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new means for preserving the old dictatorial power, he sank into morbid pessimism.
After his application, he was summoned to the office of the editor he'd been seeing—who, as he knew, was also a KGB captain. The older man, a family friend, made a reference to "you Yids." The Leonid who had endured years of the clique's insults spit in his face.
Putting away his handkerchief, the editor quickly summoned the police while the documentary evidence of "Disrespect for an Official Person" was still on his cheek. The police's first order to Leonid was to expectorate on a paper for chemical analysis of his saliva. During his two weeks of jail for hooliganism—a reduced sentence because the editor-vigilante pitied his parents—his head was shaved and his resolve reinforced.
Shortly after this, he got a letter from Zhenya, whose sister is helping him sell canvases hand over fist to American tourists in Tel-Aviv. The Bearded Giant dislikes Israel less, but far more volubly, than he ever did Russia, abandoning all his Moscow caution about criticizing in public and spending much of his time lobbying to emigrate to New York. He blesses "Soviet humanism" for sharpening his wits in the matter of wringing an exit visa from a "miserable bureaucracy"—and this newfound flipness in safe surroundings angers Leonid, the new Zionist.
Thus do attitudes change—in keeping with the country's persistent search for nonexistent solutions. But, as always, its personal lessons are far more important than the social and political hash of new dreams from old it tries to offer up. Not only Alyosha is gone forever, but a close handful of others. The wisdom of the country where people disappear overnight is not merely that life goes on because it must. I sense I have been loaned a few friends to love—who have been taken away again so I will know how to behave with others in the future.
On old Stoleshnikov Lane, a man in an ankle-length overcoat pulls me toward a telephone booth. It's very important, he can no longer see well, I must help him dial. I get the same wrong number on three attempts and he clumps away without a word.
Stoleshnikov Lane is more crowded than ever today. Like sperm wriggling in the street, a hundred thousand shoppers are
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hunting New Year's Eve treats. Incredible even by Moscow standards, the jewelry and liquor departments are thronged with gaping, glowering customers, faces set as if they do not recognize each other as being of the same species. Thirty rubles for a lacquered Lenin in his bank clerk's suit, forty for a crude clay plate: where do these working people get the wads for their splurges?
The humbler street stalls have temporarily lost their attraction; fat women peddling political pamphlets have time to gossip with fat women peddling stamps. A line stretches around the block to Petrovka Street from a clothing store with a supply of fedoras. A mother near its end is peeling an orange for her son with all the emotion generated by a land where each globe of fruit, each touch of mama's hand, is a tangible link to human existence.
I'm falling into a familiar mood again. The orange reminds me of the obsession of Chekhov's Trigorin. "Night and day, I'm a slave to a single inescapable thought," he complained. "I must write. / must write.'"
I see that cloud over there, shaped like a piano. And I think: in a story somewhere I've got to say that a cloud floated by, shaped like a piano. . . . Worst of all is that I'm in some kind of stupor, and often don't understand what it is I'm writing. ... I feel I must write about everything.
I wonder why I too feel compelled to see and memorize every detail. The brownish shawl on the woman slogging on in front of me—one of ten million exactly like it, in which every working-class woman over fifty is wrapped from October to May. I know it stands for something and must fix it in my memory. Somewhere I must record how snow lands on the nubby, soiled wool. How she walks, this block of a woman, clutching her canvas bag and wedging the phalanx of blocks ahead of her.
And that drainpipe—a tube of dented tin from which ice water dribbles to the wavy asphalt sidewalk. I'm constrained to study it too lest it disappear from my consciousness—which I equate with being dead.
The drainpipe belongs to a jumble of yellowish buildings whose submissive acceptance of fate provokes pity and love for them, myself, the human race. Here they stoop, asking only to
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share the same air; and the huge mural of the handsome Soviet Woman harvesting wheat and the confident Cosmonaut Conquering the Future leaves their essential humbleness unchanged. The cafeteria in the adjoining basement has good chicken soup: this is my last day, / must remember. Must remember the stories too that otherwise will be attic letters fed to an incinerator. Such as Alyosha's note from a fifteen-year-old Erstwhile made pregnant by a classmate. "Dear Alyoshik," she wrote from the maternity ward. "I wish little Natastinka were yours. People still make me feel ashamed. Please come see us if you're not busy."
Perhaps this episode must survive because of the dresses he bought mother and daughter. Yet deeper reasons lie in the Russia I'm leaving. Walking these self-effacing streets, I have been nourished by communication with the fire, water, air and earth that constitute the universe. These organic materials; this homemade planet. The atoms of that weatherworn fenceboard over there are related to mine. I have come to understand that I belong to the weary, all-forgiving whole known as Mother Earth.
I chide my feet for having taken me here; Red Square is for tourists. The Historical Museum, a fairy-tale witch's castle, which rumor says will soon be razed in Moscow's massive rebuilding into a "Communist" city of steel and glass. A busload of smart French tourists being guided toward the mausoleum. And the Central Lenin Museum—where, before meeting Aly-osha, I used to take my first pickups to escape from the cold, and to feel them up furtively in the shelter of bunched listeners to eulogies to The Leader.
The square's expanse is fuller than I've ever seen it except during State parades. Holding their children close, provincial tourists gawk at the landmarks or enjoy a break from the madness of GUM. Just before two o'clock, thousands bunch to see the changing of the mausoleum guard, the hourly celebration of the country's existence that blends the police state's religious idolatry with its veneration for arms. The clock produces its famous chime; the soldiers goose-step to their places, bayonets fixed, fanatic devoutness imposed on village faces. The crowd watches in boredom or awe, but not, apparently, with my
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queasiness. I wonder what they really think of their iconic mummy on the slab inside.
"Won't their feet freeze?" a young girl asks her mother about the soldiers, now statue-like at the crypt's entrance.
"It's not cold today."
"What about other days?"
"Yes, it's hard for those boys to stand there without moving."
Behind them, one provincial man is enlightening another: "Stalin used to be there too. Now it's Lenin alone; things change."
An older mother is comforting her braided daughter: "Are you hungry, Tanyechka? We'll go home and fix you some nice soupchik."
So here too, at Leninism's sanctum sanctorum, the human element intervenes. It is this childlike innocence I'll sorely miss: the long-exploited, everlastingly misled Russian people falling for vast religious and political con games, yet retaining the purity and artlessness that can make you feel clean. It's still not too late: maybe I should stay here as a translator, subservient forever, but in contact with this gift.