Sibir Read Free Page B

between them. Both are intensely nationalistic peoples. Each race has stubbornly defended its own culture and language against encroachments by the other. The situation has some similarities with the one which still exists between French and English in Canada. Yet here was a Ukrainian national (and very nationalistic) poet being honoured, not only in Moscow but simultaneously throughout the Soviet Union, with all the pomp and ceremony the state could muster. I have no way of knowing if Franko was a good enough poet to warrant this attention. However, I
do
know that the honour being paid to him, and through him to all Ukrainians, was a clever piece of practical politics. How much, I thought to myself, could be done to heal the spreading rift between Quebec and the rest of Canada if we had the intelligence and the will to make similar gestures.
    I was still musing when intermission arrived – an hour and a half later. We were the last to leave the platform but we did not linger in the V.I.P. waiting room. With averted eyes we scurried for the exit.
    We went back to the hotel and as we sipped our nightcaps we considered the nature of the problem we had presented to the audience at the theatre, to the television watchers, and to the cinema goers in the Ukraine and elsewhere who would never have any explanation for the abrupt materialization and equally abrupt disappearance of those three strange ladies.

Two
    A DISQUIETING episode preceded our departure from Moscow.
    Claire and I had gone to bed early, but shortly after midnight we were awakened by a gut-shaking rumble which seemed to permeate the entire building, setting the dishes on our table tinkling nervously.
    I went to the window. Moscow normally goes to sleep at midnight and the broad, dimly lit street five storeys below was empty of life. Nevertheless the air throbbed with a harsh, metallic thunder. The sound grew closer until a massive column of tanks loomed into view at the far end of the street.
    These squat behemoths were the precursors to a truly Orwellian spectacle. For three hours an unrelenting river of steel thundered through the black October night. The buildings on both sides of the street shuddered to that passing-on, but did so eyelessly. Not a single lighted window broke the obscure facade.
    The tanks were followed by echelons of armoured carriers, self-propelled guns, atomic cannon, and an array of tank-towed missiles which looked particularly menacing because each was wrapped in a dark canvas shroud.
    Although I knew this chilling display of weaponry could only be a rehearsal for the military parade which is a feature of the annual celebration of the Great OctoberRevolution, the effect was to make me feel naked and alone in a potentially lethal and hostile world.
    Claire, who had joined me at the window, was less impressed. She soon became bored by this display of male bellicosity.
    “From up here,” she said, stifling a yawn, “they look like a lot of children’s Dinky Toys. Come back to bed!”
    I slept uneasily for the remainder of the night, my imagination haunted by all the propaganda I had ever read, or heard, about the Communist hammer, poised high to crush the life out of the Western world.
    I was still bleary-eyed next morning when we boarded a big black Chaika limousine for the trip to Domodedovo Airport. Domodedovo lies sixty kilometres distant and the route to it follows a long segment of the circular bypass highway which is supposed to be Moscow’s ultimate boundary – a ring of concrete intended to contain the burgeoning city and prevent if from spilling out over the surrounding countryside.
    There was a heavy snowstorm and the road was crowded with trucks carrying concrete sections for the prefabricated apartment buildings which were springing up everywhere. We drove for miles and miles past rows of apartments, built and building. In some areas they were sprouting in the midst of age-old growths of log houses which must have looked