Among the Russians(84)
It was utterly, consciously un-Communist. I could only say ‘Yes’ as he pronounced this simple and absolute heresy against all he had ever been told.
The next moment a shabby, middle-aged man sat himself beside us and tapped my shoulder. Russians often reminded me of characters in their own fiction, and this one recalled those sad, petty professional men who wander the pages of nineteenth century novels. His face was all eager foolishness. He had diagnosed me as an American, and he had a question. ‘Why,’ he demanded incredulously, ‘do you Americans say you’re afraid of Russia? How can any country be afraid of Russia?’
Perhaps it was the gentling night, the wine, or the ease of conversation with Julian, but something in me softly broke. In the man’s doltish, puzzled face his country’s myth of innocence seemed incarnate and all at once maddening, and suddenly, with a distant, helpless dismay, I heard months of opinionated frustrations unlock themselves and barge out of my mouth. Why afraid? Because Russia, I began, dominated the last and hugest empire on earth. I invoked the invasion of Hungary in 1956, of Czechoslovakia in 1968, of Afghanistan in 1979. It was a country of evangelistic ruthlessness, of nationalism disguised as ethics; it was as materialistic and more cynical than America had ever been (I had momentarily adopted America); yet its government was too frightened to permit a free vote or even a free poem, and was headed by a clutch of privileged autocrats. Soviet Communism, I went on, was merely the art of opportunism, it had lost touch even with the dignity of an outdated Marxism…. Then I noticed Julian’s face. It was turned away from me, whitened, towards the darkness. And when I looked back at the other man I saw that my fusillade of romantic disappointment might as well have been fired at the sky. His expression showed only a bewildered hurt.
‘“Empire”,’ Julian repeated later. ‘“Ruthlessness”. Strong words.’ They hurt him—he was deeply patriotic—but he mulled and forgave them. We smoothed them away in wine until late in the night, talking of England, and of countries where he’d never been, until I wondered incoherently if the most useful role of governments might be to express all their people’s fear and antagonism, and so release the people themselves into some precious and unexpected friendship.
That night I dreamed I was looking over the edge of the campsite into a waterlogged valley. I was surrounded by frightened people—Russians, British, Americans—who said that a mass of soldiers was advancing up the slope. As I peered over, I saw their helmets teeming below in the odd, aqueous light. Then I realized that they were only tree-stumps, and I called out: it’s nothing, it’s all right. And the fear around me vanished.
But I woke up.
The Crimea, like the Caucasus, is darkened by a displaced people. On a thin suspicion of collaboration with Germany, its two hundred thousand Tartars were deported en masse to Central Asia by Stalin in 1944, and their role in the partisan fight against Nazism was systematically distorted or suppressed. In 1967 the charges against them were withdrawn; but thousands had already died in the hardship of exile, and their efforts to filter back into the Crimea have been harassed ever since.
Sixty miles north through the mountains, the old Tartar capital of Bakhchiserai is now a tourist site. Its palace clusters under chestnut trees around secret courtyards and the slop of marble fountains. It has the subtle mutability of so many Turkic things—a nomad camp eternalized in wood and stone. In its cushioned chambers the sun enters only as a paler-than-usual shadow, leaking through vine-hung windows, or sliding beneath tiled roofs across the crimson flowering of carpet and divan. A goblin smallness touches everything. The little courts, once raked by the scrutiny of bored eyes from door or lattice, still reek of whispered conspiracy. The walls are low, for overhearing. The verandahs listen. The painted ceilings and witch-hat chimneys of the harem are redolent of tinkling headdresses and yawns and perfumed baths. In the main court the Tartar Fountain of Tears, adorned with tiny marble cups, lets drop its watery beads unnoticeably from one little chalice into another, in symbol of recurring sorrow.
‘A few Tartars are returning as farmers in the north of the peninsula,’ said Julian, ‘but there don’t seem to be any in the south—I don’t know why.’ He was genuinely perplexed. ‘And there are plenty of jobs here.’
It was our last evening. He had bought a bottle of Caucasian dessert wine—we never normally drank much together—and we celebrated a sombre farewell. From time to time his gaze wandered uneasily to the restaurant television. ‘You’ve heard the news?’
‘No.’
It came non-committally from the television announcer: the outbreak of war between Iran and Iraq.
We stared at one another, wondering where the Soviet and Western governments would stand, what we would be told to feel. ‘It looks like Moscow and Washington are hanging back,’ Julian said. ‘It’s not time for us to report for duty.’ He tried to laugh. But we touched glasses unhappily, as if already clothed in invisible battledress. The news had momentarily reduced us.
‘Sometimes I think of my father,’ Julian said, ‘and of that whole war generation, and I think: “Let the dead bury their dead”.’ He grimaced. ‘Is that in the Bible or Longfellow?’ Then, out of his schoolboy memory, he began to quote Burns. I suppressed a moan as My Heart’s in the Highlands came up. But the words rolled out of him with a kind of ponderous wonder, restoring the poem to itself, and exorcized the sarcasm of Misha in the Elburz mountains.