Among the Russians(31)
‘It’s true that we learn to read between the lines of our newspapers,’ said Vadim, who knew nothing of the incident, ‘but how can we know if even the lines aren’t there?’
Later, before we parted, and perhaps regretting his own long cri de coeur over his country and his city, he suddenly said: ‘But I love Novgorod more than anywhere else in the world. Our people are mostly good here, you know, and I think we lose something by leaving. Years ago I had a girlfriend who married a lorry-driver from Amsterdam, and emigrated. The first time she came back to visit us she was homesick. But later she returned with her nose in the air. Oh God! She’d taken a slimming course and lost kilos! She’d been a big strong girl before, and now she looked like a ghost—a sort of artifice, I can’t explain. She thought we were all mad to stay in Novgorod, and she gave us expensive presents as if she pitied us. But I looked at her and I thought: how strange, what has happened to her? She wants us to become like her, but is she better? What is she?’
He poured out the last of the brandy. I too could imagine the girl, her homely peasant looks fined down to mimic European manikins, her Mongol cheekbones rouged to Western colour, her mind and emotions grown more circumspect: less rude, less slow, less candid (but it was only a guess). I too doubted if she were ‘better’. Appearances and material things still seem to interest the Russians only in some shallow part of them. Objects may be acquired with bitterly-won time and money, but will be given or feasted away with scarcely a thought in a burst of exuberance or a maudlin lapse. They exist in the service of feeling or of friendship: it is a proud and primitive state. And when I looked at Vadim across the bottle-strewn table—the meal must have cost him three days’ salary—he too seemed still to belong to this peasant aristocracy.
But now it was late. The doorway behind us showed a cold quadrangle of stars. We toasted the people of each other’s countries for the last time, and stumbled out into the whispering grass and meandering footpaths of the kremlin.
4. Leningrad
LENINGRAD IS LIKE no other city in Russia or on earth. It seems to reject the half-Asiatic hinterland on whose rim it hangs, and to have exchanged this troubled parentage for the grace of eighteenth century Europe. On the northernmost limits of the ancient Byzantine world, it lies like a pale and beautiful question-mark. In 1917 the Bolsheviks repudiated it as capital, and it is touched now by the sad, patrician glow of an Istanbul or an Alexandria. However important its present, its past seems to saturate it. Bathed in the lost harmony of Europe, it symbolizes the paradoxical leaning of Russia towards the West, spurred by an atavistic dread of China and a centuries-old longing for civilized recognition.
Whereas the streets of most old Russian cities radiate out from a crumbling or vanished kremlin, those of Leningrad echo the centripetal grace of its canals. As I drove in deeper, its office and apartment blocks gave way to a glimmer of nineteenth century mansions, seedy and blemished now, along the outer waterways. Then, in an ever-tightening rhythm of alternate water and stone, the city’s heart came beating round in its saddened splendour. All the way to where the Neva river wound beneath a rank of water-reflecting palaces, and the Gulf of Finland opened to the west, canals and avenues succeeded one another in long, shining arcs of ever-increasing beauty.
Leningrad ineluctably has been called the Venice of the North. In fact it resembles Venice little more than Paris or London does. No Mediterranean warmth overhangs the measured glory of its canals, but a clean, unenchanted Nordic light. Palace follows palace, terrace follows terrace, with the impersonal radiance of a Bach cantata. All is cool, balanced, spacious. Under a coldly luminous sky, the thousands of quiet dwellings line the waters without appearing to partake of them. Even in summer the fogs and ice of the Neva seem to pervade the streets. These mansions reject any charm of southern ornament or light, and hold their place by elegance of proportion alone. Here and there the curve of a pedimented window or a lightly-moulded frieze breaks the stone serenity, but all the rest is a soft interplay of chromatic squares and rectangles. Their colours are wintry pale—gentle and reticent in the summer sunlight, as I first saw them: pastel yellows, ochres and oranges. The quays and pavements beneath are shod in pink-grey granite, and the bridges reach over the canals in single spans of handsomely-wrought iron, forged with winged heads and long-redundant coats-of-arms.
All through the city’s heart it is breathtaking. From across the river the palaces shine with an unspoilt, eighteenth century refinement. It seemed a crime to motor here, but for a while I drove about in blithe exhilaration. Trams and concertina-like Hungarian buses wobbled along the streets; but often the ways were half deserted. In every other lane my car would hit a heaving slipstream of cobbles. Open manholes gaped without warning in the middle of the thoroughfares, and twice I nearly dropped the car into one. Every street was a long, seductive ambush. Tram-lines erupted like swords from their cobbled beds; and once I almost crashed into one of the black official limousines, bullying its way down a road’s centre.
But the city was not built for cars, and the next day I lapsed into a directionless roaming. Soviet Leningrad faded away and I indulged a dream of tsarist St Petersburg. The treacle-brown waterways, the granite pavements under my feet, the street lamps with their embossed bases and politely dangling brackets, filled me with the balm of an old and recognizable world.
Yet increasingly I realized that the city was, in its way, profoundly Russian. In its vista-hung perspectives and its avenues breaking into lake-like squares, in the endless frontages of institute and palace modulated by battalioned columns and flanked by enormous, almost unpeopled gardens, the size of the land itself seemed to boom and resound like the sea. The yellow brick of modern Moscow seemed realigned into expanses equally enormous, whose characteristic pale yellow stucco could be as forbidding and remote as a Stalinist skyscraper. Then as now this impersonal vastness was the public face of Russia. Its voice, if it had one, intoned an unmistakable Net. And all the canals and looking-glass mansions, in their courtly but firm way, were saying Net too.