Among the Russians(41)
An old man of eighty-four attracted my attention in the Mikhailovsky gardens. He brandished a sabre-shaped walking-stick as he strode down the paths, his war medals dangled in ranks at his chest, and his features showed bellicose above a mist of white beard. He looked like God the Father peering over a cloud.
‘I’m an Old Bolshevik,’ he announced to me. ‘One of the original Revolutionaries!’
A ghost from the twenties, he still exulted in the people’s common ownership. He patted the tree trunks possessively as he marched by and frequently said ‘This is my tree, and this is my tree.’
In 1907 he had become a revolutionary, and had been sent in chains to Siberia. But a fellow-prisoner, he said, had concealed a file in the lapel of his coat, and together they had cut through their manacles and fled back to Leningrad. Those were the days when Siberian exiles and prisoners—Trotsky, Stalin and Bakunin among them—escaped from Siberia with laughable ease and slipped over frontiers with the freedom of stray cats.
Then the old man had joined the Revolution and fought for three years against the Whites. He settled into a military stride as he spoke of it, and thrust out his beard like a torpedo, while all the time his gaze flashed and fulminated over the gardens. ‘Get off the grass, comrade!’ he bellowed. A young mother, seated on the sward beside her pram, looked up in bewilderment. ‘Get off our motherland’s grass!’
He embodied the intrusive precepts of early Communism, whose zealots were encouraged to scrutinize, shrive and denounce each other. He was the self-proclaimed guardian and persecutor of all about him, and he entered the 1980s with the anachronism of a mastodon. Farther on a girl was leaning in the fork of one of his precious trees. ‘Keep away from there!’ he roared. ‘Can’t you see you’re stopping it grow? Get off!’ She gaped at him, said nothing, did not move. He marched on unperturbed. He even anathematized a mousing cat. ‘What are you looking for, comrade? Leave nature alone!’ He did not seem to mind or notice that nobody obeyed him.
We rested under a clump of acacias. ‘When I was a boy,’ he said, ‘I saw these trees planted.’ He pointed to the largest of them, which bifurcated into a gnarled arm. ‘That tree was no taller than a little lamp-post then. The garden was private, of course, but as a boy I often squeezed in over the railings. The tsar and tsaritsa used to walk here in the summer.’ His voice dwindled from an alsatian growl to purring reminiscence. ‘Once, while I was hiding in the shrubs, I saw them myself…. What were they like? It’s hard to recall exactly. But she was a beautiful woman, I remember. She had her hand on his arm. And he seemed very large and handsome, and….’ But he never finished. The lurking commissar in him erupted again. ‘What are you doing, comrade?’ Beneath us, a man was raking weeds out of an ornamental pond. ‘How can you weed a lake?’
The gardener looked up stoically. ‘I’m at work.’
Work. The magic syllable.
Immediately, as if some benedictory hand had passed its grace across the old man’s brow, his expression changed to a look of benign redress. ‘Fine,’ he murmured, ‘work.’ For him the word had the potency of ‘revolution’ or ‘collective’. The mousing cat, too, had been at work, I thought, but had been unable to voice this watchword.
Before we parted he said: ‘I’ll give you my address. It’s just a postal address, not the real one. That’s secret. You see,’ he repeated, ‘I’m one of the Old Bolsheviks.’
I wondered then if he were not deranged. He scribbled out his address on the back of a newspaper, in enormous handwriting. It was only as he was leaving me that I realized from his age that the history he had given me was nonsense. The tsars did not send lone boys of eleven to Siberia.
‘How old did you say you were?’ I asked. For he looked timeless.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he answered. His eyes twinkled at me collusively. ‘You Estonians, you’re a clever lot. You’re thinking that I can’t have been sent to Siberia aged eleven. But actually I’m ninety-four….’—and he strode away through the trees.
One evening I went with Lucia to the Kirov Ballet. I had never seen a more ravishing auditorium—five tiers of gold, white and blue, and a blue-gold curtain about to lift on Swan Lake. But beneath it the audience, plumped out in its best clothes, was innocently styleless. Under banks of chandeliers and cupids lounging among gilded foliage, they sat in ill-fitting brown and grey suits or outlandish flowered dresses. The old imperial box was stuffed with portly municipal dignitaries and their wives. They cheered tremendously.
The Kirov was once to the Bolshoi what Leningrad is to Moscow, and the company would dance with a classical line and restrained brilliance which could make the Bolshoi’s vigour seem crude. But tonight this no longer seemed so, and a new flamboyance was seeping through both company and audience. Here was a chubby-looking ballerina whose unexpected dash produced volleys of clapping from all over the house. A claque in the gallery was cheering on the male principal with obtrusive shouting, and feats of technique were applauded in mid-leap, as Italian audiences greet High Cs.
‘It’s not a proper Leningrad audience,’ Lucia insisted angrily. ‘Some of them aren’t even wearing ties.’
But performers and spectators were one. A love of the dance infected them all. This, I remembered, was the nursery of Pavlova, Karsavina, Nijinsky, Ulanova, Nureyev, Makarova. Beneath the classical discipline an ancient Russian fire was breathing up and spilling into the audience, some of whom sprang to their feet at the end of the Black Swan’s thirty-two fouettés, and drowned the music in cheers.