Travels with Myself and Another (37 page)

“How did it begin?”

“We met in Kiev in 1919 and went to bed the first night.”

“Love at first sight,” I said like a dummy; I never discovered how to talk with Mrs M.

“I would not call it love.” She glanced at me and I saw her then as a girl, a reckless mischievous sexy girl, not beautiful, she can’t ever have been that, but dark and small and slender and filled with the joy and excitement of living. What fun they would have had, the poet with his glowing romantic eyes and the gaiety that never left him and the girl bride. They didn’t seem to have been troubled by mundane matters like money, they earned and borrowed, roamed about, nesting wherever they found themselves, believed in poetry and music and painting and friends, hated politics but were not blind to its cruelty.

In the thirties, Stalin’s reign of terror must have been like the black plague scourging the country. The poet read aloud to a few friends, as was the custom, a new poem in which four lines branded Stalin as a murderer. One of the friends was a Judas. The four lines doomed the poet. Did Stalin himself, ruling a nation of over two hundred million people, actually learn of those four lines heard only once in private, and himself order the obscene slow destruction of this man, the loss of employment, the refusal of publication, the eradication of his published work and finally his arrest and death? Or did the machine of Stalinism, geared to crush the smallest dissent, simply mesh and roll over his life? Hitler wouldn’t have needed four lines of poetry as a reason for murder since the poet was a Jew.

“It can’t ever be so bad again,” I said.

“What?”

“The world. We’ll never have a Hitler and a Stalin again, not even a Mussolini.”

“Oh Marta,” Mrs M. said and laughed and coughed.

John Shaw, the
Time
magazine correspondent, gave me lunch in his flat in the foreigners’ ghetto and took me to the Dollar Store. This is a mini-supermarket, where foreigners can buy all the good food the heart desires, except fresh vegetables, for foreign currency, and Soviet VIPs can do the same with vouchers. I stocked up on delicacies and more whisky; we would eat well at Mrs M.’s tonight for a change.

By now I had learned the transport trick. You wait for a private car; there are not many and there is no traffic problem in Moscow. You step out from the kerb and raise one finger (one rouble), two fingers (two roubles), or if me and frantic, three fingers. The car slows and stops. You run to it and show your little piece of paper with the address in Russian. If the driver is going your way, he opens the door; if not, he shakes his head and drives on. Private enterprise. It worked much better than the taxis; the private drivers knew where they were going.

I had a big haul of food and winter clothing but it was a bad day. Mrs M. returned from the telephone looking white and shaken and spoke in Russian. Then, “They have arrested Medvedev.” Dr Medvedev had been refused permission to attend an international conference on geriatric medicine at Kiev; he went anyway as geriatrics is his speciality and was arrested. “In a telephone kiosk,” Mrs M. said. The tomtom spread this news before any reporters heard it; spread the news and the fear. Mrs M. didn’t know Medvedev but any arrest is as if the old plague had broken out again; all are in danger.

Because of this news, the atmosphere in that stifling kitchen changed. They were tense; they talked politics in their disjointed way. I don’t think they knew much more about Russia than what they heard in swirling rumours or saw in their own constricted lives. And knew still less of the outside world; foreign books are few and printed in very limited editions, the press is official propaganda not news, the radio was jammed. Somehow Vietnam came up and led to a parting of the ways. I had been in South Vietnam and that war had obsessed and tormented me for six years by then, and paralysed my life; nothing seemed worthwhile except ending this evil. They sat around the table and gave me the Nixon party line and I erupted like a volcano.

I told them they were inhuman, they could not imagine or feel any suffering except their own. They were as immoral as their government if they believed that ends justified means. We were destroying a country and a whole innocent peasant population while proclaiming that we were saving them from Communism. Had they any idea how children looked and sounded when half flayed by napalm? Could they picture an old woman screaming with a piece of white phosphorus burning in her thigh? We had uprooted and made into refugees millions of helpless people by unopposed bombing of their villages. We were hated in Vietnam and rightly; we had prevented free elections and were no better than the Nazis and Fascists helping Franco win the Spanish Civil War. This war was the greatest disgrace in American history and a denial of every moral value America was meant to stand for. It was ruining the Americans themselves in Vietnam and darkening our own land. South Vietnam was a corrupt police state and finally their talk made me sick and I was revolted to listen to it.

Well, I tell you. Since I hadn’t got a word in edgewise until that moment, they stared at me with shocked surprise, an infuriated stranger in their midst. Yuri tried to calm me while Mrs M. maddened me by making categorical statements.

“If North Vietnam wins, they will shoot three million people.”

“Why?
On what grounds do you say that?”

“Here they shot three million people.”

“Fortunately, everywhere is not Russia.” As I remember, in 1975 Vice-President Rockefeller predicted a million executions which didn’t happen either. “Why would they kill their own people? The real collabos are a very small group and they will escape; they have plenty of money outside Vietnam.”

“The Chinese will take Vietnam when the North Vietnamese win.”

“Why?
The Vietnamese have been enemies of China since God knows when. That’s why they want Soviet aid, to keep their independence from China.”

“The Chinese are terrible. Do you know they cut off the hands of the Chinese pianist who won the Tchaikovsky prize here? They executed a Chinese student who was accused of stealing ten roubles.”

Unless she had seen the handless pianist or the execution, or knew someone who swore to being an eyewitness, she could not know this was truth. It was certainly the Soviet party line.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Mrs M., talk about something else.”

A visitor, a new face to me, said, “Marta, do you not think the Spanish are better off with Franco than the Russians?”

A dirty blow. I had hated Franco all my adult life, yet Spain was better off. I could have said I thought anywhere in the western hemisphere was better off than Russia. And not only now. I could have said that Russians seemed to have a peculiar historical genius for oppressing and being oppressed. That it seemed to me they had always lived in a permanent quarantine, isolated from the changing outside world, and the quarantine itself had sickened the nation, as a life sentence in jail must deform the prisoner. That more than half of Spain had been defeated and oppressed thereafter by Franco but I didn’t believe Spaniards could be oppressed forever; they were not Russians. And said none of this because Russians are patriots and adore Mother Russia and they would have been outraged at the suggestion that the horrible wrongness of the Soviet system was also due to something wrong in Russians and Russia. I could hardly say that Spaniards had to be better off simply because they lived in Spain.

So I said, “In spite of Franco, don’t you see? I think a capitalist dictatorship works better than a communist dictatorship because people are natural capitalists. Everyone wants to own something for himself and for his family; people naturally want to earn and save and give their children a better life than they had. But all dictatorships are abominable. Some more abominable than others. You will not get me to approve of Franco just because your dictatorship is worse.”

After that, at least we could eat the goodies I had brought and I wouldn’t have minded a drop of soothing whisky. But no, everything was put away in the kitchen cupboard. It was unfair; we ate other people’s contributions. I felt a flicker of that slit-eyed complex which besets the rich; I was being used. And went away hungry and angry and stood with three fingers raised until I got a ride back to the cathedral spires. The private enterprise owner-driver dropped me far up the street, beyond the hotel, where he ran no risk of being spotted with a foreign passenger. Those unseen, watching eyes.

At seven-thirty in the morning, my American friends picked me up to go to the peasants’ market, already crowded and the liveliest place I had seen. The peasants arrived at dawn with their produce in a suitcase or a sack. They rented a foot of counter space and a weighing machine, displayed their scant wares, set their own prices and kept the money. Legal private enterprise. Mrs M. had told me that without the small vegetable gardens of the peasants the country would starve; certainly this doll-size commerce provided vegetables for Moscow.

People queued for six carrots. Lettuce was sold by the leaf. People bought one flower from one vase of flowers and walked off, holding it with extreme care and a look of rapture. The young American wife asked advice of her husband on the subject of radishes. Nothing was cheap.

Honest to God, after fifty-five years this was all the Kremlin could manage in the way of supplying fresh food to the capital. What availeth the conquest of space if you can’t organize adequate grocery stores on the ground? Isn’t it arguable that the Kremlin is more terrified of us than we have any right to be of them? Flawed as it is, our system produces a lot of butter as well as an oversupply of guns.

An American breakfast was like manna from heaven and I returned to my room. I was worn out by the heat and lay upon my bed, too limp to move, and brooded through the day. I was thinking about Poland where I spent three weeks twelve years ago, collecting material for an article about the postwar generation, those who had been small children under Nazism and grown to university age under communism. I wanted to see how this experience shaped minds and personalities. And found, contrary to logic, that personalities were of the greatest charm and gaiety and minds beautifully free, inquiring, thinking their own thoughts.

The Polish police state was in good working order; you could hear the telephone tap, an echo, a gentle whirring; my room was searched, all that kind of thing. The landscape of Poland is leaden and flat; the weather in early winter was cold rain and cold wind; poverty wrapped the country like a shroud. Warsaw still looked bombed and burned out, blackened façades, hollow buildings. War had wrecked their country and their lives. Peacetime Soviet policy was to keep Poland poor and tightly controlled. None of that mattered because of the Poles.

They are an unusually handsome people, the young quite dazzling. There was nothing heavy and patient about them. I remembered them all as quick and expressive, recklessly open. Travel was forbidden, as in Russia, but they knew about the world outside Poland, they did not seem cut off, they were Europeans, in no way alien. I arrived without any introductions and the same day began to collect funny companions of the road. It was far from prudent to welcome a strange foreign journalist into their homes and lives. I expected to be interested, I hadn’t expected to rollick through the weeks, laughing at their jokes, and loving everybody. I was bewitched by Krakow, unkempt and neglected since 1939, and so happy there that I returned a few years later just to see them all, and I am still in touch.

They knew that the régime, imposed and maintained by the Kremlin, was immovable short of war and no one wanted war ever again. They could only hope for gradual reforms. Meantime they poked fun at their rulers. It was a national sport. In a student nightclub the kids did a striptease of a Socialist Realist statue of Stalin, brassière, panties and all, to the uproarious delight of the audience and the city when news of the joke spread. The trial of those concerned was also a great pleasure. Agnostics flocked to Sunday Mass to swell the crowd outside the church doors. The older generation kissed hands everywhere, helping a lady on to a streetcar, in the corridors of the law courts, in grocery shops, at every chance encounter on the street. Manners were of a special old-world courtliness and everyone was carefully called “
Pan,
” “
Pani,
” Monsieur, Madame, never Comrade. They abhorred the Nazis but talked with a curious condescension of Russians, their dull clumsy masters. They dreamed of Scandinavian Socialism as the ideal form of government. Poles were no more free than Russians but they had kept a private freedom and with what panache, what bravado and style.

There was nothing like that in Mother Russia. This city was out of the world, literally. Out of any world I knew, not part of Europe, altogether alien. Either the octopus state had squeezed the life from these people or else they were hiding behind those joyless faces, mistrusting each other, never knowing who informed. The Poles, the Hungarians, even the regimented East Germans, even the slow Czechs had rebelled against the insane oppression of Stalinism; why not the Russians? Russians had suffered more and longer than any others exposed to such government. Was the country simply too big, revolt impossible because it could not be planned and coordinated? Or were these strong heavy people unable to imagine any other government except rule by force? They endured their tsars from first to last, then endured plebeian tsars. They needed another revolution to break the age-old Russian pattern of prisoners and jailers but that was their problem.

I pitied the prisoners and admired with awe those who had the iron courage to dissent. But oh me oh my, a very little of this country went a very long way. The worst hardship of any horror journey is boredom. Never having been in prison I cannot say what it is actually like to be stir-crazy, but I thought it must be boredom to the degree of pain and I was so afflicted here and now. Malaria would seem exciting compared to this, and preferable. Summoning up Mr Ma’s tigers always made me laugh and steadied my sense of proportion. Mr Ma’s tigers were no help here. I felt that my brain, my skin, my bones, my soul were turning concrete grey, the very colour of Moscow.