I walk with Marina down to the broad River Neva, along the broad Nevsky Prospect that inspired novelist Andrei Bely to imagine the whole of St Petersburg as ‘the infinity of the avenue raised to the nth power’. And yes, I am feeling this ‘nth power’; I am feeling Nevsky Prospect’s ‘centripetal all-engulfing force’, which is how Grebenshikov defines the essence of the city’s main avenue, an essence which he believes has not changed since Dostoyevsky’s time. I have had to give up my fantasy about moving to Leningrad when I finish school. It is too late for these kinds of indulgences. But I can run to earth the traces of Grebenshikov. I am determined to find the building where he lives. We are told to scout a certain inner-city locale by a DJ we meet at a Palace of Culture. (Palaces and Houses of Culture are a Soviet version of community centres, well-surveilled hubs of ‘cultural leisure’ complete with much-sought-after theatre and performance spaces and uniquely suited to channelling and sublimating people’s potentially dangerous ‘surplus energies’.)
We walk along Perovskaya Street, sticking our heads into every building on the way (oh, the golden era before the intercom, when blocks of flats and even posh apartment buildings were enchantingly porous). We recognise ‘our’ building by the fans’ scrawl, which covers the staircase walls from the ground floor right up to the top where Bob (as BG likes to be called; the man is an Anglophile) lives in a communal apartment. I have never seen so much graffiti in my life, all of it purposeful and, on the whole, well spelt: a dense maze of Idolatry 101, fragments of Aquarium songs and philosophical maxims that seem to engage each other in one of those longstanding conversations that need no one to continue them. With time, it will become fashionable to regard these walls with obligatory irony, as if apologising for the lack of sophistication, for the crudeness of this altar. Only Grebenshikov’s mother will tenderly copy the inscriptions from the walls, to include them in a book about her son, as a tribute to all those people who loved her little boy with such a naïve, childlike desperation.
Outside BG’s door on the fifth floor, his fans are known to wait for him at all hours of the day and night, not giving up the hope that their idol may share a brisk glass of port with them in the hall (they will supply the beverage, of course), or tell them something life-changing, or simply smile appreciatively, in recognition of their loyalty and impeccable taste, on the way to taking his all-too-human rubbish out.
Somewhere between the second and third floors, Marina and I take a brush and a tube of gouache paint we brought from her place and add our own lines to the wall. A slightly reworked quote from his lyrics, nothing arse-licking, don’t worry. I have contemplated our inscription for days: Borya, always remain in a place of green trees and gold over blue. Borya is neither the cool, knowing, for-insiders-only Bob nor the overly deferential BG, it is an informal version of Boris – this is, I imagine, what he would have been called before becoming the man about town. As Marina and I are about to put the lid back on the squeezed-to-death paint tube, we hear the creaking of a door followed by a wail of an exasperated neighbour: ‘What are you doing ruining the walls? Have you no shame! Get rid of this crap or I’ll call the police. Don’t you know? He does not live here anymore, you fools. He never comes here at all.’
‘Did the grumpy neighbour call the police?’ I ask Marina twenty years later, all too aware of how quickly the tissue of my memory grows over all the gaps. ‘No,’ she replies without hesitating.
‘Did we clean up the graffiti?’
‘Of course not – are you kidding!’
‘Do you remember how our lines looked on that wall?’
‘Yes, they looked good – nice and fat. I saw them a few years later in a documentary about Grebenshikov and St Petersburg’s underground culture. They were filming him going up the stairs and the camera caught our bit of the wall. Of course it has all been cleaned up since then. All the buildings near Nevsky Prospect have been completely renovated and refurbished – they are all now offices and exclusive apartment blocks for the nasosy.’ (Nasosy, which means ‘vacuum cleaners’, is unflattering St Petersburg slang for the new rich.)
On reflection, I now see that 5 Perovskaya Street was my first visit to a real site of pilgrimage, although perhaps some classical pilgrimage components were missing. For one, I would have never knocked on BG’s door and would have genuinely dreaded the prospect of coming face-to-face with the phantom man at the top of the stairs. I know now that the very act of paying respects to the phantom man himself was not what was ultimately at stake for me and Marina. (After all, isn’t the real purpose of any pilgrimage a communion with other pilgrims, rather than the communion with a dead or living deity of one’s choice?) What was at stake was the need to seal our friendship before I left the country. Climbing up those stairs together with Marina felt like a rapid and irreversible solidification of our friendship, like a more mature version of a childhood ritual in which we used to cut our fingers and rub them together, bleeding and sticky, in the literal creation of blood ties.
All these years later, I still suspect that I am a St Petersburg person, that if something had happened in those last months of 1989 and my family had not been able to emigrate, I would have somehow made my way to this city. Of course, I have never lived in St Petersburg, so what would I really know? I never woke up and went to sleep in one of its countless decrepit communal apartments, never came to see with painful clarity that this was a place of magnificent facades and rotting, neglected interiors. I never had to contend with its legendary climate – legendary for producing only sixty or so sunny days a year. And then there’s the weight of its history – the barbaric creation of the city on the bones of the people, thousands of whom died draining the swamps at the whim of the Emperor Peter; the 1917 Revolution germinating and finally exploding in the city; the nine hundred days of the Blockade, which, after the camps, is perhaps the most unbearable aspect of the Soviet Union’s World War II legacy. And my heroes of the city, look what happened to them: Mandelstam perishing in one of the transit camps (’Petersburg, I don’t want to die yet’); Brodsky forced to emigrate; Akhmatova compelled to live with the grief of not one but two slain husbands, as well as with chronic poverty, persecution and harassment, her only son imprisoned for over a decade. So, what would I know? And still, I often fantasise about being a disgruntled resident of St Petersburg, the kind who once in a while cannot wait to escape from the city to some simple, sunny place, only to come back and ‘to swallow at once the cod liver oil of Leningrad’s river lamps’. (Mandelstam here again, a few years before his death.)
Marina is waiting for us at her apartment, ready to light twelve candles as soon as the door opens, as if she knows how much Billie needs to be fussed over, how desperately my daughter needs a big production to be made out of her birthday – with people listening intently for her steps, ‘Shh, shh, was that the lift?’, with the candles lit just in time, with ‘Happy Birthday’ sung uproariously, as if it was not at most nine in the morning. Marina’s husband, Misha Senior, who met us at the train station, enters the apartment first, followed by our two suitcases – ‘gigantically enormous and impossibly huge’ (sounds like that Jonathan Safran Foer book, but it is merely the suitcases’ description in Billie’s diary). I see Misha’s tall musician’s frame bent under the weight of the larger suitcase, the contents of which I can no longer account for, except to say that three megabooks by Australia’s own Isobelle Carmody, weighing at least five kilos, are stuffed in it. They are Billie’s fiercely negotiated provisions to be stretched over five weeks on this trip. She cannot do without these books because she cannot read in Russian. In her golden bilingual childhood Billie spoke excellent Russian, knew the alphabet and was just getting into reading when she started primary school and the wall-to-wall English of her new surroundings first sidelined and then pretty much ousted her other ‘native’ language. Shortly after I simply gave up on the unrewarding task of forcing Billie to maintain and improve her Russian – in the words of the Russian saying ‘I broke all my teeth on the difficulty of it’ – and look who is crying. (Answer: I am the one who is crying, she seems totally fine with her Carmodies.)