TEN

Waking, Joe saw sunlight streaming through the dirty glass door at the end of the room, and sitting in the sunlight, almost invisible in it, was Gerald, who seemed to have been there for hours, looking at Joe sleep. All Joe could make out clearly of the big man was his smile.

Pushing himself up by his arms, Joe was about to ask, alarmed, “Where is Zoya?” as if her absence was due to Gerald’s presence, as though he had come while Joe was asleep and sent her away. And if he had sent her away, Gerald had remained for a severe account from Joe of what she was doing in bed with him. But Joe knew that Zoya had left shortly before he had fallen asleep.

From his almost invisibility in the dust-filled sunlight, Gerald said, “I waited for you and Zoya yesterday with food.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No need to be sorry. I ate it all myself—black caviar, smoked sturgeon, bread and butter, and a bottle of vodka, from a hard-currency shop. And what did you eat, boiled potatoes?”

“Yes, at the place of Zoya’s friend Alla.”

“I thought as much. I like Alla. What did you think of her?”

“I liked her.”

“Was her son there?”

“Is Yura her son?”

“Isn’t he? You can never know, here, how people are related to one another. Families as we know them seem hardly to exist.” Gerald said all this in a monotone, without moving, as he appeared not to have moved in hours. “And I presume you came here after your dinner of potatoes and Zoya went to her apartment.”

“I came here, but I didn’t ask Zoya where she was going.”

“I doubt she went to work, though she could have. What time was it?”

“Ten o’clock, around.”

“She could easily have gone off to do some work at that time, though I sometimes think Zoya is less professional about her work than I am, and I am, I must say, disgracefully unprofessional.”

“Not knowing what the both of you do, I couldn’t say.”

“I suppose you’d like to know.”

Joe sat up and pulled the bedclothes about himself. “I don’t know if I would.”

“Right.… I brought you some breakfast.”

Joe thought his cold, with a fever, had returned. Wrapping the bedclothes closer about his body to contain his nakedness, Joe, still partly asleep, said, “Thanks.” He knew he must try to be attentive to everything Gerald said and not take what he said for granted. Gerald always meant inwardly something other than what his words meant outwardly. His constant smile when he spoke showed that.

Joe thought, Gerald must know Zoya spent the night here, but can he know, too, that nothing happened? It seemed to Joe that Gerald did know.

“Get up and shave and have a bath and do whatever else you have to do before you dress, and then have breakfast,” Gerald said. “I’ll wait. I’ve been blessed all my life with not caring about waiting. In fact, I love to wait. It is a kind of blessing, waiting for someone else, because it relieves you of having to do anything else but wait.”

“I’ll hurry.”

“Don’t hurry.”

Joe didn’t want Gerald to see him naked. He clutched the top blanket in its cover about himself and with a free hand grabbed some clothes from an armchair and rushed to the bathroom, and there he did take his time shaving and bathing, always aware, though, of Gerald in the other room. He came out of the bathroom wearing creased and limp clothes, but with his face shaved and washed and his hair combed. He felt his insides were trembling as if he had a low fever.

Gerald was sitting where he had been, the sunlight thick with dust. Pointing to the desk, he said, “In that bag there you’ll find good bread, a jar of apricot jam, instant coffee and milk, and some bottles of Cuban fruit juice. If you’d care to, you could set out a charming little breakfast on the coffee table before your sofa. You’ll find plates and cups and glasses and knives and such things in the kitchen.”

In the kitchen, Joe found the garlic Zoya had bought, and he peeled and swallowed three cloves. The kitchen, with a cement floor and a bulb hanging from the ceiling with a shade burnt on one side, was dirty. Joe gathered together what Gerald had asked him to and went back to the living room, where Gerald had moved to one of the armchairs near the coffee table, and he appeared as though he had been there, immovable, for days and days. Gerald, wherever he sat, always appeared to have been sitting there, immovable, for days and days. He was wearing his polo shirt with the stretched collar and his tweed jacket.

Twiddling his long, thick fingers, he said to Joe, “Set everything out there nicely for our breakfast,” and Joe did as he was told.

“You didn’t bring hot water for the instant coffee,” Gerald said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Come to think of it, I didn’t ask you to, so there’s no need to be sorry.”

In the kitchen again, which smelled a little of escaping gas, Joe heated water in a blackened kettle on an old gas range, then brought the kettle out, steaming.

“I’ve put the coffee into the cups. I like doing what I can. All you need do is pour in the water.”

Joe once more did as he was told, then sat on the sofa. He had no appetite, but thought he might vomit.

“Now have some fruit juice, all the way from Cuba,” Gerald said. “Imported fruit juice from Cuba may be the last product the Soviet Union does import from there, but the importation won’t last long, and Cuba will be the only country in the world trying to remain Communist after all the others have given up. It’s actually terrible fruit juice.”

Joe opened a small bottle with a torn and dirty label and drank it down, and when Gerald, as if concerned about Joe’s well-being, told him to drink another bottle, he did. He was thirsty.

“Now take a piece of bread and cover it with lots and lots of apricot jam,” Gerald said. “Don’t stint on the jam. I myself won’t have any breakfast.”

As Joe swallowed, his stomach almost rejected the food, but he drank coffee to keep it down.

“I’ve been looking forward to seeing you again.”

“Can I guess why?” Joe asked, trying to joke, as he thought Gerald would want him to do.

“You can try.”

“You want to know things about me.”

“Do I? I think you’re presuming a lot. What could I, who already knows everything about everyone, want to know about you?”

“You want to know if I like jerking off into girls’ panties.”

Gerald liked that and laughed an abrupt laugh. “No, that wouldn’t interest me enough. Try again.”

“You want to know if I like shitting on a woman’s bare tits.”

“Even better, but no, not yet interesting enough to me. Try again, though.”

“You want to know if I lied and Zoya came here last night and we fucked.”

“I like you, I really do. But, I have to tell you, my interest in you doesn’t have quite so much to do with you in yourself as you might imagine.”

“I don’t understand that.”

“I can of course tell you what I think of you, if you’re interested, which I think you are.”

“No thanks.”

“Give in, boy, give in. You are interested. Don’t hold back.

You hold back, so far back you seem to be useless to do anything. But think of what you’d be able to do if you gave in to hearing what I think about you, which you want to hear. Everything you’ve repressed in yourself would make you vital, and you’d be doing what now you can’t even imagine yourself capable of. It doesn’t take much to give in—just the risk of being, oh, ridiculous. Is it in you to be ridiculous?”

“I’d like to think so.”

“And do anything, but anything, and not care what anyone, but anyone, thinks of you?”

“Maybe, yes.”

“Or maybe not. Maybe something holds you back so much there’s no way you can give in, holds you back so much you’re made useless by it. And what is that something? I could tell you, but I want you to ask me to tell you. I’m not referring to any kind of justification for what you are, because I’m sure that you, like me, have a loathing of justifying excuses, such as that you are the way you are because of something that happened to you when you were a boy that was so terrible it excuses what you are now. I’m sure nothing terrible happened to you.”

“No, nothing terrible happened to me.”

“What did your father do?”

“He was a local building contractor.”

“He built your family house?”

“He did.”

“And you spent a happy childhood in it.”

“I did.”

“And your parents weren’t rich, but not really worried about money, and they were pretty much happy together.”

“They were.”

“So you don’t have any excuse for being the way you are.”

“No, none.”

“You have a girlfriend?”

“I had.”

“And nothing terrible happened between you so she’s no longer your girlfriend?”

Joe said abruptly, “No.”

“Nothing you want to talk about.”

“There’s not much I want to talk about.”

“Unlike me, you mean. I like to talk about everything.”

“I know.”

“You wouldn’t say if anything happened to terrify you in all your life?”

Joe laughed. “I think only what I was able to imagine.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt that in your helplessness you’re a person of the most vivid imagination. Do you want to tell me what a bad boy you are in what you imagine?”

“No.”

With a burst of laughter, Gerald said, “I like that, I like a person denying that even the horrors of what he imagines can justify his being the bad person he is. The worst kind of Nazi is the Nazi who did terrible things during the war—helped lock a whole Russian village into their church and set fire to it so the people burned to death—and who tried, after the war, to find some way to excuse what he did, or worse, even, try for some kind of reparation. Not that I don’t believe in forgiveness. I believe in forgiveness, totally absolving forgiveness, as long as the sinner doesn’t try to excuse his sin, but just says, ‘I did this, I did that,’ with no expiating explanation of what he did, and certainly with no idea that he can make right what he did wrong. I’d forgive a man who said, ‘I killed my girlfriend with an ax,’ but I’d take back that forgiveness, I’d condemn him for being a fake, if he tried to justify what he’s done.” Gerald yawned. “But this is getting so boring. Why do I go on? I don’t want to. Is it because you want me to go on?”

“Maybe.”

“You won’t give in, however much you want to.”

“Give in, so the bad boy I am will finally become the bad man you are?”

“That’s good. You do have wit. You do, you see. Work on your wit, your detachment and irony.”

“I’ll try.”

Gerald pursed his fat lips, thinking. “If you won’t admit you’re interested in talking about yourself and what I have to say about you, let’s talk about me, which I’m sure interests you as much as it interests me. Frankly, I’m only interested in you insofar as you’re interested in me, if that doesn’t sound too candidly egocentric.” Gerald settled more, never to move, in the chair. “Tell me, do you really think I’m a bad man who can’t be anything but bad? Tell me what you think of me.”

This stopped Joe’s thinking, and he looked at Gerald’s smiling mouth for a while before he asked, “Tell you what I think of you?”

“Yes.”

Joe slowly ate the bread and jam, drinking coffee with milk from time to time, and didn’t answer Gerald’s question.

Gerald smiled more. “Do you think someone as bad as I am can be helped?”

“Helped, how?”

“Oh, say, by someone else praying for him.”

“Praying?”

“Yes, praying.”

Astonished, Joe tried to laugh. “If you’re asking me, I don’t know what I’d pray for if I were praying for you.”

“No?”

“I’m sorry, no.”

“Don’t be sorry. I don’t like people to be sorry. I’m never sorry. No doubt, anyone praying for someone like me wouldn’t know what to pray for.”

“No doubt.”

“Do you ever pray, boy?”

Joe tensed, then after a long time said, “I did lie to you about my coming back alone here last night and Zoya going off somewhere else, to her apartment or work or wherever.”

“Did you?”

“We stayed and we fucked.”

“You did, did you?”

“While we fucked, she told me everything that you and she do together when you fuck.”

Gerald half lowered his lids. “And did that excite you?”

“I was hoping she’d come up with something I hadn’t heard of before that you and she do together.”

“You are not a good boy.”

“No.”

“And you like being a bad boy.”

“Oh, I’d like to be a bad man.”

“Like me?”

“Maybe like you.”

“The first thing you’ve got to learn about being a bad man is that bad men don’t lie. Bad boys lie, but not bad men.”

“What do bad men do?”

“They always tell the truth.”

“You think I lied to you about Zoya and me?”

“As what you said was, in its way, so flattering to me, I really would like to accept it as the truth.”

“But you know it isn’t?”

“I know that Zoya would never risk fucking another man, however less repellent he is to her than I am, because she knows what’s invested in me.”

“You trust her.”

“I don’t trust her. I have a hold on her. Did Zoya tell you I promised to marry her to get her out of here?”

“She did.”

“Do you think I’ll do it?”

“No, I don’t.”

“That’s great. That’s the kind of talk I like to hear, without your saying you’re sorry for saying it. That’s being a man. What do you think I’ll do with her if I don’t marry her?”

“I’d have to know you better to say.”

“You already know me well enough. Tell me what you think I’ll do with Zoya if I don’t marry her. Come on, tell me what you think of me. You don’t want to hear me say what I think of you, but I’m passionately interested in what you have to say about me. Not that I care what anyone thinks about me, but I am interested in knowing. Do you think I’ll abandon Zoya when I find someone else even younger and prettier who’ll fuck me for a promise of marriage to get her out of here? Do you think I’m that kind of person, or even worse? Do you think I’m a totally worthless person who can never, ever be saved by anyone praying for him? You do, don’t you?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you think it. I’m not drunk now, and when I’m not drunk, I’m afraid I take myself rather seriously, rather, but not too seriously. You think I can’t be saved, don’t you?”

“Is that what you want me to say?”

Gerald laughed, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You’re not going to give in, are you? You’re not going to let me tell you about yourself, and you’re not going to listen to what I think of you, and you’re not going to tell me just what you think of me, not going to tell me the truth about myself. You want to, I know you want to, because you know that hearing the truth and telling the truth would make a real man of you.”

Joe sat back on the sofa. “You tell me more about how bad you are.”

“Oh, as for that—did Zoya tell you what our business is?”

“She said you helped people get out of the Soviet Union.”

“People she finds for me, because my Russian isn’t good enough.”

“She said she helps you find people.”

“Women, all young women, all girls. Though I suppose they could be boys, too.” Gerald scratched his head. “You know why, don’t you, just looking at me? Because there’s a demand for girls and boys as prostitutes in other countries, and because so many Russian girls and no doubt boys want to fulfill that demand. They’re common in every country in the West now, in France in the Bois, in Italy along the autostrade, in London advertising themselves with calling cards stuck in telephone booths. They are particularly common in Tel Aviv. It’s like after the Revolution when White Russian women who had to escape or be killed, women of the best families, became prostitutes even in China. What do you think of me for doing that? Do you think anyone praying for me will save me? Do you think there’s any help for me?”

“No.”

Gerald laughed a loud, harsh laugh. “I really like you, boy. I do, I do. You don’t know what you might have risked if you’d said yes. You don’t know how angry I can get. Anyone tells me there’s help for me, anyone tells me I can be saved, and I go into a rage, and in that rage I’m not responsible for what I do.”

Joe put both his hands over his mouth.

“Did you ever have religion, boy?”

“Yes,” Joe said through his hands.

“So you did pray once.”

“Yes.”

“What was your religion?”

“Catholic.”

“Catholic? From where I come from, we don’t consider that a religion but a damnation. I had religion, too, once. I had to go to church with my pa the senator and my ma the senator’s wife to our church in Washington, and every time at church I heard about somebody being saved, a rage would come over me. And you know why? Because I knew it was a lie. I knew no one was going to be saved, not me, not my ma or pa, not my brothers and sisters, not my grandma and grandpa, not even Aunt Emma, who was justified if ever there was anyone justified.” Gerald began to speak in a Southern accent, maybe from one of the Carolinas, Joe couldn’t tell. “I didn’t want to be justified, I didn’t want to be saved, not me, and I was so irreverent my ma and pa and my aunt and everyone in our church not only gave up on me, they were glad that I was out every night at parties where I could be as irreverent as I wanted because I made people laugh, and that was an advantage in Washington. But you don’t have religion now?”

Joe dropped his hands from his mouth. “No.”

“And what made you stop having religion? You want to tell me. Tell me.”

Joe tried to sound ironic, but talking from the side of his mouth, he knew that he didn’t sound ironic. “Well, let me tell you, then—I guess I realized that religion made no difference to me or, for that matter, to the world.” He felt his face go red.

“When did that happen?”

Joe could do nothing now, his face redder and redder, but to go on trying to sound ironic, and he twisted his lips to talk even more from the side of his mouth. He was sure Gerald’s only interest in him was to ridicule him, and that was all right with Joe, except that Joe wasn’t up to responding to the ridicule as he wanted to. “You really are interested.”

“No, I’m not really, but you are in telling me.”

“All right, all right, I’ll tell you. I stopped having religion when I stopped being able to fuck.”

“Ah, now I know you’re telling the truth. You can’t fuck?”

“No.”

“Let me tell you, no longer being able to believe because you can’t fuck seems to me a banal excuse for giving up religion.”

“You said it before—I loathe excuses.”

“I’m disappointed in you, boy. There must be a real reason for your giving up religion.”

“If there is, I don’t know it.”

Gerald’s eyes went out of focus. “I sometimes tell myself there has to be a real reason why I gave up religion.” Then his eyes all at once focused on a spot on the coffee table, in the midst of the breakfast things, as though something had just appeared there that amazed him. “Where’s the bottle?”

“The bottle?”

“There was a bottle of vodka standing right there in the middle of that table.”

“I don’t think there was.”

“There wasn’t? I didn’t bring along a bottle of vodka? Go and look in that plastic bag I brought the breakfast things in, there on the desk, to see if the bottle’s in it.”

At the desk, Joe held the limp bag upside down. “Nothing.”

“Where’d it disappear to, then? I know I put it on the table.”

“I don’t think it was ever there.”

“Are you telling me I’m hallucinating? Look around the room, boy, get down on your hands and knees and look under the furniture. I’m not accusing you of hiding it, but I want this room searched.”

Joe got down on his hands and knees and glanced round. “Nowhere to be seen.”

“I’ll be damned, just when I was getting into our conversation and needed a drink to keep it going.”

Joe now stood before Gerald.

“I don’t know if I remember your name, boy, but that doesn’t matter. I like you, and I was enjoying our conversation. But to continue I need a drink, or two or three. Now, if I give you the money, will you go out to a currency shop and buy a bottle?”

“You don’t have to give me any money.”

“I insist.”

“Just tell me where to go.”

“There’s a currency shop in the National Hotel. Take a taxi there and back. You can always get a taxi if you pay in dollars. Hurry up, now, because I may lose the thread of what I was going to say.”

*   *   *

Out on the street, a taxi stopped as soon as Joe held out a hand, which meant the driver knew he was a foreigner, and when the driver said, “Five dollar,” Joe said, “Da.” Many cars were parked outside the National Hotel, with drivers sitting in them, waiting for foreign passengers, and among the cars were the prostitutes.

Joe didn’t go into the hotel. He wasn’t going to buy a bottle of vodka for Gerald and go back to the apartment and listen to Gerald talk.

For a while, he watched the girls walk among the parked cars, tall, slender, beautiful girls with silk scarves that were folded into their coats, then he turned away.

He went down into an underpass, along which people stood at small tables selling badly printed magazines. When he came out, he found himself in Red Square, where sunlight was shining on snow. As he went toward the red-and-black granite mausoleum of Lenin, he passed a small wedding party, the long white veil of the laughing bride blowing sideways in the wind. Behind the bride was a girl in a pinafore, with a large ribbon tied in a bow at the top of her head, laughing, too, as she helped the bride to hold the blowing veil. A line of people was on the right side of the mausoleum, waiting to go in. Joe stopped at a distance and watched them go in, slowly, and he couldn’t make himself go on and join them. He looked up at the brick walls of the Kremlin, at the pointed towers with the red stars, and he could not get himself to go any nearer to the mausoleum, at each side of the closed main doors of which stood guards of honor.

He turned back to descend into the underpass, where an old woman standing at a folding table was selling badly printed holy cards. Joe noted that there were girls, and boys, too, loitering in the underpass, and he thought they must be prostitutes.

The commissionaire opened the door of the hotel for Joe, who walked into the lobby and followed signs along corridors with threadbare runners to the currency shop. He bought a large bottle of vodka and at the checkout counter saw a little cardboard box of lapel pins of the head of Lenin.

He did not want to go back to Gerald, he thought, and he wouldn’t go back to Gerald, even though he had bought the bottle of vodka. But he didn’t know where he would go.

Leaving the hotel, he saw, among the parked cars, Zoya talking with a girl who must have been a prostitute. Joe stepped back, but Zoya, as if she were expecting him to appear, turned to him. He waited for her to come to him, her breath steaming about her in the cold, bright air.

He said, “Gerald asked me to come buy him a bottle of vodka.”

“You shouldn’t have come out. I see your fever has come back.”

“How do you see it?”

“In your eyes.”

“I came to buy this for Gerald because he more or less demanded that I should, but, just now, I was thinking I wouldn’t go back to him with it. I bought it with my own money, so I don’t owe him anything.”

“If you don’t go back, where will you go?”

“That’s what I asked myself.”

“Come, we will go into hotel for you to have some hot tea.”

But the commissionaire, who had opened the door to Joe, wouldn’t let Zoya in.

“Please do not insist,” Zoya said. “It is too tiring. Wait here.” She quickly went back to the prostitute she had been speaking to, who had remained standing among the parked cars, spoke briefly to her, and returned to Joe. “We can walk, and that will warm you up.”

Joe wouldn’t ask Zoya why she had been talking to the prostitute, but he didn’t know what to ask her, and she seemed not to know what else to ask him. They walked up a wide boulevard, Ulitsa Gorkogo, to Pushkin Square, of yellow and white neoclassical buildings and the statue of Pushkin in the center of the square, all under brilliant snow.

Joe said, “I want to ask you again if you will you marry me.”

Zoya shook her head. “I must marry Gerald.”

“Must?”

Zoya pressed her lips together, then after a moment said, “I am not free.”

Joe smiled a little. “To marry a boy?”

“I do not like men, but men are necessary.”

“And boys are not.”

“Please.”

“I’m sorry. I suppose I must get back to Gerald with this bottle of vodka.”

“Must?” Zoya smiled.

Joe smiled.

“No, don’t go back. We will go to Alla’s. Yura will be there. Yura told me this morning when I saw him how much he liked you and how much he wanted to see you again.”

“Where did you see him?”

Zoya raised a shoulder and let it drop to indicate that she might have seen him anywhere.

“No, I think I really must get back to Gerald.”

“Bring him the bottle, then come to Alla’s, where I will be, and Yura.”

“You think it’ll be that easy to get away from Gerald? He’ll want me to pour out his drinks.”

“He is capable of pouring out his drinks alone.”

“He’ll want to talk.”

“He is capable of talking alone.”

“What should I say to get away from him?”

“Tell him you have a date.”

“That’s all?”

“Gerald respects privacy.”

“I’ll come after a while.”

“Come while there is still sun. Soon the sky will cloud over and the sun will go and there’ll be more snow. Will you come?”

“I’ll come.”

“You will go back to Gerald by taxi, so let us walk back to the hotel for one.”

As they walked back down Ulitsa Gorkago, they were again silent. Only when Joe was in the backseat of a car and Zoya was standing outside holding the door open did she ask, “Will you tell Gerald you saw me?”

“If you don’t want me to, I won’t.”

“You can tell him.”

“He’ll understand?”

Zoya winced a little. “He’ll understand.” She shut the door and the driver turned on the ignition, but she opened the door again, and after she spoke to the driver in Russian she told Joe to get out of the car for a moment because she wanted to tell him something. They walked away from the parked cars. She said, “You know, prostitutes in Moscow around the big hotels used to work for KGB, some of them. Not anymore. Now they work for Mafia. Though how much is KGB and how much is Mafia, how can we know? I will tell you what I should not tell you—I used to work for KGB. Though I no longer am KGB, how much am I still in contact with KGB and how much with Mafia, how do I know? My privileges are all gone, but I am still in contact with people, and this is how I help Gerald. You were wrong to come to this country. It is a terrible country, always was and always will be, and everyone in it, including myself, is bad.”

“Bad?”

“Yes, I am bad. Now go back to Gerald.”

But before Joe got into the car, Zoya grabbed him and kissed him. “Come as soon as you can to Alla’s. Yura will be waiting. He told me to tell you he will show you his Russia.”

“His Russia?”

“He has his Russia.”

In the car, Joe touched the palm of his hand where it had been kissed by Zoya.