Our fortunes ride Russia’s slide into chaos. Closer analysis tells a different tale but comes a distant second to renewed marital bliss. The name change to Green Continent vindicates my father’s acumen. Student numbers swell as Russians exit the USSR by the jumbo-load. Processing times for Australian visas blow out beyond two years. For me Australia lives up to its promise, functions as a receding mirage, sustaining abstraction, contagious optimism. A turning point is Anna’s birthday. She lets me buy a proper CD player, replacements for damaged discs and additions to her collection at Melodiya music store on Kalinin Prospekt. As the city becomes one big open-air bazaar, food outside beriozki wastes and inflation hits three digits, I work half-time for a threefold US dollar salary. Evenings, weekends sometimes, we make love to Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Rachmaninov, Glinka – the whole firmament.
I try her on the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street. Anna delivers a pithy verdict. ‘An orchestra of jackhammers and nail-guns.’
I’ve outgrown them too. I assure her that most of the appeal of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon is in their lyrics, which of course don’t survive the journey. Lusher than the Stones but still jejune. Eight-chord as opposed to four-chord posturing.
Anna pouts.
We are at one in dismissing the Soviet hit factory as “pop-pourri”, but Anna warms to Aquarium and Time Machine who wear down official disapproval by dint of sheer popularity. St Petersburg rebel outfit DDT, volume down on sedition. The KGB has already called in their singer/songwriter Yury Shevchuk for some friendly advice.
Who is improving whom? She is elevating my taste while offloading some of her snobbery.
Snug in our eyrie we take news in nightcaps, cheerfully shirking our civic duty to be fully informed. Filtered through television, politics is a puppet show. At a certain psychological remove, narrative minus affect. Red-faced puppets, Gorbachev the head puppet, shake their fists at each other as at departing trains. Like the best aphrodisiacs, laced with guilt. Before long we’re grappling on the divan, Maria Alexandrovna’s rapping cane reliable syncopation.
Making up for lost time. By rights the story of our marriage – not out-and-out shotgun like her parents’ but exigent to a degree, bypassing courtship, not to be confused with our relationship – is Anna’s to tell.
Except she won’t. Tolstoy’s been summoned to higher duties, so it falls to me.
Anatoly’s funeral took place inside the low-ceilinged administration building behind another church-turned-food-store. A neighbour shepherded Anna into the viewing annex. Six days dead, Anatoly’s complexion was blanched and rigid, pudding left to set too long. He was still two metres, stretched out in his birch coffin. A sour smell like half-washed sweaty clothes pervaded the annex. Anna took her seat in the middle of the front row, for the service was due to begin.
One by one his colleagues rose to eulogise Anatoly Ivanovich Kuplinov, transform him into a man she vaguely recognised. His unstinting dedication to his research, critical to the Soviet cause. Youthful footballing prowess merited a mention. He existed as the sum of his deeds. By omission, his only daughter was relegated from no-longer-little Octobrist to bastard orphan, issue of a scandalous union glossed over for politeness’s sake.
The closing speaker Igor Ivanovich introduced himself as her father’s deputy, referred to ‘Tatiana Kirillovna’s untimely death’.
‘Of course Anatoly Ivanovich leaves behind a daughter, Anna Anatolyevna.’
Eyes turned to her, a sympathetic murmur, her shoulder clasped in sympathy. ‘Anyushka, cherish your father’s memory, as we will.’
The service concluded. A short procession to the cemetery behind the casket, now closed, weaved and bobbed round stones, stakes, fenced-off corners of gravesites. It began to rain, turning the path to squelch. The cortège flowed round a section dedicated to those fallen repelling Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, winter 1941-42. General Zhukov’s line, from Kaluga to Mozhaisk held firm, a turning point in the war. No sign of any Germans. The mourners ringed her father’s burial place. Blackened geranium stems littered the neighbouring graves, a ring of forget-me-nots, a spray of yellow spike blossoms. A middle-aged couple, defying the drizzle – too old Anna guessed to have recently lost parents, more likely a child – had set up a table spread with pies, hard-boiled eggs, a thermos of tea, and salted herring.
The casket was lowered. The ropes jerked, almost flipping it over. Steadied, it plopped square into pea-green water. Anna recoiled from the splash. No, she would not return here. Not alive at any rate.
The long, bleak winter after her father’s death was good only for skating. Her first paying audience – and she was certain even then, the last – was four old men plying ice holes for sprats. They waved at her improving, but still wobbly figure eights. For an encore she scooted over to accept a bucketful of wrigglers.
Three years passed, seven, a blur of relentless accomplishing. Her gift for science plus an illustrious surname gained entry to Moscow University’s prestigious physics degree. By then the house was subsiding into the Oka and she faced relocation to a kommunalka. Fifty summers of potato harvests beckoned.
Unbroken columns of High Distinction lined her exit route, Red Diploma awarded on her twentieth birthday. With it, the coveted spravka temporary living permit for promising non-Muscovite specialists, guest workers or students, valid for the duration of her postgraduate research in submarine circuitry at the elite Bauman Institute, monthly stipend of forty-five roubles, meals and dormitory accommodation thrown in. Eight bunks to a room. Filthy toilet and spluttering tap off the corridor, porridge spiced with weevils and cockroaches. Everything she thought she had escaped. Plus an irksome degree of surveillance. Students had to log movements to the minute. Dormitories were out of bounds during the day, unscheduled visitors forbidden.
In class she played the provincial upstart, bristling with ambition, first to answer and unfailingly correct. Let others skip lectures, hang out at Illusion Cinema. The sizable contingent of Central Asians, plus a few Pakistanis and Indians, lent camouflage, helped her fade into a sub-exotic foreground. She passed through the canteen just long enough to gulp down a cabbage roll and stewed juice and hurry to the next lecture. If a boy offered to carry her books she made sure he didn’t ask a second time. Having clawed her way into the capital and onto its graduation-to-grave conveyor belt, nothing and nobody would prise her off.
Eighteen months into her postgraduate studies she was transferred to the Central Scientific Research Institute for Automated Submarine Radar, extending her spravka by two years. The security guard, who came to know her by footfall, let her in without running her scarf and hat under the metal detector on condition she signed the entry book and proffered her passport. She handed her coverings to the old woman with cracked spectacles minding the cloakroom and stepped into the elevator. Her fellow passengers studied each other’s right shoulders. Arriving on time, they had thirty minutes to relax and gossip. Kettle murmuring on the hob, they assembled for ritual tea drinking, bonbons and dainty caramels passed round with warmed-up complaints about scarcities, skyrocketing prices, wayward men. They scattered like foxes at the sight of a sheep when a supervisor appeared around nine, either went to their desks or headed to the stationery department. The room emptied again at lunchtime, everybody racing to the shops to buy meat and dairy products that by mid-afternoon would clear from the shelves.