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The Girl from Petrovka
When I have some free time in the early afternoon and its not unbearably cold, I often take a walk along Petrovka. Its not a ritual or anything symbolic, but simply a way to stretch my legs and absorb some sights and sounds of city life after a solitary mornings work and the winter sullenness that invades my office through the window. Petrovka starts just round the corner from the office and runs about half a mile almost due south, ending beside the Bolshoi Theatre at Sverdlov Square, near the very center of town.
The street has unpleasant connotations because of the dominant building at the near end - near to my office, that is. This is the notorious ‘Number 38’, headquarters of the Moscow Criminal Police. Number 38 is a large stone structure with the look of a mental hospital. It’s carefully maintained and surrounded by a ten-foot iron fence - one of the few buildings of its age in Moscow with straight angles and a facade unblemished by peeling plaster. Outside, a cordon of armed policemen patrol in overcoats cut to the uppers of their boots; they wave black limousines through the gates from time to time and never smile. Muscovites don’t say ‘police headquarters’ but simply ‘Petrovka thirty eight’ -‘he was whipped off to thirty-eight’ - and there are disturbing rumors about interrogations in the basement. The captain of the guard (presumably three or four rotate the twenty-four-hour watch, but they all have the same gross features, like the town bullies of Gorky’s youth) peers at each passer-by, and it’s assumed someone’s stationed behind
the bars of a ground-floor window with a telescopic camera. For prudence, therefore, I always keep to the opposite sidewalk. I pass there almost every day, and years have convinced me that this is enough to make police superintendents, and most Soviet officials of any kind, suspicious.
I used to seethe at this need for caution - the stupidity of such things here, the hundred daily humiliations. Time trains you to swallow them. There are so many more abhorrent pressures to rail at when the railing mood comes on that petty irritations like these pass almost unnoticed. Besides, you learn not to complain about the major wrongs too - unless you’re unhappy enough to court expulsion. 1 myself can’t risk that now; I must remain in Moscow for at least three more years.
In any case, I avert my eyes almost instinctively when I pass the blank fortress now. You must be very brave, very angry or very foolish to pry into matters like police work here. Number 38 occupies almost a full block near Petrovka’s northern end. Just below this the old thoroughfare takes on its own personality, and it’s here, in the center, yet back-
woods, of the city, that I love to wander. Petrovka at this point is an ancient, bustling shopping street, lined with former merchants’ houses built at the turn of the century and peeling, sagging, rotting under a hundred layers of chalky yellow paint. On the ground floor, the weary old houses are now a jumble of offices, small shops and proletarian cafes. The floors above are given over to decrepit three-beds-to-a-room apartments. It is an urban Russian salad.
The pavements bordering the houses are as jammed as an Oriental bazaar; their pedestrian traffic spills out into the roadway, ignoring the railings erected specifically to prevent this, as well as the fierce whistles of policemen who yearn to establish order. Fat old women in mountains of smocks and shawls are hawking greasy pirozhki and a bizarre assortment of books they can’t read. A forty-minute line has formed for a truckload of pathetic chickens sold directly from their muddy crates: a professorial-looking
gentleman is wrapping his in the morning's Pravda and stuffing it into his tattered briefcase. Stalls selling ice cream, foul-smelling soap, runty lemons (at the equivalent of two dollars each), theater tickets and odd items of flimsy clothing obstruct the already impossibly crowded alleyways. Here as everywhere on Russia's back streets, the ordinary people, the anonymous masses, join in their daily, and eternal, struggle to acquire the necessities of life. The street is awash with bulging black overcoats colliding in a kind of human kinetic motion, bumping and jostling each other without resentment - without, one would swear, even feeling the contact.
The shops are shabby and battlescarred, with the look of worn, wooden Woolworths recovering from the depression. Inside, crowds ten to twenty deep are fighting toward the counters, resolved to buy sausage, panties, pencils, anything before supplies are exhausted. The salesgirls, school dropouts with crudely bleached hair, compete in demonstrating contempt for the supplicating customers.
Occasionally one jolts out of her studied indifference to abuse a customer. ‘How do I know if this pen works. You're the one who wants to use it, not me. Get out your money or leave.'
Some of the shops have been modernized recently on what was presumed to be a Western model, but the signs are so primitive and metal fronts so amateurish that the effect is more pathetic than smart. Petrovka is what Petrovka was; the changes themselves, even those wrought by the Revolution, speak more than anything of the continuity of Russian life. The rag-tag, cosy spirit conveyed in paintings of peasant markets in the seventeenth or eighteenth or nineteenth century - it does not matter which - is the spirit now.
This is why I take my walk on Petrovka and drift among its crowds. It is the heart and soul of Russia, the real Russia, not the mask I write about in my newspaper or Soviet journalists in theirs. I'm not a Soviet expert and still less a Slavophile; just a rather veteran Chicago reporter who was
posted here almost three years ago because in my last year at night school - the year both America and Russia entered the Second World War - I had an impulse to study Russian and liked it enough to continue on my own. None of this was planned, any more than this assignment. Nor fated: at my first sight of Petrovka, I felt only pity for its impoverished people. But slowly I came to understand the street and love it, as if it were somehow mine.
I don’t want to overstate all this. At my age you veer too easily towards cynicism or sentimentality - and in Russia, curiously, sentimentality can be the greater danger. But something moves me in the spirit of Russia’s vagrant, peeling streets, as in the spirit of her eroded river banks. They are slovenly but dearer than a mile of chrome. Despite the ‘eastem-ness’ and dirt, I feel an indefinable communion here with the mystery and meaning of the world.
This illustrates, I think, why a peasant loves his sliver of barren land. We all infuse with patriotism and emotion whatever we have or know, however humble - especially when humble. Something about Petrovka makes this phenomenon, or paradox, especially tangible. On this street more than any other, you are engulfed by an involuntary affection for the Motherland of sadness and misfortune. Oh backward, drunken, tortured Russia, said Gogol. How miserable you are - and how we love you!
But I’m far afield already. Rambling - as Petrovka rambles - is an occupational disease in Russia, perhaps caused by the pace of life and the geography: fields and forests without beginning or end. It’s not Petrovka itself I want to write about but the person who introduced me to it. And to Moscow and Russia - the parts I’d believed no longer existed. Oktyabrina went with Petrovka like bread, as the Russians say, goes with salt. Although I’d lived literally next door for years before she appeared, it was through her eyes that I began to know and love it.