Among the Russians(89)
It was my last night in Russia. I lay in the bath, reading my travel diary. I was afraid I would not see it again. That night I was followed on foot through the streets. And as if a belated attempt were being made to expose me, I received a flurry of criminal proposals in the foyer of the hotel. A man introducing himself as a Polish student asked me for drugs. Another offered dollars in exchange for any pornography or underground literature I might have. A woman wanted to change my British pounds on the black market.
Next day the Zhigulis shadowed me to the Hungarian border, keeping their distance through the last, pine-dark hills. They vanished only at the final moment, where the border-post of Chop looked deceptively asleep. I did not know what to expect here. My close-written diary, an irreplaceable store of detailed memories, blazed like a beacon in my pocket.
I was met by a friendly interpreter who told me the formalities would only take twenty minutes. After the first hour he said: ‘It’s nothing personal.’ A little later he admitted ‘It’s a bit long.’ Then he fell silent. Other cars came and went; but mine stayed. Four hours later I was still being investigated. Five men inspected my scant luggage, item by item strewn miserably along the customs’ counter. I was stripped and body-searched. My camera was emptied, my film developed. The mud-clogged Morris was driven over a dip where two mechanics probed it for two hours, then dismantled even its door panels, and lifted out its dashboard.
Finally, darkness falling, I was summoned into a room below the customs post. The officials looked vaguely nonplussed. Everything I owned had melted into innocence under inspection, except the illegible diary, which now lay in fingered sheafs on the desk of a stone-faced immigration officer. As I entered he glanced up from his magnifying glass with an expression of heavy frustration. He looked weary. He demanded: ‘Have you developed this writing specially?’
He summoned the interpreter. Then, for half an hour, he pointed to passages in the manuscript and ordered me to read them aloud: Odessa, Rostov, Riga…. I read them out, omitting a few ruderies, while the interpreter translated them into poetic Russian. Neither man could read what I had written. I might as well have quoted the psalms or Shakespeare. But this did not strike me as odd at the time.
Yet I read the diary like a valediction. I was sure it would be impounded. Even as I did so, I was reliving places and people half forgotten, until these descriptions seemed to be all I had to take away with me. I passionately wanted to keep them. Without them, I felt, I might not believe that I had entered the Soviet Union at all. And there are times even now when this land reverts to the enigma which hung on my classroom wall when I was a boy—Mercator’s projection, its proportions distorted—until it seems to be less a physical country than an area of mingled tenderness and unease in my mind, which I call Russia.
At last the shoulders of the immigration officer (if that is what he was) heaved with a kind of dejected relief. ‘It’s getting late.’
‘Yes.’
For a minute more he ruminated in silence, then a tiny, resigned smile opened in his face, and he handed back to me the notes from which this book has been composed.