L ike any saga, this story has a long pre-history which beginsβnaturallyβin Mozambique. To afford the down-payment for a house in Chicago, I first had to sell my four-room apartment in Moscow. That fabulous dwelling was in every sense dearly earned. Though we never had a chance to live in it. So this is:. Admittedly, while in Africa, we were paid rather lavishly.
As much as fifteen to twenty times the average wage in the USSR. Returning to Moscow in , I discovered that life continued to be eerily normal there. After Tete it took us months to feel comfortable sleeping on sheets in a bed, without a gun, or being able to drink tap water. I could buy the most expensive available car Volga with cash, and there would still remain plenty to buy presents for all the relatives.
But why get a car? I still lived in the university dorm, four guys in a room. Instead, we ate delicacies by crateloads. Moscow was supplied exceptionally well compared to the rest of the country. I had lived in the dorms of Moscow State University for five years, since I was sixteen. It was a world of our own.
But we were about to graduate and leave. Five years later several dorm-mates emerged as leading lights of post-Soviet politics, as either warlords in places like Tajikistan, Karabagh, Ingushetia or Transdniestria, or as more peaceful parliamentarians; or even in more distant lands like Eritrea, Palestine and Lebanon.
After the chronic overcrowding of the dorms, the idea that I could afford a whole co-op apartment of my own seemed ever more dazzling as the day of graduation approached. In the usual Soviet fashion, I tried several ways round this stupid rule, until I ran into a particularly irritable old man at the Public Reception Desk of Moscow City Soviet. He promised to report me to the appropriate authorities. All available legal channels were now exhausted, and I had no access to extra-legal capabilities.
