Among the Russians(49)

The hotel was predictably supervised. To the average citizen of Riga it was terra incognita. Nobody who did not have a permit could pass its doormen. Huge and wakeful at her desk on each landing, the dezhurnaya held autocratic sway. With her sleepless stint of twenty-four hours on watch (followed by three days off) such a guardian seemed to incarnate the Russian mania for supervision. She was generally middle-aged or old, and always poor. Very likely her young womanhood had been engulfed by the Second World War, leaving her husbandless. She was only outwardly formidable. A joke or a kindness would split her granite face into a motherly smile. She would grow sentimental and indulgent, produce extra bulbs and blankets, offer to wash clothes. My youngest dezhurnaya in Riga had been to Cuba three years before (but avoided telling me why) and had been inspired to paint by the mammoth flowers and the tropical sun. When she spoke of those swarming West Indian towns, the brilliant sugar-cane and tobacco fields, she shook her head in disbelief that she had ever been there. Later I met other Russians whose cultural insulation had been shattered by the sensual or intellectual shock of a new country. They never returned quite the same.

Darkness replaced the vanishing rain, and all I had glimpsed of Riga was a watery silhouette shimmering in the rectangle of my hotel window. I went downstairs in the hope of supper. But of the hotel’s three restaurants, one was closed for repair, one had the day off, and the door of the third displayed a notice refusing entry to anybody not wearing a suit and tie. Such things no longer surprised me. Suitless, tieless and not a group, I wandered into the city.

But it was nine o’clock and the whole place a wilderness. The street-lamps shed pools of dimness over empty pavements. Even the main road showed little but blacked-out windows. Wherever a notice proclaimed ‘Restaurant’, stout concierges or imperturbable porters closed the doors against all enquiry. A few young couples were walking the streets on the same desultory search as I. When we saw a restaurant we squashed our starved and accusing faces against the glass doors and made ignored signs to the guardians inside.

But in all the capital of Latvia, it seemed, no eating-place was open to ordinary people. We were refused entry for no reason we knew. Simply there was no incentive to let us in. Nothing belonged to anybody; and the bourgeois balance of supply-and-demand did not exist.

I went back to my hotel and tried to penetrate its night-club.

‘You need a ticket,’ I was told.

‘I’ll buy one.’

‘There aren’t any.’

‘But the club’s almost empty,’ I said.

‘But there are no tickets.’

So I gave up this Through the Looking-glass enterprise, and went upstairs to bed. The rat-scuttling electricity still didn’t work, and I jotted down the events of my evening—precisely because they were so ordinary—by the glow of the state advertisement sprawled across the opposite roof: ‘The ideas of Lenin….’



Morning transformed the city. From the glass eyrie of my bedroom I gazed on a rumpled panorama of roofs which interlocked in salients of silver-black tiles and rusted tin. The whole skyline bristled with the multi-headed chimneys, spires, crosses, aerials, domes, flags of an apparently streetless city, vanishing northward where the island-studded Daugava eased in a sombre estuary out to sea.

If Tallinn has a portly, well-to-do relative, it is Riga. It still has the solid, stately look of an old banking centre. Handsome nineteenth century buildings spread along a tree-lined canal—the moat to ramparts now vanished—and the town beyond jostles with churches, guildhalls and mediaeval warehouses. Here and there rise the steep-pitched roofs and gabled fronts of merchants’ mansions—sixteenth or seventeenth century, going to seed. The churches loom in unlovely hulks of brick and sooty tiles: battered mongrels whose Gothic bodies are crowned with baroque spires. But all look deeply German. Common sense and bourgeois self-interest are in the air. The Russian enormousness is not here. Wagner was resident conductor at the opera house before fleeing his creditors in 1839, and Schumann gave piano concerts and wrote home that the citizens knew nothing about music and only talked about food.

Riga shares Tallinn’s history too—the same reduction of its native peoples to serfdom by Christianising Germans; the same dim and confused clashings of Teutonic Knights, Hanseatic burghers and fighting bishops. Latvia was always surrounded by giants. But it grew rich in merchandise. Even its Knights (whose castle is still here) dealt ‘in every trade unbecoming to knighthood,’ wailed the competing merchants, ‘selling fruit, cabbages, radishes, onions….’ The city reeks of commerce still. And there followed the same tormenting as all the Baltic suffered: Sweden, Poland and Russia countermarching over its frontiers, with a moment’s blaze of independence between the World Wars. Its Germanized people saved themselves by hard work. Even today Latvia is not only a land of heavy engineering, like Estonia, but produces the Soviet Union’s finest consumer goods. Riga is well-known for its radios, refrigerators, washing machines and clothes. Russian workers flood its industries. Its people were better dressed than any I saw elsewhere (jeans suits were the rage) and seemed to fill the old streets with something like security.

But even here Russian-style queues—a hundred and fifty people lined up for fatty bacon, seventy-five for ice cream—twined through the cobbled lanes, where I took to wandering at random; and when I visited the Church of the Nativity, I found it turned into a planetarium (‘Mars—planet of riddles’ was showing at twelve o’clock).