444^MOSCOW FAREWELL
quick and let the foreigners check in first. An Aeroflot pilot appears, uniform crumpled and picking his teeth: surely the spitting image of the one in command at the time of Joe Sourian's crash.
Another deputy sallies forth. Certainly the airport personnel know what they're up to with me; it's old hat to them. But I'm amazed that none of the foreigners have an inkling. So this is how the 1930s roundups worked: no opposition because each marked man was totally alone. Cut off from all help—even here, at ye international airport. I'd shout, but what's the point of frightening innocent tourists? As it is, even the pilgrimage-to-socialism ones are nervous about getting out of the country. Besides, I'm guilty. Attracting their attention to the icon's exposure would propagandize them exactly the wrong way.
Better to go it alone. This isn't the challenge I'd choose if I had a new chance, but it's mine. Bastard picks up a telephone, announcing something as if this were his moment in Marxist-Leninist history. I don't want to hear the drawl he himself despises. Or look at his eyes.
He sneezes and turns angrier. That look I remember when he kept repeating something I couldn't understand one evening while I sustained my diffident "Pardon me." His thin amour propre corroded, he pressed on grimly with the word. Suddenly I deciphered "the leadership of Spiro Agnew" through his Laugh-In accent and laughed so hard that I spattered him with wine. Georgian red on Russian purple: gorgeous!
Now his plainclothesmen are badly blanched. Crazy man, what can they fear from the prey? But I can't miss it, even in my own nervousness. Maybe they're afraid they'll botch everything, like Bastard with his phony cable address.
The funny thing is that I'm in this having had almost no contact with the dissidents so important to most other Americans here. Sometimes I felt the names in the Western headlines were the least representative Russians, but the reason I didn't get involved was simply that I didn't happen to meet them. The one celebrated "opposition" writer I did run into once later defected during a trip to London, earning himself pages of hailing publicity—and doing me dirty in a way I then couldn't believe. To demonstrate his loyalty and avoid a last-minute cancellation
Come Again? "^445
of his visa, he concocted information about an American who'd supposedly tried to sell him dollars, choosing a real name—mine —for maximum verisimilitude. While the world press was extolling his gallant honesty, two men were slyly grilling me in the University—which is one reason Bastard wanted to meet me even before Alyosha got sick. But try to explain this mix-up, where I shared Bastard's opinion—but for very different reasons —of the I-chose-freedom hero to Bastard's one-track, enemies-of-the-Motherland mind. Try to explain it, for that matter, to Western worshipers of any Russian who hates Soviet rule, seeing him as a gloriously noble Dissenter in every instance.
No, I must steer clear of all such complications, and everything else too true to be invented. My job is to cook up a bluff for Bastard about the legal materials. I've done it before with him; can do it again in the clinch. I'll say I need a few real cases for worming my way in with Washington's Soviet experts, the better to ferret out information for him. "Evgeny Ivanovich, you yourself taught me how terrible our censorship is. We can never read about your legal system. All America will go wild over these priceless examples of true justice in action. . . ."
But you know something, I'm tired of mouthing stories. I don't even want to shout; don't even hate him any longer. In an odd way he's been preparing me to face my real conflict once I'm past his tackle and home, trying to find something more "me" to commit myself to than professorial briefcases and mortgages. The Russia he represents has helped me see the other one—of simplicity, instinct, fantasy—more clearly, and to accept that it's not all one nation; everyone must pick and choose. Partly through him, the limits of my feeling have been extended and I've learned the Russian lesson that it's all right to be yourself. Bastard, the emancipator from emotional inhibition!
What I resent is that he'll be pawing the papers that are the private, intimate property of Alyosha and me. And that I'm wasting final thoughts on him. All the people I've known, the episodes I want to contemplate—and he's the last Russian I'll talk to. I feel enormously beholden to the country, but the joke is that only the KGB is left to receive my thanks.
The counter has been cleared for me. I sense that I've straightened up and that this confuses Bastard, who likes his
446^MOSCOW FAREWELL
charges to lay their heads on the block. He's under my nose now, with all his symbolic power somehow gone.
"Let's not go through the song and dance, Evgeny Ivanovich." My voice surprises me with its mellow confidence. "You'd really rather sing and dance at some party tonight, wouldn't you? ■Somewhere, old chap, you're nice enough to dislike your work."
His reaction is amazing—yet commonplace. His eyes blaze but his feet pedal backwards, like those of any challenged bully. In this second, I see that I'm going to make it past him; that he'll only go through the motions of a search because he knows that if it comes to a trial, I'll disclose everything I know about him instead of playing along to reduce my sentence.
"I want to board as soon as I can. Please have someone help with my things."
Yes I'm nervous, but if necessary, I'll start telling what I know about him right here—and in loud, clear English too, for the benefit of the passengers. He knows this; he sees in my posture that I'm stronger than he. My only restraint will be for Anastasia's sake: a big fuss now would keep us apart for too many years.
Too many years. I think my need to postpone the real things has expired. I'm not afraid to give, to see, to feel, to be. To cherish her even though she is both purer than I and less perfect than my ideal. To love as I loved Alyosha, accepting that part of all such happiness must die. To know—and not shrink at the triteness of it—that whatever I eventually do in life is less important than what I am. I remember Maya at the counter of the Lenin Library. It doesn't matter now, I have my baby. I'm full of joyful gratitude for the power, at last, to understand her with more than my mind.
Still grimacing. Bastard is trying to think of a scare tactic to deprive me of this. But he doesn't want a confrontation with me, especially in front of witnesses. If he does find the contraband, he'll confiscate it quietly. And in the long run, this doesn't matter. I'll take the real things with me.
I
