Matveyeva: Perhaps I have thought about my ideals, but I don’t discuss intimacies with strangers. Anyway, you cant put into words who you are and what you live for. A fish moves towards where it’s deeper, a person towards where it’s better - perhaps you know the saying.
Question: Once again, the court asks you to consider your behavior. Don’t you regret the way you live?
Matveyeva: I lived the way I wanted to. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. I mean, I never hurt anybody, did I?
She lived as she wanted to. Didn’t hurt anyone. The words were painful. For Matveyeva refuses to recognize that Soviet
society, itself, all its deeply humane Leninist principles and goals, is viciously undermined by her kind of gangrene.
Who craves this undermining? Our enemies of course: the enemies of Leninism, of everything progressive in mankind. 246
Our enemies feed on the hope that riff-raff like Matveyeva , specially among our youth , will somehow weaken our socialist state. In this hysterical hope , they smuggle all the anti-Soviet drivel they can through our borders. Such as the tawdry and obscene ‘magazines’ that so delighted Matveyeva.
For many people the expression , ‘the putrid influence of the Western way of life*, still hangs in mid-air. Oktyabrina Matveyeva , has made it sickeningly graphic. She ‘presented herself to Moscow over a year ago. Since then her life has been vulgar and ugly - rotten , like a swamp. Like her ‘answers’ in court and her ‘ideals’. Like everything she represents.
What should be done with people who violate everything we cherish? Who corrupt our youth , the inheritors of our revolutionary Leninist ideals? The court reached the only correct answer to this melancholy question. Having searched deep into the defendant’s soul and found nothing sacred there , it sentenced her to five years’ deprivation of freedom.
This was my last contact with Oktyabrina. I haven't heard from her again; now there is no one from whom I can expect to hear of her. Spring smells floating through my window make it hard to focus on facts, but I have a grip on them.
I probably won’t hear from Oktyabrina for three years, until her early release for good behavior. It will be hard to see her even then, for she won’t be permitted to live in Moscow. In theory, visits of up to two weeks are allowed. But any one of a dozen officials acquainted with Oktyabrina’s dossier may prevent her from coming to the capital and its temptations. She’d risk too much, a much more severe second conviction, by sneaking in again, without a propiska. Most likely, shell live out her life in Nikolaiyevka. Or, if she’s lucky - because she may be kept on her collective farm - in the relative cosmopolitanism of Omsk.
When they are imaginary, stories like this sometimes end
with a letter from their heroines. I've thought of the one Oktyabrina would send so often that I can write it myself. It would be in her unevenly sloping script; the text would be both breathless and full of imagery, which means it could either have been dashed off on an impulse or carefully pondered.
Darling Zhoe!
When the moon comes up over the hills, the snow is somehow reddish, like a blanket of garnets. Only in my beloved Russian countryside have I come to understand a certain inner meaning of existence, the ecstasy not only of being alive, but of being oneself in an environment of obligations. This is why I haven't written sooner: IVe been frantically busy exploring my depths. . . .
There would be an explanation - with much truth - of how camp life had ended her final, final silly phase. She would make sly hints about our 'devastating' love-making, and guarded references to my divorce, the causes of which genuinely interested her in our few 'man-and-wife' days before Vladimir’s illness. She would pretend she hadn't needed my food parcels but couch her thanks in jokes; the p.s. would be an old Russian saying about separation not being alienation. No smudge of cosmetics would soil the notepaper: camp conditions would see to that.
But the note will never come. If the censorship of ordinary mail is fierce, what chance have prisoners' letters?
I'm not worried about spiritual damage to Oktyabrina in her camp. Most prisoners, if not debased on arrival, are hardened beyond recognition by the severe conditions and coarseness of guards and fellow convicts. Oktyabrina is immune to this - but she is surely thinner now: it is a question of pure hunger and cold.
I hope she’s allowed to wear my sheepskin coat. But it's strange that I have more presents from her than she from me. The mass-produced matrioshka and splendid Birth of 248
Christ icon adorn my living-room, together with the Minister s office plants. The Maxwell House can now holds my paper clips instead of hairpins or Gelda’s worms.
And I have memories. Some well up so overwhelmingly that I suspect self-deception: it’s not Oktyabrina I pity, but myself; not the injustice to her but the deprivation to me. Other memories are straightforward: the way she sipped a glass of tea.
The way she grimaced when it had too much lemon and smacked her lips in exultation after making it sweet. No one can understand the joy of her hundred hourly performances without actually seeing her mime’s face. I liked her best when she was unaware that I was watching. Every gesture - the clutching of the glass, the pursing of her lips - was an event.
Hardly a day in our year lacks something to remember. A week before the heatwave, when she still had hopes for Alexander, she coaxed him to the ballet. The tickets required considerable hunting, and she seduced Alexander by pretending they were for a visiting African troupe with 'naked bosoms and all kinds of erotic rituals’. But once in the lobby Alexander spied the Sleeping Beauty poster and left. Whereupon Oktyabrina prowled the streets to procure a substitute escort: a corpulent colonel.
Of all the animals in the zoo, she loved a young chimpanzee best. He was named ‘Cheetah’, in honor of the Tarzan films, the exotika of Oktyabrina’s schoolgirl generation. One day, a drunk teenager fractured Cheetah’s skull with a rock. Oktyabrina’s reaction was a characteristic mixture of cunning and fantasy: she sent a signed petition for ‘recuperative’ bananas to the Supreme Soviet. It came to nothing, but I hadn’t realized until now that she risked discovery for this ‘mercy mission’ too.
I like to retrace those ‘exploits’; the memory of more personal moments leads too swiftly to self-pity. After our evening at Kostya’s, she came home with me and entered the bedroom directly, saying only that all the lights should
be off. At any time before this in our year, we would have been disastrous. That night, our nervousness lasted only until her feet were warm, after which she clung to me with more strength than should have resided in her skinny arms and her trembling legs. An hour later, I knew that more than nervousness kept her thin. She made ‘Zhoe’ into a hundred Russian variants; she cried out in free delight - not quite the same as mine, for she was still too young to know how crazy it is, how truly exalted, to have passion with a friend.
The next morning, she stretched out on the davenport. T feel so contented somehow/ she said. ‘Like a cow - is that absolutely inexcusable?’
I suppose it’s obvious that I never see the davenport without thinking of her. Several places in the city have the same effect. The ice-cream cafe where she wolfed down sundaes with jam. And the Kropotkinskaya Quai, where one June evening, leathery truck drivers braked their rattling machines to contemplate her, strolling in a preposterous slouch hat. She waved to them like the dewy-eyed young heroine of third-rate Soviet films, remarking about the maternal properties of the sun, then setting brilliantly on the river.
Let there always be sunshine !...
And there is Petrovka of course. It is more teeming than ever lately, even on sopping afternoons. The pedestrian railings have been moved further into the street, but the abstracted crowds spill beyond them as before, oblivious to the traffic, the policemen’s whistles and each other. The lines at stalls offering gloves, cigarettes, panties and postage stamps are as long as ever. Today there is an exceptional crush for pineapples, of which a shipload recently arrived. But lemons disappeared again almost two months ago, and tea without them isn’t the same.