11
On May Day, I was up early to cover the parade in Red Square. The entire center of the city had been sealed off - a much wider area and with far stricter security than for funerals - and reporters had to be in their places by eight o’clock. The vigilance smacked of an occupying army preparing a major roundup: platoons of soldiers patrolled the otherwise empty streets, ensuring that only people with passes entered the restricted area. Starting at the metro exit, there were six checkpoints within the few hundred yards to the stands, and I had trouble at all of them because 108
one letter of my name had been misspelled on my pass and ‘contravened' my passport. Finally, I convinced a colonel who I was, and he escorted me to my place in the foreigners section opposite the Lenin Mausoleum, and beneath a gigantic ‘FORWARD TO THE VICTORY OF COMMUNISM!' banner. Bedecked with painting and signs in this vulgar evangelical style, the great, austere square seemed scaly, like a medieval dragon.
The ceremony started at the chimes of ten o clock. Marshal Malinovsky, the Minister of Defense, reviewed the troops from a bulbous limousine, while thousands of soldiers shouted battle cries in unison. A violent harangue from him followed, warning the enemies of socialism. Then the parade itself in the traditional sequence: thundering tanks and missiles the length of football fields, accompanied by divisions of soldiers, sailors and cadets. Finally the massive civilian procession was set in motion. The thought that some of the tens of thousands of floats, banners, and portraits of Marx and Lenin had no doubt come from Evgeny Ignatievich's warehouse provided the long mornings only moment of relief.
For nothing in the world less conveyed the impression of spontaneous joy it sought than the elaborately rehearsed pageantry streaming through the square. Everyone knew that all of the hundred thousand odd ‘demonstrators had been drafted and painstakingly drilled - and that no one would dare refuse to ‘volunteer’. Hundreds of signs read simply ‘HAPPINESS!' - one of the blessings that Communism has officially conferred on the Russian people. This was the moment when the full sorrow of the paradox descended: deeply unhappy Russia with its cruel climate and history, its crushing political backwardness, proclaiming to the world that it has established Happiness on Earth. The land of Ivan the Terrible, Stalin, and mendicant mystics is somehow fated to go on this way, limping from tragedy to tragedy, sacrificing generation after generation - and always searching frenziedly for the path to paradise and
redemption. The deeply religious roots of all this were demonstrated again that morning by the thousands of portraits of radiant Lenin, just as icons had been borne aloft by the Orthodox Church’s ragged, unquestioning faithful.
Yet most Russians themselves would dismiss these ‘insights’ as patronising foreign humbug. The procession’s hundreds of thousands of participants were thinking not about historical or philosophical abstractions, but about the big bowl of borscht waiting for them at home. It was a holiday, after all, and people were in a holiday mood. They might have preferred to stay in bed rather than spend the morning on a forced walk; but the sun was shining and May the First had fallen on Friday, meaning that absenteeism on Saturday was going to be prodigious, and a self-declared three-day weekend had begun.
When I had filed my copy and arrived home, Oktyabrina was also in a holiday mood. She dashed to the door in a lacy white dress, a kind of peasant bridal gown - her ‘homage to spring’.
‘Do you really approve?’ she said, twirling happily. ‘May Day, you know, is the opening of the “love season” - it’s an old Russian tradition. I’ve a marvelous inspiration for how to celebrate.’
Her inspiration was to see La Dolce Vita. Somewhere, she’d heard the news that it was to have a private screening that evening at the Cinema Workers’ Club. Oktyabrina had an idea of the movie’s motif from a story in one of my old magazines, which convinced her it was 'precisely her kind of thing.
Foreign correspondents get passes fairly easily for these closed screenings, and I telephoned the office which makes the arrangements. But I had no luck there, or with any other of the calls I made during the afternoon. The reason was obvious: foreign films like this one are screened under the fiction of inspection for possible purchase, but in fact to allow a handful of chosen people to sample the forbidden fruit. La Dolce Vita's reputation was known, and the news 110
of its one and only showing had raced through the city’s intellectual elite.
Besides, most of the tickets had already been requisitioned. A thousand Party first secretaries, heads of censorship departments and ideological specialists on The New Soviet Man and other moral themes were dying to treat their wives or sweethearts to a really choice evening of bourgeois decadence. Tickets were simply unobtainable; not even Kostya’s excellent contacts produced results.
Oktyabrina removed her white dress and sulked on the davenport. ‘What a way to start the love season,’ she said, fixing an eye on me. ‘This year things aren’t exactly auspicious!
Suddenly, she jumped up and lifted the telephone herself. She searched through my notes on the pad and picked out the number of the Party bureau in the Cinema Workers’ Club. While she dialed, her face turned hard; for a second I saw a resemblance between the faintly Mongoloid cut of her jaw and Marshal Malinovsky’s much fatter one at the microphone that morning.
‘Whom am I speaking to?’ she said in a vicious, splitting voice. ‘Oh yes? Well, you are talking to Comrade Vinogradova.’ She paused. ‘I’m with five Comrades from the Ukrainian Central Committee. We’re here on the May Day project and require recreation. Reserve us six tickets for your film tonight, is that absolutely clear?’ She paused again. ‘Of course not, no. We are far too busy for any picking-up. Have them waiting at the door directly before the start -and no slip-ups , do you understand?’
She slammed down the receiver with all her might. Then she turned to me with her triumphant grin. ‘I’m hungry, Comrade correspondent. You may serve tea.’
It was a chance in a hundred, but when we arrived at the large stone building that houses the Club, the burly doorman, while holding back the crowd with one hand, produced an envelope with the other. It was marked ‘ For Comrade Vinogradova , Ukrainian Central Committee Dele -
gation. Inside were six tenth row tickets.
Oktyabrina was exultant. Nobody would have believed a story about two tickets, she explained in a vainglorious whisper - and with a corresponding gesture distributed the four extra ones among the swarm of beseeching hands outside the door. Then she collected five rubles from me, the winnings of our bet, and strolled into the auditorium with more self-importance than the celebrities who belonged.
The movie itself, however, disappointed her hugely - so
much so that she was fidgety and full of sonorous yawns after the first twenty minutes and dozed intermittently until the dunking-in-the-fountain scene near the end. Afterwards, when we stepped into the fresh air, Oktyabrina was irritated by the buzz of ecstatic praise from other members of the audience. The whole exercise was much too talky - nor could she understand why Marcello Mastroianni was so spiritless or what was so wonderful about that decadent life.
T mean, those people didn’t believe in anything. Didn’t love anything, even feel anything. All those furs and cars and things gave you the creeps, like in some mausoleum. Please take my arm, Zhoe darling/
"Fellini’s a master at making you feel cold-bloodedness, you should see it as a modern morality play.’
"But why does he believe that beauty and luxury must be stone dead like that? Kostya’s right - I wouldn’t trade a hundred Romes like that for dear Moscow.’
"We’re in our happy period now, aren’t we, Zhoe? It’s so unfair, how people squander the joy of plain domestic peace/