In the last six weeks Ruzya and Samuil have walked the length and breadth of Moscow. They have exhausted their repertoire of Mayakovsky poems. They have carried out comparative studies of ice cream served on street corners citywide. Like all young Moscow couples, they conduct their relationship in the street. Ruzya is still living in the cramped basement apartment with her parents and the twins, who are now eleven years old. (Her older brother, Yasha, is by this time a married man, no longer living in Moscow. A professional pilot, he has been test-flying planes in Sverdlovsk.) Samuil, his parents, and his teenage sister occupy two adjacent rooms at the end of a communal apartment’s corridor. On the one occasion the couple spent time there, when the rest of Samuil’s family was occupied outside the home, they overheard a neighbor’s loud lament regarding Ruzya’s too well-worn coat, left carelessly to hang in the entryway: the neighbor would have to report to Samuil’s mother that the boy was keeping inappropriately shabby company. From the pinched look on Samuil’s face, Ruzya gathered that, much as he would wish otherwise, his beloved mother was not above such concerns. They have stayed out-of-doors ever since.
There is no better time to walk the streets of Moscow than the months of May and June. An occasional chill provides the excuse needed to press close to each other, but it is never too cold to stand still and stare endlessly at the lights in the distance or at each other, struggling finally to say the obvious and finding no relief even after releasing the words that have crowded out all others. They have done all the known routes: the romantic Boulevard Ring, the animated Garden Ring, the foreboding, vast granite embankments of the Moscow River. They have lingered on bridges, under streetlamps, and next to monuments. They have taken that extra circle around the block, that extra ten minutes on the bench, that extra moment just inside the entryway of her building before parting. They have told each other about their exams—they are both finishing the fourth year of five-year programs—the pressure and the cramming, but still school has receded into a haze. They have told each other they are in love. Somehow, using interjections, silences, and sighs, they have now come to a new agreement: their relationship should pass into its next stage.
Their initial plan’s elaborate nature betrayed their fears. They decided to take a boat down the Moskva-Volga Canal. Samuil said it was an appropriate choice because the new channel, which connected the Moscow River to the Volga four years earlier, making the Soviet Union’s landlocked capital into a world-class port city, symbolized that in the future nothing would be impossible. What he meant, they both knew: their plan called for leaving town. Once aboard one of those beautiful new white boats, they would choose a stop—they all had names like Sunny Meadow and Green Harbor—to disembark and wander until they found seclusion in one of the parks that, according to the papers, lined the canal. They went to the river port early that afternoon—it was their day, they knew, because neither had exams on a Thursday—and stood in line for two hours. They felt a bit out of place among the white-shirted and straw-hatted families with shiny children whose very presence seemed designed for the neoclassical splendor of the port, with its alleys of round streetlamps lighting the approach to the white boats. Ruzya, at Samuil’s request, wore the rust-colored dress she had had on at the party where they met; he, for utilitarian reasons best left unspoken, had donned a trench coat. Trying hard to ignore the moms, dads, and nannies, all of whom, they felt certain, could plainly see their intentions, they engaged in that sort of regressive chatter couples in love easily fall into. He called her “Puppy” and held her large hands and told her he was ecstatic to be in her paws. She told him he had peas in his eyes and made a production of calculating their number: “4,817 little ones and 599.5 large ones.”
The line was cut off no more than ten people in front of them. There would be no more boats that day. It was as if some force had pushed them apart—they let go of each other’s hands and breathed their separate sighs of relief at the collapse of their thrilling and frightening plan—then allowed them to reunite, their bond cemented now by the momentary lightness of separation. “I now consider us husband and wife,” Samuil whispered, putting his arm around her.
They walked most of the way back into town: four or five hours, sore feet, and a new kind of planning. Now that they considered themselves married, what would they do? His parents were leaving for the dacha the following weekend, but the prospect of facing their friendly and nosy flatmates frightened Ruzya, who after that single visit to Samuil’s home was convinced his family would reject her. Her own parents and younger brothers were planning to leave in just over two weeks to spend the summer at a dacha Moshe had been building for years. He had a dream, a most bizarre one for an urban, educated Jew—he wanted to have a vegetable garden. This summer, finally, following years of scrimping and saving and countless arguments with his wife, he was going to commit his family to three months of digging, watering, and fretting. Once they were gone, Ruzya and Samuil could set up housekeeping in her parents’ apartment.
Today, three days after their failed boat expedition, they feel a new legitimacy. Separated for days by their exams, they meet now in town, she in the rust-colored dress and he in the trench coat, and they take the tram to Sokolniki, a giant park whose carefully trimmed alleys give way to what, in urban Russia, passes for complete wilderness: a mixed forest where squirrels and even moose wander virtually undisturbed. Ruzya and Samuil venture far enough to feel that it is unlikely they will be seen by anyone other than the animals. They lay down Samuil’s trench coat, and they become husband and wife.