Among the Russians(29)

The earliest surviving letters of its citizens, jotted down on birch-bark in the fourteenth century, are typically pragmatic. ‘Order to Gregory: I’ve sent you a bucket of sturgeon.’ ‘Greetings to Father and Mother: When you’ve sold the house, you can go to Smolensk or Kiev. Bread is cheap there…’

Even its icons betray it. Those of Vladimir and Suzdal, its rivals, are pervaded by a cool, patrician lyricism; their colours are lilac-brown and silver-grey, and their painted prophets seem to be participants in some celestial ballet, choreographed in Constantinople or in paradise. But Novgorod’s icons are robust and emphatic, filled with the joy of life. Powerful scarlets, yellows and vivid blue-greens predominate. They are at their most typical when exemplifying action. These are the icons of peasants: warm, sensual, nationalistic. Their Virgins and apostles keep their feet on the ground, and might drive a hard deal; and one suspects that the real stockin-trade of their shrewd-eyed saints is not human souls, but flax or carpets.

I imagined the features of these canonized shopkeepers reproduced among the modern inhabitants. But it was a different face which looked through my windscreen as I was bedding down in the campsite that evening. Circled in a golden halo of hair and beard, its brown eyes inspected me with a questing puzzlement. I opened the door and the gently leonine face peered in. Its expression was one of mingled diffidence and trustingness.

‘You’re the Englishman?’ Vadim spoke fluent English. He was an engineer from a sordid-looking factory nearby, whose guarded gates were plastered with slogans for harder work. He had heard that an Englishman had arrived in Novgorod, and he was anxious for books. Had I, by any chance, the novels of James Hadley Chase? Well then, Dickens or Lawrence…

‘I can’t get English novels here, and our own are hopelessly dull.’ He settled himself in my car and plucked two bottles of vodka from his pockets. ‘Here, let’s get drunk. Got a cup?’ We swilled alternately from a plastic mug balanced on the hand-brake between us. ‘It’s coarse stuff,’ he said. ‘I don’t like the taste, I like the oblivion.’

So we started to drink. Vodka—that colourless innocence! It’s the curse and liberation of Russia, a self-obliterating escape from tedium and emptiness, from interminable winter nights, and the still longer, darker nights of the soul. It is drunk in furious, catatonic debauches, with the full intention of rendering its drinkers virtually insensible. Bottles are always tipped dry, glasses drained at a gulp. Drunkenness accounts for over half the motor accidents and almost all the murders in the country. It has accelerated infant mortality and drastically reduced the life expectancy of men, whom it lures from their work and leaves crumpled in the doorways of every city in the land. As early as the ninth century, it is said, when the Russians were choosing which religion to embrace, they repudiated teetotal Islam with horror. ‘Drinking is the joy of Russia,’ declared their prince, ‘we just cannot do without it. ‘And travellers since the sixteenth century were astonished at how the Muscovites seized on alcohol as on some suicidal sport, how state banquets ended with the whole imperial court collapsed under the tables, and how people dropped dead of drink in the streets.

As for me, in no time my head was misted to a beneficent blur on weightless shoulders; my voice became the woodwind section of an orchestra tuning up for symphonies which never took place, and my vision contracted until it encompassed only the cherubic face of my host, which started to gyrate slightly around his sad, brown and still puzzled eyes. We talked about Western pop groups, of which I know nothing at all. Yet I dimly heard myself holding forth on Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones and several groups which I must have invented. We drank to them all.

Once only Vadim’s talk strayed into politics. He said that the Moscow leadership was hopeless, moribund.

I pricked up an inebriate ear. ‘Why?’ I asked.

‘All this propaganda,’ he mumbled. ‘It makes you puke. Equality! I tell you, there are people living round me who are all but millionaires …four or five of them…. By the way, you know that black American group…? These millionaires don’t get rich on salaries, of course…they’re all in some underground business, selling stuff on the black market…. Let’s open the other bottle…’

After three hours I drove Vadim back to his home through the dark. I was criminally drunk. I fumbled along the road with mole-like caution, concentrating on the weak-looking blobs thrown by my headlights. Beyond these were only my own and the night’s darkness. My head was a gaseous bubble floating in nothing. Praying not to encounter the police, i dropped Vadim two streets short of his house, as he wished. Talking with foreigners was permitted, he said, but not liked. Novgorod was very provincial. We arranged to meet the day after tomorrow, and he vanished shakily into the blackness.

All next morning I lay stretched out with other drunks in the parklands round the town’s kremlin. Vodka is said to bequeath no headache to its victims, only a painless anaesthesia, but my head throbbed and filled my eyes with lead. From time to time I would have them open and gaze across to the long, blistered fortress. It rose from an embankment now deep in shrubs and grass, and circled above a marshy moat filled with butterflies and yellow flowers. Squat wall-towers with witch-hat roofs and mean, barred windows stiffened the hoary circlet of its walls, which curled for a full three-quarters of a mile, enclosing the inner city above its steel-bright river. On the eastern bank the churches of the merchants’ quarter bubbled up in a fantasia of wasp-wasted globules and cones, tubular turrets, onion cupolas and spires; and my vodka-dimmed eyes discerned the gutted arcade of a seventeenth century market—a last memory of those lantern-hung booths and multicoloured awnings which once illumined the spices and slaves of Novgorod fair.