As her time to leave approaches, Olga becomes less certain and more nostalgic for the places where she suffered extreme adversity. "How does a person live outside of Russia? My aunt's rich, she has her own apartment and car. But what happens to your insides when everything's so easy? When you can do what you want, buy what you like; everything's there for the asking? Maybe I'll be back home in two weeks."
It's time now to attend to my correspondence. I don't write home often because the outside world has become an illusion, obscured by paralyzing, eternal Russian isolation. By the sense of existing in a separate cosmos, cut off by dusky space and aeons of time: this has contrived to stay in power, despite everything shrinking the twentieth-century world.
The technical marvels exist somewhere here: BE A Tridents from London four times weekly, the BBC Russian service three hours a day. But electronic communications and speed-of-sound jets are as extraneous to our lives as horseflies in this winter landscape. They do not penetrate the ironclad, snowbound Russian remoteness; cannot affect the heavy, fated way of life. Like the dazzling achievements of Soviet science we read of, they are not bogus but exist by and for themselves in some sealed laboratory, and therefore are irrelevant to the likes of us. A brilliant young professor I know works on computer design in the mathematics faculty's research department. But when his wife asks him to bring home some meat, he slips away early to stand on an hour-long line for a ham in an outlying store where his luck has been good before; then stuffs the precious, Pravda-wrapped kilo in his battered briefcase while the counterwoman bends over an old abacus to do her sums. This is the technology we live and understand.
Perhaps it is to the credit of the otherwise lumbering Russian state that it has kept pace with every kind of dizzying technological advance in its methods for preserving the ancient isolation.
Notes from My Window X 65
Telecommunications with the outside are effectively nullified because not one knob on a single control board can be touched without the Party's authorization. The BEA flights are chimerical because even the buses delivering passengers to planes are searched by armed guards, and not one Russian in a hundred thousand can approach as close as the check-in counter. Tapping apparatus clearly superior to the telephone system itself, jamming equipment more powerful than any transmitter—everywhere in modern life, restraint covers progress like paper, in the old game, over rock.
But censorship and controls are not enough to keep us apart. Insouciance and profound passiveness are powerful allies: the internal isolation that hundreds of years of backwardness and hardship has bred into native bones. Russians are cut off" and know it. And if they think of the possibility at all, many do not want to close the gap: too much effort is required, too much disappointment awaits them. Dream as they do of transforming themselves, they fear that any attempt to reach European standards would stop at the visionary talk stage, like the plans of Chekhov's doctors. For, if successful, would the executors not have ceased being Russian? And if they weren't Russian, would there be need for agonizing self-analysis, dreams of shining new worlds and futile crusades?
Life here is different. As on a ship at sea, special rules apply; distinctive prohibitions and dangers condition mind and movements. Although some of this country's distinctions from Europe are subtle, the overwhelming whole is far greater than the sum of its parts. Sometimes I scrutinize people and places in an attempt to define them more sharply; but nothing I can specify in their appearance or moods captures the underlying y^^/m^, every day in every setting, that this is another world. "There are parts of what it most concerns you to know that I cannot describe to you," wrote Plotinus. "You must come with me and see for yourselves." Or, to take a less common quotation, I can cite an underlined first sentence of a Frenchman's book lying on a cluttered, unoccupied desk in the Lenin Library yesterday: "If there is a country in the world that seems destined to remain unexplored and unknown by any other nation, either nearby or far away, that country is surely Russia, at least as far as her
66^MOSCOW FAREWELL
Western neighbors are concerned." The article was written in 1861, the year of the emancipation of the serfs.
For centuries, European residents in Russia have been overpowered by the same sensations. The observations of the Marquis de Custine (French Ambassador to St. Petersburg in the nineteenth century) and Sigmund Von Herberstein (Ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire to Muscovy in the sixteenth century) are as relevant to contemporary attitudes as any analysis of the socialist system and Soviet regime. Both were followed, deceived by obsessively secretive bureaucrats, alternately exhilarated by the irrepressible Russian spirit and horrified by the slovenliness and dirt; both described precisely the sense of wilderness that grips me this minute.
This is why I've lost contact with the outside world and write but a few dutiful lines to America, as if to another planet, every other week. Besides, my mail is opened. Crudely: little drops of brown glue decorate the envelopes, symbolic of Russia's odious acts, and of the coarseness with which she performs them. I confine myself, therefore, to picture postcards and small talk. My correspondents read about the weather and stirring performances at the Bolshoi.
But what would I write if I were free to describe my real feelings? On bad days, I so despise this country and all it stands for that I dream of guiding B-52s to the Kremlin with a flashlight. The honored assistant rector has lied to me outright, announcing blandly that a meeting I'd asked to attend as research, and which was being held that very minute, had been cancelled. My faculty advisor, who is fond of jeering at "bourgeois" scholarly integrity, counsels me to measure Soviet public opinion by "the best documentary evidence": the 99.7 per cent election majorities and unanimous votes of the Supreme Soviet. A professor of political economy cites the New York garbage strike as living proof of the American workers' exploitation and capitalism's disintegration, never mentioning actual wages even before the dispute because he knows that skilled Russian mechanics, who can't strike anyway, earn one-sixth as much.
Not ideological commandments but cynical deceptions like these, on which the country is governed at every level, reduce me to a nonentity. My movements restricted, intelligence sneered at.
Notes from My Window"^67
individuality violated, I choke with rage. How dare they do this to me? I was born a free man! This country is ruled by cousins of the redneck sheriffs of the Mississippi town where I spent a crow-eating summer as a civil rights worker. It's not enough that they can crush you at a whim; they want you to grovel by applauding their lies.
But the subduers of happiness are usually less specific: the weight of everything, the inexorable presence of melancholy and misfortune, the absence of a moment's diversion by a pretty, airy thing. All my childhood presumptions—a four-lane highway of goodness and progress, leading onward and upward for the world and me—are vaporized in this gloom. I spend hours on the daybed, leafing dog-eared copies of Time. Despite the snowfall's chalky reflection on the walls, these are the darkest days—and the longest—I have known.
Sometimes I tell Russians about Paris, Rome, the Greek islands: all the lush places I'll revel in when I return to civilization. I do it for spite, to hit back—unfairly, but in the only way I can—at the coarse hands controlling me. My listeners know they'll never see the color of the Mediterranean, sip a drink in a real cafe, own a suit even like the Barney's sale one I bought specially to wear out here or to give away. Some quiver when questioning me: they're envious, as I intended.
Few suspect that I'm as envious of them: that I often wish that I'd been born to their deprivation and pressure. What they lack sometimes seems inconsequential compared to what they have: ingenuous talk in place of sports cars; homemade singing instead of discotheque noise; hair worn long not to be with it or to conform, but to postpone the sacrifice of thirty kopeks for a haircut; guitars which represent neither revival nor fad—Russians have always played. . . . They are more natural and whole than any young people I've known; their student life is the kind I've always wanted. And this is no less true because caused by Russia's old-fashioned poverty.