8. The Other Anna

[ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA HAS been described as ‘steely’. She was not; she was matter-of-fact. These articles show her humanity, a sensitive conscience, a willingness to engage with the unfamiliar, and regret that her homeland was not a more enjoyable place to live.]

PASSION ON TIPTOE THAT MAKES YOU QUIVER: MOVEMENT AS AN ALLOTROPE OF LOVE

30 March 2000

In London the performances of the internationally renowned Buenos Aires company Tango Por Dos, directed by its creator and invariable principal dancer, the breathtaking Miguel Angel Zotto, have played to consistently full houses, raising sighs and gasps from a habitually reserved audience. In the Peacock Theatre on Kingsway, the visitors have been presenting a two-act performance of Tango Argentino. Almost three hours of bewitching stage action with never a word spoken, only music, dancing and emotion. By the finale the exceedingly well-balanced, phlegmatic, and even apathetic British audience had been roused to a peak of frenzied enthusiasm, wanting more. Know how to live and you can have a life!

There is pure passion on the stage, nothing else, performed by six couples. Naturally, there is no sex, which I mention for Russian ignoramuses yet to learn the distinction between passion and bed. All the dancers are middle-aged, not babes in arms or adolescents, expressing more than just climactic ecstasies. These are adults who know all about losing, and winning, and hoping. Their intensity is magnificent and mind-blowing. No grinding of teeth, no rending of raiment, no biting of lips, not even any crying out. It is a presentation of oblivious passion. There is such heat generated by the show that from time to time you see couples quietly sneaking out of the auditorium and the theatre. The theatre’s regulars assure you that they leave to make love to each other themselves. Rumours are swirling around London that this always happens during Tango Argentino: the men and women watching the dancing, in which nobody is topless, there is no striptease, not a hint of Playboy titillation, can’t sit it out to the finale. They want to do it themselves, to experience this eternal reality. Such a torrent of libido floods from the stage that unless you are made of stone you succumb to it. If you came on your own, you would feel amorous towards whoever was sitting next to you. If only for a couple of hours, you can imagine yourself to be a dazzlingly inventive lover, capable of anything.

Do not suppose that this is a gourmet spectacle for the cognoscenti, or even for those accustomed to imbibing cocktails of passion. Nothing of the sort. Everything is very simple, even primitive. Six couples demonstrate every type and variety of tango, such as might grace a ballroom, or be seen at a rustic dance (in Argentina, of course), or in a seaside café to the accompaniment of a small, artless dance band. And that’s pretty much it. What is striking about the performance is not what they are dancing but how: every womanly cell breathes desire, but it is not the kind of desire squandered in the Metro, on a trolleybus, or in the drunken cafés and dives of Russia. It is a desire trained to draw in to a happiness – possibly a transient and ephemeral happiness – every atom of the man beside you.

Tango Por Dos is both an Argentinian show and the name of the dance company. It was created in 1989 by Zotto and Milena Plebs, the best tango dancers in Argentina. At that time they were also in love and, for almost 10 years, touring constantly, they projected their private emotion from the stages of the world in dance steps and poses with unbelievable power.

In Argentina the couple were known as ‘our Romeo and Juliet’. They had met in 1985 when Milena was already a famous ballerina and, moreover, the well-educated daughter of a prominent family. Zotto was her inferior in every respect. He was born the son of an amateur actor and had no popular following. Who trained him? Only ‘life itself’, and the tango in the streets and nightclubs of Buenos Aires.

It was then Milena decided that Zotto was completely irresistible and would be magnificent in the tango. She abandoned her ballet career and, for the sake of her man, defied family and friends, even breaking off relations with many of them, just to be with Zotto, touring the world. In due course, living out their own love on stage, in front of an audience, they were transformed into a legendary couple in their own right and were crowned king and queen of their genre. People who saw Milena and Miguel dance maintain that the sparks they emitted every time they danced the tango could give members of the audience a heart attack.

Alas, three years ago Zotto and Plebs split up. Zotto announced that he wanted to be alone, and Milena said she would never dance again, despite an abundance of offers. The end of their pas de deux came when Zotto refused Milena, by then 36, a child, both for career and personal reasons. He refused to be burdened with a family and children.

There were other reasons. In 1992 he had lost his father, who died an agonising death from cancer. Plebs later said she had sensed that this was the beginning of their own last act. She continued to look after Miguel in his anguish, but suddenly discovered that her inconsolable partner had someone else wiping away his tears. In 1995 Milena had to recognise that, apart from the tango, they no longer had anything in common.

Milena Plebs is an amazing individual. She avers that the tango is a dance of passion which can be danced only by a couple who are in love. Anything else is a profanation which will not captivate the audience. ‘When you love a man,’ Milena has said, ‘that is the tango. The tango means being together, hoping for a child. When all that is in the past for Zotto and me, I no longer wish to dance.’ She lives in Buenos Aires and teaches choreography, sometimes directing a performance herself. But she doesn’t dance, and she hasn’t had a baby.

Today Zotto obstinately refers to himself as an incurable romantic, while continuing to dance without Milena, and doing so outstandingly well. He does not need to love the partner he twirls in the tango. Oh well – that’s men. But Milena – that’s also what women are like.

This show has toured the world but has never come to Russia. I suspect there is good reason for that. Zotto has circled almost the entire globe with his dancing, and more than once. He has performed in such lands disinclined to overt displays of passion as China, Thailand, and heaven knows what other places remote from Latin culture, from the salons of Europe, the cafés of Argentina, and the reality of Latin America. So why has Russia been denied the opportunity of sipping from this spicy chalice?

Love has, of course, taken root here, and often, but we entirely lack any culture of passion. Yes, it looms large in Dostoevsky, Leontiev or Tolstoy, both love and tears, but alas, it hardly figures in the everyday lives of people like us in the twenty-first century. We have become habituated to quiet love, to understanding another person to the depths of their soul. We pity the unfortunate and the alcoholics drinking themselves to death because their souls have been defiled. We have a tradition of making do with love on a shoestring, of living in hope as the years go by, of washing his feet and drinking the dirty water. But passion as a short-lived, all-consuming fire – forget it! We are incapable of a month of passion (even just the one, but sweet, devastating, and luring us towards madness), or even of a passionate break-up to shake our whole organism to the core even though it is obvious that this is the end, so let’s end with a burst of passion. As an experiment, just try suggesting to your gentleman friend parting at the peak of your amorous relations. He will shy away in horror. For us, breaking up means divorce and walking out with all our belongings and all the ancient dust which has settled on them.

Our pro-Soviet love is nothing but rummaging around in ourselves, not a desire to take from our partner every last drop of the happiness he can give, even if these are our final hours together, and to give him in return the same, even though we know the pillow will be empty tomorrow. Passion Russian-style is a trip from A to B. At A we kiss, and at B we saw away at the bed-frame. It is great good fortune if the trip is direct, and awful if the path is tortuous, which it all too often is. But why go on? As if we don’t already know this only too well.

Perhaps the accommodation shortage has put paid to our scope for passion. There’s no doubt it can have that effect, but passion is not only about square metres of floor space, and it is vital not to be dwelling on how they might be divided if something goes wrong. Passion does undeniably require money, and our men have withered decade after decade because they have been penniless. Even when recently some of them have become rich, they have rushed away from their wives to prostitutes or other readily available women, to strip clubs and massage parlours – anywhere, just as long as they don’t have to prove themselves.

These last years have been a complete disaster for passion. Following in the footsteps of teenagers and racketeers, the rest of society has even adopted the terminology ‘screwing’. Anybody who has a relationship is ‘screwing’, and that is how they and those around them refer to it. [The poet] Sergey Yesenin claimed elegiacally ‘not to regret, invoke the past, or shed a tear’. Neither do modern couples in Russia – instead they screw. Bankers screw, their children screw, retired engineers screw, homeless people screw, and so do musicians and poets. Can we be bothered with the storms of passion, the paroxysms of a last farewell, our knees giving way at a chance meeting? Well, no, actually we can’t. A quick screw is all we need. If you should regrettably find yourself engulfed by passion, the put-down of the Russian male, long adept at screwing, will be like a bucket of cold water: ‘Don’t put me in a difficult situation. For heaven’s sake, we are grown-ups.’

In our culture you must either control or conceal your passion, and then people will find their way to you. It makes you sick! You are expected to be modest, not to have pretensions, not to give yourself airs, not to be different … and then you will be graced by happiness ‘just when you least expect it’. What nonsense! What garbage! What a pathetic excuse for promiscuity! You should be emotionally open only at home, and then only if you are lucky enough to have someone who appreciates it!

We ladies, however, are not much better. We expect little and, as has long been known, it is women who reflect their men, never the other way round.

So why on earth would we need an Argentinian tango for two in Russia? It would just cause a lot of upset for no good reason.

‘The Lord went forth to test the people’s love.’ So wrote Yesenin, who knew the meaning of passion. That line belongs here if only because there is a quotation in large print in the programme of Tango Por Dos from Isadora Duncan, who danced the tango and was Yesenin’s lover. Alas, her spirit has not been passed on to us.

If you find yourself in London, escape Russia at the Peacock Theatre. If you miss the show there but still want to be lashed by someone else’s unreasoning passion, you can catch it in Milan, Turin and Lyons where Tango Por Dos will be touring in April. But not in Moscow.

THE JOY OF PARIS

1 June 2000

So much has been said about Paris that it is embarrassing to join the chorus. But it can’t be helped, I really want to. This city has such powerful magic that your tongue, that wretch which betrays your innermost feelings, is untied and puts to sleep protesting reason. You want to shout that you too have been happy here. Even if it’s banal, cliché-ridden, even if it’s already been done to death by everybody, including the greatest and most brilliant people on the planet, you still want to say it your way, even though you recognise the pointlessness of the enterprise.

So, I’m in Paris, it’s late May and the chestnuts are in bloom. The next five days are mine, all mine.

The reason for being here is that a collection of reports from Chechnya and Ingushetia, published in Novaya gazeta between September 1999 and April 2000, are being published here. This is very pleasing because it puts our regular readers, from Chukotka to Kaliningrad, ahead of the Parisians, those legislators on every aspect of fashion. The publisher who has lavished so much loving attention on Novaya gazeta (not without the prompting of Alexander Ginsburg, former political prisoner and dissident, who is today a champion of human rights, friend of Solzhenitsyn, and a Parisian), is not only very large, popular, and well known in Paris, but boasts the aesthetically pleasing name of Robert Laffont. There, in just those two words, those four syllables which flow into each other, France is rendered into sound. The uvular trill of the ‘r’, twice. The lily-like ‘la’ where a tender ‘l’ merges with a kiss from lips delicately forming that special ‘a’ to produce a sound close to the la-la-la of a toothless babe.

However, the imposing Robert Laffont was not until tomorrow morning. My first night in Paris was to be spent in a café. Where else? But how are you to pluck the very finest pearl from such a gleaming pile? In Paris, a city of freedom and a certain frivolity, the only way is to advance boldly and see what happens. The very first Parisian café we managed to select entirely at random (‘Should we go in here?’ ‘Oh no, much too crowded!’ ‘OK, then, down the street there to the right?’ ‘How about this one?’ ‘Let’s find a seat’) was called by coincidence ‘Le Select’.

It was perfect. We found ourselves in the centre of Montparnasse, both the district and the Boulevard, and accordingly in a haven where the artistic elite of the entire world came to alternate resuscitation with inspiration. As we soon found out.

If we had known where we were headed, we might have been more circumspect. At the next table was a boisterous party of stereotypical Parisians: quasi-actors, quasi-artists, of differing ages but all with a suggestion of the eternal student at their greying temples. They were having a great time, oblivious to the joys or sorrows of anyone around them. There was little space between the tables and the rooms were very narrow, the furniture ancient. The interiors were perfectly preserved from the early 1920s. It is wholly impermissible to make any changes to the historical appearance of Parisian cafés. They are museums of the spirit of Paris.

The atmosphere, too, had been preserved. A young girl-artist, very proud of herself – like all Parisian girls – and instantly tipsy, eager to find happiness with a young boy-artist sitting some distance away, headed rapidly towards him through a historic, narrow space and sent a bottle on our table flying. There was water everywhere, in my handbag, on our clothes, in our shoes. So what did this select, impulsive fledgling of Montparnasse do about it?

Well, actually, nothing. Women in Paris are very proud indeed and have their noses in the air while managing simultaneously to seem entirely available. Our artistic mademoiselle politely, but not too politely, cooed ‘Pardon’ and quickly found the joy she had fluttered in here to find, in the company of her Pierre, who was perhaps an as yet undiscovered Derain, or Matisse.

The names, of course, are deliberately selected. Derain, Matisse, and indeed Picasso, Cocteau, Max Jacob, Henry Miller, Scott Fitzgerald, and Hemingway himself had sat at these same little tables at which the early twenty-first-century Montparnasse avant-garde had given us a good soaking.

What more could a former Soviet citizen want in order to be happy? At this moment in life, nothing, unless to feel their backside in contact with the tattered armchair which had been scuffed by the threadbare trousers of the young Hemingway as he sipped the same cocktail as you. He was select, and you are select.

The waiters of Le Select, incidentally, are men of advancing years, if not just plain old. And yet, how proud they are, standing out even among the proud Parisian crowd. In vain will you seek to attract their attention, for you are no Picasso. Your predicament, however, is that you don’t want to rise irately from your seat and storm out, having lost patience with the arrogant garçon. For some reason you understand and forgive, for you are still only in the foothills.

The waiter eventually deigns to come over to you, a débutante here still far from conquering Montparnasse. He brings you the water you requested long ago, naturally in a 1920s tumbler. The glass is thick and coarse, without a hint of gentility, and openly proclaims its primary function as being not to get broken too soon. The clientele have always been a bit rowdy. Give them half-decent glasses and you would have been permanently in debt, even if some of them did go on to become Nobel Prize winners, the crème de la crème, champions of the world.

You have to sympathise with the glasses. As he bangs mine down on the table, the waiter does not favour his non-regular customer with so much as a glance. The party next to us are ‘his’. He and they belong here, guffawing, flirting, twining themselves around each other, even though one brings the coffee and another pays for it. Naturally the garçon can only look down on me.

He is haughty, but not actually rude. He even appears partly to forgive me for being a nobody in Montparnasse. You get a strange feeling from your mute contemplation of this old Parisian professional’s game. You catch yourself trying to be noticed by him, supercilious though his glance will be, and are glad when you see he has forgiven you. You want to jump up straight away and pursue the bluebird, to stand out from the crowd, if only for an hour, but most certainly to be a hero. Such, they say, are the antics provoked by Montparnasse. We may not be the greatest on its slopes but neither are we going to be the least.

But now, farewell, proud Le Select! You may not have known it, but in fact we were not such nonentities. Tomorrow we too would begin our conquest of Paris. The ‘pre-publication marketing’ of our book was about to begin. What in Russia we would call the hype. How was it? Bruising. Russian public relations firms have no idea: from an early breakfast to a late supper inclusive there were press conferences, interviews, parties, presentations, conversations. By evening I was hoarse, and the next morning everything began all over again. There was a whirl of journalists who for some reason were interested in the book, some of whom had even found time to read it. The timetable was rigorously adhered to: I was whisked from one interview to the next, with no deviations from the agreed programme. Between meetings with journalists there was an orientation talk with my publisher Malcy Ozonna about things I must under no circumstances forget to say. Marie Gigault from Le Monde was to be told one thing, Thierry Brandt from the Franco-Swiss newspaper Le Matin something else, the magazine Elle something else again.

For all that, the frenetic pace did not dissipate the emotional charge. Everywhere kind words cascaded down, love, warmth, admiration, respect – a positive tsunami. Life was suddenly something to enjoy, surrounded by interested people. These were feelings long unfamiliar in Russia where people do not love you for your articles. On the contrary, most hate you for them.

The French intellectuals involved in promoting the book were clearly puzzled by my increasingly obvious embarrassment as this carousel of kindness continued. ‘Isn’t it just the same in Russia when somebody has written and published a book?’ ‘It is not at all the same in Russia.’ ‘What do you mean? Has your book not been published in Russia?’ ‘Of course not!’

They were amazed. They shrugged their shoulders. For the first time they looked at me uncertainly, unable to believe it. I did not try to explain. What would be the point? These were trivial details. I looked about me instead, taking in what really mattered – how the Parisiennes were dressed.

You have only to stand in the bustle of Place de la Madeleine for ten minutes to understand that there is no answer to this question. The essence of Paris is that the women dress as they please. The men too. And they think as they choose to, and put on their make-up in the morning as they see fit. This kind of life is called freedom. Liberty. You live as you please, however you like.

Moscow had been only a transit airport on my flight to Paris. The starting point of the journey which brought me to the capital of France was Ingushetia and Chechnya: refugee camps; foothills; forests; soldiers desperate to go home; hungry people crying; the routine horror of life in our homeland where everybody lives as best they can, just trying to survive. That is why ‘my’ Paris seemed such a sweet, heavenly treat. It was like the taste in your mouth after wormwood, when a single chocolate has the impact of kilograms of honey.

‘“Why are you not sleeping?” “Paris will not let me sleep.”’ Sometimes we hum that song to ourselves as we struggle towards the light through the routine austerity of life in Russia. And do you know what? It wasn’t true! I slept very soundly in Paris, for the first time in all the months of the war, without sleeping pills, without shivering. Nobody was yelling at me, goading me, telling me I was a traitor. Everybody liked me. Everybody admired me. May you enjoy the same experience.

That was the joy of Paris, the private property of one Russian journalist who dares to testify to it. It was a joy all the more poignant because immediately before it I had to dare to do quite different things. My book will go on sale in the bookshops of Paris on 4 June 2000. Its publishers have decided to call it Journey to Hell: A Chechen Diary. The Daring Testimony of a Russian Journalist.

A Lighter Postscript

Simultaneously with the collection of articles from Novaya gazeta about Russia during the Chechen War, another book on the same topic will be published in France in early June.

It has the eye-catching title of Chienne de Guerre, A Bitch of a War. Its author is a Parisian journalist, Anne Nivat. Our books are not thought too similar, although they tell the same tale. But now, let’s consider some parallels. Is it mere chance that the books are appearing together? The French emotionally assured me that it was a complete coincidence. That might seem hard to believe, but to confirm it, here is a story.

Anne Nivat is not just a brave French journalist, she is also the daughter of Georges Nivat, today a professor at the University of Geneva, and a very famous Slavist in France. Georges Nivat is not just a famous Slavist, but the same person who came as an exchange student to Moscow in the early 1960s and very soon found himself in the house of none other than Olga Ivinskaya, the last love of Boris Pasternak. Georges did not merely drink cups of tea in her house, but fell in love with her daughter, Irina. He even moved in with them, and their impending marriage was blessed by Pasternak himself. More than that, Pasternak and Georges spent a lot of time together, talking. Pasternak helped him to make sense of Russian life, with all its trials. Later he was booted out of Russia thanks to the efforts of the relevant agencies. And Irina? She ended up in one of the labour camps in Mordovia.

Gradually everything fell apart between Georges and Irina. First he got married in France and began bringing up his children in the ascetic spirit of strict Protestantism. Little Anne Nivat crawled through the mountains with her Papa. That is how she was brought up, learning to grit her teeth. Less than 30 years would pass before these lessons in survival came in very handy as Chechnya burned. She was to crawl through the mountains of Chechnya, well able to grit her teeth. But let us return to the story of that love in the middle of the last century. Learning that Georges had got married in France, Irina too fell in love with a prisoner in the neighbouring camp for men.

The marriage of Georges and Irina, to which Pasternak had given his blessing, never came to pass, but the love he had encouraged did flourish in a house in the very road where Novaya gazeta’s offices are situated. The house is still there, and so is their apartment.

We are all closer to each other than we know. Our world is a strange place and more intricately connected than we imagine in our wildest dreams. Paris and Moscow are almost the same.

COME WITH THE WIND: MOSCOW CHAMPIONS OF A BETTER RUSSIA MEET GEORGE W. BUSH (AT HIS REQUEST)

25 May 2002

It is not only the Kremlin that gets to enjoy the Bushes’ company. Over 100 of us, officially classified as ‘Russian social, parliamentary, and religious opinion-formers’ and highly diverse in terms of our socio-political make-up, also got invited to meet the US President. On 24 May 2002, from 2.15 p.m. Moscow time, immediately after a presidential lunch in one of the Kremlin dining halls. The venue was Spaso House on Old Arbat, the renowned residence of the American Ambassador.

A fashionable function is good because nobody is responsible to anybody for anything. It is pure entertainment. While the Bushes were being catastrophically late arriving from the Kremlin, the rest of us in Spaso House were also enjoying ourselves. First, everybody was entertained by Boris Nemtsov of the Union of Right Forces, who appeared sporting such an amazing milk-chocolate tan that he eclipsed even Valentina Matvienko. Madame Matvienko is a Deputy Prime Minister in the Russian Government, and has lately been making increasingly strenuous efforts to mutate into a social lioness. Anyway, she was amazing too at the crush in Spaso House, displaying a tan worthy of the Caribbean and Seychelles.

‘Well, I got mine in Sochi,’ Nemtsov said defensively. ‘I always go there in the spring.’

An hour and a half passed in disputation and the consumption of aesthetically irreproachable canapés. Still Bush didn’t appear, but no nervous anticipation was observable among the guests.

Jewish administrators, eternally indebted to America, sauntered around and the Chief Muslims of Russia in exotic costumes smiled sweetly at them. The A-team from the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department of Foreign Relations, the whole lot of them, drifted in looking pleased with themselves. One of the last to appear was Gleb Pavlovsky, our principal Presidential Privy Counsellor, looking grumpy.

This provoked a minor stir. ‘What’s he doing here?’ echoed around the room with its laden tables. Most of those present evidently felt that Bush’s definition of social, parliamentary and religious opinion-formers would not include, to put it mildly, supporters of Putin. ‘He probably bought the invitation,’ the crowd decided, whispering this explanation from ear to ear. ‘How much for, do you think?’ novices in these matters mouthed at the cognoscenti of the political netherworld. ‘About $5,000,’ those versed in such matters muttered out of the side of their mouths.

Congregated around a large tray of fruit, Russia’s best-known civil rights activists, Oleg Orlov, Tatiana Kasatkina (‘Memorial’) and Svetlana Gannushkina (‘Citizens’ Aid’), modestly dressed, discussed the course of the Second Chechen Campaign in funereal tones. Not three steps away from them the same topic was being discussed by official ‘representatives of the Russian people’ Mikhail Margelov and Dmitriy Rogozin, chairmen of the Foreign Relations Committees respectively of the Soviet of the Federation and of the Duma, resplendent in the latest Parisian male fashions. They were studiedly pretending not to have noticed the human rights activists, and were discussing when they would next be obliged to return to Strasbourg to defend Russia from another attack by the human rights camp.

At last we were called through to the sumptuously decorated hall, solemn, bravura symphonic music flowing from the amplifiers, such as accompanies cosmonauts en route to a launch.

The President of the United States of America was manifestly not a hundred miles away. It was time for his speech. We were directed to our seats. Democrat Grigoriy Yavlinsky analysed the principles behind the allocation: ‘Those seated closest to Bush are those most persecuted.’ And indeed, Pavlovsky was awarded a seat right at the back, while Novaya gazeta merited the third of approximately 30 rows, between Yavlinsky and the head of the Russian Mormons. In front of me was the broad back of Yevgeny Kiselev, sacked director of the now closed NTV television station; Jews, Muslims and Catholics made up the first row, and were accordingly those deemed to be suffering most under the present regime.

A clipped command was issued to ‘fasten the cordon’, and we were enclosed around the perimeter. It would not be permissible to go out, we were advised, even to the toilet or to smoke, until the presidential motorcade had departed from Spaso House. His back to the podium, a young man from the American security services stood facing the social, political and religious leaders of Russia, his eyes looking simultaneously in every direction. ‘He’s checking for al-Qaeda,’ Yavlinsky quipped.

Another half-hour passed until finally there was a rustling behind the curtains and several men wearing black suits simultaneously brought in identical ‘nuclear briefcases’. This was apparently a traditional ploy to confuse any possible enemy, who would not know which was the briefcase.

Condoleezza Rice was in the same group. The omnipotent National Security Adviser was wearing less than perfectly tailored black trousers and a rather chilly yellow jacket, with black piping along its imaginary pockets and real sides. She had no perm, something that Matvienko would never countenance in public.

‘There’s Condo-Liza Petrovna,’ the Soviet of the Federation quipped somewhere behind, in accordance with the sense of humour they have there.

Laura Bush was announced next, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and the ambassadorial couple, Lisa and Alexander Vershbow. Proud and serene, not even carrying a handbag, Laura came out in a grey suit with white buttons and black open-toed sandals. Powell sat down and crossed his legs. Glory be, he got away with it: unlike the socks of Russian men, which are invariably too short, Powell’s were magnificently long. Unfortunately, something seemed to be annoying him and he sternly viewed the ‘Russian opinion-formers’ as if they’d done something to upset him. By contrast, Lisa Vershbow beamed enchantingly, and the Ambassador glanced benevolently out at all of us from under his eyebrows.

The great moment arrived. A rather gorgeous Afro-American in a chocolate-brown three-piece suit, the President’s personal bodyguard, materialised and, almost immediately behind him, Bush himself appeared, relaxed, smiling, and flushed. He landed on his chair, assumed the pose of a citizen of the greatest power on earth, and casually crossed his legs. (Well done, Laura: he too was wearing very long socks.) He was soon invited to speak and began, not by apologising for being more than two hours late, but with a paragraph in praise of his wife, the former librarian of a rural school who at one time had no interest at all in politics, but now found herself married to such an important political figure.

He spoke for perhaps another half-hour, about freedom and universal human values. Powell frowned periodically, Condoleezza was inscrutable, the black suitcases whispered about some manifestly practical matters, and the First Lady listened to her husband with the practised pose of all American First Ladies: her back straight, her head proudly raised a little, turned three-quarters towards him. Her faced expressed a calm, steadfast love which had stood the test of time, and unshakable admiration. For the entire half-hour.

All she allowed herself was an occasional nervous tapping of her right leg when something her husband was saying apparently did not impress her.

Bush enjoyed being at the lectern. He only occasionally squinted at the papers, previously arranged by his speech writers, and appeared to be speaking largely off the cuff. When he had finished, he walked directly towards us for handshakes. He had a slightly strange manner of exchanging a few brief words with one person while already extending his right hand to the next, with a gesture which suggested you were supposed to take it yourself. He is a simple man.

Nevertheless, Bush’s grip was firm and his hand was not clammy, which was something. Russia’s leaders melted, almost all of them, standing there with hands outstretched in anticipation.

The hand-shaking ceremony took another half-hour before the President and his retinue left the room. We were kept in our enclosure for a further 15 minutes, and then set free to go with the wind.

A SICK DOG IN THE BIG CITY

September 2005

Last summer our dog died. He was very, very old. Our loyal Dobermann, Martyn, was 15, exceptionally long-lived by Dobermann standards. He was a remarkable dog who loyally protected us through the long years of the chaos of perestroika, the total gangsterism of the three years of ‘primary accumulation of capital’, and today’s dissolution of freedoms, when life is again not without risk. Shielded by Martyn we felt safer than we would have behind a posse of bodyguards. He adored us and our friends, and unerringly identified and ruthlessly chased away anyone ill-intentioned. But he never bit anyone. In Martyn’s presence we quarrelled and did not always manage to make up; we met and parted; and through it all he loved us unreservedly, even, on one occasion, swooning with love. Only during the last 45 minutes of his life was Martyn not there to serve us, when he lay down and lapsed into unconsciousness. Then it was we who served him, cupping our hands beneath his heart until it stopped beating.

Six months later we were missing him terribly. Life without Martyn was like living without an intravenous drip of love. We realised that he had been a powerful drug, a perpetuum mobile generating and projecting joy at us. Even as he was dying Martyn did not forget, occasionally raising his eyelids, to wag his stump of a tail and smile. After he died, two cats and a wonderful parrot moved in, so we had little to complain about. Yet every evening we were conscious that, although they were great, we were suffering acute emotional deprivation without a dog.

Then the children found a remarkable offer on the Internet. He looked nothing like Martyn, which was a must. He was not long-haired, which was also important because that was what we were used to. As far as we could tell from the information, he was friendly. A bloodhound puppy, a kind of basset hound on long legs, with eternally sad eyes and long ears.

We went to see the breeder. She kept saying, ‘He’s simply wonderful, the best pup in the litter.’ Maybe, but he was peeing incessantly, every time he looked at us. On the other hand, here was an ocean of affection. He flirted with us: take me, please. That did it. He really wanted us to.

‘Four months old. He still has every right to pee,’ the breeder insisted.

When we got home we renamed him van Gogh instead of the idiotic ‘Hagard’ inflicted on him by the breeder, and we settled down to live together. It very soon became apparent that van Gogh didn’t just pee all the time, he was a non-stop urination machine, and the strange thing was that he had only to catch sight of a man for there to be a puddle. We stopped letting men into the house, apart from our own, supposing that it was a phase he was going through. We never dreamt of shouting at him – of course not, heaven forbid – but we could not even slightly raise our voices for fear of an immediate flood. As soon as he made a puddle, he would rush around in despair, hiding away or, even more awful, trying to lick it up so we wouldn’t see it. As for going for a walk, we soon found out that van Gogh hated going outside. He disliked everything about it, and his happiest moment was when we came back to the entrance of our block, got into the lift, and went up to the flat. His tail joyfully sprang to attention as soon as we were home. Our house had clearly become his castle, and he would prefer never to leave it.

At the vet’s they told us straight away that the claim he was four months was nonsense. He was at least five months old, and they invited us to guess why the breeder had understated his age.

‘Go on, then, why?’

‘To get you to take him. People don’t like taking older dogs because somebody has already been training them and there’s no guarantee it has been done properly.’

That turned out to be true, and the vets also found sand in van Gogh’s bladder. Finding the sand cost over 25,000 roubles, and the antibiotics another 2,000 because he had an acute inflammation. Permanent damage. That was our first clue, as it became ever clearer that van Gogh was positively clinging to us as if we were his last hope. He became increasingly nervous of visitors. His fear of other people grew as he grew, and his inclination to hide behind us, his family, was becoming insane. Imagine the scene: somebody approaches us in the street, and this great big dog with huge paws cowers behind my back. He doesn’t bark or growl, just looks at the stranger with such abject terror that you feel scared yourself.

Eventually we realised he was afraid someone would come and take him away. His first owners had been men who took him away. Men, sadly, had become his lifelong enemies.

Clearly we had acquired a dog with serious psychological problems. He was not going to protect us; we were going to have to protect him. Less than ideal.

I rang the breeder: what had happened to the dog in the past? I wasn’t ringing to complain, I just wanted to know so I could help both the dog and myself. The breeder gave in. Before us van Gogh had twice been rejected, though what had gone on was nothing to do with her. But he had been beaten, by men, and they had done something else to frighten him, and then kicked him out.

That seemed credible. We would need to find an animal psychologist and a trainer who worked with dogs individually. Animal psychologists, we discovered, charged $50 a visit if you were lucky. For your $50 you were advised to take a holiday, take the dog to the countryside, let him rest, change your flat, your environment, your town, your country. Nor was all this imparted in a single consultation. Each separate piece of advice cost another $50.

Ouch! No way could we afford that.

So we rushed to find a personal trainer for him. Katya, at 500 roubles an hour from a company called something like ‘Clever Dog’ or ‘Faithful Friend’ informed us that she only worked with dogs of the elite (not elite dogs, but dogs belonging to the rich), and that she was fully booked. She did, nevertheless, find time for us. At 7.00 a.m. Katya arrived. She stuck her hands in her pockets and started giving me commands: ‘Go there! Do this!’ There was nothing elite about it.

Fifteen minutes before the end of the session Katya, despite her anti-globalist garb of black pullover, trainers, and bandanna, entirely capitalistically demanded 500 roubles. We didn’t invite her back. The second and third personal trainers were identical in respect of the quality of their exercises, but proved even pricier at 700 and 900 roubles for the same truncated hour.

We decided to stop throwing money down the drain, the more so since van Gogh’s bladder continued to require thousands of roubles. Life went on as before. He was scared stiff of anything and everything, and I stood between him and the unfamiliar – screeching garage doors, squealing car tyres, and men walking past.

As he grew older, the problems intensified. In order to get to a dog-walking area in our neighbourhood, you need to cross a main road at a crossing without traffic lights. That is, you have to weave between cars not in the custom of reducing speed when approaching a zebra crossing. As we neared it van Gogh would collapse, prostrate with fear. I had to half carry him, half drag him like a sledge, 40–50 kilograms of resisting live dog, between the cars. One walk over the crossing and back guaranteed a rise in blood pressure. It was plain, however, that a dog with a dysfunctional metabolism, sand in his bladder and problems of social interaction simply had to be taken for a walk in the company of his fellows.

In the end I started loading van Gogh into my Lada 10 and driving him across the road. In the walking area he runs about anxiously among the other dogs, not playing with them often, but sometimes at least. He exercises, he sniffs, he gets used to them. His main occupation there, however, is standing by the fence gazing longingly at our Lada. The minute I open the doors, van Gogh jumps into the back seat. Being driven, or even just sitting in the car, is the one thing he really loves. A small, contained space separate from the rest of the world, just him and his owner, that is the best place on earth for van Gogh. He immediately calms down, looks out of the windows at the world with pleasure, and his gaze becomes steady. He can fall asleep like that, all his fears forgotten. He jumps out of the car and heads straight for the the entrance, runs to the lift, and can’t wait to get back into the flat.

For now my blood pressure has returned to normal, but what next? The vets are telling me unambiguously I should have him put to sleep. Friends and colleagues concur. Why give yourself such a hard time? A dog is not a human being. Give him away. That is only their polite way of saying the same thing: have him put down. Who else would put up with him, other than those already wholeheartedly attached to this long-eared, sad-eyed creature who is guilty of nothing?

Nobody. It is the lot of sick dogs in the big city to be put to sleep if their owners do not have large amounts of money for treating and supporting them. A world which has become heartless towards unfortunate people (the disabled, orphans, the sick), has become equally heartless towards animals. Naturally. What else could we expect? Quite how feral money makes us is something you understand when you have a sick dog. I am not a crazy dog-lover, a category of people as large as that of crazy dog-haters. Crazy dog-lovers differ from the rest of us in loving dogs more than people. When all is said and done, I love people more than dogs.

But it is not in my nature to abandon him, a sentient being who would not survive being rejected again. He would die without me. He is completely dependent on me, to the last hair on his long silky ear, and he would be equally in the power of anybody else in whose hands he found himself. The world of the rich has produced such a numerous, ever increasing caste of abandoned dogs, van Gogh’s brothers. These people buy van Goghs as toys, play with them, tire of them, and kick them out. If they’re lucky they are returned to the breeder who sold them and don’t just find themselves on the street. They have no monetary value, and no one values a living soul devoted to you to its very depths.

I understand that not everybody who has money is bad. Not all vets are rip-off merchants. Of course not. Only why do we have packs of abandoned pedigree dogs sniffing around our gates?

It is evening once again. I turn the key in the door and van Gogh hurtles to greet me from wherever he is, every time. No matter how his stomach may be hurting, no matter how soundly he might have been sleeping, no matter what it was he was eating. He is a radiant perpetual motion machine of love. Everyone may abandon you, everybody may take umbrage against you, but a dog will never cease to love you.

I take him, I lead him to the car, I drive him over the road. I leap alongside him to get him to jump about with the other dogs in the square. I show him how he ought to play with them. I run the obstacle course with him to help him overcome his fear, and I take him over to other men. I take their hands and stroke van Gogh’s ears with them, and try to persuade him they are not dangerous.

WHAT YOU SEE AT THE END OF THE WORLD

June 2006

I was recently in Australia at the annual Sydney Writers’ Festival and couldn’t resist a little tourism. Having failed to resist it, I now can’t keep quiet about what I saw. The following are just the jottings of a tourist.

I have never seen a chapel or a naval base like these, although I have seen plenty of both. I had been told I must see a really curious place of worship, only it was in a naval base. Admittedly, it was an old Australian base, but still … So there I was at the checkpoint with my knees knocking, long conditioned to the knowledge that checkpoints are bad news. You don’t get through them, or, if you do, only under guard.

In the goldfish bowl sat a cheery, suntanned officer who glanced casually at our passports and did not stick a rifle in our backs and tell us to get out. He was delighted that somebody was interested in visiting his base. ‘Have you come to see the chapel?’ he asked. ‘Do you know how to get to it? You want to drive there? Of course. No probs.’

He groped somewhere behind him and let us through. A recently democratised Soviet citizen’s brain had difficulty coping with such free and easy behaviour: how could we be admitted to a naval base without having the car inspected, without even a look in the boot? What if it was packed with explosives? You even get checked nowadays if you want to drive into the Luzhniki Sports Complex in Moscow, just to relax and smell the flowers. This Australian officer, so woefully lacking in vigilance, continued whistling to himself, loafing in his chair, his body language totally at variance with my expectations.

At last we reached the chapel. Picture it: Australia is at the end of the world, you can’t go any further, and this naval base is right at the end of the end of the world, on a stunning, high promontory jutting out into the Pacific Ocean. It hovers above it. Our chapel was at the very end of this end of the end. When you enter you are suspended above the ocean, and moreover the chapel’s far wall, behind the altar, is made of glass. When you look at the altar it is like praying to the expanse of the ocean and the lofty, amazingly blue sky above the sea. Your prayer is to that great Ocean of Peace to protect and preserve you. A chapel in a naval base is built not for open-mouthed tourists, of course, but for those putting out to sea, and sometimes never returning.

This is a chapel which discriminates between faiths no more than the waves, which are wholly indifferent to the religious affiliation of those they swallow. Red-headed, fair-haired, curly-haired, hook-nosed, the Pacific engulfs them all impartially.

No doubt the chapel has a nominal affiliation, and I can probably guess which, but as you stand before the altar looking out to the end of the world, this place feels pagan. All those ingenious interventions placed between man and nature, this sect, that cross or another, or no cross at all, dissolve and become meaningless. You are communing with the sea, even if out of habit you call it the Almighty. You ask it not to take you, and there is no philosophy beyond that, not a hint of that universal human error of recent times, the belief that we are the all-conquering rulers of the earth.

Otherwise, the chapel is simple, like a plainly constructed hut. In addition to the rear wall, the façade is glass, and if you spin around you feel that both you and this cliff jutting out into the ocean are floating in the sky. The chapel is furnished with benches, their cushions embroidered with naval insignia, and on the walls are lists of those who did not return, and a cross. I was going to ask the officer at the checkpoint about the denomination but thought better of it. What do the specifics of faith matter?

The cheery sentinel waved us goodbye, and our incursion on to the territory of a military site was over. I am no uncritical admirer of the West who imagines that everything is better and purer there than in Russia, but I have to admit that it is far more common there to encounter something warm and human.

Sydney is a mixture of a city, which makes it seem strange by comparison with anywhere else. The centre appears on the one hand to be pure London, but on the other pure New York. With that wonder of the modern world, the Sydney Opera House, looking out towards the harbour like the open lid of a shell, the central area resembles New York; with the exception of the Opera it is a concrete jungle of skyscrapers with narrow avenues between them. Fairly comfortless, highly urban, as linear as anyone could wish.

But it is only superficially New York. When you start reading the street names you are amazed: everything is just like in London: Hyde Park, King’s Cross, the station and the adjacent district. There is a Paddington, and even an Oxford Street, and it too is very long. The names of London streets and places have been transplanted, with only a light admixture of local exoticism. King’s Cross Station in Sydney, for example, is located in Woolloomooloo, an Aboriginal name Londoners could not imagine in their worst nightmares.

The Aborigines, admittedly, are in short supply. Woolloomooloo there may be, but Aborigines, the indigenous inhabitants of Australia, there are not. Search as you may, you will find none in the streets of Sydney.

Australia was born in tears and did not hold out the prospect of an easy life. In the late eighteenth century there was a crime wave in London, and England, running short of prisons, hit on the idea of finding an island on the other side of the earth where it could dump its criminal elements, with the Exchequer bearing only transportation costs. Once the criminals were there they could be left to survive as best they could, a way of thinking similar to the Tsarist regime’s view of the island of Sakhalin.

Captain Cook was given the commission by his government and duly performed it. Soon convict ships were sailing to the distant land he had discovered, the convicts were disembarked, and their survival was then very much up to them. There were already people on the island who bore little resemblance to Captain Cook, strange, dark-skinned people talking mumbo-jumbo. They named them Aborigines and set about brutally exterminating them, regarding them as little better than animals. Later they began sending the younger sons of lords to the British island, allotting them enormous territories in Australia to cultivate for next to nothing. Some Aborigines considered that these territories belonged to them, by the grace of Mother Nature and not of the minor aristocracy.

The offspring of the British upper classes accordingly took to destroying anybody who tried to defend his lands. There were occasional truces which held for a time, and Aboriginal women had babies by the younger sons and the British staff who served them. It was accepted that half-castes were taken from the Aboriginal women and brought up as British.

Those times are, of course, long gone, and today’s Australians try their utmost to right the historical wrongs of their conquering fore-bears, but if they have had much success it is not very noticeable: I didn’t spot a single Aborigine in Sydney. People told me to wait because one elderly Aborigine sometimes played his didgeridoo at the central harbour.

‘One?’

‘One.’

In all the evenings of my visit not even that one Aborigine appeared. On the harbourfront Chinese musicians played passionate Latin American music which flowed out into the tourist shops, and there were heaps of Aboriginal bits and bobs: gift boomerangs, knick-knacks made of kangaroo hide, paintings in traditional colours and motifs on a variety of surfaces. Alongside sat photographs of the artists: smiling Aborigines. So many photographs, so few live Aborigines. One wondered anxiously whether they had all died.

There is a permanent exhibition of Aboriginal art in the National Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney with some 200 works dating from the 1950s to the present day, a period when there were no longer any conquerors, and the descendants of those cruel people were trying to atone for their sins. For all that, the most common subject of Aboriginal painting is conquerors killing Aborigines. Another is the family trees of Aboriginal tribes, certifying their right to their lands. The Aborigines draw all this in a unique manner: everything appears to be viewed from above, and the impression is that there are multiple visual planes. The kangaroos are flattened too, as if they are dead and have been dissected. The same goes for lizards, and koalas, and Aborigines themselves.

If you stand at the harbour waiting for the Aborigine to play his didgeridoo, you will observe a remarkable scene. White-collar workers, business people who work in the city centre, stream out into it straight from the ferry at the harbour quays. Here people come to work in the morning, and in the evening go home on the little ferries and steamers. A ferry moors in the morning at Central Quay, and city workers in dark suits and clutching laptops pour from it as if an underground train had just come in. The city is built around the harbour, with people living on the shore and working in the centre. The roads around the harbour are narrow and suffer from traffic jams, but nobody has yet devised a way of causing traffic jams in the Pacific Ocean. What’s more, the ferry is cheap, and always arrives on time.

I naturally boarded the ferry, and it set off. The first stop, still in the city centre, was the Rocks. That is the name of a district, and is the point where Captain Cook landed. There he stands today, a statue by his own toy-like house, which is built of the typical reddish-beige local sandstone.

The ferry takes us further, to the quays in the dormitory suburbs. Such-and-such Street, only it is a quay. Rose Street, only that is a pier. There are signs like we have at bus stops, and a shelter in case of rain. Around the quays low houses grow into the cliffs, small stores and completely wild countryside. Ten minutes on the morning ferry takes you to New York with its soul-destroying pace of life, but on the way home you can meditate on the water flying by the side of the boat, the crests of the waves, the seagulls, the surf, and you must already be feeling better. Psychotherapists cannot be much in demand in Sydney, where the citizens have the ocean, and the major urban transport arteries lay themselves over it. There is nothing to build, and nothing to constantly maintain. What would Moscow’s Luzhkov find to do if he were Mayor of Sydney?

You can also take the ferry to the theatre, the museum, and the colonial-style Governor’s residence.

The ferry also takes you to the zoo, which in Sydney is called Taronga Zoo. Who or what was Taronga? None of the local people could give me an answer. Well, fair enough. The main thing is, I saw an echidna, a funny little animal, quiet and retiring, with a long nose and quills. Not the world’s most beautiful animal, perhaps, just as not all people are Apollo Belvederes, but why do Russians say damningly, ‘You are not a mother – you are an echidna’? I observed the ways of the Australian echidna for a long time but couldn’t work that out. It just snuffled everything around with its long nose and did nobody any harm.

In Taronga, naturally, there are a lot of koalas. They look like little cuddly bears, almost completely grey, but with a beige shimmer, and they sleep 20 hours out of 24 in trees, according to the sign, in uncomfortable postures: the back of their furry neck pressed against one branch, their backside against another, and the rest of their body dangling down. They sleep sweetly, so that must be how they like to be. How important it is not to impose our own ideas of comfort on other people.

And then, of course, the kangaroos. How could one visit Australia without seeing a kangaroo? Unfortunately, the kangaroos seemed rather unfriendly. They were probably afraid. They would look at you, but very anxiously. You could go into their pen and they would hop alongside, not agile bipeds but on their two rear paws, and not too close. Along with the kangaroos, an insolent beauty lives in Taronga: the emu. She sashayed over and promptly pecked the back of my head, which was at just the right level, with a beak the size of a small shovel. She was clearly asking for food, but all the signs in Taronga shout: Do Not Feed The Animals! So we parted with the emu not on the best of terms.

The cockatoos in the Sydney zoo are very handsome, striking, multi-coloured, and friendly. They are almost the size of eagles, but the best cockatoos live on the Sydney central embankment, enormous, white with black patches, and move in flocks over short distances, from one of the enormous trees which surround the opera to another, kicking up a fuss among themselves, like our crows, and paying no attention at all to people.

Well, that is it. After the zoo I had to fly for 22 hours, for the most part over seas and oceans, with two stops, in Singapore and Dubai. In total it took over 24 hours to get back to Moscow. It wasn’t much fun, but I don’t regret it. To have been to the far end of the earth, which you always knew existed, is very invigorating and a good inoculation against the great-power mentality drummed into us in Russia. How can we be the epicentre of everything if you can fly for 24 hours from Moscow and still find there is more world to see?