Irina came back for soup and beer, and we listened to my Philip Glass tape: minimalist electronic music called Life Out of Balance. When you listen to that and look at Yury Gagarin’s statue outside the window, like some insistent silver boy, it seems a perfect match.
After she left I caught up with Izvestiya. Shevardnadze has gone back to Georgia and Mutalibov has resigned in Azerbaidzhan. The situation seems wide open in both countries.
Sunday 8 March: Women’s Day
Today is also Forgiveness Sunday in the Russian Orthodox Calendar and the day before the Lenten fast begins, so it was pancakes, pancakes all the way.
I took my vacuum cleaner to give to Misha’s wife, and we had a fine time with wine over lunch. She told me that the father of Yegor Gaidar, the Finance Minister, was a national hero in the Second World War, and at school they used to sing a song about him called ‘Gaidar in the Frontline’! Now people are sending in ironic letters to the radio about the young Gaidar and his economic reforms, saying he should be in the frontline too.
The Quaker meeting was very fine today. Afterwards I talked with Marina, who’s a psychologist devising recommendations for reconciliation in ethnic conflicts. The trouble is, they have no one to send their recommendations to. I told her how I’d learned that losing my temper seems to work in office here, but I don’t know how to square it with other things I believe in. She said, “You have to shout, because it’s the only thing they understand”, and then we both laughed, because she doesn’t know how to square it either.
Felt surrounded by great warmth and affection. Misha Roshchin had brought me an inscribed book; Sergey the electrician had brought me a tulip and a book. I was kissed by the elder in the Russian Orthodox Church who handles the key.
Monday 9 March
I’ve three weeks left and in that time I have to pack and ship my things; do interviews with Izvestiya, Nezavisimaya Gazeta and Sovetskaya Justitsiya; and tie up the rent agreement for the office. Hit the road with renewed energy.
The electricity inspectors were round at the office in the early morning. It turns out that the Moscow Electricity Board has no meters (!) and so we have to find and install our own. Tolya is working on getting us a phone, and said that to get it quickly we need to give the secretaries a “present”. I went to a hard currency shop and bought a big tin of foreign biscuits. We also need to chivvy up the Health and Safety people, and I actually contemplated giving the inspector the flowers I had bought – but decided against starting on this path. However, when I saw her sitting in her bleak room, I offered her a carnation to cheer it up and we exchanged a complicated sort of look. I then went back to the Bureau of Technical Administration to pick up our replacement ground plan for the office. They hadn’t done it – but something seems to have changed there. The doors are open, people are busy and they were full of pleasant apologies for keeping me waiting.
A funny thing today: I popped back into the flat at midday, picked up the phone, and the mouthpiece reeked of vodka. First time I’ve noticed anything strange in the new flat. I wonder who, and when. When I picked up Amnesty’s letters from the PO box, several were torn open and one arrived closed, but empty.
Tuesday 10 March
This was a bit of an endurance test. The morning went on paying bills to the Electricity Board and telephone station, then doing the ninety-minute-round hike to the photocopying shop. In the afternoon the Armenian Embassy called me in to give me their death penalty statistics, and I went on the search for my train ticket home to the UK. I had three false starts, then eventually found a bureau that would sell tickets to a foreigner with a credit card, travelling on their own, across the border. It’s on Petrovka Street. It was a two-hour wait in the queue, and I listened to two women behind me discussing how they were travelling to “capitalist countries”. I asked them what they called a “capitalist country” nowadays. One of them looked at our empty service desk and said bitterly, “Capitalist countries are where they sell tickets.”
After she saw my visa and that it was issued by the Foreign Ministry, the ticket woman became immensely ingratiating and almost flirtatious. It was quite nauseating while she was flicking away Russian customers at the same time.
In the evening I wound up at Tolya’s for another exchange of bills and papers. By this time it was 9.00pm. I wondered which woman would be with him this evening, but he was alone and thoroughly enjoying the space and solitude of his empty flat.
Wednesday 11 March
This was one of those days that went on castors and totally lifted my spirits. The six boxes arrived from Customs! Only five months late.
Two editors from a law journal in Yaroslavl outside Moscow rolled up unexpectedly, with proposals for cooperation with Amnesty. He was a people’s deputy for his region and she had taught law to one of the judges on the Russian Constitutional Court. They were very middle of the road, but for that reason very interesting. They think repression is on the increase in Yaroslavl and fear their paper will be shut. They described the coup as a “fight between clans” and said it had nothing to do with Yaroslavl. They were simply forced without a moment’s notice to take sides. Words like democracy, “right” and “left”, have no relevance to today’s situation, according to them. I see what they mean.
In the afternoon I managed to change £100; pay more bills; collect a decree from Nikita at the Moscow City Justice Department; and – most amazing of all – get an estimate of the utility charges our office will have to pay from a pleasant woman economist at the REU office.
Zaure is visiting Moscow from Alma-Ata, and I spent the evening with her at her friends’ house. We had a splendid dinner, then Zaure read our fortunes in our coffee cups, using the opportunity to say what she really thought of us. One of the women fared rather badly. Zaure said to me, “The easy part of your life is behind you.” Blimey.
I enjoy these easy and daft Russian evenings. Zaure is a bit of a riddle. She has the easy and constructive manner of some intelligent women who did quite well in the Party, and she’s also got their puritanism and idealism. She has apparently pushed her sister into becoming a broker in the commodity exchange, which is in Alma-Ata’s old Palace of National Economic Achievements. When she said this a delightful, ironic and enigmatic expression passed over her face. I would love to know what she was thinking at that point.
Thursday 12 March
Tolya was round at 8.00am to collect receipts and go to the telephone exchange. He has managed to beat down our installation bill. He’s certainly being an immense help.
After preparing the mailing for London in the morning, I went to the office to interview a man who is convinced he’s being persecuted by the KGB. Most of the country seems to be sick with this feeling. He was the director of an institute and had a good and intelligent face. As a director he’d spent his working life literally surrounded by KGB people on his staff and in his circle of acquaintances. At a certain point he became obsessed with the idea that someone was going through his flat, papers and fridge. Everything he said I notice in myself and in other people here. Eventually he tried to drown himself, but couldn’t because he was a good swimmer.
The poor guy then went to the police station and asked them to arrest him, to stop this threatening feeling. So they did, and he was put in a psychiatric hospital. The water there had been turned off and all the cups of all the various slobbering patients were being washed in the same bowl of water. He tried to bolt, so they pumped him full of drugs. I think he was a bit off his hinges, but it was hard to separate reality from paranoia, and most of his reactions to me were totally understandable. It was obvious that he didn’t trust me either. I opened the window because it was hot and he kept turning to it nervously, as though there was a microphone hidden outside.
Irina and I went to see the actress Margareta Terekhova opening the premier of her new film, We Are Not Mad Men. It was an evening when I was terribly impre
ssed by Irina’s comments on people and on acting. From within her four walls there’s this great big brain following and absorbing everything. Her phone keeps being cut off and is drowned with background noises.
Friday 13 March
I think Tolya and I spent the day in futile bureaucratic pursuits. Eight hours later he rang to say the Electricity Board now wants us to produce architects’ plans for the houses next to our office, to find out where the electricity cables are. *!*^?
Andrey came round for dinner and told me about his hunger strike in psychiatric hospital. Apparently he was in Abramtsevo. When he found out my brother is a psychiatrist, the cup which was nearly at his lips came down to the table with a bang. “Sorry, involuntary reaction,” he said.
Saturday 14 March
Helena came out to visit from the UK today and I picked her up from the airport. Her arrival started an odd chapter with Russian friends, as I discovered. Irina was round for lunch beforehand and I wanted them to meet, but Irina didn’t want to. All the more touching that she bought us both tickets for a Chekhov play on Wednesday night.
Sunday 15 March
I locked us out of the house again. More “mindfulness” on my part. After taking Helena to the Danilov monastery, the market and the Quakers, we went round to Viktor’s place for his mother’s birthday party. They lived up to eccentric form, showing Helena the carrier bag with his grandmother’s ashes in it.
Viktor’s mother told me that from now on I must speak only English with Viktor, to give him practice. I accidentally said something in English to her, and a blank look passed over her face, before she said royally, “But to me you may speak Russian.” Viktor says he is reading only English now, because it gives him “less information”. He’s drowning in all the news. Me too.
I worked until 2.30am, sending emails to London.
Monday 16 March
Helena struck out into town on her own, with only my map and her English vowels to save her from destruction.
I did more mailings, then met Irina briefly to pick up our theatre tickets. She was going to interpret for a group of young scientists from the USA, who are visiting her medical research station and are anxious to share statistics on AIDS, rabies etc. The paper in Russian, which they had sent in advance, had got lost in the office, no one had read it, and the office were totally unprepared for their visit. Irina was embarrassed at the berkish questions she was having to interpret. It sounds like something from Gogol.
Helena had wanted to meet Andrey, so he came round for dinner. Here began another unexpected awkwardness. She was telling him about her old job, and how human rights groups used to compete for funds to do projects in South Africa. Andrey said, “Why?”, and I watched the cultural gap open between them and never close. Helena was furious, but too polite to argue and also sorry not to be getting on with a friend of mine. Andrey didn’t mind if they got on or not, and that too was a cultural difference. I realised it is marvellous having Russian friends, but it has never been painless.
Tuesday 17 March
Big tension was expected in Moscow today, as members of the old Soviet Parliament assembled to agitate for a return to the old USSR. Although I saw red flags and some knots of people outside the Moskva Hotel, they were smaller than the crowds selling shoes and shirts round the corner at Kuznetsky Most. Moscow’s becoming like New York. If you’ve got the money you can buy champagne at 6.00am and a jumper at 11.00pm. You see huge throngs in the street, which last year would have been a pro-Yeltsin gaggle. This year it is traders standing in lines along the pavements with pedestrians slowly moving through, trying on this or beating down the prices for that. The bottom of Gorky Street, Kuznetsky Most and the Lubyanka are almost impassable. It is certainly good to see cheese – and different varieties too – beer, and wines up from Tajikistan and Karabakh. There was nothing like it last year.
Today I was supposed to meet the paranoid man again in the office, but would you believe it the telephone engineers decided to install our phone there today. Tolya asked them to postpone it, to save the man’s nerves.
There’s a settlement of Old Believers’ Churches just east of Taganka – the Rogozhsky settlement – and this morning Misha Roshchin, a Quaker who is also an Old Believer, took Helena and me round it. They had refused to accept new church rulings in the 1500s, in particular the introduction of crossing yourself with three fingers not two. Hard to believe, but true, and they and their clergy went through years of persecution because of it.
The church was absolutely beautiful. They have kept to the old canons of icon painting and do not use electricity, so have a splendid eighty-four-piece candelabra in burnished metal hanging before the altar. There is a massive wooden scaffold on wheels which they use for lighting the candles. A woman was lovingly sweeping the wooden floor and other old ladies were sitting in the peace and quiet in the sunlight which was streaming in through the windows.
I was quite entranced by the sense of devotion, until a thin old lady in felt boots marched across the church at a fair clip, crossed herself profusely en route past the icons, and screamed that she’d seen me holding my hands behind my back. I begged her forgiveness and she said, “The Lord may forgive you”, but there again he might not. Helena, who was lounging by some shroud, smartened herself up pretty sharpish.
At night I sat between Andrey and Helena at an organ concert, by this time neither of them making much attempt to be friendly with each other. From the back view the organist looked as though he was breakdancing during the complicated bits. As we parted Andrey gave me beetroots and homemade cake from his briefcase. I think that’s the thing about friendships here. You don’t get to know someone through conversation, so much as going through similar problems and helping each other. Conversation comes later. If Helena lived here I think she and Andrey would get on quite differently.
Wednesday 18 March
Today I decided to get our certificate from the Health and Safety people, whatever it took. Yesterday I’d gone for a preliminary recce to the Health Department where, after bawling me out, a woman said quite reasonably, “You know, we’re under no obligation to give you one, we’ve a thousand other things to do.” “Well, why are we under an obligation to get one then?” I asked. “Because it’s a stupid system and totally stuck in a rut,” she said. She reckoned it would take us a month to get it.
Today I went to the Chief Doctor’s office at Kuznetsky Most, where I had first registered our application. There were two receptionists – a man and a woman – sitting in white coats, and one other client sitting in silence. I asked the woman if she could check the register to see what stage our certification has reached. She went barmy and shrieked that it was a waste of her time. I said quietly that it was a waste of my time if she didn’t, and an electric charge went through the room. I said I was prepared to wait, got out my Izvestiya and read it for forty minutes, aware out of the corner of my eye that her nerve was beginning to crack. She rang someone about me and said, “She’s sitting here, as bold as brass…”, and then finally she looked up her blasted register and told me the certificate was across town at their Taganka office, waiting to be typed.
I went over there and found the very nice solitary secretary sitting in the basement, who immediately whipped out her paper and typed up our certificate there and then. Back to Kuznetsky Most, where by this time the woman receptionist had gone and I was treated to the old man, who breathed heavily through his mouth and whispered as he wrote. Still the silence reigned, although I heard him tell a new client that it was pandemonium: they were “never off the phone” and there was “a constant stream” of people coming to see them. True, the phone did ring once while I was there and the old man answered, “Rats? They’re not us! Ring so and so.”
He told me the Chief Doctor was out and would be back very, very late, maybe about 7.00pm. I took out Izvestiya and said I would wait. In fact she was back in about twenty min
utes, spent half an hour giggling with her pal, then signed and stamped my certificate. She was young and the office was heavy with the smell of flowers – obviously a bribeworthy person.
All this took over four hours and it’s hard to keep in mind that it has anything to do with human rights. It is also hard to be human and reasonable with people who are only doing their jobs, while at the same time you feel utter contempt for the system, the work and the aggressive, cowardly and lazy attitude it breeds.
Helena and I went to see The Cherry Orchard at the Moscow Arts Theatre. Shcherbakov, the main actor, had died and there were flowers laid on the windowsills, and a short, moving tribute to him at the start. The British actress Caroline Blakiston was playing the governess, and although she had a tiny part, it became her show, as though she was the compère in Cabaret. Extraordinary and not really a success.
Thursday 19 March
Today was a very beautiful spring morning and I took Helena down to the Kolomenskoye monastery and then to the lovely icon exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery. We came back, lazed and bathed, then I took her up to the station in time for her night train to St Petersburg.
Tolya has managed against the odds to get the ground plans of our neighbours’ offices for the electricity cabling, but the Electricity Board has said it will not give us our certificate for a month. So we can’t get our furniture from London, we can’t get our rent agreement and the order on our premises, and I learned today that the professor who was supposed to be my sparring partner has backed out of the death penalty round table with Sovetskaya Justitsiya. Apparently he doesn’t want to go public and in particular does not want to argue with a foreigner. Since we would have been arguing in Russian, I should have thought he would be at an advantage. This last six-week stint is turning out disappointingly anti-climactic.
Moscow Diary Page 28