I cooked my first half-decent meal today: fried carp, potatoes and some nice salads, including my first cauliflower in smetana and honey, for US friends who were coming to lunch. Tanya Smith is a very smiling person, which makes a refreshing change here.
The Quaker meeting was excellent, the ministry being on “forgiveness”. Somehow we seem to be hanging together better as a group, despite all our differences. We were visited by a US electrician from Minnesota, who had been repairing the electrics in a Russian monastery. Very nice man. I brought Nikolay back to give him some eggs and we had a very good, deep talk.
Monday 14–Wednesday 16 October:
The Trip to Uglich
This was my boat trip with Irina up the Moscow River and into the Volga to visit the ancient town of Uglich, where one of the Tsarevich’s sons was murdered. We seemed to spend a lot of time in canal locks and almost every time we looked out of a window we saw a wall. Uglich itself was a poor Soviet town in the drizzle, with dusk falling. One shop was selling apple slices covered in flies for 2.60 roubles a kilo. Irina got immensely depressed by it and annoyed by my cheerfulness, which she said showed I have “a reserve of my own life somewhere else”. Yes, but I also get irritatingly cheerful when I can sense someone else’s spirits failing. I also noticed that Irina cannot bear the average aggression of Soviet officials, from the booking clerk to the waitress. It must be a dreadful handicap and torture for someone brought up here. It usually makes me want to fight, but it seems to make her want to run away. She’s the only Soviet I know like that.
We had brought our own food and had a very nice lazy time, living in a cabin the size of a cupboard. When we bit into our hard-boiled eggs at the first breakfast we both stopped and looked at each other; it was so nice to eat an egg again. Irina said, “It was high time to have an egg.”
All was well until I got home and found the bottom lock had jammed and I couldn’t get into the flat. Aleksey from No. 36 was wonderful. Although he had just been getting into the bath, he came and stood on the cold landing for two hours, trying to fiddle the lock, and finally cutting it open with an axe. He then mended it for me, and wouldn’t accept anything in exchange. The house cat darted in and dashed around my kitchen – and it was curtains for mousey. So, an unexpected boon.
Aleksey told me what he had done during the coup. He’d heard that Yelena Bonner had been on Radio Liberty already, so by some strange instinct he went to Chkalov Street, but realised he didn’t know which flat she lived in, so just stood there, hoping to see her. Tanks were already rolling up the ring road, but he noticed they were all stopping when the lights were red. A law-based society indeed. He went up to defend the White House, and said that from the tension his legs were simply exhausted, as though he’d walked a hundred miles. I remember I thought I’d got an ulcer.
Thursday 17 October
Othmar came to take the mail again, looking lonely and down in the mouth after his first month here without a word of Russian. He’d spent three hours trying to find the post office last week. You forget how hard all these things are without the language.
Tolya and I looked round the completed office, making a list of doors that jammed and two windows that leak, which we’ll get done before we make the final payment. He’s going to cook dinner for all the workmen tomorrow night, and advises me to buy them all small presents. Part of me rebels at this cringing servility to the builders, but he wants to keep in with them in case we need future repairs, and his judgement is usually right.
Today, amongst other things, I gave my first English conversation class – to Anna Yevgenievna Bochko, the woman who defended Andrey Zapevalov on appeal. Her English was good and I enjoyed my first experience of teaching. I also learned what may be the real reason that his death sentence was commuted. One of the members of the USSR Clemency Commission was taught law by Anna’s grandmother, so some telephone calls were made and the whole Commission read her appeal thoroughly. However, I must say it was a very good one. Anna was perfectly frank and illusion-free about the patronage system here.
Today I saw a carton of milk half-spilled in the street and seriously thought about picking it up and taking it home. Odd the effect living here has.
I’ve got to think about going home to the UK. Various people are making nice noises about me staying on here, but underneath it all I am always very aware that I am foreign and looked on like that – from Natalya Vysotskaya’s outburst after the coup, to Irina’s in Uglich about my “life in reserve”. But what kind of a life? It is a very curious thing, but in ten months I haven’t actually been homesick for the UK once. In June I suddenly wanted to sail down the Thames to Kew; I got a pang at the Henry Moore Exhibition when I saw that one of the exhibits came from Wakefield Art Gallery (although why, I don’t know, as I’ve never actually been to Wakefield); then the other day I thought I would quite like to eat an avocado pear and a banana, which I could do in the UK.
But other than that, Britain seems from this distance a strangely closed society that has no sense of direction. When you hear about the last outburst of riots in Newcastle, you feel the different people involved and commenting on it actually have no experience in common at all. Here, although opinions are massively divided, people are facing the same things: how to cope with the break-up of the country; how to avert hunger; how to understand their history.
I learned yesterday that Lambeth cashed my cheque for the so-called arrears in my poll tax, then sent me another court summons for the same amount, plus two more months that I’ve been living here.
Friday 18 October
In the evening Tolya gave his party for the workmen. It was like Boys from the Blackstuff, Soviet-style. They presented me with a bunch of red carnations, then all got excruciatingly embarrassed in the presence of this foreign woman, fell silent, and one by one left the room for a smoke. Tolya had made wonderful food and had just the right manner to hold the group together. During the coup the builders had worked solidly on the office, not knowing if their firm would get the chop (as they’re a cooperative), or if Amnesty would too. At night they’d gone to the barricades.
At my wits’ end about what to take to Leningrad this weekend as presents, I went into the new Irish supermarket on the Novy Arbat, and nice it was too. There are a number of nice clothes shops opening on that street and although the prices are probably ridiculous, it is a real pleasure on the eye to see a shop window that is full and attractively laid out. Andrey came round, bringing me a blanket for my freezing flat. At 11.40pm I managed to trap down Vyacheslav Bakhmin at a party and ask him about Amnesty’s registration. He still hasn’t sent his letter about us to Yeltsin. And so we climb onto another ladder of delays.
The Economic Union was signed today.
Saturday 19 October
Before I caught the Leningrad train at lunch I visited Viktor, partly to ask if he will be a consultant to the Council of Europe’s human rights project here.
Today they changed the tape on the metro to match the new station names. People were chuckling as they heard “Alexandrovsky Gardens” instead of “Kalinin”, and “Clean Ponds” instead of “Kirov”. Then an old woman turned to me in panic and asked, “Is there a Prospekt Marx station?” I said we’d passed it and it was now “Hunters’ Row”. Another woman started raging that everything is changing for the worse.
Tatyana and I were going to Leningrad to meet a man who wants to join the Quakers. He came to meet us off the train, then I went to stay at Ludmilla’s. The shop signs on her street were all illuminated and once again St Petersburg looked more prosperous than Moscow.