3 January 1992. I walk arm in arm with a baby-owl of a man who carries a briefcase through the courtyard of the Academy of Arts. The clouded sky is cherry-coloured and amaranth purple with evening and the lights of the windows are golden in the rain. Ice has been melting and the cobblestones are treacherous in the rain and we pick our way in a mutal pose of supplication.
‘It’s raining cats and dogs. Or, as we say in Russia, the rain is coming down in buckets. Cabaret with Liza Minnelli is a beautiful film. What did they see wrong that we couldn’t see it for years? Sex? You can’t have sex without beauty. Now you can see everything. And a lot more. You know the joke? What the Russian girl says to the Englishman? There’s no sex in Russia. I was born in the Ukraine. Evacuated to Tashkent. Came to live in St Petersburg after the war. My heart is not in it any more. It’s too difficult. Five years ago we had fruit and vegetables and meat like the other big cities. Now the provinces keep the food for themselves.’
Just outside the courtyard, on the pavement, he lets go of my arm and tries to step on to the road. He falls into a cleft of water to his waist. ‘Oh, my skeleton is pained!’ he shouts. I wipe his briefcase with tissues.
We get on a bus and go to an ice-cream parlour on Nevsky Prospect where I buy him ice-cream and fruit cocktail, served by a woman in peep-toe, moccasin sandals with black net uppers. A little girl with a bouquet effect of ribbon on her head drifts around waving a carrot-haired doll and at a nearby table young soldiers, some in turquoise fur hats, some in forage caps, have half tuned into our conversation as has a girl in a leopardskin trousers at another nearby table. At the next table to us a woman is treating her children to ice-cream but despite her tasselled silk shawl her face is the face of famine.
Why do I think of Dublin in the 1950s? Going there at Christmas with my father and mother. To the races at Fairyhouse or the pantomime at the Gaiety which boasted the most ungainly sisters, Maureen Potter and a man with Nordic blond hair with braids. The ugly sisters in the Gaiety pantomime would wander around the stage like two nuns out for a walk together in Ballinasloe, huddled up and close in conversation.
Stop and consider! Life is but a day;
A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way
From a tree’s summit.
On those trips to Dublin with my parents as a child I saw men march, singing ‘Starvation Once Again’, I saw women march, holding pictures of Cardinal Mindszenty; later on I held my mother’s hand as we watched Brendan Behan’s funeral.
The baths at Marata Street feel like Dublin’s baths in the 1950s. On 3 January naked men beat themselves with bits of Christmas tree. A tap haemorrhages on to a bowl containing a piece of Christmas tree. In the sauna a rosé man feeds water into the oven which is built into the wall and has shutters on it. At one point I come into the sauna and it is empty but for a nude pearl child crouching in red sandals among the bits of Christmas tree which are scattered everywhere. At another point I come into the sauna and it is crowded with naked men wearing woollen caps, all on their hunkers, chanting a strange song which could be a rugby song or a Christmas hymn. Outside the sauna a man is bent over as another man creams him with shampoo, and a man whose entire back is tattooed is seated talking to a friend, the tattoo depicting a Russian Orthodox priest holding up a cross against a medieval Batman-type figure with a ponderous crotch.
The walls are lemon and they are slimy the way the walls of the changing rooms in Blackrock Baths were slimy when I was a child, and I think of the outdoor Blackrock pool, just a wall keeping us from the Irish Sea and what lay beyond, the pestilence called England. The outer rim of the Blackrock pool was strong as an Iron Curtain.
One night, after a day when we swam at Blackrock Baths, my father took me to an outdoor performance of Twelfth Night in Blackrock Park. There were lights around the park like the lights in parts of Petersburg now, red, blue, green, white. Nevsky Prospect is ruled by different departments and only one part, near Moscow Station, has lights, white lights like a row of deep-fronted necklaces.
On New Year’s Eve at Prospect Prosveshchenlya, a new town to the north, my friend Denis played ‘Going home’ by Rockin’ Ronnie and ‘Let’s go to the hop’ by Danny and the Juniors on a sausage-like cassette player, and drunks in fur hats came up to jive. Resigned-looking men in brackish furs stood at stalls around us, selling Sharon fruit. A woman studied two identical henna rubber dogs for a quarter of an hour before purchasing one. The doors of a truck were thrown open with a poster showing a sylvan scene – brooks, mountains under blushed skies – pinned on either side and there was a run on such posters, a man, crouched, handing them down to a queue. Fires burned in huge rubbish canisters under the star-blue high-rises and little trains of people carrying Christmas trees were charcoaled into the snow wastes in front of the flats.
Denis was wearing bi-coloured teddy-boy spats he’d bought in London, forks of white through the black on top. He’d taken a plane to London in October, lost everybody’s address on the way, met his Russian friend Dimitriy in Victoria Station on the day of his arrival, shacked up with Dimitriy in a room on the King’s Road for a month. Dimitriy got £30 a week, immigrant’s money, from the Queen, and a free room.
In London Denis saw Marlon Brando in The Wild One but to him the seventeen-year-olds were more like thirty-five-year-olds. All they thought about was money. He’d corrugate his forehead and point a finger at it to show this. He returned to St Petersburg. Despite everything his friends and he had fun all the time there. Gena, one of his friends, was a bouncer in a café and I had a sauna with them at the back of the café my first night in St Petersburg this time.
Gena slept on work nights in a room near the café, his bed surrounded by weight-lifting contraptions which were meant to increase the prowess of the current bouncer for the job. Gena, who’d recently won a blue band for karate, like to pose on that bed, sitting there, arms folded, relaxed and strained at once, showing the outline of those laurelled muscles.
There was a calendar for 1992 in the café with a picture of a chimpanzee who had weightlifter’s deltoids, a denim waistcoat on him, denim jeans, chains snapped at his feet and beer in his fist.
Apart from the café, in which everyone seemed to be drunk, food a licence for as much alcohol as you could afford, there was also a coffee bar and a cinema upstairs which were part of the territory Gena protected.
Denis’s mother had made a tiered, pale blue cake, with brown railings on its parapets, for New Year’s Eve and the Christmas tree had hazy pink lights on it.
As Denis and his friends bopped to further rockabilly music from the cassette player during an interval in the kitchen, in a room with a poster for an appearance by the King in the Hector Piece Auditorium, Jackson, Florida, 1954, I looked through a box of photographs. Denis’s mother was from Latvia.
There were photographs of outdoor summer funerals in Latvia, men with goatees and women in scarves facing the camera in a meadow outside a house, funeral processions along village streets in Latvia – the lid carried separately from the open casket. Photographs of funerals in pine forests, women converging with wreaths and potted plants. Gold-brown photographs of soldiers playing guitars, fishing. Photographs of women feeding leaves to gargoyles. Many photographs taken at shooting galleries. An old man with a large hooked nose dressed up as a pregnant woman. Then a photograph of him lying dead in a coffin, a religious band on his forehead. A photograph of another man lying dead with cloth petals strewn all around his head. Photographs of Denis on a cow at a summer house at Pavlovsk.
I’d met Denis at the Jazz Club early last summer. ‘You’re different from the other Englishmen,’ he’d told me. ‘You walk different.’
But almost everything I knew in St Petersburg was elusive and most stopovers had to be abruptly terminated.
A little Christmas tree in a kiosk deep in a metro had decorations of sweetpapers on it and at the top of the escalator three young women, one with a guitar, carolled the New Year, facing one another.
Before midnight I arrived at the party of my friend Dema, on Lomonosova Street. He’d given up his apartment two weeks before, was sleeping now in a bed near his friend Julia – ‘But she is not my sexy friend’ – had spent four thousand roubles hiring a studio for a week, erecting lasers in two rooms, just so he could give a New Year celebration to his friends.
In the first room I entered at a quarter to midnight young people were seated around two narrow tables stuck together to give the feeling of length and banquet. On the tables were vodka, London Dry Gin, Viennese beer, chocolate biscuits, Clementines in a paper bag.
At midnight no embraces; just the clinking of glasses.
‘On the outside I’m all smiles, a piece of theatre,’ a girl called Katya told me, ‘but inside I sob and sob. I’m thinking of my grandmother who’s spending New Year alone. She could not get bread for the New Year. In the days of Stalin and Brezhnev you could get bread she says.’
Katya visits Germany often, on the invitation of her boyfriend who works in a Rudolf Steiner school in Essen. The Rudolf Steiner people, she said, believe the second coming will be in Russia and they come frequently, scouting for its signs. As Katya spoke I remembered what Steiner said about evil people, that you must become a diviner to protect yourself from them, divine the signs and intercept the blows.
This room was fire and divination now, and the streets I’d passed through, the colour of Imperial face paint, frequently screens for murder and starvation or mere statutory spiritual nihilism, were all part of a girl’s improvisation now.
The dancing commenced in the other rooms and the lasers beamed and jetted and little nervous red dots flashed on the walls and two small Armenians arrived, the landlords, to inspect their premises and the party. They took one look at me and said I was a foreigner and shouldn’t be there.
In Dema’s previous flat, before he left it, the landlady – who he said looked like an otter – had started to move in, often staying for nights, choosing a variety of rooms as a bedroom.
I walked the streets. Before I’d left the party Dema had been wandering around, jacket thrown over his shoulder, white shirt seen to effect, a smile on that face which had a series of moles like beauty spots, his fringe truncated with a shears-like effect. In Dvortsovaya Square a woman dressed as a candy-pink pussycat pranced around on a stage. Little old ladies blew up balloons. People entangled with one another with streamers and tinsel. Into the early hours of the morning there were parties on stationary trams, girls emerging from the driver’s compartment, pulling back their coats to show they had no skirts on.
A woman, her eyes violet from drink, came up and gave me a chocolate sweet, first holding it up as if it contained the transformative powers I needed.
On New Year’s Day the lights on Nevsky Prospect went off for a while and people milled in the darkness. Then they came on; pale pink star flowers under a tray holding a huge fake bottle of champagne; little cylindrical lights on a little Christmas tree, blue, green, yellow and raspberry red; rims of shadow running through an arch of white bulbs at the entrance to a cinema; a quartet of shapes two blue, two white, juggling outside another cinema.
There was a spate of saucy cartoon nude ladies displayed outside cinemas on Nevsky Prospect; overweight bottoms, cherry nipples.
In the window of an ice-cream parlour an orange Santa carried a blue handbag in one hand and an orange-brown squirrel in the other.
Some sex maniac had daubed a poster on a wall, a nude girl crawling through the snow to a naked warrior flanked by wolves.
On 2 January the weather didn’t know what to do with itself, halfway between fading snow and incipient mildness. People stood around in huddles, not knowing what to do with themselves. Trams looked as if they were about to die. And those big fur hats on people’s heads seemed to stabilize the disarray, giving some people a druidic wisdom.
I visited two friends, a young married couple, on Kuznechnyy Lane. One was a television script writer, the other a translator. The walls were sparse, one picture against the Chinese red wallpaper, a very vicious-looking bear mauling some Napoleonic soldiers. There were photographs of a beloved silvery-haired aunt sneaked into the bookshelves which were epidemic in the apartment, in one her legs apart as she sat on a park bench and a pair of Oxfords on her feet. She’d recently died. In another photograph, elevated on the bookshelves, she hugged a bunch of carnations tipped by gold and red and blue. She’d never been to England but she’d spoken and taught English in an upper-class English accent learnt from one of those Edwardian governesses who inhabit the back of pre-revolutionary St Petersburg photographs. That accent had been passed to my friends.
We had a meal of barley porridge and tea.
On the table was my detritus of gifts.
My friend had just got up from bed, had thrown on a mauve jersey. Her head was bowed and she seemed to speak into the table as she said: ‘There’s just no food. All you can think of all the time is food, how to get it.’
I saw old ladies feed bread to pigeons that day and then walk away, mumbling to themselves, a set of silver teeth suddenly turning to you. I saw a newlywed couple lay flowers by the statue of Lieutenant Shmidta, a big rusted ship situated near him, on the other side a confectionary-type lavatory, one side for men, one side for women, the bride’s veil blowing up like gossamer against all the other gossamer effects, the sheaths of snow on the aborigine-black shadow of St Isaac’s, against the Neva which on the far side was like the surface of the moon, snow tufted on it, other parts clear, just pebbles of snow reinforcing the ebony.
That day Dema paid one rouble, fifty-five kopeks for milk which had previously been thirty-one kopeks, and two roubles, sixty kopeks for a loaf and a half of bread which would have previously cost sixty kopeks.
After the Jazz Club I visited a flat in student dorms near the Fontanka Canal with Dema. Two beds close by, a mattress in between, a mother from Stepnagorsk in one of the beds who’d brought big jars of strawberry jam she’d made which we kept dolloping on to biscuits, having tracked down the awakening freshness of last summer in the jam, a Christmas tree precipitously at the head of the flaxen-haired boy from Kaliningrad on the mattress who, when he heard me admiring his paintings and drawings which were pinned around, rose and with an iridescence in his blue eyes which made them even clearer presented me with a painting and a drawing.
In the kitchen on the other side of the corridor there was a different feast: dozens and dozens of insects on the wall around heaps of rubbish at the entrance to the kitchen.
On the evening of 4 January I met up with Dema again and some of his friends, Julia, Denis, another Dema, that Dema’s thirteen-year-old daughter Kszniy.
‘Money. But what does money matter? I don’t think of money,’ said Julia who, with the same leopardskin foulard at her neck over the same brown trouser suit she’d worn at Dema’s party, looked like an escapee from a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. She had the conspiratorial feeling of an recent escapee too and seemed to find a similiar, manifest kind of conspiracy in me.
We drove around in Denis’s father’s Lada at first, then had tea and champagne in the second Dema’s apartment, afterwards drove around again.
The second Dema was an artist and an architect who visits Germany often. My second night in St Petersburg this time I’d sat with him and some of his friends around the table in his apartment, glass on the table, covering a collection of old Soviet postcards in which Russian people who were made to look like kewpie dolls fondled one another, kissed, stared into one another’s eyes under summer moons in indigo skies, on daytime park benches, on beaches. There was one odd card which looked like a British humorous one, a big woman in a saffron coat and little black pellet-hat hugging her tiny husband goodbye before taking the Leningrad–Sochi train.
As the others spoke in Russian I looked through a book of Soviet art and, inevitably, a portrait of Akhmatova came up, a profile by the artist Tyrsa.
These apartments, with dual-coloured walls leading to them, with their mess like pigs’ feed outside the doors, with their air of attrition at the entrances, reminded me of apartments in Dublin and Cork.
‘You can live with your history,’ I’d said on my first visit. ‘Much as I love the cities of Dublin and Cork I’ve got to escape them.’
The two Demas tipped glasses before parting that first night, towards this, ‘their first meeting’.
In the hotel room I was sharing with an Englishman, after that late social night which, as after a Galway party in one of my stories, left a strange colour, ‘like light in wine or a reflection on a saxophone’, I was vindictively woken by the World Service at eight in the morning.
Denis, whom I met for the first time on 4 January, had the fragile face of an overgrown child and a child’s quizzical sense of wanting to know all the time if he was doing the right thing even if he was doing nothing. He wore French oyster-white jeans. He’d lived in France for a year, supported by someone – he didn’t say if it was a woman or a man. But under these circumstances he’d clashed with something in himself. He demonstrated the kind of collision by veering his flat down-turned hand against an empty German champagne bottle. His hand impacted with my wrist in the process and paused, as if to feel what I knew of the situation, and seemed to detect the electricity of a similiar, even greater clash, a clash with the patriarchal God and the secretively gleaming Mother of the Russian Orthodox church maybe, before going on.
Under the auspices of a sense of these deities he’d got the Paris–Moscow train back to Russia for a pause.
But he was too young to be a stone yet. He’d return to France soon.
He spoke about France as if it were an understanding friend and I remembered hitchhiking with a lemon-haired girl from Dublin on the Riviera at night, cars stopping and the drivers inquiring: ‘Voulez vous faire l’amour tout les deux?’ I remembered the first time I saw grapes growing, with this girl, old women touching the azure-ash clusters from beneath.
Boats docked by the Neva are decorated with strings of white lights as we drive around. It was my fifth visit to St Petersburg in three years. I came here to find Dublin and Cork and also to be away from the racist country in which I was shacked.
Against a lighted boat Denis put his arms about me and said: ‘I know there are bad people. But take it easy, man.’
I knew who he was then. He was an orphan in the convent in Ballinasloe when I was a child who reputedly had a Russian father and who would stand endlessly in the convent grounds against the river Suck in the cornflower-blue orphan’s outfit.
Back in the racist country again, without St Petersburg, I felt the emptiness like never before.
He wanders through deserted rooms
And tidies up for hours.1
1 Boris Pasternak, tr. Lydia P. Slater