I wanted to ask if running after men was cause for being sentenced to a loony bin here, and also what was the sanity status of Russian men who ran after women but I don’t know how I could have asked anything unless I banged the table for silence.
“Sa fille avait deux ans et maintenant elle a cinq ans et elle a des crises de nerfs de peur que sa mère va repartir,” said the surrogate son.
“Yes, that is true,” said Mrs M. “That is sad. Nobody should have children.”
A man said something and they all went off into peals of laughter.
Since college, when first I started reading them, I thought the great Russian writers invented this kind of dialogue, where all speak, few if any listen, and non sequitur piles joyfully or gloomily upon non sequitur. There is no other dialogue in literature like it; I gave the Russian writers credit for inventing something totally new in the world, like Edison and Marconi. Invent, my foot. They were reporting. Russians talk this way. Everyone around Mrs M.’s table was straight from Chekhov and Dostoyevsky. I went off into my own peals of laughter. Six hours of real-life Russian dialogue had left me feeling light-headed not to say unhinged.
“Why do you laugh, Marta?” Mrs M. asked and departed to answer the telephone.
A man said, “You know how to fix telephone so is safe? No? Come, I show.”
Mrs M. had finished the usual quick chat. The man pushed the dial all the way round and locked it in place with a pencil. I have never been able to do it since so cannot have seen right.
“That way they do not hear what you are saying.”
Did the KGB really spend its time recording such dotty innocuous conversation all over Moscow? If the KGB had personnel enough to harass a poor sick harmless woman, they had time and personnel for anything.
“Also a cushion over is good,” said Mrs M.
It was near to the closing hour, ten o’clock. After about twelve hours of this non-stop sociability, Mrs M. retired at ten. People began to drift off in pairs or alone, making no noise; as if this guiltless gathering had to be disguised, as I am sure it did. They knew their country.
“Yuri will find a taxi for you,” Mrs M. said, sending me out with the surrogate son. “I will see you tomorrow?”
Oh yes, every day, it was why I had come to hateful Moscow. In the taxi I told myself how fortunate I was, how privileged, to move directly from the airport (via the Minsk hotel, screaming, arguing, two taxis) into real Russian life, not an official masquerade for foreigners. It is an experience, I thought with the deepest gloom, to remember.
From the first day, I knew what was best in Mrs M., best for my taste. Her eyes, pale blue, tired, sad but still with a look of innocence in them. The touching innocence or vulnerability came and went; enough to know it could be there. And her laughter. She enjoyed herself. Despite the past and the present and the always doubtful future, she was ready to take pleasure in life. She loved having a good time, it was fun for her to be surrounded by friends in that ugly hot hovel. Laughter had not been crushed out of her. That was her greatest triumph, her very own victory.
I went sightseeing entirely as a cover story for the KGB. If questioned—What were you doing in Moscow?—I had to be able to say “Looking at the wonders and beauties of your glorious city.” In this spirit, as fast as possible, in the course of the week, I ran through the Kremlin, Red Square, the Pushkin Museum, the entrance to the University, and GUM. Unbelievably, I haven’t the faintest notion what Red Square looks like, not a shadow of a picture in my mind. Not much better about the Kremlin: there was a church with scaffolding outside and dutiful schoolchildren inside and ikons everywhere. I saw very little in the Pushkin Museum to forget. The University is also Stalin-Gothic. I seem to remember there were trees in a small park outside the Kremlin and somewhere near the University; in general I think that Moscow was barren stone. And no birds sing.
GUM was different. I went to GUM to buy something heavy to weigh down my suitcase for the homeward journey; I was as terrified in advance of the empty suitcase as I had been of the packed suitcase. GUM, the great department store of the U.S.S.R., is a hybrid born of Macy’s basement and an oriental bazaar, and you’d have to be Russian not to see it as a big black joke. Elbowing, shoving, and pushing with the other citizens, I found a counter selling curtain material. A weary sales-woman, besieged by shoppers, got the idea that I wanted four metres of some fairly odious thick yellow cotton brocade. I took a chit to the cashier and back to the sales counter and so spent one boiling hot hour on a single purchase. Even so, a suitcase with a pair of jeans, two T-shirts, a sweater, four metres of curtain material, and a lot of scrunched-up newspaper was not going to be easy to explain.
I had paid the State for breakfast and meant to collect. The hotel dining-room was enormous and all the tables had dirty cloths. After twenty minutes a thin pale tired young waiter, also dirty, strolled over and said, “Thé? Café?” “Thé please.” After twenty-five minutes he returned with a small glass like a medicine measure of watery fruit juice, a tin teapot with lukewarm brownish water in it, a small yellow cowpat, cold, scrambled eggs made from powdered eggs, and stale bread. Many people never touch breakfast and feel fine. I feel murderous without breakfast but I couldn’t handle this mess and never tried again. I just felt more murderous than I already felt.
After no lunch, back to Mrs M.’s with ulcer pills, detective stories, and sweaters. In the bedroom, she and Yuri were listening to a Menuhin record with lighted faces. They stood by the table in the attitudes of worship, close to the gramophone.
“Why don’t you sit on the bed?” said I, always seeking the douceur de vivre angle than which nothing could have been more futile. Neither heard so I sat on the bed. And noticed a half-empty bottle of Chanel Five in the dense disorder of the bedside table. Mrs M. probably thought “scent,” the word I’d used, was different from perfume. Or she wanted to give me pleasure as the bearer of a unique gift. Or she had survived only by stealth and guile and was so conditioned by the long endurance contest that she couldn’t be straightforward. I mused on this puzzle again when she put the ulcer pills in the kitchen cabinet where already there was a small collection of the same jars. Her life in this hell country—ce pays maudit de Dieu, as one of her friends remarked—had made Mrs M. complicated in ways I would never understand, though a five-year-old Russian kindergarten child might also be beyond my comprehension.
Lena arrived to be greeted with special warmth; then an influx of friends.
“How did you ever write your books, Mrs M.?”
“I lay upon the bed and typed with one hand. The typewriter on the bedside table. Ten hours each day.”
She had written two fat books, the second not then published.
“I meant with so many interruptions.”
“There are no interruptions. I do not hear if I am writing. I write very easily.”
Now that we were all sweating around the kitchen table, Mrs M. began a tease that curled my hair for days. She said, “I will emigrate.”
“What?”
“But I wish to take Lena with me; I cannot go without Lena and she is not Jew. I say she must marry a Jew then we can go.”
“Go where?” Oh Lord, I thought, not London.
“I think London.”
“Mrs M., it’s not a bit like Moscow. I mean we don’t drop in on each other, we telephone and make engagements. We don’t visit very long either or ring up all day. I think you’d find it boring, rather cold and sad, not what you’re used to.”
“I must take my furniture,” Mrs M. said dreamily.
“What?”
“This is a very old bench. It has been many generations in my family.”
I didn’t believe it for a minute but refrained from saying that she could buy its cousin if not twin in any of the junk antique shops on the King’s Road beyond World’s End. I saw my future, running errands and keeping company. Already to my relief, I knew I had not come to attend a deathbed but feared I had come to be appointed
her private American Express. Daily, she changed her plans. Perhaps Paris for the food and intellectual life. Perhaps Rome would be better for the climate. This tease kept her friends wrought up too, some saying you must not go, you will die of loneliness, some saying she would get good medical treatment abroad. As a worry, the emigration gambit was a great success. She never meant a word of it as I soon guessed. She could no more live outside Russia than I could live in it. Russia is the home of the heart, despite everything. Anywhere else is exile.
Mrs M. said, “I must go to London to be near Anthony Bloom. He is a saint.” Father Anthony is the Archbishop of the Russian Orthodox Church in England.
I said irritably, “Since when did you get so religious?”
“Since I have seen Anthony Bloom. Also my grandfather and my father converted.” I didn’t believe that for a minute either.
Yuri whispered, “Elle croit dans le paradis parce qu’elle veut voir son mari là-haut.” I felt guilty yet unconvinced. I suspected her Christianity, about which she protested too much. But if her new or old Christian beliefs gave her hope of finding that long-lost man, what difference did it make how she talked.
Mrs M. said, “Solzhenitsyn writes very bad style. He is crazy too.” I didn’t know that they were now talking about Solzhenitsyn but was thoroughly irked and said he was the finest Russian novelist of this century which was also rot because I know nothing of modern Russian literature and the minimum about pre-modern Russian literature. Jealousy is a universal human vice, by no means limited to writers. Mrs M.’s jealousy was not for herself but for her husband; he was to be the only great Russian writer of this century. I was getting hotter, hungrier and crosser every minute.
“Yakir has a complex to be a martyr,” Mrs M. said. These remarks were thrown up like driftwood from waves of Russian talk. As if suddenly Mrs M. remembered me and, assuming I had heard and understood all before, gave me the benefit of her conclusion. Yakir had been arrested; I knew nothing beyond that he was a central figure in the Chronicle of Current Events, a secret publication of dissent. I wasn’t clear as to who he was or what the publication was but it seemed enough that the man had dared something and was now in grave trouble.
In America then, we had our own dissent against the Vietnam war. We despised and loathed the policy of our government and were united in a single aim: stop the killing. Anyone who stood up to be counted was a brother. I could not imagine speaking ill of the motives of another dissenting citizen. Not that I would be so firm and fierce if my every word was a passport to Siberia. And yet I was outdone; what did it matter how or whyYakir or Solzhenitsyn or anyone dissented? The whole point was that dissent itself was defiance of fear and an affirmation of the dignity of man.
“What is your opinion of life in Moscow, Marta?”
“I think it is hell.”
That made her laugh and cough; it made them all laugh. “You do not know,” Mrs M. said. “It is paradise now compared to before. Paradise. It has not been so good since 1917. I am a coward, not a fighter. I would like to write a book about how life is today but I am afraid to do it here. I must emigrate to write such a book. I can earn my life as a newspaperwoman, I am a very good newspaperwoman.”
How could she know, I wondered, since she had never been one.
“Intellectuals are very few in this country,” Mrs M. said. “They do not matter for anything. If the people have bread that is all they care about. They have bread now, they are content.”
They sure didn’t look it. I never saw such a glum people. You might think laughter was forbidden by decree of the Politburo and anyone caught smiling got a twenty-rouble fine or twenty days in jail.
“Sinyavsky is becoming a very good writer,” Mrs M. said, as if she was making up her mind about bestowing the Nobel Prize. She was intolerable today with her tease and her pronunciamentos. “Now he is out of the camps at home, he is writing two books at once. I hope they do not learn he is writing again. Masha is wonderful, his wife, you know Marta, she is my friend. But they are afraid to see a foreigner now. Masha earned her life and for her child all the five years and nine months Sinyavsky is in the camps, by making pins and rings from silver.”
Lena exclaimed. Mrs M. turned up the palms of her hands. Her hands are very small and fragile. The palms were lipstick red.
“What is it?” I asked, alarmed.
“I do not know. It has not happened before.” She stared at her hands, alarmed too.
Across the table a man was talking and people were actually listening. When he stopped, Mrs M. laughed so hard she cried. “It is a very funny joke about Khrushchev.” She had forgotten her hands.
To my relief and joy, I was dining with my American friends. Their flat was high-class housing for the effete foreign bourgeoisie. Palatial compared to Mrs M.’s residence, otherwise very modest: a small living room-dining room, small kitchen and bath, three little bedrooms for them and their three children who were spending the summer in the U.S. They had imported simple Swedish furniture and light-coloured material for curtains and upholstery; the walls were white; it was clean, even cool. Ice in the drinks made me “almost happy.”
They said that their two women servants were sweet and very fond of the children but naturally KGB informers who reported all they heard and saw. The telephone was of course tapped and a bug or bugs planted on the premises. How could they stand it? It would drive me barking mad. Oh no, everyone got used to the rules of the local game; life in Moscow was fascinating, the climate was much better in the winter; the little foreign world was fun and full of friends; unofficial Russians were delightful; one was never bored. But if everything you say is taken down and can be used against you or someone else, doesn’t that make conversation about as bland as cream soup? Well, it made you cautious.
After dinner, we went on an underground sightseeing tour. The Moscow subway stations resemble vast subterranean Turkish baths, with a touch of old-time Roxy movie palaces. Giant murals in mosaic and brilliant paint; statuary in niches, many-coloured marble, pillars and arches. It is the most sumptuous public transport system in the world. Stupefying. Why this opulence below ground when above ground all amenity is lacking? On the other hand, for once I approved the Soviet system; there was not a speck of litter in the subway carriages or stations; not a cigarette butt, not a shred of paper. Perhaps the penalty for dropping litter is the firing squad and if so, maybe it’s not a bad idea, might be worth copying.
Muscovites lined the bench opposite. Riding on subways does not bring out the sparkle in people anywhere but these citizens looked the same on the streets. They cannot all have been dressed in grey, brown, black, but that was the impression. Dull clothes on heavy bodies topped by tired expressionless faces. In this blazing summer, skin was still pale concrete colour. A diet of bread and potatoes? They certainly didn’t look like any people in Western Europe, being built to last rather than for beauty, and well suited to this heavy drab town. I take pleasure everywhere from life on the streets, from faces, from the wild variety of clothes, from unpredictable public behaviour but here, above or below ground, what you got was the blues.
Across from me a small man, smaller and thinner than the general run, green-white rather than pale concrete in colour, was drowning in the depths of drunkenness. Poor little man. His head lolled onto a shoulder to the right, was brushed off like a fly, then lolled to the left, again brushed off. If someone didn’t let him rest a while, I despaired of his future. Why shouldn’t he be dead drunk? I’d be glad to be dead drunk myself except it was too hot to drink. No wonder alcoholism is a prime problem in Russia.
All focusing eyes in this part of the carriage were fixed on me. Surely pants and a T-shirt were not unknown in Moscow?
“What are they staring at?” I asked my hostess.
“Your toenails.”
“Do you mean to say this is the first time they’ve ever seen degenerate Western painted toenails?”
“Looks like it.”
I wanted to
amuse Mrs M., do something different, have a party; I also hoped to get a square meal. I called in a taxi to take her to lunch and found that Lena was coming too. “She will not speak,” Mrs M. said apologetically. Dressed up, Mrs M. had shed ten years. She wore a black patterned bandana tight around her head, an embroidered white nylon blouse, a straight grubby mustard-coloured skirt and mustard-coloured corduroy shoes. I had been meaning to ask her why Russian women were so bowlegged, eight out of ten I reckoned, but observed in time that Mrs M. without her enveloping Mother Hubbard house garment had legs so bowed that they formedaVfrom hip to ankle. She looked more stylish than anyone I had seen but her body was typical: a heavy solid torso, hips as wide as shoulders, set like a rock on short muscular legs. I had thought this was a peasant’s shape but Mrs M. had no peasant blood or heritage.
We drove the long distance to the centre of town. Suddenly Mrs M. shivered; I felt her whole body shake. We were passing a huge yellowish edifice. “The KGB,” Mrs M. whispered. I had no time to study it; it looked like an old-fashioned apartment block. She said it had been a hotel (in fact, it had been the office of the All-Russian Insurance Company, heavy irony) and was no longer used as a prison, only for interrogation and headquarters. The sight of the Lubyanka and the attendant memories cast a black pall over our party.
Having vetoed Lena’s choice, the Hotel Rossiya, in appearance a state hospital, the biggest hotel in the world and doubtless the worst, we fetched up at the Armenian Restaurant. For couleur locale, it was a failure, being simply a hot crowded room.
“Oh Lord,” I said, “send us a waiter. Mrs M., if one ever comes, please get something cold to drink right away.”
Travels with Myself and Another Page 30