Moscow Diary

by Marjorie Farquharson

  Friday 20 March

  With Helena safely in St Petersburg, Irina reappeared and even took me up to the station to see me off on the night train to Leningrad. The delegation of US scientists has now finished its visit to her institute. They were young, had streaming colds, and looked in a bad way. Irina said people at the institute had decided they were spies and had even held a meeting about it, and resolved not to give away any secrets. Irina said all this was to cover the fact that no one had turned a hand to prepare for their visit. Welcome to 1992 and the world fight against AIDS. The Institute Director had asked Irina what she thought about the delegation. Irina said it was no secret that Russian medicine was decades behind the West, so what on earth could they have been spying on? This is what I like about her. She’s a minority of one, and honest in a dishonest world.

  I had got all my boxes of belongings ready for shipping and spent the day tied to the house, waiting for a driver who didn’t come. He finally rolled up at 8.30pm, just as we were leaving for the train.

  Saturday 21 March

  St Petersburg is also packed with traders. I bought Lyuda and Viktor a bottle of coffee liqueur at 6.30am, then joined them for our last cognac breakfast.

  I had gone there to say goodbye to them, but in the end we set off so late for my return train that I suddenly had to bolt for it without saying a word to them. I only caught it because it was two minutes late, and I found Helena on board, about to sail off to Moscow on her own with no key and not a word of Russian. Felt ill for about an hour after the run.

  Sunday 22 March

  Helena went back home to the UK today, but before then we had a raucous and boozy lunch at the Teplitskys’. Natasha had given her English-language pupils some advertising slogans to match up with pictures. When she produced, “It’s the very best way to start the day…”, all her pupils had pointed to the picture of a bottle of cognac.

  In the evening I went to John Crowfoot’s, to get his verdict on a translation of some memoirs I have done for him. I think he must have slated it in private, because his wife fussed round me with food, as though she was trying to soften the blow, and for the first time addressed me as “ty”. To me, however, he restricted himself to saying that my style is very dry. “You do read books, don’t you?” he asked concernedly. It felt a bit hollow insisting, “Yes, honest,” when there was obviously no evidence of it. Years of Amnesty style leaving their mark, I think.

  There were around twenty people at the Quakers, among them two visitors from the US, who immediately dominated the conversation afterwards with loud reminiscences of Colorado. Seventeen interesting Russians sat in silence. It is hard to imagine two Russians coming to a Colorado Quaker meeting and instantly taking over. I got quite angry, and depressed too.

  Monday 23 March: My last week in Moscow

  A death penalty case from Krasnodar is due to come before the Russian Supreme Court this week. Today the lawyer asked to meet me. She is a middle-aged lady and former Secretary of her District Party Committee, who was staying in Moscow with an acquaintance. She had read about Amnesty in Komsomolskaya Pravda and the acquaintance had seen the Human Rights Day slot on TV. So it seems our publicity has been reaching middle Russia. The lawyer was intensely nervous about her case.

  Afterwards I said my goodbyes to Natalya Vysotskaya, sitting on a bench in a park. She is totally burned out. We realised all our conversation is about rapists, murderers, arsonists etc. we know in common, and it made us quite giggly.

  Tuesday 24 March

  Since laundry prices were freed, the laundries have apparently stopped doing their “express” (i.e. five-day) service. I eventually tracked down a laundry, handed the stuff over, then found out it will only be ready on 8 April, when I’m already in London. Took it all back and had to cart it with me to lunch at the Café Orient with a visitor from the human rights group, Helsinki Watch. It was the first time I’d met her and privately I was waiting for the moment when, like other US visitors over here, she would tell me how much she loves her own country. However, it turns out she is strongly against the death penalty and said of the USA: “Talk about arrogance and complacency!”

  In the evening I returned bedding to Yelena and her mother. They each staggered to the front door, looking the worse for wear, and I discovered they had an exhausting stranger visiting them: an ex-prisoner who recited Valentin Zek’s poetry at the drop of a hat. We were all inventing pretexts to call each other out of the room and get a break from him.

  Wilhelm Fast from Tomsk was also visiting them. He’d been at the Congress of Soviet Germans, which is getting increasingly militant about Yeltsin’s treatment of them. Wilhelm will also be going to the Congress for an Independent Siberia. They want to own all their own resources and ban foreign investment. Although I could understand their wish for autonomy I didn’t understand the economic thinking, and when I asked him about it he didn’t seem to either. It was like some eighteenth-century idea of a static “common weal”, based on land.

  By contrast, today I passed a row of old ladies in the metro, who were selling the Financial Gazette and Guides to Taxation. When I picked up my mail from the old flat I also overheard the landlord negotiating a lorryload of Belgian goods from St Petersburg docks. All changed days since last year. It’s changed so much, you feel there’s either some strong mercantile instinct getting its head, or that it’s totally superficial and can be swept away at a stroke.

  Trade has fallen so dramatically for my old laundry since the price rises that its two departments have been knocked into one and half the premises are now for rent.

  Wednesday 25 March

  I went out early to visit the Russian Supreme Court, which was hearing the Krasnodar death penalty case on appeal in open session. A woman in a blue cardigan unlocked the courtroom and shouted at the defence lawyers, “Are you just having a get-together, or are you here for the trial?” This was the prosecutor.

  It was a fascinating trial to watch, though I’ve read about them a thousand times. One judge read a book and periodically looked out of the window. The Chair of the Bench interrupted the defence, the prosecutor interrupted the chair, and also insisted on having first look at any papers the defence intended to hand to the bench. At one point the chair literally exchanged looks with the prosecutor and rolled her eyes heavenwards. Presumption of innocence rules OK.

  When the judges retired to deliberate, a bitter squabble broke out between the prosecution and the defence, at quite a personal level. The prosecutor said she was happy to hear a defence speech, as long as it didn’t “distort the truth”. She also said that anyway, if there had been a jury, they would have voted for a death sentence in the case too. That’s a point: why was there no jury at the first trial? The judges upheld the death sentence. That’s probably how people are condemned to death the world over.

  Anna Bochko and Viktor came round for a joint English lesson in the evening and were marvellously funny in acting out scenes together. We had cake and cognac, and laughed a lot. It was goodbye.

  I did my big Izvestiya interview this afternoon.

  Thursday 26 March

  I ate four meals in rapid succession today. Nina Petrovna invited me to breakfast to say goodbye. She told me how she’d been beaten up in her fifties, she reckons by the KGB. As she left her institute in the evening a young man reeking of vodka came up and started chatting, then beat her up in cold blood, breaking her nose and jaw. You must need to get drunk to beat up an elderly lady without provocation. She kissed me goodbye.

  Straight after lunch at the Soros Foundation, I had another meal with the defence lawyer from Krasnodar, now wanting to help Amnesty in any lawyers’ actions we do. Really, these personal contacts bear some of the best fruit.

  Dashed home just in time to prepare a meal for Irina, come straight from work, and then we went to a wonderful concert of Metner, Rachmaninov and Scriabin, played by the Tchaikovsky P
rize runner-up, Vladimir Ovchinnikov. It was nervy and brilliant and for that reason I found it terribly Russian. Irina found it very Russian too and I asked why. She thought, then said, “Because it is inconclusive sound.” She was tired and unhappy, I think. She says she feels there’s less and less oxygen to breathe. We walked home sharing an umbrella in the rain. She says she won’t see me off when I go.

  Friday 27 March

  What a day. I worked at home and had a stream of people delivering and collecting papers and documents by the hour. Father Nikon came round in the early evening. It’s funny, whenever he is on a high, he starts talking about marketing his hair-removing preparation.

  Saturday 28 March

  Today I had to move my filing cabinet and twelve more boxes from the flat to the office. Siffra nicely came round with her car and we sweated up and down the stairs. When we got to the office Tolya arrived to help us with the carrying, and to put up shelves.

  Viktor had said he would collect my armchair today. When I got home a Dickensian man in black Homburg and long black coat was hovering round my door. He produced his card from his waistcoat, and offered to help me in any way possible. It turned out he owns warehouses and two docks, and is the head of vegetable and fruit distribution in Moscow. Would that I had known earlier! Though why he was collecting my chair for Viktor is a mystery.

  I went to Irina and her mother’s for dinner, and then Irina and I had an evening’s jazz at the Paveletsky Cinema: Keith Jarrett and Wynton Marsalis. I’m resisting any morbid goodbyes with Irina and her mum.

  Sunday 29 March

  Some Lithuanians are asking for help for the relatives of the people killed in Vilnius in January 1991. I went to collect their list of names, and then had a late breakfast with Elena and her family, and we reminisced about how we met in 1989. They gave me a beautiful wooden Siberian honey pot, and want to see me off at the station.

  I checked over my Izvestiya interview in the afternoon with Valery Rudnev and said goodbye to the Quakers. Irina and I met to look round Tolstoy’s museum-house. Rather a gloomy old hole.

  Monday 30 March

  John Crowfoot took me up to meet Semyon Vilensky, the man who compiled the prison memoirs which I will be helping to translate. He told me what my author was like as a person and I got very enthused by the whole project. My woman was the most realistic and most reserved of the group, apparently, and wrote her own memoir only because she disapproved of the sentimentalised memoirs of her friends.

  I spent the afternoon at home packing and receiving a stream of visitors, who were literally passing in the hallway. I finished my last bit of computing, then struck north to Hella and Siffra for dinner and to say goodbye. At about 11.20pm I got round to Irina and her mother’s to deliver my computer and the office money for safekeeping, until my replacement arrives.

  Natalya Ivanovna went to bed, and we sat up talking and drinking port until 2.00am.

  Tuesday 31 March

  I hardly slept. Irina hardly slept because she was on the floor. Natalya Ivanovna hardly slept because she got up at 6.00am to bake me food for my journey. She went to bed and conked out while Irina and I ate breakfast. Then it was time for goodbye. We all sat in silence for the journey, Russian-style. Natalya Ivanovna took my face in her hands and gave me double kisses on each cheek. Irina went limp and somehow wasn’t there. We were all smiling with serious faces, and that was my last glimpse of Natalya Ivanovna, as the lift door slid shut. Very very good people, who really opened themselves to me.

  A frantic day of emptying the PO box, buying and installing a phone, saying goodbye to Tolya, collecting articles from Izvestiya, and taking my leave of my landlord and the Desperate Donnegans.

  From 2.00 to 5.00pm I packed like a loony, helped by Andrey. We too sat in silence for the journey, then he carried all my heavy stuff out to the taxi and on to the train at Belorussia station.

  As we waited in the sunshine up came a delegation from the Moscow College of Advocates, bringing flowers; then Viktor, bringing me a tray. At the last moment Yelena ran up, beaming and beaming, and inviting me to come on holiday with them next year. At a distance from her stood Andrey, dark and deadpan. They actually have a lot of friends in common, but don’t know each other. I leaned out of the window and said, “I don’t want to leave”, and Andrey gestured me to come back. The only person missing was Irina. As the train pulled out I suddenly felt immensely tired and burst into tears.

  I shared a compartment with Igor, a Soviet businessman working in Germany, who had been back home for his father’s funeral and was steadily slugging his way through the vodka. Spent much of the ride on my back looking up at the window. Except for the odd trees, it was empty in Russia and Poland. In Germany it was crossed with electricity wires and pylons. Suddenly a statue on horseback leapt out and filled the frame in Belgium. Everything seemed much more crowded the further west we got. As I raised my head above the parapet at a German station I was astonished at how sexless all the women looked. Not masculine, but sexless. Really a different world, or culture.

  I was the only passenger across Belgium and drifted into nice chats with the two Soviet guards, who brought me their tape deck and played me Yesenin’s poetry. I gave them a picture and they gave me flowers, before helping me with my luggage at Oostende dock. Like Igor, they thought the August coup was not significant – simply a baronial fight in Moscow, which has really changed nothing, That seems to be the accepted wisdom now, as I’ve heard it from several quarters before, and it seems quite true to me. But perhaps the significant things in history are precisely the things that stay the same, and that does not discount the coup.

  When the boat train arrived in Victoria station there was not a trolley in sight, nor a porter. I hung around with my bags for close on forty minutes, accompanied the while by a chatty guard. I asked him if he would help me carry things for a tip. “Oh no, it’s more than my job’s worth,” he actually said. Oh, happy isle!

  Notes

  * * *

  1A Russian historical and civil rights society (NGO) which focuses on recording and publicising the Soviet Union’s totalitarian past, but also monitors human rights in Russia and other post-Soviet states.