Despite its exciting allure, the New Woman’s sexuality was markedly different from that of the traditional femme fatale who appeared in early Soviet literature and opera, reforged and recoded as a bourgeois woman with bedroom eyes and an insatiable desire for material possessions. She reappeared during World War II as a woman on the home front, having an affair while her husband fought the Nazis, risking his life every second of every day for her and their children born and unborn. The savage nobility of Pushkin’s and Mérimée’s gypsies, and the love of freedom above all else that defined them (Carmen: ‘Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame’), were gone. Instead, staring at us from underneath her heavily made-up and cunning eyes, was a banally treacherous seductress, a creature as familiar with the concept of true, all-consuming freedom as a broom handle in a closet.
The proud, attractive gypsies of Pushkin and Mérimée are also nothing like the gypsies I came to know in daily life. The ones I saw growing up were skilful thieves, underground merchants and compulsive wanderers. They moved in mobs, stole everything that did not lie straight and had a way of rendering our ‘indefatigable’ Soviet police powerless. They were most recognisable in popular images of dirty children, female beggars and palm readers (often one and the same), of golden jewellery dangling and sparkling on women of all ages – at least it looked golden to me then. The Russian language too pinned them down in no uncertain terms: a ‘gypsy sun’ was the moon, a ‘gypsy trade union’ a gathering of hobos. People were wary around them, while the Soviet state tried to tame them, settle them, put them into purpose-built factories and collective farms and take their children away. To little avail.
The parallels between the persecution of Jews and gypsies in Europe are well-known. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935, aimed initially at the Jewry, were amended to include Romany people, who by 1937 were firmly classified as concentration camp material. In the Soviet Union, gypsies were tirelessly harassed by authorities powerless to control their movement and their activities. According to the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance, they are still the most oppressed minority in today’s Russia. Like citizens from the Caucasus, they are twenty times more likely to be stopped by police patrols than citizens of Slav appearance. But unlike other persecuted minorities, gypsies seem to have relished their outsiders’ role. In his recent history of gypsies, artist and writer Nicolay Bessonov suggests that, despite all their persecution, ‘there was no freer people in the whole of the Soviet Union’ – free from involuntary atheism; from military conscription; from the social apparatus that forced people like sausage meat from schools to tertiary institutions to their first ‘assigned’ jobs, then to permanent positions few would ever leave. Gypsies made their own choices about what to do and were not beholden to their superiors. For a totalitarian society this must count for something, says Bessonov.
Anyway, back to the opera and Billie’s birthday treat.
Dear Diary,
Escamillo was a chubby not too good-looking bloke who was massively undervoiced. Compared to Don José (pronounced Ho-ss-ay) he was horrible. It made Carmen look like a lady who went for the popular guy that the ( fake) peasants loved. José was amazing. Carmen was, as my mum and Marina said, ‘a chick with an attitude’.
Since we met over two decades ago, Marina and I have never had a fight. For one, we have never lived at close quarters long enough to have those kitchen-sink stoushes; and as far as the big picture is concerned, from love to politics and back again, such differences as we could unearth and debate over a great distance – by way of phone calls, letters and emails – were never fundamental. So when our blow-up comes, right out of the blue at the end of a long and happy day together, with a nice dinner in our stomachs, both Marina and I are taken aback. It is Marina who starts it with what is clearly a throwaway line not intended to cause friction, most probably not even meant to elicit any kind of response. A rhetorical statement, in other words.
‘Those Americans, so hollow on the inside. I have to say I absolutely loathe Texas.’
Have I heard her correctly? Unsure, I respond in a way that on reflection seems all too combat-ready, as if she is pushing on something inside me, something I cannot quite identify.
‘What are you talking about? Have you been to America? How many Americans do you know?’
‘You know I haven’t, but I have met enough Americans. But this is not the point. Look at their culture, their movies, their music. What more evidence do you need?’
I’m on thin ice, since all through our trip I have been making rude jokes about the busloads of American tourists who seem to dog our steps. But I plunge headfirst into an argument anyway.
‘I cannot believe you can talk like that about the whole people. It is like saying that all Russians are alcoholics and all Jews are cunning.’
‘No, it is not. Alcoholism is external, but this emptiness, it lives and multiplies on the inside. It is their culture. You cannot mistake it for anything else.’
‘You cannot talk about the whole people like that. These are personal attributes, not national ones.’
‘Yes, you can. The only reason you may think you cannot is because of political correctness. But if you are honest, you can say that Norwegians, for instance, are on the whole rather primitive. They made their secondary education compulsory not that long ago. You can say that Finns are pretty calm. You should see them fish. And Americans, well, you know what I think.’
It starts off all bemused and civilised and ends in shouting. Misha Senior has to pull us apart, make us stop talking over each other. He knows, all of us know, that this conversation is unlikely to end well with either of us crossing the floor. It is best to end it now. He looks on like a boxing referee at the end of a round, anxious to make sure there are no freak punches thrown when the other is not looking. Misha is a confirmed cosmopolitan, his superior English learned initially for the sake of the English-language music tradition, which, in his view, any self-respecting rock musician should know and follow closely. He loves London, loves the English mother tongue, and the music born and bred in that British milieu. I have no idea where he stands in this argument, for he never tells us. And lest Marina comes across as a case study in banal insularity, let me say now that she has travelled widely and possesses plenty of what is known as cultural awareness and curiosity. Her position, in other words, is in no way a reflection of horizon-deficiency. I know that much.
However contentious Marina’s pronouncements may sound to me, I recognise how lame my retorts must sound to her. They even sound lame to me. Am I a victim of political correctness, a spouter of crusty slogans, a ‘bleeding-heart liberal’, as those damn Americans might say? The same words pronounced elsewhere, about the utter fallacy of reducing a nation to a person (usually an infuriatingly flawed person), would seem safely self-evident, but here, in Marina and Misha’s apartment, they sound grandiose and self-righteous. I wonder too, after calming down a bit, to what degree the intensity of my response comes from grappling with one particular tradition central to anti-Semitism and, perhaps, to any kind of xenophobia. This is the tradition of condensing the whole Jewish people into a singular grotesque image, which is then held responsible for the suffering of the Russian people – a cunning and ruthless Jewish moneylender of the nineteenth century, or a Jewish revolutionary of the early twentieth century embracing all things Soviet with an eerie zeal. Variations of those stereotypes have existed in Europe for centuries, and now they have a global counterpart in the figure of a cunning and ruthless Israeli settler responsible for the suffering of the Palestinian people. Is this the button that Marina pushes in me? After all, she does not actually hate anyone (probably not even Texans!); she is just generalising, big deal. There is no double standard in what she is saying either. I am pretty sure she could have a crack at the Russian people in the same expansive, all-encompassing terms.