Part 2
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Stuffing a sheaf of inky papers into my briefcase, my passport clamped between my teeth, I entered Russia. Ahead of me, behind a glass partition, was what resembled a minicab driver's convention. Two hundred men in cheap anoraks looking like a Vivienne Westwood Oxfam-inspired fashion show, some holding cards with names felt-tipped in barely legible English, overwhelmed me. Clutching my bag tightly, I was feted with offers of rides into Moscow at prices upward of one hundred US dollars. Somehow in this welter of faces, I spotted a card with my name on it, and the ubiquitous logo of the ad agency I had come to work for. My driver looked as shabby as the rest. He offered to take my bag, but I declined, fearing never to see it again. He led me to the kerbside of a subterranean concrete car park. "You must wait" he barked, like Colonel Stock in Funeral in Berlin. I waited at the kerb and was again regaled with one hundred dollar ride offers. Some even tried to gee up trade by snatching at my bag. Five minutes later, having watched men actually light newspaper fires under the petrol tanks of their frozen vehicles, my chauffeur reappeared in a rusty, filthy Lada scrunching through the filthy, rusty slush. I sat in the front seat next to him. He put my bag in the boot. I clutched my briefcase. The seat belt anchorage was broken, but I was obliged to drape the belt across me for appearances sake. We lurched off into the night, weaving down a vast sodium - lit, pothole - riddled road, alarmingly jockeying with enormous ex-military trucks. I once wrote a TV commercial for seat belts. Clunk Click Every Trip went the slogan. The image was of a revolver with one bullet in it. Russian roulette, in fact.
Half of the traffic seemed to be ex-military. Trucks, jeeps, cars all uniformly olive drab. All driven, disarmingly, by men in filthy purple or turquoise anoraks which gave the impression that there was a huge army surplus sale going on. Or worse, as if the military were all out driving around in civvies, discipline long gone to the dogs. A scene out of a John Carpenter movie. Decidedly unsettling.
The road bounced on forever, relentlessly straight and wide towards the unconquered capital of this unconquerable land, its proximity always elusive, as if - like its armies - it could retreat when necessary to muster strength deep in the hinterland. Coming up on the right, my driver pointed to a giant iron cross beside the road. In fact a huge copy of a tank barricade, one of those formed by welding lengths of railway track at right angles which were then hastily embedded in concrete to halt any further wheeled advance. Beyond it I could see the first grey blocks of worker housing. This was as far as the bastards got. This was where Hitler's delusions ended. Mere metres from the edge of the city that they had come so far to seize in their Fuehrer's name, the German's froze to their guns right here beside the main highway. Maybe that's why Moscow stands where it does, invincible, cold and filthy, a mirage filled with cunning, always out of reach to anyone but Russians.
I have a photograph of my arrival at the office in Moscow. I asked the driver to take it. It shows the Lada in a courtyard. The boot is open, my bag is on the ground next to it. I am wearing a blue woollen hat and gloves, the Crombie and a look of deep despair. Like the Nazis, I had come so far for this. I had left the promised land of sun and sand for this dingy set of brown buildings with a temperature of minus 20 degrees which was falling even faster than the sunlight. The entrance to the building was shared with a men's hostel in the basement as was the smell of their meals which pervaded everything constantly. Up a flight of grimy marble stairs, I came to a heavily reinforced partition door let into an archway. This was the agency. This door shielded Russia from the impending storm of capitalism. The new conquerors.
In London in the seventies the walls of ad agencies were decorated with crumbling brown cork. It cascaded off the walls all by itself. It came away in whole squares and was picked off in bits by simmering secretaries in hostile moments on the phone. The sight of it was always accompanied by the frenetic clatter of technology's then latest advance the IBM golfball typewriter. In London, all of these sights and sounds had long since shuffled off to secondhand stationery shops. Just as the comb and paper buzz of the dot matrix printer tells you today that you're in the presence of outdated technology, hearing the zip-clunk tabulator of an IBM again made everything feel instantly familiar. Here I was five thousand miles from home walking straight back into my office in the London of twenty years ago. Incongruously, there was a fax machine, which only received information intermittently as the paper rolls were kept under lock and key strictly for emergency use. As there is no branch of Ryman's yet in Moscow, anyone coming from London was asked to bring Magic Markers, layout pads and fax paper with them.
Helen, the friendly if slightly over made-up receptionist and company secretary told me I was staying in the Penta for the present, a modern Western style hotel. In order to pay for it, I was given five hundred dollars from a safe that could formerly have done service as a prop in The Lavender Hill Mob. Cash - or hard currency as it would be called - was all that worked here. No credit card would be accepted as no-one in Moscow had any access to credit. That evening, once I had settled in I was to meet Veronica for dinner, the TV producer who would be able to advise me on the facilities here in Moscow. She would come to the Penta with more hard currency.
Outside, the light had gone. The air was viscous with cold. I hugged my bag to my chest in the rear of the other agency Lada as we ground through the miserable traffic towards the hotel. On the way we passed several small parks, their iron railings torn down and trampled for no clear reason. Maybe it was a long-held hatred of being banned from these parks under Communism. Or perhaps it was just the wantonness that comes from having no clear direction any longer. We also passed a sea lion park, which looked as if it would be happier in the Coney Island of the Twenties. It too was wide open, its stars long since gone, having loped off to the sea perhaps, or eaten. All that remained was an unlit neon sign with a sea lion balancing a ball on its nose and an undecipherable Cyrillic logo. This of course presented me with my first inklings of a real handicap. Even if I could pronounce addresses in Moscow - "Take me directly to Kaminsky Street, comrade" - I couldn't recognise the word Kaminsky when I got there. It was like being on Mars.
The Penta Hotel looked like it had just arrived from another planet too. The planet Zanussi perhaps. It was brand new in gleaming chrome and glass with immaculate concrete preformed panels. In my mind, I was ricocheting from time and location like an agent in the opening titles of an international spy adventure. Suddenly I felt as if I were back in Frankfurt, or London or the outskirts of Milan even. My driver pointed to a line of ominous looking Volga saloons. "Taxis", he whispered conspiratorially then lost himself in a small traffic jam of milling tourists. I stepped through the revolving doors back into the Western world. In the lobby all was chaos. Tall men in fur coats and hats with fur earflaps were arguing about a pile of suitcases. Lufthansa pilots and crew wearily filled in forms at the long marble counter near the concierge. I joined a line at the registration desk. Above me on the ceiling was a huge yellow chandelier and several video cameras scanning the room. Eventually, I was urged to go to the fourteenth floor where I would find the VIP check in. The fur hats were still arguing over their luggage downstairs. They couldn't have been very important.
Giles cartoons always used to make the IRA look like Russians for some reason. They wore trench coats, black boots and had jowly bulldog faces. The KGB look like that still. I thought the man in the fourteenth floor lobby was dressed up to go to a fancy dress party, but no, he was the real thing. He was there to help the blonde VIP receptionist prise the five hundred US dollars hard currency from me to cover two nights stay there. They prised successfully and I was given a plastic key card and shown the VIP lounge which looked like six tables and a bar at the end of a corridor. VIPs of all nations were drinking bottles of Beck's at twenty dollars a bottle. I wandered off down my faceless VIP corridor and found my sanctuary. The universal L shaped bedroom with two vast Tsar size beds, colour TV on which I could watch the BBC World Service, French skiing , German pornography, Italian political trials or the blandness of world events as processed by CNN. A news-channel that always seems to be for other people. Somewhere there must be a hard core of viewers - Time Magazine readers perhaps - who are switched on to this woolly wavelength and nod sagely at every snippet of local trivia or global overview. As for Russian TV, it came without subtitles and the presenters all looked like they did their shopping at C&A. But it was in colour. I was impressed. I had a mental picture of Russia in black and white. The most interesting channel I found was the video of the ground floor reception from one of the cameras suspended up near the chandelier. I was able to watch endless comings and goings and the group of furcoats still trying to decide whose bag was whose. The view from the fourteenth floor window was of Moscow by night, but as it faced away from everything there was nothing to see at all. Not even street lights. Someone must have failed to pay the electricity bill. I took a shower in the cubicle that formed the L-shaped room. I phoned home. Everything seemed so normal. Sue and the kids were back from Sainsbury's, they were going to make some cakes for tea. Perhaps the last seven hours were all a dream. I rubbed my eyes. No it wasn't. On the TV, people were still standing in the lobby in furcoats and one very tall woman was occupying the centre of the lobby waving at the camera. At me, it seemed. The phone rang. It was the blonde receptionist. "Madam Veronica will meet you in the bar downstairs, Mr. Moseley". She spoke the words separately which like a phone number inquiry message are glued together electronically with no feeling for each other. "Thank you." Click brrrrr... I looked at the screen again. The waving woman was gone. Perhaps it was Veronica. I put on most of my clothes and the Crombie and wearing my woollen hat and gloves indoors, set off down to meet her.
In the basement of the Penta I wandered down long marbled corridors and observed international trinkets displayed in glass cases. Tartans from the Scotch House, bijouterie from Cartier draped on driftwood, bottles of Absolut vodka from Finland and other staples of Russian life such as Aeroflot tickets, the choice of millions we were informed, if only they could get exit visas. The subterranean bar was intriguingly lit with star shaped holes cut in the ceiling. It looked like any other bar in any other international hotel in any other country. The tall bony woman I had seen on the TV monitor sat awkwardly on a leather armchair. She stood to greet me. She was taller than me by about four inches. She projected an air of jaded sophistication yet spoke with a Cockney accent, rather like Janet Street-Porter, but at the pace of someone who only has a short time into which to cram volumes of information. "Welcome to Moscow Darling. This cold is too much even for me. I wish I was at the dacha in Yalta. Anyone of any worth is there at this time of year. Only fools stay in Moscow in winter. It'll be minus twenty again tomorrow and you'll see them in the streets buying their Absolut vodka from those damned kiosks wearing nothing but sacks and lying in the street dying of frostbite." "Would you like a drink Veronica...? It is Veronica isn't it?" I squeezed the words in before the next onslaught. "Champagne darling. It's the only thing to drink these days. That's one thing Glasnost has brought. Access to state champagne. It used to be reserved for apparatchicks. Now everyone can get it. Yeltsin's veins are permanently full of it of course, when he's not swimming in Stolichnya." I realised that I wouldn't so much as have a conversation with Veronica as listen to a broadcast by her. I caught the barman's eye as he proudly placed a packet of Phileas Fogg peanuts on the table - in Russia branded goods are flaunted. Peter York should come here and observe social status in the making. Rather like the California Gold Rush, they're streaking across the plains of consumerism. Mercedes Benz has become passe as the new millionaires seek to outstrip each other. Dying of frostbite in the gutter with a skinfull of Finnish vodka is probably the other end of the same spectrum. I joined Veronica in drinking State champagne. The hell. I set my brain to run on sift and receive and listened to her strangely exaggerated Cockney as she rambled on and on about starving acquaintances in the ballet - in particular one with fantastic cheekbones - "So gaunt. Just wretched the way he's treated by the managers. He's dying of Aids of course." I studied her more closely. Fortyish. Thin. Tall. Groomed well. Fur coat, and expensively dressed. She dealt with the barman and, as I was to discover, everyone else with a haughty arrogance that seemed as if she had been brought up endlessly watching Rod Steiger's performance in Dr. Zhivago. Her finger nails were talons and the excessive stage makeup she wore reminded me of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. There was the same air of faded grandeur. She seemed to be modeling herself on the theatricality of Tsarist Russia. It was all a pose, quite definitely. Like the Cockney accent which turned out like everything about Veronica to be partly real. She had lived in London for ten years and knew Soho intimately. Particularly the TV post-production circuit, although perhaps inevitably, all her information and contacts were at least ten years out of date. However we were in her home town now. "You are familiar with Afghan food, darling? We'll go to this marvelous place I know. The agency will pay so what do I care? You don't want to eat here, ever - apart from breakfast. They simply don't know. More champagne and then we'll embrace the night."
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