The end was sour. Despite his unfaithfulness and her brittle resentment, their de facto marriage was surprisingly solid—until October, when Sergei became apprehensive. Since neither he nor Anna were Muscovites, both would be sent, upon graduation in June, to a village or town for fulfillment of their obligations at jobs assigned by a state commission. The prospect of a three-year "sentence" to the provinces was very bad; worse was their slim chance of ever securing the residence stamp that would permit them to live again in the capital. Sergei proposed the standard subterfuge: he would marry the first suitable Moskvichka who came his way; Anna the first bachelor Moskvich. Thus they would remain in Moscow, free to continue almost as before. After a seemly interval—not less than two years, because the police have begun revoking residence permits obtained through obvious marriages of convenience—they would pay their partners whatever was necessary, divorce them and come together officially.
Anna reluctantly agreed when she realized that, under the circumstances, this was as close as possible to a marriage proposal. But when Sergei actually made his choice—a shy girl he met in the library and proposed to immediately—her self-control shattered. Weeping, cursing, begging, she fell upon the mortified fiancee with fists and nails. His resolve stiffened by just these hysterics, Sergei carried through his plan.
To spite him, she too married the first interested man—a minor official of fifty—for her Moscow permit. But Sergei was happy with his docile bride and Anna succeeded only in increasing her misery by pointing up his lack of jealousy. Now she's trying to cultivate friends in high places, for she is determined to be more successful than "that shallow careerist I thought I once loved."
There are worse troubles than Anna's. Last month a girl hanged herself in a room on the adjoining corridor. She looped a belt through the handle of a cupboard over the doorway, and the wood held just long enough to achieve the strangulation. It is said there are a dozen suicides a semester in the dormitories.
30^ MOSCOW FAREWELL
Most victims jump from the upper-story windows after prolonged fits of winter melancholy. The incidents are never reported; on the contrary, the University administration painstakingly hushes them up. A constant buzz of rumor therefore surrounds the circumstances of each episode. Was the boy who died in October the son of a certain minister?
Last month's victim had been discovered stealing from a roommate—single rubles from pockets from time to time and bits of clothing which she sold. The roommate reported her suspicions and, on the morning the investigating commission was expected, left to meet them in the main foyer. Returning to the room twenty minutes later to question the suspect, they found her body on the floor. She had left a note: "I cannot face my guilt nor the shame of a Comrades' Court. Please forgive me. Something went wrong."
Chingiz came in to tell me. The dead girl had been his lover. He sat on the floor, fingering the books she'd left him the evening before and speaking in staccato. "Galya stole because of hunger for aflection. It's the most basic psychological reaction. She needed more than we gave her; and tomorrow, when our guilt wears off^, we'll be as selfish as ever. Why the 'brotherhood' pretense when we're all alone? Damn the lies we live."
It was not the first suicide Chingiz knew. He's a type—unhappy himself, yet solid—reached for by people who feel they can't cope. Foolish as the premonition is, I'm convinced bad news of our own will pull us together.
Chingiz and I hadn't been close before that morning but sensed the time would come. Passing in the corridor, we always smiled comfortably, pleased at biding our time. When the suicide was discovered, it was natural he came to me; natural, too, to go to a movie instead of demonstrating proper mourning.
Dreamer, libertine and former laborer, Chingiz looks exactly like what he has been and is. He's tall and lean, with a cowboy's slouch and mane of dark hair obscuring an Apache-Asian face. Except for his eyes, which are often impenetrable, he reminds me of a less-dented Jack Palance. In the freeness of his spirit, he resembles a younger Alyosha except that he, my friend of friends Alyosha, is never moody.
Notes from My Window^Sl
Black-eyed Chingiz was born in the vast semi-arid steppe north of the Caucasus. His people are hybrid Russians and Kalmyks: seminomadic Buddhists who speak Mongolian and raise sheep. The feeling of something very close and very good—his mother, who rode with him strapped to her back—was the first emotion he remembers; wanderlust was the second. Mother and father adored and spoiled him, the settlement's young darling, but by the time he could master a strong horse, he knew he had to explore. After half a dozen adolescent attempts to run away and a score of odd jobs on trucks and construction sites, he found his way to Odessa and became a sailor; then a leading seaman, next an officer; then an officer on ships going abroad.
No matter that the crew was watched incessantly to prevent defections and the ship's political officer made him sick; he had found his calling. Movement and open air soothed him, while his quiet hard work earned him regular promotions. He entered the University two years ago because his ambition is to captain his own vessel—to be his own boss—and a Soviet master's license requires a University degree. In any field whatever; for lack of another academic interest, Chingiz chose Russian literature. And now the sea has a strong competitor; he has discovered that poetry puts him in communion with the Large World much as dawn perceived from the bridge of a solitary ship.
Mayakovsky is his hero. ("I will make myself black trousers of the velvet of my voice.") Chingiz knows his long poems by heart and loves to recite "The Cloud in Trousers."
Your thought
musing on a sodden brain
like a bloated lackey on a greasy couch,
I'll taunt with a bloody morsel of heart;
and satiate my insolent, caustic contempt.
I'm not sure precisely what I admire in Chingiz. We still haven't fully opened up about ourselves, although I know he's troubled by "sensitive" political issues and detestation of repression lies in his bones. (Did I know why Mayakovsky really committed suicide? he once asked me. Why almost all the real revolutionary poets killed themselves by 1935?) In fact, we rarely discuss anything at length. On a "walk" last Sunday in Moscow's
32^MOSCOW FAREWELL
outskirts, a six-hour hike through tumbledown villages and disconsolate woods, we hardly exchanged a sentence. It was enough to absorb the countryside's tranquilizing current, transmitted through the immense, inspiring silence and icicles of sunlight. Chingiz never speaks of his girls, who are legion, or how he wins swimming meets without training. He broods, drinks, enjoys his hard-won privilege of being left alone by the clique and by Komsomol activists trying to recruit "volunteers" for their latest project to raise political consciousness.
His schedule conforms to the general pattern. He attends lectures and seminars throughout the day: forty long hours of classes a week, for Soviet pedagogues prefer group study and textbook-spooning to independent reading and research. Like military service schools, this educational system assigns certificates on the basis of course hours attended rather than individual achievement. Evenings, Chingiz plays dominoes in the common room, goes walking in town, or entertains a girl in his room. Not what but how he does things is different; even reading in bed, he's more alone and intense than the others, yet the whole range of University activities seems a mere distraction for him, as if he's marking time for something more important.
It was from Leonid I learned that Chingiz's father was one of the first Kalmyk Communists, a Robin Hood admired by the local shepherds as much as they despised the ruthless commissars dispatched from Moscow. A victim of one of the earliest purges, he was taken away before dawn one morning after holding Chingiz's forehead through a fit of vomiting that very night. Chingiz never saw him again, nor heard what happened to him—not a word in thirty years, until a letter for his mother arrived in 1958, posthumously rehabilitating her husband, sharing her sorrow over the unfortunate mistake, promising the Party would never again tolerate the "isolated violations of socialist legality" permitted during the "personality cult." His mother threw away the paper. Someone looking back to the promise of the Khrushchev days once lauded the Party for rehabilitating purged Communists; Chingiz stood up and left the room, his silent fury ending the argument.