Thursday 12 March
Tolya was round at 8.00am to collect receipts and go to the telephone exchange. He has managed to beat down our installation bill. He’s certainly being an immense help.
After preparing the mailing for London in the morning, I went to the office to interview a man who is convinced he’s being persecuted by the KGB. Most of the country seems to be sick with this feeling. He was the director of an institute and had a good and intelligent face. As a director he’d spent his working life literally surrounded by KGB people on his staff and in his circle of acquaintances. At a certain point he became obsessed with the idea that someone was going through his flat, papers and fridge. Everything he said I notice in myself and in other people here. Eventually he tried to drown himself, but couldn’t because he was a good swimmer.
The poor guy then went to the police station and asked them to arrest him, to stop this threatening feeling. So they did, and he was put in a psychiatric hospital. The water there had been turned off and all the cups of all the various slobbering patients were being washed in the same bowl of water. He tried to bolt, so they pumped him full of drugs. I think he was a bit off his hinges, but it was hard to separate reality from paranoia, and most of his reactions to me were totally understandable. It was obvious that he didn’t trust me either. I opened the window because it was hot and he kept turning to it nervously, as though there was a microphone hidden outside.
Irina and I went to see the actress Margareta Terekhova opening the premier of her new film, We Are Not Mad Men. It was an evening when I was terribly impressed by Irina’s comments on people and on acting. From within her four walls there’s this great big brain following and absorbing everything. Her phone keeps being cut off and is drowned with background noises.
Friday 13 March
I think Tolya and I spent the day in futile bureaucratic pursuits. Eight hours later he rang to say the Electricity Board now wants us to produce architects’ plans for the houses next to our office, to find out where the electricity cables are. *!*^?
Andrey came round for dinner and told me about his hunger strike in psychiatric hospital. Apparently he was in Abramtsevo. When he found out my brother is a psychiatrist, the cup which was nearly at his lips came down to the table with a bang. “Sorry, involuntary reaction,” he said.
Saturday 14 March
Helena came out to visit from the UK today and I picked her up from the airport. Her arrival started an odd chapter with Russian friends, as I discovered. Irina was round for lunch beforehand and I wanted them to meet, but Irina didn’t want to. All the more touching that she bought us both tickets for a Chekhov play on Wednesday night.
Sunday 15 March
I locked us out of the house again. More “mindfulness” on my part. After taking Helena to the Danilov monastery, the market and the Quakers, we went round to Viktor’s place for his mother’s birthday party. They lived up to eccentric form, showing Helena the carrier bag with his grandmother’s ashes in it.
Viktor’s mother told me that from now on I must speak only English with Viktor, to give him practice. I accidentally said something in English to her, and a blank look passed over her face, before she said royally, “But to me you may speak Russian.” Viktor says he is reading only English now, because it gives him “less information”. He’s drowning in all the news. Me too.
I worked until 2.30am, sending emails to London.
Monday 16 March
Helena struck out into town on her own, with only my map and her English vowels to save her from destruction.
I did more mailings, then met Irina briefly to pick up our theatre tickets. She was going to interpret for a group of young scientists from the USA, who are visiting her medical research station and are anxious to share statistics on AIDS, rabies etc. The paper in Russian, which they had sent in advance, had got lost in the office, no one had read it, and the office were totally unprepared for their visit. Irina was embarrassed at the berkish questions she was having to interpret. It sounds like something from Gogol.
Helena had wanted to meet Andrey, so he came round for dinner. Here began another unexpected awkwardness. She was telling him about her old job, and how human rights groups used to compete for funds to do projects in South Africa. Andrey said, “Why?”, and I watched the cultural gap open between them and never close. Helena was furious, but too polite to argue and also sorry not to be getting on with a friend of mine. Andrey didn’t mind if they got on or not, and that too was a cultural difference. I realised it is marvellous having Russian friends, but it has never been painless.
Tuesday 17 March
Big tension was expected in Moscow today, as members of the old Soviet Parliament assembled to agitate for a return to the old USSR. Although I saw red flags and some knots of people outside the Moskva Hotel, they were smaller than the crowds selling shoes and shirts round the corner at Kuznetsky Most. Moscow’s becoming like New York. If you’ve got the money you can buy champagne at 6.00am and a jumper at 11.00pm. You see huge throngs in the street, which last year would have been a pro-Yeltsin gaggle. This year it is traders standing in lines along the pavements with pedestrians slowly moving through, trying on this or beating down the prices for that. The bottom of Gorky Street, Kuznetsky Most and the Lubyanka are almost impassable. It is certainly good to see cheese – and different varieties too – beer, and wines up from Tajikistan and Karabakh. There was nothing like it last year.
Today I was supposed to meet the paranoid man again in the office, but would you believe it the telephone engineers decided to install our phone there today. Tolya asked them to postpone it, to save the man’s nerves.
There’s a settlement of Old Believers’ Churches just east of Taganka – the Rogozhsky settlement – and this morning Misha Roshchin, a Quaker who is also an Old Believer, took Helena and me round it. They had refused to accept new church rulings in the 1500s, in particular the introduction of crossing yourself with three fingers not two. Hard to believe, but true, and they and their clergy went through years of persecution because of it.
The church was absolutely beautiful. They have kept to the old canons of icon painting and do not use electricity, so have a splendid eighty-four-piece candelabra in burnished metal hanging before the altar. There is a massive wooden scaffold on wheels which they use for lighting the candles. A woman was lovingly sweeping the wooden floor and other old ladies were sitting in the peace and quiet in the sunlight which was streaming in through the windows.
I was quite entranced by the sense of devotion, until a thin old lady in felt boots marched across the church at a fair clip, crossed herself profusely en route past the icons, and screamed that she’d seen me holding my hands behind my back. I begged her forgiveness and she said, “The Lord may forgive you”, but there again he might not. Helena, who was lounging by some shroud, smartened herself up pretty sharpish.
At night I sat between Andrey and Helena at an organ concert, by this time neither of them making much attempt to be friendly with each other. From the back view the organist looked as though he was breakdancing during the complicated bits. As we parted Andrey gave me beetroots and homemade cake from his briefcase. I think that’s the thing about friendships here. You don’t get to know someone through conversation, so much as going through similar problems and helping each other. Conversation comes later. If Helena lived here I think she and Andrey would get on quite differently.