presently keeping/
‘I was coming to that, Zhoe darling. You aren't terribly cross, are you? Because I just cant help myself. The Minister’s so madly jealous/
'That’s nothing I can’t achieve if I tried/
‘He actually suffers with it, the poor dear. I simply can’t let him see me with another man. Even when it’s ineffably pure - like you and me, I mean/
She paused again, straightened her hat - a home-made sombrero - and nodded grandly to a startled passer-by. ‘The Minister’s not Jewish either,’ she said slowly. ‘But he looks it, so it’s almost the same thing. I heard a man call him a dirty Jew at the airport. There ought to be a pill or something to make funny-looking people more romantic/
‘He looks well enough off with that coat and car. At his age, that’s a pleasant compensation. How long have you known him?’
‘All my life, practically. He says his conscious life started when the clouds parted to reveal me/
‘Of course. How long have you known him?’
‘He was on the train when I came to Moscow. Invited me to share his first-class compartment and insisted I accept all kinds of sweet things. He’s really terribly cuddly when you give him a little respect/
‘He must have a couple of divisions of office staff to take care of that. What does he do to rate that Volga? I mean his title on the door/
‘He masterminds some kind of vegetable strategy, I think. Mostly it’s all kinds of meetings and absolute stacks of paperwork. That’s probably what infatuates me most about him: he’s always crushed by work. I don’t think people would describe it as sheer love . . . I’m hungry. Want something delicious?’
She stopped at an ice-cream cart run by an exceptionally old babushka and bought us each a cup of the most expensive brand. Then we slowly walked back to my car and drove to the Novodyevichy Monastery (‘New Monastery of
the Virgin’), which is on a quiet bank of the river, two miles or so upstream from the Kremlin. The monastery is bordered by a cemetery where Russia’s elite have been buried for centuries. Solitary flowers and sprigs of pine adorned the graves of Gogol and Chekhov, but the largest bouquet lay at the plain marble tombstone of Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin’s first wife. The sadness of her suicide corresponded to the monastery’s mood - even its very name. Boris Godunov was elected Lord Protector there in the sixteenth century, and something of the spirit of those hard days imbued the grounds. Oktyabrina and I were both very moved.
Novodyevichy was my selection. After our false start, we’d returned to the idea of seeing Moscow 7 together properly. Dropping the pretense of Oktyabrina playing guide, we concentrated on visiting celebrated landmarks. Oktyabrina or I chose a new one every other day or so from an old Tsarist guidebook she’d found in a secondhand shop. We both attacked the project earnestly, partly, I suppose, because neither had anything more pressing to do most afternoons. It was soon much more than a w r ay to pass the time.
The best places were the oldest ones, and the powdery guidebook was a rich source of finds. I remember visits to crypts, crumbling cathedrals, places where Peter the Great slept, estates of Tsarist nobles. One day we drove to a village called Tsaritsino, where Catherine the Great had ordered a palace in bizarre Moorish-cum-Gothic style, only to abandon it in mid-construction. The gloomy skeleton still stands, together with the ruin of something called the Temple of Love, which of course captivated Oktyabrina. Next was an outing to a splendid eighteenth-century estate called Arkhangelskoye, which was once owned by Prince Yussupov, Rasputin’s assassin. This was enough to make it bewitching, even without its Pushkin-like charm.
Oktyabrina herself was an essential part of the outings: she
gave familiar sights the freshness of new eyes. Although I was the supposedly observant journalist, it was usually she who noticed the icon-like quality of the faces in a fresco, the Minister’s moustache on an old portrait, the angle of a broken statue which complemented the angle of a medieval arch. I never admired her more than at these creative moments. She would fling out her finger to designate the spot and blurt out her observation. Then she glowed -partly, I think, because she sensed a communion with me in these discoveries.
This was her positive side as a sightseer. Her negative side generated singular complications. The first problem was usually Oktyabrina’s power of concentration - which fell rather short of proverbial Russian endurance.
The first forty minutes usually went well. But then she became hungry. Or thirsty. Acutely thirsty, acutely tired or acutely in need of a bathroom. She was crying out for relief with a well of reproach in her eyes. Unless her needs were satisfied almost instantly, she whimpered from genuine physical distress.
She could not use a public toilet because the filth and odor made her retch. She hated cafeterias and the grim little snack-bars called ‘buffets’ because cheap food - and there is hardly any cheaper - upset her even when she was ravenous. Yet waiting the necessary hour or so outside a restaurant was torture. Her metabolism and fastidiousness, coupled with the dearth of consumer services, kept her on the brink of crisis, like a diabetic inexperienced in regulating his system.
Her interests also made her a rather dangerous companion. Oktyabrina was attracted to museums and landmarks principally because they told a ‘life story’. What interested her most about famous people were the intimate details of their private lives. I learned to stand a discreet distance away when I sensed this interest arising, for Soviet landmarks are meant to be shrines of Education and Reverence, and their intoning guides do not value questions about
love affairs and decolletage.
She coaxed me several times to the Lenin Museum on Red Square. It was one of her favorites, partly because its location made it convenient for thawing-out during long walks. Although the rooms are stuffed with the same mass-produced Leniniana displayed in a hundred provincial Lenin Museums, the oil paintings here are original and represent a fortune in canvas alone. Lenin thinking, Lenin writing, Lenin reading, Lenin haranguing the grateful crowd. . . . The tableaux are so immense and so reverent that you feel overwhelmed, if not impressed.
But what attracted Oktyabrina was the room where Lenin’s childhood is traced with appropriate veneration. She was fond of young Volodya, the plump, adorable and obviously pampered child in his party dress and blond curls. She visited this room a dozen times until an incident in January made us personae non gratae throughout the museum.
The incident is inexplicable without an appreciation of Lenin’s place in Soviet orthodoxy - and the faith of the Russian masses. Lenin is not a man, not a mortal politician or philosopher, but Marx reborn and redeemed in the sacrament of revolution: the saviour of mankind. ‘Lenin Is More Alive Than The Living!’ All the fundamentalist fervor of the Orthodox Church is lavished upon him in daily liturgies of praise and devotion; and since the state conducts the stupendous operation, his image literally cannot be avoided for more than an hour.
The Central Lenin Museum is this religion’s holy of holies. Squads of guides recite incantations on their tours; each one is followed by a cluster of peasants who have entered the museum for an hour of reverence on their trips to Moscow. Smelling powerfully of onions and old clothes, they devour the sermons, perhaps just because they’ve already heard them thousands of times.
Oktyabrina was oblivious to all this; what interested her was Lenin’s life story. She plied the guides for information 54
about adorable little Volodya and his transition to adolescence. They tolerated her questions about Lenin’s disconcerting lisp. They managed to control themselves when she mentioned his premature baldness. (‘The trouble probably started when he lost his hair and got lonely, the poor man/) But late one afternoon when the second floor was unusually packed with worshipful peasants, Oktyabrina raised the question that intrigued her most: Why did Lenin take so long to marry his girlfriend, Krupskaya?