28
PARTISAN REVIEW
pear. We all prayed for invisibility , wished to be forgotten, so that
nothing threatened our fragile right to read forbidden literature . My
neighbor, however, had some sort of inner confidence. He did not
seem afraid to lose the precious privilege, nor did he appear to revel
in his unique status. Even more surprising was his way of reading.
An ordinary reader always remembered he was not alone and hence
kept up an expression of distaste or boredom no matter how gripping
the book - as if he were being forced to read or to chew on a lemon .
It was our disagreeable profession , after all, that compelled us to
read Western propaganda rather than join the rest of the populace
and rejoice in optimistic Soviet literature . My neighbor, for his part,
was obviously and completely captivated by his reading: he read and
repeated to himself, he smiled and smirked. Once, when he stepped
out for a moment, I could not help breaking the sacred rules of the
spets; quickly, thief-like , I riffled through his file of books . The
opened one turned out to be
L 'affaire Toulaev
by Victor Serge–
neither the book nor the author meant anything to me. But his other
books struck me . They were by Trotsky or about him, and almost
all of them in French or Spanish. Even more amazingly, my
neighbor disdained concealing his interest. In 1950, during a search
of the apartment of the father of one of my friends , they found Trot–
sky's
Literature and Revolution.
At the closed trial the prosecutor stated
that "with every page the accused took another step towards betrayal
of the fatherland ." The accused cried with joy after being sentenced
to twenty-five years - he had expected the firing squad. And my
neighbor, he read Trotsky as if it were the most ordinary thing! The
only explanation was that he belonged to the dying breed of "anti–
Trotskyist propagandists ." But they all worked at an institution that
was privy to special sources of information and had no need to visit
the spets.
The urge to find out about my neighbor grew daily. To inquire
directly was out of the question, but to wait for a lucky accident to
give away his name could take years . Still, I had some special
sources of my own. Natasha, my "almost sister," worked in the
library. She was not my sister, but ever since I had had a brief affair
with her older sister- for whom I pined hopelessly for a long
time-we had been trusting and devoted friends . The youngest
Ph.D. in the library, she was the head of a department and a person
of influence. But even she had trouble finding out the name. The
first flash of information was puzzling. He was registered under the
