Among the Russians(80)

Albert hunted for a girl. A ring of twenty-year-old students had gathered round us; their faces looked keen and sensitive. But he teetered away between the tables and spied a long-haired teenager, vapidly pretty. Grinning and thrusting out his chest in its prestigious flying-jacket, he presented himself before her—the epitome of confident but doomed middle age. His sagging stomach and hopeful face suddenly looked pathetic. She was mercilessly young. Her gaze swept over him, then without a word she turned away and stared back at the smoke-filled dance-floor. The canned music clashed and thundered.

Albert returned, full of Troikas and unabashed. ‘She was too young,’ he said. The next moment he’d gone again, and this time ended up dancing with a gawky brunette who overtopped him by a foot. He beamed and bumped against her breasts, and came back bursting with self-esteeem and shouting: ‘I’ll find you a girl!’

But I found her myself. She was a nineteen-year-old student from the local polytechnic. Her soft voice almost disappeared in the dinning music as we danced. She looked embarrassed and lost. ‘You’re English?’ She jigged in my arms with her head turned away, blushing. ‘You’re not really English?’ She answered my questions in rushed, flat monosyllables. The polytechnic was quite nice. Dancing was all right. Zaporozhye was quite nice. But I wasn’t really English?

I settled with the students round our table, talking about poetry: one was eloquent on Blok, another passionate about Yesenin. Albert got fed up. He tried to join in, but he was irreversibly of the Jack London generation. In a moment, I thought, he would quote Burns. ‘They’re just students,’ he said. ‘They don’t know anything. They’ve no experience of life.’ And they seemed indeed to be a different race. Alternately my gaze focused on them and on Albert through the deepening pool of my inebriation. I was not sure if I were looking at a generation gap or at some other, deeper human division. ‘You’re my guest,’ Albert mumbled, ‘not theirs….’

They were gentle with him, as with a child. They refused to take offence. His petty vanities and ritualized hospitality seemed to be as foreign to them as to me. When his talk turned crassly to politics, they deflected him. ‘No, no, no,’ they said. Politics threatened differences; they were less important than the flesh and blood of my presence. When Albert tried to force drinks on me, they tactfully dissuaded him.

I was dimly aware that I was witnessing two Russias. I hoped that one was the future and the other the past, although even in my drunkenness I realized that nothing was as simple as that. Yet Albert was typical of his deprived generation. He was practical, tough and narrow. To him these others were too pampered and easy. They were, I sensed, apolitical. He resented them; and they, in turn, looked on him not only with the old Russian respect for seniority but with a feeling that he was somehow irrelevant, and belonged to a world of absolutes which was forever past.

‘They’re too young,’ he said.



Southward the land achieved a new nadir of flatness. Sluggish with haze, its 12,000-acre wheatfields wallowed and shimmered among interweaving lakes, where the enormous Dnieper moved in an invisible flood to the west. Glimpsed through wind-breaks along the road, the twin planes of land and water stretched level and interchangeable to a horizon which fell away like a cliff-edge into nothing. Around the neck of the Crimea the Azov Sea, so still and shallow that in winter it freezes solid, curved along rutted mud-flats where flocks of gulls swam offshore or paced over a sheen of pink-berried shrubs.

From the Crimean capital of Simferopol I flew that night to Odessa. In the Tupolev jet the seat beside mine was occupied by a Ukrainian vet. His suntanned face, grained and scored like old wood, either shut itself off from me with a look of paranoid suspicion, or crinkled into multiple smiles. There seemed nothing in between. Thickset, bald, uncomfortable in his dark suit and light mackintosh, he epitomized that haunted generation which spent its youth under Stalin. Half the things he said, however innocent, were pursued by qualification. If I questioned him too closely about himself, his face would suddenly freeze solid, but the moment I seemed disinterested and returned to reading my book, an impeccable pamphlet called Lenin and Co-operatives, he would begin to ask me questions—what did I think of Russia, was America still ‘ahead’?—and talk about himself. His life had been spent as a small-time vet on state farms in the southern Ukraine. He had only once been to Moscow, and his conception of anywhere else was as blurred and misshapen as of another galaxy. The tools for understanding had never been handed to him. He conceived of the West, of all the world, as an extended Ukrainian town. ‘England…’ he murmured, scouring his brain. ‘England…fog!’ He was delighted with this nugget. ‘How is the fog in England?’ He knit his brows at the thought of its impermanence, and rummaged through his mental lumber-room again. ‘Bacon! The English like bacon. I remember that.’ But here his knowledge ended. Fog, bacon.

Outside our window the moon, almost full, was beating out a bronze passage over the sea. Sometimes, far below, the lights of a boat flashed in the night, and I thought of Turkish fishermen I’d known on the southern shores, trading their sturgeon illicitly with Russian boats in mid-sea. The vet was talking about trotter disease in pigs now, cautiously saying that his job was poorly paid. ‘I’m a specialist—five years’ training, I call that a specialist…but perhaps that’s going too far.’ He had to feed and clothe two teenage daughters, and his wife worked in a chemist’s shop to help (but his voice clouded when he spoke of her).