deserve/
This was evidently more than she’d bargained for. ‘Phoo, you don’t expect me to believe that/ she said in her old all-men-are-rascals voice. T happen to be aware that Americans have no patience for anything. . . .’ Then she began to cry. The sounds were softer than her sobbing of our kiss-after-bath fiasco.
‘What’s the matter now?’ I whispered. ‘Please don’t say I’ve hurt you again/
‘Haven’t you ever seen tears of joy, you big brute? Why do all the beautiful things happen to me ?’
Her hair tickled my face. ‘You have a remarkably serious “happy” cry,’ I said. Her sobs grew louder. I held her, wondering whether they were genuine.
‘I don’t deserve this happiness yet,’ she blubbered. ‘Why don’t others have it too? ... I want to warn you right now: I’m absurdly demanding. Any man of mine will have to be stunningly rich: I want him to support an orphanage. We’ll start with the poor little girl from Evgeny Ignatievich’s class. She’s not an orphan, but hasn’t a chance.’
Wax sputtered onto the spruce, filling the room with an unforgettable spell. I poured more champagne. We sipped it silently.
‘As long as I’m making demands,’ added Oktyabrina, ‘you had better be gallant to Mishka, my teddy bear. Because he’s exceedingly jealous — I shall not sleep without him.’
23
Then Vladimir was taken ill. It was the sniffles at first, but he was apprehensive. With good cause: a heavy cold materialized and culminated in a nasty case of Asian ’flu -probably the vanguard of an epidemic that had been spreading, perversely, eastward from England.
Perhaps sensing that this was the time to prove his man-
hood to Oktyabrina, Vladimir foolishly attempted to treat himself. This resulted in his being sprinted to a hospital for Ministry of Education personnel. His mother made the arrangements. With some reluctance, Oktyabrina recognized an obligation to visit him.
What an untimely tragedy/ she said, mocking herself. T must go to him.’
I must go with you, I answered — superfluously, for we were together most of the time now.
We drove out after a concerted shopping effort. Oktyabrina bought apples, lemons, jam, honey, canned compote and a bottle of a strong pepper-vodka called pertsovka , a peasant remedy for colds. ‘I feel almost middle-aged/ she hummed. Being an angel of mercy for a former suitor/
The hospital lay in one of those Russian tracts whose roads, such as they are, seemed designed to confuse outsiders. This might actually have been their purpose, since the adjoining woods contained government dachas, where the public is manifestly unwanted. When we finally arrived, it was to a locked gate. The absence of a flock of relatives bearing food parcels meant it was obviously not a visiting day. A sign on the gate confirmed this, adding that ‘unauthorized persons' were ‘categorically forbidden’ to enter except during specified hours. This was enforced by a brick guardhouse and watchman inside who refused so much as to approach the petitioners window. He waved us away and returned to a tin of fish, morsels of which he consumed from the tip of a penknife.
Oktyabrina shouted about a ‘supreme emergency’, but it was obvious that nothing would move the guard. Having come this far, however, she couldn’t abandon the ‘mercy mission’. After we’d driven a few hundred meters back down the road, she asked me to stop the car. The fence of the hospital grounds was made of raw timbers, already sagging. Oktyabrina took the provisions from the car and I helped her climb over.
Her absence, she assured me, would be spectacularly
brief - not a tick more than half an hour, for I was due for cocktails at the British Embassy. The newspaper in which the provisions were wrapped tore as I passed them over the fence. I retrieved a jar of Bulgarian jam and put it in Oktyabrina’s little mitten, which peeked over the top board like a baby bird’s beak.
‘Thanks a million, Zhoe darling — for you and for absolutely everything,’ she shouted. ‘Half an hour, I hope to die. Please violate me if I’m late - even if I’m not. And darling, don’t worry.’
I wasn’t at all worried. Russian hospitals are notoriously lenient with strangers who’ve somehow sneaked inside. I heard Oktyabrina’s rabbit steps crunching along the snow crust as she advanced through the woods towards the complex. Then she fell, squealed, giggled and picked herself up again.
I’d allowed an hour for Oktyabrina’s visit. The woods softened the cold, and I spent most of the time outside the car. The newspaper from which the provisions had fallen had a wonderfully comic letter from an indignant grandmother, a Communist of forty years’ standing, complaining of a fur workshop in her district that dispatched its workers to stores to buy up its own products at state prices, then resold them for double on the black market. I blocked out an article on the theme, softening the conclusion to avoid trouble.
A bowlegged man appeared on the road, mumbling to his large, sad mongrel. To me, the man rambled about ‘ships from a foreign planet’ that had landed in nearby woods. They had come to make a deal with Politburo bigwigs, he said, to sell them a thousand pensioners a week as slaves. He urged me to return that night ‘for proof’.
Oktyabrina had been gone an hour when the man limped on. Waves of exasperation passed, and I returned to the gate in case she was waiting there. I scouted several hundred yards further along the fence in case she’d lost her
bearings. When I returned to the car, she’d been gone almost two hours; I had to leave for the British Embassy. The epithet I drew in the snow crust for her was a favorite of Gelda’s during her milder fits.
Gelda called the next evening: Oktyabrina had skipped work again. She was more irritated than worried — until the following day, when we faced the fact: Oktyabrina had disappeared again.
Gelda and I met after work to consider the possibilities. One theory of mine seemed worst: the emotions unleashed at our revel had somehow been transferred back to Vladimir. They had eloped.
Saturday was a visiting day at the hospital — but mention of Vladimir s name stopped us at the guardhouse. A younger guard scanned the registry book and scowled. A policeman joined him to question us about our identity. Together, they announced that Vladimir had left the hospital - they could not say for where.
We don’t inform strangers about former patients. He’s been discharged. You have no further business here.’
I drove Gelda to Oktyabrina’s latest room. It was in the basement of a converted monastery not far from Vladimir’s apartment. The windowless cubicle was empty; the family who let it hadnt seen Oktyabrina since the morning of the mercy mission . They refused to tell us more: detectives had come to examine Oktyabrina’s things — and to warn them that they faced prosecution for profiteering on their apartment.
The rest of the weekend was a see-saw of anxiety: we would dash somewhere on a fruitless lead, and return to pace Gelda’s room. The secretary at the Museum of V. I. Lenins funeral Train at Paveletsky Station — a trite propaganda palace - felt certain that Vladimir was still in the hospital, since his mother had telephoned to this effect that very morning, explaining his absence.
We traced Vladimir’s home telephone and Gelda called. 224
No one answered until evening. Then it was a woman, obviously Vladimir’s mother. When Gelda asked to speak to him, she replaced the receiver.
Sunday was election day for representatives to the Supreme Soviet. Gelda had to drop her ballot, pre-marked by machine, in the box at a school near her room; then we drove to the pet market. But Oktyabrina did not appear there during the whole of the long afternoon.
On Monday morning, the election results - 99.4 per cent for the unopposed Communist-picked candidates - were reported as a 'magnificent demonstration of the superiority of Soviet democracy’. I was writing up the story when Kostya telephoned. He had just heard from a typist in the Moscow City Council.