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for this moment, and sense that a bit of action will clear the ambiguities.
Our first race, the ninth and penultimate on the program, is off at 3:40—and then 3:45 because the starting car stalls and the rigs must be lined up again. "Who do you like?" challenges an urgent last-minute voice above the babble, and as the seven trotters prance past, a chorus of "C'mon, c'mon" goes up, in a universal intonation. But when the winner is announced— Burma, driven by a muscled woman—the curses of disappointed bettors are distinctly stronger than at Yonkers.
"Shit."
"The whore."
"A cunt of a nag, she took a dive."
When Alyosha and Ilya go off to place their bets for the final race, I contemplate the woman on my right, a crone in boots and a winter overcoat. Gradually, I become aware of a man in a windbreaker nudging me on the other side. I begin the small talk. He yacks in a country dialect about luck, life and the hardships of Siberia, which he has "er, visited once," but for some reason balks hard when I ask where he hails from. At last he mutters "Odessa," but when I ask about his occupation there, thinking of Ilya's house, he becomes pugnacious. I turn away from the odd stranger, but he fingers the cloth of my pants and asks where / hail from, the busybody. . . .
"You're American. But no. Really-really? Let's drink to that. I want to share a bottle with you—/ insist."
I manage to demur by citing my companions, and soon we're smiling the idiot smile of nothing further to say. But minutes later, his lips are in my ear again.
"Over there in your America—-have you got crime?"
I affirm the sad truth.
"That's what our newspapers always say, but . . . well, you know. Good to hear it from a straight-shooter. Tell me, how much goes on?"
"Too much."
"Wait now, don't mix me up. For example, have you got any karmanchiki.'^"
My memory supplies the translation, but my imagination isn't
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working. Visibly pleased by my reply—of course we have pickpockets—the thin man turns thoughtful, only to wheel around again a minute later.
"Send them our respects. To American pickpockets from their Russian colleagues: we embrace them, in true peace and friendship."
When I decipher the clues—what had so interested him in my clothes, why he'd stood so close, what he was doing in Siberia—I pull an instinctive step away. The nifty professional reads my eyes. "Don't worry, for God's sake, I'm not going to do you. Stick up Uncle Sam? I'm no double-crosser."
It's my day for being reacted to as an American. Hearing the news, the taxi driver on the way to the University lectures me about my President, who has already arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport. Gor'blimey cap down to his eyes, the driver is lamenting the ninety minutes lost because much of the city center is closed for the cavalcade. A squad of policemen ordered all drivers on his street to the curb, ignoring pleas to move on by an alternative route until their orders changed. But despite his temper, he's surprised I'm not cheering Richard Milhous among the sidewalk crowd.
"Your own President, aren't you proud? People should stand up for their country or it'll grow weak. Take us for example. Even your American bosses come here to learn. To bargain for agreements—because we're strong."
I left Alyosha and Ilya after the last race to attend to some things in my room. Ilya had acknowledged our four-ruble winnings with a playful "Our Luck Lies in Our Own Hands," a slogan for prodding productivity—to which Alyosha retorted with an old Russian saying: "There's no such thing as luck—and don't bother waiting for happiness either." In keeping with this out-of-character pessimism, and with his odd behavior all day, he asked Ilya to pinch-hit at a five o'clock appointment with a lovely. He was going home and asked me to come as soon as I could.
The dormitory is almost gay in the spring afternoon. Before starting my nuisance errands, I respond to a note from Masha asking me to come by immediately. Gesturing to the ceiling—a
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bit of silliness: surely her room's not bugged—she steps into the corridor to tell me that Chingiz has been arrested.
She's almost certain. He was led away last night. To prevent Jewish activists from causing embarrassment, the causes celebres were rounded up for the duration of Nixon's visit, and rumors are flying through the dormitory and the Philological Faculty that Chingiz had volunteered some services for them or was otherwise involved in the dissident movement.
We find privacy in the stairway. Masha blurts out a story that punishes me for my part in Chingiz's trouble. A month ago, he was summoned to an office in the main building and handed a manuscript. It was a draft of a newspaper article cataloguing my sins, from "debauchery" to "disrespect for elected Soviet representatives," and had been prepared, he gathered, for instant publication in case I was expelled for running with disreputable elements. Among the testimony exposing me as an instigator of anti-Soviet conversations was a quote from Chingiz. The author, a middle-aged journalist specializing in the Western colony's sins, asked him to sign.
Chingiz said he had neither heard such remarks from me nor observed me as described. Storming that this was not the behavior of a Soviet citizen, the journalist threatened him with expulsion. The rector's relative liberalism and reporter's extremely weak case convinced Chingiz that this was a bad bluff", but Masha feels the episode is connected with his arrest. Perhaps the correspondent had worked through the pro-rector, known for his Stalinist inclinations. Chingiz's selection to be one of the students "quoted" by whoever ordered the article is also ominous.
The news is like a many-pronged attack. Since Masha is not in the fraternity of temperamental opposition, I'm uneasy talking politics with her. Weeks ago, out of the blue, she accused me of considering Palestinians subhuman, "like all Americans do." Our relationship is grounded on avoiding everything separating East and West, and only such an emergency could have prompted her to open up to me about the pressure on Chingiz and the journalist's tricks. But of course the brunt of the blow is on him. All I can do for him now is do nothing; until where and why he was taken is known, bringing the story to a Western
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correspondent might worsen his position. Recognition of our helplessness gives Masha and me a moment of camaraderie before she returns to her resentment, silently blaming me for involving Chingiz with my foolish liberalism.
The truth is that he dismissed my political notions. Unlike other dissenters, if that's what he really is, he still regarded Marxist socialism as the ultimate hope for progress. Although more aware than most that Soviet society was less democratic in many ways than the worst tsarist reigns, he insisted that this could change if the dictatorship were displaced; whereas the outward manifestations of choice in the West—one vote for a banker, one for an unemployed black—only pointed up the impossibilities. A substructure of contradictions, hypocrisy and greed, capitalism could never support anything shining.
At our last meeting, we discussed Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, which he'd laboriously studied with his rudimentary English. What impressed him was not the murderous Soviet drive for control of Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War; he'd fully expected that ruthlessness. But Orwell's enduring faith in democratic socialism strengthened his own. He read me a passage he'd painstakingly copied: "In every country in the world, a huge tribe of party hacks and sleek little professors are busy 'proving' that socialism means no more than planned state capitalism with the grab motive left intact. But fortunately there exists a vision of socialism quite different from this."