There’s no better city for being in love than St. Petersburg. The streets and squares double the intensity of your feelings. The angel atop the Alexander Column soars in the dark, scudding clouds, and the air is heavy and humid. I suppose that in sunny countries happiness has another flavor. There it is anxious, tormenting, and imbued with a cold fog.
A warm apartment, hot strong tea, lemon liqueur. Damned guests won’t go away. I want to be alone with him. So that’s what desire is: I’m hot; I’m feverish; I have a strange sensation in my belly. I don’t understand what’s happening to me. For me, desire is part of being in love. We don’t even
make an attempt to create anything. It’s twilight, and we’re lying under a blanket with our clothes on. All that exists for us is lips, hands, shoulders, my breasts. We don’t touch the sweet, secret places.
We went to the beautiful suburbs around Petersburg, taking walks in the snowy paths of the palace grounds past marble statues that are boarded up. He said that you shouldn’t kiss in the cold because your lips will crack. We kissed. On the way back we had a childish argument, and in the train he caressed and warmed my hands. He had received a college scholarship, and there was a farewell dinner in the luxurious Evropeiskaya Hotel. I couldn’t taste the food; tears kept filling my eyes. What will happen to us?
Nothing. I went back to Moscow; his calls became rarer and rarer. Our next meeting took place a few months later, and it was sad and unnecessary. Then we saw each other rather frequently. We drank a bit and had a bit of fun and drove each other a bit crazy, but we didn’t fall in love.
That was more than fifteen years ago. Now he’s a professor, wise and talented, a bit odd, and profoundly religious. Incidentally, he never did marry.
OCTOBER 5 . More about my husband. Gradually things came to an end. Sociologists have targeted the crisis years in a marriage. I think they’re the second, fifth, and twentieth. Our crisis came in a year and a half. One fine morning I asked my husband to go back to his parents for a month. I had to force
myself to do it; parting scared me, but our life together was
impossible. He didn’t argue; he packed and left. I wept the first
night, and then it was wonderful. My friends and parents were
proud of my determination and at the same time seemed to pity
me. I was a sort of hero tricked by fate. I bought new clothes,
started going out, and then . . . had an affair. I don’t know
whether I was finding myself or taking revenge. I loved the role
of the disillusioned woman made wiser by experience and now
betraying her husband at last. We made intellectual small talk
until one o’clock (what if my husband were to come home?)
and then . . . Around six I would chase out my seducer, to his
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great annoyance. My husband would appear when I was at work, leaving money and food.
After the month was up, it was his turn to take revenge. He said that he’d come back when he felt like it, maybe in another month. I was losing the initiative. I had to do something.
Here s a widespread Soviet story. A lousy husband, drunkard, hooligan, and womanizer perpetrates petty hooliganism, as it is called. Maybe he even beats up his wife. The police arrest him, and the next morning his wife, with a swollen, bruised face, runs to them and begs, “Give me back my bastard!” Of course, that’s much too plebeian a version for me, but I had to get my “bastard” back anyway. Simply out of stubbornness. Ironically I offered him a chance to come back on March 8, International Women’s Day. I was solidifying the international victory of women over men. I went to a friend’s house—as if I weren’t even waiting for him. He came home later than I did, returning into captivity with his head proudly held high.
OCTOBER 10. Now I can joke about it, but at the time it was sad and difficult to understand. We divorced eight months later.
You get married and divorced in the same building, the registry of civil documents. You go in for a divorce, and you’re met by happy newlyweds on the way out. I’d like to see you two years from now , I thought spitefully.
You bring over the divorce documents and worry about going in the wrong room; you might get married by accident again. While we waited in line, my husband thought up a fun thing to do: get married and immediately go next door for a divorce. No one would care; you only have to wait three months.
When we registered our marriage (I hate that expression), everything was fun and silly: a woman with a red sash across her shoulder (the symbol of a solid Soviet family?), the memorized spiel, the band that isn’t sick of playing the same wedding march every fifteen minutes. At the most solemn moment I got the giggles and couldn’t hold it in. The woman must have thought that the not-very-young bride was suffocating with happiness. The groom couldn’t understand what was expected from him when the woman suggested he congratulate me—i.e., kiss me. We obviously didn’t belong at this Soviet ceremony.
The wedding certificate, a pretty piece of paper in a blue folder, looked decent. We checked that the names were right. Friends had had a curious thing happen. They got married, and at the wedding feast with relatives and friends, when an uncle jokingly proposed, ‘‘Let’s look and see whom they married you to!” they looked at the certificate. The bride was correct, but the groom was a stranger. They were leaving on their honeymoon that evening, and they couldn’t check into the hotel without proof of marriage. They hurried back, but the registry did only
divorces in the afternoon. They had to make a scene in order to get a temporary certificate with the groom’s name on it.
We didn t have a problem, and the registrar even spelled my husband’s difficult name right. All I wanted to do was have a drink or even get drunk, and that is what I did. We went home, accepted the congratulations of the relatives and friends who had been waiting for us, and sat down to a luxurious feast. A half hour later I was tipsy, forgot about my new husband, and enjoyed our guests. By nightfall, when the honored relatives left and only the friends remained, I was dancing on the table.
The next day we left for our honeymoon in the Baltics— closer to civilization. My husband’s relatives had given us a present: They arranged for us to stay at the Central Committee hotel. The closer to the Central Committee, the closer to Soviet rule and the farther from Europe, so there was no hot water, the bed collapsed after our first trial, and party fat cats were feeding in the restaurant downstairs. The hotel for foreigners across the street was a different matter: Finnish furniture, bars and restaurants, a sauna, and drunks—but at least they were Finns. At the Central Committee hotel the staff knew everyone and didn t ask for a passport or hotel pass or care about your family status. If party functionaries wanted to sin with other
men’s wives, that was their business and the party didn’t interfere.
A strange alienation occurred in the early days of our honeymoon. Or was it just my imagination? We walked along the cozy streets of Tallinn, went to the best restaurants, drank beer, spent money, but I was sad.
Two years later we went next door in the registry building
to get our divorce. It was easy. If you don’t want to divide up anything in court, you come back three months later, and you’re as free as a bird. It only costs one hundred rubles. That’s tidy income for the state since there are so many divorces. It’s more complicated with property. There are no prenuptial agreements in the Soviet Union, so everything is divided in half. Your only hope is to prove that the furniture and so on were bought before the marriage. I know an intelligent young man who, after living for several years with his wife in her parents’ apartment, tried to take away a blanket that they had purchased five years before the wedding. My neighbor took his own child’s baby carriage during his divorce and gave it to the child of his future spouse. People have moral blackouts during divorce.