Beneath the champagne lay a pile of familiar black-and-red wrappers: Mars bars.
Mitya and I sat on a bench outside the shop and started in. It’s interesting how champagne consumed of necessity has a different effect. No aristocratic jollity for us. We were drunk, of course, but it was a sober drunkenness, a light-headed, yet solemn state.
“So we’ll live on champagne and chocolate alone,” said Mitya.
“Better than the French Revolution,” I agreed, beginning to nod and then deciding against it.
The bubbles ran to my head, and it was not long before I was feeling so buoyant that I had to hold on to the seat with both hands.
The Uvarovs had the first five-hundred-ruble note that I came across. It was larger than the one-hundred, with the swirly writing this time in piercing fuchsia pink—really the prettiest banknote I have seen. I dropped in to visit them just after they’d withdrawn their savings from the bank.
“Come in, come in,” Mrs. Uvarov said kindly, as always. “You look dreadful. Have something to eat with us, come along.”
I ate a bowl of soup while they planned how best to spend the money. About this time, I remember hearing a calculation on the radio: if you bought a ton of steel in Russia, sold it for foreign currency, and then spent that foreign currency on Russian steel; if this were possible, and you repeated the operation just eight times, you could buy the entire Russian steel industry.
This was a hypothetical exercise, of course, but all the same, millions were being made that year. Everyone had something that he or she was trying to sell abroad, and in the Uvarovs’ case it was an enormous petrified log. I don’t know how they had come by such a thing, but they were confident there was a living to be made from it. They were writing letters, telephoning, spending every evening driving about all over the place to talk to people about the log.
It’s a strange thing, considering how lazy everyone knows Russians to be. Sloth, which wraps the gentry in their robes and sends the peasant to doze on his stove, has long been recognized as a part of the national character. Yet that winter people took on two or three extra jobs. They became taxi drivers, businessmen, antique dealers, and speculators in currency. In the evenings they arrived home late, having driven twenty miles out of their way to collect a spare part for the Lada which an acquaintance had agreed to exchange for a pair of fur boots. In the mornings they dropped in on a friend who was willing to sell dollars at a slightly lower rate, then picked up a fare and ferried him to the other end of town before arriving at work, again late. Arriving on time at work was a luxury even the most punctual couldn’t afford that winter. And yet they arrived at the office somehow, despite the fact that their salaries shrank each day and often were not paid for three or four months.
And not only did people work hard, they took risks and responded to the market. Everyone became entrepreneurs, gambling their savings on a load of Turkish fruit juice or Polish cigarettes they then tried to sell on. As paychecks were delayed, workers began to accept payment in the goods they produced. Along the big highways the rows of figures sitting quietly beside identical piles of saucepans (if theirs was a saucepan factory), or buckets, or even garden gnomes became common. How did they survive? Mr. Uvarov laughed when I asked him.
“How do any of us survive?” he replied, shrugging. “Habit, I suppose.”
It’s rare, I suspect, for people to come to Russia in search of moderation. When I arrived my head was stuffed so full of preposterous excesses that it made my eyes bulge. I’d read, for instance, that during the reign of Nicholas II, so many jewels were pouring out of Siberia that the courtiers were not content with mere necklaces. Collars, belts, whole breastplates made of diamonds became the fashion. In the nineteenth century, the Tolstoys were so particular about their laundry that they sent it to be washed in Holland. As 1917 unraveled, the last aristocrats in the Empire washed their hair in champagne and danced barefoot in troughs of caviar. A few months later most of them were penniless or dead, but the attitude lived on. As late as 1982, the Communist Party leader in Azerbaijan, Geidar Aliyev, built an entire palace for a visit by Brezhnev. Aliyev also presented him with a monstrous ring, which consisted of one large jewel (representing the Soviet Union) surrounded by fifteen smaller ones (the republics). Brezhnev stayed for the weekend; the palace was not used again.
Yakov had inherited something of this spirit, I’ve no idea where from. In the New Year he and Nina parted ways. Nina had grown tired of listening to Yakov improvise on his guitar, and Yakov had begun to look hunted. He became very thin and seemed to develop a horror of physical contact. One evening I caught an expression of disgust on his face as he glanced down at her hand holding his. They agreed to end the affair and Yakov did not visit the hostel for some weeks. Nina was a phlegmatic girl, and the entire episode—the turbulent opening scenes, the anguish, though short-lived, of her friend Liza Minnelli, and the anticlimactic end—barely impinged on her manner of faintly vacuous cheer. Soon the three girls in Room 99 were lolling in bed together until afternoon, drinking tea, and stubbing cigarettes out in old beer cans, as good friends as ever. Yakov, however, seemed badly shaken.
The next time I saw him it was three o’clock on a chill February morning and he was leaning over my bed, shaking me by the shoulder. Emily and Ira slept on.
“Come down to the station with me. I want to show you something.”
I sat up. “What—”
“Come on, let’s go to the station.” He was trembling. The half-light from the corridor emphasized his thinness, his puffy eyes.
“OK, let me get dressed.” It occurred to me that I’d rather he did not go down to the station alone. He had an air of urgency that felt dangerous.
Yakov and I walked out into the black, glittering street. The temperature was a steady ten degrees below and the wind had fallen. At night, the ice seemed to have compelled the whole world, even the clouds far above, to be still. Only the breath rising from our lips like blue feathers defied it.
Yakov led me through the station and up the iron stairs of a bridge spanning the tracks. I clattered behind him. He hadn’t spoken since we left the hostel. Now he stopped halfway across the bridge, panting, and waited. It was a fine, solid Soviet construction, covered, with sides five feet high and crisscross wire netting stretched above, so no one could come to harm on the tracks. Where we stood, a long jag in the wire had been cut open and the loose section bounced gently, shaken by our footsteps. I waited with Yakov, watching him out of the corner of my eye. We were both shivering.
A flashlight was wavering toward us along the rails; the ringing note of iron against iron identified the figure as a signalman, checking the points. He drew closer and I saw him puffing as he walked, bending and swinging his hammer rhythmically.
“That must be a lonely life,” I remarked to break the silence.
I struck a nerve. Yakov responded in a high, wobbly voice. “Yes, you know I work and I study… struggle to do the best for everyone… and the whole world is running and no one has time… even my mother hardly speaks to me these days… and all these people, my friends, these girls—they all want something from me and I’m exhausted… given my heart and yet rejected…”
“But Yakov, what do you mean? You haven’t been to visit us lately, we thought you must be too busy. I heard you were working?”
“I have been! Working like a madman, and yet what comes of it but problems, awkwardnesses?” Yakov paced back and forth. He was very pale, on the verge of tears. “You know what, if this was a stage and down there”—he gestured at the tracks—“down there ten thousand people—ten thousand—were waiting and watching, you know what I’d say to them?” He expanded his chest. “I would stand here, and I would say, ‘None of you, not a single one of you, understands me!’”