The Wanting by Michael Lavigne Page A

lines. Perhaps it was because she was so unlike Irina that I hadn’t really noticed her. I’d only gone out to talk because I couldn’t take another round of songs.
    I tore my eyes from her and took in the view, which was nothing but the haggard apartment house across the street. “Aren’t you cold?” I asked.
    “I’m fine,” she said. “I don’t mind it at all.”
    “I guess it’s better than the music.”
    “I don’t mind that, either.” She took a long, luxurious drag on her cigarette, let it drop from her fingers, crushed it under her high-heeled shoe, then bent down and picked it up.
    “Here,” I said. I took the cigarette butt from her, slipped it into my jacket pocket.
    “Let’s go for a walk,” she suggested. “I’m bored.”
    She grabbed her coat, put on a pair of leather gloves, a fuzzy pink scarf, a little woolen beret. We rode the elevator down and stepped out into the black Moscow night. All the apartment windows were dark except for our hosts’, and most of the lights inthe courtyard had long ago burned out, though here and there a putrid glow spilled from a lamppost onto the broken pavement. We made our way through the underpass and out onto the street.
    “Let’s go down to Razina. I like to look at the churches,” she said. From where we were we could easily walk, and we strolled along like any couple, me with my hands in my pockets, she with her arms folded in front of her to ward off the cold. Across the way, a drunk was falling against a telephone pole; down the block, another lay collapsed in a doorway. There were almost no cars on the streets, of course, and the buses and trams had already been garaged for the night. Every so often a taxi would swing by, slow down, then move on, or a traffic cop in his Lada would speed by—sometimes these would slow down, too, but in the end, they just waved us along.
    “So,” she said at some point, “you are the great Roman Guttman.”
    “I have a reputation?”
    “But that’s a good thing, isn’t it? No one wants to be anonymous.”
    “In our country,” I said, “everyone wants to be anonymous.”
    She laughed.
    We walked down Chernyshevsky, and I pointed out some of the old houses—the Apraksin Palace, the Botkin House—and explained how they were constructed, some of their history.
    “I know all this,” she said. “Talk about something else.”
    “Well, that’s where the old Church of the Ascension used to stand, but then Stalin tore it down. You may not have known that the decorative element around the bell tower was the Star of David atop a seven-branched menorah.”
    “I did not know that,” she admitted.
    “Well, there you are.”
    “Isn’t there anything else you like to talk about?” she asked. “Other than palaces and houses?”
    “I like constructivist architecture as well,” I replied.
    “Ah.”
    “I’m joking,” I said.
    I looked to see if she was smiling, but her scarf covered her lips, and her eyelids were closed. When she looked up again she said suddenly, “I’ve applied for Israel twice already. That makes me a refusenik. Does that bother you?”
    “No.”
    “I think it does. Your crew isn’t political, I know that.”
    “Why should it bother me?” I said.
    She slipped her arm through mine. “Never mind. Look at the sky. See how peaceful it is! It’s almost morning, isn’t it? The dawn has crept up on us, like a thief.”
    “I think we still have a few hours yet till dawn,” I said.
    “Even so …”
    Razina is a tiny street, very famous for tourists and architects, that runs more or less easterly from the southern tip of Red Square toward Nogina Square and Kitay Gorod. It lies somewhat lower than the modern street level, as if you were walking through a little gully of antiquity. The old houses are preserved, as are a series of small, beautiful churches. I wanted to tell her about these churches in some detail, but I resisted, and in the quiet that followed she said, “I used to