Among the Russians(59)
He spoke unlaughing. Sometimes his alternate pedantry and vulgarisms gave me the fleeting illusion of a Dickensian gentleman fallen on evil days. He had studied English, he said, at the pedagogical institute in Moscow. Now he was a schoolmaster and part-time guide in Pyatigorsk. ‘And what is your profession?’ he suddenly asked.
I launched into an outdated story about a company directorship. He poured out more champagne.
‘You were today a long time arriving here. I have been waiting for you since three o’clock—propping up the bar, if thus I may put it.’ His forehead performed a mazurka of spasms. I thought he was slightly drunk. ‘I feared something had befallen you.’
No, I said, nothing. He uncorked the second bottle of champagne with a celebratory flourish. ‘This is Black Label Georgian. The best! Now this company directorship of yours….’
The drink seemed to be seeping into my eyes, clouding them. I was watching Misha through a muslin curtain. His forehead was shooting about in self-conscious imbecility now. I wondered momentarily if he were retarded. But his questions had become more searching. Somewhere, far back in my mind, a warning bell was sounding.
‘Tomorrow,’ he was saying, ‘we will go into the mountains. There is a game reserve where I have a certain buddy. I do not wish to press my insistences upon you, but you are a sportsman are you not? I love hunting. Do you love hunting? It is forbidden there, but nevertheless.’
The second bottle was draining fast. Misha refilled the glasses with remorseless devotion, grinning at nothing. I reckoned he was drunker than I, but my head was already swaying feebly, and to refuse the last champagne was to insult his hospitality.
He began talking politics. He was a member of the Communist Party, he said, and certainly he seemed modestly privileged: he had worked as an interpreter with Russian groups abroad; he had also read the best-known Western exposés of the Soviet way of life. ‘Those books are right,’ he said. ‘Politics here are a farce.’ He burped. ‘Just propaganda. Nobody can find out anything serious except through the Party grape-vine. Do you know there are strikes going on in Poland at this moment…serious strikes…and almost nobody in this country knows about them?’ And what were my politics, he asked?
I mumbled some British complacencies, gauging my own drunkenness, feeling unhappy. When he next refilled my glass, I surreptitiously emptied it into an ash tray. I did not take his news on Poland seriously; I had heard nothing.
A distant, slurring voice (my own) asked: ‘How can you be a Party member when you think it’s all a farce?’
He smiled, and misunderstood. ‘I deserve my place in the Party. In the early sixties I was with Soviet troops in Somalia, shooting members of the Somalia resistance and so forth. Then the country’s allegiances, if thus I may put it, unfortunately changed to the British, and we were chucked out.’ He said the word ‘British’ as if it had nothing to do with me (and his history was badly garbled).
‘You shot Somalis…but you think your politics….’
In my champagne-sodden mind the idea of Misha was by now hypnotic. I foraged for some hidden rationale to his self-cancelling beliefs, but he intimated none. One moment he let drop that the whole Soviet Union was rife with corruption. The next he asked me to send him a postcard from Britain congratulating him on his country’s glorious October Socialist Revolution. His talk was an obscene chiaroscuro of ideology and cynicism. It was as if his integrity had rotted away long ago, or never existed.
Suddenly he said: ‘You will not refer on me to the authorities?’
‘I don’t know any authorities.’
He dropped his cigarette into the ash-tray. It fizzed in my discarded champagne. ‘Why have you poured it away?’ He stood up. ‘We’ll go to the camp restaurant. I have friends waiting there. We’ll have a party.’
From this later, drink-fuddled celebration, which drowsed and gabbled far into the night, I retrieve only random glimpses. A gallery of inebriate faces glows in my memory, severed from time and place; their remarks surface in meaningless isolation, and whole conversations lie stranded without starts or ends. But the faces, I recall, encapsuled in miniature the Soviet empire. Opposite me a Slav suet-pudding physiognomy proposed cumbersome toasts and cracked into smiles with the slowness of a geological fault, while beside him a citron-skinned architect might have sprung from the pages of Russian folklore. On my right Misha’s low brows and Tartar cheeks surrounded bright but indecipherable eyes; to my left a long-faced Armenian barman, with the creamy skin and voice of his people, offered me seductive sums for my Morris.
The architect, I thought, looked restrained, ill at ease. He talked to me ruefully. His teenage children, he said, were besotted by pop music; as for him, he wondered if I had any records of Victor Sylvester with me—he loved those. He shared the Russian passion for the countryside, and would often vanish on two-day fishing expeditions, although this upset his wife.
‘Actually he fishes for women,’ said the suet-pudding, fracturing into a grin. ‘There aren’t any in Pyatigorsk, only sanatoria.’
One by one we declaimed portentous toasts, groping to our feet with teetering solemnity. Wine, vodka and Armenian three-star brandy slopped down our throats in ceremonial debauch. With each toast the little glasses of vodka were tossed back at a gulp, so that drunkenness advanced in dazed leaps and bounds, and faculties were amputated at a stroke. On one side of me the Armenian’s car-prices spiralled into fantasy, on the other Mischa kept clinking his glass against mine, chirruping ‘Quite sincerely!’ and spoke of himself in the third person. ‘Misha needs a holiday…. Misha is quite fed up with being a schoolmaster…. Tomorrow, or perhaps the day after, we will go into the mountains and see the eternal snows. Misha loves beauty. Do you love beauty?’—glasses clashed—‘Quite sincerely!…Misha should have been a lawyer…. What did your father make you do?…He didn’t? Your fathers in the West, they’re very lenient…. Misha’s made him work at an English language institute…. Quite sincerely! I was only seventeen, and I wanted to do law…. ’ Snatches of pop songs droned inconsequently in his speech, then he would change the subject without warning or ask sudden questions.