Somewhere outside, past the thousands of trees and the villa that cannot be demolished because the owner has a paper signed by Lenin, past the Black River where Pushkin was killed, and the metro station done in blue neon but named after Gorky, we had walked high over the frozen Neva where it passed through a city of such magnificent architecture it made Paris look like a shanty town. And that’s when I understood what the old composer had told me on the train, in his black pants and maroon shirt and green blazer and carved walking stick, and thick white hair and heavy face like Brezhnev and wife who shared her Ferrero Rochers with me for breakfast: “Moscow,” he wheezed, “is a village.”
But we are in a little hole of a flat in an area the Jews left behind, surrounded by parks and frozen ponds and stories, and prints of icons stuck on the faded wallpaper, and an old battered piano and layers of books, and a table of cabbage pies, and rice and mushroom pies, and potato pies and apple pies and tea with lemon wedges, and salads with wild berries, listening to a man who almost became a priest.
“The Soviets forgot God, but He didn’t forget them,” insists Costya. “And there was never a moment where there were no believers. Someone always believed. And we got saints out of this suffering: 1,600 of them officially. And many, many more. Only God knows how many.”
We had walked past the graves the day before, near the walls with bullet holes, where we had bumped into the old lady who cleaned the snow off the tombs in return for food. “No one cares about this place,” she had moaned, clutching at Constantine Kalashnikov and repeating a Russian favourite: “There is you, and me, and we are together.”
“But the Soviets knew that when you tell yourself that there is no God you have no rules, and you can live any way you want. You do not have a conscience.”
“In the end,” he sighs, “we have what we have.”
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2 Comments
I like how you share your own experience while narrating someone else story..
really intresting