Student Dormitory
In the evening, willy-nilly, you must return to your dormitory. On a question, where are you going, you never say- home; you say- dorm. It was unpleasant living in that dorm, although very cheap. Four adults in one room. Four single beds, two along one wall, their backs touching each other, and two others along the other wall. Small bedside stands were placed next to beds. In the middle, a table with four chairs for eating or studying. Each of us had one narrow locker for our clothes, shoes, and coats (nobody locked them). We had a storage room in the building’s attic, so all that we didn’t need for a season, we kept there in our suitcases. I suppose my suitcase is still there, along with a massive tome of Pushkin (my father's gift to my mother) and my pink chiffon dress.
It was a new four-story building; half of each story was for girls and another half -for boys. We could see each other in the reading room, the two small kitchens on every floor, or the cafeteria, which was open for breakfast and supper. On Saturdays or Sundays, we had the dances, but I was very seldom there; I didn’t want to wait for a boy to favor me for a dance. The Commandant, our building authority, occupied the two rooms on the second floor with his family; his wife used the communal kitchen for cooking. A linen keeper was given one room for living, and in another room, she kept the mountains of clean bed linen. We changed our bed linen on a schedule every ten days.
To enter the dormitory, we had to show our passes to a watchwoman (always a woman), and our dormitory was closed for the night from 12 p.m. to 6 a.m. We also had a student council to address problems that arose in communal living.
You can add a significant proportion of students from various communist countries, the GDR, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, China, Cuba, and several African countries. Our four-story building was a vast and noisy swarm of bees. But bees don’t need privacy; each one of six hundred or more students suffered without it. (I think this dormitory building is still there, on Vasilevskiy Island, Shevchenko Street, and the conditions are just the same.)
I was a sybarite, if you could call a person living in this dismal world. I usually woke up late when everybody had already left for university. I loved to loll in bed, alone in the room. I loved slow mornings- making a strong coffee for myself in the empty kitchen and enjoying it with my first cigarette.
If I couldn’t miss my practical classes, like Latin or Old Slavonic, I had to participate in the terrible collective haste of the morning ablution. First, you have to find some comfortable, soft piece of paper (Russians didn’t produce toilet paper at the time) for using a toilet, usually newspaper, but without the leaders’ portraits; then to collect or grab the toilet accessories and run to the end of the corridor to the washroom before the Germans girls. After them, you would be entering the deluge on the floor of a room because, for them, morning ablution was a sacred matter: naked, they washed rigorously with soft, soapy mittens (we saw this kind of mittens for the first time), in the cold water, in the cold winter washroom. They did not care for the rest of us, as Madam de Pompadour for the French people: “After us, the deluge.” The hot water and shower rooms were installed much later in the 60s. Before that, we went to the city’s bathhouses once a week.
I moved to the dormitory three months after the start of the semester. First, I rented a corner room in a communal apartment, but didn’t like the premises. So, when I asked for a room in our faculty’s dormitory, I was given a room on the first floor with three girls from different language departments. One of them – Galia, from the Russian Dept., Sonia, from German, and Lilia, a girl from my city, Voronezh, from the Greek Dept. None of us, living together, became friends. I don’t remember why, but the atmosphere in our room was cold and indifferent despite Galia’s wide, radiant smile. Russians smile rather seldom and only among friends. Galia always smiled at anybody who paid little attention or looked at her. But even her smile couldn’t break our indifference to each other. Voronezh's Lilia was a diligent and studious student, although her school boyfriend, Sasha, was not as studious, but on the other hand, a worldly guy. Somehow, they didn’t impress me.
A “lyrical” digression about Lilia’s boyfriend, Sasha.
Sasha K. and Lilia S. – everything in their lives was already predetermined when I met them at university: from their school days in Voronezh through the Leningrad University, Greek Department, back to Voronezh University, where they, as planned, had made their teaching careers. Such a rare union of the same inclination of minds to Ancient Greek, the scientific carrier and teaching at the Voronezh University, and being married, all life stages were decided at 18! And they accomplished everything: Sasha became the Head of the Department of Ancient Languages at Voronezh University, and Lilia – a full professor in this department. Later, even their daughter taught in the same Department and defended her Ph.D.
I knew Sasha better than Lilia, mainly through familiar friends. At a glance, they were a wonderful couple, especially at the beginning of the term, when everybody was a stranger to one another. They were always together from morning to evening, including the other three students in their Greek study group. (For some foreign languages, the University accepted only five students – four boys and one girl). Lilia, being so studious, devoted her life only to studying. But not – Sasha. Their ‘Siamese twins’ existence ended one day, but they still stayed together. Sasha found a new girlfriend, or she found him. Their liaison continued for several years; she became pregnant and had an abortion, and Lilia, having known everything, closed her eyes to Sasha's disgusting relations with both of them. Fortunately for Lena (the other girl), a young British man fell in love with her one day while teaching English at our Faculty. When Lena began her relations with this young man, Sasha was very upset. And when a foreigner offered “his hand and heart,” as we say in Russian of the marriage proposal, to Lena, Sasha implored her not to accept it because he didn’t want to lose her, but he didn’t want to lose Lilia either.
Lena accepted the marriage proposal. Both fiancé and bride were happy, but the University Foreign Department of the KGB was not. Before that, we had not even suspected their existence at our university. Marriage to a foreigner has been prohibited in the USSR since 1946. It was a law. However, it was the year of the Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. What luck out for the enamored young couple! They sent a letter to Congress, asking for permission for their marriage. How could Congress refuse when many foreign Communist guests came to Congress? Approval for the marriage of an English man to a young Russian woman has been granted. Instead, the KGB demanded a list of guests for their wedding, and some of them were excluded, like Maya, a close friend of Lena's (and mine). Why? It might be because she was Jewish. Although Lena was Jewish on her mother’s side, she was officially listed as Russian in her passport, due to her Russian father. Lena happily (I hope) lives in England. After finishing Postgraduate School, Sasha returned to Voronezh and married Lilia; they made their university careers and lived happily ever after. I am, actually, not sure about it.
My relationship with Sasha became utterly unpleasant when, one time, I asked him to bring a lump of my stepfather’s favored Roquefort cheese to him when Sasha went on vacation to Voronezh. At that time, he was already at the Postgraduate School. He brought some homemade delicacies from my parents on his way back. It was late in the evening, his dormitory was one hour away by train from Leningrad, and I offered him a folding bed to spend the night in my rented room in the city. He accepted it, and I made a bed for him after our late tea with home delicacies. However, instead of going to his folding bed, he came to me offering sex. What a cretin! Why should I have sex with him? Poor Lilia!
But the next thing was much more serious. I worked at the time as a senior librarian at the library of the Institute of Physical Culture. The library had excellent funds because the famous scientist Peter Lesgaft bequeathed his library to the new Soviet institute at the beginning of the 1930s, if I remember correctly. We even had some old old books of Greek literature. And I bragged about it to Sasha, so he came to the library to look. And looking, he found what he needed, so I gave the book to him, checking it out in my name, and he, for nothing, appropriated this book (I don’t remember the author’s name).
Time passed, like ten years. I got married, our daughter was born, and we decided to leave Soviet Russia. It was 1980. Jews were allowed to leave the country, and my husband, being a Jew, joined Exodus. We got permission to go. The rule was to bring the official document to OVIR (Department of Visas) stating that you do not owe anything anywhere. And here was a Greek book I owed to the library for a long time. I didn’t work at that library for at least six years. A book was published in Greek. And Sasha had it, but how would I find Sasha? To call the Ancient Languages Department of Voronezh University? We didn’t even have a phone at our apartment. Anyway, the library director agreed to photocopy this book. Lucky for me, the State Public Library had one copy of this Ancient Greek author's work, and for half of my monthly salary, they photocopied it for my former library. I could leave this awful country! But all of it had happened twenty years later.
Still, in 1959, I was a student in my first year in the Russian department and had been living in an unfriendly dormitory room. On Sundays, if you have nowhere to go besides the bania, you spend the whole day at the dormitory. But it’s so dull, how can you stand it? So, you have to invent something to do- to get out of this mammoth, noisy, and closed (I don’t want to use the word “prison”) place. And if it's winter, the weather can be nasty; wet snow and cold wind would compel you to stay inside. But still, you need to eat, so you run to the store across from your building and buy a pack of pelmeni (ravioli). Then you go to the kitchen on your floor, find an empty dirty pot, wash it with disgust, and boil some water for pelmeni. It’s your dinner.
Pelmeni was the cheapest food for students, and I now dislike it since I ate so many of them during my student days. (My husband, who never lived in a student dormitory, loves pelmeni and now buys them from a Russian store named Gourmanoff. Could you believe it?) What a gourmand! And they are pretty expensive here.)
If you want to spoil yourself, make a cup of fresh, strong, black coffee and enjoy it with a cigarette. Students drink too much coffee, and I very quickly joined their ranks. The dormitory’s Reading room also helps out a lot. But the best time to go there is late evening and in the session (exam period) – nighttime, when the room is almost empty. Having to live in a dormitory, I understand I am a “Sova”- owl, not a “skylark.” And as a sybarite, if I can use this “aristocratic” symbol for such a miser life, again. When everybody ran to the washing room in the mornings, I loved to wallow in the poor iron dormitory bed, not opening my eyes, and continue my happy dreaming, slowly beginning my day with a cup of freshly brewed coffee and a cigarette. (I smoked a lot at university.) However, I could do it only on the mornings of lectures, such as History of the KPSS (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) or Folklore, which I could skip unpunished. That is, I continued my school truancy at the University. Without my mother watching me like a hawk, I felt free, independent, and sometimes even happy.
A great read!
This is excellent, as always.