“Is Sashenka really a Bolshevik, Papa? How’s Aunt Ariadna? Is it true the doctor prescribed her opium?” Mouche asked questions and hummed to herself as he tried to answer them. Vika glared at her father each time her mother pressed her lips together, sighed or sniffed sanctimoniously.
No one could ruin a meal for Gideon. Whether it was kasha in his dreary apartment or a sturgeon steak at the Contant, he was a vigorous trencherman, recounting the family news, smacking his lips, sniffing the nosh like a happy dog and soiling his beard without the slightest embarrassment.
“You don’t eat as you taught us to eat,” said Vika. “Your manners are terrible, aren’t they, Mama?”
“Don’t do as I do,” replied Gideon. “Do as I say!”
“How can you tell the children that?” asked his wife.
“It’s hypocrisy,” said Vika.
“You two are a regular trade union of sulking women! Cheer up,” said Gideon, putting his feet up on a filthy chair, already marked by his boots on other occasions.
“No more jokes, Gideon,” said Vera, sending Vika and Mouche to do their homework.
The moment he was alone with Vera, everything changed. Her drawn sallow face, made for martyrdom, irritated him. She was always wiping her nose with a green-stained rag. Her prissiness maddened him. He adored his daughters—or rather he adored Mouche—but what had happened to Vera? A child of the provincial bourgeois, the daughter of a Mariupol schoolteacher, she had been educated, an intellectual who worked on the literary journal Apollo, full of vim and enthusiasm, with a high bosom, blue eyes and golden hair. Now the bosom hung around her waist like udders, the eyes were watered down to a tepid pallor, and the hair was greying. How he had been so foolish as to get her pregnant again, he could barely believe! But on Mouche’s birthday he had been overcome with a sort of erotic nostalgia for how she had been, forgetting how she was now. The fact that he himself had done this to her and that he felt guilty about it made him resent her all the more.
Only Mouche delighted him, and he decided that when she was a little older he would invite her to live with him. As for now, he could hardly stand it here another moment. Great events were taking shape on the streets; parties were throbbing in the hotels; a writer must see history being made; and he was stuck here with this straitlaced harridan.
Vera droned on with her complaints: the morning sickness was gone but her back ached and she could not sleep. The doorman made comments about Gideon’s carryings-on. Vika had told her friends that her father was a revolutionary and a drunkard; Mouche was insubordinate and rude, the teachers complained about her and she was growing out of all her boots and dresses. But there was no money; it was hard to get meat in the shops and impossible to find bread; the neighbors had heard from someone else in the building that Gideon had been seen drunk in the early hours in the Europa Hotel; and how did he think that made her feel?
A full belly never made Gideon sleepy; it went straight to his loins. It fortified his libido. For some reason, he cast his mind back to the lunch last week at his brother’s house. The Lorises were famous for their happy marriage but the boring count was not at the lunch so Gideon had given Missy what he called the Gideon Manifesto: let us pleasure ourselves now for life is short and tomorrow we die. (Obvious as it was, the manifesto was surprisingly successful!) Now Gideon recalled how, as he was saying good-bye to Missy, she had looked into his face with her crinkly, twinkling eyes—her laughter making creases around them—and squeezed his hand unmistakably, saying, “It would be wonderful to talk more about Meyerhold and the new theater. I suppose you won’t be at Baroness Rozen’s at the Astoria on…,” and she named a date. It happened that it was tonight. Gideon had neglected to follow up—but now his refreshed and well-fed phallus, a brilliant interpreter of female intentions, stirred. He had to get to that party right away.
Missy had never paid him the slightest attention. She was worldly enough—she had to be open-minded to be friends with Ariadna. But she had never really flirted with anyone and certainly not with him. Gideon reflected that the war, the loss of respect, the ever-changing ministers and the disturbances on the streets must be shaking free some ripe fruit that would never otherwise have fallen to the ground. He thought about Missy Loris’s body—that bobbed blonde was skinny and had no bosom—yet he suddenly hungered for the sheer unadulterated joy of tasting new skin, lips, the satin of her inner thighs. He smiled to himself: this ursine giant was capable of Herculean erotic feats that no one—except the women themselves—would have believed possible. He proposed the most deliciously outré acts of lovemaking in delicate French phrases that liberated the restraint of chorus girls and countesses alike. Yet he had never become complacent about this erotic success. Why did these lovely bubelehs, these babes, choose me? he thought. Me? Of all people! I’m an ugly brute—like a Jewish innkeeper! But what the hell, I’m not complaining!
He just could not help himself: he had to find Missy right away that night. But if he handed over the two hundred rubles to Vera now, he would have nothing to buy the ladies drinks and snacks. What to do? He groaned. He’d do what he always did.
Moments later, as Vera washed up morosely, Gideon fled, leaving a hundred rubles on the hall table and keeping the rest for himself. Mouche helped him pull on his felt boots and handed him “our Menshevik article!” while Vika shook her head, pursing her lips.
“You’re leaving already, Papa? I knew it. I knew it. I knew it!”
“We’ll change the locks, you deadbeat!” shouted Vera, but he was gone.
Outside in the streets, Gideon could not find a sleigh. As for Vera, the whiner would manage, he thought. Vera and Vika: what a pair of sourpusses! I’m a coward, an incorrigible shameful hedonist—but I’m so happy! Dizzy with anticipation! What’s wrong with happiness? We make our own lives! What are humans? We’re just animals. I’ll die young. I won’t make old bones so I’m just doing what my species does. Besides, I had to go! I have an article to deliver to the newspaper.
He smelled the icy air. Strange sounds echoed in the distance. Gunshots crackled, factory whistles sang, engines revved and screeched, voices chanted—but here all seemed oddly quiet. But as he strode toward the Astoria Hotel, his mind racing with the anticipation of Missy’s bare shoulders, her soft belly, her smells of female sweat and perfume, he stepped out into the wider streets. It started as a murmur, became a throbbing and grew into a roar. The broad boulevards were filling with masses of people, their covered heads and heavy coats making padded bundles of them as if they were automata all marching in the same direction.
Gideon weaved in and out, sometimes letting the current carry him, sometimes standing aside and watching it rush past. He was excited. As a writer, he was witnessing something. But where was the army, the Cossacks?
He stepped into the hotel, home again among its gleaming parquet floors, the shiny gold and black elevators, the dark oak bar.
“The usual, Monsieur Zeitlin?” asked Roustam the barman. Inside the Astoria, the polished formality had given way to a wild and carefree holiday. Tossing his coat and hat at the hat-check girl and forgetting to remove his boots, Gideon padded toward the private room where Baroness Rozen was holding a soirée. A girl in a backless orange dress, a feather boa and yellow shoes—what Vera called a woman of easy virtue, but what Gideon affectionately called a bubeleh—hailed him like an old friend, and he beamed at her. She was holding a drink and offering him a sip. The receptionists laughed at her: were they drunk too? A couple, an officer and what appeared to be a respectable lady wearing a double rope of pearls, sat kissing on the sofa in the foyer as if they were in a kabinet, not a public place. A doorman opened the double doors to the party and Gideon noticed that the red-faced servant did not bow, just smirked as if he knew what was inside Gideon’s head.