In Russian, "To Be Silent" is an Active Verb

Once Again the Soviet Union, that great preoccupying history, fills my hours. Long ago I studied "friendly Russian," singing the old songs about wide plains, willing maidens and birch-filled forests; I was trying to be a good liaison with our gallant Soviet allies. In volleyball tournaments with Russian officers, we wanted to win and so did they, and we also wanted to be friendly--all of us wanted that--and the friendship was precarious but worth working for. Russkies and Yankees both like to laugh, yes? Drink, yes? Other things, yes, oh, yes--let us like all those things together, plus Pushkin and Tolstoy and, sure, Jack London and Mikhail Sholokhov, why not? And volleyball, too.

When this war was over, we would all enjoy peace and love and remember how we sang Pólyushka Pólyeh together during blackout times.

And now I am waiting in the airport lounge in San Francisco and reading in the (continued on page 150) "To be Silent" is an Active Verb (continued from page 128) Los Angeles Times the statement of Dr. Nikolai Blokhin:

[Solzhenitsyn] has long deprived himself of the right to the lofty title of citizen of the U.S.S.R. That is why depriving him of his citizenship and turning him out of the U.S.S.R. is a correct, a very correct decision.

Serendipity strikes the theme for this return to the Soviet Union. Last night I heard Bob Dylan sing:

Time will tell

Just who has fell

And who's been left behind. . . .

Who are these nonpersons whom Dr. Blokhin and Dr. Dylan celebrate in different ways? Nine years ago in Moscow, as the guest of the Writers Union, I saw mostly official persons, hospitable, wary and well. But I got a whiff from the best of them of those others, the nonpersons, burdened with their stubbornness, and this time I'll seek them out through the enveloping Intourist-comfort fog. In California, news of the human-rights movement--the writers and scientists, those warded in psychiatric hospitals because to disagree with the government is plain crazy, the lovers of the word, the Jews, the political prisoners--is being replaced by the Nixon-Brezhnev businessmen's détente, with Dr. Armand Hammer leaping up to announce a fresh trade deal every few days. Alexander Solzhentsyn has just been expelled--a slight setback. They decided not to administer harsher treatment to a man watched so closely by the West.

"Yea, the sparrow hath found a house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young"--Psalm 84. "The son of man hath not where to lay his head"--Jesus.

A stewardess looks at my ticket and declares, "Moscow! Wow! Why?"

"Skiing."

"Oh, wow, groovy."

I settle down in my seat to stare out the window, trying to remember my Russian, sorting out my memories of Moscow and thinking ahead to what I can expect of trouble this time. I manage to turn off the stewardess. As Dr. Blokhin says: a correct, a very correct decision.

• • •

Pan Am Lounge, Kennedy Airport; Orly Airport, Paris

Is that Andy Warhol I see before me? It's his two-tone wig, his blank stare into the new Esquire (the maestro looks glum), his chirping entourage gathered to bid him ta-ta. The Soviet Union will be different.

Warhol gets off in Paris.

Rushing through Orly and climbing straight onto an Aeroflot Ilyúshin, bound for Moscow, seems odd for a retired Francophile. I doze in this gray stratospheric global dawn. The melancholy of the traveler headed away from home is followed by thoughts that dart to and fro like arctic foxes, as cold as foxes. I soothe my disrupted metabolism by getting interested in the Russians returning home--women with flowers from the Champs Elysées, wrapped in plastic; bearded, fur-capped young men with affable, amiable, slovenly, old-time students' ease (is it a chess team?): gray bureaucrats in ice-blue suits and black-plastic briefcases attached like prosthetic devices to their arms. Their sleep-swollen, cholesterol-stuffed faces look as if they left behind any lively dreams years ago. But the nice plump stewardess, wider in the neck than the California stewardess was at the middle, doesn't ask if I'm coming to ski in Russia.

The last time I flew Aeroflot to Moscow, one filmy plastic glass served everyone for drinking, and you had to wait till it was free, and it was misty with strange lips when I finally thirstily received it and it played Misty for me. This time elegant little private cups--progress under socialism.

• • •

Rassiya Hotel, Red Square

Only one bag was lost in transit--mine. How do I define myself on my first day in Moscow? Who am I now? I am a man in sub-zero temperature, lonely for clothes, books, scarf, gloves, hat. Who else am I? I am sweaty man, man with secrets, worried about papers that might be found in my bag. I am man who needs a bath.

At customs they go through my briefcase carefully. A girl reads aloud from a book I've brought for a friend, one of my own novels, and makes it sound like German. She calls her superior. He calls his superiors. A group of officers is huddled over my book, saying. "Very interesting." But they don't mean they like it. They mean: Why is this writer coming here as a tourist? I understand their Russian, but I look dull and tired, because that seems the correct, the very correct way to look. Thinking about my lost bag helps. But also, since I have written and spoken about the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, the trial of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, the plight of the Jews. I applied for my visa in Washington, not San Francisco. If their bureaucracy functions, I could be turned back from the airport.

I pass with a chill stare from the chief inspector.

My Intourist car takes me to the Rassiya, which is to the idea of a hotel what Los Angeles is to the idea of a city--massive, intimidating, overgrown. It's the largest hotel in Europe, perhaps in the world, and the elevators often work. Since I have nothing to unpack, I'll eat.

In the official dining room reserved for foreign tourists. I am placed at table with two English engineers bound for Siberia. Ruddy is the word for them--lean beef. They've just come from drilling in the Sahara, and now they're hunting oil and natural gas during the day and drinking vodka at night. "We work for six months in some Godforsaken place and drink ourselves to sleep every night, and then we come out with our money and get laid," says Ruddy One.

"I only have to drink for two months. I'm not staying any longer this time," says Ruddy Two.

"Those Berber girls. Those Venezuelan girls. Anything that's got mixed blood has got the clap," says Ruddy One, a six-month man with an analytical mind. "Let's have another carafe so I can sleep, hey?"

Ruddy Two's nose curves out and down, his pouting thin lips out and up, so that they nearly meet, and his face is on a unique time-space warp, looping around to recycle back into itself: a lonely, defiant, minimal face. "Another goddamn night when the British Empire's son doesn't set," he declares, pushing the table away from his chair.

• • •

I didn't drink enough of their vodka. I look our over Red Square, snowy and forbidding, and notice Berber girls dancing by the fireside near St. Basil's. A bunch of Venezuelan wenches are whooping it up near Lenin's tomb in the below-zero weather. I decide to go for a walk, wake up and realize I can't in this temperature, especially since my warm clothes haven't arrived.

Perhaps I could borrow a coat from the tail I have already noticed lurking down the halls of the Rassiya Hotel. He wears a tail's winter uniform of fur hat and black overcoat.

That middle-of-the-night melancholy returns, the traveler's disease, the chill loneliness that I used to think a compound of fear for mortality and the bruising of metabolic time zones. More than that, of course. As Solzhenitsyn says, a transplanted person is like a tree, all the large and tiny roots and rootlets cut, hurt, bleeding, until it finds its place again. And if it doesn't, it withers. Why do exiles suffer so? A traveler gets a whiff of it during his sleepless midnights. No wonder tourists behave so badly--they are hurt children. Travelers remember the postcards they sent, not what they felt as they finally decided. What the hell, I'll write some cards. And (continued on page 190) "To be silet" is an Active Verb (continued from page 150) then they are ill-mannered, drunken, demanding of joyless luxuries.

What to do without my duffel? I look out at the winter scene, sky and snow glowing, Moscow glowing in its self-generated winter light like an astral body, immobile in the scope of universe. Soon the morning snow sweepers appear, those widows with legs wrapped in rags. Moscow looks frozen inside and out, and I shiver as I lean across the radiator to the frosted glass in accesses of swooping doubt as all the Soviet people I've seen parade across my brain, with that thickened and wounded and stubborn look they have. Americans are not a happy people? Of course not. Russians neither; brothers of a sort.

My Russian is beginning to come back and, as language always does, the Russian language more than most, it tells about history, hope, dread, soul, Nine years ago, a woman at the Writers Union stood silently weeping because no one answered when I explained why I couldn't be, in their terms, a "progressive." (Because if I were a Soviet writer, I would be dead.) She approached me later with a philological comment: "You know, in Russian, the verb, to be silent' is an active verb." And then I came upon these words in the stage direction at the end of Pushkin's play about tyranny, Boris Godunov--but what great Russian work is not about the convulsions of tyranny? Narod byezmolstfuyit. A poor English translation would read (Boris falling, Boris dead, his children strangled, all finished): "The people are silent." But it really says: "The people perform the action of silence." And that isn't it, either. "The people enter a world of silence." Narod byezmolstfuyit. "People without-words-there-stand."

It can't be translated. But that's what they are still doing, except for the brave and tragic few who defy and suffer.

The word for dissident means those who think differently. Andrei Sakharov, the great Soviet physicist, has said there are many moral people who are secretly joined together, without knowing one another, without even any physical contact, with links now effectively severed by the secret police; but nevertheless they are joined, simply because they are moral people. The most famous of them is Solzhenitsyn. He has been through all the tyrannies--the cancer tyranny, the concentrtion-camp tyranny, the police-censorship tyranny, even the conventional young-writer-wanting-fame and husband-grown-weary-of-wife tyrannies--and now he has come out in some spectacular balance and health within a prolonged threat of martyrdom. He refused to leave his Russian soil for comfortable exile until they picked him up and threw him out. He gripped his birthright with all his strength, alternately patient with explanation, scornful, howling with rage in letters to the Swedish Royal Academy, which negotiated with Soviet authorities about a diminished Nobel Prize ceremony in Moscow, to the Writers Union that expelled him, to publishers who would no longer print him, to colleagues who turned prudent backs, to foreign journalists, even to Kosygin, Brezhnev and the Presidium, to anyone in the path of his memory of pain and his prayer for the future--and especially to the notebooks in which he inscribed the history of shame. And now, after imprisonment, abuse, cancer, threats and exile, he has achieved a kind of health. Amazing grace Of course he is obsessed and often wrong, like all prophets. But he has found his path in the way of the great 19th Century Russian novelists, who believed in God, in benevolent authority, in sin and redemption and the destiny of the great, sluggard, ominous Russian people. Like Dostoievsky's, his passion turns out to have more worth than mere rightness.

Pyotr Grigorenko, the general and war hero being "treated" in an insane asylum for supporting the democratic movement, may have shown more of a soldier's stalwart courage. Sakharov, who linked the free-speech movement with the right of Jews to emigrate to Israel, may show a broader world sympathy and culture. Others have suffered bitterly, unknown, hustled into camps or prisons or psychiatric infernos or into a still, stifled silence like the predawn streets of Moscow at which I stare now from my window. But Solzhenitsyn, because he knows how to howl, makes his pain real to the rest of us in our comfortable, anxious, unquiet elsewheres. He may not even be the best man among a brave company, but he speaks for them all. Therefore, he also speaks for us.

If my clothes don't show up, he'll speak for a scarecrow. But somehow I imagine my duflel is safe in some office at Shiryemyetyiva Airport Number One.

• • •

At eight A.M., I wake to watch the snow still drifting down over the onion domes of St. Basil's and Red Square. In this children's-paperweight vision, figures are marching to work with karakul or thick fur hats, black greatcoats; they would be more picturesque somehow without their plastic briefcases. At the Intourist office downstairs. I mobilize the ladies who must find my luggage. I insist. I am definite. I will accept no fatalistic shrug; I prefer my own clothes. I narrow my eyes and utter pedantic ungrammar in my best Cornell accent. An energetic soul gets on the phone to the airport, spelling out my name for the luggage handler at the other end: "Gospodin Gold! Gold! Galina! Olga! Ludmilla! Dmitri! Gold!"

She promises to pursue the subject as I head for my limousine and guide. In the clothes I wore in San Francisco. I'll see Moscow with a sturdy Intourist ex-plainer in fur hat, plastic boots, rimless glasses, capacious purse. My luxe tour gives me a black Volga, smelling new, a blank chauffeur, an Intourist Lareina, smelling of her furs. She is ready to answer every question: "You know, when you will see lines in shops, do not be surprised. It can be attributed, you know, to the great purchasing power of the Soviet people. . . .

"There you see concert hall. Tchaikovsky concert hall, seating capacity one thousand five hundred. That gray building is called Satire Theater. The name speaks for itself. The building to the right is movie hall------"

"Are those Chinese?" I asked, pointing to a little line of Japanese tourists.

"Very few Chinese here now. Only embassy. Our apartment houses are very good, hot water, heat is from central heat plant, coming from steam central. I will now brief you on our medical system. . . ."

We trudge along a sight-seer's way. The car waits, motor chugging, chauffeur dozing. Snow, slush, spit, fur caps. There are 7,000,000 people in Moscow, 250,000,000 in Soviet Union. "You know, Moscow is now fifth largest city in world," remarked Lareina.

No one just lies about in this weather. You've really got to want to get someplace. But all I want is to recover from jet lag, receive my baggage, proceed with my secret desire, which is to know more than: "Birch tree, you know, is symbol of youth, something slim, slender. Here is Moscow University, named for Lomonosov, great scientist. Now I will give you briefing on Soviet education system. After finish school, no problem to find job, you know. There are always place in university for everybody. Women have first choice, also collective farmer." I knew that Jewish kids were having trouble entering humanities and arts programs, but Lareina was saying: "Nobody force to go to school or work. Citizen decide. Lomonosov found university in 1755, very late, always dominated by Church. Lomonosov always good at art, mosaics, specialist in Russian language, astronomy, in 1761 he discovered first that Venus had atmosphere. Somehow he found it out." The key was spinning out of control in her back: a spring had snapped. She applied emergency slowdown equipment to her tonsils. "Now university bears his name. Lomonosov, in city of Moscow."

No, I couldn't just walk through the halls of the university to look at students and teachers and classes. "For that you need special pass. Ask. It is matter of details I do not familiarize myself."

The Stalinoid towers, black with the weather, made me think of Brigham Young University, probably minus football. The university hulked over the skyline, isolated by guards, like an imperial barracks.

I wondered if my bag was finished getting through the K.G.B. inspection service while this Grushenka with the tape loop ratified her life with a sweet librarian's conviction. If her lips were less thin, if her glasses didn't have that rimless dull glitter, she might have gotten the jump on the West. Instead, yawning away. I hummed softly the bad word of the hour: "Solzhenitsyn." My excuse was that we had passed an anti-Solzhenitsyn poster in a window on Gorky Street: something about a toad, a squat, a spew, the usual running-dog view of a dissenter. Lareina explained:

"I tell you story. To explain question is very good answer. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Bad Child is title of story. So, I have child he was treat too severe. Punished, you know. The camps in the Cult of Personality time. That is all finish now. We regret. But now we apologize, those who are dead receive pension, yet he never forgives. He keeps on writing same old way. He even sends manuscript abroad. So naturally he is sick, we send like sick child far away."

Amazed. I asked. "Are you a mother? You send a sick child into exile?"

"Others," she stated, "we treat very bad, maybe worse than Solzhenitsyn--after all, we cure his cancer--they say thank you for apologize. He never forgive. He repeat, repeat, repeat."

I was scratching my fur hat, bought for foreign currency only in the Byeryózka shop to which Lareina had led me. The subject of Solzhenitsyn was finished and the key whirled on.

"Lenin Library, twenty-five millions volumes in one hundred seventy languages."

It was snowing in every language. Downfell the swirlsnow upon one metabolism, California, malfunctioning. I needed something hot. I wanted to end my tour and see if my baggage had surfaced into Socialist Reality. "I've noticed," I said, "that I can't buy anything but official Communist Party or Soviet newspapers and I'd like some news besides the strikes in France------"

"We cannot buy foreign papers because we save our hard currency--very reasonable," she remarked, with her peculiar habit of judging her own comment and finding it good. The plump moon turned up to see how I was taking it. "Also perhaps to avoid the influx of hostile foreign propaganda, perhaps. And now a few words about our Kremlin, which means fortress. I hope you know there were two dynasties from the Russian czars. When I am ask who is our president. I usually answer: We have a collective presidency, unlike your Watergate. Mr. Podgorny, a Ukrainian, is the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. The prime minister would be Mr. Kosygin. Mr. Brezhnev is the general secretary of the Communist Party, our unique party. There are twenty towers in the Kremlin walls, five of them topped with ruby stars, which are also weather-vaned. You look like Jewish writer person, yes? You look like Jewish person from our Ukraine, too, you know."

You don't need to be a weather vane, I thought, to see where the wind is blowing.

"Tomorrow you will see Palace of Socialist Cooperation?"

I returned to my room at the Rassiya and thirstily gulped down several glasses from the Palace of Central Moscow Water Recycling Plant. As "3-In-One" Oil protects bicycle gears, this product protects the tongue from harm. I replayed in memory my guide Lareina's sentimental parting shot: "You ask if Lareina is Russian name. Lareina is name of all nations--Spanish. Portugal, France--but is especially honest Russian name, too."

At the Intourist desk I received my good news: Bag arrives. "You will proceed to airport to identify."

"Why don't they just send it here?"

"You will proceed to airport to identify."

At the airport, a little K.G.B. crew was gathered about my ski bag. "For whom these books?" My month was dry. Again I had done wrong. Teacher said. I shouldn't have brought books to my Soviet friends Tolstoy. Dostoievsky. Gogol. Pushkin. A cop was reading from the jacket of an English edition of Futhers, which describes the story as that of "a Jewish immigrant from the Ukraine." Good old Lareina. "Very interesting," said the cop. And with this diagnosis, like a flock of pigeons attended by con-fetti, they flew off and released me. But where was my ski bag when my ski bag was lost? (Footnote: Never again in the Soviet Union would I be attended by less than a crew of dicks. In the worst rush-hour crowd, with lines gesticulating for taxis, I would never do more than raise my finger and a cab would appear. My tail became a fact of life, like steam heat. Sometimes I could even hear the crackling of the walkie-talkie in a nearby briefcase.)

At midnight, in the night bar, thick bureaucrats in gray suits lurched around to the music that Glenn Miller replaced. Their heavy ladies swayed in exaggerated paroxysms. A drunk piled menacingly toward me and was pulled off by his friends. I noticed that one sleeve was in his pocket. The war is not finished yet. He thought I was staring because of his missing arm: I was staring because he was a crazy drunk. A tall hood asked if I wanted to change money and glowed in the dark with invisible neon: Official K.G.B. Black Marketeer. A pasty blonde lady wanted to go to my room and throbbed with invisible lights: Official K.G.B. Whore.

To bed alone. My phone rang in the middle of the night and I lurched like the drunk toward it. No one.

Again an hour later.

I took the phone off the hook. Now they'll not know if I'm in or out. I bedded down comfortably with plump, charming, ever-babbling Miss Paranoia.

• • •

By the end of the first week I had made certain delicate psychological calibrations to the fact of being followed, watched and no doubt taped. At first Miss Paranoia was a difficult companion, and I suffered a fading of confidence, a blur of doubt, an itch of plaint and those occasional stabs at futile evasion (walking fast, leaping in and out of cabs or trolleys). Then I tried reasoning: Little could happen to me, other than a quick hustle to the airport: and if the people I talked to didn't mind and I always warned them, why worry? And then I tuned back to the ridiculousness of it all and my eyes learned that old Moscow roll toward the ceiling--"Hey, Fred! I'm really loyal!" one foreign resident used to address his bug--and it was reduced to a mere fact of life.

Nevertheless, the heaviness remained. Other stations were fussily turned to mine. Everyone jokes; but everyone is also sapped by that interfering buzz.

In the bar of the hotel, a man in orange jacket and brown teeth, tall, with a friend in brown jacket and orange teeth, short, was waiting for me. As I walked by, he pinched my sleeve and pulled at it. "Oh! How-are-you-seed-down-I-wish-practice-my-English. You wish change monyeh?"

"No."

"Two for one," said his little friend. "Very good rate."

I was followed everywhere. Since illegal money didn't stimulate me. maybe something else could work. As I strolled on a quiet street, a new yellow Soviet-built Fiat pulled up, three girls and one driver, who hunched over his wheel to be invisible, not quite a successful maneuver. The girl in front hissed, beckoned, announced, "Hallo! How are you? You like to change monyeh?"

"No."

"No really?"

I peeked inside, enjoying the packed perfume of this cargo of dumplings who were hustling me from a yellow Fiat on a deserted street near Red Square, Moscow, U.S.S.R. "It's illegal," I said.

One of the back-seat backups pointed to Devushka One. "Hey! You like to go to restaurant with this girl private?"

Devushka One flapped an angry hand at her colleague. "Padazhdyityi, padazhdyityi!" ("Wait, wait!") She looked deep into my eyes. She exhaled a deep, frosty sigh, a bubble of haze in the winter night, and leaned forward to whisper: "Khow are you kwhere are you from?"

Page seven, K.G.B. Directory of Dalliance.

As soon as I refused, the driver, hugging the wheel, pulled away with screeching tires. I was alone for a few moments, amid the granite walls of this granite city, plugged with monuments and museums, gray-black in the night. The stone seemed to have been laid and erected with a Pharaoh's efforts. It was very cold, it was dark, there were the ancient towers of neighborhood godless museums nearby. The coldness of Moscow's beauty testifies to a certain cost. I walked, thinking of the blocks of apartments farther out, where people like my friend--call him Yuri--worry about their hearts, treasure photographs of their friends, make a life in their dreadful privacy.

The yellow Fiat was gliding alongside again. "Hallo!" called a tinkly voice. "You sure?"

The next night, a trio of happy boulevardiers stopped me on Gorky Street, one pinching a familiar spot on my sleeve to say, "You like it here?"

"Terrific city"--my crispest English waste-no-time style.

"Alas! No free emigration, you think?"

I shrugged.

"So now we go talk a little, practice English, drink a little"--and they boxed me in and were moving me along.

"No-o-o-o," I said, drawling my vowels and shifting my bowels. It was less out of elegance than out of what could proudly be described as Stark Terror. "I'm just running along now down to my hotel."

"Oh, yes! Little talk! No free emigration, is forbidden!"

I broke free. They would have to slug me and drag me. Somehow, at this late hour, they expected me to be drunker. They tried a new tack. A keen young fellow with a sharp nose and bright blue eyes, a little drop of moisture at the end of his nose and a glop of yellow in the corner of each eye, declared: "You are artist. So I sell icon cheap, for few dollar."

"I believe it might be forbidden," I said.

"Oh, dear." He sighed the same delicious flirtatious smile as the girl in the yellow Fiat. "Lovely icon for few dollar," he murmured, and the droplet on the end of his nose fell to the swept stone. A trio of volunteer police in their red arm bands, looking for drunks, marched by. The Three Iconeers followed them.

• • •

Valodya reports a conversation with a K.G.B. interrogator. "What if I prove Israel is bad?"

"Then let me go to fight badness in my own country."

"This is your motherland."

"I can't fight anything any longer here except to go. I want to go home, although I've never been there."

I have made contact with various outcasts--Jews, nationalists, religious people, those who believe in the common freedoms. I also take the police with me on my Intourist guided tours. Before a painting of a baptism: "This is group of Shivering. They catch cold." Before a wedding dance: "We Russian have same sense of humor as you American, not the English. From the historical point of view, very interesting, also from the artistical. . . . And here is Rublev, top man in icon painting."

I twist around to look at a line of pushing, frost-blowing women at a food shop. Lareina: "You may have noticed our consumers waiting in queue. This is not because of shortage. This is because our people are so rich they are pressing, pressing, pressing to buy goods."

Carrying forbidden thoughts--to paraphrase a master--wonderfully concentrates the mind. My friends among the dissenters are so desperate they no longer fret about being followed. My tails and their tails stand like the shivering baptized outside the door. I have lunch at the Restaurant of Stars in the new Intourist Hotel. I turn down another K.G.B. offer to exchange money: "How are you I practice my English give you three rubles for one dollar?"

The place should be called The Restaurant of Occasional Light Bulbs in Ceiling.

• • •

"Pop art," explained my friend Sasha, "represents the excess of things--soup cans, Jell-O boxes. Sock art represents the excess of ideology--slogans, poster messages."

Sock art?

Sasha explained that they do these satirical pictures of slogans and poster styles, not really satirical, they don't mean to be funny, they mean to be true. No, without seeing, I couldn't really un-derstand. Yes, the artists were desperate for a window to the West and would be pleased to have a visit, even with my police tails. Sasha and I took a cab and another car followed us.

Sock art, socialist op art, is the creation of two young men, Alexander Melamid, very skinny, married, wife pregnant, and Vitaly Komar, divorced, watchful. They used to be Soviet painters. Now they have been expelled from their painters' union for ideological degradation and they are not Soviet painters anymore. They are forbidden under-ground painters. Nonetheless, they are still painters. The two men work in a tiny apartment in what looks like a Soviet Lefrak City. Melamid, goggle-eyed behind his glasses, was the patient explainer. Of course, better just to look, but sometimes words help. The sturdier Komar, a bit of the soccer player in his style, carried and propped paintings in corners for me to examine.

"I'm sorry to bother you," I say.

"No bother. We like."

(continued on page 200) "to be silent" is an active verb (continued from page 196)

A painting in the style of heroic socialist realism, the style of Lenin on the mountain, Lenin on the steps, memorializes the father of Melamid. A timid man is embedded in Pharaonic stone. Ah, real people here, but they are swamped by idea. I begin to understand. A slogan is given a fancy frame and signed--as Warhol might sign a photograph of a motorcycle and sell it as his. Party and People are one--A. Melamid. Communism will triumph--V. Komar. The familiar object is personalized and brought back where it belongs, to the voice of a man, so that it can be judged by men. Conversely, intimate subjects, girls, parents, flowers, the things allowed by commissars as long as they are taken to be landscape, are treated in the grandiose manner, expressing the doublethink of double views. Yes, it makes me smile, since I have lived only a few days among this gigantesque tumor of ideology. Methodically, patiently, ferociously, they respond to its affront to the spirit. They paint a cigarette box, even as Warhol or Wayne Thiebaud would paint a pack of cigarettes, but I see now the glorification of the Sputnik program that is a stylized part of Soviet tobacco merchandising.

Komar doesn't explain, but watches to see if I see anything.

Wispy, worn-out, a frail boy, Melamid remarks very precisely: "The mass culture which surrounds you is tomato-soup can. The mass culture which surrounds us is poster about maternity, is slogan about party and people united, is portrait of Solzhenitsyn as dog with fangs, is Moshe Dayan with swastika for eye patch."

What surrounds us in this room with its shades drawn, the closed-down opposite of an artist's loft in, say, New York or San Francisco, is a succession of visions of Soviet reality. "In our dreams we cannot get rid of posters." Komar remarks. "So when we paint girls, they have this cubist look. It is not always so sad."

"Though they say we are crazy and maybe we need shock treatment. That is a little bit sad," says Melamid. "It is an interesting diagnosis."

We all think a bit on this, and then Melamid proceeds with what interests him more than his fate at this moment--to make sure I begin to understand the vision he has come to as he works here in the dark, with bare bulbs, with shades drawn, with spying neighbors. "Totalitarianism, you see, creates privacy instead of making public men. Man is driven into himself by the pressure of mass. We want to show how men are made alone and we paint together, Komar and I, to eliminate personal fact and show only fact." He notices that I am uncomfortable about this small-group effort. "We work not in art but in ideas about art. Art is a tool for us."

"The pictures are good."

A brief, wan, peaked smile from Melamid. "Spasyíba.' Komar nods a chaste acknowledgment.

"Painting is your form of, uh, the word we use in America, it's almost a cliché now . . . dissidence?"

"We've heard the word. No, we are not dissidents, we are artists and we make ideas. We express a certain inertia, active inertia."

But we would all rather look at their work than filter theories through several language barriers. Komar sets up a conventional setting-sun painting, only the setting sun is a hammer and sickle. They are taking the psychology of their time and expressing it as if it is reality, because, indeed, it fills the air they breathe, and not with inertia.

The shades are drawn. There are no buyers. They show me dozens of paintings. No, this is not inertia.

For example, the Nose Series. They have invented a one-eyed painter named Buchumov. He is a Soviet genius, a conventional silly painter, and they have painted his paintings, 64 of them, four each year, each at a different season, but at the same place, the same time of the year, until his purging. ("Why was he purged?" I ask. "Nobody knows.") Impasto, blur, art-school self-taught modeling. Buchumov never moves. Early on, in 1917. there is a country church. The church disappears. There has been a revolution. A tree grows. The sky remains the same, year after year. The life of Buchumov literally frames the events, and I begin to giggle with the hilarious repetition of one silhouette--his nose. The one-eyed painter, of course, sees his nose as a fixed heroic structure. As the vision takes me, I begin to laugh, but they don't even smile. So many noses in the crude, nearly identical frames of the 64 painstaking, talentless oils. Bergson describes humor as coming from the perception of mechanical repetition where there should be original, individual adjustment to reality.

"It is not satire," says Komar. "We are just stating the fact. And he pays with his life."

"You will perhaps notice," says Melamid, "that the nose gets a little larger as Buchumov ages. Noses do so."

It's in the Russian tradition to be fascinated by noses. Gogol's noses paraded down the street like people. The series stops suddenly. Melamid shows me a typed book, a tribute to Buchumov. He must have died in some purge. Out of tact and sadness for the execution of the imaginary painter. I don't ask how Buchumov sinned. The seriousness of their effort makes Western art foolery seem merely trivial.

They also own all the known works of another painter. Zyablov, the serf genius who invented abstract art in the 18th Century. "Our Russian inventor," Melamid murmurs proudly about their creation. "You know how Russians discovered everything?" Melamid and Komar have also written the biography of Zyablov and collected the usual academic tributes.

During the worst days of Stalinism, the painters who made their careers on repeated heroic expressions of Stalin Speaking, Stalin Thinking, Stalin Sympathetic, Stalin Steellike also produced an avalanche of landscapes, by some comfortable reflex action. Komar and Melamid have parodied these lobotomized landscapes without the glorification of sloganized abstraction. Under their bare light bulbs they have been very busy and very productive, undistracted by gallery owners, buyers, exhibits or public discussion.

In another room they have constructed a space they call Rai. which means paradise. It is filled with collage, wire construction, breezes, painting, images, paste-ups, and as they let me live in it a little, they turned on a tape of the steady instructional mutter of Soviet broadcasting. It was an environment of mixed satire and hope and not so claustrophobic as this description must seem. There were small pleasures and discoveries--maps, nudes, colors, shapes, flowers, perspectives, memories. When I had had enough. I signaled to be let out. Their faces were bland. They hoped I enjoyed the trip.

To be expelled from their union for violating the principles of socialist realism means that these two young men are now outlaw artists. This is a contradiction in terms. If you're not a member of the union, you're not an artist. They write letters of protest to officialdom: officialdom does not stoop to answer outlaws. Officialdom has more important papers to shuffle. They know that the K.G.B. is gathering information about them. Sock art must seem insane to cops. What can happen? What happens when only the cops are free. The world will not protect unknown artists. If they are declared crazy, who can argue for them? No trial is necessary. As Melamid says mildly, "The average Soviet psychiatrist will certify us."

The novelist Vladimir Maksimov and the physicist Sakharov came to see their work. This will not protect them. Newsmen sometimes come. But what is the special story in a couple of unknown artists, working alone in Moscow's Lefrak City? They are not even political.

They are not dissidents or revolutionaries or heroes. They are only artists with several good jokes and a certain intensity. All they have is talent and stubbornness. They have some playful visions and some poignant ones, and they seek time and space, paints, canvas and freedom to work through that stubborn itch of creation. Who will keep them from harm as they try to provide an alternative to Lefrak City, Moscow branch?

• • •

I enter the warm clutter of an intellectual Russian apartment--books, records, photographs, furniture of all periods, many chairs, as if an audience is expected (and, indeed, the evening is a performance, the guests are an audience), dark wood, sweaters, scarves, the smell of wool, guitar, a Frisbee incongruously perched on a bookshelf near a portrait of Pasternak, trays of cheese and sausage, bread and butter, coffee, cognac, tea, and more food appearing every hour. Kulturny was the traditional Russian word that expressed this style and it meant graceful, tactful, loving, intellectual; and perhaps it also had overtones of us against the world. Someone is singing a song, one of whose couplets runs:

Those with empty eyes in leaden faceTell me to pay their debts.

Nine years ago, I made a friend in the Writers Union. He shrugged helplessly over the "problem" of losif Brodsky, poet, who had been sent to a labor camp for parasitism--he was not an official poet. My friend was "evolved," perhaps more evolved than others, but after all, socialism has bettered the lot of men. He would keep his peace.

Now my friend has spoken out about some things--Solzhenitsyn, the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, the use of mental hospitals against General Grigorenko and others--and gritted his teeth about such matters as the armed crushing of Dubcek's "socialism with a human face" at the end of the tragic Prague summer, about the bitter anti-Zionist campaign, with its archaic resonances. His partial prudence has only partially saved him.

My friends from 1965, flourishing after the Khrushchev thaw, are now outcast, unemployed, threatened. They were being harassed by success and the fight against cynicism in the middle Sixties. Now they look unworried and younger than nine years ago. Perhaps they are only thinner. They are black-listed. "We are free now," one sings. "The lies are down like fallen flags." The guitar thrums. They sip tea, nibble bread, sing the songs that make trouble and laugh when I ask what their best hopes are. An old friend answers: "Hopeless!" And then he picks up his guitar and sings a new song, full of bears, snow, drums, revolution. "We're fighting for peace by getting ready for wars, we've always done that-------"

My friend Yuri says to me, "And now it is time for a walk." He points to the ceiling and makes that familiar circular gesture of a tape whirling on its spool.

We blow puffs of frost and circle the long dark block, plodding against crisp ice. Yuri has a complicated matter to discuss. A few years ago, an American friend, a writer, offered him a gift of money. He refused, a little insulted, even. "I was working, my wife worked, no problem. Now. Now would you tell him I am so happy for the success of his last book? But I can no longer publish my books. My wife no longer has job. So if he would still like. . . No."

"I'll tell him."

"The situation is difficult for us now. But no."

"I'll make sure he understands."

It has to do with things he has said and not said, petitions he has signed and not signed, even with books he has read, languages he knows. With the difficult times. And so if this American friend would still like to make a gift.... He was wringing his hands. There were frozen tears on his cheeks. Rage and pride take strange, contorted shape on a sturdy grandfather's face. "No! Please do not."

"Don't worry, I'll explain."

"Sometimes we're not sure if we'll have enough to eat!" he cried.

We walked back in silence, until at the door he shook his head stubbornly and said. "No. Promise me. Say nothing. Only my greetings to an old friend."

• • •

Alexander Goldfarb has dark, thick-lashed, sleepy eyes and the kind of relaxed slouch that tends to irritate parents and make girls long to improve a fellow's character. He is also a very intelligent young man, a microbiologist by profession. He has let his hair grow long: he wears jeans with zippered pockets he looks like a Berkeley graduate student. But instead of the pleasures of coffee-houses and grant-getting, a trick of history has put him into a tortured maze at the age of 26. He happened to be born in the Soviet Union. He has requested a visa to Israel for himself and his non-Jewish wife. The round of abuse, banning and trouble is now his life. He is an otkaznyik--a refusenik.

His father is an internationally renowned geneticist, a Soviet war hero who lost a leg at Stalingrad. Sasha himself was placed in a research institute where, as the single Jew, he had good hopes of a comfortable career. Instead, he has been out of work for two years, arrested, hounded by the police, beaten up by mysterious anonymous strangers, because he requested to be allowed what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the Soviet Union voted to adopt, prescribes--the right of free emigration, without which men are serfs.

Why has he chosen this difficult fate? He is a cheerful man, not a suicidal one. He makes trouble for family and friends, not just himself, and he has interrupted his research at the crucial age of rapid achievement, and there is reason to fear his sacrifice will be in vain, they will hold him prisoner and toy with him--why?

We hung out together: we wandered the streets of Moscow, noses burning with cold, beards frozen. I met his friends, many of them watching his troubles unroll before they make their own decisions. His wife, a slim and pretty girl with a broad face and long braids, fixed lunch. She practiced her Hebrew on me and showed disappointment at my vocabulary. I let their story unfold as we pulled apart the chickens and ate marvelous black Russian bread, made from American détente grain, which somehow metamorphosed during its sea trip from glutinous Wonder Bread to chunky strong chorny khlyep.

Sasha could have had the goodies the Soviet Union offers its technical elite, but instead he risks prison for an uncertain sojourn in a troubled little nation far away. He began to think of himself as a Jew and to inform himself of what this meant only after he decided to go to Israel. Now he is reading the Bible, remaking his history. His fair Slavic wife wears a Star of David around her neck and carries her Hebrew-Russian dictionary and doesn't fret too much about what happens to her in the street. Why?

The example of Israel's triumph and suffering led him, no doubt about that, but his life in the Soviet state, despite his family's favored status, determined his path. As a brilliant graduate, he was chosen by the head of a research department to enter his program. When his name was put forward, the political overseers--what we used to call commissars--asked the chief: "Why do you need this Jew?"

"He's very good. He's valuable." The professor hinted he would resign if his request were not granted. The Soviet government favors science and sometimes a professor can stand up against a cop, it he doesn't abuse the privilege.

"All right. You can have him. Take him. But he's your responsibility."

Sasha's face is glum. He loves and admires this Russian who remained firm for him. But as things developed--the Six Day War, the anti-Zionist campaign, with its resonance of anti-Semitism, the restrictions and limitations of Soviet life for other people, for Sasha's friends, if not for him--"it became rather difficult." He was asked to do "volunteer street-cleaning labor" and refused, and his chief said, "Look. I stuck out my neck for you. They'll never give me another Jew." So he swept the streets on his day off. But it rankled.

"A few little problems. But mostly I could have lived comfortably, petted, coddled, gently milked, if I had looked away from my brothers."

He warned his parents and his sponsor at the research laboratory that he planned to ask for an exit visa. They asked him not to. His father would no longer have the right to travel abroad. His chief would be berated for poor judgment and the K.G.B. overseer would say. "You see, we warned you, you may be a good researcher, but we know our business." His wife's brother screamed at her: "Better you had married a Negro! Now if I have to put down that I have relatives in Israel, all is lost, promotions, everything!"

He told his chief he was determined. The man shrugged, sighed, turned away.

He went to OVIR, the visa office, and applied.

Of course, he lost his job immediately. His application was denied, and denied again, and denied again. No means to live. No chance to keep up his skills. He too, is threatened with the mental hospital. He carried old copies of Scientific American with him wherever he went. "Of course, very interesting, but I am research. I need lab. Of course, it is also rather hard to concentrate."

Two years of this. He works as a laborer to avoid the charge of parasitism. He is now a refusenik and a Moscow Jewish activist. Many of those dear to him are hurt by his action. His family, his sponsor, some teachers. "Well, they have made their choice, they have to permit mine," he says, but clearly it saddens him to be the source of pain and trouble for others.

He is learning English and Hebrew, and waiting--especially the last. Patience comes hard for a young research scientist. These are the years of creation. His wife was also a scientific researcher and also lost her job. She is better at Hebrew than her Jewish husband. One consolation in all this, she says, is that they spend more time together. They are holding hands. I am holding the wings of a chicken in two chicken-smelling hands. They laugh at my negligible chicken-eating skills.

Sasha talks freely about his troubles. Being followed is now a familiar part of his life. He writes open letters to the Presidium of the U.S.S.R. and appears in demonstrations in Red Square. He visits other refuseniks and non-Jewish dissenters, such as Sakharov, and those who strive for internal reform, and even persecuted Baptists and other religious people and Ukrainian nationalists. He says about a young K.G.B. probationer who tried clumsily to entice him into a money-changing operation: "Poor kid. He's stuck."

"You don't hate those who make trouble for you?"

He, too, is a Russian. He accepts. He says: "Maybe I'll go away to prison for a year or two. Usually, after that, they get tired of the game and let us go."

"I prefer not to go to prison," remarks his friend Vladimir Kozlovsky, a scholar of Sikh culture, a researcher into Eastern religions, a compiler of slang dictionaries, who apparently also has secrets that require refusal of a visa. His last job was doing a running oral translation of The Godfather for a private showing.

"How do you feel about those who are still waiting, those who will never take your risks?"

Sasha is two decades younger than I, but he looks at me with pity for my American simple-mindedness. "How can they throw away all their beliefs, all they have suffered for?" he asks me. "How can they tell themselves not only that they will die but also that all their lives were a disaster? Don't you remember that thousands went to their deaths shouting 'Long live Stalin!' as the firing squads fired?"

We spend the day gossiping, eating, walking about. He points out the chauffeured cars of important people with curtains on their windows. The faceless bureaucrats don't want their faces seen as they glide through their domain.

When I get a cab for the trip back to my hotel, it also contains a girl. She offers me a quick cuddle home. Although it's cold and lonely in here, I decline. She stares straight ahead.

Red Square, the Rassiya Hotel, a hot bath and push-ups. I hope the girl won't get a demerit because her khow-are-you failed to bring the blush of love to my cheeks.

• • •

I awake late the next morning. As I stroll in the wintry sun of Red Square, the soldiers stand at attention in front of Lenin's tomb and it seems I am looking at the same guided tourists from Eastern republics, waiting to file past the waxen, melted relic of the great untouchable leader, that I saw in June nearly ten years ago. Someone has brought them winter coats and fur hats. Healthy, spick-and-span officers clatter by in their high boots. One young captain holds his daughter--the age of my youngest--by a hand and takes his salutes with the other. The child toddles in the stiff, bundled gait that seems almost natural now. I, too, am swaddled in layers of wool, leather and fur.

I am waiting to meet Lydia, a dissenter, at the Intourist Hotel. The city looks clean despite sky-darkening belches from the stacks of the electric plant nearby. No dogshit (no dogs, either), little litter of paper and squads of old babushki sweeping the square with long birch brooms. But once you leave Red Square, the somber, closed-down look of Moscow makes you forget it's really a nicely scrubbed town--a layer of brown reserve, a beige and dark withdrawal, no commercial gaiety and the morose drunks who are swept up by the citizen militia along with the litter. Somehow the stark slogans in red on white or black--Communism will triumph or party and people united--are no more invigorating than pepsi tastes good or I'm ok you're ok. Komar and Melamid are still telling me something, which is what artists are supposed to do. They go on going on.

*At presstime, I received word from underground sources that my friend Alexander Goldfarb was in hiding, pursued by the K.G.B. His friends are threatened with prison unless they betray him. A brave young man is being hounded to destruction.

Lydia is not afraid to be seen with me. Nothing more to lose; a familiar story now. She belongs to a group that has sworn to take the consequences of its judgment of life here and hardly cares what happens to her. Despite this grim adjustment, she is a twinkly, spectacled, grizzly middle-aged lady with that cheerful Russian indoor mealtime volubility. Before she drifted into the democratic movement--reform, free speech, exchange of information, no prison or asylums for dissidents--she worked as a translator for Intourist. It amuses her to shock her former colleagues by appearing here. She says happily, "Good, the food for lunch is better than it used to be. The German businessmen will be happier."

• • •

On one of my last days in Moscow, Melor Sturua, a foreign editor of Izvestia, invited me to visit him in his blue-walled sunny offices above Gorky Street. The name Melor is an acronym for Marx Engels Lenin October Revolution. Melor's parents must be old-timers. The last time I saw him, he was a correspondent, visiting San Francisco. Now, natty and cordial in an elegant, tight-waisted French suit, he offered me the customary Russian hospitality, tea, cookies, sweet and savory eatables on a tray, served by a lady he described as his "colleague." She whisked the food off the tray and then the colleague whisked herself away. "So how have you been?" he asked.

I was talking fast about his suit, his healthy look, our mutual friends in New York. I feared embarrassing questions about what I was doing, whom seeing, but his real concern seemed to be to express hurt because of an open letter to him by our friend Earl Shorris, published in The New York Times. "How can politics and personal life be confused?" he asked. "I am a Soviet person--but why blame me for political hurts?"

A moment of melancholy enveloped us along with the sun, the smell of lemony tea, the silence of incomprehension. Shorris had written about the gleeful Soviet urging of war upon the Arabs and how this changed their friendship. "He would not have written so after the Six Day War," said Sturua. "Because there was what the Arabs call a victory this time, naturally, he was emotionally upset. I was not so concerned."

That night I went to the farewell party for Vladimir Maksimov, the novelist, who was being expelled to France. Hundreds of people flowed through his apartment, all day long, to say goodbye. Those observing outside looked like the plain-clothesmen I have seen at demonstrations in the States, only in thick black coats and fur hats like tea cosies around their heads. The crackling of occasional hidden walkie-talkies might be confused with the stomach rumblings of giant robots.

In his tiny kitchen. Maksimov weaved slightly, pressed his pugnacious lips together and said. "It is a disaster, a catastrophe."

"Why not enjoy your exile?" He is a former laborer, self-educated and frightened. Less famous than Solzhenitsyn, he knows how trees wither when their roots are cut. I talked about Turgenev. Nabokov, Bunin, all the Russian writers who worked in exile. "Why not just enjoy Paris?" I asked, feeling foolish, like anyone who suddenly finds himself in the consolation business.

"A disaster, a catastrophe, and do you understand me?" He stared at me with a glaze of rage. How could he explain anything? Comfortable in California, what could I know about his earth, his history, his hope to live in peace with his own people? Only at home did life have any reality.

I thought of the peculiarity of this nation, where those who desperately want to stay are shipped into exile and others, who feel they can survive only elsewhere, are pinned in place like wriggling insects for the pleasure of people who seem to have no pleasure and give no reasons.

Belligerently Maksimov shouted after me: "I'm not Turgenev, I am. . . ." I thought I heard him say he was greater than Solzhenitsyn. It was sad to be drunk, hurt, expelled from the only language and world he understood. "Maksimov wants to be a Russian!" he howled. It was a long party for him.

Then I went for another midnight supper--getting heavy on cheeses, sausages, butter, bread--it the apartment of some friends from my last visit, when I had found them attractive Soviet people, enthusiastic about foreign literature, very intellectual, but making out OK in Soviet reality. They would never rock the boat. Well, now the boat has been rocked. They are expelled from the Writers Union, black-listed: and they are not world-renowned, but they are decent, distinguished, thoughtful, warmhearted, at the late end of middle age and fixed in a limbo of no work, no money, no travel; they are frozen in a winter they cannot understand: fear, threats, isolation, and their last years passing in a peculiar din of silence.

Nevertheless, their Russian gaiety pokes its head out for the evening. A guitar, songs and exchange of jokes, eager questions about writers whose books they no longer receive in the mail. An old man who looks like a Tolstoyan peasant, huge baldish head with a thin mane of white hair, a cane, grizzled beard, great wet kisses for everyone, male or female, makes a nonpeasant reply to my questions about Maksimov. "Some manage to leave for the West. Some Jews can go to Israel. The rest just disappear. They stay. I don't mean die. I mean silence. I mean drink or silence. Gone. That is not brain drain. What Maksimov said, disaster, that is true. It is soul drain."

"What can I do?"

He looked at me with his rosy, charming, old man's face, and took his peasant's heavy staff and pounded the floor with it, and shouted with a certain Russian pride: "The Soviet Union will not be solved, or solve itself, at the will of a traveler!"

And all these friends are fixed in a frieze of joy and laughter, staring at me and inwardly, at themselves, in judgment of the presumptions of human will. Time will tell who will fall and who has been left behind. My rosy, cheerful old friend keeps his manuscripts in a metal box. He has a weak heart and will die one of these days. And a great nation is still waiting in history with all its power, performing the act of a noisy, puzzling silence.