Zoya

they met secretly--the black american and the russian's wife--grasping fragments of joy in a world of cunning and betrayal

There Are No Women in Moscow. Well, there are women and children, but no girls. Well, there are girls, but for whom? All claimed for the entertainment industries or the large oblong bureaucrats with their flapping pants or the officers smelling handsomely of leather.

He was strolling along across Red Square from his suite in the National Hotel. Ah, poor lonely Jim Mackton. A lonely, rich, black Afro-American in Moscow, doing a job for a great newsmagazine. Being horny was the worst of the job, even worse than trying to get some hard news, not just the press-department handouts, the same old denunciations, warnings, transfers, reminders, quotas, plans, new men in space and old space in the men.

Well, horniness was hard, but it wasn't always the worst. Work was sometimes the worst, a harassing day-to-day scramble with sources and notes and copy. For example, there was his problem with the Patrice Lumumba People's Friendship University. He thought it would be a good story. His African cousins, all threaded through a block of squat yellow buildings, were learning to be good Marxist engineers, learning Russian, learning to be good Leninist accountants, learning calisthenics, learning to put together their emergent nations, learning--what else? There were rumors of trouble. Some Moscow drunks had beaten up a Nigerian student they caught with a Marxist-Leninist white girl. The kids were being confined to quarters like untrustworthy basic trainees. The proletarian princes of Africa, Jim had heard--future engineers, teachers, scientists, leaders--felt insulted and injured.

Jim got a permit to visit the university. "Lumumba, Tuesday," were the words on his calendar. He tucked the pass into his wallet.

It seemed odd to gather so many different peoples--Yorubas, men of Dahomey, Senegalese, Nigerians, men from Ghana and Upper Volta--into this one spot which was so much like a compound, but maybe it made some kind of sense. After all, they did need to learn the common language for their studies. And they were all the same color, if you count brown, black and blue-black the same. But anyway, it did feel kind of gummy to Jim.

He took a cab to the locked flat yellow stone building. The driver waited. Jim wondered why, since he dismissed him and told him he would be spending the day. But the driver seemed to expect his fare back soon. At the door, a sentry stood in the familiar greasy double-breasted blue suit of the lowest rank of clerk. He admitted visitors in single file--a group of portly East Germans with pasty faces, a couple of Albanians with ruddy cheeks and handle-bar mustaches. A delegation of high school principals to inspect the storied halls of ole Lumumba U. Jim got in line and presented his pass. "Propusk," he said.

An official in a leather jacket stepped forward. He had been waiting for Jim. He looked at the pass but did not look at it. He took over for the clerk. "Nyet," he said. "Nein today. No visitors."

"Propusk. Pass," said Jim.

"Nyet."

Jim went pushy and insistent. The others had been let in. He could just join the group. He had been promised. He had a pass. Here, the pass.

An implacable leather arm barred the door. "Nyet"--with trouble coiled and waiting in that arm.

"You let them in!" he said to the owner of the leather arm, and hated the whine in his voice.

"Spetsialny propusk," said the guardian with a small smile. Well, he liked Jim's whining. It was one of the prerequisites of his job--make people whine.

Jim pushed a little, just to try. The man meant business. The answering shove had a lot of push-ups and put-downs buried among cracked folds of winter leather. The business was no business.

Jim returned to his cab. The driver also wore a little extra tuck at the mouth. Smile. OK, Jim smiled, too. He went back to the office to order a special pass. No go. No pass could be special enough. They were having exams at Lumumba. They were repairing the labs at Lumumba. They were busy at Lumumba. No visitors. No pass. No pass to the American Negro journalist.

Good. He'd get his story, anyway, and the no pass was part of it. He returned every day. He waited outside on the street. At different hours. Then at the same hour, so the students could find him. He talked with gangling blue Dahomans, fat Yorubas, narrow-eyed Nigerians uncomfortable in their flapping Soviet clothes. No matter what the rules, they had to be let out sometimes. They were guests of the Soviet people. He lurked, they lurked, they found each other. The African students were curious about him; they plucked at his gabardine trench coat. The Nigerians and the Ghanaians spoke English with a handsome lilt. And they told him their sad stories--isolation, mistrust, disorganization, homesickness, disappointment. They were sick of indoctrination. They wanted to learn. They were sick of group singing. They wanted some fun.

Then one day they walked by without turning their heads, or, rather, they turned their heads every which way but his way, and the tall Nigerian who had become a kind of pal and interpreter lagged behind a little, waggling his finger as a signal. Jim already knew his time was up with them. They had been threatened.

OK, he decided, and walked briskly off toward the bus stop. He would let the story ripen. Maybe he had tried to go too fast--the eagerness of the new man. He had been warned about this. Maybe he had gotten too interested in the African students and that was a mistake. But he would follow it up. He could be stubborn, too. ...

Pieces of paper, the tumbleweed of Moscow, blew in the dry summer wind at his feet. He climbed the long steps into the Moskva Hotel, palace of bedding. A doorman in a greasy coat stared at the door, hands in his pockets, as Jim pushed it open. The doorman didn't move. Jim walked around him. He followed the corridor to the main dining room.

He was in the huge pre-Revolutionary hall, the grand dining room of the Moskva Hotel. Smell of cabbage and waitress. The commissar d'hotel showed him to a small table drowning in linen, lamp silver. Above him swung a watchful chandelier. He was hungry. He was thirsty. He was alone. He studied the menu. He would eat and drink a great deal again tonight. His expense account covered all the goodies a fellow could buy. On the stand, the all-girl balalaika band--none weighing in under 180 pounds--played Stay As Sweet As You Are. Much food, much drink. Another night in Moscow. Much, much alone.

• • •

Mackton was industrious, agreeable and eager to make his mark. He went to the ballet, the opera, the theater. He sent notes to all whose names were given him by American journalists, French writers, Italian cameramen--friends of friends--anybody. Soon he began to break through the sulky fear and isolation. He partied at the National Night Bar, where a girl like a tucked-in, fatty sausage sat week after week, waiting, with that invisible sign hanging from her visible neck: Official-Foreign-Currency-Only Whore. (The girl looked sad. She not only had to perform her traditional labors; she also had to fill out reports afterward. And probably there was a camera fitted to her bedstead to check that she was giving good socialist realism. It kind of takes away some of the kick to know that the moment of unearthly joy goes into a file for possible future study.) He drank melted ice cream at the Gorki Street ice-cream parlors. He ate egg rolls in the penthouse restaurant at the Peking Hotel, and shashlik at Aragvi, where the Georgians broke into fistfights at midnight (explanation: "They're Georgians"). He got taken along to apartments in the House of Creativity, where writers, actors, directors and other artists lived pell-mell piled together, with a florist's shop at ground level so that tributes could be fired up pronto into the bedroom of an admired contralto or dancer.

Thus it happened, due to continuous cultivation, that he was invited to the summer dacha in Peredelkino of a famous critic, translator, collector of forbidden modern art, and police spy. Many thought him a rat, but he provided good food, jolly talk and, most important, was allowed to entertain all sorts of foreign visitors. So people watched what they said and went when invited.

The guests strolled on the porch of the large cottage and in the pine and spruce of the woods, where sandaled painters toted canvases from their studios and children played near a log-cabin library, built in the style of the traditional Russian izba, and everyone congratulated each other on the minty air of Peredelkino and on escaping brown, dusty Moscow, and expressed concern at the increasing weekend crush on the roads. Occasionally, someone slipped away to visit the grave of Pasternak.

The writers and artists have it good, he decided, yes, pretty sweet-smelling, summer-cottagey, woodsy good. So long as they are good little writers and artists like his host, the distinguished critic and police spy. There was ice, caviar, a samovar bubbling, vodka cooling and heaps of little gleaming-eyed fish and cheese with curly seeds embedded in it and slices of ham and morsels of cold chicken. And flowers, flowers everywhere. And Pasternak, hounded to death, his grave covered with flowers.

This was a village for "creative workers." They created in cottages of creativity and in hotels for creativity, and they led a rather monastic life, it seemed. Frequently, he would be stopped by a raised hand and a camera and a smiling creator who hustled about, stationed him in the sun and took his picture. "Photo," he would say.

"Photo," Jim replied.

"Spasibo thank you," the creative photographer answered, bowing. "Write. I send photo." And Mackton gave the new friend his New York address, which was what he wanted. He wanted to see a New York address written in the hand of a genuine New York Creative Negro.

Once a gay little bald chap sprang out of the bush, where he had been doing Mackton knew not what, crying, "Kodak!"

"Agfa!" answered Mackton in astonishment, hoping that was the password.

The man giggled and cried, "Medlinkov! My name! Playwright, critic, satirist, friend!" (continued on page 112)Zoya(continued from page 92)

When he returned, the party at Valodya's country villa was in pleasant progress. Flowers in little vases were losing their petals in the heat. Ladies in flowered dresses swelled pinkly under the influence of "Konyaku," which is a sweet yellow Soviet brandy, and vodka, which is pure glassy Soviet vodka, and tea and cheese with little seeds in it, some of them showing signs of sprouting. There was Finnish bread. There were smiles, greetings, jokes, explanations as the alcohol performed its good works; they forgot that some of them regarded others as enemies of the people, others as enemies of the state, while a few were marked down as police informers. Instead, it became simply a fragrant August day in Peredelkino, made for the enjoyment of the privileged and the creative.

And then she entered the room and his life. The first thing he saw was the sunburned part in her hair. Oh, that probably hurts a little. But she didn't seem to notice it.

She was smiling.

Pink sunburned part in the hair.

She was wearing an Italian knit dress, and just an extra pound or two beyond legally defined slimness; she was sweet-fleshed, healthy and she gave the impression of being astonished and delighted by the world.

Introduction. To his surprise, Jim already knew her husband's name, even some biographical tags. Dimitri Mest-chersky was colorful enough to figure in anecdotes--born "knyaz," a prince in the melancholy post--1917 Paris world of titled taxi drivers and patrician head-waiters. His talent was for ancient instruments--lyre, recorder, lute--and in a fit of sentimental Russianness, he took the amnesty and came home in 1945. Baroque music, though un-Marxist, was not anti-Marxist; and so, with his group, he gave concerts everywhere in the cities of the Soviet Union. His wife was called Zoya.

"Is it true," she said to Jim Mackton in excellent English, "my husband wishes me to ask you is it true, as you know he plays Rameau, Couperin, Bach, Baroque music using the old instruments, is it true, as someone told us recently, is it true...?"

She seemed nervous. Why should this fine lady be nervous before brown, nervous, smiling Jim Mackton?

"Is it true in America they play this music with electronic lutes? Amplified harpsichords? Treated recorders?"

"You're kidding," said Mackton. "You are putting me on."

"You are putting me off," Zoya said.

"OK, I'll answer you seriously. It's a confusion. I think your informant is thinking of the Swingle Singers or something--voices they use. And then maybe sometimes it's recorded electronically, but that's not how it's usually done."

She sighed. "We hear so many things. I read an article yesterday about the zoot-suiters. But I am reasonably sure----"

"Righto," said Jim. "You are right to be reasonably sure."

"You know tvist?" she asked.

"Tvist?"

"Tvistovat," she said. "Chobby Checker, Beatle, Rollingstone."

"Oh," he said gravely, "twist, yes. A few years ago."

"I know easily to pronounce vee and doubleyou," she said, "only I make mistake sometimes when I don't know."

"I wish I could mispronounce your language. But you speak beautifully, and your voice----" It was a rich voice, well imbued with her body.

They simply looked at each other after so much politeness and exchange of information. Their words had been foolish. The intention was clear.

"I think," she said, "I must take a walk in the woods."

"May I go with you?"

She smiled as if he had obeyed her command in the way that pleased her most. She set off, walking rapidly, without waiting for him. He understood that he was to follow her, "gradually," as he put it to himself. For a moment, however, he looked after that woman striding off into the pine woods of Peredelkino. She was already crackling twigs and not looking back. It pleased him that she was wearing sensible shoes, since the rest of her looked so Western and elegant.

A translator's girlfriend was asking him: "You are an American Negro?"

"Yes, my dear," he said.

"I see. You are a peace-loving American Negro, part of the world family of peace-loving peoples?"

"Deed ah do love peace," said Jim Mackton. "But mah family live in constant turmoil."

"Pardon?" said the whatzit's girl. Impatiently, he cut the English lesson short and ambled out to the woods.

The trail curved through leaves, twigs, dappled sunlight in bursts of fir. There was nobody on the trail. OK, she was going someplace. He would take a walk, anyway. His thoughts were peacefully monklike. His celibacy had begun to grow habitual; that is, he felt like a cucumber becoming a pickle, not knowing what was hitting him--vinegar, cloves, untimely souring in a barrel.

A crackle on the trail behind him. Zoya Mestchersky stood in a gleam of sunlight as he turned. She waved her handkerchief, then touched it to her forehead, as if to bless her brain, then hurried toward him in a silky, filmy float handkerchief, a springlike wiggle of firm flesh in Italian knit. "Hallo!" she called. She came toward him, lips slightly parted, laughing inwardly, bragging: "I was watching you from a tree. Like a Druid. I was spying on you like a CIA Druid, sir!"

"Hallo, funny," he said.

"You gave up very quickly, it seem to me. You forget me already."

"There's so much to remember," he said.

"You go for a walk alone. First you see me, then are happy to be alone."

"Not so happy," he said.

This brought a look of grammatical puzzlement to her face. She came very close to peer into his eyes, to stare at his mouth and his nose. There was more than syntax in her inquiry. He felt as if he were receiving his annual checkup three years late. He felt like surrender; he knew what a girl felt like, surrendering; he recognized this feeling, he did not like it, he took her in his arms.

And they stood together a moment in the middle of the path before they kissed. And then he pulled her off the path, someone might come along, he pulled her away, someone might see, he put his arms around her, he grasped, he took handfuls, they were kissing, someone might see, he pulled her off the path onto a crackling bed of leaves, he felt straps yielding, he felt her sudden hands reaching for him, for him, for him, a squeak came from her mouth, she was falling, someone might see.... "Oh, no!" she sobbed.

"Yes."

"Wait, wait, oh, wait."

And panting they untouched. They detouched. They let the hot humid air cool them. Crickets, other bugs. Shimmer off trees. They made plans swiftly. It was all decided in a few words, with no doubts at all. Whenever it starts, there are doubts, there are fears, whenever it is the first time, but this time there were none. They understood everything. And it began with this, as simple as this: She would come to his room in the little outer garden cottage in exactly 40 minutes. And now, to be careful, they must hurry back to the party separately.

First, before going to the cottage, Jim Mackton decided to eat a cold cucumber and have a glass of iced vodka.

She opened the door without knocking. It was on a leather thong; she lifted the thong. There was a passion for antiquity in Peredelkino--Baroque music, wide pants, fireplaces, leather thongs. And there she stood in the piny dark, embracing him a hundred yards away from her husband, and the distance steadily widening as they flew toward the Milky Way. Here in puritan Russia, Jim Mackton and Zoya found their little cottage in the woods, a few miles from Moscow. There were pine cones and the hot smell of sunlight on leaves, rather (continued overleaf) than ice buckets and Coke machines; and other things were different; and they flew, distancing the earth, plans, fears, expectations, toward the Milky Way and on through.

Afterward, he awoke--when had he fallen asleep?--and heard little scraping and slipping noises in the cottage. He opened one eye. She was straightening up where clothes had been flung. He closed his eye. He opened it again. Still picking up. Both eyes opened. "What the devil are you doing?"

"The chyort," she said, "is cleaning your mess. You were asleep, filthy person."

He pulled her to him, he fitted her body to his, he rocked against her, he rocked with her. She twisted around and looked full into his face. She kissed him, keeping her eyes open. His eyes open. They struggled. Nails, groans. She sighed. She turned her back to him to be rocked some more. Then he seemed to sleep again. She kissed him like a child. She was gone.

Later, a few hours later, he was in the crowd at the dacha again. It was time for midnight supper. Cheeses with exotic marbling, wine and brandy from the Caucasus, Georgian sausages and heaps of glistening, sugary sweets, all sharpened with iced vodka and then espresso coffee, black as night, made in a complaining machine some lucky traveler had brought back from Italy.

Jim tried to find on Zoya's face a sign of what had happened that afternoon. He knew her because he knew her. He knew her because he knew himself, a rage of relaxed good will, his soul expanded and his heart full. But she smiled and bestowed her smiles as impartially as if she merely sought to please a visitor.

He was about to guess what he would do if her husband spoke with him when her husband was speaking with him. "I understand, Gospodin Mackton, that Baroque music has become a veritable fad in your country. On radio FM, they say, there is sometimes eight hours of uninterrupted Bach and the sons of Bach. That is too much."

In this excellent English, he was inviting Jim Mackton to his Moscow concert the next weekend. It was sold out; it was filled with Komsomol lovers of Baroque, but would Jim like to accompany his wife, Zoya, to the concert, and then afterward, they could all have a little light supper together?

Her smell still clung to his fingers. Her husband was asking him to sit with her and watch him conduct from the harpsichord. They would form a long isosceles triangle, Jim and Zoya at the base and the nonprince at the public apex and the delicate shading of Komsomols in their red ribbons all between. What nonsense. What absurdity. What trouble this boded. What a ridiculous thing to ask. What a peculiar, silly, dangerous game. Why ask for trouble? Why risk so much? Why spend such danger on a girl, a flowered, delicate, tender, married girl? What a fool is the man who falls into that trap.

"Yes, I'd love to," said Jim Mackton.

As he stood at the doorway, saying goodbye to Mestchersky and his wife, Zoya, who stood smiling shyly at him, a chipper little voice cried out, "Kodak! And you answer Agfa!"

The bald playwright sprang up from nowhere.

"Hold!" he cried. "Workingman's camera! I smile, you smile!"

The three of them stood fixed in their own secret thoughts as Medlinkov shaded his viewer. Click. Bolshoe spasibo.

Many, many thanks.

• • •

Is it because she happens to fit the hollow place in my heart? Is it because she tastes so sweet? Both, both, thought Jim Mackton. She had come to his room on the fourth floor of the National Hotel, not far from the onion domes and cobblestoned expanses of Red Square. It was afternoon and they took this chance. They just walked along, past the hairy, frowning, bored old babushka stationed at the elevator, who accepted the laundry, kept the keys, reported all that went on. But today it seemed unnecessary to practice the usual deception by meeting under the Bolshoi Kamenny Bridge. They could go to the concert openly.

What mattered was the fantasy which, for no good reason, had come true for James H. Mackton, prudent dreamer. He had dreamed of the girl who would love him by magic, by virtue of a spell received from the gods or maybe the Devil. Therefore, no doubts or wavering and he could be free. He didn't have to do anything. He didn't have to be white or black. No performance required on Sunday through Saturday. She just loved him. He had connections with eternity and a little pull down at the universe. And, therefore, filled with lazy confidence, loafing like a happy American, like that dream of a happy American, he needed no spells, charms or magic. It had just happened; she had simply chosen him.

They had just time for essentials. As far as the elevator babushka knew, they were on their way to the theater. Down the wide imperial hall of the National Hotel, past the Chinese engineer in his shorts and the East German bureaucrat sweating for his convictions (black suit of thick black fleece), he shut the door, he shut the double door, he had already searched the floor and walls for wires. None. He was not important enough for the new pinhead listening devices. Likely, they would just use an old transistorized nest, if that. Zoya and Jim would take care and lip-read into each other's bodies, and they would take the chance because they had no choice in the matter. Love, love, sweetest love, whatever they try to do to us now. Lip-read, whispered, sighing words. Darling, golubchik, darling.

Inside Jim Mackton's room, his Zoya was a prisoner. It was Zoya's room and Jim Mackton was a prisoner. In this generous cell--samovar, table with shawl tablecloth, unused tea service, then nook with bed, hung with dusty velvet, and bathroom with tub which he could fill with reddish rusty hot water--both of them found freedom, air, light, no past and pure present and never mind the future. He took off her clothes. He looked in the towel compartment for a nest of wires--no wires. He kissed her body, her body, all of it. He tapped the rug for a speaker or connection. He turned on the radio--Tchaikovsky, followed by a panel, discussing the problems of Ghana--to wear over the sighs, sobs, undone cries. Afterward, he could not sort out when he had done what, against electronic intervention, against future loneliness, it all came together. There was not very much time. By now, the first arrivals were standing in line for her husband's concert.

"Open your arms," he said. She did. "You're a bird, you're a plane--you're superchick."

"Super chic? My clothes are Soviet products. I'm not wearing any. And shhh."

"An American joke. A poor American joke. A poor American joke but mine," he said.

"You crawl into the house of Baba-Yaga, the house on chicken's legs. You hide in folklore."

"What?"

"You see, we don't understand each other."

"But we do"--tickling her--"don't we, Zoya?"

"Perestan! Stop it! Yes," she gasped, "stop it, yes, we do, stop it!"

After lovemaking comes gossip, joking, ease. She never said anything critical of her husband; when she spoke of him, she spoke with warmth, as of an old friend. When he went prying, she laughed and tossed her head and did not answer. It did not interest her to diminish her husband. He felt like a happy brute; like a cat stretching and sleepy; like a dim, proud animal, bones all stretched and clicked into place. Then it was time to head for the Kremlin Palace of Congresses. They dressed.

They strolled down the hall, past the concierge with her gray monolingual head bent into the box of keys, and down four flights of the long curving stairway, past the restaurant and "Night (continued on page 194)Zoya(continued from page 114) Bar, Foreign Currency Only" on the second floor. They had decided against the elevator without discussing it. Although it was a few minutes before all curtains went up, they found a cab to the theater at once. It was a short bumpy ride. Her heels on the cobblestones were rapid, conjugal. Her hand fluttered against his a moment, leaving a blur of invisible signals.

Inside, the overflow crowd in its satins, medals and ribbons was smiling and intertalking--that was how Jim felt it--intertalking, intermixing with itself. He paid attention to the graspings, floatings, flutterings of the crowd, because he didn't understand the language. A line of desperate applicants at the ticket office was winding past a lady who was saying, judging by her face, no, no tickets for tonight. "Nyet!"--and she slammed down the window to her little proletarian cage. And then she peered out at Zoya and Jim as if she knew them or someone standing just behind them.

There were thousands of new plush seats in the theater. Each seat had a little desklike slab that could be pushed up. "For critics?" Jim asked his companion.

"For delegates," she said. "Also meetings here."

Replete, triumphant, exhausted, insatiable, he had this conversation with the lady by his side. Then her husband appeared in a spotlight. A sea swell of applause swept toward the man with upraised hands, then with bowed head. The lady was applauding. Jim Mackton paused a moment, then began beating his hands together while his knee lay against hers. She did not seem to notice. He stared. She felt his eye on her, made a quick smiling glance, pulled her knee away, went on clapping.

The hand was up at the harpsichord, commanding, like a five-fingered phallus risen from the delicate curve of the instrument. The hand struck the air down. Music commenced.

At last the intermission came; applause, bows, applause. Now they would go eat caviar on little pieces of bread, crowding among the other eaters, eating delicious little things and taking vodka and coffee. "You like?" Zoya asked.

"I like. But now excuse me."

Ahh, he thought, in the confraternity of a tiled men's room. This was like home again. The room was large, pink and white, and all in tile, and when you pulled the flush on the toilet of the new Kremlin Theater for Realistic Idealism, the pipes stuttered with a ghostly noise in the effortless liquid language of good American plumbing. None of that mute and gurgle and trickle of the French or the silent airless swallowing of Germany. No, no, a hearty mass hiccup of water, copper, pumps and steel.

More Baroque music ahead. Mackton dried his hands on the community towel. A small fat man with a portfolio stood watching distastefully, as if Jim's color might come off on the towel. None did.

Zoya smiling at him in the crowd with a red Komsomol ribbon pinned to her blouse. White blouse with ruffles at the buttons and that mysterious person inside.

She was smiling, smiling, smiling as he approached her, but he had an odd sense that she was smiling over his shoulder. She was not meeting his eyes. She was smiling like an unskilled dancer, looking elsewhere. He paused a moment. She did not move toward him. She was talking to someone, a man cut square, with a large mop of blond hair and a red neck, and she was looking past the man and smiling at a point just to the right of Jim's ear. And on that point, written in very small letters, visible only to him, were words he could suddenly read quite clearly: Watch out. Very bad trouble.

• • •

They sat together through the concert. Afterward, amid the din of applause, he said to her, frozen-faced, "I'm rather tired. Should I go backstage with you?"

"If you are rather tired," she said, equally stiff, "then perhaps you should return to your hotel and have a rest." Who was watching them? "I think that is always a considerate plan."

"Yes, I'll do that."

"Yes, I think you should."

He burrowed through the dense evening crowd on the sidewalk near the theater, then across a cobblestoned stretch of Red Square toward the entrance of the National Hotel.

Trouble? He would meet the trouble when it met him. But he could not sleep.

He turned away from the hotel to take a walk in the dim, nearly arctic gray midnight of summer in Moscow. Across the square stood the onion domes of St. Basil's and, nearby, the long low stone tomb of Lenin and Stalin from which Stalin had been quietly removed. During the day, lines of tourists--two lines, one for ordinary tourists and one for preferred guests of the state--waited to file past the purplish preserved body. Lenin's raiment sloped down to the feet without a rise--no toes, it seemed--horrid, horrible--Jim shivered. The guards, as featureless as toy soldiers at this distance, watching over a few silent watchers just standing in front of the building. Jim Mackton headed across the wide empty square.

Suddenly, a man was tugging at his elbow. "Psst! I am African!"

It was a young black man, hurrying along, pulling at his sleeve. "Student at Patrice Lumumba People's Friendship University! Please do not walk so fast, sir."

Mackton paused. He didn't recognize this one. "What do you want?"

"I am your brother. Your soul brother, I believe. I can get you two, three rubles to the dollar----"

"No, I'm not in business."

"Four."

"No."

Mackton was moving along rapidly, not running but concentrating on stride.

"Sir! Sir!" the boy hissed in a despairing whisper. "A brother! I want to get out of here. Perhaps you have a transistor you can sell me?"

"No, please, leave me alone."

"A ballpoint?"

Mackton paused, ready to give him a pen. But that, too, would be evidence. "No," he said and hurried on.

From out of the darkness came a last whispered plea: "Chewing gum?"

And then, at the receding sound of heels, a despairing laugh and cackle, "Soul brother?"

Mackton hurried toward the tomb of Lenin, as if to ask it: Why? Why was he afraid to make love with the woman he loved? Why was he afraid of a gesture of solidarity toward a poor student, a boy of a persecuted and unhappy race, which happened also to be his own race? Why was he afflicted with the horror of the vacuum at this hour and unable to accept anything that might relieve it, the solidarity of friendship and love, of ease and strolling, of just drifting on the moment? Why, Mr. Toeless?

At the tomb, there were a few shabby teenagers with silenced accordion peacefully folded and a guitar, also silent, and their voices--stilled. Nice kids, ripe and sullen. Jim's shoelace was untied and he started to put his foot on the railing to tie it. One of the two guards at the tomb pointed his rifle at him. Mackton laughed. The guard made a step toward him. Mackton shrugged and moved off clumsily, his shoe ill fitted to his foot. Then he bent, grunted and tied his shoe without desecrating the railing.

Well, it would be the same in Washington, he thought. You wouldn't want to put your foot on the Lincoln Memorial. He turned and looked back at the tomb. The door was ajar and two soldiers stood guard over the crack of blackness. To make sure Lenin didn't come strolling out? To make sure Jim Mackton didn't walk in to untie his shoelace?

He wondered now, at last sleepy, having had his walk, not having found who was following him and watching him: He wondered if there was the silence of a home and family between Zoya and her husband when they took a meal together. That domestic quiet and peace. Or what there was between them.

Up the four flights of stairs to bed. Key, please. The concierge handed it to him without looking at him. But she saw everything she needed to see: two feet, the black American.

When he reached his room, the telephone, which ordinarily did not work, was ringing. When he picked it up, there was no one. It was out of order again. He began to shiver and he knew that he could not sleep now.

• • •

In the dining room of the National Hotel sat clusters of the woebegone hungry, awaiting the pleasure of waitresses and cooks. It was between official breakfasttime and official lunchtime. A few among the widely spaced, heavily linened tables had obtained tea, cucumbers and bread; but the others, prisoners of starvation, sat mournfully with elbows on tables. At a serving ledge, a cluster of waitresses leaned against each other, apparently deaf to the cries of "Devushka! Pazhalusta!" Among the noneaters sat Jim Mackton.

Then two of the waitresses seemed to come unthawed. One came by with eggs on a tray. For someone else. Steaming cabbage soup with sleek eyes of fat floating on the surface. For someone else.

And then, for Jim Mackton, a woman hurrying past the clusters of waitresses, officials, malnourished tourists, toward the offices at the far end of the hall. This was not the straight way to those offices. As Zoya slipped by, her lips almost moved and she almost said, "In the subway entrance. One hour from now."

And she was gone.

Mackton looked at his watch and calmly noted the time. In one hour, he would be in the subway entrance downstairs at the corner of Gorki Street and Red Square. In 20 minutes, he expected a messenger from his office. He had done a story on the reaction to the recent traveling exhibition of American architecture. This was the sort of thing that gave Soviet citizens a real idea of how Americans lived; Jim had noticed that they picked up their little Stars-and-Stripes lapel flags and wore them as they left the exhibition hall.

The messenger came to his table. Mackton gave instructions about airmailing it. He liked writing these unspectacular service articles. They were more important than another gas bubble from a foreign minister. He was keeping track of things. He was also watching the flow of toys to GUM, the state department store, and the flavor of the beer sold in the Stolovaya, the neighborhood cafeterias, and glacial changes of mood among the visiting East Germans, Hungarians, Albanians and the few remaining Chinese. Like a Mississippi Negro learning to deal with the friendly Kluxer at the gas station, he read the subtle shifts from affability to murder on the faces of men who had endeavored to kill all local expressions. His ancestry prepared him for the job.

The messenger took the envelope and touched his little cap, which for some reason said Mercury on it. A joke of Jim's predecessor. The messenger left, no wings on his feet.

He strolled down the wide stairway into the lobby and past the Intourist office, where groups of visitors awaited their guides, translators, chits, tickets, cars, instructions. He had an odd sense of being blacker than usual--stares and elbows nudging at the progress of the tall, glum, limber young man in a blue Dacron-and-cotton summer suit of the Ivy cut of five years ago, heading out toward Gorki Street. He felt like more of a spade this morning.

He blinked and gazed out over the hurrying Moscow crowd--hurrying to work, to shops, to appointments, and a few students hurrying around the corner to the branch of the university founded by Lomonosov, the peasant scientist who came to Moscow by foot in 1730 and.... But Jim ducked into the underpass that led to the subway.

Zoya was there.

She saw him and started walking. He followed.

When she got on a train, he squeezed into the same car. She seemed not to see him. When she got off, he got off. It was in a neighborhood he did not know. She walked rapidly. He kept his distance. Suddenly, she turned onto an unpaved street with rutted dried mud like a map of the moon. Just a few steps from the corner stood an izba, that medieval Russian house, a log hut built a little like a squat tepee, with a peaked roof out of which a smoky fire curled.

Zoya had disappeared. Mackton looked into the izba and, suddenly, something seized him about the neck, pulled him in, and a furious laughing creature was squeezing and pummeling him, shrieking with laughter. She was weeping and laughing. She was hysterical. He stroked and calmed the hot child's body. She felt feverish. "No, no, I'm not ill, I'm, I'm, I'm----"

"What?"

"I'm glad you are here. I was frightened. I was frightened to lose you! I'm glad."

He kissed her in a long unbroken line from the corner of her eye across her body, down, down and down her leg until his lips clasped her ankle.

"Let me wet your lips," she said. She kissed and kissed him and followed his path, but adventurously, finding her own route. They followed their own roads. They shared the separate journeys.

Afterward, he lay looking up at the log ceiling with his eyes open, as if trying to remember something. He was memorizing the striations of pine logs. He was imprinting this moment forever. He was trying to recall something else, the world, the present and the future which must be put in the old order once more, even after love, after the unalterable change.

"Do you love me?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Do you love me?"

She smiled with heartbreaking tenderness. She was shaking her head no. She said: "Maybe. I wish I could. Yes."

They slept enlaced together. When he awoke, she was staring at him. She touched his mouth and then pressed the finger to her lips. Then she rested her hand on his shoulder as if she loved him.

Her gold-flecked green eyes, the lashes blinking. Smiling. Pity.

At that moment, as he awakened in response to her shifting weight, he heard first a sound and then it happened. Or perhaps first it happened and then there was the sound. At the window, in the dim half-light of the perpetual dusk of this place, a flashbulb exploded. Surely they could have taken the photograph with sensitive film and without the flashbulb. But perhaps it was just their way to let him know and then to let him think about it.

• • •

Waiting, he lay in bed in his fourth-floor room at the National Hotel, listening to the trucks hosing down the stones of Manezhnaya square outside his window. On the transistor he heard the chimes of the sweet little tune, Moscow Nights, he thought it was, with which Moscow Radio marked the time changes. There were trucks loaded with water on the square, and then they were followed by the heavy-ankled, waterlogged old women hunched over their birch brooms, sweeping and sweeping in circles. Without getting up to go to his balcony, very tired but wide awake, he could see those women--the kerchiefed babas, stupefied by deprivation, of the generation which had lost its fathers, brothers and lovers in the War. Twenty million of them.

But it was the middle of the night and he could not sleep and his blood pressure was down and his temperature depressed and his pulse fluttering and he knew they would come for him before dawn. Twenty million. But what had he done? He had fallen in love with the most beautiful woman in Moscow. Married, yes. Twenty million, yes. He was not only frightened; he felt guilty. This selfish conscience would not have risen up in the night if he had not been frightened.

Once he heard a siren and stiffened. But they would come to him silently, smoothly, sleekly. It was only a motorcycle accident, a heart attack, a doctor speeding someplace.

He was almost asleep, or at least dulled, unconscious, his muscles sore with the waiting, when he heard a discreet knock. At last. He put on his robe and went to open his door. There was a little Chinese in nylon shorts, pointing, pointing, pointing around the corner into his room.

"What do you want!" Jim tried this in every language he could think of.

The Chinese kept on pointing. He was naked except for the transparent nylon shorts. Suddenly, Jim began to laugh. He wanted to use the toilet, he didn't have one in his own room, and he couldn't find the one down the hall. Mackton welcomed him with a low, bowing gesture. The Chinese smiled. He hurried in and courteously left the bathroom door ajar, so that Jim could see what he was doing--not gobbling his vitamin pills, using his soap or poking through his laundry. He was having a few difficulties, he grunted, but occasionally he would lean his head through and make a modest little grin of gratitude and apology. Here we are, Jim thought, the triangular suspicious powers: the Soviet Union foreboding, America bewildered and China constipated.

We don't trade with China, he thought, but we let her relieve herself under our auspices.

I still have the best facilities at the best hotel in Moscow. Not the suite used by General De Gaulle, but the second or third best, maybe. The fourth best.

The poor Chinese engineer--mechanic? textile salesman? bookkeeper?--was still imprisoned in his digestive tract when three plainclothesmen came through the open door, surprised to find it open and a lamp lit.

"Come with us," one of them said. They paused, as if considering whether to drag him, until Mackton began to dress. But they waited. They allowed him to dress.

They showed no particular astonishment at the Chinese using the toilet, and they ordered him along. Meekly, though he had not finished, he obeyed their order. He did not seem to be surprised by this. Barefooted, in his nylon shorts, he padded down the deserted hallway a half step behind Mackton and two cops. The dozing concierge with her open drawer of keys barely blinked as they passed. The third cop trailed behind. Nothing surprised the old lady. But she should still react somehow.

What kind of unholy alliance was this between black American (brown) and Red Chinese (yellow)? she ought to be wondering.

They were put in separate cars. The naked Chinese, shivering in the predawn chill, showed no more emotion than if he were being sent off to be shot. Mackton never saw him again.

They drove, but not very far. The police said nothing. They sat comfortably slumped in their seats, at ease with themselves. They had the bad gray color of men who slept through the day.

They drove through a guarded porte-cochere. It must have been a pre-Revolutionary house. There was a rambling garden of stunted, branchless trees and a dry fountain with a disconsolate, beached Poseidon with a broken fork. Jim felt a little easier: not a prison. The door came open for him. He was escorted up a handsome wooden stairway. Paneling, mahogany, railings. They put him in an anteroom with hangings on the wall and a table with an unused samovar and a tea service covered with a linen cloth.

And then they let him sit. An hour. More than an hour. He was tired and cold. Dawn had come. When he tried to open a door, he found a man with a pistol guarding it. Who just said, "Nyet, nyet," and shut the door gently in his face. "Postoyte," or something like that. It must have meant: "Wait."

Then why did they come to get him so early, if they were waiting till regular working hours anyway?

The man at the door opened it and stared at Jim. He wore black shoes with lascivious, bellylike humps at the toes. He was sipping a glass of steaming tea. When Jim caught his eye, he slowly closed the door.

A ray of sunlight came through a high curtained window. Sunrise. He stretched; he tried to ease his back. He was thirsty. He went to see if there was any cold tea in a cup near the samovar. There were tea stains, the cup had not been washed, but it was dry, evaporated.

It seemed that he was figuring how long before inquiries might be made by the American embassy--too long. He waited. And then, despite the thickening rays of sunlight, he was asleep, swaying slightly, as if in an all-night coach car heading through Washington, Virginia and down along Route 1 toward Augusta, Georgia, where he had been born. The porter was shaking him gently and saying, "Boy. Hey, boy. ..."

"What? what? Oh."

A sallow young man in high boots but civilian clothes led him into the next room. Jim tried to force himself awake and frightened. He was dimmed out and sleepy, and when he felt the young man'; guiding hand on his arm, he knew that the tea had been drugged. And then a convulsive urge to smile: He had taken no tea. It was a dream of tea. He was worn out by Zoya and fear and waiting and a night without sleep.

A short thick man rose politely to greet him. His crop of streaked blond hair was combed high and fluffy to give him an extra half inch of height. He had a fine healthy smile.

"So sorry to keep you waiting it was a mistake our appointment for nine o'clock sit down," he said. Evidently, he had learned excellent English but had forgotten about the punctuation. "OK?" he asked.

"All right," Mackton said. Keep light on the feet, he thought. Don't get caught.

"You are a Black Muslim like so many American Negroes reactionary religious orientation?"

"No," said Jim.

"Then why Muslim literature in your baggage?"

"I'm interested. I read many things. I read Stalin, Marx and Lenin, too. Do you worry about what all foreigners read?"

"This is the tourist office we are only asking."

"This is," Jim said very deliberately, trying to slow him down, "the police office. You are a cop."

The man looked puzzled.

"Policeman. You work for the KGB."

A look of hilarity took the man's face. "Please we no longer use those initials we have changed the words."

"All right," said Jim. "You can put me straight. What's bothering you and what do you want?"

The man sighed. "All right I will be short with you." He stood up and, sure enough, he was short with Jim. He was barely five feet, six, hair and all.

"We believe you are exchanging money illegally. We believe you are importing nationalistic literature and infecting our African students where in the Soviet Union we are all brothers. You have no right to cause dissension only dissenters are not brothers in the Soviet Union. You dissent our happy African students from formerly colonial independent nations. Drip your bourgeois poison in the U. S. of A. what about your suffering comrade darkies in the South?"

"Hold your horses," said Mackton. "No money exchange. We call ourselves black, comrade. Haven't you heard of that? And any literature I brought in was for my own use and education. I am a journalist. I read professionally. I meet people professionally. All this is nonsense, colonel."

"Nonsense that you are a profiteer a bourgeois dissenter a smuggler?"

"Yes, polkovnik," said Mackton.

"You know polkovnik means colonel? You speak more Russian than you say. But I am not polkovnik I am civilian officer in tourist bureau."

"Get to the point, officer."

"You also debauch our Soviet womanhood." And now the man suddenly found periods and full stops. He was catching up with the ones he had omitted earlier. "She. Works. For. Us. We. Have. Pictures." He shrugged a moment, as if sharing with Jim his troubles with women. Women were like that--between men, yes? "It would have been more intelligent to find one of your own, if you wished to make----" He paused for the word and looked at the girl secretary seated at the baize table, writing in shorthand in a tablet.

"Sex, dirt, jigajig, fornication, copulation, abomination," she supplied tonelessly.

"All those!" the man shouted.

Jim, studying Russian, had learned the word toska, which means nostalgia, loneliness, longing for you know not what, homesickness, perhaps, the horror of the vacuum. But this was a man who could not understand the word in any language, nor what Jim sought in Zoya, nor what he had found despite everything. Was she employed to entrap him for some idea they had? No. No. He would not believe it. He had thought about it already--that she was deceiving her husband, her husband looked into her eyes and saw the meaning of his life and it was a lie, just as Jim had looked into her eyes so recently and saw--what? The meaning of his life. A remedy to the horror of the vacuum, to toska.

"I had no other ideas," Jim said.

He was squinting. The man's pink face lay in shadow. The sun now full through the window was falling exactly on Jim's eyes. Ah, the room had been laid out that way. A disadvantage in bending and squinting against the white sunlight. Was that all the advantage he needed? It was the middle of a workday morning and the light was shining hard in Jim Mackton's eyes.

"I am only a private individual, a journalist," said Jim. "What are you plaguing me for?"

"Plague?" asked the man of his secretary.

"Pestilence, epidemic disease, highly contagious illnesses carried by rodents, small insects, microbes," she said.

"Ah insults," he replied. "And could not you wait several months until your leave to use a hired woman in Paris or elsewhere?"

The girl's pencil was mounted in air like a bug killer, waiting to spear flea or bubonic-carrying word. "I was.... It was ... happened," he said.

The man looked pleased. Now things were going the right way. He enjoyed the subject's confusion. "'I was it was happened,'" he repeated to the secretary. "We know how to understand that, sir." He looked at him with great joy. "'I was it was happened' signifies you debauching Soviet womanhood and we prove it disgusting revolting filthy pictures of African and Russian marching together jigajig brotherhood humanity----" He paused for breath and for syntax. He was breathing hard. "All. Right. Now. I. Tell. You."

He rattled off the Mackton dossier, reading from a folder open on the green-baize cloth of the table. Jim Mackton sat blinking and amazed. His eyes hurt. He thought of the American tourists and scholars mysteriously detained, of the student who committed suicide on his way to Siberia, of the international protests followed by international silence.

Motes of dust floated in the sunlight. The secretary's shorthand pencil flew on her tablet. Jim thought of a child arguing his innocence in a dream. They were all toy figures in a child's dream, proving the virtue of some invisible dreamer.

But then his interrogator stepped out of the dream, with his swollen blond face, his wide pants, his thick, wavy blond hair, the unreliable reds of his eyes. "And," he said. "Without. Doubt." He was ready to speak of Zoya. They had pictures. If you make trouble about Lumumba students, he was saying, we will show how you debauch our women--in what perverse, unhistorical, bourgeois fashion--you, an African corrupted in bourgeois America.

Time stopped, soundless and motionless. The blond face was a portrait, caught in an ugly mood. The pencil was silent. Even the dust motes hung arrested in the air. Jim felt the chill of remote prison camps and iron circling his wrists. After a long, long time, the voice started up again, "And now we show Soviet mercy and contempt for one who. ..."

• • •

They took Jim under guard to Cheremetyevo airport. Hopelessly, he scanned the faces of the women in the waiting room. He was still staring back when they put him aboard the Aeroflot Ilyushin. From Paris, then, by train to Le Havre, and then the liner that would take him on leave to the States. The tourist season was over. A few passengers walked round and round the decks, seeking an exit from melancholia. Others quickly found the exit, drunk and singing at the bar, or squirming against each other in their cabins, or telling the stories of their lives to new victims in wind-shielded, salt-rinsed places. Jim was up at the brief, reddened dawns, before the North Atlantic took control of the day.

A few months later, a traveler in Paris mailed a letter to Mackton at his new post in the Ottawa bureau. All it contained was a print of Medlinkov's snapshot at the door of the dacha in Peredelkino. It was a photograph, of sun, dappled air, lovers with a summer space between them that shivered with yearning. She had folded and folded and torn away the side of the picture which included her husband.

A faceless traveler had searched through his magazine's masthead in Paris and found his name; this cry had come in the mail. He would never know if Zoya had been compelled to be the snare with which they caught him. He hoped that nothing would give him the answer all the rest of his life.

Henceforward, Jim would learn to live with a roll of dead film around his heart.