"Wait, please don't hang up!" I blurt this out before she can slam down, instinctively resorting to the most effective bid for attention from operators, gatekeepers and other strangers. "Don't cut me off again, please. I'm a foreigner and I can't understand why your number keeps—"
" A foreigner/" The woman's panicky shriek tells me she is an officer worker in her sixties widowed by the purges and pinched by decades of grind; still living by the Stalin era's laws—according to which a foreigner's call is a Mafia kiss. She hurls down the loathsome instrument in her hand, saving even her gasp until the danger is past.
So I'm beaten? Without knowing why? I wait for the solace of the new scheme that switches on automatically when my preceding one breaks down, but fail to discover anything sensible, let alone positive, in whatever it is that has thwarted this last word with Anastasia. If I really wanted to reassure her, the inspiration should have come in time for more than a stagy call from the airport. I will have to reach her another way, without the instant reward of her voice and new friendship. Anyway, for once I'd rather do something for her than promise it.
Life goes on. My hat goes on. I remember Alyosha's joke when he sewed its crown an inch smaller because I'd bought it too big. From the depths of his memory, he dragged up the phrase "swelled head" in English, adopting it to the reversed circum-
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stances and simultaneously satirizing Malenkov. But the trick is to shunt some of this nostalgia-generating energy into the physical variety, since dreams won't get my trunk to the check-in counter.
It strikes me as odd that I haven't seen this final scene before. Free of deja vu, I lug the trunk toward the entrance, also coping with all my other gear in a clumsy gavotte of strained arms and stretched fingers. Although it has turned colder, my underwear is sweaty. No, I won't return to the telephone booth for my sheepskin gloves.
I reach the entrance, conscious of the eyes following my progress. The driver is talking to a younger man posing as a fellow chauffeur, but neither makes a move to help me with the double portals. Heavy doors again: I must write that essay. Although I should be supremely indifferent to the opinion of these two musclemen, something tells me to display fortitude by tackling the doors and struggling without resting. More than any possible arrest inside, I fear the humiliation of dropping my bags.
The numbness that relieves my arms also pleasantly unfocuses my vision. It's the well-known phenomenon of split-consciousness sundering my conscious and acting selves. The first thing I notice inside is that this is no international departure building, but a Mosfilm set for an espionage potboiler supposedly set in the West—the kind old roommate Viktor liked so much. Good old Viktor, whom I appreciated only after he was replaced by tougher types, just as Moscow intellectuals grew fond of Khrushchev during Brezhnev's reign.
A detachment of soldiers is crossing a large area of new flooring, its warps rippling in the fluorescent glare. A tourist couple searches nervously for the document listing their ruble purchases, which must be surrendered before they can leave the country. My fellow passenger in the Chaika is staring at me as if I'd risen from a bloody accident. What's on my face, I wonder, to cause his startled concern? How I admire him, that straightforward American with nothing to smuggle and no Russian illusions to defend or shatter.
Cleaning women, pudgy counter women, a few porters sustaining the motions of work. A microphone voice squawking about botched transportation for incoming passengers. But like a
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wildebeest's eyes fastening on a waiting lioness, my vision is drawn to an immobile object in this kaleidoscope of everyday disarray. Bastard is standing like a bludgeon under the messy sign announcing "Flight BE411, Moscow-London," gloves folded in a stubby hand like a collaborator imitating his Gestapo boss.
Bastard at the airport? Of course, as you knew he'd be. Since we both knew the Intourist girls had instructions to tell him before writing my ticket, his arduously blase questions about when I "might leave" was his usual phony dissembling to demean me. I'm just as sure now that New Roommate informed long ago about the icon—proof of Alyosha's judgment in urging me never to take one to my room.
I remember thinking that Bastard's itch to punish identified him as the type who supervised the mechanics of the purges. He wanted revenge in general; and in my case in particular, I always knew I'd have to pay for "spurning" him. I wonder whether he knows I'm Jewish; whether he swallows the newspaper stuff about the "Zionist conspiracy" to subjugate a hundred million Arabs and, by "impugning President Nixon's integrity," to sabotage the Soviet-American detente. He's the type to believe he's on the trail of an agent of Tel-Aviv and of the Pentagon simultaneously.
Even from here, I can make out the facial moles: plugs for spraying the vinegar of his countenance. He's checking his watch now, and the silliest of words— escapel —whispers itself to me. But where could I flee to or hide in? Assuming I somehow sneaked out of the building, should I try for the Turkish border? The notion makes me smile—a mistake because Bastard catches sight of me at this instant, and Bastard wants humble recognition of his mastery on my face. While he inspects me, the smile, to my dismay, becomes one of bumping into a shit in the subway and faking pleasure to conceal embarrassment. The triteness of this role I'm about to play with him makes me sheepish.
He grimaces and nods to his henchmen, seven or eight dicks in the uniform of customs officers or equally distinguishable KGB mufti. An announcement of a flight arrival in delightful Mata Hari English breaks my concentration. A woman waddles out from her currency-exchange booth to whisper to a passing stewardess, oblivious to everyone's opinion of her dignity. That's
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what I love in these people. Russians squabble in a packed bus if they want to, slurp their soup in a crowded restaurant—because they're simply not selfconscious . . .
And I'm contemplating the Russian character even now, making me realize that this has encroached on everything I've done here, preventing me from thinking straight about Anastasia not as a type but as a person —and about myself. For some reason, I sought in this country's ambiance the missing keys to what I wanted to be and wasn't.
The joke is that one of the needs it promised to satisfy was my old one for punishment. It's not simply, as I used to reflect at my window, that Russia relieves neuroses by providing external adversity; even that it reminds you daily of the tragic essence of existence. Its subtler gift is a sense of retribution to fill out the primordial human knapsack of guilt. And if the underlying melancholy I welcomed is utterly contradictory to the happy Russian childhood I also sought—just like extolling Russians being themselves with Bastard striking his ludicrous pose twenty yards away—I can only venture that contradiction is the stuff" of human nature. That by laying bare some of my own, Russia has brought me alive. I feel closer to my own paradoxes, wiser because what I don't understand about myself has come nearer to the surface; some day I may grapple with it. The last irony is that I'll probably have my first taste of real persecution now, when I have less need for it because I want to go home, plant my feet on the ground, stop falling for illusions.
As I drag the trunk toward the counter, Bastard deploys one of his plainclothesmen. To reconnoiter? The deputy circles toward my blind quarter, eyes wide as if waiting for me to pull a gat, and at the same time trying to look inconspicuous, no doubt in accordance with his training. The guy's actually on his tippie-toes, and when I stare directly at him, continues snaking through the nonexistent grass, pretending he's still undetected. Meanwhile, the customs men clear a space to do a job on my luggage.
Outside this burlesque, life plods on. A middle-aged tourist is gushing awe of the Soviet people because a luggage-conveyor mechanic has handed her a glove she dropped. At a counter next to mine, a would-be Russian passenger, unmistakably a technician going abroad, is ordered sotto voce to stand the hell aside