I hand my things to the old attendant when the next hook is freed, p>ocket my metal claim check, squeeze through the one-person-at-a-time railings to the checkpoint guarding the main entrance, display my pass to the scowling, scrutinizing matron behind the desk, collect my daily attendance slip, nod to the smiling, scrutinizing policewoman beside her and mount the wide, worn stairway to Reading Room Number One.
The plaque on the door proclaims:
SCHOLARLY-SCIENTIFIC READING ROOM NUMBER ONE
For Doctors, Professors, and Members of the Academy of Sciences
And, of course, American graduate students. VIP treatment— in the Soviet hierarchy, a doctor, let alone a member of the Academy of Sciences, is an exalted personage—for the likes of obscure me. What a way to cop a birthright! In reverse proportion to the lower standards here, I'm closer to this country's richest and best than I'll ever come in my own.
Scholarly-Scientific Reading Room Number One is my workroom, the place I'm meant to put in my forty hours. A stately
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hall whose wood paneling insures an appropriate solemnity despite large windows on both long sides. Big brown desks—individual, in contrast to those of the Library's lesser reading rooms—with inkwells and lamps of editor's-visor green. Persian runners in the spacious aisles, chandeliers as if designed to spoof everything proletarian-pompous, and Lenin's collected works— in three editions, but not the unexpurgated first—for handy reference on both sides of the room. I love this hushed sanctuary and the headache it gives me: my old friend, the pressure of undone homework.
Maya's on duty behind the counter this morning. She'll be leaving soon for her three months' maternity sabbatical, and if she stays away longer, I'll be back in New York and may never see her again. The bubble on her slender frame has swelled day by day since October, making her face correspondingly more luminous with expectation and motherly pride; sometimes her space-staring gaze makes me want to cry. But Maya herself is no longer crying; she's actually happy that her great tragedy ended as it did. She's even taken to giving me mini-lectures, apparently genuinely oblivious that they deny everything she had been saying, hoping, praying just months ago. Her theme now is the need for maturity, responsibility and compatibility of background in lasting love. Don't marry one of us, she keeps whispering. No matter what she promises or pleads, don't become involved with a Russian girl. Because it can't work: your outlooks would be too irreconcilably different. Even before you'd leave the country, the great burden would be on her. Like white hunters taking native wives, it's always an injustice.
Bending awkwardly when she sees me approach, she fetches my books from the reserved shelves behind the counter. Then she blows a "haaa" of hot breath on her rubber stamp, punches it smartly on my slip, scrawls a big "5" in the corner with a red pencil and hands me the slip together with my books. She recognizes the titles by now: the same five I've had out since last month.
"How about some work. Comrade?" she teases. "You're getting like the old ones." The old ones are elfish men in prewar suits too big for their shrinking bodies, who daily collect and return the same small pile of books. Two are waiting behind me
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now—surely distinguished men to have survived the purges and earned the honor of the use of this hall, but who have become the very picture of an old age of useless scholarship. Their type slumbers and slides toward death everywhere in the world, but somehow seem more archetypal because they are Russian.
I pick up my pile and look for an empty desk near the windows, where the clear light and steady draft will keep me invigorated. How hard it is to work in this room—not only because the conditions are so good and it seems so easy, but also because its air brings on daydreams like the ones induced by dentist's gas. The very pretense that it's a reading room like any other adds to the mystical qualities and sense of encapsulation in this strange country. But enough of this goddam musing. I think of my future and take a deep breath. I will make headway today!
Every few minutes the door opens with just enough noise to draw your head up to see who's entering. The 10:45 arrival is Ilya Alexandrovich. Striding to the counter, he picks up his books and settles his large frame at his usual desk. Within minutes, however, his arm is lying across his books and his head is resting on top, as if they were a pillow. Weariness overpowers him more and more often now, yet he feels it is his duty not to die until his clandestine work is done.
Why Ilya Alexandrovich told me his story is mystif/ing unless you know that Anastasia was with me, and that some people want to reveal their secrets to her. (And, despite his eighty-two years, Ilya Alexandrovich has an eye for pretty girls.) He spied her waiting for me outside the library late one afternoon, and when I appeared, invited us home for tea. Following his brisk pace to his nearby apartment, Anastasia and I wondered what to expect. It was one of those winter dusks of opaque colors and severely beautiful fagades flanking empty streets, as if someone had designed a Winter Palace setting for the coming narration. Inside, Ilya Alexandrovich settled us in heavy armchairs and made the tea himself, serving it and an excellent pepper-vodka with black bread and his own marinated mushrooms. Of course we knew his famous surname, but none of the rumors about him were as strange as his facts. We listened, postponing our questions.
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He was the last living member of one of Russia's most noble families; owners of thirty thousand serfs, holders of respectful attention in the courts of a dozen tsars. As a young man—a latter-day Vronsky, with dark good looks, huge energy, and impeccable lineage—he was sent to the Imperial Naval Academy in Saint Petersburg, a highly select institution that was one of backward Russia's islands of technical and professional excellence, on a par with the best in the West. It was intended as a kind of reform school for the enfant gate, but he trained hard and won firsts.
After graduation and commissioning in 1912, he was assigned to the cruiser Border Guard under Admiral Alexander Vasilevich Kolchak, whose personality would leave a deeper impression on him during the next eight years than even the incredibly tumultuous events the two men were to grapple with together. Kolchak was simultaneously Captain of the Border Guard and flag officer of its squadron in the Baltic Sea; but these were the least of his duties and concerns. At the moment, he was desperately trying to prepare the entire fleet for war with Germany, which he predicted would start by 1915. Matched by towering integrity and power of leadership, Kolchak's energy and intelligence had driven him to involvement in almost every phase of naval operations and strategy, from Admiralty staff" work (where his presence had been the dominating factor before returning, recently, to sea duty) to hydrology and submarines. More than anyone it was he who cast aside the tsarist bureaucracy's mountainous deadweight, inspiring and reorganizing the Navy's rebirth as a modern, technologically oriented force after its catastrophic 1905 defeat by the Japanese—during which Kolchak himself was taken prisoner, suffering from wounds that never fully healed.
With the outbreak of the First World War, Kolchak's stature grew yet greater. On land as well as sea, he was a hero to all younger officers and a teacher of most older ones: a kind of Commander of the Battle Cruiser Squadron (Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty), Commander of the Grand Fleet (Admiral Sir John Jellicoe) and First Lord of the Admiralty (Winston Churchill) in one.
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aide—even, after the Revolution, to Kolchak's native Siberia where, in a much better-known period of his hfe, he commanded one of the Civil War's most powerful and ruthless White armies. When the Admiral was finally defeated in 1920 and dispatched by a Red firing squad in Irkutsk, Ilya Alexandrovich was awaiting his own execution the following morning. He escaped, lived like a hunted leopard for weeks and finally smuggled himself abroad, joining the great White emigration as his great family's sole male survivor of the national bloodletting.