"Of course you've always had this unquenchable love for the people," someone cuts in. "All your earlier stuff about them being 'dumb animals' was clever acting. A great passion—and how about a little idealizing of golden tsarist times to deepen the hurt?"
A decorative girl on the periphery raises the old Khrushchev conundrum: how much might have been put straight if he and his 1960s thaw had continued. An artist sporting hundred-ruble Levis ordinarily would have disdained such triteness but has taken a visible fancy to her tits and rewards her offering by arguing that it's not a valid question. Nikita's very downfall proved the impossibilities: the Party establishment is far too strong, even if the masses really cared about who paints and writes what. "Nobody but us misfits really wants freedom—and we wouldn't know what to do with it. Besides, Khrush himself was no angeclass="underline" as Ukrainian Party boss, he presided over three million killings."
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"One million," says the petulant girl, proving her point about the former chiefs goodness.
That nothing said changes the opinion of anyone in the room, let alone in the government, helps loosen the conversational flow. The dialogues relate to the country's social life as Monopoly to Wall Street. The proof of this is the zestful iconoclasm, even though everyone knows some of the guests inform for the KGB: harmless little reports that earn equivalent little privileges. And although who actually does the dirty deed is a matter of some speculation, each party whispering about the other, almost all agree that one man—a writer now propounding Bulgakov to surrounding smaller fry—not only reports but also invents. Known as a freedom-fighter in the West and a fink here, he is simply treated with slight extra caution, rather than avoided.
"Hey Zhenya, going to get clipped in Tel-Aviv?"
Having exchanged socialist morality for superstitious Jewish ritual, Zhenya's zealously Communist father decided his son mustn't be circumcised. He, the father, now detests the Party, but can't resign unless willing to suffer revenge for a despicable insult to Soviet rule. And Soviet hospitals won't truck with foreskins.
"Hey Zhenya, going to treat the great Western public to lectures on the Dobrininskaya bohemia?"
The party is in full swing. An historian who writes about the unspeakable evils of the 1918 Allied intervention is drinking hard and owning up to me. "Fourteen fucking anti-Soviet armies were on Russian soil. Why oh why couldn't you crush Soviet rule before it really got started?" Next to me, two profiles lit by the dirty window do not hear each other at all, but this does not interfere with the smooth mesh of their arguments. After all they've been rehearsing for years—and one is now married to the other's former wife.
Kandidat of Philological Science
Book Illustrator
. . . gap of political backwardness widening as Russia's rottenness grows .
. . . fleeing to the West, which no
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longer even seeks a Lost Paradise, is suicide for an artist . . .
. . . obscurantism, misery, brutality; and the main thing—the choice oi either tyranny, or anarchic bloodshed—will take another century to change . . .
. . . rationalist-legalistic-materialist West: Westxnghons^ refrigerators bulging with produce, and you pretend that feeds the soul? . . .
. . . sick to death of the romanticism that goes prospecting for nobility in Old Russian pigshit . . . the same self-deception that ruined us . . .
... a cynical dictatorship, yes—but /'d never go where the inner ethic is also corrupted . . .
The Kandidat's much advertised hangover allows his stronger adversary to carry the day. "Yes, we're ruled by bullies with their whips and Marxist-Leninist bullshit. But I say we're freer, and happier, than where everybody volunteers to work for General Motors. . . . Pasternak said it all in that New Year's message of his. Socialism's only our attempt to put into practice the Christianity they preached for centuries. We took the sermons seriously because we're backward and naive—and of course bungled everything for the same reasons. Suffered horribly for our mistakes. But why do they hate us for this?"
I push across to the other side of the room. Not long ago, I couldn't get enough of socialism talk, but the monotony becomes as bad as the phoniness—which would be obvious enough after a few months, even if you didn't know that the book illustrator fond of proclaiming his detestation of Western corruption lives handsomely on propaganda drawings for reactionary publishing houses. He's not above some really vicious things—East German
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peasants tall and happy; West Germans bent and frightened— for children's books.
His protests that a Russian belongs to Russian culture are all the louder because of the unspoken comparison of his talent and future to Zhenya's. And because bright lights in all the arts—the genuinely creative handful who have stayed uncorrupted—are evacuating in the Jewish emigration. They leave behind the rest of the artistic elite, much of which is slimy with dishonesty. The dachas and club privileges for which they sell their hack stuff seem more pitiful as better people turn their backs on them.
By contrast, Zhenya's close friends, who are bunched near the kitchen, are reliving their trips to the provinces where, on commission to paint murals, they fucked everyone from daughters of collective farm chairmen to convict women in lumber camps. I used to like this talk even more. It was the real thing: free-and-easy bohemian life, the participants dropping everything for a month of hand-to-mouth adventures because they care about nothing except good vibes. But the truth is that they all suck someone as a source of income, like West Coast hippies with monthly parental checks—only the Russians live on much less. And although the discussion of who had whom last night and which vodka makes cunt taste sweetest can be amusing, they worry more than many Muscovites about sex. An ex-girl of Zhenya's once told me that if a new lady isn't impressed with him at the first glance, he can barely talk to her. He's so unsure of himself, she said, that he needs a fix of immediate approval, and only after this can he be his super-casual self In any case, I suspect that a few of Zhenya's friends are carefully taking notes for samizdat reportage about Moscow life, in which they themselves will appear as the antihero heroes.
Elbowing me aside on his way to the spotlight, a movie director bumps me into the oldest person in the room, an elfish fat man. When I pick up the thread of his monologue, he is reminiscing about his youth. Born in Poland, he grew up an anomaly: a Jewish soccer-player. He wasn't "a blimp like this, but beautiful slim as a pencil, oh boy, oh boy." Then the Nazis invaded; he ran east to where the Red Army was carving out its half, and was soon in NKVD hands. His prison train to Siberia was unfit for pigs, and he existed like a caveman in the
320^MOSCOW FAREWELL
unbelievably primitive settlement, gathering berries and sharpening stone to chop his wood. But if many died during the first winter, it was better than being gassed, like most of his family. He never lost his affection for every new day, nor his gratitude to the Russians, who didn't kill him.
While still in Siberia, he took his first flutters on the black market, to which most immigrants—Russians too—directed most of their working thoughts. Whole trainloads were sold and resold by steel-nerved operators, he,says; in some lines, seventy per cent of the production went astray. Investigators arrived from Omsk or Moscow, confiscated the loot, and unloaded it at top price—to the apprehended swindler if his bid was highest. His Krakow ghetto had hardly been a cultural center, but Russia's jungle laws took his breath away.