this.
Ecclesiastes 7:10
A novelist should aim not to describe great events but to make small ones interesting.
Arthur Schopenhauer
ONE
Those were the Days!
For many years I used to think I had been born too late. Fascinating times, extraordinary events, exceptional people – all these, I felt, were things of the past, gone for good.
In my early childhood, in the 1950s, the ‘great epochs’ for me were above all the 1930s and the years of the war. I saw the latter as an age of heroic, almost titanic struggle when the fate of the world hung in the balance, the former as a golden age of carefree oblivion when the world, as if set aglow by the gentle light of a setting sun, gave itself up to pleasure and innocent folly.
Later, some time in the early 1960s, I realised I had come to see the Stalinist period, only just over, as another such ‘great era’. True, I had lived through part of it myself, but as a child too young to appreciate its malevolent power; and although I was well aware that, like the war, it was a nightmarish time, a time of degeneration and crime and collective madness, still it imposed itself on my mind – just because it was so extreme – as something unique, almost out of this world. And I felt a strange regret that I had been denied the chance to experience it in full, had scarcely brushed against it, confined as I was then to a view from the pram, the nursery and the little garden on the edge of town. The wild orgies of slaughter indulged in by the authorities of that time, the demented trances that gripped thousands of people, the tumult and delirious ravings – all this reached me only as a distant echo, faint and quite beyond my comprehension.
My sense of late arrival was not limited to the sphere of history. It had occasion to emerge in a rich variety of contexts, on a smaller, almost miniature scale.
Take, for example, my first piano lessons. My teacher was a dignified elderly lady, her family landed gentry, her own student days spent in Paris, London and Vienna in the 1920s. And here I am, on day one, already listening to reminiscences about the glorious past, the days of great talents and great masters, the speed at which pupils used to learn, the delight taken in music, how splendid it all was then and now how hopeless.
‘Bach, Beethoven, Schubert . . . and above all, above all, that wonder of nature, that example of perfection incarnate, that divinity – Mozart! The day he came into the world should be celebrated like the birth of Christ. The twenty-seventh of January, 1756: remember that date! There are no geniuses like that now. And music nowadays – oh, it’s not even worth discussing. Waste of breath. It’s finished. A barren wasteland, a desert.’
Or take chess. The game caught my interest, and after a few years of solitary practice I joined a club to develop my skills. There were just a few of us – a little group of teenage enthusiasts. Our instructor, a degenerate pre-war intellectual partial to the bottle, had us practise various openings and endgames, and showed us how such-and-such a game should be played. Sometimes, after making a move, he would suddenly interrupt his demonstration and ask, ‘Do you know who thought up this move? Who was the first to play like this?’
Naturally, no one knows. This is just what the instructor has been waiting for, and he launches into a so-called educational digression: ‘Capablanca. In 1925, at a tournament in London. I hope you all know who Capablanca was . . .’
‘Umm . . . he was a Master,’ someone mumbles.
‘A Master!’ He sneers at the hopeless inadequacy of this response. ‘I’m a Master, too. He was the Master, the absolute Master! A genius! One of the greatest chess players the world has ever known. A virtuoso of the positional game! They don’t make them like that anymore. They don’t have tournaments like that anymore. Chess has gone to the dogs.’
‘But what about Botvinnik, Petrosian, Tal?’ someone ventures; these were the stars of Soviet chess at the time.
Our instructor’s face twists into a scowl of unutterable disapproval. Then he lapses into a gloomy reverie. ‘No, no,’ he says finally, with an expression of distaste verging on disgust, ‘that’s not the same thing at all. Not compared to the way chess used to be played, to what chess players used to be. Lasker, Alekhine, Reti – now they were true giants. They had the divine spark. Capricious, spontaneous, full of wit and flair and élan: true Renaissance types. In their day chess was still the game of kings! But now . . . it’s just a waste of time. Competitions between clockwork robots.’
Or take another example: mountain climbing. I must have been about thirteen when a friend of my parents’, a seasoned mountaineer, took me up into the Tatras for what was to be my first real climb. I’d been to Zakopane before, but my experience there as a tourist had been confined to stays in comfortable pensions and lowland walks in the valleys and pastures. This time I was to stay in a real mountain shelter and climb real mountains.
And here I was at last, with my experienced guide, in the very heart of the Tatras, in a hostel of almost legendary fame. Our lodgings weren’t too bad, as we’d had the foresight to reserve a double well ahead. But the food situation was worse: queues for meals were endless. Trips to the bathroom involved similar difficulties. These obstacles and indignities overcome, we finally set off. There, ahead of us, is the trail, and there, at last, the long-awaited encounter with the majesty of silent peaks and vast empty spaces. But the longed-for peace and emptiness are disturbed at every turn by hordes of screaming schoolchildren, our contemplation of surging peaks and plunging abysses made impossible by the singing and collective clamour of tour groups going down ‘Lenin’s trail’. And my seasoned guide, in his dark-green windcheater, thick brown cords tied at the knees with special bindings, thick woollen checked socks, knee-high and tight, and well-worn, lovingly cared-for French hiking boots, perches himself gracefully on a rock and launches into this bitter lament:
‘So much for the mountains! So much for mountaineering! Even this they’ve managed to wreck. Everywhere you go, you come up against these damn pests. Mass tourism – whoever heard of such a thing? What’s the point of it? It was different before the war. You arrived, and the first thing you did after you got off the train was to stock up: buckwheat, noodles, bacon, tea, sugar, onions – not very refined, perhaps, but cheap and dependable. Then you went on to Roztoka or Morskie Oko, either on foot or in one of those small open-roofed vans that made the trip whenever enough people wanted to go – never by coach! There was a family atmosphere about that shelter at Roztoka, and the best thing was that nobody was there – fifteen people at most. That was the base camp; you’d strike off from there, sometimes for a few days, sleeping rough in shepherds’ huts and, higher up, under the rocks. That’s what it’s about, after all: silence and solitude, being alone with Nature and with your thoughts. You feel as if you were alone in the world, in a place where earth meets sky, touching the heavens, the cosmos . . . floating somewhere above the rest of civilisation. But just try and do that now, with these idiots all over the place. Tours; coach trips; “guides”, they call themselves. Lowlanders! A circus, that’s what it is – a travesty. It’s sickening.’
For years this kind of sneering at the hopelessness of the present and nostalgic sighing for a glorious past rang in my ears as an almost daily refrain. So when I took my place, at the age of fourteen, in the classroom where I was to spend my last four years of school, I was not surprised to hear variations on the same theme. Now they took the form of paeans of praise to former pupils.
During lessons the teachers would sometimes stray from the subject to reminisce about some of these old students and their doings. The personalities were invariably very colourful and
