‘There was a big oak back home,’ she said, ‘that was scarred with initials. “JBW loves LJ.” Funny it should come into my mind just then like that. “BH loves S.” Ah hell, what’s the use?’ She pouted viciously, for some reason, at the bright Baltic outside. ‘That bitch,’ she said, and Paul still couldn’t understand the viciousness. Besides, he wanted to explain the Russian alphabet to her.
‘Their pi is our pee,’ he said. ‘The letter, I mean.’
‘I didn’t ask for a letter,’ complained Belinda. ‘A card would have done.’ And then, ‘Ah hell, I’m going out. Who do they think they are, anyway, making us stick in like this? I’m going to see that man Stroganov or whatever his name is. Some mail may have come aboard.’ She strode energetically to the door. As soon as she opened it a female voice shouted:
‘Nye mozhna, nye mozhna!’
‘Hell, what’s that she’s saying?’
‘She says you can’t,’ said Paul. ‘We’ve got to wait in here.’
‘But it’s so goddamn childish.’ Nevertheless she came back into the cabin, as though the corridor bristled with knouts. Frowning and restless, she lit one of her king-size cigarettes and blew smoke at Paul. ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘I ought some time to tell you——’ Paul looked up, smiling kindly, from neatly printing the C in PASTERNAK. ‘Ah hell, what’s the use?’ she said. And then the knock came and Paul’s heart jumped. The door opened and a Soviet official walked in.
‘Dobriy dyen.’
Paul had already suspected, from his brief experience of the sea-Russians, that here was a people he was going to have to love. Now, with the ambling in of his first land-Russian, the suspicion was confirmed. For how was it possible to hate or fear this harassed clerk in a customs uniform as ill-cut and skimpy as coolie-dress? (Of course, this was high summer; the effect of the winter uniform might be different.) He was middle-aged, lined, he had his worries; you could see him going home from them at the end of the long Soviet day, fat kisses from his wife, the samovar bubbling, the kitchen reeking of beetroot, children running to lisp their sire’s return. A family man, he assessed the ages of Paul and Belinda, then decided to be their uncle. He kept his pungent papiros in his mouth, he smiled, he enfolded their right hands in turn in two warm paws. And then he wanted the cases opened.
‘We wear all these,’ said Paul, his voice tight and high. ‘At least, my wife does.’ The customs-man peered in at the chemical dresses, nodding, spilling papiros-ash on to them. ‘A matter of perspiration,’ said Paul. ‘Pot,’ he translated. Dissatisfied with that, which sounded vulgar, he tried ‘Potyeniye’.
The customs-man understood. ‘Shvet,’ he said.
‘It’s this book I’m really worried about,’ said Paul, presenting Dr Zhivago. ‘Can I bring this into the Soviet Union?’
The customs-man examined it with little interest, flicked through the pages as if looking for old tram-tickets, then handed it back. ‘Mozhna,’ he said. ‘Can.’ Then he went back patiently, making crooning noises, to the dresses, counting them gently like some old Chinese laundry-hand.
‘Oh God,’ said Belinda.
And then, to his huge relief, Paul saw that the customs-man was not really interested in the dresses; he accepted Belinda’s alleged hyperidrosis with rather insulting readiness. He was looking for something else. Paul frowned, puzzled, as the blunt warm Soviet fingers dug into a sponge-bag. They pincered out a full and a near-empty tube of Dentisiment.
‘Ah,’ in triumph. ‘Narkotik.’
‘No no no,’ smiled Paul, ‘that’s a substance for making loose false teeth stick to the … What I mean is, I have these four bottom false teeth here in the middle, look, and what with the shrinking of the gums, you see …’ The Dentisiment advertisement had been rather more coherent; the customs-man looked not at all convinced. ‘Denture,’ said Paul, showing. ‘Ryahd zubof. That stuff is a sort of klyey, if that’s the word, for loose ryahd zubof.’ Belinda began to laugh, showing teeth all her own. ‘It was for you I lost them,’ cried Paul hotly. That was true. Borrowing that bicycle that time on their French holiday to go and get the doctor because she said she had appendicitis and then wheeling smack (wrong side of road) into a Renault. It was he who’d needed the doctor; her appendicitis turned out to be only wind.
‘Narkotik,’ persisted the customs-man.
‘Nye …’ Paul said, and went through the motions of lathering. ‘Nye …’ he said, clenching his teeth and shaking his fist at mouth-level.
The man shrugged: what else could it be except some narcotic? Anyway, to be on the safe side, he was going (and no hard feelings, he evidently hoped) to confiscate. He put the tubes in an inside pocket.
‘But what am I going to do?’ cried Paul. ‘The damned things will fall out.’ And he tried to wrest the Dentisiment back from the customs-man; the customs-man, a reproving uncle, slapped him sharply, though without rancour, on the wrist. Belinda laughed.
‘Ah, damn it all.’ Paul was angry. ‘I won’t be able to get any more, not in Russia. The blasted thing won’t stay in.’ He blushed, hearing himself say that. Perhaps, then, yesterday, after the Russian cognac there had been no roast beef of Old England for an effete Yankee. He hadn’t asked her and she’d said nothing. Perhaps the holiday hadn’t really started yet after all. And now teeth were going to drop out.
The customs-man asked Paul how much foreign currency he was bringing in and recorded his answer on a form. He chalk-crossed the suitcases, humming and smiling, and, before leaving, again wrapped both his warm paws round each right hand. But he would not return the Dentisiment.
‘Come on,’ said Belinda, following the reek of his fresh papiros, ‘let’s go and get some nice cool Soviet air. And see that man Stroganov.’
Paul groused to himself. In the corridor he saw teeth, Soviet teeth and teeth of Soviet satellites, flashing in the flash-bulb’s instant from the wall-newspaper near their cabin-door. There had been wall-newspapers all over that RAF camp, he remembered, tacked up by a grim commissar of a flying officer, also portraits of a wet-lipped sulking bulldog, their war-leader. It had really been a kind of Russia, really, the Services. This ship’s wall-newspaper had the usual punning heading—‘MIR MIRU’. The Russians seemed proud that mir meant both ‘peace’ and ‘world’, as though that were a specifically Soviet achievement. There were glossy press photographs of Khrushchev embracing emergent revolutionary leaders all over the peace or world—bearded, in fez or songkok, all well-teethed. Paul’s quaternion of false ones was, he knew, soon going to be loose.
There was nobody around the administrative area. The saloon was full of Immigration, Intourist, expostulatory arms. Paul had had their joint passport stamped already, so that was all right. As for their hotel, well, that was Mizinchikov’s responsibility. Poor dead Robert had kept in touch with occasional pen-pal letters in Russian, describing the Changing of the Guard and the British Weather; Mizinchikov had replied in primary-school English, saying that everybody was very happy in the Soviet Union. That was just to keep the engine ticking. And then the cable, only this time Paul had sent it: ‘DOUBLE ROOM PLEASE ASTORIA JULY 4 REGARDS.’ Robert’s signature, of course; everything could be explained later. Mizinchikov knew what the cable meant, as well as what it said; Paul knew what Mizinchikov looked like: he had a snapshot given to him by Sandra—Mizinchikov embracing Robert in Leningrad Port, a background of gantries, sunlight, hammer-and-sickled ship’s funnels, gulls. Poor dead Robert, slim till death and no grey in hair which, had he been a woman, would have been called honey-coloured. Fat laughing Mizinchikov, a Mongol-straight lock over a Coleridge-type brow, roaring his happiness. Russia seemed a great place for happiness. It was a colour-photograph, taken by some third unknown. First seeing it, Paul had realized with a shock that the Soviet Union must be coloured like anywhere else; it was not just grey, as in spy-films. One was learning all the time.
Meanwhile the ship rode steadily in, the great city’s skyline becoming more and more clearly defined. Chaika,
chaika went the gulls, announcing that they were Russian gulls or chaiki. They screamed and wheeled, beaked hungry maws planing on the wind, their greed as whining under one régime as another. Buoys, tramp-steamers, launches, brown faces laughing up, teeth white and gold. And the gold breast of St Isaac’s flashed like an old dull filling. Paul and Belinda leaned on the taffrail, squinting at that distant relic of Holy Russia. Students leaned too, sullen and still hangoverish, but Paul recognized no one from the Atheists’ Ball. And then Belinda was tapped cheerily on the shoulder. They both turned to see the ship’s officer she called Stroganov, the purser, a young man whose sad Asiatic eyes belied his brave smile. He had a fistful of mail. ‘For you,’ he said, ‘a postcard. From Sandra. You do not mind if I read, it is good for my English.’ So even Sandra was being folded into the great Russian family. Belinda snatched it, saying:
‘Oh, you …’ She devoured it like a potato crisp. Paul saw a Lake District view. ‘The bitch,’ went Belinda. ‘She’s gone to Keswick with that bloody ——. I knew all the time she would.’
‘Who, darling?’ said Paul. ‘Let me see.’ But she angrily tore the postcard quarto, octavo, then scattered the scraps over the side. The gulls came mewing, dipping.
‘That is astonishing,’ smiled the purser. ‘I can say “astonishing”, yes? That will be with sudden rage at this Sandra.’ And he pointed to Belinda’s neck. The rash, with chameleon-speed, had flared up to a kind of burning purple, the texture of porridge.
5
‘I MEAN, WHAT CONCERN OF YOURS IS IT REALLY, DEAR, Sandra’s morals, I mean? Morals surely don’t come into it, do they? What if she has gone off on a little holiday somewhere with somebody? She must be very lonely. Especially with us away.’ Something about ‘or ere those shoes were old’. ‘I just don’t understand this newfound posthumous concern about Robert,’ said Paul, thinking he did understand it. Or perhaps did. ‘Sandra’s got to start a new life, hasn’t she?’ No reply from the bunk.
The ship’s doctor, looking in drilon not merely beautiful but desirable, had repainted the rash and administered a mild sedative. Paul’s stomach rumbled. He’d neglected the flat unresonant gong-call to an early disembarkation dinner to sit here by Belinda. He fidgeted. The luggage was piled outside cabin-doors like rubbish. Starboard now had a monopoly of sea; to port was the strangeness of diminished light, landfall’s obtrusion. To arrive anywhere was unpleasant, imposing small responsibilities which were harder to bear than the great moral and civic ones: the winches’ squeal and the shore-voices sounded derisive. Soon they would have the pain of having to start to know a new city. He wished Belinda would be fit and lively and cheerful and awake. His little wedge of false teeth was as loose as toffee in his mouth. He knew he could understand all this Sandra-and-guilt business if only he had the time and lack of distraction to mine deeply enough. He could almost press down that first charge now, feeling that if she and Robert, Robert teaching things in bed, that is to say, Robert would at least be alive again if they were … What he meant to himself was, no need for Belinda’s guilt really, certainly no transference of self-reproach to Sandra … Oh, now was no time for thinking about that sort of thing, was it? He wished to God she’d wake up and blink and smile, rub her neck in wonder to find the rash gone, then say, ‘I feel wonderful. Let’s go.’ But all she did was start to snore gently, as though settling down to a night’s sleep. This would not do at all.
And this nervous hunger. He had repeatedly pressed the button which should summon the stewardess, but the whole ship, as a working organism, seemed to have gone dead now, except for the trundling away of the baggage. And where was Yegor Ilyich, his adoptive nephew? Ashore undoubtedly, telling laughing stories, his lower lip a ruby, of how he’d drunk quarts of a silly Englishman’s cognac. Belinda went on snoring in relaxed slow rhythm. Paul fancied he could hear excited noise in the distance, the noise of disembarking passengers. There was no need to panic, he kept telling himself; the ship, having butted to the end of a blind alley, was not going to sail on anywhere; the day after tomorrow it would turn around and be outward bound for Tilbury; there was plenty of time. But he wanted them both to be normal, to join the disembarking queue like everybody else. A nervous hunger for conformity was what it was.
Paul couldn’t keep still. He went out into the corridor and found his luggage had gone. It would be awaiting his collection, he assumed, in the Sea Terminal. Supposing, he thought confusedly, the little customs-man had started to talk about somebody who had what would seem to any ordinary person an excess of drilon dresses (it was none of his business, of course; the lady apparently sweated too much; still, it was something new and perhaps amusing, a topic for gossip) and somebody brighter and higher up had decided to have the bags opened up again because there’d been a lot of this smuggling in of capitalist consumer goods lately and attempts to wreck the Soviet economy, and this, a large number of dresses, seemed to be it at last, a genuine catch and perhaps—who knew?—leader of the smuggling ring and a little torture under strong lamps, bald bullet-heads looking on, the reek of papirosi which was really the smell of prison, would perhaps elicit the names of everybody involved on this side, and so——
Help! Paul almost ran to the comfort of decent laughing disembarkers who thronged the port side of the ship. Everybody was looking down, laughing. Paul pushed in at the rail and saw that the androgynous doctor was being carried ashore, well-rugged and wrapped, despite the sunny warmth of an evening that promised to be endless. The wheelchair was being bumped down the steps of the gangway, Madox blowing at the rear, a surly blue-denimed porter at the front taking the weight, bowing to it as to imperial whips, the wattles and cheeks of Madox and the doctor chattering at each jolt. The doctor cried to the jeering students:
‘Louts! Board-school scum! You will learn, all of you, never fear!’ The skinny silver hand held a dog-headed Malacca stick at its ferrule, shaking it in impotent threatening.
It was, Paul now saw very clearly, too much of an act, something for a masque; there was something fishy going on. To his relief he saw also a sort of bogie riding up a ramp, its load passengers’ baggage; he thought he recognized theirs. There would be time, time, if he could drag her ashore now. ‘Leningrad,’ he breathed. He devoured the port in a single blink: the people waiting to greet with flowers, their clothes ill-cut as by prentice dressmakers and tailors. Crates, cranes, a film-team of all girls in deplorable flowery frocks—clapper, camera, director. That Iron Curtain was a mere fright for children, then. Smoke, haze. They were here, and it was the same as anywhere else. The bogie reached the ramp’s summit and entered the port building. Bogey was the word; Russia was a Hallowmass bogey. It was just people waiting, smoking, with flowers, their shoes or sandals abominably made. Dr Tiresias now entered it, the first, pushed by Madox, up that ramp. The students cheered. Paul ran back to the cabin. Everything changed at once; time changed, place changed: a cabin was a room where you were suspended between departure and arrival. Leningrad disappeared, and there was only Belinda, still snoring.
‘Dearest.’ He shook her roughly. ‘Come on, we’ve got to go ashore.’ She did not respond. Shaken on to her back, she presented an open mouth to him. It said only a snort. She seemed well out, that sedative was not so mild after all. He shook her quite violently and heard strange words, words from the underworld: ‘Gart … fairgow … lublu …’
How strange! She knew no Russian, and yet here was an approximation to the Russian word for ‘love’ bubbling up from the depths, as though James Joyce had really been the inventor of everybody’s unconscious. Earwicker was Everybody. Robert had been, for a time, keen on that. Robert had taught him quite a bit, he supposed. He shook and shook and shook Belinda, but soon saw it was going to be hopeless. He sat down in the airless cabin and lit an English cigarette, then, between puffs, tongue-juggled with the denture, now completely loose (wedge it with a pledget of cotton wool perhaps?). Mizinchikov would probably be waiting at the hotel, aware of time of disembarkation. It
would be a relief to get all this dirty business over quickly. Of course, she would be awake in an hour or so, but still …
Even if Mizinchikov were not waiting, even if he did not come to the hotel tonight, it would be safer to get those bags out of the shed out there and lock them in a hotel room. He could leave Belinda here, taxi to the Astoria, taxi back to the ship (the ship could not move off; it was all laid down in the agency’s timetable: two days here, then Helsinki, Rostock, Tilbury, Le Havre. The ship would still be here, Belinda asleep in it, when he got back.) He tore out a page of his diary and ball-pointed a message: ‘Darling, have just gone to hotel to make all arrangements, don’t worry, will be back at once, hope you feel better. NOT TO FEEL GUILTY.’ After three seconds of deliberation he deleted that last injunction. He shook her two or three times more; she did not stir. Satisfied that he was doing the right thing, he went out, carrying his raincoat. At the purser’s office he saw a small rounded officer he had never seen before and suddenly lost all confidence in his Russian, he could not tell why. He performed a brief mime against a background of disembarking students (haversack-carrying, grown long-haired and scruffy for the occasion; he saw that delectable fallen angel of last night, now jerseyed and sluttish, her accent coarser). The little officer watched with patience, his brown eyes compassionate, while Paul mimed that his wife was ill and under official Soviet sedation and she had better stay on board asleep while he …
‘Da da da da,’ went the officer like a baby, laying comforting hands on Paul. Paul joined the disembarkation.
He was jostled down the gangway and then tripped, for he suddenly found himself in the middle of a confusion of hearty Russians, smelling of Georgian wine, borshch, harsh tobacco, most of whom he seemed to know. It was the Soviet musicians being welcomed home—Korovkin, Yefimovich, Vidoplyasov, Kholmsky, others, all looking like decent artisans on a day out, carrying brown-paper parcels and cardboard suitcases, greeted by women with thin bunches of sweet william and smacking kisses. He, Paul, Pavel Ivanovich Gussey, was somehow all mixed up in this loving group, so that a little girl leapt on him like a dog and washed him with a fury of affection, and a toothless babushka, lined and tanned like a gipsy, cackled and held out brown arms that were all intertwined cables. Clap went the clapper-girl, another girl brought a hand-mike, Paul could see sound-recording going on in a lorry, film began to whir on the sprockets. Paul was in it, a sizable chunk of Soviet newsfilm, and couldn’t get out. ‘Uluibka, uluibka!’ the film-girls were calling, meaning they wanted a smile. Paul obliged, showing a fair upper row and a bottom row whose middle four, unsecured by Dentisiment, were ready to drop on the quay at any moment. Behind him he heard a voice, female, Manchester, saying loudly, ‘That’s a bit of a mockery, him being a friend of Opiskin’s.’ Comrade Korovkin seemed to recognize him as somebody who, though a foreigner, had something to do with Soviet music, and grabbed him with a beefy friendly hand. The camera recorded all this, the sound-apparatus Paul’s shouting ‘Oh hell’, running away up the ramp and escaping into Russia.