‘For goodness sake, Oktyabrina, snap out of it. There are kisses and kisses. Can’t you tell what kind that was?
She studied me from her corner of the room. Kisses and kisses,’ she murmured. ‘Then the dark-haired Ruslan bent slowly over the fair Ludmilla, still sleeping in her deathly paleness. He kissed her with aching sweetness, and the spell was broken.
‘I was just trying to say “hello”. And let me tell you: for my own reasons, I’m no threat to you.’
The sobbing subsided slowly, like a child’s who is appeased after a fall. ‘I know, I know that of course,’ she mumbled at last. ‘It’s just that ... I happen to have a very infectious cold, if you must know everything. I didn’t want you to
catch it - Westerners are such easy prey.’
She retreated to the bathroom in a gay saunter, returning
a few minutes later in sloppy trousers and an oversized sweater. The glass of tea she presented me was thick with sugar. As I sipped it, she pronounced a declamation.
‘I do love you very much, Zhoe dearest. I want you to know that for ever and ever. But there is also love and love - do you understand?’ She adjusted the cushions on my chair and leaned over precariously to place a musical kiss on my cheek. The telephone rang again, and when I returned to the living-room, she was curled up on the floor next to the chair. Her hand was running back and forth over the carpet in a large arc, as if through thick grass.
‘Zhoe, listen to me carefully. I don’t know you very well yet, but I’ll tell you something very few people understand. Every woman really needs three men in her life, do you 92
understand? Every woman needs a lover, a husband and a father. Sometimes the three are combined in one person, but that’s tragically rare. Anyway, I’ve always pictured journalists as fathers. I suppose it’s because they have to write things they dislike for the sake of the state - it’s like protecting your family by sacrificing something cherished of your own, I think it’s frantically noble. ... To tell you the absolute truth, of the three sides, it’s the fatherly one women need most.
During the next few days, she was extremely attentive. She arrived in the morning with bottles of yoghurt and buttermilk for my lunch; a man of my age and sedentary occupation couldn’t be too careful. When the gas man came to read the meter, she directed him to check all the fittings on the stove and hot water heaters, all of which she insisted on overseeing because ‘you can’t trust repairmen’. By this time, the sentries in the courtyard were giving her their little respect-for-foreigners nod when she came and went. I don’t think we fooled them - or their bosses; despite their policemen’s uniforms, they actually work for the KGB. But they rarely stop someone they’re used to seeing. And there is always the chance that one shift assumed another made the report on her. At least that was our hope.
The next time she had a bath, she talked about it, by way of describing her new Polish pine salts, for an hour in advance. I didn’t ask whether this was meant to warn me or to indicate the earlier incident had been forgotten. She emerged from the bathroom wrapped from neck to toe in my bathrobe, with the towel wrapped around her head. She marched into the office with her arms folded, imitating a sirdar - but I was less certain than ever about who she really was.
It was when she was in the tub that afternoon that I got up and looked through some of her things. They had spilled from her open handbag on the floor next to the davenport, and a small pool of cream was leaking onto the carpet. I screwed the lid back onto its jar and then, to my own
embarrassment, began investigating. Among handkerchiefs smeared with lipstick, flattened tubes and old bus tickets,
I saw her ‘passport’.
‘Passport’ is in quotes because it’s a document for internal identification, rather than foreign travel; every Soviet citizen is supposed to carry his at all times, something like papers in an occupied country. I know of nothing expressly secret about them, but this was the first one I’d seen. It was in an olive drab binding embossed with the Soviet state emblem; slightly smaller than an ordinary passport and quite dirty and frayed. Inside, there was a photograph of Oktyabrina: a skinny adolescent in a woven peasant blouse. It was a head-and-shoulders view only, but you pictured the rest as a farm kid in bare feet. The following information was listed on the first page:
1. Surname, given name and patronymic: Matveyeva Oktyabrina Vladimirovna.
2. Date and place of birth: 14 April 1950. Village of Nikolaiyevka, Omsk Province.
3. Nationality: Russian.
4. Party affiliation: Not a member of the Party.
5. Social status: School pupil.
6. Military status: Not obligated to serve.
All the following pages were empty, but the last one bore a police stamp showing she was registered to live at a certain street address in the village of Nikolaiyevka. It was true, then, that she had no Moscow propiska. But what did Nikolaiyevka mean when she’d talked about her native city of Omsk? I looked for it in my atlas without success. Then I searched on the large wall map of the Soviet Union in the corridor. Finally I found a tiny dot, several kilometers northeast of Omsk. Perhaps it had later been incorporated within the city limits.
It was only much later that I awoke to the other discrepancy. According to the passport, she was not twenty at all, 94
but had barely turned eighteen!
The other disquieting matter was the disappearance of cigarettes. I noticed it only when my consumption had mounted to three cartons a week. Still, I often give packs as tips, and it never would have occurred to me that Oktyabrina was involved until I noticed her inspecting me one morning when I opened my drawer and discovered only two packs were left. I then tried an experiment: I bought the usual three cartons and kept track of my consumption. Sure enough, a small but steady depletion was unaccounted for. One day it was one pack, the next day two; they were taken from the middle of a carton so their absence would be inconspicuous.
It was a trivial loss. I buy cigarettes in the hard-currency store at duty-free prices: two dollars a carton — one of the foreign colony's thousand privileges. And Oktyabrina's coveting them was understandable: a pack of Camels provides considerable prestige and even more actual barter value among ‘underground’ contacts. I would have supplied her with all she wanted, of course - and did give her a few packs whenever she asked. But it was unsettling to have genial domesticity at one level and senseless petty theft at another.
We were driving to a movie early one evening when I raised the matter cautiously. I pretended to have forgotten my cigarettes and asked Oktyabrina if she happened to have a Western one.
‘Anything for you, Zhoe darling. I adore the way your forehead scrunches up when you drive.' As usual, she was extremely pleased with the prospect of an evening ‘out'. She had opened her handbag and begun searching for the cigarettes before she realized what producing a pack of Camels would mean. The handbag snapped shut.
‘I was mistaken. Sorry.'
‘Have a look in your pockets, will you, sweet? Maybe there's an old pack. I’m desperate.’
‘Why do you imagine cigarettes would appear in my pockets? I don't indulge in common habits. Certainly not on the street. . . . Sweetheart, what is it? I happen not to carry cigarettes for my men, is that a crime?'
No cigarettes were missing during the next few days. Then the leakage started again, but never more than one packet at a time. Oktyabrina often blinked - it could not quite be called a wink - when she saw me open a new pack. And when Gelda appeared, she conspicuously presented her with two full cartons.