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28th April 1998:
London
The taxi took me
through Crawl Dimension to a hotel whose Towers we were both unable
to place in the
Hyde Park region. This was
because it had none. Marbled reception with French staff and
Egyptian posters reflecting true owners flitting in back ground gave
way to the scraped carpets and bumpity-up-and-round two step with
fire door/another company's logo on door and telephone scenario.
L-shaped barely upper case space with impressive view of me for all
the back windows of Queensway. Small cubicle lining up
toiletsinkshower just like that - NASA would be proud. This is my
perfect caddis case in which I will not rattle.
Popping round the
corner to check the proximity to Bayswater Station (very neat &
nifty) I discover the next road over is
Moscow
Road
. I
stroll down this noting pub and restaurant and Dry Cleaners (latter
few all Greek), fail to get Football Italia in Newsagent and am
accosted by large youth with even larger face and postcard
explaining why I must give him money. When I refuse he says ‘You
never even read it,’ and when I say this aggression is hardly going
to make me want to give, he says, ‘I should have known: you're
Scottish and I'm English.’ Plans to spend the evening on this street
fizzle.
I go for a stroll
round Notting Hill and up Queensway, vaguely checking out things,
and buy some Vit C and a
London paper, then
retreat to Kings Bodypart, Moscow
Road.
It's a Bernards pub,
one of those that hark back without fooling anyone, and the beer,
which should be excellent, hoppy Theakstons, tastes a little sour. I
concentrate on my paper, still slightly stunned by how interesting I
find the football.
London
teams, for
Christ's sake, but tragic Tottenham and triumphant Arsenal give me
that combination I look for in Italian teams: the winners who seem
bland in their flawlessness and can therefore be envied and
despised, the losers with the individual talent that isn't properly
acknowledged. Ginola being rejected by the French coach is exactly
it, though it's playing personality and team identity that involve
me: as soon as they say anything off the pitch or about themselves I
immediately lose interest.
Vague list of things
to be written during this trip:
Sunderland
stained, glass and Christmas lights project; Italian team poem for
Times supplement. As if that's likely.
There's a couple of
kids doing a loud routine in this corner of the bar. It's
inoffensive stuff about defining coolness, citing activities and
programmes which can contain this. It's like cud-chewing, they have
to digest the pre-packaged social signs of drink and late nights,
social netting and tribe language, and, unlike me, they get to do it
with each other. I have a twinge for the
Regent Street
house and wonder how much changes: are we really inhabiting the same
decades over and over?
I'm turning into
grumpy bastard. I wanted to go to a place called
Byzantium
for dinner,
which I thought would be a nice link, but it's only really a cafe.
Then I consider a nifty-looking Chinese but go into a chain Italian
and get exactly what I deserve. The house wine's corked, the roasted
veg is smothered in cheap sweet balsamic, and the black linguine
arrabiata has too little chilli and stewed tomato sauce. I'm all
refined but can't be arsed going anywhere decent, that's my problem.
I do the crossword and go back to the L for TV therapy.
During Stressed Eric,
which is about him not getting any, a group of possibly twelve start
falling into the room next door as if the hotel was pitching steeply
to starboard. As Eric attempts intercourse with an old college
fantasy entity, there is the unmistakable sound of boffing from the
other side of the toilet cupboard: sort of a woman being hit in the
stomach with a huge soft tennis racquet or carpet beater, and every
now and then emitting a little ‘doh’ noise. It's all very Pilsbury
doughboy and I catch myself wondering whether to mute the TV to
listen, but I quite like the theme music (how to tell a good
cartoon: check the theme music). By the time it's done they're done
too, and I'm asleep pretty soon after that.
Wake up with stomach
cramps but push them away. Am travelling down south with my father
and have somehow avoided or missed a flight. There's some business
with a wooden hole which I'm trying to explain (various fragile
concepts and objects have been carried through recent dreams), then
I'm talking to my mother about getting on a train to
Rome
and she says ‘What,
in this weather?’ And it's raining and I am a little reluctant. Dad
does this sort of intimidating journey all the time, business style,
and
Moscow
is the third
Rome
after
Constantinople. I resist looking at my watch
till (I discover) five to six.
The trip to the
airport has a tramp bloke opposite me in tatters of a raincoat with
long blond hair and a pile of papers and mags he looks through. I'm
thinking of Iggy's ‘Every stinkin bum should wear a crown’ whilst
checking out his reading matter (one of those household gadgetry
catalogues: non-slip inflatable dust mite-cum-ioniser), and thinking
affirmative things about London (one of the articles in the paper
last night was about how the city has grown and thrived chaotically,
not in a planned manner: this appeals to me and reminds me of
Eddie's somewhat unexpected antipathy to Patrick Geddes the other
weekend. When we asked why he just said ‘Garden cities,’ with such
contempt that Robert cried out, ‘You're such a Stalinist!’ in mock
protest.)
I have this fond
belief you can get anything in airport duty frees, and had a
hankering for a see-through pocket gameboy, but couldn't quite bring
myself to buy it. You can get B & W disposable cameras with
flash, however. Didn't get booze either: I'm waiting to see what the
lifestyle's like. Bought a pack of cards though I'd've preferred to
have paid ten times as much for an electronic Patience game. You
just can't consume in this society. Still deliberating over my
perfect watch: ‘They say you can never judge a book by its cover,
but you can always judge a man by his watch,’ Douglas McCloud,
electronic engineer,
Dundee (quoted in BA
mag: have to check whether Dad knows him). Interesting announcement:
do ‘they’ say both halves of this? The cover as your face at a
particular time. Got the black luminous Swatch with the date:
establish what this declares.
30th April:
Moscow
Got off the plane
having had my complimentary Daily Telegraph nabbed by a most
convincing borrower. Marched round an endless apparently empty duty
free place which claimed to be open 24 hours. Then everyone went
down some steps, formed into several queues, and stayed that way for
some time. This was passport control, and while I shuffled forward,
I tried deciphering cyrillic with no particular success. Lots of
British businessmen in the queues were phoning around in a
nonchalant manner, and I noticed that the low roof, which appeared
to be made out of foot-wide rolls of carpet, was actually dusty
brass rounds: this was so archeologically the seventies that I was
as reassured as their phoning seemed to be making them. Then there
was a problem with my passport.
‘Moment,’ the
uniformed unsmiley girl said, and did the rest of my queue and
sorted out a somewhat dodgy-sounding bloke before saying ‘Moment’
again. Everyone else was gone and another unsmiley one had taken my
passport through an unmarked door. I was feeling very serene at this
point: I didn't see any way I could be mistaken for a spy, though
this was apparently what they were checking. Then I was through and
searching among the abandoned suitcases for mine, then I was looking
for a woman with my name on a card, saw a man with a British Council
placard, and realised Alyosha was a man's name all at the same
time.
He was tall and thin
with light lifeless hair and a scar running parallel to his nose
runnel, wearing white shirt and pale trousers. His car was also
white and in a grimy carpark in considerable sunshine. There seemed
to be no division between pavement, road and carpark, just a random
lumping of the tarmac. The men in charge of the barrier were
jovially shaking each other's hands every few minutes and ignored
the car till it was bumping the barrier. We went rattling past some
people whose cars the police had apparently stopped as soon as
they'd left the carpark, and headed onto a motorway with possibly
three lanes. He drove in and between all these lanes very fast
whilst smoking and trying to remember the English words for things
and translating the Cyrillic on signs and very politely pointing out
things of interest as we scorched through first the satellite town,
then the outskirts, and finally headed down Leningradskiy Prospekt.
There was a bit of a
jam at the Garden Ring where they were building an eight-lane
bridge, but nothing compared to the opposite direction, which was
jammed solid with people ‘going to their dachas’. At one point a
Mercedes-like vehicle came thundering down the central reserve with
its driver in shades and smoking casually. The bare earth churned up
in his wake. Ladas clapped out all along the way, smitten by the
heat. Alyosha (soon to become Alex) pointed out the pseudo-classical
Stalin blocks and the equally pseudo-utilitarian Khrushchev ones.
Pre-revolutionary meant low ochre-yellow or powder blue buildings
with white plaster. True Russian was very low with patterned brick
facings. We passed a chocolate factory called ‘Bolshevik’ and two
women were walking in front of it eating very big haloes of bread
that didn't look particularly sweet. These were ‘boboliy’. This
place was a favourite smell of his, it would waft over the centre
when the wind was right: ‘I like to see this smell.’
By now I was flashing
past statues of Mayakovsky (dashing) and Pushkin (inward) and
catching glimpses of MacDonalds, the Kremlin and Lubyanka and being
told I was staying in a large Stalinist block called the rocket in
stone (apparently one of thirteen), and then I was sort of there
staring up at this honey-coloured magnification of the Scott
monument with extra boxiness, and we were in its back area and I got
out into a large hole shaped like a fifty pence piece.
As I got out of this,
two women approached, one young with a dark fuzz of hair and bright
scarf, the other older and more definitely Russian-looking, with
short fringed goldy-brown hair, oval face and eyes and a thin nose
with that bendy bit icons have. Sasha and
Lena, only Sasha was English. She had that
dark eye and brow combination Robert Woof has, that looks sort of
distant and not very English at all. We then had a series of lock
struggles with code combinations and dummy locks and wildly
divergent key types, before I could just get in, say see you soon,
and have a shower.
The apartment is big:
big-hailed, high-ceilinged, big-roomed with views into the centre
from its two bedrooms (I'm in the smaller and quieter, with a
cupboard at my feet and a TV at my ear). The outside door is
actually two, the outer wooden and the inner seems to be metal with
fawn-coloured padded quilted leather on it, there is a double glass
door into the sitting room which has a strange pale brown, goldy and
red blotchy-flower patterned sheeny covering and a balcony. The only
available socket in the kitchen was later to explain in a note that
it ‘is not in order now’, which would mean boiling water in the
living room, there is a supernumerary light-switch in every location
which is not connected to anything, and plenty of hot water. So I
got clean, went down, and Sasha,
Lena and I
went out.
We walked over a
bridge on the Yousa River, which is worth a cheer in itself, then
along a low grimy street which I was told was both beautiful and
typical of old Moscow. We strolled up Podkolokolniy Pereulok (under
the bell street) and up a hill to see the first of many churches and
monasteries with little towers on them not as plastered up as the
rest of the building, with little trees and bushes growing out of
them, like hair out of an old man's ears I saw someone hadn't
bothered to take down their Christmas lights.
Meanwhile I was learning please (‘spassiba’) and
thankyou (‘pajalsta’) and discussing Russian pies. Reading Cyrillic
was now starting to resemble trying to read in a dream: you look and look and
the letters seem to swarm and change, but underneath it there is
some thread of sense, the knowledge that you could know this. We
came to the Kitai wall, which Alyosha/Alex had swung me past, and
popped into the Russian Bistro,
Moscow
's answer to
MacDonalds. Its symbol is a rather grumpy hussar, and my first
action was to lean against a light switch inadvertently plunging the
upper floor into darkness, whereupon a sturdy gentleman in a nice
suit with an impassive face came and spoke to me. I realized I
couldn't understand anything nor say anything back, and for a second
S & L were too focussed on pies to notice. Then we attempted to
smooth everything out, though I noticed
Lena
didn't want to sit upstairs. It
turned out there was nowhere else, so, armed with
cabbage pies and kvass, up we went.
Kvass turned out to
be a cross between sweet tea and beer, the pies were savoury-spongy,
pasties actually, and S & L asked me things about why I wrote
Scots and poems to Yeltsin, which I'm beginning to realise everyone
will ask and I'm starting to come up with better answers for. This
establishment was like a cramped Wimpy, though the fridge had not-so
miniature bottles of vodka in it with paper seals on them, which
might be a useful development. A lot of the people using it turned
out to be deaf people from a nearby institute -- I'd just assumed
Russian people used very elaborate hand gestures when ordering food.
I looked down from the first floor on this funny tufted lance which
I later discovered was the wooden cut-out version of the grumpy
hussar logo, only his hat's tuft being three-dimensional.
We then wandered past
the huge Russia Hotel, which Alyosha had previously railed against
because it blocked our view of the newly-reconstructed Cathedral of
the Resurrected Christ (he having a new Russian religious streak).
It is indeed a mighty bland box. We turned up some official-looking
streets with few people, no shops, big yellow buildings with white
window frames, another church with hair in its ears. I was told
about the street with no name, we turned into a more main-y seeming
street very freshly and pastelly painted, and I learned some more
about the post-Perestroika mania for rebuilding buildings demolished
by the Soviets. This particularly appeals to me...
(Back to top)
2nd May
...in relation to my
fantasy of reconstructing demolished parts of
Dundee (that old film stand-in for
Moscow): if something
has once existed in
Moscow, it exists
forever, and I suspect that goes for Soviet stuff as well as pre-.
Down the side lanes here were really shambolic broken-down
buildings, pipes down the sides of houses dented and broken off, the
lanes themselves filled with sand and tyre-tracks and oily muck.
There was a wooden, plain, country-looking house built between these
august distressed buildings and behind boarding where the builders
lived. They were leaning out of the windows as though looking at
fields, as though the house travelled when they were asleep. Then we
were by the side of GUM and onto Red
Square.
This happened so
suddenly I was rather taken back by the ease of it: that it was
possible to stroll onto this forbidding territory on a fine warm
evening, for people to say, 'That's the Spasski Tower with the
Galloway Clock on it, ' and me to reply with that old trope of there
actually being a St Andrews flag of jet trails behind it -- this
seemed strange beyond measure.
S & L were
telling me stories about the execution place and St Basil's that I'd
read in the Rough Guide and it all seemed distant and normal, a
condition that still seems inappropriate, but which people will
probably accept as actually normal in the not too distant future. I
found myself thinking about how many people had died in this
equable-seeming place as we strolled along looking at lines painted
on the ground for the First, and big blue screens on the front of
GUM to project some images or other.
Lena was
saying as we passed the Lenin Mausoleum how she had been taken there
as a child, and had been so overwhelmed she just started laughing
hysterically: laughing at the corpse of Lenin. Then we were looking
at another reconstructed church at the top of the square (can it
really exist just as a ‘square’ in lower case like that?) with red
neon over its door saying ‘Christ is Risen’. They say this to each
other after Easter, replying, ‘Indeed He is risen,’ as a common
greeting. Two girls wearing folk and eighteenth-century costumes
came out of the
Museum of
Russia 's restaurant
and starting touting for business. We turned into an archway and
looked at another broken-down space, a courtyard lined with
seventeenth-century buildings with thin brick pilasters half-way up
it beneath a row of large green ceramic panels, half of which were
missing.
We went through the
gates into a large Western seeming square with a great street full
of neon heading away from it. I found out later this was Tretskaya
Prospekt, the same avenue I'd driven down with Alex, catching a
glimpse of the little green and red chapel which sits between the
two gates. But for now the directions everything was pointing in
were still unclear. This square bustled with people and information,
as S & L explained the huge hotel's asymmetric frontage (as the
RG had done: Stalin had appeared to say ‘And not or’ when asked to
pick between two designs, and no-one dared find out if this was due
to inattention); and Lenin and Yeltsin walked by with cameras so
they could be photographed with tourists; I was told about the
mayor's hideous refurbishment of a once bare space as an underground
shop & cafe complex, of the radioactive nature of the metal
Marshal Zhukov and his horse were made of, of the underground river
they had just reopened only to stand truly awful statues in by the
mayor's mate (from fairy tales which seemed to be about giant ducks
and bears attempting to vote).
I was now beginning
to get footsore and information-weary, but we wandered on as it
started getting dusky past a huge library with a statue of
Dostoevsky outside it apparently sitting on something very painful,
down past the shop which sells military uniforms (I somehow expected
them to be modelled in the windows like giant Action Men), and round
some dusty, derelict and rather lonely corners (Lena shivered as she
went past the open stinking window of one such), till we got to
Rosie O' Grady's Irish Theme Bar, where some young dudes were
setting up to play the blues (one guy was sitting at a table staring
at them wearing dark glasses and looking 13: I have a strong sense
he was their manager), where the signs were mostly in English, and
where they poured Guinness as badly as in England whilst charging
10,400 roubles for three beers. Then when we sat down the band was
deafening and the prints on the wall were of Glamorgan. Still, by
now we were able to chat and to start to get on.
(I forgot to say that
when we were in an underpass checking on what was being played at
the Conservatory we met a friend of theirs, a smiling small-chinned
and -hair big-necked brown speckled man who dropped into English in
a manner that made me despair of my (and our) monolingualism. But
that's because of the overload, the overload, and this structure is
what the overload feels like, three days behind and still
remembering.
Home with
Lena, thinking how fearless these
women seem or how safe they must feel, making me safe by reflection.
We went through two metros, including Lubyanka, each one seeming
vaster, cooler and more blankly stylish than the last, and stood
looking up a hill for trolleybuses before deciding to walk the five
minutes home down a road I now recognised, across the reckless but
emptying lanes of traffic and home.
Light into the hall
didn't work and next morning it turned out the points in the kitchen
didn't work either and the milk was off, so tea and toast had to be
got via the TV socket in the sitting room where I sat down, sipped
yellow label out of an English teacup with gold traceries on it like
a set my grandmother has, and gazed out of the window trying to
gauge how much the leaves on the trees in the courtyard had grown
since the afternoon before, and sort out a seminar. Then it was
already ten and Alex was buzzing me to go to the Kremlin.
We walked along by
the river discussing many of the same features as the previous
evening -- the
Russia
hotel, the age of the little churches that seem set around it like
guardposts, Basil's, the
Spassiky
Tower , the place of
execution which they're rather disturbingly renovating, and then a
woman interrupted us and asked if we'd like to see Lenin.
This turned out to
mean a portly man in a tan jerkin with flat grey hair whisked us
through GUM (since the rest of Red Square was now fenced off) whilst
reciting facts involving the word ‘million’ and I stared at this
rather stylish arcade now almost mall-like in its choice of shops
and wondered where the big box-like department store I'd always
dreamt of had gone: grim women, long empty counters, strange grey
goods -- all a fantasy. Maybe at TSUM.
Then we were shown
the gates, the icon chapel, the hotel, Zhukov, a gorilla with a
camera, and the man gave me a single odd look when I made a note and
Alex explained I was a poet, and then we were in the Alexander
Gardens and I was looking at the heaps of dark earth brought in for
planting, and the small birds which were almost sparrows and finches
who were hopping in the old brown dirt and in the water from the
gardeners' hoses. We went and handed our camera and mobile phone in
at a booth that seemed ridiculously far away, under a bridge that
led into the Kremlin over what had once been a river.
Then we rushed back
to catch the changing of the guard at the eternal flame. Again, this
was just tucked in the top corner of the Gardens, almost missable,
and indeed we almost missed the change, only arriving in time to
watch the new guard being inspected and their predecessors marching
away with extraordinary balletic grace, pausing just perceptibly at
the tip of each goosestep, their rifles balanced so that they didn't
touch their shoulders, the peaks of their hats so big that they
seemed even younger than they were. That pause I now recognise as
the very characteristic moment in which a Russian appears to leave
time.
Then we were in a
queue with kids -- I looked at the sackcloth still stretched over
the earth heaped against the Kremlin walls -- we were whizz-beeped
by a weapons-finding device, and released to walk towards the squat
dark mastaba.
I was talking about
the MacDiarmid poem as we went down the stairs in a gloom that
contained a hushing guard, then we turned into the chamber. It
seemed so beautifully typical of its era, a set from a twenties
Biblical film that had actually been built in stone, except that it
had this dead husk of a man in it. He was utterly gone: there was no
presence, just an atmosphere of austerity, a religion going through
the motions of belief. I could have stayed there for hours: it was
like the space at the bottom of your dreams, in which you assume
there will be monsters, but where in fact there are only these
impassive men quite rightly advising you to remain silent in the
face of such an enormous loss of face, such a total failure of the
miracle.
Alex couldn't quite
keep quiet, and when we got out he said how it (the body) was going
to be taken away and burned and how strongly he approved of that:
he'd felt a kind of preventing force in the room. When I asked him
when this would happen, he said ‘In half an hour,’ instead of half a
year, a mistake he'd made before (the words must seem closer), and
we all laughed at his, including the guide who'd waited for us above
ground. But it did have that feeling of urgency: I understood I'd
never see that husk that had had so much hope and dread invested in
it again.
The guide then took
us round the back of the mausoleum, where plaques in the wall mark
the interred ashes of the Soviet heroes (politicians, military,
scientists, cosmonauts, token foreigners and Gorky), and where the
busts of leaders stand in a neat row, each emerging from their
oblong of black marble as though they'd been wedged into a box.
There isn't really room for any more (maybe one), which makes you
wonder how long they really imagined all this lasting. Stalin's
bust, Alex said, is only here because Khrushchev had him removed
from Lenin's side. Imagine being embalmed and getting ready to lie
there for your concept of a soulless eternity, only to be shoved
underground to rot like anyone else.
We paid the guide and
went back through GUM to pick up our stuff, passing a very thin girl
with poodle blonde hair and a red woollen skirt, short and ribbed
and with a hole cut for her cleavage to peep out of. Alex made a
noise to himself and, thinking of another MacD poem, I asked,
‘Krassivy?’
He said, ‘She's
certainly red and desirable, but not, I think, beautiful.’
When we had picked up
our stuff I watched a white butterfly flop lazily over the wall into
the barracks they're building for the guards and thought again about
the suddenness of the season change. Now it was time to visit the
Kremlin.
As we trundled over
the bridge and in, past the enormous Hall of Deputies where Chris
Rea would soon be having a growl, past the biggest cannon never
fired and the biggest bell never rung, across the square of
Cathedrals where a limo announced the presence of the Patriarch
himself, possibly to bless another bell, and down toward the
Armoury, I thought about the way Russia had united Church and State:
that Vatican and Parliament were possible in the same contained
area, the fortress-cathedral of authority. Then a man in uniform
with a small white stick insisted we walk on the pavement, giving us
a special miniature dose of authority to top us up.
The Armoury itself
was a two-floor tape-mishear and shuffle job, '... the humorous
Kremlin cathedrals and palaces...': fine when you're looking at
intricately-jewelled pre-Mongol book bindings, or the gold
silhouettes they place around the ikons (oklad), or the measuring
ikons which commemorate the birth-length of a prince (even one later
murdered by his father), or the eggs and jewelled dandelion of
Faberge - less so when you're foot-tapping before silverware from
Western European powers, though I liked the galleon goblets. The
armour collections suddenly struck me as silly: a man entirely
dressed in bending metal so that sharp things bounce off. The other
floor was costumes, crowns and carriages: the ivory throne of Ivan,
the lovely savage furry crown of Monomakh (claimed as but hardly
Byzantine), the heavy sledge that a princess bumped in for three
days and twenty seven horses between
Petersburg and
Moscow . I bought photos
of the Kremlin's red stars on the way out. They're supposed to be
made of massive rubies: Alex finds them quite offensive in his
pro-Orthodox, new Russian way. I can see we Western slobs are still
wedded to Soviet chic, but don't get how the double-headed eagles
would be a better thing.
We had lunch (fish
soup, rye bread and coke) beneath the arches by the
Alexander
Gardens watching
boys climb into and out of the shallow strip of river to fish out
the coins people had thrown in, then we had to flag down a car to
get back to the flat and pick up stuff for the afternoon's seminar.
As we headed up toward the Lubyanka, Chris Rea happily growled ‘Road
to Hell’ from the car radio.
Alex and I stood
outside the building with the British Council Offices somewhere
within it in quite a blazing heat until it was time for the seminar
to start, constantly expecting S & L to appear, then went up in
the rickety and found them completing a dither, checked out a
picture of a library by that man who does reverse perspective on
protruding boards, who I'd watched on TV paint a homage to De
Chirico, and whose name no-one could remember, though one woman
pointed out it was a hell of thing to see if you had a hangover,
which somehow did not seem an uncommon event in that office. Then we
were off, down by the canal and over the river with only a glance at
the Smirnoff house and the usual list of places where Akhmatova did
something (in this case worship). The writers seem to haunt the
streets of Moscow to a greater extent and in a greater concentration
than anywhere else: you feel if you scraped the paint off the walls
there would be poetry, if you lifted the cobbles from the streets
you would find books, if you filtered out the sound of traffic you
would hear their voices, still discussing and reciting.
The offices of
Foreign Literature seemed large and cool, a long corridor of
semi-official status. I suppose some of it probably have belonged to
other organisations: there are no absolute borders in Russian
society. We went in to an office with six chairs around a little
table with trays of Russian sweets and biscuits on it before a
massive desk under a Picasso-like pencil drawing. Out the window
some young men were examining a hopeless-looking blue car.
In came gradually a
bald black-bearded smiling man, a little lean and seedy, a short
smiling woman with short blonde hair and a fixed look, and, after a
proper pause, a grey-bearded bald bespectacled man of polished
appearance. This was my seminar for which I had prepared an advised
ten minutes.
The suave man told me
the history and circulation of the magazine (the latter declining as
its authority and accuracy of translation increases), mentioned that
the total, real and overall editor, whose study this was, was on
holiday. This gentleman had left a two foot long white plastic piano
somehow related to mozartkugeln as a symbol of his presence -- and
his predecessor had been KGB. At which point I recognised that I had
been unconsciously stereotyping the woman as that Bond antagonist
with the knife in her boot-tip.
The suave man clearly felt sceptical about the
existence and practicality of poetry in Scots language, but didn't
seem to want to leave the subject topic, especially when I started
talking about the characteristics and key figures of British poetry.
I got as close as I could to my ten minutes, prose was mentioned and
suddenly I found my every word on the topic of contemporary
fiction…
(Back to top)
5th May
…was being copied
down by the woman. They even suggested that I send them some of my
prose. I had no idea whether this was in addition to or instead of
my poetry. After a bit of this everything seemed to be over, hands
were shook, I was suggesting to the poetry editor that I give him
photocopies of the contemporary Scots poets I'd been mentioning, the
woman was retaining my poetry books, the suave editor was explaining
that the drawing was indeed a Picasso of Gargarin, but that I
mustn't mention this (oops), then he was gone and much sitting
around commenced, in which I learned that this house had once
belonged to an aunt of a friend of Pushkin's, a playwright who had
been literally torn apart by the Persians. Pushkin had seen the
coffin full of pieces being brought back to his distraught widow,
about whom there was a subsequent tale of Greyfriars Roberta-type
loyalty which, like all Muscovite literary anecdotes, was alluded to
rather than recounted.
When we finally hit
the street, there was then some confusion about how I would pick up
more books for the next day's events, which ended up with Lena fetching back the copies we had
so generously donated. Hope they do give them some more. Then Sasha
and I began to stroll genially toward the Tretyakov Gallery in that
intense coppery late afternoon light, pausing to look at things like
the Street of Old Translators, check the Russian for Golden Horde
Street, wander down one of those lanes busy with booths, long
caravan-like shops, folk in huddles drinking beer, folk doing
something with a doubledecker London bus and a large beam of wood.
We crossed a street,
turned right, and were suddenly staring at a Russian
arts-and-craftsy facade, restored and rather porno in its clean
brick and swish tiles with fancy lettering, like a pristine edition
of Geddes's Evergreen or a Rennie Mack reconstruction. Inside I had
to hand over my Swiss army knife for one plastic numbered tab, my
coat for another, and my bag for a third. Then we ascended stairs
lit by these ghastly and surely inappropriate sugary white and mauve
light fittings, which looked like they'd been made by conglobing
large flakes of skin (another mayoral innovation), and entered the
first rooms of what appeared to be an Ashmolean-sized building.
There was an immediate Czar, sixteenth centuryish wearing rather
nice red stilettos. There then turned out to be rather a lot of
rooms of eighteenth and nineteenth-century portraits, many of which
hovered between Raeburn and Gainsborough to my eye, some of which
were very charming indeed, including Rokotov's portrait of Struisky,
in which the mouth was out of focus no matter where you stood,
implying either that it wasn't finished, it had decayed, or that he
wouldn't stop talking.
Levitsky's women were
all charming and amused, or even charmed and amusing, as though he
entertained them so much he couldn't finally take them seriously.
Even the best portraitists seemed to fail when they were required to
do full figure large canvases: gestures emptied, backgrounds
flattened and filled with dull symbols. Small or rather iconic
figures with relatively low focus on background seemed to work best.
Venetsianov seemed to do two kinds of successful paintings:
disturbingly Dadd-like large-headed peasant women suckling children
or looking like they might suckle calves, and distant peasant women
in a small harvesting landscape, their heads turned away and almost
Hopperesque. There was a portrait of a middle-aged Tolstoy by
Kramskoy which was superrealist in its fierce grasp of his features:
you retreated before it instinctually as though it was eating up the
space.
Somewhere in the
midst of this I realised that there were far more rooms than I had
understood or could bear, including Pushkin's tartan moment, heaps
of sketches for the vast Holman Huntish Baptist Spots Christ while
Biblical Blokes Hang Around. After many nineteenth-century epic folk
tale renditions I was being meekly led around. Then, as the gallery
was closing, we got into the ikon rooms (which was why I'd wanted to
go there in the first place).
Everything calmed
down and at the same moment intensified. These faces were continuing
to gaze out at a space not without context, but without time: how
could they fail to? There were paintings here that no-one was
supposed to have painted, there were paintings here that were
painted in Byzantium. Figures
partaking in the death of the virgin were tragic and serene at the
same time because the artists could convey that there was no other
time these events took place in: this was how you existed in
eternity. Saints' faces were full of abstracted whorls that
represented wrinkles and thoughts: they almost constituted
landscapes. The big Rublev figures bunched themselves in a graceful
manner I remember from my Iliad book, isolating the small heads and
fingers and the immensity of their expressions and gestures.
The relation between
mother and child in the Vladimir icon was so
precisely that encounter with the unknown inside the tender, she was
so vulnerable to the way he transcended the human within her human
response to him: this seemed an utterly Russian perception. Exactly
like that pause in the march or that space between pavement and road
or office and office or self and self that you have to perceive for
yourself. Then its texture, its state of survival, was so
interesting: fragments of text, the battered old frame, the way gold
folds of fabric fell like architecture. It was at once weathered and
untouched, as was a massively damaged Rublev in the next rooms, just
a portion of the face of Christ left on a large board. I felt these
images would still exist if their materials flaked away entirely, if
they were buried, if they blackened, if they were burned -- they
would still be there or rather their absences would still mean this
mother, this child, this man's face.
After leaving the
gallery, I finally got a chance to ring James, only to have to leave
a message on his answer machine. Sasha and I went for a
restaurant-directed wander which got longer and longer as one was
full and another was the Russian Bistro again and we sort of wanted
to look around anyway and get some evening air in this quiet,
low-buildinged bit sort of around where she lived anyway. We took a
detour to look at a waffle factory and were peering through the
half-open windows of this big establishment when a man popped his
head round and engaged Sasha in a long friendly chat. This turned
out to be information-loaded: the waffle factory was a block over;
this was where they made childrens' encyclopaedias, a hundred a day
at $10 each, whilst he earns $100 a month - what did we think of
that?
We eventually arrived
at the garden ring and bought milk and water in one of the caravan
kiosks, me getting stared at by a bloke sort of on the door in a
dark slick outfit as if this was one of his establishments and he
didn't like the class of foreigner it was attracting. Then we went
past a Roman temple that was actually a cinema, and sighted the
American Diner that sits on the middle stretch of (recent) greenery.
Here all was even slicker than his gaudy lapels and we were
addressed in English.
We discussed metre,
ate blackened tuna and chicken salad, I drank piva and learnt my
first phrase (‘Please, I really want some beer,’), James called back
and, eventually, there he was, looking stocky about the chest, wispy
about the head, as wrinkly round the eyes as I see myself becoming
(funny how a year's age difference shrinks as you get older), and
somehow married. He proclaimed himself impressed by my pronunciation
(‘Pajalsta, ochin xachoo piva’), and, on being taken to an outer
table where three women had just seated themselves, I found myself
unable to guess which was his wife. She turned out to be the
youngest, most attractive and Russian one. We four then went back to
Sasha's flat to catch up, and for me to practice my vodka -- by the
time James'd driven there I had forgotten my phrase. By the time I'd
gotten little more fluent in vodka I'd found Mark Hird was now
living in York and forgotten to pick up Elena Shvartz's book from
Sasha, and was sloshing cheerfully about in his car whilst they
worked out the way back to my flat.
James wants to leave Moscow, but not
necessarily to return to Broughty Ferry. We were both agreed it was
the best place to live, we just seemed to be unable to actually do
so. He talked about how tempting the power/money/reputation aspect
of journalism is versus the nose down aspect of just writing: it's
what I recognise as the need to have an unimportant-seeming finger
in every pie. But being tempted is good, just like Faust: it means
your soul is worth something.
The next morning I
knew I'd been drinking but it was something dispelled by breakfast,
a beautiful day, and a focus on the day's mysteries, which was a
relief. Just before going to sleep the previous night I'd read in my
Rough Guide that these blocks had been built by slave labour, and,
when a slave died, the done thing was to throw him in the cement
walls, with the result that the plugs sometimes oozed what the book
delicately described as ‘moisture’. Strangely enough this hadn't
bugged me: the place had such a reasonable atmosphere, but I had
been thinking the previous night that it seemed a place devoid of
ghosts, as though decades of official atheism was a guarantee
against haunting.
Alex scooped me up
promptly, handed me a plastic bag of bublikiy (those big round bits
of bread, covered in poppy seeds), which soaked up the rest of the
alcohol and drove me to what seemed the extreme outskirts where he
confessed himself unable to tell where the Pedagogical University
was. His solution to this was to pull over to the verge on sighting
a pedestrian, any pedestrian, or jump out at traffic lights and ask
the driver behind. Eventually we turned off down the right
disintegrating lane, manoeuvred past the usual scuffed and battered
works truck, and pulled up outside a large grey event, a huge
dissolving sugar cube of concrete, at which point I was told my
audience would entirely consist of young women. Three of which,
nicely-suited, well-made up, and very young indeed, were waiting to
meet me.
Everything inside
looked as if it had been occupied just before it had been finished:
they almost seemed to be camping out in the shell of a building, and
to have been doing this for some time. Concrete dust was everywhere,
floor-tiles were missing and slipping, walls seemed not to have
received their appropriate number of coats. But for all this it was
absolutely bustling, and stalls for food and for books were set out
in the main areas. When they took me upstairs to a small classroom
it turned out to be packed out with very attractive very
formally-dressed very young women indeed. They all stared fixedly at
me and murmured, most likely not with delight, as the organisers
explained I could do anything I liked as long as it went on for an
hour and I could somehow handle the fact they would be too shy to
ask questions.
6th May
I improvised what I
thought was a very cogent analysis of 20th century Scottish poetry,
its various strands, its approaches to language, facts, the cosmos,
free verse, the perspective of women, skipped Gaelic poetry like a
bastard, and read them heaps of stuff, including...
7th May
…a version of ‘The
First Men on Mercury’ which went down an ion storm. Every five
minutes another twelve neatly dressed young women would appear
clutching chairs, and every two(ish) someone unrelated would pop
their head round the door, just to see what was what. About fifty
eight minutes in, just as I was reaching the middle of my last poem,
a grumpy Gromyko-type stomped in and started demanding what appeared
to be the immediate evacuation of the building for ideological
reasons. The organisers bundled him out of the room whilst
indicating that I should continue regardless, which, having got a
handle on the Russian way by now, I did.
Then there were very painfully extracted
questions about why I had written a poem to Yeltsin, how I coped in
a poetic tradition without music, much applause, and a heartfelt
query about socialist principles in a world gone rotten, which
elicited the response ‘You are a great man,’ at just the moment that
I felt like an enormously uninformed twit. I found myself
autographing programmes (the programme by the way features a photo
of its designer swathed in bandages with a bullet wound to the
heart: they asked me why? I thought of M.E. Smith's cogent
observation, ‘I'm a mummy!’) and being bustled out by Alex, who I
think thought I needed rescuing. The lifts didn't work, but the trio
of organising women remained very enthusiastic about getting someone
else to visit as well and we shook hands and parted. The sunlight by
now was bright and blinding, my bublikiy had started perebaking
themselves, and we rushed back to Moscow past the State
Circus building, which looked like a big Tartar hat, or possibly
even the Monomakh crown.
On the way we stopped
off at the Sparrow Hills in front of the Stalinist university
building, and looked down over Moscow. There were two
ski jumps which looked like they would propel you into the big oval
Spartak Arena, which had not yet acquired its all-weather roof.
Peeping from the trees that curved around the river were the green
roofs of Politburu dachas, with their own metro line to the Kremlin,
now open to ordinary Muscovites (the line, not, probably, the
dachas). And this was where ordinary Muscovites came after getting
married: there was a church where Pushkin and his bride had
exchanged rings, and various women in silvery white dresses were
dashing about whilst their men set off fireworks in the day time:
smoky orange fizzles that looked more martial than usual.
We looked at the
stands and I saw the Vladimir Ikon painted on a wooden egg and
understood, though this version was a little pretty-pretty, this was
the thing I wanted from Moscow for myself. Alex
and I reckoned I'd be able to get an even better one in the city,
so, with a few postcards for the great horde of those requiring
postcards sent to them, I left it there and we drove back into town.
We discussed how rare it was to know exactly what you wanted as we
drove past the statue of a character from a Soviet fairy story
(wonderfully twisted idea, that: what was the story like?), and,
later, past the statue of Gargarin, shooting like a stainless steel
Dan Darevitch Schwarzenegger out of the top of a column wearing Iron
Man Paolozzi mittens, once more round the cathedral, and home.
Alex took me to lunch in the cafeteria of a
newspaper which was tucked around the back of the block the British
Council flat was in. This was where they (the BC staff) usually
sometimes go for lunch. As we swung round I saw that there was also
a cinema within the same huge building, and at the top of the little
hill that got you there was an extremely bulbous low white monastery
that was actually Greek Orthodox, a sort of monastic embassy. The
café was a small brown square room with light pine panelling and
powder red upper walls, an enormous off-central pillar and a small
bar-like serving area with a clock above it which was just the hands
and roundels with roman numerals on them attached to the panelling.
The light fitting consisted of little rectangular pieces of glass
with white stars on them forming an open oblong. It was all cool and
light, with a green plastic plant pot (‘woven’ effect) in one of the
two windows and a tiny woven basket with three fake roses in it
perched on the top of the central pillar's panelling. We were served
by two women who looked like they'd strolled out of their kitchens
with some stuff in tupperware and a borrowed microwave, one tall and
dark, one shorter and stout, both amused by the effort of
translating the dishes into approximate English for me.
People sat arguing
equably and slapping their children whilst we ate pale cheese soup
and I had ‘small cow’ rissoles with mushrooms in creamy sauce and
shredded fried potatoes, (Alex had slab o pork with boiled
buckwheat) and drank an intense Georgian spring water like alka
seltzer from a technicolour can.
13th May
After a bit S & L
came in with Olga and a packet of inch-long chocolate orange sweets
in wrappers that looked better than money, and discussed a store in
which they were piled one on top of the other in great columns, and
ikon eggs and writing time, and it was decided that I'd get an hour
or two for that latter task, then Alex would take me to the Arbat to
search for the former. So I went back to the flat and attempted to
catch up with my heapings-up of experiences, but got phoned at ten
minute intervals by various relatives and friends who'd tracked me
down and thought it fun to call Moscow, so I'd barely done Day One
by the time Alex rang the buzzer and I was off again, having
scarcely had time to notice the leaves were now pouring from the
trees out of the balcony window.
We went round by the
cathedral just in case there was any luck attached to this process
we might have missed previously, and parked just off this long
paved-over street filled with dark scarf- and military hat-laden
booths, and lined by pizzerias, street cafes and places with grey
wooden doors intensely carved, which turned out to be almost
anything: tourist shops or travel agents. This was the Arbat. Every
stand had matrushkiy of the Beatles and American football or perhaps
basketball teams, usually the various Soviet leaders, and sometimes
famous Russian composers; there would be black painted lacquer
boxes, metal military hip flasks with little Leninist bursts of red
enamel, painted wooden dolls with various traditional costumes on,
cubes of clear plastic with 3D images picked out within them by
laser, and lots and lots of eggs. Very few of these were of the
Vladimir Ikon, and most of those cost far more than I had thought I
could afford. One of the more expensive was a tiny little one
painted in a ‘village’ style (which seemed to mean balloon heads).
Anything in a shop as opposed to on a stand cost a hundred dollars,
and meanwhile we passed Georgian kebab places, hunting shops with
their strange flat coloured plastic montages (sort of Mister
Magoo-style cartoon images), ran cartoonists' gauntlets,
contemplated ice cream stands, saw the statue of an extraordinary
elongated golden girl sitting on a fountain outside the theatre,
photoed a wall of permitted graffiti, and ended up back at the
corner where we'd started eating lollies and watching a jazz
band.
Meanwhile I'd bought
Izzie the little red doll I'd seen on the way down, only now ten or
ten thousand roubles had been knocked off the price for weariness's
sake. It turned out she was wearing the Moscow costume, so this
was another sign of perspicacious good fortune. My lolly was too
sloppy, Alex's too frozen, so I kept dropping slivers of the
surrounding chocolate on my shoes and he didn't. This reminded me of
the advert for shoes: act your age, not your shoe size, which I am
for some reason idiotically fond of. The middle-aged band played
cheerful beboppish stuff without a bass drum, all leaning in a line
against a wall, the drummer doing good things with a snare and a
hi-hat (possibly). The accordionist had a cigarette sticking out of
a jaundiced holder, the trumpeter strolled over to chat with a
younger guy who arrived with a guitar in a case. No one applauded
though they were rather good, and a pair of slim little middle-aged
women brushed past us as we decided to go. Alex leapt after them and
I saw he was knocking the burning end of his cigarette off the
orangey-red outfit of one of them. She affected not to notice, while
the other gave him a dirty look for his trouble.
(Back to
top)
14th May
We then had to scoot
back to the reading, which was in the Mayakovsky Museum, just behind
the Lubyanka, through an arch into a courtyard where two children, a
boy and a girl of about six, were playing grubbily around a
flat-tyred car. We went round a corner and bumped into some bomb
blast street carnage of steel and glass (the entrance). Inside
James, Gareth (a friend of his who worked for Reuters: thin,
receding black curly hair, very enthusiastic eyes) and numerous
punters milled around an innocuous white space that led through to a
skew-whiff red modernist corkscrew with tacky theme-poet bits,
plenty of glass with things dotted on it, large black and white
photos of various relevant heads cut out around their outlines and
poking up in bug-eyed groups, a lamp-post emerging at several angles
and unbalanced or unevenly legged pieces of furniture. Montage had
been extended into the third dimension in order to vortex and whorl
about the staircase that marked the remains of the apartment
building. Tough elderly women were at hand to prevent my every step
into what was for them a shutting museum. When Alex pointed out I
was one of the poets come to read, one of these women, who had
formidable blonde hair a la Pat out of Eastenders delivered a short
impassioned speech that surely contained the word ‘should’ many
times, though I couldn't work out whether I should be like
Mayakovsky or I shouldn't have the temerity to call myself a poet in
the same apartment block.
There were no chairs
for any of the increasing audience, and Sasha was suggesting I led
the audience on a merry jaunt up several of these levels (as well as
read to them in a foreign language), whilst I tried to establish
what was on each level and be introduced to Mikhail Aizenberg, a
stately greybearded trim gentleman with pronounced red patches under
his eyes and a leathery garment, who handed me a book of his essays
but seemed disinclined to speak (his English was minimal, my Russian
had risen to three words: ‘presteetya’ or ‘excuse me’).
Whilst I had stood on
the stairs earlier peering up (all the doors to actual former
apartments were locked) and through to the lateral added dimensions
of the museum, Alex had pointed out that upstairs was the room where
Mayakovsky had actually shot himself, and I felt the first of many
frissons of death-aversion. So I said to Aizenberg through Sasha
that I would go up three of these stages, but no further: that was
more properly his territory if he got my drift which he may not have
done. However he handed me a flask full of Jack Daniels, the
audience crowded round and I made an extended dumbshow of putting my
papers on a slanting desk and watching in apparent confusion as they
slipped off. This amused no one and I began to wonder if humorous
poems would be permissible and indeed whether I had written any.
I had to get
Lena to translate my
introductions and this rapidly became an extended jazz riff thing as
I used the space to get my bearings. Two poems a floor, I reckoned,
and would they follow me? Just about, as I raced up to the section
full of manuscripts in cases and enormous white busts of M in
various states of shaven-headedness. Folk sometimes applauded,
sometimes looked nonplussed, a few appeared out of breath, a few
intensely-eyeballed types seemed more interested in making contact
with Aizenberg who maintained an air of JD-fuelled equanimity
throughout my runnings and my rantings. Third floor I was parked
between two unrolling scroll-type wooden structures, as though on a
very small stage. I was reading well by this point and could play
with the intros, though Lena threw me by asking for a Scots poem
which I then had to translate after reading (I had already read the
first Ode: to Gorbachev, in spontaneous English translation). This
last turned out to be a good ending point, and, with a polite
outbreak of applause, everyone turned to follow Aizenberg to the
next level.
I'd given out the big
energy swell and had to have water, while one Russian whispered
‘Bravo!’ and a small precise woman asked to see a copy of my ‘Moses’
poem (the one that was actually about Joseph). Sasha offered to
translate the intros while Aizenberg stood very straight under a
montage balcony of Lenin and some Russians, took out a series of
small very rectangular pages apparently torn from a book, and began
reading quietly. There were no other introductions, and he didn't
move up from level to level: he just flipped to another page and
read that and again and so on, getting slightly louder, stopping at
one point and asking for a drink and, when someone asked if he meant
water, said ‘I'm not speaking metaphorically’ (Sasha's translation).
The rhythms were intense and, occasionally, people smiled, but that
was all I could get, except the experience was analogous to looking
at cyrillic script: you feel this ought to be comprehensible at some
level and so you start to lean into all the available signs tone,
gesture, expression but everything falls back to that increasing
intensity of rhythm, in which you see the shapes of sense appear to
appear. At one point a guide brought a party noisily down the steps
from the fatal floor, at another I looked round and saw a woman
clutching lots of red carnations: they give them to poets at the end
of readings, the travel guide part of my mind told me, though I'm
not sure where it picked up this piece of information. At the end of
the reading the formal woman gave myself and Aizenberg the red
carnations, though he somehow acquired a pot of purple peonies, so
the photo I asked James to take of us both has a remarkable array of
Baconish hues, plus me doing my village-style balloon head Stan
Laurel grin.
After all this it
seemed reasonable to run and see whether my bag, abandoned on the
first level, was still there, and then, as though we'd all been
wound up by our gradual ascension and were now playing out, we all
gradually ended up in a traditional post-reading mill while Sasha
named restaurants and Aizenberg suggested another, better, nearby
one. A woman who knew Pete Mortimer came up to me and asked me to
contact him on her behalf because his answer-machine didn't work and
they had worked together on Poets of Perestroika, and perhaps I
could take, translate or edit a subsequent volume, and if she could
just write him a note in my pad which turned into a letter just as
everyone was leaving and so we had to stand around encouraging this
woman to be terse.
So then we set out
along the streets behind the Lubyanka past a luxury chocolate
showroom to the area where Lena was brought up but she couldn't
think what restaurant he meant and we discussed the Scots issue
again and I took some more photos of hunting shops before Aizenberg
led us into a large dilapidated art nouveau-ish courtyard and to a
steel door in one corner leading down through plastic sheeting. This
somewhat unprepossessing entrance concealed the bizarre and lavish
Petrovich Restaurant.
(Back to
top)
27th May
We went down a flight
of stairs towards a burly besuited gentleman who could have been
about to violently eject us or explain the restaurant was a mafia
figment but didn't, and we passed along a corridor of drawings by
the cartoonist Petrovich, whose idea all this was. These were
Calmanesque bare images of people shooting at footballers and
preparing to dive into saucers of milk uttering short fatalistic
comments to identical other people who were always Petrovich. There
were also painted wooden busts, carefully crudely hacked, of famous
politicians, TV personalities and historical and literary figures,
and these ran on shelves all the way round the elegant bare brick
interior: all identified as the offspring of Petrovich. Some collage
boxes of cosmonauts and sixties icons completed the decor, and we
started surrounding a couple of tables by the entrance.
An iced-over green
glass pitcher of gratis vodka arrived, with a plate of hard-fried
little cubes of dark bread, Muscovite beer was ordered, and the
extraordinary menu was perused. This consisted of very traditional
Russian dishes, caviar, blinis, sturgeon, but all renamed ironically
- red caviar being ‘To Victory!’ This extended to the toilet doors,
where cartoon characters argued whether Petrovich had any balls or
not. I had ‘To Victory!’ and a baked sturgeon whose message has not
survived. I chatted through James with Mikhail or Misha as everyone
else called him, and found he had been to London and Bath, but that was it for
Britain. At
some point an orange, urinous liquid turned up in another iced-over
pitcher: this was bread-flavoured vodka, and with it everyone's
focus and grip started to simultaneously slip. I found out that
Gareth, was a former pupil/protégé of Kenneth White's and we
discussed that significant expat for a while, me thinking how it is
that cultured gentlemen like these would never dream of running a
news item on an event like this: the folks back home don't need to
know about how culture travels: it's purges, corruption and
brutalism still for tea. It wasn't even that I held this against
them, just that it made me weary in a general sense, as journalism
often does.
At some point Ken
(Smith, not White) came in wielding a stick and a tape recorder and
was ensconced at a further corner of the table: we were indulging in
toasts by this point (pronounced ‘toe-ast’ in the Geordie manner)
and he may have felt the need to catch up, anyway, time was doing
that drift-and-pounce thing it likes to practice after hours, and I
was aware at some point that he had spilled soup into his tape
recorder. I strolled over to discuss the intense sense of home re
Dundee that James and I were articulating (if that is quite the
right verb) with Lena, who reciprocated warmly re Moscow (this was
all deriving for me at least from the degree of Scottishness Kenneth
White might still be thought to possess), and Ken pronounced this
somewhat parochial and terrible: I thought this a trifle harsh and
pointed out that I was aware it was a folly but saw no point in
concealing this truth from anyone present. At this point I was
replaced by Misha who was kissed by Ken and told he was indeed a
soulmate, which Misha seemed to find an interesting but not
unpleasant concept. Sasha had had to leave with stomach cramps,
having explained the word ‘Ugis!’ meaning ‘Terrible!’ and pointing
out I would find it very useful. People were beginning to be aware
that something had to be done about us all, so another round of
beers was sent for whilst we debated this deep and troubling issue
and some others that were strictly irrelevant but seemed to politely
elbow their way into the conversation, along with another pitcher of
vodka.
It was eventually
decided that James, his wife and I, would take Ken back to the flat,
but that I would go on to their flat for the night, since there were
so many further topics that had to be covered before dawn, and we
would all meet up the following morning for the trip to Peredelkino.
James flagged down a guy who very obligingly waited with them at our
flat while Ken and I performed an impromptu Bolshoi military
manoeuvre involving stick and pass-number, lift and six keys, he
explaining to me that his foot was collapsing in on itself and me
experiencing something of the same sensation with my brain.
Eventually he was at the table in the living room with a bottle of
duty free and a cigarette lighter, and I was at the door with a bag
full of pyjamas or socks, having mildly electrocuted myself putting
on the TV so he could see programmes he couldn't understand. I
sealed him in and returned to my party and the obliging driver
bloke.
As we drove over to
the other end of town I made a small bet with James that we would
find Ken slumped against the inner door the following morning,
having beaten on its panels to no avail, like Gogol waking up in his
own coffin. Then we arrived, paid the man (still unconcerned at
having a good three quarters of an hour knocked out of his night by
drunken Brits who, I think, didn't pay him very much), and bundled
upstairs in the lift to an extremely nice, spacious apartment with a
print of Dundee on the wall, numerous recognisable books on the
shelves, and strange semi-pornographic programmes and wonderfully
pusillanimous music videos on the TV, which we occasionally remarked
on whilst sipping tea and realising we had effectively caught up.
After quite some time comparing test card signals we woke up much
refreshed and went to bed properly. At 7.30 exactly I woke up going
‘Ugis! Ugis!’ (‘The horror! The horror!’) and seeing exactly what
Sasha had meant.
Some ghastly
drowsing, a read of Aizenberg's essays, and a yoghurt later, James
and I sat over tea contemplating how old we must have become just
overnight. It was quite a beautiful day, and I gaped out at the
clear cool light on the green roof of the block opposite, the colour
the same as the leaves on the trees. The courtyard was giving off
crisp echoes of the people beginning their day, and the glass I was
looking at it through had noticeable vertical strips in it where
presumably it had been rolled out. This sent a ripple across the
pale custardy buildings as you moved about.
This was the first of
May in Moscow. It had an
atmosphere of enormous unfussedness, just all the city's details
being laid out, its cars starting and its people turning their
heads, milk sitting in their fridges, a great static parade
celebrating the cool normality of waking up and still being
alive.
I had a shower to see
if that would help me get on board with this normality thing, and it
sort of did, so we headed off to my vesodka or ‘high thing’,
Stalinist rocket block to you, promptly finding I didn't have my
valuable photocopies of poems by other Scottish poets and would have
to go back for it, couldn't see it in the flat, and sat in the car
trying to remember if I'd put it down in the BC flat or in
Petrovich's or what? And then thinking about what it was you were
supposed to do in Russia if you
returned for something after leaving a place: change your clothing?
Sit for ten minutes? Say a particular prayer? Sneeze?
En route we passed a
sort of tower of letters which James explained was a construction
combining the Russian and Georgian alphabets. I liked this, even
though it turned out to be by the same man as did the giant bronze
duck and voting bear in uncovered-river travesty. Maybe I just think
words are that totemic. James whipped around the garden ring in an
assuredly Muscovite manner, which I, who have never dared to drive
abroad, admired enormously. Back outside the BC flat we shook hands,
insisted we must remain in better contact, and generally acted
guiltily until Sasha showed up and explained there had been no
sighting of Ken. Bye byes over I trooped upstairs with her, unlocked
the door, and found that he was indeed slumped in a chair by the
entrance, in his long johns, without a clue how to get out and two
hours behind Moscow time according to
his watch. At least he'd somehow made up an hour during the
night.
Tea was made, I ate
corn flakes, found my photocopies, shifted shirts, Ken jumped into
action, chatting about Pasternak's boots, still apparently where
he'd removed them, and we were sooner or later strolling towards a
convoy of BC vehicles all waiting to go to Pasternak's dacha. One of
these was a tall Range Roverish thing belonging to the head of the
British Council, who it turned out lived near Brechin. He was pretty
tall and rangy if not roverish himself, his wife a little more
stand-back smiling sharply. They elected to take Ken in their
vehicle, though the climb up was perhaps as inconvenient as our
bumpy backseat might have been. Alex, Sasha and I led the way in his
car, and Lena, the lunch
and Olga followed in another, driven by possibly another Alex, whose
last name meant ‘virtuous’: his car was certainly cleaner.
As we approached the
bridge leading to Red Square Alex and Sasha were teaching me the
worst swear words they could think of when we looked up and saw
people were streaming over it bearing huge red flags: so there was
going to be a parade after all, and we would miss it. The swear
words took on greater relevance: yomayo (‘Fuck that!’) the fact that
the word for ‘who’ stood in for the word for ‘dick’ (I think: puts a
new complexion on Doctor Who), as did the word blini for ‘whore’ (an
even worse term in Russian than in English). Then (after passing the
cathedral of course), we headed down the road where the poet in The
Master and Margherita had run, after going mad, to jump in the
river. I suggested we should have a caucus race of all the Bloodaxe
poets to see who could jump in first. I also lamented that James had
suggested a Bulgakov tour there would now be no time to fit in.
As we headed out of
Moscow the roads started
thickening with cars, but first we turned off at the Sparrow Hills
(the rest of the convoy bewilderedly following us) and went in
search of the woman who'd had the first egg. Amazingly she was
there, and just setting up, and when we asked, produced first the
one I'd not really liked but had now resigned myself to, and
another, more delicately painted one, which I snapped up. Along with
two matrushka to bring the price up to the equivalent of a tenner.
Though we'd been quick everyone else had got out of their cars and
were wandering about looking at all the wares, the view, the
couples, and it took some time to get going again.
By now the roads were
clogged with cars stacked high with furniture on their roofs and
foodstuffs on their seats. People squodged together peered out at us
as we attempted to keep together, though with Alex's special
between-lane steering, this wasn't easy. There would come the
occasional clear stretch, like the moment on Mechurynski Prospekt
when I could see cigarettes glittering as they rolled here and there
on the new tarmac, but basically it was slow and increasing
claustrophobia. My hangover and its various bodily consequences
started weighing in on me as we passed dirty roadside cafes and
drove alongside lines of silver birches, still leafless, stretching
above grey walls and between grey lamp-posts. Then we hit the
massive ringroad and things seemed a little lighter.
We drove past a little pond between trees and
pylons just as a duck landed in it. We drove past a sign for ‘Three
Chicken Settlement’ which turned out to be prophetic. We passed off
the road into scrappy forest and the glimpse of wooden buildings,
turned down another and another, and found ourselves in a lane
beside the Pasternak dacha looking between birches and over a brown
field at the small domes of the church where he is buried.
Everyone stretched
things and sipped cranberry juice. Sasha broke up a heavy biscuity
cake with jam in it and a word picked out on top. Some BBC or
otherwise media people were there doing that media thing whereby
they talk to the important person (here the director) whilst their
body language excludes the people in his group. We decided to walk
to the church. The road was very dusty and lined with bottles and
wrappers. I was talking to the director, having gotten into a
discussion about Scotland, we then talked about the improvisatory
energy of the Russians, the way they just reinvent themselves every
fifty years or so, and how this was happening more and more
frequently, how no-one had expected them to recover from the
collapse of the Soviet system as quickly as they had. This fitted
in, in my mind, to that division I had contemplated between jazz and
folk: how folk is about memory and preserving, whilst jazz is about
flinging memory off and reinventing. Largely inaccurate as a model,
of course, but symbolic of certain directions in my mind: I always
think of myself in the jazz category, the ‘Will ye no fuck off?’
grouping, and it was something I had identified and felt intrigued
by in the Russians I had met and the whole organisation of this
tour.
I picked up an orange
plastic thing, a broken base for a toy perhaps, and entered into a
conversation with Ken and Lena about accent, he saying his had
become an accumulation of everywhere he had lived, and me citing the
way Scots people either preserve or adapt their voices when they
live out of context. Your voice should grow as you grow, I think we
were saying, not stunt and stick to an early stage, but add rings to
itself and grow in peculiar directions. We were walking by this time
up a hill by the cemetery, and could see that the graves were
painted, mostly powder blue. There were a lot of little fires and
remains of fires all along the way, where people had burned rubbish
and scrub. Lena was
saying how people make a day out of going to visit graves, almost
having picnics at them and including the dead. Ken was saying they
laid out food and drink for them, but maybe that was in
Georgia.
As we came along a
track past the church, heading on toward the grave, we were
discussing whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that the poets
on this trip were so isolated from each other. Ken was saying that
he thought it wasn't bad at all: if you got stuck with the same
bunch it could get boring. Just because we were all poets didn't
mean we all got along. I said poets were like relatives: we all knew
each other but that didn't mean we needed to see each other all the
time or necessarily liked each other. Still, here we were visiting
someone's grave just because they were a poet and it dawned on me
this was true: it was as though Pasternak was a venerable ancestor.
There was a couple of family graves around his pale stone, a
rectangle tapering into the ground with his profile dug into it,
trees gathering around and a bird singing furiously in them, glad to
have survived if birds are glad. The director was telling me how few
of the native birds do survive, and we discussed how close to our
native species they were. There was a family gathered around a grave
just chatting to each other, as though they were in their dining
room. We talked about translators and whether the Russian poets
could visit Britain, and
headed back to the church.
The church was very
small inside: it had been private, and so was not intended to hold a
large number of worshippers, everything subdivided into private
side-chapels. But Alex said even more public ones were pretty much
like this. I liked the idea you crowded into a
God-and-His-saints-shaped space. There were paintings everywhere, in
the light, in the shadow, shrouded in their golden oklads or not,
any size, any period, single figures, faces, scenes, the great wall
of them that makes up the centre of the church, everyone in the
place and in their station. Sasha and I lit candles: me for my
grandmother and my daughter. There was a lingering trace of the
incense, and the longer you were in there you more you became aware
of the scarcity of light, the thickness of walls, the appearance of
little doorways turning ever further in. I went into a sidechapel
dedicated to the Virgin and found I was praying to her ikon, a
rather modern (last century?) one, about all my family's troubles
and needs. I thought that to be in this space was to be travelling,
that it was like a spaceship, that the ikons were all cosmonauts and
you were squashed into their capsule with them, a golden, dark,
concentrative space that it was hard to want to come out of
Eventually, I came out into the sunlight and looked at the strange
puffy green and blue domes, half edible, half interstellar. It was
time to head back to the dacha.
(Back to
top)
28th May
On the way I talked
with Sasha about her childhood: her father being some sort of
high-placed inspector of trains, the family had just travelled
everywhere in Britain by
train, and she had these lovely liberating memories of waking up
just anywhere in the British
Isles. We also talked about how people are shut off from
their own creativity as part of the process of becoming part of a
peer group as an adolescent, and as part of the process of being
educated in analytical method, the attempt to assay and measure
being analogous to the incessant gauging of our characteristics as
appropriate or not for a social group, and how this rebounds in
later life when both the self and the industry employing the self is
turning to a flawed concept of creativity to rejuvenate their
different needs and activities. When we got back, Gareth and a young
woman who had also been there the previous evening had turned up for
the reading, together with a number of Russians, some of whom had to
be the local poets, and one of whom must be the poet's
daughter-in-law.
We went into the
house, which was sparse and full of aged cleanliness, things being
placed and left, rather than nudged by usage. There was a dining
room table looking out on the birches from beneath a heavy light
fitting: five dark branches supporting smoked cones of glass, these
dangling from an eight curve-pointed plaster star. On the table by
the entrance sat a bulky box radio with a tiny TV screen budding in
the middle of it. Opposite the dining table and between a cabinet of
glassware and the door leading through to the rest of the house was
a white marble bust of a woman with a chipped nose, who was turned
to inspect a large creamy fridge hiding behind that opened door. The
walls were busy with his father's paintings and sketches, the former
mainly large female nudes, the latter rural ink exteriors, which
induced a strange perspective: lush flesh bending and creasing over
little monochrome farms. On the other side of the table with the TV
was another door leading to a kind of sun lounge, where there was a
long table filled with biscuits and teacups. There was an atmosphere
of ‘We shall mill exceedingly for a while’, so I went through to the
rest of the house.
Across the hall was
another death room: almost empty, a flower on a couch and a portrait
on an easel. I didn't go in, just stood in the hall looking up at
the stairwell being reminded of things. This was all like the way
those houses of dead relatives stick in your memory: at a previous
point, unused, preserved. It was like those dreams where I walk into
my grandparents' houses, it was like an amalgam of them: a crowd is
chattering in the bright rooms and the rest is bare, silent, full of
brown and white shadows, a soft blush of terror, the attempt to
remember what is upstairs. I went back through like crossing a
border or switching a channel, and went to find the toilet. On my
way out, in the entrance porch part where they sell tickets and
books and cassettes, I saw a photo of the young Pasternak with his
immense eyes and swollen cheekbones: the elongation of his face
suddenly reconfigured into that of Buster Keaton. I recognised that
I was in deep, in a place that fitted with my own deep nature. I
found myself checking details as the daughter-in-law began speaking,
Sasha translating: died 30th May, 1960, so would have seen this day
in his last year; said everything he'd done he owed to his father;
the panes of the room have the same clearly visible ripples I saw in
James's flat: some positioned vertically and elongating the birches,
some placed horizontally and making them slightly more squat.
The proper guide, a
tall lean grinny man that kept making me think of Yevtushenko, now
took over, saying that as we were going to hear a lot of poetry
today we might as well hear something by Pasternak. He then
positioned his upper torso on some imaginary shelf in mid-air and
delivered in an orotund and empassioned tone a short Pasternakite
ditty. He was to do this several more times in an effort to keep a
balance between Boris and the rest of us. Eventually we went
upstairs into an austere double room: bed, divan, bookcase (the
boots that Ken had been eagerly awaiting), the division, a desk,
another bookcase concealed by the angle of entry, a standy-up-at
sloping desk, some very small pictures. That was it. Bare boards and
broad windows: the birches before, the woods behind. Much commentary
on the austerity, how few books, a few poems delivered from the
invisible but fully portable shelf, and an extraordinary moment
during a peroration on one of these topics in which the little
babushka (these women sit almost completely still everywhere you
turn: the whole of the literary history of Russia, its art, is being
watched to see what it might do) stood up and exhorted him, as far
as I could see, to be even more passionate, even more definite on
Pasternak's importance to ordinary Russians. This degree of
engagement was beyond anything I've ever seen in an equivalent
British institution: I began to wonder if she'd known or worked for
the family, or if this was just the case, that was how people
felt.
Eventually we went
back to the conservatory bit, where a samovar had appeared, to my
great excitement, and we began to squash ourselves around the table,
between the babushkiy and the biscuits. Sugar cubes, lemons,
Pringles crisps, pistachios: it was a feast without substance. I had
several croissant-shaped biscuits called glagol (verbs). On my left
sat Lena, and on her left the little passionate woman; on my right a
larger woman who kept being left out of the biscuit-handling
sessions, so I passed her things whenever they came within reach.
Beyond her sat Ken, and beyond him, in the curved end of this glass
extension, two local poets. The little woman wanted what looked like
a tub of margarine, which turned out to be runny cheese. My samovar
tea turned out to be pretty tea-like but I nonetheless regarded it
as marked with specialness and sipped it slowly.
First the woman read,
rather well I thought given that I couldn't understand a word, and
for only a few minutes, then the man. He had a book filled with
slips of paper, and appeared to be going right through it as fast as
he could. I was being told she was good but he was terrible, and
then it was my turn. I read the two or three poems that this place
reminded me of: North-Easterly small towns, summery-sinistery
pastorals, cathexese of death, but kept the intros light. Then Ken
read the vodka poem and the chicken poems and we all fell about. It
felt like a really good reading even the media people spoke to us
afterwards about how good it had been. I was beginning to really
like having my intros translated as I went: it charged you up for
the poem; and I was starting to read differently, giving slightly
more weight to the rhythms, that thing that Debbie says I do that
teeters on the edge of being mannered that I think of as being drawn
into the words. It's terribly important to read less than you're
supposed to, not to yield to the enthusiasm of the audience.
After, the director
and his wife and I talked about the rundown-ness of Brechin and the
beauty of the Pictish stones coming out of their wooden cases in the
spring. Gareth and I spoke more and he said he was going to write to
Kenneth White, to reinaugurate that relationship. As we got into the
car to leave I began to realise that I was starting to leave
Moscow even as I was
being driven back to it, that I was now on the outward trajectory. I
realised I'd forgotten my coat and ran back into the house for it,
obviously not wanting to leave all that past even though it was
unliveable in.
We came back packed
in the car with some friends of Ken's who were going to Kazakhstan
(perhaps) but who wanted to accompany us to the next reading at the
Caledonian Club: these were two women of perhaps sixty, one his old
friend and the other her landlady, who looked rather like each other
in a warm blonde and bustley-dressed sort of way, and a younger
woman whose degree of engagedness I couldn't ascertain. I was trying
to establish a different set-list for the next reading (I'd decided
not to duplicate in any given Russian city), and wasn't paying much
attention to the view, though I did establish that the shiny dacha
roofs were made of zinc, and got one last shot of children playing
on the tanks outside the military museum. Then we were back in
Moscow, rolling around the garden ring, past the usual sights - the
church where Pushkin got married, a statue of Gogol, the place where
a large ballerina had fallen off the top of a building and crushed
passers-below - and thinking about where the Caledonian Club might
actually be.
29th May
Now cars started
peeling off, separating, stopping to consult and failing to catch up
with each other. Eventually Alex pulled up outside a plaque and
entrance on a sidestreet, and we went bounding up the stairs. A very
large gentleman with a sandy-coloured beard stood halfway up shaking
hands, and when we reached the landing and started hanging coats on
a stand, people bustled by into a big room to the left of the
stairs. I went to the toilet and came out to find everyone had gone
in but a small balding long-haired very Russian-fizzoged man with
ginger beard and no moustache was standing there dressed in a
reddish kilt with matching bagpipe (mor, not small) waiting for his
very loud moment. I scurried in on waves of it reminded of the Burns
Brunch in Grasmere where
they'd had to pipe in a tureen of cockaleekie soup.
Many solemn people
sat facing a double flag: a white saltire on a blue background, and
a blue saltire on a white background. The room was full of display
cases about a Soviet writer with military connections - not
Gorky but nearly,
certainly not Scots. Ken and I sat on squeaky chairs with a low
table between us, and a fluent young man with soft curling-away hair
and beard spoke for a while about Russo-Scottish connections,
Lermontov, trade links and possibly football. Then I tried a few
Scottish poems on them which they appeared to understand if not to
understand that these could be amusing, then some that weren't
intended to be amusing to see if it would work backwards (it didn't,
but they started warming), and finally blasted out a version of
Cabaret McGonagall because it was the last thing I would be reading
in Moscow and it surely didn't matter. Ken read the wonderful Poem
to be Translated and some more chicken poems, which they didn't
cotton onto immediately were supposed to be funny either, but the
whole thing ended amicably enough with a few questions.
Towards the end of
Ken's set I was asked in elaborate dumbshow from tall bearded man
through Lena if I knew
any Gaelic, and I regretfully explained in dumbshow back that I did
not. Then the soft-haired gentleman delivered another happy speech
about the same sorts of topics as before, pointing out various of
the more granite-chopped types as being direct descendants of
Barclays Bank and so on and - just as I expected to be wheeched
through to another room for whisky-drinking and general merry-making
(not that I felt like drinking a great deal of whisky), the piper
man leapt up with a short aged man tucked under one arm who happened
to be clutching a fiddle and this duo made their way forward, Ken
and I having been shown to seats in the front row. These then
commenced playing reels and slow airs in strict rotation: first a
slow one then a fast one then a slow one with occasional pauses for
applause and for the piper man to move from thankfully small pipes
to guitar and back. The little man cooked up some wild jiggery and
Lena kept asking me if
this was authentic: I had to say it was very like things I had sat
through as a child, though to be truthful the lack of an accordion
prevented my Jimmy Shand nightmare from being complete. I ended up
quite enjoying this demonstration of the two modes of Scottish
thinking: manic and melancholy with no transition, and I even saw
Ken's toe tap, though presumably not the one on his collapsed
foot.
Then finally we were
let through into a small room containing trays of biscuits and
bottles of Russian wine which was not good. The soft-haired beardy
was discussing Dundee United's form with me, if form was the right
word, and another bald and bearded man with the glittering
spectacles of the fanatic came up to explain that his daughters had
both been to Dundee. I think sending one would have been sufficient,
but saw no reason to curb such enthusiasm. Later he and a daught
sang some tunes I can't remember along the lines of
Scotland the
Brave, The Skye Boat Song and (though probably not) Donald Whaur's
Yer Troosers? followed by a rather haunting Georgian song which,
given their selection so far, was probably to do with extracting
sheep from domestic appliances. Disillusion set in still further
when the one woman in the audience who'd been listening with what
looked like a glint of intelligence sidled up to me to explain that
she too was a poet and she had even translated a British poet called
J.R.R. Tolkein.
Finally I spoke to
the piper whose elderly mother translated for us, she at least
appearing a woman capable of irony. I told him the story about the
MacNeil of Barra sending his piper (though I think it was his bard)
up to the top of the castle (which could have been on Gigha) to
announce ‘The MacNeil has dined, now the rest of the world may eat.’
He punched his fist several times at this, it obviously
corresponding exactly to his picture of the Scottish soul. Then he
asked me about his playing, and I said I did exactly the same thing
in my poetry: first lyrical, then fast with lots of double rhyme,
which seemed to ring depressingly true. By this point I wanted to go
away, so, having shaken the proud little fiddler's hand and the very
tall bearded man's hand and the hand of the soft-haired man who knew
the terrible truth about Dundee United, we all piled out in a hurry
to get to a decent restaurant and eat something other than
wafers.
(Back to
top)
1st June
Finally we went to a
Georgian restaurant. People had been promising this all through my
stay and here it was...but just before arriving Sasha decided we
could just about manage a lightning Bulgakov tour, so down the mean
street of the maddened poet we went one more time, and to the
Patriarchs' Pond - which turned out to be a square surrounded by
houses, not unlike the Stobbie Pond in Dundee. Again, we were shown
where real and imaginary people (and satanic cats) had lived as
though there were no division between them, and again I realised how
perilously close to being true this is: it's only an article of
faith in the human, barely preserved in scratch-marks and
scar-tissue on some dusty lobe, that enables us to regard the little
we know of former lives as more significant than the equal quantity
we know about characters whose existence is ensured by print.
Perhaps that's why we need biography: only paper can finally prove
we are more than those who existed only on paper.
We drove round to
Bulgakov's flat and entered a courtyard where the graffiti
pronounced Micky Mouse to be dead, and found an iron door, very
locked, had been placed on the entrance to the block Bulgakov's flat
had been in. We had been going to look at the efflorescence of more
literary graffiti on the walls of the tenement lobby, but apparently
the new owners didn't want Bulgakov groupies hanging around. Sasha
tried ringing up and indeed shouting. A couple of youth wandered
over to see what was up: slightly aggressive looking young Russian
males who then seemed entirely mollified by our motivations.
Moscow seems a place with
a totally different attitude toward the concept of ‘highbrow’. On
the iron door was scribbled, ‘Please get rid of this door: it's
ruining our lives.’ As we went back to the car, Alex said that was
the first time I hadn't been lucky since arriving: I said I'd
enjoyed not getting in quite a lot, but I could see it was becoming
time to go.
Eventually we arrived
at the restaurant, a dusty little parking space filled with mafia
BMWs and overlooked by a dark wood balcony. Inside there was a
nearly life-sized recreation of a Georgian cooking fire staffed with
peasant dummies: you threw money in the pot. Then a space to hand
coats over to someone who looked like he owned the place, strange
models of village life behind glass frames, all flattened to the
pane like ant colonies, rooms with violinists, grand pianos, stairs
in corners, private rooms where diners glanced at you dismissively,
possibly private balconies: a total warren of dark wood and shining
tableware, a sense of being followed by a rug, always hanging on a
wall near you, then into a room which had a waterfall at one end
with three people, two elderly macarena-like men and a younger
fleshy dark-haired woman, singing close harmonies in front of it,
and a dark wood bar at the other which it seemed safer to be near,
so we all gathered round a table between it and the entrance to the
balcony we'd seen from the car. The waterfall was pouring over a lot
of fake rock apparently directly into this band's electrical
equipment.
The group consisted
of Alex, Sasha, Lena,
Olga, myself, Ken, Ken's friend, her landlady and younger friend.
Alex was appointed toastmeister (talabar?), though in fact we all
shouted out toasts randomly and vigorously clacked our glasses
together once the wine arrived. This was Georgian red stuff: the
sweet too sweet and the dry too stringent, also alka seltzer water.
‘Here's mud in your eye and a chicken in your ear!’ ‘Lang may yir
lum reek!’ Sasha did a good one impersonating a pompous Russian type
talking officialese about the importance of cultural links between
our great nations. By now the food had started arriving:
lasagne-like cheese pie, various bean pastes, green and red, bread
with eggs sitting in hollows, chicken in strange lemony-looking
sauce, aubergine stuff that was more than Mediterranean, salad bowls
containing great shoots of flat-leaf parsley.
The female crooner
cranked up the volume of the backing tape, laid out her CD, and was
blasting out greatest hits while we shouted to each other about
shishes. Several of us retreated to the balcony, Sasha mimed to the
songs, and a man got up and did violent ‘cossack’ dancing, so
Lena and I got up and
danced too, though somewhat more genteelly. In between blasts, Ken
and his friend related how they'd met, teaching on one of the
innumerable dodgy Oxford summer schools: she was quite a
grandiloquent type, clear and cherishing about her own
eccentricities, though she kept asking me to slip her another glass
of the not-to-anyone's-palate wine (it didn't help that we had three
varieties of sweet to one of dry). Alex pronounced himself very fond
of this wine, though, because he had to drive, he had to stick to
Coke and we had to drink it on his behalf.
Next blast the singer
was wandering between tables and came over and shook her finger at
the still-miming Sasha, amused but in control of the room. So Sasha,
typically fearless, leapt up and got her to dedicate the next song
to Ken, since he was going to Georgia. He'd
been smoking on the balcony during our last fling, and had to adjust
rapidly as she approached, trilling, and got him up to dance and
gave him a kiss, the mistress of all she warbled at.
Eventually kebabs
arrived with nifty gravies and sauces, and I had what might have
been sturgeon-on-a-stick, and we discussed the habit of drinking tea
with a sugar lump clenched between your teeth (drinking with your
teeth), and what it did for conversation. Sasha said there was an
even more abstract custom, employed by the especially impecunious
and philosophy students, which consisted of drinking tea whilst
looking at a sugar lump: this was drinking with your eyes. By this
time, Lena was getting worried about my train, though Alex was still
fairly laid back, permitting himself a sip of the few remaining
drops of red before we ducked out, having arranged to all meet up at
the station for a traditional farewell, which according to Sasha
should involve vodka in some liberal dowsing manner.
Alex and I went back to the flat, where he
watched a strange variety show which seemed to involve a
wholesome-looking dance group performing filthy satirical songs
against various glittery quick-painted backdrops, whilst I stuffed
things in my case, checked the entire flat from top to bottom
(totally overlooking my unused waxed jacket which was hanging on the
peg by the door) and had what turned out to be my last piddle of the
night (though not the last one I wanted to have). Then, me
discreetly saying farewell to my benign flat, we strolled down to
the car and cruised through the cool late night streets towards the
station.
Three main stations
line both sides of an enormous road full of side lanes and parking
spaces (all taken). Leningrad Station is reasonably Muscovite in
style, but the other two look like churches, palaces, vast numbers
of them, anything but something a train or two might pull up in.
Entering the station was to be plunged into memories of Milan's
stazione or Grand Central: vast marbley spaces echoing with the
quiet way in which travellers handle their confusion, bright little
booths selling anything, all duplicating each other, blearier ticket
and information points, the Lenin statue with birdshit on his head,
the succession of vaster rooms before any kind of exterior. I had a
strange moment when we got to the platforms of looking at the
noticeboards to see where the trains were going, before realising
that of course all these trains were going to St
Petersburg. We were at almost the end,
marching down an endless curve of maroon train with something
beginning ‘kras-’ that I knew meant red, and something that spelt
‘strella’ that Alex told me meant ‘arrow’.
Eventually we reached
my carriage and went and had a look at my compartment: it was
exactly like the continental couchettes that had taken me to
Italy so many
times in the eighties: four bunks with envelope sheets and fuzzy
soft blankets. There was a little row of mineral water bottles and
funny bulbous teacups without handles on the tiny table by the
window, and various ingenious coathook/lightswitch arrangements.
Alex showed me the secure steel box under my lower bunk, but the
suitcase wouldn't fit into it so I shoved my reading bag in there
and wodged my suitcase underneath the bunk beside it. The
compartment was deserted, so I had a brief surge of hope that I
might have it to myself, then we went to stand on the platform to
see if the others were coming. Alex smoked, I checked out the night
sky, spotting my only star of the stay, and the minutes ticked by
till it was time to shake hands very profoundly and thank him for
being such a friend, and claim I would be back and start to even
hope it, and climb on board to find I was now sharing with a young
couple and their sevenish-year old son and glance out of the window
as we started moving out to find Sasha running down the platform
waving vigorously, something she kept up for some time as I laughed
and waved back and, gradually, the endless platform gave way to
vague industrial sights and the sense of closure and finally falling
night that realising the time and how tired I was induced.
I lay on my bunk and
peered at the St Petersburg guide for a
bit, though I couldn't focus and kept wondering how this family were
going to get through their goodnight rituals. Eventually the son was
slung into an upper bunk, from which he issued urgent requests for
the breakfast trays the attendant had handed round. Eventually the
woman headed for the bathroom with a dressing gown and I decided to
climb into my envelope. Lying there trouserless I was beginning to
contemplate the state of my bladder and thinking I shouldn't have
drunk so much of the fizzy water bottle (pity you don't have marks
on your stomach showing how much of a litre is in there), when she
came back, the bloke slung himself up and the attendant shoved a
piece of red plastic onto the door lock, showing how to slap this so
we were sealed in, she slapped it, and there we were, sealed in.
I lay there a bit
more, picking my nose in a frenzy of displacement activity whilst
contemplating my idiocy, wondered if my bladder training extended to
this situation or whether I should just wake everybody up, then fell
asleep before deciding.
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