And in a way, some of the same minority are proud of, as well as appalled by, government persecution. Russian life is hard— but isn't challenge the psyche's daily bread? Doesn't the highest satisfaction lie in surviving a difficult environment, winning out over severe obstacles and dangers? It is Russia's paradoxical good fortune that the pressures of her life—weather, war, shortages, tyranny—are external, often producing a unification of self and a rising to the challenge, rather than the anxieties and neuroses germinated by affluent liberalism, where you have only your flabby self to blame. No one need feel confused or guilty about the too-soft life here; primeval forces prevail, to be faced and overcome.
A bony girl at the end of the corridor is soon to leave the country forever. After nearly a decade, and the new arrangements between East and West Germany, her exit visa has been granted, and she will join her only surviving relative, an aunt living in Frankfurt, whom the Germans took for slave labor during the war. Even by Russian standards, Olga's life has been unusually cruel. Stalin deported her entire people, the Volga Germans, to Siberia in 1941. Her father died of exposure during the journey; her mother, who built a hut with her bare hands in the wilderness of their exile, succumbed within the year. In their grim settlement, half the children with living parents expired; Olga's orphaned childhood was an animal struggle for existence, won only by her lusty constitution. After the rescinding of the exile in 1957, she continued to bear the stigma of "traitor." Smuggling herself into Moscow, she spent every free hour for years in ministry offices, pleading to join her aunt.
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But now a new theme—Siberia's natural beauty—is modulating her lament of hard times. "Yes, winter was brutal. And in the six weeks of summer, the mosquitoes ate you alive. But the rivers! The lakes and the trees! Germany will have nothing like it. Can it be true I'll never see that glory again?"
As her time to leave approaches, Olga becomes less certain and more nostalgic for the places where she suffered extreme adversity. "How does a person live outside of Russia? My aunt's rich, she has her own apartment and car. But what happens to your insides when everything's so easy? When you can do what you want, buy what you like; everything's there for the asking? Maybe I'll be back home in two weeks."
It's time now to attend to my correspondence. I don't write home often because the outside world has become an illusion, obscured by paralyzing, eternal Russian isolation. By the sense of existing in a separate cosmos, cut off by dusky space and aeons of time: this has contrived to stay in power, despite everything shrinking the twentieth-century world.
The technical marvels exist somewhere here: BE A Tridents from London four times weekly, the BBC Russian service three hours a day. But electronic communications and speed-of-sound jets are as extraneous to our lives as horseflies in this winter landscape. They do not penetrate the ironclad, snowbound Russian remoteness; cannot affect the heavy, fated way of life. Like the dazzling achievements of Soviet science we read of, they are not bogus but exist by and for themselves in some sealed laboratory, and therefore are irrelevant to the likes of us. A brilliant young professor I know works on computer design in the mathematics faculty's research department. But when his wife asks him to bring home some meat, he slips away early to stand on an hour-long line for a ham in an outlying store where his luck has been good before; then stuffs the precious, Pravda-wrapped kilo in his battered briefcase while the counterwoman bends over an old abacus to do her sums. This is the technology we live and understand.
Perhaps it is to the credit of the otherwise lumbering Russian state that it has kept pace with every kind of dizzying technological advance in its methods for preserving the ancient isolation.
Notes from My Window X 65
Telecommunications with the outside are effectively nullified because not one knob on a single control board can be touched without the Party's authorization. The BEA flights are chimerical because even the buses delivering passengers to planes are searched by armed guards, and not one Russian in a hundred thousand can approach as close as the check-in counter. Tapping apparatus clearly superior to the telephone system itself, jamming equipment more powerful than any transmitter—everywhere in modern life, restraint covers progress like paper, in the old game, over rock.
But censorship and controls are not enough to keep us apart. Insouciance and profound passiveness are powerful allies: the internal isolation that hundreds of years of backwardness and hardship has bred into native bones. Russians are cut off" and know it. And if they think of the possibility at all, many do not want to close the gap: too much effort is required, too much disappointment awaits them. Dream as they do of transforming themselves, they fear that any attempt to reach European standards would stop at the visionary talk stage, like the plans of Chekhov's doctors. For, if successful, would the executors not have ceased being Russian? And if they weren't Russian, would there be need for agonizing self-analysis, dreams of shining new worlds and futile crusades?
Life here is different. As on a ship at sea, special rules apply; distinctive prohibitions and dangers condition mind and movements. Although some of this country's distinctions from Europe are subtle, the overwhelming whole is far greater than the sum of its parts. Sometimes I scrutinize people and places in an attempt to define them more sharply; but nothing I can specify in their appearance or moods captures the underlying y^^/m^, every day in every setting, that this is another world. "There are parts of what it most concerns you to know that I cannot describe to you," wrote Plotinus. "You must come with me and see for yourselves." Or, to take a less common quotation, I can cite an underlined first sentence of a Frenchman's book lying on a cluttered, unoccupied desk in the Lenin Library yesterday: "If there is a country in the world that seems destined to remain unexplored and unknown by any other nation, either nearby or far away, that country is surely Russia, at least as far as her
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Western neighbors are concerned." The article was written in 1861, the year of the emancipation of the serfs.
For centuries, European residents in Russia have been overpowered by the same sensations. The observations of the Marquis de Custine (French Ambassador to St. Petersburg in the nineteenth century) and Sigmund Von Herberstein (Ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire to Muscovy in the sixteenth century) are as relevant to contemporary attitudes as any analysis of the socialist system and Soviet regime. Both were followed, deceived by obsessively secretive bureaucrats, alternately exhilarated by the irrepressible Russian spirit and horrified by the slovenliness and dirt; both described precisely the sense of wilderness that grips me this minute.
This is why I've lost contact with the outside world and write but a few dutiful lines to America, as if to another planet, every other week. Besides, my mail is opened. Crudely: little drops of brown glue decorate the envelopes, symbolic of Russia's odious acts, and of the coarseness with which she performs them. I confine myself, therefore, to picture postcards and small talk. My correspondents read about the weather and stirring performances at the Bolshoi.
But what would I write if I were free to describe my real feelings? On bad days, I so despise this country and all it stands for that I dream of guiding B-52s to the Kremlin with a flashlight. The honored assistant rector has lied to me outright, announcing blandly that a meeting I'd asked to attend as research, and which was being held that very minute, had been cancelled. My faculty advisor, who is fond of jeering at "bourgeois" scholarly integrity, counsels me to measure Soviet public opinion by "the best documentary evidence": the 99.7 per cent election majorities and unanimous votes of the Supreme Soviet. A professor of political economy cites the New York garbage strike as living proof of the American workers' exploitation and capitalism's disintegration, never mentioning actual wages even before the dispute because he knows that skilled Russian mechanics, who can't strike anyway, earn one-sixth as much.
Not ideological commandments but cynical deceptions like these, on which the country is governed at every level, reduce me to a nonentity. My movements restricted, intelligence sneered at.
Notes from My Window"^67
individuality violated, I choke with rage. How dare they do this to me? I was born a free man! This country is ruled by cousins of the redneck sheriffs of the Mississippi town where I spent a crow-eating summer as a civil rights worker. It's not enough that they can crush you at a whim; they want you to grovel by applauding their lies.
But the subduers of happiness are usually less specific: the weight of everything, the inexorable presence of melancholy and misfortune, the absence of a moment's diversion by a pretty, airy thing. All my childhood presumptions—a four-lane highway of goodness and progress, leading onward and upward for the world and me—are vaporized in this gloom. I spend hours on the daybed, leafing dog-eared copies of Time. Despite the snowfall's chalky reflection on the walls, these are the darkest days—and the longest—I have known.
Sometimes I tell Russians about Paris, Rome, the Greek islands: all the lush places I'll revel in when I return to civilization. I do it for spite, to hit back—unfairly, but in the only way I can—at the coarse hands controlling me. My listeners know they'll never see the color of the Mediterranean, sip a drink in a real cafe, own a suit even like the Barney's sale one I bought specially to wear out here or to give away. Some quiver when questioning me: they're envious, as I intended.
Few suspect that I'm as envious of them: that I often wish that I'd been born to their deprivation and pressure. What they lack sometimes seems inconsequential compared to what they have: ingenuous talk in place of sports cars; homemade singing instead of discotheque noise; hair worn long not to be with it or to conform, but to postpone the sacrifice of thirty kopeks for a haircut; guitars which represent neither revival nor fad—Russians have always played. . . . They are more natural and whole than any young people I've known; their student life is the kind I've always wanted. And this is no less true because caused by Russia's old-fashioned poverty.
What do I really want to tell the people I write to? I am a second generation New Yorker. My grandfather fled from a Polish ghetto after a pogrom. My father used to talk to me about man's dignity under Marxist socialism—until Stalin destroyed his faith and made him a cynical reactionary. Both hate Russia
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for what it did to them and theirs; both begged me not to come. How can I explain to them that the worst of what they believe about this country is here, practiced and suffered every day, and that I love it nevertheless? That when I'm in my gloom or Leonid lowers his eyes at the clique's obscenities, I feel as cursed as the hunchbacks in the corridors, yet grateful for the glimpse of man's tragic essence that has replaced the complacency and false security of my former existence.
For I have begun to sense what Russian writers have long revealed: that this is a place where the human spirit is made to struggle, thereby becoming fuller as well as more repressed. Their nineteenth-century phrases—"the vulgarity of life . . . the meanness of man . . . the tragic nakedness of human existence" —still afford the deepest reportage of the Russian scene and soul. The truths they lay bare uplift as well as demean. My senses are sharpened here; I know that I am me. It's not despite Russia's fated tragedy that warmth and emotion flourish here, but because of it.
"Great God!" wrote Leontiev, "am I a patriot? Do I despise or love my country? It seems to me that I love her as a mother loves, and despise as one despises a drunken thing, a characterless fool."
And Rozanov: "Russian life is dirty, yet so dear."
And an ill Yuli Daniel from his labor camp: "I loved you so much, my Russia—even more, perhaps, than I loved women."
Although depression never fully leaves me, I've somehow come to cherish the spell I'm in. If this is what the great writers knew, a particle of their insight has been given to me. The sense of abandonment and cosmic loss that haunts me simultaneously draws the rest of creation to my side. For the first time, I see I am part of everything. Anastasia and Alyosha are here, who are all to me that my family wasn't. This is why I yearn to escape this room, to flee Russia and never return. And why I know I'll always long to live this year again.
Today it is colder. Rings of rime coat streetcar cables and stunted poplars; the ground is a glacier of soiled ice.
Nightgowned Masha feels her way into my room an hour earlier than usual, a night of love accentuating her usual essence. (She sleeps with Chingiz for fun; with a pallid young physicist from town for a restaurant meal or emergency rubles. When she slept with me, I was intimidated by the warmth of her body and my thoughts of her total availability: too easy, still too sensuous for a boy like me whose mental energy for years went to fantasizing precisely this kind of sex.) She drops a cigarette from her fingers and fumbles for another, then ambles to the window and stares at the numb outdoor expanse. In their gelid states, every substance is alike, fusing into a single mass. All molecules are frozen immobile, and the suspension of icy fog in the air is like iron.
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A growl of protest rises to Masha's throat. "This rotten cold, it makes me sick. What's wrong with these matches?"
I make her a cup of Nescafe with my immersion heater and gather some papers into my briefcase. She closes her eyes to savor her sips.
"Aren't you used to the weather? You've had it all your life."
She turns to me with no expression. "Sometimes, friend, you sound positively patronizing. No visiting-scholar anthropology today. I have a headache; I've got to go out^
Someday, I'll write an essay about Russian winter. Russkaya zima, the great depressant of spirit and waster of life. We live in a no-man's land, enveloped by the seamless, soundless mist. Isolated even from the sky: it's been weeks now since enough sun has forced through to be able to guess its position.
The cold of this country has a freakish quality. Each moment outdoors is a confrontation with a vast antagonistic force. Your cheeks burn and nerves are permanently tensed; not even a dash to a mailbox can be taken for granted. Freezing the tears it has drawn from your eyes, a light wind raises the discomfort to genuine distress. You cover your face with your gloves and hurry for shelter, hearing your child's voice pleading for relief.
Mere temperature is not the crippler; Vermont and Minnesota—even Iowa during severe cold snaps—can produce harder spells. The difference is the immutability: the grip of the Russian freeze—and of its mood—never lets up. Winter lays hands on you in October, takes command of you, throttles you straight through until April. Week after week, a slate-gray cloud bears down on the squat skyline and people are made numb or sullen. Your skin flakes and shoulders ache; in time, your psyche also suffers. Irrationally resentful, you begin to take the punishment personally, and by late February—after the January thaw fails to appear—you recognize traces of persecution anxiety. A snapshot of a friend enjoying the Bois de Boulogne in a mere raincoat and muffler arrives (after its sixteen-day delay by the censor), filling you with envy of everyone "outside." Some days, the resentment snaps your will and turns you passive—as the Russian people are so enduringly passive? Now and then, it blinds you—like them?—to good sense in your urge to rebel. Always, you are
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conscious of living in a land where nature has gone wrong and appeals do not lie to justice or reason.
Seven months of such seige each year; and a total far greater than the sum of its parts. For winter is not a season like other seasons, but a state of mind, saddening even summer—which is too short to soothe the sense of hurt. Russian winter is the song of Russian life: submit, you lost lambs, to your fate of inexplicable hardship. You were born and you will die in a place of aberration—a cruel accident, but also your hope of salvation through suffering.
The inhuman weather and feeble human responses to it; how little I knew about these keys. I was a certified Soviet specialist, qualified to lecture about this society and its politics; yet the thousand books and treatises I've read revealed less than Masha's response to the look of February through my wavy glass. In a sense, all I'd mastered about the structure of the Party, the exercise of power, the channels of absolute authority, took me steadily farther from a native's perspective. For stifling as it constantly is, deceitful and vengeful at the slightest provocation, the dictatorship is but a marginal addition to Russia's older, heavier burdens. Although worse than I had imagined, the brutalization of political life is also less important because it is subsidiary to climate, geography and mood, the chief oppressors of everyday life.
Occasionally there are gifts. A bright day is polished turquoise; the air scrubs your lungs, the sun on the snow's crust makes you squint. Faces flush with bonhomie and the exalted beauty, people talk of the wholesomeness of Russian winter and of the good old days when frosts were really that. But such prizes are as rare as roses in December. Moods sink with the reappearance of the overcast, and the cumulative effect is disastrous.
Winter is a struggle to wage, a cross to bear. Day after day for half the year, half their lives, Russians pay groaning tribute in energy and fuel for the concession of staying alive; their children's swaddling and their own mountain of clothes are never enough to dispel the shock to skin and stiffness of limb. Cautious intellectuals can go months without an encounter with Party or KGB, and millions never think of the Kremlin at all except with
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vague patriotic pride. But no one escapes from the tyranny of the freeze. Each step from sheher to street is a slap in the face by searing air. Each buckhng of boots for the venture outside is a reminder to respect your betters. You are humbled by dumb, blunt forces, the parents of Politburo satraps.
Someday, I'll document my insight into the Russian personality. The elements are hostile here; this is the fons et origo of hulking buildings, strident newspapers and absent amenities—of everything that village-bred, disaster-fearing men (for these are the kind who control all public reactions as well as rule) make ponderous, laborious and inimical to public amusement. Where life is a struggle to fend off such giant forces, why build cafes to serve aperitifs or coffee? No matter that even more northerly countries are far less grim; in Russia, encumbered by backwardness, the environment is perceived as hostile. With their mothers' milk, children are given to understand that their hot, cramped homes are love, but that the world outside is essentially unfriendly to human habitation.
The Party unconsciously understands this awful truth, which is why it protests so shrilly to the contrary. A million messages a day about its glorious victories; two generations of pleas, proofs and exhortations about remaking society and forging the New Soviet Man—and all, as they somewhere know, in vain. For Marx himself teaches them that "environment determines consciousness"; and above all, it is the weather which controls the environment, making mockery of their agitated efforts. All the propagandists' exhortations and the people's sacrifices have done nothing to loosen the grip of today's bleak iciness and mood. Pathetic posters proclaiming the achievement of "HAPPINESS!" under socialism hang from every other wall, railing futilely against the pervading sadness; for Russians will not be remade nor their sense of having been mistreated by nature relieved until something drastic is done about the Russian winter. Nor will the quiet sore of guilt from having caused their own troubles be healed—an irrational oppression, as in children who blame themselves for their family's bickering. "Russia is a freak of nature," wrote Dostoyevsky, always stressing how much heavier the psychological burdens are than the merely physical.
To Town^73
All this I know more certainly than anything tangible I observe. The personal questions are harder: Why am I so at home with this futility and guilt? What pulls me closer to myself here than elsewhere; puts me in communion with the universe through a sense of cosmic depression; allows me to welcome my inner ache?
Masha yawns, scratches her hips and settles into my desk chair, exchanging her empty cup for my shaving mirror and examining her face with undisguised concentration that makes her self-absorption seem artless. Had Huxley not usurped the word, I would have thought of her flesh as pneumatic. Hard work and deep sleep have given it a springy plumpness that somehow magnifies the dimensions of her bottom and breasts.
Yesterday morning, she wasted an hour scouring my room for a mislaid book; although still unfound, it is quite forgotten. Shivering at a gust that has breached the window and grazed her neck, she again affirms that the cold goes right through her. "I detest winter; always have, always will." Yet she apparently hasn't considered wearing something over her redolent nightdress or on her tawny feet.
I promised myself to be in the Lenin Library by now but postpone my departure while she lingers to enjoy another Camel. Happy thoughts dominate her bemusement; a distant smile puckers her chunky lips. Her presence in the room is deeply comforting, as if contact with someone so sound in mind and body will help me pull through my troubles and find my adult feet. Sometimes I think of asking her, this miner's daughter reluctant to stretch her thoughts beyond a given day's physical satisfactions, what I should do to make something of my life. When she's with me, my anxiety about career and reputation loosens its grip; I understand that I needn't be more than what I am. People are really meant to procure and consume their daily bread, raise their children, enjoy their morning Nescafe and thoughts of chicken for Sunday dinner. To live the days as they come without sweating to make some mark of significance—and therefore, without suffering a self-made sense of failure. With a tenth of my prospects for success, riches and worldly stimulation.
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Masha is ten times more contented. Unperturbed by the bad, she congratulates herself for the good, and when she's near, I believe I can learn her secret.
"What are you thinking about, Masha?" I've never asked her before, and wonder whether it might be a mistake.
"Oh, nothing. I have to get my boots repaired."
This is declared with a loud blankness that breaks the meditative spell. My regard for Masha sometimes reminds me of a friend who disdains Italian opera because, he insists, the dandified singers trilling dolorous heartbreak are in fact concentrating on their post-performance spaghetti.
"I have to go out this morning," Masha adds. "And my guests are coming," she informs me, using the incongruously dainty slang for the arrival of her period (and probably explaining the source of her sharp smell and uncharacteristic headache). "Can you get me more jiggers?"
Although she could barely believe her eyes when she first saw them mere months ago, she already regards Tampax, the "jiggers," as indispensable. She had never heard of them, had never used more, in fact, than a handful of cotton wool positioned in her panties—even when available, Soviet sanitary napkins are too coarse and too expensive for regular use—until I ran into her one fall afternoon while wandering on a busy street behind Red Square. It was shortly after I'd first arrived; months before I could make sense of the ensuing hour.
Recognized and beamed at, I was gaily invited to join her looking in on a friend in a nearby, green-painted building—a temptation in itself, for each step into a Russian apartment carried the excitement of forbidden adventure. The Embassy had frequently warned of the drugging-and-photographing dangers of risking this alone, and somehow official Russia too made it clear that while Moscow's main streets were open to the likes of me, the people's living quarters were off limits. Entering the musty structure had much in common with visiting a Harlem tenement at midnight, which I once did in tow of a burly black friend.
The apartment behind GUM was less demoralizing than the one on 119th Street, but darker and more threadbare. Following Masha up a dank staircase to an attic, I found myself in the
To Town ^75
company of five young women smoking and drinking cheap wine like sorority sisters. Galya, Maya, Ina and Ida; but there was barely time for these first-name introductions before I triggered the puzzling incident.
As I took off" my coat, my fortnightly bag of purchases from the American Embassy's commissary fell from my hands, revealing, inter alia, a box of Tampax destined for a French girl in the dormitory. The girls' giddy exuberance in retrieving the carton suggested they envisaged a treat of foreign bonbons for their party. My offer of a box of tea bags as a substitute was ignored as hands ripped at the tantalizing Western cellophane, symbol of everything "brand-name"—imported, and therefore deluxe—as opposed to "Sov," the contemptuous epithet for domestic production.
It was Masha who tore off" the lid and sniffed. Perplexed by the unchocolate-y savor, she examined the leaflet—and then experimented. In the failing afternoon light, her large dusky triangle beckoned like eggplant from beneath her raised skirt. What the hell is this, has she forgotten I'm here? Are Russian girls the way Swedish ones used to be imagined? But while my excitement was driven by thoughts of the coming orgy, Masha's was expressed in marvel at the ingenious device. Nonsense, she assured the others, it doesn't hurt a bit. "Doesn't even tickle—it feels nice.'''
Shame-shaming and cajoling, she persuaded the others to drink up and follow her lead. (The staunchest holdout was concerned about sanitary considerations and possible infection.) Swiftly removed and scrunched into balls, four more pairs of panties were tucked beneath the cushion of a broken chair; the girls seemed more embarrassed by their old-fashioned underwear than by exposing themselves to a total stranger. Squatting on the square of ancient carpet, bumping backs and steadying one another's legs, they passed the box back and forth as if it indeed contained chocolates. For having tried one, tipsy delight prompted them to test their skill with another; and then a third ... a game of inserting, cooing, giggling and withdrawing that climaxed in a romp for the last tampon. Girlish squeals echoed from the barren walls as the happy friends demonstrated "how / look" and tugged at the others' strings.
Neither the strangeness of the scene nor the girls' playfulness
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blunted my excitement as I waited for my fun. But in five minutes, the novelty had worn off. The new toys were withdrawn for wrapping in the inevitable Pravda and discarded under the communal kitchen's corroded sink. The empty carton was just an empty carton; the Russian compulsion to splurge had been indulged and satisfied. (Even the most expensive Swiss chocolates, each one a rare luxury, would have been consumed to the last piece, just as every bottle of vodka, port or brandy in the country is drained to the last drop in the same session it is opened.) The girls were now discussing a handsome actor's film debut, and my attempt to steer the conversation back toward the seemingly promised sex drew rebuking glances. It was my turn to be baffled. I like to claim that I introduced tampons to Russia, and maybe I did; but if I were to write a story about the episode, wouldn't it need a better ending?
"Can you get me more jiggers?" Masha repeats. When the party broke up, she popped off" to a movie with the other girls and did not mention Tampax for weeks. But she asked for some when her next period began, and I've been a faithful source of supply ever since.
"I will if you promise to finish the story about your brother's girls."
Masha tells dozens of tales about life in Perm, often not realizing why they're amusing. Yesterday she reminisced about the first time she was old enough to vote in a Supreme Soviet election. Oversleeping, she did not report to her polling station by noon, the hour at which election workers like to have the show wrapped up. When a representative knocked at her flat to inquire what was the matter, her mother, who had already voted, volunteered to run down again and drop her daughter's pre-marked ballot into the box. The officials were delighted: with the vote unquestioned in any case, their principal interest was in winning the competition to be the first district to report the unanimous "Yes!"
But my favorite story of Masha's is about the schoolteacher who replaced the KGB agent as her lover. The young man's provincial political staunchness helped get him selected to a small student delegation to Austria, from which the political careerist—who else goes abroad?—returned "with an even bigger
To TownX77
head and all the Western glad rags he could buy or beg." But because a Young Communist secretary, which he was, would court scandal and downfall by being seen in such foreign gear, his new wardrobe never saw the light of Russian day. Instead, he modeled his mod shirts and tight trousers in the safety of a sidekick's flat, a treat to which he sometimes invited Masha until she "wised up" and left him.
The radio bleeps ten o'clock. Masha pulls herself up and suggests we ride into the city together in fifteen minutes or so. "But don't keep me waiting, please. My boots are falling apart, I mustn't be late."
She's going to an Armenian called "Uncle Grisha," a war invalid permitted to operate a private repair service. Uncle Grisha is rich on his reputation as the only Moscow cobbler able to cope with new Western platform shoes (he fabricates soles from old vegetable cartons) together with his skill in fooling the inspectors who check on him constantly to impose crippling taxes. Since only the smart set has this footwear, he's patronized by many of the city's lovelies, some of whom allow him to lavish his earnings on restaurant meals for them, and a few of whom even grant him their favors. It's as entertaining to visit his workroom as the studio of Zhenya, my highly talented painter friend.
Meanwhile, I sit down to tackle Leonid's novel, his one effort he likes enough to have shown me. He's rewritten it four times in response to changing political desiderata, for he much hopes to have it published and preserve some of its truths. The story is about the entwined fates of a Moscow lad and a Luftwaffe pilot he first "encounters" when he sees his bomber overhead in 1941. The more I read, the more it reveals itself as a feeble imitation of The Young Lions. There is even a scene, remarkably like Irwin Shaw's, of the seemingly doomed pilot regretting all the women he could have had and didn't; and I wonder what to say to Leonid, who is hanging on my "Western" verdict.
The disappointment of the first chapters prompts me to nag Masha that her "fifteen minutes" elapsed half an hour ago. After an additional quarter-hour, she is wrapped in her mottled acetate coat, topped by a pink acrylic hat: ready! I'm going to the Lenin Library at last; she to the basement workshop of her
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cobbler. The cold is as severe as it appeared from the window; we set out to make the ten-minute walk to the metro station in eight. On the way, Masha tells me not about her brother but about a Marxism-Leninism teacher of the old generation, who bristles at "insults to revolutionary sacrifice" and tends to flunk students who appear before him in clothes with any trace of style. His examinees are careful to dress "proletarian," the boys in open collars and no jackets, the girls without makeup or high heels. Masha herself is planning to go in overalls from her native Perm.
Soon I'm telling her about the summer / spent in overalls, when I was a high-school senior trying to "return to the land." The old farmer I slaved for, whose nastiness to me and his animals I took very seriously at the time, was named Blackcock. Doubled up at my attempts to render this in Russian, we lose the path and sink into the snow.
At this moment, I catch sight of a laborer on the skeleton of a new University building. A pretty girl with a peeved expression —no doubt bricklaying was not her first choice—she peers down from her scaffold, picking us out from the pedestrian stream trickling into the station. Construction in this temperature? Yes, on it goes, despite the vast extra effort and waste. (Even if the girl were not partially paralyzed by cold and clothes, would she give a damn where she slapped her mortar?) Somehow, I know this daily walk will go into my memory with the image of this tough-but-fragile worker: trowel dripping half-frozen mortar, smatterings and gobs from the head to the toe of her weather-beaten laborer's quilts, a thick smear of carrot-colored lipstick to proclaim that she's a woman.
Twenty thousand identical colleagues are putting in their eight hours at a swarm of nearby sites. I look back and wave to this one. Her cheekbones remind me of my Anastasia, and the day takes on another dimension.
The Lenin Library flanks the city's epicenter, a short block from the northwest hypotenuse of the Kremhn walls. You rarely give it a glance except when the guide of a passing busload of winter tourists summons attention to the landmark: a pile of gray masonry and casement windows in the style of the functional office buildings of the first Five-Year Plans. It was designed in the early 1930s before the birth of Stalinist architecture, and although built as a monument, with statues of peasant and proletarian heroes, its slap-dash construction shows in the uneven wear of the spacious steps and porticoed facade.
The main entrance fronts on Kalinin Prospekt, a hundred yards south of the Central Military Department Store. Rows of Zils and new black Volgas are parked in an inlet between the two institutions, their chauffeurs waiting hours in the cold with the help of cigarettes and cheap novels. The cars are assigned to several high commands and war colleges in adjacent side streets,
SO^MOSCOW FAREWELL
and from time to time, a gold-braided general appears, a boulder of a man with an ankle-length overcoat and a face bloated by peasant choler and peasant success. Bulling his way through knots of trudging shoppers, he disappears behind the drawn curtains of his sedan, like a caricature of himself.
The other exposed beam of the building faces a stark asphalt artery for cars and trucks speeding toward the Moscow River. A short walk down this icy avenue—still called Makhovaya by old Muscovites, although it's been renamed Prospekt Marx—rises the former Pashkov House, an elegant eighteenth-century palace with a memorable rotunda. This was the site of the Rumyanstsev Museum, a private collection nationalized after 1917 to become the Lenin Library's foundation. The great state institution has grown phenomenally since: two thousand seats for readers (the guides intone); three thousand employees and two hundred and fifty kilometers of shelves. Very big, very rich, very revered.
At the entrance, a metal grating is built into the pavement, designed for hot air to be blown through and melt the snow from users' boots. But something is permanently wrong with the mechanism: what air does appear has the force and warmth of human breath, causing mounds of gritty slush to pile high every morning—and more work than ever for the cleaning women. Bent over the foyer floor, they sop up the mess with grimy rags and mops.
Above the grating stands a block of doors with the weight of a fortress's outer portals; it takes the full force of your body— oomph!—to swing one open. There are eighteen in all, positioned six to a set in outer, middle and inner rows, a yard or so apart. But only one door in each row is ever unlocked—at opposite ends, to keep out the cold as people enter and leave. Because you never know which one is in service on a given day, you must yank at several: one of the country's hundred daily tests of your patience, endurance and strength.
I used to wonder about this while struggling through the maze each morning. Why do they always humiliate you? If doors can't be used normally, why don't they at least post signs indicating which ones work? Why build grandiose entrances—twenty-four
The Lenin Library^81
portals, for example, at the University's "parade" entrance— only to make you grope and squeeze your way through like a laboratory rat? (Half the front doors to everything in Moscow are permanently locked. Unless you're in some foreign delegation, you must search for a grimy staircase—appropriately called "black" in Russian—somewhere at the back.) A.nd if protection against the cold is really the purpose, why do they keep the system operating throughout the summer? Even in the minor, nonpoliti-cal matters, convenience for the public is the last consideration. Moscow's entire center is closed to stage some old Bolshevik's funeral and a hundred thousand unwarned shoppers freeze on cordoned-off streets. Metro stations are cattle-car packed, but one of the escalators is shut off on bureaucratic schedule, forcing you to butt in even harder toward the working one and to feel even more misused and helpless. Why the vast expenditure for show everywhere, and the maddening disregard for how things actually work?
Still, the Lenin Library is more comfortable than most buildings. And the time I waste finding my way into it and bemoaning such affronts to my dignity postpones the moment when I must open my books. Russia supplies so many good excuses for your own procrastination and failures.
The room just inside the entrance is equipped with the usual petitioning window for offices that receive the public: a small opening—at chest level to reduce the petitioners to a suitably humble crouch—with a wooden cover for slamming shut when the bureaucrat inside wants to terminate a too-persistent supplication. The line for passes to use the library begins here and curls around the waiting room's walls, which are lined with library instructions-cum-prohibitions and posters illustrating Lenin's love of learning. The last person to join the line, a breathless woman with a briefcase, is solicitously reassured by her antecedent that the wait will be less than an hour.
The first person, a large man with an asthmatic wheeze, is pleading his case at the window. He must use the library for a week, it's essential for his research. He's come all the way to Moscow for this, and his institute is counting on his report. . . . But the secretary with the stringy hair and limp cardigan is unmoved.
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She's sorry, she says—bored even with the bureaucrat's satisfaction of being haughty to aspirants—but rules are rules; he doesn't have the proper documents.
"How can I get all those signatures now? I told you, my institute's in Kharkov. I just came from there."
"And I suppose you can go back? The regulations weren't made yesterday, and we're not changing them today. Signed and stamped statements from . . ."
(Under his breath): "—and grab your mother by her fucking
leg-"
"... your organization explaining on what grounds their request for you is based. Full details. We can't let people in off the street, Citizen."
"Just a week. Three or four days. I'm asking you."
Suddenly the secretary's contempt elevates to rage. "You are wasting my time. Citizen. You are not going in. next!"
The man moves away with no discernible expression, stops, returns to the waiting room and joins the end of the line for another try.
The lines in the main foyer are shorter but take more time. Eight or ten of them stretch from the vast open cloakrooms on both sides, where users of the library must leave their outer clothing. For it is gravely nekultumo to enter an office (or a theater—and, in the case of prudes, a living room) in outerwear; and whatever was bad manners under the ancien regime, the new Soviet functionaries fear and despise more than Wall Street or a free idea. Therefore the operation of divesting oneself of overcoat, overshoes, scarf, hat and gloves is performed a hundred million times a day at the entrance to every public building; performed solemnly, for it is as much a social ritual as a matter of convenience or, as is sometimes argued (with reference to germs transported in overcoats), of public health.
The holdup in the library is caused by an insufficiency of hooks to accommodate the daily legion of readers. All are taken by nine o'clock, just as every chair of every Moscow restaurant will be occupied twelve hours hence. The elderly attendants, therefore, gossip among themselves, read handed-along newspapers and sip tea to pass the time behind their counters. They can do nothing until someone leaves the building and claims his
The Lenin Library X 83
things, liberating a hook for the person at the head of one of the Hnes. Knowing they may have to wait until lunch time, those near the end of the lines make use of their hours. Upright and sweating in their overcoats, they read their current "queuing" books, stuffing scraps of notes into their pockets.
Sometimes I wait with the Russians too: it is another way to postpone my work while feeling virtuous. I tell myself I'm learning something about local life by living it as a native. But this morning I won't waste the time. Two good hours remain before lunch, and I feel clearheaded and determined: this is the day I'm going to shake off my inertia. I make my way to the counter on the left and ask to be served next. (This is my right as a foreigner, and I'm encouraged to exercise it to jump lines at restaurants, movies, theaters and stores. But it too is part of the syndrome of show-before-people. Why does the Soviet government excoriate the Western bourgeoisie in every newspaper, lampoon them vulgarly or viciously in every other cartoon—then bow and scrape to them shamelessly when they appear on Soviet soil?)
I hand my things to the old attendant when the next hook is freed, p>ocket my metal claim check, squeeze through the one-person-at-a-time railings to the checkpoint guarding the main entrance, display my pass to the scowling, scrutinizing matron behind the desk, collect my daily attendance slip, nod to the smiling, scrutinizing policewoman beside her and mount the wide, worn stairway to Reading Room Number One.
The plaque on the door proclaims:
SCHOLARLY-SCIENTIFIC READING ROOM NUMBER ONE
For Doctors, Professors, and Members of the Academy of Sciences
And, of course, American graduate students. VIP treatment— in the Soviet hierarchy, a doctor, let alone a member of the Academy of Sciences, is an exalted personage—for the likes of obscure me. What a way to cop a birthright! In reverse proportion to the lower standards here, I'm closer to this country's richest and best than I'll ever come in my own.
Scholarly-Scientific Reading Room Number One is my workroom, the place I'm meant to put in my forty hours. A stately
84.^MOSCOW FAREWELL
hall whose wood paneling insures an appropriate solemnity despite large windows on both long sides. Big brown desks—individual, in contrast to those of the Library's lesser reading rooms—with inkwells and lamps of editor's-visor green. Persian runners in the spacious aisles, chandeliers as if designed to spoof everything proletarian-pompous, and Lenin's collected works— in three editions, but not the unexpurgated first—for handy reference on both sides of the room. I love this hushed sanctuary and the headache it gives me: my old friend, the pressure of undone homework.
Maya's on duty behind the counter this morning. She'll be leaving soon for her three months' maternity sabbatical, and if she stays away longer, I'll be back in New York and may never see her again. The bubble on her slender frame has swelled day by day since October, making her face correspondingly more luminous with expectation and motherly pride; sometimes her space-staring gaze makes me want to cry. But Maya herself is no longer crying; she's actually happy that her great tragedy ended as it did. She's even taken to giving me mini-lectures, apparently genuinely oblivious that they deny everything she had been saying, hoping, praying just months ago. Her theme now is the need for maturity, responsibility and compatibility of background in lasting love. Don't marry one of us, she keeps whispering. No matter what she promises or pleads, don't become involved with a Russian girl. Because it can't work: your outlooks would be too irreconcilably different. Even before you'd leave the country, the great burden would be on her. Like white hunters taking native wives, it's always an injustice.
Bending awkwardly when she sees me approach, she fetches my books from the reserved shelves behind the counter. Then she blows a "haaa" of hot breath on her rubber stamp, punches it smartly on my slip, scrawls a big "5" in the corner with a red pencil and hands me the slip together with my books. She recognizes the titles by now: the same five I've had out since last month.
"How about some work. Comrade?" she teases. "You're getting like the old ones." The old ones are elfish men in prewar suits too big for their shrinking bodies, who daily collect and return the same small pile of books. Two are waiting behind me
The Lenin Library ^85
now—surely distinguished men to have survived the purges and earned the honor of the use of this hall, but who have become the very picture of an old age of useless scholarship. Their type slumbers and slides toward death everywhere in the world, but somehow seem more archetypal because they are Russian.
I pick up my pile and look for an empty desk near the windows, where the clear light and steady draft will keep me invigorated. How hard it is to work in this room—not only because the conditions are so good and it seems so easy, but also because its air brings on daydreams like the ones induced by dentist's gas. The very pretense that it's a reading room like any other adds to the mystical qualities and sense of encapsulation in this strange country. But enough of this goddam musing. I think of my future and take a deep breath. I will make headway today!
Every few minutes the door opens with just enough noise to draw your head up to see who's entering. The 10:45 arrival is Ilya Alexandrovich. Striding to the counter, he picks up his books and settles his large frame at his usual desk. Within minutes, however, his arm is lying across his books and his head is resting on top, as if they were a pillow. Weariness overpowers him more and more often now, yet he feels it is his duty not to die until his clandestine work is done.
Why Ilya Alexandrovich told me his story is mystif/ing unless you know that Anastasia was with me, and that some people want to reveal their secrets to her. (And, despite his eighty-two years, Ilya Alexandrovich has an eye for pretty girls.) He spied her waiting for me outside the library late one afternoon, and when I appeared, invited us home for tea. Following his brisk pace to his nearby apartment, Anastasia and I wondered what to expect. It was one of those winter dusks of opaque colors and severely beautiful fagades flanking empty streets, as if someone had designed a Winter Palace setting for the coming narration. Inside, Ilya Alexandrovich settled us in heavy armchairs and made the tea himself, serving it and an excellent pepper-vodka with black bread and his own marinated mushrooms. Of course we knew his famous surname, but none of the rumors about him were as strange as his facts. We listened, postponing our questions.
86/^MOSCOW FAREWELL
He was the last living member of one of Russia's most noble families; owners of thirty thousand serfs, holders of respectful attention in the courts of a dozen tsars. As a young man—a latter-day Vronsky, with dark good looks, huge energy, and impeccable lineage—he was sent to the Imperial Naval Academy in Saint Petersburg, a highly select institution that was one of backward Russia's islands of technical and professional excellence, on a par with the best in the West. It was intended as a kind of reform school for the enfant gate, but he trained hard and won firsts.
After graduation and commissioning in 1912, he was assigned to the cruiser Border Guard under Admiral Alexander Vasilevich Kolchak, whose personality would leave a deeper impression on him during the next eight years than even the incredibly tumultuous events the two men were to grapple with together. Kolchak was simultaneously Captain of the Border Guard and flag officer of its squadron in the Baltic Sea; but these were the least of his duties and concerns. At the moment, he was desperately trying to prepare the entire fleet for war with Germany, which he predicted would start by 1915. Matched by towering integrity and power of leadership, Kolchak's energy and intelligence had driven him to involvement in almost every phase of naval operations and strategy, from Admiralty staff" work (where his presence had been the dominating factor before returning, recently, to sea duty) to hydrology and submarines. More than anyone it was he who cast aside the tsarist bureaucracy's mountainous deadweight, inspiring and reorganizing the Navy's rebirth as a modern, technologically oriented force after its catastrophic 1905 defeat by the Japanese—during which Kolchak himself was taken prisoner, suffering from wounds that never fully healed.
With the outbreak of the First World War, Kolchak's stature grew yet greater. On land as well as sea, he was a hero to all younger officers and a teacher of most older ones: a kind of Commander of the Battle Cruiser Squadron (Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty), Commander of the Grand Fleet (Admiral Sir John Jellicoe) and First Lord of the Admiralty (Winston Churchill) in one.
The Lenin Library^87
aide—even, after the Revolution, to Kolchak's native Siberia where, in a much better-known period of his hfe, he commanded one of the Civil War's most powerful and ruthless White armies. When the Admiral was finally defeated in 1920 and dispatched by a Red firing squad in Irkutsk, Ilya Alexandrovich was awaiting his own execution the following morning. He escaped, lived like a hunted leopard for weeks and finally smuggled himself abroad, joining the great White emigration as his great family's sole male survivor of the national bloodletting.
He lived in Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, trying to feed himself and make sense of emigre politics. But the Second World War found him in Yugoslavia, where he fought bravely with the partisans and organized liaison with the approaching Soviet Army staff^. Russian generals wined and dined him, and—on orders, of course—urged him to return to the Motherland's forgiving embrace. Tears of love for Russia fell into cups of vodka. Not nearly so naive to believe the "times-have-changed, Russia-needs-its-best-sons" orations, Ilya Alexandrovich nevertheless felt alone and weary of exile. And curious.
On the plane to Moscow in 1946, the tone of the accompanying officers changed in one breath from respectful to reviling. The next moment, handcuffs went on. "Counterrevolutionary!" "Enemy of the People!" "Traitor to the Motherland!" Perhaps Ilya Alexandrovich had been a trifle naive after all: he could not quite banish images of the Leningrad apartment and curatorship of a small handicrafts museum he had been promised for a modest but comfortable—and contributing—middle age. Instead, he was treated to the zombie conditions and surrealistic interrogations of Lubyanka's basement. (Relatively few questions were put about the former Prince's prerevolutionary life or even his Civil War activities; it was emigre affairs in Paris and, especially, aspects and personalities of the Yugoslav partisan high command that concerned his inquisitors.)
Two years passed. The trip from the Moscow military airport to jail had been in a Black Maria. Aside from his jailors and interrogators, Ilya Alexandrovich did not, in that period, see another soul, Russian or otherwise.
Suddenly—and mysteriously, for 1948 was a time of big leaps in repression and terror, especially after Tito's break with
88.^MOSCOW FAREWELL
Stalin—his imprisonment ended. And means for him to contribute to the Motherland were indeed found: after a period of rest and rehabilitation, he was served up to foreign dignitaries, delegations, and the occasional visiting newsmen as evidence of Soviet goodwill to former class enemies. What more satisfying proof of the harmony of all peoples under socialism than this still-robust man, with the name second only to Romanov, thriving in Moscow? And happy in his humble but honest job—for one had been found for him, teaching Slovenian in a language institute.
Substitutes frequently took over his classes, however; Ilya Alexandrovich was always on call to be driven with a group of foreign visitors to one of the family's former estates, now an orphanage, in a lyrical valley southwest of Moscow. "How happy I am that these buildings are being used for the good of unfortunate children instead of ludicrous private privilege," he would say (in French, Italian, German or Dutch—but, most typically, to a British trade union delegation tearing with joy for the use to which the magnificent mansion, like the Botanical Gardens and the Bolshoi Ballet, was being put under Soviet love for the people).
"I myself have a comfortable apartment in Moscow. (You must visit me sometime.) What on earth could I have wanted with a time-wasting extravagance like this? I can only thank the elected representatives for freeing me of endless roof-repairing and wrangling with gardeners; and bless them for making it possible that my family's wealth and greed, so often the source of hurt to others, is at last contributing to my people's happiness."
KGB officials stood at both elbows, and the tour leaders—also secret policemen, of course, like the picked chauffeurs—strained for his every word. But Ilya Alexandrovich's declarations were not pure hypocrisy; he was not lying even when he suggested that in their common recognition of service as man's redemption, Communism and the Orthodox church were far from incompatible. Whatever else he felt—and it was not, despite everything, that his homecoming had been an unqualified mistake—the former heir to literally incalculable wealth did not want his estates returned. In this sense, he was grateful to the Revolution.
The Lenin Library X 89
But he was no less grateful to be relieved of his role and left in relative peace. This happened gradually in the 1950s, as his novelty value declined in proportion to the greater numbers of foreigners admitted to post-Stalinist Russia. Finally, he was freed entirely of his burden (together with the obligation of having to sign his name to the occasional article about aristocratic perfidy in general and his family's debauches in particular) and treated as a private citizen—in which capacity he turned his full attention to teaching. Lacking a family, he gave his free time to compiling a Slovenian-Russian dictionary. It was a tolerable end to a full life, affording even a degree of dignity, provided he kept his mouth shut. But—and this was the point of his story—he had not seen the last of his trials.
To aid his labors on the dictionary, he was granted use of the Lenin Library—even assigned to Reading Room Number One. During breaks, he took to reading about the cataclysmic civil war in which he had played a minor part. What deprived him of a quiet old age was not the textbooks—teaching had fully acquainted him with the appalling distortions codified there— but that even in scholarly works, even archives, a great mass of evidence had apparently been destroyed. The Russian people were being deprived not only of the truth but also of the means of ever resurrecting it.
His dismay centered around Kolchak, the dazzling naval hero turned anti-Bolshevik war lord. Ilya Alexandrovich had long questioned the Admiral's Siberian adventure: having mistakenly involved himself in politics, he thought, the professional sailor had been inevitably sucked into the deception and terrible cruelty practiced on both sides. But what of his earlier brilliance in Russia's service? The supercharged dynamism and dedication to standards, the furious resolve and labors that had transformed the Navy from feudal stagnation to a modern force—and gave splendid victories to the Admiral's squadrons on the high seas? All this was gone, together with any hint of Kolchak's magnificent patriotism and courage. Portraying him only as an arch enemy of revolution, Soviet historians had ruthlessly eliminated every reference to his prerevolutionary virtues and achievements —even to his existence. Like Trotsky, he had been made into a counterrevolutionary villain in a state fable.
90x^MOSCOW FAREWELL
After all Ilya Alexandrovich had made peace with in his own Hfe, the odious assassination of Kolchak's memory became unbearable. The Admiral's execution began to dominate his memories. ("I've looked death in the face more than once," the condemned man had answered the officer in charge. "Thank you for your offer, but I have no need for a blindfold now.") Ilya Alexandrovich became possessed by the knowledge that in another decade, no power on earth would be able to rescue Kolchak from the quicksands of ideological villainy and insensate myth. Eyewitnesses and subordinates would all be dead, and even if tsarist archives had been preserved somewhere, a fair history of the leader and his contribution—even his tragedy— could never be produced. And if understood, this very tragedy— symbolic of so many of Russia's—of a good man's destruction contained more potential enlightenment than the hate-provoking official liturgy of Red saints and White devils. How did this officer whose honesty and chivalry approached the quixotic become a Caesar, presiding over (if not personally directing) a brutal tyranny?
This was Ilya Alexandrovich's new trial: for lack of anyone else, it had fallen to him to assemble a chronicle. Accepting the challenge, he felt a resurgence of his youthful commitment to honor, duty and country, as if this was the culmination of his cadet training. Secret research became the lonely man's obsession. Stealthily excerpting from rare naval histories and class-books, warily tracking down former naval officers among the handful who survived, the octogenarian was assembling the makings of a monograph on his former commander and was dieting carefully so as not to die before completing it.
But then what? With whom would he leave it? And knowing that one word to the authorities would be its ruin, why did he entrust his secret to Anastasia and me? "Perhaps," he said, refilling our glasses, "my subject holds enough interest for publication in the West. If you believe it is worth something, you might help me in this endeavor." (Eyes on Anastasia.) "But let's turn to lighter subjects. How did such an enchanting couple meet?"
He saw me in the library often after that but never so much as alluded to Kolchak again, let alone my smuggling out his
The Lenin LibraryX91
manuscript. As he's doing today, he alternated between intervals of great bounce and equal exhaustion, in which his age seemed to vary by thirty years. Now he's deep in his books again, apparently revived by his nap. He's wearing a handsome new tie to go with his cream-colored shirt: he still takes pride in his appearance.
Drifting and daydreaming; staring at and somewhere absorbing, but unable to focus on or fully comprehend the sights of this room. Steeped in the smell, a muskiness of newsprint and pulpy scholarly journals. Lulled by the sounds: of Prospekt Marx's snow-muffled traffic outside and the swish-swish of whispered Russian, with its consonants, here and there inside the hall. Benumbed by the mood: of the huge rubber plants, a plaster bust of Lenin, marbled columns, and the long-unanswered ring of a telephone in the librarians' anteroom.
Were I able to fix the meaning of even a few of the images before my eyes, something might be clear about why Russia has a life unlike any other. The shaved head of the man at my right, a bullet-like skull sitting evilly on a bureaucratic torso, the chandeliers' reflection gleaming in the oil of its pores. Good God, is he really the sinister Stalinist he seems? Or, on the contrary, does he look like that because he himself suffered? Why do Russian academics still shave their heads? . . . The man in front of him, no less pear-shaped and serge-suited, but sharing a desk with a woman lipsticked and bleached like the most blatant Broadway tart. And a third man, older and more shriveled, steering a shaky course down the aisle toward the door with a cane in one hand and a square of trembling newspaper in the other: yesterday's newspaper, which this corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences—like all Russians, no matter how august—has trained himself to carry in pocket or briefcase for when the call of nature sounds. Somehow it seems not humbling but democratic when done with his dignity.
From the desk to my left, the guttural whisper of two wiry Iraqi students, no doubt discussing girls, careers in state petroleum monopolies, and the intrigues of the University's Arab factions. Dressed in chain-store sports jackets and nylon shirts, they are nevertheless a sartorial cut above Russian students; and
92.^MOSCOW FAREWELL
the Russians, bitter at Mother Russia's additional levies to enrich distant ingrates—and repelled by colored skin—keep a sullen distance from their "Arab brothers." The book on their desk is a standard American chemistry manual: after three years here, their Russian is still too weak to struggle with Soviet textbooks on subjects unavailable in English. They have come all this way, supported by fat stipends, immense economic investments and international commitments, to learn their formulas from pages printed in New Jersey.
To the Iraqis' left, the reedlike Nigerian with an Italian suit cut to accent his superbly haughty bearing: a chieftain's son popular in the University's smartest black circle, not least for his denigration of everything Slavic. Flaunting his English like his wardrobe, he insists—reverting to Russian on these occasions, and making certain he's overheard—that the natives will remain ignorant muzhiks until colonized by a superior civilization. In the same spirit, he encourages his scholarship colleagues to refuse their turns in dormitory cleanup details: although students from Eastern and Western Europe all pitch in uncomplainingly, Africans, he says, should not stoop to sweeping Russian floors.
The Nigerian's warrior face is sometimes pulpy from the fists of townie-type Russian students; during the last ambush, when a cooperative blonde lured him from the path to the metro, his always-worn dark glasses were ground to bits in a mortar-mixer. His answer was to have a smarter pair air-mailed from Paris, exhibit himself in the company of his latest sexy conquest (won partly with a half-dozen bottles of Revlon nail polish and a purse atomizer of Madame Rochas) and again swear to dedicate himself, after returning home to a place in his government, to the cause of weakening Soviet-Nigerian relations.
The North Vietnamese students with their Mao uniforms and relentless industriousness—are they my enemies? They never so much as glance at me and, in fact, hardly look at anything except their books. The well-groomed West German girl who has come from an incredibly richer, slicker world to study Lermon-tov , . . BUT NO more: I must get to work!
At first, I had the crazy idea that I was going to reform Farmer
The Lenin Library "^ 93
Blackcock. Then I hated him for kilHng my idea of finding myself through tilling the soil.
He was impatient for the days when his bull was scheduled to service a cow. The wet summer kept their rear ends dripping, but he never missed a milking time to tell his joke about why the shit didn't swim up their "cunts." I had to laugh hard enough to keep his temper down, but not too hard because he was trying to bait me for sodomy. His other conversation piece was how they loved "that kinda thing" down old Marne way, which he'd noticed in '18, under Pershing. Lifting tails, he'd inform me that Frenchy liked to sniff his food.
Blackcock himself treated food as feed, consuming just enough to stoke his scrawniness. Once he missed dinner while attending to the tractor in town, and his wife gave Jim and me more. Most days, we felt too intimidated to ask. "Cut that up with yer 'tatas," he'd instruct, nudging his knife into the slice of pork fat representing our meat. "Protein builds yer sinews."
We finished quickly because we had fifteen free minutes while Blackcock cheered Fulton Lewis, who was cheering McCarthy, on the radio. Jim didn't lie down. He played with his pile of old comics. He was fourteen, already stunted by undernourishment.
The New York State orphans' bureau paid twenty dollars a week, or something, for his maintenance. Blackcock didn't spend three on his food, and no more than twenty a year for clothes. His one pair of sneakers was rotting from sweat and lime. He wore them all day, every day, like a depression kid. And Blackcock squeezed even more out of him than me—Sundays too—because the kid knew all the machinery and procedures. Work was over when it was too dark to see. We went up to our attic without washing. At dawn, his wife woke us with the fire-gong.
It was easier on the days I worked alone, away from his exhortations. The farm was at the tip of the state, twenty miles below Canada. I rested on my pitchfork and watched in case a car would appear on the rise across the fields. Each one was my spaceship back to civilization. A '49 Buick speeding toward Burke, then on to Malone, which had a movie house ... It was breaking loose from here! I loved its chromy glint and pictured
94^MOSCOW FAREWELL
the lucky driver. He v^diS free. Zooming toward the city, carnival of lights, drugstores, traffic and crowds: of everything I loved with a refugee's longing for his homeland. When the car was gone, an incredible emptiness gripped the fields. No human in sight, even from the top of the pasture. When someone did appear it was Blackcock, who was coming the back way to check on my hay mounds.
I knew what kept me in his power. Having made the dramatic move of leaving school to become a farmhand, I couldn't return at least until fall. Why I went on these escapades in the first place was harder to fathom. My mother and father constantly fought, but whose parents didn't? As long as I can remember, they both worked—and I felt so alone that I concocted quixotries like returning to Mother Earth. To escape solitude, I fled to that geezer's forsaken farm where—this was the laugh—my loneliness was unbearable.
I crept out of the attic in the dead of a September night, walking to Malone without hitching in case a neighbor reported me to Blackcock. When the stores opened, I spent my last five dollars on a pair of white sneakers for Jim. . . .
I slump in my seat, remembering my pastoral summer with tender relief. When things are punk, it's a comfort to relive something much worse. Having pulled through the genuine misery of Blackcock, I'm not going to surrender to today's petty panic.
What's the great death blow if I drop my dissertation, don't get my Ph.D., never become a professor? That's no cause for these waves of self-contempt. The irony is that I never really wanted the academic life—until this year, when I realized I'll never get in. Being a professor was my last substitute after the fiasco of doing something "basic" through farming. And now I've convinced myself, for some self-destructive reason, that I'm too old and have come too far in graduate schools to switch to anything else: if teaching's out, there's no other way to earn and justify my existence. How typical of me, this whining self-pity! I can do something free from intellectual pressure—drive a taxi, for example—and be happier for it. The way to see my inability to work here is release from something wrong for me, not to whine about "another day's defeat."
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My big mistake was not buckling down to my research immediately, in September. No, it was choosing the wrong subject. I'm trying to work on municipal government: the daily functions of city Soviets. But I'm not permitted to observe their sessions, see their agendas, lay eyes on archives about meetings ten—or fifty—years ago. I've begged to attend five minutes of a single conference—a discussion, say, about revising a bus schedule—in order to sample Soviet democracy in action. I'm answered that this is unnecessary and even foolish. Soviet self-government, the freest and most open in the world, has been exhaustively described by Soviet professors. Why attend meetings, my academic overseers reply, when the material for my dissertation has already been painstakingly prepared? Unfamiliar procedures may mislead a foreigner at any given session, whereas skilled Soviet scholars provide a complete picture of the whole. For analysis of municipal institutions in action, they say, go to the books—the most reliable sources. And read Lenin. Study and restudy Vladimir Ilich—"this is the duty of a scholar examining a Leninist society."
But the books are impossible. Like wartime save-paper editions, these tomes from the State Publishing Houses of Juridical and Political Literature have warping covers and marginless pages, and chapter after chapter of text so dense that the pages make me seasick. And all of them, all the millions of words I'm supposed to be digesting, are arid elaborations of a defunct illusion:
In our country, an all-peoples' state has come into existence —a crucial landmark on the road to Communist self-government. In Communist self-government, into which socialist statehood is growing, the Soviets, trade unions, cooperatives and other mass organizations will merge into a single, unified structure. . . .
As well as in the policy and practices of all state organs and officials, the strict safeguarding of citizens' rights is organically inherent in the Soviet state. V. I. Lenin devoted enormous attention to socialist legality. V. I. Lenin summoned the toilers to unflinchingly observe all laws and regulations of Soviet rule, and to keep vigilant watch so that everyone observes them. . . .
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The Soviets' strength lies in their indissoluble ties to the masses, to the people. V. I. Lenin called the toilers' enlistment into the administration of the state a "marvellous means" capable of "immediately, at a single stroke, multiplying our state apparatus ten-fold. . . ."
Socialism and Communism, Marxist-Leninist theory teaches, are products of the creative work of a people who are organized, tightly united and striving toward a single goal. Therefore, the further growth of workers' mass organizations and of the masses' unification constitutes an objective, inevitable development of the Soviet state and Soviet society. . . .
Enhancing the role of local Soviets is one of the natural, inevitable phenomena of the Soviet state's development at the present stage of the full-scale building of Communist society. Basing himself on Leninist propositions, L.L Brezhnev pointed out that "the genuine character of Soviet democracy is also evidenced by this fact: that in our country an ever-greater role in the State's administration and direction is being assumed by local governmental organs and communal organizations. . . ."
The Communist Party teaches that an essential condition for the Soviets' successful accomplishment of its tasks is the further deepening of socialist democracy in all their activities. In carrying out their mass-organizational work, the local Soviets participate more and more actively in attaining the course plotted by the Communist Party toward gradually transferring the functions now fulfilled by paid state officials to mass organizations of workers.
For whom is this gibberish written? Only a handful of foreigners—saddled graduate students, like me—ever see it, while the dimmest Russian student isn't taken in. He may be a vigorous patriot, may even feel personally committed to socialism; but the ritual constructions about socialist legality, Soviet democracy and workers' participation have long ceased to mean a thing. Yet new editions pour forth in hundreds of thousands of copies every year, with the key Lenin quotations rearranged in keeping with the latest nuances of the line: pamphlets, brochures, booklets, fat volumes ... an ocean of pulp flooding a country where—despite immeasurable timber resources—paper is rationed for most useful applications.
The Lenin Library "^ 97
Every book in the standard typeface; each a plodding repetition of the same mumbo-jumbo fraud. There can't be another mass of literature so monumentally tedious in the world.
The humiliating thing is that other exchange students working on even stodgier, less relevant subjects keep to their duty, cramming five-by-eight cards with notes. But my paralysis grows; I can't read another page. I've never daydreamed so much before, sunk to such purposeless wandering. And although I can |j
hardly believe I've washed out, the failure also confirms what I've always known about myself
When I was in the third grade, I felt I'd never possibly reach |
the wise and giant kingdom of the eighth. In the eighth, I couldn't picture myself in high school; in high school, college seemed far beyond my abilities and reach. The difference between me and others who surely entertained these commonplace thoughts was that I made too much of them because of a notion that something was wrong with me, which would reveal itself before I fully grew up. And to verify the infantile dread, this block materializes in ye olde Lenin Library, on the last step from student to grown man, bringing greater shame than a thousand abandoned dissertations could otherwise provoke.
What an idiot I am! My presumed brain finds it interesting to feature me in plotless, reasonless melodrama. Unemployable at my age, supposedly because nothing's good enough: /'m not good enough.
With a swallow, I clear my ears of the jeers of the rabble and return to reality. The thing is to take some kind of action —get up to peruse the morning's newspapers, for a start. A stack of the nationals lies on a table near the door, supplied daily, as in every public room: whatever else doesn't work, the Soviet people must "sharpen its political consciousness" by reading the Soviet press. For this hall's sophisticated public, Communist papers from abroad are also available, although rHumanite and 77?^ Morning Star are missing when the issues contain a disapproved photograph or opinion.
For a change, I chose Sovietskaya Rossiya. The feature article is about the current intensification of the ideological struggle.
The Soviet people are prepared. They know that increased
trade and other contacts with capitalist representatives
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demand heightened vigilance under Our Party's guidance. For ideological coexistence cannot exist. The present historical era is characterized by a sharp intensification of the struggle of ideas, as capitalism thrashes about trying vainly to delay Marxism-Leninism's inevitable triumph.
It surprises no one that the West keeps braying about "intellectual freedom"—which is nothing more than a cloak for anti-Soviet propaganda. As V. I. Lenin taught, there can be no creative freedom without freedom from bourgeois-exploitative ideology and relations, which bind the artist's will and distort his talent.
The hypocritical farce conducted under the slogan "intellectual freedom" is actually a last-ditch attempt to somehow stem socialism's triumphant development. This too proves there can be no talk of even "ideological armistice," an attempted trick to slow socialism's march to its complete and final world victory.
The next piece is about bauxite workers mobilizing all resources for the productivity battle in this decisive second year of the historic Five-Year Plan. Then a progress report about scientists working to improve the sound quality of records that preserve Lenin's voice. Chemists, physicists, acoustical and computer engineers—all disciplines toiling together to restore dear Vladimir Ilich's inflections.
I keep wading through—about battles on the Ukrainian preplowing front (only four months left to prepare) and victories over Siberian rivers; socialist morality sermons and denunciations of "nihilistic" West German poets—because I tell myself that this is another form of work, more digestible than my academic stuff", thanks to the comic relief. Still, ten minutes is the limit. I long to telephone Anastasia, but it will do no good, for the same reason that it's too late to start again and make up for the lost months of work. If only I hadn't ruined that; if only I had her again! I know we wouldn't be blissful in the old way, but at least I'd be finished with these dreary self-doubts.
But my broken record is worse than Lenin's. If I leave the library now, I can't even pretend to have tried. What next?
Maya's alone at the counter now, again staring into space. She
The Lenin Library"^99
seems to be planning the life of the child in her bubble-belly. This is the quiet hour; the morning stragglers have arrived, her supervisor is out for tea. I go up for the briefest heart-to-heart.
"We'll stay with his mother for a while," she whispers, an eye peeled for anyone observing our chat. "She's been terribly good to me. She'll sleep in the kitchen and give us the room."
Maya's tears are pearls of suffering, as the Russian saying goes. As a young Tadzhik actress, she was brought to Moscow from Leninabad (formerly Stalinabad, formerly Dushambe) and given a coveted place for "outstanding representatives of the nationalities" in a theatrical academy. Months later, a train crash impaired her voice and badly scarred her Hiawathan face. While she was in bandages, her mother burned to death in a factory accident. Unwilling to return to the Leninabad she had left triumphantly a year before, she enrolled in a librarians' institute.
After graduation, she was found a good job in the Lenin Library—comfort to her lonely years, for she was certain her disfigurement would keep her unmarried. It did until last winter.
During the previous year, a studious Englishman named Ian doing research in Hall Number One had chatted with her once or twice about the weather. His good-bye in June was as reserved as these earlier exchanges, but back in the University of Manchester, memories of her, perhaps colored by comparisons with his more frivolous students, took command of him. Without so much as a letter, he returned to Moscow during the Christmas vacation last December. He asked the Intourist car waiting at the airport to take him to the library, raced up the stairs and proposed to her at the counter.
Maya knew this was her Chance. Ian was gentle and honest; whatever Britain was like, they would raise children and be happy. Having applied with her for permission to marry, Ian went home to Manchester, planning to return for the wedding at the end of the month-long waiting period. Days after his departure, Maya was summoned to an office.
"Why do you want to marry that English fool?"
"Because I love him." Aware that the purpose of the interview was to terrorize her, Maya fought back her tears.
The officer slapped her on the face. "Do you still love him?"
lOO/^MOSCOW FAREWELL
"Yes, I do."
The second slap made her scars burn. "You hardly know him. You want to exhibit your" (sneer) "physiognomy in the" (smirk) "United Kingdom?" He raised a fist. "Do you still love him?"
"I do. More than^ou will ever understand."
"Leave my sight before I lose control. And start praying."
None of Maya's fears materialized. She continued working— and with foreigners!—at the library. The marriage was prevented simply by refusing Ian an entry visa. The coming and going of their wedding date deepened Maya's love even more than the KGB interview. Ian was educated, refined, kind; he wanted to take her to a world of cultivation. This quiet Englishman who had made his glorious gesture for her became a knight representing, as well as a polar opposite to the KGB's hands, the good luck that had been intended to compensate her for her bad.
During her ensuing grief, her sole interest was England. Within the limits of available materials, she became an expert on Manchester daily life. She had spent so little time with Ian that she was able to relive every moment; able to remember his every copper-colored freckle. Then a workman came to mend the telephone in her apartment, and her thoughts about England and the Round Table, even about intellectual life, ceased as suddenly as they had begun. Her letter breaking the engagement asked him not to write again. She had come to feel that marriage to a foreigner was distasteful per se; that Ian was trying to drag her to unhappiness. In this, at least, the attitude of the KGB interviewer was now her own. A Soviet girl can never be home abroad. Heartache is a crushing price for cars and suburban cottages. True happiness can only be achieved with one's own people—even an unambitious telephone repairman.
"My mother-in-law will be a great help when the baby comes. She was a nurse during the war."
"Boy or girl? They can tell you in advance now."
"We don't know. My husband wants a boy, of course. . . . And don't you marry a Russian girl."
I'm about to ask something about the vague husband when, for the first time, I decipher her expression of the last months. It doesn't matter now. Nothing matters. I have my baby.
The Lenin LibraryXlOl
Back at my desk, I smile at the irony of Maya's "Don't marry a Russian girl" in the context of Anastasia. Then I force myself to have another go at a page of text. But it doesn't work: torpor puts me in a trance again, like autumn mud paralyzing the countryside. I cup my hands over my forehead to pretend I'm reading; better the other graduate students not know. I let a film form over my eyes and float over this building toward the demoralization of failure . . . which is accompanied by spiritual bliss.
I pry open my eyes. A pretty girl with a broad Russian bottom is standing at the lending desk. A bottom that's already mine: I'm certain she will turn, smile at me, give the magic sign. The sensuousness of my next dream is accompanied by sunlight streaming through a chapel's stained glass. When Joe Sourian wakes me, my watch reads twelve o'clock.
Joe and I sometimes have lunch together when we're both at the library. He likes to eat at noon—likes to eat, come to think of it, at most times of the day (he always reckons it's just before or just after the rush), and his room is the only place for a satisfying snack when you're starved at night. He lives two floors below me in the dormitory, in a room crammed with jazz records, antihistamines, saucepans, vitamins, stacks of letters, heating pads, travel guides, boxes of soap powder, back issues of Time, back issues of Playboy, as well as Sugar Pops, Right Guard sprays and a substantial supply of canned chow mein from the American Embassy and other sources. Joe is as big and friendly as the stereotypical fat boy in any movie of fraternity life. He always wears a tie because his mother raised him to be a good Armenian boy; and because liquids drip down his stubby chin, the tie is always soiled. He's an exchange student like me, but this is his second full year; he likes it so much that he "extended" after the first. There are two kinds of Americans in Moscow, he likes to say: those who hate it here and "Joey-boy" Sourian.
"Let's chow down," he says, hand on his buckle. The belt is pushed so low by his stomach that his blue buttondown fails to reach it, revealing a triangle of T-shirt. "We gotta get a move on if we're gonna beat the crowd. Grab something quick so we can get back to the books."
102^MOSCOW FAREWELL
In and out of the University, Joe has a hundred friends, and all have sucked him into their schemes. Russians, Frenchmen, Georgians, the two Dutch girls who pretend to want nothing to do with uncouth Russian men, and the entire English and American contingents are his pals. People who otherwise might have little to say to one another—East and West Germans, Pakistanis and Bengalese—squeeze together on his bed as a member of the Armenian community shifts to make room for them: every Soviet Armenian considers himself a blood brother of the easygoing American who always has a gift, if only an old Esquire or the chance to hear The Original Dixieland Band on four-track Sony, for everyone who enters the room.
When he leaves his room, it is rarely without items to deliver to friends, friends of friends and supplicants. Wrapped in newspaper, stuffed in a cellophane bag and stashed under his overcoat in the manner of Harpo Marx, the daily booty represents a small fortune in rubles—and otherwise unobtainable happiness—to the recipients. Joe's dark eyes goggle slightly, for it is not certain whether any one of the items or their aggregate can get him arrested as a "speculator." But he laughs at himself and waddles on, hoping his bulk conceals his cargo.
A pair of West German scissors for his barber, woollen knee socks for the daughter of last year's biddy, nylon ties and tights for the world of Moscow taxi drivers and waitresses. Even a tattered prayer book, passed in a cubicle of a park toilet, for an Orthodox Jew so frightened that he requested it from an American rather than his own people, who are Jewish but Soviet. Because he takes seriously the unwanted obligation of a Westerner to supply Soviet friends with what he alone can obtain for them—and because his ability to catalogue and find each person's need somewhere in the Western community is extraordinary—he is a phenomenon of procurement and supply. He can't say no to a request. They pour in like airline reservations. If he went into business he'd have an overnight trading empire.
The Armenian merchant: some would say it's in his blood. Some do say he loves the middleman sweat and intrigue, and that his complaints are like an executive proudly beefing about too much work. His truth, however, is that he does it only out of the class fat boy's sense of obligation, which he would happily shed if
The Lenin Library^ 103
he could. ^^You try playing Santa for twelve months," he sighs.
His acumen notwithstanding, he is nowhere as rich as Soviet students imagine: he takes just enough "turnover tax" on each item to keep his trade going. Nor, despite his chuckle to one and all, is he happy-go-lucky; keeping up this role is an even greater burden. "It costs plenty to be good for laughs," he told me on the night we played Russian and bought a bottle specifically to get drunk. On the other hand, his popularity and Russia's jumble have helped him break free of mama's inhibitions.
Even more than mine, his childhood is a case study of immigrant Americans stumbling in the tug of war between tradition and striving. His father, an A & P butcher, lost his job and died. Fed on starchy lavash and sweet telmash, pampered by aunts, Joe grew up a mother's boy—and mother's man, hope and idol. By fifteen, he harbored a self-fulfilling prophecy that his moist flabbiness would repel any girl he desired. But the sadness of this was softened by the general pattern of his adolescence. All interests, sexual and other, were subordinated to the goal of becoming a professor at Cincinnati University, whose library was visible from their house. He wore a white shirt to class every day. He had to succeed.
This is the background he is now bravely deserting: for the first time, he's up to his ears in wheeling-dealing and life. But it's less his Moscow goings-on that have freed him than the adventures of last summer. Instead of joining the other Westerners scurrying, on their first day of vacation, like baby gulls toward water to refresh their spirits in Europe, he decided to remain in the country between his two academic years. Convincing his sponsors that the travel was essential to his studies—his dissertation concerns prerevolutionary Russian attitudes toward Tamerlane —he wrested a subsidized tour for himself to Soviet Central Asia, seat of this branch of the Mongol conquerors. It was to start in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent and culminate, predictably, in a sentimental detour to Yerevan, where advance parties of Armenians home on vacation from studies in Moscow were already preparing the sumptuous welcome he would never receive. . . . Joe once more urges a "quick nip" to the cafeteria in order to avoid the dinner crush, but I so enjoy the story of his Central Asian voyage that I persuade him to join me on the double seat
104^MOSCOW FAREWELL
and tell it anew. Wary of the authorities, he has whispered the whole tale only to Chingiz and me. But he seems to recognize my need for diversion today and starts at the beginning.
The trip began in the desert heat of July, after the usual false starts because of extra documents required at the last minute and hard-won reservations abruptly canceled when Swiss and Swedish delegations appeared to monopolize planes and hotels. On the first leg, his companions—if he could help it, gregarious Joe did not journey alone—were a young French couple on a fling south from the University before summering in Menton. The Parisian girl changed costume before and after every meal. Under a sun that fried feet through sandal-leather, her suitor followed in her footsteps, lugging trunks on their peregrinations from one Tashkent hotel to another. (Intourist had bungled their arrangements.) Entering a lobby where the porters were having a smoke, he tripped, tore a tendon, and could not move. His darling cursed him and walked on.
Joe couldn't help: he was busy ministering to a lady of his own. A resident of Akron named Mrs. Betty Vogl, she was on his plane coming down, and invited him to a nightcap in her room. She answered his knock in a spangled bikini.
"It's so hot in here and no air-conditioning—can you imagine?"
Although never facile with words, Joe perceived some things so clearly that they formed near aphorisms in his thoughts. This Vogl floozy, he mused, is as ignorant as lustful, as vulgar as forward. Until now, her American Express trip had not been a success. "I couldn't care less. Big Boy," the voyager's twang proclaimed, "whether this is Tashkent or Timbuktu. Long as I got you." Nevertheless, he succumbed to her patent tricks. He was mesmerized by her boldness and, when his shirt was unbuttoned, by her obviously unfeigned attraction to the growth on his chest. Here was a woman who wanted him.
Tashkent seemed as worlds-apart from Moscow as Moscow from Cincinnati, but Joe could only guess: he hardly saw more than the skyline from Mrs. Vogl's balcony, whose view was partially blocked by a Lenin monument. Here he was in the Central Asia of his five years' study and research, and spending his entire stay within four walls with pretensions to enclose a
The Lenin Library X105
Statler room. After each bang, he resolved to say good-bye to this thin-faced Betty with the hunger exceeding his own but could not leave her in the lurch. She liked meals in the room and was delighted with his ability to arrange this by actually talking that gobbledegook on the telephone. On the last morning, she promised to return via Moscow rather than Hawaii after the tour's India circuit.
From Tashkent to Samarkand, the second leg of his journey, Joe's companion was a gangling young "scholar" who introduced himself as Pavel, then groped for his surname. The circumstances of their meeting were quite enough to unmask his function: before fully arranging his limbs at Joe's side in the airport, the stranger with the genial smile but edgy eyes instantly had begun marveling about all they had in common—muffing, however, some of his lines. Quaintness can soften crudeness, thought Joe aphoristically. In such things, clumsy obviousness can add an element of Old World charm.
As Pavel had it, their main mutual interest was Ulug-Beg, a nephew of Tamerlane and the subject of his graduate research. What luck! They could spend time together in Samarkand! With nothing to hide and a year's experience of how to conduct himself with student narks, Joe did not mind that someone had been assigned to him for the trip, or even that Pavel knew almost nothing about Mongols and the fourteenth century. It was summer, after all, and understandably difficult to recruit someone of his own specialized background at short notice. Young Pavel's compulsion to point out every new cinema and row of trees as a Soviet Achievement in the former Asian badlands was disconcerting, but this very clumsiness was reassurance that he, Joe, was not taken seriously as a threat to Soviet security. This was routine surveillance, and all things considered—including Samarkand's evening dullness—he was grateful for the company.
Because it was the holiday season, Joe found few of the professors he wanted to interview. But he did spend time exploring minarets and glorious azure mosques—in which Pavel, to his own delight, developed an interest. And although thorough Sovietization had transformed the city from a fabled oasis lying across the world's most important spice route to a tackier version of modern Moscow, the new construction made Tamerlane's
106.^ MOSCOW FAREWELL
tomb and other surviving Islamic treasures all the more important. Joe thought his way back to the dusty days of Marco Polo, Ghenghis Khan and his own Tamerlane.
Soon it was time to fly to Bukhara, former oasis, ancient rival of Samarkand, rich prize of warring Arabs and rapacious Turks. Joe was much looking forward to this: Bukhara was said to be far less spoiled, still a city of mud battlements and tapestries. His fluency in Russian—and Pavel's mistake—resulted in their placement on an ordinary milk-run flight, rather than one of the better ones onto which foreigners were usually herded. The plane for the hundred-and-fifty-mile journey was a two-engined propeller job modeled on the old, workhorse DC-3. Fine—but why was it skimming so low over the baking scrub and sand?
"And why are you, my friend, so often nervous?" answered Pavel from the aisle seat, taking this cue to provide a mini-lecture about Aeroflot, the world's safest airline.
Joe reasoned that Pavel might be apprehensive for having delivered him to this crate's din and dirt in violation of his brief. But accepting that he, Joe, often did fret unnecessarily, he opened his guide book. Because concentration was difficult (despite their seemingly perilous altitude, the nose seemed to be pointed down instead of up) he switched to memories of the best moments—that is, the wordless ones—with Mrs. Vogl. But if broken seats and a metal floor with cigarette butts didn't necessarily reflect safety procedures, why were the engines whining so? The scarlet-haired stewardess preferred not to interrupt her bickering with a swarthy passenger to reply. Their yells had begun over his right to keep a sack of slaughtered chickens under his seat, but the question of whether they stank or merely smelled led to mutual observations about the fragrances exuded by the disputants themselves. Oh well, sighed Joe, if she's not worrying, why should I?
Turning to the window after a shuddering wobble, he saw a lick of blue flame dance out from the engine. A moment later, the propeller was feathered. He pushed past Pavel's knees, seizing the stewardess to inform her of the fiery substance to his suspicions. Returning from the pilot's cabin to which Joe had virtually pushed her, she assured him that everything was absolutely fine, Comrade. The pilot had said that the plane was
The Lenin Library^ 107
in its normal pattern, and the sun's glare on the wings often played tricks on people unaccustomed to flying.
She went forward again, snapping an oily curtain behind her. Through a rip, Joe saw her examining a pair of new pumps with her dumpy colleague. They giggled into each other's ears. The shoes had obviously been procured in some machination "on the left."
The following fall—that is, last September—Joe asked the British air attache why he thought no announcement had been made about the crippled engine.
"Not in the pilots' manual," the Britisher replied. "The blighters feel they must deny any and all malfunctions, even when lives are at stake. You know the revolutionary instinct: refute all imputations of shortcomings as anti-Soviet slurs."
Joe agreed that keeping the passengers in ignorance conformed to the country's spirit. They were only ordinary prols, after all; their fate in the air was entrusted to the pilots, just as their lives on the ground to the wisdom of Lenin's Party. And the Party not only knew what was best for, but also when to tell what to the masses it led.
But that was when he had the leisure and composure to analyze the episode. Now, as it approached an obvious climax^— either a dramatic escape or a dramatic something else—the crew's silence seemed surrealistic. Believing he wasn't crazy, he assumed they must be.
His agitation alerted Pavel, who became one of the few to surmise that something was seriously wrong. His efforts to conceal this prompted a tenderness in Joe for all human beings forced by a code of something, usually gibberish, to violate their most basic instincts. Instead of fearing for his life, poor Pavel had to feign ardor for socialism. The engine on the opposite wing was now so straining that Joe felt a certain sympathy for it too. He remembered a morbid story about the copilot jerking off" told him by the class wise guy the first time he flew.
Involuntarily, he also remembered a series of recent New York Times articles about Aeroflot. The line's first fifty years passed in almost total ignorance about its safety record, during which the Soviet authorities claimed to have eliminated human failure and many foreigners took them at their word. (Until the late 1960s, it
108^ MOSCOW FAREWELL
somehow seemed natural to picture Soviet mechanics working to the highest possible standards, just as Soviet kitchens were always clean in the imagination and Soviet trains ran on time; certain sorts of slovenliness had no schematic place under socialism.) But when Westerners began traveling in the country, rumors of horrendous human and mechanical mishaps reached them; and now the newspaper series was giving details of no less than ten major crashes, taking some twelve hundred lives, in the last nineteen months. And these were only the planes in which Westerners were flying, or which fell at or near airports open to Westerners: an old kite like this—which Joe wasn't supposed to be on—wouldn't have qualified. He regretted having spent so much breath in so many offices and bureaus wangling permission to have his daily Times delivered (fifteen days late, on average) to his dormitory room. He regretted reading it so diligently. But both activities derived directly from his character, like those that kept his room stuffed with his drugstore assortment. Stacks of newspapers, magazines, Kleenex boxes . . . what good would they do him now?
On the other hand, he was proud of his self-control. He sensed that disaster was imminent and somewhere was violently afraid; yet also recognized there was nothing he could do about anything and kept his composure. He had not expected so comforting an answer to his old question of how he would behave in a crisis. He, Joe Sourian, could think first of the effect of his death on his professors and poor mother. He could be brave!
It was impossible to determine whether his fellow voyagers could be too, since they were still unaware of the trouble. The cabin was pungent with a human odor, but it was the normal bouquet of forty unwashed bodies in this land of black shawls and mules, not the smell of fear. The other passengers—a typical selection of small dark men in dusty suits and busty women with large moisture stains under the arms of their print dresses—continued to swig from bottles, gesticulate in prosecution of heated card games and fan themselves with limp sheets of Uzbekistan Pravda. Except for a lingering agitation after their characteristically frenetic Soviet shoving into the plane to make sure they weren't left behind or removed at the last minute, they might have been the lower-middle-class population of some Macedo-
The Lenin Library X109
nian town. But given Soviet roadlessness and intensive use of civil aviation, surely they'd flown before? Then why on earth (if, in the circumstances, that figure of speech was permissible) did none of them notice that the plane was now down to almost rooftop level? And in this stretch of emptiness broken only by an occasional one-story abode, rooftops were probably lower than sea level—which was the way it came to Joe to say that the craft was insanely depressed.
Suddenly another native characteristic revealed itself as new, rather than the psychological key to everything in the cabin which Joe hadn't found until this moment. It was that no one, least of all the stewardesses, cared about anything not directly and manifestly bearing on his individual well-being. Not only his neighbors' welfare, but also all larger questions were of no concern to any of the good citizens aboard. The condition of the plane? Aeroflot's business. The way they'd been snarled at in the airport and kept on the approach to the runway for fifty-five minutes (in that heat! and without even a door being opened in the absence of an air-conditioning system!) with no explanation? Well, what the hell could they, ordinary Soviet citizens, do about it except shut themselves off from thoughts that could bring only frustration. In this political, let alone meteorological, climate, only personal grievances mattered. Each for himself and only himself (the converse, naturally enough, of the endlessly repeated "one for all and all for one" of newspaper language); it was quite enough to claim, fight for and guard one's own, without worrying about anything that was officially the responsibility of someone else. As if to illustrate that everyone cared only about his private interests, another client-crew fracas was in progress. A livid woman near the tail was screaming at the fatter of the two stewardesses about the ten unoccupied seats near the front of the cabin. Told at check-in that the flight was fully booked, she had to leave behind her husband and brother in Samarkand, where they might have to wait days for another flight. The irony wasn't lost on Joe: in this case, the usual practice of turning customers away, even when empty seats existed, had saved the victims. Deaf to the woman's woe, a conspiratorial-looking man seated beside her got up to trade a melon in his valise for a bottle of someone's homemade wine. Other men were singing in groups;
some in celebration of a legendary Uzbek princess, others in anticipation of the family reunion planned for that evening.
Neither the cacophony nor the temperature (not flames here, but the plane's heaters were on) disturbed yet other passengers from dozing on each others' shoulders. What a bunch to die with, Joe said to himself It's as if my family came to America by mistake, and now I'm back. Pavel had stopped talking. Joe looked out of the window and, from some reading years ago, recognized the scrub as camel's thorn. Thank God this steppe can't support trees (for smacking into), he thought, feeling better immediately for his combination of observation and wit. Perhaps he could have been a parachutist or a frogman. In the past ten minutes he'd learned to take for granted his coolness under pressure. But to be on the safe side, he removed his glasses.
The instant he put them on again to check the window, the wing on his side grazed a high-tension wire. (Leading to a secret military communications center? Joe wondered. Just my luck! In the middle of this desert, what other use could there be for so much electricity?) Although there seemed no room for the maneuver, the plane performed a cartwheel. All but the few passengers who had actually seen the wing touch the wire still appeared oblivious to any danger. As if to confirm that negotiating the Kara Kum Desert upside down was a splendid demonstration of socialist progress, Pavel recovered from his trance and started to say something about the exhaustiveness of Soviet pilot training—or was it a statement about the dialectical incompatibility of crashes under a social system of and for The People? How sad, thought Joe again: even now, the poor fellow was trying to dream up a Save Soviet Face story for him. Wouldn't it be better if he could devote these last seconds to his own reflections, or to coming to terms with his Maker?
Joe wished he could think of something to say to his Maker. For it was clear that these were his last seconds too; only some James Bond feat would enable him to survive. And he was spending them in second-rate speculation about a man who meant nothing to him. On the other hand, perhaps this was a message about the importance of literally loving your neighbor, since you never knew who he would be or what you might go through together. Or a sign that he, Joe, was not a selfish slob
because—although his hfelong pattern of rushing around doing favors for everyone was a phony pose—here he was, at the finish, more concerned about Pavel's peace of mind than his own.
But in general, Joe was not disposed to philosophizing, despite all he'd read about men facing death. It comforted him more to settle some little things. It was a mistake to have risked it with those glasses, he realized, pulling bits of shattered lenses from his cheeks. The sickening sound of crunching metal offended, rather than terrorized him. He realized the plane was crashing and crumpling. Then blackness descended for an indeterminate interval. He had an extremely peaceful sleep although, despite the seeming contradiction, it was also filled with profoundly disturbing dreams. He awoke to a midday sun mercilessly searing his face and a ghoulish chorus of grunts and moans from the dying, somewhere out there, on his right.
Weeks later, he learned that half of the forty-eight passengers and crew were killed on impact or expired before nightfall. He was saved by being thrown clear and landing, on the cushion of his fat, in a sizable ditch of water and mud. You mean it actually rained in this Sahara sometime during the last six months? he heard himself wondering. No, Joey-boy, this is some irrigation scheme to make the socialist desert bloom. It had better be that: Mama would be destroyed to learn I expired in a pile of camel shit.
He passed out again. The afternoon hours were an alternation of blessed unconsciousness and the awfulness of the others' wails and moans. The wall of the irrigation ditch shaded his forehead; his body told him not to move. A man in an Aeroflot uniform, only relatively more crumpled than the average one, was wandering about, cursing his luck and lazy mechanics. Evening was evidently approaching, but the sun did not relent. Joe wondered whether he would join the passengers who had stopped making pitiful sounds.
Once when he awoke, a rescue party was there, apparently from a local collective farm. So . . . the high-tension wire had led somewhere real. He could raise his legs from the ground, but not his head or trunk. More vehicles arrived; by the late-evening dusk, all wounded had traveled the road to the nearest hospital in the outpost town of Karshi. Each rut wrung a whimper
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through Joe's teeth, but at last he was between clean sheets and falling asleep. What a day!
In marched a delegation of local government officials to wake him and announce that he would be driven to better facilities in Tashkent. Joe begged to be left with the other wounded. Were they trying to give the grim reaper a second chance? Finish him off with another, much longer ride? He implored them to give him at least one night's sleep. Determined above all to relieve themselves of responsibility for the foreigner, the bumbling town fathers packed him into a vehicle, volubly assuring him that their handsome gesture was for his precious health alone.
It was not a vintage Packard but an ambulance. It narrowly missed being demolished by an oil truck when stopped on the road to repair a ruptured fanbelt with tape. Tashkent was attained well after midnight. During a further half hour, the driver was lost on its streets. It was Joe's longest, most action-packed day; whatever else was wrong with his body, it was pounds lighter.
Despite everything, part of him looked forward to recuperation in Tashkent. He was now placed to observe far more interesting sights than all he'd missed here under Mrs. Vogl's deodorized wing. To start with, there were a few things he wanted to record about Aeroflot's crack-up debut. The collective farmers who first arrived on the scene hesitating to comfort the parched, groaning wounded with bottles of mineral water still intact in the plane's tail—for fear they be charged with stealing state property. The failure to direct even that seat belts be buckled as the plane held its doom course. (The loudspeaker system was broken, as well as many belts, but the stewardesses could have shouted over the engine noise as they had to announce the takeoff, giggling like children on a summer camp stage.) The Karshi Party man's assurance that the plane had made a "forced landing" because of electrical storms, resulting in a number of broken bones. . . . His hospital stay might provide material to deepen these observations with more generalized sociological analysis. The insights into daily life and human relations here would make a fascinating comparison to Solzhenitsyn's panorama of the cancer ward of a similar hospital—perhaps this very one, although he hesitated to ask. He might put it all on paper: Tashkent ward, twenty years
The Lenin Library "^ 113
later. Break into print with it faster than with his unfocusable dissertation.
Joe's ruminations provided the silver lining required by the human psyche as compensation for tragedy. The hospital had other ideas. Another dead-of-night hour was consumed transferring a bewildered patient from his isolated private room so that the American could be moved in. Examined and given a sedative, he at last had his sleep.
He awoke the following evening to a delicious vision: Eva Marie Saint playing nurse at his bedside. She seemed Slavic, but with finer features than most Russian girls; and she was murmuring comfort tinged with adoration. "You mustn't worry; there is nothing further to fear." (Was this a dreamed improvement of Mrs. Vogl? Was it in fact "Big Boy" and not "My Large One" she was whispering—if the apparition was whispering at all?) "I am here; you will be well again."
Joe continued to doubt the latter assertion: he still could not move his neck, and the bandages on his hands suggested severe burns. "What you've endured, my bravest." (Now he imagined cool fingers on his brow.) "Sleep, I will restore you."
When he awoke again, the light was on, his neck pains were horrendous, and the fair whisperer was washing her hands in a corner basin: curious behavior for the angel of a semidelirious dream. Her name was Barbara. A Polish name because she was in fact a Pole: the daughter of a well-to-do Lublin mother, whose family had been uprooted and exiled to Kazakhstan after the 1939 Soviet occupation, and of a Polish prisoner of the same invasion who was also not allowed home after the Second World War. Her mother's first husband had been a cavalry Major who was executed in a massacre carried out by Soviet soldiers on the same day as the notorious one in the Katyn Forest. In a show of something, Barbara chose to bear his surname rather than her father's. Although her legs were largish and her face wasn't Polish-princess white—none remained so under that desert sun—a small mole on her cheek was a very model for an aristocratic mark. Altogether, she was the loveliest creature ever to cradle Joe's head, let alone sponge-bathe his hairy—and now sweaty and itchy—arms and legs.
How to explain her instant infatuation for him? Barbara's
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uncommonly romantic nature showed even in the blonde braids she wore upswept on her head, like a Turgenev maiden in her family's summer estate. Her background also contributed. All her life, she had dreamed of being rescued from Tashkent. Borne away to Poland or some other gentle land—not that this had prevented two marriages to local bulldozer operators. Nor that she had made any effort to save herself, even when free (after the Khrushchev reforms) to resettle, say, in Tula or Kiev. She waited. And Joe arrived.
"I will return your strength, my pathfinder."
It was Barbara who told Joe about the deaths of twenty-four of his fellow passengers. Freakishly, however, most of the survivors were not seriously hurt, if the word-of-mouth information from Karshi was reliable. (Needless to say, the press mentioned nothing about them, nor the crash itself) When Joe asked several representatives of the Tashkent City Soviet's Committee of Friendship and Hospitality, as the men who came to call on him identified themselves, about poor Pavel, their quick answer was that no such person had been on the plane.
"What?" Surviving the accident had given Joe a flush of courage. Moreover, he knew that the authorities' concern over the potentially damaging publicity of an American witnessing such an affair gave him a weak hold on them. "Look here, I've been in your country a full year. That boy was no archaeology student, but he got us on that flight."
Startled by this boldness, anxious about where it might lead, the officials agreed a mistake was possible. On the next visit, only two of the group appeared, of whom the talkative one was obviously a local KGB chief He said that the passenger list had been studied, no one of that description was on it and Meester Sourian must continue to rest, since delirium was an indication of a continuing condition of shock. Thus did Pavel pass from Joe's existence, for he decided not to press the issue—nor to argue with the Aeroffot representative who appeared to investigate the value of his valises. Joe's lost suits alone could not have been replaced for a thousand rubles but, beset by a slight relapse, he felt too tired to itemize and suggested five hundred. Outraged, the man offered fifty, together with a declamation about the inconvenience of "this whole episode" to Aeroffot, and the
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danger, in a collectivist state, of concocting fraudulent claims.
Barbara's reappearance after each visit was beauty after the beasts. Because she had been warned to tell her patient nothing ("You understand,'" the hospital chief had said sternly, "that unpleasant news might retard his recovery") she put herself at some risk by mentioning the fatalities. By that time, however, she v/as up to her graceful neck in even greater dangers. For one thing, her hours with him were largely stolen from other duties. Twenty times a day, she slipped through the door and into the room's heavy atmosphere—it was Tashkent's most murderous summer in years, with an unbroken month of hundred-degree days—to fan, stroke and talc his corpulent form to the accompaniment of a Polish ballad popular during the Second World War called "Przemin§k)y Wiatrem": "Gone With the Wind."
Although his neck was still badly sprained, there was no malfunction of his central nervous system. Even if Barbara hadn't been a thousand times more enchanting than Betty, this second demonstration of his body inspiring affection in a grown woman—Barbara was twenty-three, and had "vaguely" lived with men before her marriages—understandably "provoked an even firmer reaction than the first. As Barbara murmured and caressed, an area of sheet rose between his belly and knees, like a low, local tent. Since its stubby upright alone was a source of ecstasy, he could not find a word for the pleasure it afforded under Barbara's ministrations.
Yet the dreamy nurse's busy hands and mouth seemed detached from her romantic aura, as Bach was separate from his glorious cantatas. "Oh yes, I've noticed that," she said one afternoon when, while mechanically smoothing the sheet, her palm bumped the upright. "My poor darling. And your hands all dressed."
She opened the door wider to any approaching footsteps in the corridor. Joe quivered with thoughts of her intention and of discovery's terrible peril. "Don't be embarrassed," she said, pulling the sheet one way and his gauzy hospital gown the other. She fondled his testicles, occasionally drawing her hand up the pole like an archer pulling his bow. She moistened him with saliva, sustaining the rhythm. Joe supposed he would faint. He tried to control his panting: even before his recent inactivity, he
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had been short of breath. ReHef came quickly. In the setting of the spare but friendly hospital, the afterglow was indescribably delicious and bizarre. He searched for something to say.
"I want to thank you," he mumbled, touching her hair with the tips of his bandages.
"It's such a pressure for a bedridden person to live with," she answered blandly. "They taught us a little about massages."
The following morning, the therapy was repeated. Then it was Barbara's day off, and she decided not to provoke the inevitable suspicions by appearing. The next day she relieved him twice, which would be average for the coming week. Each finger was like a machined piston ring; together they moved up and down him as if he were as long as an arm. Her mouth encircled him wholesomely, as if puckering for a Life Savers ad. He came like a whale blowing. She cleaned up, stood up, smiled.
When she took him to the bath, she washed his parts twice, first and last. Weak in the knees and unable to grip the railing through his bandages, he was supported by one of Barbara's hands in the small of his back, while the other laid on the soapy strokes. Masturbation was exultation!
Barbara now went directly to it with no exchange of words. It was understood that the silence was to help avoid detection: Joe's room surely had KGB "ears." This inhibition also made them accept that intercourse was impossible. With Joe's neck, she would have to mount him, and would require too long to get down if there was an alarming sound in the corridor. The one time he reached his forearm inside her long uniform skirt, she was moist but hesitant.
"Not here. Soon you will be well again." She went to her other duties and Joe sniffed the heat-heightened genital scent lingering on his skin.
But Barbara's disinclination to talk seemed to derive too from the dispassionateness of her attendance: the same professionalism, or whatever, that prompted her immediate attention to his erection whenever she entered the room alone, and her unhurried yet undallying relief of it. In any case, the only sounds were Radio Tashkent in the patients' common room one floor below and a medicine trolley's occasional squish over linoleum. The muteness of the room itself during these breathtaking acts
imparted a dreamlike aesthetic obscenity to Joe's pleasure, which the fear of exposure heightened still further. Venery was ecstasy!
In contrast to Barbara, Joe beheld the sex as integral to something larger; the artistry of her hands intensified his worship for the whole of her. Ever since reading A Farewell to Arms, he'd had a fantasy of being wounded in a daring enterprise—the crash served perfectly well—and being nursed (true, on some cooler shore, with November sun and wistfulness) by a Grace Kelly in whites. Whereas beautiful girls had no reason to give him a chance in ordinary circumstances, the extended contact of recuperation would allow the woman of his reveries to truly know him. He and Barbara were following this scenario faithfully. His lust was only the icing, or confirmation, of a heavenly relationship whose coincidental elements were stronger even than the fanciful: how many lived to see so many elements of their sexy-angel fantasy come true? As if the two substances were trying to fuse permanently the interlocking of dream and reality, the old-fashioned starch of Barbara's uniform smelled much like his semen, which she swallowed to avoid staining the towel.
Still severely sprained, his neck was now in a cast. There were a thousand things to worry about, beginning with being held incommunicado these twenty-three days. His doctors seemed capable, but the Tashkent officials clearly hadn't informed the Embassy in Moscow, despite all promises. They were probably investigating him furiously to determine his connection to the crash. His whole Central Asian trip would be the subject of some Colonel's report about motivation and likelihood of espionage. Meanwhile, no one in the world who had known him before could guess his whereabouts. His Armenian student friends, waiting with their abortive banquets, no doubt presumed he'd been arrested and were planning how to downplay their friendship. His own family, to whom his letters were surely not getting through, might think him dead or be hoping for a miracle like Hemingway's after his African crash. (A Farewell to Arms was constantly on his mind. The hospital librarian brought him a copy and he read the Russian translation with infinitely more enjoyment than he had the American original.)
But his only real worries were the heat and fear of discovery. Nothing else mattered: not the boredom nor the food (they made
special efforts for him); surely not the American Embassy. In this haven from pressures and neuroses, he began to realize he was a grown man, mature enough to accept Barbara's attention to his manhood and her respectful devotion. Only she could have done this for him.
Only she too could have made him think of disappointing his mother's most important expectation of him: to marry a nice Armenian girl. He ruminated and sweated, trying to weigh the apples of his upbringing against the oranges of this tumultuous love, all the harder to measure because of the suspected microphone and Barbara's untalkativeness. For example, he couldn't determine whether she was quiet-dumb or quiet-intelligent. But in the end, he was relieved of the decision. The romance terminated with much less originality than it had begun.
When he was well enough to walk for exercise, Barbara vanished from the hospital. Like Pavel, she might not have existed.
Joe had to be careful when asking about her, even though he felt more ill than after the crash. That the other nurses claimed to know nothing about her disappearance increased his dread. And indeed: the man "from the city soviet committee" who had continued visiting him after the others dropped off appeared in his room after three tormenting Barbara-less days. In tones of hurt, anger and menace, he accused Joe of violating Soviet hospitality and the "honor of young Soviet womanhood."
He handed him a piece of notepaper. On it was Barbara's confession, ostensibly to the hospital directorate. "I cringe when I think of what I have done to myself and to the reputation of Soviet women. I am tortured by thoughts of my violation of the People's trust. I sold everything I'd been given in life—all Soviet society's material support and moral development—for a foreigner's glad-rag promises. Oh why did I do this humiliating thing to me and my Motherland? Defile the sacred name of Nurse, even spoil hospital sheets with my vileness? These questions will haunt me the rest of my life. . . . I beg that my career not be ruined nor behavior publicized in the press. Please allow me to return to Tashkent and, in the spirit of Soviet humanitarianism, atone for
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my guilt by doing the bedpans—anything connected with my profession."
When it was all over and he was back in the University for this, his second year, Joe pondered two small puzzles. Had the entrapment been planned from Moscow, or at the initiative of local agents? And what purpose did it serve—unless to recoup Aeroflot's fifty miserable rubles—to make him pay for the "polluted" sheets? (When the KGB man left, hospital officials said they could not "impose" such linen on innocent Soviet patients, and a pile was produced for Joe to examine before—as they claimed—its feeding to the incinerator. If they were indeed his dirty dozen, this indicated surveillance from the very beginning.) Why the operation had been undertaken at all seemed less mysterious. He had seen too much and was behaving too cockily. In case his sickened deflation at the news of Barbara's fate were not enough, he was warned that any "exaggerations" he might spread would only "lengthen Comrade-Nurse Kowalska's social rehabilitation." The men in charge obviously reckoned that expelling him from the country directly from Tashkent would have increased the chances of his publicizing the summer's adventures. Instead, he was returned to his Tamerlane research in Moscow, where they had a hold on him.
The stiffness of his neck muscles persisted into late fall, causing back pains and eyestrain. His heartache, manifested first in total apathy, then in overwhelming self-condemnation for his selfish incaution and finally in a longing for Barbara's hair and eyes, lasted longer. Surely it wasn't possible he'd never see her again. On the other hand, the "Summer of the Two," as Chingiz called the five weeks in Tashkent, was a turning point; and when Mrs. Vogl turned up in Moscow and traced him to the University, he did not go to her hotel. The body for which he had lusted and thanked his lucky stars only last July had utterly no attraction for him; didn't that show remarkable growth?
Just before the deep freeze in November, the University organized a trip for English-speaking history students to Borodino, site of the great battle between Napoleon's and Kutuzov's armies. Puffing on the hills and, as always, visualizing Barbara, Joe lagged behind and got lost. His asking directions of three girls
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picnicking on an old breastwork sparked a conversation. Yes, he was American, he said wearily; and they were . . . nurses from Tashkent! His next question twitched on his lips. Two of the three answered yes. One had even studied with Barbara!
She knew more than the others. While Joe was still in the hospital awaiting his examination for release, poor Barbarinka was exiled to a village in Kirgizia. It had no medical facilities; she was put to work looking after pigs. But her mother collapsed almost immediately and she was permitted to return home. Now she worked as a floor-mopper and toilet-cleaner in Tashkent's ice-cream factory.
Devastated, Joe had to sit down. The pain in his neck felt just as it had in the irrigation ditch. But either because they genuinely knew or wanted to calm him, the girls said that Barbara wasn't unhappy. She blamed no one; indeed, felt nothing called for blame. "And we're not just saying this." The girls had seen her in cafes and strolling the main street, and nothing in her conversation or behavior suggested bitterness or even surprise. . . . Yes, for a month or so, she did talk of Joe returning to rescue her from Tashkent. But now she was planning to be married. To a half-Tartar boy who made deliveries to the factory.
Weeping about this, it seemed to Joe that the tragedy's added dimensions reached to new lows and new heights. Something transcendental was afoot; nothing else could explain his encounter with the nurses two thousand miles from Tashkent, in a Napoleonic battlefield's forest of monuments to slaughtered divisions. Would the summer's weirdness never end? The enormity of meaning behind the chain of events made him giddy with life's infinite mysteries and possibilities. He, a Cincinnati teacher's pet, living through this! But the multi-adventure's very quirks made it a kind of religious experience, so personal that no third party could sense its mystical effects, any more than they could know what Barbara would always mean to him.
So she wasn't crushed, but peacefully accepted her fate. But this new twist—the ultimate injustice of her goodness in the face of calamity—produced the greatest hurt. No, she was not just a shallow beauty; this had been no summer romance. But marriage to a Tashkent truckdriver? Surely she had the same
The Lenin Library"^ 121
commitment as he to the memory of their idyll? With new puzzlement and fresh areas of pain, the affair recaptured control of him for the winter season of brooding.
Time has held its breath during Joe's narrative. In a polite request for confidentiality, he reminds me that only Chingiz and I know the whole of it, then sits still for a long moment. I cup my hand on his shoulder as my lieutenant on a nonbelligerent street gang used to on mine. Slowly we return from Central Asia to the reading room's high ceiling and imposing four walls.
"You gonna check your books in?" he asks in his hoarse whisper. Despite the season, an oily film coats his cheeks. If only he knew how much everyone, from Arabs to Cambodians, likes him. How much everyone needs to relax with him in his cafe of a room, especially when bored or depressed.
"Might as well."
Yes, I've had enough for the day. If I leave now, I can make a fresh start tomorrow.
Depositing my five volumes with Maya in return for my canceled check-out slip, I follow Joe's bulk out of our dissertation works. Although he recuperated relatively rapidly from the Borodino blow, he turned to food for solace, growing larger than ever. We walk down the main, marble stairway, then through a series of wire-encased passageways and back steps to the cafeteria, with its mess hall smell. Like ten thousand eateries in Moscow basements, it is a steamy room with dishwatery smears on the walls, but with a much smarter clientele than average. We pick up our metal trays and cutlery, twisted aluminum pieces that might belong to some post-atomic holocaust survival kit. In the absence of knives—a favorite item of pilferage, rarely replaced—some diners are ripping off^ mouthfuls of meat from their chunks with bared teeth, while others try to cleave them into bite size with two soup spoons. At the counter, we choose the hearty borscht, a main course of scrawny chicken, and the dried-prune-and-apricot compote for dessert. But it's a mere seventy kopeks and, as Joe predicted, the line is insignificant at this hour.
In quest of air, we sit at a table near the door. His mouth full of food, Joe nods toward the steam table. During a pause for
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refilling the soup caldrons there, two teen-age ladlers in white smocks and caps have grasped each other around the waist.
"See what I mean?" he says. "This fantastic physical contact, it's everywhere. Where else would you see that scene?"
"That scene" is repeated severally in the stuffy cellar: girls holding hands, linking arms, touching. Pairs sharing seats, like kindergarten children. Before the summer, Joe used to position himself in metro cars, elevators and other packed places to explore breasts with his elbows. The ease of it amazed him. Either because Russian women were too healthy-minded to suspect his tricks or, he theorized, because a lifetime of crowded quarters had rendered them oblivious, none noticed even minutes of persistent kneading. After Betty and Barbara, he no longer needed this—nor did he feel his former awkwardness with girls: he even managed to take several dormitory neighbors to bed. But he slept only a few times with each; what interested him more was the Russian female as a genus, their attitudes and habits. What did it mean that in the library's other reading rooms, all less commodious than Scholarly-Scientific Hall Number One, females were always in each other's laps? That they seemed to enjoy rather than resent the squashing, as if the reassurance of a warm body touching one's own was better than sitting alone and tackling independent work?
He considered writing an essay that would trace some of the stable elements in Russian life through delineation of the girls' attitudes: the uncomplicated goodness, exemplified by the unself-conscious physical contact that comforts and fortifies the beleaguered nation. In this time of women's lib, his contribution would be as relevant as his stillborn chronicle of Tashkent. But he got bogged down deciding whether to make it a sociological study or an account of his personal observations. Too detached to capture Russian girls' beguiling informality, a scholarly treatise would mislead more than enlighten; too frivolous-sounding to be taken seriously, a first-person sketch might damage his academic career. This project too was abandoned.
But not thoughts about it. "I think I'll pack it in with you for the day," he says as we leave the cafeteria. "Wait for me in the main hall? I'll show you something."
I do wait while he pulls himself up the stairs to the reading
The Lenin Library"^ 123
room and hands in his books. The lines at the cloakroom counters have almost disappeared, and one of the attendants is displaying his dental work to a female colleague. When Joe comes down again, past the check-out matron and the policewoman, we put on our overcoats and step into the momentarily refreshing cold. He leads me over a bus and trolley route, grinning when I press him for our destination. I spent one afternoon with him searching for Ray-O-Vac batteries for a gadget fanatic, and a full day trying to establish whether a 1921 one-hundred-dollar bill, which a prerevolutionary publishing family had fearfully hid in an attic these fifty years, is still legal currency in America. But he'll only say that I'm in for "something completely different" in a moment.
We turn a corner to an impressive new physical culture institute that trains sports coaches and "amateur" athletes. One of the few Americans willing to risk bluffing his way past the pass-checkers at gates, Joe takes the lead today by talking to me in Russian about weight lifting loudly enough for the guard to overhear. Our final steps lead to the balcony of a huge gymnasium, below which a class of girl gymnasts is training, the cheeky sexiness of their tight boobs and behinds protruding from wash-shrunken leotards. I whistle to myself thinking of my best friend Alyosha—who has probably screwed half the class; and for the other half, if he'd only see them as I am now, he would swing down to the floor mats by overhead ropes, like Tarzan.
For a half hour, we stare explicitly at their darling parts, but this fails to penetrate their concentration on splits, twirls and headstands, just as old Joe's probing elbow went unnoticed in metro crowds. The blondie I find myself following most is almost my mind's eye image of Barbara. As the afternoon wanes, I suddenly realize something about my friend.
"You come here often. Professor?"
"Pipe down. There's research and research. Does it beat the Lenin Library?"
Alyosha
Seven o'clock one February morning: the gauntest hour I've seen on land. Cold so prodigious that the continent seems paralyzed, squeezing a chant from my depths to the cosmic forces. Wind moaning as if through Arctic forests and snow reflecting the stars' phantom gleam while a specter probes the eastern horizon: not yet dawn, but promise of an end to the deathly night. Frost on my eyebrows and the mittened hand of a girl called Alia clutching mine as we pick our way through drifts and debris toward the road, two tire tracks meandering along the horizon. (When we reach it, will we see the top of the world?) My head throbs with fatigue, my senses pound with the eerie beauty—and with a premonition of danger: my activities here would anger the American authorities as well as the Soviet.
We are somewhere in the western outskirts of the city, in a new housing development with the look of a Siberian industrial site cut from the forest. Finished now, as construction here is finished,
AIyosha^l25
with pipes unconnected and unopenable doors, the raw buildings are fully inhabited by grateful tenants, although a tangle of dirty paths over the ice must serve for sidewalks, haphazard in the Russian manner and strewn with bottles and broken bricks. But in the tundra-like vastness swallowing the twelve-story structures, what significance has disorder as petty as this?
Around us, mute figures in black overcoats are setting out to work, feeling their way over the paths and through the hoary mist as if moved by radio signals from some Orwellian Ministry of Labor. Like us, they are making obliquely for the distant road. At the closest curve, a battered construction truck bounces along it, lights on, groaning and rattling, trailing a banner cloud of frozen exhaust and the night's new snow. The pedestrians trudging along the shoulder disperse mechanically at the sound, unwilling to raise their faces from the sanctuary of their collars. In the distance, a group has clustered at the lone streetcar stop, bunching together like peasants fleeing the Nazi advance at a railroad crossing.
Alia and I have said nothing since leaving the apartment; we are silenced by the shock of moving directly from that world to this. She strides along the path ahead of me now, head down and teeth chattering. Ruled by my feeling for her, an unaccountable combination of comradeship and prurience, incest and pastoral innocence, I follow in her intrepid footsteps. Or is my awe of the natural forces aggrandizing my conception of her? I know the adventure I'm living inclines me to rhapsodize, but even the plodding part of me I keep in reserve can't separate the effects of a universe of numbing cold from the instincts of self-preservation that drive us through it. Of the mute whiteness that subdues everything beneath it to the body heat of AUa's loins and legs. If I idealize her flesh, it is through the same perception that senses something exalted in this climate's cruelty; the exhilaration of being tested and surviving. This is the link—the zoological instincts of sex and life—between yesterday's lust and the morning's forward motion.
The crunching of snow crust under her boots gradually quickens. She is a physiotherapist at a clinic near St. Basil's and must be there, in uniform, by eight o'clock. I'm going back to my room to sleep. We have just come from another orgy during
126^MOSCOW FAREVS^LL
which we made so much love, so freely and furiously, that Alyosha's thick morning coffee has made me slightly sick.
Last night we were five: Alia and I, Alyosha Aksyonov and two girls recruited earlier in the evening, en route to the "fete"—counter girls in a dingy dairy whose last names were neither asked for nor offered, although they gave body and soul to the paganism. Essential virgins (except for a cellar episode or two with tanked Russian boys) who went speechless when Alia suddenly gulped the last of her wine and stripped to her panties.
Again, it was the girls' reaction that most fascinated me. So many new pairs repeating the pattern, yet confounding me each time with whether to believe what I see. Since I knew what to expect from them, the other characters in the small cast, although more extraordinary, surprised me less. "Efficient" Alia, the stewardess-like twenty-three-year-old whom Alyosha has been seeing for weeks, and who had to stay home yesterday— bringing the party to her apartment—for the expected call from her traveling husband. Older and higher-class than the average participant, she is also more laconic and outwardly self-contained. And Alexei Aksyonov, the fabulous, notorious, adored and much-imitated Alyosha who lives the charmed life of a playboy and universal fixer and has become, after too long without one, my best friend. My tutor, protector and indulgent provider—everything summed up in muchacho, his nickname for me, pronounced as if I'm a newly discovered nephew.
When Alyosha first approached the girls on Kirov Street, flustered blushes showed through the glow of their cheeks in the cold. Two tallish, robust lasses in worn overcoats and clodhopper boots, who caught his lynx eye amid a shopping street's thinning evening crowd. Arm in arm, unlipsticked lips pressed close to thick ear muffs for transmission of girlish chitchat, they were wending home after work with the telltale look of having nothing to do, no money to spend, too few memories—certainly of good times with gallant suitors—to reminisce about. Offspring of the Moscow proletariat and dreamers of romance, having read Pushkin and Lermontov last year in school, who had begun to perceive that their lives would be spent behind cheese counters or with husbands, when hooked, who preferred vodka.
Alyosha^l27
A strand of neon painted their faces as they crossed the otherwise shadowy street. Spying them from the driver's seat, Alyosha braked, parked and leaped out in a single motion. Of all I love in him, the great constant is the contrast he represents to everything surrounding him: his agility in unrelievedly ponderous streets, deftness in the homeland of the stolid and slow-moving, spontaneous wit where solemnity is a national institution. Alyosha the graying leprechaun in the country of hulk and drudge. His charm begins with his movements, whose fluidity predisposes even weary bystanders to smile, recalling carefree childhood moments. When I caught up, he had already introduced himself to the girls—"Please forgive me, ladies, may I stop you for just a moment?"—and induced the first laugh.
"Some consider iady' a nasty bourgeois slur. In which case, I take it all back. Comrades. What's a little solecism among friends?"
Mockery of his own eagerness as well as of the human and Soviet condition showed through his ever-so-earnest imploring. Swiftly drawing new women to his confidence and bed, the act of recruitment also prompts old chums to shake their heads in affection. "There's Alyosha for you. Still the naughty boy at fifty; he'll never change."
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