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In this interview with Russia Beyond The Headlines, the English-language supplement to the newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, I was asked why I write about Russia, why my characters are “two-sided,” and what interests me about the KGB.
RUSSIA BEYOND THE HEADLINES
Writing about a country you’ve never visited
British journalist and author Patricia le Roy discusses her inspiration.
Ksenia Khrustaleva, special to RBTH
Patricia le Roy is known for writing novels that range widely in time and space, from Burma at the height of the drug trade to France just after the war to Soviet-era Leningrad. Her heroes move cities and countries in search of love and liberty, facing the Gordian knot of parting and betrayal on their way.
A native of Liverpool, le Roy studied French at university and lived in Paris for a number of years working as a translator, editor and journalist. Eventually she joined Radio Liberty and served as a research editor from 1974 to 1991. Le Roy spoke to RBTH about how this experience inspired her to write about Soviet realities.
RBTH: As many as four of your novels relate directly to Russia in different periods of its history. Compassion spans three generations, starting from the Great October Socialist Revolution; three other novels take place in the Soviet Union heading for its decay. What inspired you to write about Russia?
Patricia le Roy: After spending 17 years working for Radio Liberty, immersed in a kind of semi-Russian atmosphere, with every hour in the working day focused on Russia or the other Soviet republics, it was unthinkable to write about anything else!
I wrote the first three books between about 1985 and 2000. Compassion came later. Reading Anna Akhmatova’s poem Requiem, I was fascinated by her themes of time and memory and loss and survival. Digging into her biography, I found the story of her affair with the artist Boris Anrep, who moved to England after the Revolution. Akhmatova never forgot him, and they were reunited briefly in London in 1966. The love that defied space and time gave me the idea for Compassion. My protagonists Andrei and Nina were inspired by Anrep and Akhmatova, even though I had to take extensive biographical liberties to make the project work. The title of the book came from Anrep. One of the mosaics he created for the vestibule of the National Gallery in London represents Akhmatova, and he called it “Compassion.”
RBTH: Did you transfer the real stories you came across at Radio Liberty to your novels?
PLR.: At Radio Liberty, I worked in the Audience Research department. Our job was to find out who listened to Western radio broadcasts in the Soviet Union (not just RL, but also Voice of America, BBC, Radio Sweden, etc.), why they listened, and what they heard. To do this, we conducted interviews with Soviet citizens traveling in the West, using Russian-speaking interviewers who were able to make contact with the travelers and inquire after their radio-listening habits in the course of a seemingly casual conversation. In the climate of the Cold War, conducting open interviews was out of the question.
Sometimes respondents talked about their lives, and we heard some terrible stories. People who lost their jobs because they had applied to emigrate, people who couldn’t study because their parents were intellectuals, people who couldn’t get medical treatment because they couldn’t afford to bribe the doctor — the tales of petty tragedy and daily humiliation flowed endlessly across my desk. I didn’t use this material directly, but my novels were inevitably colored by what I had learned.
RBTH: You mentioned in your blog https://www.patricialeroy.com/timeline/ that employees of Radio Liberty were barred from visiting the Soviet Union until 1990. When you first visited the country you had been studying carefully for many years, did your view change?
PLR: In 1990, I traveled with a French tour group to Leningrad and Moscow. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Travelers to the Soviet Union during the Cold War had described Russia as a gray, repressive country of frightened people. Maybe parts of it were still like that, but that wasn’t what I saw. What struck me most in the two major cities was the way Russia was opening up. In Leningrad, we attended a packed church service in the Alexander Nevsky monastery; on the Arbat [Street] in Moscow we bargained in dollars for matryoshkas of Gorbachev and Yeltsin. I left the group and wandered off on my own once or twice, checking out locations that I had chosen sight unseen for The Angels of Russia.
RBTH: In your Soviet-era trilogy, the protagonists are not what they seem to others. A dissident in The Angels of Russia turns out to be a KGB agent; a Soviet re-defector in Café Maracanda publicly denigrates his Western friends and starts his life anew as a broker in Central Asia. What is behind such “two-sidedness” of Soviet people in your opinion?
PLR.: The Soviet regime was based on coercion, which forced many people (of course, not all) to say one thing in public and think another in private. One of the attractions of Western radio was that the “voices” said what many people thought or suspected but did not dare say aloud. If Pravda [newspaper] was telling you that the harvest had been bountiful and the shops were full of bread, but you could see with your own eyes that there was no bread on the shelves, it was unwise to point out the discrepancy at a Party meeting. Instead you were forced into a kind of doublethink. This is one reason why my characters are two-sided.
In the three books of the Soviet trilogy, the principal male protagonist is not what he seems. In each case, he has hidden links to the KGB. This was a deliberate choice, not because I was writing action thrillers, but because I wanted to explore the psychology of repression. By the 1980s, the KGB was no longer ideological — they left that to the Party. They were pragmatists (which is why they proved better at surviving in post-Soviet Russia). The role of the KGB was to preserve the system, but its members had access to information that showed the system was failing. I wanted to explore how they dealt with that. What interests me as a writer is people who doubt.
My three protagonists all doubt the rightness of what they do, but their paths are different. Sergei in The Angels of Russia knows from the beginning that what he is doing is wrong, but he didn’t choose to work for the KGB, he’s being pressured to do so, and he follows orders until he can no longer bear the weight of his betrayals. Axel in Music at the Garden House starts out believing in his cause, but then has a crise de conscience, breaks with the KGB, and does what he feels is right. Igor, the most complex of the three, knows that what he is doing is wrong, but goes on doing it (Café Maracanda). The theme is the same: how do you live with the choices you made when you had no choice but to make them?
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Writing a novel about Central Asia might not have been a good idea. It took almost ten years to write. Part of the problem was research, and part was the characters. The story revolved around five main characters, all of whom had complex pasts, unconventional career paths, and murky relationships with the truth and with each other.
Most of Café Maracanda takes place in Uzbekistan (Maracanda was the name of Samarkand in the ancient world), but the book begins and ends in Italy. A young American couple, Davey and Camilla, invite their colleagues Igor and Rachel to share a villa near Siena in the summer of 1990. The holiday starts out badly. The men are old friends, but the women can’t stand each other. The first day is fraught. But then Igor takes over. Igor is a Russian who defected from the Soviet Union. A journalist at Radio Liberty, where all of them work, he has a talent for smoothing things over. By the end of the month Rachel, the thrifty north-of-England bluestocking, is best friends with Camilla, the entitled WASP princess. Idling away the days in the lush Tuscan countryside, between talk and sex and wine and food, the four become very close. If anything is slightly amiss, they ignore the signs. It’s an enchanted summer they will always remember.
But when they return to Munich, the spell is broken. Igor vanishes. For a week they have no news. Rachel fears he is dead. And then he reappears in Moscow, gives a press conference on Soviet television, claims that his years in the West were a nightmare, and announces that Rachel is an enemy of the Soviet people, that Camilla works for American military intelligence, and that Davey is a CIA spy. Everyone is stunned. No one saw it coming – not even William Kavanagh, a Radio security officer who has been watching Igor for months. Igor’s friends are devastated. Rachel attempts to kill herself, and Davey begins to drink.
Fast forward seven years. The Soviet Union has collapsed and been replaced by fifteen independent republics. Radio Liberty has moved to Prague; William Kavanagh has moved to Washington; Igor’s friends have not recovered from his betrayal. Davey was killed in an accident shortly after Igor left. Camilla, raising their son alone, is still wondering why her husband was so hard hit by Igor’s defection. Rachel has changed jobs and moved cities, but never got over Igor.
Only Igor has moved on. He has settled in Central Asia and opened a bar. Not just any bar. When Camilla marches into the Café Maracanda to demand an accounting, she finds Kavanagh there already, watching Igor in action. The Maracanda is a marketplace for biznesmeny, and Igor brokers the deals.
A word about Radio Liberty: During the Cold War, both East and West made extensive use of radio broadcasts. On the communist side, the “voices” included Radio Prague and Radio Moscow. On the Western side, stations such as the BBC, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, and Radio Sweden attempted to explain the way of life and political positions of their sponsoring countries. Radio Liberty was different. It was an American station funded by the US Congress whose purpose was to act as a surrogate home service and provide Soviet listeners with news they could not obtain from their domestic media. This might seem less seditious than straight British or American propaganda, but from the Kremlin’s point of view, it was much worse. Radio Liberty was competing directly with state radio, supplying Soviet citizens with undesirable information about Aeroflot crashes, the General Secretary’s state of health, and the latest casualty figures in Afghanistan. RL was demonized in the Soviet press and heavily jammed.
The starting point for Igor was a real-life two-time defector who defected from the Soviet Union in 1965, got a job as a journalist at Radio Liberty, and re-defected in 1986. Back in Moscow, he gave a press conference accusing Radio Liberty of anti-Soviet activities, and the Audience Research department, where I worked, of spying against the Soviet Union. Thoughtfully he provided our office address, and the names of two of our staffers. The office was on the top floor of a Parisian residential building, reached by a creaky little lift, and bore a certain resemblance to the office in Three Days of the Condor, where everyone is wiped out by assassins in the first reel. For a while, we were rather nervous.
I first travelled to Samarkand courtesy of James Elroy Flecker and his famous poem: Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells,/When shadows pass gigantic on the sand,/And softly through the silence beat the bells/Along the Golden Road to Samarkand. I was at school when I encountered The Golden Journey to Samarkand, and years later, when I joined Radio Liberty and found myself dealing with Soviet Central Asia on a daily basis, it turned out that the romance of the desert had stayed with me. Central Asia fascinated me in a way I cannot explain: a vast landmass at the centre of the world – east of Europe, south of Russia, previously Muslim, nominally Soviet – made even more interesting by the fact that no one seemed to know much about it. A few would-be experts solemnly forecast an incipient wave of Islamic fundamentalism but it was never clear what their predictions were based on (especially as they never came to pass). Until 1990, I was unable to go and look for myself because employees of Radio Liberty were barred from visiting the Soviet Union. My first attempt to travel there when the ban was lifted fell through, but I finally hit the Golden Road with my husband in 1995.
Our first stop was Almaty, the capital of Kazakstan, where vast oilfields had aroused the interest of the West and engendered direct flights from Vienna and Frankfurt. Almaty was airy and green and spacious, but oddly lacking in focus. The Russians had built a fort there in 1854 and called it Verny, meaning Faithful. There was a pedestrian shopping precinct, previously Gorky Street, now re-baptized Silk Road Street. None of the Central Asian republics had been independent before, and they were all trying to find their feet.
The main tourist attraction in Almaty was the Russian Orthodox Cathedral, painted pink and green, like a Little Gingerbread Church. Built without nails, it was the only building to survive a 1911 earthquake that flattened the rest of the city. Not far away was the Soviet War Memorial, a Gorgon-like sprawl of implausible bronze muscles. A school group listened intently to their teacher describing the heroic feats of the Panfilov Division, which had defended Moscow in 1941. In the park, an old man sat vacantly on one of the benches, and a middle-aged lady lay passed out on another. The air was yellowish-grey and tasted metallic. English-language hoardings advertised the Bank of Texas and Kazakhstan, and a giant Coca Cola sign sat atop the old Kazakhstanskaya pravda building.
We took a bus to Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. Crossing the steppe, we caught glimpses of miserable-looking villages, shepherds on horseback, and hilltop cemeteries with odd turreted railed-off graves. A leftover slogan by the side of the road said SLAVA TRUDU (Glory to Labour). When we got to the frontier, a bored police officer got on the bus and wandered up and down the aisle, requesting no passports and inspecting no luggage. The road ran straight ahead to the Tien Shan, the Mountains of Heaven.
Bishkek had the same grid layout as Almaty, the same greenery, the same anonymous buildings, but it was smaller and quieter. Traffic was sparse, people walked with a relaxed swing, the mountains were closer, and the air was clearer. There were fewer Russians than in Almaty, and practically no Westerners. More than once we were taken for Balts. The Soviet War Memorial sprawled across a vast empty square against a backdrop of mountains. A gigantic statue of Lenin urging on the masses was surrounded by a flock of little girls in black dresses and white aprons. It was class photo day.
“Is this really the capital of a country?” asked my husband sceptically. Half the town centre was taken up by a vast overgrown park where statues huddled unsuspected in the uncut grass, and girls lounging in idle groups waved and giggled. Shell suits outnumbered chic Western outfits on the streets, the airport was frequently closed for lack of kerosene, and there was something desperate about the way the market vendors called out their prices and tried to catch your eye.
We had dinner in what the guidebook claimed was the best restaurant in Kyrgyzstan, the Son Kul. It had red carpets, white tablecloths and lacrymose Russian pop music. One floor was for Russian food, and one floor for Kyrgyz. We took the Kyrgyz floor, which was almost deserted. The food was excellent, and the waitress was patient when we got in a mess with the currency, which was called the som. Next morning, on the way back to the bus station, my husband bought a large wooden abacus from a man in an underpass.
Thirty-six hours later we were in Samarkand. It was a cool, grey, rainy evening. Avoiding on principle the Hotel Samarkand, where all the tour groups went, we told the taxi to take us to the only privately-owned hotel in the city, the Zerafshan. Snobbery was our undoing. The outside of the building was newly painted and the lobby had a sub-harem decor with a lot of white lattice work, but the Arabian Nights charm went no further. The room we were offered was standard Soviet grunge, plus a a pile of cleaning materials on the floor, plus a strange man watching television on the bed. But it was late, and we were tired. We had spent most of the day in Tashkent airport, first persuading the immigration authorities to let us enter Uzbekistan without a visa, then convincing Inturist to book us on an onward flight. The Uzbeks did not approve of spontaneous travel.
The receptionist was annoyed by our failure to leave. She made us pay in advance. After a struggle with the unfamiliar currency (the third in five days: this one was called the sum), we finally emerged into the mythical city. The grave of the Emperor Tamerlane was just round the corner, at the end of a quiet street lined with mulberry trees. But it was after hours, and there was no one around. Should we come back next day? Suddenly a uniformed caretaker appeared. Otkuda? he demanded; where were we from? Frantsia, we told him. Dollari? he asked.
We agreed that we had dollars, and he ushered us into the tomb. The mausoleum contained six white marble tombs and a huge slab of jade. The caretaker told us earnestly about the tombs and the architecture, and then abruptly put his finger to his lips, ushered us through a side door into the courtyard, took us round a corner, and unlocked a door. A flight of stone stairs led down to an underground crypt. This, he explained, was where the bodies of Tamerlane and his companions really lay. The jade upstairs was just for show. Here was the last resting place of Timur the Lame, son of a minor tribal chieftain, spiritual heir of Genghis Khan, conqueror of Delhi, Baghdad, Moscow and Damascus. The man who rampaged over half of Asia, dead of a fever in 1405, lay disintegrating into dust beneath a plain slab of marble. We gave the caretaker a dollar bill, and stumbled off in search of dinner.
Samarkand turned out to be distressingly un-golden. Flecker, of course, had never been there. Neither had Goethe or Marlowe. After the demise of the Silk Road, it had fallen into ruin, and now it was a charmless socialist city. The ancient sites were spread out through the town and we had to plod through vast stretches of Soviet residential wasteland to get from one set of turquoise domes to another. Having worked our way through the Registan (three enormous madrasas looming round a vast courtyard), the Bibi Khanym mosque (named for Tamerlane’s favourite wife), and the Shah-i-Zinda (the royal burial ground), we pitched camp in a chai khana with loud Turkish music and a row of men in white coats grilling shashlyk, and watched the world go by. The contrast with the cities of the steppes was striking. This was another world. It might not be golden, but it was colourful. People in traditional costume marched purposefully past, heading for the market next to the Bibi Khanym. The women wore brightly-coloured dresses. Older men favoured embroidered skull caps, boots and baggy breeches. Younger ones went for Western-style trousers and shirts. Down here in the oasis there was a bustle and dynamism that we had not seen before.
It was a five-hour bus ride to Bukhara across a flat desert landscape. We lunched off lepeshka and apricots. The man across the aisle demanded to see our guidebook, asked if the man with me was my husband, and inquired where our group was. Bukhara was more atmospheric than Samarkand. It had no monuments on the scale of the Registan, but the old city was in better shape and there was more of it left. A maze of little alleys wound past earth-built walls, and there was a madrasa on every corner. In the tenth century, Bukhara the Noble was a centre of Islamic scholarship. It was still a holy city, you could feel it. Spirituality seeped out of the walls and hung in the dry desert air. At breakfast in the hotel we met a German couple who had come to visit the mausoleum of Sheikh Bakhautdin. The man explained that they converted to Sufism after seeing Peter Brook’s The Conference of the Birds in London, and announced that this was a great experience for them. The lady wore a hijab and said nothing.
On the edge of the old city stood the Ark, a barbaric construction which was once the citadel of the Emirs of Bukhara. Above the eighteenth-century gatehouse, overlooking the square, was the euphemistically named “music pavilion,” where the royal family used to gather to watch public executions. Again we arrived at closing time, and this time we were rescued by a sixteen-year-old English-speaking Tajik boy called Ulugbeg. “Tomorrow we are closed,” he said, “but you come back and I show you round.” We accepted the offer, which was payable in dollars. All the Central Asian republics had their own currency, but no one seemed to want them.
Next day Ulugbeg showed us the fortress, the madrasas, and the prison, including the notorious Bug Pit where less fortunate criminals (including two emissaries of Queen Victoria) shared living quarters with rats, scorpions and sheep ticks. Then we took the bus out to the suburbs to visit the Emir’s Summer Palace. That was closed too, and all of Ulugbeg’s persuasiveness failed to get us in. He took the refusal as a personal insult: “This very bad man.” We strolled round the gardens, which were pleasantly cool after the heat and dust of the city. My husband invested in an embroidered camel bag.
The best place in Bukhara was the chai khana at Lyab-i-Khauz. Wooden diwans were spread out on a flagged terrace overlooking the tree-shaded pool. Old men in traditional costume sat cross-legged on their diwans, with bowls of tea on small tables before them, gossiping, playing chess or backgammon, moving round the pool in the sun’s shadow. Workers dropped in for shashlyk or plov, a kind of Central Asian pilaff, which cooked all day long. It didn’t look as though much had changed since the last Emir fled the Bolsheviks in 1920.
We returned to Tashkent on the Transcaspian Railway, which ambled along at a leisurely pace. It had liux two-berth compartments, sheets and pillow-cases, free chai, and obligatory piped radio which dispensed news in Uzbek, followed by a little local night music. Tashkent was a pleasant surprise. It felt like a capital city ought to feel. It was a bustling modern city complete with yuppie restaurants, gleaming fountains, and a dazzling new metro. It hummed and buzzed. The air smelt of money. Much of the city was levelled in a 1966 earthquake, and the city was rebuilt by Republican First Secretary Sharaf Rashidov, an authentic Arabian Nights potentate whose private mansion was said to possess several underground storeys crammed with gold and jewels and prisoners and concubines. Rashidov’s wealth came from the Great Cotton Scam. Under pressure from Moscow to increase cotton production in the republic, he falsified figures to show that quotas were being fulfilled, pocketed money for cotton that was never produced, and allegedly netted the equivalent of some $2 billion for himself and his cronies.
On the strength of this trip, I began to plan Café Maracanda. Hubris, of course. To make up for my lack of first-hand experience, I read everything I could get my hands on. Most of it was written by academics discussing Central Asia from a Russian point of view, and it took me a while to realize that their vision was flawed. After making a second, somewhat longer, trip to Almaty and Tashkent, it became evident that what I was reading did not square with what I had seen. My book ground to a halt while I tried to figure out the social fabric of the new republics. One of the things I needed to know was the role played by local clans. I posted a query on a couple of Central Asian websites, and got some intriguing responses. All the Central Asians informed me firmly that clans no longer existed. All the Westerners begged me to pass on any information I obtained. Eventually a French expert on Afghanistan helped me get back on track.
Meanwhile I had discovered that Samarkand was the centre of a thriving drug trade, and I was planning Igor’s bar. The Café Maracanda serves fine Italian cuisine and the best margaritas in Central Asia. Tourists come to sample the charms of the old khanates in the fine tiled courtyard. Drug lords come to negotiate the price of heroin in the discreet inner rooms. Igor’s old KGB cronies drop in to chat. Arias from Italian opera (Igor’s favourite) drown out illicit conversations. Dormiro sol nel manto mio regal…. The café, of course, is straight out of Casablanca, but instead of letters of transit and appointments with Monsieur Renault, what is on offer is enriched uranium from Kazakstan, drugs from the Chu Valley, money for the Chechen rebels, and arms for the warring factions in Afghanistan. Everyone goes to Igor’s.
I have always been drawn to ambivalent characters: wives who betray their husbands, dissidents who report to the KGB, men and women who appear to be what they aren’t, and don’t always know themselves what the truth is. Igor is no exception. For most of his career as KGB officer, radio journalist, and biznesmeny, he has managed to be all things to all men. In Italy, he was a sorceror, seducing Rachel with love, Davey with understanding, and Camilla with sex – all the while negotiating with his Soviet contacts to return to Moscow. In Samarkand, he is the rainmaker, introducing people who have things to sell to people who want to buy them. But now the past is catching up with him. He has made too many enemies. The Uzbeks have withdrawn their protection. The KGB has cut him loose. The CIA wants to close him down. Kavanagh is gathering evidence and enlisting allies. Igor knows what awaits him. The game is nearly over, Rachel. My time is running out. He has one last wish. Writing late at night in his diary, he admits the truth: Rachel, whom he abandoned in Munich, has always stayed in his mind. Rachel, without you, my life would have had no sense. You have never left me once in seven years. I don’t want to die without seeing you one last time.
Some of my research into the Café Maracanda’s clients was done one evening in Tashkent in a place called the Vernisaj Kafé. Situated in the basement of the Union of Artists building, it was recommended by the guidebook as a cheap alternative to the ubiquitous plov and shashlyk. It was my second trip to Tashkent, two years after the first, and I was travelling with a friend who was based in Almaty. It was early when we got to the Vernisaj. The place was empty apart from three Westerners chatting at the bar, and a troop of very young Uzbek waitresses in short black skirts and tight red tops. There was a long row of tables next to the window with deep couches on either side. It seemed entirely civilized, though the prices had gone up since Lonely Planet was there. The waitresses avoided eye contact, which was a bit odd, but there was a vast choice of cocktails, and a perfectly edible menu of chicken, steak and salads.
About half-past seven, the place began to fill up. Apart from one Russian family group, the customers were men, mainly Uzbek, mainly in groups. They all wore dark suits. They moved from one table to the next, they waved, they exchanged greetings. On the surface it all seemed very convivial, but they did not look pleasant to know. Then all of a sudden the atmosphere got very strange. Nothing remotely threatening was happening, nobody was paying attention to us (though they looked us over), there were neither drugs nor weapons in evidence. The waitresses’ faces grew blanker with the strain of not overhearing people’s conversations. Their manner became more nervous and deferential. Time to leave. When Vasily, our driver, came to fetch us, the doorman followed us out and said something through the open car door. Vasily said, Ya priedu, I’ll come back, and drove off very fast and clearly annoyed. Neither of us caught the sense of the exchange. Vasily refused to tell us what had been said.
Café Maracanda was conceived as the third volume of a trilogy covering the fall and legacy of Soviet communism. Its predecessors were The Angels of Russia (set in 1986) and Music at the Garden House (set in 1990). I wanted to explore guilt and responsibility in societies whose citizens were not free to decide their own actions. How does the individual withstand coercion? How does he come to terms with the wrong he has done? How does he survive in a society which has turned morality on its head? I had no idea where I would end up. It was a fascinating journey.
At the end of the book, Igor gets his wish and is reunited with Rachel. But he cannot bring himself to admit to guilt for what he did, and Rachel will not forgive that. We missed each other in time, Igor,” she says. “We never had a chance.”
Igor has one last chance to tell the truth.
“Don’t you see?” he asks her. “That was why I left. It was the only way to keep what we had. Yes, I regretted it, of course I did, but what is there to regret when you have no choice? It’s what you can bear that matters.”
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When Katharine opens the door of her London house one summer morning, she finds Axel, her old lover from Moscow, standing on the doorstep. Music at the Garden House goes on from there. I liked the idea of having a ghost from the past show up and seeing where it led. Only later did I work out who the woman was, and who the ghost was, and what had happened to them in the past, and what happened to them next.
Reviewing the book, the London Sunday Times called Music at the Garden House “a tense and intriguing novel that raises provocative questions about betrayal: personal, national and political.”
I set the novel in July 1990 – a time of transition. The Berlin Wall had fallen, and the Cold War was more or less over, but Germany had not yet reunified, and the Soviet Union had not yet collapsed. Lots of loose ends to work into a thriller; plenty of room for betrayal. Axel tells Katharine he’s being hunted by the KGB, and asks her to help him leave England. Initially reticent – and sceptical too – Katharine smuggles him across the Channel and shelters him in her house in France.
My husband and I used to own a house in the Perche region of Normandy, and it was here that I set the tale. The house was in the middle of nowhere, down a tiny lane, on the edge of the woods, several kilometres from the nearest village. There were one or two other houses nearby, but basically you could do what you wanted out there and no one would know. We used to lead a quiet life on our weekend visits, but I gave my characters a tense three days that culminated with the incursion of the KGB and a dead body on the floor.
Well, that’s what Axel tells Katharine. That’s what gets her out of the house and into the car, on the autoroute driving east. But there are other reasons too. Axel vanished from her life without explanation ten years earlier, and she has never got over it:
“I would never again let any man rip apart my life to such an extent. Unless, of course, the man was Axel himself. His disappearance had left me with a sense of things unfinished, accounts unsettled, a journey of discovery uncompleted.”
And then Axel takes over the narrative, and it’s clear that he’s been lying to her from the start. Not just in London, but in Moscow too. But Katharine doesn’t learn the truth until they get to Prague, and in the meantime she has driven Axel across half of Europe, and they have fallen in love all over again.
So what happens next? Can she forgive him? Can he forgive himself? As the miles roll by, Axel comes to doubt himself and what he has done:
“For the time being, we were safe. I would be able to spend the night with Katya, fending off questions about the past, telling her lies about the future, using her, deceiving her, betraying her with every word I spoke. In Moscow, I had abandoned her. Because of me, she had nearly died. And now I had come marching heedlessly back into her life, with no thought for what I might find, nor what I might leave behind me.”
Music at the Garden House is structured as an East European road trip. The original title of the book was Driving to Koenigsberg. To make sure I had the geography straight, I covered most of the route myself on two different journeys. In 1992, I dragged my family on a camping holiday to explore the ex-communist East. Because of my job at Radio Liberty, the area had been off-limits until two years earlier. We went to East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. We stayed in some rather dubious campsites, and swam in some frankly filthy lakes. We took the Autobahn to Kaiserslautern with car chases in mind, and drove the slow road through the mountains from Dresden to Prague.
We did not drive to Koenigsberg. You can’t: it doesn’t exist. The old Prussian capital where Frederick the Great was crowned was awarded to the Soviet Union in 1945, renamed Kaliningrad in 1946, and is now a Baltic enclave belonging to Russia. In the book, Koenigsberg is a fantasy land where Axel and Katya imagine themselves leading a different life, away from Katya’s husband and Axel’s career and the divisive political loyalties of the Cold War. But the print publishers made me change the title. They said no one knew where Koenigsberg was, especially in Australia where my previous books had sold well. I came up with the new title after a night of feverish brain-racking. I suppose I can see their point.
The other journey was in some ways more enlightening. It had taken place a year earlier. I rented a car in Bavaria and took my fourteen-year-old daughter to explore the DDR. Braving bad roads and inadequate road signs, we went to Erfurt and Weimar and Eisenach. We found a witch’s hut in the Thuringian Forest where Axel and Katya spend a night. We also encountered Ludmila, a disillusioned East German Party member, who was later to play a pivotal role in Axel and Katharine’s story by helping them escape Stasi surveillance.
In real life, Ludmila lived in Erfurt. For the needs of the story I moved her to Weimar, but otherwise, I hardly changed a thing. The real Ludmila was retired, sixtyish, a widow who rented a room to tourists to make ends meet, very chatty. She said it was interesting for her to have people to talk to, and added that it was interesting for me to visit East Germany and talk to people living there. And then she launched into a requiem for the recently vanished DDR (Germany had reunited the previous October). Communism had always been her ideal. Could I imagine how she felt now that her ideal had been taken away? She complained that the West Germans were moving in and taking things over and pushing up prices, and she accused the market economy of failing to look after those who needed protection, such as old people, children and the handicapped.
Ludmila was half Russian. She was born in Leningrad, still had family in the Soviet Union, and made periodic trips there. This dovetailed nicely with my story and I used it all. On her last trip to Moscow in 1989, she had seen glasnost in action and been much struck by the sight of people singing satirical songs and selling caricatures of Brezhnev on the Arbat. Arriving home in August 1989, at a time when East Germans were pouring through Hungary into Austria, and holing up in West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw, she went to a Party meeting where an official stood up to say: “We don’t understand what Gorbachev is trying to achieve with his perestroika. We don’t need that here. Our reforms are completed.” Ludmila felt that the Party had let her down.
My daughter was lying on her bed reading her book, and Ludmila and I were sitting round the coffee table eating cherries straight from Ludmila’s garden plot, getting on beautifully. So I asked her what she thought of the Stasi. (If you come out with a direct question on a delicate topic, people will sometimes take you for a stupid foreigner and give you an answer.) It worked. Ludmila suddenly got very intense. She pulled her knees up under her chin and said that natürlich, she hadn’t worked for the Stasi herself. Natürlich, I said. However, she went on, the Stasi were being treated unfairly. They were being used as a scapegoat. They had only been doing their job. They hadn’t done anything the West German secret services hadn’t done. There was a witch hunt underway. It wasn’t right.
Next morning, my daughter and I went to Buchenwald, which was disturbing in more than one way. Not just the lampshades made of human skin, but the odd slant of the museum. The prisoners at Buchenwald had liberated the camp themselves, and the curators seemed more excited by their brave anti-Fascist deeds than saddened by the loss of life. Anti-Fascism? Really? Forty-five years later? But what shook me most was the inscription Jedem Das Seine (To Each His Own) emblazoned across the main gate.
We drove on to Weimar. The West German colonists had set up a branch of Benetton on the main square. After what we had seen that morning, it felt very civilized. We each bought a capitalist T-shirt. We visited the Goethehaus and the Schillerhaus and wandered through the park to the River Ilm. On the far bank was Goethe’s Gartenhaus. As we arrived, an outdoor concert began. I don’t remember what they were playing. In the book, I said it was Bach. Axel and Katharine stumble on a concert of music they once listened to in Moscow, and hearing it again ten years later makes them understand why they are driving across Europe together.
Music at the Garden House was originally conceived as the second part of a trilogy exploring the moral compromises forced on the individual in a police state. (The first was The Angels of Russia, set in Russia in 1986, and the third was Café Maracanda, set in post-Soviet Central Asia in 1997.) To solve Axel’s crise de conscience, I used the real-life confessions of a dissident colonel in the KGB called Oleg Kalugin. Kalugin acknowledged the wrongs he had done, and expressed his regrets, on the front page of Moscow News, the cult newspaper of the perestroika period.
To balance the sombre admission of sins at the end of the communist era, I tried to show the other side of the coin. In 1999, Axel’s father dies. He is a general in the Red Army. He was born in a peasant’s hut in 1923, and he owes everything to the Party: his ideals, his education, his career. He believed in the advent of socialism but, at the end of the century, he is dying disillusioned. I wanted to take a look at Soviet communism from another perspective. The Bolshevik experiment was a great adventure that won the faith of millions of people. When it failed, it destroyed their hopes of a certain kind of life. One of the inspirations for the character was Ludmila.
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Buenos Aires feels like a place one could live in. Coming in from the airport, it looks lush and green, with none of the peeling suburbs that greet you in so many capital cities. Our rental apartment is in Palermo, an upscale neighbourhood of cafés and designer boutiques with a Mediterranean feel. The apartment is vast and white and loft-like, with concrete floors. You could be in Barcelona or Naples. Kathy’s flight from Washington gets in shortly after mine from Paris. We eat lunch at the parilla (grill) downstairs, and then I drag her off to look for the Casa Borges, where the writer was born. You can’t go in, but from the outside, it has a subtle, quirky air. Inside there might be monsters and labyrinths.
Argentina is the most European of the South American states, and in some ways you feel entirely at home, but this is the Southern Hemisphere, and things are different. The monsters and labyrinths are of course invisible to the naked tourist eye. What we notice first is the climate. It’s March, the summer is over, there’s a cool breeze blowing up from Patagonia, and winter is coming.
Kathy’s daughter Lara joins us next morning, and we head for the Recoleta Cemetery to pay our respects to Evita: saint, whore, jefe spiritual, “that woman” – take your pick. The cemetery is vast and well-kept, laid out in a tidy grid of narrow alleys. All the best dead people in Buenos Aires are here. Eva Duarte de Perón resides in a plain black marble tomb. Her corpse was removed from the country soon after her death, but she was finally laid to rest twenty-two years later.
After lunch at La Biela, a grand old nineteenth-century café whose terrace is shaded by a venerable gum tree, we head downtown. The Microcentro district is the financial and administrative heart of the city. At the height of its wealth and glory, in the late nineteenth century, with immigrants pouring in from Italy and Spain in search of a better life, Buenos Aires aspired to become the Paris of the South, and built accordingly. The eight-lane Avenida 9 de Julio claims to be the widest street in the world. The Teatro Colón was for years the biggest opera house in the Southern Hemisphere, until Sydney overtook it in the 1960s.
Heads spinning with traffic and jetlag, we stumble round the Plaza de Mayo, where the mothers of the desaparecidos demonstrate on Thursdays. Today is Monday, there’s some kind of activist tent city, and cars pounding all round the square. At one end is the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace, painted an unappealing salmon pink colour to symbolize the blending of the red of the Federalists with the white of the Unitarists in the nineteenth century (don’t ask). It has a balcony overlooking the square where politicians come to stir up national passions. This is where Evita used to whip up the “peasant resentment” of her descamisados (shirtless ones). Further down the square, the Metropolitan Cathedral is a shrine to José de San Martín, Argentina’s most revered hero, who liberated Chile, Peru and Argentina from the Spaniards in the early nineteenth century. I’m intrigued to realize that the Libertador is a neighbour of mine. There’s a statue of him in the park across the road from my house in Paris.
The first European to reach Buenos Aires was Pedro de Mendoza, who made landfall in San Telmo in 1536, and founded the settlement of Nuestra Señora Santa María del Buen Aire (at a time when traffic pollution must have been much less acute). San Telmo remained a fashionable residential area until an outbreak of yellow fever drove out the bourgeoisie, and Italian immigrants took over their elegant mansions. It claims to be the birthplace of tango, and is supposed to be the haut lieu of urban poetry, but we missed the Sunday market, and nostalgia is in short supply on a Tuesday. A couple of mediocre dancers are practising their craft on Plaza Dorrego, surrounded by the output of some mediocre painters. It’s the Argentine equivalent of the Place du Tertre. The dancers are technically proficient, but short on passion. They pass the hat round the tables when the shift is up.
South of San Telmo is La Boca – which also claims to be the cradle of tango – and which is a district of Ill Repute. The guidebooks warn about not straying out of the tourist areas, the people at the next table in the café on Plaza Dorrego advise us not to go there on foot, and the taxi driver instructs us not to come here at night. No por la noche. He says it twice and with emphasis, to make sure the gringas have understood. But in daylight, La Boca is fun. After quiet San Telmo, it’s a sort of funfair thirties slum. It was founded by Genoese dock workers who built corrugated metal shacks along the dockside and painted them with whatever colours were left over from the ships. The result is a lurid hodge-podge of low-lying buildings running along one or two main alleys: yellow staircase, pink sidings, orange balconies, all mixed up together. Shops sell tourist tat, restaurants offer cut-rate menus, Carlos Gardel blares out on every corner. Gardel was one of the most famous tango singers of the 1930s, killed in a plane crash in 1936. His songs feature plaintive violins, bouncy bandoneons, and a suffering tenor voice that sends old-fashioned shivers down your spine.
Back in our laid-back yuppy neighbourhood, Kristoffer, the apartment manager, born in Sweden, drops by to change our euros and dollars into pesos, and advise us on where to have dinner. The Argentine peso is so low that the locals are desperate to get their hands on some serious currency. There is much talk about the Argentine Debt, protests break out sporadically here and there, and at one point there’s a public service strike. For us, however, everything is cheap. Restaurants, taxis and trendy boutiques are well within our reach. We don’t get jolted out of our happy tourist bubble until the end of the week, when a taxi driver refuses one of Kristoffer’s hundred peso notes. The heladería doesn’t want it either. Alarmed, we rush home and check our piles of notes, holding each one up to the light to inspect the watermark of Evita. Only two are fake. Kristoffer apologises and agrees to change them. The monsters and labyrinths recede.
The ferry across the Rio de la Plata to Uruguay takes an hour and a quarter. We arrive in Colonia del Sacramento at half-past one. It’s a quiet, still, grey day. There is no one to be seen, and no cars on the road. After the chaos and energy of BA, it’s disconcerting. But at the entrance to the Barrio Historico we find the Restaurant Florida, which has lace tablecloths, antique ornaments in a glass-fronted bookcase, and Carlos Gardel record covers on the walls. The owners are elderly, and speak clear distinct old-fashioned Spanish. (Argentine Spanish is slushy: Cafayate becomes Cafajate, and “llamar” becomes “jamar.”) The owner’s father came from Bordeaux, and the cuisine is advertised as cocina de autor, auteur cuisine. We have an exquisite three-hour, three-course lunch, accompanied by two bottles of Tommasí, a delicious Uruguayan Chardonnay that just slides down. After that, there’s just time for a quick stroll round the historical centre. Colonia has some attractive colonial buildings, cobbled streets, a lighthouse, a vast central square. Tourists are few and far between. The season is over. On the way back to the ferry we see a few men sitting on their porches, and some little boys on bicycles who scream, Holà, how are you!
Back in Palermo, we’ve taken to having breakfast in a café called Bartola that has nursery-coloured pink and blue chairs, a wide choice of brunch, and delicious medialunas (croissants). A poster at the entrance says: La vida es como la bicicleta – hay que pedalear hacia adelante para no perder el equilibrio. (Life is like a bicycle: keep pedaling or you’ll lose your balance.) Anyone who rides a bike in Buenos Aires must be insane. The traffic is ferocious, and the city is huge. In a week we only skim the surface. There are districts we don’t get to, and monuments we don’t see. As the days go by, culture shock is kicking in. The Catholic underlay and the European faces make you think you’re at home, but it’s a whole parallel universe down here. The politicians are people we’ve never heard of, and so are the rock stars. The shops sell clothes in colours that are brighter than we’re used to, created by designers whose names mean nothing.
The Museo Evita is housed in an elegant mansion that was originally bought by the Eva Perón Social Aid Foundation in 1948, and converted into a shelter for homeless women. The Museo claims to “disclose truth with historic rigour,” and a few book covers at the entrance acknowledge that there is indeed a “white myth” and a “black myth,” but any negative impressions are soon swept away by film footage of adoring crowds and bereft mourners, and glass cases of glamourous dresses. Evita was a star of radio soaps during the Thirties, and became a political figure during the Forties, when she married Juan Perón. She died of cancer in 1952, aged thirty-three. The military thought she was a dangerous whore, and shipped her body out of the country. The Argentine film Eva no duerme (released in 2015, the year after our trip) tells the story of her macabre posthumous existence, and draws a straight political line from Eva and her descamisados to the Generals and their desaparecidos.
Back to tango. After the elusive sighting on Plaza Dorrego, we try to find a milonga, which is a place you go to dance, watch other people dancing, maybe take some lessons. Milongas are supposed to have sessions in the late afternoon and in the evening, but the ones we find are all closed. One of them has a drawing on the pavement showing you how to place your feet, so we try that instead. We are not gifted. It seems that Serious Tango People don’t come out until after dark, but we have dinner reservations. La Cabrera is supposed to be one of the best restaurants in Buenos Aires. It occupies three or four addresses stretching over two city blocks, and there’s a queue in front of each one. The steaks, like all the steaks we’ve eaten this week, are far too big for any non-Argentine to consume, but they give you a map of the cow to help you navigate the menu.
Abandoning a side-trip to the pampas to see the cows in situ, we fetch up at the Museum of Latin American Art. It’s housed in a striking trapezoid structure. Glass walls allow natural light to flood the exhibition space. It houses over five hundred works of twentieth-century Latin American art that were collected by a local millionaire. Some of the Cubist works are clearly influenced by Braque and Picasso, but they’re so drenched with colour that they have an entirely different feel. There are paintings by Rivera, Kahlo and Botero, but most of the works are by artists I’ve never heard of: Tarsila do Amaral, Xul Solar, Jorge de la Vega. More of the parallel universe. A temporary exhibition by the Peruvian fashion photographer Mario Testino is called In Your Face. The photos show Beautiful People baring their fangs in various states of dress, undress, and feigned sexual arousal, all preparing to leap down from the walls and devour you. It’s a bit like being at the zoo.
It’s Kathy’s birthday, and we have seats for the show at the Esquina Carlos Gardel. Although it’s a tourist venue, the setting is elegant, the food is all right, and the dancing is not bad, though the older dancers have a flair and style that the younger ones have yet to acquire. Tango, like wine, has to age.
Lara goes back to Washington, and Kathy and I get down to business. A few years ago we took a swing through the Napa Valley, and we’re anxious to pick up research where we left off. Argentina is the world’s fifth-biggest wine producer and the industry is centred in Mendoza, on the edge of the Andes. We leave Palermo for the airport as dawn is breaking, and reach Mendoza mid-morning.
The wine harvest is over and Mendoza is quiet. It’s a functional little town organized in a grid system of one-way streets, which they call contra mano. Street signs are an optional extra. The locals don’t like drivers who don’t know where they’re going, and they keep their hands on the horn. After driving three times round the block counting the intersections, we locate our hotel, which is called the Bohemia. Oil paintings decorate the pool, and there’s a bookshelf in the bar. The rooms are cramped and the shower is lukewarm, but the owners are friendly and helpful. We spend the afternoon in the park recovering from early rising, and dine on grilled chicken in a nearby parilla. The wine is a Malbec called Finca La Linda that I discovered in Liverpool last year. Nice choice, says Marco, our friendly waiter, who has spent time surfing in Hawaii.
Most of the bodegas that offer wine tours and tastings are scattered along Ruta Nacional 40. Bicycles can be rented to tour the vineyards. We had assumed that Highway 40 was an idyllic little country road with wineries nested on either side, but it turns out to be a four-lane highway lined with warehouses. There’s an unappetising shopping mall on the edge of Mendoza, and an entrepreneur selling dog food from a pick-up truck. More serious is the fact that today is feriado, and most of the wineries are closed. We fetch up at Roberto Bonfante, where the only tour is in Spanish, a language we don’t really have down, but there are no better offers. The guide is a very nice lady who takes our group through the process of wine-making from start to finish. Most of the finer points go over our heads. Dudas? she asks, preguntas? Doubts? Questions? but linguistic deficiencies prevent us from expressing either. She urges us on to the next part with Adelante! and is kind enough not to charge us for the visit.
We drive back to Mendoza for a late lunch in a cavernous Italian restaurant with white tablecloths and artificial lighting that looks like the kind of place the Godfather would take his family. On the main square, the Frente de Izquierda (Left Front) is endeavouring to break the holiday calm with megaphones and a small band of demonstrators. It’s not at all like Napa here. Not a single health food store or trendy clothing boutique. Well-dressed Mendoza seems to favour T-shirts and tracksuits.
Over the next two days, we visit four more wineries. The Bodega Lagarde is foodie paradise, and we indulge in a gastronomic lunch of honey melon soup, pumpkin terrine, goat cheese on beet mini cake with hummus, and fillet steak, each with its own specially chosen wine. Not entirely sober, we roll across the road to Luigi Bosca, the producers of Finca La Linda. The climate here is cutting-edge commercial, they produce one million bottles a year, and the winery has a Californian air.
Next day, at CarinaE, a “boutique bodega for high-quality wines,” we meet a Frenchman called Philippe who came out to Argentina to work for EDF, found an abandoned vineyard, and stayed on. The bodega uses the traditional cement vats that have been phased out in some vineyards to produce what they call “Argentine wine with a French soul.” It’s a cool grey day, and the Andes are hidden by mist. Our guide is an amiable young man who offers us a choice of wines, accompanied by sausage and cheese. I opt for the in-depth experience with five different Malbecs, while Kathy is more open-minded.
Our last stop is at Catena Zapata, which is built in the shape of a Mayan pyramid, and has delusions of grandeur. Catena is an empire producing five million bottles a year. By buying up smaller vineyards, they’ve created a vast range of wine. There’s a guard with a walkie-talkie, a barrier across the road to keep out the riff-raff, and a stone and marble interior that could have been built for Mussolini. In the grandiose oval cellar where the wine is stored, the barrels sweep round the corner into the distance. After the tour, our guide gives us a lesson on how to assess the wine. First you swirl it round, then you smell it, which she calls “first nose.” Then you do it again, “second nose,” and discover that the smell is different. Then you take your first taste, swirl some more to let the air in, and taste again. The first and second sips are completely different. We may not know what we’re looking for, but at least we know how to do it.
Next stop is Salta, a colonial city on the edge of the Andes, founded in 1582. The plane lands as it’s getting dark, and the drive into town is a nightmare. First we miss the turn off the highway, and then we get lost. The town is laid out in another contra mano grid system, and there are no street signs. It’s too dark to read the map, buses thunder past, drivers hoot, the car mists up, the ventilator fails to shift it. We’re relieved to reach the hotel.
The Hotel del Virrey is vast and dark and colonial, and we are given a huge room furnished with what looks like Grandmother’s cast-offs, on the ground floor overlooking the street. There’s an iron grille over the window. The first night we enjoy strewing our possessions around after our cramped quarters in the Bohemia: the second night, having discovered a succession of quiet, white, unoccupied rooms on the courtyard side, we are not pleased to have been fobbed off with the the ugliest, noisiest room in the hotel. Still, the water is hot in the shower.
Salta is rougher and tougher than sleepy Mendoza, with a frontier edge and more colour. Bolivia is not far away and there are more Indian faces. It has a colourful, noisy town square with trees and fountains, stalls selling local handicrafts, a mournful Andean guitarist singing something impassioned, and a pink and white colonial cathedral that looks as if it were made by Baskin Robbins.
The Museo de Arqueología de Alta Montana was set up to exhibit the mummified bodies of three Inca children who were found in 1999, preserved in ice, near the summit of Mount Llullaillaco. They were sacrificed to the Inca gods in the early 1400s. The museum exhibits a range of artifacts that were intended to accompany them into the next world, describes the expedition that found them, and explains how the sacrifices worked. The children came from high-born families, the sacrifice was intended to ensure the continuing fertility of the land, and it was considered an honour to be chosen. The three children, a young boy and girl, and an older girl of around fourteen, travelled to Cuzco in Peru for the ceremony and were then taken home. The journey would have taken months. After being welcomed home, they were taken up into the mountains and entombed. Studies have shown that the children, especially the older girl, imbibed considerable quantities of chicha (an alcoholic drink) and coca, in the months before they died.
It’s all rather grisly, and we’re happy to fall into the nearest restaurant and order a glass of wine. Salta is another wine-producing area, and I’m developing a taste for the local Torrontés, which is not the same as the one produced in Mendoza. The Mendoza Torrontés grape is an uva mentirosa that is dry and fruity at the same time. The grape up here is crisper and more straightforward. Eating our Ensalada Caprese, with mozzararella that comes from goats and is unexpected in colour and texture, we watch the comings and going on the Plaza 9 de Julio. (The Ninth of July is a very big deal: it’s the day Independence was declared in 1816.) There are old gents in pullovers, schoolchildren in uniforms, sharp young lads with jeans hanging off their hips, women carrying quite large children (not a single buggy in sight). Sellers of necklaces and pink Rolexes offer their wares politely, but don’t hassle us.
By late afternoon, we have exhausted the town’s colonial and sociological opportunities and seen a great many churches. The light is drained and dusty; people flop in the square. A young mother is asleep on a bench, and the baby beside her is sleeping too. The culture shock we barely noticed in Buenos Aires is creeping up, and the baños (restrooms) are getting worse. We go in search of an ATM. Our supply of pesos is running low, and tomorrow we’re leaving for a three-day trip to the back country. In Mendoza we got done by the traffic cops for not having our lights on, and it might well happen again. At dusk, we retire to the hotel swimming pool with headphones and a bottle of Malbec to watch the sun go down. Kathy has an audiobook, and I listen to music. Out here on the edge of the desert, it takes Bach and Brel and the late great Roy Orbison to keep me grounded.
It’s 159 km from Salta to Cachi, and the trip takes five hours. We leave as soon as it’s light, which is not until eight. All of Argentina is on the same time zone as Buenos Aires, and we’re quite far west. It rained in the night, but around ten the sun comes out. By then we’re up in the mountains. The road is unpredictable, but the views are amazing. We stop for coffee and a visit to the baños, buy some earrings from a lady selling silver jewellery, and peel off a layer of clothes. We’re about to enter Los Cardones, a national park, where there are no services at all. The landscape is spectacular and desolate, red soil, grey rock, cactuses standing guard like sentinels on the hillsides. Traffic is sparse. Layers of cloud, high and low, grey and white, off-white and pearl, light and thick, cotton and gauze, drift past the mountain peaks and float across the plain.
By one o’clock we are in Cachi, feeling smug that we survived the wilderness. Cachi has a central plaza, a simple church, and not much else, but the hotel where we’re staying is delicious. El Cortijo has low beams, flagged stone floors, and is decorated in warm earthy reds and browns. The service is friendly and the food is excellent. It’s so cosy that we linger longer than we should the following morning. The distance to Cafayate is 154 km, about the same as the previous day, and we think we’ve got it down. It’s a beautiful clear sunny day and the sky is a pure deep blue. At least we have the wit to fill the tank and buy bottles of water.
The road is far, far worse than the previous day. Nine-tenths of it is unpaved, and the surface is dreadful. Why did nobody warn us to get a four-wheel drive? There are emergency telephones every few kilometres, but we’re not anxious to have a breakdown in the middle of nowhere. We crawl along. We cringe every time a stone bounces off the car. It’s less isolated than yesterday, with occasional houses and dried-out pueblos. We average 20 km an hour. This gives us plenty of time to admire the landscape. There are mountains all around us with snow capped peaks. Little clouds drift out of nowhere and perch on their summits. Dogs stray in the dust along the road.
Around lunchtime, we stop in Molinas, in the hope of finding sandwiches, but there’s only a sleepy restaurant across from the church and we want to keep moving. The only thing worse than breaking down in the midday heat would be breaking down at night. It’s starting to feel very Thelma and Louise. Kathy wonders when Brad Pitt is going to show up, but he doesn’t appear. The mountains have been thrust up from the earth and tortured by the wind into strange quasi-human shapes. Twenty kilometres out of Cafayate, the paved road begins. You can hear our whoop of joy back in Bolivia.
Cafayate is a pleasant little town. It’s the centre of a big wine-growing area, and if we had had time we would stay longer, but we have to get back to Salta to catch the plane to Iguazú. We squeeze in a morning visit to a bodega in the town centre, but the tasting is jinxed by the arrival of a large group of morose, middle-aged French tourists, who look as though they have got up too early, driven too far, and heard too much, so after a rapid lunch of empanadas and a glass of Torrontés, we get back on the road. It’s 190 km back to Salta, but the road is good. The Quebrada de Cafayate is a landscape of towering red ravines and weird rock formations, scarlet and crimson, rust and vermilion. As we get closer to Salta the mountains flatten out, the traffic gets thicker, we get stuck behind trucks of corn, and start to stress, but we reach the airport in plenty of time for the Hertz guys to do their long weird South American routine on the computer, check in for the flight, and decompress in the bar.
Aerolineas Argentinas flies a circular route from Buenos Aires to Mendoza to Salta to Iguazú and back to BA. The flights work like clockwork. The planes are clean. The flight attendants are polite and impersonal and address us as “Lady” (gap in the training manual there). The invariable inflight snack consists of one lemon cookie, one chocolate cookie, and a packet of crackers.
When we get to Iguazú, night has fallen, and the sky is full of stars. The drive to the hotel takes us through what seems to be the rain forest. It’s dark and tropical, faintly menacing. We’re staying at the Sheraton, the only hotel in the national park, and the only one with a view of the falls. Since it’s dark we can’t actually see them yet – but we can hear them.
The adventure is over, and for the rest of the trip we will have a guide. Joining a group of English-speaking travellers, herded by an Argentine guide called Gabriel, we take a small train through the jungle next morning to Garganta del Diablo (Devil’s Throat), which is the biggest and more impressive of the cataracts. Then we take the train back to the starting point to do first the Upper and then the Lower Walk. This might sound like overkill, but it isn’t. The Iguazú Falls are amazing, there are over 250 different falls, spread over 2.5 km, and you don’t tire of contemplating them from a variety of angles. Today we’re visiting the Argentine side, and tomorrow we’ll cross the border and do the Brazilian side. At least, I will. As a US passport-holder, Kathy needs a visa for Brazil, and she doesn’t have one. The guidebook implied that she could get away without one, but Gabriel is categorical that no, she can’t. By the sound of it, his agency was burned in the past, and had to pay a fine.
On the train back from Garganta del Diablo, we share the carriage with a group of international twentysomethings discussing cattle roping at an undisclosed location on the Brazilian side. One of the girls (probably English) asks one of the boys (probably Argentine) how they can eat so much meat. The solution, says the Argentine kid, is to avoid vegetables, which are entirely useless and take up space in your stomach that can be more profitably reserved for meat. Ah, so that’s it.
The first European to see the Falls, says Gabriel, was called Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish soldier and explorer who was shipwrecked in Florida in 1527. It took him nine years to make his way to Mexico, and he wrote an account of his journey called The Shipwrecked. He saw the Iguazú Falls on his way to the Rio de la Plata in 1540. When he talked about what he had seen, no one believed him. He died in poverty in Seville. (I come across his book on Kentish Town Road in London two weeks later. Small world.) The visit ends with a very nasty boat trip that takes you along the river and under the Falls. You get soaked to the skin and they give you canvas bags to wrap up your shoes and cameras. Kathy thinks it’s hilarious, and I hate it. There’s so much water you can’t open your eyes, and so you don’t see a damn thing. It’s waterboarding that you have to pay for.
Much more congenial is the helicopter trip they offer us next day on the Brazilian side. It costs an extra US$100, but it’s worth it. They take us up in a small four-seater helicopter for ten minutes. Seeing the falls from the air makes you see how it all fits together, Argentinian side, Brazilian side, river before the falls, river after the falls. I’ve never been on a helicopter before, and it’s a damn sight drier than the boat. Back on the ground, we cross the Brazilian national park to see the falls from a different angle, and Gabriel fills us in on filmography. The Mission, with Jeremy Irons and Robert de Niro, was shot in Iguazú in 1985, and all the scenes that show the falls are authentic. Moonraker with Roger Moore took place on the bank over there. The villain’s house in the movie Miami Vice was located right here where you have a view of two waterfalls (no such house actually exists). Our walk ends up right beside the Falls. There’s a platform where you can stand right beside the water, and a panoramic elevator to take you back up the hill.
After all that energy and violence, it’s good to spend a quiet afternoon at the Sheraton eating a lunch of useless vegetables, followed by a Guaraní massage that involves lumps of wood shaped like lemons, followed by Pina Colada by the pool as the sun goes down, watching exotic-coloured birds that match the exotic-coloured cocktails. If the Sheraton wasn’t so stingy with the free wifi, it would be perfect.
The Jesuits arrived in Argentina in 1609, and founded fifteen missions in the provinces of Misiones and Corrientes, organizing the local Guaraní Indians into social and religious communities to cultivate the land. The best preserved of the surviving missions is San Ignacio Miní, which is a four-hour drive from Iguazú. According to the museum at the entrance to the mission, the Jesuits found their vocation in South America, away from the political and imperial intrigues of Europe. The missions benefited the Indians by protecting them from bandits and slave hunters, and the result seems genuinely to have been a kind of social utopia. But the Jesuits fell foul of Portuguese and Spanish colonial interests in the New World, and were ordered to leave South America in 1768. All the missions were abandoned, and they fell into ruin.
San Ignacio Miní was rediscovered at the end of the nineteenth century, by which time it was completely overgrown, but in its heyday, looming out of the jungle, it must have been an impressive sight. There was a huge red sandstone church and an enormous plaza. The gilded baroque interior is long gone, but you can still make out the insignia of the Society of Jesus over the altar. (In Buenos Aires, we visited a building called Manzana de las Luces, which was the former headquarters of the Jesuits in Argentina. The cab driver had never heard of it, and we had to tell him where to go. When we found it, it was in serious need of upkeep. The only sign of life in there was a ratty handicrafts fair.)
From the mission we drive down to Posadas, a sleepy town with a manicured riverbank, just across from Paraguay. There’s a five-hour wait for our flight to Buenos Aires. The airport has no departure board, no planes announced, no passengers waiting. But time goes fast in the air-conditioned bar with free wifi and very cheap whisky.
We spend our last night in Argentina in an odd little hotel in the Retiro district called the Art Hotel. It is long and narrow and loft-like, manned by unsmiling black-clad young men. Imaginatively positioned mirrors on a black-painted wall open up the space, and there’s an art exhibition on the ground floor. Our room is dark and cramped and might, in less cultured circumstances, be described as dingy. Midway through your shower, you have to turn off the water to let the drain cope with the flow. After the nonchalance of the provinces, Buenos Aires feels like another planet. Mothers pick up uniformed schoolchildren, dog walkers exercise seven or eight animals on leashes, cars flood past. The air smells of petrol and parilla. In the cemetery down the road – maybe – Evita sleeps.
March 2014
)
The Angels of Russia is the story of a Soviet dissident who meets a French student in Leningrad, and persuades her to marry him so he can leave the country and escape KGB harrassment.
The year is 1986. Arriving in Paris with his new wife, Sergei meets Stéphanie’s family, including her Russian aunt Marina, who, he learns, defected from the USSR twenty years earlier. Sergei is stunned. His KGB controllers never mentioned that when they briefed him for his mission. Why is he here? What do they have in mind?
The Angels of Russia has been described as part history, part spy-thriller, and part love story. A review by John Sutherland in the Times Literary Supplement called it “a sweeping contemporary historical romance, set against the great drama of perestroika. The story,” said Sutherland, “is … gripping and finally surprising; what, in other contexts, would be called a page-turner.”
Gradually the reader discovers that Sergei is being pressured by the KGB, and that his “chance” meeting with Stéphanie was choreographed from above. The real target is Marina. When she defected, she destroyed the careers of her father, an aide to Khrushchev, and her brother, a high-ranking official in the KGB. Twenty years later, it’s time to settle the score.
Originally published on the internet, The Angels of Russia was the first e-book to be submitted for the Booker Prize in 1998, generating a lot of media controversy about what-is-a-book? and a lot of silly definitions about paper and binding. I was interviewed by Time and The Los Angeles Times, and I even got a mention in Izvestiya. Poetic justice?
I became interested in Russia entirely by chance. In 1974, I needed a job and went for an interview in a small office on the top floor of a building on the Boulevard Saint Germain that apparently had something to do with radios. In my ignorance, I took this to be one of the pirate stations then in vogue on the North Sea. Not quite. My new employer was a US-funded radio station broadcasting in twenty or so languages to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. I had never heard of such a thing. I was hooked right away.
I spent the next seventeen years working for the Audience Research department of Radio Liberty. Our job was to ascertain who listened to Western radio broadcasts in the Soviet Union, how they listened, what programmes they listened to, which stations they favoured, and what they thought of it all. Back then, this was not easy to do. Western radio listening was technically not illegal in the Soviet Union, but in practice it was frowned upon, and the stations were jammed. In the Cold War climate of the 1970s, polling inside the USSR was unthinkable, and nor could we conduct open interviews with Soviet travellers to the West.
We solved the problem by using Russian-speaking interviewers who had a plausible reason for making contact with Soviet tourist groups in Western Europe. One worked for Radio Finland, one was interested in ham radio, one was a journalist… All were adept at striking up conversations with individual members of the group (Soviets always travelled in a group), and extracting information on radio listening in the course of a seemingly casual discussion. The identity of our interviewers was a closely guarded secret, and the names of the people they talked to were not passed on. Using methodological safeguards to verify the data, we worked like this for twenty years, until things began to loosen up and perestroika made it possible to gather information in a more orthodox way.
Emigrants from the Soviet Union were a parallel source of information. Some were defectors, some were Jews, some were dissidents. In the 1970s, emigration, voluntary or otherwise, was the regime’s way of getting rid of undesirable citizens. Many of those who ended up in Paris found their way to our office. There was Jonas, a Lithuanian sailor who jumped ship in Sweden, with whom we went out for herrings and vodka at the Brasserie Lipp; Sergei, a cartoonist for the satirical magazine Krokodil, who literally ran away from his tourist group in Nice; Efim, the teenage son of a Russian poet, who gave me my first lessons in Russian conversation. Eminent visitors included writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Viktor Nekrasov (who became the model for Kazakov in The Angels of Russia), along with Noe Tsintsadze, Foreign Minister of the short-lived independent Republic of Georgia in the 1920s, a delightful old man with courtly manners but rather short sight, who never failed to greet me with a cheerful “Bonjour, Mademoiselle, comment allez-vous?” even when I was eight months pregnant and forced to take a step backwards so we could comfortably converse.
And then there were all those that I never actually met, all the hundreds of people who told their stories to our interviewers, often in such detail that I felt as if I had known them intimately for years. People who lost their jobs because they applied to emigrate, people who couldn’t study because their parents were intellectuals – the tales of petty tragedy and daily humiliation flowed endlessly across my desk. Careers blocked, residence permits refused, families split asunder. Family reunions that consisted of an American citizen and his Soviet cousin standing a few yards apart on a station platform in Ukraine simply looking at each other. Before joining Radio Liberty, I had no strong views about communism, but a couple of years in the company of my Soviet acquaintances, the present and the anonymous, cured me of that.
Our unconventional research methods, combined with occasional privileged access to highly-placed sources, enabled us to accumulate a vast amount of information about what Soviet people really thought, and what their lives were really like behind the bland, shameless prose of official propaganda. We knew how they struggled to find food in the shops, what they thought of the war in Afghanistan, how they viewed their own leadership. Not everything they told us was reliable, mind you. We heard about rising stars in the Politburo whose careers went nowhere, we were assured that lifeguards occasionally drowned the people they were supposed to be rescuing in order to collect a bonus, we got the scoop on a mansion with several underground floors of torture chambers allegedly owned by the First Secretary of one of the non-Russian republics (that one turned out to be true).
None of this was viewed with pleasure by the KGB, though in general they kept their distance. There was a bomb attack on Radio Liberty’s Munich headquarters in 1981, but our office on Boulevard Saint Germain remained unscathed. The truth was that we were probably useful to them. We published the kind of insights into Soviet attitudes and opinions that were obtainable nowhere else. (Opinion polls were not taken in the USSR: regarded as a bourgeois science, they were replaced by the Party line.) Concrete sightings were relatively few, although one of our interviewers was once beaten up in the street, but the KGB were a constant, lurking presence. They hovered at the back of our minds, they coloured the way we worked. Certain people were kept away from the office, others refused flatly to set foot there.
The idea for The Angels of Russia originally grew out of the cloak and dagger meetings held by our staff with Russians in obscure cafés around town, where no one quite knew who was telling the truth, who was being pressured, who was vulnerable because they had family in the Soviet Union, and who was not what they seemed. What would happen, I wondered, if a Russian who was ostensibly a dissident turned out to be a KGB agent?
I made my first trip to the Soviet Union in 1990. Until then Radio Liberty employees had been barred from visiting Eastern Europe and the USSR, but perestroika had advanced to the point where the ban could be lifted. I traveled with a group of mainly French tourists to Leningrad and Moscow. Whenever possible I peeled away from the group to take a look at the settings I had used, sight unseen, for the first draft of The Angels of Russia. It was all oddly familiar. I inspected the Philharmonia Theatre where Stéphanie first meets Sergei, walked along the Moika canal where he lives with his mother, and explored the Writers’ Graveyard in the Aleksandr Nevsky Monastery where Stéphanie agrees to engage in a fiktivny brak.
(Meanwhile a woman speaking perfect French, who said she was in Leningrad with her engineer husband, attached herself to our group. She claimed to be at a loose end while her husband was working. Nobody seemed to notice how she worked her way round the group and talked to us all, that the husband never made an appearance, and that she chatted to our tour guide in fluent Russian at mealtimes. They all took her at face value. That was the scary part.)
The Angels of Russia is a tragedy of perestroika. No one escapes unscathed from the drama that begins in Leningrad and ends in Paris, but when the conspiracy against Marina comes to light, the one who suffers most is Sergei. The title of the book comes from a 1984 poem by the dissident poet Irina Ratushinskaya that runs like this:
…the angels of Russia/Freeze to death towards morning/Like sparrows in the frost/Falling from their wires into the snow.
Sergei was my sparrow in the frost. Some of the snow has melted since then, but far from all.
March 2016
)
There’s a reason why I write about about paintings. If I know why provenance is crucial and inventory is vital, why you should always check the artist’s signature, and what you can hope to learn by reading the label on the back of the frame, it’s because my husband was an enthusiastic art collector. Over a period of nearly twenty years, starting in 1990 and up until his death in 2009, he amassed a collection of nearly 130 paintings. The pictures are American Impressionists and post-Impressionists, and some 80 of them are due to go on sale at Christie’s in Paris in March 2016.
W.S. Horton
Paysage au Crépuscule
Jean-Claude began collecting American paintings more or less by chance. In 1990, he bought a picture by a painter he thought was French, but who turned out to be American. That awakened his curiosity in American art, and in the following months he purchased works by Daniel Ridgeway Knight, Frank Boggs and James McNeill Whistler.
His interest endured until the end of his life. Collecting was my husband’s means of self-expression. Like many collectors he had no artistic talent of his own, but collecting enabled him to capture beauty from a different angle. It was a way to become more than himself. His profession as a travel agent led him to explore the globe, and his fervour for paintings led him to discover art and beauty.
F.M. Johnson
Le jardin
For nearly twenty years, Jean-Claude tracked down artwork by American painters all over France. He kept abreast of sales in all the big auction houses, pinpointed likely paintings, researched their provenance, contacted auctioneers and experts for additional information. Whenever possible, he attended sales himself, both in Paris and in the rest of France.
Once the painting was safely home, the real work started. Jean-Claude made a point of checking the authenticity of all his paintings. He viewed research as an integral part of his collecting activity. He corresponded with American museums and galleries, art experts working on catalogues raisonnés (a comprehensive, annotated listing of all known artworks by an artist), and sometimes even with the family of the artist.
Some of the painters he came across were less than famous, and some of the pictures he bought had been previously unknown. Jean-Claude regularly provided documentation on these little-known artists along with photos of their work to research institutions such as the Frick Art Reference Library and the Smithsonian’s Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture. In a letter addressed to him in 2002, the Chief of the Frick Collections Development and Research Department wrote: “Donations such as this, from private collectors, have been a tremendously rich source for our photo archive over the years.”
T.E. Butler
Route à Giverny
Art was a passion that changed Jean-Claude’s existence, and it also became the backdrop to our family life. We tramped round Paris trying to determine the exact spot from which a picture of the Ile Saint Louis or the Square du Vert Galant had been painted. We made excursions to Chézy-sur-Marne and Giverny and looked at the shape of the trees. Once we went to Venice and sized up the Grand Canal. Another time we poked round a cemetery in Dinard trying to find the headstone of a relative of Jules Pagès. The friends who were sometimes dragged along on these outings were intrigued rather than annoyed. We visited curators at the Brooklyn Museum of Art to discuss Morgan Russell, and the Cincinnati Art Museum to discuss Elizabeth Nourse. Staying with friends in Washington, I was dispatched to the National Museum of American Art to see what I could find in their archives on Elizabeth Gardner.
Unsurprisingly, art filtered into my own work too. The hero of Compassion is a sculptor, and the heroine of The Judas Tree is an art restorer. Girl with Parasol features a fictional painting by Monet which is hidden from the Nazis in Occupied Paris by the niece of a Jewish art dealer, assisted by the real-life curator Rose Valland, who spied for the Résistance in the Jeu de Paume.
A.G. Warshawsky
Jardin du Luxembourg
There were always too many paintings to hang on the walls, and lately most of them have been living in the basement, which always seemed a pity. When I made the decision to sell them, an American auction house seemed the best way to go and so I contacted Christies. The paintings will go under the hammer in the course of Christies’ Vente Intérieur, to be held at their auction rooms at 9 avenue Matignon on Thursday March 17, starting at 1400. The catalogue includes works by Jules Pagès, George Oberteuffer, Alexander Robinson, Abraham Warshawsky, James Whistler, Frank Boggs, Morgan Russell, Charles-Henri Fromuth, Theodore Butler, Clarence Montfort Gihon, Birger Sandzen, and Francis Morton Johnson.
February 2016
)
Sri Lanka is a jungle on a rock watered by tropical rains in the Indian Ocean. It likes to bill itself as the original Garden of Eden, but this seems unlikely. Adam and Eve would have been too busy gardening to deal with apples and serpents.
Sri Lanka is bursting, pushing, thrusting, thriving. The inhabitants are rushing, scurrying, surging forward dementedly in their tuk tuks, vans and trucks. Everyone is in a hurry to get somewhere, in case the jungle gets there first. The tsunami hit in 2005, the civil war ended in 2009, and everyone is anxious to make up for lost time. “Sri” means resplendent, and the island is alive with colour. Houses are painted pink, turquoise, orange and yellow, the sea is an amazing shade of blue, and the jungle swoops through every tint of green.
My friend Liz and I arrive in Colombo at five in the morning and are met by Sid, who will be our driver-guide for the next ten days. He greets us with garlands of flowers. We spend the first two nights in Negombo, a beach resort close to the airport, recovering from our twelve-hour flight on Sri Lankan Airlines (stingy with leg space, generous with alcohol).
On the second day Sid takes us to see the sights of Negomobo, which are few. Liz buys a hat and some travel sickness pills, I get my glasses fixed, and then Sid invites us to his guesthouse for coffee and what turns out to be an introduction to Buddhism – or at least his version of it. He says we should look for the truth within ourselves, and not compare ourselves to other people. He informs us that our fundamental “me” is different from the “shell” that is Liz or Patricia or Sid. If Sid breaks a finger, that doesn’t matter to the “me,” only to the “shell.” What if Sid is a concert pianist? I ask, but he evades the question.
Back to the pool for the afternoon. Having had Buddhism for lunch, around four we’re hungry. The pool bar offers milkshakes and cake: brown and cream Mabel Velvet Cake [sic], pink and green Ribbon Cake. It’s like being back in the 1950s. The radio features Billy Fury in Halfway to Paradise, and Connie Francis in Lipstick on your Collar.
Next morning we set off to the Cultural Triangle, in the northern part of the island, where a succession of ancient kingdoms founded capital cities. The road is lined with unlovely shacks selling everything from cement mixers to cell phones. Sid proves to be a highly efficient driver, skilfully weaving his friend’s borrowed Nissan in and out of single-lane traffic, accelerating past buses, sliding between trucks, overtaking vans. Maybe the friend’s Virgin Mary on the dashboard protects us. Sri Lanka is mostly Buddhist, but there is a sizeable Hindu minority, and some Muslims and Christians.
At noon we reach Yapahuwa, which was a royal capital between 1271 and 1283. Sri Lankan history is wonderfully confusing, a mish-mash of obscure kingdoms which all seem to have flourished and died in the space of a few decades. Later things got tidier as first the Portuguese, then the Dutch, then the British arrived and worked their way inland from the coast. The Cultural Triangle consists of ruined mediaeval cities that were built on impossibly high hills, partly to evade the clutches of the jungle, and partly to ward off enemies. There is nothing left of Yapahuwa but a granite staircase leading up the rock to the ruins.
Time for lunch. Sid steers us to a roadside shack which serves rice, pappadums and fiendishly spicy dhal. Sid eats with his fingers, and we get spoons. A lottery seller idles by on a bike, with a radio blaring out the latest hit tune. On the road to Aukana, we see children in white uniforms riding home from school. Pointy-faced dogs, who look as if they would give you rabies with a mere gnash of their teeth, wander aimlessly along the roadside.
Aukana
Aukana houses a gigantic Buddha carved in the living rock. While Sid buys tickets, we attempt to find what they call the “washroom.” A little man in a grey shirt and sarong leads us down the hill into some kind of Buddhist parish hall cluttered with plastic cups and chairs, and points to a door. The door is locked. The little man knocks gently on the door. Nothing happens. He whispers through the door. Nothing. The ticket seller comes out from his booth and knocks slightly harder. Nothing. Liz hammers on the door, the ticket seller beats a retreat, the grey shirt cringes. The door is flung open and a glaring monk appears in the doorway, retying a bright orange sarong. All this because of a siesta? My inner memsahib bursts to the fore and I spit, “About bloody time too!” The spirit of this gets through, if not the words, and he waves us through the junk-laden inner sanctum into the washroom. When we emerge, he’s waiting to ask where we’re from. “France,” I say, not untruthfully, and his lip curls. Clearly one can expect no better of the French.
We stay the night in Sigiriya. Our hotel is called the Eden Garden, and it’s a bit like being inside the Serpent: dark and slithery. The sinister swimming pool is overhung with trees, the restaurant is shadowy and clammy. Our room is up two flights of unlit stairs, at the far end of a cavernous gallery. The wall bordering the corridor is made of glass, and the door doesn’t lock. We complain to the desk clerk, who finds us vexatious, but sends a porter to check. The porter can’t lock it either. Having announced that he had no empty rooms, the clerk now produces one. Game, set and match. Sid, who has decided to let the memsahibs fight their own battles, applauds from a distance.
Sigiriya
Sigiriya was built by King Kasyapa between 477 and 495 AD. Kasyapa killed his father, took refuge on top of a quite spectacular rock, built an elaborate city with an ingenious water system, and carved dancing girls on the rock face. In the end, he had to come down from the rock to fight his half-brother. Fearing the battle was lost, he killed himself. It’s too hot to make the vertiginous climb up the rock face in the sun, but we visit the excellent museum, admire the water gardens, and consume pineapple juice (our new craze) lounging in brown plastic chairs that are got up to look like carved wood.
On to Polonnaruwa, which is blessedly flat. Originally a Buddhist holy site, it was taken over by King Parakranabahu in 1161. Here too there’s a good museum that shows what the buildings must once have looked like, but there’s so little left that it’s hard to imagine. The site has dropped out of time. No one goes there now but tourists and souvenir sellers. Sid is not good at bringing the past to life. He was a hurdler in his youth, and he’s a man of action. History is not his thing: he has a tendency to confuse BC and AD, and he’s not good with abstractions. Part of the problem is his command of English, his strange relationship with certain consonants, and his habit of referring to the seventeenth century as “the seventies” and the eighteenth century as “the eighties.”
A treat awaits us on the way home. Sid has talked us into visiting an Ayurvedic massage parlour. We decline the steam bath, which looks like a coffin with a hole cut out for the head, but submit to the ministrations of two young female masseuses. We are pushed, pummeled, kneaded and oiled like lumps of meat on the butcher’s slab. By the time they’ve finished, we’re ready to be put in roasting tins and popped in the oven. Instead we drive home. A wild elephant lumbers across the road ahead of us in the dusk.
Back in the Serpent’s Stomach, we need a drink. Having taken the precaution of procuring the essentials at Charles-de-Gaulle airport (one bottle Bacardi, one bottle Scotch), all we need is Coca Cola from the bar. We take our time. By the time we reach the dining room, a group of German tourists has polished off most of the buffet dinner.
Dambulla
Dambulla has a pink-and-white wedding-cake museum, a huge golden Buddha, and orange-clad monk statues lining the path from the parking lot. Pure Buddhist kitsch. Up the hill are rock temples dating from the first century BC, with an entrance porch built by the Dutch. The temples are stuffed with a great many Buddha statues of varying sizes, recumbent and seated. It’s rather like visiting a Buddha warehouse. Pleasant, but strange. Next comes a Hindu shrine in a forest glade at Nalanda Gedige, and then spiritual matters are shoved aside, and it’s time to shop.
Sid has a list of tourist shops where he is duty bound to take us. One of these is the Spice Garden just north of Matale. An obliging gent takes us on a tour of a mini-plantation, pointing out cinammon trees and pepper trees, explaining that vanilla is a type of edible orchid, vaunting the medicinal quantities of this and that, giving us creams to try, and finally escorting us into the shop where we spend a fortune on snake oil and potions that we will probably never use.
The road from Matale to Kandy goes through the centre of the island, and it’s here that the scenery is most luxuriant and most beautiful. There are high forested hills to either side, the sun glances off the jungle, it’s just gorgeous. Gliding through this splendour in our air-conditioned car, I feel like the papal emissary in The Mission, overwhelmed by the Jesuit paradise in the depths of the jungle. I can see exactly why the Portuguese and the Dutch and the British, coming from their grey, cold, rainy homelands, were so keen to get hold of this glittering, jewelled island with its plants and spices and rich fertile soil. The houses that line the road are painted Barbie pink, sea turquoise, lime-green, pistachio, lemon yellow. Sid stops at a Buddhist retreat with a bilingual bookshop, and tries to persuade us to buy a wonderful book about Buddhism that he is reading.
Kandy is the second biggest town on the island. It was the final seat of Ceylonese power, retrenched in the middle of the island, while the colonists nibbled away at the edges. The British took over in 1815, and packed the king off to India. The approach to the town is a scruffy commercial strip with lumber yards, a Buddhist Boys’ Home, a Rest Home for the Elders, and outlets for Nippon Cement (Bonds For Life). We check in to the Hotel Topaz, high on a hill overlooking the town, with amazing views and well-groomed greeter ladies, all smiles and saris.
And then Sid takes us out for a drink. Kandy is a ramshackle place best viewed from the surrounding hilltops, and he drives up to a bar overlooking the lake and the Temple of the Tooth. He suggests coffee, but by this time of day the memsahibs need something stronger. We inspect the liquor menu, and Sid notes that they serve Glenfiddich. I’m surprised he knows what it is, since he announced two days ago that, as a Buddhist, he avoids putting harmful substances into his body, but it seems he used to be a drinker. I ask if he would care to join me in a glass of Glenfiddich, and he accepts with alacrity, but then the barista sorrowfully explains that the bar’s liquor licence expired yesterday, and won’t be renewed till tomorrow. Back to Square One.
We adjourn to the Police Officers’ Mess. Sid used to be a police officer until he retired two years ago, and he still possesses a United Nations police pass (though we haven’t quite gathered why), not to mention contacts everywhere and an authoritative manner. The Police Officers’ Mess is deserted, which is a pity, sociologically speaking, but Sid orders Johnnie Walker Gold Label, which I’ve never heard of, but which is excellent, and some of what they call “short eats”: in this case chickpeas and fried potatoes. It’s the best food I’ve had for days. Curry and rice have palled very fast – far too spicy, and not very varied. The conversation gets on to Buddhism again, and Sid informs us that a bad action, if done the right way, is good. I can’t get my mind round that, and I wonder if he can.
Lotus pool
Driving through Kandy next morning to the Botanic Gardens at Peradeniya, we pass pawn shops, a restaurant called Bite Me, and a great many schools, colleges, and other places of education. From the Little Wonders Nursery to the Cornerstone College, Kandy is bent on self-improvement. Sid says that secondary education is free, but access to higher education is very restricted. People are anxious to get ahead because salaries are low and so are pensions. The Botanic Gardens were founded in 1815 by the British. Tsar Nicholas II and Lord Mountbatten both planted trees there.
On to the Elephants’ Orphanage in Pinnawela. It’s a two-hour drive. Families are out on the road, in tuk tuks or vans, and there’s a lot of traffic, though not many private cars. Today is the first day of a long holiday weekend. We pass a man driving a scooter with his wife sitting behind him and the baby wedged between them. The journey is enlivened by bland instrumental versions of Homeward Bound, Exodus, and Sailing, punctuated by squeaky recorders and additional twiddly bits. Sid’s had the radio on non-stop since Negombo, and it’s driving us mad. At the Elephants’ Orphanage, we watch two baby elephants being bottle-fed by a keeper. The smaller one tries to push the bigger one out of the way and the keeper sends him off with a slap. He goes off into a corner and sulks for a bit, and then tries to edge his way back.
After a lunch of Chinese noodles, we head back to Kandy, passing the Ladies’ Prayer Hall and The People’s Bank (The Pulse of the People). “Peace begins with a smile” says the slogan on the back of a tuk tuk. There’s not much to see in Kandy, so it’s back to shopping. First on the list is a gem factory, followed by a tacky textile shop whose salesgirls have not been trained in Western shopping practices (Rule One: Totally Ignore the Customer), and follow us round the store breathing down our necks. Next comes a performance of Sri Lankan folklore, which we have been nervous about all day, but which turns out much better than expected, with gorgeous costumes and excellent dancing.
Temple of the Tooth
And then, as night is falling, we walk round the lake to the Temple of the Tooth. It’s an imposing sixteenth-century temple which allegedly houses one of the Buddha’s teeth. It has a comfortable family atmosphere that reminds me of a Burmese pagoda. People bring their babies to be blessed, toothless grandmas queue up to see the sacred casket. (The actual tooth is not on view. Why am I not surprised?) Sri Lankans make pilgrimages here from all over the island. Looking at people’s faces, your scepticism fades. They are moved by what they see, and you are moved by their emotion, even if you don’t share it.
The train ride from Peradeniya to Gampola is reputed for its scenic views. Sid drops us at the station. The train is packed. We’re wedged in the corridor in the middle of a group of young men clutching sports equipment. They clap their hands and bang on the walls. When the train goes through a tunnel everyone screams. God knows what the scenery’s like: we can’t see a damn thing.
Sid is waiting with the car at Gampola. We’ve asked him to find us coffee – proper Sri Lankan coffee, not the Nescafé the locals favour. As usual, he knows just the place. Sid is no good at history, but in other respects he’s a treasure. When we complain about the muzak on the car radio he finds an English-language station called Gold FM which plays a weird array of tunes from the Fifties and Sixties, all of which are instantly familiar, despite the fact that I’ve never heard them before. Maybe they’re all B-sides and the rights are cheaper. “Gold FM,” murmurs a guy with a fake American accent, “wherever you are, wherever you go, all over Paradise Island.”
In this part of the island (heading south-east), we are what they call “up-country.” No more history. Attractions are waterfalls and a tea plantation. We stay overnight in Nuwara Eliya, the former summer residence of the British governors, a scrubby little town built in chalet style. It claims to be inspired by the Surrey stockbroker belt, and the weather is just like the Lake District. It’s popular with Sri Lankans who come to get away from the heat. They rent the chalets, and drink. Sid packs us off to the park for an hour while he gets something fixed on the car. There’s nothing to see, which is good, because we’re all Buddha-d out. It’s a relief to retire to the Heaven Seven hotel, halfway up a hill, read Michael Crichton and listen to music on the iPod.
Independence Day. The tuk tuks all sport the national flag, which features an orange stripe (for the Buddhists), a green stripe (for the Hindus), and a lion (to commemorate the ancient kings). Sri Lankans claim to be descended from lions and the Buddha. Gold FM plays By the Rivers of Babylon, and gives us local news from Australia and Singapore. This year the main Independence Day celebrations are in Trincomalee, a town on the east coast that was once a Tamil stronghold. The purpose of this, says Sid, is to prove to the world that the nation is united. “If you’re listening in Trincomalee,” says Gold FM, “you’re right there! Hallelujah.”
Driving down the mountain to Tissaharama, it becomes clear that this part of the island is much poorer than the area round the ancient sites. The region hasn’t been developed for tourism, and the people live off agriculture. A lot of Sri Lankans work as domestic servants in the Gulf Arab states, and Western Union offices are much in evidence. The radio dedicates a song to “everyone at Ceylon Chocolates,” and another to “Terence in Montreal, Quebec, that’s Canada.”
Up country
We stop for coffee in Ella, a mountain town, at a restaurant perched on the hillside run by another of Sid’s good friends, and delve deeper into Sid’s biography. Now forty-two, he seems to have been a wild young man. When he was young he was a national-level hurdler and won competitions. When he left school he went to Colombo, ostensibly to study but in reality to pursue his athletic career. When his mother discovered this she told him that she wanted a son not a horse. She cut off the money, he joined the police, and found himself in a Special Task Force fighting Tamil insurgents in the jungle. A stint in the Foreign Intelligence Service running informants was followed by an assignment driving high-level visitors around, then came some years in the CID. He acquired the United Nations police pass when he was doing police training in East Timor. Now he’s retired from the police and is taking tourists around for a living. In eight years’ time, when he’s fifty, he says he’s going to change his name and withdraw from the world into an ashram he’s in the process of building. He will renounce capitalism and be self-sufficient. Visitors to the ashram will not be charged. They will live off the vegetables he will grow. We don’t know what to make of this, but he seems very sure of himself.
Liz has a craving for jaggery, a local toffee-type delicacy, but all the shops are closed for Independence Day, so Sid takes us to a local hotel for jaggery pudding, which is dark brown and very sweet. After checking into the hotel at Tissa, it’s off again to Kataragama, which is a holy city for Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims alike. It’s dark by now. The Hindus have an interesting little routine that consists of lighting a candle in a coconut shell, waiting till the light goes out, and then smashing it down to the ground with great force. The Buddhists make offerings of fruit, which they buy from stalls set up outside the temple grounds. We have an offering too, which we duly get blessed, and then Sid gives it to the pilgrims flocking through the grounds. Elephants wander the temple grounds, and it’s dark and rather chaotic. Leaving the temple, Sid finds the road closed off by police barriers. Without missing a beat, he gets out of the car, enlists the help of a couple of bystanders, calmly moves the barriers, and drives the car through.
Back at the hotel, we eat dinner in the rather gloomy dining room. Sri Lankans are big on dark wood. I order prawns and noodles, followed by curd with treacle. The curd is distinctly sour, and God knows what was wrong with the prawns. Retribution arrives at two thirty a.m. Liz was struck down half an hour earlier. The rest of the night is distinctly unpleasant. At eight, we turn off the alarm, at nine we warn Sid that we won’t be leaving just yet, and at eleven we stagger forth. Sid drives us straight to Tangalle, to the beach resort we’ll be staying in for the next few days.
The Palm Paradise Cabanas are individual bungalows, basic but functional, with huge covered verandas. Liz is feeling better, but I am not, so she summons a doctor via Reception. The doctor shows up half an hour later, a charming young lady who can’t have been qualified very long, accompanied by a uniformed nurse wearing white knee socks, a white apron, and a watch pinned to her bosom. The doctor examines me and consults by phone with higher authority. Then she doles out five sets of pills to be taken for three days, with a warning that if I’m not better by then I’ll have to go to hospital. So there’s nothing for it but to get better.
Galle
The next few days are quiet in our little palm-fringed ghetto. The hotel is run by two dour Germans called Siegfried and Brunhilde (well, that’s what we call them). We talk to some of the other people staying there. We become addicted to toasted cheese sandwiches. We visit Tangalle, a flea-bitten little town with not a lot going on. We get very burned on the beach. We take a trip by tuk tuk to Galle (pronounced Gawl), a port once used by Arab traders to transport gems, silks, and spices from the Far East to Genoa and Venice, conquered in 1597 by the Portuguese, taken over in 1640 by the Dutch. The old Dutch houses are being done up, and turned into boutique guesthouses and trendy clothes stores. The Heritage Café sells us Lavazza iced coffee and focaccia sandwiches.
This is the west coast of the island, where they take the enticing pictures of palms and white-sand beaches and coloured fishing boats to lure you to Paradise Island. On the way to Galle, we stop at Weligama to observe the local fishermen, who are renowned for perching on odd-looking poles to catch their fish. As soon as they see us coming, they leap up from the beach and jump on their poles. When we put our cameras away, they hop down and demand a tip. I’m not sure how they actually catch the fish. The sea is a wonderful colour, and the palms lean seaward at enchanting angles, but the approach to Galle is full of ratty beach resorts for back-packing surfers, crammed between the highway and the sea’s edge.
Fishermen
Tangalle is a good place to catch up on one’s reading. Especially when it rains. The monsoon is supposed to be over, but we have several evenings of rain and one full day. I tinker with Girl with Parasol, my work in progress, and consider how to get the hero and heroine back together. The cabin is damp, the sheets are damp, our clothes are damp. The roof leaks in puddles on the floor, and from outside comes the rich dank smell of something rotting.
Sid comes to take us to Mulkirigala, where there are rock temples from the 2nd century BC, built on a boulder sticking up from the plain. From there he escorts us to the site of his future ashram. This outing is not on the programme, and we are off the tourist map. At our own request, we are deep in the heart of rural Sri Lanka. First we stop at a wayside shack to drink coconuts. “This is the kind of atmosphere I like,” says Sid cheerily, setting his plastic chair on the earthen floor, while the vendor hacks away at the coconut with his machete. Lunch has been prepared for us at the home of the caretaker who looks after the ashram, a vast chili-less meal of many dishes and two kinds of rice, specially prepared for whining foreigners. The caretaker, a retired farmer, lives in a large, bare, basic house with his extended family. The table is laid for us alone. The rest of them sit around, play with the children, and watch us eat.
A post-prandial stroll through the jungle takes us to the ashram. So far it consists of a single hut with rudimentary walls, equipped with two planks to serve as a bed. Sid assures us that it’s a great place for a siesta. He urges us to return in eight years’ time to meditate and to write. Tempting, but how productive would you be with all the wildlife howling around, and the jungle making strange noises in the dark? At the future main gate a sign says “A Meditation Center For Realization Of One’s Own Self.” A mangy cow, donated by someone, is tied up near the entrance. Everything else is a work in progress. (Checking out the website when I get home, I discover an astonishing list of rules prescribing lights out at nine and no talking.)
A group of little girls stops to stare at us and giggle. Sid arrives with the car, the caretaker hauls his sarong up round his waist to walk home, and we crawl back into our air-conditioned cocoon. “When you reveal your deepest emotions,” says Gold FM, “it’s not just art it’s freedom. Especially when its essence is premium cocoa butter. It’s not chocolate, it’s Revello.”
We decide we need Revello, and Sid promptly finds us some, in a Western-style supermarket called “Food City.” There are two Sids: Sid Past, the highly competent, resourceful ex-policeman, who has possibly done things he can no longer live with, and Sid Future, the self-eclipsing, vanishing, nameless, meditating wannabe. Sid Present is a strange mix where sometimes one and sometimes the other predominates. “True liberty is to be free of all viceses,” says the slogan on a passing tuk tuk.
Our last day in Sri Lanka is Valentine’s Day, which Gold FM takes as an excuse for a shameless outpouring of schmaltz. “Men don’t care all that much about Valentine’s Day,” confides the (male) presenter, “but we know the ladies are more soft-hearted.” The road to Colombo is drowned in slushy violins. I can’t help falling in love with you, I’ll be loving you eternally, all I need is the air that I breathe in to love you.
Colombo turns out to be sleeker and more sophisticated than we had imagined. It has its share of scabby commercial shacks, but the centre is green and spacious. There are several well-preserved colonial buildings, and some flashy modern ones. The people on the streets are better dressed: shimmering saris replace the nondescript T-shirts and knee-length flared skirts of the countryside. There are sharp boutiques called Cool Planet and Barefoot and Odell’s where the golden youth of the capital go to do their shopping. Presumably they’re the people who listen to Gold FM: English-speaking, affluent, entitled, convinced of their right to shove past you and tread on your feet.
Our plane is due to take off at the uncivilized hour of 01.15, and Sid has offered to take us to his house to change and have dinner beforehand. Having seen what he considers good living conditions the day before, we are apprehensive. Sid ushers us into a house that would fit nicely into Elle Déco. The well proportioned living room has a high ceiling, open kitchen, computer, well-filled bookshelves, and a television. Sid’s twelve-year-old daughter is glued to a Korean-made series that goes out every weeknight. Part of the room is open to the air, with grass on the ground and plants in coconut pots on the walls. Sid designed it all himself. We start to think his ashram really will come to pass. His wife is charming and speaks excellent English. A few days earlier, he asserted that she was ready to become a nun as soon as he became a monk. When we tell her we visited the ashram, she seems bemused. We’ll check the website again in eight years time.
February 2013
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I hold to no religion or creed,
am neither Eastern nor Western,
Muslim or Infidel,
Zoroastrian, Christian, Jew or Gentile.
I come from neither the land nor sea,
am not related to those above or below,
was not born nearby or far away,
do not live either in Paradise or on this Earth,
claim descent not from Adam and Eve or the Angels above.
I transcend body and soul.
My home is beyond place and name.
It is with the Beloved in a space beyond space.
I embrace all and am part of all.
– Mewlana Celaleddin Rumi (1207-73 AD)
Translated from the Persian by someone
Posted on Turkistan-N, 18 November 2003
In Memoriam
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In the edgy literary newsletter The Paris Insider, reviewer K.V. Marin writes:
“Just this year I have already read four books on the subject of how the Nazis stole artwork during WWII. No one has written the story so clearly and with such emotion as Patricia Le Roy in Girl with Parasol.
“This book makes you ask yourself: What lengths would you go to for a work of art? Woukl you lie? Would you steal? Would you betray someone? Four people’s lives are brought together by the enigmatic, Girl with Parasol, Monet’s little known portrait of Tania Wertheimer, daughter of his art dealer.
“Half-Jewish Corinne was born into a family of art collectors and gallerists. Tania, Corinne’s mother, died when she was born, and so the painting is Corinne’s only link to the woman she never knew. As the Nazis occupy Paris, Corinne desperately fights to save the family gallery and keep the painting safely hidden away.
“Rose is the sole French curator allowed to remain at the Jeu de Paume museum, now converted into the German transit point for stolen art. The simple, understated, even mousy, appearance she adopts is no threat to the Nazis yet it allows her to keep tabs on all of the in and out movement of the art.
“Hanna’s pre-war excursion to Paris is made memorable by Corinne. Back in her native Germany, now married and working for the Foreign Ministry, she harbors fond memories of her visit to the City of Light, and of her dear friend.
“German diplomat Thomas straddles two worlds as he gives in to his attraction to Corinne while living under the pressure of his duty to his Nazi bosses. Driven to the brink, his actions disrupt the lives of this trio of woman while forever changing the fate of the painting.
“At the center of the story is the painting itself playing the multiple roles of prized possession, masterpiece, source of inspiration and link to the past.
“Le Roy is a master at crafting a gripping story with an emotional tug of war that makes you question morality. I couldn’t put the book down, and in fact was irritated when I had to. It made me think, it made me cry, it made me angry, it made me want more. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
The Paris Insider is put out by Terrance Gelenter (paris-expat.com)
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Monet’s Garden: 1905
The painting shows a girl standing on a bridge. Her right hand rests lightly on the rail, her left hand holds a parasol above her shoulder. The parasol is white, and the dress she is wearing is made of blue and white striped silk. Everything else is green: the rail of the bridge, the water beneath it, the trees that surround it. Only the lily pond reflects the shimmering tones of the Sunday dress. Somehow you know it is Sunday, a serene glowing day in early summer. You can see the sunlight filtering through the leaves, you can feel the warmth of the air glancing off the water. The girl’s face is in shadow and her features are indistinct, but you can tell she is young by the way she stands. There is something impatient about her. She is poised to take off. As soon as the painter gives her leave, she will dance off the bridge and run through the trees, heedless of her new dress and her best shoes and the parasol she has only recently acquired.
“Girl with Parasol,” oil on canvas, Claude Monet, 1905.
Tania was fifteen on that glittering June Sunday, and the reason she was so anxious to skip out of the canvas was the young man who was standing behind Monsieur Monet, watching him work. Early twenties, blond hair. Tania had been to Giverny more than once before with her father, who was Monsieur Monet’s dealer, but she had never on any of her visits seen this young man. If she had, she would have remembered. She had to summon up all her willpower to keep her fingers from drumming on the rail of the bridge and her face from creasing in a speculative frown. It was a great honour to be painted by Monsieur Monet: Papa had looked as though he might faint when Monsieur Monet proposed it, and it would never do for Tania to let him down.
But who on earth could it be? The young man had arrived just after Monsieur Monet started work, accompanied by an older man who Tania recognized as Monsieur Monet’s son-in-law, Theodore Butler. Monsieur Butler was an American: was his friend American too? Neither his clothes nor his features looked French. Papa was always saying that Giverny was turning into an American painters’ colony.
She stared at him across the lilies, willing him to stay. He stood at a respectful distance from the great artist, watching the brushstrokes, absorbing the concentration, exchanging a couple of low-voiced words with Monsieur Butler from time to time. He seemed to have no inclination to leave. Tania began to relax. The morning drew on, the sun moved round, lunchtime approached, and Monsieur Monet laid down his brushes. Released from her pose, Tania darted across the bridge and arrived just in time for the introductions. The young man’s name was James Whittaker, and he had been in France for only three weeks. He was a distant cousin of Monsieur Butler’s, his family came from upstate New York, and his ambition was to be a painter. Monsieur Monet smiled at him tolerantly, and then noticed Tania.
“Mademoiselle Wertheimer, permettez-moi de vous présenter Monsieur James Whittaker. Monsieur Whittaker, this is Tania, who I have known since she was a baby, and today on an old man’s whim I have decided to paint her.”
“Enchantée,” said Tania demurely, extending her hand.
“Enchanté,” repeated James, beaming, and kissed her hand.
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