Voyage By Dhow (22 page)

Here in the dim light and gathering fog we were confronted by what appeared to be a large version of an English market-stall, from the middle of which rose a pyramid displaying stacked ranks of my books. Today, Valentina proudly informed me, was not only
The Volcanoes
’ publication day, but the copies on sale here were the first delivery fresh from the press.
First Day
had been stamped on their covers, and this, Valentina hoped, added a stimulus to sales.

I was now exposed to the extraordinary sight of a queue that had formed to buy my book. Buyers were eager, the stall’s owner having announced that supplies were only likely to last for a matter of days. The high sales Valentina had anticipated had made it possible to drop the book’s cost to the equivalent of about three shillings. Valentina claimed that Soviet citizens were the world’s most eager and voracious readers. Such prices undoubtedly helped.

Suddenly, the portrait of
The Volcanoes
’ author was produced for inspection. It was a face of a visionary and a leader of men. A boldly painted eye stared confidently back at me. There was a challenge here, a firmness of purpose and courage. I looked up at Valentina, who shook her head, and we both laughed.

Valentina tackled the bookseller. ‘Comrade, we both like the portrait, but it’s incorrect.’ He pushed his way through the buyers to talk to us, for a moment distracted by the bell chiming repeatedly on the old-style cash register in the rear. ‘They never sent the real picture as promised,’ he said, ‘so we had make do with the best we could find. The story is that this gentleman in the picture is in French films, but who’s to know the difference?’ Valentina asked how many books he had sold, but he couldn’t tell us, though it was ‘certainly quite a number’. I examined a copy left on the counter. The cover glistened with yellowish varnish painted over a picture of a volcano erupting. In the lower right-hand corner a terror-stricken witness to the scene opened his mouth in a scream. The bookseller smiled admiringly. ‘You must admit it stands out,’ he said, and I had to agree with him.

I spent four days in Moscow, with Valentina always at my side. As she had promised, Valentina had persuaded Natasha to act as my guide on my tour of the country, and on our last evening together, Valentina told me a little more about my future companion. Natasha, she said, was the daughter of one of the nation’s leading film stars, but she had become a figure of some importance in her own right. She spoke all the main European languages with complete fluency, and was therefore in much demand as a guide in the service of foreign visitors. My guide’s arrival at the hotel next morning, however, did little to improve the Muscovite’s reputation for dangerous driving. The road passing the forecourt of the hotel—a prolongation in fact of the Orel Highway—must have been one of the widest in Europe, and, like the rest of the city’s streets, it was largely deserted. Knowing the Russian obsession with punctuality I was waiting with my bags by the kerb when Natasha drew up. Seconds later, with the highway still apparently empty, a taxi crashed into the back of her car. Within minutes the police were on the spot, followed almost immediately by a doctor in a sports car of local production. Natasha had been flung forward, doubled up, by the force of the crash and the doctor suspected damage to the vertebrae of her neck. At that, the doctor drove her off to the nearest hospital for an X-ray. They returned within the hour with Natasha full of smiles and the news that all was well.

As it had been announced that our plane would be delayed, we still had some time to spare. We settled in the hotel’s lounge to discuss plans. Natasha was a lively, fair-haired girl, possibly in her early thirties, who spoke English—as did most Muscovites I had so far met—both idiomatically and fluently. She was clearly excited by the prospect of a journey of exceptional interest, but she was lukewarm, as most Russians appeared to be, on the subject of Central Asia. ‘There is so much to be seen in the Soviet Union, and so little in the Asian steppe.’ Valentina had been insistent that Sochi should be included in the itinerary. Natasha, however, was opposed to this. She shook her head, lips tightly compressed. ‘I believe you will see what I mean when you get there.’

‘I agree that Sochi is very beautiful,’ she explained, ‘and it is historically interesting due to the local opposition to the Tsarist regime, and its liberal traditions. But the place is now full of foreigners, many of whom have been persecuted in their own countries and have been invited by our government to settle there. The government houses and feeds them in exchange. This lazy life has changed their characters. It is hard to live simply when you no longer have to fight for democracy or freedom. These men behave like primitive Indians. They paint their faces and stick feathers in their hair. They expose themselves to women and sleep in the street. We can stay in this place if you wish, but I am against it. I think we should please Valentina by stopping there a day or two, and then we should go away.’

We left the hotel and caught the plane. Like all those who visit the Black Sea, we were unable to find any justification for its name. Coming in to Sochi at sunset we had circled over a vast spread of lemon-coloured water fleeced with hardly moving breakers. On landing, wonderful frigate birds tumbled out of a sky deepening to night to inspect us, and at the edge of the runway we glimpsed children oblivious to our presence, still playing with immense crabs on the beach.

An Intourist representative wearing a circus comedian’s pink bowler hat was there to meet us and accompany us to our dacha. The dacha had been reserved for us for some weeks, he said, but he had to apologize for its condition. Turning on the kitchen light he was quick with a sponge to wipe out the obscene drawing on the wall. Through the window I could see the sea, now ashen in the evening light, and beyond the furthest waves a glowing ripple of the far-off Caucasian peaks.

The small incident of the drawing on the wall provided a glimmer of insight into an unexpected aspect of Natasha’s complex personality. As I examined once more what was left of the damaged wall-drawing, I said, ‘Pity. A good, strong picture. Quite a primitive work of art. Wonder if a fisherman did this?’

‘No,’ she replied, contempt twisting at the muscles of her mouth, revealing in her judgement a puritanism that came as an immense surprise.

Shortly after dawn the next morning the local council’s chairman arrived to pay us a courtesy visit. The chairman—whose name, we soon discovered, was Budenin—had brought with him a posy of water-lily blooms and a basket of oven-fresh black bread as welcoming gifts. He was quick to apologize for the early hour. ‘I started life as a fisherman,’ he said. ‘We Sochi fishermen work a fourteen-hour day, and that means an early start.’ He straightened himself for his formal speech, delivered, as I had come to expect in this country, in fluent English. ‘I have been asked by the members of our council to express our pleasure and satisfaction at your visit to our town,’ he said, and I assured him how delighted we were to be able to visit the principal town of the Black Sea. ‘Are there as many foreign visitors this year?’ I asked.

Quite as many, Budenin assured us. ‘Many foreign people are visiting our town at this time. You must understand that some are friends of the government. Not all these we are liking so much. Why is their behaviour so strange? My friends have all been fishermen since childhood, and we each know how the other can be expected to behave. Whatever the situation that arises, we know how our friends will confront it—how they react in pleasure, in anger or in sorrow. The foreign friends of the government who now occupy so many of the houses in this town we cannot understand, for there is no way of foretelling how they will react to any situation.’

Next day, the chairman invited us to lunch in the ancient building which the council had commandeered. He perched us on stools, as was the custom in Sochi, round a low table. ‘When friends honour us with a visit,’ he said, ‘the main thing here is to keep fish off the menu. This means that sometimes we’re down to horse. Today we’re in luck. This is a kind of edible squirrel from the mountains. We like it, and we hope you will, too.’

The council building had been chosen for the commanding views it afforded over the town, and in front of us we could see the fishing boats in port, some with old-fashioned blood-coloured sails and odd cartoon figures painted on their sterns. Immediately beneath us, ancient buildings shelved steeply down to the sea. Inhabitants of this upper part of the town, the chairman informed us, were noted for their eccentric behaviour, blamed ridiculously on the thinness of the air. A citizen walking in the street below stopped to blow a whistle, at which Budenin left the table to open the window and listen to the man’s news. Coming back, he assured us that there was nothing we really needed to hear, except that, as expected, the seasonal alteration in fishing times appeared to be giving trouble again.

The chairman then took his seat again and ladled food on to the plates. ‘There was one bad incident last night,’ he explained. ‘You see, all our people are fishermen. I’m one myself. A servant of the government, if you like, but a fisherman at heart. There’s a season when we fish by daylight, and another when we put out floating lights and fish at night. When the night-fishing goes on our wives sleep alone in their beds. We respect them and they respect us. That’s how it should be. But now there have been certain incidents involving the foreigners—we’ve been obliged to appeal to the police at Sukhumi to come to our aid.’

Back in Moscow I had perhaps incautiously mentioned to Valentina my interest in wildlife and this, passed on by the Writers’ Union to their representative in Sochi, had produced the offer of a small expedition on my behalf. Specialists in local fauna and flora had been alerted and I was assured that the Abkhazskaya mountain range, some forty miles to the south, was exceptionally rich in rarities of all kinds. Much of this region was virtually unknown territory, having been made accessible to four-wheeled vehicles only a few years before.

Two days after our lunch with the chairman, three specialists in animal and vegetable life arrived in a suitable vehicle. After Natasha had excused herself, we set out on a brief reconnaissance of the area most likely, as they believed, to produce results.

It turned out that two of my companions were university professors. However, the third, Colonel Vyacheslav Soldanov, was an acting army officer, and I could not repress a suspicion that he would be attracted to any adventure offered him, however small. It was a suspicion that increased when the colonel suggested our trip might offer an opportunity for exploration of a minor kind. One of the latest army four-wheel-drives had been put at our disposal, he said, and this could be used on the roughest of tracks, previously unpassable to any motorized vehicles. Soldanov claimed that with this form of transport we could reach parts of the Abkhazskaya mountain range that had never previously attracted botanical interest. I was amazed at this point to discover that my escorts had brought with them a brown paper bag containing a scimitar. This, they said, would be used to uproot interesting specimens—garden spades being practically unknown in this area of the Soviet Union.

The route suggested by the colonel was automatically accepted by the two scientists. Just as we were about to leave, however, one of the professors recalled an extraordinary event which had occurred very near the region we were to visit. A group of illicit adventurers in search of valuable minerals had suffered a catastrophe. They had been attacked by swarms of bees of an unknown kind, causing the deaths of several members of the group, and the panic-stricken flight of the survivors.

After a study of his maps the colonel assured us that we had nothing to fear from killer bees. We therefore made a start, and in the early afternoon we reached the closest of the foothills.

We found ourselves among a deserted landscape of strange shapes and exhausted colours. Walking up through the hills we came across an opening among the trees, where some freak effect, perhaps of the weather, had cleared a black little semicircle. Around us pigeons clustered like white decorations in the top branches of the pines. The Colonel was surprised—and perhaps a little disappointed—that a previous visitor had left a notice, now hardly legible, nailed to a tree trunk, advising visitors as to what could be seen. In front of us, it said, was a ‘Cave of a Thousand Owls’, and we watched in silence as the birds flapped in and out of sight through the black cataract of the cavern’s eye. In another, smaller cave we found evidence of a now vanished human population, for it was full of skeletons packed carefully into niches by those who had interred them, with polished stones plugged carefully into the sockets of the eyes. The whole of this area was scented with the peppery odour of the pines, and there was a mysterious pinkish tint to the light, as if at the instant of sunset, caused by countless millions of tiny, winged insects that were drawn up into the stratosphere.

In these surroundings the colonel revealed himself in a new light. He believed that human mistakes over the course of the ages had caused countless damage to evolution, and despite his honours degree and senior army rank he was prepared to defend his views against all comers. Evolution, he insisted, seemed to have fallen into a mysterious torpor—either it had come to a complete standstill or accelerated in an eccentric and incomprehensible fashion.

This, said Soldanov, was why he visited these mountains whenever an opportunity arose. It was here, according to his researches, that early man had begun interfering with the natural world. He had cut down the trees, and killed all the animals considered dangerous—the bears, the mountain lions and the poisonous snakes—but the invincible malarial mosquito and the high mountain caves full of deadly bees would always remain. These, he said, would put evolution back on course in the end. In the meantime Soldanov thought there was no place to equal Abkhazskaya for a view of what had gone wrong with the world.

Back in Sochi two days later, the Soviet Union’s erstwhile foreign community was still giving trouble. The detachment of police that had been called up from Sukhumi to deal with the problem had more or less shrugged their shoulders and gone off. The chairman had ordered obscene drawings to be cleaned off the town’s walls but these had immediately been replaced with others of a similar kind, although with less artistic pretension. Natasha’s only news was that two respected exponents of the socialist ideal had endeavoured to further the cause of the natural presentation of the body by a naked stroll down the principal street. She was delighted to say that she had booked seats on the plane for Tashkent that would be leaving next day.