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ENGLISH PLUS
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Eleven o’clock. An hour left to kill. I’m on a train. I disembark at Alexander Gardens opposite the Kremlin. My feet are retreading my school pilgrimage to the Mausoleum, the Monday after Victory Day May 9, 1978.
As every year the Red Square parade bulged through our television screen. From the podium Brezhnev blessed marching bands, generals with grandchildren, other decorated veterans, marching naval squadrons, air force divisions and burly parachutists in blue and crimson berets, killing machines who pledged never to return alive from missions unaccomplished. The machines themselves followed – tanks, fighter planes, rocket launchers, battalions, SS19 intercontinental missiles wheeled upright, BM-21 rocket launchers, a Tunguska anti-aircraft carrier with evil turrets like the tusks of a boar, ten years behind state-of-the-art to lull the West into complacency. This was Brezhnev’s, what, sixteenth parade as General Secretary? How many more had he endured on his path to supreme power? The old men beside him, rank and file Politburo, looked asleep on their feet.
‘Vassily Sergeyevich! Keep step!’
Resplendent in Young Pioneer red scarves and white blouses, Grade Six 1978, Moscow Municipal School No. 113 filed past red, yellow and white tulips emblazoning corners of lawn marked off with iron hoops. Echoes ricocheted off the cobblestones as we trooped across Red Square, too cowed to titter. Victory Day bunting, shreds of orange and black ribbon commemorating the 1945 rout of Berlin, stuck to paper cans and other debris. Our martinet Klavdiya Sergeyevna shouted to hold ranks. To our right bunched golden domes, steroid-fed onions, behind swallowtail Kremlin ramparts. On our left was the GUM Department Store, its fabled merchandise hidden behind grimy windows, May sunshine refracting off the last snow trickling from crannies. Why couldn’t Klavdiya Sergeyevna schedule some shopping? At least allow us a glimpse of the black caviar from the Caspian, Lakomba tube ice-creams, crème brulee in waffle cones, that exemplary Young Pioneers could aspire to. Women hurried to queue at two open entrances. A decent consignment of East German shoes or Polish handbags must have come in. My gaze lingered on the windows until the boy behind nearly tripped over me a second time.
Ahead was St Basil’s Cathedral’s whipped-candy exuberance. Our Marxist-Leninist Philosophy and Dialectical Materialism teacher, Valentina Pavlovna, in a rare discursive moment, told the class how in real life Ivan the Terrible, the commissioning Tsar, blinded the architects so that they would never design a building as beautiful again. More likely Ivan assigned each dome’s decoration to a gifted child – and what glorious results. Green cross-hatching amber binding a basket. Harlequin green and red checkerboard. The tallest blue and white, vertical stripes spiralling at the base.
We walked past the necropolis, war heroes niches on the wall, to the mausoleum entrance where other excursion groups already waited. From the outside a pyramid structure with five pointy projections. After twenty minutes we were ushered through, four at a time. It was like going down into a dank but very well-appointed public toilet. A cubic hall with a stepped ceiling, low podium, flanked by red marble pilasters. One dim, overworked ceiling globe. Crimson curtains parted to VLADIMIR ILYICH LENIN, 1870-1924, an ellipse inside a glass casket; the great man attired in a natty black suit and white-spotted tie. Reddish goatee accentuated his mottled potassium permanganate complexion, blemishes scab-white. Left hand clenched, right hand relaxed. How short he was – did corpses shrink over forty-three years? How unimpressive.
All that way, for this? I looked around, hoping to read others’ reactions, but the space was too crowded. One man began crossing himself and muttering; ‘Lenin… our God.’ Ten minutes allotted viewing time over, we took the exit stairs and Klavdiya Sergeyevna bustled us back to Alexander Gardens Metro.
Emptied of sightseers, end-of-autumn melancholy suffuses Alexander Gardens. A few brown leaves cling to saplings ringing the mausoleum. Moustaches rustling audibly, a crone extends a withered arm thin as a crane pick. Under communism beggars are paradoxical phenomena, like the prostitutes outside Hotel Russia and other Western tourist establishments, their pimps skulking at a distance – logical impossibility and undeniable fact. I go to toss her a few kopeks until I remember that under the 1977 Soviet Constitution Article 40 it is an offence to abet mendicants, who, under Article 60 guaranteeing full employment for all, don’t exist.
I leave the gardens and board the train. At Kievskaya, my exit station, I shoulder through the crowd and confront a panegyric to forgotten revolutions. Lenin, flanked by acolytes Gorky and Ordzhonokidze, haranguing his audience of Ukrainian Cossacks. Hydra-limbed artillery fighters load cannons. Bayonets thrust forward as invisible German troops surrender. Further along the wall a soldier leaks malachite from the sole of his boot. Young Pioneers cheer a passing parade. All wear red scarves, boys’ blouses peasant white, girls’ cornflower blue. A bronze bas-relief portrays miners hewing coal from Donbass tunnels, heaving containers onto wagons, stoking engines by the shovel. True communism consists of feats of conveyance, hauling trainloads of human cargo like so much slag steel from the Urals. I fling my hands up to an invisible heaven – what else can you say about a system that finds apotheosis in tractor shows?
Traffic along the Garden Ring underpass throbs in my soles. I enter New Arbat, formerly a theatre and café precinct for the nomenklatura, pampered heirs of the 1920s Bolshevik elite. Stalin, later Khrushchev, pile-drove roads through. Once again it is a new rich hangout, pavement kiosks selling Pierre Cardin, bootlegged cassettes and Time magazine. Mafia hoods gun their BMWs along Arbatsky Prospekt. I round the bulletproof windows of Prague Restaurant into Old Arbat pedestrian mall, dodge ten-year-old gypsy pickpockets tricked out as shoeblacks. American tourists pose for photographs beside life-size cardboard cut-outs of grinning Yeltsin in commiserative handshake with morose Gorbachev. Galleries are being converted into doll shops, fifty-flavour ice-cream parlours, outlets for stolen icons. In my student days – was it really a decade ago? – these mildewed tenements hummed with basement bars. Muddy jazz fusion, honking riffs from makeshift stages under strobe lights, filled the cavern space. Lank-haired hippies mixed up carafes of champagne cocktails with cider, vodka, red wine and split cherries, swigged from beer bottles frosted over with cigarette ash. I communed down there with other duffel-coaters, pored over brown envelopes of banned novels by Solzhenitsyn and Aksenov, giggled nervously at a cyclostyled caricature of former General Secretary Brezhnev as whore, eyelashes fluttering over rouged simian features, jewelled hand on outthrust hip, the five Olympic rings dangling from one ear. In jaded hindsight we were small-u underground; waifs not worth surveillance.
Checking the time again – by now I am glancing at my watch every other minute – I hurry past a school building, a dark brick L adjoining a badminton court, withered net waving in the breeze. Some boys play scratch football at one end, their cloth ball unravelling with each kick. At the other, English Plus Language School is in a ten-storey residential block like mine, if anything more scabrous and dilapidated. My usual feeling of having stumbled a complete circle. Down piping tilts out from the walls, icicles line up to spear passers-by below, cement chunks from a long-abandoned renovation ring the ground floor entrance. Perfect camouflage for the cautious revolution within.