A Writer's World (18 page)

The judgment, which had taken the judges four hours to prepare, seemed to take an age to deliver. Expectantly packed, from the reporters in the gallery to the off-duty stenographers peering through the curtain at the back, the whole courtroom rose for the entry of the three generals, and remained on its feet as the chairman read the judgment.

The court had concluded, he said, that Powers was a tool of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States, ‘which carries out its plans with the permission of the American Government’. His flight was deliberately designed to increase international tension and had created a threat to the general peace.

For a moment, just then, I feared the worst: that the prosecution’s demand for fifteen years’ imprisonment, and the pleas for mitigation from the defence counsel, were both no more than appetizers, designed to give dramatic impact to the supreme sentence. I could see Mrs Powers below me, as white as a sheet, clutching a handkerchief in her hand. Around me my colleagues from a dozen countries were poised at their pads, and in the body of the hall the television cameramen had laid their cameras upon the defendant and were only waiting to switch on. Just for a moment I thought we were awaiting a death sentence.

But then: ‘The Military Collegium of the Soviet Supreme Court, proceeding from principles of Soviet humanism and taking into account Powers’s
sincere repentance, sentences Francis Gary Powers to ten years’ detention, three years of them to be spent in prison, for espionage against the Soviet State.’ A wave of emotion swept through the court, and in a moment the chandeliers were shaking to applause. Powers walked out of court steadily enough, a soldier before him, a soldier behind, and almost in a matter of moments the brilliant lights were doused, the great Hall of Columns was emptied of its guests, the three enigmatic judges had withdrawn and the Powers trial was over.

I hated every minute of it. It was horrible. It was our brave new world in microcosm, and it stank.

Peter the Great called it his ‘window on the West’, and it remains a look-out still, watchfully Western in style and manner, a magnificent artefact of Europe at the gateway to Asia. They have tamed Leningrad and harnessed
it, driven away its emperors, turned its palaces into museums and its academies for young ladies into political offices – coarsened its exquisite restaurants, exiled its fan-makers and its riding-masters, swamped its bookshops with dialectical materialism, desecrated its cathedrals, humbled its hierarchies, stifled its frivolities, left its great avenues peeling and pining. Yet it rides above its fate like the queen it is, and seemed to me, when I flew in out of the horny Ukraine, still a Cleopatra among cities.

Leningrad is more than just a geometrical, but actually an astronomical metropolis, for Moskovsky Prospekt, the southern entry to the place, is not only six miles long and dead straight but runs along the meridian from the Pulkovo Observatory on the southern heights. Calm, precise, and elegant seemed the city as I drove along this celestial boulevard: a thoroughbred still, balanced and proportioned, with no uncanny Mongolesque skyscrapers to mar the skyline, only a serenity of classical colonnades, baroque mansions, domes and gilded steeples. Sea-light and snow-light filtered perpetually through the structures and shone icily from the broad frozen stream of the Neva, scattered with islands, lined with impeccable architecture, and running away between the quaysides to the Gulf of Finland and points west.

Dazzled, the scales of the Ukraine still in my eyes, I wandered through all this lucidity. Across the river the sunshine gleamed miraculously upon the golden finger-spire of St Peter and St Paul, slim as a stiletto above its ramparts. In the upstairs galleries of the Hermitage, flooded in sunshine and surveying a brilliant landscape of white, gold and baroque, the great Renoirs, Gauguins, Monets and blue Matisses stood in gorgeous vivacity, to be inhaled like a fragrance or gulped like a draught of some exalting wine. Russia in winter is a dread and dreary country, clogged alike with sludge and dogma; but fly into Leningrad as I did, and your very glands will be rejuvenated.

For all its shrines of materialist revolution, its thumping industrial fringe, the atomic submarines upon its shipyards – for all these signs of the times Leningrad retains, like an ageless courtesan, many an inessential charm. I bought a batter-wrapped sausage that morning from a solemn woman in a white overall at a street-corner stand. I found a 1905 Baedeker Russia in the jumble of an old-school bookshop, inscribed in a spindly German hand in the ink of long ago. I strolled among the hidden statues of the Summer Garden, each one locked away for the winter, like a wayward nymph in a rock, inside its own little wooden house. I wondered at the profusion of fresh flowers on the tomb of Peter the Great, and I gazed from
the balcony of St Isaac’s Cathedral upon the glinting steeple of the Admiralty, like a Buddhist stupa above the ice, and the fabulous immensities of the Winter Palace, where the Tsars lived in immeasurable splendour, and the revolutionaries stormed their way into history. In Moscow it is difficult not to feel a kind of snob; in Leningrad you are a serf in untanned thigh-boots, gaping at the carriages and climaxes of the past.

For this is a city with the gift of timelessness. Elsewhere most Russians seem so unalluring that it is a mystery to me how the reproduction of the species is maintained. Here there are still girls of a haunting and nostalgic beauty, such as you meet in the pages of the immortal novelists, and men of a natural elegance beyond class or era. Forgotten Western echoes, too, linger suggestively on. I observed two young diplomatists in my hotel, wearing heavy coats and high fur hats, whose immemorial English faces and languid long-limbed attitudes at the reception desk made them look like thrusting fur traders from Eastcheap, awaiting a concession from the Empress. I drank my morning coffee in a shop that might have sprung from imperial Vienna, and I listened to jazz so brassily honky-tonk that I might have been in some forgotten burlesque of the Loop, thirty years ago in Chicago.

Leningrad is a humorous city. The cloakroom attendant puts your hat on your head with a delightful parody of courtly excess. Even the official guides are slyly amused by the presence in the Anti-God Museum (the Museum, that is, of the History of Religion and Atheism) of a section reverently devoted to the adulation of Lenin. The young people of Leningrad, often rakishly and sometimes brazenly dressed, preserve a sense of bubbly fun: traces of taste, style and delicacy have survived the convulsion, and there are still a few citizens whose clothes fit and whose eyes are lit with a glint of gaiety.

There are modernistic trams in Leningrad – devices I had hitherto regarded as a contradiction in terms. There are polite and mercifully unobtrusive policemen. There is a mosque like something out of Isfahan, a square in which practically every building is a theatre, a house once inhabited by the inventor of the aeroplane (twenty years, I need hardly say, before the Wrights), a Wedding Palace for the white weddings now officially encouraged in Russia, a mammoth in a museum, a vase weighing nineteen tons and twenty-five Rembrandts. Even the snow-ploughs do their work with a special kind of symmetry, moving around Palace Square in lumpish ever-decreasing circles, like old-fashioned reapers, until at last they can revolve no more, and a squad of cheerful women with brooms
and shovels leaps through their clouds of exhaust to remove the last central pile of snow, where the hare should be.

I went to a children’s puppet theatre in the afternoon and watched its entrancing fooleries among an audience so enthusiastically disorganized that it made the end-of-term play at an English village school feel like Order in opposition to Chaos. And in the evening I saw
Die
Fledermaus
, staged with a genuine rollicking panache, and so instinct with the magic of the waltz, the whirl of white skirts and the flick of tail-coats, that when I inspected the faces of the women about me, Soviet proletarians every one, I found them glazed with a true suburban enchantment.

They gave me champagne at dinner, placing a neatly folded napkin like a white cone over the bottle-top, and very late that night, with the fizz still in me, I slithered down the river bank beside the Admiralty, and crunched a path across the frozen Neva, The sky above me was a deep cold blue. The lights of the city shone dimly off the ice, like phosphorescence. The golden steeple of the Admiralty was floodlit and resplendent, like an archangel’s wand in the night, and beneath the bridge I could just make out the three tall funnels of the old cruiser
Aurora
, and the speckled lights of her portholes. Leningrad lay lucent still, even at midnight, and seemed to me like an exemplar, a paradigm, an obituary of the European ideal.

Next morning a fog fell upon the city, and you could not see across the river from one side to the other.

The most dramatic, as well as the most diligent, conductor in the world is to be seen in action at the Theatre of Opera and Ballet in Odessa. He is an elderly man, but passionate. All around him as he works peculiar things are happening. Behind, in the half-empty auditorium, a constant buzz of
homely conversation underlies the score, and three ill-shaven Levantines in the second row seem to be in the throes of opium dreams, squirming and sighing in their seats. In front, the stage is alive with minor mishaps – trap-doors mysteriously closing and opening, fans being dropped, iron accessories clattering, while the cast of
La
Traviata
, none apparently more than five feet high, smile resolutely across the footlights with a treasury of gold teeth.

The conductor is unperturbed. Majestically he sails through the confusions of the evening, impervious to them all, sometimes grunting emotionally, sometimes joining in an aria in a powerful baritone, throwing his fine head back, bending double, conspiratorially withdrawing, pugnaciously advancing, with infinite variations of mood and facial expression, and frequent hissed injunctions to the woodwind. Nobody in the socialist bloc fulfils a norm more devotedly, and nobody does more credit to the Hero City of Odessa. It is not often easy, in Moscow or Kiev, to respond to the simplicities of the Russian Revolution. In such great cities the deliberate vulgarity of communist life, the perpetual aura of baggy trousers, hair-cream and Saturday-night hop, is more depressing than endearing, and you begin to pine, however egalitarian your convictions, for a really snooty upper-crust restaurant, or the high-pitched gossip of debutantes. In a smaller provincial centre like Odessa, though, it is different. Here, far away from the dreadful workings of state, there still feels some faint suggestion of idealism to the People’s Dictatorship, a sense of simple pride and purpose: and in such a setting it is difficult not to warm to the conscientiousness of the modern urban Russians, whether it is directed towards a mastery of English vowels or the correction of a wandering contralto.

A century ago Odessa was an urbane seaport of Francophile tendencies, raised into eminence by a French satrap of the Tsar, the Comte de Richelieu. Though long stripped of its boudoir fripperies, it retains a certain faded elegance. A fine wide boulevard runs above the harbour, and from it descend the broad steps that figured in
The
Battleship
Potemkin
. There is an ornate old Bourse in Odessa, and the ghost of an English Club, the shell of a Credit Lyonnais, an Opera House of lofty traditional opulence, muse-haunted and nymph-scrolled. There is even the old building of the local Duma, dishonestly identified by Intourist as ‘yet another former Stock Exchange under the old system’. Wide, straight, and Parisian are the avenues of the city, and embedded in the thigh of a statue of de Richelieu is a cannonball from HMS
Tiger
, a ferocious visitor to these waters during the Crimean War.

Odessa was built by the Tsars as a southern outlet for Russia, and remains the second port of the Soviet Union. It faces south and east, and its quaysides are embellished with vast welcoming slogans in Arabic, Chinese, French and English – ‘Long Live Peace and Friendship’, they proclaim, ‘among the Peoples of the Whole World’. A smell of tar hangs agreeably on the Odessa air, and a fine jumble of shipping lies always inside the moles: a pair of lovely three-masters manned by cadets; two or three smart Black Sea liners, running down to Georgia or Istanbul; freighters from Latakia or Alexandria; a squat Russian warship with sloping bulbous funnels. In the summer British and Greek cruising liners, flecked with the Aegean, put in here for brief inquisitive visits; in the winter a fringe of ice loiters around the harbour, and most of the ships seem to lie there supine and deserted.