All this took place in what she called ‘Domolinart’ - short for ‘Young Intellectuals’ and Artists’ Club’. This was a pathetic copy of imposing official establishments like the Writers’, Composers’ and Cinema Workers’ Clubs, which are all located in large buildings nearby, with special restaurants, closed cinemas and other privileges for their chosen members. Domolinart was a room above the comer of Stoleshnikov Lane and Petrovka. Strictly speaking, Oktyabrina’s quarters were not this room, but a three-by-eight 46
corner of it, behind a tattered curtain rigged around her cot.
The room itself belonged to a former railway pensioner whose most exciting moment in life was seeing a train which had been traveled on by Lenin! He rented out one comer of his room to Oktyabrina and the opposite one to another un-person, a shy young man called Leonid, a former graduate student who was trying to stay in Moscow somehow after expulsion from a physics institute. Oktyabrina talked wistfully of his gentleness and melancholy.
I saw Leonid only once during these days - a shaggy head of dark hair and glasses with one broken lens were what stood out about him - because I visited the room only once. It was on Railway Workers’ Day when the old pensioner had gone to a mass meeting and was certain not to return until late afternoon. Nevertheless, Oktyabrina was categorically forbidden to entertain visitors, and she rushed me in and out of the room in a minute.
Which was more than I cared to stay. The room was as depressing as any I’ve seen. Everything in it exemplified that combination of cheapness, neglect and pure grime that drove tens of millions of Europe’s poor to steerage passages for the New World. Oktyabrina had once tried to relieve the gloom by buying patterned red-and-chartreuse curtains in a shop on Petrovka. But the old man came home unexpectedly as she was hanging them, found her tip-toeing on a chair, and ordered her to get back in her comer, and keep her rags to herself.
No doubt he later regretted this: although he was indifferent to curtains, their being free would have given him satisfaction. For he was as stingy as he was testy. And as mercenary: he paid the standard three or four rubles a month for his state-assigned room, and charged Oktyabrina and Leonid twenty-five each for their prized and illegally sublet comers. This fifty rubles nearly doubled his pension, but he still breakfasted and supped on black bread, onions and tea, treating himself to only one full meal daily of heavy soup and kasha.
As for Oktyabrina, the twenty-five rubles for rent, although exorbitant, was a drop in the sea. Her expenses for cosmetics - she insisted on Western brands, obtained almost entirely on the black market - and for pop clothes, of which she was the first and perhaps still the only devotee in Moscow, were obviously very substantial. It could not have cost her less than 150 rubles a month to live, more than the wages of a skilled engineer.
I mention money not because it played a normal part in Oktyabrina’s life - ten-ruble notes often parachuted from her pockets like so much used Kleenex - but because the source of it was part, at least, of the elusive whole truth. Oktyabrina was kept. The man was never referred to by name, but by title: ‘The Minister’. ‘The Minister gets furious when I’m late,’ Oktyabrina would say, dashing from one of our brief afternoon walks. ‘The Minister’s depressed, poor dear. He tried to drive his car without the chauffeur and the motor came apart.’ ‘The Minister’s wife issued an ultimatum last night: she gets a Persian lamb by New Year’s Eve or he sleeps in the kitchen - on the floor.’
Kostya never met him, but had formed a clear idea about his character. ‘He’s the Marxist-Leninist version of a sugar-daddy. Keeps his girls according to socialist principles: without giving them enough to eat. Your typical Minister.’
As I understood it, however, the Minister was not in fact that, but Chairman of one of the Ministry of Agriculture’s myriad research commissions or First Secretary of one of its even more multitudinous departments. Still, he was a senior official, the kind I would have given a great deal to interview professionally - a vain wish, because bureaucrats of that rank are unapproachable even by Soviet journalists. For some reason, presumably Byzantine in origin, even agricultural officials live and work in a remote corridors-of-power world, hidden away in carefully guarded office buildings and behind thick white curtains across the rear windows of their cars.
The Minister’s car sported these very curtains and a
‘MOS’ license plate, indicating it was an official government vehicle. I first saw it parked in front of Oktyabrina’s lodging house the evening I took her to Uncle Vanya at a small theater just off Petrovka and walked her home after the amateurish but moving performance. It was the only vehicle in sight, an immaculate black Volga whose running motor generated a great cloud of frozen exhaust. Oktyabrina froze too when she saw it. Then she clutched me, stepping up on my boots.
‘Oh my God. He’s here. Zhoe darling, disappear’ She found her feet again and pushed me with both hands against my chest. ‘Round the corner - quick.’
But before I could disappear, before I realized why I ought to, the car had begun to back up and was almost upon us. The man who emerged from the back seat was large and loose, with Groucho Marx eyebrows and a moustache longer than his lips. He caught the sleeve of his Persian lamb-collared overcoat on the door handle, entrapped the arm further in his urgent efforts to disengage it, succeeded at last, and duck-walked towards us with a fleshy smile. Oktyabrina waved to him with one hand; with the other, she continued to push me away.
‘Run along now, Uncle Vanya, it’s time you got some rest.’ This was meant for me but almost shouted in the Minister’s direction.
Even now, I’m still embarrassed by Moscow’s unwritten code of bad etiquette. A foreigner’s overriding responsibility to avoid casting suspicion on his Russian friends accounts for one of the cardinal rules: if when in the company of a Russian friend he encounters one of his friends accidentally, you disappear at once. In this case, the Minister’s position reinforced the obligation. I backed away to the comer and went the long way home.
‘Are you Jewish, Zhoe?’
‘What’s that, another expression?’
‘No really - are you?’
‘Not that I know of. What makes you ask?’
‘Because you’re nice. You don’t get angry.’
It was early the following afternoon; we were entering Sverdlov Square from the bottom of Petrovka. Over the columns of the Bolshoi Theater, gigantic portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Brezhnev were being mounted in preparation for the evening’s celebration of an obscure revolutionary anniversary.
Oktyabrina gingerly slipped her arm under mine. The sight of the sun after three weeks had infected everyone with a touch of childish exuberance. A woman laborer in overalls and a cotton quilt jacket was chasing her work partner, an identically dressed man, with a broom. Both fell giggling into a snowbank.
Oktyabrina giggled with them briefly, but caught herself short. ‘I knew a Jew once,’ she said seriously. ‘In Omsk. He never told anyone but me he was Jewish. He was the sweetest little man with about four hairs on his head and very, very good hands.’
An old peasant couple stopped us for directions to GUM. When they’d moved off, Oktyabrina continued.
"Actually it was this man more than any other who taught me to develop my mind. I think Moishe Issakovich wanted me urgently, but he always sublimated his desire in the most creative way possible: by converting it into an artistic assault on my mind. Even when I was compelled to ignore him as a man, he never, never got angry.’
"I got the message about Omsk some time ago, Comrade Circe. I’m rather more interested in the company you’re 50