Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (54 page)

But it is not in my nature to abandon him, a sentient being who would not survive being rejected again. He would die without me. He is completely dependent on me, to the last hair on his long silky ear, and he would be equally in the power of anybody else in whose hands he found himself. The world of the rich has produced such a numerous, ever increasing caste of abandoned dogs, van Gogh’s brothers. These people buy van Goghs as toys, play with them, tire of them, and kick them out. If they’re lucky they are returned to the breeder who sold them and don’t just find themselves on the street. They have no monetary value, and no one values a living soul devoted to you to its very depths.

I understand that not everybody who has money is bad. Not all vets are rip-off merchants. Of course not. Only why do we have packs of abandoned pedigree dogs sniffing around our gates?

It is evening once again. I turn the key in the door and van Gogh hurtles to greet me from wherever he is, every time. No matter how his stomach may be hurting, no matter how soundly he might have been sleeping, no matter what it was he was eating. He is a radiant perpetual motion machine of love. Everyone may abandon you, everybody may take umbrage against you, but a dog will never cease to love you.

I take him, I lead him to the car, I drive him over the road. I leap alongside him to get him to jump about with the other dogs in the square. I show him how he ought to play with them. I run the obstacle course with him to help him overcome his fear, and I take him over to other men. I take their hands and stroke van Gogh’s ears with them, and try to persuade him they are not dangerous.

WHAT YOU SEE AT THE END OF THE WORLD

June 2006

I was recently in Australia at the annual Sydney Writers’ Festival and couldn’t resist a little tourism. Having failed to resist it, I now can’t keep quiet about what I saw. The following are just the jottings of a tourist.

I have never seen a chapel or a naval base like these, although I have seen plenty of both. I had been told I must see a really curious place of worship, only it was in a naval base. Admittedly, it was an old Australian base, but still … So there I was at the checkpoint with my knees knocking, long conditioned to the knowledge that checkpoints are bad news. You don’t get through them, or, if you do, only under guard.

In the goldfish bowl sat a cheery, suntanned officer who glanced casually at our passports and did not stick a rifle in our backs and tell us to get out. He was delighted that somebody was interested in visiting
his base. “Have you come to see the chapel?” he asked. “Do you know how to get to it? You want to drive there? Of course. No probs.”

He groped somewhere behind him and let us through. A recently democratised Soviet citizen’s brain had difficulty coping with such free and easy behaviour: how could we be admitted to a naval base without having the car inspected, without even a look in the boot? What if it was packed with explosives? You even get checked nowadays if you want to drive into the Luzhniki Sports Complex in Moscow, just to relax and smell the flowers. This Australian officer, so woefully lacking in vigilance, continued whistling to himself, loafing in his chair, his body language totally at variance with my expectations.

At last we reached the chapel. Picture it: Australia is at the end of the world, you can’t go any further, and this naval base is right at the end of the end of the world, on a stunning, high promontory jutting out into the Pacific Ocean. It hovers above it. Our chapel was at the very end of this end of the end. When you enter you are suspended above the ocean, and moreover the chapel’s far wall, behind the altar, is made of glass. When you look at the altar it is like praying to the expanse of the ocean and the lofty, amazingly blue sky above the sea. Your prayer is to that great Ocean of Peace to protect and preserve you. A chapel in a naval base is built not for open-mouthed tourists, of course, but for those putting out to sea, and sometimes never returning.

This is a chapel which discriminates between faiths no more than the waves, which are wholly indifferent to the religious affiliation of those they swallow. Red-headed, fair-haired, curly-haired, hook-nosed, the Pacific engulfs them all impartially.

No doubt the chapel has a nominal affiliation, and I can probably guess which, but as you stand before the altar looking out to the end of the world, this place feels pagan. All those ingenious interventions placed between man and nature, this sect, that cross or another, or no cross at all, dissolve and become meaningless. You are communing with the sea, even if out of habit you call it the Almighty. You ask it not to take you, and there is no philosophy beyond that, not a hint of that universal human error of recent times, the belief that we are the all-conquering rulers of the earth.

Otherwise, the chapel is simple, like a plainly constructed hut. In addition to the rear wall, the façade is glass, and if you spin around you feel that both you and this cliff jutting out into the ocean are floating in the sky. The chapel is furnished with benches, their cushions embroidered with naval insignia, and on the walls are lists of those who did not return, and a cross. I was going to ask the officer at the checkpoint about the denomination but thought better of it. What do the specifics of faith matter?

The cheery sentinel waved us goodbye, and our incursion on to the territory of a military site was over. I am no uncritical admirer of the West who imagines that everything is better and purer there than in Russia, but I have to admit that it is far more common there to encounter something warm and human.

Sydney is a mixture of a city, which makes it seem strange by comparison with anywhere else. The center appears on the one hand to be pure London, but on the other pure New York. With that wonder of the modern world, the Sydney Opera House, looking out towards the harbour like the open lid of a shell, the central area resembles New York; with the exception of the Opera it is a concrete jungle of skyscrapers with narrow avenues between them. Fairly comfortless, highly urban, as linear as anyone could wish.

But it is only superficially New York. When you start reading the street names you are amazed: everything is just like in London: Hyde Park, King’s Cross, the station and the adjacent district. There is a Paddington, and even an Oxford Street, and it too is very long. The names of London streets and places have been transplanted, with only a light admixture of local exoticism. King’s Cross Station in Sydney, for example, is located in Woolloomooloo, an Aboriginal name Londoners could not imagine in their worst nightmares.

The Aborigines, admittedly, are in short supply. Woolloomooloo there may be, but Aborigines, the indigenous inhabitants of Australia, there are not. Search as you may, you will find none in the streets of Sydney.

Australia was born in tears and did not hold out the prospect of an easy life. In the late eighteenth century there was a crime wave in
London, and England, running short of prisons, hit on the idea of finding an island on the other side of the earth where it could dump its criminal elements, with the Exchequer bearing only transportation costs. Once the criminals were there they could be left to survive as best they could, a way of thinking similar to the Tsarist regime’s view of the island of Sakhalin.

Captain Cook was given the commission by his government and duly performed it. Soon convict ships were sailing to the distant land he had discovered, the convicts were disembarked, and their survival was then very much up to them. There were already people on the island who bore little resemblance to Captain Cook, strange, dark-skinned people talking mumbo-jumbo. They named them Aborigines and set about brutally exterminating them, regarding them as little better than animals. Later they began sending the younger sons of lords to the British island, allotting them enormous territories in Australia to cultivate for next to nothing. Some Aborigines considered that these territories belonged to them, by the grace of Mother Nature and not of the minor aristocracy.

The offspring of the British upper classes accordingly took to destroying anybody who tried to defend his lands. There were occasional truces which held for a time, and Aboriginal women had babies by the younger sons and the British staff who served them. It was accepted that half-castes were taken from the Aboriginal women and brought up as British.

Those times are, of course, long gone, and today’s Australians try their utmost to right the historical wrongs of their conquering forebears, but if they have had much success it is not very noticeable: I didn’t spot a single Aborigine in Sydney. People told me to wait because one elderly Aborigine sometimes played his didgeridoo at the central harbour.

“One?”

“One.”

In all the evenings of my visit not even that one Aborigine appeared. On the harbourfront Chinese musicians played passionate Latin American music which flowed out into the tourist shops, and there
were heaps of Aboriginal bits and bobs: gift boomerangs, knick-knacks made of kangaroo hide, paintings in traditional colors and motifs on a variety of surfaces. Alongside sat photographs of the artists: smiling Aborigines. So many photographs, so few live Aborigines. One wondered anxiously whether they had all died.

There is a permanent exhibition of Aboriginal art in the National Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney with some 200 works dating from the 1950s to the present day, a period when there were no longer any conquerors, and the descendants of those cruel people were trying to atone for their sins. For all that, the most common subject of Aboriginal painting is conquerors killing Aborigines. Another is the family trees of Aboriginal tribes, certifying their right to their lands. The Aborigines draw all this in a unique manner: everything appears to be viewed from above, and the impression is that there are multiple visual planes. The kangaroos are flattened too, as if they are dead and have been dissected. The same goes for lizards, and koalas, and Aborigines themselves.

If you stand at the harbour waiting for the Aborigine to play his didgeridoo, you will observe a remarkable scene. White-collar workers, business people who work in the city center, stream out into it straight from the ferry at the harbour quays. Here people come to work in the morning, and in the evening go home on the little ferries and steamers. A ferry moors in the morning at Central Quay, and city workers in dark suits and clutching laptops pour from it as if an underground train had just come in. The city is built around the harbour, with people living on the shore and working in the center. The roads around the harbour are narrow and suffer from traffic jams, but nobody has yet devised a way of causing traffic jams in the Pacific Ocean. What’s more, the ferry is cheap, and always arrives on time.

I naturally boarded the ferry, and it set off. The first stop, still in the city center, was the Rocks. That is the name of a district, and is the point where Captain Cook landed. There he stands today, a statue by his own toy-like house, which is built of the typical reddish-beige local sandstone.

The ferry takes us further, to the quays in the dormitory suburbs.
Such-and-such Street, only it is a quay. Rose Street, only that is a pier. There are signs like we have at bus stops, and a shelter in case of rain. Around the quays low houses grow into the cliffs, small stores and completely wild countryside. Ten minutes on the morning ferry takes you to New York with its soul-destroying pace of life, but on the way home you can meditate on the water flying by the side of the boat, the crests of the waves, the seagulls, the surf, and you must already be feeling better. Psychotherapists cannot be much in demand in Sydney, where the citizens have the ocean, and the major urban transport arteries lay themselves over it. There is nothing to build, and nothing to constantly maintain. What would Moscow’s Luzhkov find to do if he were Mayor of Sydney?

You can also take the ferry to the theatre, the museum, and the colonial-style Governor’s residence.

The ferry also takes you to the zoo, which in Sydney is called Taronga Zoo. Who or what was Taronga? None of the local people could give me an answer. Well, fair enough. The main thing is, I saw an echidna, a funny little animal, quiet and retiring, with a long nose and quills. Not the world’s most beautiful animal, perhaps, just as not all people are Apollo Belvederes, but why do Russians say damningly, “You are not a mother – you are an echidna”? I observed the ways of the Australian echidna for a long time but couldn’t work that out. It just snuffled everything around with its long nose and did nobody any harm.

In Taronga, naturally, there are a lot of koalas. They look like little cuddly bears, almost completely grey, but with a beige shimmer, and they sleep 20 hours out of 24 in trees, according to the sign, in uncomfortable postures: the back of their furry neck pressed against one branch, their backside against another, and the rest of their body dangling down. They sleep sweetly, so that must be how they like to be. How important it is not to impose our own ideas of comfort on other people.

And then, of course, the kangaroos. How could one visit Australia without seeing a kangaroo? Unfortunately, the kangaroos seemed rather unfriendly. They were probably afraid. They would look at you, but very anxiously. You could go into their pen and they would hop alongside,
not agile bipeds but on their two rear paws, and not too close. Along with the kangaroos, an insolent beauty lives in Taronga: the emu. She sashayed over and promptly pecked the back of my head, which was at just the right level, with a beak the size of a small shovel. She was clearly asking for food, but all the signs in Taronga shout: Do Not Feed The Animals! So we parted with the emu not on the best of terms.

The cockatoos in the Sydney zoo are very handsome, striking, multicolored, and friendly. They are almost the size of eagles, but the best cockatoos live on the Sydney central embankment, enormous, white with black patches, and move in flocks over short distances, from one of the enormous trees which surround the opera to another, kicking up a fuss among themselves, like our crows, and paying no attention at all to people.