On the opposite side of Romanov, in No. 4, a brokerage house sells mutual funds and shares in the extractive industries in Siberia and the far north from an office fronted in gleaming floor-to-ceiling glass. As in a high room, sounds and scents are intensified in the street. Late each afternoon, outside No. 4, a man in a dark suit stands at the kerb in a cloud of vanilla-scented pipe smoke, reading the pink business papers. Lawyers and stockbrokers cluster under the arches above the polished granite steps of the building, drawing on their cigarettes, gossiping, clutching their coats about them. The slender heels of Moscow’s loveliest demimondaines tap the pavement as they make their way, shining for the evening in diamonds and air-soft sable skins, on a narrow pathway of granite flagstones set with green cat’s eyes, from the luxury health club in the basement of No. 4 to the opened doors of their chauffeur-driven cars.
Until the dilapidated building next to No. 4, known as the Professors’ House, was scaffolded and shrouded for evisceration and remont (renovation), the sound of invisible wind chimes would float teasingly down on the air from somewhere on the upper floors. This street is sheltered from the coarser winds that move capriciously about the city. In deepest winter, the gales blow across the Neglinnaya valley below the Kremlin’s western wall and husk the snow, fine as smoke, off the roof of the Kremlin Hospital. Sometimes, in the weeks when everything is melting and pedestrians walk in the middle of the streets, or nervously along the pavements, looking up frequently, choosing between the perils of cars that might run them down or large icicles that might fall from the eaves of high buildings, the ice in the drainpipes explodes into fragments and cascades in a noisy rush to the pavement.
On one of the balconies of No. 5 Romanov Lane, where communal apartments are still being converted for foreign bankers, oil executives and Moscow’s new tycoons, Tajik labourers in poor clothes take the air, laughing, speaking their own language, looking down on the street. They live in the apartments while the work is done. Below them, in a black jeep, four men in bullet-proof vests and blue-grey urban camouflage that makes them look like shadows in the twilight wait for the tycoon who occasionally visits his apartment in the building, ready for sudden violence. The large apartments in No. 5 (which was built fifteen years after No. 3, in a more restrained style but on a comparable scale) were communalised in the 1920s. Bolsheviks of lower rank than those in the ‘Fifth House of the Soviets’ next door moved in with the ‘people of the past’: manufacturers, doctors and professors with Jewish names. In 1928 the future dissident V. S. Zhukovsky, son of a young Communist from the Ukraine who had once raised his hand for Trotsky at a Party meeting, moved with his parents into two rooms of a five-room apartment, shared by four families, on the second floor of No. 5. People still called the street ‘Sheremetev’ then. In his memoir, Muscovite from Granovsky Street, he recalls his mother’s parties in their small living room, the Blüthner piano, the expression on his father’s face as he read Hitler’s Mein Kampf (which he left face-down on the table), and the timetable for weekly use of the single bathroom. One of the residents of the kommunalka, the irritable, uxorious Professor Himmelfarb, was arrested one night in 1931 and died in prison before standing trial. Even after Stalin’s death, his widow was too afraid to appeal for his rehabilitation. Another resident, a working-class Party member, a former miner, shot himself at the height of the Terror. Zhukovsky’s own father was arrested (how could he have survived that vote for Trotsky?) and shot in the Lubyanka in 1940, as his son learned only after the death of Stalin.
When I have left No. 3 and its inner doors are closed to me again, I know that the memories of my years here will collapse, as memories do, into a collection of moments, with their own curious logic, cut free from the sense of duration, the aspect of time which can never be reclaimed. I cannot, for all my efforts, remember through which of the many doors I entered the house for the first time, or even whether the entrance was through the ‘black entrance’ from the courtyard or from the street. In my recollections, the interior, which was remarkable, has entirely detached itself from the exterior. It is as though I was led in and out in a blindfold. (Perhaps it was the same spatial vagueness that allowed the families of Politburo members and top generals to live as neighbours here through the years of night-time arrests and show trials.) It was the last autumn of the Yeltsin presidency, rents were still down after the national default and the currency crash of the previous year, and we were exhausted by the louche and noisy environs of Tverskaya, where drug addicts came to the stairwell of our building at night, and left their used needles in the elevator. At that time, I still thought of No. 3 as an unattainable dream house. I came to see the smaller of the two apartments that were advertised to let. I remember the smell of alcohol on the breath of the blowsy middle-aged woman who greeted us, the pale outstretched hand of the long-haired exquisite in velvet slippers and a silk Chinese jacket who stood behind her. I remember the drops of coloured crystal on the delicate eighteenth-century chandelier in the front hall, the Karelian birch curves of the Biedermeyer chairs in the main room, and in the gilt mirrors, the reflected colours and lines of oils by Picasso, Braque, Matisse and the Russian avant-garde painters Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov. ‘Not suitable for a family … the antiques … we were looking for a bachelor, an aesthete,’ the woman told me as she showed me through the rooms. She pointed to a chaise in the corner: ‘It belonged to Napoleon’s aide-de-camp. He didn’t take it back to France,’ she laughed. ‘Your collection is extraordinary,’ I murmured. ‘It was my late husband who was the collector.’ Her rheumy eyes fixed me with a brief light. ‘He was a diplomat.’
When we first moved into apartment 59, the view from my study window was clear all the way to the Voentorg. This ‘Military Department Store’, built five years before the Revolution as premises for the Military-Economic Society of Moscow Officers, became one of the grandest department stores in Soviet Moscow, the equal of GUM on Red Square and TsUM by the Bolshoi Theatre. Families of the generals in No. 3 had special access to the Voentorg, and in the first years after the war they could sometimes find on its shelves delicious Lend-Lease conserves sent from America. My view was a tranquil, scarcely inhabited and private one, truly a luxury in the centre of a city. The ex-KGB colonel who ran a security firm from the mews building behind the house rarely came into his office. Wind-sown birch saplings grew on the brick wall outside, their silky fraying bark catching the tonalities of the old buildings in the neighbourhood: dull white, ochre, pink and rust; shades of plaster, light earth, northern skies and snow. Crows came to promenade the length of the yellow-painted gas pipe that ran along the wall.