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vague patriotic pride. But no one escapes from the tyranny of the freeze. Each step from sheher to street is a slap in the face by searing air. Each buckhng of boots for the venture outside is a reminder to respect your betters. You are humbled by dumb, blunt forces, the parents of Politburo satraps.
Someday, I'll document my insight into the Russian personality. The elements are hostile here; this is the fons et origo of hulking buildings, strident newspapers and absent amenities—of everything that village-bred, disaster-fearing men (for these are the kind who control all public reactions as well as rule) make ponderous, laborious and inimical to public amusement. Where life is a struggle to fend off such giant forces, why build cafes to serve aperitifs or coffee? No matter that even more northerly countries are far less grim; in Russia, encumbered by backwardness, the environment is perceived as hostile. With their mothers' milk, children are given to understand that their hot, cramped homes are love, but that the world outside is essentially unfriendly to human habitation.
The Party unconsciously understands this awful truth, which is why it protests so shrilly to the contrary. A million messages a day about its glorious victories; two generations of pleas, proofs and exhortations about remaking society and forging the New Soviet Man—and all, as they somewhere know, in vain. For Marx himself teaches them that "environment determines consciousness"; and above all, it is the weather which controls the environment, making mockery of their agitated efforts. All the propagandists' exhortations and the people's sacrifices have done nothing to loosen the grip of today's bleak iciness and mood. Pathetic posters proclaiming the achievement of "HAPPINESS!" under socialism hang from every other wall, railing futilely against the pervading sadness; for Russians will not be remade nor their sense of having been mistreated by nature relieved until something drastic is done about the Russian winter. Nor will the quiet sore of guilt from having caused their own troubles be healed—an irrational oppression, as in children who blame themselves for their family's bickering. "Russia is a freak of nature," wrote Dostoyevsky, always stressing how much heavier the psychological burdens are than the merely physical.
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All this I know more certainly than anything tangible I observe. The personal questions are harder: Why am I so at home with this futility and guilt? What pulls me closer to myself here than elsewhere; puts me in communion with the universe through a sense of cosmic depression; allows me to welcome my inner ache?
Masha yawns, scratches her hips and settles into my desk chair, exchanging her empty cup for my shaving mirror and examining her face with undisguised concentration that makes her self-absorption seem artless. Had Huxley not usurped the word, I would have thought of her flesh as pneumatic. Hard work and deep sleep have given it a springy plumpness that somehow magnifies the dimensions of her bottom and breasts.
Yesterday morning, she wasted an hour scouring my room for a mislaid book; although still unfound, it is quite forgotten. Shivering at a gust that has breached the window and grazed her neck, she again affirms that the cold goes right through her. "I detest winter; always have, always will." Yet she apparently hasn't considered wearing something over her redolent nightdress or on her tawny feet.
I promised myself to be in the Lenin Library by now but postpone my departure while she lingers to enjoy another Camel. Happy thoughts dominate her bemusement; a distant smile puckers her chunky lips. Her presence in the room is deeply comforting, as if contact with someone so sound in mind and body will help me pull through my troubles and find my adult feet. Sometimes I think of asking her, this miner's daughter reluctant to stretch her thoughts beyond a given day's physical satisfactions, what I should do to make something of my life. When she's with me, my anxiety about career and reputation loosens its grip; I understand that I needn't be more than what I am. People are really meant to procure and consume their daily bread, raise their children, enjoy their morning Nescafe and thoughts of chicken for Sunday dinner. To live the days as they come without sweating to make some mark of significance—and therefore, without suffering a self-made sense of failure. With a tenth of my prospects for success, riches and worldly stimulation.
74^MOSCOW FAREWELL
Masha is ten times more contented. Unperturbed by the bad, she congratulates herself for the good, and when she's near, I believe I can learn her secret.
"What are you thinking about, Masha?" I've never asked her before, and wonder whether it might be a mistake.
"Oh, nothing. I have to get my boots repaired."
This is declared with a loud blankness that breaks the meditative spell. My regard for Masha sometimes reminds me of a friend who disdains Italian opera because, he insists, the dandified singers trilling dolorous heartbreak are in fact concentrating on their post-performance spaghetti.
"I have to go out this morning," Masha adds. "And my guests are coming," she informs me, using the incongruously dainty slang for the arrival of her period (and probably explaining the source of her sharp smell and uncharacteristic headache). "Can you get me more jiggers?"
Although she could barely believe her eyes when she first saw them mere months ago, she already regards Tampax, the "jiggers," as indispensable. She had never heard of them, had never used more, in fact, than a handful of cotton wool positioned in her panties—even when available, Soviet sanitary napkins are too coarse and too expensive for regular use—until I ran into her one fall afternoon while wandering on a busy street behind Red Square. It was shortly after I'd first arrived; months before I could make sense of the ensuing hour.
Recognized and beamed at, I was gaily invited to join her looking in on a friend in a nearby, green-painted building—a temptation in itself, for each step into a Russian apartment carried the excitement of forbidden adventure. The Embassy had frequently warned of the drugging-and-photographing dangers of risking this alone, and somehow official Russia too made it clear that while Moscow's main streets were open to the likes of me, the people's living quarters were off limits. Entering the musty structure had much in common with visiting a Harlem tenement at midnight, which I once did in tow of a burly black friend.
The apartment behind GUM was less demoralizing than the one on 119th Street, but darker and more threadbare. Following Masha up a dank staircase to an attic, I found myself in the
To Town ^75
company of five young women smoking and drinking cheap wine like sorority sisters. Galya, Maya, Ina and Ida; but there was barely time for these first-name introductions before I triggered the puzzling incident.
As I took off" my coat, my fortnightly bag of purchases from the American Embassy's commissary fell from my hands, revealing, inter alia, a box of Tampax destined for a French girl in the dormitory. The girls' giddy exuberance in retrieving the carton suggested they envisaged a treat of foreign bonbons for their party. My offer of a box of tea bags as a substitute was ignored as hands ripped at the tantalizing Western cellophane, symbol of everything "brand-name"—imported, and therefore deluxe—as opposed to "Sov," the contemptuous epithet for domestic production.
It was Masha who tore off" the lid and sniffed. Perplexed by the unchocolate-y savor, she examined the leaflet—and then experimented. In the failing afternoon light, her large dusky triangle beckoned like eggplant from beneath her raised skirt. What the hell is this, has she forgotten I'm here? Are Russian girls the way Swedish ones used to be imagined? But while my excitement was driven by thoughts of the coming orgy, Masha's was expressed in marvel at the ingenious device. Nonsense, she assured the others, it doesn't hurt a bit. "Doesn't even tickle—it feels nice.'''