We spent the rest of the evening strolling up and back along the wide new boulevard, which Kostya kept comparing unfavorably to Sochi, where you strolled in soft moonlight and balmy air instead of cold drizzle. ‘You Russian Question people never get to primary causes,' he said. ‘Everything wrong with this country starts with a single simple reality: the shock of slipping from a cosy womb into an angry climate. The plumpest foetus can get paranoic/
He told a tale about the latest promise of Soviet science. The country's roots, he said, would be cut by fantastically powerful laser beams and the entire Russian land mass 166
drifted fifteen degrees south, where ‘weather suitable for homo sapiens’ begins. The operation was highly secret because it was going to be implemented in honor of Lenin’s hundredth birthday the spring after next. ‘Oh yes, a few hundred million Indians, Chinese and the rest will have to be squashed down a bit towards the equator. What the hell, they 11 be jubilant to make way for Lenin’s homeland. . . .’
Before the lights were extinguished on the boulevard, Kostya told me about his first evening with Oktyabrina in Sochi s tender moonlight and gentle air. She kept reminding him that he mustn t seduce a girl on the first night out of respect to Tamara, and volunteered as his chaperon. Near midnight, they walked down to the port, where a horde of tourists and local peasants were struggling to pack themselves onto a cruise liner about to cast off for Yalta. Gentle wavelets rippled against the quay and the moon made a wide road, as Russian poets call it too, across the water. Oktyabrina breathed deeply of the tropical air. Nevertheless, the Black Sea, with its Moscow-style cafeterias and lines for newspapers, fell far short of its promised exotika.
Oktyabrina began to question Kostya about his youth. Were his parents alive? Did they introduce him to vodka? Cautiously, she steered the conversation to sex. In Omsk, she informed Kostya confidentially, some people still believed that the size of a woman’s mammary glands affected her capacity to experience sexual pleasure. That was one reason she just had to rip herself from her roots.
Her own enlightenment, thankfully, was early, complete and joyous. Being a sensitive, modem woman as well as a doctor, her mother had told her everything with great simplicity and beauty before she died. But the ignorance in the orphanage was so massive that the staff feared Oktyabrina’s knowledge would upset the other girls. Some thought that babies were conceived by the wife sitting in an armchair immediately after the husband, while the cushions were still warm....
Her own problem was not sex but children. Society made
hideous demands on young women: how could anyone be both a mother and an artist? That’s why her policy was to abandon men, even cruelly , rather than to bear their children at this stage. But even if certain nineteenth-century prudes rejected the logic of this modern solution and called her promiscuous. .. .
‘That’s enough theory, kid,’ Kostya interrupted. ‘I’m convinced - let’s go to bed.’
Oktyabrina dropped her scarf - Tamara’s present - on to the sidewalk and watched the breeze play at its corners. To gain time, she protracted the retrieving of the handsome silk.
‘Let’s go to bed, kid,’ Kostya repeated. ‘I’ve been mortifying my flesh for far too long - it’s a terrible toll on my health. I want to let my passion burst right into you.’
‘What about Tamara?’ asked Oktyabrina shakily.
‘Tamara will understand. If it’s you. Better than a stranger, after all - she’s very fond of you.’
‘Well . . . yes,’ said Oktyabrina, obviously trying to think of an escape. ‘You’re absolutely right, Kostya darling. When would you suggest - back in Moscow perhaps?’
‘I’d suggest in about ten minutes. I need an experienced woman like you.’
‘What an absolutely brilliant inspiration,’ she said uncertainly. ‘Sex is always best when garnished with a good laugh. With us, it’s bound to be a huge giggle. And dynamite too.
Walking home, Kostya put his arm low on Oktyabrina’s waist and felt her hip socket gyrating like locomotive connecting rods. Her mind seemed to be churning with equal energy to hatch a deliverance.
Not far from the composers’ colony, they heard the familiar strains of a famous pre-revolutionary ballad, that had recently become popular among students searching Old Russia for their roots. The singers, a group of young men and women on a walking tour, mouthed the refrain listlessly, probably because it was the day’s tenth repetition. But aided 168
by the sea noises, the old melody had enough heart-melting melancholy to generate a mood.
I was on my way home.
Riding home and thinking of you.
The moon shone sadly,
Through the coach's dingy windows ...
Oktyabrina held her breath. After the second verse, she sat down on the curb, clutched her face in her hands and mumbled through her fingers.
Kostya dearest, tell me what to think. Those words. That melody. I can’t begin to explain their meaning.’
Give it a try,’ said Kostya huskily. ‘Don’t worry about me, kid. I can take it.’
‘It was our song. Intrepid Vyacheslav and I. I never dreamed I’d hear it again like this.
And Vyacheslav,’ prompted Kostya, ‘was one of your most treasured lovers.’
Not one of the most. That son of heaven, my one and only idol - it was his children I so longed to bear.’
Kostya helped her gently to her feet. ‘I’m heartbroken,’ she whispered. ‘But of course you understand. I can’t pos-sibly give myself to you just now. This wound will take time.
Of course it will,’ said Kostya. ‘Tomorrow’s another day. C’mon, you’ll need help to struggle to your room.’
The following day, Oktyabrina appeared in black on the promenade bordering the beach. She shouted to Kostya that she was going to a sanatorium called ‘Lenin’s Path’ for treatment of her ‘ballad-shattered’ nerves. The day after that, she boarded a boat for Yalta.
Winters first spearhead arrived in late September. A grim, gunmetal cloud descended on central Russia and hung there, immobile, smothering all hopes for a break. The trees were already naked black and the streets swept clean of their soggy leaves, removing the city’s last trace of color. Cotton
wadding was stuffed again into the cracks of window frames, symbolizing the general mood.
By October the first wet snows had fallen and the awful burden arrived that makes Everyman an unwilling martyr: the unrelenting, unfair battle against the climate. A month of this clammy rawness passed that seemed like three; by the time the press was building up to its usual exultation over the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, a state of mental siege had returned.
This was stoutly reinforced by the Party’s new line. Even before Czechoslovakia, an ominous hardening could be felt in all domestic affairs. Leonid was a victim of this, together with hundreds of fellow intellectuals who dared object to the return of a full police-state atmosphere. The invasion accelerated the repression. It became known as ‘neo-Stalinism’, which described the retreat towards Stalin’s orthodoxy and restoration to power of many of his henchmen and admirers.
The general consequences of neo-Stalinism made subjects for carefully worded stories: ‘liberals’ dismissed from their jobs and exiled from Moscow; intensified censorship and corresponding deterioration in all branches of the arts; a furious campaign to root out ‘bourgeois’ influences -meaning anything not rabidly anti-Western - in every publication, television broadcast and film. But it was harder to describe the great depressive effect of this on the sliver of Muscovites who had aspirations for Russia’s progress to-170