Among the Russians(78)
In one of these sanatoria, half visible for cascading rain, I found a stout matron to show me the facilities. It accommodated seven hundred, but I wondered where they had all gone. The place’s white-coated staff and elaborate size began to suggest something indefinably alarming to me—a lost episode from Kafka. A few men were standing under the porticoes by enormous chess-tables, slamming down outsize bishops and pawns, and four women emerged from the sanatorium’s hair salon, crowned with bouffants and bird’s-nests, straight into the destroying rain. It was oddly desolate. It suggested that something was happening somewhere else; but nothing was. Mornings, said the matron, could be passed in the health clinics undergoing diagnosis, massage, sulphur inhalation, roentgen or ultra-violet rays. Afternoons were spent by the sea.
The matron was inexorable. She tramped the corridors with doctrinal authority. ‘Look at our lovely sea!’ she cried. It was invisible for rain. ‘Look how beautiful our gardens!’ They were soaked and obliterated; muddy water gushed down the terraces. When we came to an empty hall she declared: ‘People are playing here.’
I stared. ‘Where? When?’
‘Now. All the time.’ Objective fact was gossamer beside taught truth.
We passed noticeboards pinned with timetables: ‘7.45: physical jerks. 8.15: first gymn session…’ A succession of lectures was forecast: ‘The politics of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’, ‘Reminiscences of Edith Piaf’, ‘The Plans of the Party are those of the Country’. A closed-up library displayed placards for the 110th anniversary of the birth of Lenin. Dictatorial posters announced: ‘A man should and must give up smoking’ above diagrams of decayed lungs. A bust of Stalin lurked in a corner.
‘Those places are death,’ said Vasily, a student I met in the campsite restaurant. ‘They’re only good for the old. Everyone’s so serious you want to puke. It’s meant to be a privilege to go there—you have to get a doctor’s certificate—but they don’t even allow discos. You just go mad. Most young people get in at recreation centres instead, or go away alone. I only went to a sanatorium because I got asthma.’ He winced. ‘In August when the ambrosia comes out my nose blocks and my eyes stream.’
‘What’s ambrosia?’
‘This weed…it arrived with American grain imports. At least there wasn’t any twenty years ago, and now it’s everywhere.’ He frowned. ‘I don’t mean to be critical…but then you’re not American, are you?’
His was an aesthetic, nervous face, its eyes and mouth never still. Perhaps his asthma had been brought on less by ambrosia than by some private distress.
‘We got the Colorado beetle through those grain sales too,’ he went on, ‘and there are American butterflies everywhere here now, rather pretty. It’s strange…’
Out of the starless night, rain came gusting and chattering at the restaurant windows, but inside, and all around us, Georgian campers were uncorking champagne with ribald whoops and jets of palomino liquid, which made Vasily physically shudder. ‘I don’t like drinking.’ We sipped dry white wine together like fastidious spinsters, and pretended the Georgians weren’t there. As their songs and uncorkings detonated around us, he lapsed into the kind of absent musing which I had once imagined only to be a figment of Russian literature. What would he do with his life? He was already nineteen, and filled with hopelessness. Why was he so melancholy? He didn’t know. Perhaps it was the size of the land which made his people such a sad one. Up in Siberia, and even in western Russia, you could go for hundreds of miles and see nobody at all. Just a few snowy owls and wolves. Then you started to think. And then you became sad. Yes, the size of everything made you feel sad.
‘Perhaps we even like feeling miserable.’ He flinched at a new fusillade of champagne-corks. ‘I can look at the sea forever, for instance…that vastness. Did you notice it last night—the waves? Waves, on and on. So I just went on looking, on and on….’
Sometimes his talk would soften and drift away, as if into the emptiness of the seascape. Then the thwop of Georgian corks would jolt him into a wondering distaste. ‘These Georgians…in a way I envy them. If somebody closes a door in a Russian’s face, he just shrugs and goes away. But a Georgian always gets in through the back. You never actually see them doing any work; they just sit in the cafes. But us Russians, I don’t think we’re made for town life….’ The voice drifted away…thwop! thwop!…returned. ‘I hate our big industrial cities, Moscow most of all. Everything gets coarsened there, uglier…’ thwop! ‘…the best people are the Siberians, you know. They’re honest and generous in ways we’ve lost here in the west. Perhaps I’ll find my future in Siberia….’
Now the rain was falling in a sustained, heavy flood, and Vasily’s mind had seeped away with it. It is said the Russian is like an onion: the more you peel him, the more you weep. And Vasily was peeled to thin air. I had the sensation that he was physically disappearing, pouring down with the rain. His voice was a self-communing murmur. ‘The rain’ll stay for days now. Everything takes such a long time here….’
Northward, for two hundred miles, the Caucasian foothills came down steep and lonely to the shore, and my road trickled in and out of their valleys. Sometimes the slopes were covered by a windswept gleam of birches; the sea would appear in turquoise triangles at the end of their corridors and small, untidy rivers slopped beneath the road to smear their floodwaters over the shoreline—muddy rainbows which deepened far out from sapphire to thunder-mauve.