Gadfly in Russia

by Alan Sillitoe

  When I said let’s fetch my car from the hotel and set off tonight he stood up stiffly and put out his hand, saying it was time for him to leave. I got to my feet as well, which felt like standing on glass marbles. The gap between me and the rest of the world was so wide it would have needed a long range jet to cross it. People at the next table seemed as if at the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. I supposed that to walk would make me feel more alert. Frans and I shook hands several times in our farewells.

  In the urinals downstairs Arbuzov the playwright and the novelist Aksyonov invited me upstairs to their table. Aksyonov, born in 1932, had qualified as a doctor, then wrote Colleagues, a novel which became a bestseller all over the Soviet Union. The book was first serialised in Yunost (Youth) magazine, edited by the novelist and journalist Boris Polevoi. I had read an English translation, and thought it good, being a brilliant and witty account of three young and idealistic physicians just starting out in life. I was happy to meet him.

  Arbuzov offered me a large brandy, which I had the sense to refuse, and they resumed a discussion with several other writers on the art of The Beatles, delighted to have a ‘real’ Englishman with them and hear his comments, though how serious and knowledgable could I appear with a lake of vodka inside me?

  Translated phrases from the long suffering Oksana must have emerged as pompous clichés, for I told them, though with little conviction, that I didn’t much like The Beatles, possibly because my ears couldn’t get accustomed to their cacophonies. Writers and intellectuals in England took their work as interesting for reasons I distrusted, but out of good fellowship here in Moscow I added that they were right to find them fascinating and agreeable, since their songs pleased young people all over the world – which they seemed happy to hear. A cynic like me had to guard against the scorn factor, which might be too easily seen as hypocrisy or conceit.

  At two o’clock in the taxi queue, still talking, I wondered how long I would be able to hold out, but cars came frequently so I didn’t have many minutes to wait. Street lights were dazzling white spheres, and at times I was seeing four instead of two. A lorry shedding clouds of diesel smoke threatened the fragile equilibrium in my stomach. I lit a cigar, as if insanely persuaded that its odour would make me ill, and eventually feel better. I didn’t refuse when my friends insisted I take the next taxi.

  The doorman at the hotel, practised at spotting a drunk, gave an understanding Russian grin as I handed him a cigar. He saw me into the lift and came up with me in case I stumbled out at the wrong floor, talking sociably all the while, though I took in nothing.

  A woman stationed behind a desk at the lift exit came out of her doze to hand over the key, my brain working sufficiently to order – in Russian – a breakfast of caviar and boiled eggs, to be served in my room at nine. She noted it on her pad and went back to sleep.

  I walked along the corridor, and found it impossible to get the key in the lock. Must be the wrong one, or someone else’s door. The sky was knocking to come in, and all my life went by, till, I found the right place and my troubles were over. Nothing would be worth worrying about ever again, and I was, with little reason, full of optimism.

  It was three o’clock, but life was worth living. A light in the brain scorched my eyes, and I was fixed on a circulating pedestal, like a lighthouse keeper condemned for the rest of his days to a lonely clifftop. I whistled some mindless tune and opened the windows, but the room continued going round like a blinding phosphorescent ocean, candlepower whitening across its turbulence. What day was it? Where was I? Disconnected from upper and nether worlds I wanted to soar over the Himalayas, out of my skin.

  I stared at the blank wall, and looked at my watch, as if that could help me. Well, it did: half an hour had gone by. My stomach was burning as if full of liquid lead. Oblivion wouldn’t come. It seemed futile to want anything. All I knew was that I had at least kept the flag flying with someone who had hoped to drink me under the table, an observation in no way discouraging as I ran for the bathroom.

  Friday, 23 June

  Groggy from my late night, yet buoyed by the residue of having been satisfactorily pissed, I called on an editor who asked me to submit an article for his literary magazine, on the writer’s relationship to society. Being on holiday – more or less – put me in no mood for such work, and I didn’t in any case care to think about problems I couldn’t take seriously.

  Maybe laziness was my reason for refusal. Essays cost blood, and I had no wish to write what children, students or civil servants penned for the eyes of whoever needed to find out whether or not they were conforming to the conditions of the country they lived in.

  Yet I did consider saying yes to that amiable editor, felt almost guilty at turning him down, being flattered that he imagined I had something interesting to write. Articles, after all, give a sense of self-importance not unattractive to a writer of fiction.

  Looking through my notebook at some of the material that might have been used, I doubted it would have been suitable, reflections such as:

  If religion is no longer permitted to be ‘the opium of the people’ why should literature be sacrificed for that role? An artist cannot afford to have any religion or political beliefs, because the faith demanded would corrupt and then destroy his liberty, and so his talent.

  If a writer has something worth saying it should be put into the mouth of one of his characters, never forgetting to think complicated but write plain. Shun the prevailing culture and only believe in yourself. Whoever thinks – or hopes – that ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ becomes society’s scapegoat.

  In your work don’t ask who you are, but help others, if you care to, to know who they are, while careful not to drive them to despair.

  A writer must consider himself a shaman who will live for ever. Any feelings of ‘class’ or hierarchy are too base to be considered. Live through others but don’t let them live through you.

  So many cracker mottoes perhaps, obfuscations and irrelevancies, and bullshit for a writer who uses imagination instead of a malleable brain. I couldn’t have concocted an article that would have been acceptable to the editor of a prestigious Soviet literary journal. But I expressed my idiosyncratic views at a five o’clock poetry reading, and at a party later.

  Saturday, 24 June

  An Intourist car and driver ferried us to Zagorsk for the day, thus allowing me to give some attention to the landscape. Yet I saw little more than if I had been at the wheel, when one-second glances took in all I thought necessary.

  With Oksana, her beautiful daughter Irina, and George, we went forty miles northeast from Moscow, across open rolling land towards the Volga. Descriptions of the Russian countryside I leave to Chekhov and Turgenev, or the paintings of Repin and Levitan.

  Zagorsk, with 80,000 inhabitants, was no longer the great religious centre it had been. A walled area in the middle of town enclosed the usual churches and monasteries, palaces and museums. In the fifteenth century the bishops could raise 20,000 men at arms, and in 1608 the place withstood a sixteen-month siege by an army of Poles. Only the Tartars took it, in the Middle Ages, soon after its foundation. Part of Napoleon’s army set out from Moscow in 1812 to loot it, but for some reason turned back halfway. It is still a point of pilgrimage, second only to the Lavra at Kiev.

  In the cathedral we were caught up in a crush of old and middle-aged women, their string and cloth bags rattling with all-shaped bottles of holy water from the well dug by Sergius the founder in 1342 – which they would take back to their town or village. Most were poor and shabbily dressed in oversized coats, despite the summer day. Some wore men’s tightly buttoned jackets, and the face of one woman was so thin I thought she must be close to death. Travel worn and seared by the wind, grey hair showed from under her headscarf. What suffering she must have endured throughout her life! The evidence was overwhelming.

  The men among them, with straggling Tolstoyan beards, wore long belted blouses and military style caps, pushing
to find a place and continually crossing themselves. Children in Young Pioneer scarves and shirts plastered with communist badges tried to get close to the altar and see the icons. Their young clean faces contrasted with those of the pious and old, and they barged about laughing and shouting to one another, showing no tolerance for the singing of the choir and the priests’ solemn incantations. To them it was a museum, and they only wanted to see the unusual objects in it, perhaps also to show off their supposed superiority to the worshippers.

  Old people, singing or prostrated, were to them a weird crowd from another world who only made it more difficult to reach the precious objects. One old woman pulled a boy back who pushed too violently by, but he snapped from her grasp and went on into the scrum, calling to boys already lost in it. Her grey eyes glared distress and hatred, wanting to yank him back and give him a good pasting, which George said he and most of them deserved. But she knew it would do no good. The lack of respect was endemic, and a lesson was impossible. The two worlds would never meet. She crossed herself and joined in the singing with a look of ecstasy which made her seem far younger. She would get the most out of being in Zagorsk while she could – or for as long as she lived.

  Sunday, 25 June

  Driving around the city, with George’s navigation. I needed it, because though the layout was more rational than in London there were no proper street maps on sale. The best had no scale, and showed the major public buildings by picture, which confused much of the neighbouring detail.

  I had two interviews that day, one with Pravda and the other with Yunost but I remember little of either, such meetings being always more or less the same. But I also called at Intourist to find out whether the permitted route to Kiev couldn’t be altered for a shorter one. I had noticed on the Freytag-Berndt ‘Strassenkarte Ost Europa’ that the one I wanted branched off just south of Orel, thus avoiding the lengthier drive through Kursk and Poltava.

  I was told it would not be possible because the recently built road didn’t have sufficient service stations. Another diversion I wanted to make was to the village of Ulashkovtsy – Loshkovitz in Yiddish, Loskowizce in German, and slightly different in Polish and Ukrainian – on the way to Chernovtsy. Before 1918 it had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but was then allotted to Poland. After the Second World War if fell to the Soviet Union and became part of the Ukraine. In past ages of shifting borders it was overrun by Cossacks, Tartars and Turks, but the Jews survived until the Germans arrived in 1941. The village stands in a sharp elbow of the meandering River Sereth, which flows south into the Dneister.

  In 1905 it was a place with an important Jewish community. According to my large-scale Austrian map it was on the eastern bank of the river with, opposite, a synagogue and a mikvah – a ritual bathing place. My reason for wanting to call and take photographs was because my mother-in-law had been born there, though it was unlikely she would remember anything: she had left with her family at the age of five for New York and a safer life.

  The place was only thirty or so miles off the Intourist route but, to my chagrin, I would not be allowed to go there, though was told that had permission been asked long beforehand it might have been arranged.

  In the evening we went to a party at the flat of Valentina Ivasheva, a professor of English literature at Moscow University. She had written textbooks for students on ‘British proletarian novelists’, and in the chapter dealing with my work said I was the only ‘genuine working-class novelist’, which seemed no favour to me, who rejected labels of any sort.

  A small grey-haired woman, somewhat fierce in her opinions, she was known, George had told me, for generosity to her students, while at the same time having the power to make or break them. He added that she wrote about ‘foreign working-class’ people because she was afraid of them in her own country, it being in any case more comfortable to write of them than fraternise in real life, a policy I could hardly blame her for, though it amused me all the same.

  I sensed she was disappointed that I had so little to say, either about my life, my writing, or my world views. She did ask why I had written The General, an anti-pacifist novel set in a war between two totalitarian states. I said I’d simply thought of the plot and used it, adding that the story was a fantasy, while knowing it to be far from the ‘proletarian writing’ she had foolishly expected.

  I was more at ease with her husband, whom everyone called Uncle Dima. He had little interest in literature except to read and enjoy it. An air ace in the war, he was a Hero of the Soviet Union, having been shot down a few times and still seriously suffering from his wounds.

  Surrounded by adoring students in the small flat, he told a joke, a sparkle of humour in his lake-blue eyes, about two lions in a circus sitting peacefully on their high stools. The assistant lion tamer cracked his whip to make them do some tricks, but they haughtily refused to move. He tried again and again. They eyed him disdainfully, so he complained to the chief lion tamer: ‘Those bloody lions won’t do a thing I tell them.’ The chief lion tamer came to see: ‘Of course they won’t. The stools are too comfortable. Make them sit on jagged rocks, then they’ll jump, and do anything you say.’

  Everyone had probably heard it before – I had – but they applauded, which pleased Uncle Dima. A few years later he leapt from the window, unwilling to face a helpless and humiliating old age.

  Monday, 26 June

  I walked through the lobby from the hotel lift with a set of windscreen wipers, two wing mirrors, and a screwdriver, as if on my way to work. There’d been no guarded parking as in Leningrad, so all accessories and whatever was visible had to be taken upstairs every night.

  I felt a bit of a fool putting things back in the cool morning air, rush-hour crowds flowing by on the way to their offices. Loot from my shopping included more Cuban cigars of all kinds from the hotel lobby, which seemed of no interest to the Russian clientele. Each colourful box of Partagas, Romeo and Juliets, Uppmans and Monte Cristos cost only a few roubles, and I stacked the car sufficient to see George and me to Chernovtsy, not forgetting to leave quite a few for England.

  There were toys for David I’d scooped up from the Dyetski Mir (Children’s World), a store as big as Harrod’s, but with a more warehouse atmosphere. I’d acquired what maps could be found, as well as an immense atlas of the physical world so big it had to be laid flat in the car. The Russians are renowned for high quality cartography, their multicoloured geological maps beautifully showing the soil and rocks of the earth. Perhaps the infinite patience required by such technical expertise holds back the onset of angst, helping cartographers to survive while making the world interesting for those who need to know what it is made of. Beyond political considerations the maps help surveyors and explorers in their field work.

  Sorrow at leaving Moscow would be more than made up for by going south. In goodbyes to friends I’d received requests to send books when back home. Valentina Jaques of Soviet Literature wanted my volumes of stories, and A Tree on Fire. Oksana Krugerskaya asked for that book as well, and pictorial calendars of English scenery.

  Tanya Kudraevzeva of Foreign Literature Magazine hoped I’d post novels by Laura del Rivo, Smallcreep’s Day by Peter Currell Brown, the text of Little Malcolm Against the Eunuchs, and a couple of my books in French translation. Someone from Intourist requested a copy of Road to Volgograd for their library, and I also promised books for Oksana’s daughter Irina. These requests were honoured, though I wasn’t able to get information on Paul Schofield for the writer Yuri Kovalev.

  As I walked back and forth along the hotel front waiting for George, passers-by stopped to look at a small MG touring car parked near mine. It was white, neat and low slung, and many admired something not made in Russia, as I heard said. They examined the dashboard, and would have liked a look at the engine, while the more knowing translated the number plate and the MG insignia, announcing to the others that it was a beautiful British ‘machine’.

  My more ordinary vehicle drew little atte
ntion, its nearest equivalent being the Volga stationwagon, which looked even more dependably robust, but I had no way of knowing how they really compared. At least people were fascinated by the compass fixed to the windscreen, while I stood among them as if the car belonged to somebody else.

  Luckily it was pristinely clean, because the previous day I’d had the first fifteen hundred miles of grit and dried mud taken off at a service station, for the cost of one rouble. I’d manoeuvred it up the ramp of the washing machine, doors and windows tightly shut, to be sloshed and thoroughly buffed up, blue liquid pouring down the windscreen. Peter Peugeot shook with hesitation on advancing slowly along the unfamiliar tracks. I wondered if it would stand up to the ordeal, not having the hardiness of Russian vehicles, but the car at last reached level ground, water still swirling and none the worse for the experience.

  George arrived bearing flasks of drinks, and large paper bags of food, saying that his mother and aunt had been up most of the night preparing them as supplies for our journey, as if we were leaving for places where nourishment would be unobtainable or, I thought, so that he wouldn’t be tempted to eat the ‘filthy’ food of some roadside stolovaya.

  His girlfriend stood a few yards off, to bid him farewell. ‘As far as Chernovtsy!’ she cried. ‘You’ll never come back, I know you won’t!’

  At another burst of tears gallant George tried to console her. ‘Of course I shall. All I have to do is take the train. My seat’s already booked. I’ll be back in ten days, my love.’

  ‘The train will crash,’ she wailed. ‘Don’t go. I dreamed last night that you were killed.’ She was in his arms, head on his shoulder, shirt and blouse wet from her weeping. ‘Please don’t go, George, I implore you.’