(from Glas 10)

We often discussed this question, tossed it around, but no matter how you looked at it, the subject remained in the realm of abstractions, although Sergei and I had met blacks at student dances, and once struck up with a Ugandan -- he had studied at the Sorbonne before coming to Moscow, could play the saxophone, and wanted us to find him a Roussian gerl - but, alas, he could not or would not introduce us to anyone, though we proposed a trade - one Russian girl for two black ones. From Soviet stories about black people, whose morals seemed far-fetched to us, we got only one thing: that even the meekest of male specimens is forever lusting after females of the opposite race, otherwise where would all the mulattos have come from? Indeed, dialectical materialism, a subject improvidently forgotten today but then forcedly learned by us, maintained that opposites must merge, yet where in the late sixties and early seventies of this century in Moscow were we to find opposites convincing enough? I remember we even made a bet in jest - a bottle of Bulgarian brandy for the first one to bed a black girl - but we were just fooling around and showing off, making fun of ourselves, since we didn't think we had a prayer, remember, Sergei? My unexpected good luck was all the more incredible.

Nothing could have been simpler: Sergei and I were crossing the bridge that goes from the old COMECON building to the Ukraine hotel, she was coming toward us, and I called out with a how-do-you-do. "How do you do," she called back, smiling with an unbelievable maw stuffed with ivory. We made friends on the spot and took her by the arm to show her "Moscow views", then swept her off to the Metelitsa where, aside from dealing pot nonstop in the bathroom, they served cocktails of bitter, greenish Italian vermouth - dirt cheap even for those days - we drank the vermouth with ice, jabbered in labored English, and suddenly I remembered a whole line from some song that was popular then: I vant to spend my life viz a gerl like you. I couldn't have come up with anything like that on my own, I leaned over to her, whispered the line to her, and she gave me such a surprised smile, so grateful and tender that, evidently, that is the moment from which one must date our fleeting romance.

Aside from being black as night, excellently, exemplarily, classically black, she possessed a remarkable quality - she was inordinately and vanishingly linear -- like the stem of a wine glass, and no one with even the slightest knowledge of human anatomy could ever have guessed how all those multifarious organs fit inside her. She was not tall, she came up to my shoulders, but because of her improbable composition she seemed very long, yet not at all thin; it was not thinness, but a marvelously artistic sleight of nature which had carved her proportionately from a single block. Never before had I seen such a slender waist, such smoothly elongated hips, such wrists and ankles, ears and neck. She was born in Jamaica, but lived in London, and had come to Moscow as an escort for a travel agency with a bunch of rich old English ladies in tow.

She was around 22, and hardly pretty by our standards.

She was unadulterated, or so it appeared, the African blood of her ancestors had never mixed with Indian or Spanish blood, but to me she was the entire Thomas Cook Travel Agency rolled into one - London sounded as exotic as Jamaica to us then.

Parting outside the Metelitsa, we agreed to meet that evening, just the two of us. I remember how I raced home - to change and get ready for our rendezvous - my first ever with a genuine, in every respect, representative of another tribe - here you had England, and the Caribbean, and the West, and dark skin, and not so much as a hint of the ghost of socialism which roamed untiringly through kindred countries, as through my own. The only hitch was that now there loomed before me the problem of how, exactly, to afford to paint the town with my unexpected black girlfriend. My finances were, as they used to say, in disarray. I did not receive a student stipend, due to my own sheer negligence, though I led a wild enough life, hung out in bars - inexpensive ones, albeit, where you brought your own - for days on end. The money was, of course, mostly my father's, but occasionally I was forced to go scavenging, though I definitely was not cut out for any kind of business. Sergei, on the other hand, was exceptionally talented when it came to commerce and, as I recall, we took to hawking cheap clothes - supplied to us by the mistress of a kindly Polish family - outside a shoe store at a 300 percent mark-up. There were other escapades too, that spring we had signed on with a student team to concrete the cellar of a building going up on the outskirts of the city, it was hard and foul labor, but when it was over it was cash down. Since I had been a permanent member of the team, whereas Sergei had only cemented from time to time, they paid me the money due him, and for some reason that money has yet to be returned to Sergei. I grabbed it then in the heat of the adventure that had overtaken me.

Meanwhile, that same summer I had been seeing a 25-year-old woman by the name of Lyudochka Sh. for whose profession there was no decent word in Russian, call her a hetaera, while I, in the language of Casanova, was her cicisbeo, and it may well be, Sergei, that some of your earnings then went to buy trifles, candy or flowers, for Lyudochka - I recall this, Sergei, with a sense of guilt at being your debtor - yes, candy or flowers, because our sojourns in restaurants were paid for, naturally, not by me, but by her swains, apparently French businessmen, famous hockey players or plain mafiosi, I was presented to them all as her cousin, and had to conduct myself in a pleasant, inconspicuous manner all evening only to bolt out the back of the National or the Metropole at the opportune moment with Lyudochka, or, having bid her admirers farewell at two in the morning, to set off in the opposite direction, turn the corner, and then fast as a shadow slip back in the entrance, into the apartment and into her bed, I winking at her, she pressing a finger to her lips, while the self-confident Frenchman rang belatedly at the blankly silent door. She was exceptionally good-looking, one of the most beautiful women I have ever known, and desperately daring to boot, I learned a lot from her though she also disparaged my importunate dream of foreign lands as an earthly paradise, and treated Europeans with a careless, even arrogant disregard. Her father was some sort of KGB foreign-trade functionary, and she possessed an exotic sleekness, an un-Russian clarity of mind, self-discipline and sense of responsibility, as well as a complete indifference, alas, to literature, hard as I endeavored to engage her in intellectual discussion, even going so far as to read some of my own stuff aloud, but this is all beside the point...

It's funny to think what the fashion was then. For a night out, let's say, I would don dark corduroy pants, green socks, light fake suede moccasins, and a brown fake suede jacket with fringe, but the clincher was the shirt - a black cotton print with little yellow flowers, a high stiff collar and extra-wide lapels. It was a flashy get-up, to be sure, and if you consider that back then I wore my hair almost down to my shoulders, you can imagine why my appearance might have appealed to exacting Jamaican tastes. That evening I took my little black girl to the hip and expensive cafe Adriatika - here there were almost no prostitutes, the service was polite, and they served pate in individual pastry shells, also cocktails and chilled champagne. We sat on a curved sofa in an alcove, imbibed Brut and chatted animatedly - her English was amazingly reminiscent of the English they taught us in school. I asked her if she went to Rolling Stones concerts, it seemed to me that living in London one had to do this, just as in Odessa one had to swim in the sea. It turned out that she had never been to a Stones concert, but together we whispered the words to "I Can't Get No Satisfaction", then she asked me if I had been to the place where that dead leader lay in state, and was shocked in turn to learn that there were Russians who had never been to Lenin's tomb. I launched into a canned anti-communist harangue, and she remarked that she was not a communist either, which struck me as strange - it seemed so obvious that a girl like her could not possibly be a communist, since she was born in Jamaica and lived in London. I went on to tell her that I was not even a member of the Young Communist League, or kom-so-mol, but this did not produce the desired effect, she did not suspect that everyone our age in the USSR was obliged to belong to this organization, though she diligently repeated the word kowm-sow-mowl, and soon we were kissing, she filling her mouth with champagne and siphoning it through my lips, it was, I must say, a strange if exceedingly pleasant sensation, though the champagne arrived slightly warmed, the alienness of her race bothered me not a bit. Of course, we were being provocative - it may be that people acted like that in London bars, pouring brut into each other mouth-to-mouth, but in the Moscow of those days such behavior was considered outlandish, though the people around us preferred to pretend not to notice. Kissing a black girl in the midst of the Great Soviet Power, I felt a rush of the sort of heroic enthusiasm that grips us when we decide to stand up for our freedom, -- the unacceptability of her London address was compounded by the color of her skin, and I knew that the former could attract the keen attention of the legal organs, while the latter could rouse the indignation of our quite racist society, - I was well aware of how my compatriots felt about Russian whores who got into taxis with those "blackassed boys", with those "niggers" and "darkies". A sense of danger, as we all know, only increases sexual excitement, but even so, when she slipped her slender, restless tongue deep inside my mouth, I realized it was time to beat it. We pocketed a bottle of Brut and caught a cab, I took her to Lenin Hills - to show her another view, figuring that in the darkness all cats are grey, and that in the park there would be no one to keep us from revelling in our African caresses.

We devoted maybe three minutes to surveying the panorama of the city. Arm in arm, we tripped down a steep path, and in a relatively level glade, dimly illuminated by the moon and distant streetlights, having drawn back into the shadow of some bushes, I embraced her and, in response, was lavished with such sweet tenderness as had never before been bestowed on me and which is generally scarce in these rushed and algid times. I unbuttoned her blouse, caressed her lovely little breasts and largish nipples, so hard they seemed made of taut rubber, and she arched her narrow, fragile frame as if dancing a dance. In turn, she unbuttoned my shirt and licked my skin with her hot tongue, her hips swaying to and fro. It was so secluded here, everything so made for immediate intimacy, only one circumstance, as ill luck would have it, held me back - I had just completed a course of treatment for the gonorrhea I had gotten from one of the girls at the Metelitsa. I probably could not have infected her, but I hadn't been tested yet, and I had signed the paper handed me by the morose doctor with the Beelzebubian beard and Coke-bottle glasses whose thick lenses made his Jewish eyes look simply monstrous. I remember that in between telling me to "Pull back the foreskin," "Show the head," and "Squeeze from the base," he castigated me angrily: "You're a student, you should use your head, not your cock," but after inspecting the culprit he remarked thoughtfully: "I suppose I understand you..."

I fondled and stroked her everywhere, dotted her black skin with a thousand kisses, pressed into myself as I squeezed her small buttocks beneath zippered slacks with both hands, my groin was on fire, my prick was ready to spring out of my pants, like a pup out of a kennel, but the prohibition was stronger than desire, and as we clambered back up the path, she may have been pondering the riddle of the mysterious Slavic soul, it seemed to her that there was nothing more beautiful than this Russian tenderness and sexual tact, though it was she who had given the signal to retreat, she said her English ladies might get angry if they needed something and she weren't there.

The embraces, the kisses, the caresses - they began all over again in the back of the taxi, though I, without looking, could feel how this irritated the driver. She embraced me again, passionately, on the steps of the Ukraine, seized my lips in her blazing mouth, even my cheeks it seemed, but here one did not have to be telepathic to sense the eyes of dozens of gumshoes and hotel informers trained on us. I tried to deflect her excessive displays of affection, but possibly she took this too for shyness, she was in Moscow for the first time and had no idea of how we did things. She asked me for my address, and I, cursing Soviet rule and myself, explained to her that it would be dangerous for me to receive her letters - even my father's purely scientific correspondence had to go through his department at the university. Then she asked: "But if you come to London, will you look me up?" And she handed me her card.

What could I say? Touching her fingers to her lips and then holding her hand out to me again and again, imprinting my face with myriad airborne kisses as she withdrew, she finally receded into the hotel, and the leaves of the revolving doors swallowed her up. I repeated her last words after her: "I'll wait for a letter..." And I kept her card for a long time. Her name was Elizabeth Smith. I never did write to her. And not only because letters without return addresses simply did not leave the country, while letters with return addresses were tantamount to self-indictments. It wasn't just that. It was that I had nothing to write to this black girl whom - and I knew this for a fact - I would never see again. What was I to write: that I had been cured of gonorrhea; that I still desired her and remembered her kisses; that I vant to spend my life viz a gerl like you, but that I live in a country where people do not choose where they go, that even inside the borders their movements are often choreographed by others; that I would never get to London because I was not a kowm-sow-mowl, and because I had never been to Lenin's tomb.

Translated by Joanne Turnbull