Travels with Myself and Another (38 page)

So I rose in the afternoon and used a toothbrush glass to give myself a shower in the grimy bathtub and set off for Mrs M.’s flat with the last of the loot, stationery and Biros and remaining winter clothes. It was my duty and there were only two more days.

At noon an Establishment figure was to call for me and take me to lunch in the country. I had met him a few days earlier at an eerie little dinner party given by a journalist. Alex was a slim Italianate young man,
fils à papa,
papa being a very big shot in the régime. This sample of second-generation privilege seemed naïve and harmless and I was curious about the life of the upper class. At noon, I was in the hotel lobby, ready to leave. At twelve forty-five, I queued for the lift to return to my room where I waited with increasing anger for a telephone call. At one-thirty, I decided I would have to descend again, cross the street and beg a crust from John Shaw or my Americans. In the lobby I saw Alex, flustered but cheerful. He rushed up and said, “I am sorry to be a little late. It took more time to arrange the camera.”

“You are an hour and a half late,” I said, in the manner of Edith Wharton displeased. “What camera?”

“The TV camera, there by the door. You can talk for fifteen minutes or so about American writers, for the cultural programme.”

I turned on him like a striking cobra. “How
dare
you come here an hour and a half late with a TV camera? Who gave you permission to do such a thing? What makes you think I would dream of talking for your TV about anything at all? I consider this the damnedest insolence I have ever seen.”

“Please, do not be so angry! I will send them away if you wish.”

“You will certainly send them away at once and the only reason I don’t send you away is that I can’t get lunch without you.”

In this mood of happy camaraderie, we drove off in his little Russian Fiat. He was cowed and apologetic and I was haughty. We crossed a brown river where people were bathing and sunning on the banks; the first agreeable sight thus far.

“We will go to my
dacha.
”

Visions of caviare and iced vodka cheered me immensely. I would be glad to lap up some of their concealed luxury. In a clearing among undistinguished trees, the
dacha
was a small stone house, half built. We clambered over the usual debris and Alex called a name. “She is upstairs.”

The house might have charm when finished but in its present state didn’t look as if it would provide caviare and iced vodka. On the second floor, in a room where evidently they camped, Alex introduced his fiancée, Vera. His divorce was not quite complete. I was impressed by the Russian talent for squalor. There would have been no period in my life, irrespective of finances, when I would have wished to weekend in a room like that. The young woman had long brown hair, a friendly eager face, and the best body I had seen which meant it was normal for her age, not overweight or bowlegged. She spoke only Russian.

“Alex, what about food?” I said, trying to keep a snarl out of my voice.

“Yes, yes, we are going now to the restaurant.”

The countryside was flat with mediocre trees, featureless Middle West. The restaurant, possibly the Moscow version of Pré Catalan, faced a thick shady wood. The building was a modern box with plate glass windows, from floor to ceiling, a wide terrace covered by tables, and an imposing collection of parked private cars. Every table was occupied.

Alex said, “We will look at the Yusupov Museum and then there will be a table.”

It was now three forty-five, less hot than in Moscow but plenty hot, and I thought this young man a flop. First a TV camera, then his useless dacha and now no reserved table. The Yusupov Museum was once a country house of Prince Yusupov, very pretty in the Palladian style. Visitors put on large felt slippers over their shoes so as not to mar the parquet. People were shuffling through the rooms in respectful silence, admiring a few pieces of furniture, some paintings, some china in showcases.

“Do you like it?” Alex asked. “It is a very beautiful palace.”

“It’s a nice house,” I said. “But you can’t expect me to get terribly excited. There are hundreds of Palladian houses in Italy and some in Ireland and England. Not museums. People live in them.” Heat and hunger do not stimulate good nature or even good manners.

There was still no free table on the restaurant terrace; we could sit inside. Sun came through the sealed plate glass windows like a laser beam. This chic joint for the Moscow élite was served by three tired sweating disaffected waiters. Alex made unavailing signs and signals. Time passed. It was now five-fifteen. As a lunch hour, it left much to be desired.

When the waiter grudgingly addressed us, he informed Alex that there was nothing cold to drink; for food, the spécialité du jour was goulash. “He says in half an hour.”

“Alex, tell me, what do the poor do here when they want to have a lovely Sunday outing?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’ve seen the pleasures of the rich and I’m going to have a fit if I stay here another minute. Haven’t you got some food in your flat in Moscow?”

Alex drove like the Monte Carlo Rally, too; perhaps moving at speed in their cars was the only sensation of freedom in this blighted land. Speaking for them both, Alex said how much they admired American writers. Why did so few visit Russia? I pointed out that a country where native writers are killed or incarcerated isn’t apt to tempt foreign writers. Hemingway was their hero; Alex talked about him the way kids used to rave about baseball kings and movie stars when I was young. Previously Jack London was the Russians’ favourite. They couldn’t understand why Hemingway had never come here where he was so loved.

“If he had been Russian, you would have killed him. You killed Babel, and he’s your Hemingway.”

After an unhappy silence, Alex said, “I am not on the side of the killers.”

“What is it about this country? Why does your government persecute writers?”

“Idiotisme.”

“Cheer up, when you come to power you can change all that.”

“People like me will never come to power. This country is run by provincial engineers. They choose and train others like them.”

“Alex, to tell you the truth, I have lost all interest in this country. I am interested in nothing except food and strong drink.”

They talked in Russian. “I am afraid there will not be anything to drink. Vera says she has nothing and this week there is a new law against alcoholism. Vodka isn’t sold on Saturday or Sunday to prevent the workers from spending their week’s money and getting drunk.”

The last small comfort left to the downtrodden masses. In Poland there would have been instant riots. I was beginning to feel that obedience was a sin. It didn’t occur to Alex that there would be any trouble from the deprived working class or that there was anything to think about, such as: why do they all get dead drunk, might it not be an indication that life was scarcely roses.

At six o’clock we climbed wearily to Vera’s apartment on the top floor of a building and larger than Mrs M.’s but so poor, so bleak, so graceless. I got a cheese sandwich.

“One thing about Russia,” I said. “It teaches you to count your blessings.”

“I do not know that expression: ‘count your blessings.’ ”

“Well no, why should you?”

Mrs M. and I were dining out. The parents of the twelve-year-old stamp merchant had invited us to a farewell celebration. In the taxi I told Mrs M. the Babel repartee. She said, “Babel was so afraid of dying that he went every day to the KGB chief and to Gorky. But the KGB chief was executed and Gorky never helped anyone.” Babel had fought bravely in the Civil War; his writing is beautiful and not the work of a coward; being hunted by the KGB terrifies everyone. Had it not terrified her and her husband? Her book described their scurrying search for aid and safety. She wasn’t the only one in this part of the world who had led a frightful life; and besides Babel was dead.

I followed her up the badly lit dirty stairs, thinking unfriendly thoughts. Who said suffering ennobles? Probably someone who had never suffered. There is no reason for suffering to ennoble; above all, it tires and hardens. Mrs M. had had the wrong sort of suffering; long, grinding, sad, lonely; thirty years of fear and no one to trust and talk to. She had pretty well lost the quality of compassion along the way.

Ahead of me, Mrs M. panted like an animal in distress. She could hardly breathe even when not climbing stairs, the heat was torture for her. She leaned against the doorpost, trying to get back her breath before seeing her friends. She looked so old—and seventy-two isn’t a great age in our world—and small and exhausted that my own compassion, which had been drying up, flowed again.

This flat was much pleasanter than Mrs M.’s, one big room walled from floor to ceiling with books, a big table covered with books and papers, a daybed, a few chairs. Another room unseen. The parents, the boy (now at a holiday camp) and the grandmother lived here. Grandmothers are essential as nannies and housewives in the Russian family where both parents work from necessity. Baba Nadia was seventy and looked a healthy pink-cheeked happy eighty. That night she was leaving for the country to take care of Solzhenitsyn and his child while Solzhenitsyn’s wife had her second baby. “Nadia says Solzhenitsyn is a good man,” Mrs M. reported. That made Solzhenitsyn all right; recommended by a member of her own circle.

We ate from plates on our laps, balancing on the daybed. The other guests were young Yuri and a woman who spoke good English and wanted to talk about religion. She was a Believer. It would have been a better party without me though I wasn’t much in the way, only as politeness required occasional translation. They were very jolly; a dinner party is a rare occasion; they chattered, giggled, argued. Suddenly I wanted to say: “In London the bus conductors, whether men or women, white or black or brown, call you ‘ducks’ and ‘love.’ Sometimes an inspector gets on to check the tickets. Last week an inspector gave back my ticket and said, ‘Thank you, my blossom.’ ” I felt a great need to tell them this vital information but they wouldn’t have understood.

Mrs M. said, “Marta, are you afraid?”

“Is that what you’re talking about? Fear?”

“We do not have to talk of it. We feel it always. And you?”

“No. I feel angry. Every minute about everything.” But that was half the truth. I felt fear too, you breathed it like nerve gas in the air. An irrational fear that I wouldn’t get out of this claustrophobic prison-land. A nagging fear for all of them. And a specific fear about the hour of reckoning with my suitcase. I was bitterly angry that I was driven to feel fear, I was humiliated by it, it was an insult to my self-respect. If I hated six days of this emotion with such passion, how did they handle lifetimes of what must end as self-hate.

They made sweet speeches and presented me with gifts as mementoes of my visit to Moscow. I knew I wouldn’t dare to pack this tray, this box, this vase; how could I explain them if my suitcase was inspected. And truly I did not wish for souvenirs of Moscow though touched by their generosity, and grieved that they had spent any of their money on me.

Mrs M. had been talking with our hostess and coughing and suddenly she stood up, bent almost double, with her hand clamped against her side. I thought: this is it, the heart attack, or whatever happens when the lungs collapse. I was on my feet too, saying “What’s the matter? What’s wrong? Shouldn’t she lie down?” They were all babbling and strangely merry. When Mrs M. could breathe and stand up straight she explained that she had got a stitch in her side from laughing.

All I had to do was deposit the farewell gifts with my American friends and rush out to Mrs M.’s for a last quick visit. I tried not to look as joyful as I felt. Mrs M. had visitors, of course, a smiling dark-haired woman and her beautiful husband, a giant with a blond beard and cornflower eyes, and their attractive fair-haired son, a student at the University. The parents were also Believers. The man showed me the small wooden cross he wore around his neck under his shirt; his wife had a hidden silver cross. “We all do so,” the wife said. Like the talisman of a secret society. Mrs M. said to the boy, “Tell Marta what the young think.”

I guessed that he was bored by this family call, embarrassed, longing to get away from the old folks. He said, “Nobody believes what they tell us but nobody fights. Everyone wants to live without trouble and have as good a material life as possible. For that, it is better to be in the Party but they are not serious.”

Now I had kissed Mrs M. and was off. Pick up my suitcase; taxi to the airport; home in London tonight. It was extraordinary, I thought, none of them had asked me one question about life where I came from, not a single inquiry of any kind. Yet apart from Mrs M., who had been abroad before the First World War, and the Ambassador’s widow, and Alex who had made a trip to South America, none had been outside Russia. I kept trying to remember something I had read about a species of fish that was born, lived, spawned, died in the dark waters of a cave; and all were blind.

There was a final scene at the hotel. I started to carry my suitcase from my room. A manservant and two stalwart maids were chatting in the hall. The man took the suitcase. I assumed he would carry it downstairs. I waited by the lift but nothing happened, walked back down the corridor and saw my suitcase. Picked it up. Was told by the floor wardress that I could not carry it. WHY? Because she must telephone downstairs for a porter to come up and collect it. WHY? It is the rule.
Do it, do it, do it,
I jabbered. And let me get out of this vile country before I blow my top.

My American friend was busy and could not escort me through Customs. He delegated the job to an amiable Englishman who was puzzled by my trembly condition. I was rehearsing my speech about the suitcase: I own only one suitcase and could not afford to come here
and
buy a smaller suitcase, but I couldn’t resist this beautiful yellow brocade, we have nothing as fine in the West. Again we sailed past Customs without a glance. Again the sun pierced like a laser beam in the glass-walled exit hall. There was nothing to see, eat, or buy and a delay in departure which caused me to smoke twelve cigarettes, bite two fingernails and age considerably.