Among the Russians(61)
My wanderings round Pyatigorsk were dogged by Misha. His services as a guide were useless—he knew almost nothing—but I was afraid of estranging him. We drove up the flanks of Marshuk together, but all around us dense clouds scarfed the hills’ peaks or rolled between their clefts, and on the summit we stood in a whiteness so utter that Misha turned to me, dilating his suddenly puerile eyes, and said: ‘Never mind. Tomorrow we’ll go into the mountains.’
For a few hours I escaped him by visiting the architect, who showed me round his spartan office. Its lobby was lined by photographs of staff members who had fought in the war, each elderly face coupled with its wartime one. The responsibility of being snapped had frozen all their expressions into the same dead gravity.
The architect was modest and direct. No foolish statistics left his lips. The building trade was undermanned, he said; speed and simplicity were vital. In the West, he knew, countless small companies made for variety, but here in Russia, where all materials were prefabricated enmasse, new forms could only be achieved by the wholesale changing of factory moulds.
Hence the stultifying uniformity of Soviet cities.
The day became a flight from Misha. I even sought out the car-mad Armenian barman. In a month’s time, he said, his name would top the waiting-list for an 8,500-rouble Zhiguli Fiat; but he had fallen in love with my old Morris. He longed, with a terrible passion, to buy it. I was glad that this was illegal, but he sank into ecstasy when I let him drive it, caressing its dashboard and steering it with such awestruck tenderness that I was amazed again by the desolate sameness of Soviet things.
Towards evening I found solitude in the largest medicinal bathhouse in Russia. I strolled through resonant waiting-halls past radon water tanks furnished with banks of control panels. I felt peacefully unnoticed. An old man and a bespectacled woman lay in gas baths under transparent covers, breathing oxygen, and gazed up at me indifferently, like mummies from sarcophagi.
I took a shower, slopped through two trays of disinfectant and into the ‘simple waters’ of a huge swimming-pool. Beyond its picture-window a scarp of hillside, pared to shrub and grey rocks, lifted into cloud with the frozen clarity of a Japanese garden. But the pool was bubbling like a mill-race. All along one side, in dedicated unison, a regiment of middle-aged health-addicts was bending, kicking, bouncing and dog-paddling in time to the whistle-blasts of a white-uniformed amazon striding above. They jogged and wheezed like monstrous babies. She shouted at them to stretch, leap, arch their backs. Clinging to the bar at shoulder level, they sent out tidal billows of spume and grunts of muscular accomplishment. Ageing biceps and deltoids reeled into life. Necks bulged, calves flailed. They belonged to Stalin’s physical-jerks generation. Flaccid Russian backs and a polished Uzbek one lurched and wallowed in line with hirsute Georgians and Armenians. When they turned, several chests showed sprawling tattoos: patriotic sickles and stars. One man’s torso was vivid with a portrait of Lenin on one side, Stalin on the other, which wobbled and shook unhappily together as he bounced, or eyed each other in stillness through a greying maquis of hair.
Just as I expected to be dragooned into line, the exercise ended and a scrum of gargantuan women burst from the dressing-rooms—cliché Soviet giantesses whose cask-like torsoes expanded downward from formless shoulders to a flood of loins and quivering thighs. They jumped shouting into the water.
I was washed against the man with the patriotic bust. Had he regretted its left-hand portrait—I asked tactlessly—after the denunciation of Stalin?
He stared at me and submerged himself. The jumping women were exploding about us like cannonballs. And I marvelled that this people, while fostering the world’s finest dancers and athletes, should yet be among the least co-ordinated and graceful on earth. It was hard to look at their worn-out bodies without a pang.
The next day there was no escaping Misha. He had arranged that we drive to Mount Elbruz deep in the northern massif of the Great Caucasus. He lay back on my mattress over the flattened passenger-seat, with his thin legs stretched fastidiously in front of him, and said in a voice of smothered pain: ‘Misha has a stomach ache.’ From time to time he would massage his ribs and grimace, ascribing his pain to the bumpy roads or the altitude. But it seemed merely to be a bid for attention. He had an infantile need to be felt. He was neurotically sensitive to my moods, which he gauged with creepy swiftness and always related to himself (he was right) asking: ‘I do not offend you in any way, sir?’
As for his own moods, I would catch the changing roles of his face in the car mirror. At some moments he appeared sly and seemed to be watching me, at others his expression slumped into a mask of simpleton candour; more often, with his look of self-conscious hedonism, he would affect sleep. But he had become irredeemably sinister to me, and now, as he leaned back with closed eyes, I felt as if the yellow membrane of his eyelids were transparent or perforated, and that he was seeing everything.
We turned west by a thin road into the mountains. The valley was steep and beautiful with trees. A young tributary of the Terek river ran beside us in grey-green spate, making for the Caspian, and spread into a stone-dimpled flood where the way eased, before descending in cold torrents again.
Misha’s eyes suddenly opened. ‘I was dreaming of the Belgian girl,’ he said. ‘I believe I will press my insistences and marry her.’ He smiled secretly. ‘I bedded a German woman last night, while her husband was having a drop, so to speak…a brunette, not a bad piece….’