Kostya asked about ‘the kid’. Oktyabrina, he complained, had stopped coming around since meeting ‘the sniper boy’.
She’d told him she had no time; Alexander took every minute and was madly jealous besides. Kostya was uncharacteristically annoyed by this, perhaps because he had a record of staying in touch with all his old girls. He disapproved of soldiers on principle, and for some reason, felt jealous on my behalf. ‘If I were you I’d boot the boy in the jodhpurs and lay it on the line with the kid/
‘I knew a career officer in the army once/ he said. ‘It was back in ’37 when we were working twelve hours a day down coal mines in the Donbass. This lovely fellow was in charge of the People’s Security - vigilantly averting sabotage by the likes of us, the happy working class. The Colonel used to get rather annoyed by losing his monthly salary in our poker game. So he arrested the steady winners and exposed them as enemies of the people. They finished life in labor camps, and he began taking a few pots. Yes sir, the regular Army’s the place for Soviet humanism - ail brains and heart.’
A man with a badly matched wig and blaring transistor radio settled himself above us on the bank. The program was about a cement factory that had volunteered for higher production norms. When Kostya could stand it no longer, he shouted a request to change programs. The man tuned in the other station, which was offering a medley of revolutionary marching songs.
‘That’s a bit better, don’t you think, Zhoe buddy?’ asked Kostya. ‘I’ve heard that you Westerners actually love that patriotic stuff. Maybe I’ll cut an album and ship it to Hollywood. I’ll call it Music to Vote By. Make a fortune - but of course I’d never agree to touch the dirty dollars without gloves/
It was inevitable that Oktyabrina would one day see Alexander outside their rendezvous time. Whenever we were out of doors together, her neck was craned and eyes peeled for him like a gazelle at a water hole. When it came,, their encounter was the product of an extraordinary combination 146
of circumstances. The first element was a sudden blistering heatwave, in late June. It had the usual Moscow characteristics: a searing sun generating tropical vapors and occasional prodigious clouds, with lightning seemingly changed by the whole of the continental land mass. The hardest element was the lack of air. Russian buildings are made for Russian winter; many windows have been permanently sealed, and without an edict, shop managers are reluctant even to open both panels of a door.
The noon news report announced the temperature was ninety-one degrees and climbing. I wrote a brief story about the heat, omitting any mention of the smells it generated -a sudden shortage of toilet soap a week before had emptied store shelves - and planned to stay in refuge in the flat. Oktyabrina was profoundly listless. Alexander was on duty that whole weekend, she reported. He couldn’t manage a single meeting.
Our patience ran out in mid-afternoon. The humidity was oppressive, yet exhilarating - even exotic. A steamy, sensual throbbing pulsed on the streets. It lured us towards some cheap distraction.
We followed the call to Gorky Park of Culture and Recreation, which houses the largest collection of what the day cried for: amusements and rides. Unfortunately, half the city’s population had hearkened to the same call. Like a double-header crowd converging on Wrigley Field, a torrent of amusement-seekers surged toward the park from the metro exit. Once swept into the sea of damp flesh blocked up at the entrance, it was impossible to get free, even if we’d changed our minds. The smell was overwhelming. A ludicrously pretentious, totally superfluous Greco-Roman portal straddled the gate - the final Coney Island touch. At last Oktyabrina and I reached the end of the sieve and were shot into the park, like particles by a cyclotron.
Inside, fractionally more air and room were available,
but a convoy of farm trucks bearing down on a village could not have kicked up more dust from the paths. Crews of maintenance workers hosed them down - taking pleasure in dousing everyone in range - but it was so hot that the water evaporated instantly, and a hundred thousand pairs of shuffling feet continued to propel gritty clouds into the air and our faces.
‘Shall I give you an old Russian saying about heat?’ asked Oktyabrina gaily. ‘Or about crowds, if you prefer. Close your eyes and you can picture Hades with a shortage of gas masks. . . . But there’s something marvelously abandoned about all this holy mess, isn’t there, Zhoe, darling?’
‘I haven’t had so much fun since KP in basic training.’
‘“KP” meaning Kommunisticheskaya Partiya ? You rascal, why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Careful, Oktyabrina darling. That ice cream is headed straight for your nose.
The threatening cone was held aloft by a hand whose owner was untraceable in the tangle of bodies. How he or she had managed to buy it was a mystery: the lines at the stalls beggared description. Even without lines, it took minutes to negotiate a few yards along the paths, and policemen were busy trying to drive everyone from what was left of the grass. Oktyabrina and I found ourselves entrapped in a monumental jam behind the open air auditorium, where a political agitator with a microphone was delivering a deafening harangue. The subject was ‘The Victory of Leninist Proletarian Internationalism in the Yemen’. To this hymn, weary hundreds were gratefully dozing in their seats. At least they’d found some kind of entertainment, and a place to rest.
Elsewhere the noise was equally devastating: caterwauling babies racked with thirst, charwomen shouting in snack bars, a public address system blaring Sunday Leniniana. . . . Yet the extraordinary thing was that most people were enjoying the day not as something camp, but at face value. Just being in the park was a treat; it was enough to watch 148
the lucky few who had secured places on the ferris wheel, and were now ooh-ing and ah-ing in appreciation and alarm as their gondolas swung upward towards cleaner air and a splendid panorama of the baking city.
Oktyabrina and I watched the ferris wheel too. A rare helicopter hovered over it for a moment, then flew off on its limping way up river, towards the Kremlin. Because of this, or because of her trouble seeing over the wall of shoulders, it is possible that she did not notice the olive-drab in a gondola starting its descent. The uniform belonged to Alexander - a model, despite the weather, for a Coke ad in Times Square. Across from him was a smaller officer with a crewcut - evidently Petya.
Petya’s girl was attractive in a clean-cut way; Alexander s was a sizzling young tart. She had a gymnast’s build - the perfect complement to his - and was fully aware of it, even while making a show of fright on the wheel. She thrust her cheeky breasts towards Alexander’s face and gripped him in the armpit. The sun’s hard rays blazed on the chemical topaz of her hair; one poster-perfect leg, visible through the gondola’s mesh, wound itself round Alexander’s. Altogether, she was a sexy combination of vulgarity and health.
I called Oktyabrina’s attention to a young father near us, carrying handsome twins on his shoulders. She was enchanted by the sight. Then we pushed our way towards the river bank in search of fresh air. Alexander was not mentioned. I now felt there was a good chance she hadn’t seen him; otherwise, she’d surely have wanted to examine the girl. As it was, she soon wished to go home and he down - to lose herself in sacred solitude for at least a year. But this could have been caused by the crowds and an entirely understandable exhaustion.
When we staggered home at last, Oktyabrina poured herself a glass of milk, the ‘liquid of life’, but her ‘Pull the teats without heart, the milk will be tart! ’ emerged as wanly as her smile. She retired to the bedroom and closed the door. I made a mental note to forgo amusement parks for