What Am I Doing Here?

by Bruce Chatwin

  Threading through the cramped bedrooms, the guide pointed to the children’s paper boats, their hoop, the nurse’s sewing machine, and a drawing, by Lenin’s sister, of Dutch windmills – windmills, perhaps, of the Volga-Dutch colony downstream. All the cot-frames had spotless, white, plumped-up pillows. In Alexander’s room we saw his chemistry test-tubes, and the gold medal he pawned in St Petersburg to buy the nitric acid for the bomb. He was, at the time, studying marine isopods at the School of Biology.

  The Ulyanovs were a literary family and, as she gestured to the bookcases, with its sets of Goethe and Heine, Zola and Victor Hugo, the guide said that Maria Alexandrovna had spoken nine languages – ‘including German’, she added, smiling at the Germans.

  ‘She was German,’ I said.

  The guide froze and said ‘NO!’ in English.

  ‘And up the road,’ I said, ‘that’s her Lutheran church.’

  The guide shook her head and murmured, ‘Nyet!’ – and the German ladies turned on me, and frowned. Obviously, from either standpoint, I had uttered a heresy.

  In 1887, when Vladimir Ulyanov was in the seventh grade, the headmaster of the Simbirsk gimnaziye was Fedor Kerensky, whose son, another Alexander, would grow up to be an emotional young lawyer with a mission to save his country – ‘that ass Kerensky’, who removed the Tsar, and was in turn removed by Lenin. In the classroom where Lenin studied there was a black desk with a bunch of crimson asters on it. At least once in his or her school career, every pupil has the right to sit at that desk.

  Downstairs in the entrance hung a huge canvas of Lenin, in his student’s greatcoat, contemplating the break-up of the Volga ice. The image of Russia as a river or a slow-moving ship is one that occurs again and again in her music, literature and painting. ‘The Song of the Volga Boatmen’ inspired perhaps the most politically effective picture of the nineteenth century – Ilya Repin’s Barge-Haulers on the Volga – which shows a gang of peasants heaving a ship against the current. The laden ship is returning from a mysterious eastern land, whence will come a saviour to redeem a suffering people.

  After lunch, I strolled about The Crown – the old aristocratic quarter of Simbirsk, now shaved of its mansions and churches and replaced by acres and acres of Karl Marx Garden, tarmac, and the offices of the local Soviet. At the edge of the tarmac, I crossed a bridge of rickety timbers and ambled downhill through the Park Druzby Narodov – a wilderness of decaying summerhouses and gardens gone to seed. Thistles choked the path, and the leaves of the brambles were red. There was a smell of potato tops burning on a bonfire. Below, the river dissolved into the haze. I peered through a scrapmetal fence and saw an old man pottering round his cabbages in the last of the summer sunshine.

  On the waterfront I went aboard one of the shore stations, a kind of house-boat, painted the ice-floe green of the Winter Palace, where in Tsarist days travellers would eat, rest, or have a brief affair between steamers in one of the cabins upstairs. On a bench by the boarded-up kiosk, a man without fingers was munching a bun. He eyed me suspiciously, having heard that there were Germans about. When I said I was English, the metallic teeth lit up and he started explaining how many Germans he’d shot in the war: ‘Boom! Da! . . . Boom! Da! . . . Boom! Da! . . . ’ – slicing the sky with his fingerless fists and getting so excited I was afraid he’d forget I wasn’t German, and I’d end up in the oil slick. I said goodbye and he pressed a fist into my outstretched hand.

  One of the Intourist guides was an agitated young man who spoke perfect French and wore a white shirt printed with Cossack sabres. He said that few sturgeon were caught nowadays in this part of the river: for caviare one had to go to Astrakhan. For some reason he knew all about Lenin’s visit to London for the Second International, and even about Lenin’s English friends, Edward and Constance Garnett. I said I had known their son David, a small boy at the time, who used to keep in his wallet Lenin’s bus ticket from Tottenham Court Road to their house in Putney. ‘Mais c’est une relique précieuse,’ he said.

  The rum merchant at our table on the Maxim Gorky would wait, frantic with concentration, in the hope of ambushing all the butter pats. Sometimes, if he saw us faltering over the main course, he would raise his fork in the air, say, ‘Please?’ and prong the lumps of pork from our plates. He had fought at the battle of Stalingrad. Out of a company of 133, he was one of seven survivors. He shared his cabin with a schoolmaster, an impetuous ballroom dancer, perennially bronzed, whose transplant of hair seedlings resembled a young rice paddy. He had been the observer on a Stuka. He had, at one time or other, bombed several of the places on our route, and was returning in the spirit of Kameradschaft.

  Not far from Kuybyshev, we moored alongside a fuelling barge around ten o’clock. There were gas flares along the horizon. The night was warm. On the barge’s deck a young man, in gumboots and shirt open to his navel, sat sprawled on a chair while an old woman who could have been his grandmother tugged at the rubber fuel pipe, then screwed in the nozzle. The barge itself was a Constructivist masterpiece, cobbled together by dockyard welders and painted grey and red. In the stern, some babies’ nappies were hanging out to dry on the same clothes-line as half a dozen carp. And what a life went on below! No sooner had we tied up than a party of girls swarmed out of the cabin, invaded the Maxim Gorky, and began to dance. One of our crew, a boy with a neat sandy moustache, had rigged up a tape-recorder on the aft deck; and they were all soon jigging away to some rather offbeat disco music. The boy was terribly concerned to give the girls a good time; kept ordering people to dance with each other; and, with perfect manners and not a hint of condescension, made a point of dancing with the ugliest of the bunch. She was, it must be said, vast. For twenty minutes she revolved on her axis, slowly, like a stone statue on a pedestal, while he capered round and round, laughing, singing and kicking. Then the fuel pipe woman shouted; the girls poured back over the rail; everyone waved, and we slunk back into the night.

  In my cabin I had a copy of War and Peace. I turned to Chapter Twenty and reread the account of old Count Rostov dancing the ‘Daniel Cooper’ with Marya Dmitrievna: (leterrible dragon ): ‘The count danced well and knew it. But his partner could not and did not want to dance well. Her enormous figure stood erect, her powerful arms hanging down (she had handed her reticule to the countess), and only her stern but handsome face really joined in the dance . . . ’

  Wrapped in his loden, Von F was up at sunrise to inspect the three locks that mark the end of the Kuybyshev Reservoir. ‘Remarkable,’ he said, alluding to the six hundred kilometres of inland sea that backs up nearly all the way to Gorky. ‘But,’ he waved at the walls of the lock-basin, ‘this concrete is cracked.’

  It was freezing cold. The sun was a ball on the horizon. The last lock-gates parted and we advanced into a path of golden light. Beyond, the Volga had shrunk to the proportions of a river. On the west bank were a sandy beach and a line of poplars: on the east, a string of fishermen’s shanties and boats hauled clear of the water. We rounded a bend and saw the Zhiguli hills, the only hills hereabouts, once the refuge of bandits and revolutionaries. Their slopes were clothed in birch and pine, and their names: the Brave Man’s Tumulus, the Maiden’s Mountain, the Twin Brothers . . .

  From Zhiguli island we then drove to Togliatti, the largest automobile factory of the Soviet Union. Togliatti is named after the former head of the Italian Communist Party; yet the factory owes its existence to the leading Italian capitalist of his generation, Giovanni Agnelli. Agnelli, I was once told, sat out most of one Moscow winter, in the Metropol Hotel, watching executives from every great car corporation come and go - and, eventually, by his presence, winning the contract for Fiat.

  An expanse of glass and concrete stretched away over a naked plain. But the aim of our rather arduous bus journey was not to visit the factory but to establish where, on the horizon, it ended. Once this point was reached we turned back. Meanwhile, the guide bombarded us with statistics. The average winter temperature was – 18°C. C
ars streamed off the production line at an average of 2,500 a day. The average age of the workers was twenty-seven. The average number of marriages was 5,000 a year. Almost every couple had an apartment and a car, and there were very few divorces.

  In a car park by the Volga we came across a wedding couple. The bride was in white, the bridegroom in a red sash. They seemed shy and embarrassed; and the Germans, having at last found something human in Togliatti, proceeded to treat them as an exhibit in the zoo. Pressed to the balustrade by amateur photographers, the pair edged away towards their car. They had thrown red roses into the scummy water, and one of these had snagged on a rock.

  When I woke the next morning the trees were gone and we were sailing through the steppe – a lion-coloured country of stubble and withered grass. There were fiery bushes in the ravines, but not a cow or a cottage, only a line of telegraph wires. I sat on deck, turning the pages of Pushkin’s Journey to Erzerum: ‘The transition from Europe to Asia is more perceptible with every hour; the forests disappear; the hills level out; the grass grows thicker . . . you see birds unknown in European forests; eagles perch on the hillocks that line the main road, as if on guard, staring disdainfully at the traveller. Over the pastures herds of indomitable mares wander proudly . . . ’

  For reasons of Soviet security the locks were unmarked on the map of the Volga that had been pinned to the ship’s notice-board. As a result, the reservoirs and rivers resembled a string of sausages. Again and again, the tour leader warned against taking photos, and spoke of armed guards and other bogey-men who would pounce on anyone seen flashing a camera. The lock before Balakovo was a particularly impressive specimen with a road-and-rail bridge running over it, and a gigantic orange mosaic – of a Hermes-like figure, presumably representing ‘Communication’. Von F was itching to sneak a shot, and had his camera hidden up his sleeve. Yet apart from the women who worked the machinery, the lock looked deserted except for a gang of spindly boys who catapulted pebbles that bounced on to our sky-blue deck.

  It was a Sunday. The sun was shining: picnickers waved from the bank, and wheezy launches chugged up and down the river, loaded to the gunwhale with trippers. At three, we went ashore at Djevuschkin Ostrov, Maiden’s Island, where a Khan of the Golden Horde once kept his harem. Before that, however, the island had been the home of Amazons. The Amazons had the practice of making love to their male prisoners, and then killing them. Sometimes, the prisoners put up a fight, but one young man agreed, willingly, to be killed – if they would grant him one favour in return. ‘Yes,’ they said. ‘I must be killed by the ugliest among you,’ he said – and, of course, got off the island. The story was told by Svetlana, an Intourist girl with a wonderful curling lip and green come-hither eyes.

  I struck inland along a path that led through stands of red-stemmed nettles. The wormwood gave off a bitter smell underfoot. Aspens rustled, and the willows blew white in the breeze. The young willow shoots were covered with bloom, like the bloom on purple grapes. A pair of ducks flew off a weedy pond. Then there were more willows, and more water, and then the blue distance and sky. Crossing a patch of bog, I thought, ‘This is the moment in a Turgenev sketch when the narrator and his dog are crossing a patch of bog, and a woodcock flies up at their feet.’ I took a step or two forward – and up flew the woodcock! There should also have been, if this were a Turgenev sketch, the distant sound of singing and, after that, the sight of an appled-cheeked peasant girl hurrying to a tryst with her lover. I walked another hundred yards or so, and heard first the singing and then saw a white peasant headscarf through the trees. I approached, but the woman went on blackberrying. She was not young. She had hennaed hair and false teeth. I offered her the mushrooms I’d collected, and she said, ‘Nyet!’

  Back at the boat station, another Winter Palace in miniature, the guardian had caught a small, sad-faced sturgeon, and our deckhands were tremendously excited at the prospect of fish stew. One carried a cauldron, another a knife and, while the cauldron was boiling, the fishermen and an officer played billiards in the lower-deck saloon. Osip Mandelstam says, ‘The hard-headed knocking together of billiard balls is just as pleasant to men as the clicking of ivory knitting needles to women.’ I, for one, could think of worse places to be holed up in – a routine of Russian novels, fishing, chess, and billiards – interrupted by an occasional visit from the Maxim Gorky to remind one that this was 1982, not 1882.

  Monday, 27 September, was a blustery morning that began with a lecture on the inland waterways of the Soviet Union. Two nights earlier, I had seen a small sailing yacht beating upstream. If only one could get permission, how adventurous it would be to sail from the Black to the White Sea! In Kazan, which we had left only four days earlier at the height of an Indian summer, it was now four degrees below.

  Next day, we stayed on the boat. From time to time a smudge of smokestacks and apartment blocks moved across the horizon. One of the towns was Marxstadt, formerly Baronsk, and capital of the Soviet Republic of the Volga Germans. ‘And where are those Germans now?’ asked a lady from Bonn, her neck reddening with indignation as she gazed at the thin line of shore. ‘Gone,’ I said. ‘Dead!’ she said. ‘Or in Central Asia. That is what I heard.’ Later in the afternoon we cruised close inshore along cliffs whose strata were striped in layers of black and white. Over the loudspeaker, a deep bass voice sang the song of the Cossack rebel Stenka Razin. We saw a flock of black and white sheep on a bare hill. Suddenly, in the middle of nowhere, there was a MiG fighter perched on a pedestal.

  Stepan (or Stenka) Razin, the son of a landowner on the Lower Don, believed that the Cossack custom of sharing plunder should form the basis of all government. He believed that these levelling practices should be applied to the Tsardom of Russia itself. The Tsar, at the time, happened to be Peter the Great. At Astrakhan, Razin captured a Persian princess who became his mistress and whom he dumped in the Volga to thank her, the river, for the gold and jewels she had given him. At Tsaritsyn, he murdered the governor, one Turgenev, possibly a forebear of the novelist. Abandoned by his followers, he was defeated at Simbirsk and beheaded in Moscow. In Soviet hagiography he is a ‘proto-communist’.

  We arrived at dawn at Volgograd. The city once known as Stalingrad is a city of stucco and marble where Soviet veterans are forever photographing one another in front of war memorials. Rebuilt in the ‘Third Roman’ style of the Forties and Fifties, it rises in layers along the European bank of the Volga; and from the flight of monumental steps leading down to the port, you can look back, past a pair of Doric propylaea, past another Doric temple which serves as an ice-cream shop, across some sandy islands, to a scrubby Asiatic waste with the promise of deserts beyond.

  At ten, to the sound of spine-tingling music, we, the passengers of the Maxim Gorky, assembled in Fallen Heroes Square as a delegation of penitent Germans to add a basket of gladioli and carnations to the heaps of red flowers already piled up that morning around the Eternal Flame. On the side of the red granite obelisk were reflected the Christmas trees of the garden, and the façade of the Intourist Hotel, built on the site of Field-Marshal Paulus’s bunker. A squad of cadets came forward at a slow march, the boys in khaki, the girls in white plastic sandals with white tulle pompoms behind their ears. Everyone stood to attention. The rum merchant and the schoolmaster, both survivors of the battle, performed the ceremony. Their cheeks were wet with tears; and the war widows, who, for days, had been bracing themselves for this ordeal, tightened their fingers round their handbags, sniffed into handkerchiefs, or simply looked lost and miserable.

  Suddenly, there was a minor uproar. Behind us was a party of ex-soldiers from the Soviet 62nd Army, who had come from the Asiatic Republics. Their guide was showing them a photo of Paulus’s surrender; and they, hearing German spoken nearby, seeing the ‘enemy’ inadvertently trampling on a grass verge, and thinking this some kind of sacrilege, began to murmur among themselves. Then a bull-faced man shoved forward and told them to clear off. The ladies, looking now more misera
ble than ever, shifted hastily back on to the concrete path. ‘Most interesting,’ said Von F, as he swept past on his way to the bus.

  Once the war was over, someone suggested leaving the ruins of Stalingrad as they were — a perpetual memorial to the defeat of Fascism. But Stalin took exception to the idea that ‘his’ city should remain a pile of rubble, and ordered it to be rebuilt the way it was, and more so. He did, however, leave one ruin intact – a shell-shattered mill-building on the downward slope to the river. Now marooned in acres of concrete plaza, the mill lies between a model bayonet, some two hundred feet high and still in scaffolding, and a structure the shape and size of a cooling-tower where visitors (by previous appointment) can view a mosaic panorama of the battle. I stood on the plaza and felt I could almost chuck a stone into the river – yet, despite Hitler’s hysterical screaming, despite the tanks and planes and men, the Germans could never reach it. The Russians fought to the slogan, ‘There is no place for us behind!’ It was probably as simple as that.

  All around were elderly men and women, some missing an arm or a leg, and all aglow with medals in the sunshine. Then I . caught sight of Von F, striding furiously around a selection of Soviet armaments lined up on display. ‘No thanks to the Americans!’ he said, lowering his voice. ‘It was American tanks, not these, that saved them . . . and, of course, Paulus!’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Good Prussian soldier!’ he said. ‘Continued to obey orders . . . even when those orders were mad!’

  In an earlier discussion, I asked Von F why Hitler hadn’t gone straight for Moscow in the summer of ’41. ‘Fault of Mussolini,’ he answered flatly. ‘The invasion of Russia was planned for the spring. Then Mussolini made a mess in Greece and Germany had to help. It was too late in the year for Moscow. Hitler refused to make the mistake of Napoleon in 1812.’