Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (51 page)

Are they moving physically?

Yes, that is where the work and the money are, but the Chinese cannot completely abandon their ancestral lands. The peculiarity of the situation is that a proportion remain behind, and those who leave return later. We still know very little about the basis of family and social relations in China. There are families which emigrated to the West, to America 100–150 years ago, but each New Year have to return; in Russia kinship ties were quickly destroyed after the revolution, but that didn’t happen in China.

Where are these 250–300 million peasants who were to be taken out of the countryside?

Everywhere and nowhere. Some here, some there. The catch is that most of them have not settled. Some are milking frogs in Russia.

^*
Soviet Foreign Minister under Gorbachev, then President of Georgia until unseated by the Rose Revolution in November 2003.

^*
In the summer of 2004 the Georgian Government tried to put an end to the smuggling through the Roki tunnel, the border between Russia and Georgia. First they took control of the tunnel, only for South Ossetian nationalist slogans immediately to ring out claiming independence. The Georgian Government continued to attack and one day closed down the Ergneti market. The Roki tunnel mafia had a heart attack. Where were they to sell their smuggled goods? At this point the “right of nations to self-determination” came in very handy, and South Ossetia started making a fuss about it, openly supported by Russia. A war began which lasted from August 12 to 21, 2004, and when 16 Georgian soldiers were killed, President Saakashvili withdrew his units from the commanding heights they had previously occupied in order to defend Georgian villages from bombardment. [This note is taken from an article Anna wrote after her assignment in Tsinkhvali, Sukhumi and Tbilisi.]

8. The Other Anna

Anna Politkovskaya has been described as “steely.” She was not; she was matter-of-fact. These articles show her humanity, a sensitive conscience, a willingness to engage with the unfamiliar, and regret that her homeland was not a more enjoyable place to live
.

PASSION ON TIPTOE THAT MAKES YOU QUIVER: MOVEMENT AS AN ALLOTROPE OF LOVE

March 30, 2000

In London the performances of the internationally renowned Buenos Aires company Tango Por Dos, directed by its creator and invariable principal dancer, the breathtaking Miguel Angel Zotto, have played to consistently full houses, raising sighs and gasps from a habitually reserved audience. In the Peacock Theatre on Kingsway, the visitors have been presenting a two-act performance of
Tango Argentino
. Almost three hours of bewitching stage action with never a word spoken, only music, dancing and emotion. By the finale the exceedingly well-balanced, phlegmatic, and even apathetic British audience had been roused to a peak of frenzied enthusiasm, wanting more. Know how to live and you can have a life!

There is pure passion on the stage, nothing else, performed by six couples. Naturally, there is no sex, which I mention for Russian ignoramuses yet to learn the distinction between passion and bed. All the dancers are middle-aged, not babes in arms or adolescents, expressing more than just climactic ecstasies. These are adults who know all about losing, and winning, and hoping. Their intensity is magnificent and mind-blowing. No grinding of teeth, no rending of raiment, no biting of lips, not even any crying out. It is a presentation of oblivious passion.
There is such heat generated by the show that from time to time you see couples quietly sneaking out of the auditorium and the theatre. The theatre’s regulars assure you that they leave to make love to each other themselves. Rumors are swirling around London that this always happens during
Tango Argentino:
the men and women watching the dancing, in which nobody is topless, there is no striptease, not a hint of
Playboy
titillation, can’t sit it out to the finale. They want to do it themselves, to experience this eternal reality. Such a torrent of libido floods from the stage that unless you are made of stone you succumb to it. If you came on your own, you would feel amorous towards whoever was sitting next to you. If only for a couple of hours, you can imagine yourself to be a dazzlingly inventive lover, capable of anything.

Do not suppose that this is a gourmet spectacle for the cognoscenti, or even for those accustomed to imbibing cocktails of passion. Nothing of the sort. Everything is very simple, even primitive. Six couples demonstrate every type and variety of tango, such as might grace a ballroom, or be seen at a rustic dance (in Argentina, of course), or in a seaside café to the accompaniment of a small, artless dance band. And that’s pretty much it. What is striking about the performance is not what they are dancing but how: every womanly cell breathes desire, but it is not the kind of desire squandered in the Metro, on a trolleybus, or in the drunken cafés and dives of Russia. It is a desire trained to draw in to a happiness – possibly a transient and ephemeral happiness – every atom of the man beside you.

Tango Por Dos is both an Argentinian show and the name of the dance company. It was created in 1989 by Zotto and Milena Plebs, the best tango dancers in Argentina. At that time they were also in love and, for almost 10 years, touring constantly, they projected their private emotion from the stages of the world in dance steps and poses with unbelievable power.

In Argentina the couple were known as “our Romeo and Juliet.” They had met in 1985 when Milena was already a famous ballerina and, moreover, the well-educated daughter of a prominent family. Zotto was her inferior in every respect. He was born the son of an amateur
actor and had no popular following. Who trained him? Only “life itself,” and the tango in the streets and nightclubs of Buenos Aires.

It was then Milena decided that Zotto was completely irresistible and would be magnificent in the tango. She abandoned her ballet career and, for the sake of her man, defied family and friends, even breaking off relations with many of them, just to be with Zotto, touring the world. In due course, living out their own love on stage, in front of an audience, they were transformed into a legendary couple in their own right and were crowned king and queen of their genre. People who saw Milena and Miguel dance maintain that the sparks they emitted every time they danced the tango could give members of the audience a heart attack.

Alas, three years ago Zotto and Plebs split up. Zotto announced that he wanted to be alone, and Milena said she would never dance again, despite an abundance of offers. The end of their
pas de deux
came when Zotto refused Milena, by then 36, a child, both for career and personal reasons. He refused to be burdened with a family and children.

There were other reasons. In 1992 he had lost his father, who died an agonising death from cancer. Plebs later said she had sensed that this was the beginning of their own last act. She continued to look after Miguel in his anguish, but suddenly discovered that her inconsolable partner had someone else wiping away his tears. In 1995 Milena had to recognise that, apart from the tango, they no longer had anything in common.

Milena Plebs is an amazing individual. She avers that the tango is a dance of passion which can be danced only by a couple who are in love. Anything else is a profanation which will not captivate the audience. “When you love a man,” Milena has said, “that is the tango. The tango means being together, hoping for a child. When all that is in the past for Zotto and me, I no longer wish to dance.” She lives in Buenos Aires and teaches choreography, sometimes directing a performance herself. But she doesn’t dance, and she hasn’t had a baby.

Today Zotto obstinately refers to himself as an incurable romantic, while continuing to dance without Milena, and doing so outstandingly
well. He does not need to love the partner he twirls in the tango. Oh well – that’s men. But Milena – that’s also what women are like.

This show has toured the world but has never come to Russia. I suspect there is good reason for that. Zotto has circled almost the entire globe with his dancing, and more than once. He has performed in such lands disinclined to overt displays of passion as China, Thailand, and heaven knows what other places remote from Latin culture, from the salons of Europe, the cafés of Argentina, and the reality of Latin America. So why has Russia been denied the opportunity of sipping from this spicy chalice?

Love has, of course, taken root here, and often, but we entirely lack any culture of passion. Yes, it looms large in Dostoevsky, Leontiev or Tolstoy, both love and tears, but alas, it hardly figures in the everyday lives of people like us in the twenty-first century. We have become habituated to quiet love, to understanding another person to the depths of their soul. We pity the unfortunate and the alcoholics drinking themselves to death because their souls have been defiled. We have a tradition of making do with love on a shoestring, of living in hope as the years go by, of washing his feet and drinking the dirty water. But passion as a short-lived, all-consuming fire – forget it! We are incapable of a month of passion (even just the one, but sweet, devastating, and luring us towards madness), or even of a passionate break-up to shake our whole organism to the core even though it is obvious that this is the end, so let’s end with a burst of passion. As an experiment, just try suggesting to your gentleman friend parting at the peak of your amorous relations. He will shy away in horror. For us, breaking up means divorce and walking out with all our belongings and all the ancient dust which has settled on them.

Our pro-Soviet love is nothing but rummaging around in ourselves, not a desire to take from our partner every last drop of the happiness he can give, even if these are our final hours together, and to give him in return the same, even though we know the pillow will be empty tomorrow. Passion Russian-style is a trip from A to B. At A we kiss, and at B we saw away at the bed-frame. It is great good fortune if the trip is direct, and awful if the path is tortuous, which it all too
often is. But why go on? As if we don’t already know this only too well.

Perhaps the accommodation shortage has put paid to our scope for passion. There’s no doubt it can have that effect, but passion is not only about square metres of floor space, and it is vital not to be dwelling on how they might be divided if something goes wrong. Passion does undeniably require money, and our men have withered decade after decade because they have been penniless. Even when recently some of them have become rich, they have rushed away from their wives to prostitutes or other readily available women, to strip clubs and massage parlours – anywhere, just as long as they don’t have to prove themselves.

These last years have been a complete disaster for passion. Following in the footsteps of teenagers and racketeers, the rest of society has even adopted the terminology “screwing.” Anybody who has a relationship is “screwing,” and that is how they and those around them refer to it. [The poet] Sergey Yesenin claimed elegiacally “not to regret, invoke the past, or shed a tear.” Neither do modern couples in Russia – instead they screw. Bankers screw, their children screw, retired engineers screw, homeless people screw, and so do musicians and poets. Can we be bothered with the storms of passion, the paroxysms of a last farewell, our knees giving way at a chance meeting? Well, no, actually we can’t. A quick screw is all we need. If you should regrettably find yourself engulfed by passion, the put-down of the Russian male, long adept at screwing, will be like a bucket of cold water: “Don’t put me in a difficult situation. For heaven’s sake, we are grown-ups.”

In our culture you must either control or conceal your passion, and then people will find their way to you. It makes you sick! You are expected to be modest, not to have pretensions, not to give yourself airs, not to be different … and then you will be graced by happiness “just when you least expect it.” What nonsense! What garbage! What a pathetic excuse for promiscuity! You should be emotionally open only at home, and then only if you are lucky enough to have someone who appreciates it!

We ladies, however, are not much better. We expect little and, as
has long been known, it is women who reflect their men, never the other way round.

So why on earth would we need an Argentinian tango for two in Russia? It would just cause a lot of upset for no good reason.

“The Lord went forth to test the people’s love.” So wrote Yesenin, who knew the meaning of passion. That line belongs here if only because there is a quotation in large print in the program of Tango Por Dos from Isadora Duncan, who danced the tango and was Yesenin’s lover. Alas, her spirit has not been passed on to us.

If you find yourself in London, escape Russia at the Peacock Theatre. If you miss the show there but still want to be lashed by someone else’s unreasoning passion, you can catch it in Milan, Turin and Lyons where Tango Por Dos will be touring in April. But not in Moscow.

THE JOY OF PARIS

June 1, 2000

So much has been said about Paris that it is embarrassing to join the chorus. But it can’t be helped, I really want to. This city has such powerful magic that your tongue, that wretch which betrays your innermost feelings, is untied and puts to sleep protesting reason. You want to shout that you too have been happy here. Even if it’s banal, cliché-ridden, even if it’s already been done to death by everybody, including the greatest and most brilliant people on the planet, you still want to say it your way, even though you recognise the pointlessness of the enterprise.

So, I’m in Paris, it’s late May and the chestnuts are in bloom. The next five days are mine, all mine.

The reason for being here is that a collection of reports from Chechnya and Ingushetia, published in
Novaya gazeta
between September 1999 and April 2000, are being published here. This is very pleasing because it puts our regular readers, from Chukotka to Kaliningrad, ahead of the Parisians, those legislators on every aspect of fashion. The publisher who has lavished so much loving attention on
Novaya gazeta
(not without the prompting of Alexander Ginsburg,
former political prisoner and dissident, who is today a champion of human rights, friend of Solzhenitsyn, and a Parisian), is not only very large, popular, and well known in Paris, but boasts the aesthetically pleasing name of Robert Laffont. There, in just those two words, those four syllables which flow into each other, France is rendered into sound. The uvular trill of the “r,” twice. The lily-like “la” where a tender “l” merges with a kiss from lips delicately forming that special “a” to produce a sound close to the la-la-la of a toothless babe.