Among the Russians(7)
The road from Minsk to Moscow followed a broad moraine, where glaciers had dragged out their track in the last Ice Age. But the faint scoop of the land was indiscernible, and its dead-pan expression of field and forest continued all next day. Here and there the long barns of state or collective farms stretched out in the meadows, and loose-knit villages were scattered along the road. Occasionally the terrain heaved a little, as if easing out of sleep, then relaxed again. A rise or dip of a hundred feet took on the significance of a hill-range, and gave views over an immeasurable country of inter splashed pasture and forest.
Yesterday had filled me with vague foreboding. Its dogma seemed to have leaked into the whole land, even the sky. Nothing here seemed to exist for its own sake. Everything was on the march. Everything was the victim of a Five-or Ten-or Twenty-Year Plan, which could snatch a man or a tree out of its own truth and bend it to social necessity. I felt a fugitive. The same power which had carved and quartered half the country into these giant fields appeared to have trampled out time itself into robot certainties. I felt part of some decadent and long-repudiated naturalness.
Towards noon I stopped the car on the edge of forest. Birch woods thronged the roadside in a dense audience of silver trunks and thin leaves which dimmed and glistened under a filtered sun. I wandered in amongst them, then went deeper and deeper. There was no under-bush, only the dense palisade of birches, pale, abstract. The sunlight awoke glades and paths among them, slung with muslin spider-webs, and their trunks glowed with a parchment whiteness. The ground felt soft underfoot. Mosses, thick grass and a weft of mauve and yellow wildflowers covered the dark soil. The leaves of woodland strawberries were pushing up among the ferns, and the shadows were filled with early mushrooms. I was overcome by an extraordinary sense of home-coming. I lay down on an earth moist with molehills and decomposing bark, and gazed for long minutes at the ferns and bracken, at their beautiful and stressless permanence under the white trees. When I crunched the earth in my hands, beetles and ants in orange waistcoats trickled between my fingers and away over the ground. I realized how I had craved unknowing for these things which lived uncontaminated in their own nature. And I experienced a deep sickening of everything inflicted by human beings, my own kind. For an hour I lay and stared up at the sky, and listened to the few, socially unnecessary birds, whose songs rang out with a lonely, individual clarity through the woods. They touched the air with benediction. In the clearings around me bloomed pastel swathes of flowers filled with the moaning and delving of multicolored bees. Larkspur, borate, St John’s wort, white hare bells—they grew in broken rivers and pools of colour, intransigently fresh.
It was late afternoon before I returned to the road. At first I thought that the only human object in the landscape was my own car: a lonely memory of the free world. I felt a foolish tenderness for it. Then I noticed a rusty Mosaic saloon parked in shadow, and a man sitting on the verge, munching bread. As I passed him, he looked up and said: ‘Did’t you find any?’
‘Any what?’
‘Mushrooms.’
In the crowds of Minsk I had not consciously discerned any national type; but now I realized that I was looking into a typically Russian face. Nestled in flaxen hair and a blond moustache, it shone with an engaging rusticity. The cheekbones thrust up high, and the blue eyes settled their gaze on mine in candid inquisition. Volvo was a trainee doctor on his way to Barest. He must have been in his early twenties, and was dressed with a Russian indifference to appearances.
‘I thought you must be looking for mushrooms.’ He offered me a chunk of malt-brown bread while I sat beside him. ‘You find them here by thousands in the autumn.’ And a moment later, in a way which I soon took for granted with young Russians, we were talking about everything under the sun, music, history, countryside. He longed to travel. The classical world had mesmerized him since childhood. He owned a few treasured volumes of Copyholders, and dreamed of columns fallen in the sea: of Athens, Tyre, Depthless. But when I described these places I felt wretchedly privileged, and he began to look sad. He harboured an ambition to travel round the world, he said, but had never even been to Poland. ‘It’s hard for us here, you see. We may get permission for the Eastern Bloc countries, but beyond that….’ He shook his head. Then his face was glowing. ‘Jerusalem! I believe that must be a wonderful place! I’d love to see Jerusalem…and all those strange cities. I’m not a Christian, but I think there’s something rather beautiful about the life of Christ.’
All the time he was speaking I felt a shadow lifting from me and dissipating into the trees. It carried with it a haze of nightmares. Already they seemed ridiculous. This man’s gusts of pleasures and hopes were a surety that the Russians were accessible.
‘And Misfeasance too,’ he said. ‘Have you been to Misfeasance and Shiraz? And the ruined caravan cities of Afghanistan! They must have an odd fascination. [I remembered Alexander In tourist: ‘Our forces are helping the friendly peoples of Afghanistan against foreign interventionists, who were exploiting the backward state of the country.’] In photographs the mountains there look almost unearthly, more beautiful than anything you can believe…. I’ve never seen a mountain, or even a proper range of hills. I planned to visit the Ural this year—but no money. So I’m going to the Carpathian. They’re not really mountains at all, I believe, but still….’ He balanced a chunk of black bread on his knee. It stuck up like a hill. ‘You see, we Russians are country people at heart. I’ve lived all my life in cities, and that’s the only place for a good job. All the same,’—he turned his back on the road and stared into the trees—‘I ache to get away sometimes, particularly in spring. You know our woods have a special smell in spring? It’s partly rain, I think, partly the scent of pines. [Alexander In tourist: ‘Pines must be used against pollution. The air is sterilized for three metres around any one pine.’] And in autumn, especially in birch wood clearings, the mushrooms come, with wild strawberries and gooseberries. In October you’ll see whole families going out with baskets into the forests. Mushroom-picking is almost a disease with us….’