This angst and I were companions fifteen years ago, during my normally abnormal teens. How surprised I am at its regeneration now; how I dislike myself for it when I'm unable to laugh. Some days, the thought of facing the music of my failure in New York is worse even than the loneliness of my exile. Since what is happening to me here has rendered me unable to be the success-type I must be there, perhaps I should somehow arrange to remain in Moscow: become a translator, a secretary, anything to keep myself alive.
In this world, I'm still a somebody. After all, "Westerner" by itself is a title. At the lowest level, it gives me access to chewing
40^MOSCOW FAREWELL
gum and Camels, which buy the same kind of deference and accommodations from the same kinds of postwar Europeans who serviced GIs. At the highest, my opinions are soHcited by intellectuals far more accomplished than I merely because I'm from "over there." How ironic that I, who had the usual youthful scorn for capitalism, feel a plutocrat for the first time in the Motherland of Socialism! The restaurants are inferior, but in what other capital could I afford the very best, together with front-row seats for every play at every theater?
No other city's luxury is so at my disposal; nowhere else am I made to feel so close to the Big Time—so important to myself The same me who is one of ten million at home has ballooned into a personage here: an attraction and a celebrity, without achieving even false success. So the temptation to stay is very great, even though I know that no Westerner can hope to settle in Moscow without eventual impressment into KGB service.
In the nadir of my self-pity, my thoughts sink from this level to the basest visions of myself, and I groan into my pillow. But the panic of what will become of me is distant today, and I luxuriate in the respite of a patient between attacks. Weeks sometimes pass in blissful freedom from conscious dread. ("What are you going to be when you grow up, fella?" "I won't.") Meanwhile, the soft ache that is my closest friend throbs greetings from inside, and I exist in perpetual limbo. Knowing the disgrace that awaits me, I drift like the bum I've always wanted and feared to be, hoping this eerie year is over quickly to end my apprehension—and, at the same time, that the refuge of suspension lasts forever.
Maybe this was my year to crash and it would have happened anywhere. Perhaps it was inevitable that as I approached the last turning point to "maturity" and the professorship to prove it, I'd discover my unsuitability and flee. Or is Russia responsible for the collapse of my props of conscientiousness and orderly habits: of everything needed—especially a deaf ear to my deepest anxieties—to support me in the world of professional upper-middle class? Perversely, the only activity I perform well here—submerging myself into the joys and maiming sadnesses of daily life—is the one that has tumbled me. But maybe Mother Russia herself will somehow save me. Or I'll straighten things out with Anastasia and we'll be happy forever after.
Notes from My Window^41
Marusa has just opened the buffet for her afternoon trading hours. It's an ordinary single room at the end of the far corridor converted to a miniature grocery: a dusty cubicle with oilclothed shelves, what we used to call an icebox, and bins of brown loaves delivered twice daily. In addition to the bread, Marusa sells sausage, cheese, milk, yoghurt, sugar, and, occasionally, a few runty, blemished apples costing (at state prices, for her little establishment is an offshoot of the Grocery Trust) the equivalent of $2.75 a pound. The yoghurt is natural; the bread sour, delicious and full of life. The other products might have come from flood relief In the main cafeteria too, even in the higher-priced one patronized by the staff and by richer students, the food gets steadily more lumpish. Apparently this tendency is typical of every winter as all fresh produce disappears; but recent crop troubles have reduced even the kasha and macaroni to mush.
Marusa is a firebrand: I picture her tongue-lashing top-hatted bankers and foreign monopolists during the civil war. She's petite and bleached blonde—good-looking in a tarty way despite her soiled smock and the heavy makeup that only emphasizes the signs of wear in her face. (She's been married three times, most recently to a truck driver whom she says she can drink under the table.) She alternately flirts with her male customers and screams at them in a shrill working-class patois. Like most Russians of her background, she's a zealous socialist who hates the thought of capitalism only less than the reality of work.
"Get the hell out of my hair, you vultures, and don't waste your time standing on line. There's no more sour cream. None. You can rot there all day, I'm not serving another person."
But students keep joining the line nevertheless. (It's shorter than the hour's wait at the cafeterias, where standees read novels to pass the time. Besides, not every student can afford sixty kopeks for a proper meal.) They know that if they beg, plead, coquet, cajole, Marusa will eventually ser\'e them all, even with magically found jars of sour cream. Why can't she simply do her job without first the cursing, then reconciliation and finally the peace offering? Why can't the most routine transaction in this country be completed without steaming it into a crisis? To buy a can of herring here is to expose yourself to a sociological
42/^MOSCOW FAREWELL
adventure. It's never an offer of mute money for an inanimate tin, but a human barter in which a chunk of self must be invested by both sides: fitting frustration, then satisfaction, exchanged.
Marusa the sociaUst. I intend nothing ironic by this, for she's utterly convinced that socialism is progressive, uplifting and morally irreproachable, whereas capitalism produces degradation and cheating as well as exploitation. Her own cheating in no way invalidates the general principles but, rather, is simply how things are done.
She makes an elaborate show of weighing everything to the gram, adding and removing a daub, adding again, then removing the final speck of bologna or cheese to balance her scales. Yet everyone knows she is busy fleecing customers and the house— i.e., the state; everyone accepts that fiddling is part of the job of every saleswoman and counterclerk in the land. Scales are tampered with, products weighed with wrapping paper to add the odd gram, a cheaper grade of cheese substituted, bread cut to leave a slice for the slicer at both ends—only a kopek's worth on each purchase, but enough to eke out a living for the perpetrators, which their tiny wages alone don't provide. It is as endemic to the system as the stupendous precautions against theft—literally nothing movable is left without a giant padlock—and occurs for some of the same reasons.
In Marusa's case, the cheating is as much professional habit as profitable enterprise. The items in her meager buffet hardly justify the effort: no wine to water, no coffee beans to spill (and later gather), not even lemons to steal. (A grade-A lemon costs more than her hourly wage. For many unskilled workers in the city, and almost all peasants outside it, taking tea with a sliver of the prized fruit is a holiday extravagance—if they can find it on sale.) And Marusa's fudging is also essential to the traditional game of tease. "Hurry up, for God's sake," shout the ravenous boys at the end of the line. "If you cut the show with the scales and speed it up, we'll give you a bonus for exceeding your cheating plan."
Marusa fairly spits with fury, but when someone winks and runs his eyes over her figure, she shams suppressing her smile. "This miserable life of mine," she moans, wiping a jagged knife on the hip of her smock. She can survive bombing, famine, and
Notes from My Window ^43
purges with heroic nonchalance, can fight at the front in fierce civil and national wars. But the daily routine of her job in the buffet—working by the clock and actually serving people—is too much.