Wrong Country

PART II CHAPTER 3 MY LOVE AFFAIR with the KGB MAN

FALLING in LOVE

(CONTINUATION)

I was still in love with Sasha, but I couldn’t grasp when or why I fell for him. He appeared and disappeared. I knew so little about his life. Then, thinking of him, I discovered that I did not even care what he was doing, where he was, or with whom. I was in love with him in my inner way, with his artistic soul, maybe, not with a person. No, it’s incorrect, with him as his own pure person, but not with the professional Sasha. With Sasha only. I loved seeing him approach me on the street, loved how his brown wool overcoat flaps swung against his pants as he came towards me. I loved his charming boyish smile and smiling eyes.

I felt tenderness towards him. Where from such tenderness? /And what to do with it, /A boy, a crafty, a singer, who calls in … I repeat after Marina Tsvetaeva, who devoted this poem to Osip Mandelstam. One night, I was reading Alexei Tolstoy’s Stories. (Stalin loved this nobleman, forgave his emigration, and brought him nearer after his return from Paris.) Being alone in my dorm room (I decided not to go on winter vacation to my parents), deep into the night, reading one of his stories, I was seized by such a profound tenderness for my absent ‘love,’ feeling almost happiness despite his absence. It was unnecessary to be loved by someone; the most important thing was your ability to love and be happy in your love. I did not need Sasha’s love; it was enough for me to feel this tenderness, which was so physical, I felt as if holding it in my hands: Where did such tenderness come from? And what to do with it? I loved an elusive, subtle, and unreadable man. Did I?

Sasha was right in his apprehension of being sent somewhere. But he lucked out. KGB sent him to Vyborg, only about three hours from Leningrad. He gave me his address. Three more years passed. At that time, I had already returned from my mandatory village teaching in Leningrad. We continue our relations from afar. I changed my rented rooms rather often, but he knew my library and sometimes appeared there, as he did in my former dormitories.

One morning, I woke up with an unprompted feeling to see Sasha. Right away. Instead of going to work, I go to the Finnish Railway Station and buy a ticket to Vyborg. I can’t call him; it is too early for him to be in his office, but I know his address. Only on the train do I begin reasoning. He would be at work, like everybody else. (Besides me, of course, I am on the train.) What should I do if he cannot see me in this foreign town? I knew only a woman’s prison in this town when I visited Alia some time ago. What a crazy idea to go to a man who has no desire to see me, who leads his own life with his unknown-to-me friends. He, perhaps, has a woman. And what is there between us? What am I doing on this train? I should go back to Leningrad, as my train stops in Vyborg.

Vyborg. Former Finnish town. I get off the train and drag myself along the familiar prison wall; after that, I have to ask for directions. OK, it’s not far away; walking calms me down. Here, it’s his building. His apartment is on the second floor. I am in front of his door. Nervous, I ring up. The door opens. Sasha is on the threshold, in his pajamas. Surprise, at least not a shock, is on his face. I enter his apartment: nobody is there, no woman. He is alone. I sigh with relief. We hug each other. I say simply, I wanted to see you so badly, and he finishes, So, you came, with a smile.

And after a pause: I am glad to see you, Lara. I am not well today; I will stay in bed. Want to join me?”

Now, after my long, nervous, sudden trip, I am delighted to join him in his bed. Utterly delighted. Off go my clothes; I throw myself into his bed, ready to kiss him. Oh, somebody comes to his door, judging by the sound of steps- a woman. She rings the bell persistently, then knocks impatiently. We froze in silence. She leaves. I am so happy to be with him; I do not even think about that woman.

We make love in the literal sense of this word- love, for me, at that moment. It had never happened to me before. Afterward, I find myself sitting, naked, on the floor against the radiator in a state of total bliss, my spirit soaring. Sex can be so happy, so beautiful…

Then we talk, eat the sandwiches he makes, and drink instant coffee. I do not know how much time has passed, but I feel sadness at the wane of our time together. I have to leave, not to spoil my bliss.

On the train, I am melancholy. I have a presentiment: I will never feel this utter elation with Sasha again. Of course, we will continue our- what? - rare rendezvous, but it would be just as before. And, by the way, who is that woman?

Who is that woman? I learned a year later, by chance. In our next meeting, Sasha informs me he is returning to Leningrad. Time flies. Months pass between our meetings. Next time, he is already living in Leningrad, and he gives me his home and work phone numbers. One day, I call him home. Woman’s voice on the phone: “My husband is resting, napping.” I am shocked, not because he is married, but because of the banality and ordinariness of her vocabulary. How is it possible that such a nonordinary man marries such a simple ordinary woman? This expression- ‘napping’-is not in his character, a real artistic person, as he is. Would he take a ‘nap’ during the day as an ordinary person? In his 34 years of life?

He calls me, and when I see him, he tells me he is married. His wife is the daughter of the Hero of the USSR (!), a divorcee with a daughter. She works as an accountant or something like that. I am utterly disappointed in him. Indeed, does he consider that her father will help him in his dwindling KGB career? But she is a beautiful woman - one of my friends saw them, as usual, on Nevsky Prospekt. (It is funny, everybody opens the secrets of one’s nearest and dearest on Nevsky Prospect. Anna Akhmatova saw her husband with his lover on Nevsky, and many others, besides her and me.) All Sasha’s women are stunning (besides me) and have useful fathers, including me. But I don’t have an apartment in Leningrad. Maybe Sasha had even been present during my father’s meeting with the KGB staff about his spy novel. At least he knows about my registration in Leningrad. My registration in Leningrad with the KGB's help. Sasha kept an eye on my father because I learned from him about my father’s presence at the expulsion of Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet Writers’ Union.

In one of our last meetings, Sasha invited me to his apartment. Of course, without his wife. She was on vacation, strangely, alone. I was surprised that they had one room in the communal flat. True, they had only one neighbor, an older woman, but to the status of the KGB man and the Hero’s daughter, it seemed like a lowlife. Their room lacked warmth, a woman’s hand, and hospitality. Sadly, or ironically, I became disappointed in Sasha, losing all interest in him. Sasha and our whole affair had become, finally, beyond me. Our so-long play was over. Once, my girlfriends joked sardonically that he would pass all my life by the red thread. The red thread was the trite expression used in our literary school textbooks. They were right; I still remember him. But what was there between us? Or had it been only between my mind and me: my implementing of his artistic notions, like his love of French poetry, guitar’s romances, with his personality, his real character? Why was I always hiding from myself the unpleasant moments with Sasha, as in this one, when he visited my new rented room, he glanced at the shelf of my books like a KGB detective, searching for a damned dissident’s literature? Thinking of him now, when I write, I still hold that old instantaneous fear of the truth of his actual work.

The Leap into the Past Present

I like that you are ill - not by me,

I like that I am ill - not by you,

And the heavy globe would

Never vanish under our feet.

Marina Tsvetaeva

In the winter of 1991, eleven years after I left Soviet Russia, I went back to Russia for a month. Soviet Russia had stopped existing. The country was in a state of catastrophe, in dangerous turmoil. I stayed with my friend Natasha and her family on Gogol’ Street, next to the Nabokov building. Now there is a proud marble plate on the building. And the street changed its name to the old St. Petersburg name- Morskaya, as in Nabokov’s time.

I wanted to know what happened to Sasha. At least twenty years have passed since our last meeting. I called the telephone company and luckily got his home phone number. When I called him, we agreed to meet in half an hour, as if many years and different countries hadn’t divided our lives. In half an hour, I went outside, but there was no Sasha. I waited and waited, as in my past- no Sasha. Finally, I went back to Natasha’s apartment and called Sasha. He answered the phone on the first ring and told me he was freezing to death waiting for me on the corner of Malaya Morskaya and Nevsky.

The second time, we didn’t miss each other. I was surprised at how young he looked. The same charming man, the same charming smile. I was startled when he, looking at me, exclaimed, “Oh, you look so beautiful!” At last, he numbered me among his beautiful victims, I smirked to myself. I might “look so beautiful” because I was dressed in the unusual white fur coat I bought for $200 on the last sale at Alexander’s when the store was going out of business. It was so easy to throw dust in the Russians’ eyes during that period of devastation in Russia. Like, my cheap shuba looked luxurious in poor Russia, and all the private cars that doubled as taxis to make extra money would stop to give me a lift. I looked foreign in my former country.

We walked around my favorite streets, and our conversation was light and relaxing. He didn’t ask me about my life or the USA, like he knew everything about me or wasn’t interested at all. I never saw him after my marriage. In fact, I saw him long before my marriage, but I felt, walking with him, that he knew about my husband and our emigration in 1980. I learned that he is still married to the same woman, and his stepdaughter’s husband is a Swedish businessman, and he told me before that his stepdaughter is autistic…. It explained his handsome down jacket.

I think now, but couldn’t grasp at our meeting that my childish, silly pride in my husband had been my getting even with Sasha. On his remark about how beautiful I looked, I exclaimed: Oh, no, I am not, but my husband is beautiful! And our daughter! Sasha, curiously, didn’t laugh at my silly exclamation but answered rather seriously that it’s seldom that a wife has such a high opinion of her husband, adding, It’s lovely.

PS. I went back to Russia several times, and Petersburg was always the first city on my way, but I never saw Sasha because my soul, free and alien, as Akhmatova found out about women’s souls, didn’t need to see him again.