So much had transpired in the last few days. The truncated visit to Dasha Cohen—why? What was I trying to unravel? The decision (who can say why—because a decapitated Arab challenged me to?) to come to Beit Ibrahim. Crazy.
My eyes suddenly felt as if they had been scourged with steel wool. I blinked over and over, but no tears, no moisture, just the grinding of my eyelids that only made it worse.
And what about Anyusha?
Mother no doubt was already at the house, taking care of her. Naturally, she would be furious with me. And Anyusha—well, who knew what she was thinking? She was always so cool about everything, nothing ever seemed to faze her. She was a remarkable kid, a good kid, a great kid, I never had to worry about her.
I brushed the sand from between my fingers and wondered briefly where these grains had begun their lives. I tried to conceive the eons of time they had endured only to end up here, on me. Time. The one incalculable, moving in all directions, coming to rest where you least expect it.
A few days after our late-night walk, Collette called from a pay phone near the Tretyakov and asked if I wanted to meet her. We met outside the museum entrance on Lavrushinsky. It had already gotten cooler, and she was bundled in her woolen coat, but this time she wore no cap and her raven hair sparkled in the few brave rays of sunshine that had forced their way through the gathering winter clouds. Shreds of light sparkled on her moist lips, bright red as always, set off like rubies against her pale skin. She put out her hand in a friendly way, and I took it.
“You like museums?” she asked.
“Of course.”
“Too bad,” she said. “I want you to meet my friends. I just didn’t want to say so on the phone.”
She was so beautiful standing there, and I had only tasted her lips. “Fine,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We hurried down the block and jumped on a trolleybus, got off some blocks from Pushkinskaya, and turned into Little Gnezdnikovsky Lane. She led me to an older apartment building, redbrick, turrets, cupolas, probably 1860s. We were quickly buzzed in, and I followed her up several flights of stairs. She knocked on a door; a woman in a purple beret stuck her head out, studied us for a moment, then motioned us into the tiny flat. Like the tram, it was overflowing with people; and, almost as one, they looked up and smiled at Collette. They were Jews and foreigners, not that I had actually met a foreigner before. Still, you had to be blind not to pick them out: the smooth, soft haircuts, the fine leather of the shoes, the perfect fit of the jeans. These people had an easy, confident manner, and the Americans especially affected a natural, lazy posture, hands in pockets, heads cocked to one side. But it was their smiles—open, almost stupid—that mesmerized me; when they laughed it was like just-popped champagne. One of them held court beside the bookcases, his audience of hungry Soviets hanging on every word as if the syllables coming from his mouth were droplets of honey. The whole room was enveloped in a golden light.
Collette said, “Come. I’m sweltering. Help me out of my coat.”
I placed my hands upon her shoulders and lifted the coat. As she pulled her arms through the sleeves, her neck was revealed to me, and, beneath the opening of her blouse, the white cup of her bra.
“Just throw it in the bedroom,” she said. “And introduce yourself if you want. Or leave if you’re afraid.”
“Why would I be afraid?” I said.
I took her coat, but when I came back, I couldn’t seem to find her. I strolled over to the window, instinctively pulled aside the curtains. Two white Zhigulis were parked near the back. I made out two more around the side. Someone came up beside me. “You seem worried. Don’t be. They won’t do anything.” He spoke well but had an accent—sort of like an old Jewish man from Odessa, but he wasn’t old and I doubted he was Jewish. In fact, he was the American I had been watching mesmerize the Russians with his speech.
“I’m not worried,” I said to him.
“All these Americans and Brits—we’re your safety net.” He gulped some wine and patted me on the back. “I’m Charlie.”
He wore gray corduroy jeans and under his jacket a thick, ropey sweater that hung loosely on his lanky frame. His feet were encased in a pair of massive square-toe boots. “One good thing about America, we don’t care what anyone does. You ever hear of Berkeley, California? You can walk down Telegraph Avenue with your dick hanging out and no one will even bat an eye. Here, you put on a pair of Levi’s and you’re immediately under suspicion.”
“It’s not true about the jeans, but your Russian is very good,” I said.
Collette now appeared out of nowhere.
“Charlie!” she called.
“There you are, my girl!” he said.
They linked arms. “Let’s talk,” she suggested. “Roma, you come, too.”
We stepped out to the vestibule and pressed ourselves onto the landing beneath a grimy blacked-out window. Charlie and Collette talked in whispers, and it took me a moment to realize they had switched to French. Maybe they thought the KGB didn’t know French. It seemed silly. After a while, she wrote something down on a slip of paper, the names of some scientific books and journals, and asked Charlie if he might be able to get them for her. He said he would try. Then he reached into a jacket pocket and brought out a small jar of instant coffee. She dropped this into her purse. At the same moment, she slipped him a little bundle. He put it into his pocket the same way a train conductor collects a ticket: without so much as looking at it.
I stood there in the half dark wondering again what I was doing there yet feeling strangely elated. Collette moved quite close to me. I was aware of the pressure of her hips. Her hand came around the small of my back and settled there.
“Let’s go in,” she said. “It’s cold.”
We hung around the apartment for a while. I believe I was a success. With the foreigners I tried my English, and with the Jews I found myself more and more at ease as the afternoon wore on, even though they were Zionists and dissidents and academics and artists, most of them refuseniks and quite a few of them what we used to call “names”—they were in the upper reaches of some alternative social order, celebrities of oppression. As for Charlie, he came up to me when he was ready to leave.
“Roman!” he said. “You’re a most interesting guy. I’d like to speak with you again sometime. Maybe see a concert or a play. I can easily get tickets. Maybe you’ll come to Spaso House for a movie? That’s the ambassador’s residence. Everybody comes for the movies. Food’s great. What do you think?”
“Oh,” Collette interjected, “we’ll have Charlie over for dinner, how about that?”
I did not know how to understand this remark, and in any case I didn’t think I’d really be going to the American ambassador’s house, so I soon forgot about the whole thing. I continued my waltz around the room, stopping to chat with this little group of three and that little group of four, but every few seconds I found myself checking for Collette. I did not have to search hard: she was a neon sign, ALL GLORY TO THE SOVIETS, CHAMPIONS OF THE REVOLUTION! Her mouth was the crimson star over the Kremlin. With the blinking of her eyelids, flecks of amethyst floated into the room. I was now completely and brilliantly aware that my life had changed. I stood in the ranks of a whole new company, on the shores of a whole new world, a more beautiful world, possibly, even hopefully, a more dangerous world.
I brought Collette her coat and followed her out the door and into the metro. We boarded the train, sat in silence as the stations came into view, vomited up their passengers, and disappeared again as the train raced off into darkness. It did not seem to matter that, in fact, she had not asked me to join her on her way home. I had this new knowledge, and it included the realization that, no matter how impossible it seemed only a few hours before, we were together.
Her place was located on the northern edge of the city, in what, not all that long ago, had been the village of Medvedkovo and was now the last stop on the orange line, an ugly little station, brand-new, the walls hammer
ed to look like serpent’s teeth waiting to devour the poor commuters who, like hordes of fat, sluggish potato bugs, ventured forth onto its narrow platforms. We rode the escalator up to Shirokaya Street. Whatever might have charmed the eye in bucolic Medvedkovo had been pitilessly obliterated by the new apartment blocks, massive bulwarks sprouting from the soil like Spartoi—only what were they guarding? The metro station? At the feet of these giant buildings cowered, muddy and dwarflike, an astounding array of identical kiosks—ice cream, kvass, cigarettes … ice cream, kvass, cigarettes—and, interspersed among them, glass message boards on which were posted the latest from Pravda and Izvestia. A few old men stood before them, reading, as if the revolution might yet produce some good news. The bread shop was emptied of all but a few stale loaves, all black; a line of shoppers snaked halfway around the block from the milk store; the shoe emporium proudly displayed its one model of oxfords, three pairs in every window, and the restaurant sat empty, awaiting its first customer of the day, or perhaps the week.
Collette pointed to a group of women in cheap coats and homemade hats.
“Disgusting, aren’t they?” she said.
We found the entrance to Collette’s building, one of the maze of apartment blocks in forlorn shades of pink and yellow. They reminded me of the girls at a party who never get asked to dance.
We pressed for the elevator. It groaned open, and a fetor stretched out toward us, followed by a large woman in a fur coat pulling a frightened little dog.
“Collette Petrovna!” she bellowed. “Hello! And who’s this nice young fellow?” She bent down and petted her dog. “Say hello, Vova!”
Collette did not reply. Instead, she edged me quickly into the elevator and pressed her floor.
“Who was that?” I asked.
“Plotkina,” she replied. “She’s just a pest. Don’t worry about her.”
Collette’s apartment was at the end of a long, narrow hall, its floors sodden by an endless parade of wet boots. She set the key in the lock and turned the bolt. We stepped inside, she flipped on the light, and I gasped.
The door had opened onto a room suffused in color and light. In the center was a kind of velvet throne with baroque finials and arms in the shape of lion’s paws; beside it, a floor lamp carved to resemble one of the undulating pillars of Saint Peter’s in Rome, topped with a shade of colored glass; the drapes were burnished taffeta, made dazzling with tassels of gold; and her rug—a riot of color, stitched, woven, glued, I could not say how, into a magic carpet. Her walls were hand-painted with tea roses, and in her tiny bedroom, a lace canopy was strung with silk flowers.
“This must be what France looks like,” I marveled.
“How would I know?” she answered sadly. “It’s all just junk I found.”
I followed her into the tiny kitchen, watched as she put on the kettle. Her hands were not delicate like Irina’s but rounded, like the rest of her body, fleshy and full, though the long red nails made them elegant and European. She brought one of these hands up to her face and languidly brushed a few untamed strands of hair from her eyes. By this time, her lipstick was mostly worn off, but her lips picked up moisture from the steaming kettle and seemed, if anything, more luminous than ever.
“Can I help with the tea?” I said.
“Wait a minute,” she replied.
Collette lifted the telephone, rotated the dial a few notches, and shoved a pencil between the finger hole and the stop bar, transfixing it in the no-man’s-land between on and off.
“That’s the way they listen,” she said. “When you break the connection, they go deaf.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You didn’t know that? Everyone knows that.”
“Of course I knew that.”
She frowned. “I don’t want them to listen to me. I’m sick of them listening to me.” Just as suddenly she broke into a smile. “But I want you to listen to me.”
“I love to listen to you, Collette.”
She poured the tea. Her china was English or maybe Japanese, and I was afraid the teacup would shatter between my fingers.
“You have your own problems,” she said. “Why do you want to hear mine?”
“I don’t really have any problems,” I told her.
“Then you live in a different world than I do.” Suddenly she looked up at me. “Roman, do you know what love is?”
“Of course I do,” I said.
“No. You cannot. How could you? You’re the lucky one.”
She put down her cup. “I met him because there is a God in heaven after all.”
“Whom?”
“Do you want to hear or not?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.”
“He appeared in the early afternoon,” she began. “I remember this specifically, because I had been looking out the window, and only the youngest children were playing—school was not yet out. It was spring, I had thrown the windows open and the air was full of life—you know, children laughing in the courtyard, birds singing, bees buzzing—spring! When out of the blue, there was a knock on my door. I was afraid, of course. No one ever comes unannounced unless it’s trouble. And then through the door I hear Je cherche Collette, Collette Pierrovna Chernova. Can you imagine? French coming through my door? I had not heard French since my grandfather …” She sighed as if Grandfather had only yesterday passed away. “And so beautiful. I peeked through the glazok. The face on the other side … the eyes so blue, so pure … Mademoiselle Chernoff? J’espère que je ne suis pas venu à un temps incommode. But Roman, you don’t understand French, do you?”
“Well, yes. Some,” I told her.
“Don’t worry, I’ll tell it in Russian.” She glanced at her hands, then out the window. “He was so tall! He wore a tweed jacket. Do you even know what tweed is? And his name was Pascal. Pascal!” She was smiling happily now. “The first thing he said to me was ‘I have a letter for you.’ He was so nervous! He kept looking around for the police to come jumping through the windows!
“He seemed like a boy to me, the way he smiled, the way it was impossible to take offense at anything he said. I made him tea.”
“Like for me.”
“Yes, like for you. Only he didn’t drink it like we Russians do, slurping and dripping and loading our cups with spoonfuls of sugar, but elegantly, unaffected. He seemed to enjoy it so much.”
“Collette,” I said, “what is the point of all this?”
“The point? There is no point. Just my life. If you’re not interested, you’re not interested.”
“No, no,” I said.
She sipped her tea very slowly, pouting. But at last she began again. “Finally, he reached into his pocket and handed me a big white envelope. Inside this envelope was … but let me get it for you.”
“That’s not necessary,” I said to her.
“No, I’ll get it. I want you to see it. To see I’m not making this up.”
She disappeared into her bedroom and then reappeared with a white envelope, just as she said, only now it was somewhat darkened, dog-eared at the corners. She withdrew from it a smaller envelope and held it up to me. It was addressed simply to “Collette,” and from that she withdrew a few sheets of onionskin. She held these to my face also, and I could make out, in a fine but shaking hand, tightly spaced lines in muted green ink.
“I’ll translate as I read,” she went on, “so you will forgive me if sometimes I make a mistake.”
“Collette,” I said again, “it’s not necessary.”
“You don’t want to hear?”
“You don’t have to translate. I know French.”
But she translated anyway.
My dearest Collette (she held the pages as delicately as one would a manuscript of great antiquity):
I am your great aunt Lorrette, the wife of your uncle Guy, whom you will have known by the name of Gennady, the brother of your grandfather Serges. I have known of your existence for some years, but only now have felt it safe to communicate
with you, especially as I am getting quite old and do not know how long I may have on this earth. When your grandfather left, we wrote and wrote, but all our letters were returned. We guessed Serges was dead, caught up in that awful whirlwind, or in prison, and his family probably in exile, though we dared to hope we were wrong and it was simply that the mail was being intercepted by the authorities. Then came the war. Guy and I had the good fortune to escape to Spain, where we remained in hiding until 1945. Unlike most of the others, we returned to Paris and began life again. Guy went back to work, first as a restorer of fine textiles, and later as a curator and an author of many beautiful books, while I worked as a journalist. Again we tried to find Serges’s family but, just as before, nothing. Still, in our hearts, we could not let go. Then, miraculously, in 1979, we met a man who was involved in what is called the Soviet Jewry Movement, of which perhaps you know more than we do, and of course we told him all about Serges and we asked him, can you find out about him? He took everything down in his little notebook, every little detail. Weeks passed, and then months, and then years, another hope dashed for us. But then one day—it was, I think, a full three years later—the telephone rang, and it was this very gentleman. Without any explanation at all, he declared not only that he had found Serges but that Serges had a granddaughter—you! We also learned that your father, Pierre, went missing, and that you are now alone, an orphan. From that moment, I was determined that you, my darling Collette, must come to France. I thought about this night and day, but because Guy was certain that you would be safest if we left you alone, I did nothing.
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