Walking back through the nave, only the old remained, clattering on sticks, sheltering in echoes. He asked if they had nowhere else to go. ‘After all, it was cold outside and they had heard about the trouble in the streets.’
‘No’, she said. ‘They are the raskol’niki. You say, “Old Believers”, remnants of another time and place.’ His next question was drowned out by the chant rising from a priest standing in a beam of light, black robes and runic markings shining, head thrown back, singing a hymn to an Old Testament God. You could hear the desperation in the intonation. Tom asked himself, where was this God when the serfs starved, when Stalin imprisoned people for the way they looked at him, or when the German panzers swept through the cornfields? His silence was deafening then, but he had found his voice now, now that the Wall was cracked and the whisperers were fewer in number.
As the huge doors swung open, symbolic of the resurrection in Orthodox tradition, grey light burst forth, showering down upon them, casting elongated shadows far back into the church. White doves rose in a flurry of flapping wings and snowy feathers. The cityscape wore a gossamer sheen. At such moments, the Leningrad of the 1930s re-emerged, buildings taking on an ominous aspect, dark and overwhelming like giant stone commissars watching everything you did, listening to every word you said, Comrade Yezhov’s eyes behind every window.
An hour later, they were stopped outside the Moscow station, at the halfway point down Nevsky. A policeman approached as they photographed the obelisk crowned with its golden star.
‘I need to see your papers’, he demanded.
‘Why?’ Ekaterina interceded.
‘Because it is a state of emergency, and foreigners were involved in the assassination of the President!’ said a voice from over their shoulders. Turning, they saw an older man in a green raincoat. ‘We are checking many people!’ The Professor noted the slicked back hair and cigarette dangling from his mouth. The uniformed officer reached for him, trying to get a grip on his collar. Tom stepped back, pushing his hand away. There was a brief struggle.
‘Resisting arrest, this is serious’, laughed the plainclothes man. ‘We have been arresting your type all day!’ He indicated for his younger colleague to stand aside. A small crowd of onlookers formed a horseshoe around them. Taxi drivers were honking horns. ‘Do you have your passport?’
‘No, he leaves it in a safe deposit box at the hotel!’ Ekaterina sounded exasperated.
‘Is this true?’ The older man asked, turning to Tom.
‘Yes’, he said, taking her lead.
‘What is your name? Where are you staying?’ Tom told him and he wrote down the details in a notebook. ‘And why are you here?’
‘I’m attending the conference.’
‘Agitator’, he smirked, then looked at Ekaterina. ‘Don’t you have pretty young women in your own country?’
‘I’m here for the conference!’ There was an undertow of anger in the Englishman’s tone.
‘So you say, and we have all heard about the trouble caused by this conference.’ He stepped up close to Tom and blew smoke directly into his face. There was a ripple of laughter from the gathering crowd. ‘Foreigners with big ideas bringing trouble to our city.’ Columns of people poured out of the station entrance. The interrogator’s younger accomplice tapped the handle of the gun at his hip. Ekaterina typed a number into her cell phone.
‘British Consul, please’, she said loudly in Russian. The inquisitor threw Ekaterina a hateful look and, walking away, brushed the girl aside with a stab of his elbow. His sidekick spat in Tom’s face before following his boss into the fast-moving traffic on the Ligovsky Prospekt.
Tom glared after them. Ekaterina wiped his face with a handkerchief, kissing his cheek. ‘You look worried’, she said. ‘Don’t be scared, it’s going to happen.’
‘But those things he said—’
‘What things?’
‘About you!’
‘You already must know people think those things? Young Russian girl with a foreign man, it is in all the hotels and bars.’
‘I don’t think about us like that!’
‘Then don’t.’
They wandered down Nevsky, checking behind them to make sure they were not being followed. A large group of Nashi youth were gathered under red and white banners at the gaping black mouth of the Mayakovskaya metro station. A clean-cut commissar was regaling the crowd outside the Nevsky Forum hotel through a megaphone. ‘Our famous patriots, the United Russia party?’ Ekaterina cursed. ‘Shit for brains!’
‘What’s he saying?’
‘No Western interference in Russian affairs… the honour of our people…’
‘Sounds ominous!’
‘Sounds vacuous!’
‘You are not impressed?’
‘Not really. You do not need to be clairvoyant. Nashi, or Ours, are really Theirs. They are the antithesis of the old Ukrainian Pora, the Serbian Otpor, and Georgia’s Kmara movements. The original Nashi leader, Vasily Yakemenko, took $500,000 to re-invent Komsomol. What we need is another Narodnaya Volya or Mladorossitsi movement! There are groups called “the Shield” working in Moscow. They raid illegal’s barracks and work with the police to combat the Uzbeks.’
‘You don’t rate Putin’s legacy?’
‘Putin was a doorman for the oligarchs. His success rested on improving the lifestyles of the mafia. That’s why when the police clear the streets of our people, these charlatans are allowed to speak. Russian democracy is paper-thin.’
‘But…’
She shut him down. ‘No ifs or buts. We need people like Oleg Kasin and the Russian National Unity, Rodina and A Just Russia. Read Andrei Saveliev’s Political Mythology or his The Image of the Enemy, then all will be clear to you. Personally, I refuse to be a consumer, blindly following fashions and the global trends determined by one-worldists who manage our media for their own purposes!’
‘Look’, he said, ‘I wanted to hit that policeman!’
‘That is exactly what they hoped for, an excuse to get you alone in their car, take your wallet, everything!’
‘What made you think of calling the Consul?’
‘The cats hunt the mice, and the dogs chase the cats.’
‘Some things never change.’ They turned onto Malaya Morskaya. Passing number 17, Ekaterina’s eyes widened, pointing up to an apartment that looked down on the street through large, clear windows.
‘That is where Gogol wrote his satire, The Government Inspector.’
‘True irony.’
‘Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.’
7.
The cult of money-making of the consumer society, proliferation and legalisation of sexual and social vice, protection of the interests of parasitic minorities at the expense of the majority, the limitation of liberties of the creative majority, ‘cyborgisation’ of people, extreme individualism, egoism, birth rates fall, destruction of the cult of family and religion, profanation of traditional values.
They reached her grandfather’s place, a block typical of its period: three storeys high, topped with pigeon-grey metal. A stone balustrade ran the length of the first floor. Balconies were balanced with trepidation, supported on varicose-veined pillars, projecting out like Neanderthals’ foreheads.
Ekaterina punched a worn button on a rusted intercom buried in the wall. ‘We’ll be safe here’, she was saying. There was a buzz and crackle. Then she pushed the door open onto a big black belly full of foul air. The lift was out of order, twisted wire sealing the shaft. Stone stairwells were filled with the whimpering of scolded children.