Alexander glanced at me with puzzlement and desperation. He took Oktyabrina’s hands in his; she touched her head to his shoulder. He flushed, making an interesting contrast between the smooth skin of his neck and the starched olive drab of his collar.
After this, it was painful to see them together. I joined them just often enough to have a picture of their ‘wooing’ moments. They would meet at the metro station and set forth on a short walk. Two or three saucy working girls would be sure to follow them, swinging their handbags gaily and chattering to be overheard. This was a daring
deed; however submissive Russian girls are, they almost never take such obvious initiative. But Alexander was strong bait, and gave them the necessary encouragement: when Oktyabrina s attention was momentarily deflected by a shop window, he would glance back, hardly moving his body, and transmit to them a devastating come-closer smile.
But of course Oktyabrina’s attention was not really caught by any shop window; she was scrutinizing Alexander’s every
movement through his reflection in the dirty glass. She was also fighting back tears of despair, for she’d pretended not to notice the girls. Finally, her control would give way. ‘Those pathetic creatures’ she would say, ‘making a spectacle of themselves. Shall I chase them away, Sashka beloved? Are you exhausted this evening?’
‘Chase who away?’ Alexander would ask, frowning intently. ‘Gosh, you mean them girls? Ain’t they a silly sight!’
Eventually the girls would turn a comer, to Alexander’s disappointment and Oktyabrina’s greater relief. But before they’d parted, more pairs would have succeeded them. Alexander kept track of the last pair’s movements, for after having kissed Oktyabrina goodbye, he would search for them. After the resolution of our misunderstanding, he confided to me that his secret was always letting girls give the first signal. When he tried to ‘corral’ one of his own liking, he invariably felt awkward; and in ten to twenty per cent of the cases, the girls wouldn’t ‘take the poke’ the first time. But when they took the initiative, success was almost certain. The only trouble was finding a place. He often did it by standing a girl against a tree in a park and ‘coming in backwards’. But this sometimes bothered him because he remembered certain men’s fondness for farm animals in his old village. ‘Maybe we’re animals too,’ he said solemnly, ‘but at least we can make it comfortable for our mates.’
There was an old Army saying that particularly disgusted him: ‘A sheep’s face will do - it’s the cunt you screw.’ He may be a bit of a rogue himself, he admitted, but there was something beautiful about girls, each and every one of them. 142
They were more like butterflies than sheep. The trouble was there were so many of them to admire, and they all died so soon. ...
14
Meanwhile, we had settled into the steady warmth of early summer. Throughout Russia, it is a quietly joyous time -more fervently embraced and venerated than elsewhere because winter is so much longer and more cruel. A burden is lifted from the psyche as overcoats are lifted from the shoulders. Hope and levity, even frivolity, infuse the air - intensified by everyone’s repressed knowledge that the escape is ephemeraclass="underline" in a dozen weeks, winter’s avant-garde will be waiting to numb you again. You receive warm days with reverence, therefore - not because you deserve them, but because the Russian psychology of siege and hardship has convinced you that the reprieve is not deserved.
I was working now at somewhat less than my usual pace, which was far too slow for someone running a bureau alone. But my conscience had melted soon after the last dirty snowbank, and I surrendered to belated spring fever. My office window was wide open, filling the room with diesel exhaust from trucks lumbering below the building. But there were also whiffs of moist earth and greenery, and I thought how strange it was to savor the smells of Michigan and Minnesota at a distance of ten thousand miles, in a disparate world.
I found myself spending more time than in winter with two American colleagues - somewhat younger men who wrote for influential East Coast newspapers. Perhaps the nostalgia of summer smells prompted this; perhaps a shift in my feelings about America and Americans. Like most other aspects of life here, this one is subject to stages.
I’d now reached the stage where I could do without the
American Embassy's mothering, and avoid almost all of its social calendar without wholly sacrificing the company of Americans themselves. I hadn’t had a close American friend since the correspondent of the other Chicago paper had been reassigned over a year before. But I liked to pass an occasional evening with my two younger colleagues, perhaps because their freedom from wives also freed them from Embassy obligations and tensions. One man was a summer bachelor whose wife had departed for a long Florida vacation, the other was recently divorced and badly wanted the company of a Russian girl friend - almost badly enough to dismiss the Embassy's dire warnings about such arrangements. There was no need with these men to exhibit love of everything ‘back home' and disapproval of everything Soviet, or vice-versa. It was simply a few hours of poker and beer - which began under natural light, since it was now bright well after supper. Bourbon and old locker-room stories often supplemented the beer.
Kostya and I were seeing more of each other too, almost in direct proportion to the rise in temperature. Our meetings took place not in his room or my apartment (in which he prudently never set foot) but in the great Russian outdoors. Every year Kostya waited impatiently for the first faint hint of warmth from the sun's rays through a closed window. When the signal came, he dashed to a nearby pond, reservoir or river to tear off his clothes and ‘soak up Helios’s potence’.
‘As everybody knows,’ he'd say in his pseudo-somber voice, ‘Communist sunshine blindingly transcends capitalist. Because it's free for all the people. Unobstructed by the clouds of exploitation, etcetera. Thank you again, dear Party - and let us not forget the sky and stars, together with the Lamp of Heaven - oops, of Lenin.'
Alongside the river or pond,- it could still be too chilly to take off your jacket, not to speak of shirts and underclothes. But Kostya would strip to his prized Japanese swimming trunks and spread-eagle without a towel on the damp clayey 144
bank. It was often in Silver Pine forest, a river-bound island that serves as a municipal retreat. Trucks and barges shuttling to raw construction projects jarred the ancient countryside's beautiful harmony, but enough old houses and stretches of eroded river bank remained to evoke the spirit of old Russia and its serene sadness.
We would laze about on the rich-smelling bank - together with a grateful ‘lassie' or two, if Kostya had brought them -and the afternoons slipped away before we'd fully settled in. Kostya talked about his Navy days and plans for his summer vacation, already well advanced. Almost every year, he contrived to spend two full months in the luxurious south, on or near the Black Sea. This meant wangling permission somehow for double the normal leave from his job, then finding accommodation in one of the resorts — usually by means of a healthy, well-placed bribe - and scraping together the comparative fortune needed for finance. Altogether it required a considerable effort in his metier of metiers; beating the system.
At the moment, he was maneuvering to secure a place on a hiking tour of the Caucasus for the girls of a Geology Institute. He d sold his beloved Philips tape recorder, and was using the proceeds to ‘encourage' the tour's organizer, an elderly assistant professor, to ‘co-opt' him on to the expedition. His aim was to be classified as a patriotic volunteer to carry the sleeping bags and pitch the tents.
‘Who needs Monte Carlo? What sane man would spend his vacation in the rat-race called Capri? Listen, Zhoe, buddy: all those spots are unhealthily overcrowded, and the profound humanity of our Public health services saves us from risking our vigor there. Write an article about me with twenty-two exploration-happy University females, two strong-limbed lassies to a tent, and every Riviera playboy will beg to swap places with me in my naked mountain pass.,'