Sakharov’s grave was signposted. Candles were burning in front of it and there were fresh flowers, to which we added our two yellow carnations. What moved me most was seeing the grave of Yelena Bonner’s mother there too, and the empty plot between it and Sakharov’s, which is presumably reserved for Yelena Bonner. It is sobering when you remember someone very much alive then see the spot where they now lie.
It must have been -10 degrees with a strong wind when we waited for the bus back. Irina got something in her eye and wanted me to help take it out, so we stood gloveless in the freezing cold and I could hardly move my fingers, let alone do advanced surgery. It was only 1.00pm when we got back, so we decided to go skiing. The sun was setting behind the birch trees as we went round Kuskovo Park. A fantastic deep yellow sky, great silence, and little dark figures in the distance.
Back to Irina’s for dinner and to listen to the new jazz tapes I’d got from home. We were sitting by candlelight as their bulbs have gone. There’s also no bread in their area so we ate something Natalya Ivanovna had baked without milk, eggs or butter. Before the public holidays I stood in a really vicious queue for bread. The tension and aggression between people were palpable and there was a running political commentary going in different parts of the shop – the sort you might hear in a London taxi. People were shouting insults over at other parts of the queue, like: “Why don’t you go and live in Georgia then?” Today, however, there was a relaxed atmosphere and people were very pleasant in the metro and in the cemetery.
Thursday 2 January
I spent the day with Professor Avetisyan’s statute for our office, first translating it into English and sending it to London, then typing it up onto the computer in Russian. In breaks from the computer I tried to pin down the Property Privatisation Fund and finally succeeded. They said our property papers have now been forwarded to the Prefect of the Central District. We’re slowly getting there.
The shops were all shut so I couldn’t take a look at the prices that were liberalised yesterday. At 10.00am a rather deranged woman came to the door and walked straight into the flat, before I barred her way. A rather deranged man had done the same thing to Natalya Vysotskaya last week. Someone is obviously giving out our addresses.
All the homilies from Russian newsreaders are getting a bit hard to take. Each item ends with, “God grant it won’t happen here”, and each broadcast with, “Be kinder to each other” etc. There was a nice report about a British gift of beef, which had failed the Russian Ministry of Health’s hygiene test. With silent irony the camera focused on down-and-outs in a filthy street while the woman reporter said, “though why it was not good enough for us is a mystery, when it feeds half the European Community”.
Bakatin has left the KGB with some dire remarks about its unreformability and Izvestiya has gone back to an old typeface. Neither encouraging omens. Talking of which, after the news there is a five-minute astrological prediction for business people next day. Tonight they were warned not to take decisions or do deals after 2.00pm. The economy somehow feels as though it is guided by astrology.
Friday 3 January
Yesterday’s snowstorms continued. The laundry ladies warned me it would be expensive, and it has gone up from 2 to 20 roubles. The place was deserted and I’m sure their work will be cut down.
Another day of hunting by phone. Apparently our property documents have already been cleared by the Central Prefektura. We seem to be moving on an inside track here. I got quite punch drunk, clipping four Izvestiya in one day.
I’m starting to clear and tidy the flat, ready for moving on 25 January. In the evening I was ironing clothes on the floor by the light of one lamp bulb, listening to Rachmaninov, and suddenly felt immensely happy. I’ve had a great year, one way or another.
There was a tribute to an actor on TV tonight and people were reminiscing about their youthful exploits with him. One actress was remembering how they’d stolen a light bulb in the street: “It was the 1920s at the end of the New Economic Policy, and light bulbs were hard to come by.” “You mean like now?” the interviewer said. “Now it’s absolutely impossible,” the actress said, “then it was just hard.” A lot of people’s reminiscences are quite funny, because either things haven’t changed or they’re worse. The piquancy moves forward.
Tonight the news ended with an astrological prediction, about disaster when the sun/moon moves into Capricorn on Sunday, but telling us not to believe it. We seem to be living in a stream of the subconscious here. I wonder what it would take for the BBC to switch to the same style.
Saturday 4 January
I spent fully five hours trudging round the square mile of local shops. First the shoe repair shop wouldn’t take one boot on its own, then the bag repair shop was just shutting with a lot of bad temper, then by the time I got to the bottle bank it had shut. Eventually I got my boots and bag repaired and also a new zip put in other boots. The boot repair that was 12 roubles in autumn is now 119.
I also went in to town and bought a St Petersburg train ticket for a colleague who’s coming out from the London office. The waiting room at the station is now paying only, and people were sitting in tidy rows, watching a bank of TVs. The cost of a single ticket has risen from 12 to 30 roubles – and there was no queue! I’d been dreading it.
I then went in search of a birthday cake for Nikolay’s mother tomorrow and ended at Yeliseyevsky’s posh gastronom on Tverskaya Street. There’s a picture of Yeliseyevsky in pre-revolutionary subfusk high up among the mosaics and chandeliers. I watched some deaf and dumb women in woollen hats gesturing up at it, apparently not very impressed. The queue for the cash desk took over an hour. The cashiers were having trouble remembering the new prices and had to keep shouting, “How much are oats?” “Thirty roubles,” came the reply, and a sort of shriek came from the queue. I felt there was a masochistic pleasure in people’s reaction, as though they were ready to give their opinion to any passing correspondent at a moment’s notice.
I find all the economic reports really interesting now. Before I used to wonder why they listed such a random bunch of things, like macaroni, oil and beetroot. But there aren’t supermarkets or shopping arcades, and shopping is just a discovery of random items, never the same two days running, so one random list is as good as another.
On my way to Leningrad Station I passed a man in black shirt, trousers, boots and black leather Sam Brown, selling fascist leaflets, under a sign saying, “The Black Hundreds – Russia’s last bastion”. About five men had stopped and were chatting to him. Other people looked and hurried by.
Misha sent me a good letter from Yugoslavia this morning. His classes are being interrupted by bomb scares and a student of his has been called up. Vukovar is only one hour from Belgrade. He’d asked his students to write an essay on “What concerns the youth of Yugoslavia today?” and regretted it, because the despair and trapped feeling which came through what they wrote was terribly upsetting to read.
Saw milk on the black market today – 7 roubles a carton.
Sunday 5 January
At 2.00pm Peter Jarman and I visited the church of All Saints at Kitay Gorod, where we may hold the Quaker meetings in future. Although it’s Russian Orthodox they’re ecumenically minded. It’s a brick church built in the 1600s on the remains of a fourteenth-century wooden church there. Inside it’s stripped back to the brick, with a cardboard iconostasis and the odd nineteenth-century fresco glimmering through patches of plaster. I liked it immensely. We had to wait until Father Martyry had finished baptising a family, and I was interested to watch how it was done. After wetting their heads he dabbed water on their eyes, ears, mouth and feet, which Peter probably rightly interpreted as “God be in your seeing, listening, the things you say and where your feet lead you.” Afterwards they had to process round the font three times, with their boots undone and flapping round their ankles. Although they looked really uplifted by the baptism, I thought they looked self-conscious about the boots.