Lark's Eggs (28 page)

I met him my first time in Leningrad, New Year's 1989, in the Metropole Restaurant. I was dining with two friends who were part of my tour party, slices of sturgeon, a dessert of clementines. The orchestra played ‘Let's Go to the Hop', ‘I
Celebrate
My Love for You', ‘Wild, Wild Party'. A man in a pinstripe blue suit and a girl with coronets on her high heels danced on the floor.

There was the chintz of the chandeliers, the chintz of the snow outside, the chintz of Alush's eyes when he came to the table, eyes of scabious blue. His hair was flaxen, an Arctic purity about it. He wore a shabby duffle coat. He was with a friend.

He'd come with bottles of champagne for my friends, five pounds a bottle. They'd met him on Nevsky Prospect, outside the Aurora Cinema. He sold T-shirts at Piskaryovskoye Cemetery where the dead of the Siege were buried. If caught he'd be sent to a
detention
centre in the country.

‘Irish,' he said to me. Sometimes the Irish tourists on Nevsky Prospect showed him Irish money. They were easier with money than the British tourists.

A few days before he'd met an Irish boxer who lived in
California
who said that when you're a boxer you come to realize your body has peaks and lows. So you learn to time your boxing with your peak times.

He's played a Victorian boxer in a movie, wearing knee-length boxing pants and duck gaiters. He snorkled and swam through the winter with his seven-year-old son. ‘He's better than me,' he said.

‘Don't you feel the cold?' Alush asked him. ‘No. You just jump in there,' he'd replied.

Sometimes, maybe in a boutique, in a sports shop in Southern California he heard the voices of Irish people or what he imagined were Irish accents. But then he remembered swimming in swimming pools in Belfast, where he was the only swimmer, with an armed British soldier outside and he didn't approach, he hid in the Southern California sun splash, exile outlined in his body. ‘I'm a guest of the Pacific,' he said.

Alush and his friend invited us back to a flat in Ploshchad Vosstaniya for a small party where we could drink the champagne he'd sold my friends and smoke hash.

We got the metro. The flat, almost at the top of the building, was being rented to a couple for some hours so they could make love. The girl, in a long black coat and astrakhan hat, was thrown out into the snow while her boyfriend stayed. Under a poster of a naked-buttocked, helmeted Mercury guiding a girl in a transparent peplum through the sky, they played Frankie Ifield, ‘Sweet Lorraine'. There was a bath in the kitchen as there'd been a bath in the kitchen of the flat of a friend of mine who died as a child.

I looked into Alush's eyes. I'd really, really despaired the
previous
year, thought I'd end up sweeping the streets.

I met Alush by arrangement the following day in a café, a fish lit up on a plate, over a bedding of pimentos on the wall. On the street outside an old lady in black carried a plastic bag with a girl in a flamingo bikini under spider palm trees on it.

When I told him my two friends were lovers he said, ‘
Homosexuals
!', that he should have charged them more for the bottles of Georgian attar he'd sold them. He and his family who were devout Russian Orthodox celebrated the feasts and he named a few for me, that of St Nadezhda, of Sergius of Radonez, of the Glorification of the Mountain of Tabor, of the Protecting Veil of the Mother of God, of Our Lady of the Snowstorm.

We walked in Kuznechny indoor market where women threaded
dill and parsley and where eggs on pedestals had illuminations under them.

A few days later in Yelokovsky Cathedral the Patriarch of Moscow blessed the throng of which I was part for the Russian Christmas Eve.

Earlier I'd swum in Kropotkanskaya near Tolstoy's house, changing in a bleak room, then swimming through a tunnel out into an open-air heated pool. Snow was falling on ladies in bathing caps with baubles on them or daisies or little roses or summer anemones.

Alush haunted me over the next few months. I got a commission to write a travel piece about Leningrad from a woman whose
cook-book
I had used to cook a turkey my first Christmas in London and which gave me lasting recipes for a sponge cake and Irish soda bread.

I met him again, after a phone call to his family home, at evening in the Seagull Bar on the Griboyedova Canal. He was with, as if
chaperoned
by, a big, muscular friend, with a Tony Curtis quiff, who wore a T-shirt with a narrative about a rabbit and a tortoise on it.

He'd been in Gatchina mental hospital in the meantime. On February the third, the Feast of St Anna, he'd slashed his wrists in order to avoid the army. It was ‘a cigarette for a fuck there', he said.

I knew in Stalinist times many people had gone technically mad in Russia. I had gone somewhat mad in Britain. The voices of Irish tramps, of Irish desolation, were omnipresent in London.

‘Do you remember Bridget the Midget?'

‘Are you a squaddie? Watch it or they'll beat you up.'

‘Stay close to me. Just to be warm. I don't like what I'm going through.'

I met him again the following evening by the Stalin Gothic Palace of Youth where steps led down to the Neva. He flagged down a van. There was a blue circus tent with auric stars on it by the Neva and a boy in half-boots, cutaway jacket, shirt of glamorous salmon, stood outside it and looked at us. We went to an off-licence that was a man sitting on a bench in a park with bottles of wine under it. Walking along the Neva I put my hand on Alush's backside. There was the taint of love in my life again.

We took a boat down the Neva. A sixteen-year-old boy, in a
beige shirt with pandas and turquoise palm trees on it, who had the blond to cotton hair of a Polish woman who'd lived in my town and would give children's parties with servings in Dresden cups, was snogging with a girl from Silver City, New Mexico, who had a scarf of Killarney green in Native American style around her head.

Outside the Hermitage later, with its Caravaggio's
Youth with a Lute
—a boy, with a rose amid new greenery beside him the colour of his half-opened doll's lips, playing a lute, in an oyster-white smock with a vent for his stork-white chest, a girl's fluted veil hanging from the back of his English chestnut hair, a script with notes of music open in front of him beside a pear with a lascivious ferrule on
butterscotch
marble—as we listened to songs and to guitars a boy briefly touched my penis.

Caravaggio fled Rome after killing a man, first to Naples, after being knighted in Malta escaped another fracas to Sicily, died on the coast of Italy after walking a hundred kilometres only to find the boat carrying his paintings—the boys with bull earrings; the
palmreaders
with fillets on their heads; patterns of clothes breaking through like the lines of a palm—had already left. He undoubtedly died of a broken heart.

In a courtyard we stood in a queue and purchased the first bread of the morning.

In the evening I went to dinner in a flat of a girlfriend of his who lived in a block of flats in Prospect Veteranov. I was wearing Scout Master shorts. Women sitting beside a bed of marigolds in the courtyard howled with laughter at me. A little boy played
handball
by himself.

The next day was a red-letter day on the calender on the wall I saw as the girl served dessert in a strapless corselette—Anna
Akhmatova's
centenary day. Alush and I resolved to go to Komorova where she was buried.

On the way down a road through pine trees to the cemetery a woman, in a dress with tiny folded umbrellas on it like the umbrellas you got in a lucky bag when I was a child, ran towards us. ‘The
Patriarch
of Leningrad is there,' she cried. We just missed him. Women who'd come in umber buses had left Anna Akhmatova's grave and run amok around other graves, reciting poetry.

 It turned out they were reciting Akhmatova's friend Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry.

In Paris in the 1930s Marina Tsvetaeva had to borrow a white dress for a reading because she had only one woollen dress she'd been wearing all winter.

‘Why didn't she leave Russia?' Alush asked me about Anna Akhmatova.

‘Some people can't leave their country no matter what.'

‘Why commit suicide?'

After visiting the cemetery we swam in the Lake of Pines and Alush, a muff daisy chain on now, slats of light running over his face, talked about escaping to the United States.

When I returned to Leningrad solo and not as part of a tour, as I had to do previously, by train from Berlin in March 191, Leningrad under snow, I rang Alush's home and was told he'd gone to Manhattan.

I returned again by train in June 1991 from Berlin, met the friend who'd been snogging with the American girl, in a Byron-shirt and hat like the young Walt Whitman, on Nevsky Prospect, and he told me that Alush and his friends gathered on a rooftop in
Manhattan
every Sunday morning, wearing tie-dye T-shirts, smoking hash and shelling sunflower seeds. They had parties in the evening in the hall of the religious group who'd sponsored many of them coming to the United States, where they drank Dr. Peppers and ate tea-cakes under an inscription from Dietrich Bonhoeffer: ‘Brother, till night be past pray for me.'

In early April 1997 coming from Southern California to New York on my way back to Ireland, the sun cutting through the
skyscrapers
to the cherry and pear trees, which were a fleece of blossom against the brownstone buildings of Manhattan, I met him, by chance, in Chelsea bagel shop. He was wearing tie-dye shorts with red kisses on them as many young men in New York wore shorts on mild days in winter and early spring. Manhattan skyscrapers were powder blue in the afternoon sunshine. A man in elephant trousers, with a Pekinese on a red ribbon, paused and looked at us.

He was married to a girl from Long Island now.

A Russian friend had recently returned to St Petersburg on a
visit and, despite the fact he spoke Russian, in a music club they asked ‘Who's the foreigner?' and tried to charge him exorbitantly as they would a foreigner.

In New York on his arrival he spent a lot of time with
American
Romany Gypsies who'd sit under charts showing family trees in their kitchens. With his girlfriend he attended a Romany wedding in Pennsylvania. On the train journey there he'd seen Amish people riding in buggies.

At the Romany wedding they gave out scarves to the women as they would at a Russian funeral and
handkerchiefs
to the men. A pig was roasted. The amounts of money people donated as presents were announced. Alush saw his
reflection
in house trailers that had laminated pictures of beaches, palm trees, curtseying blue waves on them.

In a house trailer with a laminated stallion outside it, beside an egg timer with faded skyscrapers on it and the word Chicago underneath, was a
photograph
of Gypsies from the Kiev region who were gassed in one of the concentration camps; skirt with diamond shapes, a girl's white dress with honeycombed front and collarette, stockings with ticker tape, mare's tail of hair, raven scarves, polka-dotted waistcoat, a Tyrolean hat with medallions, a Montmartre hat, a moustachio, a soldier in forage cap, an accordion with a keyboard, a cello, violins.

‘First a Jew, then an American,' said a Jewish boy at the wedding. ‘First a Romany, then an American,' said a Romany boy at the
wedding
. ‘First a Russian, then an American,' said Alush now.

‘Before it wasn't easy to survive. Now everything must go through corruption. And before it wasn't easy corruption. But it was a way of meeting people. Now it's vicious, dangerous, violent and
still there's the
KGB
, the army, the navy. They have the money. They are the mafia.'

He went to Fire Island in the summer, wore shorts, fifties shirts purchased in thrift stores, had his body universally admired in the flint aquamarine. But his body was exiled in marriage now.

Sometimes he and his wife camped by a lake near a Buddhist monastery in upstate New York.

Before I'd left England I'd moved from South-East London for the last few months to Hampstead, ‘a place of transition', someone said, where people walked harlequin Great Danes on the Heath by the violet-and yellow-leafed elderberry trees and the torch-henna chestnut trees, where Goldilocks-yellow Virginia creeper garbed houses that once held silver spoons whose legend, as the dying Keats saw, drew hordes of ‘gypseys' to Hampstead.

I met three American Dhamnapala Buddhist monks in golden robes coming out of Keats House and one in white robes. They'd left America and moved now between monasteries in Northumberland, Devon, Herefordshire, Sussex and monasteries near Kanderstag near Thun in Switzerland and Santa Cittorama in Sezze Romano, Latina.