The Mammoth Book of International Erotica

returning from the Army that he was the only person with a high-school education in his detachment. While intellectuals were generally despised and abused, he wasn’t. His will to power won. He made the soldiers polish his boots; they squatted in front of him brushing away methodically every bit of dust. He had liked it. He said that of all the things in the world, he loved power the most. Anya assumed he was still into Nietzsche. By the age of 21 he was chosen to enter the Communist Party on a special basis, that is two years before the official age of eligibility which was 23. During the 1980 Russian Olympic Games – the last epic event of the Brezhnev era – Misha was elected to the Leningrad Olympics Committee. He had called her then, appearing very friendly and promising to get her some Ceylon tea which had long since vanished from the stores and could only be acquired by the privileged few.

She couldn’t forgive him that tea for a long time. Maybe it wasn’t the tea itself but his tone of voice… That year she had become something like an internal refugee and had to leave the university, “voluntarily expelled”. She applied to emigrate and soon after that friends stopped visiting her. Occasionally they would call from the public phones and speak in strange voices, and then when something squeaked in the receiver, they would say goodbye: “Forgive me, I’m out of change. I’ll call you later.” Anya ran endless errands, as a therapy against fear, collecting inquiry cards and papers – spravki - to and from various departments of Internal Affairs… And yes, good tea was hard to get in those days, especially the sweet and aromatically prestigious Ceylon tea. She often imagined meeting Misha somewhere in the noisy subway, in the middle of a crowd. He would be proudly wearing his fashionable brand-new T-shirt with the winking Olympic Bear, made in Finland “I’ve been transferred to Moscow, you know,” – he would shout at her. “I’ve been very busy lately.” “Me too,” Anya would shout back. “I’m emigrating, you know…” She knew she would be compromising him at that moment, that she would be saying something one didn’t say in public, something one could whisper in private only and never over the phone. A few strangers would conspicuously turn around to look at them, as if to photograph Misha’s face and hers with their suspicious eyes. And then Misha would blush, in his unique girlish fashion, his cheeks turning embarrassingly rosy, like in those teenage years, and he would vanish into the crowd.

But all of this was many years ago, and Anya no longer had any problems with tea. Those fragments of intimacy with Misha and Sasha, those tactile embarrassments and unfulfilled desires were the few things that remained vivid in her mind from the “era of stagnation”. Those incomplete narratives and failed perfect moments were like fragile wooden logs, unreliable safeguards on the swamp of her Leningradian memory which otherwise consisted of inarticulate fluttering and stutters, smells and blurs.

Anya had already performed some of the obligatory home-coming rituals but they had been too literal and therefore disappointing. She had walked by the aging but still cheerful Gorky on the now renamed Kirov Avenue approaching the windows of the Porcelain store that now sold everything from grilled chickens to “Scottish Whisky” and Wrangler jeans. Across the street from the square with the monument to the Russian inventor of radio (whose invention, along the others, is now questioned) she searched in vain for the shadow of Lenin made of red fishnet. The house where she used to live was under repair and on the broken glass-door of the front entrance she found a poster advertising a popular Mexican soap opera “The Rich Cry Too”. Otherwise the facade looked exactly like it had in the old days, but it was more like an impostor of her old house, a stage set that was a clumsy imitation of the original. Anya climbed up to their communal apartment through piles of trash. The place looked uncanny. The old communal partitions, including the secret retreats of Valentina Petrovna who had borne witness to her teenage romances, had been taken apart and the whole narrative of communal interaction was destroyed. On the floor she found telephone wires, worn-out slippers and the broken pieces of a French record. She looked through the window: black bottomless balconies were still precariously attached to the building, inhabited only by a few rootless plants. A lonely drunk was melancholically urinating near the skeleton of the old staircase.

“Comrades, Ladies and Gentlemen. Remember who’s the last in line and don’t let in anyone else. Can I trust you?”

“But, of course… We’re all family here, miss. We know who’s in line and who’s out, who’s with us and who’s against us…”

“Hurry up, comrades. Fill out your inquiry cards neatly. Be sure to include name and patronymic, place of birth, nationality, permanent address… We’re short of time here…”

Indeed we’re short of time, thought Anya. We are all only a phone call away from each other. Misha, Sasha, let’s all get together… Let bygones be bygones – God, we used to learn so many proverbs in our English classes and then never had the occasion to use them… Let’s chat, remember the golden seventies, have a drink or two. What do you think? There are a lot of blank spaces in our life stories, and we don’t have to fill them all, it’s OK. We’ll just have fun. Let’s meet in some beautiful spot with a view, definitely with a view. We don’t need broad panoramas, no. And I don’t think the Church of our Savior on the Blood is such a good place either – (I heard they took the scaffolding down and you can actually see it now, it’s been restored after so many years…) Let’s meet on a little bridge with golden-winged lions. “Let’s tell each other compliments, in love’s special moments” – I didn’t make up this song; it really existed.

Relax, Sasha… I know what happened. I’ve heard… I don’t have much to say about it, only that it could have been worse… Listen, you looked really gorgeous in that white coat with red lining and I was totally and completely seduced by that silly song about the falling snow… I must have had a real crush on you. I even forgave you for not reading Pasternak. It’s just that we took ourselves so seriously in those days, you and me… But tell me how did you come up with that cruel Latin word “frigid”? In America, you know, women are rarely frigid, but the weather frequently is…

Hey, Misha, I’ve really forgotten about that Ceylon tea of yours… it doesn’t matter any more, I’ve brought you some Earl Grey… Remember our telephonic orgasms in the communal hall? God, I wish someone had taped those… Should we try to continue with that in a more sedate, grown-up fashion and shock the long-distance operator? I remember something about you, from those earlier days. The taste of your tongue in my eyes… There was spring dirt on your boots then, they were still unpolished… Where are you now? Way up or low down? As usual, beyond good and evil? I’m joking, of course, you might have forgotten your high school Nietzsche…

Me, I’m fine really. I love New York, as they say. Like New Yorkers, I love it and hate it. It feels like home and I feel a bit home-sick now, for that little studio of mine on Tenth West Street, bright but rather messy, without any pretense of coziness. Sometimes I go traveling to the end of the world, or at least to the southernmost point in the United States, Key West. Last time I nearly slipped on the wet rocks. You see, I need that, to get perspective, to estrange myself. It’s risky to get attached to one place, don’t you think?

And, yes, naturally I must be having great sex. For that’s what we do “in the West” and it couldn’t be otherwise. It’s actually almost true and not a big deal. I have a Canadian boyfriend, we work out a lot… Sometimes he says he hasn’t found himself yet (found whom? – you would ask…) I know it might sound funny here. Some people try to lose themselves and others try to find themselves. Oh well, let’s have a cup of coffee…

Where shall we go? You’re local, you must know some place. Yesterday we tried to have a drink with my old girlfriend and couldn’t find a place to sit down. It was raining out. So we ended up going to the movie theater “The Barricade” on Nevsky. They have a nice coffee shop there. We even bought tickets to the movies, just in case. They were showing Crocodile Dundee - The cleaning woman tried to get us to go see it. “Hey, kids, it’s such a funny movie,” she said, “You just can’t stop laughing… Our movies are never funny like that.”

“No,” I said, “we bought tickets but really we just want to sit in the coffee shop since it’s open till the next show.”

“But you can’t do that -” she said, “the coffee shop is for moviegoers only and what kind of moviegoers are you?”

“I already saw Crocodile Dundee,” I protested.

“It’s impossible… Don’t try to fool me. This is the opening night…”

“I saw it in a drive-in theater in New London,” I insisted…

“Look, miss, leave the coffee shop this very minute. I tell you that in plain Russian, loud and clear. Coffee is for moviegoers only.”

Maybe we’ll see a movie, Misha, something slow, with long, long takes. Wait, Misha, don’t rush… I’m sure we’ll find a place nearby… I could invite you for a bagel, but it’s far away… We could talk about Napoleon. He’s sort of out of fashion now… I bet the waitress would take us for ageing foreign students…

“The Information Kiosk closes in fifteen minutes.”