VICTOR ZASLAVSKY
27
spets freedom took the form of Engels's "recognition of necessity."
Almost any book could be chosen, but it had to be registered in the
reader's personal selection sheet. It was easy to see that from time to
time the overseeing organization would peruse the books selected by
a given reader over a year or two and draw certain inferences about
his interests and progress in his studies.
If
the reader felt the need to
keep his interests to
himself~
great care had to be taken to conceal it.
The simplest tactic was to select as many books as possible , so that
the true choices were buried by the mountain of books registered as
ballast. But the method could backfire if a perusal of his choices led
the organization to draw spurious conclusions by fabricating connec–
tions between the chosen books - and sometimes to bring charges
against the reader.
Somehow the atmosphere in the spets was always tense. The
readers did not speak to each other, even if they were acquaintances.
People sat two to a table in their assigned seats, and even if they
shared a table for years they never exchanged words or recognized '
each other. Each guarded his own secret, and when they left Room
88 it was as if their secrets ran along on a leash.
I got hold of a comfortable table by a window with a view onto
Nevsky Prospect, where a worried humanity could be observed queu–
ing with shopping bags at the famous Eliseev food store . For a full
year I had the table to myself and, having grown accustomed to
solitude, was almost offended when one day a neighbor material–
ized. He carried at least two dozen books, embracing the stack like a
cord of firewood . He loaded the books onto his half of the table and
apparently wanted to give me a friendly nod but cut himself short,
understanding the impropriety of such a greeting. In response I
shifted my chair slightly to the left. The exchange was the utmost in
politeness given the circumstances: we acknowledged each other's
existence in a place where people should not notice each other.
My neighbor showed up almost every day and came to interest
me more and more. He was without distinguishing marks: simply a
tall, broad-shouldered man, about sixty, with a stubborn chin. A
Ukranian, perhaps. Obviously he had been strong but had gained
weight from lack of exercise. Then again, all the habitues of the spets
gained weight at that age: there could not have been too many
athletes in such a place. He dressed Western-style but that was no
rarity in the spets either. Nonetheless, my neighbor was markedly
different from a typical spets reader, and it took me a while to realize
why. Usually the
spetskhran
customer tried to shrink, hide, disap-
