Several months later, still trying to figure out what it was about our fight that affected me so deeply, I peer into the brave new world of the Russian blogosphere, only to discover how uncontroversial Marina’s views actually are. Educated and smart people are saying essentially the same things – despite some fundamental similarities, people and cultures are different, and there is no harm in trying to capture those defining and important differences in words, as long as you are not being outright xenophobic, blindly asserting your own people’s and culture’s undoubted superiority.
I read these articulate and well-formulated posts, and I feel like I come from another planet. Yes, I too think that without recognising and trying to understand what is profoundly different about people’s lives, behaviours and worldviews, there is no effective politics, no good literature, no enlightened conversation between cultures. And the notion of the global community itself, if it is to be more than a vast transnational zone for the exchange of goods and services, only makes sense when universal principles come together with this recognition of irreducible difference. What bothers me is the monolithic quality of the pronouncements of difference – the clash of civilisations theories, the idea of the chosen people (whoever these people are), the notion of national characteristics that Marina espouses (however refined those notions may become in the hands of a skilful demagogue). I am reminded of writer Marietta Chudakova’s observation about how comfortably inferiority and messianic complexes coexist among her fellow inhabitants in post-Soviet Russia. And it’s not just about Russia of course. What about the Americans with their sense of Manifest Destiny; the French, who gave the name to chauvinism; the British with their Empire on which the sun would never set (or so they thought)? When you think about it hard enough, the human condition can sometimes seem like a giant medical chart of all these complexes – superiority, inferiority, messianic, you name it.
Perhaps if these monolithic pronouncements concerned only the question of national or ethnic identity I would disagree with them vehemently but not feel quite so personally affronted by them. But they hover around a very different kind of question too – not what it means to belong to a certain people, but what it means to be a woman. The Soviet ideas of womanhood – harsh, puritanical and deeply disingenuous – have long since been eclipsed, but there are still ‘hard and fast’ rules about what it is that a woman really needs. Since the end of my second marriage, most heartfelt birthday wishes I receive from my female friends in Russia and Ukraine focus on the appearance of a man in my life. Not just any man, of course, but kind, smart, good-looking, passionate, creative, with money and a strong libido, who will carry me around in his arms, having first taken the burden of solitary womanhood from my shoulders. At times my friends can stretch themselves to endorse my argument that there is no greater tragedy than a loveless, hollow marriage, and that to escape such a fate can be cause for enduring happiness – as long as they think I am on the way out to try to meet someone else.
Back in her kitchen in St Petersburg, Marina and I look away from each other. Billie, with her nose buried in an Isobelle Carmody book, does not seem to have noticed the change of temperature around her. Has she heard any of the shouting? ‘Let’s have a drink,’ says Misha, who is half-Russian and half-Jewish (and thus simultaneously smart and cunning, and uniquely predisposed to solving ‘problems’ with a few shots of vodka, but not too many). We drink in silence and I think about Marina. I test my feelings about her: Have they changed? Have our life experiences pushed us to the opposite sides of the divide, turning her into a xenophobe and me into the caricature of a holier-than-thou Western liberal democrat? For half an hour or so our faces wear Do I really know you? expressions. Then our stiff necks start to relax. It is very hard to maintain our hurt pride and momentary outrage. There is too much love, history and loyalty between us to regard each other with suspicion.
We are still friends, and I wonder how our friendship turned out to be immune to this blow-up. If you think of it, our conversation was seriously unsettling for both of us, maybe even a deal-breaker. Friendships, I do not need to tell you, tear over less irreconcilable differences. Is it because we forgive our childhood friends much more than those friends we make as grown-ups? Or is it because we learn that we do not need our friends to agree with us or to espouse the same views on select ‘big’ topics? (This is what drinking buddies and professional acquaintances are for.) What we really need is for our friends to stand behind us, to have our back, to hold us, especially when we are ridiculously far away from each other.
It occurs to me that I have never really asked how it was for you in 1989, Marina. I was so preoccupied with my own grief. I ask you now, and you reply:
I remember so well the cold wind on the Neva embankment. And you got on your knees to say goodbye to the Neva. The cold I felt was inside of me, from the thought of seeing you off into nowhere. I really did think that I would never see you again. I could not imagine then that this country would stop existing, and that there would be instead a new country with international passports and trips abroad. I was convinced then that all I had left was writing letters and waiting for months for your replies (because of all the mail being checked).
Do you remember we met some of my classmates and I felt kind of ashamed for them? They were so uninteresting, unremarkable ( forgive me my arrogance). This is the truth. And they were staying here, while you were going. I really wanted you to understand then that these people were just my classmates, they were not my close friends. This was very important to me. I wanted you to know that I was with them because I did not have a choice.
I knew this, Marina. I also knew that after I left you never contemplated the possibility that our friendship was too high-maintenance or too abstract to survive. You have found me after all those years in the pre-email wilderness, during which time both of us changed postal addresses and lost track of each other. You did not count this protracted episode of mutual disappearance as death from natural causes. You did not stop looking. I did, but you did not. What are our ‘ideological differences’ compared to this history, to learning from opposite ends, what Mandelstam called, ‘the science of departures’?
9
LENINGRAD
I would not be telling you the whole story about St Petersburg if I said nothing of the war. Not so much World War II as the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet portion of the conflict, which began with the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. As I was growing up, the city of Leningrad and its agonisingly long siege by German troops were inseparable in my mind. This is not, I think, some peculiar personal quirk. I was born into a world drenched in references to the Great Patriotic War (the very opposite of ‘don’t mention the war’ culture). It was omnipresent and had certainly long since eclipsed the symbolic power of the 1917 Revolution.
The legendary ‘hero city’ was how St Petersburg was referred to as I was going through school. It was one of several cities granted this formal recognition by the Soviet government. (Really clever totalitarians can teach us a great deal about running brand-awareness campaigns.) In my history textbook at school, the war towered over all other topics, and the description of the Siege of Leningrad read like a series of black, pounding newspaper headlines: one of the darkest chapters of the conflict with Fascism; nine hundred days of starvation, cold and constant shelling between September 1941 and January 1944; then, of course, the horror trumped by a happy ending. Against all odds we did not surrender Leningrad (while, needless to say, ‘they’ did not think twice of surrendering ‘their’ Paris). The ‘mission statement’ that accompanied every mention of the siege was crystal-clear. I bet it could have been conjured up without much hesitation by every child seven-plus, even a kid shaken awake in the middle of the night.