SIXTEEN

Zoya came quietly into the apartment, as though taking a chance that there might be someone there she didn’t want to see her and whom she would turn away from quickly before he saw her. She found Joe, lying flat on his face on the small Turkish rug on the parquet floor, his arms outstretched, and surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of red ruble banknotes. For a moment, she wondered if Joe was alive, he lay so still. Then she saw sweat running down the side of his face and the back of his neck and saw his pulse beating in his temple. She crouched low and called softly, “Joe?”

He opened his eyes to see her worn-out, wet boots, with the fake leather peeling off the heels. Then he turned over onto his side.

She said, “I know you don’t want to see me anymore.”

“You came looking for Gerald?”

“Yes.”

“You thought I’d have gone?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know what I thought.”

She looked at the circle of scattered ruble notes, picked one up and studied it, and let it drop.

Rising on an elbow, Joe said with a high laugh, “I changed all my American money for rubles.”

“All?”

There was a frightening hilarity in his voice. “All of it.”

Frowning with concern, Zoya asked, “Did you get the form that allows you to turn rubles back into dollars?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I got any form. But I’m not going to turn the rubles back into dollars. I’m going to spend them.”

“On what, Joe? There is nothing to buy in rubles. You can only buy with hard currency.”

“Then I’ll just give all my rubles away.”

“Joe.” Zoya knelt by Joe, in the midst of the money, and looking into his feverish face, she said shyly, “I know you didn’t want to see me again. I came thinking Gerald would be here. I came to tell Gerald something.”

Again Joe said, “And you thought I would have gone?”

“I do not know, Joe, I do not know. Maybe I hoped you would be gone, maybe I hoped you would still be here.”

“But, really, you came to tell Gerald something?”

“Yes.”

“Gerald left, I can’t remember when, and he didn’t say if he’d be back or not.”

Zoya put her hand on Joe’s forehead. “Your fever is worse.”

“It is.”

“You need care.”

Joe laughed his high laugh of frightening hilarity.

Zoya then picked up in both hands wads of rubles. “You must not give all this money away.”

“If I can’t buy anything with it, what else am I going to do with it?”

“Joe,” Zoya said, softly admonishing him to try to bring him down from that high and frightening level of hilarity.

He sat up and picked up handfuls of the notes and piled them onto those she already held in her hands. “You take it all.”

She dropped everything. “No.”

“I changed five thousand dollars in traveler’s checks into rubles and some greenbacks.”

“Joe, you could not.”

“I did.”

“In black market?”

“I don’t know what it was. Black, red, white. I went out with my suitcase and my money belt, I went out thinking I would find a hotel, but I went to the National, the Rossia, the In-tourist Hotel, and there was not a room available, not for me, because I hadn’t reserved from abroad. For a foreigner here, everything has to be done from abroad. As I was wandering around, wondering what to do next, a man stopped me and asked me if I wanted to change currency into rubles at a good rate, and I said yes. He took me to some small, grim, dim place. I signed all my checks and gave him all my greenbacks, everything I had in my money belt. He treated me very well, even gave me a glass of vodka, which, when I got out again, I threw up.”

“That was illegal of him. Also, you took chance. He could have been KGB agent.”

“If he was a KGB agent, he was very excited about our illegal transaction. He gave me so much money, in stacks, I had to get rid of some clothes from my suitcase to make room for them. We were both laughing. And I came back here, because I didn’t know where else to go, to think what to do.”

“I should not have let you leave me.”

“You couldn’t have kept me.”

Looking away, Zoya said, “No, I couldn’t have kept you.”

“Now I’ve got all these rubles and I’ve got to decide what do to with them.”

“Without the right form, you will not be able to change your rubles back into dollars.”

“I don’t want to.”

“It is your fever that is making you do these things.”

“You tell me what to do with all my rubles, if you think they’re worthless. Shall I open the window and throw them all out into the snow?”

“Why did you do it?”

“Because I wanted not to be able to leave Russia.”

Zoya began, slowly, to pick up the red notes and arrange them into piles.

Joe said, “No one understands how I love this country. I do, I love this country. I love this country, and I want to stay and stay and stay, and never, ever leave.”

Arranging the money in neat stacks in a row on the floor, Zoya asked, “To do what, Joe?”

“To be Russian.”

“And what do you think it is to be Russian?”

Joe lay back flat on the floor.

Zoya brought the piles of money to the desk, where they formed a red block.

Standing over Joe, she said, “Maybe I will tell you what I came to tell Gerald.”

“I don’t want to hear.”

“Well, you are right, because you have every reason to mistrust what I have to say. You have seen in me a Russia that you have every reason to mistrust.”

“But there is another Russia.”

Zoya sat in an armchair, and looking down at Joe lying on the floor, she cried, “Another Russia?”

“There is.”

Placing her elbows on her knees, Zoya leaned forward and pressed her hands against her face.

Joe didn’t move.

When Zoya got up, she walked about, swinging her arms and body loosely, as though beside herself with all her feelings. “Well, I’d better go find Gerald and tell him what I have to tell him.”

Joe sat up. “You can’t go to Gerald.”

“I must.”

“You can’t go alone.”

“I have often seen Gerald on my own.”

“You can’t see him on your own now.”

“What has happened that I can’t see him on my own after I have so often seen him on my own?”

Joe, dizzy, had to sit still and again close his eyes for a moment. He stood. “If you have to see Gerald, I’ll come with you.”

Astonished, Zoya asked, “You think Gerald would do something bad to me if I were alone with him?”

“I’m coming with you.”

“You are not well enough to come out.”

“I’m not well enough to stay in.”

“But if you do not want to see me, you want, less, to see Gerald and me together.”

Joe passed his hands through his sweat-thick, black hair. “What you have to tell him, is it about your joint venture?”

Zoya looked away shyly. “It is.”

“Let me tell you this. You think you know Gerald. You don’t know him. You don’t know what Gerald is capable of doing.”

“I know.”

“You know what he is capable of doing to you?”

Zoya pressed her lips together hard, then said, “I know.”

“And you go on working with him?”

Zoya pressed her lips harder together and said nothing.

“No, you don’t know Gerald, don’t know what he’s capable of, don’t know what he’s capable of doing to you. If you have to see him, I’m coming with you.”

“To guard me against him?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe you should hear what I have to say to Gerald. Yes, come with me to National.”

Zoya had to help Joe on with his coat, but once he was in it, he went to the desk and pushed stacks of rubles into all his pockets, into his trouser pockets, into the inside pocket of his jacket, the breast pocket, the hip pockets, and into the inside pockets and hip pockets of his overcoat.

“What are you doing?”

“I want to take all my money with me.”

“You are crazy. Foreigners are beaten up in Moscow streets and robbed.”

“That’s all right.”

Joe even pushed a wad of money into his shirt pocket, and as he did, he laughed with that hilarity that frightened Zoya.

“Maybe you should not come. You are not well at all.”

“I’m coming, I’m coming.”

But he stopped her as they were leaving the apartment. “Do you know anything about a girl tortured and hanged by the Germans named Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya?”

“Of course I know about her. She is Soviet saint. She was a fanatic. She wanted to be tortured and murdered.”

“That’s impossible.”

“It is very possible.”

Joe turned away from her to face the wall of the small entrance hall.

“I was named after her.”

Joe pressed his face against the wall.

“You will stay here. I will go tell Gerald what I have to tell him, and then, whether or not you want to see me, I will come back to take care of you.”

“I’m coming.”

Joe was just behind her when they went out into the snow.

“Now, without dollars, we will not be able to take taxi,” Zoya said.

“We’ll go by metro.”

“Will you be able to make it?”

“I will.”

They got out at Karl Marx Station and walked through the late-afternoon darkness and snow to the National, its glass doors lit up, and outside the parked cars and the prostitutes. Zoya stared straight ahead as she and Joe went among them, as if they did not exist for her. At the hotel door, there was no commissionaire either to stop them from going in or to open the door to them. Inside, Zoya went from the lobby up the carpeted stairs and down a dim corridor with rooms on either side, the carpet embedded with dust, the wallpaper on the walls loose at the seams, and water stains on the ceiling. At the end of a long corridor was a desk where, usually, the woman who would not let you into your room unless you had a pass to exchange for your key sat among seltzer bottles and teapots, but the desk was bare, as though no woman sat at it anymore and controlled who came or went. Zoya knocked on a door, and soon Gerald, in pajamas, answered.

His gray hair was disheveled and his pajamas were half-unbuttoned, revealing hairy parts of his body. He didn’t say anything to Zoya and didn’t even look at Joe, but turned back into his room and evidently meant them to follow him.

He stood, staggering a little in his drunkenness, in the middle of the room and said, “They don’t make up my bed anymore or change those useless towels in the bathroom, or even clean. Do you think this is their way of getting me out because I haven’t paid?” Staggering, he sat on the edge of his unmade bed. “I hope, Zoya, you’ve come with some money, some money from the powers that be for convincing some pretty girl to get out of this godforsaken country, so I can at least pay part of my hotel bill.” He looked about, it suddenly occurring to him that he had forgotten something important. “Did anyone see a bottle of vodka?”

Zoya said, “It’s on the floor at your feet.”

Looking down, Gerald said, “Ah, there you are, right next to my big, ugly, bunioned feet.” He almost fell over as he reached down for the bottle, but Zoya rushed to him to lift the bottle to him, and he took it and drank from it, then studied it. “It has a way of disappearing.” Holding the bottle out to Zoya and Joe, he asked, “Will you have some?”

“No,” Zoya said.

“And you?” Gerald asked Joe.

“No.”

“No one can ever say I’m not generous with my liquor.” Gerald swigged more, then asked Zoya, “Have you come with some money?”

“No.”

“No?” Gerald appeared, not angry, but puzzled why Zoya had not brought money.

“I have to tell you, Gerald, I have other work now.”

Apparently not hearing, Gerald said to Zoya, pointing the bottle at Joe, “Why did you bring him? Is he now in on our joint venture?”

“We no longer have joint venture, Gerald.”

“No longer have joint venture?” Gerald asked as, still puzzled, he tried to understand.

“No, I have another job.”

“What other job?”

“I have a job now at Bolshoi.”

“At the Bolshoi? Everyone knows that the Bolshoi is now a joke. How can you have a job at the Bolshoi?”

“I will help with Bolshoi publications of picture books on the history of Bolshoi, on the history of dancers and singers.”

“You mean, picture books to sell in the Bolshoi gift shop along with cheap souvenirs, like tin trays painted with flowers and ceramic eggs and hollow wooden dolls that fit into one another, so the Bolshoi will be able to finance itself when the state drops it.”

“We must, now, finance ourselves.”

“That kind of job is not going to get you anywhere, certainly not out of the Soviet Union to the United States.”

“I know that.”

“You can’t mean you’re giving up on getting out and coming to America with me?”

Zoya said in the strictest voice, “I am giving up our joint venture, Gerald.”

Gerald smiled. “Well, I can’t say you’ve been doing a whole lot lately to merit your being part of a joint venture with me.”

“Not a whole lot.”

Gerald stood and, hitching the bottoms of his pajamas about his large waist, began unsteadily to walk about the room. He seemed to be thinking, his puzzlement slowly, as he understood, giving way to anger.

He turned to Joe and shouted at Zoya, “So did you take him along to protect yourself from me?”

Zoya held her place, and behind her stood Joe, who thought he might vomit.

There was then a silence in the room, with Gerald listening to something he alone appeared to hear. “Just a minute.” He went to the loudspeaker, hidden beneath a circle of black material, that was meant to be for radio broadcasts, the black switches for which were on the wall, and he leaned close to it to listen more intently. Voices of people having a conversation were coming faintly over the loudspeaker, and Gerald shouted into it, “You’re supposed to be listening to us talk, you idiots, instead of us listening to you talk. You’ve got the surveillance system ass-backwards.” A click sounded over the loudspeaker and the voices ceased. “That’s what the KGB are up to now—instead of listening in on other people’s conversations, they let the whole world listen in on theirs.”

Gerald walked again about the room, from time to time taking swigs from the bottle, and when he was near a small table, he knocked it over with the swing of a fist and shouted at Zoya, “I’m not going to let you go.”

This startled Zoya. “Gerald, I have brought you nothing, nothing, for a long time. You have always said you could find someone else easily, someone who would bring more in for you.”

“Find someone else in the pathetic condition I’m in? Look at me. I’m about to be thrown out of this hotel, and you know we only have the apartment because of the good graces of the powers that be for business use, and once they find out there is no business, as I’m sure they more than suspect now, that apartment will go, and where am I? Tell me that, where am I?”

“I don’t know where you are, Gerald.”

“I know what’s happened to you. You’re still indoctrinated by Party directives, even if you no longer belong to the Party. You follow the directives from above, which are that you should be self-sufficient. You know that self-sufficiency is an impossibility in Russia, always was, is, and always will be. You all need to be told just what to do by some higher authority, and you are all terrified by that authority. Your lives are regulated by bureaucracy, were regulated by bureaucracy long before Communism and will be regulated by bureaucracy long after Communism goes. You are oriental and can’t be Western. You are used to despots. You would be lost without them. You even need them to tell you to be self-sufficient. So you are going to work to make the Bolshoi self-sufficient. That is funny. Just think of all Russians now trying to make themselves, because it is the latest directive, self-sufficient. Just think of the chaos. It will be very funny to watch. If you stayed with me, you’d find out, really find out, about self-sufficiency, which is bred into the bone of each and every American. You’re trying to be what you can’t be.”

Joe, feeling weak, put his hand on Zoya’s shoulders to lean a little against her.

“I was teaching you self-sufficiency,” Gerald said, “and you have learnt nothing, nothing. I invested my whole being into teaching you self-sufficiency. And what do you do? You give up on me, who can teach you the real thing, and you take up something that is in no way real and will fail. And where do you leave me?”

Gerald’s raving didn’t make any sense to Joe, but with his fever nothing made sense. He heard voices without knowing what they were saying, though he did know that Gerald was demanding money from Zoya.

Joe said to Gerald, “I’ll give you money.”

“You?” Gerald said with a cracking laugh.

“I’ll give you five thousand rubles.”

“And how far will that get me?”

“You can pay your hotel bill.”

“If the hotel will take rubles.”

“It will,” Zoya said.

A sudden bright redness flashed in Gerald’s face, and his eyes, the whites also red, bulged, and as he stared at Zoya, a crazy look appeared in all that redness.

Zoya stepped back, and Joe with her, as though Gerald were going to approach them, but he remained where he was by the table knocked over onto its side, one of its legs broken.

In a low voice he said, “I love you, Zoya.”

Now, his head lowered and his shoulders raised, his face dark red, he advanced toward Zoya. The vodka in the bottle he carried sloshed. He advanced slowly, heavily, his bloodshot eyes fixed on Zoya.

As he advanced, he said, breathing heavily, “I love you, Zoya. Believe me, I love you as no one has ever or will ever love you.”

Zoya pressed up against Joe, who put his arms around her waist to hold her. Gerald, dropping the bottle, came within arm’s reach of her, but his shoulders hunched, he kept his arms hanging low at his sides. All the muscles of his face appeared to sag as the color drained out of it, and his eyes, too, appeared to weigh down his face. The jacket of his pajamas was half-unbuttoned, and a large pink nipple showed in dense gray and greasy hair, and the pajama bottoms were turned so that the open fly revealed his thick, hairy thigh.

Zoya’s face was twisted with fear.

Gerald said, “My suffering Zoya.”

His body sagged more as he reached out to take Zoya into his arms. She jumped back against Joe, who drew her even farther back.

Gerald, his body sagging so he had difficulty moving, slowly turned away to go to his bed, on the way managing to pick up the sloshing bottle, and he slumped on the edge of his bed.

Hurriedly, Joe took out from his pockets wads of rubles, which he dropped to the floor.

Gerald roused himself to stand, and raging, he screamed, “Get out, get out, get out or I’ll kill you.”

Joe opened the door to the room and, his arms about her, brought Zoya out into the corridor. They hurried down the long, dim corridor, past the empty desk where a woman used to sit, to the top of the stairs down to the lobby. There, Zoya had to lean against a wall.

It was a while before she was able to walk down the stairs with Joe, who supported her. He straightened her hat, which had become crooked, and tightened her gray woolen scarf about her neck. They were walking to the Metro Station Prospekt Marxa when Zoya asked, “Did you give Gerald all your rubles?”

“Not all.”

“At least not all.… You go home and get your suitcase and leave apartment for good. You will meet me later at Bolshoi, side entrance. I will take you to my apartment, which I am so ashamed of, but which I will not be ashamed of showing to you.”

“You’ll take me to your apartment?”

Standing outside the metro station, Zoya put her arms around Joe. “Please understand, I want nothing from you. I do not want you to take me out of Soviet Union, I do not want you to give me money, I do not even want that you should love me. Please understand.”

“I understand.”

“You will go to apartment and take your suitcase and meet me at Bolshoi?”

“I will.”

“You will?”

“I will.”

“Please do not do any strange things.”

“Have I done anything strange?”

Her arms still about him, Zoya pressed her lips to Joe’s face. “You are burning.”

“Zoya, Zoya,” he said, and laughed.

Now she pressed her lips against his open mouth, suddenly and hard, and as she did, he closed his lips to kiss her.