The love song of the dark lady IV

Previously

Chapter 4

It was the closest you can get to the middle of nowhere an hour or so’s train ride from Moscow. But there were a couple of shops that were open, so I resolved to stock up on some cigarettes.

“I’m just going to go in there for a minute,” I said.  It was wonderfully warm compared to outside, and I took my time buying a couple of bottles of fizzy drink and enough packets of cigarettes to last me a few days. Galina looked on disapprovingly when she saw the carrier bag with my goodies.

“You’ll not be allowed to smoke, either of you, nor drink Coca-Cola.”

“I’m sure I will be allowed to do what I please outside.”

“We’re supposed to be clearing our minds, not filling them with stimulants.”

I tried to be conciliatory. “I’ll do my best, but you can’t expect someone to give up everything at once.”

“I understand,” said Galina. “It’s very good of you to come at all and you, David. I’m sure you will both enjoy yourselves.”

I looked at David and caught the slightly dubious look on his face. But he was pleased to be there. It was minus thirty. He had on clothes that would have worked brilliantly on the coldest day in Britain or indeed that worked well in Kaliningrad, but I could see that he was absolutely freezing here. His thick leather jacket just didn’t do anything at these temperatures. He was stamping and clapping his hands round his body. We waited and then we waited some more. As ten minutes turned into twenty, we began to wonder how much longer we would have to stand in the cold.

“I can’t think what’s happened,” said Galina. “I told them when we would arrive.”

“Why don’t we get a taxi?” I said.

“No. I’ll call again.”

Twenty minutes later a rather old minivan turned up. The driver looked vaguely as if he was in India except that he was Russian and had on the outer clothes that a Russian would wear in January. He introduced himself with a name that I instantly forgot, some combination of Indian words or perhaps, they were Sanskrit words. There were no apologies. No doubt, he had been considering higher things.

We put our bags in the back and drove off. It must have been five or six miles we drove. The route was circuitous and we passed a lot of what looked like dachas, rather expensive ones that the wealthy in Moscow used for the summer. There were endless woods all around and thick snow that hadn’t been cleared. Eventually, we pulled up outside a large modern house. It was completely secluded. I wondered, but already sort of knew, what it had been before. I’d been in such buildings in the old days. It was the sort of place you’d go for a conference or for training. I’d attended these from time to time in Kaliningrad. There was always good food and often some luxuries that were not usually available. We’d go away for a few days, there’d be some lectures, perhaps, we would be told about some new initiative, perhaps, there would be a demonstration that showed a new way of doing things or a new policy. There would then be networking and a chance to keep in touch with others doing similar work. I remembered these events quite fondly. Of course, it had been necessary to play the game and sometimes things might turn a little creepy, even a little dangerous. Powerful people are always a little dangerous, because there is little they are not capable of. We are all capable of much good and much evil given the necessary power. If you think this does not apply to you, you just have not been in the requisite circumstance. Most of us are neither especially good, nor especially bad, but we all have in us the seeds of something much better or indeed much worse. I have seen this from people who were not so very different from me. We kid ourselves when we suppose that such people are unusual.

This was just such a place as those I had visited in the dying days of the Soviet Union. It would have been ideal. It was secluded, not far from Moscow and could have given some favoured people a touch of luxury otherwise hard to obtain. Who knows what went on here before? I used to hear talk of there sometimes being quite riotous parties at such retreats. There might be drink, there might be pretty young girls, but there also sometimes might be screams. It was beneficial for all sorts of reasons to be secluded, far enough away for no one to be able to hear.

So it was with a certain frisson that I arrived there. I had been in just such a building many times in the countryside around Kaliningrad. It was built almost to exactly the same design. Soviet architects frequently worked to the same plan, which is why it is not always easy to tell which town you are in unless you know in advance or you get the chance to see a sign post.

It did not matter to me much where I slept, and so I ended up in the girls’ dormitory along with Galina and Vera.  It was warm and sufficiently comfortable and I had lived long enough in Russia to not find it problematic when it was sometimes necessary to live in a Spartan fashion. If you travelled at all, or even if you wanted to go out into the country for more than a day, it was normal to accept a degree of privation. At home Petr and I would often just drive out somewhere and ask some people if they could find a place for us to sleep. They usually would for a small gift. Houses in rural parts of Russia do not always have running water or toilets inside. So I have sometimes found myself roughing it on some cushions on the floor. It is worth it. Once you get used to a simple life, there is a lot to recommend it. You can live in the countryside in Russia happily for next to nothing and the next morning can be very beautiful with the sun rising over a lake and the sound of a moose calling. Then there is the whole day ahead of you, maybe gathering mushrooms, maybe hunting or fishing or having a barbecue. There’s a freedom in this that we had in the Soviet Union that people in the West just do not get. We were so far away sometimes from anyone that no one could listen to what we said and no one could tell us what to do, because no one was there and no one cared what we did. Practically speaking we were as free if not freer. Some of the places which go on about freedom I find rather filled with regulations about what you can or cannot do and there are rather a lot of things you cannot say, even things that are self-evidently true.

I could see however, that David was not comfortable. His idea of a holiday was not sleeping in a dorm with a bunch of people he did not know.

“Can you help me out, Zhenya?” he said in English. “I might need the help of a translator.”

I went with him and found the organiser of the event. He was a man in his fifties and quite strict. To begin with, he said there was no possibility of someone staying on their own. Who did David think he was anyway? I explained that David was not used to the conditions in Russia. He had just flown in from Scotland and was tired. Moreover, he was happy to pay extra.  I spoke to David in Scots to find out how much he had with him. It was a lot. I started negotiating. David did not particularly care how much it cost him, but he did want a room on his own. I guessed why. It was not just that he was shy. It was not just that he was mistrustful of the people he was suddenly going to spend the next few days with. He wanted the possibility of being alone with Galina. He did not, I am sure expect anything to happen, at least not immediately, but his sole purpose of making the trip was to spend time with her. How could he do that if there was nowhere they could go? He told me later of their first couple of hours together that day.

He had arrived with very vague instructions. It was two in the morning, and she was not there. He had told her of a backup plan if they somehow missed each other. He would go to a certain hotel in Moscow and she could find him there. He had stood there in the airport nervously drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, but after about half an hour she turned up. She had taken the earliest possible bus. It simply had not been possible for her to get there earlier. He did not care. Instantly his mood had changed from fear of being stood up to joy at seeing her. The joy was mutual. He could see that she was absolutely delighted that he had come. She told him that no one had done something as splendid for her before. For the next two or three hours it was exactly like those first afternoons they had spent together in Kaliningrad, except now his Russian was pretty good. She was amazed at the progress that he had made. They talked of literature, they talked of films and of the things that were important to them. They talked of everything except of where she was taking him and what would happen there. He had written to her with feeling for the longest time, but he was overwhelmed by his feelings for her now after such a long separation.  He was unprepared for it. He thought he could detect some sort of feeling in her, too. I think, he was right. Frequently when I first saw them together, there was something about them that suggested possibility. I thought David might have been just what Galina needed. Moreover, it wasn’t all one way traffic. I saw how she sometimes looked at him. Anyway, what woman would not be delighted to see a man who has flown from Aberdeen to Moscow just to see her?

So I understood fully why he wanted a room of his own. He was completely ripped off, but he paid willingly. His room was a sort of unused sauna with no heating. But it had a door and a lock. For this he paid the equivalent of a Moscow hotel room. He slept for the next few days in all the clothes he could wear and still froze. But he needed that room. He knew he would need it and in the end, and not only in the end, he did indeed need it. 

Next  

The love song of the dark lady III

Previously 

Chapter 3

As we sat chatting I sometimes helped David out when I saw that he was struggling with a word. I’d just quickly slip in the English word. Finally, seeing that he had been up all night I tried an experiment.

“De ye ken far we’re garn?” I said.

He looked at me as if I was from the moon.

“How on earth?” he said in English.

I don’t intend to reproduce the Aberdeenshire Scots of the area where I was born in this narrative, not least because even people from Edinburgh might struggle to understand, and I have no idea how to spell it. Anyway, I find the attempt to write Scots, as opposed to speaking it, tiresome and far too tied up with political sentiments with which I disagree. But anyone reading this is welcome if they know how to pronounce it in their head as if they are from Aberdeenshire.

“Can you understand Doric?” I said.

“Not bad, but I just don’t get to speak it that often.”

“I don’t either, as you can well imagine, but this is how I spoke in my youth.”

“Where are you from? I thought you were Russian?”

“I am Russian.”

“But then?”

“I’m not only Russian. Let’s not get into that just now. As I said earlier, do you know where we’re going?”

“I know a bit, but not that much.”

“Maybe we could compare what we know.”

Galina looked over at us: “He should be practicing his Russian, Zhenya. Anyway, what sort of language are you speaking?”

“It sounds something like Danish,” said Vera.

“I think, David’s tired,” I said. “We’re just having a little break.”

I looked across at him and wondered if he had understood the nature of my little experiment.

“I’ve found it useful,” I said, “sometimes in life to have a language that no one else can understand. Quite often that language is Russian, but what if you live in a country where everyone speaks Russian, or indeed where everyone speaks English?”

“Is that why you started speaking to me in Doric?”

“Well, they can jabber away in their fast colloquial Russian that you can’t understand, why shouldn’t we do the same”

During the rest of the journey and in bits and pieces of conversation later on we shared what we knew of our destination. I taught David a method of indirect communication. As long as you were circumspect, as long as we didn’t use names or phrases which would be obvious we could talk quite freely in our private language, which only someone from Aberdeenshire could understand.

Ever since Galina had given up her makeup, ever since she’d stopped looking in the mirror every time she’d come into class, I’d known that she’d changed. I didn’t ask her what had happened. We were sort of friends but it was more a teacher pupil kind of thing. She must have been twenty years younger than me.

She’d come to my office. I’d read something she had written and we’d discuss it sometimes. We’d meet up and drink coffee. Once in a while she came to dinner with my husband and perhaps one or two other students. I might once in a while meet her friends. There were some hints occasionally about what had happened that summer. I guessed a couple of things. It wasn’t anything drastic. Or at least if she had said anything about it, no one would have considered it so. But sometimes something very private that only matters to the person concerned can put them on a different path. She sometimes also talked indirectly. She sometimes gave what might have been clues. Perhaps, I even picked up on a few of them even then, but nothing really was said.

Over the next couple of years she devoted herself to her studies in a way that she had not previously. She began to come out with some interesting ideas. I’d give her an article to read or a novel, and simply suggest that she write something about it. Sometimes I thought she missed the point, but then sometimes what she wrote was rather brilliant.

As she became more deeply involved in her studies she more and more held herself aloof. The girls with whom she had been friends were baffled that she no longer cared about clothes, makeup, celebrities and television. The boys found her more attractive than ever in a way that was quite unexpected even to them. They would have said that they preferred the young model look. They didn’t. They were embraced, insofar as they wanted to talk about philosophy, literature and theology. They did indeed want to talk about these things. But as soon as Galina discovered that the subject that actually interested them was her, she began holding them aloof, too. Eventually word got round that it wasn’t worth bothering. She became part of a small group of the more studious students. The crowd that was not in. But even here there was something missing. While previously she had made friends easily, now her aloofness somehow was retained even with those who shared her interests. They didn’t share her interests. She was beginning to be interested in something else.

I was as close as anyone to Galina in those days, but she still called me the Russian equivalent of “vous”. We more or less only talked of her studies but widely and in a way that was freely touched on whatever came to mind. She used her essays to communicate some of what she was really feeling and our academic talk would skirt around the personal without directly stating anything. A discussion of literature can be quite revealing and can be intended to reveal. But there is only so far a closeness can go when it is developed in terms of metaphor. We were not that close.

She would ask me to suggest books for her to read. Her interest was presented as academic, but I knew that far more, it was personal. She was looking for something in books and wanted to discover some piece of literature that would provide what she was looking for. She didn’t know what it was, which was why she asked me. But although it was all connected to the subjects we were studying, it wasn’t so much for that reason that she was asking. She felt a need.

I told her of some of the books I had liked in Cambridge. I mentioned Walter Scott’s ‘Redgauntlet’, James Hilton’s ‘Lost Horizon’, Kierkegaard’s ‘For Self-Examination’, parts of Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus  and Philosophical Investigations’, ‘The Story of a Soul’ by Thérèse of Lisieux and other things that had influenced and changed me. I mentioned Dostoevsky, but she already had read and hated Dostoevsky at school. That was always the pity of force feeding great chunks of Russian literature to school children. They had to spend their summer holidays reading quickly what they could not understand and, certainly, not understand quickly. I’ve met far too many Russians who can’t stand Tolstoy, or Dostoevsky because of how it was forced on them at school, but then I’ve met a lot of people in Britain who wouldn’t dream of reading Shakespeare for pleasure.

I played her music that I liked, especially some pieces of 20th century classical music which she had never heard. I told her of how through listening to some of these composers I had seen some connections between music, literature, philosophy and theology. I said that all of these things together and many other things had been part of what made me think the way I did.

But she didn’t like the path which I was pointing her towards. I always describe this as the great choice: either Kierkegaard or Hegel. That is the fork in the road. You either think in the end that everything is one or you think that everything is different and discreet. You either think in terms of the individual or in terms of the collective. Galina didn’t care much for the books that I suggested.

Her parents had been quite deeply involved in the Party and when it all fell apart, they were left in a much worse situation. So indeed were many of us. As a little girl Galina had known almost nothing of Orthodoxy. It became clear to me over time that she was looking for something else. It was for this reason that she didn’t find what she was looking for in the books that I suggested or the music I played to her. I’m not even sure that she looked seriously. She saw the label Christianity, and immediately knew that what she was looking for she would not find there. She told me that she found Christianity dull and too every day, just old ladies with head scarfs and men with beards. Besides, the Orthodox Church had always sided with those in power. In a way she wished she could feel something for it but she didn’t. Somehow it was both too near, too familiar, but also too far away. She had been brought up to think of the Church as superstition and that the Party had raised Russia out of the mire of ignorance. The books that I had been suggesting didn’t touch her or what was more important, they only touched her intellectually and therefore in the end, they did not even touch her intellectually. She didn’t really go beyond the surface of these books, because she had already rejected them before she had even started reading. I told her how I had been the same at her age, but somehow faith had come to me as a gift most unexpectedly. I had thought that I was arguing against it, but found one day that I was arguing for it and that the argument I was using was the same argument from a different perspective. She looked at me baffled and she was right to be baffled: I couldn’t explain. Who can?

She started looking elsewhere than me. At that time in Kaliningrad a lot of people from the West started arriving offering free classes in dianetics, massage, English, meditation or yoga. What they were offering was free, but it quickly became clear that they were selling something.

It’s hard to get across to people, who didn’t go through it, how traumatic the break-up of the Soviet Union was for so many people. There had been certain rules of life that you followed. These led to success. Life in the late 1980s wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t bad. The idea that people have of the Soviet Union in the West is nearly always completely false. In many, if not most respects, it was much better than what came afterwards. If you studied and worked reasonably hard, life was pretty good. It wasn’t like the 1930s.

When I first arrived in Kaliningrad, I started by teaching English. For the first year or so I studied Russian intensively with a personal tutor. I went to the obligatory Marxism-Leninism lectures and I also had some courses in philosophy and literature. Of course, much of what I had already studied in the West was not taught in the Soviet Union, but then neither was much that was taught in the Soviet Union known about in the West. I started reading 20th century Russian literature and found much of it very interesting. Some of course, was dull and stupid, but that’s the same everywhere.

I was paid an academic’s salary even while I was still studying and getting up to speed with my Russian. My English lessons were for the most advanced students. None of the other English teachers had been abroad, and so they frequently had rather odd ideas of what was correct and what was incorrect. Moreover, they didn’t generally teach people to communicate. That was my task. The people I taught were usually those destined in some way to work abroad.

With my husband’s salary and mine we lived pretty well. We had the upstairs part of a house a couple of miles from the centre. The house was one of those old German ones with large rooms. Food was cheap. There wasn’t a lot of choice, but then who needs more than one type of cheese. There were frustrations and the bureaucracy was ridiculous, but we had enough to go out regularly and to take trips. Weekends would involve a trip to the beach or to the woods, where there would be barbecues. The men went on drunken fishing trips. There were loads of holidays.

I never regretted going to the Soviet Union. I was intensely happy there. There were rules. There were things you didn’t talk about and there were things you had to do. But so long as you played the game, all would be well. I had a good job for life that paid me enough to live well. So did my husband. I was lucky in addition that I still had my job in the UK. I was still a fellow of my college and they paid me quite a decent amount given that I only ever turned up there about once a year.  I’d go back, chat with my colleagues and friends, bring some articles and whatever else might be useful, then I’d go up to Scotland to see my parents and afterwards fly back to Kaliningrad. Visas were never a problem as I always had two passports and just switched them. People were very understanding and in case of difficulty, well let’s say there was never any difficulty.

Of course, I had advantages that were unavailable to all Soviet citizens at that time. My husband had a fairly important job with the government, we had certain privileges and we had access to foreign currency if and when we needed it. But we rarely did. My friends weren’t exactly destitute. I went to people’s apartments and had dinner with them. They had enough and more. What we all had was certainty. We knew how things would play out. You worked hard and once a year you’d get to go to the Crimea or the Black Sea coast. You might sometimes get a trip to Moscow or “Peter”. As long as you kept out of trouble, all would be well.

Behind closed doors we were free. I discussed what I pleased with my husband and certain friends that he introduced to me. We sometimes even had religious services. There was no problem doing this at all so long as you were discreet. There was no problem with almost anything so long as you didn’t think it necessary to wear a t-shirt.

When it all fell apart however, there was uncertainty. Suddenly the rules didn’t apply. A job in a university no longer paid very much at all. Someone who had an important job with the government might find they had no job at all.  The paths to success after 1991 frequently led to failure. Suddenly we were all much, much poorer. I remember in the early 1990s we received food aid from the USA. We ate the chicken they did not want to.

It was no longer necessary to attend the Marxism-Leninism lectures. It was no longer necessary to sit quietly in the Komsomol meetings. But those things were a small price to pay for the certainty. Nearly everything that everyone had been taught to believe their whole life turned out to be false. The whole economy turned out to be some sort of house of cards. We had thought of the Soviet Union as indivisible, but in one breath it all fell apart in what felt like seconds.

With so much uncertainty, with so many of the old certainties discredited there was a vacuum. There was a desire for something to replace what had been lost. We kept our street names in Kaliningrad for we could not revert to the old German ones, but some of the statues were moved. Nearly everywhere else in Russia went back to its pre-revolution name. Kalinin became Tver, Sverdlovsk became Ekaterinburg, Kubyshev became Samara, Gorky became Nizhny Novgorod, Leningrad became St. Petersburg, etc. etc. So we were no longer to believe in Lenin or any of the others communists who had had cities named after them. It wasn’t quite like the way Stalin had been purged after his death. Statues remained and Kaliningrad remained a sort of time capsule of communism at least in terms of names. But still if your faith had been Marxism-Leninism, if you believed that Lenin was a more or less perfect human being, even indeed if you had liked your life in the Soviet Union and found the new Russia rather less likeable and much more uncertain, you began to feel rather empty.

Some people filled the vacuum with what had always been a part of Russian life. They went back to the old ways. Orthodoxy began to flourish again. We rebuilt churches, we built new ones. I began to explain to friends some of the stories. People did not know what the icon they had represented. So I told them. But it didn’t matter. They believed without necessarily knowing the details just as people had done for centuries. Medieval peasants in France couldn’t read the Bible, so they had pictures and they had carved doorways. It didn’t make their faith less. Perhaps, indeed it made their faith more. It was like the 70 year gap was as nothing. Russia almost immediately became one of the most faithful countries in Europe. It had all been slumbering like a seed that waits in the desert for decades. It was very beautiful indeed to see this flowering. I was grateful to be a part of it.

That was one path. That was the path I suggested to Galina. But she was one of those who found for whatever reason that this path was blocked. Perhaps, she couldn’t bear going back seventy years and so thought she had to go forward. She started looking for something that was free. She tried free English lessons, but made almost no progress when she found that the lessons were just a front for Mormonism, or scientology or dienetics. Instead, she found meditation and yoga more to her liking. These apparently genuinely were free. They just taught you to clear your mind and to relax. She kept going to the classes and when she had got quite good at meditation and yoga, someone began explaining the philosophy behind it. It was all very exotic, and she began to dream of India.

I began to see less and less of Galina. One of the last times I had seen her was with David. I remember wondering if at the time they might be, or at least become, a couple. There was something about the way he looked at her and also about how she seemed happy with him in a way I had not seen her with anyone before. But it had been a short flying visit. She’d come to let me know that she was shortly going to leave for Moscow. She was going to stay with friends in the beginning. She said she hoped she could travel soon. I asked her to write me an e-mail every now and again. Sometimes I waited months at a time and thought perhaps she had thought there was no point anymore to such a correspondence. But just when I had forgotten about her or at least ceased to think of her, I would get a message.

David, it turned out, had kept in more regular touch and he at least wrote longer letters. When he had said goodbye to her in the school in Kaliningrad he had assumed that everything was finished. He had not expected to see her again. The whole experience had been mildly unpleasant. He had liked her very much and had felt some sort of connection, but then suddenly she had not wanted to continue their afternoons of conversation practice. He wondered what had done. Anyway, he took the disappointment like all the others before and just got on with his lessons. But he was hurt, and made it pretty clear he did not want to spend any time around Galina. She seemed to think everything could just continue as before, but David was having none of it. He resented her presence and was glad when he left thinking that it was all done with.

It was two or three weeks afterwards when he received an e-mail from her. He might have disregarded it as spam as her address was unfamiliar and the whole thing was in Russian. He was terribly surprised. In fact, initially he simply couldn’t reconcile her writing with how things had ended. But soon he began to take it as a good sign. He felt renewed optimism. He thought this one might just be worth pursuing. He got over her, but his feeling for her returned as he read her letter. So he wrote back and with every letter his feeling increased.

David’s Russian at this point was fairly rudimentary. But he got his grammar book and he got his dictionary and he set about writing the best letter he could. He did not even know how to type on a Russian keyboard and so even finding each character on the keyboard was initially a challenge. Each letter would take him four or five hours to compose. He set about courting her with his words and learning how to write well in a language he was really only just beginning. He tried to write far better Russian than he could, but then that is why in the end, he did write far better Russian than was reasonable to expect.

Initially her replies came fairly regularly. He had to sit deciphering each letter with a dictionary and found himself frequently baffled by her grammar. But he was desperate to understand her meaning and so this keenness, this need to translate helped him do so. He picked up on the words she used about him and about herself.  He looked for clues in the dense texts that she sent him. Was there anything to suggest a return of the Galina with whom he had spent those pleasant afternoons?

As time went by he discovered that she was soon to go to India. He was planning another trip to Russia and so suggested he visit Moscow on the way there for a day or two. That was impossible she said. He couldn’t visit where she was staying. She lived with friends. They weren’t keen on visitors. Besides she was busy. There was a lot that needed to be done to prepare for her trip.

Whenever he asked her about India, she was vague about it. Soon her e-mails almost dried up. He would wait and wait and eventually send her a second e-mail. He checked his in-box incessantly. In one year he received only two short e-mails. She was in India. She was living in a monastery. It was difficult to write.

As months passed he began to give up. He kept on going to Russia and met new people. There were other girls who interested him, but still he kept an eye out for Galina in his in-box. When she came back to Russia she wrote him a long e-mail telling him something of her life in the monastery. He asked about again about the possibility of them meeting up. She sent him a brochure for a festival in Germany, which she thought she might go to. He found the brochure rather bizarre. It had to do with something called Bakhti Yoga. People had markings on their noses and were smiling as if they were on drugs. He had no interest whatsoever in such matters, but thought it wouldn’t be so bad if only he had the chance to meet up with her again.

It turned out that it was harder than she had thought for her to get to Germany and so their meeting was put off. He told her he was willing to just fly to Moscow if only they could meet up for a few days. She discouraged this and came up once more with excuses about who she was staying with and being busy at work.

Finally, she had invited him to Moscow in the New Year saying that they would go and stay at a house in the countryside and that there would be a festival. She said he would be able to find out a little about what she had been doing in India and that he would find it interesting. She suggested that he read a book as a sort of preparation. It was called the Bhagavad Gita. He read it, plus a couple of other texts and an introduction to Hinduism. It wasn’t really his sort of thing, but he tried to read with as much understanding as he could and had actually learned quite a lot.

At some point Galina let slip that she had acquired another name somewhere along the line either in India, or in Russia. She was now called Garudi. David did not particularly care what she was called. Her letters continued to contain the odd hint about how she thought tenderly about him and there was the occasional mention of caresses, probably metaphorical ones, but he took them literally. He wrote quite well by this stage and thought he was excellent at writing between the lines. But of course she did not need to read between any lines to know what he was after. While she took months to reply, he would reply in a few hours.

I knew rather more than David did. I knew quite a bit about the people she was involved with.  When I had been asked a few weeks earlier to go to Moscow by Galina’s mother, I had found out what I could. She had broken off all contact with her parents on her return from Moscow. It seems her father had got angry and said she was ruining her life with a lot of nonsense that was all completely untrue. Galina had left soon afterwards, changed her mobile and e-mail addresses and had never got in touch with her parents again.

I agreed to try to help and gave Galina a message on “VKontakte”, the Russian equivalent of  Facebook. I talked vaguely about being interested in what she had been up to. She, too eventually asked me whether I had read the Bhagavad Gita. I said I had, which was true, but that it was not an area I knew that much about. Within a few messages she had invited me to Moscow, too. Just like David, I read up a bit on the subject. In every possible way I found out all I could.

Even so I did not know quite what to expect when we arrived at a small town on the edge of greater Moscow.  I knew in general, but not in detail. 

Next  

The love song of the dark lady II

Previously

Chapter 2

We were going to some little place on the outskirts of Moscow that I’d never heard of and apparently it would take about an hour on the little suburban “electrichka”. Since Vera had turned up the mood had rather changed. Galina began speaking rapid-fire colloquial Russian and David simply couldn’t keep up or join in. I felt it was my job to field him.

I half listened to what Galina and Vera were talking about. It was bits and pieces about working in offices, some things about popular culture and a bit about what we were going to do when we got to our destination. Vera sometimes even made somewhat sarcastic remarks about some leader and his pretty new Russian wife. Galina looked rather sternly at her. David began to look a little left out, so I talked to him.

“You’re tired no doubt,” I said. “You must have flown all night.”

“Yes, I flew from Aberdeen. You may not know it. It’s a town in the North-East of Scotland.”

“Yes, I know where it is.”

“That’s strange, few people in Russia do.”

“How long have you been learning Russian? You know, you speak it pretty well.”

“Around three, or is it more like four years? I still struggle a bit when they speak quickly.”

I looked at him more closely. I guessed that he was about thirty five. There was something very intense and serious about his look. I could see how it might put some people off. His eyes rather looked into your soul. Above all, he looked cold. He had on a leather jacket that was simply inadequate for minus thirty and he just didn’t have on the sort of clothes that Russians knew to wear. He didn’t have on enough layers.

“Have you been to Moscow before?” I asked.

“Never, I’ve only been to Kaliningrad.”

“It’s rather strange, there’s nothing much there.”

“But you like it well enough.”

“Yes, but not for reasons of tourism. It’s my home.”

“I’ve never been much of a tourist either.”

He looked at Galina and I could see that he wasn’t here to see anything, he was only here to see her. She had changed since I’d last seen her. I remembered how she had arrived at my class at the university; it must have been four or five years earlier. She used to arrive as if dressed to go out to a nightclub. Her long black hair she used as a sort of extra means of expression. She would touch it, flick it. She knew that everyone was looking. I saw her sometimes as I went into the class. She’d stand before the mirror in the hallway, adjusting her hair, making sure her makeup was just right. She was stunning and she knew it. Everyone else knew it, too.

For a long time, she’d sat in the class and said almost nothing. But I took her aside one time and asked why she was so quiet. I wondered if the class bored her. But no, in the next five minutes she showed that she had taken in much of what I had been teaching and had gone beyond it in a couple of places. She was able to think for herself and wanted to do so. I wondered if she was worried about ruining the effect if she started getting involved in a discussion of literature, philosophy and theology. So I began asking her to have coffee with me so that we could talk alone. We did this for some time.

Over the years I watched how Galina changed her appearance. The young model look was suddenly ditched at the end of her second year. She came back from the summer holidays dressed as if she hadn’t thought at all about what she was going to wear. Her hair was simply combed and she wore no makeup. She was still stunning, if anything she was more beautiful. She wasn’t trying anymore. She didn’t need to. The looks that she was used to getting from the boys if anything increased, but she no longer seemed to welcome them. She rebuffed them.

Our occasional coffees continued even after she graduated. She mentioned some of the things she was exploring. She began buying books on Taoism, Buddhism, or forms of mysticism. I tried to steer her back to the traditions which were closer to home, but she wasn’t very interested. I said that it was a mistake to think you need to journey to India to find the truth. You can find it in a prison like Boethius. You can find it in Kaliningrad or anywhere else you happen to be. But she was young and wanted to travel. She ended up working in a Russian language school for foreigners. She was rather hindered, I suspect, by not speaking any English, but her role was not so much that of a teacher as that of an administrator.  

Looking at her now sitting opposite me I found the change extraordinary. She had taken off her heavy jacket and unwrapped some of the other layers and set on one side her faux fur hat. I was confronted with a beautiful twenty-four or twenty-five year old woman who had tried and failed to make herself less beautiful. It was as if she had turned herself into Cinderella or more sinisterly into a woman faced with an invading army who tries to make herself  inconspicuous and ugly so as not be noticed.

Galina looked thin as if she had been fasting or more likely, ill. This was plausible enough after all, as she had only relatively recently returned from India and had been there for some time.

It looked as if she had cut her hair herself. It was short but rather uneven as if she had used dress-making scissors and used them quickly. But the black sheen of her hair was still there and somehow despite her efforts it was as if she was trying out some experimental hair style. She had a dark beauty, partly from the blackness of her hair, which would have survived any of her attempts to wreck it. But this darkness was not really matter of complexion, which was fair, or eyes, which were light brown, as it was simply how I had always seen her. I’m not using the word dark in any way negatively, quite the reverse.  I think, everyone would have agreed about the description dark, just as everyone would have agreed about the description beautiful, even if it isn’t always easy to describe quite in what way she had these qualities.

I couldn’t help noticing how David glanced at her. He was quite obviously in love with her and hoped that she would come to love him. It was equally clear to me that she did not, at least not in an ordinary straightforward way. Otherwise, she would have been engrossed in conversation with him.

I thought, any woman could have grasped the truth of the whole situation in second. After all, why else would he have flown so far if he did not love her? He certainly would not have done so to meet a man. The very idea was absurd. But then I thought, surely Galina could grasp this situation, too. In which case why did she ask him to come? I assumed she had. Then I remembered how they had been when I first saw them that morning. They’d seemed like a couple somehow. There had been that spark. But it wasn’t there now. I sat puzzled.

I saw how David glanced and looked away so as not to appear as if he was staring. Obviously, he still found her attractive. He was right, too. Somehow the Cinderella look worked even better than how she had been aged eighteen. That was a little girl playing with makeup, this was a woman who was beautiful because she didn’t give a damn how she looked.

“You met Galina in Kaliningrad?” I asked David. I saw Galina glance up at the mention of her name.

“It was on my second trip there,” said David. “She was working at the school and one of the teachers thought it a good idea that she show me around and that we have some conversation practice.” 

He spoke very well indeed for someone who had only been learning Russian for three or four years. The grammar was more or less correct and his accent fairly natural. Still I adapted the way I spoke. Thinking of words he would probably know and saying them clearly.

“It seems to me your conversation practice must have gone well. After all, you are here.”

“The first time we had an afternoon together I hardly understood half of what she said. She has a habit of getting excited and speaking very quickly.  I was still working out the grammar in my head and spoke poorly. But somehow there was a sort of breakthrough that day.”

“I know what you mean. I teach English as well as bits and pieces of other subjects. The key I think is always that moment when you must understand and speak because you so desperately want to. It’s good to have that motivation. What better motivation could there have been?”

I glanced across and saw that he had caught my glance, though I thought, no one else had.

“I realised that I could understand without getting all the words and I could make myself understood even if I didn’t know a word or if I mangled the grammar. I used all sorts of strategies including pantomime, but I could talk about films I loved and literature, too.”

Galina interrupted: “You speak much better now, David, there’s no comparison.”

“It’s all down to you,” he answered.

“You exaggerate as always. What have I done? We spent a few days together, then as I recall you decided to snub me.”

“What this?” I said. “Was there a tiff? Do tell!”

“It’s all best forgotten,” David said. “I was rather silly. Galina, you see, was a bit busy back then and after meeting up a few times, it turned out she had no more afternoons free. So after that we saw rather less of each other, only really at the school.”

“He became very formal,” said Galina, “like a 19th century English gentleman. I remember he rather surprised me on his last day by saying something rather withering in extraordinarily good Russian. I was observing his class and made a comment and he just let rip with a sentence that was far above his level as if he was dredging it up because he so desperately needed it.”

“Perhaps, now it is you that is exaggerating,” said David.

“I think not. When he left that day he all but clicked his heels and made a bow. It was very charming indeed.”

“I don’t understand then,” I said. “It sounds like it all ended badly.”

“So why am I here?” said David.

“Quite so,” I said.

“I wrote to him,” said Galina. “How could I not?”

“And I wrote back,” said David. “Not only did she teach me to speak, she also taught me to write.”

“Nonsense,” said Galina. “You taught yourself. He writes really rather well, remarkably correctly. He writes these long letters which somehow describe emotions, but not specifically; they say almost nothing, but are full of feeling.”

“Sometimes I get even get replies,” he said.

It was extraordinary listening to this exchange. She was pleased to see him. More than that, at times she was acting like a school girl.

“Is this your first meeting since the heel clicking and the bows?” I said.

“Yes,” said David. “Since then we’ve only written e-mails.”

I sat their wondering. Why did she write to him? Why did she invite him to see her in Moscow? What really did she want?

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The love song of the dark lady I

Previously


Chapter 1

I flew into Moscow and immediately the cold hit me. It had been a cold morning earlier when I had got up and been driven to the airport by my husband Petr, but it had not been like this. Moscow was at least fifteen degrees colder if not twenty. There was no wind and it was dry, much healthier than on the Baltic, but breathing was difficult and it hardly seemed possible to wear enough layers.

Sheremetevo’s domestic terminal seemed as shabby as it had been all those years before when I had first arrived there. But it was, of course shabby in a rather different way. Back then in the late 1980s there were few, if any, adverts, there were few, if any, shops and there was the odd bit of propaganda which was immediately contradicted by the reality all around. But somehow it had been more honest.

I made my way through the terminal. I had all I needed with me and so didn’t have to wait. I had, perhaps rather too much time if anything so there was no need to hurry.

I passed some baffled tourists about to be ripped off by extortionate taxi drivers and instead found a likely group who might know a cheaper way to get into the centre of Moscow.

“Do you know how to get to the metro from here” I asked someone pretty much at random.

“I think we’re all doing the same,” he said. “Just follow the crowd.”

“Don’t worry,” said another woman. “Everyone’s waiting for the same bus. Then you’ll need to make just one more change and you’re there. You’re not from round here?”

“I’m from Kaliningrad.”

She looked a little unsure.

“It’s on the Baltic next to Poland, I added.”

“Ah yes, your accent sounds a little different. Where are you from originally? Lithuania?”

“Everyone asks me that,” I laughed. “I’m Russian like all of us, it’s just I lived abroad a bit when I was a child.”

People were friendly at bus stops in way that is rare in a country like Scotland where I had spent my childhood. In Aberdeenshire everyone avoided any acknowledgement of those they did not know. Everyone sat on their own if at all possible, on the bus and moved whenever there was a spare two person seat as if they might catch something from sitting next to a stranger. Conversation happened, but rarely, usually when something unusual happened like the bus breaking down or some such disaster. Then everyone wanted to talk, but only then and the next day the shutters would be closed once more. I liked that even in a huge city like Moscow people wanted to help each other. Perhaps, it was because it was only in this way that we had been able to get through the tough times.

After a rather complicated journey involving a couple of changes and a few short walks I arrived at the metro station. I thought once more of the poor tourists. There is no way they could have done what I had just done. Russian really opened the gate that took you into Russia. Without it you saw nothing but the tourist attractions and understood less of where you actually were.

I had been to Moscow a few times over the years, but I was far from familiar with the metro. But again I knew where I had to get to and it was easy to find someone who would tell me the best way to get there.

I sat back and found my book. I’d chosen to take with me ‘A sSory of a Soul’ by Thérèse of Liseux. I hoped it would keep me on the right path in case of any difficulty.

The names of the metro stations flashed by, nearly all still the Soviet names. I wondered why they had changed so much but not that. But then it would have been necessary to destroy all the art too and that would clearly have been vandalism. So best to keep Komsomolskaya, Ploshchad  Revolyutsii and such like along with the Soviet realism that had a strange beauty even if it covered up a multitude of sins.

I was rather early when I arrived at the metro station where I had arranged to meet Galina. So I found a café nearby and sat there smoking and drinking a large black coffee. It was amazing how coffee had improved since when I’d first arrived in Russia. I remembered the row that I’d had with Petr the night before. He didn’t want me to go. It was the long January holidays and I’d be spending them away from him. He was right. There was no real reason why I should be here. I didn’t even really know where I was going or rather where I was being taken. I hadn’t seen Galina in well over a year and anyway I wasn’t much closer to her than any number of my students. Sometimes it was possible to make a certain sort of friendship with a student, but it rarely lasted and there was usually some sort of a distance. I’d corresponded with Galina intermittently I don’t remember who first started writing, I think it was her,  but I had always been pleased to write because she had a little something extra that I’d  recognised and valued. Sometimes she hadn’t replied for months, but then out of the blue would come a long e-mail.  In the end, I’d come because her mother had visited me in my office and had asked me to get in touch with Galina and try to see her. After a few minutes I’d felt I had no choice but to agree.

“But why you?” Petr had said.

“Because I’m the only one who can.”

“You still have to do the knight errant stuff, don’t you, Effie?”

“If I wasn’t that sort how do you think I’d have end up here?”

That had rather ended the argument. We reflected back all those years ago. How we’d met, how I’d ended up going to him and it seemed silly fighting after that. So we didn’t.

Sitting there in the Moscow café I thought of the first time I’d flown into Kalingrad. It was a few years before the Soviet Union broke up. Yes, I had been something of a romantic back then, but I didn’t regret it. We’d married in Copenhagen in the Saint Alexander Nevsky Church. We then had a wonderful few days together in one of the nicest hotels. Soon, however, Petr had to go back to Kalingrad and I was left in an apartment waiting for the paperwork that would enable me to join him.

I contacted my parents who were upset, but remarkably understanding. I had a sort of fellowship in Cambridge and they, too, were most accommodating. They were happy to describe my time in the Soviet Union as research if I could just come back every now and again and let them know how things were going. I promised to stay in touch and they promised to stay in touch, too. My salary would be paid into my account and they’d work out a way that I could have some of it if that should ever be necessary.

I had a number of interviews with people at the Soviet Embassy in Copenhagen. For the most part they were perfectly pleasant. They were also very helpful and gave good advice. I remember when they told me my new name.

“We have decided that you will be called Evgenia Ivanovna. It’s the closest common name to Effie.”

“Effie wouldn’t work in Kaliningrad,” I agreed.

“No. As you know, it’s a closed city. Only Soviet citizens can live there.”

“It’s still going to be a bit tricky in the beginning with my Russian and my accent.”

“You are going to have to spend a lot of time listening and not so much time speaking, at least in the beginning.”

“But I’m going to have to speak sometimes.”

“Your story will be this. You grew up in Scotland because your parents were involved in a Soviet trade mission there, to do with oil. You went to local schools there and didn’t like speaking Russian because your friends laughed. It is for this reason you speak such good English and can teach it and this also explains your mistakes and your accent.”

“Do you think people will believe this story?”

“I don’t want you to tell it that often. I don’t want gossip about you. You must spend the next few years being unnoticed, but if you get someone who won’t shut up asking questions or if you meet an official who wants to be troublesome, you must show them this.”

In the folder where my passport fitted there was a document and a stamp. I looked at it, looked at the embassy official, who confirmed what I was thinking with a nod. She closed the passport and gave it to me.

“You are booked on tomorrow’s flight to Moscow and from there to Kaliningrad. Good luck and welcome to the Soviet Union.”

I’d been anxious on that first flight into Moscow. I just didn’t know what to expect. I’d not once set foot in the Soviet Union, but here I was a citizen about to be reunited with my husband of less than a month.

My Russian was good even then, I spoke more or less fluently, but I wasn’t used to the speed at which people spoke and I didn’t get all of the colloquial expressions.

There was a hold up at the passport control counter. The guard said something very quickly to me and I only got about half of it.

“I’m sorry”, I said, “Could you repeat that?”

He looked at me as if I was stupid.

“Are you quite sure, you’re a Soviet citizen, comrade?”

“Yes, you have my passport.”

“It’s a brand new passport with no stamps.”

“I lost mine in Denmark. The embassy there provided me with a new one.”

“What were you doing there?”

“I don’t think we need to go into that”, I said. “Actually I was getting married. I’m going to see him now.”

“That’s what you think. I’m going to call….”

“I wouldn’t do that. Rather look inside the back cover of my passport.”

He did so.

“I am sorry to have held you up, comrade” he said passing me my passport.

“Not at all, you were doing your job correctly. Thank you.”

I looked back and saw that he was obviously nervous, but then again so was I. That little piece of paper proved useful on a number of occasions in those days.

I looked at my watch and realised that my reflections on my first arrival in the Soviet Union had nearly taken me up to the time of my meeting with Galina.

I got up, went to the garderobe, gave the old lady the token and put on my coat, scarf and hat and made my way out into the cold. It was only a hundred or so metres to the metro and I thought it might be Galina I could see in the distance, only she wasn’t alone. But then again our arrangements had been terribly vague. She hadn’t said she would be with someone, but then again she hadn’t said she would not. As I got closer I realised that it was Galina, but somehow she looked different.

“Hello, Galina!”

“Hello, Evgenia Ivanovna! Allow me to introduce my friend David. He’s come all the way from Scotland.”

I thought I vaguely recognised him from a couple of years earlier. I thought perhaps Galina had introduced us once before.

“I think we met once before,” he said in pretty good Russian. “Galina took me to your office once.”

“I remember. Your Russian has improved, I believe. And please let’s all be informal. None of this Evgenia Ivanovna, Galina, if we’re on a trip together, let it be Zhenya.”

“That’s easier for me, too,” said David. “I can never quite get used to the formal ‘you’ form.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “English is much less complex since we did away with all that.”

“We just have to wait for one more,” said Galina.

I saw a moment of surprise in David’s eyes, perhaps a moment of disappointment. He was quite animated as if the last few hours had been something he had been waiting for. It looked as if everything was working out very well with Galina. She was smiling at him and he was just delighted to be there with her.

“Who are we waiting for?”  I said.

“Oh, just a friend, she’s called Vera.”

A few minutes later we went through the introductions again and then set off to find the train that would take us into the countryside surrounding Moscow. 


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