Notes from My Window^ 15
in the front oflfices which require higher education and accompanying refinements: the diplomatic service, newspaper and broadcasting editorships, control posts in cultural and educational affairs. Other students will graduate with higher distinction, but the clique's peasant-proletarian lineage will win them the administrative jobs. It's not the working-class pedigree itself that makes people trustworthy here but the attitudes bred by upbringing in laboring communities, untainted by cosmopolitanism—precisely the Russia First animus of these up-and-comers. Bright as they are, the Party knows—because it has arranged— that their education will have done nothing to undermine their fundamentalist patriotism. As they themselves recognize, they will always belong to their villages.
"We'll get ahead," Number Two assured me recently, "because we're in tune with the country. Moscow is the facade; we've always needed facades. But the truth is still the village. Everything comes from the village and is the spirit of the village. Which is why the sons of the clever Moscow intellectuals will be working for us."
This cynicism, a facet of the clique's essential dishonesty, helps put me off" them. But perhaps, on the contrary, they are admirably honest to acknowledge their advantage. Maybe my unease is prompted simply by my being older—or by resentment that, like Viktor, I'm too square to make their grade.
Two nights ago, the clique had their monthly fling in one of the double rooms. The table was laden with sausage, tinned fish, sweating cheese and real butter for their fresh white loaves. The room was as stiffing as a cowbarn in winter. The vodka was consumed in water glasses downed zalpom, eight ounces in one daring gulp. As ritual toasts were shouted and the alcohol relentlessly swilled, the boys' features grew thick along with their voices. Sweat coated their faces, somehow more lurid because of the bitter night outside. They were not twenty-one, but fifty; not even fifty, but ageless. Having joked, fought, screamed, sung, cursed Mother Russia and sworn to die for Her, they were staggeringly, insensibly drunk by ten o'clock. By midnight, having smeared the lavatory's wall tiles with layers of vomit, they were stacked across the cots like cordwood, in each other's arms and oblivion. The Chinese student who lives next door—whose
16^ MOSCOW FAREWELL
presence is a mystery since all his countrymen were sent home ten years ago—was smugly disgusted. "Barbarous Russians. They will never change. We are supposed to learn from them?^''
Much in Russia is opaque, atmospheric, redolent of its great literature; but there is no mystery in the clique's smells. Socks that have been worn all winter inside a single pair of shoes, now polluting the floor like fetid puddles. The shoes themselves, never dry of sweat and slush, with their own distinctive odor. Body odors distilled from cabbage and garlic sausage; tobacco tar seeped deeply into winter skin; the Clorox mustiness of men's dormitories everywhere, heightened by rarely washed laundry and never-cleaned wool. And on the morning after the spree, the vapors of adolescent puke: universal hangover stink, in no way more interesting or agreeable because it reigns here, in enigmatic Russia.
Sprees are held never less than once a month, on someone's birthday, a national or University holiday or payment day for student stipends. Whenever a few rubles come to hand, the clique casts about for a suitable event—Miners' Day or the anniversary of the Mongolian Revolution, in a pinch—to celebrate. That afternoon, money is allocated to food and drink, the purchasing logistics are planned—no less solemnly than for a feast day of the Mohawk nation—and the chosen room is arranged with tables and chairs. The agenda of the party itself varies little. The boys nibble at the bologna and salted cucumbers, clink their glasses and toss them down, emote, bare their souls, become hopelessly maudlin, then turn savage before passing out. It is a pagan celebration, a religious rite; the Russian peasants' quest for periodic escape, salvation, release from this shabby world to something higher and all-encompassing.
Delicacies such as cheese and "Doctor's" brand sausage—let alone vodka—represent a spendthrift extravagance. The party costs at least half their monthly stipend, and during the last ten days of the month they will exist solely on boiled potatoes and "white nights" tea—glasses of hot water with nothing added. ("The tea's zhidok^'' they say, ritually repeating their stale wordplay, "but the host is Russian." In this case, zhidok means both "watery" and "a Yid.") But this only intensifies their anticipation of the next party and broadens their grins while they
Notes from My Window"^ 17
plan how many cans of marinated cod and how many bottles to buy. When a Dutch student suggested they might be healthier and happier on a more realistic budget, they were contemptuous. "What are we, clerks in some goddam office? You save your own money, buy yourself a bookcase. Russians know how to live.""
The clique is often joined by a slightly younger student whose appearance and background are as unlike theirs as was Isaac Babel's from his beloved Cossacks. Narrow-shouldered Leonid wears a clean suit and flesh-colored glasses, and is balding before his voice has fully changed. A cosmopolitan Muscovite, he is the son of well-to-do Jewish intellectuals. His father is a corresponding member of the Academy of Medicine, his mother a distinguished classicist, his older sister a cellist training in the Conservatory. Leonid himself, almost against his will, stands near the academic head of his faculty. He reads a dozen books a week in three languages, and his room in the comfortable family apartment is a substantial library.
When the drinking at the sprees has begun in earnest, a fierce Great Russian chauvinism expands within the boys as if the vodka were an acid producing a gas on contact with the soft metal of their prejudice. And integral to the chauvinism is a deep hatred oiZhidi, the dirty Jews. The first jokes are relatively mild. "I heard the weather was lousy on the Black Sea last summer." "Yeah, those dirty Jews." . . . An old Jew shuffling up Arbat Street is clonked on the head by dislodged fragments of a building's facade. "Goddamit, there's no place for a good brick to fall down in this country." But such witticisms are soon discarded for more direct expression of the clique's drunken wisdom.
"The Jews are scum, they stink up Russia with their sniveling fear and greed." . . . "To straighten out our country overnight, take the plum jobs from the bloodsucking Jews and send them to the front. No, they'd kiss the enemy's ass and sell us for some jewelry." Leonid lowers his eyes and plays with the oilcloth. When he offers a comment about a subject under discussion, he is told to shut his mouth. Everyone knows a Jew's opinion is worthless because a Jew understands nothing but money and hoarding—certainly nothing about Russia or Russians. "We'll ask you when we want to know about Moses."
One morning, when Leonid was catching some sleep in my
IS^MOSCOW FAREWELL
room after an especially hard party, I asked him why he put up with the awfulness. Sparked by the victory of the Six-Day War, fired by hope of a huge immigrant column trudging to Israel, the Zionism of some Jewish students is fierce. Children whose parents kept resolutely "assimilated" households for decades, denying their Jewishness for the higher cause—socialism was going to make Judaism and all "petty nationalism" obsolete—are among the most implacable Israeli patriots, perceiving antisemitism even where it's absent (a considerable feat in contemporary Russia) and sneering disgust at every aspect of Soviet rule. Among many Moscow Jews, not an hour passes without speculation, calculation and agonized deliberation whether to take the do-or-die steps toward leaving—and questions, questions, questions to me, who, as a Westerner, must know what a Tel-Aviv dentist earns in terms of a kilo of stewing beef.