10
The whole course of Oktyabrina’s involvement with Gelda was set by how and where they met. It happened during the opening gush of a rainstorm. No April showers mood obtained because in Russia - testimony to its pinched warm season - ‘May thunderstorms’ occupy that place in spring's song and verse. This was a prosaic, chilling rain, pouring down, as the Russians say, as if from a bucket.
Oktyabrina and I were strolling up Petrovka, talking about why I divorced and whether parents should drink in front of their children. The downpour struck suddenly. In the clownish moments before feeling soaked, we sang a chorus of ‘Let there always be sunshine. . . .' Then Oktyabrina's mascara washed down her cheeks like ink in a sink.
‘ Refuge , Zhoe. No rain without clouds, no tears without sadness -- and I need both like a whale needs an umbrella,'
We were alongside a long, low building with sharply sagging windows and chipping ochrey paint: refuge had to be taken in one of its four or five ground-floor shops. A sign tacked to the comer of the building announced its impending demolition and replacement by a sleek skyscraper. The sign was almost illegible with age, for the demolition had been scheduled for years before; it was now part of the 96
landscape, like the faded poster above it: Lenin haranguing a massive crowd of workers at the Putilov works in St Petersburg.
The crowds in the downpour that afternoon were almost as dense. Oktyabrina chose the door with the least resistance, above which a sign read ‘Secondhand Bookstore No 44\ Inside, there was a murkiness caused by the dust of powdering paper and city soot.
Oktyabrina blotted her mascara with my handkerchief. When my eyes adjusted, I saw walls stuffed with old books from floor to lofty ceiling. Every millimeter was crammed, causing the old shelves to bend radically under their burdens. Lenin was inside too: as in every bookstore, new and used, throughout the country, the most prominent department was devoted to politics - principally works by and about Vladimir Ilyich. But in this decaying shop at least, he provided some much needed decoration. Plaster busts and full-color portraits of him were everywhere, accompanied by well-known citations on decaying crimson banners about the inevitable victory of Communism, the wisdom of the working class and importance of reading books.
A tight knot of shoppers and employees were engaged in one of those shouting matches without which no shop can function. I followed Oktyabrina around it and found myself staring into the eyes of the cashier. This was not accidentaclass="underline" she had looked up from her work and was examining us with a rapt gaze which seemed to combine hostility and defensiveness, passivity and aggression.
Even at first glance, this strange girl was commanding in spite - or because - of her appearance. She was inside the cashiers booth, sitting on a stool that had been augmented by several thick volumes to raise her to normal height. Black hair, matted and streaked with grey, clung like mattress stuffing to her oily, pitted cheeks. But everything was redeemed by the eyes - which went quizzical when they shifted back from me to Oktyabrina. It was the first time I understood the lyric paeans to solid, coal-black * Russian*
eyes.
I couldn't make out Oktyabrina’s air-sent message to her. It was followed by quick strides to the booth, the opening of its door and the whispering of a quip into the girl’s ear. When she dismounted from her stool, ignoring the line of customers at her window, she proved to be almost a head shorter than Oktyabrina. This meant that Oktyabrina s presentation of a soggy paper-flower necklace from her own neck to the girl’s formed a downward movement - although she somehow managed to create the impression of looking up, as if the girl were the General.
Gelda was with us every minute of the next four days, except when she worked. This subtracted only a few hours, since we met on a Thursday and Gelda took the following afternoon off to lengthen the weekend. She and Oktyabrina closeted themselves in my bedroom for hours, chattering like maiden aunts. When the door finally opened, the exhaust was a heavy vapor of smoke, moist exhalation and feminine odors.
Gelda told me nothing of their conversation, hinting at confidences that would be revealed in good time. But during meals and Oktyabrina’s brief absences, we had our own spirited exchange. I soon knew more about her background than Oktyabrina’s.
Books drew us quickly together. I owned some novels that are wildly prized by Moscow intellectuals: emigre editions of great Russian writers - Nabokov, Pasternak, Zamyatin, Bulgakov - that are taboo in Russia. Gelda’s curiosity about my shelves swelled to intense excitement when she spied these titles. When I gave her several, she gushed with gratitude, as if they were priceless first editions.
For her part, she quickly compiled a list of books for me which, while not prohibited, are so long out of print and so rare as to be virtually non-existent. She was eager to introduce me to a body of literature hardly known outside intellectual circles but which, she promised, described aspects 98
of Russia better than the great masters. She offered to find some of the books themselves for me, and give me the first of them on Monday.
‘Geldechka, you promisedl Oktyabrina was annoyed by the digression to literature. ‘You’re not going to work on Monday. Were going to buy you an outfit. In the latest pastels/
‘Yeah/ replied Gelda. ‘Pastels will work wonders for me - like a haircut helps a hanged man/
But Gelda and I would have cottoned on to each other even without the ‘contraband’ of books. She was articulate and intelligent, and when she talked about herself, which was whenever she was asked, she wove each episode of her life into a kind of capsule chapter of Russian history. Her only reluctance in this was prompted by characteristic misgiving: it was too narrow; she should be talking about the human condition. Otherwise, her attitude towards herself was entirely straightforward - meaning, under the circumstances, incurably fatalistic. Her voice was often disagreeably nasal, but lacked the faintest hint of self-pity or shame.
Gelda was only four years older than Oktyabrina, but like the offspring of most prominent intellectual families under Stalin, she had been exposed to an abundance of ‘life’ (meaning, as usual, death) at an early age, and become middle-aged, like Europe’s post-war novelists, while still an adolescent. Adolescence was some ten years ago; now her matted hair and bony cheeks gave her the look of a forgotten actress, eking out her twilight years in bilious poverty.
Acting once ran in her family. Gelda’s namesake was a paternal aunt who had been a character actress in the Moscow Art Theater just before and after the Revolution.
Another aunt designed costumes for the Bolshoi. In fact, her entire family were minor celebrities in Moscow’s artistic-intellectual elite. Now Gelda was the only survivor except for an elderly uncle, and two cousins who worked in an upholstery factory near Kiev,
The family was destroyed because it was Jewish, liberal
and recklessly outspoken. Gelda’s father, a talented editor, was shot as a 'rootless cosmopolitan’ in 1950. In keeping with contemporary protocol, no one was informed of the execution: the man was simply dragged away, fumbling for his glasses, after a knock on the door at two a.m. - and was never heard from again. Gelda’s mother, an Estonian cellist, went mad soon after this and took to submerging her hands, together with Gelda’s, in a cauldron of scalding chicken soup at dinner-times on Sundays.
The mother spent two years trekking from prison to prison seeking news of her husband, even though his fate was painfully obvious to everyone. She caused acute embarrassment and sometimes panic by talking obsessively about the case to relatives and friends. In whispers, they begged her to forget her husband and think of a new life. Soon people avoided her entirely. It was cruel, but in Stalin’s last mad years the risk to oneself and one’s own family of asso-ciating with this woman was too great.