wards Western standards. Once again, their hopes for healing Russia had been crushed. They reacted as the Russian intelligentsia has for centuries: by withdrawing to an inner world of favorite books and close friends.
The weather was equally gloomy. Snow had already fallen often, but the temperature pushed up again to a few degrees above freezing, leaving only mud and slush as if to remind everyone that autumn is the worst season of the Russian year. Besides the rawness, waiting for winter causes a palpable strain. A librarian once compared it to two and a half months of pre-menstrual tension.
During her breaks, I used to take this elderly woman, a member of an old intellectual family, to tea in the Lenin Library's basement cafeteria. Now she declined my invitations with a rueful smile. It was again a time to avoid social contact with foreigners. Together with the general tighten-ing up everywhere, there was a major campaign to warn about the growing danger of ‘alien' thoughts and influence. This was classified by the newspapers - in at least one article daily — as ‘ideological subversion', and it was said to be practised by a significant percentage of the Soviet Union's foreign guests. The press ‘reported’ case after case of innocent people having been duped by Western correspondents and tourists who seemed friendly to Russia, only to worm their way into citizens’ trust and sow the rotten seeds of doubt. Doubt of the Party's infallible guidance - an odious vice.
The most maddening refinement was the hypocrisy. At the very moment the ideological xenophobia was being whipped up, Intourist offices in every Western capital were straining to attract foreign tourists - meaning foreign currency. ‘Visit the USSR! Land of Caviar, Ballet and Friendship!' A translation of a single Pravda article about heinous imperialist spies, double-faced rats trying to gnaw at Marxism-Leninism, and verminous enemies of all socialist peoples would have kept all but a handful of masochists out of Russia forever.
I wondered about a connection between the xenophobia and Oktyabrina’s continued absence. Then I dismissed the thought and cursed myself for having entertained it. A certain kind of Russian ignores these campaigns, even when the peril to himself is very real. Whatever she wasn’t, Oktyabrina surely belonged to this category. In loyalty to friends - the primary test of character in Russia - I knew she was above reproach. But why had she disappeared for almost four months? Wherever she was, why didn’t she telephone? At least write?
Soon I began to doubt whether I’d see her again at all. This can happen in Russia, even with your best friends -and the fact that other old friends like Kostya are left alone only heightens the anxiety. Two years before, I’d been friendly with a young doctor whose passions were Tennessee Williams and Norman Mailer. We used to meet for walks and talks in Sokolniki Park, until one day he didn’t turn up as we’d arranged only an hour before. I never heard from him again.
The disappearances are not necessarily sinister. Many Russians have a powerful, inbred wanderlust which seizes them periodically. Despite all the rules and required documents - the identity papers, labor books, propiskas and hundred other devices designed to combat Russian chaos and establish order - despite all this, these restless people move about the country like Dos Passos characters in USA.
When you’re on a train in a relatively remote part of the country and you keep your identity quiet long enough, vodka will appear and stories will be swapped. The jumble of autobiographies in your compartment will amaze you. One man will have spent his life logging in the far North, and a woman will have wandered through the South after being a truck driver during the war. A crippled man will
have worked on the Volga or the Don, and his wife will have been Mikoyan’s personal nurse. Not one person in six will live in the city where he was bom. The vagueness of living patterns corresponds to the vagueness of the land: 172
the greatest of all wide open spaces.
I pictured Oktyabrina on a train somewhere, talking nonsense and stuffing herself with someone’s pickles and pirozhki. Did she still wince over a swallow of vodka? Was it really possible that I’d never see her again? I began to understand that I had been wrong to go abroad. If I’d taken her to the Black Sea, she wouldn’t have disappeared. Hadn’t she hinted that we should explore the Caucasus together, as we used to sightsee in Moscow?
I was no longer sightseeing now because the person I was keeping company with had only evenings free, and preferred to spend them at small dinner parties. Several weeks after my vacation, I’d met a woman who ended my paralysis at last: the Dutch Ambassador’s personal secretary. She was tall and graceful, worldly and intelligent. She wanted no permanent attachments because of her career, and had half-a-dozen suitors among the foreign colony’s bachelors. But she sometimes responded gaily to my calls and became a companion for a few of the long evenings and weekends. I told her nothing about Oktyabrina. She would have thought the whole affair absurd.
And what was there to tell? It couldn’t even be called an affair, after all. Besides, I was more and more certain that Oktyabrina would never reappear; more and more aware that with my usual insensitivity, I’d ignored a hundred opportunities to encourage her, to tell her why she was needed. As usual, I saw my mistake only after the friend was gone. Kostya heard a rumor that Oktyabrina had ‘fallen in with’ an important East German engineer who was taking a cure outside Yalta. He reported the news with unmasked sorrow. Selfishly, we were sorrier still when we heard a second rumor: she’d been picked up on the beach by an ageing film director, moved to Kiev with him, and was pregnant.
I’d not only stopped sightseeing, but for months hadn’t had a proper walk along Petrovka. The street had lost its appeal; I now walked north, away from the center of town.
Ordinarily tranquil children in the streets had become whiny and irritable because of the incomprehensibly protracted fall.
On 7 November, I covered the parade in Red Square. It was virtually an exact replica of the May Day affair and provoked the same reaction in me - only more intense because we were descending into winter instead of rising towards summer. 7 November marks the end of an era, when the last hopes for mild weather are laid to rest. I remembered Oktyabrina’s new white dress and ‘love season’ chatter after the May Day parade. It was time to put these thoughts to rest too, together with the tenderness for her which I produced so abundantly in her absence.
We were approaching mid-November: Tankists’ Day, Petroleum and Gas Workers’ Day, Workers of the Fishing Industry Day . . . and then came an ordinary Monday, without a title - but which should have one in terms of Oktyabrina’s adventures.
The day started in anything but a Monday mood: I had a new idea for a story. Since Czechoslovakia, they were harder than ever to find. The Press Department gave permission for an interview only if your idea was not just merely neutral, but positively pro-Soviet. At the same time, Chicago wanted more and more hard news, which was as unobtainable as ever. A reporter could satisfy neither side - nor himself.
My idea promised to tread the narrow middle ground. A new movie about Isadora Duncan had just opened in New York and I thought of writing about her strange Russian adventure. The way to start, I thought, was through her husband, Sergei Esenin.
Esenin was a brilliant and debauched lyric poet, still revered by Russian youth. He killed himself in 1925, joining many of the country’s best poets who could not work under Soviet rule. I made some telephone calls and discovered that he was buried in Moscow. An expressive lead to the story then suggested itself: a description of his grave.
I drove out to the cemetery after lunch. It lies behind the American Embassy, past the zoo and is bordered by a desolate old road called 1905 Street’. This is one of the city s forgotten corners of old houses, old logs, old unpainted doors - all having earned the compassion due old workhorses. It is fittingly expressed in the cadence and old Slavic resonance of the cemetry’s name: Va-gan-kov-sko-ye. A