A headlighted car pulled alongside the curb. The strip of black and white checks bordering its frame identified it as a taxi. The rear door opened, and Stefan Orlov called my name. Leaning in the door, I tried to explain what had happened and ask him to help the man, but he was impatient, he didn’t want to listen, he kept saying, “Get in,” and, “Will you please get in”; and at last, with a fury that shocked me, “You’re an idiot!” he said, yanking me onto the seat. As the taxi swung in a U-turn, its headlights exposed the man sprawled on the sidewalk, his lifted hands plowing the air, like the claws of an insect cruelly tumbled on its back.
“I’m sorry,” said Orlov, regaining a civil voice that also managed to sound sincerely remorseful. “But other people’s quarrels. They are not so much interesting, you understand. Now, enjoy yourself. We are going to the Eastern.” He commented on Miss Ryan’s absence and regretted “deeply” that she’d been unable to accept his invitation. “The Eastern is where you want to take a girl like Nancy. Very good food. Music. A bit of Oriental atmosphere.” After the clandestine nature of our meeting, it struck me as curious that we were now proceeding anywhere as gay and public as he described; and I said so. He was hurt. “I have no fears, but I’m not an idiot either.
The Astoria is a sensitive place. You understand? It’s a nuisance to go there. Why shouldn’t I see you if I like?” he said, asking himself the question. “You are a singer, I’m interested in music.” He was under the impression that both Miss Ryan and myself were singers in the cast of Porgy and Bess. When I corrected him, and told him I was a writer, he seemed upset. He had lighted a cigarette, and his lips, pursed to blow out the match, tautened. “Are you a correspondent?” he asked, letting the flame burn. I said no, not what he meant by a correspondent. He blew on the match. “Because I hate correspondents,” he said, rather warningly, as though I’d best not be lying to him. “They’re filthy. And Americans, it’s too bad to say, are the worst. The filthiest.”
Now that he knew I was a writer, I thought perhaps he saw the situation in a different, less harmless perspective, and so suggested that if the taxi would take me within walking distance of the Astoria, we could amicably part company then and there. He interpreted this as a protest to his opinion of American correspondents. “Please, you misunderstand. I admire so much the American people,” he said, and told me that the years he’d spent in Washington “were of a happiness I never forget. The Russians who lived in New York were always very snobbish about the Russians who had to live in Washington; they said, ‘Oh, my dear, Washington is so boring and provincial.’ ” He laughed at his grande-dame imitation. “But for me, I liked it there.
The hot streets in the summer. Bourbon whiskey. I liked so much my flat. I open my windows and pour myself a bourbon,” he said, as though reliving these actions. “I sit in my underwear and drink the bourbon and play the Vic loudly as I like. There is a girl I know. Two girls. One of them always comes by.”
The so-called Eastern is a restaurant attached to the Hotel Europa, just off the Nevsky Prospekt. Unless a few desiccated potted palms connote the Orient, I am at a loss to explain Orlov’s contention that the place had a slant-eyed atmosphere. The atmosphere, if any, was a discouraging one of yellow-walled drabness and sparsely occupied tables. Orlov was self-conscious; he picked at his tie and smoothed his dark hair. While we crossed an empty dance floor, an ensemble, four musicians as spidery as the palms they stood among, were scratching out a waltz.
We climbed a flight of stairs that led to a balcony where there were discreet dining booths. “I’m sure you think the Astoria is more elegant,” he said, as we were seated. “But that is for foreigners and large snobs. Here is for smaller snobs. I am very small snob.”
It worried me that he probably couldn’t afford the Eastern at all. His overcoat featured a luxurious sable collar and he had a hat of gleaming sealskin. Still, his suit was a poor, thin plaid and the laundered freshness of his white shirt somehow made more apparent its frayed cuffs and collar. But he gave sumptuous instructions to the waiter, who brought us a 400-gram carafe of vodka and a huge helping of caviar heaped in silver ice-cream dishes, toast and slices of lemon on the side. With a passing thought for Mrs. Gershwin, I dispatched every soft, unsalted, gray, pearly bead of it, and Orlov, marveling at the speed of my accomplishment, asked if I would like another serving. I said no, I couldn’t possibly, but he saw that I could, and sent the waiter for more.
Meanwhile, he proposed toasts in honor of Miss Ryan. “To Nancy,” he said, draining his glass, then, with a refill, “To Nancy. She is a beautiful girl”; and, again pouring, “That beautiful Nancy. Beautiful girl. Beautiful.”
The succession of fast-gulped vodka flushed his pale, almost handsome face. He told me he could drink “a fool’s fill” and not get drunk, but a gradual dimming of intelligence in his fine blue eyes belied the boast. He wanted to know if I thought Miss Ryan was partial to him. “Because,” he said, leaning forward in an attitude of excessive confidence, “she is a beautiful girl, and I like her.” I said yes, I gathered he considered her highly. “But you think I’m an idiot? Because I’m nearly forty and I’m married five years?” He spread his hand on the table to show me a plain gold wedding ring. “I would never do harm to my marriage,” he said piously. “We have two babies, little girls.”
He described his wife as “not beautiful, but my principal friend,” and told me that aside from the children, the mutual interests they shared made the marriage “a serious composition.” Among professional classes in Russia, it can be observed that persons seldom make alliances with anyone outside their own field of work. Doctors marry doctors; lawyers, lawyers. The Orlovs, it seemed, were both mathematicians who taught at the same Leningrad school. Music and the theater formed their main pleasures; they had taken turns, he said, waiting in line to buy tickets for the Porgy and Bess first-night, but in the end they had been allowed just one ticket. “Now my wife pretends she doesn’t want to go. That is so I can go.”
The previous year they had bought a television set as a New Year’s present to each other, but now they regretted having spent the money on something “so boring and childish.” He expressed himself with equal harshness on the subject of Soviet films. His wife, however, was fond of going to the kino, but he himself would only be enthusiastic if ever again they showed American pictures. (“I should like to know. What has happened to that beautiful girl, Joan Bennett? And the other one, Ingrid Bergman?
And George Raft? What a wonderful actor! Is he still alive?”) Apart from this disagreement on the merits of movie going, his wife’s tastes coincided with his at every point; they even, he said, enjoyed the same sport, “boating,” and for several years had been saving to buy a small sailboat, which they intended docking at a fishing village near Leningrad where each summer they spent two months’ vacation. “That is what I live for—guiding a boat through the poetry of our white nights. You must come back when the white nights are here. They are a true reward for nine months’ dark.”
The vodka was exhausted, and Orlov, after calling for a replenishment, grumbled that I wasn’t keeping pace with him. He said it “disgusted” him to watch me “just tasting,” and demanded that I “drink like a decent fellow or leave the table.” I was surprised how easy it was to empty a glass in one swallow, how pleasant, and it appeared not to affect me except for a tickling warmth and a feeling that my critical faculties were receding. I began to think that after all Orlov was right, the restaurant did have an Oriental atmosphere, a Moorish coziness, and the music of the orchestra, scraping like cicadas among the palms, seemed to acquire a beguiling, nostalgic lilt.
Orlov, at the stage of repeating himself, said, “I’m a good man and I have a good wife,” three times before he could reach the next sentence, which was, “But I have strong muscles.” He flexed his arms. “I’m passionate. A lusty dancer. On hot nights, with the window open, and the Vic playing loud as we like … and the Vic playing loud as we like. One of them always comes by. And we dance like that. With the window open on hot nights.
That’s all I want. To dance with Nancy. Beautiful. A beautiful girl. You understand? Just to dance. Just to … Where is she?” His hand swept the table. Silverware clattered on the floor. “Why isn’t Nancy here? Why won’t she sing for us?” With his head tilted back he sang, “Missouri woman on the
