The hands-submerging ritual continued, despite Gelda’s variety of attempted escapes at the first scent of chicken soup from their apartment’s communal kitchen. Gelda’s mother also continued to play the cello, but her dementia deepened. After years, a neighbor in the apartment could no longer endure the querulous hag and her daughter’s Sunday whimpers. She reported Gelda’s mother, a medical investigation was launched, and the woman was committed. By that time, Gelda was nine, and abnormally short. The medical investigators also concluded that she was both mentally and socially retarded, but did not know that she had already absorbed more literature than many of her school-teachers. Compulsive reading in the bad basement light had already weakened her eyes.
She was also fat, unclea*n and ugly in a way that children can be only when severe deprivation affects them before they can understand its cause, encouraging them to attribute the guilt to themselves. As so often, the guilt had physical effects: Gelda was 'a lump of rashes’ and sickly obesity. 100
The great watery weight evaporated during adolescence, and she was now almost gaunt, existing principally on canned cod livers, a hard-to-find delicacy, and prostok-vasha , a thick, refreshing soured milk. She also chainsmoked papirosi , the cigarettes with the long cardboard holder usually associated with the clenched, brownish teeth of a truck driver.
What had not changed from youth was Gelda’s personality. She belonged to the category of deprived children who react with a kind of involuntary magnanimity, together with occasional belligerence, and spend much of their lives effacing themselves and indulging in inordinate generosity to others. Gelda was always the ‘easy’ one: the girl in her class of whom any favor or unpleasant errand could be
demanded, and who volunteered when not asked. This was so ingrained in her character that she preferred not to use her lunch break at the bookshop - except to see Oktyabrina and me - but to give extra time to one of the salesgirls. She called them The children', and looked almost like their mother, although in fact most of them were roughly the same age as she.
The salesgirls, in turn, were a godsend to Gelda’s need for self-sacrifice: except for an elderly lady with long service, they were all relative newcomers with no special knowledge of books, and needed frequent coaching and reminding. Gelda herself had worked in the shop for almost six years, ever since her graduation from a vocational high school. She knew every phase of its operation far better than the manager, a Party functionary with a green suit and stuffed-animal mentality, who had been given this sinecure of a job after an ignominious failure as director of a small bottle works. Without Gelda’s managerial help, especially in keeping the books (his early attempts at embezzlement had got him into an impossible tangle), he faced certain downgrading again.
In contrast to the manager too, Gelda had read literally
thousands of the books that passed through the store. She
was the only member of the staff permitted to take them home, a grave violation of the rules about the protection of state property. Her current book was always open at her side, even in the cashier’s booth. Yet like most members of the intelligentsia, she never laid eyes on a newspaper: the turgid stvle and moralizing repelled her, even when there were no recognizable distortions or lies. She enjoyed taunting the manager by flourishing a torn page of Pravda when marching to the toilet - its intended function, in the perpetual absence of toilet paper, was obvious. The manager himself always pondered Pravda s every word searching for clues to shifts in the Party line.
Despite this, and despite the total disparity of their life styles, the manager and Gelda had achieved a relatively smooth working rapport. The only serious trouble came when Gelda fell into one of her terrible moods. Gelda even introduced Oktyabrina to the manager, and he volunteered that he might ‘do something for the little girl’ when his luck changed and he got another plum job. (He was now angling for the management of a railroad depot that handled imported consumer goods.) The offer to help Oktyabrina was prompted by less than pure chivalry: the manager carried a not-so-secret torch for the oily-cheeked Gelda and often tried to coax her into his cubby-hole of an office for what she called a ‘quick sniff and the usual three minutes of pawing’.
The extraordinary thing about Gelda was that despite everything, she was attractive to men. A significant percentage who entered the bookshop, especially the rougher-looking types, took stock of her in the way that indicates desire. Something about her, if only the attraction of 'ugly beauty’, was stubbornly sexy. But Gelda herself looked at no man unless he sported a moustache - and if it turned out to be thin, short, wispy or limp, she rarely looked twice. Her obsession with moustaches was overpowering, and she happily succumbed to it. Her last important lover had, as 102
she put it, a ‘Serbian smugglers one’. She showed me his photograph. It was badly blurred, but the moustache was indeed thick and black - I would have said Mexican rather than Serbian - and the man himself was correspondingly dark and powerful-looking.
They met in a line for suitcases at the East German shop. The man remarked that a good suitcase was an essential refinement of life. But before they’d reached the counter Gelda enticed him to her cramped attic room. He told her he taught acting in the Shchukin Academy, one of Moscow’s best known drama schools. Through her old family contacts, Gelda learned that her man had nothing to do with the Academy - where she felt he might have been a janitor, for she herself had quickly determined that he knew nothing whatever about drama and little about school. Soon after this, she discovered his real occupation, for objects began disappearing from her room in order of their value. The transistor radio, the long-playing records, the horn comb (one of the last of her mother’s mementos), finally the box of talcum powder....
Still, Gelda clung to him, leaving him to his profession when she left for work in the morning. After work, she bought him supper and arranged for the evening’s entertainment, usually a band concert or sporting event - never the theater because he refused to ‘mix professional obligations with pleasure’. Gelda saw through everything and dismissed everything for the sake of the moustache and the special things he did with it. The Serbian was the most compelling love of her fife.
When he finally disappeared, it was with every object in the room except the furniture. He even took the wormy wooden frame in which her father’s photograph had stood, leaving the yellowed photograph itself on the bare, badly-stained mattress of the bed.
Gelda’s attractiveness to men and her own attraction to moustaches were not her only curious qualities. She kept a handsome aquarium in her room, only eighteen inches wide,
but almost as long as the bed. (The Serbian had emptied half the water and tried to carry this away too, but had abandoned it in the corridor because of the weight.) In it she nurtured a collection of tiny, violently colored tropical fish which she bought in the so-called pet market at outrageous prices. She read widely in the literature of this subject, limited as it is in Russia, and had started a correspondence - in German, with the help of a language teacher — with Konrad Lorenz, whose books she herself paid to be -translated. They began by writing about cichlids and blue triggers, but soon drifted to Lorenz’s observations of human behavior, Gelda being curious about her own psychological make-up. But she was summoned by the Party Secretary of the Retail Book Trust and ‘advised’, as the euphemism has it, that the correspondence was ‘not in her own best interests’. She was forced to drop Lorenz. Then remembering that her own uncle was engaged in behavioral research, she began meeting him. The old man, her father’s elder brother, had also suffered badly during the most virulent anti-Semitic years and developed near fatal cases of ulcers and diabetes simultaneously. But he survived, and now worked in the medical department of the Moscow City Soviet. According to Gelda, he had recently presided over a massive public health survey about a supposedly secret subject. Its purpose was to determine, by means of obligatory physical examination,' the sexual habits of Moscow school-girls. The team found, among other things, that twenty-seven per cent from the ages of fourteen to seventeen were virgins. The younger doctors were said to be surprised that the percentage appeared so high. Variations of this story are so rife in Moscow that I was at first sceptical of Gelda’s uncle. But she, of all people, had no reason to misrepresent such things, and since she mentioned the survey to me only once, I came to believe her.