50^MOSCOW FAREWELL
Russian babushka is in place, starting with the round, frostbitten face and ending in legs grown loglike with the arduous years. She's a grandmother in fact as well as in shape, and three or four times a week brings her grandson Shashinka with her to work. (Her daughter is a secretary in a ministry, where children are not welcome; and in any case, infants are granny's rather than mother's responsibility during the working day.)
Shashinka has become primus inter pares among the children smuggled into the dormitory, and a mascot to the students. (Raya and Ira, however, try to keep him out of their room because he prefers dismantling their lacework to enjoying their cuddles.) He waddles up and down the corridors and wanders into any room, a bundle of pink fat sweating in leggings, sweaters and white knitted cap. Winter having arrived. Auntie Zina will not dream of removing another layer of his clothes, even when the steam heat is working—even when Sasha wilts in the kitchen heat. When tired, he falls asleep in the lap of any cleaning woman available: all are his babushki, for he already senses he belongs to the one big Russian family.
Zaiida Petrovna also takes Shashinka along to the obligatory political lectures for service personnel after work on Thursday afternoons. She likes the meetings for their churchgoing warmth, the feelings they give her of belonging and doing good, but she would not understand less if the lecture were a Mass spoken in Latin. The child sits on his grandmother's lap while she tries to knit, not listening to a word or even pretending to. (Toward the rear of the room, farthest from the red flags and busts of Lenin, workmen are cleaning their nails and noses, and one swigs surreptitiously at a bottle.) "What's Shyria?" the tyke asked one day when I saw them leaving the session. (That afternoon's sermon had been on the righteousness of supplying Israel's enemies with arms.) "I don't know, darling," she answered, buttoning his thick fur coat. "I don't know a thing." She believes in Communism just as, and in the same way as, her people believed in God, heaven and forces for greater, higher good— forces that will insure, in this life or the next, that justice is done for the long-suffering little people. Nevertheless—or perhaps consequently—the thought that she or anyone she's fond of must work hard to achieve Communism has never occurred to her.
Notes from My Window "^51
She's always admonishing me to take it easy, he down and have a rest.
"But what about building Communism?" I ask her. (It's not an entirely facetious question; she assumes that, being here, I'm of course a Party member.)
Waving her hand "No," she casts about for a place to settle her bulk. "Communism can be built one day later, lad. Young people mustn't work so hard. You should be having a good time—a person must think of his health."
In this even more than in her appearance, she symbolizes her people. The principal concern is to avoid exertion, to cut down on work. Not advancement but peace of mind is the summum bonum —and a layer of fat for protection against famine and cold.
At the window again, gazing at my world. The University's central skyscraper, a monstrous stalagmite misplaced in residential tundra, with red running lights to caution aircraft. Acres of formal gardens where Stalin's wraith lurks, keeping them rigid and unused. . . . Across the river, my Moscow in nightdress: dusk in mid-afternoon. Ten thousand streetlamp specks interspersed in the great expanse like the diesel-generated lights of some oil port. Neon chiefly in a scattering of signs sputtering: "glory to the communist party!" "glory to the soviet people!" "glory to communism, shining future of all mankind!" I understand the spell of the Russian countryside now, but what is it in this drab urban scene that also tugs at my heart? Why does the whole human condition, its futility and mine, seem there, in the despondent expanse?
Below me, the great iron fence surrounding the University grounds and the stone blockhouse guarding the gate—a working battlement, as if Moscow State University were a tsarist outpost subject to Mongol raids. A light breeze plays dry snow through the bars of the fence and the branches of young trees, which, in the burning cold, are as stiff and black as the metal.
A crowd is bunched outside the guardhouse. Evening session is about to begin, and everyone waiting to enter the grounds is rummaging in a pocket or handbag for his pass, a little cardboard folder with a photograph of the bearer and, of course, an official stamp. The rules are universaclass="underline" passes required for
52^MOSCOW FAREWELL
entrance into the University, as for every office and institution of this People's State; no citizen allowed where he doesn't belong; old men or women camped inside every door in the socialist land, checking credentials and intentions. Citizens! Produce your passes!
I once asked an assistant rector whether all this was necessary at an institute of higher education. Didn't I see? he responded fervently. Grounds accessible to ordinary members of the public, to anyone with a whim to look in, would lead to intolerable chaos. Operating a great university without passes was unthinkable. And it's true that this institution, an impressive luxury in the context of Russian life, attracts crowds of gawkers and gapers. Despite all fences, vagabonds are found encamped in dormitory rooms after every vacation.
But the examination of passes is brief. Negotiating a narrow passage through the guardhouse, each holder shows his document to a team of fieldhand women bundled in overcoats and the inevitable woollen scarves. When the women are grumpy and examine photographs, the line-standers, late and cold, mutter under their breaths; when they are gossiping, a mere motion toward a pocket that might contain a pass suffices. And when you've forgotten your pass or have none, you can usually heartthrob your way through the emergency.
A standard performance is required: ten minutes of pleading in deeply tragic tones to demonstrate why this exception to the rules is justified by higher human considerations. In the manner of a Soviet criminal defendant—and in the tradition of mercy for the errant in Russian literature—you must show yourself to have been the victim of cruel fate, prove yourself profoundly repentant, throw yourself at the women's boundless mercy. "Just this once, I'll never ask again, I promise. If I don't get in to fetch a certain book now, the whole semester's wasted. My pass was stolen yesterday, together with all my money. I've had only a glass of tea today. I know it's wrong of me to ask, but I'll be grateful to you forever. Sure you have a fine son about my age; think of how you'd want my mother to treat himy
It helps to have given the women a bar of chocolate on Women's Day or the Anniversary of the Revolution—not at the moment of pleading itself, however, for a direct bribe may be
Notes from My Window ^53
insulting and even dangerous. But even without goodies or a month of smiles to build you a credit of goodwill, a passable actor melts their village hearts. A humble lad's lamentations means so much more than rules they themselves don't understand.
But if this fails, there is a last resort: an enlarged space between two bars in the fence on the opposite side of the dormitory, which all but the fat can negotiate after removing their coats. Nine out of ten people who must gain entrance to the University will find the means; the whole pass system, with all its paperwork, procedures and shifts of a hundred guards, is a gigantic waste of time. The regimentation breaks down when brought into contact with the human factor: iron and discipline corroded by neglect and compassion—the pattern of many phases of Moscow life.
Each fall, whole classes of students are dispatched to the countryside to dig potatoes—the usual forced labor, hailed as "volunteer." The October countryside is a sea of slime, and living conditions on the collective farms are kindly described as "primitive": pig sties converted to barracks or leaky tents without latrines, and food fit only for the starving. But the students have potato fights, songfests and alfresco love affairs; and those who truly detest the prospect of a full month of cold and wet can usually feign illness or buy a faked medical exemption. Russia has more restrictions, prohibitions and bureaucratic imperatives than all of Europe combined, but most are easier to evade than in countries of sensible, and therefore seriously taken, regulations. A law of compensation operates: where the burden of rules is most impossible, petty officials seem most persuadable to ignore them.