This is the first in a series of excerpts from my new book How the Future Worked, available on www.roperpenberthy.co.uk or on Amazon.co.uk.
Next time you hear an expert from one of the better universities, or, worse still, a journalist, claim he understands the Russians, ask him this question: ‘Have you ever lived in a Soviet communal flat?’ And if he answers ‘no’, call him a liar, throw him out of your house and refuse ever to talk to him again. Unless, of course, he recants, which he probably won’t.
The communal flat is the microcosm, it’s the distillation of the Russian spirit, the stage for tragedies and comedies compared to which Shakespeare’s plays are soap operas and everyone else’s are commercials. The communal flat is the forge of character, the smithy of taste, the educator of souls, the judge and the jury. More important, the communal flat was my childhood.
Nabokov’s memory spoke to him in continuous narrative, a carefully woven fabric of a Bach fugue arranged for the romantically minded by Busoni. Much as I admire both Nabokov and Bach, my own memory speaks in the modernist staccato bursts of discordant sounds, in images more worthy of Kandinsky than Metsu. The memory is thus divorced from the rest of me, but it would be wrong to let the rest of me interfere. After all, one’s memory is a sieve that retains what’s needed and lets the rest run down the drain. What settles between the holes is the stuff of which understanding is made.
Thus the communal flat of my childhood comes back to me in a potpourri of sounds, a kaleidoscope of images, a bouquet of smells. Oh, the smells of my native land! Both Pushkin and Lermontov described them in glowing terms, making it clear even to a neophyte that they never darkened the threshold of a communal flat.
A Bordeaux wine taster would perhaps be able to analyse the bouquet better, but for the time being you’ll have to make do with my nasal memory. It comes back with sweat, bodies that go unwashed for weeks, underwear that goes unlaundered for months, outer clothes that have never seen the inside of a cleaner’s, sauerkraut, stale urine, dried sperm, condensed vomit, cheap cigarettes, alcohol vapours and decaying teeth. That was the communal olfactory background against which individuals could smell their own lives.
In our flat there were 22 of them. They were divided into six families, each occupying one room and sharing the kitchen, lavatory, bathroom, corridor and telephone. These days class-conscious Englishmen, who can’t help noticing that I don’t move my lips when reading and sometimes use words of more than two syllables, remark accusingly that I must have been upper-middle class back in Russia.
That’s God’s own truth. For not only did my mother try to protect me from egalitarian influences, but the flat, indeed the whole building in which I grew up, was decidedly upmarket. Most tenants there had degrees from decent universities, held responsible jobs and sneered at the equivalent of the lower-middle class.
Those people could only dream of such luxury. Their lives were circumscribed by the so-called ‘corridor system’, in which dozens of rooms (each housing a family), one kitchen, one bathroom and one lavatory hid on either side of a smelly winding corridor perhaps 300 to 500 feet long. Our poor relations lived in one of those. I liked to visit them because in their corridor one could ride a tricycle around numerous bends at most satisfying speeds.
The lower classes looked even upon the corridor system with the same expressions one sometimes notices on the face of a rubbish collector driving his lorry through an exclusive neighbourhood. They lived in communal barracks at the outskirts of Moscow, not what you’d describe as fashionable suburbs. Their lavatories were outside and consisted of a hole in a wooden frame erected over a pit and enclosed in an unheated wooden shack.
In winter, when outside temperatures plunged to minus 40C, certain activities you take for granted became life-threatening. Predictably, just like during the American westward expansion, human ingenuity defeated the elements. Our heroic compatriots would do their business onto newspaper sheets spread over the floor of their rooms. They’d then carefully fold the paper, discreetly put it under the bed and dump it into the outhouse on their way to work in the morning.
They worked in places like the Red Proletarian Factory or Car Depot No. 6 and went there by public transport, where their odours intermingled. Someone with a reasonably sensitive nose needed a gas mask to enter a Metro train on a hot day, but entering was the easy part.
The real trial came when the train suddenly jerked to a stop, and all the short-sleeved passengers grabbed the overhead rail not to fall down. In doing so, they’d raise their arms, thus adding a certain armour-piercing quality to the already pungent smell of their bodies and clothes. Typically, they had no bathrooms at all and several times a year washed in communal baths, whether they needed to or not. This was seen more as a social occasion than a hygienic imperative.
Communal apartments of one type or another were by no means a rarity in Russia. In my time, about 90 percent of the urban population lived in them. Now, 40 years later, 15 percent still do, according to the official data. Unofficially, the number is much higher for, say, a one-bedroom flat housing three generations of the same family doesn’t fall into that category. It would be classified as a ‘separate flat’, whereas most Russians, when hearing an unqualified ‘flat’ mentioned, would still assume that it’s a communal variety.
Now, history may indeed repeat itself first as a tragedy and then as a farce. However, the first event in the flat that I recall coherently comes back to me as a detective story, and that’s how I’m going to tell it.
Grandpa walked into the room and beckoned us to the door. Sensing that something important was afoot, Mama, Papa, Grandma and I followed him to the kitchen without arguing. As our room was next to the front door, to get to our destination we had to walk the entire length of the corridor, unlit for considerations of fiscal prudence. Bumping into the handles sticking aggressively out of the doors of the other five rooms, we passed the bathroom, then the lavatory, executed a neat 90-degree turn and found ourselves in the kitchen. By contrast it appeared to be brightly lit.
The view was familiar: two gas cookers with eight rings between them, one assigned to each family, two up for grabs (the nightly battles for those two were worthy of Dostoyevsky’s pen at its most dramatic); six rickety tables for preparing food and washing dishes afterwards; two clothes lines hung with faecally stained underwear quite past laundering. Some of our 17 neighbours completed the scene. In the tradition of the Russian characters so aptly described by the classics and enacted on the stage of the Moscow Art Theatre, their mouths were smiling but their eyes weren’t.
Grandpa, incidentally, was himself an actor at that famous theatre. By the time I was born his personal repertoire had crystallised to one role only, that of Stalin, whom he impersonated in The Chekists and other Moscow hits. In the past he used to play other roles as well, such as Schiller’s Karl Moor (after whom a famous London journalist is named), and according to Mama, if no one else, his performances had been brilliant.
Like most actors, he was histrionic off-stage as well, a tendency that showed in the semi-circular sweep with which he pointed at our own kitchen table. There, between two dirty plates and a half-finished cup of tea with a cigarette butt in it, lay a lock of hair plucked out of Grandpa’s thick mane. He was waiting for us to guess who the perpetrator was…