Joe and I sometimes have lunch together when we're both at the library. He likes to eat at noon—likes to eat, come to think of it, at most times of the day (he always reckons it's just before or just after the rush), and his room is the only place for a satisfying snack when you're starved at night. He lives two floors below me in the dormitory, in a room crammed with jazz records, antihistamines, saucepans, vitamins, stacks of letters, heating pads, travel guides, boxes of soap powder, back issues of Time, back issues of Playboy, as well as Sugar Pops, Right Guard sprays and a substantial supply of canned chow mein from the American Embassy and other sources. Joe is as big and friendly as the stereotypical fat boy in any movie of fraternity life. He always wears a tie because his mother raised him to be a good Armenian boy; and because liquids drip down his stubby chin, the tie is always soiled. He's an exchange student like me, but this is his second full year; he likes it so much that he "extended" after the first. There are two kinds of Americans in Moscow, he likes to say: those who hate it here and "Joey-boy" Sourian.
"Let's chow down," he says, hand on his buckle. The belt is pushed so low by his stomach that his blue buttondown fails to reach it, revealing a triangle of T-shirt. "We gotta get a move on if we're gonna beat the crowd. Grab something quick so we can get back to the books."
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In and out of the University, Joe has a hundred friends, and all have sucked him into their schemes. Russians, Frenchmen, Georgians, the two Dutch girls who pretend to want nothing to do with uncouth Russian men, and the entire English and American contingents are his pals. People who otherwise might have little to say to one another—East and West Germans, Pakistanis and Bengalese—squeeze together on his bed as a member of the Armenian community shifts to make room for them: every Soviet Armenian considers himself a blood brother of the easygoing American who always has a gift, if only an old Esquire or the chance to hear The Original Dixieland Band on four-track Sony, for everyone who enters the room.
When he leaves his room, it is rarely without items to deliver to friends, friends of friends and supplicants. Wrapped in newspaper, stuffed in a cellophane bag and stashed under his overcoat in the manner of Harpo Marx, the daily booty represents a small fortune in rubles—and otherwise unobtainable happiness—to the recipients. Joe's dark eyes goggle slightly, for it is not certain whether any one of the items or their aggregate can get him arrested as a "speculator." But he laughs at himself and waddles on, hoping his bulk conceals his cargo.
A pair of West German scissors for his barber, woollen knee socks for the daughter of last year's biddy, nylon ties and tights for the world of Moscow taxi drivers and waitresses. Even a tattered prayer book, passed in a cubicle of a park toilet, for an Orthodox Jew so frightened that he requested it from an American rather than his own people, who are Jewish but Soviet. Because he takes seriously the unwanted obligation of a Westerner to supply Soviet friends with what he alone can obtain for them—and because his ability to catalogue and find each person's need somewhere in the Western community is extraordinary—he is a phenomenon of procurement and supply. He can't say no to a request. They pour in like airline reservations. If he went into business he'd have an overnight trading empire.
The Armenian merchant: some would say it's in his blood. Some do say he loves the middleman sweat and intrigue, and that his complaints are like an executive proudly beefing about too much work. His truth, however, is that he does it only out of the class fat boy's sense of obligation, which he would happily shed if
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he could. ^^You try playing Santa for twelve months," he sighs.
His acumen notwithstanding, he is nowhere as rich as Soviet students imagine: he takes just enough "turnover tax" on each item to keep his trade going. Nor, despite his chuckle to one and all, is he happy-go-lucky; keeping up this role is an even greater burden. "It costs plenty to be good for laughs," he told me on the night we played Russian and bought a bottle specifically to get drunk. On the other hand, his popularity and Russia's jumble have helped him break free of mama's inhibitions.
Even more than mine, his childhood is a case study of immigrant Americans stumbling in the tug of war between tradition and striving. His father, an A & P butcher, lost his job and died. Fed on starchy lavash and sweet telmash, pampered by aunts, Joe grew up a mother's boy—and mother's man, hope and idol. By fifteen, he harbored a self-fulfilling prophecy that his moist flabbiness would repel any girl he desired. But the sadness of this was softened by the general pattern of his adolescence. All interests, sexual and other, were subordinated to the goal of becoming a professor at Cincinnati University, whose library was visible from their house. He wore a white shirt to class every day. He had to succeed.
This is the background he is now bravely deserting: for the first time, he's up to his ears in wheeling-dealing and life. But it's less his Moscow goings-on that have freed him than the adventures of last summer. Instead of joining the other Westerners scurrying, on their first day of vacation, like baby gulls toward water to refresh their spirits in Europe, he decided to remain in the country between his two academic years. Convincing his sponsors that the travel was essential to his studies—his dissertation concerns prerevolutionary Russian attitudes toward Tamerlane —he wrested a subsidized tour for himself to Soviet Central Asia, seat of this branch of the Mongol conquerors. It was to start in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent and culminate, predictably, in a sentimental detour to Yerevan, where advance parties of Armenians home on vacation from studies in Moscow were already preparing the sumptuous welcome he would never receive. . . . Joe once more urges a "quick nip" to the cafeteria in order to avoid the dinner crush, but I so enjoy the story of his Central Asian voyage that I persuade him to join me on the double seat
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and tell it anew. Wary of the authorities, he has whispered the whole tale only to Chingiz and me. But he seems to recognize my need for diversion today and starts at the beginning.
The trip began in the desert heat of July, after the usual false starts because of extra documents required at the last minute and hard-won reservations abruptly canceled when Swiss and Swedish delegations appeared to monopolize planes and hotels. On the first leg, his companions—if he could help it, gregarious Joe did not journey alone—were a young French couple on a fling south from the University before summering in Menton. The Parisian girl changed costume before and after every meal. Under a sun that fried feet through sandal-leather, her suitor followed in her footsteps, lugging trunks on their peregrinations from one Tashkent hotel to another. (Intourist had bungled their arrangements.) Entering a lobby where the porters were having a smoke, he tripped, tore a tendon, and could not move. His darling cursed him and walked on.
Joe couldn't help: he was busy ministering to a lady of his own. A resident of Akron named Mrs. Betty Vogl, she was on his plane coming down, and invited him to a nightcap in her room. She answered his knock in a spangled bikini.
"It's so hot in here and no air-conditioning—can you imagine?"
Although never facile with words, Joe perceived some things so clearly that they formed near aphorisms in his thoughts. This Vogl floozy, he mused, is as ignorant as lustful, as vulgar as forward. Until now, her American Express trip had not been a success. "I couldn't care less. Big Boy," the voyager's twang proclaimed, "whether this is Tashkent or Timbuktu. Long as I got you." Nevertheless, he succumbed to her patent tricks. He was mesmerized by her boldness and, when his shirt was unbuttoned, by her obviously unfeigned attraction to the growth on his chest. Here was a woman who wanted him.