I grew accustomed to the sights of Petrovka. In clothing shops with floorboards almost worn through, there would be a melee around a rear counter signifying a batch of cotton socks that elsewhere would be discarded as rejects. The entrance to an old department store was always so packed that the last woman to join the line yards away would lower her shoulder to drive against the last back. The jostled woman would not complain — wouldn't even turn around. She would be too busy driving against the back in front of her.
But the street was always full of more important sights. The lines on the faces of the women who worked the stalls, and the stoop of their backs, bent by ponderous clothes and heavier burdens. The bundles of tightly wrapped laundry carried by women shoppers - which, on closer inspection, proved to be infants, miraculously alive and breathing in their winter swaddling. The fagades of the grander buildings, encrusted with sculptures, pillars, pediments and porticos, a typical blend of pretentiousness and decay, part Greek, part Roman, and all the more Russian for their labored imitation of the West. The steamy, sweaty basement cafeterias where weary shoppers compete for mess-kit utensils of bent aluminium, or rip off hunks of unidentifiable meat with impatient teeth because the last wobbly knives were stolen months ago and not replaced. The smell of diesel exhaust, tar, bitter tobacco, antiseptic cleaner and sour, sweat-soaked wooclass="underline" the unmistakable smell of Russian industry and earth. The girl friends linking arms and waists and the men friends sneaking gulps of vodka and baring souls in tiny clearings on the sidewalk. The intensity of physical and emotional contact which nourishes the human spirit despite — or because — of the elements that are hostile to it. The understanding of why Russia always was and will be a land of hardship and suffering - and of compassion for those who endure hardship and suffering.
Sometimes we walked up one side of the street and down the other, then reversed the order for a second trip. At other 88
times we walked on to where Petrovka becomes Coach Row Street and then Red Proletariat Street both, despite their names, slices of the same life, with the same bad asphalt and sagging houses. But most often, we lingered in and around the lower part of Petrovka itself, investigating its. jumble of shops and savoring the primordial Russian flavor. Oktyabrina studied fabrics and trinkets with the diligence of a comparison buyer, but it was the street itself that moved her - moved us both.
'Tired but happy, they returned home,’ Oktyabrina would say after our walk, mocking the cliche of Russian travel stories and simultaneously emphasizing the idea of ‘home Sweet home’ - my house was also hers. She would make directly for the davenport, collapse on it, and cover her legs with an old blanket to which she’d pinned some pink satin-It was nice to see her there, in spite of the added disorder. After years of occupancy by bachelor correspondents and then my wife’s departure, the apartment had become hollow-I couldn’t help thinking that neither ‘older men’ nor ‘younger girls’ should live alone.
‘I don’t have to be a super-star overnight, do I, Zhoe darling,’ she said late one evening while postponing her return to Domolinart. ‘I can be happy if I just get on the stage some day and bring some little glow into people’s lives.’
She herself glowed so brightly when I asked her for help with a Russian word or gave her something like a pair of old cuff-links - with a story, of course, about their romantic origin - that I sometimes invented questions for the sake of her reaction. For her part, Oktyabrina produced a dozen, questions to my one: why are typewriter keys covered with glass? in what State was I bom in America? how much does nail-polish cost in France? I jotted down the queries for several successive days in an attempt to unravel her train of associations. Nothing fitted, except that questions about shoes and books seemed to be followed or preceded by thoughts about children.
And that curiosity about the mechanics of sex hovered in the wings, although rarely expressed itself explicitly. One morning she found a diaphragm lying, in its case, on a high-up kitchen shelf. I’d seen it there myself a month before, but had then conveniently forgotten its existence. It was my wife’s - she was fond of leaving it on the bathroom sink whenever we had visitors. Oktyabrina approached my desk, examining the open case as if it contained something fascinatingly nasty, like a centipede.
‘Zhoe precious, what on earth is this?’
She could not have known. A few diaphragms are sold in Russia, but their quality is crude and the idea is almost unknown. When the Bolshoi Ballet first traveled to New York and made the discovery of American technology, nine-tenths of the corps - according to an interpreter I know -dashed to doctors to be fitted up.
‘What on earth is what? Oh, that’s a . . . a . . .’ But I didn’t even know the Russian word.
Oktyabrina was now holding the diaphragm itself between two fingers and at arm’s length. Having scrutinized me meaningfully, she dropped the device into my waste-paper basket.
‘Whatever it is, it has an odor’ she announced. ‘I will bottle you those pickles, Zhoe darling - but Mother Russia will be blasphemed if you cover the jars with that’
Then something paradoxical happened. At this moment, I think for the first time, it struck me that Oktyabrina would soon be a flesh-and-blood woman. Somehow her girl-next-door innocence awakened me to something very different underneath. The thought dissolved quickly and we went to a movie together in place of our walk, to enliven the drizzly afternoon. It was a sublimely bad Soviet-counterspies-smash-imperialist-agents adventure, during which we annoyed the audience considerably by groaning during the most ‘heroic’ scenes. Films like this were one of our private jokes, together with a particularly silly-sentimental song for Pioneers, which Oktyabrina had sung throughout her child-90
hood. The melody was so infectious that we returned to it four or five times a day.
‘Let there always be sunshine Let there always be glee Let there always be Mama Let there always be MET
A few days later, I was scanning a new book in the living-room when she emerged from the bathroom and her daily hour-long soak in the tub. A small towel covered her from armpits to knees. There was something terribly fragile about her with a face of scrubbed pink instead of the usual layers of make-up. Her shoulders were so thin and her waifs eyes so trusting that I got up and kissed her before I realized why. She smelled of soap and hair, like a little girl before going to bed.
A surge of happiness swept over me. I had made the gesture; a barrier was broken.
As I stepped back to my chair, Oktyabrina’s face screwed up as if in pain. She uttered a wail and began crying in long, looping sobs.
‘For goodness sake, what’s the matter?’ I asked.
‘You too,’ she blubbered.
‘Me too what?’
‘You too. Every man’s always grabbing for the same thing. Just because I’m unclad - I don’t want to be kissed all the time.’
I didn’t believe her. Who could take offense at such a gesture? At someone who’d never grabbed anything, who offered her only protection, with no strings attached?
‘You’re all some kind of . . . machines. You don’t know what it’s like to be kissed all the time.’
‘What are you talking about? I don’t try and kiss you all the time.’
‘No no no. Just the first time I’m easy prey.’
It was then that I realized the depth of her fear. I’d been
a Platonic dud with her - glad of the company of someone sexually undemanding, but wondering nevertheless how and when to apologize for my paralysis. And now it turned out she really needed to be left alone: virginity so shone through her bravado that I couldn’t even talk seriously about these things with her. But why was I so hurt? Why was I sorry to see her fumbling with a shirt to cover her shoulders, and, after it was on, to sense a defeat for us both?