by Goldie Hawn
Outside, the gray air cuts my throat. The opening line in The Girl from Petrovka says the cold of a Russian winter can kill even a memory. I am beginning to understand.
Murray drives me down the wide-open boulevards of Moscow, lined with trees that are just about to lose their leaves. We pass grand architecture, great domed churches and opulent halls, beautiful onion-domed buildings erected during the reign of the csars and csarinas. I can smell Moscow’s pungent history.
“Have you ever read The Girl from Petrovka?” I ask brightly.
“Shhh,” Murray hushes me. Whispering, he adds, “The car’s bugged. Let’s talk about it later.” Seeing my expression, he laughs.
I am in shock. This isn’t part of any world that I have ever known. I can’t imagine not having the freedom to say what I feel. I dare not speak another word.
We pull up outside a building that is enormous and hideously ugly, a big cement block that sits in stark contrast to the older buildings around it. I get out of the car and stand staring up at it, thinking about communism and Trotsky and his band of brothers who really believed that they had all the answers.
“Is this my hotel?” I ask.
“I’m afraid so,” Murray says, fetching my bag from the trunk. “It’s okay, we can talk now. Everything’s bugged. It’s the way of life here. It’s funny, we talk about it quite openly. As soon as a new correspondent arrives, his vehicle is taken away to be ‘serviced,’ but everyone knows what’s really happening.”
He leaves me with a wave and promises to collect me later. I walk up the steps to my monstrous hotel, which looks like a Second World War bunker. Sad is one way to describe it. Devoid of spirit is another.
Later that night, Murray drives me to his run-down apartment block, where all the foreign correspondents live. It is a veritable village of antipropaganda. The building is very utilitarian, in a style I now know to be typical of communist architecture. Sitting in the lobby on a bench are three old women, chatting away among themselves. They remind me of my aunt Sarah and her friends chewing the fat.
“Privyet. Hello,” I say with a smile, but they don’t respond.
Murray takes my elbow and leads me away. “Those, my dear, are called informants.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, they report when you come in and when you go out; who comes to visit you and what time they leave. They’re tattletales. They all work for the KGB.”
Upstairs, in a rather drab apartment, I am introduced to some of his colleagues. There is a British reporter who works for the Daily Telegraph, a Frenchman who works for Le Figaro and a rather dashing correspondent who writes for Time magazine. He is very cool and speaks candidly on the complex political relationship between Russia and the United States.
They smile and say hello and carry on with their earnest, intelligent conversations about the state of the Politburo and life in the Soviet Union. I join them, sitting around an oval table, eating a simple dinner cooked by Murray’s wife. Sipping vodka and drinking in the atmosphere, I listen as they share their experiences laughingly and speak of their strange lives as strangers in a strange land. Sometimes when they talk, they don’t make a sound, they just move their mouths and the rest of us have to lip-read. When I look quizzically at Murray, he laughs and points to the ceiling, and I realize that his apartment is bugged too.
“We have to be careful what we say,” he whispers in my ear. “They are always listening.”
I am endlessly fascinated by his guests’ stories and how they cope with living under KGB rule and dealing with a repressive government that doesn’t allow truth. They speak of the corruption of the Communist Party and how difficult it is to get information. I am in awe, and more than a little stimulated, in this place that is nothing like home, or anyplace I’ve ever been in my entire life. This is an interesting table, full of smart people, intellectuals involved in reporting world affairs. It is a million miles away from show business.
“Does anyone here ever see movies?” I ask, wanting to contribute.
“A select few,” comes the reply.
“Well, only the elite in the party,” another laughs. “And then only the films they choose.”
I have started them off talking about Hollywood, the subject that interests me the least. Some tell me they have seen The Exorcist on recent trips home, the hot film of the year. They ask me who I know.
“Has anyone here read The Girl from Petrovka?” I chime in softly, eager to change the subject.
The Time correspondent says, “Yes, I know the writer.”
“You do? Oh, I’d love to meet him.”
“George? Well, I’m sure that can be arranged. I’m not sure which country he’s living in right now, but I could make some calls.”
“And is it all true?” I ask. “Has the story been embellished at all?”
“Yes, it’s true. The girl was sent away to Siberia because they thought she was a spy when in fact her only crime was to fall in love with him. But, of course, the newspapers accused her of writing subversive material against the party. They said that was the reason.”
“Yeah, another lie. Poor girl.”
“Poor George. That was a hard time for him.”
“Oh, this might be interesting. I’m an actress, and I’ve been asked to play the girl,” I tell them. “But I don’t think I look like a Russian.”
The British reporter throws back his head and laughs. “I think you do, my darling,” he says as the rest of them nod in agreement.
“Have you been out on the streets yet?” the Time man asks.
“Not yet.”
“Well, have I got a day for you, girl.” He grins. “I’m going to take you out and show you a bit of Moscow you’ll never otherwise see.”
It is he who drives me back to my hotel later, and, as we are driving along, I notice a nondescript black car following us closely. I look round and then at the reporter, and he checks his rearview mirror.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “That’s just the KGB. They follow me everywhere. I don’t know what in the world they think I’ll be doing. They’re probably more interested in you than me tonight. The Girl from Petrovka is banned here.”
Safe inside my hotel, I pass through the cavernous lobby with hardly a stick of furniture in it and take the elevator to my floor. Facing me, sitting behind a desk, is an old woman who stares at me intently, logging in the exact time I returned. My own personal watchdog. A bit eerie. Closing my door behind me, I have a strange feeling. I wonder what she knows about me already.
The next morning, the Time correspondent collects me as promised and takes me into downtown Moscow. I am shown all the usual tourist sights—the Kremlin and Red Square, the Archangel Cathedral and Lenin’s Mausoleum—and some of the not-so-usual ones, such as KGB headquarters and the state-owned GUM department store. I quickly learn to tell a Russian by his shoes—they are old and worn and far from stylish.
I am surprised to see the windows of the stores full of clothes and appliances.
“Don’t take any notice,” my friend tells me. “It’s all for display. There’s nothing inside.”
Dressed in a T-shirt and embroidered bell-bottom jeans under my heavy coat, I am completely out of place. What was I thinking? American jeans are very hot on the black market.
The journalist takes me to the house of a friend of his. “She’ll give you a sense of what life is like here as a young woman,” he says as we pull into the parking lot of her apartment building. “She’s not dissimilar from the girl you’re going to be playing, actually.”
“Really?” I say as we pass another trio of old ladies sitting on a bench. I wink at my friend and giggle.
As we climb the stairs, he tells me, “I’ve arranged for you to spend the day with her. It’s okay. She speaks English. Her sister just defected to the West, so she is alone.”
A woman opens the door. I am shocked. She is breathtakingly beautiful. She has jet-black hair and green eyes, a devastating com
bination. I take note. Uh-oh, I look nothing like her.
She thrusts her hand forward. “Hello, my name Kristina.” She smiles and welcomes me in. As I step into her tiny, one-room apartment, a two-year-old boy I assume to be her son dashes from the corner and hugs her tight around her legs.
My friend and I walk in, and Kristina turns to him and says, “They stole the book you lent me. The Girl from Petrovka.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“No, they came when I was out. When I come back, it finished.” She shrugs her shoulders and laughs. “So, that’s living in Russia.”
Kristina is a single parent with no sign of any man in her life. As my friend departs and she turns back to the room, she sees that I am shivering and runs for a sweater that she places over my head and insistently pulls down over me. She puts the kettle on, and the two of us sit on either side of her son by the stove in the corner of the room.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “It is cold. But the heating in the building isn’t turned on until…”
Her final words are drowned out by a sudden terrible sound. What little light there is in the room is blotted out. I can see her lips moving but can’t hear her voice, and her apartment shakes violently. Instinctively, she reaches out and places both hands over a pile of dinner plates. Through the small window behind her, I see a freight train rush past so close I can almost reach out and touch it. All around me, the building shudders and jolts. The cracks in the peeling walls appear to be opening farther with each tremor. Then, just as soon as it began, the noise stops. The light returns through the window and all is calm.
“November one,” she says, finishing her sentence as if nothing at all has interrupted it.
Kristina is a true girlfriend’s girlfriend. I feel instantly connected to her. Hunched by her stove, we nibble cubes of chocolate from a small, flat bar she has bought specially for me. There is little else in her kitchen, and I am humbled by her hospitality.
“You have beautiful hair,” she tells me, staring at my now shoulder-length locks. “Like your name. Golden.”
Embarrassed, I run my hands through it and tell her, “Oh, it’s not looking its best right now. It needs a good wash.”
She jumps up like a child. “Please. I will wash for you.”
“Oh, no, no, that’s okay.”
“Please,” she says quietly, pressing her hand on mine. “I want. I used to wash my sister’s hair.”
So, there in her warm kitchen, with her son playing with his wooden blocks, she positions my head over her deep ceramic sink and washes my hair gently with shampoo that smells like Palmolive soap.
“Yes, my sister left. She is in New York. She is now model.”
I look up. “You could be a model too.”
She laughs. “No.” She pauses. “I will never see my sister again.”
“Why didn’t you defect with her?” I ask.
“My heart is in Russia,” she replies simply, her gaze steady.
I am beginning to understand. There is still something steeped in the walls of these old buildings that speaks of this nation’s great history, of its poetry and its art.
When Kristina has finished rinsing my hair, she turns on the oven, opens the oven door and leads me to a chair in front of it. She sits me down and pushes my head upside down. Without saying a word, she runs her hands through my hair, fluffing it dry, so tenderly. I feel like we’ve been friends for years. She must have loved her sister very much.
“Now, how beautiful,” she chirps, preening and fluffing the last few strands of my hair. “Now you will meet my friends.”
With her child on her shoulders, Kristina and I skip down the stairs, past the suspicious watchdogs and out onto the streets of Moscow.
“I hate those old women,” she mutters under her breath.
“Please, first I’d like to buy some treats for your friends,” I tell her. “Where can we go?”
“Oh, yes, the bakery. Come.”
We walk through the chill air along a grand Russian boulevard lined with baroque buildings and dart into the doorway of one that looks like a royal palace. It is now a bread hall.
I am amazed by all the customers inside, who have formed at least three different lines. Dour-faced men and women in heavy hats with gray scarves wrapped around their faces are lining up to choose what they want to buy from a glass-fronted display case.
I stand in line. A woman in a drab utilitarian uniform puts my pastry choices in a bag and hands me a ticket. I watch as my bag is taken away by another staff member in a uniform and a funny hat.
Kristina leads me to a second line, where I hand someone my ticket and pay for my pastries. Then a man gives me another ticket and points me to a third line, where I now have to wait to collect my goods.
The bread hall is my first glimpse of everyday life in Russia. They had a good idea: that everyone be employed and treated the same. I already know from listening to my journalist friends that the reality is quite different. The results are in plain sight. The human spirit is being crushed, and apathy has set in.
“My God. This is insane!” I tell Kristina. “What a screwed-up system! This whole process has taken almost an hour. It would have taken five minutes back home.”
She laughs out loud, hoists her son back up on her shoulders and off we go, down the narrow streets, continuing on our journey through life under Moscow’s communist rule.
With my hard-earned bag of pastries, I walk with Kristina and her son in the October morning and down some streets that grow narrower and narrower until the walls are only a few feet apart. I am on an epic journey into Russia’s past. I soak up everything I see—the architecture and the faces, the sounds and the smells of this great city, so full of history. There are very few cars, and many people are walking the streets. No one smiles very much. No one looks very happy. And no one looks me in the eye.
We reach a four-story building, and Kristina leads me inside. We are faced with the challenge of climbing the old wrought-iron staircase, whose steps are rusted out in the middle. Placing a foot carefully on each side of the step, being careful not to fall through the middle, we pick our way up and up and up to the top floor.
Kristina knocks on a heavy wooden door, and it is thrown open almost immediately. Facing us are dozens of smiling faces, all welcoming us in enthusiastically. Hands reaching out to us, they draw me into their large apartment with its floor-to-ceiling windows.
“My, what a large family!” I cry.
“This isn’t one family.” Kristina laughs. “This is three. They share three rooms. Everyone has own private corner. My friends live in this room.”
I pass by a small kitchen. On the stove a huge pot of something is bubbling.
Kristina’s friends have a beautiful blond child, aged about ten, called Sofia. She has a big, open face, and her hair is pulled into tight little plaited knobs of gold on either side of her ears. She could be my daughter. I hand her the bag of pastries. She gently takes it, smiles and says, “Spasibo,” before rushing off to the kitchen.
The light through the high bank of windows on one wall shines a kind of a golden southern glow onto the table we are invited to sit at. It is beautiful. Along each windowsill sit prized tomato plants laden with dozens of cherry tomatoes, a rare gastronomic treat. The father plucks one and offers it to me. I take it and eat it with reverence. He is so proud of his garden. Fruit and vegetables are not easy to come by in Russia, I learn.
We are served steaming bowls of broth with fresh-baked bread and then the treats I have brought. The adults chatter away in Russian while Sofia sits staring at me, and her father throws his head back and laughs uproariously. Everyone else laughs along. I’m laughing too. I just don’t know why.
Kristina explains. “He said that Sofia went to school today with poem she wrote about nature and what God means to her. The schoolmaster summoned the father and tells him, ‘Your daughter must learn about the party, not art. Not God. Not allowed.’ He thinks this crazy.”
The family are still laughing, and I laugh along with them. Surely these are not members of the Communist Party.
Suddenly, Sofia tugs on my arm and gestures for me to go with her to her corner of the room. Secretively, she rummages under her bed and pulls out a little red change purse.
“You want to show me something?” I ask, picking up her thoughts. I have no idea what it is but I can tell it means a great deal to her, so I hold my breath, make my eyes big and look excited.
“What can it be?” I gasp as she giggles.
Reaching into the purse, she pulls out a collection of delicate seashells.
Kristina explains from across the room that Sofia collected them on a rare trip to the coast once. They are her prize possessions, and she handles them like rare jewels.
“They’re beautiful, honey, really beautiful,” I say, taking the time to touch each one and turn it over and examine it as she watches.
Sofia’s eyes are round and rich and full. I can feel her dreaminess, her wonder, her bohemian free will rolling around inside her. I am afraid it will be crushed by the system according to her birthright, or no right. I feel intense sadness at the thought that when she grows up, that look of wonder in her eyes will almost certainly be replaced by the deadening gaze of the women I have already seen—people whose spirit has been squashed.
Cradling her shells in my hand, I continue to squeal with delight. “Oh, look at this little yellow one. Oh, and that pink one, with the big swirls on its shell. How lovely, Sofia. Thank you so much for showing them to me.”
Sofia takes my hand and opens it, dropping the seashells into my palm one by one. Then she closes my fingers around them. “Goooldie.” She speaks my name softly.
“No, no, no!” I shake my head vehemently. “I can’t possibly take them, my darling. But thank you so much for offering them to me.”
“Da.” She nods, her big eyes confused. I can tell she is thinking that if I like them so much, then why don’t I want them?
“No. Nyet,” I say firmly, placing them back in her hands and closing my hands around hers. “You must keep them, Sofia.” Staring deeply into her eyes, I add: “These are yours to hold and yours to dream with. Keep them forever, never stop looking at them, and I will always remember you and your shells in a special place in my heart.”