Among the Russians(60)
‘It’s true there are no girls in Pyatigorsk…not after Moscow. Misha enjoyed himself in Moscow. But it’s not a good city for the personal relationships…. Bye-bye, baby, bye-bye…. Russian girls, let me tell you sir, make very good wives, excellent in the home, very tender and not very sexually experienced…. What is your father’s job?’
It struck me that Misha was not only drunk but pretending, perhaps enjoying the idea of drunkenness, I didn’t know. His forehead and eyes wrinkled and popped in unison. ‘Let me tell you, sir, there was a Belgian girl on the language course in Moscow…lovely wide hips, very woman-like…oh Misha! Save all your kisses for me…. How is it you are allowed on such a tour by your authorities? You must be an important person….’
But a tiny, watchful fragment of myself was refusing to get drunk. I remembered a sixteenth century ambassador to Moscow writing that he could only avoid stupor by feigning it already, otherwise he was forced to continue drinking. Feigning wasn’t difficult. My head had become a hydrogen balloon tethered among empty bottles and dismembered expressions. The architect, as it happened, resembled a French schoolmaster from my childhood, so that in my drugged vision the two men—the present and the imagined—nudged each other bifocally and occasionally overlapped. For all I know I began calling him ‘sir’ and conjugating irregular verbs.
Then the suet pudding lumbered to his feet for yet another toast. We had already pledged eternal friendship, the beauty of women, the peoples of our two countries, our families and much else, and had now entered a realm of flowery, maudlin libations which threatened to drop me senseless. ‘We come like many rivers from different sources,’ he intoned, ‘yet we meet in the same sea, under the same sky, so let us drink….’
Two or three more vodkas, I calculated, and I’d be insensible. I proposed my return toast in a babble of goodwill and mixed metaphors, and spilled my glass unseen into a vase of plastic flowers.
Soon afterwards the restaurant closed, and we were stumbling out under the stars. The air was soft and warm. Good-nights sounded in the dark. I walked gingerly to the camp gates. My feet felt numb on the path. Misha kept blundering against me. ‘You can’t drive home in your state,’ I said.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he slurred. ‘The police won’t do…anything to me.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I work….’ He floundered again, recovered; but I suddenly knew what he was going to say. ‘Because I work…for the KGB.’
My voice sounded flat. ‘What’s that like?’
‘Mostly rather…boring.’
We were approaching the gates, where porters loitered. I had time, I estimated, for one more question. ‘I don’t imagine they’re interested in me, are they?’
An ugly silence fell. ‘In you…especially.’ Then he disappeared through the gates and into the dark.
A nineteenth century grace and leisure linger about the terraces and springs of Pyatigorsk—an aroma of Baden-Baden or Bath. Trees bloom and tumble about the lower slopes of Mount Marshuk, where the health-giving waters flow, and limestone pavilions touch its walks and arbours with a tryst-like seclusion. Once orchestras lilted in the acacia boulevards, and blue-pantalooned tsarist officers sauntered the terraces at evening, their silver epaulettes yellowed by sulphur fumes, while a chaperoned and crinolined procession of ladies, with fashionable or unmentioned diseases, fluttered by in a prattle of gossip and bad French.
But higher up, the slopes of Marshuk suddenly turn naked, and the scent of box and lime trees vanishes in a sharp air. The jagged hills lift and fall in the shadow of steeper heights, which litter the sky behind in pinnacles of snow. The feel becomes less of Bath than of Victorian Simla—a privileged sanctuary on the edge of tribal wilderness. Far into the last century Cossack pickets were still guarding the spa’s outskirts, and the threat of kidnap by Circassian brigands filled the visiting ladies with pleasurable horror.
A lacework of stairs and terraces ascends to the sulphurous halls of the Elizabeth Spring, the old hub of spa society, and an elegant belvedere, whose weather-vane once plucked the strings of a suspended harp, still emits unearthly music in the wind. But the exclusive resort of a century ago has spilled over the slopes in ranks of modern sanatoria. Robust young couples in shorts and T-shirts cram the walks on health-cult holidays, and mud and carbonic baths receive the suffering bodies of a long-excluded proletariat. The sallow ghosts of nineteenth century debutantes, who once lowered little wicker-cased tumblers into the waters, have been ousted by the squat local towns-women—limbs unshaven and blond-dyed hair showing inches dark at the roots—who invade the spring-kiosks on their way to work and swill back the nauseous waters from beaked cups.
Pyatigorsk is dedicated to the Romantic poet Lermontov, who was shot here in a duel in 1841. There are Lermontov baths and statues, a Lermontov walk and grotto, Lermontov station. On the site where he was killed a commemorative obelisk is ringed by chain-hung pillars shaped like bullets; attendant vultures reverse their bronze heads into their ruffs in mourning; and a plaque declares that Lermontov’s memory is cherished for ever in the hearts of the people. Yet it occurred to me how few nineteenth century writers would have survived the Soviet regime—not the Westernized Turgenev nor the God-haunted Dostoevsky. Pushkin would have been disgraced for bawdiness, and the apocalyptic Tolstoy was too like his spiritual descendant, Solzhenitsyn, for his own or anybody’s comfort. As for Lermontov, he was an outspoken and cynical delinquent, out of love with men and with himself.