Among the Russians(82)
In the last act, as the stage princess danced in a gold and scarlet dress before her wedding, the small girl by my side, her hair clouded in chiffon ribbons, threw herself flat against the seat in front with a little cry, rammed her fists against her cheeks and went on gazing long after the curtain had fallen. Then her father gently pulled her away, and we all went back down the gold and marble stairway.
Outside in the harsh sunlight real brides, looking wooden and matter-of-fact, were laying their bouquets beneath a memorial to the city’s heroes, and posing to be photographed beside their unsmiling grooms.
Early on Sunday morning I took a series of trams far into the suburbs, searching for Uspensky monastery, which runs one of the last three theological seminaries in the Soviet Union. The streets were almost empty. A few women holding enamel pots formed desultory queues beside milk-churns just arrived from the country, and some elderly men in track suits were wheezing round October Revolution Park. In my last tram I sat next to a man whose son had defected to the West and now played the violin in a New Orleans orchestra.
‘Can he come back and see you?’
‘Not until there’s peace.’ He looked crushed as he talked of it, and got off hurriedly at the next stop.
It was hard to believe that the ramshackle seminary—a scattering of monastic buildings under yellowing trees—nurtured so many of Russia’s future priests. In its two churches, celebrants were already observing the liturgy, and old women were silently begging along its dusty paths. They kissed the monks’ hands and pectoral crosses, bowed under their perfunctory blessing. It seemed a place for the blind, the unloved, the widowed.
The number of seminarists is not only brutally curtailed—there are 250 here, I heard, with thirty-eight monks—but the influx of those with too educated a background is restricted. Nobody seemed free to show me the buildings. Scurrying along the paths in their black, serf-like robes and crumpled hats, the monks met my requests with unhappiness or bemusement. Only one man, distressed by my failure to cross myself in church, seized my arm at the back of the nave. ‘Touch your head for the Father, my child, then down to your belly for the Son—no, you’ve got it wrong—now across your shoulders….’ But when I asked him about the seminary, he said: ‘I don’t know anything. I never went to a seminary myself. I only finished third grade…. Some of the monks teach there, but not me. We pray, you see. We pray for men’s brotherhood. You’re not from our country, are you? I can tell that.’ He twined his fingers in and out of his beard; he was like an ancient child. ‘We pray for peace.’
On his lips the word ‘peace’ lost its contamination. For the first time I wanted to share it.
But the seminary, and Odessa itself, had eluded me.
Beneath the Crimean mountains, which fold the peninsula’s southern shore in a tropical balm, I lazed away a week near Yalta, swimming a little, walking in the hills, sometimes forgetting that I was in Russia at all. The inhabitants call this early autumn ‘the velvet season’—the whole land mellow and still, sinking with a sigh into October. A milky haze covered everything, smoothing the sky and the quiet sea together, horizonless, so the wake of a passing boat remained a wrinkle suspended in emptiness. Over the forest-brown earth of the foothills, a thicket of burnished reds and yellowing greens scattered and glowed. The vines were turning crimson in the valleys, the hazels gold. Juniper, cypress, wild apple, plum and pear trees and twisted Crimean oaks reached high up the hills, until mountain crags steepened out of their softness, flecked only by pine-trunks stark against the rock.
Even my campsite was perched precipitously above vineyards. I arrived at night to find its hundred-odd huts filled with Russian and East German tourists, but the murmur of their holidaymaking dissipated and died in the valley. Seated on a tree-stump near my camping hut, a huge, dreamy-faced man was staring up at the stars. He occupied the cabin beside mine, spoke a halting English, and chose to sit by me that night in the restaurant. I at first suspected him of being an informer.
Julian was my age, but the contrasting experience of our countries had equipped us divergently. I felt at once younger and more sophisticated than him. When we talked, his boyish face would wrinkle quaintly round its weather-creased eyes with the effort to understand or explain something, transforming him into a diligent but backward pupil. Yet beside this heavy simplicity there was something powerful too, and stubbornly independent. It was this recalcitrant independence, I think, which drew us together. In him it seemed to be the product of a masculine self-confidence, of the weight he gave to his own experience. Whereas in me, perhaps, it stemmed from a restless inner life and a distrust of belonging.
Julian worked in a collective farm near Simferopol. Ten years before, he had travelled in an agricultural delegation to Britain, and he now grew cucumbers on straw bales in the British way. But he had become impatient. He had enjoyed setting up the farm, but he was irritated by its routine. He preferred creation to maintenance. ‘I tell you what I loved in England. I loved your personal farms—forty cows or so, and the small tractors and the little orchards. I call that a marvellous system!’ He stopped, scenting his own heresy. ‘But I suppose it wouldn’t work here…I suppose not.’ The wrinkles reconvened between his eyes. ‘Those small farms, they make people independent. That’s good. A man needs to be on his own. That’s what I liked about you when I saw you. Alone.’ He gave a deep, shy laugh.