Fellow Travelers (9 page)

Now the city was trying to restore itself, recover its soul in a new embodiment, rebuild itself in a new world with the same élan and self-confidence. Everything had started anew. Its artists pursued a new socialist aesthetic, its painters, sculptors, actors, musicians, and architects. There was a vitality unknown for decades, perhaps ever. But it wasn't going to last. The vitality would rapidly rigidify into sculpture fit for a pharaoh and architecture for some demented Sun King.

In those days Manny was gone much of the time, off to the Ukraine overseeing the first shipment of Ford tractors or the first delivery of General Electric turbines or Moline harvesters, or on to Rostov and the Caucasus, Bako and the oil fields, Tiflis in Georgia for god knows what. I found myself desperately lonely. I would lighten my evenings with the opera and the ballet—it didn't matter if I didn't understand the language. I found a pantomime in the suburbs and a puppet theatre where the language didn't much matter either. But the Moscow Art Theatre remained out of reach.

People like to say that with a really great acting company you don't need the language, but I did. I sat through five hours of
The Seagull
consumed with boredom. I couldn't understand what the characters were saying; my recollection of the play was too shaky to remember what must have been going on, and there wasn't even a plot summary in the program, like at the opera, that enabled you to say to yourself, oh here is where Rudolfo declares his love to Mimi.

I kept nagging Manny about his promised introduction to his friends in the Moscow Art Theatre. Who were these people he knew? When could he arrange for me to meet them? He kept saying he would once the business began settling down. Then everything changed.

I met Kasha. I'd like to think I lifted my eyes from a deal in the black market, saw her crossing Red Square, and dropped everything I was doing to set off in hot pursuit. But it wasn't like that. I can't even remember any more how it was. But after I met her, Kasha, Ekatarina Ivanovna Arkadyevna, nothing was ever the same again.

iv

Katya, Ekatarina Ivanovna, Ekatarina Ivanovna Arkadyevna, Katya, Kasha, she of the multitudinous names, spreading and multiplying like the ripples on the water, my darling, my love, whom even today, fifty years later, I cannot think of without an ache in my heart, without my breath quickening and my pulse beginning to race. And then my heart breaks, crashes, my eyes fill as they do these days at the slightest triviality, and I brush the tears away, but never the ache from my heart.

Spring comes late in Moscow, in late April, even in early May. It comes in fits and starts, with deep frosts and sudden snows interrupted by days of rapturous beauty, the buds swelling on the trees, the lindens lining the streets, lambent birches at the riverbanks, the maples reaching above the rooftops in the courtyards and alleys, the light flashing upon the river, like silver, and the snow shrinking back in the gutters. The sun lifts in the sky and touches places it has not seen all winter.

I wish I could remember how we first met, as if I could find some key, some talisman that would open and illuminate everything that followed. I would like to be able to say, with a wry smile, that we met at the Bolshoi, in a glittering blaze of luxury and light, when mistakenly we had both been sold the same seat. Or on the street, on Tverskaya Street, when her dog slips off the leash, a foolish, frivolous little dog with white hair over its eyes, and I retrieve it for her, stumbling and lurching and then, successful saviour, catching the leash in my hand and returning the dog to her, breathless and smiling.

But I remember nothing, only that it was spring, a Sunday afternoon by the river, and we are sitting together on a bench under the budding trees watching the barges head down the river.

“Where are the barges going?” I say.

“What barges?” she says.

“The ones in the river, there, straight ahead of us.”

And she laughs. “You don't mean barges, you mean flat-boats.”

“I thought that's what I said.”

In my faltering Russian I must have mistaken one word for another, and instead of asking where the barges are going I have asked where the kangaroos relieve themselves. Something like that. Who knows anymore?

“I'm not from Moscow,” she says. “I have no idea where they're going.”

I think now I must have looked up and seen her, standing at the parapet along the embankment, must have said to myself I've seen her before somewhere, a face on a passing streetcar, or glimpsed in a sidewalk café perusing a newspaper, or just there, somewhere, in my dreams, and she smiles at me. Her face lights up, and she says, “What a beautiful day, I love it when the catkins begin to burst on the birches.”

I don't understand a thing she has said, and I try to explain that my Russian is worthless, all I know are phrases from travel guides and the technology of platinum mining.

She laughs; her eyes lower, as if she doesn't understand even the little Russian I do know.

She is about my age, a little older maybe, and dressed in a quilted jacket open at the front with a scarf curling around her neck. I think she is beautiful. A soft round face surrounded by golden curls, a halo, a wreath, and her eyes dance, her lips purse and rise at the corners.

“I've seen you before somewhere,” I say.

“Every day,” she says.

I think she's making a joke, or I've misunderstood her Russian.

“You don't know who I am?” I shake my head.

“I thought you did. I don't usually talk to strangers, but I know you in a way. I see you every morning when you come in for tea at the shop on the corner of Koznetsky Most and Petrovska.”

“You're the girl at the counter?” I say. I don't remember seeing her there at all.

“No, no, in the kitchen. I put the little cakes on the plates at the back of the room and then in boxes for the people to take out.”

When I try to remember, I see the round tables with their peacock wire backs, I see the morning sun streaming in through the window, I see the backs of people sitting at the table, overcoats and jackets, hats and mittens, but I do not see her, though I must have, how else would I know I have seen her.

“I can see I made quite an impression.”

“You're the American,” she says. “
Amerikanen
.” She uses the word the way you refer to some exotic creature in a zoo, a duck-billed platypus, a homocameleopard.

“How did you know”

“The way you dress for one thing, the overcoat, the leather gloves, the hat. Everyone watches you.”

This makes me uneasy, and I say, “You want to sit down?”

She shrugs, and we cross the walk and sit down on the bench, side by side, facing the parapet and the blue sky beyond.

“Do you come here often?” I say.

“When I feel like it. When the weather is good.”

And suddenly we have nothing to say. I want to know all about her, but nothing comes to my mind, and I look at her and I find myself blushing, burning beet red. I push my hands in my overcoat pockets and finally ask “Can I get you a lemonade? Some tea cakes? Some coffee?”

“I think I'd like that.”

We get up and walk along the embankment toward the stand where they're selling food and drink, maybe a quarter of a mile away. I want to take her hand, but can't and we keep bumping into each other as we walk, muttering sorry under our breath—
ua sazhetchyon
—talking nonsense about the park, the view, the budding spring. She is half a head shorter than I, large-boned, full-breasted, and I can sense her weight and warmth when we jostle against each other. She seems like a foreigner. For some reason, I've come to think of Russian women as light-limbed, frail and delicate, with thin faces and thinner wrists, too frail and delicate to touch without breaking.

We sit on the parapet, drinking tea and eating a pastry, and she says finally, “I have to go now, I've got to meet my sister; we're going to the Pushkin museum.”

“Look,” I say, “I'm new to Moscow; can we eat together sometime, go to the ballet, see each other again?”

“I'd like that,” she says, and she leans over and kisses me quickly on the cheek. I can feel the warmth after she has turned and run down the path to the corner, where I see her meet another girl somewhat older than she, and as they go out of sight I realize I don't even know her name.

Ekatarina Ivanovna Arkadyevna.

When I stopped at the canteen for coffee the next morning, she was there at the back of the room, in a white uniform arranging the pastries.

“Where can we meet?” I ask when I've eaten my brioche, downed my tea, and slipped awkwardly to the back of the room, and she says on the corner of Petrovsk and Stoleshnikov Lane. We met at six that night, in the wintry dark, and had dinner at a bootleg restaurant, a culinary speakeasy of sorts, that catered to foreigners and Moscovites with enough money to afford decent food at indecent prices. Kasha had an enormous appetite, and it was only later that I realized, not necessarily that she was starving, but that she hadn't had food like this ever before in her life.

She was a country girl and had grown up in Byelorussia, five hundred miles to the east on the edge of the great birch forests, a peasant farmstead in a land of stolid, ignorant peasants. But her father had different things in mind for his daughters and insisted they get an education, and so she and her sister had gone to the high school in a village five miles away. However, she never got her certificate. The war broke out, then the revolution and they burned down both the high school and the village around it.

When the evening was over I walked her home through those deserted streets for what seemed hours, finally turning off the boulevard ring and onto a street that sloped down toward the Khitrov market. We arrived finally at a dim four-story stone building. I kissed her warmly, hungrily, and was kissed in return, sweetly, tenderly.

“When can we meet again, Ekatarina Ivanovna?” I asked, using both of her names and sounding to myself like someone out of Dostoievski or Tolstoi. When shall we meet again, my Kasha, my love?

I had never felt quite like this before. Heading back to the hotel I seemed to be walking two feet above the ground, my heart sang, I was singing, I would run and leap and dart into the air, crying in wordless joy. When I climbed the stairs to our rooms at the top of the Excelsior Hotel, I found Manny waiting for me and I tried to recover my calm. He'd been away for a week, in Odessa and Novorissovsk.

“What's the matter with you? he asked.

“Nothing,” I answered, but I could feel myself beginning to blush, sweating a bit even in all that cold.

“If I didn't know better, I'd have said you were freshly laid.”

“Nothing like that,” I said, and thought to myself, or not yet, but better than that, just touching her, feeling the warmth of her lips, her face, the heft and hunger of her body.

“All the women in Moscow are streetwalkers,” Manny said bluntly.

“Not this one,” I said.

“How do you know?” Manny said.

“Because I met her in the breakfast room.”

“Where does she live?”

“Down near the Khitrov market.”

“My god, those are the worst slums in Moscow, the red light district. The haunt of cutthroats, thieves, and socialist deviationists.”

“There are no whorehouses in socialist Russia,” I said severely.

“Have it your way,” he answered. I said goodnight and dove into my bed, under the covers for some of the sweetest dreams I can ever remember having.

Within a week I had taken her back to the Excelsior, we had made love, and within two weeks Katya had more or less moved in with me. She brought some of her clothes, the uniforms she used at her work, a few dresses and coats, a set of those nesting dolls, which she put on the windowsill, and an ikon of the Blessed Mother that she set up on the wall next to the bed. Sometimes we would be making love and I'd open my eyes to find the ikon watching us both, I always figured in envy.

My room was too small for the two of us, but Manny was there only part of the time so we generally had room to spread out. To me, everything seemed cramped, confined, but to Katya our quarters afforded a quantity of light, space, and air she hadn't enjoyed since she had come to Moscow. Though most Russians still lived on a hand-to-mouth basis, foreigners could live like kings, or perhaps like party members, and I took Katya to the commission shops the government maintained for foreigners and bought her clothes, jewelry, and other frivolities she could never have dreamed of otherwise.

“Tell me, Ekatarina Ivanovna, that you love me a little.”

“I love you a lot,” she said.

“Tell me I'm not just another way to survive, for another week or month, for another season.”

“I will tell you whatever you like, but you will know how I love you, not by what my lips say, but what my whole being says to you.”

“I shall watch, Katerina Ivanovna, I shall wait.”

“That is too formal, you're talking as if I were somebody's aunt or grandmother.”

“Kasha then,” I said. “I shall call you Kasha.”

“Kasha, you sound like a Georgian. It's Katya, even Kate. Kasha is a grain, it's groats, a mash that you eat cabbage with.”

“Then I will call you Kasha, because you are good enough to eat.”

It sounds foolish even to me, such talk, something out of Booth Tarkington or Stephen Crane, but it was anything but foolish to us. The clichés masked the immensity of our feeling for each other. I was entering a foreign country, and I explored every nook and cranny of it, every ocean and continent. And yet, over fifty years later, what do I remember? Our months together seemed to me less an ecstasy, a rapture, than a mood like the dying notes of a flute.

I fell wildly in love with her. I had never fallen in love with anybody before (and, truth to tell, never since). I was obsessed with her, yet after all these years I can scarcely recall the intoxication she filled me with whenever I saw her, standing at a street corner waiting for me, behind the counter in the commissary, across the table from me in a restaurant. I would give anything to be able to recover that excitement. But I can't. That's how I know I am old.