Дмитрий Савицкий: Waltz for K.

Katya brought it home from the dressmaker, whose husband was by way of being an underground bookseller—he made copies of Solzhenitsyn, Barkov, or Steiner. He did all the bindings himself and was pretty inexpensive. We used to get all sorts of new stuff from him, for a night or two—a Nabokov story, or an article by some dissident. In ordinary life the bookseller worked as an elevator operator.

Katenka had run herself up a marvellous punky dress, although there was nowhere she would ever be able to wear it. I shall explain why. A translator acquaintance of ours wangled us an invitation to an international beer exhibition, at Sokolniki Park. The exhibition was closed, for the trade only, and it was hard to get in. When we got inside the pavilion, of course, Katenka and I found everyone we knew: loft artists, underground poets, and Madame Kasilova famous for her midnight salons, and actors from the Polyanka, and even the ambassador of the Republic of Burundi, who never failed to show up at every party thrown by unofficial Moscow. We walked to the exhibition across the enormous snowbound park. It was early evening, darkness was falling rapidly, the snowdrifts glowed a deep blue. The park’s innumerable walks were packed with ice—kilometers of marvelous skating. People were walking and falling, falling and walking. They laughed, swore, and fell some more. Katenka, too, slipped, fell and bruised herself. It was so silly to walk, comically pawing the ground, when it cost nothing to simply pick up and fly. I was especially struck, then, by the manifest absurdity of ordinary locomotion. Inside the pavilion each country had set up its own bar. We had never seen anything like this: comfortable, clean, invisible music playing; beautiful girls in little aprons passing round mugs of beer, not a single cop—not in uniform, that is. The clientele consisted of our lot and their lot. Our lot had long hair, wore tattered jeans and sweaters; theirs—from the ministries and committees—were heavily built and had on suits; their eyes were oily with hatred. They were drinking lots of ale, they grew heavily drunk, and began importuning the busty barmaids without understanding a word of anything but Russian. One, with a protruding lower lip and party eyebrows, was saying to a friend: “Translate for me, tell her HI give her two kilos of caviar... what the hell, make it four kilos....”

The Germans had simply set up an antique fire engine in their part of the pavilion. It was all gleaming with red lacquer and highly polished brass. The barrel with its pump was full of powerful Munich beer. A bare-legged floozie in a golden helmet treated us to hot sausages. It made you think longingly of a putsch.

Katenka grew flushed and started playing the fool. Lit by carnival flashes of colored light, she stood before a beer-sodden apparatchik and allowed herself to be wafted up on a light of current of air, then sank modestly back again: up... down, up... down. The man’s face darkened apoplectically, with his great paw he clutched now at his heart, now at the wall. I didn’t get cross. No one else had seen her.

But when we emerged into full darkness, broken only by the occasional street lamp, and then made our way along a slippery path past a row of flagstaffs thrumming in the wind, I couldn’t stand it any longer either and, flying briskly up ten meters or so, spent a good half-minute disentangling an American flag from its pole while my fingers grew numb with the cold. Katenka clapped her hands and twirled delightedly below. I glided safely back to earth with the flag bundled under my arm, and we rushed off in search of a taxi, now and then briefly taking off from the black ice in our impatience. An old Odessan promised to have us home in no time, we grew languid in the warmth of his taxi and lay wrapped up in each other while he rattled off one story after another, laughing at his own jokes in a voice hoarse from too many cigarettes. A ground mist eddied in the empty street and squares. The city seemed to simmer.

That night we joined Western democracy, spreading the flag on our bed, still smelling of snow and only slightly damp. Next morning, when the winter sun touched the poplar’s bare branches with red, when Katenka called out that coffee was ready, I was pulling the ragged quilt over our bed when I noticed among the stars and stripes a tiny spot where she had slept—Katenka was having her period.

Anyway, for a laugh, she used the flag to make herself a long, rustling gown. Can you imagine wearing such a thing to the Bolshoi or the Conservatoire?

Back from the dressmaker’s, hovering at various heights before our submarine mirror, eaten away by rust and time, she announced: “On the Fourth of July I shall go to the Yank reception ... the military attaches can all salute me....” “Watch your language,” I said in alarm. “Oh yes,” reaching behind her back for the zip, “there’s an article in the bag over there by that what’s-his-name—Pogoreltsev—who goes to the church at Sokol.”

Professor Pogoreltsev, who had done fifteen years in the camps, was the author of a scandalous book, Between Fear and Fear. The book, which had only got into print by a fluke, and was hastily withdrawn from all libraries, was officially about the culture of Tibet; in it the author said that the Christo-Piscean age came to an end in the mid-sixties, and that the Age of Aquarius now beginning would have to find some new symbolic realization. We all knew about that: the signs of the Zodiac, rising counterclockwise; the Magi, last representatives of Djinns and Aladdin’s lamps, at Christ’s cradle; the new star above them; the next two thousand years; Aquarius, the “man-angel” ...but no one knew how all this would begin to manifest itself. The professor reckoned that the appearance of people who could fly was to be expected, that it was no accident, that there was no need to fear the country would really be sealed off—he meant the bell jar. “There’s no way they can keep us under glass!” he quipped. But the most important thing Pogoreltsev wrote was that “even within the Kremlin walls, here and there people are starting to lift off from the waxed parquet, and any day now we may witness an extraordinary happening, when high above the stars of the Kremlin, so inauspicious for our age, will fly the black figure of an eminence grise and the chimes on Spassky Tower will ring in a brand new age....”

This article got the left intelligentsia all excited. Hope for a new surge of liberalism seized Moscow like a fever. The editor of The Mirror, the most widely-read underground monthly, wrote a letter to the editorial board of Novy Mir proposing that they join forces on the threshold of the new life. The painter Odnoglazov exhibited a huge canvas at the Manege: Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Suvorov, the actor Smoktunovsky, even Vasilij Vasilievich Rozanov—all, from various quarters of the cloud-wreathed heavens, were converging on the Cathedral of Vassilij Blazhennij (Basil the Blessed). Katenka said it looked like a witches’ sabbath.

From my omniscient friend, as I already mentioned, I got the address of the top secret institute where I figured they had to be holding Nikolai Petrovich. During rush hours, when the streets were jammed with sullen crowds, I would affect a businesslike air and walk briskly past the faceless building. It was again spring, here and there in the grey mass of humanity you caught a fleeting smile, it was nice to hear the scrape of people’s shoes on the pavements now free of snow, there was a smell of sun-warmed dust, and from somewhere far away a mild, disturbing wind blew in upon the city. The lower stories of the spellbound building were faced with granite, and there were very solid-looking bars on all the windows. Higher up these disappeared, and the topmost story, with a balcony running all the way round and the blunt snouts of TV cameras poking out, was wide open—a trap for idiots. Below, of course, a grey Volga was doing time on the street across from the front entrance, with four heavies inside. The front doors bore the modest black-and-gold legend: “Committee on Vibrations.” The people going in and out through these doors were either as unobtrusive as mice, or in a state of feverish excitement. After a week of surreptitiously observing the general to-ing and fro-ing of officials, I picked out one seamed but still quite decent-looking face and, very nearly making a fatal mistake, set off behind the velvet coat as it mingled wearily with the crowd. In a nearby side street, lined with rotting shacks like broken-down furniture put out for sale, I was already bracing myself to pronounce the ritual phrase “Excuse me,” when suddenly I felt rather than heard a bulldoggy panting at my back and, without pausing for thought, took off like a rocket into the clear pink sky, and flew off at great speed. All I managed to see out of the corner of my watering eye were two men standing in the narrow street below, their raincoats blown open by the wind, heads thrown back and arms outstretched. It was a long time since I had last flown over open spaces, and I had grown unused to it. My head swam, and in a matter of seconds I skipped over the cornice of a twelve-story building equipped with something very much like a machine gun nest. But I had to return to life just as rapidly as I had leapt out of it. It was a dormer window in one of Stalin’s skyscrapers that saved me. There was no glass, and I flew inside with nothing worse than a scratched cheek. It smelled of dust, and enormous portraits of leaders looked down at me from every wall. Whoever was in charge of the place was clearly guilty of brazen dereliction, since he kept not only the current bigwigs, whose portraits had to be displayed on public holidays, but also the long-since superannuated. Pushing open a door thick with the dust of ages and stepping out onto a stair, I turned round—the “Kremlin mountaineer”—was casting a sidelong glance at his bald-headed successor.