The Stories of John Cheever (116 page)

He returned to the office at six. She was waiting in the street, waiting by the door. “Did you have a nice tour?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” said Artemis. “Oh, yes. I don’t seem to like museums, but then, I’ve never been in any and perhaps it’s something I could learn.”

“I detest museums,” she said. She took his arm lightly, lightly touched his shoulder with hers. Her hair was a very light brown—not really blond—but it shone in the street lights. It was straight and dressed simply with a short queue in the back, secured with an elastic band. The air was damp and cold and smelled of diesel exhaust. “We are going to hear Luncharvsky,” she said. “It isn’t far. We can walk.”

Oh, Moscow, Moscow, that most anonymous of all anonymous cities! There were some dead flowers on the bust of Chaliapin, but they seemed to be the only flowers in town. Part of the clash of a truly great city on an autumn night is the smell of roasting coffee and (in Rome) wine and new bread and men and women carrying flowers home to a lover, a spouse, or nobody in particular, nobody at all. As it grew darker and the lights went on, Artemis seemed to find none of the excitement of a day’s ending. Through a window he saw a child reading a book, a woman frying potatoes. Was it because with all the princes gone and all the palaces still standing one felt, for better or for worse, that a critical spectrum of the city’s life had been extinguished? They passed a man carrying three loaves of new bread in a string basket. The man was singing. This made Artemis happy. “I love you, Natasha Funaroff,” he said.

“How did you know my name?”

“Mrs. Kosiev told me all about you.”

They saw ahead of them the statue of Mayakovsky, although Artemis didn’t (doesn’t today) know anything about the poet. It was gigantic and tasteless, a relic of the Stalin era that reshaped the whole pantheon of Russian literature to resemble the sons of Lenin. (Even poor Chekhov was given posthumously heroic shoulders and a massive brow.) It grew darker and darker and more lights went on. Then, as they saw the crowd, Artemis saw that the smoke from their cigarettes had formed, thirty or forty feet in the air, a flat, substantial, and unnatural cloud. He supposed this was some process of inversion. Before they reached the square, he could hear Luncharvsky’s voice. Russian is a more percussive language than English, less musical but more diverse, and this may account for its carrying power. The voice was powerful, not only in volume but in its emotional force. It seemed melancholy and exalted. Artemis understood nothing beyond the noise. Luncharvsky stood on a platform below the statue of Mayakovsky, declaiming love lyrics to an audience of one thousand or two thousand, who stood under their bizarre cloud or canopy of smoke. He was not singing, but the force of his voice was the force of singing. Natasha made a gesture as if she had brought him to see one of the wonders of the world and he thought that perhaps she had.

He was a traveler, a stranger, and he had traveled this far to see strange things. The dusk was cold, but Luncharvsky was in his shirt sleeves. His shoulders were broad—broad-boned, that is. His arms were long. His hands were large and when he closed them into a fist, as he did every few minutes, the fist seemed massive. He was a tall man. His hair was yellow, not cut and not combed. His eyes had the startling and compelling cast of a man unremittently on the up and up. Artemis had the feeling that not only did he command the attention of the crowd but had anyone there been momentarily inattentive, he would have known it. At the end of the recitation, someone passed him a bouquet of dying chrysanthemums and his suit coat. “I’m hungry,” said Artemis.

“We will go to a Georgian restaurant,” she said. “A Georgian kitchen is our best kitchen.”

They went to a very noisy place where Artemis had chicken for the third time. Leaving the restaurant, she took his arm again, pressed her shoulder against his, and led him down a street. He wondered if she would take him home and if she did, what would he find? Old parents, brothers, sisters, or perhaps a roommate? “Where are we going?” he asked.

“To the park. Is that all right?”

“That’s fine,” said Artemis. The park, when they reached it, was like any other. There were trees, losing their leaves at that time of year, benches, and concrete walks. There was a concrete statue of a man holding a child on his shoulders. The child held a bird. Artemis supposed they were meant to represent progress or hope. They sat on a bench, he put an arm around her and kissed her. She responded tenderly and expertly and for the next half hour they kissed each other. Artemis felt relaxed, loving, close to sappy. When he stood to straighten the protuberance in his trousers, she took his hand and led him to an apartment house a block or so away. An armed policeman stood by the door. She took what Artemis guessed was an identity card out of her purse. The policeman scrutinized this in a way that was meant to be offensive. He seemed openly bellicose. He sneered, glowered, pointed several times to Artemis, and spoke to her as if she were contemptible. In different circumstances—in a different country—Artemis would have hit him. Finally, they were allowed to pass and they took an elevator—a sort of cage—to another floor. Even the apartment house smelled to Artemis like a farm. She unlocked a door with two keys and led him into a dingy room. There was a bed in one corner. Clothes hung to dry from a string. On a table, there was half a loaf of bread and some scraps of meat. Artemis quickly got out of his clothes, as did she, and they (his choice of words) made love. She cleaned up the mess with a cloth, put a lighted cigarette between his lips, and poured him a glass of vodka. “I don’t ever want this to end,” Artemis said. “I don’t ever want this to end.” Lying with her in his arms, he felt a thrilling and galvanic sense of their indivisibility, although they were utter strangers. He was thinking idly about a well he had drilled two years ago and God knows what she was thinking about. “What was it like in Siberia?” he asked.

“Wonderful,” she said.

“What was your father like?”

“He liked cucumbers,” she said. “He was a marshal until we were sent to Siberia. When we came back, they gave him an office in the Ministry of Defense. It was a little office. There was no chair, no table, no desk, no telephone, nothing. He used to go there in the morning and sit on the floor. Then he died. Now you’ll have to go.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s late and I’ll worry about you.”

“Can I see you tomorrow?”

“Of course.”

“Can you come to my hotel?”

“No, I couldn’t do that. It wouldn’t be safe for me to be seen in a tourist hotel and, anyhow, I hate them. We can meet in the park. I’ll write the address.” She left the bed and walked across the room. Her figure was astonishing—it seemed in its perfection to be almost freakish. Her breasts were large, her waist was very slender and her backside was voluminous. She carried it with a little swag, as if it were filled with buckshot. Artemis dressed, kissed her good night, and went down. The policeman stopped him but finally let him go, since neither understood anything the other said. When Artemis asked for his key at the hotel, there was some delay. Then a man in uniform appeared, holding Artemis’ passport, and extracted the visa.

“You will leave Moscow tomorrow morning,” he said. “You will take SAS flight
769
to Copenhagen and change for New York.”

“But I want to see your great country,” Artemis said. “I want to see Leningrad and Kiev.”

“The airport bus leaves at half past nine.”

In the morning, Artemis had the Intourist agent in the lobby telephone the interpreters’ bureau. When he asked for Natasha Funaroff, he was told there was no such person there; there never had been. Forty-eight hours after his arrival, he was winging his way home. The other passengers on the plane were American tourists and he was able to talk and make friends and pass the time.

ARTEMIS WENT
to work a few days later drilling in hardpan outside the village of Brewster. The site had been chosen by a dowser and he was dubious, but he was wrong. At four hundred feet he hit limestone and a stream of sweet water that came in at one hundred gallons a minute. It was sixteen days after his return from Moscow that he got his first letter from Natasha. His address on the envelope was in English, but there was a lot of Cyrillic writing and the stamps were brilliantly colored. The letter disconcerted his mother and had, she told him, alarmed the postman. To go to Russia was one thing, but to receive letters from that strange and distant country was something else. “My darling,” Natasha had written. “I dreamed last night that you and I were a wave on the Black Sea at Yalta. I know you haven’t seen that part of my country, but if one were a wave, moving toward shore, one would be able to see the Crimean Mountains covered with snow. In Yalta sometimes when there are roses in bloom, you can see snow falling on the mountains. When I woke from the dream, I felt elevated and relaxed and I definitely had the taste of salt in my mouth. I must sign this letter Fifi, since nothing so irrational could have been written by your loving Natasha.”

He answered her letter that night. “Dearest Natasha, I love you. If you will come to this country, I will marry you. I think of you all the time and I would like to show you how we live—the roads and trees and the lights of the cities. It is very different from the way you live. I am serious about all of this, and if you need money for the plane trip, I will send it. If you decided that you didn’t want to marry me, you could go home again. Tonight is Halloween. I don’t suppose you have that in Russia. It is the night when the dead are supposed to arise, although they don’t, of course, but children wander around the streets disguised as ghosts and skeletons and devils and you give them candy and pennies. Please come to my country and marry me.”

This much was simple, but to copy her address in the Russian alphabet took him much longer. He went through ten envelopes before he had what he thought was a satisfactory copy. In the morning, before he went to work, he took his letter to the post office. The clerk was a friend. “What in hell are you doing, Art, writing this scribble-scrabble to Communists?”

Artemis got rustic. “Well, you see, Sam, I was there for a day or so and there was this girl.” The letter took a twenty-five-cent stamp, a dismal gray engraving of Abraham Lincoln. When Artemis, thinking of the brilliant stamps on her letter, asked if there weren’t something livelier, his friend said no.

He got her reply in ten days. “I like to think that our letters cross and I like to think of them flapping their wings at each other somewhere over the Atlantic. I would love to come to your country and marry you or have you marry me here, but we cannot do this until there is peace in the world. I wish we didn’t have to depend upon peace for love. I went to the country on Saturday and the birds and the birches and the pines were soothing. I wish you had been with me. A Unitarian doctor of divinity came to the office yesterday looking for an interpreter. He seemed intelligent and I took him around Moscow myself. He told me I didn’t have to believe in God to be a Unitarian. God, he told me, is the progress from chaos to order to human responsibility. I always thought God sat on the clouds, surrounded by troops of angels, but perhaps He lives in a submarine, surrounded by divisions of mermaids. Please send me a snapshot and write again. Your letters make me very happy.”

“I’m enclosing a snapshot,” he wrote. “Its three years old. It was taken at the Wakusha Reservoir. This is the center of the Northeast watershed. I think of you all the time. I woke at three this morning thinking of you. It was a nice feeling. I like the dark. The dark seems to me like a house with many rooms. Sixty or seventy. At night now after work I go skating. I suppose everybody in Russia must know how to skate. I know that Russians play hockey, because they usually beat the Americans in the Olympics. Three to two, seven to two, eight to one. It is beginning to snow. Love, Artemis.” He had another struggle with the address.

“Your last letter took eighteen days,” she wrote. “I find myself answering your letters before they come, but there’s nothing mystical about this, really, for there’s an immense clock at the post office with one side black and the other white showing what time it is in different parts of the world. By the time dawn breaks where you are, we are halfway through the day. They have just painted my stairs. The colors are the colors favored by all municipal painters—light brown with a dark-brown border. While they were about it, they splashed a little white paint on the bottom of my mailbox. Now when the lift carries me down, the white paint gives me the illusion that there is a letter from you. I cannot cure myself of this. My heart beats and I run to the box, only to find white paint. Now I ride the lift with my back turned, the drop of paint is so painful.”

As he returned from work one night, his mother told him that someone had called from the county seat and said that the call was urgent. Artemis guessed that it must be the Internal Revenue Service. He had had difficulty trying to describe to them the profit and loss in looking for water. He was a conscientious citizen and he called the number. A stranger identified himself as Mr. Cooper and he didn’t sound like the Internal Revenue Service. Cooper wanted to see Artemis at once. “Well, you see,” Artemis said, “it’s my bowling night. Our team is tied for first place and I’d hate to miss the games if we could meet some other time.” Cooper was agreeable and Artemis told him where he was working and how to get there. Cooper said he would be there at ten and Artemis went bowling.

In the morning, it began to snow. It looked like a heavy storm. Cooper showed up at ten. He did not get out of his car, but he was so very pleasant that Artemis guessed he was a salesman. Insurance.

“I understand that you’ve been in Russia.”

“Well, I was only there for forty-eight hours. They canceled my visa. I don’t know why.”

“But you’ve been corresponding with Russia.”

“Yes, there’s this girl. I went out with her once. We write each other.”

“The State Department is very much interested in your experience. Undersecretary Hurlow would like to talk with you.”