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mentioning her private parts. And such a fine-looking man, with clean blond hair and an open face! Why did he talk that way? Did he suppose she was no longer a virgin?
Blushing fiercely, she wondered where to hide. Then something wholly unexpected and even more pleasant happened: he blushed to the same hue. It was clear (he explained later) that he'd misjudged her; he regretted his insult. He hadn't even checked out her face at first—only the body, which certainly looked of age and experience to pop straight into bed.
Still intrigued, he recommenced on an entirely different tack. He carried her tray to her seat, withdrawing immediately so as not to embarrass her before her girl friends. Leaving his friends, he waited outside the canteen and persuaded her to meet him after class. Walking her home, he made her laugh. It was a week before they actually slept together: seven unhurried days and evenings of courting, coaxing, reassuring and good times, filled with as many movies and meals together as they could sneak time for. By then he had grown fond of her, and she, needless to say, loved him breathlessly. He was a hail-fellow-well-met, liked by the town's successful young men, not least because of his repertoire of political anecdotes. (A KGB man joking about the Soviet system? Yes; and less improbable than Masha's dancing ambition.) Charming and unusually energetic, he drank moderately, spent freely and treated Masha with tenderness and respect.
And made love to her wildly. Never, he exulted, had he known such passion; certainly not with his wife, a good-looking, well-dressed blonde whom, however, he didn't like even before, as now, she became a source of guilt and resentment. For hard as he tried to remain a husband to her and good father to their boys, he was increasingly entranced by Masha and soon loathed time spent at home. Although unfaithful to Masha as well as to his spouse—he couldn't help it, he told her—his other conquests were mere one-shot pickups. On top of everything, family finances virtually collapsed under the drain of entertainment and gifts for Masha. To the wife who formerly budgeted his monthly pay, he brought home nothing.
His superior officers posed the greater problem. To maintain the KGB officer's public image of a hardworking, clean-living
Notes from My Window^23
Builder of Communism marching in the vanguard of poUtical and ideological campaigns, all drinking, joke-telling and fornicating are kept scrupulously private. The behavior of Masha's man caused increasing displeasure at headquarters. The couple had been seen in the city's handful of restaurants. Their affair was far too open; talk swelled about the failure to uphold family-man standards—and about Masha's age. He'd even ignored friendly front-office advice to drop her. Divorce was out of the question: an agent who leaves his wife, especially for a younger woman, is a discredit to the service. Something had to be done.
A less popular and competent officer might have been discharged. Masha's man was offered alternatives: accept transfer to a distant city or resign. Masha begged him to think of his family and career—and he agreed. Their last evening together foundered. In the morning, he left for his new post two thousand kilometers away, and she never heard from him again. A year later, there was an epilogue. Masha was in trouble for associating with a young chemist who read and passed around Andrei Sinyavsky's On Socialist Realism. Out of affection for his departed protege, the KGB captain conducting the investigation dismissed her with a warning. Nothing incriminating entered her dossier.
I hadn't intended to dwell so on the KGB. This is the style of the diplomatic crowd, belaboring its idee fixe. (My main grudge against the Embassy is grounded in its security lecture the day after my arrival, whose dwelling on "sexual fraternization" dangers gave me weeks of frustration and a mortifying hour of impotence at my first serious attempt with a puzzled Russian girl.) Even now, much of the American colony remains constantly ALERT, refusing to set foot in a Russian apartment. Provocations are indeed staged; but what really terrible thing can happen to someone with diplomatic immunity? But, paradoxically, this preoccupation does reflect a partial truth about the secret police. The same isolation that shields Embassy officers from the institution's "human" side—KGB agents are people, after all; viz. Masha's paramour—also prevents them from personally seeing how thoroughly police penetrate daily life.
Last week, a school friend of Raya's passed through Moscow
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from their native town and told the story of a neighboring family's distress. It began when their cottage burned to the ground, the blaze consuming their last book and wooden spoon. In despair, the widowed mother of three approached the local Red Cross for assistance, and her persistence was rewarded with fifteen rubles—food for a week. "But the Red Cross is supposed to help; it's supposed to be for emergencies just like mine," she wrote in gentle protest—adding, in a petition to her local Soviet, that during her own dozen years as a volunteer member at her factory, her dues alone exceeded the sorry offering. The result was a KGB visit and warning that continuation of such attempts to "create a disturbance" would be dealt with as an antisocial act. "How," asked the officer in charge, "will imprisonment help your children?"
My mistake was to have pictured the KGB crushing only political dissent, whereas any little display of any kind of independence may incite them. At the same time, there's a wider area of uncertainty and more room for play than I'd expected. It's less sinister when you know it, and more depressing.
It's cosy to have women students in the dormitory. Quarters are assigned helter-skelter in the Russian way, with men and women often in adjoining rooms. For four years in the 1960s, women were segregated in a specially guarded wing of the main building. Now that the sexes are together again as they should be, there is speculation about what caused their seclusion and why it was abandoned. Three theories are popular. It is said that foreign students, who began arriving in numbers in the late 1950s, could not take the mixed arrangements in stride; their antics and tittering warned the authorities of damage to the University's reputation. Alternately, it is argued that a shocking number of (free and legal) abortions proved the need for remedial action. But later, segregation was found not to have appreciably reduced the demand on the University clinic, perhaps because hundreds of male students managed to sleep in the women's section every night. (Of course another elaborate system of check-in and check-out operated to prevent this, including watchwomen at the entrances and midnight patrols
Notes from My Window ^25
checking rooms. But where else is it so easy to fool or bribe the checkers by distracting attention, switching documents, sliding a chocolate bar into a granny's pocket? Or, if you're caught, to plead your way—"I throw myself at your mercy, please-oh-please don't be cruel to me"—out of being reported? Petty Soviet authority is often a peasant babushka, unquestioning in political faith, impervious to logic, but with a heart waiting to be moved so she can forgive her errant charges. In any case, hordes of men sneaking into the women's section was acknowledged to be a disturbance greater than those of the old system.)
But now a new theory is gaining sway concerning the first secretary of the University's Party organization. A Georgian obsessed, like most men of his nation, about female virtue in his family, he became anxious when his own darling daughter was about to enter the University: clearly, the traditional dormitory arrangements would not do for her. With a lofty preamble about Communist morals, he issued the segregation ukase. In vain, the University's Young Communist League protested on humanitarian grounds, as did several deans on bureaucratic ones: scattering students of the same faculties increased paperwork. Unhappy years passed, ended at last by a happy discovery that the Georgian had been stealing and reselling textbooks and office supplies (or, in another version, that he persisted in speaking well of Khrushchev). Dismissed after a confidential Party investigation, he was ordered to an obscure Siberian post while the old system was quietly restored. Sic in Muscovy res geruntur. Sic, in any case, is the nature of the rumors.