Pedro telephoned yesterday. After the call, I was so mixed up that I bumped into the key of the outer door, which gave me a bang on my left arm. Now there's a big bruise there. You can't get through love without injuries. It exposes the wounds. An optimist believes that it heals them, but a pessimist believes that it makes them deeper. I waver between optimism and pessimism.

Pedro told me that he'd had a bad dream about me. I had on a red dress and in the dream I was making love with my cousin. He asked me who I'd been sleeping with last night. At first I thought that I wouldn't answer and change the subject instead, but since he'd seen in the dream that I was in bed with someone, it seemed useless to lie to him.

"I met Henri."

"Don't you love me any more?"

"Yes, I do. But I'm not going to become your second woman."

"I can't leave Emilita, she'd commit suicide and I couldn't stand myself after that and I wouldn't be able to be with you any more either."

"Let's start to be platonic then, as before. I don't want Emilita to kill herself because of me."

"Do you mean that you don't intend to have sex with me?"

"It's hard to talk on the telephone, it'd be better if we'd meet," I suggested, because everything's so clear and simple in bed, since you don't have to talk there.

"You've corrupted me," Pedro complained.

"In what way?"

"Your femininity has drawn out my masculine macho-qualities, even jealousy, which I thought I'd got rid of. I'll kill that Henri, if he goes to screwing you any more."

"You're not serious, are you?"

"No, but I don't want you to have another man."

His voice sounded so desperate that I took back what I'd said.

"All right. Let's forget Plato and be the way we were before."

"And you'll give up Henri."

"Yes, I will," I promised.

"I guess I have a crush on you, even though I don't want to. What if you're my destiny?"

"A person has several destinies, of which he chooses the best one. There were Three Fates," I showed off how sophisticated I was.

"An impotent man would kill you."

"Luckily you're not impotent."

You can't control love and death. That's why they scare a power-hungry person. Both are a situation where a person is at the mercy of the unknown and can't dictate the course of events. You have to learn to give up before it's obligatory. Giving up is also a choice. If you make a wrong choice, you notice in two weeks. A wrong fate is like skin that's too tight, it doesn't feel like your own and you can't live with it. At the latest, it dies in three years, if it isn't really obstinate, when it can live even for nine years. My fates are triangles, whereas Dolores' are drunken men. According to her, it's due to the repetition-compulsion. She said that one drunkard is chance, but two drunkards aren't. As long as the internal problem is unsolved, you have to repeat it.

2

My problem began in Moscow. I was only 22 years old and married to Philippe, when I met Nikolai. Right then and there I felt a physical attraction to him and he to me, but I didn't go to bed with him then, stupid as I was. At that time I still had ideals and I believed in faithfulness between spouses, even though Philippe wasn't faithful to me even one day, not even when we were engaged.

I met Nikolai in the Moscow subway. My shoulder bag was about to come off, slipped down, and started to roll down the stairs. I stooped down to take hold of it at the same time he did and our heads bumped together. I was the first Western woman that he'd met, and so hard-headed that he saw stars and got a bump on his forehead as a souvenir of the meeting. I don't know whether it ever happens to other women, that when they see a good-looking man, either their bag falls down or they slip on dog shit or bump into an electric lamp post. But it happens to me time after time. He invited me to have coffee and so we got acquainted with each other. We walked around Patriarch Lake in Gorky Park, went to the movies and ice cream parlors to enjoy champagne and ice cream. Our relationship was completely platonic and romantic as though in a novel for girls. It lasted half a year. Then Philippe got a transfer to New York as a correspondent.

I met Nikolai for the second time ten years later, when I traveled alone to Moscow to visit with old acquaintances. I was just divorced and he was no longer a bachelor. He had both a wife and a mistress and a child with each. He couldn't abandon them on account of me. He was a man with a sense of responsibility and didn't want to go to the West with me, even though I tempted him to go. At that time only professed dissidents left the country, if they weren't sent to Siberia. They were called defectors and they were morally despicable people. And the most famous dissidents, like Solzhenitsyn, were expelled from the country. They were stripped of their citizenship because they didn't dare to kill them, since they were famous abroad. Nikolai was a secret dissident. He was such a decent man that he thought of his sons' future. They wouldn't be able to go to the university, but would have to join the army, if it were generally known what he thought about the Soviet Union and Communism. He read the Bible, studied English, and dreamed of fleeing to the West after his sons were old enough to manage on their own.

I loved him for a year and a half, but I was in bed with him only five times, because we rarely met. We never had time to get to know each other properly and live together, so it was a happy love affair. We made love in his dacha outside Moscow, in Peredelkino. Nowadays when I hear Bach's Brandenburg concertos on the radio, I remember the quiet room that smelled of smoke, fresh oil paints, and insecticide and was full of sunshine and pale light, because every time when I came to his place he put on those concertos and they played in background when we were in bed. He had a small penis, but it didn't matter as long as I was in love with him. He was a durable, affectionate, and good lover, and not the same sort of fussbudget as Philippe, who lasted two minutes inside a woman, because of course he had as many women as he wanted. It was only with Nikolai that I had my first proper orgasm, which I felt deep in my heart. Up till then I'd been frigid and making love had seemed to me to be a very miraculous affair - at any rate, not the sort of thing ffor which it would have been worthwhile to kill yourself or somebody else, as often happened in books and in life.

Before Nikolai, I didn't really like men. I always suspected that they despised me because I'm a woman and they just want to embarrass and defeat me. I admired Liza in Turgenev's The Gentry's Nest, who lived purely and innocently and only loved one man during her life, and when she couldn't marry the man, since he was already married, she entered a convent. I didn't like my body and its desires and smells. I was ashamed of my large breasts and broad backside. When I was a child I was ashamed of my protruding front teeth, tight braids, and too-short thumbs, which I hid inside my hands, when Mother said that I have good green thumbs. No one else had thumbs or braids like that. But above all I was ashamed of my feelings. I was terrified about someone finding out that as a 13-year-old I was crazy about my cousin, who had just gotten married. I could have just killed his wife. I was so jealous. Secretly I peeked at what they were doing in the bedroom. At night I fondled myself under the blanket and imagined that German was doing to me the same thing he did to his wife. After that I was even more ashamed of myself and I thought that I'd turn into a whore. Father also said that I'd turn into a whore since I wanted to get a permanent and paint my lips. I dreamed that I'd become a whore and was selling myself on Faubourg Saint-Denis Street at half-price, a deposit cost one franc, but no one wanted me.

I'm eternally grateful to Nikolai for freeing me from inhibitions and misconceptions with his tenderness, so that in his arms I was able to yield myself to love. At that time I finally got away from the pessimism of youth. I began to believe in myself when I freed myself from the fear of being a whore. Nowadays I think that from the standpoint of the great totality it's better to be a whore than to poison your surroundings with bitterness.

When I met Nikolai for the last time in Peredelkino, it didn't go well with him.

"Has your love come to and end?" I asked.

"I love you as much as before," he assured me.

He behaved strangely. He glanced at the walls as though they had eyes and peeked out at the yard from between the window curtains. He had a stomachache and was very nervous. When a branch rustled outside, he jumped out of bed. I thought he had a guilty conscience. He was probably afraid that Liudmila would come to the dacha. He claimed to have heard footsteps creeping from the yard. I opened the door and looked into the yard. A large black cat, its nose white with flour, was rummaging around in the trash heap. Perplexed, it raised its eyes, saw me, and bounded into a clump of nettles.

"Has Liudmila found out?"

"No," he said.

"Well, Natasha, then?"

"Not her, either."

"Then what's wrong?"

"I can't tell you."

"Tell me."

"You don't understand. You haven't lived in a climate of fear ever since you were born. I was born in a disgusting time and live in a disgusting time. In this country love's been made into mere filth. When I was a child everything was forbidden. It was forbidden to see, to hear, to talk. It was forbidden to be despondent and sad, you couldn't cry for somebody in prison even though it was your own father. But you could lie, you could pretend, you could make a show of sanctity."