But Green Continent? I shudder at the deserts spanning its centre, vaster than Kazakhstan.
★
MAKEOVER
★
‘We’re going to Australia.’ Channelling my father’s declaration at the dacha. Card sharp leading with my trump. Standing against the oven, Anna drops her wooden ladle which clatters onto the floor.
‘I’ll start again. I might be going, subject to clearance. When, if, who knows.’
‘For how long?’ Anna isn’t mollified.
‘Twelve months, tops.’
‘Twelve months?’
‘Don’t think I’m happy about it. But my father’s my boss, what to do?’
‘Looks like you two have worked it all out,’ she says. Her voice carries no anger, just flat regret after the fact. ‘Can’t be including me in the discussion. Whatever next?’ The sarcasm’s turned wintry.
‘Once I’m there, and show I’m genuine, I can invite you on a visitor visa, for up to nine months. My father reckons they’ll grant it as a matter of course. I don’t take his word for much, but I trust him on this. No one would mistake you for a runaway type.’
‘Better you than me. You’re braver when it comes down to it. I can’t just leap out into the void.’
She goes back to preparing cabbage soup, onion and tomato salad, pancakes with lashings of raspberry jam and cream she whipped herself. Her mother’s green muslin dress she wore on our honeymoon hangs loose on her slimmed frame. Tiptoeing from behind, I sink my chin into her shoulder as she spoons sugar into the heaving mix. Put both arms round her waist, let my fingers spider-creep towards her breast. Anna moans – one part arousal, two parts protest. She sidesteps to the cupboard to fetch the salad bowl, three candles from her shrine. In the last six weeks or so – since her last period, come to think of it – her energy and colour have returned. She’s positively vibrant, even bursting with news.
The news? That’s the trouble with life here. We spend the whole time watching each other, but don’t end up any wiser.
Later, after we make up in the usual way she rolls off the wet patch, props her chin on one elbow and muses. ‘She must have been quite something, this Helen woman, for your dad to carry a torch all these years. I’m sad for Teresa, intrigued all the same.’
Disregarding my father’s genial objections – ‘They won’t be needing a linguistics professor, just a native speaker. The idea is to make the lazy bastards speak Russian. Keep trading on your ignorance, it’s got you this far.’ – I enrol in advanced English classes at Moscow University, in a tall brown building overlooking the river. Formerly the physics department, it is converting to a hotchpotch of import firms leasing office space. The teacher, an ex-scientist himself, over-accentuates what he tells the class are stressed syllables. There are about twenty other students, mostly older, preparing for language tests at various Western embassies. This lends an inhibiting earnestness to the sessions. For all their unwavering concentration and assiduous note taking, they make only faltering progress. I am usually first to complete the teacher’s prompts, more from my advanced sense of pedagogic rhythm than any cognitive agility.
Week three is a thorough revision of English verb tenses and I flounder in a quagmire of present continuous, pluperfect, past subjunctive mood, present imperfect and future passive conditional. I sit further and further towards the back as my classmates’ dogged persistence reaps rewards. It dawns on me that I’ve frittered away potential, coasted on too many set-piece conversations in corrupted boardroom Amerenglish.
The trick, I decide, is to recite a mnemonic until it embeds itself in my subconscious, meanwhile keeping a bedside diary for nocturnal breakthroughs. My father’s oft-repeated axiom – ‘If you are dreaming in your second language you are well on the way to mastering it’ – proves its worth. Scanning my vocabulary tables I choose show for its less dastardly spelling and pronunciation across past, present, future than, say, think, from the discouragingly long list of irregular verbs.
After class I walk around the campus, composing for an hour. I tinker with syntax, splice vignettes into monologue, sprinkle negatives for variety, let the auxiliary verb have run amok until I’m satisfied it is word-perfect. On the train home I mutter into my textbook. Yesterday I wanted to show you the Kremlin again, but did not, I had shown it to you already. I did show you St Basils, and I would have shown you the Victory Arch. On Sunday I will be showing you Lenin Mausoleum and Red Square. By next Monday you will have been shown everything interesting in Moscow.
The discovery that my passive vocabulary eclipses my conversational range is uncertain consolation. I can look forward to Australians underestimating my intelligence.
I frequent places where Westerners congregate – Alexander Gardens, Gorky Park, foreign-currency shops in hotels Rossiya and Intourist and the entrance to Russia’s first-ever McDonalds in Pushkin Square. Americans are easiest to spot. Huge Pentax cameras jiggling over anoraks, baseball caps swivelling in the direction of their guide’s pointed finger. I hang back too far to be mistaken for KGB, but close enough to glean tidbits of idiom, often loud complaints about slovenly service, admission surcharges for foreigners, abrupt changes in itinerary. Finding a park bench I jot these down on journal pages, gathering them under headings I invent for their cataloguing. Useful Expletives for Frustrating Moments. Toilet Euphemisms. Dealing with Rudeness. Dealing with Bureaucrats. How Not to be Ripped Off in Hard-Currency Shops. At Tourist Markets. What to Say when the Restaurant Closes Early. When the Chosen Menu Item has Run Out. Haggling. Examples of American Humour. The last remains blank, not that Americans are a solemn race, rather because their quick-fire repartee among themselves draws more laughter than leisurely spun anecdotes.
Occasionally I happen upon Australian tourists. I can pick that drawl at fifty paces. Slim Dusty has worn a groove in my brain. But they tend to stroll in pairs, or with a local guide, and stalking is fraught. An alert militiaman might deduce criminal intent. On the other hand, given Moscow is awash in Yankee culture it has probably swept Australia too, so I’m hoping any colloquial transatlanticisms will retain their currency.
English lends me a double life, privileged witness to Moscow prised open yet again to foreign influence, even offers me a tiny part in its transformation. Language usurps Party membership as class divide. Those with business flair and a glib turn of phrase reinvent themselves as managers, real estate agents, stockbrokers. The monolingual remainder – architects, musicians, engineers and scientists among them – operate kiosks, drive taxis, hawk Microsoft manuals on street pavements. Young pretenders – Gaidar, Nemtsov, Yavlinsky – preen their Harvard jargon at international conferences or on chat shows. My second language is a gold pass into the burgeoning stateless world. I sport the smug frisson of the initiate.
Taking care not to wake Anna, I inch towards the bedside table, where my diary has lain untouched for weeks. At the top of a fresh page I write Dreams in English 21/02/1991. Underneath, I have had shown to me…