We’ve have taken off, broken away and now we’re flying. “Hey, world, stand aside!” We live in crazy times, my friend, where eras and empires follow one after the other as our drunken driver stares into the impenetrable night. I was born in one country and live in another, and God only knows what’s coming next. I only know it’s nothing to do with me.
“You’re apolitical, you’re infantile, Titch,” Tolya kept nagging me on Yakimanka. “You sit up there in your gallery reading and don’t give a toss about anything.” I smile and say nothing. Lenka and Sasha say nothing as they kiss mutely on the bed. Tolya is in the throes of a bout of righteous indignation. “What an unbelievable generation of airheads is growing up! They don’t give a toss about anything. You don’t want anything, you aren’t going to change anything.”
“Tolya, what are you getting so het up about? Everything’s fine as it is.” “That’s what’s so bad, Titch. Let’s face it, what are you? A courier! We live in a country of managers and couriers. Oh, gods, bring me poison!” I feel the urge to give Tolya a round of applause.
What are you expecting from me, friend? I would like to have been born in your era. Then we would surely be able to talk to one another heart to heart.
Three brothers had I, three older brothers. The first founded a business and became rich. The second had two children and all he could think about was how to make ends meet. The third disappeared from our family’s view as soon as he was any age at all. Three brothers had I, three older brothers. Just like in a fairy tale.
I loved my brothers devotedly, as a puppy loves the hands which give it sugar. They were a whole lifetime, a whole epoch older than me. They were going to school when I was born, and started families when I went to school. We never had anything in common. In my memories they are fine young men, the embodiment of manliness; in their memories I am a bundle of snot and tantrums bereft of brains or understanding, whose only function was to be a nuisance to them as they lived their important adult lives.
The gift I got from my brothers was to love anybody older than myself, and fate cast me up on Yakimanka. For my fellow members of the commune, hippies, stonewashed jeans, rock on the earliest cassettes, the Afghan War and the Young Communist League were features of their youth, not history like they are for me. For all that, they were still lost souls, searching for and ready to give all their love to whoever came along. I understood them, and that is exactly what they needed. Those around me on Yakimanka did not remember me as a child, but even so for them I was Titch, the eternal younger sister of all of them.
Once upon a time there were three brothers, Kiy, Shchuk and Khoriv, and they had a sister, Lybed. Just like in a fairy tale.
Your life long ago became reality but mine is stuck in a state of suspended attraction to you.
Oh, time, how inexplicably you allocate destinies! Where is justice if everything good seems to be in the past, and all that is left in the epoch of my own generation is to scrape out the burnt leftovers?
Max cast Aquarium up on Yakimanka, the same highly mysterious Muscovite Max by whose will I first went to live there. He brought a whole stack of cassettes, said nothing to anyone, and left them on the piano. “In the past I used to store all the junk up in the gallery,” Roma said. “But now you’re there, Titch, we’ll have to chuck it out.” “Why chuck it out? You can store it with me. He may just have forgotten them.”
I hadn’t understood Aquarium’s music before and didn’t like it, but these cassettes had been brought here by Max, and everything Max did had hidden meaning, or so I liked to think. I kept the cassettes and listened to the music. A week later, Lenka and I were skipping about to one of their hits whose title was ‘2-12-85-06’ and racing each other to the phone to dial the number. One time the phone was answered by a tired, cross old gentleman. We said nothing and stopped calling.
I listened so much to their songs that I started seeing chaotic, poisonously coloured dreams of hills and rivers, I started rambling incoherently and all but talked in rhyme. Max had accomplished his mission — I had discovered Boris Grebenshchikov, the guru of a generation, and if you could only become initiated into that generation by being poisoned by BG, I cheerfully gulped down the poison.
It is a great torment to love something that happened before you existed. When Boris was singing his best songs, if I was born I might as well not have been. Nowadays he’s a big old sad gentleman with a beard and narrow eyes, and back then when I would have wanted to love him, I didn’t even know the word. What justice is there?
I picture the women to whom he dedicated his songs as beautiful, enigmatic, a little drunk, a little sinful, and that only makes them seem the more beautiful to me, and makes me all the more aware that they are not me.
Oh, time, how inexplicably you allocate destinies! Where is justice if it is so easy to love something you don’t even remember, and so difficult to love what is close at hand.
Although, then again, who says I don’t remember? One of my brothers would sing “Under a Blue Sky” in the disconsolate tones of an abandoned cat, sitting on our kitchen balcony in the hope that our neighbour would come out and talk to him. I remember that. During the day he locked himself in his room and put on Aquarium. I understood none of it, but would sit by his door and weep over their songs, as magical as they were incoherent. At kindergarten I didn’t play with the other children but wandered off into the bushes and sang them to myself, almost swooning.
By the time Aquarium arrived in our commune my brother had forgotten his songs and BG had gone to Tibet. The mossy, decaying trunk of Russian rock music was covered in thin, vigorously sprouting shoots and my pimply peers were joyfully hoovering them up. It’s what is called a generational difference.
Oh, time, how inexplicably you allocate destinies! But if we want to talk about justice, friend, we will see there is nothing to talk about. The world outside the windows of Yakimanka was a glossy neon world, and if there was anything about that I didn’t like, where was I to find a different one? You, my brothers, didn’t have one either.
Tolya related that he came to Moscow in the 1990s, paraded about on the barricades, drank vodka and hugged tank drivers. He told me he was a long-haired hippy then. He and his friends intended to confront the tanks naked, covered only in flowers, and bring about the hippy revolution, but either they couldn’t find enough flowers or they got blind drunk too early in the day. “What was it you hoped for, Tolya?” “Oh, Titch, you’re not old enough.” He gestured dismissively without even looking at me. “‘Yesaul, Yesaul, why abandon your steed? Why not put down your mount in its hour of great need?’ Why aren’t you singing, Seryozha? I’m not your bleeding radio!” “Tell me rather something about yourself, Sasha.” “Ekh, Seryozha, why tell you when very soon we’ll be home and you’ll see everything for yourself. I’ll take you to my home and to the bathhouse! You’re helping me and I’ll help you. People should be good to each other but today there aren’t many good people around. The moment I saw you I knew, these are just the people I need, I’ll certainly make it home with them, but without them… It’s not good to be driving on your own. Your thinking’s clouded, and the first cop you meet will pull you over. The bastards can sniff you out a mile away. So you’re helping me and I’ll help you. What, isn’t that right? Ekh, Seryozha, it’s not far now and soon we’ll be home, if we don’t die first.”
You don’t know whether to pray or not to bother. The Red Star scuds through the black sky close on our heels.
The way it happened was this. Right at the end of my shift, the owner of the travel agency where I was a courier found out where one of her top customers was. She was pushing through visas for him to take a whole group to India and needed his signature on some crucial piece of paper. We’d been trying to get hold of him all day until she finally discovered he was at the theatre and immediately sent me off to intercept him.