Oktyabrina entered the apartment with a symbolic ballet leap and another sigh: the beginning of an era?
"You will offer your caller a Coca-Cola, won’t you Zhoe darling? I’ve heard absolutely everything about its devas-tatingly decadent effects.’
"Throw your coat anywhere. One can of Pepsi coming right up/
She sniffed her glass suspiciously before proposing a toast. "To dearest Zhoseph and his wonderful maturity.
There’s scant peace in a home’ - she winked knowingly ‘where the hen clucks and the cock remains silent’.
The apartment was in its usual disorder, but it swept Oktyabrina’s breath away, despite her efforts to appear blase. She trod back and forth from room to room, feeling her way into corners and cupboards like a cat in a new home. Did I really live here all alone ? It was a little lunatic wasn’t it? - all these rooms for one person. She fingered the sheets on the bed, tested the water in the bidet, and stretched out tentatively on the old davenport in the living-room.
‘Does it look absolutely incongruous to see me hereabouts? I can just picture all the women you’ve seduced, on this very divan. Not that I blame them - it’s kind of romantic here. All this spaceV
More than anything, she was dazzled by the bathroom’s ‘romance’, which was actually a cheerless reminder of the hasty departure of one of my predecessors from the apartment. Near the middle of his assignment, he contracted a severe case of a common professional disease: an obsessional craving for something to remind him of real luxury. One of his projects was to have the bathroom wallpapered in crimson velvet imported from Helsinki. The job was completed just before he left Russia suffering from a minor breakdown. This was several years ago. Since then, the velvet had torn away in critical spots making it more tacky than most of the furniture and carpets left behind by other correspondents. But Oktyabrina crept around the room, stroking the walls and oohing.
‘Zhoe darling, it expresses a side of you I hardly even imagined. What absolute perfection ! I simply wouldn’t change a thing! She paused to let her glad tidings sink in. ‘But you simply must do something about the kitchen. It’s going to be crawling soon.’
She scrubbed the stove furiously, expressing increasing concern about my eating habits and the condition of the apartment. Her point was restated in reflections about older 84
men who live alone; they needed someone understanding to look after them, and wasn’t it scandalous that nowadays you could never find a housekeeper with a heart? There was a certain mature man in Omsk - my age - who lived alone and was absolutely lost until she joined him - although no one would believe they never actually had an affair. . . .
Suddenly she spied a pair of cockroaches on the floor, creeping with the cheeky sluggishness bred in infested cities. Oktyabrina swooped down with her fingers and disposed of them without a break in her narrative.
She never officially moved in. Towards the middle of the evening, she would pull herself up, yawning, and return to Domolinart. When we walked back together we would pass groups of students celebrating spring with guitars. They winked at Oktyabrina and me, assuming we were lovers. Neither of us minded this; it was a nice touch to our unspoken understanding not to initiate any sexual approach. Each of us had our own reasons for avoiding even talk of a physical relationship, although the divorce’s effects weren’t going to keep me numb forever.
During the day, Oktyabrina encamped on the davenport, and surrounded herself with a growing assortment of junk. From time to time, she’d make a quick survey of ‘her’ comer of the room, as if guarding a claim to squatter’s rights. Soon little piles of underwear, knick-knacks and cosmetics marked the boundary of her territory.
She usually arrived in mid-moming with a scrap of news or gossip. She disappeared into the bathroom almost immediately for lengthy stints of washing hair, sweaters and underwear. Ivory Flakes enchanted her almost as much as the wallpaper, and when the door was locked for hours without the toilet flushing, I think she was contemplating herself in the full-length mirror. One morning, she brought me a glass of tea at my desk and hovered over it until I was fully distracted.
‘Drink, Zhoe darling, you must be positively dying of
Do
thirst. A good glass of tea makes a writers pen free. . . . you have a lover at the moment?’
'What?’
'You are such an adorable prude. I asked you whether you’re involved in a current entanglement.’
'My sweetest, this household has only one serious rule. In case you’ve forgotten: please let me concentrate until lunch. It pays the rent.’
'Well, I think it’s marvelously convenient. Just think: we can both have a nice little intermission from that sort of thing. Don’t be angry, darling, but you look as if you need some recuperation. Foreigners just aren’t made for our Russian winter.’
The next day a battered cardboard suitcase made an appearance near the head of the davenport. When its lid was up, it appeared to contain a collection of old clothing, but I was sworn never to open it myself. The following morning, the Minister’s plants were transferred too, and stood on the floor beyond the knick-knacks because Oktyabrina couldn’t make up her mind exactly where they belonged.
A happily uneventful week passed. The plan was to call Oktyabrina ‘Marina’ because my apartment was certainly bugged. But everything was so untroubled that we forgot our own subterfuge by the end of the first day. When we did remember after that, it provoked giggles and a happy sense of triumph.
Our routine was simple and relaxed. I did my morning’s work in the office as usual, or pressed on with my reading in Russian when there were no urgent stories. Oktyabrina, her enthusiasm for ballet tapering rapidly, would stretch out in the living room, ‘slimming’ her 'literary backlog’. This meant leafing through whatever Soviet magazines were lying about and trying her hand at the puzzles quaintly called crossvord in Russian. She rarely completed more than four or five entries before exhaling with great weariness and turning to a fresh puzzle. Yet I was often inter-86
rupted by urgent requests: ‘Who wrote “The Teaching of Marx is Invincible Because It is True”? Five letters - starting with >K - I think/
But her favourite occupation was browsing through back issues of Life and Look. She devoted herself to this for hours, sometimes putting a magazine she’d just perused on the bottom of a pile, to be returned to yet again. Although she couldn’t decipher a word of the text, she loved the photographs and was positively transfixed by the advertisements, especially for Westinghouse kitchens and stunning ladies admiring General Motors cars. By the end of the week, she was no longer tearing off her reading glasses and hiding them under the pillow every time I walked into the room. The frames were plain beige plastic-the only ‘square’ Soviet thing she owned, no doubt because glasses can’t be bought privately or made at home. They magnified her eyes even more, making her a caricature of the pretty young thing in the boudoir comedy who affects spectacles to fool her father.
In the afternoon, we often went sightseeing. Although it was still cold, dauntless spring grew stronger almost daily, encouraging the hope that justice exists in the world. Despite the terrible odds, relief and redemption were approaching. Old women were clearing the cotton wadding from the outer windows of their rooms, preparing for the magic day when they’d be flung open to the streets. The water of melting snow cascaded down broken drainpipes and along sidewalks; pedestrians were splashed to the hip in muddy slush. But the lifting of winter’s siege had an irrepressibly uplifting effect on everyone.
When Oktyabrina took a box of cookies with her to blunt her recurrent hunger, our walks often extended to several hours. We were both pleased when no special itinerary suggested itself: this meant a stroll along the regular route, Petrovka. The old street felt cosy in early spring despite the slush, vast puddles and smell of wet decay. The crowds were larger than ever.