Among the Russians(75)
‘No.’ She knit her brows. ‘Just a…bear. And after that you’re expected to go and live with your mother-in-law. I’m not doing that either. My friends all say: Why not, you’ve got a built-in babysitter? But I’d rather live my own life. That’s the Russian way. Anyway, I don’t want to sit at home. I’ll go on working until I’m fat and unattractive.’ She shot me a fierce smile. ‘So I’m getting my husband to live with my family. We’ve got four bedrooms in a first-floor flat. We can live there.’
‘If your husband agrees.’
Her forehead flickered only momentarily. ‘Yes, of course, if he agrees.’
We were driving into the village of Garni now, where in Roman times Armenia’s kings had built their temples and summer palace on a near-impregnable promontory above snow-fed rivers. We walked along a paved way between twisted trees and the walls of cities older still. But nothing prepared me for what was to come. To our left, the promontory suddenly dropped away. Far below there opened out vistas of hills tossing in a naked jumble. And in front of us, perfect and solitary on the bluff’s edge, stood a Greek temple. Framed in those camel-coloured hills, so far from home, it was gently moving. Nothing intruded on it. It lifted above its wild backdrop as if flown in by a stage-designer, its sombre basalt only darkened and mottled a little after two thousand years.
Irina thoroughly approved. The shrine made a logic in the wasteland. It seemed to know its mind. But in fact the Armenian kings were only lightly Hellenized, and the place was old in fire-worship. Seen close, an oriental exuberance pervaded the temple’s friezes, where whirls of stone foliage ran riot among the lion-masks, and undermined Ionic capitals.
We stared down at the splintered mosaics of a bath-house, where nereids and sea-monsters swam in the oblivion of their ruin. ‘We worked, but we were not paid’, runs its enigmatic inscription. Irina said that scholars still wrangled over the words’ significance. But soon, with thudding predictability, a tour-leader pointed them out to his group as proof of the Capitalist oppression of mosaic-workers in the first century A.D. and shrivelled the life-loving fantasy beneath our feet to Marxist dust.
We penetrated deeper and higher into the hills, making for the cave-monastery of Gueghard up a valley suddenly empty and overbearing. On either side grey and yellow bluffs dangled above the river or tapered to the skyline in pitted organ-pipes. The monastery was a wild, secret place, enclosed in cliffs above the stream’s head. A few pilgrims and tourists were about. Black-robed priests were tending beehives on a terrace, or snoring in the shade, and nearby trees were knotted with the handkerchiefs of the faithful, left there for a plea or a thanksgiving.
Irina sat down on a boulder overlooking the stream and told me to go in alone. ‘I don’t like these places. I like things rational.’ She examined her painted toe-nails. ‘These people call themselves Christian, but half of it’s superstition—all that giving candles in exchange for favours!’
Above the monastery walls the memorial stones of the mediaeval dead, sculptured with a Celtic filigree of crosses and stars, are propped between crags or carved in the rock-face.
But beneath them, and pushing deep into the cliffs, a labyrinth of churches, cells and mortuary chapels burrows and winds through an intestinal darkness. The frescoes and church furniture have gone, but the chambers themselves heave and gouge with a savage, indestructible strength. They are upheld by the passive power of the whole mountain. Their subterranean pillars reach up to monolithic spans of arch and lintel. Their walls are carved with disordered crosses, repeated like an incantation, and the chiselled blazons of princes rise around their emptied tombs. The feel is of eternal dusk. The sun penetrates only in a jagged stammer of light, through a few embrasures and perforated domes, and the black-red basalt of the building-stone is of one flesh with the living rock.
I could understand why Irina shunned the place. It belonged too profoundly to her repudiated past. She would have liked to dye the darkness blond, as she had her hair.
As for me, I felt as if I were back in the Middle East. I passed Islamic-looking prayer-niches and trudged under stalactite vaults like those of Mameluke Egypt. Anonymous tombstones rang underfoot, and here and there some candle-blackened alcove betrayed continuing worship. I found a spring trickling in a cleft, where babies are still christened. A well-dressed family pushed by me and washed their faces there with pagan solemness; two old women dipped a bottle in its waters, and an imp-like boy scrambled into the grotto to light candles.
The Church, so an Armenian told me, is the people’s soul. But as I emerged from that uterine blackness into the light, I found Irina pacing back and forth, wearing her intolerant look and waiting to go.
9. On the Black Sea
BY THE END of September I was back on the Black Sea at Sukhumi, near the border between Georgia and ethnic Russia. Here the mountain people begin to thin away, and their vividness is replaced again by the Slavic patience, which seems to disregard the present altogether in a long, dimly-focused concentration on something far off. Perhaps because I was alone, this tranquil quality reassured me. It didn’t threaten. Even the Russian children—there were many here—would only assemble about my parked car in a cautious circle, standing a little back, and ask diffident questions about its speed and horsepower.
This Black Sea coast might have been sliced from a littoral of Provence or Istria. Sukhumi itself stands on the same latitude as Nice. Its boulevards are heady with banana palms, oleander and eucalyptus, and the slopes behind are steeped in ferns and creeper-dangling oaks. The town strikes a Mediterranean-lover with an odd, nostalgic confusion, so strange-familiar are its scents and sounds. Cypress trees rise like dark flames from the gardens, and canna lilies blaze among parklands by the slop of a tideless sea. If you half close your eyes the lumbering Nordic holidaymakers become Germans and British on the Aegean; and the Black Sea itself is furrowed by the same remembered past—the square-rigged Greek merchantmen plying between colonies, Ottoman galleys policing the coasts, Venetian slavers bound for the Crimea. The sea is soft with history and men’s change. It blurs all absolutes except itself. Along the promenades the mother-of-pearl-encrusted peep-boxes show quaintly illumined scenes of—what? Not the Twentieth Party Congress, but the Folies-Bergere and King Edward VII opening Parliament.