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cal perversity—the chants to the takers and cripplers of Hves— seemed to him less hypocritical than insane. Yet even intelligent people pretended not to notice. To keep themselves in power, the authorities had created a centralized system of permanent terror and depression. An entire population was toiling to make life harder for themselves under a Kafkaesque antiphilosophy based on forcing society as far from possible from what was normal. By comparison, even the devastated Germany through which his tank had clambered seemed a haven of enlightenment and comfort. It was now clear that a lifetime of odd man out awaited him in this ocean of sullen poverty. Yet when his chance to escape peeped out, he hadn't dashed for it. For such stakes, why hadn't he taken the risk? . . .
In 1946, he worked on the wall newspaper of a Moscow subway line under construction, using the Glorious Victory lessons he'd learned during the war to achieve the proper prose bombast. Then he was briefly a darkroom assistant. For all his pondering, it was an accident that made him a lawyer. The ambitious girl he married in 1947—she already had a foot in the door of the capital's tiny upper class of wheelers and dealers— was a Jewish student in the Moscow Juridical Institute, where he too enrolled. It was she with whom he was soon to lay in bed at night, bursting with hardness for others.
In keeping with its role in Marxist-Leninist theory and in Soviet governmental practice, law had become the least intellectual of disciplines. Studying in his spare time, Alyosha finished the three-year course in less than two. The curriculum was designed for the solidly proletarian lads who (like roommate Viktor) would quickly take their places as the nation's judges, prosecutors and Ministry of Justice officers. Less backward than provincial army officers, many were nevertheless unequal even to the primers that reduced all legal theory to easily memorizable formulas, applicable to any case without thought.
"Lecturers recited the bold print, we intoned the answers. No music: it was a recitative Mass."
Alyosha was again reminded that underestimating the stupidity in official places prejudiced one's survival and well-being as much as insufficient caution. The course taught the smattering of cosmopolitan youths who were to be Moscow's successful advo-
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cates that one gets ahead by exploiting the pervading apathy and ignorance.
For these reasons, law provided a happy choice. In half the time it took most of his colleagues—a fifth of the average Soviet work week—Alyosha earned a relatively handsome income: enough from his first month as a practicing lawyer to enjoy restaurant meals and presents for sweethearts. Within a year, he had met Georgian speculators and other "businessmen," the cream of the criminal lawyer's clientele. His long affair with Moscow's cafe society was beginning.
As with almost all his prosperous colleagues, Alyosha solicited under-the-table payments from criminal defendants or their relatives. But unlike some, he kept his private fees reasonable, which is why brothers and uncles of robbers and embezzlers he'd once defended sought him out when they too came a cropper. This was true even when these robbers and embezzlers had been convicted and shot, for Alyosha's best arguments sometimes came to nothing, even in the rare cases when he believed his clients innocent.
In a non-Soviet court, his agility of mind and precision of expression would have made him brilliantly successful; here, he was careful to use a goodly part of his powers to control the other parts from exercising their natural abilities. Beyond certain limits, defense of a "criminal" in the dock was not merely unseemly, but anti-Soviet. Thus Alyosha walked a narrow line not only between prosperity and greed with relation to his clients, but also between integrity and discretion vis-a-vis judges. Since a vigorous defense, especially one that punched holes in the indictment, might anger the judiciary, he had to disguise his thrusts, even when the indictment was full of blunt contradictions or where evidence of police mistakes or prosecution wrongdoing might have mitigated the sentence. Quite calculatingly, he repressed his briefs almost to the level of his former fellow students, now the plodding representatives of Soviet jurisprudence on the bench.
Nevertheless, Alyosha's clients trusted him to adapt his tactics to the circumstances. He became known as a connoisseur of which judge would stand for what amount of "legalism" (read "introduction of previously unnoticed, exculpating facts") in the
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defense case, or of "unhealthy oppositionism" in general to a prosecution conducted in the service of the Party and the Soviet people. Sometimes suspected but never disliked, the young lawyer with the easy smile learned that sensitivity to moods and character on the bench— and to Party-organized campaigns against this or that public abuse—was as important to his craft as knowledge of the law.
Of all his rewards as a lawyer, Alyosha most cherished the uncommon luxury of being almost his own boss. Apart from court appearances and the occasional volunteer stint for the sake of his record as a good citizen, his involvement with the system that monopolized ninety-nine of every hundred lives was minimal. Taking the cases—and vacations—he wanted, he worked an average of ten hours a week: just enough for food, drink and gasoline.
Over the years, he handled every kind of case, from bank robbery and murder to wrangles over square inches of floor space between estranged husbands and wives forced by housing conditions to continue sharing the same room. But commercial considerations prompted a preference for criminal rather than civil trials; the highest-paying clients remained embezzlers and captains of speculation, which shortages nourished like ragweed. Despite the narrow limits of his ambition, his reputation grew, especially within the sparse ranks of the Moscow advocacy. Trusted to split fees honestly as well as never to betray a venal colleague, he was referred choice cases that others were too busy to accept.
The making of his name in a specific area of the criminal code was as accidental as his choice of law itself. One day, a former client asked him to represent a nephew charged with rape. The accused was no less than the center forward of Moscow Dynamo, one of the country's most popular soccer teams. But instead of having his indiscretion hushed up, the usual practice with athletic and other celebrities, he was apparently in for a severe sentence, as demanded by Evening Moscow's squib about the crime. Rumor had it that the stadium hero had earlier taken liberties with a niece of a Central Committee member, and that this was the moment for a drastic lesson.
Titillating talk about the case swelled greatly when it came to
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trial and the heavy sentence was approvingly publicized. As a side effect, the newspaper's incidental mention of Alyosha provided him with more popular publicity than a Soviet lawyer could attract in a lifetime of squatting on a flagpole. From Murmansk to the Urals, requests streamed to "Defense Counsel A. Aksyonov," as he had been identified, from relatives of young men accused of sex crimes. When the parents were of the upper middle class or the black market bourgeoisie, they paid handsomely. Alyosha discreetly left unmentioned the curious circumstance of his professional expertise now running dead parallel with his personal.
"Not so curious at all," he said when I put it this way. "Not when you know what's happened to others. Whose fate do you know that isn't erratic in our happy land?"
Although his reputation as a sex crimes specialist slowly diminished over the years, Alyosha still handled many more sexual cases than the average lawyer, and continued to be visited by an improbable assortment of clients, from schoolteachers to generals, seeking confidential advice about conjugal duties and rights. Alyosha gave it objectively. With his adroit use of humor and of matter-of-fact tolerance to human diversity, he also tried to soften the vindictiveness of narrow-minded judges but, even within possible limits, never actually advocated sexual liberation. His attitude toward obtaining satisfaction was summed up in a ditty he liked to quote: "Kolya's fucking someone/Someone's fucking Kolya/And what's it to you, Tolya?" But although this was intended to satirize the whole panoply of Soviet intrusion on private lives—the idiocy of armies of inspectors, investigating "what The People think when they pee"—he felt it wiser to affect professional detachment on all larger issues.