Luckily it was pristinely clean, because the previous day I’d had the first fifteen hundred miles of grit and dried mud taken off at a service station, for the cost of one rouble. I’d manoeuvred it up the ramp of the washing machine, doors and windows tightly shut, to be sloshed and thoroughly buffed up, blue liquid pouring down the windscreen. Peter Peugeot shook with hesitation on advancing slowly along the unfamiliar tracks. I wondered if it would stand up to the ordeal, not having the hardiness of Russian vehicles, but the car at last reached level ground, water still swirling and none the worse for the experience.
George arrived bearing flasks of drinks, and large paper bags of food, saying that his mother and aunt had been up most of the night preparing them as supplies for our journey, as if we were leaving for places where nourishment would be unobtainable or, I thought, so that he wouldn’t be tempted to eat the ‘filthy’ food of some roadside stolovaya.
His girlfriend stood a few yards off, to bid him farewell. ‘As far as Chernovtsy!’ she cried. ‘You’ll never come back, I know you won’t!’
At another burst of tears gallant George tried to console her. ‘Of course I shall. All I have to do is take the train. My seat’s already booked. I’ll be back in ten days, my love.’
‘The train will crash,’ she wailed. ‘Don’t go. I dreamed last night that you were killed.’ She was in his arms, head on his shoulder, shirt and blouse wet from her weeping. ‘Please don’t go, George, I implore you.’
She was sliding to her knees for more desperate pleading, but he drew her up. ‘I must go,’ he said, with such a loving and tender kiss that I envied him. He may have been disappointed had she not put on such a performance, but it was plain from her despairing features that she was in exquisite misery at the prospect of his departure. He consoled her as best he could, but finally eased her away at seeing my impatience, though I did try to hide it.
On our way out of town we were stopped by a militiaman for having strayed into a left lane instead of going straight on at a traffic light. Though his whistle blew loud and clear I was for charging on. ‘We have to stop,’ George said, ‘but let me talk.’
I didn’t see why we should be pulled up for such a petty fault, or something which seemed no fault at all, but George said that policemen in Russia were very strict with drivers, which was why there were so few accidents.
He explained, with much tact, that I was a foreigner, an English writer unfamiliar with the traffic regulations and the complicated layout of Moscow. His half truths were accepted, but he was told that I ought nevertheless to watch out and stay in the right lane. ‘And by the way,’ he added, when all I wanted to do was scoot off, ‘what kind of car is that?’
George obliged him with as many details as he had picked up along the way. The policeman then asked, pointing at me: ‘What kind of books does he write?’
‘Proletarian novels,’ George said, as traffic flew by in all directions, drivers with smug expressions giving us a wide berth and glad we’d copped it instead of them.
‘I’m pleased to have met an English writer, but tell him to stay in the right lane.’
I cursed all the way to the ring road, George horrified at such a bolshie condemnation of the police. ‘They’re people’s police, after all,’ he said.
‘Of course they are. They’re the people’s police in every country. They’re not fucking Daleks. He might have sounded a bit cultured but he’s still a copper, though maybe he wasn’t one at all. The Writers’ Union hired him from an actors’ school and told him to stand there and stop us so that he could say what a fine writer I was and make me feel more at home. On second thoughts perhaps Intourist set it up.’
He forgave my rant, since we seemed to share the same brand of humour. The longer he was with me the more I realised how sophisticated, tolerant and diplomatic he could be, a courtier from having been brought up by two women. Perhaps it was also due to his Georgian ancestry which, so the joke had it, allowed every man to call himself a prince.
Open spaces calmed me. They always did, but the road narrowed, and I was faced with the usual perilous task of overtaking lorries whose rear ends tended to sway across the empty side of the road when I got too close. Those coming from the opposite direction called for equal care.
Serpukhov was bypassed to the east by a new bridge over the River Oka, which I would mark on the map in my room later. George said he had often strolled along the beautiful banks with his girlfriend — not the one he had just said goodbye to — in summertime. A glance showed its water running blue under sunlight between sleaving greenery left and right, with flashes of white sand here and there, a Russian paradise. I felt how pleasant it would be to rent a room in a village for a month and enjoy the languorous days.
‘You must come back and do it some time,’ George said. ‘The Writers’ Union would make it possible, since you’re their blue-eyed boy. You’d find a nice Russian girl who, believe me, are the best in the world. Then I suppose you’d be happy, at least for a time.’
Best to go on living with my own inner storm, I thought, the powerhouse of a writer. To present it with good treatment would turn it into a war of spiritual attrition. So I would leave the dazzling serpentine Oka alone and concentrate on the road, or go back to twitting George. ‘Your girlfriend was certainly upset at you leaving. She was as devoted as Melanya in A Nest of Gentlefolk.’
‘“Not with all the strength of her soul” though’ — he finished the quotation — ‘because my girlfriend was angry as well.’
‘All the same, it was very touching. I was almost crying myself. Do young women always play up like that when their boyfriends go away?’
‘Mine do. Not that it’s rare, because women in Russia never know whether or not their men will be coming back. Perhaps it has something to do with the war. They used to say that the way to war was a wide highway, but the way back is only a footpath.’
I was half intoxicated at speeding over such endless tracts of land, so vast we seemed to be going slower than we were, making the scenery somewhat dull. The sun came partially out again, like white wine suffusing the sky. Lorries moving south were laden with iron ore, sand, bricks or crates, so many on the move maybe the railways were overloaded, and though electrified had too few lines to serve the needs of so much industry. Many, however, turned off to places not served by the railway, their space in the column replaced by more vehicles filtering on to the main road north and south. Some were abandoned wrecks just off the verges, and I hoped not because of accidents, though supposed that most were.
Overtaking when it was clear, we made headway, and the impulse of a pleasurable month on the tranquil Oka was ploughed under the wheels of the stalwart Peugeot. We reached Tula three hours after leaving Moscow, trundling over cobblestones and tramlines. Signposts were scarce, or not prominent enough for me to see them without George’s help. On my own I would have been at the mercy of my intuition, and got lost, but even he urged me to pull in a couple of times to ask the way. A street plan of the city would have made little difference. I supposed one day there would be a Michelin guide of Russia, with information and town maps to ease the way of bourgeois travellers, yet wasn’t sure I wanted one in this hit-or-miss exploring ground.
Twenty kilometres south of Tula I turned right and, after a mile, came to Tolstoy’s estate of Yasnaya Polyana, where he lorded it from 1862 until his death in 1910. A gardener told us that the man in charge of the house would be going to lunch in a few minutes, taking the key with him, so we couldn’t be shown inside. We were free to enjoy the grounds though.