‘We cannot thank you enough.’ The man’s voice trails away.
The woman rallies. ‘We decided to get out of Chechnya before the Russian invasion began. Our relatives smuggled us aboard a vegetable truck. We hid under wooden crates all the way to the border. Some border guards discovered us, but my uncle gave them half his savings in return for safe passage to Moscow.’ She brushes hair from her face. ‘Everyone knows there is a Chechen Mafia, same as the Moscow Mafia. Now we are criminals just for being Chechens.’
Anna swishes some warm milk in a saucepan, decants it into three of our best silver-winged glasses, and stands a teaspoon in each. Tilting the baby’s chin, the woman dribbles a little into its mouth, pink as a kitten’s. The baby grimaces, releases a cry and tongues the moisture off its lip. Anna hovers, arms half-outstretched.
‘What’s its name?’ she asks the woman.
‘Khalid. A Muslim word that means immortal.’
‘I’m sorry we can’t offer you shelter for the night. As you can see, we’ve no space.’ I waved my arm around the kitchen.
‘We will find shelter, my friend. I wish you happiness. And your children.’ When the man smiles, a long purple scar parallel with his under-lip tautens like a tugged thread. We all shake hands. Anna withdraws to a corner.
I see them out to the stairs almost colliding with Maria Alexandrovna beside the rubbish chute. ‘What was that Caucasian filth doing in your apartment?’ she shouts after me. ‘It’s a criminal offence to harbour aliens. I’ll report you for that.’
Anna is still crouched against the wall, blanket hugged to her knees.
‘You see, Anna? We can’t keep out the rest of the world forever. It’ll bide its time, and one day come barging in.’ My voice carries more anger than I intended.
She flinches as if struck, folds arms over her face. Seething but composed, she slowly gets up, goes to the kitchen window and stares unfocused. ‘You’re a million miles off the mark. That’s the closest I’ll ever get to holding a child. If they had asked me to nurse it, I wouldn’t have trusted myself to hand it back. If it was a girl, they could kiss it goodbye.’
I have nothing in reply.
Something outside catches her attention. School’s out. Children are being shepherded across the schoolyard.
‘Anyone would think, just another afternoon in Moscow.’
‘They’re safer in school. Even mercenaries can only stoop so low.’
On cue a mortar shell whizzes overhead, followed by an explosion unseen but close enough to crack the window, loosen ceiling dust. Some of the children dive to the ground. The rest scatter. We hide in the bedroom until the vibrations stop. The perfect place to talk, reconnect, if not for the crack-crack of duelling snipers.
★
LEAVING
★
My documents arrive in a smart pink cardboard jacket, its edges sharp enough to draw blood. It is two years and six months to the day after lodging my exit permit application. A letter pinned inside instructs me to report to OVIR, the government department that approves passports and visas. The bland officialese is surely a ruse. My permissible time abroad will be cut to three months, they will grant me permanent emigration, but if I set foot on Russian soil again I will be forbidden to leave a second time. Anna’s permit will be withheld indefinitely, or issued just as mine expires. I am certain only that it will be none of these. Bureaucratic imagination thrives on the unthinkable.
From Metro Arbatskaya I pick a path through tattered birches, along dog-legged alleys with minor museums in permanent disrepair – closed for revision, as the joke goes – till I come to Vozdvizhenka Street. From 1946 to 1990 it was named Kalinin, honouring the eponymous ideologue. Vozdvizhenka, the name of a monastery built in 1450 and burned down in the great fire of 1812 is anodyne, ostensibly bereft of ideology and therefore suits the times. Steel-ribbed buildings frame the street, shrinking in the background to trapezoid ghosts. I peer hard towards the crenellated walls of the Kremlin, trying to see if their red stars have finally been taken down. Funny how symbols of the recent past that the present strives hardest to annihilate prove hardy as weeds.
Revolutionaries are spendthrifts, ordinary lives small change. With its characteristic blend of secrecy and swagger, a government of recanted communists is systematically stripping the city’s ornaments, knocking down statues and altering street names at a rate calculated to sow confusion. I don’t care for the symbols themselves – so many parade props – but resent their removal by fiat. My – our – memories are being scattered to the four winds. Should she ever leave, Anna will be better equipped than I am. She has compressed her life into a few precious heirlooms. Her territory now.
Cloudbanks shift, spilling sunshine. I head for the steps of the White House, ice crunching beneath my boots. Sleek black Chaikas pull up inside the car park, disgorging portly grey-suited peoples’ deputies. A shiny metal fence, brass tips like spears, has been erected around the parliament complex. Uniformed sentries wave official vehicles through the entrance. The top four stories of the White House are still boarded up after last year’s insurrection.
OVIR is located off Chernyshevskaya Street, in an anonymous three-storey building that in Tsarist times was a deportment school for young ladies. A refectory ambience lingers in the narrow foyer and forked corridors. Behind swinging wooden doors a small gold-on-black sign states working hours. Inside a windowless office two queues form before a counter. The one for foreigners seeking work permits circles back on itself. Mine, shorter, hugs the wall. When I reach the counter a secretary sits bolt upright, begins typing, fingers fluttering over the keyboard. Without taking her eyes off the gyrating screen she asks my full name, stands up and goes to a security room. She returns a moment later with my passport, stamped black with the USSR motif of rye stalks coiled around the hammer and sickle, and Temporary Exit Visa rubric below. I sign a declaration form pertaining to duties of Russian citizens abroad and give it back.
‘That’s all,’ she says, smiling at my disbelief.
I find a quiet side street to pore through my papers. My passport photo has inexplicably darkened; arms clasped to chest, the fugitive meets his interrogators with a haunted, defiant expression. The original was wayward innocence. As a parting gift OVIR has morphed me into Carlos the Jackal.
Eyes closed, we kneel by the threshold of our flat, in the traditional traveller’s farewell. The latches on my cardboard suitcase strain against its load. My father and I had to sit at either end for several minutes. I sneak a peep at the other actors in this tableau. My father tries to hide a smirk. Anna leaks stoic tears as she has every night for the month since my twelve-month Australian visa was granted.
I watch my mother bow her head lower and lower as though preparing for a somersault, flatten her hair to her scalp as though determined to straighten every last kink. She presses her face between her legs, muffling her sobs. My departure to Australia becomes a race between my taxi pulling into the courtyard and her regaining composure. The taxi wins. I emit the driest of dry coughs. Has she stolen my moment? It’s not mine to steal, I only borrowed it.
Anna goes one better. At the departure gates she whispers hard into my ear, ‘Okay, this is it. Be my emissary.’ A vote of confidence, the best I can hope for. In a blink, for the first time I can recall, she regresses to a newly bereaved orphan, clinging to my waist, howling into my chest till my father prises her away. When I glance over my shoulder from the exit turnstile she is still on her knees, heaving against my father.