In Melbourne, before we came away on our trip, I found myself thinking a lot about irony, because it seems the default register of so many fictional and non-fictional contemporary accounts of modern-day Russia, most particularly from expat writers of my generation (yes, myself included). Irony also makes an appearance when the quality media of Russia find themselves engaged in the task of reflection and commentary. I remember an article in Kommersant, a daily newspaper, which responded to a survey showing that fifty-four per cent of Britons were dissatisfied with life in Tony Blair’s Britain by inviting the dissatisfied to emigrate to provincial Russia. ‘In any central Russian district, life, by British standards, is unseemingly cheap and remarkably laid back. By 11 am most of the working population is becoming “traditionally” relaxed.’ As to the weather, ‘Thanks to global warming this difficulty will solve itself.’ I laughed when I read it; the amount of irony that could be squeezed out of the premise was infinite. Oh, the hilarity of sending all those stockbrokers from the Home Counties to the desolate, filthy, ignorant, alcohol-infused Russian provinces, from which every person, dog and cat with half a brain is always trying to escape. I laughed until I felt sick of my laughter.
But something is wrong when thinking becomes unthinkable without irony. And it is too easy to be ironic about provincial Russia. Here, and in the former Soviet republics, province has always been a culturally complicated place, imagined with equal fervour as the epitome of decay, bigotry and soul-gnawing hopelessness, and, at the same time, as the true haven of human decency, kindness and spiritual authenticity. This duality is hardly unique, of course; just about everywhere the periphery is demonised and deemed valorous all at once. Yet I love the way the somewhat disparaging English-language ‘backwater’ becomes in Russian the unexpectedly tender ‘glubinka’ – the diminutive for depth.
Furthermore, now that we are going to Katya, being ironic about where she lives feels somehow underhanded, like I am withholding something. I cannot do that. And so as we get closer and closer to our destination of Stary Oskol I remind myself of Erofeev’s voice, in which irony is not eliminated but co-opted into a new and precious kind of seriousness.
Erofeev, who drank like a fish himself and died from throat cancer barely a fifty-year-old man, became indistinguishable in the popular imagination from his most famous protagonist. So much so that when a monument was built to commemorate the anniversary of the writer’s birth, it was a memorial to Venichka the protagonist, not to Venedikt the author. I have read about the monument but, despite craning my neck as Billie and I run to catch our train, I cannot see any sign of it in the square in front of the station. I learn later that the railway authorities, fearing quite rightly that the monument would become a pilgrimage site for booze artists and poetry-reading radicals, would not agree to its erection there. And so the monument stands now in no-man’s-land, neither near Kursk Station nor in Petushki, tucked away in an obscure Moscow square.
Dear Diary,
My first trip on an overnight train released all of my homesickness and though I was tired, I was very happy. I felt so calm and serene. I laughed at the stupidest stuff.
After our first few days in Moscow, I have been starting to dread this train journey. Gone is my conviction, previously unshakable despite being untested in battle, that Billie would love overnight trains, if not as much as I do then enough to let them wash over her and give her a much-needed taste of stillness in the middle of constant movement. For months I have been fantasising about Russian train journeys, the sense they give of travelling in a dream. But as we clawed our way through the Metro to Kursk Station at the perfect median point of the after-work peak, I felt little but apprehension. Because if Billie hates trains too, we might as well go home.
Fotunately, we find ourselves alone in a four-berth cabin. This is a real blessing. The train to Katya is the height of luxury, at least by my standards. God knows, it is much more expensive than I had counted on – we are paying more for it than for two Melbourne–Sydney airfares. We could have gone much cheaper, of course – could have bought tickets to the platzkartnuy vagon, where there are no doors and the four bunks in the doorless compartment are complemented by two additional bunks in the corridor. The money saved would not have been worth it. No doors meant total absence of privacy and I had to be careful to ration Billie’s culture shock. But to find ourselves with an entire cabin to ourselves is unprecedented, undreamed of; I don’t think I have ever travelled like that in my life. We wait until the train starts moving to make absolutely sure there is no last-minute arrival knocking at our door, no over-perfumed bleached blonde, no greying man with a fried drumstick in a foil wrap. And then comes a jolt and we are off. Within minutes Billie’s face begins to relax, her glow and softness returns. My daughter’s face is no longer the cold grey of antagonism and discomfort; it is pink, flushed and excited. And so, all of a sudden, out of the blue, we begin to talk and laugh. And the more we talk, the less we need to talk, the more language itself – thick, curvaceous, delivered first in outbursts and then in a continuous, unstoppable flow – becomes our ether. And in this ether that dreaded feeling of observing each other from the opposite sides of the barricades seems, for the moment at least, to have dissolved without a trace.
I think I can see Katya. The train has not stopped yet, and Billie and I are at the window, our eyes pulling us forward, willing us to arrive before the train does. At first Katya is a moist patch of condensed air, then she is a tiny square of blurred colour the size of an acid trip, and then finally she is there human-sized – the girl we said goodbye to four years ago, only now in a taller body with long golden hair so clean it shines through the permanently dirty window glass. When I imagined this moment – our reunion against all odds – for all the violins in my head, there was also a fear there that I could not quite shake off. The fear was of Katya (yes, even of our Katya) becoming unambiguously a product of her place and time, a girl in a tight synthetic skin, all made-up and clued-up. There were so many young women out there like that: shrewd, strategic and categorically down-to-earth. Perhaps it was the down-to-earth bit – a consensual, wholehearted cohabitation with one’s limited and limiting circumstances – that scared me the most.
I knew, of course, that the distance covered from the ages of eleven to fifteen was so vast that there was no telling who would be waiting for us on the platform. Still, growing up and growing into some kind of a prefabricated biography template were two different things, and observing the latter is something I have always found to be one of the saddest things in the world. No matter how powerless and dependent on the mercy and decency of others they might be, children belong to the world of ‘who is to say’, of ‘stranger things have happened’, of ‘wait and see’. They are the heralds of the great indeterminacy of life. But what a struggle it is to retain a sense of your future not being foreclosed by your proletarian suburb, the school you were sent to, the idiocy of losing your virginity to an arsehole, your father and mother splitting up at the worst possible moment or dragging themselves through the fog of a shared existence in your name. The script does not really matter. So what if you are the golden child of a wholesome, well-adjusted family in which everyone is still married to everyone else, and your apartment always smells like apple pie and sounds like a philharmonic hall. You still have to fight for your life not to become the sum total of your circumstances, not to follow the path laid out, stone by stone, by other people’s hands.