The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [13]
I put myself on a budget that made me feel more like a college student now than I had when I was twenty-one. I walked and walked, looking for a bakery where I might find something tasty and cheap. I found one on Varvarka Street, beside the Znamensky Monastery, and for pennies, I snacked on pirozhki, one filled with apples, one with potatoes, one with cheese. The lady who served me was a relic, draped with a blue baker’s coat and cap atop her teased hair. Later, I bought a sack of strawberries at a kiosk, this time for ten rubles—roughly forty cents. An old friend and I ate osso bucco and gnocchi alla Romagna at a restaurant that was more delicious and expensive than anything in New York. He escorted me past an intimidating trio of doormen who were bursting out of their suit jackets. There was plenty of security because upstairs, an oligarch was throwing a lavish birthday party.
The city was changed, as I had expected—full of glitzy boutiques, and women with tan legs and towering heels—like Miami Beach of the Steppes. In the Soviet era, even young women plodded through Moscow’s grim streets with their backs hunched over; now it seemed they all stood eight feet tall, their shoulders back and breasts pushed forward.
On the third morning I stopped in to see Lenin in Red Square. It had once been among the safest places on earth, patrolled by army troops and teeming with militia. Now, parts of it felt like a seedy theme park, with kiosks selling balloons and overpriced lemonade. It never seemed possible that Lenin, the tiny gray figure whom one network correspondent I knew referred to as Dead Fred the Head Red had overthrown the monarchy and set his nation on its course for almost a century. But in 2010, it seemed ludicrous. I was sad as I left the poor old fellow in his depressing permafrost.
My Russian was slowly coming back, and there were glimmers of recognition—the lady at the bakery, for one—but I otherwise felt disconnected, rudderless, like I might feel in any unfamiliar European city. The place didn’t feel like mine anymore. I was a stranger now, in spite of years of work there, the love affairs, and mostly, the great trove of Russian books that had sustained me, and to which I returned again and again and again.
That afternoon, I hired a taxi which came with a driver called Pavel to take me to the Novodevichy Cemetery, to visit another grave—that of the only dead man I have a crush on. He knows my mind as if he were inside it, and grasps the confounding equation of marriage more than any writer living or dead. I hesitated before plucking two sprigs of jasmine blossoms from an overhanging tree. Then, I tossed one flower on the soil above Anton Chekhov’s body, and stuck the other between two pages of a notebook in my bag.
The sky darkened and without warning split wide open—thunder, lightning, a curtain of rain that in an instant washed the poplar seeds clean off my shoulders. I took shelter against a low building, beside gravedigger tools. After about a half hour, the sky turned a blinding blue. The storm had passed, leaving puddles that I waded through in flip-flops.
As I walked towards the exit, I saw a crowd of people gathering in the main courtyard, along with eight or so television cameras. A man wearing an officer’s cap and gloves stood in front of a bulky red funeral arrangement. He held a framed black and white photograph, and I recognized the image as that of the poet Andrei Voznesensky, who had died earlier in the week at age seventy-seven. I had stumbled upon his burial procession. Though I was drenched from the downpour, I decided to join it.
He was one of the great poets of the Soviet era, introduced to me by my college professors, who had the wisdom to convey that a literary tradition perseveres even