I walked to Saint Basil's, and to the Metropole Hotel, where I had stayed in 1968—it was now a sort of monument — and strolled through the GUM store, looking at the merchandise.
While I was staring at some very inferior-looking alarm clocks, I realized that the woman on my right and the one on my left were sidling nearer to me.
"Is nice clock? You like clock?"
I said, "Alarm clocks wake you up. That's why I hate them."
"Is funny," the woman on my right said. She was dark, in her early twenties. "You want to change rubles?"
The surprising thing to me was that one of these young women was pushing a little boy in a baby carriage, and the other had a bag of what looked like old laundry. They were pretty women, but obviously preoccupied with domestic chores — airing the baby, doing the wash. I invited them to the ballet — I had bought pairs of tickets. They said no, they had to cook dinner for their husbands and do the housework, but what about changing some money? The official rate was seventy-two cents to the ruble: they offered me ten times that.
"What would I do with all those rubles?"
"So many things."
The dark one was Olga, the blonde Natasha — a ballet dancer, she said. Olga spoke Italian; Natasha only Russian, and had a dancer's slimness and pallor, and china-blue eyes with a Slavic slant and an expressive Russian mouth.
I said I was walking — I needed the exercise.
"We will go with you!"
That was why, about ten minutes later, I came to be walking with a Russian woman on each arm, carrying Natasha's laundry — Olga pushing little Boris in his pram — down Karl Marx Prospekt. Olga was chatting to me in Italian and Natasha was laughing.
"You seem to be doing all right for yourself, Paul!"
It was a group of people from the tour, heading back to the bus. I was delighted that they saw me — what would they make of it?
The women and I stopped at a café and had a hot chocolate, and they said they wanted to see me again—"We can talk!" They made a fuss about the time, probably because they were deceiving their husbands, but we agreed on a time when they would call me.
That evening I went to the circus and was reminded of how much I hate circuses, especially communist ones. Everyone says: Rumanians are wonderful acrobats! Bulgarians are brilliant jugglers! You haven't lived until you've seen a Russian on a tightrope — and a Chinese performer can balance a whole set of crockery on a chopstick he's holding in his teeth! Why is this so? Why all the flying humans, and people tumbling like ferrets, and doing amazing things with stools?
This Moscow Circus had bears that walked and danced — big hairy things, slavering and pirouetting; and dogs that balanced on one leg, and seals that gleamed and manipulated balls with their flippers. All the animals looked human in their frightened way — walking stiffly and unnaturally on their hind legs, and giving pleading glances to their trainers, as if they were going to be kicked or electrocuted if they did the wrong dance step.
It all made me very uneasy; it seemed to me funless and frantic. Was I taking it too seriously in thinking that it was the most vulgar expression of peasant entertainment? It was what poor people did to get kopecks thrown at them in the bazaars and market squares. It was open-air amusement, and it made me think of serfs and slaves and gypsies: men leaping like dogs, dogs goose-stepping like men. And virtually all the interest in the women performers was inspired by their scanty costumes — so shocking in the puritan society of political commissars.
It is hard to imagine a well-educated and fair-minded society producing circus performers, or any sensitive person training a bear to dance. Circuses may flourish in some prosperous countries, but the artists, so-called, come from elsewhere. The Ringling brothers were Wisconsin farmboys — very poor — who liberated themselves by learning to juggle and tumble. Rudolf Ringling could balance a plow on his chin. Today, Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus gets most of its stars from either Eastern Europe or China.
The simplest explanation of the circus's popularity is that most people like a spectacle — music, tumbling, noise, sex, patriotism and cheap thrills. They enjoy watching white dwarfs riding elephants or one of the more popular acts that Ringling Brothers presents: twenty-five black people playing basketball on unicycles. There is another side to this. "The desire to turn men into animals was the principal motive for the development of slavery," Elias Canetti wrote in the chapter entitled "Transformation" in Crowds and Power. "It is as difficult to overestimate its strength as that of its opposite desire: to turn animals into men… popular amusements like the public exhibition of performing animals."
The spectacle of the Moscow Circus supported the truth of that statement. Nothing was more revealing of Soviet thought than a Russian lion tamer, and the process that lay behind that big brown bear's clumsy jig or the lobster quadrille said a great deal about the political system.
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.