"Rada was in love with Dean," said Alla.
"But he treated her so badly," I said.
Alla said, "He was a big star. He was a man. He had the right," said Alla.
Quietly now, Alla sat, crying. I wondered how many other girls he had left behind him, bruised, in Moscow, convinced that he had the right because he was a star. I wondered how much the diaries would, in the end, cost me.
After Alla finished her sad tale and had another good cry, she went home and we sat down to dinner. There was chicken and pickled garlic, cucumbers and cheese, chocolate cake and red wine.
"Stalin's favorite vintage," Art said examining the label.
At the end of the meal we had tea; Svetlana put cherry jam in hers and it was the only time in Russia I ever had what could pass for a race memory: my father liked to eat cherry jam with his tea. He said it was a Russian custom. Otherwise, I had never once felt Russian, never.
My grandparents had been among the Jews of the Pale of Settlement, an area of parts of what are now Belarus and Ukraine. From 1791, it was a kind of vast ghetto. Peasants and villagers like my own grandparents often did not speak Russian, only Yiddish. They were obviously not baptized, so there were no church records. They were barred from going to university and there were restrictions on what trades they could enter. Then came the murderous pogroms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those who could fled to avoid being killed by the Cossacks.
What was there for me to feel? When people asked where my ancestors came from, I would say, "Fiddler on the Roof without the music." I felt nothing. But I knew that for my great-grandparents it had been much, much worse than I could imagine and even the jokes were often bitter.
Svetlana, long legs stretched out in front of her, was preoccupied. We were all delighted by the onset of Glasnost and Perestroika: the restaurants that had suddenly opened, the way people talked with increasing candor about the system. In Moscow there was real excitement, a sense of drama, a lot of intellectualizing about the new revolution and its possibilities. The nascent free press, the sheer exuberance of free speech. Svetlana wanted action. Her vision of a better life was born in long lines at the butcher and waiting rooms at the doctor's office. If it was tough for her, for a well educated, urban, sophisticated Muscovite, what was it like for ordinary people?
"Did you ever believe in Communism?" I asked.
"Not for one single day in my entire life," she said. "When I was a little girl, I drew wigs on Lenin in my schoolbooks and my mother had to be called in to discuss the problem."
She did not believe in any of it, not even now. In the Soviet Union things would deteriorate, Svetlana believed. The lines would get longer. The meat would get scarcer. Everyone would get meaner, more vicious. And the men would keep on talking.
Maybe it was OK for the men, who sat around Moscow's restaurants with their Western pals, arguing, drinking, laughing. Boy, did they talk. Sometimes you felt Moscow's intellectuals would talk the whole enterprise to death. Maybe glorious Glasnost was OK for them, Svetlana said, but she saw no reason to stick around just to stand in food lines. If she could get out, if she could go to the West, she would go and happily.
"What good is this Glasnost if I have to wait in line for a chicken four hours?" she said.
"Why do we need a chicken?" asked Art.
"I don't care about a chicken. But you would care if our friends had nothing to eat. I don't want to wait for a chicken. I want to be doing my work," she said.
Svetlana turned to me. "Can I say this in Russian and Art will translate?"
"Yes, of course."
Eyes blazing, fists clenched, Svetlana suddenly let out a torrent of Russian.
"Well, the first thing I must say is that Svetlana is absolutely wrong, now I will translate what she says," said Art.
Svetlana turned away. She wanted to leave the country and her husband didn't get it.
Art, of course, did not want to leave. It was his moment. He was much in demand by visiting Westerners and anyhow things in the music business were jumping. He told me about his conceptual punk band. it was called Vladimir Illych.
"We wore Komsomol outfits and we had several big hits such as 'Lenin is Alive' and 'Lenin, Come Back', after Lassie Come Home. There was also 'Brezhnev is Knocking at Your Door'." Art picked up his glass of Advocaat liqueur. "Of course, the band only exist in our heads," he added. Then he looked at Svetlana and said, suddenly, "I think I will send Svetlana to the West."
"What? Like a parcel?" Svetlana banged her fists on the table; the plates jumped. "You don't understand," she said. This was addressed to Art. He looked bemused.
In her way she was much less sentimental and more astute about the world than Art. A year or so later, when they came to New York for the first time, I took her to Macy's. I asked if she was surprised.
"No," she said. "I think this is the normal way to live."
It was tough times in New York, plenty of homeless all over the city, crime, crack, poverty.
"I understand," she said. "But at least there is the possibility to live a better life. In the Soviet Union there was none. Everything was arranged for you: where to live, how to live, what job to do. Nothing. No chance."
There was a New York City subway map on the wall of Art and Svetlana's flat and, in the living room where we ate, a large Sony Trinitron monitor. It didn't work as a television set, of course, because the broadcast standards were different in Moscow. But it was the only set Art found stylistically interesting, so he used it as a monitor for his video player.
"You know," he said, "when Dean Reed first arrived, he did numbers like 'Blue Suede Shoes'. This meant something to us. There was nothing in Soviet culture that reminded me of my dreams, and rock was a concentration of all good things." He polished off his Advocaat. It was late. I asked what records he wanted from New York when I got back.
"Cab Calloway," he said and grinned sardonically. "And early Louis Prima."
On the night I was to meet Dean Reed's Soviet translator, we - Leslie, Jo, and I - went to a bar on the third floor of the National Hotel.
The hotel was like a little city, with many restaurants, bars, meeting rooms. I thought of the third floor bar as the Carpet Bar because it had what resembled old carpet on the wall. There was a friendly bartender and you could get plates of smoked fish and hard-boiled eggs and caviar. The bartender would also sell you jars of caviar, for about seven bucks. It was the blue and white china, though, that I was obsessed with.
The bar had a set of china on which it served snacks and which was also decorative, propped up on shelves among the vodka bottles. Somehow I got it into my head that this was the original National Hotel china, that it dated from the 1920s, a wonderful period in Soviet decorative arts, and that, in the course of history, Lenin had probably eaten his sandwiches off it.
Everything in the Soviet Union on that first trip was interesting, everything had an exotic glitter for me, and if there were few souvenirs, there was, nonetheless, the history.
I began to barter with the bartender for the plates. Pantyhose changed hands, and so did ballpoint pens, but the thing he seemed to desire most were music cassettes. He was willing, for instance, to trade a blue and white teapot for a James Taylor, a large serving plate for Paul Simon, and for the Rolling Stones I was able to acquire four nice soup bowls.
And so it went, not just then, but for the several trips to Moscow that followed. I carried the blue and white china wrapped in newspaper, smuggled along with the seven dollar caviar, out of Moscow, convinced the china was more or less national treasure. And then once, on a TV program, I saw a reporter interview some very poor people in a remote region of the USSR; they lived in what appeared to be a hut. But in the hut, when they invited the reporter in for tea, was a set of blue and white china. The same blue and white china. It didn't matter though; the dishes I bartered in the Carpet Bar of the National never lost their luster.
After a snack and a drink, we took the subway to meet Art and Svetlana at the appointed station. In the subway train, the Muscovites stood and sat, behind books and newspapers, secret and unsmiling and blank. One beanbag of a woman, who seemed to have been stitched permanently into her overcoat, clutched a string bag triumphantly. It held a rush of yellow oranges. Fruit was more precious than gold in a Moscow winter and there must have been a special on somewhere. All over town that day I had seen oranges spilling from suitcases or stuffed into net bags, bright yellow and orange balls of fruit, like jewels caught in nets.
The Moscow subway stations were everything that had been promised. The walls were marble and granite; there were chandeliers and stained-glass windows; there were stations like Las Vegas hotels and stations as streamlined as Rockefeller Center, where the Art Deco bronzes glittered just for the pleasure of the strap-hangers. In the subways, the imperial ambitions of Mother Russia had been passed on to the working classes and I would not have been surprised to find walls made of solid silver. For five kopeks, you could ride forever.
Warm, efficient, safe, the subway was one of the few institutions in Moscow that worked. Above ground things were changing every five minutes. Here, amid the subterranean splendors, was the only place that Art Troitsky felt on firm ground.
At the Gorky Park Station, Art was waiting with Svetlana. Outside, a light snow was falling. The black iron gates to Gorky Park glittered with gold filigree. Inside the park was a silvery, moon-shaped ice-rink on which skaters raced, twirled, stumbled. From the loudspeaker system came the insistent strains of "Volare." .
"Nel blu di pinto di blu," Domenico Modugno warbled. The skaters circled. The music changed to the "Skater's Waltz" and the show-offs spun on to the rink, dancing, spinning, jumping. Millions of distant little stars twinkled coldly overhead, and we trudged off into the park, Leslie in a Russian-style hat made of monkey fur, the earflaps down, Jo in a newly acquired caracal, his huge leather bag over his shoulder, Svetlana graceful and surefooted. The ground was frozen and occasionally skaters suddenly sped out from among the stands of trees. I thought as we walked, alone, silent, in the empty frozen park, even the music fading and distant, about Gorky Park, the novel, and the dead man left in the park, his face flayed.
In a clearing, near the embankment of the Moskva River, was a building painted the same blue as the cafe in East Berlin, and I wondered if there was an oversupply of duck-egg blue paint in the Eastern Bloc. An old man without any teeth was its gatekeeper. He pulled open the door and followed us in.
Waving a filthy handkerchief at us, he blew his nose on it and stuffed it up his coat sleeve. He did a little Charlie Chaplin dance and snatched our coats, locking them away in a sealed cupboard.
It was useless to try to hang on to your coat in Moscow - perhaps it was bad manners, or bad luck. Perhaps the doormen were afraid the pockets concealed something dangerous, maybe it was only for the tips.
I was hungry. On Mondays, Moscow's restaurants closed for cleaning and I'd had only a minuscule portion of bootleg caviar to eat since early morning when, with the take-it-or-leave-it look that came with the breakfast, a sullen waiter in the hotel dining room tossed a couple of limp hot-dogs on my plate. Art had promised dinner, and somewhere, from the bowels of the building, came the delicious meaty smell of lamb cooking.
We followed Art down a long corridor and I heard music from behind closed doors. In the hidden maze of ramshackle rehearsal rooms, Moscow's rock bands practiced their liberation. In the basement was a cooperative restaurant. It was very dark.
The building belonged to Stas Namin. A rock star, he was also the grandson of Anastas Mikoyan, a former premier of the Soviet Union, and politics ran in Stas's blood; so did commerce.