To Russia with Love
To Russia with Love
I can report no dialogue. I can describe no body language. The woman—well she was dressed like a woman, but you would need one of those chromosome tests they were supposed to carry out on the shot-putters to be sure—stared past us at some equally uninteresting object towards the back of the queue. Her hands drew in our passports, stamped them, and pushed them back. We moved past her, collected our bags, and walked through customs.
Outside, a throng of people, dressed in woollen coats and warm hats, seemed to understand the frequent unintelligible public announcements, knew the place where they had to go, and hurried towards it. We found a thin unshaven man, wearing a black hoodie, holding up a roughly scribbled sign saying "LLOYD". We briefly checked that there was not some other tidier man he had copied it from, and approached him. "Здравствуй," I ventured. The man glanced at me briefly, perhaps comprehending the difficulties of learning a language in which the word for "hello" starts with three mysterious consonants, and put our bags in the back of his taxi.
We had a small typed sign of our own: "Будапешт хотел"—Budapest Hotel, 42km away in central Moscow. We needed to find our way to the right hotel. The destination was important for us, and to the Russian authorities. We had come to visit our daughter, but the official line, required to obtain our visas, was that we had been "invited" by the hotel.
We had booked the airport transfer in New Zealand. It was cheaper we discovered to request a driver who didn't speak English. This one, like the person we encountered at the Immigration desk, showed no evidence of being able to speak any language at all. Putting our lives in his hands, we got in the taxi and sped away from the airport.
The Budapest Hotel turned out to be comfortable, in an old-fashioned kind of way, harking back to some historical period the rest of the world had missed. The outside was made from imposing grey stone. We spotted an old man standing at the doorway dressed in a matching grey uniform and a ridiculously large Red-Army-style hat. He checked us over rather than welcomed us—I'm not sure what we had to do to pass the test—then opened the door. Inside, we approached a wooden desk and were met by a young blond man with an equally serious manner. He spoke well-pronounced English, but with a limited vocabulary—checking our passports and credit card, giving us our key, and directing us to our room.
We wandered our way down long corridors with polished wooden floors, found our room, and pushed open the heavy wooden door. We opened the weighty brocade curtains for a view of the grey Moscow street outside. There was nowhere obvious to eat, so we found our way to the hotel dining room, where we sat on our own in a grand space graced by marble columns and decked with crystal chandeliers, perfectly suited to a Russian aristocracy that no longer existed. The waitress worked out what we wanted to eat and brought it to us where we sat together enjoying our meal surrounded by silence.
The next morning, breakfast was in an equally grand chamber, which had the appearance of a former ball-room. There were other diners. Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” was playing faintly in the background. We picked what we thought we wanted to eat, including Russian breads, pancakes, cold meats and pickles, from the continental buffet. We were served coffee at our table by the only person from Turkmenistan I have ever met.
In the hotel lobby, we waited on comfortable leather chairs for our daughter Alice and her boyfriend, Andrew, whom we had not had the pleasure of meeting before. They had got to know each other in France, at a course they both attended on how to teach English as a second language. This was their first job as teachers. There are limited opportunities for people with no experience. Their options at the time were Moscow or Kyiv. This was a few weeks before the Russian military undermined the elections in Ukraine and annexed Crimea. Alice and Andrew had backed a winner by electing to come to Russia. Luckily for us, the Hat Man let them in to the hotel, and we had a chance to meet our future son-in-law.
* * * *
"I'll have the stewed yak please," said Andrew. He smiled. "I don't think I've ever had the chance to say that before.”
We were eating in a Siberian restaurant somewhere out in the suburbs. One of the joys of visiting Russia is coming into contact with people from different ethnic minorities, mainly from the former Soviet republics, that we had never previously heard of, and trying their food.
Earlier in the day, for lunch, we ate at a Georgian establishment. It was a busy place upstairs, with many customers sitting at rough wooden tables. We tried: kharco—a beef soup with plums, walnuts and herbs; khachapuri—flat bread stuffed with cheese; matsoni—a thick rich yoghurt; and chakapuli—a herb-flavoured lamb stew. All delicious. Another evening, we enjoyed a long walk through the Arbat district to an Armenian restaurant, which was a family business, with the grandmother cooking out the back. Our favourite was the grilled sturgeon—don't bother saving up for the caviar, just eat the fish.
Tonight, it was Siberia. We pointed to some elk and other dishes to go with the yak. There were many different types of vodka. Probably too dangerous. We ordered a bottle of wine. Some old men came in carrying musical instruments—a double bass, a violin, and a balalaika. They played a distinctly Russian version of Amore, then some other tunes that we didn't recognise. They seemed to be taking requests. I wanted them to play “Lara's Theme”from Doctor Zhivago, but I realised we were in Moscow, not in Hollywood, and left them to their own favourites.
The next day we took the Metro to Alice and Andrew's apartment. We walked with them to the local market. Again, we found the unrecognisable ethnic minorities manning the stalls. A woman gave Alice a hug. She was excited to meet us. "Mama? Papa?" she asked. Alice confirmed that this was the case. "Is that one of your students?" we wondered. "No," said Alice, "She is the lady who sells us our herbs. She seems to have taken a fancy to us." We bought some bread and vegetables and bright purple berries of some sort, and went back through a leafy park to the apartment to prepare a meal.
* * * * *
We had arranged to meet Alice in the Alexandrovsky Metro station near Red Square. While we waited, we wandered idly around the underground shops, most of them offering expensive designer items. A small kiosk selling leather goods caught my wife’s eye.
"Why don't you look at getting a new wallet while we are here?"
I inspected the familiar battered wallet I had bought in Sydney six years ago, and was forced to agree. There was one on the shelf about the right size. We checked the price. We had been overcharged before. There are around 44 roubles to the New Zealand dollar. We did a quick calculation. The price seemed to be about right. There was no way we would be able to haggle.
An older lady, tidily dressed, watched us quietly from behind the counter while we made our choice. She smiled kindly when we indicated that we wanted to buy something. We pointed at the wallet. She took it out for us and opened it, proudly displaying the different compartments. I made a thumbs-up sign. I checked that we would be able to use a New Zealand credit card.
"Da," she said. She put our card in her machine. Then something went wrong. She made the universal expression that shopkeepers adopt when your credit card has been declined. We expressed surprise, and worry: there would be many other things we wanted to buy with the credit card, including food. The lady checked more carefully. Then she became alarmed. She tried to show us the figures on the machine, hurriedly explaining in perfect Russian what had happened. We had no idea what she was talking about.
We tried to indicate that our daughter would be coming soon, and would be able to understand her. This was like indicating nothing. The lady ran frantically from shop to shop, calling out, "Anglisi!Anglisi! Anglisi!", but was unable to find anyone who spoke English.
About then, Alice arrived. We pointed her out, and the lady came over. Alice greeted her in Russian, and probably confirmed that we were her parents. The lady went back to the machine, and explained the same thing. Alice mumbled something back. The lady looked relieved.
"She has accidentally entered 100 times too much on the machine," Alice explained. "She is worried she will get into trouble if she doesn't explain it to you and if you report her."
"Tell her it's all right. We wouldn't do that,"
"I've done that," said Alice.
We paid the correct amount and took delivery of our wallet. We were all happy: we would still have money to spend on the rest of our travels; the lady wouldn't be transported off to the gulag for ripping off tourists; and Alice had had an opportunity to use her language skills. We thanked the lady—Spasiba. Spasiba. Spasiba. We both hugged Alice—I would like to have hugged the lady too—and went off together for a coffee.
* * * *
We were in a Belgian bar in St Petersburg across the road from our hotel in Nevsky Prospect. The two staff were playing a game of chess on the bar. The place was quiet, apart from the music from their sound-system. The place had a mainly western playlist. The Rolling Stones were singing about being stuck around St Petersburg; a time for a change; killing off the Russian royal family. The music moved on to the Eagles, a few old Beatles songs, and some more modern numbers. The people in St Petersburg, especially the young people, seemed to us much more part of Europe than the ones we had encountered in Moscow. Many of them said they had visited Germany or France or England. We had come across a number of excellent bakeries and cafes that seemed to be popular with locals.
The girl came over to take our order. She said she was from the south of Russia, near the Black Sea, but was studying business in St Petersburg. She suggested we try the red beer. She struggled to explain what was in it. She knew it contained a fruit, but didn't know the name for it in English. She drew us a picture of the bushes it grows on. Cranberries. The beer was strong—Belgian beers it seems have more alcohol than other European varieties, which is probably part of the attraction.
It was our second day in town. The first day had gone well. Finding our way around the city along the Griboedov canal, we had stumbled across the Church of the Saviour on the Spilled blood. Constructed on the spot where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881, the building, based on a number of iconic older buildings, is the climax of imperial Russian architecture. Although we were not looking for the church, we immediately recognised its distinctive onion domes. The inside is spectacular: the walls and ceilings are covered in colourful mosaics. It was a welcome burst of colour on a grey day.
In the evening, we had eaten at an excellent Italian restaurant. The Russians have a flair for appropriating cuisine from countries in the rest of Europe that the British can only dream about. Then we went to the ballet—"Swan Lake” (what else?) at the Palace Theatre.
The next day we visited the Winter Palace. It is unimaginably huge, even from the outside. We walked along the impressive street front along the Neva river, trying to find a way in. The entrance is around the back, several hundred metres away. It was late October, starting to get cold. We queued in the garden courtyard in lightly falling snow. Inside, the place is even more sumptuous. We had set aside a whole day. We needed it. There are more than 1500 rooms. We had no intention of seeing all of them. We had come mainly to see the paintings.
The Hermitage Museum is just one wing of the palace. It contains a priceless collection of great art, which started in 1764 with the collection of Catherine the Great, but now includes artworks from small collections from throughout the former Soviet Union, and some French Impressionist paintings appropriated from private German collectors during World War II. There was plenty for us to take in. The building itself is stunning. The grand Jordan Staircase is itself worth the price of admission. It was easy from our surroundings to imagine the opulent lifestyle of the Romanovs, who lived there part-time.
The change that the Rolling Stones were alluding to came in 1917. St Petersburg at the time was the capital of Russia. The country, like the rest of Europe, was caught up in the Great War. People had had enough of their royal family. They stormed the Winter Palace. The Tsar and his family were arrested and replaced with a provisional government. The following year they were moved to Yekaterinburg, taken to the basement, and shot.
Back in the Belgian bar, we recognised another song they were playing, ostensibly about royals—a rejection of the sumptuous lifestyle of pop celebrities, like the Russian Revolution, an expression of a craving for something simpler and different. We called the waitress over to our table. Maybe she had chosen it.
"That song," we said. "It comes from our country: New Zealand."
"Yes, Lorde. I read an article about her in a magazine." She thought carefully again how to express simply what she wanted to say next. "You are a long way from your home," she said.