Translated phrases from the long suffering Oksana must have emerged as pompous clichés, for I told them, though with little conviction, that I didn’t much like The Beatles, possibly because my ears couldn’t get accustomed to their cacophonies. Writers and intellectuals in England took their work as interesting for reasons I distrusted, but out of good fellowship here in Moscow I added that they were right to find them fascinating and agreeable, since their songs pleased young people all over the world — which they seemed happy to hear. A cynic like me had to guard against the scorn factor, which might be too easily seen as hypocrisy or conceit.
At two o’clock in the taxi queue, still talking, I wondered how long I would be able to hold out, but cars came frequently so I didn’t have many minutes to wait. Street lights were dazzling white spheres, and at times I was seeing four instead of two. A lorry shedding clouds of diesel smoke threatened the fragile equilibrium in my stomach. I lit a cigar, as if insanely persuaded that its odour would make me ill, and eventually feel better. I didn’t refuse when my friends insisted I take the next taxi.
The doorman at the hotel, practised at spotting a drunk, gave an understanding Russian grin as I handed him a cigar. He saw me into the lift and came up with me in case I stumbled out at the wrong floor, talking sociably all the while, though I took in nothing.
A woman stationed behind a desk at the lift exit came out of her doze to hand over the key, my brain working sufficiently to order — in Russian — a breakfast of caviar and boiled eggs, to be served in my room at nine. She noted it on her pad and went back to sleep.
I walked along the corridor, and found it impossible to get the key in the lock. Must be the wrong one, or someone else’s door. The sky was knocking to come in, and all my life went by, till, I found the right place and my troubles were over. Nothing would be worth worrying about ever again, and I was, with little reason, full of optimism.
It was three o’clock, but life was worth living. A light in the brain scorched my eyes, and I was fixed on a circulating pedestal, like a lighthouse keeper condemned for the rest of his days to a lonely clifftop. I whistled some mindless tune and opened the windows, but the room continued going round like a blinding phosphorescent ocean, candlepower whitening across its turbulence. What day was it? Where was I? Disconnected from upper and nether worlds I wanted to soar over the Himalayas, out of my skin.
I stared at the blank wall, and looked at my watch, as if that could help me. Well, it did: half an hour had gone by. My stomach was burning as if full of liquid lead. Oblivion wouldn’t come. It seemed futile to want anything. All I knew was that I had at least kept the flag flying with someone who had hoped to drink me under the table, an observation in no way discouraging as I ran for the bathroom.
Friday, 23 June
Groggy from my late night, yet buoyed by the residue of having been satisfactorily pissed, I called on an editor who asked me to submit an article for his literary magazine, on the writer’s relationship to society. Being on holiday — more or less — put me in no mood for such work, and I didn’t in any case care to think about problems I couldn’t take seriously.
Maybe laziness was my reason for refusal. Essays cost blood, and I had no wish to write what children, students or civil servants penned for the eyes of whoever needed to find out whether or not they were conforming to the conditions of the country they lived in.
Yet I did consider saying yes to that amiable editor, felt almost guilty at turning him down, being flattered that he imagined I had something interesting to write. Articles, after all, give a sense of self-importance not unattractive to a writer of fiction.
Looking through my notebook at some of the material that might have been used, I doubted it would have been suitable, reflections such as:
If religion is no longer permitted to be ‘the opium of the people’ why should literature be sacrificed for that role? An artist cannot afford to have any religion or political beliefs, because the faith demanded would corrupt and then destroy his liberty, and so his talent.
If a writer has something worth saying it should be put into the mouth of one of his characters, never forgetting to think complicated but write plain. Shun the prevailing culture and only believe in yourself. Whoever thinks — or hopes — that ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ becomes society’s scapegoat.
In your work don’t ask who you are, but help others, if you care to, to know who they are, while careful not to drive them to despair.
A writer must consider himself a shaman who will live for ever. Any feelings of ‘class’ or hierarchy are too base to be considered. Live through others but don’t let them live through you.
So many cracker mottoes perhaps, obfuscations and irrelevancies, and bullshit for a writer who uses imagination instead of a malleable brain. I couldn’t have concocted an article that would have been acceptable to the editor of a prestigious Soviet literary journal. But I expressed my idiosyncratic views at a five o’clock poetry reading, and at a party later.
Saturday, 24 June
An Intourist car and driver ferried us to Zagorsk for the day, thus allowing me to give some attention to the landscape. Yet I saw little more than if I had been at the wheel, when one-second glances took in all I thought necessary.
With Oksana, her beautiful daughter Irina, and George, we went forty miles northeast from Moscow, across open rolling land towards the Volga. Descriptions of the Russian countryside I leave to Chekhov and Turgenev, or the paintings of Repin and Levitan.
Zagorsk, with 80,000 inhabitants, was no longer the great religious centre it had been. A walled area in the middle of town enclosed the usual churches and monasteries, palaces and museums. In the fifteenth century the bishops could raise 20,000 men at arms, and in 1608 the place withstood a sixteen-month siege by an army of Poles. Only the Tartars took it, in the Middle Ages, soon after its foundation. Part of Napoleon’s army set out from Moscow in 1812 to loot it, but for some reason turned back halfway. It is still a point of pilgrimage, second only to the Lavra at Kiev.
In the cathedral we were caught up in a crush of old and middle-aged women, their string and cloth bags rattling with all-shaped bottles of holy water from the well dug by Sergius the founder in 1342 — which they would take back to their town or village. Most were poor and shabbily dressed in oversized coats, despite the summer day. Some wore men’s tightly buttoned jackets, and the face of one woman was so thin I thought she must be close to death. Travel worn and seared by the wind, grey hair showed from under her headscarf. What suffering she must have endured throughout her life! The evidence was overwhelming.
The men among them, with straggling Tolstoyan beards, wore long belted blouses and military style caps, pushing to find a place and continually crossing themselves. Children in Young Pioneer scarves and shirts plastered with communist badges tried to get close to the altar and see the icons. Their young clean faces contrasted with those of the pious and old, and they barged about laughing and shouting to one another, showing no tolerance for the singing of the choir and the priests’ solemn incantations. To them it was a museum, and they only wanted to see the unusual objects in it, perhaps also to show off their supposed superiority to the worshippers.
Old people, singing or prostrated, were to them a weird crowd from another world who only made it more difficult to reach the precious objects. One old woman pulled a boy back who pushed too violently by, but he snapped from her grasp and went on into the scrum, calling to boys already lost in it. Her grey eyes glared distress and hatred, wanting to yank him back and give him a good pasting, which George said he and most of them deserved. But she knew it would do no good. The lack of respect was endemic, and a lesson was impossible. The two worlds would never meet. She crossed herself and joined in the singing with a look of ecstasy which made her seem far younger. She would get the most out of being in Zagorsk while she could — or for as long as she lived.