I was seized by the idea that I had somehow wandered into Metro-2. It was said that in the 1950s, after Stalin began living and working full-time at his Near Dacha in Volynskoye, construction of the line had been abandoned. Rumors of this sort tended to be disinformation. The military abandoned nothing. Millions of rubles had been poured into this tunnel, equipping it with the most advanced military technology. There were other stations on the line, vast caverns and intricate warrens. The line had likely remained a military installation, a shadow city inhabited by apparatchik-phantoms. The commuters walking shoulder-to-shoulder with me carried torn string shopping bags and their clothes were ordinary univermag suits and jackets, but I detected a distinctive confidence in their stride and a wariness in their glare. Whether army or KGB, they knew the secret underground workings of our society, which manifested themselves only obliquely in the events that played out in public view in our newspapers and television reports, on our boulevards and avenues. Or perhaps Metro-2 was the real city, and the above-ground Moscow was the one in shadow.
The last corridor discharged onto an unfamiliar platform, which, like every other metro station in the capital, was lavishly decorated around a particular theme.
This station seemed to imply some kind of southern motif. The station’s supporting columns were tiled with scenes of swarthy peasant-workers at garden banquets and vineyards set beneath distant mountains. Grapes and other subtropical fruit were depicted on the pediments above the platform. They were alternated with garlanded, hammer-and-sickled seals of one of the organs of power, I couldn’t recognize which. Someone behind me took me firmly by the arm and I recalled that it was the emblem of the old NKVD. Through the foggish heat that had descended upon me, I heard my name called.
“I was just thinking of you a few minutes ago. I must be a witch,” Marina said. “A picture of your face popped into my head and look, here you are.”
“Amazing coincidences happen,” I replied slowly, recovering from a series of sentiments that passed through me in the space of a few seconds: first, there had been fright, and then an unspeakable elation, and then embarrassment at the fright and elation. “Even in a planned economy.”
We were standing close enough to each other to embrace, or to dance. Buffeted by the rush of commuters, their bags and parcels brushing against us, we began to sway, as if we were indeed dancing—a lazy, slow, subtropical rumba.
We appraised each other again and I was revisited by the impulse to which I had first given in: to turn away. I repressed it and at last said, “How’s everything?”
Marina groaned. “Complicated. I’m not with Iosif Spirin anymore.”
I bobbed my head sympathetically, but with a slightly quizzical expression fixed upon my face, as if I hadn’t known that she had been with Spirin at all. It occurred to me to resent that she thought I was keeping track of her love life, though in fact I was.
She pursed her lips and frowned. “Where are we?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I thought I was going to Ploshchad Revolutsii. I think my stairs are at the other end of the platform.”
“I’ve never been here before.”
“They’re always opening new stations,” I said and forced a laugh.
At that moment, a train roared into the station, displacing stale tunnel air and discharging a swirl of passengers. Unsure of what else to say, and unable to speak over the noise anyway, I waited until the train left. Meanwhile, Marina studied my face as if she intended to write about it. I wondered if she had been pursuing me. Had she too been caught in the labyrinth of tunnels, corridors, and escalator chutes? Before the first train could leave, another arrived from the opposite direction. And then another every sixty seconds, according to the digital clocks at each end of the platform. We had stumbled into the tumult of rush hour.
I asked her if she would come with me for a cup of coffee, but the invitation was completely submerged in the noise. I couldn’t hear my words nor even feel their consonants upon my lips. The long hall was scoured by sound, a great onrushing, rarefying force as elemental as gravity or light.
“Marina,” I said. “I want to take you home.”
This was an experiment. She smiled and pointed to her ears and made a gesture of helplessness.
“You can’t hear me,” I said, searching her face for any kind of acknowledgment.
She smiled at my persistence in trying to speak.
“Good. Marina, you’re driving me crazy. I can’t stop thinking about you. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s your success. I resent it. I resent you.”
She shook her head to show her incomprehension.
“But I want to make love to you,” I said. “I want to fuck you silly. I want to ride your ass from one end of my flat to the other. I want to smear sperm all over your tits, your face, all over your body. I want to put my cock in your mouth.”
I was shouting now and I still couldn’t hear my voice. Of course, Marina should have been able to lip-read at least some of what I was saying, but even that, I felt in the white heat of the moment, had no consequence. The safest place to practice the genre of silence was in a tunnel of noise.
Marina laughed, to show that she at least comprehended the dispensations allowed us a hundred meters beneath the Kremlin. She would never be sure of what I said and later I could solemnly deny everything, since I couldn’t hear it myself. She could deny it too, even what she was sure of. Now she began shouting too. The trains arrived and left. The clocks were reset to zero. Commuters grimaced at the spectacle we were making. We said whatever came into our heads, whatever we wished. My eyes focused on her finely shaped mouth and, thrillingly, I thought I saw it shape itself around words that encompassed lewd acts. This spurred me on, to match my own lewdness with hers—“let’s fuck right here on the platform,” I cried—spinning out obscene fantasies with increasing abandon, things I never even knew I could imagine. Then three words emerged from her lips, clearly readable. The words were: “democracy and freedom.”
With that, the waves of machinery cast forth by the agate print of the metro schedule met at a point of destructive interference. The station emptied of trains. The noise subsided, despite the hundreds of travelers making their way to the platform exits. Marina and I heard each other laugh, nervously now. I was shocked by the words I had spoken, but even more so by what I believed were hers. We fell silent. Now that she could hear me, I wasn’t sure what I wished to say. I looked down the hall, the clock had passed the sixty second mark, but there was no sign of a train approaching on either track.
“Marina,” I said.
My voice was perfectly audible. Her smile was warm. Our eyes met as they had the night of our reading.
“Marina,” I repeated. Then I said, “Thank you for that review in Znamya.”
She made a small, disappointed laugh and the air deflated from her.
“There’s no need to thank me. I write whatever I like.”
“Of course,” I said, stung by her rebuke. This did not stop me from adding: “And your novel. I liked that too.”
Another train finally arrived and we embraced in farewell. In my arms she assumed a substantiality that I had not expected, as if before I had only confronted the idea of Marina, and this was Marina herself. I began to tighten my embrace, but, no longer smiling, she abruptly brushed my cheeks with her lips, pulled away, and went to the opposite end of the platform. I watched her go. As I returned to the staircase that had brought me here, a second train arrived. It was just then, before the train obscured it, that I looked up to read the name of the station emblazoned on the wall on the other side of the tracks: Beryevskaya, after Lavrenty Beria, the Georgianborn secret police chief executed in the weeks following Stalin’s death. At least, that’s what I thought I read.