A Writer's World (17 page)

A pair of dead men are embalmed there among the bayonets, bathed in an unearthly light, waxen and preternaturally clean. One has a short beard and a high-domed head. The other’s moustache is coarse and bushy, and the jacket of his pale blue form is heavy with medals. Not a word, not a sigh, not a cough escapes the crowd as it passes these cosmetic relics. An occult sense of ritual pervades the place, as in the eerie tomb-heart of a
pyramid. The traveller, caught in the fustian momentum of the queue, is carried as in a dream out of the chamber up the broad steps into the evening light: and already he feels clinging to his person, trapped in the folds of his coat and turn-ups of his trousers, impregnating his hair like tobacco in a railway carriage, creeping beneath his fingernails, smarting his eyes, the odour and essence of Moscow.

Moscow in winter is hardly a dream, and not exactly a nightmare, but has more the quality of a hangover: blurred, dry-mouthed and baleful, but pierced by moments of almost painful clarity, in which words, ideas, or recollections roll about in the mind metallically, like balls on a pin-table.

It is a graceless but obsessive city, the capital of an alien Asiatic world. Among its avenues of ugly buildings, stamped with the inexpressible emptiness of Stalinist taste, the muffled multitudes shove their way with hungry gusto: not indeed mindlessly, as myth would have it, but with a special technique of ill manners, a kind of self-induced trance in which the existence of anybody else on the pavement is erased from the consciousness, as a yogi dismisses the blistered crowd around him. Nobody can push more effectively than a Muscovite: but drab and docile are the queues, all the same, that trail away from the milk counter in the central market, or wait in suffocating proximity, each man breathing stertorously down his neighbour’s neck, for their hats and galoshes after the opera. No elegance or style is left twitching in the streets of Moscow. This is the metropolis of the common man, and he eats his borscht with a proud snuffle.

Through the dreary proletarian pall, though, crooked mysteries gleam. Some are the mysteries of communism: mummified philosophies and deifications, medallions of Lenin as a baby, a dead physicist lying in state upon his bier, a wilderness of pamphlets and slogans and Five-Year Plans, the shifting mosaic of strange faces that makes this an imperial city – Mongols and Kazakhs and bland Chinese, scarred Africans, wide-eyed Indians, lean men from Central Asia, with knobbly sticks and crinkled lambskin hats.

Some are the mysteries of ancient state: the spiked medieval helmets of the Kremlin Treasury, the gorgeous saddle trappings and the royal sledges, gold in piled elaborate formality, splendid silver from England, jewellery of minute ingenuity, thrones of ivory, sceptres, golden cocks, owls, pheasants, railway trains, ships in golden eggs, galleries of armour, all shining and glinting in their cases while the tourists, their feet muffled in felt overshoes, as in a mosque, pad in obedient groups behind their guide.

Some are the mysteries of religion – the religion of Leninism, which has already etherealized that eminent political scientist, or the religion of Tsarist Russia, still ornately surviving beneath its onion domes. Church service on Sunday morning is still veiled in strangeness and suffering. Outside the door an old man with a forked beard feeds a gaggle of mangy pigeons: inside a million Muscovites seem to occupy the nave, crammed so tightly that a sudden genuflection sends a ripple across the church. Far, far away the vestments of a priest sometimes flicker in the candlelight, and always drifting around the pillars and the ikons loiters a cadence of hidden choirs. Near the door the corpses of two old ladies, pale but peaceful, lie encouched in flowers. In a side chapel a bespectacled priest with long golden hair, sitting on a kitchen chair beside the altar, accepts a stream of murmured confessions and entreaties, the women pressing round him like dwarfs around a magician.

Strange are the encounters of Moscow, like incidents in a fevered fancy. A man in clumping boots and huge leather gloves will introduce himself in a champagne bar as a brigadier of communist labour, and ask after the welfare of the comrade plasterers in England. A gay girl in the Lenin Library will slip you an irreverent witticism about socialist realism. A female judge in a divorce court will burst into tears at the memory of her orphaned childhood. Two youths in slinky coats will solicit you for pound notes, fountain pens,
Life
magazine, chewing gum, nylon shirts or gramophone records. Moscow is full of innuendoes, hints of espionage, suspicions, the threat of imminent portentous confidences.

Sometimes a sense of suffocation overcomes you, and you feel yourself so far from the sea, in the heart of something so swollen and incalculable, that the blood throbs in your head and your mind sags. In the immaculate subterranean halls of the underground you may feel like this, stifled by gigantic symbolisms and frescoes of dancing milkmaids; or lost among the myriad text-books, tracts, collected works of Lenin, portraits of bemedalled demi-gods, economic treatises and inspirational posters of a bookshop; or wandering among the awful symmetries of Moscow University, Big Brother’s
alma
mater
, a brain factory, a production line where 25,000 students labour like so many ants in a 32-storey heap (33 reading rooms, 5,754 sleeping chambers, 80 Members of the Academy of Sciences, 20 Merited Sciences, a million books, 50,000 trees, an assembly hall with 1,500 seats and 11 floors of storage space – ‘The best university in the world,’ as an Intourist pamphlet puts it, ‘can only be seen in Moscow’).

Sometimes you may feel frightened: not simply by the suggestion of
hidden microphones and secret police, or the strained isolation of the foreign residents, herded into their ghettos, or even by the sense of stark power that emanates from this dismal but impressive city; but by a profound sense of alienation, as though you belonged to some unrelated visiting species. Your conversations, however cordial, never really bridge the gulf of ideology. Your informant, kindly and hospitable, will suddenly assume a tone of quite unexpected arrogance. Behind the inquiries of the brigadier of communist labour there lurks not hostility exactly, but a sense of inescapable misunderstanding, as though at some predestined point both your languages and your conceptions will diverge, never to be reconciled. You can never get to grips with the truth in Moscow. It slithers away from you into the snow, and even its tracks are obliterated by armies of passing footfalls.

But sometimes you may, nevertheless, catch a glimpse of the very heart, the core of this city’s mysteries, as the man with the hangover analyses with cheerless clarity the exact mixture of drinks that was his undoing. It may well be at the Bolshoi, when some gigantic Russian epic is being ferociously enacted, with rolls of kettle-drums and clashes of armour, a mammoth chorus open-throated, a clutch of heroes swelling in the foreground with a passage and repassage of knights, horses, serfs, a frenzy of conical helmets and chain mail, banners dramatically waving, flames issuing from a backcloth, smoke, flashing beacons, the orchestra in a quivering
fortissimo
, the conductor wiping his sweating bald head, the enormous audience gripping its seats or craning from the high gilded balconies above the chandelier – then, in the middle of it all, you will glance across your neighbour’s shoulder to the great state box in the centre: there will be sitting the most powerful man on earth, looking bored and rather glazed, a slight sad smile playing around the corners of his mouth, his wife, in a bun and brown sagging dress, demure and attentive at his elbow.

You need not wait for the last act. Go home and sleep it off.

In the House of the Union in Moscow this morning the American Gary Powers, aged 31, described as a spy, was accused before the Military College of the Soviet Supreme Court of espionage against the Soviet state. He pleaded guilty.

His wife was at the back of the court, sad in black with a white Puritan collar. So were several hundred diplomatists, Kafka and George Orwell, but it was not, by and large, a morning of horror. The emotions of the Hall of Columns, the gorgeous setting of the case, ranged from bleak apprehension by way of growing cynicism to occasional moments of levity. It did not seem this morning a hectoring or a bullying court. Why should it be? It had all it wanted, and its purpose was merely to paint a tarnished lily.

Macabre enough, all the same, was the sense of eerie ritual as Powers was led into the limelight this morning. The court sat on a kind of stage against a background of opaque white curtains. In the centre were the military judge and his two assessors, generals all, immaculate in dove grey, and sitting in their tall wooden chairs like bulky Buddhas. To the left sat the prosecutor, the procurator-general of the Soviet Union, a heavy and formidable lawyer in a sombre blue uniform. The lights were blinding – chandeliers, strings of bare bulbs, floodlights – bathing the whole scene in chill brilliance and giving the members of the court a waxen cosmetic look.

Into this extraordinary scene Powers was led, punctually at ten, with an escort of two young soldiers in olive-green jackets and blue trousers. He wore a blue Russian suit a size too large for him, so that he had to hitch up its sleeves now and then, and his hair was cut in a kind of modified crew-cut – or perhaps a crew-cut overgrown. They put him in the wooden dock, like a big child’s playpen beneath the floodlights. The sentries stood to attention beside it, as beside a catafalque, and presently, to the first whirr of the cameras, his trial began.

It began frighteningly. Powers was obviously frightened, and so was I. Coldly, precisely, ceremonially were the charges proclaimed, interpreted for Powers in a terrifyingly dry and academic English and instantly translated through headphones into French, German and Spanish. The witnesses for the prosecution were led self-consciously on stage – four stocky men in double-breasted blue, who signed the register at the secretary’s table and shuffled awkwardly off again. The expert witnesses were summoned – ‘Will the experts please come forward?’ – six officers in uniform and a scientist in natty grey. Now and then the brilliant lights were shifted, when the cameramen needed a view of the expectant audience, or a long shot of
Mrs Powers. It all felt cold, preordained, hopeless, from the young man standing like a living whimper in the dock to the impassive general high in the judge’s chair.

Once or twice Powers looked into the hall hopelessly out of the blaze of the camera lights, but he evidently could not see his wife. He looked to me like a lost man already, a broken, demoralized, almost obsequious prisoner, caught in a mesh like a shaky fly. Anxiously he stood up, sat down, answered the questions like a good boy. To be sure they treated him gently enough, allowing him full scope to play the capitalists’ puppet, the nice, simple, up-the-garden-path all-American boy. The burden of the defence is clearly to be that Powers undertook the flight without really participating in its intentions – that he just did what he was told without reasoning, and in this instance without dying, either.

The procurator-general nevertheless got some strangely tart answers, and the morning passed in queer ups and downs of elation and despair. At the back of all our minds, though, lay the suspicion of brainwashing, of torture in dark offstage dungeons, and all the court became tense when at last the procurator-general, rolling the hours away, reached the poison pin.

‘I was given it in case I was tortured and could not stand it, would rather be dead.’

‘So your masters did not put much value on your life?’

‘Well, they more or less left it to me. No one told me to kill myself.’

‘Were you told you would be tortured?’

‘I wasn’t told I would be, but I expected to be.’

‘And were you tortured?’ asked the procurator-general.

‘No,’ said Captain Powers. ‘I have been treated very nice.’

Last night Powers’s defence counsel, Mikhail Grinev (who looks a little like an abstemious Oliver Hardy), presented all the expected arguments of mitigation. Powers was, he implied, just an ordinary American
muzhik
, exploited by a cynical capitalist state, striving only to set himself up in a modest business against all the handicaps of his heartless environment. He came from simple stock and had only the simple ambitions shared by working people the world over: flying a U-2 over Russia was, so to speak, just a temporary aberration forced upon him by the cruel pressures of a capitalist, war-mongering society.

The trial has had, though, its moments of piquant fascination, its glimpses of a queer world beyond our experience. We saw Powers, for example, in his oxygen helmet being dressed for the flight at Peshawar like
a knight before battle – the maps thrust in his pocket, the secret equipment loaded in his aircraft, the rocket site pointed out on his map. We saw the misty figure of Colonel Shelton, commander of the U-2 detachment, crossing the tarmac to the aircraft before its take-off and giving Powers a piece of black cloth – an ill-explained talisman to be handed over by Powers when he safely reached Bodo. We looked with Powers out of his cockpit, somewhere over Russia, and saw the condensation trail of a Soviet aircraft far below.

We saw the country folk near Sverdlovsk standing beside their doors to watch the swinging parachute come down. We examined with the comrade experts all the extraordinary assembly of instruments, from cameras to radar bafflers, that are the tools of modern intelligence. Our vision ranged from the Pamirs to Scandinavia and even across to the America of Powers’s adolescence, when he worked as a lifeguard ‘because nobody would hire somebody who was going to be drafted’. And through it all we watched the immobile, impassive, faintly Mongol face of the court’s president, sitting godlike and erect beneath a gigantic hammer and sickle.