Writing Home (27 page)

Meanwhile the press continue at their games, and Mrs Thatcher attacks media ethics. But of course she doesn’t mean Mr Murdoch (whom she regularly invites to Christmas Dinner); what she means is the investigative reporting of the Gibraltar shootings.

10
–
20
May
. I spend ten days in Russia on a visit arranged by the Great Britain-USSR Society. My colleagues are the novelists Paul Bailey, Christopher Hope and Timothy Mo (who also writes for
Boxing News
), the poet Craig Raine (who doesn’t) and the playwright Sue Townsend, of
Adrian Mole
fame. I have many misgivings about the trip, particularly in regard to creature comforts. I wonder, for instance, if the Russians have got round to mineral water. John Sturrock reassures me. ‘Haven’t you heard of Perrierstroika?’

The Writers ‘Union is a pleasant one-storeyed nineteenth-century building set round a leafy courtyard and currently being refurbished against Mr Reagan’s visit. He is to have lunch here. We are never going to have lunch, it seems, as this introductory session of talks began at ten and it is now I.30 with no sign of it ending. We sit down one side of a long green-baize-covered table with the Soviet writers on the other, the most eye-catching of them the playwright Mikhail Shatrov, a stocky middle-aged man with a pallor so striking Sue Townsend insists it owes something to Max Factor. Shatrov is seemingly contemptuous of these proceedings; he arrives late, ostentatiously reads a newspaper during the speeches, and from time to time points out items of interest to his colleagues. Sceptical of the purpose of formal discussions like these, I find Shatrov’s attitude not unsympathetic, particularly when the talk turns to the writer’s role in society. I feel like a not very expert motor mechanic taking part in a discussion on national transport policy. Presiding over the meeting is Professor Zassoursky, who holds the chair of journalism at Moscow University. He is an urbane and elegant figure (in what looks like a Brooks Brothers suit), and witty with it. The talk among the Soviet writers is all of the coming Party Congress, which they hope will enforce the retirement of the heads of the Musicians’ and Writers’ Unions, both notorious hard-liners. ‘But if they resign,’ says Zassoursky, ‘it could even be worse. After all, they might start writing again.’ The Hotel Ukraina, where we are staying, looks like the Gotham or the Dakota, those monstrous nineteenth-century mansions on New York’s Central Park West, though this and dozens of buildings like it were built fifty or sixty years later by Stalin. Like the Writers’ Union, the Ukraina is being refurbished against The Visit, the refurbishment taking the form of new three-ply cabinets to encase the (old) TV sets. My room has a fridge which lights up nicely but otherwise just makes the
contents (one bottle of mineral water) sweat. An engineer comes and looks at it but is baffled. It is hard to understand, with simple technology such a mystery, why they haven’t blown us all up years ago. ‘Be fair,’ says Sue Townsend: ‘I believe they do a very good smelter.’

I am disturbed to find Melvyn Bragg working in the hotel as a doorman. He pretends not to recognize me.

To Massenet’s
Werther
at the Bolshoi. It is an indifferent production, the scenery and sets almost music-hall, but the house is packed, and Nina and Galina, our guides, say that this is the first time for years they have managed to get a ticket – which makes us all feel worse for not enjoying it. Someone who is enjoying it is Melvyn Bragg, this time in the back row of the chorus.

Though food is pretty basic, I find meals the high points of each day, just as they are when filming. One talks about food, thinks about it, and tonight, returning from the opera, we are mortified to find we are too late for supper. Anne Vaughan, our organizer, braves the kitchen, and eventually a waitress takes pity on us and gives us some bread and ham and a bit of dog-eared salad, which we take upstairs in plastic bags. ‘You must be very hungry,’ says a man in the lift. ‘What country are you coming from?’

Another session at the Writers ‘Union. Most of the writers we talk to are likeable, decent people and it is this that makes it difficult to raise potentially embarrassing issues like dissidence. If these were fanatical hard-liners it would be easy to ask the hard questions, but they are not. One tells us how she has just translated
Animal Farm
(’Not a good book,’ one of us says prissily), and they are so obviously thrilled with what is happening that to inquire, say, about psychiatric punishment seems tactless. What one does not get from them is any sense of
what they think of each other. They hear out each other’s speeches without comment or dissent, and only when Bogus-lavskaya (Mrs Voznesensky) makes a long self-regarding speech and shortly afterwards sweeps out does one get some hint that they think she is tiresome too.

Breakfast (food again) is self-service and is generally a relatively tranquil meal, but this morning I come down to find we have been invaded by the American Friendship Society (‘Lois Ravenna Jr,’ says the name tag of the lady opposite). They are a middle-aged to elderly group, ladies whom I would call ‘game’ (and Barry Humphries ‘spunky’). They know they cannot expect the creature comforts on offer at the Wichita Hilton, but they are determined not to complain or be defeated. This sometimes leads them into absurdity. One old lady, not noticing the nearby pile of plates, assumes the plate is just another refinement the Soviet Union has not got round to. No matter. She grits her teeth and piles meat balls on one corner of her tray and porridge on to another, a practice she can only be familiar with from Hollywood prison movies.

Another visit to the Bolshoi, this time for an evening of ballet excerpts. Note the universal presence, even here at the ballet, of small, square old men, their jackets buckling under the weight of medals and ribbons, and looking like the Eastern Front in person. By now I am unsurprised to find Melvyn is in the ballet as well as the opera, and he even takes a curtain call, accompanied, as ballet calls are the world over, by a deadly hail of tulips.

I have seen only one bit of graffiti in Moscow, a faint felt-tip scrawl on the huge revolving doors of the Ukraina: ‘Be Attention. Aids!’

To the Novodevichnaya Cemetery to see the grave of Chekhov.
However, today is Saturday, relatives ‘day, and, since we are only tourists and no one, not even Timothy Mo, is related to Chekhov, we are not admitted. Galina, the sterner of our guides, goes into the gateman’s office to argue it out.’ I have a delegation of British writers outside.’ The man shrugs. ‘But these are
writers
.’ ‘So? I am a reader.’ One had not thought deconstruc-tion had reached so far.

After lunch at the Georgian State restaurant near Pushkin Square we stroll back through the Arbat, a pedestrian precinct crowded with shoppers and sightseers this Saturday afternoon. With its seats and bulbous lamp-standards, street pedlars and guitar-players, it could be a precinct anywhere in Western Europe. (‘The Russians are like us; they have precincts.’) The difference, of course, is that there is virtually nothing in the shops. There are queues for ice-cream and queues for coffee, but, that apart, no one is selling anything resembling food.

I go into a stationer’s to buy an exercise book (the word
tetradka
surfacing unbidden from my Russian learned and forgotten thirty-five years ago). Even in the stationer’s there is a queue, and a bored shop-girl serving a little boy has him trembling on the edge of tears, so I come out.

Going into the shop has made me lose the others, and hurrying to catch up I pass a middle-aged woman stood at a podium improvised from a cardboard box. It has something written on the front in pencil, and on a bench nearby sit a man and a boy whom I take to be her husband and son. She is making an impassioned speech to which no one is listening, the husband looking shamefaced and the boy turning away in embarrassment. Not wanting to contribute to their discomfort, I do not listen to her either, or try to read what is written on the box. It is only after I have walked on that I wonder if this is a political protest and think maybe that is what dissidence is like –
embarrassing to the general public, shaming for the immediate family, getting a dose of freedom like getting a dose of Jesus.

By overnight train to Orel. It is a bad night, and we have to be up at six. Me: ‘There are two men playing chess in the next compartment.’ Craig Raine: One of them isn’t Death by any chance?’

None of us has ever heard of Orel, and when we come out of the station we realize why: it is Loughborough. We are met by our Intourist guide, Marina, a youngish woman, sturdy, solid and with a wide-eyed humourless look I find familiar but hard to place. Of course: what is missing is the wimple. She is a nun. ‘Now’, she says briskly, ‘we have arrived at our place of destination.’ We get into our bus and she seizes the intercom. ‘Allow me to compliment you on your choice of season for coming to our city. It is spring and, as you see, everything is not yet bare still. After your breakfast we will pick up, so to speak, some other writers from the centre of our city and visit the war memorials.’

Even on the short journey to the motel one detects the difference in atmosphere between here and Moscow. There we had scarcely seen a slogan, and Sue thought that even the pictures of Lenin were not as common as a few years back. Here he is very much in evidence, and every factory and public building is still surmounted by calls to action. ‘All Power to Soviet Youth.’ ‘Long Live the Working Class.’ Marina drives the point home. ‘Let me say something of Orel centre. The city was a witness to many historical events. It has a prolonged form along the river, and was one of the fifteen most ruined cities by the Fascists. On the right is a monument not to any concrete personality, so to speak, but to the distinction of Orel Steel Rolling Mill, which outports to sixty countries in the world.’ It is seven o’clock on Sunday morning.

The morning having been devoted to war, the afternoon is set aside for art. ‘Here is our museum of Orel writers,’ announces Marina as our bus draws up. ‘Now we are getting out and coming in.’ The Orel writers turn out to be Fet, Bunin, Andreev, Novikov and (somewhere out in the country) Turgenev. What they all have in common, having been born in Orel, is that they got out of it at the earliest opportunity. The museum is full of dark Edwardian furniture. It is like a succession of dentists’ waiting-rooms. Soon I am moaning aloud with boredom and I begin to realize what the Queen must feel like.

A tea party to meet the present-day writers of Orel – the ones who haven’t managed to get away, that is. My neighbour is a burly playwright who looks more like a butcher. ‘Do you like Orel?’ I begin vapidly. He shrugs. ‘He says it is nice,’ Marina explains – ‘less rushing than in Moscow.’ ‘Were you born here?’ I ask. ‘No. He was born in Siberia.’ Maybe it is the mention of Siberia that galvanizes Marina, but she decides we have spent long enough on the social chit-chat and ought to get down to business. ‘What is love?’ she asks firmly. ‘That is good question to discuss. Love is, so to speak, many things. Let us discuss that as writers.’ Instead we discuss literature, and in particular Jerome K. Jerome’s
Three Men in the Same Boat
.

We drive sixty kilometres to the east to visit Turgenev’s birthplace. Wide-verged roads, thin woods, rolling countryside: the tanks must have had a field day. Marina has the mike again. ‘Permit me to say a couple of words about the vegetation of Orel region. There are oak trees, pine trees, birch trees. There are in all many grown-up trees.’ Two of the local writers accompanying us take a fancy to Sue Townsend, taking turns to sit next to her, and these manoeuvres generate a sense of hysteria in our party.

Lunch is taken at a ranch-style roadhouse in a room hung with chandeliers used for banquets and weddings. We have scarcely started on the food when the toasts begin, the writers popping up one after the other to give long rambling speeches about peace and friendship and the Russian soul. I remember the Russian soul. It was much in evidence thirty-five years ago when I was on the Joint-Services Russian course at Cambridge; it was always a useful theme to pad out one’s weekly essay. None of the writers in Moscow had mentioned it, but here it was in Orel, still alive and kicking. When the lengthy meal is finished, we climb wearily back into the bus, whereupon Oleg, the leader of the Orel writers (and one of the suitors for Ms Townsend), proceeds to harangue us further on the Russian soul. We become more and more hysterical. ‘I had been told the English were reserved people,’ says Marina, ‘but you laugh all the time.’ And of course knowing we are behaving disgracefully doesn’t help.

When we reach Turgenev’s villa, Sue Townsend, Craig Raine and I avoid the guided tour and wander by the lake. We then do a perfunctory tour of the house (more dentists’ waiting-rooms) and sit by the village pond just outside the gates. The back gardens of some wooden cottages run down to the pond, and a peasant woman stands on a little jetty washing some buckets. Children play by a lower pond, and geese usher their goslings down to the water. It could be a theme park, of course, but it doesn’t look to have changed much since the nineteenth century. It’s the sort of scene that youth or love would print on the heart, but with nothing to make one remember, no agent to develop the snapshot, one notes the pond and the peace this warm spring day and that’s all.

The coach returns and, as we draw near to Orel, Sue’s admirers become increasingly desperate and try to get her to go for a walk in the woods. One of them (the playwright)
coyly opens his briefcase to reveal two bottles of wine. He has his son with him, a shy boy who is about to go into the army and who speaks a little English. He has to translate his father’s ogling remarks. Were the seduction to go according to plan, he would presumably have to stick around until actions began to speak louder than words. In its potential for filial embarrassment it reminds me of a Chekhov short story in which a father and son, sailors on a freighter, draw the winning lots to the cabin spyhole through which they watch a honeymoon couple.

At an embassy cocktail party back in Moscow I talk to the BBC correspondent Jeremy Harris, who has been at Philby’s funeral. He says the first evidence that it was happening was a phone call to a Reuter’s colleague to say that Philby’s funeral was taking place at the Kurskaya cemetery. ‘When?’ ‘Now,’ said the voice, and rang off. They piled into a taxi, got to the cemetery, and found it deserted, the only evidence of the coming ceremony an open grave lined with red and black silk. Eventually a procession threaded its way among the graves, with the coffin borne aloft. As it was lowered, they saw that it was open, and there was Philby, smiling slightly, and, waiting at the graveside, fresh from the airport, Philby’s son.