Sunday, 25 June
Driving around the city, with George’s navigation. I needed it, because though the layout was more rational than in London there were no proper street maps on sale. The best had no scale, and showed the major public buildings by picture, which confused much of the neighbouring detail.
I had two interviews that day, one with Pravda and the other with Yunost but I remember little of either, such meetings being always more or less the same. But I also called at Intourist to find out whether the permitted route to Kiev couldn’t be altered for a shorter one. I had noticed on the Freytag-Berndt ‘Strassenkarte Ost Europa’ that the one I wanted branched off just south of Orel, thus avoiding the lengthier drive through Kursk and Poltava.
I was told it would not be possible because the recently built road didn’t have sufficient service stations. Another diversion I wanted to make was to the village of Ulashkovtsy — Loshkovitz in Yiddish, Loskowizce in German, and slightly different in Polish and Ukrainian — on the way to Chernovtsy. Before 1918 it had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but was then allotted to Poland. After the Second World War if fell to the Soviet Union and became part of the Ukraine. In past ages of shifting borders it was overrun by Cossacks, Tartars and Turks, but the Jews survived until the Germans arrived in 1941. The village stands in a sharp elbow of the meandering River Sereth, which flows south into the Dneister.
In 1905 it was a place with an important Jewish community. According to my large-scale Austrian map it was on the eastern bank of the river with, opposite, a synagogue and a mikvah — a ritual bathing place. My reason for wanting to call and take photographs was because my mother-in-law had been born there, though it was unlikely she would remember anything: she had left with her family at the age of five for New York and a safer life.
The place was only thirty or so miles off the Intourist route but, to my chagrin, I would not be allowed to go there, though was told that had permission been asked long beforehand it might have been arranged.
In the evening we went to a party at the flat of Valentina Ivasheva, a professor of English literature at Moscow University. She had written textbooks for students on ‘British proletarian novelists’, and in the chapter dealing with my work said I was the only ‘genuine working-class novelist’, which seemed no favour to me, who rejected labels of any sort.
A small grey-haired woman, somewhat fierce in her opinions, she was known, George had told me, for generosity to her students, while at the same time having the power to make or break them. He added that she wrote about ‘foreign working-class’ people because she was afraid of them in her own country, it being in any case more comfortable to write of them than fraternise in real life, a policy I could hardly blame her for, though it amused me all the same.
I sensed she was disappointed that I had so little to say, either about my life, my writing, or my world views. She did ask why I had written The General, an anti-pacifist novel set in a war between two totalitarian states. I said I’d simply thought of the plot and used it, adding that the story was a fantasy, while knowing it to be far from the ‘proletarian writing’ she had foolishly expected.
I was more at ease with her husband, whom everyone called Uncle Dima. He had little interest in literature except to read and enjoy it. An air ace in the war, he was a Hero of the Soviet Union, having been shot down a few times and still seriously suffering from his wounds.
Surrounded by adoring students in the small flat, he told a joke, a sparkle of humour in his lake-blue eyes, about two lions in a circus sitting peacefully on their high stools. The assistant lion tamer cracked his whip to make them do some tricks, but they haughtily refused to move. He tried again and again. They eyed him disdainfully, so he complained to the chief lion tamer: ‘Those bloody lions won’t do a thing I tell them.’ The chief lion tamer came to see: ‘Of course they won’t. The stools are too comfortable. Make them sit on jagged rocks, then they’ll jump, and do anything you say.’
Everyone had probably heard it before — I had — but they applauded, which pleased Uncle Dima. A few years later he leapt from the window, unwilling to face a helpless and humiliating old age.
Monday, 26 June
I walked through the lobby from the hotel lift with a set of windscreen wipers, two wing mirrors, and a screwdriver, as if on my way to work. There’d been no guarded parking as in Leningrad, so all accessories and whatever was visible had to be taken upstairs every night.
I felt a bit of a fool putting things back in the cool morning air, rush-hour crowds flowing by on the way to their offices. Loot from my shopping included more Cuban cigars of all kinds from the hotel lobby, which seemed of no interest to the Russian clientele. Each colourful box of Partagas, Romeo and Juliets, Uppmans and Monte Cristos cost only a few roubles, and I stacked the car sufficient to see George and me to Chernovtsy, not forgetting to leave quite a few for England.
There were toys for David I’d scooped up from the Dyetski Mir (Children’s World), a store as big as Harrod’s, but with a more warehouse atmosphere. I’d acquired what maps could be found, as well as an immense atlas of the physical world so big it had to be laid flat in the car. The Russians are renowned for high quality cartography, their multicoloured geological maps beautifully showing the soil and rocks of the earth. Perhaps the infinite patience required by such technical expertise holds back the onset of angst, helping cartographers to survive while making the world interesting for those who need to know what it is made of. Beyond political considerations the maps help surveyors and explorers in their field work.
Sorrow at leaving Moscow would be more than made up for by going south. In goodbyes to friends I’d received requests to send books when back home. Valentina Jaques of Soviet Literature wanted my volumes of stories, and A Tree on Fire. Oksana Krugerskaya asked for that book as well, and pictorial calendars of English scenery.
Tanya Kudraevzeva of Foreign Literature Magazine hoped I’d post novels by Laura del Rivo, Smallcreep’s Day by Peter Currell Brown, the text of Little Malcolm Against the Eunuchs, and a couple of my books in French translation. Someone from Intourist requested a copy of Road to Volgograd for their library, and I also promised books for Oksana’s daughter Irina. These requests were honoured, though I wasn’t able to get information on Paul Schofield for the writer Yuri Kovalev.
As I walked back and forth along the hotel front waiting for George, passers-by stopped to look at a small MG touring car parked near mine. It was white, neat and low slung, and many admired something not made in Russia, as I heard said. They examined the dashboard, and would have liked a look at the engine, while the more knowing translated the number plate and the MG insignia, announcing to the others that it was a beautiful British ‘machine’.
My more ordinary vehicle drew little attention, its nearest equivalent being the Volga stationwagon, which looked even more dependably robust, but I had no way of knowing how they really compared. At least people were fascinated by the compass fixed to the windscreen, while I stood among them as if the car belonged to somebody else.