There was only one awkward moment all evening, caused by Kostya’s pointed and somewhat crass joke about a KGB bureaucrat. A fleeting interval of embarrassed silence was ended by Kostya’s suggestion that everyone dance to escape his ‘big clumsy trap’.
Dancing to that music - and in our incongruous pairs -was something to be seen. The black marketeers came over to invite Kostya’s girls, but they dissuaded outsiders because by that time the birthday party had developed a kind of family reunion warmth. Free of ballet’s restrictions, Oktyabrina was wonderfully light on her feet.
We all left together when the restaurant closed after eleven o’clock. For the first time, a smell of spring was in the air, blown into our faces by a wet wind. We walked down to the river and listened to the happy sound of ice
breaking up as it flowed past swiftly in the dark. When the familiar Kremlin chimes struck midnight, everyone congratulated the Minister heartily again and thanked Oktyabrina with considerable ceremoniousness. It was only then she revealed that her own birthday was ‘not far hence’. There was a chorus of ‘ohs’ and ‘ahs’, and befitting pressure to make her divulge the date; but she held fast to her refusal. She was not, she said modestly, going to spoil this glorious birthday now with thoughts of another one, belonging to someone so manifestly less deserving....
A policeman approached to peruse our little group, but was impressed enough by its respectability actually to lift his hand to the Minister in a kind of salute. Soon after this, Evgeny Ignatievich gallantly offered to accompany the elderly lady home to Gogol Boulevard, and the rest of our group strolled along the quay for a while, playing a traditional game called ‘Frankness’. Anyone was allowed to ask anyone else any kind of question, and the answer, on one’s honor, had to be scrupulously honest. The Minister’s aide, who had hardly said anything all evening except in a private conversation with Leonid, was the last subject - or victim, as he called it. It was discovered rather quickly that he had been celibate for almost a year, not by his own choosing. Kostya then arranged that he ‘borrow’ one of the dairy girls, with her giggling permission, for the night, provided he give her taxi money to get to work in the morning. And exhilarated by the change of weather, he invited us all to another intimate reception in his room the following Saturday. It was to be the first of his ‘pre-May-Day celebrations’ combined with a ‘coming-out party’ for a crew of girls he’d recently met who worked in a candy factory.
Less than a week later, the Minister got his bad news. In connection with the new chemical fertilizer crusade, the Ministry had been subjected to another radical reorganization. The Minister’s entire research laboratory was to be liquidated by the end of the financial quarter, and the staff 76
reassigned to ‘actual field production' on laggard farms, meaning plowing and weeding in stony northern latitudes. It was the standard treatment for junior agricultural medicine men who had failed to work a miracle cure. The Minister himself had been ordered to a teaching job in Saratov, a provincial city on the Volga.
Our last drowning-sorrows fling took place the following evening, with the vodka and cognac augmented by a fifth of bourbon so that I could swallow my full share. But instead of getting drunk, I was car-sick. My sense of loss was compounded by how much I’d disliked and distrusted the Minister before I’d met him, a few weeks ago.
The Minister himself took the blow calmly. Com, he explained, had fallen from favor years ago, together with Khrushchev; ever since ‘that p-poor dreamer’s’ overthrow, he’d know that his own Moscow days were numbered. He sounded more relieved than hurt when he told Oktyabrina and me the details, ‘just: think. All that g-good land plowed up and p-p-planted in c-com w-when it really should have been 1-left in gr-grasses and p-pasture. M-mil-lions of acres turned to d-dust bowls. As if I needed a c-colossal tragedy 1-like this in my 1-life.’ He smiled apologetically and lowered his eyes.
Oktyabrina, on the other hand, was frantic with distress. ‘Oi, mamachka , mamachkal she wailed, and fell into the Minister’s perplexed arms, rending her hair. It was a gesture-for-gesture duplication of the scene in every Soviet war film where the wife, mother or sweetheart is informed that her man, the smooth-cheeked soldier with plans to be a nuclear scientist, has been killed at the front.
But the truth is that Russian women do take personal loss with this gushing emotion. Oktyabrina’s instincts told her that the Minister would come to grief. Apparently she interpreted his reassignment as a kind of criminal sentence; all that day she talked about the ‘calamity’ and kept referring to Saratov as ‘Siberia’, as if the Minister were being sent into exile with hard labor. ‘I’m not interested in geo-
graphy and require no cosy consoling/ she snapped. ‘That man’s gentleness cannot take another chilling. Hell never be the same again/
But she slowly allowed herself to be convinced by the Minister that his new post was in fact a gratifying promotion which he couldn’t reasonably turn down. They exchanged elaborate promises about long, daily letters and week-end trips to Moscow - Saratov was only twelve hours away by train, after all, and ‘r-remember what traveling by r-rail m-means to us both’. Oktyabrina was to be given the Minister’s office plants to look after because he would clearly soon be returning permanently to Moscow where he’d need them again. ‘If t-there’s one c-certainty at all in the M-Ministry, it’s that n-nothing is final/ The research laboratory would be resurrected one day, even Khrushchev might be rehabilitated. The Ministry and its roulette wheel were eternal; ‘Only the 1-1-land suffers in the 1-1-long run. . ..’
By the following day, Oktyabrina was enumerating the advantages of the temporary Saratov assignment. Moscow wasn’t really good for the Minister, after all; he needed a change and a rest. This way they could spend whole weekends together, and in between he would get back to research. He could invent some new kind of marvelous plant, a hundred times better than corn. When his Lenin Prize was presented, everyone would feel terribly ashamed about the way he d been wronged.. ..
As for herself, she was going to dedicate herself more than ever to work. ‘This might be just what I’ve needed all along, don’t you think, Zhoe darling? I mean, now I’ll have a higher motive for becoming a success. Because if things somehow don’t work out brilliantly for the Minister in his lab, I could bring him back to Moscow as my personal impresario/ She said this quite flatly, while devouring the last of a huge chunk of halvah for quick energy. She was exhausted and famished, having just cleaned up her comer of Domolinart and carried down back issues of Farm Life 78
for transfer to the Minister.
On the morning of his departure, however, she was emphatically sullen. She wore little make-up except for white powder and grey semicircles under her eyes, and her principal adornment was a velvet armband of a mulberry color, presumably to signify mourning. She insisted on going to the station to watch the Minister board the train. This turned out to be physically difficult as well as psychologically tense because the funeral of an Artillery Marshal had caused a massive diversion of traffic. As usual on these occasions, main thoroughfares were sealed off without notice, and hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting people, we included, had to wait over an hour while the Wagnerian ceremony ran its course. Luckily for the people caught on the street, the temperature that morning was only a degree or so below freezing. But the delay spoiled Oktyabrinas plan to hide a book of Volga folklore in the Minister's compartment before he'd arrived at the station.