I also thought: What a stupid man I am to be sitting alone at a circus in Moscow. I could not imagine why I wasn't doing something vastly more enjoyable, like sailing off East Sandwich, Massachusetts. And then I remembered that I was on my way to Mongolia and China.
There was a message waiting for me when I got back to the Hotel Ukraine: Olga will call tomorrow at 12. She called on the stroke of noon the next day to say she would call again at two. At two she said she and Natasha would meet me at three-thirty. These phone calls had the effect of making our meeting seem necessary and inevitable. It was only when I was waiting on the hotel steps that it occurred to me that I had no idea why I was seeing them at all.
Natasha walked by but did not greet me. She was wearing old clothes and carrying a shopping basket. She winked at me; I followed her to a taxi in which Olga was already sitting and smoking. When I got in, Olga gave the driver an order and he drove off. After that they intermittently quarreled over whether this was the right direction or the quickest way.
After twenty minutes of this—we were now deep in the high-rise Moscow suburbs—I said, "Where are we going?"
"Not far."
There were people raking leaves and picking up trash from the streets. I had never seen so many street sweepers. I asked what was going on.
Olga said that this was the one day in the year when people worked for nothing, tidying up the city. The day was called subodnik and this work was given free to honor Lenin—his birthday was two days away.
"Don't you think you should be out there with a shovel, Olga?"
"I am too busy," she said, and her laugh said: Not on your life!
"Are we going to a house?"
"We are going to my girfriend's apartment."
Olga gave more directions to the driver. He turned right, entered a side street and then cut down a dirt road and cursed. That bad road connected one housing estate with another. He kept driving on these back roads among tall, bare apartment houses and then he stopped the car and babbled angrily.
"We can walk the rest of the way," Olga said. "You can pay him."
The driver snatched my rubles and drove off as we walked towards a sixteen-story building, through children playing and their parents sweeping the pavements in a good subodnik spirit.
No one took any notice of me. I was merely a man in a raincoat following two women down a muddy sidewalk, past walls that had been scribbled on, past broken windows and through a smashed door to a hallway where three baby carriages were parked and some of the floor tiles were missing. It could have been a housing estate in south London or the Bronx. The elevator had been vandalized but it still worked. It was varnished wood, with initials scratched onto it. We took it to the top floor.
"Excuse me," Olga said. "I couldn't get my friend on the phone. I must talk to her first."
But by now I had imagined that we had come to a place where I was going to be threatened and probably robbed. There were three huge Muscovites behind the door. They would seize me and empty my pockets, and then blindfold me and drop me somewhere in Moscow. They didn't go in for kidnapping. I asked myself whether I was worried, and answered: Kind of.
I was somewhat reassured when I saw a surprised and sluttish-looking woman answer the door. Her hair was tangled, she wore a bathrobe. It was late afternoon—she had just woken up. She whispered a little to Olga and then she let us in.
Her name was Tatyana and she was annoyed at having been disturbed—she had been watching television in bed. I asked to use the toilet and made a quick assessment of the apartment. It was large—four big rooms and a central hall with bookshelves. All the curtains were drawn. It smelled of vegetables and hair spray and that unmistakable odor that permeates places in which there are late-sleepers—the smell of bedclothes and bodies and feety aromas.
"You want tea?"
I said yes, and we all sat in the small kitchen. Tatyana brushed her hair and put on makeup as she boiled water in a kettle and made tea.
There were magazines on the table—two oldish copies of Vogue, and last month's Tatler and Harper's Bazaar. Seeing them in that place gave me what I was sure would be a lasting hatred for those magazines.
"My friend from Italy brings them for me," Tatyana said.
"She has many foreign friends," Olga said. "That is why I wanted you to meet her. Because you are our foreign friend. You want to change rubles?"
I said no—there was nothing I wanted to buy.
"We can find something for you," Olga said, "and you can give us U.S. dollars."
"What are you going to find?"
"You like Natasha. Natasha likes you. Why don't you make love to her?"
I stood up and went to the window. The three women stared at me, and when I looked at Natasha she smiled demurely and batted her eyelashes. Beside her was her shopping basket with a box of detergent, some fresh spinach wrapped in newspaper, some cans of food, a pack of plastic clothespins and a box of disposable diapers.
"Here?" I said. "Now?"
They all smiled at me. Out the window I saw people sweeping the sidewalks, raking leaves and shoveling up piles of rubbish—a little unselfish demonstration of civic pride for Lenin's birthday.
"How much will it cost me to make love to Natasha?"
"One hundred and seventy U.S. dollars."
'That's rather a precise figure," I said. "How did you arrive at that price?"
'That's how much a cassette recorder costs at the Berioska shop."
"I'll think about it."
"You have to decide now," Olga said sternly. "Do you have a credit card?"
"You take credit cards?"
"No, the Berioska shop can."
'That's an awful lot of money, Olga."
"Hah!" Tatyana jeered. "My boyfriends give me radios, tape recorders, cassettes, clothes—thousands of dollars. And you're arguing about a few hundred dollars."
"Listen, I'm not boasting—believe me. But if I like someone I don't usually buy her before we go to bed. In America we do it for fun."
Olga said, "If we don't have dollars we can't buy radios at the Berioska. It closes at six o'clock. What's wrong?"
"I don't like being hurried."
"All this talk! You could have finished by now!"
I hated this and had a strong desire to get away from the nagging. It was hot in the kitchen, the tea was bitter, all those people raking leaves sixteen floors down depressed me.
I said, "Why don't we go to the Berioska shop first?"
Tatyana dressed and we found a taxi. It was a twenty-minute ride and well after five by the time we arrived. But for me it was simply a way of saving face—and saving money. I had been disgusted with myself back there at the apartment.
Before we went into the shop the three women started bickering. Olga said that it was all my fault for not making love to Natasha when I should have. Tatyana had to meet her daughter at school, Natasha was due home because she was going to the Black Sea tomorrow with her husband and small child—and was counting on having a cassette recorder; and Olga herself had to be home to rook dinner. Vremya, Natasha said, vremya. Time, time.
I had never seen such expensive electronic equipment—overpriced radios and tape decks, a Sony Walkman for $300.
"Natasha wants one of those."
Olga was pointing to a $200 cassette machine.
"That's a ridiculous price."
"It's a good cassette. Japanese."
I was looking at Natasha and thinking how thoroughly out of touch these people were with market forces.
"Vremya," Natasha said urgently.
"These are nice," I began trying on the fur hats. "Wouldn't you like one of these?"
Olga said, "You must buy something now. Then we go."
And I imagined it—the cassette recorder in a Berioska bag, and the dash to Tatyana's, and the fumble upstairs with Natasha panting vremya, vremya, and then off I'd go, saying to myself: You've just been screwed.