Murderers and Other Friends Read online

  When we had got to the coffee and the plum brandy I asked the judge what sort of society he would like to emerge finally from the velvet revolution.

  ‘I hope we keep a little Socialism. Just a little of it.'

  ‘What would have been the real difference, if we were sitting having lunch in this restaurant in the days of Communism?'

  He thought, ground out a final cigarette and said, ‘Under the Communists, it would have been cheaper.’ He was joking, of course.

  I remember talking to an English general who admitted that when he’d heard Reagan say that the Berlin Wall should come down, he felt a few moments of pure fear. Now this unthinkable event has occurred and the West is deprived of the enormous comfort of feeling that we have an easily defined enemy.

  Some people arrived from the frontiers,

  And they said there are no longer any barbarians,

  And now, what shall become of us without the barbarians?

  Those people were a kind of solution.

  C.P. Cavafy summed up the bewildering situation in which the West finds itself. The Russians, like the Czechs, must have been equally puzzled to be suddenly landed with a free market economy without a market; and such western-style benefits as crime on the streets, pornography, unemployment and a newly formed Mafia, swollen by out-of-work KGB men, with even more dangerous habits than those of the fraternity in Palermo or New York.

  I went back to Russia to see Emily, who was spending her third undergraduate year there to improve her Russian and take an acting course at the Moscow Arts Theatre.

  It was the Russia of Boris Yeltsin, hero of the failed coup and the CNN news, enemy of the speaker Khasbulatov and the endlessly obstructive members of parliament. Moscow was now a capital city where Gumm, the great glass shopping arcade just off Red Square, which once specialized in fur hats and voluminous knickers, houses Benetton and Christian Dior and the Galleries Lafayette. ‘What sort of people,’ I asked, ‘queue outside these shops?’ ‘Mainly crooks, members of the Mafia and hard-currency prostitutes,’ was the answer. In fact the sort of people who shop in such places all over the world.

  Victory in the Cold War is so complete that the only currency worth anything on the streets of Moscow is the dollar. Pounds are derided, francs laughed to scorn, hold out a fistful of roubles and the gesture is ignored; but a few dollars will buy you huge pots of caviare, a fat goose to cook for a party of friends, any one of the eleven thousand prostitutes who now patrol the streets and bars, or many hours in the massage parlours which boast genteel names like The Welcome and The Prince of Wales. Forget the Peking Hotel where strangers in blue suits may be found on your bed eating pickled cucumbers out of a plastic bag. The Metropol, restored to its full art deco glory, is one of the most efficient hotels in Europe, with a first-floor restaurant so expensive that, having booked, I had to feign a heart attack in order to escape from it with any dignity. Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are now the names of the conference rooms in the hotel’s business centre. Only a few hundred yards from its glittering entrance there is a flight of steps where elderly women are offering a single shoe for sale, others hold out a paperback or a bottle of mineral water in the hope of ready cash. Many people are sleeping on rubbish dumps or round the railway stations; the rouble and full employment collapsed at about the same time as the Berlin Wall.

  I had read, in the English papers, of rioting and anger in the streets, but I had to wait until a Sunday morning before I caught sight of any sort of demonstration. Perhaps two hundred people were standing on the steps of the Lenin Museum; some of the older women were carrying red flags on which the hammer and sickle still appeared. Other red flags, carried by similar ladies, bore the bearded face of Christ from a well-known icon. Some of them were shouting through loud hailers, but they were orderly enough. They had formed, it seemed, a strange alliance of old-time Communists and Christian monarchists: such a conjunction is unlikely to stand the tests of power.

  ‘Oh, yes, the old Bolshevik women,’ our friend Henrietta Dobryakova said. ‘There are always a few of them holding up flags round the Lenin Museum.’ She had been transferred from the Stanislavsky Museum to the house of Nemirovich-Danchenko. Nemirovich was a dramatist who, after a conversation in the Slavyanski Bazaar restaurant which lasted from lunch-time to breakfast the next day, founded the Moscow Arts Theatre with Stanislavsky. Nemirovich cared about writing; Stanislavsky was concerned with stage-effects and his somewhat tortuous methods of acting; but the Stanislavsky home is the mecca of many Americans, whereas Nemirovich’s is a shrine hardly visited. Henrietta sits there unoccupied, occasionally emerging into the daylight for a quick drag on a cigarette. Her head tilted back on her short, round body, her wide eyes sometimes mocking but capable of tears on parting, her voice slow and precise, she passed judgement on the Moscow of the moment. ‘No one here takes politicians seriously,’ she said. ‘We have many other things to think about. Personally I find watching the news worse than toothache.’

  ‘Some English papers are talking about civil war in Russia.’

  ‘Civil war!’ Henrietta laughed. ‘I don’t really think we have enough energy for it.’ Then she went on to talk about her home in Sebastopol and the real war, when every Russian family lost at least one member as the Germans invaded, and her father was killed when she was four years old. ‘What do the Russians think of Yeltsin?’ I asked her, after a silence.

  ‘Oh, they like him because he gets drunk!’ Henrietta laughed. ‘When they see him in Parliament with his hair all over the place they say, “He’s getting over a hard night. He’s just like one of us.” Probably you in the West think that it’s either Boris or the gulag and the KGB. He does his best to encourage that.’

  ‘And what do you think of him, Henrietta?’ Her head tilted back as usual, she gave me a heavy-lidded smile from behind the smoke. ‘To me, I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘Boris Yeltsin is a bit of a wanker.’

  Emily was in Moscow with Tom, her boyfriend. They had acted Laertes and Gertrude in Hamlet at the Edinburgh Festival; growing younger, they were planning to become Hamlet and Ophelia when they got back to Oxford. Tom was about to do his finals and spent much time with the Independent crossword as a protest against last-minute revision. In the bar of the Metropol we met their friend from university, a girl who sang in a jazz club in the Arbat, who had just finished a love affair with a man uncomfortably close to the Mafia and who said she liked Russians because they were so honest, they made no secret of who they were: con-men, small-time crooks from the kiosks, poets or poetical drunks.

  It was spring, but there was still snow on Chekhov’s grave. Emily, a spectacularly thin girl, with the leather coat she had commandeered from me flapping round her, ran among the traffic, stopped cars at random and did quick deals with their drivers, causing them to change direction and take us wherever we wanted to go at far less than the rate for a taxi. In the Irish bar in the lower Arbat, where waiters in shamrock-green waistcoats pull pints of draught Guinness, we sat among Muscovites who have taken the place to their hearts. No doubt they have a great deal in common with the Irish; they love literature and strong drink, they can exert huge charm and suddenly become mad, bad and extremely dangerous to know. There we decided to give a party. So we went off shopping in the echoing halls of food, among banks of shining fruit, fresh eggs, vegetables and all sorts of cheeses, where old men offered us slivers of smoked ham held between a thumb and a sharp knife. The caviare counter was manned by two enthusiastic ladies, who travelled behind us wherever we went, offering us prices which fell like the Stock Exchange on Black Wednesday. It was all part of the free market economy, a market scarcely available to the ordinary Russian on a rouble salary.

  The dark entrance to Emily’s disintegrating apartment block was a refuge for Moscow’s dogs and a huge man was asleep in one of the evil-smelling lifts. But as we crowded round the table, her living-room seemed warm and festive. Henrietta’s husband Gennadi had been given no more children’s films to direct
since the fall of Communism, but he seemed in good spirits as he proposed a toast to ‘Mr Mortimer, who has come a great distance to a strange country, in search of his daughter’. A middle-aged English woman, married to a Russian husband, said she had always voted Conservative in England so she regretted the old Communist days ‘when you knew exactly where you were’. There was a successful actor there named Igor, one of whose films was playing on the huge television set that seemed to take up half the room. He was a gentle, loose-limbed man with an actor’s wide eyes and a face of great mobility.

  At the end of the evening Igor offered us a present of three mimes. They were entitled Drunk on the Metro, The One-armed Flautist and The Hunter in the Forest. For this last act, he stole cautiously into the room wearing a fur hat with flapping earpieces and carrying a non-existent but entirely visible shotgun. He was certainly in a forest, starting at every snapping twig, wheeling round to aim his gun at every shadow. Then, to his great disappointment, he was caught short and had to squat among the leaves. He had thoughtfully brought a sheet of newspaper for just such an emergency, but as he sat he became fascinated by some article or news item and missed the bird that came fluttering overhead. It was a long time since I had seen such immaculate acting.

  British writers enjoy plenty of freedom and low esteem. A certain amount of disrespect is every writer’s guarantee of independence and, although we’re asked for instant views on every subject from open marriages to video nasties, no one takes our opinions, if given, particularly seriously. In Communist Russia writers were accorded high status and no freedom. Together with brain surgeons and ballet dancers they were the imprisoned aristocracy, given everything except what a writer needs most – the chance to bite the hand that feeds him. The Writers’ Union in Moscow has always been a place of splendour and intellectual tyranny. It was once the palace Tolstoy used as a model for the Rostovs’ home in War and Peace. We sat in a marbled hall at the foot of a great staircase, down which Nicholas, the last Tsar of All the Russias, after a heavy evening on the vodka, went tobogganing on a silver tray. Above us was the baronial balcony from which a self-appointed jury of servile hacks passed a sentence of expulsion on Pasternak. Now the Union didn’t seem to be entirely devoted to writers; various entrepreneurs were sitting at the tables under the chandeliers and talking on portable phones. We were with Denis the poet, who had been pleased, three years before, to be crossing Red Square with Emily because her father had represented the Sex Pistols. Now he brought some poems he had written about her. They were in a magazine recently launched by a furniture manufacturer, a form of publishing Denis found bewilderingly new. On the whole, books of poetry no longer get published, although there is a huge market for the works of Stephen King. Denis went down to the basement of the ex-Rostov palace to look for peppered vodka from the Ukraine. ‘Yeltsin?’ he said when he got back. ‘I feel I do not like him. I don’t understand any of the politicians. Wasn’t the USSR a better thing than Russia?’ A few toasts later he said, ‘I now think that censorship is the best thing for a writer. He should have something to fight against, and some stupid laws to get round by exercising his ingenuity.’ Still later, we weren’t tobogganing down the staircase but sharing toasts with a party of writers at another table.

  A plump young man, with a pale face and shoulder-length hair, introduced himself as a Goethe Mannerist and his friends as the ‘most talented in Moscow’. He recited a little Pushkin, we fought back with rather too much Hamlet; soon they were singing ‘Moscow Nights’ and we sang ‘Jerusalem’. When we managed to collect our wits and go home, we left Denis a number of dollars to pay for the evening. Unhappily the cash was pinched by the most talented table next to us. ‘The Writers’ Union,’ Denis said on the telephone the next day, ‘is a very dishonest place.’

  There was also the story of Emily’s green jacket. She left it hanging on the back of her chair. The Goethe Mannerist, this time with the best of intentions, took it in order to keep it safely until he could give it back to her. Sadly when he got home, around four in the morning, he was met by a furious wife, who said she was sick to death of being married to a Goethe Mannerist who came back drunk in the small hours, probably slept with other women and made a pig of himself in the Writers’ Union. ‘You’re entirely wrong, my darling,’ the accused husband defended himself, ‘I’ve been out searching for a present for you and I managed to buy this remarkably smart green jacket.’ His wife went to bed mollified, but the next day Denis rang and told him he’d have to give my daughter her jacket back. So the poor Mannerist confessed all to his wife, who gave him such a hard time that he had to go out and get drunk at a friend’s party, where, unfortunately, he left the green jacket which he had been seriously meaning to restore to its owner.

  I went back to England and wrote a television story set in Moscow. There was a great deal in it about the Russian soul. When it was made, Emily played the part of the girl from a posh school, singing in a jazz club in the Arbat. The unit came to film in Moscow. Khasbulatov, the parliamentary speaker (‘He wears high heels and pinches women in the canteen. No one takes him seriously,’ one of Emily’s friends had told us) and Rutskoi, once a hero of the Afghan war, had pushed Yeltsin beyond endurance.

  Eventually he dismissed the parliament and our technicians, filming in Red Square, only found out what had happened when they rang their wives who had been watching television in England. Later the parliament building was fought over and destroyed. Yeltsin banned some newspapers and prepared for new elections with disastrous results. I don’t know what happened to the Goethe Mannerist. Governments may come and go, but the spirit of Gogol and his absurd, sad, outrageous comedy will always stalk the streets of Moscow.

  Chapter 25

  It had rained a great deal all the summer and for a long time, during the autumn, there was no frost. The leaves stayed on the trees far longer than usual. They turned yellow, red and russet; the maples seemed on fire and the beech woods on the hillside looked like cloth of gold. At long last the wind changed and blew icily, with flurries of snow, from Siberia. The leaves collapsed and fell, the trees made black patterns against the low and blinding sun. Another year was coming to an end.

  At the midnight service the village church is packed out. There are new, fresh faces, sons and daughters, and the sons’ and daughters’ lovers, who are brought there to while away the long, soporific hours of a family holiday in a converted cottage. The few church-going regulars, elderly ladies, a retired schoolmaster, can scarcely find a seat. I’m also there paying my annual visit. I stand up for the Creed but I don’t add my voice to the casual murmuring around me because I don’t believe in God.

  Lack of belief is also an act of faith; the one thing we can be sure of is uncertainty. The atheist longing for some deeper and more magical quality in living, and the religious man afraid he has devoted his life to a myth, have much in common. In ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ Browning wrote:

  All we have gained then by our unbelief

  Is a life of doubt diversified by faith,

  For one of faith diversified by doubt:

  We called the chess-board white, – we call it black.

  My unbelief doesn’t mean that I could do without churches. As the slow queue shuffles up to the altar rails, Paul Nicolson says, ‘You will be as much loved here whether or not you take Communion.’ Whether that’s true or not, I feel completely at home in this church at Christmas. Even as an unbeliever, I am part of a Christian civilization. Perhaps it’s in its declining years, but Christianity has been responsible for me. The poetry I value, the art that is important to me, have existed in a Christian framework and can’t be understood without a reference to Christian beliefs, even when they are rejected or used as a cover for more ancient and pagan celebrations. The politics I have adopted come from the Sermon on the Mount by way of Victorian Christian Socialists and the preachers in Welsh chapels. For this reason, if for no other, Christianity has to be treasured and learnt; without it we couldn’
t understand Shakespeare or Milton. Without the Bible, in the form it took before the new translation wrecked it, spoken English is reduced to the meaningless waffle now heard in law courts and the Houses of Parliament.

  So should I be sitting, huddled in my overcoat, while others kneel? Why shouldn’t the ungodly pay their respects to this superb invention, if that’s what they believe it is? Voltaire said that if God didn’t exist it would be necessary to invent him. But does it matter if God is man’s creation and He is, like the Greek gods, a supreme character in fiction? Fictional characters can influence our lives, and from a jumble of myth and history there emerged the revolutionary idea which has changed us all for the better: the belief in the supreme importance of each individual soul. Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov says that if human beings invented God ‘the marvel is that such an idea . . . could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man’. So celebrating Christmas in the village church is at least as important as going in a procession to lay flowers on Shakespeare’s grave.

  This night began the year long before the people of the Angli were converted to Christ; they called it Mothers’ Night and kept awake till dawn, in celebration, I suppose, of conception and birth. To the Victorians Christmas, with magical trees imported from Germany, wasn’t an entirely religious occasion. For Dickens Christmas didn’t mean the birth of a Son to redeem the sins of the world; it was about helping the poor and buying them a socking great turkey.