Wreckage

Vanya swirls vodka in his unkempt mouth, tasting bitter failure.

One tooth to the back of his mouth which he can feel with his tongue he knows to be black and hollowed out with a creeping decay like the apartment blocks which suddenly collapse inwards from time to time in the outer reaches of the city.  He dreams of Volgograd, walking the battlefields, sniffing around Pavlov's house and Mamaev Kurgan.  Instead he journeys to Samara, drunkenly saluting the space shuttle moored close to his hotel and queues for the return flight to Moscow amid a crowd of doctors pressed together beside a coffee stand at five in the morning.

Kiosks are his passion, innocuously they dispense the real medicine of newspapers, coloured magazines, cheap lighters and innumerable bottles of inebriating poison which he so badly needs.  Ice cream in winter has become his diet.

Inspiration is needed. The toilet smell drifts down the aisle all the way back into the west, the plane a floating sunspot over Nizhny Novgorod and the Volga a ribbon of gunmetal infinity snaking like an umbilical cord over the untrammeled plains of central Russia.

His eyes heavy, dimly take in a chocolate factory he always heard tell of.  The long ateries disconcertingly unchoked by traffic at this early zenith of an autumn dawn, a taste of hunger in the mouth and curled up memories of park pavilions and painted gates unraveling somewhat on the ride from Sheremetovo.

Daylight weak yet pure and a sense of emptiness as Saturday awakens into a long gleaming vessel gliding in slow motion.  Scratching an eyebrow and checking for messages.  Nothing from Natasha, and it has been three days.  An accordion reverberates joyfully in the underpass on Kievskaya.  He's back to Moscow.  The hospitals are full of amputees, brilliant children with blood diseases and hearts as big as trees.  

Yulitsa lament

Lamentations blow invisibly through the dark space around the unlit White House, its silence on this morose day of elections offset by the linear glow of Novy Arbat's lamps stretching up the hill, and of evening traffic fleeting glumly over Kutuzovsky Bridge where the Christmas lights are strung in purple and blue. 

Moscow where the black water pools on your pavements.

Moscow where the shuffling shadows walk.

Moscow where armies of people clash from opposite sides of the freezing streets at level crossings.

Moscow where a girl's neatly-brushed hair flickers golden on the down escalator. 

Moscow where accordion music fills the underpass in the morning, and the smell of piss and vodka at night. 

The dying of a year and it's so early to be thinking like this.  A small dog for sale in Kurskaya attracts Julia's attention and she's dying to have it; Anna is dying to give Julia's uneaten sandwich to a homeless person and searches the bazaar for someone, anyone, but for once there is no-one. This is not America.  Small kiosks and trolleybuses shuddering along, ice on the broken pavements and the electricity is out in the exhibition hall.  The devil appeared to the Master in that narrow park, Anna explains.  Julia's eyes burn with an intensity as if to confirm this. 

Moscow, light me another cigarette and tell me it isn't winter.

Moscow, give me examples of the steely coldness inhabiting the human soul.

Moscow, remind me every day to stare my fellow man in the eyes. 

Russky Standard

There's silence most of the afternoon, Vanya just contemplates the great glass Gomorrah appearing like a child's tooth on the horizon between the Hotel Ukraina and Moscow State University. Would that the Fairy take it, nighttime is descending after all in these swirls of warm early winter snow. He's seen Miko's girlfriend and she's twenty-one, Natasha's out there but her daughter's only four.

South-west to the vast expanse of city between the houses. Dry air, the last death-rattle of another autumn in an eternity of cycles repeating. Can we see the pattern? He asks silently, shoe-laces unravelling a short distance from the metro. You have to try with the thin threads you've kept intact this far, for God's sake, Vanya self-admonished, gulping the cold air and grasping the irony of the nearby ice-cream stand. At once, Natasha is so close you can feel her glossy painted nails raking your wrists in playful fashion, the cinema dark and your clock reset to...who knows when (you claim that autonomy after all!), and she's so tangibly far, bathing Galina as her mother farts into the sofa cushions so far from Krasnodar. You just have to loose yourself amid the fronds of her pale hair, deep beneath the streets where history marched impetuously over such human trifles, attributing bullets to kisses.  That was twenty years ago, Vanya, mumurs the voice.  Now there are no more whispering tank treads, you can indulge their faintly rumbling end here in the windswept chaos of Ploshad Revolutsi, where suddenly you pull Tasha close and kiss her tight warding off history and drowning in the now.

Red November

They emerge from the red express train onto a long, cold platform at Paveletskaya, thick, black graffitti encircling the steamed-up windows of the limegreen outbound trains, delayed by a power failure out there in the birch woods (the last thing anyone expected to see: a lone swastika tattooed on a low steel fence by a clearing); and then, like the first flakes of snow and in succession: the blond boy in the rumpled coat throws away his receipt on the empty tracks, everyone begins to smoke and chatter as they break into the crowds, suitcases and people collide where the platform funnels through a narrow exit amid the smell of warm bread, and the wave is carried far, past the news kiosks and the wall of men in caps touting taxis, stiffened by the early evening rush; and the wave continues, elbowing through the heavy metro station doors and becoming still more concentrated as it rushes down the escalators smelling of clothes and vodka - into the famous metropolitan soup of coats, boots and faces. 

Vanya is freezing on the corner of what he thinks is the place they will meet. 

They are singing the Internationale in a deep, eerie voice and waving their red flags in the middle of Teatralnaya Ploshad - he is sure it is not an illusion.  Ten Days That Shook the World, he thinks, snapping open the iphone. Jack can hear them in the Kremlin Wall.  Still - there is more Ploshad than Party, and more vodka than doctrine is flowing through the crowd. 

He has no idea where Natasha is in the labyrinth of the metro and is guessing that neither does she.