Among the Russians(79)

Towards dusk I emerged above the horseshoe bay of Novorossiisk and turned inland at last across the sleepy humps and farmlands of the Don. The Arabish songs of the Caucasus faded from my radio and were replaced by news bulletins encrusted with the activities of Party dignitaries. In the outskirts of Krasnodar a haggard old man, recognizing a Western car, ran up and banged his fists on the bonnet, crying: ‘We have no Capitalism! No Capitalism! Tell your people back home that in Russia there’s no Capitalism!’

Ever since crossing the Polish border I had privately resolved not to argue, but to listen. Now I was dimly aware that the tensions of this self-imposed silence were piling up dangerously inside me. Ten minutes later, while repairing a puncture, a garage mechanic said: ‘In the West you have tyres with tubes. In Russia we gave those up twenty years ago. We’re in advance.’ Beneath such pronouncements, sometimes fibs, a rankling inferiority glares. Cruelly I asked him how long he had spent in the West, that he should know such things.

Krasnodar seemed destined to dispirit me. It is one of those featureless Soviet conurbations, grown impressively from nothing in a few years, which dishearten by their sameness. In the absence of a campsite I had been assigned to a hotel, whose foyer was full of loitering men. It made me uneasy. I slipped away to take some children’s books to the friend of an acquaintance in England, and was soon lost in a web of identical, tree-lined roads. When I at last found her, she turned out to be a spirited blonde schoolteacher. Her husband was away with students on one of those ‘voluntary’ brigades which are in fact compulsory, helping farmers to bring in the grape harvest. She launched into a laughing diatribe against Krasnodar. It was miserably boring, she said; that summer she had taken her eight-year-old son to Leningrad, simply to show him that a town could be beautiful. The idea of remaining all day with her two children in the cramped flat horrified her; instead she worked for a primary school at the other end of town. But she had no babushka to babysit—only a twinkle-eyed grandfather, eighty-five years old (‘he can’t babysit, he’s a man’)—so her two-year-old daughter had been attending nursery-school since the age of seven months, and remained there from eight in the morning until eight at night.

There was nothing unusual in this. Millions of children are brought up from the age of one, or less, to the crushing group identity of kindergarten; the teachers are maternal and intrusive, and even parents seem to guard their children from their own individuality—even from the most harmless flights of fancy—with instinctive fear. Already, for eighteen months, the two-year-old girl sulking on her mother’s knee had been nursed in a regimen whose purpose, says a Soviet teaching manual, is ‘the formation of a convinced collectivist’. She had been trained to sing songs to Lenin and the Motherland, and her dawning mind was already receiving fables about the October Revolution. The sight of the books which I had brought from England—bright, fanciful, strange—seemed to fill the little girl only with smothered alarm. She turned tearfully away from them against her mother’s breast, cramming all her fingers into her mouth.



Back over the Don steppes to Kharkov, and south-west along the watershed of the Dnieper for three days, the road took me a thousand miles to the tip of the Crimea. Now the black earth was shaded here and there by a vivid green. The villages were all of brick, but were few and lost among collective farmlands whose entrance-gates lined the roadside blazoned with sickles and corn-sheaves and clasped hands. In this wide, Ukrainian flatness, it seemed as if nothing could ever change or happen, and when a car in front of me slithered off the road and glided down a bank into the fields, it occurred in an unreal silence. I found a small, drunk man trapped in its wreckage. His wife had been hurled through the windscreen. She lay in an incongruously sybaritic-looking heap among the black furrows, while six or seven village women were already hurrying round shaking bags of talcum powder over her. I wrenched open the car doors. The man hobbled out, grasping my shoulders, and sat down near his wife. She was covered in powder now, like a long-decomposed corpse, but she suddenly sat up and gaped at him. Neither said anything. The car was shaken to a ruin, but both seemed unscathed. Some lorry-drivers stopped and ran over, then slowed to a glum semicircle around us. Nobody asked, or offered, any explanation. Only the lorry-drivers, who had noticed my British car, glanced at me and muttered together, torn between patriotic humiliation and gratitude.

I spent that night at the campsite of Zaporozhye, a day’s journey from the Crimea. I was the only foreigner, and sat alone in the restaurant, watching the flux of its customers.

A squat Aeroflot pilot bounced down opposite me. ‘You’re drinking alone?’ His bulldog expression emanated eager goodwill. ‘Drink alone, and you’re an alcoholic! Better to drink in pairs!’ His name was Albert—the kind of German name only given to Russians before 1941. Albert was my age, but a collapsed stomach was already oozing from under his flying-jacket and his thickened neck merged with his head in a single, flatulent column. He was determined to have a party. With a sinking heart I watched my vodka-glass fill up, and heard the toasts begin. The ritual was too-familiar. I reciprocated miserably. We drank to each other’s countries, families, peace. He invented a wife for me, and drank to her. I drank to his.

Albert was bored. His wife and children were away on holiday in Lvov, and he had driven over from the local airport to try his luck with the campsite girls. Some of the youth of Zaporozhye had adopted the place for the weekend, using its huts as bedrooms, and its bar was ablaze with noise and dancing. Soft, passive-bodied girls and vacant-looking youths sat around its walls on benches. Ukrainian girls, Albert declared, were bigger than the Russians (although precisely where bigger, he didn’t say). He plied me with a cocktail called Troika—vodka, brandy and liqueur—which swam up into my eyes. I gazed out from behind it, feeling sick. Albert’s face grinned and pulsated in the watery gloom. ‘This is the drink that God loves!’ We rubbed glasses. ‘Three in one and one in three!’ We tossed them back wholesale. Soon the floorboards under my chair were sodden with surreptitiously discarded Troikas, but drunkenness lurched forward uncontrollably.