When she thought of Misha, she saw herself sitting on an uncomfortable chair near the “communal” telephone, counting the black squares on the tiled floor. The telephone was in the hall and was shared by everyone in the apartment. While talking to Misha she had had to lower her voice, because Valentina Petrovna, the voracious gossip, would conspicuously walk back and forth between her room and the kitchen, slowing down as she neared the phone. The rest of the time she was probably standing behind the door to her room, busily filling in the gaps in Anya’s and Misha’s fragmented conversation. With Misha Anya had been very intimate but theirs was a safe intimacy, and distance had protected them from self-censorship. They knew they were part of a larger system of official public communication. The invisible presence of the others, the flutter of slippers in the hall had only stimulated them, provoked confessions about the things that had never happened in real life.
Anya met Misha on the “Devil’s Wheel” – a special ride in the Kirov Park of Culture and Leisure. Misha fell victim to the calumnia of Anya’s girlfriend – Ira – who observed his immediate fondness for Anya. “He’s handsome,” Ira said, “but he has smooth rosy cheeks – like a girl. You know what I mean…”
“He has smooth rosy cheeks like a girl…” – this strange sentence haunted Anya the whole day, that beautiful spring day when they were riding on the “Devil’s Wheel”, trying to touch each other in the air in an instant of ephemeral intimacy, and then pushing each other away, as they swung on the chains. The song went like this:
Just remember long ago in spring
We were riding in the park on the “Devil’s Wheel”
Devil’s wheel, Devil’s wheel
and your face is flying, close to me
But I’m swinging on the chains,
I’m flying – OH!
“Ahh…”
“Oh?”
“Ahh – ‘I’m swinging on the chains, I’m flying Ahh…’ “I thought you were humming the old song ‘Devil’s Wheel’. It hasn’t been on the radio for ages… It must be ten years old…”
“Yeah… I don’t know why it stuck with me.”
“It’s a nice song. I remember that great Muslim Magomaev used to sing it on TV on New Year’s Eve. It was when I was still married to my ex-wife and our son was in the Army… She would be making her New Year potato salad in the kitchen with my mother-in-law and I would be watching that TV show called ‘Little Blue Light’. And there would be a clock and the voice of comrade Brezhnev – first it was comrade Brezhnev himself, then it was his voice, and in the last years the voice of an anchorman reading Brezhnev’s speech… poor guy had a tic… but the speech always sounded so warm and familiar and it went so well with a little glass of vodka and herring: ‘Dear Soviet citizens… I wish you good health, happiness in your personal life and success in your labor.’ And then Muslim Magomaev would sing – ‘Devil’s Wheel’. Just remember long ago in the spring… We were riding in the park on ‘Devil’s Wheel, Devil’s Wheel, Devil’s Wheel…’ I know you’re not supposed to remember things like that these days… Now it’s called ‘the era of stagnation…’.”
“But it was such a good song…”
Anya was afraid to lose Misha’s face forever at the next swing. “Devil’s Wheel, Devil’s Wheel and your face is flying close to me”. The words of this popular song shaped their romance. But in this whirlpool of excitement, in the chains of the Devil’s Wheel, in the cool air of the Russian spring Misha’s cheeks were getting rosier and rosier. Ira’s words froze on the tip of her tongue. He blushed like a girl. They were doomed…
They would have made a strange couple anyway – he with his girlish rosy cheeks and his deep masculine voice, and she with her boyish clumsiness and long red nails painted with an imported Polish nail-polish. They didn’t know what to do with their excessively erotic and intellectual selves. After the encounter on the Devil’s Wheel came months of phone calls. They would carefully plan their next meeting and then always postpone it. Finally they decided, that it was now or never, they would conduct a secret ritual, to penetrate deep mysteries of the soul.
She left her house and walked away from the city center. She passed the larger-than-life portrait of Lenin made of red fishnet in the 1960s. Behind the statue of the Russian inventor of the radio was an urban no-man’s land, with the old botanical gardens, the ruined greeneries and endless fences made of wood and iron. This was the border zone – exactly the place that Misha wanted to perform their secret ritual. “This can be done only once in a life time,” he said seriously. “Napoleon did it to Josephine.”
She had to stand against the iron fence with her hands behind her back and her eyes open wide. He touched her eye with his tongue. He touched it deeply, trying to penetrate the darkness of her pupil. He lingered for a second, and then he licked the white around her eyelids, as if drawing the contours of her vision from inside her. Her gaze reacquired a kind of primordial warmth and humidity. They paused for a moment. Her eyes overflowing with desire.
They never deigned to kiss or hold each other; or saying romantic “I love yous” on the roof of the fortress. They despised such conventional games. They committed a single Napoleonic transgression, a dazzling eye-contact, a mysterious pact of intimacy signed with neither ink nor blood.
“Miss, you’ll have to rewrite this… We don’t accept red ink. And try to be neat…”
“Forgive me, I have terrible handwriting…”
“That’s your problem, not mine. And hurry please, we close in an hour…”
“But we’ve been waiting an hour and a half.”
“Well, yesterday, they were waiting for three hours and in drizzling rain. Be grateful that you’re in line for information, and not bread…”
“Oh, by the way, miss, speaking of bread, you should see what they sell in the cooperative bakery around the corner. Their heart-shaped sweet bread now cost five hundred rubles… I mean this is ridiculous… They used to be twenty kopecks – max.”
“What are you talking about? We didn’t have heart-shaped breads before… If it were up to people like you, we’d still be living in the era of stagnation or even worse, in the time of the great purges… You can’t take any change…”
“Hey, Comrades, Ladies and Gentlemen, whatever… Stop yelling while you are in line. These working conditions are impossible! I can’t give out any information with all this shouting!”
And in New York there were a hundred kinds of bread – Anya suddenly felt ashamed – bread with and without calories, with and without fat, bread which is not really bread at all but only looks like it. Bread that never gets stale, that is non-perishable, eternally fresh and barely edible. Sometimes you have to rush to an expensive store, miles away to get foreign bread that lasts only a day, that’s fattening and crusty and doesn’t fit into the toaster. So Anya did not express her views on the heart-shaped bread. She tried hard to remain neutral and friendly with all the strangers in line and concentrated on filling out her inquiry cards. But those two intimate episodes were her main clues for tracking down Sasha and Misha. The rest was the hearsay of well-meaning friends, rumors, that were mostly fifteen years old.
Sasha, rumor had it, was married and was drinking. Or rather, at first, he did everything right – he flirted with the black market in his early youth, but then he cut off all his blond curls and ties with foreigners and entered the Naval Academy. He married his high school sweetheart, whom he had begun to date in the resort town of Z just about the time of their romance, and who had waited for him heroically throughout the years. Naturally, they had had a very proper wedding in the Palace of Weddings on the Neva embankment and they had placed the crown of flowers in the Revolutionary Cemetery and taken lots of pictures with her white lacy veil and his black tuxedo. Sasha wanted to be a gentleman officer, like his father, a youngish-looking, well-built man who often played tennis with Sasha at the courts of the town of Z. Sasha was made of the “right stuff. But then something unforeseen happened. Some time in the early 80s he started developing strange symptoms, losing hair and getting dark rashes on his arms… Nobody was sure what it was… During his service somewhere in the Arctic Circle, Sasha might have received an excessive dose of radiation. But those were the things one didn’t talk about, you know what I mean… He quit the service, left the city and underwent special medical treatment somewhere far away. He came back completely cured. Anya’s distant cousin, Sasha’s occasional tennis partner, said that he was in Leningrad, but that he had moved from his old apartment, and no longer spent summers in the town of Z. Another common friend had spotted him down in the subway, but Sasha hadn’t said hello… Then again, the crowds had been moving fast, the light was dim, and, who knows, it might have been someone else…