tive. They banned cognac at the officers’ mess of one military garrison. The counter woman found a solution right away: She poured cognac into tea glasses, and to make things look realistic, she gave them a couple of cubes of sugar and a teaspoon in the saucer. The officers were happy because they got two hundred grams instead of fifty in each glass.
Despite all the antialcohol severity, curious things still happen. A watchman went to check the rooms and found the office manager dead drunk. It scared the old watchman, who had been unable to open the door since the drunk’s legs had been propped against it. Another story was spicier. Two staff members were found in a classroom. When the door was opened, he started running around in search of his trousers, but she was too happily high to worry. Both were fired. Before, drunkenness was considered a minor human fault, for which people were chided but not punished. Now it’s all different. I think it’s gotten better. There are fewer drunkards on the street, and you don’t smell alcohol on your fellow passengers in the metro and bus.
DECEMBER 26. Sometimes it’s not so bad to go to work. Quite often it’s a substitute for everything else—a women’s club (which we don’t have), store, beauty salon, and literary salon. We have plenty of free time, so we get together with the charming girls from another room and discuss men, sex, fashion, and health. In contrast with American women, we don’t discuss recipes. If we do talk about food, it’s only where to buy it. Cooking it is a secondary consideration.
One of our favorite topics is putting down men for being
egotistical, lazy bums and scoundrels. All of us have examples from our own lives, and any thesis can be supported with convincing facts. Recently Irina’s boyfriend went off with another, and she’s still upset. We keep telling her that she’ll find someone else. Olya’s husband refuses to earn money and told her, “Why should I support you? You have an education, too.” Lyuda’s husband won’t sleep with her (this is not widely known). Nadya’s husband, on the other hand, wants her all the time. I prefer to listen. It’s not interesting to talk about my ex-husband. But we never run out of material, and sometimes we even stay after work.
Some of the women have special talents—sewing, knitting, cutting hair. Work is where we order and try on dresses and blouses and have our hair done and get manicures and massages.
However, our biggest amusement is buying and selling clothing. We get valuable information at work about what’s on sale where, and we can order deficit goods. Say one woman sees French nail polish in the morning. We quickly chip in, send her to the store, and cover for her absence. Men sometimes participate in these games, too. Recently we sent a young professor to buy American makeup kits. We lost on that one because you could buy only two per person. His wife got one; his boss, the other.
Certain goods arrive directly from abroad. Some of the girls have friends working there. The girls do a small business helping sell the things their friends bring back. The clothing isn’t from Dior, but it’s not from the neighborhood department store either.
I remember a story Mama told. The principal of her school had a great sense of humor. Watching the women examining an
imported bra, he said, “Girls, if it doesn’t fit any of you, I’ll take it.” But seriously, men buy things for their wives at work, too.
DECEMBER28. I love my job when I’m actually doing it. It’s the enforced lying and doing nothing that I hate. But what else could I do? Disregard everything? I’d be eaten alive. You have to be an irreplaceable specialist or have nerves of steel. Unfortunately neither applies to me. How can you become a professional when you have to lecture on more than twenty topics? We are “broad-profile” specialists, jacks-of-all-trades, masters of none. We often joke among ourselves as we head off to the lecture halclass="underline" “Which will we do this time—sing or dance?” We manage on our general erudition and favorite topics. That’s also an art, starting a conversation on economics, for instance (what the lesson plan calls for), and then steering it ten minutes later to the mysterious phenomena of the human mind. It’s hard to talk about concrete problems because no one knows what to do about them. It’s better to stick to the eternal topics: literature, mysticism, love.
Students have changed in recent years. They used to swallow everything. They read newspapers, knitted, or talked during bad lectures. Now they don’t want to knit or read. They want to hear the truth. Why must we pay for the sins of others by standing in confusion before our audience? We’re still afraid to tell the whole truth, and no one needs half-truths anymore. Naive students are expecting concrete advice from us. Where are we supposed to get it? It’s impossible to teach theory because it differs from practice, and practice differs from common sense.
Smart students either skip lectures or don’t ask questions and gladly chat about interesting topics.
I think that what’s important now is learning how to talk freely and without fear about everything—politics, concerns and cares, feelings, disappointments. The “inner censor” is still inside each of us, and I doubt that our generation will ever be free of it.
No, in our troubled times the best thing is to teach something like ancient history or archaeology. There’s a funny joke. On the final exam in Marxism-Leninism the teacher can’t get any answers from a student. He finally asks the easiest question: “Who were Marx and Engels?”
“I don’t know,” the student replies.
“And Lenin?”
“I don’t know either.”
The teacher is stunned. “Where did you come from, dear fellow, what remote corner of the world?”
“From the city of Kozlov.”
The teacher gives him a D and then goes to the window, looks out into the distance, and says softly, “I wonder, should I say the hell with everything and move to Kozlov?”
DECEMBER 29. How can you run off when there’s such a great canteen, such a great lunchroom, as well as clean toilets and carpet runners in the halls? At my last job the lunchroom stank unbearably, and we had to stand in line for forty minutes to gulp down disgusting food in the remaining five.
Here we treat special perks with great respect. When the
canteen is offering deficit products like meat, fish, or cottage cheese, we drop whatever we’re doing and hurry down. The canteen is more important than anything else. “He’s in the canteen’’ is as impressive as “He’s lecturing.’’ We hurry after the ones already there. When coffee vanished from the city, everyone came into work, even on days off, for a cup or two. Our canteen feeds not only those who work here but their relatives and friends. I managed to feed a friend’s sick dog; I bought liver, which the dog loved. People go home from work with large shopping bags filled with food.
Back in the thirties the satiric writers Ilf and Petrov captured the rapidly developing reality of Soviet life: “Beer only for union members.” That’s why you need a pass to get into our institute. We have no state secrets, but we do have our canteen. It’s no wonder that we calculate the effectiveness of our workday by the amount of products we buy. And here we have true equality. Professor and cleaning woman are equally happy to buy a stick of sausage. Actually, the professor may be even happier because he doesn’t have a lot of time to shop. He has to lecture as well.
We’re so used to this that we don’t even notice the absurdity of our life!
There’s a marvelous story on the subject. A writer exiled from the Soviet Union is riding in a cab in New York and talking about Moscow life with the driver. “Tell me, do you really have problems with food? What’s it like?” the cabby asks.