Oh Pushkin’s beloved city
How far off those years are now!
You fell, tortured, into an abyss…
Vladimir Nabokov –Petersburg
The human struggle against despair is nothing new.
These words circle my head like flies. I look down again at the book on my lap, a collection of letters and poems written during the siege of Leningrad.
The struggle against despair is an inherent feature of our existence.
My train is announced. I shove the book into my bag and shuffle through a neon-lit limbo towards theescalator. The Eurostar glides out from a ghostly morning platform. London Waterloo, the British Interplanetary Society, faded graffiti on black brick:Punk Rules, concrete tenements, the four sentinels of Battersea power station, a lone spotter on Clapham Junction. Commuters keep silent vigil on suburban stations. Mist hangs low over fields, abruptly pierced by wire fencing and watch towers. We are swallowed by the tunnel. A passenger rises from his seat across the aisle and takes a picture of the darkness through the window.
The train’s familiar motion lulls me into a doze. I awaken somewhere on the outskirts of Lille. It is 1999 and I am travelling back to St Petersburg. Go, a friend urged, go and write about the siege.
The siege of Leningrad has haunted me since my first visit to the city as a student in 1979. On a chilly April morning, melting snow running in rivulets over tarmac, I stood by the Monument to Victory with bowed head, listening to the Intourist guide describe the massstarvation of a city so like my own.
Later I became involved with a man who bore the siege’s legacy. The son of a survivor, Ivan Nikolaevich was a native of Samara, a provincial city on the Volga. I first met him there in 1992 while researching a book on post-Soviet Russia. He invited me to seeEugene Onegin, then walked me home along the misty river.
I returned to London. A phone call came. Ivan wanted to send me an invitation. Didn’t I miss the Volga? At the sound of his voice my London life ebbed like grey tidewater. I abandoned my home and work and bought a ticket to Samara, changing in Moscow and heading eastwards through Ryazan and over the wide Volga. As a blizzard raged across the steppe I felt the vertiginous joy of hurtling through boundless space. Today that excitement has vanished without trace, as completely as a disgraced comrade from a Stalin-era photograph. In the end I stayed with Ivan for no more than a few months.
Brussels Midi. Another half-world, a subterranean antecha
