Among the Russians(77)
So not even monkeys were collective, I teased her, let alone humans.
‘You’re right,’ she laughed. ‘We have a lot of capitalist free enterprise in these cages. Listen to that—’
A colony of macaque rhesus had burst into hullabaloo, its soft jungle cries turned to screams. Number 15179 had attacked number 15387, and the cage had become a flurry of bared teeth and blood-streaming ears. A big, roving male seized a young rival and dunked him in the water trough, then wrenched him out and bit him; now he sheltered with his mother, who touched him from time to time with long, tentative fondlings of her hand.
Occasionally an old feeling that I had never really touched this country would madden and depress me, and the urge physically to feel it—its tracks and unseen villages—became so intense that I would stop the car and tramp into the woods.
Not far north of Sukhumi, in one of these fits of impatience, I trekked towards a Roman fortress looming from trees a thousand feet up in the hills. As I trudged cross-country the coastline beneath me smoothed to a Tuscan stillness of vineyards and cypress trees. Only the haunted, Argonautic sea, twisting and glittering around its headlands, disturbed the illusion of a Florentine painting, the tended backdrop to some Renaissance madonna.
But where I climbed, the soil was peeling from the slopes, and grey-rooted trees came writhing out of the rocks. The only person I met was an imbecile youth wandering near a village which appeared abandoned. The Roman battlements vanished and reappeared above me, deep in woods. They girdled the hill in pale-stoned ramparts and towers gushing with foliage. Softened by ruin and solitude, they were more like a romantic engraving than a strategic fact. The warrior-emperor Trajan built them in the second century, and they passed painlessly into the Byzantine power and out of history. Yet they were formidable still, strangled in tree-roots, their binding courses of brick compact and firm. A Byzantine barbican loomed above the forest, the vaults of its hall broken apart and their central pillar toppled like an oak, all of a piece, into the shadows. I climbed an entrance-ramp through the walls. Beyond them, the defended hill rose under whispering glades of trees whose leaves were already falling. It was shiveringly empty. Red squirrels rustled over the branches. Elms lifted from a soil glazed with moss, but the slopes around were stripped to rock and scree, as if the mountain’s very bones were erupting through the frail earth. The air fell utterly still. But the Grimm-like trees, racked by winter gales, remained blasted and wrested askew in the silence, as if still shaken by an invisible tempest.
From the summit the fortress hovered over half Abkhazia—the land of a people older and stronger than most Caucasian tribes, and the last to be conquered by the Russians. Here they retain a small, so-called republic of their own. But the only Abkhazian I met was an elderly collective farmer who hailed me as I descended. The Abkhazians were happy with life, he declared, as he plied me with a treacherous homemade wine, with cheese from his goat and mandarins from his trees. The Russians allowed them their own language, their own magazines, their own television programmes. Perhaps it was only in my imagination that from time to time his hawk’s face flickered into secrecy and slyness. Before Stalin’s death there were plans to exile the whole Abkhazian populace inland, because they were thought disloyal.
But the farmer was living well. His two-storeyed house stood in its own grove of pear and orange trees. A television and telephone basked in the centre of his sitting-room like domestic pets, and a refrigerator monopolized the kitchen. Even his hat-stand was stuck with a museum of headware: straw, slouch, stakhanovite, homburg, pork-pie. His sons, he said, were taxi-drivers and sanatorium-warders in neighbouring Sochi, and he was proud of them. Their children’s toys littered the linoleum floors of all the downstairs rooms, to the gentle despair of his wife.
‘Abkhazia’s good country—rich,’ he said. ‘Are there many Abkhazians in England?’
‘Well, I’ve….’
‘England…England….’ he mused, ransacking his memory for any fact or image. ‘Ah yes! Churchill!’ He poured out more wine from a huge earthenware jug. ‘I’ve seen your Queen, Mrs Churchill, on our television. She had white hair and was very beautiful, but her head was sticking out of a tank.’
I dimly recognized Mrs Thatcher. This photograph of her visiting a tank regiment had been circulated by the Soviet news media to corroborate her belligerence. ‘I don’t approve,’ said the farmer circumspectly, ‘of women driving.’
I saw more Abkhazians next day. Lean, dark men on lean, dark horses, they were driving their cattle and proud-horned goat flocks down the savage glens beneath Lake Ritsa to winter by the sea. But at the holiday resort of Sochi these nomad freedoms died, and I was in Russia. Sochi, Sukhumi and Yalta are the choicest resorts of the country, and members of the Politburo keep discreet villas here. But in my campsite the rain thrashed in all night off the water, rocking my car so that I woke to find trees bent double above me and lightning illuming a sea broken and livid with foam.
By morning the storm had thinned to a frail, continual rain, and some of the campers trooped down and plunged into the curdling waves. By seven o’clock the washhouses were full of others lined up bare-chested in track-suit trousers before cracked shaving-mirrors, while their women, sleepy in slippers and flowered dressing-gowns, plodded fatalistically among the puddles with saucepans and towels.
Sochi was full of those titanic sanatoria so favoured in the Stalin years—grandiose Italianate palaces where approved workers are sent by their trade unions for 26-day holidays of sea-swimming, lectures and thermal baths. Like the Moscow subways, these institutions bring the trappings of luxury to the masses. Porticoed terraces lumber down through fountained gardens towards the sea, and the spartan dormitories are banked behind Corinthian colonnades. They seem to offer the grosser inconveniences of privilege without its essence, and the people themselves come and go in a dwarfed quiet, looking for the beaches.