Among the Russians(27)
The divorce rate is appalling. A third of all recent Soviet marriages end within one year. Explanations for this cite drunkenness, cramped living space and the need for wives to work. But every case I encountered complexified these categories or turned them irrelevant. ‘I was blindly in love with my wife,’ Sasha said, ‘but we were completely different. Her family, you see, were in the medical profession, dentists. They kept to themselves. But mine were real workers’ people. My father was a tanner, open-hearted as the day, and our house was always full of people coming and going. [The class distinction was a subtle one: a dentist earned less than a tanner.] My father knew I’d be unhappy. He died soon after our wedding. I think it killed him.’
Sasha’s high-wrought features had hardened; he was looking to me for sympathy. But I was imagining his wife, a schoolmistress, returning from work to collect the children out of nursery school, going back to an empty house, feeding them, coping. The vaunted equality of Russian women is a mirage.
‘Yes, it’s harder to be a woman in life than it is to be a man,’ Sasha said. ‘We think more about ourselves.’ He did not look as if he meant to change this.
We talked about other things, and laughed at politics—his world’s and mine—in which neither of us trusted. Then he got up to go. He was taking his daughters to swim in the Volga early next morning. ‘I told my wife I’d be back by two o’clock.’ But it was only midnight. Vera got up with him. He squeezed my hand as he left. ‘You’re not like an Englishman at all,’ he said. ‘You’re more like a Russian!’
I accepted this gratefully for its spirit, with its overtones of spent inhibition, and watched him and Vera disappear up a pathway. There were plenty of empty huts.
In my own the mosquitoes were whirring back and forth like helicopters. I massacred them with a folded copy of Izvestiya and spread out my sleeping-bag on the wooden bunk, remembering Sasha with warmth. These intense, subterfuge-ridden conversations, snatched in camping-huts or tiny flats, had about them a feel almost of redemption. In them I sensed a weight of fear and suspicion, unconsciously carried all my life, lifting from my shoulders with the ease of a natural event, of something rectified. Then I would realize by the depth of my pleasure how profound the fear had been. All the while, in the asking and answering of questions, it was less the facts that mattered than the human touching, the translation of an abstract people into flesh and spirit.
This ambassadorial glow accompanied me next morning while I strolled about the town. Kalinin was once an imperial staging-post between Leningrad and Moscow, and spread along the Volga with a jaded neo-classical distinction. It was Sunday, and thousands of white, sunbathing bodies turned the riverbanks into beaches. In the Park of Rest and Culture old women were selling red and white gladioli—but Rest was interrupted by loudspeakers pouring out political harangues, to which nobody was listening, and Culture was confined to an outdoor theatre where nothing happened, its seats filled by families staring at its stage with a common expression of emptiness. A board of honour and an avuncular portrait of Lenin presided in the dusty gardens. At a line of outdoor tables middle-aged men were playing chess. Nearby, in a stadium of bumping-cars, the small boys were not shouting and crashing into one another, but circled round and round in a studious and polite ceremony of avoidance, and there was scarcely a noise. Soon the speeches from the loudspeakers were superseded by the marching paeons of a male choir. Archaic, drenched in patriotism, they exhaled a chilling martial bumptiousness and mission. Together with bass folk-songs sung in mock-Chaliapinesque, they were the standard fare for Parks of Rest and Culture, and they pervade my aural memories of Russia in a cold leitmotiv.
I joined a crowd around a group of little girls. Immaculate in frilled dresses and white socks, their hair ballooning with ribbons, they were kneeling round a playground and chalking pictures on the tarmac. The subject of the drawings—it was a competition—was ‘Peace’; and the judges, a trio of friendly-faced municipal officials, were being lobbied by possessive mothers. The girls were very quiet. They drew their pictures with the same look of demure solemnity as that with which the small boys avoided one another in bumping-cars. In the corner of each they inscribed their name and age.
I stared eagerly at their compositions, as if to peer into the mind and heart of a whole generation. They were heartbreakingly similar. They portrayed the symbolic Olympic bear Misha—all round ears and cuddly torso—under the slogan ‘the Olympics means peace.’ A few auxiliary cats and flowers completed the stock of fantasy, and above each picture the five-or eight-or ten-year-old child had inscribed ‘Peace’ or ‘Peace to the World’. They had drawn nothing truly their own.
An elderly man with whom I had spoken before took me gently by the arm. ‘You see these,’ he said. ‘You must understand now how much we want peace. I hope you will go back to your people and tell them.’
Looking into his childlike eyes, I couldn’t doubt their sincerity. But I went on gazing at the pictures, hoping for I know not what. Perhaps I was perverse in finding something empty and frightening here. But these designs had not even the naturalness of stick figures or a box house. They were merely taught phrases and symbols, all alike. These children, I felt, might equally well have inscribed ‘War’, for they were drawing only the government’s temporary requirement. They were perfect tools, pure reflections. They were morally neuter. I wanted to tell the man that imbued obedience was the enemy of peace, and that while these white-stockinged innocents were chalking their bears on the tarmac of Kalinin, Soviet gun ships were murdering Afghans in the Hindu Kush.