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Interlude: Summertime
- Syracuse University Press
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118 INTERLUDE Summertime My f ir st yea r at Moscow Univer sit y ended not after the spring semester finals but two months later, at the beginning of August. After the first year, all students at the School of Soil Science were required to do a summer semester at a research and study facility in Chashnikovo, about thirty miles north of Moscow. Although considered a “small town” (selo) because it had a school (and had earlier had a church), it was really a village with geese ambling along the unpaved streets. Chashnikovo was right off the Leningrad Highway and getting there by car was easy. It was more complicated to get into or out of Chashnikovo by public transportation . City buses only circulated between Moscow and Zelenograd, the local district center; once in Zelenograd, you were left to your own devices. Rural buses, those prehistoric animals, ran irregularly. The most viable option was to stand on the curb of the Leningrad Highway, trying to hitch a ride with a trucker. Telephone cards (or any other plastic cards) were unheard of in what was then the Soviet Union, and students had telephone access on the Chashnikovo campus only in case of a dire emergency. Staying there for two months, we felt severed from civilization —that, despite Chashnikovo’s close proximity to Moscow. The living conditions on the summer campus were basic, although not as primitive as the ones I would encounter in a year’s time during a summer expedition to the south of Russia and the Caucasus. We were staying in rough-hewn unheated bunks with walls and floors made of unfinished wood painted green and maroon. Each bunk had about a dozen beds in it. Mosquito nets, a form of capitalist decadence, were missing on windows. There were two sheds with unlit and unventilated pit latrines, and a row In te rl ude: Summer ti me | 119 of faucets outside the sheds, where men and women performed their ablutions . There were no showers. The day started at 6:30 a.m. with cheerful songs thrusting out of a mounted loudspeaker. After breakfast we would line up for a military-style briefing. The campus refectory served food of average repulsiveness: clumpy cream of wheat and rainy tea for breakfast , and for lunch and dinner, some creative combination of depressedlooking cabbage soup, grayish village macaroni, pieces of fat in gravy over mashed potatoes, and compote, always compote, made from fresh apples or dried fruit. Vegetarians or those with other dietary restrictions would have had a rough time. Back then I was still eating pork, and the challenge was simply getting enough nutrition. (I can’t recall whether my Muslim classmates—and there were at least eight of them—also ate pork and I suspect they did.) We were young and eternally hungry, and we continued to practice the same old tricks many of us had learned in summer camp: stealing an extra dish for a “sick friend” or confusing the server, a local girl, with flirtatious urban chatter, so that she would lose count and hand the charmer an extra dish of Stroganoff to be split several ways. Upon arriving in Chashnikovo, we were divided into units of eight to ten students, and each unit was assigned a field instructor of botany. I will call our instructor Elena Olegovna Blinova. She was a self-effacing tortoise with tender eyes. Out of breath, she would arrive late in our classroom verandah, clutching notes and books to her expansive chest as though they were a baby. How old Blinova was—thirty-five, forty-five, fifty?— we didn’t know. It was rumored that her late husband was her former dissertation adviser at Moscow University, but such rumors often circulate around female academics with broken lives. Blinova’s unkempt hair was straw-gray, her skin sallow. She was a heavy smoker and sometimes bummed cigarettes from students. All of us became very fond of Blinova. She was incapable of malice. Despite her sloppiness, messy clothes, and chronic unpunctuality, she was a first-rate botanist with discoveries to her name, and also an exciting speaker. Of all my studies at the School of Soil Science, botany was easily among my three favorite subjects, in no small measure thanks to Blinova’s guided daily excursions to fields and forests. Plants were as godly to her as human beings. They were as alive as people, had souls. Plants were also characters in some endless play of...