FOURTEEN

Snow was again falling from the low, darkening sky as Joe hurried along the paths he tried to remember that went to Alla’s apartment. Zoya would be there, would be waiting for him with Yura, and he’d tell her not to go to the apartment where Gerald would be even drunker than when Joe had left him. He’d tell Zoya never to go to Gerald again.

Half running along a path diagonal across an empty space among the apartment houses, he realized he was going in the wrong direction, and he ran back along the path to find the right one. Just at the angle where the right path went in another direction from the path he’d just ran back along, he stopped, panting.

Everything Gerald was capable of imagining suddenly struck Joe as being of the flattest banality.

He ran along the path to the almost derelict building in which Alla had her apartment and where he would find Zoya and Yura. He jumped over the gap in front of the outside doorway, pushed open the flat wooden door, and rushed down the corridor to the door of Alla’s apartment. He knocked. Yura answered, smiling.

Yura exclaimed, “Joe!” and then he went on in Russian to say something Joe thought he had been told, maybe by Zoya, to tell him, though if by Zoya she would have known that Joe wouldn’t be able to understand Yura’s Russian.

“Alla?” Joe asked.

“Ally nyet.”

Joe asked, “Zoya? Gde Zoya?” but he didn’t understand Yura’s responses, except Yura’s repeating, over and over, “Da, da,” and nodding his head. Joe became frightened that Zoya would not appear, but was perhaps on her way to Gerald, was already there. He hoped that whatever it was Yura was telling him, with animation and sudden flushes in his clear, blond cheeks and forehead, had to do with their going out to meet Zoya, because he seemed to be saying that they would go out. He made this emphatic by putting on his ski jacket and ski cap.

Yura, excited, hurried ahead of Joe, eager to get to where he wanted to show Joe something, and Joe followed him to the metro. In the station, Yura took from his pocket the kopeck pieces for the turnstiles. Joe saw in Yura’s large, big-knuckled hand, held between thumb and index finger, a five-kopeck brass coin, with the world superimposed on the hammer and sickle and surrounded by sheaves of wheat and surmounted by a star. Then Yura dropped the coin into the slot and Joe went through.

In the train, a young woman, with blue eye makeup that almost formed circles around her blue eyes, looked at them intently, then away out into deep space.

On the street again, Yura continued to rush ahead of Joe, often turning round and signaling to him to come more quickly. They were among high-rise apartment buildings with large letters and numbers painted on them; Kb 59-109. Yura took Joe into one.

In a glassed-in booth under the stairs of the entrance, a woman was knitting. She was sitting, one leg folded under her, on a built-in bench covered with thin pillows in different flower patterns, and tacked on the wall behind her was a cloth, hanging in folds, of yet a different pattern of flowers. The skirt of her dress was of a pattern of flowers different from all the other patterns, and so was her kerchief, tied tightly round her head and knotted at her nape. She was the concierge. She didn’t glance up from her knitting as Yura and Joe passed her to go up the stairs. On the landings were galvanized buckets of sand against fire.

With a key, Yura opened a door padded in brown vinyl, beyond which was another door, wooden, not locked. Yura pushed it open and held it for Joe to go in first, into a narrow hallway with closed doors on all sides. On hooks along the hallway were coats and hats, and under them collapsed boots. Pushed against a wall was what had once been a drop-leaf table, the drop leaf gone, and on it was a big jar of onions in vinegar. Yura helped Joe off with his coat and hat and hung them up, took off his and hung them up, then, opening another door, brought Joe into a small, square room, on which he shut the door.

The room was papered with old maps of countries and cities, and among these were pinned colored snapshots of groups of people, all young, in an apple orchard, the branches sagging with heavy fruit, and Joe wondered if such photographs appeared in every Russian apartment. There was a sofa and a table made from the drop leaf from the table in the hallway set on wooden boxes, and a large wooden spoon on it. A big wardrobe, with dusty suitcases on top, was standing partway into the room, half hiding an unmade bed behind it.

Joe stood in the middle of the room while Yura walked back and forth before him, speaking as animatedly as ever.

“Zoya?” Joe asked.

“Da, da. Zoya.”

Joe grabbed Yura by his shoulder to stop him from pacing so excitedly, and the boy stood, silent, surprised and expectant, facing Joe.

“Yura.” But Joe didn’t know what else to say, wouldn’t have known what to say if Yura understood English. It wasn’t to find out what they were doing in this room, what they were waiting for, as if where they were and what they were waiting for didn’t concern Joe.

The light in the room was becoming dim as the light outside dimmed more and more with falling snow.

“Yura.” Joe felt a sudden weakness in his arms and legs.

Yura understood when Joe asked for the toilet and showed him, out in the hallway, a narrow water closet with a seatless, brown-stained bowl and a pile of torn-up newspapers by it. The cistern high on the wall and the pipe down were corroded. Joe vomited.

Going back into the small, square room, Joe saw Yura sitting still on a wooden chair by the window, a shadow against the disappearing outside light. Yura’s head was lowered. He didn’t hear Joe, who stood at the threshold. When Joe entered the room, the boy didn’t rise from his chair, but remained with his head a little lowered, and now Joe paced back and forth.

He hadn’t closed the door to the room and saw a door off the hallway open into a lighted room, and an old woman, with a hair net and an old, open-worked crocheted bed jacket and black stockings and black felt slippers, come out to use the toilet, then go back into her room and close the door.

As Joe continued to pace before Yura, the boy watched him, frowning a little. Joe said, as though he were calling him from a distance, “Yura.” The boy got up and came to him in the darkening room. In a low voice, Joe said, “I want to die.”

Yura laughed, and suddenly a yellow ceiling light was lit.

“Larissa,” Yura called. At the doorway to the room was a girl, like Yura about sixteen, who, as she came forward, shook her head and combed out her long blond hair with her fingers. Strands fell over her face, and she pushed them aside. Yura, excited again, introduced Joe to Larissa.

As Yura had, she assumed, matter-of-factly, that Joe could understand Russian. From time to time, she paused and puckered her full lips together so her cheeks became long hollows and her delicate cheekbones stuck out more prominently, and she looked at Joe with a lowered forehead. When she spoke, she did quickly, having given a lot of intelligent thought during her pauses to what she said.

Yura was stepping from foot to foot, like a dancer restless to dance, but he didn’t speak while Larissa did, or even during her pauses. All he did was hold out his arms, one toward Larissa, the other toward Joe, about to put them around their shoulders and bring them close together, as if he wanted Joe to have the same relationship with Larissa as he had, whatever that was.

But then, the way Larissa spoke to Yura seemed to leave Joe out. He didn’t mind being left out, but liked watching the two young people, she, as with the authority of a dance instructor, telling him what he must be attentive to in his dancing, while he, entirely attentive, frowned a little. Whatever they were talking about, she knew more about it than he did, and he listened with the awareness that she knew more, that he had everything to learn from her. It was as though he, in his simplicity, counted on her to tell him what to do, and she, protective as much of his simplicity as his talent, took him on as her responsibility. Joe watched them more closely, her talking rapidly then pausing and pursing her lips and brushing strands of blond hair from her pale face, and he, his slightly oriental eyes blinking slowly, as attentive to her during her pauses as when she spoke. She said something that made him smile, and when he smiled, she smiled, too, and together they laughed light, bright laughs. Joe felt a pang at the sight of these two beautiful young people in clothes that didn’t fit them, her skirt too big for her and her blouse too small, the collar of his old dress shirt frayed, the trousers of a pinstripe suit worn at the cuffs, his belt that of a much bigger man but drawn in tightly, with holes punched into it for the buckle, about his waist. In their way, whatever way that was, they were in love with one another, maybe in the way that made her love him for his boy’s innocence, an innocence that precluded sex, and made him love her for her woman’s knowingness, a knowingness that included the worst horrors of sex, which she did not want him to know anything about. Joe, as though he were much, much older than they were and was looking at them from a distance of so many years they appeared to him to belong to another generation, another world, thought, God preserve them. When, on Larissa’s instructions, they became active, they did in ways that again seemed to leave Joe apart. Larissa went out of the room and Yura straightened the jerry-built table before the sofa, then went out of the room, too, and came back with mismatched plates and glasses and knives and forks and set the table. From the wardrobe he took a bottle of wine and opened it. In a short while, Larissa came in with a big, dented cooking pot, which she held out before her with a rag about the long handle. Only when everything was ready did they call Joe over to the table, where, Larissa side by side with Yura on the sofa and Joe on a wooden chair, they ate boiled fish and potatoes and drank wine.

Yura and Larissa talked between themselves, she talking more than he, often throwing long strands of hair from her face. Sometimes the boy and the girl stopped talking and studied Joe. Yura moved slowly; Larissa quickly. She said nyet again and again, presumably disagreeing with Yura, then she frowned when she pursed her lips to think. When Yura spoke, she held out her hand to stop him from thinking. Then the idea came to her, and shaking her head and at the same time throwing her hair about with her hands, she spoke seriously to Yura. He said, “Da.”

They both stood in the small space beyond the table, and bending over from their waists so their backs were straight, they took off their shoes, hers scruffed pumps, his large old man’s shoes with worn heels, and while Larissa called out commands to him, Yura held her in his arms and she leaned far back so her hair fell, then he swung her from one side to the other and lifted her so she was lying across his arms, then he lifted her up high over his head and she raised a leg and touched the knee of the other leg with her pointed toes, and for a moment they remained still. That pang came to Joe again with a sudden rush of tears to his eyes. When Yura lowered Larissa, with slow gentleness, to the floor, the two young people smiled at one another. Joe clapped and they bowed.

Looking at them, Joe all at once thought, But I love Zoya.

He asked, “Zoya, gde?”

Larissa jumped as she grabbed Joe’s hand and, speaking fast in Russian, pulled at him, so he rose. She put on her shoes and Yura did his, and then she continued to pull at Joe across the room and out into the hallway to their coats hanging on hooks, and as she and Yura put on their coats and hats, so did he.

They took him down into the metro, changing stations from time to time to run to trains on other lines, and they came up near the Bolshoi Opera House. Larissa took one of Joe’s hands and Yura the other to rush him along to the side of the Opera House and in through a battered side door.

Just inside, a group of old people were gathered about the doorway of a small anteroom. In the anteroom, a man sat at a small, rickety table. He wore felt boots and a coat. The old women in the group wore knitted caps. They glanced at Larissa, leading Joe, followed by Yura, who passed them, but they glanced expressionlessly. If they had originally stood guard to stop people from entering, they no longer cared who did enter.

At the garderobe, the three took off their coats, hats, gloves, and passed them across a counter to a woman with a knitted cap who said nothing to them.

Yura and Larissa, whispering to one another in Russian and sometimes laughing, took Joe to the very top of the opera house. As they walked along a curving corridor that followed the curve of the cupola, Larissa put her finger to her lips to indicate they must be quiet. Along the corridor were practice rooms—with KABIHET painted on the closed doors—from which, as they passed, Joe heard a woman singing, or a piano playing. The old, springing parquet floor creaked under their feet, and Larissa kept her finger to her lips as though that would stop the floor from creaking. The smell, a smell that got into Joe’s sinuses and burned a little, was the dust of the old opera house.

Then, pressing her finger more emphatically to her lips, Larissa led Joe, always followed by Yura, through a narrow doorway and along a narrow gangway to the top balcony of the house, high up under the painted ceiling with its chandelier. There were people in these high balcony seats like shadows. Joe leaned over the heads of these shadows to see, far below, the illuminated stage, and an old woman in a chair singing with great grief, her voice resonant when she sang those low, long Russian notes though she was in fact singing in French with a refrain of “Je ne sais pas pourquoi,” notes that were the lament of her deep grief.

The singer finished her aria, and Larissa touched Joe to let him know they must go, and the three tiptoed out and went down, down, down stairs, from level to level. Joe could hear, in the distance, muffled music. They went into the empty foyer of the opera house, its highly waxed floor gleaming, reflecting the crystal prisms of the chandelier above. They stood still and listened to the distant Russian music.

By a narrow door, they went along more curving corridors, through doorways into more curving corridors that took them backstage, and no one stopped them. The backstage corridors were covered with old linoleum over the old parquet, and the walls were painted thickly with green, glossy paint. At intervals along the walls were plastic loudspeakers over which the performances on the stage sounded very far, with static. In a corner were copper kettledrums and a small harpsichord covered in a torn black rubber sheet. Larissa pressed her finger even harder against her lips as she rushed ahead, and Yura rushed, too, to join Larissa, as though where they were going now needed both the young people to bring Joe there. They appeared to be a little frightened of what they were risking. They passed through a doorway with a thick, battered, metal door, then they climbed metal stairs past a low, dark room with its metal door open, inside of which were great black pulleys and ropes. Joe, looking to the right and left and not ahead to where the children were hurrying, found himself, when he did look ahead, on the side of the stage of the Bolshoi. He saw, between the flats of a pastoral scene, onto the stage center, where, in light so bright it appeared to make them glow silver, were two singers, a man and a woman, facing an audience Joe couldn’t see, and singing, in Russian, an aria that rose and rose with their love for one another.

On the other side of the stage, between flats, Joe saw Zoya. Joe’s immediate impulse was to walk across the stage to her, an impulse so strong he had to hold himself back from it. He listened to the end of the aria, then the clapping.

Zoya came to him from behind and put her arms around him, and Joe felt all his body give way to her, so that for a moment before he drew back she was holding him up. He kept hold of her hand.

In the buffet of the opera house, Zoya and Joe sat side by side holding hands while Larissa talked to Yura in nonstop, rapid Russian, admonishing him, maybe even reprimanding him, about something, while he simply listened. Only from time to time did he turn his eyes, which, with the slight Asiatic folds at the corners, appeared to look at someone at a distance, to Joe, and he smiled at Joe, though his smile, too, seemed to be at someone at a far distance. Joe held Zoya’s hand more tightly and smiled back at Yura.

“What is she telling him?” Joe asked Zoya.

“She is advising him about his future.”

“What future?”

“They are both passionate about ballet and want to dance at Bolshoi, but Bolshoi, like everything in our country, is going down, and soon it will only survive because of tourists paying to see what was once great and they think is still great because it once was.”

“So what is she advising him?”

“That he must leave Russia and go to ballet school in the West.”

“And what about her?”

“She is more concerned about him than herself. She believes he is a great dancer.”

“She loves him.”

“Yes, she loves him.”

Joe studied the young couple, Yura intent on what Larissa was so intently telling him. “And he loves her.”

“He loves her,” Zoya repeated.

All along the walls, in niches, were porcelain Russian vases with pastoral scenes on them, and behind the bar of the buffet were glassed-in cases with crystal vases and bowls. Among the people waiting in the line at the bar was a group of young ballet dancers, girls, in their practice clothes, their hair severely pulled back into small, tight knots held by gold or silver nets, their smooth, long, thin napes visible down to the vertebrae when they leaned toward one another. With their coffees and plates of biscuits, they went to a table across the room, and Joe, listening to Zoya and Yura and Larissa talk, continued to watch them all the while they sipped at their coffee and nibbled their biscuits.

Zoya said, “I have told you so much, why not tell you more? When I worked for KGB, I was assigned to watch the dancers of Bolshoi and their relationships with foreigners. There is behind Bolshoi Theater a big building that used to be headquarters for KGB especially watching Bolshoi artists and their relationships with foreigners. I used to come often to Bolshoi and bring Yura with me, so, since he was child, he has been passionate about ballet. Everyone here knew me, and everyone knew why I came, and everyone here was very attentive to me and to Yura because of me. I still come, and everyone knows I come now only for myself, come because I love to be here, come because I, too, still think it is great because it was once so great, but everyone is used to me and they let me come. Years ago, when it truly was great, Yura asked me if he could study dancing, and I asked and I was told, of course, of course. No one would want to deny me the privilege of his studying ballet. You do not know how strange it is to have authority. You never think you are abusing it, you think you are asking something of friends and your friends are very obliging. They say, ‘Of course, of course, with pleasure,’ and you think how agreeable they all are, how much they like you and Yura. Yura does not know this. He is, in fact, a very good dancer. Maybe not great, as Larissa thinks, but good. But he is no longer a privileged person because I am not. Some people in KGB were able to keep their privileges even though they ceased to be KGB. Some transformed their privileges very much to their advantage, but I have lost all my good privileges except that no one minds if I come and wander around Bolshoi.”

“You’ve known Yura since he was a child?” Joe asked.

“Yura is my son.”

“Does Gerald know that?”

“No.” As though Yura and Larissa could understand English, Zoya said something to them in Russian that made them stand, but before they left Yura said something to Joe in Russian that Joe asked Zoya to translate.

Zoya said, “He wants to ask you something in the little English he has learned.”

Joe said to the boy, “Ask me, Yura.”

Enunciating carefully and gravely, Yura asked, “Please, do you have hope for Russia?”

Startled, the sudden impulse came to Joe to cry out and reach for Yura’s head and press it to his chest.

Yura’s calm but sad eyes were fixed on Joe.

Joe’s breath heaved, and he had to wait a moment before he said, “I have great hope for Russia.”

Yura bowed his head a little and said, “Thank you.”

Then Zoya said something to her son, who approached Joe closely and kissed him three times on his cheeks. Larissa followed Yura, and the young couple went off together, Larissa, perhaps, insisting on knowing what Yura had asked Joe and what Joe had answered and commenting on the exchange.

“They are too beautiful,” Joe said.

“Please do not say that,” Zoya said.

“I’m sorry.”

“The last thing I want is for Gerald to know that Yura’s my son. Did you see him in the apartment?”

“I saw him.”

“Was he drunk?”

“He was getting drunk.”

“I will wait until he is very drunk, then he will not remember if I came to see him or not. Did you tell him you saw me at the National?”

“Yes. He asked me if you were working.”

“And you said?”

“I said I supposed that you were working.”

“I was working.”

“Do you know what happens to the girls once they get to other countries?”

Zoya stared at him flatly.

“Why are you doing this? So Gerald will marry you and bring you to America? You want to go so much?”

“For myself, yes, but for Yura more.”

“So that he will become a ballet dancer?”

“So that he will become something. He will become nothing here. I worry, I worry so much what will happen to him if our country falls apart more and more. Will there be wars on all sides, wars with all the republics that break away, and will Yura have to fight to keep them in the Union? Can you imagine what it is like to be a soldier in Soviet army even now? I know mothers who try to get their sons admitted into insane asylums, because in the insane asylums the conditions are better than in Soviet army. In Soviet army, each soldier has one spoon to eat with, and after he eats he licks the spoon and puts it in his boot. That is only one aspect of army life that may be funny, but it shows how bad everything is. I won’t have it, I won’t have it.”

“Does Yura know you want to get him out?”

“No.”

“Would he leave Larissa?”

“He would have to. I cannot save everyone.”

“But supposing he wouldn’t leave Larissa?”

“Don’t ask such questions.”

Joe watched the young ballerinas at a table across the room get up, all together, their backs straight, their gestures slow and simple and pure, and walk among the empty tables and out.

He had come to tell Zoya not to go to Gerald, had come to tell her never to go to Gerald, had come to tell her that Gerald would never marry her; but to tell her about Gerald, all of that, everything about Gerald, seemed to Joe of a flatter banality than ever, and he thought there was no point in telling Zoya anything because none of it was interesting.

Whatever Gerald was capable of imagining, all he was capable of doing was to get drunker and drunker, to rave more and more crazily in his alcoholism, and to become helpless. He wouldn’t marry Zoya, and he wouldn’t do anything he fantasized doing to her, because, finally, Gerald would not be able to do anything, and Zoya would be left with a big man lying unmovable in a puddle of his vomit. And this, too, Joe found too banal, too uninteresting, to warn Zoya about. Zoya should have known, and maybe Zoya did know, but even her desperate attempt at not knowing, at continuing to believe that Gerald would marry her so she would be able to get herself and Yura to America, roused nothing more in Joe than a sense of fatigue about Zoya. Her relationship with Gerald did not concern him and he didn’t want it to concern him.

And yet he asked, “Has Gerald ever been to your apartment?”

“No.”

Joe tried to smile. “You were too ashamed to let him see it?”

“I was too ashamed.”

“Where does he live?”

“He lives in National Hotel.”

“And where did you meet him?”

“I met him at Bolshoi, during an interval of a ballet, in the foyer. I was alone, as I often was when I went to performance at Bolshoi, and he came and talked to me. Maybe he thought I was a prostitute. He was a handsome man just three years ago, buying, he said, works of Russian art for commercial galleries in the West, which was just beginning to be a possibility then, a possibility we thought of as glasnost and not yet as a collapse. And he knew everyone in all the big embassies, was invited to all the embassy parties because he made everyone, even Soviet officials, laugh. He would make jokes about their rows of medals, and they, amazingly, would laugh. And sometimes I was his guest. I thought he must be working for American intelligence.”

“Was he?”

“I do not know. All foreigners in Russia are thought to be working for intelligence.”

“Even I?”

“I don’t think you.”

“I don’t look as though I could be?”

“No, you do not look as though you could be.”

“You know he’s not a good man, but you’ll see Gerald again?”

“Please do not ask me these questions, Joe. You are asking too many questions I can’t answer.”

“You will?”

She dropped her fists into her lap and sat up stiffly. “Yes, I will.”

Joe’s hat was on a chair next to him, his coat draped over the back. He picked up his hat and put it on.

“You’re going?” Zoya asked, her eyes wide and staring.

“Yes.” Joe stood and began to put on his coat.

“Will you see me again?”

“Maybe not.”

Zoya’s body slumped as she fell against the chair back, and Joe saw in the slump her total resignation, a resignation that she must have had to accept over and over and would have to go on accepting over and over. She said calmly, “I do not blame you.”

“No.”

“I am sorry for Yura. He likes you so much.”

“I like him.”

“Maybe you would see Yura?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Will you tell me some expression in English I will tell him? He likes to learn expressions in English, even if he doesn’t understand what he is saying and I have to explain to him again and again.”

“I can’t think of anything original now.”

“I understand.” Still slumped back, Zoya ran her fingers through her hair as if to try to arrange it. “What will you do now?”

Joe raised his shoulders and let them drop.

“Go back to America, Joe.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Now, you will return to apartment?”

“Now, yes.”

“And if Gerald is there?”

“Is there something you want me to tell Gerald?”

“No, nothing.”

As Joe was turning away, he turned back and asked, “Aren’t there other ways of getting to America than to marry Gerald? Many Russians do go, you know, many, so parts of New York, like Brighton Beach, are Russian colonies.”

“I counted on Gerald.”

“I see.”

“Don’t turn away from me without giving me a kiss.”

Joe went to her and, leaning toward her, saw her white face, which appeared not beautiful but gaunt. She reached for his shoulders to pull him down to her, and as she did, he felt, more forcefully than he had ever felt before, a pull to give in to something, a pull that seemed to him to wrap round his body like tight ropes and yank at him, and a terror passed through him. He jumped back from her.

With a fine wail, she asked, “Am I so evil to you?”

He stood still and breathed in and out, and after a moment he again leaned toward her and kissed her on the cheeks, three times, on her right cheek, on her left cheek, and again on her right cheek, as he knew Russians did. Then he turned away.

*   *   *

He could not find the key to the apartment in his pockets, though he knew it was there. He hoped that when he rang the bell, no one would answer, and though he had no idea where he would go, he would go back out.

An almost unbearable heaviness came over him when Gerald opened the door, Gerald without his jacket, his polo shirt stained under the armpits and the collar stretched so far down his white, greasy chest showed. He was carrying the bottle, which was still more than half-full.

With a scowl, Gerald asked, “Who are you?”

“I’m Joe.”

That was enough for Gerald to turn back into the apartment, staggering so he fell against and bounded back from walls, and let Joe follow him. The air was fetid.

“I’ve been waiting for Zoya,” Gerald said.

“She didn’t come?”

“No, unless she came and I’ve forgotten, which is very possible.”

“She didn’t come with a prostitute for you to have a look at her?”

“I think I would have remembered that.” Gerald sat monstrously in an armchair and placed the bottle against his fly. “Not that I remember much.”

“You don’t remember the interesting conversation we were having before I went out?” Joe asked, taking off his hat and coat and sitting, as if he had never left it, on the sofa among the messy bedclothes.

Gerald frowned so deeply, his eyebrows beetled out over his eyes and almost covered them. “What were we talking about?”

“We were talking about Zoya.”

“What were we saying about Zoya?”

“You were saying.”

“Was I? Well, I know a lot more about Zoya’s life than she thinks I know.”

“How? Through the KGB or the Mafia?”

Gerald laughed one of his short, abrupt laughs.

On a sudden impulse, Joe asked, “Do you know her son?”

Gerald became motionless so as not to let on in any way that he didn’t know. “I know him, I know him. What’s his name?”

“Yura.”

“That’s right, Yura.”

“He has a girlfriend called Larissa.”

“That’s right, Larissa.” Gerald tried to raise his heavy, beetling eyebrows by opening his eyes wide a number of times, but they kept falling as if of their own bushy weight. “I know about Yura and Larissa.”

A sweat broke out all over Joe’s body.

“What was I saying about Zoya?” Gerald asked.

“How much you love her and want to help her.”

“Oh, yes, I love Zoya and want to help her.”

“And her son, Yura, and Yura’s girlfriend, Larissa.”

“I want to help them all.”

Joe felt the sweat run down his body.

Gerald said, “I couldn’t find a glass to drink from, so have been drinking, disgustingly like a hopeless alcoholic, from the bottle.”

“I’ll find you a glass.” Joe went into the kitchen, where he stayed for a long moment, his hands over his face. He rinsed one of the little, etched vodka glasses, left dirty on a table, and went back to the living room with it.

“I was waiting.”

Joe handed Gerald the glass without speaking, then huddled among the bedclothes.

Gerald filled the glass and drank it down, filled it again and drank it down, and filled it yet again and drank it down.

“Do you hate your imagination?” Gerald asked.

“I loathe it.”

Gerald laughed in an abrupt way, as if he were burping, but it was a laugh of complicity. “Right on.… Why?”

Joe shrugged one shoulder.

“I can tell you why. Because everything you are able to imagine that you feel is true has already happened in fact in history, has been photographed in black and white, so you are left with nothing else to imagine that you feel is true. You loathe your imagination for not being able to be more true than history. Isn’t that so?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe? Of course it’s so. I know. I know it about myself because, though I am a horrible and therefore loathsome person, I am historically true. You know that, and that’s why you listen to me. Isn’t that true?”

Joe looked down.

“Look up at me,” Gerald commanded.

Joe looked up.

Gerald said, “Do you want to know why I always wanted to come to Russia? Being as interested as you are in me, you might have asked yourself, ‘Why did he come to Russia?’ I’ll tell you why I always wanted to come to Russia. I wanted to come to Russia because I knew everything I was ever capable of imagining that was true had already happened, in documented black and white, in Russia, because Russia was, is, and will be the country of the greatest suffering in the world, beyond anyone’s imagination. I wanted to come because Russia has suffered, is suffering, and will go on, forever and ever, suffering. That’s why I wanted to come here. Suffering does something to me, Joe, if that’s your name. It always has. It fills me with a feeling that is so strange, I can’t begin to explain it to you, can’t come anywhere near naming it. I don’t mean my suffering, of course. I would do anything, and have done anything, not to suffer. No, suffering is not for me. I’m talking about the suffering of others, suffering beyond anything I could imagine, or endure. The closest I can come to saying what it is that the suffering of others fills me with is a sense of strange longing. You understand this, don’t you? This is why I feel, deep down, that Russia in her suffering is a country of such great longing.”

Joe closed his eyes.

Gerald said, “I can’t explain the feeling, but I can say when it first occurred to me. Open your eyes—I can’t talk to someone with his eyes closed—and I’ll tell you.”

Joe opened his eyes to see the big man in the darkening room.

The big man leaned forward and lifted the back of his jacket and took out from the back pocket of his trousers his wallet. “People usually carry photographs of their family in their wallets, but I don’t have any family, or any that want to know me. They wouldn’t care where I am or what I’m doing. In fact, I don’t carry photographs of anyone I know.” Gerald opened his wallet in a studied way and slowly flipped through the yellowish plastic holders in which Joe saw cards of different kinds, not only credit cards but, it appeared, old membership cards to clubs. Gerald slipped something out, looked at it himself and smiled, then, holding it up but turned toward him so Joe couldn’t see it—all this done, Joe thought, for slow, dramatic effect—he said, “Look,” and he turned the picture round to Joe.

At a distance, Joe saw only a gray blur, and he had to lean far over to see the picture clearly.

“This isn’t a fake photograph. What it shows happened, wasn’t imagined by anyone, was done in fact.”

Joe rocked from side to side.

“I’ll tell you where I first saw the photograph,” Gerald said, as if not drunk but totally in control of himself, his eyes fixed, if not on Joe, on people around Joe to whom he displayed the photograph. “I saw it when I was a kid, in Washington, just after the Second World War. I was a kid but old enough to go through my father’s desk when he wasn’t home, when he was out being a senator. I was maybe sixteen. This was the time when the world was finding out what the Germans had been doing—doing in Greece, in Italy, in Poland, in Russia, never mind in Germany itself—and I found this photograph clipped to some papers in one of my father’s drawers. I took it, took it and kept it in a drawer in my room where I had my secret collection of things, a squirrel skull and a prism from a chandelier and a golden tassel from a curtain and a little dagger with a mother-of-pearl handle, things that only I knew about and that I could look at whenever I wanted. I looked at this photograph a lot. I had never, ever seen anything like it.” He held the photograph closer to Joe. “Take it.”

Joe reached out for it, but looking at his hand reaching out, he dropped the hand. Gerald was still holding the photograph out to him.

“You never saw the photograph before?”

With a low moan, Joe said, “I did.”

“She’s Russian, this girl. She was a Russian partisan during the war. She was captured and tortured and hanged by the Germans. Her name was Zoya. Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya.” Gerald turned the photograph round to look at it himself, and as if he were talking to himself, he said, “When I saw the photograph for the first time, I felt for the first time those feelings, those feelings from deep, deep down, those strange feelings roused by suffering, those feelings of such great possibility.” He inserted the photograph carefully into his wallet and, raising his haunch, replaced his wallet in his back pocket. Then he said, looking at Joe, or around Joe, “What was the feeling I had? What? It was so strange, almost like love.” Then he looked straight at Joe. “Shall I tell you what that strange sense roused in me by the photograph of Zoya inspired me to do?”

“No.”

“You don’t want to hear?”

“No.”

“Sure, you want to hear.”

“No.”

“Shall I tell you, then, what you feel?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll tell you what you want to feel. You want to feel, looking at such a photograph, that there must be something beyond horror, something beyond the age of terror we all live in, don’t you?” Gerald added severely when Joe didn’t reply, “Don’t you?”

Frowning so his eyes were almost closed, Joe, as if despite himself, nodded a little.

“And what could that be? Say, a sense of grief, the deepest possible grief, and beyond the grief the deepest possible love?” Gerald shouted, “Don’t you want to believe that?”

Joe, nodding, kept his eyes down.

“And beyond love? What do you want to believe is beyond love? Redemption? You want to believe there is redemption for the age of terror we live in, don’t you?”

Joe’s nodding head went lower.

“And it could all happen, you want to believe, if only you could imagine something beyond all the horror.”

Joe put his hands over his eyes.

“But you know you’re wrong. You know that everything you want to believe can never be true, however much you want to believe in what you know is not true, don’t you? Though you know you’re bad, you want to believe you can be good, don’t you? And though you know God doesn’t exist, you want to believe that God does exist, don’t you? Oh, Joe, you want so much, you want everything.”

Joe dropped his hands, raised his head, and stood. He walked round the coffee table and Gerald in his armchair and down the room to the glass doors to the balcony. He stepped out into the snow and shut the door behind him. He shivered with the cold but he remained outside.

When he turned back, Gerald was gone.