Among the Russians(88)

I didn’t know, I said (whatever we meant by happiness). But we couldn’t go back.



When I returned to my hotel, I knew that something was wrong. The comfortable old concierge who had taken over duty on my floor, and who had previously shown a maternal benignity, now gaped at me with horror.

My room, in my absence, had been searched. It had been done near-perfectly, everything repositioned almost precisely as it was. Only by the pinpoint siting of several objects before I left, and by the insertion in notebooks of tiny threads now dislodged, did I realize that everything I possessed—letters, clothes, wallet, books, documents—had been removed, scrutinized and fastidiously replaced.

But my diary was in my pocket, and my address-list ashes down the lavatory.



You would not know, from its exterior, that Kiev’s cathedral of Haghia Sophia contained a pure eleventh century core, built at the zenith of Russia’s early power. Octagonal turrets, gilded lanterns, trifling apses and a multiplicity of curvaceous eighteenth century domes cloud it in stucco candy-floss. From the surrounding trees, huge chestnuts thump onto the fish-bone paving to the delight of children, and a four-tiered baroque belfry looms above.

But inside, the Byzantine glory breaks like an ocean in wave upon wave of fresco and mosaic, embracing for ever the divine and earthly order of things, engulfing arches, pillars and galleries in its petrified and self-existent splendour. In the dome hovers the soft mosaic presence of Christ the Ruler. His russet hair falls to a misty rain of beard. But he looks unfit to rule. The mouth is a fat anemone. The huge, deer’s eyes gaze dreamy-sad. Yet beneath him apostles and archangels circle the dome in adoration, and on the pendentives the evangelists relax in high-backed chairs, penning the secrets of eternity. Lower still, her feet balanced light in the golden cave of the apse, the Virgin Mary stands disembodied. Her face is long, dusky, other-than-human, haloed in refracted light—less a woman or a goddess than a metaphysical idea, a blue-gold geometry of intercession.

The tourist groups were attending doggedly to their guides, and were being dealt a Marxist interpretation of theocratic art. It was my last morning in Kiev. Behind one group, pretending to be attached, was a small, sallow man. He knew I knew (our eyes had met on another occasion) and he looked rather miserable. But by now I was released. In a moment of angry self-absolution I had started to ignore my persecutors and live my own life instead of theirs. I at last understood how in Moscow, that August night, Boris and Nikolai could have talked so outspokenly in his eavesdropped apartment, and had refused to be coerced into dishonesty. Besides, it seemed to me now, in calm, that this sudden intrusion on me sprang from pure bureaucracy. The big tourist hotels are heavily monitored by the KGB.

Around me the cathedral’s dogma was as self-embalmed as theirs. Law and chaos, sin and redemption, unfolded in a golden dialectic across its walls, and fading over all the frescoed arches and pillars of the side-aisles, patriarchs and saints—ascetic and learned, hermit and militant—waved their chalices and crosses in ghostly obsolescence.

Once this Byzantine world had exercised so profound an appeal to the Russian spirit that despite all persecution its decline would be inexplicable had not its power so clearly been deflected into a new redemption on earth. Sometimes in the past months I had almost envied this entirety of vision. Now, wandering in the forest of pillars, I felt old and alienated. I harboured, I suppose, a sceptical European sense that no system could deeply alter the absurdities of human nature, whereas the Russians still indulged an ancient sense of mission. ‘In every way there is something gigantic about this people,’ wrote Madame de Sta?l, ‘ordinary dimensions have no application to them.’ And as I walked through these aisles of faded certainty, it seemed that after even the most tragic failings had been counted, despite the public tyranny and private dissimulation, the travestied history and the sallow men on the edge of crowds, there yet remained a bruised grandeur about this race who could still dream, however faintly, of a perfectible community on earth.

But all around me the frescoed ancestors of this foolishness were thinning away. The blemished saints and Church fathers no longer held the heart and gaze. They were draining back into the plaster, into their unimaginable centuries.

‘It was just superstition,’ a guide said. ‘Primitive daydreams….’



The next day I drove 340 miles westward to Lvov. Half a mile behind me over the wide-open land a white Volga kept pace. But it gave me up where the Kiev district stopped, and the traffic police flagrantly radioed my progress. After ten miles I passed two of them fidgeting with their truncheons in the middle of the road. Caught in my mirror, one of them turned and raised his arm, and a white Zhiguli slid out from the trees behind him. Thereafter, for two hundred miles, I was followed by Lvov 22-65, and drove through corridors of autumn trees, hung with mistletoe, and over the Carpathians. After a while, too, it dawned on me that half a mile ahead a second white Zhiguli was attending me in its own sophisticated way. If I accelerated to sixty, it did the same; if I slowed to thirty, it copied me. So all afternoon, bracketed between Lvov 22-65 and Lvov 78-65 (and marvelling at the waste of manpower) I made for the West.

In Lvov itself, while searching for my hotel, I again became lost. I blundered in circles, so that my two escorts anxiously closed in, aligned themselves behind, and clung to me through a hundred futile alleys.

The city breathed out a dilapidated, Austro-Hungarian charm and the hotel, when I discovered it, was stately with gilt and aspidistras. Its old, gentle-mannered staff seemed to have survived inexplicably from the pre-war, cosmopolitan Lvov shattered by Stalin.