Last night, I again heard one of the University's most popular stories. Unwashed and unshaven, a young law student is bodily in attendance at one of his droning lectures in a large amphitheater. His attention wanders (as does that of his fellow students, who are doodling, chattering and reading novels: it is the rare lecturer anyone actually listens to, if only because most parrot the plodding textbooks). Three rows below and a dozen seats to the right, he spies a pretty girl he'd never noticed before. Scribbling her a note, he has it passed on, hand to hand. "I like your looks. Come to my room tonight at seven o'clock, we'll
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fuck." The well-groomed girl pens her answer in the margin and returns it by the same route. "Will be there at seven. Understood your hint."
The old chestnut always gets a big laugh—because, the students say, it's so true. They're surprised to hear that even after all recent permissive developments, sex at Harvard is less plenteous and informal. And I still wonder at what can be had here almost for the asking.
Some professors apparently have as much trouble as I concentrating on work. Students say the "boss" of Scandinavian languages, for one, is better at philandering than philology. Inviting undergraduates home, he mentions their doubtful grades and "screws us like mad," as a self-confessed victim put it. Other teachers too are known as notorious womanizers, and their conquests, very easy anyhow, are augmented by a tricklet of girl students to them. . . . All this is true, I swear it; but not the implication about my personal riches. Even here—especially here, with robust sex all around me—I manage to jinx things at the last moment, and get less than I should. When I'm blue, I long to bury myself in the oblivion of passion. Like artichokes, Russian femininity seems to grow directly from the earth. Strong, supple arms and the slight bulge of vulvas through skirts beckon with the lure of all the high-school seniors I used to fantasize about. The flesh seems so pliant.
Miner's daughter Masha is the strongest female personality on our floor, but the prettiest girl—the most enchanting I saw anywhere in Moscow until I met my own Anastasia—is sylphlike Natasha. Perhaps, however, her braids distort my judgment. She's the only girl who still wears them—the traditional flaxen plaits that fall to the small of her back, ends gladdened by snippets of ribbon. Sometimes she winds them around her head, exposing her creamy neck. She has a roundish face, limpid eyes and classic Slavic features. Her mouth is almost too perfect for kisses. When she sits in the common room, head tilted, humming to herself, I think I'm looking at the model for a Russian Renoir.
Natasha teeters on the border of serious academic trouble. Her mind wanders, she says—superfluously, for her most characteristic expression heralds this. She wafts along the corridor, day-
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dreaming about her future. Every few days she comes into my room and, if I'm alone, sits on my cot, squeezing her hands and sighing. She is so beautiful and unaware of it that I wish we could fall in love and live happily ever after. Occasionally she talks about her married sister in Moscow—who, as I found when I tried to track her down one day, doesn't exist: there is no building at that address. The thought of schoolteaching, her given destination, appalls her. She hasn't the slightest interest in Soviet history, her major, or, indeed, in history in general.
"What do you want to be, Natasha?" runs the game played daily on our floor.
"An actress."
"In films or the theater."
"The theater." (Sigh.) "I think my place is on the stage."
She goes quickly to the cot of anyone who says she has the makings of a natural actress, but bursts into sobs after perceiving she's been duped. (Aside from a high-school play three years ago, she has never acted.) Her weeping used to be heard more often from several rooms, but some older boys have recently assumed the role of her protector, and have stopped sleeping with her themselves—because, they say, taking advantage of a child spoils the fun.
The boy who loves Natasha more than anyone is Kemal, but she won't even have supper with him: like many girls here, she has a visceral repugnance for "black" skin. Kemal's color is in fact a delicate umber—which, on his ankles, looks like suntan against the white of his adored sheepskin slippers from Harrods. He pads back and forth along the corridor, studying while in motion like a guru and inviting every English-speaking soul into his room at each encounter.
"I'll make us a cup of tea?" the singsong Indian voice asks in English, with a trace of a Russian accent.
"Sorry, Kemal. I'm late for the movies, just can't stop."
"You are too pale. You will need some good tea."
Kemal lives next to the kitchen in a room he's had for four
years. (He swears he found a microphone under the bed his first
winter—if true, the only tangible discovery of the bugging of
foreigners' rooms that Russians take for granted.) The son of a
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wealthy Delhi manufacturer, he came to Moscow to study instead of to his beloved Oxford for what he calls "unfortunate political reasons." Declining to elaborate, he will, however, reveal how he copes with another inherited problem. Like his moneyed father, Kemal is short and slender, with full black hair and an unusually meager penis. The shortcoming troubled him severely until a wise man near the family's summer residence taught him the elements of hypnotism. He used this power primarily to convince conquests that the member they were enjoying was "very full and fat," and now insists Russian girls are his best subjects. "They are susceptible to it, you understand. Because they are always flooded with statistics to convince them they have three times what they actually do. Production figures, production reports—it comes to the same thing, you know. It is a nice setup for my little deception."
Kemal questions me for hours about the chances of fulfilling his dream: graduate study at M.I.T. on the basis of his Moscow degree. (When the application forms arrived—imagine the problems they inflicted on puzzled postal censors!—I spent days interpreting questions and helping phrase his replies. He saw hidden meanings and rewrote answers like a prisoner composing a stay-of-execution plea.) He also tries to establish something like an English-Speaking Union with the new crop of American and English exchange students every September. But his closest friends are a Russian couple who befriended him during his first week in Moscow, two hundred and thirty-three weeks ago, "not counting the days." The couple live together unofficially two floors below, and have established a kind of University record for a love affair's durability. I know the girl, brown-eyed Anna, moderately welclass="underline" a Belorussian with the intensity of a Radcliffe student who suspects she's unattractive. But human-dynamo Sergei avoids me: he's planning a government career, hopefully in the diplomatic service, which fraternization with an American might prejudice. According to Anna and Kemal, Sergei, the product of a poor family, will stop at nothing to make his way.
Now Kemal is bitter on Anna's behalf The four-year affair has come to an end. In fact, Anna and Sergei have just married other partners, although they still share an occasional night.
"In my four years with him," says Anna, "I didn't know other
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men existed. I've never slept with anyone else, before or after. I can't sleep with this person called my husband. I belong to Sergei."