I AM SEVENTEEN AND JUST got accepted to the Leningrad University’s English department, evening division. The day program where I applied did not admit me because my parents were professionals and because my family lacked connections. This made me think of my mother, who had to wait for a milkmaid’s daughter to drop out to be accepted to the Ivanovo medical school because my grandfather by then was an engineer and no longer a peasant. It was interesting, I thought, that with our incomparable leaps toward a better future in other areas, nothing has changed in the college admission process since 1930.
“Nyet huda bez dobra: there is no evil without good,” my mother recited, when I repeated what my English professor said at our first class. “The evening program is much better because all of you are qualified,” she told us. “You got in because you know English, not because your mother drives a tractor or because your father sits in a Smolny office.” It made me feel good to be so qualified, yet still resentful toward the university’s admission board.
But now I need a job, immediately: the evening division requires its students to work during the day. By the end of September I must bring to the dean a letter, signed and stamped, certifying my full-time employment.
The prospect of having a job is thrilling. It plucks me out of the wading pool of my classmates and drops me into the sea of adults, instantly making me a grown citizen imbued with real, paid-for responsibility. But it’s not the responsibility that sounds so attractive, it’s the status and the rights that working brings. It’s the feeling that I’ve finally reached real life, quivering on the horizon like a promise, that everything before this was mere expectation, a string of landmarks on the way to that horizon.
“I’m going to work,” I’ll utter casually as I pass handsome Vitya from the fourth floor, who will blink his usually disinterested eyes and stare after me in stunned admiration.
I don’t know how one finds a job, but I don’t need to: my mother is in charge. As a result of her commandeering, a neighbor from the third floor, Alec, offers me a position.
“You’ll be a draftsman,” my mother says.
“But I don’t know how to draft,” I object, instantly imagining how I will embarrass our generous neighbor on the very first day of the job.
“You don’t need to know anything. They’ll tell you what to do. As I understand it, you’ll copy some blueprints.”
“Blueprints of what?”
My mother pauses, pretending she’s sorting out the silverware in a drawer. “It’s a secret factory,” she says. “They make ships.”
“Ships?” I giggle. “What kind of ships? Atomic submarines? They have to make atomic submarines, otherwise why would it be such a secret?”
“I don’t know,” my mother says. “All Alec told me is you need to get clearance.”
Clearance will take two months, Alec says, but in the meantime I can still work copying drafts. Maybe these are drafts of outdated submarines, those that are no longer classified and can be safely exposed to my unvetted eyes. I sit in a huge room with long tables, next to a boring girl with thin lips and dusty-looking hair, arrogant because she’s just received her clearance. Sometimes we draw blue lines on translucent drafting paper, but mostly we carry rolls of drafts to the production department, hot rooms the size of my school gym with rows of forges managed by bawdy men. I walk fast and look straight ahead, but my heels click on the metal floor no matter how hard I try to step softly, and the men leer from behind their enormous machines and smile and yell things I don’t want to hear.
So far I haven’t seen any boats, or any parts that could belong to a boat. To my relief, I haven’t seen Alec, either.
Every morning at eight I pass through a checkpoint. This is the time when the whole factory files in through one turnstile, so we often stand outside in a small crowd, in the morning dusk, waiting our turn to show our IDs to a woman on duty. From her perch near the door, she silently peers at each one of us and angrily presses the button to open the turnstile. Once in a while she starts screaming when someone has forgotten or lost his card. I don’t know why she has to be so angry. She’s not the one who will have to stay behind the factory wall until five, when it will be dusk again, when we will have to walk through the same turnstile back into the unclassified world.
Every morning at eight a question buzzes in my head, persistent as a fly: is this all there is to work? What has happened to the spirit of adulthood and independence, to that promise quivering on the horizon? I try to ask the girl with dusty-looking hair, but she doesn’t understand what I’m trying to say. She keeps drawing thin lines and carrying the rolls of blueprints to the production area, ignoring leering men and their catcalls. Or maybe the men can sense how boring she is and don’t even bother to look up and yell after her.
At the end of October, a frightening thought begins to stir in my head, especially on those dark mornings when freezing half-rain/half-fog congeals the air into globs of icy aspic as we stand outside the checkpoint. Everything I’ve done so far has always been the eve of something else. Eighth grade was the eve of an academic path, when a few of my classmates left to go to vocational school; the all-night walk around the city after graduation was the curtain call of childhood and the eve of the next morning, when boys suddenly grew tall and brazen; the marathon of university entrance exams was the eve of self-sufficiency and freedom—all these things, although nerve-wrecking and difficult, have led to something else. This waiting at the checkpoint, replayed every morning with slight variations of a different angry woman on duty shouting at a different man who forgot his card, only leads to the pocked cement of the factory yard, to the cafeteria with more surly women ladling cabbage soup, to production lines with no hint of any boats.
I quit on the first day of November, just a few days before they approve my clearance.
FOR THE NEXT EIGHT months I am a lab assistant at my mother’s anatomy department. I’ve grown up in its formaldehyde-saturated walls, so this job doesn’t even feel like a job. I sit in a small room across from another assistant, Luba, creating microscope slides professors use in their research. Right now the predominant research project has to do with space travel and weightlessness. Every year or so we watch on television a time-delayed broadcast of another space crew parachuting down somewhere in Kazakhstan after another successful mission, and our anatomy department provides its contribution to animal research. Luba and I pull lab rabbits out of their cages in the basement, strap them to a centrifuge, and spin them at a cosmic speed that blurs the rabbits into circles of gray and white. If they are still alive after the centrifuge stops, we have to kill them with ether, because what the researchers need is the rabbits’ spine. We have to carefully break the vertebrae, remove the soft cord of spine in one piece, freeze it, and then create slides by slicing it into thin translucent chips that will fit onto a microscope glass. I hate holding a rag full of ether to the rabbits’ faces, to their clotted and damp fur, whereas Luba hates breaking the vertebrae, so we delineate the labor in a mutually agreeable way.
When there are enough slides stacked up, we sit on top of our desks and chat with Sasha, who is short and square-jawed and always wears a white doctor’s coat. Sasha is an aspirant, a graduate student working on his dissertation, which presumably tackles the question of organic spine changes in space, so he spends more time in our lab than anyone else, always telling jokes, always laughing.
“There is a Russian, a German, and a Jew,” says Sasha, and I wonder if I’ve already heard this one since all Sasha’s jokes include an international trio roughly representing our view of the world hierarchy. “And God says to them, I’ll grant you one wish each, any wish you like. Kill all the Germans, yells the Russian. Kill all the Russians, screams the German. And what do you want, God asks the Jew. Grant them both their wishes, says the Jew, and I’ll have a cup of coffee.”
I giggle, but Sasha is watching Luba’s reaction. I know he likes Luba, who is twenty-four and has black eyes bigger than a microscope lens.
Luba obligingly smiles at his jokes, but when Sasha leaves, she isn’t so charitable. “He’s married,” she smirks and disdainfully bends her wrist. “Plus he’s short and looks like an ape.”
Luba likes Professor Rodionov, who is also married but is the tallest man in the department and from a distance resembles the French actor Alain Delon. She times her cigarette breaks to the end of his classes so she can casually ask him for a light when he leaves the dissection room. He behaves politely but never goes beyond lighting her cigarette. I don’t think she stands a chance because everyone knows that Professor Rodionov is a class system snob and would never pay attention to someone who, like Luba, can boast nothing past a secondary school diploma.
Although according to our history books, social classes were eradicated in 1917, along with the tsar, Professor Rodionov takes great pride in belonging to what he calls “the erudite elite.”
“A classless society,” smirks my sister, “means that the classes never acknowledge each other’s existence.”
At noon, a curly-haired woman named Valya comes around with a crate of milk. Since we work in a hazardous formaldehyde environment, all of us in the anatomy department are entitled to a free daily bottle of milk. Valya always has medical questions for Sasha, who is eager to answer and who, like most aspirants, knows everything. Yesterday she wanted to know if a gallbladder actually contained gall, and the day before she needed a cure for warts. Today Valya is interested in the most reliable method of contraception. Luba shakes her head and leaves the room, outraged by this shamelessness. I am curious, so I stay.
“Cement,” says Sasha. “Cement all orifices and nothing will get through, I guarantee.”
Valya bursts into loud laughter and slaps Sasha on the back with her broad palm. I go back to pasting rabbit spinal cord onto slides, disappointed. Frankly, I was hoping for something more informative.
When I get home, I find turmoil: Marina is looking for a birthday present for the musical director of her theater. The birthday party is next Monday, and she is desperate. “Men are impossible to find presents for,” she proclaims. “Vodka is too pedestrian and decent cognac impossible to get.”
“Give him a book,” says my mother in her teacher’s voice.
“He already has a book,” says Marina with a straight face although we all know it’s an old joke, so old that my mother’s posthumously rehabilitated Uncle Volya was telling it back in 1937. “The only thing I can think of is something to add to his collection.”
“What does he collect?” I ask.
“Rabbits,” says Marina. “All kinds of rabbits—glass, porcelain, wood. All sizes.”
It’s instantly obvious what the present must be. It cannot be a coincidence that the music director collects rabbits and in the anatomy department where I work tons of rabbits sit in rusty cages, waiting to become statistics for Sasha’s quantitative study. I’m certain my idea is brilliant and unbeatable. I’m bursting with my own genius; I can no longer keep it in. “A live rabbit!” I shout. “Give him a rabbit from our lab!”
My mother looks at me with a quizzical expression, not sure if I am serious, not sure if removing a rabbit from the anatomy lab is a proper thing to do.
“Yes, yes, a live rabbit!” I babble, choking on my own words. “You’ll have a unique birthday gift—and we’ll save a rabbit from being centrifuged, smothered with ether, and sliced.”
I see my mother hesitate and I trot out my last argument. “We have too many rabbits right now anyway; we’ve just had an inventory,” I say. The inventory bit is a fib. “Sasha said yesterday,” I add, “we should start stewing them for lunch.”
Now my sister’s eyes are burning with excitement, too. With the combined forces of both of us, my mother doesn’t stand a chance.
On Monday, my sister and I go to the basement of the anatomy department with rows of dark, smelly cages and pick a tri-colored rabbit—black, white, and yellow—a sign of luck, according to my sister. The rabbit rustles inside folded newspaper as Marina fits it into a string bag to take on the bus across the city.
I imagine Marina arriving at the birthday party with a rabbit in a string bag. I see the whirl of shock and excitement; the petrified rabbit pressed to the parquet floor; the flurry of rabbit-related toasts; the hands that pet and cradle the rabbit until, in utter panic, it pees on someone’s dress; the empty apartment with clouds of cigarette smoke over the ruins of dinner and the semiconscious rabbit gasping in the corner of a dark hallway.
“Are you sure he can handle a live rabbit?” I say, but all I see is Marina’s back disappear behind a closing door.
IN THE BEGINNING OF my second year, my English professor Natalia Borisovna pulls me aside and says there is an opening in the House of Friendship and Peace, where I used to work as a tour guide in the ninth grade. The job is the director’s secretary and has nothing to do with speaking English, but with time and luck, the professor points out, it may evolve into something else. At any rate, she adds, it is an impressive and prestigious place to work.
My job is to sit behind an enormous desk in front of the director’s office and answer the phone. The director, Viktor Nikolaevich, a party member like every functionary, doesn’t seem to be interested in the calls that come through me; the only calls that make him excited come on a red phone without a dial that sits on the desk of his office. When the red phone rings, he puts his feet up on a coffee table, laughs into the receiver, and leaves shortly afterward, always in a good mood. Viktor Nikolaevich often seems to be in a good mood. A smile starts from the corners of his eyes, dimples his cheeks, and stretches his large lips when every morning he crosses the waiting room in confident steps at the civilized hour of ten o’clock.
“Hozyain,” deferentially mutters Ludmila the bookkeeper as he saunters by, the word that means “master.” He is tall and broad-shouldered and looks like a master. He looks as if the House of Friendship and Peace, with its marble stairways, bronze chandeliers, gilded moldings, and thirty people hunkered down in their first-floor offices, belong exclusively to him and not to the state.
The echoey waiting room where I sit behind a vast desk makes me feel both humble and important. It is the social center of the first-floor offices, where people make arrangements for foreign delegations visiting our city. It draws coordinators from both the socialist and capitalist departments to exchange the latest gossip and parade their clothes. The socialist women are usually dressed in brighter colors. The tall and reedy Olya, coordinator for the German Democratic Republic, wears sky-blue suits with short skirts, while the doughy Galina, coordinator for Czechoslovakia, favors spiky heels and heavy makeup. Sergei, the handsome, sad-eyed coordinator for Bulgaria, comes to complain about a hangover and the fact that he has to arrange hotel reservations for groups of Polish Soviet deputies because Sveta, who is responsible for Poland, is on a yearlong maternity leave.
The capitalist coordinators wear more subdued beiges, grays, and dark greens. Rita, who ten years ago graduated from my department of the university, appears hand-in-hand with the hooded-eyed, theatrical Tatiana Vasilievna, the coordinator for all the English-speaking countries. Tatiana Vasilievna makes me feel even more inferior than I normally do in this exclusive environment of such important and well-dressed people. She likes to give advice to everyone below her in rank, and that’s pretty much everyone except Viktor Nikolaevich, who sits behind an oak door next to my desk.
“Use a little bit of makeup, darling,” she murmurs into the ear of Anna, a typist in the corner of the waiting room hunched over a typewriter in her perennial gray suit shiny from wear. Anna, who is twice my age and excruciatingly shy, forces her lips to smile, wishing she could compress herself into a wall, away from Tatiana Vasilievna’s ringed fingers, which clutch a thick batch of papers to be typed. Darling, dushenka, is what she calls all younger women before she insults them or overwhelms them with work.
“Dushenka, don’t call me Mrs. in front of those British gentlemen,” she coos to Rita, embracing her. “I’m not married anymore, am I?”
Everyone in the House of Friendship and Peace knows that Tatiana Vasilievna’s husband packed up and fled three months after the wedding, nine years ago, just as she turned thirty-five. It’s a wonder he stayed so long, said Ludmila the bookkeeper, who told me the story.
“Otherwise they’ll think I’m a housewife with a bunch of runny-nosed children,” whispers Tatiana Vasilievna to Rita. “Just like you.”
Rita smiles an embarrassed smile and apologizes. I don’t know how she is able to squeeze a smile out of her scrunched face, but I suspect she must be thinking about the future, about ten years from now when Tatiana Vasilievna reaches fifty-five, a retirement age for women, the moment that will put Rita in command of all English-speaking countries. Although I realize it’s a formidable prospect to be in charge of the whole English-speaking world, it hardly seems worth ten more years of Tatiana Vasilievna’s reign. I imagine myself in Rita’s place, coming back with witty, powerful responses I’d need days to think up, responses that would disarm Tatiana Vasilievna and turn her into a kind, sensitive person.
Tatiana Vasilievna spends a lot of time in the waiting room because she likes the director, my boss. He has a wife, of course, and like all functionaries, must serve as an example of a proper society cell, but this trifle is irrelevant to Tatiana Vasilievna. She thinks up projects and explains them at length to Anna the typist, who shrinks like a turtle into her worn-out suit every time Tatiana Vasilievna sails into the room. She moves papers around my desk, pretending she’s reading each one, waiting for the oak door to open. If it doesn’t, she clutches at her chest and starts to vigorously fan herself. She breathes hard; she calls for Rita in a barely audible voice. When Rita comes running, Tatiana Vasilievna puts the back of her hand over her forehead and implores her to call for a doctor. This is the time when Viktor Nikolaevich, who can usually sense this turmoil, comes out of his office to bring her back to life. One time, when he was away at a meeting, she fainted onto the floor in front of the fireplace, her legs neatly crossed at the ankles.
From my boss’s squinted eyes I think he sees right through Tatiana Vasilievna and her theatrical hysterics, taking her for what she is—a neurotic, lonely woman. But she is a high-ranking coordinator for a hefty chunk of the capitalist world, so we have to pretend we’re concerned about her shallow breathing and her chest-clutching, rushing to the bathroom for cold water and to the café for wedges of lemon, unbuttoning her blouse just enough to expose a hint of lace from her brassiere.
Although I don’t know where our coordinators shop for their lace underwear, web-thin pantyhose, and well-fitted suits, I know where they don’t. Maybe owning hard-to-get decent clothes is another perk for being a coordinator at the House of Friendship and Peace, along with a food package containing a kilo of beef, a jar of instant coffee, and a stick of hard salami they can pick up at a special distributor before major holidays. What I wear to work comes from elbowing in line at a local store or from the artistic hands of my sister—a Hungarian shirt with small purple flowers and a brown skirt resewn from Marina’s old pants. My sister has lately been in a good mood, so she’s making me a little black dress from a piece of fabric I found rolled up in our armoire, a number just like the one I saw in the England magazine left open on Rita’s desk.
Aside from Tatiana Vasilievna and her nervous fits, there isn’t much at work to pay attention to. I sit at the desk, do my homework, and stare at the grandfather clock in the corner whose hands don’t seem to move. At around one-thirty I go to the House of Friendship café, an exclusive place with waitresses and a printed menu, which is open for lunch for employees and members of the select public involved in foreign affairs and which stays open on those nights when there is an art or culture festival in the ballroom on the second floor.
It’s those nights that intrigue me. Days are predictable and boring, all work, coordinators trekking through with their reports, Ludmila the bookkeeper offering her latest gossip, Viktor Nikolaevich cackling into his red phone, Anna hitting the typewriter keys with the speed of a machine gun. But what happens here at night? Who sits at these tables in the café when we’re all safely tucked into university classrooms or our apartments, and what kinds of transformations occur to the soup and meatballs and pastries with pink roses after the clock strikes six?
So the next time there is an evening affair celebrating an anniversary of the British composer Benjamin Britten, I don’t leave at five-thirty. It’s a Wednesday, the only weekday with no university classes scheduled, and my conscience is clear. I walk up the marble staircase with wrought-iron banisters to the main ballroom, vast as a stadium and made even bigger by floor-to-ceiling mirrors in gilded frames. Of course, I immediately see Tatiana Vasilievna—it is, after all, an English-speaking affair—directing Rita in how to arrange the chairs for musicians and where to place the podium.
“I have to face the audience directly,” she instructs. “You don’t want me to twist my head off, do you?”
As Rita tries to push the podium, Tatiana Vasilievna clasps her head and closes her eyes. “Dushenka, you’re scratching the parquet, don’t you see?” she hisses.
I step back because I don’t want to take part in moving the podium or the chairs, especially under the commandeering of Tatiana Vasilievna. I also don’t want to explain to her what I’m doing here, way past my working hours, at a concert of capitalist music, exposed without her approval to a very real possibility of communicating with people from English-speaking countries.
I see them filing in through the front door as I walk back downstairs: a group of women who look youthful and ageless, all with rich, blondish hair and real leather shoes, and men in blue jeans, whose movements are unhurried, as if they’d never had to squeeze into a rush-hour bus. They are now gawking at the gold, marble, and crystal that belonged to Count Shuvalov, who owned all this voluptuous excess before 1917, when the Bolsheviks handed it down to the people.
Tatiana Vasilievna appears on the top of the stairs and stands there magnanimously, as if this opulence belonged to her, waiting for the group to ascend to her height. They walk past me, sending in my direction a whiff of the West, an odor of perpetual cleanliness and good clothes, and knowing that Tatiana Vasilievna is going to be occupied for a while, I retreat into the café in the hope of rubbing shoulders with the select members of the public invited to such exclusive affairs.
The truth is I don’t know if I really want to retreat to the café. I’m petrified. I’m afraid that the moment I walk in everyone will take one look at me and realize that I’ve never been to a restaurant at night. Aside from my sister, who sometimes goes to the Actors’ Club, I don’t know anyone who has. There are a few restaurants in the city, so someone must eat there, but they’re always guarded by stone-faced doormen who can only be bribed by things we don’t have. The interiors, I’ve always imagined, were sets from old movies: a piano next to a potted palm, a starched napkin in a circle of light cast by a table lamp, a bent waiter with a white towel over his arm. As I stand in the doorway of the House of Friendship café, I feel as exposed as if I were entering my boss’s office having forgotten to put my clothes on.
The lunch room with neon lights has metamorphosed into a dark cave gauzy with cigarette smoke. At the far end I can still make out the counter with pastries, and I gather all my courage and walk straight toward the shelves with familiar éclairs, focusing on the beacons of tarts crowned with pink roses. I pretend I belong here, and although I do belong here, I feel as if I were walking across a minefield, ready to make a mistake that will shatter my disguise and expose me for what I am: clumsy, ill-mannered, and unworldly.
By the pastry counter, like a savior, sits Natasha from my university English class. I lunge forward and greet her as if she were a best friend I haven’t seen in years, despite the fact that I sat next to her in my phonetics class only yesterday. She tells me how she ended up here, at this concert and in this restaurant, but her words sail past my ears. I’m so relieved I order a Napoleon and a coffee and a bottle of lemonade for both of us, although I’m not even sure I have any money in my purse.
“So who do you think all these people are?” I ask Natasha, nodding toward the crowd smoking in the dusk. There is no food served, I notice, only sweets and drinks.
“I was going to ask you,” says Natasha. “You’re the one who works here.”
She is right; I should know. Everyone who works here probably knows, with the exception of our typist Anna, who sees nothing but the typewriter keys because she’s mortified to oblivion by Tatiana Vasilievna. All my co-workers, I bet, have sat at these tables at night, ordering platefuls of éclairs and perhaps even glasses of the cognac and champagne whose golden labels gleam behind the counter.
To be decadent, Natasha pulls a pack of cigarettes out of her purse. We light up and lean back, feeling relaxed and hedonistic now, lazily poking into our plates as though our parents forced us to eat Napoleons every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This pretense makes me feel like everyone else, makes me feel I belong in a dark corner of this restaurant where no one questions my presence.
Then, with her imperial gait, Tatiana Vasilievna walks through the door and marches straight to the pastry display. She sees me sitting at the table and her face congeals into the expression she wore when Rita failed to procure her a first-class ticket on the same-day train to Moscow to accompany a group of American businessmen.
“May I have a word with you?” she says ominously as I obediently get up because that’s what primary school and our mothers taught us to do when we speak to a person older than ourselves.
“Your work ends at five-thirty,” she says, deliberately glancing at her gold watch. “There’s no need for you to be in this restaurant at night.” In her high heels she is taller than I, or maybe it is my curled shoulders that make her tower over me.
I can’t think of anything to say. I don’t know if Tatiana Vasilievna can prohibit me from entering this restaurant, but judging by her lifted chin and narrowed eyes, she’s certain she can. And it is this certainty, this authority leaking from every pore of her heavily made-up face that makes me stoop even lower. I’m too docile and cowardly to belong here, after all, and I hate Tatiana Vasilievna for driving this point home.
“Dushenka,” she says in an injured tone because I wounded her senses by eating a Napoleon in a place I am not permitted to enter at night. “You should remember: What’s allowed for Jupiter is not allowed for the bull.”
Although I’ve never heard this saying before, I can imagine that Tatiana Vasilievna has made it up so that she could compare herself to the most powerful Roman god. But why am I the bull? In addition to barging into restaurants without permission and generally not knowing my place, I must also be ignorant of Roman mythology and the idioms that employ it. I glance at Natasha, who is sitting very quietly wedged between the table and the wall, not knowing if this exchange somehow applies to her, too.
With Tatiana Vasilievna leading the way, I leave the restaurant and all its dusky decadence. Still stooped and utterly defeated, I walk through the double oak doors out of the House of Friendship and Peace, which, as it has just become clear, offers neither of the two solaces it was named for.
THERE IS A RUMOR that my boss, Viktor Nikolaevich, is being transferred to Czechoslovakia. People say this with respect: Ludmila the bookkeeper deferentially lowers her voice while Olya the coordinator of the German Democratic Republic rounds her eyes and her mouth into perfect O’s. Since the transfer is to a foreign country, it is definitely a promotion. How big a promotion? Bigger than Bulgaria or Vietnam but smaller than, say, France. At any rate, Viktor Nikolaevich now spends less and less time behind his door, which triggers an injured expression on Tatiana Vasilievna’s face every time she sails into the waiting room only to find his office empty, only to become so despondent she doesn’t even try to pretend to faint because he isn’t there to see her exposed cleavage or her knee sheathed in shimmering nylon and carefully bent on the floor right next to my desk.
I like Viktor Nikolaevich and dread the day when he has to leave. He is easygoing, he makes jokes, he never gets upset with me, and he protects me like a father would, although he looks nothing like my father. He doesn’t smoke, he is broad-waisted and fair-skinned, and he has a mouth full of real teeth.
According to Ludmila the bookkeeper, he has a soft spot for the waitresses at our café. He loves them, she says, especially Maya, who has ash-blonde hair and likes to wear a tight uniform and red lipstick. For some reason I dislike Maya; strangely, it almost feels like jealousy. He is my boss and I want him to like me, only me. The other day, when I was leaving his office with a shuffle of papers to type, Viktor Nikolaevich took my hand, the one without the papers, and held it and stared into my eyes so intensely that I had to look down. When he let it go, I went back to my desk in the waiting room, and a few minutes later he left, having answered the red phone.
Since the Jupiter and the bull incident Tatiana Vasilievna hasn’t spoken to me directly. Maybe she wishes she hadn’t humiliated me in the restaurant because, as it turns out, I could be useful in detecting Viktor Nikolaevich’s whereabouts when she feels like fainting again. Or maybe she expected an apology for my inappropriate behavior and, when she didn’t receive one, decided that I was hopeless, worthy of the only possible course of action on her part—to ostracize and ignore me. Whatever the reason, she no longer addresses me, which is a great relief.
It’s April, two months from the end of my second year at the university, and I’m busy thinking up ways to take my history final early. The course is compulsory, the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and taking it early solves the two problems inherent in the class. It will save me from sitting through the rest of the seminars, listening to made-up history, and according to those innovative minds who’ve done it before, it is much easier to get a good grade early since the professors haven’t yet entered the mind-set of the two merciless final semester weeks. I have composed a letter, on the House letterhead and with the House stamp I keep in my drawer, requesting the university dean to grant me permission to take the finals early because in June we are so swamped with foreign delegations from all over the world that it’s impossible for me, a House of Friendship employee, to find time to study.
In reality, of course, June is the month when things slow down and people start taking vacations, but the dean and the communist history department are used to the twisted truth. The letter is immaculately typed and has everything but the director’s signature. I time the crucial moment for Monday, the last day before Viktor Nikolaevich leaves for his new position in Czechoslovakia.
On Sunday I lean on Marina to finish the little black dress she is sewing according to the picture in Rita’s England magazine. On Monday morning, at ten, I stand by my desk to greet my boss, wearing the dress. It’s short, very short, with a deep V-neck too low for work, and Viktor Nikolaevich immediately sees that. He opens his large lips to say something but doesn’t. The blue of his eyes softens and melts as he gazes at me—at the whole me, for the first time since I started working there. The unexpected part is that it feels good, this look. It feels edifying. And maybe part of this edification is the fact that it is I being granted this stare of admiration—not Maya with her tight uniforms and red lips, and certainly not Tatiana Vasilievna, who could faint a thousand times, deftly exposing her nylon and her lace, and still fail to attract this look.
Viktor Nikolaevich goes into his office, and I follow him with a bunch of mail and a typed letter in my hand. He sits at his desk, puts on his glasses, and starts shuffling through the papers, pretending he hadn’t just drilled me with a stare, pretending he no longer sees the little black dress I’m wearing.
“Could you possibly sign this for me?” I ask in a timid and submissive way that makes directors feel even more powerful. “To take my final early. The history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”
He takes my letter, reads it, then squints at me from above his glasses. “Overwhelmed with foreign delegations in June,” he reads. “Impossible to find time to study, eh?”
I nod and squeeze out a little smile, showing that I know that he knows it’s a lie.
He pulls a pen out of an enormous writing set presiding over his desk, signs, and hands the letter back to me. “It’s my last day here,” he says as I mumble my thanks. “We’re going to celebrate after work.”
It is obviously no use telling him that I have classes at seven.
The day drags on because Viktor Nikolaevich is mostly out of the office. First the red phone rings and he promptly leaves; then he reappears only to vanish again toward the café and its waitresses. Several times Tatiana Vasilievna whiffs in, followed by a trail of perfume, and on one of her attempts she gets lucky and bumps into Viktor Nikolaevich, who is also just walking in.
“Well, well, well, it’s your last day, I hear,” she coos and lifts her hand as if expecting him to kiss it. “Old friends must say good-bye.”
Viktor Nikolaevich motions her into his office, and she throws her head back as she walks in so that her hair flips away to expose gold hearts drooping from her ears.
Five minutes later she is back in the waiting room, looking utterly disappointed. I stand by the desk, pretending to be engrossed in a bunch of work orders, but out of the corner of my eye I see her wiggle her shoulders as if shaking off embarrassment. Then she glances at me and notices my dress. I keep shuffling paper, but by her expression, even from this skewed angle, I know she is furious. I know she knows that Viktor Nikolaevich is going to spend more time saying good-bye to me than he did to her. And that knowledge tingles in my throat like champagne as she tosses her head back again and clicks out on her skinny heels.
Champagne is opened at six. Viktor Nikolaevich, who has already had some earlier during his multiple absences, waves me into his office and shuts the door. From across his desk, he pours two glasses; we drink; he pours more.
“To you,” I say, and he says the same. The wine fizzles down my throat into my empty stomach—I was too nervous to eat lunch, or maybe I didn’t want to parade my black dress around the café—and makes me instantly drunk.
“Will you visit me in Prague?” he asks, and I giggle because it’s a silly question. We both know that I can’t go to Prague, or any other foreign capital, that the few people who go must have the right connections or belong to the top bureaucratic layer, like him.
“Send me a visa and I’ll visit you anywhere,” I say and giggle. “Anywhere abroad,” I add prudently.
Viktor Nikolaevich moves from his side of the desk to mine. He sits down in a swivel chair across from me, reaches out and pulls me in, then wraps his big lips around mine, tongue and all, definitely too long for a good-bye kiss. I knew something like this was going to happen, so I act as though I’m used to being pulled into my boss’s lap, especially since it feels like I’m flying. Or maybe it is he who is spinning, I can’t tell, or maybe it’s the chairs that are dancing around the room. His taste is now in my mouth, cognac and champagne, and his smell is all over my face—a smell of cologne, or maybe it’s the perfume Maya the waitress wore when he said good-bye to her.
Then he stops spinning, lifts me off his knees, and gets up. “Nice dress,” he says putting on his suit jacket. “Go get your things. We’re going to my farewell party.”
Obediently I get up and amble toward the door, puzzled that we are going somewhere else, that draining a bottle of champagne and smooching in his office did not qualify as a farewell. Things around me are no longer flying, and I’m able to take my coat off the hook in one swoop. I don’t doubt that Viktor Nikolaevich knows a lot of places to hold a farewell party, but there is a dark thought thumping in my head like a brewing headache, a dizzy feeling of to-be-continued. After all, he is forty-five and I’m his eighteen-year-old secretary in a minidress drunk on champagne, a situation so tattered and predictable everyone knows how it usually ends. But I’m also the only one from the whole collective of the House of Friendship and Peace he’s taking to his farewell party. He isn’t taking the sophisticated Tatiana Vasilievna, who’s mad about him, or the lanky pretty Olya, who manages the East German delegation, or any other woman who works here and whose clothes are not resewn from her older sister’s. He’s taking me, who isn’t supposed to drink lemonade at a café after working hours and who is now, full of champagne, meandering toward his black Volga.
His chauffeur, Borya, a kind old man with a puffed-up face, waves at me and smiles as if I’d been riding in this Volga all the time instead of merely handing him envelopes to deliver to important addresses at the Smolny, the headquarters of the Leningrad Communist Party. Inside the car it smells of gasoline and old leather, and I’m glad that Viktor Nikolaevich, when he ambles out, plops down into his usual seat in the front. As soon as he slams the door shut, Borya cranks the car into gear and we rattle off.
The car flies along dark streets as I crane my neck out the rolled-down window to try to determine where we’re going. I feel thrilled to be in this luxury car with Viktor Nikolaevich, seduced by all this exclusivity and attention. I also feel mortified about what he may want from me and to which I will, undoubtedly, submit. We zip along, until the building of the Smolny Cathedral sails into view, its pearly cupolas glinting softly against the black sky. Next to it is the yellow building of Smolny, the Leningrad Communist Party itself.
“Go straight to the entrance,” commands Viktor Nikolaevich. “Grisha’s office is just down the hallway.”
Grisha, he says, is his friend who calls him on the red phone.
The car bounces through the main gate and pulls around the circular driveway to the entrance. I can walk straight now, whipped by the cold wind of an April night. Borya and I get out, propelled by the broad waving gesture from our boss, to face the two soldiers standing guard at both sides of the door, holding guns as big as I remember my father’s hunting gun to be when I was eight. Their eyes diligently stare into the distance, but when they see Viktor Nikolaevich, they silently step aside and let us in. We walk along a corridor that smells of fresh paint, toward one of the doors with golden signs on the front. Inside, a man in his forties sits behind the desk, his wide-jawed face gleaming in the light of a table lamp, his forearms laid on the leather top. When we creep in, the man takes off his glasses and leans his chest on the desk to help himself up.
“Vitya, come in, buddy, come in,” he roars, stretching out his hand, heavily patting Viktor Nikolaevich on the shoulder. “He’s abandoning us, imagine that.” He turns to me, and I make a sad face, a quite genuine one because I wish he weren’t going to Prague and leaving me with a new director I haven’t yet met, who probably won’t sign a phony letter or tell jokes and make everyone laugh.
Grisha invites us to sit in armchairs as he produces a small key out of the top drawer of his desk. “Celebration time,” he announces and walks toward a safe in the corner of the room, an intimidating-looking cabinet of steel, a perfect place for top official secrets. This is where they must keep dissident files and plans for nuclear attacks on the West. This is where Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and all of Solzhenitsyn’s works must be stacked up in neat, forbidden piles. Borya and I sit very quietly, with our eyes on the key and what it is about to reveal, silently marveling at our privileged and exclusive vantage point.
In a precise, frequently performed movement, Grisha clicks the key in the lock, and the heavy door noiselessly opens. Inside, in the empty iron murk, presides a round bottle of cognac surrounded by six shot glasses.
As Grisha starts to pour, Borya waves his arms in front of his face, telling him he is at the wheel, responsible for delivering us home.
“Have one,” says Viktor Nikolaevich. “You must drink to me. And don’t worry about the rest.”
Borya stops waving. I’m sure he is dying to try the cognac in a bottle marked “highest quality” that we have never seen in stores, knowing that no militiaman would dare arrest anyone who has just been to Smolny and seen the contents of one of its safes.
I sip the honey-colored cognac much more carefully than the champagne a few hours earlier. It has a strong taste, but it doesn’t have the odor of regular cognac, which, according to my mother, smells of bedbugs.
I wonder what my mother would say if she saw me drinking cognac with three men at the Leningrad headquarters of the Communist Party. I know she would frown at the men and the drinking part, but what would she think about the highest-quality cognac, hidden inside a party safe? Or about all those kilograms of beef, and the well-fitting suits, and the trips to Czechoslovakia that Viktor Nikolaevich and his friend Grisha have access to because they can enter the building of Smolny, the seat of the party of which my father had been a member longer than either one of them?
Grisha reminisces about old times. He tells a story of him and Viktor Nikolaevich going fishing when they were on assignment in the German Democratic Republic. They dug the worms and got into a rowboat and caught the biggest pike Grisha had ever seen.
“You can’t catch a pike with a worm,” Borya interferes. “You need a lure.”
“Forget a worm, forget a lure,” laughs Viktor Nikolaevich loudly. “We didn’t catch any pike, you old cheat. I’ll tell you what we caught if you don’t remember.”
I wonder how I am going to explain my late arrival at home. I am supposed to be in class, English phonetics and then the history seminar, the one I’ll soon be out of because in my bag I have a letter to the dean signed by the director of the House of Friendship and Peace. I wonder if my boss’s friend Grisha is powerful enough to exempt me altogether from the final in scientific communism next year.
Grisha pours another round of cognac. I shake my head and cover the glass with my palm.
Grisha and Viktor Nikolaevich drink, and then my boss gets up, indicating that the party is over. He embraces Grisha, then motions for Borya and me to follow him back to the car. Borya shakes Grisha’s hand, and I smile and say good-bye.
“How do you feel?” asks Viktor Nikolaevich, swiveling to me from the front seat of his Volga.
I feel like throwing up. The empty stomach, the champagne, the “highest-quality” contents of the Smolny safe. The expectation that in a second or two or five Viktor Nikolaevich will take my hand and, this time, will not let it go. The gnawing feeling in my guts that I’ll have to do something I don’t want to do yet, certainly not with my departing boss. The muted, cobweb feeling of being empty of protest, something my mother must have felt when she made her monthly visits to the secret Ivanovo apartment.
Viktor Nikolaevich stares into my face with his directorial blue eyes, his face so close I can smell cognac on his breath. At this close range he looks completely unfamiliar. I realize how little I know about this man, although we’ve worked together for almost a year. I don’t know, for example, how old his children are. I don’t even know if he has any children.
“Borya will drive you home,” he says. “I’m the first one on the route.”
I nod, stick my head out the window, and let the wind scour my face.
A few minutes later, the car stops at the building where he lives, somewhere in the center. My boss, who is now my former boss, gets out, comes around, and leans into my window. “Remember me,” he says and smiles with his big lips and gives me a real good-bye kiss, short and dry.
“I will,” I say, and I know that he knows that I mean it. I’ll remember him. I’ll remember that he was funny and generous, that he protected me, that he didn’t do what he could have done. And sometimes it is not doing things that edifies a Communist Party boss and gives him a little bit of soul.
Borya and I watch him saunter toward his door as drizzle falls onto the windshield and smudges his contours, as though he were already beginning to be erased from memory.
I feel old, as old as Borya. I feel I no longer want to work, at least not in the House of Friendship and Peace. I don’t want to wait years for a promotion that will allow me to move chairs and arrange train tickets; I don’t want to wait for Tatiana Vasilievna to retire, for Rita to take her place and abuse me the same way Tatiana Vasilievna abused her. I don’t want to squeeze into a bus twice a day at dusk, at eight in the morning and at six at night, for twenty or thirty years, before I may be allowed to coordinate the entire English-speaking world.