Among the Russians(39)
On and on they talked, with a youthful cynicism which had already left rage or surprise behind it.
‘Influence is more important than wealth,’ Lucia said. ‘Plenty of people have money, but they don’t have access to anything worth buying.’
This remark seemed the sadder because we were walking up Nevsky Prospect, once the most fashionable street in Russia. ‘The shops are utterly uninteresting,’ she said. ‘Anything of distinction vanishes the moment it appears—but it probably never appears.’ As we went east, the three-mile boulevard unleashed itself before us in long, serene facades. The early palaces, banks and exclusive shops had sobered into offices and cinemas. Their upper storeys, with light mouldings or bold columns, plaster masks and friezes, dwindled below to neon signs, half-subterranean stores and a web of trolleybus cables. Every other vehicle was a ramshackle bus or van.
Lucia knew the Prospect by heart. ‘I was brought up just a street away from here. Look how beautiful it is!’ But she spoke of it with impending loss, which I did not understand. She pointed out the mansions as we went, calling them by their old names, half forgotten. Here Gogol lived, there Tchaikovsky died. In Number Thirty, Wagner and Berlioz had conducted, and Liszt played. A little way away, she said, Fabergé had his workshop. Nearby the Stroganov palace gazed at itself in the Moika canal—a green and white Narcissus. In the basement of the neighbouring Yusupov palace, Prince Felix had poisoned the atrocious Rasputin, who yet lived on until he was plunged under the ice of the Neva. Down one canal the barley-sugar spirals and jagged domes of a Muscovite-style church erupted like a curse. Little by little Lucia’s talk divested the great street of its neon and trams and set the nineteenth century carriages trundling with their pearl-and-vermin aristocracy, summoned up the sartorial elegance and stately slowness of St Petersburg life—and the drab, almost unnoticed mass of the ancient poor too, moving in between, biding its time.
Opposite Kazan Cathedral (Museum of Atheism, tomb of Kutuzov) we plunged into an outlandish building topped by a glass tower and sculptured angels—once the office of the Singer sewing-machine company. It had been turned into Leningrad’s largest bookshop. ‘But there’s nothing here worth reading,’ Lucia said.
It was bemusing. Among the banks of scientific textbooks, war memoirs and indifferent novels, among all the snoring and paralyzed shelves of unsold Marx, Lenin and Brezhnev, I searched in vain for the Russian classics. Tolstoy, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Yesenin—they were almost absent. Why? I never discovered for sure, but it was the same everywhere. Lucia said that the official reason was the paper shortage. But literally millions of unread political tracts are printed every day. In order to get rid of them and achieve their sales quota, shop staff may only part with a volume of Turgenev, for instance, in the compulsory company of four or five books on Marxism-Leninism and the Komsomol. I noticed a little shelf of works in English; they were dizzy bedfellows—Jack London (an old favourite), Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Penn Warren.
Lucia was looking round in despair. ‘It’s all so depressing.’ When we came to a counter selling posters of the October Revolution and the Soviet Achievement, she said: ‘Foreign friends of mine buy these to hang in their lavatories.’ She started to laugh dangerously.
‘Let’s leave here.’
Then, as if ashamed, she began to praise her city. In the centuries-old rivalry between Leningrad and Moscow, she belonged heart and mind to Leningrad. ‘Moscow’s an eyesore, it can’t compare. Even our metro’s better than theirs. And we speak a purer Russian.’ A ghostly Muscovite demurred inside me, but she silenced him with an imperious: ‘We, after all, were built to rule.’
We wandered into a square dense with trees. On its far side the Pushkin Theatre—a tour de force of the architect Rossi—swam weightless in pale yellow and soft white, carved out of air or icing. Corinthian columns shaped its loggia in the sky, and high on its pediment a chariot of Apollo trampled.
‘I pass this square every day to work,’ Lucia said, ‘and every day it fascinates me. That’s the Kirov school on one side—the best ballet company in Russia [my ghostly Muscovite grumbled again.] The Pushkin Theatre’s gone downhill. We don’t seem to have good young actors any more. But look what beauty!’ Again her voice was full of anticipated loss, as if the building were passing away before her eyes. A faint flush had travelled along her cheekbones. ‘I want to walk about this city all the time now, all day.’
Suddenly I realized that she meant to leave: not only Leningrad, but the Soviet Union. How she could achieve this, I had no idea; but beauty might be as potent a passport as money. She looked embarrassed and sad when I asked her, and only said: ‘Yes, I’m leaving for the West. That’s why it’s strange to walk here now. It seems to grow lovelier as I look at it. It’s like leaving a person. That makes it hard to bear.’
Her face all at once seemed depleted, older. She did not mention Anatoly. But I sensed that she was leaving him also. Anatoly was too old to begin afresh.
We started up the street from the little square. I did not ask her any more. Beyond the Anichkov Bridge, statued with horse-taming youths, the Nevsky Prospect grows young with a late nineteenth century gaucheness. Thunderous caryatids labour under unmanageable columns. Facades grow cluttered and inarticulate, mouldings coarse. So we remained in the square, inspecting its statue of Catherine the Great—a thirteen-foot bronze harridan cradling wreath and orb. Grouped about her statue’s base, the bronze figures of her statesmen and lovers loll and strut and confabulate together so that we could almost smell their perfumed wigs and eavesdrop on their pompous and obscene chatter. The generous Orlovsky and cadaverous Suvorov, the bluestocking Princess Dashkova fondling a book, Derzhavin declaiming poetry (and nobody listening), the bear-like and sensual Potyomkin—they sat in her shadow, as they had in life.