Scotland Street Volume 18, Chapter 36: Light, Lenin, etc

By Alexander McCall Smith

Published 24th Mar 2025, 07:00 GMT

He thought this as he rounded the corner that came just after his road – the road to Biggar – suddenly split into two. His road was the high one, the road that hugged the side of the Pentland Hills and eventually led to West Linton and beyond. The other road, the one he never took, dipped down sharply, before levelling out and leading to the Bush Estate, where agricultural and veterinary students were trained, and where Dolly, the first cloned sheep, had made her debut. Dolly had been such an ordinary-looking creature – the lot of most sheep, of course – but had briefly enjoyed the scientific limelight. Dolly was the beginning, people thought; soon we ourselves would emerge from test tubes, designed by scientists to embody the qualities that people in the future would want to have. Of course, it was nothing like that, and humanity was still very far from straightening its crooked timber. Yet Dolly herself, who died of old age – a fate denied to the overwhelming majority of sheep – was transported to Edinburgh and placed in a glass box in the National Museum of, secure in her historical status. Just like Lenin, who was treated in much the same way.

Dolly, Lenin … As Matthew drove, the images followed upon one another, as thoughts do in our ordinary, stream-of-consciousness lives. He had visited Russia as an eighteen-year-old, in his last year at the Edinburgh Academy, when he had gone as a member of a school trip to Moscow and St Petersburg. They had stood in a slow-moving queue for hours before being admitted to Lenin’s tomb, and then suddenly they were in the inner sanctum and Lenin was there before him, illuminated in the darkness, lying prone as he had done since 1924, even if, during the Second World War he had been spirited away to temporary safekeeping in Siberia when the Germans got close to Moscow.

As they approached the sarcophagus, Matthew realised that in all his eighteen years he had not seen a dead body before. And now here was Lenin, soaked in chemicals, they said, somehow preserved against the dissolution that faced ordinary mortals. His classmate in front of him in the shuffling line of visitors had whispered, “He’s deid”, and had turned to Matthew and grinned. Matthew had not encouraged him. They had been warned that they were to be silent and respectful, and that they should not put their hands in the pockets while in the tomb, as the Russian authorities considered this an insult to the great man’s memory.

They had passed by, and were on the way out when somebody behind them, a woman in a long, drab overcoat, had suddenly started to wail. It was an expression of grief, as heartfelt as any that one might accompany any real, recent bereavement, and the sound of distress echoed against the solemn walls of the tomb. A couple of security guards appeared from the wings, and went to the support of the woman, who might otherwise have dropped to the floor.

The boy who had whispered “He’s deid” turned to Matthew in astonishment. “How many years ago was it? And still … Jeez. Can’t she get over it?”

Matthew had been embarrassed, and had said nothing. This was real. There was a dead body just a few yards away. People moved on, more hurriedly now, past the stricken woman, who was now being comforted by the guards. A young woman in what looked like the uniform of a first aider appeared and was crouching beside the woman, who was now seated in a folding stool that somebody had produced.

Once outside, Matthew and his friends had looked at one another, uncertain as to what to say about what they had seen. Their teacher, a history master, had said, “This is a still all very raw for them, you know. Remember that there were seventy years of communism. People here believed for seventy years and then suddenly it was all over. That poor woman was crying for all of that, perhaps. Perhaps her parents had given everything to a system that then just suddenly walked away.”

Matthew had known what he meant. He felt sorry for that woman. And now he remembered her, all these years later, as he took the corner on the road and the expanse of hill to his right climbed up to a wide evening sky. Light: it was all about light, which is what Vermeer understood. He thought of his picture of the woman pouring milk, where the light shone on the milk; where the whole room was filled with a light that the artist had only suggested. You can’t paint light, he thought; it’s just there. You can’t paint empty air – all you can do is paint the things that are there, surrounded by the air; you can paint what the light does to these things. He thought of the View of Delft, and of the little square of light that Vermeer had depicted on a distant section of wall. That was just a tiny fleck of paint, but it was the most important fleck there was in all Dutch art. Just that miniscule square of yellow.

Now the road rose again, and the country opened up to his right. In the distance were the Lammermuir Hills, a line of attenuated blue. They always seemed so soft, he thought, as if they would prove, if one approached closer, to be a mirage, an idea of hills, rather than something real. Matthew loved them. He loved everything here – this road, this small forest clustered around a farm road-end, these sheep grazing on the lower slopes of the hills, this rooftop now just visible off to the right which was his roof-top, where Elspeth, whom he loved so dearly, was waiting for him, as were those three little boys who were his flesh and blood and to whom he was their omnipotent Daddy, who would urge him to kick a football with them for hours on end, and tell them silly jokes, and read to them their bedtime story when they were in their dressing-gowns, and for whom he would do everything he possibly could, although he knew that the thing that he most wanted to do for them, he could never do. He could not protect them from what the world was becoming. He could not protect them from the collapse of this exhausted world, from the bitterness of the struggle that was going to ensue over resources and water and a patch of land to stand on.

He drew up outside the house, and put these thoughts behind him. The boys were waving to him from the window. They were clearly excited.