For a change, I chose Sovietskaya Rossiya. The feature article is about the current intensification of the ideological struggle.
The Soviet people are prepared. They know that increased
trade and other contacts with capitalist representatives
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demand heightened vigilance under Our Party's guidance. For ideological coexistence cannot exist. The present historical era is characterized by a sharp intensification of the struggle of ideas, as capitalism thrashes about trying vainly to delay Marxism-Leninism's inevitable triumph.
It surprises no one that the West keeps braying about "intellectual freedom"—which is nothing more than a cloak for anti-Soviet propaganda. As V. I. Lenin taught, there can be no creative freedom without freedom from bourgeois-exploitative ideology and relations, which bind the artist's will and distort his talent.
The hypocritical farce conducted under the slogan "intellectual freedom" is actually a last-ditch attempt to somehow stem socialism's triumphant development. This too proves there can be no talk of even "ideological armistice," an attempted trick to slow socialism's march to its complete and final world victory.
The next piece is about bauxite workers mobilizing all resources for the productivity battle in this decisive second year of the historic Five-Year Plan. Then a progress report about scientists working to improve the sound quality of records that preserve Lenin's voice. Chemists, physicists, acoustical and computer engineers—all disciplines toiling together to restore dear Vladimir Ilich's inflections.
I keep wading through—about battles on the Ukrainian preplowing front (only four months left to prepare) and victories over Siberian rivers; socialist morality sermons and denunciations of "nihilistic" West German poets—because I tell myself that this is another form of work, more digestible than my academic stuff", thanks to the comic relief. Still, ten minutes is the limit. I long to telephone Anastasia, but it will do no good, for the same reason that it's too late to start again and make up for the lost months of work. If only I hadn't ruined that; if only I had her again! I know we wouldn't be blissful in the old way, but at least I'd be finished with these dreary self-doubts.
But my broken record is worse than Lenin's. If I leave the library now, I can't even pretend to have tried. What next?
Maya's alone at the counter now, again staring into space. She
The Lenin Library"^99
seems to be planning the life of the child in her bubble-belly. This is the quiet hour; the morning stragglers have arrived, her supervisor is out for tea. I go up for the briefest heart-to-heart.
"We'll stay with his mother for a while," she whispers, an eye peeled for anyone observing our chat. "She's been terribly good to me. She'll sleep in the kitchen and give us the room."
Maya's tears are pearls of suffering, as the Russian saying goes. As a young Tadzhik actress, she was brought to Moscow from Leninabad (formerly Stalinabad, formerly Dushambe) and given a coveted place for "outstanding representatives of the nationalities" in a theatrical academy. Months later, a train crash impaired her voice and badly scarred her Hiawathan face. While she was in bandages, her mother burned to death in a factory accident. Unwilling to return to the Leninabad she had left triumphantly a year before, she enrolled in a librarians' institute.
After graduation, she was found a good job in the Lenin Library—comfort to her lonely years, for she was certain her disfigurement would keep her unmarried. It did until last winter.
During the previous year, a studious Englishman named Ian doing research in Hall Number One had chatted with her once or twice about the weather. His good-bye in June was as reserved as these earlier exchanges, but back in the University of Manchester, memories of her, perhaps colored by comparisons with his more frivolous students, took command of him. Without so much as a letter, he returned to Moscow during the Christmas vacation last December. He asked the Intourist car waiting at the airport to take him to the library, raced up the stairs and proposed to her at the counter.
Maya knew this was her Chance. Ian was gentle and honest; whatever Britain was like, they would raise children and be happy. Having applied with her for permission to marry, Ian went home to Manchester, planning to return for the wedding at the end of the month-long waiting period. Days after his departure, Maya was summoned to an office.
"Why do you want to marry that English fool?"
"Because I love him." Aware that the purpose of the interview was to terrorize her, Maya fought back her tears.
The officer slapped her on the face. "Do you still love him?"
lOO/^MOSCOW FAREWELL
"Yes, I do."
The second slap made her scars burn. "You hardly know him. You want to exhibit your" (sneer) "physiognomy in the" (smirk) "United Kingdom?" He raised a fist. "Do you still love him?"
"I do. More than^ou will ever understand."
"Leave my sight before I lose control. And start praying."
None of Maya's fears materialized. She continued working— and with foreigners!—at the library. The marriage was prevented simply by refusing Ian an entry visa. The coming and going of their wedding date deepened Maya's love even more than the KGB interview. Ian was educated, refined, kind; he wanted to take her to a world of cultivation. This quiet Englishman who had made his glorious gesture for her became a knight representing, as well as a polar opposite to the KGB's hands, the good luck that had been intended to compensate her for her bad.
During her ensuing grief, her sole interest was England. Within the limits of available materials, she became an expert on Manchester daily life. She had spent so little time with Ian that she was able to relive every moment; able to remember his every copper-colored freckle. Then a workman came to mend the telephone in her apartment, and her thoughts about England and the Round Table, even about intellectual life, ceased as suddenly as they had begun. Her letter breaking the engagement asked him not to write again. She had come to feel that marriage to a foreigner was distasteful per se; that Ian was trying to drag her to unhappiness. In this, at least, the attitude of the KGB interviewer was now her own. A Soviet girl can never be home abroad. Heartache is a crushing price for cars and suburban cottages. True happiness can only be achieved with one's own people—even an unambitious telephone repairman.
"My mother-in-law will be a great help when the baby comes. She was a nurse during the war."
"Boy or girl? They can tell you in advance now."
"We don't know. My husband wants a boy, of course. . . . And don't you marry a Russian girl."
I'm about to ask something about the vague husband when, for the first time, I decipher her expression of the last months. It doesn't matter now. Nothing matters. I have my baby.
The Lenin LibraryXlOl
Back at my desk, I smile at the irony of Maya's "Don't marry a Russian girl" in the context of Anastasia. Then I force myself to have another go at a page of text. But it doesn't work: torpor puts me in a trance again, like autumn mud paralyzing the countryside. I cup my hands over my forehead to pretend I'm reading; better the other graduate students not know. I let a film form over my eyes and float over this building toward the demoralization of failure . . . which is accompanied by spiritual bliss.
I pry open my eyes. A pretty girl with a broad Russian bottom is standing at the lending desk. A bottom that's already mine: I'm certain she will turn, smile at me, give the magic sign. The sensuousness of my next dream is accompanied by sunlight streaming through a chapel's stained glass. When Joe Sourian wakes me, my watch reads twelve o'clock.