Sibir (3 page)

At one minute past the hour we scurried into a huge room from which a single set of double doors led toward a glare of lights. The backs of a group of people almost filled the wide doorway. We dashed up behind them,
followed them through … and found ourselves on the stage of an immense auditorium in company with about fifty soberly dressed, distinguished-looking men and women.

Five tiers of chairs had been arranged on the stage behind a long, baize-covered table bristling with microphones. The chairs were filling fast. By the time we reached them (carried along by sheer momentum) there were only a few still unoccupied – directly behind the long table and close beside a sort of podium or lectern. At this point I hesitated, contemplating flight, but Claire nudged me cruelly. “Sit down for heaven’s sake! The whole place is staring at you!”

It was true enough. Fifty solemn faces on the platform were turned our way with expressions of polite incredulity. Beyond the footlights we could see a wash of faces whose owners also seemed much interested in the spectacle of three brightly attired ladies – one of whom sported a large red beard – milling about in a confused way at front stage right.

We sat down and tried to disappear. It was difficult. Spotlights were trained onstage to provide illumination for several television and motion picture cameras. Still photographers added their own illumination, producing a recurring flicker of flashbulbs.

A robust, black-suited gentleman on our left, who turned out to be a high ranking member of the Politburo, got to his feet and announced that the evening’s entertainment was to be in honour of the famous Ukrainian poet, Ivan Franko, who, though dead these many years, was loved and honoured throughout the Soviet Union. Many famous guests, the chairman told us, were present on stage this night to do Franko honour. He proceeded to name the guests and each stood up and made a little bow. They included the cream of the Moscow literary élite, not to mention a score of major political figures. The audience, many members of which had equipped themselves with opera glasses (these can be rented in any
theatre in Moscow) closely examined each famous figure. Having made all the introductions on his list, the chairman seemed to realize that something had been left out. He cast a perplexed glance at us and the opera glasses all swung our way – but inspiration failed the chairman. He shook his head in a baffled manner and turned back to the program.

Speakers and singers and reciters of poetry now came forward one by one to the podium. Since I sat on the outside chair beside the podium I was not screened by the table, and the
T.V.
cameras had an unobstructed view of me. Claire drew my attention to this fact with a murderous, “Cross your legs!
And keep them crossed!
”

Some of the speakers spoke in Russian, and Laura, slowly recovering from acute paralysis, gamely translated for us. However, many more spoke in Ukrainian and this was outside Laura’s provenance. Finally she turned to a dignified lady sitting on her left and politely asked if the stranger would mind translating from Ukrainian. The lady seemed startled but before she could reply she herself was called on for a speech … after all, she
was
the Minister of Culture for the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Since there was nothing much else to do except consider what fate I would visit on Sasha when I caught him, I began to ponder the implications of this celebration. For centuries Ukrainians and Russians have lived uneasily as neighbours, and often there has been violence between them. Both are intensely nationalistic peoples. Each race has stubbornly defended its own culture and language against encroachments by the other. The situation has some similarities with the one which still exists between French and English in Canada. Yet here was a Ukrainian national (and very nationalistic) poet being honoured, not only in Moscow but simultaneously throughout the Soviet Union, with all the pomp and ceremony the state could muster. I have no way of knowing if Franko was a good enough poet to warrant this attention. However, I
do
know that the honour being paid to him, and through him to all Ukrainians, was a clever piece of practical politics. How much, I thought to myself, could be done to heal the spreading rift between Quebec and the rest of Canada if we had the intelligence and the will to make similar gestures.

I was still musing when intermission arrived – an hour and a half later. We were the last to leave the platform but we did not linger in the
V.I.P.
waiting room. With averted eyes we scurried for the exit.

We went back to the hotel and as we sipped our nightcaps we considered the nature of the problem we had presented to the audience at the theatre, to the television watchers, and to the cinema goers in the Ukraine and elsewhere who would never have any explanation for the abrupt materialization and equally abrupt disappearance of those three strange ladies.

A
DISQUIETING
episode preceded our departure from Moscow.

Claire and I had gone to bed early, but shortly after midnight we were awakened by a gut-shaking rumble which seemed to permeate the entire building, setting the dishes on our table tinkling nervously.

I went to the window. Moscow normally goes to sleep at midnight and the broad, dimly lit street five storeys below was empty of life. Nevertheless the air throbbed with a harsh, metallic thunder. The sound grew closer until a massive column of tanks loomed into view at the far end of the street.

These squat behemoths were the precursors to a truly Orwellian spectacle. For three hours an unrelenting river of steel thundered through the black October night. The buildings on both sides of the street shuddered to that passing-on, but did so eyelessly. Not a single lighted window broke the obscure facade.

The tanks were followed by echelons of armoured carriers, self-propelled guns, atomic cannon, and an array of tank-towed missiles which looked particularly menacing because each was wrapped in a dark canvas shroud.

Although I knew this chilling display of weaponry could only be a rehearsal for the military parade which is a feature of the annual celebration of the Great October
Revolution, the effect was to make me feel naked and alone in a potentially lethal and hostile world.

Claire, who had joined me at the window, was less impressed. She soon became bored by this display of male bellicosity.

“From up here,” she said, stifling a yawn, “they look like a lot of children’s Dinky Toys. Come back to bed!”

I slept uneasily for the remainder of the night, my imagination haunted by all the propaganda I had ever read, or heard, about the Communist hammer, poised high to crush the life out of the Western world.

I was still bleary-eyed next morning when we boarded a big black Chaika limousine for the trip to Domodedovo Airport. Domodedovo lies sixty kilometres distant and the route to it follows a long segment of the circular bypass highway which is supposed to be Moscow’s ultimate boundary – a ring of concrete intended to contain the burgeoning city and prevent if from spilling out over the surrounding countryside.

There was a heavy snowstorm and the road was crowded with trucks carrying concrete sections for the prefabricated apartment buildings which were springing up everywhere. We drove for miles and miles past rows of apartments, built and building. In some areas they were sprouting in the midst of age-old growths of log houses which must have looked the same when Napoleon came amongst them. Tiny, and ornately decorated, the log houses were Old Russia, and they were doomed. Their passing does not depress the Muscovites, particularly those who grew up in such homes without water or plumbing and often enough with three or four families squeezed into as many rooms. What the average Muscovite seems to want – and the quicker the better – is a brand-new apartment of his own; and he is not apt to be overly critical if the walls are so thin he can hear his neighbour breathing.

Against all odds of weather and traffic we reached the
airport on time – one full hour before
scheduled
departure, which is not to be confused with
actual
departure time. Aeroflot treats its schedules with a casual disdain which can be a trial to the keyed-up nerves of Westerners.

Russians have a saying (they have one for every eventuality) which sums up their attitude towards Aeroflot’s cavalier disregard for schedules. “You should not complain if the plane leaves late,” Kola told me solemnly. “Be grateful that none have ever been known to leave ahead of time.”

Russian tolerance for such delays is at least partly due to the knowledge that Aeroflot’s safety record is unmatched. Generally speaking Soviet civilian aircraft will not take off if there is the slightest doubt about the weather, or about any other factor bearing on safety.

However, the cautious policies of Aeroflot are not universally observed. Claire and I once shared a three-seat section on a flight from Moscow to Tbilisi, capital of the Georgian Republic, with a Moscow physicist who, from the moment we boarded the plane, was in an unabashed state of funk. We asked him why he seemed so unhappy.

“Georgian pilots … and watermelons!”

Pressed to explain, he described a trip he had made a year earlier.

“We boarded our plane at Tbilisi airport and then were kept waiting an hour in the broiling heat while the crew personally put aboard an entire truckload of watermelons. Since there wasn’t room in the cargo compartment they just stacked them in the centre aisle, five or six deep. When we got into the air and hit some turbulence, the cursed melons were the only things aboard that had room to move and they rolled under seats and even burst open the door into the pilot’s cabin. We human passengers were stuck where we were. No chance to reach the toilet. I had to sit with my knees under my chin most of the way to keep from getting my feet squashed.

“I’m sure we didn’t actually go
over
the Caucasus
Mountains. We were too heavy to get enough altitude. We must have flown between them, but-it was such thick cloud I can’t say for sure. Anyway we did get to Moscow and then we had to sit in the plane for another hour until a truck appeared and the crew got the melons off the plane.”

“What happened to the melons?”

“Oh, the crew doubtless sold them for twenty times what they cost. Good businessmen, the Georgians, only the government really shouldn’t let them play about with airplanes.”

Domodedovo Airport was swarming with the most fantastic mixture of people. They seemed to include representatives, often in native dress, of every known race, together with some of totally unknown origin. There are more than ninety ethnic groups in the
U.S.S.R.
and the majority live south or east of the Ural Mountains. Domodedovo is their airport, serving Siberia and the Far East, but it also serves most of non-Soviet Asia, and Asia has taken to the air with passion and abandon. For almost the only time I was in the Soviet Union, I was able to wander about almost unnoticed, despite being kilted, bearded and draped in an Eskimo parka. By the standards of Domodedovo my garb and my appearance were relatively square.

Our flight departed only thirty minutes late, which seemed to surprise Kola and Yura. After we had settled ourselves, and endured the take-off, I asked Yura to tell me something about the
TU
-104 jet in which we were flying. He was unhelpful.

“Airplanes I do not like! Dog team is better.”

“We’ll ask the pilot,” Kola interjected, and without more ado shepherded Claire and me forward to the cockpit, apparently treating it as the God-given right of every Soviet citizen to visit that sanctum if and when he chose.

The Captain, a fatherly-looking fellow, explained his plane with gusto. It was a civilian modification of a bomber type, he told me. Then, with a grin, “In the
United States they call it Badger bomber and they worry because we have so many. Don’t tell them most of our 104’s carry passengers instead of bombs. Is big military secret!”

When we returned to our seats, the co-pilot, a handsome young chap from Kiev, came along with us. He was infatuated with northern aviation, having spent several years with the polar division of Aeroflot. His northern flying had been mostly over the Chukotka Peninsula (Chukotka and Alaska are only fifty-six miles apart) and he amused us with an account of how American radio stations sometimes sought to seduce Soviet fliers into defecting across the intervening Bering strait.

“They have one fellow who speaks good Russian, and he calls us up on our working frequency and tells us we are foolish to live in slavery when all we have to do is bear west for fifteen minutes to reach a free country.

“One time my captain told him: ‘Yes, you are right, okay, we are coming right away.’ He got very excited and wanted to know how many of us would come. We told him not many … maybe four squadrons of
MIG
-21’s. He lost his temper at that and told us, anyway, we were too stupid to be free!”

At this juncture the co-pilot, who had been eyeing Claire in a frankly admiring manner, bent smoothly toward her and slipped his arm around her shoulders.

“Look down!” he told her. “The Ural Mountains! Soon we leave Europe behind. Then is
Sibir
– the name means the Sleeping Land – but it is not sleeping now. It is the New Land of the Soviet people, wide awake at last!”

Pilots are the same the world over. They are not to be trusted with pretty girls. Although I was very curious to see the legendary Urals, the port-hole was completely blocked by two blonde heads. Kola leaned across the aisle.

“Never mind, Farley,” he said sweetly, “come and look out my side. The view is just as good.”

Actually the view was terrible. Seen from a height of five kilometres, through a filter of thin cloud, the Urals
appeared only dimly as an ill-defined pattern of grey rock darkened by the forests clinging to the slopes.

Although not physically as impressive as most of the world’s great mountain ranges, the Urals have nevertheless loomed surpassingly large in human history. In ancient times they were believed to be the eastern limit of the habitable world, if not of the world itself. The long, sinuous sweep of the Urals had a similar quality to that of the bleak, grey, sea horizon of the Atlantic Ocean. Beyond both lay a void in human knowledge and for an almost equal length of time both served as barriers blocking the spread of European man and denying him access to the greater world beyond.