from the news stall at the station. Probably, the editors in England were covering Polish events incorrectly.
3 rubles was not a sum to live in a grand style, but I still watched a historical action movie starring Karachentsev.
(…the ours, in general, can make 15 minutes of a movie quite watchable, but the rest may have been safely skipped…)
To the hotel Polar I went by the grandiose Moscow subway, aka metro. Since it was the daytime, the restaurant guests were some kind of excursionists because they all were sitting side by side in a row along the table assembled from smaller ones, and ate their havvage with their fur coats and overcoats on.
I asked a man in the waiter’s uniform garb to call waiter Nikolay but he only shrugged his shoulders. Then I demanded the head waiter, a tall woman came out in the same stripe-sleeved jacket.
"A year ago dining at your restaurant, I was 1 ruble short and promised the waiter to make up later. His name was Nikolay, he had a clever round face. Pass it to him, please." And I outstretched a ruble banknote, she silently accepted it…
Besides, I found another place to pass the time for free – the Central Library named after V. I. Lenin. You obtained a ticket there without any money if your passport was on you… That's a really grand place that Central Library after Lenin, yes, indeed, some crossbred of a theater and a metro station, the temple for book-worshipers, in short. Even the door was as tall as a church gate, and bore the inscription on its handle: "pull". And so I did. And behind the door, there was a big vestibule with a porthole in the blind wall, where they gave a free ticket if you had the passport, and then another door to the hall so very awesomely huge.
It turned out to be the cloakroom, yet adorned with white columns and the view to the distant stairs of milky white marble in the far end of the hall. And all around there swarmed the friendship of peoples from the whole of planet in full swing – all kinds of Burmese and Senegalese, yet the Whites also flashed thru. But it seemed to me as if the cloakroom was somehow, like, out of balance with the cloakroom attendants on the right side keeping a-trot between the hangers and the marble barrier, uploading bundles of coats, hither-thither, back and forth, yet the line to them never shortened, while the attendants on the left stood idle and beastly dying of ennui. I felt sorry for them as well as for the trotters, so I turned left and dumped my demi-saison coat upon the white marble barrier of the slackers.
The snooty footmen hardly paid any attention whatsoever, but then one of them looked down his nose at me and in a lordly manner deigned to explain – their half in the cloakroom was for academicians only. Some f-f..er..frightful mix of segregation and discrimination, as if my camel would graze fur off their coats! In short, I thanked the snob for the tip and walked over to the other side which was for mere mortals…
Before the stairs of milky white leading up into the height, there was a narrow gate that I hadn't made out from afar. They checked your ticket at that gate and gave more slips of paper, and only then let go up between a pair of militiamen, standing by so as to instill respect for order.
Up there, high above the cloakroom, stretched the galleries of endless ranks of catalogs in boxes which looked like automatic storage cells, only of wooden color, not metallic. I shuffled thru the cards wired in narrow drawers and found Freud, his lectures published in 1913 on the occasion of some of his jubilees, to commemorate it with the conjuncture publication of just 60 pages. I wrote out all the indexes and other marks of that booklet and went to the reading room to enjoy an hour of pleasure. Greetings!
The attendant scanned thru her glasses my application slip and squeaked up, like, she was calling for the militia when jumped by muggers: Freud?!!
Exactly, says I, I wanna see what the guy was about, be so kind, please.
That's when she rubbed my silly nose in. To have access to the mentioned book, says she, I had to be a PhD of relevant sciences, apart from being also a permanent resident in the Moscow city (the free ticket testified that I wasn't), and the last but not least, I had to produce a document asserting that gods of the Soviet scientific Olympus allowed me to open the book in question.
My jubilation ceased with a fizzle and in a state of a dejected calm, I climbed down the pasteurized stairs to collect my camel and go… I went out into the street, feeling, like, engulfed with the most profound calmness, as thick as bullet-proof glass; no desire to go anywhere, no wish to want any single thing.
Reaching as far as the underpass to the metro, I leaned my behind against the parapet and once again eyed the pompous building of the Central Library after Lenin. My mind was perfectly empty and somewhere in the background there echoed the lines from Shevchenko:
"… learn what is foreign, keep what is yours…"
Damn, folks! Where am I? The huge temple, the giant letters: Central Library Lenin. What was his ultimate goal? So that workers could read books! His famous bequeath had been drummed into our heads, dinned in the ears, rammed down the throat:
"Learn, learn, and learn!”
And, now what? 4 years before the Great October Revolution, in 1913, any worker could drop into a bookstore and buy those 60 pages of lectures, if so was his wish. After the victory of the mentioned revolution, in the Central Library after Lenin, they told me: "Fuck yourself! there's no book for you because you are a worker!"
Yet even screwed anew, I did not feel myself a
