, cucumbers, stuffed vine leaves, fish salad, hot meat pies. We stuffed ourselves while Stas Namin asked our advice about a name for this new venture.
"What would sell it to foreign visitors?" he asked.
Inevitably, it became the Hard Rock Cafe.
We began to eat and Art Troitsky drifted away, as Russian men always did. In the smoky distance, at a table where there were only men, he sat and talked with them. They formed a circle. They crouched over their cigarettes and vodkas and beers. As far as I could tell, they were rock musicians: they were young, hip, and thin, and they dressed in black, what I always thought of as the international brotherhood of black clothing. Somehow they resembled all other Russian men I'd seen in the way they formed a closed circle. Dissidents, miners, musicians, it didn't matter; the circle was closed. I watched as they whispered among themselves and smoked the cigarettes as if they wanted to eat them.
After a while, Art returned. With him was a young man in glasses.
"This is great!" Art said in English. "The guy I wanted you to meet happens to be here, tonight. Surprise. We have had good luck. This," he added, "is Oleg Smirnoff."
"What do you mean, 'happens to be here'? I thought that's why we came," I said.
Looking at me gravely, Svetlana shook her head. I kept on talking. She seemed to want me to shut up, but why? Hadn't we come to meet Oleg, the interpreter? Why the secrecy? Still, it was clear that for whatever reason the meeting was supposed to be accidental. This really was a foreign country.
Oleg Smirnoff, who wore round rimless glasses, had a row of ballpoint pens in the breast pocket of his plaid button-down shirt. He wore a blue pullover. He spoke nearly perfect English.
"So. Dean Reed," he said after sitting down next to me. "Dean was a great guy. He was as American as an apple pie."
"How did you meet Dean Reed?' I asked.
"Dean Reed is the first singer for my generation. First time, I am sixteen, in front row at concert. Dean Reed jumps down and together we sing 'When The Saints Go Marching In'. It was great."
"Great," I said.
Oleg was not listening. "Ten years ago - 1978? - I was a student translator. I got a call to work for Dean, but I said, No thanks. Who is this guy who's telling us how to run our lives? Dean did that. But I was wrong. He was an emotional Democrat. What I didn't see for a while was that he was an idealist in a wilderness. He taught kids here to believe in the possibility of idealism even when it was impossible."
Oleg talked fluently about Dean Reed, eager to get the story out.
"Dean's words were important. That's why he needed an interpreter. I would sit on a stool on stage, just next to him. Talking to the audience was as important as the songs. We each had our own spotlight," Oleg said.
"Every song was a page from Dean's book of life," he added. "He wasn't complicated or well read, but he believed. He was an innocent. He had a minder in the East German Politburo who was responsible for him there; here Mr. Arbatov was Dean's Godfather. Dean wrote about socialism. He made one big mistake, though, and he regretted it. He criticized Solzhenitsyn and then wanted to apologize, but he would have to acknowledge he had been used. He knew it, though. Anyhow, you couldn't apologize."
In 1971, Dean wrote to Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
"Dear Colleague in Art Solzhenitsyn:
"Mr. Solzhenitsyn, the society of my country, not yours, is sick. The principles on which your union relies are healthy, pure, and just, at a time when the principles on which our union are built are cruel, selfish, and unjust."
That night in the cafe in Gorky Park, his elbows on the table, Oleg Smirnoff talked and talked. For ten years, he said, he and Dean had worked together. They had worked together in Siberia, where Dean sang "Tutti Frutti" for a handful of loggers and in Kiev; in Minsk, Mongolia, Tashkent, and Moscow, Oleg translated for Dean. "I believe in music," Dean sang and everyone adored him, Oleg reported.
Girls followed Dean everywhere. Girls tried to rip his clothes off. The stage-door Ninas pursued him relentlessly. Dean could have any woman he wanted in the Soviet Union, said Oleg, savoring the memory. Everyone wanted to possess a little piece of Dean.
"But he was a very shy guy," Oleg said, pleased with the little rhyme he'd made and he repeated it. "A shy guy," he said again.
"Did Dean speak Russian?" I asked.
"Not much. A few words only," said Oleg.
Then, unaccountably, Oleg went silent. He sucked his drink from the bottom of the glass and averted his eyes. For half an hour, I'd been drawn in: we were in a club in a basement which, if it smelled of burned lamb, nonetheless had the black walls, the loud music, the lank-haired kids that were the universals of rock clubs. But in Moscow this was still a half-secret venue. An underground club in a still secret country where a million half-facts made up a forgotten history as hidden as the little wooden dollies you bought in the souvenir shops.
I wanted more from Oleg. I wanted everything he knew about Dean Reed. I sensed he had been as close to Dean for a decade as anyone in the Soviet Union. I wanted it and I thought of the woman at the front desk in the National Hotel and how she tried to help and then drew back. I wanted but I didn't necessarily get, not right away, not the room with a view or secret things that Oleg knew about Dean Reed.
Intellectually, I got it, but it was still hard for me to grasp in my gut that one way or another pretty much everything in this enormous country was a function of officialdom. An American I met later said of a guide who helped her in Moscow, "Well, who does she work for?" And by then I had learned enough to say, "For the state, of course. Everyone works for the state. There isn't anything else."
Now, in the restaurant in Gorky Park, his face suddenly seizing up in anger, Oleg removed his glasses and put his twisted features close to mine.
"How do I know who you really are?" Oleg said.
"I've told you, we're planning a drama-documentary about Dean," I began patiently, looking at Leslie, who was deep in conversation with Jo and Svetlana at the other side of the table. He turned around and confirmed what I'd said. Oleg was not convinced.
"Oh yeah? Yeah? How do I know? How do I know you're going to preserve the memory of Dean properly?" Oleg asked.
Christ! I thought, he's going to leave. He had videotapes of Dean's concerts and I wanted to see them. I looked around for Art, but Art had gone with Stas and the boys into the maze of little rooms at the back of the Gorky Park Hard Rock Cafe.
I tried to suck up to Oleg. "So, did you play an instrument as well?"
"It wasn't my job."
"No, of course not. I mean, why should you? So when did you last see Dean?"
"I can't remember," he said. "I stayed in his house the last Christmas. Dean took Renate to London, and I stayed in the house in East Berlin to look after the dog and have a holiday. Germans! In Germany, when you went for a walk, people said hello to the dog but never to you. I don't know how Dean stood it," Oleg said.
"If you took down the Berlin Wall, half of the people would fight for the system; the other half would rush to the other side. Here, everyone would fight for the Fatherland," Oleg added.
"Who do you think killed Dean?" I said, exhausted finally, not much caring if Oleg defected from the conversation or not.
He drew himself up and fingered the row of pens in his pocket.
"He was killed by the forces of evil," Oleg said.
"Which forces?" I asked.