How is this for irony – we grew up with the toothache-inducing dictum of Marx (Karl, not Groucho) that ‘being determines the consciousness’. Yet we were born into a world not of our making or choosing, where nothing broken got fixed, nothing decaying got renovated, where rivers of liquefied rubbish were flowing in the streets, and just about every road not manically mended just in time for a Great Leader’s visit was an assault obstacle course. So what kind of consciousness were we meant to develop when our being was so degraded? Living conditions may mould the human psyche but, as the Soviet experience tells us, they actually do so in ways that are far more complex, life-affirming and unpredictable than Marx ever imagined. I want Billie to understand that people are not their crumbling foyers or their broken lifts, and I feel ashamed of giving a damn in the first place. I was not like that before.
I have never previously visited Petya and Natasha’s apartment, but when I step inside the door I already know it. The box in the foyer, for the slippers that are worn inside the house. The coats hanging off the sagging rack, like a bunch of about-to-explode bananas. The big room, which is several zones at once: an office with two desks and two computers (Natasha is a philologist and editor; Petya is a computer programmer); a lounge room with a television set, stereo, bookshelves and a fold-out table in the corner; a guestroom with a couch that unfolds, on which Billie and I sleep. The second, smaller room where every centimetre of space is used to accommodate the marital bed, Andryusha’s cot, a wardrobe and mirror. Objects and spaces have their day and night shifts, sometimes several shifts within a span of twenty-four hours. The washing is hung above the bath overnight. The kitchen table, meant for two, but around which five of us companionably gather in the evenings. Andryusha, I discover, plays in the slivers of space not taken up by things. And to think that just a year ago I felt the need to run from an apartment twice this size in Melbourne, because I could not bear the thought of my little Miguel, who was about to start crawling, having nowhere to stampede. In the West, people are truly like liquid that takes up its container’s shape. Able to swell and spread themselves in an instant. Not in this country. ‘If there is an infinite aspect to space,’ wrote the poet Joseph Brodsky, ‘it is not its expansion but its reduction.’ Space is infinitely divisible into smaller spaces. Much more so than even an IKEA catalogue might lead you to believe. It is enough to remember the description of life in a standard student dormitory from Twelve Chairs, the most famous satirical novel of the 1920s: ‘The large mezzanine room was cut up into long slices by plywood partitions… Rooms resembled pencil cases, only rather than with pens and pencils they were filled with people and primus stoves.’
The Hungarian historian István Rév wrote that Communism is ‘the regime of compression: long lines, constant waiting, a limited number of extremely crowded places, people jammed in and pressed close to each other’. For some, like Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the perversely named Liberal Democratic Party which advocates ultranationalism and the rise of the militant State, growing up in communal apartments was the source of a powerful anger. As the smallest of children, he was routinely pushed around and humiliated, made to feel his vulnerability. In his autobiography he wrote of how he hated the stinking shared toilets, the poisonous cigarette smoke, the bullying. (Was he, in truth, displacing other hatreds – a sense of inferiority over his father’s painstakingly concealed Jewishness?) To many others, communal spaces were not meaningless and dehumanising, despite their catastrophic lack of privacy and the seemingly intolerable level of transparency and interference into other people’s lives; despite the queues to the amenities, everyone smelling each other’s farts; despite people ratting on each other and whole webs of squabbles, stand-offs and strategic alliances – despite all of it. When I was a kid, these spaces constituted a different reality with its own system of meaning and its own rewards. You would never die alone and unnoticed, you would never find yourself without milk or salt, you would never feel socially disengaged or isolated. Boys who grew up here were comfortable around women; after all, they had lived in the pockets of their female neighbours, robe-clad women talking incessantly, with their tenderness, bad moods, menstruation and their ability to conjure the most delicious dishes out of thin air. Lev Rubinstein writes that Russia’s communal apartment system, with its overcrowding and its own rich and complex internal dynamic, is closer to the medieval town than to the old Russian village. The kitchen figures as both the marketplace, where goods and information are exchanged, and the cathedral square: ‘The eternally broken faucet does double duty as the town fountain.’ The hallway with its clotheslines stretched right across functions as the main street.
‘Long before collective farms and Gulag camps,’ says Rubinstein, ‘a communal apartment embodied the rapid mutation of Utopia into anti-Utopia.’ The characteristic feature of that anti-Utopia was something akin to what producers of reality shows from the Big Brother franchise have painstakingly tried to recreate in their televised social experiments, by placing participants in enclosed spaces where privacy is abolished (even in toilets) and space itself has been stripped of its ability to conceal, shelter and segregate.
In writer Asya Lavrusha’s story Human Material, an old apartment is a living creature with its own distinctive physiology, feelings and memory. The apartment was once spacious and luxurious, but after the 1917 Revolution its owner left for Paris. The flat’s layout was brutally rearranged and within its walls twenty ‘dead-ends’ were created, each housing a family. The apartment did not like in the slightest its new inhabitants, who ‘looked like cockroaches – it poured plaster on their heads, flooded them with water and once even tried to poison them with gas’. Not all apartments were so unwelcoming. In my childhood our kitchen could stretch to fit in as many guests as were present on the day. This is how most of us lived, except the top echelons, of course. We were the unrivalled masters of spatial optimisation. Folding and unfolding (and enfolding). Layering things on top of each other. Counting centimetres to ensure maximum utilisation of space. Squeezing the air out of our space. This determined the texture of our lives, the way we remembered ourselves as children; this made us who we are, whatever that means.
I feel at home in Petya and Natasha’s kitchen and in every part of their apartment straight away, and not because of some kind of display of extra-special hospitality – no, hospitality is when there are guests and hosts. With Petya and Natasha we are never made to feel like guests of any kind. For a week the five of us simply share the space as one family in an unspoken, effortless state of reciprocity, without any complicated rituals of caretaking or mutual obligation. Our lives intersect when the time is right for all of us and then we eat together and talk, but no contact, no conversation is forced or pre-arranged. Our conversations never feel like manic catching up, like a gallop through our respective lives in a quest to fill in gaps. They flow anarchically and without an agenda and, inevitably, sometimes in virtually no time, they take us to the things that matter. I have met Natasha on previous visits and liked her enormously but, this time, as we talk in her kitchen, I remember all of a sudden the happiness that comes from being in the presence of a person whose every thought and word find in you the deepest kind of recognition. Like-mindedness in the real sense of the word.
When I first met Petya, years ago while he was still at school, I thought him a brilliant writer. The two of them are highly intelligent, witty and well-read, but there is nothing put-on about Petya and Natasha. I trust completely their apparent disinclination to appraise Billie and me. Sophisticated Muscovites, they do not condescend or bore us by trying to dazzle; nor do they mount ideological hobbyhorses or warm up only after they have metaphorically prodded me in the sternum for emigrating. As to the lively, generous, lovable Andryusha, he almost makes being away from Miguel feel bearable. It is not that we are worried about Miguel – we left him in the loving and capable hands of his dad, my mum and my indispensable auntie – but Billie and I struggle terribly with our first extended bout of Miguel-deprivation. Unconsciously and persistently, we gravitate towards Andryusha, taking great solace in his laughter, his warmth and baby smell, and in the strength of his resolve to take that first step without help from chairs, walls and supporting adult hands. We are there for his first successful attempt.