by John Mole
“Are you OK, Flor?”
“What are we doing, Mister John?”
“Having a good time?”
“Maybe,” he sighed. I braced myself for an outpouring of Russian soul. “How would I do in America?”
“You’d do just fine.” We stood and watched the snow while our body temperatures plummeted.
“Am I coconut, Mister John?”
“Er...”
“Coconut. Coconuts fall in sea and they go a thousand miles to another place and they grow there.”
“One thousand five hundred people a year are killed by coconuts falling on their heads.”
“Dear God.”
“What is a coconut in Udmurt?”
“Kokoos.”
We went back to the party and I never saw Maria again. On Monday I left on a tour of the farms of the Leningrad district. I was away for three weeks.
The day I got back to the office I went down to see Flor. He was happy because a friend in the Izvestia News Agency had sent him a UN report on wheat production in the Former Soviet Union. I complimented him on a new silver tie, which shone like a fog light in his general mustardness.
“Thank you. My girlfriend gave it”
“How is Maria?”
“Not Maria. Katerina. Mister John, what are your plans for Saturday?”
“Saturday? Oh, I think a friend is getting tickets for the Bolshoi.”
“Oh, that is pity.”
“So who is Katerina? Is she Udmurt?”
“No, she is from Bashkortostan.”
“Where?”
“Bashkortostan. Bashkiria. It is in Urals. Next to Udmurtia. She is like me, her father was Russian and her mother Bashkir, from Ufa.” I knew about Bashkiria. Rudolf Nureyev was a Bashkiri Tatar.
“I see. Is the State Troupe of the Bashkortostan Republic in town?”
“No. Why do you say that? She is accordionist. On Saturday there is national accordion competition in Kremlin Theatre. It is pity you cannot come.”
“What a shame. I love the accordion. Perhaps the next time. Tell me, what happened with Maria?”
“She is living with a Siberian in her grandmother’s dacha”
“What? In this weather?”
“They have stove. Siberians have interesting mushrooms”
“But still”
“He says he is shaman. She wants to be a true Russian.”
“I thought she wanted to be American.”
“She said she could never be a true American. She was Russian pretending to be American.”
“I hope it wasn’t my fault”
“It was mine. I took her to Udmurt show. She said she was so moved she could not speak. She envied me to have such heritage. She said it was such beautiful culture. She decided to discover her rootings. She wants to find Russian self.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s OK. She gave me all her heavy metal. She said I should learn them if I want to go to America. But Katerina and I prefer accordion. Tell me, Mister John, do they play accordion in America?”
Free jazz
I should not like to give the impression that I was swanning around on taxpayers’ money. There was serious work to be done, of a kind that brings a glaze to the eyes of the general reader, but I was assiduous. Fax machines in Moscow and Clapham chattered about yields and options, machinery specs, square footage and rentals, hourly wage rates and annual bonuses. I pored over weekly bulletins on produce prices from the Interfax news agency, market research reports, property newsletters, accounting regulations. We crafted cash flows and business plans, projections and simulations, forecasts and sensitivity analyses. We agonized over turnover per table, meals per occupancy, revenue per portion. I lay awake at night concocting menus, tossed and turned between the merits of cook-chill and frozen. I toyed with Desiree and Charlotte and Marfona into the small hours.
When I was preparing to write this book I dug my old files out of the shed. Hard information would give substance and a sense of mission to the story, I thought. The jewel was the report I submitted to the Know-How Fund, a thesis on fast-food franchising in the new Russia, a brilliant case study of the economics, politics and semiotics of the business and its social context. A year’s work. As I opened the file, disbelief gave way to to panic, which ceded to despair. My fax and computer used thermal printers. The immortal words had faded to white on the heat-sensitive paper. Every page I had saved was blank. It was a wonderful image of the futility of human endeavour. But bloody annoying.
Staffing was critical. Everyone in the business was unanimous that we should not hire anybody who had worked in a traditional Russian restaurant or shop. Service, with or without a smile, was an unknown concept to them. Employees helped themselves before the customer. Takings were reckoned up on the basis of one for them, one for me. Jobs were for life, so there was no disincentive to idleness and poor time-keeping. The only way to circumvent this culture was to hire nobody over 20 years old. Petya found us a core team of five friends from his college. We arranged to send them to London in the summer to work in Jackets.
Afanasy had a fishing friend who was a tax inspector. He briefed me on payroll management. The maximum amount of wages employers could set off against tax was $350 per employee per year. This was far below the going rate of $1200 for crew and $7500 for a manager. This meant that if all our wages went through the books we would end up paying the equivalent of 90 per cent tax on profits. In addition, employers paid 40 per cent of wages in tax and pensions and employees paid 12 per cent income tax. The result was that wages were paid in cash under the counter. There were many other ploys that depended on the compliance of the tax inspector. My favourite was that if you employed disabled people you didn’t have to prepay your tax. What would disabled people do in a restaurant? Nothing. They would not exist. Like Gogol’s dead souls, they would only be names on the staff roster. I looked forward to making them up.
We did market research. Flor’s Bashkiri girlfriend dumped him. To cheer him up I took him with me and Natasha on fact-finding expeditions to our competition. I learned that a Russian restaurant was really a night club, a café was a restaurant, a bufyet was a snack bar, and the equivalent to a pub was a shack where they brewed their own beer in buckets. A rock-hard dried fish that you whacked on the edge of the table filled the culinary niche of a packet of peanuts. I paid Petya to recruit researchers and carry out a traditional market research study among young people. He came back with 100 per cent positive approval. He probably sat down and ticked all the boxes himself. I probed gently, but didn’t make a big thing of it. He grew up in a system in which nobody cared about their opinions and attitudes. The whole idea of marketing, finding out what people want and making it for them, was as alien as it was in 1950s Britain.
To survey the expats, I went to the Thursday Night British Club at the back of the commercial section of the Embassy. It was a large room with about 100 seats around tables, two dartboards and a bar serving seven kinds of beer and three flavours of crisps. It was a home from home, if you patronized working men’s clubs. It was not for EU con sultants and government advisers, oil men and bankers, City lawyers and accountants, anyone on fat expenses. They hung round with the mafia and the valutnaya in the lobbies and bars of the Metropole and the Radisson.
The club was for honest toilers, whose per diems just covered their expenses, getting out of cheap hotels and seedy apartments for a couple of cans of McEwan’s and a game of darts - like Keef, the Rolls-Royce engineer working at an airbase outside town, and Camilla, a young woman just graduated from my old college, who worked for IBM, and Wayne, who had just arrived from Tooting with a truckload of building materials parked outside. Old hands terrified the new arrivals with urban myths, such as people found naked and dead on garbage dumps after taking a cab from the airport, foreigners’ apartment doors stove in by armed robbers with sledgehammers, friends of friends who had been gassed unconscious and robbed on overnight trains. But mostly you could
pick up useful tips about making the most of this alien, confusing and exciting city. Those at the club would all have murdered a Jackets with extra cheese.
On my first evening I sat down next to a chap a bit older and a lot fitter than me, bald on top and grey round the edges, wearing a London Marathon T-shirt and a shiny red track suit. His Brummie twang made me feel homesick.
“Just arrived?”
“Off to Kyrgyzstan in the morning”
“Oh great. Do you live there?”
“No. Sutton Coldfield”
“Land of my fathers.”
“What? Kyrgyzstan?”
“Birmingham.”
“I’m setting up chambers of commerce.”
Kyrgyzstan. A mountainous semi-desert country in Central Asia next to China. Cotton fields and Turkic tribes. Horseback rugby with a headless goat for a ball. Chambers of commerce were just what they needed.
“How are you getting on there?”
“It’s my first time. I’ll be there nearly a fortnight.”
“So long? Do you speak Kyrgyz? Russian?”
“I speak a bit of French.”
“That’ll come in handy. I thought for a minute you were involved with sport. Don’t know what gave me that idea.”
“I was in the marathon. I went straight to the airport.”
I was impressed. I loathe running. And I was envious. What a great caper. Central Asia. With fees and expenses and per diems dripping from the gravy train.
“My luggage got lost. This is all I’ve got. I’ll look a real berk.”
He needn’t have worried. The shell suit is Kyrgyz national dress. I phoned him when I got back to England. He had launched a campaign to twin Sutton Coldfield with Kyrgyzstan’s second city of Osh, on the basis that they are both noted for their television transmitters.
I went out into the street with a picture of the product and a clipboard. Russian reactions were mixed. Many of those who could afford to eat out preferred the chic of McDonald’s. Those who couldn’t afford it would rather spend their money at the markets. One woman didn’t believe the picture was a potato. A middleaged man shouted at me for torturing honest Russians with fantasies. An old lady gazed at the photo, clutched her stomach and burst into tears. Ashamed, I gave her fifty roubles.
I stood outside the McDonald’s in Pushkin Square with my clipboard sampling the queue that snaked around the building. There were about 700 seats inside and about half that number of people waiting to get in. By timing how long they waited, I calculated that the outlet served something like 30,000 meals on an average day. There was a lot less takeaway than in the West, perhaps 10 per cent of the trade. The food was too expensive for street grazing. A Big Mac Meal cost a tenth of the notional monthly wage. There was not much of a peak at mealtimes. Russians did not keep a rigorous timetable for food. If they were hungry or a meal came along, they ate it regardless of the time.
A quarter of the customers were foreigners, mainly tourists but a good sprinkling of expats. The Russians were predominantly under 50, well dressed, middle class, working in the private sector. There were still tour buses from hundreds of miles away come to taste the West, although they were less frequent than in 1990 when the place opened. I noted a coach from Volgograd, 600 miles away. Not long ago they would have been coming for Lenin’s tomb. But I couldn’t be snooty about them. In 1974 McDonald’s opened its first British restaurant in Woolwich, along the South Circular from where we lived. We got the children into clean T-shirts and joined the queues. String fries not chip-shop chips, meat with cheese on it, toasted buns, eating out of cardboard - it was new and exciting and American. That was before trans fats and obesity and rainforests were thought about.
The queue in Pushkin Square was entertained by buskers. The best was a three-piece jazz band: trumpet, snare drum and banjo. They played mainly New Orleans, with “Midnight in Moscow” every fifth number. When he got bored the trumpeter branched out into real jazz and he was very good. He played “Tunisia Nights”. I knew it note for note from my saxophone phase, although my stodgy fingers conjured up more of a wet afternoon in Lewisham than the Maghreb. I slapped my clip board for applause and he bowed.
“Dizzie Gillespie,” I said.
“Bravo. You like Miles Davis?” he replied and launched into “So What”. A bass and a guitar would have been better than a banjo, but it was still pretty good. Once he had been blond and boyishly good looking. Outdoor work and whatever he took to keep him going through the uncertainties of a busker’s life had exacted their toll. But plump trumpeter’s cheeks saved him from scrawniness and his eyes lit up when he played. I asked him where he had learned to play jazz.
“Nowhere.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Have you ever eaten in McDonald’s?”
“Are you joking?”
“Come on”.
The musicians would probably have preferred the money, but curiosity got the better of them. We marched to the head of the queue and, once we had clarified we were going to eat not play, were whisked inside as if on a guest list. We joined the line for one of the thirty serving points and took our trays to a table next to a five-foot-high replica of the Eiffel Tower. I asked the trumpet player again where he had learned to play jazz. As always, you never know how much is true and how much is embellished but, for what it’s worth, here it is.
By training Tomas was a musician, piano and trumpet. In the Time of Stagnation he had been in a theatre orchestra and doing a music degree in order to avoid conscription. But the dramaturge, the literary director of the theatre, overheard him playing jazz one lunchtime. The functionary was a political as well as literary commissar and American jazz was officially frowned on. The pillars of socialism trembled before boogie-woogie. Besides, the dramaturge had a nephew who had just graduated from the conservatory at the bottom of his class and needed a job. Tomas was dismissed.
There was nothing standing between him and the army and he was conscripted into a nuclear missile brigade of the Strategic Missile Force in the middle of nowhere, somewhere between Moscow and the Urals. He was older than the other recruits so was not bullied like the school leavers, but he kept quiet about being a musician. Like everyone else, he got by on booze. From the cleaners of the afterburners to the warrant officers who kept the keys to the firing boxes on chains round their necks, they were all perpetually drunk on bootleg vodka.
The base was a secret town, a ZATO - a Closed Administrative Territorial Formation - called Ozyorni-10. In the Time of the Tsars the settlement had been a staging post and railway station for a few large estates. It went into decline after the collectivization of the 1930s and now depended on the missile base for its existence - or its non-existence. It had been expunged from the maps. Not only was it extremely difficult to get to, it was even more difficult to get out of. The roads were guarded. Passes were needed. The only link with the outside was a bus that came and went once a week, usually empty.
The enlisted men came and went as well, but the senior officers and civilians spent their careers in the place. When their children went to university they rarely came back. The soldiers were confined to their barracks near the silos. Senior officers lived in the town. The commanding officer, his deputy, the director of the labs that kept the weaponry alive, the mayor who kept the town functioning, the head of the collective farm that fed everyone - these were the luminaries of the town and their wives were at the pinnacle of social life. Many officers stayed when they retired. A society had developed that Gogol would have recognized, a nineteenth-century garrison town with locals and exiles obsessed with rank, consumed with lethargy and pining for St Petersburg.
The commandant treated the men under his command as serfs. He supplemented his pay by hiring them out to the town and the collective farm. At the beginning of spring, Tomas’s platoon was ordered to clean up the gardens and common parts of the apartment block where the élite lived. Tomas was hard
at work with a scrubbing brush on the patio when he heard from an open window of a ground-floor apartment the familiar dissonance of the commandant’s youngest daughter doing her piano practice. He leaned through the window and gave her advice. Her mother overheard and invited Tomas inside. She sat him down at the excruciatingly tuned piano. The town’s piano teacher had died three months before and it had been impossible to find a replacement. The upshot was that the commandant released Tomas from rocketry duties, found him a billet with a widow, Natalya, who had an old wooden house with a garden, and engaged him to teach piano to the children of the town.
Tomas was the envy of his comrades. He joined Ozyorni-10’s society, albeit on the lowest rung. He taught piano and singing to children and their mothers, circulating on a bicycle with his music case strapped to the crossbar. When winter came the commandant lent him a driver and a Volga from the car pool. He played music at all the parties. Things went well with the widow Natalya too. He moved from the lodger’s attic to the master bedroom. When he was not giving lessons, he helped in the garden in summer and sat by the stove in winter. He liked the town with its old wooden buildings and the high wooden fences round the muddy courtyards. He liked the countryside, the vast open plains, the clumps of trees on the horizon, the placid river with its reeds and herons. As for his music, he stuck to the politically acceptable and never played jazz, even when he was alone. Besides, he could not keep up to date. He did not have a short-wave radio to get Voice of America. He told himself he would wait to catch up when he got back to Moscow and could seek out cafés and cellars and syncopation’s other dens. He took no risk of being expelled from his Garden of Eden to the rocket silos.