Among the Russians(20)

I searched for a bench of my own. All around me men were scrubbing themselves or one another with the dedication of uncouth religious acolytes. They slopped water over their heads and backs, and soaped each other wholesale. Several were bending over like Victorian schoolboys about to be whipped, while others behind covered them from head to toe in suds.

Certain benches appeared to be traditional property. I mistakenly sat on one. A pale-eyed Goliath loomed above me. ‘What are you doing on my bench, comrade?’ It was the nearest to anger that I had seen in any Russian.

‘I couldn’t tell….’

‘You are not from here.’ He stared at me incuriously. I moved away. He proclaimed after me: ‘He is from somewhere else.’

A grumbling attendant was handing out , bunches of birch twigs. With these the bathers set to thrashing their shoulders and legs, or flailed one another’s backs with the vigour of flagellating penitents to muttered demands of ‘More! More!’ The air was filled with whirring and thwacking. But whenever they stopped, the brutal charade instantly collapsed. Then the veniki were tossed on the floor in sodden tufts. The skin of the flagellants, luxuriously tingling, was covered merely in a fragrant rash of birch-bark. They let out sybaritic grunts and burps. Their pores were opened, their flesh painlessly chastened, their minds touched with a pleasurable sense of atonement.

I entered a passage crossed by pouring water and indecipherable smells, then pushed through a wooden door into the third room. The heat hit me like a mattock-blow. My chest heaved but my lungs merely whispered feebly in its blaze. Only a ghoulish light crept through a window of clouded orange glass into the cramped chamber. The fire shuddered and sweltered through the air in invisible, breath-extinguishing waves. I made out a furnace booming in a clay boiler against a wall. Underfoot the tiles were scalding. Somewhere in the darkness above my head a voice demanded ‘Throw on more!’ until a man hurled water against the boiler walls, and the steam, bursting outward, seemed to extinguish the last wisp of air. I groped forward. Above me rickety wooden steps wound to an open loft, where men were slumped in exhausted stupor, or squatted on their haunches tickling each other’s backs with birch twigs and murmuring together in the unbreathable air. It was the deepest circle of the inferno. All light, all sound, all movement were slowed into dreams and shadows of themselves. The air itself was the only real presence-a black and suffocating embrace. The Rembrandt light showed bowed heads and blobs and glows of incandescent flesh: the ultimate hopelessness. With each step of the stair as I ascended, the heat exploded in harder blasts. I reeled like a mountaineer at the top, then capsized among the mumbling bodies.

But the last stage of the bathhouse ritual passes by in a somnolent balm. All through the dressing-rooms lounge white-towelled ghosts celebrating their escape from purgatory. Their cleansed and rosy skin fills them with dronish well-being. For hours they loll in their cubicles gossiping about sport or women, munching dried fish and salami, downing mugs of watery beer. A clinking of bottle-openers releases a gurgle of smuggled-in vodka; voices rise and fall in clubbish collusion; and the seedy surroundings, littered (as are the older bathhouses) by the cracked statues and chandeliers of tsarist times, take on the surreal glow of a wrecked paradise.



Strange moment near the Arbat, one of Moscow’s wealthiest thoroughfares. A big-boned young man and woman stand talking in the shadows. Suddenly the man lifts his fist and crashes it into her face. They continue talking. I stare at them, wondering if I am the victim of hallucination. The woman’s face is unblemished; it wears a look of timeless endurance. Then the man draws back his fist again and slams it into her stomach.

‘Comrade!’ I call out incongruously. ‘What are you doing?’

He turns and looks at me blankly. The woman’s face wears no expression at all. Then they walk away, his arm around her waist. I am left staring after them, feeling as if I had interrupted some arcane mating ritual. I remember, too, reading from a sixteenth century manual of Muscovite etiquette. A husband should beat his wife lovingly, it advises, so that she will not be rendered blind or permanently deaf. I suppose I intruded.



I went to Children’s World, the big toy store on Marx Prospect. Among the dense crowds a dangerous undergrowth of stout, pushing mothers elbowed its way at stomach level. Undemanding, unsmiling, uncrying, their children trotted after them. But the toys were bitterly expensive and so tawdry that I wondered how they could awake the imagination at all. War games were less common than in the West, it seemed—I saw only a few self-assembly rockets and tanks, and plastic soldiers which were mere wafers of men, unpainted. I searched for a smile among the soft toys and plastic dolls, but encountered only the compulsory grin of a frog. For the rest, their faces were cemented in expressions of Pinocchio idiocy.

But in the shop’s centre the communal spectacle compensated a little for private paucity. A huge ship, crewed by two old men, a sick hippopotamus and a lame giraffe, lurched and revolved in an imaginary sea. And high on one wall, inside an elaborate timepiece, at the stroke of every hour a cuckoo rotated its plastic head, wooden figures patrolled out unsmiling from little doors, and the clock face opened two blue Slavic eyes which glanced circumspectly left and right, then closed again in sleep.



I returned late on the metro from the Bolshoi Theatre, whose banked tiers of crimson, cream and liquid gold were echoed in the 1930s glory of the underground stations. These are less stations than palaces: Augustan halls of jointed marble, and lordly floods of steps, friezes swagged in stucco banners and weaponry, or vaulted with mosaics. For a few pence you may ride here for ever. It is unnervingly clean and superbly efficient. At night the whole network is staffed by little more than women in red hats, who preside at train level in small kiosks. The escalators flow fast down steep avenues of gilded neon torches. The platforms are chandeliered corridors.