A Writer's World (19 page)

The docks are shut off by high walls and policemen, and you can only peer at their quaysides from an eminence, or skulk about their gateways pretending to meet a comrade: but Odessa anyway feels unmistakably a port – a peeling, rather regretful port, a Soviet Tangiers. It is a cosmopolitan city still, full of Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Georgians, Egyptian seamen, Chinese delegations. The jolliest of old sacristans will conduct you around the decaying synagogue, lending you a white peaked cap for your head, and sallow Mediterranean faces will greet you solemnly in the Greek church. Odessa is a languid southern seaside city, snowless and sunlit, and even the pantheon of communist deities, even the Workers’ Honours Boards, even the blaring loudspeaker from the Central Committee’s headquarters, even the tinny new carillon, even the nagging suspicion that somebody is following you cannot altogether stifle the relaxed and easy-going nature of the town, like a soft warm breeze across the Bosporus.

Odessa is scarcely a show-place of the regime. It has busy industries, a large university and a celebrated eye hospital: but thanks to the occurrence of a soft subsoil it has none of your towering tomb-like blocks of flats, and you have only to step through an archway off almost any boulevard to find yourself back in pre-revolutionary Russia, with tumbledown apartments around a shambled courtyard, and women with buckets collecting their water from the communal outdoor tap in the middle. All feels small, friendly and unpretentious. In the new railway station, dedicated to Odessa’s heroic resistance during the war, there is a large notice-board which, upon the pressure of a button, illustrates in illuminated signs the route to any western Russian city; and there is something very appealing to the pleasure this simple toy gives the concourse of people constantly consulting it, the air of
wondering merriment that hangs about its buttons, like country festivity at a fairground.

There is also something paradoxically old-fashioned about Odessa. Its restaurants, though sprawling with greasy young men and loud with brassy jazz, are marvellously nineteenth century in appointment. Its public buildings still preserve, beneath their threadbare sloganry, shreds of old decorum. And if you observe a pair of young women sauntering together down the promenade, you will be struck by niggling sensations of
déjà vu
. What is so familiar about them? Where have you seen them before? And then, in a revealing flash, you have a vision of old newspapers lining attic drawers, full of the cloche hats and long coats of the thirties: and you realize that these young ladies of Odessa take you back mysteriously to your childhood, like snapshots in an album.

Just think! Odessa is the second port of Russia, the gateway of the Ukraine, the pearl of the Black Sea; yet it all boils down in my mind, such is the indivisibility of time and experience, to an indistinct memory of childhood, dormant for thirty years and revived only by a glimpse of forgotten fashions above the Potemkin Steps.

‘And this morning, Mr Morris,’ said my guide briskly, rearranging a businesslike bun in her blonde hair, ‘we shall visit Marianske Lazne, in the western area of our country.’ My heart neither leapt nor sank, for it was numb with cold and scepticism. I was deep in disbelief. The country was Czechoslovakia. The time was the very depth and nadir of a grim central European winter. The car into whose back seat I lowered myself, with a rather frigid smile of acceptance, was a bow-legged green Skoda. But as she settled herself beside me, giving me a sweet but not altogether convincing smile, my guide added as an afterthought: ‘Under the old regime, you know, they used to call it Marienbad!’

Marienbad! Instantly a bell rang in my mind, jangled but golden, cracked but still rich, oddly familiar after my peeling baroque evenings in Prague, my icy folk-customs in the High Tatra mountains, my long shuddering drives through the snow-enshrouded, fir-blackened, heartless and cheerless Czech countryside. Marienbad! It was like an echo of a golden age just to hear the name, and many a discredited vision crossed my mind, as my guide kindly explained to me the new medicinal treatments for workers’ families: visions of lace and stiff white collars, of clip-clopping greys and fawning courtiers, here a plumed imperial hat, here a fluttering embroidered fan – little lap dogs, hurrying servants, coffee on spindly tables, the orchestra tuning its fiddles among the roses and the hotel manager, moustaches pomaded, hurrying to greet His Excellency. They were pictures of an age that was rightly ended, of a society justly abolished, of unfair privileges and outdated protocol; but they retained an old lavender charm in the imagination, as of faded holiday postcards.

For me they offered more, too: for through them all, through the strolling old-fashioned crowds and the string bands, there glared boldly into my mind the eyes of a particular face. One of the divinities of my personal pantheon is old ‘Jacky’ Fisher, British Admiral of the Fleet, creator of the
Dreadnought
, iconoclast, egocentric, flatterer, failure and humorist, who died six years before I was born, but who is still marvellously alive in my affections. This old greatheart was an habitué of Marienbad in its palmy days. There he consorted proudly with the imperial potentates, and danced blissfully with the imperial ladies, and picked the brains of foreign generals,
and cocked a gay eyebrow at many a Continental beauty. Many a letter had I read in Fisher’s huge-scrawled hand on the browning writing-paper of forgotten Marienbad hotels, with elaborate flowery letterheads, and engravings of the winter gardens.

So we were going to Marienbad! As we laboured through that grim landscape Fisher’s wrinkled cynical face peered at me constantly through the firs. He had an extraordinary face, so oddly striking that legend had him the illegitimate son of a Ceylonese prince, so unforgettable that the Sultan of Morocco, once inspecting Fisher’s Mediterranean Fleet, was asked what had struck him most, among all the gleaming lines of battleships, the great barbettes and the impeccable gun drills, and replied without a second’s hesitation: ‘The Admiral’s face!’ Never was a face so congealed with self-esteem, so glorious with gaiety, so proud, so contemptuous, so flirtatious and so compelling! I could see its heavy-lidded eye winking, all but imperceptibly, through the damp fog that lay like a shroud upon the fields.

But we were there, and driving through the fine avenues of the place towards the graceful squares and colonnades that surround the baths. Marienbad was stately still, for all its dismal communist miasma. The old hotels, now occupied chiefly by proletarian groups, were still stylish beneath their peeling paint. The covered promenade (along which the girls of a Youth Association were sauntering in frumpish crocodile) was still sadly elegant. The fountains were still delicate. The gardens were still fresh. The charming houses, all official or institutional, still possessed a faint scented allure of satin and window-boxes. It was a ghost with shreds of colour.

We looked around the place conscientiously; and inspected the free treatment in the baths; and examined institutions of one kind or another; and strolled a little forlornly along the pallid splendours of the spa; and presently found ourselves, marshalled by a huge comrade of the coarsest kind, looking at the civic museum. This queer collection of souvenirs, mostly about the bad old days of the Habsburg Empire, was housed in a small pretty villa in the centre of the town; and sometimes, as we wandered from room to room, from glass case to glass case, while the Comrade Curator leered at the Archdukes, and the guide attended intermittently to her hair – sometimes, as we looked at this sad exhibition my eye wandered through an open window, to the curve of the esplanade below. How easy it was to imagine those old grandees of the 1880s, wicked perhaps, often selfish, generally heedless, sometimes
cruel, but alive with a vanished panache and glitter! How easy to see the whiskered potentates, and the willowy English peers, and the doll-like Austrian ladies, and Fisher himself, the boldest of paladins, like a laughing mandarin among the feather boas!

I tapped the curator, rather gingerly, upon the shoulder. The museum was fine, said I, but was there no one in the town who actually
remembered
those old times, when the plutocrats and warmongers battened themselves so shamelessly upon the spa? The churl thought long and deep before replying, and then told us with a grin that there was somebody, in that very house – none other than the woman who had owned the place and occupied it in greedy ease and luxury, until the advent of the People’s Government. Like a huge shambling bear he led the way, down the steep staircase among the prints, until we stood again in the hall of the house, beside the entrance. This woman, explained the curator, was permitted to live in a room in the basement, in return for keeping the place clean: and opening a door he shouted hoarsely down the basement stairs. At first there was only silence. The curator bellowed again, in a harsh imperative, and presently there was a sound of movement below. A cough, a rustle, laboured footsteps up the stairs; and there emerged into the hall beside us an old woman, dressed almost in rags, wiping her hands on her skirt. Her face was blank and quite impassive. Her movements were oddly stiff, as though she had had a stroke. Her skin was dirty and her hands were rough and crooked. She looked like some spiritless old animal, a broken pit pony, a lame and useless sheepdog. ‘Here she is,’ said the curator, gesturing her roughly into the hall. ‘Ask her what you want.’

I was embarrassed, and angry with the man, and wished I had never summoned the old lady into this cruel limelight: but my guide smiled at her with sudden unexpected kindness, and I asked her my one question. Did she happen to remember, out of all the foreign visitors to Marienbad, all the eminent men and dazzling women who must have crossed the corridors of her life – did she happen to remember Admiral Jack Fisher of the Royal Navy?

A glimmer entered her eye, and warmed, and flourished, and very nearly sparkled: and turning her head stiffly to look at me, and straightening her drab-cottoned back, she answered in a perfect, clear-cut Edwardian English. ‘Ah!’ she said. ‘Jacky Fisher! Jacky Fisher!
What a face that man
had!’

So I shook her limp soap-coarsened hand, walked out of the museum
into the cold fog, thought how lasting was the glow of a good man’s fun, and ended my visit to Marianske Lazne.

Seen across the hours from a hotel window in the depths of winter, Warsaw could only be Warsaw, for nowhere else on the face of the earth breathes quite the same fusion of atmospheres. Room 221 in the Bristol Hotel is heavily but quite cosily Victorian, with a wicker mat hung in incongruous ornamentation on one wall and a bright if unadventurous abstract on another. Outside the door two dear old pudgy housemaids sit habitually on the floor in white caps, aprons and carpet slippers, sibilantly gossiping, and down the corridor the immense glass lift, like a cage for a phoenix, slides in magnificent lurches to the foyer, its voyagers slipping a few zlotys to the operator as they leave. There is a violent smell of cooking on the landing, and downstairs you may just hear the tapping of a progressive American playwright’s typewriter – he spent last evening with a group of eminent sociologists, and is busy working up his notes.

It is a fusty, old-fashioned, plush but mournful hostelry, but outside the window Warsaw is nothing if not spacious. The sky is grey, immense, and unmistakably central European. The snow lies thick and sullen on the broad streets. Down the hill only a thin winding stream of water forces a way through the frozen Vistula. The air, to a visitor from England, seems slightly perfumed with petrol and boiled potatoes, but feels nevertheless like country air, blown out of forests and endless plains and Carpathian ravines; and when you first lean from your window in the icy morning you will hear the clatter of horses’ hooves and the triumphant crow of a cold
but irrepressible cock. Below you then the first citizens of the morning intermittently appear: an elderly lady with a jolly black dog, a covey of merry schoolchildren, entrancing high-boned faces peering through their fur hoods like fox cubs through the bushes. Long carts full of snow go by, with a column of big lorries, and even an antique barouche trundles with creaks and squeaks towards its cab-rank; and presently Warsaw is wide awake, the sun is wanly shining, and the observer in Room 221 can watch the world of the Poles pass by.