for that purpose. Things were not always as you find them now. There is libéralisme in the Chamber of Deputies and throughout the government; it is in the air. But this was not always so,” she said, taking advantage of her understatement to smile again. “I was the first woman mathematician to become a member of the Soviet academy.” I gathered that her discipline was almost as much a barrier as her gender, and that even after she was elected there were still more obstacles to overcome. “Perhaps six years ago the international symposium was held in Montreal, but I was not permitted to go.” But with the Gorbachev ascendancy, the mood changed instantly; the trip to Italy was her first and so far only visit to the West.
Finally we grew tired of talking. She put out the lamp, saying merrily, “There is too much illumination in the carriage.” We lay back on our respective bunks. Whenever we passed through a town during the night, I could see her head silhouetted in the flickering light. It looked as though it belonged on an ancient coin.
As it happened, I saw Leningrad in strict sunshine, which it is possible to do only 65 or at most 100 days of the year. This good luck no doubt contributed to my general impression that Leningrad was on balance one of the handsomest cities I had ever been in. I mean the old central city, which became the capital in 1712, a few years after it was founded, and retained the distinction for 200 years. But even the outer districts, with rusty factories in the Soviet manner, were not without a 1930s late modernist charm. They made you forget for a moment how northern a city Leningrad really is, with its Baltic air and immense skies. When you move beyond the city—and such is the density that you don’t have to move very far, considering that there are five million residents—you run into forests of white birch.
When leaving Canada, I had stuffed a bag with expendable secondhand paperbacks for consumption in queues and waiting rooms (and learned when I arrived that they made welcome gifts as the appetite for English books was hearty every where I went). Quite by chance I came upon a passage in Walden in which Henry David Thoreau enumerates his reasons for choosing to settle at Walden Pond. “No Neva marshes to be filled; though you must everywhere build on piles of your own driving,” he writes. “It is said that a flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the Neva, would sweep St. Petersburg from the face of the earth.” But it’s not like that at all, at least not in the warmer months. The Neva is a broad river that cuts a deep blue pattern through the heart of the city, augmented by small canals that suggest a miniature (and cleaner) Venice. On both banks of the river, for as long as one can see in both directions, are perfect baroque buildings from the 18th century and classical ones from the early part of the 19th. Many are painted in pastel shades—not, as in Portugal, say, to display them-selves best in direct sunlight but to fight back against the absence of it. The Winter Palace, I was surprised to discover, is wintergreen (a mnemonic device in the making for anyone who has difficulty remembering what buildings were stormed in the Revolution). The low line of harmonious rooftops was interrupted here and there by a church spire or a gold dome. One such dome, in the distance, belongs to St. Isaac’s Cathedral, whose columns still bear some scars from the war. It is located across the square from the Astoria Hotel, which Hitler vowed to make into a museum of the conquest of Leningrad. Some chicken, some neck. The pockmarks on St. Isaac’s are retained as a reminder, like a sign on a building in Nevsky Prospekt, the principal commercial street, requesting pedestrians to walk on the other side of the avenue during periods of bombardment.
The damage done during the war went beyond what would be suggested by the word extensive; it was heartbreaking. But the Soviets were the world’s champion restorers and rebuilders, and neither the antiquarian symmetry of the riverfront nor the open-handed bustle of Nevsky Prospekt, with its often magnificent pre-Revolutionary shops, showed Leningrad for the tragic and violent place it had so often been. Granted that by now there should be no way of recalling that three-quarters of the buildings were destroyed in the war against Napoleon. What is implausible—and it flies in the face of all sensory logic, too—is that it is not easy to connect the place with its revolutionary past—Leningrad, where the Decembrists rose up, where the men of the cruiser Aurora, which is now a floating museum, fired some of the first shots of the Revolution, where Lenin disembarked at the Finland Station, his exile ended. But it is so. I found it much easier to conceive of Moscow, where intellectual and artistic ferment go together with a gritty workaday existence, as the epicentre of past political earthquakes than Leningrad, which was merely the hub of government, the aristocracy, and the capitalist business culture that were being overthrown. Not that it was remote from the present political turmoil. On the contrary. Only weeks earlier a crowd of 100,000 had gathered outside the Winter Palace to protest the possibility that the two former prosecutors whose stories of corruption had been printed in the Moscow News might lose their immunity. I saw graffiti such as FUCKEN POLICE and the letter A in a circle, the international sign for anarchism. Yet despite all that, Leningrad was definitely the quieter place, with both a deeper level of culture and a sense of inferiority, perhaps equally profound, about having become the second city. The comparisons are inexact enough to be odious, but Leningrad is to Moscow as Montreal is to Toronto, San Francisco is to Los Angeles, and Melbourne is to Sydney.
As befits a city that in tsarist times gave pride of place to its magnificent classical Stock Exchange (by now a naval museum), it was also, or so I found, a greedier place than Moscow in terms of the poor Soviets’ eternal quest for the magical American dollars—greedier and so ruder, because the mission was clear and the time to accomplish it so brief. My experience of Intourist employees I dealt with in Moscow, for example, was that they were uniformly helpful and efficient and usually friendly to boot; but the ones in Leningrad wore renfrogné expressions that were matched by their voices. One or two of the foreigners’ hotels in Moscow had a few discreet slot machines in the lobby to extract yet a few more dollars or pounds per year, but in Leningrad they were more numerous and not at all hidden; in one instance, there was a sort of miniature casino, gaudily lit. May be that kind of thing is to be expected in any city whose museums and treasures make it a place where tourism is disproportionately important to the economy (20,000 people per day visit the Hermitage museum, 40,000 per day in the summer and during holidays). One incident for me crystallized Leningrad’s position in this matter.
Wherever I went, I found, as so many Western visitors do, that people were forever approaching me to change dollars into rubles at the best black-market valuta (you would have had to be crazy to run the risk of accepting) or to try to sell me wristwatches or vodka. Leningrad exceeded all the boundaries. Spotting me as a foreigner (it is my fate always to look like a foreigner wherever I am, even when I stay home), young men would enquire in whispers whether I might wish Soviet flags or icons or caviar (three jars for $10—“special price”). The most original was a chap not far from the main entrance of the Admiralty. He was in civilian attire, but I took him to be a sailor by his distinctive haircut—and because Leningrad has been full of sailors since it was established originally to be the country’s Baltic seaport. He was carrying a bag of some rough cloth, bigger than a large pillow slip. I thought I saw it move, leading me to suppose that it contained a chicken or perhaps a litter of kittens. But what he wanted was to sell his—or somebody’s—dress uniform, complete with braided cap and epaulets. I declined, and we each scurried off in stoic embarrassment like two people whose stomachs had been rumbling in public. Naval discipline, I gathered, was not what it once was.
I stayed in Leningrad a couple of days, looking at paintings and buildings and talking to as many people as I could, including bathers sunning themselves on the sand beneath the walls of Peter and Paul Fortress, the old political prison. I marvelled at the brevity of their costume, given that I found it cold enough to warrant something midway between a mackintosh and an overcoat. They’re a hardy mob, those Leningraders.
I wish I could report that my return journey to Moscow was as rewarding as the trip up had been, but it was merely memorable. My roommate this time was a merchant seaman who kept addressing me as Englander. I had all the more reason to not split hairs, but simply accept this as the generous compliment it was, given that he was as drunk as a—well, as a sailor. He couldn’t move more than a few steps without banging his head into something, and he kept dropping the
