gray clouds, that sort of thing. If you had been looking out this same window an hour earlier, you would have seen a downpour splashing on the flagstones, but when I dialed the number and someone picked it up on the second ring, the sun burst out from behind a cloud, the rays so bright they hurt, and I had to half-shut my eyes. The booth had a list of prefixes—typewritten with penciled corrections—for the major Russian cities. I could say I was calling from Simferopol, I realized, for a better bargaining position, so I’d be under less pressure, the rain less of a threat.
“I’m calling about the ad.” (Why else would I be calling? I ought to introduce myself first, but that meant a name. I could invent a name: say, Andrei Gavrilov. Maybe I should start with a greeting: “Good afternoon, but it’s probably already evening …” No, straight to the point, no preliminaries.)
“Yes,” she responded dryly. (Fifty or fifty-five years old, fleshy, full breasts, in a dark housedress and slippers at the moment. Flinty blue eyes. I could just picture her.)
“Can you tell me about it?”
“I don’t give out information on the phone.” (Seventy, no, more than seventy years of Soviet rule).
“But do you have any rooms?” (Several years in Russia myself. I can elbow my way on to a city bus, if need be, and haggle over a kilo of figs in the market, with the best of them.). “I have a letter of recommendation,” I added. The lie occurred to me as I watched a multicolored helium balloon go up across the bay.
“Oh, good!” Meaning, that changes things, and in more than one sense: she knew it was false, totally false, but wasn’t that a testimonial to my ingenuity? Anyway, they didn’t use letters of recommendation in Russia anymore. Since 1917, maybe a little later. Only the state wrote letters for or against you, promoting you to a ministerial post or dumping you in a distant outpost, ruining your reputation and your career. She suspected I was a foreigner, which gave her a bit of confidence, enough to open the door a crack, so she could throw me out, face first onto her lawn, telling me:
“I don’t think it will be possible. We don’t have any vacancies. But you can come by anyway.”
Before I left the phone booth, I ran my finger down the list for the Astrakhan prefix. A second balloon was now rising, rocking back and forth, as slowly as a coin falling to the bottom of a glass (not quickly, the way a bubble rises from the bottom of a glass—how odd!). The revolving door of the Oreandra pushed me toward the street with feigned friendliness, but instead of hurrying out before it slapped me on the back I continued the circle and returned to the lobby. I had decided to write myself a letter of recommendation on the spot, at one of the tiny marble tables in the lobby.
I used my best Russian penmanship, imitating the shaky handwriting of a seventy-five-year-old man, Vladimir Vladimirovich, a friend in St. Petersburg. A single paragraph was all I needed, and I turned it out in the stiff superficial style of official letters, applications for jobs (and dismissals from them). And addressed it to Maria Kuzmovna (just like that, Maria, Kuzmá’s daughter, with no last name), the name on the ad.
The coast road ran past blue mountains with pine trees growing up them (and the sea below). Sometimes there was a clearing and I would have a perfect view of the tourists’ sailboats and a large-hulled ship coming into the harbor. The wind carrying the balloons across the bay hit me in the face, a few raindrops still floating in it, but warm again. The asphalt ribbon of the highway slipped off onto the shoulder without a curb, irregularly, like it was pinned down by pine needles. A good road. I was glad it was asphalt not concrete, very much alike, but the asphalt was softer, making my walk easier. The lady at the front desk in the Oreandra had told me that a trolleybus went to all the little towns and beaches on the coast, Livadia and beyond, as far as Alupka. A strange route for a trolley. I let her tell me where to catch it—go five blocks down, wait at the movie house—and decided to walk.
It would take a half hour, I figured, by the road through the pines. I walked against the traffic. That way I could see the cars coming toward me (as a safety precaution), and the shuddering of the cable long before the trolley appeared around a long curve, an ancient model, its wires held on by rope.
Following its line I couldn’t get lost. I walked past several pensions, practically on the road. The trolley didn’t make regular stops, just pulled over when the driver saw anyone who wanted to go into Yalta, or the other way, to the mineral baths in Alupka. I had been to Yalta before, but it didn’t count. I had made a quick circuit of the peninsula, driving along the coast in a prewar convertible, hardly stopping at all. Without visiting Livadia, for instance. There is a Grand Palace in Livadia, built in 1911. Surrounding it is an English garden with the road down the middle. I stepped onto its grass and ran downhill, full tilt, so I wouldn’t fall. I slowed down at a gravel path. “It’s not far from the Palace, in fact, just 800 meters from the left wing.” Nice location, near a palace. I went a little farther, down to the sea. And found the two-story house I wanted: “Livadia” (the pension’s name, too).
The Black Sea was a good place to live, lots of family-style pensions, very cheap since the crisis. The only problem was that these pensions, these solid houses built on stone foundations, with ten to fifteen rooms plus a kitchen, were not really family-run. Not any more. Not since the turn of the century. Now they were administered by the state, with the rooms listed on the vacation plans of unions from all over. Schoolteachers and retirees could stay practically free, paying with vouchers for meals, plus every service from laundry to midnight snacks: a cold glass of milk and some cookies.
Vladimir Vladimirovich had spent a month there, I told Maria Kuzmovna. She didn’t remember him, naturally, but my dollars, which she could change into the new local money, widened the opening my fake reference had given me. I just let her know I didn’t approve of the old voucher system. I would pay in cash and in advance for board and bedding.
She didn’t have to read the letter twice, I noticed, not this Kuzmovna. Her fear was gone, most of it anyway. She was just cautious, probably had to be, without the false trust so many people invested in the newly opened market. The swarms of old soviet economic police were being replaced by fiscal inspectors, and I had seen many people slip up on deals that seemed safe. She gave me a sharp look. She was about fifty, with a broad chest like a landing strip for airplanes with soft tires, nearly flat. She yelled: “Mikhail Petrovich!”—another retiree in loose shirt and sandals—“Come here please.” She wanted a witness to our deal. So at least she wasn’t overcharging me. She wanted to know the purpose of my visit. No answer. She had to ask, she explained, since I was staying so long. I said, “I need a room with a view.” It could mean anything: a poetic nature, an interest in astronomy, a respiratory disease. “I have a room facing the sea,” she admitted at last. She folded the letter and put it away, slipping it into the pocket of her dress. Mikhail Petrovich, the retiree in the round glasses, couldn’t be her lover: he was too old and feeble to move Kuzmovna’s massive hips. I was in. A pair of unsuspecting vacationers showed up for the room, pockets full of vouchers, and she sent them packing: someone’s always messing up, Moscow or somewhere, sending two guests for the same spot (lie!); try the big sanatoria, maybe, or the Palace.
I soon discovered that the boarders exchanged notes, which they attached to the doors of their rooms on little self-adhesive papers with a strip of glue that stayed sticky. I went sneaking from door to door, reading these little notes, forming impressions of the other guests. Kuzmovna’s always had a peremptory tone: “Mikhail Petrovich, don’t ever leave the oven on again!” Kuzmovna was bright enough ordinarily, but could not seem to learn my name. I let on that it was Joska, which ended the stammers provoked by a strange name, and soon notes started to appear, topped by that simple name, and decked with three exclamation marks (indicating amazement, urgency, incredible importance): “Don’t forget to empty the wastebasket!” or “How many times must I tell you, your breakfast gets cold by eight-thirty in the morning?”
