As the others prepared to talk, or rather listen, to the stories I’ve heard hundreds of times before, I took myself outside, using Anastasia as my excuse to take a long walk. We started along the Moscow river, passing under the gaze of the not quite finished colossus Peter the Great. I silently thanked the man who, desiring a more exact knowledge of his eastern territories, initiated his Great Northern Expedition to explore and map Siberia. Such a remote part of the world charted not for expansion but for knowledge itself. That didn’t happen often.
Anastasia and I took a detour through a deserted Gorky park. Dilapidated with rickety shanties and rusting equipment. I saw one lone man ice fishing in a tiny frozen pond. There were a couple of kiddie rides up and running although no one was around. The loudspeakers at the entrance broadcast lively, blaring music. Anastasia did not approve of the loud music I could tell. She turned her head to look up at me with pain in her old dog eyes. ‘Are you a reincarnation of another Anastasia?’ I asked her with my thoughts. She blinked. I took that to be a yes and picked up her poop with a bit more reverence after that.
I turned in at Red Square to see the Kremlin and St. Basil’s Basilica looking like some mad Arabian dream and zigzagged back through streets and lanes, always within sight of renovation cranes hovering over Christ the Savior Cathedral. Peeked inside the famous GUM department store, a multi-leveled glass arcade housing several stores that all sell the same things. Moscow is dilapidated and magnificent, everything on a massive scale. Buildings take up entire blocks, square and solid in red brick and grey stone with little decoration. Streets are wide, in many case six lanes wide, although it is evident that the lanes do not restrict, for cars pitch and weave across the road at will. I saw u-turns completed right in the middle of the street without even slowing down.
The men are somewhat colourless but the women of Moscow are impressive. Very smartly dressed in furs, impeccable makeup and stylish shoes. How they can manage to look so groomed in polluted air and muddy streets I don’t know. The December air is cold and the skies are grey but I am surprised not to see snow. Disappointed too, I want a ride in a troika sleigh.
When I returned I encountered one of Auntie Galina’s neighbours, a well dressed man accompanied by two guards armed with Kalashnikov rifles. He motioned me to join him in the elevator but I smiled him on, pretending to be waiting for someone else. I did not fancy standing in a glass elevator glass next to someone who needs two armed guards. Back in the flat everyone was resting, so I read “Crime and Punishment”. “Such a troubling book” Auntie Galina said with a sniff when she saw it, but I have always felt connected with Dostoyevsky somehow.
I was frequently distracted by the landscape out the window however, the river off to the left, and one of the so-called “Seven Sisters” in the distance. These are wonderful old Soviet buildings that look like severe wedding cakes, tiers topped with a communist star. I placed my hand on the shiny window pane to feel the ebbing sun’s weak warmth. Light reflected on the top layer of creamy white paint, showing off long ago brush strokes by some unknown painter.
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