Fellow Travelers by James Cook Page B

regret it.”
    But I wouldn’t. My acting career I could let go. But not Katya. I had never been so happy in my life.
    We spent a lot of time in bed, but up also wandering all over the city, to the museums, churches, monasteries, parks, the dance halls in the country, the food stores on the Okhotny Road, and the private ones on Hunters’ Row. In the churches, she would always want to kneel down and pray but the curators had installed ropes to prevent the faithful from exercising such primitive behavior.
    I was not enchanted with Moscow, however. It was a barbaric place, partaking of all the multitude of things that the Russian empire had absorbed. It was at least tolerable in the summer. The nights were only two or three hours long, but the weather was bearable. You could forgive the heat, the sultriness that came off the river, because of the explosion of greenery that filled every niche of the city from April on.
    What Katya loved was the Rolls Manny bought, complete with chauffeur and built-in bar. She had never ridden in a car before, never mind a Rolls Royce, and the first time we went for a ride she was transported by the experience. She plumped herself back on the seat cushions, rolled down the windows, and waved at the people watching enviously outside. She had become one of the nobility, one of those women from the great estates at home riding down those dusty roads in Byelorussia. We drove all over Moscow and out into the country. If the car broke down or if the road proved impassable, we would abandon it and the chauffeur and find somebody else to take us back into town.
    The Rolls always made me uneasy. It was somehow the symbol of all the things the revolution was supposed to sweep away, the image of privilege and power. But nobody else seemed to feel that way. Katya was delighted with it and the general populace was too enchanted by the automotive marvel to turn their envy into malice.
    In winter, the city was eerie, hidden, hermetic, turning in on itself to escape the encompassing cold. Night came soon after noon, and everybody hurried to get inside. The sidewalks bustled with scurrying people and the streets with the whoosh of traffic moving on runners—miniature sleighs with plodding blowing arthritic horses. The wind tugged at your face, your hands, the cold went for your feet, your thighs, your shoulders, and you took on whatever armor you could—sweaters upon vests, jackets upon sweaters and vests, great coats upon jackets, furs and scarves and hats and mittens and gloves, leggings, boots, galoshes, and when nothing else served to keep you warm, you beat your hands against your chest and stomped your feet on the snow.
    For Katya and me there was nonetheless joy and laughter. We would burst in out of the cold, tingling and red-faced, frosty-eyed, stiff, with hearty, uproarious laughter bubbling up from deep inside, as if two people who could endure all this could endure anything When you went inside, the heat struck you like a blow. The heat, the moisture, the smell. There was no ventilation anywhere, the doors were doubled and tripled against the cold and the windows taped shut. Even the Grand Hotel smelled of kerosene, stale cooking and bodies too long lacking warm water for a bath. The hotel’s community toilets, little better than indoor latrines, sent their odors out past the potted palms in the lobby, where two enormous stuffed bears with trays on their uplifted paws invited you into the dining room. I remember cold beer and hot mushrooms at a café on Smolensky Street, a pitcher of warm vodka at Pegasus’ Stable, with grated lemon peel floating on top like the pollen of sunflowers.
    If I close my eyes, I can almost recover my memory. I can summon up tones of her face, the light in her eyes, and the sounds of her laughter. But never herself. She has gone, lost in my memory, along with the rest of me.
    For a time she left me her Russian speech. By the end of that year we