The Russian Century

the handkerchief to him until years later and, of course, by then he had completely forgot it.

It was a long time, though, before I understood a handkerchief like this one was not so important to an American. Because of the terrible shortage of all kinds of consumer things in Russia, I felt a…a…how do you say it?…a awe, but really it was more than a awe, almost a reverence for American goods. The Russian government never considered worthwhile what the people like; it never spends the brain or the money for the bright, attractive things, just the absolute necessary things. It condemned as capitalistic tricks all the miracles of the five-and- ten.

So I admired extravagantly almost everything that Robert had; but one time I admired something that made a big joke. We were going on a picnic and he came with the dark glasses and it was the first time in my life I saw the dark glasses.

“Really, you can see through them?” I asked.

Robert got real proud of his country and said the technical technique in America is unbelievable. Take the glasses for an example. You can do anything with them. You can drop them on the floor, you can sit on them, and then be took the glasses and threw them down and they went into millions of pieces. That was the funniest thing as can be.

I wasn’t an exception, though, in loving everything from America. All the Russian people loved everything from abroad. The Russians’ favorite word is zagranichnyi—from abroad. I remember on the newspaper there was a messenger boy and he came up to me and ask me to do him the greatest favor. “Will you ask your American friend for the labels off his clothes? I want very much to have something zagranichnyi.”

So Robert cut the labels from his pajamas, his shirts, his BVDs, his hat, from everything possible—and brought them to me in an envelope, and the next day the messenger boy showed up all in labels on the outside. There came Macy suddenly on the back of the cap and Gloomingdale [sic] on the front of the shirt, but the funniest alliance, as I understand now, was the Brooks Brothers on the Russian tie.

Every time I went out with Robert, everybody sit and wait my appearance and greet me with, “So?” which means what I learn about America? Sometimes I had no time to learn anything—we were busy loving—and then at the end I’d say to Robert, “Please tell me something quick to tell about America.”

However, it was most difficult to find in Moscow a place for hugging and kissing. Robert was renting a room in one part of Moscow for a fabulous sum, but under a condition that he never bring a wife or somebody to live with him and, of course, I had no room of my own, and it was not permitted to go like to the Cherokee Park for loving, and we had no car for parking.

Nila Magidoff, Only to Travel! Only to Live!

217

Then I got a wonderful idea. We would go to the big station where trains come in every few minutes, and whenever a train came in we would rush into each other’s arms and kiss and kiss, and then wait for the next train. But one day the militia man came up to us and say, “You have met enough trains now. Go home!”

That was the one funny incident of our courting, for to tell you the truth it was the saddest romance one can imagine. Not because of me, but because of the circumstances. By this time I love Robert very dearly and he loves me; however, I thought his stay in Russia was almost over and if I married him I will never get permission to go out of the country. Robert will have to leave me and I know how hard that will be on him, especially if there is a child, for I understand by now how wonderfully kind and gentle he is.

So I explain him all this, but he argues he loves me so much he will fight until he gets me out. After I marry him he will register at the American embassy that I am his legal wife, not just his girl friend. I am his wife for good or for worse whom he want to take with him home.

I decided I must go out of Moscow and think it over. So I went out to a Government Home of Rest for newspaper people, musicians and artists and I ask Robert not to come there, but anyway he did. He came every day with a box of chocolates on the only train from Moscow that took three and a half hours to make the trip, spent fifty minutes with me on the station platform, and then went back on the only train returning to Moscow. I was certainly very much impressed.

Of course, I couldn’t ask him to spend the night in this Home of Rest because he was a foreigner. It would be the biggest scandal ever happen at this Home of Rest to have a foreigner inside of it. This fact helped me realize that our marriage will never work. I am so proud of him. Such an educated man he is and such new horizons he opened for me, but I will always be afraid to ask him in a Russian house or to ask him to meet my Russian friends. I will always be in terror that the militia will come and arrest me and then what will he do? So I say to Robert, no, and go back to Moscow.

Then in 1937 we start to hear about new arrests in Russia. Mostly they are arresting the wives of men who were counterrevolutionists; the men who had opposed the rise of Stalin. This struck terror to my heart for of course Karel [her executed husband] was one of these counterrevolutionists. For more than a year now he had been dead; but I felt sure his fight against Stalin was not forgotten.

How right I was! One day I came home and my landlady in real Russian fashion, like I’m already dead, clasps her hands in front of her and sways from side to side and says the militia man had been there. He had come with the summons for me to appear on a certain date at the regional headquarters.

218

Chapter Twenty-Two

I knew, of course, what it means. This was the new technique: instead of arresting you he just left the summons for you to go to the militia where you will be given the place of your exile. What a sadness I felt! I thought I am finished as a human being. I will never come back from the militia station.

I telephoned Robert and told him I must see him at once. When we meet he knows by my face what has happened and he at once begs me to marry him. “Your only chance is to marry me immediately,” he argues. “If it save you, wonderful. If not, you go to exile and I go to America.” By this time Robert had got his visa extended for six months and was writing free-lance stories for United States newspapers and magazines.

The next morning Robert took his passport and I took mine and we went to the marriage office. There were no flowers, no wedding dress, no nothing. Everything was frozen in me. I still didn’t know whether it was the right thing to do, but Robert kept saying, “Oh, darling, cheer up! We’re going to be married.”

Now they change the marriage office completely, but when Robert and I were married, there were only two windows there—one was for deaths and births and one was for marriages and divorces. The ceremony takes you ten minutes. “Passports,” the man say, and click, click, it’s finished. He fills in the names, the dates of birth, stamps the passports and gives you a certificate of marriage and that’s all. No witnesses needed. Nothing. We paid him three rubles and left. A marriage certificate is the cheapest thing you can buy in Russia.

Robert says, “Let’s drink champagne,” and so we went to the Cafe National the most fanciest, the most expensive cafe in Russia. It’s the only place you can order apple pie a la mode. And Robert say, “Now don’t argue; you are my wife now and we’re going to have champagne and little cakes.”

I had champagne and little cakes and I was throwing out all night. Happily for the bridegroom, he was not with me then. We had no place to be together. It was five months before we lived as man and wife and then we lived in one room that Gordon Kashin, an American correspondent, let us have in his three-room apartment.

But back to the summons from the militia. When the day came, Robert walked with me to the headquarters