Points East

I am going to tell you some stories involving Russia and Ukraine today. These stories are for the most part light-hearted ones, so let me say from the start that I mean no disrespect to the people who have lost their lives, their homes or their family members due to the recent invasion, and I am in no way underrating the recent tragedy. Since the Aberfan disaster, no one can hear the name of that little Welsh town without thinking of the dreadful day when the pit slag heap engulfed the school. Mariupol looks like it might join it as one of those place names that always conjures up a horror.

                                                          *****************************

In the early 1990’s I worked on some projects in the All-Union Cancer Research Centre (soon to become the All-Russian Cancer Research Centre after the demise of the Soviet Union) in Kashirskoe, Moscow. For a country which had supposedly thrown off the bourgeois shackles, it was strangely prudish. We had to pretend that Linda and I were married in order to share the same hotel room. Anyway, in the Soviet Union days, Moscow was a complete dump. It had an impressively sinister appearance, but it was like Gotham City with all the fun sucked out of it.

My Russian colleagues were lovely people, and very hospitable. Just as well, as at that time you could have starved to death for all the food outlets there were in Moscow. One or two street food stalls were present, but Linda and I found to our gastrointestinal cost that making use of them was a mistake.

One thing that I absolutely loved was getting out of Moscow to the dacha at the weekend. Vast numbers of Russians have a dacha, a wooden house out in the country, a weekend refuge from the working grind in the city. Some are magnificent wooden mansions with saunas, indoor lavvies and all the rest of it. Others are little more than garden sheds. But they are an important asset to the Russian soul. Several of my Moscow colleagues had dachas in the village of Zagoryanka, twenty miles out of Moscow, on the Klyazma river. Out there it was like the old Russia of Turgenev and Dostoevksy, all birch forests, lakes and unfenced wheat fields.

I remember sitting in the garden in my pal Dmitri’s dacha one Saturday. Dmitri, his brother and their spouses and children were pottering about, the pet crow was bickering with the dog, and Dmitri’s mother, a matriarch who appeared homespun, but was regarded as an important source of wisdom, stood at the kitchen door. One of the children cried out and the adults clustered round her. An animated conversation ensued.

Dmitri left the merry throng and came over to me, sitting on a blanket in the pale Russian sunshine.

‘What we are discussing,’ he said, ‘This child has cut her finger. My mother is a physician, so we ask her what to do with this child. My mother says: Give her a piece of watermelon to eat.’

This reminds me of a time a few years later in Cambridge, when our Bill was about fifteen months old. It was a Saturday morning, Linda was away at a conference, and Bill was running round the living room, delighted with his new-found ability to walk. Then he tripped, struck his forehead on the corner of a chair and began bleeding profusely and howling tragically. I immediately picked Bill up and dialled 999 on the telephone telling them that the baby had injured his head and was bleeding badly. They promised an ambulance in a few minutes.

I then went to the kitchen and found some chocolate. Bill wired into this, stopping crying almost immediately. When the ambulance arrived, the paramedics found Bill and myself both covered in blood, and Bill’s face having a ring of melted chocolate round his mouth.

                                                          *******************************

On a later visit to Moscow, I was on the flight out there from Heathrow to Sheremetevo, and there was a very old man sitting beside me. He told me that his name was Basil Hutnik, he came originally from a village in Ukraine, in the Carpathians, and was going back there for the first time since he left in his teens to fight in the second world war and would be seeing his sister for the first time in more than fifty years. He told me had diabetes, he was clearly very frail and had recently been in hospital, as he was still wearing a hospital name bracelet. He was rather worried as after arriving in Moscow, he had to get another flight to Lviv, what we then called Lvov. This involved getting a bus to a different airport. At the time, all flights from the UK into the Soviet Union went to Sheremetevo, and depending on your next port of call, you had to go to another airport. I had a conversation with the stewards serving the food and drink and ensured that the old chap would be escorted to where he needed to go to get his flight to Lvov.

All the time, however, a question hung in the air and was never asked; ‘When you went off to fight in the war…’

The mid-twentieth century left so many ruined souls in Europe.

 

                                                          *************************

Later, in the Gorbachev years, I was roped in to appear on Russian telly, on a giving up smoking game show. This had been reality TV long before we ever heard of it in the west. Around twenty smokers had been recruited to try to give up and the numbers had gradually been whittled down by contestants being caught smoking on camera or having a urinary cotinine test which indicated that they had been having a sly fag.

I and the boss of my department, a charismatic and brilliant Georgian cancer scientist, David Zaridze, were roped in to the final, filmed on a Saturday morning, in which the three persons still remaining in the contest were subjected to a quiz. Before this, they wanted some input from expert (ha ha) public health scientists. They got me and David. They would ask me a question, I would answer in maybe three sentences in English, and then David would translate into Russian, taking ten minutes or so. After the second question, the compere told David that that was plenty and that he sounded like Brezhnev at a party conference.

Anyway, the filming took take after take, and at one point, a junction box burst into flames. I was anxious to get away to the dacha at Zagoryanka. Dmitri told me afterwards that he saw the proceedings on a monitor in an outside broadcast vehicle and found it difficult to keep a straight face at how often I consulted my watch.

Eventually, a winner emerged. The first prize was a holiday in Rome, including an audience with the Pope. I am not clear what exactly an audience with the Pope involves, but I know you don’t get to chew the fat with him. I think all it means is that you get to be in the same room as him, at the same time as dozens, possibly hundreds, of other people.

Apparently, the Russian orthodox church was up in arms about this. The Russian church is VERY orthodox, and they wanted to know why good Russians were being subjected to this perfidious Roman influence. They lost interest, however, when it was revealed that the winner of the competition was Jewish.

                                                          ****************************

One last silly anecdote. Again, out in the garden in Dmitri’s family’s dacha one weekend, I was sitting in the garden in the sunshine, and the friends and colleagues were again talking animatedly. Always the dutiful host and friend, Dmitri left the gang and sat beside me.

‘What we are discussing,’ he said, ‘Is Lena’s new husband a handsome man, with good… features and strong physique? Or is he like…’ here he struggled for the translation, but eventually found it, ‘Monkey?’