‘They always start late,’ said Ursula, still petulant.
‘I know, but we get to watch Ted here experience the delight of St Basil’s and then the horror of the Rossiya.’ He turned to me. ‘Only the outside is bad, like Inturist next door. The inside is good. Not falling down, like this old place.’ He stood and shook my hand. ‘See you in the morning, Ted.’
He downed his wine, Ursula left hers, and they walked off, arm in arm.
The other good news was that I had decided I wanted soup. I ordered it at the bar, with another glass of wine. Borsch Moscow style, the bar man corrected me, not ‘soup’. Although it was a soup. It was good and rich, and the dark bread that came with it was filling, although I nervously left the cream on the side. When I finished, I noticed that there were more Russian voices than before, although I wasn’t entirely sure I was able to pick out Russian from Polish, or Finnish, for that matter. But the room was warm and smoke filled, the wine was good and I felt quite at home.
I closed my eyes to listen to the noises around me, and smell the food. Having forgotten to bring my notebook downstairs, I would have to write all this down when I got back to my room. One thing I had found in the newspapers in the library was regular interest in Moscow. Opinion pieces, travel pieces, everyone wanted to understand what it was like to be in this secretive city. So secretive that Thomson ran tours here, and it seemed the whole world visited but still, articles describing weekend breaks to Moscow were published. I had hopes that a couple of good articles could erase my lack of qualifications, and I was happy to play up the idea of secrets to get into the National Union of Journalists.
One more glass of wine, and I decided to wander outside and look at the illuminated stars above the Kremlin. The Kremlin wall was the other side of a wide road and some gardens, further than I’d thought, and on the path running up a slope alongside it I could see an army of cleaners, with trucks washing the paving down after all that rain.
Couples strolled along the road, foreigners talked loudly and I felt utterly safe. It may not be true that there was no crime in the USSR, as the Soviets claimed, but I felt a lot safer here than I did in London. It was early to do this, and I was in a hotel, but first impressions are important so I ran through my list. Are the shops empty, transport links broken, the utilities not functioning, are there too many police evident? Do people look tired and hungry? No.
I stood on the street, smoking a cigarette, and thanked Mr Benstrup for never following up my references.
CHAPTER 15
I woke to a knock on the door. I froze. I had half-expected the constant phone calls which I’d experienced in Bucharest, and had covered the phone in case of this, but I hadn’t heard anything. Now there was a knock and, although it was morning, I was scared.
I crept from the bed, and opened the door a little. A maid in black uniform with white lace trim was holding a tray. My breakfast.
I opened the door properly and put my hands out to take it from her.
‘Nyet.’ She manoeuvred past me, and placed it on the round dining table.
‘Thank you.’
‘Nichevo.’ She had a swagger that I had to admire.
I rubbed my eyes and sat down. I looked in vain for milk to put in the tea, but there was only a lemon. I drank half of it anyway. The bread and jam were good.
I dressed and went downstairs to wait for Alan and Ursula. I was early on purpose so I could see if Alan was coming from the hotel next door or Ursula’s room. It would be a clue. The leather chairs already held the inert bodies of men with newspapers and hats. I wondered if they had been there all night.
Alan came in looking tired, and lifted his hand in recognition.
‘You look dreadful,’ I said.
His face looked baggy. ‘I was woken up a lot. Did you get any phone calls last night?’
‘No.’ I felt a bit left out. ‘I did in Bucharest, but not here. Not yet, anyway.’
‘Lucky you.’ He smiled. ‘I’ve got my technique honed now. You have to muffle the phone with towels, anything you have, but last night I forgot to prepare everything. You can’t leave it off the hook or they complain. It’s psychological warfare.’
‘It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? Everyone seems so nice, except for the receptionist at your hotel.’
He patted me on the back. ‘It’s nothing to worry about, as long as you don’t say yes to anything. They’re just trying to see what they can get away with. Ah, here she is.’ He kissed Ursula on the cheek, and we headed out of the door into brilliant sunshine.
She was wearing an olive-green blouse and black trousers. He was wearing an ironed blue shirt and dark blue trousers. I was wearing a crumpled grey shirt and dark brown cords which, I now saw, had a drop of dried soup on the thigh. I would have to up my game.
I hadn’t stood up next to Ursula, and now I realised she was taller than me. I checked her shoes, and was relieved to see that she wore high heels. Even so, I drifted to walk with Alan between us. He was taller too, but not by much.
We crossed the road, and Alan pointed behind us.
‘Who’s luckier? The one in the ugly hotel which looks out at the beautiful one, or you two?’
The Inturist hotel was a grey office block from anywhere, while the Natsional was curved, cream and decorative.
‘That’s my room there,’ said Ursula, pointing. ‘First floor.’
She had a better view than me. I’d checked when I went to bed, and saw the square courtyard at the heart of the hotel.
Alan led us up the cobbled incline, past the queue for Lenin’s tomb that he pointed out and the women sweeping, their heads covered in black scarves. The brushes were bundles of twigs, their shoulders bent, but their voices boomed if they saw someone drop a cigarette butt. The soldiers watched them approvingly.
‘That’s the big shopping arcade there,’ said Alan. ‘Every year I think that I’ll go and get a handmade pair of shoes. If you fancy it, they’re on the top floor, but give them a couple of days to make them. Ursula went to a fashion show there once, didn’t you?’
‘Do you come to every film festival?’ I asked.
‘We have done for—’ Alan looked for Ursula to finish his sentence.
‘This is my fifth,’ she said, ‘so it’s your sixth.’
Alan nodded. ‘I’m sure you’re right. Goodness.’
Finally, a clue. ‘So this is where you met?’
‘Yes. And they’re every other year, so that’s ten years we’ve known each other.’
‘No, eight years.’ She counted them on her fingers. ‘1967, 1969, 1971, 1973, 1975.’
‘Yes, you’re right. I first came here ten years ago. Did you ever go to Tashkent?’ he asked her.
Colleagues. Film festival colleagues. I watched the easy way they interacted. This festival ran from the 10th to the 23rd July. That was two weeks. They’d known each other for eight weeks in total.
I stopped at a raised round area constructed from white stone. There were steps up to it, and a closed metal fence around it, but nothing there.
‘What is this?’ I asked, but they had gone.
‘Are you coming?’ called Alan. They’d moved ahead so I ran to catch up. We walked around St Basil’s which was starting to look a bit silly up close, and then Alan pointed at a large, ugly office block. ‘The Rossiya.’
‘Blimey.’
‘Twenty-one floors, four thousand rooms. We stayed here in ’73 when they moved the festival to this hotel. If you need a nightclub or a post office, they’ve got it. They even have a barber, and a police station.’
‘You’re kidding?’
‘No,’ said Ursula, ‘look out for the black door next to the barber. That goes to the cells.’
It was a weird kind of teasing. She didn’t smile at all.
‘But a brilliant movie theatre,’ said Alan. ‘Two, actually. And a concert hall. That’s why lots of festivals and conferences are focused here.’ He checked his watch. ‘We’d better hurry. They like
us to be on time, even if they aren’t.’
I followed them, arm in arm again, around to the main entrance where there was a crowd of people, all dressed up. I looked down at my clothes again. As we got closer to the doors I could see a group of children, each with a red handkerchief around their neck, holding out pieces of paper for people to sign. A few women were handing out red and white carnations, and a series of banners in different languages hung over the entrance. I found the one for me: ‘Greetings to the participants of the IX International Film Festival in Moscow’.
We made it past the shiny newspaper kiosk and clear phone booths, and through the glass doors of the hotel into another crowd in a bright, double height lobby. There was the grand Russia of the Natsional, and then this modern Russia of veneer, plate glass and mezzanines. As I gazed around I noticed with horror that the women who were directing the crowd to the auditorium were wearing grey and brown, the same as me.
‘Is it what you expected?’ asked Ursula. She stood out with her height, but also in the comfortable way she eased her way through the crowd. I was continually jostled, smelling food and soaps and cigarettes and cigars and aftershaves and washing powders from around the world.
‘A bit busier than I was expecting,’ I said.
‘The whole world is here,’ said Alan.
‘Are there other British people?’ I asked.
Alan lowered his voice. ‘There is another British man, Terence, but you really don’t want to get stuck with him. Or maybe you do, but not until you have a drink in your hand. He’s unbelievably dull.’
‘All right.’
We followed the swell of languages and colours and I began to feel excited. Everyone was smiling and eager. I gazed up at the light fittings above the reception desk and wondered if they were deliberately modelled on Sputnik, before noticing the grim faces of men looking down on us from the mezzanine.
We were welcomed as we entered the cinema, and Alan guided me to the right, up onto the overhanging balcony section. Ursula was already arranging herself and shooing away people from our two seats. We sat down, and the murmur of languages grew louder.
Two weeks of films in a couple of very different posh hotels. I could see why Alan and Ursula kept returning. I could be one of them. I could draw the contemporary references from the fictional worlds I saw. I could come to understand serious, complicated films. I might even come to like them.
CHAPTER 16
I was separated from Alan and Ursula in the crush after the introduction, and went alone to my first film of the festival. It was from North Vietnam, not an area of film I knew anything about, but that’s why I was here.
I had got lost in the corridors, arrived late and, instead of heading to the balcony, had been pushed into one of the lower seats by an usher. The four women in the seats along from me were, I was sure, the group of women from my hotel that I had seen the day before. I looked around. Everyone in this section of the cinema was Asian, and I hoped I hadn’t taken someone’s place.
There was a woman translating at the front of the cinema into Russian, the soundtrack was quieter than normal and my headset had a woman translating into English. With the door opening and closing, and three versions of the film running, it was surprising that anyone could follow it. But I did. It was amazing what you could get used to.
When I started to well up I half-wished I had been more distracted by the swinging doors. I managed not to cry until I realised everyone else around me was sobbing. I supposed they were North Vietnamese. The lady nearest me passed me a handkerchief, and that was it.
I met up with Alan and Ursula in the café. Their table was full, but the two people sharing left soon after I’d spotted them. The waitress remonstrated with me, pointing at people waiting by the bar, but Alan pulled my arm so I sat down hard in the green tub chair, and then there was little she could about it. She smoothed down her white apron so her white blouse with red embroidery puffed above her waist, tutted and left. I was hungry, and hoped she would come back. I held the menu up to signal this.
‘How was your film?’ asked Alan.
I blew air from the side of my mouth, wondering how to put it.
‘Hard going?’
‘Yes.’ I lit a cigarette, keeping the menu loosely upright, and changed the subject. ‘The translations were intense. Are they recorded?’
‘No, they’re live. They have a whole load of women in the back, watching the films and translating sometimes as they watch, and sometimes from a script. Sometimes they haven’t seen the film.’
Ursula added, ‘Sometimes they don’t even know the language they’re translating from and they have to make it up. They do a pretty good job. They are great at reading the content from the images. But they can usually cover every language.’
‘It’s like the United Nations,’ I said.
‘It is the United Nations,’ said Ursula, ‘in a way.’
I thought back. ‘There was a lot being said at once, though. You have the film, the translation, and then there’s the woman shouting the Russian translation from the front.’
‘It can be overwhelming, but it generally works, somehow,’ said Alan. ‘The Illusion cinema uses earphones from the war, but I think the ones here are newer. What about the film itself?’
‘It was the Vietnam war from the perspective of a small girl. I think it had actual war footage. It was a bit – it was amazing.’ Thinking about it again, I wasn’t sure that I was still hungry. I looked at their plates. ‘What did you eat?’
‘Blini,’ said Ursula. ‘Pancakes. They’re good.’ She leaned towards me. ‘Do you like herring?’
I blinked, and looked at Alan. He was smiling.
‘Ursula wants to go to a Beriozka to get some herring. She’s having withdrawal symptoms, but I said no one would want to sit next to her and we all have to see Kurosawa later.’
She pouted. ‘I’ll just eat it on my own tonight. I don’t have to share.’ She looked around, and tried to attract a waitress over with her hand. One saw her, and turned away. ‘I’m going to the bathroom.’
Alan watched her walk away, biting his lip, so I watched too. Ursula cornered two waitresses who looked at her, and then carried on talking. Their eyes suggested they were talking about her. Ursula spoke to them, and they spoke back. The one that had tried to stop me sitting was loudest, but Ursula silenced her with a lot of finger pointing and then left the café. The waitress who had been over before sent the other over, still blushing, and Alan ordered me blini and kefir.
‘What was that about, with Ursula?’
Alan bowed his head towards me. ‘She gets a lot of abuse here. The Russians swear blind they’re not racist, but they are. Very. They were standing over here before, right behind her. Ursula can speak Russian, so she likes to listen to what they’re saying and then tell them she’ll report them for being inadequately Communist and shaming the state in front of foreigners.’ He sighed. ‘It works during the festival because no one is quite sure who is who, and who has power. But it gets to Ursula, being on guard all the time.’
‘Do you speak Russian?’
‘Yes, no, thank you – that’s it. Not even all the basics. Every year I leave convinced that I will apply myself to learning it for the next two years, but it hasn’t happened yet.’
The waitress arrived back, slammed the plate with the blini down with some force, and the glass of kefir with slightly less, but enough for it to slop over the dark orange tablecloth.
‘I think she doesn’t like being told off.’
‘Oh, they never do. Some service staff think that it doesn’t show them to be equal if they have to serve people. Even though that is what they have agreed to do as a job. There’s this phrase you get, something like, “I’m a human too”. And then you see them with someone in a uniform, and they behave exactly like a servant.’ His eyes went back to the door. ‘She’s been a while.’
This was the point at which I should ask what was between them, but then Ursula
came back in, glaring at the waitress in her path. She sat down.
‘How’s the blini?’
‘Oh.’ I’d eaten half without noticing. ‘Really good. And this drink is strange, but I like it too.’
‘It’s called kefir, but sometimes translated as yogurt.’ Ursula looked at her watch. ‘We have a little time before the film. I think I’ll go for a walk by the river.’
‘I’ll come too,’ said Alan. ‘If that’s OK?’
‘Of course.’
Definitely more than colleagues. The waitress sat three new people down on my table, but didn’t bother to clear the dishes. With the small tulip-shaped lamp in the middle, there was nowhere to put anything else. I nodded to them, but had no idea what language they were speaking. They looked Indian, or Sri Lankan, maybe. I couldn’t guess. The world was a big place. I finished quickly, and left.
Now that the lobby was emptier I could appreciate the space. The floor was a series of grey and black marble slabs, polished nightly, Alan had told me, by a team of women with rags tied to their feet. The women behind the reception desk wore white blouses with black pinafores, and the phones next to them were a startling yellow. They still had chandeliers in this modern palace, but contemporary and simplified, constructed from golden tubes.
I could also now see the men guarding the doors in their black uniforms, as well as the men in no uniforms who were smart and stood too still. I remembered the cells and the police station and, for some reason, thought that the least suspicious thing to do would be to look at the items for sale in the glass cabinets, and the Russian language newspapers that I could not read.
I wanted to go to the river, but I didn’t want Alan and Ursula to think I was following them or that they had to look after me. I picked up a couple of Inturist leaflets and found a red armchair to sit in, next to the window. I lit another cigarette, and read about what I could do in Sochi and Novgorod.
A group of five women walked past the plate glass window, one man in front of them and one behind. I watched and wondered if this was part of the gang of translators, getting ready for the big film, Kurosawa. And then I remembered the task that Vasile, or Marku, had set me. The woman in the photo, Ingrid, had been photographed here. Did that mean she spoke Russian? She had spoken Romanian to Marku’s family, but she must have spoken German too, or they thought she did. Maybe she just translated between Romanian and German, or Romanian and Russian. I watched the last of the women walk past the window, and then turned to watch them walk through the lobby towards the cinema. All ages, all heights, sizes, hair colours. I didn’t recognise Ingrid, although I wasn’t sure that I could. A couple of women noticed me staring, and I turned away. I wasn’t going to be challenging those security guards to get close to any of them, but I was interested to see if Ingrid was real.
The Starlings of Bucharest Page 10