What Am I Doing Here? (21 page)

O
n the MV
Maxim Gorky
, a cruise-boat belonging to Intourist, I spent ten September days sailing smoothly down the Volga; through the Volga-Don Canal, and on down the Don to Rostov. The days were clear and the nights were cold. All the other passengers were Germans. Some had been Panzer officers who had wasted their youth in Siberian labour camps, and were revisiting the scene of lost battles. Others had been pilots whose planes had failed to crash. Then there were the war widows – moist-eyed women clinging to the remains of prettiness, who, forty-one years earlier had waved and waved as the trains drew out for the Russian front – and who now, when you asked why they had come to the Volga, would bow their heads and say,
‘Mein Mann ist tot in Stalingrad.'

Also on board was the Prussian Junker, Von F – a proud ex-aviator with the planed-off skull of Bismarck and a stump of an arm on which he balanced his Leica. His fate, in peacetime, was to be a water-engineer; and he would be up at dawn, pacing the deck in a dark green loden coat, gazing bleakly at the locks through which we passed. His views on the technical achievements of the Soviet Union were summed up in the words ‘East minus West equals Zero'. He had fought for the Fascists in Spain. Yet nothing could be more agreeable, on our rare walks ashore, than to pace through the steppe grass beside this stringy and optimistic man, while he aired his encyclopaedic knowledge of Russia, or the migration of barbarian hordes. From time to time he would point to a bump on the horizon and say, ‘Tumulus!' – and once, when we had come to a slight depression in the middle of a level plain, he stopped and said, conspiratorially, ‘I believe this is a fortification from the Second World War.'

Every morning, at eight precisely, a peremptory voice would sound over the loudspeaker,
‘Meine Damen und Herren
. . . ' and announce the events of the day. These began with a programme of gymnastics on the sun-deck – which, to my knowledge, no one attended. Then there might be a lecture on the turbulent and revolutionary history of the Volga region. Or a visit to a riverside town. Or to one of the hydroelectric schemes which have turned this Mother-of-all-the-Rivers into a chain of sluggish inland seas the colour of molasses.

We went aboard the
Maxim Gorky,
after dark, at Kazan. The ship's band was playing a medley of melancholy Russian favourites. A woman in peasant costume offered us the customary bread and salt; and the captain, whose deep blue eyes were set in a face composed of horizontals, went about squeezing everyone's hand. The river port lay on a reach of the Kazanka river, a short distance from the Admiralty, where Catherine the Great once landed from her state galley — after almost being drowned. Beyond a mole we could see the lights of tugboats towing barges up the Volga. After supper, a paddlesteamer with a raking funnel tied up in the berth ahead. Her cabins were freshly varnished, and there were swagged lace curtains in her saloon.

I asked the captain how old such a vessel was.

‘Eighty years,' he said. ‘Perhaps even one hundred.'

She was the ordinary passenger boat from Moscow to Astrakhan on the Volga Delta – a journey which took ten days. The stopover at Kazan lasted half an hour. Then a boy slipped her mooring rope from the bollard; her paddles frothed the water, and she eased back into the night – a survivor of the Ancien Regime, reminding one of the stiffblack-skirted ladies sometimes to be seen manoeuvring through the foyer of the Moscow Conservatoire.

Chekhov took a Volga cruise for his honeymoon in 1901. His wife was Olga Knipper, the actress for whom he wrote
The Cherry Orchard
. He was, however, already suffering from consumption, and his doctors had ordered a ‘koumiss cure'. Koumiss is fermented mare's milk, the staple of all steppe nomads and remedy for every kind of sickness. The ‘noble mare-milkers' appear in literature as early as the
Iliad
, and it was nice to think of Chekhov – on his paddlesteamer – scribbling notes for a new short story, and sipping a drink known to Homer.

Kazan is the capital of the Tartar Autonomous Republic, and lies about five hundred miles due east of Moscow at a point where the Volga, after meandering through the cities of northern Muscovy, takes a right-angled bend towards the Caspian. There are two Kazans. One is the Russian city, with its kremlin and cathedrals, founded in 1553 by Ivan the Terrible after a victory which finally rid Russia of the so-called ‘Tartar-yoke'. The other Kazan, punctuated here and there by minarets, is the Muslim town to which the Tartars were banished, and where they have remained. Tartars number nearly half the population, speak Tartar as their first language, and are the descendents of Batu's Horde.

For the purpose of Russian history, the words Tartar and Mongol are synonymous. The Tartar horsemen who appeared on the fringe of Europe in the thirteenth century were thought to be the legions of Gog and Magog, sent by the Antichrist to announce the End of the World. As such, they generated the same kind of fear as the hydrogen bomb. Russia bore the brunt of their attack. In fact, so long as the Tartar empire survived, the Russian Grand Dukes were sub-vassals of the Great Khan in Peking – and this, together with a folk memory of whistling arrows, piles of skulls, and every kind of humiliation, may account for a certain paranoia the Russians have always shown towards the slant-eyed peoples of Inner Asia.

The Volga is the nomadic frontier of Modern Europe, just as the Rhine-and-Danube was the barbarian frontier of the Roman empire. Once Ivan crossed the Volga, he set Russia on her course of eastward expansion, which would roll on and on until the Tsar's colonists met the Americans at the Russian river in northern California.

I went ashore before breakfast. Hydrofoils skimmed by and, in the flowerbed beside the boat terminal, a solitary mongrel sat chewing verbena. Through a mishmash of telegraph wires I caught site of the Peter-and-Paul Cathedral which, at this hazy hour of the morning, resembled the pagoda of an imaginary Cathay. The terminal building was deserted; but in the square behind, sweepers were sweeping the night's fall of leaves; the stench of cheap gasoline hung in your nostrils; and a woman in a scarf of aniline roses was unshuttering the front of her kvass bar – in front of which a queue had formed.

Kvass is a beer brewed from rye flour, but I did not want it for breakfast. I wanted koumiss, and had been told I could get it. ‘Koumiss,
nyet!'
the woman said. Was there anywhere, I persisted, that did sell koumiss? ‘Koumiss,
nyet!'
she repeated. ‘Koumiss,
nyet!'
bellowed a Tartar in a black hat and black padded jacket. He had been standing behind me.

Plainly, the mares weren't giving milk at this season, and plainly I should have known it. So I went back to the quay where another, northbound steamer had docked. Families with bundles were shuffling up the gang-plank. Soldiers in top-boots were striding about as if they had saddles between their legs. Then a slender young man stepped ashore carrying a single stalk of pampas grass.

At eleven we went into town. Across the street from the university, the bus pulled up in front of a reckless adventure in stucco, its façade encumbered with naked figures, and its windows painted with peacocks and peonies. This, the guide confessed, had been the house of a millionaire. It was now a technical bookshop.

By contrast, apart from the odd hammer and sickle, there was nothing in the sombre, neoclassical university building to distinguish it from any minor college in the American Midwest. Students strolled about with satchels, or sunned themselves in a small memorial garden. The entrance hall, however, was lined with pictures of sad-faced academics, and we were made to wear grey felt overshoes in case we damaged the parquet flooring.

Upstairs we were shown the lecture room where Lenin studied law before being booted out for taking part in a student strike – a room of bare benches, a blackboard, a white-tiled stove, and green shades around the gas lights.

In his Kazan days, of course, Lenin had not yet assumed the name of that other, Siberian, river, the Lena. He was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov – a boy with red hair and an excessively determined lower lip, who, with his mother and sisters, had come here from his native Simbirsk. Only a year before, his elder brother Alexander had been executed in St Petersburg for making a bomb to kill the Tsar. The Ulyanovs' house is a cosy timber building, painted treacly brown, and situated in a hilly suburb once known as ‘Russian Switzerland'. On hearing of his brother's death, young Vladimir is supposed to have said, icily: ‘That means we shall have to find another way.' And in the half-basement, you are shown a scullery, hardly more than a cubby-hole, where, feet up on the stove, he first dipped into
Das Kapital.

Another student was Count Leo Tolstoy. He was at the university for five-and-a-half years in the 1840s, studying Oriental languages, law, history and philosophy. Already, at the age of eighteen, he was keeping a diary of his thoughts and ‘Rules of Life': ‘Keep away from women' . . . ‘Kill desire by work' . . . But, in the end, he decided his professors had nothing to teach him, and ordered the coachman to drive to Yasnaya Polyana. ‘Men of genius', he wrote only twelve years later, ‘are incapable of studying when they are young, because they unconsciously feel that they must learn everything differently from the mass.'

On leaving the Ulyanov house, the Germans went back to the
Maxim Goryk
for lunch. I gave them the slip and went to the Maxim Gorky Museum, a whitewashed building on a corner, next to a playground with cardboard figures of athletes. Across the street, people with wooden shovels were pitching a pile of potatoes into a cellar. Inside, two motherly women brooded over an immense display of photographs and memorabilia associated with this now almost deified novelist. His desk was awash with knick-knacks; and along with his suits, there was a pair of Samoyed reindeer-skin leggings.

Gorky – Alexei Maximovich Peshkov as he was then – came here as a blushing boy from Nizhni Novgorod (now Gorky) in 1884. He, too, had hoped to enter the university, but the authorities turned him down as being too young, ignorant, and poor. Instead, he had to educate himself in tawdry lodgings, in flophouses, in a brothel, on the wharves along the river, or in the cellar of the bakery where he earned himself a wage. These were his
Universities
– the title of the second volume of his autobiography. His friends were amateur revolutionaries and professional tramps. At the end of one winter, he shot himself – but the bullet pierced his lung and not his heart. The river called him, to the South; to the freer air of the Cossack steppe; to what, later, he called his ‘Sky-Blue Life'. He left Kazan by boat: ‘The ice on the Volga had only just broken up. From upstream floated porous grey ice-floes, bobbing up and down in the muddy water. The boat overtook them, scraping against her sides and shattering into sharp crystalline flakes . . . The sun was blinding . . . ' For three years he lived as a hobo. Then he published his first short story in a Tiflis newspaper. A map in the museum charted the zigzag course of his wanderings – and then we looked at the photographs: the successful young ‘peasant' author, in an embroidered shirt, reading to a gathering of bourgeois intellectuals; the villa in Capri, dated 1908; or with his new friend, now definitively known as Lenin, who would insist on going to the beach in a bowler. Then New York; then another villa, in Taormina; and then back to Moscow in the Twenties. The last pictures, taken in his hideous art nouveau house on Kachalova Street just before his death (by poisoning?) in 1936, show a kind old man at the end of his tether.

The streets of Kazan bore the imprint of a vanished mercantile vitality. Yards once stacked with barrels of fish-oil or bitumen now lay overgrown with burdocks and thistles. Yet the little log houses, with their net curtains, their samovars, their currant bushes, their African violets in the window, and the streams of blue woodsmoke spiralling from their tin chimneys – all reaffirmed the dignity of the individual and the resilience of peasant Russia. Somewhere on these streets was the ‘house of comfort' where Tolstoy lost his virginity; and where, once the act was over, he sat on the whore's bed and broke down and blubbed like a baby. This is the subject of his story
A Holy Night.

Strolling into the yard behind a church, I found a nun feeding bread to her pigeons. Another nun was watering the geraniums. They smiled and asked me to come for the service, tomorrow. I smiled back, and said I should not be in Kazan. Later we all tried to lunch at the Kazan Restaurant, but only got as far as its grandiloquent gilded entrance. ‘
Nyet!'
said the black-tied waiter. He was expecting a delegation. So instead we had cabbage soup and fried eggs in a noisy white-tiled café, presided over by a powerful Tartar woman, who couldn't stop laughing. Her head was wrapped in the kind of white cloth superstructure you sometimes see in Persian miniatures.

The lanes of Tartar-town were muddy but, on some of the houses, the door and shutters were a lovely shade of blue. By the door of the mosque sat an old pair of shoes. The interior was dingy, and the evening sunlight, squeezing through a coloured-glass window, made blotches of red on the carpet. An old man in an astrakhan cap was kneeling to Mecca, to say his prayers. On top of the minaret, a golden crescent glinted over this, the northernmost extension of Islam, on the latitude of Edinburgh.

After dark, at a Friendship Meeting, I saw a slender Tartar girl craning her neck to watch the foreigners. She had glossy black hair, rosy cheeks, and slanting grey-green eyes. The dancing seemed to excite her, but a look of horror passed over her face when the Germans played musical chairs.

 

The
Maxim Gorky
sailed through the night, down the Kuybyshev Reservoir and past the mouth of the Kama river. By dawn, we were approaching Ulyanovsk. On the way we must have passed the ancient city of Bolgar where, in the tenth century, an Arab traveller called Ibn Fadlan awoke one morning to see some sleek ships at anchor in the river. These were the Vikings. ‘Never', he wrote, ‘had I seen a people of more perfect physique. They were tall as date-palms, and reddish in colour. They wear neither coats nor mantle, but each man carries a cape which covers one half of his body, leaving one hand free. Their swords are Frankish in pattern, broad, flat and fluted. Each man has tattooed upon him trees, figures and the like, from the fingers to the neck.' At the approach of winter, one of the Viking chieftains died, and his companions decided to bury him, in a ship mound, on the bank of the river. Such is Ibn Fadlan's descriptions: the ship carved with dragons, four posts of birch; the frost-blackened body sewn up in its clothes; a faithful dog sacrificed, and then the man's horses. Finally, the slave woman, who was to be buried as well, made love to each of the companions. ‘Tell your master,' they said, ‘I did this out of love for him.' On the Friday afternoon, the companions held her up three times over the ship's rail. ‘Look!' she cried out. ‘I see my master in Paradise, and Paradise is beautiful and green, and with him are the men and young boys. He calls me. Let me join him!' – whereupon an old She-Giant, the hag they called the ‘Angel of Death', took the woman's bracelets from her wrists. The companions drowned her cries by beating on their shields. Six men made love to her again; and as she lay back exhausted, the ‘Angel of Death' slipped a cord around her neck, and a dagger between her ribs.