Happy anniversary of a sad day

One of the happiest events and one of the saddest days of my life overlapped on 12 July, 1973. Exactly 50 years ago, and time does fly whether or not you’re having fun.

On that day I left for ever a country where I had never belonged – and not just because of its cannibalistic politics.

It’s fashionable now for youngsters to insist they were born in the wrong body. I’m not sure most of them mean it. But I’m absolutely certain I was born in the wrong country, among the wrong people.

I despised their unrestrained emotions, unstructured thought, overall disdain for the form of life and ignorance of its substance. Lest you accuse me of Russophobia, the most cutting remarks about the Russians’ formlessness were made by Nikolai Lossky, the Russian philosopher best known in the West.

According to Lossky, who was rather the opposite of a Russophobe, this disdain for form even penetrated the Russians’ gene pool, having produced many ill-defined, amorphous facial features so different, say, from the chiselled North European profile. Indeed, many Russians show a certain lack of straight lines in their faces. It is as if, having drawn a sketch of their features, God then went over it, smudging every line with his thumb.

Lossky’s observation may be too sweeping, but it’s certainly evident that the Russians’ amorphousness extends to the way they treat every public institution, from justice to religion.

Pavel Florensky, the polymath religious thinker murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1937, explained this aspect of the Russians in essentially the same way as Lossky did, if in slightly different words: “There is no sun in the Slavs, no transparency, no definition! Clarity and serenity are lacking… It seems to me that this is meaningfully related to their failure… to find the sublime in the here and now and not strain to seek it in the non-existent or the far-away.”

That’s how even those Slavophile thinkers saw their own people, and that’s how I saw them (with notable exceptions, as should go without saying). Russia, with her mores, emotions, language, was so alien to the way I thought and felt that I sometimes say I never had a single happy moment there.

That’s obviously an exaggeration, but whatever joyous moments there might have been were drowned and dissolved in days upon days, years upon years of sheer drudgery and seething resentment. Unlike many other dissidents I knew, I didn’t want to change Russia. I just wanted out.

Mercifully, the KGB saw things the same way and let me leave. That deliverance came from one of their departments, but the KGB is a Russian organisation and therefore bad at organisation. Six months after I left Moscow, a team from another department came to arrest me, and my poor father had to disappoint them by saying they had just missed me.

Never a day goes by that I don’t thank God for taking me out of that alien land and into a country – and language! – best suited to my mind, soul and temperament. Finding the right country is almost as important as finding the right woman, and I’m happy to have found both.

But that day, 12 July, 1973, was far from happy. I really can’t add much to the way I described it in my book How the Future Worked:

The scene featured a silent girl wearing a stark white blouse and a face to match, Mama who was weeping so much she couldn’t even say good-bye, and Papa whose face had suddenly acquired an uncharacteristic look of solemnity.

Mama was sobbing uncontrollably, I was holding her close, her tears mixing with mine, or maybe they were all hers, and I had just managed to hold mine in. Before the plane even took off I was desperately missing them all, and especially the little boy who at that time looked just like me and could already speak such beautiful Russian.

I was sure I’d never see any of them again, and was wondering whether their tangible suffering was worth my nebulous freedom. At that moment I was inclined to think it wasn’t and cursed my unfeeling selfishness. But subsequent events have somewhat vindicated self-interest as an acceptable motive for our behaviour.

The little boy soon came to America with his mother, forgot his beautiful Russian and replaced it with intentionally demotic English. He then stopped being a child who disapproved of me and became a grown-up bent on proving that Oscar Wilde was wrong when saying that children eventually forgive their parents.

The white-faced girl joined me in the States and in due course we got a divorce after 11 years of happy but mutually unsatisfying marriage. (I could explain this seeming paradox, but if you are married you understand anyway, and if you’re not you probably won’t believe the explanation.)

And, to the dismay of my wife Penelope, about 25 years ago Papa began to come every year for stays ranging from a few weeks to three months, until he died at 92. Penelope didn’t believe he came to visit his son. She maintained, not without prima facie evidence, that his sole purpose was to bug our friends with queries of how much money they made.

Only Mama didn’t manage to give the lie to some of my macabre premonitions. She died without ever seeing her only son again. That happened merely a year before the post-glasnost government could have allowed her to come for a visit. Surrounded by the dingy concrete of Sheremetyevo Airport that day, she must have sensed that the part of her life devoted to me – which is to say her life – was coming to an end. 

‘I’ll write, Mama, I promise I’ll write,’ I kept repeating, aware of how grossly inadequate those words were, not finding better words, knowing there weren’t any better words to find. ‘I promise I’ll write. It’ll be okay, Mama. It’ll be fine…’

It’ll be fine, Mama. I’m only leaving for ever.