Stanley Stewart - In the Empire of Genghis Khan - A Journey Among Nomads

All the following day at sea, Kolya followed me around the ship like a pint-sized bodyguard, his jacket bulging. Below in the cabin he spent most of his time loading and unloading the pistol. I tried to keep myself out of the line of fire.

In the dining hall Kolya, Anna and I ate together at a corner table. Meals on the Mikhail Lomonosov were dour occasions. Breakfast was an ancient sausage and a sweet cake. Lunch and dinner were indistinguishable – borscht, grey meat, potatoes, hard-boiled eggs. The passengers ate in silence, large pasty figures earnestly shovelling food in a room where the only sound was the awkward undertone of cutlery.

At breakfast we sat together like a dysfunctional family, bickering over cups of tea. We drifted into a curious relationship in which I was cast in the role of the grumpy and distracted pater. My failure to respond to Anna’s advances had upset them both. She behaved as if I was a shiftless husband who had humiliated her. In a filthy mood, Anna cut short the boy’s mediating advances by scolding him for his table manners, for his swearing, for his untucked shirt, for his lack of attention to her. Then she scolded me for not exercising more control over him. I retreated monosyllabically behind newspapers. It hardly seemed credible that we had met only twelve hours before. We chaffed at the confinement of our respective roles as if we had inhabited them for a lifetime.

Though he had conceived some loyalty to me as cabin-mate and foreigner, I was a disappointment to the boy. I knew nothing about rap stars, I lacked the flash accessories he associated with the West, and I took a firm and decidedly negative line about his chief pleasure of the moment: the revolver. With Anna he had a tempestuous and ambivalent relationship, alternately straining at her maternal leash and embracing her bursts of affection. Argument seemed to strengthen some perverse bond between them. When they made up, Kolya brought her bottles of Georgian champagne and fake Rolexes, then snuggled into her lap amid the sacks of cargo in her cabin in some uneasy limbo between a childish cuddle and a lover’s embrace.

He took the fact that I had not slept with Anna as a personal slight. When we were alone he would try to convince me that I should have sex with her. His pleas were both an injured innocence and a sordid knowledge beyond his years. At one moment he might have been the whining child of divorced parents, hoping for a reconciliation. At another, he was an underage pimp trying to drum up business.

In spite of Kolya’s disapproval of fraternizing with the staff, I had accepted an invitation from Dimitri, the second mate. He inhabited a small cabin on the port side of the ship where he had laid out afternoon tea: slabs of jellied meat, salted herrings, hard-boiled eggs, black bread, and glasses of vodka. Despite his long tenure on the Lomonosov the cabin had an anonymous air. There was a hold-all on the bed, two nylon shirts on hangers, and an officer’s jacket hanging on the back of the door. He might have been a passenger, uncharacteristically travelling light. His mood had not improved since the first evening I met him when the ship was docked in Istanbul.

‘In the Ukraine, in Russia, shipping has no future,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘There are no opportunities. When I first went to sea, the Soviet Union was a great naval power. Its ships sailed the world. It is unbelievable what has happened to us. You will see in Sevastopol. The great Black Sea Fleet. The naval docks look like a scrap yard.’

He poured the vodka and sank his teeth into a boiled egg.

‘Do you know what this ship was?’ he asked.

I shook my head. The eggs, like rubber, made speech difficult.

‘It was a research vessel,’ he said emphatically as if I might contradict him. ‘I have been seventeen years on this boat. Before 1990 we used to sail all over the world – the Indian Ocean, South America, Africa. We carried scientists – intelligent people, interesting people, engaged in important research. Professors from Leningrad, from Moscow, from Kiev. You cannot imagine the conversations in the dining room. Philosophy. Genetics. Hydrography. Meteorology. You couldn’t pass the door without learning something. And nice people.’ His voice softened at the memory of the nice professors. ‘Very nice people. Polite. People with manners.’

He crammed a salted herring between small rows of teeth. His expression seemed like an accusation of culpability, as if perhaps I was taking up space that might have been allocated to a wise professorial figure with interesting conversation and good table manners.

‘Look what has become of us. Carrying vegetables and what else back and forth across the Black Sea like a tramp boat. It is difficult to believe.’

I didn’t ask how this had happened. I knew he was going to tell me anyway.

‘Money,’ he exploded. ‘The country is bankrupt. Oh yes we all wanted freedom. We all wanted the end of Communism. But no one mentioned it would bankrupt the country. There is no money for research any more. There is no money for anything. So here we are.’

His rage subsided long enough for him to refill our glasses. ‘I have not been paid in five months,’ he said quietly.

I asked how he managed.

‘I have a kiosk, in Sevastopol.’ His voice had dropped; he was mumbling. He seemed ashamed of this descent into commerce as if it was not worthy of him, a ship’s officer. ‘We sell whisky and vodka, sweets, tobacco. I bring them from Turkey. Otherwise we would starve.’

In the Ukraine, as in the rest of the constituent parts of the old Union, the quest for a living has become everything. From education to the nuclear defence industry, all the great public institutions are obliged to hustle for things to sell like pensioners flogging the remnants of their attics on street corners in Moscow. For Dimitri any hope of advancement had shrunk with the maritime fleet. He had been second mate on the Lomonosov for the last twelve of his seventeen years of service, and still the first mate showed no signs of departure or death.

Economic pressures and the tedium of their endless passages had made the Mikhail Lomonosov a ship of malcontents, riven by jealousies and intrigues. The officers all hated one another. Dimitri hated the cargo master, the cargo master hated the chief engineer, the chief engineer hated the first mate, who hated him right back. Everyone hated the captain whose position allowed him access to the lucrative world of corruption.

Dimitri piled more sausage onto my plate. His anger had been spent, and he seemed apologetic about drawing me into his troubles, as if they were a family matter, unseemly to parade before a foreigner.

‘Do you know who Mikhail Lomonosov was?’ he asked.

I confessed I didn’t. I had seen his portrait hanging in the dining hall, an eighteenth-century figure in a powdered wig and a lace shirt.

‘You are not a Russian. How would you know? But the passengers on this ship. None of them know who Lomonosov was.’ He was beginning to grow agitated again, in spite of himself, chopping the air with his hand. ‘He was a great Russian, a scientist, a writer. He founded Moscow University. He set up the first laboratory in Russia. He was also a poet, a very great poet. He wrote about language and science and history. The scientists who travelled on the ship all knew his work. They discussed him. But these people, these traders, they are ignorant. They do not know their own history. They can tell you the price of every grade of vodka but they know nothing about Mikhail Lomonosov. No one cares about these things any more, about science, about poetry. Only about money, and prices in Istanbul.’

In the evening I went to visit him on the bridge during his watch. He was alone. The hushed solitude of the place and the instruments of his profession – charts, radar screens, compasses – had lightened his mood. On the chart table the Black Sea was neatly parcelled by lines of longitude and latitude. Near the bottom Istanbul straddled the Bosphorus. At the top Sevastopol was tucked carefully round a corner on the western shores of the Crimea. A thick smudged pencil line joined the two. Overdrawn countless times, it marked the single unvarying line to which his life had been reduced: 43° NE.