The Russian Jerusalem

 

 

That September, St Petersburg was a city of freezing rain, blown horizontally into the eyes of anyone walking the streets in the direction of the sea. And St Petersburg is a landscape of sea and sky. When it rains, the brown skies and wet streets are continuous.

I'd rented a flat just off Sadovaya Square in a poor area of the inner city. The Square itself was filled with cranes and boarded up with planks. Taxis brought me through an archway into a dark courtyard with unexpected holes going down to the plumbing. There might be sable coats and French
haute couture
in the glass-fronted shops on Nevsky Prospekt, but the streets just behind were still open to the sewerage.

The flat, on the ground floor of a stucco building pitted by weather, was owned by a molecular biologist. He had a PhD from a university in the States, and a research job in an Institute of Biochemistry, but his pay was sporadic and he lived on the rent from the flat and his wife's classes in psychotherapy. These last were eagerly sought in
post-Communist
Russia. She used one of the rooms by arrangement three times a week, and there were tapes of sixties American folk music, and a sense of alternative hippy culture.

Handing over the keys to me, he insisted the flat had to be locked and chained even when I was inside it. Burglaries are understandably commonplace, though I'd been assured by a laconic friend as I set out for St Petersburg, ‘There's much less street crime. The Mafia has got its act together.'

It was a spacious flat, but very cold because central heating remains under the control of the municipal authorities, who turn it on every year at the appointed date, regardless of the weather. The flat's only other form of heating was a single bar electric heater. In 1998, when my husband was still alive and travelling with me, he lit the flames of the gas cooker in the kitchen to save us from hypothermia. Now he lies buried in Willesden Green cemetery.

For the most part, the tenants round the courtyard were Korean. At the end of the street, wooden booths sold bread, and milk. Old women in bulky clothes with their hands in mittens weighed and sliced sausages. They also sold drinking water in unlabelled polystyrene containers the size of petrol cans. This I did not trust and found it worth walking round the square to a small supermarket to buy bottled water, which was necessary even for brushing my teeth. The liquid which comes out of St Petersburg taps has a nasty bug, even if residents have become immune to it.

Once, on an overnight train to Moscow, two rumbustious, vodka-drinking industrial chemists explained the presence of the famous bug. The source of St Petersburg water remains as clear and pure as a Highland spring. It is the filtering mechanism that is infected: a telling image for that network of hands – Joint Enterprise, old apparatchik or opportunist – whose greed has polluted the Russian dream of a Western free society.

This remains Peter's city, built on the tears and the corpses of his slave workers, who dragged earth on old sacks and bark matting so that the grand Rastrelli palaces could glow in the water of the River Neva. It's also the city of Pushkin's Queen of Spades, where poor Herman stood looking up at the Countess's window while large flakes of
wet snow fell on his greatcoat; Akhmatova's city of granite and disaster; the Petropolis of Mandelstam's dreams, where the streetlights look as yellow as drops of cod liver oil in the sleety mist.

It was never my city, though I had visited many times. My family never lived here. They moved from the
stetls
of Belorus in the last decades of the nineteenth century to find homes in Britain, Canada or Latin America or went south to Odessa, a city of acacia trees and street cafes, dumplings and seed bread where half the population were Jews, many with a Russian education.

So what draws me to this city where only wealthy Jews were allowed to live under the Tsar, and where they suffered like everyone through civil war, Stalin's Terror and Hitler's siege? Not the glories of the Hermitage, though no visitor could reach the end of the European art collected there: the Matisses, the Impressionists, the paintings stolen from German collectors. Not the dark green painted stucco of the Winter Palace either, nor the golden curlicues on the staircases within, the marble columns, the jewel box ceilings. Not the great statue of Peter the Great on the Embankment, not the golden dome of St Isaac's.

I am here for ghosts.

Below street level on Mikhailovskoye Square, the legendary cellar of The Stray Dog has opened once again, though for tourists now, not the great spirits of the Silver Age who once gathered there after the theatres closed and often stayed talking until dawn. To reach The Stray Dog, you still have to descend a narrow stone staircase, and enter a low doorway. The windows of the café are blocked even now, as if to keep out the everyday world, but these days the walls
and ceilings of low, curving plaster are no longer painted with flowers and birds in brilliant colours.

A blink, and Osip Mandelstam, barely twenty years old is there, with his long lashes, and a lily of the valley in his buttonhole, sitting at a side table with Akhmatova, a melancholy young beauty with a black agate necklace. Princess Salomea Andronikova, his Solominka, sits at the same table. They are drinking chilled Chablis and eating white
bulka
rather than black Russian
khleb
.

Thirty years ago I was ensnared by the dangerous glamour of those ghosts, a glamour much to be wished for if you come from a town in the English Midlands. My own roots always drew nourishment from elsewhere, and I grew up passionately aware of it.

My parents came from very different families, but both of my grandfathers were Russian Jews. My mother's father Solomon was a glass merchant; small, sandy haired and clean shaven, with starched triangles to his white collars, and a single rose-cut stone in his tiepin. He was a crabby man, but an able one; his sons went to Cambridge, and changed the family name to Compton as they entered the English establishment.

It is my other grandfather I remember, however. Among my earliest memories of our little house in Groby Road, Leicester, is a large ginger-bearded man seen through the slats of my cot. He had blue eyes with deep laughter lines, and I never saw him anything but cheerful. I thought of Menachem Mendl as my Russian grandfather.

He was not a fastidious man. Perhaps he wore a suit when he went to the synagogue, but I don't remember him doing so. His cardigans sagged at the back and he smelled of peppermint and snuff. His large yellow handkerchiefs were chosen to disguise that habit. He left his cigars
half-smoked
in ashtrays all round the house. My mother folded her lips tightly as she collected them up. When he drank lemon tea from a glass in a metal holder, holding a lump of sugar in his mouth the while, he said it was always drunk so in
der heim
. I was not sure then what country he came from, but he was old, had a strong accent and his gestures were not English. I was taught to call him
Zaida
, not Grandpa.

And I liked his stories. When I sat on his knee, he told me about scholars and dreamers, and young men and women dancing together in the forests. He had lost the top joint of one of his fingers, and showed me the stump of his smooth, unmarked knuckle which had healed perfectly. He was a dreamer, too absent-minded to be left in charge of a circular saw.

About his own childhood Zaida spoke little, but he had lived for a time in Odessa, and that he described with love: the bustle in the wide streets, the music everywhere, and the liveliness of the Jews.

When I was eight, my father bought a plot of land in Elmsleigh Avenue and built a big house on it. It was a leafy bit of Leicester, a suburb in the south of the city, where neighbours dressed quietly. He was proud of the oak floors and doors of solid wood. Each room had its own colours. The dining room had russet tones, picked up in the huge stone fireplace. Zaida lived in the large front room with a bay window and delicate lilac colouring, sleeping in a wide put-u-up bed, opened out for him by my father at night and covered with a rug of patchwork squares of thick velvet during the day.

Sometimes Zaida lamented the absence of Jews in Leicester. Certainly there were few living nearby, though the war brought Jewish refugees, market traders from
London, and Jewish servicemen from America, and my father invited them to our home for meals.

The adventures of my forebears are not my only connection to Russia, however. For nearly forty years I have been infatuated with their poets, their very being as much as their genius. It is something to do with the love between friends that I first understood reading Nadezhda Mandelstam's
Hope Against Hope
. Poetry underpinned that friendship, and I found it enviable. There is an intensity to Russian friendship which is stronger than the passion of sexual love.

Long before I put a foot on Russian soil, I had close Russian friends, first among them Masha Enzensberger, a white-skinned beauty with high Tatar cheekbones and blue eyes glittering like frozen sea, recently separated from the poet Hans Magnus. We met in the bar of the University of Essex, and talked through my version of Tsvetaeva's ‘Attempt At Jealousy', a poem we both had reason to treasure. Masha was unhappy in England, homesick for Russia, yet unwilling to spend the rest of her life in the Soviet Union. She resembled her father, the novelist Fadeev, whom she had met only rarely; her mother was the poet Margarita Aliger, then well-placed in Moscow. Masha travelled between Moscow and Cambridge, where for a time she had a Fellowship at King's College. There she entertained lavishly, striking a glass to command
Russian-style
toasts from sheepish Cambridge dons. For me, she was the voice of Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry, which she read – while keeping her name out of the
Radio Times
– in a series of radio programmes I put together in the 1970s. We often shared our troubles, but she was more deeply troubled than I knew. I saw her last in a Moscow of brown streets, puddles and people still shaking with euphoria after defeating the
military coup in 1991. She had been among the women who held hands to confront the tanks. The victory excited her so much she was unable to sleep. A few days after she returned to London, she took her own life.

Through Masha, I met many Russians, including Princess Salomea Andronikova, Mandelstam's Solominka, herself at that time living with Anna Kallin in a Chelsea flat. The princess was still beautiful, and I admired her poise. I remember only that the china was pretty and that Salomea, even in her seventies, still looked exquisite. I imagined it was her husband, the banker Halpern, who had left her so well provided for, but it turned out the flat was the gift of Sir Isaiah Berlin. I was far closer to Vera Traill, whose rackety life had stranded her in Cambridge in her sixties. She was the daughter of Guchkov, a great industrialist, who was a member of Russia's short-lived Duma in 1917. In her childhood, she remembered being driven around in one of the few cars Moscow could boast before the First World War.

Masha disapproved of Vera profoundly. Rumour had it that she had been, and perhaps still was, an agent of the NKVD. I was more intrigued than disapproving. Vera had been in Spain; she had escaped from a German prison camp. I admired her Marlene Dietrich bones and bold manner, and knew that in France she had been married to Peter Suvchinsky, one of the founders of the Eurasian movement, and so a close friend of Tsvetaeva's husband, Sergei Efron.

It was this last which brought me to visit her for the first time in the Cambridge hospital where she had been taken after a fall.

‘I hope you haven't brought
flowers
,' she greeted me without preamble. ‘What I need is a bottle of good red wine.'

Fortunately, I had been alerted this was the case, and poured red wine into a cup which should have held Ribena. After her first mouthfuls, she was eager to tell me about an encounter with T.S. Eliot some twenty years earlier. He had agreed to see her, but they had not hit it off. Somehow she managed to convert that snub into a criticism of Eliot's prudery. I was impatient. I wanted her to talk about Tsvetaeva, but she seemed reluctant to do so and even when she began I could hear that, although she admired Tsvetaeva's poetry, she did not like the woman. She chose to condemn her slovenliness but I guessed what she found most offensive was an arrogance founded on talent rather than beauty. Of Sergei, however, she spoke warmly.

‘He was handsome, genial, friendly,' she said. ‘
Of course
I liked him more than her. When I was in hospital, having a child with great difficulty – I had to lie with my legs up in the air so as not to lose it – he came to see me every day.'

She deplored his fidelity to Tsvetaeva: ‘There
was
another woman, you know. She was Swiss, and her father a millionaire. Sergei could have gone off with her, but he refused. He decided she was not the right one for him and stayed in Meudon with Marina. And do you know the reason he gave? He said he couldn't leave such an important poet.'

Over the years Vera told me many stories, in her low, cigarette-husky voice. To some I listened with polite incredulity. Most have since turned out to be true. One day, when she was entertaining me in her shabby bedsitter on the far side of Jesus Green, she described her return to Russia in 1937, the year the Russians call the
Yezhovchina
, when Yezhov, then boss of the NKVD, organised the most murderous of Stalin's great purges. When she visited Yezhov, he stood up without preamble to warn her in
agitation: ‘Go now. See no one. Go straight to the airport and leave. If you stay here, I cannot protect you.'

She obeyed, and reached Paris safely. I failed to ask what she was doing, calling on Yezhov in the first place. I know now that she had gone to plead for the release of her lover, once a prince, then a dedicated Communist. It was with him she had returned to Russia two years earlier. His arrest and disappearance had been unexpected. I did not enquire what her relationship had been to Yezhov.