We walked on, circling the Friendship of Peoples’ Fountain, a frothy confection of sixteen gilded female figures dressed in ethnic costumes and representing the old Soviet republics. Ahead rose the freshly painted ‘Russia – My History’ museum with three-storey-high portraits of Catherine the Great and Putin. Next to it stood the abandoned Ukrainian pavilion, its padlocked doors flanked by crumbling statues and cracked concrete hammers and sickles.
‘Now I talk,’ said Dmitri. ‘I said before you are ambitious.’
‘Yes, and so is Sami,’ I replied, refusing to give up.
‘I talk about you now. You have smart thinking face. You can double your cleverness if you listen to me. What are The Thirteen, The Great Snake and White Sun of the Desert?’
‘They’re movies.’
‘Yes. Russian movies. Russian Western movies.’
White Sun of the Desert was a retelling of The Magnificent Seven. In The Thirteen nasty capitalist bandits set upon cowboy-like Red Army soldiers. In At Home Among Strangers the Apaches are portrayed as Civil War anti-communists.
‘I love Russian Westerns and your book – my story – can be movie, for sure.’
In years past American cowboy films had been hugely popular in the USSR. Even Stalin was a fan, ordering Soviet cineastes to remake John Ford’s The Lost Patrol. But after the old villain’s death, the genre was deemed to be counter-revolutionary, in its praise of white colonialists and portrayal of Native Americans as bloodthirsty savages. Hence the birth of Red Westerns, produced in the Soviet Union and East Germany, substituting the Urals for Nevada and subverting Western clichés in order to criticise foreign culture.
‘Tell me, what are two biggest victories in European history? Not Great Patriotic War. Not 1917 Revolution. No. Bigger and more great are victories over Mongol and Muslim.’
‘That was in the fifteenth century,’ I pointed out.
‘Yes. After 700 years’ occupation,’ he replied, not overly burdened with historical accuracy. ‘People must know danger is coming again.’
‘And you’re making a movie about it?’
‘Red Western movie.’
‘And this is also a reworking of Nineteen Eighty-Four?’
‘Both is allegory, like I say.’
This then was Dmitri’s agenda, and it stopped me in my tracks, along with Vasya and the shadowing Range Rover. Somehow he’d learned about my time in the film business.
‘You’ll direct it?’ I asked.
‘Acting too.’
‘Can you ride a horse?’
‘I get stunt double.’
Tinny music echoed through the park’s ubiquitous loudspeaker system. A team of North Korean guest workers in wide-brimmed hats weeded between the pebbles in Young Naturalists Square. Children swept by them on bicycles and roller blades. A bridal couple posed for wedding photographs in front of the Stone Flower Fountain.
I’d played Dmitri along for too long. I’d drawn him out so as to hear what lunacy might next spill from his lips, to try to fathom that unspoken part of his personality. But my game had gone far enough. ‘Dmitri Denisovich,’ I told him, ‘there won’t be a book or film script for you, at least not written by me.’
‘Give and take, if you know what I mean,’ he replied in warning. ‘I pay what you want. I buy you nice apartment in London or Berlin. No problem. Every man has price.’
‘I can’t do it,’ I said.
The chicken tsar looked at me with disdain, staring as one might at a urinating dog. Then with a dark laugh the arch-opportunist said, ‘I help your black man too.’ He stretched his lips around his broken teeth in a semblance of a smile and added, ‘I warn you, do not spit on my soul.’
The two buildings formed a rectangle around a small sloping Moscow square. Along the upper edge rose a monumental Stalinist block, its pantheon of Soviet gods gazing down across the courtyard at their broken Sixties sister. I rented a room in the lower block, without statues, beyond a copse of birch trees, behind a dirty, panelled balcony and double security door. My building’s geometric steel frame rusted at its edges. Its raw concrete walls blocked out the sun.
Often at dawn I was awoken by the sound of fallen tiles, cracking underfoot beneath my jammed window. Early risers stepped around them on their way to the metro, ahead of the heat of the day. Schoolchildren dodged them, mounting the square’s steps with heavy satchels and tread, chased by street-sweepers and the rising sun. Next came the squeak of prams, the yap of lapdogs and – just before ten – sure-footed bureaucrats striding towards a ministry building on the far-off riverbank. Later, a breath of air stirred the smell of boiled cabbage and meat-stuffed golubtsy, wafting it around the square as an aged veteran shuffled into town. He wore a black tie and medals (including the Afghan Order of the Star) when destined for another funeral, his silvery spectacles enfolded in his dark-veined hands.
After lunch the drunks lifted themselves from the corral of benches and staggered away in search of their next drink. An hour later they returned, bickering around the birches, cadging lights from passers-by, squatting on untended concrete planters that sprouted with wind-blown grasses. Come late afternoon the sun found a gap between the buildings, and residents gathered to catch its light. Old men played dominoes, grandmothers cracked open sunflower seeds and Uzbek labourers shared news from home. The feuding couple from House 2, Apartment 49 found a kind of privacy out in the open, away from the confines of their small family flat. Beyond them in the playground young mothers shepherded toddlers around a Kremlin tower climbing frame – known to residents as ‘the ogre’s castle’ – until their husbands tramped home carrying shopping bags of onions and pickles.
With dusk the blue light of hundreds of televisions flickered on sheer nylon curtains. Water pipes gurgled between floors. The Korean nail salon closed its door and the old soaks fell into a half-hearted fistfight on the abandoned basketball court.
Two evenings I waited in the square. I waited not for the housewife, who ambled out after supper to sit cross-legged on a wall and smoke a cigarette, nor for the drunks snoring towards oblivion on the benches. Again and again I turned to look through the Stalinist archway, and between the trees, as if someone had called my name, or been there only a moment before, then melted into shadow.
On the third evening the shadow came to life and I recognised the familiar limp. Sami looked more tired than he had at our last meeting. The bags under his eyes seemed heavier. In his fist he clutched my address. We shook hands and I told him that Dmitri would be no help. He wasn’t surprised, yet – as he sat down beside me – he seemed to crumple, his shoulders and head drooping in disappointment.
‘It can’t be rightfully so,’ he said quietly. ‘Can’t be so.’ I hadn’t realised how much store he’d put in my mention of the chicken tsar. He took a deep breath and went on, ‘You know, my father had a heavy hand but he kept me out of trouble. He wouldn’t let me hang out with knuckleheads and problem-makers. He gave me my compass so I always found the right path.’ Again he held my eye.
I remembered another story from thirty years ago. On that earlier trip I’d met a woman who, as a child, had caught three ants and put them into a jar. When they’d started to climb out, she’d shaken them back down to the bottom. Every time they’d tried to escape she’d made them fall. Finally, after many hours, the ants had given up, like the bird on the metro.