sion, and after it was over, I hinted that it was very hot and it would be nice to go for a walk in the park. He was afraid to cut classes. Was he a bore? Using my authority as an instructor, I subtly led him to the metro and told him that the best part of the park was near my house. Everything went according to plan, as if I were writing a novel.
After a marvelous walk you need to have tea, and I just happened to have a delicious cake I had baked the day before. “Don’t be afraid, no one’s at home except my turtle,” I told him. He pretended to be politely hesitant.
It was a lovely summer day, all the windows wide open, and we sat in the kitchen and had tea. Then it was time for me to go to the pool. I changed into jeans and a T-shirt. We were in the hallway, ready to leave. Well, at last, he made up his mind! We kissed for a long time. It seemed that in skirt and blouse I was too much the teacher for him, and the jeans were the deciding factor. Should I go to the pool or not? We decided to meet the next day. What could be better than delicious anticipation?
The next day came, and many days after that. I think that people at work began to suspect. Sasha was always around me. I had a convenient schedule with a lot of free time, and he cut his classes. We spent wonderful days together, and were both paid a salary for it. There’s one of the advantages of socialism.
Today we walked around the city. It started to rain, and we had to go into a crummy cafe. We sat drinking a sludge called pomegranate drink and holding hands. But I had to hold my breath because the cafe stank of revolting, burned food. It’s not Paris, merely the center of Moscow.
Incidentally, the reviewer criticized my article. I wasn’t upset. It played its part, and next time I’ll write a good one.
JANUARY 19. I think I’m getting old. I’ve started comparing generations. “At your age we thought only about studying. We didn’t wear makeup; we didn’t sleep with boys.” And it’s true, I didn’t use mascara until I was nineteen, I didn’t have my first shot of cognac until I was eighteen, and my first kiss was at eighteen. Almost all the girls in my class were like that. There was one bohemian group, and their behavior was outrageous to us. We read American best sellers and had a theoretical knowledge of sex, but in real life sex was an exciting mystery. When one of our group got married, we asked her timorously, “Well, did you like it? Was it nice?” She said it wasn’t bad but nothing special. We relaxed. We didn’t sleep around because our parents had told us that you had to be a virgin when you got married.
The next generation was different. It adjusted better to cruel reality and matured early. There was a joke in the Armenian Radio series. “A grandmother calls in and asks if she should talk to her thirteen-year-old granddaughter about sex. Armenian Radio said that she should. She’d learn a lot that’s new and interesting.”
It’s silly to lump everyone together, but the attitude of young people today is quite different. They quickly learned to take. They have nice clothes, have fun, and don’t think about tomorrow. We gradually forgot how to work, but they never learned.
I’m probably overstating it, but I’m not criticizing them. I want to understand. Maybe I’m envious. The twenty-year-olds insouciantly flitting about at work delight me. They’re a pleasure to look at, and they don’t ruin other people’s lives.
JANUARY 20. Joyous day—the end of the school semester, a few weeks ahead of legal indolence. Before the vacation we’re told long and persistently that the next semester will be particularly important and significant and so on, so that we’ll spend all two weeks thinking about how to work even better. But Soviets are experienced people. We’ve heard it all a hundred times— watershed, decisive, determining, completing year of the five- year plan. We know that they’re all equally meaningless. It brings to mind a joke from the Brezhnev years. A middle-aged man comes home from work and tells his wife, “Starting tomorrow, our factory is going to work on a bidding plan.”
“What’s that?” his wife inquires.
“Just imagine that today I tell you that we’re going to make love two times. And you reply, ‘Three times,’ even though we both know that we’re lucky to manage even once.”
Let’s Sit Down, Friends, Before a Long Voyage
JANUARY 23. Foreigners are surprised and touched by our tradition of sitting down before leaving home on a trip. Everyone sits down for a minute in silence. Now people say it’s to make sure you haven’t forgotten anything; before, it was to say a prayer. And you’re not supposed to sit near the stove; that will jinx the trip. Today we avoid sitting near the radiator.
Russians have always loved travel. It’s in our blood. The theme of the road is strong in almost all the classics of the nineteenth century. Long trips are conducive to meditation, the Russian expanses and forests to poetic images and bittersweet sadness, and meetings on a journey to reminiscences and unexpected love affairs.
I’m off on a nostalgic ramble again. Let me get back to socialist reality. There was a popular joke in Brezhnev’s day. An American and a Russian are comparing how many cars each family has. The American says, “We have one car for getting to work every day; it’s small and practical. The other is for weekends and special occasions; it’s bigger and fancier. And of course, we have the trailer for trips abroad, say, to Canada or Mexico.”
“We don’t need any cars at all,” the Russian replied. “We
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go to work by bus, to the country on weekends by railroad, and for special occasions we can splurge on a taxi.”
“What about travel abroad?” the American asks.
“We use tanks.”
It’s a grim joke, with a grain of bitter truth, if we recall the events in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan.
Ever since Stalin’s day we have been cut off from the world, and trips abroad became a special privilege for functionaries. It was only in the early sixties that the curtain was lifted somewhat. Tours were arranged, and scientists and scholars were allowed to attend congresses and symposia. But every trip required the humiliating procedure of getting character references and other documentation.
Travel within the country was very complicated, too: lack of tickets, hotels, and other problems. What was meant to be pleasure turned into torture.
JANUARY 27. The “character reference” involves so many unpleasant associations. Until quite recently you couldn’t take a trip abroad without one. Gradually its length diminished, and now, at last, it no longer exists. Originally it consisted of numerous questions that went back several generations. You had to list all relatives, including dead ones, where they lived and where they were buried. There was the question, Have you or any of your relatives lived in occupied territory? If you take into account the fact that a large part of the country had been occupied at one time or another by the Nazis, many people
were under suspicion. If you had lived there, you had unlimited opportunities to become a spy, spend several decades lying low, and then plan to travel abroad in order to deliver the information you’d been gathering and return with a new assignment or else defect for capitalist goodies.
Of course, you had to be a shock worker, with busy public and social activism, and be politically literate. Also, you had to be characterized by moral stability—that is, not getting drunk and getting into fistfights on foreign territory or chasing the local beauties into your bed, and, most important, disappearing abroad. As a precaution, husbands and wives were not allowed to travel together. One always stayed behind as hostage.
Once you had the reference, which you often wrote yourself, you had to go from place to place, moving up the ladder, starting at work and ending up practically at the Central Committee of the party. At each place you were examined closely. Bureaucrats were looking for your potentially treacherous heart. After all, the desire to go abroad alone was suspicious in and of itself. You were asked a lot of unrelated questions. You had to know history, the political system of the country where you were planning to go, the names of its progressive political leaders and the heads of its Communist party, no matter how small and insignificant it might be. What if an ideological foe came up to you on the street? You’d have to be prepared with an educated and well-argued rebuff. There was a minor contradiction here: You were categorically discouraged from dealing with foreigners except for store clerks. And in general, you weren’t allowed to walk around by yourself, just in case of a provocation or hostile act. There was a comedy in which a gawking Soviet tourist was