RACHEL POLONSKY
AMoscow time passes. I become increasingly mellow about being called 'girl' by strangers in the street. There's no reason why I should ever have been bolshie about it. After all, as a form of address, the Russian word devushka functions just like mademoiselle in French. But language is as much about sensibility as about sense and, to my English ear, devushka always had an incivility about it that made me flinch. Maybe it's a question of changed public tone. I don't hear the word as an insult now that the rage of old against young that was such a feature of the last years of communism has ebbed a little. But I dare say it would be wise to avoid specious historical generalisations and to look to my own vanity; for the only thing I can say for sure is that I'll die a thousand deaths the first time some stranger calls me 'woman'.
The man who tapped my arm in a crowded metro carriage last week and said 'Girl, a gypsy boy just took your wallet' could not have been more civil or, indeed, more committed to civil order; so committed was he that he resolved to see justice done and rode back with me to the scene of the crime, where he recruited a shambling militia patrol to my cause. We were soon sitting in a tiny cell in the metro station, watching as a parade of brown-eyed gamins was led in and put behind bars. 'It wasn't me, madamme, I don't take your roubles and your crredditte cards,' each protested in turn in thick, gypsy Russian. The culprit was the last to enter. The 'boy' turned out to be a girl with a dusty crop. She pulled my wallet out of her clothing with a flourish, and fixed me with a rascally stare. 'Where's all my money?' I asked her. 'They're eating it, madamme,' she replied, indicating her friends in the cage, who were busily chomping away on fresh meat pies. There was nothing for us all to do but laugh. I thanked the thief for the wallet, my guardian angel praised her dexterity and told her that she should try for the Moscow Circus, and the militiamen told them all to scarper. If civilisation is the art of living in cities, then it does not manifest itself in the sullen public decorum that communism imposed with its numberless petty repressions, but in moments of civility such as this, improvised in the messy course of life in an imperfect world.
0 ne of the staples of Western chat in Moscow is to wonder at what precise moment in the life-cycle of a Russian
woman she metamorphoses from pussy-cat devushka into ruthless ten-ton babushka. I had a fairytale insight into this fated journey between two stereotypes as I picked up my books in the State Historical Library the other day. Another reader put her ID down on the issue desk in front of me, and a pretty young woman with a heavily dressed 1940s hairdo looked up from the black-and-white photo. I turned and found myself face to face with a balding, hunchbacked crone.
Libraries are intense places at the best of times, and, as I reflected on it, my encounter with the old lady became all the more stark and troubling. What has she been doing in here for the past six decades? One moves around a library impelled by one's own intellectual desires and purposes; procedures delay things, false leads frustrate, and then some tiny revelation or new trail can cause one to gasp in private satisfaction. But, just once in a while, the insidi
ous whisper of futility coming from all those millions of books can cause one to falter and weaken. There is never more danger of this than in a Russian library, where the air itself is rancid with failure and loss, and where every room is lined with hundreds of volumes of Marx, Engels and Lenin — all that work, all that paper, and their only use is to keep the walls from falling in.
Ilove the building I live in for the mysteries of its evil past. Stalin's faithful comrade, Molotov, lived for many years in the opulent apartment upstairs and many of his possessions are still in place. When the amiable Texan banker who now lives in it is not at home, I have leave to browse. Molotov had a private library of fascinating diversity: Stendhal, Sterne and F. Scott Fitzgerald are stuffed three-deep into glassfronted bookcases, alongside such littleknown classics as Nikolai Morozov's How I Became a Revolutionary. Trotsky's Towards the Question of the Stabilisation of World Capitalism lies beneath a battered copy of The Divine Comedy. I try to track Molotov's reading by following the marks of his red pencil in the margins. But the books only hint creepily at personal secrets they will not reveal. I opened his encyclopaedia recently and found a hair still lying across the entry for the mediaeval philosopher and lover Abelard; later a scrap of paper with 'borsch!' pencilled on it dropped out of a gossipy pre-revolutionary book about the Karenina-esque malaise of bourgeois female existence. Why, I wonder, did the Bolshevik ascetic mark the page so heavily just where it says, 'If a woman is young and pretty, society will smile at her infidelities: all she wants to do is live. . . . '?
0 ur concierge is a poet, and now that, as she says, her life is over and the world beyond these walls is nothing but filth and chaos, she has time for composition. [visit her now and then in her little basement room, and she recites her latest lilting tetrameters about the 'bright days' under Stalin, when 'love was pure', and she would march in parades through Red Square with her head held high. The other night she showed me a photo of her teenage grandson all dressed up in tails for a ballroom-dancing competition, striking a gallant pose. 'He looks like a real Russian aristocrat, doesn't he?' she said, with tears in her eyes.
Rachel Polonsky is a writer living in Moscow.
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