The Pigeon Tunnel (13 page)

‘David, I fucked up your movie.'

17

The Soviet knight is dying inside his armour

I have been to Russia twice only: first in 1987, when thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev the life of the Soviet Union was ebbing away, and everyone except the
CIA
knew it; the second, six years later in 1993, by which time criminalized capitalism had seized hold of the failed state like a frenzy and turned it into the Wild East. I was keen to take a look at that new, windy Russia too. It therefore happened that my two trips straddled the greatest social upheaval in Russian history since the Bolshevik Revolution. And uniquely – if you set aside a coup or two, a few thousand victims of contract killings, gang shootouts, political assassinations, extortion and torture – the transition was, by Russian standards, bloodless.

Over the twenty-five years leading up to my first trip, my relations with Russia had been less than friendly. Ever since
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
, I had been the target of Soviet literary invective, one moment – as my critics put it – for elevating the spy to heroic status, as if they themselves had not made an art form of doing exactly that, and the next for making the right perceptions about the Cold War but drawing erroneous conclusions, a charge to which there is no logical response. But then we were not talking logic, we were talking propaganda. From the trenches of the
Soviet Literary Gazette
, controlled by the
KGB
, and
Encounter
magazine, controlled by the
CIA
, we dutifully lobbed our bombs at each other, aware that in the sterile ideological war of words, neither side was going to win. Hardly surprising then, when in 1987 I paid my obligatory call on the Soviet Cultural Attaché at his Embassy in Kensington
Palace Gardens to secure my visa, that he should observe not very nicely that if they'd have me they'd have anyone.

Not surprising either, when a month later I arrived at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport as the guest of the Union of Soviet Writers – an invitation apparently brokered by our Ambassador and Mikhail Gorbachev's wife, Raisa, over the heads of the
KGB
 – that the rock-faced boy in magenta shoulder boards behind his glass cage should dispute the authenticity of my passport; or that my luggage should go mysteriously missing for forty-eight hours, only to reappear unexplained in my hotel room with my suits rolled into a ball; or that my room at the dismal Hotel Minsk was ostentatiously shaken out every time I left it for a couple of hours – wardrobe rummaged, papers strewn in a mishmash across my desk – or that the same pair of overweight middle-aged male
KGB
watchers – I dubbed them Muttski and Jeffski – was assigned to trail me at a distance of two yards whenever I ventured out alone.

And thank goodness for them. After a rousing evening spent at the house of the dissident journalist Arkadi Vaksberg, who has passed out on the floor of his own living room, I find myself standing utterly alone in an unidentifiable street with nothing but the black night round me, no moon, no sign of dawn, and not a glimmer of light from the city centre to tell me which way to walk. And no spoken Russian with which to ask the advice of a passerby even if there'd been one, which there wasn't. Then to my relief I identify the silhouettes of my faithful watchers slumped side by side on a park bench, where I guess they have been taking it in turns to nap.

‘You speak English?'

Niet.

‘Français?'

Niet.

‘Deutsch?'

Niet.

‘I-am-
very-
drunk' – idiot smile, slow rotation of right hand round right ear – ‘Hotel
Minsk
 – okay? You know
Minsk?
We go together?' Extend both elbows, indicating fraternity and passivity.

Three abreast, we process at a slow march down a tree-lined boulevard through deserted streets to the awful Hotel Minsk. As a man who likes his creature comforts, I had tried to stay in one of Moscow's few dollar-hotels, but my hosts would have none of that. I must stay in the Minsk, in the
VIP
suite on the top floor, where ageing microphones were permanently in place and a redoubtable female concierge kept guard over the corridor.

But watchers are people too. And with time there was something so resigned, so enduring, I would almost say endearing, about Muttski and Jeffski that, contrary to convention, I would have wished to draw closer to them, rather than further away. One evening I dined with my younger brother Rupert, in those torrid days the Moscow bureau chief of the
Independent
newspaper, at an early cooperative – privately owned – restaurant. There is a score of years between Rupert and me, but in poor light we do look vaguely alike, particularly if you're drunk. Rupert had invited other Moscow correspondents. While we chatted and drank together, my two watchers sat inconsolably at their corner table. Moved by their plight, I asked a waiter to take them over a bottle of vodka while keeping my gaze elsewhere. When I turned my head, the bottle was nowhere to be seen, but when we broke up they followed the wrong brother home.

Try to describe Russia without vodka in those days, you might as well describe a horse race without horses. In the same week I pay a visit to my Moscow publisher. It is eleven in the morning. His cramped attic office is littered with dusty Dickensian files, stacks of mysterious cardboard boxes and yellowing typescripts bound in harvest twine. Seeing me enter, he springs from his desk and, with a roar of delight, hugs me to his bosom.

‘We have
glasnost!
' he cries. ‘We have
perestroika!
Censorship is over, my friend! Henceforth I publish
all
your books for ever: old books, new books, lousy books, I don't give a shit! You write
telephone directory? I
publish
it! I publish anything except the books those lousy bastards in Party censorship office want me to publish!'

Blissfully indifferent to Gorbachev's recently enacted laws on the consumption of alcohol, he yanks a bottle of vodka from a drawer, tears off the cap and, to my sinking heart, tosses it joyously into the wastepaper basket.

It appeared entirely logical to me, in the looking-glass world I had entered, that while I was being watched, followed and regarded with the heaviest suspicion, I should also be treated as an honoured guest of the Soviet government. My photograph was featured in
Izvestia
over a pleasant enough caption, I was royally entertained by my hosts, the Union of Writers, whose literary qualifications were for the most part obscure, and in some cases downright mythical.

There was the great poet whose oeuvre consisted of a volume of poems published thirty years ago, but they were rumoured to be the work of a different poet whom Stalin had shot for insurrection. There was the old, old man with white beard and red eyes flooded with tears, who had spent half a century in the Gulag labour camps before being rehabilitated as part of the
glasnost
, or openness. Somehow he had kept and published a doorstep-sized diary of his life's ordeal. It is in my library now, in Russian, which I can't read. There were the literary acrobats who for years had walked the tightrope of official censorship, with allegories conveying coded messages to those with the insight to interpret them. Whatever will they write, I wondered, when they are let into the wild? Will they be the Tolstoys and Lermontovs of tomorrow? Or have they been thinking round corners for so long that they can't write in straight lines?

At an outdoor party at the writers' colony in the leafy suburb of Peredelkino, those who were reckoned to have conformed too zealously with the Party line were – thanks to the advent of the
perestroika
, Gorbachev's policy of political and economic reform – already
looking a trifle hangdog beside those who had earned themselves a name for indiscipline. One of this latter group, he informed me, was Igor, a drunken playwright who insisted on keeping his arm round my neck while he murmured conspiratorially into my ear.

By now Igor and I had discussed Pushkin, Chekhov and Dostoevsky. That is to say, Igor had discussed them and I had listened. We had admired Jack London. Or Igor had. Now he was telling me that if I
really
wanted to know what a total fuck-up the real communist Russia was, I should try sending a second-hand refrigerator from my house in Leningrad to my grandmother in Novosibirsk and see how far I got. We agreed that this was a fine measure for the state of the disintegrating Soviet Union, and had a good laugh about it.

Next morning Igor called me at the Hotel Minsk.

‘Don't say my name. You recognize my voice. Yes?'

Yes.

‘Last night I told you shit joke about my grandmother, okay?'

Okay.

‘You remember?'

I do.

‘I never told you shit joke. Okay?'

Okay again.

‘Swear me.'

I swear him.

The one artist I met who would indubitably survive whatever restraints had been imposed upon him, even relish them, was Ilya Kabakov, who over the decades had flitted in and out of official Soviet favour to the point of being obliged to sign his own illustrations under another name. To reach Kabakov's studio you had to be trusted, you had to know somebody, and your way had to be lit for you by a boy with a hand torch across a long rickety pathway of loose planks laid on the rafters of several adjoining attics.

When you at last arrived, there was Kabakov, exuberant hermit and painter extraordinary, with an entourage of smiling womenfolk and admirers. And there on canvas was the wonderful world of his
self-imprisonment: mocked, forgiven, made beautiful and given universality by the loving eye of its unconquerable creator.

In the St Sergius cathedral in Zagorsk, often called the Russian Vatican, I watched old Russian women in black prostrate themselves on the flagstone floor and kiss the thick, misted glass covers of tombs containing relics of the saints. In a modern office fitted out with slick Scandinavian furniture, the exquisitely robed Archimandrite's representative explained to me how the Christian God worked his wonders through the agency of the state.

‘Is this only the
communist
state we're talking about?' I ask him when his set-piece has ground to its appointed end. ‘Or does He work them through
any
state?'

For answer, I get the torturer's broad, forgiving smile.

To visit the writer Chingiz Aitmatov, of whom to my shame I had never heard, my British interpreter and I take an Aeroflot flight to the military city of Frunze, now Bishkek, in Kyrgyzstan. We are accommodated not in Frunze's answer to the Hotel Minsk, but in the five-star luxury of a Central Committee rest home.

The wire perimeter is patrolled by armed
KGB
guards with dogs. They are there, we are told, to protect us from rustlers from the mountains. No suggestion then of dissident Muslim tribesmen. We are the rest home's only guests. In the basement we have an excellently equipped swimming pool and sauna. Lockers, towels and beach robes are embroidered with fluffy animals. I choose moose. The pool is heated to stockbroker temperature. In return for a few American dollars, the manager offers us forbidden vodka of various flavours, and ladies of the town. We take the first, pass on the second.

Back in Moscow, Red Square is mysteriously off-limits. Our pilgrimage to Lenin's tomb has been postponed until another day. It takes us another twelve hours to discover what the rest of the world knows: that a young German aviator named Mathias Rust, defying Soviet ground and air defences, has landed his little aeroplane on the Kremlin's doorstep, and incidentally provided Gorbachev with
the excuse to sack his Defence Minister and a nest of generals opposed to his reforms. I remember no raucous celebration of this feat of aviation, no hoots of laughter as the word was passed around the literati of Peredelkino: rather a stiffening and a quieting, as the familiar fear gathered that some unforeseeable and violent consequence could result. Will it be a political coup, a military putsch, or – even today – a purge of undesirable intellectuals like us?