It was the beginning of the end. I knew nothing as yet, but ice suddenly flowed in my veins.
You didn’t have to be a Spinoza to guess that Kolenka had not been seized for writing poetry, though it too was far from innocuous. Here is how it came out later: the yard concierge, an old witch paid to spy on the tenants, glanced through the window one evening and saw Nikolai Petrovich resting above the table. He was dozing, poor fellow, an open book in his hand threatened to slip down, kept its word, and fell with a soft thud. Kolenka awoke and dove head first after the faithless book. The woman started back from the fogged-up window and, clutching her broom like a flagstaff, rushed off to telephone the appropriate quarters. In the appropriate quarters there had long been a research center to deal with such problems in the appropriate manner. A sort of Scientific Research Institute for the Study of the Surreal.... Nikolai Petrovich was taken away forthwith. They say he was flanked by two heavy-set characters, both handcuffed to the poor poet—in case he tried to fly away.
Russian-language broadcasts from abroad, too, were full of incredible news. The BBC reported it had been learned from diplomatic circles in Moscow that the Central Committee was definitely concerned about the situation in the country. The announcer even declared that the appearance of people who could fly was directly connected with the dissatisfaction and the desire of millions of people for freedom. The Voice of America was now broadcasting a daily fifteen-minute program entitled “The Wings of Freedom,” and assured its listeners that the population of the USSR was at last emerging from a period of weakness of will, blindness, and humiliation by violence, and was now ready to go flying off all over the world. It was rumored that Washington had held secret talks with its allies on the number of flyers who might defect and methods of putting them to use. It was proposed to revive a project, put on ice in the late seventies, for the construction of artificial floating islands. The CIA calculated the percentage of potential agents insinuated among the mass of defecting flyers, but the Swami Vivekananda occult centre just outside the U.S. capital immediately issued a statement saying that no orthodox servant of the regime would be capable of getting off the ground by even the thickness of a party card. West Germany, taking no part in the disputes, began building an enormous tent city. Along the borders of the satellite countries, directional arrows were now lit up at night. France splurged on colored lights and half the night sky of Paris blazed out the message: WELCOME!
All these strange tidings seeped through the chronic bronchitis of my old radio; but not, as yet, one single report of a successful defection by flight.
In January we hardly flew at all. It had become too dangerous. Anyway, it was difficult to stay up for long in the snow-laden air, despite our fur coats and hats. Katenka tired quickly, snow got in our eyes, and we might be spotted, even in the woods. Katya suggested sewing us some white suits. This would have been wonderful, but we had almost no money at all.
The frosts of Epiphany arrived with a bang. On St. Tatiana’s day I learned exactly where they were holding Kolenka. I looked in at Lukov Street, the neighbors showed me the sealed door with joyous trepidation. I had expected scarlet sealing wax, the National Emblem, like on a general’s button; instead there was a slip of paper and faded blue seals. There had been no search—too many books. I was told they would now be given to the Lenin Library. They only took away papers lying on the table and, strange as it may seem, the cat. The bit about the cat I don’t believe, incidentally. The neighbors had long wanted to do him in. Poor old puss. Formally, Kolenka was charged with the usual thing, breach of public order, although phrases like “losing touch with reality” were slipped in. He could be held only in a cell or in a camp enclosed in some sort of special netting. But in the final analysis, even this charge was flim-flam. What they wanted from him was just one thing: how?
I can vouch for Kolenka, I am quite sure that no amount of neuroleptic drugs could drag out of him those utterly simple yet incredibly deep explanations with which he changed my life forever, in the spring. Kolenka was as soft as wax, tender-hearted, loving; but like everyone else he hated what was going on, he didn’t even hate it, he rejected it biologically.
At last I understood the meaning of the message he sent on with Katenka: “It’ll be better this way....”
Rumors began to circulate that they were closing the country in earnest, that taxes would be raised, vodka would go up yet again, even whale meat would cost twice as much, while the military budget was to be sharply increased so as to carry out a colossal project: something like enclosing the whole country under one gigantic bell jar. There were arguments about ultraviolet radiation, about photosynthesis, all sorts of things connected with the sun’s rays, respiration, and so on. A friend of mine, a pilot in civil aviation, told me what I have no doubt is true: that the Western frontiers were already being patroled by aircraft flying in pairs with a kilometer-long net strung between them. There was talk of the problem of birds. The West also began to take the whole business a lot more seriously. NATO began to fear that the Soviet army would harness the experience of the flyers and war would assume an entirely new character. The possibility of a completely new and appallingly concrete isolation from the rest of the world was becoming more and more real. Although for me, who had never been further afield than Tallin, it didn’t make a blind bit of difference. It was in those fleeting, chaotic days that I chanced upon a somewhat confused article by Professor Pogoreltsev.
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.
Back on the street, wiping the blood from my cheek with a handkerchief, I saw the obscene dragon-fly shape of a helicopter flying impermissibly low, darkening the sky.
A few days later I received in the mail a modest slip of paper indicating that at 11 a.m. on Tuesday next I was to report to Inspector N. at such-and-such an address; it was signed with a flourish. The address, needless to say, was the very same. I did not know what to do. Katenka, fragrant, crazy Katenka, who these days was always carefully groomed and dressed, who even had her hair done and used French perfume bought one lucky day in a Ladies on Petrovka—Katenka was hanging in the corner, in a patch of sunlight, and the smoke from her cigaret traced patterns in the still air. A Wagner record—the Ride of the Valkyries—had just finished playing, and the needle ran on idly in the groove. “Don’t go,” said Katenka, “simply don’t go. They have no right. They don’t give you a clue what it’s about, or who they represent, instead of the inspector’s name there’s just an initial.” I stood beneath her for a moment, raised my face, rubbed against her hem, kissed her slender ankle. Something was happening. We both felt it. Something was bearing down on us from afar. I decided to go. But if Katenka was even then meditating my flight, my fear was that I might lose her.
So I went. I said, to hell with it, and went. I did, however, phone the one man I knew with connections in high places, explained when I was going and where. I had the idiotic illusion .that if anything happened to me he might be able to help, through his father, the General Secretary’s personal interpreter from Bengali. It didn’t even occur to me to wonder how often the General Secretary met with Bengalis.
Katenka, swaying in the doorway, said: “This isn’t goodbye, you hear?” and I set off.
Of course, I wound up at the “Committee on Vibrations,” but through a different entrance. The sign on the door, too, was different. Believe it or not, what it said—this time on a bit of cardboard, admittedly, as if only temporary, and I like a fool even thought it might be meant for me!—was: “NON-BORING-CASES: RECEPTION” and some room number. The inspector’s name, too, was scrawled beneath: Nikakov. No mention of forename or patronymic. The porter, wearing some special gear that looked more military than any actual uniform, called up the inspector, having first taken away my passport. While he was telephoning, with his back to me, I surveyed a portrait of the leader standing on the brink of a precipice: below, in the valley, lay a vast sea-girt city. It looked as if any moment the leader would either take flight, or drop like a stone. The skirts of his army greatcoat were already flung wide. There was the sound of a steel door opening, and the inspector was bearing down on me, his little grey eyes already fixed on me from afar. He was on the small side, roundish, there didn’t seem anything special about him. He wore a thin, crooked smile, the sort people used in the old days when screwing in a lorgnette. “Nikakov,” he said, not, thank God, offering me his hand. Right at the door, with its row of illuminated buttons, he suddenly rounded on me and gave me a penetrating stare. I naturally lowered my gaze. Quick as a wink he spun round again and pressed one of the buttons. The door slid back. We walked down long dimly lit corridors. The floor was covered with a soft plastic material of a dark cherry color. They say that when Professor Pogoreltsev got roughed up a bit somewhere around here, then taken off to his cell, he left behind no alarming trail of blood spots—the floor covering absorbed everything without trace.
In his office, having seated me on a hard, straight chair, Nikakov sprawled in a leather armchair opposite and immediately seemed to fill out and grow Digger. Above him hung another portrait °f the leader. This time the leader was standing on the very brink of the Kremlin wall. Far below, red-bannered crowds flowed past, and the sky was thick with aircraft. It seemed as if with one more gust of wind the leader would take off. The skirts of his grey gabardine raincoat were already spreading, wing-like. “Can you guess,” said Nikakov, pushing across cigarets and an ashtray, “why we have invited you here?”
The conversation was like the onset of flu. I felt hot and uncomfortable in the thick sweater I had instinctively put on that morning, together with winter socks, although the whole boulevard was already turning green. I kept breaking out in a cold sweat, I was all shrinking from the terribly strange things the inspector was saying. He had genuine mastery of an art unknown to me: taking ordinary Russian and turning it into stiff, rote-learned phrases, rusty but full of barbs. These phrases got inside my head and messed it up. I gurgled something in reply. “Your close friend,” Nikakov was saying, “Nikolai Petrovich Smolensky, has broken away from the masses. You understand what I mean, of course, when I say ‘broken away’? What he wanted, Okhlamonov, to speak plainly, was to elevate himself, as it were, to rise above his native land, above the working collective, above the Party, too, for that matter.... This, at least, is how he did feel.... Now he has repented his errors, now he has fully acknowledged them and taken them into account, thought things through and got to the bottom of things, now he has sobered up and woken up and cleared things up, now he groans with compunction.... “—some mechanism in Nikakov had jammed, but he gave his shoulders a shake, grimaced spasmodically, and got himself back under control, though still skidding a bit behind the facade—41... has reflected and now regrets his errors, has analyzed his errors and is now punishing himself....” Nikakov kept fiddling with a pencil, but although it twisted and turned every which way, at regular intervals its sharp, black point was aimed directly at me. “You were a friend of the accused, were you not?” asked the inspector. “Yes,” I said, “we were friends. I respected his talent.” Nikakov spun around once in his swivel chair like a child, showing a ham-colored bald patch, then set off again. His little smile, like a laddered stocking, split open stitch by stitch across his scrubbed face: “So we may conclude from the aforesaid”—I swear the words “my dear boy” were trembling on his lips—”that you were not only his admirer, drinking companion, and perhaps something else as well that we have not yet ascertained, but, to put it mildly, his pupil”
This was so stupid that I was suddenly bored, bored to death, and not for the first time that false spring. You know how it is when absolutely everything you look at makes you sick. Under my jacket I could feel the warm bulk of a flask—my sweet Katenka had slipped a flask of cognac into an unsuspecting pocket. 1 wished Nikakov would go to the lavatory, or to see his boss, so I could have a drink. And, as if someone had read my mind, there was a buzz from some apparatus with lots of buttons bearing the legend “Bell System” and Nikakov, saying something into the machine, got up and walked to the door. “1 have to leave you for a minute,” he said.
The office was painted a vile official color—lettuce-green, as the poet Oshanin put it. A brown border ran along the top. On one wall there was a long, unusually horizontal mirror. There were no bars on the window, but each pane had a pale triangle stamped in one corner—the kind of glass they say you can’t break even by hitting it with a stool. The table had nothing on it but a calendar, and n copy of Pravda with a leading article entitled “Dig Deeper Roots in our Native Soil,” I got up and stretched. The flask glowed amber when I drank in front of the mirror. There was a mysterious, even whirring and clicking sound from one corner. I felt sleepy, either from the cognac or from the strain on my nerves. I went over to the window and leaned my forehead against the glass. It gave onto an inner courtyard. I could see the planked footway of an exercise area, with a barred roof overhead and netting along the sides. A couple of soldiers stood smoking by the massive gates. A sick pigeon with a festering beak cooed on the window ledge. The glass was damp and I recoiled in horror, realizing that the inspector’s breath had participated in the formation of this moisture.
Nikakov returned an hour later. Saying nothing he sat down at the table, opened a drawer, got out what appeared to be a standard questionnaire and began rapidly filling it out. His questions now were dry, ordinary, and I answered automatically. The pencil lay lifeless on the table. From the yard below I could hear tramping sounds and the shouts of guards. The whirring noise had also stopped. A very palpable hatred was simmering quietly inside me. Nikakov finished writing. “Sign here,” he said. I read through the statement, which said that I was a friend of Kolenka, was an admirer of his poetry, but had never taken part in any of his experiments. “Take it next door to be stamped”—Nikakov handed me a pass—”someone will see you out.” His voice rose to a squeak, and he himself seemed to shrink and dwindle in size, just as if someone had let the air out of him.
I left the office and knocked on the next door. Inside there was a glass partition; a man in a white coat stuck his head through the window like a cuckoo. Preferring the pass, I involuntarily glanced inside. God! the room next door to Nikakov’s office was a laboratory! Reels of pink and silver film lay heaped on the floor, lights winked on and off, screens gleamed all around. Along one wall ran a darkened horizontal window with a curtain drawn back half-way—this was the “mirror” in the neighboring office! They had been checking up on me....
A hand gave me back my pass and pointed to another door. An electric lock clicked. I took a chance and, with a cheeky grin, asked: “What? Won’t I do?” The white coat, returning to the reels of film, replied with his back to me: “We get your kind in here by the truckload. You weigh plenty, kid.”
Downstairs, handing over the pass in exchange for my passport, I surveyed the State Seal bearing sword and two crossed wings; and it was shortly after that, in the metro, that I tumbled to the rest of it: left alone, I was supposed to panic and give myself away, like scratching a forbidden place, was supposed to lose control if only for a second. and take off, if only a millimeter. “You weigh plenty!” They had been checking to see if I would lose weight!
From that same samizdat, from the same dressmaker (Katenka had made herself a golden gown out of a silk curtain; I once photographed her in it at sunset, hanging sadly above the cross atop a village church—her last photo in Russia), about a month later, reading the sixth blurred carbon copy, we learned that Kolenka had outwitted his jailers: had agreed to experiments and, when they transferred him from his cell (ceiling about 20 meters high) to a laboratory the size of an aircraft hangar, and freed him of everything but telemetry leads, had plunged from fifty meters up onto the only solid object—the professor’s table—everything else having been providentially upholstered in that same soft cherry-colored material—and died on impact. In Sweden a committee had already been set up to defend him. Radio Liberty regularly gave readings of his poetry, two young Americans had handcuffed themselves to the Emperor Cannon in the Kremlin in protest, but it was too late.... In May, when the first thunder storms were breaking over the city and the oak trees were in blossom, an article appeared in the Moscow Evening News calling Kolenka a charlatan who had fleeced his friends by promising to teach them something that does not exist. He was also, of course, described as suffering from the delusion that he was a great writer. The article was signed by a well-known poet.
At the very end of the month, when the few surviving front gardens were already ablaze with lilacs, Katenka dragged me off to the country. We went a long, long way out, to our beloved Nikolsky woods. There no one could see us, but for some reason she tenderly refused to do it in the air, as we had used to, but insistently drew me down onto the grass. She hugged me fiercely, with a new ardor, wound her legs around me, her embrace almost squeezed the breath out of me, her fragrant sweat, mingled with mine, bathed her face ... it was all more powerful than it had ever been before.
That day we definitively decided to fly away.
“Lead boots will soon be all the rage,” joked Katenka. She wasn’t far from the truth. Here and there “socially conscious” pensioners, not waiting for instructions from above (I suddenly realize that “from above” sounded ambiguous in those days) started putting up notices: FLYING STRICTLY FORBIDDEN. They were already drafting new legislation against “anti-social breaking away from the collective,” setting prison terms, etc., etc. It was even suggested that parents were responsible for their children, no matter if they themselves were incapable of rising above the prosaic realities of our native land.
In Tsvetnoy market the Georgians were selling tomatoes for exorbitant prices, someone had brought some plump gladioli into town, and the Prime Minister of Australia was due to arrive on an official visit, and an aphorism by the mayor of the city made the rounds of Moscow, to the effect that if anyone flew during the visit, heads would fly too—in a word, a pal! of ennui and desolation had descended, and Katenka and I finally got two plane tickets to Simferopol; from there we would make our way by road to Yalta, rest a while, take a look round. and, going out to sea one night on a pleasure boat, leave the country for ever.
Kolenka’s warning—not to fly over large expanses of water—naturally made us a bit apprehensive, but we had no choice. The Western frontiers were now being patrolled in earnest.
Do you know what Yalta is at night? No, not Soviet Yalta, full of drunks and street brawls, reeking of cheap perfume and suntan oil! A different Yalta. Mute, dwindling, sprawled on its side like a distant dying campfire. A city from which so many have fled.... A last memory, spiced with cheap jokes....
It was a close, moonless night. I had a child’s compass, bought at the last minute. I was so afraid the pointer would come off the needle‑‑‑‑‑
Again I go back to the photographs from those years—black and white, of course; color film from the West I got only rarely, it cost the earth. Here is Katenka bearing a tray of coffee through the air—a heavy tray from our grandmother’s day. She is finding it heavy going, so her naked little form is pitched downward, her legs pointing skyward, I can see the twin hills of her buttocks, the tender confluence of her breasts. Her hair is uncombed, carelessly pinned to one side. Her downy mound still to this day gives me the shakes. Katenka under a river bridge, in one hand she is holding a rolled-up newspaper and tooting on it like an archangel. Katenka upside down in our little apartment; her hair completely covers her face, her dress too has fallen back, only her legs stick straight up like a fountain.
I have one particular photo that fills me with particular sadness—Katenka is pulling back the shade: a winter window, snow-covered branches, a sparrow, the feeble sun, wires. She is wearing an old dressing gown. Holding it at her throat with one hand, as if something were strangling her. Sometimes I think that even then she knew what was going to happen.
The most surprising thing about this picture is that Katenka is standing on the floor.
I’m reaching for the matches.
How we got ourselves to Paris is another story. We undertook no more long flights. Except Turkey, which we cut across in three hot nights alive with the incessant buzzing of cicadas. The U. S. consul in Athens issued us our first Western documents. Of course they wanted to know all about us, but we concocted a simple-minded tale involving an inflatable dinghy, supplies of drinking water, and Lady Luck. Once launched, this idyllic fiction circulated for years through all the prefectures of Europe. Pretty soon I managed to sell a dozen or so of my photos to a French agency, received an advance—it was this, incidentally, that decided our choice of a country; they had promised us the rest on arrival in Paris—and we timidly rushed out to spend what was for us an enormous amount of money. The pictures, which showed up a week later on the front covers of various thick magazines, were the sort of thing I’d been doing all my life: streets, people, mainly people. I had taken only the last few from high up—there was one of Moscow slanting away below, bristling with the sinister spires of its dwarf skyscrapers, crushed beneath the funereal weight of administrative buildings.
In Paris we lived modestly, with a sort of melancholy gaiety. Something had infused the atmosphere of our relations for good: a certain quantity of what I thought was non-lethal poison. I tried not to hear news from Russia, bought no newspapers, but whether I liked it or not the magazines that used my work slipped in commentaries on Soviet life, and I was often overcome with disgust, as in Nikakov’s office—overtly or covertly, they were 99 per cent pro-Soviet.
Money started to come in. Katenka rented a narrow storefront in one of the back streets off Les Halles. She fixed up almost everything herself, herself went around buying stuff, and soon she opened a tiny boutique, “Chez Katy,” where everything, literally everything was the same dark-cherry color. I mean blouses, sugar, pants, tennis racquets, bottles of liqueur, boots, candles, glasses, even cakes and pastries. For a month the shop yawned empty, then buyers began arriving in droves—my Katenka became very fashionable, and you saw girls in the street dressed all in Katenka’s one color. I was gladdened by her success but, to be honest, frightened by the color.
One evening at a noisy party given by a famous art critic—every last painter was there to pay his commercial respects—Katenka and I were standing on a balcony. She was wearing a light dress and her bare hands were cupped, I’m afraid to say prayerfully, around a glass of champagne. Suddenly she started talking about Nikolai Petrovich, about his one-room library, while I looked down at the early-evening bustle of Montparnasse far below. What she was saying filled me with something heavy, and I was on the point of stopping her when I heard: “He gave it to us as a gift, and it became our salvation, and we never even try it any longer... not even a tiny bit....” Already bending, or rather pouring, over the rail of the balcony, she was slipping down. The rest happened in an instant: I saw her turn in a spiral, then plummet down, a colored ball with her gown streaming out behind; I heard the motley crowd gasp as it instantly formed itself into a perfect circle.... Why did I rush to the stairs, to get the elevator? To this day, I don’t know....