Among the Russians(4)

I listened to him with the helplessness of the mathematically illiterate, who tend to judge a culture by whether the children look happy or the cats run away. But Alexander Intourist (as I silently named him) shared a trait which I came to recognize as profoundly Russian: he was hypnotized by size and numbers. He had recently graduated from language college, had completed his six-month training as a guide and was bursting with unimparted knowledge and statistics.

‘White Russia as a whole has ten thousand schools, thirty universities and higher institutes, 130 secondary specialized educational establishments, fifty-three museums, 21,000 libraries….’ Figures tumbled out of him like the dry rush of a grain chute. He had been trained to answer all tourists’ questions, and since I didn’t ask them (he gave me no time) he did so rhetorically himself, and replied with a deluge of data. ‘Are there new hotels in Minsk? Yes, there are new hotels in Minsk. On our right you see the Yubileinaya Hotel, which accommodates four hundred and was founded on the fiftieth anniversary of the White Russian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Planet Hotel holds six hundred. The conference hall beside it holds 180, able to listen to four different languages in simultaneous translation. What are the principal manufactures of Minsk? The principal….’

But I had long ago stopped listening to his words, and was watching his face. It was not that of a computer, but of a prophet. It was gentle, lean and fervid, bisected by a delicate nose and a loose-lipped, rather sensual mouth. Only in repose, I noticed, his heavy-lidded eyes lost their doctrinaire glow; then he would polish his spectacles nervously on a handkerchief, and his expression would show the faintly hurt, inwrought studiousness of the Jew.

It was not a face which I saw reflected in the people of Minsk. Before the Second World War half the population was Jewish, but they were scattered and decimated. Now, hemmed in glass and concrete, a desultory river of men and women commuted between placeless places with a look of stony dedication. I could discern in them, as yet, no distinct physical type at all. Like the Russian countryside, they seemed to be defined only by absences, by the demeanour of a people unawakened, their gaze shut off. They were like a nation of sleep-walkers. Small-eyed men in dark jackets carrying briefcases; soldiers with their caps shoved back from their foreheads; youths in poor-quality Polish jeans; hefty women with sensible hairstyles; old men, their shirts buttoned and tieless at the neck—they conformed, as if by conspiracy, to the Western notion of them: collectivized corpuscles of the state body. And there still clung about them the rough quietude of soil. They seemed not to be walking urban pavements at all, but trudging invisible fields.

By now Alexander Intourist was mounting to a new crescendo of statistics. We had driven past the Palace of Sport (serves 6,000) and the stadium (seats 50,000) and had arrived in one of those lunar zones of apartment blocks which surround every Soviet city. ‘These are flatblocks of the fifties, the Stalin era, very decent’, he said, ‘and over there are blocks of the sixties, even more beautiful, with shops below them. But in the seventies the system of mixing flats and shops fell out of favour, and we achieved blocks like the ones you see over there’—he indicated a cliff-like hulk of pale brick structures. ‘Those are the most beautiful of all.’ I glanced at him in case he were joking, but his face showed no hint of irony.

I understood then something which was to strike me again and again. The Russians do not see their buildings aesthetically, but symbolically. Certainly Alexander was convinced of the loveliness in these apartment blocks. But their beauty lay not in the concrete already cracking, nor in their brick and glass palisades rushed up to fulfil a quota in a flagging Five-Year Plan. It resided in the progress they embodied. It was national pride projected on utility. I was reminded obtusely of a Russian nun whom I had known in Jerusalem. All physical things, she said, were illusory; they were merely a shadow thrown by spiritual events.

We were moving toward Lenin Prospect into the heart of a city measured out on the clean slate of German destruction. ‘Help the Motherland—Build Communism’, ‘Glory to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’. ‘The Ideas of Lenin live and conquer’—the only advertisements repeated and repeated themselves neon-lit above the rooftops or splashed across the walls, as if to din their purpose into brains armoured by defensive reflex. We passed the municipal design centre, glowing with a portrait of Lenin in phosphorescent lights, and debouched into Lenin Square. An ageing, ten-storey blaze of concrete spread across half the plaza—the seat of the Supreme Soviet of White Russia, whose powers are those of a mammoth district council.

‘White Russia is a free republic,’ Alexander said. ‘It has a separate seat in the United Nations. It can secede from the Soviet Union any time it wants.’

I found myself staring at him again. Did he really believe this fantasy? (Anyone invoking the constitutional right of secession can face the death sentence.) But again his face showed no hint of cynicism or ambiguity. ‘And there is its Ministry of Foreign Affairs,’ he added.

‘Where?’

‘There.’ I descried a pitiful attachment to the buildings of the city soviet.

I changed the subject. What of the church, I asked? It stood at one corner of the square, ancient and unlovely in the surrounding harshness.

‘That? That’s been turned into a movie-makers’ club.’

I was beginning to be mesmerized by Alexander. The idealism of Communism was coursing through him as if this were 1917. He believed he lived in the perfect, the only society; yet he had no grounds for comparison at all. He seemed to be the pure creation of propaganda—a frightening mixture of na?vety and intelligence. I wondered if all Russians were going to drop this ideological curtain between us. But Alexander, perhaps, had redirected into Party dogma the fervour of a repudiated Judaism, and I never met anybody quite like him again. He loved to attribute every significant invention to the Soviet Union, and to Belorussia in particular. He repeated many hoary Stalinist claims—that a Russian called Popov, not Marconi, discovered radio; that Polzunov created steam-engines twenty-one years before James Watt. Potash fertilizer had been invented in Minsk, he said; and the first ice-creams had sprung from the sap of the Soviet birch tree, frozen overnight and tentatively licked by the inquisitive peasants of Belorussia. At some point, too, he emerged with the statistic that a cubic meter of Russian pine-wood could be made into three hundred men’s suits—a beautiful thought, perhaps true, which often recurred to me on the Moscow metro when watching crumpled commuters.