S^MOSCOW FAREWELL
and work. With his father, brother and brothers-in-law, he is adding a second room to the dacha for the sake of the wives (the clan's cooks, cleaners and driving force for upward mobility) and the children, the revered little heirs. For the men, there is a large pond on the other side of the village with muddy water but delicate-fleshed pike.
Obsessed by the twelve-by-fourteen-foot construction project, Viktor resents the intrusion of academic and Party obligations on his thoughts and time. (Although he attends every class and meeting of his Party section, I've never seen him open a textbook except when an exam was approaching. But sometimes he'll read a spy novel or his favorite sports magazine before dropping off to sleep at ten o'clock.) He enthuses about the joys of a country place, remonstrates against the outrageous price of lumber, describes how best to bribe an electrician to take a day off" from his legal job. (The last Party session inveighed furiously against such corruption.) He can discourse too on the intricacies of plumbing and cesspools—for the new "wing" includes an internal water closet!
He's also fascinated by my toilet kit—stainless steel razor blades provoked his first suspicion about the inherent superiority of a socialist economy—and empties my aerosol cans of shaving cream in surreptitious play. After a long struggle with his self-control, he mumbled a request for one for his father's birthday. Scotch tape, ballpoint pens and my immersion heater to boil water for instant coffee also enchant him, but he turns up his nose at the toilet paper I obtain at the American Embassy commissary. "Too dainty," he complained, returning to the standard University product: ripped-up eights of yesterday's Pravda. On the other hand, the highly impressionistic drawing I bought from my friend Zhenya, an "underground" painter, leaves him speechless.
Viktor makes sure I'm out when, every ten days or so, he brings a girl to the room for fornication. He doesn't want me to acquire an unseemly view of Communist morality, which he's supposed to represent. Or maybe it's the girls themselves he'd rather I didn't meet. I've caught sight of several when, after the event, he'd be prodding one of them down the corridor toward the emergency stairs, tugging her anxiously away from the
Notes from My Window ^9
elevator in case a car containing an acquaintance should arrive. The girls are among the University's homeliest, and never from our department (called the Juridical Faculty). He rarely sees one a second time and never provides supper. Having safely seen the sweetheart out, he returns to the room, runs through a set of Red Army light calisthenics and lingers in the shower, repeating to himself a list of things to do.
My friends warn me that Viktor weekly informs the appropriate authorities about my visitors, activities and ideological inclination, just as he reported on his fellow soldiers in the role of company stool pigeon. Somehow this fails to disturb me. I'm told too that he probably describes me as dull-witted and harmless because this is quickest and easiest for him. He wants to avoid writing supplementary reports about any transgressions he might name and, above all, more intensive surveillance assignments that would bite into the family weekend. On the other hand, I think I sometimes see in him a certain disappointment that I'm not the slick ideological subversive he has been educated to expect.
This morning, he was up as usual before seven o'clock to polish his city shoes and darn a pair of khaki socks. Having noticed I'm not feeling my best, he presented me with a saucer of his mother's delicious apple jam, made from the fruit of a tree bordering the family garden. Then a second saucer with a glass of tea. "Gosh," he said in response to my praise of the jam. Yes, it's his smile I like best. And he likes me because he knows I don't care, so he needn't feign an interest in his legal studies.
I turn on the radio and listen for a moment, lying on my daybed and looking at the black-bordered pinup of Gagarin above Viktor's desk. (Strange how this cheapest, ugliest lump of furniture, like all my beds everywhere, has become my closest friend, although its grease-stained mattress cover made me gag when I first arrived and I could hardly touch it before, let alone after, its dusting with bedbug powder during the presemester general cleanup.) The radio transforms every voice into a thick buzz, making it tricky to follow even the news, whose phrases I know by heart.
Actually, it's not a proper radio but a speaker that transmits
10^ MOSCOW FAREWELL
Radio Moscow from a plug in the wall; like most hotels, restaurants, offices and apartment houses, the University has been wired with rediffiision points throughout, enabling the Whole Truth to ring in every room. Violins soar and the announcer's voice grows throaty: the program is about a retired machinist's love for his old lathe; and through the lathe, his factory; and through the factory, his Soviet Motherland and Lenin, "our eternal Vladimir Ilich, who is truly more alive than the living." Radio Moscow's correspondent affects profound emotion at the veteran worker's patriotism, and excerpts of his interview are transmitted, crudely spliced and laden with rallying cries, a precise copy of a hundred increase-production interviews broadcast all day, every day, and supplemented by commentary for anyone who misses the point. "Our factory carries the sacred name of Lenin; we couldn't fail our socialist duty. . . . The most satisfying day of my life was when we were judged worthy of the title. Brigade of Communist Labor. . . . An honest man loves his factory like his family, his Homeland . . ."
The music matches the ceremonial cliches. Pretending his ardor is out of control, the announcer breaks in. "Comrades! We are devoting our utmost efforts to greet the New Year of our beloved Socialist Motherland as Lenin teaches us, with new dedication and success on all fronts of labor productivity! In this way we show our heartfelt thanks to our Leninist Homeland, the world's first socialist state—and to our dear, native Communist Party, inspiration of all progressive people. Lenin inspires each of us to do his very best ..." It's less the message itself than its morning-to-midnight incantation that has anesthetized part of my reason. This is no country, but a crypt. Everyone in it is a dervish being whipped up for self-sacrifice.
The next vignette is about a North Sea fishing captain who has voluntarily increased his socialist norm in honor of the second "decisive" year of the "historic" new Five-Year Plan—and bagged a bigger catch than ever, "as if Vladimir Ilich himself was guiding the crew." Then a little sketch about stitchers in a clothing factory mobilizing all their thoughts to increase labor productivity and regretting they weren't there to sew shirts for dear Vladimir Ilich while he was alive. It's so bad that Viktor, a devotee of propaganda soap operas, asks me to turn it off. He has
Notes from My Window^ 11
finished breakfast and stripped to his bloomer-Uke black under-shorts—the standard, flyless Soviet model of vinegary acetate—in preparation for a wash. Last night, he interrupted our aimless conversation to declare he's keeping an eye out for a wife, damn hard to find among modern city girls who know zilch about running a thrifty house. "The University ones can't open a can by themselves and feel too important to learn. Yet I'm for women working, so what's the answer? You've got to have equality, everybody building Communism. But women are happier in a kitchen than in an office. It could cause trouble, this diverting them from their natural purpose."
The clique at the end of the corridor demonstrably ignores Viktor, the "hopeless square." Although somewhat disconcerted by this—his age and Party membership should make him our floor's ethical leader—he's come to terms with his unpopularity, counting its compensations: he would bitterly resent keeping up with the clique in expenditures for tobacco and drink. He shakes his head in saddened puzzlement at their camp affectations: quoting obscure hack writers of the worst Stalinist periods and smoking the cheapest papirosi in imitation of Volga riverboat bums. He can't even understand their idiom, a supercharged student-underground hodgepodge of jazz, criminal and labor-camp jargon. It's the latest smart way of talking and requires introducing everything with an exaggeratedly drawled pronunciation of the phrase "personally speaking." "Personally speaking, I could go a glass of tea"—or, "have a pee." "Personally speaking, Charles de Gaulle was the President of France." Although my Russian is now adequate for most conversations, I often fail to catch even the gist of their apparently riotous exchanges, and they are delighted when they can keep up such banter for several minutes without my understanding a word of it. But I've managed to learn a few of the more fathomable terms: a "hammer" means great guy; "old slipper," a swinging chick; "boiling derby," a smart kid.