“The Soviet generation of engineers has been replaced by a generation of couriers!” Tolya pronounced when he caught sight of Sasha. “You will shortly have a statue erected to you in our courtyard. We live in gone times, friend. What more could you ask?”
The commune turned out to be just what Sasha needed. He was from a distant Moscow suburb and only went home at weekends, staying with friends during the week. Relations with his friends got strained, and on what he got paid the commune was the right place for him. A more suitable berth was not immediately available, so Sasha was accommodated in the bathroom.
He was skinny and drained by alcoholism was Sasha. His knobbly knees were like shrivelled pumpkins and brought tears to my eyes. He had huge thick glasses which concealed the withered face of a man who has been dumped by three wives in succession. He had some innate logical deficit, which meant that listening to simple stories about his life entailed plunging into impenetrable thickets of personal and world history until you were totally disorientated. Nevertheless, I listened to them. We started off in our room when we got back from work and finished in the kitchen at dawn. Still there was no end in sight. We skipped college, and soon every aspect of reality began to fuse in my mind into total nonsense.
Sasha had a ridiculous, endearing, blind vulnerability, and an ability to get on with absolutely anyone. He was kind and undemanding, so I listened to him and hung out with him while he was living in the bathroom. If there was any suggestion of infatuation in my feverishness, then only because I had caught it from Lenka, like ‘flu. It was, nevertheless, a relief to see my temptation terminate one evening when Sasha and Lenka went off together to the nearest drink kiosk, returned after midnight and ended up together in Lenka’s bed.
That was the night I saw the imp on her pillow.
“Hey, Sasha, let’s play Robinson Crusoe and imagine no one will ever come to rescue us.” The campfire dries us and we warm up. We cut bread into thin squares, sprinkle them with salt and toast them on twigs. Our tap water is sweeter than wine. Sasha has an old canvas tent. All night we keep warm by hugging each other, then lying back to back. The blankets are too thin for a May night on a lake.
I dream of Producer. He is sitting in a boat fishing. A wonderful new guitar is floating on the water, its strings gleaming. “Is this all for me?” happy Julia sings on the beach, jumping up and down and clapping her hands. Julia is a child, a girl with pigtails. She doesn’t yet know she will sing songs and rescue the underground rock music of Moscow from the ruins. Will everyone there be her friends?
I wake up hungry. Warmed by the sun, the tent has become as muggy as a swamp. We crawl out. “Sasha, do you really not have any food?” “We’ll meet up with them,” Sasha says. We strike the tent and get going, munching bread and salt.
“Look, we can see the whole island. It can’t be that big. See, it’s round. We’ll find them. “Julia!” Sasha yells towards the woods, although no sound is coming from that direction. I try again to see everything at once and from above: there we are, there are the woods, there is lots and lots of water. I see nobody else.
“Sasha, let’s play at being eagles catching gophers in the open.” The woods are still wet and bare and they haven’t warmed up. Nobody lives here. We walk through them like orphans. “Julia!” Sasha bellows like a moose. “Pro-du-cer!” I yell. “Hey, Sasha, why aren’t we shouting for Lenka?” Sasha’s face darkens. Even when there are three of them, what Lenka wants Lenka gets, and Sasha knows it. He says nothing. We finish the bread. That’s it, man, now there’s nothing left to fuel your jealousy.
“I still have some sugar,” Sasha says. Sugar and water are good, only we’ve finished the water. We come to a swamp. “Sasha, do you remember where the lake was?” “No. Hang on a minute.” He leans over and fills our bottle. We drink the water and eat the sugar. “That’s better,” Sasha says and stretches contentedly. “First time I’ve drunk swamp water!” “It’s pure,” he says. “There was a toad in it. Toads never sit in dirty water.”
They both changed suddenly. One mania fused with another and Sasha entered a state where he could not let Lenka out of his sight. Lenka liked that. They stuck to each other like differently coloured pieces of modelling clay on Tolya’s recycled picture boards. They had a long and happy life together. Really long by Lenka’s standards and really happy by those of the commune. When love becomes dependency, however, the children forget to play by the rules. As luck would have it, this was the moment Julia showed up.
You were not destined to live with us, Julia, but your songs, drunken, crazy, toxic, were about all of us, the waifs and strays of Yakimanka. That is why we loved you, Julia. That is why you were one of us, and in our hearts each of us would have followed you to the ends of the earth. Every age needs an idol, and as we don’t have one right now, why not you, Julia, star of the Moscow beer bars? We were at one with you when you were singing about us and for us. You didn’t sell out, and anyway, who would have bought you?
Sasha brought her to us. She started singing rap in the autumn, and by midwinter her Producer had materialised. It looked like her creative career was coming good. The commune as a whole, however, not yet back on an even keel, succumbed to a new bout of fever. Roma Jah hesitated for a moment, frowned like an old wise Indian and said, “It’s all over!”
His pronouncement came after Sasha, not sparing himself, had run all over Moscow sticking up posters for Julia’s concert, while Lenka tattooed on her arm from wrist to elbow the word ‘Producer’ in runic script.
We are playing associations. Tolya is leading and I am answering. Everybody listens, punctuating a fraught silence with laughter.
“Piano,” says Tolya. “Lame dog.”
“Alarm clock.” “Peevish schoolkid.”
“Lenka.” “Little girl lost.” (I see her laughing and biting Sasha’s ear with delight.)
“Sasha.” “Boy reading with a torch under the bedclothes at night.” (I see Sasha wants to say something, but he is too slow.)
“Julia,” Tolya says, getting the bit between his teeth. “Girl looking forward to New Year presents.” (What a pity you aren’t here with us, Julia.)
“Titch, all your associations follow the same lines. That’s questionable.” “They aren’t associations, they’re what I see.”
“Okay then. What about Producer?”
“Producer, erm, er… He is…” For the first time I am having to think. It is a pity he isn’t here either for me to glance at him. “No, I can’t see him. For some reason I can’t see anything.”
Producer was pale, thin, and wore jeans with holes in them, socks with holes in them and shirts with buttons missing, but he knew the right people at the right clubs, and seemed even to know people in higher and classier places too. He said nothing, though. He waited. He was good at waiting, was Producer, bluffing but with a Joker in his pocket. Or had he?
In the meantime, he showered advice on Julia. They would come back together, Julia would sing the way she always did, and then Producer would say what ideally she should be doing. From my gallery I could see his eyes — blue-grey, intelligent — and I could understand Lenka. From my gallery I could see Julia’s lips — thin, with a twist of indifference and a little white lower tooth, and I could understand Sasha. From my gallery I could see absolutely everything, and it all got terribly mixed up.
Madness was building up in the commune again. It built up all winter and by spring had the power of a hibernating atom bomb. Lenka and Sasha made up and broke up, moved on to a brother-sister relationship, then fought and gave each other purple love bites. Julia and Producer continued their quiet, steady relationship and I watched them from my gallery. The light from a nearby bulb dimmed in my eyes because I couldn’t see both couples at once. My home is full of children who have forgotten they are children but all want games to play.