She quickened her stride among the alien, indifferent crowds. Spring breathed around them, the scent of blossom not entirely defeated by car exhaust.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘Just a coffee. You see I’m going to Russia soon and I’d like some advice.’
They reached Lafayette Square. The White House behind its fountain glistening with sunshine as if it had been painted overnight; porticoed and colonial, majestically snug behind Kensington railings. The baronial hall of the big bad baron himself. It was too much for Natasha Zhukova just at that moment. She gazed instead at the church on the corner, St John’s, the church of the Presidents. Sunlight imprisoned in its gold domes above its clean cream walls. Plucked, she thought, from the Kremlin, or a clearing in the taiga where, in such churches, moths of old women still worshipped with fragile defiance. The house of a rejected faith glowing now with familiarity.
He spoke again in Russian, expanding the aura of familiarity and stepping deftly inside beside her. ‘Perhaps you’d like to see the church. It’s a pretty little place.’
She glanced at him curiously, timidly. Until now she’d been aware only of his camel’s hair coat, bright tan shoes and button-down shirt; aware of his neatness. Now she appraised the man. About twenty-four, a bit like an actor with his hair longish by Russian standards (unless you were a rebel). On the skinny side which helped him to wear his clothes well, she supposed. A trace of a suntan from last summer, or a winter resort maybe—there was no telling where a man like this wintered. Hard grey eyes set with gentleness, ears a little flappy. Certainly the most elegant man she’d ever spoken to. And the most courteous, especially when she had previously consigned American males into seven brackets—the principals of The Magnificent Seven which she’d seen in Moscow; especially when the whole race was always dismissed as hooligan. Certainly someone to describe to envious girlfriends back at university—if she were ever readmitted.
The little church rejoiced in the sunshine and she said yes she would like to see inside.
Red pews. And tremulous water-colour patterns from the stained glass window above the altar.
‘The Last Supper,’ said her guide, pointing at the window. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it.’
Natasha Zhukova agreed. The whole church so self-composed and clean and golden.
The young man said, ‘The original church was built like a Greek Cross. The architect was a guy named Latrobe. He helped to build the Capitol and the White House. And he wrote to his son, “I have completed a church that has made many Washingtonians religious who had not been religious before.”’
Natasha Zhukova smiled for the first time that day; for the first time for many days. ‘It seems to me they’re not very religious today.’
‘Not today maybe. It’s too nice outside. I don’t think God—our God—would object to that.’ He led her down the aisle to Pew 54. ‘That’s where the President worships. Every President since Madison has worshipped here.’
‘Let’s go now,’ she said. Because she had a sudden frivolous desire to sit where the President’s backside had been. I am eighteen: I must curb such immature irresponsibility. But the church had done its job: tranquillized her heathen mind: the fear—or most of it—had been lapped up by the melting water-colours beneath the Stars and Stripes on the wall.
Beside the railings of the White House a Sikh wearing long leather boots and turban displayed a placard bearing the words: ‘My family is the largest. The Human Race. Be a world citizen.’ The guard on the gate regarded him with indifference.
‘He will surely be arrested,’ Natasha said.
‘Why? He isn’t doing anything wrong.’
‘I don’t know …’
A panting silver bus unloaded a posse of sightseers who headed, cameras joggling on their chests, for the Executive Mansion.
‘Would you like to go inside?’
‘No, please. I must go home.’
‘You don’t have to worry about anything. Everyone who comes to Washington goes to the White House.’
‘Everyone who goes to Moscow goes round the Kremlin.’
‘But can they go around the home of President Podgorny? Or Brezhnev or Kosygin?’ he asked cautiously.
‘I don’t know. But the Kremlin isn’t the sort of prison that you Americans seem to think it is. Moscow’s a beautiful city. And Leningrad—that’s even more beautiful. It is not unlike Washington I think.’
‘I’m glad you like Washington.’ He hesitated. ‘I’d like to show some of it to you. There have been some great architects involved …’
‘You seem to be very interested in these buildings of yours.’
‘I am,’ he said. ‘I’m an architect. I’ve just passed my exams. And you—what do you do? What brings you to Washington?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ She had once decided never to lie; particularly not to herself. But wasn’t silence the easiest lie of all? She noticed that his attention had wandered to a girl in a miniskirt airing her thighs in the new sunshine. ‘Do you work here? And do you make a point of talking to strange girls in book shops? That would never happen in Moscow.’ Or at least it had never happened to her.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And now, please, won’t you come and have coffee with me?’
‘Just one,’ she replied, surprising herself. ‘Just five minutes and then I must go home.’
‘Where is home?’
‘Not far away.’ No lies.
One coffee and, because he insisted, a hotdog. Which she ate very quickly because she was suddenly hungry; gurgling ketchup and mustard on to it. Pouring cream and crystals of coloured sugar into her coffee. Vague guilt surfacing at the memory of rectangles of sugar that rested like stones at the bottom of thick cups.
Here, among the jeans and the girls discussing last night’s boyfriends or lack of, among the clerks and tourists and worried men fingering the help-wanted sections he looked too smart. Bars, she thought, beckoned him; bars with dim lights and olives floating in cocktails and girls of ravenous sexual appetite and impossible elegance. She would, she decided, ask her father for some money for a few clothes and to have her hair styled. And a mini-skirt! But I would have to change into it far away from the embassy. In a toilet, perhaps. To emerge with bare thighs rubbing, exciting the boys. Except that my thighs are so white, and in any case my legs are not my best feature. Russian men like plump women. I am not yet plump but I could easily become so. (She discarded the insistent desire for another hotdog.) Am I so decadent then? Guilt and excitement. Poor Georgi.
He put his hand on her arm. ‘May I see you again?’
‘Why me?’ she asked.
‘Because I like your company.’
But not, she thought, because of my allure. With my braids and this old coat with a winter collar like a rat clutching my neck. But at least she wasn’t a degenerate trollop like the girl in the bookshop with the cruel fingernails. If I had a pair of shears I’d hack my braids off.
‘May I see you again?’
The mini-skirted fantasies faded. Cinderella in the daylight. The warnings, her guilt, the faces of the plainclothes police, her father’s position which she had already imperilled—all these ganged up on her. She shook her head, tasting crystals of blue and red sugar on the tip of her tongue.
‘Why not?’
‘It is just impossible. And now I really must go. You have been really kind.’
‘Very well,’ he said, courteous in defeat. ‘May I ask your name?’
She told him and asked him his.
‘Charles,’ he replied. ‘Charlie to most people.’
‘Charlie,’ she repeated. ‘I like that very much. I am glad you are not called Genery.’
‘Genery?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We Russians have much difficulty in pronouncing haitch.’ She had difficulty with that, too. ‘And would you be so kind as to tell me your other name?’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘It’s Hardin. Charlie Hardin.’
He called her a cab and she went
back through the wide, free-breathing, fast-flowing streets to the apartment building near Dupont Circle.
She could have been back in Russia: the small apartment provided for the Zhukovs in the middle-aged block which predecessors had made as Soviet as a bowl of borsch. Except for the electric cooker with cockpit dials and rotating spit, the humming refrigerator in which there was always a slippery heap of steak for communal stews—and a small decadence of Hawaiian Punch and blue cheese dressing bought by her father, and a washing machine with a built-in spin-dryer. The rest was Russia: plastic flowers, furniture with slivers of veneer rising like cockroach tails, bowl of red currants coated with icing-sugar, a faint aroma of brilliantine, a bottle of vodka and a bottle of brandy bought at the embassy commissariat, the table with its cloth the colour of fog laid for dinner with elegant glasses and a plate of poppyseed rolls and black bread. An old Motorola TV set on which her father missed nightly soccer and a record-player on which the Red Army choir, their militancy a little scratched, could still be counted on to inflict defeat on the TV commercials.
Here in the evenings Natasha joined other Russian guests for soup and stew and tax-free liquor; moist reminiscences, throaty songs and television, the most popular shows being variety. Get Smart, Ed Sullivan, Lucille Ball and I Spy!; and loud comments about America which, unlike the normal symptoms of tipsyness, became more sibilant and furtive with intoxication—when, in fact, a little praise was being bestowed, when only trusted friends were present. Sometimes the Zhukovs went to other Russians’ homes, sometimes to Czechs’ or Hungarians’ apartments; rarely elsewhere. Except for her father who these days dressed better than his colleagues and went out two or three times a week, leaving early and returning late and noisily.
Everything, of course, was shared by V. I. Lenin in reproduced oils and the three top Kremlin leaders enigmatic in glossy black and white.
This afternoon Natasha hurried to her sparse room and gazed at herself in the mirror. The plain white blouse, clerical skirt, those braids, soap-clean face with a touch of powder on the high cheekbones, unplucked eyebrows. The only crudity missing, she thought, was a set of steel teeth.
What had he seen in her?
So elegant, sophisticated, assured. In a city teeming with attractive women, a city whose only shortage was men. (Like Moscow.) Perhaps he had wearied of all the cultivated sexuality; perhaps he saw her as a quaint alternative, whose gaucheries could be recounted to smirking friends.
You, Mr Hardin, she accused angrily, would be the quaint oddity in Russia, the greatest power in the world, where values have not been depraved by excess.
Could he have been honestly attracted though?
My hair is thick and glossy and men seem to enjoy loosening the braids, as if they’re loosing faucets of water. My face is not beautiful, but the touch of Mongol makes it interesting—so I’ve been told. I’m not unintelligent; although certainly not brilliant, emphatically non-intellectual, as my studies proved. I enjoy sex with a wholesome appetite: perhaps this shows … And my body …
She took off her blouse and brassière, smoothing her big breasts in front of the mirror. Took off the rest of her clothes to see what men saw. Felt between her thighs with curiosity. Untwined her braids, but in doing so noticed the hair at her armpits. Intuitively she knew that Washington women would remove it. In Russia I was desirable: in America I am a peasant.
Natasha Zhukova lay down on the bed and considered her appetites, summoning the honesty that she insisted on. Honestly she saw no wrong in them. Civilization had made hypocrites of women. Dearly she wished to fuse sex with love.
Unsolicited, Charles—Charlie—Hardin presented himself in her imagination. Even as Georgi had deflowered her—Georgi the instrument for the inevitable experience—she had wondered what shape and form love would take.
But not Charlie Hardin. Instant attraction occurred: not instant love. That was for bourgeois magazines. And in any case this attraction—it might be nothing more than curiosity—was doomed. East and West. Taboo.
She dismissed Charlie Hardin but he stayed.
I know, she thought, that he did not approach me merely because he wanted advice about Russia. ‘A woman knows,’ she told herself, quoting some novelist or other.
But why?
In one month there had been so much that had been inexplicable. Why, for instance, had the Soviet authorities suddenly allowed her to visit America although she’d been suspended from university because of her association with undesirable dissident elements? Poor Georgi.
She went first to Garfinkels. But, like the White House, it was too much. A superabundance of elegance where phantom Czarinas looked down at her through lorgnettes; hushed halls chiming faintly with golden sovereigns. She picked up an ornamental egg of polished stone, sea-green and cool, feeling its weight while she sought escape.
A few counters away an elegant male assistant warned the house detective about Nicolai Grigorenko lingering incongruously among the Christian Dior ties and frilled shirts.
Then she was away into the street looking for a drug store more suited for a muzhik with thirty roubles to spend. Behind her, on an invisible leash, came her bloodhound, tail between his legs, shaggy face desperate after the abuse from that little shit Brodsky.
At the cosmetics counter of the drugstore shyness mastered her. So humiliating in the society she’d been taught to despise. Milky cleansers, skin lotions, moisture lotions, lipsticks in shell-pink and even white (for the Negroes? she wondered), eyeshadows in green and mauve and blue—some glittering with Stardust—powders, mascara, lacquers, pictures of girls bathing orgiastically in rainbow soap suds …
Beside her a busy girl applied lipstick samples to the back of her hand like warpaint. Nerving herself, like a child trying to slip into an adult movie, Natasha Zhukova copied her. Together they crayoned. Finally Natasha chose ‘Show Pink’ because pink seemed to be fashionable. The slithery texture, and the perfume reminding her of the wild flowers that peasants sell in Moscow—lilac, lily-of-the-valley and cowslips—intoxicated her and she embarked upon a tiny orgy of cosmetic spending. Lotions, cleansers and conditioners, whose uses she only vaguely understood. And a pair of eyebrow tweezers with which to barber those two thick question-marks. But how did you pay? No abacus. She joined a queue of Washington girls, elegant, laughing, gossiping girls; all industriously absorbed with the trivia of the day.
Natasha handed the woman assistant her purchases.
‘Nine dollars thirty-five,’ intoned the assistant, a middle-aged woman with bubbly blonde hair and rhinestoned glasses.
Natasha fiddled with her bills which all looked the same, panicked and handed the woman five dollars.
‘There’s only five here, honey,’ she accused, with the monotone assurance that American women seemed to have.
‘I’m sorry … how much more do you want?’
‘Another four thirty-five, honey.’ She stopped chewing her gum. ‘Gee, honey, where you from? Alaska or some place? Soon you’ll be telling me all them bills look the same.’
Natasha sensed the implication that she was trying to cheat. The blood of Siberia and Moscow boiled angrily. ‘Are you accusing me of anything?’
All around the gossip stopped.
The woman fielded the indignation—and the probability that she had made a mistake. ‘No, honey,’ she said. And then, Are you from around here?’
The audience listened, gum suspended.
‘I am from Russia.’ As if she were announcing herself at a chandelier-hung ball.
‘Gee,’ said the saleslady. ‘Ain’t that something. Or,’ she asked doubtfully, ‘are you just putting me on?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Are you kidding me?’
‘I am from the Soviet Union.’ The silence was solidifying: even more dramatic now—as if she’d swung in to the store like Tarzan. She found another five dollar bill. ‘Here is the rest of the money. Kindly give me my change.’
The woman nodde
d like a basking lizard. ‘Well I’ll be darned.’ She took the rest of the money. ‘But come to think of it you do look a bit Ruski. I guess it’s them braids. How long you been in the States? I mean how many years has it taken you to pick up the lingo?’
Despite the embarrassment of it all, pride raised its smug head. ‘I’ve only been here a week. I learned all my English in Russia. We have very good education in the Soviet Union.’
‘One week!’ She looked around like a talk-show moderator. ‘How about that?’
The audience was receptive. The squaw with the lip-sticked hand said, ‘Have you ever met that Khrushchev? What a wild guy he was.’
The faces formed a circle. She remembered her braids, her virginal blouse, her untended eyebrows, her father, the embassy, the police. ‘Please,’ she pleaded, ‘my change.’
‘Don’t you want your purchases, honey?’
‘Please.’ Bravado cringing close to cowardice.
‘It’s been a pleasure serving you, honey.’
The faces parted as if she had muscle men guarding her. And the saleslady’s voice followed her: ‘Have a good day. Have a good time in the United States …’
Such a hooligan approach, such formality and politeness, such innate kindness snuggled like the kernel of a winter-hard nut …
Later she cried, inexplicably. But not before she had asked her father for a few more dollars to get herself a hair-do and a new coat and a tiny skirt to be donned in some secret place in Washington.
Two days later, when she emerged from the apartment building, Nicolai Grigorenko, sulking in his Volkswagen, didn’t recognize her from the back; long hair flowing glossily around her shoulders, hand brushing it from her forehead, shaved legs, round-toed shoes with tallish heels, yellow spring coat from Hechts, walking with the arrogant spring stride of an attractive girl. So Grigorenko sulked on, waiting for a braided girl with stubby shoes and uncertainty in her gait.
She walked down Connecticut with the intention of reaching the ceremonial mansions and spring-blooming gardens of the capital. It was the most direct route: it also took her past the book store where she’d met Charlie Hardin.
The Red House Page 11