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!