The Stories of John Cheever

  He had breakfast in the dining room with an Englishman who told him the facts. He also suggested that if Artemis needed an interpreter, he should go to the Central Government Agency and not Intourist. He wrote, in the Cyrillic alphabet, an address on a card. He ordered the waiters around officiously in Russian and Artemis was impressed with his fluency; but he was, in fact, one of those travelers who can order fried eggs and hard liquor in seven languages but who can’t count to ten in more than one.

  There were cabs in front of the hotel and Artemis gave the address to a driver. They took the same route they had taken to the Bolshoi and Artemis was able to recheck the fact that all the portraits of Khrushchev had been removed in two hours or three at the most. It must have taken hundreds of men. The address was a dingy office building with a sign in English as well as Russian. Artemis climbed some shabby stairs to a door that was padded. Why padded? Silence? Madness? He opened the door onto a brightly lighted office and told a striking young woman that he wanted an interpreter to take him around Moscow.

  The Russians don’t seem to have gotten the bugs out of illumination. There is either too much light or too little and the light the young woman stood in was seedy. She had, however, or so he thought, enough beauty to conquer the situation. If a thousand portraits of Khrushchev could vanish in three hours, couldn’t he fall in love in three minutes? He seemed to. She was about five foot five. He was six feet, which meant that she was the right size, a consideration he had learned to respect. Her brow and the shape of her head were splendid and she stood with her head raised a little, as if she were accustomed to speaking to people taller than herself. She wore a tight sweater that showed her fine breasts and her skirt was also tight. She seemed to be in charge of the office, but in spite of her manifest executive responsibilities, there was not a trace of aggressiveness in her manner. Her femininity was intense. Her essence seemed to lie in two things: a sense of girlishness and the quickness with which she moved her head. She seemed capable of the changeableness, the moodiness of someone much younger. (She was, he discovered later, thirty-two.) She moved her head as if her vision were narrow, as if it moved from object to object, rather than to take in the panorama. Her vision was not narrow, but that was the impression he got. There was some nostalgia in her appearance, some charming feminine sense of the past. “Mrs. Kosiev will take you around,” she said. “Without taxi fares, that will be twenty-three rubles.” She spoke with exactly the same accent as the woman who had met him at the airport. (He would never know, but they had both learned their English off a tape made at the university in Leningrad by an English governess turned Communist.)

  He knew none of the customs of this strange country, but he decided to take a chance. “Will you have dinner with me?” he asked.

  She gave him an appraising and pleasant look. “I’m going to a poetry reading,” she said.

  “Can I come with you?” he asked.

  “Why, yes,” she said. “Of course. Meet me here at six.” Then she called for Mrs. Kosiev. This was a broad-shouldered woman who gave him a manly handshake but no smile. “Will you please give our guest from the United States the twenty-three-ruble tour of Moscow?” He counted out twenty-three rubles and put them on the desk of the woman with whom he had just fallen in love.

  Going down the stairs, Mrs. Kosiev said, “That was Natasha Funaroff. She is the daughter of Marshal Funaroff, They have lived in Siberia.”

  After this piece of information, Mrs. Kosiev began to praise the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and continued this for the rest of the day. They walked a short distance from the office to the Kremlin, where she first took him to the Armory. A long line was waiting at the door, but they bucked this. Inside, they put felt bags over their shoes and Artemis was shown the crown jewels, the royal horse tack, and some of the royal wardrobe. Artemis was bored and had begun to feel terribly tired. They toured three churches in the Kremlin. These seemed to him rich, lofty, and completely mysterious. They then took a cab to the Tretyakov Gallery. Artemis had begun to notice that the smell of Moscow—so far from any tilled land—was the smell of soil, sour curds, sour whey, and earth-stained overalls. It lingered in the massive lobby of the Ukraine. The golden churches of the Kremlin, scoured of their incense, smelled like barns, and in the gallery, the smell of curds and whey was augmented by a mysterious but distinct smell of cow manure. At one, Artemis said he was hungry and they had some lunch. They then went to the Lenin Library and, after that, to a deconsecrated monastery that had been turned into a folk museum. Artemis had seen more than enough, and after the monastery he said that he wanted to return to the hotel. Mrs. Kosiev said that the tour was not completed and that there would be no rebate. He said he didn’t care and took a cab back to the Ukraine.

  He returned to the office at six. She was waiting in the street, waiting by the door. “Did you have a nice tour?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes,” said Artemis. “Oh, yes. I don’t seem to like museums, but then, I’ve never been in any and perhaps it’s something I could learn.”

  “I detest museums,” she said. She took his arm lightly, lightly touched his shoulder with hers. Her hair was a very light brown—not really blond—but it shone in the street lights. It was straight and dressed simply with a short queue in the back, secured with an elastic band. The air was damp and cold and smelled of diesel exhaust. “We are going to hear Luncharvsky,” she said. “It isn’t far. We can walk.”

  Oh, Moscow, Moscow, that most anonymous of all anonymous cities! There were some dead flowers on the bust of Chaliapin, but they seemed to be the only flowers in town. Part of the clash of a truly great city on an autumn night is the smell of roasting coffee and (in Rome) wine and new bread and men and women carrying flowers home to a lover, a spouse, or nobody in particular, nobody at all. As it grew darker and the lights went on, Artemis seemed to find none of the excitement of a day’s ending. Through a window he saw a child reading a book, a woman frying potatoes. Was it because with all the princes gone and all the palaces still standing one felt, for better or for worse, that a critical spectrum of the city’s life had been extinguished? They passed a man carrying three loaves of new bread in a string basket. The man was singing. This made Artemis happy. “I love you, Natasha Funaroff,” he said.

  “How did you know my name?”

  “Mrs. Kosiev told me all about you.”

  They saw ahead of them the statue of Mayakovsky, although Artemis didn’t (doesn’t today) know anything about the poet. It was gigantic and tasteless, a relic of the Stalin era that reshaped the whole pantheon of Russian literature to resemble the sons of Lenin. (Even poor Chekhov was given posthumously heroic shoulders and a massive brow.) It grew darker and darker and more lights went on. Then, as they saw the crowd, Artemis saw that the smoke from their cigarettes had formed, thirty or forty feet in the air, a flat, substantial, and unnatural cloud. He supposed this was some process of inversion. Before they reached the square, he could hear Luncharvsky’s voice. Russian is a more percussive language than English, less musical but more diverse, and this may account for its carrying power. The voice was powerful, not only in volume but in its emotional force. It seemed melancholy and exalted. Artemis understood nothing beyond the noise. Luncharvsky stood on a platform below the statue of Mayakovsky, declaiming love lyrics to an audience of one thousand or two thousand, who stood under their bizarre cloud or canopy of smoke. He was not singing, but the force of his voice was the force of singing. Natasha made a gesture as if she had brought him to see one of the wonders of the world and he thought that perhaps she had.

  He was a traveler, a stranger, and he had traveled this far to see strange things. The dusk was cold, but Luncharvsky was in his shirt sleeves. His shoulders were broad—broad-boned, that is. His arms were long. His hands were large and when he closed them into a fist, as he did every few minutes, the fist seemed massive. He was a tall man. His hair was yellow, not cut and not combed. His eyes had the startling and compelling cast of a man u
nremittently on the up and up. Artemis had the feeling that not only did he command the attention of the crowd but had anyone there been momentarily inattentive, he would have known it. At the end of the recitation, someone passed him a bouquet of dying chrysanthemums and his suit coat. “I’m hungry,” said Artemis.

  “We will go to a Georgian restaurant,” she said. “A Georgian kitchen is our best kitchen.”

  They went to a very noisy place where Artemis had chicken for the third time. Leaving the restaurant, she took his arm again, pressed her shoulder against his, and led him down a street. He wondered if she would take him home and if she did, what would he find? Old parents, brothers, sisters, or perhaps a roommate? “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “To the park. Is that all right?”

  “That’s fine,” said Artemis. The park, when they reached it, was like any other. There were trees, losing their leaves at that time of year, benches, and concrete walks. There was a concrete statue of a man holding a child on his shoulders. The child held a bird. Artemis supposed they were meant to represent progress or hope. They sat on a bench, he put an arm around her and kissed her. She responded tenderly and expertly and for the next half hour they kissed each other. Artemis felt relaxed, loving, close to sappy. When he stood to straighten the protuberance in his trousers, she took his hand and led him to an apartment house a block or so away. An armed policeman stood by the door. She took what Artemis guessed was an identity card out of her purse. The policeman scrutinized this in a way that was meant to be offensive. He seemed openly bellicose. He sneered, glowered, pointed several times to Artemis, and spoke to her as if she were contemptible. In different circumstances—in a different country—Artemis would have hit him. Finally, they were allowed to pass and they took an elevator—a sort of cage—to another floor. Even the apartment house smelled to Artemis like a farm. She unlocked a door with two keys and led him into a dingy room. There was a bed in one corner. Clothes hung to dry from a string. On a table, there was half a loaf of bread and some scraps of meat. Artemis quickly got out of his clothes, as did she, and they (his choice of words) made love. She cleaned up the mess with a cloth, put a lighted cigarette between his lips, and poured him a glass of vodka. “I don’t ever want this to end,” Artemis said. “I don’t ever want this to end.” Lying with her in his arms, he felt a thrilling and galvanic sense of their indivisibility, although they were utter strangers. He was thinking idly about a well he had drilled two years ago and God knows what she was thinking about. “What was it like in Siberia?” he asked.

  “Wonderful,” she said.

  “What was your father like?”

  “He liked cucumbers,” she said. “He was a marshal until we were sent to Siberia. When we came back, they gave him an office in the Ministry of Defense. It was a little office. There was no chair, no table, no desk, no telephone, nothing. He used to go there in the morning and sit on the floor. Then he died. Now you’ll have to go.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s late and I’ll worry about you.”

  “Can I see you tomorrow?”

  “Of course.”

  “Can you come to my hotel?”

  “No, I couldn’t do that. It wouldn’t be safe for me to be seen in a tourist hotel and, anyhow, I hate them. We can meet in the park. I’ll write the address.” She left the bed and walked across the room. Her figure was astonishing—it seemed in its perfection to be almost freakish. Her breasts were large, her waist was very slender and her backside was voluminous. She carried it with a little swag, as if it were filled with buckshot. Artemis dressed, kissed her good night, and went down. The policeman stopped him but finally let him go, since neither understood anything the other said. When Artemis asked for his key at the hotel, there was some delay. Then a man in uniform appeared, holding Artemis’ passport, and extracted the visa.

  “You will leave Moscow tomorrow morning,” he said. “You will take SAS flight 769 to Copenhagen and change for New York.”

  “But I want to see your great country,” Artemis said. “I want to see Leningrad and Kiev.”

  “The airport bus leaves at half past nine.”

  In the morning, Artemis had the Intourist agent in the lobby telephone the interpreters’ bureau. When he asked for Natasha Funaroff, he was told there was no such person there; there never had been. Forty-eight hours after his arrival, he was winging his way home. The other passengers on the plane were American tourists and he was able to talk and make friends and pass the time.

  Artemis went to work a few days later drilling in hardpan outside the village of Brewster. The site had been chosen by a dowser and he was dubious, but he was wrong. At four hundred feet he hit limestone and a stream of sweet water that came in at one hundred gallons a minute. It was sixteen days after his return from Moscow that he got his first letter from Natasha. His address on the envelope was in English, but there was a lot of Cyrillic writing and the stamps were brilliantly colored. The letter disconcerted his mother and had, she told him, alarmed the postman. To go to Russia was one thing, but to receive letters from that strange and distant country was something else. “My darling,” Natasha had written. “I dreamed last night that you and I were a wave on the Black Sea at Yalta. I know you haven’t seen that part of my country, but if one were a wave, moving toward shore, one would be able to see the Crimean Mountains covered with snow. In Yalta sometimes when there are roses in bloom, you can see snow falling on the mountains. When I woke from the dream, I felt elevated and relaxed and I definitely had the taste of salt in my mouth. I must sign this letter Fifi, since nothing so irrational could have been written by your loving Natasha.”

  He answered her letter that night. “Dearest Natasha, I love you. If you will come to this country, I will marry you. I think of you all the time and I would like to show you how we live—the roads and trees and the lights of the cities. It is very different from the way you live. I am serious about all of this, and if you need money for the plane trip, I will send it. If you decided that you didn’t want to marry me, you could go home again. Tonight is Halloween. I don’t suppose you have that in Russia. It is the night when the dead are supposed to arise, although they don’t, of course, but children wander around the streets disguised as ghosts and skeletons and devils and you give them candy and pennies. Please come to my country and marry me.”

  This much was simple, but to copy her address in the Russian alphabet took him much longer. He went through ten envelopes before he had what he thought was a satisfactory copy. In the morning, before he went to work, he took his letter to the post office. The clerk was a friend. “What in hell are you doing, Art, writing this scribble-scrabble to Communists?”

  Artemis got rustic. “Well, you see, Sam, I was there for a day or so and there was this girl.” The letter took a twenty-five-cent stamp, a dismal gray engraving of Abraham Lincoln. When Artemis, thinking of the brilliant stamps on her letter, asked if there weren’t something livelier, his friend said no.

  He got her reply in ten days. “I like to think that our letters cross and I like to think of them flapping their wings at each other somewhere over the Atlantic. I would love to come to your country and marry you or have you marry me here, but we cannot do this until there is peace in the world. I wish we didn’t have to depend upon peace for love. I went to the country on Saturday and the birds and the birches and the pines were soothing. I wish you had been with me. A Unitarian doctor of divinity came to the office yesterday looking for an interpreter. He seemed intelligent and I took him around Moscow myself. He told me I didn’t have to believe in God to be a Unitarian. God, he told me, is the progress from chaos to order to human responsibility. I always thought God sat on the clouds, surrounded by troops of angels, but perhaps He lives in a submarine, surrounded by divisions of mermaids. Please send me a snapshot and write again. Your letters make me very happy.”

  “I’m enclosing a snapshot,” he wrote. “It’s three years old. It was taken at the Wakusha Res
ervoir. This is the center of the Northeast watershed. I think of you all the time. I woke at three this morning thinking of you. It was a nice feeling. I like the dark. The dark seems to me like a house with many rooms. Sixty or seventy. At night now after work I go skating. I suppose everybody in Russia must know how to skate. I know that Russians play hockey, because they usually beat the Americans in the Olympics. Three to two, seven to two, eight to one. It is beginning to snow. Love, Artemis.” He had another struggle with the address.