Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [211]
In my worst nightmare I could never have imagined that the citizenship of the body in the coffin would be held against Anna by our “patriots,” and used as a frightener by the “sovereign Russia” brigade. Her books, like the Unpublished Letters of Marina Tsetayeva all those years ago, are well known in the civilised world but not to be found on the shelves of Russian bookshops.
The main investor, receiver and allocator of favors in Russia is once again that well guarded fortress in the center of Moscow. Anna tells me how the fat cats fight for the right to a flashing light on their car, and how, if they decide to give it up, they make a major “democratic” fuss about their magnanimity. Celebrity brains do not function until hit over the head by a revived special operations militiaman.
Our marriage lasted 21 years. I managed to lose. We separated. Life under a permanent storm front came to an end. We separated but did not divorce, in order that our colleagues who work to get money from the bosses should not be given a news break. There were plenty of enemies. They didn’t often sue because they knew what she wrote was the truth, but they pelted her with filth.
She was invited to a forum in Eilat devoted to the end of the century. It was our last tour. I accompanied her. In the bus our guide, an ex-Soviet, insisted that Judas was only acting his part in a play which had already been written. “That’s rich!” Anna said, and laughed. We didn’t take him to task.
We travelled through the Holy Land. Orthodox Christmas. Rain in Bethlehem. Anna and I stood next to the Temple. Everybody was pushed aside. Moscow cars with flashing lights. Did I imagine it? We squeezed into the building and there, sure enough, sitting in chairs in the middle of the Temple as if they were in a theatre, were Yeltsin, Chubais and Arafat. The service was being played out in front of them like a performance. Had they come to beg forgiveness for their sins? It was totally monstrous. Horrified, we came out and heard in the repulsive drizzle a sweet voice. In the square we were confronted by another extraordinary sight. From our youth, like the brave little tin soldier, a wet Demis Roussos was rushing about on a stage in the almost deserted square. Not a single New Russian to be seen, only a few Israelis, and nobody was collecting cash, as they would be in Russia. “Goodbye, my love, goodbye.” “He’s taking the piss,” Anna whispered. In the darkness we were surrounded by émigrés under umbrellas who wanted to ask us about perestroika.
It would have been good just to talk without them, and not about perestroika. We had to work on the perestroika of our family relations. We found it just as difficult to get unused to each other as to put up with each other in the same flat.
A few days later, the intimate meeting again in the church, at the funeral service, the dissipating gossamer of incense with its hint of bitterness. The priest pronounced the last word. I suddenly had the feeling that she was arguing with me again, and such a wretched emotion came over me that, as I remembered the tears I had caused this woman to shed, I couldn’t proceed to the coffin to go through the motions of a helpful ritual. Whether it was the diary of the brave little tin soldier, or Gavroche going his own way and forced to spend nights in the ruined bowels of a monumental elephant … An independent creative unit. Tsvetayeva’s noose. In the evening I remembered the first amazing words of the prayer, “Make me an instrument of your peace.” Hers was my surname; how significant it was that I had taught the words of that prayer to a schoolgirl.
An Independent Creative Entity Elena Morozova
MLAN (Masha–Lena–Anna): this remarkable association lasted long enough to celebrate its fortieth anniversary, but came to an end on October 7, 2006. The bullets fired from a Makarov pistol hit their target, the heart of the association, Anya.
We had been friends since childhood, and it was