The Lenin Liln-aryX 119
my guilt by doing the bedpans—anything connected with my profession."
When it was all over and he was back in the University for this, his second year, Joe pondered two small puzzles. Had the entrapment been planned from Moscow, or at the initiative of local agents? And what purpose did it serve—unless to recoup Aeroflot's fifty miserable rubles—to make him pay for the "polluted" sheets? (When the KGB man left, hospital officials said they could not "impose" such linen on innocent Soviet patients, and a pile was produced for Joe to examine before—as they claimed—its feeding to the incinerator. If they were indeed his dirty dozen, this indicated surveillance from the very beginning.) Why the operation had been undertaken at all seemed less mysterious. He had seen too much and was behaving too cockily. In case his sickened deflation at the news of Barbara's fate were not enough, he was warned that any "exaggerations" he might spread would only "lengthen Comrade-Nurse Kowalska's social rehabilitation." The men in charge obviously reckoned that expelling him from the country directly from Tashkent would have increased the chances of his publicizing the summer's adventures. Instead, he was returned to his Tamerlane research in Moscow, where they had a hold on him.
The stiffness of his neck muscles persisted into late fall, causing back pains and eyestrain. His heartache, manifested first in total apathy, then in overwhelming self-condemnation for his selfish incaution and finally in a longing for Barbara's hair and eyes, lasted longer. Surely it wasn't possible he'd never see her again. On the other hand, the "Summer of the Two," as Chingiz called the five weeks in Tashkent, was a turning point; and when Mrs. Vogl turned up in Moscow and traced him to the University, he did not go to her hotel. The body for which he had lusted and thanked his lucky stars only last July had utterly no attraction for him; didn't that show remarkable growth?
Just before the deep freeze in November, the University organized a trip for English-speaking history students to Borodino, site of the great battle between Napoleon's and Kutuzov's armies. Puffing on the hills and, as always, visualizing Barbara, Joe lagged behind and got lost. His asking directions of three girls
120^MOSCOW FAREWELL
picnicking on an old breastwork sparked a conversation. Yes, he was American, he said wearily; and they were . . . nurses from Tashkent! His next question twitched on his lips. Two of the three answered yes. One had even studied with Barbara!
She knew more than the others. While Joe was still in the hospital awaiting his examination for release, poor Barbarinka was exiled to a village in Kirgizia. It had no medical facilities; she was put to work looking after pigs. But her mother collapsed almost immediately and she was permitted to return home. Now she worked as a floor-mopper and toilet-cleaner in Tashkent's ice-cream factory.
Devastated, Joe had to sit down. The pain in his neck felt just as it had in the irrigation ditch. But either because they genuinely knew or wanted to calm him, the girls said that Barbara wasn't unhappy. She blamed no one; indeed, felt nothing called for blame. "And we're not just saying this." The girls had seen her in cafes and strolling the main street, and nothing in her conversation or behavior suggested bitterness or even surprise. . . . Yes, for a month or so, she did talk of Joe returning to rescue her from Tashkent. But now she was planning to be married. To a half-Tartar boy who made deliveries to the factory.
Weeping about this, it seemed to Joe that the tragedy's added dimensions reached to new lows and new heights. Something transcendental was afoot; nothing else could explain his encounter with the nurses two thousand miles from Tashkent, in a Napoleonic battlefield's forest of monuments to slaughtered divisions. Would the summer's weirdness never end? The enormity of meaning behind the chain of events made him giddy with life's infinite mysteries and possibilities. He, a Cincinnati teacher's pet, living through this! But the multi-adventure's very quirks made it a kind of religious experience, so personal that no third party could sense its mystical effects, any more than they could know what Barbara would always mean to him.
So she wasn't crushed, but peacefully accepted her fate. But this new twist—the ultimate injustice of her goodness in the face of calamity—produced the greatest hurt. No, she was not just a shallow beauty; this had been no summer romance. But marriage to a Tashkent truckdriver? Surely she had the same
The Lenin Library"^ 121
commitment as he to the memory of their idyll? With new puzzlement and fresh areas of pain, the affair recaptured control of him for the winter season of brooding.
Time has held its breath during Joe's narrative. In a polite request for confidentiality, he reminds me that only Chingiz and I know the whole of it, then sits still for a long moment. I cup my hand on his shoulder as my lieutenant on a nonbelligerent street gang used to on mine. Slowly we return from Central Asia to the reading room's high ceiling and imposing four walls.
"You gonna check your books in?" he asks in his hoarse whisper. Despite the season, an oily film coats his cheeks. If only he knew how much everyone, from Arabs to Cambodians, likes him. How much everyone needs to relax with him in his cafe of a room, especially when bored or depressed.
"Might as well."
Yes, I've had enough for the day. If I leave now, I can make a fresh start tomorrow.
Depositing my five volumes with Maya in return for my canceled check-out slip, I follow Joe's bulk out of our dissertation works. Although he recuperated relatively rapidly from the Borodino blow, he turned to food for solace, growing larger than ever. We walk down the main, marble stairway, then through a series of wire-encased passageways and back steps to the cafeteria, with its mess hall smell. Like ten thousand eateries in Moscow basements, it is a steamy room with dishwatery smears on the walls, but with a much smarter clientele than average. We pick up our metal trays and cutlery, twisted aluminum pieces that might belong to some post-atomic holocaust survival kit. In the absence of knives—a favorite item of pilferage, rarely replaced—some diners are ripping off^ mouthfuls of meat from their chunks with bared teeth, while others try to cleave them into bite size with two soup spoons. At the counter, we choose the hearty borscht, a main course of scrawny chicken, and the dried-prune-and-apricot compote for dessert. But it's a mere seventy kopeks and, as Joe predicted, the line is insignificant at this hour.
In quest of air, we sit at a table near the door. His mouth full of food, Joe nods toward the steam table. During a pause for
122^MOSCOW FAREWELL
refilling the soup caldrons there, two teen-age ladlers in white smocks and caps have grasped each other around the waist.
"See what I mean?" he says. "This fantastic physical contact, it's everywhere. Where else would you see that scene?"
"That scene" is repeated severally in the stuffy cellar: girls holding hands, linking arms, touching. Pairs sharing seats, like kindergarten children. Before the summer, Joe used to position himself in metro cars, elevators and other packed places to explore breasts with his elbows. The ease of it amazed him. Either because Russian women were too healthy-minded to suspect his tricks or, he theorized, because a lifetime of crowded quarters had rendered them oblivious, none noticed even minutes of persistent kneading. After Betty and Barbara, he no longer needed this—nor did he feel his former awkwardness with girls: he even managed to take several dormitory neighbors to bed. But he slept only a few times with each; what interested him more was the Russian female as a genus, their attitudes and habits. What did it mean that in the library's other reading rooms, all less commodious than Scholarly-Scientific Hall Number One, females were always in each other's laps? That they seemed to enjoy rather than resent the squashing, as if the reassurance of a warm body touching one's own was better than sitting alone and tackling independent work?