He came back to life when the long moving penny finally dropped and I backed into a potholed side lane to turn around. ‘Abratna!’ he cheered.
‘Abratna!’ I cried as he gave me a clap on the shoulder that almost sent me to the middle of the road. We smoked nearly half a packet of Pall Mall before drawing up outside the hotel at half past four. By now the best of friends, and in full view of the gilded onion domes of St Isaac’s Cathedral, he wrote his full name on the page of a small pad, and his address which was only a few minutes away on Gorki Street, saying as we shook hands that I must call on him some time, when we could eat, drink and indulge in endless toasts of good vodka.
I went into the hotel to see about my room, not unhappy at being out of the car for a couple of days. I had driven on the left in England, changed to the right in Denmark, gone back to the left in Sweden, and switched once more to the right in Finland, so what were a few abratnas to me? It was no wonder that I had ended up speeding to Leningrad mostly down the middle of the road, and strayed off it twice.
I unpacked, and showered, the rush of cold water a blessing, then changed and went to the lobby where I was greeted by a hefty young man wearing black-framed spectacles. He spoke good English, and told me his name was George Andjaparidze who had been seconded by the Writers’ Union as guide, factotum and companion during my stay in the Soviet Union. His duty, he said, in a humorous and immediately likeable tone, was to make sure I didn’t get into any difficulties, or trouble with the traffic police, while on my travels. It was a gesture of the Writers’ Union’s solidarity and concern, he went on. They wanted me to be well looked after, because a foreign writer who could not speak the language was bound to need help in navigating strange and complicated cities.
I supposed he was right, and was happy to meet him, though didn’t want to say that I felt more than capable of finding my way to Rumania on my own. But I did hint as much, and he said he didn’t doubt my abilities as a motorist, but all the same he was very experienced at getting about, for he had travelled a great deal by car in Russia with his uncle, camping along the highways to and from holidays in the Crimea and the Caucasus.
He had studied at Moscow University and written a thesis on Oscar Wilde, and was now working on a postgraduate dissertation on the books of Evelyn Waugh. ‘So we’ll have plenty to talk about, and learn from each other,’ he said with a broad wink to indicate that we were bound to enjoy the trip.
I showed him the car outside, which he immediately called Peter Peugeot, in honour, he said, of the greater Peter who had founded the city. He arranged for it to be stabled in a special compound nearby, where it would be guarded by an old soldier for a rouble a day. I would not, therefore, need to take the wing mirrors and windscreen wipers up to my room.
I had always liked the sound of ‘Leningrad’, a solid word, as if with such a name the city could never have been anything but immovably fixed to the centre of the earth — in spite of being built on a swamp. Spread over a vast plain, domes and broad avenues shone in white-night sunlight, the geometrical and artistic layout suggesting that Leningrad was still the capital of Russia.
In the war it suffered more than any other Russian city from the plague of German Nazism, when a million inhabitants had starved to death or been killed by bombardments and air raids. But the place had survived, and communism had continued to dominate people’s lives, though not perhaps for most of them their hopes. Living under such discipline they managed from day to day, as is always the case, supporting the barely endurable weight of their rulers, though I didn’t see anyone without bread or shoes or a place however small to sleep in. Over much of the Third World the Soviet Union supported insurgencies, while the intelligent Russian realised that the high cost could only come off their backs.
In the park the atmosphere was relaxed, in the warm softness of evening. A young man played a Beatles tape: ‘We all live in a yellow submarine …’ and two Swedish mariners were trying to kiss a couple of Russian girls.
I went with George to a Caucasian restaurant on the Nevsky Prospekt, and ate the best and largest meal since leaving London. He certainly knew the places to go, which was so much in his favour that my dream of motoring alone quickly faded. After sharing a bottle of vodka and a few fragrant wines from the land of his ancestors, I chaffed him at having taken on the onerous appointment of looking after someone like me.
‘My dear fellow, it will be a pleasure. They were queueing up by scores to get the job, and I was delighted when it was given to me,’ spoken in such a tone as to imply that if I believed that I would believe anything.
In our semi-inebriated condition we strolled along the Nevsky Prospekt hoping to wear off some of the food and drink. At twenty-four he was a man of the world, sophisticated, intelligent, charming and well informed, as well as being entirely open with me. He had already been married and divorced, and had a child, he told me with a pronounced wink under a street lamp, a girl he sees as often as possible, for he was still on good terms with the mother. He now had a wonderful girlfriend, who was most upset by his absence from Moscow.
I looked out of my window at the Hotel Astoria, at the dome of St Isaac’s, red sky spreading left and right to cover the whole panorama. People walked the streets at a quarter to one, and buses still slid around the cathedral in the huge square. Living for the moment more easily than I could, youngsters clutched their tape recorders and transistors. The radio behind me gave no interesting news. Going by the squall of deafening static some stations seemed to be jammed by Russian censors, endeavouring to cut out the wail of pop music perhaps, or the drone of information.
Monday, 11 June
Thirteen hundred roubles had been put into my Russian bank account by two magazine publishers, as payment for extracts from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Road to Volgograd. I collected the newly minted notes as if they were alms for a pilgrim that would see me through the country and yet, having come so easy and unsolicited, they seemed hardly real.
‘Money only ever did when I had to run urgently and buy food, or put it by for the rent man, which I haven’t had to do for nearly ten years,’ I said to George, who helped me with the formalities.
Stuffing the Monopoly notes into my wallet I complained that any left over at the end of my stay couldn’t be taken out and changed into other currencies. He replied that I should just enjoy spending what a Russian labourer had to keep his family on for a few months. I’d never had the equivalent of nearly four hundred pounds in my pocket at any one time, so could feel rich.
On my previous visit to Leningrad, four years before, I’d met Maria Abramovna Shereshevskaya of the university, who had survived the seige as a child and now had a sixteen-year-old daughter. With her friend Galya she had done some of my stories into Russian, and they were now translating the works of Joyce Cary. I was taken with them to Tsarskoye Selo — renamed Pushkin. It was gratifying to reflect that the poet had at last got his own back on the tsar, as poets invariably do on those who torment them, even if only posthumously. To the north of the Great Palace there was a bronze figure of Pushkin on a garden seat by the sculptor R Bach.
Sitting with tea and cakes at a café we talked about the relationship between Russia and England, of how they flirted with each other in the sixteenth century, when Ivan the Terrible made an offer for the hand of Queen Elizabeth I, stating that she ‘would be kin to his friends, but hostile to his enemies, and he would be the same to hers’. Good Queen Bess thanked him for his goodwill, but suggested he marry Lady Mary Hastings, about whom the Tsar’s envoy reported back that she was ‘thirty years old, tall, well built, has a clear complexion, grey eyes, red hair, a straight nose, and long fingers’.