Tolya invited me round in the evening, the night before he moves. He’s under immense strain and doesn’t seem happy at all. I felt sorry for him sitting in the relics of his flat, with a very uncertain future. He gave me tablets for my eczema and a piece of cake to take home with me. Last night Natalya Ivanovna had offered to get an alternative doctor to examine my jaw. She said he hadn’t actually been able to help her, apparently, but that was because she was, she said, “a funny bugger”. “Marjorie’s a funny bugger too,” cautioned Irina.
Professor Avetisyan and I also finalised the office statute today. He proudly showed me round his offices at a Western law firm in the centre of town, and took me right into the boardroom where the directors were having a meeting. Great culture clash, because he sat down and wanted me to “speak English with them”. I think it was only because I was so obviously embarrassed that they contained their disbelief and annoyance and ordered us coffee. So, we spoke English together.
Saturday 29 February
Irina is immensely kind to me. She is painstakingly translating an anatomical diagram of feet for me, because she knows I am interested in doing a reflexology course when I go home. There is something very innocent about my friendships here, which reminds me of childhood friendships, and is lovely. I think it is maybe because people aren’t transient so, unlike me, they don’t have a host of floating associations in different countries, whose relative importance is not clear, even to me. If they like you they like you, and you come to the house and meet the family. They also talk about you and think about you a lot, and in a place like this, that is a lovely feeling.
We went to a concert in the Scriabin Museum, looked around the exhibits, then went to the twentieth-century photography museum and finally to see Cinema Paradiso at the Kino Centre. A nice day.
Sunday 1 March
Spring began today with a bright sun, a big thaw and mighty rushing of waters along the street. I must have been so keyed up this week that as I began to relax my body was sore and my brain was dead. I spent all day fretting about the delivery of office furniture and feeling extremely sorry for myself. I walked all along the embankment and into town to the Quakers, where I fell into a kind of trance and couldn’t believe an hour had passed. There are more than twenty of us now, and some very good people among us. I felt very much better and came home and worked on the death penalty, to prepare myself for the duel with Professor Baskov in Sovetskaya Justitsiya.
Desperate Donnegan came round with his paper on Walter Pater, wanting my views on it. Somewhere from the midst of my gloom, I admire his intense enthusiasm for nineteenth-century English.
Monday 2 March
Today I took the Health and Safety Inspector round the office. She was a hefty woman, who swept over the rooms with one glance in three minutes. For this they were going to charge us 2,000 roubles, if I hadn’t pleaded poverty. Because I was foreign she liked me and began showing me photos of her family, and talking about religion. Interesting: she was a paramedic, but had been to both Syria and Pakistan in the Brezhnev era.
I also tried to tackle our banking problems by opening up an account. The simplest thing would be to have a rouble account at the Savings Bank opposite the office, but they sent me up to their headquarters in Krasnopresnensky to get a letter of authorisation. The headquarters was distributed through an ordinary block of flats, oddly enough, so I came across a room of tellers counting notes furiously in what would normally be the basement area for rubbish. I was batted between two women who didn’t want to deal with me, and finally both of them refused to let Amnesty open an account because we are not a “small business”.
I came home via Pushkin Square where I picked up documentation from some HIV sufferers. After dinner I went out to Yelena’s place to return the saucepans I borrowed from them over a year ago. Yelena’s mother is being made redundant on 5 April. Their neighbour is going to all the right-wing demonstrations. Yelena gave me spare cardboard boxes for packing up my things and going back to London. So the crates which brought relief from the Solzhenitsyn Fund will be carrying out things for the Amnesty rep.
Everyone looked very tired, but it was a leisurely family evening as usual, with Yelena’s mother listening to the radio in the kitchen, and the baby asleep. Yelena and I played the piano to each other, using the music she had copied out by hand in exile. It was a very vivid picture: Yelena with her long dark hair and face slightly strained with the effort, baby’s bath on top of the china cabinet, and the room strewn with boxes of things for prisoners. Late twentieth-century woman, who has been exiled in her own country. I wonder what her daughter’s friends will remember about her in future years.
I had a new postman today: someone from the USA who is doing research into nuclear policy. He took Amnesty’s article to the Journal of Asian and African Studies.
Tuesday 3 March
Nice weather continues, with the streets like the seashore, continually running with little ripples of water.
Every time I try to buy something in the street, or flag down a car, some good-hearted woman leaps to my elbow and tells me not to because it’s too expensive, or tells me where I can get it cheaper round the corner. I don’t usually have time go round the corner, but feel inhibited to carry on buying there in the street. So I’m not getting very much at the moment.
Wednesday 4 March
Prepared this week’s courier and also got myself ready for an interview on China tomorrow at the Russian World Service. Took the afternoon off and went with Irina to see an exhibition at 28 Malaya Gruzinskaya, the place where they held underground art shows during Brezhnev’s times. From there we walked up to Chekhov’s museum at the house where he used to practise medicine, now on the Garden Ring. Whichever museum you go into, you always find Shalyapin and Gorky gracing the photos, like something out of Jennifer’s Diary.
In the evening Simon Cosgrove came round to take away my cups and glasses. I’m starting the pruning for moving.
Thursday 5 March
Since I’ve read about Buddhist “mindfulness” I’ve left my handbag overnight at the Sannikovas’, and this morning I locked myself out of the flat. Obviously being too “mindful”.
I had an early morning appointment with Nikita at the Moscow City Justice Department, to ask his advice about how we register with the Russian authorities. I’m afraid we are straddling two horses, going along simultaneously as a “charity” with the Moscow Mayordom, and as a “foreign business” with the Russian government. He thinks so too. He gave me an hour of his time, looking up decrees and phoning contacts. At one point he sat with a phone at each ear, discussing decrees down one, and some bargain food down the other.
Afterwards I did an interview with Kirill Mikhailov at the World Service and he took me for lunch. His questions were all very general about human rights, but very interesting. The interview will be broadcast to China, North Korea, Afghanistan and elsewhere.