“Woman Found Drowned in Moskva River, Still Clutching Bags.”
She walked and thought. Despite the official State philosophy that the USSR was the best country in the world, Russians were always on the hunt for importny things. The best you could get was from the Warsaw Pact countries—especially Yugoslavia, which was almost half capitalist and bordered with Italy. Polish cosmetics were good but not comparable to French. Those you could get only in Moscow, only at the National Department Store. The appearance of Italian shoes was an event. People from the Eastern bloc looked better, too, and people from the capitalist West seemed to be made from higher-quality material altogether: whiter teeth, broader shoulders, happier faces.
Luciano had grown up surrounded by beauty. Tanya knew from studying art and from the travel programs on television that Italy was full of well-preserved palazzos and facades decorated with paintings and stone cupids. Hundreds of nude sculptures sunbathed in the piazzas and cooled off in street fountains. Maybe Luciano’s eyes were simply better trained to see a woman’s beauty?
Why couldn’t Anton see it? After all, he could appreciate a pair of three-hour-line shoes for their ordinary, magnificent shoeness. Had she succumbed to him too easily? They had dated during their last year of university, and Tanya didn’t want to be the last unmarried girl at the graduation.
Auntie Roza opened the door and took some of the bags off Tanya’s numb hands. One naked lightbulb in a row of five burned furiously in the hallway. Pea Soup’s slouchy husband was smoking by the communal telephone. His hair was a violent red—a comical contrast to his straw-yellow eyebrows and eyelashes—as though his fiery crown had drawn out all the pigment from below. His sons (their hair the same Red Banner hue) rattled back and forth down the hallway, the elder on his indestructible bicycle and the younger, about Borya’s age, with a saucepan helmet and a soccer ball. The Ivanovs’ baby wailed. The poodle barked behind Sergeich’s door. The hallway smelled of old cigarettes, fried meat, stewed cabbage, more pea soup, and something putrid—perhaps the dog’s revenge on its neighbors.
“I’m just waiting for an intercity call. Do you need the phone? It should come any moment now,” Pea Soup’s husband muttered.
“Relax, Lyosha. I’m not your wife,” Auntie Roza said. “Please tell your boys not to ride over the shoes.”
When they reached the haven of Auntie Roza’s room, Auntie Roza said, “Shto, got lucky?”
“Oh, yes. Now the shower.”
“Not the best time, Tanechka. Everyone’s cooking dinner, you see. We only have one heater between the kitchen and the washroom.”
“You said it would be your turn in the evening.”
“It is my turn, but—”
“You let them bully you?”
“What can I do? They’ve lived here longer than I. You could try tying a dishrag around the kitchen faucet—that’s our sign for hot water needed in the bathroom—but I doubt it’ll work.”
“Oh, Auntie.”
The kitchen was in midbattle. The laundry had been taken down from the ropes. The three female household heads and Sergeich, the lonesome penguin, were cutting, shredding, frying, boiling, meat grinding, and dough rolling at their stations. The oil hissed, the pans banged, the radio yowled like a frantic mother calling for her child in a crowd of strangers. Sergeich winked at Tanya. She tied the dishrag around the faucet and escaped to the bathroom. As she showered, the water went hot and cold every few minutes, then just as she was washing off, it shut off completely.
“For your rendezvous?” Auntie Roza said when Tanya returned to her room. She was holding up the new dress to herself in front of the wall mirror.
“What rendezvous?” Tanya tried to keep her voice dispassionate. “I’m dog tired. I’d rather spend the evening with you.” This, too, was true. “Tell me stories about when you and Mama were girls.”
“You’ve heard all of our stories a million times, Tanechka,” Auntie Roza said. “Straighten out your shoulders and try to make yourself a little happier. If you don’t, no one will.”
“I’m not sure this would make me happier. Honestly.”
On the one hand, she didn’t want to disturb the precarious balance of her life. On the other hand, there was the beautiful dress—a defitsit to everyone else and readily wearable to her. “I’ll just try it on. If it’s too big, I’ll leave it for you.”
Tanya slipped on the dress and looked at herself in the mirror. It fit as though tailor-made, accentuating her waist—not as small as in her youth but still workable—her narrow, sloping shoulders, her diminutive but adequately perky breasts.
“Look at you,” Auntie Roza exclaimed, but Tanya had already grabbed her makeup bag and dashed out of the room.
The washroom was occupied. She couldn’t go back to her aunt’s room, not yet; she knew what Auntie Roza would say. She ran to the bathroom. Free! She switched on what she hoped was Auntie Roza’s lightbulb, sat down on the toilet, and put her makeup bag in her lap. Squinting into a hand mirror, Tanya put on some blue eye shadow and mascara. The new French lipstick turned out to be a clownish shade of orange, so she wrapped the tip of a match in a piece of cotton ball, something she always kept handy, and scraped out leftover coral paste from her old lipstick tube.
Someone hammered on the door. The bleary-eyed young father of the restless baby, clutching a roll of toilet paper to his chest. Tanya got out of his way.
Back in her aunt’s room, she sat down at the table, from which she could see herself in the mirror. She put her hair up in a bun. The hairstyle showed off her small ears, the only part of her body she’d consistently liked.
Neither the makeup nor the hairstyle had altered her features, yet she hardly recognized herself. The exhaustion in her eyes lit up her face with a kind of wistful nobility. She wanted Luciano to see that he was right to pick her from a plane of other dusty people. Tipsy off this sudden metamorphosis, some romantic essence of her separated and floated above her tired body like those happy lovers in Chagall’s paintings. She wouldn’t get in trouble with the KGB for one time, would she?
“Go, Tanya. Go,” Auntie Roza said. Before Tanya could duck, Auntie Roza spritzed her with the unfashionable Red Moscow perfume and made the sign of the cross.
It was seven o’clock. As Tanya skipped down the five flights of stairs, even the clicking of her heels seemed brighter.
“Ah, Tanechka, I forgot to feed you!” she heard her aunt yell from the top of the stairs, but her hunger had already evaporated, along with her shame and fatigue.
Tanya’s skin tingled pleasantly in the evening cool that had descended on panting Moscow. The tram came right away, and she sailed the two stops humming quietly to herself. She was walking to the metro entrance when she saw that at the fruit stand by the station they were selling bananas.
Bananas! Golden crescents, honeyed smiles, the fruit of sun-soaked dreams. They were even more rare in Moscow than Italian shoes. Seven-year-old Borya had eaten bananas only twice in his life. Chomping off the thinnest disks one by one to prolong the pleasure, he ran around the apartment pretending to be a monkey on a whirlwind adventure. The bananas were right
