Among the Russians(37)

Then, from nowhere discernible, sounded the muffled blare of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, the doors at the end of the gallery flew open, and in trudged a fat young couple—she in white, he in a lumpish brown suit. They looked wholesome and embarrassed, as if they were causing too much bother. The bride had a homely face, on which the lipstick and eye-shadow stood out like a betrayal. The next moment they were marching between our lines, which murmured and smiled, and we were crowding behind them into a chandeliered hall. In its centre the registry desk inevitably suggested an altar; but behind it, in place of an ordained priest, stood a swarthy, cross-eyed girl in dark green, who announced the couple’s marriage with constant references to the Soviet Socialist Motherland, which sanctified their union. Seated on chairs behind them, their friends and relatives betrayed no pleasure, no tears, nothing at all. The couple were declared man and wife. But instead of the linked crowns and processional symbolism of the Orthodox rite, the Soviet national anthem played. Everybody stood to attention, except a deaf babushka who remained comfortably over-flowing her chair. The couple signed the register among the strains of Rachmaninov, exchanged rings, and it was over.

I stared at the relatives as they lumbered together for their formal embraces, and hoped to be taken for a remote and unkissable Estonian cousin. The married couple accepted congratulations with dissociated smiles, and we proceeded back down the stairs in silence. I felt vaguely stricken. As we descended, I glanced back and saw another couple entering the gallery to the Jupiter Symphony. The affair had taken little more than ten minutes. The portentous music, palatial rooms and sacerdotal desk; the intense, worthy but inescapably unimportant clerk; the Soviet State presiding in place of God—all had thrown an inflated ceremonial around the precarious human promise of a bewildered man and woman. They suggested perspectives of eternity and moral absolutes which were forever gone. Something very simple and austere, I thought, would have been better, more fitting. But perhaps, if nobody had tried to recreate God under the chandeliers, I would have felt subtly cheated. There was no pleasing me.



The next evening, in a southern suburb of the city, I was flagged down for breaking one of the innumerable petty traffic laws which obsess the police. A gawkish young officer gave me a polite warning, then fell to discussing the speed and horsepower of my car. But after a minute somebody else emerged behind him: a thick-set man with crisp black hair, dressed in a black raincoat. He murmured something to the policeman, who backed away and vanished. Then he turned to me. Instead of speaking, he shouted. His questions detonated like pistol-shots. Where had I come from, where was I going to, where were my papers, why was I in this zone of Leningrad?

I did not have to ask what he was. I mumbled confused answers, resorting to worse Russian than I knew. In fact I was on my way to visit a known dissident.

Why was I not in the tourist part of the city? Where was I staying? Where was my group? I looked back at him numbly. His stare was a power-drill. I vaguely wondered in what degree such men were insensitive, cruel or patriotic; but I came to no conclusion. Then, after I had answered his questions, he smiled, walked backwards as if he were on a parade ground, and the next moment had merged with the crowd.

I gazed after him. The surface of Russian life had suddenly cracked open under my feet. Just as abruptly it had closed up again, but the ground no longer looked the same. I was disgusted to remember in the man’s smile a trace of charm.

I drove through an abyss of empty streets on my way to the dissident, constantly checking that I was not followed. After I had entered his flat-block, I lingered under the well of the stairs like a thug in a low-grade movie; but nobody entered after me. I was thoroughly unnerved.

Volodya, like most dissidents, had been deprived of his job, and lived in one room of a shared flat. He was slight and high-strung—a shadow of a man, whose expression was so crestfallen that I could not imagine any strength in him. Yet he had been prominent in a disbanded human rights movement, he published underground literature, and had been harassed by the KGB for years in an unspectacular way. His room was crowded with seven or eight young men and girls, seated on cushions against the walls. A bloom of youth and hopefulness hung over them, permeating their conversation, glowing in their eyes. They were teachers, part-time artists and playwrights. Volodya, twenty years older than any, sat among them with his frail legs crossed in front of him. When he spoke, which was rarely, they listened to him intently. They held his intellect, his age and his sufferings in quiet awe, and when I compared his wrenched face to their clear ones, I was moved by the depth and cruelty of the divide which separated them.

They chattered with the sureness of undergraduates about underground art exhibitions and samizdat. I was sitting next to a would-be playwright who veered every few minutes between buoyancy and pessimism. He was trying to push his play through the multiple layers of censorship, and had already penetrated seven of them; but he reckoned he had several more to go. ‘Of course the play’s not openly critical of the system. I’d have to be a lunatic to try that. It’s a kind of fable. Serious plays nowadays conceal themselves as something else—they masquerade as fairy stories or bits of harmless history. But by the time the censors have finished with them they’re unrecognizable anyway.’

Volodya thrust a sheaf of bound papers into my hands. ‘This is what I do.’ It was a copy of the religio-cultural samizdat journal which he published. I fingered eagerly through it. It exuded the peculiar mana of all Russian underground literature—cobweb-thin foolscap pages of blurred carbon lines, worn and thumbed by numberless surreptitious hands. It was one of three such magazines in Leningrad, now in its twentieth edition, and contained poetry, religious and philosophical essays, and articles about non-conformist art. Elaborate diagrams accompanied a piece on aesthetics; a woman since fled to the West had written ‘On the Existential and Religious Significance of Unofficial Culture.’