All these strange tidings seeped through the chronic bronchitis of my old radio; but not, as yet, one single report of a successful defection by flight.
In January we hardly flew at all. It had become too dangerous. Anyway, it was difficult to stay up for long in the snow-laden air, despite our fur coats and hats. Katenka tired quickly, snow got in our eyes, and we might be spotted, even in the woods. Katya suggested sewing us some white suits. This would have been wonderful, but we had almost no money at all.
The frosts of Epiphany arrived with a bang. On St. Tatiana’s day I learned exactly where they were holding Kolenka. I looked in at Lukov Street, the neighbors showed me the sealed door with joyous trepidation. I had expected scarlet sealing wax, the National Emblem, like on a general’s button; instead there was a slip of paper and faded blue seals. There had been no search—too many books. I was told they would now be given to the Lenin Library. They only took away papers lying on the table and, strange as it may seem, the cat. The bit about the cat I don’t believe, incidentally. The neighbors had long wanted to do him in. Poor old puss. Formally, Kolenka was charged with the usual thing, breach of public order, although phrases like “losing touch with reality” were slipped in. He could be held only in a cell or in a camp enclosed in some sort of special netting. But in the final analysis, even this charge was flim-flam. What they wanted from him was just one thing: how?
I can vouch for Kolenka, I am quite sure that no amount of neuroleptic drugs could drag out of him those utterly simple yet incredibly deep explanations with which he changed my life forever, in the spring. Kolenka was as soft as wax, tender-hearted, loving; but like everyone else he hated what was going on, he didn’t even hate it, he rejected it biologically.
At last I understood the meaning of the message he sent on with Katenka: “It’ll be better this way....”
Rumors began to circulate that they were closing the country in earnest, that taxes would be raised, vodka would go up yet again, even whale meat would cost twice as much, while the military budget was to be sharply increased so as to carry out a colossal project: something like enclosing the whole country under one gigantic bell jar. There were arguments about ultraviolet radiation, about photosynthesis, all sorts of things connected with the sun’s rays, respiration, and so on. A friend of mine, a pilot in civil aviation, told me what I have no doubt is true: that the Western frontiers were already being patroled by aircraft flying in pairs with a kilometer-long net strung between them. There was talk of the problem of birds. The West also began to take the whole business a lot more seriously. NATO began to fear that the Soviet army would harness the experience of the flyers and war would assume an entirely new character. The possibility of a completely new and appallingly concrete isolation from the rest of the world was becoming more and more real. Although for me, who had never been further afield than Tallin, it didn’t make a blind bit of difference. It was in those fleeting, chaotic days that I chanced upon a somewhat confused article by Professor Pogoreltsev.
Katya brought it home from the dressmaker, whose husband was by way of being an underground bookseller—he made copies of Solzhenitsyn, Barkov, or Steiner. He did all the bindings himself and was pretty inexpensive. We used to get all sorts of new stuff from him, for a night or two—a Nabokov story, or an article by some dissident. In ordinary life the bookseller worked as an elevator operator.
Katenka had run herself up a marvellous punky dress, although there was nowhere she would ever be able to wear it. I shall explain why. A translator acquaintance of ours wangled us an invitation to an international beer exhibition, at Sokolniki Park. The exhibition was closed, for the trade only, and it was hard to get in. When we got inside the pavilion, of course, Katenka and I found everyone we knew: loft artists, underground poets, and Madame Kasilova famous for her midnight salons, and actors from the Polyanka, and even the ambassador of the Republic of Burundi, who never failed to show up at every party thrown by unofficial Moscow. We walked to the exhibition across the enormous snowbound park. It was early evening, darkness was falling rapidly, the snowdrifts glowed a deep blue. The park’s innumerable walks were packed with ice—kilometers of marvelous skating. People were walking and falling, falling and walking. They laughed, swore, and fell some more. Katenka, too, slipped, fell and bruised herself. It was so silly to walk, comically pawing the ground, when it cost nothing to simply pick up and fly. I was especially struck, then, by the manifest absurdity of ordinary locomotion. Inside the pavilion each country had set up its own bar. We had never seen anything like this: comfortable, clean, invisible music playing; beautiful girls in little aprons passing round mugs of beer, not a single cop—not in uniform, that is. The clientele consisted of our lot and their lot. Our lot had long hair, wore tattered jeans and sweaters; theirs—from the ministries and committees—were heavily built and had on suits; their eyes were oily with hatred. They were drinking lots of ale, they grew heavily drunk, and began importuning the busty barmaids without understanding a word of anything but Russian. One, with a protruding lower lip and party eyebrows, was saying to a friend: “Translate for me, tell her HI give her two kilos of caviar... what the hell, make it four kilos....”
The Germans had simply set up an antique fire engine in their part of the pavilion. It was all gleaming with red lacquer and highly polished brass. The barrel with its pump was full of powerful Munich beer. A bare-legged floozie in a golden helmet treated us to hot sausages. It made you think longingly of a putsch.
Katenka grew flushed and started playing the fool. Lit by carnival flashes of colored light, she stood before a beer-sodden apparatchik and allowed herself to be wafted up on a light of current of air, then sank modestly back again: up... down, up... down. The man’s face darkened apoplectically, with his great paw he clutched now at his heart, now at the wall. I didn’t get cross. No one else had seen her.
But when we emerged into full darkness, broken only by the occasional street lamp, and then made our way along a slippery path past a row of flagstaffs thrumming in the wind, I couldn’t stand it any longer either and, flying briskly up ten meters or so, spent a good half-minute disentangling an American flag from its pole while my fingers grew numb with the cold. Katenka clapped her hands and twirled delightedly below. I glided safely back to earth with the flag bundled under my arm, and we rushed off in search of a taxi, now and then briefly taking off from the black ice in our impatience. An old Odessan promised to have us home in no time, we grew languid in the warmth of his taxi and lay wrapped up in each other while he rattled off one story after another, laughing at his own jokes in a voice hoarse from too many cigarettes. A ground mist eddied in the empty street and squares. The city seemed to simmer.
That night we joined Western democracy, spreading the flag on our bed, still smelling of snow and only slightly damp. Next morning, when the winter sun touched the poplar’s bare branches with red, when Katenka called out that coffee was ready, I was pulling the ragged quilt over our bed when I noticed among the stars and stripes a tiny spot where she had slept—Katenka was having her period.
Anyway, for a laugh, she used the flag to make herself a long, rustling gown. Can you imagine wearing such a thing to the Bolshoi or the Conservatoire?