It was then that I learned to disbelieve all the noise about the subconscious. I think that I never dreamed in symbols —1 always saw the real thing: bosom, hips, female underwear. As to the latter, it had an odd significance for us boys at that time. I remember how during a class, somebody would crawl under a row of desks all the way up to the teacher's desk, with a single purpose—to look under her dress to check what color underpants she was wearing that day. Upon completing his expedition, he would announce in a dramatic whisper to the rest of the class, "Lilac."
In short, we were not troubled much by our fantasies —we had too much reality to deal with. I've said somewhere else that Russians—at least my generation—never resort to shrinks. In the first place, there are not so many of them. Besides, psychiatry is the state's property. One knows that to have a psychiatric record isn't such a great thing. It might backfire at any moment. But in any case, we used to handle our problems ourselves, to keep track of what went on inside our heads without help from the outside. A certain advantage of totalitarianism is that it suggests to an individual a kind of vertical hierarchy of his o^, with consciousness at the top. So we oversee what's going on inside ourselves; we almost report to our consciousness on our instincts. And then we punish ourselves. When we realize that this punishment is not commensurate with the swine we have discovered inside, we resort to alcohol and drink our wits out.
I think this system is efficient and consumes less cash. It is not that I think suppression is better than freedom; I just believe that the mechanism of suppression is as innate to the human psyche as the mechanism of release. Besides, to think that you are a swine is humbler and eventually more accurate than to perceive yourself as a fallen angel. I have every reason to think so because in the country where I spent thirty-two years, adultery and moviegoing are the only forms of free enterprise. Plus Art.
All the same, I felt patriotic. This was the normal patriotism of a child, a patriotism with a strong militaristic flavor. I admired planes and warships, and nothing was more beautiful to me than the yellow and blue banner of the air force, which looked like an open parachute canopy with a propeller in the center. I loved planes and until quite recently followed developments in aviation closely. With the arrival of rockets I gave up, and my love became a nostalgia for propjets. (I know I am not the only one: my nine-year-old son once said that when he grew up he would destroy all turbojets and reintroduce biplanes.) As for the navy, I was a true child of my father and at the age of fourteen applied for admission to a submarine academy. I passed all the exams, but because of the fifth paragraph —nationality—didn't get in, and my irrational love for navy overcoats with their double rows of gold buttons, resembling a night street with receding lights, remained unrequited.
Visual aspects of life, I am afraid, always mattered to me more than its content. For instance, I fell in love with a photograph of Samuel Beckett long before I'd read a line of his. As for the military, prisons spared me the draft, so that my affair with the uniform forever remained platonic. In my view, prison is a lot better than the ^roy. In the first place, in prison nobody teaches you to hate that distant "potential" enemy. Your enemy in prison isn't an abstraction; he is concrete and palpable. That is, you are always palpable to your enemy. Perhaps "enemy" is too strong a word. In prison you are dealing with an extremely domesticated notion of enemy, which makes the whole thing quite earthly, mortal. After all, my guards or neighbors were not any different from my teachers or those workers who humiliated me during my apprenticeship at the factory.
My hatred's center of gravity, in other words, wasn't dispersed into some foreign capitalist nowhere; it wasn't even hatred. The damned trait of understanding and thus forgiving everybody, which started while I was in school, fully blossomed in prison. I don't think I hated even my KGB interrogators: I tended to absolve even them (good-for- nothing, has a family to feed, etc.). The ones I couldn't justify at all were those who ran the country, perhaps because I'd never got close to any of them. As enemies go, in a ceU you have a most immediate one: lack of space. The formula for prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time. This is what really bothers you, that you can't win. Prison is a lack of alternatives, and the telescopic predictability of the future is what drives you crazy. Even so, it is a hell of a lot better than the solemnity with which the army sics you on people on the other side of the globe, or nearer.
Service in the Soviet Army takes from three to four years, and I never met a person whose psyche wasn't mutilated by its mental straitjacket of obedience. With the exception, perhaps, of musicians who play in military bands and two distant acquaintances of mine who shot themselves in 1956, in Hungary, where both were tank commanders. It is the army that finally makes a citizen of you; without it you still have a chance, however slim, to remain a human being. If there is any reason for pride in my past, it is that I became a convict, not a soldier. Even for having missed out on the military lingo—the thing that worried me most—1 was generously reimbursed with the criminal argot.
Still, warships and planes were beautiful, and every year there were more of them. In 1945, the streets were full of "Studebekker" trucks and jeeps with a white star on their doors and hoods—the American hardware we had got on lend-lease. In 1972, we were selling this kind of thing urbi et orbi ourselves. If the standard of living during that period improved 15 to 20 percent, the improvement in weaponry production could be expressed in tens of thousands of percent. It will continue to go up, because it is about the only real thing we have in that country, the only tangible field for advancement. Also because military blackmail, i.e., a constant increase in the production of armaments which is perfectly tolerable in the totalitarian setup, may cripple the economy of any democratic adversary that tries to maintain a balance. Military buildup isn't insanity: it's the best tool available to condition the economy of your opposite number, and in the Kremlin they've realized that full well. Anyone seeking world domination would do the same. The alternatives are either unworkable (economic competition) or too scary (actually using military devices).
Besides, the army is a peasant's idea of order. There is nothing more reassuring for an average man than the sight of his cohorts parading in front of Politburo members standing on top of the Mausoleum. I guess it never occurred to any of them that there is an element of blasphemy in standing on top of a holy relic's tomb. The idea, I guess, is that of a continuum, and the sad thing about these figures on top of the Mausoleum is that they really join the mummy in defying time. You either see it live on TV or as a poor- quality photograph multiplied in millions of copies of the official newspapers. Like the ancient Romans who related themselves to the center of the Empire by making the main street in their settlements always run north-south, so the Russians check the stability and predictability of their existence by those pictures.
When I was working at the factory, we would go for lunch breaks into the factory yard; some would sit do^ and unwrap their sandwiches, others would smoke or play volleyball. There was a little flower bed surrounded by the standard wooden fence. This was a row of twenty-inch-high planks with two-inch spaces between them, held together by a transverse lath made of the same material, painted green. It was covered with dust and soot, just like the shrunken, withered flowers inside the square-shaped bed. Wherever you went in that empire, you would always find this fence. It comes prefabricated, but even when people make it with their o^ hands, they always follow the prescribed design. Once I went to Central Asia, to Samarkand; I was al warmed up for those turquoise cupolas and the inscrutable ornaments of madrasahs and minarets. They were there. And then I saw that fence, with its idiotic rhythm, and my heart sank, the Orient vanished. The small-scale, comb-like repetitiveness of the narrow palings immediately annihilated the space—as well as the time— between the factory yard and Kubla Khan's ancient seat.