“What stories?” Tanya asked.
“Well, I heard from a friend of a friend who knows someone who’s friends with one of the Party kids. You know, they all travel to the West like it’s Crimea. So, that particular comrade lived in America for a year and he said that they have special pornography schools there.” Sergeich made a sour face at Auntie Roza. “They teach … technique and some kind of philosophy of love there, as if it could be taught.” He hit his chest. “It’s amoral and it’s expensive. They don’t have free education there, so not everyone can attend. Those who do, you know, they have to bring a partner. They don’t have to be married, and — can you imagine? — it doesn’t even have to be a woman for a man. You know what I mean? They study special books and have homework assignments, also class demonstrations. As if it was some woodworking class!”
Pea Soup barged into the kitchen, tore through the bedsheets, and yelled out of the window: “Kolya! Grisha! Lunch is ready. March home on the double!” The poodle began to yap again. Pea Soup squatted down and clapped her big hands right by the dog’s flappy ears.
“Don’t you dare do that again, grazhdanka!” Sergeich yelled after Pea Soup. “Tak, where was I? These so-called students learn to hold — well, you know what I’m talking about — for a whole hour and sometimes more. And during the, the … during this, they see God. Yes, God. It is insulting to me even as a nonbeliever. But this is in America, I don’t know about Italy. Or Bulgaria.” Tanya thought she saw Sergeich wink at Auntie Roza.
“Are you sure it’s not the yogis in India?” Tanya said.
“An orgasm for an hour? That would finish Comrade Brezhnev right off.” Auntie Roza laughed, a beautiful, throaty trill. Sergeich’s face was completely purple now. “Those Americans must have a lot of free time. Italians, on the other hand, they don’t need any special schools. They have passion in their blood.”
“Now is not Yezhovshchina, of course, but it never hurts to be careful,” Sergeich whispered, then in full voice: “Remember that the State disapproves of intermingling with foreigners. It’s for our own protection, Tanya.”
“But what could happen?”
Sergeich stared at her with incredulity.
Tanya envisioned Luciano’s shapely olive arms. Her skin prickled.
“Every room in the hotel is bugged by the KGB. You may get accused of spying, that’s what. Arrested,” Sergeich said. “Or you could get recruited to spy on the Italians.”
“Mikhal Sergeich, my darling, what are you talking about? First of all, this is a onetime thing. Second, she’s not going there to talk.” Auntie Roza finally gave him the smile he’d been waiting for.
“Spying … I don’t have time for a second career,” Tanya said, a little exhilarated just thinking of the idea.
The women picked up their pans of food and went to eat in Auntie Roza’s room.
“Don’t listen to him, Tanechka. Listen to me,” Auntie Roza said, meeting Tanya’s eyes over the perfect nostalgic borsch.
* * *
The giant Children’s World department store stood across the square from Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters. Entering the first floor, with its marble columns, a sparkling double-decker carousel, and endless rows of toys still gave Tanya the same thrills she’d felt here as a child on her family’s transits through Moscow. Practical things first, Tanya said to herself, and marched up to a line that started at the base of the stairs. She took her spot at the tail and tapped the woman in front of her on the shoulder.
“What are we standing for?” Tanya asked.
“Finnish snowsuits.”
“God help us. What number?”
The woman showed Tanya her palm with “238” written on it in pen. Tanya pulled a pen out of her purse and wrote on her own palm: “239.”
The woman’s cheekbones were beautifully pronounced, convex like the bowls of soupspoons. “And where are you from?” she asked Tanya in a soft, friendly voice.
Too nice for a Muscovite.
“From Vladivostok,” Tanya lied.
Magadan was famous for having been the entry point to the cruelest of Stalin’s network of camps. People might think her parents had sat there; and if they were arrested, then there must’ve been a reason. Now people were paid good money to live in the northeast. It wasn’t a good idea to advertise either.
“And you?”
“Odessa. I’m buying the snowsuit for my relatives in Arkhangelsk.”
While they chatted about children and tricks for procuring this or that defitsit item, the line crawled up the stairs. The woman’s name was Zina. Tanya also made friends with a man behind her, Denis from Sverdlovsk, and asked him to hold her place. In the shoe department on the third floor, she was lucky to happen upon some Yugoslavian winter boots. She got two pairs, two sizes too big for the boys to grow into. For now, she’d sew a little pouch of wool inside the toe.
The line for Finnish snowsuits climbed to the second landing. Denis gave Tanya a nod of cooperation, and she dashed to the fourth floor, where she stood in two lines for a pencil box, a stack of notebooks, and a yellow backpack with cars printed on the flap. Others held Tanya’s place in the toy line on the ground level, while she held places for Zina and Denis in the snowsuits. The store was stuffy; in the thick of the lines it reeked of sweat and cologne. She ran downstairs and prized out a microscope for Borya, lettered blocks for Pavlik, and a box of toy soldiers for her friend’s son.
Tanya returned to the snowsuits line, which had finally scaled the second floor, and waited for another hour. She could already see the big brown box out of which fluttered the puffy aquamarine snowsuits. After a few more minutes of waiting she heard screams at the front of the line. A wave of people threw her back, and immediately she knew: They’d run out. They’d run out of Finnish snowsuits!
At first Tanya bobbed in the whirlpool of other anguished shoppers — elbows out, bags in — all hoping for a miracle. Her throat prickled with tears, and eventually she gave up. She knew that the clerks had stashed away extra pairs, but they would distribute them through their network of relatives and friends. There was no use begging.
She staggered out to the street. She didn’t have time to waste, yet she couldn’t bear leaving the store. She still had so much to find. When she returned home, Anton wouldn’t go out of his way to praise her exertions. There was nothing heroic or special about these shopping expeditions, a common burden shared by hundreds of millions of her fellow grazhdanki. It seemed unbelievable that just a few hours before, Luciano had invited her to a hotel. What was he doing now? Training on a soccer field or sightseeing the best, cleanest, approved-for-foreigners parts of Moscow with the voluptuous Intourist spies?
Tfoo, princessa. Her mother and Auntie Roza had lived through the famine and war, and here she was — too good for lines. She looked at the Lubyanka building, where so many of Magadan’s prisoners had started their journeys.
A babushka, her face yellow and wrinkled like a spoiled apple, pulled Tanya down the street and around the corner. From prior shopping adventures, Tanya knew that the pensioners who lived close to the big stores often got up early to stockpile the most coveted items and resell them at a profit. As the babushka unzipped the suitcase with her knobby hands, Tanya prayed for the snowsuit.
“Bought something for my granddaughter, dearie, and it turned out the wrong size,” the babushka said, twisting her head, on the lookout for the police.
She held up a pink rabbit coat with fur balls on the ends of the zippers.
“I have a son,” Tanya said. Disappointment settled acridly in her stomach.