Travels with Myself and Another (35 page)

Up to the age of sixty everyone must have a job; four months unemployment classifies the unemployed as a “parasite,” which is a felony. If you are intelligentsia thrown out of work, you are deeply out of luck; you can’t get a job as unskilled labour because the unskilled labourers don’t want you around. The obvious suspicion is that jobless intelligentsia must have dangerous ideas or why did they lose their jobs. This system is special hell for Jews who are dismissed from their work immediately upon applying to emigrate to Israel and are then in limbo, doubly unwanted as Jews due to endemic anti-Semitism and as traitors. What more disloyal than to wish to leave this Eden where all is well and all men are equal?

Mrs M.’s kitchen in that tiny tenement flat was a salon. Her entourage had read her book in Samizdat and revered it but she was also the widow of a great man. Fame and position do not depend on interior decoration and real estate. Russians take literature far more seriously than we do, the proof being that Stalin thought it advisable to kill so many writers, while his successors send writers to concentration camps or insane asylums or deport them. Total censorship also shows how the state fears the independent power of words. The makers of the words are honoured. Mrs M. had the important rewards and didn’t mind the appalling conditions in her tenement, nor did her friends. I was the only one who minded.

At three-thirty in the afternoon, T-shirt wet against my back, I showed up with the airport whisky. Mrs M. sketched introductions to six visitors. I can’t remember names in English let alone name and patronymic in Russian. My name was easy: Marta. I was accepted as if I had been coming to the flat for years like the rest of them. Mrs M. distributed cups as she had no glasses and poured the nicely warmed whisky which they all drank neat, saying it was better than vodka. I shuddered and said I would wait.

Private talks were held in the bedroom. Mrs M. and I withdrew so I could give her the manila envelope. I don’t know if she used spectacles to read; I never saw her wearing them. She spread the clippings on top of the mess on the bedroom table, seeing her photograph and her husband’s because there had been new translations of his poetry and I think a biography. She could see the size of the reviews but I doubt if she understood what that meant in terms of success in our papers and magazines; she could see the quantity. She touched all this with her fingertips and smiled uncertainly and said, “I did not know, I did not know. Is it true?”

We returned to the kitchen-sitting room. Small helpings of greasy fried mushrooms were passed. It was four-thirty. I wondered if this meal could be tea, the mushrooms a special Russian twist, but mushrooms were the beginning and the end. To keep me partially in contact a mishmash of German, French, and English served. Mrs M. heard all the conversations and would turn from one person to join in another conversation. Everyone talked at once; a mystery, how anyone heard anything.

At 5.30, without warning, small helpings of fried aubergines appeared. I had been listening to a partly translated fierce argument about mushrooms. Mrs M. said, “Do you believe in Paradise, Marta?”

I thought the subject was mushrooms. I said, “Well no, I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Lena is absolutely sure she will meet her mother in Paradise,” said Mrs M.

“Sa mère est morte il y a neuf jours,”
said a young man beside me, whom I saw every day, a surrogate son or grandson I suppose.

Lena, the subject of this talk, spoke only Russian but did not speak at all. She was nice-looking, fair, young. Mrs M. had introduced her lovingly as “my adopted daughter.”

Mrs M. said, “What is that name you said about my cough?”

“Emphysema.”

Mrs M. talked rapidly across the table to a man of about forty; he had a big unruly head of black hair, a two-day beard, heavy hot workman’s clothes: her doctor. “No,” Mrs M. said with assurance. “In Russia we do not have this disease.” Then she coughed until I thought she would choke. Her doctor was finishing his share of aubergines and arguing loudly, above the horrendous noise of Mrs M.’s cough, with the surrogate son.

More visitors arrived; more folding chairs were opened. As I felt I might faint from heat, I moved to the bedroom where I met again the lady of last night. She had been telephoning. She said she had known Mrs M. for fifty years and “I do not like this new religiosity. It is all due to Lena. No, Lena is not a girl; she is forty and has been married three times.” She greeted in Russian a woman who must just have come. “Sit down, sit down, you don’t look well.”

Indeed the newcomer didn’t; she was white as chalk and breathed shallowly. This lady was recovering from her third severe heart attack. She was in a dangerous state of tension because her son had applied to emigrate to Israel and was now threatened by conscription into the army, a common form of punishment and imprisonment for Jews. Her telephone had been cut off for months and a KGB agent, stationed in the hall, escorted visitors to her flat.

“Why?”

The tall lady said, “So no one will go to visit her and she will be more alone.”

You want to scream. And feel suffocated. What in God’s name did the Soviet government have to fear from an ailing elderly lady or from her son, a youngish ordinary Jew?

The tall lady said without emphasis, “My friend’s husband was killed in Stalin’s purge of the doctors.”

The white-faced lady smiled a sad ironic smile and said, “Her husband was an ambassador. He was killed in Stalin’s purge of the diplomats.”

Stalin widows. Three in one small flat. There must be millions of them in the Soviet Union. It is not a safe category either: guilt by association with the dead.

I returned to the kitchen-sitting room. Small helpings of fried potatoes and mushrooms were being passed. The whisky was finished. It was seven o’clock. The surrogate son said,
“Tout est beaucoup pire depuis Nixon.”

“Yes,” Mrs M. said, with her alert ear, “for the Nixon visit many Jews were arrested and many telephones cut off; it is much worse. He asks [pointing at a new face] if you like strawberries.”

Strawberries were put on a plate in the middle of the table. I wasn’t quick enough; I got two.

Mrs M. said, “They are talking of . . . ,” a name I didn’t catch. She laughed and coughed. “Marta, when seven or eight people made the demonstration in Red Square about Czechoslovakia, one and half are Russians, the rest are Jews.” She repeated this in Russian, I assume, and they all laughed gaily.

A man began to explain something partly in German, partly in English. Mrs M. took over. “He says if you are Jew criminal or feeble-minded or tuberculosis or cancer or unskilled or very old, they will let you go to Israel. Most from Georgia. But if young or professional Jew, no.”

Small helpings of tomatoes and cucumbers were passed. It was eight-thirty. Ten people sat around the table. Apparently visitors brought contributions of food and as it was brought it was eaten. Mrs M. laughed very hard, coughing more. “It is about . . . ,” again the name I didn’t catch. “She is a poetess. She was the only woman in Red Square. They let her alone for a year and then put her in a mental asylum for three years. She has come back. She said the doctors treated her well, something not previously known, you understand. But I think that she is pretty crazy all the same, always running after men.”

I wanted to ask if running after men was cause for being sentenced to a loony bin here, and also what was the sanity status of Russian men who ran after women but I don’t know how I could have asked anything unless I banged the table for silence.

“Sa fille avait deux ans et maintenant elle a cinq ans et elle a des crises de nerfs de peur que sa mère va repartir,”
said the surrogate son.

“Yes, that is true,” said Mrs M. “That is sad. Nobody should have children.”

A man said something and they all went off into peals of laughter.

Since college, when first I started reading them, I thought the great Russian writers
invented
this kind of dialogue, where all speak, few if any listen, and
non sequitur
piles joyfully or gloomily upon
non sequitur.
There is no other dialogue in literature like it; I gave the Russian writers credit for inventing something totally new in the world, like Edison and Marconi. Invent, my foot. They were reporting. Russians talk this way. Everyone around Mrs M.’s table was straight from Chekhov and Dostoyevsky. I went off into my own peals of laughter. Six hours of real-life Russian dialogue had left me feeling light-headed not to say unhinged.

“Why do you laugh, Marta?” Mrs M. asked and departed to answer the telephone.

A man said, “You know how to fix telephone so is safe? No? Come, I show.”

Mrs M. had finished the usual quick chat. The man pushed the dial all the way round and locked it in place with a pencil. I have never been able to do it since so cannot have seen right.

“That way they do not hear what you are saying.”

Did the KGB really spend its time recording such dotty innocuous conversation all over Moscow? If the KGB had personnel enough to harass a poor sick harmless woman, they had time and personnel for anything.

“Also a cushion over is good,” said Mrs M.

It was near to the closing hour, ten o’clock. After about twelve hours of this non-stop sociability, Mrs M. retired at ten. People began to drift off in pairs or alone, making no noise; as if this guiltless gathering had to be disguised, as I am sure it did. They knew their country.

“Yuri will find a taxi for you,” Mrs M. said, sending me out with the surrogate son. “I will see you tomorrow?”

Oh yes, every day, it was why I had come to hateful Moscow. In the taxi I told myself how fortunate I was, how privileged, to move directly from the airport (via the Minsk hotel, screaming, arguing, two taxis) into real Russian life, not an official masquerade for foreigners. It is an experience, I thought with the deepest gloom, to remember.

From the first day, I knew what was best in Mrs M., best for my taste. Her eyes, pale blue, tired, sad but still with a look of innocence in them. The touching innocence or vulnerability came and went; enough to know it could be there. And her laughter. She
enjoyed
herself. Despite the past and the present and the always doubtful future, she was ready to take pleasure in life. She loved having a good time, it was fun for her to be surrounded by friends in that ugly hot hovel. Laughter had not been crushed out of her. That was her greatest triumph, her very own victory.

I went sightseeing entirely as a cover story for the KGB. If questioned
—What were you doing in Moscow?—
I had to be able to say “Looking at the wonders and beauties of your glorious city.” In this spirit, as fast as possible, in the course of the week, I ran through the Kremlin, Red Square, the Pushkin Museum, the entrance to the University, and GUM. Unbelievably, I haven’t the faintest notion what Red Square looks like, not a shadow of a picture in my mind. Not much better about the Kremlin: there was a church with scaffolding outside and dutiful schoolchildren inside and ikons everywhere. I saw very little in the Pushkin Museum to forget. The University is also Stalin-Gothic. I seem to remember there were trees in a small park outside the Kremlin and somewhere near the University; in general I think that Moscow was barren stone. And no birds sing.

GUM was different. I went to GUM to buy something heavy to weigh down my suitcase for the homeward journey; I was as terrified in advance of the empty suitcase as I had been of the packed suitcase. GUM, the great department store of the U.S.S.R., is a hybrid born of Macy’s basement and an oriental bazaar, and you’d have to be Russian not to see it as a big black joke. Elbowing, shoving, and pushing with the other citizens, I found a counter selling curtain material. A weary sales-woman, besieged by shoppers, got the idea that I wanted four metres of some fairly odious thick yellow cotton brocade. I took a chit to the cashier and back to the sales counter and so spent one boiling hot hour on a single purchase. Even so, a suitcase with a pair of jeans, two T-shirts, a sweater, four metres of curtain material, and a lot of scrunched-up newspaper was not going to be easy to explain.

I had paid the State for breakfast and meant to collect. The hotel dining-room was enormous and all the tables had dirty cloths. After twenty minutes a thin pale tired young waiter, also dirty, strolled over and said, “
Thé? Café?
” “
Thé
please.” After twenty-five minutes he returned with a small glass like a medicine measure of watery fruit juice, a tin teapot with lukewarm brownish water in it, a small yellow cowpat, cold, scrambled eggs made from powdered eggs, and stale bread. Many people never touch breakfast and feel fine. I feel murderous without breakfast but I couldn’t handle this mess and never tried again. I just felt more murderous than I already felt.

After no lunch, back to Mrs M.’s with ulcer pills, detective stories, and sweaters. In the bedroom, she and Yuri were listening to a Menuhin record with lighted faces. They stood by the table in the attitudes of worship, close to the gramophone.

“Why don’t you sit on the bed?” said I, always seeking the
douceur de vivre
angle than which nothing could have been more futile. Neither heard so I sat on the bed. And noticed a half-empty bottle of Chanel Five in the dense disorder of the bedside table. Mrs M. probably thought “scent,” the word I’d used, was different from perfume. Or she wanted to give me pleasure as the bearer of a unique gift. Or she had survived only by stealth and guile and was so conditioned by the long endurance contest that she couldn’t be straightforward. I mused on this puzzle again when she put the ulcer pills in the kitchen cabinet where already there was a small collection of the same jars. Her life in this hell country
—ce pays maudit de Dieu,
as one of her friends remarked—had made Mrs M. complicated in ways I would never understand, though a five-year-old Russian kindergarten child might also be beyond my comprehension.

Lena arrived to be greeted with special warmth; then an influx of friends.