‘We called at a stolovaya for a snack. The Englishman was hungry. He insisted.’
She lifted her hands. ‘Oh George, why are you always so careless? How many times have I told you never to eat in those filthy proletarian places?’
I chaffed him. It couldn’t have been the food, since I was perfectly well. ‘Perhaps you’re ill from puffing at too many cigars. Or you’re not sick at all, more like, but lolling in bed with your girlfriend. If that’s the case I hope you’ll feel better soon.’
I walked back to the window, saw rain splashing on to the rooftops. The fair tiler had gone, and taken the packet of American cigarettes I’d left for her on the sill.
Sweeping items off the shelves with my unexpected windfalls of cash, everything seemed so cheap, like being on a looting expedition, George said. He was still pale after yesterday’s meal, as I parked the car outside the GUM department store.
He recommended records as bargains, so I bought a box of ten by Chaliapin, and as many as could be found of Shostakovich, which included the complete Katerina Izmailovna of Mtsensk, and Stenka Razin with a text by Yevtushenko. My hand went out for the ‘Leningrad’ Symphony No. 7, and then I picked up a set of Prokofiev’s ballet score Romeo and Juliet, also a couple of dozen works by Scriabin, Moussorgsky and Tchaikovsky — music from the finest voices and orchestras of the USSR.
We came out of other departments laden with fur hats, balalaikas, Palekh boxes, matrioshka dolls, packets of Chinese brick tea, and more Monte Cristo cigars.
In the evening I was taken around the newly opened ‘Library of Foreign Literature’, millions of volumes from all countries in their original languages. Walking the stacks of so many treasures proudly pointed out, I recalled my first visit to a Nottingham branch library as a child, and a few years later to the main one in the city centre.
The lady in charge led me into a large hall, to give a poetry reading before several hundred people. Out of respect I decided to perform standing, as I nearly always did in any case. But my legs shook so violently that I thought of sitting, though didn’t, because the lower part of me was hidden by a curtained table. The affliction must have been due to long walks that afternoon or, more likely, from so many days sitting in the car.
One poem read called ‘Love in the Environs of Voronezh’ was also the title of a forthcoming book. I wrote the line for its assonance, and because the poet Osip Mandelstam had been exiled to Voronezh during the purges of the 1930s — before being sent off to die in Siberia.
I stood on the pavement afterwards, the Moscow air freshened by a storm of rain. A girl from the audience who introduced herself as Svetlana Filushkina told me she had been born in Voronezh, so I explained why I had used the name, and gave her a copy of the poem so that she would remember why I had done so.
Oksana Krugerskaya and I went by taxi to the Writers’ Club, to spend the evening with Frans Taurin. We had met him in Irkutsk four years before, when she had guided me around the Soviet Union.
Relaxed and elated, as one often is from a reading, I was shown to our reserved table in the great dining room. Frans reminded me, after handshakes and the first glass of vodka, of our boozing session by Lake Baikal, when I had walked out on the ice wearing only a thin English mackintosh.
He was a year or so over fifty, but I knew nothing of his life except that he had written novels, and had been on hunting expeditions in the taiga. Just above middle height, though not heavily built, he looked physically tough, short fair hair and sharp grey-blue eyes flashing a touch of humour now and again. I could see that he was well able to put on a stance of authority in his new post as a high official in the writers’ union, but hoped he did so with sufficient tolerance and generosity.
We toasted absent friends with the first bottle. I spoke little Russian, so Oksana interpreted. What we ate I don’t recall, though it must have been good, since the restaurant had a reputation to keep up among those privileged writers who belonged to the Union.
Platitudes and aphorisms flourished as vodka took effect, and for three hours we hardly stopped talking. He seemed to be watching me for signs of collapse, but I foolishly matched him glass for glass, aware of heading for a blackout if such a rate kept up. Hoping to stay conscious till reaching the hotel, a third bottle arrived, and Oksana, who drank only water, became uneasy. Not normally a heavy drinker, I nevertheless assumed that such convivial indulgence was not beyond me, but would I imbibe so much as to make me feel as flat as a board?
The highway to oblivion was in the offing, though the prospect by now seemed not unpleasurable. In London I was used to a few glasses of an evening on needing to relax, so thought I could take my share without losing clarity of speech. My perceptions fought to avoid splitting in two, and did not succeed. One half from its vantage point told me, with hard words and a wagging finger, not to go on too long, while the weaker part scorned its puritanical hypocrisy. I tried to join the two entities, and thereby gain superiority over both, though it was hardly possible, knowing that the fight would only cease in the refuge of sleep. Meanwhile the dam of tight control allowed me at least to continue talking and, in a way, performing.
In the midst of full tables with their shouting parties Frans and I talked about life, art, the duties and freedoms of a writer in a socialist or any other society, issues I was still able to define. All I wanted to do, I said at some point, was get into my car and drive to Siberia — back to Irkutsk — but couldn’t because no road went the whole way.
He laughed at my supposing so. ‘You’re wrong, my English friend. Nowadays there’s a wide macadamised highway from Paris to Lake Baikal, and even beyond, take my word for it.’
‘But I wouldn’t get permission from the authorities to do it, would I?’
‘That will come, I’m sure. But you’d have to drive six thousand kilometres before we could do some fishing on the shore at Baikal. Even you would take about a month to do such a journey.’
A good reason for going to Irkutsk again would be to call on Mark Sergeyev, an especial friend from my former visit, a young writer who, with his parents, had been deported from the Ukraine in the 1930s. He told me how, one day after weeks on the railway, his father lifted him up to a slot in the carriage and said: ‘Look at all that water. See it? It’s Lake Baikal!’ I still have the little book he wrote about the region that he came to love.
When I said let’s fetch my car from the hotel and set off tonight he stood up stiffly and put out his hand, saying it was time for him to leave. I got to my feet as well, which felt like standing on glass marbles. The gap between me and the rest of the world was so wide it would have needed a long range jet to cross it. People at the next table seemed as if at the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. I supposed that to walk would make me feel more alert. Frans and I shook hands several times in our farewells.
In the urinals downstairs Arbuzov the playwright and the novelist Aksyonov invited me upstairs to their table. Aksyonov, born in 1932, had qualified as a doctor, then wrote Colleagues, a novel which became a bestseller all over the Soviet Union. The book was first serialised in Yunost (Youth) magazine, edited by the novelist and journalist Boris Polevoi. I had read an English translation, and thought it good, being a brilliant and witty account of three young and idealistic physicians just starting out in life. I was happy to meet him.
Arbuzov offered me a large brandy, which I had the sense to refuse, and they resumed a discussion with several other writers on the art of The Beatles, delighted to have a ‘real’ Englishman with them and hear his comments, though how serious and knowledgable could I appear with a lake of vodka inside me?