Among the Russians(19)
‘What can I do for you?’ the man asked with his spare breath. ‘I can get you Armenian brandy. Or do you have dollars? If you want a favourable exchange rate….’
All spiritual and political ideals, it seemed, divided the world drastically; if it were ever to be united, it would be by jeans.
No, I had no dollars. The man struggled spider-legged away through the rain, leaving me struck by the illogic of things.
I find myself noticing the young, as if I were not among them. This process of ageing has its compensations: perhaps I am more objective. The young here were born into a happier world than were their parents. They have the softness of their selfishness. The old keep the grimness of their sacrifice.
I stare at girls and youths in the street, as if they contain a mystery. Their T-shirts fascinate: ‘Michigan University’, ‘Lonely Art’. The faces above them bear symptoms of Western sophistication. Occasionally they drop pieces of American into their conversation like watch-words. ‘Let’s go’. ‘Wow!’ ‘That’s where I’m at.’
I queue outside Moscow’s best-known Slavic restaurant, once the haunt of nineteenth century writers. Eating out in Russian cities is a battle, like everything else. After half an hour ignored in the cold, the queue starts protesting. But restaurant doormen are petty tsars; they grant or refuse entrance for arcane reasons. Several expensively-dressed couples push through unchallenged, and are acknowledged with servile nods. I wait an hour before gaining entry. No, I am not a group. From the magnificent menu of thirty-six dishes only one is available.
I engage in desultory conversation with the others at my table. They are in their early twenties. I guess that they enjoy the privileges of important parents; inherited advantages in education and jobs are a Soviet commonplace. They are friendly, candid and a little drunk. On radio, they listen to Voice of America (soon to be jammed) and the BBC, they devour underground literature and frequent the black market. But they are secure. They look on politics with apathy, and scarcely question anything at all. They badger me for news of Western pop groups, but they don’t understand Western freedoms. They know no other life with which to compare their own. If they were not gentler than their elders, I would be depressed. But even their materialism is an ugly kind of comfort.
On another evening I dine at the Arbat restaurant. It is very grand. Entry is by an unfathomable system of tickets which I had bought three hours before. I relax and stare at the clientele. Even here, in the hub of Moscow snobbery, it looks faintly rustic. The women hang their coats around their shoulders in the cold evening. At the tables of celebrating parties, littered with pressed caviare and Chicken Kiev, the diners are already flushed by the sunrise pink of vodka and pledging toasts with a foggy pomp which sometimes brings the whole party to its faltering feet. At other tables middle-aged officials murmur conspiratorially to each other, and wholesome young couples, with a look of pre-war Europe, are courting in gauche silences.
My questioning reduces the enormous menu to an available pittance. Meat is scarce this year. I rely on borshch and a powerful black rye bread, and later feel sorry for my chicken, which must have led a hard life.
I am surrounded by the upper stratum of Moscow society, in which Western vanities of class are replaced by those of bureaucratic rank, and it is sad to see it conform to cliche: heavy, hard-drinking, styleless. Only once a party of long-haired jeunesse dorée invades the dance floor in leather jackets and tight trousers. Some of them even wear frivolous military insignia, which is utterly un-Soviet. But the cabaret is about to begin, and the head waiter ushers them courteously away while a band strikes up on a garish dais.
Typically, the distinction of the evening belonged to this supremely physical cabaret—tumblers and acrobats and finally a balletic pair of extraordinary strength and stateliness. The man lifted his fragile-looking partner in aerial poses of miraculous ease, holding her up now by a foot, now by a hand, while she froze immobile like a bird in the spotlight, and the clientele went on eating its Chicken Kiev and fuddling itself on Georgian champagne.
One afternoon I wandered south over the loop of the Moscow river, where the Kadashevsky district begins. This area escaped the fire which gutted the city during Napoleon’s occupation, and its stucco fronted houses now meander along tree-darkened lanes in affable decay. Their doors burrow beneath street level. Their decorated window-frames are crumbling away. After the anonymity of the flatblocks they reflect a life-giving diversity.
A public bathhouse loomed among them like a half-ruined factory. I was persuaded to visit it by jumbled feelings of griminess and curiosity. I don’t know where the origins of this supremely Russian institution lie: probably in Byzantium, reaching back to Roman and Greek bathhouses, but perhaps also in obscure Tartar ancestors.
I undressed in a padded cubicle among a flotsam of shoes, bottles and drunken flies. An ancient colossus was already seated there, swathed in towels like a Berber chief. He had come for the afternoon with four bottles of beer, and grunted that there was no point in spending less than three hours in a bathhouse.
Thereafter the rooms succeeded one another like the circles of Dante’s Hell. The tiled expanses of the tepidarium, ringed with stone benches, were pervaded by an insidious steam and filled with quiet, naked men. The Russian body is unlike any other. Hundreds of bull-necks, ponderous shoulders and nerveless torsos descended to a burgeoning delta of stomachs and thighs. The muscles were strong but passive. Their owners squatted and lumbered through the chambers in a miasma of friendly but neuter-looking flesh, plastic sandals and a phantasmal array of bath-hats.