Protagonist of many yarns about motoring into potholes, the plump former dandy is the manager of a well-known dramatic theater, tickets for which he skillfully barters for everything from restaurant reservations to his frequently needed body work in the city's every official and illicit garage. Hurrying to the trotting races to crown a four-hour workday, he persuades us to join him. Alyosha and I hesitate briefly to ride in his accident-prone Moskvich, but it is microphone-free, promising easier talk than in the Volga.
Driving to the Hippodrome, Alyosha gazes passively through the window—as I often do—while the ebullient Ilya tells the morning's latest joke, a variation on the new vogue of turning everything into its opposite to spoof the Hegelian principle adopted by Marx. The scene is Brezhnev's private Kremlin den, to which, late this very evening of May 22, he will proudly lead Nixon after their sumptuous feast. Heavy eating and drinking have intensified their shared predilection to see themselves as knights of their silent majorities and noble friends, misunderstood by their own intellectuals.
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"Tell me, Lenny," says the President. "How's it really going over here? The rabble, I mean."
"Honest, Dick, Russians are fabulous. We arrest the lousy dissenters—and not a word. Raise the price of bread; still nothing. Wipe out inflationary savings by voiding our compulsory bonds—still they applaud the Party. You can't beat the Russian people."
"Jesus," moans the envious Nixon. "How can I inspire some genuine patriotism?"
Brezhnev rests his hand on Nixon's knee. "Sorry, Dick: I've promised Kissinger not to export revolution. . . . But maybe we should bump off the meddling Jew?"
The joke pleases Ilya with its penetration into the topsy-turvy cynicism—every last principle abandoned on both sides—that cements the new Soviet-American detente. Encouraged by my chuckle, he offers a quick resume of other new stories and schemes to beat the system. His commercial curiosity has been aroused by the enterprise of a fellow theatrical official who worked his way into a group visiting Japan. The thousand rubles for the package tour—nearly the average Russian worker's annual wage—was hell to raise, but the traveler bought two large mohair blankets in Tokyo. Cutting them into forty strips on his return, he sold them as shawls for twenty-five rubles each. This covered the trip; the felt pencils and other trinkets represented pure profit.
Whistling at the feat—or the rumor, which serves the purpose —Ilya proceeds to his own latest exploit, devised to overcome the spare parts famine. Repair of a privately owned Volga can usually be bought or biibed at a government garage, since most official agencies use this car; but mending a Moskvich can stymie even procurers of his standing. Nevertheless, his own car has just been completely overhauled. It was only necessary to extend the factory guarantee by a trifling eight months, a minor forgery performed by a steady-handed dentist for less than the price of a gold inlay. "It's morally satisfying to fool the plant that produced your lemon."
He works his way out of his usual quota of wrong turns and onto Leningradsky Prospekt. A million policemen are assembling here: this is on Nixon's route from the airport. In the wide road's
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comparative safety, Ilya drifts into a monologue about his family obsession, many times stronger than autos and racehorses.
Ilya's people were Jews from Odessa, Russia's prerevolutionary Marseilles of waterfront hurly-burly, racial mixtures and criminal craft. His grandfather, a society tailor who journeyed to Paris annually for designs and for the pleasure of speaking French, was a superfluous organism in the new union of workers and peasants. And indeed: a month after the establishment of Soviet rule in the city, recruits of the Cheka, forerunner of the NKVD and KGB, visited to have a look at him and to expropriate possessions that caught their eyes. When the toughs had slammed the door, grandfather set to work hiding the rest of his gold and valuables in scattered caches in the walls. Then the city soviet requisitioned six of the apartment's eight rooms, settling them with toilet-clogging members of the lumpen proletariat. Three quarters of the fortune was thus immediately lost. To try to sneak in and recover it, even to propose a deal to the new neighbors —who were whipped up with the class hatred of victorious underdogs—was unthinkable. One accusing word to the authorities might easily have the former exploiter shot.
Without even the pleasure of stealing an occasional gaze at his riches, the former baron of southern Russia's clothiers quickly aged. Besides, he now took home just enough food to feed his children: less than enough for himself. Even when provisions were available, the threat of denunciation prevented him from buying more, and he died in 1921, so near to and far from his treasure. Returning from the cemetery, the family found the seventh room occupied by new neighbors, and their remaining furniture plundered. Now led by Ilya's father, a comic writer of magazine feuilletons, the five members squeezed into the remaining room: three generations within fifteen square meters. The valuables in those four walls tided them over several unthinkable crises during the ensuing famines and purges. They triumphed—that is to say, survived.
But when Ilya's father returned from his World War Two service, it was not to that room—nor to Odessa altogether, whose large body of Jewish writers were just then being liquidated in the fearsome postwar campaign against "cosmopolitans." Provincial Kaluga, where he settled his family, was far safer from
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denunciation and execution. Again they survived intact until Stalin's death liberated them from terror—but the buried treasure was farther than ever from their grasp. This roiled them—especially Ilya, who himself was now grown and living handsomely in Moscow. He had started on his high life of imported clothes, expensive restaurants and glamorous women, for which jewels and gold were badly needed. Not that he hated Soviet rule—not, anyway, for the sole reason of family grievance. But politics aside, the utter waste of the money made him ill.
He made several visits to the house near Odessa's celebrated Deribasovskaya Street. His palms sweated as he gazed at it. He could/^^/ the treasure inside—but could devise no way to attain it. In each instance, he paced a week and went home. Three years ago, when he learned the old homestead was scheduled for rebuilding as a historical museum annex, his agony shot up and consultations with Alyosha assumed new urgency. As today, he never misses a meeting to kick around, as he says wistfully, his collection of futile plans.
Approaching the Hippodrome, he breaks off to concentrate on driving and parking. This operation completed, we hurry on foot to join the fine-weather crowd for the final races.
Like an amusement park, the Hippodrome is fun to visit every once in a long while. The notion of gambling in the Soviet Union is a laugh, but the racetrack itself is as dreary as a jazz combo from Volgograd. Faces in the crowd are the best entertainment: shabby pensioners who spend every possible hour and their last kopeks at the track; would-be racketeers with pencil moustaches. Periodic newspaper campaigns demand that the course be closed, citing fixed races, compulsive gamblers embezzling state funds, and the "dregs of society" who swarm to this intolerable eyesore in the nation's capital. But everyone here is nose-close to his form sheet as if the indignant articles concerned some development on the African continent.
Physically too, the creaking wooden stands smack of Coney Island. Pushing past toughs and teen-agers, who run small-time operators' errands as Alyosha once did, we find a place among the enthusiasts at the rail. The afternoon is at last taking shape. I have no real wish to be here but can think of no place I'd prefer