Dancing in the Light (24 page)

Vassy smiled at me in the bathroom mirror. He could see that I was considering what he said.

“Now,” he said proudly, “you don’t mind my small cell?”

The association seemed a peculiar one to me, but it was one of the first times I realized that Vassy Medvedjatnikov always needed to be in complete
control. On his turf or anybody else’s. The combination of the two of us would indeed prove combustible.

His telephone jangled beside the mattress on the floor. He picked it up and launched into a barrage of Russian.

“Mamitchka,” he said to someone and then turned to me. “It’s my mummy from Moscow.” He proceeded to carry on an animated conversation, his husky voice rising higher and higher. I wondered what could possibly be making him so excited. Was something wrong?

The conversation went on for about ten minutes. I really had the impression the KGB must have arrested his mother. Soon he hung up, quite satisfied it seemed.

“What was that all about?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “Mummy just wondered if I had arrived back in Paris from States all right. Her flowers are doing well at dacha in country and perhaps she will come to France in summer.”

“Jesus,” I said. “I thought maybe the Third World War had started.”

“It’s the way Russians talk,” he assured me. “We always scream. You will see.”

Vassy went to his small cupboard and pulled out some soft garlic cheese and crackers. Then he uncorked a bottle of red wine and without ceremony began to eat the cheese and crackers and gulp the wine standing up.

“Your flight was fine?” he asked, really more concerned with what he was eating than my inane answer.

“Sure,” I replied, absolutely fascinated by his relationship with food. One would have thought he had grown up starving in a hovel in Siberia, but I knew he had come from a very well-to-do family of artists and writers. He had told me that his mother was a poet and linguist and the daughter of one of Russia’s great painters. His father was the author of children’s books and a big
functionnaire
in the writers’
union in Moscow. I had not pressed the question of individual artistic freedom with Vassy quite yet. He was clearly not suffering from it.

“I told Mummy I finally met you,” he said. “I believe she is concerned I will go Hollywood. She admires you very much.”

The phone rang again. It was his friend Sasha who owned the apartment. He was having a party and wanted us to come.

Vassy shrugged his shoulders and asked me in Russian if I wanted to go. I knew what he was talking about anyway. What the hell, I said in Pidgin Japanese. I figured I couldn’t sleep anyway.

So I changed my clothes and out into the cobblestone streets of Paris we walked. In a few minutes we entered a living room crowded with a confusion of gesticulating Russians and French people. Most everyone spoke English though.

Vassy introduced me to Sasha and his wife, Mouza. I thanked them for letting us use the apartment. Sasha said I was crazy to stay there. Russians had a way of being disconcertingly to the point, with a twinkle of recognition that they were throwing everybody else off by just being themselves.

Vassy went around joyously greeting people at the party, not bothering one way or the other with how I was getting along. Fortunately, everyone knew who I was and what I did, so conversation was not difficult, but I could see them eyeing me with a kind of jaundiced curiosity about why I was in Paris with Vassily Okhlopkhov-Medvedjatnikov.

Apparently Sasha and Mouza had been born in France, therefore were not subjected to the restrictions of the Russian-born. But I was learning that regardless of where a Russian finds himself a citizen, he still feels he is Russian. As I wandered around looking at the icon-laden apartment, I noticed a Frenchwoman eyeing me with more than usual intensity.

At the first opportunity I mentioned it to Vassy and asked why that would be.

“She is my French woman’s sister,” he said. “She knows I broke the relationship with her for you.”

I felt that sort of paranoid stab you feel sometimes when you know everyone in the room knows more about what you’re really involved with than you do.

“Oh,” I said quietly, “I see. For some reason I felt
she
was involved with you.”

“She was,” he admitted, stunning me right up against the wall. “When I was very jealous of her sister, I slept with her out of spite.”

I suddenly couldn’t keep all his women straight—my heart was thudding away in response to his stupifying directness.

“You mean, you slept with both sisters?”

“Yes,” he answered. “I was angry and jealous because Monique was sleeping with her husband.”

“Oh my,” I said rather helplessly. Then, piqued by curiosity, “What did you expect her to do?”

“Sleep with me,” he answered simply.

“I see. So you balled her sister for spite.”

“Of course.”

Mouza came in with a plate of piroshkis, a Russian pastry filled with ground meat. Vassy took one and swallowed it whole.

“Wait a minute,” I said, recovering myself. “Did your Monique know what you were doing?”

“Of course. I am always honest. I never lie.”

“No,” I said. “I can see that.”

“You are having a nice time?” he asked, as though the weather were beautiful.

“Oh yes,” I answered. “Wonders never cease. All kinds of wonders.”

“This is wonder—ful?”

“Sure.”

Vassy pranced like a playful puppy-man into
the living room with the camera he had acquired somewhere on his shoulder.

Mouza sidled up to me at the doorjamb. “Have you ever been involved with a Russian man before?” she asked simply.

“No, Mouza, I haven’t. Why?”

“I just wondered, that’s all.” Then she quickly remembered that she had forgotten to fetch more vodka. I wandered back into the living room, caught somewhere between jet lag and naïveté.

Vassy handed me a glass of vodka and raised it to my eyes. “I am very
fidèle,”
he said. “When I am in love, I am
fidèle.”

The roller-coaster ride was well into its first turn.

A few hours later, I needed to sleep. Vassy tenderly took us back to our cell. I undressed as though already asleep, but I was aware enough to notice that he took off his gold cross and placed it carefully beside two small framed pictures. One was a picture of his mother. The other, an icon of the Virgin Mary and Christ. We fell onto the floor mattress and melded into love and sleep.

When I woke in the morning I opened my eyes to find Vassy watching me with an expression of glowing love on his face. He didn’t move. His expression didn’t waver. He just smiled and smiled and then sighed and touched my nose.

“You are my Nif-Nif,” he said playfully.

“I am? What’s a Nif-Nif?”

“You know, in Russia we have a children’s story about small pigs. You have the same, I think. My favorite small pig was Nif-Nif. You are my small Nif-Nif because you have a face adorable as a small Nif-Nif.”

I was overcome with his tenderness.

“Nif-Nif,” he said, “I love you. I will always be honest with you. You know that.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve had some slight experience with that already.”

“Do you think,” he said, “that we have known each other before?”

I sat up on my arm. He never led up to anything. He just blurted out what he was thinking without hesitation. And he seemed to be asking me something that touched a trigger in me, but I had considered the relationship too fragile—or perhaps too important—to bring the question up myself.

“Do you mean in another lifetime?”

“Yes.” He waited for my reaction. Well, I thought, why not? But still I hedged a little.

“I think maybe yes. I don’t know what I believe about all that stuff.”

“I feel,” he went on, “that I have known you all my life. Why is that?”

“I don’t know. I feel you are very familiar, too, and yet I don’t understand one thing about how you really are.”

“We are very different, yes?”

“Very.”

“American and Russian. Why have we found each other?”

“You found me, Vassy. You made the initial search. I’m still not sure what’s going on. It’s crazy.”

“You know,” he said, “I used to stop women with red hair and faces like yours on the street. I honestly thought I saw you everywhere. It is true. You have seen my film. I lived with that actress for three years because she looked like you. Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“She knew it too. She had pictures of you on her wall because of it. She loves you very much too. She wants autograph from you.”

“Okay. Sure,” I said, beginning slowly to comprehend some of the complicated dimensions of his honesty.

“You will come with me to Russian church for Easter service while you are here?”

I glanced at his cross on the bedside table beside
the icon. “Sure,” I said. “It means a lot to you, doesn’t it?”

“I am Christian. Every Russian is religious whether Communist or not. Maybe these men in Kremlin secretly wear cross themselves when no one around.”

Vassy put his arm behind his head. “Russia is very spiritual place,” he said. “With system we have, it’s necessary. Maybe communist system makes spiritual feeling even deeper. So we don’t object.”

“You don’t object. Why?”

“It’s as our strawberries. Because strawberries are buried under the deep Russian snow for six months, they taste so beautiful in the springtime.”

“You mean, only strawberries that suffer are sweet to eat?”

“Of course. The same with life and people. Suffering is necessary to art and happiness.”

He continued speaking with deep conviction. “Our Russian love of God and spiritual understanding is most important to all Russians. Do you understand?”

“You mean, you’re telling me that the group in the Kremlin Marxist government are not atheists and are secret Christians?”

“Not Christian-religious. Even atheists have atheism with passion. Russian peoples have
convictions.
Doubt comes from the West.”

I sat up from the mattress and crossed my legs and faced him.

“And you, Vassy? Is that how you feel?”

“I am Russian Orthodox Christian,” he stated clearly.

I wondered if
any
of his answers would ever be qualified. He seemed so full of conviction about
everything.

He went on. “We must fight against satanic forces,” he said. “Evil forces will destroy us if we don’t recognize God.”

“You believe there is such a thing as a satanic force?”

“Of course. And each time we feel it within ourselves, we must look for God.”

“Is that why you wear your cross … for protection?”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “Of course, but you must also understand that we Russians are also Moslem, not in a religious way, but mentally. We are combination of Christian spirituality and Asian Moslem mentality. We are unable to control ourselves and obey order, therefore a big fist government is necessary for us.”

I wasn’t sure if what he was saying was a contradiction or not. Then I remembered reading what Dostoyevsky wrote: “Russians can be sentimental, but cold and cruel at the same time. A Russian can weep at a piece of poetry one minute, and kill an enemy on that same spot a few minutes later. A Russian is half saint, half savage.”

“My Nif-Nif,” Vassy went on. “We Russians have no sense of respect to personality, it’s more emotional—love and hate. Since the time of the czars, and now too. Russians respect only mightiness, power. This respect is mixed with fear and sometime admiration. That’s why Russians admire Stalin. He was the real iron fist. See, therefore we don’t expect to be respected unless we have power, muscles.”

I was distressed by what he said. How was it possible to carry on a relationship either personally or on an international level, if, in fact, such a chasm of mistrust and human values separated us? What would happen with the SALT talks or nuclear disarmament or even the exploration of space if what he was saying was true?

He went on to speak of the dichotomy in the Russian character, a kind of duality in their temperament and approach to life, formed by their climate and geography as well as their history.

“Can you imagine,” he said, “what it is like to
live in small village for seven months under twenty feet of snow, with five days of travel to nearest railroad or neighbor? That, for centuries, was life of a Russian. Sometimes the news they got, if they got it at all, was a year old.”

He went on to say that a Russian could be scientifically disciplined for a period, and then fall apart with self-indulgence. He could be privately unassuming and publicly pompous. He could be kind and compassionate and uncaring and cruel.

I remembered Hedrick Smith had said the same thing in
The Russians
, his Pulitzer Prize-winning book. Half savage, half saint, as Dostoyevsky had said.

I had to admit, my Vassy fit the description to a T. Oh, my God, now I understood why Mouza had asked me if I’d ever been involved with a Russian before. Again, I felt that same haunting tap of familiarity somewhere deep in my mind, as though I had known this man from hundreds of years ago.

Vassy took my hand in his. “You are my sunshine,” he said. I felt myself blush. “You have beautiful fingers,” he said. “So sweet and graceful.” He gently squeezed the tips of them. “I love your soft finger pillows here,” he said. “My padded pillows. You must cut your nails so I can see them more.”

He startled me back to reality with yet another personal directive. I kept my nails long because if I didn’t, I unconsciously picked at my cuticles, sometimes even until they bled. Someone had told me once that I did that because I was attempting to peel away the outer layers of myself in a desperate unconscious attempt to reach the core of myself. Pop psychology maybe, but probably some truth to it.

“Will you jog with me, Nif-Nif?” he asked like a small child requesting a big personal favor from his mother. “I never knew a woman who would jog with me before.”

“Sure,” I said, feeling jostled between his childlike charm and his adult assertiveness.

“But first Water Pik,” he directed. “You must
make Water Pik. You were too tired last night. Now you must make Water Pik properly.”