Among the Russians(62)
These transparent lies called for no reply. They belonged to the Russian mode of vranyo fantasy, which rampages through public as well as private life. Perhaps they were Misha’s form of sex.
He pleaded to halt at each restaurant along the way. They were poor places, but after many meatless days in north Russia I was happy to eat their tough shashlik and burnt chunks of liver. Misha cast a pall on his own countrymen too. Always he demanded a type of food or cigarette or canned music which was not available, so that wherever we went we left behind a litter of unfulfilled demands and puzzled or insulted staff. He would ogle the better-looking girls with an insolence made subtly more repellent by his ugliness. In each restaurant he would drink a little, then praise the beauty of the mountains. But his love for them was not really that. He merely loved the idea of himself in them. They were the theatre of his eating and drinking: a synonym for luxury. He tipped back thimblefulls of vodka in windowless restaurant rooms, and sighed with affected rapture ‘Oh the eternal snows!’ He belonged to a generation that had read Jack London and Burns at school; he quoted My Heart’s in the Highlands. I felt sick.
I think he never ceased to act. I simply wondered if any of his roles were real. In one restaurant he found a public telephone, and tried to dial his mother, then sat down simpering: ‘My mother tries to make me marry. She praises many boring girls.’ He mimicked her voice. ‘She loves her only son, she loves her darling Misha.’
I hated him.
But slowly his drinking took effect, and for a long time, lounged in my car, he did not notice that the clouds had washed away from Mount Elbruz. Suspended before us in the evening sky, it shone huge above the glacier-hung valley—a great cathedral of a mountain, untouchable, solitary: the highest in Europe.
‘Why don’t you love the mountains?’ Misha asked, rousing himself. ‘You don’t say anything. Why don’t you say anything?’
‘It’s time to turn back.’
At nightfall we ate supper near Pyatigorsk, and my mind cleared. The prospect of moving into the Caucasus next day filled me with the cleansing remembrance of my freedom. I began to think of Misha more kindly. After all, I was afraid of him only because of what he represented. In himself he was only a petty informer like thousands of others.
He was also, once again, drunk. ‘The authorities,’ he mumbled, fingering his empty glass at the restaurant table, ‘are neurotic about foreigners from the West.’ He peered up at me. ‘What shall I tell them? They will say: you spent two days with this man and learnt nothing. So tell me something!’
His face might have been pleading or simply engaged in vranyo.
But I didn’t answer.
7. The Mountain of Languages
ACROSS THE CORRIDOR between the Black and Caspian Seas, the palisade of the Caucasus mountains puts a full stop to the Slavic world. With the abruptness of some divine geological decree, it severs the northern steppelands from the plateaux of Turkey and Iran, divides ancient Christendom from Islam, Europe from Asia. Here, at the Iberian Gates, the Roman Empire petered out. It was the end of the known world. Classical legends touched its mountains with an antipodean strangeness, and placed at their mist-hung limit the haunts of the Cyclops and Amazons. Here too spread the gold-bearing kingdom of Colchis; and on a remote scarp of Mount Kazbek Prometheus the fire-stealer was chained by the gods.
Persecuted peoples—a centuries-long flotsam of war or migration—filtered into these half-inaccessible valleys. The sudden declivities and enclosed pastures preserved uncouth tribal purities: relics of ancient Celts, Armenians, Circassians, mountain Jews. Pliny said that the Romans conducted their affairs here only by using a hundred and thirty interpreters. The Arabs called it ‘the Mountain of Languages’. Even into the 1930s the blond tribes of the Black Aragvi, who were rumoured to descend from Crusaders, were striding about the hills in tunics of chain mail blazoned with crosses.
South from Pyatigorsk the last northern flatlands ruffled into hills. The drizzle had thinned and I was travelling almost blind. But I sensed that the mountains were gathering in front of me now, lifting formidably through the rain. The rivers which I crossed no longer wound in the patient Russian way, but clamoured down wide, shaley beds. Among the people, too, the Slavic tameness was gone, and a mountain physiognomy had appeared: mobile bodies and eagle faces; black, crisp hair. Children ran alongside the car. The women made a dark sparkle. I felt the closeness of an old Mediterranean world: high-strung, vigorous, sensual.
But this nothern Caucasus was filled, too, with an invisible sadness. The German armies which beat against the mountains in the summer of 1942 found supporters here; and for the disloyalty of these few, Stalin deported whole tribal nations to central Asia and Siberia. Their lands were all about me. The nomadic Kalmyks to the north-east, the Balkars in the foothills to my right, the Chechens and Ingush to my left, the Karachai in the mountains farther west—more than half a million people were spirited away en masse, and did not return for more than a decade, depleted by starvation and disease.
The German advance, and its paranoid aftermath, faded out at the Ossetian town of Ordzhonikidze, where I cut west off the main road into the mountains. The Ossetians are descended from the Alans, barbarians who pushed out of the unknown early in the first century A.D. Some of them vanished from record in faraway Spain, where they were absorbed by the Vandals and Visigoths. But others settled here.