But, in fact, we never did meet anyone we knew. And for my part, I told no one in the Western colony about those days, even though from a journalist’s standpoint, a close association with someone like the Minister would have been considered a major coup. My western colleagues would never have believed that nothing the Minister said was newsworthy in any way.
Our Sundays had a pattern. We would meet in the morning to buy provisions, usually in ‘Food Store No. I’, a wildly incongruous emporium built by a pre-revolutionary entrepreneur in the style of a brothel for robber barons. The garish interior was always packed from wall to ornate wall with resolute workers amassing the week’s provisions, and we’d all stand in four or five separate lines at counters and cashiers to expedite the convoluted shopping process.
On the way out of town, the Minister would stop for gas at an ancient, one-pump garage, serving himself in
the Soviet manner. While he fumbled with the filthy hose, a large woman in a greasy jacket - the manager - shouted
insults at him, together with every other customer in sight. The Minister could have avoided all this, as well as the hour-long line of cars at the pump, by instructing the driver to fill up in the Volga’s regular government garage. In fact, he could have avoided the whole hard shopping grind, and saved himself considerable money too, by buying his provisions in the special shops for high officials.
But the Minister liked everything to be on a do-it-yourself basis. Much of the day’s meaning for him lay precisely in the ritual of ‘r-r-rubbing in with r-r-real 1-life’. ‘O S-sacred S-s-simplicity,’ he liked to pronounce as he fumbled, now dirty-handed, with the car keys, promising himself he was going to track down the quotation as soon as he was a bit less busy.
Unfortunately, do-it-yourself also meant the Minister liked to ‘t-take the h-h-helm’ of the Volga and do all the driving. Once we simply left the road - and this was in the light of midday, when the asphalt happened to be dry and ice-free. Incredibly, he failed to notice that all conversation ceased every time a truck passed us or we approached an oncoming car. What saved us was his notion of speed, which he seemed to tailor to the era of the Grapes of Wrath villages along the way.
Finally we arrived at our own village, a typical settlement of ramshackle houses strung out along the main road. The Minister’s cottage stood alone, just below the woods. We unloaded the provisions, tied on our snowshoes, and set out on the day’s highlight, called the'Long Walk. The landscape was neither distinguished nor decorative; just a slightly rolling tract of snow-covered farmland with a blotch of a duck pond and the usual drifting paths and rotting fences. Still, it managed to convey an overwhelming beauty and sadness. A disused church, now serving as a grain storehouse, stood exactly where it had to, at the crown of the rise above the village. A landscape painter would know what this means, for that humble scene somehow inspired sublime feelings, like a work of art.
Our route took us to the top of the rise and into the woods, which smelled sharply of snow and evergreens. We followed animal tracks where they crossed the snowed-over paths, and the Minister and I fed Oktyabrina’s tingling curiosity about the terror of being alone and lost in a Siberian forest. Even with snowshoes it was hard going over the unbroken paths, but the unspoken rule was to be thoroughly chilled and famished before returning to the cottage.
We always bought enough sausage, pickles, cheese and sprats for hors d’oeuvres for six people, but almost everything disappeared before it was properly set out on the little table. Then we each made our own portions of shashlik on the wood-burning stove in the comer, and for dessert, I supplied something exotic like chocolate bars or tinned pineapple from the American Embassy commissary. My little treats provoked the usual questions about life in the fairy-tale West, especially in Hollywood. I never knew whether to paint the West gloriously, to satisfy their expectations, or dismally, to soothe their hurt at knowing they’d never see it for themselves. Besides, I myself had actually forgotten what life 'on the outside’ was like; it was beginning to seem almost as mythical to me as to Oktyabrina and the Minister. And how to explain to them that they would not have been happier or felt closer to the important things anywhere else than in that creaking cottage?
After the last glass of brandy, the Minister perused some papers, apologizing that the work load increased with the approach of the planting season. By this time, it would have been inexcusable to break the tacit ban on shop talk and ask him exactly what he did. But he himself volunteered that his principal job was running a research laboratory specializing in corn. And he continued to muse about his fate. 'It’s funny when you think of it,’ he stuttered one afternoon. 'This whole system we h-have. The Russians took over Armenia. The B-Bolsheviks took over R-Russia. All these violent changes. Without them, I s-sometimes wonder what
I would have b-been?’
After the meal we would venture into the fields again if the light was good. This was when the Minister photographed Oktyabrina with his 8mm movie camera, an excellent Japanese model that he’d been brought by a traveling colleague. He posed her with painstaking attention to detail and a natural sense of composition. Following his directions, Oktyabrina pulled at branches, disappeared down trails, sat on tree stumps looking elated or pensive - sequences she performed with great earnestness and, I thought, surprising grace.
This was usually the end of the day, for the Minister had to plan for the protracted drive back, and dared not be late: eight o’clock was starting time for his wife’s regular Sunday soiree. One evening after we’d returned to Moscow and the Minister had dropped us off, Oktyabrina confided to me that she occasionally considered abandoning ballet. But she always mastered the temptation - for the Minister’s sake more than her own. ‘He’s counting on me to make good. Because of his own artistic disappointment, of course. It’s a terrific pressure, actually. I can’t let him down.’
She spent almost an hour that evening dipping into a stack of popular pamphlets with titles like Further Triumphs of Collectivized Agriculture and The People's New Five-Year Plan and the Farm. This was part of her campaign to ‘read what the Minister reads’ so that she would ‘understand what the Minister understands and suffer what the Minister suffers. As his alter ego, I can hardly do anything less.’ But the pamphlets - cheap adulation of Soviet agriculture that managed to be simultaneously vainglorious, heavy and hollow - defied reading for more than a page at a time. Oktyabrina salved her conscience by dashing to a kiosk, whenever she saw one, to buy the latest issue of an equally impossible maeazine called Farm Life. She carried a copy with her religiously, and spoke in a language I couldn’t decipher to the photographs of the milking herds.
The plans to celebrate the Ministers birthday were laid days in advance, pondered, rehearsed, and revised half a dozen times. In the end, Oktyabrina decided to give him an ‘intimate reception' at home in Domolinart. The food and drink were to be supplied by the maitre d’hotel of an Armenian restaurant called the Ararat, and paid for from the sale of some of Oktyabrina’s better cosmetics. It was to be excellent value because the maitre d’hotel ran his ‘take-out’ service on supplies filched from the restaurant. The railway pensioner was bribed with two bottles of vodka to stay with friends for the evening. Oktyabrina herself paced about her room, squinting to visualize the arrangements in her mind’s eye. It was to be her first venture as a hostess and it required a supreme effort of self-control not to tell the Minister all about his own surprise.