Shame-shaming and cajoling, she persuaded the others to drink up and follow her lead. (The staunchest holdout was concerned about sanitary considerations and possible infection.) Swiftly removed and scrunched into balls, four more pairs of panties were tucked beneath the cushion of a broken chair; the girls seemed more embarrassed by their old-fashioned underwear than by exposing themselves to a total stranger. Squatting on the square of ancient carpet, bumping backs and steadying one another's legs, they passed the box back and forth as if it indeed contained chocolates. For having tried one, tipsy delight prompted them to test their skill with another; and then a third ... a game of inserting, cooing, giggling and withdrawing that climaxed in a romp for the last tampon. Girlish squeals echoed from the barren walls as the happy friends demonstrated "how / look" and tugged at the others' strings.
Neither the strangeness of the scene nor the girls' playfulness
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blunted my excitement as I waited for my fun. But in five minutes, the novelty had worn off. The new toys were withdrawn for wrapping in the inevitable Pravda and discarded under the communal kitchen's corroded sink. The empty carton was just an empty carton; the Russian compulsion to splurge had been indulged and satisfied. (Even the most expensive Swiss chocolates, each one a rare luxury, would have been consumed to the last piece, just as every bottle of vodka, port or brandy in the country is drained to the last drop in the same session it is opened.) The girls were now discussing a handsome actor's film debut, and my attempt to steer the conversation back toward the seemingly promised sex drew rebuking glances. It was my turn to be baffled. I like to claim that I introduced tampons to Russia, and maybe I did; but if I were to write a story about the episode, wouldn't it need a better ending?
"Can you get me more jiggers?" Masha repeats. When the party broke up, she popped off" to a movie with the other girls and did not mention Tampax for weeks. But she asked for some when her next period began, and I've been a faithful source of supply ever since.
"I will if you promise to finish the story about your brother's girls."
Masha tells dozens of tales about life in Perm, often not realizing why they're amusing. Yesterday she reminisced about the first time she was old enough to vote in a Supreme Soviet election. Oversleeping, she did not report to her polling station by noon, the hour at which election workers like to have the show wrapped up. When a representative knocked at her flat to inquire what was the matter, her mother, who had already voted, volunteered to run down again and drop her daughter's pre-marked ballot into the box. The officials were delighted: with the vote unquestioned in any case, their principal interest was in winning the competition to be the first district to report the unanimous "Yes!"
But my favorite story of Masha's is about the schoolteacher who replaced the KGB agent as her lover. The young man's provincial political staunchness helped get him selected to a small student delegation to Austria, from which the political careerist—who else goes abroad?—returned "with an even bigger
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head and all the Western glad rags he could buy or beg." But because a Young Communist secretary, which he was, would court scandal and downfall by being seen in such foreign gear, his new wardrobe never saw the light of Russian day. Instead, he modeled his mod shirts and tight trousers in the safety of a sidekick's flat, a treat to which he sometimes invited Masha until she "wised up" and left him.
The radio bleeps ten o'clock. Masha pulls herself up and suggests we ride into the city together in fifteen minutes or so. "But don't keep me waiting, please. My boots are falling apart, I mustn't be late."
She's going to an Armenian called "Uncle Grisha," a war invalid permitted to operate a private repair service. Uncle Grisha is rich on his reputation as the only Moscow cobbler able to cope with new Western platform shoes (he fabricates soles from old vegetable cartons) together with his skill in fooling the inspectors who check on him constantly to impose crippling taxes. Since only the smart set has this footwear, he's patronized by many of the city's lovelies, some of whom allow him to lavish his earnings on restaurant meals for them, and a few of whom even grant him their favors. It's as entertaining to visit his workroom as the studio of Zhenya, my highly talented painter friend.
Meanwhile, I sit down to tackle Leonid's novel, his one effort he likes enough to have shown me. He's rewritten it four times in response to changing political desiderata, for he much hopes to have it published and preserve some of its truths. The story is about the entwined fates of a Moscow lad and a Luftwaffe pilot he first "encounters" when he sees his bomber overhead in 1941. The more I read, the more it reveals itself as a feeble imitation of The Young Lions. There is even a scene, remarkably like Irwin Shaw's, of the seemingly doomed pilot regretting all the women he could have had and didn't; and I wonder what to say to Leonid, who is hanging on my "Western" verdict.
The disappointment of the first chapters prompts me to nag Masha that her "fifteen minutes" elapsed half an hour ago. After an additional quarter-hour, she is wrapped in her mottled acetate coat, topped by a pink acrylic hat: ready! I'm going to the Lenin Library at last; she to the basement workshop of her
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cobbler. The cold is as severe as it appeared from the window; we set out to make the ten-minute walk to the metro station in eight. On the way, Masha tells me not about her brother but about a Marxism-Leninism teacher of the old generation, who bristles at "insults to revolutionary sacrifice" and tends to flunk students who appear before him in clothes with any trace of style. His examinees are careful to dress "proletarian," the boys in open collars and no jackets, the girls without makeup or high heels. Masha herself is planning to go in overalls from her native Perm.
Soon I'm telling her about the summer / spent in overalls, when I was a high-school senior trying to "return to the land." The old farmer I slaved for, whose nastiness to me and his animals I took very seriously at the time, was named Blackcock. Doubled up at my attempts to render this in Russian, we lose the path and sink into the snow.
At this moment, I catch sight of a laborer on the skeleton of a new University building. A pretty girl with a peeved expression —no doubt bricklaying was not her first choice—she peers down from her scaffold, picking us out from the pedestrian stream trickling into the station. Construction in this temperature? Yes, on it goes, despite the vast extra effort and waste. (Even if the girl were not partially paralyzed by cold and clothes, would she give a damn where she slapped her mortar?) Somehow, I know this daily walk will go into my memory with the image of this tough-but-fragile worker: trowel dripping half-frozen mortar, smatterings and gobs from the head to the toe of her weather-beaten laborer's quilts, a thick smear of carrot-colored lipstick to proclaim that she's a woman.
Twenty thousand identical colleagues are putting in their eight hours at a swarm of nearby sites. I look back and wave to this one. Her cheekbones remind me of my Anastasia, and the day takes on another dimension.
The Lenin Library flanks the city's epicenter, a short block from the northwest hypotenuse of the Kremhn walls. You rarely give it a glance except when the guide of a passing busload of winter tourists summons attention to the landmark: a pile of gray masonry and casement windows in the style of the functional office buildings of the first Five-Year Plans. It was designed in the early 1930s before the birth of Stalinist architecture, and although built as a monument, with statues of peasant and proletarian heroes, its slap-dash construction shows in the uneven wear of the spacious steps and porticoed facade.