When M. went to the rest home in Tambov, the "agent" threw all our things out of the room. They were gathered together and kept by the prostitute. When he returned, M. couldn't get into his room and had to go out and wait in the offices of the newspaper next door. Somebody rang up the nameless institution in which our landlord worked. In the evening he came to the newspaper office and said to M.: "You can go back—I've been told not to make trouble." This brought home to us the advantage of renting a room from a member of an institution which imposed military discipline on its employees. From that time on, the "agent" behaved like a lamb. When we moved out, he himself loaded our belongings into the cab. He was so delighted that he even crossed himself: he had never thought he would get rid of his unwelcome tenants so easily.
It was said that in 1937 he got rid of another tenant, but he didn't enjoy his triumph for long, because he was transferred to guard duty in a forced-labor camp.
During our three years in Voronezh we changed rooms five times. After leaving the "agent," we moved to an apartment belonging to a widow in a luxurious new building for engineers and technicians. She let two rooms simultaneously—one to us and the other to Duna- yevski, a young journalist. It was he who had arranged this splendid new place for us, but the widow had only agreed to it because she calculated that he would marry her. When it appeared that he had no intention of doing so, we had to move out to make room for another prospective husband.
The last of our rooms was in the tiny house of a seamstress who worked for the local theater. It seemed like heaven to us, a dream from a vanished past, a reward for all our tribulations. M. had taken them all quite calmly, but living at the seamstress' house, he came back to life.
The seamstress was a most ordinary sort of woman, friendly and good-humored. She lived with her mother, whom she called "Grandma," and her son Vadik, who was like all boys of his age. Her husband, a cobbler, had died a few years previously and some actors who had their shoes repaired by him had got his widow a job in the theater so she could feed her family. Since the cobbler had been a Party member, she managed also to get an allowance for her son. They lived, like everybody, on potatoes and "Grandma" kept a few hens in the outhouse. For them ten roubles was an enormous income. They had generally had actors living there, and she was famous among them for her good nature. That is why they had sent us to her. Living in her house, we breathed freely again.
There were once many kind people, and even unkind ones pretended to be good because that was the thing to do. Such pretense was the source of the hypocrisy and dishonesty so much exposed in the realist literature at the end of the last century. The unexpected result of this kind of critical writing was that kind people disappeared. Kindness is not, after all, an inborn quality—it has to be cultivated, and this only happens when it is in demand. For our generation, kindness was an old-fashioned, vanished quality, and its exponents were as extinct as the mammoth. Everything we have seen in our times—the dispossession of the kulaks, class warfare, the constant "unmasking" of people, the search for an ulterior motive behind every action—all this has taught us to be anything you like except kind.
Kindness and good nature had to be sought in remote places that were deaf to the call of the age. Only the inert had kept these qualities as they had come down from their ancestors. Everybody else had been affected by the inverted "humanism" of the times.
In the seamstress' house we lived quietly, like ordinary human beings, and we quite forgot that we had no place of our own. Later on, traveling in a car or a tram through the streets of some huge city or other, I often counted the windows as they flashed by, wondering why I could call none of them mine. I had grotesque dreams in which I saw enormous corridors, like covered streets, with doors leading off on either side. Now, I thought, the doors would open and I would be able to pick a room for myself. Sometimes I found dead relatives of mine inside, and this made me angry: Why are you living here, while I have to wander without a home? What Freud would dare to explain such dreams in terms of sexual repression, the Oedipus complex or similar monstrosities?
It has been said that Soviet citizens do not need to build houses for themselves because they have the right to demand a free apartment from the State. But whom does one demand it from? Even in my dreams I wondered about this, and always woke up before the blissful moment of receiving the piece of paper entitling you to move into an apartment and get your residence permit. In Voronezh I lived on the illusion that I still had my own hard-won place in Moscow, something quite unique in its way. But I no longer have such illusions and am familiar with the laws under which I have no right to anything. And how many of us are there like me? Please don't think that I'm an exception. Our name is legion.
Future generations will never understand what "living-space" means to us. Innumerable crimes have been committed for its sake, and people are so tied to it that to leave it would never occur to them. Who could ever leave his wonderful, precious twelve and a half square meters of living-space? No one would be so mad, and it is passed on to one's descendants like a family castle, a villa or an estate. Husbands and wives who loathe the sight of each other, mothers-in- law and sons-in-law, grown sons and daughters, former domestic servants who have managed to hang on to a cubby-hole next to the kitchen—all are wedded forever to their living-space and would never part with it. In marriage and in divorce the first thing that arises is the question of living-space. I have heard men described as perfect gentlemen for throwing over their wives but leaving them the living-space. I have also heard of eligible girls with apartments, and of bachelors who want nothing more. Some clever women have been known to put on old clothes and hire themselves out to clean student dormitories, in exchange for a corner to live in. Here they would stay, putting up for years with curses and threats of eviction. Even faculty members brave insults to live in such places. I too could at one time have done this, and sat cooped up until late at night, listening to the women students singing and dancing. Often there were not enough places for them, and they had to sleep two to a bunk.
Your permit to reside went with your accommodation and if you lost it you could never return to the city you had lived in. For many people their apartments turned out to be real traps. The clouds were already gathering, their friends and colleagues were being picked up one after another, or, as we used to say, the shells were falling nearer and nearer, but the possessors of permanent titles to apartments stayed put for the police to come and get them. As they waited, they deluded themselves with the hope that this cup might for some reason pass from them. In this way they clung to the wretched dumps they called "apartments," and if they were self-contained ones in new buildings, the only way out—to complete the resemblance to a trap—was the window, since there were no back stairs. I knew only one woman who, during the expulsion of former aristocrats from Leningrad, was sensible enough to pack her things and flee to the provinces, thus keeping her record clean and avoiding a great many misfortunes.