Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir (8 page)

Peter Hennessy has written graphically of the Cuba week, of how, if Khrushchev had not changed course at lunchtime on October 28, 1962, Prime Minister Macmillan would have set World War III drills in motion – the Transition to War Committee was nearly called that weekend. But it wasn’t, the world breathed again, and one reads now with astonishment, and a kind of nervous hilarity, Hennessy’s description of the arrangement whereby, should the prime minister have been in his car, on the move, at a moment of crisis, he would have been reached by way of the Automobile Association’s radio network, whereupon his driver would have sought a phone booth from which the prime minister could make the essential call: “. . . only the Brits . . . could have dreamed up a system whereby the Prime Minister is envisaged making a collect call from a phone booth to authorize nuclear retaliation.”

Indeed, one reads of all these meticulous, bureaucratic preparations with a certain incredulity. They had to, of course, that is what civil servants are for, what a government has to do. But it is eerie now to think that all this was going on – the discussions, the paperwork – while the rest of us were listening to the Cold War rattling of sabers, understanding what thermonuclear meant, looking with fear at our children playing on a beach. The plan for removal of art treasures before nuclear attack – eleven vans with military escort to quarries in Wales and Wiltshire; the Corsham bunker with its bedsteads, its ovens, its cups and saucers, equipped for post-holocaust government. Government? Who, or what, would they have governed?

Escalation: the word that haunted, all through the sixties, the seventies, until at last the Vietnam War came to an end. Would the Russians come in? Would there be a direct Soviet–United States confrontation, spiraling up from that distant, localized conflict? It was as though the Cold War was already starting to smolder, the embers poised for a conflagration if the wind blew the wrong way.

Again, it didn’t happen. The history of the late twentieth century seems like a sequence of reprieves, until the one great, startling positive of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of communism. I remember Jack, a political theorist, watching the events of 1989 and the end of the Soviet Union with amazement, almost with disbelief. And with exhilaration. He was the author of what is still seen as a seminal work on the definition of democracy; he had an interest.

Thirty years earlier – the summer of 1959 – there had been a summer school in Oxford for a party of Soviet academics and their students – quite a radical departure at that point, surprising that the Russians agreed to it. Jack was one of those giving lectures and leading seminars. I think that the general theme was Britain and its institutions, so he must surely have given them a rundown on democracy, but what I remember is his wry amusement at the appreciative reception of Harold Nicolson, a visiting lecturer whose subject was the monarchy, and the irritation of the Oxford organizers at the KGB man – ostensibly a professor of something or other – who sat through all sessions reading
Pravda
and smoking a cigarette. Jack did everything he could to make contact with the small group of students, who were under draconian supervision but occasionally managed to break free. I remember Vanya, a particularly charming and exuberant boy, vanishing into the garden with the hostess’s Italian au pair girl at one evening party, and being hauled back by the KGB man. On the last night, at another party, everyone fairly tipsy, we hugged Vanya and said we hoped, we really hoped, we’d see him again. His exuberance fell away; he pulled a face – “No, no, you will never see me again.” He was well aware of the system under which he was living, would continue to live.

*

In 1984 I had my own glimpse of that system, as a member of a delegation of six writers sent by the Great Britain–USSR Association (which was sponsored by the Foreign Office) to have talks with representatives of the Soviet Writers’ Union. We were there for ten days, first in Moscow having conference-style talks (immense long table, everyone wired up to microphones and headphones for simultaneous translation) and interminable toast-punctuated evening banquets, and then a few days’ rest and recreation at Yalta on the Crimean coast as guests of the Ukrainian Writers’ Union.

My diary of that visit is in a separate exercise book; we had been warned that if we were keeping notes we should have them with us at all times – our rooms and our luggage would undoubtedly be searched. They were; I found the contents of my suitcase slightly rearranged. Reading those scrawled pages now, I am at once taken back to the baffling, frequently tense, always inscrutable practices of that encounter with Soviet life. I wrote of the initial speech by their spokesman: “‘We know a great deal about you all,’ says Kuznetzov after his remarks of greeting. Which was somehow unsettling rather than flattering.” And of Red Square: “an eerie place, that rippling scarlet flag in the black night, hushed religious atmosphere in the small group in front of Lenin’s tomb, people standing in silence or speaking in quiet voices. Statuesque policemen facing each other at the entrance, which was a crack open – a suspended feeling as though someone might come out – Lenin? The mausoleum is a monolithic slab-like structure. It – and the posture of the policeman – made me think of Pharaonic tombs in Upper Egypt.”

We were shepherded throughout by two minders – a middle-aged woman called Tatiana, who was a translator, we were told, and Georgy, head of one of the state publishing houses, specializing in English translation, and both of them, we had been warned back in London, members of the KGB. My experience of Georgy veered from bizarre to chilling, when he accompanied us to the Crimea: “Somewhat odd to hurtle through the Crimea [in the coach from the airport] with Georgy, emitting the vodka fumes of his last three heavy evenings, bellowing an exegesis of the early works of Evelyn Waugh into my ear (apparently he is very popular here). It is really hard to credit that a Siberian public library he recently visited had copies of
Vile Bodies
and
Black Mischief
so heavily read as to be physical wrecks, but so he said.” On another occasion, though, walking with him along the Yalta seafront, from which one gazed out over the Black Sea toward an empty horizon, somewhere beyond which, way beyond, lay Turkey, I commented (deliberately, provocatively) on the total absence of sailing boats or power boats off this coast, that would be a usual feature of resort shores: “‘No, here there are not. People are just not interested, you see, Penelope, it is a thing they do not much like to do.’ Shrugging.”

Some of the Soviet delegates did their best to drag politics into the agenda: “an address on the function of the critic was for the most part a diatribe about the arms race, the evil forces of violence and a denunciation of capitalist greed and irresponsibility.” We were aware that all of them were necessarily figures acceptable to the regime, and some of them out-and- out apparatchiks: “People keep vanishing and being replaced by others in the Russian delegation. On the first day a woman scientist was there who appeared to have been drafted in at the last moment to refute our provocative item on the agenda about the paucity of Russian women writers [initially there had been no woman member of their team; we were fielding three]. She appeared from her remarks to be a biochemist but said she also wrote novels and claimed this was a mass phenomenon – ‘the unity of the artists and the scientists.’”

They all disregarded the agreement that none of us, on either side, would speak on any topic for more than four minutes – this, we soon realized, was simply not compatible with Russian style: “I have learned never to take at face value the expression ‘a short comment upon the last speaker’s remarks.’” Simultaneous translation meant that relays of translators staggered exhausted from their booths, and produced some interesting renderings: “We cannot throw away a baby with the water from the basin.” And each evening there were those formal dinners: eat, a Russian rises to make a toast, a Brit rises to respond, eat a bit more, repeat the ritual. London had told us sternly that, while it would be all right for the women to take a token sip of each vodka toast, offense would be taken if the men did not down the glass – they must drink for England. Much mineral water was consumed by the British delegation during the morning sessions.

We arrived at the final session to find that everything was set for it to be televised: “As soon as the cameras were rolling Kuznetzov launched into an account of how our discussions had been of literature and writing but we had of course concerned ourselves with matters of the writer’s commitment to society and especially the overwhelming question of international peace and how to counter the forces of aggression. Consecutive translation, so we had to wait a few minutes to get it, and then all froze with annoyance. Francis King splendidly countered with a sharp piece about how he couldn’t recall that we had discussed any such thing, and we each said something to the same effect (which no doubt they will edit out of the program).”

In the Crimea we stayed at one of the thousand-bedroom hotels built for the recreation of the Soviet masses, sat about on a “skimpy pebbly beach littered with very fat Germans and Russians. Lukewarm completely inactive sea full of small jellyfish in which you loll wondering what to do next. Sat and listened to Georgy (wearing jockey shorts and a scarlet peaked cap) holding forth on his degree dissertation at Moscow University and the relative merits of Muriel Spark and Doris Lessing.” And it was in the Crimea that there was the curious episode of the man who fell into conversation with some of us as we walked on the promenade one evening. Speaking good English, he explained that he was a seaman who had worked on a Russian refrigerated container ship plying the Baltic that had stopped off frequently at Hull, where he had English friends. Next day we were taken by coach to a palace along the coast, a place amidst an immense park with a cliff path along which we walked to admire the view: “And half-way along out from behind a tree appeared, incredibly, the seaman from the refrigerated container ship, clad only in diminutive shorts and dripping with sweat, whom we had met on the promenade in Yalta the night before. We could scarcely believe our eyes. The sense of paranoia and disorientation induced by this country is now complete. Anyway, he ambled along beside us, a very nice fellow, talking of his affection for the English and taste for English books, etc. with Tatiana, distinctly rattled, muttering, ‘I think this is a very boring man, we must get free from him.’”

Coincidence? Or not? Had he wanted something of us? We speculated. We never knew.

Years later, I turned that episode into a short story, one that was to do with quite other things but was prompted by that time and place, an instance of the way in which, for me, short stories have always risen from some real-life moment but have then expanded into something quite detached from that.

And this was the abiding sense of opacity and ambiguity that made that taste of Soviet life so unnerving. You never really knew if things were as you thought they were, or quite other. Some people were genuinely open and friendly; others were opaque. The ten days were demanding, exhausting, intriguing; and occasionally hilarious. One evening, after a reception at the British Embassy, we managed to elude our minders and ended up in a restaurant where a large party of Romanians at a neighboring table were singing national songs: “Melvyn [Bragg] insisted we must counter so we belted out John Brown’s Body, Tipperary, etc. until the Romanians announced themselves defeated and departed with much flashing of teeth and hand-shaking.”

My Soviet diary ends: “Things I never want to see again: a Russian bath towel, which is two feet by one foot and made of sandpaper; the lift at the Yalta hotel, full of large sweating people all pushing each other; the beach at Yalta; Georgy; the grey carcasses of cooked chicken offered for breakfast in the hotel canteen; a microphone; Georgy.”

A diary is an ambivalent reflection of memory. Much that is in mine I no longer remember; the diary is testimony but memory has wiped. And, conversely, stuff lies still in the head that apparently escaped the diary. From the Soviet visit, I have further shreds: our final hours before the plane home, when we spent our remaining roubles (a daily subsistence “fee” which could not be changed into hard currency) on large bowls of caviar for afternoon tea; Tatiana, on the plane to the Crimea, ordering several rows of fellow passengers to their feet with a mere gesture and tilt of her head, in order to have us seated together rather than scattered around the plane and thus not under her eye – how did they know that she was a person you had to obey? And I remember a visit to Chekhov’s house in the Crimea – a rare privilege, apparently, not generally open – small cluttered rooms with photos and personal possessions and I wanted to keep quiet, and had that sudden blinding recognition that the past is true, that Chekhov had indeed existed, had been here, once, where we now were.

*

I have never been back to Russia; the Soviet Union that we fleetingly experienced is now a historical phenomenon. Someone of my age, living there now, will have known an extraordinary social and political upheaval, in an incredibly short space of time. Born into one world, they live now in another – from totalitarianism to democracy, of a kind. Accelerated change, unlike the slow social metamorphosis of this country – indeed, of most politically stable countries in peacetime.

But change there has been, here, and when I squint back at my twenty-year-old self I realize that she would be surprised by two of the major ways in which assumptions and expectations have mutated, and would be startled, probably, to understand that she herself would shortly be a manifestation of a third. I want now to look at this: the three ways in which, to my mind, our society has revised itself during my lifetime – one seismic, one determined and by and large successful, one opaque and generating argument.

Opacity and argument first. The shifting ground of class and social distinctions. Is the twenty-first century any closer to achieving the classless society to which John Major looked forward in 1990? On the face of it – no. That said, the social landscape of the 1950s looks very different from that of today – more predictable, more rigid, you could place a person by how they spoke, how they dressed. There is a flexibility today that is less to do with social mobility than with a more open-minded approach; perhaps we are just less bothered by apparent distinctions. But the polarizations are still there – the violent apposition of those who have and those who have not.