The main entrance fronts on Kalinin Prospekt, a hundred yards south of the Central Military Department Store. Rows of Zils and new black Volgas are parked in an inlet between the two institutions, their chauffeurs waiting hours in the cold with the help of cigarettes and cheap novels. The cars are assigned to several high commands and war colleges in adjacent side streets,
SO^MOSCOW FAREWELL
and from time to time, a gold-braided general appears, a boulder of a man with an ankle-length overcoat and a face bloated by peasant choler and peasant success. Bulling his way through knots of trudging shoppers, he disappears behind the drawn curtains of his sedan, like a caricature of himself.
The other exposed beam of the building faces a stark asphalt artery for cars and trucks speeding toward the Moscow River. A short walk down this icy avenue—still called Makhovaya by old Muscovites, although it's been renamed Prospekt Marx—rises the former Pashkov House, an elegant eighteenth-century palace with a memorable rotunda. This was the site of the Rumyanstsev Museum, a private collection nationalized after 1917 to become the Lenin Library's foundation. The great state institution has grown phenomenally since: two thousand seats for readers (the guides intone); three thousand employees and two hundred and fifty kilometers of shelves. Very big, very rich, very revered.
At the entrance, a metal grating is built into the pavement, designed for hot air to be blown through and melt the snow from users' boots. But something is permanently wrong with the mechanism: what air does appear has the force and warmth of human breath, causing mounds of gritty slush to pile high every morning—and more work than ever for the cleaning women. Bent over the foyer floor, they sop up the mess with grimy rags and mops.
Above the grating stands a block of doors with the weight of a fortress's outer portals; it takes the full force of your body— oomph!—to swing one open. There are eighteen in all, positioned six to a set in outer, middle and inner rows, a yard or so apart. But only one door in each row is ever unlocked—at opposite ends, to keep out the cold as people enter and leave. Because you never know which one is in service on a given day, you must yank at severaclass="underline" one of the country's hundred daily tests of your patience, endurance and strength.
I used to wonder about this while struggling through the maze each morning. Why do they always humiliate you? If doors can't be used normally, why don't they at least post signs indicating which ones work? Why build grandiose entrances—twenty-four
The Lenin Library^81
portals, for example, at the University's "parade" entrance— only to make you grope and squeeze your way through like a laboratory rat? (Half the front doors to everything in Moscow are permanently locked. Unless you're in some foreign delegation, you must search for a grimy staircase—appropriately called "black" in Russian—somewhere at the back.) A.nd if protection against the cold is really the purpose, why do they keep the system operating throughout the summer? Even in the minor, nonpoliti-cal matters, convenience for the public is the last consideration. Moscow's entire center is closed to stage some old Bolshevik's funeral and a hundred thousand unwarned shoppers freeze on cordoned-off streets. Metro stations are cattle-car packed, but one of the escalators is shut off on bureaucratic schedule, forcing you to butt in even harder toward the working one and to feel even more misused and helpless. Why the vast expenditure for show everywhere, and the maddening disregard for how things actually work?
Still, the Lenin Library is more comfortable than most buildings. And the time I waste finding my way into it and bemoaning such affronts to my dignity postpones the moment when I must open my books. Russia supplies so many good excuses for your own procrastination and failures.
The room just inside the entrance is equipped with the usual petitioning window for offices that receive the public: a small opening—at chest level to reduce the petitioners to a suitably humble crouch—with a wooden cover for slamming shut when the bureaucrat inside wants to terminate a too-persistent supplication. The line for passes to use the library begins here and curls around the waiting room's walls, which are lined with library instructions-cum-prohibitions and posters illustrating Lenin's love of learning. The last person to join the line, a breathless woman with a briefcase, is solicitously reassured by her antecedent that the wait will be less than an hour.
The first person, a large man with an asthmatic wheeze, is pleading his case at the window. He must use the library for a week, it's essential for his research. He's come all the way to Moscow for this, and his institute is counting on his report. . . . But the secretary with the stringy hair and limp cardigan is unmoved.
82.^MOSCOW FAREWELL
She's sorry, she says—bored even with the bureaucrat's satisfaction of being haughty to aspirants—but rules are rules; he doesn't have the proper documents.
"How can I get all those signatures now? I told you, my institute's in Kharkov. I just came from there."
"And I suppose you can go back? The regulations weren't made yesterday, and we're not changing them today. Signed and stamped statements from . . ."
(Under his breath): "—and grab your mother by her fucking
leg-"
"... your organization explaining on what grounds their request for you is based. Full details. We can't let people in off the street, Citizen."
"Just a week. Three or four days. I'm asking you."
Suddenly the secretary's contempt elevates to rage. "You are wasting my time. Citizen. You are not going in. next!"
The man moves away with no discernible expression, stops, returns to the waiting room and joins the end of the line for another try.
The lines in the main foyer are shorter but take more time. Eight or ten of them stretch from the vast open cloakrooms on both sides, where users of the library must leave their outer clothing. For it is gravely nekultumo to enter an office (or a theater—and, in the case of prudes, a living room) in outerwear; and whatever was bad manners under the ancien regime, the new Soviet functionaries fear and despise more than Wall Street or a free idea. Therefore the operation of divesting oneself of overcoat, overshoes, scarf, hat and gloves is performed a hundred million times a day at the entrance to every public building; performed solemnly, for it is as much a social ritual as a matter of convenience or, as is sometimes argued (with reference to germs transported in overcoats), of public health.
The holdup in the library is caused by an insufficiency of hooks to accommodate the daily legion of readers. All are taken by nine o'clock, just as every chair of every Moscow restaurant will be occupied twelve hours hence. The elderly attendants, therefore, gossip among themselves, read handed-along newspapers and sip tea to pass the time behind their counters. They can do nothing until someone leaves the building and claims his
The Lenin Library X 83
things, liberating a hook for the person at the head of one of the Hnes. Knowing they may have to wait until lunch time, those near the end of the lines make use of their hours. Upright and sweating in their overcoats, they read their current "queuing" books, stuffing scraps of notes into their pockets.
Sometimes I wait with the Russians too: it is another way to postpone my work while feeling virtuous. I tell myself I'm learning something about local life by living it as a native. But this morning I won't waste the time. Two good hours remain before lunch, and I feel clearheaded and determined: this is the day I'm going to shake off my inertia. I make my way to the counter on the left and ask to be served next. (This is my right as a foreigner, and I'm encouraged to exercise it to jump lines at restaurants, movies, theaters and stores. But it too is part of the syndrome of show-before-people. Why does the Soviet government excoriate the Western bourgeoisie in every newspaper, lampoon them vulgarly or viciously in every other cartoon—then bow and scrape to them shamelessly when they appear on Soviet soil?)