The Big Green Tent (79 page)

The waiting people had gotten into position too soon—it would be another hour before the arriving passengers had gone through customs and picked up their luggage.

The Soviets differed from the Americans primarily in the amount of luggage they carried and the terrified expressions on their faces. The Americans could be distinguished from the Soviets by their height, their air of inquisitive naïveté, and their clothing. If you looked closely, however, the clothes of the Americans and those of the Soviet officials and their wives were the same: tweed overcoats on the men who occupied higher positions, and hooded anoraks or duffel coats on those of a more modest position. All of them wore muted, dark winter tones; but on the Soviets, the clothes wore a different facial expression.

Among this group, sedate and exhausted after the flight, there was one bright spot: a red gnome hat that stuck out above the crowd, boldly and provocatively. Under the pointed cap were lavishly painted eyes, red cheeks, and a mouth covered in a horrendous shade of lipstick. A typical matryoshka nesting doll—but one of foreign make. A detail for the initiated—she wore a luxurious mink fur and hiking boots. In her hands, along with a woman's makeup case, she carried a giant plastic sunflower. This was the signal.

A light-haired young man in a black jacket separated himself from the waiting group. A hat with earflaps was sticking out of his pocket. He moved in the direction of the sunflower, just as sunflowers follow the direction of the sun. He stopped in front of the woman in the red gnome cap and reached out for the sunflower …

“Debbie! You are … I'm glad…”

Debbie, his fiancée, was no beauty, but she had a radiant smile.

“Sah-nee-a!
Ya tebya lublyu!
”

Pierre had managed to find an ideal bride for Sanya. She was a journalist, a feminist, and a hell-raising activist from the American delegation for the International Women's League. A year before, she had been in Moscow for a women's seminar organized by the Committee of Soviet Women. Where she and Sanya had met and started a romance! A watertight legend!

They embraced. From one side, the click of a camera shutter sounded—a photographer from a progressive American newspaper was documenting the meeting of Debbie O'Hara, an activist in the American women's movement, and a young music historian. With her pudgy hands, Debbie grabbed Sanya by the cheeks and kissed him right on the mouth. The soapy taste of lipstick. Sanya put his arm around her weakly. She was half a head taller and seventy pounds heavier than he was.

Another smacking kiss. Another click of the camera. One more kiss, one more click, and Eugene Michaels left: he had accomplished his mission. Two gray suits, who blended into the crowd, crossed from two corners of the hall. They came together in the middle, by the exit, like somnambulists, whispered something to each other, and parted again.

Chirping:

“Your English is wonderful!”

“Yours is too!”

“You're so cute!”

“And you're my life's dream!”

The bride and groom giggled. Sanya was covered in red lipstick. Debbie gently rubbed off the spots of faux blood with a soft handkerchief.

Sanya tried to grab the suitcase, but she pushed him away, protecting it.

“You're a savage, Sah-nee-a! I'm a feminist! I won't allow you to open doors for me, or to carry my suitcase. I'm an independent woman!”

Sanya looked at her, somewhat abashed.

“Well, I just thought it was heavy…”

She had already thrown the bristly dark brown fur over her left arm. She bent her right arm at the elbow, saying:

“Look at my muscles! I lift weights!”

Sanya probed her bare arm.

“Debbie, you're simply the dream of my life! When I get tired, you can bring me up in your arms!”

Marvelous, fluent English.

“Oh! You made a mistake! To ‘bring up' is what a mother does. You know, nursing your young, and all that. ‘Carry me' is what children say!”

Putting down her suitcase, she placed both palms on her heavy breasts to illustrate her point.

Sanya was somewhat alarmed.

Sanya took his bride to the Berlin Hotel. Before Debbie went to sleep—for about twelve hours straight, a logical consequence of jet lag, her revels with friends in New York on the eve of her departure, and a healthy nervous system—they drank vodka downstairs in the bar. They chatted. Then they kissed, and parted until the following morning.

The next day, Sanya had planned to show his bride Moscow, and to take her to the Conservatory in the evening. He hadn't prepared any other surprises for her. There was just one thing on the agenda: submitting papers for registering their marriage at the Palace of Matrimony, the only place that accepted documents from foreign citizens.

Their morning stroll through Moscow began after lunch. Sanya had put together the itinerary. Debbie had seen the Kremlin the last time she was there, and now she wanted to see what she called “real life.”

When they left the hotel, the weather was magical: frost and sunshine, a marvelous day, a remarkably blue sky and snow. In the bracing cold and frigid sunshine, the Irish girl from Texas experienced such a corporeal joy and exhilaration that Sanya, who didn't like winter, looked around and was forced to agree: it was great!

Still, winter induced no ecstasy in Sanya, and, unconsciously wishing to deflate his bride's euphoria, took her to the most terrible place of all—to Dzerzhinsky Square, where the bloody knight of the Revolution stood in the middle like a column.

He pointed to the building at his back.

“That's the Lubyanka. Our own Judgment Day.”

“I know, 1937!”

He took Debbie's hand.

“Why 1937? That monster is still alive today. And now that I've managed to spoil your good mood, let's walk around some more.”

He spoke his textbook English well, and his keen ear immediately picked up on her slightly lisping Texas drawl.

They went to Pushkin Square, stopping at the very beginning of Tverskoy Boulevard. How often the LORLs' excursions had begun here in years gone by! Victor Yulievich would arrange for them to meet at the Pushkin monument, and from there they would take excursions into the past: Ilya with his camera, Mikha with a notebook, and ten other inquisitive lads …

Debbie turned out to be an absolute novice, a clean slate, when it came to Russian culture—so much so that it was difficult to know where to begin.

“Have you read Tolstoy?” Sanya asked.

“Oh, yes! I saw the movie
War and Peace.
Two movies! I adore them! Audrey Hepburn, she's just gorgeous! And your Pierre Bezukhov, Bondarchuk, of course. He got an Oscar! I wrote a review!”

“That's a start. I'll show you the house where the family of Count Rostov lived,” Sanya said with a sigh.

What a simpleton she is!
he thought, and took her to look at the famous mansion.

For four days the bright cold weather held, and for four days they wandered through the city. The bride, despite her naïve simplicity, turned out to be quite capable of sensitivity and sympathy. She was, in fact, a wonderful traveling companion, animated and curious. Her astonishing ignorance about everything concerning Russian culture gave way to a passionate interest in it, which took hold on the empty spot. This interest extended to Sanya.

During the sunny days, they walked through the icy streets, and in the dim, poorly lighted evenings they shivered and stopped into cafés, which were hard to find back then, for a warm-up and a snack. For Debbie, this was the most romantic trip of her life. With the exception of Spain—ten years before, she had spent a month there, and a handsome Spaniard had turned up, shown her Madrid and Barcelona, and then run off with all her money. There hadn't been much of that anyway …

After visiting the museum in Khamovniki, where Debbie was so moved she nearly cried (“Sah-nee-a! Your Lev Tolstoy is every bit as great as Voltaire!”), freezing, they had taken shelter in the entryway of an old building. On a third-floor windowsill, they sat down to warm themselves over the radiator. Sanya took a flask out of his pocket—Ilya's example!—and both of them took a gulp right from the bottle.

Debbie chattered almost nonstop. But now she was very quiet, and when they were by the hotel, saying good-bye, she said:

“Sah-nee-a! I can't understand how I have lived without all of this! When I get home I'm going to learn Russian!”

“Debbie, why would you need to do that?”

Debbie blazed up. Her temper was not merely Irish (though that would have been enough), but downright Italian.

“
Ya lublyu! Ya lublyu
the Russian language! You are, of course, very cultured, and I understand! But I am perfectly capable of learning myself! I learn fast! I learned Spanish! I learned Portuguese! I will learn Russian! You'll see!”

Sanya got nervous, and adroitly changed the subject.

“Debbie, do you know who Isadora Duncan was?”

“Of course! Of course I do! I'm a feminist! I know all the extraordinary women! ‘The Dance of the Future'! A new style of dance, barefooted and wearing tunics! And her lovers were Gordon Craig and a Russian poet, I forget his name.”

“Look, Debbie, they stayed in this hotel in 1922. This is where her love affair with Sergei Esenin began!”

Debbie lifted her hands to the sky in a gesture of prayer.

“My God! It's unbelievable! And I'm staying here, too! And I'm not even having a love affair!” She laughed. “No, I'm having a love affair with Russia!”

The following day, accompanied by Olga and Ilya, for moral support, they went to the Palace of Matrimony on Griboyedov Street, the only place where male foreigners could solemnize their marriage to a Russian woman. This was a rare instance in which a Russian man was marrying an American woman. Debbie's American documents were so well prepared that she even had a few papers too many. Sanya didn't have his birth certificate with him, so he had to take a taxi and go home to find it, not very confident of success. But Anna Alexandrovna didn't let him down now, either. On the shelf with his favorite books, between the French novels, in a folder that was very familiar to him, Sanya found all his documents, arranged in perfect order, beginning with his birth certificate and ending with his Conservatory diploma and certificates of vaccination.

The documents were accepted. The wedding date was set for May.

“Our Fanya always said that you shouldn't marry in May, or you'll rue it the rest of your life,” Olga said.

Ilya and Olga fully backed this marriage venture. Olga was eagerly taking part in establishing the matrimonial union: she made borscht and cooked dumplings.

Debbie was over the moon about Moscow, and about borscht, and the Russian people she met. She loved everything about the Soviet country except the position of women. She came to her conclusions after observing how Olga prepared dinner, washed the dishes, and took care of their adolescent son, and Ilya didn't lift a finger to help her. When she tried to express her indignation about this, Olga simply didn't understand.

On her last day in Moscow, Debbie ended up at Sanya's apartment. The visit was unplanned. They had been walking around Kitai-gorod, and she desperately needed to use the bathroom. The closest one, it turned out, was at Sanya's. Neither his mother nor his stepfather were home. Debbie threw her mink coat on Nuta's chair, and proceeded to walk through the communal apartment to the communal WC. After her rest stop, she glanced into the communal kitchen.

The Texas native experienced another shock. She had not been sympathetic to communism before now, and a single WC and kitchen for twenty-eight people did not increase her regard for the social system. The next shock came when she sat down in Anna Alexandrovna's armchair and looked around: an old piano, a voluptuous dressing table on claw feet, painted with flowers and birds, bookshelves containing books in three languages, sheet music, paintings, a valuable chandelier gleaming with crystal … She found it hard to reconcile the poverty of the shabby communal apartment with the splendor of Sanya's room.

“Try to warm up. Do you want some tea? I'll put on some music.”

“Why don't you play something yourself?”

She took the gnome's cap off her head, and her red Irish hair crackled with dry static.

Sanya sat down on the round piano stool. He thought a bit, and began to play Prelude no. 1 in C Major.

Debbie sat listening, her hands folded over her stomach like a peasant, and analyzed the situation that had unfolded. She was not as stupid as Sanya thought she was. She liked this Russian boy—he was over thirty, and three years younger than she was—very much.

He was younger, better educated, and, besides, he clearly came from a higher class of people than she had ever had anything to do with.

By the time Sanya had finished playing, Debbie had made a decision: since this strange and absurd proposition had already come about somehow or other, let it not be merely for show. She would marry this boy for real.

Sanya had not suspected that things might take such a dangerous turn.

*   *   *

The weather broke on the last evening, as though Moscow had grown sick of trying to make a good impression on Debbie. A damp wind began to blow, it grew warmer, and icy snow started to fall. Sanya wanted to take Debbie to a Richter concert, but it was canceled. They went to Olga and Ilya's on foot.

Olga fed her friends what she called a “prenuptial dinner.” By that time, Sanya had grown weary of the endless walks with his bride, and even the idea of the marriage had begun to pall. It hadn't even been his idea in the first place!

Olga served salads and pies. Ilya brought the vodka out of the cupboard built into the kitchen window—the original refrigerator from the time of the building's construction, before the advent of modern fridges.

Debbie ate a lot, and drank a lot as well. She sat next to Sanya and kept trying to tickle him and paw at him; but she did this as though in jest, as if it were all a game. She pushed her smiling face into his, and he noticed, all of a sudden, the glistening pink strip of her gums above her upper row of teeth. It prompted a sharp adolescent memory—Nadia's gums! Potapovsky Lane!