Among the Russians(8)
I saw this later. To the Russians the wild mushroom has a peculiar mystique, and these expeditions lie somewhere between sport and ritual. They mingle the country-love of an English blackberry hunt with the delicate discrimination of the blossom-viewing Japanese. If Russia’s national tree is the silver birch, then her national plant is this magic fungus, burgeoning in the forest shadows. It has sprouted up in Russian literature, even in Russian song. In one of the most poignant passages of Anna Argentina,, I remembered, the learned forty-year-old Koznyshev goes mushroom-picking with the delicate orphan Varenka, meaning to propose to her, and both feeling their love; but instead they walk in fear and shyness together, talking of mushrooms instead of one another, and the moment passes for ever.
‘Mushroom-hunting…I wish I could express it to you.’ Volodya’s face became filled with this obscure national excitement. ‘It’s like this. You get into the forests and you know instinctively if the conditions are right for them. You can sense it. It gives you a strange thrill. Perhaps the grass is growing at the right thickness, or there’s the right amount of sun. You can even smell them. You just know that here there’ll be mushrooms’—he spoke the word ‘mushrooms’ in a priestly hush—‘so you go forward in the shadows, or in a light clearing perhaps, and there they are, under the birches!’ He reached out in tender abstraction and plucked a ghostly handful from the air. ‘Have you ever sniffed mushrooms? The poisonous ones smell bitter, but the good ones—you’ll remember that fragrance for ever!’
He went on to talk about the different kinds and qualities of mushroom, and how they grew and where to find them—delicate white mushrooms with umbrellaed hats, which bred in the pine forests; red, strong-tasting birch-mushrooms with whitish stems and feverish black specks; the yellow ‘little foxes’, which grew in huddles all together; and the sticky, dark-tipped mushroom called ‘butter-covered’, delicate and sweet. Then there was the apyata which multiplied on shrubs—‘you can pick a whole bough of them!’—and at last, in late autumn, came a beautiful green-capped mushroom which it was sacrilege to fry. All these mushrooms, he said, might be boiled in salt and pepper, laced with garlic and onions, and the red ones fried in butter and cut into bits until they appeared to have shrunk into nothing, then gobbled down with vodka all winter.
We sat on the verge for a little longer, talking of disconnected things. He was going to Brest, and I to Smolensk, and it was futile to pretend that we would ever meet again. This evanescence haunted all my friendships here. Their intimacy was a momentary triumph over the prejudice and fear which had warped us all our lives; but it could never be repeated.
Volodya clasped my hand in parting, and suddenly said: ‘Isn’t it all ridiculous—I mean propaganda, war. Really I don’t understand.’ He stared at where we’d been sitting—an orphaned circle of crushed grass. ‘If only I were head of the Politburo, and you were President of America, we’d sign eternal peace at once’—he smiled sadly—‘and go mushroom-picking together!’
I never again equated the Russian system with the Russian people.
Between Minsk and Moscow the roadside villages looked neat and artificial as toys. Built of planks or (occasionally) logs, with intricately carved window-frames, their cottages were fenced about with gardens of roses and hollyhocks. These villages seemed deserted and centreless—rarely a church, never a café only a desolate shop labelled ‘shop.’
Some fifty miles beyond Minsk I crossed the Beresina river, northernmost tributary of the Dnieper. It is haunted forever by Napoleon’s Grande Armée, whose retreat from Moscow in the autumn and winter of 1812 almost ended in annihilation here. For three days the chaos at the bridgeheads was utter. Soldiers, horses, heavy wagons and a confused mass of camp followers clogged the makeshift causeways or floundered drowning among the ice-packs of the river, lashed by Russian artillery. ‘When they tried to climb up the sides of the trestles,’ wrote the quartermaster-general de Ségur, ‘most of them were pushed back into the river. Women were seen among the floating ice sheets with children in their arms, holding them higher and higher as they sank. When their bodies were under water their stiffened arms still held the little ones up. At the height of this ghastly scene the artillery bridge parted in the middle….’*
Beyond the Beresina the tramp of Napoleon’s ghosts grows thicker still. Of the six hundred thousand men who crossed the Niemen into Russia in the spring of 1812, barely one in thirty returned. Some had died in battle; but most were eaten up by the ravaging cold, the wind, the snow and the mournful, harrowing immensity of Russia itself. Their hair and beards were turned to icicles. Their inflamed eyes oozed blood instead of tears. Frozen and mad with hunger, they staggered off the army’s course into the glacial pine forests and the waiting Cossacks. At night their camp fires were no more than icy splutters of light; the morning found circles of corpses around little heaps of ashes. ‘We drifted along in this empire of death like accursed phantoms,’ wrote de Ségur. ‘Most of the men fell without a word of complaint, silent either from weakness or resignation.’
The roadsides, as I went, still seemed possessed by the memory of these dead, and by the shreds of I Hitler’s panzer divisions hurled back in 1944. The pitting of human armies against such a land appears an insanity. For its appalling, inert strength has eaten into the people too. The whole country is like a requiem. In its consuming maternity, its individual children drown; and all other nations become petty or irrelevant—they are far away. From her own people Russia elicits a helpless worship of belonging. She contains them with the elemental despotism of an earth mother, and they feel for her the supplicant’s tormented tenderness.