Honey for the Bears Page 5

  6

  IN THE GREAT SEA RERMINAL OLD AND NEW RUSSIA MET AMIcably. Posters offering chasse and Jagd in civilized forests jostled loot from the walls of the Hermitage—a fleshy Raphael, a still-life of unplucked game, a monstrous Rembrandt convocation of burghers. The water-jugs and glass goblets on the bright brochure tables were obviously filched sacramental vessels. Jaunty girls from Intourist called cowed blue-clad serf porters tovarishch; ill-dressed and handsome, ear-rings jingling, they strode among the crowds of disembarked. With relief Paul saw that his and Belinda’s luggage stood disregarded by the money-changing desk. He joined the queue for roubles and kopeks. A fat man in braces for the heat, his bare gums like polished coral, said to his wife: ‘Stands to reason you’ll be able to get a nice steak and chips in a big place like Leningrad. Stands to reason, it does.’ For his ten-pound traveller’s cheque Paul was given, by a really sweet girl, a few notes that he took at first to be meal-tickets. But they were roubles all right. He had heard that one could do better with black-market touts in hotel lavatories. Tomorrow.

  Paul took his meagre fistful of money across to a sort of small snack-bar that stood open about half a mile off over the luggage-packed floor of the Customs Hall. The little eating-room was full and he had to join another queue. His stomach rumbled as he watched with kindly interest the cheerful serving-girl swishing the beads of her counting-frame. She was plump and ginger and shouted as though on a farm. He took in the vases of sweet william, the open sandwiches of ham and smoked salmon and red caviar, the Russian champagne and cognac. A self-sufficient country. His spirits rose with the excitement of one who knows he is at last again on foreign soil. It was important to note the most trivial of details: the single blond hair that lay coiled on that dark man’s back; that other man tugging at his nose as though trying to milk it; the match-sticks on the floor; the rich tobacco that smelt like Christmas. He surveyed the ranks of Soviet cigarettes, some of them celebrating Soviet scientific achievements—Sputnik; Laika (that intrepid space-bitch laughed happily, like Mr Khrushchev himself, on the packet); Vostok; Vega (their ambition was limitless). But an older Russia was represented in Troika, Bogatuiri (bearded Cossack heroes on shaggy steeds), Droog, meaning ‘friend’ (a fiercer-looking dog’s head than Laika’s). And then there was …

  The serving-girl whoaed cheerfully at Paul. He jumped, and his tongue jumped with him, and his quaternion of teeth leaped out of his mouth. He fielded the little pink wedge skilfully, but various Soviet citizens, including the serving-girl, saw and were startled. ‘National Health,’ Paul tried to smile, feeding it back in. For some reason, now he was on Russian soil, his Russian had deserted him.

  ‘Never cry stinking fish, mate,’ said a known voice. Paul turned to see Madox, secretary-companion to Dr Tiresias, standing in the crush, a bottle of Budvar in his hand.

  ‘I should have thought …’ Paul began to say. And now, the fall-out of teeth having made some customers step to one side (foreign secret weapon; foreign dangerous jape), he could see the Doctor itself, in wheelchair still, right in the corner by the bar, talking animatedly to a surly strabismal man in a dingy suit. ‘I had the idea …’ Paul wanted to say that he had expected Dr Tiresias and Madox to be whisked off immediately on disembarkation in an official car, but he was finding that any attempt at speech threatened to propel once more the tiny pink machine into the crowd. Besides, the serving-girl was urging him with louder whoas to say what he wanted. He pointed to a couple of open sandwiches and a bottle of beer and put a single rouble on the counter. When he turned round Madox was not to be seen. A flesh curtain had been drawn again to hide the Doctor and the surly man: a Mongol woman in summer frock and great bare shaking arms; a tragic Caucasian giant, brawny chest exposed for the heat. Paul shrugged the matter off (he had his own concerns to occupy him fully) and, like Laika herself, took his food into a corner to wolf it. He had to take the teeth out first. Something must be done about that, and quickly.

  Sucking his real teeth and belching on the hurried draught of Budvar, he turned right outside the buffet and strode to the lavatory. It was a rough substantial kind of lavatory, not too clean, typically Russian perhaps, and it was empty. Paul took out his matches and began to make hasty experiments, cleaving match-sticks lengthwise, trying to contrive little wooden wedges. Mad, it was mad; here he was in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics at last and all he could find to do was to split matchwood with his thumbnail in the port lavatory. At length he managed something that would serve: a pine-tasting splinter that he drove between denture and left canine. He tested with his finger gingerly. That ivory portcullis held fast enough between the yellowing towers. Good; it would do.

  Now there was the question of a taxi. He went down the steps on the land side of the Terminal and saw many shabby motor-coaches with students and elderly conducted tourists getting into them. There was an official car or two. But there was no taxi. He asked a busy pyknic-looking man with wrestler’s shoulders, a man in whom many seemed to have great confidence. ‘Outside the gates,’ said this man, ‘you may find a taxi. Or there is a number 22 autobus. But here is nothing.’

  ‘It’s a question of my luggage, you see,’ said Paul.

  ‘It is not a big walk,’ said the man. ‘A mile perhaps only. This is not London.’ He pronounced the o’s round and deep, making that city sound like a great capitalist dungeon, crammed with wasted cabs; then he turned his back on Paul. Paul saw Miss Travers counting the students aboard one of their coaches. She gave him a look of grim triumph.

  ‘I wonder if it would be possible …’ began Paul. ‘You see, there’s a certain transport difficulty for those of us who are not under the aegis of any particular …’

  ‘Twenty-seven, twenty-eight. It would not be,’ said Miss Travers. She was atrociously dressed as if for eventual camouflage. She spoke with a mock-patrician accent.

  ‘Or even just some of my luggage,’ said Paul. ‘I could pick it up from wherever you’re being taken to. And my wife’s ill, you see. Please.’

  ‘Thirty-two, -three, -four. That seems to be the lot.’ The students aboard jeered down, up-your-piping and I’m-all-right-jacking like truck-riding troops at route-marching troops.

  ‘I didn’t mean what I said, whatever it was, about Opiskin,’ pleaded Paul. ‘It was my friend who admired him, you see, not me.’ Meanwhile, the coachload of conducted tourists was already bumping off to its specially packaged Russia, waving. Miss Travers said:

  ‘You’ll have to make your own arrangements, chum. It’s nothing to do with us.’ And she began to follow her charges up the coach-steps.

  ‘You and your bloody brotherhood-of-man hypocrisy,’ called Paul. The holiday was really starting well. ‘Sod you and yours for a start. Opiskin for ever,’ he shouted, as the gears ground and filthy smoke poured from the exhaust. The students fat-baconed, old-Roman-signed from their safe if dirty windows and shot jerkily away to their mission. Paul wondered about Dr Tiresias and Madox and how they proposed to get to town, then he determined to ask no more favours. What he would do was to carry the two dangerous suitcases as far as the bus-stop or taxi-stand and leave the harmless ones in the Terminal for later collection. He saw activity in the office marked ‘INTOURIST’, a man searching manically for a lost document, a goddess in a faded rose dress yelling ‘Allo, allo’ into the telephone. Nobody heeded him as he carried the two safe bags into an inner chamber, dark and smelling of crumbs. With confidence he said, coming out of it, ‘Bagazh.’ Distractedly they thanked him. That was all right, then.

  It was a wearisome walk to the dock gates. This high northern summer evening was hotter than he would have thought possible, brought up as he was on the Western image of Leningraders always dressed in furs. After the tramlines, bales, vistas of ships, there came enclosed sad little lawns, a modest fingerboard stating that it was pointing to (but where else was there now the sea was at his back?) the city. Then the peeling archway, the monstrously blown-up portraits of the Leningrad Soviet, li
ke a committee of welcome with no welcome in any stern governing face; the squat small official who, his concern more aesthetic than bureaucratic, admired and admired the blown-down portrait of photogenic Belinda on the joint passport Paul showed; then out to a vision of appalling shabbiness, a lack of paint on the Manchester-docks-style buildings under a magnificent gold-blue quattrocento sky; a sooty stunted garden, decayed ornamental urns filled with butt-ends, shabby folk resting, exhortatory posters; Soviet workers waiting for buses or taxis. For the first time Paul became aware that there was capitalism in the very cut of his clothes. Neither the new cavalry-twill trousers nor the quite old Harris tweed sports-jacket could be absorbed easily into this scene. Here was the capped tieless proletariat with a vengeance; he had never really, he realized, seen the proletariat before. He wanted a taxi quickly, to escape to the decent normal luxurious world built, however ephemerally, by capitalist tourists (safe drinking round a table, laughing in conscious superiority to the natives outside). Ashamed as, he remembered, his father John Hussey had been ashamed when in work at a time of mass unemployment, he joined the taxi queue at a post marked with a large T. The queuers ate his shirt, tie, shoes, even the greasy raincoat over his arm. But, damn it, they had Yuri Gagarin and the Bolshoi and Kirov Ballets. They had Comrade Khrushchev’s sky-pie promises, they had the monopoly of truth, beauty and goodness. What more did they want?

  They wanted his clothes and pigskin suitcases, that’s what they wanted.

  Waiting, Paul tried to smell Soviet Russia, knowing that only to the rawest newcomer does a country reveal its smell; after a day it becomes deodorized. He smelt his schooldays in Bradcaster—a whiff of brewery, tannery, burning potatoes, dust, a bourdon of tobacco which suggested Christmas, the pantomime, for, with the British, only festive smokes were aromatic. He saw himself in a queue of his own poor relatives—Uncle Bill and Auntie Vera, little Nell and Cousin Fred, unwilling to talk to him now because of his appearance of opulence—but all in the past, in the thirties, for now one did not have poor relatives any more. Odd forgotten images grew, sharply remembered: sixth-form holiday swotting in the sooty People’s Park of Bradcaster; the filthy shop-window of the RAF Recruiting Centre and one day no more swotting in the People’s Park; himself in uniform; then the evening on the Russian course when, the gramophone playing Opiskin’s bell-music, Robert had started shivering with fright, remembering the beam attack and the starboard engine on fire; then Paul’s wrapping Robert in his arms and going ‘There there there there there …’

  Startled, Paul found himself at the head of the queue. He had to fight a feeling of guilt at an achievement that, after all, only time and patience had brought. And, anyway, there was no need to feel guilt at entering the broken-down home-grown jalopy that eventually came, its dirty buff flanks enlivened only by the statutory T-in-a-circle-and-a-row-of-dots, its driver shirt-sleeved, sweaty and smoking. ‘Astoria,’ Paul said.

  He was shocked to his soul as the grimy past enfolded him deeper and deeper. He had expected, he could not think why, a fresh clean city of glass and modern flat-blocks. He found wide streets enough, empty of traffic as for an English provincial Sunday, but carious, cracked, in cynical disrepair, as though Soviet eyes were focused only on outer space. And the buildings were wounded, all tattered bandages of peeling stucco, windows starred, the diseased walls crying for paint. Childhood Bradcaster, yes, but an even older Bradcaster, heard of in childhood, uncovered. Despite the canals that suggested a factory-worker’s Venice, the bald Cyrillic signs saying ‘MEAT, FISH, MILK, VEGETABLES’, as though the town were a vast house and these shops the larder, Leningrad was not a foreign city.

  But then the taxi sailed bumpily into Byzantium—over the Neva of Byronic Pushkin to St Isaac’s Square, a prancing equestrian statue, the vast barbaric cathedral itself with its dull gold dome like, in the sun, an army of Mussorgskian brass, the sparse traffic, the pigeon-moaning piazza, the feel of the centre of an imperial city.

  Getting out at the Astoria, his eyes still on that fiery dome, Paul paid the driver a rouble. He pulled out his luggage himself and then his heart dove to find he had brought the wrong bags. Later he would be able to call it an understandable mistake, hiding what was forbidden in a dark cache for Intourist to guard. But now he cursed emphatically, dislodging his denture again.

  7

  THE ENTRANCE-HALL OF THE ASTORIA HAD A DUSTY ECCLESI astical smell, and Paul was not really surprised to find, at the still centre of the bustle, a peasant man and woman sitting on the edges of their chairs, eyes closed, hands joined. Perhaps they were on their first visit to the great city and thought this was St Isaac’s. Or one of the railway termini, and peasants were notorious for liking to pray while waiting for trains. Paul dumped his bags quietly near them and then blinked round at the huge Edwardian ornateness. There were high unwashed chandeliers of the most painful workmanship, gigantic vases into which it seemed permissible to chuck cigarette-ends. The décor was fussy, stuffy yet spacious, all gilt and plush with stone and metal tormented into unnatural curlicues; the carpeting was deep and well worn. Well, this was what it had wanted, that pack of yapping middle-class revolutionaries, the tied-on tincan proletariat clanking obediently behind. It had wanted Dad’s monogrammed silver hair-brushes and leather-bound travelling flask. In 1917 it had got the lot. And now it had to go on having them. Paul was quite sure that at the bottoms of those monster floor-vases there would still be fag-ends of the Tsarist régime.

  Nowhere, among the ill-dressed natives and the smart tourists, was there anybody to be seen who might be Mizinchikov. Anyway, let’s have one thing at a time. Paul took a long walk down a corridor, found the gents, then, in the cool dark of a cabinet, made another matchstick wedge for his denture. Then, kicking his heels back in the entrance-hall, waiting for the queues at the desks to grow smaller, he had leisure to kick himself about that blasted mistake of the bags. Mizinchikov? There was certainly no Mizinchikov around. To be quite sure, he took out that sunlit photograph with poor dead Robert embracing Mizinchikov and prowled around the great vestibule, covertly comparing the image with various incurious Slav and Mongol faces. No good. Then a very bald man called to him from behind a desk:

  ‘Eh!’

  Ah, something was moving at last. ‘Yes?’ said Paul, his heart quickening, going over. The bald man pursed shapely Russian lips at him and said:

  ‘What is right to say—in a corner, at a corner, on a corner?’

  ‘How,’ asked Paul, ‘did you know I was English?’

  ‘You are English,’ said the man, ‘so you know what is right to say.’ He said this grudgingly, as though Paul had an unfair advantage.

  ‘Well,’ said Paul, ‘it all depends, doesn’t it, on the context? For instance …’ He was not a trained teacher, and the lesson took rather a long time. The bald man called other hotel employees over—a waiter in white coat and tennis-shoes, a woman who had the look of a governess, the pretty dark girl from the magazine kiosk. ‘Stand the naughty boy in the corner,’ said Paul.

  ‘Please, what is notty?’

  ‘That will be for another lesson,’ said the bald man impatiently. ‘One subject, one lesson. Continue,’ he told Paul.

  ‘… is situated on the corner of the street. Look,’ said Paul, ‘I have to see about the booking of a room. A double room. My wife and myself.’

  ‘You cannot do that here,’ said the bald man. ‘At the Intourist counter you must do it.’ He dismissed this need of Paul’s, frowning, as a frivolous interruption, and said, ‘So I cannot say, “I am in the corner of the street”? Da da da, ponimaiu, I understand. So. Now we have another difficulty, whether to say “in the bed” or “on the bed”. You will explain, please. Shhhh,’ he beetled to the now large class. A sort of fish-chef was breathing heavily over Paul’s shoulder; a pencil had been shoved into Paul’s hand. Paul said:

  ‘Look, the queue’s going down. I’d better get over there quick.’

  ‘I do not think you can say “quick�
� like that,’ said a woman in black with a large key-ring. The bald man said reproachfully:

  ‘In the Soviet Union we all want to learn. We want to know everything,’ he said with passion. ‘Very well.’ He dismissed the class grumpily. There were some murmurs against Paul. Wait, was that fat back the back of Mizinchikov? It was not. Mizinchikov, then, would have to be contacted at the only address Paul possessed, that of the Dom Knigi or House of Books. There Mizinchikov, it seemed, had some undefined job. Tomorrow morning. Paul saw an empty space at the Intourist counter and rushed to claim it. The praying peasants were now asleep, the man snoring slightly. A freckled snub-nosed girl was ready for Paul, her wide-set speckled eyes turned mildly up at him, on her desk a down-turned Penguin Margery Allingham. She had a snivelling summer cold and kept dabbing her nose with a soaked ball of a handkerchief. Paul was now aware of a well of compassion for the Russian people rising slowly in him; he wetted his lips from it and smiled.