No wedding-bells in Moscow

LOUIS GOLDING

I have become a Soviet godfather. Or perhaps I am a little precipitate. We all hope, Irina and Alexander and I, that I am to become a Soviet godfather.

It happened like this, in Moscow. I went into a registry office, where marriages are sealed and divorces dispatched with rather less difficulty than it takes to get a week-end excursion ticket to the seaside. As I came in at the door, a rather weary workman and his wife went out. They had been married about half a minute. They were getting on in years. It was their day off and they had evidently been rather bored. It was too hot to struggle into a tramcar and go pounding along to the Central Park of Culture and Rest. The cinema wouldn't open till the evening. So they thought they might as well get married.

But it was very different with the young couple who were going through it inside the office. A little dark-eyed plump girl of about twenty sat at a chair signing her name. Her husband—he would be her husband thirty seconds later, after he had signed his name, too—leaned over her shoulder and smiled happily into her hair. He was a tousle-headed youngster, a good year the girl's junior.

They were shoddily dressed, of course. She wore no stockings and her shoes were worn thin as potato-peel. She had on a threadbare pull-over tied loosely with blue cord. His canvas shoes didn't seem capable of taking him to the next street-corner. Yet there was something more moving in their drabness than in the western gentleman's immaculate frock-coat and his lady's oyster-shell satins. The stony-faced lady presiding at the marriage-table couldn't dispel that sense of romance: nor the index-files; nor the hygienic injunctions on the walls; nor the flies buzzing listlessly around the electric globes. A strange priestess of the hymeneal mysteries was that stony-faced lady.

But the lad smiled down into the girl's hair; and then he, too, signed his name, and his wife smiled happily, and her forefinger slid gently down the bared spine of his elbow.

It all excited me immoderately, a lot more than a grand wedding at St. Margaret's, Westminster, with a gable of crossed swords, and orange-blossoms, and bridesmaids, and press photographers. You see. it was the first indication I had seen of the persistence in Russia of so demode a commodity as romance. I had seen no lads and maidens anywhere looking in just that way into each other's eyes, or whispering under trees, or pinching each other vulgarly and gloriously. Of course I mustn't exaggerate the intensity of Irina's and Alexander's mood. They were happy, but they weren't excited. It wasn't as if they saw Stalin or Kalinin in the flesh, or news had just come through from the great dam at Dnieperstrow that all the turbines were at last working at full pressure. That would really have been something to write home about. They were happy. I say, but I think I was more excited about their marriage than they were.

So I took the liberty of going up to them and wishing them "Good Luck!" in my feeble Russian, and they smiled back charmingly and thanked me. But I wanted to express my congratulations in some more concrete manner. A couple of pairs of shoes would have been useful, but would have forced the pace a little. And I do not carry about odd pairs of shoes in my pockets, even in Russia.

"I should have liked us to drink a drop of vodka together." I said, "to celebrate the happy occasion. . . ." But I immediately realized I had made a mistake. "We are Comsomols!" they said, just a shade sternly. That is to say, they were going through the necessary novitiate before developing into fully-fledged members of the Communist Party. These youngsters are not actually avowed anti-alcoholics and anti-nicotinics, but the Party conducts a strong propaganda against drinking and smoking, which it considers rather capitalistic vices, like religion. As for vodka, it is the liquor the Tsaristic Circe brewed to steal their senses from them. It is sold, it is drunk, but it is frowned upon.

I covered my traces instantly. "Vodka!" I said. "Pah! I should think not! But I insist that you should take a couple of English cigarettes!" (On trains, on steamers, in peasants' huts, in embassies, English cigarettes are a straight way to the heart.) "You must!" I said. "It is a good wedding day!"

Alexander took one. Irina demurred. "Then you must take it for him!" I insisted. "After all, you are his wife now!" Alexander and I lit our Gold Flakes—a queer sacrament to celebrate a Soviet wedding!

Another young man and woman had entered the room. It was about time Alexander paid up and took his wife off. to make room for another espousal. He produced a three-rouble note. A marriage costs two roubles. The stony-faced lady behind the table had no change. Alexander looked around helplessly. He didn't know whether he'd have to divorce Irina and come back and marry her again when he had the proper sum.

• Suddenly I dived into my wallet. Out came two roubles. "I insist! I insist! ' I said. I saw a chance of standing them something more fragrant than a cigarette, more potent than vodka. I would stand them their marriage. The stony-faced lady put the two roubles into a drawer without a word. My faint phantom of fear that Irina's and Alexander's Communistic pride might be outraged was laid at once. They entered into the spirit of the thing delightfully. Their eyes twinkled.

"So I'm your Little Father now!" I said. I kissed her paternally on the brow. "I have the right!" I explained. They roared with laughter. Even the stony-faced lady slipped a lip muscle.

"Look here!" I proclaimed. "We must have a wedding-breakfast! Come along to my hotel at once—or wait! Just give me an hour to get something in—"

"A wedding-breakfast?" they asked, wondering.

"Yes," I said. "That's the custom in our country. We have champagne ..." I hurriedly changed the topic. "We have cakes and chocolates . . . "

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"Cakes . . . and chocolates?" they marvelled. "No-o-o!"

"Yes!" I said. "And sandwiches. Lots! But tell me! Where on earth were you two going off to now?"

"We're students, at a Chemical High School. We were going off to the Library of the Chemical Institute."

"You're jolly well coming to my hotel in an hour!" I commanded. "Do you hear? Will you come?"

They had never had such an odd adventure in their lives. They were almost dancing with excitement. "We'll come!" they said.

So I went to Torgsin, the shop where you can buy almost anything in the world—so long as you pay for it in dollars, pounds, pesetas—anything but roubles. And I bought cakes with icing, and cake with fruit stuffing, and tinned tongue, and chocolate biscuits, and tunny-fish (there's a lot of tunny-fish about), and wafers, and bonbons, and anything that might ravish the hearts of two young Comsomols, two people so young and so many centuries too old. And my guests came, several minutes before the appointed time. And whereas, to go and get married, a thing you might do and undo on any off day, they had put on their ordinary shoddy, to come and visit their Little Father—regrettable bourgeois though he might be—they came attired very differently. They had lovely white blouses on, all embroidered at the neck and sleeves. They both wore stockings, with hardly a hole in them. Their shoes made up in layers of lustrous blacking what they lacked in leather.

What a Wedding Breakfast that was! How they gorged themselves on these almost unearthly delicacies! As for myself, being no Comsomol, I insisted on drinking their health in vodka. They clinked against my glass their glasses of raspberry pop. "You make a great deal of fuss about weddings in your country?" asked Alexander. "Not so much as this!" I said. They filled their glasses again and dived a deep hand into the chocolate biscuits.

What an epitome of Russia the two children were, of the infinite variety within its borders, of the flame that endeavours to make them one. Alexander came from a region on the middle Volga, once called Cherimizi. It has been occupied by half a million Finns for centuries. She came from Blagoveschinskaya, in the Amur district, in the Far East, on the boundaries of Manchuria. Her mother was a Pole, her father a Moldavian. It had taken her twenty-four days' hard travelling to get to Moscow to take up her studies. She is a year ahead of him and gets a hundred and ten roubles a month; he gets fifty. (Students receive a stipend during their years of study.) Last night they slept respectively in the youths' and girls' dormitories. Tonight they would have a small room, quite infinitesimal, but quite their own. Alexander, though so young, had organised the collective farm in his own village. Irena told me that. She was very proud of it.

"And now, children," I said. "I have a wedding present for you! Take some more cake!"

"No! no!" they said. "Evongl! No present!"

But I had taken careful advice about what I might give them. "There!" I said. I handed over to them two fat pads of lovely smooth writing-paper. There is a great shortage of good paper in Russia. Being students, there was nothing (except more chocolate biscuits, which wouldn't last long) that could so please them. I had intended to devote those two pads to my next novel. They will be scrawled over with chemical formulas now, not with loves and hates and births and deaths and marriages.

Their hands trembled with pleasure as they reached for the writing-pads.

"And when the baby comes," I said, "it is agreed you will let me know. Am I not your Little Father?"

"It is agreed!" said they.