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David Lempert
Harvard University Ukrainian Research Institute
Abstract
During the past several years as communications have eased with the (former) Soviet Union, an increasing number of works have appeared describing gender roles and relationships within the various ethnic groups in the region.
This article presents an experiment with the new forms of ethnographic interpretation in an attempt to describe the socialization of gender roles in Russian urban society in 1989-90, using story and allegory to describe the reasserting of traditional gender inequality during perestroika and the inequality of relations between Russia and the West.
During the past several years as communications have eased with the (former) Soviet Union, an increasing number of works have appeared detailing the double burden faced by Soviet women (Clements, Engel and Worobec, 1991; Fischer, 1983; DuPlessix Gray, 1989), presenting the voices of Soviet women (Hanson and Liden, 1983; Lapidus, 1978; Mamanova, 1984), depicting male-female relations in Soviet society (Attwood, 1990; Stern and Stern, 1980), the workings of the Soviet family (Juvelier, 1966), and describing the role of women in various age groups in the society (Bystydzienski, 1989; Riordan, 1989). A variety of works, many of them historical, have also appeared to detail the particular roles and attitudes of women in the Soviet Union's more than 100 ethnic groups (Engelstein, 1990; Massell, 1974).
These studies have usually presented a statistical portrait of the plight of Russian women, have provided an opportunity for selected women to describe their lives and their concerns, or have reviewed the place of Soviet women in the society as reflected in literature and other cultural texts. The form of these studies has tended to reflect the disciplinary paradigms of their authors, with anthropological interpretation of contemporary gender roles and relations absent from the literature. What anthropology has to offer the field is the ability to capture some of the previously uncaptured complexity and nuance of gender roles and relations which are accessible to the participant observer.
During 1989-90, I had the opportunity to conduct anthropological field work in Leningrad /St. Petersburg as one of the first American anthropologists to observe and record life in a Russian city using ethnographic methods (Lempert, 1992; Ries, 1992); forty years after Margaret Mead tried to determine how to study the Russians without the possibility of entering the society. (Mead, 1953)
Although neither Soviet, nor of Russian ancestry, nor a woman, my training and goal as an anthropologist was to understand and to try to "become" the "other" -- to cross the boundaries of culture, time, gender, status, power and place -- and to use myself as an instrument, through cultural immersion and participant observation, to interpret the texture of the unfamiliar. (Rapp Reiter, 1975; Geertz, 1973; McGrane, 1979)
Such an attempt is not only rare in the study of Russia, but also in the emerging literature in women's studies. Indeed, almost all of the writings in the field are written and edited by women with little existing literature on how men might or have attempted to cross the psychological barrier of gender in trying to see the world not only through the eyes of a member of a different culture but of a member of that culture of a different gender. (In one of the leading journals, for example, Signs, all 31 members of the 1992 Editorial Board, all 65 members of the Advisory Board were women and all 29 of the articles in the Winter and Summer 1992 issues were by women.)
As a participant observer with the hope of doing so, among several research goals, I was able to view the dynamic of gender roles, their patterning, and to try to interpret the flow of Russian culture and Russian history as a backdrop to an internal perspective of the lives of the Russians as seen through their eyes.
Many of my observations are best presented in literary form; a compendium of true stories woven into a picture of reality, in a way that protects the anonymity of informants while allowing their emotions and character to be expressed. (Geertz, 1988; Clifford, 1988) While the picture created may appear stereotypical, it is based on an averaging of actual observations as would be presented in the more standard article stripped of some of the additional detail.
What follows is an attempt to experiment with the new forms of ethnographic interpretation in an attempt to describe the socialization of gender roles in Russian society in 1989-90. The story which follows is not only about individuals as they lead their lives in contemporary Russia. It is also an allegory of Russian history and of current relations between East and West; about the idealism and longing in the West for the transformation of Russian culture to something like us -- a process that is complex and at times mysterious in a reality that is discomforting when placed side by side with Western practices and values. Part of the juxtaposition of the views of individuals in this story might seem slightly jarring. It is purposefully so. One of the advantages of this format over other anthropological writing is that it asks the reader to question his or her own values by placing them, perhaps uncomfortably, in the context of a European society, in some ways perhaps not so distant from our own.
The story of Russia and its relations as a society, mirrored by stories of individuals, is one of abuse, of denial, of a double character. It probes beyond the statistics which are becoming familiar litanies in the literature; presenting the complexity of the series of interrelationships within and outside of modern Russian society. A Story of Love and Tears in the Soviet Union.
I
Pushkin wrote of Dunya, the daughter of the rural station master, and the effect of her paralyzing beauty and warmth on Russian travelers. Lermontov recorded tales of tantalizing mermaids. Karamzin told of Poor Liza who drowned herself in romantic desperation. Turgenev brought to life the beautiful unfathomable, enigmatic, mocking Zenaida and then brought us to share in her tragic end.
These were tales that opened a window into something called the Russian "soul"; something I thought came not only with black bread and potatoes, but also with the red caviar and cherry brandy that can't be found in Russia anymore, except in the Kremlin and hotels for Americans; places that aren't really Russia.
Before I left for a new life in St. Petersburg, (Leningrad), the capital city of the tsars, I had read these romantic and often tragic tales of life and love and family in 18th and 1 9th century Russia.
I didn't know what I would find in the land of purges and terror, or of the romantic glamour of perestroika and its icy hint of civil war, but I was in search of something redeeming; the kind of hope of national rebuilding and vitality that grows only on the soils of pain.
Romance, many had said, had been squeezed out of existence by the Soviets; creating a society of fear and intolerance, of corruption and avoidance, of opportunism and escape; a place as frigid as its winters were cold; a world of "Little Veras" of little belief; a world without sentiment, without love, without mystery; a world of concrete and coldness and misery.
Returning visitors and immigrants would talk of the depth and exclusiveness of relationships they had found among a terrorized populace who needed someone to trust and invested everything in their tiny circles. To me it seemed that these were the fringes and not the typical Russians. These were not the Russians I met on the tramways or on the lines outside supermarkets or inside factories or classrooms.
What I found was a city of vampish teenage girls in fish net stockings and caked-on makeup and pale malnourished faces and blank stares and indifference; of overweight and overburdened young mothers and alcoholic fathers; of misunderstanding and pain.
And then I met Acia.
Over the course of a year, I heard piece after piece of Acia's story; and the story of Andre, the young French poet and budding statesman who loved her. I saw what had happened to the Russian soul and how maybe, there was a chance to hold it for a small embrace before it disappears once and for all from the soils of Russia. This is their story and our story -- about Acia and Andre, and a little about me; about how we all become fused together by the intensity of circumstances and shared belief during the time when Communism fell in Eastern Europe.
I had been in Leningrad for almost two months before I met Acia, bracing for the cold of winter and the shortages; trying to understand what was happening in a city of palatial facades, a city built for tsars but not for common people, a city that was now crumbling and receding into nothingness. I could feel it in the crushed hopelessness of the young and from the uneasy sounds of an invisible spinning wheel of sexual roulette in a city absent of passion.
I was there to write about Soviet reforms and changes in the legal system; but what I found was a myth; the changes were on the surface, on the facades, the facades of the palaces and museums and hotels that are constantly renovated for the tourists and the elite. Inside was darkness and emptiness and uniformity and despair. After two months, I didn't expect to find much at all. I guess that's why there was something so transforming about Acia.
Andre and I were already friends, confidants, though I couldn't stem what I recognized later as jealousy. No matter. Younger than I, more honest, more courageous, more believing in himself. The Russians didn't understand him, nor the French, nor I, completely.
Andre was an idealistic reformer in the tradition of a Leon Blum or a Masaryk or a Disraeli or perhaps even a Lenin; something quite European. There was a softness and gentleness about him, a curiosity, and a tremendous amount of energy about the things he believed in -- a new kind of democracy for France, a new kind of policy in Africa, a new kind of system of education. If he wins the Nobel Peace Prize someday, for it, I wouldn't be surprised. And if a stray bullet finds him first, I won't be totally surprised either.
There was also an element of pathos and pain and sad destiny in him. It wasn't that he was impractical, for the cleverness of his schemes not only was that they might work, but that he had already started to test out some of his ideas, putting to use the startling amount of education and experience he had managed to accumulate in a short time.
It was that he suffered from being ahead of his time. It made people afraid. He made me afraid, too, at first, until I understood him. People nudged him out on the edge of society; and he didn't really understand.
While his project in Leningrad was unprecedented, he was somehow on the run in the world, without any place to go, until maybe, he hoped, the times would catch up with him, or until he would change them so that they would. He had a kind of enduring faith in himself and in the world, coupled, at the same time, with a modesty and fear of the immediate future. I felt for him.
There was another side to him that I didn't know, but it seemed to complement the rest. He was able to laugh at himself and recognize his own weaknesses, and be practical when he had to be. But he was also a romantic. He sought purity of spirit and depth of feeling and intensity in others. For that, I thought he was in the wrong place.
When he told me one day that he had met his match and that he was scared -- that he had met a woman who was beautiful but not spoiled, with as much energy, and the need to do good and ability as he had, an outsider with repressed pain, someone who wanted to help him and understood him, someone who inspired him again to poetry, I wasn't sure what he was imagining. But he said I didn't have to imagine anything; that I could come to meet Acia.
II
It wasn't hard to notice her. She sat up straight and her clothes had color, and her eyes glowed. She peeked out from among the Russians like the wild strawberries I had seen growing in the forests near Leningrad on the raised soil of trenches that had been left from the war.
Though I wasn't exactly sure of the various proportions, I thought she looked something like an Asian Minnie Mouse and a Transylvanian Vampire and Audrey Hepburn in "Roman Holiday", combined into one.
The journalism faculty where she was a student, and where I met her, was one of those decrepit 1 9th Century buildings, now common in the heart of Leningrad; probably built as a nobleman's residence, now serving as a home for hungry mice.
The smell of the broken toilets extended into the hallways, and the small furry residents scurried from under chairs in the department offices. In the classrooms, the desks were covered with graffiti attacking everybody and everything, and the windows were cracked, and the carcasses of broken chairs were piled in the back of the rooms. The clocks all gave different times, and the lights were dim and the paint was chipping off the walls where there was still paint to cover the plaster.
The Russian students, slumped in their seats, were telling jokes, scribbling on the desks; the women reading fashion magazines and touching up their make-up (women Acia herself said were "fools" with nothing better to do than talk about their clothes and smoke in hallways and go out for sweets), while professors droned on through the noise about some newly passed directive or some newly introduced and misunderstood technique from the West.
But Acia was the random comet shooting across the staid background. She created a kind of fascination that made everything else seem as exciting as the daily varieties of Russian kasha; mush.
It wasn't that I loved Acia as Andre did. But as someone who saw the world in much the same way as he, I couldn't help but love her spirit in some way, too, the way that I loved Leningrad's midnight sunsets in summer, or eclipses of the moon, or the smell of a forest at sunrise in the spring. As time went on, I became more and more curious about her story -- what it told me about changes in the Soviet Union, and what it told me about the next generation of the Soviets, and about people in a society that's crumbling.
It wasn't a story about political repression, exactly, though it is a story about Soviet power. It's a story about the social ripples of the events of forty or fifty years ago; about the pain and confusion of the periods of the war and purges, and how the violence and trauma of the past sends its shock waves out through time to disrupt and distort the lives of the young, and their young, in unforeseen ways, generations later.
It's about the psychological violence and pain and confusion that's simmering through Russia; about different types of prejudices and injustices; about a different kind of horror that's more subtle, and maybe one that appears inside all of us, only in different forms.
I didn't hear very much of the story from Acia directly, though I did spot her a few times in the main building of the University, and spoke to her once or twice when she was with Andre. Most of her story I learned from Andre, who loved her with a purity and intensity I thought reserved for idealistic heroes in times of revolution and war.
It was what I learned from both of them as his friend and an admirer of hers from afar -what I learned about love, about passion, about life, about what it meant to be a woman, about being a Soviet woman, that ended up changing me as it changed them.
III
Who was, is that comet that is Acia?
She was in her own category; a category that doesn't exist in Soviet society, and one that nobody would let her build. How does one describe Acia? A journalist, a mother, an artist, part Russian, part Asian, part rural, part urban; a sort of goodness and beauty and hardship personified; an unusual Soviet woman; an unusual woman. Acia.
But what she was, was the effect she had on others at unexpected moments. When I was sad in Leningrad, I sometimes went for walks in the tsar's summer gardens, to look at statues of cavorting Gods and Goddesses with their mystical energy and playfulness and knowingness. I didn't think anyone could, but she did. She reminded me of them. I always thought of her there.
And I thought of her whenever I saw Soviet displays and banners. She had crafted her own display in the journalism faculty, which she had put up on the colorless and bare walls. It was entirely out of place, in a quiet challenge to everything else there, and it was already falling apart out of neglect. It had its own symbolic power and beauty.
She said she was tired of seeing just the glorification of Lenin and of World War II heroes: that there were lots of people whose achievements needed to be recognized, and that every individual could make a difference. Her display commemorated the little known journalists who had been minor heroes in the revolution but who had taken risks, some suffering for it, and written about things they believed in.
She was both inspired and sad when she talked about it; sad because she said several students promised to help redecorate and revitalize the interior of the school when she started, but that no one did; that no one understood what she was trying to do and never would. In the year I was in Leningrad, I didn't see anything else like it in the whole city, nor like her.
To look at Acia was to look at an eerie perfection, to see her long black hair in braids to her waist and the corners of her Asiatic eyes curling into smiles. Her other worldliness was marred only by a small scar on her lip, from when she had tried to kiss a baby chick on her collective farm as a little girl. The chick had kissed her back and drew blood. It was a scar made her both more real and more beautiful.
There was something both old and young about her -- the watchful look of a child who sees everything; and the kind of cynical maturity and tenderness of the old, mixed with an undirected rage that made her remarks sharp edged and tinged with pain. She said she was old, very very old. Yet she had a face that looked like it would never age, and looked several years younger than her age; 22 when I first met her.
IV
Her story begins in a place far away in distance and in time; in that part of Russia far far north that they describe as in the "deafness", the place where the tsars sent thousands to exile, and where Stalin sent hundreds of thousands more. She came from Siberia, up along the Lena River one of the longest rivers in the world.
There is a legend that God traveled around the world collecting his treasures in a satchel, and when he arrived at the mouth of the Lena River, the satchel broke and all of the riches within were strewn there, onto the earth.
Despite the riches, it is today as it was for decades, and as parts of Russia were before it for centuries, a land of wood burning stoves and horse drawn carts; of water wells and outhouses, and ice and mud. Its riches are extracted to the cities while its people are left there, in poverty.
Her mother still hand washes their clothes in the cold of winter, and her little brother drives a tractor. And their prized possessions are the volumes of Shakespeare and Tolstoy on the shelves in their common room. It is peasant Russia.
She didn't know her family's origins, though it seemed to her that they had always been there. Her mother was from of the indigenous Asiatic groups that had lived in the area, speaking a language something like Turkish, the legacy of invasions and migration centuries before. Her father was Caucasian; maybe a Russian, maybe a Jew; questions they had learned not to ask anymore. Their family name was a simple one; too simple to be real, perhaps. It means "from the East" in Russian.
Had her great grandfather been sent or fled there during the Stalinist purges and changed the family name? Or had her ancestors come even earlier; among the Polish and Ukrainian Jews, sent to political exile by the tsars?
So much history and identity had already been destroyed. What did it matter, now?
What mattered was that she knew she was not the same even if she couldn't quite say why. Her father, a doctor, was the most educated man in the village, from a tradition long ago that valued education and charity; perhaps the legacy of an ancestor who came in political exile. having fought to build a utopia in Russia.
Like all the other wealth extracted to the center, and now being siphoned from Russia to the capitals of the West, he, too, could have gone off to the city; to the hospitals for the Party elite in Irkutsk or Yakutsk or Vladivostok or Sverdlovsk. But he stayed.
Her mother was a nurse and collector of native stories, one of them her favorite, of the most powerful woman in the region's history, a courtesan of a king whose influence changed history.
She asked her father once why he hadn't gone off to make a career, and why they lived poorly, and why they always lived in the village, and why he stayed there with the shortage of medicines and backward equipment. And, he told her it was because they were in a helping profession; something the Party didn't understand. He told her that the peasants needed help, and that when you treated someone whose life was hardship and pain and made them well, they knew what kind of gift it was that you had given them.
They weren't like anyone else in the village; the four of them; she, her parents and her little brother. Her father built their house apart, in a ravine, near the river. He told her to read and he helped her find books and he encouraged her to be whatever she wanted to be.
She would sit alone or with her brother on the banks of the Lena and dream of being a sailor, of sailing up to the Arctic and down through the Baltic to the capitals of Europe, or out to Asia and the Americas.
But as she grew up, she found out that lots of things she had been told were not true.
The waters of the Lena were not clear and drinkable. The legacy of industrialization and extraction had killed the river with chemical waste and radioactive fallout from nuclear tests in the region.
And it was not true that women can be anything they want to be. Soviet women can't be sailors, and lots of other things. And they don't strive to be. Russian women, themselves, say that certain jobs -- the ones with prestige and power and adventure -- are "not women's work", and that doing them is not Russian tradition.
But she wanted to try to be what she could be. She was a high school "gold medalist" -first in her class, straight 5's (A's). Her teachers called her "the voice in the wilderness". She wasn't going to stay on the farm and get pregnant at 17 or 18 and spend her life hand washing clothes out in the snow like her mother.
There was a journalism faculty in Sverdlovsk, 2,500 miles away and she took the five day train ride there. On the way there she heard stories about the students in Sverdlovsk, how the ideological education they received was so excruciating that some of the women students would commit themselves to mental hospitals just to find an excuse for an official leave of absence -- their only way out. Once there, some would never return.
For the men, there was no escape. Before starting school or after the first or second years, they would be conscripted into the military, forced into a kind of hierarchical slavery to those who had entered a year before; often raped. When they returned to school and stopped having nightmares or stopped dreaming at all, most of them didn't care about or believe in anything, anymore.
When she got to Sverdlovsk, the competition was intense. There were unwritten quotas that translated into impossible standards for half Asian farm girls speaking Russian as a second language, without any coaching or help or contacts or money to bribe their way in, and educated in tiny wooden schoolhouses where the library was so small that she had long ago read everything that there was. She didn't get in.
So she went back home for a year, lost and alone, and was put to work writing propaganda stories on the collective farm. She wrote articles against drunkenness and in praise of the revolution; posters that she knew didn't alleviate any of the problems that caused the drunkenness or that gave any meaning to the revolution's lost and distorted ideals. And she cried.
And she realized that there was no escape. As a journalist she would at best be a "political prostitute", a phrase that sounds and means the same in almost all of the languages of the industrialized world.
A year later, though, she was studying journalism in Leningrad, the first woman ever in the history of her village to study at the university in the former capitol.
V
That was about as much of the story as she would tell me. Our mutual understanding ended there, and I was too busy just trying to find food in the stores and to keep myself warm. It was enough to convince me why marriage and family made sense in Soviet society, as much as for division of labor than for love, but not enough to feed any fires of passion. Alone it was impossible to survive. Urban survival seemed to have made romance irrelevant.
The rest of the story, as I got it, I got from Andre. And what she told him was filled with such confusion for her, and for him, that I don't even know if he ever heard all of it, or the full truth. But how often does one ever know the truth about Russia, or about oneself, or about anything?
In a land of purges and impossibility and silent fears has been bred new types of deception and denial. She often lied to him and he knew. Mostly he forgave her when he understood why, and heard more. It is not Andre's way. But it is their way; a means to protect themselves from authority and responsibility and pain.
VI
About the time of winter recess, when the daylight shrank to five hours per day and none of us could get out of bed to face the cold and darkness, I knew that something was not right with Acia, nor with Andre..
From the outside I didn't know what to think. I didn't have as much faith as Andre that he and Acia would stay friends for long.
I knew he was in love the first time he saw her, but that he took a long time to approach her. He said he had seen her in a romantic embrace in the city with a tall Westerner (Swiss it turned out) whom he thought was her husband.
But when they spoke, she said she had been waiting for him to introduce himself; that she was a free person; that she was divorced and had a daughter she loved dearly. And he joked about the Swiss man he had seen her with.
In his candor and broken Russian, he said he told her how beautiful and charming he thought she was. And she invited him to travel with her in the Baltics.
It was shortly after that that I skeptically agreed to meet her, still not knowing who or what she was. Already what I was discovering was that there was another side to Andre, but I turned out to be completely mistaken about what that side was. I suspected nothing good would come out of his feelings for this young Acia.
He was writing her poems in French, which she went home and translated. And he wrote a romantic story for her daughter to explain to her, when she could read, who he might be in her life.
But to Acia, the story was just a fable about her and her ex-husband. In the jealousy I had for him, I gloated over the notion that my statesman friend might turn himself into a toy for a Soviet divorcee on a holiday and find something entirely different from what he expected. Such is the pain that romantics and idealists inflict on themselves. But then, I'm not really sure what he expected.
He said that he knew her soul, that he knew a part of her loved him as soon as he met her; that he couldn't help but fall in love; that he had met the combination of goodness and cleverness and disillusioned idealism and hope that he had always wanted to find in someone other than himself. He said that she was poorly educated but intuitive and quick and bold, and that her sharp tongue and underlying pain were things about her that he could understand but that no one else would.
But he also knew that he might be wrong. His realistic side told him to be afraid. Perhaps it was only what he didn't know that drove him.
I wasn't sure what to tell him.
When she finished her exams, Acia invited him out for cognac on a Saturday afternoon and, he said, expected him to pay and to buy her lunch and to open doors for her. He said he tried to explain something to her about equality in relationships and protecting her dignity and not "buying her" and being certain that she wasn't using him as a rich Westerner. He said he put his arm around her and teased her and walked her over to the banks of the Neva River in the cold and started crying about France and his future. He said her gloved hand wiped the tears off his face, and that he never cried in front of anyone before; that she could make him laugh and cry.
She refused his kisses and said it wasn't true that she was hiding something that made her sad. But she told him part of a story about how she didn't deserve to get into the University in Leningrad and how it had to do with "a man who helped her".
He told her he loved her and she said she never loved anyone and was drunk, and ran off before he could say anything more.
He went home and sat in his room in his overcoat. He had been home already three hours, but he was still shivering feverishly. And that was how I found him.
VII
I didn't know what to tell him.
I told him he was living in a dream world and there were a few things about men and women that someone ought to tell him; that she was running away from something; that it was all a subtle game. I was sure that Acia wanted him to treat her and take her home and make love to her and that the alcohol was her chance to deny it all and say she never had feeling, because she didn't want to have any.
I told him that maybe that wasn't a good thing, but that maybe that was all there was. If he was looking for more, that was too much; that he was chasing a myth. I told him that other Westerners and the Soviets themselves knew that there was no love here, but that didn't stop them from enjoying what it was they could take; that perestroika was a facade and projection, and that he was projecting his own myths as he probably had in France.
I told him that if he continued believing the way he did, that all his schemes would fail, that he was asking too much of people, more than they would demand of themselves and more than they would ever understand. I told him that he had come to the right place to learn that you couldn't build a utopia with people who weren't ready, and that at best you could show them a few things and lead them on their way after you had gotten their interest. I told him that maybe that wasn't so bad.
Afterwards, I was sorry I said it. I wasn't even sure if I believed what I told him. I had a lot of anger myself, at the time, and confusion; from the absence of food and light and heat and basic necessities and services, and the stone wall of bureaucracy. I wasn't sure how to react to the married teacher I liked, who asked me to the Hermitage and told me not to tell her husband, and the young women students ten years younger than I was who gave me their phone numbers or left notes on my door. And I guess I was jealous in some way about Acia.
Somehow I think he accepted what I was telling him, but he still had a belief that urged him otherwise; maybe some kind of crazy or hopeless intuition that doesn't know when to give up. "Yes," he said, "she was running. But she's not running purposelessly or recklessly. She's not using people for any kind of material or career gain. She's not like that. Something bad happened to her. I don't know what exactly, but I know. And if that's her only weakness, maybe that's not even a weakness. Maybe it's just a part of being young and human.
There's no dignity to life here. They suffer. They accept it. They blame themselves. They punish themselves. They accept their fate. And there's not a lot of hope for them. But Acia is not like that.
"I'm always running and leaving things unfinished or not starting what I should start," he told me, "and I don't want to run anymore. I want to try to build something good with Acia; honest and equal; something that she'll see the value of in time and that will be very important to her when it does; something that will take longer but that will last longer."
It didn't make a lot of sense to me, but I realized that what I thought wasn't going to make a difference in what he was going to do.
If Acia was going to understand him, it was going to take a long time. Why wait? Who knew where he was going to be after a year? And what he identified as confusion, I thought, perhaps was cruelty.
Before she left she had played some trick on him to see if he were "the type of man who could stand up to her". And she told him that perhaps she had had "lots and lots of men", that perhaps she was a "Goddess".
She accused Andre of playing with her, a young girl without defenses, and of viewing her as an "experimental rabbit", saying that he was known among students as a genius who had come to study them and predict their future.
These tricks and "tests" were interspersed with her stories that didn't give me a lot of confidence in her as a person and even started to make me feel bad for Andre -- how she and her husband had planned to rob banks and escape to Finland before she had gotten pregnant; how her ex-husband was accosting her in public places, threatening to kill himself if she didn't come back to him, and how she said she wished he would.
I wondered what would happen to him when his romantic ideal hit reality; whether he would lose hope; and if he did, what it would mean for all of the other good he had the potential to do.
I could already feel his disillusionment and puzzlement and struggle to understand. He wondered why a smart woman with such a brilliant future had gotten pregnant and chosen to have a child in her first year of school, and whether it really was, as she said, better for her health.
I rested his mind about that with tales of other horrors. I heard the stories of women in assembly line abortions -- of unsterilized implements passing AIDS from one woman to another; of painful procedures where women are only half anesthetized, of infections and bleeding that continues for days afterwards, sometimes resulting in sterility.
After a while I didn't even feel sorry for the Russians anymore. I felt sad, but sad that maybe they want the difficulties they face in their daily lives; that maybe given the chance they wouldn't create it any other way; that they had themselves created place where, in a lifetime, the average Soviet woman will undergo four or more abortions as their preferred method of birth control.
The confusion started to break Andre down, but he didn't give up. He said he sent Acia notes telling her that they could have something great if they could just dealt with each other honestly; that she didn't need to put on an act of being a "Goddess"; that whatever they wanted they could just talk out. And though I don't think he was, she said he was always scolding her and he just didn't understand.
When winter break came, she told him she wouldn't see him for three months, and asked him to write.
Several days after she had gone, he was in such a state of confusion and depression that he couldn't stand it, and I didn't want to listen anymore.
He thought she loved him and he couldn't understand why she was toying with him. He didn't understand her Swiss lover in the city. He didn't understand what was happening with her ex-husband. He didn't understand why she was treating him so coldly. And of course, he was madly in love with her and apparently out of his mind.
He had to find a way to get to Siberia.
I had no doubt that he would, and he did. Though he broke Soviet law to do it
Just to leave a city, a foreigner needs either an internal visa; requiring paying a $100/night hotel fee, or a letter of invite from a Soviet. Of course he didn't have an invite. Even for Soviets there are internal restrictions -- not for travel but for places of residence, which are restricted by passport. Soviet society is still feudal.
By plane and train he said it was a 50 hour trip, and one night he spent sleeping in a bus station. In a major airport, he shook what he thought was a KGB agent following him.
He arrived at Acia's home at mid-day. And he said that when he saw her, her face was completely white. Her daughter was playing on a bare wooden floor and looked up at him and cried. Her mother, a fat peasant woman, told Acia he was poorly raised and ill mannered.
He said he was even more confused than before. He didn't know where he was, hours from civilization, in the cold and the ice and mud.
Acia told him that she thought he might be crazy enough to come, but that he had to leave immediately, that it was not her house; that she was making up with her husband who would soon arrive and that she could not have them both in her parents' house at once. She said that his feelings mustn't be hurt, that she would explain everything when she was back in Leningrad, two months later. She gave him some potatoes and a couple of pieces of meat and some dried bread, and walked him to the door. She put written instructions on what buses to take to the train and how not to be cheated on the price. She didn't hold his hand.
He arrived back in Leningrad several days later and it took a while for me to get the story. He had been turned into a babbling idiot.
I felt sorry for him when I realized what had happened -- or at least when I thought I understood about Soviet marriages.
"Of course she went back to her husband," a neighbor, a divorced woman with a sixteen year old daughter explained to me. "She must go back. Even if he hits her, even if there is no love. She must go back to live with him for the sake of her daughter, for the sake of her job, for the sake of everything.
She can't go back to her parents as a divorced woman with a child on the farm. No one will marry a woman with a child; not in the city and certainly not back in the country. And the country is where she'll go unless she can get a permit to live in Leningrad; not likely unless she's married to someone who has residence status there or has high level connections.
She has to go back to her husband and do what he tells her; submit to anything. And now he will never let her out of his sight. She can never even look at another man."
Already Acia had a view of herself as bad, Andre said, and of having broken the rules. Maybe she felt that now she had to pay up.
The neighbors in her communal apartment, where she shared a kitchen and a bedroom, said that she was a "bad" woman because she had kicked out her husband, (and probably, I thought, because her Swiss boyfriend had visited her there). And by law, that was where her husband was assigned to live. You can't just "move out" without having to inconvenience someone else. There isn't any place to go.
Other women told me similar stories - how the neighbors would question the character of a divorced mother, how her morality would be questioned in her job file, how men would try to force themselves on a divorced woman and how there was little protection.
Acia said she was a bad woman -- that she lied to her parents. She couldn't say she was divorced because they might disown her and not help her raise her daughter (her daughter was with Acia's parents in Siberia where there was poverty, but where there were at least fruits and vegetables and fewer heavy metals in the water and toxins in the air). If she were forced to raise her daughter alone in Leningrad, she would probably have to drop out of school and would befall some misfortune.
One of the most brilliant chemists in the city, who had been offered jobs all over the world, told me about some of those misfortunes. At 20, she realized that her first husband had married her just to boost his career (her father was the head of an enterprise) and when he had what he needed, he left her alone with a young son. There was no way she could work and care for her son. There are no conveniences or day care, few labor saving devices. The Soviet Union is a land of shortages and lines. She was forced to sell all of the valuables she had fortunately inherited.
A high party official caught sight of her and demanded that she sleep with him. Although she said that most Russian woman would have, thinking nothing of it, she refused. In a short time, she had not only lost her job, but he was threatening to take her residence permit to the city away. Without that, there was nowhere in the country she could legally live.
She took the only other option available to her. She found an equally powerful, aging man, and she married him, quickly, for protection.
Other single woman from outside the city, with no one to protect them, told me similar stories. They told stories of officials in the student dormitories demanding sexual favors for lodging in the rooms that still have heat; and of officials seeking sex in exchange for the chance to go overseas on exchange programs with foreign universities which they still do not publicize. "A woman here without family is defenseless," a 21 year old woman friend told me.
Even in marriage, with a man she first admired because he was unlike the other men she knew -- brighter, and more gentle she thought, and aloof -- Acia had suffered. Her husband had hit her, she said, and she would never live again with a man who could strike a woman. They had a bitter quarrel soon before she gave birth, probably over her decision to bear his child, and she took the long train ride home to Siberia and was in labor as soon as she got off the train. She almost died in childbirth and her husband wasn't there.
She told Andre she would never marry again, because all that Russian men wanted were play-things who would cook and clean and raise children and never have a life of their own. She said that marriage was stifling.
And I realized that what I had walked into was not just a love story, but a tragedy; and an all too common one that is repeated over and over again in the Soviet Union.
Once I even heard the suffering from Acia herself, in a sort of cry that paralyzed me. I still can't shake the pain in her voice in response to something insignificant I said one day when I saw her on the street. "Nobody cares about me. I'm just a girl from the farm."
VIII
Enough was enough. But not for Andre. He couldn't believe she went back to her husband. He tried to justify it to himself by saying that she must have really loved her husband and that she really wanted to try to make it work again and thought she could. He said that she wasn't the type of woman to give up and settle for something she didn't believe in, to live with a man who would beat her.
He tried not to think that she had just been using her Western boyfriend, and maybe was going to use him, just to try to hurt her husband and force him to come back to her on her terms.
It was sad to watch. Sadder still was to watch it work its way into Andre.
As winter turned into spring, he began to crumple. He was turning frail and wispy, graying fast, though there was nothing physically wrong with him.
He said that Acia was suffering and that he was suffering with her. He said that there already was a part of her inside him. He said that he didn't know why, but that he couldn't forget her; that he was connected to her in a way that he couldn't untangle.
It was pathetic in the way that other people's failed romances often are, and how they would cling to them in self destructive ways, how they could just be obtuse. But what seemed even stranger was that even I found myself getting caught up in it. Despite the seeming irrationality of it all, I wanted to believe in it, too.
I wanted to believe there was something there when Andre said that his sisters would turn into Acia in his dreams. And when Andre came back from Siberia, and received a letter from his mother, telling him that they had once had ancestors along the Lena, that his family had emigrated down into Indochina and had made it to France during colonial rule, I wanted to believe that there was something unexplainably the same about them.
In a way, they both were people struggling in places where their values didn't fit, that their values weren't that different, and the societies they were in were also very much the same in an odd sort of way.
Perhaps the two of them were part of an approach to the world that was being wiped out in process that was silently destroying the ability of people to feel and to be themselves. Perhaps they were both fighting for survival of a cultural tradition and approach they shared in common that was now endangered; and that it was worth saving.
I liked his belief that their fates were interconnected, that he said he was going to find a way to get her over her pain; and that since they believed in the same things it didn't matter if she were victorious here or if he were victorious in France with his ideas, because their lives represented the same thing. I admired his belief in himself and in something and someone apart from himself.
I liked the romantic ideal of his letters telling her to be herself and that everything about her was good. Along with one of the letters, he said he gave her a mirror and told her to see herself as he could see, how wonderful and beautiful she was.
And I started to let myself feel some of the pain that he felt from the pain she gave him. He bought her a flower and she accepted it in mockery, as]king if it were a trick. He told her he loved her like he had never loved anyone, and she came to his room and asked him what he "wanted" from her, and told him she wasn't a prostitute.
I wondered what would happen; what happens to lifelong idealists when reality hits ideals too piercingly. Do they just reshape the perception of reality; or do they take anger and pain and turn it to others in a never ending cycle of hostility, as maybe Acia had once, against herself and against those around her? Where would it end? And who would break that cycle?
I didn't know. But somehow, a part of me really wanted to believe. Maybe Andre was right. Maybe he was the one who could turn fear and hate and confusion into love -- by caring enough; by not giving up.
Andre said that with Acia, he had to believe he was right, because if he gave up on her, she would have no one.
She was young and in between two worlds and being constantly told what women were told about their place in Russia; and having to learn to hide and deny and be dishonest in their relations and cheat, because that was the response that made them "grown up" there.
He said her coldness wasn't directed at him personally, and that he knew she was reaching out to him for his help, that she was sending him subtle signals that she knew he would detect, telling him not to go away; even if they were signals she could deny. If there was anything selfish in her behavior it was because she wanted to help her daughter, and he could never begrudge her that.
He told me what he knew was happening in her marriage -- that Acia didn't have to tell her anything herself; that he knew just by looking at her.
He could feel her suffering and that something evil was happening to her on the inside because it was so visible on the outside. She was losing weight and starting to wrinkle, and all of the luster had gone out of her face, while her husband, a graduating law student, was looking fine.
He said she was being emotionally blackmailed to go back; that she was a woman who made men afraid because she was too smart and independent; and that because of it, her husband was trying to destroy her even though he said he loved her. "When they met," he explained, "she was a naive farm girl and he was older. Now it's three years later and she knows what she doesn't know then. He realizes that she's as smart or smarter than he is. He can't deal with it.
"He probably blames her for her pregnancy. He blames her for kicking him out of their apartment. He's found a way to play on her feelings of guilt about her affair and her feelings about herself.
"He says he loves her but it's a lie. You don't love a beautiful and smart woman and turn her into garbage."
For me, it was still just taking on the tone of someone else's story until one day when I saw an emaciated Acia on the street with a tall handsome Russian leading her around like a dog on a leash.
IX
I didn't know what motivated Andre to intervene, exactly, except that I think he had had about enough. Saying it wasn't his business to interfere in her life wasn't an excuse that was going to work anymore.
I think he realized that what was happening to her was not exactly unlike what was happening to him in France -- that his troubles were because he made people afraid. There was nothing wrong with him, and the reasons why he didn't fit weren't his fault; but there wasn't anybody there to push him or to give him a mirror.
And so, one day it just poured out of him. She asked him for his help in translating something from French. She told him that she had had a marriage proposal from a classmate of hers from near where she lived in Siberia, and that she only wanted to talk to him about the translation and wouldn't even talk to him about his feelings. And then she said she had to go to catch up with her husband.
He stopped her and made her husband stand and wait. He told her she would probably tell him to go to hell; that she could reject him, but that he wasn't going to stand by and watch a great person destroy herself. He said that the way she had been going the past few weeks. she might as well have disappeared to Finland.
He said he didn't want to hear any more excuses, of her being "foolish like all women" and not the same as he was, and that she had no future and nothing to believe in, excuses that she knew they weren't true. He told her that she had to go back to her writing; that she had to be a hero for her daughter if not for anyone else. He told her there was a fire raging inside of her like in no one else, and that she had everything anyone could ever hope to have; and that if no one else believed in her, he did.
He said that he was going to torment her to make something of herself, whether or not anyone else cared. He said he was not going to let her throw herself away and stand by while she hurt herself.
When she started to tell him that the fire in her had long since burned out; that nothing was left except her obligations; that there was nothing left for her in life bur emptiness and her need to accept it, he stopped her and told her to wake up. He told her to listen to what was inside of her and to believe it an to follow it as far as it would take her.
She looked at him for a long time. And she told her husband to wait. And then she squeezed his hand and said, "Thank you."
X
It went on like that for a long time.
In a way , it was the story of Andre's struggle to create hope as much as it was Acia's chance to find it.
I had always thought that hope was something you had to be born with; that it was one of those things in life that you could only lose, and the question was whether it would be all at once or little by little.
But for Andre it was something that you could lose and find again. And if you gave it, it was something that might come back when you needed it. And he said that for him, just knowing that there was an Acia in the world gave him hope. Someday when he needed something to believe in again, she would be there.
He was going to take away all of her excuses for not being what she could be, and that if she were going to reject herself, she would have to take responsibility for it herself and not put the blame anywhere else.
When she said she had no contacts and no resources, he gave her an envelope with 500 rubles (twice the average monthly salary) as an investment in her future and asked that she pay him back only with the equivalent of what it was to him (a day's pay), by spending a day writing or drawing something beautiful , with her heart in it, that would give him inspiration.
She refused.
That's how it went on until May, when he got a note from her telling him to meet her at a specified time and place.
They met along the bank of the Neva and he said it was so pitiful looking at her that he didn't know how to react. She had lost 15 pounds. Her hair was stringy. Her skin was course and wrinkling. Her breasts had evaporated. Her eyes were red. Her lips were cracked. And she sat looking into the river and pulling at the hairs on her legs poking through her tights.
XI
Since December, she believed she would be dead in a matter of months.
Her husband said he was dying of AIDS and that they would be dying together.
She took the first train she could from Siberia in January to see him, back in the rat infested student dorm for non-Leningraders where they had once both lived, in single rooms of four and five people with a little space between them. It was where they had lived before they had moved to married housing, and where she had conceived.
Five days later when she arrived in the city, she couldn't find him, and she took the train all the way back home again.
For a long time she really wanted to trust him and believe that her husband really did love her, and would treat her as an equal and that things would be good between them.
When she had enough courage, she went for an AIDS test. And it showed she did not have AIDS. She confronted her husband. And he laughed.
I've heard that laughter of Russian men many times before, from them directly, and in echoes in the pathetic stories of my women friends. One 21 year old woman from Moscow was in tears when she told me how her boyfriend laughed about the two women whom he had impregnated and who had to risk Soviet abortions because of him. She was about to tell him that she had been the third.
Acia's husband laughed because when he had been writing her letters and telling her he had AIDS and inducing her back to the city, he was in a friend's dorm room, sleeping with women he had picked up on the streets. He had bribed the day watchman not to let Acia in.
For the previous several weeks when they had been back together, he told her she was a prostitute who had cheated on him with her Swiss boyfriend. Suddenly she realized what a double standard was and told him she would never believe him again.
She went to sleep crying and she woke up screaming. He raped her in her sleep.
XII
When Andre told me, I understood what it meant when she said her husband had "hit her" the first time when she left him and I didn't want to think about it or about the Russians anymore. I was sickened. And the sad thing is, I somehow wanted to blame her for it in part, too, particularly after seeing the pain she had given Andre. I wondered if Acia and her lawyer husband, soon to be a police investigator, didn't deserve each other.
I didn't understand why Acia just wasn't honest with Andre, and why she believed her husband for so long.
I wondered if there wasn't just an evil cloud over the city; a cloud the Russians themselves said went back to the founding of the city when thousands of workers perished in the bogs building palaces. It was a city of tormented history -- of the brutality of the tsars, the bloodshed of the revolution and of years of purges, and of the horrors of the German's siege of the city during the war, in which the few survivors included cannibals and thieves.
I wondered if the hatred and deception didn't just feed into itself, and if in her dealings with Andre and with her husband and perhaps with other men, if Acia weren't just one of the same, and if she wouldn't drag Andre down into it with her.
XIII
Andre didn't know where she lived with her husband because he had never been invited, and that going to see her uninvited in Siberia was already enough. But after she kicked her husband out again, he found out where she lived, and he went, and brought her some vitamins and some foods that he knew she wouldn't buy for herself. He sensed that there was a lot that he still didn't know and wasn't sure if he wanted to know, but he also knew that he should help her.
Acia was happy to see him.
They met twice more before she left for home for the summer. He took her to the train station and asked if he could see her and her daughter over the summer and she said no.
He didn't know if he would see her again, because he was off to the Sorbonne in the fall. He had written there of his work in Leningrad and they had invited him, and he would go back and try to make his career. But he couldn't leave the country without knowing that he would see Acia again, at least at the beginning of the fall term, and still stay in touch after that. I didn't know how they would manage it or where they would live, and he never said it in those words, but I was sure he wanted to marry her, and he would never give up until he heard it from her.
At the train, he said he asked Acia if he could kiss her, and again she said no.
He held her hands and looked at her and told her he loved her and would miss her. Before the train began to roll out of the platform, she looked out into space and told him a story; a story of life as a peasant girl trying to survive in the city in the Russia of perestroika, and why she no longer believed, and why for her and for other women, there was no revolution, no perestroika, and probably never would be change.
XIV
It is a story about castles and palaces and princes and feudalism without the golden carriages and the glass slippers and balls, and without the happy endings. Feudalism in modern times.
In Moscow and Leningrad they have huge industrial combines and great scientists and renowned universities with tests and admissions exams and applications, but that isn't how it works.
People pay thousands of rubles to get into universities or use contacts and position. The process is a process of powerful men trading favors.
If you are a girl from the countryside, you need to find a prince -- either a local boss in your region who has an interest in helping you, or a prince in the city who can say that there will be a position for you in his organization after you graduate, and that it's okay just to let you take the admissions exam before you even come up against the network of favors and bribes.
She started with a story about Moscow. She said that after Sverdlovsk she had gone to Moscow on her own without telling anyone. She said at first she had wanted to be a diplomat and not a journalist, and that she went to apply to the one school in the country for diplomats, but they laughed at her.
They laughed at her for believing that the process was fair; for believing that you could just come to Moscow as a woman from the country, without any family connections or money for bribes and believe that you could enter the diplomat school. They laughed at her because she didn't know.
And the prince whom she thought had rescued her, who had invited her to come to Moscow, while she tried to take the entrance exams -- he turned out not to be a prince.
When bad things happened to her, there was no one she could talk to about it because she had lied to her family about where she was going, because she took risks that she shouldn't have taken, because she was a woman and had broken the rules and realized how mistakenly trusting she was. And she blamed the bad things that happened on herself and kept it to herself. And she took the long train ride home.
A year later she came to Leningrad to apply for admission to the journalism faculty.
Now she understood slightly better how the process worked. She found a more powerful prince this time, a married journalist friend she had met in Siberia. He brought her to the city, got approval for her to take the exams, got friends to write letters on her behalf. And on her own, she met some Siberians who also had contacts, who were able to find a way to throw her some extra points on her exams, to help compensate for her miserable education on the farm.
But the way the admissions process works, through oral exams, she had to stay in the city for a while on her own in order to go through the application process. Even with a "prince" to protect her, being alone in a feudal city was not enough.
There was a military officer who knew she was there, an acquaintance of her journalist friend, and he devised an elaborate scheme to blackmail her, complete with telegrams and stories about how he was going to ruin her in the city and have her acceptance to the University revoked, and send her back to Siberia.
The price was her body.
He raped her, and she was helpless.
She knew no one would believe her story against that of an officer's. In the military courts, the judges would be men. There was no place she could go, no one to talk to. There was nothing she could do except keep silent and learn to trust no one.
Most of all, then, she wanted someone to trust, to tell her that she was all right, that she deserved to be there among the children of the privileged with their "clean socks and white slippers. "
She hoped that one of her teachers would believe in her and encourage her. She went often to talk with him; a married man with ideals. He was a reformer and it was in the early days of perestroika when some people still believed in the reforms, and thought they might be more than just an unleashing of unbridled self interest.
She brought him some soup one week when he was sick.
And when he was well, they took a room in a flea-bag hotel one afternoon, where, she found out later, the prostitutes in the city worked.
She told Andre it was about the most disgusting she ever felt in her whole life and that she still has nightmares about it. She says the teacher isn't a reformer anymore. She says the system has crushed what was left of him to crush.
Maybe there were others -- people on whom to take out anger, to play off of each other; men whom she could conquer and withhold herself. It's the kind of game you play when you are powerless, where the only type of equality is to find some way to treat others the way they would treat you. When you lose faith in a place where there is no faith, there is no end, unless maybe you find someone who might care.
When she met her husband she thought her pain would be over. But in their first quarrel, he told her she was a prostitute. The marriage dissolved.
"What did you tell her after she told you all that?" I asked Andre.
"She told me that she made a mistake in life; that she believed in people. I told her that when she met me, it wasn't a mistake. I told her I was going to be good to her. And I told her I believed in her. I told her not to be mad that I asked to kiss her, that she has a good friend in me, and that whatever way she wants me to help her, I will."
He wrote her a torrent of letters all summer -- passionate letters, letters of advice, funny letters to her daughter, letters she said she answered sparingly because they sometimes arrived opened if they did arrive.
They say the KGB is still in place, collecting information as it has before, waiting for perestroika to end, or waiting for their services to be used by the new economic elite of the market economy.
She said she was afraid.
One of his letters to her he read to me; one of the funny stories he was writing to fill a book for her daughter, the most important person and source of hope in her life.
There are lots of things about being a woman that a man can never really know, but probably having a child, even at a young age and with all of the burdens it created for her, was the only thing in Soviet society that gave her any sense of worth and dignity, sign of being an adult, of being a woman. And probably, in the big city, it was the only control she had over anything in her life.
When I heard the story he wrote to her daughter --understanding what he was trying to teach her about love; something she knew but had forgotten; something that had been taken away from her -- and the passion and humor and wisdom in what he wrote, given his own feelings of rejection, I think I saw who he was, and who Acia was, and what was happening in their little story in Russia.
I went from thinking Andre a little naive and lost in delusions, to seeing someone warm and compassionate and strong. And I stopped being as cynical as I had been.
After he read me the letter, he said he was going to continue to take as long as it took to take her pain into himself; to bear it and absorb it and to turn it back as understanding and inspiration and courage and hope.
He said that the self punishment, the internalized guilt, the hopelessness, the loss of belief, the search for escape and excuses -- that these were all the result of her trying to be herself, to rise in a society where there wasn't anyone like her.
He said that he was going to fight for her right to be different; for theirs, for her daughter's and for anyone else's.
He said that if she didn't win, then nobody could win; that he was not going to win for her but that he was going to give her the confidence, the encouragement, the skills, the wisdom to make her strong so that she could win for herself. He said she had in her all the potential she needed. She had just forgotten about it.
I felt ashamed after hearing the letter to her daughter and hearing him speak. And I felt inspired, too; and something I hadn't felt for a long time -- a sense of hope.
That wasn't the end of the story, of her story, or of their story. There was more. And maybe more still, but I didn't want to ask. I already knew enough about Russia. And I had stories of my own to puzzle over.
It was about how she got into the journalism faculty, and it was obviously the hardest for her because she hid it until last. I squeezed it out of Andre because he didn't want to tell it.
It was about her friend, the journalist, a man twice her age, whom she had met in Siberia, who had come from Leningrad to write about a case of diamond thefts and smuggling that the party wanted prosecuted.
He had come to her rescue and paved the way for her career in the city. But he wasn't much of a prince, either.
While she came to the city for his help, he told her she was a Goddess and that he loved her. He was there for her to help her to get into the University; something she couldn't do on her own in Soviet society. And she knew no one else in the city, and she looked up to him and saw the powers that a young woman could have over an older man. And she made love to him.
And I don't know why, but when Andre told me the story, I thought of Turgenev's Zenaida, though I'm not even sure it makes sense. She thought that "giving herself was a sweet thing to do".
I think Acia realized, then, both her dependence on men and their weakness, and how she got tangled up in something she never foresaw.
He said he loved her and wanted to marry her. He said he couldn't concentrate on his work. He wanted to give up on his family. He wanted to leave his wife and his children for her, and she didn't understand.
She didn't understand that what might start out good would lead to pain. She didn't dislike his wife or his children. She loved his little daughter, little Acia. And now she saw that this man she respected was going to throw away little Acia, his daughter, to be with her.
She didn't understand why she had to cheat to get into the university and why there was no other way.
She didn't understand a society where the adults had failed her; where there were no heroes and no role models; where suddenly she had to tell a man twice her age what his responsibilities were.
She didn't understand later why he had said he loved her, but had never taught her about her body. He did all of the planning for her. Women weren't supposed to think about it, and she didn't have to.
When she was impregnated by her husband, she really didn't know how to protect herself, because men always told her they would take care of it.
And when she was raped by the journalist's acquaintance, she never had the chance to feel whole again. It was also something her journalist friend took care of. He told her he used his connections to "destroy" the officer, though she never knew how. He never would tell her exactly what he had done to bring her justice.
They all failed her -- the reformers, the adults, the people coming from the West. From one generation to the next.
What difference had the revolution made? What difference had perestroika made?
The admissions procedures to the university hadn't changed.
Perhaps the anger, rage, violence that men acquired in the military would lessen some now that University students no longer have to serve, but the process will be slow.
And now, now that the economy is collapsing, there is a new source of anger, and greater burdens on men and women.
The generations are reproducing themselves again; her husband perhaps turning out no different from the military officer who raped her.
What of perestroika, of opening to the West? Her Swiss lover treated her better, had more money to spend on her. But he left her with new problems.
There was Andre.
But how many Andres are there?
XV
A week ago I got a letter from the Sorbonne.
It was from Andre. Acia had written to him there.
She wanted to try to go there for a year.
But the letter was bittersweet. She told him that she understood him now, and that she was eternally grateful. He had found a part of her that she always knew was there, and he had awakened it. She said she had cried for how much she had hurt him and for not believing in him, and she wrote him a poem.
She cried about where to go, and whether she would always be alone, and whether she would be like the Russian exiles who had found there way to 19th century France and who could never really find a home.
She wrote that she was going gray and wrinkling. She said she was no longer a Goddess, but just a person, and that she hoped she could be a good one.
She said that she was writing again -- working on a novel and some articles and short stories. And that sometimes she goes out to the river and draws. And she's working on her French and writing advice to her little brother and to her protégés -- young teenage women she's met who were alone, and need someone to encourage them.
She said she loved him in a way that she didn't understand; that he was the only man who ever understood her and cared enough; that they needed each other in their auras in order to shine.
She signed the letter with a kiss. The last I heard, she was trying to go see Andre, but now there were new barriers; barriers just like the others but under a different name.
She tried to go see him in France, but she couldn't . Poor, divorced women from peasant families and university degrees that aren't in science and technology, and without protectors in high places, don't get visas to the First World. She realized that she was being denied a visa to the Western democracies for the very same reason that she had been raped in Russia.
I worry about them sometimes and about whether what both of them stand for in the world will survive; and whether they will both be alone in their countries, or whether they'll ever be together, and where, and how.
Sometimes I think of Acia running through the streets at night near Petergof, the Tsar's summer palace, with a look of terror in her eyes and a knife clutched in her fist in one hand and a can of imported mace in the other.
I think about the stories she told Andre and about her fear now of living alone in a dormitory she says is run by an organized crime network of men who frighten her, in a country overwhelmed by sloth and indifference and underlying pain.
Sometimes I think, if she survives it all, maybe some day they'll be together, and maybe she'll even win that Nobel Prize, even before Andre.
And maybe together, they'll discover something about love and passion and the human soul -- something that's disappeared from Russia and from lots of other places that maybe they can help bring back again.
Acknowledgments
Field research for this study was conducted as part of an exchange between the University of California and Leningrad (St. Petersburg) State University. This paper was written while I was a Visiting Scholar on a Bradley Fellowship at the Harvard University Russian Research Center and as a Research Associate at the Harvard University Ukrainian Research Institute
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