FIVE

Joe, carrying his and Zoya’s cases from the car, followed her to the back of a cement block of apartments into a long, narrow, rough, weed-grown yard, and through a battered door into an entrance hall. The hall was painted pale blue, with rows of darker blue mailboxes on which numbers were painted crudely in white strokes, and near the boxes was a partly rusted metal box, tilted and held to the wall by a rusted bracket across it. Above the box, Zoya pressed a combination of buttons and turned to the inner door into the foyer of the apartment building, expecting it to open, but it was still locked. She had to press the buttons again and again until the door, which seemed about to fall off its hinges and could have been pushed open, opened.

“Soon,” she said, “nothing, but nothing will work, nothing.” The walls of the elevator that took them up were scratched with graffiti, and the car rattled, stopped for a moment between floors, then, with a little jolt, continued up.

Zoya sighed.

Joe took in all the details, as if it were in the smallest details that Russia would be revealed to him: on the landing, the door, padded with brown vinyl and studded with brass tacks, which Zoya opened with a key; the small entrance hall with walls covered with, it appeared, layers and layers of thick, gray wallpaper, mottled with stains and, however thick, showing the cracks beneath; the floor covered with irregular bits of brown felt, glued down and worn; and just inside, tacked to a wall, a tourist poster of a view of the Rocky Mountains of America. Joe followed Zoya directly ahead into the one room of the apartment, papered in blue paper with a pattern of many, many small white and yellow medallions, with gilded light brackets, here and there at angles on the walls, holding up bare bulbs on imitation dripping-candlesticks, a few dirty crystal prisms hanging below. The floor was creaky parquet, the spaces among the boards wide and impacted with dirt, and in the middle of the floor was a cheap Turkish rug. There were two cubelike chairs, the foam-rubber stuffing showing through tears, and a sofa. On the sofa lay an old teddy bear with one leg, which looked as though it had been soaked in water, and a pile of blankets and sheets and pillows.

Looking about, Zoya again sighed. “I used to think of this as luxury place before I brought you here.”

“You probably have a very elevated idea of the places in America where I’ve lived.”

“I have no idea at all of places in America where you have lived in.”

The room was hot, and the heat smelled of dust, grease, and faintly of shit.

“We cannot control heat,” Zoya said. “Comes from government heating center, maybe kilometers away, through pipes underground. You will see steam rising out of ground in empty lot or at street corner, and you will know that a pipe bringing steam heat has broken underground. You will see that all over Moscow. Now is too hot, but, suddenly, there may be no heat, and room will be freezing cold.”

“Whose place is this?” Joe asked, taking off his fur hat and gloves and coat and throwing them on an armchair.

Zoya removed only her hat, which she waved as if it didn’t matter whose place it was. “I suppose, really, I should register your presence here with police, but I think police, now, would not know how to register foreigner in private apartment, if that is permitted, which it most likely is not. I think for you to stay in private apartment you would need to have permission from Soviet embassy from when you were in America, so it would be on your visa. So, because they will say they can do nothing to give you permission to stay, we will not go to police.”

“I’ll be staying here illegally?”

“Does that worry you?”

“It worries me, yes, not to be doing everything strictly legal in the Soviet Union.”

“Would that worry you in United States?”

“No.”

“But here, yes.”

“I want to do what’s expected of me here.”

“You want to be thought of as good boy, like Young Pioneer always doing what is right.”

Joe smiled.

“Don’t worry. No one here does what is expected, or right. You will find out that Moscow is totally corrupt city, where what is legal is what you can get away with, and you can get away with everything, especially if you have American dollars.”

“I changed five hundred dollars into rubles when I first arrived.”

“You were crazy. No one will accept rubles. You still have dollars?”

“I have.”

Joe felt that Zoya was about to ask him how many, but she restrained herself. She said, pointing to the sofa, “You will sleep here. You did not sleep on train and are tired, I see, so sleep now. Russians sleep on sofa, not because we want to, but because our apartments are too small to have bedroom. Did you have bedroom to yourself in your house?”

“I did, yes.”

“Was it big house?”

“It was a big, brown, clapboard house with a cellar and two floors and an attic with a steep roof and gables, and it was in a forest.”

“A deep forest?”

“Well, a woods.”

Zoya appeared to be trying to imagine it, but a thought broke through and abruptly she returned, now in a hurry, to instructing Joe about the apartment. She showed him the bathroom and the kitchen.

“Do not,” she said, “answer telephone if it rings. Or, rather, in case I might be telephoning, pick up receiver, but do not speak until you hear me, and if anyone else speaks, you say nothing and hang up receiver. If telephone rings again immediately after, do not answer.”

Zoya didn’t go. In the main room again, they stood before a wide window with a view of a cement apartment house exactly like the one they were in.

Zoya asked, “And in America, did you have job?”

“I was a student.”

“What did you study?”

“History.”

“And you gave up?”

Joe said, “It’s begun to snow in Moscow.”

For a while, standing side by side, they watched the snow fall in slow flakes.

“In where you lived in America,” Zoya asked, “did it snow like it does here?”

“Yes.”

“So much that everything was covered deeply in snow?”

“Very deeply.”

The snow began to collect on the broken pieces of furniture out on the little balcony.

Then, as if, again, she remembered she was in a hurry, Zoya said, “I must go.”

But she remained standing still beside Joe.

“The snow is falling more heavily,” Joe said.

“You do not want to talk about America.” With apparent great reluctance Zoya turned away from Joe and left him standing at the window, and putting on her hat and picking up her case, she went out of the apartment.

It was only when Joe, his case open on an armchair, was sorting through what he had packed, wondering if he should take anything out and if so put where, that he realized he was locked in the apartment. Zoya hadn’t said when she would be back. He walked around the room, trying to calm himself down. He thought he might panic.

The telephone rang and he went stark still. It rang and rang, a large, black, old-fashioned telephone. Joe gently raised the receiver but said nothing. A loud voice asked, “Zoya?” Joe held the receiver to his face without moving. He heard again, “Zoya? Zoya?” and he hung up. Immediately after, the telephone rang again, but he didn’t answer.

He looked in his case for his toiletry bag, and as he was turning over his underwear, he uncovered a money belt. He took it out and unzipped it and ran his thumb over the thickish edge of a book of traveler’s checks, all the money, except for a few hundred dollars in bills, he had left from his part-time job while he’d been studying. He extracted a ten-dollar bill from the money belt and held it in his hands. What did it mean, he thought, this American ten-dollar bill in Soviet Russia? He put it back and took from his toiletry bag his toothbrush and toothpaste, his razor and shaving foam, and he went to the small, windowless bathroom that smelled very much of shit.

Zoya was right, he was tired because he hadn’t slept on the train, and he should, now that he had brushed his teeth and shaved, sleep. But his being alone in the apartment kept him wandering around it.

Don’t panic, he told himself; don’t panic.

A wide piece of furniture against one wall consisted of cabinets at the bottom and shelves behind sliding glass doors at the top. All the books were in Russian, and propped against them were black-and-white photographs, curling about the edges, of slightly out-of-focus people in an apple orchard, the branches of the trees hanging low with fruit, and all the people laughing.

Joe put the photographs back on the shelf. He had taught himself to read the Cyrillic letters, but couldn’t make out any book that was written by Marx or Lenin or any Communist, though some of the books had their spines missing. And nothing, nothing at all in the apartment, referred to the history of the Soviet Union, and apart from the books, all that referred to Russia was, on a desk, a wooden bowl painted in a black-and-red, Slavonic pattern that was filled with pencil stubs, common pins, and pinecones.

He was making up the sofa with a bottom sheet and a blanket inserted into a cover that was like a large white envelope when he heard the door to the apartment open, and he called, “Zoya?”

A thrill of fear went through him at the sight of a large man in a large brown fur hat and a long, brown overcoat, unbuttoned and swinging open on his bulging stomach, his face red.

“Who are you?” the big man asked in American English, as if this were the only language he spoke and presumed everyone in the world understood—not because they understood English, but because they must understand him. He didn’t wait for an answer. “Were you the one who answered the telephone?”

“I—”

Again, the big man didn’t wait for an answer. “Where is Zoya? She was supposed to meet me. I waited five minutes for her in the snow.”

Joe wondered if the man was joking and laughed a little. “That’s long enough to die in the snow.” The man did smile a little, but not enough to reassure Joe that he’d been joking. “She was here, but said she had to go.”

“Who are you? Were you the person who answered the telephone when I called?”

“I—”

“Never mind who you are. Don’t go on making up that sofa, which is so uncomfortable you wouldn’t be able to sleep on it in any case. You can’t stay here.”

Wondering again if the man was joking, Joe asked, “You’re going to send me out to die in the snow?”

The man grunted in a way that might have been a little laugh. “Is that meant to be funny?”

“I hoped so.”

The man now did unmistakably laugh, and Joe relaxed. If Joe could make a person laugh, even a little, he felt that everything would be all right, that the person would like him.

But the man shook a hand loosely at Joe’s open suitcase and said, “You’ll have to close that and go. I told you you can’t stay here.”

He offered no apology and no reason for Joe not being able to stay, and he would not, Joe knew, wait to hear from Joe why he was there. His large face, made smooth by fat, was redder than when he had come in, with sweat running from under his fur hat and down his cheeks. His blue eyes were small and round and bloodshot. He turned away and left the apartment.

Joe sat on the sofa and looked about the room. He hadn’t noticed a pair of worn felt boots beyond the bookshelves, and a broken chair in a corner, and propped behind the chair a big, cracked, empty picture frame that had once been gilded. He sat for a long while.

With some effort, he got up and began to arrange his clothes in his suitcase so he could close it. There came over him once again not only the fear of being alone, but of being alone in the Soviet Union, where he knew there were rules and regulations that were strict and that he must obey. But he didn’t really know what these rules and regulations were. It seemed to him that by going out alone into Moscow he was going out into a world in which anyone could stop him and tell him that what he was doing was wrong, even carrying a suitcase in the street. He closed his suitcase and put on his overcoat and fur hat, and he went to stand by the window to look out at the snow falling more heavily, now covering the broken pieces of furniture on the balcony.

He was standing there when he heard Zoya call him and he turned to her.

Alarmed, she asked, “Where are you going?”

“A man came and told me I had to go, so I’m going.”

Zoya closed her eyes for a moment and in a low voice said, “So Gerald came here.” She opened her eyes and said, “I wanted you not to meet Gerald.”

“If that was Gerald, I met him.”

“He never comes to this apartment unless we have business. Why, now, did he come looking for me?”

“Maybe because when he telephoned earlier and I answered and said nothing when he asked for you, he came to check this place out. You were late meeting him.”

“But I was five minutes late.”

“He seemed to think that was long enough to die.”

The snow on her boots melting, Zoya walked around the room, trying, it seemed, to make up her mind what she should do now. “It does not matter if he met you. He will forget he did. He will not mind your staying here, because he will forget that he told you to go. Gerald says things like that, without even thinking of what he is saying. He doesn’t mean what he says. He doesn’t mean what he says because he doesn’t think of what he says. He says he minds waiting, but then, another time, he says he doesn’t mind waiting, for however long. You never know what Gerald will say. He says, only, what first occurs to him without thinking. And then he forgets what he said.”

“He seemed to mean what he said.”

“Please believe me. He did not mean it. If he came back now, you would see that he had forgotten to tell you to go.

Without even asking how you are, because it never seems to matter to Gerald who anyone is, he would tell you to sit down and would offer you vodka because that is what first occurs to him. And then he would tell you to stay in apartment.”

“Supposing something else, not so welcoming, first occurred to him?”

“With me here, only to tell you to sit down and to offer you vodka would occur to him. Gerald is always different when he is with me.”

She pulled off her hat and threw it on a chair, then took off her coat and threw that on the chair, then untied her boots and threw them from her. “I did not want you to meet him, but now you have.”

“Why didn’t you want me to meet him?”

“Because you are good, like boy is good. Gerald is not good, is too much of man to be so good as you are.” Swinging out a hand in a wide gesture, Zoya said, “Gerald is in our Soviet Union for the truth of what our Soviet Union is now, and Gerald is here to make money out of collapse of our Soviet Union. I mean, the collapse. You see, talking with you, I am beginning to remember to use articles.”

“What’s his business?”

Zoya put her hands to her face and held them there in silence, then she dropped her hands and stood. “I must go and find him and tell him I did not do in Petersburg what he expected me to do, and that I have put you up in this apartment. He will not mind either that I did not do what I was supposed to do in Petersburg or that you will stay here.”

“You won’t tell me his business?”

“It is business we have together.”

“What is that?”

Zoya approached Joe and pulled a little at both wings of his collar as if to bring him closer to look more deeply at him. He saw she was very tired. “You would not fit into our business.”

“You and Gerald are partners?”

“We have, in a very loose sense, what is called joint venture. In our country, joint venture has become Russian expression now. I was supposed to come back from Petersburg with someone who would fit into our joint venture, but I did not. In Petersburg, I thought, I won’t do it, it is stupid, all stupid. So I came back with you instead.”

“And Gerald won’t mind?”

“Gerald, I tell you, doesn’t mind anything. He doesn’t care about anything, not even our joint venture.”

“I’d like to know what that is.”

“I help find people who want to leave Soviet Union for West, and Gerald helps them to leave.”

“And why this apartment?”

“Here, people who are to leave in a few days stay while waiting. It is for people in transit.”

“In a way, as I am.”

“Let us go out and buy at least some bread and kefir for you to have in kitchen, in the kitchen. Do you know what kefir is, a yogurt drink? Kefir is still one good thing you can find in our Soviet Union. We will buy some if the lines are not too long in the shop.”

“I thought you said you had to see Gerald. I think you should see Gerald. Gerald might get angry if you don’t see him as soon as possible.”

“Yes, yes, Gerald.” Zoya bit her lower lip. “Gerald.”

She went to the telephone, dialed, but over and over the call didn’t go through, and angrily she jabbed at the buttons at the top until the telephone emitted a faint jingling ring, and when she dialed again, the call went through.