Long Made Short

Stephen Dixon Long Made Short

To Sergei Dovlatov

1941–1989

THE RARE MUSCOVITE

I can be such an egotistical self-righteous pompous son of a bitch; unaccepting, nonaccepting, I can’t think of the right word but it’s what I so often am and all of it’s what I was again. Moscow, my wife and I, she to research a book she’s anthologizing and introducing, I just to accompany her and see a city and be in a country I’ve never been to, and it’s really just the extra airfare, since restaurants are very cheap and the hotel room’s the same for one or two. She — Marguerite — speaks Russian, will be working all day in libraries and with Russian contacts so, through a colleague in America weeks before we left, got an interpreter for me for the five weekdays. Svetlana shows up at our hotel at nine, half-hour before she’s supposed to. I’m squatting in the little tub, reach over and push the door shut, and Marguerite lets her in. I overhear them: Good mornings in Russian, then “Please, if it’s possible, everything in English from now on. I want to sharpen my interpreting facilities even better from your trip, and I’m planning of visiting America in a year. And my earliness — tardiness? — earliness is because the metro got here faster than I thought and was less crowded than expected. Then our brave police downstairs let me up with a wave when I thought I’d have more difficulties. And I didn’t want to walk around in the slippery cold or sit in the dreary lobby with everyone blowing smoke and sturgeon fumes on me and talking in their loud German and English and American voices, present employers — employees? — excluded of course. I had a stroke, you see, two years ago. Recovered from this side being paralyzed to where I could barely walk. Twelve almonds a day, a healer from Kiev said — the doctors could offer no medicine but time for me. You might think it madness, I know so much how Americans rely on science, but the almonds worked, I’m sure of it, and I don’t want to get excited. I can’t afford to, you say? — by having to tell them off to their faces, all those bloated businessmen elephants blowing loud smoke and talk on me. I am one of those rare Muscovites who — whom? Let me get it correct now, who. Who detests those burning props.”

I get dressed in the bathroom, come out, introduce myself, make coffee for us, take out sugar packets and coffee cake and tiny Edam cheeses we got on the plane with our dinner and snack, offer her peanut butter and dried salami and crackers we brought with us. “You don’t get anything like this here,” she says, “unless you wait on line for hours or buy it in the dollar stores, which I’ll take you to,” she says to me. “Hams in tins, coffee in cans, the best sardines and cheeses and most overpriced caviar. You won’t need those perhaps, for only a week’s visit in a hotel. But if you have Russian friends who do or you want to make a gift out of to them, that’s also what they have there. And lemon and peppered vodka and Scottish scotch and Ararat, you know what that is?” “Da,” I say. “Ah, listen, wonderful — possible he doesn’t need an interpreter. But people say it can be as good or as better as the best French cognac. I wouldn’t know since I’m also rare in Moscow in that I’ve never had a taste for alcohol. Maybe for my bad tooth, as a girl, but nothing else. And also at the Beriozka American cigarettes to kill people is what you get there too. One carton of them, none other than Marlboros, would be equivalent to, at black market rubles for dollars, a month’s wages for the average worker here, or fifty rubles less. If you want to, we’ll go. For if you return to America and your wife tells Millie you didn’t have an opportunity to buy the best Russian whiskies and gifts, because I was taking you to all the more cultural places, I shall be very embarrassed and dismayed.”

“No no,” I say. “Any place you take me to is fine, since it’ll all be new to me. Though if we want Ararat and vodka, better I hear at the duty-free store at the airport going home.”

“But for use in your room? Marguerite tells me she’ll be entertaining scholars here. Perhaps you brought the much preferred American whiskey with you. Or you don’t drink or once did but went A. A., which is only beginning here. It’s not that? If it was, or should it be ‘were’?” He throws up his hands, points to Marguerite and says “She knows.” “Oh, small difference, since we both know what I meant, and I have the few places and hours the A.A. clubs meet each week. Anyway, it’s all up to you. I am simply here to coast you through. And the truth of the matter is that the Beriozkas, though something to see for their glamorous contradictions if not outright falsehoods to the rest of Moscow and present Russian life, have no real appeal to me.”

But what am I getting at with all this? I had an idea of saying right at the start “Happens again,” and then explaining what does. She gets a stroke our third weekday here, dies, and I didn’t especially care for her almost from the moment I heard her through the bathroom door — actually got irritated, but not visibly, by her almost incessant talking and parading of her knowledge and vast learning. She seemed to know something or a lot about everything we spoke about or saw. She was familiar with the details of Marguerite’s project and doctoral dissertation and knew the works of the people Marguerite was going to see, as well as every writer, painter and composer I mentioned and building we visited or I pointed out. Knew the dates, history, influences, inner meanings, could quote lines, cite pages and recite poems and so on — I, what? I forget what I started out saying. But she has this stroke, dies, police have to break down her apartment door to get her two days after her stroke and I feel very bad about it of course and guilty I bad-mouthed her so much to Marguerite and asked her to phone her to call her off after the second day, at least for a day and then I’d see how I felt. “I want to walk around alone, not meet any schedules, get lost on the metro if I want with only the few Russian words I know. Find a farmers’ market by myself and the Tolstoi museum and Tolstoi’s house again if I like, which I think I would but without her telling me who painted what picture on the wall and who the people are in the portraits and what famous composer played what famous composition on the grand piano there. I just want to feel the place, guess which side of the bed Tolstoi slept, and those desks of his and Sofia’s and no electric lights and that sad room behind theirs where their youngest son — I forget his name, though she told me, and I think he was the youngest — died of scarlet fever in that oversized crib she said was a typical seven year old’s bed then, or maybe he died in the hospital and she said he only got sick at home. For sure she had it right, whatever she told me. Or just to stay in our room finishing War and Peace and maybe going downstairs to the hotel café for a coffee and bun.” And I feel if I had let her continue being my interpreter and guide, though we never used that word, instead of giving her a paid day off — paid, it’s so absurd, since it was so little money and because she has no survivors we now don’t know whom to send it to — she might have somehow survived, or at worst been with me when she had the stroke and I could have got help for her and saved her life. Or been with us, if we again took her to the hotel restaurant for dinner that night — and why not? since she knew which foods were freshest, so was an asset of sorts, and she didn’t ask for more wages and the dinner was certainly cheap enough. But she died in her room that Wednesday, might not have had anywhere to go except to stand in the cold for hours on different food lines — she was retired but not even sixty. And maybe was incensed at me — knew I didn’t like her much for not very good reasons but stayed because she needed the money — or worried the job wouldn’t work out because of what she sensed I felt about her, or grieved or got angry over it or both or something else and that somehow provoked the stroke. But I feel partly responsible for it, also that I wasn’t there when I possibly could have been to help her when she got the stroke. And when I say “happens again” I mean because I’ve done things like that before. Bad-mouthed people for inadequate reasons — there probably aren’t any good ones — just to avoid seeing them that night, for example, because they were preventing me from doing something I thought I might want to — just their presence would — or they had achieved some sort of stature or success that let’s say I secretly wanted, which I’m not saying she did though I have to admit I admired her intelligence tremendously, and though nothing so bad as a stroke or anything near it happened to any of them I always knew I was wrong in this attitude and regretted it and told myself I wouldn’t do it again and sometimes only told myself I should try my hardest not to.