Among the Russians(28)
But by now the children had meandered back to their parents or stood in meek groups, looking at the work which they thought was theirs. As I watched their clear faces, I felt a muffled despair. It seemed as if a whole generation were being anaesthetized before my eyes. A single precocious girl had chalked down something different. Her picture showed a bomb escorted by grotesque, top-hatted Americans, whose button eyes squinted above overfed cheeks, crammed with cigars. Above this was inscribed another current state slogan ‘No to the American Neutron Bomb’, and at its foot ‘Drawn by Anna, aged nine.’
Half visible in drizzle for miles ahead, the road dipped and tilted over the light breathings of the plain, pushing to Novgorod through a vista of pastureland and rain-faded forests. I had arrived within sight of the city’s lakes, and the first, watery bloom of domes beyond, when a young woman tottered off the verge into the middle of the road and stood with downcast eyes as if embracing death. When I stopped she came and tapped faintly at the car door with her ringed fingers. She was not suicidal but sublimely drunk. She wanted a lift into Novgorod. My passenger seat had been flattened for camping, but she climbed into the back with a wilting bunch of flowers, and twined her arms about my neck as we drove. The arms were soft and slender. But she herself did not possess even the interest of ugliness; she seemed oddly unformed (although she was twenty-two), her eyes callow behind their spectacles. Her talk was a breathless and musical ramble. I’m drunk,’ she said, without shame. ‘But I can show you the way. I’m a crazy person, I ought to tell you. I’m unhappy, that’s why, or so my parents say.’ She began fondling my ears.
‘Where’s your boyfriend?’ I asked.
‘He doesn’t write to me. He’s a fighter pilot. In Poland. I worry. Oh God, I worry. Where’s your girlfriend? Are you alone?’ She inspected the car with bovine turnings of her head, as if one of the seats might yield up a woman. Then she returned to my ears. ‘I’m so glad I met you. Where shall we go? My parents have just got a new flat. I don’t know whether they’ll be there or in the old one…’.
Framed in my driving mirror and in a limp horseshoe of hair, her bespectacled face presupposed some species of louche and highbrow siren. As we entered Novgorod, she pointed out the sights, her fingernails alternately disinterring and embedding themselves in my shoulders. ‘That’s the Church of St Somebody…and there’s the headquarters of the KGB…heh-heh…I’m not really drunk, or am I?…and there’s old Lenin…’. She gestured ahead with a wavering arm. ‘I used to work somewhere over there…I still work sometimes …and sometimes I make love…Turn to the right here…. Let’s try the new flat.’ She lowered her spectacles over her chin and pinched her eyes. ‘I hope you don’t mind me…I’ll never see you again after tomorrow, I realize that…’.
We reached the flat through a rear courtyard, where men were playing backgammon under ragged trees. These huge blocks are a busybody’s paradise—we were raked by a crossfire of inquisition as we entered—yet often neighbours do not know one another’s names, and the old communal village life finds its grave here. I was relieved to meet the girl’s two brothers, struggling with a hillock of unsightly furniture and books in the entrance. She stumbled along the corridors. By Soviet standards the apartment was spacious, and she crooned at the thought of having a bedroom to herself, where previously the whole family had slept in one room.
When I tried to leave, she stared at me with a vague sadness, then begged to be taken to her old flat and sat resolutely in the back of my car again. The tears began to roll down her cheeks and into her mouth. I didn’t know what to do. Sexual puritanism here is allied strangely to this peasant frankness, which can be both rude and touching. Many young people, especially, live in a violent chiaroscuro of public prudery and private licence.
Then a Lada saloon drove up beside us. In it were her parents: a stony mother and a bald, bullet-headed father with authoritarian grey eyes.
‘That’s them,’ she said. Her voice had dwindled to a miserable hush. ‘They’re angry because I’m in a foreign car.’
They were. In the back seat a formidable pair of grandmothers added their Gorgon stare to the barrage of accusation, until the whole car resembled some livid and scandalized hydra, which said not a word. I went up to them to talk, but they stared absolutely through me at their neurotic daughter with a terrible suppressed fury and shame.
And now the girl was beside me. ‘Mother’. She knocked with her fingers on their car door as she had on mine. ‘Mother…’. Trembling, she thrust her straggly bouquet through the quarter-open window. Her mother snatched it and tossed it behind her. The girl turned to me. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ she slurred. ‘Good-bye. I think you’re so…so very…’
She was, I thought later, the most contemporary Russian I had met. She could have been any member of the West’s lost young. And Novgorod that evening seemed to sympathize with her, bleakly conscious of its poverty. People were few and hurried in the streets. The voids in the landscape appeared to have intruded into the city, exposing its inhabitants as to some brutal public gaze. Roads, buildings, squares—everything was bigger than the citizens were.
The old town keeps a tended, antiseptic beauty. It is restored, cleaned, petted. The Volhov river cuts it in two. On the west bank the kremlin, its princely heart, erupts from dense trees. On the east a constellation of churches marks the old merchants’ quarter. Novgorod, like half these north-western towns, grew up as a trading-post between the Baltic and the Black Sea, and was ruled by the haughty democratic spirit of its Veche, an assembly of leading citizens whose parliament, guarded by an octagonal tower, still stands on the river bank. A practical, earthy spirit pervaded the town almost from its beginnings. ‘Lord Novgorod the Great’, as its citizens named it, was the only republic in Russia. ‘If the prince is bad—into the mud with him,’ they said. The churches which sprinkle its riverbanks were built not by lords, but by trade guilds. At its height the population stood at four hundred thousand.