Moscow farewell

VII/Interlude 346

VIII/A Gold Medal 361

IX/Come Again? 422

MOSm)W FAREWELL

I Notes from My Windo'

From my window, through two panes of wobbly glass, a corner of this University, this city, this brooding country. Kremlin cupolas in the distance, jewels of possessed autocrats, shrouded by an icy fog. The seat of temporal and spiritual authority in its medieval splendor, regilded yearly and equipped with loudspeakers for big-brother Muzak.

Outside its sepia walls, the capital's sprawling center, sullen to match the setting and mood. A city landscape wanting neon and city life, as if square miles of squat buildings had been abandoned at the first November snows. No aircraft or traffic sounds but a northern folk song wailing in the back of my mind. Overwhelming sadness and strength in the subduing hush of Russia's expanse.

A broad artery, one spoke of the city center's wheel, leads in this direction toward the single bridge over the Moscow river; and along its snowy length, four lone construction trucks and five

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buses are gliding, past the empty intersections and sagging Glory-to-Lenin signs. The river itself is immobile and resigned, like the boarded-up summer cafes on its bank in Gorky Park; like the old women guarding the park gates, suspended in time and space. Frozen steam rises from ice packs in the water, drifts, darkens, and settles in the snowfield of the deserted Lenin stadium. One of the world's largest, it is lost in this white continent. "There is something in the Russian soul," said Berdyayev, "that corresponds to the immensity, the vagueness, the infinitude of the Russian land." I soar and sink with this understanding.

On this side of the river, everything has changed and remains the same. Flat fields, flimsy red flags, mile after mile of prefabricated apartment houses; and a scattering of furtive figures hunched into fraying collars of ankle-length overcoats. This section of the city is a showplace of postwar Soviet construction, but winter ravages new buildings of brick and cement block as relentlessly as any Volga cabin. Peeling from their dour facades, bricks plop into nets hastily hung to protect pedestrians. Joints sever, sidewalks crumble into the snow. A fortune is spent on repairing the ubiquitous cracking, flaking and cleaving, and much patchwork is abandoned midway when teams are summoned to more urgent emergencies. Even the new Palace of Pioneers, star of a thousand magazine features, has lost the battle to winter, chipping apart before it is fully fitted out. But runny-nosed children, bundled in fur until they're nearly round, are swooping down snow-covered mounds of sand and gravel left by the builders, whooping like Indians on their homemade skis.

Below me, a splendid boulevard perpendicular to the central artery separates the University from its sporting grounds beyond. Straight, broad, Olympian, it belongs to this country's Great Shining Future, for which elaborate plans are regularly remade. But it is empty now and already eroded: mournful for the present and mocking the future. A crew of women wrapped in black shawls is sweeping it clean of the new snow, swinging their witches' besoms in the age-old scything motion. Even the flanking firs and birches are stunted by the climate.

I am high in the Stalinesque tower of Moscow University,

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looking north at this panorama in the light of the mid-morning dawn. It is gray: a solid plane of heavy cloud presses on earth and shoulders with a relentlessness that groans "Russian winter." And cold: icicles dangle from the skyscraper's ornate cornices, although this is the first day of December, only the beginning of the annual trial. And still: the thump of student shoes striking a lumpish soccer ball reaches me from the courtyard eighteen stories below. (Those shoes! And many must last another winter.) A raw wind sneaks through my dormitory window although it is double, like all in Russia, and workers appeared in October to stuff cotton wadding between the warped frames.

Inside, the lights are on despite the hour, the bulbs emitting a hum. This huge complex of buildings, the pride of Soviet education, is a Socialist Achievement worn in a decade to a provincial sitting room's homey dilapidation. I am Pinocchio unanimated: the weight of everything devitalizes my limbs. The Russian I hear from the corridor is like a language I knew in an earlier life rather than sounds I first heard as a Harvard senior in my typical scramble for the beautiful and true, this time in Russian courses after three prosaic pre-law years. The corridor itself seems closer to the spirit of my inner life—a hall so ordinary that it gives you a headache, but with the expectation of something ennobling at the end—than my own progression from Manhattan to Orange County with my family, then to Cambridge as their white hope. Its threadbare oriental runners discharge a smell of must and dust; in the common room, fat rubber plants compete for space with massive sofas of disintegrating leather. For show, the floors are scrubbed every month—with an acrid liquid that corrodes the once-precious wood.

A mechanic is repairing the elevator again. Arriving grimy and cheerful in early morning, he spent the first three hours flirting with a busty cleaning woman and trying to borrow tools. The elevator will break down again tomorrow, but no one will waste time lodging a complaint. Even on good days, it's shut off" before midnight to save electricity for the current Five-Year Plan.

Anastasia is slipping away from me and I can't stop it unless I somehow become a better man. I'm not going to call her today; and Alyosha is still away, so there is nothing much to do with

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myself. It took this moment of musing to tell me how much my life here has come down to just these two people. Maybe I'll go to the library later—or on a book-buying outing into town, my standard excursion to pass time while pretending to be busy at something useful. Meanwhile, I'm going to stay here at my twelfth-floor window, watching the pickup game of soccer and the hearty, sweatsuited girl students taking their morning jogs through the snow. Just sit here, dreaming and resting. I want to merge with the mood of this place: the oilcloth on my tiny table that links me to my grandmother's ghetto kitchen; my pal, the wooden lamp on the desk. With this heaviness, sadness, acceptance of fate.

The room smells of slightly rancid lard. Roommate Viktor is frying potatoes on the old hot plate in his corner. Twice daily, after breakfast and supper, he drains the lard back into a pickle jar, to jell gray on the window ledge and be re-used until fully consumed. His skillet lacks a handle, and Viktor stoically endures every burn to his stubby fingers. My suggestion to purchase a replacement produces only bewilderment: "Ekh, but I can't waste the cooking part, the metal!" The potatoes come from his family vegetable patch, a major treasure of the beloved family plot. Before being sliced into the pan, each dwarfish bulblet is clasped for a tender, proprietary instant.

Viktor has enough money to breakfast in the cafeteria, for he's rich by Soviet student standards. But he's also relentlessly frugal: reads other people's newspapers to save the daily two kopeks; presses the pants himself of his single, funereal suit (it has never been to the cleaner's); dices a hundred grams of the cheapest grade of garlic sausage into the potatoes for his supper. He always goes to the movies (twenty kopeks, in one of the ground-floor auditoriums) alone, lest in a group he find himself nearest the cashier and be expected to pay for everyone, according to the loose Russian custom. He's saving money now to invest in the family plot, that precious half-acre allocated for dachas and gardens. But he would save mightily even without a specific goal; the compulsion is in his bones.

When prompted with trigger questions, he can dredge up quotations from his three decades of intensive socialist upbring-

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ing and training, reciting cram-course extrapolations from Engels on private property's psychological, sociological and familial evils. But never for an instant has he related his unfaltering ideological commitment to himself or his own treasure, the marshy little plot. Just as political evils are over there in the bourgeois West, his political enlightenment stops at the border—the Soviet border, on the Elbe—and in a schooldesk compartment of his brain. His real attitudes, the working ones, came with his mother's milk—in her photographs, mother is only slightly too squat and stern-looking to be the picture of the Russian peasant—and he loves what is his as powerfully as any Breton shopkeeper.

Viktor is a pudgy, Mongolian-looking man with an overdeveloped torso (he stores his weight-lifting equipment under his bed) and a mole shaped like Corsica on one starchy cheek. His smile is his most endearing feature, a sheepish, friendly grin that seems to say all this is too much for him. Being at this top University is too much; the thought of becoming a People's Judge—which he'll be "elected" soon after graduation—is too much; above all, rooming with a foreigner—an American —is more than he ever bargained for. Born in a village, he expected a peaceful life. The opportunities and adventures that have befallen him entirely by chance disturb more than stimulate him. Who could have guessed that his very ordinariness would reward him with such advancement? But he, the unimaginative plodder, is precisely whom the cadres-bosses recruit for the country's "leading ranks."

He is the only Communist—meaning member of the Party— in our wing of this floor of the dormitory. Other students will join in time, a handful out of conviction, most as a prerequisite for privileges or promotions; but they are still too young. Viktor is thirty-one; he was a tractor driver, a collective-farm assistant brigade leader, then an infantryman before becoming a student. (Party membership, a solid record as a soldier and a worker, and a sterling peasant-proletarian background squeezed him into the University despite his entrance exam scores.) It was in the Army that the unquestioning Young Communist of twenty-seven joined the Party itself. The regimental political officers tapped him for his "positive" attitude, stolid loyalty and, again, the desirable social origin.

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During his first eight months in uniform, he did not have a single overnight pass; not expecting one, he wasn't surprised. After basic training, he was stationed for nearly three years with a border garrison some sixty miles northwest of Vladivostock and did not manage so much as a day trip to the city, much less a week of home leave. The sum of his Army wages for three years was one hundred and thirty-five rubles, the price of his black serge suit. But he's proud of the hardships of national service. "Our Army is tough," he explains gravely. "We don't pamper the men; that's why we win." Moreover, he expects the opponents to live up to their reputations. Raised on comic-book-level spy stories and indescribable television potboilers featuring the intrepid secret police, he wants the evil, tricky imperialist agents to put up a proper fight before surrendering. His greatest disappointment in the American warmongers was the cowardice of Gary Powers, who so abjectly confessed. He offered me condolences for the ten-year-old humiliation, just as he dutifully congratulates me when an American team defeats a Soviet one in some track meet.

I have had fierce, friendly, meaningless and painfully enlightening political arguments with many other Russian students in the dormitory; often they start at supper and continue into the night. But Viktor and I never talk about anything political. His thoughts about the nature of man and society are limited to the opening paragraphs of the morning's Pravda editorial.

Having scanned today's issue—saving his two kopeks—he's returned it to my table. "The struggle between the two conflicting ideologies—socialist and bourgeois—represents the greatest battle of ideas in all history. It has acquired a genuinely all-pervading nature, and this is the principal characteristic of the contemporary stage of the ideological struggle."" This is the kind of statement he used to repeat, indeed to read doggedly to me, during our first trying weeks, before we'd worked out the terms of our coexistence: political truce based on political silence. His assertions of fact during the initial jousting were on the same level: Finland attacked Russia in 1939 and (since Soviet Russia has never struck a first blow) Japan also invaded in 1945. Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. (Viktor's clinching proof was Roosevelt's aid to fellow-Jew Trotsky in pursuing anti-Soviet

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subversion from Mexico.) The Communist parties of Britain and the United States are, ahhough illegal and repressed, the people's genuine voice—because all Communist parties are by definition repositories of truth and virtue, and everyone who, like himself, knows the way the world really works is automatically a Communist. In short, his "brass tacks" arranged themselves around a powerful magnetic field. Mother Russia is right, her opponents wrong.

Despairing over the usual dead end of our debate, I asked him one day whether the Soviet government had ever committed an injustice in its foreign policy. He gave some genuine thought to this unexpected question and answered with shining eyes and quivering sincerity.

"There were a few before the Revolution."

Yet although the living embodiment of Emerson's "We are born believing. A man bears beliefs, as a tree bears apples," Viktor knows less about Marxism or Leninism, not to speak of any other social idea, than some Greenwich Village barbers. He's never read Marx, only the primers for schools and the Army. There's no kinder way to say it: my roommate belongs to the camp of the Communist Party whose chief characteristic is not cruelty, drive for power or even ideological rigidity, but straightforward thickwittedness, stiffened by plebeian envy of his betters. "Not all the dullest and dumbest are in the ranks," said a wit across the corridor. "But the less you know the better. Ol' Vik's mental equipment makes him a natural."

But this is irrelevant in a sense, since Viktor is not really interested in Marx. Nor, in fact, in anything even faintly political; and unless provoked by me, the incarnation of the ideological enemy, he'd rather not pretend. He does care about three things: the fortunes of Moscow Dynamo, his favorite soccer team, the fishing conditions compared to this time last year and, again, the family half-acre. The plot is located in a little village of unpainted, ramshackle peasant cottages about forty miles east of Moscow. Directly after his last Saturday morning class, Viktor wraps his overalls in newspaper—the ones he favors in the room to save wear on his "lectures-only" trousers—and hurries to the station. A suburban electrichka and a brisk walk on eroded lanes delivers him home in two hours for a weekend of family council

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and work. With his father, brother and brothers-in-law, he is adding a second room to the dacha for the sake of the wives (the clan's cooks, cleaners and driving force for upward mobility) and the children, the revered little heirs. For the men, there is a large pond on the other side of the village with muddy water but delicate-fleshed pike.

Obsessed by the twelve-by-fourteen-foot construction project, Viktor resents the intrusion of academic and Party obligations on his thoughts and time. (Although he attends every class and meeting of his Party section, I've never seen him open a textbook except when an exam was approaching. But sometimes he'll read a spy novel or his favorite sports magazine before dropping off to sleep at ten o'clock.) He enthuses about the joys of a country place, remonstrates against the outrageous price of lumber, describes how best to bribe an electrician to take a day off" from his legal job. (The last Party session inveighed furiously against such corruption.) He can discourse too on the intricacies of plumbing and cesspools—for the new "wing" includes an internal water closet!

He's also fascinated by my toilet kit—stainless steel razor blades provoked his first suspicion about the inherent superiority of a socialist economy—and empties my aerosol cans of shaving cream in surreptitious play. After a long struggle with his self-control, he mumbled a request for one for his father's birthday. Scotch tape, ballpoint pens and my immersion heater to boil water for instant coffee also enchant him, but he turns up his nose at the toilet paper I obtain at the American Embassy commissary. "Too dainty," he complained, returning to the standard University product: ripped-up eights of yesterday's Pravda. On the other hand, the highly impressionistic drawing I bought from my friend Zhenya, an "underground" painter, leaves him speechless.

Viktor makes sure I'm out when, every ten days or so, he brings a girl to the room for fornication. He doesn't want me to acquire an unseemly view of Communist morality, which he's supposed to represent. Or maybe it's the girls themselves he'd rather I didn't meet. I've caught sight of several when, after the event, he'd be prodding one of them down the corridor toward the emergency stairs, tugging her anxiously away from the

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elevator in case a car containing an acquaintance should arrive. The girls are among the University's homeliest, and never from our department (called the Juridical Faculty). He rarely sees one a second time and never provides supper. Having safely seen the sweetheart out, he returns to the room, runs through a set of Red Army light calisthenics and lingers in the shower, repeating to himself a list of things to do.

My friends warn me that Viktor weekly informs the appropriate authorities about my visitors, activities and ideological inclination, just as he reported on his fellow soldiers in the role of company stool pigeon. Somehow this fails to disturb me. I'm told too that he probably describes me as dull-witted and harmless because this is quickest and easiest for him. He wants to avoid writing supplementary reports about any transgressions he might name and, above all, more intensive surveillance assignments that would bite into the family weekend. On the other hand, I think I sometimes see in him a certain disappointment that I'm not the slick ideological subversive he has been educated to expect.

This morning, he was up as usual before seven o'clock to polish his city shoes and darn a pair of khaki socks. Having noticed I'm not feeling my best, he presented me with a saucer of his mother's delicious apple jam, made from the fruit of a tree bordering the family garden. Then a second saucer with a glass of tea. "Gosh," he said in response to my praise of the jam. Yes, it's his smile I like best. And he likes me because he knows I don't care, so he needn't feign an interest in his legal studies.

I turn on the radio and listen for a moment, lying on my daybed and looking at the black-bordered pinup of Gagarin above Viktor's desk. (Strange how this cheapest, ugliest lump of furniture, like all my beds everywhere, has become my closest friend, although its grease-stained mattress cover made me gag when I first arrived and I could hardly touch it before, let alone after, its dusting with bedbug powder during the presemester general cleanup.) The radio transforms every voice into a thick buzz, making it tricky to follow even the news, whose phrases I know by heart.

Actually, it's not a proper radio but a speaker that transmits

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Radio Moscow from a plug in the wall; like most hotels, restaurants, offices and apartment houses, the University has been wired with rediffiision points throughout, enabling the Whole Truth to ring in every room. Violins soar and the announcer's voice grows throaty: the program is about a retired machinist's love for his old lathe; and through the lathe, his factory; and through the factory, his Soviet Motherland and Lenin, "our eternal Vladimir Ilich, who is truly more alive than the living." Radio Moscow's correspondent affects profound emotion at the veteran worker's patriotism, and excerpts of his interview are transmitted, crudely spliced and laden with rallying cries, a precise copy of a hundred increase-production interviews broadcast all day, every day, and supplemented by commentary for anyone who misses the point. "Our factory carries the sacred name of Lenin; we couldn't fail our socialist duty. . . . The most satisfying day of my life was when we were judged worthy of the title. Brigade of Communist Labor. . . . An honest man loves his factory like his family, his Homeland . . ."

The music matches the ceremonial cliches. Pretending his ardor is out of control, the announcer breaks in. "Comrades! We are devoting our utmost efforts to greet the New Year of our beloved Socialist Motherland as Lenin teaches us, with new dedication and success on all fronts of labor productivity! In this way we show our heartfelt thanks to our Leninist Homeland, the world's first socialist state—and to our dear, native Communist Party, inspiration of all progressive people. Lenin inspires each of us to do his very best ..." It's less the message itself than its morning-to-midnight incantation that has anesthetized part of my reason. This is no country, but a crypt. Everyone in it is a dervish being whipped up for self-sacrifice.

The next vignette is about a North Sea fishing captain who has voluntarily increased his socialist norm in honor of the second "decisive" year of the "historic" new Five-Year Plan—and bagged a bigger catch than ever, "as if Vladimir Ilich himself was guiding the crew." Then a little sketch about stitchers in a clothing factory mobilizing all their thoughts to increase labor productivity and regretting they weren't there to sew shirts for dear Vladimir Ilich while he was alive. It's so bad that Viktor, a devotee of propaganda soap operas, asks me to turn it off. He has

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finished breakfast and stripped to his bloomer-Uke black under-shorts—the standard, flyless Soviet model of vinegary acetate—in preparation for a wash. Last night, he interrupted our aimless conversation to declare he's keeping an eye out for a wife, damn hard to find among modern city girls who know zilch about running a thrifty house. "The University ones can't open a can by themselves and feel too important to learn. Yet I'm for women working, so what's the answer? You've got to have equality, everybody building Communism. But women are happier in a kitchen than in an office. It could cause trouble, this diverting them from their natural purpose."

The clique at the end of the corridor demonstrably ignores Viktor, the "hopeless square." Although somewhat disconcerted by this—his age and Party membership should make him our floor's ethical leader—he's come to terms with his unpopularity, counting its compensations: he would bitterly resent keeping up with the clique in expenditures for tobacco and drink. He shakes his head in saddened puzzlement at their camp affectations: quoting obscure hack writers of the worst Stalinist periods and smoking the cheapest papirosi in imitation of Volga riverboat bums. He can't even understand their idiom, a supercharged student-underground hodgepodge of jazz, criminal and labor-camp jargon. It's the latest smart way of talking and requires introducing everything with an exaggeratedly drawled pronunciation of the phrase "personally speaking." "Personally speaking, I could go a glass of tea"—or, "have a pee." "Personally speaking, Charles de Gaulle was the President of France." Although my Russian is now adequate for most conversations, I often fail to catch even the gist of their apparently riotous exchanges, and they are delighted when they can keep up such banter for several minutes without my understanding a word of it. But I've managed to learn a few of the more fathomable terms: a "hammer" means great guy; "old slipper," a swinging chick; "boiling derby," a smart kid.

Because its members seem Westernized in some ways of student iconoclasm, the clique illustrates the irrelevance of many imported categories and calculations—those I used to think in too—to this country. Even these jivey cats obey Russian laws of

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logic, confounding Western assumptions about how they should reason. Six or seven of them—who do not really look alike but appear to because their striving to be hip encourages conformity —comprise their tight ingroup. They are country lads with gangling arms extending inches beyond their faded flannel cuffs. All twenty-one or twenty-two years old, all sons of semiliterate peasants who nevertheless won gold medals in their village schools, they are, beneath their boisterous nonchalance, palpably nervous about the startling success and status so quickly severing their roots. In England, their type—Yorkshire working-class lads who find themselves making good in London—has been the making of much contemporary literature: the brash soon-to-be elite, with less and less to say to their village parents, yet also little to the genuine intelligentsia of Moscow and Leningrad.

But they themselves don't know they're on edge. Quick and clever, they've exploited their provincial manners to help make them the dormitory's wise guys and big wheels. Taking the University as a long, big-city spree, they devour impressions and discoveries—of theaters, girls, acquaintances working in the cultural establishment—with appetites befitting their thin frames. They are flying through the best years of their lives on their energy and wit. All my life, I've avoided the fraternity type more successfully than here; the clique somehow shames me into returning slaps on the back and repaying them with American jokes for theirs about Russia.

In their last of five years here, the members are writing theses instead of attending classes. A hundred or so pages long, these papers are the first independent scholarship required during their University careers, but thanks to agreeably low standards of research and writing, most of their day is available for loafing. (The ringleader, a caustic young man with unwashed hair and wild eyes, is writing about Vsevolod Meyerhold, the brilliant theatrical experimentalist, arguably more important than Stanislavsky, who "disappeared" in Stalin's 1937. Caught between the impossibility of an honest thesis—-because Meyerhold's avant-garde theories are still taboo and his tutor wants no mention of Stalin—and the bitter pill of a phony one—because he's increasingly enthralled by his subject's genius—Number One has taken to increased buflbonery "in Vsevolod's style.") Waking late

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in their airless rooms, they shout the well-known slogan to each other through the walls: "Rise, workers; onward and upward!" Then they reluctantly take leave of their beds to congregate in one of the rooms, sitting against one another in underwear worn a full week, smoking strawlike cigarettes for breakfast and telling political jokes.

The gags are variations on three or four old standbys illustrating the gap between Soviet rhetoric and reality, and the nonsense of intensifying propaganda campaigns instead of tackling real work that might close the gap. Two collective farmers meet in the mud of their village street, "Hey, Petya!" shouts Ivan. "What's this I hear on the radio? Something called Communism—d'ya know what it means?" "Sure," volunteers Petya. "That's when everybody gets everything he wants." "Gee! What would you ask for under Communism?" "A good little airplane." "Why on earth doyou need an airplane?" "I could fly to America and buy myself a bag of potatoes."

Question from "Armenian Radio": "Can a prick be a member of a Brigade of Communist Labor?" Answer: "No—for three reasons. It can't work seven hours a day. It frequently changes its place of employment. It is known to spit on its work partners."

Urgent archaeological exploration is being pursued on Egyptian territory soon to be flooded by waters from a new dam. An Italian team discovers a miraculously preserved tomb, but their elation turns to consternation when they fail to decipher its hieroglyphics, even to determine the buried suzerain's name. They call in an English team working nearby, but the Oxbridge experts have no better luck. A French team is summoned, then a German one; the code remains unbroken. In despair, someone thinks of sending for Professor Stukaivich, the leading Soviet Egyptologist. A telegram to Moscow produces the great academician ten days later—flanked, of course, by two KGB escorts. Shaking hands with his colleagues, whom he knows by way of scholarly journals, he enters the tomb. That evening they do not reappear. A long day and second suspenseful night pass without sign of them. Haggard and bearded, the three men finally emerge on the third evening, announcing laconically, "It's Ramses III." The astounded scientists whoop their congratulations. "Marvelous chaps, those Russians!"—but how was the

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mystery solved? "I don't want secrets," says an Italian over the popping of corks. "But how did you identify Ramses?" "The bastard," grunts a KGB man. "He confessed."

But disagreeable reaction has taught me to draw no "obvious" conclusion from these jokes. Behind the clique's sarcasm lurks an insular patriotism from which the Texas Bible Belt could take lessons. When I laugh too loudly at their failures-of-socialism stories or offer an observation of my own, they turn on me, a glint in their eyes. They'W poke the fun; foreigners had better keep their mouths shut—or, as their rougher mates do with the odd cheeky Arab, be prepared for a beating one day when caught alone in some snowy field.

At bottom, they're convinced that Soviet ways are the best in the world. They accept the system's underlying axioms partly because it is easier to believe than to doubt, partly because propaganda, as E. M. Forster said, "is not a magic drug; it must appeal to something that already exists in men's minds, or its power evaporates."

The appeal to the clique of their own social system lies not so much in its being Soviet or socialist (some of their favorite jokes remind us that Marx was a bearded Kraut—no, a dirty, bearded Jew) as in its being Russian. And what is Russian is ours. The Red Army is ours, Lenin is ours, sputniks and dialectical materialism, agitprop and even meat shortages are ours. Maybe Russia isn't really best; perhaps, for the real truth, it's crude and backward. But not weak! The armed forces, biggest and best, are growing more so; let the West laugh at that! Besides, backwardness is all the more reason to defend the homeland against the richer, denigrating West. All the more reason to work for our people's triumph. Lampooning their political lessons, therefore, they believe in the need for them.

Work for the Soviet Union is precisely what the clique will do two or three years after graduation. Assuming success in their first jobs, as teachers and editorial assistants, where occasional reprimands for heavy drinking will not spoil their essentially favorable records, they will be recruited to operate the machinery of the state. Not the heavy machinery of the KGB or Party apparat —from the Party's point of view, they're too clever and sardonic to be trusted with direct political power—but the desks

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in the front oflfices which require higher education and accompanying refinements: the diplomatic service, newspaper and broadcasting editorships, control posts in cultural and educational affairs. Other students will graduate with higher distinction, but the clique's peasant-proletarian lineage will win them the administrative jobs. It's not the working-class pedigree itself that makes people trustworthy here but the attitudes bred by upbringing in laboring communities, untainted by cosmopolitanism—precisely the Russia First animus of these up-and-comers. Bright as they are, the Party knows—because it has arranged— that their education will have done nothing to undermine their fundamentalist patriotism. As they themselves recognize, they will always belong to their villages.

"We'll get ahead," Number Two assured me recently, "because we're in tune with the country. Moscow is the facade; we've always needed facades. But the truth is still the village. Everything comes from the village and is the spirit of the village. Which is why the sons of the clever Moscow intellectuals will be working for us."

This cynicism, a facet of the clique's essential dishonesty, helps put me off" them. But perhaps, on the contrary, they are admirably honest to acknowledge their advantage. Maybe my unease is prompted simply by my being older—or by resentment that, like Viktor, I'm too square to make their grade.

Two nights ago, the clique had their monthly fling in one of the double rooms. The table was laden with sausage, tinned fish, sweating cheese and real butter for their fresh white loaves. The room was as stiffing as a cowbarn in winter. The vodka was consumed in water glasses downed zalpom, eight ounces in one daring gulp. As ritual toasts were shouted and the alcohol relentlessly swilled, the boys' features grew thick along with their voices. Sweat coated their faces, somehow more lurid because of the bitter night outside. They were not twenty-one, but fifty; not even fifty, but ageless. Having joked, fought, screamed, sung, cursed Mother Russia and sworn to die for Her, they were staggeringly, insensibly drunk by ten o'clock. By midnight, having smeared the lavatory's wall tiles with layers of vomit, they were stacked across the cots like cordwood, in each other's arms and oblivion. The Chinese student who lives next door—whose

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presence is a mystery since all his countrymen were sent home ten years ago—was smugly disgusted. "Barbarous Russians. They will never change. We are supposed to learn from them?^''

Much in Russia is opaque, atmospheric, redolent of its great literature; but there is no mystery in the clique's smells. Socks that have been worn all winter inside a single pair of shoes, now polluting the floor like fetid puddles. The shoes themselves, never dry of sweat and slush, with their own distinctive odor. Body odors distilled from cabbage and garlic sausage; tobacco tar seeped deeply into winter skin; the Clorox mustiness of men's dormitories everywhere, heightened by rarely washed laundry and never-cleaned wool. And on the morning after the spree, the vapors of adolescent puke: universal hangover stink, in no way more interesting or agreeable because it reigns here, in enigmatic Russia.

Sprees are held never less than once a month, on someone's birthday, a national or University holiday or payment day for student stipends. Whenever a few rubles come to hand, the clique casts about for a suitable event—Miners' Day or the anniversary of the Mongolian Revolution, in a pinch—to celebrate. That afternoon, money is allocated to food and drink, the purchasing logistics are planned—no less solemnly than for a feast day of the Mohawk nation—and the chosen room is arranged with tables and chairs. The agenda of the party itself varies little. The boys nibble at the bologna and salted cucumbers, clink their glasses and toss them down, emote, bare their souls, become hopelessly maudlin, then turn savage before passing out. It is a pagan celebration, a religious rite; the Russian peasants' quest for periodic escape, salvation, release from this shabby world to something higher and all-encompassing.

Delicacies such as cheese and "Doctor's" brand sausage—let alone vodka—represent a spendthrift extravagance. The party costs at least half their monthly stipend, and during the last ten days of the month they will exist solely on boiled potatoes and "white nights" tea—glasses of hot water with nothing added. ("The tea's zhidok^'' they say, ritually repeating their stale wordplay, "but the host is Russian." In this case, zhidok means both "watery" and "a Yid.") But this only intensifies their anticipation of the next party and broadens their grins while they

Notes from My Window"^ 17

plan how many cans of marinated cod and how many bottles to buy. When a Dutch student suggested they might be healthier and happier on a more realistic budget, they were contemptuous. "What are we, clerks in some goddam office? You save your own money, buy yourself a bookcase. Russians know how to live.""

The clique is often joined by a slightly younger student whose appearance and background are as unlike theirs as was Isaac Babel's from his beloved Cossacks. Narrow-shouldered Leonid wears a clean suit and flesh-colored glasses, and is balding before his voice has fully changed. A cosmopolitan Muscovite, he is the son of well-to-do Jewish intellectuals. His father is a corresponding member of the Academy of Medicine, his mother a distinguished classicist, his older sister a cellist training in the Conservatory. Leonid himself, almost against his will, stands near the academic head of his faculty. He reads a dozen books a week in three languages, and his room in the comfortable family apartment is a substantial library.

When the drinking at the sprees has begun in earnest, a fierce Great Russian chauvinism expands within the boys as if the vodka were an acid producing a gas on contact with the soft metal of their prejudice. And integral to the chauvinism is a deep hatred oiZhidi, the dirty Jews. The first jokes are relatively mild. "I heard the weather was lousy on the Black Sea last summer." "Yeah, those dirty Jews." . . . An old Jew shuffling up Arbat Street is clonked on the head by dislodged fragments of a building's facade. "Goddamit, there's no place for a good brick to fall down in this country." But such witticisms are soon discarded for more direct expression of the clique's drunken wisdom.

"The Jews are scum, they stink up Russia with their sniveling fear and greed." . . . "To straighten out our country overnight, take the plum jobs from the bloodsucking Jews and send them to the front. No, they'd kiss the enemy's ass and sell us for some jewelry." Leonid lowers his eyes and plays with the oilcloth. When he offers a comment about a subject under discussion, he is told to shut his mouth. Everyone knows a Jew's opinion is worthless because a Jew understands nothing but money and hoarding—certainly nothing about Russia or Russians. "We'll ask you when we want to know about Moses."

One morning, when Leonid was catching some sleep in my

IS^MOSCOW FAREWELL

room after an especially hard party, I asked him why he put up with the awfulness. Sparked by the victory of the Six-Day War, fired by hope of a huge immigrant column trudging to Israel, the Zionism of some Jewish students is fierce. Children whose parents kept resolutely "assimilated" households for decades, denying their Jewishness for the higher cause—socialism was going to make Judaism and all "petty nationalism" obsolete—are among the most implacable Israeli patriots, perceiving antisemitism even where it's absent (a considerable feat in contemporary Russia) and sneering disgust at every aspect of Soviet rule. Among many Moscow Jews, not an hour passes without speculation, calculation and agonized deliberation whether to take the do-or-die steps toward leaving—and questions, questions, questions to me, who, as a Westerner, must know what a Tel-Aviv dentist earns in terms of a kilo of stewing beef.

Leonid belongs to this category precisely. Some of his friends have left, and even his well-established parents are locked in the frightening debate of whether to throw everything up and face the persecution accompanying an application to emigrate. But the meek young man himself has pledged never to "quit." The last thing he'll become, he says, is another unemployed Israeli intellectual. "They have a surplus already, while Russia goes hungry."

"But why subject yourself to abuse from boys half your worth?" I repeated. ''You have no illusions about inherent proletarian wisdom. Is it masochism?"

He hesitated again and I was sorry I'd pressed him. Day by day, he was being grinded between the clique's "anticosmopoli-tan" arrogance and soaring Jewish tribalism. "Because I want to be a writer," he said at last. "I want to write about the Russian people, and these are real ones, not the sophisticated types my family has always known. The truth frightens my parents largely because they've always hidden from it—masked it with political dreams. . . . Besides, I like the boys. Underneath, they like me. They're my best friends."

And they are: for Y^conid personally, the clique has only respect and affection. They are unhappy when Lenya, as they call him, spends the night at home instead of squeezing in to share one of

Notes from My Window ~~^ 19

their cots. Once they actually postponed a party because flu had him bedridden.

As for drinking, Leonid himself is a slouch only in comparison to the clique's hard core. The boy-intellectual started in order to be accepted and to demonstrate his affinity for the muzhik, but by now enjoys inebriation in and for itself.

"If you lived here, you'd drink too. It's less the thing to do than the thing you must do. Vodka is essential to everything."

To pursue his interest in "real Russians," Leonid would like to live with the clique rather than in the grandish family apartment, but manages only occasional nights sharing one of their narrow cots. Students whose families reside within fifty kilometers of the University must live at home even if they'd prefer the dormitory (just as Muscovites may not take a room in a Moscow hotel). This restriction reflects practical as well as political needs: even without the Moscow contingent of students, the dormitories are badly overcrowded. The University's enrollment, like that of almost all Soviet institutes, strains its physical plant.

Next door live three girls in a room meant for two: Raya, Ira and Masha. Coarser than Chekhov's Three Sisters, they provoke the occasional association nevertheless, specially in their delight at inhabiting Moscow after wholly provincial childhoods. Raya and Ira, who share the same plainness and freckle patterns, spend their spare time sewing curtains, doilies and what they think are pretty little things for their bathroom. (Why no pretty dresses for themselves?) Stendhal novels opened, they listen to Tchaikovsky on the portable record player for which they saved all last year.

Sometimes they attend one of the Saturday dances in honor of Soviet-Burmese Friendship Day, the Fifty-fifth Anniversary of the Young Communist League and similar holidays featuring a revolutionary or peace-and-friendship theme. The evening begins in the main auditorium with political lectures, expressions by Asian and African students of gratitude for the magnanimity of Soviet foreign policy, academics citing the latest production targets—cement production will be increased threefold by 1977!—and a professor of literature holding forth on the current

20^MOSCOW FAREWELL

slogans. Then the main event itself, which, in the central building's main hall of columns and a splintering floor, reminds me of my parents describing their 1930s dancing days: a big, sloppy student band playing that kind of fox-trot, boys and girls displaying their Sunday best—purple dresses and ties with metallic threads—and hundreds of couples swaying almost in time to the beat while crowds of singles eye each other across the floor.

"She's not bad, the one with that belt."

"Are you serious? Scary as war."

"And gives. She loves to put out."

After their afternoon of ironing blouses and washing their hair, Raya and Ira arrive looking less attractive than almost anyone else and move quickly to a corner. Their spirited talk there is about the same subjects, and in the same tone, as all day and all week. After dancing with each other half a dozen times, they leave together, arm in arm. Do such girls still exist in America? The homely but kindly ones, waiting for husbands without a word of distress, a hint of complaint or, of course, of aggressiveness? I'm always too embarrassed to thank them, as I'd like to, for being their unadorned selves.

That Masha gets on beautifully with them is a case of total opposites attracting. Raya and Ira leave early for class, holding hands and stopping en route for a cafeteria bun and a glass of muddy coffee; Masha, on the other hand, sleeps until eleven if possible (despite the strict requirement, accompanied by elaborate machinery for strict enforcement, that attendance is obligatory at all lectures). Masha then knocks at my door, her yawning face puffed by too much sleep, and, when Viktor's at class, comes in to breakfast on Nescafe and an American cigarette. A strong, sourish smell surrounds her, proclaiming who she is—a miner's daughter—and the spicy foods she likes to eat: an intriguing scent to someone raised with Colgate and Arrid. Tipped by wide purple nipples, her breasts swing heavily under the gauze of her nightdress. Masha is a geology student and my oldest female Russian friend. When she was young, she says, she adored making love. Now she can take it or leave it—nothing personal intended. Next month she'll be twenty.

Notes from My Window^21

On the day Masha and I broke the ice as neighbors, she told me about her first love. Amply developed physically, she was otherwise a schoolgirl in uniform and braids whose knowledge came from chaste novels and classmates' reveries. She did dream about romance—but more about Ulanova and Plisetskaya, for she was attending a special high school for ballet. (Masha a ballerina? With that low-slung bottom and the matching Russian thighs? Photographs of her at sixteen, when this happened, indicate that she had already acquired her womanly sponginess, together with a lower body designed more for cross-country skiing than for the stage. Nevertheless, her teachers assured her she had promise.)

This was in her native Perm, the industrial center of the middle Urals, which is off limits to foreigners because of defense plants and military installations. In such "closed" cities, the role of the secret police is significantly greater than elsewhere in Russia, another way of saying it is very great indeed. The KGB closely watches all aspects of municipal life: roads into the city, airports, streets and squares, and every institution on these same streets and squares. The central headquarters for the huge staff required for this myriad activity was a large building some fifty yards from young Masha's school.

It had a staff cafeteria, of course. Every Soviet institution has its basement cafeteria—one of many reasons why cities are so bare of places where a private citizen can eat. When this one was closed for repairs and repainting, several junior agents walked next door for dinner, to the opera theater's canteen. One day, Masha's class, which had been rehearsing for a recital on the theater's stage, was also eating there. As the lusty girl with the face flushed by her pirouettes stood in line at the counter, a young man approached—who, however, did not seem young at all to the sixteen-year-old. It was the handsomest of the agents.

"That's a terrific pair of tits, lassie—and a luscious ass. Shall we road-test it this afternoon?"

This was not the first time Masha had heard such words. Like most city girls, she had accustomed herself early to propositions and sneered obscenities by toughs loitering in courtyards and back streets. But no man had ever explored her eyes while

22^MOSCOW FAREWELL

mentioning her private parts. And such a fine-looking man, with clean blond hair and an open face! Why did he talk that way? Did he suppose she was no longer a virgin?

Blushing fiercely, she wondered where to hide. Then something wholly unexpected and even more pleasant happened: he blushed to the same hue. It was clear (he explained later) that he'd misjudged her; he regretted his insult. He hadn't even checked out her face at first—only the body, which certainly looked of age and experience to pop straight into bed.

Still intrigued, he recommenced on an entirely different tack. He carried her tray to her seat, withdrawing immediately so as not to embarrass her before her girl friends. Leaving his friends, he waited outside the canteen and persuaded her to meet him after class. Walking her home, he made her laugh. It was a week before they actually slept together: seven unhurried days and evenings of courting, coaxing, reassuring and good times, filled with as many movies and meals together as they could sneak time for. By then he had grown fond of her, and she, needless to say, loved him breathlessly. He was a hail-fellow-well-met, liked by the town's successful young men, not least because of his repertoire of political anecdotes. (A KGB man joking about the Soviet system? Yes; and less improbable than Masha's dancing ambition.) Charming and unusually energetic, he drank moderately, spent freely and treated Masha with tenderness and respect.

And made love to her wildly. Never, he exulted, had he known such passion; certainly not with his wife, a good-looking, well-dressed blonde whom, however, he didn't like even before, as now, she became a source of guilt and resentment. For hard as he tried to remain a husband to her and good father to their boys, he was increasingly entranced by Masha and soon loathed time spent at home. Although unfaithful to Masha as well as to his spouse—he couldn't help it, he told her—his other conquests were mere one-shot pickups. On top of everything, family finances virtually collapsed under the drain of entertainment and gifts for Masha. To the wife who formerly budgeted his monthly pay, he brought home nothing.

His superior officers posed the greater problem. To maintain the KGB officer's public image of a hardworking, clean-living

Notes from My Window^23

Builder of Communism marching in the vanguard of poUtical and ideological campaigns, all drinking, joke-telling and fornicating are kept scrupulously private. The behavior of Masha's man caused increasing displeasure at headquarters. The couple had been seen in the city's handful of restaurants. Their affair was far too open; talk swelled about the failure to uphold family-man standards—and about Masha's age. He'd even ignored friendly front-office advice to drop her. Divorce was out of the question: an agent who leaves his wife, especially for a younger woman, is a discredit to the service. Something had to be done.

A less popular and competent officer might have been discharged. Masha's man was offered alternatives: accept transfer to a distant city or resign. Masha begged him to think of his family and career—and he agreed. Their last evening together foundered. In the morning, he left for his new post two thousand kilometers away, and she never heard from him again. A year later, there was an epilogue. Masha was in trouble for associating with a young chemist who read and passed around Andrei Sinyavsky's On Socialist Realism. Out of affection for his departed protege, the KGB captain conducting the investigation dismissed her with a warning. Nothing incriminating entered her dossier.

I hadn't intended to dwell so on the KGB. This is the style of the diplomatic crowd, belaboring its idee fixe. (My main grudge against the Embassy is grounded in its security lecture the day after my arrival, whose dwelling on "sexual fraternization" dangers gave me weeks of frustration and a mortifying hour of impotence at my first serious attempt with a puzzled Russian girl.) Even now, much of the American colony remains constantly ALERT, refusing to set foot in a Russian apartment. Provocations are indeed staged; but what really terrible thing can happen to someone with diplomatic immunity? But, paradoxically, this preoccupation does reflect a partial truth about the secret police. The same isolation that shields Embassy officers from the institution's "human" side—KGB agents are people, after all; viz. Masha's paramour—also prevents them from personally seeing how thoroughly police penetrate daily life.

Last week, a school friend of Raya's passed through Moscow

24^MOSCOW FAREWELL

from their native town and told the story of a neighboring family's distress. It began when their cottage burned to the ground, the blaze consuming their last book and wooden spoon. In despair, the widowed mother of three approached the local Red Cross for assistance, and her persistence was rewarded with fifteen rubles—food for a week. "But the Red Cross is supposed to help; it's supposed to be for emergencies just like mine," she wrote in gentle protest—adding, in a petition to her local Soviet, that during her own dozen years as a volunteer member at her factory, her dues alone exceeded the sorry offering. The result was a KGB visit and warning that continuation of such attempts to "create a disturbance" would be dealt with as an antisocial act. "How," asked the officer in charge, "will imprisonment help your children?"

My mistake was to have pictured the KGB crushing only political dissent, whereas any little display of any kind of independence may incite them. At the same time, there's a wider area of uncertainty and more room for play than I'd expected. It's less sinister when you know it, and more depressing.

It's cosy to have women students in the dormitory. Quarters are assigned helter-skelter in the Russian way, with men and women often in adjoining rooms. For four years in the 1960s, women were segregated in a specially guarded wing of the main building. Now that the sexes are together again as they should be, there is speculation about what caused their seclusion and why it was abandoned. Three theories are popular. It is said that foreign students, who began arriving in numbers in the late 1950s, could not take the mixed arrangements in stride; their antics and tittering warned the authorities of damage to the University's reputation. Alternately, it is argued that a shocking number of (free and legal) abortions proved the need for remedial action. But later, segregation was found not to have appreciably reduced the demand on the University clinic, perhaps because hundreds of male students managed to sleep in the women's section every night. (Of course another elaborate system of check-in and check-out operated to prevent this, including watchwomen at the entrances and midnight patrols

Notes from My Window ^25

checking rooms. But where else is it so easy to fool or bribe the checkers by distracting attention, switching documents, sliding a chocolate bar into a granny's pocket? Or, if you're caught, to plead your way—"I throw myself at your mercy, please-oh-please don't be cruel to me"—out of being reported? Petty Soviet authority is often a peasant babushka, unquestioning in political faith, impervious to logic, but with a heart waiting to be moved so she can forgive her errant charges. In any case, hordes of men sneaking into the women's section was acknowledged to be a disturbance greater than those of the old system.)

But now a new theory is gaining sway concerning the first secretary of the University's Party organization. A Georgian obsessed, like most men of his nation, about female virtue in his family, he became anxious when his own darling daughter was about to enter the University: clearly, the traditional dormitory arrangements would not do for her. With a lofty preamble about Communist morals, he issued the segregation ukase. In vain, the University's Young Communist League protested on humanitarian grounds, as did several deans on bureaucratic ones: scattering students of the same faculties increased paperwork. Unhappy years passed, ended at last by a happy discovery that the Georgian had been stealing and reselling textbooks and office supplies (or, in another version, that he persisted in speaking well of Khrushchev). Dismissed after a confidential Party investigation, he was ordered to an obscure Siberian post while the old system was quietly restored. Sic in Muscovy res geruntur. Sic, in any case, is the nature of the rumors.

Last night, I again heard one of the University's most popular stories. Unwashed and unshaven, a young law student is bodily in attendance at one of his droning lectures in a large amphitheater. His attention wanders (as does that of his fellow students, who are doodling, chattering and reading novels: it is the rare lecturer anyone actually listens to, if only because most parrot the plodding textbooks). Three rows below and a dozen seats to the right, he spies a pretty girl he'd never noticed before. Scribbling her a note, he has it passed on, hand to hand. "I like your looks. Come to my room tonight at seven o'clock, we'll

26/^MOSCOW FAREWELL

fuck." The well-groomed girl pens her answer in the margin and returns it by the same route. "Will be there at seven. Understood your hint."

The old chestnut always gets a big laugh—because, the students say, it's so true. They're surprised to hear that even after all recent permissive developments, sex at Harvard is less plenteous and informal. And I still wonder at what can be had here almost for the asking.

Some professors apparently have as much trouble as I concentrating on work. Students say the "boss" of Scandinavian languages, for one, is better at philandering than philology. Inviting undergraduates home, he mentions their doubtful grades and "screws us like mad," as a self-confessed victim put it. Other teachers too are known as notorious womanizers, and their conquests, very easy anyhow, are augmented by a tricklet of girl students to them. . . . All this is true, I swear it; but not the implication about my personal riches. Even here—especially here, with robust sex all around me—I manage to jinx things at the last moment, and get less than I should. When I'm blue, I long to bury myself in the oblivion of passion. Like artichokes, Russian femininity seems to grow directly from the earth. Strong, supple arms and the slight bulge of vulvas through skirts beckon with the lure of all the high-school seniors I used to fantasize about. The flesh seems so pliant.

Miner's daughter Masha is the strongest female personality on our floor, but the prettiest girl—the most enchanting I saw anywhere in Moscow until I met my own Anastasia—is sylphlike Natasha. Perhaps, however, her braids distort my judgment. She's the only girl who still wears them—the traditional flaxen plaits that fall to the small of her back, ends gladdened by snippets of ribbon. Sometimes she winds them around her head, exposing her creamy neck. She has a roundish face, limpid eyes and classic Slavic features. Her mouth is almost too perfect for kisses. When she sits in the common room, head tilted, humming to herself, I think I'm looking at the model for a Russian Renoir.

Natasha teeters on the border of serious academic trouble. Her mind wanders, she says—superfluously, for her most characteristic expression heralds this. She wafts along the corridor, day-

Notes from My Window^27

dreaming about her future. Every few days she comes into my room and, if I'm alone, sits on my cot, squeezing her hands and sighing. She is so beautiful and unaware of it that I wish we could fall in love and live happily ever after. Occasionally she talks about her married sister in Moscow—who, as I found when I tried to track her down one day, doesn't exist: there is no building at that address. The thought of schoolteaching, her given destination, appalls her. She hasn't the slightest interest in Soviet history, her major, or, indeed, in history in general.

"What do you want to be, Natasha?" runs the game played daily on our floor.

"An actress."

"In films or the theater."

"The theater." (Sigh.) "I think my place is on the stage."

She goes quickly to the cot of anyone who says she has the makings of a natural actress, but bursts into sobs after perceiving she's been duped. (Aside from a high-school play three years ago, she has never acted.) Her weeping used to be heard more often from several rooms, but some older boys have recently assumed the role of her protector, and have stopped sleeping with her themselves—because, they say, taking advantage of a child spoils the fun.

The boy who loves Natasha more than anyone is Kemal, but she won't even have supper with him: like many girls here, she has a visceral repugnance for "black" skin. Kemal's color is in fact a delicate umber—which, on his ankles, looks like suntan against the white of his adored sheepskin slippers from Harrods. He pads back and forth along the corridor, studying while in motion like a guru and inviting every English-speaking soul into his room at each encounter.

"I'll make us a cup of tea?" the singsong Indian voice asks in English, with a trace of a Russian accent.

"Sorry, Kemal. I'm late for the movies, just can't stop."

"You are too pale. You will need some good tea."

Kemal lives next to the kitchen in a room he's had for four

years. (He swears he found a microphone under the bed his first

winter—if true, the only tangible discovery of the bugging of

foreigners' rooms that Russians take for granted.) The son of a

28.^MOSCOW FAREWELL

wealthy Delhi manufacturer, he came to Moscow to study instead of to his beloved Oxford for what he calls "unfortunate political reasons." Declining to elaborate, he will, however, reveal how he copes with another inherited problem. Like his moneyed father, Kemal is short and slender, with full black hair and an unusually meager penis. The shortcoming troubled him severely until a wise man near the family's summer residence taught him the elements of hypnotism. He used this power primarily to convince conquests that the member they were enjoying was "very full and fat," and now insists Russian girls are his best subjects. "They are susceptible to it, you understand. Because they are always flooded with statistics to convince them they have three times what they actually do. Production figures, production reports—it comes to the same thing, you know. It is a nice setup for my little deception."

Kemal questions me for hours about the chances of fulfilling his dream: graduate study at M.I.T. on the basis of his Moscow degree. (When the application forms arrived—imagine the problems they inflicted on puzzled postal censors!—I spent days interpreting questions and helping phrase his replies. He saw hidden meanings and rewrote answers like a prisoner composing a stay-of-execution plea.) He also tries to establish something like an English-Speaking Union with the new crop of American and English exchange students every September. But his closest friends are a Russian couple who befriended him during his first week in Moscow, two hundred and thirty-three weeks ago, "not counting the days." The couple live together unofficially two floors below, and have established a kind of University record for a love affair's durability. I know the girl, brown-eyed Anna, moderately well: a Belorussian with the intensity of a Radcliffe student who suspects she's unattractive. But human-dynamo Sergei avoids me: he's planning a government career, hopefully in the diplomatic service, which fraternization with an American might prejudice. According to Anna and Kemal, Sergei, the product of a poor family, will stop at nothing to make his way.

Now Kemal is bitter on Anna's behalf The four-year affair has come to an end. In fact, Anna and Sergei have just married other partners, although they still share an occasional night.

"In my four years with him," says Anna, "I didn't know other

Notes from My Window ^29

men existed. I've never slept with anyone else, before or after. I can't sleep with this person called my husband. I belong to Sergei."

The end was sour. Despite his unfaithfulness and her brittle resentment, their de facto marriage was surprisingly solid—until October, when Sergei became apprehensive. Since neither he nor Anna were Muscovites, both would be sent, upon graduation in June, to a village or town for fulfillment of their obligations at jobs assigned by a state commission. The prospect of a three-year "sentence" to the provinces was very bad; worse was their slim chance of ever securing the residence stamp that would permit them to live again in the capital. Sergei proposed the standard subterfuge: he would marry the first suitable Moskvichka who came his way; Anna the first bachelor Moskvich. Thus they would remain in Moscow, free to continue almost as before. After a seemly interval—not less than two years, because the police have begun revoking residence permits obtained through obvious marriages of convenience—they would pay their partners whatever was necessary, divorce them and come together officially.

Anna reluctantly agreed when she realized that, under the circumstances, this was as close as possible to a marriage proposal. But when Sergei actually made his choice—a shy girl he met in the library and proposed to immediately—her self-control shattered. Weeping, cursing, begging, she fell upon the mortified fiancee with fists and nails. His resolve stiffened by just these hysterics, Sergei carried through his plan.

To spite him, she too married the first interested man—a minor official of fifty—for her Moscow permit. But Sergei was happy with his docile bride and Anna succeeded only in increasing her misery by pointing up his lack of jealousy. Now she's trying to cultivate friends in high places, for she is determined to be more successful than "that shallow careerist I thought I once loved."

There are worse troubles than Anna's. Last month a girl hanged herself in a room on the adjoining corridor. She looped a belt through the handle of a cupboard over the doorway, and the wood held just long enough to achieve the strangulation. It is said there are a dozen suicides a semester in the dormitories.

30^ MOSCOW FAREWELL

Most victims jump from the upper-story windows after prolonged fits of winter melancholy. The incidents are never reported; on the contrary, the University administration painstakingly hushes them up. A constant buzz of rumor therefore surrounds the circumstances of each episode. Was the boy who died in October the son of a certain minister?

Last month's victim had been discovered stealing from a roommate—single rubles from pockets from time to time and bits of clothing which she sold. The roommate reported her suspicions and, on the morning the investigating commission was expected, left to meet them in the main foyer. Returning to the room twenty minutes later to question the suspect, they found her body on the floor. She had left a note: "I cannot face my guilt nor the shame of a Comrades' Court. Please forgive me. Something went wrong."

Chingiz came in to tell me. The dead girl had been his lover. He sat on the floor, fingering the books she'd left him the evening before and speaking in staccato. "Galya stole because of hunger for aflection. It's the most basic psychological reaction. She needed more than we gave her; and tomorrow, when our guilt wears off^, we'll be as selfish as ever. Why the 'brotherhood' pretense when we're all alone? Damn the lies we live."

It was not the first suicide Chingiz knew. He's a type—unhappy himself, yet solid—reached for by people who feel they can't cope. Foolish as the premonition is, I'm convinced bad news of our own will pull us together.

Chingiz and I hadn't been close before that morning but sensed the time would come. Passing in the corridor, we always smiled comfortably, pleased at biding our time. When the suicide was discovered, it was natural he came to me; natural, too, to go to a movie instead of demonstrating proper mourning.

Dreamer, libertine and former laborer, Chingiz looks exactly like what he has been and is. He's tall and lean, with a cowboy's slouch and mane of dark hair obscuring an Apache-Asian face. Except for his eyes, which are often impenetrable, he reminds me of a less-dented Jack Palance. In the freeness of his spirit, he resembles a younger Alyosha except that he, my friend of friends Alyosha, is never moody.

Notes from My Window^Sl

Black-eyed Chingiz was born in the vast semi-arid steppe north of the Caucasus. His people are hybrid Russians and Kalmyks: seminomadic Buddhists who speak Mongolian and raise sheep. The feeling of something very close and very good—his mother, who rode with him strapped to her back—was the first emotion he remembers; wanderlust was the second. Mother and father adored and spoiled him, the settlement's young darling, but by the time he could master a strong horse, he knew he had to explore. After half a dozen adolescent attempts to run away and a score of odd jobs on trucks and construction sites, he found his way to Odessa and became a sailor; then a leading seaman, next an officer; then an officer on ships going abroad.

No matter that the crew was watched incessantly to prevent defections and the ship's political officer made him sick; he had found his calling. Movement and open air soothed him, while his quiet hard work earned him regular promotions. He entered the University two years ago because his ambition is to captain his own vessel—to be his own boss—and a Soviet master's license requires a University degree. In any field whatever; for lack of another academic interest, Chingiz chose Russian literature. And now the sea has a strong competitor; he has discovered that poetry puts him in communion with the Large World much as dawn perceived from the bridge of a solitary ship.

Mayakovsky is his hero. ("I will make myself black trousers of the velvet of my voice.") Chingiz knows his long poems by heart and loves to recite "The Cloud in Trousers."

Your thought

musing on a sodden brain

like a bloated lackey on a greasy couch,

I'll taunt with a bloody morsel of heart;

and satiate my insolent, caustic contempt.

I'm not sure precisely what I admire in Chingiz. We still haven't fully opened up about ourselves, although I know he's troubled by "sensitive" political issues and detestation of repression lies in his bones. (Did I know why Mayakovsky really committed suicide? he once asked me. Why almost all the real revolutionary poets killed themselves by 1935?) In fact, we rarely discuss anything at length. On a "walk" last Sunday in Moscow's

32^MOSCOW FAREWELL

outskirts, a six-hour hike through tumbledown villages and disconsolate woods, we hardly exchanged a sentence. It was enough to absorb the countryside's tranquilizing current, transmitted through the immense, inspiring silence and icicles of sunlight. Chingiz never speaks of his girls, who are legion, or how he wins swimming meets without training. He broods, drinks, enjoys his hard-won privilege of being left alone by the clique and by Komsomol activists trying to recruit "volunteers" for their latest project to raise political consciousness.

His schedule conforms to the general pattern. He attends lectures and seminars throughout the day: forty long hours of classes a week, for Soviet pedagogues prefer group study and textbook-spooning to independent reading and research. Like military service schools, this educational system assigns certificates on the basis of course hours attended rather than individual achievement. Evenings, Chingiz plays dominoes in the common room, goes walking in town, or entertains a girl in his room. Not what but how he does things is different; even reading in bed, he's more alone and intense than the others, yet the whole range of University activities seems a mere distraction for him, as if he's marking time for something more important.

It was from Leonid I learned that Chingiz's father was one of the first Kalmyk Communists, a Robin Hood admired by the local shepherds as much as they despised the ruthless commissars dispatched from Moscow. A victim of one of the earliest purges, he was taken away before dawn one morning after holding Chingiz's forehead through a fit of vomiting that very night. Chingiz never saw him again, nor heard what happened to him—not a word in thirty years, until a letter for his mother arrived in 1958, posthumously rehabilitating her husband, sharing her sorrow over the unfortunate mistake, promising the Party would never again tolerate the "isolated violations of socialist legality" permitted during the "personality cult." His mother threw away the paper. Someone looking back to the promise of the Khrushchev days once lauded the Party for rehabilitating purged Communists; Chingiz stood up and left the room, his silent fury ending the argument.

Another student told me that Chingiz recently spoke at a Komsomol meeting for the first time. The discussion concerned

Notes from My WindowX33

an unruly troublemaker whom the Presidium had recommended for expulsion. The activists were startled, then angered, at Chingiz's extemporaneous speech in his defense: such challenge to the leadership at an open meeting was insolent. (Not quite unprecedented, however: similar democratic gropings had been ventured during the heady days of Khrushchev's liberalization.) When the vote was taken and the recommendation defeated, several kingpins succumbed to rage. Chingiz quietly left, reappearing with a large Lenin emblem pinned to his black turtleneck.

His father's reverence for Lenin is clearly sire to his own assumption that a return to genuinely revolutionary principles would set the country straight. In other words, his "opposition" is uncorruptedly Leninist. Students of Leonid's sophistication, by contrast, have come to feel that just this Leninism—its dogmatism, intolerance and repression of dissent, born of the narrow-minded ruthlessness of the man himself, who discarded centuries of wisdom for his Marxist "answers" to everything—was Russia's greatest tragedy. Is it a law of nature that Leonid knows more yet does less to ameliorate present wrongs? That his greater understanding only inhibits him in comparison to the strong-willed Chingiz?

Is it in keeping with some other law that the one student I know who has actually participated in a form of organized political dissent is among the least likable personally? Long-legged Pyotr has never said precisely what he does and I don't ask, of course; but to an American, he's willing to hint that he once helped collect samizdat materials documenting political persecution. In other words, he was an authentic member of the now almost-extinct "democratic movement": one of the handful of "underground" fighters for civic rights whose persecution, as reported in the Western press, has brought them awesome international admiration.

And Pyotr obviously is brave; his political principles—for which labor camp and a mangled life are the most probable rewards— are exemplary. But the question of why he and his fellows attract so little sympathy from the Russian people for whom they volunteer to sacrifice themselves is complicated by matters of personality. For all his social high-mindedness, Pyotr

34^MOSCOW FAREWELL

is a self-righteous petty tyrant, not unlike some American salon revolutionaries. Russians' perverse resistance to enlightened efforts to improve their condition is hardly new; but in this case at least, there is good reason why few are moved to clasp hands with Pyotr the Prig. I must not reveal more about him. But if there is more to say about Soviet villains than fits into newspaper accounts, there is also more to examine about those I once accepted, ipso facto, as saintly heroes.

When Chingiz is in a talkative mood, he sometimes alludes to goings-on in the University and city which I hear about nowhere else, although I'm supposedly deep in native life, sharing the authentic Russian experience. Students expelled from the University and exiled from Moscow for challenging some of the more fatuous The Party Saved Russia myths of the (obligatory) History of the Communist Party course; several professors dismissed from their jobs—with confiscation of manuscripts on which they'd been working many years—for having signed petitions about the twelve-year sentence awarded Vladimir Bukovsky; assorted intellectuals demoted or blacklisted for having befriended Westerners who later published articles "slandering Soviet reality." (In some cases, prior authorization to invite the Westerners to their apartments had been quietly obtained, but the police officers resented their misuse of the privilege: the hosts obviously failed to exercise proper control of their guests.) Chingiz says the KGB network in the University is almost as active, and its control almost as strong, as in the armed forces and the Party itself One of his closest friends, a rebellious history student, was expelled for challenging a lecturer to admit Trotsky was the father of the Red Army.

"Why don't I hear about these things from anyone else?" I ask.

"Who'll tell you? Dissenters are cut down soundlessly, to avoid publicity. People who do learn about specific cases know that they can expect the same if they talk. It's a protection racket: victims' lips sealed by fear. Outsiders like you are hard put to learn how things really work."

Chingiz is almost as disgusted with foreigners who misinterpret Soviet life as with the KGB apparatchiks who, as he sometimes says, are the country's real government. He considers the naivete of Western leftists as boundless as the dictatorship's hypocrisy:

Notes from My Window "^35

"the two feed on each other." When he was at sea, roughly a third of the crew was permitted ashore in capitahst ports; the others were not trustworthy enough—that is, not ideologically resolute and genealogically pure. (No one with a relative anywhere in the West or connections with foreigners in Russia was even considered.) Those with the coveted permission could leave the ship for no more than four hours at a time, only in a group, solely on central streets, always shepherded by a KGB overseer. The watchdogs too were watched by a secret informer in the group, as well as by KGB personnel in Soviet trade missions in the ports themselves.

"Much of our free time went to receptions by friendship societies. Gentlemen in tweeds would shake our hands, pleased with themselves. Happy to pretend that everything was normal —simply some Soviet lads abroad, you see, just like ordinary sailors, only better, of course. They'd talk about Soviet culture and achievements. If you tried to tell them two-thirds of the crew couldn't set foot in their city, they wouldn't believe you. But the point is, nobody did try. Goons with sharp ears were busy mixing in that merry hall—a word from them and you'd join the stay-aboards."

But Chingiz too must be seen in the Russian, rather than the Western-liberal, context. To start with, he's suspicious of liberalism and the societies that nourish it. "Russia is subjected to enormous Western influences," he says. "Unfortunately, most are harmful. Ninety per cent of what our people want is the cheapest, most vulgar of capitalist glitter. This applies to our high-school generation in particular, whose ideals are down to chrome and bubble gum. And artists too: the blind imitation of phony Western trends can make you sick. So many 'smart' people fawning, posing, plagiarizing; passing off their worthless copies as art because they'd sell in San Francisco. . . . The paradox is that our campaigns against Western commercialism encourage more empty imitation. Prohibitions only weaken us for more debasement and demoralization by the tawdriest Western junk."

In short, Chingiz is a neo-Slavophile, convinced that Russia must develop along its own lines, avoiding Western excesses. He doesn't realize that just this attitude, with its unrealistic idealism

36^ MOSCOW FAREWELL

and unwillingness to take freedom's bad with its good, is itself a reflection of Russia's enduring troubles. Like Solzhenitsyn, he's far better at diagnosing ills than at concocting home remedies.

Still, all this is secondary. It is the condition of the country's peasantry that disturbs Chingiz most strongly. Twice a year he visits his mother, who moved to a collective farm north of Moscow after the war. Unable to exist for more than a week on her infinitesimal pension, she returned to work—for a monthly sack of flour and a few rubles in cash—at the age of seventy-three. This provides sufficient bread to fill her stomach, but she doesn't see potatoes for months (except for her own fowl, there is no question of meat), until Chingiz appears. "/ take a sack of potatoes to her on the farm; that's what country life is like. Hardly any able-bodied men are left on her farm: they've all escaped, even without papers. Women, children, pensioners do the work. Animals should get better feed."

Although Chingiz seems resigned when talking of such matters, I'm afraid he'll explode one day and quickly join his expelled, exiled friend. Last week, surely in sublimated protest against authority, he went to the apartment of a history professor who had been entertaining Natasha and other pretty, academically troubled girls. In the fierce argument following Chingiz's demand of an end to such exploitation, each threatened to ruin the other. In the end, Natasha was liberated. Like the rescued heroine of a real-life drama, she waits outside Chingiz's door with adoring eyes.

Two dozen suicides a year; but some say many more. The surface motive is rarely Harvard's scourge, fear of academic failure. In some psyches, the succession of winter days produces a cosmic depression formerly called "Arctic hysteria." As dense as a morning's frozen mist, vapors of purposelessness descend, obliterating all traces of a path or a refuge. With nowhere to go and no objective to sight upon, the country's burdens become personal, therefore intolerable. The nostalgia of threadbare workmen for the late hangman—"In Stalin's day, you could get a mug of real beer; he cared about the people"—bespeaks its impossible demands. The cold mercifully numbs the pain; you feel only that the infinite outdoor void has captured your insides.

Notes from My WindowX37

and that death might be a sensible escape from the domination of the gray forces.

Surely it's these phantoms that crank up my own depressions to a grotesque pitch. Sometimes I'm so stricken that I can drag myself up only for the toilet. On top of my familiar feelings of worthlessness and being trapped in petty spites, a dread I've never known before keeps me prostrate in my unchanged sheets, grateful, at least, for the deep overcast that helps me feign sleep. I am surrounded by adventures, new impressions, eager friends; I have only to open my senses in order to absorb the unique excitement of living in Moscow. But when the self-doubt strikes, I'm too weak to lace my shoes.

What am I doing here, cut off from all I know and everything I am? Deprived of my bourgeois ways and New York comforts? All my life I've roved off my beaten track to demonstrate I'm more swashbuckling than a garment-district salesman's academically achieving son. Football with Irish bruisers, pig farming in Canada, Palm Beach lifeguarding instead of summer camp—my ventures into what my family considered enemy territory were intended to show that I have the brawn to cope with low life and danger. Some ended in humiliating tears, and this time I fear another debacle. I plead to be delivered from this dismal room and the pretense that has driven me across the earth to this blankness.

The real me is no intrepid explorer but a puzzled little kid who happened to grow tall and strong—and somewhere felt so small that he had to act out the adventure fantasies of all Jewish boys. The real me visualized himself listening to Mendelssohn in Carnegie Hall all the time he worked in an Oregon sawmill and, when the moods strike now, whimpers for a Sixth Avenue corned beef on rye, not a Russian salad of despair and freakish visions. Once I actually daydreamed of my parents arriving to take me home.

Mad as it seems, I lose control partly out of infatuation with socialism. Anyone would think that firsthand acquaintance with the hypocrisy sneered in its name here would beget immunity to its false promises, and on most days this is true: I so hate the gangsters who rule me that I pray for economic collapse. I visualize war with China sparking explosions of nationalism in

38^MOSCOW FAREWELL

the non-Russian republics and outbreaks of popular revolt, in which I play a daring oratorical role, like a reverse John Reed. But at other moments, I surrender to socialism's essential truths and cheer for its victory. One hundred and seventy-two million tons of steel annually at the end of the Five-Year Plan? Splendid, comrades; how can I help? Twice as many pairs of shoes per capita, three times as many eggs? Yes, the country is marching toward plenty for all, while we claw and pollute, and our blacks still grovel. The Soviet representative has consistently called for complete, unqualified disarmament throughout the Geneva negotiations? Well, I don't know Kissinger's answer, since it is never printed. But it seems fine, and I wonder why our militarists won't agree. As never before, I see that capitalism, driven by selfishness, is degrading by its very nature, whereas socialism at least appeals to better instincts and therefore does represent a higher stage of civilization.

How terribly wrong it is, how ugly, that powerful individuals own oil produced by geological processes over millennia, surely a nation's common property. That grasping hands determine the distribution of wealth; that good people suffer from poverty while vulgarians gorge themselves on obscene consumption. Only socialism can wash away the anomalies and bitter injustices of private enterprise—which, before this extended contact with even perverted Marxism opened my eyes, seemed to me God-given. Only socialism offers us all the means to love and respect ourselves by working for the common good rather than for the appetites within us that we least respect. Even if all this is Utopian, even if Soviet State capitalism is more exploitative than our corporate variety, I know I'll never again be happy living and working under the American system's legalized greed. Hypocritical as they are, newspaper articles here about pet shops where more is spent on poodles' coiffures than some black families can afford for food fill me with shame. Pravda makes me shudder about much I never noticed before.

But most of my depressions are more personal. These brief breakdowns are mainly in reaction to the breakdown of my career. I can't picture my place in the America I've come to disvalue. Nothing will be found for the everlasting student who—it's absolutely certain now—will never fulfill his promise.

Notes from My Window ^39

It's clear now I'll never teach. This encounter with Russian life, which was supposed to complete my education, has crippled me for scholarship. As Florence forces amateur painters come there for inspiration to abandon their puny efforts, the confrontation with Russia's unbalancing spirit vitiates archival labors. I can no longer see the country in terms of paradigms, Party infrastructure and intergroup pressures, the concepts of my trade. Like my Russian friends, I'm too confused and oppressed for sober monographs. They've taught me to shut out everything unrelated to the individual people who bear directly on my life; to swap detachment and rationality—those foreign conceptions —for subjective sensations. Having learned the Slavophile's truth, how can I devote myself to scholarship? "Russia is not to be understood by intellectual processes," said Tyutchev. "You cannot take her measurements with a common yardstick; she has a form and stature of her own."

No job, no future. Nothing from which to exorcise the success so long expected of me; no hope, at this age, of mastering another profession. This once-in-a-lifetime year is slipping by and I'm wasting it; I can never have another. To be a nobody at this supposed prime of manhood is intolerably shaming. I simultaneously plunge into an abyss of degradation, as when I used to masturbate to relieve the guilt of masturbation, and cling to the rock face of existence with fantasies of rescue through confession and self-enslavement. I'll tell the world how useless I am; I'll work for anyone who supplies my daily bread. If only I had a genuine skill, the training of any honest craft, instead of the hot air of my liberal education!

This angst and I were companions fifteen years ago, during my normally abnormal teens. How surprised I am at its regeneration now; how I dislike myself for it when I'm unable to laugh. Some days, the thought of facing the music of my failure in New York is worse even than the loneliness of my exile. Since what is happening to me here has rendered me unable to be the success-type I must be there, perhaps I should somehow arrange to remain in Moscow: become a translator, a secretary, anything to keep myself alive.

In this world, I'm still a somebody. After all, "Westerner" by itself is a title. At the lowest level, it gives me access to chewing

40^MOSCOW FAREWELL

gum and Camels, which buy the same kind of deference and accommodations from the same kinds of postwar Europeans who serviced GIs. At the highest, my opinions are soHcited by intellectuals far more accomplished than I merely because I'm from "over there." How ironic that I, who had the usual youthful scorn for capitalism, feel a plutocrat for the first time in the Motherland of Socialism! The restaurants are inferior, but in what other capital could I afford the very best, together with front-row seats for every play at every theater?

No other city's luxury is so at my disposal; nowhere else am I made to feel so close to the Big Time—so important to myself The same me who is one of ten million at home has ballooned into a personage here: an attraction and a celebrity, without achieving even false success. So the temptation to stay is very great, even though I know that no Westerner can hope to settle in Moscow without eventual impressment into KGB service.

In the nadir of my self-pity, my thoughts sink from this level to the basest visions of myself, and I groan into my pillow. But the panic of what will become of me is distant today, and I luxuriate in the respite of a patient between attacks. Weeks sometimes pass in blissful freedom from conscious dread. ("What are you going to be when you grow up, fella?" "I won't.") Meanwhile, the soft ache that is my closest friend throbs greetings from inside, and I exist in perpetual limbo. Knowing the disgrace that awaits me, I drift like the bum I've always wanted and feared to be, hoping this eerie year is over quickly to end my apprehension—and, at the same time, that the refuge of suspension lasts forever.

Maybe this was my year to crash and it would have happened anywhere. Perhaps it was inevitable that as I approached the last turning point to "maturity" and the professorship to prove it, I'd discover my unsuitability and flee. Or is Russia responsible for the collapse of my props of conscientiousness and orderly habits: of everything needed—especially a deaf ear to my deepest anxieties—to support me in the world of professional upper-middle class? Perversely, the only activity I perform well here—submerging myself into the joys and maiming sadnesses of daily life—is the one that has tumbled me. But maybe Mother Russia herself will somehow save me. Or I'll straighten things out with Anastasia and we'll be happy forever after.

Notes from My Window^41

Marusa has just opened the buffet for her afternoon trading hours. It's an ordinary single room at the end of the far corridor converted to a miniature grocery: a dusty cubicle with oilclothed shelves, what we used to call an icebox, and bins of brown loaves delivered twice daily. In addition to the bread, Marusa sells sausage, cheese, milk, yoghurt, sugar, and, occasionally, a few runty, blemished apples costing (at state prices, for her little establishment is an offshoot of the Grocery Trust) the equivalent of $2.75 a pound. The yoghurt is natural; the bread sour, delicious and full of life. The other products might have come from flood relief In the main cafeteria too, even in the higher-priced one patronized by the staff and by richer students, the food gets steadily more lumpish. Apparently this tendency is typical of every winter as all fresh produce disappears; but recent crop troubles have reduced even the kasha and macaroni to mush.

Marusa is a firebrand: I picture her tongue-lashing top-hatted bankers and foreign monopolists during the civil war. She's petite and bleached blonde—good-looking in a tarty way despite her soiled smock and the heavy makeup that only emphasizes the signs of wear in her face. (She's been married three times, most recently to a truck driver whom she says she can drink under the table.) She alternately flirts with her male customers and screams at them in a shrill working-class patois. Like most Russians of her background, she's a zealous socialist who hates the thought of capitalism only less than the reality of work.

"Get the hell out of my hair, you vultures, and don't waste your time standing on line. There's no more sour cream. None. You can rot there all day, I'm not serving another person."

But students keep joining the line nevertheless. (It's shorter than the hour's wait at the cafeterias, where standees read novels to pass the time. Besides, not every student can afford sixty kopeks for a proper meal.) They know that if they beg, plead, coquet, cajole, Marusa will eventually ser\'e them all, even with magically found jars of sour cream. Why can't she simply do her job without first the cursing, then reconciliation and finally the peace offering? Why can't the most routine transaction in this country be completed without steaming it into a crisis? To buy a can of herring here is to expose yourself to a sociological

42/^MOSCOW FAREWELL

adventure. It's never an offer of mute money for an inanimate tin, but a human barter in which a chunk of self must be invested by both sides: fitting frustration, then satisfaction, exchanged.

Marusa the sociaUst. I intend nothing ironic by this, for she's utterly convinced that socialism is progressive, uplifting and morally irreproachable, whereas capitalism produces degradation and cheating as well as exploitation. Her own cheating in no way invalidates the general principles but, rather, is simply how things are done.

She makes an elaborate show of weighing everything to the gram, adding and removing a daub, adding again, then removing the final speck of bologna or cheese to balance her scales. Yet everyone knows she is busy fleecing customers and the house— i.e., the state; everyone accepts that fiddling is part of the job of every saleswoman and counterclerk in the land. Scales are tampered with, products weighed with wrapping paper to add the odd gram, a cheaper grade of cheese substituted, bread cut to leave a slice for the slicer at both ends—only a kopek's worth on each purchase, but enough to eke out a living for the perpetrators, which their tiny wages alone don't provide. It is as endemic to the system as the stupendous precautions against theft—literally nothing movable is left without a giant padlock—and occurs for some of the same reasons.

In Marusa's case, the cheating is as much professional habit as profitable enterprise. The items in her meager buffet hardly justify the effort: no wine to water, no coffee beans to spill (and later gather), not even lemons to steal. (A grade-A lemon costs more than her hourly wage. For many unskilled workers in the city, and almost all peasants outside it, taking tea with a sliver of the prized fruit is a holiday extravagance—if they can find it on sale.) And Marusa's fudging is also essential to the traditional game of tease. "Hurry up, for God's sake," shout the ravenous boys at the end of the line. "If you cut the show with the scales and speed it up, we'll give you a bonus for exceeding your cheating plan."

Marusa fairly spits with fury, but when someone winks and runs his eyes over her figure, she shams suppressing her smile. "This miserable life of mine," she moans, wiping a jagged knife on the hip of her smock. She can survive bombing, famine, and

Notes from My Window ^43

purges with heroic nonchalance, can fight at the front in fierce civil and national wars. But the daily routine of her job in the buffet—working by the clock and actually serving people—is too much.

Why was I surprised to find such a variety of personalities here? The range may be no wider than elsewhere but it appears more diverse because I'd expected uniformity, as if the two hundred and fifty million would arrange themselves into the four or five categories of my textbooks; and, I think, also because the personalities seem larger than life: extravagant theatrical characters against the dull gray backdrop of the Russian mise-en-scene. Just as the bleached blonde hussy in a Moscow restaurant is the quintessence of bleached blonde hussies, the studious lad, the enthusiastic joiner and the soccer fan are all classics of their type.

Even the sprinkling of foreigners seems more interesting in this setting, their awareness of themselves heightened by the undercurrent of potential drama. A large, amiable Bulgarian student, for example, shakes my hand with splendid gravity whenever we pass in the corridor. He seems to feel we have something profound and risky in common, and although I don't know what, I somehow share in the assumption. Month by month, his smile broadens. What are we in together?

Naturally, the range of Russians is broader. There is misanthrope Igor, who had been in the Air Force until his MIG crashed ten years ago, mangling his splendid body. Miraculously, he was revivified and fitted with artificial limbs; but his spirit never recovered and his self-pitying bitterness casts a pall when he enters the common room. He had been a blond, blue-eyed fighter pilot, the elite of Soviet warriors, with all the money he needed and a new girl every week. Now he's a scarfaced cripple, unable to intrigue himself or anyone else. He drinks up his pension alone in his room, hardly pretending to study.

And Sergei Alexandrovich (no one calls him Seriozha or just Sergei), another older man (Soviet higher education institutes accept students to the age of thirty-five), who avoids Igor out of fear and detestation. Big and blubbery, Sergei Alexandrovich is the only obvious pederast I've seen in the University; but the official attitude to homosexuality makes him exceedingly careful.

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A graduate student in English literature, he lavishes his love where it is safe, on dead writers of a distant land. A distant era, too, for he's convinced the summit of English literature was reached by Dickens, and grieves over the language's subsequent debasement. Months ago, I fulfilled his request for a copy of Dictionary of American Slang, without which Russians can hardly decipher contemporary novels in English. But although he thanked me for the gift, he hates what it represents.

"Those dreadful words. So degrading, so unnecessary. And to use them in literature, whose function is to uplift. To compile a scholarly dictionary of them, ugh!"

He prefers memorizing Bleak House to reading anything of the last fifty years—Joyce, Waugh, Bellow, Mailer—for the first time. This will make him the perfect high-school teacher: for political reasons—his picture of rapacious English capital and a hungry working class—Dickens is the backbone of the Soviet curriculum. Odd that Sergei Alexandrovich's students will know as little of contemporary literature as the government wants, but for very different reasons.

Edward too wanted a Dictionary of American Slang, but not for academic reasons. Craving everything Western, he lets it be known when he's wearing Eminence underwear or a (somewhat soiled) Liberty foulard (the former was bought from a French student, the latter exchanged for an out-of-print Russian book) and tries to keep his tone casual when comparing the cut of Brooks Brothers to Savile Row. (The jewel of his wardrobe is a gray pin-striped suit only one size too large. Many tourists remove labels as a precaution, but this one was intact and his "dealer" imposed an onerous surcharge for it.) Edward's Western name and appearance—he's tall, slim and dressed like a neat prep school graduate—are sadly fitting. He's the most persistent and pathetic of the Russian hangers-on among the French, English and, especially, American students. Always in a Westerner's room, denigrating everything Russian; always offering clever comments on movie reviews—of movies that will never be shown in Russia—in back issues of newsmagazines he's managed to obtain and study; always laboring to be fluent in the latest trends and slang. (To be au courant with this season's trouser widths and Washington scandals is evidently not enough. Once

Notes from My WindowX45

he tried to engage me—"Like, what do you dig about it, man?"—in a discussion of gold stock futures.) Like a newly rich African entrepreneur after a grand European tour, he has rejected his own society's every value, even—or especially—Russian folk music and folk art, which enchant the angriest dissenter. Because he can never actually become one of us, his rich, white Western gods, his highest goal is to win hourly demonstrations of our acceptance. Like a Harvard freshman desperate to join a snobbish final club, he is at the heels of one or another foreigner every free moment of the day.

That he reports to the KGB is acknowledged even by a grunt of "no comment" from Viktor: otherwise, of course, he would not be allowed to devote his life to Western decadence. Soon after he began dropping in on me, Edward himself told me how he had been recruited. In recognition of his Young Communist organizing efforts years ago he was chosen for a student trip to Geneva. The morning before the never-in-his-wildest-dreams departure, his crisp new passport was delivered (he had never seen one before) and he was summoned to an interview. "You're a good chap," began a KGB officer briefed on Edward's weakness for "foreign" and "abroad." "We've heard you're planning a jaunt to Geneva. That's fine; travel is always beneficial. . . . You know, I think, that we can easily, er, postpone your journey. Someone else can be found to take your place. But I'm certain there will be no last-minute difficulties. Help us out with a little something, and I guarantee you'll stay on the list."

What was wanted of him, predictably, was to report on the behavior of the others in the group, including informers planted earlier. Given the afternoon to ponder, Edward became ill. It was the opposition of his unusually principled girl friend that tipped the balance, giving him the fortitude to decline. Crying in the officer's presence, he regretted the decision bitterly even as it sounded on his lips. His passport was taken from him before he completed his explanation.

Edward's self-pity dilated to greater size and weight with every memory of the injustice earned by his noble refusal. In the absence of any hope for travel, he became obsessed by Western possessions. This demoralization made him more promising to the KGB than if he had accepted their conditions for the Geneva

46^MOSCOW FAREWELL

trip—in which case he could have claimed he'd seen nothing worth reporting. When a second officer offered him a chance for redemption by "helping out" in the dormitory, fresh tears—this time, of relief, anticipation and self-reproach—accompanied his acceptance.

But now his sorrow for himself swelled yet faster: he was not just a victim, but simultaneously an informer—a pimp for pimps. It was not only Western things that had beguiled him all his youth, but also Western notions of privacy and individual dignity, from which his voluntary peonage had excluded him forever. To assuage his remorse, he took to cautioning foreigners about himself, cursing his weakness and pleading for understanding; mixing mea culpas with tortuous explanations. (It was Edward who, days after my arrival, motioned me into the corridor, away from the bugs, to give me my first whispered warning. "You're the new American? Beware. Your moves will be watched, every word recorded. Believe me, there's a microphone in your room; I've heard the recordings. I tell you this as a friend, someone who hates treachery.")

Sometimes the spectacle of his self-incrimination moves Westerners to soothe him with gifts of rock'n'roll records and James Bond paperbacks. Other times, the trinkets are an inducement for him to quit their rooms at last. Far from evil, Edward makes it as plain as anyone that only the accident of birth has given me the luxury of not having to be a hider or a liar. But his piteous attempts to win approval by confessing sins to the very people on whom he practices them are authentic Dostoyevskian self-destructiveness. Each admission sucks him deeper into the whirlpool of self-pity and self-loathing; lowered even further in the eyes of his masters and his quarry, he tries harder to please both. There is no escape, only the solace of new items of secondhand clothing, which, by compounding his debt, also fuel the dismal cycle. Ruined at twenty-four, he can only hope that the police retain him in this petty servitude and allow him to keep his loot. And, as his spirit descends, he can trade up: from a two-year-old London Fog to an almost-new Burberry.

Edward's roommate Yuri, by contrast, is so oblivious to clothes and other worldly goods that Edward's degradation is beyond his comprehension. Yuri the Righteous: so quiet, kind and selfless.

Notes from My Window^47

So devoutly virtuous that he gives me a queasy sensation of being in another age; in ours, I was certain, such rectitude no longer existed. Yuri of the steel-rimmed spectacles and churchgoing radiance, who can't tell a lie even to save himself from the most boring invitation, and who spends a morning searching for the saleswoman who undercharged him by ten kopeks. He's more the Puritan settler than anyone in contemporary Massachusetts.

It's curious how virtues as well as vices seem larger than life here, undiluted from biblical models. More than anything, this country is old-fashioned; the fundamental qualities of people and things are as plain as Colonial furniture. The dormitory houses many of Yuri's kind, young women as well as men. Sober-faced and morally scrubbed, their high-mindedness gleams all the brighter in contrast to their washworn shirts and dresses. They really do live by the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism— which, after all, is the Ten Commandments, slightly revised.

And if there are a score of conflicting types among the students I personally know, what of the twenty-five thousand as a whole, coming and going in ceaseless streams from the metro station and bus stops? Most seem supremely ordinary; I've been picking out the personalities because of their stories. Bland, conventional, insufferably dull! Some days, the huge building shrieks of boredom, and if one more small-town, small-minded Russian asks me the horsepower of a Ford, I'll punch his philistine nose. If one more businessman slinks into my room with a handful of greasy rubles for my ties, underwear, socks . . .

Among the twenty-five thousand, odd things stand out. One is that the proportion of military officers is even greater here than in the city as a whole. In crumpled uniforms, clutching tattered briefcases, they contemplate their physics texts, even when stuffed into the dark, impossibly overcrowded elevators. The Army is never out of sight. Rumor has it that the main building's entire eighteenth floor—at which the elevators never stop and for which there's not even a number on their floor indicators—is reserved for tapping equipment and war research.

Last war's casualties are as numerous but more depressing. Armless and legless men are everywhere among the professors and older students; pinned-up sleeves, timeworn crutches, black plastic gloves over wooden hands and clumping artificial limbs.

48^MOSCOW FAREWELL

Their numbers too are greater here than in the city generally: disabled veterans are given preference in the severe competition for University places, and the age limit is often waived. Maimed and mutilated bodies are an integral part of the national scene, living exhibits of Russia's misfortunes.

But why so many clubfeet and bone malformations among the students of my generation? Here the forgotten word "rickets"— no less unpleasant in Russian: rakhit —is in common usage, and the familiar hunchback of Russian literature still casts gloom on daily University life. Standing abjectly on cafeteria lines, they are reminders of a tubercular uncle of mine, symbols of a particular sadness.

Student privation is a lesser manifestation of the same problem: the stark lack not only of pretty things to wear and interesting objects to buy, but often even of nutritious food. This country's poverty is a baffling phenomenon. Even amid the University community's relative plenty, scarcity is seemingly incurable. It's not the poverty of the East; no one is near starvation. Things are getting better all the time. But everyone except progeny of the Moscow bourgeoisie struggles near slum level. A single shiny suit hangs in the otherwise bare wardrobes of most male students; girls wear one grubby sweater week after week. (It is to save body heat and a few kopeks rather than in pursuit of chic that some wear them with undershirts rather than brassieres.) And a professor full of years and the authority of papers in international journals spends hours telephoning friends to help him acquire the prize of a Belgian raincoat: it's no classic trenchcoat he wants, but a plastic imitation that is all the rage.

Noises from the communal kitchen now, complementing Marusa's yelps. Dented pots and kettles clanging on the old black stoves; an anonymous tenor crooning "Strangers in the Night" while hands plop lunch potatoes into water; children of maintenance personnel supplying motor noises for their tinny toy cars. A white-tiled, dairy-smelling chamber next to the common room, the kitchen becomes a midday center of activity on the otherwise listless floor.

It's extraordinary how easily people who share it—of every generation, sex and cultural level—get along. Patrician graduate

Notes from My Window ^49

Students with uncombed women floor-waxers, the shy young bride of a Hnguist (hving illegally in his room) with the members of the clique. There is neither condescension nor self-consciousness as each tends his own pot on the stoves; no surprise that such an eclectic menagerie, complete with children and grandchildren, inhabits a university dormitory. Russians can be as selfish and snobbish as anyone, and their inequality of wealth and life-styles are often enormous. But when pushed together in the business of living, they display a natural egalitarianism whose source must surely be older than the Soviet propaganda they ignore. At some level, they are joined by a common history and fate: the intense experience of being Russian, which pulls people together like soldiers under fire. All belong to the continental family nourished by the Russian earth.

The matriarch of this tiny wing of it is Zaiida Petrovna, chief biddie of the twelfth through fourteenth floors. Everyone is required to deal with his own kitchen mess, and once a month we all serve on the morning cleaning detail which scrubs—is supposed to scrub—stoves, tables and walls. Nevertheless, Zaiida Petrovna is always left with a filthy kitchen (if you believe her complaints), and displays her neat bulk at lunchtime to remind the kitchen-users of their duty. Heard as well as seen: in her alto wail, she carps at everyone in sight, interrupting her own ceaseless monologue about intolerable slovenliness and disrespect for the elderly.

"Such people! Leave their mess every day for a weary old woman. Dear God, it's shameful. For the likes of us, never a moment's rest."

Yet rest, of course, is what she does most of the day. Otherwise she's busy hoarding things: bits of paper and string; rubber bands and sardine keys; almost everything, on the you-never-know-when-it'11-be-available-again life principle. Since my own mother threw out almost everything, I couldn't account for my familiarity with Zaiida Petrovna's attitude until I remembered my grandmother, and my wincing for her when my mother assailed these same Old Country habits. I wonder whether this is why I sometimes feel I've come home to this distant land.

It's hard to imagine altering a single detail of "Auntie Zina's" countenance. Every feature and bulge of this quintessential

50^MOSCOW FAREWELL

Russian babushka is in place, starting with the round, frostbitten face and ending in legs grown loglike with the arduous years. She's a grandmother in fact as well as in shape, and three or four times a week brings her grandson Shashinka with her to work. (Her daughter is a secretary in a ministry, where children are not welcome; and in any case, infants are granny's rather than mother's responsibility during the working day.)

Shashinka has become primus inter pares among the children smuggled into the dormitory, and a mascot to the students. (Raya and Ira, however, try to keep him out of their room because he prefers dismantling their lacework to enjoying their cuddles.) He waddles up and down the corridors and wanders into any room, a bundle of pink fat sweating in leggings, sweaters and white knitted cap. Winter having arrived. Auntie Zina will not dream of removing another layer of his clothes, even when the steam heat is working—even when Sasha wilts in the kitchen heat. When tired, he falls asleep in the lap of any cleaning woman available: all are his babushki, for he already senses he belongs to the one big Russian family.

Zaiida Petrovna also takes Shashinka along to the obligatory political lectures for service personnel after work on Thursday afternoons. She likes the meetings for their churchgoing warmth, the feelings they give her of belonging and doing good, but she would not understand less if the lecture were a Mass spoken in Latin. The child sits on his grandmother's lap while she tries to knit, not listening to a word or even pretending to. (Toward the rear of the room, farthest from the red flags and busts of Lenin, workmen are cleaning their nails and noses, and one swigs surreptitiously at a bottle.) "What's Shyria?" the tyke asked one day when I saw them leaving the session. (That afternoon's sermon had been on the righteousness of supplying Israel's enemies with arms.) "I don't know, darling," she answered, buttoning his thick fur coat. "I don't know a thing." She believes in Communism just as, and in the same way as, her people believed in God, heaven and forces for greater, higher good— forces that will insure, in this life or the next, that justice is done for the long-suffering little people. Nevertheless—or perhaps consequently—the thought that she or anyone she's fond of must work hard to achieve Communism has never occurred to her.

Notes from My Window "^51

She's always admonishing me to take it easy, he down and have a rest.

"But what about building Communism?" I ask her. (It's not an entirely facetious question; she assumes that, being here, I'm of course a Party member.)

Waving her hand "No," she casts about for a place to settle her bulk. "Communism can be built one day later, lad. Young people mustn't work so hard. You should be having a good time—a person must think of his health."

In this even more than in her appearance, she symbolizes her people. The principal concern is to avoid exertion, to cut down on work. Not advancement but peace of mind is the summum bonum —and a layer of fat for protection against famine and cold.

At the window again, gazing at my world. The University's central skyscraper, a monstrous stalagmite misplaced in residential tundra, with red running lights to caution aircraft. Acres of formal gardens where Stalin's wraith lurks, keeping them rigid and unused. . . . Across the river, my Moscow in nightdress: dusk in mid-afternoon. Ten thousand streetlamp specks interspersed in the great expanse like the diesel-generated lights of some oil port. Neon chiefly in a scattering of signs sputtering: "glory to the communist party!" "glory to the soviet people!" "glory to communism, shining future of all mankind!" I understand the spell of the Russian countryside now, but what is it in this drab urban scene that also tugs at my heart? Why does the whole human condition, its futility and mine, seem there, in the despondent expanse?

Below me, the great iron fence surrounding the University grounds and the stone blockhouse guarding the gate—a working battlement, as if Moscow State University were a tsarist outpost subject to Mongol raids. A light breeze plays dry snow through the bars of the fence and the branches of young trees, which, in the burning cold, are as stiff and black as the metal.

A crowd is bunched outside the guardhouse. Evening session is about to begin, and everyone waiting to enter the grounds is rummaging in a pocket or handbag for his pass, a little cardboard folder with a photograph of the bearer and, of course, an official stamp. The rules are universal: passes required for

52^MOSCOW FAREWELL

entrance into the University, as for every office and institution of this People's State; no citizen allowed where he doesn't belong; old men or women camped inside every door in the socialist land, checking credentials and intentions. Citizens! Produce your passes!

I once asked an assistant rector whether all this was necessary at an institute of higher education. Didn't I see? he responded fervently. Grounds accessible to ordinary members of the public, to anyone with a whim to look in, would lead to intolerable chaos. Operating a great university without passes was unthinkable. And it's true that this institution, an impressive luxury in the context of Russian life, attracts crowds of gawkers and gapers. Despite all fences, vagabonds are found encamped in dormitory rooms after every vacation.

But the examination of passes is brief. Negotiating a narrow passage through the guardhouse, each holder shows his document to a team of fieldhand women bundled in overcoats and the inevitable woollen scarves. When the women are grumpy and examine photographs, the line-standers, late and cold, mutter under their breaths; when they are gossiping, a mere motion toward a pocket that might contain a pass suffices. And when you've forgotten your pass or have none, you can usually heartthrob your way through the emergency.

A standard performance is required: ten minutes of pleading in deeply tragic tones to demonstrate why this exception to the rules is justified by higher human considerations. In the manner of a Soviet criminal defendant—and in the tradition of mercy for the errant in Russian literature—you must show yourself to have been the victim of cruel fate, prove yourself profoundly repentant, throw yourself at the women's boundless mercy. "Just this once, I'll never ask again, I promise. If I don't get in to fetch a certain book now, the whole semester's wasted. My pass was stolen yesterday, together with all my money. I've had only a glass of tea today. I know it's wrong of me to ask, but I'll be grateful to you forever. Sure you have a fine son about my age; think of how you'd want my mother to treat himy

It helps to have given the women a bar of chocolate on Women's Day or the Anniversary of the Revolution—not at the moment of pleading itself, however, for a direct bribe may be

Notes from My Window ^53

insulting and even dangerous. But even without goodies or a month of smiles to build you a credit of goodwill, a passable actor melts their village hearts. A humble lad's lamentations means so much more than rules they themselves don't understand.

But if this fails, there is a last resort: an enlarged space between two bars in the fence on the opposite side of the dormitory, which all but the fat can negotiate after removing their coats. Nine out of ten people who must gain entrance to the University will find the means; the whole pass system, with all its paperwork, procedures and shifts of a hundred guards, is a gigantic waste of time. The regimentation breaks down when brought into contact with the human factor: iron and discipline corroded by neglect and compassion—the pattern of many phases of Moscow life.

Each fall, whole classes of students are dispatched to the countryside to dig potatoes—the usual forced labor, hailed as "volunteer." The October countryside is a sea of slime, and living conditions on the collective farms are kindly described as "primitive": pig sties converted to barracks or leaky tents without latrines, and food fit only for the starving. But the students have potato fights, songfests and alfresco love affairs; and those who truly detest the prospect of a full month of cold and wet can usually feign illness or buy a faked medical exemption. Russia has more restrictions, prohibitions and bureaucratic imperatives than all of Europe combined, but most are easier to evade than in countries of sensible, and therefore seriously taken, regulations. A law of compensation operates: where the burden of rules is most impossible, petty officials seem most persuadable to ignore them.

Someday this aspect of the national character must be explained. The Russian propensity to laziness and anarchy frightens the rulers, who promulgate tomes of unworkable controls. The old habits of "fix-it" and "make-do" encourage people to ignore and evade them, an essential element of the Russian way of life. The rules are augmented by yet another series of ukases, accompanied by propaganda campaigns for strict observance. Do the drafters themselves, I wonder, take their own decrees and campaigns at face value? No one seems to, yet someone must.

54^MOSCOW FAREWELL

Besides Chingiz, my friends are nice, middle-class boys. Lev—Dustin Hoffman with a beard—actually studies evenings, a wondrous strange pastime when exams are not imminent. In dread of the three years' service in the provinces after graduation, he is determined to make the top five per cent of his class, thus exempting himself from such bondage so he may proceed directly to graduate school. He's on the economic faculty and wants to write a book about Robert McNamara. (If he's accepted for graduate work by the institute of his choice, he will have access to such research materials as old Time magazines and the Congressional Record.) For relaxation, he plays Monopoly on a set left behind by a former American exchange student. Delighted by the incongruity it represents in this citadel of Marxist-Leninist learning, he swears that the game has taught him more about capitalism than four years' reading of Soviet texts.

Pavel comes from Tbilisi, where his father is a high official in Pravda of Georgia. Once a month, a brother brings him a package from home containing smoked meat, jars of pickled delicacies and three bottles of home-brewed vodka, against which all Soviet newspapers, his father's included, wage a fierce, permanent campaign. Pavel's greatest problem is whether to follow in the paternal footsteps—and use his influence—toward a Party career or to struggle alone to become the artist he would like to be.

And there is Semyon, who is not, however, a friend, but for some reason an antagonist and a tutor. Semyon has no friends. Sometimes he seems to have no physical substance. He is all brain waves, nervous tension and irritation: the Doom of the Intelligentsia incarnate.

I think I see as much of him as anyone in the dormitory— which speaks of his terrible loneliness, for he is impossibly distant from me despite our hours together. Hours entirely tete-a-tete, for if a third person approaches, Russian or foreigner, anyone except Chingiz, he slinks away, without a good-bye or acknowledgment of the intruder (but directing an evil glare at me). To avoid this, he almost always contrives to see me after midnight.

The first time was frightening. He slipped into my room without knocking one night when Viktor was at his dacha. When I awoke, my traveling clock's luminous hands indicated 2 a.m.

Notes from My Window X 55

Switching on the overhead light, Semyon walked toward the bookcase. I'd never seen him before, or anyone so loathsome. He had an embryo's body and ballooned forehead: facial skin stretched taut over visible skull, scalp depositing live flakes on pathetic shoulders. He was clearly much older than the typical student, like a veteran circus dwarf among newcomers. A nervous twitch clutched his lips, revealing stubs of chlorine teeth.

Without more than a (scornful) glance at me, he ran his eyes over my bookcase like a thief contemplating new loot. He took down three or four volumes by Trotsky and Deutscher (among the most heretical, therefore the most interesting and dangerous, of the country's hundred thousand banned books; it was only through a friendly diplomat that I dared get them in) and opened to their title pages to check the editions. Then he selected several other studies of Russian history, tucking them under the decomposing sack of wool and canvas that served as his jacket. Finally, he acknowledged me.

"I n-need a book c-called The Agrarian Foes of B-bolshevism by Radkey, the American, and the 1-last edition of Kerensky's Russia's Turning P-point, p-published in 1970. I expect you can obtain them. I'll be b-back to check n-next week at this t-time, when I will return these."

"Who are you? What are you doing here? Books like that can get you into trouble."

With a leer—although he might have intended it as a smile—he was gone, ashes from his trembling cigarette leaving a trail on the floor.

It was months before I found out anything about him. He seems to have no animal needs: I've never seen him eat, sleep, or use the toilet, and I can't picture him in the cafeteria actually mixing with other students. After we've talked for several hours, he sometimes pours himself some water from the washbasin and drinks a few sips. (Disliking myself, I wash the cup with soap afterwards.) Otherwise, he feeds on a surprisingly expensive brand of tobacco, books, and a kind of nihilist self-torture best portrayed in the doomed souls of The Possessed.

Just twice—the second time when a sensational rumor about a Politburo conflict was circulating and I wanted the opinion of Moscow's best analytic mind—have I visited him. The smell of

56.^MOSCOW FAREWELL

the clique's dens after a hard night is disagreeable enough, but Semyon's room had the stench of a condemned man's cell. The deposit of his scalp coated the sheets. Like beach party refuse, sticky jars and tins were scattered on stacks of books. In one corner was a pile of rotting laundry. These unwashed clothes, including several white shirts, were a mystery, for I've never seen Semyon in anything but his prison-like gray suit, sagging with dirt. The puzzle of why the Sanitary Commission (appointed by the student government to make weekly rounds of all the rooms) tolerates Semyon's filth is more intriguing. Perhaps they want to spare themselves the sight—or have been told to give him special treatment? How else is he left in peace—although watched—to live his asocial, even "antisocial," life?

He appears in my room once a week after I've switched off the light, always in quest of more volumes whose possession, especially as Brezhnev and company intensify their suppression of dissent, might be used as evidence in criminal proceedings. He never asks for this literature but demands it as his right.

"It is your d-duty as a citizen of the free world to supply the intellectual m-material I require."

There is something more sinister about Semyon than even the cynicism, scorn and smoldering hate that sputter out of him. But he is also the only genuinely brilliant man I know, and more erudite and lucid about political affairs than all my professors together. From tourists and exchange students, "underground" archives and Moscow's network of dealers in "rare" (read "prohibited") books, he's obtained and absorbed an immense body of literature in English, German, French and Swedish on all aspects of history, sociology, politics and philosophy. (Although his reading knowledge of these self-taught languages is excellent, he can barely utter an intelligible sentence in any of them.) Semyon thinks much of this scholarship has merit only in comparison to Soviet drivel. Human motivation, he says, is too complex for successful analysis, certainly by New England political scientists who feel neither Russia nor Marxism, and whose interpretations are burdened by academia's self-perpetuating pedantry. To demonstrate this, he takes an event such as the collectivization of agriculture—incomparably more brutal, traumatic and significant to the country, he claims, than the Stalinist

Notes from My Window^57

purges which so fascinate Soviet speciaHsts—and talks about it spellbindingly for hours, commenting on Marxist, non-Marxist, and anti-Marxist theories, and drawing Russian geography, cHmate, history, psychology, national character, culture—the whole of Russian civilization, with special emphasis on the shaping-cM^rz-reflecting role of the Orthodox church—into his extemporaneous discourse.

Semyon is especially scornful of Western social scientists who predict an early liberalization (normalization!) of Soviet rule—in stupendous ignorance, he says, of the central shaping forces of the Russian mentality and way of life. But he is hardly less contemptuous of foreign writers who treat the widely heterogenous members of the underground "democratic movement" as selfless heroes one and all, carrying the banners of Virtue, Good and Russia's Hope. Some dissenters glorified in the Western press are vainglorious and intolerant as well as courageous, he says; and only the superficiality of Western analysts—who portray in a single dimension, omitting everything but the dissent itself—fails to recognize the tyrannical potential of those fighting the present tyranny. "Lenin t-too was a dissenter in his d-day, you know. How m-many times have Western analysts got things wrong? Swallowed n-novelistic nonsense about Russia's new saviors? Sacrificed their intelligence because they needed p-political heroes?"

That Russia's present martyrs are brutally repressed, he says, does not in itself make them virtuous, any more than the long oppression of American blacks has made them the country's natural leaders. The contribution of Soviet dissenters and protestors is their recognition of the society's grave illnesses— from which they themselves are not immune. The unqualified adulation of Solzhenitsyn, for example, is based on a publicity trick: a "pre-packaged 'solution' for m-minds that, to recognize b-black, must have an opposing white." The first thing Western students are taught about Leninism, he continues, is that its narrowness developed in reaction to the autocracy it opposed. "Yet Western teachers s-somehow can't apply the same analytic concept to Solzhenitsyn's n-nature, shaped by the society he opposes. He is in the Russian tradition: religious, mystic, p-potentially dictatorial. P-plus qa change. But for all their

58^MOSCOW FAREWELL

1-luxurious libraries to draw on, not one p-pampered Princeton 'scholar' writes a word of this.

"And by the way, if it's democracy they really w-want for Russia, as they claim, the Communist Party happens to serve quite well. In the t-true sense of the word, it's relatively quite d-democratic: consisting, and r-reflecting the views of, society's lower elements. The scholars haven't even got their t-terms straight, meaning their ideas. And here, the p-problems are far deeper than scholarly."

In short, Semyon's prognosis is profoundly pessimistic and, as with much debunking, has a realistic ring. But sneer as he will at Western naivete, he can't keep himself from his addiction to forbidden books. He knows they will land him in trouble again; it's said that one of the KGB informers on our floor (a misery of dourness, while the other is a handsome ladies' man) was assigned to watch Semyon more closely even than the Western students. "Sooner or later, they'll have to p-put me in a 1-labor camp. It's convenient, you know, to have a State t-that lays down hard laws about sin. That caters to one's own shilly-shallying death wish."

In all, Semyon has vouchsafed a dozen sentences about himself Discussion of personal affairs is frivolous; it is the affairs of state that merit attention—above all, the philosophy of state power. By what means do some men dominate others? Hypotheses, abstractions and analytical formulas are his companions; personality—of the Lenins, Stalins, Nassers and Joe McCarthys —enters only as a factor in these equations. His is the ultimate of that well-known phenomenon, the human condition studied by someone isolated from ordinary human contact. Surely his insatiable passion for everything historical, anthropological and sociological is a partial substitute for the personal exchange from which he feels his ugliness excludes him.

What I've learned about him seems all political, too. Born in Rostov-on-Don, he moved to Leningrad with his mother while his Cheka father, whom he rarely saw, roamed the country on extremely secret—presumably murderous—assignments. In Leningrad he read, kept to himself, and entered the University, from which he was expelled seven years ago for participation in an "anti-Soviet" political cell. The "cell" was in fact a half-dozen

Notes from My Window X 59

Students who met to discuss the Russian past and future in terms of heretical concepts such as humanism, agrarian sociaHsm, and "genuine" Marxism (as opposed to Marxism-Leninism, the illegitimate and corrupt distortion of Marx's theories and ideals). The group was heavily influenced by Nikolai Berdyayev, the early twentieth-century philosopher who wrote of creativity and the free human personality as the central meaning of Christianity and the hope for Russia's salvation.

After months of discussion and extremely difficult preparation, the group "published" a "journal," using—at great risk—a mimeograph machine in a government office to which a member had access. It was a collection of essays about the drift of Russian history interrupted by Bolshevism, and was designated "Volume I, Number I." There was no second number. The KGB unearthed the authors within days, and they were imprisoned for ten months while the case was investigated. Tried in secret, the moving spirits were sentenced to five years of labor camps and exile.

Semyon spent some months in prison, too, but his monkish personality apparently saved him from serious punishment: although a charter member of the "cell," he had attended only two meetings and could not face the personal involvement of long "underground" editorial conferences and secret working shifts with the mimeograph machine necessary to produce the journal. Or did his father's influence save him? In any case, his present enrollment in Moscow University—rather than chopping logs in exile—is puzzling.

"How did it come about?" I asked him when he confirmed the Leningrad episode. "Surely you can't be expelled from one university, have that on your record, and go to another?"

"These things happen. N-not everything in this country is as eflficiently t-totalitarian as your p-political scientists imagine. . . . Don't worry," he added, implying that I might suspect a quid pro quo had been demanded for allowing him to continue his education. "I'm hardly the informer t-type."

On his next visit, more of his background emerged. I had asked something about Leningrad and he was lecturing me, in his contemptuous yet brilliant style, about the city's Party organization as a traditional power base in Politburo intrigues.

eO^MOSCOW FAREWELL

Having tossed off plot-and-counterplot biographies of Zinoviev, Kirov and Zhdanov as examples, he suddenly froze, staring at the window's blackness. When he snapped back, it was to say something wholly extraneous to his previous associations.

"More Leningraders expired d-during the Nine Hundred Days" (the Wehrmacht seige of 1941-43) "than Americans in their w-wars combined. I m-mean all the wars in the history of your country, including the Civil W-war."

He stated this as dry fact, perhaps implying that Leningrad's tortured political history—the purges and bloody retributions, execution and exile of hundreds of thousands of her best people, including the best Communists—cannot be understood without a grasp of the tragedies that were not self-imposed. This is an underlying theme of much he says about Soviet—and tsarist— rule: cruel acts of nature visited upon Russia sustain an atmosphere and mentality that encourage the politics of masochism. But surely the statement about the Nine Hundred Days was also a hint about his personal history? For until the children could be evacuated, he himself endured the seige.

Semyon once described the experience to Chingiz. His family —grandmother, mother and an aunt; his father was still away on special duty—lived in a largish room of a relatively comfortable downtown apartment. A month after the German invasion, little remained of recognizable life; the blockade's sealing in September introduced them to hell. Semyon's grandmother died first: too old to work, she was not allotted bread enough to live, even lying all day in bed. Semyon hid when her corpse was carried out. His aunt was then killed in a cellar hit by a shell.

That winter, his mother's daily bread ration was two hundred and fifty grams (roughly nine ounces); his own, half that. Every day, she gave him half her own— and he seized it, knowing she was starving to death, like granny. She died of pneumonia in March. Semyon grew up in orphanages, drawing attention to himself by his precocity and urge to hide.

"Perhaps he'd have been troubled anyway," said Chingiz. "But war made it certain. His first perception of the world was in a city that suffered more than any other in modern history. He was intelligent enough to understand that he wanted his mother's crust more than he wanted her to live. . . . Yes, we won the war,

Notes from My Window "^ 61

survived the purges; but the damage to the living sometimes exceeded that to the forty milHon dead."

Last month, Semyon's interest was piqued in Freud and he set out to obtain something of his legally. There had been a rumor—one of the daily clusters of rumors—that despite the general intellectual constriction, censorship was being quietly relaxed in selected disciplines considered necessary for the country's development. In the Lenin Library, Semyon tested this by submitting a slip for A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis together with requests for eight Soviet works on Marxist-Leninist Pavlovian psychology, most containing indignant attacks on Freudianism. Producing the approved books, the librarian made no mention of the Freud.

"Where's the ninth?" asked Semyon, deadpan. With a cautionary squint, the librarian said she could not issue "such material." Semyon persisted. She pointed to a door behind her counter.

The office was sparsely furnished. Lenin's portrait hung low over the desk; beneath it sat a man in a pulpy suit. He studied Semyon's request, then his petitioner's splotchy countenance.

"Why do you want to read Freud?"

"I d-don't want to read him. It's essential—for my work."

"I do not think it is essential. Dozens of our texts will explain what you need to know about Freud. You understand his 'theories' are pornographic and unacceptable?"

"I think I do."

The official frowned. "Listen, young man. I'll give you this book if you insist. But take my advice and don't. Why have such things in your record? Be sensible: pick up your other issues and

go."

Which is what Semyon did. The episode, he said, did not refute the rumor about the easing of restrictions. A harder man, or the same one with sterner instructions, would have informed him the book was missing, entering a damaging notation in his dossier.

Semyon encountered a friendlier form of censorship in connection with his honors thesis on the Yalta Conference. It was a hack job, culled from standard Soviet sources and free of any reference

62.^MOSCOW FAREWELL

to scores of Western analyses which Semyon could have demolished—but had no business knowing. Approving a preliminary draft, his tutor suggested that the phrase "the Soviet representative" replace "J. V. Stalin" throughout the text. "Between us, it's safer that way. Why expose yourself? No one knows what the attitude toward Stalin will be by the time you're ready to submit."

Sure enough, the official attitude is steadily hardening—that is, softening toward Stalin's crimes. Publications have resumed praising his "historic work" building socialism and Soviet might, no longer mentioning what used to be called "unfortunate negative factors." Even the scholarly press faithfully supports the rehabilitation by going mute again on huge chunks of history. Semyon's tutor gave sound advice: liberal or conservative, the readers of the Yalta thesis need not trouble themselves with the political implications of mentioning a former Great Father by name.

The line shifts. Yesterday's saints become today's Judases, then heroes again. History is hastily rewritten to document the latest immutable truth. But a portion of the slag heap of superseded literature finds some use. In a reeking latrine the other day, a copy of the obsolete 1967 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was braced between the tiles and drain pipe, its pages extolling N. S. Khrushchev's inspiration to progressive mankind to be ripped out for toilet paper as needed. But no irony was intended: the convenience was an unconscious acquiescence to the law of shortage requiring maximum recycling, and acceptance that the yellowing pulp now best serves for this.

But why such emphasis on this kind of observation? Most Russians I know well, on this floor and others, are less keen than I to spot the aberrations of government and state. Here politics is impenetrable, like the low cloud cover sealing us in from one horizon to the other. Something suffered and accepted, not puzzled over or pried into: given, like the weather. It's snowing again, and the radio predicts a—normal—night of twelve to fifteen degrees below freezing.

And so, when Andrei Amalrik received his terrible second sentence last week, the trial's whys and hows were hardly

Notes from My Window ^63

discussed. A few people felt a tug of hurt, the kind Russian peasants experienced when prison convoys trudged past them on their way to Siberia. (Peasant women pressed loaves badly needed by their own families into the desperate prisoners' hands.) Several passionately "literary" students, the lovers of Mandelsh-tam, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, turned aside for a dry cry, and perhaps more people than I know felt wounded. But most neither knew nor cared; and even the "activist" minority produced a low moan rather than shrill noises of shock or outrage. Such tragedies are expected; no one can prevent them. What hurts most is not being able to comfort the victims.