Among the Russians(43)
We might as well have swum. The car was parked a mile away. Lucia’s St Petersburg sophistication had dissolved with her mascara. Now, her hair flying lank against her Tartar cheekbones, she appeared to be running out of some other century altogether, and to be as rustic and obstinate as all the rest of her long-enduring countrywomen. I could see why Anatoly loved her.
Sergei lived somewhere in the northern suburbs. I had been given his address by a friend in Moscow, with the warning that he was ‘a bit wild’.
But I despaired of finding him. For miles northward the apartment blocks barged and elbowed one another along near-carless streets. They clustered together with the aridity of mathematical symbols transferred raw from the drawing-board to earth, and their broilerized occupants walked tiny in the wilderness beneath. Some blocks divided into three or four hundred flats each; but when I approached them, their magisterial ranks shifted and separated, and the land between seemed huge and derelict. Wherever building was newly finished, stagnant pools collected, and a wasteland of twisted metal and concrete became the playground of boys. A current Soviet television programme, I remembered, ridiculed the sameness of these dormitory towns by having its Leningrader hero visit Moscow, but absent-mindedly assume himself to be at home; so similar is the environment that he finds what he imagines is his street, his block, his apartment—and even his key fits.
Somewhere in this planetary landscape Sergei lived. I found the street by chance. It was straddled by a mammoth portrait of Lenin, superscribed ‘Lenin’s Precepts are True’. Enormous, half-empty shops sprawled alongside. There were no queues, because there was almost nothing to queue for. A few women were walking around in pairs with their babies in their arms.
I hesitated before Sergei’s flat, wondering what a Russian was like ‘a bit wild’. Leningrad has more than its share of eccentrics and down-and-outs. Its inner streets are haunted by loitering drunks, whose flushed faces and paled eyes would occasionally gape through my car windows yelling for dollars. I had briefly met a surly messiah who went about swathed in an orange prayer-shawl, his head banded in gold, with a broken guitar on his back. In Chelsea or Greenwich Village he might have passed unnoticed, but here such dress was like a manifesto.
I rang the bell and Sergei’s head popped out, deprived of its body by the angle of the door. He looked far younger than his thirty-three years. A vertical gush of black hair unfurled above his head, whose eyes bulged with excitement.
‘You’ve come from Viktor? Did he tell you the news?’ Then he rammed a theatrical finger against his lips. ‘But shshshsh—my wife doesn’t like it. Shshsh.’
I had no idea what he was talking about. We sat in his kitchen downing vodka and salami, while his red-haired wife watched me with intent green eyes. She seemed nervous and dispirited.
‘She’s crazy about the apartment,’ said Sergei, talking as if she wasn’t there. ‘It’s her dream. Before this we occupied a single room. But now we even have running hot water.’ His head trembled with delight and for instants afterwards his strange hair went on shaking independently above it. ‘I’ll show you round. It’s a real palace here.’
They seemeed to have more room than they could fill. In Leningrad, which is so overcrowded that a resident’s permit is priceless, this was extraordinary. In one room his two doe-eyed daughters were sitting on a couch watching television. They smiled at me shyly, and settled their frocks round their knees. In another a mongrel bitch lay twined among her fourteen puppies. The paper-thin walls mingled the girls’ giggling and the puppies’ squeals.
Sergei’s delight at his new flat rebuked my depression with these suburbs. For such rootless feats of buildings, for all their Euclidian blankness, are an impressive embodiment of the national will. Thirty years ago scarcely an urban family occupied a flat of its own. People lived crammed together, sometimes two or three families to a room, separated only by a line of washing, a barrage of tawdry furniture, or nothing at all. Kitchens and bathrooms were shared, or did not exist. Against this poverty, for the past quarter century, the government has launched a titanic rehousing campaign. Every year between two and three million new apartments have been built. They are aesthetically null, and poorly constructed; almost before they are up, the bricks drop off, the concrete cracks, the paint flakes away. But they have transformed their people’s lives.
‘Didn’t Viktor tell you?’ whispered Sergei, as soon as his wife was out of the kitchen. ‘I’m leaving in the autumn, getting out of here. First to Finland, then to Germany.’ All the time he was speaking, his face ignited and dimmed in a chiaroscuro of joy and anxiety. It looked trusting and foolish. ‘I want to join a pop group.’
‘What pop group?’
‘A Christian pop group. I don’t know where or how. But God will show me. Yes! I want to serve my God!’ His hair danced a fandango. ‘I love my country, but I can’t serve Christ here. It’s all too…too difficult. But over there, in Sweden or in London perhaps….’ He clasped my arm. Siren cities and countries were unwrapping behind his eyes. ‘Maybe New York!’
’It can’t be easy.’
‘God will show me! I love my God!’ I thought he must have fallen in with some clandestine evangelical group. He was shaking with a colossal, unworldly optimism, and chewing salami like a horse.