Among the Russians(21)

I found myself climbing out at every other stop to stare at its Stalinist fantasies with mingled wonder and revulsion. Here, in the thirties, the luxuries of the palace were being consciously transferred to the people. Every station was different, and every line. I walked through steel and plaster Pantheons where paintings and bas-reliefs portrayed bucolic happiness on the collective farms, or flaunted a proud, unsmutted industry. The only other occupants of the trains were a few rural families travelling late to railway stations; they huddled on the seats with their silenced children, their string bags and bundles massed about them.

At one stop I stepped into a hall where stained-glass windows glowed with flower patterns in twilight tints. They filled the deserted platform with a weird, ecclesiastical gloom. It was here, set in mosaic, that I noticed the familiar slogan ‘Peace.’ But the word seemed to have shed its benign connotations and to mean something else. Although it hung on the lips of every Russian-in-the-street, and was uttered by him with perfect sincerity, it resounded as an instrument of Party propaganda with a perverted menace, shouted like a war-cry. And now here it was again, proclaimed in Stalin’s Russia before the Soviet treaty with Hitler in 1939, before the partition of poland, before the forced servitude of the Eastern Bloc, the suppression of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the occupation of Afghanistan. ‘Peace.’ It glowed solemnly in the Gothic gloom of the station. I stared back at it. Peace, according to the Marxist-Leninist canon, could only come about when the world had ceased to change and had resolved into one system and one idea. Marxism itself, built on a Hegelian dialectic of opposites, drew its life from tensions and antagonisms; peace was merely ‘a means of gathering together one’s forces’, as Lenin said.

I took the next train out.



Several times in Moscow I visited the ex-fiancée of an English friend. Lyudmila lived on the tenth floor of a high-rise flatblock with her bland-faced mother and her nine-year-old son by a broken affair with a foreign diplomat. She was attractive, for no perceptible reason. A pair of hesitant, grey and rather child-like eyes illumined her pale face, and her mouth was crammed with projecting or crooked teeth which manoeuvred her lips into smiles of oddly sensuous innocence.

She had given birth to her illegitimate son in the early seventies, long before the Soviet government discouraged abortion in order to bolster the population. She had been confronted by the KGB and for a long time, I think, had lived through a private hell. Now, in the evenings, I would find her sitting on a wobbly chair with her legs tucked under her; sometimes she would close her eyes in mid-talk, as if she were weary or in perpetual meditation. The damp-streaked wallpaper of her apartment was lacerated by the child’s graffiti; a barricade of cupboards and faded purple curtains partitioned the sitting-room from somebody’s bed; and a grimy chandelier lit us outlandishly from above.

Lyudmila talked of her past life as if it were somebody else’s. Even of mutual friends she spoke only with a remote and separated affection. ‘I was unhappy for years after the boy’s birth. I wanted to die.’ Her eyes shut, as if testing the idea, opened again. ‘I didn’t find the world worth inhabiting at all. It was just a haze of people hunting for money, position, things. And I thought: what’s the point? They were like children playing games.’ She uttered this indictment in tones of faraway wonder, like somebody gazing at the universe down the diminishing end of a telescope. ‘Sometimes I’m grateful to have been born in Russia,’ she said. ‘If I’d lived in a better society I’d have believed myself free. I would never have discovered the reality inside me. But instead I was born into this hell, and was forced to discover my own peace. Perhaps, in the end, we’re lucky here….’

It was easy to guess the nature of her refuge. On the chair where she was sitting her legs had buckled into the lotus position, and through her bedroom’s doorway, jarred open by the boy’s bicycle, I saw the photograph of an Indian guru whose garlanded head and wrinkled paunch presided over the Slavic chaos with bizarre serenity. In front of him she had placed a little vase of flowers.

For her the ‘real’ world had dimmed to an asylum of the lost. It had become unbearable and she had rejected it, had rearranged it in the tranquil Buddhist patterns of wholeness and incorruption. She looked on its striving, she said, with increasing alienation and faint surprise. All that was irrelevant.

‘You see, all the time life—reality—is not in these battles and struggles at all.’ She picked up an apple which her cat was patting across the floor. ‘It’s everywhere else. In the trees around us, in the earth. Truth is in this apple, for instance. The apple is purely itself. And we’re surrounded by such things, but we don’t see them….’

It was all perfectly familiar, the neo-Buddhist litany. What was extraordinary was to find it here in Moscow, in the heartland of pragmatism. The cult of meditation was new in Russia, she said, but it was quietly growing. ‘They say here that there’s only one right way. But right and wrong are meaningless—figments of mind. What is lies above morality. Look at this cat’—she cradled the oblivious creature between her thighs, then held it up to me. ‘Do you see why I like it? This cat is itself. It’s uncontaminated by human beings. And birds too. In spite of revolutions and politics, the birds sing….’

I remembered the birds in the Minsk woods, but said teasingly: ‘I thought bird-songs were territorial war-cries.’ I stared at the cat without envy.