View on The Stoloben Hermitage of St. Nilus on the Lake of Seliger or…

The end of the Odyssey into Russian Reality.

We ride out of town and keep going north, the firs and birch trees flashing past in mile upon mile of forest. We grind through the hours, the miles, the noise, the potholes, the endless stopping and starting again to finally stagger out of the car, legs shaking, and choking on fine dust.

Belongings are carried in to the house, wood is chopped and lit, and soon the scent of fish and meat cooking on an open fire rises into the chilling air. More food is brought out and bottles of wine, beer, brandy and vodka fill the gaps between the plates. The unknown meets the familiar, new friends are introduced, two or three languages collide, and insects dance around our ankles as the night wears on. Woodsmoke seeps into everything.

The following morning, five of us climb unsteadily into two small, leaky boats. These new miles are measured in waves and churn past more slowly. We inch our way across the lake through reeds, wakes and winds; laughing, shouting and singing across to one another. A small boy takes on the task of helping Papa to row the boat. With excitement, delight and deep determination his little hands grasp his fathers’ fingers on the oars, his arms bravely circling, circling, his serious eyes fixed far out to the distant horizon. Leaning on these oars he feels the resistance of the water, of his father, of the world. I look into his eyes and beneath his long, dark lashes I catch the flash of the high seas and the gleam of new continents waiting to be discovered.

On an island half way across, two men are preparing lunch. They have set up camp here; two tents, a fireplace and a tarpaulin rigged up between trees. The fire is ready, the water has boiled for potatoes and some sort of salad has been hacked out of a pile of vegetables on a sloping table. They have been fishing all morning but have caught nothing for their meal so far. More successfully, they have also been drinking all morning. One of them lurches over to us with a benign smile, inviting us to join them.

The tiny, peaceful island is calling to be explored, and so we visit the cheerful fishermen on the way. The little one gets to inspect their camp and peer through their binoculars. This is an idyllic spot: a sunlit, singing forest surrounded by calm water. There is even a miniature beach where we write our names with sticks on the wet sand. We walk slowly, collect pine cones and listen to the birds. I have been looking forward to escaping Moscow and seeing beautiful countryside without the inevitable depressing piles of rubbish strewn among the trees and bushes, so I look about me here and try to find a few meters that are natural, clear and litter free. It turns out that even so far out of the city, it still isn’t possible to do so. It’s hard to shake off the sadness of this.

Having rested, we climb back into our boats again and set off towards the larger island where a monastery sprawls, its golden spires glinting in contrast to the blue of the sky.

Part 2 follows next week – in which we are thrown off an island

She peeps from beneath the broad brim of an enormous hat, held in place by a wide silk bow. She has to lift her chin high from time to time to see out. Glancing about her, fascinated and furtive, she seems to be seeing everything for the first time. She looks a little anxious, but amused.

A shawl is draped over her coat: soft, dark green and elaborate, its folds arranged as if she were sitting for an artist who has achieved the perfect arrangement for an exercise in painting in oils. Her posture is unusual, as though trying not to disturb the flow of fabric, while holding her body still against the motion of the train. As if she were being painted. Did she slip out of the studio, (several decades ago) pop out for a coffee and find herself, strangely, sitting on a metro train to Sokol? I imagine that all time travellers have that dazed look about them: it makes me smile. She is an unpainted portrait.

An extraordinary face. Cheek bones that arch with regal curves; a long, Roman nose and a full mouth painted a bright and incongruous red. She is not young, certainly she’s over sixty. But she’s older than that too: a nineteenth century face looking in amused bewilderment at a twenty-first century world.

I wake to find that Spring was only teasing yesterday. That bright scent in the air, the sunshine (taking off gloves and hat for the first time) had all been a mere flirtation. Today winter is back to whisper in our ears lest we forget, whitening the branches of trees all over again.

I make my way through fresh slush towards the metro station. A woman is standing to the side of the pavement holding a cardboard sign. It says she is hungry. She stands rigid in the gentle snow, a scarf tied beneath her chin, covering her head which is tilted towards her right shoulder at precisely the correct angle to elicit pity from anybody who might look in her direction.

Her right shoulder is slightly raised, lifted just the tiniest shade towards her leaning head, as if between the two some invisible embrace exists, holding her up, and a disembodied voice breathes words which she can barely hear; impossible to tell if they are words of hope, despair or resignation. She even looks comfortable in that position. Snow is building up in little piles on the shoulders of her coat, as on the eaves of houses. Her eyelashes are collecting silent snowflakes.

Upon my return, she is standing in the same place, her body in exactly the same position. She has refined this posture over time. Who knows how long? A small, sharp wind flicks a flurry of snow from the plastic cover of a nearby newspaper stand and blows it over her. Although the sky is clear elsewhere, in her small corner where she stands, perfectly still, it is still snowing.

Meanwhile, my new year’s resolution, emerging fully formed from my recent experiences, is simply to KEEP CALM – no matter what happens.

I wish all my readers a happy, successful, healthy, beautiful Dragon year; full of fun, wisdom, insight, the ability to see what you need to see and be seen when you want to be.

From the Invisible Woman with Love. Happy 2012!

Free of the usual constraints of city life, the little one runs – in shouting, stumbling zig-zags, kicking through piles of shining leaves. We make our way up and down cascades of wooden steps to find new spires and more domes, small symphonies of church bells lacing the air. I take him by the hand and lead him into a small, ancient orthodox church. His walk slows right down, his head lifts, his grip tightens around my fingers; he breathes in short, shallow sniffs examining a strange new scent. The incense is drifting in a smokey haze that glows in the aura of the votive candles. Every inch of wall space from the floor to the towering roof is painted and gilded and shining with angels and apostles in the light of the tiny flames. He stops still and waits. He lifts his arms to be picked up: he wants to see higher and further, to feel nearer. The single syllable he pronounces flares up to fill the domed roof with a warm, clear bell that rings on and on until every corner resonates with his immaculate voice. “More”, he says. He is right.

More leaves are sent scattering into the chill afternoon air, more sticks are found and used for exuberant swishing, more steps and paths and heavy tree branches sending fresh drops dancing until we reach the orchard. Here I feel my shoulders drop, my whole body relax, and listen to unknown tensions sigh suddenly out to join the mellow mists around us. We all stand, as if in reverence, to inhale the sharp and sweet smell of apples crushed and bruised and partly fermented. The search begins. We show the little one how to find the best fruit. He doesn’t believe us at first that this hard, green orb which has fallen from the tree can be bitten into: that his mouth could suddenly flood with such acute, bright flavour. His first fallen apple.

The orchard stands in stately majesty, the avenues between trees carpeted with fruit. These same avenues have been trod by grander feet before our own: more than a century of the sliding, crunching autumn footsteps of tsars and jesters and then people just like us. The boy is busy exploring the world of apples, the simple joy of biting into fruit new-fallen from its bough, of feeling the rough bark of apple trees beneath chilled fingertips, of the scent of the orchard in autumn. We will come here again in another season; in the spring when the air will be flushed with an altogether lighter perfume, and these same trees will be dressed in their finest lace, as if all were brides to the morning sun.

We prepare to continue walking back through the gardens to make our reluctant way home. Like slow dancers, people are moving, disappearing and reappearing behind the trees, faces turned towards the earth and gracefully stooping and plucking the fruit from the low branches and the ground beneath: each absorbed in his own private harvest. There is one whose dance is different, moving in other ways, stretching up to bring ripe apples down from the uppermost branches with a makeshift tool of fishing rod and sawn-off plastic bottle. The huge bags that he and his wife carry on their backs and in their arms are testament to the success of his ingenuity.

The orchard has given us a perfect afternoon. It has given us first tastes, lasting memories, links to the past and to the future. It has been such a joy to be here.

from Ruslan and Lyudmila, by A. Pushkin

Dear Ruslan,

Like the lady Lyudmila, I have learned the art of not being seen. A turn, a flip, a tilt of the wizard’s hat (she knocked it flying off his head in a scuffle,) and she’s invisible again: disappearing into thin air. Perfect for hiding from one’s abductor.

I suppose, in my case, I would have to say that I abducted myself. Here I am, forever trying on various hats; twisting and tweaking, wondering who that is, this time, in the mirror. Like Lyudmila, I, too, have discovered that I am capable of becoming invisible, and that it all depends on which hat one is wearing, and how.

It’s impossible to live in this climate with an indifferent attitude to hats.

On the day I met you, I wasn’t wearing it. That particular hat. In fact, I remember a colourful skirt, high boots, perfume, lipstick, earrings, a silk scarf. I remember the fresh, thick snow and skipping through it as fast as I dared to arrive at the theatre on time. I almost didn’t make it. Flustered and late, I swept alone down an empty corridor, hair flying, skirt swinging, towards you standing at the far end, imposing, impassive and impossibly tall, your long arm reaching for the door. You stepped forward as if to stop me. I expected the usual growl, yet another ‘nyet”. But it turned out that you were smiling. You have quite a smile – and you know it.

You spoke briefly in English, and you told me you were Ruslan. The next day, laughing, I stomped through the deep, beautiful snow to the theatre to deliver a note to you which was also a message to myself. To me it signaled ‘I am not here to hide, I am here to live.’ My romantic gesture caused you so much trouble. A foreigner living in her own world, concealed within your world, like Lyudmila in a trance. I couldn’t see it then. It hadn’t occurred to me that my note would be checked for chemicals, explosives, secret codes, then translated and scrutinised again. They fired questions at you and shut you in a room until they were certain. They had the fairy tale all the wrong way around. And after even all that, you sent me your reply: “Thank you. I very happy”.

You told me stories that winter. I didn’t understand everything you said, even though you were speaking in my language. Your stories often began with “Russian People Very Like…”, or “In the Old Times…”, by which you meant Communist Russia. We often didn’t understand one other. On the one hand, communication is fast this way. Eyes, eyes, eyes: and silence. Outside of their usual constraints, words and expressions can dance free of their meaning and become wild and dangerous creatures. What can a heart reasonably rest upon when incoming information is delivered in misquoted popular song lyrics? You were a real Ruslan, and you rescued me from a long, lonely winter, even if I was not your true Lyudmila.

Like her, I have been swept away from my own people and the place of my birth. Like her, I found myself in an extraordinary, elaborate place. Like her, I got myself a hat and learned how and when to be invisible. Here I am, like Lyudmila, living in Russia, and I continue to be entranced and rescued and entranced all over again.

So thank you, Ru, for receiving my note with such grace, and for sending me that reply. It’s time I answered at last, so here in this letter I send you a goodbye – a wave from the other end of that long corridor I first flew down to meet you.

Long may you walk so tall in the world, Ruslan.

Your one-time, loyal Lyudmila

*******

Here is the wonderful Anna Netrebko as Lyudmila. Here she has been abducted by the wizard Chernomor and carried off on the night of her wedding to Ruslan.

Here is a review of a recent Moscow production of Kolobov’s version of the opera reviewed by Glynn Williams http://theoperacritic.com/tocreviews2.php?review=gw/2012/novruslan0312.htm

The famous tale of Ruslan and Lyudmila was written by Alexander Pushkin in 1820.

Photograph by Thomas Allen, Digital Vision/Getty Images

At the heart of the bilingual family flares the eternal flame of potential misunderstanding. Any group of people anywhere in the world has scope for miscommunication, but in the bilingual home this potential is magnified. On top of this there is the constant possibility that at any moment, you could be fried in a high voltage blast of culture-shock.

Yes, culture-shock is a real and physical phenomenon, and although it is more often a vague and prolonged condition of the mind, it can also flash or thrill through you instantaneously at times, causing excitement, love or damage, depending on the situation. Sometimes it’s just like being zapped in the office when you touch a chair, the static charge having built up between your shoes, the carpet, the coffee machine, air conditioning and whatever you think of your boss in that moment.

Perhaps you do not believe me? Please allow me to paint you a picture. Here is a family preparing an evening meal in a kitchen in, say, Moscow. Let’s have the Father be a Russian man, the Mother an English woman, and include their small child. The scene is a pleasant, if somewhat messy one. The kitchen is homely, but there is a chaos of toys on the floor which trip the parents up as they go about their tasks. One of the parents is trying to get a meal together, and the other is concerned primarily with the extraction of beer from the refrigerator. I leave that up to your capable imagination. The mother is speaking to the child in her native tongue, English. The incoming information is mostly in Russian, which she doesn’t always understand. Even now. The child is attempting both languages but attention is necessary to fill in the gaps on his behalf.

Imagine now, if you will, that this is the moment when the family collectively discover that the child has grown more than anyone realised just lately, and that when he’s standing up straight, his head no longer clears the bottom of the fridge door. Let’s throw in a few of the toys (with wheels on) to add to the dramatic tension. The child is now communicating at an unnecessary volume in his very own language, and insisting on being picked up. The mother is trying to find somewhere to put hot saucepans and soothe and admonish simultaneously in two different languages. Additionally, there is a flow of lively Russian language directed into the refrigerator, but bouncing out again most effectively. At this point, I need you to imagine that time mysteriously begins to slow down.

Movements elongate and extend, a saucepan arcs gracefully through the air and finally makes contact with a work-surface, faces and hands are frozen in mid-gesture and everything descelerates until we eventually arrive at a tableau of a family in a kitchen; a living photograph that could almost be picked up and examined. There should probably be some interesting sparkly special effects and all voices and sounds should widen, warp and deepen until, finally, after a ‘fizz’, a ‘pop’, a ‘boing’ and a very loud ‘zap’: there is silence.

Now that the situation is under the microscope, we can zoom in – past the cells and synapses and… er… hemispheres… to the epicentre of the culture-shock within the minds of the members of this chaotic little family.

The incoming information for the Mother in this situation is encoded in either Toddler or Russian, whereas her own thinking process is still deeply rooted within the English language. In this moment there is too much pressure coming from too many directions to be able to handle the collision of languages in her mind. It is as if a small black hole is created in this instant, somewhere in-between the point at which the listening, thought-processing, feeling and speaking parts of the body, mind and soul connect up together. (Being an honorary half-Russian, I’m allowed to talk about the Soul.)

This black hole begins to open up – a slow implosion – and the world appears to begin to fold itself into it and disappear. Normal abilities disappear into it. It feels slow but it all happens in a flash.  The attempt to negotiate all the physical, mental and emotional factors involved has suddenly and spectacularly failed, as nerves and synapses cross-wire, short-out, crack-up and generally spark out.

The result of this flash of culture-shock is that any movement she now makes will be clumsy and she will almost certainly break or drop something. Any attempt at speech in any language will come out even less correctly formed than the two-year-old’s, and she will look like a wild woman from prehistoric times as she tries to summon the fragmented shards of her splintered mind together. She shouldn’t bother. If she just manages to pick the child up without falling over, then everybody will survive.

This is an example of culture-shock as it manifests in the minds and lives of bilingual families. It can happen on a scale ranging from mild irritation (like a tiny zap at the water-fountain in the office) to a seismic shift of mind-changing proportions.

Although the example shown here has language at its core, it is possible to experience this even where different languages are not involved. Culture shock waves can be felt snapping across generations, or zapping between strangers in schools and offices and market squares – anywhere where a person’s inner world might struggle to merge with or match the external situation in that moment. Culture shock can be felt at any time when expectations built up over long experience within one culture are broken in encounters with another.

This phenomenon needs deeper investigation. Watch this space for further exploration into bi-cultural and bilingual living and learning. Another set of invisible footprints to follow!

Please feel free to add a footprint of your own as a comment here if you have experienced culture-shock of some kind.

This peculiarity of Moscow culture is part of its somewhat reckless charm, and has rescued me time and again: a fleet of knights in shining Ladas, just when I need them most. If I miss my bus in the morning, I can still get to work on time if I stop a car. It’s an expensive alternative to do this every day, but life being what it is, I find myself doing it fairly often. Over the years the worst problem I have had to deal with is the dreaded driver with hideous breath or a very smelly car. Or both. Occasionally he or she will ask too many questions, but mostly they will drive in polite or surly silence.

It was not a silent drive on the morning when I discovered that I was sitting in a scruffy but warm car with Sergei Ignatov, who was a big circus star back in the day, famous for his juggling skills. On that morning, the drive to the bridge just wasn’t long enough. His enthusiasm and passion for his art and for the life of the circus made the dull and rainy Moscow streets sparkle through the smeared windscreen. My own family have circus connections, and the sensation of linking stories, like a touching of ancestral fingertips beyond borders and generations, stayed with me for a long time afterwards. We discovered that we live on the same road. “Then we shall certainly meet again”, he exclaimed happily as he dropped me off at the Bridge of Doom. I am still hoping, and I am still waiting.

This month brings an official new ruling that this unofficial taxi ‘business’ is now illegal. With effect from January next year, a driver caught taking money for giving a lift without a special taxi driver’s license can be fined anywhere from 1,000 rubles and up to a maximum of 10,000 rubles in the city centre. The potential for further corruption in this situation is ripe. The systems to ensure that the money levied through fines is all used for the good of the public and to improve conditions on the road, are possibly somewhat flimsy at this stage.

From a system that has historically benefitted both the average car-driving, petrol-buying, road-tax-paying citizen and a non-car-owner who is trying to get somewhere, Moscow is now lumbered with a system which could well drive prices of private transport up to the turrets and domes of the city skyline, or indeed increase the number of private cars on the road from the ridiculous to the… even more ridiculous.

Mind you, Moscovites may actually take no notice of the new law whatsoever. Rules of the road are often ignored: many people still neglect to wear a seatbelt (despite potential fines), and nobody ever actually stops at a pedestrian crossing. Ways will probably be found around the new ‘no unlicensed private taxis’ rule too.

I have my own reasons to mourn the passing of the impromptu cab. From time to time local drivers realise that I am almost incapable of making it to the bus on time, and take to waiting at the place and time at which I do not catch my bus. Clearly this can be very convenient, but can also occasionally become a bit creepy. I did once change my route to school for a while. But there was a time when it worked out fabulously well. Pregnant, just a little heavy on my feet and coming to the end of my time at work, I became less and less interested in catching the bus or walking any further than strictly necessary. Nikolai arrived out of the blue. He had a decent, clean car, was friendly but not too talkative first thing in the morning and took to waiting more or less outside my door for me every day. I never asked him to, but he was always there. He dropped his children off at school around the corner just beforehand, so it suited us all. Eventually, I took his phone number and it turned out that it was he, Nikolai, who drove the two of us carefully to the hospital in the middle of the night when the time came, and a few days later it was he who drove the three of us even more carefully back home. Occasionally we run into him near the local shops, and he shakes the little hand of the person who once used to ride, curled invisibly, in the back of his car.

That is the kind of natural community connection that I associate, sometimes, with being in Moscow. I fear for its future. The new law marks the end of an era. Another Sign of the Times, along with the shutting down of markets and kiosks across the city, where a general process of regulation and insistence upon licences and officialdom is encroaching into every angle of public life. Not such a bad thing in itself, if only we can assume that the institutions of regulation and control are impartial and publicly accountable.

An advocate of the registered-taxi-only system may have safety in mind rather than the profits of the official taxi companies. Its hard to trust strangers and, sadly, there are very good reasons for teaching our children not to accept lifts in cars. But still, I can’t help feeling that this is all a bit crazy. A million trillion cars drive about all day in cities with one person at the wheel and three empty spaces, in a world where pollution is one of our biggest problems. And there are always people around who are trying to get somewhere.

Moscow had just one very small, simple answer to all that. And now it hasn’t.

The Bridge of Doom measures time. It is an iron-framed concrete calendar of my days in this city. For six years I have walked across this bridge on an almost-daily basis, in all weathers, every season, and every frame of mind. I have often walked it alone. I have walked beside the laughing, the loyal and the lost. I once walked in silence beside a grown man whose heart was breaking out loud: over Moscow, not over a girl.

The bridge gained its name through a collection of memories from my first ever Russian winter: climbing the crumbling steps, the treads all at slightly different heights and rakish angles, so packed with ice that they became mere edges, peeping out here and there through a perilous slope. Traversing the long, narrow causeway in a cross-wind of ice-knives, looking down to see how the concrete was crumbling and eroding at the edges. The long drop down to the railway tracks below – all too clearly visible in places where it shouldn’t be. Ice, ice, ice underfoot. The rusting railings, with their obvious weak spots, that shuddered with the vibrations of the endless feet and high winds. My relief when repairs began one winter, only to find myself stepping over tools, and welders, and skipping through showers of flaming sparks.

Much later on, and in a kinder season, pregnancy gave me the perfect excuse to stop half way up the steps, look out across the busy expanse of the railway to catch my breath and contemplate quiet inner miracles. And as for outward happenstance, how can it be that I moved from a small town in England from which I could often hear the whistle of a classic steam train, to a part of a foreign city in another land where I can still hear that same rare call? An aged and splendid Soviet steam engine lives here beneath my bridge, a bold red star blazing in the lights of the film crews that frequently surround her.

In the mornings the dance becomes about keeping my body and belongings defended against oncoming daredevil speed-walkers, as passengers are exhaled onto platforms and swarm up onto the bridge. After all this time, certain characters have become familiar faces. The same couple overtaking me, year after year, on the bridge at a swivelling trot. Always late for the train. I think something has happened to them lately – these days she runs past me alone.

At the end of the bridge, near the platforms, there is always someone selling something. Blouses, skirts, tea-towels, melons, pyjamas and enormous knickers. Once a week a van parks at the foot of the steps at the far side of the bridge, the doors at the back open and a small crowd immediately forms as large cuts of meat are brought out to a table and haggled over. A small pack of feral dogs hang out among the old ladies who are selling hand knitted socks. The women make a fuss of the dogs and feed them, and the dogs make a fuss of them, but occasionally bite passers-by.

Perhaps, by now, you are wondering about the jam. Over the years there have been all manner of marks and stains appearing and disappearing on the blotched canvas of the bridge. Various smashed fruit, depending on the season, broken bottles and their splashed contents, once a mysterious small slick of blood, and sometimes the splattered proof of over-indulgence after a late night on the Bridge of Doom. But last week, jam arrived. A huge glass dome full of blackcurrants set into dark, sticky juice had been dropped and abandoned as a hopeless case. As I walked past on my way back home, several of the larger slices of glass had gone, but the jam remained, a slowly-spreading, sticky accusation. I wondered how long it would take to erode. Stepping over a corner of the jam continent, by now studded with cigarette butts, I wondered why a person would think that it was a good place to put their cigarette out. As if the stickiness of the pool of jam could draw all other useless dirt into itself with its very own gravitational field.

The next morning it had gone without a trace. Not a single currant to be seen. Not even one last wine-coloured drop of jam upon the Bridge of Doom.

If, at first, you read the words ‘Jam on the Bridge of Doom’ and thought this piece would be about traffic in Moscow, I hope you are not disappointed. But, if you first read the words ‘Jam on the Bridge of Doom’ and were expecting something about an opportunity to hang out with musicians and sing the blues, then I have to say I couldn’t agree more. In fact… let’s do it.

You supply the music and the voice in your mind and here are some lyrics. I only ask that the voice you imagine (could well be all rusty) be accompanied by some evil slide guitar and some steaming harmonica playing if you can manage it.

As for the tune… I think you know how it goes.

Blues to the Bridge of Doom