Masha and Volodya arrived on an evening in the second week of September, in weather that had been warm during the day but was brushed with a strange dry cold when they came down off the bus. No one greeted them; no one spoke to them. A wind blew from the north down toward Mongolia and the Gobi Desert.
The hotel was a shabby one-story building. At the far end of its single corridor were two faucets, only one of which had a sink beneath it. The water from the other faucet ran directly onto the floor and through the semirotted boards to the ground below. The room they were given had two iron beds, a table, chairs; a lightbulb hung from the ceiling by a wire. There was electricity only in the morning and evening. The window was without curtains. Gazing out into the darkness, Masha felt she was on a planet burned to dead charcoal by a merciless sun. Five hundred thousand square miles of dull, unfruitful earth, and the Gobi Desert only a few hundred miles away. Still, people live here, she thought that first night. It is possible to survive here.
Volodya woke early to go to his job. They had brought with them a one-burner stove, on which Masha cooked their breakfast. Volodya worked unloading the grain trucks that arrived from the combines. At one point during the day the chairman of the kolkhoz said to him that he knew all about Zionism: The Zionists were evil people who wanted to conquer the world.
Toward the end of September, with the start of the very cold weather, Volodya was given a job as a stoker in the boiler room that heated the kolkhoz garage, in which were trucks and jeeps. There was no antifreeze on the kolkhoz, and frozen water lines could spell disaster for the vehicles. His salary was 120 to 140 rubles a month. He and Masha could not have survived on that, but assistance came from the special fund established by the refuseniks. The money that entered the fund through the sale of tape recorders, radios, cameras, and clothing left behind by overseas visitors was allotted to impoverished refusenik families whose wage earners had lost their jobs and could not find work, and to prisoners and the families of prisoners.
In October winter descended swiftly and cruelly upon the village. Volodya worked in the boiler room of the kolkhoz garage. His labors began at 8:00 A.M. Stripped to the waist in the blistering heat, he stoked the furnace for twenty-four hours and then had forty-eight hours free. He toiled week after week. Twenty-four hours of labor in that boiler room; forty-eight hours off.
In the beginning all the villagers appeared alike to Masha. But Volodya, who had spent his childhood in China, distinguished easily among the various Asian faces: Buryats, Tatars, Yakuts. He began to talk at length to Masha about his years in China. He had never done that before, talked to anyone about those years. Life in Peking and Mukden. His Chinese nanny. The day he and his sister saw the wildcat in the garden. His exile returned him in memory to the warmth and innocence of his beginnings.
At first there was no place where they could live other than in that wretched hotel, its heating system erratic, its walls pocked with holes, its toilets in the yard outside. It was a stop for truck drivers who hauled goods from Chita to Mongolia, which lay a few dozen miles to the south. An old Buryat woman would open the door for them at all hours of the day or night. She would give each a room with a bed, food, and a bottle of vodka, and they would drink until they dropped.
Masha grew fearful of remaining alone in the hotel. At times, when Volodya worked nights, drivers who had discovered there were exiles living in the hotel would yell drunkenly through the door, “Open up! Open the door!” and Masha would say, “Go away or I’ll call the police.”
One night a Buryat driver, drunk to near-unconsciousness, tore the door off its hinges and stood there, staring into the room, swaying. Masha said in a calm voice, “Why are you behaving so badly?” The driver, seeming to sober up a little at her composed, reprimanding tone, pulled himself up and said, “I wanted to open the door and look.” She said, “Well, you looked. Now you can go back to your room, or I’ll call the police.”
Volodya told the chairman of the kolkhoz that he and Masha could not go on living in the hotel. Why couldn’t they settle in nearby Aginskoye, only twenty miles away? But the KGB authorities didn’t want the Slepaks in Aginskoye and suggested to the kolkhoz chairman that he give them one of the apartments in the two-story brick building nearing completion in Tsokto-Khangil. The chairman of the kolkhoz called Volodya in and said, “I intended to give that apartment to the best worker in the kolkhoz, and instead I have to give it to an outlaw, to an anti-Soviet element.”
Volodya said, “You aren’t giving me that apartment. You were ordered to do so. Why are you complaining to me? If you don’t like it, you should complain to them.” And he left.
The apartment was one room in a two-story brick building near the dirt road and dry riverbed that ran to the west of the village. The room measured twenty feet by ten. There was a ten-by-seven kitchen and a bathroom, a toilet, a balcony. In the toilet and bathroom were sinks and a tub and a lavatory pan-entirely unusable because there was no running water in the village. From the window and balcony they had a clear view of the unpaved road to Mongolia and the riverbed and the steppes beyond, numbing with monotony, barren save for brownish, brittle, rain-starved grass, and empty of people. Wolves and foxes roamed about, and packs of wild dogs. In the farthest distance were hills, tall climbing mounds of gray rock, without trees, without vegetation.
The building had been constructed by a crew of Armenians from blueprints drawn up for apartment projects in the more moderate climate of Moldavia: hollow plywood doors, thin outer walls with no insulation against the cold. Because it was among the last to have been completed, the apartment was built of whatever pieces of lumber had been left. The result was a nightmarish dwelling: buckling, shabbily painted walls, ill-fitting doors, warped windows, cracks between the floor planks. Cold air blew in through the doors and windows, and the floor was difficult to walk on because of the uneven length and thickness of the boards.
Masha and Volodya began to transform the apartment. They repainted the walls, doors, and floors. With the planking of discarded packing crates, Volodya built shelves and a table for the kitchen. In a garbage dump he found a junked bed, which he brought to the apartment and repaired. He built bookshelves, shoe racks, benches, a sofa. He had brought tools with him from Moscow; the nails he found along the sides of the road that ran through the village. Once, out on the steppes, he came upon a new wrench. Often the Buryats, after repairing broken machinery or equipment, carelessly left the hardware behind. They didn’t care. None of it really belonged to them; it was all the property of the Communist state.
One night in early November it began to snow, tiny flakes thickly falling. The wind picked up the dust and sand of the steppes, mixed it with the snow, and pelted the village. In the dry air of the morning the snow vanished quickly, but the village stood pallid and dust-covered. Everywhere, sand-in one’s clothes, eyes, mouth, food. Toward the end of the month Masha and Volodya moved into the apartment.
In the evenings the uncovered windows seemed menacing black holes to Masha, and she bought fabric and made curtains. She and Volodya went to the department store and brought back cartons, which they laid out on the uneven planks of the floor and then covered with plastic; the floor was even now, and insulated. She stuffed rags into the hollows of the plywood doors, and when the frost deepened and the winds grew stronger, she bought the thick felt used by the Buryats for their yurtas-the tepeelike structures in which they lived during the periods they grazed sheep on the steppes-and hung it over the doors for further insulation.