Ilya could boast of a small victory, at least: Mikha’s revolutionary ardor had cooled. Nevertheless, they began spending less time together. And Sanya was off in his own musical universe. He was up to his ears in arcane theories of scales, and his best friends could never have been interlocutors on this subject.
It was Mikha’s affinity for literature that had led him to the difficult and sad situation in which he found himself in the late autumn of 1966, unemployed and barred from graduate studies.
His would-be adviser, Yakov Petrovich Rink, was distressed about what had transpired and tried to help Mikha. Within the bounds of reason. Yakov Petrovich was unquestionably decent, but he was also pliant and adaptable. And so clever that he understood perfectly well how complicated and difficult it was to combine decency and pliancy when faced with the powers that be, with whom he had successfully negotiated his whole life. In Mikha Melamid’s case, however, he had not managed. It was a great disappointment, and it grieved him; but it hadn’t prevented them both from continuing work on their very important common cause.
Yakov Petrovich had made several attempts to help the young man find employment. Yakov Petrovich had countless connections in the pedagogical world, but even he wasn’t able to find a job that would allow Mikha to carry out his experimental research: implementing new methods of speech therapy.
Thus, every avenue of scholarly work was closed to Mikha.
The only thing Rink, corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, was able to do was arrange for the unsuccessful graduate-school candidate to teach literature in a night school—and only on a part-time basis. The eight hours a week he taught offered them meager sustenance for only eight days—and there were at least thirty days in a month. Alyona was still going to college, and her studies completely exhausted her energies, which were not very ample to begin with.
Mikha became convinced that he would never be able to find work on his own.
At the local Board of Education, where he went to inquire about a permanent job as a teacher of Russian language and literature, he was told there were no vacancies in Moscow, and that he would have to go to the Ministry of Education—maybe they would have something on offer in the provinces. They told him to leave his résumé and contact information with them just in case; sometimes there were temporary vacancies.
Mikha didn’t go to the ministry. Alyona was a young wife and still a student; nothing could have induced him to leave her behind in Moscow to go it alone.
Victor Yulievich, who had left teaching, felt that Mikha didn’t stand a chance to find a job as a schoolteacher. Tutoring was his only hope. And he gave him a student right away. But none of that—work by the hour, private lessons—could really satisfy him. He missed the boarding-school children!
By this time Mikha had taken on the dullest and most strenuous job of all—he was loading and unloading cargo at night at the Moscow-Tovarnaya railroad station. The work wasn’t terribly difficult for him, but Alyona objected. Mikha’s eyesight had never been good, and it put too great a strain on his eyes, she said. And she was right.
Another regular source of income was blood donation. He became a donor, but there were limits placed on how often one could do this—only once a month.
Finally, Mikha decided to talk to Ilya about more unconventional ways of earning a living. They planned to meet at the Pokrovsky Gates in breezy Milyutin Park, which had once belonged to the Office of Surveying and Land Management, on a park bench with two broken slats. Each of them had a bottle of beer in his hand and a briefcase at his feet. Sanya wasn’t there. They had decided not to include him in their deliberations.
After they graduated from high school, Ilya was the first of them to realize that he didn’t wish to work for the state—whether on a nine-to-five, or an eight-to-eight, or a three-days-on, three-days-off schedule. He also had no desire to go to college, because everything that truly interested him he could learn without disciplinary regimentation and coercion. He was adept at various means of avoidance, evasion, and disappearance.
The best option was a fictitious hire as an assistant to a scientist or a writer. This kind of opportunity was not easy to come by, but it had guaranteed Ilya virtual independence from the state. A more reliable, but less attractive variant required real input of one’s own time and effort: working in a boiler room, as a concierge, or as a security guard. When it came to earning dough, Ilya knew plenty of ways.
Ilya expounded on this to Mikha, yet again demonstrating his long-acknowledged intellectual superiority.
“You see, Mikha, we’re really talking about two different things here: fulfilling, interesting work, and making money. But I still think that you have to know how to combine them. Let’s take samizdat. The phenomenon itself is remarkable and unprecedented. It’s vital energy that is spread from source to source, establishing threads, forming a sort of spiderweb that links many people. It creates passageways that conduct information in the form of books, magazines, poems, both very old and very new, the latest issues of the samizdat Chronicles. There are streams of Zionist literature printed in Odessa before the Revolution, or in Jerusalem last year; there is religious literature of both émigré and domestic manufacture. The process is in part spontaneous and natural, but not completely. This is a conscious undertaking for me, and, in a sense, a profession. This is the work that earns me a living. And, of course, the cause needs to be developed and expanded.”
Mikha sat rapt and openmouthed, quite literally. A small trace of saliva had even gathered in the corner of his mouth, as happens with a sleeping child. Ilya held forth in an unusually solemn, serious tone. Mikha was completely enraptured with the contents of the lecture, and at the same time filled with pride: that’s our Ilya!
“It’s a fine thing!” Mikha said quietly, somewhat overwhelmed with the greatness of his friend.
At that moment Ilya was himself enamored of his role in furthering world progress. The grandiose picture that he painted did not completely jibe with reality, but it wasn’t pure invention, either. The petty demons of the Russian Revolution—the very ones Dostoevsky described—haunted the darkening recesses of the forlorn, overgrown garden. The long shadow of the completely ingenuous Chekhov was moving in the direction of Immer’s garden store, where the writer had stopped in to buy seeds now and then, and in a neighboring wing, in about the same years, under the patronage of the not completely innocent Savva Morozov, died Levitan, the gentle Jew who sang the praises of Russian nature with his paintbrush …
On this very corner, a few steps away, twenty years before, a tram came to a screeching halt … Yes, Murygin.
But on the whole, progress was on the march; of that there could be no doubt!
Ilya had an intriguing proposal at the ready. Samizdat had become a widespread social phenomenon, and demand for it was growing steadily. By the mid-sixties, the provinces had come alive. Not all samizdat was produced by idealistic enthusiasts. A real market was taking shape, and the most diverse kinds of people were active in it, including those with purely commercial interests. In addition to publications, the cost of which was determined solely by the price of paper or film, new merchandise was appearing that was meant to be sold for profit. Something akin to a trading network was coming to life. One of the key figures in this market was Ilya. Mikha could help with the distribution.
Mikha would never make a stellar distributor, Ilya knew this already. He was too noticeable, too friendly and open, too imprudent. He was also trustworthy, loyal, and responsible, however. Ilya might have thought twice about making such a proposal to Mikha; but he needed to have some means of survival. And besides, he had a wife!