Natalya Ivanovna went to bed, and we sat up talking and drinking port until 2.00am.
Tuesday 31 March
I hardly slept. Irina hardly slept because she was on the floor. Natalya Ivanovna hardly slept because she got up at 6.00am to bake me food for my journey. She went to bed and conked out while Irina and I ate breakfast. Then it was time for goodbye. We all sat in silence for the journey, Russian-style. Natalya Ivanovna took my face in her hands and gave me double kisses on each cheek. Irina went limp and somehow wasn’t there. We were all smiling with serious faces, and that was my last glimpse of Natalya Ivanovna, as the lift door slid shut. Very very good people, who really opened themselves to me.
A frantic day of emptying the PO box, buying and installing a phone, saying goodbye to Tolya, collecting articles from Izvestiya, and taking my leave of my landlord and the Desperate Donnegans.
From 2.00 to 5.00pm I packed like a loony, helped by Andrey. We too sat in silence for the journey, then he carried all my heavy stuff out to the taxi and on to the train at Belorussia station.
As we waited in the sunshine up came a delegation from the Moscow College of Advocates, bringing flowers; then Viktor, bringing me a tray. At the last moment Yelena ran up, beaming and beaming, and inviting me to come on holiday with them next year. At a distance from her stood Andrey, dark and deadpan. They actually have a lot of friends in common, but don’t know each other. I leaned out of the window and said, “I don’t want to leave”, and Andrey gestured me to come back. The only person missing was Irina. As the train pulled out I suddenly felt immensely tired and burst into tears.
I shared a compartment with Igor, a Soviet businessman working in Germany, who had been back home for his father’s funeral and was steadily slugging his way through the vodka. Spent much of the ride on my back looking up at the window. Except for the odd trees, it was empty in Russia and Poland. In Germany it was crossed with electricity wires and pylons. Suddenly a statue on horseback leapt out and filled the frame in Belgium. Everything seemed much more crowded the further west we got. As I raised my head above the parapet at a German station I was astonished at how sexless all the women looked. Not masculine, but sexless. Really a different world, or culture.
I was the only passenger across Belgium and drifted into nice chats with the two Soviet guards, who brought me their tape deck and played me Yesenin’s poetry. I gave them a picture and they gave me flowers, before helping me with my luggage at Oostende dock. Like Igor, they thought the August coup was not significant – simply a baronial fight in Moscow, which has really changed nothing, That seems to be the accepted wisdom now, as I’ve heard it from several quarters before, and it seems quite true to me. But perhaps the significant things in history are precisely the things that stay the same, and that does not discount the coup.
When the boat train arrived in Victoria station there was not a trolley in sight, nor a porter. I hung around with my bags for close on forty minutes, accompanied the while by a chatty guard. I asked him if he would help me carry things for a tip. “Oh no, it’s more than my job’s worth,” he actually said. Oh, happy isle!
PHOTOGRAPHS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marjorie Farquharson worked in the field of human rights and the USSR and post-Soviet States for over 30 years. She was the Amnesty researcher on the USSR at the International Secretariat from 1978 – 1992 and Amnesty International’s first representative in the Soviet bloc, worked as the Director of the EU TACIS project, worked in 44 of Russia’s federal regions as a Council of Europe Officer, and helped establish a regional ombudsman institution there. She has been a freelance researcher, writer and translator since 2001 and worked in all 5 Central Asian States.
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 Marjorie Farquharson
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