The girl from Petrovka

And a speculator. For she also busied herself buying and selling rags. She never wasted an opportunity to turn a kopek in some back alley. Her compulsion to sell junk was as strong as to sell her body....

One more ‘detail': Oktyabrina Matveyeva had no business in Moscow in the first place. She came not to study or work, but specifically to live her putrid way of life - without a propiska, of course. She was a depraved individualist who not merely disregarded society, but sneered at it.

But more than this provoked my nausea on that brilliant February evening. I was alone with Matveyeva. The warden hoped that I might unravel what still puzzled everyone.

‘What made you insult society at every opportunity, Oktyabrina? Was something troubling you?'

‘Do let's discuss something more interesting. Who sold you that tie you're wearing? It's a fascinating piece - for a museum, I mean?

‘Look through the window, Oktyabrina. All those people - they're happy because they've found their place in life. They work. Raise children. Contribute to the society that nurtures them. Does that mean nothing to you?'

‘Who wants to have babies? Just to spend their lives at some desk hearing about obligations. ... I might tell you what one of my most marvelous lovers said about that. He

was also a journalist, from Rome.

To many of my questions, Matveyeva produced an inane smirk and corresponding gobbledygook, insulting even the Russian language. But a fool is happy only in fairy-tales, as they say.

How is it possible that such a girl can ‘flourish* in our socialist society? We once believed that the elimination of capitalism ivould insure the disappearance of her kind of decadence. But facts must be faced: 50 years have passed since the Great October Socialist Revolution - for which, with a final stinging irony, Oktyabrina Matveyeva was named. And although our achievements in those five decades have thrilled the world, we cannot be content while scum like she still poison our society.

Thus the answer is not in slogans but lies in a full and objective examination of the facts: what turned Oktyabrina Matveyeva rotten. We asked a reporter in Omsk to investigate her background. He visited her parents. They live in the quiet village of Nikolaiyevka, Omsk Province; and are long-standing members of the thriving ‘Our Leninist Path* state farm. Vladimir Pavlovich, the father, operates a combine. Svetlana Petrovna, Oktyabrina’s mother, works in a new brick dairy barn.

Oktyabrina herself was trained as a milkmaid. Her younger sister was a gold medalist in the local school. The family seemed to lack nothing.

But those who said this cared too little about Soviet responsibility for ones neighbors to look beneath the surface, where grave trouble lurked. Oktyabrina had hardly cut her pigtails when her ‘career as a parasite and cheat was launched.

She had left school. She treated her work with unconcealed contempt. She was often missing from the morning milking, her most crucial duty. A search would find her hidden with a fashion magazine, or trying to distract a young tractor driver. Her cows suffered visibly from her wilful 228

neglect.

She was as cruel to her parents. Beneath the surface of innocent curiosity, a wholly selfish ego was running wild, like malignant cancer.

‘Finally we had to send her to a colony,’ said Svetlana Petrovna, wiping away tears. ‘We were all so ashamed. But she was wild; we couldn’t cope with her ’

Yet the family history is more complex. Sympathy for her parents cannot absolve them of their blame for Oktyabrina’s deep moral flaws.

That they took no part in community life - avoiding meetings, even films, in the Palace of Culture - was in itself an ominous warning. The Matveyevs isolated themselves from the socialist collective - in order to booze. They were known on the farm as ‘the moonshine pair’.

And when they drank, vodka’s fever possessed them. Neighbors described repulsive, shrieking battles. Moreover, vodka alone held them together. They were never heard to exchange an affectionate word. They never strolled together through the neat little village, went to the well together, or watched the sunset, hand in hand....

But these details are not our concern here. Our concern is why intolerable cynicism and anti-social attitudes were permitted to fester. After six months in a juvenile colony, Oktyabrina blithely resumed her anti-social ways. Unobserved and unhindered. No one bothered with the festering sore. Because no one saw any immediate advantage in intervening. No one cared.

This was the gravest fallacy. For when infections like those in the Matveyev family are allowed to fester, the whole of society eventually suffers. The people who must cauterize the infections suffer. You and I suffer. And the greatest sufferers are our children, who are exposed to the infection before they are fully grown and morally strong. Everything we have built in our socialist society becomes tainted; everything we cherish.

This rottenness doesn't go completely unnoticed. Obnoxious youths are sometimes arrested and lectured. But too often without further action - because ‘no specific crime has been committed’. Thus even the People’s police too can forget their socialist obligations.

For what is hooliganism? Hooliganism is cynical actions committed as a barefaced challenge to society. Do the actions of Matveyeva express such cynicism? She behaved in full and conscious contradiction of our ethical principles. And her declaration as our ‘conversation was drawing to its wretched close summed up her brazen cynicism ‘I don’t understand what you’re going on about ’ she said, smirking. ‘Nothing can stop me from living the way of life I like.’

By goodness, she was right! No court, no police officer, no prosecutor, not you or 1 - no one could prevent her from being a prostitute, disgracing Soviet womanhood and pouring filth on our Motherland.

But I suggest that these insects can be controlled. Energetic application of the legal sanctions against hooliganism will stop good-for-nothings taking advantage of our indecisiveness.

It must be made clear that insulting and abasing the national dignity of the Soviet people is no less a social danger than a punch in the face. Soviet citizens should not be required to live with this stain on the honor of our womanhood and citizenship.

We are all responsible for the moral cleanliness of our capital. So we can hardly find it onerous to take a broom and sweep this riff-raff out of the city. Cleanliness is the first step to health, as the old saying goes. Besides, our air will be noticeably purer.

There was a time when I imagined something like this would be ‘romantic’. It was intrigue in a foreign land; I was involved with someone in danger. Now the article brought only a dizzy weakness. I had to rest before reading it again.

There was too much to take in; peripheral points struck 230

me first. The regular use of fabrication by the Soviet press: when Prague workers were needed to applaud the Kremlin’s invasion in August, Pravda coolly invented them and 'quoted’ their cheers for the Soviet tanks. Yet the report about Oktyabrina’s parents rang terribly true. Her daily references to cows and barns - 'pull the teats too hard, the milk will be sour’ and all the others - flashed to mind, followed by waves of understanding for who she was and was trying to become. Yellow fever in Omsk? Vodka was the disease; now her repugnance for it made grisly sense.

Otherwise, I could only guess what proportion the author had been deceitful as opposed to merely misinformed. He was a regular contributor of feuilletons, a well-liked genre which permits important topics to be treated from a supposedly personal point of view: the indignant citizen-journalist appeals to the authorities to put an end to some moral abuse. Of course the opposite was true: without directions from above, no Soviet reporter would dare suggest the police were too lenient. Nor would a major newspaper print an article of this length without high-level editorial - meaning governmental - instructions. These were undoubtedly issued in pursuance of the anti-hooligan campaign.

Within an hour, we’d uncovered the first major distortion. The fact was that Oktyabrina had been taken to Petrovka on suspicion of stealing drugs! Finding her in one of the hospital’s store rooms, the arresting policeman thought he’d uncovered something big. Oktyabrina was interrogated about narcotics for two days in Petrovka: once suspicion has been aroused, Moscow police - even more than most in the world - are loath to abandon it. The investigating officer did so only after the drug notion had completely disintegrated. He then transferred her -reluctantly - to an ordinary prison on less serious charges.

Kostya learned this through a former girl friend in the Moscow City Council. The author surely knew these facts, but failed to mention them lest they weaken his article. His feuilleton was typical in purpose as well as tone: it set the

stage for a trial intended as a public example.

I read it again that afternoon, then drove to the hospital for my own investigation. Something told me that Vladimir, the unmentioned key to the puzzle, was still there.

The younger man occupied the guardhouse. He'd have recognized me, even if I pretended to visit another patient. If I were seen climbing the fence, I'd be expelled from the country with nothing achieved. I abandoned hope of slipping into the hospital.

But not of finding out. When a story is vital in this country, one method sometimes works: interview the janitor or cleaning woman. Many won't understand the story’s significance, and therefore speak candidly. Others will know about the affair, but their attitude towards it may differ enough from the 'fine' to provide an important clue. At last I could use my professional skills for a story that mattered.

Vladimir’s ward number came back to me from the register the week before. I drove back to the point where Oktyabrina's mitten last peeked above the fence. This was a good position for intercepting everyone who’d left the hospital and was making for the solitary bus stop. The task began of finding someone who worked in Ward 4.

I might have given up after several hours had not patience at this game been rewarded before. Dusk descended early, but the snow diffused a greyish light. I was relieved that my message to Oktyabrina had been erased by fresh falls, until I caught the fallacy behind the thought. When the moon appeared, the patter of animals enlivened the woods.

I smoked a pack of Camels.

The information appeared in the form of three student nurses, chattering happily after a long shift. They were indeed from Ward 4, and solved the mystery of Oktyabrina’s arrest as I drove them home.

The girls talked in unison: Vladimir receiving extra attention from the moment he was put to bed ... his mother carping at everything in the ward, down to the Intourist 232

calendar with a well-endowed girl . . . her position in the Ministry of Education allowing her to choose her own visiting hours . . . Oktyabrina appearing gaily in the ward and Vladimir flushing with conflicting emotions.

‘It’s you/ he cried from his bed. ‘You’ve come! - but dearest, you must go away/

‘Calm yourself, Vladik/ said Oktyabrina. ‘You’ll be in marvelous shape soon. I know about hospitals - my mother practically ran one, after all.’

Far from calming himself, Vladimir raced into a series of exciting pleas: that Oktyabrina recognize the changes in him since her letter to Mama, that she return to him when he was well - but now leave, immediately. He had just overcome a sneezing fit when a woman with a muff entered the ward.

‘Summon the duty doctor, Comrade Nurse. And I’d like to see my son’s charts.’

When Vladimir’s mother recognized Oktyabrina, her first reaction was a surprising nervousness. Moreover, she vented her feelings not on Oktyabrina herself, but on the hospital staff. How dare they allow outsiders into the ward during nor-visiting hours. It was outrageous. . . . But she rather quickly drifted into her now familiar sermons about civic duty and reminders that when she was a Young Communist, people respected authority.

Someone recognized the moment to ease Oktyabrina from the ward, apparently ending the incident. But a moment later, Oktyabrina peeked into the doorway.

‘Don’t forget to wash the apples, Vladik/ She winked. ‘And I want to wish you the best of everything in life - the most marvelous good luck* She disappeared into the corridor again. Searching for the staircase, she opened a storeroom door.

Oktyabrina’s afterthought was too much for Vladimir’s mother. She strode into the corridor, demanding that ‘measures’ be taken. The open storeroom prompted her to add theft of state property to her accusations. Reluctantly,

the staff summoned a security officer.

The nurses were certain that the bagatelle would end in a lecture. But Oktyabrina's lack of papers and a satisfactory explanation of her identity led to a call to the police - whom she had to avoid at any cost. When it was found that the storeroom contained narcotics and Oktyabrina had no pro-piska , the situation turned ominous.

When Oktyabrina was seated in the motorcycle sidecar for delivery to Petrovka, Vladimir's mother seemed somewhat contrite. ‘Nevertheless/ she said, ‘it was wrong to let my boy, with his advantages, carry on with her kind. She's a common shop-girl, just look at that old dress!'

Oktyabrina was puzzled. ‘But I could have escaped ,' she kept repeating. ‘I just stayed there and let her call the police. What a blunder for the sake of my new maturity!’

The following week I was in Belgrade to cover the trip there of a Soviet Party delegation. I then flew to Munich to meet an owner of my newspaper. When I returned to Moscow, Oktyabrina's case was still under investigation. She was in a prison called ‘Old Sailors', whose charm is known not to extend beyond its name. We could not visit her: prisoners under investigation on criminal charges can be seen only by their immediate family.

Moreover, we were not permitted to visit even after completion of her investigation. This was accomplished with unusual dispatch, leading* according to Kostya's source, to indictment under paragraph II of article 206: malicious hooliganism. This article falls under Chapter Ten of the Criminal Code: Crimes Against Public Security, Public Order and Public Health:

Article 206. Hooliganism. Hooliganism - that is, intentional actions violating public order in a coarse manner and expressing clear disrespect for society - shall be punished by deprivation of freedom for a term not exceeding one year. ...

Paragraph 11. Malicious hooliganism - that is, the same actions committed by a person previously convicted of hooliganism ... or distinguished in their content by exceptional cynicism or impudence - shall be punished by deprivation of freedom for a term not exceeding five

years.

*

24

The day of the trial passed, as these things do, in the semitrance necessary for self-control. There is much to be said about the emotions of that day, but 111 keep to a reporter's account of the scene.

The courthouse was a few hundred yards from the American Embassy, a squat two-story structure in the old

Russian style of logs and yellow plaster. The floorboards sagged and walls flaked from dehydration.

Kostya and I arrived at the same time. It was a clear morning, but so cold that fingers ached through sheepskin gloves. Nothing in nature moved except people, by sheer will. And things made by people: busses ghostly with frost.

A plaque beside the weatherbeaten door read, ‘Ministry of Justice, RSFSR, PEOPLE’S COURT, Krasnopresnensky District’. Why the trial was held there was a small mystery - and also an apparent violation of the law, for Oktyabrina had neither worked nor lived in Krasnopresnensky District. In fact, she’d rarely visited this part of the city except to meet me occasionally near the Embassy and to visit the zoo. But this was the least disturbing violation of criminal procedure.

The most disturbing was the conduct of the entire trial in camera. There was no justification whatever for this; Soviet law requires all trials to be public except when state security may be jeopardized, or minors or intimate sexual matters involved. None of these exceptions applied to Oktyabrina.

Yet not only was the door of her courtroom shut and guarded, but a wiry police lieutenant cleared the corridor leading to it minutes before she was escorted through, from the prisoners’ chambers in the basement.

Kostya inquired about the secrecy in the court office. No reason was given of course, but we guessed: hooliganism trials of women can be an embarrassment to the authorities. Especially when there was no guarantee that the defendant would exhibit proper contrition, efforts were often made to suppress the details, except as revealed through the unique prism of the Soviet press.

In any case, Kostya and I were permitted to return to a bench in the corridor only after the trial had begun. When we opened the door, it was slammed shut by a policeman inside. At the third try, he cursed and looked at his gun. During the split second the door was open we could see the prosecutor sitting beneath a steamy window - a middle-aged woman in a blue uniform and her hair in a severe bun.

This was on the second floor of the old dwelling, a succession of former bedrooms converted to courtrooms. Clusters of workers waited outside adjoining courtrooms; the smell was of their clothes, acrid tobacco and the building’s dilapidation. And of the toilet, a tiny cubicle whose door jammed against the slanted floor. Few people managed to drag it fully closed. From time to time, defendants were led to and from courtrooms. With their shaved skulls and ragged clothes, they might already have served years in dungeons.

Gelda arrived after ten o clock, her face made fierce by Asian flu. The pits in her cheeks had turned purply in the cold, and she swallowed pills after every papirosa. Fifteen minutes had passed when I heard a distinctive swish-clump of galoshes along the corridor. I had just recognized these noises when the Minister appeared. Surprise flicked in his eyes at the sight of us, but the larger emotions were weariness, pain and disgust. He dropped his briefcase on to the floor and blew his nose into a dirty handkerchief.

‘M-m-miserable b-bastard,’ he said ‘M-miserable b-has-

tard.’ It was the first time I’d heard him swear. He removed a greasy notebook from his briefcase.

‘N-notes,’ he declared angrily, ‘I’m g-going to c-catch the eight o’clock t-train.’

The Minister’s appearance was wholly unexpected but more perplexing was how he’d learned about Oktyabrina’s trouble - obviously before the Komsomolskaya Pravda article. For he kept alluding to his campaign to rescue Oktyabrina through intervention by his former chiefs at the Ministry. From Saratov, he had written, telegraphed and finally telephoned everyone he could think of in high places in Moscow. All this would have taken a minimum of weeks. The Minister himself called it tilting at windmills.

Til tell you one thing straight away,’ he stammered, 'Don’t try to pull strings from the bam. Nobody wants to know you when you’ve been disgraced. You might as well have foot-and-mouth disease.’

The Minister’s self-condemnation lacked his old, endearing whimsicality. He was now acutely sardonic, and berated himself cruelly.

He broke the nib of his pen writing in his notebook and rummaged his pockets for a stub of a pencil. He was irritated for having arrived so late, as if this would bear crucially on the outcome. Although he’d been in Moscow several days to continue his defense campaign, he confused the name of the district that morning and went to a courthouse in another part of town.

‘M-miserable b-bastard. And w-who the hell t-told y-you people I c-can’t go inside?’

His fur-collared overcoat was distinctly shabbier; Kostya’s moroccan gloves might have been used for digging. Despite the gloves, the Minister ignored Kostya - and was also unaccountably chilly to me. Only towards Gelda, a total stranger, did he show any interest. This was more than reciprocated, despite Gelda’s ’flu and gloom - despite everything. For the Minister’s moustache was more prominent than ever on his newly haggard face.

I thought of soothing the Minister’s self-disgust over his failure to save Oktyabrina, as I’d once tried to alleviate his failure to make films. In our cottage days, I talked of my own washout as a novelist; now, similarly, I could describe my own uselessness in Oktyabrina’s defense. But this defeat was too new and too acid to mouth into consolation, even had the Minister wanted to listen.

In a real way, my failure to help Oktyabrina was more punishing than his: I hadn’t lifted a finger. Kostya kept reminding me that the worst a foreigner could do, especially after the feuilleton’s clear reference to me, was try to intervene, since this would joyfully be used against Oktyabrina. The Press Department too gave me to understand that they knew all about the affair, and were keeping an eye on me - that is, watching me squirm. They were somewhat cleverer than I thought, knowing that a person’s feelings of impotence and guilt don’t switch off on signals from Party headquarters.

So I said little to the Minister. Oktyabrina’s plight had assembled us physically, but her absence dissolved our intimacy.

The save-Oktyabrina-campaign, such as it was, had been shouldered entirely by Kostya, with less ambitious and somewhat more promising strategy than the Minister’s. Lacking contacts in that area and on that level, he had no hopes of influencing the prosecution.

The anti-hooligan crusade was so intense that only personal interest by some high official could have helped. However, Kostya did find and engage one of Moscow’s best criminal lawyers. Alexander Kuperman was one of a handful of lawyers who tried to defend his clients on principle instead of advising them to exhibit profound penitence and throw themselves on the mercy of the court and the Motherland. ‘He’s far too expensive for the likes of us,’ Kostya said. ‘But he happened to take a fancy to a few lassies of my acquaintance.’

Kostya labored to imitate his usual jaunty self, and

spoke of combining ‘the kicks’ acquittal celebration with a pre-Easter party. But this pretense soon evaporated. Most Soviet trials are dispatched in an hour or two; the longer they exceed this, the slimmer the defendant’s chances. Oktyabrina’s had run well over the average without so much as the door opening, except when a witness was summoned from a group gathered - hostilely - around a nearby bench.

Behind our own bench, a radiator hissed incessantly, intensifying the heat and smells. Our sweating little group was joined by a bohemian-looking couple, apparently from Oktyabrina’s ‘underground’ contacts. The boy showed us an old triptych that Oktyabrina had given him.

A silver-haired Komsomolskaya Pravda reporter also joined us, explaining that he’d been assigned to follow up the case. He smoked expensive East German cigarettes procured from an attache case, also obviously imported. Since the bench sat only three people, we took turns standing against the flaking wall. Policemen occasionally pushed past us like Cossacks dispersing petitioners to the Tsar.

The trial dragged on. By pressing our ears to the courtroom door, we could distinguish voices, but not words. When Gelda pulled open the door again, the guard furiously kicked it shut. Then he opened it himself to call the next witness. It was the wizened railway pensioner, proprietor of Domolinart. By this time, our little group had been reduced to sullen silence. I was glad of the chance to lose myself in old dreams of glory.

At last a witness - a prim girl supporting the prosecution on behalf of the Young Communist League - emerged from the courtroom and revealed that an adjournment was imminent. Extra policemen appeared to clear the corridor again. We sought a glimpse of Oktyabrina from the bottom of the stairs, but there was a separate route to the basement for prisoners.

On our way towards the main door, we met Vladimir, hunched in the squalid vestibule alongside a plaster Lenin bust. He hadn’t come upstairs for fear of being seen by an

informer or reporter. His plan was to wait for the verdict in the courtyard, and he had endured this torture until the cold actually numbed his limbs. He wore a new musquash hat, but his nose was still mauve and his strength depleted.

‘I honestly don’t understand how they could get everything so wrong,’ he quavered. ‘Our own organs of socialist legality. . . . After everything she gave me, Oktyabrina being crushed like a butterfly on a wheel. Even Mama doesn’t believe the article.’

The lunch break lasted an hour. Kostya used the confusion to smuggle himself into the courtroom. He was ordered out again in the security check before resumption of the trial, but convinced the police lieutenant he was an acoustics engineer assigned to run a test under actual trial conditions. Ten minutes later the judge ejected him permanently, but not before he’d had a good look at the proceedings.

Oktyabrina sat on the ‘defendant’s bench’, guarded by a large policewoman. The judge was an elderly man with greasy glasses. The witness box enclosed the bookshop manager, who had carefully avoided Gelda’s eyes in the corridor. Now he was nervously explaining his relationship to Oktyabrina. Both prosecutor and judge interrupted frequently to condemn his ‘scandalous laxity’ in the shop’s management. The testimony ran on rather tediously for some minutes until the prosecutor turned her ire to Oktyabrina.

‘You not only led a parasitic and dissolute way of life. You also disrupted an economic enterprise, causing direct harm to the state. Defendant, the court wants to know exactly why you spent so much time in Secondhand Bookstore Number 44.’

Oktyabrina sighed wearily. ‘If you must know, Madame, the bookshop was a source of a certain enlightenment and self-understanding. I daren’t tell you more. Anyway it’s easy enough for you to be smug - you didn’t get what I did for lunch.’

The court was jolted from its post-lunch drowsiness; the judge removed his glasses for a clearer view of Oktyabrina. Searching the room for the source of a snicker, he discovered Kostya and ordered him removed.

Kostya’s report to our corridor outpost rallied us for several minutes. Oktyabrina was still concealing her job at the bookshop to avoid implicating Gelda and the manager -which showed that her spirit remained unbroken. Encouraged by Gelda’s response to him, the Minister came to life and announced that his wife had divorced him. Gelda pressed her thigh against his on the bench. Vladimir had joined us and, overcoming his awe of the Minister’s title, described his interrogations by the police, throughout which he staunchly rejected pressure to denounce Oktyabrina as a slut. This, he boasted, was why the prosecutor hadn’t called him as a witness: he was too tough to crack. However no one asked the embarrassing question of why Kuperman hadn’t called him in defense.

By this time, the finely-groomed Komsomolskaya Pravda reporter was almost one of us. No one objected; the presence of this small pillar of the Establishment was reassuring. Besides, he was very friendly and optimistic about Oktyabrina’s chances. He suggested I meet him some day after the trial to exchange professional notes.

But the afternoon quickly became worse than the morning. By four o’clock we sensed the dusk, even though the corridor was windowless. Fear of missing something kept us sweating in our overcoats on the bench, unwilling to make a move except for hurried trips to the toilet. The filthy cubicle was a reminder that Oktyabrina’s plight was part of the larger, national one. Scraps of newspaper that had been used for toilet paper littered the floor. Gelda said what no one else would: after a newspaper 'expose’, no defendant was ever acquitted.

No waiting in the world is like a courtroom vigil. Our group smoked a hundred ritual cigarettes, adding heavy smoke to the powdering plaster of the walls. The resulting

mixture produced rings around the light bulbs and an oddly subtle coloration to the Lenin-And-Law poster. Kostya found himself reciting poetry, something he hadn’t done since his Navy days. He remembered only one poem in its entirety, and this he recited twice, in a voice I’d never heard before. It was from the Mandelshtam volume he’d given me:

It needn’t say a thing,

Or even try to learn.

It’s sad this way - but also good A simple animal soul:

It doesn’t yearn to preach,

It cannot even speak

But swims, like a young dolphin,

The aged oceans of the universe.

It was partly this wonder-struck curiosity - too "nihilistic’ for Soviet rule - which had delivered Mandelshtam to tragedy. And Oktyabrina? ...

Finally the court retired to deliberate the verdict. We learned this from witnesses who emerged from the courtroom, complaining about how late it was to manage their shopping. Word spread that an "interesting’ trial was approaching its climax, and most people still in the building pushed into our corridor to await the verdict. I hated them for adding to the tension without understanding what was at stake.

Soviet law stipulates that even after a closed trial, the reading of the verdict must be open to the public. But when the court had apparently returned from deliberation, only witnesses were permitted inside the courtroom. The police lieutenant slammed the door shut again, like a blade across my throat.

Minutes later the door opened for the last time. The first policeman out had a pulpy vodka face. "Five vears, normal 242

regimen,’ he croaked. ‘Clear the way there you - move aside.’

We did not believe him: real trials do not end this way. Soon the prosecutor emerged followed by Kuperman, sadly confirming the sentence. The spectators pressed closer, like the Paris rabble straining for a glimpse of the doomed. A police detachment cleared a passageway. When would the judge come to announce the reprieve?

Then Oktyabrina appeared, escorted by a wart-hog of a policewoman and two male colleagues. Her big eyes were pallid, but otherwise she looked healthy and inexplicably taller than before. When she made us out in the murkiness of the corridor, she broke into a grin of relief. It was her first sight of friends since her arrest. But she quickly reshaped the grin into a pout.

‘Honestly, you big darlings,’ she began. ‘How many times have I told you: gossip at the well lets the herd go to hell.’

Then she caught sight of the Minister in the comer and grinned again, despite herself. ‘Aloha, my dear friend,’ she cried. She waved as if from shipboard and blew him a kiss.

‘For goodness sake, don’t fuss ,’ she exclaimed. ‘Read a novel called Resurrection : people who are sure about their inner selves thrive on pressures from without.’

All this took less than a minute. Angered by her exchange with non-prisoners, the police escort yanked her away -towards the basement cells, and from there back to jail Her shoulders were slanted in a certain way which perhaps only I could interpret. I knew she was trying to concentrate on something. Half way down the corridor, she threw her head over her shoulder and her eyes instantly seeped to the depths of mine. It was the same look as when we first met at Kostya’s - an obvious artifice to make me feel special. Except that the pretense was gone and more than I’d ever understood was added.

‘Zhoe!’ she called. ‘I’m not walking this rocky road alone. Because I remember everything, understand everything. You simply cant leave me now.’ The pohcewoman shoved

her forward and she was gone.

The Minister made a move to follow, but stopped and looked at the ceiling. 'So she’s finished too/ he stuttered. 'That sprig of youth. And many of our great people will savor its snapping. Oh yes, with somebody else’s ass, it’s fine to sit on a porcupine.’

He wiped his nose and stared at the handkerchief. 'G-good G-god, my 1-language - I’m b-becoming one of t-them. Who w-wants some c-cognac, I can’t go h-h-home.’

Gelda took his arm and pulled him to the first of many evenings together. At the last minute, the Minister kissed me and begged that I take his briefcase. He had no need of it, he said, and nothing better to give.

'T-try not t-to think about h-her,’ he said quietly. ‘T-try not to think of m-me. At least you were n-n-never the t-type to g-get r-romantically involved.’

Kostya and I walked the opposite way from the courthouse into the needles of frozen mist. 'Listen, Zhoe buddy,’ he said, ‘hop on the next plane to Paris or somewhere - you need a vacation. We all loved her, but the kid was the one in a million for you.’

25

The five years are being served in a labor camp. After Stalin, they were renamed 'colonies’, but the improvement is largely semantic. Sheer survival is not always at stake for the prisoners, but thanks to grueling physical labor on a deprived diet, it dominates their thoughts. Labor-camp policy makes even ordinary appetites groan; although Oktyabrina’s 'normal regimen’ gives her the maximum of 2,100 calories a day, she will never have a moment free from hunger.

Kuperman assumes she is in a women’s colony of the Mordovian Autonomous Republic, a swampy region with a 244

severe climate some four hundred miles east of Moscow. He does not know precisely which camp; this information is not revealed. Kuperman did not advise appealing against either the verdict or sentence: there was virtually no hope for either, and any commotion might lessen her chances for parole after three years. He is convinced that someone in the Moscow City Communist Party had fixed her sentence prior to the trial, and it is wiser not to oppose such decisions now but wait for an easing of the anti-hooligan campaign.

Four days after the trial, Komsomolskaya Pravda ran a second article about Oktyabrina. The author was the genial correspondent who’d shared our vigil.

Following up the Initiatives of KOMSOMOLSKAYA PRAVDA:

THE FINALE OF LA DOLCE VITA

Oktyabrina Matveyeva is being tried:

The same girl whom this newspaper described in abundant detail last month in the feuilleton ‘Riff-Raff’. Today we can answer the storm of indignation and outrage that her behavior provoked among our readers. For the acts which soiled the dignity of the Soviet people , Matveyeva was brought to criminal justice.

Frankly , it’s sad to see such a girl in the dock. She should be dashing to class with excited girl friends, discussing her infatuation with some newly-discovered poetry, turning the heads of happy young cavaliers - for nature has not shortchanged her.

In short, she should be living life to the hilt and growing up: learning to be a responsible adult.

Rut no, she’s here - in the dock of a criminal court. Alone of her ‘magnificent lovers’ has managed to ‘rescue’ her -even bothered to visit the court for support. But this will not deter the court from its duty to administer justice in accordance with V. I. Lenin’s teachings.

Matveyeva’s guilt is spelled out in great detail. The facts are meticulously established and corroborated by documents

and witnesses’ testimony. Moreover, Matveyeva herself denies nothing. N evertheless, the trial lasts many hours . With great tact and benevolence Judge Pyotr Vladimorovich Milutin tries to penetrate Matveyeva’s soul. One senses that they see before them not primarily a criminal, but a person - one whose whole life still lies ahead. ( Incidentally, it’s a pity no one thought of televising the proceedings. They would have been extremely instructive.)

Step by step, sparing her vanity, the Judge lays bare her character. But nothing has changed. She still refuses to understand how she has poured filth on her Motherland and people. On the contrary she demonstrates her contempt for society by insulting the Judge.

Question: And now, Oktyabrina. Do you still see nothing wrong in being supported by one man after another?

Matveyeva: They never complained about not getting their money’s worth. If you must know, some were in love with me.

Question: Have you ever thought about what you live for Oktyabrina? Ever thought about your relationship to the ideals, work and sacrifices taking place all around you for our common goals?

Matveyeva: Perhaps I have thought about my ideals, but I don’t discuss intimacies with strangers. Anyway, you cant put into words who you are and what you live for. A fish moves towards where it’s deeper, a person towards where it’s better - perhaps you know the saying.

Question: Once again, the court asks you to consider your behavior. Don’t you regret the way you live?

Matveyeva: I lived the way I wanted to. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. I mean, I never hurt anybody, did I?

She lived as she wanted to. Didn’t hurt anyone. The words were painful. For Matveyeva refuses to recognize that Soviet

society, itself, all its deeply humane Leninist principles and goals, is viciously undermined by her kind of gangrene.

Who craves this undermining? Our enemies of course: the enemies of Leninism, of everything progressive in mankind. 246

Our enemies feed on the hope that riff-raff like Matveyeva , specially among our youth , will somehow weaken our socialist state. In this hysterical hope , they smuggle all the anti-Soviet drivel they can through our borders. Such as the tawdry and obscene ‘magazines’ that so delighted Matveyeva.

For many people the expression , ‘the putrid influence of the Western way of life*, still hangs in mid-air. Oktyabrina Matveyeva , has made it sickeningly graphic. She ‘presented herself to Moscow over a year ago. Since then her life has been vulgar and ugly - rotten , like a swamp. Like her ‘answers’ in court and her ‘ideals’. Like everything she represents.

What should be done with people who violate everything we cherish? Who corrupt our youth , the inheritors of our revolutionary Leninist ideals? The court reached the only correct answer to this melancholy question. Having searched deep into the defendant’s soul and found nothing sacred there , it sentenced her to five years’ deprivation of freedom.

This was my last contact with Oktyabrina. I haven't heard from her again; now there is no one from whom I can expect to hear of her. Spring smells floating through my window make it hard to focus on facts, but I have a grip on them.

I probably won’t hear from Oktyabrina for three years, until her early release for good behavior. It will be hard to see her even then, for she won’t be permitted to live in Moscow. In theory, visits of up to two weeks are allowed. But any one of a dozen officials acquainted with Oktyabrina’s dossier may prevent her from coming to the capital and its temptations. She’d risk too much, a much more severe second conviction, by sneaking in again, without a propiska. Most likely, shell live out her life in Nikolaiyevka. Or, if she’s lucky - because she may be kept on her collective farm - in the relative cosmopolitanism of Omsk.

When they are imaginary, stories like this sometimes end

with a letter from their heroines. I've thought of the one Oktyabrina would send so often that I can write it myself. It would be in her unevenly sloping script; the text would be both breathless and full of imagery, which means it could either have been dashed off on an impulse or carefully pondered.

Darling Zhoe!

When the moon comes up over the hills, the snow is somehow reddish, like a blanket of garnets. Only in my beloved Russian countryside have I come to understand a certain inner meaning of existence, the ecstasy not only of being alive, but of being oneself in an environment of obligations. This is why I haven't written sooner: IVe been frantically busy exploring my depths. . . .

There would be an explanation - with much truth - of how camp life had ended her final, final silly phase. She would make sly hints about our 'devastating' love-making, and guarded references to my divorce, the causes of which genuinely interested her in our few 'man-and-wife' days before Vladimir’s illness. She would pretend she hadn't needed my food parcels but couch her thanks in jokes; the p.s. would be an old Russian saying about separation not being alienation. No smudge of cosmetics would soil the notepaper: camp conditions would see to that.

But the note will never come. If the censorship of ordinary mail is fierce, what chance have prisoners' letters?

I'm not worried about spiritual damage to Oktyabrina in her camp. Most prisoners, if not debased on arrival, are hardened beyond recognition by the severe conditions and coarseness of guards and fellow convicts. Oktyabrina is immune to this - but she is surely thinner now: it is a question of pure hunger and cold.

I hope she’s allowed to wear my sheepskin coat. But it's strange that I have more presents from her than she from me. The mass-produced matrioshka and splendid Birth of 248

Christ icon adorn my living-room, together with the Minister s office plants. The Maxwell House can now holds my paper clips instead of hairpins or Gelda’s worms.

And I have memories. Some well up so overwhelmingly that I suspect self-deception: it’s not Oktyabrina I pity, but myself; not the injustice to her but the deprivation to me. Other memories are straightforward: the way she sipped a glass of tea.

The way she grimaced when it had too much lemon and smacked her lips in exultation after making it sweet. No one can understand the joy of her hundred hourly performances without actually seeing her mime’s face. I liked her best when she was unaware that I was watching. Every gesture - the clutching of the glass, the pursing of her lips - was an event.

Hardly a day in our year lacks something to remember. A week before the heatwave, when she still had hopes for Alexander, she coaxed him to the ballet. The tickets required considerable hunting, and she seduced Alexander by pretending they were for a visiting African troupe with 'naked bosoms and all kinds of erotic rituals’. But once in the lobby Alexander spied the Sleeping Beauty poster and left. Whereupon Oktyabrina prowled the streets to procure a substitute escort: a corpulent colonel.

Of all the animals in the zoo, she loved a young chimpanzee best. He was named ‘Cheetah’, in honor of the Tarzan films, the exotika of Oktyabrina’s schoolgirl generation. One day, a drunk teenager fractured Cheetah’s skull with a rock. Oktyabrina’s reaction was a characteristic mixture of cunning and fantasy: she sent a signed petition for ‘recuperative’ bananas to the Supreme Soviet. It came to nothing, but I hadn’t realized until now that she risked discovery for this ‘mercy mission’ too.

I like to retrace those ‘exploits’; the memory of more personal moments leads too swiftly to self-pity. After our evening at Kostya’s, she came home with me and entered the bedroom directly, saying only that all the lights should

be off. At any time before this in our year, we would have been disastrous. That night, our nervousness lasted only until her feet were warm, after which she clung to me with more strength than should have resided in her skinny arms and her trembling legs. An hour later, I knew that more than nervousness kept her thin. She made ‘Zhoe’ into a hundred Russian variants; she cried out in free delight - not quite the same as mine, for she was still too young to know how crazy it is, how truly exalted, to have passion with a friend.

The next morning, she stretched out on the davenport. T feel so contented somehow/ she said. ‘Like a cow - is that absolutely inexcusable?’

I suppose it’s obvious that I never see the davenport without thinking of her. Several places in the city have the same effect. The ice-cream cafe where she wolfed down sundaes with jam. And the Kropotkinskaya Quai, where one June evening, leathery truck drivers braked their rattling machines to contemplate her, strolling in a preposterous slouch hat. She waved to them like the dewy-eyed young heroine of third-rate Soviet films, remarking about the maternal properties of the sun, then setting brilliantly on the river.

Let there always be sunshine !...

And there is Petrovka of course. It is more teeming than ever lately, even on sopping afternoons. The pedestrian railings have been moved further into the street, but the abstracted crowds spill beyond them as before, oblivious to the traffic, the policemen’s whistles and each other. The lines at stalls offering gloves, cigarettes, panties and postage stamps are as long as ever. Today there is an exceptional crush for pineapples, of which a shipload recently arrived. But lemons disappeared again almost two months ago, and tea without them isn’t the same.

The Bolshoi Theater’s sagging roof is under repair; its makeshift tin drainpipes are as crooked as ever. Behind the theater, an establishment called Cafe Friendship has greedily absorbed a coat of spring paint. It is an outdoor eatery ' featuring frankfurters, inedible green peas and chipped 250

glasses of muddy coffee. Across the street, Wanda, the Polish shop, has put a lustrous lipstick on sale, and a thousand women materialize instantly to besiege the counters.

Bookstore No 44 carries on as before, several doors above Wanda; the Ministers request for appointment as the new manager has been denied. In the struggling crowd, a middle-aged woman with rimless glasses and a tight bun, nothing more or less than a Chekhov character, is looking for a volume of Chekhov stories. When she leaves, it is to fight her way into a fish store for supper’s salted cod, but she loses no dignity in doing it.

The fish store, a pathetic butcher’s, a pharmacy from a silent movie set. ... A cluster of red kerchiefs on school-children stands out in the ceaseless stream of bodies pushing along the street and in and out of these establishments. Then three bantam Asian soldiers strolling arm in arm, followed by a hulking muzhik with a full beard holding tight to his grandson, who in turn is clutching a white toy horse.

A grizzled taxi driver slows down to allow a neatly-dressed man to beg for a ride. A handsome girl is giving an impatient stranger her telephone number, knowing they’ll be in bed together in several hours, A schoolboy in uniform checks to see whether he still has his wrist watch. A hundred peasant grandmothers trudge onward with their sacks. . . . What makes these scenes seem so memorable? Perhaps no more than a perception that we have little say in who we are and what we do. Something in this old street makes truism about fate and mortality especially real.

Petrovka is what Petrovka was; even the changes seem to speak of the continuity of Russian life - and of the human condition. I can’t say I love it any longer, but it’s her street and I want to stay. What would I do in Chicago?

‘You can’t leave me now ’ she called in the courthouse. Surely this was meant to imply that I’m with her, ‘inside* forever. But we both know enough about her use of ambiguity to recognize its other meaning. The problem is to keep

my stories neutral enough to deter expulsion. This is progressively harder; now even Esenin is under attack in vengeful tirades. The retreat towards Stalinism wasn’t temporary, as optimists hoped; we’ve settled into another age of hard times, seemingly more natural to Russia than its occasional liberalizing spurts.

To ease this pressure, I walk down Petrovka in the early afternoon. The familiar ache of being alone is also a comfort, and a bond with the missing person. I indulge myself in the old game of seeing her reflection in a shop window and postponing the moment of discovering that the girl is a pale imitation. I can’t imagine that I’ll never see her again.

BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY

IfllllllllllllllllHiniiii ......

girlfrompetrovkaOOfeif

girlfrompetrovkaOOfeif

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(Continued from front flap)

acerb commentator on the bureaucratic and Establishment scene, a dabbler in the black market, a pursuer of girls, girls, girls, and the past master of deadpan wit. He—along with Oktyabrina's other colorful lovers, friends, and acquaintances—bodies forth the mystery, vitality, and endurance of the Russian people, but it is Oktyabrina herself who unforgettably stands out against one of the most sharply realized and evocative portraits of real Russian life yet written by a Westerner in thU century.

has been

Moscow correspondent for a number of English and American newspapers and is the author of Justice in Moscow, which described the workings of Soviet courts. His first trip to Russia was as a college-student-guide during the 1959 Fair, at which he was a witness to the famous Nixon-Khrushchev "kitchen debate" that took place. Born in New Jersey, he graduated from Harvard Phi Beta Kappa and received his M.A. from Columbia University. Mr. Feifer was also the recipient of a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Foreign Area Fellowship, and holds a Certificate from Columbia's Russian Institute. He is now a resident of London, where he lives with his Soviet-born wife, Tanya, whom he met during that same 1959 Fair in Moscow, when she was sixteen, and whom he married in 1970.

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