by Mark Kermode
As it turned out it was Ivan (rather than me) who understood the complexities of my predicament. When we arrived at his apartment on the outskirts of Moscow I was duly shown to the phone where I attempted pathetically to make an international phone call. When I asked what the international dialling code was, Ivan laughed sardonically and then tapped a number into the phone which connected me to a sternly unwelcoming operator.
‘Da!’
‘Oh, hello. Sorry. Um. Dosvedanya! No, wrong word – bother. Er, do you speak English?’
‘Da.’
‘Oh, great. I need to make an international call. To England.’
‘England?’
‘Yes.’
‘Phone England?’
‘Yes.’
‘You have booked?’
‘What? What is all this about? Everyone keeps asking me if I’ve booked. What does it mean?’
‘It means “you have booked?” Your international phone call. To England. You have booked?’
‘Have I booked to make a phone call?’
‘Yes.’
‘No.’
‘So, no call. You want to book?’
‘The phone call?’
‘Yes.’
‘To England?’
‘Yes.’
‘Er, yes I suppose so. How long will it take?’
‘Two days.’
‘Whaaaat?’
‘Yes, I know. Is fast. Not so busy right now.’
‘Hang on, you’re saying it will take two days to book a phone call?’
‘Yes.’
‘But I need to call now!’
‘Then you must book.’
‘Now?’
‘Yes, now. And you call in two days.’
My head was reeling. This couldn’t be true. Surely it wasn’t possible that a civilised nation which had defeated the Nazis and been the first to put a man in space didn’t have simple international subscriber trunk dialling? But Ivan had been right all along. I really did need to have booked – which I hadn’t.
So much for the glorious revolution.
I now faced a dilemma – the first of many. I had told Linda that I would phone her the instant I arrived in Moscow. I had failed in this endeavour. Worse, there was no chance of the situation improving in the near future. I couldn’t book a phone call from Ivan’s flat because we were due to ship out of Moscow pretty soon en route to Odessa, after which we would continue on through Ukraine and to the shores of Feodosiya. By the time we got there we would have been travelling for at least three days, on to which I would then have to add the extra two days it would take to book a phone call. Assuming, that is, that they had a phone in Feodosiya, which seemed uncertain. By the time I finally got word to Linda that I was not dead I would be on my way home, and she would surely have succumbed to grieving. In the movie in my head I could see her (played, as I mentioned earlier, by Julianne Moore) waiting by the phone, a photograph of Jason Isaacs propped on the desk with a solitary rose leaning poignantly against it, her face growing darker and more burdened with worry and anguish by the moment …
Of course, in the ‘real world’ (of which everyone seems so enamoured) none of this was happening at all. Linda (rather than Julianne) knew that nothing had happened because there’d been nothing on the news about plane crashes and the like and she just assumed that it was hard to call from Russia. You probably had to book it in advance. But I was now in a state of advancing panic, and nothing would calm my agitation. Nothing except …
‘Alcohol. I need alcohol.’
‘Yes,’ said Ivan pleasantly.’We have vodka. You want some?’
‘No, no, no, I can’t do vodka,’ I said feebly.’Particularly not Russian vodka. I’m not that rugged. Do you have beer?’
‘No, but we can get beer. And see Moscow. We have a few hours. We can see the sights. Your train doesn’t leave until 3 a. m.’
‘You mean 3 “p. m. “’
‘No, I mean 3 “a. m. “ Three o’clock in the morning. Tomorrow morning. About twelve hours from now.’ He produced the train tickets and, as always, he was right. Our train was indeed due to pull out of Moscow at 3 a. m. Bloody hell. It was still early afternoon, and the lightly freezing rain outside was starting to abate slightly, unlike my headache. So we headed off into town in search of beer and the ‘sights’.
Out on the streets, Ivan held out his hand to the first passing car which promptly screeched to a halt in the middle of the road. The driver wound down the window and exchanged a few pleasantries with our guide, before opening his back door to let us in.
‘Is it a taxi?’ I asked.’He doesn’t have a sign or anything.’
‘No,’ replied Ivan, nonplussed.
‘He’s a friend of yours?’
‘No. But he will take us to Red Square.’
‘I see. Why?’
‘I thought you wanted to see the sights.’
‘Oh yes I do, but why is he taking us? If he’s not a taxi. Or a friend.’
‘We will pay him.’
‘So he is a taxi?’
‘No. But we will pay him and he will take us.’
As it turned out, this was how the (non) taxi system worked in Moscow. If you wanted to get somewhere, and you had some money, you simply flagged down a car. Any car. And, for a reasonable remuneration, they might agree to take you to your preferred destination. Sometimes, there would already be other people in the car, perhaps a family with children or elderly relatives. But a mixture of benevolent spirit and earnest entrepreneurism meant that if you had the roubles you could squeeze in with their nearest and dearest and go almost anywhere. Considering the frankly terrible experiences I’ve had with taxis and minicabs in the UK (‘You wanna go where mate? At this time of day/night/year? You’re joking incha?’) it was surprisingly pleasant, if a little unusual.
So roubles changed hands, spaces were found, and off we bumped in an overcrowded Lada (every car was a Lada – clichéd but true). We trundled through uniformly drab streets, past endless municipal housing much of which reminded me of my old Hulme flat in Manchester, and on toward the very heart of what used to be the Soviet Union.
After a while we reached Red Square. It was smaller than I had expected. I could see the Kremlin, which looked a bit like Sleeping Beauty’s castle from Disneyland, only without Tinkerbell. But with a McDonald’s. That’s glasnost for you. The rain worsened a little, and the wind picked up a touch. I spied the entrance to a subway station. I’d always wanted to see the Moscow Metro which, according to legend, was decorated with striking Soviet murals and offered a beacon of hope to those who still believed in the potential benefits of state-run socialism.
Eager to shelter from the weather we all piled down the subway steps and found ourselves in a cavernous underground palace, clean as a whistle, spankingly upkept, with the promised artwork gleaming from every wall. It was magnificent. A train howled proudly out of the tunnel and into the station where Muscovites proceeded to board and disembark in polite and orderly fashion. I thought of the horrors of London’s Northern Line; of being crammed up against jostling bullying louts between Archway and Tottenham Court Road, of endless delays and signal failures, of ripped posters advertising lousy movies and noxious anti-dandruff products, and of illiterate graffiti forcefully inviting me to ‘suk thiz’. I thought of being propositioned by a paedophile at Lancaster Gate on the way home from a shopping trip at the age of eleven, and of Paul Weller getting stuck ‘Down in the Tube Station at Midnight’ and getting beaten up by Nazis who ‘smelled of pubs and Wormwood Scrubs and too many right-wing meetings’. And suddenly the absurd romance of my dreams of Mother Russia came flooding back to me and I was filled with an overwhelming love of Lenin and a powerful desire to defect to the East and spend the rest of my days watching Battleship Potemkin. We were, after all, headed for Odessa …
After a while we trudged back up the steps and on to the Moscow streets, cold and wet and tired, and headed back toward the suburbs of Moscow. Here we m
et Yolena, who would be our translator, guide, and (as would become apparent) guardian angel during the descent into hell upon which we were unknowingly about to embark. Yolena was a student in her early twenties; bright, intelligent, fluent in many languages, solid of character and sunny of disposition. She had agreed to give up a week of her life in order to chaperone a pair of shabby moaning Brits around her country for almost no pay (but rather for ‘the experience’) and frankly we did not deserve her. But as yet we hadn’t realised just how far out of our depths we had drifted nor just how different things were going to be now that we weren’t in Kansas any more.
Yolena took us to her sister’s flat, stopping to pick up some misshapen bottles of what claimed to be ‘beer’ from a ‘licensed’ vendor on an anonymous street corner. Here we were fed and pampered by our hosts whose hospitality seemed boundless. You can say what you like about the Russian state, about its crap economy and rampant corruption (more of which later) and about the stunning inequality between the rich and poor in an allegedly socialist society, but somehow none of that political venality seemed to have brushed off on the Russian people themselves. They were absolutely lovely.
Then again, we hadn’t yet met ‘Mr Nyet’.
Looking back on this episode now, one question rings in my head: What on earth were we doing in Moscow in the first place? I don’t mean that in the cosmic, spiritual sense, but in a very real and material way. Why were we there? Why? Even before we left Heathrow, Nige and I had known that neither Mariano nor any significant members of his crew were going to be in Moscow when we arrived. I’m not even sure now whether they were ever in Moscow – although the film would indeed wind up being edited there several months later. We had already ascertained that the ‘studio’ part of the Dark Waters shoot was going to take place in Odessa, which we had fondly imagined to be somewhere ‘near’ Moscow (in the same way that I had imagined Los Angeles to be ‘near’ New York). In this age of Google Maps it would take most people about ten seconds to discover that Odessa is actually in Ukraine, and nearer to London than Moscow, by some distance. It is also nearer to Kiev, which has an airport, and (crucially) is also in Ukraine. But in my geographically challenged head I think I had simply imagined that in order to get into ‘Russia’ (by which I really meant the former Soviet Union – including Ukraine) you had to go through Moscow, like the magical wardrobe which provided the only access to Narnia. And somehow, even though I knew this was not the case, I had conjured a scenario in my head in which our old pal Mariano, with whom we had got on so well in Pizza Express all those months ago, would have ‘popped up’ from the Odessa shoot to meet us upon our arrival in Moscow and welcome us with open arms before taking us out for a slap-up meal where he could tell us how brilliantly the film was going and how he was going to remember to thank me and Nige personally from the Oscar stage when the inevitable plaudits started rolling in. Knowing me (rather than knowing you) this sounds like exactly the kind of foolishly self-aggrandising scenario which I would have cooked up in my head and then convinced myself was true. Or ‘based on a true story’.
The only thing that was really ‘true’ however was that we were now further away from Mariano and Dark Waters than we had been when we got on the plane in London – both geographically and philosophically. As yet, however, the magnitude of our miscalculation was not quite clear.
Give it time.
At 2 a. m. , we shambled back off to the overground train station, tired, bedraggled, and generally not at our best. The station was largely empty and cold but a few seats in the middle of the vast open terminus offered somewhere to plonk our aching bones while we waited an hour for the train to arrive. As with the subway, the overground station was fantastically clean, a feature which sadly had its drawbacks. As we slumped huddled on to those lonely seats a man with a mop appeared, slopping his sanitary way inexorably toward us from a great distance. Like an escapee from a Samuel Beckett play he traversed great swathes of wide-open concourse, making a bee-line through the vast emptiness to the tiny cluster of chairs upon which we perched. He could have spent the next ten years mopping the empty floor around us on which no one was seated, but for some reason he wanted to mop the exact spot where we had taken root. So, with a few terse words, he got us all to get up and then proceeded to pack our chairs away in a pile and to mop the floor where they had once stood with the vigour of a murderer cleaning fingerprints from the scene of a crime. We stood, bleary-eyed, staring at him, wondering whether he was going to let us sit down again. But he wasn’t. We were going to have to stand. For an hour.
So we stood.
For an hour.
‘Incidentally,’ I asked in a stuporous drawl as the appointed time drew nearer.’How long is the journey to Odessa? Once we actually get on the train …’
‘Twenty-seven hours,’ replied Yolena matter-of-factly.
‘Twenty-seven hours!?’ Nige and I blurted in stunned unison.
‘Yes,’ Yolena confirmed, in calming tones.’Twenty-seven hours. We will arrive early in the morning.’
‘Early in the morning … tomorrow?’
‘Yes. Early in the morning … tomorrow. And now it is time to go to the train.’
As the clock struck three, our train appeared on the platform and we shuffled queasily toward its open doors. The culture shock was staggering. While you could have happily eaten your lunch off that ultra-clean station floor, you probably wouldn’t have wanted to take a dump on the dining tables of the train. The toilet (for which we’d been waiting with increasing agitation since the station toilet was closed ‘for cleaning’, naturally) was monstrous beyond belief. It was, in effect, a rusted tin trumpet voiding openly on to the track below, its sides encrusted with a cocktail of faeces and vomit. The ammonia-heavy acrid stench that festered in that tiny portable torture chamber could have been bottled and dropped on to battlefields with results which would surely have contravened internationally respected rules of warfare. Even if your bladder and bowels were so full that they were about to burst out of your body in the manner of John Hurt’s spectacular chestular eruptions in Alien, believe me you’d still find it preferable to tie a knot in it or evacuate out of the window rather than avail yourself of the on-board conveniences.
They were, to be clear, not nice toilets.
The cabins weren’t much better.
They consisted of four fold-down bunk beds, each with a stinky mattress covered with a ‘cleaned’ sheet. You knew the sheet had been ‘cleaned’ not because it was actually ‘clean’ but rather because it was actually wet. At least, I hoped that was why it was wet. Frankly, by that point I was starting not to care. There was already one passenger occupying a lower bunk and noisily eating some non-specific meaty substance so I clambered up on to a top billet and lay down in the dampness, my head filled with dreams of Hampstead Heath and a swift half at the Spaniards Inn. I started to drift into unconsciousness …
… only to be woken almost immediately by the sound of Nigel involved in an increasingly heated argument. I clambered back down from the bunk and out into the corridor where Nige was squaring up against a uniformed guard while Yolena stood between them, clutching three rail tickets and bravely attempting to preserve whatever was left of the peace.
The problem, it transpired, was that Nige and I were British, yet our train tickets had been purchased for us by a Russian. Apparently, foreigners were supposed to pay more money for the privilege of travelling on this particular portable toilet, and the guard was now insisting that we hand over more money which he would presumably pocket. Yolena was level-headedly translating all of this for Nige whose replies were being similarly relayed in the correct language back to the conductor. Through this miracle of multilingual communication skills, Nige was able to understand that the Russian guard wanted to fine him for the crime of being British and the guard was equally able to understand Nige’s forcefully expressed reaction to this apparent cultural apartheid. At the point that I arrived on the scene, Nige was asking
Yolena to translate the following phrase: ‘If I pay you any more money, will it make the train go any faster?’
Yolena wasn’t entirely happy about this but Nige wasn’t taking no for an answer. Clearly he was as rattled as I was, which made me feel a bit better; it’s always good to know that somebody else is miserable too – that’s why I like Morrissey so much. So Yolena politely passed on the message to the guard who stared goggle-eyed at Nige’s insolence, his face going various shades of red, white and blue. He seemed to be weighing up the merits of throwing us all off the train, and I was pretty much ready to decamp back to the station and have it out with the cleaner about giving us back our chairs, when suddenly he let out an exasperated gasp, turned, and headed off down the train.
‘I take it that means no,’ said Nige as I ducked back into the cabin, taking refuge once again in the rollicking swallow of the marshy top bunk while the man down below continued to munch contentedly. I really wanted to go home, to be wrapped in the arms of my wife who was surely, even now, making funeral arrangements, certain of my premature demise due to my abject failure to phone her immediately upon my arrival at Moscow airport all those hours (or was it days?) ago. I drifted in and out of consciousness, too tired to stay awake, too cold and wet to sleep.
And that was pretty much the way I stayed for the next twenty-seven hours. Every now and then I would get up and wander down the corridor a while, staring out of the window at the abyss of featureless flat fields and scrubby settlements which seemed to stretch the entire length of the journey. Baz Luhrmann, the director of Strictly Ballroom and Moulin Rouge, once proudly boasted to me that his home country Australia had ‘more “nothing” than anywhere else in the world’. Clearly he’d never been to Russia. Or Ukraine, into which we had slipped without really noticing. For hour after hour, an epic vista of nothingness stretched out all around us. And not just nothingness – but ugly nothingness. So much for the majestic wheat fields about which we’d all sung so passionately back in the warm pubs of Manchester. The reality was infinitely more miserable than the trouble and pain inspired by a rented room in Whalley Range. God help the Smiths if they’d have been brought up here.