He did not care to be a tourist in a mythical town. It was the wrong way to see Moscow. The right way – the only right way – was in the stories and dreams of the old generation. The glinting, golden splendour of St Basil’s added nothing to his mother’s infrequently aired memories of a girlhood in the city; the monumental blocks of Lenin’s tomb, its strutting, green-clad, goose-stepping guards, added nothing to the endless, convoluted narrative of his father’s youth. You could, he thought, take a copy of Ulysses, a street mapof Dublin and have a good, if long, if pissed, day out in Dublin. You could take the Russia of family legend, any map of Moscow, and never find it in the stone and mortar of the Soviet Union. He should not have come.
All in all he was searching for a metaphor. If Beirut was what? What had he called it? The Britain of the black market? Then Moscow, Moscow . . . was Britain in the drab age, Britain in the late 1940s, when rationing had gone on far too long, when the nation was heartily sick of it, when the humour, and the glamour if ever there had been any, had gone out of spivvery, and the country was locked into its first, its only five-year plan. Moscow, Moscow was the result of endless, serial five-year plans, of well-intentioned drabness piled upon orderly, dreary, gut-shrinking austerity; the heartless devotion of serial monogamy. It was a monumental city of vast spaces, of stone plains and cobbled prairie, of width and breadth and vista, shaped to the division and the column and the battalion. And its people skulked at the edges, refusing the open space, huddled in the shadows, buried in the bottle, born to narrow lanes and dark alleys, born not to Red Square or any square, born to Lyàpin House and Protótchny Lane, born to life within the iron hand. No line of Kipling or Masefield, no skylining metaphor of light or air, would ever so transpose, would ever touch these depths. It was Blok, Aleksandr Blok, who had it right: ‘Russia . . . her strength compressed and useless in an iron fist.’