Chapter 5
The accommodation was
all inclusive, but I could immediately see that the food and drink was a
disappointment to David. We sat on benches and were served a sort of Indian tea
without any of the plant that is usually described as tea and what I can only
describe as a mess of pottage. It really was a mess. On plastic plates we were
each given some stewed vegetables with a slightly Indian taste. Nothing
remotely resembled what you might expect to find in an Indian restaurant.
Galina was busy with her friends. She knew
absolutely everyone and they knew her. I saw David looking around and wondering
what to do.
“Why not sit with me, David?” I said. “I think,
she’s a bit busy right now.”
“I could really do with
some coffee to be honest,” he said. “I’ve been up all night and now that the
excitement has worn off… What is this anyway?”
“This is what we’re going to eat for the next few
days.”
I saw his look of
disappointment and disbelief. He was slightly plump and I guessed he had no
idea whatsoever about deprivation. He could buy whatever he wanted at the supermarket
in Scotland and never had to even think about it. The idea of a few days
without any meat, without any tea or coffee filled him with horror.
“Don’t worry,” I said.
“We can slip out for cigarettes and I brought some contraband with me. I had an
idea that it would be like this.”
“You don’t mind?”
“I’ve been through worse.”
Indeed I had. When the
Soviet Union fell apart the little enclave that was Kaliningrad suddenly found
itself cut off from the rest of Russia. Whereas previously we had been able to
travel freely into Lithuania and further into Latvia, within a short time there
was a manned border. Now we needed a visa and it was not always easy to obtain.
Over the years the border to Poland was sometimes all but closed. Sometimes it
was the Russians that decided to search every car, sometimes it was the Poles,
but the result was that it often took half a day to cross and nearly always
took three or four hours.
In the beginning there
were food shortages because the normal sources of food from all around dried
up. The collective farms ceased working. Workers were unpaid and so did not
work. People sometime think that when a country breaks up, everything that went
on before continues to go on as if nothing had happened. This is untrue. We
noticed the breakup of the Soviet Union and for the first year or so we noticed
it every day. The shops were empty and anyway we might have to wait months for
the next pay check. I remember gradually working my way through every tin in
the cupboard, until there were none left.
My money from Cambridge
continued. They were happy with the work I was doing and did not think it of
any less value now that the Soviet Union had fallen apart. Unfortunately, in
most of Britain the Russian/Soviet departments were gradually closed down until
the subject ended up being almost as obscure as Sanskrit. But even if in the
end, I had access to money, I did not always have it to hand and anyway, I did
not always have anything to spend it on.
So we would go
gathering what we could in the woods. We went fishing and hunting not so much
for recreation as for food. We bartered and we shared. Most ordinary people
back then were very generous. Nobody starved.
In the first few months
after the breakup there was chaos. Petr did not know who he was working for
now. The organisation that he had been working for ceased to exist and he
waited to see what role he would have. Many of his friends and colleagues found
themselves unemployed. The job they had been brought up to think was for life,
was no longer needed, their experience no longer useful. Petr was lucky he got
to stay. But he was paid much less and found himself earning less than taxi
drivers, and he had less status than criminals.
There was a mad
scramble to seize the assets of the Soviet Union and for the most part they
were seized by crooks. Petr’s
grandmother ran one of the largest department stores in Kaliningrad and as the
central power fell apart, it ended up effectively as hers. That’s how things
went in those days. The party functionary who ran the factory ended up owning
the factory. But he had to be willing to fight for it.
I remember Petr coming
back one day to tell me that Olga, his grandmother, had lost the store. Some
men had arrived and told her she must give them the shop and everything in it,
and she must do so immediately. She made inquiries. Petr made inquiries. He was
told that these men were untouchable and nothing could be done. He told his
grandmother to give away the store. She did so without hesitation. That was how
you became an oligarch at that time or failed to become one. Someone would say
this one is untouchable, that one is not. The rich became rich because of
connections patronage, luck and sometimes the willingness to fight or at least
to risk things getting rather dangerous. Most of us did not think it was worth
it. It was not.
It was better to be
relatively small and insignificant. The initial risk involved in fighting for wealth
was not worth it, because it would be liable to continue. There was always going
to be someone stronger who was willing to fight harder and who did not fear any
risks. There are always people who fear nothing, because they do not care and
have nothing to lose anyway. In the
thirties the safest place to be was someone anonymous in a factory or on a
farm. That was not always safe, but it was a safer than being someone
important. So we did not envy those who got the store. They did not last long.
After the initial
period of chaos, things gradually improved. But we had all been through a
period when we eat just to obtain calories. We did not care what we eat. We
would open a tin of stewed marrow for dinner and be grateful we had that. So I
was fully used to eating vegetables and I did not mind doing without coffee.
When you live in Russia,
you talk to people who have been through worse. It gives a certain perspective.
I had been through the breakup of the Soviet Union. I had been through the
default and the devaluation of 1998. I had gone hunting through shops when
there was nothing. I had told my husband we did not have anything for dinner. I
had received parcels marked ‘Aid’ from the USA and been very grateful. It did not matter what was in the parcel, we
ate everything. I had gone through that sort
of experience twice in one decade. It always runs together, perhaps, it was
three times even four. We stopped following the news. It was always just one
more story of parliamentary chaos in Moscow. The news did not matter. It only
mattered that we sometimes got paid, and sometimes there were things to buy in
the shops.
But there were always
friends who rallied round and we all faced the tough times together. The thing
is we all knew that times were just not that bad. So what if we had lost all
our savings and so what if a loaf of bread suddenly seemed to cost a week’s
salary? We knew that this was as nothing compared to what earlier generations
had gone through. Everyone knew friends and family who had gone through the war
years. We used the collective memory of this to give us strength. The war is
much closer to Russians than it is to those in the West. It always seems very
close indeed. It is not a matter of history, it is a matter of now. Those
people are always with us. Their presence is why we feel their absence so.
So when I was faced with my cup of strange tea and
my stew of vegetables, I simply ate everything while I watched David picking at
his and leaving the most of it.
“Let’s go out for a cigarette,” I said.
“Sure.”
As I got up I saw Galina
glance at us. Was it disapproval I saw on her face? It could not possibly be
jealousy. I was at least ten years older than David, if not more. But anyway if
she felt at all proprietal about him, why had she not sat with him while we ate.
I wondered again about what she was hoping for and what she was looking for.
The cold hit me again
as I left the warmth of the building. But it was not unpleasant to stand out
there for five or ten minutes. It was dry and fresh and invigorating. It was
only when you were out in it for half an hour or more that it became really
unpleasant.
“Shall we talk in English?” I said. “I’m sure you’re
tired.”
“Why not? You speak English as well as me. Where are
you from, Zhenya?
“I’m from Kaliningrad.”
“But before that?”
“I lived in Scotland.”
“Are you Scottish?”
“Why don’t you call me
Effie, that’s what all my friends call me? That’s what they called me as a
little girl in school in rural Aberdeenshire, too.”
“I don’t get it. How can you have two names?”
“It’s as much as
anything about declension. You know that. Effie doesn’t decline, Evgenia does.
It’s much easier living in Russia if your name fits the grammar.”
“Did you learn Russian as a child?”
“I’d describe it more
as a teenager. Now, David, stop probing. We’ve only just met.”
“I’m sorry. You seem something of a mystery.”
“Well, that’s very kind
of you to say. Every woman wants to be a bit mysterious. How did you start
learning Russian and what for?”
We spoke a lot about
our experiences with Russian over the next few days. From these I am able to
piece together much of David’s story, naturally, I also told him some of mine.
He’d been in his early
thirties, single and working in an office in Aberdeen. He had liked his work
well enough, but the last year or so had been rather the same as the year
before. Most of his university friends were married and he seemed to have
rather missed out. If there were a boat, it seemed to him that it had long
since departed or else had sunk prior to arrival.
What he liked to do
tended to be solitary and somehow he had become very shy. Holidays were a
particular problem. He hated travelling alone as he was not at all good at
meeting strangers without an introduction. He just was not the sort who could
get chatting to someone he did not know in a bar. He never spoke on trains. But
the few times he had spent some time abroad in a strange town all on his own he
remembered with a shudder as being very dreary, lonely affairs, watching other
people having fun while not taking part.
Somewhere he read an
article about language schools. There was a built in social element. There was
the chance to learn something and meet some new people. He looked at the
pictures in the brochures. Everyone looked like they were having fun. They were
all university age or just past. There were usually some pretty girls.
He liked studying and
although had never seriously studied a language, school French somehow did not
count, he thought it might be fun to try. He had been looking for something,
perhaps, a new challenge would make him feel less despondent.
He thought of the
languages he might learn. Chinese and Japanese were too hard and anyway, it
would be far too expensive to go to there on multiple occasions. He thought of
all the western European languages, but he reflected on those who went to
evening classes in French or German, and it seemed terribly dull and
unoriginal. Anyway, he wanted to do something difficult. To be honest, I got
the impression he wanted to be able to show off a bit. Who can really tell
about someone else’s motivations? We all deceive ourselves and the reason may
be something quite trivial. It can be something as small as a book you read, or
a film you see or a person you meet for twenty minutes. The first step that
takes you on a new path may be made for a reason even more trivial than that.
Usually the first step does not cost very much. It might turn out that it leads
nowhere, but sometimes a few pounds can change your life.
David bought a “Teach Yourself
Russian” book that cost about 10 pounds. Thousands buy such a book and never
finish it. Some barely even start. They waste 10 pounds for curiosity’s sake
and to half learn a strange alphabet. David was one of the few who persevered.
He had no teacher, just whatever books and other materials he could find on the
Internet. Those first few months were pretty tough. I do not know that I could
have done what he did.
After a while as summer
began to approach, he began looking a for a language school in Russia. He did
as much research as he could but in the end, the information provided by the
various schools was much the same. He chose to go to Kaliningrad, partly
because he wanted to go somewhere relatively small, where people were unlikely
to speak much English, but mainly because it had once been called Königsberg,
and he had rather liked Kant.
The three weeks he
spent there was a very pleasant holiday. There had been plenty of students from
the school with whom he could go on trips and out drinking. The school arranged
for him to have conversation partners with two Russian girls in their twenties.
They had not spent much time speaking Russian, but it was the first time in
some years he had been out with a girl even if it was only for conversation
practice. Who could tell, maybe conversation practice would lead to something
else, if not this time then maybe the next when he could speak rather better?
He had liked Russia. It
was not that far away, but it was very different indeed. There was something
exotic in everything being written in Cyrillic and he found the Russian people
he met had a subtly different mentality to anyone he had met previously. They
looked more or less the same as anyone else from Europe, but he found himself
surprised by how they thought. It was not that different, but it changed things
around in way that was sometimes similar to the way Russian sentences came out
back to front. The whole experience in Russia was like some sort of “Oh, Brave
new world that has such people in it” series of encounters to him. At times it
was challenging, but it was interesting and he grasped onto what he had found
there and did not intend to let it go. He resolved to return and in the interim
he decided to study harder and improve his Russian as much as he could.
His three weeks had
taught him what he needed to do in order to improve his ability to successfully
complete the complex task of speaking a Russian sentence. He had bought a book
recommended by a teacher there which had hundreds of grammar drills. He did
every exercise in the book, then turned back to the beginning and did them all
again. He drilled himself in grammar like learning to play the piano. Only by
practice could the piano player learn to play without thinking about the notes.
The same applied with Russian. He drilled so that he could stop thinking about
the grammar, rather like a piano player can only play by ceasing to think about
the fingering of the notes. He did all
that he could to immerse himself, even drown himself in Russia. He watched
films, he read novels and he read books on history. He hoped that by somehow
almost transforming himself into a Russian he would be able to speak like one.
When he returned the
following February, there were only two or three other students, but he did not
want to talk to them anyway. He only wanted to talk to Russians. His teachers
were amazed at his progress. He began to show off a little in the lessons and
performed the odd party piece like translating an English poem into Russian.
But they soon put him in his place with a full speed Russian sentence that he
could hardly follow. But they did take him seriously. Few students at the
school every made any real progress. But this one could.
It was at this point he
met Galina. Someone had the bright idea that it would be interesting to put
them together. It was. I could still see that spark that had been evident from
the beginning. No doubt, it was one of the reasons someone thought they might
do well together. It might smoulder, or more likely flicker. It might be damp
and struggle to catch fire, but there was something between them, and it kept
bringing them back together and preventing them continuing apart. That same
indefinable something had been when they first met and it was still there now.
It was as if they at any point could have fallen into each other’s arms. There
was something like a current fizzing between them and yet there wasn’t the
connection. There was something hindering, some barrier that couldn’t be
overcome. So there would be a look that was shared, and then the shutters came
down and there was nothing. It wasn’t by any means only David who was involved.
Galina looked, too. She lit up sometimes when she saw him looking. They were a
natural couple, but the moment when they should have kissed had long passed and
it wasn’t clear there would be another such moment. That happens sometimes with people who ought
to be together.
David now spoke very
well indeed and I could see that the motivation had been Galina. Without her he
would not have put in the hours. Without her he would have been stuck at the
level of most undergraduates who know a lot of grammar, but speak as if they
are working it all out in their heads. In the time since he’d last seen her
he’d thrown himself into the subject returning as often as he could to
Kaliningrad. He spoke only Russian while he was there and stretched himself
beyond what he thought were his limits. There was a freedom in the way he spoke
even if there were a lot of mistakes. It was rare indeed for a foreigner to
speak this well.
We shared notes in the
course of our conversations. Of course, quite a bit of this was technical stuff
about grammar and strategies of learning. There is no need to go into any of
this. In general, David told me rather more about his experience of learning
than I told him about mine. I had the impression of someone who loved to talk
so long as he was in the company of someone who wanted to listen. We spent a
lot of time together in those few days, either smoking outside, or else we
would sneak down to his room and I’d pour him some of the whisky that I’d
smuggled in.
I told David that I
began Russian at Cambridge, which was more or less true, but I felt there was
no need to mention that my degree had nothing whatsoever to do with Russian. It
was a sort of optional extra course I took with a Soviet émigré. It wasn’t something
I was able to speak about while I was at Cambridge, and I had rather kept that
habit ever since. Did I begin speaking Russian when I was eighteen or was it
rather earlier? There were times when I had needed to be rather vague on this
point. So I never went into any great detail about my origins. That still
remained the case even if my initial reason for coyness had rather changed. So
I let David talk about his initial struggles with Russian nouns. I mentioned
mine only in passing. I did however describe some of my experiences when I’d
reached a rather higher level.
When I went to live in
Kaliningrad I was given intensive private lessons every day for a year. This
was a special programme for those who already had reached an excellent level. I
was very lucky indeed to be given the chance to work with some of the best
teachers in the Soviet Union.
The lessons were
strict, serious and austere. I remember an element of sadism sometimes crept
in. The teacher would read a complicated passage of Russian. My task would be
to copy it. Every mistake would be gleefully pointed out by the teacher and I
would have to copy out each word I got wrong five times. I learned to hate
dictation with a passion, but it worked. In time, too, there was something of a
thaw. Eventually, I saw that my teachers were rather pleased with my progress
and just occasionally I surprised them by doing something rather better than
they expected. This drilling combined with total immersion in Russian life
where I never ever spoke English meant that after that year I reached the stage
where no-one much questioned my Russian. I sounded like any number of Soviet
citizens who spoke Russian, not quite like a Russian did but near enough so as
it wasn’t an issue worthy of comment. I began to fit in, and gradually I found
my voice and no longer needed to be shy at parties. I no longer had to avoid
conversation, I no longer had to pretend to be the shy little women to scared
to say anything. But I retained elements of that persona as it meant that
people took me for granted and sometimes let their guard down.
