The Russian Jerusalem (11 page)

There was no regret for Gorbachov, however.
Glasnost
had depleted their incomes, since the Russian people now lusted after pornography from the West. The following day, Yunna was going to Perm to give a reading, and she told me there would only be a small audience. Less than four thousand, she thought. I had to ask her to repeat the figure. When she came to read at the Cambridge Poetry Festival, I reminded her, we were proud to muster four hundred. But what happened in Great Britain no longer mattered to her. Only the United States could offer her what she needed. She planned to travel to a university there next spring and to supplement her Moscow earnings with a term's teaching.
She was a warm, ebullient, powerful woman whose world had collapsed.

I am lucky, she conveyed to me. There are people more trapped than I am.

And Aliger was among those too frail to make such a journey. A sorrowful brown bird, she seemed to me, though I knew she had unexpectedly made a late marriage to a younger man in the last year. Not long after my return to London, a few weeks after she heard of her daughter's death from an overdose of sleeping pills, she died of a heart attack in the street.

Yunna Moritz, on the other hand, became more and more imperious as her life became difficult. Some time in 1998, while I was writing a life of Pushkin, I visited her at home in Moscow. She sent her husband to collect me from a Metro station and bring me to her flat. He was her third husband, I think; a calm, patient man who must have needed all his gentleness to cope with Yunna.

I was wearing the amber necklace – which looked like a string of yellowing animal teeth – that she had given me on a visit to Cambridge. She said it would protect me. And there was a period in the 1980s when I wore it every day, superstitiously, as Tsvetaeva might have done, even to collect the post. I told her as much, but she was not amused by my story.

Indeed, I began to be aware of a banked-up fury underneath the warmth of her welcome. She was angry with me because I knew so little about what was going on in Moscow that year. The anarchy. The brutality. The way murder for a few roubles had become commonplace. Corpses were left for days untended on the subways. The week
before, her son had been taken into hospital with a head wound and she had been unable to find him for three days.

Her flat was small and she did not want to talk about Pushkin. Everyone talked about Pushkin, she told me crossly. And his courage. Was it so brave to tell the Tsar he would have been part of the Decembrist revolt if he had been in St Petersburg? It was no more than a clever stratagem. Rather than Pushkin, she honoured Ryleev, who had actually
been
on Senate Square and was afterwards executed in a horribly bungled hanging. A fine poet and a genuine liberal, she insisted.

She came close to accusing Pushkin of tacit collaboration with Nicholas, though she backed off from calling him a
trimmer
. I did not argue strenuously. I could not help feeling that she was talking about herself, and the contrast between her own fortune and those of other poets who were now coming into prominence. She shrugged off the names I mentioned, and showed little admiration for any, even her own contemporaries like Bella Akhmadulina. An era had ended, and she was not optimistic about what was likely to come next.

To me, she seemed indomitable. And, for all her pessimism, she continues to write and publish. As I left, she gave me her latest book: children's poems with her own illustrations. I gave her mine, though I doubted she would read it in English.

Writers' gifts.

Some time in the winter of 1978, I was taken by Yevtushenko to see Pasternak's grave in Peredelkino.

We left the car near the Pasternak dacha, a two-storied wooden building, not yet a museum. One of the rooms on the upper floor was lit, but this was a spontaneous visit after a Moscow party and there was no question of disturbing whoever was living there. We walked across a field to the Writers' Cemetery.

The great poet's profile in bas-relief on the gravestone was peaceful and grand. I remember a dark blue sky and a light scattering of snow on the ground. Birch trees lay behind the gravestones and there was an unlit candle at the foot of the grassy mound.

‘Seventy years old,' Yevtushenko said, more to himself than to me. ‘An amazing age for a Russian poet.'

On this visit, my husband was travelling with me. While I was taken in Aliger's chauffeur-driven car to look at the place where Tsvetaeva's childhood house had once stood on Three Ponds Lane, and the flat she and Seryozha had lived in at the corner of Boris and Gleb when they were first married, my husband visited the distinguished immunologist Raoul Nezlin, the son (I later discovered) of one of the Jewish doctors imprisoned by Stalin at the time of the ‘Doctors' Plot'.

Nezlin was in some minor trouble himself in 1978, and
had been denied foreign visitors. An interesting deal was struck, whereby my husband visited a friend of Nezlin's in the same laboratory, evidently not so restricted, in return for chemicals which were hard to obtain but available to Nezlin.

For supper we went together to that friend's flat, which I was astonished to discover was much smaller and far less well furnished than Aliger's. Poets were evidently accorded a higher status than most scientists. He seemed to find that unsurprising, and spoke of Aliger with great respect. When I mentioned I was meeting Yevtushenko the following day, however, he could not conceal his hostility. He was, we had already discovered, also Jewish, and I thought he ought at the very least to be grateful for Yevtushenko's courage in recalling the massacre of Jews at Babiy Yar.

He agreed. But that was then, and now, he managed to convey, Yevtushenko was no more than a tool of the regime.

Suspicions of Yevtushenko were not yet commonplace in the West, though there was always some astonishment that he was allowed to travel so freely when other writers had trouble with visas. He was, of course, an unashamed advocate of Socialism – of Lenin rather than Stalin, he was at pains to point out – and I assumed his charm and enthusiasm were explanation enough for the licence accorded to him. He enjoyed some of the same privileges accorded to Ilya Ehrenburg a quarter of a century earlier, and for rather similar reasons. He made friends easily among artists and writers everywhere, especially among the European Left.

His ebullience was unmistakeably genuine. He took us to shop for food in the covered Georgian market, where it was possible to buy fresh vegetables even in the depths of winter, a rarity in those days. He bought a huge slab of beef
for our lunch, and a string of dried mushrooms for me, so strange in their beauty that I absolutely could not imagine putting them into soup as he suggested. Once back in Cambridge, I kept them so long in a tin they went mouldy before they could be used.

With the shopping complete, he took us back to his flat. He lived in one of the huge central blocks built of steel, stone and hard wood like the subway, which were once supposed to be set aside for Stakhanovite workers. There was none of the clutter we had seen in other Russian flats. In fact, it would have seemed bare if not for the art on his walls, notably a magnificent Blue Period Picasso. I stood in front of this for some time, before asking how he had come by it.

Smiling, he told the following story.

On a visit to Paris, in the early days of his own celebrity, he had been invited to meet Picasso in his studio. The painter was delighted with the lively, uninhibited young Russian and took him round his
atelier
before offering to give him any of the new paintings that he liked. Yevtushenko walked around, trying to decide, but found that none of the new paintings attracted him. To Picasso's amazement, he admitted this problem.

Picasso was not in the least offended. He chuckled: ‘Until this moment I never really believed that Dostoevsky story about Nina Filipovna throwing a hundred thousand roubles into the fire – but now I see it is true. Simply Russian.'

We laughed, although I pointed out that the story in no way accounted for the Picasso on his wall.

‘Ah. The following day I went round to meet Fernand Léger's widow, and told her the story. She beamed with glee. She felt Picasso had stolen much of the glory that
belonged to Léger. ‘You are right,' she said proudly. ‘Everything Picasso does now is shit,
n'est ce pas
?'

Yevtushenko agreed politely, but then became aware of a picture on the wall of her flat, a painting of a woman at an ironing board. With as little tact as he had shown Picasso, he pointed to it and confessed: ‘But
that
I do like.'

Her gaze followed his finger.

‘
Like
it? You can
have
it,' she said, and there and then made to take it from the wall.

Yevtushenko helped her and accepted the gift happily, which was how the painting came to be hanging in his flat.

The following day he took us to meet his ex-wife, the flamboyant poet Bella Akhmadulina, who was living with her third husband, the stage designer Boris Messerer, in a huge flat which was attached to the Bolshoi Theatre. I remember a long corridor filled with props: many varieties of old flat irons, buckets, tongs, and metal fenders.

Yevtushenko ushered us through the flat into the huge kitchen and there, on the oak table, were little pewter saucepans filled with the same dish of chicken liver and nuts that we had eaten at the Writers' Union.

At the stove stood Akhmadulina, the Queen of Moscow poets. I thought she had gone to a great deal of trouble, and said so. Yevtushenko said glumly: ‘She didn't cook for me.'

I believed him. She is a striking beauty and her poems do not suggest she could ever have made a conventional wife. In one poem she is a woman in a fever, burning and shaking so fiercely that the doctor can hardly examine her. Her neighbours are disgusted by her strangeness. In ‘Rain', she arrives at a smart party soaked through, and is brought up to the fire by her disapproving hostess to dry out. The eager cries of the guests remind her of the way a
crowd would once have urged a witch into the flames. Even more than Tsvetaeva, she relishes the thought of having supernatural powers.

Yevtushenko called her writing of ‘I swear' an inner Rubicon. In this short fierce poem she gives the name of Yelabuga, the little town on the Kama where Marina Tsvetaeva took her own life, to a fairytale monster which she threatens to kill:

The poem ends with the Yelabuga turning a single yellow eye in the poet's direction. These are poems which could easily be read politically, and Akhmadulina has often courted trouble, but there is something playful in her. And she is never altogether reverent. Hers is a genuine Tatar name – unlike Akhmatova's which was assumed when her father objected to her writing poetry – and Bella enjoyed making that clear. They had never been close friends. Akhmadulina told a story about one of her rare meetings with Akhmatova. She had offered to drive the ageing poet to a dacha close to Moscow but unfortunately Akhmadulina's car stalled at the traffic lights and, despite a desperate struggle with the starting handle, lifting the bonnet and calling on the help of several passers by, the journey ended ignominiously. Akhmadulina drew herself up to her full height, to mime Akhmatova's magnificence as she decisively refused the offer of a lift in a friend's car: ‘I never make the same mistake twice.'

I had one further task to perform while I was in Moscow. Before leaving London, the playwright Michael Frayn, whom I know only casually, had asked me to find out what was happening to his Russian translator, Nyella, who was in some kind of difficulty. He had suggested I should not telephone from the hotel, so on our last day I asked Masha if I could use her mother's telephone.

Nyella answered nervously, and was alarmed when she heard I was from London. Immediately she plied me with a flurry of questions. I was unable to answer any of them. Frayn and I were far from close, and not only did I not know the name of Frayn's first wife, I had no idea how many children he had. I was afraid she would hang up on me.

Before she could do so, Masha took the telephone and explained that I was phoning from the flat of Margarita Aliger, and that I was a trusted friend. Nyella then gave me her address and I promised to go and see her on the evening before our flight home. My husband and I decided to go together.

Prospekt Vernadskovo. Somewhere in the northern suburbs. I did not at first recognise the address, though we had seen it before. In London. It was an address we had been given of a house where unofficial seminars took place for
refuseniks
, people who had applied for a visa to emigrate to Israel, and lost their jobs for doing so. Eminent scientists from abroad visited them, and distinguished writers too.

Since I knew that I would need several future visas to complete my Tsvetaeva biography, I had decided not to give the authorities such an easy opportunity of refusing me entry. I had even taken the typed address out of my luggage in case it was searched. Now I was travelling towards the very house, and quite soon very noisily.

Prospekt Vernadskovo was out in snowy suburbs, where no one cleared the snow as they did in central Moscow. There were frozen piles to the height of a house on each side of the road, though little channels had been dug at intervals through the thick walls so that people could make their way through to their homes. In the starlight, the snow had a blue gleam, and there was little traffic. The temperature had fallen far below zero.

Once in Prospekt Vernadskovo itself, there was an unexpected problem. We knew the house was Dom 99, but the numbering of Russian streets follows no obvious order. Several times our taxi paused and our driver ran through a channel to check the house numbers, only to come back shaking his head. Several times we had to turn in our tracks. We could hear him shouting to an occasional resident. It was getting late. My thoughts began to turn apprehensively to our early morning plane.

Then a large, bear-like figure of a man dressed in a furry coat flagged us down. It was Volodya, Nyella's partner. We got out into knee-high snow, paid the taxi and followed Volodya into a block of flats, or rather bedsitters, where, as we soon discovered, an interesting group of people were living, among them the nephew of the artist Naum Gabo. Once they heard there was a visitor from the West, all the residents piled into Nyella's tiny sitting room bearing vodka and tins of sardines and made us welcome. They sat on bare floorboards between sticks of chairs, some broken.

All were
refuseniks
. Their poverty was obvious, but they were far from gloomy. I asked one of them, a young
pale-skinned
boy with narrow lips and a heartbreaking smile, why exactly he wanted to go to Israel. He was astonished. ‘Because being a Jew in Russia is not easy, of course,' he replied. ‘To get into Moscow University, for instance, we
need 10 per cent higher marks than an ethnic Russian. And the other students at the Conservatoire hate us. They learn it with their mother's milk. You won't understand that because you aren't Jewish.'

‘But I
am
,' I replied. ‘Surely I look more Jewish than you do, with my dark hair and black eyes?'

But he remained sceptical. I suppose each country recognises its outsiders by different clues.

‘When, as a child, you hear the way they say
Yevrei
, something curls up within you for ever. It is worse than
Zhid
, which is almost friendly.'

He was not religious. He was a musician. There would be many such on the pavements of Tel Aviv once the floodgates opened.

We did not leave until it was time to go and collect our cases for the plane to London. As we left, Volodya gave us two black wooden carvings of a priest. A large one for Michael Frayn, and a smaller one for me. Much later, rumours of Volodya's activities as an icon smuggler reached me.