Gadfly in Russia Read online

  When pressed as to why the man thought so he merely said I looked like one, and went back to his newspaper. Could it be there was Estonian blood in me from way back? Perhaps some ancestral member of a Baltic Brotherhood had in olden days been shipwrecked at the mouth of the Humber and, losing his bearings from anguish and homesickness had, instead of making northeast, staggered along the banks of the Trent to Nottingham. If so, the thinning blood of his berserker spirit must have been much watered down by intermarrying with the civilised English – though it wasn’t a likely story.

  Telling Irena about my motor travels in the summer she was preternaturally interested in the crossing of Transylvania, because of its association with vampires. What did I know about them?

  ‘Nothing. I never met one. I was wearing a bulb of garlic around my neck, so they left me alone!’

  ‘Vampirism is a perversion,’ she informed me, and I wondered whether she was referring to the sexual proclivities of the bat itself, or using the word to indicate a psychological or psychopathic condition. If the latter, perhaps the reason people became vampirish had to do with the deprivation of milk at the mother’s breast during the first months of life.

  It was hard to know how I’d picked up such assumptions, but I went on to say that some children are emotionally underdeveloped, and unable to become normal on growing up, for quite mysterious reasons, which results in them taking on the protection of a ‘Vampire complex’. On the other hand it could be that those who show serious symptoms of underdevelopment one day, and alarming maturity the next (for I suppose there must be such people) turn into writers and artists.

  This supposition brought a strange expression on to her pale and rounded face, but what more could I think of to amuse or horrify her – and pass the time? On more solid ground I told her about the 1930s film with Bela Lugosi, Vampire Bat which I’d seen at eleven.

  ‘As a child?’ she exclaimed. ‘How could someone so young be permitted to see it?’

  ‘We just lied to the doorman that we were fourteen, and held out our money.’ I then set her cheeks aglow by relating the plot of Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu, which may have been treading on very unSoviet ground, though I couldn’t be sure, because the topic kept us talking to the end of our journey.

  There were many churches and monasteries in Vladimir, most with views of the surrounding plain. The Gothic and baroque ecclesiastical monuments of Spain had usually brought on a feeling of wariness and even dread, but in Russia the graceful curves and domes of grandiose buildings calmed and enchanted. In gold, blue, white and green, they were invariably set in spectacular situations, and the holy Russian architecture of Vladimir matched if it did not exceed that of Kiev, Novgorod and Zagorsk.

  Clusters of evening lights on the plain were like islands on a dark sea. Though train whistles and the hooters of shunting diesels sounded all night, and a noisy open-air dancing place close to one of the nearby cathedrals pumped away, I nevertheless slept long and well, agreeably woken by the cloth-footed musical bells of Old Russia.

  Thursday, 7 September

  Behind a cluster of church domes bushes of grey smoke from a factory chimney flattened along the underbelly of the sky. Vladimir was also an industrial city.

  On the chilly morning below slowly whitening clouds we went forty kilometres by Intourist car to Suzdal. The Cathedral of the Nativity inside the Kremlin walls was built in 1528, but not being a student of churches I walked by the wonders quickly, a glance at icons and other details in passing, and hoping something would stay in the mind. It rarely did. I wanted vistas rather than close-up work.

  Outside the Pokrovsky Convent a bow-legged black cockerel strutted like a formidable bulldog, so fiercely jealous of its territory that even a cat ran away in terror. We explored churches and monasteries at Bogolyubovo and Pokrov-on-the-Neri, till my eyes were almost blinded by the dazzle of so many icons.

  The past closed itself off, so that all senses could as firmly as possible take in the present. I relished not feeling any responsibility for either past or present, for myself or others. On mentioning the mood to Irena she declared that it was against life to be that way. It was self-indulgence, she said, and would have to be atoned for when back in the real world. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ I admitted, though dazzled more and more by such aesthetic products of the art of painting, but knowing that if I did have to pay for how I felt at the moment it would be by writing, in which the novelty of invented people would be my judges and hear me out.

  With so many masterpieces of Byzantine architecture it became impossible to separate one church from another, in spite of taking notes, and I didn’t seem capable of wielding a camera any more. From the main highway we followed a lane between wooden houses, and went under a railway bridge to a gently humped pasture where a few dozen cows grazed. Tracks multiplied, so we drove over open fields towards a small white church standing before a line of dark woods.

  We left the car by a copse of birch trees, and from the opposite side of a broad lake the entire reflection of a white church shimmered in the water. Nearby, behind another church, a one-storey building had been divided into apartments. ‘For architectural students to stay in the summer,’ Irena said.

  An elderly kerchiefed woman looking after a boy playing with a large ginger cat (its ears seriously lopsided) was the caretaker. Cats have as much personality as people, and who can say why, unless it’s the way they look at us, or as we perceive them. The boy turned the animal this way and that in his arms, and the cat, endeavouring to settle on the direction it was required to look, while disconcerted by an anxiety it could well have done without, was only waiting for a lack of alertness on the boy’s part to leap away to the woods, till hunger struck and it had to come home.

  Friday, 8 September

  On the 07.50 train back to Moscow I made up a story for Irena, which was what she may have expected from a writer, of two foreign couples who planned a joint visit to Vladimir. At the last moment the wife of one man didn’t feel like leaving Moscow, and the husband of the other couple also decided to stay behind. Thus the pair who went became familiar with each other on the train, an intimacy that intensified in their romantic strolls from one church to another. ‘What about the couple left behind?’ Irena asked. ‘Did something similar happen to them?’

  ‘Not much. That’s the main part of the story, though I suppose something could be made to happen.’ She finally thought the plot too mechanical, and so did I, though most plots have to be, I said, which is why I can’t always be bothered with them, certainly not the most obvious ones. ‘I shan’t write it, in any case.’

  Taking the Metro, I was soon back at the hotel. In my room the telephone rang, and an interview was set up. A few minutes later it sounded again, and I was asked to do another. Magazines and publishers wanted to see me. Should I be flattered, or tell them to get lost? Unable to decide one way or the other, but knowing it was unrealistic to imagine I could come to Russia and not be asked to do such chores, I agreed to what was possible in the time available. To spend the days alone was much desired, but what would I have done beyond some unprofitable walking? So I decided to accept whatever was wanted with as good a grace as could be mustered.

  On being wakened from an afternoon sleep, by a photographer requesting pictures of me in Red Square for the Moscow News, I went out to meet her.

  She was young, with a perfectly shaped pretty face in that doll-like pink cheeked Russian way, and tried her charms on a well-scarfed grandmother and her two charges into cosily posing by my side. Was I to pick the kids up and give them a kiss? Or splodge one on the old woman? The children were well enough dressed to belong to a wealthy official family, and looked at me as dourly as did the woman, who said something to the girl which I imagined to be the Russian equivalent of fuck off.

  I didn’t blame her, and drew the line at the experiment anyway, but the girl wasn’t discouraged, and suggested a shot of me eating an ice cream. I told her I wasn’t hungry, and that I would
only be photographed without such accompaniments, recalling a cameraman from a London newspaper who, asking me to ride into an Arab market in Tangier on a donkey, got an abusive refusal.

  I was more annoyed with my nonco-operation than at the girl’s request, so kept my sense of humour and, not wanting her to get into trouble with her editor, knowing she had a living to make, and was ambitious (though I didn’t see what she would get out of her appointment with me) I agreed to have photographs taken against the background of Lenin’s tomb.

  I was later telephoned by someone from Novy Mir magazine asking if I would give a lecture on modern writing at the university-style Gorki Institute of Literature, a prestigious training ground for young Soviet writers. That sort of thing was what I had been waiting for, and though I was by now somewhat fed up with so many requests, I tried not to sound too abrupt on agreeing to do it.

  So instead of walking the streets as intended it was necessary to sit at my desk, while smoking a cigar and waiting to hear from George, and make notes on what to talk about.

  Many young Russians had hinted about the lack of freedom in intellectual matters. They had little faith in the messages put out by their newspapers and journals, and imagined publications from the West to be far more free and interesting. The only newspaper available in English was the communist Daily Worker, and though it was often far less rigid when it came to the party line, they didn’t trust that, either.

  They also distrusted critics and academics who told them what it was healthy under the system to believe. Translated novels by foreign writers always had an introduction telling them how to interpret what they were about to read. The hatches of censorship seemed more onerous than I had thought they were in the summer. Yet the young, always hopeful, only wanted their country to allow greater freedom in the arts and humanities, assuming that when this came about real civilisation would exist.

  I had mentioned to various editors the case of Daniel and Sinyavsky, as well as that of the student who had received three years in prison for organising a demonstration, but had no success in drawing them out.

  In my luggage were books by myself and other writers, to give away, yet I couldn’t help wondering why the authorities were so tightfisted in not buying them for their students, and other members of the public. I supposed they didn’t want their readers to become influenced by liberal ideas but also, if such books were imported, they were afraid of the murderous rush to get at them in the shops.

  At dinner in the Writers’ Union George introduced me to the poet Alexei Zaurikh, with the words: ‘Meet a famous foreign writer.’

  We’d drunk a good deal, and Zaurikh exclaimed: ‘Hey, he can’t be a foreign writer. He looks just like one of us, who belong to the Moscow hooligans.’ As he came forward to give the usual bear hug George said: ‘No, he’s not. He’s one of the Nottingham hooligans,’ at which everyone, including me, had a good laugh, and went back to the bottle.

  Saturday, 9 September

  I had always thought that aspiring writers would be much better off teaching themselves by trial and error, if need be, rather than listening to professors and already successful authors telling them how it should be done, and yet here I was, about to do the same.

  I was shown on to a dais, wondering what those hundreds of young people expected me to say on opening my mouth. Two officials of the establishment bracketed me, and since I also wore a tie I didn’t suppose the audience of mostly students thought there was much to choose between us, and that I would bring out the same old party line. I was expected to sit but preferred to stand, at which a flunky immediately levered the microphone to my level.

  After the usual hesitations I launched into what I was clearly not expected to mention, to the obvious unease of the dean and his sidekick. How much the audience understood was hard to say, though I’d been told that many would know English.

  After taking a few minutes to inform them of my origins and how I became a writer – establishing my ‘working-class’ credentials, though on this occasion I decided not to be bashful about that – I went on to say that writers should have the freedom to write what they felt inspired to say, in other words whatever they liked. It was futile and certainly unnecessary to clothe them in straitjacket theories of social realism. Demanding literature of that or any kind was a barrier to creativity. A writer should be left to develop his own personal idiosyncratic style, and tackle any subject that came to mind, without having to consider what an audience might want. Complete liberty in these matters would eventually give birth to a literature that in the end would be of more value, and even more patriotic, if you like, but certainly more credit to his country than if any obstacles had been placed in his way.

  Young writers should be permitted to experiment with form and style if they wanted, and have a chance at least of getting published. If the worst came to the worst, and no editor wanted it – as often happens of course in the West, where my work went around for ten years before anything was taken – he can always put it away for a year or two, and wait his chance, meanwhile writing something else. But whatever transpired he should keep on writing, and hope that one day he would get into print somehow. Did not the great Tolstoy say to Maxim Gorki (who would surely have agreed with what I am saying) ‘Don’t let anyone influence you, fear no one, and then you’ll be all right’?

  Before going on to mention the writer’s justifiable dissatisfaction with any forms of censorship I said something about theatrical and cinematic censorship in England. I told them of the fight with the British Board of Film Censors, when Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson had been forced to show them every draft of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. We had been compelled to make amendments through every turn of the script, which were unjustified and unnecessary, but there had been no other way to get the films made.

  Such information now seemed to be received with approval by the men at my side, who no doubt told themselves what else could you expect in the capitalist West? But then I went onto the offensive on censorship in all countries, including the one in which I was speaking. Having asked me to talk during my pre-paid hard-currency holiday they could hardly hold it against me for not talking like a specially invited all-found guest.

  What I want for myself, I informed them, I not unnaturally desire for all writers everywhere. We must stand united in that if nothing else. In conclusion I praised the poems of Andrei Voznesensky, since he was in trouble with the authorities at the moment.

  I wasn’t disappointed by the decibels of applause at the end. George gave his usual louche wink, and discreet thumbs up, which was good enough for me as we went out. He later said that my speech had been much appreciated, and that the gist of it was all over Moscow by evening – among those to whom it mattered.

  Sunday, 10 September

  On my way to visit a Russian family, whose address had been given me in London, I turned a corner and saw a man, wearing a blanketlike overcoat – his fur hat nearby – spreadeagled between the pavement and the gutter. Deader than a dead man could ever have looked, he might have hit the deck from twenty floors up, and landed in such a posture that had he performed a similar collapse of all faculties in a ballet at the Bolshoi the whole audience would have been on their feet in a fever of applause and appreciation. As it was he had merely taken refuge in a little death from the too great strain of modern life – unless it was only to soothe the turbulence of his soul as in the old days.

  In other words, he was blind drunk, and to go by his features he was one of the sub-proletariat. I could only say good luck to him in his blacked-out condition. In tsarist times he would have been thought of by the intelligentsia as one of the ‘dark people’ they were trying to save, though I supposed there to be marginally less of such nowadays, and that whoever fitted into that category had a love-hate relationship with the Soviet system – love because of indisputable benefits, and hate for having been dragged into an existence of stricter discipline. I assu
med he would totter off sooner or later, and went on my way.

  Walking up the steps to the flat I found the correct nameplate and rang the bell. After some wait I buzzed whoever was inside several more times. The block was cleanly kept, with no sign of broken bottles.

  No one was in, the place so quiet I didn’t think there could be anyone in the other flats either. They were all out for the weekend maybe, or the people I had come to see thought it unwise to open the door and receive the small gift in my haversack I had been asked to deliver.

  On my way back to the centre of town, annoyed at not having accomplished my mission, I saw that the drunken man was no longer where he had been, though the curving river of urine still mapped the pavement. The militia must have bundled him into a van and taken him away for deintoxication which, I had been told, was the usual procedure.

  Moscow wasn’t built to a scale for walking, like Paris, London, or Madrid. On the other hand a unique and efficient Metro served all areas. The grand and sombre city impressed rather than welcomed, and it was easier to give oneself up to it more than feel much affection. I supposed it inspired loyalty and even love for those who lived there and had overcome its sense of intimidation, and their own insignificance. St Isaac’s Cathedral in the distance would have seemed more pleasant to reach if the space in front of me was covered by a maze of streets.

  I went with Oksana to a peasant market near the Moscow River, where people with string bags and briefcases were scooping up much that was on offer. I wanted to buy a couple of Orenburg shawls for Ruth which were made from goat’s hair, said to be so fine they could be drawn through the space of a wedding ring. The woman with battered teeth showed how this could be done, then wrapped them up as if not too happy to let them go. We left her trying to get the ring back on her finger.

  Oksana wondered if I wanted any souvenirs to take home, but I said I already had enough matrioshka dolls to cover a table. Back in Red Square she asked if I would like to go inside Lenin’s tomb. ‘Everyone does.’