Leonid belongs to this category precisely. Some of his friends have left, and even his well-established parents are locked in the frightening debate of whether to throw everything up and face the persecution accompanying an application to emigrate. But the meek young man himself has pledged never to "quit." The last thing he'll become, he says, is another unemployed Israeli intellectual. "They have a surplus already, while Russia goes hungry."
"But why subject yourself to abuse from boys half your worth?" I repeated. ''You have no illusions about inherent proletarian wisdom. Is it masochism?"
He hesitated again and I was sorry I'd pressed him. Day by day, he was being grinded between the clique's "anticosmopoli-tan" arrogance and soaring Jewish tribalism. "Because I want to be a writer," he said at last. "I want to write about the Russian people, and these are real ones, not the sophisticated types my family has always known. The truth frightens my parents largely because they've always hidden from it—masked it with political dreams. . . . Besides, I like the boys. Underneath, they like me. They're my best friends."
And they are: for Y^conid personally, the clique has only respect and affection. They are unhappy when Lenya, as they call him, spends the night at home instead of squeezing in to share one of
Notes from My Window ~~^ 19
their cots. Once they actually postponed a party because flu had him bedridden.
As for drinking, Leonid himself is a slouch only in comparison to the clique's hard core. The boy-intellectual started in order to be accepted and to demonstrate his affinity for the muzhik, but by now enjoys inebriation in and for itself.
"If you lived here, you'd drink too. It's less the thing to do than the thing you must do. Vodka is essential to everything."
To pursue his interest in "real Russians," Leonid would like to live with the clique rather than in the grandish family apartment, but manages only occasional nights sharing one of their narrow cots. Students whose families reside within fifty kilometers of the University must live at home even if they'd prefer the dormitory (just as Muscovites may not take a room in a Moscow hotel). This restriction reflects practical as well as political needs: even without the Moscow contingent of students, the dormitories are badly overcrowded. The University's enrollment, like that of almost all Soviet institutes, strains its physical plant.
Next door live three girls in a room meant for two: Raya, Ira and Masha. Coarser than Chekhov's Three Sisters, they provoke the occasional association nevertheless, specially in their delight at inhabiting Moscow after wholly provincial childhoods. Raya and Ira, who share the same plainness and freckle patterns, spend their spare time sewing curtains, doilies and what they think are pretty little things for their bathroom. (Why no pretty dresses for themselves?) Stendhal novels opened, they listen to Tchaikovsky on the portable record player for which they saved all last year.
Sometimes they attend one of the Saturday dances in honor of Soviet-Burmese Friendship Day, the Fifty-fifth Anniversary of the Young Communist League and similar holidays featuring a revolutionary or peace-and-friendship theme. The evening begins in the main auditorium with political lectures, expressions by Asian and African students of gratitude for the magnanimity of Soviet foreign policy, academics citing the latest production targets—cement production will be increased threefold by 1977!—and a professor of literature holding forth on the current
20^MOSCOW FAREWELL
slogans. Then the main event itself, which, in the central building's main hall of columns and a splintering floor, reminds me of my parents describing their 1930s dancing days: a big, sloppy student band playing that kind of fox-trot, boys and girls displaying their Sunday best—purple dresses and ties with metallic threads—and hundreds of couples swaying almost in time to the beat while crowds of singles eye each other across the floor.
"She's not bad, the one with that belt."
"Are you serious? Scary as war."
"And gives. She loves to put out."
After their afternoon of ironing blouses and washing their hair, Raya and Ira arrive looking less attractive than almost anyone else and move quickly to a corner. Their spirited talk there is about the same subjects, and in the same tone, as all day and all week. After dancing with each other half a dozen times, they leave together, arm in arm. Do such girls still exist in America? The homely but kindly ones, waiting for husbands without a word of distress, a hint of complaint or, of course, of aggressiveness? I'm always too embarrassed to thank them, as I'd like to, for being their unadorned selves.
That Masha gets on beautifully with them is a case of total opposites attracting. Raya and Ira leave early for class, holding hands and stopping en route for a cafeteria bun and a glass of muddy coffee; Masha, on the other hand, sleeps until eleven if possible (despite the strict requirement, accompanied by elaborate machinery for strict enforcement, that attendance is obligatory at all lectures). Masha then knocks at my door, her yawning face puffed by too much sleep, and, when Viktor's at class, comes in to breakfast on Nescafe and an American cigarette. A strong, sourish smell surrounds her, proclaiming who she is—a miner's daughter—and the spicy foods she likes to eat: an intriguing scent to someone raised with Colgate and Arrid. Tipped by wide purple nipples, her breasts swing heavily under the gauze of her nightdress. Masha is a geology student and my oldest female Russian friend. When she was young, she says, she adored making love. Now she can take it or leave it—nothing personal intended. Next month she'll be twenty.
Notes from My Window^21
On the day Masha and I broke the ice as neighbors, she told me about her first love. Amply developed physically, she was otherwise a schoolgirl in uniform and braids whose knowledge came from chaste novels and classmates' reveries. She did dream about romance—but more about Ulanova and Plisetskaya, for she was attending a special high school for ballet. (Masha a ballerina? With that low-slung bottom and the matching Russian thighs? Photographs of her at sixteen, when this happened, indicate that she had already acquired her womanly sponginess, together with a lower body designed more for cross-country skiing than for the stage. Nevertheless, her teachers assured her she had promise.)
This was in her native Perm, the industrial center of the middle Urals, which is off limits to foreigners because of defense plants and military installations. In such "closed" cities, the role of the secret police is significantly greater than elsewhere in Russia, another way of saying it is very great indeed. The KGB closely watches all aspects of municipal life: roads into the city, airports, streets and squares, and every institution on these same streets and squares. The central headquarters for the huge staff required for this myriad activity was a large building some fifty yards from young Masha's school.
It had a staff cafeteria, of course. Every Soviet institution has its basement cafeteria—one of many reasons why cities are so bare of places where a private citizen can eat. When this one was closed for repairs and repainting, several junior agents walked next door for dinner, to the opera theater's canteen. One day, Masha's class, which had been rehearsing for a recital on the theater's stage, was also eating there. As the lusty girl with the face flushed by her pirouettes stood in line at the counter, a young man approached—who, however, did not seem young at all to the sixteen-year-old. It was the handsomest of the agents.
"That's a terrific pair of tits, lassie—and a luscious ass. Shall we road-test it this afternoon?"
This was not the first time Masha had heard such words. Like most city girls, she had accustomed herself early to propositions and sneered obscenities by toughs loitering in courtyards and back streets. But no man had ever explored her eyes while