Here's a story about a wonderfully human experience - so elusive in Moscow - by an old banya buddy (no jokes!) of mine.
A Gift for Reading Hall No. 1
Chronicle of Higher Education, April 3, 2009
By BRYON MACWILLIAMS
Moscow
I walk past the long line of people waiting to check their coats in the grandiose atrium of the Russian State Library. I stop next to the first person in line, a young woman. I smile, shed my wool overcoat, lay it across the counter.
An elderly woman in a dark blue smock approaches. I hand her my coat. "I'm in the first hall," I say.
"So what?" she says. "That doesn't make a difference anymore. We're all equal now."
I look at the young woman next to me. She looks down. I had not meant it that way, as if I were somehow exceptional. I was merely following the rules: Veterans of World War II do not need to wait in line, nor do those like me, those in Reading Hall No. 1.
Engraved into a brass plate on the tall, heavy wooden doors of the reading hall are the words, "For Professors, Academicians, and Doctors of Science." I am none of those. To the pensioners who work the coat check, it is apparent. Sometimes they glance at my library card to verify that I am telling the truth. Sometimes they look at me as if I were crashing a party — or, rather, the elite club as intended by the Communist Party.
I was placed in the first reading hall in the mid-1990s, when the Russian government still honored Soviet traditions of granting certain privileges to certain foreigners. Today the government is not enamored of foreigners, especially foreign journalists. Today I would be put in a reading hall that is less exclusive, and more crowded. I am a holdover from another time. And I am grateful.
For me, Reading Hall No. 1 is a retreat from the grim energy of this megalopolis, and from the things I do to avoid sitting still and working — sleeping, snacking, surfing the Internet, talking to friends, and chatting up women. Here in the first hall, the rules are different. I can request as many books as I want. I can keep books without renewing them for five days, not three. I can hold them for two months, not two weeks. I can also use a laptop for long periods; it is the only hall with electrical outlets. Most importantly, though — for a guy without a girlfriend, kids, or even a roommate — the reading hall is a place where I can labor at a solitary task, among people. Usually the people at the reading tables are much older men, in down-at-the-heel shoes and threadbare suits, who, one librarian told me, have been coming to the library for 50 years, "who come here for themselves, for the soul."
"It was conceived as a place for our very best specialists — those who love to read, and love the library. A special level, a very special level, was necessary, because important scientists sit here. They need quiet, they need comfort," Lyudmila Koval, head of the Museum of Library History, told me. "Of course it is splendid for a reader to walk in and, all around him, there is a kind of aura that is uncommon, extraordinary."
The reading hall is extraordinary. The ceiling is some three stories high, as are the banks of windows that overlook the crenelated walls of the Kremlin across the street, and, within, the golden domes of the Ivan the Great Bell Tower. In late morning the daylight drifts cool through gauzy white curtains that hang like crepe, accenting the faux-marble swirls of the imperious columns, and the grain of the shellacked wood of the reading tables. In early evening the muted light of the chandelier and the brass lamps with green lampshades bestow a cozy atmosphere, like that in a study at home.
For me, though, the uncommon aura of the reading hall is composed less of notions of grandeur and more of elements that are without pretense. The librarians, all women, are attentive, patient, helpful; sometimes they cut corners to get me a book. Moreover, they have introduced to the hall a dimension that was not envisioned by the architects in the early 1900s: In Reading Hall No. 1, there always are more plants than people.
Recently I counted 76 plants on the parquet floor, on the recessed window sills, and on bookshelves that serve as privacy screens on the reading tables. There are split-leaf philodendrons, creeping vines native to tropical rainforests in Central America. There are spider plants and tubular white arum lilies, natives of Africa. There are jade plants and Christmas cacti. There are ferns and ivies. There are hoyas in bloom, and begonias and hibiscuses that are not. All were brought from home, by the librarians.
There is an orange tree. There are lemon trees, and young date palms with spindly leaves. All of them were grown from seeds of fruit eaten by the librarians, and their families, at home. None of the trees actually bears fruit; this is the 55th parallel, after all. But the leaves of the plants are lush and, like all the surfaces in the reading hall, without dust.
When I moved to Russia, in 1996, I did not expect to see tropical plants. I expected gray skies, scarce sunlight, and long, cold, dark winters. Snow and vodka, yes. Split-leaf philodendrons, no. Yet just about everywhere I have reported, diverse places in each of the country's 11 time zones, I have seen exotic plants in public buildings, primarily universities and scientific institutes. They are tactile expressions of the human spirit, a devotion to beauty, and life, in dilapidated surroundings.
Everywhere, perhaps without exception, the caretakers of the plants are women. In Reading Hall No. 1 they are Oksana Sakharova and Natalya Lionova, librarians who arrive at 8 a.m., an hour before the library opens, and fill a half-dozen five-liter jugs with water from the private lavatory of the library's director. They transport the jugs in a stainless steel tub, on wheels. They let the water sit for a day, to allow chemicals to evaporate. Then they water the plants, together, over the course of about an hour.
Other librarians from other reading halls "come in and steal them," Ms. Sakharova told me, smiling. "I even have had to hide plants." The pilfering has less to do with avarice, she said, and more to do with the popular belief that one cannot rely on the health of plants purchased in stores, that "for a plant to live, it's best ... not to pass up a chance to break off a piece."
Some of the plants were donated by readers. "This palm tree was shipped to us by a reader from the Crimea," Ms. Sakharova said. "The coffee plant — see the tall one with the red fruit? — was given to us by a reader from Sochi," also on the Black Sea.
Others — more than a dozen — were donated by me: a tall palm grown from a coconut brought back from Sri Lanka; another palm, smaller, that was given to me by a friend. I've donated plants, native to regions from South Africa to South America, that I grew in the seven apartments I have rented over the past decade. I gave them to the hall because I am leaving the country soon. I am working here for possibly the last time. I am researching a book, my first.
I donated the plants because I wanted to give something back, something living. If my book is published, I will mail a copy to the librarians, who will place it in bookcase 43 N. 1, beneath the sign "Gifts from Readers," on a shelf near Soviet-era books like The Arithmetic of Infinity and Cosmonautics and Rocket Building, and more recent titles like From Where, and Toward What, Goes Russia?
The other day I asked a pensioner at the coat check what will happen after I leave, after my library card expires. If I come back, can I still work in the Reading Hall No. 1?
"Of course," said the woman in the blue smock. "Why couldn't you? Just stand here, and you'll always get a special place. Just come right here, and we'll take care of you."
Bryon MacWilliams reported from the former Soviet Union for more than a decade. He is writing a book about Russia through the culture of the banya, the Russian steam bath.
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 55, Issue 30, Page B20
1 comment:
lovely story. thanks for posting it.
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