Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Their Grandmothers

Old lady, standing outside the heavy metro doors at Rechnoi Voksal metro station in Moscow. It is  minus 4 celcius and she is holding two transparent plastic folders in her bare outstretched hand. . It could be a flower, it often is a flower, or a bunch of flowers. It could be a bunch of herbs, a jar of homemade jam, a pair of socks or something from the bottom of a long forgotten drawer that she thinks she might be able to sell. This dear old lady was selling two plastic folders. They cost 4 rubles in the shop, I had seen the  same ones just the day before at the Biblio Globus bookshop in Lubyanka. She is dressed in a grey coat, her face is white from the cold, she is stooped and shaking.  Where does she come from? Where does she live? Where does she go home to? Real charity, it's been said, is not giving when you can give, but sharing the last scrap of meat you have, when you are also hungry. Charity and giving from a position of wealth springs more from guilt than from love. And when it's real, the question isn't "how much can I give"? but "What should I do?".
She looked like all the blood had drained from her face and hands, she was ash white, shaking like a robin's feathers in the wind.
I put three ten ruble notes in her tiny white hand. ( about 80 pence). She says "no, it's 10 rubles for both". "No, I'm sure it's 30 rubles for one". She looks at me with the gratitude of a grandmother whose grandson had traveled from the other side of Russia to see her. I hear so many words bandied about, everywhere outside Russia. Like the word "heartbreaking". I have never heard Russians complain, about anything, and I have never heard them say, with a 'poor them' pitying tone "Ah, that's heartbreaking". It's a place where the broken heart has no name, where it isn't  called anything, or given a voice, but where it just is. In Russia, the words describing pain, and suffering, and love, go whispered on the breath, or as a deep hum underground, like the rumbling and groaning of plates as they grind together before an earthquake, and the angels go to heaven  unannounced, untainted by pity,  as innocent as Robins.

Love in a mask................(jk)

There is a boy with a spiderman mask in the  Moscow metro. He sits perched on the edge of his seat clutching his plastic sword, watching the Russians in their usual deep metro slumber. The boy feels the thrill of being different, standing out in his disguise, of being a superhero in the land of grey chameleons. The preying mantis can change his colour to blend in with his background, for survival. So can the Russian. Grey is the best colour to blend in with despair and humility. And here is our boy in his bright red spiderman mask, a bright red ship on a sea of grey. He watches them. They can hide themselves from each other, but they can't hide from spiderman.

Metro angel - (jk)

There is an old lady singing deep in the bowels Novokuznetskaya metro station. The tunnels carry the sound to your ears long before you see the singer or the instrument. The Moscow metro echoes with faint sounds drifting like prayers through the catacombs of an ancient underground cathedral. She is dressed from head to toe in black, with a black wide-rimmed theatrical bowler hat by her feet, inside which glistens a sediment of roubles and curled notes. About 70,  her face gently sagging, lips rouged, large wedgewood blue eyes glisten with a halo of tears, fingers interlocked and placed over her diaphragm.

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

November 5th, 2007 Moscow

November 5th (bonfire night) came and went like a damp firework. I threw the last cig of the night down the stairwell and as it flipped thorough the anti-suicide wire meshing placed across the well every three floors, orange sparks flew off in all directions. That was my fireworks for the night. The stubborn cold is dragging on, a cold sore has made a dramatic entrance stage left of my top lip and the voice only partially returns when black tea with honey is drunk. And yes this miracle cure does work.
This Kommunalka where I now live is better than the other one in Shabolovskaya, but I didn't foresee ending up back in one.
Two sixteen year old girls, Lena and Oxana, live in the flat opposite on the same floor. Their mother, who looks like a Soviet gym instructor, wears a red tracksuit and shouts even when you are stood close by. She wants her daughters to study English with me and I tell her I want to but that don't have much free time. She corners me in the lift with her giant intimidating breasts, with an implicit threat of suffocation, saying that their grammar is good but they need speaking practice. I agree to let them come to my flat for a quick test, but once released from the imposing breasts, resolve to find an excuse if they come. They do come, the next day, my resolution fails at the sight of their innocent breast-beaten faces. Empathising with these two spindly victims of the grotesque mastadon which had spawned them and heaved her heavy pendulums over since birth, I let them in and it transpired that 'good grammar' meant " Couldn't understand a thing". It was pre-beginner level, almost pre-language level, dating back to that time in adolescence when all meaning is expressed either by the absence of or presence of a blush. Their teacher had given them some cheap bad quality class books , intermediate level, and left them to get on with it. None of the exercises had been done. They said that he was often not in the class with them. He goes to walk and smoke around the school and leaves them alone. I gave them an exercise book, a CD and some homework exercises to do for next time, whenever that might be. Next time never came. During the next month, whenever I saw them in the lift I asked if they had done any homework for me, they just blushed and said nothing. Whenever I saw their mother, I was threatened with the heaving udders to explain why I had not invited her offspring for a second lesson. When I said that I had invited them but that they had never been, she began to snort like a bull. It seems they had been sent around to me for further lessons, but had never arrived at my room across the corridor. I feared for the girls safety that night and slept with one ear pricked for the muffled sounds of suffocation.