“Moscow”: Travel Impressions
by Sylvia Ostrowetsky
What will remain to me of this eight-day stay in Saint Petersburg and Moscow, cities that seem by themselves to sum up the whole History of Russia? What drove me to set foot in a country that everyone takes pleasure in saying has become not only dangerous but undone?
A Congress — that of the secular Jews who had decided to meet there, where the very idea of Jewishness has perhaps been the most problematic. The Russian delegation that organized the gathering must surely have made an effort beyond imagining to receive us with dignity. Everything was surreal. The choice of halls, posted at the last moment; the mere inscription of the word Jew in the old university next to Red Square; the simultaneous translation into French and English that prevented us from hearing the speaker directly even when he spoke our language; the meals from the local “Mac-Do” distributed by serving girls in red-striped caps in the high halls arranged around the statue of Lenin — not pulled down but chipped at the crease of the right trouser leg; the American delegation grouped into two associations, one of which, the most traditional, is led by a man of about fifty with a brisk gait and an affable manner, whose name “Wine” is more than a bouquet, a veritable “secular rabbi” who, at a first meeting, had sorted us all out according to criteria that belonged only to him. A first fraternal contact in which, from the outset, the essential had been said in a disarray and an innocence without artifice. Nothing more foreign than a French intellectual and a wealthy American, a housewife from Detroit. Nothing, except this strange possibility — gathered in the waiting room of a sumptuous hotel, and despite the difficulties of language once again — of saying everything: loves, tastes, fears, and joys. One of them, after ten minutes, announces to her little group that, arrested in France, she was taken in in Switzerland, that she lives alone in the United States and has not made love for fifteen years. She begins her sentence in French, continues it in Hebrew, and ends it in American, her mouth drawing on a Blonde cigarette that can barely support an ash about to fall. The other rejoices, the third sighs. Each one wonders: where do your parents come from? What did they do during the war?
We are perhaps the only ones able to meet one another on such a basis. To come from elsewhere and follow the thread of one’s existence from that. Our names are outlandish, we know it, so much so that this has become our calling card. I am from Poland, I do not know a single word of it and have gone there only as a tourist, but my name means the island: Moses in the midst of the waters. That one there is the man with flowers; this other one serves, by descent, a Mass whose ceremonial he learned from books.
The successive interventions which, on the first day, consisted only of ovations of existence and emotional embraces, gave me the impression of reunions after the end of the world.
“My father,” said the Israeli delegate in Hebrew, incapable of pronouncing the least coherent sentence in Russian, “was born here.” All, or nearly all, began thus with this affective hook. All made of what was very often a first journey the moment of a return. We all bear, or nearly all, the names of a territory whose language we do not know; to come here was indeed to find oneself a little. We had the feeling — the Ashkenazim above all — of drawing from a source from which we no longer knew how to drink but which our high-cheekboned faces, the bearing of our voices, let one suspect in spite of everything. Small and thin with clipped speech. Stout and chubby with loud talk. Whence came, beyond the diversity of languages, the difference of conditions, and despite that flagrant contradiction that consists in pledging allegiance to a religious foundation one rejects, this underground fraternity, these gestures of the arm, these old men with red eyes evoking “Papa” and “Mama” and their frantic flight across the world? We, the French, who have in common belonging to a people whose beliefs we reject in the name of a republican secularism embarrassed by these offshoots of an over-sweet vine. He, the little Jew with the mischievous blue eye; she, the stout Jewess with chubby fingers. The beautiful Sarah with the marble body. The slender son of the herring seller. She, with the anxious face of the care to think rightly. He, who cares nothing for what is said, provided that he is loved.
Red — for “beautiful” is said “red” in Russian — we are red. Open to all deviances provided they do no harm, to all impulses provided they do not kill. Former members of the brigades, former militants, former lovers spurned by life, former zealots of justice, former workers of the dark back streets of the workshops. Young or old, we are all elders. Life took us by inadvertence and we no longer know how to grow old. Our gazes are almost innocent or of a despairing happiness. Our gestures are clumsy or of an animal swiftness. Our memories have the freshness of “as if it were yesterday.” We love History because it has passed through us in a definitive way. Saved because always lost.
How I loved our innocence, our fears, our swollen knees, our lowered lips, our too-flashy clothes, our hesitations and our too-long, sententious speeches. O my friends with strange first names, O my tender ones with hips too full!
That is what remains to me of this impossible journey. But also that gaze, piercing and offered at once, of that little lady in black taking us back up, slight, amid the statue-frozen gestures of the bronzes of the metro, toward a tsarist suburb and fields of color. The Moskva is at our feet, the wooden platform of the onion-domed church offers itself to our weary tastes. The children sing and dance in quarter-tones like orange sparrows. Peter the Great with his ignoble little mustache welcomes us into his isba of copper and painted wood with too-low a ceiling. The Metropolitan spreads out his luxurious sweetmeats and the Bolshoi’s chariot halts its surge facing the setting sun. One plunges into the passages packed with people on the move, slipping among the hoodlums and the affable passersby. One raises one’s eyes to the sky toward a moon that thumbs its nose in the evening at the gilded onion domes. The black and brown marble of Lenin’s mausoleum vanishes into the half-light while a poor madman carrying a Kalashnikov and a long-barreled revolver has himself photographed as if he were in the midst of the virgin forest by a tourist starved for strong sensations. The painting on the carved wood has not the time to acquire a wrinkle. The Moskva stretches like a splendid animal bordering the upper town, as if it were one distant day to join it in a silent future.
Silence. Silence — the old women selling meager garments, raising their hands in the air as if, in presenting them to the busy passersby, they capitulated in a nonsense they could not overcome. Silence — the metro travelers returning exhausted from a purely utilitarian journey. A woman of a certain age enters the car. A young girl gives up her seat to her and places herself just in front of her, clinging to the nickel poles. The woman, once seated, takes the young girl’s too-heavy shopping bag and sets it on her knees, by way of thanks. The young girl smiles and continues her reading. At the moment of leaving the train, she takes up her burden again and goes off without a word.
I tell myself that a people still capable of giving up its seat, still capable of these small gestures of exchange and solidarity, despite its silence, despite its disarray, is not dead. The schoolchildren who visit the museums of Saint Petersburg are well-kept, dressed in bright colors. They seem happier and more serene than our adolescent girls dressed in black and grunge boots. Despite hunger, despite the riffraff, despite the taxis one must not take, they say, at any price, despite the knife-point score-settlings in the back courtyards, despite this wartime scarcity, Russia exists.
S.O.