Gadfly in Russia Read online

  ‘Abratna!’ I cried as he gave me a clap on the shoulder that almost sent me to the middle of the road. We smoked nearly half a packet of Pall Mall before drawing up outside the hotel at half past four. By now the best of friends, and in full view of the gilded onion domes of St Isaac’s Cathedral, he wrote his full name on the page of a small pad, and his address which was only a few minutes away on Gorki Street, saying as we shook hands that I must call on him some time, when we could eat, drink and indulge in endless toasts of good vodka.

  I went into the hotel to see about my room, not unhappy at being out of the car for a couple of days. I had driven on the left in England, changed to the right in Denmark, gone back to the left in Sweden, and switched once more to the right in Finland, so what were a few abratnas to me? It was no wonder that I had ended up speeding to Leningrad mostly down the middle of the road, and strayed off it twice.

  I unpacked, and showered, the rush of cold water a blessing, then changed and went to the lobby where I was greeted by a hefty young man wearing black-framed spectacles. He spoke good English, and told me his name was George Andjaparidze who had been seconded by the Writers’ Union as guide, factotum and companion during my stay in the Soviet Union. His duty, he said, in a humorous and immediately likeable tone, was to make sure I didn’t get into any difficulties, or trouble with the traffic police, while on my travels. It was a gesture of the Writers’ Union’s solidarity and concern, he went on. They wanted me to be well looked after, because a foreign writer who could not speak the language was bound to need help in navigating strange and complicated cities.

  I supposed he was right, and was happy to meet him, though didn’t want to say that I felt more than capable of finding my way to Rumania on my own. But I did hint as much, and he said he didn’t doubt my abilities as a motorist, but all the same he was very experienced at getting about, for he had travelled a great deal by car in Russia with his uncle, camping along the highways to and from holidays in the Crimea and the Caucasus.

  He had studied at Moscow University and written a thesis on Oscar Wilde, and was now working on a postgraduate dissertation on the books of Evelyn Waugh. ‘So we’ll have plenty to talk about, and learn from each other,’ he said with a broad wink to indicate that we were bound to enjoy the trip.

  I showed him the car outside, which he immediately called Peter Peugeot, in honour, he said, of the greater Peter who had founded the city. He arranged for it to be stabled in a special compound nearby, where it would be guarded by an old soldier for a rouble a day. I would not, therefore, need to take the wing mirrors and windscreen wipers up to my room.

  I had always liked the sound of ‘Leningrad’, a solid word, as if with such a name the city could never have been anything but immovably fixed to the centre of the earth – in spite of being built on a swamp. Spread over a vast plain, domes and broad avenues shone in white-night sunlight, the geometrical and artistic layout suggesting that Leningrad was still the capital of Russia.

  In the war it suffered more than any other Russian city from the plague of German Nazism, when a million inhabitants had starved to death or been killed by bombardments and air raids. But the place had survived, and communism had continued to dominate people’s lives, though not perhaps for most of them their hopes. Living under such discipline they managed from day to day, as is always the case, supporting the barely endurable weight of their rulers, though I didn’t see anyone without bread or shoes or a place however small to sleep in. Over much of the Third World the Soviet Union supported insurgencies, while the intelligent Russian realised that the high cost could only come off their backs.

  In the park the atmosphere was relaxed, in the warm softness of evening. A young man played a Beatles tape: ‘We all live in a yellow submarine …’ and two Swedish mariners were trying to kiss a couple of Russian girls.

  I went with George to a Caucasian restaurant on the Nevsky Prospekt, and ate the best and largest meal since leaving London. He certainly knew the places to go, which was so much in his favour that my dream of motoring alone quickly faded. After sharing a bottle of vodka and a few fragrant wines from the land of his ancestors, I chaffed him at having taken on the onerous appointment of looking after someone like me.

  ‘My dear fellow, it will be a pleasure. They were queueing up by scores to get the job, and I was delighted when it was given to me,’ spoken in such a tone as to imply that if I believed that I would believe anything.

  In our semi-inebriated condition we strolled along the Nevsky Prospekt hoping to wear off some of the food and drink. At twenty-four he was a man of the world, sophisticated, intelligent, charming and well informed, as well as being entirely open with me. He had already been married and divorced, and had a child, he told me with a pronounced wink under a street lamp, a girl he sees as often as possible, for he was still on good terms with the mother. He now had a wonderful girlfriend, who was most upset by his absence from Moscow.

  I looked out of my window at the Hotel Astoria, at the dome of St Isaac’s, red sky spreading left and right to cover the whole panorama. People walked the streets at a quarter to one, and buses still slid around the cathedral in the huge square. Living for the moment more easily than I could, youngsters clutched their tape recorders and transistors. The radio behind me gave no interesting news. Going by the squall of deafening static some stations seemed to be jammed by Russian censors, endeavouring to cut out the wail of pop music perhaps, or the drone of information.

  Monday, 11 June

  Thirteen hundred roubles had been put into my Russian bank account by two magazine publishers, as payment for extracts from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Road to Volgograd. I collected the newly minted notes as if they were alms for a pilgrim that would see me through the country and yet, having come so easy and unsolicited, they seemed hardly real.

  ‘Money only ever did when I had to run urgently and buy food, or put it by for the rent man, which I haven’t had to do for nearly ten years,’ I said to George, who helped me with the formalities.

  Stuffing the Monopoly notes into my wallet I complained that any left over at the end of my stay couldn’t be taken out and changed into other currencies. He replied that I should just enjoy spending what a Russian labourer had to keep his family on for a few months. I’d never had the equivalent of nearly four hundred pounds in my pocket at any one time, so could feel rich.

  On my previous visit to Leningrad, four years before, I’d met Maria Abramovna Shereshevskaya of the university, who had survived the seige as a child and now had a sixteen-year-old daughter. With her friend Galya she had done some of my stories into Russian, and they were now translating the works of Joyce Cary. I was taken with them to Tsarskoye Selo – renamed Pushkin. It was gratifying to reflect that the poet had at last got his own back on the tsar, as poets invariably do on those who torment them, even if only posthumously. To the north of the Great Palace there was a bronze figure of Pushkin on a garden seat by the sculptor R Bach.

  Sitting with tea and cakes at a café we talked about the relationship between Russia and England, of how they flirted with each other in the sixteenth century, when Ivan the Terrible made an offer for the hand of Queen Elizabeth I, stating that she ‘would be kin to his friends, but hostile to his enemies, and he would be the same to hers’. Good Queen Bess thanked him for his goodwill, but suggested he marry Lady Mary Hastings, about whom the Tsar’s envoy reported back that she was ‘thirty years old, tall, well built, has a clear complexion, grey eyes, red hair, a straight nose, and long fingers’.

  Mary thought it might not be a bad match, since men were becoming scarce for women of her age, but then she heard of his ‘barbarous manners’ and turned him down, even though he promised important concessions to an English trading company.

  Ivan was a man of unlimited self-indulgence and a ferocious disposition. During his six-week occupation of Novgorod he had 60,000 of its inhabitants slain and thrown into the river. The city of Tver, with a histo
ry of incessant devastations, lost 90,000 of its people due to his cruelty. He was to beat his son to death in a prolonged fit of rage, dying from grief and remorse soon after.

  Tuesday, 20 June

  My first trip on a hydrofoil took us along the coast to Petrodvorets, a smooth ride, and comfortable except for a queasily strong smell of high octane fuel. The out-of-bounds naval base of Kronstadt was half concealed by the haze of Leningrad, a picture that might have been done by Turner.

  The half-full hydrofoil eased its way to the landing stage, and we walked into the park along a canalised stream called the Ropcha. After great aquatic leaps from the terrace of the palace its water fed numerous fountains to either side before flowing into the sea.

  In front of the palace, where the waterfall filled a pond, was a bronze-gilt figure of Samson parting a young lion’s jaws from its tonsils, the ferocious combat frozen in an everlasting pose. Samson knew what he was trying to do, while the noble lion wondered at such vicious purpose, when all it had done was thoughtlessly stray into a vineyard and roar at someone disturbing its enjoyment of the grapes.

  The lion could never be as savage as Samson, who endeavoured with maniacal strength to break his adversary unto death. The sculptor Kozlovski had well caught the pitifully tragic scene of the contest, in which God had ordained that Samson do something previously unthought of by man or animal, who both realised when it was far too late that they had been coerced into a situation that could only have one end. From the anguished lion’s mouth a jet of water spurted sixty-five feet high, as thick as a man’s arms, liquid which might as well have been blood.

  The Great Palace, with a façade nine hundred feet long, had been gutted by the Germans, not as an act of war but out of gleeful Teutonic spite. Only the exterior had been restored, to give some idea of what it had once been. The Marly House in the park had been built as a country mansion for Peter the Great so that he could contemplate his new fleet on manoeuvres in the Gulf. Its exquisite proportions were reflected in the surface of a rectangular sheet of water. I viewed the house from a distant point, the one sight from the complex of parks and palaces I would want to remember. I was told that fish in the lake were, until recently, summoned for feeding by the ringing of a certain tone of bell. Rye flour was given to them in accordance with Peter’s wishes; he had stocked the water with carp and chut from Prussia.

  An oak tree began life as an acorn taken from George Washington’s garden. Planted on the Tsarina’s Island, it had been presented to Nicholas I in 1838 by the supercargo of an American ship calling at St Petersburg. I pencilled the ways of our several miles’ walk on a plan in the Blue Guide so as not to forget the marvels no sooner were they behind me. Maria Abramovna had booked a car for one o’clock, to take us back to the hotel.

  In the afternoon George and I perambulated the Petersburgian quarters associated with events in Dostoevsky’s novels.

  Wednesday, 21 June

  A pink mist illuminated the cupolas and façades of buildings around the hotel, streets already busy as I collected the car from the parking compound, giving the guard a few extra roubles for keeping it safe. We were going to Moscow.

  Luggage was stowed, and Maria Abramovna, who would go as far as Novgorod and return to Leningrad by bus, brought flasks of tea, coffee and sandwiches for the road. She then guided us out of the city by the Ismailovsky and Moskovsky Prospekts.

  Traffic was heavy in the suburbs, mostly lorries and buses, but there was less after the right fork indicating Estonia and Kiev, and I took the road straight on for Moscow.

  Clouds were low, the land flat and livid green from a recent saturation of rain. None of us seemed properly awake, and I needed full alertness in overtaking the heavily laden and often swaying two-unit lorries.

  George and Maria were my invited guests who had to be looked after, so I tried to keep up the talk and not seem grumpy. Their lives were in my care, and I hadn’t driven for a couple of days. Whenever at the wheel in the early morning (and we had left at seven) it was not unusual for me to have, or imagine I might have, a near miss or potential accident. It could be in avoiding someone coming too carelessly out of a side turning, or on making a dodgy attempt to overtake, but today all went well because the road was straight and fairly empty. I kept the speed at fifty for a while, then let it creep up to sixty as my senses sharpened. There was no cause to worry, in any case, because it didn’t matter what time George and I got to Moscow. My speed went up to seventy.

  In Western Europe one could find somewhere to stay the night with no trouble, but hotels in Russia had to be pre-booked and a schedule maintained. Moscow was almost five hundred miles away, and I’d been advised in Leningrad to cover the distance in two stages, but having set off early I hoped it could be done in one without mishap – or disaster.

  We had breakfast by the roadside, and did the first 200 kilometres to Novgorod by ten o’clock. I parked by the bus station so that Maria could buy her ticket back. Novgorod the Great was now a quiet and pleasant town, with wooden houses on the outskirts, and blocks of flats and public buildings in the middle. Trees, gardens and wide streets increased the feeling of somnolent relaxation, very much in line with how we felt.

  Near the Kremlin I decoded the word kvass on the side of a barrel-shaped wagon where people were standing with jugs and bottles. Being thirsty, and not so far having tasted the beverage, I joined the throng and asked the woman to give me some. For a few kopecks she drew half a litre from the spigot of a light brown liquid which went smoothly down my dry throat and benefited the stomach as well. Maria said it was made from fermented rye bread and flavoured with raisins, and she also enjoyed a mug, though George disdained it. I felt refreshed, and was glad to know you could get it on street corners almost any time of the day.

  Some of the churches and monasteries within the walled and fortified Kremlin had been blown up or damaged by the Germans, precious frescos by Novgorod painters lost for ever. I hoped no other calamities would ever befall the town.

  A wooden stairway up the side of a tower led to the walls, giving a south and easterly vista of flat fields and sluggish rivers. Slender spires and coppery domes above white churches seemed to doze on the silver green landscape.

  Sitting over glasses of lemon tea, in a circular café of many windows outside the Kremlin, an old woman paused in her sweeping between the tables and asked Maria Abramovna if I was an Estonian. If so perhaps you would allow me to talk to him. I regretted not being from that country, for she might have had an interesting story, but on being told I was English she went away sadly, shaking her head.

  After two hours in Novgorod George and I had to get on, so walked Maria to the bus stop and said goodbye, promising to send each other books. She wanted a copy of The Rats and Other Poems, as well as A Tree on Fire when it came out in a few months – both sent with pleasure.

  Just after midday we crossed the Volkhov, and I asked George if we couldn’t stop in a village and buy a wagon of kvass, tow it behind the car and slake our thirsts from it now and again in the warm and sunny weather.

  ‘The roubles may be burning your pocket,’ he said, ‘but it’s an impractical idea,’ so instead we savoured large Havana cigars bought on the Nevsky Prospekt, and he likened us to a couple of swollen plutocrats out for a spin.

  Cruising at sixty, a car overtook us at more than seventy. Others went by at the same rate, showing D-letters for Germany on their rear ends. ‘Did you notice them?’ I said. ‘Blazoned along the sides was “Berlin–Moscow Rally – 1967”.’

  Though I had seen no such thing he half believed me. ‘I’m feeling too lazy to overtake,’ I said.

  ‘You’d be crazy to try.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I went on. ‘There’s no hurry as far as I’m concerned. If I’ve learned anything at all in my life it’s never to compete. We still have 500 kilometres to do before getting to the greatest kremlin of them all, so we can take it easy.’

  More cars of the same breed jet-engined by, ser
ious drivers in shirtsleeves and eye shades, and navigating companions with binocular straps around their necks intent on outspread maps. For some reason George became agitated: ‘Do we overtake, or not?’

  ‘I will if you want me to. Your wishes are sacrosanct as the Russian guest in this French car with an English driver.’

  Putting the speed up to seventy, perhaps a little more, brought us to the tail of the German column. ‘My father was in the Red Army,’ he said, ‘and was killed in action on the way to Berlin with his brothers-in-arms.’

  I ignored the reference to Evelyn Waugh. ‘I’m sorry to hear it, but it took place more than twenty years ago.’

  ‘I never knew him. He came from Tiflis. My mother and aunt brought me up.’ Unable to look on him directly, I nevertheless sensed his peculiar froglike twist of the lips. ‘They spoiled me, of course – rotten, as you say – though I never complain, because they still do.’

  ‘So the Germans are advancing on Moscow again,’ I said, ‘instead of retreating back to Berlin with swastikas between their legs. Maybe they’ll stop at Kalinin or Klin for schnapps.’ I pressed the acceleration a little more firmly, till eighty showed on the dial. Flipping on the blinkers and giving two honks I swung out and hurried along on the other side of the road at ninety, my plain Estate sliding by their chequerboard doors. George’s tongue went out, two fingers up.

  He was still laughing when we halted to finish off Maria Abramovna’s sandwiches, but stopped when the German cars overtook us. Further down the road some drivers had pulled in to do physical exercises, bobbing up and down or throwing beach balls to one another. I flashed by, sounding the horn, which they took as a greeting and waved companionably back.

  We gave a lift to a village postmistress because of her heavy bag, and when she got to where she was going we took a woman and her child on board. Setting them down a few miles on, the German column swung by, their blips in the wing mirror, the last one narrowly missing a lorry coming the other way.