In their own way, Polina and Maxim had kept the abortion to themselves. Maxim had given a tin of caviar to the doctor at the regional polyclinic who had referred Polina to the hospital. It was understood that the doctor wouldn’t say anything to her parents. Polina also didn’t share the information with her sister. Which was why, since they did not know otherwise, her mother and her sister each made a point of commenting on Maxim’s extraordinary romantic display.
—Three bouquets in one week. It’s a very refined and thoughtful gesture, Polina’s mother said.
—He’s probably going to propose, Nadja said.
Maxim had already talked seriously about marriage. But he’d refrained from making a formal proposal because they were at a “crucial point in their lives.” To make a major life decision before graduating from the institute would be rash. They would both have to pass their exams and, ideally, finish near the top of their respective classes. After that, Maxim would have to perform his military service. He would be gone for two months and be obliged to pass another exam. Neither of them yet knew where they might be posted for work.
Much later, when Polina became involved with Alec, she looked back upon her younger self, the girl who at twenty-one had allowed Maxim to dictate the terms of her life. She understood that she had made a mistake. But she also understood that, at the time, she had been incapable of acting differently. Unlike her friends who descended into infatuations, she had never had a great love. Some people’s conceptions of what was available to them coincided with what was actually available to them, other people’s conceptions did not. There were men whom she found more engaging than Maxim but they didn’t much pursue her. They found her too serious. There were many other pretty girls who fawned and laughed more easily. What put those men off drew Maxim to her.
She met Maxim at a party in her friend’s dormitory room. Polina had been sitting and talking to one of her friend’s roommates when she turned her head and saw Maxim standing beside her. Maybe she smiled at him, maybe she didn’t. As if reading from the pages of a courtship manual, Maxim asked if she would care for a drink of any kind. Polina couldn’t think of a reason to decline, and so he returned with a glass of lemon soda and installed himself at her side for the rest of the evening. He ascertained her name, where she lived, what she was studying, her opinion of her program, her career aspirations. Next he proceeded to cultural and recreational interests: movies, books, ballet, musicians, figure skating, volleyball, rhythmic gymnastics. To be polite, Polina answered his questions, and when Maxim asked to see her again she said yes because she didn’t want to say no. She then forgot all about him until he appeared one evening at her door. Her mother told her that she had a gentleman caller, and she couldn’t imagine who it might be until she saw him waiting there. Worse still, she felt panicked because she couldn’t remember his name. But she experienced her first affectionate feeling for him when he rescued her by reintroducing himself. He didn’t appear to do this because he’d inferred that she had forgotten his name, but because a person was well advised to repeat his name upon meeting someone for only the second time.
That night he took her to see a figure skating competition at the Palace of Sports. He recalled, he said, that she had expressed an interest in figure skating. She recalled having expressed only the same generic interest in figure skating as in volleyball and rhythmic gymnastics. But tickets to the figure skating competition were hard to come by, even two at the very back of the arena. After the competition he took her to a café. He opened the door for her and held her chair. He did everything with precision and earnestness. At some point someone had taken him aside and informed him that, in the civilized precincts of planet Earth, there existed certain protocols. At some point, everyone heard a variation of this same speech, but not everybody took it to heart. Maxim had. In Polina, he sensed that he had found someone who also possessed a respect for the protocols.
Polina didn’t encourage him, but he didn’t seem to require encouragement. He courted her with the measured discipline of a person climbing a long flight of stairs. There was something endearing about Maxim’s doggedness as, step by step, he insinuated himself into her life. He asked to be introduced to her parents. He brought flowers and a bottle of cognac. He also brought a gift for Nadja and subsequently invited her along on outings. She was then only twelve or thirteen. They went to the zoo. He hired a boat and rowed them on the Lielupe River. Nadja teased him in a playful way. When they were in the boat, she hopped up and down in the bow, leaned over the edge, and made a theatrical speech about the cruel, cruel world and the weedy river’s irresistible call.
—I’m going to do it, Maxim, she said. Are you going to jump in and save me?
—Don’t be silly, Maxim said.
—I’m going to do it, Nadja said.
—Polina, Maxim appealed.
—Nadja, Polina cautioned.
—Oh, it’s all just too too much for a delicate girl to bear, Nadja said, and flopped over the side.
The green water closed over her like a curtain. Polina looked back at Maxim with apology and exasperation. They watched the water and waited for Nadja to part the curtain again. Polina stole glimpses at Maxim. Just when Maxim seemed ready to plunge in, Nadja thrashed to the surface, gasped for help, then disappeared again. Maxim waited a few moments longer and then, stalwartly, as if complying with an order, removed his shoes and jumped in after her. A lesser man, Polina thought, would have let Nadja flounder until she grew bored. Another kind of man, however, would have embraced the game.
After some requisite diving and searching, Maxim found Nadja peeking out from under the keel. When they floated back into view, Nadja had her head tipped back and one arm around Maxim’s neck. Her free arm swayed dramatically above her head. My hero, Nadja sighed, her eyes half closed. Maxim endured Nadja’s performance with the consummate face of the adult: distaste subjugated to obligation.
Reason, or its pale ambassador convention, ordered their time together. It extended to everything, including sex. Before Maxim, Polina had had three encounters that had approached but never crossed the line. On two of the occasions she had halted things before they went too far. The other time, at a Komsomol retreat, she had been willing but, at the critical moment, another couple entered the barn and started climbing to the hayloft.
Polina couldn’t say that she was eager to take the next and inevitable step with Maxim, but she did wonder when he would grant himself the permission to do it. During their gropings and fumblings, she felt like a spectator, watching Maxim as he denied himself for the sake of her honor. These preliminary bouts always ended with Maxim apologizing for the liberties he had taken. Polina either pardoned his liberties or said nothing at all. They would then sit or lie together on a bench in the public gardens, or on the embankment of the river in the industrial quarter, or in the cold, shadowy entrances to public buildings, and share momentous and ostensibly soulful silences. Eventually, Maxim interrupted a bout of groping to ask Polina for her opinion and her permission. She consented with a simple All right, and waited as Maxim scrupulously tore the edge from the yellow paper wrapper she had heard about but never actually seen. Inexpertly, he put the rubber on himself and then spat on his hand and pawed Polina clumsily in preparation. Polina shifted her weight from one hip to the other so as to help him and then put her hands on his chest to resist his weight. She said, Careful, because she wasn’t quite ready and she didn’t know how to explain that to him. It was the only word that passed between them. Afterward, Maxim acted as if something significant had transpired and Polina didn’t contradict him.
From then on, they repeated the act with some regularity. Polina saw that Maxim liked it and wanted it, so she obliged him. What they did, they did with no variation. For Polina, intercourse began when Maxim tore the edge from the yellow paper wrapper. She assumed that it was the same for everyone until she overheard other girls speaking about their experiences with their mainly drunken boyfriends. That was when she l
earned that most men went to great lengths to avoid having to deal with the contents of the yellow wrapper, and that, despite the risks, most women relented. They rationalized their actions by maligning the quality of Soviet condoms, which were known to rupture or slide off. It made little sense, they said, to put one’s faith in something so unreliable. In Polina’s experience, the condoms had never ruptured or slid off. She also thought the alternative measures the women cited—hot water, wine vinegar, urine—sounded dubious, but several weeks later, when they were alone in Polina’s apartment, her parents having gone with Nadja to attend a choral recital, Maxim found that he did not have any condoms, but Polina insisted that they do it anyway. It was not something she had planned in advance, but neither was it entirely spontaneous. It was the first time she had ever challenged Maxim’s authority, and she was as aroused by the prospect of luring him into temptation as by the recklessness of what they were doing. Maxim was sitting up on his knees when she told him what she wanted, and he wavered for a few seconds, a look of fear and doubt on his face, before Polina reached out and took him into her. After that, the fear and doubt left his face and were replaced by something insular and fierce. For as long as it lasted, Polina felt florid reverberations, as if from dense and cumbersome things thrown against her body. Gothic thoughts took shape in her mind, some of which momentarily surprised her and then mocked her surprise. Shortly before it ended, Polina hissed in Maxim’s ear that she wanted him to do it inside her. It was a sentence that had been circling malevolently in her head from the moment she had insisted that they have sex. As she said it, she knew it couldn’t have had less to do with a desire for children. And as soon as Maxim finished, Polina slid out from under him and went to the kitchen for a basin and a purple, thin-necked vase from which she had to first remove three of Maxim’s carnations. She returned to the bedroom, set the basin in the middle of the floor, and urinated into it. Carefully, under Maxim’s silent gaze, she transferred the urine from the basin into the vase, spilling several drops onto the floorboards. She then stretched out on the floor, arched her pelvis, and instructed Maxim to pour the urine into her from the vase. What they were doing was disgusting and sordid, and Maxim avoided Polina’s eyes as he carried out her instructions. He was pliable then in a way that he had never been before and never would be again. She had made him complicit in something depraved, and she expected that, in some way, she would be punished for this. Later, when her punishment was meted out, Maxim never once blamed her for what she knew was exclusively her fault.
3
On his third day at the briefing department, standing before the newly arrived émigrés at their cafeteria orientation, Alec felt like a fraud. He felt tempted to confess that, not one week before, he had been sitting in their place, and that he knew no more about Rome than they did. But he was aware that this kind of revelation would only sow panic.
After the orientation Alec made the rounds of the émigrés’ hotel rooms. He distributed U.S. emigration forms, priming people for their Persecution Stories and, if necessary, their Party Stories. Some people came prepared with a vast catalog of grievances that they had been compiling their entire lives; others needed some interpretive assistance.
A couple from Berdichev found the concept particularly boggling. The wife looked at Alec like he was obtuse.
—What do we need this for?
—Nobody’s saying you need it. The Americans need it. You’re claiming refugee status. To be a refugee you need to have been persecuted.
—The entire country was persecuted.
—Did you and your husband attend university?
—Yes. Both of us.
—Was it the university of your choice?
—I was not an exceptional student. I had no grand designs.
—And your husband?
—He has a good head for academics. He had wanted to study history.
—He wasn’t accepted?
—Not into that faculty.
—How come?
—What do you mean how come? Look at his nose.
Alec had landed in the briefing department after a brisk evaluation by Matilda Levy. She had walked him through the HIAS offices while rattling off the various positions and personalities.
—Konstantin is our messenger, Matilda said when they passed the table reserved for the messenger. He is going to Canada. After one month he could find his way without the aid of a map not only in Ostia and Ladispoli, but also in Rome.
At the doors of the transportation department, a room that smelled strongly of body odor, cigarettes, and fried food, Matilda Levy introduced Alec to three of the four men who worked there. They looked up from their particular stacks of documents and submitted to the introduction in a cursory way, disguising not at all their displeasure at having to engage in the formality of greeting a superfluous person. The fourth man, Matilda explained, was at the dockyards coordinating the movement of freight. The slightest mistake and you had disaster—a family lands in New York but their dining room set lands in Melbourne.
—You do not seem to me an imposing man, Matilda said.
—Imposing? Alec asked, not understanding.
—A man to give orders to other men, Matilda said. No, they would eat you alive on the docks.
As neither the docks nor the musty office held any appeal for him, Alec saw no reason to contest Matilda’s perception of him. Besides, she was essentially right. His father was imposing and enjoyed issuing decrees and orders. Karl had this capacity as well, although he didn’t derive the kind of pleasure from it that their father did. Whereas the only thing Alec detested more than being ordered around was having to order someone else around. Basically, he was of the opinion that the world would be a far more interesting and hospitable place if everyone—genius and idiot alike—was allowed to bumble along as he pleased. “More freedom to bumble” neatly described his motive for leaving the Soviet Union.
—You are the type that prefers the company of women, Matilda Levy said as they stepped away from the Transportation Department. Is this correct?
They stopped in the hallway and Matilda Levy peered boldly into Alec’s eyes, squinting slightly as if in this way to achieve a better vantage into his innermost character.
—Yes, it is correct. I have always preferred the company of women, Alec said and, after hesitating one instant too long, smiled.
The smile, Alec immediately felt, was a mistake. Under Matilda Levy’s peculiar scrutiny and under the demands of a foreign language, he had momentarily been unable to act like himself. He had intended only to deliver a simple statement in the English language and season it with a little charm but had instead, because of the yawning gap between his words and his smile, presented for Matilda Levy’s consideration a man who was either licentious or deranged or some combination of the two.
Matilda Levy seemed to regard him ruminatively.
—Yes, she said, I believe it is so.
Alec wasn’t sure what she meant: What was so? He had temporarily lost track of what they had been talking about. Matilda Levy appeared before him transformed, as though she had stepped out from behind some scrim that had been obscuring a more vital Matilda Levy. Alec sensed that she was now differently disposed to him. They were no longer administrator and prospective employee, but rather woman and man—with complementary desires and bodies. For Alec’s consideration Matilda Levy presented the physical Matilda Levy: hips, breasts, legs, hairdo—adorned with nylons, necklaces, bracelets, bulky rings, and lipstick.
Saying nothing further, Matilda Levy swept around and, wielding her bosom like a prow, sailed down the hall, to the stairwell and beyond. Alec followed in her wake. It had been a long time since he had found himself in this position. More often, he led the way. Other times, the act of seduction was performed in a spirit of mutuality. Nobody led. Hand in hand, both tumbled together. But Alec couldn’t imagine himself tumbling hand in hand with Matilda Levy. He could imagine other scenarios, though these, even cast in the most
favorable light, were either comic or absurd. Nevertheless, as Matilda reached the bottom of the stairwell and crossed four lanes of traffic, Alec felt that he had to seriously consider the possibility. Could it be that his job with HIAS was conditional upon becoming Matilda Levy’s lover? Far stranger things happened with astounding regularity. His mother’s cousin, raided by the police, once tried to swallow an inventory list. When one of the officers attempted to pry it out of his mouth, he bit off the policeman’s finger. Compared with that, sleeping with Matilda Levy for a middling job at HIAS seemed perfectly reasonable. And with every successive step Alec took he asked himself: Should I do it? The answer, of course, resided in the question. If you asked yourself if you should do it, you shouldn’t do it.
Matilda Levy inserted a key into the lock of a nondescript building and stepped inside the shadowy lobby. She did not look back to check whether Alec was behind her. She pressed ahead with implacable resolve, as if everything was foregone and settled, as if she and Alec had come to an agreement. Alec supposed that maybe he had agreed to more than he’d suspected. Between a man and a woman, the merest look has sexual implications. For all he knew, Matilda Levy could have taken his smile for a marriage proposal. He thought to say something, to clarify his position in some diplomatic way, to alter the tone, but Matilda Levy’s silent determination discouraged talk.
In spite of all this, Alec found himself inspecting the lobby for suitably concealed corners where the act could be consummated. This was purely reflexive, a consequence of Soviet privation. It was one thing to attract a woman, quite another to find a place where you could be together undisturbed. One time, in a bind, he had convinced a girl to climb up onto the broad bough of an oak tree. She’d feared falling, tearing her dress, losing a shoe. He’d had to reassure her, and also hoist her up on his shoulders. She was not a large girl but neither was she a natural climber. “What are we, squirrels?” the girl had complained. “If only,” Alec had said.
The Free World Page 8
