EIGHTEEN

His suitcase bumping against the door as he opened it, Joe went into the side entrance of the Bolshoi, where the same people he had seen before, all in felt boots, were in the same positions they had been in. They glanced at him and, expressionless, turned away. He put down his suitcase. His body felt sticky beneath his clothes, his hair matted beneath his hat, some of the black hairs of which dripped over his forehead.

The walls of the room appeared to begin to slant in different directions, and as Zoya, smiling, came to him, the floor appeared to slant toward her.

She said, “Now we will go to open market to buy food for big dinner. We will use rubles you have left.”

“We’ll use all of them.”

“We will have big dinner with Yura and Larissa, and after you will stay in my apartment to get better.”

Joe had transferred the rubles he had left, which were in stacks, from his bulging pockets into his suitcase, and when he and Zoya got to the open market, a large, pre-Revolution market with stone pillars and oriental arches, he put the case down in a corner, opened it, and took out handfuls of rubles, which he gave to Zoya. She said, laughing, “Enough, enough,” and people passing, many with oriental casts to their faces and wearing embroidered skullcaps, stopped and laughed, showing gold teeth. “Enough.”

Joe closed his suitcase, but didn’t fasten it shut, so when he picked it up by the handle the top dropped open and his clothes, mingled with rubles, fell out.

Zoya piled his clothes, most of them dirty, all of them wrinkled, back into his case, shut it and secured it, and carried it herself through the market, along cracked marble counters on which were piles of lemons sprinkled with water, large bunches of fresh parsley and dill and mint, heaps of pomegranates, and great bunches of white and red grapes hanging from metal hooks above the counters. A man with an entirely oriental face held up a bunch of grapes to Zoya and Joe as they passed, and Zoya stopped to bargain with him and buy it. The man wrapped the bunch in newspaper, and Zoya put it into the suitcase, among the clothes. There were apples, heaps of cranberries, and small plums, and the dark hearts of sunflowers. There were counters piled with carrots and eggplants and cucumbers. Zoya stopped from time to time and bought from a man in an embroidered skullcap or a woman in a kerchief tied tightly about her head, all people from the eastern republics who flew into Moscow with suitcases filled with their fresh produce. On another counter were large, round pats of ricotta-like cheese, glass jars of sour cream, slabs of honey in the comb, and bottles of seed oil. There were hills of dried apricots and prunes and raisins. The vendors were all polite, calling out to Zoya and Joe to come taste their wares, holding out a bit of cheese or a slice of a pear on the blade of a knife. Zoya tasted, looked doubtful, discussed, bought. She was having a good time. In a separate section of the market were pork joints, beefsteaks, calves’ heads, brains, whole piglets, great shanks of meat held out by vendors in white, bloodstained smocks for Zoya and Joe to come and see: lean meat, no fat, fresh. Zoya bought meat, bought flour, eggs, milk; and when the suitcase became too heavy for her, Joe insisted on carrying it. A lone girl in an embroidered, sleeveless jacket over a thick sweater was sitting before a large, clear-plastic bag of shelled walnuts, everything she had to sell. Zoya said, “Maybe I can make a walnut cake,” and Joe said, “Buy them all, buy all her walnuts from her.” Zoya, laughing, did, and the girl looked down at the rubles where the bag of walnuts had been. As they were leaving the market, Joe saw a flower stall of gladioli and chrysanthemums in tin cans, and he said, “We must have flowers,” which Zoya bought and carried.

Zoya said, “We have spent, for some people, a year’s salary.”

“People who can’t afford to buy here?”

“Only the very rich can buy here.”

“I thought there weren’t supposed to be rich and poor in the Soviet Union.”

“You are still joking about our Soviet Union.”

“Am I joking?”

They walked along the snow-covered sidewalk, Joe sometimes stopping to rest from the weight of his case. They passed the state-owned shops, with blue, stylized signs of what was sold inside—a loaf of bread, a bottle of milk, an apple—pasted on the dirty windows, through which Joe saw dark and static lines of people waiting at empty counters.

“They queue up,” Zoya said, “in anticipation of a delivery.”

“And if there isn’t a delivery?”

“They go home without.”

Laughing, Joe said, “Let me go into a shop and give away some rubles for them to go to the open market.”

Zoya held him back by his arm. “They will think you are crazy.”

They walked on to the metro.

Joe said, “But why is there food in the open market and not in the state shops?”

“I do not know.”

“There must be a reason.”

“I do not know.”

Zoya, carrying the flowers across her arm, appeared to be happy.

She had to hold the flowers close to herself in the crowded metro, in which she and Joe stood in the midst of silent passengers. Hefting his case, Joe followed her, always in the midst of crowds, when they changed from one train to another along passageways that were like the tiled corridors of palaces with chandeliers hanging along their lengths. Out of the center of the city, the metro stations were stark. More and more people got off, until Joe and Zoya were alone in the wagon.

They climbed the cement stairs of the station into a vast dark sky through which snow was falling in great, slow swirls. Near the station were two glass-enclosed kiosks, at each a long line of huddled people. In one kiosk a woman in a white smock and knitted cap was selling apples, and in the other another woman in a white smock and knitted cap was selling pieces of red meat she picked up with a fork from a basin filled with bloody pieces and dropped onto a sheet of paper and wrapped. Zoya and Joe passed these kiosks and continued into the snow-filled darkness, to where, in the far distance, were the lights of apartment buildings. As they walked, the snow made great, windblown swirls about them that caught Joe’s breath away so he had to stop.

“I will carry the case,” Zoya said.

But Joe insisted on carrying it.

They arrived at the battered metal door of a cement apartment house that looked as if it had been started and abandoned years before. The corridors, with bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling on wires, were cinder block and covered with graffiti in chalk, and the metal doors to the apartments were scratched with graffiti. Joe saw, written in big letters in the midst of Cyrillic, I WANT TO BE HAPPY. The cement floor was wet from melting snow.

Zoya opened the door to her apartment.

She said to him before she turned on the light, “For years I was promised better apartment, for so many years.”

A smell of gas was inside the apartment, and when Zoya switched on the overhead light it seemed to shine dully through gaseous air.

On either side of the small room, its cinder-block walls painted green, were what Joe had once known as davenports, with knitted blankets and pillows on them. At the far end of the room was a plywood partition. All there was on the walls was a reproduction of an icon of the gentle head of Jesus Christ that Zoya said she had bought from an old woman in a metro underpass.

She said, “All the money I could earn, I spent on Yura.”

The apartment was hot.

Arranging the blankets and pillows on a davenport, Zoya said to Joe, “You will lie here. Get into your pajamas, and I will cover you. Then I will bring you a hot drink.”

Zoya pulled Joe’s pajamas out of his case, which she then took with her behind the plywood partition and into what must have been her kitchen. Joe undressed, put on his pajamas, and lay on the davenport. He felt hotter than the hot apartment, and the longing came to him to run out into the freezing cold air and snow. Zoya came back quickly with a glass of tea with honey and lemon, and she propped pillows behind his head so he could drink, then covered him.

“You don’t have aspirins?” he asked.

“No, I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right.”

The glass of tea was scalding, and Zoya helped Joe hold it so the tea wouldn’t spill.

“You rest now, and I will prepare our dinner. You will have a good dinner, with Yura and Larissa to cheer you up, and when, tomorrow, you wake up, you will be well.”

Joe smiled at her over the rim of the glass of steaming tea. “But does Yura live here?”

“He has his bed behind the partition.”

“And he sleeps here every night?”

“Sometimes he sleeps at Alla’s.”

“He and Larissa,” Joe asked, not knowing how to ask the question so it wouldn’t sound banal, “are they…?”

“Lovers?”

“I wondered.”

“No, they are not. Yura would tell me if they were. They love one another, they love one another very much, more, maybe, than if they were spending nights in bed together.”

“Their love is pure.”

Zoya laughed. “I no longer know, Joe, if you are joking or not when you speak like that.”

Laughing a little himself, Joe said, “I guess I’m not sure myself.”

“I will go now into the kitchen and prepare for our feast.”

“I don’t know if I have too much appetite.”

“You will eat, and then you will be well.”

Zoya went out. Sometimes Joe felt drawn back a long, long distance from what he saw, and sometimes he felt he was brought up very close.

Zoya put her hand on his forehead and said, “The tea was good for you.”

“I’m still thirsty.”

“I will bring you more tea.”

She helped him drink it.

He asked her, “Have you ever been lost in a forest?”

“I was once, yes. That was during the brief period I spent trying to live outside the world. I was with the people I knew, in the forest, collecting mushrooms. I got separated from them and I got lost. I thought I must go in the direction of the sun, and all the while I kept calling and calling. Hours passed, hours. Finally, one of our group heard me. He told me that if I’d have gone against the sun, I would have gone into four hundred kilometers of unbroken forest, with no houses, with no one.”

“Is this when you were staying in the monastery?”

“Yes, then.”

“Was it snowing in the forest?”

“No, it was not snowing. Why do you want to know if it was snowing?”

“I thought it might be snowing.”

Again, Zoya put her hand on Joe’s forehead and held it there a long while.

“You will be better,” she said, “I know you will be better. I have prepared a roast, and we will have soup.”

“I’m really not very hungry.”

“You will eat. As soon as Yura and Larissa come, we will eat all together. They will give you appetite.”

She went out again and Joe closed his eyes. Zoya woke him by setting up a narrow trestle table at the partition’s end of the room, and he watched her cover the table in what looked like an old red velvet curtain and go out and come in and set the table with mismatched plates and cutlery and glasses.

She said, “Yura and Larissa must come soon, or our meal will be overcooked.”

She went out and came back with a bottle of vodka and, laughing, said, “I bought this for Gerald but never gave it to him, and now I take it as mine. Maybe a little vodka would be good for you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“No?”

“I’m very thirsty.”

“I will bring you more tea with honey and lemon, and by then Yura and Larissa will be here.”

Again, she helped him drink the tea.

He asked her, “Were you brought up with any religion?”

“No, none. My parents were proper atheists. They would be shocked by my revisionism if they were alive and knew that I now believe and pray.”

“What do you pray for?”

“You must know. You once prayed, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

Zoya appeared to him to become very small, then very large.

He said, “I once read of an ancient religion in the Russian forest in which the devout prayed to a dark hole in the earth.”

“I have never heard that.”

“Maybe I know more about Russia than you do.”

“Maybe.”

“I sometimes think I had an earlier life in Rus, in ancient Rus, and prayed in the forest to a hole in the earth. I was all alone. There was snow falling. I remember snow was falling. And one day, wandering, I got lost in the forest and couldn’t find my way out, couldn’t find my way out of the great, snowbound pine forest.”

“Drink tea.”

He raised his head to drink.

Zoya asked, “But where are Yura and Larissa?”

“Maybe they stayed for a performance at the Bolshoi.”

“That is possible. As bad as it is becoming, Bolshoi is still everything to them. But they said they would be here over an hour ago. And Yura was eager to see you, and so, too, was Larissa. They should have been here an hour ago.”

“They’ll come soon.”

“Yes.”

“You are a believer. Tell me what you believe in.”

“Your fever makes you stranger and stranger, Joe. Maybe you are joking with me?”

“Maybe.”

“Nothing remains of what you believed when you were a believer?”

“I think, nothing.”

“No, not nothing.”

“Then what do I believe in?” Joe asked.

“In what I believe in, too—in grief.”

“Grief?”

“Because grief inspires everything that belief in God is supposed to inspire, and so rarely does. It inspires tenderness, devotion, and love. It inspires reconciliation. It inspires all the best feelings that human beings are supposed to have. And that is why I believe that God, who is tender and devoted and loving, grieves for us.”

“But then, when the grief passes, all the worst feelings return, and God vanishes.”

Zoya said, “All that has already happened in the world, what is happening right now in the world, what will happen forever in the world, all that suffering is enough to keep our grief always with us. Our grief is forever, our grief is for all eternity, like God.”

“And do you pray to God?”

“Grieving is praying, and you grieve.”

A cry rose from Joe.

Zoya put the empty glass by the bed and lay down next to Joe and pressed her face against the side of his hot and sweating face.

He kissed her cheek, her temple, and when he tried to kiss her lips, she, sighing, drew away from him and sat up on the edge of the bed. She said, “I am worried now that Yura and Larissa have not come.”

“They’ll be here any minute.”

Zoya began to pull at her hair. “I do not know, I do not know.”

“They will be.” Joe reached out to try to bring her back down beside him on the davenport.

But Zoya stood away from Joe and looked down at him. “Did you tell Gerald that Yura is my son?”

She went into such a far distance she seemed to Joe to disappear, and then she came so close he could see into the pupils of her eyes.

“Does he know about Yura?” she asked.

Joe saw, through her eyes, into a vast space, in which the walls of a house appeared to be coming together and drawing apart again and again in different ways.

Zoya said, “Maybe I should go to American embassy for a doctor for you.”

“No, no, don’t go to the American embassy.”

“You are not well, Joe.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

Zoya paced, pulling at her hair. “I am so worried about Yura.”

A knock on the apartment door made Zoya rush to it as though the room were suddenly very big and it took her a long time to reach it, and when she opened the door, a young man stood outside at an even greater distance, but the blue envelope the boy handed Zoya appeared to be so large it filled all the space of the big room. Zoya shut the door and tore open the envelope and took out a shiny, black-and-white photograph, and as she held it up, Joe saw on it the blurred faces of a boy and a girl, their eyes wide, staring out in a flash of terror.

Zoya screamed and fell sideways to the floor. She kept screaming, holding the photograph in one hand as she crawled, sideways on her hip, across the floor.

Joe jumped up and went to her and she grabbed at him and, screaming, pulled him down to the floor. Joe tried to hold her, but she kept twisting and turning in his arms, screaming. She was screaming in Russian.

“Zoya,” Joe called, “Zoya.”

She went still, and after a moment she rose to her feet and said, “I am going out to find them.”

Zoya put on her old boots, tied them up, put on her scarf and old suede coat and hat of cat’s fur, and without saying anything to Joe, she left the apartment.

Weak, Joe had not had time to put on his clothes to follow Zoya out. He threw himself on the davenport. He was shuddering, and he drew the blankets over himself, but his shuddering caused them to slip off.

He stopped shuddering and became calm and found himself walking up a flight of white wooden stairs, and on the landing at the top of the stairs he opened a door with a crystal knob. In rows on either side of the room were beds covered in white bedclothes, and people were sleeping in the beds. As Joe passed between the rows of beds, he knew that the people in them were recovering from illnesses that had almost killed them and that they would now be better than before the illnesses struck them. He saw a naked arm rise from the bedclothes of one bed and a nurse in a white uniform come quickly to hold the hand for a moment then gently place it under the covers.

At the other end of the room was a door with another crystal knob, which shone at points when Joe reached out for it. He stood for a long while with his hand on the knob, and then, slowly, he opened the door into a bedroom.

The bedroom was surrounded on all sides by windows, with white curtains that billowed out and were drawn in against the sills, and in the middle of the room was a large bed, a bed like a huge wooden sleigh, and on it a woman, naked, was kneeling, and kneeling behind her was a man, also naked, calmly braiding her long, thick hair. Joe, or whoever Joe was, walked by them slowly. The woman’s breasts appeared tender, the nipples only a little more pink than the breasts, which shook a little as she moved her shoulders with the movement of the man braiding her hair. As Joe passed them, she looked at him, and though she smiled at him, tears were running down her face.

He crossed the room to the other side, to another door, this one a double, paneled door with a tracing of gilt about the panels, and when he turned back, he saw that the woman and the man were gone, but on the bed, in the midst of the rumpled sheets, was a comb. And fine, glistening hairs floated about on the currents of air through the room.

As he leaned against the double doors behind him, they opened, and facing them, he saw, near or far he couldn’t tell, a mature woman dressing a boy in white, in his First Communion clothes, helping him on with his white shirt, his white tie, his white socks, his white kneesocks, his white knee-length trousers, his white shoes, his white jacket; and all the while around them were men and women, drinking cups of tea and talking among themselves, but admiring him, patting his head and shoulders. One old man drew the stem of a white carnation into the buttonhole of his lapel. On the faces of the woman helping him to dress and the people circling him, tears were running in fine streams.

Joe, or whoever he was, left the room with the boy in his First Communion clothes and his admirers, and opening another door, he found himself outside, in a backyard, where a girl was swinging on a swing under a grapevine. She had a large bow tied to her hair at the top of her head. Though tears were running down her face, she said with a smile that her family was going out to the country to pick apples, and would he like to come?

As she said this, wagons appeared, horse-drawn, wooden wagons, and he and she got into a wagon among children and adults, all laughing and joking with the bumps and rattling of the wagons over the dirt roads into the country, but all with tears running down their faces.

And when they arrived at the huge apple orchard, they were met by a large, muscular, bald man wearing blue bib overalls, who, as much as he laughed, wiped tears from his face with his laborer’s hands.

Everyone disappeared into the orchard. Joe, or whoever he was, climbed a ladder among the branches of a fruit-heavy tree to pick apples and felt the ladder sway. When he descended, it seemed to him that he was the only one in the orchard, that everyone else had gone.

But the girl with the bow in her hair appeared from behind a tree. He went toward her, half tripping on the windfalls in the high grass, and approaching her, he saw the tears now falling from her smooth, soft, smiling face down onto the flat bodice of her pinafore.

The girl disappeared into Joe’s own tears. He looked around, and the apple orchard disappeared into his tears.

Joe saw Zoya in the room, crouched low, her arms between her raised knees, rocking back and forth and moaning. She was wearing her suede coat, unbuttoned, and her hat was on the floor beside her.

Joe called, “Zoya?”

She looked at him for a long time, and whether or not she knew who he was and why he was calling her, she got up and went to stand over him. Her face was white and her hair was ragged.

She held out a hand to him. Sweating and shivering with his fever and hallucinating so that he saw what wasn’t there and didn’t see what was there, he managed to get up and put on his trousers over his pajamas, his shirt, his socks and shoes. He put on his overcoat and gloves and hat. She buttoned her coat and put on her hat and opened the door for him.

At moments he was pressed close to her packed in among people in a moving metro carriage; at moments he followed her along underground passageways with chandeliers; at moments he waited in the corner of a cold, dimly lit building that might have been a train station because porters were standing by luggage trolleys; at moments he stood with her on a station platform. And then they were on a crowded train.

Dawn rose through falling snow, a thin, gray light. They got out of the train in the middle of forest. The station was blue stucco, with white, neoclassical pillars supporting a pediment, and in the pediment a relief of double red bunting, and only one woman stood on the platform, wearing a visored cap and holding up a sign, which was a round, black dot surrounded by a margin of white. She lowered the sign and went into the station when the train left.

Joe followed Zoya round to the back of the station, where there were no footsteps in the snow. Their breaths caused great clouds to form about them that drifted away in the wind-driven snow as they went down a narrowing, snow-covered road into the forest, where they left the road to walk in the snow among the trees.

In the stillness and silence of the forest, the sudden cascade of snow down a pine tree, falling from branch to branch, startled for a moment, but the stillness and silence that returned was more profound than before.

As they trudged, the clear cold penetrated right through Joe’s fever and made his thinking clear, so it was with great clarity that he thought there were people in the forest, invisible people who became visible only at instants in sudden, rising and falling whirls of snow among the dark trees. He and Zoya penetrated more deeply among these people, who gathered about them and followed them, an always greater and greater number, through clearings and into denser forest, where the drifts were so deep Joe and Zoya sank up to their knees and had to pull each other out. These invisible people, so many they swarmed about them in wide gusts of wind-driven snow that shook the trees, drew Joe and Zoya on. Zoya, panting, stopped, and Joe stopped with her, but he felt the ghosts of people encircling them to pull them as if with heavy ropes farther into the forest, there where they would themselves become ghosts.

Their breaths great clouds that almost hid them, they stopped before an immense drift in a hollow among the trees. Zoya’s face was shining with sweat. She was looking starkly about at those ghosts pressing in on them, and when she turned to look at Joe in the same way, he put his arms about her, and slowly she put her arms about him.

As she drew him down into the drift, he thought he saw over her shoulder, through the trees of the forest, a steep-roofed, brown clapboard house with a fieldstone chimney entwined with a winter-bare tangle of honeysuckle.