Because its members seem Westernized in some ways of student iconoclasm, the clique illustrates the irrelevance of many imported categories and calculations—those I used to think in too—to this country. Even these jivey cats obey Russian laws of
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logic, confounding Western assumptions about how they should reason. Six or seven of them—who do not really look alike but appear to because their striving to be hip encourages conformity —comprise their tight ingroup. They are country lads with gangling arms extending inches beyond their faded flannel cuffs. All twenty-one or twenty-two years old, all sons of semiliterate peasants who nevertheless won gold medals in their village schools, they are, beneath their boisterous nonchalance, palpably nervous about the startling success and status so quickly severing their roots. In England, their type—Yorkshire working-class lads who find themselves making good in London—has been the making of much contemporary literature: the brash soon-to-be elite, with less and less to say to their village parents, yet also little to the genuine intelligentsia of Moscow and Leningrad.
But they themselves don't know they're on edge. Quick and clever, they've exploited their provincial manners to help make them the dormitory's wise guys and big wheels. Taking the University as a long, big-city spree, they devour impressions and discoveries—of theaters, girls, acquaintances working in the cultural establishment—with appetites befitting their thin frames. They are flying through the best years of their lives on their energy and wit. All my life, I've avoided the fraternity type more successfully than here; the clique somehow shames me into returning slaps on the back and repaying them with American jokes for theirs about Russia.
In their last of five years here, the members are writing theses instead of attending classes. A hundred or so pages long, these papers are the first independent scholarship required during their University careers, but thanks to agreeably low standards of research and writing, most of their day is available for loafing. (The ringleader, a caustic young man with unwashed hair and wild eyes, is writing about Vsevolod Meyerhold, the brilliant theatrical experimentalist, arguably more important than Stanislavsky, who "disappeared" in Stalin's 1937. Caught between the impossibility of an honest thesis—-because Meyerhold's avant-garde theories are still taboo and his tutor wants no mention of Stalin—and the bitter pill of a phony one—because he's increasingly enthralled by his subject's genius—Number One has taken to increased buflbonery "in Vsevolod's style.") Waking late
Notes from My Window^ 13
in their airless rooms, they shout the well-known slogan to each other through the walls: "Rise, workers; onward and upward!" Then they reluctantly take leave of their beds to congregate in one of the rooms, sitting against one another in underwear worn a full week, smoking strawlike cigarettes for breakfast and telling political jokes.
The gags are variations on three or four old standbys illustrating the gap between Soviet rhetoric and reality, and the nonsense of intensifying propaganda campaigns instead of tackling real work that might close the gap. Two collective farmers meet in the mud of their village street, "Hey, Petya!" shouts Ivan. "What's this I hear on the radio? Something called Communism—d'ya know what it means?" "Sure," volunteers Petya. "That's when everybody gets everything he wants." "Gee! What would you ask for under Communism?" "A good little airplane." "Why on earth doyou need an airplane?" "I could fly to America and buy myself a bag of potatoes."
Question from "Armenian Radio": "Can a prick be a member of a Brigade of Communist Labor?" Answer: "No—for three reasons. It can't work seven hours a day. It frequently changes its place of employment. It is known to spit on its work partners."
Urgent archaeological exploration is being pursued on Egyptian territory soon to be flooded by waters from a new dam. An Italian team discovers a miraculously preserved tomb, but their elation turns to consternation when they fail to decipher its hieroglyphics, even to determine the buried suzerain's name. They call in an English team working nearby, but the Oxbridge experts have no better luck. A French team is summoned, then a German one; the code remains unbroken. In despair, someone thinks of sending for Professor Stukaivich, the leading Soviet Egyptologist. A telegram to Moscow produces the great academician ten days later—flanked, of course, by two KGB escorts. Shaking hands with his colleagues, whom he knows by way of scholarly journals, he enters the tomb. That evening they do not reappear. A long day and second suspenseful night pass without sign of them. Haggard and bearded, the three men finally emerge on the third evening, announcing laconically, "It's Ramses III." The astounded scientists whoop their congratulations. "Marvelous chaps, those Russians!"—but how was the
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mystery solved? "I don't want secrets," says an Italian over the popping of corks. "But how did you identify Ramses?" "The bastard," grunts a KGB man. "He confessed."
But disagreeable reaction has taught me to draw no "obvious" conclusion from these jokes. Behind the clique's sarcasm lurks an insular patriotism from which the Texas Bible Belt could take lessons. When I laugh too loudly at their failures-of-socialism stories or offer an observation of my own, they turn on me, a glint in their eyes. They'W poke the fun; foreigners had better keep their mouths shut—or, as their rougher mates do with the odd cheeky Arab, be prepared for a beating one day when caught alone in some snowy field.
At bottom, they're convinced that Soviet ways are the best in the world. They accept the system's underlying axioms partly because it is easier to believe than to doubt, partly because propaganda, as E. M. Forster said, "is not a magic drug; it must appeal to something that already exists in men's minds, or its power evaporates."
The appeal to the clique of their own social system lies not so much in its being Soviet or socialist (some of their favorite jokes remind us that Marx was a bearded Kraut—no, a dirty, bearded Jew) as in its being Russian. And what is Russian is ours. The Red Army is ours, Lenin is ours, sputniks and dialectical materialism, agitprop and even meat shortages are ours. Maybe Russia isn't really best; perhaps, for the real truth, it's crude and backward. But not weak! The armed forces, biggest and best, are growing more so; let the West laugh at that! Besides, backwardness is all the more reason to defend the homeland against the richer, denigrating West. All the more reason to work for our people's triumph. Lampooning their political lessons, therefore, they believe in the need for them.
Work for the Soviet Union is precisely what the clique will do two or three years after graduation. Assuming success in their first jobs, as teachers and editorial assistants, where occasional reprimands for heavy drinking will not spoil their essentially favorable records, they will be recruited to operate the machinery of the state. Not the heavy machinery of the KGB or Party apparat —from the Party's point of view, they're too clever and sardonic to be trusted with direct political power—but the desks