Among the Russians(48)

We walked in his garden: marguerites, roses and hostas gathered round a reedy pond. His florid face kept turning to mine. ‘I think you’re an educated man. I wish I had been. I used to love geography, even though I had no time to read.’ He took a pair of spectacles from his pocket as if in preparation for something, and straightened his waistcoat. ‘But when you sail, you know, you begin to feel the shape and size of the world. It’s a way of study.’

But the brightness had faded out of him. Things had not been easy, he said. During the Second World War their chapel in Tallinn was destroyed; so were their offices, but they had built them up again with their own hands. Now they shared a church with the Seventh Day Adventists—a rather extreme lot, he thought. But Christians must share….

He was thankful for my visit, he said. He felt stronger for it, comforted. Perhaps God had sent me. Before we parted he clasped my fingers in his stunted hand. ‘How old are you?’

‘Forty-one.’

‘Well, I’m an old man now.’ He was not looking at me. ‘You’re young and I’m old, so we won’t meet again.’ Suddenly he was shaking. His round eyes winced, and I saw tears shining under the rim of his spectacles. ‘We shan’t meet again, not here.’ He pointed up the stair. ‘We’ll meet up there.’ For a moment I thought he was indicating his apartment. But he meant heaven.

I stood confused in the doorway, helpless before his loneliness. To him, I sensed, I came like an ambassador from a great believing world—the Christian West—which for years he had not seen.

‘We have God,’ he said hoarsely, ‘we have God.’

Then I felt his farness, the shadow of world politics between us, and the still darker passage of time. He seemed isolated in his trust and ignorance. I took his old face in my hands, and kissed him.

He stumbled up the stairs, the tears falling onto his coat, and I into the market square.



Evening. Close to my campsite lay the city’s largest graveyard—a pine-scented valley of the dead, shimmering with flowers. Half the modern graves showed Christian symbols. Their lit candles glowed among the wreaths. Many were set with little benches; even today some families eat meals at the tombs of the deceased—a survival from the pagan feasts of the dead.

In this state cemetery all faiths lay together. I even saw the sculptured menorah of a Jew. Other graves showed the Communist star or the atheist flame (the flames of Hell, joke Christians). I vaguely wondered what an atheist funeral was like. ‘They read poems,’ Jaan had said, ‘and sing songs about Nature and the birds carolling in the trees. It’s grotesque.’ But their inscriptions were simple and honest. ‘Remembrance of you remains’. They faced grief unsupported, in the hope only that a person’s memory outshine the dissolution of death.



Two days later I flew to Riga, the capital of Latvia. In the seat on my left sat the leader of a Dutch poultry-farming delegation, on my right snored an army officer. Beneath our cruising Tupolev, the Estonian flatlands smoothed into rectangles of yellowing wheat, pastureland scattered with piebald cattle, forests cut by rides. A land of pig-breeding, potatoes, grain, flax. Latvia, too. I stared down on a white symmetry of collective farms, and on those unpaved roads which foreigners never travel. German agricultural traditions (said the Dutchman) turned these lands into the most efficiently farmed in the Soviet Union.

Cups of mineral water were distributed in mid-flight. Everybody drank, then relapsed into Pravda, Soviet Sport or sleep. Twenty minutes from Riga the army officer’s mineral water awoke him with a burp, and we fell into lustreless conversation. The moment I enquired about the army, he retreated into his carapace like a turtle, only poking out his head to inspect me with little reptile eyes and agree with whatever I said.

Did the army give him much spare time, I asked?

‘We have spare time.’

‘Much?’

‘Some.’

Did he find it an interesting life?

‘It has interest.’ And so on.

I touched the insignia on his shoulder. ‘What rank is that?’

Half a minute passed—thirty seconds of knotted brows and pursed lips—before this momentous secret could be declassified.

‘Major.’

We were flying over loose-knit villages now, then circled above the sea and came in low where the watershed of the Daugava river pushed fat, sleepy fingers into the mist.

Two hours later, from the twenty-third storey of Riga’s newest hotel, I stared out into a blanket of rain. The hotel itself conformed miserably to expectation. It was huge, charmless, exhibitionist. Latvians joke that these tourist ghettoes are made of sixty per cent glass, thirty per cent ferro-concrete and ten per cent microphones. All their minor fittings, all those things by which a civilization may be gauged by archaeologists after it has gone, were wretchedly poor. When I turned on the light-switch the electricity made a scuttling like rats along the curtain-rails, then died. The furniture was of black-varnished pine; the curtains chiffon-thin. The lukewarm water which trickled from the shower was augmented by surreptitious leaks in other places, and the rain had enfiladed the double-glazed windows to stream down the frames. I noticed these things only with muted astonishment. I didn’t care; and nor, very much, do the Russians. They are used to discomfort. Such hotels belonged merely to the ghost-landscape of Soviet appearances: architectural status-symbols, metaphors for civilisation.