My courtyard was lovely too. The trees give a nice shade and a group of men were out slapping chequers on the table near the rubbish containers, while I ate my ice cream. It was almost too hot to be out.
Tamara took me to the jazz festival at the Palace of Culture attached to the Moscow Physics Institute. We watched them warming up and as usual some incredibly bad-tempered administrator came and shouted at the sound engineers. Tamara said Soviet people were bad tempered from morning to evening and she was sick of it. Me too. It was a mixed blessing going to the concert with a jazz expert, because she was intensely critical and intellectual about it. At the first interval we went backstage and she and her friend Bella demolished the acts. “It wasn’t jazz”, “It was not jazz”, they said. Apparently the singer with the headband and indifferent voice is married to the compère.
Bella took us to a backroom and played us some improvisations. She graduated from the Composers’ Faculty at the Conservatoire and now plays at the Peking Restaurant and the Russky Traktir. Her classical training was stamped all over her, but her foot was stomping like there was a jazz musician trying to get out.
Bill Skeat was on in the second half with a Soviet trio, including an excellent bassist, Viktor Dvorskin, and good young pianist, Lev Kushnir. They seemed to meet with Tamara’s approval too, because she kept saying to me in English, “A fine culture of sound” and “They have think” (?). We travelled home in the van with the performance artists from Minsk. There seem to be a number of interesting things developing in Belorussia.
And now it is thundering.
Monday 27 May
Amazing how yesterday refreshed me. Another hot day. I met Natalya Vysotskaya at Krasnopresnensky District Soviet and we went to collect the next batch of documents in the paper trail leading to our premises. Apparently we have to make a written request, endorsed by the Fund for Non-Dwelling Premises, for a ground plan of Herzen Street 22/53. This has to go to the Bureau of Technical Administration then come back to the Fund. The woman insisted we type our request on an Amnesty letterhead, which I didn’t have with me. Natalya very charmingly offered to create our own letterhead and to type the request herself there and then. The woman relented, we got our request stamped, and saved maybe three days or a week of faffing around. By a lucky fluke the Bureau of Technical Administration was open on a Monday, so I got our request in in the afternoon and persuaded them to have it ready by Friday.
Natalya is being great. The day before she’d spoken at the Moscow City College of Advocates and encouraged them to give their time to her legal aid fund. They said now was not the time, because the financial situation was so difficult. She said now was exactly the time for poor clients.
Ed Kline invited me to lunch at the Metropol hotel, the newly restored, super-duper Art Nouveau creation in Revolution Square. I went as I was, in T-shirt and jeans. Two women descended on me and asked if I was looking for the service entrance, then three security guards came up and tried to send me to the canteen. Finally made it to the restaurant. Ed’s wife later offered me a comb, so I guess today’s look was not a whing-ding success. It was fun to see them again and they were kind to me.
Ed asked me if I’m meeting “plain people” and not just the intelligentsia. I’m having no trouble meeting “plain people”. It seems to me “intelligentsia” is something other people should call you, but which some people here call themselves. When I got off the bus I bumped into Father Nikon’s sister, Ira, at the bus stop. She was so surprised she flung her arms round my neck and kissed me. She’s off tomorrow for two months’ nursing at a pioneer camp. It’s one way she can give her son a holiday.
Tuesday 28 May
A crow gave an immense squawk on my window ledge. I flung on the radio and switched off the alarm, but found it was only 5.20am.
At 2.00pm I went to meet an opposition deputy from the Georgian Supreme Soviet. He was with the representative they hope to base in Moscow. The Georgian mass media is so controlled by Zviad Gamsakhurdia that they are fairly desperately looking for outlets to the world. They came with information on seventy-two prisoners in Georgia and said four people had been picked off the street and “disappeared” for a week. They were held in some kind of garage. Gamsakhurdia has set up a National Guard parallel to the police force.
I don’t know what their nationalist outlook would be if you scratched the surface, but they were both mild-mannered and said they oppose the death penalty, rather to my surprise.
At 5.30pm I met Valya, to visit our premises. She brought Tolya, her daughter’s boyfriend, who will supervise the day-to-day building work. He seemed very serious about it and I liked him. He’s also old enough and just tough-looking enough to be quite handy in the job, I think. However, when we got to the office we found the padlock had been changed. Apparently last week there had been a fire or a flood there. The next-door neighbours said they were lucky they hadn’t been burned alive. “Must have been a fire,” said Valya, to no one in particular.
Tolya and I went round to the District Exploitation Administration to see if they have changed the lock. Usual scene of bedlam in their office and they shouted at us. Apparently they hadn’t; an international association of orphans is using it to store stuff. Michael Jackson and Vanessa Redgrave are its patrons.
It makes a tremendous difference to have these helping hands at this stage. Perhaps I’m just doing more interesting things, or perhaps I’ve just been around long enough. I do feel more at home. Yesterday I knew exactly which underpass to drop into to pick up a copy of Nezavisimaya Gazeta. They had an interview with Ian for our thirtieth anniversary today. They said he was “a man of few words”, but I think that may have been because I was interpreting for him. The Russian TV news carried an excellent five minutes on our thirtieth anniversary tonight.
At night another terrific thunderstorm burst and I got drenched. As I got nearer home this was joined by fireworks. The noise was spectacular and it looked like it was raining blood.
Wednesday 29 May
I slept very badly because the thunder and lightning continued till 2.00am and I don’t have curtains. Then there were mosquitoes. Was woken at 7.45am by agitated ringing on the doorbell. It was the postwoman, asking why I hadn’t collected a book that had been lying waiting for me for the last month. No one had told me about it, but apparently it was my fault.
Ruslan rang to say he too had got caught in last night’s storm and his clothes now looked as though they’d been gone over by a cold iron that had been rubbed in dirt.
I rang my Foreign Ministry minder to tell him I was off to Dubna for the night, then off I set to speak to research physicists interested in Amnesty. Savelovsky is like a village station in the middle of Moscow. You buy your ticket at a Nissen hut and people sit out knitting and reading at the buffers of the train. It was 130km north through deserted provincial Russia, with the odd cupola glinting across vast fields, and two peasant women sitting chatting on a furrow. Dubna is the USSR’s answer to CERN. I expected an impersonal science city, but found a leafy provincial town with lots of lilac trees and people cycling by. The river Volga bends north here. The grand old houses were built by German POWs, and the newer science blocks were put up in the last twenty years.