Gadfly in Russia

by Alan Sillitoe

  She was sliding to her knees for more desperate pleading, but he drew her up. ‘I must go,’ he said, with such a loving and tender kiss that I envied him. He may have been disappointed had she not put on such a performance, but it was plain from her despairing features that she was in exquisite misery at the prospect of his departure. He consoled her as best he could, but finally eased her away at seeing my impatience, though I did try to hide it.

  On our way out of town we were stopped by a militiaman for having strayed into a left lane instead of going straight on at a traffic light. Though his whistle blew loud and clear I was for charging on. ‘We have to stop,’ George said, ‘but let me talk.’

  I didn’t see why we should be pulled up for such a petty fault, or something which seemed no fault at all, but George said that policemen in Russia were very strict with drivers, which was why there were so few accidents.

  He explained, with much tact, that I was a foreigner, an English writer unfamiliar with the traffic regulations and the complicated layout of Moscow. His half truths were accepted, but he was told that I ought nevertheless to watch out and stay in the right lane. ‘And by the way,’ he added, when all I wanted to do was scoot off, ‘what kind of car is that?’

  George obliged him with as many details as he had picked up along the way. The policeman then asked, pointing at me: ‘What kind of books does he write?’

  ‘Proletarian novels,’ George said, as traffic flew by in all directions, drivers with smug expressions giving us a wide berth and glad we’d copped it instead of them.

  ‘I’m pleased to have met an English writer, but tell him to stay in the right lane.’

  I cursed all the way to the ring road, George horrified at such a bolshie condemnation of the police. ‘They’re people’s police, after all,’ he said.

  ‘Of course they are. They’re the people’s police in every country. They’re not fucking Daleks. He might have sounded a bit cultured but he’s still a copper, though maybe he wasn’t one at all. The Writers’ Union hired him from an actors’ school and told him to stand there and stop us so that he could say what a fine writer I was and make me feel more at home. On second thoughts perhaps Intourist set it up.’

  He forgave my rant, since we seemed to share the same brand of humour. The longer he was with me the more I realised how sophisticated, tolerant and diplomatic he could be, a courtier from having been brought up by two women. Perhaps it was also due to his Georgian ancestry which, so the joke had it, allowed every man to call himself a prince.

  Open spaces calmed me. They always did, but the road narrowed, and I was faced with the usual perilous task of overtaking lorries whose rear ends tended to sway across the empty side of the road when I got too close. Those coming from the opposite direction called for equal care.

  Serpukhov was bypassed to the east by a new bridge over the River Oka, which I would mark on the map in my room later. George said he had often strolled along the beautiful banks with his girlfriend – not the one he had just said goodbye to – in summertime. A glance showed its water running blue under sunlight between sleaving greenery left and right, with flashes of white sand here and there, a Russian paradise. I felt how pleasant it would be to rent a room in a village for a month and enjoy the languorous days.

  ‘You must come back and do it some time,’ George said. ‘The Writers’ Union would make it possible, since you’re their blue-eyed boy. You’d find a nice Russian girl who, believe me, are the best in the world. Then I suppose you’d be happy, at least for a time.’

  Best to go on living with my own inner storm, I thought, the powerhouse of a writer. To present it with good treatment would turn it into a war of spiritual attrition. So I would leave the dazzling serpentine Oka alone and concentrate on the road, or go back to twitting George. ‘Your girlfriend was certainly upset at you leaving. She was as devoted as Melanya in A Nest of Gentlefolk.’

  ‘“Not with all the strength of her soul” though’ – he finished the quotation – ‘because my girlfriend was angry as well.’

  ‘All the same, it was very touching. I was almost crying myself. Do young women always play up like that when their boyfriends go away?’

  ‘Mine do. Not that it’s rare, because women in Russia never know whether or not their men will be coming back. Perhaps it has something to do with the war. They used to say that the way to war was a wide highway, but the way back is only a footpath.’

  I was half intoxicated at speeding over such endless tracts of land, so vast we seemed to be going slower than we were, making the scenery somewhat dull. The sun came partially out again, like white wine suffusing the sky. Lorries moving south were laden with iron ore, sand, bricks or crates, so many on the move maybe the railways were overloaded, and though electrified had too few lines to serve the needs of so much industry. Many, however, turned off to places not served by the railway, their space in the column replaced by more vehicles filtering on to the main road north and south. Some were abandoned wrecks just off the verges, and I hoped not because of accidents, though supposed that most were.

  Overtaking when it was clear, we made headway, and the impulse of a pleasurable month on the tranquil Oka was ploughed under the wheels of the stalwart Peugeot. We reached Tula three hours after leaving Moscow, trundling over cobblestones and tramlines. Signposts were scarce, or not prominent enough for me to see them without George’s help. On my own I would have been at the mercy of my intuition, and got lost, but even he urged me to pull in a couple of times to ask the way. A street plan of the city would have made little difference. I supposed one day there would be a Michelin guide of Russia, with information and town maps to ease the way of bourgeois travellers, yet wasn’t sure I wanted one in this hit-or-miss exploring ground.

  Twenty kilometres south of Tula I turned right and, after a mile, came to Tolstoy’s estate of Yasnaya Polyana, where he lorded it from 1862 until his death in 1910. A gardener told us that the man in charge of the house would be going to lunch in a few minutes, taking the key with him, so we couldn’t be shown inside. We were free to enjoy the grounds though.

  We wandered among dark and shady elms, pines and oak trees, to Tolstoy’s unmarked grave off the path in a small clearing, a hump of earth where he’d wanted to be interred. If I had been wearing a hat I’d have taken it off. No wonder he did so much work, living in the same place for so long. Not that his existence had been peaceful, said George.

  A tall elderly, elegant and refined looking old man, in a stylish brown suit with a watch chain across his waistcoat, came out of the house and greeted us. I talked in French, for his was fluent, with no trace as far as I could tell of a Russian accent. He had been one of Tolstoy’s secretaries in the last year or two of the great man’s life, and was now a curator of the house and museum. Many people came here, he said, writers among them – oh, how many writers! But there was only one Tolstoy, who has long been at rest at this most beautiful spot on earth.

  By the grave was a simple wooden bench Tolstoy had often used. We were told that an English writer had been there recently – he shall be nameless – and had sat on it, insisting someone take a photograph. Maybe I would find his initials on one of the nine trees surrounding the spot, if I cared to look, I said to George.

  The house had suffered during the war – furniture smashed, books scattered, manuscripts used to light fires. Maybe the more enlightened – if there’d been any – had sent handwritten sheets back to Germany as souvenirs.

  Buses were unloading Russian tourists and an eager band of young scholars. Tolstoy opened a school for peasant children in his house – and trampled his own devils on walks around the estate. He went regularly on foot to Tula and also, on several occasions, the 200 kilometres to Moscow. Our amiable guide, who must have been at least eighty, said he must go to lunch, so we got back in the car.

  The compass pointed south to Orel, through more country occupied by the Germans, though you would never have known. Electrification of the mainl
ine railway was complete to the Donbas, and many new factories east of the highway – huge, plain and in light colours – stood near complex transformer stations. We passed the right turn for Turgenev’s estate at Spasskoye Litovinovo and, deciding there was no time to call, went on into Mtsensk, which I knew of from Leskov’s story, and Shostakovich’s opera Katerina Izmailovna seen recently at Covent Garden.

  A militiaman on duty at every important crossroads kept an eye on passing traffic. Provided with a sentry box, he usually stood outside. For any minor infringement of the rules, George told me, such as passing him at more than twenty-five miles an hour, or overtaking at the junction, or being a shade too close to the middle of the road, or having a dirty windscreen which might cut down visibility, he could fine you on the spot. The minimum was one rouble, and if you got by without getting fined – not always easy – you said you had ‘gained a rouble’.

  Without his frequent warnings I would probably have shelled out my literary earnings into the greedy palms of the police. To be on the safe side, George went on, it was better to go by at twenty, though not much slower or he might think you were drunk.

  I wondered what I had done wrong, therefore, on being motioned by an unmistakable baton to the verge. ‘This is getting monotonous.’

  George wound down his window. ‘It’s only the second time in 300 kilometres,’ he said, as the law came over in his blue uniform, peaked blue and red cap, and gave a vague salute. He was young, handsome you could have said, with a dark complexion and leathery skin, and piercing brown eyes showing how bored he must be in that dusty little town mouldering under its own history. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Moscow.’

  ‘And where are you going?’

  ‘To Kursk,’ George said. ‘We’re tourists.’

  ‘Papers.’

  He examined the our passports, then handed them back. ‘What sort of a car is this?’ He looked at it for a while.

  ‘Ask the bastard if we can go,’ I said.

  George told me not to be such a hooligan. ‘May we go now, officer?’

  He waved us on with his stick. ‘Don’t drive too fast.’

  We lit Havanas with the roubles saved. I hadn’t been over the limit. We’d been stopped because he’d had nothing better to do. George laughed at the notion as I shot through the rest of town, a pretty place, with its cathedral perched on a thousand-foot cliff.

  The weather had been dry so far, even sunny, but disagreeable clouds were assembling to the south. On our way over gentle hills we talked about the novels of Evelyn Waugh, William Golding and Iris Murdoch, and the state of literary criticism in England – which I knew nothing about, though I didn’t want to disappoint him.

  Soon tiring of that we swapped common curses in both our languages, unable to decide whether English or Russian would get first prize for having so many of the most foul, blasphemous and picturesque. I even invented a few, but can’t be sure who won. I could only suppose that the exchange of philological unpleasantries encouraged George to say: ‘I must tell you that I feel privileged in spending so much time with a real English proletarian writer.’

  ‘Don’t insult me, George, though let me tell you that I’m equally happy to be in the company of a university graduate I can enjoy talking to. I don’t have any such friends in England.’

  ‘I’m not sure how I’m meant to take that exactly, but you must tell me about the working class in your country. I haven’t even met any Russian workers, in my sheltered life, never mind an English one.’

  ‘First of all, the term “proletarian writer”,’ I said, ‘is an oxymoron that only morons would use, as you ought to know by now, being a fully qualified philologist. And “working class” is a bourgeois definition, used by those who only want to keep the workers in their place.’

  ‘But according to what you write you don’t like the Establishment in your country.’

  ‘Who would? The Establishment doesn’t like me, and goes on trying to throw its weight about.’

  ‘So don’t you want to overthrow it? That’s what we are told in our Marxist textbooks.’

  I laughed. ‘The workers in England are very sensible. All they want is to work less and get more money, and who can blame them? I certainly wouldn’t want to see them storming Buckingham Palace.’

  He mulled on this for a time, then: ‘What you say is very pessimistic, but I suppose I should consider myself lucky in getting such views from the horse’s mouth.’

  ‘Have you read it?’ I was glad to get off the topic. ‘It’s a wonderful novel of Joyce Cary’s.’

  ‘Of course I have. You’ll be asking if I’ve read Dickens next, or Kingsley Amis. I’m not illiterate. But what about the trade unions? They’re very active in England.’

  ‘That’s because it helps them to get into Parliament, or the House of Lords. Every sensible person wants to be part of the Establishment, but not me, because I’m a writer.’

  ‘I’m disappointed.’

  ‘In life, George, you learn far more from disappointment than success.’

  And so we went on, sometimes slagging each other due to our ignorance of each other’s country, which talk finally came down – or went up – to respect and friendship. He was an ideal companion.

  In Orel (pronounced ‘Ariol’), 400 kilometres from Moscow, our energies were declining. The central tram route through the city was being ‘reconstructed’ on both sides, which called for slower speed and more care. The usual litany of disasters had happened in the history of Orel only, it seemed, more so. After its foundation by Ivan the Terrible it was ruined by the Tartars, taken by the Lithuanians, sacked by the Poles, and calamitously burned to ashes in 1573, 1673, 1679, 1848, and 1858. The Germans occupied it for two years from 1941, and half the town was devastated by the time they were thrown out. It was now a thriving city, with many industries. All this from George, and I said he ought to be congratulated on knowing so much about his country, which was in some ways rather more than I knew about mine. On the other hand towns had been burned down less often.

  On the southern outskirts we stopped for a beer, bumping into a parking space by piles of rubble from the roadworks. At Trosna I saw the sign for the direct road to Kiev, which I was not allowed to take, so pressed on into the Province of Kursk, where the land was more open, and fertile under a recent visitation of rain. The road surface turned black and slippery with mud spilled by tractors crossing from one field to another (if you could call such huge expanses fields) the back window so covered that nothing could be seen, which made George even more necessary as an extra pair of eyes.

  The earth was as black as all books said it would be, but with occasional patches of livid green. Stopping, with fifty miles to go before the end of our day, we snacked away the final cutlets, pickled plums and cucumbers packed by George’s angelic mother and her sister, and shared the remaining cold tea. The verge was so saturated with rich loam I feared the car would sink to its axles if we stayed too long. I recalled thoughtlessly parking by the roadside in central Finland, on gravel so soft it was impossible for the tyres to grip when we wanted to move. Hardly knowing what to do, it seemed we would be stuck for ever, till half a dozen tall young Finns came from a nearby farm and lifted the car bodily back on to tarmac.

  Mentioning this to George, we hurried away and, at eight o’clock, just before nightfall, reached Kursk, 375 miles south of Moscow. I went slowly by trams and parked cars looking for the Intourist Hotel, up straight wide Lenin Street to vast Red Square where, according to the sketch plan in Nagel’s guidebook, we would find it. There was no sign, so George got out to enquire, and returned with the information that we must have passed it two miles back up Lenin Street – such were the distances in Russian provincial cities.

  Our spartan rooms were adequate in which to change and have a shower. The manager arranged to have the mud-splattered car cleaned, and watched over during the night in its parking slot by the hotel entrance. After our snacks and picnics of the day
we fed like lords in the little-patronised eating area, washing the meal down with a hundred grammes of vodka each.

  To remind ourselves that we still had legs we took our umbrellas and walked along the wide deserted streets. Rain stopped, and the night air softened, though odours from recent downpours were sharp in the nostrils. Blocks of flats shut off the moon, cushioned in its powdery halo when we glimpsed it, and promising more bad weather. A train hooter sounded, from a string of lighted carriages on their way to Moscow beyond the wooden houses. It was part of my exhaustion to wonder what I was doing in Kursk – of all cities – yet I felt glad to be spending the night in a place that wasn’t a capital.

  The whistling of another train reverberated over the houses, tugging primevally at the stomach. George suddenly asked what I thought of Stalin. Did he want to know so that he could report my opinions back at headquarters? I need hardly care, but decided to answer seriously, yet without committing myself to complete honesty.

  ‘In what way?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, we all know that he wasn’t a good man.’

  ‘You can say that again, but I’ve known it for a long time, certainly before 1952. I was familiar with Arthur Koestler, Victor Serge, and George Orwell, as well as The Conspiracy of Silence by Alex Weissberg, and a book about what happened to the Poles after the Russians marched in in 1939, not to mention The Long Walk an epic of escape from Siberia to India via the Gobi Desert, by Slavomir Rawicz. No doubt there were many other witnesses. I’ve always been a hungry reader, an addict if you like, because what else does a writer do except read? A lot of people on the so-called Left in England didn’t want to know. All the books I read seemed true enough to me. A lot of Russians must have twigged what was going on, because they were living through it themselves.’

  ‘But do you think Stalin was necessary for Russia?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s for the Russians to say. Perhaps only somebody so ruthless could have got the country through its industrial revolution, and held things together in the Great Patriotic War. When I worked in a factory at that time we used to say “Joe for King!”, but that was because the Red Army was performing so many miracles.’