Black Sea (26 page)

The inner city is divided between crows and doves. The crows rule the district by the railway station, where Richelieu and Catherine Streets - for fifty years disguised as Lenin and Karl Marx Streets - set off on their dead-straight march to the sea. In spring, twigs clatter down on the broken pavements of Richelieu as the rookery nests pile up in the plane trees. White bird-lime draws a line round the feet of the beggars in the cathedral porch on Pushkin Street: Russian beggars with matted fringes and buniony faces, who cross themselves continuously with shaking hands.

The crows make enough noise in the mornings to wake the guests in the cheap hotels near the station; their quarrels are louder than the grinding and crackling of the trams. Further on, in the streets between the station and the Moldavanka quarter where the Jewish gangsters used to live, is the real heart of crow territory. No dove or pigeon would survive long here, for this district is the site of the crows' food supply, the Privoz market. In the mud between the market halls, they hop and haggle over shreds of calf-muzzle, crumbs of brinza cheese, carrot-tops and the skeletons of anchovies. Gypsies passing with jam-jars of hot tea shout at the crows, and the Tatar women selling grated carrot slash at them with sticks if the birds sidle too close to their stalls.

About halfway down Catherine Street towards the sea, as you approach Deribasovskaya, the doves begin. They do not hustle, but get a living by charm. They sit in rows along the cornices of the opera house, whirring down prettily to beg from children in the Palais Royal gardens or by the monument to the
Battleship Potetnkin's
mutineers. The families mooching along Deribasovskaya shed trails of sunflower seeds and fragments of ice-cream wafer for the doves.

The doves disdain the trees, although there are huge old planes all along Primorskie Boulevard — a street which is really a long esplanade garden with palaces down one side and an open view over the port and the Black Sea on the other. A few years ago, at the end of the Soviet period, a planner decided to improve this view by cutting the trees down, and it was the first sign of changing times in Odessa when dozens of young people came down to Primorskie and clung to their trees until the workers with chainsaws grew ashamed and went away. But the doves prefer to feel marble and bronze under their pink feet, on the ledges of the ancient London Hotel and the governor-general's palace, on the
Tiger
cannon, on the sculptured forehead of Pushkin's statue or on the shoulder of Richelieu at the top of the Steps.

Konstantin Paustovsky, who wrote about Odessa as a man writes about a wife who died young, used to sit here on the low wall. Giddy with hunger — it was 1910, a year of blockade and famine - he would rest in the early morning on his way to the newspaper office where he worked and breathe the wind.

Apart from decks, it smelt of acacias, dry seaweed, the camomile in the cracks of the sea wall, and of tar and rust. Occasionally, all these smells were washed away by a special after-storm smell from the open sea. It was quite unlike, and could not be mistaken for anything else. It was as though a girl's arm, cool from bathing, were brushing my cheek.

When I first read those words, nearly twenty-five years ago, I knew at once that this could no longer be true about the sea wind on Primorskie, and that Paustovsky had known that it would not be true. The air at the top of the Steps now smells of oily brine, low-octane petrol and fatigued cement. But those words cannot be unwritten. I have remembered them in other Black Sea places, like the harbour at Anapa at dawn after a night of wind. They are accurate because nothing can be added to them and nothing taken away.

The Odessa steps, the
Escalier Monstre,
are enigmatic. To see them, for anyone who cannot forget how Eisenstein in
The Battleship Potemkin
made them into the most famous flight of stairs in the world, is like seeing a famous actress: smaller, drabber, less purposeful than in the movie. The Steps seem to go nowhere in particular. Once they leaped straight down from the city to the harbour, a triumphal strut towards the sea and the southern horizon. Now the main dock highway cuts across the foot of the Steps and the view is blocked off by walls of stained cement: the dilapidation of the Ocean Terminal.

And, from the top, the Steps seem short and neglected. They are so constructed that a glance down them sees only the landings between each flight, suggesting a mere set of terraces. The grass on either side is unkempt. On one flank an ugly metal funicular railway is broken down and rusting. It is all a disappointment. But then, as you start off down the 220 granite steps, there arises a sense of entering some process of illusion, rather like going into a maze or walking up to a Greek column.

There is even some legerdemain about who built the Odessa Steps; they were certainly started in 1837, but not by the Italian architect Boffa whose name is engraved on them. So is the name of an Englishman called Upton, but his Steps numbered only 192 and were made of Trieste sandstone.
³
At some point, the design, the material and the master of works all changed. The Steps were re-planned in granite by Boffa, or possibly by Rossi or even Toricelli who both built much of Odessa, with a sharply diminishing width from base to summit.

So it happens that at the bottom you turn around and are amazed. From here only the risers are visible; the Steps, extended by a false perspective, race up to heaven. At the top is Richelieu, with clouds streaming past his head. In reality, his statue is dwarfish, smaller than lifesize. But from the foot of the Steps he is a colossus.

After Richelieu, Langeron governed in Odessa. He was a pleasant, witty old soldier who found the New Russian salad of races too much for him and said so: 'a territory as big as France and populated by ten different nationalities.' He was succeeded by the first Russian Governor-General, Ivan Inzov, who lasted only a year and in 1823 was replaced by Count Mikhail Vorontsov.

With Vorontsov, a new magnificence arrived in Odessa. Educated in England, where his father had been ambassador, this was a gentleman of enormous public and personal ambition. He helped to make New Russia and Odessa rich, and the Vorontsovs offered splendid official hospitality in their white palace at the end of Primorskie. He also made himself spectacularly rich on the profits of private land speculation (while he was still Governor-General) and of new Crimean vineyards equipped to produce champagne. At Alupka, on the Crimean coast, he converted Richelieu's old villa into a Tudor-Moorish palace with 150 rooms.

I I

It stands there still, a monstrosity in perfect taste, chilly on the hottest summer day. The British delegation stayed there during the Yalta conference in 1945.

Alexander Pushkin thought Vorontsov was a marmoreal prig. Vorontsov inherited this cross, untrustworthy poet from Ivan Inzov when he took over Odessa in 1823. It was then nearly five years since Pushkin, at the age of twenty-one, had been rusticated from St Petersburg. He was officially a member of the Foreign Service, so that he could be discreetly punished by being sent on an official journey; Pushkin was handed over to Ivan Inzov, a tolerant guardian who took the poet with him on a succession of appointments in Ekaterinoslav and Kishinev, and allowed him to wander off on a prolonged 'convalescence' in Crimea and the Caucasus. When Inzov was transferred to Odessa, Pushkin went too, and took up enforced residence in the city.

This was not exactly a serious punishment for a dissident writer suspected - accurately - of anti-state activities. But Pushkin, who could not know what worse fates would fall upon other Russian poets in the two centuries ahead, felt himself a martyr. Part of his punishment in Odessa was to be taken up by Vorontsov and bored stiff. He resented having an eye kept on him, and still more the governor-general's suggestions for little jobs to keep him busy.

One reason for Pushkin's resentment was that he was already busy. In May that year, he had started writing
Eugene Onegin
in his dark apartment behind Primorskie. But there was another reason. Soon after the new governor-general's arrival, Pushkin had started a love affair with his wife, the Countess Vorontsova. In Odessa, nothing stays secret. Pushkin met the cold, English gaze of the count and did not like what he fancied he saw there. Early in 1824, Vorontsov overruled the poet's noisy protests that he was dying of a heart aneurism and was too sick to move, and appointed him to a travelling commission to study locust damage in the Dniester country. Pushkin never forgave him. His report is supposed to have consisted of a four-line poem:

The locusts flew and flew over the plain.

They landed on the ground,

Ate everything they found,

And then the locusts flew and flew away again.

This may be apocryphal, but by now Pushkin was becoming unbearable to Vorontsov, who wrote to his friends in St Petersburg and secured Pushkin's dismissal from the Foreign Service. This meant that he had to leave Odessa and live on his father's country estate for two years of boredom and loneliness, in the course of which he wrote most of his best verse. He took with him a gold talisman-ring with a cabalistic Hebrew inscription, which Countess Vorontsova had slipped onto his finger one day after they had made love on a Black Sea beach. Pushkin wore the ring for the rest of his life. It was removed by friends after his death thirteen years later in a duel, and survived until
1917
when an unknown looter took it from the Pushkin Museum in Moscow in the early months of the Revolution.

Pushkin was expelled from Odessa in July
1824.
Less than a year later, Vorontsov was sent another poet to keep an eye on. In late February
1825,
after a journey, mostly by sledge, from St Petersburg, three young Poles arrived in Odessa. They were Franciszek Malewski, Jozef Jezowski and Adam Mickiewicz.

They were all under sentence: banned from the Polish provinces of the Russian Empire and subject to orders of enforced residence. A few months before, they had been released from imprisonment in Vilnius and transferred to the Russian capital, where they had persuaded the authorities to let them be redirected to the south, hoping to wind up in Crimea or the Caucasus. As a compromise, they were sent as far as Odessa.

All three had been involved in a plot, or more correctly in a secret society, devoted to the restoration of Polish independence. The Filarets ('lovers of virtue') had arisen in the early
1820s
among students at the Wilno (Vilnius) University, some twenty-five years after the final suppression of Poland by the Third Partition. Before the Filarets, there had been a much smaller grouping called the Filomats ('lovers of learning'), to which all three exiles had belonged: something between a Masonic lodge and a debating club in which romantic students discussed Byron, sex (they invented an 'Erometer' for measuring passion) and the liberation of Poland. But too many people heard about them and wanted to join.

The Filarets started as an overflow organisation from the Filomats. Soon, however, they became much larger and bolder, not to say reckless. Prominent Polish conspirators, sought by the tsarist police, came to Vilnius and talked insurrection. So did a few young

Russian friends of liberty, who later became members of the 'Decembrist' conspiracy. Russian informers kept note of words and names. But the explosion, when it took place in 1823, was expected by nobody, touched off by a stroke of pure Polishness.

It started in a classroom at the Vilnius Lycée. One lesson was over, but the next teacher had not turned up. A boy called Plater, in the fourth form, sidled to the blackboard and wrote
Vivat Konstanqa
in chalk. He had some girl in mind. But another boy in the form, a serious-minded youth called Czechowicz, rubbed out the end of the second word and wrote
Konstytucja
- Long Live the Constitution.

Every boy in the room knew what that meant. It meant the patriotic Constitution of the Third of May, 1791, the charter of Polish national enlightenment and liberty which had been erased by the tyrannous partitioning powers. Somebody else drew an exclamation mark. Then yet another schoolboy got hold of the chalk and added: 'Ah, what a sweet memory!' Hubbub broke out in the classroom and spread down the corridors.

It was too late to contain the outbreak. The school authorities arrested three of the boys and were then arrested themselves by the Russians. All over the pink, yellow and white walls of baroque Vilnius, graffiti unreeled themselves: 'Long Live the Constitution! Death to Tyrants!' Senator Novosiltsev, who had been sent to Vilnius to investigage rumours of sedition in the university, was roused from a drunken coma and signed an order licensing the police to act on the Filaret files. Within a few days, most of the leading Filarets and Filomats, including Adam Mickiewicz and his companions, were locked up in a dungeon in the cellars of the Basilian Monastery.