Travelling to Infinity (26 page)

Kip had many conversations on this theme with his Russian friends, while Stephen and I provided a useful front of social activity. One evening this previously successful ploy backfired.
Throughout our stay, our hosts showered us with tickets for the Bolshoi: for the opera,
Boris Godunov, Prince Igor
, and for the ballet,
Sleeping Beauty
and
The
Nutcracker.
Though Stephen was eager to attend the opera, he was very reluctant about the ballet. Indeed, on the only previous occasion when we had been to the ballet together, to a production
of
Giselle
at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge, he complained of a headache in the first act and I had to take him home in the interval, only to find that he made an immediate and miraculous
recovery. In Moscow we were consistently in our seats in good time for the opera, but when we arrived at the Bolshoi for
The Nutcracker
the doors were already closing. We were hurriedly
ushered into a side aisle and the doors closed smartly behind us. Kip, who had been intending to use the cover of the ballet to escape with a colleague, Vladimir Belinsky, into the streets of
Moscow for surreptitious discussions on matters political as well as scientific, found himself trapped. He had come into the theatre to help us settle in, and when the doors closed, he had no
option but to sit patiently through the first act of
The Nutcracker
till the interval, while Belinsky waited for him outside in the foyer. At least Stephen had a companion in
adversity.

Although we were well aware of these cloak-and-dagger operations lurking in the background, we began to realize that Stephen’s scientific colleagues enjoyed in a limited fashion a freedom
denied to the rest of the people, the freedom of thought. In its ignorance, Communist officialdom was unable to measure the significance of abstruse scientific research. Consequently it tended to
leave scientists in peace as long as they behaved with caution and towed the party line – unless, that is, like Andrei Sakharov, they spoke out openly against the regime on overtly political
grounds. Indeed, in his book
Black Holes and Time Warps
, Kip Thorne refers to the unnecessary fear he felt for the Russians, Lifshitz and Khalatnikov, when they courageously wanted to
acknowledge the error of their claim that a star cannot create a singularity when it implodes to form a black hole:

Lifshitz’s freedom to travel had already been long curtailed when, to his immense credit and with the greatest urgency, he had persuaded Kip on an earlier visit to Moscow
in 1969 to smuggle out a paper retracting the claim and admitting the mistake. The paper was published in the West. As Kip thankfully remarks, “The Soviet authorities never
noticed.”

Stephen got on well with his Russian colleagues because they shared his intuitive approach to physics. Like him they were concerned only with the crux of any problem; the fine detail did not
interest them, and for Stephen, who carried all his theories in his head, fine detail was a hindrance to clarity of thought. Effectively, like him, they discarded all dead wood for a clearer view
of the trees. They adapted this approach to whatever subject was under discussion, whether physics or literature. They gave the impression of having stepped out of the past, from the pages of
Turgenev, Tolstoy or Chekhov. They talked about art and literature – their own Russian masters and Shakespeare, Molière, Cervantes and Lorca as well. Like my student acquaintances in
Franco’s Spain, they recited poetry and composed verses for any occasion – including poems in Stephen’s honour. To them, it seemed, one more repressive regime meant little,
because their country had always been governed by totalitarian regimes and had no experience of democracy, so, like generations of Russians before them, they found their solace in art, music and
literature. In a society dominated by
Soviet
materialism, culture was their spiritual resource. Through them, I felt I could touch the soul of the country, the mournful soul of Mother
Russia, who always draws her exiled children back to her lonely rolling landscapes of rivers and birch forests. Their personalities shone out of the background of their bleak lives like the golden
domes of the well-preserved though no longer functioning churches which would suddenly appear from behind the gaunt concrete blocks of modern Moscow, illuminating the grey dreariness with their
gleaming brilliance.

These colleagues seemed just as happy to take us on cultural expeditions as to talk about science. Often our days were a combination of the two: scientific discussions would accompany our
sightseeing. We wandered through the golden-domed cathedrals of the Kremlin, purged of their religious function by an officious Communism which nevertheless had not managed to eradicate their air
of sanctity. We stood enraptured before the altar walls of icons, and we examined floors of semi-precious stone. We ambled through the art galleries, the Tretyakov and the Pushkin, and made the
pilgrimage to Tolstoy’s homely wooden house, with its stuffed bear standing on the creaky landing ready to receive visiting cards, and its little room at the back where the great man applied
himself to his other passion, shoemaking. From Tolstoy’s garden I picked up a handful of fallen maple leaves, rich brown, orange and yellow.

I asked to see a functioning church and was taken both to the extravagantly decorative, red, green and white church of St Nicholas in Moscow and to the Novodevichy Monastery on the outskirts.
Despite the wailing chants and the mumbling icon-kissing of the elderly devotees, neither place could convey the essence of holiness with the power of the two decommissioned, empty little churches
which stood abandoned outside our window, dwarfed by the bulk of the hotel. One was brick-built, topped by a gold cross; the other was little more than a golden dome. It seemed that in banning
organized religion, the Communist regime had actually encouraged the growth of an inner spirituality, which was ever present for those who were receptive to it and alien to those who were not.

In the age of space travel, we were drawn back into the past through the lives of the dignified, poetic individuals with whom we were associating. There were few cars on their roads, their
material possessions were scarce and their clothing was drab. Health care was available to them free of charge, but what we saw of it suggested that Soviet hospitals and doctors were to be avoided
at all costs. During the second week Stephen needed a dose of hydroxocobalamin, the fortifying vitamin injection which, in Cambridge, Sister Chalmers came to give him every fortnight. With some
difficulty, his colleagues persuaded a doctor to come to the hotel. At first glance, I thought that it was Miss Meiklejohn, the terrifying, doughty games mistress from St Albans High School, who
had walked into our room. She produced her equipment from a black bag: a steel kidney-shaped bowl, a metal syringe and a selection of reusable needles. We both winced. Stoical as ever, Stephen sat
quietly while she jabbed the bluntest of her needles into his thin flesh. Squeamish as ever, I turned away.

The endless, grey-raincoated queues in the shops where our friends bought their food brought back childhood memories of post-war London. Whether in GUM, the state department store on Red Square,
or in neighbourhood shops, the system seemed expressly designed to discourage its customers from making any purchases whatsoever. First they had to queue to find out whether the desired items were
available on the shelves, then they had to queue to pay for them in advance at the cash desk, and finally, clutching their receipts, they had to return to the original queue to claim their
purchases. As privileged foreigners we could shop at the tourist shops, the Berioska shops, which were greedy for our pounds and dollars. There, wooden toys, brightly coloured shawls, amber beads
and painted trays abounded. I assumed that all the goods were produced in the Soviet Union until I chanced upon a pair of black leather gloves which bore the label “made by the Co-op,
Blackburn, Lancs”.

In other Berioska shops, foreign visitors could buy fresh and imported foodstuffs such as grapes, oranges and tomatoes, which for the average Russian were luxuries. If the food produced in the
hotel, supposedly a first-class hotel, was any yardstick, the average Russian lived on an erratic subsistence diet of yogurt, ice cream, hard-boiled eggs, black bread and cucumber. Such meat as the
hotel managed to provide was usually concealed in minute quantities in floury rissoles, or was so tough and tasteless as to be good only for shoe leather. My smattering of Russian, learnt in an
evening class some years previously, was not much help in choosing from the numerous pages of the menu, because once we had made our selection, we would be told that it was “off”.

For the first few days, we despaired of getting an edible square meal until one evening we discovered a restaurant, secreted away on the top floor of the hotel, looking out over the red stars on
the towers of the Kremlin. We found ourselves sitting near a Frenchman and watched in amazement as his meal was served. With the suave confidence of a Parisian dining in one of the best restaurants
in his native city, he embarked on his first course, which consisted of a dish of caviar, smoked fish and cold meats, with a small glass of vodka. Then, while we pushed a flattened piece of chicken
swimming in grease around our plates, his main course came to the table. Crisp brown slices of roast potato enveloped a steaming, succulent, baked sturgeon. Enviously we watched him eat, savouring
the aromas which wafted in our direction. It was not until he leant back in his chair with a Gallic sigh and a gesture of deep satisfaction that it occured to me that here was somebody with whom I
could actually communicate. All I had to do was ask him in French where to find sturgeon and caviar on the menu. Obligingly, he indicated items 32 and 54, thus holding out the delectable promise of
an acceptable diet for the rest of our stay. It was our bad luck that the very next day, the top-floor restaurant closed down, and items 32 and 54 never featured on the menus of the other less
classy restaurants.

Mistrust of the next meal became a constant preoccupation. However, with some anticipation we looked forward optimistically to one of the supposed highlights of our stay, dinner in the Seventh
Heaven revolving restaurant of the Ostankino Tower, a radio tower on the outskirts of the city. The tower, a space-age status symbol, was closely guarded – supposedly because of its strategic
importance – and only special guests were allowed to dine there. Even they were not permitted to approach the tower directly, but were frisked at the perimeter fence some fifty yards away,
and then led along an underground tunnel to the lift. Cameras were forbidden, we were told, since during the course of its heavenly revolutions, the restaurant passed by a milk factory. For
“milk”, read “armaments”, Kip said. The milk factory came round with disconcerting frequency as we tucked into our first good meal in weeks. Nor was the ride a smooth one
– the tower lurched drunkenly halfway through each cycle – which may explain why Stephen and I spent the next twenty-four hours competing for occupation of the bathroom.

It was no surprise to us that our Russian hosts were not at liberty to invite us into their own homes, but there was one notable exception. On our last evening in Moscow we were invited to
dinner at the home of Professor Isaac Khalatnikov. Khalatnikov was a beaming, expansive character whom we had first met at the General Relativity Conference in London just before our marriage in
1965. The taxi delivered us to an imposing block of flats, close to the river in the centre of Moscow. We had heard from contemporaries of the difficulties of family life in Moscow. Apartments were
scarce. Entitlement to housing depended on one’s standing in the Party. Newly-weds frequently had to live with their parents in two-bedroom flats. Later, families would often take in
surviving members of the older generation, particularly the babushka, whose presence was well-nigh essential, even in such cramped conditions, because she would generally run the household and care
for the children while her daughter or daughter-in-law was out at work. We were astonished therefore to find that the Khalatnikovs’ apartment was exceptionally large, consisting of several
spacious, well-furnished rooms complete with television and hi-fi. Furthermore the food on the table was a veritable banquet which would not have been out of place at a Western dinner party. The
servings of caviar, meat, vegetables, salads and fruit were lavish and tastefully presented. Stephen and I were appreciative but mystified. Why, in a society which trumpeted its equality, did this
family enjoy such an ostentatiously indulgent lifestyle? As usual Kip provided the answer: it had nothing whatsoever to do with Isaac Khalatnikov’s distinguished scientific status. It was the
consequence of his wife’s connections. Valentina Nikolaevna, a rather sturdy blonde lady for whom my gift of delicate costume jewellery was singularly inappropriate, was none other than the
daughter of a Hero of the Revolution. In a nation where all were said to be equal, some were more equal than others. By virtue of her birth, Valentina Nikolaevna was entitled to all the
prerogatives of the new aristocracy, including preferential housing and the right to buy her food in the Berioska shops.

The maple leaves that I had collected from Tolstoy’s garden proved to be an eloquent metaphor of the Moscow we saw in those weeks of our visit. It was with genuine relief that we joined in
the cheers of the passengers when the London-bound plane took off in a swirling snowstorm in mid-September. Like the snow, the autumn leaves were harbingers of winter in a country where all those
freedoms of speech, expression, thought, movement which we took for granted were permanently frozen. Yet their vivid colours sang of our irrepressible friends, those courageous people stranded in
that political wasteland. As winter approached in Cambridge, we realized that together with the leaves and the souvenirs, the wooden dancing bears and hand-painted china, we had brought back with
us an unwelcome legacy of Soviet oppression. For several weeks after our return, we were unable to communicate freely in our own home for fear that the walls might be listening to us. If this was a
measure of the psychological pressure that our friends lived under all the time, our admiration for them could only increase. Thrilled as we were to be back with our children, such a realization
was sobering. How, we asked, would we cope in those circumstances?