Among the Russians(15)
Suddenly Olga’s nerves had spilt into her speech and she was asking: ‘Do you think you were followed here?’
‘I’ve no idea.’ I felt mildly surprised. ‘I don’t think so.’
The blobs and splashes of her face were like a Morse Code; but indecipherable. ‘I think you were,’ she said. ‘They follow every foreigner who’s on his own. This isn’t London.’
She went on to speak about England, where she had once been permitted to travel. She had loved London, she said, the department stores were a paradise. Then she stopped abruptly. ‘But it’s difficult to talk about.’ Constantly her sentences would trail away into nothing, or suddenly end. Later I noticed this phenomenon in many of those who had been brought up during the Stalin terror. They were marked by unconscious fear. They would suddenly break off an innocuous conversation, leaving it to float into unspoken speculation; or they would interrupt themselves to say ‘Of course this is only between ourselves’ or ‘But I could be mistaken.’ I met a fifty-year-old journalist whose whole speech was littered by these reflex utterances, although he talked to me of nothing more perilous than his holiday on the Black Sea.
And now Olga said: ‘I don’t mean that I should like to live in Britain. Not at all. Your television’s lovely, of course.’ Her toes wriggled in anguish. ‘But no, I wouldn’t live there. It’s too cold—the people, I mean.’ She looked faintly confused. ‘It’s hard to talk. I can’t say.’
Candour and secrecy coexist in many Russians. By second nature they may prevent their talk, or even their thoughts, from straying into danger areas; but the next moment they can show a countrified bluntness. ‘You’re going to Suzdal for a few days?’ Olga suddenly said. ‘Can I come with you?’
Was she serious? I never knew, for the next instant this question had drowned in a river of other talk. The diffident woman of a moment before had suddenly relaxed, and I was confronted instead by a hearty, child-like matron who was asking to go and look at my car in the park outside, as if we were partners at a village hall dance. Or would I drive it underneath her window when I left, she demanded, so that she could see what a Morris Marina was?
Now the truffles were tumbling into her mouth and she was talking about the dissidents she had met. Did I know M—, married to a French actress? After a few collusive nods and winks, the names came pouring out. Had I met Y—, the leader of a disbanded Helsinki Human Rights monitoring group? She tossed back more brandy. Why on earth, she half shouted, didn’t the Soviet Union cast up better leaders for itself? Kruschev, she declared, was an idiot, and Brezhnev a boor. ‘Most of them speak the most frightful Russian, you know, almost uneducated. It sickens me to listen…’
Within less than two hours she was by turns inhibited, vulgar, flirtatious, voluble and finally sad—a child of Russian nature. Whereas I was polite, hypocritical and emptily English. I could not like her at all. When I drove my car under her balcony and away, I glimpsed her Morse-Code face looking down at me, the reflecting orbs of its spectacles like the facial discs of an owl, high up and expressionless in the building’s pallor.
Since entering Russia I had barely thought about the KGB. But a few days after seeing Olga, when I was visiting a known dissident late one evening, I double-checked that I was not followed. This time the door was opened by a forty-year-old man whose steep-browed face emanated something slow, patient and distantly hurt. Boris had been banned from his job as a university lecturer (dissidents are the only unemployed in Russia) and lived, I think, by the charity of friends and by free-lance teaching. The only luxury in his three-room flat was a library of scientific books.
We sat at a bare table. His auburn-haired wife set out little cakes for me, then relapsed opposite, resting her head on her bare arms, and watched us with the sleepy self-sufficiency of a cat. Boris talked in a husky, deliberate voice. I sensed in him that acceptance of affliction which gives to many dissidents who have suffered a gloomy stubbornness. They rarely sounded bitter. The retribution of the system might have fallen on them not from human beings, but from some blind, impersonal height—a force of nature as vast and deaf as fate or the Russian sky. Accused as traitors to a nation they loved, and surrounded by the narrow and universal patriotism of their own countrymen, they were doubly isolated. Few other countries on earth have the power of such ubiquitous damnation.
Yet the dissidents were never alone. A knot of friends surrounded them. This evening there was Nikolai, a pale, slight-built professor of languages. While Boris and Tanya often stayed silent and presented a punch-drunk obduracy to life, Nikolai was suavely animated, and seemed still unscathed. Even in appearance he and his friend were strikingly different. Above Boris’s tall, kindly brows, a dust of light brown hair was softly receding. His face was drowned in its flesh. It gave out a muffled sadness and aspiration; it absorbed things like a quicksand, then returned to itself. But Nikolai’s features were sensitized and mocking, silhouetted in a lank blackness of hair and beard, and lit by effervescent eyes. He looked like a pallid and cynical Christ.
I found them listening to the radio. They were waiting to learn the fate of a colleague, a priest who was facing trial, and were afraid that he might be forced into a public self-denunciation. We heard news bulletins, obituaries, the end of a play. They listened with bowed heads, afraid that at any moment they might hear the voice of a now unrecognizable friend. In the next-door room Boris’s children awoke from sleep with faint cries. But the radio gave no word.