“Tell me, Alik, was life so bad there?” Maika again touched his shoulder.
“Silly, we had an excellent life. But life’s excellent for me wherever I am.”
It was true: Alik lived in Manhattan as he had lived in Moscow’s Trubnaya Street or Ligovka, or in any of his long-stay or three-day addresses. He quickly made himself at home in new places, exploring their side-streets and dark spaces, their beautiful and perilous angles, like the body of a new lover.
In the years of his youth everything had whirled past him at great speed. But later, with his heightened attentiveness and memory, he found that nothing had been forgotten: he could recall the patterns of the wallpaper in every room he had lived in, the faces of the shopkeepers in all the local bakeries, the shape of the mouldings on the façade of the building opposite, the profile of a pike caught on a rod in Pleshcheevo lake in 1969, the lyre-shaped pine tree with one broken point rising over the pioneer camp in Verya where he used to spend his summers as a child. As if in gratitude for the memory, the world opened itself up to him. He went to Cape Cod, swollen from the rains, and a trembling sun poked through the clouds. He walked past an apple tree, and as though waiting for this moment, an apple dropped at his feet as a present. His life had a charmed quality which extended even to the world of technology: when he dialled a number on the telephone, the line was always free. It became a little trick of his: people who knew about it would sometimes ask him to dial a constantly engaged number. He would sometimes refuse for hours before suddenly seizing his moment and immediately getting through.
America returned his admiration with friendship. The newness of the New World took his breath away. It seemed new to him in the most literal sense of the word: even the oldest, many-ringed trees seemed to be made from newer, stronger material. Here everything was solid, firm, crude. Alik, a man of the third, Russian world, had by the age of thirty known both America and Europe. At first Vienna and Rome, the sweetness of Italy, under whose spell he had lived for almost a year. Only when he went to America and had lived there for several years did he understand the American envy of Old Europe, with its cultural subtlety, its worn, even worn-out, transparency, and also Europe’s disdainful, but fundamentally envious, attitude to broad-shouldered, elemental America.
Alik, with his bristling ginger moustache and his hair tied at that time in a long, wiry ponytail, stood between these two worlds like a judge, and they couldn’t have had a fairer one. He was not distinguished by impartiality; on the contrary he was unbelievably, passionately partial. He worshipped the highways of America, the patchwork crowds of New York’s subway, which he considered the most beautiful in the world, the American street food and street music. Yet he also loved the small round fountains in the squares of Aix-en-Provence marking a delicate transition between France and Italy; he loved Romanesque architecture, and rejoiced whenever he came across remnants of it; he loved the filigree shores of the Greek islands, shaped like the leaves of maples and birches; he loved medieval Germany, which kept promising to reveal itself in Marburg or Nuremberg but never did, because everything that wasn’t on the streets was to be found in the country’s stunning museums, and German art totally eclipsed the Italian Renaissance. And German beer was excellent too.
He never felt the need to take one side, he stood on his own side, and in this place he loved both equally.
He muttered to Teeshirt a brief and it seemed to him insignificant remark about America and Europe, and he felt sad that he had become stupid and couldn’t talk persuasively or coherently any more.
Maika listened thoughtfully, and said: “Do you like Russia, then?”
“Of course I do.”
“So what do you like about it?” she persevered.
“Just because,” he brushed her off.
Maika was cross; she hadn’t learnt to make allowances for his illness. “God, you’re just like the rest of them! Tell me properly, why? Everyone says things were terrible there.”
Alik considered this: the question really was far from simple. “Shall I tell you a secret?”
She nodded.
“Bring your ear closer.”
She leaned her ear to his mouth, almost closing it. “Nobody has the faintest idea why. The most intelligent people are just dissembling,” he said.
“Dis-what?”
“Pretending.”
“And you? Do you pretend?” Teeshirt said exultantly.
“I dissemble better than anyone else.”
Irina glanced enviously at them; they both looked extremely pleased with themselves.
TWELVE
The landlord lived in one of New York’s wealthy suburbs and left everything to his superintendent, a paid job which combined the duties of both janitor and house-manager. The “super” here was called Claude, and he had worked in the building virtually since its occupation. Claude was a highly original man, half-French with a complicated history. From the stories he told Alik, Trinidad would surface, with an ocean yacht, and North Africa, with dangerous hunting-trips. Most of it he probably invented, yet one had the impression that his real life was no less interesting, and Alik would fill in the gaps, telling everyone he was a great card-sharp, that he had been arrested and imprisoned in a Turkish jail and had escaped in a hot-air balloon.
Twice, when things were particularly difficult, Claude, who wasn’t without artistic and philanthropic interests, had bailed Alik out by buying his paintings. There aren’t many superintendents who buy art. As well as this, Claude loved Nina. He would drop by to chat with her and she would make him coffee and occasionally lay out cards for a silly fortune-telling game, “find the queen.” Not knowing a word of English when she arrived in this country, she had immediately started learning French. This peculiar idiocy was typical of her, and it was probably the reason Claude loved her so much. He too had his peculiarities, and unlike everyone else he preferred Nina to Alik.
Visiting usually in the first part of the day, Claude saw an element of strict order in her chaotic and disorderly life. She would get up at about one and utter a weak cry. Alik would make her coffee and take it into the bedroom with a glass of cold water. This was when he was working, so he rarely spoke to her then. She would come round slowly, take a long bath, anoint her face and body with various creams sent by a friend from Moscow—she didn’t recognize the American ones—and pass a brush endlessly over her renowned hair; in her youth she had worked for several years as a model at one of Moscow’s fashion houses, and she could never forget this marvellous time in her life.