That winter, his mother's daily bread ration was two hundred and fifty grams (roughly nine ounces); his own, half that. Every day, she gave him half her own— and he seized it, knowing she was starving to death, like granny. She died of pneumonia in March. Semyon grew up in orphanages, drawing attention to himself by his precocity and urge to hide.
"Perhaps he'd have been troubled anyway," said Chingiz. "But war made it certain. His first perception of the world was in a city that suffered more than any other in modern history. He was intelligent enough to understand that he wanted his mother's crust more than he wanted her to live. . . . Yes, we won the war,
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survived the purges; but the damage to the living sometimes exceeded that to the forty milHon dead."
Last month, Semyon's interest was piqued in Freud and he set out to obtain something of his legally. There had been a rumor—one of the daily clusters of rumors—that despite the general intellectual constriction, censorship was being quietly relaxed in selected disciplines considered necessary for the country's development. In the Lenin Library, Semyon tested this by submitting a slip for A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis together with requests for eight Soviet works on Marxist-Leninist Pavlovian psychology, most containing indignant attacks on Freudianism. Producing the approved books, the librarian made no mention of the Freud.
"Where's the ninth?" asked Semyon, deadpan. With a cautionary squint, the librarian said she could not issue "such material." Semyon persisted. She pointed to a door behind her counter.
The office was sparsely furnished. Lenin's portrait hung low over the desk; beneath it sat a man in a pulpy suit. He studied Semyon's request, then his petitioner's splotchy countenance.
"Why do you want to read Freud?"
"I d-don't want to read him. It's essential—for my work."
"I do not think it is essential. Dozens of our texts will explain what you need to know about Freud. You understand his 'theories' are pornographic and unacceptable?"
"I think I do."
The official frowned. "Listen, young man. I'll give you this book if you insist. But take my advice and don't. Why have such things in your record? Be sensible: pick up your other issues and
go."
Which is what Semyon did. The episode, he said, did not refute the rumor about the easing of restrictions. A harder man, or the same one with sterner instructions, would have informed him the book was missing, entering a damaging notation in his dossier.
Semyon encountered a friendlier form of censorship in connection with his honors thesis on the Yalta Conference. It was a hack job, culled from standard Soviet sources and free of any reference
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to scores of Western analyses which Semyon could have demolished—but had no business knowing. Approving a preliminary draft, his tutor suggested that the phrase "the Soviet representative" replace "J. V. Stalin" throughout the text. "Between us, it's safer that way. Why expose yourself? No one knows what the attitude toward Stalin will be by the time you're ready to submit."
Sure enough, the official attitude is steadily hardening—that is, softening toward Stalin's crimes. Publications have resumed praising his "historic work" building socialism and Soviet might, no longer mentioning what used to be called "unfortunate negative factors." Even the scholarly press faithfully supports the rehabilitation by going mute again on huge chunks of history. Semyon's tutor gave sound advice: liberal or conservative, the readers of the Yalta thesis need not trouble themselves with the political implications of mentioning a former Great Father by name.
The line shifts. Yesterday's saints become today's Judases, then heroes again. History is hastily rewritten to document the latest immutable truth. But a portion of the slag heap of superseded literature finds some use. In a reeking latrine the other day, a copy of the obsolete 1967 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was braced between the tiles and drain pipe, its pages extolling N. S. Khrushchev's inspiration to progressive mankind to be ripped out for toilet paper as needed. But no irony was intended: the convenience was an unconscious acquiescence to the law of shortage requiring maximum recycling, and acceptance that the yellowing pulp now best serves for this.
But why such emphasis on this kind of observation? Most Russians I know well, on this floor and others, are less keen than I to spot the aberrations of government and state. Here politics is impenetrable, like the low cloud cover sealing us in from one horizon to the other. Something suffered and accepted, not puzzled over or pried into: given, like the weather. It's snowing again, and the radio predicts a—normal—night of twelve to fifteen degrees below freezing.
And so, when Andrei Amalrik received his terrible second sentence last week, the trial's whys and hows were hardly
Notes from My Window ^63
discussed. A few people felt a tug of hurt, the kind Russian peasants experienced when prison convoys trudged past them on their way to Siberia. (Peasant women pressed loaves badly needed by their own families into the desperate prisoners' hands.) Several passionately "literary" students, the lovers of Mandelsh-tam, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, turned aside for a dry cry, and perhaps more people than I know felt wounded. But most neither knew nor cared; and even the "activist" minority produced a low moan rather than shrill noises of shock or outrage. Such tragedies are expected; no one can prevent them. What hurts most is not being able to comfort the victims.
And in a way, some of the same minority are proud of, as well as appalled by, government persecution. Russian life is hard— but isn't challenge the psyche's daily bread? Doesn't the highest satisfaction lie in surviving a difficult environment, winning out over severe obstacles and dangers? It is Russia's paradoxical good fortune that the pressures of her life—weather, war, shortages, tyranny—are external, often producing a unification of self and a rising to the challenge, rather than the anxieties and neuroses germinated by affluent liberalism, where you have only your flabby self to blame. No one need feel confused or guilty about the too-soft life here; primeval forces prevail, to be faced and overcome.
A bony girl at the end of the corridor is soon to leave the country forever. After nearly a decade, and the new arrangements between East and West Germany, her exit visa has been granted, and she will join her only surviving relative, an aunt living in Frankfurt, whom the Germans took for slave labor during the war. Even by Russian standards, Olga's life has been unusually cruel. Stalin deported her entire people, the Volga Germans, to Siberia in 1941. Her father died of exposure during the journey; her mother, who built a hut with her bare hands in the wilderness of their exile, succumbed within the year. In their grim settlement, half the children with living parents expired; Olga's orphaned childhood was an animal struggle for existence, won only by her lusty constitution. After the rescinding of the exile in 1957, she continued to bear the stigma of "traitor." Smuggling herself into Moscow, she spent every free hour for years in ministry offices, pleading to join her aunt.
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But now a new theme—Siberia's natural beauty—is modulating her lament of hard times. "Yes, winter was brutal. And in the six weeks of summer, the mosquitoes ate you alive. But the rivers! The lakes and the trees! Germany will have nothing like it. Can it be true I'll never see that glory again?"