Free The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes Page A

him some sausage? Vodka? A few kopecks? Why did he half-remember this station, this beggar among thousands of others? Was it to do with a joke? Had one of them made a joke? But which one? No, it was no good.
    He couldn’t bring to mind the beggar’s barrack-room obscenities. What came back to him instead was a soldiers’ song from the previous century. He didn’t know the tune, just the words he’d once found, glancing through Turgenev’s letters:
    Russia, my cherished mother,
    She doesn’t take anything by force;
    She only takes things willingly surrendered
    While holding a knife to your throat.
    Turgenev was not to his literary taste: too civilised, not fantastical enough. He preferred Pushkin and Chekhov, and Gogol best of all. But even Turgenev, for all his faults, had a true Russian pessimism. Indeed, he understood that to be Russian was to be pessimistic. He had also written that, however much you scrubbed a Russian, he would always remain a Russian. That was what Karlo-Marlo and their descendants had never understood. They wanted to be engineers of human souls; but Russians, for all their faults, were not machines. So it was not really engineering they were up to, but scrubbing. Scrub, scrub, scrub, let’s wash away all this old Russianness and paint a shiny new Sovietness on top. But it never worked – the paint began to flake off almost as soon as it was applied.
    To be Russian was to be pessimistic; to be Soviet was to be optimistic. That was why the words Soviet Russia were a contradiction in terms. Power had never understood this. It thought that if you killed off enough of the population, and fed the rest a diet of propaganda and terror, then optimism would result. But where was the logic in that? Just as they had kept on telling him, in various ways and words, through musical bureaucrats and newspaper editorials, that what they wanted was ‘an optimistic Shostakovich’. Another contradiction in terms.
    One of the few places where optimism and pessimism could happily coexist – indeed, where the presence of both is necessary for survival – was family life. So, for instance, he loved Nita (optimism), but did not know if he was a good husband (pessimism). He was an anxious man, and aware that anxiety makes people egotistical and bad company. Nita would go off to work; but the moment she arrived at her Institute, he would telephone to ask when she was coming home. He could see that this was annoying; but his anxiety would just get the better of him.
    He loved his children (optimism), but was not sure if he was a good father (pessimism). Sometimes he felt his love for his children was abnormal, even morbid. Well, life is not a walk across a field, as the saying goes.
    Galya and Maxim were taught never to lie, and always to be polite. He insisted on good manners. He explained to Maxim at an early age that you preceded a woman upstairs but followed her downstairs. When the two of them acquired bicycles, he made them learn the highway code, and practise it even when riding on the emptiest forest path: left arm out to indicate left turn, right arm out to indicate right turn. At Kuibyshev he also supervised their gymnastic exercises each morning. He would turn on the radio, and all three would follow the hearty-voiced instructions of a fellow called Gordeyev. ‘That’s right! Feet shoulder-width apart! First exercise …’ And so on.
    Apart from these parental physical jerks, he did not train his body; he merely inhabited it. A friend had once shown him what he called gymnastics for the intelligentsia. You took a box of matches and threw its contents on the floor, then bent down and picked them up, one by one. The first time he tried it himself, he lost patience and stuffed all the matches back in handfuls. He persevered, but the next time, just as he was bending down, the telephone went, and he was needed at once; so the housekeeper was detailed to pick up the matches instead.
    Nita loved skiing and