Among the Russians(83)

He should have had his own work, his own cattle, his own space. Instead he owned a twenty-foot garden and a fox terrier, and bred pet rabbits with his son. Sometimes on weekends he frustratedly pruned his father-in-law’s orchard of thirty fruit trees. But that was all. Big cities he regarded with distress, and Moscow he hated. ‘It’s a city which doesn’t communicate with itself.’ He preferred London, he said, because you could feel the earth amongst the stone. ‘Those gardens and squares! I like that. But one thing astonished me—the open pornography. I don’t know if it’s good or bad, I was just amazed, knowing the British character. Perhaps I’ve read too much Galsworthy….’ The wrinkles spurted up around his eyes again. ‘There’s another thing that’s very strange. We don’t hear anything in our country about your fighting in 1940. It’s as if those events don’t exist for us.’ Had a whole generation in Britain, he wondered, been transfixed by the war as it had in Russia? ‘It’s made a deep divide between my father’s generation and mine. He’s an old man now, over eighty. He used to drive a horse-cab in Oryol, and he fought in the Revolution. Pure history! He’s absolutely definite about everything, even though his mind’s going. But I care less for politics than he did. It’s the same with all my contemporaries. We seem farther from those things….’

‘And your children?’

‘My son’s only twelve. How different he’ll be from me, I can’t tell. But the children are more pampered now than we were, so perhaps they’ll be gentler than us.’ His face clouded into disapproval. ‘But there are so few of them! A lot of married couples can only afford one. And that one grows up surrounded by aunts and grandmothers and women teachers. We’re growing soft.’

Julian wanted to nurture his son’s enterprise. He seemed to be saying that Russia, contrary to appearances, was shaped by women, and that their influence inhibited individuality. He himself fiercely needed to be alone. This solitary holiday, which his wife resented, was spent fishing. He would row himself out to sea with an old sailor and sit for four or five hours at a time with his line dangled overboard. Once he caught a shark, but never much else. And he would often throw his catch back into the water. Each evening we met in the camp restaurant and discussed our different days; and mine, which started in a flurry of anxious sightseeing, became subtly infected by his, and slowed to a languorous procession of walks above the sea or in the hills.

Once these shores were the evening playground of the tsarist aristocracy. Their lush slopes gleam and bristle with the architectural fancies of western Europe and the Orient. But now the palaces have been turned into sanatoria for the people (as inscriptions on the base of every Lenin statue remind you). Confections in the Moorish or Ottoman taste, overblown Swiss chalets and Renaissance palazzi, sprout and ramble among parklands or botanical gardens fat with oak and arbutus. The castle of a German oil baron hangs in Rhenish fantasy on a cliff above the waves, and pastiche becomes brilliant lunacy in the Vorontsov palace, built in battle-grey dionite, where Mameluke minarets and Tudor chimneys taper above Landseer lions slumbering beside a Moghul gateway. Even Livadia palace, where the Yalta conference was held in 1945, rings the scene of the birth of the United Nations with a spurious halo of white granite and Moorish-Florentine courtyards.

The very coast seems touched with artifice. The so-called Bear headland abuts the waves in a shaggy, sea-browsing hulk; and the pine-hung declivity of Cat Mountain, its boulders clambering eight hundred feet into the sky, resembles some gargantuan tom crouched to pounce on the breakers. Yalta itself has doubled its size in twenty years; but its alleys still twine through a nineteenth century heart of parks and verandaed mansions, and its quay tinkles with a children’s funfair; while higher inland, in a stone house and a garden jungly with lilies, Chekhov wrote The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard.

It is easy to see why artists loved this region. All along the coast the villages and little towns give out a haphazard secrecy, confusions of stucco houses scramble up slopes bright with hollyhocks, or lurch together in a sun-softened mingling of walls. Vines shade old footpaths; buddleias are stuck with yellow bees. Courtyards have become living-rooms or kitchens, hung with onions and scattered with washing and cats. Sometimes, so intense is the feeling of a Latin land, that the sudden stridency of Russian radio songs, or the emergence of Slavic faces in place of the Mediterranean grace and agitation, produce an almost physical shock of dislocation.

But the beaches where I walked could only have been Russian. Their people lined them like convalescents, in a strange, prostrate self-surrender. They lay crowded on their towels or on penitential wooden boards, without playing or even talking, as if to absolve themselves, in these few snatched weeks of oblivion, from all thought and unrest. The older women, especially, stretched themselves out in heaps with a grotesque, peasant beatitude. Floppy cloth sun-hats sheltered peeling noses and inflamed cheeks. Beneath the big, loose breasts turning crimson in the heat, flaccid hips and Buddha stomachs tapered to legs as bruised and unshaped as old tree trunks. They changed dress in Victorian-looking beach-cubicles, then emerged to swim solemnly along the shallows in unisexual bathing-caps. Only a few of the young showed a Western slenderness, and occasionally, in this outwardly puritan land, a couple tentatively fondled, or a head rested on a nearby lap.

‘Those beaches just make you want to get into the hills,’ said Julian that evening, ‘or go home.’ We were gazing from our restaurant over the darkened valley. He had spent all day catching one fish. He looked happy, and his deep, rumbling laugh detonated at ease into the night. Then, suddenly serious, he pointed into the mountains. In the encircling range one bluff erupted from the others in a treeless solitude. The full moon picked it out from all the rest in an eerie interplay of shadow and insubstantial light. A dissident. ‘I love that peak. Standing on its own. That’s what I like about the English character too—at least the classic English character.’ His laugh exploded again. ‘I don’t know why, but I like it. Too much Galsworthy! And your Queen, that’s something I like too. An ideal.’ Suddenly he was making almost a declaration of faith: ‘It’s hard to carve out your own way, isn’t it? Not to be subjected to a laid-down principle, only to be governed by what you find is so? It’s harder but…right.’