Sounds of a disturbance interrupt this familiar musing. I push through to see a scarlet-faced major flaying a young dark-suit-and-white-dress couple celebrating their wedding with the traditional Red Square visit. The officer commands the hidden vantage point from which the holy place is kept under constant surveillance.
"So you like jokes?" he bellows. "This one won't go unrewarded. "Let's see your papers."
The mortified pair beg forgiveness. Their transgression was photographing each other with a bathroom cabinet, a wedding present just picked up in GUM, with the teacher's mausoleum "right there," in the background. Softened by a new fall of sodden snow, the major's threats of punishment for the sacrilege ring in my ears as I leave the Square my last time. Lenin is indeed "more alive than the living."
Winter's daylight ebbs; my time expires. The banality of the symbolism does not embarrass me: in a thousand ways, unspoiled
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Russia's movements are still determined by the angle of the sun. But my compulsion to exaggerate has had its own day. I walk up Kalinin Prospekt past the Lenin Library, remembering Ilya Alexandrovich, the aged prince. One look at the British Museum's listings on Admiral Kolchak was enough to recognize that Ilya will never produce more than an outline of White Russian records preserved abroad. The brave man's risky, crusading research has all been written up long ago, and better. Only in this closed world did his secret labors seem original and important—and I was quite willing to be taken in.
Have I blown up Alyosha too in this conspiracy to boost myself? But the truth is that Moscow withered after his death. The spark was gone; the common touch. Even people who hadn't known him well felt adrift. And phrases about him that propaganda overuse would otherwise have made extinct kept circling through the intelligentsia. Alyosha was "life-loving," "bubbling with life," "irreplaceable."
The morning I left for London the previous July was like a Three Stooges film. Although late as always, Alyosha and I had to conclude a last-minute deal involving a tie-clasp. Then stop for a pretty girl. Then race to the Tretyakov Gallery and talk our way in with a nutty pitch: we'd left our long-planned icon inspection for the last minute and it turned out to be the museum's monthly "sanitary day." Then to Gorky Street for the makings of blini, my last-lunch wish; but empty counters meant that the smoked salmon had to be bribed from the manager of the nearest restaurant.
Hurrying home, we drove right off again to a local foodshop for additional supplies: two girls waiting in the courtyard had to be co-opted to the party. The toasts split our sides. The blini were downed still sizzling from the pans. Leave the country without a proper celebration? Hell no! better to gorge, guzzle and joke against the clock.
Suddenly it occurred to us that empty valises—I'd sold or given away everything except the suit on my back—would alert customs as surely as if they'd been bulging with icons. Climbing on chairs, ripping at ancient cartons, Alyosha ransacked the room to supply me with "London outfits"—anything too old or ripped even for the secondhand stores—and taking the occasion
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to proclaim to the microphone that the Soviet people spared the naked Western proletariat nothing. He crammed my bags with rags, grandly topping the pile with a sweater I myself had given him, now full of holes. Wide ties of the 1940s still bearing Western labels were best: how could a customs officer prove this stuff wasn't mine? "Pacesetting bon ton, sir; imitators years behind." Alyosha's double-talk sales spiel mocked everything we were and were trying to be, turning the incongruity of the clothes into a riotous, yet tragic, representation of our fated topsy-turvi-ness. We doubled up.
This was only six months ago, when the cancer was already marching toward his lungs.
We downed the last blinis in the car. A tire gave out in sight of the airport and he tried to fight off my help because I was going "there" and my hands should stay clean. Racing my things to the counter, he whispered facetious instructions for London life in my ear. Only his eyes betrayed a hope that something would cancel the flight.
Winter's daylight ebbs. Last laughs echo off the overcast.
She is just inside the little post office off October Square, the spitting image of a Siberian girl who urged me, an aeon ago, to hop on a train and play house with her in Irkutsk. She has the telltale look of having nowhere to sleep, no money to spend, nothing to do until something comes along to snap her boredom. I visualize her nipples as she dutifully exposes them; I remember my exultation of our parade. All the giving girls marching into the category of the people I'll never see again . . .
Inside, I think of filling my hollowness by handing her the rubles I no longer need. I go to the telegram counter and send them to Nina, trying to decide whether signing my name will slow her healing.
I couldn't get him into the cemetery where his mother had been buried, so the funeral was held here, in this new one. A rambling tract beyond a housing development's skeleton, but he'd have liked the name—Vostyakovskoye—for its old Slavic ring. Might have been touched, too, by the crowds: the caretakers said it was one of the largest private burials they could
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remember. He was a whitish death mask in his rough coffin, attended by colleagues, criminals, Erstwhiles, troupes of friends from various classes. The line for the ritual kiss of the cold forehead stretched into the muddy slush.
Then the eulogies: tender, funny, intensely personal yet universal. Subtle and honestly sentimental in the Russian oral tradition; worthy of him. The Chairman of his Juridical Consultation Office lauding his legal mind, a movie director reminiscing about the 1950s cafes, when the entertainment was either Alyosha himself or talk of his talent. . . . The wind blowing snow into eyes helped me drift into my private memories. I saw him bent under the lamplight, sewing his underpants as he sometimes did after returning from a gala evening, touched by the sad-humanity pantomime that makes a great clown. I remembered him backing out of the apartment one night when a girl wanted to be alone with me. I thought he had gone for a drive, but when I went to the bathroom afterwards, found him asleep in the tub, weary after a long day's running around. He looked at me fondly over the water and raised his fingers to his lips, "Shh . . . ," clowning that I needed reminding not to frighten the girl.
"The final moments slip by, one by one, irretrievable." Suddenly I was aware that his first wife was up on the little mound, denigrating his "juvenile behavior." Explaining that she had grown up but—this was his trouble—he never did. Everyone gasped but no one answered. I tried to make a speech, but my Russian went blurry just when it had to be most precise. Of the hundred pairs of eyes looking up at me, I recognized Anastasia's, thanking me because she understood.
His wife's attack was garnished by a moment of horse-trading by one cluster of mourners for the pitiful pickings of his possessions. Then two separate friends from his dandy days whispered that he had been reporting on me to the KGB all along. Their fables and faked concern bore all the marks of Bastard's touch. A country where people have to do that, even to the dead. And they didn't even have to: they had sold out for some little privilege.
The next day, Nina and I were alone at the grave. Our wreaths had been stolen. It was the work of teen-agers who sell
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them to mourners arriving an hour later at the cemetery, making more this way than they could in a factory. This in the country that has "eliminated the objective causes of crime" and sentences people for questioning the dictum. Alyosha so liked flowers in the hospital. We had built little tents of fir branches to protect these from the frost.
The grave must wait a year for a headstone. I stand by its side until it gives me the power to go. No place on earth is so peaceful.