And our descendants, remembering the past:
‘Where were you?’ – The question will rumble like thunder,
The answer will rumble like thunder: – On the Don!
‘What did you do?’ – We accepted torments,
Then grew tired and lay down to sleep …
Son, the Russian word for both sleep and dream, rhymes with the name of the quiet river that runs through the wild country of the Scythian steppe.
Not long after seven, we arrived back in Rostov, charmed and rested by the southern light after the long Moscow winter, wanting to wander the city streets again in the dry evening air and avoid, for as long as possible, the joyless precincts of the Intourist Hotel. On the Garden Ring trams swung past hives of kiosks, selling food and flowers, gaudy clothes, trinkets, underwear and plastic shoes, imported from Syria, Turkey and China. Set behind them, in the ground floors of mansions built in the proud years of Rostov’s cosmopolitan prosperity, were sepulchral stores selling French and Italian designer clothes and handbags, and lingerie boutiques called The Pearl and Wild Orchid, with white headless mannequins in their windows, dressed in suspender belts and lacy negligées. Molotov married a woman from the south who had a certain chic: a tailor’s daughter who (before the Revolution changed everyone’s lives) had worked as a shop assistant. In his library I found an odd book called Our Ladies, the oldest of the books hidden in the bottom of the bookcase, published in 1891, when Molotov was just one and No. 3 not yet built. Our Ladies was a wry essay in social commentary (reminiscent of Sands’ series of satirical prints, The Gay Women of Paris, in its mercilessness about the consumerist motives of women) about the art, the expense (silks and jewels, sweetmeats without end) and the woes of love among the haute bourgeoisie. Though it was out of place among all the books on central planning and diplomacy, the book was marked with numerous underlinings in a familiar purple ink. The marked passages pondered the arts of seduction, the ways in which women enslave and drain men with their beauty, their endless desire for luxury and amorous diversion, their faithlessness. ‘A woman of contemporary upbringing will not sell her life away cheap,’ warned the author (whose name was A. Dyakov), and his reader took note.
We came to the city opera theatre, a socialist culture palace of the 1960s, vast and white. Puccini’s Madama Butterfly was playing, but we were almost an hour late for the start. A lady usher in navy blue, who was chatting to the elderly coat-check attendant in the marble foyer, told us to wait for the interval and then go in and find a seat. Upstairs, a thin man in a grubby waistcoat was arranging trays of Sovetskoe champagne and red caviar sandwiches on a table beside a white piano. The doors of the auditorium swung open, and the public emerged loudly into the chandeliered hall to queue and promenade. The women’s evening clothes, as ruched and silky as the curtains on the marble staircase, glinted back from long walls of mirrors. When the third bell rang we took two seats at the edge of the hall. The red synthetic velvet gave off sparks as women brushed past, puffing, sighing and chuckling. As the curtain rose on a new set, the audience applauded, whispering loudly over the recorded overture. ‘Oh, the bitter fragrance of these flowers,’ sang Pinkerton, straining dryly for the high notes. As Cho Cho San ended her life with the blade of her father the Samurai, a mobile telephone played the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy in someone’s handbag. ‘To die with honour, when one can no longer live with honour,’ the geisha sang, holding her father’s sword.
We ordered a late supper of river pike and boiled potatoes in the bar of the Intourist. The music was hard to bear. Two women came to sit at the bar and smoke, lingering over a single cocktail. One was blonde and very young, and wore a mini-skirt and white platforms; the second was older, her Asiatic features blanked by make-up, her hair streaked with orange. Their minder, a heavy man with coiffed hair in a canary-yellow jacket and thin black tie, sat alone in a booth, his back to the mirrored wall, watching the room. A business traveller came in for a bottle of wine. As he waited for his change, the blonde caught his eye, then walked slowly out of the bar ahead of him, tossing her long hair.
The investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya lamented the role that prostitution played in foreign perceptions of her country. I think of her now when I think of the south. In the last book she published before she was shot dead in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building in 2006, she listed those things that the West finds ‘entirely to its taste’ about Putin’s Russia: ‘the vodka, the caviar, the gas, the oil, the dancing bears, the practitioners of a particular profession’. As she was flying south to Rostov-on-Don two years earlier on her way to the school in Beslan in which terrorists from Chechnya were holding many hundreds of children hostage, Politkovskaya was served tea laced with poison (she was certain) by the secret police. Like Marina Tsvetaeva, on whom she wrote her graduate dissertation, Politkovskaya was one of a ‘fierce few’ who stood against a rising power. She wrote about the dirty wars in the south that people would rather forget. ‘Behind Anna everything burns,’ as one of her colleagues at the newspaper Novaya Gazeta said to me before her murder.
At the reception desk in the Intourist lobby, I waited for our room key. A young woman at the desk was slowly copying out the passport details of a man in a suit. ‘Speak English?’ he asked. She shook her head, smiled a feline smile, and bent over her writing again, long eyelashes resting on her reddening cheek. ‘French?’ She nodded. ‘Tu est tray jolie,’ said the traveller, ‘tu as tray beau-coup de charme.’
NINE
Taganrog
‘I am not a historian; I am a man living in history.’
FATHER ALEXANDER MEN
The steppe clarifies sight and focuses memory. On the drive along the old post road from Rostov-on-Don to Taganrog, it was the sign to the ancient city of Tanais that outlined itself in the foreground of my vision. As though we might turn off and find ourselves among busy traders in fish and slaves in this far colony of the Hellenic world; the small rust-pocked black letters TAHA-C pointed left across the stony grassland. ‘In writings it is written that there is a lot of treasure here,’ says the old shepherd in Chekhov’s story ‘Fortune’, ‘only the treasure has a spell on it, you won’t get at it.’
A freight train rattled past, shaking me out of the moment-long spell cast by the ancient place name on the road sign. The railway marks the course of the Dead Donets, a tributary that slips out of the Don just beyond Rostov and dances its own way up country to flow into the northeastern tip of the Azov Sea, mingling with the marshes in the delta. Locals like to think that this white shoreline could be Lukomore, the enchanted land in Pushkin’s Ruslan and Lyudmila which ‘smells of Rus’, where a green oak stands on the empty sand, a place ‘where there are wonders’.