Among the Russians(81)
‘And why aren’t you married?’ he demanded. ‘You like girls? You’re in love? Then why, at your age—you must be at least twenty-eight—aren’t you married?’ The next moment he was looking at me with an open, innocent cunning. ‘I know. You can’t find rooms. No apartments. We have the same problem here.’ He brushed aside my denial as needless patriotism. ‘I had to live with my in-laws for over a year, all of us in two rooms. Lack of space, it’s the same everywhere….’
Odessa blazed orange and white over the sea. We were flying above the harbour now, where liners showed in burning almonds of light. I imagined the gossipy pre-Revolutionary port which I had read about somewhere: the Greek, Jewish and Italianate cosmopolis with its polyglot interchange of wares and ideas, its tang of French architecture.
But morning disclosed a city quieter, tamer, more uniform. Its trade, once the highest in the Soviet Union, has been deflected to the satellite port of Ilyichovsk a few miles to the south, leaving Odessa becalmed among its nineteenth century streets and plane trees. It rises above the sea in terraced avenues fringed with old business houses, while at its quays the Black Sea passenger ships idle among cranes; a few tugs bustle over the water and goods trains dawdle on grass-sown tracks. The Odessans show an old humour and entrepreneurial cunning. One in every three families is employed by the sea, and a desultory life still revolves around the cafés. I passed the Old English Club, the one-time London Hotel, the defunct Stock Exchange still adorned with its statue of Mercury, god of trade (and thieves), and descended the flight of 192 steps where Eisenstein filmed his classic sequence for Battleship Potemkin.
‘You find a different spirit here,’ a woman said. ‘It’s a slow city, but…subtle.’ We had sidled into conversation while examining the gloomy faces on a board of honour. Individual workers were listed beside factories, ships and the Odessa Telegraph. (‘Why don’t they smile?’ I ask. ‘It would be frivolous,’ she replies.) The woman seemed a quintessence of Russian middle-age: earthy, immobile as a windmill, but sentimental and vaguely sad. Her history, too, was common. After the German troops had evacuated Odessa in 1944, she said (in fact they were Romanian troops) her parents had come back to find only the ruins of the street where they had lived. She had stayed with them in a one-room flat until 1967, had married, divorced, and returned to her sick mother with a baby son. To her the war was a dimly-remembered horror perpetuated in her parents’ distress and in the collective consciousness of the nation. She shared the national obsession with security. ‘We have to be sure that it will never happen again.’ We were passing the tomb of the Unknown Sailor, where Komsomol cadets rotated their vigil every fifteen minutes. ‘The proof that our people love the Communist system,’ she said (she was a Party member) ‘is that twenty million died for it in the war.’
‘They died for their country,’ I said. Twenty million never died for a system.
The woman recognized my antagonism. Her mind was full of doctored history, and judgements strange to me. Stalin’s faults were redeemed by his strengths, she said, speaking the word ‘faults’ with tenderness, as if his victims had perished in a moment of absentmindedness; and she explained the invasion of Afghanistan by Russia’s deep desire for peace. ‘We have to defend our borders.’
‘And what of Afghanistan’s peace?’
‘We were invited in by Afghanistan’s leader.’
‘But you liquidated him!’
The woman grew muddled. Perhaps the Afghan people had invited Russia in, she said. I answered that the people had no voice: they were unrepresented. Besides, they were an ethnic chaos, not united at all. Her eyes dilated at this, her face puckered. An apparently simple situation was splintering into disagreeable and complicated patterns. For one instant a note of life-giving surprise and confusion coloured her voice. Then her expression cleared and she delivered a blunt statement of faith in her country’s incapacity for evil. Facts were only decorative trifles in her emotional landscape. They would not shake her. The details were not really important, she said. Her country was right.
This blindness reappeared when we walked near the city’s opera house, crowned by the Muse of Tragedy in her chariot of leopards, as the woman said: ‘The leopards represent human passion, but the muse holds up a torch to symbolize the controlling power of civilization.’
I stared up. ‘The torch has gone.’
She followed my gaze. ‘It’s there,’ she said. ‘She’s holding it up.’
She was not. The uplifted hand was empty. ‘The leopards are having a field day.’
‘It’s there,’ the woman insisted. ‘It stands for civilization.’
For a moment I imagined she must be short-sighted, but then I saw that her expression had retracted into a brooding stubbornness. The torch should be there, so it was there. It was an emotional fact. The Odessans loved their music, she went on, as if to buttress her claim. Gilels and David Oistrakh had trained at the city’s academy. Two-and-a-half million litres of liquid glass had recently been poured into the opera house foundations to stabilize them; eleven kilograms of gold had been spent refurbishing the decorations….
That afternoon the opera house put on a children’s ballet choreographed on the fairy tale of ‘the little hump-backed horse’. In the baroque auditorium, where lamps of clouded glass dangled like fat pearls, everybody became a momentary tsar. Immaculate ten-and twelve-year-old children, as many boys as girls, peered from the lavish boxes with their dowdy parents. The curtain rose on a fantasy contrasting so cruelly with their ordinary lives that the shock must have been dazing. Peacocks nesting in a golden shrine under the curly-domed palace of the czars; gauzy screens of humanoid flowers; a corps de ballet of rainbow-feathered birds which flitted and twirled through a blue and purple night—the audience froze into pin-drop stillness. It was a world of exuberant peasants and a harmless, imbecile aristocracy, and the hero was one of those prince-fools beloved by Russian folklore. In the intervals the children wandered after their mothers in stunned-looking shoals. Anybody trying to imitate the hunch-backed horse by galloping down the aisles was seized by frightened parents or dragooned into silence by bullying, middle-aged usherettes. Fantasy was not for living.