As a going-away present she gave me a small sixteenth-century icon. She’d had it cleaned by a restorer who removed several layers of overpainting to the original richly colored image. The subject was the Birth of Christ, an unusual one for the Orthodox Church, painted in the northern style. It was one of the most beautiful icons I’d seen outside a museum, and Oktyabrina declined to say where or how she got it, except that it had not been snatched from the Tretyakov Gallery. Even Kostya was impressed. He identified the three Magi in the painting as Brezhnev, Kosygin and Suslov, but studied it respectfully during breaks in the preparation of the supper.
Tamara helped him expertly in this, for she’d already mastered some of the secrets of his cuisine. She was very happy to be with him, even though she knew the romance would not last. Kostya gave his ‘steady’ girls, defined as those who were with him eight or more consecutive days, 158
an intangible but unmistakable deepening, which never left them and for which they were forever grateful. Many came to see him years, even decades, after their brief affairs, and he took great pride in recognizing them all, no matter how many husbands and children they'd had, and however drastically their shapes had changed.
Tamara's farewell gift to Oktyabrina was an almost new Italian silk scarf that one of her medical colleagues had bought from a Western tourist. Kostya gave me a slim volume with yellowed pages and a tattered cover. It was a collection of poems by Osip Mandelshtam, who died in a labor camp in 1938 and has never been republished, although most of the ‘underground' literary intelligentsia consider him Russia's best twentieth-century poet. Kostya had kept the book throughout the darkest Stalin years, when mere possession of literature by a liquidated writer terrified most people and could lead to denunciations. Inside the grease-stained cover, he'd written an inscription: To Zhoe, whom we ll miss whether he's gone two days, two months or . . . well, longer. If it’s the latter, try to understand these poems and think of us. We'll never forget you. From your buddy Kostya.'
. It was when Oktyabrina read this aloud that the realization we might never see each other again suddenly became real and immediate. We all stared at the floor for a long moment, feeling everything, but with nothing to say and no need to say it.
Oktyabrina broke the tension by presenting me with a ‘memorandum' which she’d been preparing for a week. It was a list of ‘import commodities' I was requested to bring in with me when I returned for the ‘Moscow season'. There were thirty-five items, all numbered in pencils of different colors. Most were Woolworth articles such as ribbon and zippers, and of course cosmetics, among them nail polish remover and lotions for pimples, all carefully described with trade names she'd taken from advertisements in my magazines. Kostya snatched the list and added item thirty-six:
One small collection of jade, to be delivered in the glove compartment of a sky-blue Buick sedan, with a musical horn and snow tires’.
After the huge supper, Oktyabrina lay back on the bed, her arm still clasping Tamara’s waist, as it had for an hour. Suddenly she jumped up and kissed Kostya on the lips and was back on the bed, sitting with mock primness, in a second. She examined me directly for my reaction, instead of from the comer of her eye. Our gazes became transfixed; for a moment we seemed lifted out of the flyblown room and on to a luxurious balcony in Monaco. 'So this is what it’s like,’ Oktyabrina whispered. 'Parting from a faithful friend.
She snapped to herself. 'Want to hear a new Russian saying? Please turn down the tape recorder, Kostya . . . "Whether far or near/Zhoe’s our special dear/And when he returns to us . . .’” She hesitated. 'Help me, you rats! Something better than "fear” or "tear”.’
The 'celebration’ came to life again, spiced by Kostya’s latest jokes. Tamara swallowed a large glass of vodka and
for the fun of it, unraveled an entire sleeve of a sweater she’d been knitting. Then she plunged into deep pensiveness and said something about the incomprehensibility of separation that would sound sentimental in the retelling, but on her lips had a perfect purity. Oktyabrina kissed her forehead.
Near midnight, the sky still held a faint trace of light, the remnants of early summer’s White Nights. I got up to leave because my flight was very early in the morning. Kostya reminded us of the old Russian custom and we all sat down again for several silent minutes to gather our thoughts and put our fives in perspective before a long trip.
I said my goodbyes in the room and Kostya hurried me down the corridor to the front door and fragrant night.
Later Kostya told me that Oktyabrina cried after I’d left. She had a premonition, she said, that something terrible was going to happen to me in over-rich, overstrung Europe.
I might be run over by a sports car or arrested as a Russian
spy. No, the real danger was worse: I would fall into the clutches of an overdressed, oversexed American heiress.
Sicily’s beauty was rendered irrelevant by the invasion of Czechoslovakia. My first news of the Soviet tanks came at breakfast on the twenty-first, through the medium of a florid Austrian at a neighboring table. He was outraged at the ‘barbaric Russians’ and feared their troops would march straight through to his beloved Vienna. But he was also sneakingly pleased. The Czechs deserved something like this, didn’t they? For being Communists themselves, of course. Besides, they were only Slavs in the first place: backward peasants who could never hope to govern themselves.
The morning passed in alternation between packing in my room and monitoring the grim radio reports in the lobby. My expected cable from Chicago arrived before lunch: ‘Proceed soonest to Prague’ to assist our East European man, who was already on his way. I got as far as Rome that evening.
The next week was exhausting. I couldn’t get a flight to Prague; every journalist in Europe was competing for seats. By the time I did secure a reservation, the Soviet army had established enough control to ensure Western journalists were refused visas at the border. This meant I now had no means of entry. When this became clear, Chicago sent me to Vienna to backstop our East Europe man, who had rushed from there to Prague on the twenty-first.
Vienna was a hard slog: relaying cables, culling secondary sources, interviewing refugees who’d already begun to stream from Czechoslovakia. I’d forgotten what it was like to do a real story, and keep at it round the clock. My Russian gave me the drift of Prague Radio’s underground reports: the heart-breaking encounters with Soviet tanks. My mind reeled with the tragedy and I think my stories conveyed its depths. But after five days of this, Chicago asked me to return to Moscow. The bureau was unmanned
except for a stringer and they wanted the Soviet side of the story covered more fully. I got a seat on the Aeroflot flight to Moscow the following afternoon.
17
When the plane landed at Sheremetyevo Airport, I felt a wave of vertigo. I was here again in this stifling, hermetic, bafflingly remote world. How can Russia be three hours from Europe - yet belong to a wholly different time and place? Everything seemed totally alien, yet achingly familiar, as if I’d come to see grandparents who died before I was born. The sharp smells of Russia seeped into the plane even before its doors were opened; a new neon sign proclaiming MOCKBA was sputtering in three places. Fifteen long minutes passed before we began disembarking: the crew assigned to the ramp - four ramps for a hundred odd planes - was lost somewhere on a smoke break. Nothing had changed; nothing would change. On the drive into Moscow, the woods were deep in yellows and browns: autumn in August. In the new, prefabricated outskirts, the inevitable lines for food attended bare housing developments: solemn people in plastic raincoats putting in the necessary hours for something dreary to eat. I’d forgotten how poor everything was.