Among the Russians(85)
Dusk had turned to night, and the wine glasses empty. Above us, as we wandered back to our huts, the one crag stood out in moon-streaked solitude from the concensus of the rest. ‘In the Kruschev years, the golden years,’ Julian said, ‘I managed to buy a copy of Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero—the book of a pacifist. Have you read it? It had a deep influence on me.’ We stopped in front of our hut doors. The noise of a radio sounded in the trees: Iraqi advance, Iranian casualties, American silence. We listened. ‘I don’t know how to talk about our meeting like this’—he was suddenly fumbling for phrases. ‘It’s important, you and I…like two people meeting in outer space….’ He ran his fingers over his face, as if to order its expression, his thoughts. Outer space. His country immaterial.
As we said goodbye, he clasped my hand and said: ‘If in some future time I see you in the sights of my rifle—I’ll miss.’
‘And I won’t fire at all.’
We laughed, but with deep emotion. I’ve never felt so brief a friendship more. In him I loved the Russian people. It was my last healing.
10. Kiev to the West
BACK DOWN THE interminable highway northward, between farmlands green in winter wheat or clogged with blackened and dying sunflowers, through Simferopol to Zaporozhye to Kharkov, I went under a sky sagging like a rain-drenched tent from horizon to horizon. Along the roadsides, where the summer dust was melting to mud, the fruit-sellers still sat in the drizzle, as if unmoved since I had passed them long before. Around the asbestos-roofed villages old men grazed their cows, and ducks and geese basked in the puddles.
From Kharkov I cut across the north Ukraine towards Kiev. Enormous wheatfields, interspersed with sugar beet, flax and potatoes, flowed against the skyline. Along the windbreaks the birch trees were dropping yellow leaves, the maples flaming into red-gold candelabra, the elders thickened and scarlet with berries. The whole land was softening into death or sleep.
Kiev, ‘the mother of Russian cities’, still keeps the unrest, the size and a trace of the refinement of a great capital. From the ninth to the twelfth centuries it was the heart of a Russia which flowered in the sunlight of Byzantium, standing where the Dnieper headwaters gathered the Viking traffic before flooding south united to the Black Sea. Now, on one bank, the apartments sprawl in a colder-than-usual rhetoric—within fifteen years the population has doubled to two-and-a-half million—while opposite, where the Church of St Andrew rises like a trumpet-blast from the old city, the boulevards are plump with spaced gardens and parklands, and cobbled streets ruffle near the water.
Kiev is still the capital of the Ukraine, and was a strategic lodestar for the Germans in 1941. War memorials reach a deafening crescendo: mounds of immortality, obelisks of glory, parks of eternity. I noticed more than ten which had been built as late as the 1960s and 70s. Russians and Germans between them destroyed much of the central city, and in the rambling complex called the Monastery of the Cross, once Russia’s holiest shrine, the eleventh century cathedral was reduced to a shattered body upholding a single dome. Far down the monastery’s gardened slopes, a covered way plunges to a little square and a church. The place has been disused for two decades. Nothing gives you to expect what is coming. But within the church the plaster-smooth walls suddenly close around the monks’ catacombs. For hundreds of yards, past dimly gleaming chapels and down water-dripping steps, the corridor beetles and bifurcates through a ghastly mausoleum. Robed in white silk, their faces covered by purple velvet or black embroidery and their feet slippered in silk, the abbots lie in their glass-topped coffins, with a single claw-like hand exposed on the breast. The cell-shrines are stacked with bones. Blackened skulls gape in their powder or leer from glass jars. Eight centuries of skeletons and mummified cadavers lie in their niches, hung with anti-religious plaques—the intolerance of Marxism hounding them even in their dust—until the defiled labyrinth washes you up again before the church’s tarnished icon-screen.
This ghoulish maze prefigured my stay. The Kiev campsites had already closed down in early’ October, and I was assigned to the Ukraine Hotel. Louring above the city’s Olympic football stadium, it was forbiddingly impressive. Its gloomy halls seemed always to be murmuring with a concourse of nondescript men, and the esplanades outside were dotted with other men, sitting by twos in cars, leafing through their briefcases, or waiting.
For several weeks I had visited nobody controversial and my vigilance had slackened. But that evening I overheard an assistant at the hotel’s Intourist telephone-desk. Her tone was tense and deferential. She was answering questions. ‘A lone British tourist?…yes…with his own car?…he arrived at 5.30….’
As she put down the receiver I asked, still untroubled: ‘Did somebody want me?’
She jumped. ‘You’re Mr Thubron?…yes…they, we….’ She was blushing, staring down and scrabbling furiously with her papers. When she looked up again her voice was loud and bright: ‘If there’s anything you want, we’re absolutely at your service.’
I took a mental note of the car number-plates behind the hotel, and that evening it was one of these which framed itself in my mirror as I drove south into the suburbs: Kiev 75-86. Once it had gauged my speed, the white Volga saloon lingered back in a way which I was soon to recognize, tucked behind a lorry four cars behind. I might have shaken it off—it assumed I was unaware of it. But by now I was worried. I had no idea why I was wanted. Had they traced me back to meetings with dissidents in Moscow or Leningrad? I didn’t know. Every minute or two the white shadow in my mirror would ease out as if to pass its covering lorry, then slide back. Once, in distraction, I overshot some red traffic-lights, and the Volga accelerated and did the same. A policeman tried to flag it down. It took no notice and swerved in close behind me. I saw a short, dark man seated in front, and a thin, fair driver. They fell back again instantly, concealed behind a truck.