Петр Померанцев - Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible - The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

And as you stand in the church, finding in the image of the suffering Christ the comforting mirror for all your failures, you turn your head and see the image of a newborn baby and his mother, and your emotions move from comforted loser to the possibility of a new beginning.

Mozhayev’s walk continues, across the boulevards all hugged with snow and past buildings covered in thick green gauze, a sign they are about to be destroyed. And all along the way Mozhayev is talking and swigging, bringing alive the alleyways and houses so they seem to teem with living ghosts. There’s something mystic in his psycho-geography, his search for the Old, Holy Moscow, a city that doesn’t quite exist, a search for something better and imagined.

It’s well into the night as Mozhayev and I loop back toward Gnezdnikovsky. The excavators are silent. Mozhayev stoops down to wipe the top layer off the snow. Under the lamplight you can see how the next layer is a thick brick red from the dust of the day’s great demolition:

“When we go to the barricades,” jokes Mozhayev, “this will be the color of our blood.”

The walk is over. We part and Mozhayev grabs a gypsy-cab home. I’d always assumed he lived somewhere in the alleyways of Old Moscow. Instead the car drives him deep into the suburbs. Shanson is playing on the taxi’s radio. He drives far out from the magic of Mozhayevland, past hordes of rectangular apartment blocks, right to the MKAD, the final, outermost ring-road encircling Moscow.

Mozhayev’s unkempt, twenty-story, 1980s block is right by the ring-road’s edge. The elevator is out of order, and he climbs the stairs past lame graffiti and tin cans full of damp cigarette ends. The walk is sobering. He pants. His own home was knocked down a few years ago, replaced with high-rises. He is an émigré.

“You grow up sure that everything will always be the same: house, trees, parents,” he will write later in another essay. “When my parents died I could remember them through the building that we lived in. Buildings aren’t so much about recollecting time as about the victory over time.”

After the cold outside the building is overheated, and he is sweating heavily by the time he reaches his own floor. He tries to be quiet as he enters the apartment; his wife and children are asleep. The youngest (of three) is lying in his cot in the corridor. He makes his way to the tiny living room. Everywhere there are small artifacts of the wreckage of old Moscow, which Mozhayev has retrieved from demolition: shards of sixteenth-century designs of flowers from the basements of houses, wood carvings from the sashes of destroyed windows—firebirds, gentle giants, mouse-kings. They are laid out like exhibits from a long-lost civilization.

Outside the sound of rushing traffic on the MKAD rises. The high-rises merge with the darkness. Only the flocks of cranes still glimmer and swing around construction sites, working through the night, like catching a theater set between the acts. In the distance the thickest flock surrounds the ever-in-construction Federation Tower, the central skyscraper of “Moscow City,” Russia’s rebuttal to La Defense and Canary Wharf but built higher, faster, and with shoulder-barging, get-out-of-my-way insistence near the middle of the capital, so much taller and bigger than anything in the city that it redefines its dimensions, its very idea of height and size. “It is time for Russia to get up off its knees,” the President’s favorite sound bite goes, and the Federation Tower rises like the folklore warriors of Russian stories, growing “not by days but by the hour.”

There’s a cry as Mozhayev’s newborn starts sobbing in his cot. Mozhayev lifts the baby up, rocks him up and down to stop the mewling. He’s only a few months old and a half-caste. Mozhayev’s wife is from Cuba; her parents were communists who moved to Soviet Moscow expecting a utopia. All three of Mozhayev’s kids are black, the only black kids the other kids around here have ever met. They get smacked about, called nasty names. Mozhayev has been thinking about emigrating for them to have a normal life.

Montenegro, he thinks to himself; he’s always liked the sound of the word “Montenegro.” Or London. Or maybe farther.

Late morning smell of benzine coating the city, overburn of weekend nights coating the mouth, white Sunday snow turning to Monday sludge—I’m late. I grab the camera and run out of my top-floor apartment with its grand view of the bend in the frozen river, and beyond that, the great jagged tooth of one of the Stalin-Gothic skyscrapers. The dark green stairwell is full of cigarette ends and small brown puddles of melted snow knocked from boots. The apartment doors are padded for security, which makes them resemble asylum cells. Behind the padded doors are millionaire’s apartments; everyone’s done well in this city of baby-faced billionaires, but especially so on this block, the old Stalin gothic block reserved for party and KGB and diplomatic elite and great actors, the last to profit from the old order and the first to profit from the new one. Yet no one cares to band together and redecorate the stairwells. Care stops at the threshold of your apartment. You lavish and stroke your personal world, but when you reach the public space, you pull on your war face.

I ride the elevator, still lit with a dim yellow bulb, past the mad woman who sits on the stairwell shouting, “I am an egg, I am an egg,” all day and night. “The KGB came and took me. They came and took me. I am an egg!” (What does she mean?, I always think to myself, Did they do something to her? Or is it just nonsense?) At the front door I pat my trouser pocket to check for the thin outline of my passport and realize it’s not there. Always the passport, always the “dokumenti!” You can get stopped and checked for papers at any moment. It might only actually happen once or maybe even twice a year, but you still have to stand in queues and knock on doors to obtain the whole library of little stamps, regulations, permits—the legal stipulations and requirements that are themselves always changing. A little trick to keep you always on tenterhooks, always patting your pockets for your papers, always waking up worried that you might have lost them in a bar. Over time you begin to pat for the passport instinctively, your hand going down unthinkingly to check your pocket so many times a day you don’t even notice any more. That’s true power—when it starts to influence the unconscious movements of your arms.

I have to go back up to the apartment.

There are so many little initiations, so many ways the system wraps itself around you. My latest has been a driving test. I would never pass, my instructor had explained, if I didn’t pay a bribe (this month $500, but about to jump to $1,000 if I didn’t hurry). I protested that I wanted to learn and pass the test for real. He explained the traffic police would fail me until I paid up.

The instructor was a friend of a friend of my parents, and I was told to trust him by everyone I knew. He specialized in giving lessons to what he described as “nervous” types: actresses and ex-pats. I gave up the money, and he made the appropriate deal. I had assumed I would then receive the license in an envelope. To my surprise my instructor told me to go to the traffic center to take the test with everyone else.

The theory part of the test was held in a large, bright, new office room with very new computers. There were around twenty of us seated in front of computers completing simulations of various driving scenarios. I assumed, with a little relief, that my bribe had been lost in the works and set about using my common sense to answer the questions. To my self-satisfied surprise I received 18/20, enough to pass. Only later did it hit me that every computer in the room must have been a priori rigged to give 18/20: everyone in the room had paid for the right result.