We've left Gorky Street and with a Chaika's immunity to police whistles are building speed on the Leningradsky Motorway. Past the boat station on the reservoir, where you can board
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a river cruiser for a day of the Russian countryside's magic. Past the Ring Freeway, on which the old Volga could circumnavigate the city in an hour on a clear spring night. The city limits. The airport highway, an asphalt strip bearing the usual military-looking trucks, and the only memory of which I have is of a winter night when a young party I met celebrating a birthday in a restaurant took me out here, to a drunken orgy in a ramshackle cottage near the road. Discovering the following noon that literally our last kopeks had gone for the taxi out, we ransacked the room for something to peddle to a neighbor for bus fares back. Then the girls peered through the ratty curtain and went out to scout before I stepped outside, even though all such precautions were a farce if the police or KGB had followed us from the restaurant. Those days of simple-minded pleasures!
The driver's eyes on me in the rear-view mirror snap the memory. He handles himself as skillfully as the car, for although we both know his work, he is self-confident enough not to need small talk. Alyosha's notes about himself are mostly brief descriptions of time and place, but the legal materials are genuinely incriminating. His most recent murder file documents a case of startlingly sloppy work by an investigator, prosecutor and judge, which an appeals court confirmed out of aversion to "indulging" a man already sentenced. Alyosha's innocent defendant got ten years, having been told by one official to "stop whining—you won't be shot."
Zoom! we overtake a black government Volga, its chauffeured ftinctionary parting his curtains for a look at us as my fellow-passenger and I exchange weak smiles. Next we swish past a tanker truck serving as a snow plow, its kerchiefed woman driver straight out of a World War Two film. That's fine, but as the caught hostage being driven to the hoods, I'm an equally cliched movie character.
I'd rather think about summer, when everything changes. When sun bakes sultriness even into these fields, and the best Moscow evenings are all balmy air and strolling in summer dresses. Baseball gloves—worn by jabbering Cuban students— appear on the University's soccer grounds, Yanqui imperialists having cleverly forced the game on exploited Cuba decades ago
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so that Cubans would infect the Soviet homeland with it. The sound of ball and bat, of insects and nightingales; the profusion of Russia's wild flowers and heady smells . . .
The turnoff' to the access road. Another two minutes cutting across a Vermont postcard of unbroken snow and statuesque firs, each branch gloriously coated. Past the old airport and to Sheremetyevo International—right up to the front door, for this is not your honking Kennedy. The new terminal is full of the usual warps, fissures and cracks. They build things so badly here, brag so loudly about the results—and thank God: this same puffing weakness of theirs may make it easier for me inside.
Besides, it's New Year's Eve: maybe the customs staff" will be too busy covering for each other's backdoor bottle-nipping to organize serious searches. Good old Russian bungling may save me, and the lifeless terminal entrance looks like confirmation that nothing sinister is planned. I control my thumping impulse to hurry inside and dump the icon in a toilet.
The quiet American retrieves his streamlined suitcase and disappears with visible relief. The driver methodically helps me with my heavier things, but won't even take a ballpoint for a tip—which removes all doubt that he's no ordinary driver.
He watches in disbelief, almost stops me because I'm not making my way inside as I should but to a telephone booth at the corner of the building. I know he's convinced I'm about to pass the word on him to the American Embassy or someplace. But the hell with him, I've heard the signal I've been waiting for. I'm going to say good-bye to Anastasia again.
Not good-bye, really, but a genuine hello. Someday, somehow, I'll come back for her. I can't yet visualize how, but I know she will be my link with this land—because she represents its beauty and truth.
There's a danger of my old self-delusion here, but I'm fortified by a truth I suddenly realize about every great Russian writer. The government of the period may be cruel, the muzhiks drunk, the gentry or intelligentsia sniveling; but the women are noble. They rule the Russian novel because their inborn commitment to honesty lifts them above the daily muck. My own thoughts about Anastasia have been fumbling toward this psychological insight of Russian literature; Vvefelt this for months.
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I won't burden her with this but will just remind her of our talk after the funeral, which she'll know excludes false promises. She needs just a bit more reassurance, and I can give it now. I'll say that one reason I want to go home is to see where we might fit in—into a semblance of the "real things" of our Esenin poem, not just summer idyls in Norway. That if I don't write through the mails, she must never doubt this. When the time comes, I'll find a way to get word to her.
And I want to know where she'll be so I can raise my glass at midnight. Luckily, I still have a supply of two-kopek coins for the phone, the last fruit of Alyosha's lessons. My fingers dial her number without having to think. Between the dark and the daylight: she'll be home at this hour. Damn, her dorm always takes a year to answer. At last someone does—wrong number.
I dial again. The same woman answers, this time cursing me before flinging down the receiver. What's this, of all madness? I know her number in my deepest sleep. Russia's million daily mechanical breakdowns checkmate you even when you know how to be a man. I've got to make the call of my life and of course it doesn't get through—because there's a system of right-and dignity-robbing obstacles that reduces you to insignificance in ways you hadn't even imagined.
But before my outrage boils over, a wiser voice tells me that railing at the telephone's flaws is an old device to shunt anger from my own. Setting down my stuff", I fish out my address book on the off"chance I've transposed figures in her number. Glancing frequently inside the terminal for instructions, my driver is making himself as obvious as police plants in the hard-currency stores. Last night, in preparation for disaster, I ripped out pages from my little black book identifying people the KGB might not be certain I knew. But the old listing under Jonquil is there, and my memory hasn't bungled her number.
Fluorescent lighting casts a ghastly glow from the terminal windows to the crusting snow and the silence is extraordinary, considering the place. It's amazing how a new challenge appearing just before a long dreaded one can disarm the second by changing your perspective. When I was twelve, I couldn't sleep for weeks because a store owner who caught me shoplifting threatened to come to our house. All that fear for nothing: when
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he did appear, my parents had just announced their separation and no one bothered with him. Now the trouble waiting at customs, even any punishment afterwards, is receding in the same pattern. The maximum sentence they'd dare is a couple of years, whereas putting things clearly to Anastasia and myself might affect our entire future.
My only fear is that something—a KGB device to foil communication from the airport?—has jinxed this telephone. I dial a third time: the number's busy. Then one try after the other, without interruption. The roar of a taxiing plane comes just at the wrong moment, when it will drown us out if our connection is bad. Still in the doorway, the driver actually nods his head in my direction. But I stick to my guns—and win!: the number rings. I somehow sense Anastasia herself will answer.
My God, it's the angry bitch again/