Saturday 23 March
Terribly excited about going home today. In the time I’d set aside for packing I was visited by Nikolay, Sergey, Jon, Phil, John and Chris. It was too much and I made a total mess of packing, leaving my camera on the floor and all my things in the bathroom.
Nikolay came to the airport with me and kept me company for an hour. It was good of him, but he was really having a field day. He started by saying that he didn’t like Arabs in a group, then later said how hard he’d found it working with Jamaicans at a conference last year, but they were “niggers”. As though to make this more palatable for me, he said, “We say in Russia that there are Jews and there are Yids – well, there are blacks and there are niggers!” I said that perhaps he didn’t understand the offensiveness of what he was saying in English.
I looked at his good, nice face trying to be liked, and after yesterday’s paeans of praise to all things Russian, I thought his narrow, categoric, racist streak is the downside of life here. He has never been outside Moscow and he’s been bombarded with the weirdest information most of his life.
As I left Moscow, the police were frogmarching two men through the barrier. As I arrived in Heathrow police were also frogmarching two men through the barrier. The woman at the transfer desk was very British-looking: a “certain age”, spectrally thin, terylene top, light perm. I was looking at her and wanted to say, “You look so British”, but thought better of it. I waited for the Manchester plane, sitting opposite a middle-aged couple, who also looked eminently British. They were sitting apart, reading the Sunday papers and not saying a word to each other. I wanted to ask, “Are you married? You look so British”, but decided to keep my mouth shut. Listened to my tapes and arrived home on a wonderful high.
Sunday 24 March
Oh, that first grapefruit, that first piece of Kit Kat.
BACK IN THE USSR: APRIL–JUNE 1991
Tuesday 9 April
It’s quite difficult being back. I’m in a sort of daze, which I suppose is the culture shock. I flew back on Sunday. This time the Foreign Ministry in Moscow sent no confirmation of my visa, but the London Consulate decided to give it to me anyway within forty-eight hours “because they know me”. It’s all very strange.
I travelled out with a German research chemist who’s based in Ostashkov to the north west of Moscow Region. He said there had been shooting there during the referendum and it had been difficult for them to leave the hotel. None of this was reported, I don’t think. It took a mental effort to shift away from friends and food and drink in London, back to this.
There’d been a mix-up about my flat and Chris wasn’t in by the time I got there. So I sat out in the landing, reading, until 10.00pm. I could hear my neighbour on the phone, first of all talking about her ration cards for vodka and sugar, then about a jumper and skirt she fancied. I felt oddly at home.
It was the Russian Orthodox Easter weekend. As I went to bed the phone rang and a peremptory voice said, “Marjorie Farquharson? Christ is Risen!” as though it was a message especially for me. I couldn’t bring myself to say, “He has risen indeed!” to this voice, but it also seemed impudent to say, “Who’s speaking?” So, I stammered. It was someone wanting to meet up.
On Monday I slept till midday, then took stock. Thirteen people had written to my PO box number, including nine Ukrainians following up the interview Heather and Ulla gave: “Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” The others were from Kazakhstan. The PO box at least seems to be working.
The exchange rate has gone from £1:10 roubles, to £1:48 roubles, apparently very close to the street rate, so a big step towards convertibility. Milk has doubled and bread quadrupled. I noticed it was being sold in smaller portions than before, presumably to help people on a fixed income. There seemed to be more food in the shops; I bought butter for the first time, and that was just in the shop next door. It’s hard to know if the government is putting goods in the shops to sweeten the pill of high prices, or if the higher prices are regulating the demand.
Things looked quite different when I got back. The snow had gone and people were painting walls, railings and bus shelters. One of the garden benches outside my window had been moved and the tree behind it cut down. A smell of burning kept coming into the flat and I saw families out burning piles of dead grass. Spring.
The procrastinations began today: the computer firm, the Foreign Ministry, the Premises Fund, all putting me off to later in the week. Emotionally I was out of it all day, reluctant to embark on this daunting assault course again. The church bells were jingling for twenty minutes, three times today, and it was like tinnitus in the background. I had my first visit of the season from my landlord. I would love to know one day what his role is.
It’s been a real withdrawal of company and fun, as well as of food and drink, but writing this diary has focused me for the first time since my return. Tonight I stuck Georgia O’Keefe flowers on the inside of my window frames. For the last two days I’ve been looking foreign in the street and I wanted to. Now I think I feel more like blending in.
Thursday 11 April
I’m sitting out on my balcony in sunglasses, bare feet and T-shirt, enjoying the evening heat. A woman is going past in boots with her coat buttoned up to the throat. There’s a wee haze around the pussy willow tree opposite and bits of green are sprouting on the stretches of brown mud in the courtyard. The place seems to be swarming with children, climbing on roofs, racing about and hitting things. It’s at least +15 degrees during the day here but people warn it will go cold again.
Yesterday Leonid from SOVAM Teleport came round to set up my electronic mail system and it was a classic case of culture clash, which left me angry. The British computer firm led me through the system explaining step by step and answering all my questions as we went along. Leonid worked away in stony silence and whenever I asked a question he would say, “What do you mean? Forget about it – not worth bothering about.” Some of this might have been the Soviet attitude to teaching, but I think there was a lot of computer macho there – this mean moody guy with the machine mystique. However, he made quite a cock-up with the word processing program and left naked wires hanging out of my phone plug, simply because he was too lazy to tidy up after himself I think. When he left I had a defunct word processing program and no idea how to work my electronic mail.
In the afternoon I went down to SOVAM Teleport to sign our contract. It was more boy meets toy – Andrey at the keys this time with a woman sitting next to him in total blank confusion. A guy who was declaiming in the office to a vast imaginary audience asked me how long I’d been in Moscow because I was looking tired. “Three months,” I said. “I thought it was three years,” he said. I didn’t tell him it was three days. I signed the contract for a trial two months, “depending on the service”. They then waived the $200 registration fee.
I walked home from the Foreign Ministry in the sunshine. People were sculling down the Moscow River. I took time over preparing dinner. There’s much more fresh stuff available now: dill, cucumber, cabbage, eggs, tvorog. Slept through till 10.00am again. I’m terribly depressed. Things are alright but I just woke up wishing I wasn’t here in Moscow. It seems people either shout at me, or speak because they want something.
Today I went off to the north east of Moscow to visit “Christ is Risen” – a Bashkir who is severely disabled. He had false legs, a steel corset and a neck brace. He’d lost the use of his right fingers after he was shot high up in his right arm as a partisan (he showed me the scars) and he read things with a magnifying glass. He greeted me with his trousers hanging off on a piece of string and it only occurred to me later that he had trouser brace clips hanging off a rail to hold up his curtains. The flat was very clean and so was he. He had Jewish, Christian and Muslim pictures propped around the room, and also Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son. This time I noticed how the light falls on the eyes of the jealous brother. I sat in the still airless warmth for two hours and heard his life story. Among other things he’d dossed at railway stations for four years when he was homeless.