circulating. However, Moscow State University’s library lent books, and even acquired books on request through inter-library loan. I felt very fortunate, much luckier than the researchers in the archives, or those who researched fields deemed sensitive. I had access—and steam heat. For exchange students in sensitive fields (contemporary, political, military), we learned, life would be hell.
With books, I was at home. There was no television available to us, but when we glimpsed broadcasts, we saw that Soviet-controlled stations (that is, all stations) featured an excess of men on tractors or men in trenches. I preferred my books. The American Embassy library and gift bookshelf for Russians stocked American authors. These presentation books I read carefully, not to mar the pages or crack the spines—and guiltily—before giving them to Russian friends. I had almost convinced myself it was O.K., since I had no other source of books. (Situational ethics, Naomi, a voice now chastises me.) Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, John Updike, Upton Sinclair, Mark Twain, Erskine Caldwell, Robert Anderson, Joseph Heller, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty…a U.S. government curriculum of worthy American writers, a selection that today would seem rather “white” and “male.” And I had brought a few books along, books outside the canon, or by non-Americans, including Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of Her Own,” Mrs. Dalloway, and Orlando; Camus’ Plague, and Kafka’s The Trial, in addition to well-known Russian novels, best read in their context.
Deep into Look Homeward, Angel one evening, I heard an urgent knocking on the door. I opened it to a group of highly agitated North Vietnamese students whom we had previously met in the shared kitchen. North Vietnam was at the time an enemy of the U.S. I had met the students one day when I had walked into the kitchen and heard an Arab student exhorting one of the North Vietnamese students (in Russian):
“Viet Nam is your country, not the Americans’. It’s your country.”
I focused on watching a pot of water come to the boil. Meanwhile, the Arab student left the kitchen. In the silence, one of the Vietnamese fellows turned to me and asked, “Where are you from?”
Uncertain of the reaction I would receive, I affected poise and replied, “I’m an American.”
He smiled and responded cheerfully about his studies in Russia and other small talk. After that, whenever Jim and I met these young men in the halls or kitchen, they always exchanged friendly greetings. I’m not sure I know why.
So when I opened the door that evening, the only mystery was what was agitating them. In accented Russian, they said, “Your husband is in trouble in the kitchen. Come quickly to help—he is making explosions!”
Of course, I followed them; my heart rate ratcheted up. Reaching the kitchen, I peered in quickly, only to find a cheerful Jim, happily popping popcorn.
Popcorn was one of his favorite treats. With some popping corn he had shipped with us, he was using a small covered pot over a hot flame. He was a pro, and the pot and corn were under control. But what a fearful sound, the menacing echoes bouncing off the hard tile walls and floors. And why—I could see them wondering— would something edible make such a noise?
Jim poured the popped corn into our all-purpose yellow plastic dishpan, added salt, shook it around, and invited the skeptical neighbors to share the popcorn. They did, and seemed to love it, although I wondered if they, like many students, were often a little short of food. But it did become a tradition for the rest of the year. At the first sound and smells of popping popcorn, they would show up in the kitchen. And if they didn’t, Jim would knock on their door with a bowl of freshly popped corn.
Another evening many months into our stay when Jim and I were alone in the kitchen, a young man entered whom we had not seen before. He had a confident swagger, wore blue jeans, and addressed us in English. Blue jeans, branded capitalist by the Soviet regime, gained major currency as status symbol, conspicuous purchase, and defiant statement. Sometimes all three. There were almost no ways to obtain them legally, and their black-market price was very high. My antennae were up.
He struck up a conversation using casual rather than studied English, saying he had been a friend of Larry’s, an American exchange student from Cornell the previous year. He told us he lived on the 10th floor, chatted for a while, invited us to call him “Charlie,” and left. A couple of weeks later, he showed up again, knocking on our door, and asking if we’d do him a favor. Already wary of an English-speaking, jeans-wearing, visiting person from nowhere, we carefully asked what it was he needed:
“My friend Larry from Cornell gave me this record. And I listen to this Bob Dylan. I try to write down and understand the words, so I can sing them when I play my guitar. But it is not possible for me. So I thought for you it would not be so difficult to write down the words.”
We looked at each other, until Jim said, “O.K.” and invited him in. Easier promised than done, we discovered that Jim and I had to try to capture alternate lines, and then to pick up the phonograph needle every few lines to catch up in our writing. Finally, close to midnight, triumphant and grateful, he left with the already well- scratched record and the full text of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” He left me wondering then (and even today) what he heard blowing in the wind back in 1966, and how many years he thought it would be before people would be allowed to be free.
After that he continued to show up randomly, hungry for American sounds, words, music, style, and look. He picked the wrong people to emulate, since we were hardly “hip,” but watched carefully our dress, manner, and especially our colloquial speech. He loved American slang. Although he was to show up in our lives over all the decades we returned to Russia, in the 1960s, his preoccupation was to be Bob Dylan. And it almost seemed he might succeed.
Maria and Alexander right next door to us had no interest in becoming Bob Dylan, pop stars, or hip. A gentle, refined couple married for some years, they were finishing their advanced degrees in philology (languages, literature, and linguistics), and hoping to be placed in schools in the same city as each other. She had the wholesome bright red cheeks Soviet posters idealized, and a warm, inviting smile; and he, the tall, lean build of a basketball player, with a gentle nature. We watched them await their mail and return from their faculty meetings during the first semester while they anticipated their fate.
One day in mid-winter, when we sat together drinking tea, I could see they had something to tell us. With the tea, we were eating homemade strawberry preserves, served Russian style, in miniature dishes with tiny spoons. They told us they’d be leaving soon—for Omsk, in Siberia. And that in a few days her mother would come from her village not too far from Moscow to deliver their three- year-old daughter to them to take along to their new home. Little Katya had been in grandmother’s care during her parents’ graduate studies. She turned out to be a picture-perfect little girl bundled in her fur coat, pink scarves, mittens, caps (wool under fur), and little felt boots, her cheeks glowing with cold. We knew we’d miss them, with their quiet decency and dignity, integrity and warmth.
And so they packed their belongings in tote bags, bundled other possessions and tied them with cord (they didn’t own suitcases), took little Katya, and, with Jim’s help, carried their household effects on the Metro train to the railroad station to embark on a three- to four-day journey to their new home and new life in Siberia. They looked like Tevye’s children in Fiddler on the Roof—but pointed east instead of west. We were happy for them, for their good fortune in being kept together as a family, but saw in their eyes an expression that said that this “goodbye” was forever. And it was.
We spent many evenings sitting around talking with fellow students, drinking tea and eating cookies. The tea, steeped from leaves, not bags, was strong; the cookies, mild and plain, very durable. The “friends” assigned to us by the Office of Foreign Students came by frequently, with enthusiasm and apparent sincerity, hoping we’d spend more time socializing with them— but that
