Edward's roommate Yuri, by contrast, is so oblivious to clothes and other worldly goods that Edward's degradation is beyond his comprehension. Yuri the Righteous: so quiet, kind and selfless.
Notes from My Window^47
So devoutly virtuous that he gives me a queasy sensation of being in another age; in ours, I was certain, such rectitude no longer existed. Yuri of the steel-rimmed spectacles and churchgoing radiance, who can't tell a lie even to save himself from the most boring invitation, and who spends a morning searching for the saleswoman who undercharged him by ten kopeks. He's more the Puritan settler than anyone in contemporary Massachusetts.
It's curious how virtues as well as vices seem larger than life here, undiluted from biblical models. More than anything, this country is old-fashioned; the fundamental qualities of people and things are as plain as Colonial furniture. The dormitory houses many of Yuri's kind, young women as well as men. Sober-faced and morally scrubbed, their high-mindedness gleams all the brighter in contrast to their washworn shirts and dresses. They really do live by the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism— which, after all, is the Ten Commandments, slightly revised.
And if there are a score of conflicting types among the students I personally know, what of the twenty-five thousand as a whole, coming and going in ceaseless streams from the metro station and bus stops? Most seem supremely ordinary; I've been picking out the personalities because of their stories. Bland, conventional, insufferably dull! Some days, the huge building shrieks of boredom, and if one more small-town, small-minded Russian asks me the horsepower of a Ford, I'll punch his philistine nose. If one more businessman slinks into my room with a handful of greasy rubles for my ties, underwear, socks . . .
Among the twenty-five thousand, odd things stand out. One is that the proportion of military officers is even greater here than in the city as a whole. In crumpled uniforms, clutching tattered briefcases, they contemplate their physics texts, even when stuffed into the dark, impossibly overcrowded elevators. The Army is never out of sight. Rumor has it that the main building's entire eighteenth floor—at which the elevators never stop and for which there's not even a number on their floor indicators—is reserved for tapping equipment and war research.
Last war's casualties are as numerous but more depressing. Armless and legless men are everywhere among the professors and older students; pinned-up sleeves, timeworn crutches, black plastic gloves over wooden hands and clumping artificial limbs.
48^MOSCOW FAREWELL
Their numbers too are greater here than in the city generally: disabled veterans are given preference in the severe competition for University places, and the age limit is often waived. Maimed and mutilated bodies are an integral part of the national scene, living exhibits of Russia's misfortunes.
But why so many clubfeet and bone malformations among the students of my generation? Here the forgotten word "rickets"— no less unpleasant in Russian: rakhit —is in common usage, and the familiar hunchback of Russian literature still casts gloom on daily University life. Standing abjectly on cafeteria lines, they are reminders of a tubercular uncle of mine, symbols of a particular sadness.
Student privation is a lesser manifestation of the same problem: the stark lack not only of pretty things to wear and interesting objects to buy, but often even of nutritious food. This country's poverty is a baffling phenomenon. Even amid the University community's relative plenty, scarcity is seemingly incurable. It's not the poverty of the East; no one is near starvation. Things are getting better all the time. But everyone except progeny of the Moscow bourgeoisie struggles near slum level. A single shiny suit hangs in the otherwise bare wardrobes of most male students; girls wear one grubby sweater week after week. (It is to save body heat and a few kopeks rather than in pursuit of chic that some wear them with undershirts rather than brassieres.) And a professor full of years and the authority of papers in international journals spends hours telephoning friends to help him acquire the prize of a Belgian raincoat: it's no classic trenchcoat he wants, but a plastic imitation that is all the rage.
Noises from the communal kitchen now, complementing Marusa's yelps. Dented pots and kettles clanging on the old black stoves; an anonymous tenor crooning "Strangers in the Night" while hands plop lunch potatoes into water; children of maintenance personnel supplying motor noises for their tinny toy cars. A white-tiled, dairy-smelling chamber next to the common room, the kitchen becomes a midday center of activity on the otherwise listless floor.
It's extraordinary how easily people who share it—of every generation, sex and cultural level—get along. Patrician graduate
Notes from My Window ^49
Students with uncombed women floor-waxers, the shy young bride of a Hnguist (hving illegally in his room) with the members of the clique. There is neither condescension nor self-consciousness as each tends his own pot on the stoves; no surprise that such an eclectic menagerie, complete with children and grandchildren, inhabits a university dormitory. Russians can be as selfish and snobbish as anyone, and their inequality of wealth and life-styles are often enormous. But when pushed together in the business of living, they display a natural egalitarianism whose source must surely be older than the Soviet propaganda they ignore. At some level, they are joined by a common history and fate: the intense experience of being Russian, which pulls people together like soldiers under fire. All belong to the continental family nourished by the Russian earth.
The matriarch of this tiny wing of it is Zaiida Petrovna, chief biddie of the twelfth through fourteenth floors. Everyone is required to deal with his own kitchen mess, and once a month we all serve on the morning cleaning detail which scrubs—is supposed to scrub—stoves, tables and walls. Nevertheless, Zaiida Petrovna is always left with a filthy kitchen (if you believe her complaints), and displays her neat bulk at lunchtime to remind the kitchen-users of their duty. Heard as well as seen: in her alto wail, she carps at everyone in sight, interrupting her own ceaseless monologue about intolerable slovenliness and disrespect for the elderly.
"Such people! Leave their mess every day for a weary old woman. Dear God, it's shameful. For the likes of us, never a moment's rest."
Yet rest, of course, is what she does most of the day. Otherwise she's busy hoarding things: bits of paper and string; rubber bands and sardine keys; almost everything, on the you-never-know-when-it'11-be-available-again life principle. Since my own mother threw out almost everything, I couldn't account for my familiarity with Zaiida Petrovna's attitude until I remembered my grandmother, and my wincing for her when my mother assailed these same Old Country habits. I wonder whether this is why I sometimes feel I've come home to this distant land.
It's hard to imagine altering a single detail of "Auntie Zina's" countenance. Every feature and bulge of this quintessential