Seconds remain to squeeze into the narrow space behind the communal rubbish chute. Hessian bags bursting with potatoes and trussed together with octopus straps rest against the chute, blocking out daylight. Gasping from her exertions she slumps over her trolley frame, her phlegmy smell mingling with cat piss and cabbage parings. Forcing herself upright she staggers off. I wait for the rattle of her lock before tiptoeing downstairs.
★
MARRIAGE
★
Ice clods litter pavements. The bread queue snakes the length of the store. People kick mulch, hands shoved deep into pockets. I walk a semicircle past the entrance where an assistant, her white apron stained with chicken juice, admits small groups whenever a corresponding number emerge from the exit alongside. The rest shuffle forward in tandem. Two women begin shoving each other for a disputed place. One lurches backwards, triggering a chain reaction. Those behind keep their footing by swaying sideways, deflecting the pressure onwards until it curls away and dissipates at the tail. The assistant slides the bolts across the entrance and disappears inside. The queue surges forward. Half a dozen fists bang the door to no avail.
Drifting with the crowd through a flea market outside Park Kultury Metro, I meander past rickety stalls laden with suspicious looking cans of tomato paste, Made in Italy labels crooked, stewed fruit, castoff galoshes, foldout guides to the Moscow Metro. Babushkas cross themselves, calico begging bags alongside them on the ground. Prices are scrawled on cardboard nailed to sticks. Someone’s ghetto blaster plays a hit song to a chugging backbeat. Oily puddles shine rainbow iridescence. Vendors on every street corner create the illusion of random movement. Communism might be on its deathbed but shoppers keep their undeviating stride, wielding bags to bullock a path through. I miss the creaking coupon system, the companionable grumbling while lined up for rations of lumpy butter and coagulated coffee. Today it suits my mood to roam the markets, spend my morning off pretending to bargain-spot, revisiting old haunts, recapturing my bearings.
Forget the day ahead, more to the point.
After the last students departed yesterday, autumn seminar over, my father left me a note. We MUST talk tomorrow. 12 md my office. Since the mushrooming expedition there have been no more dinner parties, yet my teaching load doubled. The portents are mixed. What troubles me is the fact of the note. Stealth is not in my father’s armoury. I am being softened up. Whatever awaits me can’t be good.
I ponder the skyline, its ossified landmarks risible metaphors. Moscow overreaches. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is a tiered anthill. Ostankino Tower’s upper half evokes a needle and filled syringe, its revolving restaurant a washer-ring on a pipe. The remaining cityscape? Bad dentistry.
Communism’s residual glory lies beneath a flight of escalators. I descend to Park Kultury Metro. Black and grey granite tiles, clean and homely as a carpet, invite lingering. Cream green-veined marble pylons, white vaults with beehive cornices, a line of hexagonal chandeliers down the middle of the platform hall runs all the way to Maxim Gorky’s tiled portrait. Gorky’s ruddy jowls and moustache eclipse his mentor Stalin’s. I count twenty-six disc-shaped bas-reliefs of Soviet youth at play. A footballer balances ball on hip. A couple dance the two-step while two crouching young men assemble a rocket launcher from the ground up.
Train headlights burn in the tunnel. I walk to the far end of the platform where shadows dart beneath the dimmed vault. I trip over an Afghan war veteran whose crutches, propped against a bench, are taller than his legless torso. The Order of the October Revolution – a gilt star superimposed on silver rays – hangs from a blue ribbon sewn on his coat. His face is immobile behind Pepsi-bottle glasses. Two fifteen-kopek coins rest in his begging cap. When he was a young soldier scouting for mujahadeen landmines, fifteen kopeks bought a decent choc-topped icecream or a double pass to the latest Hollywood overdub. Inflation has eroded their real value to zero. The government retains them as phone booth tokens rather than melt down all that surplus metal.
I step into the last carriage, around puppies and kittens peeping out of carry bags. Is the unsung achievement of Moscow Metro the transportation of one pet per owner, delivering them unscathed in their zippered cocoons? Breaking with my usual purchase of a cheap weekly from the station newsstand lets me study my fellow commuters. Mud-spattered runners with big eyelets outnumber stilettos and calf-high boots. The gender divide begins from the knees up. Firetruck-red vinyl raincoats are still popular among secretaries, if no longer current high fashion. Men too young for reading glasses favour charcoal slacks over Lee denims, windbreakers over anoraks.
One thing hasn’t changed. Whether sitting, standing, or swaying on the edge of exhaustion, Muscovites remain avid readers. But today subscribers to august publications like Literaturnaya Gazeta or even the middlebrow Argumenty i Fakty appear few and far between. The men rub stubble against Seks i Skandal, which features doe-eyed models lounging beneath headlines. Pages three and onwards are devoted to personal columns and escort agencies. Just five years ago these would have been officially denounced as Western pornographic bilge.
The women devour pulp romances, quick and dirty translations of Barbara Cartland and Rosemary Rodgers in yellowing paperback. Their flimsy spines barely withstand cover-to-cover reading. Sexual emancipation subdivides along gender lines. Hardy romanticism and sweaty-palmed prurience.
Bizarre segregation at close quarters. My story writ large.
Only one man reads Pravda, the government mouthpiece that perestroika and glasnost – current bywords for rebuilding and openness – have reduced to fulminating impotence. Fiftyish, attired in ankle-length serge overcoat and matching brogues. I suspect he carries lunch (brown bread and sausage) in his clasp-top briefcase. He holds the newspaper at arms’ length, as intent as a blueprint for a Lada prototype, ruminating on its contents from behind black rimmed spectacles manufactured in Lada's heyday. Laser graphics fill the carriage walls behind him, advertising shares in Siberian oil ventures, bank dividends, the recently issued ‘government citizen voucher’. I feel an unexpected twinge of empathy. We are both picking through the rubble for scraps of absolute truth.
He, half the carriage and I get out at Lubyanka, the station nearest the Central Scientific Research Institute for Automated Antisubmarine Radar. Close as I’ll ever get to Anna’s office. Her threadbare pretext for never meeting me at work is that relatives, especially spouses, are forbidden access. Granted, with the blind turns through courtyard archways and the double-sentry checkpoint by the car park, a disoriented tourist might fancy he has stumbled into the very seat of military might. The institute is a titanium-grey Soviet Vatican that competes against shadowy consortia to design interception systems for submarines Gorbachev, Reagan and Bush bartered away. Although on the periphery of the military industrial complex six or seven removes from the weapons themselves, the arms race is a sprint and intrays sag beneath commissions. Or so Anna leads me to believe. Little trickles down into wages or meals. Her monthly payslip, in scurrying dot print, erodes to one week’s supply of bread, tea, lemons and a saucer of jam or equals a cabbage, runty carrots and two kilos of mud-caked potatoes. We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. The communist saw in action.