But then what? With whom would he leave it? And knowing that one word to the authorities would be its ruin, why did he entrust his secret to Anastasia and me? "Perhaps," he said, refilling our glasses, "my subject holds enough interest for publication in the West. If you believe it is worth something, you might help me in this endeavor." (Eyes on Anastasia.) "But let's turn to lighter subjects. How did such an enchanting couple meet?"
He saw me in the library often after that but never so much as alluded to Kolchak again, let alone my smuggling out his
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manuscript. As he's doing today, he alternated between intervals of great bounce and equal exhaustion, in which his age seemed to vary by thirty years. Now he's deep in his books again, apparently revived by his nap. He's wearing a handsome new tie to go with his cream-colored shirt: he still takes pride in his appearance.
Drifting and daydreaming; staring at and somewhere absorbing, but unable to focus on or fully comprehend the sights of this room. Steeped in the smell, a muskiness of newsprint and pulpy scholarly journals. Lulled by the sounds: of Prospekt Marx's snow-muffled traffic outside and the swish-swish of whispered Russian, with its consonants, here and there inside the hall. Benumbed by the mood: of the huge rubber plants, a plaster bust of Lenin, marbled columns, and the long-unanswered ring of a telephone in the librarians' anteroom.
Were I able to fix the meaning of even a few of the images before my eyes, something might be clear about why Russia has a life unlike any other. The shaved head of the man at my right, a bullet-like skull sitting evilly on a bureaucratic torso, the chandeliers' reflection gleaming in the oil of its pores. Good God, is he really the sinister Stalinist he seems? Or, on the contrary, does he look like that because he himself suffered? Why do Russian academics still shave their heads? . . . The man in front of him, no less pear-shaped and serge-suited, but sharing a desk with a woman lipsticked and bleached like the most blatant Broadway tart. And a third man, older and more shriveled, steering a shaky course down the aisle toward the door with a cane in one hand and a square of trembling newspaper in the other: yesterday's newspaper, which this corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences—like all Russians, no matter how august—has trained himself to carry in pocket or briefcase for when the call of nature sounds. Somehow it seems not humbling but democratic when done with his dignity.
From the desk to my left, the guttural whisper of two wiry Iraqi students, no doubt discussing girls, careers in state petroleum monopolies, and the intrigues of the University's Arab factions. Dressed in chain-store sports jackets and nylon shirts, they are nevertheless a sartorial cut above Russian students; and
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the Russians, bitter at Mother Russia's additional levies to enrich distant ingrates—and repelled by colored skin—keep a sullen distance from their "Arab brothers." The book on their desk is a standard American chemistry manuaclass="underline" after three years here, their Russian is still too weak to struggle with Soviet textbooks on subjects unavailable in English. They have come all this way, supported by fat stipends, immense economic investments and international commitments, to learn their formulas from pages printed in New Jersey.
To the Iraqis' left, the reedlike Nigerian with an Italian suit cut to accent his superbly haughty bearing: a chieftain's son popular in the University's smartest black circle, not least for his denigration of everything Slavic. Flaunting his English like his wardrobe, he insists—reverting to Russian on these occasions, and making certain he's overheard—that the natives will remain ignorant muzhiks until colonized by a superior civilization. In the same spirit, he encourages his scholarship colleagues to refuse their turns in dormitory cleanup details: although students from Eastern and Western Europe all pitch in uncomplainingly, Africans, he says, should not stoop to sweeping Russian floors.
The Nigerian's warrior face is sometimes pulpy from the fists of townie-type Russian students; during the last ambush, when a cooperative blonde lured him from the path to the metro, his always-worn dark glasses were ground to bits in a mortar-mixer. His answer was to have a smarter pair air-mailed from Paris, exhibit himself in the company of his latest sexy conquest (won partly with a half-dozen bottles of Revlon nail polish and a purse atomizer of Madame Rochas) and again swear to dedicate himself, after returning home to a place in his government, to the cause of weakening Soviet-Nigerian relations.
The North Vietnamese students with their Mao uniforms and relentless industriousness—are they my enemies? They never so much as glance at me and, in fact, hardly look at anything except their books. The well-groomed West German girl who has come from an incredibly richer, slicker world to study Lermon-tov , . . BUT NO more: I must get to work!
At first, I had the crazy idea that I was going to reform Farmer
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Blackcock. Then I hated him for kilHng my idea of finding myself through tilling the soil.
He was impatient for the days when his bull was scheduled to service a cow. The wet summer kept their rear ends dripping, but he never missed a milking time to tell his joke about why the shit didn't swim up their "cunts." I had to laugh hard enough to keep his temper down, but not too hard because he was trying to bait me for sodomy. His other conversation piece was how they loved "that kinda thing" down old Marne way, which he'd noticed in '18, under Pershing. Lifting tails, he'd inform me that Frenchy liked to sniff his food.
Blackcock himself treated food as feed, consuming just enough to stoke his scrawniness. Once he missed dinner while attending to the tractor in town, and his wife gave Jim and me more. Most days, we felt too intimidated to ask. "Cut that up with yer 'tatas," he'd instruct, nudging his knife into the slice of pork fat representing our meat. "Protein builds yer sinews."
We finished quickly because we had fifteen free minutes while Blackcock cheered Fulton Lewis, who was cheering McCarthy, on the radio. Jim didn't lie down. He played with his pile of old comics. He was fourteen, already stunted by undernourishment.
The New York State orphans' bureau paid twenty dollars a week, or something, for his maintenance. Blackcock didn't spend three on his food, and no more than twenty a year for clothes. His one pair of sneakers was rotting from sweat and lime. He wore them all day, every day, like a depression kid. And Blackcock squeezed even more out of him than me—Sundays too—because the kid knew all the machinery and procedures. Work was over when it was too dark to see. We went up to our attic without washing. At dawn, his wife woke us with the fire-gong.
It was easier on the days I worked alone, away from his exhortations. The farm was at the tip of the state, twenty miles below Canada. I rested on my pitchfork and watched in case a car would appear on the rise across the fields. Each one was my spaceship back to civilization. A '49 Buick speeding toward Burke, then on to Malone, which had a movie house ... It was breaking loose from here! I loved its chromy glint and pictured
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the lucky driver. He v^diS free. Zooming toward the city, carnival of lights, drugstores, traffic and crowds: of everything I loved with a refugee's longing for his homeland. When the car was gone, an incredible emptiness gripped the fields. No human in sight, even from the top of the pasture. When someone did appear it was Blackcock, who was coming the back way to check on my hay mounds.