The Big Green Tent

FRIENDSHIP OF THE PEOPLES

It was 1957. Moscow was aflutter with anticipation: The International Youth and Student Festival was about to open. The recent high-school graduates were preparing for entrance exams to the university. In passing from the category of ordinary young person to the category of student, they also got a dispensation from compulsory military service, along with the advantages of an education. They all sweated it out from morning till night, and Victor Yulievich coached the aspiring college students. In addition to his regular private students, he tutored several of his “own” without charge.

Conscription posed no threat to the Trianon. Ilya possessed the unique gift of having flat feet, Mikha was nearsighted, and Sanya, with his crooked fingers, was unfit for handling a weapon. In short, they all had minor defects or shortcomings that disqualified them from their military obligations. Ilya studied perfunctorily. Sanya, who had applied to the Institute of Foreign Languages on the advice of his grandmother, didn’t study at all, but lolled on the divan listening to music and reading books (even foreign ones). Mikha’s position was the most vexed. Jews were barred from entering the philology department, and he had decided once and for all that it was the only place he wanted to study. As if that weren’t problem enough, he was also the only one of them who needed a scholarship to be able to study. His relatives had pledged to help him only until he finished high school. Of course, as a last resort he could go to night school, but he so desperately wanted to experience the authentic life of a student.

“I can’t understand your passion for the humanities. It’s one thing to read books, to try to figure out what they mean, to enjoy them—but why do you want to make a profession out of it?” Ilya would say. He spurned philology, and made the independent decision to enroll in LIKI, the Leningrad Institute of Cinema Engineering.

Ilya had an uncle in Leningrad who had sought him out soon after his father’s death. He invited Ilya to come to Leningrad to live with him until he started college. After Ilya received his high school diploma, he immediately took off for Leningrad. He had saved a considerable sum of money, earned through illicit means—fifteen hundred rubles. This was three times his mother’s salary. He also intended to live it up before the semester began.

That year in Moscow, the dates of the entrance exams were shuffled around so the aspiring students wouldn’t arrive all at the same time and thus inconvenience the guests in the city for the festival.

Ilya liked the Institute of Cinema Engineering immensely. His uncle Efim Semenovich said that Ilya’s father had worked there before the war, and that some people might still remember him. He began to call around to various numbers; but, unfortunately, those who remembered Isay Semenovich weren’t there anymore, and those who were there didn’t remember him after all.

Ilya left Leningrad abruptly on the day he found out that the entrance exams would coincide with the first day of the festival. He wouldn’t miss that great event for the world. He grabbed his camera and returned to Moscow, clutching his passport. He was required to show it five times, from the time he bought the one-way ticket at Moskovsky train station in Leningrad until the moment he made it home: to policemen, conductors, volunteer patrolmen, and to other random officials who demanded to see his documents. Only Muscovites were permitted entry into Moscow.

Ilya stopped over to see Mikha. Mikha had already been accepted as a student, it turned out. He hadn’t been accepted to Moscow University, as he had hoped, but to the less prestigious Pedagogical Institute, where (as the story went) there were eight females for every two males—one of them lame, another one cross-eyed. Self-respecting young men without such shortcomings were not eager to enroll there.

Mikha had had no trouble getting in. His gender and his thorough academic training outweighed his unfortunate ethnicity. But his triumph was made bitter by loss: on the day he found his name on the list of successful candidates for admission, poor Minna died of pneumonia. He had never even visited her in the hospital. She suffered from pneumonia at least three times a year, and he couldn’t have imagined that this bout of illness would be her last.

Now he was left alone with a dreadful secret and with the sinking feeling that this burden of guilt would stay with him until the end of his days. Slow-witted Minna was in love with him, and he had somehow become entangled in a strange sexual relationship with her. There was no other name for it, although sex in the absolute sense of the term was not what went on between them. Minna would lie in wait for him at the secluded end of the corridor, next to the WC, lure him into the corner, and press herself against him with all the warm and soft parts of her body, until he slipped away, flushed, shaking, and quite satisfied. He wanted to kill himself after every episode of fondling, and swore that next time he would push her away and flee; but he could never bring himself to refuse her. She was affectionate, soft, thrillingly hairy in places, and had a strong speech defect, a quality that protected their anonymity and guaranteed they wouldn’t be found out. He was being slowly strangled with a sense of guilt and disgust, and the thought of suicide always hovered in the back of his mind. No one dared mention the unconscious in those days.

This was the state Ilya found him in. Ilya decided not to pry, but dragged him outside to get him to relax.

* * *

Moscow was uncharacteristically clean, and fairly empty. The festival was opening the next day. Through the deserted city streets, in various directions, passed motorcades of passenger automobiles, pickup trucks, some with their sides lowered, some with their sides up, old-fashioned buses—even Hungarian-made Icarus buses.

Everywhere you looked there were flags and giant paper flowers. That summer the girls were wearing full, brightly colored skirts on top of thick umbrella-like petticoats. Their waists were cinched with wide belts, and they wore their hair in “beehives.”

After they managed to get through two light cordons, the boys came out into the small park in front of the Bolshoi Theater. Quite a few people were milling around. Ilya pointed out two confused-looking and not especially pretty girls to Mikha, saying: “Come on, let’s pick them up!”

“No way,” Mikha said, offended by the suggestion, and turned to go.

“Aw, I’m sorry, Mikha. I’m a boor! Shall we go and get drunk somewhere? Come on, let’s go to the National.”

Somehow they were able to get into the National. Possibly, the doorman had gone to relieve himself and had forgotten to close the latch; or maybe he was relying on the effectiveness of his sign, which read “Closed for a Special Event.”

“We’re drinking cognac,” Ilya said confidently, and ordered doubles from the discombobulated waiter.

They drank their double cognacs with two pastries, then repeated their order. Between the first and second rounds, Mikha’s spirits visibly lifted. Just then, a young man with a Hasselblad camera on a strap came up to them. He looked Russian. He asked them whether he could join them.

“Sure, go ahead,” Mikha said, offering him a chair.

They immediately hit it off. He said his name was Petya. It turned out, though, that he wasn’t just an ordinary Russian “Petya,” but a Belgian whose real name was Pierre Zand. He was of Russian descent, a student at the University of Brussels. They split the second round three ways, then went to wander through town. On Ilya’s advice, Pierre left the camera behind in the hotel room.

They strolled through the center of Moscow, and it would have been hard to imagine a better tourist than Pierre was. He recognized all the places where he had never once set foot—the reminiscences of his mother and grandmother, and a deep familiarity with Russian literature, were coming to life for him.

And the veteran LORLs were the best possible guides for Petya, with his nostalgia for a place he had never seen before.

At Trekhprudny Lane, by a small wooden house, Ilya stopped and said:

“Marina Tsvetaeva lived somewhere around here.”

Pierre seemed to melt and go soft, and all but wept, saying:

“My mother knew Marina Tsvetaeva well, in Paris. They won’t publish her here…”

“Tsvetaeva may not be published here, but we all know her,” Mikha said:

“Some are of stone, some are of clay,

But I am silver and sparkle!

My crime is betrayal, my name is Marina.

I am the ephemeral foam of the sea.”

“Actually, I like Akhmatova more. As for Ilya, he’s obsessed with the Futurists.”

* * *

But never mind their preferences. What was astounding was the fact that they were standing there with a real person, their own age, whose mother had known Marina Tsvetaeva in real life. For them, Pierre himself represented a vast, already nonexistent country that had gone into exile. While they were walking, he told them about his family, about that former Russia, which to his interlocutors seemed as insubstantial and distant as Brussels or Paris. And how bitterly Pierre hated the Bolsheviks!

* * *

Mikha and Ilya, who had often discussed the shortcomings of socialism, had for the first time met a person who didn’t talk about the shortcomings of the Communist regime—rather, he raked it over the coals, condemning it as satanic, dark, and bloody. He saw no fundamental difference between communism and fascism. In some unaccountable way, Pierre was able to unite a love for Russia with a hatred of its system.

For the next two weeks, they were almost inseparable. Thanks to Pierre, they all managed to cram themselves into a Belgian bus and get into the opening of the festival at Luzhniki Stadium. More than three thousand of the finest athletes bloomed in formation as a single flower, or spread themselves out in geometric patterns, hands, feet, and heads rising up or descending in perfect unison. It was a thrilling spectacle.

“They did this sort of thing at Hitler’s rallies, too,” whispered Pierre. “Leni Riefenstahl’s films were shown all over the world. The great power of mass hypnosis. But it really is powerful to witness it! And amazing!” Pierre sighed and pressed the button on his camera. Ilya did the same.

Then there was a jazz concert, a mass relay race with torches, some water ballet, along with countless song-and-dance ensembles of the Soviet Army and Navy, industry and trade groups, and cooks’ and hairdressers’ labor unions.

Pierre had absolutely no interest in the Egyptians chanting “Nasser! Nasser!,” the black citizens of newly independent Ghana, or the Israelis, who were also very popular among Soviet citizens branded with the same ethnicity in the “fifth line” of their passports.

On the third day of the festival, after he had recovered from another case of tonsillitis, Sanya joined them. For two more weeks they reveled, rushing around from one place to another and having fun. Mikha didn’t have time to dwell on Minna.

Nor did Ilya think about his unrealized attempt to enroll in the cinema engineering program, or Sanya his thwarted career as a professional musician. All of them were enamored with Pierre, whom they nicknamed “Pierrechik,” and not one of them contemplated how the foreign friend might influence their fates.

They learned that Pierre had been sent to the festival as a representative of a young people’s newspaper on an assignment to photograph life in Moscow. His photographs of Moscow were superb, in large part thanks to his new friends. He photographed the bread store when fresh bread was being delivered; the river port, with its tall cranes and stevedores; kindergartens; inner courtyards, with clotheslines and sheds; girls reading in the metro; old folks standing in lines; grown men kissing and hugging; and myriad other joys and pleasures.

Fast-forward, and the photographs were rejected by the editor of the newspaper. They were deemed to be inauthentic—mere Soviet propaganda. Pierre, who could never have been accused of sympathy for the Communist regime, accused the editor of bias, and they quarreled.

On the day before Pierre’s departure, they all went to Gorky Park together to drink beer. There was a wonderful Czech beer garden, masquerading as a restaurant. The line stretched all the way around the place, like foam around the rim of a beer mug, but they obediently went to stand at the tail end of it—they were in no hurry.

They had planned a rendezvous there with someone—a distant relative of Pierre’s, the second or third cousin of his mother, who was working in Moscow in the French embassy. Standing in line was not in the least dull; exciting things kept happening all around them. First a group of people on stilts galloped past, followed by a procession of Scottish bagpipers, Mexicans with maracas in their hands, and costumed Ukrainians.

Sanya and Mikha saved their place in line, while Ilya and Pierre kept darting off to get a good shot of something or other. They managed to capture a fight that broke out between a powerful, stocky black man and a Scot wearing a green-and-white kilt from some obscure clan. The fighters were surrounded by a crowd of boisterous people egging them on:

“Kill the blackie!”

“Nail the faggot!”

In short, the people amused themselves in the ancient and time-honored tradition of gladiatorial fights. Strains of Soloviev-Sedoy’s ubiquitous “Moscow Nights” were heard in the background as they battled—it was a song you heard everywhere you went that summer.

The black man threw the deciding blow, and the Scotsman crumpled into his skirt.

The music changed. “The youth will strike up a song of friendship, you cannot strangle it, you cannot kill it…”

The Scot stirred. “You cannot kill it, you cannot kill it,” the loudspeaker blared.

Two hours later, when the boys had already entered the pub, Pierre’s uncle found them. He was a Frenchman by the name of Nikolay Ivanovich, with the Russian surname Orlov. He was aging, pink, and rotund, reminiscent of the merry little pig Nif-Nif. He spoke in the Petersburg slang of another age. His clothes were funny—a straw hat and a Ukrainian peasant blouse with an embroidered collar—like Khrushchev’s. No one would ever have suspected that he was a foreigner. He resembled a provincial accountant with a small, tattered briefcase.

As soon as Pierre set eyes on him, he roared with laughter.

“What a getup!”

Pierre introduced the boys to his uncle so that they could keep in touch through him.

They didn’t trust the postal system. They exchanged phone numbers. It went without saying that they could make calls to him only from public pay phones. They agreed that they would continue to rendezvous at this same place by the Czech restaurant so that they wouldn’t have to risk saying anything over the phone.

So began their illicit dealings with a foreigner.

* * *

The famous Czech beer was a pilsener served in sweaty mugs, evidence that it was the ideal temperature. Of course, those mugs were on the neighboring tables. By the time their little group had entered the pub, the Czech beer had run out. The sausages were also gone. The waiters were serving Zhigulevskoe beer, a local brand, with salted pretzels, a hitherto unknown treat. At the adjacent table, they had smuggled in dried fish, which they were picking at like lint, and pouring vodka into their beer—under the table.

The friends wanted to take photographs, but it was, first, too risky, and, second, too dark.

Mysteriously, the Czech beer suddenly reappeared, and they had to drink another two mugs each. They left sated and happy. As a parting gift Pierre gave Ilya his Hasselblad. Actually, he had first offered to exchange it for Ilya’s Fedya, but Ilya wouldn’t think of it.

“It was a gift from my father; it’s not a thing, but a part of my life.”

Then Pierre removed the strap from around his neck, and said:

“I understand. Here. It’s yours.”

* * *

Uncle Orlov gave them his accountant’s briefcase. It was laden with books. By the metro they parted ways, in different directions. Ilya and Pierre had decided to go on foot to the center of town. Orlov also went on foot, but in the opposite direction. He lived on Oktyabrskaya Square.

Mikha was carrying Orlov’s briefcase full of books. He and Sanya went down into the metro. The revels were still in full swing, though the festival had formally ended.

Happy, drunken crowds, somewhat the worse for wear after two weeks of festivities, were spending their last evening together.

The foreigners, who had temporarily brightened up the Moscow cityscape, were few. They had most likely gone to pack their suitcases, sleep, exchange their last gifts, sell the remainder of their hard currency, and give and receive their final kisses from the Soviet girls who had discovered the wonders of an affair with an Austrian, a Swede, or a citizen of independent Ghana.

The friendship of the peoples had triumphed. In spite of years of inculcation of the opposite view, it turned out that foreigners were decent people—they weren’t capitalists at all, but Communists and their sympathizers. Like Picasso the dove painter, and the progressive Federico Fellini.

Sanya and Mikha sat till deep in the night on a bench in the yard of the Vanity Chest house on Chernyshevsky Street, talking about the improving social mores and habits of Russia, praising Khrushchev, who had “opened” the iron curtain. Then they began talking about more personal matters: Mikha informed Sanya about what he had explained in so many words to the mocking Ilya—about poor Minna, about their impure relations, about the bitter aftertaste he would now have to suffer his entire life.

Sanya nodded in silence. He had always imagined this secret between men and women to be dirty and at the same time vulgarly attractive. He couldn’t fathom it—there were no words for it.

The two friends grieved, grumbled, and moaned, and then parted ways.

Outside, echoes of “Moscow Nights” still hovered in the air: “Not a whisper is heard in the garden, all grows still till morn, if you only knew how dear they are to me, these Moscow nights…”

Mikha forgot about the brown briefcase with the books under the bench. Sanya didn’t remember it, either.

Uncle Fedor, the street sweeper, immortalized subsequently by Yuly Kim, sobered up suddenly and went out to sweep the yard. He found the briefcase—there was nothing interesting in it. Just some books. He turned them in to the local police.

* * *

The parents of the stout Orlov’s former wife considered him to be a complete dolt, and they were very disturbed by his appointment to the diplomatic mission in Moscow. He was the first one in their family to cross the border of the Motherland in the wrong direction after 1918.

The briefcase contained a priceless gift—six volumes of The Journal of the Russian Christian Student Movement, and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, which had just been translated into Russian and published by Posev. It was unfortunate that the boys would read the book with a five-year delay, and only in a poor copy. The real misfortune, however, was that in a side compartment of the briefcase there was a letter from Masha, the wife who had left him. It had been sent in the diplomatic mail pouch. Orlov’s name was on the envelope, and it proved to be no problem to hunt him down.

The festival was over. The girls who were pregnant with brown-skinned babies had not had time to realize it, but Orlov was already in trouble. Luckily, they didn’t throw him in prison; but he was expelled from the country forthwith. His diplomatic career was over. His ex-wife and her parents now had indisputable proof that Nikolay Ivanovich was an absolute dolt, and that so he would remain.

But the boys came off unscathed.