The Big Green Tent (62 page)

 

MILYUTIN PARK

No one knows the secret of irresistible attraction, the law that draws a particular man and a particular woman together. Ecclesiastes, at any rate, didn't know. Medieval legend tries to account for it in the guise of a love potion. Poison, in other words. No doubt the same poison in which the omnipotent Eros soaked his operatic arrows. Modern people find the answer in hormones serving the instinct to preserve the species. Clearly, between this pragmatic goal and platonic love there is a significant gap, even a cognitive dissonance, as a more contemporary idiom might have it. The earnest task of continuing the species takes refuge in all kinds of ritual embellishment—orange blossoms, priests, seals graced with eagles, and so forth, right down to the bloody sheet hung out in the courtyard for public inspection. This aspect of love is more or less straightforward.

But where does that leave friendship? Not a single major instinct supports it. All the philosophers (men, of course—before Piama Gaidenko there were no women philosophers, unless you count the legendary Hypatia) considered friendship to be at the very pinnacle of the hierarchy of values. Aristotle provides a wonderful definition, which still rings true right up to the present, in contrast to many of his ideas, which are so quaint and anachronistic as to sound ridiculous. Hence: “Friendship is a specifically human fact, the explanation and goal of which must be sought without recourse to the laws of nature or a transcendent Good extending beyond the framework of empirical existence.”

Thus, friendship is not conditioned by nature, and has no apparent goal. It consists in the search for a kindred spirit with whom to share one's experiences, thoughts, and feelings—right down to “sacrificing one's life.” But in order to achieve this happiness, one must feed friendship with time, time that is part and parcel of one's own, and only, life: going for a walk down Rozhdestvensky Boulevard, for example, and drinking a beer, even if you'd prefer another beverage, since your friend likes beer; or going to his grandmother's birthday party; or reading the same books and listening to the same music—so that eventually you create a small, warm, enclosed space together, in which jokes are understood by a single word or gesture, opinions are exchanged through a mere glance, and interaction is more intimate than anything one can achieve with someone of another sex. With rare exceptions.

But there was less and less time for friends. There were no more school breaks, walking excursions through Moscow with a favorite teacher on Wednesdays—the sublimely obligatory school-day camaraderie had ended. They came together from time to time out of the inertia of habit, but they dove into their little coves of friendship less and less often. Suddenly they discovered that life had forced them apart, and the need to share their daily experiences and events—whether large, small, or completely trivial—had exhausted itself. A telephone call once a week, once a month, or on holidays was sufficient.

Of course, this growing apart happened gradually. The history of the friendship the three friends shared had an irrevocable significance; but five or six years after graduating from school, it was possible to look back and identify the points or moments when the divergence began. Take Mikha, for instance.

Ilya could remember Mikha's personal evolution—how he followed a trajectory of enthusiasm for the revolutionary Mayakovsky, the magical Blok, and that Pasternak who could write:

Eight volleys from the Neva,

And a ninth.

Tired, like glory.

Like—(from left and right

They lurch headlong).

Like—(the distances shout out:

we'll get even with you yet).

Like the straining, bursting

Asunder of joints

Of oaths

Once sworn

To the dynasty …

Ilya tolerated Mikha's revolutionary sympathies. Sanya smiled wanly. Their friendship easily withstood minor differences, divergences in the placement of accent and tone. Pierre Zand, the festival visitor they befriended, a young Russian-Belgian, troubled Mikha to the depths of his soul with his antagonism toward the Revolution. Mikha decided to establish a personal and dispassionate perspective on communism. This took more than two years. First he read Marx, then he reversed his steps, beating a retreat into the past to read the early socialists, who were all fairly accessible. After that he stumbled over Hegel, and, executing a pirouette, made a beeline for Lenin.

Marlen, his uncle (they had grown steadily closer over the years), viewed his interests with suspicion:

“You're reading the wrong stuff, Mikha. There were many revolutionaries in our family, and they were all executed, except for Mark Naumovich. And Mark Naumovich survived because he first volunteered to serve in the NKVD, and then hightailed it out to the provinces just in time, as some sort of consultant. A very clever fellow, and a bastard if ever there was one.”

“I need to figure it out on my own,” Mikha said in his own defense.

“Well, figure it out then, figure it out,” Marlen said, conciliatory. “If you want to reinvent the wheel, it's your business.”

Aunt Genya put a bowl of borscht in front of each of them, then served the main dish: meat patties with potatoes. Her son got three, Mikha got two, and she herself got one.

Marlen laughed, pointing at the meat patties.

“There's your socialist equality! And everywhere you look, it's always the same!”

Mikha racked his brains, trying to get to the bottom of things. He read and read; what he read generated many questions, and few answers. He tried to talk about socialism with Victor Yulievich, who just grimaced and said that he had no predilection for social science.

Ilya, who had one of the most inquiring and informed minds of all the people he knew, threw fuel on the fire. The most combustible, in his view, was Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-four
, the samizdat they had lost, without ever knowing what it was, in the briefcase of Pierre's uncle Orlov, the French diplomat, in 1957.
Nineteen Eighty-four
made a deep impression on Mikha. He was far more receptive to the artistic word than to the dry erudition of socioeconomic scholasticism.

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!