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Extracts A
Journey with the Muscovites
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from A Journey with
the Muscovites Oksana, who is fifteen,
is my former neighbour. Oksana loves dogs; she has greyhounds and other
thoroughbreds. She lives with her seven dogs and her father and her alcoholic
grandmother and, from time to time, with her almost-stepmother and stepsister
in a one-roomed flat. Oksana sometimes used
to cry, like other teenage girls. She was at her most distraught when
her dogs hadn’t won their competitions. She would come round when
these incidents dictated and cry on my landlady’s hospitality. They
would drink tea and talk until the judges’ failure became more bearable,
and then she would return to her tiny space between the vodka bottles
and the dog food. The space sometimes seemed too small for her to do her
homework, so she’d return with her books and settle calmly at our
kitch-en table. Muscovites live in
small spaces, and communally. They help each other in ways surprising
to a Westerner. They’re more prepared to do favours for their friends
and neighbours; and expect more from their friends and neighbours than
we,in general, do. "Can I borrow three hundred dollars?" 'Well,
I’ve only got four hundred myself, but I guess your need is more
than mine." People live with in-laws
and grandparents, and tensions are proverbial. Divorce is common and easy
and family feuds are expected. Moscow is cramped, pressed to heaving point.
It’s desperately difficult to buy your own flat. Credit is slippery
and mortgages impossible. And so the cycle of family arguments, low incomes
and even poverty trundles on, lubricated on its pathby friends’ favours
and neighbours’ loans. Russians are prisoners
of their past more obviously than other Europeans. They confront it in
the smallness of their apartments and the proximity of their parents.
Yet the inheritance of the Soviet Union lives in Muscovites beyond their
small apartments: or, rather, its positive legacy is a result of these
flats of boxes. The Soviet Union, in reality and not just in ideology,
forced people to live together, communally and, in some ways, for each
other. By necessity, it developed in people a gift for friendship (and
for quarrelling) more effectively than any Western system can ever hope
to emulate. If nobody has any money, then who can afford to pay a tutor?
The professor next door can teach German to your son, and it goes without
saying you’ll bring him plenty of the vegetables you’ve just
harvested at your dacha. This isn’t a direct transaction: more an
escalation of goodwill, which might or might not yield more favours. It’s
life. Moscow doesn’t have really bad districts like richer, and poorer, cities have. Certainly, some places are more desirable than others, some neighbourhoods and apartment buildings more prestigious. But there are no sinks of hopelessness and poverty, nor ghettoes which are prisons of unmentionables. In any analysis, Muscovites are no better than anyone else. Their city might have no laws and be rotten and corrupt. But society exists here in a way that could never be in classier, class-ridden places. |