At the last minute, however, there was a frantic change of plans. The maitre d’hotel informed us apologetically that he could not deliver the food to Oktyabrina’s room. An investigation by a team of People’s Controllers had been sprung on him, and certain irregularities discovered: watered wine, reduced portions, and soup without the required ounces of meat. Unless he was able to place a bribe quickly, he was in danger of being arrested for embezzlement and speculation - his second rap. He returned Oktyabrina’s sixty rubles and, deeply regretting that the money would go to the state instead of into the fund for his new dacha, he suggested the party be transferred to the Ararat itself. The least he could do, he said, was to reserve us a good table, ensure the bugging equipment was on the blink, and assign us waiters who weren’t informers.
Oktyabrina was deeply disappointed. The intimacy she’d been designing was all in ruins, and she might never have
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another chance to be a real hostess.
The evening went surprisingly well nevertheless. We had the table of honor, which stood in a pseudo-oriental alcove with an oil painting of radiant Armenian girls driving muscular Russian tractors and a potted palm of matching taste. It was so hideously pretentious that the combined effect was somehow homey. The Minister had been told he was wanted at the restaurant for consultation about the preparation of a traditional Armenian stew. When the unmistakable swish-clump of his galoshes resounded along the cracked tile floor, everyone fell silent and straightened in his chair. At the sight of the table, the Minister blinked; for the first five minutes, he remained quietly bewildered. The more he thought about things after this, the deeper he was moved. He reached across the table and touched Oktyabrina’s hair with shaky fingers. Several large tumblers of cognac steadied his hands without dulling his emotion. He kept declaring that he didn’t deserve the honor, and dabbing freely at his cheeks.
To everyone’s surprise and relief, the Minister and Kostya took an immediate liking to one another. As his birthday present, Kostya gave him a pair of handsome morocco gloves - which were more than symbolic because they had obviously cost at least a week’s salary at some black market source. ‘In the old days,’ said Kostya as he presented them to the Minister, ‘when people wanted to imply a man was a Don Juan, they’d say he changed his women like gloves. Well, socialism’s cleansed us of our nasty old bourgeois habits. Now a comment like that is the highest compliment to a man’s fidelity - because we change our gloves once a decade, if we’re lucky. . . . Anyway, I’m sure we don’t want to pursue this . . . er particular subject with this evening’s guest of honor. But we do all want to wish him what he bestows upon others: long years of tranquility. And of happiness and health.’
Beaming and blushing, the Minister gazed fondly at Oktyabrina, and whispered something into her ear while 72
trying on his present. Then Kostya launched into a genuinely choice selection of suggestive political jokes and the Minister laughed so hard that he developed hiccups and pleaded for respite.
Kostya complied for a time, which gave everyone a chance to compliment Oktyabrina extravagantly on her skill with the arrangements. The clamor of soup being slurped, particularly from the corner occupied by Evgeny Ignatievich and Oktyabrina's favourite lady from Gogol Boulevard, testified eloquently to the enjoyment of the victuals. Then Kostya stood again and proposed an elaborate, highly elegant toast to the Minister’s future, wishing him long life and as many devoted and admiring friends forever as were gathered there at that ‘humble’ table.
The Minister responded in the same spirit despite the stutter. Then, surprised and delighted by his own recklessness, he asked our indulgence to a joke of his own. It was an extremely stale one about members of a rich collective farm dreaming of Communism: they would all have a private airplane in which they could fly to America for potatoes. Everyone roared although - or perhaps because -we’d all heard the story a dozen times before. ‘Of c-course I’m corny,’ the Minister said in my ear, ‘but try to explain that to these 1-lovely chaps.’
The party gathered momentum as it progressed. The usual screeching of waitresses and cooks resounded from the kitchen: who worked harder than whom; whose mother was a stupid cow. But the supreme informality only made everyone more relaxed. The maitre d’hotel was charmed by Oktyabrina in her lacy pinafore, and dragged a chair to our table to join us. Perhaps sensing the days until his arrest were numbered, he ordered more food and drink at the restaurant’s expense. Evgeny Ignatievich assured us he could not remember a more successful evening, even during the heyday of St Petersburg salons. He was absolutely enchanted by Kostya’s girls, two rather pretty, if unwashed, assistants in a neighboring dairy he’d picked up on his way
to the Ararat. The girls were somewhat dumbfounded by the lavishness in which they suddenly found themselves. Between bursts of giggling and attempts to hide their soursmelling working smocks, they kept whispering to one another, presumably about how to respond to Evgeny Ignatievich's persistent under-the-table exploration of their legs. Oktyabrina hardly had time to notice: her eyes kept darting from glass to plate; she flurried about making certain that neither was empty for a second. In between, she tried hard to keep a conversation alive between the Minister s aide, a silent type, and the Gogol Boulevard woman who’d called her ‘the lady from the theater.
The restaurant itself was in excellent spirits. The band produced a non-stop medley of apparently wildly popular Armenian songs. It was a bizarre ensemble of trombones, violins and ancient Armenian stringed instruments. The musicians were correspondingly diverse: sweating, shirtsleeved young men, clearly dashing in their own image, cheek-by-jowl with middle-aged women with enormous arms and moustaches. Together they played so deafeningly that you had to shout info your neighbor's ear to ask for the salt. Most of the diners at neighboring tables were singing; none pretended to be sober. At one point a man stood up on a chair, clapped for silence, and made a public declaration of love for his frowzy but delighted wife. A group of extremely swarthy, conspiratorial-looking men in black market nylon shirts, probably black marketeers themselves, sent their respects to our table, together with four bottles of native wine they insisted we sampled. Then, hearing an American was present, they inquired whether it was true that Franklin Roosevelt had Armenian blood. I sensed it would do no good to disappoint them, and the gift of a fifty cent coin managed to distract them into a flurry of entrepreneurial deliberations.
Even Leonid was drawn out of his depression. He had arrived late and drank a surprising amount for someone of his age and his intellectual bent. He was wearing a clean 74
white shirt and patterned tie that Oktyabrina had given him. The Minister said if he wanted his hair cut, he would send around a mowing brigade of Communist labor to give
him an estimate - but joking apart, his generation was the hope of us all, and he prayed they wouldn’t abandon their ideals.
When his turn came, Leonid offered a joke based on his own background and inside professional knowledge. Who invented the X-ray? he asked us. No, not Roentgen - not any German, in fact. Or Englishman, Frenchman or American. In the late seventeenth century, no one else but a certain Ivan Ivanovich, an upstanding Volga muzhik who was serving his statutory twenty-five years in the army. Rumors reached him that his wife was distributing her favors to one and all back in their village. He wrote her a letter through the battalion scribe: ‘Dear Masha. You can’t fool me with your goings-on. You fat bitch, I see right through you.’ The letter had recently turned up in an archive, and Leonid’s former physics Institute was in the process of preparing a paper on this incontrovertible proof of the precursor of the X-ray. I see right through you ; Mother Russia was first again, as always.