Murderers and Other Friends (25 page)

Emily is twenty-one. I am sitting in a rehearsal room in the Moscow Arts Theatre watching her acting lesson. The room is large and apparently airtight. Like all rehearsal rooms, it's dusty, unswept and provided only with a few clapped out pieces of furniture. The director is tall with floppy hair and, unlike English directors who sit motionless, making notes, he acts all the time, giving a larger than life demonstration of all the performances. The scene takes place in the bedroom of a suspicious husband who has just brought his wife home from a ball. Everyone is smoking tirelessly while they act or direct. Emily has a long speech and is making beautiful sounds which I cannot understand. The play is by Lermontov, the director is an actor at the Moscow Arts Theatre, the others are students. All Russians act hugely, with thrilling voices and flamboyant gestures. During a break I ask the director how he gets his actors to act so energetically, when it's quite hard to persuade English actors to move their mouths. Large and expansive gestures come naturally to Russians, he says, and tells the following story: ‘A man is lost in a strange city. He sees a local inhabitant coming down the street towards him, carrying a huge watermelon, so he asks him the way to the Nijinsky Prospekt, or whatever the street he wants is called. “Just hold my watermelon a moment,” the local inhabitant says, and when relieved of his burden he opens his arms in a great gesture of comic despair. “How the hell should I know?” he says, and then he asks for his watermelon back.'

It was in the sixties, during Russia's bad times, that I first saw Moscow. I remember being sent out, armed only with a phrase book which contained no apposite entry, and a hazy memory of the Greek alphabet, into Red Square on a Sunday morning to buy sanitary towels. Russia is always unpredictable but, surprisingly enough, my mission was successful. In this it was unlike our attempts to get permission to film a version of Anthony Burgess's novel
Honey for the Bears
in what was then the Soviet Union. At endless meetings in a variety of ministries our requests to make this story, which concerned the illegal importation of a suitcase full of nylon underwear, were greeted with encouraging smiles until the final, unvarying
niet
from the top.

I remember the long car rides through birch trees, the children in their red pioneer uniforms dancing for us in restored palaces, and then applauding us with well-drilled charm. I remember a night in a Leningrad hotel, watching a Chinese general in full military uniform waltzing with an elderly gentleman who looked like a senior civil servant in a black jacket and striped trousers. I remember the breakfast that took three hours to come, which I used to order a careful two and a half hours before my then wife woke up, so that she and the cold hard-boiled egg and bottles of beer might, if we were lucky, arrive in the dining-room at the same time. I remember the first sight of gold, onion domes and spires across the water, and men stripped to the waist standing to sunbathe against south-facing walls. Through all the smiling, meaningless conversations in the offices of the film bureaucracy I never forgot Chekhov.

I had first read the plays during the school holidays, and I thought his characters very like us, members of a doomed middle class, living an uneventful life in the country, carrying on a daily battle against boredom. I read them sitting in the garden on long summer evenings, tormented by midges, lonely because my father didn't encourage visitors who might be embarrassingly sympathetic about his blindness. The empty time, aching to be filled, was something I could recognize, as were the unexpected moments of high drama, which came, like all great tragedy, mixed with farce. Later, and with growing excitement, I read Dostoevsky. I revelled in the bizarre comedy and the courage of characters pushed beyond the limits of endurance. I could admire him from the rational calm of an English home where religious passion, self-abasement, wild extravagance and epileptic fits would all be greeted with a nervous smile and a retreat into the shrubbery. In those days Russia meant the story of a seagull shot beside the lake; lovers kissing in the snow of the Nevsky Prospekt; the huge, comical, grotesque, weeping figure of the father of the Karamazovs; and the tap of a hammer on the wheels of Anna Karenina's train. Russia was all in books, and Moscow still seems to me, even after its conquest by McDonald's, the most literary city in the world, the place where people still read seriously on the metro.

During the war the Russians were our heroic allies, standing firm at Stalingrad, luring Hitler to defeat, afflicted neither by Chekhov's poetic uncertainty nor Dostoevsky's penetrating hysteria. After the war Winston and Uncle Joe, smiling broadly, carved Europe up and we discovered the full horror of Stalinist dictatorship. We settled down into that comfortable ice age, the Cold War, where everyone thought they knew who the enemy was and the world was kept comparatively quiet by an imaginary balance of terror. I didn't go back to Russia until the start of the thaw. It was 1988, Gorbachev was in power and he had just stopped a particularly senseless war in Afghanistan. The future seemed warm and bright and no one imagined that the melting ice would end in a torrent of uncheckable racial hatred. I went to Moscow with our National Theatre which was performing Shakespeare's three last plays, autumnal stories of forgiveness. The Company was led by Tim Piggott-Smith, an actor who had shown great power in the television version of
The Jewel in the Crown
, Eileen Atkins and Geraldine James. I was there to chronicle their progress through a land an American president had called ‘barbaric'. It was also a place of beautiful buildings, hilarious evenings and people of great generosity and warmth.

Actors on tour, and film units on location, bring their own world with them, like snails in shells or armies on the march. They bring their jealousies, love affairs, rivalries, disappointments and the expectation of five-star treatment once they are sent abroad. Such luxury was not readily available in the Peking Hotel in Mayakovsky Square, a gloomy building, decorated inside like an old touring set for
Chu Chin Chow.
When, after prolonged formalities, I was shown into my vast bedroom it became apparent, in the gloaming, that two men in blue suits were lying on my bed, eating cucumbers from a plastic bag. Having no Russian I didn't know how to invite them to leave, so I unpacked, hung up my clothes in cavernous cupboards and, when my visitors started to refresh themselves from a carton of milk, I went off to find the lady at the end of the passage. These custodians of the keys used to be large and unsmiling; with the advent of glasnost I found a youngish blonde wrapped in an eiderdown and she, after some argument, persuaded my visitors to leave. One of the actors was less fortunate. Coming back late at night, he found a man in his bed watching television. When he protested, the girl at the end of his passage nodded understandingly and fetched a camp bed which she erected so that he, and his newfound friend, could watch television together.

Peter Hall, who directed the last plays of reconciliation with great simplicity and understanding, did not care for Russia. I had known him so long, off and on through his various marriages, and we had sat together so often in the National Theatre boardroom, where he displayed those extraordinary political skills which are even more impressive than his understanding of Shakespeare's verse. His life had been a marvellously organized flight from the small town where his father was stationmaster, the single bar of an electric fire to study by, and the relations who called birth a ‘happy event' and death a ‘merciful release'. Moscow seemed, to him, to be everything he had escaped. Breakfast at the Peking Hotel, consisting as it did of pork and roast potatoes, rice pudding, buttermilk and cold soft-boiled eggs, appealed to him not at all. The ponderous Russian critics, trained in Marxist dialectic, said they failed to find a ‘social message' in his productions. Glasnost, Peter judged, had changed nothing and Moscow, hot as Antibes and smelling of lilac and petrol fumes, was irredeemably working class. Some of the actors were invited to Sunday lunch in the country. Unfortunately their journey took them through a prohibited military zone and they came back with tales of having been chased by the police, hiding in ditches and lying flat on the floor of their host's bedroom when the authorities came to look for them. Peter, it seemed, had taken a wiser course: a taxi to the airport and a plane back to London. He left the Russians a marvellous production of
Cymbeline,
which had no message except its story of past injustices and old brutalities forgiven. As the king at the end of the play says, ‘Pardon's the word to all.'

‘In the West I know you can go into a shop at the end of the street and find twenty-five different sorts of yoghurt. Here you are lucky if you find one sort. I tell you, life for us is so hard. We have so little and have to queue for it so long. What can we do but live a rich inner life? So we read books and poetry and, when we can, we go to the theatre.' I was talking to Olga, a university graduate and a poet who had translated for me at the Theatre Workers' Union. She said she had not been feeling well recently; it seemed to her that she was about to die. The reason, of course, was that her mother was casting spells on her. ‘Why on earth should she do that?' I asked, not questioning the spells. ‘Mainly, I think, because she wants to get me out of the apartment where my husband and I and our child are living with her and my stepfather and his child by a previous marriage. I am sure that my mother is burning a candle in church from the wrong end, which I know is the way to kill someone. When I was a small girl my mother loved me, but now I have grown to be a beautiful woman she is very jealous. Of course, I have to pray very hard to recover from the illness my mother has brought upon me.' The conflict of families and incantations in one small apartment was terrible to contemplate. Not only Orthodox religion and the love of icons but a reliance on witchcraft seemed to have survived Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev and the age of reason.

‘I am translating this short story,' Olga told me as we were walking down what was then still Gorky Street, ‘and I came to the following sentence, “He called in to the motel for a meal and a good bonk.” How should I translate, please, “a good bonk”? Is it a beer, perhaps, or a cup of coffee?'

‘It takes a bit of explaining,' I told her. ‘Shall we go and have a drink at the National Hotel?'

‘Oh, you mean,' she smiled charmingly, ‘have a good bonk?'

We sat at lunch with our new friend, Henrietta Dobryakova, a short, plump, middle-aged woman with the eyes of a schoolgirl. She worked at the Stanislavsky Museum, sitting among the master's furniture and luggage, his books, photographs and the costumes he had designed for him by Gordon Craig, longing for a cigarette. Her husband, surprisingly young-looking and slender, made children's films. Henrietta spoke English caressingly, in a voice which seemed to be making a gently amorous approach to the language. We were entertaining the Professor, small, grey-haired and opinionated, an elderly man whose son had been imprisoned for his beliefs in the Brezhnev era. Now he spent his time caring for his sick wife and studying the life and works of H.G. Wells. Geraldine James was with us, the actress with a mass of red hair, Imogen who became the boy Fidele, at whose supposed death the lines ‘Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust' are sung. Geraldine was a good friend to take to the holy city of Zagorsk or share champanski and red caviare with in the National Hotel.

Henrietta was talking about a previous short-lived thaw, the momentary appearance of glasnost when Khrushchev was in power. ‘He promised us freedom,' she told us, ‘but all we got were the Olympic Games.'

‘My mother was English, my father was a Russian working in China,' the Professor told us. ‘They chose Russia as the best country in the world. So see what a life they gave me! A good deal of war. A lot of Stalin. A moment of hope with Khrushchev and then years of Brezhnev, who was too stupid to open his mouth without a bit of paper in his hand. And now freedom when I'm too old to enjoy it.'

‘Are the workers really interested in freedom to write books and plays? Don't they want more food to buy?' I asked. A huge shop window in Gorky Street contained no more than three yellowing cabbages, each mounted on an ornate stand.

‘I have no idea what the workers want.' The Professor gave me a lofty smile. ‘I am of the intelligentsia. I know little of the workers.' I thought Peter Hall had been mistaken in thinking Russia a working-class society. ‘I do not know what will happen, quite honestly,' he went on. ‘We would like Gorbachev to win but Russia has eighteen million bureaucrats who have their jobs to look after. They don't want too much change.'

‘In Stalin's time,' Olga said in a wistful fashion, ‘the bureaucrats could have been killed off, but that's not the way we do things now.'

‘What will you take?' The Professor was studying the menu, prepared to eat for the intelligentsia. ‘The red caviare, I think. And then will you take piglet? I see that they have it.'

‘I don't think I'm very keen on piglet,' Geraldine confessed.

‘Why not?' The Professor fixed her with a gimlet eye. He was at his most challenging. ‘Why shouldn't you like it? Haven't you an actor in your company, Tim Piglet-Smith?'

‘Do you ever feel tempted to leave Russia?' I asked, remembering his account of the political history of his lifetime and trying to drag the conversation back to world events.

‘Leave? Why should I leave?'

‘You're a Jew. Your son was in prison. Didn't you ever think of leaving?'

‘Of course not. This is my country. Anywhere else I should be a stranger.'

Henrietta took me to visit the Director of the Moscow Arts Theatre – Mr Yefremov, thin, fine-boned, as elegantly dressed as one of the light comedy performers of the Rex Harrison period. Acting as an interpreter, Henrietta was unusually nervous and in considerable awe of Mr Yefremov. I also knew that she was afraid to smoke in his presence and was longing for the moment when she would be free to dash to the room in the Arts Theatre dedicated to smoking and, feeling her way through grey clouds as thick as those that hang over the stage during a Royal Shakespeare battle scene, light up a Cosmos. To add to her torment, Mr Yefremov himself applied a gold and tortoiseshell lighter to a Chesterfield. ‘When all books and newspapers were censored,' he said, ‘the theatre had to speak out and take the lead with new ideas. Now the newspapers are free to discuss everything and the theatre can return to its proper work.'