‘With our name on the labels? Do me a favour.’
‘Go and get them early in the morning, then. Throw them into the harbour. Anything. I knew,’ she mourned, looking fearfully out at the big dirty street, ‘I knew all the time we shouldn’t have come. I had this presentiment.’
‘Chuck away all those potential roubles and nickers?’ said Paul. ‘Do me a favour.’ He was shocked at his speaking in that pert slangy way. The Cockney spadger of a driver, that was what it was; he had always been suggestible. ‘No,’ said Paul. ‘What I shall have to do is to turn myself into a retailer. Sell the dresses in lavatories and so on. They’ll go like hot cakes, man. Woman, I mean. Darling,’ he said, taking her hand, ‘how are you really? Are you really all right?’
‘You shouldn’t have left me like that. In a strange country. You should have known better. Going down that goddamned gangway on a stretcher. I was ashamed. And they had this very old female nurse in the ambulance—it was a terribly small ambulance, no bigger than a minicab—and she had my head in her lap and was crooning old Russian lullabies or something. And, oh yes, the two other nurses were male nurses, and one of these kept cuddling me, but not in a sexual way at all. Anyway, the whole thing wasn’t right. It was as though they were just taking me into the family as some of these big slum families were so big already they used to take in just any poor kid from the street. That street,’ she said of Nevsky Prospekt which they were just crossing, ‘seems a pretty big street. That, I would say, is really imposing. But shabby. And kind of anonymous.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Well, no names. No sky-signs and advertisements and things. It’s not a bit like London. Or New York, for that matter. No,’ she said, ‘it’s very far from being like the States.’
He saw better than she probably did what she meant by anonymous. It was all nameless the way everybody in a family was nameless; names were for strangers. All the shops and stores and warehouses here were in the family. ‘One thing it’s not meant to be like,’ he said, ‘is the States. Do you mind about that?’
‘And yet,’ she said, ‘I kept getting kind of a whiff of when I was a little girl. I wonder why that was. Do you know what I mean?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Paul, ‘Russia is really everybody’s past. Not everybody’s future but everybody’s past.’
‘Oh, that’s crazy,’ said Belinda. The driver found himself entangled in people who were trying to board a tram; he mimed that he was so entangled, his back very vigorous. Then he neatly drew up outside a dark place with dirty glass doors, the name ‘Metropol’ (in the current script that was so unlike print) sprawled across them. If light and gaiety were here they were well wrapped in darkness; it was as if the war were still on. An old man like the postman of Douanier Rousseau was on guard. When Paul had paid off the taxi-driver this old man opened up a dim passage-way. It reminded Paul of a municipal library after closing-time, the local literary society gathering upstairs. And then, seeing on his left a sort of inset rough eating-shop that was shutting and being angrily swept, he remembered that disastrous war-child of Winston Churchill—the British Restaurant, with its sour-faced servers, floors filthy or else wet from the mopping, the diarrhoeal niff of liquid cheese from the kitchen. But, as they mounted the bare curving stairway, they could smell the heat of gaiety above, like some guffawing popular magazine in its drab public-library folder. Belinda seemed much better; she ascended jauntily towards the noise of jazz which wasn’t quite jazz—dzhez, rather: it was fiercely Russian under the corny sax-and-trumpet configurations of ‘Lady, Be Good’, some desperate martial melancholia brewing up.
Here it was again—the old solid Russia preserved in Tsarist décor: piano nobile, vista of white napery, complex chandeliers like ice-palaces shaking to the thud of the dancers. The dance-floor steamed with fox-trotting engineers, electricians, transport workers, all with bulky unsmiling wives; there were small uniformed men, whom Paul took to be cosmonauts, twirling with girls who glowed as from the farm, their firm bodies apparent through skimpy summer dresses; here and there were the very young, thin-legged in jeans or tights, jiving. A rich though grubby drawing-room, fussy with plush and mirrors, separated the dancers from the diners. At the moment it was loud with Italianate waiters in white jackets and tennis-shoes, all combining to throw out two Dostoevskian drunks. By the door of this room was a cigarette-machine glowing the letters ‘ABTOMAT’; it had gone mad and was whirring out free cigarettes to a gleeful group who were cramming them into their pockets. ‘Follow me,’ said Paul. He thrust through, Belinda clutching his sleeve, to the dining-room.
White, white, light—just like that hospital revelation. There was even the smashing of glass, but this was in drunkenness, not rage. Paul could see at once that formidable drinking was going on. ‘Pozhal’sta, pozhal’sta,’ he kept excusing himself, pushing, squeezing.
‘My God, the heat,’ went Belinda.
As with the heat, the eating and drinking groups at the tables had expanded into the aisles, sturdy legs wanting leg-room, elbows needing space for the swilling act. The heat bounced back from mirrors and chandeliers; heat danced in the vodka-glasses. ‘Here,’ cried Paul. It was the table from which, to judge by the swilling mess on the cloth, unsmoked cigarettes opening like flowers in a pool of beer, the drunkards had been evicted. But it was a table for four, and opposite sat a young artisan, his arm round his wife or girl, forking up fried egg from a kind of cakestand with the hand that was free, while she—not a pretty woman, her hair gollywoggy and a top incisor missing (thank God, Paul’s bottom quaternion still held, but how sore the gum was)—poured beer and giggled. ‘Well,’ said Paul, as he helped to push Belinda in, ‘now at least we can have a drink.’
The corks of Russian champagne-bottles exploded: bubbly for the workers. Their table companions had bottles of Budvar, a flask of vodka, a pinkish viscid liqueur which the young artisan—putting down his egg-fork—sipped with fat red lips. Over in a far corner a wild-haired giant stood up to toast something amid his table’s roars. There was a group of young men who seemed to be students, but not Russian students, singing something that sounded nevertheless Slavonic, their spilling beer-glasses swaying in rough rhythm. A serious man and his family celebrated something, all seriously drinking. ‘Oh God,’ said Belinda, ‘I’m so dry.’ Waiters, having disposed of the drunks, went leisurely to and fro with trays of beer, Georgian muscatel, warm-looking champagne, vodka, cognac. Paul made ingratiating gestures, lolling out his tongue, heaving his shoulders in the metre of desperate panting, pointing to his wife’s thirst, swooning up his eyes in death’s throes. Two respectable-looking citizens meanwhile seemed to have a vodka-drinking competition of two minutes’ duration; another champagne-cork popped and sweet warm champagne spurted; a man emerged from his beer-glass with frothed lips.
Paul panted more shallowly, his hand on his heart, crying to the nearest waiter, ‘Pozhal’sta, tovarishch.’ All waiters continued to ignore his pleas.
‘I shall die,’ threatened Belinda, ‘if I don’t get a drink soon.’
Waiters cheerfully or solemnly gurgled wine into glasses and levered off crown-corks. They smirked at Paul and Belinda indulgently as if they were a television play about dipsomania which they hadn’t time to watch. Then Paul noticed the source of the tray-loads—a zinc-topped counter at the end of the room, a white-overalled masseuse of a woman presiding, on her hair a tiara-shaped white head-dress. He pushed his way (‘Pozhal’sta, pozhal’sta’) towards her. The woman got behind her cash-register, frowned, then tried to shoo him away. ‘Beer,’ begged Paul. ‘Piva, piva, piva,’ he translated, crescendoing like some desperate bird. The woman beetled more nastily and sneered, ‘Nyet.’ Paul was becoming tired of all this bossing by stocky females. He saw where the beer was, crated duodenes of it stacked between counter and wall, and went to help himself. The woman came, raised two formidably muscled arms, and began to hit him. Paul, who had had enough for one evening, wanted to cry. All he asked was
a bit of peace over a couple of cold beers. He felt tears of self-pity pricking his eyes as he backed away, weak, done, arms at his sides.
‘What you must do,’ said a male voice, ‘is go back to your table and wait till the waiter comes. You both wait, dig?’
The speaker was a young man, tall, in a sports shirt unbuttoned at the neck, its rolled sleeves pushing up into the very armpits. His denim trousers were skintight. Paul, wiping his eyes, saw hard-as-hurdle arms with a broth of goldish flue breathed round, scooped flank, lank rope-over thigh. The blue eyes were wide-set, the nose had generous wings which were now, in time to the dzhez from the next room, twitching independently and alternately. The hair was hyacinthine, curling over the shining brown forehead. The mouth was good, wide, meaty, gently smiling. This young man, without changing his relaxed stance, shot out an arm like a chameleon’s tongue for speed and caught a passing waiter. He spoke rapid Russian which Paul partly understood.
‘Thank you,’ said Paul. ‘I do appreciate that. We’re both dying of thirst.’
‘He’ll bring it to your table, dad,’ said the young man. ‘No trouble at all. Though maybe you could spare …’ He made rapid V-signs to and from his lips.
‘Cigarettes?’ Paul searched himself and found, next to the massive room-key which was weighing him down like a lateral pregnancy, a crushed ten-packet of Player’s.
‘Cigarettes,’ said the young man, accenting the word, in the Jewish-American manner, on the first syllable. ‘Thanks, dad.’ He examined the bearded sailor, the lifebelt, the sea and said, ‘British.’ Paul frowned, trying to assign the young man to a national group. American? But he was no tourist (too relaxed, settled, ill-dressed). He had spoken Russian like a first language. And now it was spoken to him, angrily, by a cross dark girl with a Chinese fringe and kohled eyes, wooden beads chattering round her neck, dressed in a puce sack-like garment and black stockings, the left knee with a hole in it.
‘As for your nationality …’
‘It’s a long long story,’ said the young man. ‘Remind me to tell you, but not now.’ Hearing a waltz strike up, he twitched his nostrils in triple time. The girl spat more angry words. ‘Relax, relax,’ said the young man easily. He winked at Paul and then pulled his girl towards the dancing, parting some fresh quarrelling drunks like a curtain on the way. Paul breast-stroked back to Belinda. High was the term, high; everybody was getting a bit high.
‘Look,’ complained Belinda, ‘what they brought was these. I didn’t order them. They brought nothing to drink, either. I’m parched.’ On the table were some salty-looking fish, shining in oil. The young artisan opposite had finished his fried eggs and was pungently, his right arm still engaged, boring into an orange.
And then—‘Thank God,’ Paul prayed, ‘Slava Bogu’—a waiter brought Budvar beer, glasses, a hundred-gramme flask of cognac. ‘The same again,’ ordered Paul before even pouring. And now the young artisan, apparently pricked by that ‘Slava Bogu’, took notice of the Husseys. In mime (indeed, it was hard now to make oneself heard above the singing, shouting, toasting) he seemed to indicate that there was, in spite of the official line, a Bog somewhere up there in His heaven, but that this Bog was not a very good one, as He allowed poverty, pain, H-bombs. His girl or wife, whom he still held embraced, looked shocked. He used the near-ruined orange as a prop, dripping juice from it from a height to symbolize rain or fall-out or mercy, solemnly making it gyrate in orbit to show that the world or the moon or the man-made satellites danced roundly on in Bog’s spite. Paul found he could now talk very fluent Russian, but he had to shout to be heard and that made him cough and drink more. The waiter, the point now being established that the Husseys were to be served like everybody else, was prompt in refilling the cognac flask and fetching more beer. The evening was now really beginning.
The young artisan could not pay his bill. He was two roubles thirty kopeks short. His girl-wife hit him and he sulked. Paul told the waiter that he himself was willing to make up the difference, but the waiter frowned that that would not do, there being the question of face. The wife (now vividly, dull gold ring and all, revealed as such) shouted very clearly that she would bring the money tomorrow. The young artisan’s eyes filled with tears. The waiter, now turned brutal, shoved him away unresisting, from the pathetic scraps of his feast—little cakes, sweets wrapped in paper, orange-peel. And his wife joined in the pushing, reviling him as he shamefully tottered off, pitiable in his drab workman’s clothes.
A phase of brutality seemed, in fact, to have broken out all over the restaurant. The tough woman from the counter was going round with a pledget of cotton wool soaked in ammonia (its smell rang astringently like some denouncing Puritan) and this she rammed up the noses of those who snored in drunken sleep. They woke crying and swearing. She rubbed the sour rag in the eyes of the harder cases and they woke dancing in great pain, blinded. A small group of waiters seemed to be kicking a customer, but their tennis-shoes could do little harm. The students were brawling. A young bearded man had climbed on to the empty bandstand, crashing music-stands over, and was punching the piano in vicious boogie-woogie. Two men started dancing together in the narrow aisle, and their clumsy animal fox-trot thumped into tables and sent bottles flying. Parents began taking children home.
‘I,’ Belinda suddenly announced, ‘want to dance too.’
Paul looked at her curiously. She seemed dangerously well; her eyes were like gems. ‘We can’t,’ he said. ‘Not here. And that place next door looked terribly crowded.’
‘You had your fun,’ said Belinda, ‘and now I want to have mine. You danced last night and I’ll dance tonight.’
‘Alone, you mean?’ Bog knew what drugs these mad Russians had been squirting into her. ‘Look, dear, are you sure you’re feeling all right?’
‘Fine, just fine. Come on, let’s dance.’ She said this last word in film-American.
And then there they were, fox-trotting away in the aisle (but the aisle was fast losing its definition) with Paul murmuring ‘Pozhal’sta’ to tables they bumped into.
The students ceased their brawling and cheered; one blond god shouted, ‘Oh yes, I dance you.’ The boogie-woogie expanded to symphonic length, reached a manic climax of repeated discords, then abruptly changed tempo and became a blues.
‘I hate to see,’ sang Belinda, ‘that evenin’ sun go down.’ She was too well to be true. There seemed no sign of the rash, her legs moved in easy rhythm.
‘Enough,’ said Paul. ‘That’s enough.’ The pianist thought so, too. Like a child he grew tired of his music, the instrument, and slammed his hands anyhow—crash thud crump—on the keyboard.
‘Temper temper,’ said Belinda.
‘St Petersburg Blues,’ said Paul. ‘Come on.’ He led her back to the table and there, having taken the chairs of the young artisan and his wife, were the dark kohl-eyed girl with the chattering beads and her boy-friend, that young man who had been so helpful at the zinc counter. ‘Well,’ said Paul.
‘If you don’t mind,’ said the young man. He V-signed, as before, from and to his lips.
‘You’ve got through those already?’ said Paul. He searched his pockets. ‘It looks as though I haven’t …’ That big room-key bruised his fingers.
‘You sound American,’ said Belinda, frowning, puzzling. She took a packet of king-size cigarettes from her bag and offered them.
The girl shook her head impatiently; the young man said, ‘Thanks.’
‘My wife,’ said Paul, ‘is from Massachusetts.’
‘What is an American?’ asked the young man, jetting out smoke from his nostrils after a long draw. ‘What are un-American activities?’ He looked with sudden bewilderment at his girl, as wondering whether she might be one of them and, if so, what his attitude should be. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is Anna. My own name is Alexei Prutkov. Is that an American name?’
‘So,’ said Belinda, ‘you are from the States.’
‘I was born,’ said Alexei Prutkov, ‘in Brookly
n. My dad came from Smolensk. His dad came from Nissogorsk. He took him, that is, his dad took my dad, to America when he was only five. My dad. Five years of age.’ He looked from Paul to Belinda and back again, twiddling his left forefinger at them in a gesture of doubt as to whether he was making himself clear.
‘Well, that makes you one hundred per cent American,’ said Belinda, smiling. ‘And this is the Old Country and this is you paying it a visit. Glad to know you, Alexei.’
‘Alex will do,’ said Alexei Prutkov. ‘And I’m not paying it a visit. Dig?’ He looked from Belinda to Paul and back again, shyly. ‘Is that right?’ he asked. ‘I pick up what I can, here and there, from tourists and newspapers. Dig. Way out. Crazy, man. Cool. Things like that. I’m a bit cut off.’
‘There are certain things,’ said Paul amiably, ‘that I don’t at all dig. If you’re not paying the Old Country a visit what are you doing here at all? Studying? In business?’ The little world of aisles and separate tables was fast disintegrating. The more violent drunks had gone. Other young men, though none with girls, were drawing up chairs to the Husseys’ table. The students who had been brawling were now marching about like convicts, hand on the shoulder of the man in front, singing.
‘My dad had cancer,’ said Alexei Prutkov sadly. ‘He said he wanted to die on his native soil. And there was only me left, dig, as my mother had eaten something in what they called a hash-joint and died. My mother, my mom that is, was what they called a Bohunk. So there was me and my dad and my dad never got further than here. He never saw Smolensk. He died in the Pavlovskaya Bolnitsa.’
‘Ah,’ said Paul, glancing swiftly at Belinda. The name evidently meant nothing to her.
‘He’d had some very special ideas,’ said Alexei Prutkov, ‘as he got more and more ill. He said he didn’t like the way things were going in America. They kept using this word “Commie”, which was like Jew or nigger, because his name was Prutkov. Then there was this man Senator McCarthy. My dad said there was no taste in the food. He talked a lot about Smolensk as he got more ill. It was as though he knew a lot about it, but he left when he was five, just like I told you.’