Someday this aspect of the national character must be explained. The Russian propensity to laziness and anarchy frightens the rulers, who promulgate tomes of unworkable controls. The old habits of "fix-it" and "make-do" encourage people to ignore and evade them, an essential element of the Russian way of life. The rules are augmented by yet another series of ukases, accompanied by propaganda campaigns for strict observance. Do the drafters themselves, I wonder, take their own decrees and campaigns at face value? No one seems to, yet someone must.
54^MOSCOW FAREWELL
Besides Chingiz, my friends are nice, middle-class boys. Lev—Dustin Hoffman with a beard—actually studies evenings, a wondrous strange pastime when exams are not imminent. In dread of the three years' service in the provinces after graduation, he is determined to make the top five per cent of his class, thus exempting himself from such bondage so he may proceed directly to graduate school. He's on the economic faculty and wants to write a book about Robert McNamara. (If he's accepted for graduate work by the institute of his choice, he will have access to such research materials as old Time magazines and the Congressional Record.) For relaxation, he plays Monopoly on a set left behind by a former American exchange student. Delighted by the incongruity it represents in this citadel of Marxist-Leninist learning, he swears that the game has taught him more about capitalism than four years' reading of Soviet texts.
Pavel comes from Tbilisi, where his father is a high official in Pravda of Georgia. Once a month, a brother brings him a package from home containing smoked meat, jars of pickled delicacies and three bottles of home-brewed vodka, against which all Soviet newspapers, his father's included, wage a fierce, permanent campaign. Pavel's greatest problem is whether to follow in the paternal footsteps—and use his influence—toward a Party career or to struggle alone to become the artist he would like to be.
And there is Semyon, who is not, however, a friend, but for some reason an antagonist and a tutor. Semyon has no friends. Sometimes he seems to have no physical substance. He is all brain waves, nervous tension and irritation: the Doom of the Intelligentsia incarnate.
I think I see as much of him as anyone in the dormitory— which speaks of his terrible loneliness, for he is impossibly distant from me despite our hours together. Hours entirely tete-a-tete, for if a third person approaches, Russian or foreigner, anyone except Chingiz, he slinks away, without a good-bye or acknowledgment of the intruder (but directing an evil glare at me). To avoid this, he almost always contrives to see me after midnight.
The first time was frightening. He slipped into my room without knocking one night when Viktor was at his dacha. When I awoke, my traveling clock's luminous hands indicated 2 a.m.
Notes from My Window X 55
Switching on the overhead light, Semyon walked toward the bookcase. I'd never seen him before, or anyone so loathsome. He had an embryo's body and ballooned forehead: facial skin stretched taut over visible skull, scalp depositing live flakes on pathetic shoulders. He was clearly much older than the typical student, like a veteran circus dwarf among newcomers. A nervous twitch clutched his lips, revealing stubs of chlorine teeth.
Without more than a (scornful) glance at me, he ran his eyes over my bookcase like a thief contemplating new loot. He took down three or four volumes by Trotsky and Deutscher (among the most heretical, therefore the most interesting and dangerous, of the country's hundred thousand banned books; it was only through a friendly diplomat that I dared get them in) and opened to their title pages to check the editions. Then he selected several other studies of Russian history, tucking them under the decomposing sack of wool and canvas that served as his jacket. Finally, he acknowledged me.
"I n-need a book c-called The Agrarian Foes of B-bolshevism by Radkey, the American, and the 1-last edition of Kerensky's Russia's Turning P-point, p-published in 1970. I expect you can obtain them. I'll be b-back to check n-next week at this t-time, when I will return these."
"Who are you? What are you doing here? Books like that can get you into trouble."
With a leer—although he might have intended it as a smile—he was gone, ashes from his trembling cigarette leaving a trail on the floor.
It was months before I found out anything about him. He seems to have no animal needs: I've never seen him eat, sleep, or use the toilet, and I can't picture him in the cafeteria actually mixing with other students. After we've talked for several hours, he sometimes pours himself some water from the washbasin and drinks a few sips. (Disliking myself, I wash the cup with soap afterwards.) Otherwise, he feeds on a surprisingly expensive brand of tobacco, books, and a kind of nihilist self-torture best portrayed in the doomed souls of The Possessed.
Just twice—the second time when a sensational rumor about a Politburo conflict was circulating and I wanted the opinion of Moscow's best analytic mind—have I visited him. The smell of
56.^MOSCOW FAREWELL
the clique's dens after a hard night is disagreeable enough, but Semyon's room had the stench of a condemned man's cell. The deposit of his scalp coated the sheets. Like beach party refuse, sticky jars and tins were scattered on stacks of books. In one corner was a pile of rotting laundry. These unwashed clothes, including several white shirts, were a mystery, for I've never seen Semyon in anything but his prison-like gray suit, sagging with dirt. The puzzle of why the Sanitary Commission (appointed by the student government to make weekly rounds of all the rooms) tolerates Semyon's filth is more intriguing. Perhaps they want to spare themselves the sight—or have been told to give him special treatment? How else is he left in peace—although watched—to live his asocial, even "antisocial," life?
He appears in my room once a week after I've switched off the light, always in quest of more volumes whose possession, especially as Brezhnev and company intensify their suppression of dissent, might be used as evidence in criminal proceedings. He never asks for this literature but demands it as his right.
"It is your d-duty as a citizen of the free world to supply the intellectual m-material I require."
There is something more sinister about Semyon than even the cynicism, scorn and smoldering hate that sputter out of him. But he is also the only genuinely brilliant man I know, and more erudite and lucid about political affairs than all my professors together. From tourists and exchange students, "underground" archives and Moscow's network of dealers in "rare" (read "prohibited") books, he's obtained and absorbed an immense body of literature in English, German, French and Swedish on all aspects of history, sociology, politics and philosophy. (Although his reading knowledge of these self-taught languages is excellent, he can barely utter an intelligible sentence in any of them.) Semyon thinks much of this scholarship has merit only in comparison to Soviet drivel. Human motivation, he says, is too complex for successful analysis, certainly by New England political scientists who feel neither Russia nor Marxism, and whose interpretations are burdened by academia's self-perpetuating pedantry. To demonstrate this, he takes an event such as the collectivization of agriculture—incomparably more brutal, traumatic and significant to the country, he claims, than the Stalinist