DIARY
SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
'T
Odessa his', I joked as I surveyed the plush private sauna with its humid pine walls, swish bar and damp smell, `is exactly the sort of place where gangsters get assassi- nated in films.' There was a long silence after my joke. None of the men in the sauna with me laughed. But my driver, who had arranged for me to meet his important local friends, just shook his head very slightly and I realised that I had made a ghastly mistake. This was indeed the sort of place where gangsters are assassinated in films — and, more specifi- cally, in Odessa. And these gentlemen, it was soon to emerge, were precisely the type who meet their Maker in saunas — especially in Odessa. I share the Russians' love of soothing steam baths, but this didn't prove very relaxing. 'Simon is a stu- dent of films,' explained my tactful driver, letting me off the hook. But actually I was there because I am a student of Odessa. I have spent my whole life dreaming of this elegant Jewish-Italian-French-Russian port on the shores of the Black Sea and now I'm here.
0 dessa was taken from the Turks on the orders of Prince Potemkin (whose biog- raphy I am researching down here); cap- tured by de Ribas, Latin adventurer; devel- oped by Richelieu; made rich by English ship-owners, Jewish traders and Italian merchants (The tongue of golden Italy rings out along the laughing street,' wrote Pushkin); celebrated in the stories of Isaac Babel; and made charmingly raffish by its Jewish gangsters. It has never really been part of Russia or the Ukraine (its present master): it is the only place I have been to in the ex-USSR where its people behave as if the communists never ruled. It has its own `Moldavanka' accent, Yiddish humour and a languid arrogance. I stay at Odessa's most romantic hotel, the Londonskaya, built in 1822, overlooking the 'Potemkin Steps' from Eisenstein's film. In the evenings, back from burrowing in the Odessa State Historical Museum, I sit out hot nights like everyone else in Deribasovskaya Street's (named after de Ribas) louche cafés, where one feasts on sturgeon shashlik and Molda- vian wine. The Odessans promenade past — flashy boulevardiers and the most beau- tiful women I have seen anywhere. The Odessans know this, boasting that it is thanks to Potemlcin's policy of importing foreign colonists. Odessan girls spend their tune on the beaches at Arkadia, and at night, dressed minimally but somehow with a class unknown in Moscow, they lazily dis- play their tans in a peculiarly insolent gait that is called `the Odessa'. You may wonder what a Duc de Riche- lieu was doing here. A descendant of the Cardinal, exiled during the French Revolu- tion, he fought under Potemkin against the Turks. Appointed governor by Alexander I, this handsome, solitary paragon of the Enlightenment lovingly developed Odessa before returning to be Restoration prime minister of France: his toga-clad statue still dominates the top of the 'Potemkin Steps', originally named after the Duke himself.
Here the gangsters have always been Jewish. In Babel's tales, turn-of-the-century Odessa is ruled by 'the King' — Benya ICrik. When Babel's Odessans enquire where the rule of law begins, the answer is: 'where the rule of Benya Krik ends'. Noth- ing's changed, which is why everything works here. But there is a discreet gangster war going on. No one knows who is fighting whom (and I did not dare ask in the sauna), but it all began six months ago when they shot `Karabas', folk-hero-godfather who took his nom de crime from a Ukrainian fairytale. Everyone has nicknames in Odessa; everyone has an uncle who knew ICarabas, and on Deribasovskaya, bathed in sunlight and mystery, they still talk about his exploits.
Western journalists in Moscow still write about the old feudal bosses of the ex- Soviet mafia called 'the thieves-in-power', but these criminal dinosaurs literally died out. The new crime moguls have a simpler, more chilling name: `autoritets', the Authorities. Since Karabas's death, they are richer, more effective, less fun. It is not a very good idea to meet an Authority, even in a relaxing sauna, but what fan of Benya ICrik could resist? My driver intro- duced me to a Russian-born, lank-haired pawnshop owner, gun- and car-dealer from Seattle with tinted spectacles, and to a pair of plump, fleshy-faced Jewish boys in tweed caps and check shirts, like dancers from Guys and Dolls. They invited me to the sauna on one condition — 'no names'. Since the local newspaper editor was recently assassinated, I'll just say Odessa's two ruling Authorities live in Tel-Aviv and Hampstead and I've even forgotten their nicknames.
Iset out across the steppes, driving into Ukraine and to the paradisal Crimea to visit all the cities founded by Potemkin, including that beautiful harbour Sebasto- pol, drenched in the blood of its English, and later Nazi, conquerors, and still a closed city, base of both the Ukrainian and the Russian fleets. I was enraptured by the Ukrainian steppes — that linear world of long horizons and endless cornfields. What luxuriant plenty! I assumed mechanised collectivisation had rendered the peasants extinct, but I found them just as they were in those photographs from the 1890s. My car regularly breaks down in villages filled with geese and ambling calves. There we eat juicy apricots bought by the bucket from peasant men wearing boots, padded tunics and caps. Their women wear coloured scarves and smocks, with red socks halfway up their legs hiding ankles as thick as my waist, as rough as bark. They drive horsedrawn carts piled with lush hay; their faces are broad, snub-nosed, nut- brown. But every village has its cripples — limping relics of the negligence of Soviet machinery.
When I get back to London, the British Library will seem very drab after this, but before I left for Odessa I observed a gripping piece of underworld life going on right in its front yard. I noticed ill-clad, goatee-bearded youths with bare bellies and shoulder bags hanging around the Library's front gate and inside its hedgerowed court- yard, but clearly not interested in using or even entering the Library. They kept bump- ing into each other, reaching into their trousers, kissing on the lips. I could not fig- ure out what they were doing, until a police television documentary showed in slow motion that this is the way drug-dealers transfer packets of drugs from trousered orifices to mouths. Naturally the Library is oblivious to this trade, but I spent fascinat- ing summer lunchtimes eating my sand- wiches in the forecourt watching these complex narcotic rituals, not far away from George III's library, just opened by the Queen. I can't wait to get back there, but one thing is certain: the 'Authorities' and the elegant ghost of Richelieu would never tolerate this sort of behaviour in Odessa.
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