EMIL DRAITSER
Faithful
Masha
A
WRITER WAS TRAVELING.
With last minute permission from the
Soviet Writers' Union, he had left his native Moscow for Amer–
ica. He had been to the States before, to New York and Chicago.
This time he came to see what life was like in one of the most intrigu–
ing corners of the country, Southern California.
He was old. His hands shook.
It
happened that he had to dictate more
and more to his wife and that troubled him. Yet they had lived together
for a long time, a lifetime, in fact. Masha had been the perfect compan–
ion for him, an invisible wife, a rarity in these emancipated times. Still,
writing is a private affair, where one's own hand is important. But what
can one do when it hardly obeys anymore? His wife had begun to listen
at night to his breathing, she was afraid he might suddenly die. During
the day when he took a nap, she found excuses to peek in and see how
he was doing. His son, unloved by him, was much like himself in his
youth-the same plain face with eyelids that seemed glued at the corners,
the same receding chin, reddish nose, and piping, abrupt speech. He had
already been given charge of their household. Yes, he was a loafer too,
but nothing could be done about it. Forty years old, some faded women
for a week or two. He didn't want to think about his son.
The snobs in the Writers' Union put him up at the Bonaventura, a four–
star hotel. Of course, they did it not out of respect for him, but to impress
the Americans. "Get a load of us! We're also a big and mighty country!"
Mighty, my ass. A country of mice, mud, and puddles. He had recently
made a short trip from Moscow to Volokolamsk, some hundred miles
north of the capital. He stepped off the train and found himself knee-deep
in mud. For the last three hundred years civilization had ignored this god–
forsaken town with its old, tumbledown monastery, dark-roofed huts,
and stray goats wandering its narrow, dirty streets. The whole country is
just one big Potemkin village defended with nuclear warheads.
Idiots! Why the hell did he need this fancy room? There wasn't even
a McDonald's nearby, or any other place to get a cheap meal, the only
one he could afford on their miserable daily allowance. The Bonaven–
tura Hotel! Fountains on the ground floor. Elevators speeding through
glass cylinders like pistons, making him nauseous. Why all this fuss?
