Neither Austrian nor Russian, the guy next to me on the flight to Moscow goes to great lengths to avoid eye contact. His English, which he saves for the Austrian stewardesses, comes with a heavy accent and an unmistakable reluctance. So we have here a man in his early forties who is neither a card-carrying member of the English-speaking world nor a frequent traveller fluent in the ubiquitous language of transactions. Clad in denim. Nondescript shoes. A no-name aftershave. An old iPod in his hand. He is clearly not one of the captains of industry dining off Russia’s natural resources but, for the life of me, I cannot work him out.
I was hoping to get some rest on the flight or, better still, do some writing, but I cannot help myself – it’s an itch I have to scratch, to have this guy pinned down. He refuses the airline snack. Ramadan? Or just too cool for Austrian Air’s famous salted peanuts? Everyone else on the plane is more or less transparent. Behind us is a team of delirious-looking young athletes, big boys from the depths of the Russian provinces, falling asleep before waking to get drunk. In the last row, their middle-aged coach is waving a palmful of sweaty euros at the stewardess pushing the duty-free trolley, to entice her to come to him first. In front are a couple of Austrian and Italian businessmen, nothing flash, lower-middle management at best. There are also a few Russian women travelling alone, one carrying a bunch of ridiculously long-stemmed roses that would look conspicuous at her wedding, let alone aboard this small, run-down plane.
One of the benefits of straddling two worlds is that I can simultaneously imagine how plastic and stiff the Austrian stewardesses look to many Russian passengers, and how boorish and ridiculous the Russians look to them (the former Eastern bloc is probably the nightmare route, the Austrian Air Gulag). I am a fine case of what the writer Ariel Dorfman, an Argentinianborn Chilean American, called ‘bilingual fate’. ‘How to deal with this incessant and often perverse doubleness,’ he asked. ‘How to protect the fragile shell of the self from its bombardment by two needs and two communities, which read opposite meanings into every mouthful at every meal?’
As long as I can remember, I have always loved the thrill of illicit extrapolation, of building strangers’ identities from a few seemingly insignificant details. Give me a washed-to-death bra strap peaking out from a crisp business blouse, and I am off and running. In an instant my mind starts buzzing, eager to cobble together a story. A couple on the train reading copies of the same book, Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex. A gracefully ageing silverhead from the neck up, a yobbo from the neck down. Then who on earth is the passenger next to me, the man with no qualities?
It suddenly dawns on me that I am practising my favourite game of identity-cracking in anticipation, limbering up for my time with people I have not seen in two decades. I have come to find pleasure in switching sides between mouthfuls, jumping across the table in the course of one meal, but on this trip I am all sides at once – the East and the West, the little lost girl and the mother, the philistine and the Wandering Jew. I am, to use Dorfman’s words, a cultural bigamist, someone who has surrendered after a long struggle to the bifurcation of her self, while never fully banishing a fear that these two parts of me, uneven and not properly cohering to each other, make me less than one whole. Dina Rubina, one of the best living Russian writers and an immigrant to the land of Israel, said that when she first returned to Moscow she could run her hand across her chest and physically feel the stitch holding the two parts of her together. As our plane lands in Moscow, I am pretty sure I can feel mine.
3
THE SPACE INSIDE
IN MOSCOW BILLIE AND I are staying with my friends Petya, Natasha and their son, Andryusha, who is about to turn one. Petya, who is several years younger than me, is the brother of Katya Margolis, one of my dearest friends, a Muscovite who now lives most of the year in Venice. Before we left Australia I bombarded Petya with questions about how to get from the airport to their place, putting aside my traveller’s pride altogether. In the face of the notoriously extraterrestrial taxi fare from Domodedovo Airport (every one of Moscow’s three airports, in fact), and too much luggage to allow Billie and I to flit around like butterflies, I turned to Petya, stripped entirely of the world-weary resourcefulness I had formerly affected. He responded by sending me a Google map with thick dots and connecting arrows, finishing his email (perhaps to let me know that our friendship was not in danger because of my sudden loss of cool) with a spot of jesting, welcoming me and Billie to the couple’s ‘modest two-room apartment in the northern part of the capital’ – a portal, so to speak, from which we could see for ourselves what contemporary Moscow eats, drinks and inhales.
The apartment is not in the centre of the capital, but it is not on the outskirts either. It is in a high-rise block, which looks so familiar to me that even before we enter the flat I experience a strange lurch in time. The contours of the present, distinctive and well-defined a minute ago, turn fuzzy, as does my sense of myself as a grown woman with a grown child in tow. ‘Why is the lift so small?’ asks Billie in a whisper, so Petya, who is trying in vain to fit both of our suitcases in the lift, won’t hear. ‘Why are these buildings so dirty, Mum?’ Here is what I imagine Billie sees and smells – the foyer and lift of the apartment block are worn and dirty, covered in spit and smelling of piss. What she will soon discover is that most residential buildings in Russia and Ukraine, at least those that are not elite, are in exactly the same state of conspicuous disrepair. Actually, the use of the word ‘conspicuous’ in relation to the violently decaying interiors of the post-Soviet world (former Baltic republics excepted) is a tautology, like talking about conspicuously wet rain. It is no secret that most mundane, not-for-show Soviet structures are rotting alive. The mortality of mortar is on display everywhere, an existential condition, a cultural given.
I never paid attention to this kind of stuff before, it was the way things were and it never used to matter. Now, all of a sudden, it does. If Billie was not here, I am sure I would have dismissed the way my nose is smelling the stink it never used to smell, the way my eyes pick out all the things that were out of focus before. I would have brushed it off as a natural resetting of the senses, emigrant’s déjà vu. But her presence is forcing the issue, no matter how much I resist. It is forcing me to confront a snake-brew of emotions – tenderness, nostalgia, longing, disgust, and something closely resembling survivor’s guilt because we were lucky enough to cut and run while others were not. I don’t want Petya and Natasha to overhear Billie’s whispers or even the fact of her whispering at all. And just as much I don’t want Billie to see me caught unawares, unsure of my reactions.