Among the Russians(44)

‘How will you go?’

‘I’ll escape,’ he said. The anxiety crawled back across his features. ‘I’m going with a friend, in September when the sea is warm. We’re swimming underwater, with aqualungs, across the Gulf of Finland.’

‘That’s impossible,’ I said, not knowing.

‘We’ve worked it out. It’s not easy, but it’s possible. God will be with us.’

‘God won’t help you if you’re impatient,’ I said, not knowing this either. ‘How often have you dived?’

‘I’ve never done it before.’

I stared at him. His face was bright, laughing, filled with the terrible simplicity of his heart. Somewhere in the pages of Dostoevsky, I must have met him before. ‘And your friend?’

‘He’s a good lad.’ He poured out the last of the vodka in celebration. ‘When I get to Helsinki, I’ll join a group. I don’t want any money. I just want to sing for my Christ, I just want…’

‘His wife walked back into the kitchen and sat beside us in silence. Her green eyes fixed me with resentful understanding. She must have known exactly what was up. Sergei seemed all but mad. I imagined her wondering how soon she would be widowed, and her children orphans.

Sergei looked out of the window. ‘Where’s your car?’

‘I parked it some way off,’ I said. ‘I thought that was better.’

‘No, it’s better my neighbours see it,’ he said. ‘Then they’ll know I have important friends, foreigners. Bring it round here, and give the girls a ride.’

For half an hour I drove them about the barren streets with their father. Dusk was falling. The white arithmetic of the suburbs added its spectral lunacy to ours. The little girls sat on my mattress, their four dilated eyes shining disembodied in the twilight.

‘Isn’t it a beautiful car?’ Sergei asked them. It was caked in mud.

‘Beautiful,’ they echoed.

‘Sergei,’ I murmured a minute later, ‘what about them?’

‘I’ll come back,’ he muttered. ‘My country will forgive me, when it understands I really love it.’

‘It may not forgive you.’

I brought them back to their flat-block. It overbore the night sky with a hundred curtained cubes and rectangles of light. Sergei’s tragicfaced wife herded her daughters back into their hall. I could only say goodbye to them by telling myself that all his plans were fantasy, a harmless stratagem to appease his day-to-day frustration by the magic of the unachievable.

But I never knew.



On my last evening Lucia, Anatoly and I went to the little Maly Theatre. It is decorated in orange, white and gold: a lustrous jewel box. Lucia wore a dress sent by friends from England, and the gaze of surrounding women devoured her. She quietly enjoyed this.

We witnessed a Sunday programme of sentimental songs and ’cello solos. Then a chubby, middle-aged man stepped forward and recited poetry with that priestly intonation which is reserved for Pushkin, abstract political pronouncements, television obituaries and the like. A Western audience would be convulsed by laughter; but the lake of Russian faces was ruffled only by a tremor of ravaged soulfulness. A long, reverberating salvo of romance, truth and meaning poured from the orator’s mouth. I felt deeply embarrassed for Lucia, on whose insistence we had come here. For a time I dared not look at her. I could not guess whether she was holding back a tumult of laughter or cynicism. But when I finally glanced at her face, she did not even notice.

A stream of mascara and tears was trickling down her cheeks.

Hours later we hovered in the well of the courtyard saying goodbye. ‘You’re going to Estonia?’ Anatoly asked. ‘Well, I wouldn’t speak Russian there, if I were you. Try a bit of German. The Estonians hate us—we conquered them.’

Lucia said plaintively: ‘Give us your address—your address in England.’

I wrote it down. Looking at her pensive face, I wondered how much greater were her chances of leaving Russia than those of Sergei.

‘Write us a postcard,’ Anatoly said.

‘Yes, of course.’ Then I realized that I didn’t even know their surname. They had been introduced simply as Lucia and Anatoly.

‘Anatoly’s name is Barinov,’ she said. ‘I’m Lucia Krukovskaya.’

So they were not married.

We hugged Russian-fashion, and from far down the street I saw them still waving, silhouetted in a lake of lamplight. For a few days their valedictory shapes had incarnated Leningrad for me—its Western beauty and native generosity, its grace and sadness.

One of the blessings of bureaucracy is its aptitude for self-defeat. I returned to my camp to find that the authorities had bungled my papers and had assigned me to a site which did not exist. So I became an unperson. Free. With this airy status I camped in peace by the Baltic Sea, listening to the melancholy fall of waves and the cries of birds I didn’t know.

Twenty miles to the west the most sumptuous summer palace of the tsars, Petrodvorets, browses on the southern shores of the Gulf of Finland. It was my last glimpse of Leningrad. Begun in the reign of Peter the Great, enlarged in that of the empress Elizabeth, it straddles a stairway of stupendous fountains whose waters glide away beneath it into the Baltic Sea. This Grand Cascade was conceived by Peter himself as the rival of Versailles and as a commemoration of his victory over the Swedes at the battle of Poltava in 1709.