21
The first day of genuine winter was like a national holiday. One morning the city was silent and white. It had a strangely incorporeal, almost sanctified quality, like the garments of a nun. In the long run, this signaled the beginning of five or six months of grinding cold - but no one thought of the long run that morning. The greyness, mud and slush were gone at last, and replaced by something shining and exalted, something even joyous. Russian winter had returned like your father after a fishing trip — someone you knew intimately, and from whom you expected much, even if he was stem. It was almost as exciting as the first day of spring. Even the old pensioners in black overcoats who’d seen it fifty or sixty times were moved.
It was the kind of day on which you telephone old friends. I called Kostya early in the morning; sure enough, he’d invented an excuse to skip work and was planning a day in the countryside with his ‘roommate’, a girl he’d met the evening before in a dry-cleaning outlet. He was brewing a large pot of potato-and-barley soup for the outing and promised me my own thermos if I came along.
‘You heard about the new furniture GUM just put on sale?’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s a long-awaited breakthrough in our consumer goods production: an all-pine triple bed. They call it ‘‘Lenin is Always With You” - and it’s selling like crazy.’ He chuckled happily and I could almost hear his grin. ‘I’ve got a hundred of them, Zhoe buddy - but not for the telephone. Leave your place now and you can join us in twenty minutes.’
I couldn’t leave until mid-aftemoon at the earliest: there were morning newspapers to look through and another disarmament story to write. I went back to work, tackling a series of Pravda articles inspired by the intensifying campaign against ‘hooligans’, then a long, tragi-comic ‘expose’ of new muddles in the distribution of soap powder. One investigation had revealed that over forty per cent of the soap production destined for Kiev was lost or stolen en route to the store shelves. I felt a wave of deja-vu: hadn’t this very article been run somewhere last year?
An hour later, a thunderous knock resounded from the front door. When I opened it, a liter-sized thermos plopped inside. A note from Kostya was tied around the neck: a man of my age, he’d written, should make certain to have soup every day throughout the winter. Instructions followed for meeting him in the countryside outside a certain village, if I managed to free myself before dark: \ . . after that last cottage, take the second trail on the left to a small clearing with a clump of birches. ... Go five paces further and look under the large fir on your right. You may see a rubber mattress. If it’s mine, you’ll recognize it. If we happen to be embracing on it, wait a few minutes discreetly in the clearing - my roommate’s strangely shy.
The soup was a meal in itself. I was on my second cupful when Oktyabrina called to tell me about the ‘sublimeness’ of the weather and invite me to share it with her, just the two of us, in some beautiful place. Gelda was unavailable because a team of government inspectors had descended on the bookshop to audit the books - ‘probably on purpose to spoil the day’. However, the snow had returned the old buoyancy to her voice and she cooed the ‘Zhoe darling’ with silvery affection.
‘Do let’s go somewhere,’ she said. ‘If you’re not working too hard, of course.’
H can’t accept invitations from you - unless I set the conditions. I’m a dominating male, after all.’ I said she’d have to discard her canvas rag and let me buy her an over-
coat.
‘You’ll probably make me get something outrageously ladylike. Zhoe darling, I know your clever little stratagems. ...’
Eventually, she allowed me to buy her a three-quarter length sheepskin at the hard-currency shop. It was surely the best and warmest coat she’d had: severe enough to let her pretend she cared nothing for style, yet stylish enough by Moscow standards to be stared at. After this we agreed on an afternoon walk in the Botanical Gardens, a favorite of our exploring-Moscow days. Driving there, Oktyabrina chattered happily about the novel she’d just started. She always knew, she confided, within the first five pages whether a writer was on her wave-length.
‘For example, you , Zhoseph. I genuinely think you’d move me deeply if only you’d take up fiction. Because you’re straightforward - kind of modem. Not full of melodramatic plot.’
The scenery silenced us. All the city’s peeling paint and blemishes were concealed by white fluff, and the cupolas of a dozen churches cast an enchanting spell. Not only the churches, but also the iron fences of the grand old mansions - even, somehow, the sagging wooden cottages and old trolley wires.
The gardens were almost too pretty. Snow fell so fast that flakes stuck together before hitting the ground, like typewriter keys punched too quickly. Each tree was a picture postcard. The air smelled of fresh snow and of something organic, as if the autumn apples hadn’t been harvested. Oktyabrina was so moved by the wintry glory that an hour passed without a call of nature. When the need did assert itself she walked ahead with no fuss at all and relieved herself in the fresh snow behind a clump of trees. Despite everything - I thought - she’d matured considerably in the year or so I’d known her.
When our faces were tingling we started back. Oktyabrina took my arm and snuggled up to me.
‘Zhoe darling, doesn’t this beauty make you feel terribly insignificant?’
‘I’m not sure. Small and great at the same time.’
'That’s it exactly - a writer understands. It makes you feel at peace with yourself because it puts things in proportion. How I hope my period of being silly has passed.’
She shook the snow out of my hat with her mitten.
‘How’s your embassy lady working out?’ she asked.
‘Not as well as I’d hoped. It’s a kind of dead end at the moment.’
‘I’m sorry, Zhoe darling. Really I am. . . . Funny - you never took me to meet her. Are you aware of that?’
‘Would you like to now?’
‘I’m not sure. I was simply dying to when your romance was at its most torrid. On the other hand, I was also secretly glad. . . . Because all this time, I never told you something rather important.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s why I didn’t come to see you all that time in the autumn. You see, it had nothing to do with Gelda, really. The real reason is I’d heard about your sweetheart and didn’t want to interfere.’
‘You’d heard about what?’ For a second, I imagined she was genuinely jealous, and my thoughts raced. But Oktyabrina reacted to my question as if to a challenge.
‘You’re right to doubt me,’ she asserted. ‘Why camouflage life’s dilemmas? Your love affair was a pretext. The real real reason concerned you and me - only you and me.’
She waited for my prodding. ‘You’re hinting that I somehow let you down before the summer vacation,’ I said.
‘Don’t be a sentimental goose,’ she said tenderly. ‘I simply felt it would be . . . well, somehow wrong to go on seeing you after our farewell ceremon)/. Perhaps my decision was influenced by autumn itself. Because there’s a time for everything in life: “Every season brings its own friends, like its own fruits” - do you understand?’
‘Not exactly. I think we might have braved the fall
together. It was fairly cold when we met, if 1 remember/
'Zhoe darling, don’t be so dense, this isn’t easy for me. What I mean is, I thought our friendship had seen its summer. Certain emotions can’t be relived. If you try to go back all you achieve is something dismally artificial .’
'But what about going forward? I was very fond of you, you know.’
Going forward to what ? — you were so distant, you gave me so little hope. . . . Besides, you’ve missed my main point. Which is that I’d changed utterly by the end of the summer. I simply wasn’t the spoiled brat you once cared for.’