To the drizzly streets again, and no sneak return for my forgotten umbrella. But the dismal episode also made clearer than ever my need to go the other way, away from riches and back to Russia. I needed Moscow's adventures and sense of struggle to bring me back to life. Fd return and recapture Anastasia whom, in London's polite foreignness, I more and more treasured as my future wife. And I had a mission. Alyosha's young internist friend had given me a list of medicines, including an experimental Swiss one, that might save his life.
Another omen was the scholarship committee's quick consent to sponsor me for a third semester. My virtual disappearance during the first two should have got me disowned, but a ten-page letter claiming Fd wangled access to city Soviet archives just before leaving in July and extolling their handling of the
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exchange program — in paragraphs they could quote for further funding from Ford — did the trick. The chairman published a paean to samizdat literature every three months in The New York Times Magazine, and I casually mentioned how well his (useless) sociopolitical insight had guided me. With only a few nervous reminders to me of my previous academic achievement, the committee declared faith in my judgment if I felt it important to return.
The Soviet side was less obliging. Unlike the students preparing to leave from America, for whom the committee coordinated and channeled the paperwork, I had to arrange my own visa. The mess ripened under the gaze of the Soviet Consulate's guilt-framed Lenin. Counselors Kuznetsov, Kutuzov and Rasskazov, the three musketeers of the propaganda-stacked waiting room for tourist visas, couldn 't understand the immensity — or cheek? — of my request. Oh no —they were not so easily fooled. If I wanted what I pretended, how could I explain the presence of a student of the American exchange program in London? . . . They should cable to their Washington embassy to check my story? Ho ho, and would I next suggest they fly me to the moon?
No, Meester, their cables went to Moscow, thank you; they knew their own jobs. A so-called "American student" couldn't be abroad without his government's knowledge and consent; why, therefore, wasn 't the proper Washington agency sorting out my problems? And if I wanted someone to check an American so-called Scholarship Committee's correspondence about me with the Soviet State Commission on Special Higher Education, why did I come to them with my dubious request? Did I know what building I was in? And that it closed at one o'clock; all, er, guests must be out."
The workings of the Soviet consulate brought everything back. Better than Moscow offices because it had a veneer for foreigners, but with the same antagonism to petitioners; the same resentment, suspicion and surliness to the public it supposedly served. To what category — rat? snooper? spy? — does this disturbing foreigner belong? Will we have to spend money on him? (Xerox copies are devilishly expensive in Moscow: a vice-minister of trade was recently rebuked for running through
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an unnecessary sheet to show off a new machine, thereby wasting nine-tenths of a cent of hard currency.) The switchboard operator — in central London! — answered with an angry "da" (guess where he was trained) and knew almost no English. In any case, Kuznetsov was not at his desk, Kutuzov was away and he'd never heard ofRasskazov. Better to call again in the afternoon (when the Consulate was closed).
The next day, Kuznetsov was away, Rasskazov not at his desk and nobody could imagine where Kutuzov was. I took a bus to Hackney for a new place to walk.
In mid-August, the sun shone most mornings and a committee check for expenses upgraded my suppers to take-out curry from a Queensway shop. A Soho chemist, the seventeenth I begged, sold me a dozen tubes of an ointment called "5 FlurouraciV without a prescription. They were to ease the X-ray burns on Alyosha's buttocks. But he couldn't get the Swiss medicine, and a Fulham Cancer Clinic consultant, having listened to my translation of Alyosha's diagnosis, said he could not prescribe treatment for someone not his patient. Besides, the potion itself could be lethal. I could do nothing more humanitarian now, he concluded, than to help my Russian friend prepare for his death. He was an upper-class English turd who informed me that Nixon should have leveled Haiphong.
The next day, I invaded the Embassy as well as the Consulate. (Telephoning was becoming harder. When switchboard operators heard the bleeps indicating an incoming call from a public booth, they hung up before I could push my two-pence in.) Kuznetsov and Kutuzov were on vacation in Moscow — which was no longer even faintly comic. A voice raised as high as mine said there was no word about my case and nothing to do but wait. It "seemed unlikely,"however, that a consulate assigned to conduct Soviet business in the United Kingdom would be empowered to issue a student visa to an American. Why didn't I fly to my homeland? Accustomed to "logical"problem-solving, Moscow would approve this "more straightforward" approach.
I sat among Hyde Park's nannies, alternately storming and trembling. Bureaucratic stupidity —/ couldn't allow myself to think it was more — was a personal insult: Russia defaulting on its
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debt to me. One more week and I'd have to borrow money and actually fly to Washington. Alyosha needed the medicines; I needed to be with him. We had worked on a scheme to meet in Bucharest if I couldn 't return: pleading the gravity of his disease, he'd get doctors to support a petition for special dispensation to travel abroad. But his oldest medical friends, who'd signed a thousand absent-from-work chits for his girls, shrugged unhappily. They could get Alyosha a visa as easily as Pravda thunder could free the Scottsboro boys. He would go nowhere. It symbolized our relationship's unnatural change of balance that everything now depended on me. I had to find the strength to make up for the decline of his.
At the lowest point, I recognized his handwriting on an envelope from the top of my hotel stairs. "News from a foreign country came/As if my treasure and wealth lay there. " Dreading the worst and hoping for the miracle, I trembled as I coped with the glue.
"Hello there, muchacho! Summer skies are blue and the radish crop gluts our markets. Accept our congratulations on the advent of Machine-Tool Workers' Day. I know I can count on you to continue saluting our patriotic holidays. For our part, we're planning a fitting fete ..."
Corny as it was, a censor might take this at face value, predisposing him to pass the rest. But my tears were forming because these first words I'd received from him since I left showed that at least part of him was undamaged.
Machine-Tool Workers' Day was on September 29 this year, he continued. His advance warning was because all my mail to him, sent throughout July and August, arrived in one delivery the previous week. "No doubt the English mates are on strike again. It's not for me to interfere, but can you really expect an efBcient postal service on exploited labor?"
He objected to two of my postcards — of Queen Elizabeth in regalia and a Modigliani nude — that had obviously pleased him, comparing them unfavorably to his enclosed one of the famous Worker and Peasant statue, which, under the guise of admiration for its sickle-waving Amazon, slipped in the sweater size of a new clothes-conscious lovely. A hilarious sketch of a visit to the Exhibition of Economic Achievement followed, the real message
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of which was an account of his icon hunt in the Zagorsk Monastery, where a sanctimonious priest talked prices between the lines, much as he was doing now. Like a plumber discoursing with a naturahst, they couldn't be certain they understood each other, and the priest balked before selling.
"Oh yes, vandals swiped the Volga's remaining strip of headlight chrome from the monastery parking place for Western tourists. But this is not the tragedy some would make of it, inasmuch as no purloining of ornamentation can affect the saloon's riding qualities."