Among the Russians(10)
Ivan wanted to find friends. We dived into a seedy apartment block, searching for a mathematics teacher whose flat number he had forgotten. We climbed seven storeys past padded or brown-painted doors with old coats and rags in lieu of footmats. Their bells didn’t work or emitted a cacophony of buzzes, clicks and dings. Then the doors creaked open to cautious slits. Grandmotherly faces emerged under nests of grey or hennaed hair, and said Net; or young mothers with lumpish children turned us away. Behind each one glimmered a den of bleak rooms, relieved only by plants, a song-bird or the rare brightness of a carpet.
At last a tousle-haired man opened the door of a communal flat and burst into greetings. His tiny room was coated in peeling green wallpaper (a teacher’s earnings are miserably low) and adorned with little but soiled paperbacks, a guitar and mounds of cigarette ash which lay heaped at intervals all over the floor, like the track of some ash-burrowing mole. But his flat was a Mecca for friends. Within minutes we were joined by a lorry-driver, whose pockets bulged with vodka bottles. This man dominated the evening. At the age of twenty-five he already looked a drunkard. Above his collapsed stomach and sagging shoulders his face showed a dissolute fleshiness. Little oily locks of hair splashed about bleary features. One after another he fixed us with a harmless, unfocused gaze—he was already drunk—then flicked a forefinger against his throat and clicked his tongue in the Slavic invitation to liquor. Finally he lifted two bottles high above his head, brought them to rest in tender ceremonial on an empty chair, then fell on our necks and kissed us in wobbling succession. Small glasses and tooth-mugs were produced from nowhere. The tousle-haired man seized his guitar. And in no time we were launched on a slow, Russian river of vodka-charged melancholy and half-forgotten songs.
A motherly-looking girl arrived, and the kissing started all over again. Then came a dour, square-headed colossus with drooping blond moustaches and Tartar cheekbones, who said nothing all evening, but lay against the wall looking like Ghengiz Khan, and finally slept. So we sat until far into the night, while the guitar-player remembered Western songs which he’d culled from records twenty years old, and the vodka gurgled neat down our relaxed and gabbling throats.
What we need is sympathy
’Cos there’s not enough love to go round
The vodka bottles reproduced themselves as if by sleight of hand. Toasts flurried back and forth, or foundered into garbled oblivion. The drink’s coarseness creaked and thundered round my head like a four-in-hand. ‘Eat chocolate, eat chocolate,’ whispered Ivan—it was all the food we had. I already felt unsure what would happen when I tried to get to my feet, or if I had any feet at all.
Half the world hates the other half….
After three hours we were all slumped about the furniture in postures of clownish indolence, and the lorry-driver was mumbling obscenities to himself, clasping the guitar-player round the neck and swivelling his gaze across the ample figure of the girl, who was seated a little prudishly (she wouldn’t drink) on a cushion opposite. ‘Drink too much, can’t fuck a thing,’ he apologized. But his voice was lost and abstract, as if he were addressing a chair or a star. The others grew angry with him; he wasn’t behaving as he should with a foreign guest. Even through their alcoholic benignity, they felt ashamed.
‘He’s drunk,’ said Ivan.
The guitar-player grew more sentimental with the hours. He sang in nasal English, the lingua franca of pop. Now and again his head nudged onto the girl’s shoulder, and he kissed her soft neck. She laughed quietly to herself. Ghengiz Khan started to snore. The lorry-driver burbled new toasts to Ivan, who was swaying dreamily on his chair. The whole party was stagnating into nostalgia, but nobody could stop it. I gazed hazily round the room. It seemed to hold nothing but Western leftovers: guitar, jeans, song-books.
Ivan opened his eyes and questioned me haltingly about his language course. What did I think of Galsworthy? Of Walt Whitman? Had I read The Importance of Being Earnest? He knew nothing about Oscar Wilde. ‘He was homosexual? I never knew that, I never knew….’ He derived a maudlin comfort from this, and kept murmuring and smiling to himself ‘I didn’t know.’ But a moment later he focused me with a look of sheer loss. The vodka stumbled his words together. ‘Is it true that you in the West allow it…between men?’ He stared incoherently at the floor, and gave a sick laugh. ‘But not here. Oh no…not here.’
The guitar-player had run out of songs by now, and was singing his own in faulty English.
A man about himself is still unsure
A man cannot discern himself at glance
He breaks up like an oak through forest floor
And dreams and dreams….
He was going to Kiev soon; the girl would stay in Smolensk; the lorry-driver was a nomad of the road; Ivan must return to Grodno. The party already had a feeling of farewell.
‘Grodno!’ moaned the drunk, teasing Ivan. ‘There’s nothing there. Just old cigarette factories and barracks.’ It sounded like a stage set for Carmen ‘Grodno’s a piss-hole, I can tell you. But Smolensk is the centre of the universe.’
‘He’s from Smolensk,’ said Ivan.
Theirs was a world of fleeting and unguarded friendships, scattered as they were by the vastness of the country and their differences of purpose. To me they seemed half dissociated from their culture, as if isolated on a bluff. The Western pop song had penetrated where Western ideology struck no deep root, and was expressing for them the private and estranged universe of the young, a universe which belonged not to their parents but was cherished as their own—waking beside an empty pillow, not being sure, going away, being unloved, uneverything.