Among the Russians(87)
It seems foolish, in retrospect, that Kiev should be so contaminated for me. I thought it a handsome city, but it remains discoloured in my mind. I remember staring into foodshops whose stock was wretchedly little and expensive: in one only a heap of decapitated chickens, in another some crates of aubergines. And this was the capital of the Ukraine, of the Black Earth! I began to feel terribly tired, as if some unnoticed strain from the past months were finally spilling over. In the hotel that afternoon I found a Soviet Greek, an engineer from Kazakhstan with a delicate, mobile face. I befriended him with neurotic relief. His parents had come from Istanbul to Sukhumi after Ataturk’s victories in 1922, and had died in old age without ever talking a word of Russian. But he himself never spoke Greek, although he understood it; and his children could barely even understand it. I prompted him anxiously about his people’s history. The Greeks, founders of freedom! Had he read Sappho, Cavafy, Herodotus? Those books were hard to get, he said. But did he still feel Greek, I demanded? Absolutely, he said. Yet I could not tell in what the feeling lay. He knew the date of Lenin’s birthday, but he could not remember who had built the Parthenon. In my present state this struck me as a parable of total corruption.
I had been given other addresses in the city: those of a priest, a journalist and the wife of a poet who had recently been arrested. But all would have been compromised if I had met them. Although I did not know it at the time, the poet, a Ukrainian nationalist, was sentenced to ten years’ hard labour on the day I arrived. I confined my trips to conventional tourist sites. I did not even see Babi Yar, where the Germans massacred over a hundred thousand Kievan Jews and others. (‘It’s discouraged to go there,’ an Armenian had told me. ‘I suppose they’re afraid of it becoming a Jewish shrine.’)
The only people I had warned of my coming were a Georgian agronomist and his Russian fiancée, who appeared by taxi one evening to take me to their home for supper. They greeted me like old friends—he a man of mercurial darkness, she motherly, blonde and Slavic-calm. I warmed to them at once. In the taxi we talked at ease of mutual friends in England. But through its back window I glimpsed the number-plate of the white Volga following us. I felt sick. But I didn’t tell them. The contrast between their blithe chatter and this paranoid shadow was somehow horrific. And I, in my knowledge, was condemned to the shadow. My guilty diary bulged in my coat pocket.
The Volga drifted to a halt beyond us when we stopped, and as we ascended in the flat-block elevator, I glimpsed a man in a leather jacket enter below. His face was enclosed, leaden, and I could hear the noise of his feet keeping pace with the rickety elevator as we rose, until he knew which apartment we entered.
But the moment the door closed, we were at peace. Mehrab and Vera had both left behind broken marriages, and were palpably in love. Theirs was a timeless attraction of opposites. Mehrab had the trim, agile physique of his people. In his swarthy face, with its high forehead and prominent but rather delicate bones, the eyes glittered with a febrile restlessness. He spoke to me about his work, but was distracted by the closeness of Vera, seated heavy-breasted beside him. His gestures incorporated a tender searching of her body with the elucidation of drainage around the Black Sea. Irrigation ditches somehow found their way across her thighs; harvest failures were offset by a consoling crop of squeezes; a bumper year collected her breasts.
And all the time, framed in page-boy hair, her blue eyes and broad lips gave out a happy and uncomplicated strength. The word ‘definitely’ kept recurring in her talk. She was outspoken and often (said Mehrab) wrong. She had a puritan love of Siberia, where she had been born, and of all northern Russia. She preferred Leningrad to Kiev. ‘The people are more open-hearted there. Definitely. Here in Kiev they’re enclosed, they live in their own circles.’
When she went into the kitchen to prepare supper, Mehrab laughed affectionately: ‘She’s biased. She was a child in Siberia, you see, and a student in Leningrad, living among students—but an adult only here. She looks back on those student days with nostalgia and on her childhood with love. So of course she sees the places in that order. But really, I think, the old gradations of north to south apply here too. Kiev, you know, is more casual and dirty than northern Russia, and the Ukrainians a bit more open. But Georgia is better still!’
Love, in many permutations and disguises, pervaded our evening. The flat was full of it: thumbed books, taped music, Black Sea driftwood which they had collected on holiday and lacquered in curious shapes. ‘A man should love his work,’ Mehrab said, ‘that’s the secret, but I’m not sure if the young do that any longer.’ He spoke of ‘the young’ as if they were another race; I supposed he was about thirty-five. ‘They’re somehow more diffuse, perhaps more imaginative than we were at that age.’
I said I hoped so. I was thinking of peace, the trust which needs imagination.
‘If real peace comes, it’ll come because people are selfish,’ Vera said. ‘Definitely. They’ll have too much to lose.’
‘Yes,’ I said. That sounded like life.
A storm rumbled outside. I went to the window. The rain was lashing down on the road, the darkened trees and the white car sheltered under them.
‘The young have ten times as much as we had,’ Vera went on. ‘When I was five, I remember, I ached for a doll. I used to make wooden ones myself, but I longed for one with proper hair and a body made of something smooth, like skin, which I could dress and undress and wash.’ She laughed boisterously. ‘I got one when I was twenty! And I loved it just as much as if I was five! And now I see children with bicycles, radios, everything, and it hasn’t improved them.’ She looked puzzled and fed up. ‘And you in the West, you have so much, but are you happier?’