There comes a moment in every foreign correspondent’s life when he decides the time has come to write The Book that truly explains what is most vital and important about the country to which he has devoted his career. Commonly this takes the form of an account of the reporter’s own personal physical and spiritual journey through country X, interspersed with asides on its literature, culture and history. This genre of reportage has spawned some of the greatest writing in journalism – Edward Behr’s Anyone Here Been Raped & Speaks English?’, Martha Gellhorn’s The Face of War, John Swain’s River of Time. But the picaresque jaunt also risks collapsing into a portmanteau of feeble anecdote and facile history.
Pieter Waterdrinker’s experiences of Russia over the past quarter of a century are undoubtedly worth telling. He knows Russia well enough to have hated it and sworn never to return after his first traumatic visit in 1988. He began his engagement with the USSR as a smuggler of Bibles on behalf of Dutch Christians, then became a tour guide, a practising lawyer, and later a distinguished foreign correspondent. The earlier part of this book covering the collapse of the Soviet Union is the most engaging. Rival European bible-smuggling groups vie with each other to get the word of God to the religion-starved Russian masses; political meetings that characterised Gorbachev’s glasnost era are earnest, hopeful, sometimes depressing and occasionally unruly. There is a bravura scene where Waterdrinker takes pity on an elderly mental patient he encounters in a hospital while handing out bibles and decides to take her into central St Petersburg for dinner at the posh Evropeisky Hotel. Fired by wannabe entrepreneurs impressing their molls, “champagne corks fly like bullets”. The confused old lady poignantly imagines herself once more in the glamorous pre-Revolutionary capital of her youth. But the evening does not end well. The old lady becomes over-excited and requires sedation – with which the hospital has thoughtfully provided her host in the form of a full syringe.
Waterdrinker’s life, like that of most expatriates living through Russia’s painful transition to capitalism, is filled with poignant encounters with the newly poor, obnoxious encounters with the newly rich, vodka binges and casual sex. Modestly, he attributes his success with Russian women to his frequent use of soap and aftershave. His descriptions are evocative. The late USSR is pervaded with a “sickly sweet smell – a mixture of garlic, stale sweat, the reek of rotten fruit and … the foul human odour emanating from the citizens.” The Dutch tourists whom he escorts view the surrounding chaos through the windows of their luxury bus “as though observing fish in a dirty deep-sea aquarium.” A drunken neighbour smashes up his wife’s heirloom furniture in their communal stairwell with an axe; an old Russian hustler friend becomes a multi-millionaire. Other friends fall into alcoholism and disappear, poor but brave in-laws scrabble to make ends meet and hit up their foreign relation for money. The whole spectrum of Russian experience of decline, fall and rebirth is contained within the author’s family and acquaintance.
Less engaging are the author’s facile, galloping asides on Russia’s modern history, complete with imagined dialogues. Regular updates on the acquisition, life history, illnesses and death of his and his Russian wife’s cats are also not fascinating. Neither are Waterdrinker’s musings on his own drinking, writer’s block, the decline of print journalism (specifically, of print journalists’ salaries), or his digs at the Dutch publishers – “the deeply corrupt world of frightened, mutually sodomising gatekeepers” who “break books and thus lives”. Doubtless there is a German word for this kind of flip-flopping mélange of the fascinating and the irritating.
The narrative isn’t helped by a translation from the original Dutch that has the jolting, bumpy quality of writing by a non-native speaker. The translator, Paul Evans, turns out to be British – but that doesn’t stop him from littering the text with bizarre vocabulary choices and stilted phrasing. “Nipper” stands for child, “soubrette” for drunk, “geezer” for thug, “poniard dagger” for dagger and “baldrics” meaning (I think) holsters. What is less clear is whether the addiction to cliché is the translator’s or the author’s own. Golden domes gleam, people die like flies, Cossacks hack mercilessly, lances quiver, bullets hail, footsteps echo, violence manifests in orgies, and frost, naturally, cuts like a … You get the picture. Also annoying (for Russian speakers) is the misspelling of common words – for instance “spasiba” for “spasibo” (thank-you) – phonetically but incorrectly reflecting a distinctly Moscow pronunciation.
It’s a pity the we don’t hear more of Waterdrinker’s experiences during the 2014 war in Eastern Ukraine, which are dealt with as a short aside. It’s also a shame that many potentially compelling characters remain unfleshed-out and two-dimensional. This book contains a great story, but it’s unfortunately well-concealed.
Owen Matthews is an historian and writer. His most recent book, Red Traitor, is published by Bantam Press.
This article first appeared in the February 2022 issue of the Catholic Herald. Subscribe today.
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