Homesickness (37 page)

‘I suppose not. I tend to take things too seriously.'

Garry began whistling a nationalistic ditty, though not loudly, absentmindedly. In mid-verse he zyvatiated, raising his glass. Then he forgot the words.

‘Well, look who's here?' Cathcart shouted. ‘Howdy, stranger!'

Doug stood up bow-legged, leather-faced, for the vaguely familiar figure.

‘Hey, buggerlugs,' Garry put out his hand, ‘I thought you were in the States?'

‘So I was,' said Hammersly nodding to the others, easily. ‘I thought I heard the old national anthem here. I thought: hell-o!'

‘Take a pew.'

‘Sit down, for Christ's sake!'

Hammersly found a space beside Sheila and unbuttoned his suit coat. He stood out in the group: was not one of them, tourists, something else. The natural rhythms of time, like sleep, had washed or softened the faces of the others. Problems of purpose and deadlines showed in the straight lines of Hammersly's face, the angles of his suit and the stripe of his shirt, a silk tie with the Windsor knot. Clearly, he travelled for a purpose.

‘So how's it going, Sheila?'

‘Watch him,' they yelled, not caring. ‘Watch out, Sheila.'

‘Fair go!' Hammersly laughed.

Give a bloke a chance.

‘I think perhaps I might retire,' said Gerald Whitehead standing up.

‘He's a dark horse,' Violet muttered.

‘We leave England shortly,' Sheila said to Hammersly.

‘You've only just arrived.'

‘It's what's called a Cook's tour,' Borelli chipped in. ‘But we're all having a good time.'

Louisa touched Borelli's hand. He was slouched in the chair. ‘Ah, there, Mrs Cathcart: you're back. How are you?'

Her glance showed she had noticed Louisa was more talkative than usual.

‘Doug and I have had a pig of a day.'

It was the sameness of things: being channelled by the worn avenues of London, the familiar facades, the humidity and the dirt.

‘I think we've done the UK.'

‘Hang on a sec,' Hammersly said to Sheila. ‘Don't shoot through.'

Desultory conversation. Fragments.

‘What's our next thrill?' Garry shouted. ‘Another glass.'

Borelli took Louisa's hand under the table; and North and Sasha retired upstairs.

On all fours, the night shift made its way along Number 3 shaft, a helmet occasionally scraping the roof. Bert, Wal, Eddy-boy, Ezra, Clarry, Mick n' Les, small men, cracking jokes. Arrrrh, yairs. (So that's where the accent comes from?) Another gang laid the line for the trucks, each man giving the other a hand. Creaking wainscotting gave a dim direction to the mine. Electric globes had been strung up at economic intervals. On the work-face though it would be lit up brighter than a Greek afternoon. Above their heads a polythene pipe the diameter of a man's waist supplied a steady cool wind and through its rips and perforations a labial
phssss
, as pronounced in the words photo or philosophy, or footslogging. And water which rapidly and constantly dripped met the floor with another sound: the way a bed-ridden old man stumbles over moist food and words. Obscenities had been scratched into the walls with pick axes.

Beginning at a former tube station in EC1 the mine followed a seventeen-foot seam of pure anthracite running in a straight north-easterly direction: supporting the City while undermining it. The mine had been operating for seven years. At Threadneedle Street and the Bank of England it followed a short-lived shoot at right angles. It then took a westerly direction, the transom tunnel known as Two Shaft, very rich, under Queen Victoria Street and the Embankment, burrowing under the Thames at Waterloo Bridge, stopping four hundred yards beyond hallowed Festival Hall. Here another shoot looked promising. An unexpected cave-in (14 March 197—) forced a retreat, left a cadaveric cul-de-sac (3.1 casualties). This exploratory shoot and the one beneath the Bank of England were coffered and converted to ventilation and service shafts, respectively. Blasting and shovelling, retreating, advancing, wrestling and installing rails and then the rubber conveyor belt and amenities, the men worked Shaft Number 3 night and day, due north, slightly by-passing Covent Garden (orders from above) because their blasting would upset the imported sopranos. Reaching the British Museum and the hotel, the tunnels duplicated on a grand scale, invisible to the naked eye, the shape of its own cross-section: π.

London itself in the early hours lay emptied and dark. It too had confusing distant lights in the air-sea of blackness. The slowly approaching car (shift-worker returning) and its solitary roar could have been the narrow-gauge loco on its way back for the last load. Water too ran down many of London's gutters, reflected the overhead bulbs. Working men wearing caps assembled at intersections the way the day shift below waited for the cage.

But inside the mine it was a different night, the density of centuries. It had its own space and proximity of things. The darkness was solid. And the coal had to be removed like time itself, piece by piece. The city slept: oyez, mouths and hands in the hotel rooms remained open, fingers apart, body temperatures and breathing down to a minimum in the quiet. Some men lay on their backs to remove the coal. Others scratched with the pick in the foetal position, crawling, blackened and grimacing. They were in the lower intestines, beyond the womb. A colony, another life down there: with its leather ledgers, artificial light, the grimy tea-urn and first-aid boxes marked with the thick cross. They had their rosters and hierarchies. There were subtle mockeries. Where the mine widened, at Level 4, a class of troglodyte timekeepers wore the blue shirt and neckties, sat at desks in a glassed-in ‘office'. The mine had its own momentum, its own laws and rules of time. It had its own narrow-gauge railway, and a system of bell signals known to all. In 207, two were commingled in drift and descent, one suddenly crying out. Hammersly turned her over. Others under their blankets lay as if they'd been flung down after an explosion: mouths, hands and legs apart. Gerald Whitehead had gone to sleep with his reading light on, his bags already packed. Violet lay nude. Phillip North in his dressing-gown stood looking out the window: the city, the vast machine, beginning to stir, rejuvenating. Light trucks shadowed like the zebras were radiating through the open tunnels. Beneath his slippered feet, a mile down, the men squatted over their bread and pies. Their mugs of tea held a black brew. Elbows rested on knees, they considered the fusain sandwiched in the rock behind them, the job ahead, their intention being to blast. Great tonnages were shifted, great movements unbeknown.

6

Yes, I went to Russia late February 19—. I was in a group. I was in the party. Fifteen thereabouts in all, well-educateds, in woollen tweed jackets, mainly British. The American schoolteacher—something wrong with him—his plaited Southern wife and kid were always the last to board the bus. Something wrong with him—built into his forehead. I remember that tall thin Englishman from Norwich who had almost no lips, very small eyes, forever looking over everyone's heads, complaining about the absence of tea. The lecturer in Russian from St Andrews University was pale, bald and bony: a living example of how a Slavic language can enter the convert's features. A plucky bulldog surgeon very neat in silken scarves and royal blue: she had a glued-on-nose, stout rubber-capped walking stick, result of a car crash. I forget her name too. For the first few days she and her husband who was taciturn and from Hampstead, I seem to remember, sat at a separate table with the Professor and his French wife—it was she who told me he was a Mallarmé specialist and a friend of J-P Sartre. Such behavioural patterns emerged after the first sit-down meals and excursions. A natural sorting process took place. Initially our group sat dispersed in the plane, concealed from the other passengers and even from itself.

The cold exhilarated us all. So did the expanse. Both sharpened our sense of proportions, of what things are or can be, as the Ilyushin crossed the northern border of Germany.

The land below became wide open, bare, all grey ice, emptiness, the same colour as our accompanying clouds and the dripping alloy of the wing. The jet went on and on labouring and labouring, as if it worked against a headwind. It was hard to know if we were making progress. It was the sensation of endlessness…that this extraordinary, barely coloured expanse can never end…which gave the impression. The ice and snow barely changed; villages were few and far between; forests were eaten into, clogged up with snow; the occasional long empty road looked like a line scratched into the metal wing; and so the simple fact of Russia's expanse and harshness signed itself into our minds. I thought of the madness of Napoleon and Hitler, the tail of long armies. How many boots and weapons must be buried under the snow? Other examples of platitudes (obvious truths?) abounded.

I remember the landing. I was taken to one side by a stone-faced officer. His long-coat was grey. He didn't mind the Penguin
Secret Agent
. He was concerned about my hardback on their revolution picked up secondhand. Curiously empty of colours and airport movement, the bare terminal caused the passengers to go quiet, more obedient than usual, a kind of confusion. He kept turning the pages and reading a paragraph at random, turning back, then forward. Trying to determine…I don't know. He saw the photograph of Trotsky in uniform and stared at me. Speckled green eyes: I saw the forests of Russia there. Eyes of a similar fractured perspective belonged to the guard in the buttoned overcoat checking each face—and mine—in the line at Lenin's tomb, close to the wall and the ashes of Reed and the cosmonauts.

This was Leningrad. Our hotel was that modern one alongside the Neva. Each floor had its samovar and an officious woman at a small table. She held a pencil over papers, keeping track of our keys. The ground floor had a purple carpet and a long enquiry counter. A row of wide-cheeked women there spoke patient English. A strange enquiry counter, looking back. The staff remained seated and since the counter stood almost chin-high we had to stretch on tiptoe and look down, while they looked up. I suppose it's still there. The Professor of French demanded to know if our freedom was being inhibited by the itinerary of the tour. He seemed to be making a point, insisting. I had to interject and tell him not to worry. In Leningrad you are free to go anywhere. Silver-haired and transparent-skinned he moved his lips as if he was chewing something small; not out of nervousness, I confirmed later—out of age. First impressions can be very interesting but are often misleading. He was a gentle, reflective man; impressive the way he had fun travelling with his wife. They were forever laughing. And delegations from Mongolia stood around, looking lost.

We, tourists, must have been conspicuous for being bareheaded. The Russian men and women and their children wore the same fur hat; and taxi-drivers and truck-drivers did so while driving. I seem to recall the sparse traffic consisted almost entirely of trucks. Green, grey or khaki their bonnets and radiators were fitted with quilted canvas flaps, rather like ear muffs. The lecturer from St Andrews wore a fur hat like the locals and appeared only at breakfasts. He'd been a student at Moscow University and went about visiting friends.

The Neva—like so many pieces of jigsaw on the map—was dramatically clogged up with broken ice, small icebergs, most of all under the bridges, and Peter's canals were frozen solid. Downpipes on many buildings had their water suspended a foot or more out, frozen in mid-air. Taking a stroll by the river I noticed condoms evidently flushed from various hotel rooms preserved in the ice like bloated toadfish, for all to see. A small unnecessary detail. The cold, not soggy like London's or Dublin's, was the true biting cold of insects swarming around the mouth and ears, especially as I walked along by the river. And the Russians kept saying how warm it was, much warmer than usual. Leningrad has more than forty bridges.

A loaf of bread cost forty cents. Taxis could be hailed only at designated ranks. Rent for an apartment was nine dollars a month, approx. Five cents on a bus can take you anywhere in the city. The streets were clean. Women were seen repairing the bridges. Others were climbing along steel scaffolds—plasterers. A sense of cleanliness, of emptiness, made some in the party complain it was drab. Few bright colours in the clothing, and no advertising signs. I was told that in Old Russian ‘red' is the same word as ‘beautiful'. Was it the lecturer in Russian? The three single Englishwomen travelling together, led by a particularly loud-voiced slide photographer reported how they were each fined ten roubles for jaywalking. In Leningrad it was oddly gratifying to see people crossing casually against the red light.

Leningrad's splendour had little to do with precision, spreading the way it did under the immense sky. Leningrad is in harmony with the land expanse. The town planners were instinctively easy with space. That was my impression. Such wide streets and squares—so many squares—and crescents and columns; and the architecture seemed deliberately, ‘unnecessarily' baroque, as if to busy the emptiness. Held low and broad the skyline accentuated the feeling. Even underground in the smart subways casual lavishness with space was evident, as in a Malevich suprematist canvas, or in the page numbers of a Russian novel or Herzen's autobiography.

There was scarcely a green leaf, a single shaft of grass, not even in the parks. Yet I remember the parks. Many times I think back to them. The trees were bare, the benches had couples resting after pushing a pram, and the floor of the parks was all ice, grey and streaked ice, like a river in flood among trees. Through it all people walked: figures in dark coats. Those strange frozen parks remain—Leningrad's beauty. In dramatic grandeur it was unlike any city I had seen.

I can tell you, the Russians were very pleasant, polite, except for the officer at the airport and the guards outside public places. Often I observed, however, a peasant stubbornness, a kind of moody irrationality. For example, in officials at desks, waiters at restaurants, in some taxi-drivers. This has been reported by other travellers. It can be irritating to some.

As in any foreign country there was the instant impact of the local people's faces. For several days these were as constantly curious as the windows on the buildings which all had deep double-glazing to keep out the cold. I found myself staring at them: at the tundra hairlines of the men, their cheekbones, eye-sockets and pallor. Being surrounded by such faces underlined my visitor's status. That is, in the streets I felt conscious of my foreignness, of that definite separation from the nearby faces. As a further reminder they seemed to take no notice of me or the group. We didn't exist. I remember sensing that in a crowded bus.

Our guide supplied by Intourist was a student—Natasha. She was slender and had her hair tied in a pony-tail, yet she was somehow disorganised. Natasha was pensive, slightly sad even. She spoke always with her lips pursed. Her mother had been a ballet dancer. It was quite sad when we came to leave. (The Professor of French gave her a present on our behalf.)

‘Natasha,' that English bluestocking slide photographer would call out through her nose, insistent, ‘Natasha, what is that there? No, no, Natasha. Over there.'

There is no doubt being in a foreign country rejuvenates the powers of observation and sense of wonder. In Russia I felt that wherever I turned my ‘experience' was being broadened. I think Russia, especially, does that. It gives that impression. I said to the American schoolteacher…

I noticed among couples a conspicuous amount of arm-holding: wives with their husbands, and pairs of men too. Someone in the group merely put it down to habit, a result of the cold. I don't think so. I sent an inordinate number of postcards to show friends (‘Dear Comrade') that I was there in Russia, and they were not. The best was a colour photograph of Lenin's blue Rolls Royce, a Silver Ghost in a Moscow Museum. Skis had been fitted under its front wheels, and a caterpillar track grotesque but no doubt practical replaced the elegant back wheels.

Many reasons can be given for visiting the Soviet Union. The dark-haired Brazilian (in our group; I forgot about him), always laughing, wanted to see Communism for himself. He wasn't impressed. I think we all wanted to ‘see Communism', a Communist country. Certainly that was a large reason for going. Outside an enormous shop for children the tall Englishman nudged me, ‘You know what that building is next door? The Lubyanka.' He nodded significantly. Next to a toy shop: ironical, you see. But there are other reasons for Russia. The Professor of French was interested in the art collections and early Russian architecture. ‘My husband,' his wife said, ‘knows much about Manet.' He kept asking to see a wooden church. Churches I was told are called
Pokrov
, meaning ‘covering' or ‘protection'. Again this must have come from the lecturer from St Andrews. He asked questions for us in Russian and sat up front with the drivers enjoying conversations.

For anyone interested in the history of the Revolution, Leningrad has many landmarks. It can feel eerie standing at these places. In Russia you can sense the force of history: the spot opposite the old Singer sewing machine building where the Czar was assassinated; the terrible open space before the Winter Palace; the Finland Station and Lenin's preserved locomotive; and so on. Russia. Doesn't expanse and tragedy exist in the word?

Yes, there is much evidence, remaining from the Second World War, traces of the siege of Leningrad. Shrapnel-marked walls and chipped corners, and German bunkers near bus-stops, the cemetery and the reconstructed villas, have a profound impact. Such marks must mean something or have a constant effect. I found myself searching the faces and again noticed the wives holding the arms of the men. No city in Australia, none in America for that matter, possesses such scars. Two pudgy New York girls (in the group; I clean forgot them) went to the ballet and the renowned theatre for children. The language, the climate, the foreignness, the sense of drama, of past events: quite a panorama. Absurdly, too, I think many of us had the vaguely thrilling feeling of being in forbidden territory. And there was the food: the different soups, borscht, their smoked fish and so forth. Vodka, not Smirnoff's either. In a foreign country there is always the cuisine.

Interesting how in a group certain figures stand out for some reason or other while others remain level, or recede. The group began as complete strangers. I'd clean forgotten about that Brazilian doctor. He had a wife, beautiful face, who rarely spoke, only nodded and smiled. Some in a group like the tall Englishman remain clear through their complaints. I remember he was the only one who wore gloves (yellow suede and wool-lined). There was another woman in the group in her mid-forties—I only vaguely see her face. She latched onto the baritone spinster (with the camera) and friends. Others created a presence by their very silence, attracting questions and glances. It was interesting how certain people gravitated to one another, first in conversation, followed by regular seating positions at tables and in transport, then walking together towards the next spectacle, a building or a museum. The group subdivides into smaller groups. How in the space of a week most of us became silently irritated at the frowning American, his wife and kid, when they kept the bus or the meal waiting yet again. Travelling makes us tired, perhaps due to the constant state of heightened awareness. It is a series of anecdotes, visual and personal. Towards the end the tall Englishman told me his wife had left him a few months before, so he decided to take a package holiday. Those two New York girls were fun. One was an actress; imagine forgetting her.

Standing at the front of the travelling bus Natasha bent down to point out the statues of famous men and their preserved houses. I saw Gogol's nose dripping with snow. In Russia you hand your overcoats to an attendant, an old man, immediately on entering a public building. Dreaming of Russia I often see the coats, heavy overcoats, whole racks of them and the old men who take them, or the distant dark coats in the frozen parks.

At Heathrow we shook hands and departed. A few such as the Professor and the actress exchanged addresses. I wonder if they ever met again?

Sometimes I think of the group, but no one person stands out. Perhaps that is only natural. I have more the view of wide buildings standing back in the frost, the dirty snow and ice, and the way my curiosity in all things was lifted to a proper alert pitch. Scraps of general knowledge and images are interconnected by great spaces and the wide sky. The cold and foreignness in that sense acted as preservatives. Individual faces in the group have faded, their names forgotten.