Among the Russians(58)

All this—royalist or revolutionary—was splashed about the museum in a tempestuous duality. But their later history had been reconvened into ghostly, half-recognizable shapes. Their role in supporting the White armies had tactfully dwindled; so had those who fought for Germany in the Second World War and who were betrayed by the Treaty of Yalta; and so had Stalin’s collectivization of the kulaks, the richer farmers, which went ahead in a welter of violence and family feuds, to end in mass arrests and mass exile.

But the drift to the towns was destroying Cossackdom more surely, and less painfully. ‘You can’t be a Cossack and live in a city,’ Yury said, as we swallowed fish soup and beef pancakes in a self-consciously Cossack restaurant on the Don. ‘You have to stay in the village, the stanitsa. An urban Cossack’s a contradiction.’

We stared out at the river. Between its unequal banks—the northern high and tree-crowned, the southern low and merging into steppe—it flowed, rife with history, to the Sea of Azov. Over its surface a light, troubling ripple played all afternoon, but left its depths untouched, as if the great waters were scarcely moving. Upriver, said Yury, it no longer skirted the wattle-palisaded stanitsas of old, but emerged from a land of collectivized hamlets and forestation schemes.

‘The whole society’s dying,’ he said. ‘It’s happening very fast. When I think of my grandfather, who rode with the Red cavalry in the Civil War!’ And in a rare moment of evocation, he conjured this ancient warrior before my eyes: a lean, choleric, sickle-whiskered barbarian, whose hair exploded in hoary thickets from under his sheepskin cap and whose gorilla arms were laced with burns. He had died of drink.

‘But what happened to him in the thirties?’

Yury kept his eyes on the grey river and announced without emotion: ‘My grandparents were considered kulak because they owned a horse, a plough and a patch of land. They were deported to Siberia. Before they went they placed my mother—she was a girl then—with one of my aunts. Those were bad years: famine. My mother’s still physically small. She came from deep Cossack country—a hundred miles north of here.’ He gestured upriver. ‘But she doesn’t want to go back. She says they’re very bitter in those villages. They wouldn’t offer a stranger so much as a glass of water. And of course they hate the memory of Stalin. Three-quarters of our people loathe Stalin.’

Southward, a feeling of timelessness descends. In the west the Azov and Black Seas, where the great rivers spill, merge invisibly with the Mediterranean world. To the east stretch the cloudy steppes of the Caspian and Asia, ancient mother of half the earth’s peoples, whom it has loosed in a staunchless flood since before record. Scythians, Huns, Avars, Tartars, Parthians, Magyars—a myriad barbarians grew in this fearsome womb and flung themselves west and south and east, in spasm after spasm, towards the civilizing sea.

Here and there along the roadside, where holidaymakers were returning north in cars bulging with children and tents, one of the tall Don horses stood in glossy solitude—a stilt-legged beauty, built to stare over the grasslands. The country nourished vines and sunflowers, withering now, and combine harvesters reared their brontosaurus heads from the maize fields. Once again the whole land had smoothed to an oceanic peace, as if it must pour itself away over the earth’s edge.

At last, like a paler emanation of the sky, appeared a long, colourless ridge. In any other terrain it would have counted for little, but for four thousand miles I had seen nothing so high. It lifted from the flatlands like a portent, abrupt and eerie, predicting a new country. And soon I was driving along a plateau of exhausted hills which broke in waves against the highway. On milder slopes the tracks of vanished rains sliced through the fields; on others only the aluminium sheen of willows survived.

A hundred miles later the first mountains appeared. Huge but insubstantial, they shifted and overlapped like shadows thrown on the sky. At dusk, when I arrived in the campsite at Pyatigorsk, it was to find these outworks of the Caucasus hovering all around in black, refractory silhouettes. The camp was half empty. I carried my bedding to my sleeping-hut under a sky already flashing with stars. But somebody had arrived before me.

‘You will please excuse me, sir’—I saw a dark man with a smooth-skinned, ingratiating face. ‘May I petition your kindness to call me Misha? I was appointed here as your guide by the authorities because they consider you particularly honourable.’

I wasn’t anxious to be noticed by the nameless authorities, but his whimsical English dismissed a faint disquiet. He was small and slight, with an ambivalent face: a forty-year-old boy. His head looked perfectly circular, and was muffled in short black hair incongruously flecked by grey. From time to time his quaint, phrase-book speech was pocked by unintentional slang.

‘Tomorrow we will visit the beauties of Pyatigorsk spa. But first may I lavish with you some booze on the occasion of your successful arrival?’ In either hand he held a bottle of Georgian champagne, and all the time he spoke his forehead shot up and down in comical spasms and his eyes popped, as if he were trying to keep awake.

‘It is not allowed to guides to tipple alone with foreigners, nevertheless,’ he said, then uncorked the champagne and gurgled it into two glasses plucked from his pockets. We sat at the table in my hut, with the curtains drawn. Misha stretched back in his chair with self-conscious hedonism, cigarette in one hand, champagne glass poised in the other, his face crossed by a sybaritic grin. I could not make him out. ‘To tell you the truth, there’s nothing to do in Pyatigorsk spa at all,’ he said, ‘unless you have a stomach complaint. As for me, my own origins, sir, are not in Pyatigorsk. According to the anthropology, I believe I have Tartar blood. I am from the Volga. But sometimes people mistake me for a mountain Jew, or an Italian, perhaps, because I talk too much.’